738: How to Build and Train Your 24/7 AI COO

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From collectibles to cookies, from resale treasures to vintage fashion, people just like you are building real audiences and real businesses on Whatnot. And for a limited time, WhatNot will match your first $150 sold in the first month. Visit whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T, whatnot.com slash sell. Whatnot.com slash sell. How to build and train your always-on AI chief operating officer. You've heard the buzz about OpenClaw, but maybe you're like me. you're not exactly sure how to set it up, what you would use it for, you're worried about some security issues, this is the episode for you. Today's guest says his new AI operator has helped him 10x his output and impact in his business and has given him this renewed sense of energy and fun toward that business that's now 13 years old. Longtime listeners will know him well from Piano in 21 Days and the online course guy.com, Jack Hopkins. Welcome back. Thanks, Nick. Thanks for having me. That was a great intro, like great energy. Like I think you're going to do well at this podcast thing. We'll see how this works out for me. This is, I believe your 10th appearance on the show, which is adding to your already record of appearances. So appreciate you coming back. Introduce us to Rocky, your open claw operator that is kind of running piano in 21 days at this point, kind of on autopilot, almost behind the scenes. Yeah, to an extent. It's certainly not a magic pill, but yeah, I've got an AI agent. I like to call it an AI operator sitting over here on my desk loaded into a Mac mini and it's doing so many amazing things for me and my business. And three months ago, he didn't exist. I was not very big into AI, but today he is doing SEO for my businesses. He is helping me manage my email inboxes. So he triages my emails. He archives what he needs to. If there's something he has the context around, he'll draft a reply that I can review and possibly send. He gives me a morning brief every morning, just telling me what came through overnight and what my priorities should be for the day. Here's a big one. He helps me with customer support for Piano in 21 Days. He is my employee. And like I said, he's better at customer support than me because he instantly has access to everything. So he has taken my course, right? He has all the contacts behind my Piano in 21 Days course instantly. He has gone through all my YouTube videos, but the reason he's better than me is because I last made my course like four or five years ago. So I don't remember like instantly exactly what happened halfway through lesson 14, right? But he does. And so if somebody is asking about, you know, day 14 in the course, he can draft just an unbelievable reply. And then my customer sport human actually reviews those and sends them out. So that's just, that's a few of many, many things that he's doing for me today. Yeah. And theoretically it could be trained on the last 10, 12, 13 years of your own customer support emails to kind of get a sense for the tone and the voice and what, what would make sense to even draft in the first place. Yes. He's gone through all of my email history as well. Piano in 21 days is a 13 year old business. And so he's able to draft replies, not only with the right context and information, but in my voice too. Yeah. Okay. I am getting the gears turning here because I'm looking at this inbox with hundreds and hundreds of unread emails from subscribers and listeners. And it's like, I want to do my best to reply, but also the rest of the business would not move forward if I did all that. So that's a thing. SEO is definitely a thing. Building some kind of daily report dashboard. Like, how did you do yesterday? I think that would be really cool. Now, I think you have this kind of four levels of AI use case. and I am probably on maybe level two, maybe level three. Level one is just a chat GPT, you know, using Gemini, using Cloud, you know, kind of question and response. Hey, I have this question. It kind of spits back something out. Level two is going a step further and building automations using Zapier, using Make. And this is kind of where I've been playing around with some assistance from Cloud Code to build out these automations. If this happens, then this happens. And that's been kind of fun. That's actually been really interesting. Like, okay, after the podcast recording transcript hits this, then this make automation fires. It gives me editing suggestions. It tells me what were the most exciting parts. I can put that in the video intro. That's all been super helpful stuff. But then there's a couple levels beyond that. You can talk to those. Absolutely. Yeah. So you've nailed it so far. I think most people that are using AI are at level one. And that's where I was three months ago, which is the chat level. We use AI from a chat perspective. We ask it questions. Maybe we get it to help us write an email or revise an email so that the one we've drafted ourselves sounds better or smarter. Level two automations. Level three is where things really start to get interesting, and it's AI agents. And this is like the big buzz right now, and this is really going to shape the future of work in general. And that's when AI can actually do work for you. It can do work on a computer kind of like a human can do. And I remember when agent stuff started to come out a year or two ago, and it was just so overwhelming. AI has overwhelmed me for so long. And because it overwhelmed me and kind of scared me a little bit, I just kind of stayed in my little chat GPT bubble in level one until about three months ago. And I jumped all the way from level one up to level four. And so I think level four takes this concept of AI agent a step further. And I call level four a personal AI operator. So it's an AI agent, but it's your AI agent that is only yours and you don't have to kind of start over every time. It continues to grow, it continues to learn. And the more you use it and the longer you use it, the better it is at doing the things for you in particular. Yeah, so it can be proactive rather than just kind of call and response. It has longer context window, right? If you have these long conversations with chat GPT, sometimes it'll forget what you were talking about at the beginning. So it has more memory in that sense. What are some of the first steps to start to set this up? So OpenClaw is currently free, open source, but then there's all these questions around security of like, well, what do I give it access to? I don't want it to like start running rampant on my machine or on the internet, or especially in the case of yours and mine, it's like kind of a personally branded business. Like we can't have it going out and saying stuff that isn't true. Yeah. So OpenClaw really changed the game and now there are competitors as well, but OpenClaw is the free open source software that allows you to create this level four personal AI operator. and it is a fairly technical setup, okay? But I have a solution for anybody that's not technical. When you go to set it up, you use an AI like Claude, a chat, a level one chat to help you set it up so that if you get stuck at any point of the way, it will be there to advise you. And that's actually how I use my OpenClaw to this day is I have my like Claude advisor. So anytime I get stuck, like it's so much smarter than me and helps me interact with Rocky. I'm not always interacting with Rocky through it, but that is one of my big tips is because it is a fairly technical setup and even to maintain is to have Claude sitting there ready to help you along the way. You went with the Mac mini setup, so it's kind of a completely standalone computer. And my initial thought was even Bluehost has like a virtual private server or you could put this in the cloud for like 10 bucks a month or something. Like, do you need dedicated hardware for this? You don't need to. But one of the big concerns, probably the biggest concern with OpenClaw is security from various different perspectives. And so I try to make mine as secure as possible. And I think one of the things we can do to make it as secure as possible is to run it on our own hardware in our own physical location. And so, yes, this can run on a virtual private server in the cloud, but I think the more secure way to do it is have it run locally. Got it. Got it. And ideally not on your primary laptop, ideally not on your primary workstation? Is there like some reason why people don't do that? Yeah, not only not ideally, but like that is a that is a hard no, like everybody that's using OpenClaw completely agrees. This needs to run on its own computer, right? So think of it like hiring a new employee. When you hire a new employee, you're not going to just let them share your computer with you. You're going to have a computer and your employee is going to have a computer because if you all of a sudden give your brand new employee access to your computer, they have access to all of your files, all of your sensitive information. And that's just, that's a security risk right off the bat. And so the best practice is have it running on its own machine. It is its computer, just like hiring a new employee. Got it. Got it. So I've got an old laptop that I could probably set up for this. It's got decent enough hardware specs that it could probably do this. Is that okay? Or does it need to be like this dedicated Mac mini box that everybody talks about? Mac minis are literally selling out in lots places. And so a Mac mini is really the perfect hardware to run it on because it's small, it's relatively inexpensive and open call works really well on, on Mac OS. It doesn't have to be on Mac, but that is better. It's not super resource intensive. So you don't need crazy hardware specs to run it. So if you've got an old Mac laptop lying around, that's a great place to get started with it. But a Mac mini is just like the best overall solution for something like this. Does it have to be an Apple product? It doesn't have to be. No, it can run on windows. It can run on Linux, but it was designed to work best on a Mac. Got it. Got it. Okay. The setup itself, the hardware setup and the software setup can get kind of technical. So Jacques actually has a really good video kind of step-by-step how to get that done. So I will link that up in the show notes. I kind of want to skip ahead a couple steps to the training process. It says, give me a soul. And like you prompt it up and it's like, Hey, you know, what do you, what do you want me to be? You know, I'm kind of an open book. Train me. And let's talk about what kind of information you fed it to kind of give it that name and soul. When you're setting up your own, there's two things that I ask people to have ready when they're setting theirs up. One is a name. That's really fun, like picking out the name for your new employee, basically. You get to name it. And I can talk later about where mine's name comes from if it's not obvious to some. Is this a boxing reference or is this a Hail Mary reference? Not Rocky the Boxer. No, it's from, so the movie just came out, Project Hail Mary. I don't know. I guess you haven't seen it yet. I haven't seen it yet, but I read the book. It was good. It's a wildly popular book. And the engineer alien guy is, it's probably, he's probably my favorite fictional character of all time. And it was just the perfect fit. Okay. But you also need to have what I call your operator brief. And this is just a brain dump of everything that you would want it to know about you. So fee, I mean, there's no limit to how much information you could give it at this point, but you want to give it all of your business history, as much personal history as you're willing to give it. I gave it my kids' names, their birthdates, where they go to school, but of course all the business history of Piano in 21 Days, the online course guide, but then also what I wanted to help me with and what some of my goals are. And that's one of the cool things you can do with it is not just give it specific tasks, but you can also just kind of give it goals that you're trying to accomplish and let it figure out some of the ways that it can help you accomplish those goals. Okay. At this point, you're not feeding in, like I was thinking, oh, I could upload my books or I could upload decades of transcripts. It's like not quite yet, just kind of a higher level overview. This is me. This is what I'm about. It's a little bit about my family. Here's kind of the direction of the business and what I'm thinking you might be able to help with. Yes, exactly. And so what I'm talking about is part of what you're setting up in the onboarding wizard is that initial brief that you're giving to it. That's not a one-shot thing. We can always add to it. And so, for example, at this point, Rocky is intimately familiar with every podcast episode I've ever done, every YouTube video I've ever done, every online course I've ever made. He's got all my content, but I didn't feed that to him on day one. Okay, got it. And that's honestly like my biggest tip, having done this for three months and starting to show other people how to do it is try not to go too fast because your agent is really good at setting things up, building them, but sometimes, you know, you set it up, but things start to break down over the next days and weeks because we try to do too many things at once. And so what I really recommend people do is really focus in on one thing one system one automation one thing at a time and really get that nailed down dialed in before you move on to the next thing Got it. What did you start with? So I think that asking where I started is maybe not the best, the most valuable question and maybe more like where should people start, maybe a little more appropriate. And so if that's where we're going, then I would say probably like business dashboards, right? I'm sure a lot of listeners maybe have side hustles or full-time businesses already. And one thing I struggled with before was just like data visibility because it would be in all kinds of different places. I don't know about you, Nick, but like I use a lot of tools, right? I'm using Kajabi and ActiveCampaign and Go High Level. And I've got WordPress websites. I've got data coming in from all kinds of different places and being able to kind of aggregate that into one like business dashboard, which like I've got spreadsheets set up and I've got a virtual assistant that tries to do some of that for me. But now Rocky's got dashboards that are updated like real time. I can see instantly where things are instead of waiting for a human to do it. And it's all in one place. It looks pretty. And so I would suggest that's a good place to start. Yeah. And if it saves your assistant the time and trouble of having to log into all these different places too. Yeah. Saves time and money. I'm thinking, yeah, could it pull in yesterday's affiliate earnings, yesterday's traffic numbers, number of email signups from kit number, uh, you know, media vine earnings, YouTube earnings. Like there's this cool dashboard that I kind of have in my mind of what it might be able to build if it had access to all this stuff. Absolutely. Yeah. And then, I mean, this is not where I'd suggest you start. But one thing I'm working on right now is I'm seeing if it can replace my bookkeeper. Because one thing I struggle with the financials is I'm not getting my books for the previous month until about halfway through the next month. And by that point, it's like almost worthless. And so by getting up-to-date books in real time at any time I want, that's really valuable for my business. And so that's a project we're working on right now. More with Jacques in just a moment, including how Rocky replaced a $3,500 per month SEO agency, the other AI building blocks you're going to want to have in place, and even building a virtual mastermind roundtable, complete with different personalities and perspectives. All that and more coming up right after this. When you're a small business, the right hire can be make or break. Hoping the right people see your job posting really isn't the best growth strategy. When the pressure's on and you need the right hire, this is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs. Indeed Sponsored Jobs get you the quality candidates when you need them most, like yesterday. How it works is Sponsored Jobs boosts your job post in the search results so you can reach the people with the exact skills, experience, and qualifications you need to help your business thrive. Plus, with Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you only pay for results. There's no monthly subscriptions or long-term contracts. 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So that means you can pay, hire, onboard, and support your team from anywhere. I'm talking about automatic payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, workers comp, 401k, you name it. Gusto makes it simple and has options for nearly every budget. And if you ever have any questions, you've got direct access to Gusto's certified HR experts so you can get back to running your business. But you don't have to just take my word for it. Gusto is ranked number one on G2's highest satisfaction products list for 2026, and it's already trusted by over 400,000 small businesses. I want to invite you to Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle. One more time, it's gusto, G-U-S-T-O dot com slash side hustle. What's it doing for you on the SEO side of things? Because this has historically been an important driver, both on the YouTube side and the organic side, like, you know, how to learn piano type of keywords is important for you. So I used to pay a guy a lot of money every month to do SEO, like $3,500 a month. He did great work. He got us on the front page for awesome search terms like how to play piano, right? And it was great because we did all that work pre-COVID. And when COVID hit, everybody and their mother was searching Google for how to play piano. And we were showing up on the first page for search terms like that. But eventually I was like, well, you know, we're in a pretty good place. I don't really want to pay him this anymore. Let's just let it ride. And the problem is that I let it ride without doing anything to it for like four years. And so now that I have Rocky, I was like, hey, you know, and this is this is another like tip for how to use something like this is don't just tell it what to do. Do something called reverse prompting. Don't say, hey, go work on my SEO. Say, hey, how can you best help me with SEO? Right. and get it to think about how it could be most effective for something like that. So that's certainly how I started. And so what it first did was a full audit. And so we connected it into Google Search Console via API access, and it could see all the data and it could see what pages are doing really well, what pages are getting zero traffic, which pages are too similar and really should be combined. It found a bunch of broken links. And so it just did a full site audit with recommendations And so on the first couple of days, it was just like fixing a bunch of things that it found. And now it's actively monitoring and helping me rank for new things. It built a new SEO dashboard that we can watch and it's writing new relevant articles in my voice, right? And so the guy that I hired several years ago to do SEO, he's amazing. He still runs an SEO agency. As you can imagine, he uses AI in his SEO agency. Now he came and did a workshop for my clients a few months ago. and it's like a two hour long masterclass on AI SEO. Well, guess what? I could take that two hour video and say, hey, Rocky, watch this training and follow it. And so basically what he's doing is he didn't try to reinvent the wheel on how to do SEO. He's following proven methods from this guy that I trust on how to best do it. You got it, because there's some risk involved. Like he starts doing some weird black hat stuff that ends up getting you in trouble, but not just kind of generating the audit report, but actually fixing the broken links, actually making updates to the pages in your voice, actually finding relevant keywords and then writing the content there. That's really cool. I mean, that's like a little virtual employee in a box. Exactly. Yeah. And look, you know, we talked about the security already. Most of the things that I've given Rocky access to is read-only, the vast majority. This is one small example where I have played with giving him write access. So he does have right access to certain areas of my WordPress site. So when I'm saying he's fixing the broken links and he's writing articles and he's updating articles, like he's actually doing that. Yeah. So he has like your WordPress login. It's not exactly like that because he doesn't use things like humans do, right? So he's got backend API access to these things. He's not just logging in on a browser and navigating WordPress like we would. Okay. So to peel it back one step, so OpenClaw is the operating system for Rocky, but then he's got to go out into the internet and he's got to call the AI of your choice. In this case, it sounds like it's Claude. And so having the Claude paid version plan allows him to do stuff and think, right? Is that how it works? Essentially, yes. Let me clarify a couple of things, okay? So OpenClaw is free. It's open source. That is the main engine or brain behind this. I don't know what the right metaphor is, but because you really are plugging in a brain into it, you've got to tie in some AI, some large language model into it for the smarts, right? So no, I don't have Claude tied into mine because as of April 4th, Claude actually banned people using OpenClaw using their models. But last month, OpenAI, who makes ChatGBT, actually, for lack of a better word, acquired OpenClaw. What they really did is they hired the creator of it. And so OpenClaw now is under the umbrella of OpenAI. So my understanding is they're going to continue to more and more optimize ChatGPT, GPT 5.4, and newer models to run really well with OpenClaw. So the way I've got mine set up today is I'm on the $200 a month ChatGPT plan. Okay. And Rocky is running on the latest and greatest ChatGPT model, which at the time of this recording is GPT 5.4. Okay. Got it. So you do need a paid plan with one of these other tools to be able to go out into the internet and have him do your bidding. Yeah. Or to do anything, right? He's worthless without being tied into an AI model. Now you can tie him into cheaper AI models. And that's another mistake I made at the beginning. I was like, well, I don't want to spend $200 a month on an AI model. So I tried some of the cheaper models first and it just wasn't very effective. Got it. Got it. Okay. Building dashboards, helping with the SEO stuff. Talk to me a little bit about the customer support or whatever was next on your wishlist here? Yeah, I think customer support was a good one because I've got, I have a customer support person, but her process before was, okay, we get an email from somebody. Well, before I just draft a reply, I need to look at the context history of our communication with this person. Is this the first time we've communicated with them? What have we discussed before? I need to log into ActiveCampaign or go high level and figure, you know, is this a customer? Is this a prospect? Where are they in the funnel? And then, okay, now that I've got all the context, Let me think about a good reply, right? So she's spending 10 minutes per email, right? So now Rocky does all those things for her. This is another area where Rocky, he does not have the ability to hit send, right? He has read-only access to my email, but he also has access to be able to create drafts. So in the draft, he's putting context for my assistant to look at, hey, this is a prospect or a customer. This is where they're at in the funnel. This is the conversation history. And then he drafts his reply. And so now all she has to do is go in, see the context, vet the reply, make sure she approves it. Maybe she tweaks it a little bit if necessary. And it's in. So instead of 10 minutes per email, she's spending probably less than one minute per email. Got it. Yeah, I'm similar. Like Teresa has done an awesome job on email support, but then there's always those that fall through the cracks on it requires some level of decision making. And it's just, I don't know. Yeah. So bringing in context history, bringing in this other data, plus years and years of content and support and being able to make a draft would definitely ease some of the mental burden for me. Yeah. And look, I'm certainly not looking at him to replace me, right? I mean, there are tools out there to where you can have your own AI persona be on video. Like I'm not looking for him to replace me and I'm not looking for him to replace my team. The word I like to use is amplify. I want him to amplify me and my team and my brand and not not replace us. Got it. So is it at that point when you're asking, so you kind of start off this prompt of like, hey, I could you really use some help with with customer support? You know, what questions or context would you need to know for me to be able to do this job? Well, it's kind of a conversation. That's a great example of reverse prompting, right? You don't have to be the brains behind designing the whole system. You just need to go to it with your struggle. Like, here's what I'm struggling with. how can you best help me solve this? Help me design the system to where you can help me solve this problem that I currently have. Now that you've kind of seen the power of this, what else is on your wish list of like, well, shoot, now we could probably build this or we could expand our reach here. Like, are you having to mess around with paid traffic and managing Google campaigns or anything like that? It is absolutely tied into my meta ads dashboard and making recommendations to me for ads. It's helping me with health and wellness, right? It is now my personal trainer, right? It's helping me with my workout plans and nutrition and just tracking those things and helping to keep me accountable. That's something that I'm working on right now is a better overall system for prioritization because that's something historically I've struggled with a lot. And that's an example of me going to Rocky and saying, hey, I'm really struggling with this. Like, how can you best help me? So he's got a pretty good understanding of my priorities in general. and the things that I'm working on and the goals I'm working toward, he not the best at like hey here are the three things you absolutely need to do today right He can give me three good things to work on but I want him to be like so good at like Jacques, to reach your goals and everything I know, like you've got to do these three things today. And so that's a system we're trying to build out right now because I want to be able to go to him at any time and him fully understand and advise me on exactly what I should be working on because that's a weakness in myself that I've always had that it would be great if he could be really good at helping to raise up that weakness in me. Has it come back with any proactive suggestions on, well, I know that you're doing this, this, and this, but it seems like people who want to learn piano also need XYZ or like something, you know, proactive. No, you really have to prompt him for that. And you could, right? You could like, hey, what am I not thinking of? Yeah. You know, everything about piano in 21 days. What are some ideas or things I'm not thinking of that can help it to grow even more? He's not going to just call you in the middle of the night and be like, hey, Jacques, I just got this really great idea. It's not like that. It's still a computer program, right? Yeah. And it's still running just code and it's got scheduled tasks and it's got a heartbeat, but it's not a human. And so the answer, unfortunately, to what you're saying is no, not exactly like that, but we can get fairly close. This is what I found is I always have more ideas than there are hours in the day, which on the one hand is a good problem to have. But I end up being kind of the bottleneck of like, okay, even if I'm using AI to build out some of these projects, like inevitably it comes back where it's like, now there's this human review process, which is probably good, but it's still like, oh, now I got to carve out the time to like figure out the next step and the next step. And then it's like, yes, it probably makes me go farther faster than I could, but it's still find myself being, being the bottleneck where it's like, if I could just let the robots run free, they could probably do better than they could if I wasn't stopping them all the time. Do you have a specific example that we could talk through? Well, I've been trying to build out a couple smartphone apps. One we talked about on a recent episode was inspired by this guy who was selling these watches that don't tell time. And the headline was like, I make two to $10,000 a month selling this watch that just says now on it. I was like, oh, that'd be cool. I wonder if I could build a smartphone version of that or an Apple watch version of that. And the apps are built and semi-functional to the limited degree that I've been able to test them. But now it's like, well, now you need app screenshots and now you got to go through this whole approval process with the app stores. And it's like, okay, I'll, I'll get to that when I get to it. And it ends up kind of sitting on the to-do list for days and days before I get to it. So first question would be, I'm assuming you program the app using CloudCode. Yes. Amazing. You know, I mentioned in the setup, it's nice to use, I use like my Claude advisor, right? And so what's really cool is you could run your open claw on ChatGPT and you could start on the $20 a month plan. You definitely need a paid plan, but I use mine so much that I had to upgrade to their $200 a month plan. And then if you also have say the $20 a month Claude plan, like really getting the best of both worlds on those two top models in the world right now. And so I use my Claude advisor, not only to help me set up Rocky to begin with, but on a day-to-day basis as a continual advisor. So let's say for example, I'm you and I use Rocky to program this app, which he could have done for you instead of Claude code. Then I could have Claude come in and help me with reviews. Right. And I do that. Those exact things all the time. Like I haven't done a mobile app yet, but Rocky will make me landing pages. He'll make me sales pages. He'll make me websites, things like that. And the first thing I do when he makes something is I give it to Claude to do the review. And so I'm getting both Opus 4.6 and GPT 5.4 to put their brains together and make it the best possible thing first before I do my human review. Okay. Any other mistakes that come to mind over the last few months, either security wise or just spending days on something that ended up being a dead end? Make sure you're doing like one main thing at a time. Don't try to do too many things at a time that I would, that really burned me and make sure you're using good models because it can be expensive. Like maybe you're turned off by the fact that I'm saying $200 a month for chat GPT. Okay. Well, I would pay probably $20,000 a month for an employee that that is this good. Like that's how much like that. That's what he is. Like he is a $20,000 a month employee that I'm paying $200 a month for. Right. And so I'd recommend starting out. I mean, you can start with the $20 a month plan, but if you use it and you get value out of it, you're going to quickly want to upgrade and you look at it as, as an investment. And hopefully you get that much or more out of it that you're putting in. Look, March, 2026 was, was my highest profit month in the business since COVID times. Yeah. Wow. I mean, I've, I've come on the podcast and told you how well piano in 21 days did during COVID because everybody wanted to learn piano. It was wild numbers, but business is going really well for this $200 a month employee. That's what I would say is more like a $20,000 a month employee. Yeah. Even in the context of the $3,500 a month SEO agency to be able to place that plus this other role, plus this other role, plus this other. Yeah. It may seem intimidating and sure. Start with the $20 a month plan. See where it gets you. Maybe you don't need it on 24 seven or doing stuff all the time. This was the other interesting use case I wanted to ask you about was building kind of your virtual mastermind around these different personas, like the skeptic person, the engineer person, the data person. It was like, oh, this is kind of an interesting model where now you have different personalities within Rocky to ask for feedback on certain ideas. I'm glad you brought that up, Nick. I mean, there's just so many cool things that he's doing that it's hard for me to remember all of them. But what you just mentioned is the AI council that he helped me build. And look, I'm following a lot of like AI influencers, a lot of open claw users and a lot of these ideas that I get from them. And then I can just like, I can literally say, Hey, Rocky, go watch this YouTube video and tell me if there's anything useful we could be implementing. And this is one of those cases where a guy was talking about his AI counsel system. And we took that and then we ran with it and made it work for our situation. Like we didn't copy it one for one. We optimized it as much as we could. So what we did was we took seven different models and assign them kind of a role, like the strategist, the engineer, the devil's advocate, so that big strategic questions, we can input it into this council and they can kind of talk about it and debate about it and give us their recommendations. So Rocky's not one of the seven, right? He's the one that hands it off to the seven roles. Okay. And they take a few minutes to analyze the situation and spit it back out to me. So you want me to give you an example of something running through the council? Sure. Yeah. So like I'm at a bit of a crossroads in my business, right? Online courses, right? The online course guy. I have wrestled with that pre-AI in terms of like, well, I also help people with memberships and coaching programs and things like that. Like I really help people with any kind of digital product. But now with AI, it's like, well, you know, AI is not going to make online courses completely irrelevant, but depending on the niche, like you can just go to AI and it can help you learn something. So I'm just trying to understand if I should be pivoting my business. I'm also really, really pumped about this AI stuff and the AI operator stuff. And so the question is basically like, hey, given all of this history and information, like what should I do with my brand going forward? And so I gave that to the AI council and it's a better output than just Rocky because there's seven powerful AI models analyzing the situation from all different perspectives. and ultimately what they suggested is, and I think this is the direction I'm going, is not completely getting away from digital products or anything like that, but go ahead and slowly transition to a personal brand, right? Instead of maybe the online course guy, just start using my name and maybe that's what I should have done nine years ago when I started this and be kind of the AI guy for digital product creators. And so the tagline that they came up with was helping digital product creators scale with AI. Okay. And I think that's new on your YouTube channel. Yeah. That's new on my YouTube channel. And you can see that my YouTube channel is just my name now. And that's not the online course guy. Got it. That's where we're starting the transition and seeing how it goes. Cause I'm still got the website, the online course guys still have the online course show. I try to make big decisions like too quickly. I try to take it kind of slowly. So we're starting on the YouTube channel and I'm just in general, starting to talk more and more about this AI operator stuff. And I don't want to be just like a general AI influence or anything. I want to help digital product creators because that's my bread and butter. That's what I still do too with Piano in 21 Days, how that type of person can scale using AI because that's exactly what I'm doing right now and what I'm loving doing right now. I don't think I've ever had this much fun in my business ever. It's so much fun. Yeah, I think that's kind of cool because we're, you know, our businesses are similar age. And so always like, I mean, for me, I get to talk to new people every week. And so that keeps it fun and interesting and exciting. But the behind the scenes part of like, well, what are the little process improvements that you could do that are really fun? And I think this would be absolutely one to play around with. And maybe that's the best use case is if you already have a business to apply it to, where you can look at OpenClaw as your new virtual assistant, your new operator or chief operating officer. What's your take on, and you see this a lot in the AI influencer videos of like, I gave OpenClaw the marching orders to go make a million dollars this year or make me $100,000 this month. And inevitably it turns into selling something AI bot related. It ends up being very meta, very circular. And sometimes. Yeah. You have to be very careful because the goal of a lot of those people is to get views and get attention. Right. And so how real is what they're showing you? And so, yeah, I see those posts all the time. Like I gave my open claw $50 and I said, if you don't make me money, I'm going to kill you. Right. And And the next day it had $3,000. Like, okay, that's a cool story, but I don't believe you, right? And it's not that simple. Yeah, how repeatable is it? Like, go find some edge on some Polymarket bet. And like, really? Exactly. And then the other thing that I see a lot is with OpenClaw, you can actually create multiple agents, right? So I've got Rocky, but like some people are creating a whole team and like they have their CEO and then they have their marketing person and their copywriter and all these different agents running on the one Mac mini. And then they have these great visuals of all of them like sitting at desks and doing work. I think that works really well for getting views. But in reality, that's not the best way to use one of these because Rocky can literally do it all. And when you start creating the multiple agents, they don't all have all the same context, right? Whereas Rocky has all the context and he can do all the roles. So I think org charts are meant for humans and work really well. But when we start getting into AI agents, one agent can do so much more than one human. Yeah. Okay. Jacques, this has been fascinating. Again, definitely check out his video on how to set this up because it kind of just goes step by step through the technical process, the hardware, the software, you know, how to communicate it with it through Telegram and all this stuff. So really helpful video. We'll link that up. Theonlinecourseguy.com slash Rocky is where to get your AI operator starter kit. Super helpful tool over there. So we'll link that up in the show notes as well. And we'll be right back with Jacques from The Online Course Guy and The Online course show coming up right after this. A lot of side hustlers suffer from this debilitating disease called what if-itis. What if it doesn't work? What if I don't have the skills? What if I pick the wrong path? But one thing 100% of our amazing side hustle show guests have in common is they took their shot. They faced down those what ifs and they got their answers through taking action. Our partner Shopify helps you turn those what ifs into why nots. Shopify is the commerce platform that powers millions of businesses around the world. What if you never built a website before? Well, they've got hundreds of ready-to-use templates that help you build a beautiful online store that matches your brand's style. What if people haven't heard about your brand? That's where everybody starts. Shopify helps you find your customers with email and scroll-stopping social media campaigns too. And what if you get stuck? Shopify is always around to share advice with their award-winning 24-7 customer support. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. Sign up for your $1 per month trial today at shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. In sports, there's this saying that speed is a weapon. And the same is true in business. If you're missing calls or being slow to follow up with customers, you're leaving money on the table. Sometimes without even realizing it because your potential customer, they've already moved on. That's why today's episode is brought to you by Quo, spelled Q-U-O. This is the business communications system built so you never miss a call. Quo is the number one rated business phone system on G2 with over 3,000 reviews, and it's built for how modern teams work. More than 90,000 businesses, from side hustlers and solo operators to growing teams, already rely on Quo to stay connected, stay professional, and consistently reachable. And here's what's really cool. Calls, texts, voicemails, transcripts, and contact deals all show up in one clean view in an app on your phone or your computer. So that way you and your team are always on the same page Plus there built AI that can even answer calls and qualify leads for you when you can pick up the phone Money is on the line Always say hello with Quo Try Quo for free, plus you get 20% off your first six months when you go to Quo.com slash sidehustle. That's Quo, Q-U-O dot com slash sidehustle. All right, we're back with Jacques from theonlinecourseguy.com for round two. This is the business idea donation round where This is something you might start yourself if you had more hours in the day. And maybe you do now that you got your AI operator in place or something you think listeners could run with. To me, given all the context of what we just talked about is an absolute no-brainer. And it is just an AI consultant. I mean, just look where I was three months ago. Like I was in my ChatGPT bubble. Most people are using ChatGPT and that's it. They're at that level one. And a lot of these people are business owners that have so much potential for how AI could be improving their business. And so I think there is such a need for good AI consultants, and it doesn't even have to be this open call thing, right? I mean, even if you out there listening are a ChatGPT user, and you start and you switch to Claude, like the application Claude and even the model Opus 4.6 is just so much better than ChatGPT in general. Like even if you make that switch, you're a better AI user and you could help business owners make that switch or you can help them implement systems, find out what they're struggling with and use AI to help them improve things. I think that is a great business to set up today once you train yourself a little bit to be an AI consultant. Yeah, you only have to be a couple steps ahead of the people that you're working with. And there's probably kind of a template that you could end up following or even especially if you go into like niche down to a specific industry or business owner type of person where it's like, okay, tell me about your pains. Tell me about your processes. How are you currently operating this? And let's see where there might be some opportunity for automation or some agentic help in those spaces. I don't know, would you play the content marketing card to attract business? Would you start cold calling people? Would you have an AI start cold calling people? How would you go about the marketing on this front? Yeah. So, I mean, it depends on who you are. Like if you don't have any platform yet, then just like starting content marketing might take a little too long. I think that the easiest path for most people is just to tap into your existing network. I mean, most people know business owners, right? And most people know people in general. And if you start just talking about this. I've been just like telling everybody I know about this, both online and personally. Yeah. And like, I'm getting texts from random people like, Hey, you know, your neighbor told me about what you're doing. I'm a doctor. Like I would love to implement some of this stuff. I'm getting random texts like that all the time, just because I've started talking about it to, to people that I know. So I think if you're not a content creator already, then that's, that's what I would do. Well, that was me last week. I was like, Hey, should we do an episode about this stuff? Cause I kept seeing your videos about it. Yeah, exactly. But that's because I put content out there. I mean, look, this, this stuff is wild. One of my really good friends lives on the next street over. And I was, I was telling him about this stuff and he immediately went out and got a Mac mini and I set it up for him because I wanted it to like make a YouTube video. Yeah. And this is great for side hustle nation. Like he is now creating and selling coloring books on Amazon with his open claw. Like that's how he is making money selling coloring books that he's not creating himself. Okay. And he's made a brand new business out of it. Wow. Okay. Well, there's an example of prompting to like, hey, let's go out and try and start a business here. Yeah. Okay. AI consultant for business owners, absolutely huge opportunity in this space. Tapping into the buzzword of the day. Everybody is aware of this. They know they need to be using it or they're going to get left behind. And all of a sudden, if you can raise your hand and be that person in their network who can help them set it up, do some process improvement, build them, maybe even build them their own little open claw operator. I think you can be a hero because the context savings of like, look, there's going to be 200 bucks a month to run this versus the $3,500 agency or however much you were paying previously. This could be a big cost savings and it would be easy to pitch that way to say, well, even I'll do it for free and you just pay me out of the savings over the next two or three months and we can go there. Let's move to round three, the triple threat. First here is a marketing tactic that is working right now. This could be on the course side. This could be on the piano side. What do you got for us? Yeah, let's go to the piano side. We haven't talked about that a whole lot. Nick, have you ever run a self-liquidating offer? No, not with any success or true dedication to it. Yeah. I mean, I first heard about these a long time ago and it's just always been on the back of my mind to try out. And this is something we've been doing finally in the past few months is running a self-liquidating offer for Piano in 21 Days. And so if anybody's not familiar with that concept, the idea is that you run paid ads to a low ticket offer. Ours is $27. And the idea is you wanna relatively break even on the ad versus this front end offer. And then any profit comes from upgrades or upsells kind of down the road. So what we did was we took the first five days of the piano course and turned it into a five-day piano challenge. It's literally fivedaypianochallenge.com. running ads to that. And there's an order bump and an upsell to where our average cart value is around $45. And that's around what we're spending in ads to get one customer. And then over the next week or 10 days, we're trying to get people to then buy our $500 to $800 full piano 121 days course. And when somebody does that, it's pure profit. So that is something that is not a new concept, but it's new for us that that's going pretty well. Yeah, that's surprising. I would have expected you to have had this dialed in years ago, but there's some moving parts involved. Well, how do I create a compelling offer that people are willing to pay for coming in cold or relatively cold, I imagine. And then, okay, we have dial in the landing page and the upsells and the order bumps and then all this other stuff. Because you got the funnel, the sequence dialed in after somebody opts in, like that's been firing for years. So if I can get people in the door for free, then everything else is gravy. Do you have a sense of how that is paying off in terms of conversion rates on the full course? Yeah. So if you look at it in terms of like ROAS, return on ad spend, we're about 2x. So that initial funnel is relatively breaking even. And then a small percentage of those people that buy will then upgrade to the full course. And ultimately, right now for every dollar we're putting in, we're getting about $2 out on the backend. Yeah, that's fantastic. So now it kind is a game of scaling up that spend and trying to find more people who wanna learn piano. Yeah, exactly. So earlier when I mentioned, you know, Rocky is helping with ads, like that's the ads that we're running. So he's monitoring that. He's giving us a daily brief on what's working, what's not working and making suggestions on ads. You know, I'm not a big ads guy. I think you probably know that. And one thing I've found interesting about this ads experiment is people often compare like creating free content versus ads. Well, content marketing, you just kind of have to continue to push out new content. Well, I'm discovering that's the case with ads too. You can't just make some ads, turn them on. Like you've got to continue to make fresh ads for them to be effective. So in a sense, when you're running ads, you're still have to be a consistent content creator. Is this YouTube? Is this meta? Where are you posting these? We're doing a meta ad. So they're running on Facebook and Instagram. Okay. And so still kind of short form hook type of video where they get somebody in and present them with this five day piano challenge. Exactly. Yeah. I'm just creating a bunch, a bunch of like 30 second videos and some work really well and some don't. Did you ever test going direct to the free lead magnet with an order bump? Because there's a couple of ways to do the self-liquidating type of thing where it's like, okay, if I expect to pay a lower cost per lead for, you know, the free opt-in, but then hopefully some people buy the, the order bump, or maybe they sign up for the $27 challenge, like on the thank you page or something. I would call that more of a tripwire where they're opting in for the freebie. And then on the next page, they get that tripwire offer where it's the low ticket once they opted in for something free. I haven't tested that exact model. What I have done in the past is run ads to my free workbook opt-in, and then they just go into my normal funnel that eventually tries to sell them the big course. And that's never really worked very well for ads. Okay. But what you're suggesting would be something good to test at some point. My gut would say that the people who bought the $27 thing and bought the upsells, my gut would say they would be more likely to convert down the road than just a regular freebie opt-in person. Yeah, that's the theory behind it. And mine is going well so far. But if I could just snap my fingers and convert what I've created to the tripwire model that you're suggesting, I think it would be a good test. And who knows, maybe I'll put Rocky on it one of these days. We'll see. We'll see. Maybe this will be another homework assignment. Add it to the to-do list or have my OpenClaw assistant try and set this up for me. Let's move to a new or new to you tool that you're loving right now. And for the sake of this episode, I'm going to cross OpenClaw off the list and make you come up with something else. That's fair. You just ruined the joke that I was going to say. Look, I do have a good answer here, and I don't know if you're using it. Are you familiar with the WhisperFlow? This is the voice to text thing? Yes. I'm not using it, but have heard of it. Like, changed my life. unbelievable. So whisper flow is a voice to text, but it's AI powered. Okay. So all I do is I hit a hotkey on my keyboard and then I start talking and it will convert my voice to text, but it's AI powered. So it fixes mistakes. Like if, if you say, you know, I'm going to the store today and I need to buy some milk. Actually, I mean, I mean butter. It will type out. I'm going to the store today and I'm going to buy butter. Okay. Right. It fixes any mistakes. It removes arms. It will format things nicely. And so this is especially helpful when you're interacting with AI and prompting AI as much as I'm doing. It's so much more efficient. And so Whisperflow is an absolute game changer. It's becoming very, very popular. And at this point, I could not live without it. And I don't really type anymore. And it's amazing. Everything going voice search. Cool. Whisperflow, we'll link that up in the show notes for this episode as well. How about your favorite book from the last 12 months? I'm going to go fiction if that's okay. And it's Project Hail Mary. Yes. It's my favorite book. I've read it three times. And the third time was recently to my 10 year old daughter who loves space. It is a sci-fi space book. And the movie recently came out and we were able to go see that together. It's a family friendly movie, fortunately. And I think she loves it as much as I do. And that's where the namesake for my AI operator comes from. So if you haven't read or seen Project Hail Mary, I absolutely love it. Sweet. We'll link that up as well. Definitely a good read. Fun story. So our mutual friend, Alex Barker, was holding this rejection challenge many, many years ago. And so my rejection challenge was I'm going to invite Andy Weir on the podcast because The Martian started out as this self-publishing project. And we had this connection to this place in California where he was working and living. And he was like, no, I'm working on my next book. So that was my rejection. That's my Andy Weir story. So what else got you excited this year? You got Rocky firing, you got these ads firing. What's the future hold for you this year? Maybe the rebrand on the online course guy stuff. I think the biggest thing is just like sharing this information with people. I was so pumped when I got your text the other day, like, hey, you want to come on the podcast to talk about it? Because, you know, I didn't reach out to you, which I've done in the past. Like, hey, I'm working on this cool online course stuff. I would love to share it with your audience. But you saw some of my content. And so that just like made my day that it resonated with you and you wanted to share with the audience. because I think that like whether we like it or not, this is here, like AI is here and AI agents are here. And like I said, I was so overwhelmed and scared by it that I didn't really do anything with it. But now that I have, it's just unbelievable and I'm just having so much fun. And so I'm gonna continue to work with Rocky, but then also share this information with people and help them set it up for themselves so that they can see all these amazing benefits that I've experienced. Yeah, this is as much for the listeners as it is for me because I've seen this stuff for months. I know I should be doing something with it, but dedicating the time to learn it and figure out how to set it up. I was like, oh, do I need my own hardware? And I'm like, oh, okay. But this has been super helpful, inspired me to go ahead and take action on it. Again, check out the AI Operator Starter Course. That's theonlinecourseguy.com slash Rocky. You'll be able to download that for free, watch the setup video, and start playing around with it. I think that's probably the best way to learn is just plug it in, see what you can get it to do and start to get this renewed sense of energy and excitement towards your business. So Jacques, again, really appreciate you stopping by the online course show. Of course, if you prefer podcasts, we'll link up the YouTube channel as well. And let's not forget Piano in 21 Days if you want to go learn how to play piano fast. Big thanks to Jacques for sharing his insight. Thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone. SideHustleNation.com slash deals is where to go to find all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. If you're finding value in the show, the greatest compliment is to share it with a friend. Fire off that text message. Somebody who needs some open claw, needs some more AI in their life, let them know about this one. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.