how average people will get rich with AI

build an AI-first one-person business

You want to get rich.

Everyone does.

And you want to do it fast.

But you also want to enjoy what you do. You want meaning. You want to control how long you work so you can prioritize other areas of your life.

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is, this is possible.

Nobody wants to admit that they've found and exploited a shortcut, but that's what our modern world is filled with right now.

Digital products are a shortcut.

Social media is a shortcut.

AI is a shortcut.

Technology as a whole is a shortcut.

If you don't like the word "shortcut," exchange it with "leverage."

You don't have to send physical letters through the mail anymore when you can post an Instagram reel of you expressing your thoughts in your car that reaches 500,000 people. (And 500,000 is insane. You don't even need 10,000. You can also DM anyone, crazy.)

You don't need to find a book at the library to find a hyper-specific piece of information when you can get unstuck from a simple conversation with AI.

You don't need to waste $10,000+ testing whether or not a physical product will work when you can launch a digital product on the same topic in 2 weeks, see if it works, generate cash flow, and then pour that money and validated idea into another business model.

Here's the bad news:

You still need to learn how to take the shortcut.

And shortcuts are not synonymous with guaranteed success.

Humans get distracted from the shorter path all the time because they can't sit down and focus.

Even with the all-powerful AI we have access to, many people will fail for the simple reason that they will try for 2 weeks and quit because they weren't serious in the first place.

For those who understand that success doesn't exist without failure, let's begin.

How To Get Rich In General

First, we need to understand how to get rich in general.

Assuming you are not rich, or you’re just reading this for fun, there are 4 ways:

• Save a percentage of your income every month (slow)

• Invest a percentage of your income every month into stocks or real estate (less slow)

• Build a cash flow business that you control the income of, then save or invest (even less slow)

• Invest an abundance of cash into businesses, stocks, or real estate (reserved for those with an abundance of cash)

Basic stuff. Mom told us this. But most of us don’t have free cash lying around.

However, most of us have time.

And thankfully, the 3rd option is something that anyone can do.

That's the option you can take to start your path to getting rich.

If you're interested in the other ones, I can't help you there.

With that said, you're going to have to build a business.

AI is just a way to do more, faster, as one person (or a small team).

I'm sorry to tell you that this isn't another get-rich-quick scheme. It's a shortcut to doing something that already works and has been proven to work. Almost every "get rich with AI" video will give you a fancy new tool to use, but that's a surefire way to ensure it never works.

The shortcut we've been talking about this entire time is starting an AI-first business.

Due to that, there are a few things you need to know:

1) Every business is a media business now.

That means every business, from e-commerce to digital products to local businesses, is posting internet content to advertise their business.

That means you will have to do that as well.

That's how you attract potential customers to pay you money.

Paid ads, SEO, and other things like sponsoring podcasts are viable marketing machines, but in my opinion, organic content is how you build a long term brand that people trust. Especially in today’s social media first world.

This will only become more important as the internet is filled with AI generated slop.

2) The greatest differentiator is you.

Personal branding isn't just another fad.

Yes, the concept of a "personal brand" is cringe.

But the essence of it is beautiful, which is getting paid to be yourself.

We aren't trying to build a personal brand, we're using modern technology to work less, earn more, and focus on the topics we deeply care about. We're using the internet as a vessel to build our life's work.

No, you don't need to show your face.

No, you don't need to use your name.

But what you do need is a story, a personality (even if it's boring like mine!), and a mission to help other people.

Because people buy from people they trust.

And when AI starts to flood the internet with untrustworthy content by people who are trying to make a quick buck without realizing that always backfires, trust becomes scarce.

You, as a person – your problems, experiences, opinions, and interests – are what set you apart in today's world.

For all I'm concerned, a normal "brand" or business can be a personal brand if it checks those boxes. That is, if it's an extension of yourself.

You don't have to start a personal brand to get rich, but you need a business with personality.

That's what we will learn.

3) Most beginners should start with a digital product.

We don't live in a world where you pour your life savings into a business and pray that people want what you sell.

Instead, you do this:

• You test ideas with social content

• You turn the best ones into a digital product fast

• You improve the product with feedback

• You expand that product into different offers

A digital product can be anything from an ebook to a course to a small-scale software that solves a singular problem. Many people are using tools like Cursor to code up niche apps (not full-blown enterprise software). I haven’t done this, although I want to soon with a gamified app for going on walks, so we aren’t going to focus on that option in this letter.

My 2-Hour Writer course gave me the money and validated idea necessary to build Kortex, a more cost-intensive software business with a team of developers.

If I wanted to, I could take it even further and sell an internet writer-centric keyboard, a physical pen, or another accessory.

If I had a health digital product, I could create a supplement like I see many doing on X and IG right now, but based on my own personal philosophy, giving it a unique twist.

And, the cool thing here is that you already have people who have benefited from your product. Meaning many of them will likely invest in whatever else you build.

Of course, you don't have to take it further than the digital product.

They have incredible profit margins and allow you to help people at scale while basking in the free time that technology allows you.

Note: a personal brand is not a business model, it’s a trust mechanism for a business. The model we are building as a beginner is around a digital product, although you can monetize almost anything.

4) That leaves us with 4 focus areas

There are 4 skills you need to start a modern business.

1. Content – because this is a media business, and media is how you attract potential customers (no customers, no business).

2. Brand – because why would they trust you? Why do random people on the internet resonate with what you help them with?

3. Product – well, that's obvious, because without one you don't get paid, or you get a fraction of the payment (sponsorships, platform revenue, affiliates)

4. Promotions – if you don't promote your product under your brand and content, it will never get seen.

Thankfully, all of those can be learned fast, done with high enough quality, and partially automated with the help of AI.

I am not talking about a full-fledged company with HR and other operations. I'm talking about what can be done as an average person augmented with AI.

That's what we're here to learn.

Note: The build a profitable personal brand in 30 days challenge starts on June 16. Join here if you want daily lessons, action steps, and AI prompts that take 30-60 minutes each day. By the end you'll have a stack of modern high-value skills and the foundations of a profitable brand.

Build An AI-First One-Person Media Company

I don't want to just give you prompts to use to have AI do this for you.

Instead, I want to give you something more powerful:

A way to figure anything out with AI.

So, rather than telling you exactly what to do, I'm going to show you how I would figure out how to create a brand, content, product, and promotions from scratch.

If you stick with this, you will come away with more than you could ever find by going about it on your own.

Brand – Creating A Personal Brand Coach

Let's imagine that you know absolutely nothing.

You don't know what a personal brand is and you don't know what makes it effective.

All you know is what you've read so far in the letter. You have the awareness of an opportunity and you want to take advantage of it as fast as possible.

But here's the thing.

For something like building a personal brand, there are 1000 different ways to go about it. Everyone has their own way of building one. They all work, but sometimes they aren't aligned with your goals.

If you were to just ask AI to build one for you, you probably wouldn’t get very far. Intelligence needs context.

Here's what I would do:

1. Find an expert you trust who teaches personal branding

2. Feed their advice into AI and condense it into a detailed action plan

3. Turn that into a prompt that coaches you and keeps you focused

For step 1, you want to find information that's not only trustworthy, but detailed enough to get results.

You can find this information in a book as a PDF, a YouTube video, free guide, course or an article.

In my opinion, the best way to find this type of information is on YouTube.

After a bit of searching YouTube for:

• “How to build a profitable personal brand”

• “Personal brand Alex Hormozi”

• “Full guide to building a personal brand”

I found a few videos that seemed promising. But there's a 6 hour video from Caleb Ralston (the guy behind Gary V and Alex Hormozi), so we're going to use that.

Here's what I would prompt AI:

I want to build a personal brand. Break this video down into a comprehensive action plan. Write the action plan as if you are teaching me how to build a personal brand from scratch.

[link to the video]

I personally did this inside Kortex since it can pull from YouTube transcripts, and you can choose between different AI models for different tasks.

I used Gemini 2.5 Pro because it is a reasoning model, and it can handle a lot of context (a 6 hour video is a lot).

The output was an extremely comprehensive guide which is exactly what we were looking for.

Now, how do we turn this into something we can use to create our own personal brand?

First, you need to think of AI not only as a tool to help you learn how to do something, but also as a tool that can do work for you based on the information you feed it.

So, we're going to turn this personal brand guide into a 2-phase prompt.

I've talked about this many times, but I highly recommend using a prompt that helps you create good prompts according to best practices.

Inside of Kortex, you can go to Chat and click Write Incredible AI Prompts.

Then, whatever you type and send will be turned into a prompt.

Or, you can copy the prompt here and paste it into whatever tool you are using and hit send.

Now, type this:

I want to create an AI prompt that acts as my personal brand coach.

Structure your prompt in 2 phases.

Phase 1 – context gathering: interview the user one question at a time to acquire all details necessary to build a personal brand. At the end of phase 1, provide a detailed step-by-step action plan

Phase 2 – personal brand coach: start with the first set of actionable steps the user should take for their personal brand and encourage the user to check in frequently with everything they have done. For every check in, give them tips on how to make their work more impactful and follow up with the next set of actionable steps.

Base each phase of the prompt on this information on personal branding:

[Paste the response from the last prompt here]

The output from that is pretty insane when using a reasoning model like Gemini 2.5 Pro. Here it is. Extremely comprehensive. (I did have to clean it up a bit, make sure you read through the output when you do this.)

Now, send that prompt to a new chat and spend a good chunk of time answering the questions for phase 1.

Congrats, you now have a personalized strategy and expert personal brand coach without paying $10,000, which took 30 minutes instead of the 6 hours it would take to watch the video and another 20 hours to map everything out on your own.

Check in with your "coach" at least once a week, and it will slowly guide you to more nuanced actions and monetization.

Content – Copying What Works, With Your Own Strategy

Since you now have a personal action plan from the last section, you know:

• What platform you are starting on

• What type of content you are going to create

• How often to post per day or week

Now, we need to learn how to write content.

There are a few different steps we can take here.

I think you'll be blown away by the output:

1) Generate a list of content ideas from your action plan.

We need relevant content ideas to work with.

Preferably ones that are proven to work.

Try this prompt in a new chat:

Generate 30 validated content ideas based on my personal brand strategy: [link personal brand strategy document from last step]

The ideas should be a balance between high-performing and authoritative, pulling from my audiences pain points, popular topics in my niche, and unique perspectives that separate me from other brands.

I'll leave it up to you to judge the quality of these ideas.

2) Break down high-performing post structures.

This will depend on the platform you are growing on and content medium.

If I were growing on YouTube, I would:

• Go to a popular account in my niche

• Filter their videos by most popular

• Find a video with the style you want to emulate

Then, ask AI to break it down in a new chat:

Give me a comprehensive breakdown of why this video works:

• The overall structure of the video as a framework

• The psychological patterns used to hold attention

• The structure of each section's ideas and why they're impactful

Structure your output as if you are teaching me how to recreate this video step by step.

You can accomplish the same thing by pasting multiple Tweets, LinkedIn posts, newsletters, or reels scripts into AI.

Once you have a detailed breakdown of why that content structure performs well you can turn that into a prompt using the previous process.

First, go to the Write Incredible AI Prompts workflow, or paste the prompt creator prompt into a new chat.

Feed it the video breakdown output from before and tell it that you want to create a prompt that generates a YouTube video outline (phase 1) and YouTube video script (phase 2) following that high-performing structure.

3) Use that prompt to create content with your own ideas

So far, you have a list of 30 content ideas and a prompt that guides you through creating the actual content.

Now all you have to do is:

• Send your content creation prompt

• Give it the idea(s) you want to turn into content

Here's an example of a Tweet writing prompt I created based on a YouTube video that teaches how to write tweets.

You already have the process to do anything you want with AI based on what we learned, so I'll leave the experimentation in your hands.

One last thing.

Since it takes an entire article to teach this, good content isn't only about writing social posts. You need to "build a world" of content for people to binge and explore. I teach that here.

Product – Stealing Like An AI Artist

Here's the thing about AI.

I don't trust a general response for something highly personal.

Sure, if you're asking AI what the weather is like today (even though most base models can't answer that due to knowledge cutoff without being paired with internet search), then do that.

But when it comes to something where:

• There is more than one "right" way to do it

• The results are determined by uniqueness and novelty

• The output requires specific knowledge from your own brain

Then you can't skip the learning process.

That's good news for you, because those who want to "get rich quick" are going to fall flat on their face.

But the other thing with AI is that you can turn it into an expert with the right prompting. You don't need to be a seasoned marketer in order for AI to turn your ideas into something a legendary marketer would use.

So far, we know how to break down what works into a detailed guide with AI. We also know how to turn that into a prompt that performs the task for you. Lastly, we know we need to find a source of expert-level inspiration so that we can give AI context to perform the task from.

So, there are a few things you can do here:

1. Find a YouTube video that explains the best types of digital products to sell as a beginner – turn that into a prompt that interviews you to see which one is best.

2. Based on the type of product (ebook, course, cohort, template) ask AI what topic you should create the product around – feed it your personal brand strategy from before as context.

3. Ask AI to give you a comprehensive breakdown of Alex Hormozi's offer creation framework. Turn that into a prompt that guides you through creating your own offer out of your product idea.

4. Break down a PDF like Breakthrough Advertising by Eugene Schwartz into a comprehensive guide to write landing page copywriting. Turn that into a prompt to write your landing page and give it your offer (I also talked about how to do this in my future of digital products letter last week).

5. Find someone who has a similar product, purchase it, and paste each section into AI to break down the structure of the product. Turn that into a prompt that guides you through creating a similar product but with your own ideas.

This is all fairly extensive, but that's because you are actually going to stand out and make this work.

Promotions – Repeating The Process

The success of your AI-first business depends on shameless and systemized self-promotion.

You have a personal brand strategy.

You are checking in with your coach to guide you through growth.

You're posting high-performing content on a weekly schedule.

You have a product that you can start selling (host it on Stan if you're wondering how to accept payment).

Now, you need to promote your product in your content.

That means:

• Link your product in every YouTube description

• Plug your product in a reply once a day as a reply to a Tweet, Thread, LinkedIn post, or in your Instagram story

• Guide people toward your bio link for Shorts, Reels, and TikToks

This all depends on what platform you choose to start out with.

Now, one last thing I want to leave you with. Because most people don't understand how to promote.

If your content is good enough, sometimes a simple "check out my product via the link in the description works," but when you are promoting in something like the reply to a tweet, you need to get specific.

Try these prompts:

What are the most effective copywriting frameworks for promoting my product on social media?

That should give you a few like PAS and AIDA.

If you'd like, ask why those frameworks work and the psychology behind them. Then ask:

Here is my product details: [link or paste your product details]

Write me three 280 character or less promotions using the PAS framework and direct response marketing principles. The promotions should link to my product.

From there, you can test and iterate on those.

Cycle through them every day and test different variations to see which leads to people clicking through to view your product more.

There is a lot more we could go over for this letter, but I'm going to leave it there. I'm confident that I gave the right people enough to work with.

Thank you for reading.

– Dan

If you want to take it further:

• The build a profitable personal brand in 30 days challenge starts on June 16th. If you want 30 days of daily lessons and action steps to reach your first followers and dollars, join here before enrollment closes.

• We now have a mega guide to creating a digital product, how to write landing page copy for that product, and how to launch the product inside the growing premium library.