He Built a $10K/Month AI Business With Zero Tech Skills - Ep. #304

Phil (0:00)

The contract that he gave me for the first six months was for $50,000.

Chris Koerner (0:05)

Holy cow.

Phil (0:06)

Once I got all that set up, we're probably talking about it taking me an hour and a half every month for this. Didn't know anything about coding, still don't. I'm still learning all of the ins and outs of Claude. I just started talking to Claude, okay?

Chris Koerner (0:19)

Yeah.

Phil (0:19)

Well, I don't know this, and I don't know all this about AI, I don't know this. There's so many things that we don't know. Look how quick AI has grown. Well, that's true, we don't know, but guess what? 99% of the business owners that we sit in front of, we know significantly more than they do, and we know enough that we know where to get the answers that we need to help them do the thing that they want to do, even if we've never done it before. I charged him $3,500 for setup, and then $1,500 a month for six months.

Chris Koerner (0:51)

How many hours would you say you spent upfront building the $3,500 app?

Phil (0:56)

Building things in there that I've never built before, I would say maybe 12 hours. Wow.

Chris Koerner (1:04)

Well, Phil, why don't you just start from ground zero?

Phil (1:06)

I basically retired from my other work in June of 2025 Been doing all sorts of things.

Through listening to your podcast, decided to go the AI agency route. And I'll say this, by far, this is the best business decision that I ever made.

Chris Koerner (1:24)

Okay. So what was the first thing that you did? Okay.

Phil (1:27)

So the first thing I did was started building voice agents, just because it was super easy to build. And I'm not that technical. I didn't have any history in computer programing, anything like that. Pitched the agents to some friends and they liked it. Pitched it to some roofing companies. They liked it through a pitch that I made to an investment firm buddy of mine. It opened the door for me to have a conversation with him about AI in his business. The guy is brilliant when it comes to finances and they manage like $1.4 billion in the Nashville area, nine offices. But in terms of him being able to trust AI to help him with something, he just didn't know what it was. And so anyway, came to an agreement with him the first part of March for initially for a six month term consulting, part-time consulting for him.

We built a, I say we, like it's, there's more than me in the company, but there's not, okay. But ended up building a content creation thing for him. That was the start of it and we're trying to be able to automate things for him now. But that said, I mean, the contract that he gave me for the first six months, what we knew after six months was for $50,000.

Chris Koerner (2:42)

Holy cow. I want to get back to him. But you start by saying voice agents, what were you using to build these voice agents?

Phil (2:49)

Okay. I was using Go High Level.

Chris Koerner (2:51)

Okay.

So you start learning voice agents in Go High Level for your friend. And he's just like, this is cool. It's long-winded, not really my use case, but it gets your foot in the door with him. It earns you some trust with him. He sees that you know what you're talking about, at least more than he does, which is the important part, which leads you to more conversations over the course of months. And then you just, in March, you signed a $50,000 contract with him, right? Yeah, correct.

Phil (3:17)

Just doing random automations for him to help him with his social media. And when I say helping with social media and marketing, this is me trying to help them automate things. Okay, I don't have any background in social media or marketing or something, but I know enough to know that if you ask the right questions of AI, it can end up guiding you through the process. And he has people in his firm who have kind of done that before. So I came into it knowing how they functioned, how all of it worked. And that was it.

Chris Koerner (3:48)

Okay. So did you talk to any other friends or family between October and March? Or was it just this investment?

Phil (3:54)

Yes. No, no. Here's the thing.

I had talked to multiple other people.

I had cold called a lot of briefing companies. But then what the trigger was for me is Brandon had a presentation one time on getting new clients. And one of the things he said was to start with those you know. And so I basically went through all of the contacts on my phone. I've got more than a thousand contacts. And I just started making a list and just started sending texts. Hey, I've started this AI automation business. You know, I'd love to be able to sit down with you. And so had probably seven to ten sit downs with business owners. My first encounters with them looking back involved me talking too much, sharing all the things that AI would do, rather than letting them share the challenges that they're having, share the pain pain points. And so some of those first clients, probably the majority of those first clients, I didn't get in. It wasn't because of AI. It's because I was just too chatty.