You're an Expert and You Don't Even Know It…AI Can Prove It

Ever feel like everyone else has some special skill worth selling but you're just… doing your job? Here's the thing: you're wrong. 

This episode is all about the expertise you've built up over years of showing up, solving problems, and figuring things out…the stuff that feels so natural to you that you've completely stopped seeing it as valuable. 

Joe Downs and Peter Swain walk you through how to use AI to pull that hidden knowledge out of your head, sharpen it into something people will actually pay for, and put it in front of the right audience. 

No guru status required. No starting from scratch. Just you, your existing expertise, and the AI tools that help you finally see — and sell — what you've already got. 

This one's for anyone who's ever thought "I'm not an expert at anything." You are. Let's prove it.

Listen For

3:16 Why are most people completely blind to their own expertise — and how does AI crack it open?

8:37 What prompts should you actually use in Claude or ChatGPT to uncover knowledge you didn't know you had?

17:03 How can AI take your raw expertise and package it into three offers someone will pay for?

19:51 What is the "Big Mac Index" method — and how does it help you reverse-engineer your niche using AI?

28:49 How do you find your first five paying customers without a website or spending a single dollar on ads?

Links Mentioned

Gemini AI (by Google)

ElevenLabs

Notebook 11

Read.ai

Otter.ai

Fireflies.ai

Nano Banana 2

Claude AI (by Anthropic)

Wey App

Email the “Idiots” Joe and Peter

Joe Downs

Website | Email | LinkedIn | YouTube

Peter Swain

Website | Email | LinkedIn | X

Transcript

Speaker Key: Joe Downs  Peter Swain

Peter Swain [00:00]

And it's like, you're charging 200 bucks an hour. You should be on 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 an hour for what you can do. But it's like, yeah, bro, I've done this all my life. Yeah, that's exactly the reason. So if you flip it around, I mean, even like a non-AI process and go, "What do I find the easiest in the world?" That's probably the thing that you can earn a million dollars a year for.

Joe Downs [00:26]

Last week I was up in Ithaca doing due diligence on a storage and warehouse facility for my company. One of the tenants is a boutique coffee company called 48, fantastic coffee, by the way. And I'm talking to one of the owners, Matt, and I was just curious about his business. He starts walking me through everything — sourcing, roasting, packaging, shipping, wholesale, retail, how he helps new barista owners get started with equipment and business setup. And he's got to be doing it pushing 20 years. He's seen it all, done it all. It was fascinating to listen to. But he had this defeated kind of vibe about him. And so I kept asking him questions. I said, "What is your concern?" He said, "Well, the big guys, the ones with money behind them, the hedge fund guys that all want their own coffee brand, they're all coming into business and it's making the landscape difficult." And I said, "Matt, you've got this knowledge.

[01:16]

Have you ever thought about a podcast?" And he goes, "Who would listen?" Who would listen? Now, Matt's got coffee, right? But here's what's true about any industry, any skill, anything you've been doing for a long time. There are people on the outside looking in and they yearn for the knowledge you've just picked up by surviving the last 10, 15, 20 years, just doing your job, and they'll pay for it. You've got something like that rattling around in your head right now and you think it's just stuff you know. Well, today we're going to find it, package it, and get someone to pay for it. I'm Joe Downs. With me is Peter Swain. We're just a couple of successful idiots who figured out how to use AI to improve our lives and power our businesses. And that's what we're going to show you how to do today as well.

[02:05]

Peter, true or false? AI can identify your hidden expertise faster than a Brit can identify which tea someone's drinking from across the room. False. Ooh.

Peter Swain [02:18]

Yeah. Don't mess with tea. Come on. We built an empire on that.

Joe Downs [02:22]

No. Tea doesn't have any smell to it. So is this the accoutrements that go

Peter Swain [02:28]

with it? Do you want a fun fact about tea?

Joe Downs [02:31]

Tell me.

Peter Swain [02:32]

So it's either called tea or cha, if you look across the globe. And it all comes down to, was it shipped from the east of China or was it shipped from the west of China? Because if it went that way over land, it came from somewhere that called it cha, part of the dialect. So all the stuff in India is called cha, because it came out of China and down that way.

Joe Downs [02:56]

When you say cha, do you mean — do I pronounce that chai? Chai. Chi? Okay. Same thing.

Peter Swain [03:01]

Whereas if it went east, it was called tea because it came out of a port that was the dialect, the variation of the word.

Joe Downs [03:10]

I feel like we need to unpack that further in a future episode. Do I need more research on that?

Peter Swain [03:15]

Fun facts.

Joe Downs [03:16]

All right. About tea. Never know what you're going to get on this show. All right. Well, here's what we're going to go over today, folks. Three things. And what's cool is you can use them in parts or as just one total flow. So first we're going to help you figure out what you actually know that other people would pay for. That sounds crazy, but that's what we're going to unpack today. Because most people are completely blind to their own expertise. And then once you find it, we're going to use AI to package it into something real — not a vague idea, an actual offer that someone could say yes to. And at the end, this is the part most people skip, we're going to show you how to find your first five paying customers without spending a dime on ads or building a website. All right?

Peter Swain [04:01]

That's crazy.

Joe Downs [04:02]

Crazy. A little bit of pressure on you, Peter.

Peter Swain [04:04]

30 minutes or less. Okay.

Joe Downs [04:06]

I'm just making promises. I've got

Peter Swain [04:09]

to write a check. Yeah. Okay, let's do it.

Joe Downs [04:12]

All right. So Peter, this is the thing that kills me. I talk to people all the time who are sitting on gold mines of knowledge like Matt up at 48, but when you ask them, what are you good at? They go blank or they talk about what their company does. Meanwhile, they've been doing something very specific usually for 10, 15, 20 years, and they know things that would take someone else well — at least a decade to learn or go through that experience, et cetera. So why is this so hard for people to see that in themselves, and how does AI actually help us crack it open and discover what our inner monologue is?

Peter Swain [04:48]

Yeah. So as you said at the beginning of the call — or the pod — because it's easy, you assume it's easy, and because it's easy to you only exists because you're an expert at the thing. People every single day discount their superpower because the thing that you find easiest is your superpower, and your superpower, by virtue of it being your superpower, is the thing that's most valuable to the world. So the thing you find easiest is the thing that's most valuable. And people consistently — I've got loads of coaches and consultants in my space and they'll say, I'd be like, "How much do you charge by the hour?" And they'll say, "200 bucks." And you look at — the one person I'm thinking of specifically used to be like the head of coaching for an automotive company — and it's like, "You're charging 200 bucks an hour. You should be on 1,000, 2,000, 5,000 an hour for what you can do.

[05:42]

" But it's like, "Yeah, bro, I've done this all my life." Yeah, that's exactly the reason. So if you flip it around, I mean, even like a non-AI process and go, "What do I find the easiest in the world?" That's probably the thing that you can earn a million dollars a year for. So in Matt's case, that's exactly what you're seeing. We see it. Unfortunately, you see it quite often.

Joe Downs [06:02]

But like AI is a mental block — I mean, I'm going back episodes, you even got a little testy with me or upset with me for saying AI is the mental block — and it's... The same situation exists here. It's stage fright. Yes, inside of me, if you put me on the couch, a therapist or psychologist could just get me to start rambling. And then if you recorded it, you're making the argument that — and I am too, obviously — but that there's value in just the ramblings that are coming out of our heads and whatever it is that you have experience in.

Peter Swain [06:42]

Well, it's a trifecta, I think. First of all, because you find it easy, you negate it. Second of all, our education system rewards hard work. So we are taught from a very young age, and our parents teach us from a very young age. If your kids or my kids did their two-hour homework in two minutes and they did it well, I doubt — I could be wrong for you, Joe — but I doubt for me, I doubt I'd say, "Great, you can go and play on your Xbox for an hour and 58 minutes." My reward for them doing it well would probably be to do more work.

Joe Downs [07:13]

Or check it. You can't be right.

Peter Swain [07:16]

Yeah. So what am I teaching them? I'm not teaching them that two minutes' worth of work is worth two hours. I'm teaching them that they should fill the two hours with meaningful labor.

Joe Downs [07:25]

That's a good point.

Peter Swain [07:27]

The poem "If." "If you can fill an hour with da, da, da, da, da, then you truly are a man, my son." I'm from Rudyard Kipling. Man, I'm dropping gems today — Rudyard Kipling and this. So you've got this trifecta. Trifecta point number one is if it's easy for you, you don't understand that it's valuable. Trifecta point number two, you're taught as a child that hard work has a reward and an effort to it. So you're taught that effort equals output. So if it's easy for you, it's no effort for you, therefore you don't perceive it as valuable. And then the kind of triple whammy of the whole thing is socially, we're taught not to boast and brag. We're taught that false humility is a good thing. Now, humility is a great thing, but false humility is, I think, a very toxic thing. And by doing a podcast, you're inherently saying, "I'm brilliant at — or at least I think I'm brilliant at — or I have value to add in the equation because you're standing on a stage talking to people.

Joe Downs [08:25]

" Well, I totally agree, obviously. But how do we... When I'm saying the mental block, I was doing a poor job of trying to tee up the example here.

Peter Swain [08:35]

We want to get to how AI can help with this?

Joe Downs [08:37]

Yes. I don't even know what to ask AI. Pick an industry, pick a profession. A single professional obviously has a skill they're already charging for. I'm talking about someone who was an employee for many years. I'm struggling. You work in a lab somewhere. I don't know. You've got an incredible amount of knowledge in there about how that lab works, the dos and don'ts, how you would even set up a lab. All the mistakes that were made when this lab was designed by someone who wasn't even a lab rat. You've got all that knowledge in there. But when I look at Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, what is the prompt? How do I get it? I don't even know how to get it out, and what am I going to do with it if I do get it out?

Peter Swain [09:25]

So I did this for myself. So the way I did it is I went to Claude, obviously voice prompt, and I said, "Hey, we're going to extract my monetizable skills. This is how I think we're going to do it, but you can add to it." So I gave it some free rein. So that's kind of my first transferable skill for people. If you know exactly — yeah, this is worth going into for a second. If you're a domain expert at something, tell it exactly what you want it to do. If you're not a domain expert in something, let it lead the way a little bit.

[10:04]

So if you're used to extracting genius from somebody for the sake of packaging it as a product, then great. Say do this, then do this, then do this. So if somebody's listening to this and it's like, "No, I've done that for all of my life," then ignore me. Do it the way that you know how to do it. But if you're like, "I don't even know how to start," give it some leeway. So here's what I did. I said, "Hey, Claude, I want to extract my genius into monetizable skills. I want them individual and categorized. So the closest to my job would be a CRO — chief revenue officer. So I want you to walk me through 30 scenarios to ask me what I would do in that scenario. And from that list, I want you to ascertain where my zone of genius is inside that." So the questions it asked were, for example: a product that you thought would perform well isn't performing.

[11:00]

Do you A, segment the data and look at it from that perspective? Do you B, do a questionnaire and go and ask existing customers why they did buy? Do you C, run further ads to different demographics in order to — or do you D — you see what I mean? And it came back from — my answer was, I would look at the upsells and the downsells, how we are setting the price — and it went, "Great. So you're not data-led, so we can throw that out because you'd have done that. You don't want the customer-led." And it said, "I'm curious why you didn't do that." And I went, "Because customers will just tell me faster horses. Interviewing my existing customers isn't the problem. I need to interview the people that aren't my customers, which I can't do." And it went, "Okay, fair enough." So we did these 30 questions and it came back really quite scarily accurate, saying, "These are your sweet spot.

[12:02]

These are the top 10 things which you are world-leading at, and these are the 40 that you could earn a great living from, and these are the 30 that you're pretty good at." So if you take Matt as an example, Matt could do the same thing, but walk through a day in the life of, "I run a coffee roasting company. I want to work out where within that big range is my specific range, walk me through a day in the life and ask me questions as to how I'd handle different situations and scenarios and let it discern from your responses where you're strong and where you're weak." And we've definitely spoken about this before — don't trust the first output. So my AI has a lot more context about me than other people will have at this stage in their journey. So when it comes back, feel free to disagree.

[12:53]

It works for you, not the other way around. So if you're like, "No, I don't want that. Get rid of that. I'd find that boring." And then Joe, you're part of my community — that document, that monetizable skillset became the genesis of all of my teaching because it's stuff that I could just wax lyrical about for any one of those bullets. I think there were 88 or something in total, and any one of them I could do a whole day on stage and be very, very happy.

[13:24]

Because that's my fun place.

Joe Downs [13:27]

It really sounds — I mean, you say this on air, you say it off air, you say it in your mastermind, you say it in private conversations. It's just context. It's just the insane amount of context you can give it will directly result in how — and I say insane in a good way — how insanely amazing the responses will be as to what you can do.

Peter Swain [13:51]

It's context and imagination. The imagination piece comes from thinking of the question, the prompt — because in the beginning of their journey, I remember you did this, like at the beginning of your journey, you're like, "AI can do that? AI can do that?" And it's about three months in when people stop saying that to me anymore, because they're like, "Oh, it can basically do everything." The question goes from could it to how does it? What is the best way to get there, instead of could it?

Joe Downs [14:19]

Yeah. I'm in a process of refinement at this point, not disbelief. I'm long past that point. It's

Peter Swain [14:26]

discernment and refinement. You're like, "Yeah, you just gave me a bad answer, and you can now tell why it's bad." But yeah, at this stage, I think if anyone were to run the prompts and the context I've just described — like, "This is a day in the life," or "This is the closest job title to my job." And you could do that as a housewife, a house husband, a mom, a dad — anywhere, as you said, anywhere that you're like, "I'm really comfortable with this. I think I'm really good at this." You could easily take that and turn it into knowledge that can then be packaged, productized, sold, et cetera.

Joe Downs [15:02]

Yeah, no doubt. And I think that was the issue Matt was running up against — he was already advising people, but then losing business even after the fact to capitalism, unfortunately. But

Peter Swain [15:15]

I'd like to add something in for Matt. And Matt, I wish I'd met you because I like coffee. Why don't we have some coffee to give away on the pod, Joe? You missed an opportunity there. I should have left with — we could have had our first sponsor and you missed it. But anyway, for Matt, the other thing I would say is, because my background before AI was as a behavioral marketer, I did that for 30 years. And I used to say this quite often to people: remember, one meaningful conversation outweighs a million likes. We get sent by our producer the statistics of the pod, and I don't really care. But when you send me items from the mailbag of people that have listened and gotten value from it, it makes my day. For me and you and for Matt, he doesn't need a million people to listen to this podcast.

[16:04]

What he needs is one person that could come and say, "I was looking to invest $10 million into my own thing. Could I partner with you and take a minor position with you instead, because you're obviously an expert at this." Just having the podcast establishes prestige for the person — the numbers aren't necessarily the most important thing. One meaningful conversation is worth way more than a million likes.

Joe Downs [16:31]

Couldn't agree more. All right. So part two of this — if somebody did this exercise that we just talked about and AI told them they have deep knowledge, and let's say it's QuickBooks for small restaurants, I don't know, right? They've run the books for three different restaurants over 10 years as an example. Let's say if you've done that, you've seen every mistake, every shortcut, every tax trap, right?

Peter Swain [17:00]

And you made a few of them.

Joe Downs [17:02]

Right.

[17:03]

That's probably how you learn. How does AI turn that raw expertise into something someone would actually pay for? I'm trying to take the... We could use Matt even again. Okay, he does the exercise, he's done the day in the life of Matt, everything he's ever touched in the business, but that's not selling him anything. So how can AI then take this... I guess you could write prompts, right? You could write a prompt that says, "I want to help restaurant owners stop losing money on bookkeeping mistakes, create three different offers that could sell — one low price, one mid-range, one premium." I don't know. I'm just thinking what they could do or what he could do. Is that how you would suggest he take... I've got my knowledge, now how do I package it?

Peter Swain [17:55]

Love it. So in the first piece of this, what we've done is we've identified the target and now we're trying to get to the bullseye, right? And you could do what you just said and it would work really well, but I am curious — since I'm dropping knowledge about the origins of the word tea today — origin story: have you heard of the Big Mac Index?

Joe Downs [18:12]

Big Mac Index? Are you about to make a Royale with Cheese joke on me from...

Peter Swain [18:18]

I am not, although

Joe Downs [18:19]

Fiction?

Peter Swain [18:20]

we could do things. I can actually quote... Let's not do that. Let's stay on.

Joe Downs [18:23]

Oh, that was the quarter pounder. You're right. Big Mac Index. No, I don't.

Peter Swain [18:26]

The Big Mac Index. For about — I think it was like 10, 20 years — the World Bank tried to work out the relative wealth per country. So they looked first at GDP per capita. The problem with GDP per capita is it gets massively skewed by very wealthy people. So the GDP per capita of Brunei is millions upon millions upon millions of dollars, but that's because the Sultan of Brunei is worth tens of billions of dollars. So that way didn't work. And after all this time spent trying to work this number out, they came up and said, "Somebody must have already done this work for us." And it turned out they had. And the answer was McDonald's. McDonald's spends a lot of money every year making sure the price of a Big Mac is the same relative price for the average person across every country.

[19:20]

So if you go to Pakistan, India, Singapore, the UK, France, Germany, America, Brazil, a Big Mac will cost you the same in terms of your relative wealth if you're on an average wage.

Joe Downs [19:34]

Interesting.

Peter Swain [19:35]

And it's called the Big Mac Index. Now, the reason I use this is to say quite often in life, you don't need to do the work that you've just described because somebody else has already done the work for you. So let's take this QuickBooks restaurateur example.

[19:51]

You could do exactly what you said. "I want to help small restaurants in America save money in QuickBooks, tell me five things I could solve." You could do that, or you could do it the other way around and say, "Who are the top five experts that people listen to, subscribe, pay, coach, consult in this area?" And reliably, weirdly, there are always at least five. You can take the most niche subject, there are still five people out there, and then it'll come back and say, "It's Jim, Joe, Harry, Sally, and Jane." You're like, "Great." The next prompt is then: what is their main methodology and philosophy? What is it that these people teach and what is their unique viewpoint? And then this is where it gets magic. Then you take the output that we just did from the first one — this day in the life, "Here are my skills" — and you say, "Combine this with this and find the gaps.

[20:50]

" So instead of going, "Here's my skillset, what five things can I teach?" you go the other way around and say, "Who are the experts already in the industry and what gap exists that they're not speaking into?"

Joe Downs [21:03]

Okay.

Peter Swain [21:05]

So you carve out a niche versus going the other way around — you might end up head to head competing with Tony Robbins, but that's probably not going to help you much because he's probably going to be better, more sophisticated, and have more money for marketing. If you want to be in the personal development space, as an example, you're going to have to find a unique angle that allows you to exist in that space. And it's a big enough space that if you find the angle, you're going to succeed. So reverse engineer as the World Bank did with McDonald's — reverse engineer from the people in the market versus engineering from your perspective forwards.

Joe Downs [21:43]

Oh, I like it. So that's going to help us narrow down what we're going to package.

Peter Swain [21:51]

Yeah. We've now gone from "here's the target," which is, what was my area of expertise? We've now got to the bullseye — like, okay, this is what I'm shooting at. What we now need is: how are we going to package it, and how are we going to deliver the arrow?

Joe Downs [22:04]

So give me the prompt for packaging it.

Peter Swain [22:07]

Packaging it. I would turn around and say — I would next go to: who would you expect to be the average buyer of this, and what price point will they sit within? Now, we're kind of blending marketing and AI a bit for a second.

Joe Downs [22:21]

Yeah.

Peter Swain [22:22]

The price that you can charge somebody is directly correlated to how much prestige you have in the area. So if you're — like Joe, for example — you're kind of like a seven out of 10 at the moment and quickly rising up to a 10. So if you want Joe's consultancy, you should buy it now, not later. In the world of storage, you are an expert, but you're not an established-name expert yet, and very, very soon you will be. So you're a seven, eight out of 10. But when you've got the name behind you, then you're the 10. So if you're looking at something going, "I've never actually spoken on this. I haven't done any social media on this. I don't have a website for this," then you're going to be like, "One, two." It's not how good you are, it's how much prestige you have.

Joe Downs [23:09]

So if Matt's listening — I just keep thinking about Matt in that conversation. If he's listening, he should probably start that podcast to give himself some name recognition.

Peter Swain [23:18]

A hundred percent.

Joe Downs [23:19]

Even if it's not name recognition, it's something to point back to.

Peter Swain [23:22]

Exactly. And then his prestige goes up. Now, if you're a one out of 10 prestige or a 10 out of 10, you still have a viable business. Just at the one out of 10, you're going to be selling $99 courses and you're going to sell them digitally and you're going to sell 10,000 of them because you still have the wherewithal and the skill to teach the thing, but you don't have the wherewithal and the skill and the prestige to carry the price. Now, if you're a 10 out of 10 prestige, then you can do a three-day retreat for $100,000. You still end up on the same money.

Joe Downs [23:58]

And it's the same content, right? 100%. Same program, same... Yeah. I mean, we've all seen this if you've been in the entrepreneur, guru circuit. Yeah.

Peter Swain [24:08]

But we do it as well. The reason that America's Next Top Model hires Tyra Banks, not Jane Smith, is because it's Tyra Banks, not because she's necessarily the best person to do it, but because she is the known face behind it. It's the same across the board. I could teach a personal development seminar because I've been in the space long enough, but you're not going to pay me the same as you'd pay Tony Robbins, even if I could prove that my IP was better. So once we know that — okay, we're solving QuickBooks for America, I don't have a well-known name, you're going to give AI that context. I don't have a name. I don't have any background. I don't have anything. Who are we selling this to? Give me three price options. And it will come back — probably, I'd imagine — and give you roughly what I've just said.

[25:04]

So if you're like, "Yes, I've got a million followers and da, da, da, da, da," it's going to push you towards a premium price point with a high-touch delivery. And if you have a non-premium, non-prestige profile, it's going to push you towards a low price point with a low-touch delivery — would be my guess.

Joe Downs [25:23]

So folks, my takeaway is the difference between expertise and income — and now you've added another layer to that, levels of income — it's all packaging. And I mean that because even the difference between the $99 course and the $10,000 retreat is how you package your expertise, not the expertise you actually have.

Peter Swain [25:50]

We're dropping loads of gems today. Have you ever seen the VW Touareg? The

Joe Downs [25:55]

car?

Peter Swain [25:56]

Yeah.

Joe Downs [25:56]

Yeah.

Peter Swain [25:57]

I mean — have you seen a Porsche Cayenne?

Joe Downs [25:59]

Yeah, they look very similar, don't they?

Peter Swain [26:01]

They're exactly the same.

Joe Downs [26:02]

I believe it.

Peter Swain [26:03]

And when I say exactly the same, I mean the same pieces coming off the same production line. They are exactly the same.

Joe Downs [26:10]

Engine and body, right?

Peter Swain [26:12]

Body, chassis, framework. Bells and

Joe Downs [26:14]

whistles are different.

Peter Swain [26:16]

Yeah. But literally, I was lucky enough once to own a Porsche Cayenne, and one of the ways they sell it to you is to say, "Hey, if anything goes wrong, you don't need to use Porsche spares. You could use VW spares." And obviously it's a great sales point because when you get to it, you don't. You're like, "No, I've got a Porsche. I want Porsche parts in my Porsche."

[26:33]

But it's just proof of what you said about packaging. It's just packaging. A guy just did this thing where he sold McDonald's burgers at a food show and he gave them a different name and he was charging $99 for a burger and he was getting food critics — I just saw this the other day — getting food critics signing off on this thing going, "Oh, it was the most amazing. It was succulent and it was moist, da, da, da, da, da." And out the back, he had a thousand Big Macs and he was just unpackaging them, repackaging them, and bringing them out with garnish, and people are like, "This is the most amazing burger ever." It was literally just a Big Mac.

Joe Downs [27:12]

Yep, yes, but this one goes to 11.

Peter Swain [27:16]

So yeah, packaging the product — the product itself is not the thing that makes people perceive the value. It's the framing and the packaging around the product that makes people perceive value.

Joe Downs [27:29]

That's so true. All right. So AI does the packaging, you get the $99. Folks, you've got to package yourself, and actually you use AI to do that — in a podcast or gosh, YouTube videos, which could create all kinds of content for you, blog posts, whatever, shorts — AI can do it all for you, but you still have to show up and that's the hardest part. But you've already done it. You've got the knowledge, you've got the expertise, you've got the offer now. So Peter, we've got to find five people to buy it without a website and without spending a dollar on marketing. And this is the part everybody skips. They do all the work, they've got their expertise, they build the offer, like I just said, and then they freeze because now they have to go sell something. And you know the old saying — 90% of people would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy, or I forget what the actual statistic is, but it's an insanely stupid number, right?

[28:27]

I feel like people, when it comes to selling, would rather be in the casket than selling the casket as well. It's terrifying for people. So how do you...

Peter Swain [28:37]

You can even know in your gut that your baby that you've just brought to life is really good. But it does hurt.

Joe Downs [28:43]

Yeah.

Peter Swain [28:44]

People say it's not personal. Well, then they haven't been an entrepreneur. It is.

Joe Downs [28:49]

All right. Well, I told you I was putting you on the hot seat. So how are we finding five customers without spending a dollar and building a website?

Peter Swain [28:58]

I'm not going to do the AI answer. I'll let you do it for this one. So we run the mastermind, as you know, and people are still consistently floored by how I launched that business. I went to my coach's house. I stayed there for a week. I sat at her kitchen table and I sent out 680 messages. And after every 10, I would alt-tab to Stripe and hit refresh with the goal of 100 customers, and every message was the same. Every message was, "Hey, Joe, I hope you're well. I'm launching this new thing. It's going to be $79 a month and it would be meaningful to me if you could try it out." "If that would work, I've put a discount code below for $60 off in the first month." And I sent it to 680 people and 100 said yes. We ended up with an $8,000-a-month business in a three-day sprint.

[29:59]

And every time I propose this to people — because I want this to be an AI-first podcast, but sometimes it is just hustle and grind and just putting some work in — and if you've got a warm audience, and everybody has a warm audience, by the way, every single person has a warm audience. They're hiding in your iMessage and your WhatsApp and your Facebook Messenger. Everybody has a warm audience. Then often it's just a case of asking in a way that they can say no. So the exact text was, "Hi, Joe, hope you are well. I'm launching this thing. It's going to be $79 a month. It would be meaningful for me if you would check it out. I've put a $60 discount code below to make it only $19." And some people said yes. Some people said no. Some people didn't say anything and just signed up.

[30:49]

No harm, no foul, whichever way around it goes. Now, if you wanted to do this with AI, I would ask it to write the LinkedIn post. When I did this three years ago, AI wasn't good enough to do it — I probably would do something different now.

Joe Downs [31:00]

Well, I was just going to say, you're giving the AI answer. You just don't realize it. The only difference is you wrote the post versus AI writes the post, and the AI writes the post in a meaningful way because it knows that you're going to send it to people that you genuinely know. You just did it naturally. You're a marketer. You have a background, you sell, you're in marketing, you're a marketing guru before AI existed. This is a walk in the park and a unique ability for you.

Peter Swain [31:25]

Very true.

Joe Downs [31:26]

What I'm trying to point out is, for someone like Matt — I'll go back to Matt. And actually, Matt told me he was in sales his whole life. He's not afraid of that grind. But it's the mental block. I don't want to ask five of my friends to try my brand-new service. It's a mental block. It's hard for people to do that. So that's the AI answer — it was easy for you, but the AI answer is you have AI write the prompt. But go ahead.

Peter Swain [31:53]

Sorry. Well, let's do two other things. One is, remember, we spoke about this a few episodes ago — if you're facing a mental block with this, it is understandable. Ask the AI to help you through the mental block. Ask it to get to the root psychology, because my answer to somebody who said that, that they don't want to ask their friends in case their friends say no, it would be to ask them how they would feel if they found out their friend needed their help and didn't ask them. Because you're asking for a favor. Now, I would like to put a word of warning in here. Don't do it for free. I don't care if you make it $9, not $9,000 — or $1, not $10,000 — charge somebody something. Because the difference between free and $1 is the difference between a genuine yes and a fake yes.

[32:42]

One of the reasons you want to put offers out into the world is to see if anybody wants to buy them. Because we can do all the work we want with AI, we can do all of the prep work, but what really counts is the market. The market will either buy something or they won't. Saying to people, "Will you do this for free?" — all of your friends will say yes. There's no jeopardy. Why would they say no? If your friends don't say yes to zero dollars, I would put it to you that maybe they're not your friends. But even a buck, somebody has to make a cognitive decision. And that's actually what we want, because if you offer it to 100 people and no one says yes, you've got a problem. You've got data now. You can now go back to people and say, "Why didn't you buy it?

[33:24]

Is there something I missed? What was the resistance?" And then we can feed that feedback back into AI and go, "I spoke to 100 people. They all said no." I asked 30 of them why they said no, and this is why they said no. And that AI can reform the offer for you.

Joe Downs [33:40]

It's right out of Russell Brunson's book, Expert Secrets. He said all of his events, he invited friends and family, nobody ever did anything because they didn't pay. And if you don't pay, you don't pay attention. It was interesting.

[33:58]

Well, that's the whole path, folks. Find the expertise you didn't know you had. Package it into something real and get your first five customers without spending a dime. If we inspired you today, go ahead and give us a like. Don't forget to subscribe so you don't miss the next one. And instead of sharing, go look in the mirror and make a promise to the person staring back at you. Then go have a conversation with AI and figure out how to unpack all that knowledge in your head and do some good with it. When you do, send us an email at idiots@successfulidiots.com. That's idiots@successfulidiots.com. Tell us your good idea, bad idea, success or failure. We'd love to talk about it. For Peter Swain, I'm Joe Downs. We are your successful idiots. Thanks for listening and we