Making $$ with AI Marketing

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 can 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. 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. So I believe that there's this great flip happening. You know, 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 know, you're at the top of the list. Then it's product people and then it's developers. 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. But I think that if you do understand it, you are at an unfair advantage. There's 200,000 new vibe coding projects being created every single day. I'm loveable. How many people are actually seeing those products? Probably not a lot. Peter levels has three million dollars plus a revenue. He has zero employees. The reason why he's been able to, you know, 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, you know, Nomad list, for example, a lot of the tools, like these could be, you know, copied quite quickly. You know, it's essentially a directory. I've done episodes and tours and how to vibe code directories before, you know, but he's obviously got good data and data as 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, you know, once they've built the product, they've got this great idea. Then they're just going to try marketing things, but it's just silence. So then they're going to build more features and they're going to launch again and 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. What smart builders do is they start with the distribution. So they'll grow an audience to maybe a thousand 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. You know, the example of Peter levels, I think I, you know, I think he's tweeted 125,000 times in the last like eight years. You know, he's 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, you know, with them. So let's get into the actual tactics. Stretchy one is going to be about using an MCP server as your sales team. So, you know, if you're listening to a startup ideas podcast, you probably know an MCP is. But you can think of it as basically like an app. You know, the example I'll use here is, you know, plugins and open AI, use the O, 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, and the AI could be, you know, a cloud, it could be chat GBT as a question. The AI discovers your MCP server and AI returns, 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 ideabrowser.com, you know, 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, zero dollars 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 from mobile in 2010. There's just a lot of opportunities to show up in LLMs in these connections, plugins, or MCP servers. So how can you start this week? And by the way, I realized that this, you know, an MCP server, it's not for everyone, right? If you're building a boring business, maybe that's off for you or, you know, even some software businesses might not be for you. But for some people, for SAS, 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, MCPT, OpenTools. And then every AI assistant that connects to your server is now selling for you 24-7. 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 how can you create 10,000 pages, SEO pages, in 48 hours? So you're going to want to look at, you know, 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. It's 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 so that you can actually, you know, provide value in your pages. Then you're going to want to use a page template, next JS, you can use Cloud 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 in 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, you know, 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. 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. You know, the math is pretty simple. If you end up creating, you know, 10,000 pages and each page gets 30 visits a month, which, you know, it's all a lot of visits, right? That could go up to, you know, 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. 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, you know, roofing in Miami, you're going to want to build your data set. So you're going to scrape with fire crawl or you can use existing databases. You can create a template in your framework, like, you know, NestJS, 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 know, you also might want to have a human in the loop 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, example, I would use is a HREF for a while has had this backlink checker. So, you know, you put in your domain, for example, Greg Eisenberg.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 HREFs. So they kind of hook you in through that. So, you know, step one is building a free tool. It can be a grader, it can 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. Generally, what you want to do is obviously grab their data in some capacity, you know, text message, email, in order to get access 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 while we've got the product for you. Now, this strategy has been around for a while, right? You know, but why is it different? Well, now it's different because you can use cloud code to go and actually build these free tools, right? 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 I can act as my top of the funnel. And that's, you know, you're going to 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? 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 in 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 sites. 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 3000 word blog posts, you're doing backlink building, keyword stuffing. Oh my god. Click through your site. You know, I'm just having flashbacks of all of doing all the 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 chat GBT 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. And then AI AI is going to send users to your product. So 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 chat GBT. 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. And you're going to step to 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 going to add step three, add schema markup and FAQ blocks. Step four, you're going to publish on a domain with authority or build authority through the other strategies. Obviously, it's bet, you know, why up Peter levels, you know, could get his SEO and AEO up quicker than the average person listening to this is because a lot of his domains have built authority over time. So, you know, there's no better time start building that authority today. And then lastly, monitor your perplexity and chat GBT citations. You can use tools like auditally, 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. Stretching number five is how can you make your outputs of your product shareable? So we all know, you know, the end of year, December, Spotify wrapped. They get a hundred 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 about something about your identity who you are. 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, the way I, 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 charitable. 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, you know, the artifact there is the incorporation milestone. Founders tweet, I just, I just incorporated, or it's been five years since I incorporated. Here's my, you know, my anniversary post lessons learned. Do a lingo, 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 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 get? What do we need? 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 charitable. 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 mostly consumer examples. Will this work in B2B? Or, you know, B2B? Yes. 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, I think audiences are really important. Sometimes it's just hard to build an audience. Listen, a lot of times it's hard to build an audience more often than not. It takes, it takes sometimes years. 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 and send a building from zero? So this is something a lot of people don't think about. But you can go and buy a 10,000 subscriber newsletter for five to twenty thousand dollars. You inherit that trust from day one. You plug in your product immediately and then you can repeat that across niches. If you have a product that you believe in and you understand that LTV, this just might make sense for you. 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 dollar offer from you. So, if we want to just get this started this week, I would go to doos.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. 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 that LTV, maybe you do, it's all about confidence. How much confidence do 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. Next step is, you know, a lot of these folks, as I mentioned, are not really making that much money. Maybe they're making zero to $500 a month and they would be open to a fair offer, you know, a five to 10 to 15 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 direct line that you can go and put links to and if you want to put your product in there and say, come by 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 a lot of people think of. So I definitely want to throw it in there. The last strategy is thinking about AI, building an AI content repurposing engine. So the way I think about it is this. You can think about creating one, you know, hero or pillar piece of content. That could be a podcast episode, a YouTube video, a long blog post and essay. And that one piece of content ends up becoming a lot more, you know, it could be 50, 75, you know, 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, you know, tweets, three to five LinkedIn posts, two to three short form videos, one newsletter. And the short form videos would be using like a remotion skill on something like a cloud code, you know, a newsletter edition, a blog post, five to 10 quote graphics that you can use creative LLM's go and create for you email sequences. And a lot of this stuff can actually, you know, for the people in the open cloud, they can go and automate with open claw. You can also use just claw dispatch and, you know, cloud co-work, 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 touch points across multiple platforms. So if you want to get that started this week, you know, I would suggest just starting recording like one 30 minute piece of content, it could be a podcast, could be a video, or just a voice memo. It's way harder to actually go and write a 3000 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 literally a video of you that you don't end up putting out, and that the actual value is in the repurposing that AI is going to do. You're going to want to transcribe it. You can drop the translation into a cloud, turn this into five tweet threads, three LinkedIn posts, and one newsletter. Obviously, it needs to be set up properly. Obviously, you know, there's, you're going to get sloped 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 setting routine, so it's going, you know, and researching, you know, different topics, and adding to what you have. 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, amount of content. They just really aren't. And where we are with content, just, you know, in 2026s, because of four U pages, you know, you, 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 that. So this is kind of like a shots on that strategy, and I don't know why more people aren't, you know, building this out. So those are the seven strategies, gross 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 that business, if I wanted to build a growth engine, code used to be the note. I think by now, maybe by the end of this, you, you understand that distribution is the new mode, 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 charitable. I've given you buy a newsletter, 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 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 here to help you get, increase your odds of success with good ideas, grow 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.