825 | He Let AI Build His Business (It Made $180K In 6 Weeks) | Jon Cheney

I built the same software twice. The first time, it cost me $3.2 million in 18 months. The second time, it cost me $400 in one weekend. That’s an absurd thing to say. Don’t know how to write a single line of code. And so vibe coding just opened up this whole new world to me. That’s Jon Cheney. He built an entire AI business on a Thursday, had a $15,000 customer by Tuesday, $2.5 million in his bank account by year one. Tracking $8 million in year two, Tony Robbins hired him, Dean Graziosi hired him. The CEO of Replet named him on the Joe Rogan podcast as the best example of what’s now possible. Yet he can’t write a single line of code. What’s his secret?

Eight-year-old vibe codes, too. Anyone can do it. It nubbles the playing field. In this episode, you’ll learn how to build a multi-million-dollar business with AI. Grabbed this thing, dropped it into the vibe coding platform and said, hey, build this. And, you know, 20 minutes later. How to walk into a local business, a pool company, a staffing firm, even BYU, and spot a million-dollar opportunity at a glance. I was standing in a 35-minute queue for water at an airport in Paris on vacation and I couldn’t stop myself. I estimated they were leaking about $100,000 a year from one queue. I am literally building these for my businesses in my head right now on this very call.

How he gets clients to sign six-figure checks for software that didn’t exist 15 seconds earlier. Early. It’s within five minutes. You can have something ready to go on the call and it literally is the thing that they were asking for. Like, how did you do this? And a hot take you might not be expecting. You can be a hairdresser making $12 an hour and afford everything you need to start a business.

You see a like-dead post that completely rewires how you think about building things. So what is it? I was just on LinkedIn and I don’t remember who it was exactly. I know it was a VC out of the Bay Area. I remember that detail, but they said, I just watched somebody build a piece of software in like 10 minutes in front of me using this platform, this vibe coding platform. I was like, what? What’s vibe coding?

And I was so excited about that. I was so excited about it when I jumped in. I opened it up and I gave it some ideas that I had and it just all of a sudden started putting software in front of me. I was like, wait, how? How is this possible? I’m a founder, entrepreneur, sales guy, idea guy. I’m good at raising money. I’m good at building. I’m good at a lot of things. I don’t know how to code. I don’t know how to write a single line of code. And so vibe coding just opened up this whole new world to me. We’re actually making money as opposed to burning $100,000 a month or, at my peak, $600,000 a month I was burning. And that’s crazy. Absolutely crazy. It just kind of almost makes me sick a little bit to think about it now. But that’s just how it was.

And so I said, you know what? I don’t want to be in this game forever. I also love the freedom of building on my own. I don’t have to, if somebody wants me to do something because they’ve given me a million dollars, they have the right to ask me that. They really do. But if I’ve done it all on my own, well, if I want to go kayaking today or fishing, I can do that. What did you first build now that you’ve discovered this wonderful new world of vibe coding? I discovered vibe coding right as I was exploring this, I had this travel app idea, right? I love to travel. Everyone loves to travel. And what I wanted was a, you know, I have in the other room here in my house, I have a map of the world and I have a bunch of pins everywhere that I’ve traveled, right? And I thought, you know, wouldn’t it be so cool if I could, if I could click on those pins and then it would zoom in on, you know, Israel or zoom in on Australia or wherever, wherever I went and then I could see the cities I visited and I could zoom in a little bit more and see the places I went and see pictures and video and just have this nice kind of interactive digital

pin board. That was the idea, right? I found a dev shop out in Ukraine that I’d worked with. I just reached out to him and said, Hey, what would it take to build this? This is before I discovered vibe coding right before it. They came back to with, you know, $105,000 proposal that they had sent over, you know, a several page, you know, architect document and kind of summary. It was probably, it was probably seven or eight pages. I just said, I wonder, and I grabbed this thing, dropped it into the vibe coding platform and said, Hey, build this. And, and, you know, 20 minutes later, it was done with the first version.

What a time to be alive. Hey, I love it. So you never launched the travel app, but you couldn’t stop thinking about what you just seen. So a few months later, you woke up on like a Thursday with an idea. What was it? And why did you decide to build it that week? I’m going to, I’m going to try to compress the entire experience of entrepreneurship from idea to first customer. But I said, I wonder if I could do it in a day, right? Start today on Thursday and be, and get my first customer by Friday, right? And so I had this idea that had been rolling around in my head about helping people learn AI better. And so I decided to create an AI IQ test, or I called it an AI Q test, right? To just see how good are you with AI, right? And people would take it. Now, the one thing that those IQ tests, they always do, they say, Hey, you know, to see your score, pay $399, right? And, you know, you have to put in your credit card and sign up for some, you know, 36 month contract. No, anyway, they make it kind of annoying, right? And I said, you know what, I’m going to, I’m going to just have them put in their email. But here was the idea. Here was where the

money was going to be made. I would get their email. That was good. But then based on their score, I would then, if they did really well, I would say, Okay, great. Now you can pay for a longer full length test and pay $59 and have a certification that says you are now AI certified from the General AI Proficiency Institute, right? That was the idea. It’s going to be this official, you know, issuer of credentials for AI, right? And I was like, look, if the SAT, the ACT, these different, you know, all these different systems out there, they had their first test at some point. And so now they have millions, you start somewhere, I said, I’m going to start here, I’m going to do this. And then if they did poorly on that, on that test, and it’s a, Hey, here’s some courses, you can learn, right? I built the whole thing, vibe coding, 12 hours that day, Thursday, 12 hours Friday and probably about 10 hours on Saturday because I had some other things I had to do, but I finished about 3am Saturday, right? And so probably, I don’t know, somewhere between 35 to 40 hours, the whole thing was built, took me about, it’s about $400. And it wasn’t all vibe coding. I think

it was about $140 went to vibe coding. The rest went to, I had to register the LLC and set up my bank account and I bought a logo that I really liked that was better than what AI could produce at the time. And, and just systems, right? I bought a domain, different things like that. So I just, I set up a whole business, right? I built a whole business in a weekend and a lot of that was the vibe coding. Of course, that was the central component. I launched ads and, and I woke up Monday morning and said, okay, I wonder how many people have bought. And I had zero purchases. I was like, what the heck is wrong? I looked at my stripe account and there was nothing there. So I go and I look at the ad and I was like, I wonder how many people clicked on it. And 140 people had clicked on my ad to come and they’d taken the test.

And I didn’t have good enough tracking or analytics at the time. So I don’t know if anybody actually tried to purchase, but I tried to purchase and it came up with an error with stripe. So I had misconfigured something because I was not a developer. I didn’t know what I was doing. And it was back then vibe coding was a little bit harder, right? I just had a little thing. It took me five minutes to fix, but I’m a sales guy and an entrepreneur. And I said, all right, I’m going to make this happen. And so I started calling some people. I just jumped on LinkedIn and started messaging people and said, Hey, I’d love to come and test your people and train them on AI. And I found someone that said yes. And by Tuesday morning, I had a $15,000 contract. So it took me five days from starting vibe coding to my first $15,000 contract five days.

That’s incredible. I want to hear a few more of the details around that. So you’ve launched your business on a Saturday night, Monday morning, you wake up, you make this quick fix. So you’ve gone from idea to first customer. What did you say on the first sales call? Fake it till you make it is the right term, but it’s something along those lines, right? I’m just very confident like, Hey, this is what we do. It doesn’t matter if I’ve never done it before, right? I just got on with somebody and it was somebody who was kind of, it was a warm cold lead. It wasn’t like a good friend or something like that. But somebody who just kind of, you’re in the same network. We’ve kind of seen each other at events. And I’m just like, Hey, the guy’s name is Johnny. Actually, I said, Hey, Johnny, you know, would love to chat.

He agreed. He’s like, Yeah, let’s jump on a call. We’ve been talking about this. We jump on. He’s like, So tell me what you’re doing. I was like, Look, AI is everything. It is, it is changing the world. The companies that jump on it quickly are really going to get ahead. And he’s like, I agree completely. What do you do? I said, Look, we come in, we, you know, we, we measure everybody, see how they’re, how they’re doing. And then we, you know, do some training for you guys so that you guys can actually learn how to do it. And we can kind of start to make a game plan for how this is going to happen. And he said, Great, let’s do it. How much does it cost? And I said something like $50 or $150 per person. I don’t remember what it was exactly. And, and then we, you know, had a $15,000 contract. I think it was $150.

Well, as starts go, that sounds like a pretty good start to a business. $15,000 by Tuesday. You started the whole process on the Thursday beforehand. Then you kept calling something like, was it $180,000 in six weeks? Completely solo. And then a client said something to you that changed your whole model. Tell me a little bit about that. I kind of like the four minute mile. Once somebody does the four minute mile, like everyone can do the four minute mile, right? Like, Oh, okay. Like there’s just this belief, right? And I think you’re a sales guy to Jeff’s. You get this. Once you sold it once. Great. Now you can sell it a hundred times. And so I sold it twice.

And, you know, anyway, I just kept finding businesses, 10,000 year, 15 there, 20 there, five there, you know, sold it to a bunch of different companies that I was selling these one day trainings. Then I had a former neighbor of mine from about five years ago once pool company and a super awesome guy. You just said, Hey, John, I’ve been seeing your stuff. I’ve been seeing, you know, you’re killing it. It looks like, you know, can you come in and help us? And I said, yeah. So I go right into the pitch, right? Hey, here’s what we do. We come and we measure and we train and we do this stuff. Here’s the things we go over. And he said, Yeah, well, what about, what about after like, how do people do like at adopting after is like, yeah, you know, it’s tough sometimes, right?

You know, when you learn something new, it’s easy to get excited about it. And then it kind of goes away. And, and then right there, my mind was like, recurring revenue. I said to Jake, I was like, but you know what, we also have this new model that we’re working, we’re working on. And I think it might work really well for you guys, where we actually, instead of just 15,000 dollars per day, you know, I become your fractional chief AI officer. And, you know, we’ll come, we’ll do the training. And, and, and then I’ll, you know, I’ll keep following up and we’ll keep working on this. And I’ll sit down with you guys on strategy and I’ll, I’ll help you build stuff.

And, you know, we’ll have some ongoing support. And he’s like, that’s what I want. Send me the contract. And I was like, awesome. Let’s go. Yeah, let’s do it. Okay. Before we go further, let me, let me get some straight here. So you’re sitting today, you’re selling a fractional chief AI officer service. So you can’t write a single line of code, at least when you started, you couldn’t walk me through how vibe coding has made all that possible. What does it actually look like when you sit down and you build something for a client today? I’m going to come in, I’m going to assess, I’m going to meet with all the different leaders in the company, whether that’s the CEO or sort of the VP’s or the marketing heads or whatever it is, sometimes even just the secretaries that people have lots of processes and stuff like that, right?

So I’ll meet with the different kind of stakeholders throughout the company and, and I’ll usually during that first meeting or maybe in the second meeting with them, I’ll vibe code something really quick and say, Hey, look, this is a process you could use. Here’s a dashboard we could start to just plug things into, right? And I’ll just vibe code it up and, and I’ll sit there and I’ll do it live with them on the, you know, on the call and say, watch, this can take me five minutes. And I’ve got, you know, at least their first version, they’re just like, Oh my gosh, if this dashboard actually worked, it’d be amazing. I’m like, yeah, we’re going to just work on this together and we’re going to make it happen.

And so I’ll teach them, I’ll teach them how to use these tools because they’re easy, anyone can do it. And again, you know, you said, Hey, John, at least when you started, you couldn’t, I still can’t, I still can’t write a single line of code. When I’m on a vibe coding platform, I’m reading the agent’s thoughts. I understand how this works and how it’s put together. Like I could draw on the whiteboard, how it all fits together and I think that’s really useful. But, but the reality is my eight year old vibe codes too. Right. And, and he can’t architect on a whiteboard. He can’t, but he can say, Hey, you know what, I want to build a game like Roblox. I want to build my own version. I want to build this mini game. I want to build this. He came in the other day and told me, Hey, he said, Dad, I built a like a fortnight style game that has a thousand different modes to play this game.

And, you know, if that doesn’t show you the power of a vibe coding, right, then I don’t know what can. So it’s all the work you’ve done now. You, you, you’re getting to know what to look for. Give me some real builds, specific projects, specific businesses. What does a boat before and after look like? And trying to understand what, what you’re actually making for a lot of these companies. I work with, you know, I mentioned a pool company. We’ve worked with staffing companies. We’ve worked with tech companies. We’ve worked with public companies. We work, we work with a solopreneur that’s a dermatologist in California, right? We do all the, so many different types of companies, but there are common patterns everywhere, right? They’re trying to cobble together tons of data in lots of systems. Most companies have tons of systems with disparate data.

It’s all over the place. It’s not organized. It’s not uniform. And so we want to, you know, a lot of times the first thing they want to do is just say, I just want to be able to understand my business better. You know what I mean? And so there’s, you know, there’s all these different systems for those calendars, Zapier, air table or spreadsheets or HubSpot or Salesforce or whatever it is. They’re just like, there’s just so much stuff out there. And I just, I don’t really understand what’s going on. So we, you know, we take time to, to understand that and to map it all out. And then we pull it all in and we basically ask them, you know, what would you like to know what we’re doing now? And this is maybe getting ahead of ourselves a little bit, but we’re launching a Jenny API, a new thing called Jenna. And we’ve launched it internally for our clients and we’re about to announce it to the public. So this, you know, is kind of one of the first times maybe it’s being talked about in the public. But Jenna is, is built on, you know, Nemo Claw, which is kind of a secure version by Nvidia of Open Claw. And this is, you know,

kind of a fully agentic type system that, you know, we vibe coded by the way, right, which we’re taking frameworks that are out there, but then using vibe coding to turn it into a usable interface, right? If the Open Claw just becomes another one of those, you know, you’ve got Salesforce and HostBot and Open Claw, you need them to all talk to each other, right? And vibe coding can help you pull that together. And so we’re launching Jenna that what that helps people, you know, be able to talk to their business and understand their business faster. And in that type of an approach where you just go in and you say, okay, what’s going on? Let’s understand it. And then, and then what we’ll do is we’ll prioritize what needs to be done, right? What needs to be done that’s going to have the biggest impact. I think I mentioned a staffing company a few minutes ago. So California staffing company, by the way, California is, you know, known for being hard to work with. And so they have all kinds of requirements and things.

And this staffing company manages about 5,000 employees. So it’s pretty significant. And one of the things they require is an incident hotline, right? So if you, you know, cut your thumb or you, I don’t know, you break your leg or, or whatever, something, right? You’re sick. I don’t know what it is, what they qualify as incidents. But if you have an incident, you have to have a phone number that people can call and report it and then, you know, have a process to deal with the incident, right? It had to be staffed 24 seven, because that’s one of the requirements, which is not fun at all. And 90% of those calls were like status checks, right?

Just like, Hey, where’s my claim? When am I going to get my $240 reimbursement for my insurance? You know, that kind of thing. And so, so we said, Okay, well, this is easy, right? We can, we can use some tools to vibe code a, an agent that could just answer the phone. And there’s all kinds of great, you know, voice agents off the off the shelf, but they don’t make it super easy to actually build the solution. The agent that, you know, how do I connect it to a phone number and how do I then connect it to a dashboard and how I connect it? But guess what? Vibe coding takes care of all that, right? It glues it all together, right? I just bring all my pieces and I say, Okay, Hey, here’s what I want to build. Here’s the type of thing I want. And so what we ended up doing is we built a dashboard for them. We built a, we connected it to a phone number.

We said, Okay, this is what you’re going to call this, the agent’s going to answer, it’s going to figure out if it is something that’s, you know, an emergency or something, they could click a button and that would transfer them over to somebody’s phone that would ring or we’d say, Hey, dial 911, you know, but, but the bottom line is this, this dashboard ended up taking their staff from three to one on this specific system. And they reduced their case resolution time from 39 days to 11 days.