I’ve been to jail. I’ve been to Rehab. I’ve had no money, no education, and no roadmap to follow.

Before I ever built my first company, I was the kid parents warned their kids about.

I’m telling you that because it doesn’t matter where you’re starting from. What matters is what you do next.

So here’s exactly what I’d do if I had to start a business from scratch today… In this new era of AI, no shortcuts skipped.

Step 1: Stop Looking for Your Passion. Find a Painful Problem.

Here’s the truth nobody wants to hear: passion doesn’t build businesses.

Solving painful problems does. People pay for painkillers. Nobody pays for a vitamin. The framework I use is called the Ikigai. It’s four questions to ask yourself.

You want to find the centre where they all overlap:

1. What do you love to do? Not what you think you should love. What do you naturally drift toward?
2. What are you good at? Think about the things people say to you unprompted… “You’re really good at that.” Those comments are data.
3. What does the world need? What are people actively complaining about, struggling with, paying to solve and still not getting solved?
4. What will people pay for? The market decides this, not you.

Most people treat this like a journaling exercise. I treat it like market research. The answers to those four circles? That’s your business idea.

Step 2: Build an Offer That Actually Makes People Want to Buy

You’ve got the idea. Now you need to turn it into something someone will hand you money for.

And here’s where most people blow it… they make the offer too complicated, too confusing, too detailed. A confused buyer never buys. Period.

Nobody buys a tool. They buy a solution to their pain. Wrap your offer in four clear components:

1. The Promise: What’s the transformation you’re selling? Not features. Not deliverables. Outcomes. Don’t say “I’ll set up your email sequences.” Say “I’ll get you 10 qualified leads in 7 days.”

The promise is the before and after. It’s not what you do. It’s what changes for them.

2. The Guarantee: Take the risk off them. Something like: “We get you 10 leads in 7 days or you don’t pay a cent.” The guarantee doesn’t just protect the client. It signals that you’re confident enough in your work to stand behind it.

If you’re not willing to guarantee it, why should they buy it?

3. Strategic Bonuses: Bonuses aren’t freebies. They’re objection killers. Think about the #1 concern your buyer has right before they pull out their credit card — and design a bonus that wipes it out. If you’re selling sales training, their first worry is “where do I find leads?”

Make a lead-finding system your bonus. Kill the objection before they ever voice it.

4. Internal Scarcity: Fake scarcity is dead. “Only 3 spots left!” Nobody buys that anymore. Real scarcity is internal. Here’s the question I use: “What’s the cost of not making this change over the next few months?”

Let them do the math themselves. When they realize what staying stuck is actually costing them, the urgency is real. You didn’t manufacture it… they discovered it.

On pricing: charge more than you’re comfortable with.

Underpricing attracts the worst clients and breeds resentment on both sides.

Use three tiers: an anchor price 5–10x your main offer, your main offer in the middle, and a cheap option that’s deliberately unattractive.

The middle option becomes the obvious choice.

Step 3: Go Find Your Buyers. They’re Not Coming to You.

I used to tell people: do five outreaches a day.

With AI, 50 is the new five — and they can be more personalized than anything you’d write yourself.

Here’s how I’d do it using a tool like Manus:

Step 1: Go to Manus, create an account, and say: “Ask me who my ideal customer is, what industry they’re in, what size of business, and what problems I solve.” Let it interview you. Feed it the offer you just built.

Step 2: Once it understands your ideal buyer, say: “Go find me prospects online. Deliver the name, company, contact info, and a personalized outreach message for each one.”

Step 3: Have the AI research each prospect — recent posts, news, job changes — and write an outreach message that mentions something specific about them. Something that only someone who actually did the research would know. That level of personalization makes your response rate go through the roof. And it took you minutes, not hours.

Step 4: Set it on a schedule — daily or weekly. Now you have a lead generation machine running automatically while you focus on everything else.

One more thing: before you go cold, work your warm network first. The people who already know you are 10x more likely to respond. Scan your contacts, your calendar, your social connections. Warm referrals close at a completely different rate.

Step 4: Selling Is Not Pitching. It’s Asking the Right Questions.

The question I get asked more than anything: “What do I say to get them to buy?”

The best salespeople don’t talk. They listen and then ask. Think of it like a staircase… At the bottom is hell, where your prospect is living now. At the top is heaven, the outcome they want.

Your job is to walk them up that staircase with questions. Not a pitch. This is what my Rocket Selling System does.

It has nine boxes:

Box 1 – Setup (before the call): Use AI to prep. Type: “Here’s my prospect’s name, company, and role. Research them and give me a one-page brief: what they do, what problems they likely have, and what we might have in common.” Uncommon commonalities build trust faster.

Box 2 – Customer: Ask about their world. Who are their customers? How long have they been in their role? When they feel like you understand their context, they’ll trust your solutions.

Box 3 – Decision: Ask this and then shut up: “What made you decide now was a good time to have this conversation?” They’ll tell you their reasons for being there. Now, they’re selling themselves to you.

Box 4 – Results: Get them to dream. I’ll say: “Imagine it’s a year from now and we’re at your favourite restaurant. What are we celebrating?” Write down exactly what they say. Those are their real desires. Push to get the specific vision, no the generic stuff.

Box 5 – Reality: Get specific about where they are today. The more accurately you can describe their current frustrations, the more heard and seen they feel. The person who feels understood buys.

Box 6 – Roadblocks: Ask what’s been standing in their way. Keep a list as they talk. You’re building your case file.

Box 7 – Model: Now you talk. Explain your methodology. Not the features, the approach. Why does it work when other things haven’t?

Box 8 – Offer: Mirror everything back. “You told me you want [their outcome]. Right now you’re dealing with [their reality]. You said [these roadblocks] have been in your way. Did I get that right?” When they say yes: “Perfect… Well, because that’s exactly what we do. Where would you like to go from here?”

Box 9 – Enroll: “Based on everything you just shared, you’d be a perfect fit. To get started, all I need is a card to lock your spot. What card did you want to put that on?”

Practice before any real call.

Type into your AI: “Act as a skeptical prospect who runs [type of business]. I’m going to pitch you. Push back, give me real objections, don’t go easy on me.”

Do this 20–30 times.

By the time you’re on a real call, you’ve already navigated every curveball.

-DM

The post I Became a Millionaire at 27. Here’s Exactly What I’d Do If I Had to Start Over Today appeared first on Dan Martell.

Most people use Claude like a fancy Google search.

That’s like buying a Ferrari and only driving it in a parking lot.

I build AI products every single day through Martell Ventures. Claude is embedded into everything: how I communicate, how I manage my calendar, how I analyze my business, how I build software.

Here are 7 things I actually do — with the exact steps to start today.

1. The Memory Import: Move From ChatGPT in 2 Minutes

If you’ve been using ChatGPT, you’ve built up something valuable: a model that knows your preferences and working style. You don’t have to leave that behind.

Here’s how to transfer it to Claude in two minutes:

1. Go to Settings → Capabilities → Start Import
2. Claude gives you a prompt — copy it
3. Paste that prompt into ChatGPT
4. Copy ChatGPT’s output
5. Paste it back into Claude → Add to Memory

Done. Your preferences, history, and context all live in Claude now. It feels like Claude already knows you from day one.

2. The Model Selector (Stop Using One-Size-Fits-All)

Claude has three power levels. Most people never think about which one they’re on.

Here’s how to route your tasks:

• Haiku: Fastest and cheapest. Use it for high-volume, low-complexity work. Summarizing 50 meeting notes? Haiku. Done in seconds.
• Sonnet: Best all-rounder for daily tasks. Drafting emails, writing content, building replies. Fast, smart, and gives you options.
• Opus: Deepest thinker. Use it for pattern recognition, complex analysis, or hard strategic problems. Takes longer. Goes deeper.

Start routing on purpose. That’s when your output quality jumps.

3. The Gmail Connector (Stop Touching Your Inbox)

Here’s the move: you should not be in your inbox.

Connect Claude to Gmail in 30 seconds: Sidebar → Connectors → Gmail → Log In.

Now Claude can search threads, summarize conversations, and draft replies — without you ever opening the app.

And here’s what nobody talks about: Gmail’s built-in search is terrible. Getting Claude to search your inbox is a massive upgrade over Gmail’s own tools.

How I use it: My assistant and I share a Claude account with my inbox connected. She self-serves anything she needs — without interrupting me once. That single setup removes an entire category of back-and-forth from my day.

4. The Calendar Connector (Your AI Business Coach)

Most people think calendar integration means Claude can schedule meetings. That’s the boring part.

Connect it the same way: Sidebar → Connectors → Google Calendar → Log In.

You can say: “Add a 1-hour block before Friday to review our YouTube outline.” Claude finds the right slot, creates it, and explains why it picked that time.

But the real unlock is this: give Claude your quarterly goals, then ask it to analyze your calendar and email.

“Am I spending time on the things that will actually move the needle?”

It stops being a scheduling tool. It becomes a business coach looking at your actual behaviour, and showing you exactly where you’re leaking time.

I use this every time I feel busy but not moving forward.

5. Artifacts: Build Working Apps Inside the Chat

Artifacts are actual, interactive tools Claude builds right inside the conversation — that you can use and change in real time.

Try this prompt right now:

“Build me a spreadsheet with sample data. Make the columns editable. Include sales rep, sale status, product sold, and anything else relevant.”

Claude builds it. You interact with it. You iterate on it.

This is where “I need to hire a developer” becomes “I built it myself.”

Got an idea for a calculator, a tracker, or a simple tool? Describe it. Most of the time you’ll be stunned it works.

6. Interactive Visuals: Stop Leaving Claude to See Your Data

I used to pull data out of Claude, open another tool, and build charts there. Complete waste of time.

Now I stay inside the chat.

Claude builds live, clickable visuals like frameworks, data breakdowns, process maps, systems.

I asked it to visualize a short-form video framework we use internally.

It pulled context from our connected Slack and built me a clickable, interactive visual to walk through each step.

The whole thing stayed in the conversation.

The prompt is two words: “Visualize this.” Then describe what you want to see.

This is accelerated learning. Instead of reading something and trying to picture it, you see it and click through it.

7. Projects: Preloaded Context for Everything You’re Working On

Think of Projects as folders that are pre-loaded with everything Claude needs to know about a client, a product, or a campaign. Every time you open a project, Claude already has the full picture.

Setup:

1. Sidebar → Projects → New Project
2. Drop in your context (internal docs, PDFs, past chats, instructions, whatever’s relevant)
3. It all lives in the Knowledge section

The outcome? Claude already knows.

How I use it: every coaching call I do gets transcribed. Those transcripts live in a project linked to my Google Drive. When I need a story, an example, or a specific client situation for content, I ask Claude to search all my transcripts.

It finds exactly what I need in seconds. That’s what feeds my entire content pipeline.

-DM

The post 7 Claude Hacks That Will Save You Hours, Grow Your Business, and Blow Your Mind appeared first on Dan Martell.

Most people spend their entire lives working hard without ever building real wealth.

The difference between those who break through and those who don’t rarely comes down to intelligence or luck. It comes down to the rules they live by.

Here are 14 rules of money that took me from broke to rich.

1. Spend Less Than You Make

It sounds obvious. It’s rarely practiced.

Dave Ramsey puts it simply: act your wage.

Meaning, live proportionate to what you actually earn.

Not what your friends drive. Not the Instagram version of your life.

As the saying goes… it’s not what you make, it’s what you keep.

Start here: 50% of income to needs, 30% to wants, and 20% to savings.

The goal, especially early on, is to live off as little as possible and reinvest the rest.

In yourself. In your skills. In your business. In your future.

2. Pay Yourself First

Broke people spend and then save what’s left.

Rich people save and then spend what’s left.

Here’s the shift: you are the most important asset in your financial life. Not a house. Not a car. Not a stock portfolio. YOU.

When you underpay yourself, you end up trading time for money just to cover basics — spending your Saturday doing laundry instead of working on the thing that could make you rich.

The better equation is:

Invest time in building skills → earn more → buy back time → invest that time in learning more skills → earn even more.

Pay yourself enough to protect your energy and your focus.

3. Assign Your Priorities

Oprah once said: you can have it all, just not all at once.

The greatest wealth-building mistake people make early on is trying to do everything at once.

Chasing multiple industries, multiple income streams, multiple skill sets.

The result is mediocrity spread thin.

Pick one lane. Go deep. Become world-class.

When you reach the top of your field, luck stops being random and starts being earned.

Don’t diversify until you’re already rich. Until then, focus is your greatest competitive advantage.

4. Have a Rip Cord Budget

Every serious business has a disaster recovery plan.

Your personal finances should too.

The rip cord budget means having enough liquid cash to survive a crisis without panic…

… so when things go sideways, you execute a plan instead of losing control.

On the business side, aim for at least 3 months of operating expenses in reserve.

On the personal side, keep 6 months of living costs liquid.

This isn’t about fear. It’s about freedom.

When you’ve decided how you’ll respond to a worst-case scenario?

You move faster and harder in the good times because you’ve made peace with the bad ones.

5. Give to Get

Frank Outlaw once said: no one ever became poor by giving.

Money is energy. When you hoard it, you signal to yourself and to the world that it’s scarce.

But when you circulate it (investing, spending intentionally, giving generously), it creates momentum.

More opportunities. More returns. More flow.

This isn’t magical thinking. It’s practical.

The more you invest in people, in businesses, in ideas, the more you learn, the more you grow, the more comes back.

6. Minimize Borrowing

Robert Kiyosaki wrote that the only difference between a rich person and a poor person is how they use debt.

Borrowing to fund a lifestyle upgrade — furniture, cars, vacations — is a trap.

You end up paying four times the price for things that don’t generate a single dollar of return.

Borrowing to invest in yourself, your skills, or a business with clear ROI potential? That’s leverage.

Take small shots before you fire cannonballs.

Test investments at a small scale, understand what returns to expect, then scale what works.

And if you can’t afford something? Go make more money.

7. Analyze the Risk/Return Ratio

Warren Buffett said it plainly: risk comes from not knowing what you’re doing.

Before making any investment, map it on a simple grid:

Risk on one axis, return on the other. High risk, high return (Bitcoin). Low risk, low return (index funds). High risk, low return — avoid entirely.

The sweet spot is low downside, uncapped upside.

They’re deals designed so you can only lose a little if it tanks, but win big if it pops.

Learn to see opportunities through that lens.

8. Don’t Fear Money

Every person carries money beliefs they picked up in childhood.

Some believe that rich people are greedy. That wanting wealth is shameful. That they don’t deserve it.

These beliefs work against every financial decision you make.

If you secretly believe rich people are bad, you will unconsciously avoid becoming one.

Work through those beliefs by asking yourself if they’re actually true, or just a story you keep telling yourself.

Money is never the problem.

It’s always a mindset problem that shows up in your bank account.

9. Avoid Lifestyle Creep

The moment money starts coming in, the temptation is to spend it.

A new car. A bigger apartment. Better watches. Better restaurants. Better everything.

This is lifestyle creep… and it destroys wealth before it ever has a chance to compound.

The game, especially early on, is to live off as little as possible for as long as possible.

Not to suffer but to stay hungry, to keep reinvesting, to let the machine build before you take from it.

Delayed gratification is more powerful than compound interest.

Instead of buying a BMW, invest in something that could buy you ten BMWs in five years.

Most wealthy people, even at the top, live on a fraction of what they earn.

The money does more work out in the world than it ever does sitting in a driveway.

10. Build a Personal P&L

The wealthiest people don’t wing it. They track everything.

You don’t need to hire a family office manager to start.

You need a simple profit and loss statement for your life: what comes in, what goes out, what’s left.

Get rigorous here.

The discipline you build managing small sums is what scales when the numbers get bigger.

11. High Tides Raise All Boats

Money at scale is a team sport.

One of the most common mistakes ambitious people make is hiring down, bringing in less capable people because they feel less threatening.

The logic is backwards. B’s and C’s don’t protect your A’s… they drive them away.

Invest in the people around you. Train them. Understand their goals.

Make your vision big enough that people see their own dreams inside of it.

When people feel like they’re growing, they stay.

When the tide rises, every boat in the harbour rises with it.

12. Money Is a Tool, Not the Goal

Henry Ford said: money is like an arm or a leg… use it or lose it.

Many people spend their twenties and thirties chasing wealth, only to reach it and feel empty.

That’s because money should have never been the point. It’s a tool, not a destination.

The point of money is to buy you time.

• Time to do meaningful work.
• Time to be with people you love.
• Time to build things that matter.

If every financial decision you make is driven mainly by money, money becomes your master.

When it’s just a tool in service of a bigger purpose, you get to stay free.

13. Your Network Is Your Net Worth

You become the average of the five people you let influence you.

That means you have agency. Upgrade your relationships deliberately.

Seek rooms where you feel like an imposter. Where the people around you are doing things that seem just out of reach.

That discomfort is growth.

And when your network includes people playing at a higher level?

Opportunities come to you that would never find you otherwise.

14. Define Your Why

Dark energy — proving doubters wrong, chasing validation, escaping a difficult past — can get you started.

It’s a powerful fuel. But it burns heavy, and it burns out.

To sustain long-term success, you need light energy:

A purpose that pulls you forward rather than a fear that pushes you.

Your why has to be bigger than money, bigger than status, bigger than any single achievement.

When you know WHY you’re building the dream, everything gets easier.

Decisions become clearer. Sacrifices feel worth it. And the money tends to follow.

-DM

The post The 14 Rules of Money That Can Take You From Broke to Multi-Millionaire appeared first on Dan Martell.

Most people who get into leadership positions never actually learn how to lead. They learn how to boss.

And there’s a massive difference…

A boss controls. A leader multiplies.

Hoard authority and you’ll be the bottleneck forever. Hand it out, and your team grows past you.

Pressure gets you results. Ownership gets you a business that runs without you.

After 29 years in business, building teams of over a thousand people, and building a portfolio doing over $100M in revenue…

I’ve distilled leadership down to 5 rules. Not theories. Not platitudes.

Rules learned the hard way…

Rule 1: Praise in Public, Correct in Private

Most managers have this completely backwards.

They’ll tell someone “good job” in a hallway but call out mistakes in front of the whole team. This is one of the fastest ways to tank performance.

I call it “seagull management.”

It’s when you’re never around, but when you do show up…

… you swoop in to sh*t all over everyone’s work before flying off to the next meeting.

This rule is simple:

If you’re going to criticize, close the door. If you’re going to praise, open the room.

Every time you feel the need to correct someone in a meeting, write it down instead.

Schedule the private follow-up within 48 hours.

Rule 2: Be the Lighthouse, Not the Tugboat

A tugboat burns enormous energy forcing ships in the right direction.

A lighthouse just stands there, calm, consistent, bright… and ships navigate toward it on their own.

You can’t drag people to better performance. You can only model it so that they’re pulled toward it.

I once had a client ask me why his team doesn’t follow his direction.

I told him: “You don’t listen to yourself. You’re not organized. You don’t follow your own advice. How can you reasonably expect anyone to follow you?”

His team wasn’t the problem. He was.

Write down the top three behaviours you wish your team had.

Score yourself honestly on each, 1–10. Anywhere below 7 is your work to do first.

Once a quarter, show your team how you actually operate—how you start your day, make hard decisions, recover from setbacks.

Transparency at the top creates permission below.

Rule 3: Train, Don’t Tell

The gap between what you expect and what your team delivers is almost always a training gap, not a talent one.

My test: for every frustration you have with your team’s performance, ask yourself where you trained them to do it differently.

If the answer is nowhere, you have no right to be disappointed.

One client I had complained his team never brought good ideas to meetings. I told him, “Show me where you trained them to come up with ideas.” He couldn’t….

Zero training. Zero surprise.

Pick the one task your team does most inconsistently.

Record yourself on Zoom doing it out loud, including the reasoning behind each decision. Upload it to Claude and turn it into an SOP.

You now have a training asset that lives forever.

Then make a frustration list. Every behaviour that drives you crazy. And next to each one, write whether you’ve actually trained them on it.

Anything you haven’t taught gets a training plan before it gets a complaint.

Rule 4: Delegate the Outcome, Not the Task

Most leaders delegate tasks because it feels safe.

You then become the bottleneck and your team becomes order-takers who stop thinking.

When I hand someone an outcome, I give them the finish line. Not the route.

They figure out the path. I stay out of the weeds.

Next time you’re about to assign a task, flip it to an outcome with a deadline.

Instead of “send five cold emails to prospects,” say “generate 10 qualified leads by Friday — use whatever channel you think is best.”

When you assign a task, you create a tenant.

But when you assign an outcome, you create an owner.

Renters don’t maintain the house the same way owners do.

Give an outcome to someone this week. Resist the urge to tell them how.

Rule 5: Default to Trust

Bosses withhold trust until it’s earned. Leaders extend it from day one.

When people feel trusted?

They move faster. Take more ownership. Make better decisions.

But when they feel monitored and mistrusted, they slow down.

They cover themselves and wait for permission.

I’m not saying let people run wild…

I’m saying give access first, then set up the guardrails.

On a new hire’s first week, give them full access to every system they need to do their job.

Then set up one lightweight check-in — a weekly 15-minute sync, a shared dashboard, or a simple end-of-week note.

Access first. Accountability second.

-DM

The post 5 Rules That Separate Leaders Worth Following From Bosses Nobody Respects appeared first on Dan Martell.

Every day, a new YouTuber promises you can “make $10,000/month with AI” by next Tuesday.

Most of them are selling courses, not running companies. But what does it look like from someone who launches a new AI company every month?

Here’s a simple, tier-ranked breakdown of 7 real AI business models (what pays well, what’s already crowded, and what will still matter in five years).

Three factors grade every opportunity:

• Profitability (how much people pay),
• Competition (how crowded it is), and
• Longevity (whether it survives the next wave of AI).

Here’s my grading system:

• S Tier – Bet your year on these
• A Tier – Solid plays with real upside
• B Tier – Decent, but you’ll work for it
• F Tier – Ignore and run away

1. AI consulting – S Tier

• Profitability: Top tier
• Competition: Low
• Longevity: Always needed

You get paid to walk into a company, audit their systems, and point to every place AI can rip out wasted hours and add real margin.

A $5K audit can turn into a $50K implementation project.

You can sell the audit, then sell the implementation, then sell ongoing support.

The goal is to sell more things to more people inside the same organization over time.

That’s what’s called “revenue growth,” and it’s what makes consulting rank above even lead generation.

Lead gen is transactional… You deliver leads, they pay you, done.

Consulting builds a relationship that keeps expanding.

The competition is genuinely low, and not in the “low because nobody’s tried” way. It’s low because most people who claim to be AI consultants aren’t actually qualified.

There aren’t many people who can sit across from a business owner, look at a real operation, and say with confidence: “I know exactly which three processes we should automate first, here’s how, and here’s what it’s worth to you.”

Pick your niche based on the industry you already know.

“AI consultant for dental practices” beats “AI consultant” by a factor of ten…

… easier to find clients, easier to build credibility, easier to charge more.

Build your audit framework before you sell it: list every core function in a typical business in your niche (scheduling, billing, intake, follow-ups, marketing, HR) and map a specific AI solution to each one.

That list is your deliverable, and building it costs you nothing but an afternoon.

Reach out to ten businesses a day (in your niche) for the next month and offer a free 30-minute “AI opportunity call.”

Your pitch: “I’ll identify three places AI can save you time or money. No strings attached.”

You’ll close paid engagements directly from those calls.

2. AI trading bots – F Tier

• Profitability: Selling a dream, not a product
• Competition: Crowded with scammers
• Longevity: Zero

Here’s the single most important thing nobody in this space is telling you:

If someone had a trading bot that actually generated reliable 20% annual returns…

They would not sell it to you for $97.

They wouldn’t tell anyone about it. They’d use it for themselves and would get rich doing it.

The firms that actually use AI to trade at an elite level are so good at it that they only trade their employees’ own capital.

The fund is closed to outside investment because the strategy only works at a certain scale and they’re protecting it.

That’s what a real AI trading advantage looks like. It doesn’t come with a course and a Discord server.

You’re selling a course dressed as a product, and people buy it.

But the ethics are questionable, the longevity is ZERO, and there’s a meaningful legal risk.

3. AI voice agents – A Tier

• Profitability: High
• Competition: Crowded in talk, thin in execution
• Longevity: Long (voice is the future)

You build an AI phone agent that books appointments, qualifies leads, and handles all inbound calls for a business.

It’s a full-time receptionist that doesn’t sleep, doesn’t complain, doesn’t get sick, and doesn’t quit. The perfect market for this is businesses where one missed call could cost them thousands…

Plumbers. HVAC contractors. Law firms. Dental clinics.

Industries where people call when they have an urgent need and move on to the next result if nobody picks up.

The profitability is high because of the labor cost angle.

When you frame it as replacing a human receptionist, the pricing clicks immediately.

Charging $500 to $1,500 a month feels cheap compared to a salary plus benefits plus turnover costs.

The business owner doesn’t need much convincing once they see the math.

And you can start this today.

Open Google Maps right now. Search for plumbers, HVAC companies, or dental clinics in your city. Call ten of them. Listen to how they handle inbound calls: the hold times, missed calls, rushed answers.

That experience is your entire pitch.

Then build a live demo agent on Bland.ai or Vapi.

They have templates you can customize in an afternoon.

Record it handling a real booking scenario for a plumber or dentist. Show the demo, don’t describe it.

Lead with a 30-day free trial at $800/month. The conversion happens when they see their old process next to the new one.

4. AI chat agents – B Tier

• Profitability: Good (monthly recurring)
• Competition: Pretty crowded
• Longevity: Moderate

Businesses get a lot of website visitors who just want to type a question and get an answer instantly.

Deploying an AI chat agent that handles inquiries, qualifies leads, and books appointments fills that gap.

The business model works on monthly retainers.

This is where recurring revenue compounds over time.

The barrier to entry is low enough that the market is getting crowded fast.

Anyone can build a basic chat agent.

The question isn’t whether you can build one… it’s whether you can differentiate your deployment from every other agency offering the same thing.

For the best positioning, use chat as part of a broader system, not as a standalone product.

The workflow that works well is chat for initial qualification.

Then routing into a voice agent for booking and closing. Selling both together as a unified system is a better offer than selling just the chat layer.

5. AI content repurposing – B Tier

• Profitability: Pretty solid
• Competition: Moderate
• Longevity: Window is short

You take a long-form piece of content (a YouTube video, podcast episode, webinar), and turn it into short-form clips, tweets, carousels, newsletters, and platform-specific posts.

Every creator and every company with a podcast needs this.

The demand is real, and tools like Opus Clips and Descript make production fast enough that the margins are solid.

The competition? Moderate. It’s a growing category but a lot of creators and companies have figured out how to do it themselves.

The more serious problem is longevity…

The tools are catching up so fast that this is getting more automated with minimal human involvement.

The window where a human-managed content repurposing service has clear value over the tools themselves is closing.

It’s the kind of service that will automate itself within a few years.

6. Faceless AI YouTube channels – F Tier

• Profitability: Near zero
• Competition: Everyone with an AI tool
• Longevity: None

The pitch sounds appealing: generate AI videos, post them to YouTube as faceless “cash cow” channels, collect ad revenue.

But here’s why it doesn’t work.

YouTube’s algorithm already buries AI-generated content because it wants real, organic, engaging human-made content… and it’s getting better at detecting the difference.

Channels built entirely on AI-generated output get demonetized in weeks, sometimes days.

There’s no brand being built, no audience, no loyalty, no way to stand out from the millions of identical AI-generated channels that already exist.

Profitability? Near zero. Demonetization will eat you.

Competition? Anyone with a free AI video tool.

Longevity? Viewers are already sick of AI slop content.

The competition is literally everyone who has access to an AI video tool.

And the longevity is nonexistent, because viewers are already tired of this AI slop content.

Learning to create good AI-generated video content is a genuinely valuable skill. It’s worth developing for your own brand or for a client’s social presence.

But as a standalone business model built around faceless automated channels? It’s the bottom feeder strategy of the internet.

7. AI agent development (S Tier — the #1 pick)

• Profitability: Massive
• Competition: Very low
• Longevity: Strongest of all

This is the “S of the S of the S.”

The single best opportunity available right now for anyone with technical know-how who wants to build a serious AI business.

People pay you to create AI agents. Not just one, but entire agent systems.

Think of it like building a team: you have a chief-of-staff agent at the top, and that agent manages several other specialist agents underneath it, like virtual team members.

Those sub-agents handle sales workflows, document processing, operational tasks, client follow-up, all of it.

It’s the difference between a chatbot and an entire workforce.

The result? Massive profitability.

Because you’re directly attacking the biggest line item on any small business’s expense sheet: labor.

When you can replace a $60K-a-year employee with a $2K/month agent system that works 24/7, never calls in sick, and never quits, the math is obvious to any business owner.

You’re not selling software. You’re selling savings they can see on a spreadsheet.

Don’t start broad. Pick one use case.

A “Chief of Staff” agent is the easiest first sell because every overwhelmed founder knows the value: someone managing their email, calendar, follow-ups, even phone calls.

Build a one-page landing page with AI (Claude, Bolt, or Cursor can do this in under an hour) that describes your AI Chief of Staff service and collects waitlist signups.

Text everyone in your phone: “Who do you know that’s looking for an AI-powered Chief of Staff that gets them back 10–15 hours a week and helps them manage more projects?”

The key: you’re asking if they know someone, not if they want it themselves.

Most will reply saying they want it.

Ask the interested people directly: “Would you pay to solve that problem today?” That question is your validation gate.

Don’t build anything until someone says yes.

-DM

The post 7 Real Ways to Make Money With AI appeared first on Dan Martell.

There’s a skill that can make you more money than sales, marketing, or even AI.

I know that’s a bold claim, but I’ve spent 29 years in business going from a broke 24-year-old to building a $100M/year AI venture studio…

… and I’ve noticed the biggest leaps in my life always came from a single source: Relationships.

And I don’t mean networking or collecting contacts. I mean building real, intentional relationships with high-quality people.

Here are the four reasons (and ways) you need to master this skill.

1. Steel Sharpens Steel

The people you spend time with don’t just make life more enjoyable…

They multiply your skills. Expand your thinking. Accelerate your results in ways that no course or book can.

My friend Taki Moore is a perfect example.

I hired Taki 8 years ago to help me understand personal brand, IP, content strategy… the stuff I knew nothing about as a software guy. We poured into each other.

Two years ago, he hired me to coach him…

That’s what reciprocal high-level relationships look like. They’re not transactional. They’re not one-directional. It’s two people who keep leveling up together.

Here’s how to find your “Taki”:

Write down the five people you spend the most time with. Ask yourself honestly:

• Are they operating at the level I want to reach?
• Do I learn from them? Do they learn from me?
• Do conversations leave me energized and expanded, or drained and stagnant?

If the answer to any of those is uncomfortable, that’s your signal that it’s time for an upgrade.

2. It Pays to Be Intentional

I flew 3,000 miles to spend 28 minutes with someone I care deeply about… John Maxwell.

I didn’t do it for a deal or a collab. I did it just to hangout with a man I admire.

Most people aren’t surrounded by bad people. They’re surrounded by limited people. That’s a harder truth to face because limited people can be kind, well-meaning, even loyal.

But if their ceiling restricts your potential, proximity to them will cost you.

At the end of every year, I review your goals and then write down the relationships you need to create to achieve them.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Write your top 3–5 goals for the year.
2. Ask: “Who, if I knew them, would make this goal 10x easier or faster?”
3. Write those names down — even if you don’t know them yet.
4. Leave the list somewhere visible. Revisit it monthly.

I wrote Rob Dyrdek’s name on my list. I didn’t even know him.

But a few months later? I got a text from Rob out of nowhere. He read my books. Got my number from a mutual friend. Wanted to connect.

The list primed me to be ready, to be visible, and to believe that the moment would come.

3. Relationships Unlock God-Sized Goals

One of the most pivotal conversations of my life happened with John Maxwell at his event, maybe four years ago.

I was blown away just being in his presence. I asked him: “How do you do it all?”

He said something that rewired my thinking: “I have goals that are God-sized goals. They’re so big they’re beyond my ability to know how to do them.”

That conversation made me realize I was under-indexing. Thinking small.

The scale of your goals forces you to find people, build teams, and invest in relationships you couldn’t have imagined needing.

Here’s how to unlock this…

Set one goal so BIG it requires other people to pull it off. Seriously.

Pick one ambition that, if you achieved it, would shock you.

Then ask: What kind of people would I need around me to even attempt this?

Start there. Build toward the goal by building toward those people.

4. It’s Not Who You Know, It’s Who Knows You

Old-school networking was cold emails, awkward events, asking to “pick someone’s brain.”

Exhausting. Slow. And honestly… It barely worked, even back then.

Relationship-building today? It’s all about content.

Sharing stories and lessons, adding value. Then letting relationships come to you.

I knew about Rob Dyrdek for 2 decades, but he messaged me because of who knew me, not because of who I knew.

The effort it takes to post one video that reaches 14 million people is the same effort it takes to post one that reaches 140.

You put it out. The platform does the networking while you sleep.

Treat content as a relationship engine.

Every piece of content you publish is a signal flare to the right people. Ask yourself before you post:

• Does this communicate my values clearly?
• Would the kind of person I want to know recognize themselves in this?
• Am I showing up fully (real perspective, real experience) or am I hedging?

If you don’t have a platform yet, start one.

It doesn’t matter where. Pick one channel and show up consistently.

The compound effect on inbound relationships is massive.

-DM

The post This Skill Makes You Rich in 2026 appeared first on Dan Martell.

I look in the mirror and tell myself I slept great when I didn’t. That today is going to be one of the best days of my life when I have no reason to believe it.

It sounds delusional…

It’s the most important habit I have.

Every business I’ve started was built on belief before it was built on anything else. Every relationship I’ve kept. Every comeback I’ve made. All of it began in my head, weeks or months before it showed up in my life.

A 2014 study at Colorado College put a number on this.

Researchers took 164 people. Hooked them up to fake EEG machines. Told half they got 28.7% REM sleep, above average. Told the other half 16.2%, below average. The data was made up. The machines weren’t measuring anything.

Then they ran cognitive tests. Attention. Memory. Executive function.

The “above average” group destroyed the other group on every test.

How rested they actually felt that morning predicted nothing.

Their belief about how they slept changed their performance more than how they actually slept.

That’s the whole game.

The story you tell yourself in the morning is the operating system everything else runs through.

And most people are letting their Apple Watch program it. Their Oura ring. Their bank account. Their last text from a difficult person.

You haven’t even gotten out of bed and you’ve already given up the controls.

So when someone asks me how I’m doing, the answer is always the same. World class.

Not because everything is. Because everything is going to be.

The lie always catches up to the truth eventually.

I just make sure I tell myself the right one.

You should too.

-DM

The post The Lie That Built Everything I Have appeared first on Dan Martell.

The task has been on your list for three days.

You’re not confused about what it is or why you need to do it. You’re not waiting on anyone. You could start right now. But you don’t…

That gap between knowing and doing? That’s procrastination.

I built a nine-figure business running on ADHD.

Learning to manage this problem is what let me scale a $100M+ business without losing my mind or weekends.

Here’s the breakdown.

1. Procrastination Was Never About Getting Distracted

Everyone thinks distractions come from the outside.

The pinging phone. The Slack notifications. The email floods. But that’s surface-level thinking. Because the real problem is internal triggers.

My friend Nir Eyal, bestselling author of Indistractable, nails it…

“We reach for distractions to escape boredom, loneliness, fear, fatigue, and uncertainty. You’re not scrolling Instagram because it’s fun. You’re scrolling because something feels uncomfortable and your brain wants out.”

And here’s the irony: avoidance actually makes it worse.

The next time you feel the urge to check your phone or drift to something easier, ask yourself: what am I actually trying to escape right now?

Name the feeling. You’ll be surprised how often just naming it breaks the spell.

2. Understand Signal vs. Noise

Steve Jobs obsessed over this concept.

Signal is the work that actually moves the needle. Noise is everything else. The distractions, the interruptions. Noise falls into two buckets:

• Busy work: looks productive, produces nothing
• Distractions: video games, news cycles, three-hour friend calls

When I was running my first company, I was grinding 100-hour weeks… and proud of it.

Until my coach analyzed my calendar and hit me with the truth: 70% of my time was spent in update meetings that produced zero results. Sales (the actual revenue driver) was only 10% of my calendar.

Here’s how to separate the signal from the noise:

Draw two columns on a piece of paper. Label one Signal, the other Noise. List everything you did in the last two weeks. Assign each item to a column. You’ll probably be uncomfortable with what you find. Good.

That discomfort is the starting point.

3. Eliminate Distractions with the Friction Rule

Now that you can see your noise, here’s how you kill it.

I call it the Friction Rule: either add friction to make distractions harder, or remove friction to make good choices easier.

• Procrastinate the distraction: Before you open Instagram to doom scroll, make a deal with yourself: wait 10 minutes. Just 10. You’ll almost always find the urge passes and you’ll break the reflex between impulse and reaction. That gap is where your power lives.
• Add friction to bad choices: I prep my gym clothes the night before, shoes and all. I tell my wife I’m going in the morning. Now I can’t not go. Accountability and environment have made it the path of least resistance.

The easier you make the right decisions, the more often you’ll make them. Design your environment so the default action is the productive one.

4. Build Momentum Not Motivation

You don’t need motivation. OR inspiration. You just need to start.

Think about driving a manual transmission car. First gear is hard. Second gear is easier because you’re already moving. Third gear is smoother still.

The higher you climb, the smoother the shifts.

But if you try to jump straight to fourth gear from a dead stop? It doesn’t work.

And once you’re cruising in fifth, you barely feel the shifts. That’s momentum.

Here’s how to kill that tendency.

Use the MINS method:

1. Write down the steps of the thing you’ve been avoiding
2. Pick the Most Important Next Step (the MINS) that takes less than two minutes
3. Do it
4. Repeat

This process manufactures momentum without needing to rely on motivation.

It’s easy. It’s fast. It turns you into a productivity

5. Systemize to Kill Procrastination

Momentum without structure just means spinning your wheels faster.

This is where systems can save you.

Systems give you control over procrastination so you’re not “just checking your email,” and losing an hour falling down the rabbit hole.

Here’s my system to kill procrastination:

1. Time block it: Schedule the task with a specific day and time. Not “this week.” Tuesday at 10am.
2. Create a forcing function: Schedule a meeting or a check-in immediately after your work block. When you know someone is waiting to see what you’ve done, you do the work. Deadlines you can’t escape are the most powerful productivity tool in existence.
3. Work in 25-minute Pomodoros: Break your time block into focused 25-minute sprints. Set a timer. Know exactly what you’re going to accomplish before the timer starts. When it goes off, you either finish or you know exactly where you are. No drifting.

Think about the day before you leave for vacation. You clear everything. Every open loop gets closed. Why? Because the deadline is real and immovable.

Live every day like it’s the day before vacation

6. Turn Systems into Identity

You can install all the systems in the world, but if you have to force yourself to follow them, you’ll eventually break.

The goal isn’t to hack your behaviour. The goal is to change who you are.

Tony Robbins told me: “The strongest force in human personality is the need to stay consistent with how we’ve defined ourselves.”

How many times a day do you stop yourself from buying a vape on the way home from work, if you’re not a vaper? Never. You don’t fight that urge because it doesn’t exist inside of you. Because “vaper” isn’t part of your identity.

When going to the gym becomes “I’m an athlete, and athletes train,” you stop negotiating. When productivity becomes “I’m the kind of person who follows their calendar,” you stop fighting yourself.

Do this exercise:

Write two sentences:

“I always…” Finish it with behaviours the person you want to become would consistently do. I always time-block my week. I always break projects into next steps before I start. I always deliver on time.

“I never…” Finish it with the short-term distractions holding you back from long-term wins. What would you give up if you knew it was costing you your dreams?

Repeat these statements until your brain believes them. Until they stop being rules and start being you.

-DM

The post How to Stop Wasting Your Life appeared first on Dan Martell.

You’ve been told AI is coming for your job. The data says something more complicated than that.

Yes, jobs are disappearing. Yes, the layoffs are real. Yes, the way most companies are structured today won’t make sense in five years.

The doomers aren’t wrong about the change.

They’re wrong about the conclusion.

Every new technology in history came with the same prediction. This one will kill jobs. Close doors. Make most people obsolete.

Wrong every time.

ATMs were supposed to kill bank tellers. There are more tellers now than before ATMs existed.

Cloud replaced server management. Same prediction. More engineers than ever.

Notice what actually happened in each of those shifts. The work transformed completely. The old roles disappeared. Entire categories of jobs got commoditized overnight.

And the result was always the same:

More people working in the field. More opportunity. More wealth created.

The global software engineer pool went from 5 million in 2010 to 28.7 million today. Every single year coding got easier, more people built software.

AI is the next chapter of the same story. Just bigger.

And at Anthropic – the company whose CEO said three months ago coding is “going away first” – engineers are being paid more than almost anyone in tech history. $320K+ bonuses. For roles that didn’t exist five years ago.

The old jobs shrank. The new ones got more valuable.

They didn’t lose their jobs. They got 10x faster. And Anthropic needed more of them – not fewer.

Meta’s engineering headcount is up 19% since 2022. Google’s up 16%. Apple, 13%. The companies that went deepest on AI tools earliest are hiring more than before. Not less.

I’m seeing the same thing inside my portfolio. The founders deploying AI hardest aren’t shrinking their teams. They’re outgrowing the structures they had a year ago. Faster than they can hire for them.

My point is: When the cost of building drops, the number of things worth building explodes.

A startup that needed 10 engineers now needs 3. But 50 companies that couldn’t afford to build at all now can.

The denominator shrinks. The numerator explodes.

Most people are watching the tool get smarter and assuming the human becomes less valuable.

That’s never how it worked.

The tool getting smarter raises the floor for what’s possible – and blows the ceiling off what gets built.

The founders winning right now aren’t the ones figuring out how to replace people with AI.

They’re the ones figuring out what becomes possible when AI makes everything cheaper to build.

Completely different question. Completely different decisions.

Every generation gets a moment where the old rules stop working and the new ones aren’t written yet.

The people who win that moment aren’t the ones protecting what used to work.

They’re the ones who figure out what’s possible now.

This is that moment.

Don’t miss it.

-DM

The post The Doomers Have Been Wrong Every Time. They’re Wrong This Time Too. appeared first on Dan Martell.