Dan Martell - May 14, 2025


Get Rich in the NEW Era of AI (2026)


Episode Stats

Length

18 minutes

Words per Minute

219.56963

Word Count

4,010

Sentence Count

190

Hate Speech Sentences

2


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 The AI revolution is here.
00:00:02.540 AI agents are about to start replacing whole teams
00:00:05.700 and Google search is slowly dying.
00:00:07.980 The world is gonna change forever,
00:00:09.900 but I don't want you to be left behind.
00:00:11.820 So I'm gonna share the eight simple steps
00:00:13.920 that I'm personally following
00:00:15.480 to take advantage of this window of opportunity
00:00:17.580 and how you can use these same steps to get rich with AI
00:00:21.240 even if you're starting from zero.
00:00:23.060 Now, before you can start making money with AI,
00:00:25.260 you need to pick the right industry.
00:00:26.940 I've built and sold three software companies.
00:00:28.900 I've invested in over a hundred.
00:00:30.460 I've been building technology companies since 97.
00:00:32.880 I saw the internet boom.
00:00:34.440 I've seen the web 2.0 boom.
00:00:35.980 I've seen the mobile boom.
00:00:37.100 I've seen it all.
00:00:38.140 I haven't been this excited in the tech industry
00:00:40.900 since 97 with the internet.
00:00:42.940 But what I saw a lot of people do back then
00:00:45.280 is pick the wrong industry.
00:00:47.060 And what I believe is true is the right industries
00:00:49.660 are the boring ones,
00:00:50.960 the ones nobody wants to talk about.
00:00:52.640 See, in life, as in technology, as in AI,
00:00:55.560 we need to focus on what's true, not new.
00:00:58.420 being too early, too technology advanced
00:01:01.760 is just as wrong as being too late.
00:01:04.580 So I'm gonna present to you five industries
00:01:07.000 that you can get involved and use AI
00:01:09.260 to make a lot of money today
00:01:10.560 to take advantage of this gold rush.
00:01:12.180 The first one is supply chain.
00:01:14.040 Think about all the logistics that goes around.
00:01:16.740 I mean, I don't buy anything at a store anymore.
00:01:18.820 It's literally over an app.
00:01:20.400 So you think about all the challenges
00:01:21.860 these companies are gonna have around forecasting,
00:01:24.520 around route optimization for deliveries,
00:01:26.560 Everything around supply chain management is ripe for disruption to make a lot of money using AI.
00:01:31.940 The second is admin.
00:01:33.320 And this is where you see a little bit of innovation happening right now.
00:01:35.860 But think about billing, scheduling, filing, sorting.
00:01:39.820 AI that's able to read the information systems that team members can use,
00:01:44.640 like the drop boxes or your CRMs like HubSpot,
00:01:47.660 to do administrative type work is going to be a huge moneymaker.
00:01:51.060 Number three is home services.
00:01:52.960 Think roofing, HVAC, plumbing.
00:01:55.180 Any time a truck has to go to a home,
00:01:58.460 there's a whole lot of processes involved
00:02:00.420 that if you use AI to help automate it and make it better.
00:02:03.820 Those local industries combined
00:02:05.720 are the trillion dollar industries in this world.
00:02:08.240 Number four, legal services.
00:02:10.220 Pretty much the first thing that people start playing around
00:02:12.880 when they get into chat GPT or other AI tools
00:02:15.260 is stuff around contract analysis
00:02:17.300 or creating drafts of things.
00:02:18.960 I remember last week, I got an email for a deal
00:02:21.080 I was about to do and I was asking some questions
00:02:22.840 and I was like, why am I even asking?
00:02:24.640 I just grabbed everything, put it into AI,
00:02:26.580 and it gave me the questions to ask.
00:02:28.400 And when I called my legal team,
00:02:29.580 they're like, how do you even know to ask those questions?
00:02:31.780 I'm like, AI.
00:02:33.040 People building tools to implement structure
00:02:35.360 and workflow into that are gonna make a ton of money.
00:02:37.820 The last one, number five, is team training.
00:02:40.340 This is an area I'm very excited about.
00:02:42.420 If you think about the idea of every company in the future
00:02:45.260 having an AI that joins for all the Zoom calls,
00:02:48.220 that you're able to talk to it,
00:02:49.560 that is your buddy for onboarding at a company
00:02:51.820 that has access to all the steps,
00:02:53.740 the processes the sops essentially is the company ai it will allow people to be so much more
00:03:00.300 efficient and have everybody have the answers to their biggest questions in real time so now that
00:03:05.580 you've got your industry you need to figure out how to help which brings us step number two pick
00:03:10.060 a high margin model margins are your moat they stack to that moat you've already started it
00:03:15.740 protects your business most people don't understand what a margin is if you sell a product for a
00:03:20.140 $100, but it costs you $20. Your margin is $80, which is about 80%. The key is, is you don't want
00:03:26.980 to be in a business that has margins that are only 20 or 30%. Think restaurants or brick and
00:03:31.580 mortar businesses with a bunch of overhead. Those are bad businesses to be in. So to win in today's
00:03:36.420 market, you have to pair AI with a high margin business model. And these are the four for 2025.
00:03:42.840 Number one, AI services with about 70% gross margin. This is building workflow and automation
00:03:49.060 for people that want AI in their business.
00:03:51.640 And it's literally getting paid to set up
00:03:53.920 Make, Zapier, N8N, or my favorite, Gumloop.
00:03:57.300 Number two is AI consulting.
00:03:59.280 And that's where you can get into 80% gross margin.
00:04:01.560 And this is being a lot more hands-on
00:04:03.520 with these companies to help them understand
00:04:05.540 not only how to build the services,
00:04:07.220 but also build the strategy behind deploying AI
00:04:10.140 and making their business AI first,
00:04:12.460 not getting sidelined by other people using AI.
00:04:15.120 Number three is AI software with gross margin at 90%.
00:04:18.340 that's my world that is literally looking at a workflow or a process and thinking about if i use
00:04:24.180 ai as a primary driver for solving that problem how would the software work and the crazy part
00:04:30.180 is is there's no more workflow a lot of the ai software is powered through text like chat voice
00:04:35.860 or just does on the back end you never see anything like i believe in this one so much
00:04:40.020 that i've gotten all in on building an ai venture studio one of the products that we're building at
00:04:44.260 at Martell Ventures is an AI powered business dashboard
00:04:47.680 to tell you where the problems are in your business
00:04:49.780 and how to fix them.
00:04:50.780 Number four is AI digital products.
00:04:53.000 And this is 95% because if you build one program on AI
00:04:56.880 and you sell it a thousand times,
00:04:58.340 there's no real cost other than the hosting.
00:05:00.320 And I've seen a proliferation on all the social platforms
00:05:03.960 around people that are building massive audience.
00:05:06.480 Like my buddy, Dave Ebelar,
00:05:07.740 where he's got 15,000 people in his community
00:05:10.300 and he's monetizing using these digital products
00:05:12.580 to help them go get better in their craft.
00:05:14.480 And then he has this massive community
00:05:16.080 that he gets to serve,
00:05:17.020 which brings us directly to step number three,
00:05:19.160 sell to a rich customer.
00:05:20.600 So Dan Kennedy, the marketing godfather had this great quote.
00:05:23.420 He said, it's easier to make a million dollars
00:05:25.680 selling to millionaires
00:05:26.840 than to make a million selling to everyone.
00:05:29.340 So to win in today's AI world,
00:05:31.480 you have to find millionaires in those boring industries.
00:05:34.220 So these are the five hacks.
00:05:35.660 The last one's gonna blow your mind
00:05:36.900 that I use to meet these millionaires.
00:05:38.900 Number one is industry specific events.
00:05:41.340 This means you either go to them or you help create them.
00:05:44.000 When I moved to San Francisco in 2008,
00:05:46.100 I didn't know a soul, but a friend of mine said
00:05:48.280 that all the people that you wanna get to know
00:05:50.040 are speakers at the event.
00:05:51.700 So go to the events, but better yet,
00:05:53.320 what I did is I reached out to the organizer
00:05:55.360 and I asked them to help out.
00:05:56.760 So then I got access to the green room
00:05:58.580 where the speakers were
00:05:59.460 and that's how I started to build my network.
00:06:01.260 Number two, hyper-personalized email.
00:06:03.520 When I say hyper, I mean like write the fricking thing.
00:06:06.540 I remember years ago, I got a cold email
00:06:08.720 from a guy named Chris and he's like,
00:06:10.340 Kayden, I know you don't know me.
00:06:11.680 This is a cold email, but I follow your content.
00:06:13.660 I kept reading and he said,
00:06:14.680 I can make you money with your email.
00:06:16.940 Give me a shot.
00:06:17.580 Because of that hyper-personalized email,
00:06:20.080 I let him take a shot.
00:06:21.400 We sent the email, it made me money.
00:06:23.380 Chris today makes seven figures working on my team.
00:06:26.340 Number three, offer an interview.
00:06:28.480 I think using a podcast to build your platform
00:06:31.420 to get you access to the world's top millionaires
00:06:34.140 in your space for where you're building your AI solution
00:06:36.820 is a beautiful way to network.
00:06:38.760 think of it as flattery marketing you know you want to sell to this customer you need to talk
00:06:43.080 to them your ask initially is to get them on your podcast they probably are going to ask you what
00:06:46.840 you do you tell them they go geez that's what we need could you come talk to my team about that ai
00:06:51.240 thing you do and that's how you build a relationship at scale to meet the millionaires to make money
00:06:55.560 number four is host the meetup and i'm doing this every week i literally go through social media
00:07:00.680 find people that are doing cool things and then i reach out to them to join a roundtable on zoom so
00:07:06.200 So I keep it super simple and we just connect,
00:07:08.520 share what we're learning in the industry
00:07:10.000 and offer to be helpful to everybody else.
00:07:12.100 So you don't have to make it more complicated than that.
00:07:14.280 People just wanna meet other people just like them.
00:07:16.420 If you're gonna do the work to organize a meetup
00:07:18.600 or a Zoom call or a mastermind, they're gonna show up.
00:07:21.660 Five, host the founder's dinner.
00:07:23.460 And this is for me a theme dinner.
00:07:25.280 Think of like AI founder's dinners.
00:07:27.160 So coming up, I'm gonna be in San Francisco.
00:07:29.060 I'm organizing a founder's lunch, AI focus,
00:07:31.800 a founder's dinner, AI focus.
00:07:33.300 And I'm gonna find people on Twitter and online
00:07:35.440 that are living in those cities,
00:07:36.880 invite them to those meals
00:07:38.020 and get to connect with them breaking bread.
00:07:39.900 So now that you're crystal clear on your customer,
00:07:42.500 let's start building your offer,
00:07:43.940 which brings us directly to step four,
00:07:45.820 create a high cashflow offer.
00:07:47.780 See, in business, I realized that profit's cool,
00:07:51.280 margins are cool, but if you don't have cash,
00:07:54.220 then your business is really tough to grow.
00:07:55.960 When I was building Sphere, my first company,
00:07:57.920 we grow so fast that there was this sound of cash
00:08:01.520 flying out the door that always made it hard for us
00:08:04.300 scale until a mentor came into my life and showed me how to set my pricing and get my offer right
00:08:09.340 so that i stopped financing my customers problems what most people don't realize is for a company
00:08:14.700 to grow it requires money and most businesses don't create their offers to be able to finance
00:08:20.860 the growth so then you end up acting like a bank to help your customers pay to solve their problems
00:08:26.860 see revenue in a business that's vanity profit is sanity but cash flow is for your vitality
00:08:33.420 so here are the key components to building a high cash flow offer number one is anchor pricing and
00:08:38.700 this will change the game for you doesn't matter what business you're in in your pricing options
00:08:42.780 you want to have something that's really expensive usually three to five times more than the second
00:08:47.820 tier in your pricing because then it makes everything else look cheap so for example if
00:08:52.060 you sell ai consulting make sure the top tier is three to five times more expensive than your middle
00:08:57.660 tier your lower tier to make those ones easier options for people to say yes to number two is
00:09:01.980 implement scarcity and you have to say this because it's probably true that there's only a
00:09:05.660 few spots for you to be able to help those customers so if they want to get started they
00:09:09.500 need to put a deposit down today to lock in their spot for you to get started if not there's no
00:09:13.980 reason for them to make a decision today number three is add a bonus the best bonus something
00:09:19.420 extra to give is usually the solution to the problem you're going to create after you solve
00:09:24.780 the problem they came to you for so if you're helping them build an ai agent well the next
00:09:29.100 problem they're going to have is training their team so your bonus would be free training after
00:09:33.740 you build the ai agent and my rule of thumb is i want to make the bonus even more valuable than
00:09:38.860 the initial offer so that they feel like it's a no-brainer number four is volume pricing and i
00:09:43.740 know i said no discounts and this is not a discount this is what you do if you can get them to buy a
00:09:47.660 lot more of what you got so if your initial pricing is for one year but you can get them to buy two
00:09:52.620 three years worth of what you've got then offer some volume discount if it's for one seat of your
00:09:57.340 software what if they buy 100 seats how much cash can you get up front from the customer transaction
00:10:02.700 because all that money that you're pre-paying for a service that you deliver on later is your
00:10:06.940 cash flow you're going to use invest in growth to make this even simpler if you want my internal
00:10:11.420 offer template just go find me on instagram at damn martell to elza martell on instagram just
00:10:15.900 message me youtube offer and i'll send you my internal playbook now that you got your offer
00:10:20.620 what do you do which brings us directly to step five sell before you build most people end up
00:10:25.660 sitting down getting ready to do business and then finally go out to the world and say hey
00:10:30.540 buy my thing to find out nobody wanted to buy the thing because the way you designed it the way you
00:10:35.100 packaged it the way it works it's just not what they want i've seen business person spend hundreds
00:10:40.140 of thousands of dollars find out nobody wanted to buy their ai solution what i recommend is
00:10:44.620 create the designs of what you want and then go to the market and have that conversation because
00:10:50.060 is no business survives first contact with the customer.
00:10:52.980 Your key is to pre-sell your AI solution
00:10:55.680 to then fund your development
00:10:57.600 so that you don't build something nobody wants.
00:10:59.420 So here are the four key steps that you need to learn
00:11:02.840 on how to pre-sell your AI solution.
00:11:04.620 Number one is prototype.
00:11:06.000 This is the game changer.
00:11:07.400 Today we live in this world
00:11:08.740 that you can prototype your solution using paper.
00:11:11.620 That's an easy one.
00:11:12.460 Figma is a more advanced one.
00:11:13.940 Balsamic is really cool.
00:11:15.380 Or go as crazy as like InVision
00:11:17.740 and really high fidelity mockups
00:11:19.740 where it's literally almost photorealistic simulation
00:11:23.500 of your AI solution so that you can demo it to people
00:11:26.440 and say, here's what it costs and get them to buy.
00:11:28.740 Number two is find your early adopters.
00:11:30.540 These are people within your industry
00:11:32.360 that are willing to take a little bit of risk.
00:11:34.580 They're the founding 50, I call it.
00:11:36.360 Those 50 get to co-create the software with you
00:11:39.620 so that they help drive the product roadmap,
00:11:41.780 but they're your early adopters.
00:11:43.200 These are your customers that are gonna be on board
00:11:45.340 for the long haul.
00:11:46.180 And those ones, you wanna give them a bonus.
00:11:48.080 You might give them time with your team.
00:11:49.980 You might allow them to shift priorities in your roadmap.
00:11:52.560 I've had people put the name of their founding 50
00:11:55.560 on the about page to thank and acknowledge them
00:11:57.900 for supporting them in the early days.
00:11:59.380 Whatever it is, make sure you go find those early adopters.
00:12:01.920 Number three is ask for advice.
00:12:03.620 Here's what I've learned.
00:12:04.480 If you wanna sell, don't try to sell.
00:12:06.200 Ask for advice.
00:12:07.000 If you ask for money, you'll get advice.
00:12:08.820 If you ask for advice, you get money twice.
00:12:11.120 Okay, that's a pit bull lyric, but it works the same.
00:12:13.320 If I reach out to people on LinkedIn and say,
00:12:15.160 hey, I'm building this new AI, I'd love to get your advice.
00:12:17.140 and then you demo this prototype software they go wow that's amazing how do i get access to it
00:12:21.300 and says well it's still early but if you want to be part of the founding 50 here's how it works
00:12:25.460 and you'll get first access in the next 90 days because then you take all that money and you go
00:12:29.220 build it and then you deliver the software step number four is one conversion tool this is how
00:12:33.860 you sell your solution maybe it's going through partners that allow you to present your solution
00:12:38.180 on a big webinar or it's using sell by chat because you have a big social media audience
00:12:42.260 or you're just picking up the phone and doing outbound calls just choose one and go deep and
00:12:46.660 And to do this the best, you wanna automate it
00:12:48.880 and have a tool to do this.
00:12:50.120 So for example, sell by chat, use Revio.
00:12:52.540 If you're gonna do calls, you wanna use a tool for that.
00:12:55.060 But that's how you scale that one conversion tool
00:12:57.340 to really get your first money to scale your AI solution.
00:13:00.460 Now that you got some money in the bank, it's time to build.
00:13:02.920 Which brings us directly to step six,
00:13:05.060 build your MVP or what's called your minimal viable product.
00:13:08.180 You know what's crazy?
00:13:09.020 Years ago, one of my buddies called me up
00:13:10.960 cause he needed a favor.
00:13:12.100 And he asked me if I could look
00:13:13.140 into this software product he built.
00:13:14.820 And he was three years building this software.
00:13:17.400 He hired an agency.
00:13:18.300 They took all his money.
00:13:19.280 They never told him to ship it.
00:13:20.620 They never told him to do anything different
00:13:22.120 because why would they?
00:13:22.980 They're getting paid.
00:13:23.740 And I asked him how much money he was in so far
00:13:25.560 for this software.
00:13:26.900 $3 million.
00:13:29.340 Essentially, he had a profitable business
00:13:31.020 that turned out to be less profitable
00:13:32.340 because it financed the software.
00:13:34.180 Don't do that.
00:13:35.100 I'm gonna teach you how to build an AI MVP
00:13:37.480 that doesn't break the bank.
00:13:39.200 Number one is no code.
00:13:40.480 This is using pre-made tools
00:13:42.400 like Gumloop I mentioned earlier,
00:13:44.000 go high level make n8n there's literally existing no code platforms where for most of you that are
00:13:50.800 building ai solutions you can just use that and keep selling it over and over and over again
00:13:55.940 number two is ai code if you need something more advanced there's literally new coding platforms
00:14:01.720 powered by ai it's kind of like this new thing called vibe coding and i mean tools like replit
00:14:07.200 and bolt and cursor and many others you can even use chat gpt to write the code and do things that
00:14:12.800 more advanced. And if you don't know how to use these tools or deploy your code, ask ChatGPT,
00:14:17.080 it'll literally walk you right through the whole thing. Third is hire an AI developer. I literally
00:14:21.380 hired one today. And for me, it's all about test project first to see if they know what they're
00:14:26.180 talking about. Culture fit, have that conversation with them, tell them the way you work so they're
00:14:30.640 not surprised. And then be sure when you hire them that you've done the pre-selling because
00:14:34.680 you have the wireframes and the solution that you've sold to give to the AI developer to build
00:14:39.600 so they hit the ground running.
00:14:41.060 But without this next step,
00:14:42.320 you're gonna overwhelm yourself with work.
00:14:44.160 Which brings us directly to step seven,
00:14:46.500 automate the delivery.
00:14:47.800 Here's what most people don't realize
00:14:49.180 is that automation turns your offer into a machine,
00:14:52.420 one that works while you sleep.
00:14:54.060 I had a friend, Rachel, years ago come to me
00:14:56.200 because she was running an agency
00:14:57.460 and she got a bunch of business
00:14:58.620 and she was overwhelmed and she stressed out.
00:15:00.920 And I'm like, how much of your thing
00:15:02.740 that you just explained to me,
00:15:03.940 did you set up and automate?
00:15:05.240 She was like, what do you mean?
00:15:06.120 I was like, well, when you sell something
00:15:07.780 and they pay you, do you have like onboarding automated
00:15:11.500 or scheduling or the reporting for them
00:15:13.940 or all the stuff that doesn't take you?
00:15:15.540 And she's like, no.
00:15:16.860 Today, especially with AI,
00:15:18.580 you have a massive opportunity to automate
00:15:20.680 all the busy work and business
00:15:22.260 so that you can do the thing that gets you paid.
00:15:24.220 So these are the four areas of business
00:15:26.220 that you need to automate starting with the first one,
00:15:29.040 purchasing.
00:15:29.600 I still see people not being able to take payment.
00:15:32.240 It sounds crazy, but in a world of Stripe
00:15:34.140 and Webflow to Gumloop, you can set this up for yourself.
00:15:37.780 Number two, account logins and setups.
00:15:40.820 I mean, once somebody pays you,
00:15:42.280 you can have all of the account membership,
00:15:44.700 the creation, all that stuff set up on the backend.
00:15:46.960 I think of membership.io.
00:15:48.520 It literally automates your whole membership experience.
00:15:51.220 So if you sell an AI membership,
00:15:52.860 use that platform, connect it to a gum loop
00:15:55.160 in your billing platform and the whole thing gets automated.
00:15:57.320 Number three, onboarding.
00:15:58.520 When Rachel showed me the amount of time she spent
00:16:00.720 taking information from her clients
00:16:02.360 and going back and forth, I'm like, that's a type form.
00:16:04.840 You take that whole intake, you give it to them.
00:16:07.160 They gotta fill it out to schedule the first call.
00:16:09.240 And then you can automate a bunch of cool AI processing.
00:16:12.460 Many people use that as the inputs to actually do the work.
00:16:15.900 Number four, support.
00:16:17.580 Post-purchase, post-deployment, post-customer using it,
00:16:21.160 they're gonna have questions.
00:16:22.280 You wanna make sure you create a knowledge base
00:16:24.340 with all your support questions that AI uses
00:16:27.160 as emails come in to scan your answers
00:16:29.420 and automatically reply as a support agent.
00:16:32.060 And the more you add to that knowledge base,
00:16:34.100 the better your agent can add to those support emails
00:16:37.040 coming in from your customer.
00:16:38.280 Which brings us directly to step eight, get greedy.
00:16:41.460 Now let me explain.
00:16:42.440 It's kind of crazy because I see this all the time.
00:16:44.420 I had an entrepreneur come to me recently
00:16:45.980 and he was like four or five months in the business
00:16:48.220 and he had an opportunity to sell.
00:16:49.500 My whole thing is what you're trying to build.
00:16:51.440 Do you wanna be short-term greedy
00:16:52.640 and take some cash off the table a little bit,
00:16:54.860 or do you wanna be long-term greedy
00:16:56.420 and build some real wealth?
00:16:57.680 Here's the three S's that I think about
00:16:59.780 to create AI wealth in today's market.
00:17:02.180 Number one is sell, and that's short-term greed.
00:17:04.440 That's literally deciding to build a little tiny app
00:17:07.080 or a little tiny service,
00:17:08.220 and if somebody's willing to pay you some money
00:17:09.680 to save some time, you could sell.
00:17:11.780 The problem with that one is you just didn't learn.
00:17:14.500 You're just starting, and the real value in all businesses
00:17:17.380 is not necessarily the money you make,
00:17:19.020 it's the experience that you gain.
00:17:20.720 Number two is scale.
00:17:21.960 Keep that thing that's making money,
00:17:23.900 keep printing money, and keep going.
00:17:25.600 I remember my friend Chris at Wistia,
00:17:27.260 he had an opportunity to sell,
00:17:28.840 and he realized that if he sold the business,
00:17:30.420 he would just start the exact same business.
00:17:32.180 So instead of selling, he raised a bunch of debt
00:17:34.480 to then buy out his early little investors
00:17:37.040 and then kept with his partner
00:17:38.680 building the business that he enjoyed so much.
00:17:40.760 Number three is stack.
00:17:42.100 And that's exactly what we're doing at Martell Ventures.
00:17:44.340 We work with some of the smartest AI minds
00:17:46.880 building technology for small businesses
00:17:49.140 to essentially build a portfolio of companies
00:17:52.180 that are gonna be the solutions
00:17:54.060 for the different categories of problems
00:17:56.060 small businesses have around the world.
00:17:57.760 If that's you, just find me on Instagram
00:17:59.520 and message me the word AI Ventures.
00:18:02.180 to learn the nine high income ai skills you need to build this year click the video and i'll see
00:18:06.820 you on the other side