Dan Martell - June 04, 2026


How to Build a $10M Business with AI (Zero Employees)


Episode Stats


Length

14 minutes

Words per minute

217.29

Word count

3,078

Sentence count

178


Summary

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

In this episode, I talk about how to stop using AI like a toy and start using it to solve real problems. AI has changed the way we do business, and it s time to stop treating it like just a tool and start putting it to work.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
00:00:00.000 AI just changed how you can get rich forever, and it's not just buy this tool or try this prompt or
00:00:05.840 sell this AI course. That's kiddie pool stuff. I've built and scaled AI companies past a million
00:00:10.780 dollars in under six months through Martell Ventures, and I've figured out the exact formula
00:00:14.640 on how you can make a lot of money with AI, starting with stop using AI like a toy.
00:00:20.580 I get it. AI is fun. We sit there and we're like, look, a new website. Boom, a new app. Boom,
00:00:26.500 built a new dashboard that's not work that's just using it like a toy rich people put ai to real
00:00:32.820 work real tasks real outputs real problems big stuff ai is selling it's delivering it's running
00:00:39.780 their business 24 7. it's not just making them feel good about using ai because it's like outputting
00:00:45.540 things that is like neat to show their friends it's actually doing work like the work you've
00:00:50.260 been avoiding but it makes you money that's great work to do with ai so how should you use ai give
00:00:55.140 AI a real target. Before you buy a single tool, figure out where to point AI towards. AI makes
00:01:02.800 all the problems no longer problems. So the problem to solve is figuring out what is the
00:01:07.540 problem to solve. And there's always one problem that's way bigger and way more important than the
00:01:12.180 rest. And that is called the bottleneck. So we got to point the AI to where you can get the most
00:01:17.280 leverage. That's why I always say buy back your time. The more time you get back, the more time
00:01:21.620 you can do things that make you more money. It could reduce waste by having better reporting so
00:01:25.740 you don't make mistakes. It could help you multiply your output. If you know there's a bottleneck
00:01:30.200 around some kind of process that if you unblock it, you can increase your revenue. That is a great
00:01:35.200 place to use AI. So before you go out there and upgrade your ChadGBT or your Claude account to
00:01:39.600 the $200 a month, because you've been hearing me talk about Claude Code and you're like, I'm going
00:01:42.340 to go Claude Code. First start by figuring out what bottleneck you got to go solve and then find
00:01:47.100 the right AI solution to solve it.
00:01:49.000 So for example, your Atlas blew up
00:01:51.160 after we featured them in a video.
00:01:52.920 And the founder, Omar, was flooding in calls and bookings
00:01:56.460 and couldn't stay on top of it.
00:01:58.300 So what did he do?
00:01:59.120 He didn't go around and buy a bunch of AI tools
00:02:01.320 to like solve this problem in his development
00:02:03.100 or do this other thing in customer success.
00:02:04.700 He looked at the problem,
00:02:06.020 he figured out what the bottleneck was,
00:02:07.200 and he realized that his own tool
00:02:08.920 was the best tool to solve that bottleneck.
00:02:10.720 So how do you find out where you're blocked in your business?
00:02:13.720 The way I think about it
00:02:14.700 is that every business runs on the same chain.
00:02:17.440 First, you have attention.
00:02:18.500 Do people know you exist?
00:02:19.640 Then you have leads.
00:02:20.600 Okay, they like what you got
00:02:21.520 and they give you their contact info.
00:02:22.960 Then there's sales, which is a conversation to purchase.
00:02:25.500 Then they buy, so you have to deliver.
00:02:27.440 And then finally, it's retention.
00:02:28.760 Do they stick around?
00:02:29.920 So now that you understand the chain,
00:02:31.560 here's what you need to do.
00:02:32.720 First, look at each stage of the flow.
00:02:36.040 Second, we have to ask at every stage,
00:02:38.260 if I 10X this tomorrow,
00:02:39.860 would my revenue actually go up
00:02:41.980 or would I create another bottleneck?
00:02:43.320 Essentially, in theory, that if you have perfect business,
00:02:46.800 so you got leads go in,
00:02:47.820 you have really happy customers on the other side.
00:02:49.920 But at some point, as you're going through each stage,
00:02:52.900 there's probably something that's gonna stop
00:02:54.660 the flow of the customer, the flow of revenue.
00:02:57.700 For most businesses, they don't have enough attention
00:03:00.000 or they don't have enough leads.
00:03:01.400 Just start there, that's your bottleneck.
00:03:03.580 Not enough leads means not enough sales,
00:03:05.560 means not enough cash collected,
00:03:06.900 means not enough money to invest in the business.
00:03:09.500 And the truth is, is you probably got opportunities
00:03:11.860 and leads that are just falling through the crack.
00:03:13.800 So where's the money leaking?
00:03:15.480 And look, I built an AI company OS playbook
00:03:18.040 that goes through the whole process in way more detail.
00:03:20.740 It guides you through the audits, the workflow templates,
00:03:23.020 the AI tools I actually use in all my businesses.
00:03:25.660 If you want it, just DM me YouTube OS on Instagram
00:03:28.420 and I'll send it over.
00:03:29.460 So let's say leads is your biggest bottleneck.
00:03:31.820 You need more revenue.
00:03:32.760 How do you get AI to solve that?
00:03:34.620 Get AI to generate revenue for you.
00:03:37.480 Starting with leads and sales.
00:03:39.720 That's where the money enters every business.
00:03:42.480 AI doesn't feel rejection for trying to close a deal.
00:03:45.440 AI doesn't worry about emailing somebody
00:03:47.280 and the person doesn't reply.
00:03:48.480 Humans get burnt out on sales
00:03:49.980 because they feel the rejection.
00:03:52.080 AI doesn't care.
00:03:53.060 The same effort from you built on the system.
00:03:55.920 AI executes it, 10X the output.
00:03:58.680 AI can do everything.
00:03:59.600 It can generate leads, it can automate follow-up
00:04:01.520 and way more and all you do is close.
00:04:04.380 And that's why in Martell Ventures,
00:04:05.680 we have tools like GetRevio and YourAtlas
00:04:07.880 that we use real ai tools that automate the lead scoring the qualifying booking of calls and way
00:04:13.000 more and if you combine those tools with clog manis you have a whole sales engine where you
00:04:17.960 just come in and close so how do we get ai to help us find deals and sell think of these different
00:04:23.480 levels number one you have prospecting ai builds you a lead list use tools like manis clog code
00:04:29.400 or apex to scrape socials and find new people every week based on your criteria and i'll link
00:04:34.520 all of these up in the description below so you can click them and go sign up for them if that's
00:04:38.040 what you want to do next qualifying ai can filter out all the tire kickers yesterday i was having a
00:04:43.640 conversation with one of my companies because they had a bunch of leads 20 000 leads sitting there
00:04:48.440 and they're like i don't want to talk to everybody i want to talk to the best people that are ready
00:04:52.760 for this product so we analyzed their lead list did some data enrichment using ai and found the
00:04:58.600 signals that told us that these people would be perfect for our product like i mentioned there's
00:05:02.680 There's tools like your Atlas,
00:05:03.680 so they can call and qualify.
00:05:04.920 Revio that does this in the social DMs.
00:05:07.080 And what you do is you give it three must-haves
00:05:09.200 for each prospect and ask those questions
00:05:11.560 to make sure you don't get on the phone with tire kickers.
00:05:14.140 Next, we've got pitching.
00:05:15.500 AI writes hyper-personal, very specific messages
00:05:19.700 to your buyers.
00:05:20.520 In many of my companies,
00:05:21.940 AI will look at past messages to the buyer,
00:05:25.080 look at their current situation,
00:05:26.900 what they're sharing on social media,
00:05:28.800 and write wildly personal messages to each one of them,
00:05:32.240 specific to their situation, their industry,
00:05:34.620 and even their stage in the buying process.
00:05:36.920 Next, we have follow-up.
00:05:37.980 An AI can literally run the whole sequence.
00:05:40.420 If someone doesn't respond,
00:05:41.820 he messages an email trigger automatically hyper-personalized.
00:05:45.400 How do you do that?
00:05:46.380 Using AI automation.
00:05:47.680 And finally, upsells.
00:05:49.200 At the end of the day,
00:05:50.040 it is seven times easier to get a current customer
00:05:52.820 to buy more from you than get a person
00:05:54.800 that doesn't know you to buy the first time.
00:05:56.920 So using AI, you can analyze your customer base
00:05:59.340 and figure out who's bumping up to usage
00:06:01.960 or maybe they're up for renewal
00:06:03.380 and actually tell you and craft a message
00:06:05.720 and send it to them.
00:06:07.000 That's why we build another product called Latch
00:06:09.040 who does this auto magically for us.
00:06:11.140 And look, if you wanna get nerdy
00:06:13.180 and get into the specifics and the prompts and the setup,
00:06:16.260 I actually did a whole video going in depth
00:06:18.740 on all the things that you need
00:06:20.520 to learn how to use a tool called Manus to set this all up.
00:06:23.800 If you wanna go deep,
00:06:25.180 I'll link it up at the end of this video.
00:06:26.700 So now you've got AI doing the whole sales process,
00:06:29.320 but once you sell,
00:06:30.340 who's doing the delivery that AI just helped you sell.
00:06:33.100 Here's a cool thing, AI delivers.
00:06:35.440 Most businesses can actually deliver sales,
00:06:38.040 can do really well, but then they drown in delivery
00:06:40.720 and humans hit capacity.
00:06:42.500 And the cool part is AI doesn't have a capacity problem.
00:06:45.260 It literally can keep doing it.
00:06:46.860 It doesn't sleep, it doesn't get upset,
00:06:48.600 doesn't talk back, it's happy all the time.
00:06:50.740 It literally wakes up and is like,
00:06:51.920 I just wanna see you win.
00:06:53.000 Help me help you win.
00:06:54.540 AI can already do at least 80% of your work.
00:06:57.580 I know, ouch, how could it possibly do this?
00:06:59.820 This hurts my feelings.
00:07:01.140 I'm such a creative.
00:07:01.980 It's very important that I'm involved.
00:07:03.580 Let me show you how.
00:07:04.420 So here's a perfect example.
00:07:05.900 We have an internship program called Young Guns.
00:07:08.380 They hired a bunch of people.
00:07:10.020 They got bottlenecked at onboarding a bunch of young guns.
00:07:12.980 So our default is use AI to solve the problem.
00:07:16.080 So they went to it.
00:07:17.160 It created a first draft of zero to hero in 14 days
00:07:21.160 to teach them how to use AI, but it wasn't perfect.
00:07:23.820 So they massaged it and then they implemented it.
00:07:26.400 And all of a sudden the bottleneck
00:07:27.780 was no longer bottleneck
00:07:28.800 and it got the young guns ready to hit the ground running
00:07:31.280 to act like seasoned pros,
00:07:33.020 even though they didn't have the life experience
00:07:34.680 to be ready yet because they were using AI.
00:07:37.200 And that all comes because we continuously train them
00:07:39.720 to default to AI every time.
00:07:42.400 Don't do anything without first consulting AI
00:07:44.560 because I guarantee it's probably gonna give you
00:07:46.300 a good first draft that you wouldn't know
00:07:48.560 because you don't have the life experience.
00:07:50.240 Now, if you are somebody that has the talent,
00:07:52.880 the knowledge, you're an artist, the deep domain experience,
00:07:55.060 I'm gonna show you a way to get out of it,
00:07:57.240 but still feel like you have a fingerprint
00:07:58.860 on the creative process.
00:08:00.440 So the first 10% is what I call the ideation.
00:08:03.340 This is where you open up a chat
00:08:04.640 and you start talking to it about different ideas
00:08:07.080 and opportunities to just even get your bearing straight.
00:08:10.120 What are you trying to accomplish?
00:08:11.220 What are some concepts?
00:08:12.540 Work with it.
00:08:13.260 You have expertise, you have ideas,
00:08:15.060 give it to the AI and have it come back
00:08:16.840 with some other options.
00:08:17.880 This is where you create the definition of done.
00:08:20.580 What does done look like?
00:08:22.520 The second part is the middle 80%.
00:08:24.520 This is what's called execution.
00:08:26.260 This is where the AI actually executes the plan,
00:08:29.900 that 10% that you negotiated with it
00:08:32.160 for it to actually help your customers onboard,
00:08:34.860 support them, track them through the process,
00:08:36.840 create a dashboard, create a whole automation,
00:08:39.640 the whole thing, let it figure out how
00:08:42.100 and have it check its own work.
00:08:44.900 That's a pro move, asking the AI to check in on itself
00:08:48.040 to make sure it's moving towards the right direction
00:08:49.860 based on the first 10%.
00:08:51.320 The final 10%, this is integration.
00:08:53.880 This is where I like to add my human touch.
00:08:56.620 This is where I review the work.
00:08:58.080 I add the personal calls.
00:08:59.340 I add the strategic advice.
00:09:00.660 I make sure that things work and feel
00:09:02.580 and look the way I want them to look.
00:09:04.960 In many ways, the AI is no different
00:09:06.800 than a person that's helping you do the work.
00:09:08.620 You just give it to the AI instead
00:09:09.960 so you don't have to pay them and you don't have to wait.
00:09:11.840 I mean, my favorite thing is waking up every morning
00:09:13.700 to work done for me while I was sleeping.
00:09:16.600 This is my favorite part,
00:09:17.960 is that 80% done by someone else or by AI
00:09:21.440 is 100% freaking awesome.
00:09:23.040 It's already giving you a bunch of time back.
00:09:25.580 So now we've got AI selling, we have AI delivering,
00:09:28.660 but there's one bottleneck left in your business,
00:09:31.020 the most expensive one, and that's you.
00:09:33.760 Now you wanna replace yourself before AI does.
00:09:37.720 This is the future that I see.
00:09:39.600 There's only two scenarios.
00:09:40.920 Either you end up working and creating with AI,
00:09:44.260 or you're gonna wake up one day
00:09:45.760 and you're gonna be working for it.
00:09:47.460 So whatever business you have today,
00:09:49.560 if we don't learn how to use the AI
00:09:51.920 to do the work for us, trust me,
00:09:54.220 somebody's gonna come in and they're gonna build an AI
00:09:56.480 and they're gonna take your job.
00:09:57.820 You're gonna feel the same way the newspapers did
00:09:59.780 back when the internet came.
00:10:00.960 People aren't getting rich by doing more,
00:10:03.600 they're getting rich by doing less.
00:10:05.080 They're saying, hey, AI, you take that on.
00:10:07.440 I'm gonna take that time to go work on things
00:10:09.460 that only I can do.
00:10:10.800 A few months ago, I decided to shut down my whole company
00:10:13.620 for two days to do an AI hackathon
00:10:16.440 where I put people into teams and encouraged them
00:10:18.960 to build tools that would replace their work.
00:10:21.160 And what happened is at the end of those two days,
00:10:23.580 everybody came back 10 times more productive.
00:10:26.940 They built the tooling to replace their work
00:10:28.760 that they didn't wanna do in the first place
00:10:30.000 following the 10-80-10 rule.
00:10:31.820 And now using Claude Code, CLI at the command line
00:10:35.860 is now mandatory for everybody.
00:10:38.160 Scaling your business is making yourself
00:10:40.140 less necessary every quarter.
00:10:42.640 So you know you're doing this right
00:10:44.100 as the business grows and you're less needed.
00:10:46.700 Now he'll feel guilty at first, lean into it.
00:10:49.020 Allow yourself to breathe for once
00:10:51.320 and have the AI continue to support you in your work.
00:10:54.540 So here's how we make this brain dead simple.
00:10:56.840 I have a process called the camcorder method
00:10:58.680 that I designed originally
00:11:00.240 to hand over things to team members.
00:11:02.300 But today I use the same process,
00:11:04.240 but I hand it over to my AI because it's doing the work.
00:11:07.100 So the first thing we have to do
00:11:08.240 is record ourselves doing the task.
00:11:10.660 My favorite way is just get on a Zoom session by yourself,
00:11:14.040 share your screen, record it.
00:11:15.760 While you're talking, you record the screen.
00:11:17.740 See, the AI can actually take snapshots
00:11:19.780 of what you're looking at so it can build context.
00:11:22.540 And while you're talking, it's taking the transcript
00:11:24.440 so it knows exactly how you're thinking.
00:11:26.420 The whole idea is you want everything recorded
00:11:28.240 or documented in every shape or form.
00:11:30.520 Two, make sure there's a transcription.
00:11:32.520 So most tools are doing this today.
00:11:33.920 If not, guess what?
00:11:34.640 The AI can do it for you.
00:11:36.020 Third is feed that transcription,
00:11:37.720 that recording into the AI.
00:11:39.540 And now it has the full context to actually repeat
00:11:42.360 and execute the tasks that you just talked about.
00:11:44.280 and finally iterate and refine until ai can do 80 of it you'd be surprised how many very
00:11:50.200 complicated steps that ai can do especially with these multimodals where you can feed it
00:11:54.440 video and images in text eventually it can find the pattern in your process and teach you how to
00:12:00.120 do it even better but get ai to do that middle 80 i would suggest doing it at least three meaningful
00:12:06.520 times to give it to the ai to see if it can figure out how you do what you do do this with every task
00:12:11.960 until everything is replaced.
00:12:13.340 I'm talking finance, I'm talking follow-up,
00:12:15.580 I'm talking hiring, I'm talking all the business stuff,
00:12:18.240 the bottlenecks that would make you more money
00:12:20.560 if they were solved.
00:12:21.820 You need to be replacing yourself.
00:12:23.800 The window is open, but it's gonna shut down.
00:12:26.280 In 18 months, it won't be there.
00:12:28.560 So the people who move first won't compete with the rest,
00:12:31.420 they'll literally lap them.
00:12:32.880 You don't have to be an expert at any stage,
00:12:35.220 you just need to be first.
00:12:37.200 Right now, it's time to take action and not overthink it.
00:12:39.760 The best skill you can learn is how to unlearn the beliefs
00:12:43.140 and relearn how to activate the AI.
00:12:46.020 I know AI is cool and there's parts of the business
00:12:48.920 that you wish somebody else would take care of,
00:12:51.000 but there's a fear because if it's doing that
00:12:53.460 and you don't know how it's doing that,
00:12:55.500 then maybe it's gonna do it wrong.
00:12:56.540 I would rather you try and have moments
00:12:59.580 where you might have to get involved
00:13:00.920 and fix something to not even try at all.
00:13:03.680 If we don't create bigger problems,
00:13:05.100 we'll never live a bigger life.
00:13:06.740 How about we go out there and say, no, let's try.
00:13:09.240 let's figure out what breaks. Let's use AI. Let's be a little crazy in how we think about it.
00:13:14.760 What if it could literally edit a video here? What if it could do a whole sales call for you?
00:13:19.900 Yesterday, I'm talking to one of my founders and he's telling me how he has his whole sales process
00:13:24.820 automated, selling $700 a month subscriptions, where he has a whole team that's still taking
00:13:30.680 calls. And now he has an AI doing the same calls. And eventually the AI is going to do it better
00:13:35.140 than the team. And then he's going to flip flop them and redeploy those people on separate things.
00:13:39.060 That is a now thing.
00:13:40.500 So either you're like my founder who did it to himself
00:13:43.020 or somebody else is gonna come into your market
00:13:45.200 and just take all of your customers.
00:13:47.120 So let me know in the comments below,
00:13:48.620 what is the first task you're gonna go and apply AI to
00:13:52.060 that you haven't done yet, that you've been putting off,
00:13:54.700 that you're like, no, I'm committed to this.
00:13:56.480 I wanna do that.
00:13:57.460 Comment below and let me know.
00:13:58.820 And remember, if you want my internal AI company OS playbook,
00:14:02.220 just DM me, YouTubeOS on Instagram
00:14:04.600 and I'll send it right over.
00:14:05.740 And as promised, here's a video that'll teach you
00:14:07.620 how to get AI to take over your whole sales pipeline.