How to Build a $10K AI Business Solo — No Code, No Funding

What would you build today if you had to start from zero? I asked 6 founders the same question: with just a laptop, AI, and no funding — what would get you to $10,000 a month in 90 days? In this podcast they share how they'd build a business today from scratch: what to build, how to choose a niche, marketing advice, and how to get your first paying customer by day 30. Gary Vee, Amjad Masad (Replit), Young Zhao (Opus Clip), Mati Staniszewski (ElevenLabs), Alex Mashrabov (Higgsfield), and Bill Gurley (investor) on what they'd actually build today. Silicon Valley Girl is a weekly AI and technology podcast hosted by Marina Mogilko. More from the Silicon Valley Girl: Newsletter:⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=compilation_aibusiness https://siliconvalleygirl.beehiiv.com/subscribe?utm_source=spotify&utm_medium=video&utm_campaign=futureproof-sub&utm_content=compilation_aibusiness Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.instagram.com/siliconvalleygirl/ YouTube: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/@SiliconValleyGirl LinkedIn: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/marinamogilko/ Topics: AI business, solopreneur, AI entrepreneur, future of work, AI startups, Gary Vee, Replit, ElevenLabs, Opus Clip, Higgsfield, Bill Gurley, $10K/month business, no-code business, AI tools 2026

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:31Speaker 01

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• 0:59Marina Mogilko?

  Over the past few months, I've been talking to a lot of people building with AI, which is super exciting right now, right? Founders, investors, CEOs, and asked them one question. If you had to start from zero in 2026, with no code, no team, no funding, just AI and a laptop, what would you build to make your first $10,000 a month? And here's what I noticed. We keep reading headlines about someone raising $100 million for their idea, or reaching crazy valuations, and we look at that and think, oh, that's what success looks like. That's the goal. But the thing is, there are many more people quietly making real money somewhere else entirely. I talked to Daniel Priestley, a UK Entrepreneur of the Year,

• 1:43Marina Mogilko?

  who took four of his agencies automated, each one using an AI platform. And one of them, Score App, started as a $15,000 client project his team used to build by hand. It now has 8,500 customers, grows 4% month over month, largely bootstrapped, no crazy cost, just money. Nobody wrote a headline about that, and that's the actual opportunity right now. Take a small problem, solve it with AI, and make 10K a month. So in this video, I pulled the exact playbook from people who've actually done it. What to build, how to find your niche, how to get customers with zero budget, and when you actually need investors. Spoiler, probably never. I keep hearing this from so many entrepreneurs that like, just start making money.

• 2:26Marina Mogilko?

  It's so much easier now. And I want to start with, of course, the legendary Gary Vee. Because when I asked him, if everything crashed tomorrow, VaynerMedia gone, Fower is gone, what will you do with just a laptop and AI? He answered this.

• 2:39Speaker 03

  If I lost my reputation and my personal brand, but I kept my knowledge of how to make content on social, I would build an app that's five to $50 a month, and I would make unlimited organic content on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and try to get customers. When you layer what I've been obsessed with about the last 20 years, which is there is a advertising and brand building ecosystem called social media that does not cost you money. And that's the point about AI apps. It really doesn't cost you money anymore to build something in the way that I grew up.

• 3:15Speaker 03

  But the fact that you can actually get awareness, that you're one TikTok away from having people know who you are and building a platform, that's intoxicating.

• 3:25Marina Mogilko?

  Build an app, make content, get customers. But what if I'm not a developer? How do I actually build the product? Here's what the CEO and founder of Replet, Amjad Masad, told me.

• 3:36Speaker 04

  Everyone has an idea. But for the most part, the thing that's stopping them is that they don't have the technical skills, or they don't have someone, you know. As a programmer, growing up, all my friends were like, oh, hey, can you program this idea for me? Well, now you can do it. We have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps, and they've had these ideas for like 20 years. We're talking about CFO at a VC firm. He's a domain expert, like he knows how to manage a VC fund, and he never found the right tools for him. And he had all these ideas on how to build them, but You know, it's almost, it's always hard to find engineering resources.

• 4:21Speaker 04

  So he, he used Replit and in three months, he built his dream app and he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts. And I think he made, um, he's on his track to make five million R R, quit his job. Now he's an entrepreneur.

• 4:35Marina Mogilko?

  Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replit? Cause I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably like, okay, I'll build it up, but what's next? Like any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way?

• 4:47Speaker 04

  First of all, what we talked about with prompting, over communicate, over communicate. Be a resource or Replit environment gives you a lot of tools like the logs and things like that. Try to over communicate with the agent. I think that's the first tip that I would give. Even if you don't have, you don't wanna learn prompt engineering, just, just be over communicative. And the other thing is, like I said, grit, like just, just, you know, not quitting after six hours is, is very differentiating. Actually, most people just quit. And so just keep going and not quit.

• 5:20Marina Mogilko?

  Okay. So building something is no longer the bottleneck and you can go from idea to product in days. This means the only thing that actually matters now is picking the right idea. I talked to the CEO of Opus Clip and he gave me one of the best frameworks I've ever heard for finding a new niche that actually works.

• 5:38Speaker 05

  The market is becoming super competitive and there are like, for most of the markets or industries, there are like more than 20, 50 AI tools out there already. So the first principle I would say is to find a really niche business. Oftentimes, many people don't really understand what is a niche. For example, is restaurant business a niche? No. Is Chinese restaurant a niche? No. Is um, Cantonese Chinese restaurant business a niche? Still no. Um, you have to drill down. There are, you know, so many different types of Cantonese food.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  And even for one specific vertical, um, are you gonna target to be like the, um, the Chanel of Cantonese restaurant? Or the Zara of, or Uniqlo of, of Cantonese restaurant, right? So a different pricing will match to different, um, markets, different ICPs as well. So pick a really, really, really small niche that you cannot further segment it to start with.

• 6:40Marina Mogilko?

  Wow, that's, that's. Good one, yeah.

• 6:42Speaker 05

  Yeah, you have to ruthlessly um segment your niche. The second thing is ideally pick something that's boring. Because the non-boring, the cool ones are definitely ten X or even a more a hundred X more competitive. You probably don't wanna work in those areas. So you need to have a passion to build something for a boring industry, but you solve a really big problem. And furthermore, ideally, there are a lot of existing services. I think we are actually, you know, changing from, we're redefining the term SaaS. And previously it was like software as a service. Nowadays, it's becoming service as a software. So in that specific market niche, boring market niche, are there existing services?

• 7:27Speaker 05

  Um done by like agencies, um by freelancers, um or some internal tools or some hacky solutions. Imperfect hacky solutions, um that is your opportunity to tackle. Um so go through some boring task, go through some niche task and go through some service test. Um so these are the my first principles to find a new business in twenty twenty six.

• 7:50Marina Mogilko?

  Young says, pick a boring niche. Here's what that looks like in real life. I have this amazing story. So two days ago, my kids are on a school break and we went to a hotel. And my daughter asked me for coloring sheets with cute deer and cute unicorns. I'm like. Where? Uh and so I went to Google, Googled all of these sheets and then I saw the website that told me I can generate. Thirty images like that for you. Choose your child's age, choose the salad, the like. Pay me fifty cents. And I'll generate thirty pages of ready for you to print. And because we were in a rush, I'm like fifty cents, nothing. I'm just gonna paint that. And I painted immediately. I got my coloring sheets and I'm like.

• 8:29Marina Mogilko?

  That's your real business. That's the real opportunity. Here's the CEO of Eleven Labs with a specific one that almost no one is doing yet.

• 8:38Speaker 06

  It will be voice specific, but I think it's so, so early that I think it's a huge one is there's definitely a lot of the infrastructure being built for the voice agents. We build it, but other companies are too. And I think there is a big gap between voice agents and then actually deploying them in a lot of those businesses. And you don't have to have the engineering expertise to deploy those voice agents. The platform now frequently will support a relatively self-serve manner of taking it. But you can easily take that voice agent and deploy that in a specific domains. And most of the businesses in the world still don't know about it. If it's, you know, not venture scale business and you just want to make good money.

• 9:20Speaker 06

  I would try to take those voice agents and go to, let's say, local doctor's office and help them appointment schedule for for the dentist so they can take appointments more easily. And they can then focus more on their work instead of nurse doing that in between or missing appointments. That's actually one of the most common, I don't know the percentage, but so frequently those appointments don't get booked because there's no one on the phone and can take them. You can go to local mechanics and help them take appointments. And I think there's, all of these require slight variation of the domain piece that you need to know. And all of those businesses are in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per month, if you get it to the few. The infrastructure is there, you just need to bring it to those domains.

• 10:05Marina Mogilko?

  Yeah, it's like B to B automated businesses with AI.

• 10:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, and small businesses all around the world.

• 10:11Marina Mogilko?

  You don't have to be a coder.

• 10:12Speaker 06

  You don't have to be the coder, you just need to spend the time, call them and ask or go to them.

• 10:18Marina Mogilko?

  Okay, you have the niche, you have the tools. Now, what does the actual 90-day launch plan look like? Alex Mashrabov built Hicksfield to 200 million in annual revenue in nine months. He raised money before he had a single dollar in revenue. But when I asked him how to start from zero today, he said he'd do it completely differently.

• 10:37Speaker 07

  Focus on bringing like the first. Dollar by day thirty of product developments and maybe one million ARR by day ninety and then decides if someone needs VC funding or doesn't need. I mean, a lot of businesses can really scale to tens of millions of dollars today profitably with AI. And for such businesses, there is no need to attract VC funding. I can give you a very simple example. So there are so many websites, we're just allowed to make professional photo shoot like for basically for passport. Many of them make tens of millions of dollars. None of them are gonna be, yeah, none of them are gonna be venture capital backed business.

• 11:16Marina Mogilko?

  Well, and you said something, one million dollars by day ninety.

• 11:19Speaker 07

  ARR, meaning like eighty K a month.

• 11:22Marina Mogilko?

  Eighty, eighty K a month in three months, that's a lot. And so the playbook to achieve that is basically generate ads and launch them and test whether, whether they're landing with your target audience?

• 11:32Speaker 07

  Paid ads are very difficult today. I think a lot of distribution come through organic social media and creator integrations. And just make sure that by day thirty, there is monetization in place. And then there is a way to constantly grow to a revenue to, let's say, one million ARR by day ninety. Many successful companies scale very quickly today.

• 11:56Marina Mogilko?

  Any tips on landing first customers in the first thirty days?

• 12:00Speaker 07

  Initially, at least last year, Twitter has been the social media where the distribution starts from. It starts from like small communities, then it goes to AI news pages on X. Then from AI news pages on X, it goes to Instagram news pages. Then from Instagram news pages to creators. Then it goes to Telegram and like other social media. That's what we have seen with Higgs field and with many other products as well, that they went through the same sort of journey of popularity and news through various social media, but it all originated on X. I think now it's been kind of changed. Today, a lot of hype, at least like a lot of companies, they sort of try to use X to boost their product.

• 12:47Speaker 07

  Sort of signal to noise ratio just drops. Twitter becomes less relevant, but still it's, it's the main place for new AI products launch.

• 12:56Marina Mogilko?

  Alex just said you don't need investors. And here's what's wild. Bill Gerli spent decades backing the biggest companies in Silicon Valley. And here's what he told me about why this is actually the right moment to move fast.

• 13:09Speaker 06

  Who has confidence about driving their own career path. These tools are actually a jetpack. Like, if you want to proactively learn, there's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. And, you know, it's AI, but it's also podcasts like the stuff you do. There's interviews all over YouTube. Like, you can learn faster than ever before. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can.

• 13:39Marina Mogilko?

  If you have a friend who keeps saying they want to start something, but don't know where to start, share this video with them. Okay, one last thing. Because after all these conversations, I kept thinking, if the opportunity is this obvious, what's the real difference between people who make it work and people who give up?

• 13:55Speaker 04

  There are a few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep launching.

• 14:02Marina Mogilko?

  New products, iterate.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Even the same product. Like, make another.

• 14:08Marina Mogilko?

  Another tweak.

• 14:09Speaker 04

  Another tweak. Show it in a different way. Iterate on your messaging. Do another video. Try to reach out to influencers to partner with them.

• 14:18Marina Mogilko?

  I've seen you go on a lot of podcasts.

• 14:20Speaker 04

  Repli, I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things.

• 14:24Marina Mogilko?

  Interesting. So the first three times didn't work?

• 14:26Speaker 04

  First few times didn't work. I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, it was when I said you can try all these different languages. And I listed the languages. Try Python. That was before AI. And that was a hit because of the title change. And so, again, it's grit, relentless, resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration.

• 14:47Marina Mogilko?

  After all these conversations, this is what really stayed with me. The barrier to starting a business is basically gone. You don't need a team anymore. You don't need to know how to code. And in many cases, you don't even need funding. But what you need is speed. Because the people who are winning right now are not necessarily the smartest or the most technical. They're just the ones moving faster than everyone else. And that's really the shift. So if you zoom out, the playbook is actually simple. Pick a boring niche, build an MVP in 24 hours, get your first dollar by day 30, and use organic content as your distribution. If you want the step-by-step checklist for everything you just heard, it's in this week's newsletter. Link is in the description. And if this gave you the plan, the next episode gives you the speed.

• 15:29Marina Mogilko?

  Alex Mashrabov breaks down exactly how to go from zero to 1 million ARR and your run rate in 90 days. Watch it.

• 15:39Speaker 05

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• 16:05Marina Mogilko?

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