Launch a $1M AI Business Solo — No Employees, No Investment, No Code

I talked to a lot of entrepreneurs and people who are building AI tools and I asked them one question. Can a solo founder build a hund00 million company and the answer surprised me a lot. The

thing is in 2025 AI becomes your co-founder and we already see companies who make millions of dollars every month and they are built by one person but one

person who knows how to utilize AIs and it's not about knowing the right tool.

There are a lot of tools that I'm going to name in this video. It's about the mindset. You need to be able to explain

mindset. You need to be able to explain to AI what you really need, how you need it done, and you need to make sure you are the right person to execute on your idea. So, in this video, I'm going to

idea. So, in this video, I'm going to give you a step-by-step plan from top people in the industry on how to start your own company being a solo founder

and a solo manager of your AI automation tools. Let's dive deeper. When we talk

tools. Let's dive deeper. When we talk about whether one person can build something truly massive, I want to start with a question asked. I'm Jad Masad, the founder of Replet. He's one of those people who lives right at their

intersection of creativity, code, and AI. How far ahead you think is time when

AI. How far ahead you think is time when a solarreneur is going to build a billion dollar company?

>> Is it a billion dollar in revenue or is a billion dollar valuation?

>> There's a valuation.

>> Valuation. So, so let's say >> 100 million in revenue 10x.

>> Yeah, let's say 20x. So, maybe a 50 million in revenue.

>> Um, I don't think it's that far. I could

see it be a $50 million AR business >> in the next couple years.

>> In the next few years. Yeah.

>> That's what's fascinating. The leverage

is no longer just in capital or team size. It's in clarity. The sharper your

size. It's in clarity. The sharper your insight into a problem, the more AI can multiply your ability to solve it. One

person who deeply understands a niche could now build what once took hundreds of people.

>> I think it's very possible just even watching the journey I went on with Instagram. There's a focus and an energy

Instagram. There's a focus and an energy when you get when you just have one or two people working on something. I think

the ideal is actually two because it's helpful having a partner when going through the ups and down ups and downs.

But what I've learned is as you grow, every person you grow the team is another person that can bring their own ideas and bring their energy which is great. But it's also another person that

great. But it's also another person that you need to get on board if you need to shift where the company is going. And so

what I think is very exciting now is that one, two, three person team can scale themselves up, do a lot more than they would have been able to do before, maybe do it faster. Um, and preserve

that kind of I call it conceptual integrity. Like you have like all of

integrity. Like you have like all of what matters about that company in your head or in two heads basically working together versus trying to steer a huge shift. When Mike said that a small team

shift. When Mike said that a small team can move faster and preserve conceptual integrity, I really felt that because when I started my first company, Lingua Trip, it was literally just me and my

husband. Two people doing absolutely

husband. Two people doing absolutely everything. We built the website,

everything. We built the website, replied to every email, picked up every phone call, uh signed every single agreement, called every single school, negotiated with partners, ran ads, all while trying to figure out what

marketing even meant because we were first- timerrs. That was our first, I

first- timerrs. That was our first, I say, real job. And then I started my YouTube channel a few years later. And

it was the same story again. I filmed, I edited for 6 hours. I came up with ideas, I wrote captions, made thumbnails all by myself. It was exciting, but it was also a lot. And I always asked

myself, what could I make more efficient about this process? And looking back, I think the biggest challenge wasn't the workload. It was this mental overload.

workload. It was this mental overload.

You're constantly switching between being creative, being strategic, being your own manager, and sometimes you just wish you had a second version of yourself to help. And now, honestly, we

kind of do. These days, I think of AI tools as my virtual co-founders. They

don't replace creativity, they amplify it. And there are a few AI tools I use

it. And there are a few AI tools I use regularly, but one of the most powerful ones is Poppy AI. We've been loving it for months now. And what's cool about Poppy is that it's not just text, it is

visual. You can upload your videos, your

visual. You can upload your videos, your favorite references, transcripts, notes, even competitor examples, and it helps you see connections between your ideas.

Then you can ask things like, "Make a real script from this clip. Turn this

interview that I did into a newsletter, find the best quotes for Instagram, come up with a new topic based on these videos." It just lets you visually

videos." It just lets you visually amplify your creative thinking and then within minutes it gives you structured results saving you hours of work so you can focus on what really matters creating and growing your business. My

favorite way to do this is I take uh reference posts that went viral for my competitors or people that I admire.

Then I connect them to my draft, give my own thoughts, and ask Poppy to create a script based on what already went viral based on that structure using similar language, similar hooks, similar

visuals. It works like magic. If I'd had

visuals. It works like magic. If I'd had something like that back when I was building my first companies, I think I would have grown not just faster, but also smarter because I would have spent less time doing the repetitive stuff and

more time thinking, okay, what's the next big idea? What actually moves the needle? Where will I get the highest

needle? Where will I get the highest ROI? So, if you're at the beginning,

ROI? So, if you're at the beginning, maybe you're starting your first channel, launching a business, or just testing an idea, use tools like this early. If you decide to give Poppy AI a

early. If you decide to give Poppy AI a try, use my code SVG for $25 off the yearly plan. But honestly, the real

yearly plan. But honestly, the real value isn't the discount. It's that

feeling of finally having more time to think. Because maybe your big idea is

think. Because maybe your big idea is already in front of you. You just

haven't had the time to see it yet.

Before you open chat GPT or replet and start prompting, you need clarity.

Daniel Priestley calls this founder opportunity fit. It's that rare overlap

opportunity fit. It's that rare overlap between what the world needs and what you naturally love to do.

>> The number one strategy is pause, reflect, and document. So go for a walk with a pen and a paper. Don't listen to music. Don't take your phone if you

music. Don't take your phone if you possibly can. Your job is to go for a

possibly can. Your job is to go for a half an hour walk and reflect upon this question. So you want to reflect on the

question. So you want to reflect on the question, when was the last time I did something special for a certain type of person? We got a remarkable result and I

person? We got a remarkable result and I could I can explain how we did it step by step.

>> Right? So you you're looking to reflect on this question so that you can write down, you know, what did we do that was special? Who did we do that

for? Uh what was the outcome? what was

for? Uh what was the outcome? what was

the result? Why was it valuable? And and

what were the steps that we that we took to get there? And it should be largely based upon something you lived through that you were hands-on with. And then

you're thinking about, I wonder if I could scale that out to more people, but you're trying to find something that you enjoyed working on because then it's going to naturally have a good founder opportunity fit.

>> Your best startup idea usually isn't something new. It's something you've

something new. It's something you've already done successfully for someone else. It's embedded in your experience,

else. It's embedded in your experience, your curiosity, your pattern recognition. It's something that your

recognition. It's something that your friends are asking you about. Daniel

told me that's where your advantage comes from. It was same for me. Everyone

comes from. It was same for me. Everyone

was asking me about those study abroad trips that I was doing. So, when your product is built from your story, your decisions are obvious. You're not

chasing trends. You're scaling something you already understand intuitively. Once

you found what you're meant to build, the next question isn't what to make, but how to make it. This is the moment where coding becomes creative writing.

The founders who win won't be the ones who know syntax. They'll be the ones who know how to exactly describe what they want. So you need to understand what you

want. So you need to understand what you want. We're always trying to build tools

want. We're always trying to build tools to optimize our internal things and we like to use replet for that. But uh when I was building something I kept getting an error. So I asked the founder why I'm

an error. So I asked the founder why I'm trying to build something with replet right now. And the thing is it's

right now. And the thing is it's something that I'm encountering. So yes,

it's building like a beautiful layout, but then >> sometimes but see service and available that's that's the recent bug I got. So

it feels like >> it's >> oh interesting.

>> Yeah.

>> On the deployment. So you can go to logs here and understand why the service is unavailable. So you can see there's an

unavailable. So you can see there's an error. Mhm.

error. Mhm.

>> You can copy that error and give it to the agent and tell it um when I deploy I get this error.

>> Okay, let's try.

>> But basically what I'm realizing uh is that it's still a little work, right?

>> It's it's work. You're still acting kind of like a software developer. You're

acting like a software development manager. And so you have this um

manager. And so you have this um powerful but easily distractable intern and you need to manage him very well. So

for example, you type this prompt that is like only one sentence. I would have like spent maybe like another minute or two on it and just say when I deploy the site I'm getting this error but you know

but I'm not getting it in the preview.

And so communicating in a more precise way is is very important. So prompt

engineering and prompting is not that different than programming.

>> We just take away the syntax from it, right? Like you don't have to understand

right? Like you don't have to understand the syntax and a lot of the underlying details, but you still have to be very precise and actually it helps when communicating with developers as well to be able to talk that way.

>> How can I learn to be better at prompting?

>> We have a YouTube channel. Uh we have a great developer relations uh person who creates a lot of content. His name is Matt. Um and so we try to train people

Matt. Um and so we try to train people on on prompting and and the underlying systems. >> One of the most fascinating ideas I've heard this year is that AI is no longer

your assistant, it's your collaborator.

And no one understands that transition better than Mike Kger. After scaling

Instagram with just two people in the early days, he's now at Anthropic where the latest version of Claude is already acting like a true co-founder. How has

it changed the way you work?

>> For me, it's anytime I've written something, I found that I still want to take the first draft myself because I, you know, sometimes writing is thinking and that's really important that you're actually, at least for me, that I'm kind of expressing myself through writing.

But before showing any human basically anything I write that's of substance I'll basically tell Claude and say hey I'm writing on this like what am I missing please challenge me on what I'm

I haven't said yet and sometimes it'll give you a suggestion and it ranges from I can't believe I forgot to address that it would have been really embarrassing to share this document and not have this and then sometimes it's oh wow I wasn't

even thinking about this dimension and something like very uh new and different and actually I use it less for copy editing but I use it a lot for challenging my ideas and and figure out how to, you know,

>> um kind of understand what a very smart person looking at this would ask as the next follow-up question and then can you kind of go from there?

>> Do do you still type? You said you're writing or you would do voice.

>> Um it's kind of a mix. Another thing

I've done with Claude sometimes when I'm like I I'm a little bit of writer's block. I need to get started but I still

block. I need to get started but I still want that experience of working through an idea myself is I will uh turn on the voice mode and just talk to it for 20 minutes sometimes and at the end say all

right that was a lot now can you organize that into some kind of you know real cohesive document that you can that I can send >> that is not full automation or replacing everyone that's actually symbiosis Mike

is describing a new kind of teamwork where AI doesn't just respond it initiates it proposes critiques and even iterates on yourh they have. The more

precise you are about what success looks like, what your vibe is. I absolutely

love when Mikey said that every app really has the founder's vibe, the better your AI performs. >> So, I was actually talking to a fellow friend who's a second or third time founder and uh he was telling me he's

like, "Mike, I'm really glad you launched Claude Max because Claude is my product manager. Claude is my lawyer. Um

product manager. Claude is my lawyer. Um

Claude is my, you know, uh founder therapist as well." And what he does is he has a claude project for each of those disciplines. So he has his product

those disciplines. So he has his product manager claude, he has his uh you know like contracts claude and he just uses that for all of those things. It's let

him run a very lean um initial company overall and and do those pieces. And so

even though he happens to be fairly technical, but he's not coding with Claude really in his day-to-day, he's actually set up Claude to be um sort of a mini version of some of these disciplines already. Even as the models,

disciplines already. Even as the models, you know, continue to get more and more powerful in those ways, even today with the right context and the right sort of history around something, you really can

start having these sort of per job function thought partners.

>> That's the mindset shift. Don't think of AI as one big tool. Think of it as a set of specialists you can hire instantly.

The founders's job is to design how those systems work together. Like if you think about the difference between the conductor and the orchestra and the people who play the instruments, the

conductor knows the sound that they're trying to get to and they know what they're trying to bring together as an overall like orchestral experience and they know what they're trying to bring to the audience, but they don't play any

instruments. So, I'm kind of that guy.

instruments. So, I'm kind of that guy.

>> That's the perfect metaphor for this new era. You don't need to play every

era. You don't need to play every instrument anymore. You just need to

instrument anymore. You just need to know the music you're trying to create.

The next natural question is if AI can do almost anything what should you build? To answer that I talked to a lot

build? To answer that I talked to a lot of people actually it's one of my favorite questions and no one ever told me oh yeah just retire. Everyone is

actually optimistic. So I talked to Aravan Serinas the founder of flexity.

His company went from 150 million valuation 2 years ago to nearly 20 billion.

>> The first thing I do when I wake up is uh read everything people all the users saying on different social platforms. You know, a lot of people email me directly. A lot of people are messaging

directly. A lot of people are messaging me on LinkedIn and Twitter. Um, I don't have time to respond to each of these, but I make sure most of the bugs are immediately attended to. So, that's kind

of how I start my day, like kind of like waking up and fixing problems. And, uh, interestingly, that's never made me feel tired. Like, I only get more energized

tired. Like, I only get more energized by uh, trying to fix issues. And you may think like, oh, what really comes out of this process of waking up every day and just bug fixing and triaging and like

trying to like, you know, identify places for improvement. But we really believe in the mantra of like 1.01 to the^ 365 is 37.78.

>> Seriously.

>> Okay. So if you do a 1% improvement every day, >> how much do you improve at the end of the year?

>> You improve uh 3,700%.

>> Mhm. You don't improve like 1% multiplied by 365. That's the concept of the exponential.

>> That mindset 1% better every day is how solo founders will build empires. You

don't need a perfect plan. You need a compounding process. But even with that,

compounding process. But even with that, Aravan says you still need obsession.

>> I would just say the bet you can make is do what you truly are obsessed about because uh fundamentally it's a bet on yourself.

>> It's not a bet on the market. It's not a bet on um ecosystem like what competitors will do will not do like

don't try to be this uh whiteboard uh strategy master like it it's completely pointless like when your idea works and and gets like 100 million or like

billion in revenue always expecting people to go after it because everyone's looking for that incremental revenue in AI because the capex is so high so the only way to justify all this is to turn

that into like business profits >> and then so they'll go after you. So the

only thing you can bet on is whether you are so obsessed about a topic that you will do it anyway regardless of all the odds stacked against you and then you'll prove the world wrong because you go so far deep into that and and no one cared

about that problem more than you did.

>> Even if you build something amazing there is a new challenge right now discovery because in 2025 it's not just humans creating content and discovering products. It's AI that we use to create

products. It's AI that we use to create content and AI recommends products. So,

I had to talk to someone from Google.

Robbie leads AI projects at Google and here is how he thinks a solo founder can get ahead in this world.

>> The AI thinks a lot like a person would in terms of the kinds of questions it issues. And so if you're a business and

issues. And so if you're a business and you're mentioned, you know, in um, you know, top business list or from a a public article that lots of people end up finding, those kinds of things become

useful for the AI to to find, you know, >> invest in your PR. That's something I've been hearing a lot.

>> So it's not it's not really different from what you would do in that regard. I

think ultimately how else are you going to decide what business to go to? Well,

you'd want to understand that.

>> But also like sometimes I invest in PR and I ask my friends, have you seen that article? And they're like, no. But then

article? And they're like, no. But then

ask AI and it really sees the article and it uses that information. So now

you're investing in PR not for people to see it but for AI.

>> That's actually a good way of thinking about it because the way I mentioned before how our AI models work, they're issuing these Google searches as a tool.

And so in the same way that you would optimize your website and think about how do I make helpful, clear information for people. So people search for a

for people. So people search for a certain topic, my website's really helpful for that.

>> Think of an AI doing that search now.

Yeah. and then knowing for that query here are the best websites given that question that's now will come into the uh context window of the model and so

when it renders a response and provides all of these links for you to go deeper that website's more likely to show up.

Yeah.

>> And so it's a lot of that standard best practices around building great content really do apply in the AI age for sure.

>> And this is so 2025 you are no longer marketing to people you're marketing to the algorithms that recommend things to people. So, in the past, SEO was about

people. So, in the past, SEO was about keywords. Now, it's about trust signals.

keywords. Now, it's about trust signals.

If your content is genuinely useful, if your product is mentioned across quality sources, the AI will recognize you as the best match when users ask questions.

So, the new SEO is simple. Be helpful.

Be real. Create content to be findable.

I >> have AI call. Yeah. So, you can go, what kind of pet do you have? Dog.

>> Next. Um, select a breed. Okay.

>> Boom. It's a little one.

>> Very little. Yeah. Extra small

>> baby >> under one year.

>> Bath and brush.

>> Uh haircut.

>> Okay. Haircut.

>> Let's make it look like a teddy bear.

>> Sweet. Um any flexibility?

>> It's okay.

>> Okay. Flexible.

>> You want to receive a text or an email?

I guess you already got your email in here, so maybe we'll just do that.

>> Um >> yeah, >> great. Nearless outdos. And so it puts

>> great. Nearless outdos. And so it puts your order in here. And so now what it's going to do, it's going to kick off a process where it's going to make phone calls um on behalf of you to a bunch of different local businesses. So these are

businesses that there's no web, there's no easy way to access them >> on the web. Many of them are local, you know, they're run by small businesses, right? It's just like a person running a

right? It's just like a person running a business.

>> Um and then you will get um an email when it's done and it'll give you all the times and you can follow up from there.

>> And how long does it take?

>> It depends on the on the question.

probably 5 10 minutes you'll probably get something back.

>> Oh, really? Oh, wow. I got an email. We

received your pet grooming request.

>> Okay, nice.

>> So, it's working.

>> Okay, it's working. This one's a This one's a offline agent, so it's got to go do a bunch of phone calls for you.

>> That's not a demo. That's a reality.

Soon AI will buy, book, and negotiate for us. The question is, can your

for us. The question is, can your business speak AI? That's where

automation stops being a buzzword and becomes your survival strategy. There is

a cool tool you can use. I talked to Marty, the founder of 11 Labs, and they're already living in that future.

>> There's definitely a few different areas, whether it's on the more classic uh customer support use cases where you

instead of having a old IVR system or no system, you can now deploy a voice agent that will take the calls instead and and will both delight the customers on the

other side because it understands you.

it's quick, it's good. Um, but then also just performs better. And then outside of customer support, we are seeing that across the entire life cycle of of of the user journey in some places where uh

uh it adds some an experience that wasn't possible before. In a simple case is uh inside of the product or even outside of the product um and you might have seen back in the day there was

those widgets for chat. Now you could have a voice agent that helps you navigate through the product experience.

So it becomes your like a partner, programmer, product person that helps you navigate through that that life cycle. And you also mentioned so of

cycle. And you also mentioned so of course some of the big pieces is in inbounding and outbounding. We actually

use it ourselves in 11 laps too where um where of course we we do have a standard flow. We have people that will answer

flow. We have people that will answer the the the reply and take a a phone call too. But if you want to go quicker,

call too. But if you want to go quicker, you can speak straight directly with our agent to understand our product offering, understand our pricing, understand what you what you can do with the product, which helps you accelerate

through the pipeline depending uh and sometimes self-d disqualify if you are not the right uh um fit for our product offering and sometimes helps you accelerate. Okay, this is exactly the

accelerate. Okay, this is exactly the set of use cases I can do. This is how I can deploy and then roots it to other people.

>> So what does all this mean for the rest of us? for creators, for entrepreneurs,

of us? for creators, for entrepreneurs, for anyone thinking about starting something. Now, I wanted to end this

something. Now, I wanted to end this journey with a quote from Reed Hoffman, someone who's been at the center of every major tech shift over the last 20 years.

>> I always recommend hope versus fear and and curiosity and optimism versus, you know, paranoia. But it doesn't mean that

know, paranoia. But it doesn't mean that it isn't painful to do the transition.

So, yes, AI tools will be available in a small number of years for everything.

And there will be AI tools for not just the thing I've created with ReAI, but like real time interaction with ReadAI and all the rest of that and that will happen. But what we should be doing is

happen. But what we should be doing is figure out how do we add our own creativity? I mean, you're one of the

creativity? I mean, you're one of the creators and everything else. How do we add our own creativity and amplify ourselves with the tools?

>> I love this perspective because it matches how I see this moment. I've

always been an optimist about AI, not because it's perfect, but because I see how it helps me in day-to-day life, how much my life has improved, and it opens doors that used to be locked or that

were unreachable for me. The fear that will take away our jobs is real. But the

truth is it's creating a new kind of job, one where we design, direct, and collaborate with intelligence itself.

And that's why I keep saying that it's very important that you work on your taste because taste makers will be the ones who will create amazing products with AI. Thank you so much for watching

with AI. Thank you so much for watching this video up to the very end and if this inspired you, share it with someone who's ready to start. Please subscribe

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