Making $$ with AI Marketing

I break down the seven distribution strategies every vibe coder and builder needs to actually get customers. With 200,000 new projects launching daily on platforms like Lovable, the real bottleneck is distribution and I believe the wealthiest people over the next decade will be marketers, because code is now commoditized. I walk through each strategy with step-by-step instructions you can start this week, from MCP servers and programmatic SEO to acquiring newsletters and building AI repurposing engines. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 01:07 – The Great Flip: Distribution Over Engineering 03:08 – The Build-First Trap 04:18 – Strategy 1: MCP Servers as Your Sales Team 06:49 – Strategy 2: Programmatic SEO (10,000 Pages) 10:09 – Strategy 3: Free Tool as Top of Funnel 13:03 – Strategy 4: Answer Engine Optimization (AEO) 15:48 – Strategy 5: Viral Artifacts (Make Outputs Shareable) 18:56 – Strategy 6: Buy a Niche Newsletter 21:40 – Strategy 7: AI Content Repurposing Engine 25:13 – Final Takeaways Key Points Distribution is the new moat — AI can build the product, but it can't build your audience or brand. Building an MCP server in 2026 is like building for mobile in 2010; early movers will own AI-native distribution channels. Programmatic SEO can scale to 300,000 monthly visitors if you create 10,000 quality pages that each pull just 30 visits a month. Free tools act as always-on marketing: you can vibe code one in a day, ship it by lunch, and it markets itself forever. Answer engine optimization (AEO) is where SEO was in 2010 — Peter Levels saw AI referrals jump from 4% to 20% in one month. You can buy a 10,000-subscriber niche newsletter for $5,000–$20,000 and inherit a direct channel to your exact audience on day one. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Today, we're going to talk about how you can build anything with AI, but people are going to need to figure out distribution. How do you actually get customers to the thing that you're vibe coding? I believe that the wealthiest people will be marketers over the next 10 years. But every YouTube tutorial is telling you how to vibe code. So today, by the end of this episode, you're going to have seven really straightforward things that you could do this week. Frameworks, ideas, alpha that's working right now, so that you can actually build a software company, a SaaS, an agent company, that actually gets customers. So I'm going to explain how to do it. By the end of this, you're going to get your creative juices flowing. I needed to make this episode. I really needed to make this episode.

• 0:43Greg Isenberg?

  I'm actually recording at night and I tweeted this that people need to figure out distribution. And it hurts me that people don't have the ideas around it. So like and comment if you want me to do more episodes on this. Let's get right into it.

• 1:08Greg Isenberg?

  So I believe that there's this great flip happening. I moved to Silicon Valley in 2014. And when I moved, it was all about engineers as number one. I actually studied computer science in university because I was like, engineers are number one on the hierarchy, right? And then it became product and then marketing as at the bottom. Like literally, the laughing stock of Silicon Valley were marketing people. Now, today, I believe that because of AI, distribution, people who understand distribution, how to get customers is you're at the top of the list. Then it's product people, and then it's developers.

• 1:49Greg Isenberg?

  This is a big deal because I actually think that not a lot of people understand distribution. They don't understand brand. They don't understand advertising. They don't understand content.

• 2:01Greg Isenberg?

  But I think that if you can, if you do understand it, you are at an unfair advantage.

• 2:09Greg Isenberg?

  There's 200,000 new vibe coding projects being created every single day on lovable. How many people are actually seeing those products? Probably not a lot. Peter Levels has $3 million plus of revenue. He has zero employees. The reason why he's been able to get so much revenue as a one-person business is he's got 750,000-plus followers, I think. And also, he's got great SEO. I mean, if you look at some of the stuff that he works on, Nomad List, for example, a lot of the tools, like, these could be copied quite quickly.

• 2:50Greg Isenberg?

  It's essentially a directory. I've done episodes and tours on how to vibe code directories before. But he's obviously got good data, and data's part of that. But it's also largely, he's got an audience, he's got trust, and he's built good SEO. We'll talk more about that in this episode. So, the big trap that I think a lot of founders and builders do is they vibe code something. Once they've built the product, they've got this great idea, then they're just gonna try marketing things, but it's just silence. So then they're gonna build more features, and they're gonna launch again in more silence. So they basically are just thinking about, "How do I build a really good product?" And if you build it, they will come, but they don't come.

• 3:35Greg Isenberg?

  What smart builders do is they start with the distribution. So they'll grow an audience to maybe 1,000 people. They ask that audience what they need, and then they go and build it in a weekend, 24 hours, 72 hours, a few days. And then that audience is shocked that, "Wow, you built the thing that I wanted." And then you launch it to a warm audience, you iterate with real users, and you start making money. So it's distribution first, product second, always. The example of Peter Levels, I think he's tweeted 125,000 times in the last, like, eight years. He's put in the consistency and the work to actually go and build that audience, and he's been iterating with users and customers with them.

• 4:19Greg Isenberg?

  So let's get into the actual tactics. Strategy one is going to be about using an MCP server as your sales team. So you know, if you're, if you're listening to Startup Ideas Podcast, you probably know what MCP is. But you can think of it as basically like an, an app. You know, the example I'll use here is, you know, plugins and OpenAI use the MCP protocol. So you can just be like at Google Drive, find the right drive, then summarize a doc and update a sheet or edit a slides deck. So there's this massive opportunity to build MCP servers as your sales team. How does it work? Well, a user asks the AI, it could be Claude, it could be ChatGPT.

• 5:05Greg Isenberg?

  As a question, the AI discovers your MCP server and AI returns.

• 5:12Greg Isenberg?

  You know, your product and the user gets value from it. So there's zero CAC, the AI assistant basically becomes your sales teams. And I have friends who are, you know, I'm actually incubating some things, you know, around here. And actually, if you look at idea browser.com, you know, we, we've been doing some MCP stuff. We also have a lot of friends who are just, you know, in, for example, in the fintech space, you know, 150 plus installations in 30 days. $0 ad spend for something that he vibe coded quite quickly. So I believe that building an MCP server in 2026 is in a lot of ways building, like kind of building for mobile in 2010. There's just a lot of opportunities to show up in LLMs in these connections, plugins or MCP servers.

• 5:58Greg Isenberg?

  So how can you start this week? And by the way, I realized that this, you know, an NPC, an MCP server, it's not for everyone, right? If you're building a boring business, maybe that's not for you. Or, you know, even some software businesses might not be for you. But for some people, for SaaS, you know, if you want to get started this week, what can you do? Identify what question your product answers. That's the first thing you're going to want to do. Number two, you're going to want to build an MCP server that returns that data. You can vibe that code that realistically in 24 hours or less. You're going to want to publish that to MCP registries, Smithery, MCP T, Open Tools. And then every AI assistant that connects to your server is now selling for you 24/7.

• 6:42Greg Isenberg?

  So that's a bet that you're going to make. And that's strategy number one. Let's get to strategy number two. Strategy number two is programmatic SEO. So it's how can you create 10,000 pages, SEO pages in 48 hours? So you're going to want to look at a keyword, a keyword pattern, best X for Y. So best CRMs for dentists, for example. Then you're going to want to do, look at data sets. So you're going to want to, I actually did a whole episode on FireCrawl recently, a tutorial on how to use it. So you're going to want to, but basically what does that do? If you haven't seen that, it basically goes and scrapes and gets you clean, structured data.

• 7:24Greg Isenberg?

  So that you can actually provide value in your, in your pages. Then you're going to want to do, use a page template, NextJS. You can use Claude Code or something to actually go and build this. Then you're going to want to actually create AI content. And then you're going to go and create 10,000 pages. Now, I know there's a big gap. I can see the comment, right? The comment section right now. It's okay. Oh, you're just going to press one button and then just automatically create 10,000 pages. Well, no, of course not, because you do need to make sure that the content is good and doesn't feel like AI. So there's going to be a lot of optimizations that you're going to have to do to actually get it. So it doesn't feel like AI.

• 8:07Greg Isenberg?

  But once you get it to there, I mean, you can start with just a few pages. And once you get it to there, then you can start scaling to more pages.

• 8:15Greg Isenberg?

  You know, the math is pretty simple. If you end up creating 10,000 pages and each page gets 30 visits a month, which, you know, it's a lot of visits, right? That could go up to 300,000 monthly visitors. If you convert at 2%, that's 6,000 conversions a month. Maybe that's $10 each. And then all of a sudden, you're making $60,000 a month from pages you built once. Now, those 30 visits a month, that's not going to happen overnight. SEO does take some time to compound. But like, think about it directionally, right? Directionally, the idea is build a lot of pages, get really good at creating AI content, get structured data that's high quality, and rinse, repeat.

• 9:00Greg Isenberg?

  So how can I actually start this this week? If this is something that's interesting to you, how can I go and start this this week? Well, you're going to want to pick a keyword pattern. So like, the product type for niche or service in city. Like, for example, the CRM for dentists or roofing in Miami. You're going to want to build your data set. So you're going to scrape with FireCrawl, or you can use existing databases. You can create a template in your framework, like, you know, NextJS, Webflow, WordPress doesn't, you know, just stick with the thing that you're going to use. And then you're going to want to use AI to generate unique content per page. So not just variable swaps, actual paragraphs, high-quality stuff. And you also might want to have a human in the loop

• 9:45Greg Isenberg?

  to actually edit and look at some of this content. Publish 100 pages as an MVP. Monitor indexation. And then that's when you can go ahead and scale. So that's number two. I think that's applicable to really anyone. Doesn't make a difference if you're building a service, a SaaS, an app. If you've got a boring business, you've got an agency, programmatic SEO is still under tap. Strategy number three, three on seven, is doing a free tool as a top of the funnel, for your top of the funnel. So the tool is your marketing. You know, the example I would use is Ahrefs for a while has had this backlink checker.

• 10:28Greg Isenberg?

  So you know, you put in your domain, for example, greggeisenberg.com. It's going to see what are the different backlinks, like who's connected to me? What links are connected to me? And you know, it's high quality and stuff like that. And you know, but the reality is it gives you a taste of their full product. So if I want more, I have to go and spend hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars a month with Ahrefs. So they kind of hook you in through that. So you know, step one is building a free tool. It could be a grader, it could be an analyzer, it can be a calculator. Step two is the user gets instant value. So you know, your site scores 43 on 100.

• 11:11Greg Isenberg?

  Generally, what you want to do is obviously grab their data in some capacity, you know, text message, email, in order to get access to that. Step three is the user shares their score. So that's going to help this thing go viral. Social proof backlinks. And then step four is more users are going to discover it. So you've got this organic viral loop. And step five is upsell to a paid product. So you want to fix these issues, well, we've got the product for you. Now, this strategy has been around for a while, right? But why is it different? Well, now it's different because you can use Claude Code to go and actually build these free tools, right?

• 11:55Greg Isenberg?

  It's now like not crazy to build a free tool a week, whereas in the past, these things would have taken you months. So you can vibe code a free tool in a day, ship it by lunch, and then markets itself forever. So I really like this one. This is something that I'm doing in all my businesses as much as possible. And if you want to get started this week, I would just say, you know, I would ask, you know, your LLM of choice to be like, here's what I'm working on. And give me 10 ideas for free tools that can act as my top of the funnel. And that's, you know, you're gonna have your 10 tools. You can prioritize the best possible ones that you think are the best. You can even ask your audience, hey, what would be more interesting? This or that?

• 12:40Greg Isenberg?

  Get them involved and then go and build it. And then just, you know, we think of, when you do social media, you think of like an editorial calendar or content calendar. But no one really thinks about like a free tool calendar. And I really do believe the tool is the marketing. This is working. Don't know why more people aren't doing it. But strategy number three, one of my faves. Strategy number four, answer engine optimization. So you want to be the source that AI cites. So the old way of, you know, getting seen obviously was SEO. You just wanted to get, you know, on, on Google page one. You do 3,000 word blog posts. You're doing backlink building, keyword stuffing. Oh, my God.

• 13:24Greg Isenberg?

  Click through your site. You know, I'm just having flashbacks of all, of doing all this stuff. It's, there's still opportunity in SEO. I mean, we talked about it today, but it's declining. And zero click searches are growing, right? So if AEO is in 2026 is where SEO was in 2010. First movers will own these niches for years. So the idea is answer engine optimization. How do we get cited by ChatGPT and perplexity? You know, structured direct answers. You can do an FAQ format, schema markup, comparison tables that AI can parse. So that, you know, that way, yeah, you're getting seen a little more.

• 14:08Greg Isenberg?

  And then AI, AI is going to send users to your product. So yeah, I think it was Peter Levels, actually. I believe that he said like his AI referrals jumped from 4% to 20% in one month. I think that it's only going to increase for, you know, across the board on e-commerce, SaaS, apps, you name it. So it's worth kind of exploring. It's worth exploring. So, okay, great. You know, you probably already knew this. Obviously, you know, you want to be seen in perplexity or ChatGPT. But how do you, how can you start this this week? Well, Google the top, step one is to Google the top 20 questions your customer asks.

• 14:50Greg Isenberg?

  And you're gonna step two, write the definitive structured answers for each. So I'm not talking about 3,000 word fluff. I'm talking about clear, direct citation worthy. It's all about getting citation worthy content. Then you're gonna add, step three, add schema markup and FAQ blocks. Step four, you're gonna publish on a domain with authority or build authority through the other strategies. Obviously, it's why Peter Levels could get his SEO and AEO up more quicker than the average person listening to this is because a lot of his domains have built authority over time. So there's no better time. Start building that authority today.

• 15:33Greg Isenberg?

  And then lastly, monitor your perplexity in chat GPT citations. You can use tools like Otterly, there's Profound, there's manual testing. But the important thing here is that you're just getting started. So get started this week on AEO. Strategy number five is how can you make your outputs of your product shareable? So we all know the end of year, December, Spotify wrapped. They get 100 million shares every December of that thing. It's absolutely crazy. Everyone wants to share it. Your mother wants to share it. Your sister wants to share it. Your kids want to share it. Everyone is sharing it, laughing about it. It says something about your identity, who you are.

• 16:17Greg Isenberg?

  So what is that for you, right? So what is the free distribution output shareable thing that you can be creating? You know, the way I have it in my head at least is, you know, ask, what does my user want to brag about? And then make that thing beautiful and shareable. For GitHub, they've got the contribution graph. And then you see like devs bragging about sharing those green squares on Twitter. Stripe Atlas, which allows you to create companies. The artifact there is the incorporation milestone. Founders tweet, I just incorporated, or it's been five years since I incorporated. Here's my anniversary post, lessons learned.

• 17:03Greg Isenberg?

  Duolingo, perhaps, you know, one of the most famous examples, daily streak count. And then, you know, users are bragging about 365 day streaks. I don't know if Snapchat was before them. I think they were. But like, I think, yeah, I think that was an original Snapchat thing, too. Right? I like to look at like, how social products, like, what are social products doing? Because you can actually take a lot of that thinking, that psychology, and bring that into whatever it is you're doing. So, your product, what is the artifact that you're going to create? What is the viral artifact that you're going to create? What do your users want to brag about? So if we want to get started this week, what do we need?

• 17:45Greg Isenberg?

  Step one, we're going to have to identify the output or milestone your user would screenshot and share. Step two, let's make it beautiful. Let's make it shareable. Let's make it branded. Your logo actually should be subtle but present. I've seen some examples of artifacts that the logo is super big and it's just, no one wants to share someone else's logo. It should be, it should feel, it's about you. Step three is you're going to want to add a share button that pre-fills the post with the artifact. Step four, every share is free impressions to your exact target audience. So that's a huge win. The user is doing your marketing because they're bragging about themselves. People are going to say, well, these are, you know, mostly consumer examples.

• 18:28Greg Isenberg?

  Will this work in B2B? Or, you know, yeah, B2B. Yes. You know, at the end of the day, B2B are people, too. There's things that these people want to share. Maybe they're sharing it within Slack. Maybe they're sharing it within Microsoft Teams. But just think about what is something that they are willing to share with the group that you ultimately want more of? So that is strategy number five. Strategy number six. So, you know me, you know, I think audiences are really important. Sometimes, you know, it's just hard to build an audience. Listen, a lot of times it's hard to build the audience, more often than not. It takes, it takes sometimes years.

• 19:13Greg Isenberg?

  It requires daily content. There's no guarantee it works, too. Right? Sometimes you just, it doesn't work. And then it's tough, right? Because you have zero subscribers on day one. So what if you just acquired a niche newsletter incentive building from zero? So this is something a lot of people don't think about, but you can go and like buy a 10,000 subscriber newsletter for $5,000 to $20,000. You inherit that trust from day one, you plug in your product immediately, and then you can repeat that across niches.

• 19:46Greg Isenberg?

  If you have a product that you believe in and you understand the LTV, this just might make sense for you.

• 19:54Greg Isenberg?

  So and a lot of these smaller newsletters, like they're not really monetizing that well. So they might be like stoked to get a $10,000 offer from you. So if we want to get this started this week, I would go to deuce.com, which is like a, you know, listing of selling newsletters, newsletter investor, or just search your niche newsletter on Twitter or Substack, and just try to find these newsletters. That's step one. Step two is you probably want to look at the 5,000 to 50,000 subscriber in your target niche. You obviously don't want to buy something so big in the beginning. But I mean, listen, if you have the money and you really do understand the LTV, maybe you do.

• 20:41Greg Isenberg?

  It's all about confidence, how much confidence that you have. Step three is DM the owner. Have you ever thought about selling? You'd be surprised how many people would take the call.

• 20:54Greg Isenberg?

  Next step is, you know, a lot of these, a lot of these folks, as I mentioned, are not really making that much money. Maybe they're making $0 to $500 a month, and they would be open to a fair offer. You know, $5,000 to $10,000 to $15,000 to $20,000. And then all of a sudden, you want a direct channel to your exact audience. And more importantly, it's not a social media account that could be taken away from you at any point. This is a, yeah, a direct line that you can go and put links to. And if you want to put your product in there and say, come buy my product, you know, it's going to get seen. Unlike places like social media that could suppress your reach over time. So I think this is something that not a lot of people think of.

• 21:37Greg Isenberg?

  So I definitely want to throw it in there. The last strategy is thinking about AI, building an AI content repurposing engine.

• 21:53Greg Isenberg?

  The way I think about it is this, you can think about creating one hero or pillar piece of content, that could be a podcast episode, a YouTube video, a long blog post, an essay, and that one piece of content ends up becoming a lot more. It could be 50, 75, 20, depends how much you want to get out of it. So you can actually use AI to take that pillar content, turn it into five to 10 tweets, three to five LinkedIn posts, two to three short form videos, one newsletter. And the short form videos would be using like

• 22:31Greg Isenberg?

  a remotion skill on something like a Claude code, a newsletter edition, a blog post, five to 10 quote graphics that you can use Creative LLMs go and create for you, email sequences. And a lot of this stuff can actually, for the people into OpenClaw, they can go and automate with OpenClaw. You can also use just Claude Dispatch and I think Claude Cowork, Perplexity Computer, any of these to go and automate some of this stuff for you. The big idea here is you get one thing that'll equal a bunch of different contents, and that gives you way more touchpoints across multiple platforms. So if you want to get that started this week,

• 23:17Greg Isenberg?

  I would suggest just starting, recording like one 30-minute piece of content. It could be a podcast, it could be a video, or just a voice memo. It's way harder to actually go and write a 3,000-word essay on something, and I just find if you just voice memo something, or you do a podcast, it could also just be an internal podcast, or just like literally a video of you that you don't end up putting out, and that like the actual value is in

• 23:48Greg Isenberg?

  the repurposing that AI is gonna do. You're gonna want to transcribe it, you can drop the translation into Claude, turn this into five tweet threads, three LinkedIn posts, and one newsletter. Obviously, it needs to be set up properly, obviously.

• 24:07Greg Isenberg?

  There's you're going to get slop by default. So you have to optimize to not slop. And a part of that is having a really good brand and reference images. A part of that is, you know, setting routines. So it's going, you know, and researching, you know, different topics and adding to what you have. Part of it is, uh, part of it is knowing what skills and having those skills, you know, implemented. But, you know, you can get started by just, by just getting started and then schedule across platforms. If you do this every week, I think in three months, you have more content than your competitors. You know, your competitors are not putting out this amount of, of, amount of content. They just really aren't.

• 24:50Greg Isenberg?

  And where we are with content, just, you know, in 2026 is because of for you pages. You know, you could, you never know when you can go viral in your niche. And you don't need a lot of followers to start. You just need a lot of shots on net. So this is kind of like a shots on net strategy. And I don't know why more people aren't, you know, building this out. So those are the seven strategies, growth strategies that, you know, I think are interesting. And that I think, you know, I would pay attention to if I was vibe coding something. If I wanted to build a business, if I wanted customers to have business, if I wanted to build a growth engine. Code used to be the moat.

• 25:32Greg Isenberg?

  I think by now, maybe by the end of this, you, you understand that. Distribution is the new moat, right? It's the most important thing is distribution. You know, it's scarce, right? AI can't build it. Product is really important, but it, you know, in lots of ways it is commoditized and code is fully commoditized. So I've given you seven distribution weapons. Just to summarize, I've given you MCP servers. So let AI sell for you. I've given you programmatic SEO, 10,000 pages in a weekend. I've given you free tool. The tool is your marketing. I've given you answer engine optimization, be the source AI sites. I've given you viral artifacts, make your output shareable. I've given you buy a newsletter.

• 26:16Greg Isenberg?

  Acquire the audience and I've given you AI repurposing engine, one pillar and seven channels. So pick two of them. Start this week. Don't just vibe code. I want to see you get customers, make money, grow from there, reinvest, have fun. And I'm, you know, I wanted to do this because like I said, I want, I want, I don't want you just to, to be, to be, you know, vibe coding stuff and no one's seeing it. And I think there's too many people doing that. So if this is interesting, like I said, let me know and I can do more of these. I have tons of strategies that I use. I can go deeper in the future. I'm here to help you. The Startup Ideas Podcast, like I, I am

• 27:00Greg Isenberg?

  here to help you get, increase your odds of success with good ideas, growth tactics, startup ideas. So, you know, please share this with a friend. Let me know what you think and I'll see you on the next episode. Happy building.