How I use AI Marketing and Claude Code to make $$

I sit down with Jonathan Courtney, host of Unscheduled CEO Podcast, to talk about the gap between building AI-powered products and actually making money from them. Jonathan walks through his four-step "Promoter Blueprint" — traffic, holding pattern, selling event, and conversion — and shows exactly how he uses Claude and Claude Code to execute each phase. This one is a wake-up call for any founder spending more time optimizing automations than promoting what they sell. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro and Welcome Back 04:13 – The Founder’s Real Job: Promotion, Period 09:23 – The Promoter Blueprint (Screen Share) 19:38 – Using AI with Promoter Blueprint 22:52 – Inside Claude: Jonathan's Claude Workflow 28:41 – Moving from Claude to Claude Code for Builds 30:55 – Building a $450K Webinar Campaign with Claude 37:30 – Scale Up, Abundance Over Efficiency 43:57 – Final Advice: Embrace Your Role as Promoter Key Points A CEO's primary job is promoting the business — building is secondary to getting people in the door. AI tools become "procrastination machines" when builders optimize systems that have zero customers. Every revenue engine follows four phases: traffic, holding pattern, selling event, conversion (and a loop back). Claude projects combined with Claude Code create a fast workflow for going from research to a shipped marketing asset in under an hour. The current play is abundance and scale, using AI to run five campaigns instead of one, rather than cutting headcount for efficiency. Off-the-shelf solutions still beat custom builds in many cases — always ask before you spend three days vibe-coding something. 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/ FIND JONATHAN ON SOCIAL Unscheduled CEO Podcast: https://www.unscheduledceo.com/ X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/Jicecream LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jonathan-courtney-4510644b/

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  So you vibe coded a project, but then when you launch it, it's just crickets. No customers, no revenue, no passive income, nothing. Well, today's episode, we bring in Jonathan, AKA Mr. Jicecream Courtney, who teaches us, hey, how do you actually use AI to generate revenue to your vibe coded project? He starts the episode off with the foundations. He talks about what you need to know, non-AI related, in order to build a business. After that, we get to the fun, share your screen, Claude code, Claude, little tips and tricks and what you can do. But I encourage you to listen to the whole episode because I think people who listen to the whole episode are going to be a dangerous weapon who understand not just how to vibe code,

• 0:45Greg Isenberg?

  but how to get customers to your vibe coded project.

• 0:57Greg Isenberg?

  We are back on the Startup Ideas Podcast with Jonathan, Jay Icecream, Jicecream,

• 1:02Speaker 01

  Hey!

• 1:03Greg Isenberg?

  Jaded Icecream Courtney, welcome back. Mr. Jicecream, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

• 1:10Speaker 01

  What people are going to learn is how to actually make money using the AI tools and get users while also using the AI tools as sort of like a support. And I think the reason I want to talk about this is because there's a huge conversation around how to technically use all these tools, all of the cool use cases. I mean, I sit down and just watch your tutorials and then just go and do that stuff. But I think what's missing from the conversation a little bit is the practical element of, well, what's the point in having a business that's not making any money? So I want to go into that side of it. I want to show you kind of what the job of a CEO is. I want to like remind maybe some parts of the audience what the job of a CEO is.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  And I also want to show like my blueprint for getting customers to buy things.

• 2:00Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, so basically, there's a lot of people who have vibe coded a thing, and they put it out there and it's crickets. And what you're going to show people is how to go from crickets to dollar signs.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  I wish there was something that would rhyme with crickets. Crickets to money rickets.

• 2:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:26Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Crickets to dollar signs. I mean, I, I would say that I use these tools like 20% of how much you and your audience use these tools because most of my time is focused as a CEO on how do I actually make money? How do I get users? How do I increase revenue for myself and clients? And so I just want to bring that cold money angle to all of this. And, you know, most of the hardcore vibe coding stuff leave to you guys to make the cool products.

• 2:56Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. And for the people listening, watching this man named Jay Ice Cream, and you're like, why should I trust this guy with like an hour of my time? You know, this guy looks like a German, more, a Berlin version of Greg Isenberg? Like, who is he? Is he even real? The answer is you've made millions of dollars using a lot of these techniques, right?

• 3:19Speaker 01

  Yes. I run a couple of businesses. Some of them are like multi seven figures. Some of them are seven figures. For example, facilitator.com is an example of one of my businesses that's out there, that's public, that people know about. I like build businesses in like the enterprise space, in the like B to C space, and also help other people like, you know, sell their stuff as well. So I do spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make money and how to sell stuff and how to turn something that's not selling into something that's selling. That's what I have been doing for the last 14 years. Oh yeah, my main business

• 4:00Speaker 01

  is called AJ and Smart. If you want to like, find the main thing of it.

• 4:05Greg Isenberg?

  Well, thank you for your life story. Let's get into it.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Ah shit. Okay, look, I, before we get into this, I think that what's really important is to understand, I really want people to understand, if you're running a business, if you consider yourself the CEO of the business, there's a massive misconception out there. I'm on X all the time. I see this misconception building up that a, like, building stuff, being able to build stuff and being able to build like super complex systems using AI tools is basically your job and then somehow you make money. And I have a lot of CEO friends that are really excited about all the AI stuff. And what I always ask is like, so cool, you spent like four or five days doing all this stuff. You know, you've built all these cool systems, you've, you've built all these automations.

• 4:54Speaker 01

  And are you making more money now? Or are you making any money now? And I think these AI tools, if used wrong, and if you don't really understand your role as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, you could just lose loads of time procrastinating. These can be procrastination machines that you're basically building for yourself. And so for me, I want to point people in the direction of the most successful people in the AI space. Do you know the name of the CEO of Anthropic?

• 5:25Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  Do you know how he looks? Do you know how he looks?

• 5:29Greg Isenberg?

  I think he's bald, right?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  He's actually not. He's not.

• 5:34Greg Isenberg?

  That was a good guess, right? CEO bald.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, CEO bald. Okay, you know who the CEO of OpenAI is?

• 5:41Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, Sam Altman, good head of hair.

• 5:43Speaker 01

  Do you know the levels.io X account? What's that guy's name?

• 5:49Greg Isenberg?

  Peter Levels.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  Okay. All of these people are like big in the AI space, right? They're all entrepreneurs. They're all CEOs. And something that they all have in common that no one ever points out is that these guys, at least 50% of their job is promoting their businesses. And so for me, what I want to get in your head as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, if you're the person who's the founder, CEO, entrepreneur, your job is to promote your business. Of course, you want to build all the cool stuff. Of course, you want to make the thing. But your actual key job, and then you build around yourself and build things that support that, your key job is getting out there and promoting your business. And so when you look at someone that levels, when you look at Peter Levels, when you look at his X account today,

• 6:35Speaker 01

  the very first thing he has posted there is essentially a long form promotion for his photo AI tool. But people on X and people who are using all these AI tools, they're like, marketing sucks. Like, all you have to do is build it, and then people will come to it. You just have to build great shit, and then people will... That's not actually what's happening in real life. It's completely counterintuitive to the fact that you know the names of all the people who build all of your favorite tools. Because they're on every podcast, because they're out there all the time making themselves known. And so this is what I really want to get across here, just as like a preamble, is that your job as CEO is not, your job description is not, hey, I'm going to use AI

• 7:20Speaker 01

  tools and get really good at them. Your job is not, hey, I'm going to build cool like little products. If you are not able to promote those things, no one's going to use them. And it becomes completely like a little self-contained procrastination station that you're building for yourself. Like analogy that I use for my friends is, imagine you start a restaurant, you're like, this is going to be the best restaurant ever. You spend an entire year augmenting every machine. So it all works automated. It makes the perfect food. You know, you've got the perfect system set up. You can book everything. It's so easy. You just go online. But you literally never told even one person this place exists. That will die pretty quick, even though you get to do your little fun procrastination

• 8:03Speaker 01

  thing. All that being said, I love all the AI tools. I'm going to show you how I'm going to use that, how I use them. But I want to show you how I actually use them in line with what my job is as a CEO, which is actually, it's my job to get users. It's actually my job to make money. It's actually my job to make deals. While at the same time, I happen to be the person who also makes a lot of the stuff that we sell. And so if you're making a cool thing, if you're making a cool product, like, for example, Greg has idea browser.com. Yet Greg, how much of your time do you spend promoting all your businesses? I mean, this podcast is a huge part of your job, right?

• 8:43Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it is.

• 8:45Speaker 01

  This is something I think that has gotten a little bit twisted in the whole like builder space, because people don't realize, oh, like Greg and Peter put crazy effort into making sure that their content is useful and valuable, so that people know about them. And therefore, people can figure out what it is that they are offering to the world. And if you were never to do a podcast, and if you were never to create any content, no one would have a clue. Clue about any of this stuff. And so for me, I just want to get that baseline before I go into showing how I would recommend thinking about selling stuff. So let's open, I'm out. You know what? I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a beautiful vibe coded blueprint

• 9:31Speaker 01

  for how I think about selling the whole or how I think about like selling stuff in general. So this is, so I put this together earlier, just as like a, I mean, this is how I show it. Just to show, hold up to the screen. This is how I show it to my like clients, like literally scrawled on a piece of paper. But I was like, I'm going on Greg's podcast. I'm going to actually show this in a fancy vibe coded way. So, and what I'm also going to do is show the AI use cases for these steps as well. But I want to, I want, there's no point in me doing this until people really understand the basics and understand how money is made in this, you know, selling products space. The first thing, you talk about this, you talk about this all the time, but I'm just going to like really

• 10:16Speaker 01

  take a step back and show the key ideas. The first step is you need to figure out how to get traffic from somewhere. And the only two categories of getting traffic are organic or paid. So either you're out here like me right now, going on other people's podcasts, you're running events and networking, you're doing posts on social media, free content, or you're paying for ads on Meta, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. I always recommend push that traffic, not straight into the product, like not, hey, just buy my product. I always recommend push them into a holding pattern. So step two is the holding pattern. And the holding pattern is basically where you're just slowly warming people up.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  And it's like your email newsletter, it could be your podcast. So your podcast, for example, the Startup Ideas podcast is a great place that people get value from. You don't need to promote a lot of stuff there, but you're keeping people sort of in your space, in your world, and the attention is on you. YouTube content, posts on X that keep people engaged. This is basically the holding pattern and that's almost like your daily content, your weekly content. The next thing, and I think I would say a lot of people on X are okay at the first two. So they know how to, you know, post and, you know, create a lot of followers, create a lot of engagement.

• 11:41Speaker 01

  But I almost see nobody who's good at moving people from now I have some people listening to me to that turning into money. And so that's the next step. The next step is thinking, okay, I've got all of these people. They're watching what I'm doing. They're excited about what I'm doing. How do I move them to a selling event? And a selling event is something like, for example, a webinar. I talk about these all the time. So you could do a live demo of your product and show people how it's being used. You see like companies like Superhuman doing this all the time. You see almost all the AI companies doing demos where you can see how these products work. And you don't even necessarily need to do a pitch at the end.

• 12:25Speaker 01

  It's just you now see how this product works. You now see how valuable it is. That's a live workshop. That's a live webinar. That's a live demo. I'm running these all of the time for myself and my clients, my partners. Second thing is an email campaign. This could be as simple as like a string of three or four emails that lead people in your holding pattern to actually making a purchase. And you see these all the time. You can see the examples of this all over the place. And by the way, I just got hit with a webinar campaign from Superhuman today because they want me to buy Superhuman teams or they want me to upgrade to Superhuman teams. And so I just got hit with a campaign to get me on one of their webinars. The other thing is if you want to pay, and a lot of people don't realize this,

• 13:09Speaker 01

  you can retarget people with a paid campaign that are already in your world. So let's say you have like a couple of thousand emails that you've collected. You can actually put those into Facebook. And again, it's not like they take the exact emails, not like it all perfectly lines up. You create a lookalike audience. And those emails can be used to retarget people on other platforms or similar types of people on other platforms to push them towards something. And the last thing, which people don't really think about, if you're building a holding pattern, and for me, if I look into my email, like, okay, let's see the last 30

• 13:52Speaker 01

  people who signed up, oh, this person has an email address at microsoft.com. We work with enterprise clients. Let me see if I can reach out to this person and jump on a call with them and see if they would be interested in working with us. And so this selling event, which a lot of people just call campaigns, are the bridge between I'm holding people in this space to now I'm moving them over to they're buying something from me, they're getting a free trial, or they're booking a call with me because they want to buy something expensive. And if they don't convert, which most won't convert, they go back into the holding pattern and they stay there until the next selling event. And if

• 14:34Speaker 01

  you look at the example of Peter Levels' X account, you could even take a look at, you know, Jason Freed's X account, or any of the people that you associate with selling really great, interesting digital products, who you wouldn't consider to be very marketing heavy, they are, you know, going on other people's podcasts to generate traffic, which pushes people into their world, whether that's their X account, or newsletter, or their YouTube channels, or whatever it is, or their own podcast. So it's from their traffic to your traffic. And they keep people there. This is where they're posting like their personal stuff, and like, Peter is always posting about like, how to cook steaks in

• 15:18Speaker 01

  an air fryer. And all of this stuff is happening there. That's not where you're generating traffic in the first place, but that's where that's happening. And then every so often, you'll see them make a clear push to selling, a clear push to, okay, I want to have people push towards this thing now. And you saw on Peter's account, he did this e-girl post, which is now pinned on his account as we speak. And then he posted the bump in sales that happened after he did that post. And so I'm not saying, by the way, that he's cynically sitting there and being like, this is specifically a sales campaign, and this is how much I'm going to make, whatever. Not that that would be a bad thing or anything.

• 16:01Speaker 01

  It's just that this is an activity that he's that's happening from the holding pattern. It's an activity that's not just happening randomly from an ad. He's not, he's not doing his sales pitch on podcasts that when he goes on other people's podcasts, he's going on other people's podcasts. And people get confused about this, by the way. Like, why is this person, like, why is the CEO of Anthropic right now at Davos getting interviewed by Bloomberg, right? Is it, is it for the good of humanity? No, like, his job is he's a promoter. He's moving people from here to the holding pattern, to their world, to understand it. When I'm watching the interview with the CEO of Anthropic, Darius, I am thinking he's

• 16:46Speaker 01

  doing a really good job at doing this sort of pre-pitch to enterprises who are now going to understand, oh, Claude is the enterprise AI company. And so he's bringing people, he's creating that attention, bringing people into that holding pattern. And the selling events for Anthropic, I mean, they have an outreach team because they're actually the company that goes and tries to get these big enterprise deals. But you know, you're following them on Twitter, you're on X, and then they post about Claude cowork, you're in their world, you're in their sphere, you're hearing about these things. Again, those companies are huge. We don't have those types of budgets, but this is the general, I would say, loop that's happening the whole time, always trying to get new traffic.

• 17:30Speaker 01

  And let me do this in a meta way. I'm on your podcast now, I would like to get traffic, right? I'm trying to expose myself to new people who might not know me yet. The next step is ideally people are going to start searching who I am because I'm not, when you're on other people's content, you don't want to make a pitch. So people are going to like, Do the work themselves to figure out who I am, where I am, what I'm doing. They'll then fall into one of my holding patterns. It could be that they listen to the podcast, email newsletter, whatever it is. Eventually, as some of them have seen this week, because we did a big campaign, they're going to get pushed towards something. Right now, it's a webinar and that webinar will be pushed, pushed them again towards

• 18:15Speaker 01

  some people doing enterprise calls with us, some people buying, um, uh, some people buying cheaper B2C products with us. And then 90% of the rest of them fall back into the holding pattern bucket. And as a promoter, ideally, you're waking up every morning and you're able to understand that this is like the, the oxygen of the business essentially. So for example, if there's no traffic coming in, if you're not doing any traffic building activities, then there's not going to be enough people in your holding pattern because, so that when you run a selling event, there won't be enough people in that selling event or campaign, which means you're not going to have a lot of sales. And so for us, for example, like we're running meta ads.

• 19:00Speaker 01

  I'm on this podcast. I'm always out there trying to get as many people into the holding pattern as possible. Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter. And when I see that an extra 5,000 people have joined the newsletter, I can mentally say that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar and that means another 12 people will buy something. And so the machinery starts to make sense.

• 19:28Greg Isenberg?

  The motor, so to speak.

• 19:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, ah, I should change it to the motor. And, and like the, by the way, look, check this out. I also have this little toggle here, which is, well, how do you use AI in all of these things? The reason I didn't have AI here upfront is because.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  This is the core element of your job as a CEO to make money. And then AI is supporting these elements. And I'll show you, I'll turn it on and I'll show you how I literally am using these tools. I'll open up the tools and I'll show you how I'm doing this. I'll show you how I'm like creating a marketing campaign and I'm showing you, I'll show you how I'm using Claude in particular to support my marketing activities that make money or grow traffic or keep people in the holding pattern, et cetera, et cetera. So let's turn on the AI use cases.

• 20:26Greg Isenberg?

  So for the audio listeners, what am I looking at?

• 20:29Speaker 01

  You are looking at, I have flipped a switch which says, "Show AI use cases." And so we're now in AI use case mode. And underneath each of the activities, so let's say we're talking about, let's say we're talking about going on other people's podcasts. I have put a use case for how to use AI tools. And also in the background, there are very beautiful like stickers of me flying around all over the place and the cursor has changed to an ice cream. So it's, it's gotten pretty serious, I would say.

• 21:02Greg Isenberg?

  Right. I'm loving what I'm seeing right now visually. And I never realized you're, before we get into this, I never realized how similar you look to Jesus.

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, now with the hair like this, that's the next one of these blueprints will be the Jesus blueprint. And so what you have here, by the way, if you want, I put this as a Versal, I made like a little Versal version of this, if you want to put it in the, in the description.

• 21:30Greg Isenberg?

  We will.

• 21:31Speaker 01

  I vibe coded it in like 20 minutes, so it's probably barely holding itself together. But what I want to show you actually is, so. I don't think we need to go into all of these things. Maybe people can look those up or people can click on the link and they can see the ways to use AI for these things. I think the best thing, and what I know about your podcast, is people just want to see inside the software and see how it's actually being used. So will I just jump in and show how I, I'll show you in a very meta way, how I prepared to go on your podcast today and how I also transitioned from using Claude standard to Claude code

• 22:16Speaker 01

  to go through the entire like flow of this. Sound good?

• 22:21Greg Isenberg?

  Perfect. Sounds great.

• 22:22Speaker 01

  Cool. Let's jump into little baby cute Claude. Now, what I'm going to show you, most of your, I think, most of your listeners, since they're so technical already, they're going to be like, yeah, I already know about this. But I know from talking to a lot of CEOs over the last two weeks, most people still don't understand how to use Claude properly, especially how to jump from Claude to Claude code when needed. So this is a project in Claude code called, sorry, this is a project in Claude. This was my essentially marketing assistant today for going on your podcast.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  What I wanted to do was, so you can see here in my little notebook, I just collected all of the physical notes that I had on this promoter concept that I wanted to talk about with you at the start of the podcast. And then I wanted to work with Claude to, number one, just create the graphic to explain to people. But number two, I wanted to do some research on the last podcast episodes I did with you to figure out like what was working and what's not, based on how many views and how many comments, etc. But also, I wanted to figure out like, where in my angle, like where in my script, is it gonna lose people's attention, especially for your audience?

• 23:48Speaker 01

  And the other thing is, I don't prepare for stuff. I'm like one of these classic ADHD entrepreneurs. And so usually, I just wing it. And I wanted it to kind of work with me in a, creating almost like an ADHD-friendly kind of overview, because I don't want to read a script either. And so the first thing I did here was, I recorded just straight to my phone, like a 15-minute like brain dump on all of the different things I was thinking about talking about in this podcast. And I dumped it into Claude. And I had it basically turn that into, actually, it's back here. I had it turn that into

• 24:30Speaker 01

  an ADHD-friendly, scannable document that I could just read in the background while I'm talking to you, so that I don't forget what to do. And that, let me just open that for you here. So, let's open the HTML. So, on another screen, I have the notes of the things I don't want to forget in the background that I can fly through like this. You remember, I talked about Dario, about Jason Fried, about Levels? And the process of doing this, and I'm bringing up the blueprint, the process of doing this helped me also figure out,

• 25:13Speaker 01

  okay, when I was looking at this, I was like, maybe I should actually create the blueprint so that people understand what I'm talking about and create a visual of it. So, step one is, I dumped all of my verbal information into Claude. And probably like everyone else is doing, my prompts are all done by Whisperflow, so I'm talking to Claude as well. So if you're not using Whisperflow or something like it, I would highly recommend using that. So you can just like, so I dumped my audio file in there. Then I just talked to Claude for a while. And at the same time, while I was doing all these little projects, I'll just go back here, sorry.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  While I was doing all of this, I was having it teach itself instructions for this particular project. So at the end of every one of these chats, so I gave it an initial instruction. It was like, I'm going to be a guest on Greg Isenberg Startup Ideas podcast today. You're going to be assisting me with putting together a strong content angle, strong ideas, and strong strategy for delivering the most value to his audience. This is currently the most popular episode I've done with Greg. And then I had it, at the end of each chat, I said, hey Claude, this was great. Now I want you to give me a pasteable set of instructions that I can put into your instructions for this podcast as we continue along with this episode.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  I also had it do in a separate chat, I had it do research on you. And so we also created a research document, so a research file. So it doesn't have to do that research fresh every single time and every single chat. It already went through your X account, it already went through your YouTube account. And all of that led to me being able to create a really simple overview and then move on to, hey, okay, let's create an infographic that represents how I want to zoom out of the big picture for customers and show them how this whole creator flow works. And by the way, prompts, again, prompts of this detail are only really possible if

• 27:26Speaker 01

  you're able to verbally play with them and just talk them out. And the cool thing here, for anyone who doesn't already know how to do this, is in normal Claude, in the Claude project with all the context I had given it, I had it build this blueprint for me. And when I was relatively happy with it, so when it was at like this point where it, you know, also it's actually already, oh yeah, so it gave me this first simple version of it and I was like, this is pretty fine. Then I asked it here, I said, Cool, I'm going to move this project over to Claude Code. So I'm going to take the HTML file, but what I need from you is to create a Claude MD file that gives you the Claude Claude code, the entire context of this project, as much context as possible.

• 28:11Speaker 01

  And so in this moment, I had to create the Claude MD file, the markdown file, and spit out the HTML file, downloaded all of them, and then I moved over to Claude Code, where I actually started building this little piece of software, this little piece of like one-off marketing software. I'm sure your audience already deeply knows how all of this stuff works, but it's kind of fun anyway, just to see how it got brought over. So here you go. So I created a, I created a project folder then on my desktop, which was about this podcast. And I said, okay, I'm working on this promoter blueprint. Take a look at the Claude Claude MD file to give yourself context.

• 28:54Speaker 01

  And then I wanted it to move into use ask or quest, ask user question mode or plan mode. And I had it just like grill me on the ideas for the podcast again, which gave me even more context to work with, which then spat out the blueprint or the promoter blueprint that I showed you, even though we spelled it wrong. And then I had it, put it on GitHub, spit it out to Vercel so that we are where we're at right now. It sounds like a lot of stuff, but all of that took about one hour, I would say. And almost all of it was happening in the background while I was doing other stuff as well.

• 29:35Speaker 01

  And so that's like a really super simple flow for any sort of CEO or marketer to go from, okay, I'm researching something to now I'm making a marketing element that I can use. In this case, I'm using it for the traffic part of my flow. And I mean, if you want to see a more complex setup, for example, if we go here, I'll show you like where I'm actually building, how I'm actually building out campaigns at a deeper level, let's say. A campaign that will, I hope, make $450,000 this week will.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  I can't guarantee that it'll make $450,000. I think it will though. At least 350.

• 30:28Greg Isenberg?

  Based on the hundreds of workshops and webinars you've done, you know, it sounds like, from what we talked about, you know, it sounds like you're gonna do between 250 and 500,000 dollars.

• 30:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's usually in that range. We are really, so we have like 4,000 webinar signups right now. So we're thinking, we're hoping it can go much higher. So we're doing, basically, this is my AJ and Smart Marketing Expert Brain. So this is where I, when I'm not like building something, when I don't need Claude code. And actually, I know I could just set up all of this on Claude code, but somehow I prefer using this interface when I'm just focusing on marketing stuff. It just, I like to see the overview. So this is my marketing copywriting machine, essentially. And you can see I'm using it for a lot of, a lot of stuff here.

• 31:26Speaker 01

  And it is my, my first place I go to when I have a new email campaign that I want to run, or when I have a new webinar that I want to run. And the important element here is that I spent a lot of time setting up the files in the document. So I have the books that I've written. I've had, I had one of my like favorite things here is a 17,766 line doc, which is me finding other people's marketing emails and just compiling them, and then learning from them, having Claude essentially boil down the main learnings

• 32:09Speaker 01

  and add them to the Claude MD file, which I'm still playing around with, so it doesn't get too overwhelmed. But let me just show you how I would normally then move from the traffic phase, maybe to the like sell phase or something. So what I'll do here is I'll say, Okay, so I just finished a podcast episode with Greg Isenberg. The topic was how I use AI tools as a CEO. And what I want to do, I'm going to give you the context of that. I'm going to put the Claude MD file here so you have the context of what I talked about. What I want to do is I want to create a very simple, juicy downloadable or lead magnet

• 32:53Speaker 01

  that I could send people to after this episode that will bring them into my newsletter. So it's got to be something free. It's got to be something relevant to this episode that I'm doing with Greg Isenberg. And I just want you to pump out about three lead magnet examples. Let's go. And so what I'll do is I'll bring in the file that we are using, the Claude MD file, instruction file we're using for your project, just so that I bring that context in here. As a one-off thing, I don't want to bring it and replace this entire context here.

• 33:34Speaker 01

  And I'll have Opus sort of come up with a first feel for it. And it's not that you're, as a CEO, completely replacing your entire brain with Claude. The thing that your brain is there to do is look for these opportunities, is to think about, I'm in the traffic phase, I want to move to the holding pattern phase. Let's see what it came up with. Okay, the promoter blueprint, one pager, I think that would work well. So PDF of the four-step framework, that's pretty good. 50 prompts for the promoter CEO, a swipe file, the cave dweller audit. Are you building or promoting? That's really great.

• 34:17Speaker 01

  A quick self-assessment that exposes the builder trap and why it works, it's provocative. That's actually pretty funny because one of the angles of this is like, you don't want to get stuck building stuff and not promoting. And so what I would do from here is then I would talk a little bit, I would take the transcript from this podcast if it was afterwards, and I would give it even more context, turn that into a lead magnet. Of course, I would then move to Claude code to create the lead magnet landing page and we're done. And so for me, this process used to be like...

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Me chatting with my team, which I still do of course, but now we can do multiple projects at the same time. Me chatting with my team, then me asking a designer to make the landing, to make this blueprint, then me going off and trying to figure out what's the best way to put together a landing page. Should we do it in ClickFunnels? Should we do it in Framer? Now, this entire process of marketing for me, that maybe it would be a week for us to, okay, let's say, let's say a full Lead Magnet campaign, two to three days to get it right. Now we're talking about half a day. And it just feels so much faster. You can make one-off campaigns that feel super custom to the content you're

• 35:36Speaker 01

  creating. And basically, that's it. That's, that's basically how I'm using it. Like, that's as far as I'm going. It's very lightweight.

• 35:48Greg Isenberg?

  So I got a lot of thoughts. I think, you know, you kind of, you kind of downplayed it. You're like, I know this audience, you know, knows these tools and stuff like that. I think that the way you use instructions, the way you're setting up projects, I think is it's helpful to see how other people are using it, you know?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Dude, I learned it from your podcast.

• 36:11Greg Isenberg?

  It's just helpful, right? It's helpful. It's like even, even like the little tidbit around for marketing related projects, I just like to start with the Claude interface, like the Mac app is interesting.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I'm getting better at moving or knowing when I want to move between Claude Code and Claude. One thing I will say is, so a friend of mine who's running a company called Pipdecks, they're like, he's gone thousands of levels deeper than me into all this Claude Code stuff, also watching your channel and learning from it. And his co-founder messaged me the other day and he was like, John, ask user question, use the ask user question skill for designing your webinar and, and ask it to like really grill you. And so what I did is I like trained a Claude project on the webinar structure that I like

• 37:05Speaker 01

  the best. And I have it do like a 30 minute ask user question flow on me. And the end results coming from that, when I'm doing it in Claude Code, just because it's quicker, it feels quicker, just hitting the one, two, three, whatever. Is something that's making me feel like I might just move the whole thing to Claude Code, but for now, I'm just feeling good about having the two separate interfaces.

• 37:31Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, for context, eight months ago, you know, you barely knew what this stuff was, right?

• 37:40Speaker 01

  Dude, I didn't know. Remember, we met in May and we were in San Francisco and I was going to all these AI events with you and I was like, I'm basically using AI as a search engine. The end. Like, the search engine slash light assistant and it's a couple of months later and every single interaction, every single business process at AJ and Smart now has an AI automated element. But I will warn other CEOs out there, it's very easy to optimize for the wrong thing and end up spending. It's, it's okay if it's for fun, but don't be me and Laura. And one

• 38:25Speaker 01

  of the things Laura said, she's running the business with me. She was like, I spent three days building this proposal builder and then I asked Claude, would it be easier for me to use an off the shelf solution? And then Claude gave me an off the self solution, off the shelf solution that we could have used from day one and have it all connected. And so there's the, the, the warning of you don't have to build everything completely custom and remembering your job as a promoter, remembering that your job is not just optimizing the crap out of everything. And the last thing, dude, we said this in May together on your podcast and I think it's more true than ever now. I don't think being efficient right now is

• 39:05Speaker 01

  the, is the play. I think the play is scaling up like crazy. So like for me, I don't think the play is, oh, all of these processes can now be done by AI. So I'm just gonna just do everything myself. I think the play is if you already have a small team, keep them and just now you have triple the size of the small team. If everyone's using these tools and you can do five campaigns a month instead of one, you can do so many more variations of Facebook ads instead of like what we used to do, like updating them every six weeks. The, I think the play right now is abundance and like. Going big instead of obsessive efficiency.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And I think Claude Code allows you to really play big, like really play very big. It's so exciting. There's like, I basically feel like you can clone yourself and then just do more shit. The challenge is making sure you're doing stuff that actually hits your goals of revenue or users or whatever it is.

• 40:07Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast and they, it's like their first time setting up Claude Code and they'll set up like a thousand skills, like Claude skills before like building one thing. And it's like, dude, like, no, no, like you could use things like skills, you could use, you know, subagents, you could use Ralph Wiggum, you could use all these like advanced techniques. But to start with, you really just wanna figure out, okay, what is it, what am I, you know, what does my team look like? Even if it's a team of one, what are the things, what are the jobs to be done?

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:45Greg Isenberg?

  And how can I use this to create better products, to promote more, to experiment more? And then just start making it part of your daily routine. And over time, you're just, you're gonna learn, oh, okay, actually, I could put a skill over here. I'm gonna do one skill. And then over time, like, it doesn't need to be, like, don't be that, you know, that person that measure twice is, which is the expression, measure twice, cut once.

• 41:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 41:14Greg Isenberg?

  Just cut.

• 41:15Speaker 01

  Cut everything. Just cut, just cut, cut, cut. There's no, there's, so when I meet other entrepreneurs, the biggest sign for me that they're going to move very slowly is too much preparation. And I think these tools are so good, you can go straight into a project with them. Like with Claude Code, I didn't, I didn't even do a test project. I was just like, I'm gonna see if I can make one of these campaign pages immediately. And by messing up and by, for example, the first thing you might hit is like, the context window becomes too long and then it compresses and then it forgets loads of stuff. And I'm like, what the hell? It's forgotten all the stuff I told it.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  And then you realize, oh, maybe like doing projects on Claude Code is like doing little bits instead of all in one massive big mega prompt. And, but I had to learn that by working with it on a real project. And so I definitely think. Less prep, more action and an understanding, especially if you're a CEO or a founder, and understanding that your job is to grow your business, to make money, or to get investors or to get users. And your job is not to be optimizing your admin before you're even making money.

• 42:30Greg Isenberg?

  I'm going to be doing a lot more episodes of the podcast that are like in this vein around vibe marketing, basically like, how do you, how do you use AI to get more customers? I'm happy that you set the foundation around like, okay, before you even do this, you know, sexy vibe marketing stuff, you kind of have to understand the foundation. But, you know, thanks for coming on and dropping the sauce. And we'll include the link in the show notes description. If you want to use the ice cream cursor. By the way, was that, that had to have been your idea?

• 43:08Speaker 01

  I, oh yeah, like, so I was looking at it and it, so it created, I wanted there to be a toggle to show the AI use cases. And then when I, when I clicked the toggle, I was like, this is boring. So then I did the cut out of my face and put it in the background. And then I was like, this is still boring. Let's add an ice cream to the cursor and I just kept adding stuff. I mean, I created a planner for me and my friends to go on vacation. It's called a wet boy vacation planner. And it's the most demonic thing you've ever seen. And so for me, that's the fun of Claude code is being able to just make very specific silly things as you're going on. So yeah, that wasn't a Claude idea. Claude wouldn't recommend something like this.

• 43:48Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, we could do a whole episode on the wet boy summer vacation app for sure.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  So good.

• 43:54Greg Isenberg?

  So good. All right. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate it. Anything you want to leave people with?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Honestly, if you just accept that your role as a CEO is, is you're a promoter and don't be embarrassed about it. I know people get cringe about promoting themselves. If that's not what you want to do, find a co-founder who wants to do that. It is literally the job of a CEO. You're supposed to be out there talking about your business. And again, it's not a problem if you don't want to do it. You gotta have someone in the company doing that job. It just won't work if you don't have that type of person who's willing to take the role. And just believe in yourself, love yourself, you know, it's all good. Hello, you know, that kind of stuff.

• 44:38Greg Isenberg?

  All right. Perfect place to leave it. Thanks again, and I'll catch you next time.

• 44:43Speaker 01

  See ya.

• 44:44Greg Isenberg?

  See ya.