#2304 “I make $4.5 million implementing AI”

**Andrew Warner** (0:00)
How much money are you making?

**Jon Cheney** (0:01)
We're sitting at about 4.5 million in annual recurring. I started this business with just $400.
As a one man band, I was able to take it by myself with all of my AI tools to a million bucks. Let me just tell you exactly how to do this, right? And everyone's looking for, well, what do I do? How do I do it? Here's my process.

**Andrew Warner** (0:18)
Presented by Zapier, the AI automation company. Jon, do you remember when you'd reached a million dollars in revenue?

**Jon Cheney** (0:25)
I was like, man, I am, I took this to a million dollars by myself. And it was at that moment, actually, I have enough budget to bring some people on. And so I'm going to do that and make my life a little bit easier. And it kind of snuck up on me. When I first started the company, there were some pathways that I kind of went down that didn't work as well as others. And I eventually found out, okay, companies really need not just some training and education and show them what to do. They need somebody that is embedded into their company, that is following up regularly and becoming part of that company. And so I built this fractional Chief AI officer model. And the cool thing about that, and that I knew as an entrepreneur was super valuable, was this recurring revenue element, right? And so at one point we hit the million dollars. And by we, I mean me, I hit this million dollars.
And it was fun, it was fun. It was, you know, that was about 80,000, 90,000 a month. And it was actually, I got to 110,000 a month. So it was a little bit over that million dollars.

**Andrew Warner** (1:21)
I took my family when I hit a million dollars to get ice cream sundaes. I remember that. Do you do anything like that to celebrate?

**Jon Cheney** (1:27)
You know, what I started doing is I started buying myself a pair of shoes every time I landed a new contract. I was like, these are 100,000 plus dollar contracts, each one, I can afford $200 shoes or whatever. And so I filled my closet and I actually stopped doing that because I was like, I have enough shoes at this point. Like I love shoes, but you know, I don't need to have 400 pairs.

**Andrew Warner** (1:46)
And by the way, for anyone who wants to follow along and build this type of business, we'll have a playbook in the comments, along with all the tools and apps and software that Jon recommends.
See you below. It all started because you said, you know what? I have an idea for a social network. I'm gonna go and hire this agency in the Ukraine. What was the price they quoted you?

**Jon Cheney** (2:03)
$105,000.

**Andrew Warner** (2:05)
Okay, and then you discovered that you could do this yourself using AI tools, specifically Replit. How did you discover Replit?

**Jon Cheney** (2:12)
I discovered Replit because I don't even remember who it was. I wish I could give them credit, but somebody posted about it on LinkedIn. It was some VC.
And they said, I just watched a founder, you know, put together this website and this new thing in like 10 minutes, something that would have taken months before and, you know, using Replit. I was like, what does that mean? And it was literally the same day I had received this proposal from this dev shop in Ukraine for $105,000. They had actually sent over, we'd already done some architecture discussions and they'd sent over a PDF with a proposal, but here's how we're going to build the whole thing. And so I was like, I wonder if I could just drop this PDF into Replit. So I just drag it in and said, build this. And 10 minutes later, I had, you know, at least the first version, that preview.

**Andrew Warner** (2:50)
When you're talking about a social network, you just gave it the same request that you had to the developers and the whole thing. It wasn't a one-shot thing. You're sitting down and you're massaging it and adjusting it, right?

**Jon Cheney** (3:01)
Yeah, yeah. The very first thing, at least back then, today, if I gave it to Replit, I think it could actually one-shot it. But back then, this was, you know, probably about 18 months ago, maybe even a little bit longer than that. I want to say September of a couple of years ago, whatever that comes out to. So probably a little longer than 18 months. But bottom line is, it was able to bring up and say, hey, here's your world map. And my idea was I wanted to, I love to travel, right? And I wanted to just have a better way to share where I've traveled. And so I wanted kind of a digital pin board, a map of the world, where I could then just drop a pin, and then I could record everything I did and have pictures and video and share, and I could see where other people have been, and just have that visual interface. And so that was the idea.