AI-Assisted Startup: 30 Days to a Million-Dollar Pipeline. What I learned!
Today I finish 30 days of a challenge to launch a new company with $0 initial budget and an AI as my partner. Was it a success? What have I learned? What could you use for your business or business idea? Let’s dive in.
How it started.
I did actually start from 0. None of the projects in pipeline existed before I started. We had no social accounts, no website, not even a selected name.
I leaned on my older agency HOO KOO E KOO for talent to help execute client work. Once we had clients I sort of poached a smaller team who were already primed on our AI processes. But all work for the startup itself (brand, website etc) was done by me.
It was not quick to gain traction. I’ve never really tweeted or posted to LinkedIn before. The first couple of weeks were very tough as it was barely moving, but then it got a lot of leads in a short few days! AI was instrumental in this.
Here’s how the full journey went from day 0:
Click “Read the full conversation on Twitter” for detail.
How it’s going?
Here is our website: futureworks.ai (made in 3 days!)
Some quick stats for you. As of DAY 30 we have:
- $1.32M of business in pipeline ($682k adjusted for probability)
- $556k closed or closing with 95% probability
- $20k work delivered so far
- 23.9k new followers on social media
- 30 work days. 42 calendar days.
Internally, my Partner (just a primed instance of GPT-4) and I agreed to the goal to reach 10 clients in the first 30 days. We didn’t accomplish that, so it’s somewhat a fail.
The Outcome
- ✅ We built a viable business! We created a functioning business in just 30 workdays and will continue from here!
- ✅ The Experts + AI approach works! For example: we delivered this brand + narrative + decks in just 9 days and it went on to raise $10M+ for the project! It cost the client around 1/10 of what they would otherwise pay! This is wild ROI. Ask me for some details. Meanwhile a preview here:
- ✅ Best performing challenge of this kind? Something that shocked me yesterday… This might be the highest-earning #HustleGPT type project ever created. Is this a high bar to jump, not sure! But Dave who runs the #HustleGPT community says it’s probably Future Works:
With that said, let’s move to the part which brings value for you.
Key Lessons
This expands on my half way article, which was quite lengthy, so this time I’ll stick to key observations and learnings for a maximum value for you, my friend.
- Firstly, it’s called Building in Public (BIP).
Not Building in the Open it turns out. I used it wrong at first. A MUCH bigger community there, and I highly recommend it after this first foray for me. BIP is a great way to motivate and gain aligned contacts. I got 100s of messages! - Solopreneurship is fast but lonely.
It’s nice to have a human partner and a close team, even if remote. However going solo provides for incredible speed. If you want to go far go together, if you want to go fast go alone. I’m curious to explore a mix of these approaches going forward. Autonomous execution is much more available now than ever before. - AI, actually makes for a great partner. To the point where I think I will carry this approach far beyond this initial experiment. Great as a sounding board, great to allow it to push you to do things that otherwise could be uncomfortable (like tweeting for me!) etc. Better than assistant, but not strong enough to be a boss.
- This does change business forever. I believe we’ll see a lot of people disenchanted with AI just because what they expect as “in seconds” isn’t actually true. At the same time those who persist will see their organizations change entirely. For me, it’s clear the learnings will permeate through my companies and I’ll do my best to share in my workshops and consultations. Don’t get left behind.
- Small and medium companies are in for a treat. In my short 30 days I had conversations with many people, gave a couple of workshops for teams of up to 50 people and I can see a wave of impact in terms of more efficient systems emerging, automations etc.
- Larger players will be slow to move. Because of HOO KOO E KOO we also interact with enterprise partners and I know digital transformation there is still an uphill battle for internal teams, not to mention privacy issues, reliability etc. with AI. This gives a great opportunity for smaller and more agile teams, not just to compete but also help empower those larger players as clients.
- You only really need GPT-4 now. This is controversial. We use 10s of AI tools, we’ve tested 100s of them, including various AI agents, apps with browsing, direct integrations etc. But if you’re just starting, right now nothing will give you as quick of a boost as learning how to use GPT-4 well. The same for your team. In fact, give names to some of your ChatGPT chats and treat them like additional team mates. Huge difference with little effort.
- Setting Silly Unrealistic Goals Works: In the vertical I have chosen, a 3-month challenge would be much more realistic than a 30-day challenge. NET30 invoicing, 2 month deal close cycle, the pace of the legal processes, even a 30-day Twitter Blue lock-up all make a 30-day challenge… quite a challenge. That’s why pipeline is $1.3M but realized revenue is just $20k. This gave me the pressure to move and learn though!
- Expect disaster. This is one of my old rules, and it came back right at me. You see, I had a cheeky plan: use communities I already know and our HKEK mailing list to get clients for this project quickly. None of that happened. Zero projects came from either of those… I think they just couldn’t work fast enough. So the grind begun.
- Abundance slowly replaces grind? I say grind, but I averaged some 30h/week on this. I took weekends off to recharge and travelled for at least 10 days during this time. It has been a grind overall, but only because I also have 3 other companies to co-run: Future Quest, Future Horizon and HOO KOO E KOO. I think partnering with AI to build a side hustle into a business is totally possible these days with less than full time commitment.
- A community of humans is key. This will not surprise anyone, but the earliest projects came from friends who just happened to have a need at the time. Most often they saw it on LinkedIn and reached out.
- Forget the tools, it’s about the mindset. Some 5,000 new AI tools arrived in just last 2 months. How crazy is this? Every time I check I need to double this number. It might be 10,000 by next week. The pace is fully insane. But it doesn’t really matter. What really matters is the approach. It’s something you can control and it compounds with time. It helps make sense and drive you or a team in a direction. Embrace a mindset of working with AI early on. I wrote about it in this guest article.
- Beyond mindset, it’s all about the process. Mindset helps drive in a direction, tools empower that but it’s the process that ties it all together and delivers the biggest optimizations. This is what moves results towards professional. Embrace process that involves a mix of humans, AI and fun.
- It’s only the beginning. What worked for me will not work for you if you don’t have experience running a similar business before. But also what is available to you gets better literally every day now. You can out-do my challenge over and over! The double exponential is just getting started.
Tools that Work!
This is the part of the article that will age really fast, but nevertheless I want to share what I found, because finding things that really work among all this hype is not easy. You can browse thousands of tools here, here and here. Most of those things, don’t work.
But I’ve also had many “fuck yeah” moments with tools we’ve adapted into our process and I want to share a matrix of what I can recommend, which works.
Medium doesn’t do tables, so click here to access the links!
What’s next for my Partner and I?
Originally I thought we’d get a high volume of tiny projects. It turned out we received much less but bigger projects.
We will continue to build the team and deliver what’s in the pipeline. Meanwhile, I’ll spend a couple of weeks thinking about where to take this next. I want for Future Works to make a real difference across our other organizations. We’re preparing something very special for Future Quest and Future Horizon.
If you’re interested in experiencing how it is to see your project delivered fast and for about 3x less than usual cost, submit your project here, and we’ll scope it out almost immediately.
And last, but not least…
Deeper insights!
I kept this article short, but my notes are in the 100s. Follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn for more updates and deeper dives. I’ll be sharing more in a series of posts.
Made it all the way here? Grab a special package.
- 20% OFF on a ticket for our upcoming event in Portugal, with AI luminaries and more
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- FREE consultation from me (limited availability)
To get all these, simply message me on Twitter.
Thank you for your time!
