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Nick Loper
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Nick Loper
and train your always on AI Chief Operating Officer. You've heard the buzz about OpenClav. Maybe you're like me. You're not exactly sure how to set it up, what you would use it for. You're worried about some security issues. This is the episode for you. Today's guest says his new AI operator has helped him 10x his output and impact in his business and has given him this renewed sense of energy and fun toward that business that's now 13 years old. Longtime listeners will know him well From Piano in 21 Days and the online CourseGuy.com, doc Hopkins. Welcome back.
Jacques Hopkins
Thanks Nick. Thanks for having me. That was a great intro, like great energy. I think you're going to do well at this podcast thing.
Nick Loper
We'll see how this works out for me. This is, I believe, your 10th appearance on the show, which is adding to your already record of appearances. So appreciate you coming back. Introduce us to Rocky, your openclaw operator that is kind of running piano in 21 days. At this point, kind of on autopilot almost behind the scenes.
Jacques Hopkins
And yeah, to an extent it's certainly not a magic pill. But yeah, I've got an AI agent You know, I like to call it an AI operator sitting over here on my desk, loaded into a Mac Mini. And it's doing so many amazing things for me and my business. And three months ago he didn't exist. I was not, I was not very big into AI. But today he is doing SEO for my businesses. He is helping me manage my email inboxes. So he, he triages my emails, he archives what, what he needs to. If there's something, he has the conte, he'll draft a reply that I can review and possibly send. He gives me a morning brief every morning, just telling me what came through overnight and what my priorities should be for the day. Here's a big one. He helps me with customer support for piano in 21 days. He is my employee and like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he instantly has access to everything. So he has taken my course. Right. He has all the context behind my piano in 21 days course. Instantly. He has gone through all my YouTube videos. But the reason he's better than me is because I last made my course like four or five years ago. So I don't remember like instantly exactly what happened halfway through lesson 14. Right. But he does.
Nick Loper
Yeah.
Jacques Hopkins
And so if somebody is asking about, you know, day 14 in the course, he can draft just an unbelievable reply and then my customer support human actually reviews those and sends them out. So that's just, that's a few of many, many things that he's doing for me today.
Nick Loper
Yeah. And theoretically it could be trained on the last 10, 12, 13 years of your own customer support emails to kind of get a sense for the tone and the voice and what would make sense to even draft in the first place.
Jacques Hopkins
Yes. He's gone through all of my email history as well. Piano in 21 Days is a 13 year old business and so he's able to draft replies not only with the right context and information, but in my voice too.
Nick Loper
Yeah. Okay. I am getting the gears turning here because I'm looking at this inbox with hundreds and hundreds of unread emails from subscribers and listeners and it's like I want to do my best to reply, but also if the rest of the business would not move forward if I did all that. So that's a thing. SEO is definitely a thing. Building some kind of daily report dashboard. Like, how did you do yesterday? I think that would be really cool. Now I think you have this kind of four levels of AI use case and I am probably on maybe level two, maybe level three. Level one is just ChatGPT, you know, using Gemini, using Claude, you know, kind of question and response. Hey, I have this question. It kind of spits back something out. Level 2 is going a step further and building automations using Zapier, using Make. And this is kind of where I've been playing around with some assistance from Claude code to build out these automations. If this happens, then this happens. And that's been kind of fun. That's actually been really interesting. Like, okay, after the podcast recording transcript hits this, then this make automation fires. It gives me editing suggestions, it tells me what were the most exciting parts. I can put that in the video intro. That's all been super helpful stuff. But then there's a couple levels beyond that. You can talk to those.
Jacques Hopkins
Absolutely, yeah. So you've nailed it so far. I think most people that are using AI are at level one, and that's where I was three months ago, which is the chat level. We use AI from a chat perspective. We ask IT questions, maybe we get it to help us write an email or revise an email so that the one we've drafted ourselves sounds better or smarter. Level 2 automations, level 3 is where things really start to get interesting. And it's AI agents. And this is like the big buzz right now. And this is really going to shape the future of work in general. And that's when AI can actually do work for you. It can do work on a computer, kind of like a human can do. And I remember when agent stuff started to come out a year or two ago, and it was just so overwhelming. AI has overwhelmed me for so long. And because it overwhelmed me and kind of scared me a little bit, I just kind of stayed in my little ChatGPT bubble in level one until about three months ago, and I jumped all the way from level one up to level four. And so I think level four takes this concept of AI agent a step further. And I call level four a personal AI operator. So it's an AI agent, but it's your AI agent that is only yours. And you don't have to kind of start over every time. It continues to grow, it continues to learn. And the more you use it, and the longer you use it, the better it is at doing the things for you in particular.
Nick Loper
Yeah. So it can be proactive rather than just kind of call and response. It has longer context window. Right. If you have these long conversations with ChatGPT, sometimes it'll forget what you were talking about at the beginning. So it has more memory in that Sense.
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What are some of the first steps
Nick Loper
to start to set this up? So OpenCloud is currently free open source, but then there's all these questions around security of like, well what, what do I give it access to? I don't want it to like start running rampant on my machine or on the Internet or especially in the case of yours and mine, it's like kind of a personally branded business. Like we can't have it going out and saying stuff that isn't true.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah. So openclaw really changed the game and now there are competitors as well. But openclaw is the free open source software that allow, allows you to create this level four personal AI operator. And it is a fairly technical setup. Okay. But I have a solution for anybody that's not technical. When you go to set it up, you use an AI like Claude, a chat, a level one chat to help you set it up so that if you get stuck at any point of the way, it will be there to advise you. And that's actually how I use my openclaw to this day is I have my like Claude advisor. So, so anytime I get stuck like he. It's so much smarter than me and helps me interact with Rocky. I'm not, I'm not always interacting with Rocky through it, but that is one of my big tips is because it is a fairly technical setup and even to maintain is to have Claude sitting there ready to help you along the way.
Nick Loper
Now you went with the Mac mini setup, so it's kind of a completely standalone computer. And my initial thought was even bluehost has like a virtual private server or you could put this in the cloud for like 10 bucks a month or something. Like do you need dedicated hardware for this?
Jacques Hopkins
You don't need to. But one of the big concerns, probably the biggest concern with OpenClaw is security from various different perspectives. And so I try to make mine as secure as possible. And I think one of the things we can do to make it as secure as possible is to run it on our own hardware in our own physical location. And so yes, this can run on a virtual private server in the cloud, but I think the more secure way to do it is have it run locally.
Nick Loper
Got it, got it. And ideally not on your primary laptop, ideally not on your primary workstation. Is there like some reason why people don't do that?
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, not only not ideally, but like that is a, that is a hard. No, like Everybody that's using OpenCloud completely agrees this needs to run on its own computer. Right. So Think of it like hiring a new employee. When you hire a new employee, you're not going to just let them share your computer with you. You're going to have a computer and your employee is going to have a computer. Because if you all of a sudden give your brand new employee access to your computer, they have access to all of your files, all of your sensitive information. And that's just, that's a security risk right off the bat. And so the best practice is have it running on its own machine. It is its computer. Just like hiring your a new employee.
Nick Loper
Got it, Got it. So I've got an old laptop that I could probably set up for this. It's got decent enough hardware specs that it could probably do this. Is that okay? Or does it need to be like this dedicated Mac Mini box that everybody talks about?
Jacques Hopkins
Mac Minis are literally selling out in lots of places. And so a Mac Minis mini is really the perfect hardware to run it on because it's small, it's relatively inexpensive, and OpenClaw works really well on Mac OS. It doesn't have to be on Mac, but that is better. It's not super resource intensive, so you don't need crazy hardware specs to run it. So if you've got an old Mac laptop lying around, that's a great place to get started with it. But a Mac Mini is just like the best overall solution for something like this.
Nick Loper
Does it have to be an Apple product?
Jacques Hopkins
Doesn't have to be. No. It can run on Windows, it can run on Linux, but it was designed to work best on a Mac.
Nick Loper
Got it, Got it. Okay. The setup itself, the hardware setup and the software setup can get kind of technical. So Jacques actually has a really good video, kind of step by step how to get that done. So I will link that up in the show notes. I kind of want to skip ahead a couple steps to the training process. It says give me a soul and like you prompt it up and it's like, hey, you know, what do you, what do you want me to be? You know, I'm kind of an open book. Train me and let's talk about what kind of information you fed it to kind of give it that name and
Jacques Hopkins
soul when you're setting up your own. There's two things that I ask people to have ready when they're setting theirs up. One is a name that's really fun, like picking out the name for your new employee. Basically you get to name it and I can talk later about where mine's name comes from. If it's not obvious to some.
Nick Loper
Is this a boxing reference or is this a Hail Mary reference?
Jacques Hopkins
Not Rocky the boxer? No, it's from. So the movie just came out, Project Hail Mary. I don't know, I guess you haven't seen it yet.
Nick Loper
I haven't seen it yet, but I read the book. It was good.
Jacques Hopkins
It's a wildly popular, popular book. And the engineer alien guy is, it's probably, he's probably my favorite fictional character of all time. And it was just the perfect fit. But you also need to have what I call your operator brief. And this is just a brain dump of everything that you would want it to know about you. So fee, I mean, there's no limit to how much information you could give it at this point. But you want to, you want to give it all of your business history, you know, as much personal history as you're willing to give it. I gave it my kids names, their birth dates, where they go to school, but of course, all the business, business history of piano in 21 days, the online course guy. But then also like what I want it to help me with and what some of my goals are. And that's one of the cool things you can do with it, is not just give it specific tasks, but you can also just kind of give it goals that you're trying to accomplish and let it figure out some of the ways that it can help you accomplish those goals.
Nick Loper
Okay, at this point, you're not feeding in like I was thinking, ok, I could upload my books or I could upload decades of transcripts. It's like not quite yet, just kind of a higher level overview. This is me, this is what I'm about. It's a little bit about my family. Here's kind of the direction of the business and what I'm thinking you might be able to help with.
Jacques Hopkins
Yes, exactly. And so what I'm talking about is part of what you're setting up in the onboarding wizard is that initial brief that you're giving to it. That's not a one shot thing. We can always add to it. And so, for example, at this point, Rocky is intimately familiar with every podcast episode I've ever done, every YouTube video I've ever done, every online course I've ever made. He's got all my content, but I didn't feed that to him on day one.
Nick Loper
Okay, got it.
Jacques Hopkins
And that's honestly like my biggest tip, having done this for three months and starting to show other people how to do it, is try not to go Too fast because your agent is really good at setting things up, building them. But sometimes you set it up, but things start to break down over the next days and weeks because we try to do too many things at once. And so what I really recommend people do is really focus in on one thing, one system, one automation, one thing at a time and really get that nailed down, dialed in before you move on to the next thing.
Nick Loper
Got it. What did you start with?
Jacques Hopkins
So I think that asking where I started is maybe not the best, the most valuable question and maybe more like where should people start? Maybe a little more appropriate. And so if that's where we're going, then I would say probably like business dashboards. Right. I'm sure a lot of listeners maybe have side hustles or full time businesses already. And one thing I struggled with before was just like data visibility because it would be in all kinds of different places. I don't know about you, Nick, but like I use a lot of tools, right. I'm using Kajabi and ActiveCampaign and go high level. And I've got WordPress websites, I've got data coming in from all kinds of different places and being able to kind of aggregate that into one like business dashboard, which like I've got spreadsheets set up and I've got a virtual assistant that tries to do some of that for me. But now Rocky's got dashboards that are updated like real time. I can see instantly where things are instead of waiting for a human to do it. And it's all in one place. It looks pretty. And so I would suggest that's a good place to start.
Nick Loper
Yeah. And if it saves your assistant the time and trouble of having to log into all these different places too.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, Saves time and money, I'm thinking.
Nick Loper
Yeah. Could it pull in yesterday's affiliate earnings, yesterday's traffic numbers, number of email signups from kit number, you know, Mediavine earnings, YouTube earning. Like there's this cool dashboard that I kind of have in my mind of what it might be able to build if it had access to all this stuff.
Jacques Hopkins
Absolutely. Yeah. And then, I mean, this is not where I'd suggest you start. But one thing I'm working on right now is I'm seeing if it can replace my bookkeeper because one thing I struggle with the financials is I'm not getting my books for the previous month until about halfway through the next month. And by that point it's like almost worthless. And so by getting up to date books in real time at any time I want that's really valuable for my business, and that's a project we're working on right now.
Nick Loper
More with Jacques in just a moment,
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including how Rocky replaced a $3,500 per
Nick Loper
month SEO agency, the other AI building blocks you're going to want to have
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in place, and even building a virtual Mastermind roundtable complete with different personalities and perspectives.
Nick Loper
All that and more coming up right after this.
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Nick Loper
SEO side of things? Because this has historically been an important driver, Both on the YouTube side and the organic side. Like, you know how to learn piano. Type of keywords is important for you.
Jacques Hopkins
So I used to pay a guy a lot of money every month to do SEO. Like $3,500 a month. He did great work. He got us on the front page for awesome search terms like how to play piano, right? And it was great because we did all that work pre Covid. And when Covid hit everybody and their mother was searching Google for how to play piano, and we were showing up on the first page for search terms like that. But eventually I was like, well, you know, we're in a pretty good place. I don't really want to pay him this anymore. Let's just let it ride. And the problem is that I let it ride without doing anything to it for like, four years. And so now that I have Rocky, I was like, hey, you know, and this is. This is another, like, tip for how to use something like this is don't just tell it what to do. Do something called reverse prompting. Don't say, hey, go work on my SEO. Say, hey, how can you best help me with SEO, right? And get it to think about how it could be most effective for something like that. So that's certainly how I started. And so what it first did was a full audit. And so we connected it into Google search console via API access. And it could see all the data and it could see what pages are doing really well, what pages are getting zero traffic, which pages are too similar and really should be combined. It found a bunch of broken links, and so it just did a full site audit with recommendations. And so on the first couple of days, it was just like fixing a bunch of things that it found. And now it's actively monitoring and helping me rank for new things. It built a new SEO dashboard that we can watch, and it's writing new, relevant articles in my voice, right? And so the guy that I hired several years ago to do SEO, he's amazing. He still runs an SEO agency. As you can imagine, he uses AI in his SEO agency now. He Came and did a workshop for my clients a few months ago and it's like a two hour long masterclass on AI SEO. Well, guess what? I could take that two hour video and say, hey, Rocky, watch this training and follow it. And so basically what he's doing is he didn't try to reinvent the wheel on how to do SEO. He's following proven methods from this guy that I trust on how to best do it.
Nick Loper
Got it. Because there's some risk involved. Like he starts doing some weird black hat stuff that ends up getting you in trouble, but not just kind of generating the audit report, but actually fixing the broken links, actually making updates to the pages in your voice, actually finding relevant keywords and then writing the content there. That's really cool. I mean, that's like a little virtual employee in a box.
Jacques Hopkins
Exactly. Yeah. And look, you know, we talked about the security already. Most of the things that I've given Ronky access to is read only the vast majority. This is one small example where I have played with giving him write access. So he does have write access to certain areas of my WordPress site. So when I'm saying he's fixing the broken links and he's writing articles and he's updating articles, like he's actually doing that.
Nick Loper
Yeah. So he has like your WordPress login.
Jacques Hopkins
It's not exactly like that because he doesn't use things like humans do. Right. So he's got backend API access to these things. He's not just logging in on a browser and navigating WordPress like we would.
Nick Loper
Okay, so to peel it back one step. So OpenClaw is the operating system for Rocky, but then he's got to go out into the Internet and he's got to call the AI of your choice. In this case, it sounds like it's Claude. And so having the Claude paid version plan allows him to do stuff and think. Right? Is that how it works?
Jacques Hopkins
Essentially, yes. Let me clarify a couple of things. Okay, so Open Claw is free. It's open source. That is the main engine or brain behind this. I don't know what the right metaphor is, but because you really are plugging in a brain into it, you've got to tie in some AI, some large language model into it for the smarts. Right? So no, I don't have Claude tied into mine because as of April 4, Claude actually banned people using OpenClaw using their models.
Nick Loper
Okay.
Jacques Hopkins
But last month, OpenAI, who makes ChatGPT, actually, for lack of better word, acquired OpenClaw. What they really did is they hired the creator of it. And so Openclaw now is under the umbrella of OpenAI. So my understanding is they're going to continue to more and more optimize ChatGPT, GPT5.4 and newer models to run really well with OpenClaw. So the way I've got mine set up today is I'm on the $200 a month chatgpt plan.
Nick Loper
Okay.
Jacques Hopkins
And Rocky is running on the latest and greatest chatGPT model, which at the time of this recording is GPT 5. 4.
Nick Loper
Okay, got it. So you do need a paid plan with one of these other tools to be able to go out into the Internet and have him do your bidding.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah. Or to do anything. Right. He's worthless without being tied into an AI model. Now you can tie him into cheaper AI models. And that's another mistake I made at beginning. I was like, well, I don't want to spend $200 a month on an AI model. So I tried some of the cheaper models first and it just wasn't very effective.
Nick Loper
Got it, got it. Okay. Building dashboards, helping with the SEO stuff. Talk to me a little bit about the customer support or whatever was next on your wish list here.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, I think customer support was a good one because I've got, I have a customer support person, but her process before was, okay, we get an email from somebody. Well, before I just draft a reply, I need to look at the context history of our communication with this person.
Nick Loper
Yeah.
Jacques Hopkins
Is this the first time we've communicated with them? What have we discussed before? I need to log into ActiveCampaign or go high level and figure, you know, is this a customer? Is this a prospect? Where are they in the funnel? And then, okay, now that I've got all the context, let me think about a good reply. Right. So she's spending 10 minutes per email. Right. So now Rocky does all those things for her. This is another area where Rocky, he, he does not have the ability to hit send. Right. He has read only access to my email, but he also has access to be able to create drafts. So in the draft, he's putting context for my assistant to look at, hey, this is a prospect or a customer. This is where they're at in the funnel. This is the conversation history. And then he drafts his reply. And so now all she has to do is go in, see the context, vet the reply, make sure she approves it, maybe she tweaks it a little bit if necessary, and it sends. So instead of 10 minutes per email, she's spending probably less than one minute per email.
Nick Loper
Got it. Yeah. I'm similar. Like, Teresa has done an awesome job on email support, but then there's always those that fall through the cracks on. It requires some level of decision making and it's just. I don't know. Yeah. So bringing in context, history, bringing in this other data, plus years and years of content and support and being able to make a draft would definitely ease some of the mental burden for me.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah. And look, I'm certainly not looking at him to replace me. Right. I mean, there are tools out there to where you can have your own AI Persona be on video. Like, I'm not looking for him to replace me, and I'm not looking for him to replace my team.
Nick Loper
Yeah.
Jacques Hopkins
The word I like to use is. Is amplify. I want him to amplify me and my team and my brand and not. Not replace us.
Nick Loper
Got it. So is it at that point when you're asking. So you kind of start off this prompt of like, hey, I could really use some help with. With customer support, you know, what questions or context would you need to know from me to be able to do this job? Well, it's kind of a conversation.
Jacques Hopkins
That's a great example of reverse prompting. Right. You don't have to be the brains behind designing the whole system. You just need to go to it with your struggle. Like, here's what I'm struggling with. How can you best help me solve this? Help me design the system to where you can help me solve this problem that I currently have.
Nick Loper
Now that you've kind of seen the power of this, what else is on your. On your wish list of like, well, shoot, now we could probably build this or we could expand our reach here. Like, are you having to mess around with paid traffic and managing Google campaigns or anything like that?
Jacques Hopkins
It is absolutely tied into my meta ads dashboard and making recommendations to me for ads. It's helping me with health and wellness. Right. It is now my personal trainer. Right. It's helping me with my workout plans and nutrition and just tracking those things and keeping. And helping to keep me accountable. That. That's something that. That I'm working on right now, is a better overall system for prioritization because that's something historically I've struggled with a lot. And that's an example of me going to Rocky and saying, hey, I'm really struggling with this. Like, how can you best help me? So he's got a pretty good understanding of my priorities in general and the things that I'M working on and the goals I'm working toward. Yeah, he's not the best at, like, hey, here are the three things you absolutely need to do today. Right. He can give me three good things to work on, but I want him to be, like, so good at, like, Jacques, to reach your goals and everything. I know, like, you've got to do these three things today. And so that's a system we're trying to build out right now. Because I want to be able to go to him at any time and him fully understand and advise me on exactly what I should be working on. Because that's. That's a weakness in myself that I've. I've always had that it would be great if he could be really good at helping to raise up that weakness in me.
Nick Loper
Has it come back with any proactive suggestions on, Well, I know that you're doing this, this, and this, but it seems like people who want to learn piano also need XYZ or something proactive.
Jacques Hopkins
No, you really have to prompt him for that. And you could, right? You could, like, hey, what am I not thinking of? You know, everything about piano in 21 days. What are some ideas or things I'm not thinking of that can help it to grow even more? He's not going to just call you in the middle of the night and be like, hey, Jacques, I just got this really great idea. Like, it's not like that. It's still a computer program, right?
Nick Loper
Yeah.
Jacques Hopkins
And it's still running just code. And it's got scheduled tasks, and it's got a heartbeat, but it's not a human. And so the answer, unfortunately, to what you're saying is, no, not exactly like that, but we can get fairly close.
Nick Loper
This is what I found is I always have more ideas than there are hours in the day, which on the one hand is a good problem to have. But I end up being kind of the bottleneck of like, okay, even if I'm using AI to build out some of these projects, inevitably it comes back where it's like, now there's this human review process, which is probably good, but it's still like, oh, now I got to carve out the time to figure out the next step and the next step. And it's like, yes, it probably makes me go farther, faster than I could, but it's still find myself being the bottleneck, where it's like, if I could just let the robots run free, they could probably do better than they could if I wasn't stopping them all the time.
Jacques Hopkins
Do you have a specific example that we could talk through?
Nick Loper
Well, I've been trying to build out a couple smartphone apps. One we talked about on a recent episode was inspired by this guy who was selling these watches that don't tell time. And the headline was like, I make two to $10,000 a month selling this watch that just says now on it. I was like, oh, that'd be cool. I wonder if I could build a smartphone version of that or an Apple Watch version of that. And the apps are built and semi functional to the limited degree that I've been able to test them. But now it's like, well, now you need app screenshots and now you gotta go through this whole approval process with the app stores and it's like, okay, I'll get to that when I get to it. And it ends up kind of sitting on the to do list for days and days before I get to it.
Jacques Hopkins
So first question would be, I'm assuming you program the app using Claude code.
Nick Loper
Yes.
Jacques Hopkins
Amazing. You know I mentioned in the setup it's nice to use, I use like my Claude Advisor. Right. And so what's really cool is you could run your open claw on ChatGPT and you could start on the 20amonth plan. You definitely need a paid plan, but I use mine so much that I had to upgrade to their $200 a month plan. And then if you also have say the $20 a month cloud plan, like really getting the the best of both worlds on those two top models in the world right now. And so I use my claw advisor not only to help me set up Rocky to begin with, but on a day to day basis as a continual advisor. So let's say for example, I'm you and I use Rocky to program this app, which he could have done for you instead of Claude code. Then I could have Claude come in and help me with reviews. Right. And I do that, those exact things all the time. Like I haven't done a mobile app yet, but Rocky will make me landing pages, he'll make me sales pages, he'll make me websites, things like that, and the flag. First thing I do when he makes something is I give it to Claude to do the review. And so I'm getting both Opus 4.6 and GPT5.4 to put their brains together and make it the best possible thing first before I do my human review.
Nick Loper
Okay. Any other mistakes that come to mind over the last few months, either security wise or just spending days on something that ended up being a dead end,
Jacques Hopkins
make sure you're doing like, one main thing at a time. Don't try to do too many things at a time. That. That really burned me. And make sure you're using good models because it can be expensive. Like, maybe you're turned off by the fact that I'm saying $200 a month for ChatGPT. Okay. Well, I would pay probably $20,000 a month for an employee that. That is this good. Like, that's how much. Like that. That's what he is. Like, he is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for. Right. And so I'd recommend starting out. I mean, you can start with the $20 a month plan, but if you use it and you get value out of it, you're going to quickly want to upgrade and you look at it as. As an investment and hopefully you get that much or more out of it that you're putting in. Look, March 2026 was. Was my highest profit month in the business since COVID times.
Nick Loper
Yeah. Wow.
Jacques Hopkins
I mean, I've come on the podcast and told you how well piano in 21 days did during COVID because everybody wanted to learn piano. Like, it was wild numbers. But business is going really well for this $200 a month employee. That's what I would say is more like a $20,000 a month employee.
Nick Loper
Yeah. Even in the context of the $3,500 a month SEO agency, to be able to place that plus this other role. Plus this other role, plus this other. Yeah, it may seem intimidating. And sure, start with the $20 a month plan. See where it gets you. Maybe you don't need it on 24. 7 or doing stuff all the time. This was the other interesting use case I wanted to ask you about, was building kind of your virtual mastermind around these different Personas, like the. The skeptic person, the engineer person, the data per. Oh, this is kind of an interesting model. Or now you have But a different. Different personalities within Rocky to ask for feedback on certain ideas.
Jacques Hopkins
I'm glad you brought that up, Nick. There's. I mean, there's just so many cool things that he's doing that it's hard for me to remember all of them. But what you just mentioned is the AI Council that he helped me build. And look, I'm following a lot of, like, AI influencers, a lot of open claw users and a lot of these ideas that I get from them. And then I can just like, I can literally say, hey, Rocky, go watch this YouTube video and tell Me if there's anything useful we could be implementing. And this is one of those cases where a guy was talking about his AI Council system, and we took that and then we ran with it and made it work for our situation. Like, we didn't copy it one for one. We optimized it as much as we could. So what we did was we took seven different models and assigned them kind of a role like the strategist, the engineer, the devil's advocate. So that big strategic questions, we can input it into this council and they can kind of talk about it and debate about it and give us their recommendation. So Rocky's not one of the seven, Right. He's the one that hands it off to the seven roles.
Nick Loper
Okay.
Jacques Hopkins
And they take a few minutes to analyze the situation and. And spit it back out to me. So you want me to give you an example of something running, Running through the council? Sure, yeah. So, like, I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my business, right? Online courses. Right. The online course guy. I've. I have wrestled with that pre AI in terms of like, well, I also help people with memberships and coaching programs and things like that. Like, I really help people with any kind of digital product. But now with AI, it's like, well, you know, AI is not going to make online courses completely irrelevant, but depending on the niche, like, you can just go to AI and it can help you learn something. So I'm just trying to understand if I should be pivoting my business. I'm also really, really pumped about this AI stuff and the AI operator stuff. And so the question is basically like, hey, given all of this history and information, like, what should I do with my brand going forward? And so I gave that to the AI Council. And it's a better output than just Rocky because there's seven powerful AI models analyzing the situation from different, all different perspectives. And ultimately what they suggested is, and I think this is the direction I'm going, is not completely getting away from digital products or anything like that, but go ahead and slowly transition to a personal brand. Right. Instead of maybe the online course guy, just start using my name. And maybe that's what I should have done nine years ago when I started this and be kind of the AI guy for digital product creators. And so the tagline that they came up with was helping digital product creators scale with AI.
Nick Loper
Okay. And I think that's new on your YouTube channel.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, that's new on my YouTube channel. And you can see that my YouTube channel is just my name now. And it's not the online course guy.
Nick Loper
Got it.
Jacques Hopkins
That's where we're starting the transition and seeing how it goes. Because I'm still got the website, the online course guys still have the online course show. Yeah, I try not to make big decisions like too quickly. I try to take it kind of slowly. So we're starting on the YouTube channel and I'm just in general starting to talk more and more about this AI operator stuff. And I don't want to be just like a general AI influence or anything. I want to want to help digital product creators because that's my bread and butter. That's what I still do too with piano in 21 days. How that type of person can scale using AI because that's exactly what I'm doing right now and what I'm loving doing right now. I don't think I've ever had this much fun in my business ever. It's so much fun.
Nick Loper
Yeah, I think that's kind of cool because our businesses are similar age and so always like, I mean for me, I get to talk to new people every week and so that keeps it fun and interesting and exciting. But the behind the scenes part of like what are the little process improvements that you could do that are really fun And I think this would be absolutely one to play around with. And maybe that's the best use case is if you already have a business to apply it to where you can look at openclaw as your new virtual assistant, your new operator or chief operating officer. What's your take on? And you see this a lot in the AI influencer videos of like, I gave OpenClaw the marching orders to go make a million dollars this year or make me $100,000 this month and inevitably it turns into selling something AI bot related. It ends up being very meta, very circular.
Jacques Hopkins
And sometimes, yeah, you have to be very careful because the goal of a lot of those people is to get views and get attention. Right. And so how real is what they're showing you? And so yeah, I see those posts all the time. Like I gave my open cloth $50 and I said, if you don't make me money, I'm going to kill you. Right. And. And the next day it had $3,000. Like, okay, that's a cool story, but I don't believe you. Right. And it's not that simple.
Nick Loper
Yeah. How repeatable is it? Like, go find some edge on some polymarket bet. And like really?
Jacques Hopkins
Exactly. And then the other thing that I see a lot is with Open Call you can actually create multiple agents. Right. So I've got, I've got Rocky, but like some people are creating a whole team and like they have their CEO and then they have their marketing person and their copywriter and all these different agents running on the one Mac Mini and then they have these great visuals of all of them, like sitting at desks and doing work. I think that works really well for getting views, but in reality, that's not the best way to use one of these because Rocky can literally do it all. And when you start creating the multiple agents, they don't all have all the same context.
Nick Loper
Right.
Jacques Hopkins
Whereas Rocky has all the context and he can do all the roles. So I think org charts are meant for humans and work really well. But when we start getting into AI agents, one agent can do so much more than one human.
Nick Loper
Yeah. Okay, Jacques, this has been fascinating. Again, definitely check out his video on how to set this up because it kind of just goes step by step through the technical process, the hardware, the software, you know how to communicate with with it through Telegram and all this stuff. So really helpful video. We'll link that up. Theonlinecourseguide.com Rocky is where to get your AI operator starter kit. Super helpful tool over there. So we'll link that up in the show notes as well. And we'll be right back with Jacques from the online course guy and the online course show coming up right after this.
Podcast Host
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Nick Loper
Jacques from TheOnlineCourseGuy.com for round two. This is the business idea donation round where this is something you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day and maybe you do now that you got your AI operator in place or something you think listeners could run with.
Jacques Hopkins
To me, you know, given all the context of what we just talked about is an absolute no brainer. And it is just an AI consultant. I mean, just look where I was three months ago, like I was in my ChatGPT bubble. Most people are using ChatGPT and that's it. They're at that level one. And a lot of these people are business owners that have so much potential for how AI could be improving their business. And so I think there is such a need for good AI consultants. And it doesn't even have to be this open clothing, right? I mean, even if you out there listening are a ChatGPT user and you start and you switch to Claude, like the application Claude and even the model Opus 4.6 is just so much better than ChatGPT in general. Like, even if you make that switch, you're a better AI user and you could help business owners make that switch, or you can help them implement systems, find out what they're struggling with, and use AI to help them improve things. I think that is a great business to set up today. Once you train yourself a little bit to be an AI consultant.
Nick Loper
Yeah. You only have to be a couple steps ahead of the people that you're working with. And there's probably a kind of a template that you could end up following. Or even, especially if you go into like niche, down to a specific industry or business owner type of person, where it's like, okay, tell me about your pains, tell me about your processes. How are you currently operating this? And let's see where there might be some opportunity for automation or some agentic help in those spaces. I don't know. Would you play the content marketing card to attract business? Would you start cold calling people? Would you have an AI start cold calling people? How would you go about the marketing on this front?
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, so I mean, it depends on, depends on who you are. Like, if you don't have any platform yet, then just like starting content marketing might take a little, a little too long. I think that the easiest path for most people is just to tap into your existing network. I mean, most people know business owners. Right. And most people know people in general. And if you start just talking about this, I've been just like telling everybody I know about this, both online and personally. And like, I'm getting texts from random people like, hey, you know, your neighbor told me about what you're doing. I'm a doctor. Like, I would love to implement some of this stuff. I'm getting random texts like that all the time just because I've started talking about it to people that I know. So I think if you're not a content creator already, then that's, that's what I would do.
Nick Loper
Well, that was me last week. I was like, hey, should we do an episode about this stuff? Because I kept seeing your videos about it.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, exactly. But that's because I put content out there. I mean, look, this, this stuff is wild. One of my really good friends lives on the next street over and I was, I was telling him about this stuff and he immediately went out and got a Mac Mini and I set it up for him because I wanted it to like make a YouTube video. Yeah. And this is great for side Hustle Nation. Like, he is now creating and selling coloring books On Amazon with his open claw. Like, that's how he is making money, selling coloring books that he's not creating himself.
Nick Loper
Okay.
Jacques Hopkins
And he's made a brand new business out of it.
Nick Loper
Wow. Okay. Well, there's an example of prompting to like, hey, let's go out and try and start a business here.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, okay.
Nick Loper
AI consultant for business owners. Absolutely. Huge opportunity in this space. Tapping into the buzzword of the day. Everybody is aware of this. They know they need to be using it or they're going to get left behind. And all of a sudden, if you can raise your hand and be that person in their network who can help them set it up, do some process improvement, build them, maybe even build them their own little openclaw operator, I think you can be a hero because the context savings of like, look, there's gonna be 200 bucks a month to run this versus the $3,500 agency or however much you were paying previously. This could be a big cost savings and it would be easy to pitch that way to say, well, even I'll do it for free and you just pay me out of the savings over the next two or three months and we can go there. Let's move to round three, the triple threat. First here is a marketing tactic that is working right now. This could be on the course side, this could be on the piano side. What do you got for us?
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, let's go to the piano side. We haven't talked about that a whole lot. Nick, have you ever run a self liquidating offer?
Nick Loper
No, not with any success or true dedication to it.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, I mean, I first heard about these a long time ago and it's just always been on the back of my mind to try out. And this is something we've been doing finally in the past few months, is running a self liquidating offer for piano in 21 days. And so if anybody's not familiar with that concept, the idea is that you run paid ads to a low ticket offer. Ours is $27. And the idea is you want to relatively break even on the ad versus this front end offer. And then any profit comes from upgrades or upsells kind of down the road. So what we did was we took the first five days of the piano course and turned it into a five day piano challenge. It's literally five day PianoChallenge.com running ads to that. And there's an order bump and an upsell to where our average cart value is around $45. And that's around what we're spending in ads to get one customer. And then over the next week or 10 days, we're trying to get people to then buy our 500 to $800 full piano in 21 days. Course. And when somebody does that, it's pure profit. So that is something that is not a new concept, but it's new for us. That's going pretty well.
Nick Loper
Yeah. That's surprising. I would have expected you to have had this dialed in, but there's some moving parts involved. Well, how do I create a compelling offer that people are willing to pay for? Coming in cold or relatively cold, I imagine. And then, okay, dial in the landing page and the upsells and the order bumps and then all this other stuff because you got the funnel, the sequence dialed in after somebody opts in. That's been firing for years. So if I can get people in the door for free, then everything else is gravy. Do you have a sense of how that is paying off in terms of conversion rates on the full course?
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah. So if you look at it in terms of like, roas return on ad spend, we're about 2x. So that initial funnel is relatively breaking even. And then a small percentage of those people that buy will then upgrade to the full course. And ultimately, right now, for every dollar we're putting in, we're getting about $2 out on the back end.
Nick Loper
Yeah, that's fantastic. So now it kind of is a game of scaling up that spend and trying to find more people who want to learn piano.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, exactly. So earlier when I mentioned, you know, Rocky is helping with ads, like, that's the ads that we're running. So he's monitoring that. He's giving us a daily brief on what's working, what's not working, and making suggestions on ads. You know, I'm not a big ads guy. I think you probably know that. And one thing I've found interesting about this ads experiment is people often compare, like creating free content versus ads. Well, content marketing, you just kind of have to continue to push out new content. Well, I'm discovering that's the case with ads, too. You can't just make some ads turn them on. Like, you've got to continue to make fresh ads for them to be effective. So in a sense, when you're running ads, you still have to be a consistent content creator.
Nick Loper
Is this YouTube? Is this meta? Where are you posting these?
Jacques Hopkins
We're doing it on meta ads. So they're running on Facebook and Instagram.
Nick Loper
Okay. And so still kind of short form hook type of video where it's like get somebody in and present them with this five day piano challenge.
Jacques Hopkins
Exactly. Yeah. I'm just creating a bunch, a bunch of like 30 seconds videos and some work really well and some don't.
Nick Loper
Did you ever test going direct to the free lead magnet with an order bump? Because there's a couple ways to do the self liquidating type of thing where it's like, okay, if I expect to pay a lower cost per lead for, you know, the free opt in, but then hopefully some people buy the the order bump or maybe they sign up for the $27 challenge like on the thank you page or something.
Jacques Hopkins
I would call that more of a tripwire where they're opting in for the freebie and then on the next page they get that tripwire offer where it's the low ticket once they opted in for something free. I haven't tested that exact model. What I have done in the past is run ads to my free workbook opt in and then they just go into my normal funnel that eventually tries to sell them the big course. And that's never really worked very well for ads. Okay, but what you're suggesting would be something good to test at some point.
Nick Loper
My gut would say that the people who bought the $27 thing and bought the upsells, my gut would say they would be more likely to convert down the road than just a regular freebie opt in person.
Jacques Hopkins
Yeah, that's the theory behind it. And mine is going well so far. But if I could just snap my fingers and convert what I've created to the tripwire model that you're suggesting, I think it would be a good test. And who knows, maybe I'll put Rocky on it one of these days.
Nick Loper
We'll see. We'll see. Maybe this will be another homework assignment. Add it to the to do list or have my openclaw assistant try and set this up for me. Let's move to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. And for the sake of this episode, I'm going to cross openclaw off the list and make you come up with something else.
Jacques Hopkins
That's fair. You just ruined the joke that I was going to say. Look, I do have a good answer here and I don't know if you're using it. Are you familiar with Whisper Flow?
Nick Loper
This is the voice to text thing.
Jacques Hopkins
Yes.
Nick Loper
I'm not using it, but have heard of it.
Jacques Hopkins
Changed my life. Unbelievable. So Whisper Flow is a voice to text, but it's AI powered. Okay, so all I do is I hit a hotkey on my keyboard and then I start talking and it will convert my voice to text. But it's AI powered, so it fixes mistakes. Like if you say, you know, I'm going to the store today and I need to buy some milk. Actually, I mean, I mean butter, it will type out, I'm going to the store today and I'm going to buy butter. It fixes any mistakes, it removes ums, it will format things nicely. And so this is especially helpful when you're interacting with AI and prompting AI as much as I'm doing, it's so much more efficient. And so Whisper Flow is an absolute game changer. It's becoming very, very popular and at this point I could not live without it. And I don't really type anymore. And it's amazing.
Nick Loper
Everything going. Voice search. Cool. Whisper Flow. We'll link that up in the show notes for this episode as well. How about your favorite book from the last 12 months?
Jacques Hopkins
I'm going to go fiction, if that's okay. And it's Project Hail Mary. Yeah, it's my favorite book. I've read it three times and the third time recently to my 10 year old daughter who loves space. It is a sci fi space book and the movie recently came out and we were able to go see that together. It's a family friendly movie, fortunately, and I think she loves it as much as I do and that's where the namesake for my AI operator comes from. So if you haven't read or seen Project Hail Mary, I absolutely love it.
Nick Loper
Sweet. We'll link that up as well. Definitely a good read, fun story. So our mutual friend Alex Barker was holding this rejection challenge many, many years ago. And so my rejection challenge was I'm going to invite Andy Weir on the podcast because the Martian started out as this self publishing project and we had this connection to this place in California where he was working and living and he was like, no, I'm working on my next book. So that was my rejection. That's my Andy Weir story. So what else got you excited this year? You got Rocky firing, You got these ads firing. What, what's, what's the future hold for for you this year? Maybe the rebrand on the online course. Guy stuff.
Jacques Hopkins
I think the biggest thing is just like sharing this information with people. That's. I, I was so pumped when I got your text the other day, like, hey, you want to come on the podcast to talk about it? Because you know, I didn't reach out to you, which I've done in the past. Like, hey, I'm working on this cool online course stuff. I would love to share with your audience but you saw some of my content and so that just like made my day that it resonated with you and you wanted to share with the audience. Because I think that like, whether we like it or not, this is here. Like AI is here and AI agents are here. And like I said, I was so overwhelmed and scared by it that I didn't really do anything with it. But now that I have, it's just unbelievable and I'm just having so much fun. And so I'm going to continue to work with Rocky, but then also share this information with people and help them set it up for themselves so that they can see all these amazing, amazing benefits that I've experienced.
Nick Loper
Yeah, this is as much for the listeners as it is for me because I've seen this stuff for months. I know I should be doing something with it, but dedicating the time to learn it and figure out it out how to set it up. Do I need my own hardware? And like, okay, but this has been super helpful, inspired me to go ahead, take action on it again. Check out the AI operator starter course. That's the online course guy.com rocky. You'll be able to download that for free, watch the setup video and start playing around with it. I think that's probably the best way to learn is just plug it in, see what you can get it to do and start to get this renewed sense of energy and excitement towards your business. So Jacques, again, really appreciate you stopping by the online course show. Of course, if you prefer podcasts, we'll link up the YouTube channel as well. And let's not forget piano in 21 days. If you want to go learn how to play piano fast. Big thanks to Jacques for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. Sidehustlenation.com deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Fire off that text message. Somebody who needs some open claw needs some more AI in their life. Let them know about this one. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen and I'll catch you in the next edition of the side Hustle Show. Hustle on the.
Host: Nick Loper
Guest: Jacques Hopkins (Piano In 21 Days, The Online Course Guy)
Date: May 14, 2026
This episode dives into the cutting-edge world of personal AI agents—specifically, how entrepreneurs can build and train their own 24/7 AI Chief Operating Officer (COO) using open-source tools like OpenClaw. Guest Jacques Hopkins breaks down how he’s exponentially improved his business operations (customer support, SEO, email triage, dashboards, etc.) by effectively "hiring" an AI operator, named Rocky, and gives actionable advice for setting up and leveraging similar systems.
Levels of AI Use in Business:
Rocky, the AI Operator:
Hardware & Security:
Setup Process & Training:
Tip:
Dashboards & Reporting:
SEO Management:
Customer Support:
Ads & Financials:
Personal Assistance:
Virtual Mastermind Council:
Reverse Prompting:
Security Best Practices:
Required Tools & Costs:
Mistakes to Avoid:
On Security & Hardware:
Jacques: "When you hire a new employee, you're not going to just let them share your computer with you ... that's a security risk right off the bat. The best practice is have [your AI operator] running on its own machine." (09:04)
On Amplification, Not Replacement:
Jacques: "I'm not looking for him to replace me, and I'm not looking for him to replace my team. The word I like to use is amplify." (25:08)
On Cost-Effectiveness:
Jacques: “He is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for.” (31:46)
On Transforming Business Process:
Jacques: "March 2026 was my highest profit month in the business since COVID times." (31:46)
AI Consulting for Small Businesses:
"There is such a need for good AI consultants … even if you’re just a couple steps ahead, help business owners implement systems and use AI to improve things." (40:57)
Tactics for getting clients:
Compiled for listeners who want actionable strategies on using AI to transform business practices—without the hype, but with all the essential details to get started or level up.