
Corey Ganim
@coreyganim • 60,102 subscribers
Helping non-technical entrepreneurs turn AI into ROI. Previous founder of a $16M eCom startup.
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This guy sells AI employees to small businesses. He's a non-technical designer with no audience, spends $0 on ads, has no tech background. Yet he's still done 21 agent setups in 6 months, almost all from referrals. His model: install one AI agent as a digital employee, then get paid monthly to manage it and coach the owner. Setup fee plus a per-agent monthly rate. Phil came on the Build With AI pod to walk us through the whole playbook. Here's what I learned: 1. The product is the coaching, not the agent. Owners treat AI like Google. You get paid to manage it so they never have to. 2. Raise your price every yes. $500 setups became $1,000. Now he's targeting $2,000 setups plus $1,000/month per agent. 3. Give the agent a value ledger. It logs every task and sends a weekly ROI report. One client's first week: 63 hours saved, $6,300 in value. 4. Put yourself in the group chat. Telegram group with Phil, the client, and the agent. The client learns by watching him talk to it. 5. The agents handle real multi-step work. One prompt: find the invoice email, extract the PDF into Excel, save to Dropbox, send the link. Done in 10 minutes. 6. Uptime is a selling point. The best prospects tried agents themselves and quit when they broke. Phil fixes it before the client notices. 7. Free work is the referral engine. Friends in his small Georgia town told friends in Atlanta and Dallas. Now he has clients nationwide. 8. The pitch is one text. "I'm testing a managed agent service. Want to be a guinea pig? I'll charge you less." First client: $250/month. 9. Make the agent write to Excel, not its own markdown. A shared source of truth is the difference between a demo and a system. 10. Phil builds his agents on Orgo. $29/month gets your agent a computer with pre-built templates. Phil's agent handles the Orgo admin itself. His 2 key takeaways: 1. You only need to be one step ahead. If you've built an agent for yourself, you know more than the owner who never has. Charge from day one. 2. Visible ROI is the retention strategy. A weekly "you saved $6,300" report re-sells the retainer every single week. Phil is doing this at a level most technical people are not, and we had a blast going deep on it. Go follow Phil Full video below. (Also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim224,915 次观看 • 1 个月前

The clearest explanation of Claude Managed Agents you'll find. Everyone's talking about it. Nobody's explaining it well. In 12 minutes we cover: - What it actually is (platform as a service for AI agents) - Who it's for and who should avoid it (4 personas) - Live console walkthrough (sessions, analytics, costs) - Real cost breakdown ($2.58 to fulfill a $1,000 service) We also built a free Google Doc that deploys your first managed agent when you hand it to Claude Code. You can grab it in the podcast show notes (Build With AI podcast) or YouTube description (video link below).
Corey Ganim777,825 次观看 • 5 个月前

7 ways to become THE go-to AI consultant in your city: (even if you have zero audience and zero capital) 1) Door-knock local businesses. One guy knocked 30 doors and signed 2 clients in a week. 99.9% of people won't do it. That's the arbitrage. 2) LinkedIn outreach, done locally. Target owners with 10 to 50 employees, never pitch in message one. 20 DMs a day is a paying client in 3 weeks or less. 3) Free audits for your warm network. Text 10 owners you know, 6 reply, 1 to 3 book. My first 3 clients came this way. 4) Partner with CPAs, agencies, and consultants. Give them 10% of every deal. A sales team you pay nothing unless they send leads. 5) AI office hours at a coworking space. My friend did 3 in a month. His last one: 20 people, one closed deal, multiple more in the pipeline. 6) Post your wins on social. A win is as small as a screenshot of you answering an AI question. 3 to 5 posts a week for 90 days. 7) Host an AI for Business meetup. Mine took 90 minutes, cost $100, and produced 7 leads and a paying client within a week. One more very important point: You don't need to be an expert, but you do need to be credible. Local owners will pay the first credible person who shows up with a plan. Two things that make this work: 1) Face to face beats cold everything. Shake their hand and you win by default. 2) Every method feeds the same ladder. Free mini assessment, $1,000 to $2,000 paid assessment, then consulting at $1,000 an hour. Full breakdown below.
Corey Ganim60,405 次观看 • 20 天前

I just filmed 6 days of cold calls and door knocks building an AI agency from scratch. -No audience -No referrals -No warm intros 60 minutes of outreach a day. 198 leads, 15 conversations, 2 sales calls booked. This is the episode where I get hung up on. Here's what's in the video: → The opening line that got me hung up on twice (and the one that replaced it) → Why 2 door knocks booked 2 calls while 13 cold-call conversations booked zero → The $500 counter-pitch to an owner who paid $2,000 for a vibe-coded website → The exact text I send the second someone hangs up on me If you want to see what it's like being in the trenches selling AI to local businesses, this one breaks it all down. This is the stuff 99.9% of people aren't willing to do. Check it out below:
Corey Ganim22,874 次观看 • 8 天前

I'm making over $10K a month selling AI services. I got there in under a year with a three-stage model: a free assessment, a paid assessment, and an AI Concierge retainer. My lowest paying client is $1,200 a month. My highest is $2,000. Here's the entire model: 1) Stage one: a free 15-minute mini assessment. One pain point, one prescribed fix. Do 1 to 3 max, purely for testimonials. 2) Stage two: the paid assessment. 45 minutes, 3 to 7 opportunities scored on effort vs impact, sold for $1,000 to $2,000. (I open sourced my paid assessment template. It's yours (free) at 3) Do the ROI math in their words. $250 an hour times 5 hours a week in email is $1,250 a week. Cut it to 1 hour and they can't argue. 4) Stage three: AI Concierge. Two 45-minute calls a month at $1,000 to $2,000. That's $750 to $1,250 an hour. 5) Add unlimited Voxer access. Feels like an AI expert in their pocket, so they pay top dollar. They barely use it. 6) Every call runs AOA: Audit, Optimize, Automate. Cut the 14-step process to 11, then turn it into a Claude skill. 7) Standardize on one ecosystem. Everything runs in Claude Cowork building Claude skills. No custom stack per client, no vendor lock-in. 8) Target owner-led service businesses doing $3M to $10M. Repetitive work, visible bottlenecks, real budget. 9) Your first client is in your phone. Text 10 business owners you know. 10 texts equals 5 to 6 free assessments, 2 to 3 paid, 1 concierge client. 10) Raise your price $250 with every yes. My next client won't be under $2,500 a month. Two things that make this work: 1) Boundaries are the offer. Free stops at the roadmap, concierge stops at two calls. Everything else is billed separately. 2) Every stage sells the next one. The free assessment promises seven more fixes. The paid report walkthrough pitches the retainer. Full breakdown below. (also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim59,298 次观看 • 26 天前

I just had Mark Fershteyn on my podcast. He spent 7 years and $8 million building a B2B SaaS to a $500K run rate. Then 6 months of part-time AI consulting on nights and weekends passed it, and he wound the software company down. So he walked me through his entire offer ladder, step by step: → The $495 per head workshop that filled 15 seats off Eventbrite and a few LinkedIn DMs → The ladder from free artifact to a $15K - $25K workshop to a $25K - $50K build → Which workshops to go all-in on and which to avoid → The "charge 20% of the outcome" rule he prices every deal against → Why he refuses maintenance retainers even when clients ask for them If you've ever wondered how a 4 hour in-person workshop turns into 6 figure AI consulting deals, this one breaks it all down. Check it out below: (also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim27,525 次观看 • 12 天前

HOW TO SELL "SECOND BRAIN AS A SERVICE" FOR $5K + (FULL COURSE) The model: build businesses a structured knowledge base out of plain markdown files, then charge to maintain it. No fancy database, Obsidian, or RAG. It becomes the foundation for every other AI project you sell them afterward. A $750 audit turns into a $3,500 build turns into a client who keeps paying you to add more. Adam Sandler came on the pod and walked through the entire playbook live. Here's what I learned: 1. Lead with the knowledge base, not the agent. Every prospect wants a CFO agent. Nobody has the context to make one work. Solve "where does the info live?" first and you've teed up every future build. 2. Sell it with AI out of the pitch. "I'll organize all your scattered company knowledge into one living asset." Their files are everywhere and they hate it. That closes on its own. 3. Zero technical friction. Just markdown files on their machine. No signup, no vault, no vectors. Technical drop-off kills AI deals. This deletes it. 4. Seven note types are your starting schema. Snapshot, people, rules, project history, decisions, open loops, links. Walk in with this and you already have a point of view. 5. Find the spine. The one thing everything ladders up to. Usually their annual goals. 6. Portability is the pitch. Fable got pulled and everyone panicked. A knowledge base outside Anthropic or OpenAI plugs into any model. Sells itself. 7. Token savings close the enterprise. One source means you stop re-pasting context every session. Real money, especially with pay-as-you-go API pricing. 8. The audit is the tripwire. Charge to map where their knowledge lives, then roll the fee into the build. Half the build is already done. 9. Two skills run it on autopilot. Ingest pulls from Gmail, calendar, and CRM. Curate does a weekly cleanup pass. That's the flywheel. 10. The knowledge base tells you what to sell next. Ask it for the top 3 AI opportunities. It finds the gap ("inbound takes 22 hours") and the next build sells itself. His 2 key takeaways: 1. Build one for yourself first. One source of truth, built once, every tool connected. Live the unlock and you'll sell it with conviction. 2. Don't let startups scare you off. Off-the-shelf can't learn how your client's business works. That domain knowledge is the moat you charge for. Adam is quietly building one of the best AI service offers out there and we had a blast going deep on it. Go follow Adam Sandler Full video below. (Also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim105,458 次观看 • 2 个月前

7 AI SERVICES BOOMER BUSINESSES ARE BEGGING TO BUY IN 2026 1) AI Tools Assessment: $999. One 45-minute interview, then a report with 3 to 7 off-the-shelf tools they can implement immediately. 50 to 60% convert into implementation. (grab the exact template I use to deliver the assessment at 2) AI Concierge: $1,000 to $2,000 a month for two 45-minute calls turning their manual processes into Claude skills. At $1,500 a month you're making $1,000 an hour. 3) Process Redesign: $3,500 to fix a broken workflow before you touch AI. One client went from 25 steps to 10. Never automate a broken process. 4) Automation Builds: $1,000 to $3,000 in Zapier or Make. One $1,500 build took a project manager out of client onboarding entirely. 5) Knowledge Systems: $3,000 baseline. A business broker went from 500 buyer emails per listing to 10 with one custom GPT. 6) Custom Workflows: $3,000 to $5,000. One client's 45-minute podcast workflow now runs off one orchestrator skill in 5 minutes. 7) Full Implementation: $5,000 to $10,000+ mixing everything above. Skills + automation builds + knowledge systems. Mix and match based on client needs. Two things that make this work: 1) The assessment is always the baseline. Start there and let it tell you what to sell next. 2) Anchor on hours saved, not hours worked. Nobody pays $1,000 an hour for your time. They pay it to get theirs back. Full breakdown below. (also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim49,298 次观看 • 1 个月前

$999 AI audits. Near-zero cost. 99 out of 100 businesses need one. The full system: → AI voice agent (built on Retell. ai) calls the business owner → Runs a 20-30 min interview on their day-to-day → Transcript pipes to Claude: "find off-the-shelf tools that fix these pain points" → Drop the output into Gamma doc → 48hr turnaround, then a 30-min follow-up call → That call upsells: process optimization ($3-5K), Zapier builds ($1-3K), CRM setup ($3-5K), custom GPT knowledge systems DO NOT SKIP THIS STEP: Do at least 5-10 audits yourself before building the voice agent. This lets you perfect your question bank, get a feel for common pain points, and get familiar with your most recommended tools. Full breakdown on Chris Koerner's Koerner Office Podcast (full video below).
Corey Ganim143,796 次观看 • 4 个月前

You guys absolutely roasted me for posting this. So here's one that went a bit better. Btw, I don't need to cold call. I do it to prove a point. I get tons of inbound leads and referrals. Hopefully it motivates someone to pick up the phone/knock the door. It's not that hard.
Corey Ganim28,679 次观看 • 22 天前

HOW TO MAKE $50K/MONTH SELLING MANAGED AI AGENTS (FULL COURSE) The model: sell managed AI agents to businesses for $5K/month each. You handle the infrastructure, they get an employee that never sleeps. 10 clients puts you at $50K MRR with 85%+ margins, run entirely by you and a fleet of agents. Nick Vasilescu is doing exactly this, and he came on the pod to walk through the whole playbook. Here's what I learned: 1. The arbitrage is that nobody knows this is possible. 99% of business owners are still asking ChatGPT what the weather is. One working agent hooks them on the spot. 2. Sell abundance. Unlimited agents, unlimited infrastructure. They don't care what an MCP is, they care that their problem is gone. 3. Don't niche too early. Say yes to everyone and let the market pull you. You find the niche by doing reps, not guessing. 4. Paid audit into managed service. Charge $1K to map every automation opportunity, then credit it toward month one. Qualifies the lead, makes the upsell a no-brainer. 5. First call, don't sell. Record it, map the workflow tip to tail, find the automation with the most value and least effort. Start there. 6. The stack is Hermes + Composio + Orgo. Composio connects all their apps in one click. Orgo spins up a working Hermes agent in 26 seconds. 7. Productize with a golden snapshot. Build one perfect agent, clone it, and every copy comes over one for one with auth intact. 8. Turn client call transcripts into skills in 10 minutes. Feed the recording to Claude Code, write the skill, port it to the client's agent via Orgo MCP. 9. Watchdogs make you look elite. Get alerted before the client notices anything broke. "Already fixed it" is why they keep paying you. 10. You become their guy. You drive more outcomes than their own employees, they credit every win to you, and churn drops to almost nothing. His 2 key takeaways: 1. Bet on cost going to zero. They launched unlimited tokens when it was barely profitable because they knew they'd capture the spread. Build for where the puck is going. 2. One client every six weeks gets you to $600K a year. The model isn't hard, it's just unevenly executed. That's the entire opportunity. Nick is crushing this model and we had a blast diving deep on how you can do the same. Go follow Nick Vasilescu Full video below. (Also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim85,723 次观看 • 2 个月前

I'm making over $1,000 an hour with one AI offer. The entire thing runs on Claude Opus 4.8. I call it the AI Concierge. Clients pay me $1,500+ a month for two 45-minute calls where we build their AI systems live, on their screen. I have 4 clients. I'm capping at 6. Here's the entire model: 1) The intake form is the audit. A 10-minute JotForm (built by Claude) surfaces their time sinks and hands me 1-3 AI opportunities before call one. 2) Done-with-you, not done-for-you. They share their screen. We build skills, set up Cowork, and write context files together. They learn to drive. (Done-for-you is the upsell.) 3) Every session runs through AOA: Audit, Optimize, Automate. Fix the process first, then turn it into a skill. Automating chaos just gives you faster chaos. 4) Day one has to move the needle. We ship at least one skill or automation on call one. No first-call win, dead engagement. 5) Unlimited Voxer between calls. They send a voice message, I reply in under 12 business hours. A 24/7 partner, not a guy they see twice a month. 6) The Notion hub is the renewal mechanism. Every call logs a quantified list of what we built. "Call one: 2 skills, 3 context files, Cowork live" makes $1.5K a month a no-brainer. 7) I never fill Notion out by hand. Two Claude skills log the call, pull the action items, and draft the recap email. 30 seconds. 8) Pricing ladder: $1,000/month, then $1,500 at 2 clients, then $1,800. At $1,500 you're already at $1,000/hour. If everyone says yes then you're priced too low. Two things that make this work: 1) Build the fulfillment infrastructure once. An afternoon. Then it runs itself outside the calls. 2) The value must be visible. People renew what they can measure. Full breakdown below. Go watch.
Corey Ganim104,244 次观看 • 3 个月前

Karpathy dropped a viral post about building a "second brain" with AI. We built it live in under 20 minutes. The system: 1. Three folders: raw/ (brain dump), wiki/ (AI organizes it), outputs/ (query results) 2. One-click install: npx skills add NicholasSpisak/second-brain 3. Obsidian Web Clipper to capture any article with one click 4. Run "ingest" and the AI reads everything in raw/, builds wiki pages, and maps connections automatically 5. Query your own knowledge base like talking to an expert 6. Monthly lint command catches contradictions and gaps before they compound Day 1 it's basic. Day 90 it's a company asset nobody else has. Free skill in the YouTube description that scaffolds the whole thing in 60 seconds. Video below, YouTube link in the replies.
Corey Ganim128,845 次观看 • 5 个月前

WATCH ME BUILD AN AI BUSINESS FROM SCRATCH (EPISODE 1) I'm building an AI services business from scratch, on camera, with 4 rules: -100% cold outreach -No audience -No network -60 minutes a day max The scoreboard is how many days it takes a total stranger to pay me $500. Here's the entire model: 1) The niche is tree services in Charlotte. High ticket, no private equity, and after-hours emergencies where the first person to answer wins the job. 2) The offer: a built and hosted website, an AI-powered speed-to-quote form, and a Google Business Profile cleanup. $500 flat. 3) The website IS the lead magnet. We build it first, give it away free, and charge $500 to install and host it. 4) Five agents inside Hyperagent run everything. Prospector, Opener, Sitesmith, Fulfiller, and an Account Manager upsell. 5) The Prospector dispatched 8 subagents, scraped 494 businesses, and verified 98 real leads. Done in 30 minutes. 6) The competition is a joke. The first five "websites" on my list: a blank page, a 404, two dead links, and a redirect to a crypto gaming site. 7) First-touch texts: under 160 characters, no links, no emojis, no mention of AI. "Hey, do y'all still do tree removal in Charlotte? Found you on Google. Corey." 8) The agent wrote "y'all" on its own. Sounding like a neighbor, not a company, is the whole reply-rate game. 9) 60 minutes a day covers 25-50 outreach attempts. Outreach is the only work that actually makes money. 10) All 5 agents get given away free in episode 4, plus $1,000 in free Hyperagent credits at the link in the YouTube subscription. Enough to run my entire lead scrape 6 times over. Two things that I'm looking to accomplish here: 1) Strip away every advantage and prove the model still works. If it works with no audience and one hour a day, nobody has an excuse left. 2) Give away the finished deliverable, not a pitch. An owner looking at their own new website doesn't need convincing. Full breakdown below. (also available on the Build With AI podcast)
Corey Ganim39,767 次观看 • 1 个月前

I charge $999 to ask a business owner questions for 45 minutes. Then Claude does the analysis in 5 minutes. I call it the AI Tools Assessment. It finds 3 to 7 off-the-shelf tools that reclaim 5 to 10 hours a week, and it's the front door to upsells from $3,500 projects to $2,000/month retainers. Here's the entire model: 1) The discovery call is questions only. "Walk me through yesterday." "What tasks do you dread?" "Where does work pile up?" No pitching. A free AI notetaker captures the transcript. 2) Claude runs the entire analysis. Paste the transcript, run one skill, and it pulls the pain points and prescribes the tools in about 5 minutes. It catches patterns you missed on the call. 3) When Claude whiffs on a tool, and fill the gaps. Thousands of tools, grouped by industry. 4) The report is 9 slides. Executive summary, effort vs impact matrix, tool recommendations, a 4-day quick win plan, and the financial impact. I open sourced the template free at 5) I go for the close on the review call. Three questions: which of these is most urgent, do you want to DIY or get help, and what's your timeline? 50 to 60% of clients ask you to implement it for them. 6) Process redesign sells for $3,500 with zero automation. One e-commerce client had an 18-step ad workflow. We cut it to 9 steps. Fixed the process, didn't touch AI, charged $3,500. 7) Knowledge systems are $3K builds. A business broker got 400 emails per listing. We trained a custom GPT on the marketing package, and buyers called it the best broker experience they've had. 8) You don't need an audience to sell this. One guy walked into 30 local businesses offering a free 15-minute mini assessment. 5 meetings, 2 clients. The free mini assessment is the hook for every channel. 9) Co-working spaces are the cheat code. Dennis in our community hosted his first free AI office hours this week. 9 people showed up, 2 became warm leads. 10) AI Concierge is the best upsell of all. Two 45-minute calls a month at $1,200 to $2,000. I have 5 clients and my blended rate is about $1,100 an hour at 99.9% net margin. Two things that make this work: 1) Sell the diagnosis before the cure. The $999 assessment is a paid discovery call that qualifies the buyer and tees up every upsell on the menu. 2) High perceived value can cost you nothing. Unlimited Voxer access sells the retainer. In 3 months across 5 clients I've gotten 4 messages. Full breakdown below. watch, implement, make money. (also available on the Build With AI podcast wherever you get your pods)
Corey Ganim49,458 次观看 • 1 个月前