3 Ways I'm Using Claude to Make Money
By Alek
Summary
## Key takeaways - **Digital downloads hit 85% profit margins**: A wedding budget planner on Etsy pulls in an estimated $66,000/month at an 85% profit margin — meaning roughly $56,000 is pure profit since the file is built once and sold repeatedly. [01:38], [02:20] - **Claude builds products in one shot**: Alek says what used to take multiple hours or days of spreadsheet work can now be generated from a single simple prompt in one sitting, producing a near-ready digital product. [02:20], [05:32] - **Skill files automate customer replies 24/7**: A 'skill' is a markdown file you load with your policies, tone, and terms of service so an AI agent can draft accurate, on-brand customer replies around the clock with zero human intervention. [07:21], [07:49] - **YouTube outlier scraper delivers daily ideas**: A scheduled skill scans YouTube for outlier videos, mines viewer comments for pain points, and refills a Notion database every morning with fresh, proven content angles. [08:30], [09:29] - **Build mini-tools for repeatable tasks**: Alek built an invoice generator and a wall-art cropper inside Claude for free, saving 15–20 minutes daily on tasks he used to do manually or pay for. [11:38], [14:30] - **Replicate proven sellers, then reskin**: His core workflow: pick a product already selling well, let Claude ask clarifying questions to make it unique, build and refine it, then list it on Etsy or TikTok Shop where buyers come to you. [04:08], [04:32]
Topics Covered
- Digital Products Print 85% Profit Margins
- Clone What Already Sells, Then Let AI Build It
- Skills Turn AI Into an Employee on Autopilot
- Save 15 Minutes Daily, Let Time Compound
Full Transcript
A lot of people are talking about how to make money using AI, but not a lot of people are actually doing it. So, in
this video, I want to break down the three practical ways that I'm actually using AI on a daily basis to make money.
If you've seen me before or watched any of my videos, then you'll know that one of the businesses I've been doing for the longest is selling products online.
Now, all the way back in 2018, one of the first ways that I ever made any money online was building and selling digital products on marketplaces like Etsy. I've just made a search for budget
Etsy. I've just made a search for budget trackers, so you can sort of see what I'm talking about here. But people will build and sell digital products and digital tools like budget trackers and
planners, and they make anywhere from a few hundred all the way up to thousands of dollars in profit per month. This is
one of the most obvious ways to use AI, but it is also one of the most powerful.
The thing about digital products specifically is you can target so many different niches while still building out essentially the exact same product.
In the case of this budget tracker, people are building all sorts of variations targeting different niches from paycheck planners, 50, 30, 20 splits to even selling more mega packs
like these ultimate budget bundles that have a bunch of different other tools bundled inside of them. Now, there's a ton of different digital niches that all work really well, like digital prints,
there's journals, clip art, recipes, tutorials and planners like these ones, but the main idea here is that now AI is able to help you build out the actual product that you're selling to the
customer. This spreadsheet, for example,
customer. This spreadsheet, for example, is built inside of Google Sheets and Excel, and it targets wedding planning and sort of wedding budget tracking as well. And you can see that 29 people
well. And you can see that 29 people have bought it just in the last 24 hours. is making an estimated $4,500 per
hours. is making an estimated $4,500 per month. Keep in mind that's just from
month. Keep in mind that's just from this one digital planner listing. So, a
shop like the shop that's selling this planner might sell hundreds or maybe even thousands of these planners. And
this one specifically is making quite a lot of money every single month just selling these simple digital downloads.
And because this is a digital download, they're going to be keeping most of the sale in profit. You can see on this particular listing, they're looking at around an 85% profit margin. So, if
they're bringing in an estimated $66,000 per month, 85% of that is around $56,000.
Claude has completely changed this business because instead of it taking you multiple hours or maybe even days to build out even one of these listings, you can build it out in a single
sitting. Make sure you switch your model
sitting. Make sure you switch your model over to Opus 4.8. It was literally released about 15 minutes ago. And then
in the chatbot, we can say something like, I want to build out a wedding budget planner that I can sell on Etsy.
And because I've set up custom instructions in my cloud, it's going to ask me questions about how I want to actually build this out. You can see it even specified where I wanted to build this product out. And so, I selected
Google Sheets because I know that's what's already proven to sell. I think
especially for beginners who are just getting started making money online, selling products on marketplaces like Etsy and Tik Tok is an excellent place to start because it's so low risk. It
doesn't take too much time relative to a lot of other businesses that you might be looking at starting. And AI enables you to basically create and sell almost any type of product that you'd want to.
I've got a full video on this, but just for a few simple examples, I was able to build out these beautiful budget trackers that are fully functional, by the way, inside of Google Sheets. And
these are basically full robust digital products that solve real problems that people face. It's almost completely
people face. It's almost completely perfect right out the gate. And with
just a few extra styling tweaks, this would be a full digital product that I could post for sale in my shop for $5 to $10. And over time, if we built up a
$10. And over time, if we built up a catalog of this type of digital product, it's something that could turn into a real income over time. This was built entirely using the AI. By the way, if I came in and modified things, I could
maybe make it a little bit prettier and a little bit better. But this was basically a oneshot prompt that created the entire budget tracker, similar to the ones that you just saw selling on Etsy. I've used this process to sell
Etsy. I've used this process to sell millions of dollars worth of products over the last seven years. And it's
really simple. You find a product that's already selling well so that you have a proven idea before you go build something that isn't going to work. You
then tell Claude what you want to make.
Have Claude ask you questions about how it thinks you could make a unique and original product. And then you have
original product. And then you have Claude build out the actual product for you. You refine it with a little back
you. You refine it with a little back and forth until you get something that's high quality and actually valuable. and
then you post it for sale on marketplace platforms like Etsy and Tik Tok shop where you don't have to worry about running paid ads to drive traffic to those products because customers come to
buy those exact type of products on those marketplaces every single day. And
after a few minutes, you can see Claude took my prompt and it built out this XLSX file which I could add to my Google Drive to open up in Google Sheets or I could open up in numbers. And if we just
take a quick look at this, it even gives us a live demo right inside of the Claude app. So, this is my modern
Claude app. So, this is my modern wedding budget planner, and it looks pretty incredible for a first draft. I
can come over into the dashboard and see how it's laid out and how it looks. We
have a few lists here. If I expand, we can see all of the content. And we've
got the actual budget tracker here as well. There's a ton of different columns
well. There's a ton of different columns and rows and categories here, but the main thing is that it oneshotted this product based on an extremely simple prompt that I gave it. If I had spent even a little bit more effort on the
actual prompt, we could get an even higher quality product here. And with a little bit more work, this would be something that we could post for sale.
Even if you never had any Excel or Google Sheets experience, you'll have to tell me what you think in the comments, but even for a first draft, I think this looks pretty good. Now, outside of using Claude to build products that I'm
directly selling to customers, skill files are helping me in all of the other business operations that I have. Now,
you might be wondering, what even is a skill? So, essentially, it's a type of
skill? So, essentially, it's a type of file that your AI is going to reference when you're completing specific tasks that you instruct it to. So, if you just drop a prompt into your AI and you don't
have any skill reference file, the AI agent is just going to process it like it would any other prompt and it's going to give you a generic result based on that prompt. a skill file, which is
that prompt. a skill file, which is called a skill.m MD, which is just a markdown type file, contains a bunch of instructions to your AI for when to
trigger that skill, what to do when it's triggered, some examples of the output, and most importantly, it gives it guard rails for how to behave when it's using that skill. And the goal is just to get
that skill. And the goal is just to get you more consistent, repeatable, and tailored results for repeated workflow.
Now, one of the best examples for this is using skills to handle automated customer service agents. I've grown up several businesses over the last few years, and with any business, you're
going to get customer inquiries. For all
of my businesses, we collect all of those inquiries through Google Workspace, specifically into a Gmail account. And we can collect all of those
account. And we can collect all of those emails through the Google API. What this
essentially allows us to do is feed all of those emails to an AI agent. Now, if
we just have the AI agent response to all of those emails, it would essentially give them slop. It wouldn't
know how to respond to those customers because it wouldn't have the proper context. And that's exactly where skills
context. And that's exactly where skills come into play because we can feed it all of the policies, all of the terms of service. We can feed it the tone and
service. We can feed it the tone and basically everything that it needs to know about that business so that when it actually replies to the customer, it's a sensical and rational response. So,
we're able to collect customer inquiries 24/7, pass them to an AI agent and have it draft replies that are ready to send, all without any human intervention. The
value here is not just the fact that it's automated and can run 24/7, and that we get responses that are ready to hit send on. It's the fact that all of those responses are curated based on our
actual business. We can spend a lot less
actual business. We can spend a lot less time modifying each email because the AI agent that's drafting all of those responses has all of the context and knows exactly how to behave every single
time it drafts an email. If I didn't have AI agents doing it, I would either have to pay someone to do customer service or I would have to do it myself, which either way would cost me a lot of money. Hopefully, you can start to see
money. Hopefully, you can start to see the logic behind when to build skills and how to build them out. But one other skill that I wanted to share with you is this YouTube idea scraper. This one's
really cool and I actually got it from a friend of mine. I'll try and leave their uh YouTube channel link in the description, but we can scan YouTube for outlier video ideas, which are just videos that have a really high amount of
views relative to the subscribers on that channel. We then read through the
that channel. We then read through the comments to see what common ideas or struggles or basic complaints the viewers have. We extract those ideas,
viewers have. We extract those ideas, fill them up in a notion database, and every single day I can wake up to fresh ideas based on the real viewers of these
super viral and popular videos. Now, the
reason skills are particularly so useful is because you can schedule and automate them out. So, not only can you get
them out. So, not only can you get predictable results, but you can have it run on autopilot without you. The
scheduling aspect is what makes this so powerful because every single day I'll wake up to a new database of fresh video ideas. So, if a specific video is doing
ideas. So, if a specific video is doing super well, I'm going to see how much of an outlier it is, I can go watch that video and I can see if it's a fit for my channel. But more importantly is this
channel. But more importantly is this agent's going to read through the comments from all of these outlier videos and it's going to create a new database and give me additional ideas
based on the comments from those videos.
So, you can see it basically referenced in this case we have like seven different videos here. It's going to give me some highlevel topics, but it's also going to give me content angles that I could use for not only YouTube
videos, but I could also use them for shorts or tweets or any type of content imaginable. It's organized them by
imaginable. It's organized them by niches that my content targets, different keywords that they hit on. And
it's essentially just constantly harvesting all of these really highquality ideas for me, and I get a fresh list every single day. There's a
ton of different applications for this, but obviously since I'm a content creator and make a bunch of videos here on YouTube, it's always helpful to see which specific videos are doing super
super well relative to the channel size.
And it's even more helpful to see what people are struggling with or what they really liked in the comment section of those videos. And that's what this skill
those videos. And that's what this skill does for me. The simplest way to think about skills is that they're essentially just prompts saved in a special type of file that you can also schedule to run
autonomously. You can set these up
autonomously. You can set these up really simply by just going into Claude Co-work and going into the scheduled section. It'll walk you through building
section. It'll walk you through building out the skill file as well as the schedule for that skill to run on. Then
once you get a little more comfortable, you can set up the actual automations that run inside of Cloud Code or setting up some agents. But we'll save that for another video. There's some other really
another video. There's some other really simple automations I have set up like my organize downloads folder. This will
every Friday at 5:00 p.m. organize all
of my downloads. I have the same one for my desktop and that way I don't just have a ton of files all over my desktop and in my downloads folder. It's a
simple automation, but sometimes it's a lot of little automations that make a big difference over time. Skills aren't
just powerful because they give you a predictable output. They're also
predictable output. They're also powerful because you can run them on a schedule. If you're new to AI, this is
schedule. If you're new to AI, this is probably one of the most important things for you to learn because these automated tasks are where you can save real time every single day. Now, the
third way that I'm using AI to make money is by building out small tools and automations. So, let me just show you
automations. So, let me just show you how this works. In a new chat, I can say something like, "I need you to help me build out an invoice generator that I can use for my various businesses so that I can quickly generate an invoice
and download it as a PDF." Once again, I'm going to answer a few of those questions just so it can figure out exactly what type of invoice generator I actually want to create. It's going to
think and then build me out that tool.
And just like that, we have a full invoice generator. It's got my listing
invoice generator. It's got my listing view business selected right here. But
this would essentially just allow me to build out an invoice in real time. So,
we could add a custom name. We could
change change things like the price. So,
maybe it was $80 and they bought four of them. There's a bunch of different
them. There's a bunch of different fields that we can edit here. You can
obviously customize these using Claude, but the main important thing is that we can generate this as a PDF. And I can just open this in preview so you can see exactly what this would look like. It
customized the name, the amount, and all of the invoice details we'd need. This
is obviously a really simple tool, but the point is that I don't have to go out and search up an invoice generator every time I need to do something as simple as making an invoice. This wall art cropper was another example of a simple tool
that I built right inside of Claude that just worked out the gate. You can use AI to generate and sell wall art and digital download prints similar to these like I was talking about earlier in the
video. But when you sell a product like
video. But when you sell a product like this, you typically have to crop it down into multiple aspect ratios so that your customer can print them in the exact size that they need. And this tool lets
you do exactly that. I've generated some art here in Midjourney. So, I'll just download one of these paintings and I can upload it directly into this tool and it lets me automatically crop this
painting into basically any aspect ratio that I want. I can hit generate crops.
It's going to process that image into five different sizes that I can download and upload to my listing so that when I sell this specific painting, the customer gets access to download any
aspect ratio that they need depending on the size that they want to get it printed in. Hopefully, you can see the
printed in. Hopefully, you can see the logic behind building small tools. Now,
sometimes it does make sense to buy a pre-made solution to your problem. But
in other cases where it's such a niche problem that you might be trying to solve, it can make sense to build out a simple tool right inside of Claude that you can use over and over again completely for free. Don't get me wrong,
sometimes it makes sense to pay the money to get a more robust, fully built solution because Claude can't one-shot a perfect tool every single time. You can
ask yourself, if you keep doing a repetitive task, is this simple and repeatable enough that Claude might be able to build out a small tool for me?
If the answer is yes, you can try building it out with Claude. And if it's no, then maybe it makes sense to look for a full stack solution and just purchase it directly. Either way, this
is a good exercise to get you thinking about how you can actually use AI in your everyday workflow. even if you're building out something small, but it saves you 15 to 20 minutes every single day. That time savings really adds up
day. That time savings really adds up and that's why I've included it in our list. But I'm also curious to hear from
list. But I'm also curious to hear from you. So, let me know in the comments
you. So, let me know in the comments section what your favorite automation or way to use Claude is cuz I feel like even though I'm spending a ton of time in Claude every single day, I'm still barely scratching the surface. But, I
hope you enjoyed. I hope you found something in this video valuable. And if
you're interested in AI, make sure you join my free AI community right below the subscribe button. I just opened it up and I'm going to share all of the resources like the skill files and all the prompts that I'm using and
absolutely everything that I know about AI all in one place. So if that interests you, you can check it out below.
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