Akamai Cloud, GPUs for agentic AI, bring AI inferencing closer to users everywhere. Get started at akamai.com. This kid made over $1 million in one year with a business idea that nobody's talking about. AI generated books. He invited us into his apartment in Toronto to show us where he found this idea, how he started on a budget, and how he built it in a few hours a day while attending college full-time. Before the money, Joe Poplis was just a uni student stocking shelves for $11 an hour. Now, he's making a living selling thousands of e-books using an unconventional method with chatGPT. Initially, this wasn't the way I did it, but this is the best way to do it now. But the craziest part about his business is actually not how he creates the books, it's how he advertises them. The majority of my money has been made off of dads. The AI revolution is here, and Joe is living proof. I'm Pat Walls, and this is Starter Story. You built an amazing business. Tell me about who you are and what you built. I'm Joe. I'm a 20-year-old computer science student. I've built a book brand that is now valued at $930,000. I generate all books with AI, and then I market them on Pinterest to middle-aged moms. How did you come up with this business idea? 2020 was the year when I graduated high school. I started working on a use case for GPT-3. I got a really good idea of how AI could be used in different business models. In 2022, I was like, why don't I just utilize my pre-existing skill set? AI, GPT-3 is now out. A few businesses know about it. Maybe I could help provide some value to some small, mid-sized businesses who want to learn more about AI. Around that time that I got that idea, people actually started reaching out to me, asking about my experience at OpenAI. I had a kind of tab on my LinkedIn that showed that I had worked on use cases for OpenAI. For the GPT-3 beta, they started asking me certain things. It got to the point where I started charging for the advice that I was giving. In July of 2022, I met with the publishing company where I got the idea. They showed me their stats and how much money they were making off of selling books. That was a complete eye-opener for me. I didn't realize how many people bought books. Per month, their revenue was about $2 million, which was absolutely insane to me. I thought, why can't I just start up something similar? Because what they were doing was so insanely simple, but they were not doing anything AI book related. When I met with them, I told them nothing about my idea that I had kind of formulated while we were on the call. In the month of August, I generated 10, 20 books. I generated a few more in September. By the end of September, I was at 40 books. I generated 40 books with AI. On October 3rd, I hit my first profitable day. That was like $20. October 4th, I was like $40. From there, it almost grew exponentially. On December 28th, I'll never forget this day. That's when I hit my first 1K day profit. That was crazy. That was just after Christmas. My whole family knew about it. I told all my friends. You built this business from money that you made for your minimum wage job. Did you do it all yourself? Yeah, it was completely self-funded. If I did it properly the first time with the stuff that I know now, I could have started it up in under $500. But I just made a bunch of mistakes. It was just a new venture for me. How did you manage building this business while you're in school and you had a part-time job? That was probably the hardest part for me. I was fitting in time for me to work on the book brand when I was studying for a huge test that was coming up in school. I dropped two courses to work on my book brand, but I spent most of the day working on school and then I would spend five, six hours in the night working on my book brand. How can someone who's watching right now get into AI generative books? The best way to start off learning is taking an interest in these generative AI models and learning how they work, how you can get the best output out of them with the correct settings, with the correct prompts. Then you need to find a niche, a niche that has traffic, a niche that has a lot of ambitious people in it. When you have people like that, you can tug on their emotions more and you can present the outcome to them that they want to achieve and the only way to get to that outcome is through your product. Your first AI e-book that you created, tell me about how you did it. I literally knew nothing about books, so I was researching how to actually build a book. I knew I could write it with AI, like I knew the output would be good enough, but I had no knowledge on how I should structure it, what should be included, all of that. When I created my first book, it was probably the worst book anybody could ever read. Like, there was no congruency, nothing. As I actually started purchasing my competitors' books and reading through them, I knew exactly what I needed to include. It's not as easy as just putting into chatGPT, write me a book on whatever. Initially, this wasn't the way I did it, but this is the best way to do it now. You get chatGPT to create the book outline. Let's say, for example, you have five chapters, and then per each chapter, there are five topics. You are going to go through each topic in each chapter and generate that topic. Even though I wasn't super experienced with writing books, people still like them. The first few eBooks that I put out, they enjoyed what they were reading. Hey, real quick, that business you want to start? Let me show you how you can make your first dollar ten times faster by using case studies. Imagine you could read the exact steps to how someone built a million-dollar business and the mistakes they made so that you can avoid them when you launch. Well, at Starter Story, we have a library of over 4,000 case studies and business idea breakdowns where you can do this all backed by real data. For example, Luke joined Starter Story and dove into our case study about a newsletter that makes $25 million a year. Just one month later, he launched his own newsletter that did $5,800 in revenue in the first 30 days. It's simple. He studied what works, implemented it, and avoided the mistakes of people that were just a few steps ahead of him. If you're serious about building something, check out Starter Story.com. We're running a special deal this week, and you can click the link below in the description to get it. Much love, and I hope you guys enjoy the rest of the video. Peace. Can you break down how much profit you made and what the business is valued at today? To date, I've made $390k profit, and my current valuation is $930,000. What's the typical profit margin in a business like this? My profit margin is about 70-80%. The only real expense that takes away from my profit is the ads. I have my premium extension subscriptions, which is about $200 a month. Creating books, to create a full book, it's about $3 with GPT-3. Then I have my proofreader just go through everything. I have them on a retainer, but you can just do the proofreading yourself at the starting. When you started out, you proofreaded everything. I did, yeah. I spent a lot of time. I would basically generate a full book, do a rough draft, and then I would meticulously go through each chapter, each subtopic, just going through the book, and I just do one revision of that, and then I have a good, ready-to-go book. Tell me more about the marketing side of things. As I understand, you make money with ads. How specifically does that work? The majority of my money has been made off of Pinterest ads. When you land on Pinterest and you start with Pinterest ads, you're going to start off with consideration campaigns, and then you're going to move into conversion campaigns. Consideration campaigns are going to give you a general idea of which niche you should be selling your product in. You're going to test out different niches with consideration campaigns. Then you're going to go way more granular. You're going to set up your Pinterest tag and then move into conversion campaigns where you're really going to dial in every single stat. Take a look at everything, your landing page copy, whether people are converting above the fold, below the fold, all of that. Tell me a little bit about how the landing pages work. How do people find the landing pages and what's the purpose of that? The landing page is going to give you room to show the lead value stacks, what's provided, chapter previews, everything. It gives you so much more real estate to sell them on the product. It's almost impossible to sell if you don't do a landing page. A landing page is also the first touch point where the lead is going to get a really good idea of your overall brand image. So if your landing page is really, really bad, doesn't look professional, they're going to bounce. They're going to bounce right away, and you're going to get a bounce rate of over 80%, over 70%. That's when you know that your landing page doesn't look professional. With AI Books, there's a low barrier to entry, right? Anybody can write an AI Book and sell it. How do you approach competition and things getting saturated? I'm at a point right now where my brand has so much momentum. When I see new competitors coming to the space, it doesn't scare me. It hasn't affected my profit, and I don't expect it. I don't see it affecting my profit in the future either because I have such a loyal customer base. There is such a huge market as well. I'm only advertising on Pinterest. When you take Google Ads, Facebook, into account, there's so much room for growth. I'm sure there's going to be many, many, like hundreds of book brands popping up, but the market is so huge. By the point that I predict or expect it to get saturated, I'll be well on my way. I think that'll be years down the line though. And saturation just means more competition. It means you need to be better at what you do, provide more value in your product, and I think it's good for people to strive towards providing more value. How sellable is a business like this? Initially, I didn't think it would be super sellable, and I wanted to test the waters, and what I did is actually post it a bunch of the details just on a few marketplaces. I just wanted to see what investors would offer for my business. The very first offer I got for the entire business was $930,000. When I saw that number, and I got the email notification that I got an offer, I was like, I'm really on to something here. Now, I'm actually working with an investor who is purchasing 40% of my book brand, and I'm able to continue building up another book brand to then maybe sell another 40%. So it's a completely repeatable process where you can build a book brand, sell it, build another, sell it, and it doesn't mean you have to sell this whole corporation. You can sell just parts of the corporation, like what I'm doing right now. You made all this money selling AI books. What does a typical day look like for you? What's your typical routine? All of my mornings are usually spent on making sure the ads are running correctly, making sure my proofreader is doing what he needs to do. I'm just checking in with the business. Now, I'm working a lot, and this is mostly the afternoon. I'm working on teaching people how to build their own book brand. That's been extremely rewarding. I've had some really successful students. They've been absolutely killing it. And then in the night, I actually make house music as a hobby, and I actually have a few songs posted to my Spotify. So AI music, is that the next thing? It could be. It could be. That's amazing. What's your DJ name? It's just my name, Joe Popoulos. You made a lot of money as a 20-year-old. Have you bought anything cool with the profits? I really haven't bought a lot of things. The only thing I've bought is just this Rolex, and I know it's going to keep its value. I want to stay away from depreciating assets as much as I can. For now, I just want to make a huge bag, and then in the future, in the near future, I'll invest in, you know, get a nice car, all that kind of stuff. But for now, I'm just solely focused on building businesses. I'm very lean, and I want to stay that way for a while. If you could sit on Joe Popoulos' shoulder when you were just starting out, you had a couple failed business ventures, what would you tell him? I would tell him to prioritize learning over earning, and be more focused on learning the skills, building up a huge skill set, instead of being focused on how much I'm earning. It was almost impossible for me to fail with the book brand because I had built up so many skills beforehand. Thank you, Joe. Yeah. Follow us at Vice, and you will make millions with AI books. See ya. Did you make house music? I did my house music. Do you want to hear the latest song? Hell yeah.
