826 | This Average Guy Found the EASIEST Way to Sell AI to business owners (MADE $1M With AI) | Jon Cheney

It took me six months to get to a million dollars solo, totally solo. Most people think the reason they haven’t started is because they can’t code or they don’t have the money or they don’t know enough yet. I had none of those things. That’s Jon Cheney. Last time he was on the podcast, he showed us how we built a million dollar business solo without writing a line of code. Built a whole business in a weekend. That took me five days from starting vibe coding to my first $15,000 contract five days. But that was the easy part. The internet went nuts. But here’s what nobody asked. How does a non-technical guy with no sales team book $180,000 in six weeks, completely cold?

Millions of people do this every day and they don’t get any customers. Why? Can’t stand. That’s it. I just said, look, I’m going to… So I did. Over the next six weeks, I ended up with about $180,000 of business booked. In this episode, you’ll learn who’s actually buying vibe coding AI solutions right now. I don’t care if it’s a hundred million dollar company or a six million dollar company. They are the same. The insane 10 minute move Jon pulls on a live sales call that has CEOs reaching for their credit card before he’s done talking. I can vibe code that commission dashboard in 10 minutes. A dashboard that looks like it can do something. Boom. And they’re ready to buy.

What to charge. So you actually have a business. $10,000 is the minimum I would be willing to charge to actively have to worry about the ongoing success of this other business. And a hot take that’s about to end a $200 billion industry. Anyone can build software. I want to continue the conversation with you about how you built your business. And one of the things that I thought was so fascinating about your story, before you made a single sales call, before you even had product ready, what were you posting about when you were building on LinkedIn? Zero customers day for posting publicly. Why? I’m a huge believer in LinkedIn. I think it’s amazing. I’m a fan of Gary Vee and some of his strategies. Now he does it to an extreme level. He’s like the ultimate agency guy.

But he posts 60 times a day and he has a huge team. And now, obviously, AI can help you do that a little bit better. But he wrote a book recently that I think he launched last year called Day Trading Attention. And might have even been a year before. But anyway, it’s one of his most recent books. And really just the title of the book gets your brain going. You’re like, if you’ve ever day traded stocks, you’re just constantly like it’s just on your mind all the time. And day trading attention, you’re just like, look, I need to be in the story. I need to be the one talking about things. And so I just am naturally curious too.

And so it’s easy for me to say, hey, guys, look what I found today. I tried this and I did it, right? So I had just dozens of examples. Every day I had easily something to talk about. So I just started talking about AI and here’s what it is. And a lot of people want to, hey, comment this and I’ll send you my strategy and I want to do this. And a lot of people don’t actually put their strategy and their results on LinkedIn. And I just do. I’m just like, here’s exactly what I do. And then people are like, that’s really cool. But I don’t know how to do it. Clearly you do. Let me hire you. And so that strategy has worked quite well for me.

The reality is AI only helped the product come to life. Millions of people do this every day and they don’t get any customers. Why? Because they don’t talk about it enough. I just said, look, I’m going to start calling businesses. So I did. Over the next six weeks, I ended up with about $180,000 of business booked. So your visibility is step one. It’s 100% human. Step two is knowing who to actually call. And you’re very specific about this. You don’t call everyone. You have a very specific profile. Who you’re, who you’re actually looking for. How do you find them before you even pick up the phone? Yeah, you know, what’s, what’s kind of funny is, you know, a lot of the people that I’m reaching out to are companies that don’t usually have a CTO, right? And that could be, you know, a law firm or a dental office or whatever, right? And, and a lot of these companies, a lot of these CEOs, they’re on LinkedIn.

They’re seeing everyone talk about AI. And they’re realizing they don’t have somebody in their company that can do this. And then I come along and say, Hey, look, I can come in at a fraction of the cost of what it would take you to hire somebody full time. And I can still give you all of those benefits. And I can make sure you don’t miss the boat, right? This is big. I know you’re thinking about it. And so, you know, it’s a little bit of maybe a FOMO pitch. I’m not actively trying to help them feel that FOMO, but that’s, that’s kind of the result of it. They’re, they’re seeing this amazing thing. And they don’t want to watch the ship go by. They want to jump on.

Go for the main street companies, the blue color ones, piano stores, paint shops, HVAC companies, they don’t have tons of technology. A lot of them still use paper. I want to understand the very first call and what it looks like. Walk me through the first call, the opening question, exact words, like, and what they almost always say back to you, what you say next. Absolutely. And it’s so easy. Every call is the same. I swear it’s exactly the same. And I don’t care if it’s a hundred million dollar company or a six million dollar company, they are the same. And we’ll get around to AI and I’ll just say, so tell me about, what are you guys doing with AI? Invariably, we know nothing. I’m like, you know what?

You’re fine, man. Like most people are right there. The fact that you’re even talking to me right now means you’re already taking, you know, you’re ahead, right? And then, and then I actually dive into, I say, well, tell me some things, you know, tell me some things that you think AI could do well at your company right now. And then they tell me, you know, they usually give me three or four or five ideas or even just one that they harp on. And now all of a sudden, they’ve sold the whole thing for me. My job is done at this point. What if we had a dashboard that connected to everything and you could just push a button and it just did it all.

And by the end, I say, okay, here’s our pricing model. Here’s what we do. And, you know, we charge 10 grand a month as a starting point. And, you know, a lot of companies work with us at, you know, 25,000. Our average client is 17,000. And when you want to start, you said you never send a proposal. You show them something working instead. So what does that actually look like? And why does it be pitching every single time? Yeah, I mean, show and tell is, I don’t know, that was my favorite day in elementary school.

People love to, you know, show their cool stuff and they look to play with things and touch things. You know, we, when we shop, right, just pay attention the next time you go to the store, anybody listening, pay attention next time you go to the store, how many things you actually just touch that you don’t even buy. Because you’ll pick it up, you’ll look at it and you’ll set it down, right? We just want to see it, right? And so we’re terrible. Like my wife will ask me all the time, she’ll go and she’ll go shopping for something or whatever. She’ll send me a picture of a dress, right? And she’s like, what do you think? And I’m like, I don’t know, put it on and I’ll tell you if it’s good, right? You know, or if she sends me a picture of the dress on a person, okay, well, I’m going to have a much better chance of saying, okay.

And then even then, you know, my wife has brunette hair, if she sends me a picture of a blonde girl that’s whatever that doesn’t look like her, then I’m like, well, I don’t know. But if that dress is on, you know, a five foot, three cute little brunette girl, then I immediately know, oh, it looks good on her. She’s that same size. She looks like that. Yeah, it’s going to be great. Then I can actually give an opinion and I’m terrible at just kind of visualizing. I think most people really are. Most people really are bad at visualizing that. What is the dress really going to look like? But if they can see it on right in front of them, you’re like, wow, you look beautiful, honey, right? Like that’s how you sell.

It’s the exact same. It’s no different. The psychology is exactly the same. And so if they need that thing, that commission dashboard or whatever, I can vibe code that commission dashboard in 10 minutes. It will be connected to no data sources. I’ll tell it to throw a bunch of mock data in there. I’ll grab their logo and throw it in there and say, put the whatever. Now, all of a sudden they’re seeing mock data with their logo on a dashboard that looks like it can do something. Boom, the dress is on the girl and they’re ready to buy. So the model is capability and systems, not code and maintenance. So with that in mind, give me real examples. So specific business, business problem, what you built, what changed, and what it looked like before and after. Yeah, you know, the reality is whether it’s a pool company or a tech company or a law firm, you know, most companies have the same problems, right? They have data that’s all over the place. They, you know, everyone has data and customer management and finance and, you know, marketing, they’ll have kind of these similar bottlenecks, right? Whether it’s content creation or just systems or understanding and trying to

normalize data. But usually you just have it kind of all over the place. You have these different systems that they’re usually not talking to each other. One example of a real customer that we did this with is a staffing company. And they have, you know, they have these, you know, this call center here. And I talked about this in the last episode, but I think it’s just worth talking about again, because it’s so simple. It’s so simple. It was, it took us a couple of weeks to solve a huge problem for them and save them $100,000 a year. They had three people managing a call center, an incident hotline. And we came in and we used vibe coding to connect their HR stuff to this, this unique dashboard that we made to manage the incidents. We used 11 labs to set up a voice agent that could answer the phone and then route them through. And then of course 11 labs can push that data because it records, it transcribes the whole thing. It has all this data and it can fill out the dashboard for you, create the incident and create the follow up and all this workflow. And we were able to reduce, you know, from three people manning that thing to one. And that’s immediate, immediate savings,

right? That takes a couple of weeks to implement. And, and it wouldn’t be possible or at least it wouldn’t be as easy as it is without vibe coding, vibe coding unlocks that thing. Amazing. But you’ve said the biggest mistake people make when they try this is becoming a dev shop. What, tell me what that means and why does it kill the model? Yeah, you know, it’s very easy to get too technical, especially if you’re not technical, right? You can get overwhelmed if you try to get too deep or too technical. And so what I love to do, what I really like to do is I help them see it. We help them build it. And then we help them learn how to maintain it. We’ll teach them vibe coding. We’ll teach them how easy it is and teach them the ways like, Hey, you know, make sure you don’t say this. And if you ever have a question about whether or not something might break something, that’s okay. That’s why we’re here. Just ask. And we’ll say, Oh, no, you’re good. Go ahead and build that feature.

You’re going to do great, right? We’ll even help you out if you need. But if you get to where, you know, you’ve got 100 clients that need your help, you know, you got to make sure you have a good solid team and you have amazing systems that manages the code. And, and that starts to turn into a little bit more technical process, right? I really like to empower my clients to feel like we’re a resource, but they’re still in charge. Walk me through how you price this. And what makes a client stay month after month, instead of canceling after the first project’s done? The reality is, it’s very easy to, to want to charge less. And you certainly can. I’m not saying you shouldn’t. You know, I just basically told myself, this is kind of how it started. And guys, this is how business works. You just say, what would it take for me to be willing to do that?

Right? And for me, I was just like, $10,000 is the minimum I would be willing to charge to actively have to worry about the success, the ongoing success of this other business. I got a lot to do, right? And so if I’m going to figure out how to build a system that is going to actually provide the value. And that’s, this is one thing that a lot of people forget is they say, okay, yeah, no, someone’s going to pay me $2,000 to do this. But then they don’t think about what it actually takes to deliver this thing. You’ve promised, you know, eight hours of your time a month for a week or whatever for $2,000. And even at that price, $250 an hour, you’re going to run out of resources very, very quickly. And you haven’t left yourself enough room to pay yourself and to pay for marketing and to pay an employee to deliver this and to pay an accountant to take care of the books. And you got to leave room for all of that. And it’s not that I’m cheating people and charging them too much. It’s that I’ve run a business before and I know how much it costs and how hard it is. And so because I knew that I had at least that experience

of having built a business and sold it and been through all the ups and downs and, you know, all the, all the difficult things that it takes to run a business. I just said, you know what, I think 10,000 is where I’m going to start. And I think there’s plenty of agencies that could serve at $5,000. And you know, you adjust your, you adjust your delivery, but make sure you calculate out what does this mean? What does it mean at scale? Right? Because at three clients, you can charge whatever you want. You can charge a hundred bucks a month and you have time to do it. The thing that doesn’t translate is when you have 30 clients, now you need budget to pay other people to make sure that your system, you have to have a business, right? And so I just started that way from the beginning and said, look, this is, this is what it is. So I’m just going to target companies that can afford this much. So an agency owner is listening here, say 10 clients, years of trust. They already have everything you had to earn with cold calls.

What do they do this week before this week is out? The specific move, the specific first sense. You know, if you already have the clients, you should already know their needs. Right. I mean, I know the needs of every one of my clients without them having, if I needed to give a report right now on every single client I could, right? And I wouldn’t have to call them up and be like, Hey, tell me what your top priorities are. I know what those are because I ask them regularly. And so that’s part of our process. And not only that, it’s documented in our systems and know what it is. And so if I wanted to increase my billables with these people and say, Hey, you know what, I, you know, with these clients, I would say, look, I know you have this issue.

I’ve vibed coded this software or this dashboard or this tool that I think is going to help you. Can we jump on a call and look at this really quick? They’re going to say, Yeah, this is awesome. And you send them a link, right? And then you jump on a call with them and talk through and say, look, I think we can maintain this for you and build it out and like finish it. This is kind of just the prototype, you know, and, you know, it’d be an extra $5,000 a month for us to do this. And now, all of a sudden you’ve got AI starting to make an impact on your business. I think, I think anybody could do that right now, but show up with something, show up with something. Remember the dress on the girl, right? Show up with something so that you can show them, Hey, this is, this is what it will actually do. And here’s how it’s going to work. What do you think is going to happen when everyone’s building an app? Like, what’s going to be the biggest moat for a business owner then?

Distribution, hands down. That’s it. At that point is distribution and brand, right? Your brand is, you know, your reputation is going to, is going to be what takes you forward, right? Which is why back to social, you must build that reputation. Your personal brand and your company brand are so important. I post every single day, every single day to LinkedIn, at least once a day, usually three times a day. And by the way, X gets the news about two weeks before LinkedIn does. So if you’re finding your news on X and then bringing it over to LinkedIn, you are the news maker. But anyway, yeah, I think that that, I think that that distribution element is how, how you’re going to get ahead because anyone can build software. I don’t even know if there will be any value to SaaS, you know, in five years or 10 years, I don’t know how long it’s going to take. It’s going to be a minute. It’s going to take some time to really percolate through society. But once, once anyone, like my eight year old, can build something with just words, then, you know, software on demand is, is a thing now, right? And everybody

has their own customers. I would never pay for a CRM today. I just wouldn’t. I have no reason to. I can build it. I have built it. I use my own stuff and it does exactly what I need. It connects to my systems, exactly how I need it to. And I don’t have to call some help desk when I need something. I have full control and that’s going to change the world. I think that agencies are actually in a better position than, than bigger software companies these days because agencies are nimble and you’re not stuck. You’re not tied to one product. You’re stuck to helping the client. That’s it. And if that really is your goal is I’m going to help you. I’m going to help this client. Then you should understand their priorities. You should understand what is that next thing. And you should be looking for them at these latest and greatest technologies. And you need to be at the forefront. Right? That’s what I’m trying to say here is if you want to serve your client, you got to know what’s going on. Right? Follow the latest and greatest and then try it. Say I wonder if like, wow, that’s cool. I wonder if I could do that for this client. Right? Whenever you see something, if it’s not, wow,

this client could use that. If that’s not going through your head, then rewire, rewire yourself. You need to be thinking and looking at everything saying, what does this mean for me, for my business, for my clients? And if you’re really doing that, they’re going to feel that they’re going to feel that service, that love that you have for them, that care that you have for that relationship. And you’ll find out, you’ll figure out, you know, the pathway forward. But if you just always take that approach, they’re going to stick with you and you’ll be able to build amazing things.