"How do I give AI all the context it needs without typing so much?"

I talk three times faster than I type. So whether it's a chat tool, a coding platform or an agent, I'm talking and having it transcribed. I use Wispr Flow because it lives on my phone keyboard and on my laptop, and everything I dictate feeds my AI brain so it gets smarter.

Then I flip the script. Instead of guessing what the AI needs from me, I make it pull from me. Add this to the end of every prompt:

"Ask me questions if you need more context."

I use Claude for this because of the built-in ask user tool. It breaks its question down into two or three steps and gives you multiple choice, a checklist, a priority list, even an "other" box where you can type a better answer than the ones it offered you.

"Why does AI keep giving me generic answers?"

Because of how it works. It's trained on nearly everything ever created, so by default it condenses and averages the best answer across all of it. Average in, average out.

The fix is specificity in the prompt. I use a framework called MAPS.

1. M is for Mission. What's the goal behind the task? "I need to get more customers."

2. A is for Ask. What specifically do you need it to do? "Generate me a list of leads I can call on." "Build me a landing page so I can capture emails." Most people give the prompt only this part, which is exactly why the answers come back generic.

3. P is for Parameters. Everything you know about your situation. Past clients, scripts that have worked, your numbers. You can hand it two or three full books worth of information. Most people give it a paragraph. If you don't have documents ready, this is where you pick up the voice tool and just talk at it like crazy.

4. S is for Shape. The format of the output. Spreadsheet? Bulleted list? Short and tight?

No specific tool here, because MAPS applies to literally every AI. One tip: I use Perplexity when I want the same question answered by different models side by side. It's like having a council of AI models and taking the best reply.

"How do I stop explaining who I am in every new chat?"

Every new chat starts at zero. It's like talking to a stranger every single time.

I used to teach something called the master prompt, where you'd sit there and answer a pile of questions. We don't have to do that anymore.

1. Connect the tools where the information about you already lives. Your email. Your Google Drive. Maybe Notion, maybe Slack. All of it is rich with who you are, what you're working on, who's in your life.

2. Then tell it: "Build the most detailed master prompt of who I am from all this information. If you have any questions, ask me."

3. Fix what it gets wrong. It'll build 90% of it, and it will hallucinate a few things. Make your edits and save it.

4. Paste it into your settings so every new chat starts with it. Then copy that same master prompt into every other AI tool you use.

Five minutes of setup. After that the answers come back like they're from a consultant who has known you for years.

I use Claude for this for two reasons. As of today it has the best memory system, so the more I give it, the more it remembers and the better it uses it. And it's built by Anthropic. When I looked at every other AI and asked who I trust most with my financial information and internal documents, that mattered. Some of them are free, and you're paying with your data.

"How can I use AI to learn things faster?"

This is probably my number one use case, every day. A course I have to follow in order might take me weeks. A book takes me days. Even then I'm not learning against the problem I actually have.

With AI I can learn a topic in under 30 minutes.

1. "Go find the best resources on this topic." YouTube videos, books, courses, events. Tell it recent stuff only. There's no point learning AI from somebody five years ago.

2. "Now build me a learning plan from these and teach them to me." I don't need to read a whole book to learn one specific thing, so I skip to the parts that matter.

My daily tool for this is NotebookLM. It's made by Google, it's free, and it pulls from PDFs, websites and YouTube, which is the number one teacher in the world. It builds a custom AI you can chat with about the topic. It'll make a podcast you can listen to, and you can call in and ask questions to the AI voice. It builds presentations. It builds a video overview. It'll even make flashcards and a quiz so you can see how well you actually know the thing.

I'm not making this up. Go try it.

"I want AI to help me set five-year goals, but where do I start?"

We can't hit a target we can't see, and most goals are vague. Make more money. Get healthier. Grow a family. None of that is specific enough for the AI, or for you.

1. Ask it to help you define five-year SMART goals - specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and timely. Use the acronym in the prompt and it'll map the output to it.

2. Answer its questions out loud with any tool that records your voice. I use Wispr Flow. Much faster than typing.

3. Make it visual, because our brains think in pictures, not words. Here's the prompt: "Describe what my life looks like when I hit that goal. Tell me about the sights, the sounds, the details, the feelings. Then turn that into a hyper realistic image." That's your vision board.

Pro tip: ask it to redo the image vertical, at the size of your phone wallpaper. Now you're looking at your five-year goals a hundred times a day.

I've always kept a vision board and I always update it. I'm just using AI more and more to make it crystal clear. Best tools for this right now are the ChatGPT image tool and Nano Banana inside Google's Gemini.

"How do I use AI to actually stick to my goals?"

Willpower breaks. Systems don't. So the question is what system makes the goal inevitable, and the big one is being able to see the progress, because seeing progress is what makes you feel the momentum.

1. Give the AI your goals.

2. Have it build a written plan with the specific timelines and the things you'd have to do to get there.

3. Ask it for a daily dashboard. The goal at the top, the daily activities underneath, and you enter your numbers every day.

4. Color code it. If I'm more than 10% below the activity it needs to see from me, red, I'm not on track. Within 10%, yellow. On track, green.

Pro tip: ask it to turn that dashboard into an app on your phone. This one's advanced. You can build a web page and save it to your home screen, or build a real mobile app.

I use Codex for this, built by OpenAI. It's really good at code, really good at math, and really good at visuals. That last part matters here, because if the information is ugly and confusing nobody opens it every day. Make it pretty and gamified and you'll be in there daily.

"Can AI plan my calendar around my goals?"

Our goals are the byproduct of where we spend our time. That's why everything in my life goes in my calendar. It's how I audit what I've actually been up to, and when the goals don't materialize I can ask what needs to change in there.

Most founders have about 10 hours a week on their calendar doing things they don't need to be doing.

1. Connect your calendar to your AI. Watching it analyze everything you've been up to is worth it on its own.

2. Give it your goals for this quarter.

3. Run this prompt: "Using my goals, look at my calendar like you're a ruthless mentor. Don't worry about hurting my feelings. Argue with me about where I need to restructure my time and tell me why, based on what's best for my goals, not what I want right now."

It needs both pieces to work: the data in your calendar, and the goals.

Pro tip: I wrote a whole Wall Street Journal bestselling book on this called Buy Back Your Time. Have it study the book and do what I teach in there, because there are things I can't get to here that it already knows.

I use Claude for this because of the connector tool and the memory system. It already knows my goals from the master prompt. And it doesn't stop at reading my schedule, it tells me what's wrong with it. It'll say you're spending a lot of time here, but you have this goal and this person on your team, so maybe ask them to take over that meeting.

"How do I get AI to write emails that actually sound like me?"

You know when an email is AI written. The dashes, the phrasing, all of it. They know, you know. Let's fix that.

1. Connect your email, Gmail or Outlook, to your AI tool.

2. Ask it to go through your emails, analyze them, and write a document that teaches other AIs to write emails just like you. You write completely differently to your boss than you do to your friends, and it can understand the difference. What comes out is a tone document, or a skill.

3. Have it update that document off your Gmail whenever you need it refreshed.

I use Claude here. My email has a lot of sensitive data in it, so I'd rather that sit with Anthropic. And Claude has been the best copywriter out there for a long time now.

"How do I get AI to do my repetitive tasks without me asking every day?"

Repetitive work is where AI shines. My rule comes out of software: DRY. Don't repeat yourself. The moment you catch yourself doing something twice, stop.

1. Find the thing you do every week or every day. One-offs don't count. If you'll only ever do it once, who cares.

2. Record yourself doing it, talking out loud as you go.

3. Ask the AI to turn that recording into a skill.

4. Put it on a schedule.

ChatGPT has a record and replay feature now. Hit the plus icon, tell it you're going to record something you want automated, and it takes your screen, records everything you do, and creates the skill. I use Claude and plenty of the others too, but most of them take over your whole screen while they work and you sit there watching your computer finish the task. This one captures it once and then runs behind the scenes. Set it and forget it.

"My notes and ideas are everywhere. How do I organize them?"

A few years ago this meant sitting there manually pulling things out of Google Drive into Notion, or moving videos from Vimeo over to Dropbox. Days of work.

1. Pick one place for all of it. People call this a home database. That becomes the brain behind every other system, the thing the AI learns from.

2. Point your other AI tools at that one place.

3. Have an agent maintain it. This is the pro move. I use apex.host, and there's Hermes and OpenClaw too. Every night my agent runs processes to delete files that don't need to exist, connect the things that should be connected, and file things where other agents can reach them.

My team runs Notion for all our corporate stuff. I take that plus everything else and save it into Obsidian, which sits on my agent machine with access to my decisions, my knowledge, my relationships, podcast interviews, conversations with my team, strategic documents. That's why when I talk to my AI, the answers are specific.

If you're a bit nerdy, Obsidian. If you're just starting off, Notion is easier to get going.

"How do I use AI to keep track of my business finances?"

Financials are tricky. The information usually isn't structured properly, most accounting software has no strong AI in it, and most entrepreneurs don't like tracking everything in the first place. Garbage in, garbage out.

Do it right and you should be able to ask anything about your money, personal or professional, and get an answer on the spot.

1. Connect all of it. Bank statements, payment systems, everything you use financially.

2. Ask real questions. Do I have enough cash to make this hire? What's my current burn rate? How many months of inventory do I have?

3. Ask for it visually. Graphs, spreadsheets, a picture of how things are moving in the business.

You can build this yourself and it might take you months. I use HelloFrank.ai. Full transparency, it's one of my venture companies. We built it internally, then my friends saw how we were using it and wanted access, so we brought it public. It acts like a full time CFO I'm not spending 10 or 15 grand a month on, it's certified and secure, and it connects straight to the bank accounts. My favorite feature is the daily cash email: it pulls the cash position of every business I'm involved in and tells me how the money is moving and what I should focus on.

In business, speed is the thing. I want to ask a question and have it answered in seconds.

"I save AI tutorials on Instagram and never implement them. What do I do?"

Shelf help. You collect things for the someday when you'll finally get to them. I'm the same way, reels saved everywhere. It feels productive. Honestly it's organized procrastination.

1. Grab the link next time you see one.

2. Paste it into your AI and ask: "Is this useful for me?" It knows your goals. It knows your calendar. It knows what systems you've built so far. Let it judge.

3. Tell it to apply it wherever it sees necessary.

4. Automate the whole loop. Call it something like Instagram ingestion. Now every time the AI sees an Instagram or TikTok link it runs that skill, and you never re-explain yourself.

I send mine to apex.host. My agent is called Kai, and I want Kai to know everything going on in my life even if I go implement it somewhere else. He's the genius sidekick.

"What's the best AI assistant out there?"

As the guy who wrote the book on training an assistant, the AI version is way more fun. They don't sleep. They don't take vacations. They don't complain. You never have to swap them out.

Here's how you build one.

1. Get all the APIs for your different systems and connect them to your AI.

2. Set up a harness, an agent that keeps everything running so it can monitor your calendar, monitor your email, look at what people are sending you on Slack.

3. Give it an identity. How it should behave, the rules it follows, the security parameters so you don't lose your information.

If that sounds overwhelming, it's the exact reason my team and I built two tools that come out of the box, so you're not configuring and securing all of it yourself.

If you're a CEO leading a big team and your problem is clarity, that's single player mode. That's apex.host, and that's my Kai. I ask it about marketing campaigns, my calendar, personal tasks, goals, projects. I have it go investigate things. I even have it call team members for updates.

If you want to power up the team, that's multiplayer mode, and that's Precision. It pulls all the company data into one source of truth, then your team builds dashboards and scoreboards, executes tasks, and runs it right out of Slack.

Full transparency on both, these are my companies. I use Precision to run my companies and Apex for me.

"I get error messages when writing code and have no idea what they mean."

Show the problem to the AI. If it knows what the problem is, it can solve it.

1. Make the error visible. Sometimes you're building an app and there's an error you can't see. Tell your code: "Create an error window I can screenshot to tell you what I'm seeing when it's broken."

2. Screenshot it and feed it back. "Fix it."

I use Claude Code most of the time. And I'm a bit of a geek, so when Claude isn't doing what I need, I'll screenshot the whole project and take it to Grok or Codex to see if it comes up with a better answer. Two different models trying to fix each other's work gets me the best outcome.

Pick one

That was a lot. Tools will change, trust me. Come back in 90 days and my list might look different. The principles never will.

Most people watch something like this and do nothing with it. You're still here, which means you actually want to get better at this.

So pick one. One tool, one path from this list, and implement it today.

-DM

I got put on ADHD medication at 11. Taken out of my home at 12. By my late teens I'd been in and out of jail.

Then in rehab I saw a yellow book on Java programming sitting on a desk. I taught myself to code from that book.

That one book put me on the path to building and exiting three tech companies before I was 35, and every bit of the life I have today.

Here's the problem. School rewards memorization, and that's created a generation addicted to what I call shelf help. Reading books, binging podcasts, buying courses, doing nothing with any of it.

The tools to self-educate right now are better than any classroom that has ever existed. So here's my system. I call it SELF: select it, extract it, live it, forge it.

S: Select It

Your parents picked what you learned. Then school picked. Now the algorithm picks. Time to take that back.

Learn just in time, not just in case.

School made me memorize history facts that have never once come up in anything I've done. Then I got into business and realized that if I learn how to hire people, I can use that this week. Guess which one stuck?

Run everything through one question: what problem is this helping me solve? If you can't point at it, that's shelf help.

Let AI interview you.

Almost nobody does this. When I sit down with my AI, I have it interview me. I tell it what I'm trying to solve, then have it ask me questions until it has enough context to give me a real answer.

AI already knows everything about business and strategy. What it doesn't know is your business, your goals, your gaps. Here's the exact prompt I give it:

I want to self-educate myself on topics that'll help me solve the biggest problems I'm currently facing. I don't want shelf help. No learning for the sake of learning. Use everything you know about me. Then interview me to figure out where learning something new would have the biggest impact. Then do a deep research project to build me a list of resources to learn from. I believe in just in time learning, not just in case. Only recommend things I can apply immediately. Don't give me the most popular resources, give me the ones that fit my current struggle. Deliver it as a spreadsheet with the resources, the format (books, podcasts, creators, courses), the link, and why you picked it for me. If anything's unclear, ask me before you start.

Pro tip: in Claude, tell it to use the ask user tool. It'll interview you with multiple choice checkboxes and even let you drag your priorities into order.

Answer honestly. Then pick one.

E: Extract It

Now you know what to learn. Here's where most people blow it up.

Study. Don't read.

Most people read a business book like a novel. Cover to cover, collecting stories, feeling motivated. Nothing sticks and nothing changes.

Studying means you're hunting for something to implement. Three things make it work:

• Daily dose. Ten pages every morning is one of my non-negotiables. Ten is manageable, so it actually happens, and while I sleep my brain sorts through it. There's a real term for this: motor learning consolidation. Do that daily and your mind stays permanently on the lookout.

• Rewrite it in your own words. This one changed my life. I read an author years ago who rewrote everything he learned in his own language so he'd internalize it. I've done it with every book since. There's a Greek line I carry around as “exhaust the body, tame the mind.” That's not the original quote. It's mine now.

• Pick one action item. Get 1% better every day and you'll wake up in a year as a different person. That's exactly why I wrote Buy Back Your Time the way I did: time audit, then inbox, then delegation, then the camcorder method, then hiring. Every chapter is built for you to study it, do it, and come back.

Feed your mind.

Everyone says social media is bad for you. I use mine as an education. My consumption becomes my curriculum. Here's the prompt:

I want a daily brief on [your space]. Find the most relevant sources and pull from podcasts, X profiles, Instagram profiles, newsletters and news sites. Every morning, scrape them and gather the best insights into a 10-minute brief I can read with my coffee. Only include things relevant to what I'm learning right now. Cut the noise. No clickbait, no distraction, nothing that repeats itself.

When it hands you the report, go follow the sources it pulled from. Now your feed feeds your mind, and you're getting the good stuff while you're standing in line somewhere.

For the deep dive, the best tool right now is NotebookLM. Give it your topic and it pulls the research, the videos and the PDFs, then builds you a custom AI to quiz you and talk it through. Schools were never able to do that.

Want the 36 AI tools I actually use? I put together my full AI tech stack: the 36 tools I run every day and exactly what each one is for. It's free. Grab the AI Tech Stack here.

L: Live It

Knowledge flowing in is exactly where shelf help starts. This is the part where we kill it.

And I'll be straight with you: AI can't do this step for you. It got you here at a speed that would have been impossible five years ago. Now you do the work.

The 48-hour rule.

If you learn something and don't act on it within 48 hours, that's shelf help. Everything you learn has a shelf life.

Everybody wants to talk about motivation. Momentum comes from movement. Want to feel motivated? Move first.

So the moment you learn something, translate it into your world, then put it in your calendar. To-do lists are where good ideas go to die.

When I learned the HYPE framework (hook, explain, illustrate, teach) I spent that same afternoon running it live. I had a podcast, so I did it on the podcast. I had a training with my team, so I did it there. I was shooting reels, so I practiced it on the reels. All inside the 48 hours, because I wanted it integrated, not remembered.

The mirror test.

Doctors get taught something the rest of us don't: you learn it, you do it, you teach it. Teaching is the mirror.

Yale ran a study where they asked people if they understood how zippers work. Everybody said yes. Then they asked them to explain it. They couldn't.

So find somebody who'd actually get value from what you just learned and say “hey, can I teach you something?” Walk them through it, then have them repeat it back. If what comes back is comprehensive, you've got it. If it doesn't, that's not on them. Run it again with the next person.

I do this constantly and people have no idea. Half the time I hear the gap and think, alright, I've got work to do.

Pro tip: no one around? Explain it out loud to your AI, then send it the source material and ask it to grade your explanation. It'll tell you exactly where the holes are.

F: Forge It

Practice until you can't get it wrong.

Most people practice until they get it right. They land it once and move on. Pros keep going until they're landing that 360 on the wake surf 99 times out of 100.

You know the Bruce Lee line: I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times. Gladwell's 10,000 hours is the starting line, not the finish. Real mastery is closer to a decade of doing the thing.

When I hired a coach to teach me to wake surf, I brought in Austin Keen. First question I asked him was how long he'd been doing it. He started skim boarding at 10 and he's in his mid-30s now. That's what great looks like up close.

When I started my YouTube channel I didn't even aim for great. I figured if I showed up every week for ten years and ran this loop on it, maybe someday I'd have 100,000 followers. We're at 3 million.

I've never once seen someone spend a thousand days on something and not change their entire life.

Obsessed, Not Interested

If you're not obsessed, you're just interested. And interested people watch obsessed people change the world.

That one book in rehab changed my whole life. Not because I read it. Because I studied it, then I did it, then I kept doing it.

So pick your one thing and go run the loop.

-DM

How does a kid from a small town in Eastern Canada who struggled in school and was in and out of jail and rehab by 17 end up in rooms like that?

One word. Relationships.

Everyone says your network is your net worth. Almost nobody shows you how to build one. So here's the whole system, including how I reach people way out of my league without it feeling cringey.

Think in people, not problems

The average person asks, "How do I solve this?"

The most successful people I know ask, "Who has already solved this?" They default to the who, not the how.

Every problem you have, somebody out there has already solved. Build a relationship with them and you inherit the solution.

That's why I moved to San Francisco at 28. Software people move to San Francisco. Media people are moving to Austin right now. Music goes to Nashville, finance goes to New York. Proximity is power, and most of what you need is caught, not taught.

The four invisible showstoppers

So if one relationship can change everything, why hasn't it happened yet?

Usually it's something I call an invisible showstopper. Small things you're doing that kill the relationship before it starts. The worst part is nobody tells you that you blew it. You just secretly feel like other people get chances you don't.

A guy spotted my car at the gym, figured out I was inside, and ran across the floor mid-workout in a full suit to ask me questions. I'm open to that. I love meeting people. So I told him we do a founder hike every Tuesday and he was invited. "For sure, man. I'll be there."

He didn't show. That was three months ago and he still hasn't.

About 98% of people who say they'll be there don't show up. That's part of why I run the hike. It's a filter, and most people fail it. If he'd just walked up that trail, whatever he wanted help with probably would have gotten a real conversation.

It travels, too. I was thinking about partnering with a guy, let's call him Bobby. My buddy Mike found out and told me Bobby talks about people behind their backs. That was the end of it. Bobby never treated me poorly and never said a word about anyone in front of me. Bobby also has no idea why nothing ever happened.

Four behaviors do most of the damage:

1. Flaking/Being late. The people you want in your corner have to be surrounded by people who follow through 100% of the time. Fix: only commit when it's a 100%. If life happens, text them.

2. Neediness. This one reeks of desperation. You start treating someone like they've got magic fairy dust, and if they sprinkle enough on you, you'll be successful. Fix: act like a peer, not a fan. The people you admire want that, because the alternative makes them uncomfortable.

3. The instant ask. It gets an immediate no and makes the yes harder later. Fix: give first. Don't ask, "want me to edit a video?" Edit the video. Send it.

4. Being transactional. If you only do things hoping to get something back, people feel it and keep their distance. Keeping score is not a relationship. Fix: be intentional instead. Gary Vee does this at scale every day. He treats relationships like investments.

The TRIBE framework

Cuban, Branson, Tony, all of it came out of this. I wasn't born good at networking either. I was awkward and introverted, and I learned to code partly because I didn't have to talk to anybody. Then I figured out business is about people, so I went and read the books and got good at it.

T is for target. Write out five specific things you want done before the end of the year. Then write the name of someone who's already done it next to each one.

R is for realize you don't need any one person. The second you say "I need this person to invest," you've made them the gatekeeper of your dream. Make a list of a dozen. Make it a hundred. Nobody has to pick me for me to win.

I is for invest. The best way to invest in a relationship is to show up. When my book came out and I did my first event at my local bookstore, my buddy Jason Gaignard got on a plane from 2,000 miles away and stood in line for a copy. I asked what he was doing there and he said he came to support the book. That's why I love the guy. He shows up. His book, Community Made, is worth buying ;)

B is for build a platform. A platform is anywhere you can invite people to collaborate with you. I started with dinners. Three local entrepreneurs who didn't know each other, plus me, doing intros. If I didn't know much about law, I invited the guy who owned the law firm. Didn't know finance, invited the person running the accounting firm. And if I'm shy, great, they talk to each other. I create the room, they think I'm a master networker, and all I did was send an email. The hike is the same idea. It costs me nothing, I get my workout in, and thousands of people have come. (You're invited, by the way, in case nobody ever formally told you.)

E is for edit. You have to put things down before you can pick things up, and that applies to your feed. Follow the people next to your goals. Mute everyone else, block them if they're genuinely negative. My rule: if I'd run into them at the mall and pretend I didn't know them, I'm not following them, and I don't care that we sat next to each other in grade 8 English.

Most people build a network by accident. This way you do it on purpose. And it comes back to goodwill, which only gets created when you give more than you take off the table.

How to actually reach out

Information without action is just entertainment. So here's the outreach.

Do your homework. Read their stuff, watch their videos. Never freestyle it. There's nothing more insulting than getting asked something that's the most publicly available fact about your life.

Show up in their world first. Follow them, leave real comments. And make sure your own profile isn't randomname1234, because that's not a good look.

Lead with something only a human could write. One very specific reference that proves you did the work, a mutual connection if you've got one. Short. No pitch.

Ask for advice, not a favor. Something specific and easy to answer, but not something they've already answered publicly. If you ask me how to start an AI company when there are 13 videos of me answering that, bad look. But "I'm debating Grok build versus Codex, which would you use?" is a question I have an opinion on and can answer in one line. Anything that sounds like can we collab, can you promote my thing, can you invest, gets filtered out.

Put your cell number in the email. One of my go-to moves. If I'm driving and you made it easy to reach you, I'm tapping the number and calling.

When they reply, tell them what you did with it. "Never heard of Grok build. Tried it, built the app, thank you." Now they know their time was well spent. That's a relationship starting.

Then offer help, ideally to their team. When I first moved to San Francisco I didn't know anybody, so I found a woman named Cassie who ran the biggest events business in the city and offered to volunteer. I'd already sold a company. I was a multimillionaire. I still knew the fastest way into the right room was to volunteer. I asked if she needed someone to recruit speakers, she said yes, and I asked for her hit list. Now I'm reaching out to the top entrepreneurs in the city on her behalf, with permission, adding value before I ever asked for anything.

Get this right and you reach a point where you've got a money problem and you've got a guy. People problem, you've got a guy. Need to hire someone, you know the person.

When you can reach the best person in the world on any problem you have, you start to feel invincible. That's the whole reason I do what I do, and the relationships end up mattering more than anything they ever get you.

So go pull out that list. Pick one name. Send one message today.

-DM

I get some version of this every single week now.

Here's my honest answer:

I don't know.

Nobody does.

Some of the smartest people I know think we're six months out from everything changing. Others think half this stuff is hype and we're watching a bubble inflate in real time.

Both camps are certain. Both are full of people smarter than me. Only one of them can be right.

That's not a question I can answer. So I spend my time on one I can:

How do you build for a future you can't predict?

Here's where I start...

Almost every business I look at is built for one specific future. Nobody decided that on purpose. But trace it back and there's always one thing that has to keep being true or the whole thing stops working.

One channel bringing in most of the leads... One person who knows how it actually runs... One product carrying the rest... etc

That business is already a prediction. It's a bet that one particular tomorrow shows up on schedule.

And when people see it, they almost always reach for one of two moves:

1. Go defensive and you survive the bad years and miss the good ones.

2. Go all in and you win big if you're right, and you're gone if you're not.

Either way you're still guessing. You've just raised the stakes on the guess.

I don't want a bigger bet. I want a business that doesn't need the bet to land.

So what do you do?

I build the version that's good across a lot of futures instead of perfect in one.

In practice that's boring work...

A second channel that's working before you need it... Someone else who knows how the operations run... A second product that could carry a bad quarter for the first one...

None of that is exciting. But all of it means no single tomorrow can put you out.

Yes, it costs me some upside. I'll never have the maximum outcome in any single scenario.

But it keeps me in the game. And that's the biggest upside there is.

The question to ask instead

So, is AI going to kill your business? Maybe. Maybe not.

What I do know is that the old rules still hold. One point of failure will get you eventually.

That was true before any of this started. It'll be true after.

AI didn't put that there. It just got enough people worried to finally go looking.

So you don't need to ask what AI is going to do to you.

Ask instead: what's the one thing in your business that has to stay true? The thing you'd be in trouble without.

Then go make it not the only one.

That's how you build for a future you can't predict.

-DM

Since we're on the subject...

I'm building and backing a portfolio of AI companies.

If you've had your exit and you're working out what's next, that's exactly who we partner with. Co-founder partners at Martell Ventures.

Going from zero to a $100K month isn’t about grinding harder. It’s about following a proven blueprint.

My first two businesses failed. Not because I didn’t work hard, but because I didn’t know the right steps. Once I figured them out, I built and sold three multi-million dollar companies, and I’ve since walked thousands of business owners through these exact steps.

So grab a pen and write this down. Here’s the whole thing.

Step 1: Do the money math

Before you pick what to sell, decide what your $100K is actually made of. There are five ways to get there:

1. 1 person x $100K

2. 10 people x $10K

3. 100 people x $1,000

4. 1,000 people x $100

5. 10,000 people x $10

Now look at the extremes. One client at $100K is concentration risk, and it usually takes a mountain of skills to earn it. 10,000 people at $10 is a fantasy when you know about six people. Chasing $100 across 1,000 customers every month is a grind. And $10K deals feel like a lot when you’re starting.

What I like is the middle. You want to be more than a thousand, less than ten thousand. So start with a $1,000-a-month offer. Land about 100 customers at $1,000 each and you’re at $100K a month. That’s the target.

Run this same math with whatever your goal number is. Ours is 100K, so now we know the price. We just don’t know the product yet.

Step 2: Find the thing to sell

Start here: people only ever spend money on three things.

1. Time. Help me buy back my time and I’ve got unlimited capital.

2. Money. The easiest thing in the world to sell. “Want to make more money? Pay me some money, make more money.” That’s why sales training sells so well.

3. Status. Nobody thinks about this one. People pay extra to sit at the front of the room, drive certain cars, wear certain watches.

Pro tip: if you’re charging $1,000+ a month, sell to business owners. Small business owners can decide fast, because all three of those matter to them.

To find the actual offer, I use the Ikigai. It’s a Japanese framework built on four questions:

1. What do you love? If you don’t love it, you’ll quit doing it.

2. What are you good at? The better version of this question: what do people tell me I’m good at? Most of us discount our own skills. “Everybody knows this.” No, they don’t.

3. What does the world need? Go online. See what people are searching for and what topics are trending.

4. What will they pay for? This is the most important one. Plenty of people love doing something nobody will pay for. That’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The center of those four is the thing you can do for the rest of your life that can literally make you millions.

Now, service or product? The easiest thing to start is a service. But the mistake is doing a bunch of custom work, because then you’re just selling your hours and there’s no leverage. Stay away from that. Products like apps, courses, and software are the other end, and they’re expensive and slow to build. Risky.

So here’s what I do: run a service, but package it like a product. A productized service means you do step one, step two, step three the same way for every customer, so you can make each step better over time. And if you get good at it, you can eventually turn that service into a product, funded by the money the service already paid you.

For the rest of this, I’ll use one example: an AI voice agent you sell to local businesses. Use your own if you want. I’ll just keep unpacking this one so you can see how it works.

Step 3: Build the offer

You know what you sell, how much you charge, and how many clients you need. Now put it all in one place a buyer can say yes to.

Rule one: don’t sell the work, sell the outcome. Don’t say “I do marketing for $1,000 a month.” Say “I’ll get you 10 new clients a month.” Features tell people what it is. Outcomes are what actually sell.

Then give them three tiers, not one. Most people make the mistake of offering a single option.

1. $500/month, do-it-yourself. All the playbooks you’d use internally to do this, except they run them.

2. $1,000/month, the core. This is the one you actually want to sell. You teach it and work with their team, so over time they can run it themselves while paying you monthly on retainer.

3. $10,000/month, done-for-you. Ten times the price, and you do everything for them.

The top and bottom tiers are decoys. What I want is to sell about 100 of the middle one every month to hit $100K. And the 10x tier does something sneaky: it makes the core offer look like an absolute steal.

Now design the offer itself, and yes, use AI. Every offer follows a format. Open the AI of your choice, give it everything from your Ikigai and the time / money / status work, then give it this prompt:

Build the offer for my productized service including every element of a great offer.

Every great offer has these pieces:

1. Outcome = the improvement you’re getting them in their business.

2. Deliverable = what they can expect from you every week and every month.

3. Price = what it costs. I like to call this “the investment.”

4. Risk reversal = “We guarantee 10 new leads a month.” “We guarantee one automated process that saves you 10 hours a week.”

5. Urgency = “I only have capacity for 5 new clients a month, and I’ve got 20 calls just like this this week. Want to lock in your spot? All I need right now is a $1,000 deposit.”

Then follow up with:

Build my premium and entry-level pricing tiers. Make my core offer look like an absolute steal.

And finally:

Send it to me as an offer doc I can send over chat as a link, and a pitch deck for sales calls. Ask me any question you need to get total clarity.

That last line is what I call reverse prompting. You make the AI interview you. Most people never teach that.

Quick note on the two documents. The offer doc is copywritten. The words walk the person through the offer and do the selling for you, right there in the document. The pitch deck is high-level. You present it in your own words on a call. The offer doc does the talking so you don’t have to.

One warning. When someone says “email it over so I can review it with my team,” that’s a no. They’ll take your beautiful doc and shop it around. “Oh, my buddy Bob does this.” And they hand your plan to Bob. Don’t do that.

Step 4: Create demand

Nobody is waiting for you. You have to create the leads. There are two engines: inbound, where people come to you, and outbound, where you go to them.

Don’t repeat my mistake. My first company was called Maritime Vacation. My dad wanted a cottage listing, I knew how to code, so I built him a website. Then I took it too far and built a whole app, and I sat there coding it for months. I built the product first. When I launched? Crickets.

When I started Flowtown, I did the opposite. I started with a blog and invested in content. It ended up doing over 350,000 unique visitors and drove 50,000 customers to our product. Instead of spamming people, I gave away my best stuff so they leaned in and asked, “what else do you have?”

Inbound is about talking to the pain. Here’s the hack: your offer doc already lists every deliverable. Go through it, and for each thing you’d do for a client, ask AI:

Give me 10 nuanced and observable problems my customer has around each of these pains.

Feed it your niche, like HVAC companies or small businesses. It’s basically an infinite content glitch. It hands you the specific scenarios your customer actually feels, and you make content that solves each one. Start with the hook. If I can explain my customer’s pain better than they can explain it to me, I’m the expert.

“But if I give it all away, what do they pay me for?” This is the cool part. What they pay for is the sequence. Step one might be “let’s audit what you’re doing today,” and step 100 is “let’s automate and set the whole thing up.” That order is the thing people buy. So in your content, you scramble it. Pain A1, then pain B2, across all the buckets. You give away everything you know how to do, but you keep the ordered process. I do this all the time. My videos give away my best stuff and teach people to solve their problems. The information of how you do what you do should be free.

Outbound is where most people jump straight to cold calling. Don’t start there.

1. Go to your phone first. Count your contacts right now. I bet it’s more than you think. Maybe 100, maybe 200. Some people have 20,000. That’s 20,000 people who can help you.

2. Ask past the person. Ask whoever you’re talking to if they know anybody with the problem. Half the time they go, “yeah, me.” Or they refer names. Then when you reach out, use the name: “I was talking to Bob, and Bob said I should reach out. I do this for people just like you. Is that something you have a problem with?”

3. Back it up with AI. If you run dry, tell it, “Build me a list of 100 people who need my services,” and get their phone and email. Tools like Social Sweep will pull and enrich the contacts from all your social and email connections into an address book you can actually call.

Then build a funnel: outbound, follow up, make the ask, close the deal. A simple spreadsheet to track your messages and follow-ups is enough to get you on a sales call, make the offer, and get paid.

Outbound is short-term, inbound is long-term. If you’re asking where I’d start, I’d start with outbound and run the content game in parallel. That’s how you build a foundation to hit $100K a month.

Step 5: Close the deal

The thing that stops most entrepreneurs is they won’t go door to door, won’t send the texts, won’t make the call. Not you. There are two ways to close: sell by chat, or make calls.

Sell by chat first. I’ve personally made eight figures over social media chat. When someone follows me, I ask them one question: are you here for the content, or are you looking for help growing your business? End on the “help” outcome, so they either say “oh, I’m just here for the content” or “actually, how can you help?” Then you ask questions, make them pain-aware, present your solution, and send the link to your offer doc. When they say “I’m in,” you send the payment link. I use Stripe. Set up an account, keep it simple, and watch them enter their card.

Pro tip for chat or call: bring up their objections before they do. They’re obstacles before they surface them, and objections after. So ask early: “Do you have a budget to solve this problem?” Handle them while they’re still obstacles.

Calls are simpler than you think. If you sell to businesses like real estate agents, HVAC, or lawyers, their numbers are online. Ask AI for a list. Here’s my cold-call opener: “I’ve got nothing to sell. I’m just curious whether you’re having this problem, and whether you’ve looked at solving it. If you have, this is what I do for people just like you, and we can schedule a quick call so I can dive deeper. I’m assuming you’re busy.” My job on a cold call is not to sell. It’s to qualify and book a meeting from a meeting.

Here’s roughly how one goes:

• “Hi, who am I speaking to?” “This is David.”

• “David, quick question. Have you spent any time looking at using AI to answer calls like this one, so you can book appointments while you’re working with clients? I’ve got nothing to sell, just wondering if it’s something you’re looking into.”

• “Honestly, not yet. I’ve just been busy.”

• “Most people in your space aren’t answering calls anymore, because the AI does it for them and they make more money. If I could show you how to do that, is that something you’d be interested in?”

• “Yeah, I like it. Fine, 15 minutes.”

• “Great. Do you have time tomorrow at this time? I’ll send you a Zoom link and demo the software live. Then I’ll text you the link to confirm.”

Book the meeting from the meeting. After that you can pre-qualify, give them a reason to show up, and say “let me know if there’s any reason you can’t make it.”

And don’t get discouraged. The first five calls are throwaways, so just get them done. Nobody cares. If it goes to voicemail, leave one and call right back. Most people have their phone on do not disturb, but a second call within a few seconds rings through. Over time, feed your script to AI and it’ll tell you exactly where you’re stumbling.

Every no gets you closer to a yes, and a yes gets you closer to $100K a month. My rule is to get to 100 no’s a day. Hit that level of rejection and you’re going to be rich.

One more thing: get paid before you spend. No equipment, no software, no anything until customers buy. Then tell them “I can only start in two weeks.” Close 10 customers in a week and you’ve bought yourself a week to get ready, with money already flowing in.

Get My Sell By Chat Playbook

I’ve closed eight figures in sales over social media chat. The full playbook is yours free: every sales script, the offer templates, and the content strategy behind it.

Send Me The Playbook

Step 6: Now build the thing

Notice this is last. You’ve already done the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur: the content, the chats, the calls, and you have customers. That’s the hard part.

If you’re building something with real lead time, like software, use the marketing and the calls to build a waitlist first. Say: “We’re just starting to call people in your area to see if there’s demand for this. If you’re interested, I can put you on the waitlist, but I need to get on a call with you.” Get on the call, show them what you’ve got, and watch them say “oh my god, that’s amazing.”

Build a waitlist of 10, 20, 50, 100 people and you have validated demand to go build. Better yet, have them pay to be on it. Every product I launch, I put up a website with a waitlist before I build a thing, and I let people pay $50 to jump to the top. That $50 is proof, with their own money, that they have the problem and want it solved the way I described it. No payment, no proof. And if I can pre-sell what I’m about to build, then I have the money to actually build it. With AI, this is the easiest part. You can stand up the site, the waitlist, the automation, even the payments, without knowing how to code.

So, are you going to do it?

Now you know the steps. Sit down and design the product or service. Run it through your Ikigai. Check it against time, money, or status. Use AI to craft the offer. Then start making the calls.

It sounds simple because it is. The only real question is whether today is the day you actually do the work. Don’t overcomplicate it. One clear offer, and one clear conversation where the right person has the pain and wants it solved the way you talk about it, will build the momentum you’ve been looking for.

Most people don’t even start. That’s not you.

-DM

I just read a study that says by 2030, AI is going to create 170 million new jobs. But here’s the part most people miss: they won’t be jobs where you sit around chatting with AI. They’ll be jobs where you build AI agents.

I get it. This space moves fast. Not long ago I was right there with you asking, “What even is an AI agent?” Then I went deep and built dozens of them myself. What I found surprised me: building and managing agents is way easier than it looks.

So easy that my team and I now run hundreds of AI agents doing 92% of the work across my companies.

Today I’m going to walk you through every step to build your first one.

First, get this straight: a chat is not an agent

A chat is like a meeting. An agent is like an employee.

With a chat, you ask a question, you get an answer, then you copy, paste, and go do something with it. With an agent, you tell it what you want and it runs the entire workflow for you.

I think of an agent as having four body parts. I call it DATA:

• D – Diagnose. It figures out what the problem actually is and solves it for you, like a consultant.

• A – Assemble. It builds a plan and designs the tools to get there, like an architect.

• T – Take action. It executes the tasks, like an operator who does the real work.

• A – Assess. It checks its own work, spots where it can do better, and fixes itself.

That last part is the whole game. It’s called a loop. Without a loop, the thing does the job once and stops, and that’s just an automation. With a loop, it keeps learning and getting better. It acts like a person.

Here’s the cleanest way to feel the difference: a chat pulls on you. It waits for you to prompt it. An agent pushes on you. It does the work and checks in to make sure it got it right. A chat helps you buy back a little time. An agent lets you let go of whole areas of your business.

Should you even build an agent? Use the Rule of R

Before you build anything, run the task through three questions:

1. Repetitive. Is this something you do every week?

2. Rules-based. Does the same input produce the same output every time?

3. Return on time. Will the time you save be worth the time it takes to build?

That last one matters more than people think. If a task takes you 2 minutes but the agent would take 2 weeks to build, just keep doing the 2-minute task. If it’s a one-off, doesn’t follow a clear process, or won’t save you real time, stick with the chat.

If it passes all three, you’ve got a candidate. Now let’s build it.

The AGENT framework

I turned the whole build into one word: AGENT. Aim, Give it an identity, Equip it, Narrow the scope, Trust it. We’ll build one together, an agent that runs your inbox, so you can watch each step in action.

A – Aim for a specific outcome

Start with the outcome, not the steps. If I’m climbing a mountain, taking a step is the task. Getting to the top is the outcome. Define the top clearly, because the cool part about AI is it can figure out the climb better than you can.

This is exactly why most people struggle to build agents. They try to control every step. But the agent often knows how to get there better than you do. Think about hiring a person. You don’t tell them how to do the job on day one. You tell them what you need from them, like grow the business, get more customers, close more sales. Those are outcomes. Aim the agent at the outcome.

Three moves make your aim clear:

1. Give it the why before the how. Tell it why you want this so it can make smart calls on its own. For our inbox agent, I’d prompt: “I need to spend less time managing my email inbox.” Notice I’m not telling it how yet.

2. Write a Definition of Done. One sentence, specific and measurable. Not “handle my emails.” Instead: “Done means every morning at 9am my inbox is empty, replies are drafted in my voice, anything that needs me is flagged to the top, and nothing important slips.” If you can’t picture it done, the agent can’t hit it.

3. Reverse prompt it. Tell it the result you want, then have it ask you the questions it needs to get full clarity. This is the move almost nobody teaches. State the outcome, then let the AI build the plan, because it’s better at that than we are.

Here’s the tell: if you can talk the task, the AI can do the task. And if you can’t state the outcome in one sentence, you’re not ready to build yet.

G – Give it an identity

Out of the box, AI knows a little about everything and nothing particularly well. An identity focuses all that raw power on the one job you hired it for. The tighter you define who it is, the better it performs.

I read about a team that built AI agents to run customer support for an airline. When they stripped out the rule books and the identity, the success rate dropped from 33% to 11%. Same model, same task, same requests. It got three times worse just because it forgot who it was.

You give an agent its identity with three plain-English files:

• Soul file – how it behaves. Its personality, quirks, values, and how it talks.

• Identity file – who it is. Its name, its role, its lane.

• User file – who it works for. Your goals, your role, and how you like things done.

Pro tip: don’t write these yourself. Have the AI write them. As you build the inbox agent, use this:

“I want to build an AI agent that runs my inbox. Create its three identity files, a soul file, an identity file, and a user file, and ask me any questions you need to fill these in accurately, then write all three.”

See the reverse prompt again? It’ll interview you, then hand back a draft that’s 99% there. For our inbox agent, the files might come back like this:

• Soul: Writes in my voice. Concise, direct, zero corporate fluff. Calm, never pushy or salesy. Never says “I hope this email finds you well.” When unsure, it flags instead of guessing.

• Identity: Name is Amelia. Role is personal inbox manager. Job is to read, sort, and draft replies to every new email. Lane is inbox only, never touching my calendar, my money, or anything outside email.

• User: I’m a founder who gets around 100 emails a day. Prioritize people first, meaning my team, current clients, and my VIP list. I run multiple AI companies and a media company.

Now your agent knows how to behave, who it is, and who it’s working for.

E – Equip it

Just like a new hire, your agent needs context, tools, and logins before it can do real work. In agent design, context is the moat. Garbage context in, garbage context out.

Picture a desk. That desk is the context window, and the AI is the genius sitting at it. On the desk are your playbooks (the processes), your identity files (its constitution), and your tools (the logins and systems it connects to). Above that sit its loops (the schedule). Under the desk are the filing cabinets, its memory, where things live when they don’t need to clutter the desk. Pile too much on the desk and you get context rot: it’s answering, but it’s not sure, because it can’t find what matters.

So how do you load the desk? You capture your process one of two ways.

The old way is the camcorder method: record yourself doing the task, talk out loud through every step, then hand the recording to AI to turn into a playbook. It works, but it’s not my favorite.

The better way is to reverse engineer it from the source. You’ve already been doing this work, so let the AI learn from your history. For the inbox agent, connect it to your email and use this:

“Connect to my email, read 50 messages I’ve sent, and study how I actually write, including my tone, my greetings, my sign-offs, how long my sentences are, and the phrases I use most. Then write a style guide that captures my voice. To test it, draft replies to my newest unread emails as me.”

Read those test drafts, tighten them, and feed the fixes back. Then do the same for every sub-process the agent runs: sort, reply, forward, escalate, and the daily report you want. Each one becomes a system prompt. Now you’ve got a real agent running.

N – Narrow the scope

This is where you’ll be tempted to throw everything at it. Don’t. A narrow scope keeps the agent from confusing itself. You wouldn’t ask your assistant to also run marketing and take sales calls. Same rule here: one specialist per job.

I have an agent that writes code and a separate agent that reviews code. They work together, but they stay in their lanes. Instead of one mega-agent doing everything, you want sub-agents that each do one thing well. That keeps the context clean and kills context rot.

Then you put a manager on top. My orchestration agent is named Kai. I only talk to Kai. Kai coordinates my research agent, my relationship agent, my coding agent, and my reporting agent, then brings me the answer. The prompt for a manager looks like this:

“You’re my manager agent. You never do any task yourself. When a job comes in, you hand it to the sub-agent built for it and let it run. One agent, one lane. If a job touches multiple areas, split it across sub-agents. You coordinate and report back to me.”

One more pro tip: match the model to the job. Cheaper models for simple work, stronger models for hard reasoning.

• Haiku for simple, high-volume tasks like sorting, labeling, and quick drafts. The cheapest.

• Sonnet for day-to-day work, research, and most coding.

• Opus for heavy reasoning, complex builds, and managing agents.

• Fable for orchestration. It has full Opus capability but is even more state of the art, and it’s great at long, complex tasks when you don’t have much to give it. The most expensive.

My inbox agent runs every 15 minutes on Sonnet, because I don’t need Opus-level horsepower for a process I’ve already defined. I might build the agent with Opus or Fable, then run it on something cheaper. One time I ran a big code refactor on Haiku for $1.50 that would have cost me around $150 on a more powerful model.

T – Trust it (in stages)

This is where your agent actually becomes autonomous. Building it is the easy part. Letting it act without you is the scary part. You don’t hand it the keys to the car on day one. You trust it in stages, and if you do this right, you’ll sleep fine at night.

Here’s how to do it safely:

1. Set the guardrails first. Define in the identity files what it’s allowed to do: draft only, send, spend, decide. That’s always your call.

2. Approve everything at first. “Show me what you’d do.” You like it, you tell it to run. You don’t, you tweak it.

3. Loosen the leash. Like walking a dog, you give a little more slack as it earns your trust, until the leash goes limp but it still holds the heel.

4. Give it a heartbeat. Once you trust it, put it on a schedule so it runs on its own, whether that’s every 15 minutes or every morning at 9am, whatever the job needs.

For the inbox agent that looks like this: first it just sorts. Then it drafts. Then it forwards the obvious stuff to finance or your team. Eventually it runs the whole inbox and you barely open it.

When I showed this to my executive assistant, she thought she was out of a job. The opposite happened. It freed her from sorting emails and writing drafts so she could do the higher-value work I actually want to pay her for. Then we rolled the same system out to the whole team.

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

I’ve spent over 1,000 hours inside Claude.

Every. Single. Day.

Building tools. Running workflows... even launching million-dollar companies with it.

And look, you might feel super productive using Claude right now.

But what if I told you you’re barely scratching the surface?

It’s like having a NASA supercomputer... and using it to calculate 2 + 2.

I’m going to walk you through every level of Claude user. From the amateur all the way up to the person who builds systems that run without them lifting a finger.

By the end, you’ll know exactly which level you’re at.

And the one move to level up.

Here goes.

Level 1: The Amateur

The amateur treats Claude like a fancy Google search.

One question in. One answer back. Close the tab.

You’re using maybe 5% of what this thing can do.

I get it though. Everybody starts here. I started here.

But here’s what I’ve come to learn... two tiny tweaks change everything.

Number one: make Claude interview YOU first.

Before it answers, tell it: “Before you answer, ask me any questions you need to do this properly.”

Then watch it pull the context out of you that it needs to give you a way better answer.

Number two: make Claude check its own work.

Just type “check your work.”

It’ll catch its own mistakes... which is kinda annoying, because you’d think it would do that the first time.

But the output gets dramatically better.

That’s it. Do those two things and you’ve already left 90% of people behind.

Level 2: The Regular

The regular treats Claude like a workspace.

They don’t just chat with it. They use Projects.

And a Project is just a dedicated space inside Claude for one thing... one role, one client, one workflow. It’s like giving Claude a desk with your name on it.

The best part? Claude finally remembers who you are every time you come back.

So the work gets better.

Here’s how you set it up the right way:

Step one. On the left side, click “create a new project” and name it after the role you work in. Let’s say... marketing.

Step two. Build a master prompt for that role.

A master prompt is just a file of instructions that tells Claude everything about you. How you like to work. What your team looks like. What tools you use. All of it.

And you don’t even have to write it yourself. Type this in: “Interview me to build a master prompt for my role as a marketer.”

Claude asks. You answer. You get a file.

Step three. Drop that master prompt into the Project files. Then add anything else your biz has... sample data, examples, processes.

Now you’ve got a customized space with memory, context, and your exact way of working baked in.

For me? Every time I sit down to make a YouTube video, I’ve got a Project loaded with my voice document, my branding, my old scripts I love.

I point it in a direction, hit enter... and it hands me outlines built the way I’ve always done them.

Pro tip: take it one level deeper. Ask Claude to interview you and build a system prompt for a specific workflow.

Think of it like this... the master prompt is your ingredients. The system prompt is the recipe.

Same quality. Same format. Every freakin’ time.

Level 3: The Integrator

The integrator plugs Claude into the tools where the work actually lives.

Gmail. Calendar. Drive. Slack. Notion.

Because why would I copy and paste an email into Claude... when I can just tell Claude to go grab the email?

Here’s how you operate at this level:

One: use connectors. Connect your Gmail, your Drive, your Slack, your Notion. Now Claude can search all those places while you chat.

Two: build visualizations. This is one of my favourites. Graphs, bars, mockups... all inside the chat.

Three: build interactive artifacts. These are like little mini-apps. Clickable outputs. Sliders. Buttons. It makes interacting with your info sooooo much easier.

I use this all day.

“Look at my calendar. Tell me what I’m missing.”

“Scan Slack for the last week and give me a CEO-level rundown of what’s going on across the company.”

I run stuff like this every single day so I’m always on top of it.

And here’s a pro tip nobody talks about... install Claude in Chrome.

I’ll have Claude write me a set of instructions, paste it into Claude inside my browser, hit enter... and it goes and does the work for me right there on the page.

At this level, Claude’s helping you.

But the next level? That’s where Claude actually does the work.

Level 4: The Operator

The operator stops being the doer and becomes the director.

This is the human IN the loop. You set up the work, Claude runs it, and you just review and approve.

You stop using Claude... and you start deploying it.

Three ways to do it:

One: system prompts. Have Claude interview you to create one for any type of output you make over and over. I truly believe the future of what makes a team valuable is having system prompts nailed down for the things they create.

Two: skills. As you keep running the same workflows, save them as skills. Claude ships with a bunch already... financial, marketing, all of it. But you can build your own for the proprietary stuff your biz does.

My rule? If I do it more than three times a week, it becomes a skill.

I built a “company status” skill that chews through all my analytics, metrics, reports and team updates... then hands me a clean little snapshot of the whole biz. I type /company status and boom. Done.

Three: schedule Cowork tasks. Cowork is an app that runs on your computer and can literally take the wheel. Kick off a job, hit enter, go have dinner, come back... it’s done.

Every night at 8:00 I get a message that maps out my next day. It reads my email and my calendar and tells me everything I need to know... like I’ve got a chief of staff. And I do. She’s awesome. But I set THIS up because she doesn’t need to.

Set it once. It runs forever. I never think about it again.

Big one here... chain your skills.

A copywriting skill that writes in your voice feeds an email skill... and both get called by a bigger skill that automates your whole inbox.

Level 5: The Builder

Not too long ago, we shut the company down for two days and ran an AI hackathon.

We taught everybody to code.

In 48 hours, my whole team became builders.

Because at this level, you use Claude Code to write code, build custom apps, dashboards, internal tools... Claude isn’t answering questions anymore.

It’s shipping software.

And if you’re already here? You’re in the top 0.04% of people. Most folks have no idea this exists.

Three flavours of building:

• Loops — recurring jobs that run on a server, talk to other agents, use other systems. Always running.

• Tools — one-off builds for a project. Disposable by design.

• Apps — real, production software.

Here’s my favourite proof.

I’ve got this incredible woman named Betty. She’s my house manager... runs life for my wife and I.

She built a system that manages EVERYTHING. The cars, the real estate, the investments, the budgets. All of it.

And she’s not a programmer.

Because in the world of AI, English is the new programming language.

Pro tip: 100% of the time, before I build anything, I use plan mode. You dump your idea, it asks questions, then it writes a full plan you approve BEFORE it writes a single line of code.

People whine, “Dan, these AI apps cost so much!”

It’s because they didn’t plan up front. Plan mode saves you a ton of money.

Pro tip: Claude Code remote. It connects to the Claude app on your phone and keeps writing code while you’re away from your laptop.

I’ve done this three or four times while mountain biking.

...which is also how I ate it on a berm and washed out my front tire. Worth it.

Level 6: The Agent Orchestrator

This is the top of the mountain.

The orchestrator designs an agent that actually runs something. A department. A process. A whole workflow.

And you’re no longer involved.

You just went from the human IN the loop... to the human ON the loop.

Claude stops being a tool and becomes infrastructure.

There’s a million ways to build an agent, so instead of one recipe, here’s a way to THINK about it:

Start with one main agent. Your chief of staff. Your CEO agent. Mine’s called Kai. He doesn’t really do anything himself... he just directs the other agents. I know, I know. It sounds crazy.

Create specialized sub-agents. Each one owns a workflow. Your main agent tells them what to do.

Connect it to your phone. I talk to mine through Telegram. Reese is my real estate agent... he hunts investment deals. Kai checks in with Reese every day and reports back to me.

All of it. Without me touching a thing.

The agents think. They decide. They execute inside the parameters I gave them.

See what’s happening here?

We’re building the machine that runs the machine.

And here’s a pro tip... I’ve got a critique agent whose only job is to review the work. Copywriting, research, whatever. It writes up notes to make it better, hands it back, and the work runs again.

So I always get the best output.

I’m not in the work anymore. I’m on the loop.

So... Which Level Are You?

Here’s the trap most people fall into.

They collect Claude features like Pokémon cards. “Oh I use that. Oh I’ve tried this.”

But they never make it a HABIT.

And a feature you tried once is worth about as much as a gym membership you never use.

So here’s what I need you to do.

Pick ONE level. One feature. And commit to using it 30 days in a row.

Maybe it’s the browser extension. Maybe it’s building your first agent. I don’t know what it is for you.

But go all in.

-DM

Too many people are getting world-class at solving the wrong thing.

A woman at my event last week was dead set on using AI for customer support.

She runs a med spa. Doing about $1.5M a year.

And she walks up to ask: “Dan, how do I build an AI agent to handle all our patient messages?”

Fair question. The messages FELT like a waste of time...

But I stopped her right there.

“Let’s reframe your question:”

• where are you at?

• where do you want to go?

• what do you think the bottleneck is?

Two minutes later, the whole thing flipped.

The messages sounded like a fun AI project... but they were NOT her problem.

She had clients lined up out the door... and not enough service providers to help them.

So she was about to spend months building an AI tool. To fix a problem that wasn’t even her real problem.

(I’m, guilty. Done the exact same thing.)

Here’s what I’ve realized:

AI is enabling people to get faster at solving the wrong problem.

That’s why their business struggles to grow.

That’s why, asking better questions is half the answer.

Find Your Real Bottleneck

Picture a little car factory.

Every day it cranks out 8 tires. 2 engines. And 1 chassis.

How many cars can it build in a day?

One.

Doesn’t matter that you’ve got 8 shiny tires sitting there. You could have 800. The chassis is still the bottleneck.

So you don’t hire more tire guys. You don’t buy a fancy AI tire machine.

You grab the WHOLE team and point them at the chassis problem.

Fix that and you double output with ONE fix.

That’s called the Theory of Constraints.

Draw the Line Before You Fix the Line

Every business on earth is the same machine.

An idea goes in one end... cash comes out the other.

The trick is mapping every step in between.

Lead → call → close → deliver → keep’em around.

You can’t spot the bottleneck if you can’t see the whole line laid out in front of you.

Ask The Right Questions

Now you see the path. Go back and ask the question like this:

• where are you at?

• where do you want to go?

• what do you think the bottleneck is?

The med spa thought it was messages. It was providers.

A guy scaling his coaching business thought it was leads. It was conversion.

He was leaving millions on the table in the funnel he already had.

Ask the right question. Give it to your team. Your coach. Your mentor. Or even yourself.

Chances are, you probably already know what to do.

Then go attack the right problem like your life depends on it.

-DM

P.S. How I can help...

Frustrated your business isn’t at the level you want yet?

If you’re ready to get unstuck... reach out to learn how we can work together.

I haven’t read my emails in 10 years…

That’s when my Executive Assistant completely changed how I operate.

That single hire freed up 15+ hours a week.

Here’s the system we use (so you can replicate it for yourself):

Step 1: Master the twice-daily inbox protocol

Goal: Inbox zero by 10 AM and 4 PM every day.

• Sort every email into 4 buckets: “Action needed,” “Review required,” “Waiting on response,” “Archive”

• Handle 80% immediately with templates: “This is [Name], Dan’s
  assistant. I got your email before he did and thought you’d appreciate a speedy reply...”

• Flag only emails that need strategic thinking (usually 3-5 daily)

• Archive everything else with proper labels (Receipts, Newsletters, Investment, etc.)

Never let emails pile up. Process everything immediately.

Step 2: Build the 10-minute daily sync agenda

This eliminates random interruptions all day.

• Yesterday’s meeting action items and follow-ups

• Today’s calendar review with missing details filled in

• Emails flagged that need my input (pre-sorted and prioritized)

• Current projects requiring decisions (with 3 solution options each)

• Tomorrow’s priority planning

Same agenda every single day. Takes exactly 10 minutes.

Step 3: Create the perfect calendar system

Every meeting gets color-coded and audited.

• Red: Client work (never moved)

• Yellow: Team meetings (flexible timing)

• Blue: Protected time blocks (workouts, family, deep work)

• Green: Travel and logistics

Plus every invite requires: clear agenda, contact phone numbers, 20-minute default timing.

Step 4: Create meeting preparation standards

Walk into every conversation fully briefed.

• Background research on all attendees

• Previous conversation history and notes

• Relevant documents organized and accessible

• Clear agenda with desired outcomes defined

• Contact information for backup communication

Never get caught off guard again.

The transformation:

• Email time: 2+ hours daily → 15 minutes daily

• Calendar chaos: Constant stress → Smooth operations

• Meeting prep: Scrambling → Always ready

Those reclaimed hours became business strategy, family time, and actual growth work.

Whether you implement these systems yourself or delegate them, the frameworks remain the same.

Most entrepreneurs think they can’t afford this level of support.

The math is backwards: every hour you spend on $25/hour work costs you 20x in missed opportunities.

Stop trying to get better at work you shouldn’t be doing. Start investing in people who can do it better than you ever will.

-DM

PS. If you want the entire 27-page EA playbook I use… I cleaned up a version I can send you.

Go here to grab it:

https://go.danmartell.com/ea-sub

The way to get rich just changed forever… and it has nothing to do with buying another tool, copying a prompt, or another AI course. That’s kiddie-pool stuff.

Most people use AI like a toy.

They spin up a website. A dashboard. An app they’ll never ship.

It feels like work. It isn’t. It’s just something neat to show your friends.

Rich people put AI to work. Real tasks. Real outputs.

The work you’ve been avoiding that actually makes money. AI that sells, delivers, and runs the business 24/7.

I’ve scaled AI companies past seven figures in under six months through Martell Ventures, and the formula is repeatable.

No BS, no “top 10 ChatGPT prompts.” Here it is.

Step 1: Find Your Bottleneck Before You Buy a Single Tool

AI makes problems stop being problems. So the real problem to solve is figuring out which problem to solve.

And there’s always one that matters more than the rest. That’s your bottleneck.

Here’s where almost everyone goes backwards:

They hear about a tool, subscribe, then go hunting for a problem it might solve. Do the opposite: find where you’re blocked, then point AI at it.

That’s why I always say buy back your time. The more time you free up, the more time you have for the things that actually make money.

When YourAtlas blew up after we featured them, the founder Omar was drowning. Calls and bookings flooding in faster than he could handle. He didn’t go buy a stack of tools. He looked at the bottleneck and realized his own product was the best thing to solve it.

Every business runs on the same five-stage chain:

1. Attention: Do people know you exist?

2. Leads: Are interested people giving you their contact info?

3. Sales: Are conversations converting to purchases?

4. Delivery: Are you fulfilling what you sold?

5. Retention: Are customers sticking around and buying more?

Walk each stage and ask one question: If I 10x this tomorrow, does my revenue actually go up, or do I just create a bigger problem?

For most businesses, the break is early: not enough attention, or not enough leads.

Not enough leads means not enough sales, means not enough cash, means nothing to reinvest.

You’ve got opportunities leaking through the cracks right now. Find where the money is leaking — that’s where AI goes first.

Step 2: Use AI to Generate Revenue

Leads and sales are where money enters the business, so that’s where AI earns its keep first.

Here’s the unfair advantage: AI doesn’t feel rejection. It doesn’t get discouraged when a prospect ghosts.

Humans burn out on sales because they feel every “no.” AI doesn’t care.

Here’s 5 layers of using AI to get more sales:

Layer 1: Prospecting

AI builds your lead list. Tools like Manus, Claude Code, and Apex.host scrape socials and surface fresh people every week that match your exact criteria… without you lifting a finger.

Layer 2: Qualifying

Not every lead deserves your calendar. One of my companies had 20,000 leads sitting cold.

They didn’t want to talk to everyone, just the ones ready to buy.

We ran data enrichment, found the signals that flagged the perfect-fit buyers, and filtered out the rest.

Give AI three non-negotiable must-haves per prospect and let it screen everyone before a human gets on the phone.

Layer 3: Pitchy

Generic outreach is dead.

AI reads a prospect’s past messages with you, what they’re posting on social, and where they sit in the buying process…

…then writes a message so specific it sounds like it came from someone who knows them.

Hyper-personal, tuned to their situation, industry, and stage. At scale. Automatically.

Layer 4: Follow-Up

Most deals die in follow-up because the human moved on. AI doesn’t.

No reply triggers another hyper-personalized message or email, automatically, at the right cadence.

It doesn’t get tired and it doesn’t forget. The whole sequence runs without you.

Layer 5: Upsells

Here’s a number worth tattooing somewhere visible: it’s seven times easier to sell more to an existing customer than to land a new one.

AI watches your base for usage spikes, upcoming renewals, and engagement drop-offs, then crafts and sends the right message at exactly the right moment.

We built a product called Latch that does this automatically for us.

Revenue you’d otherwise leave on the table, captured in the background.

Step 3: Use AI to Deliver What You Just Sold

Selling is only half of it. Lots of businesses scale their sales engine and then drown in delivery.

People hit capacity, quality drops, clients churn.

AI has no capacity problem. It doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get upset, doesn’t talk back. It wakes up every day like, “I just want to see you win.”

AI can already do at least 80% of your work.

I know… ouch.

If you’ve got real domain expertise and you’re scared of losing your fingerprint, here’s how you keep it. The 10/80/10 rule:

The First 10% — Ideation. The part only you can do. Open a chat, talk through ideas, share your expertise, and define what “done” actually looks like.

The Middle 80% — Execution. Hand it off. AI builds the plan and does the work. Onboarding customers, building the dashboard, running the automation, the whole thing. Then have it check its own work against the criteria you set in the first 10%.

The Final 10% — Integration. You come back in. Review it, add the strategic calls, the personal touch that makes it feel like you. You’re not removing yourself from the work. You’re removing yourself from the labor of it.

Step 4: Replace the Most Expensive Bottleneck — You

Now you’ve got AI selling and delivering. There’s one bottleneck left, and it’s the costly one. You.

You want to replace yourself before AI does.

I see two futures: either you work and create with AI, or you wake up one day working for it.

If you don’t learn to put AI to work, someone else will build one and take your spot.

The same way newspapers felt it when the internet showed up.

A few months ago I shut my whole company down for two days for an AI hackathon and told everyone to build the tools that would replace their own work.

They came back 10x more productive. Claude Code is now mandatory for everyone.

Scaling means making yourself less necessary every quarter (you’ll feel guilty at first, but lean into it).

Here’s how to make it brain-dead simple. I call it the Camcorder Method — I built it to hand work to team members, now I use it to hand work to AI:

1. Record yourself doing the task.

2. Feed the recording to AI.

3. Iterate until AI can do 80% of it.

Do this with every task until it’s all covered. Finance, follow-up, hiring, all of it.

Especially the bottlenecks that would make you more money if they were solved.

The people who move first won’t compete with everyone else, they’ll lap them.

You don’t have to be an expert at any of this. Just don’t be last.

-DM

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

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

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

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

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

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 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

Most people think productive people are built different. They’re not.

I’ve competed in Ironmans, run multiple companies, and still always made it home for dinner to spend time with my family. That’s not talent. It’s not drive. It’s not even discipline.

It’s architecture.

Your days take on a default design if you aren’t intentional. The structure of your day should make your outcomes inevitable.

Without it? You’re pouring everything into a bucket full of holes.

Plug the holes first. Habits are the architecture. Stack them right, and the output (the health, the freedom, the business) starts to take care of itself.

Here’s 8 habits to build your architecture.

Habit 1 - Win Tomorrow, Tonight

Most people set an alarm to wake up. I set one to go to sleep.

Because if I don’t, I’ll keep going and ruin the next morning.

It sounds simple but it’s one of the highest-leverage things I do.

Start here:

1. Plan tomorrow tonight: My whole day is set the night before. My whole week is planned every Sunday. I never wake up guessing. I wake up executing.

2. Set a bedtime alarm: Not just a wake-up alarm. An alarm that tells you to stop and go to sleep. This one habit alone will transform your mornings.

3. Dump your open loops before bed: I keep something to write on next to my bed. When things float around in my head (concerns, tasks, ideas), I dump it out. Now my brain can actually rest.

4. Park unfinished tasks in tomorrow’s calendar: At the end of my workday, I have a Google Doc where I drop all unfinished tasks, linked to the next day’s calendar. It gives me a clean ramp-down. Nothing follows me to bed.

Habit 2 - Protect Your Morning

The night sets up the morning. Now the morning has to be defended.

The first hour after waking is the most valuable hour of your day.

Most people give it to someone else. They let a notification derail them, an email, a headline. I don’t. Phone on Do Not Disturb. Door shut. My calendar literally reads “DO NOT BOOK” across the block.

Three things, every morning:

1. Input fasting: No news. No social. No email. None of it for the first hour. Zero.

2. Prioritize the pump: Weighted vest walk, gym, run — method doesn’t matter. The sweat is non-negotiable.

3. Drink a full bottle of water: You’ve been still for 7–8 hours. Your brain can’t perform dehydrated. Electrolyte water is the cheat code.

Habit 3 - Mindful Journaling (The 1-2-3 Method)

You get in life what you focus on.

But if you keep everything in your head (which is a terrible place to keep things), you can’t process it or change it.

When you put it on paper, you can look at it. Process it.

This takes 5 minutes. Not an hour. Here’s the 1-2-3 method:

1. ONE big brain dump. Open loops, fears, conversations you’re avoiding… get it all out of your head and onto paper.

2. TWO priorities for the day. Not five. Not ten. Two. Two meaningful completions builds more momentum.

3. THREE things you’re grateful for (even if it’s mundane). During my hardest stretch in business, one of mine was my coffee cup. I wrote that for six months straight. It helped me survive it.

This writing habit got me through a lot of those tough times.

It anchored me. Kept my head on straight. Made me grateful and more focused.

Habit 4 - Learn Daily

My budget for books is unlimited. Always has been.

I’ve read more than 1,600 and I buy courses weekly.

For $30 I can buy the blueprint of someone who spent 30 years mastering what I’m trying to do, and absorb it in 6 to 8 hours.

A few learning rules I follow:

• Read 10 pages every morning. Right after journaling. 18 years straight. (Cheat code: bump the font on your Kindle.)

• Just-in-time books, not just-in-case. Only read what solves a problem you have right now. If it stops being relevant… drop it fast.

• Apply golden nuggets immediately. JFDI. A passage inspires you? Go take the action. Don’t flag it for later.

• Teach it to someone else. Screenshot it, post it, explain why it matters. Teaching locks in learning like nothing else.

Habit 5 - Engineer Your Environment

A good mindset can’t override a bad environment.

Put someone in a commercial freezer and they freeze no matter how warm their thoughts are.

You are the product of where you spend your time.

There are two levers you need to pull to engineer your environment.

1. Make the right action the easiest action: In the studio, I had my team hide the protein bars that I can’t stop eating. It’s easier to avoid the dragon than to slay it.

2. Surround yourself with killers: The people around you and their expectations of you will set the tone for your life. When I always say it: People either pull you up or push you down.

Habit 6 - Measure What Matters

A friend showed me an old photo of me once. Chubby Dan.

He asked how fat I was in the picture. I had no idea because I refused to step on a scale for years.

That’s exactly why I was heavy. I didn’t want to know.

Numbers don’t judge you. They just show you the truth so you have something to push against.

Here’s two steps to measuring what matters:

1. Find your north star metric. Every goal has one leading indicator that predicts progress more than anything else. Find it. If you’re unsure what it is, ask AI.

2. Build a scorecard and update it daily. Log the number. Review it every Sunday. The ritual of tracking creates accountability you can’t manufacture any other way.

Habit 7 - Fight for Momentum

You’re always spiralling. Either up or down. There’s no flat.

That extra 15 pounds started with one skipped gym day. One day became six. Six became thirty. By the time you noticed, you couldn’t do your pants up.

Momentum is what you’re really fighting for. In the right direction.

When you have it, you move faster, ship sooner, decide without second-guessing. People notice. When you lose it, the opposite is just as true.

Three rules of momentum:

• Done is better than perfect: Can’t make the gym? Go for a run. Can’t run? Walk. The bar for keeping the streak should be as low as possible.

• Kill negative momentum immediately: My rule: never miss the gym two days in a row. One day off is human. Two is a slide. Don’t let a slip turn into a slide.

• Celebrate your wins: High performers who skip celebration are draining their own tank. Celebration is the fuel that makes the next hard stretch bearable.

Habit 8 - Choose Hard, Always

Winners lose more than losers ever will. But they keep making the tough calls anyway.

Three weeks before my Iron Man, a van cut me off at 25 mph.

Destroyed my bike. Nearly dislocated my hip.

I laid on that pavement and thought about everything I’d sacrificed to get to that race.

Hundreds of hours. My family watching me disappear into training. And now this?

Everyone told me to sit the race out. But after months of 4am rides and a family watching me disappear into training?

I hadn’t sacrificed all that to watch it from a folding chair.

I found another bike and rehabbed myself to get to that starting line.

I crossed the line and dropped to my knees. Weeks earlier I was lying on the pavement with a bike pieces. Now I was an Ironman.

Choosing hard is the most important habit on the list, because:

Easy choices → hard life.

Hard choices → easier life.

• Pick one challenge that scares you: 75 Hard, a marathon, dropping 15 lbs — something you’ve been avoiding. Use it to become the person who can do it.

• Tell people about your commitment: Go public. Announce the date. When quitting means letting people down publicly, you’ll find reserves you didn’t know you had.

• When you hit the wall, say “good.” If it were easy, everyone would have it. The point isn’t to have it. It’s to become the person who can get it.

• Stack this on everything else. Each habit makes the next one easier. When choosing hard becomes your default, you separate yourself from almost everyone around you.

Start with one habit. Dial it in. Stack the next.

My whole philosophy: can I be 1% better today?

I’m not competing against Elon, my brother, or anyone on the internet.

I’m competing against me from yesterday. That’s it.

-DM

I’ve spent time with Richard Branson, Naval Ravikant, Tony Robbins, and dozens of other billionaires.

Not one of them told me to wake up earlier.

Not one said grind harder.

What they actually taught me? A completely different set of rules.

Rules that almost nobody knows exist.

Each one builds on the last and by the time you’re done reading this… you’re going to realize that almost everything you’ve been taught about success is working AGAINST you.

Billionaires Play a Completely Different Game

You and I grew up learning one game.

Go to school. Get a job. Work hard. Save money. Retire at 65.

Billionaires aren’t playing that game.

They didn’t tweak it. They didn’t optimize it.

They deleted it and installed something completely new.

It’s how Richard Branson runs 400 companies but still spent a full day skiing with us at his lodge in Switzerland.

He’s not working harder than you. He’s just not playing the game we’ve been taught.

But before you can install anything new, you’ve gotta uninstall what’s already running.

Delete Your Old Software

Your mind is like an operating system.

Stop updating it, and it lags.

But before you can upgrade, you have to DELETE.

Here are the 2 billionaire rules that show you how.

Billionaire Rule #1: Laws Are Meant to Be Broken… Sometimes

Travis Kalanick was one of my first investors.

I watched him build the earliest version of Uber from a shared workspace.

And I watched what he ran into immediately.

There are 13,250 taxis in New York City today.

There were 13,250 sixty years ago.

The original operators got their licences for free, then lobbied the city to stop issuing new ones.

This manufactured fake scarcity.

For years, many rideshare trips were technically illegal.

Travis didn’t accept that reality.

He moved first. Made the old rules irrelevant.

By 2017, 36 states passed new ridesharing laws.

The founders who change industries are rarely the ones who waited for approval.

Billionaire Rule #2: Think in First Principles

First principles thinking means asking how you can go from point A to point B as fast and cheap as possible.

Best example? Elon Musk.

NASA was paying $380M per rocket launch. SpaceX cut that to $67M.

How? Elon didn’t ask how rockets had always been built.

He asked what’s actually true about the physics.

Stripped everything down to its bare essentials.

And used reusable rocket technology to drive costs down to one-sixth of NASA’s.

The primary driver? Elon’s ability to recover and reuse the first-stage booster, which accounts for the 70% drop of the rocket’s cost.

Install the New Software

Once the old programming’s cleared out, you’ve got room for something better.

Here’s what billionaires install.

Billionaire Rule #3: Look for Leverage, Not Labour

Most people think more work = more money.

Billionaires think more leverage = more money.

Leverage is simple: small input, massive output.

Naval Ravikant taught me that there are 4 C’s of leverage:

1. Code. Build it once, runs forever without you. Software doesn’t sleep. It doesn’t take vacations. Every night it’s cranking out results while you live your life.

2. Content. Your ideas, frameworks, and knowledge, documented and out in the world. Your genius is more valuable as content than as labour. A playbook, a course, a book, a video. These things work for you forever.

3. Capital. Money that makes money. Understanding how to deploy dollars through investing so your wealth compounds without you touching it.

4. Collaboration. The ability to recruit, partner, and unlock other people’s networks. One relationship can give you access to thousands of clients, opportunities, or resources. That’s the multiplier.

Every billionaire I’ve met has mastered all four.

Not one of them built their empire by working more hours.

Billionaire Rule #4: Build Net Worth, Not Active Income

Here’s something that surprised me early on…

Most billionaires don’t have a billion dollars in cash.

They OWN something worth a billion dollars.

Elon owns 19.8% of Tesla. That percentage (not a salary or a paycheque) is what makes him the wealthiest man alive.

Stop asking how do I make more money.

Start asking what do I own that can compound?

At Martell Ventures, my AI venture studio, we own equity in dozens of companies.

I took my knowledge, documented it, partnered with the right people, and built.

We’re on pace in just our second year to hit nearly $250M in value.

The billionaires I know don’t obsess over their bank balance.

They ask two questions: how much do I own… and who do I know that can solve my biggest problems?

Act Lazy

Every time I meet a new billionaire, I’m surprised.

Not by how much they work. By how LITTLE.

Text them, they reply immediately. They’re always available.

Their whole philosophy is: I don’t want to be the bottleneck.

From the outside? You’d call it lazy.

But it’s actually the most advanced form of leverage there is.

Billionaire Rule #5: Create Your Filter

Richard Branson doesn’t carry a phone.

He has his assistant, Helen, and nothing gets to Richard unless it’s truly worth his attention.

During the week I spent with him, I watched him close several multi-million dollar deals over dinner conversations.

He wasn’t buried in email. He wasn’t in back-to-back calls.

He was present. Scanning for opportunities. Using his mind for its highest purpose.

That week changed how I operate.

I hired an in-person executive assistant to handle the noise.

One of the highest-leverage decisions I’ve ever made.

Billionaire Rule #6: Stop Working So Hard

Jeff Bezos brags that most mornings he putters.

He told himself a long time ago: I need to make 2 or 3 really good decisions per day.

Not fifty. Not a hundred. Three.

Done consistently, those 3 decisions create more value than a hundred reactive ones made while you’re running on fumes.

What makes billionaires different from most entrepreneurs isn’t their schedule.

It’s what they PROTECT.

Most entrepreneurs protect their time. Billionaires protect their thinking.

Fall in Love With the Game, Not the Outcome

I was recently sitting across from a group of people collectively worth billions of dollars.

Not one of them talked about their bank account.

They talked about the people they were building. Who they were becoming. What scared them for years.

The money was a byproduct. Not the point.

When you do something for the love of doing it, money naturally follows.

Billionaire Rule #7: Never Stop Growing

Tobi Lütke, founder of Shopify, has a rule: the company must grow 40% per year.

If you can’t keep up, you become the bottleneck.

But the growth isn’t just about the business.

Every problem can make you sharper.

Every failure can make you tougher.

Every hire, every fire, every hard conversation is an upgrade IF you look for the lesson.

You get paid for the value you create. Not the hours you log.

Billionaire Rule #8: Build a Life Resume

Jesse Itzler is one of the most deliberate people I know.

Takes every Friday off. Every month, a full week away.

He also does what he calls an annual misogi: one defining challenge per year.

Something so hard it should feel 50% impossible.

Doing an Ironman. Hiking a mountain. Writing a book. Something that marks the year.

That way, every year has a story.

2024 was this. 2025 was that. What’s yours for 2027?

The billionaires I’ve spent time with are always stacking experiences worth remembering.

Stop trying to win a game someone else designed.

Billionaires don’t play by other people’s rules. They write their own.

They build their filters, frameworks, definitions of success. That’s the operating system.

Delete what’s not working. Install what is. Build for leverage. Protect your thinking. Fall in love with the game.

And build a life worth remembering.

-DM