Can you tell us more about your origin, the good, the bad, where you are now, and your journey?
It’s great you’re asking about my origin—I’ll tie this into the LLM discussion later. My first truly successful business was called 1 Second Copy, which I started as freelancing right after college because I was broke and wanted to avoid any work that could be shut down by local governments. I leaned on my university writing experience and began offering freelance writing. Around the same time I got into AI, stumbled on GPT‑2 while taking a computer‑science course, and found it could generate usable headlines and short text, which sparked the idea of automating my workflow. When GPT‑3 arrived (early 2020), I back‑doored access through a chatbot that had GPT‑3, started automating Fiverr fulfillment requests at one cent per word, and confirmed I could automate article writing, though the pay was only a few hundred to a thousand dollars. I resisted raising prices because I doubted the quality, but my friend Noah suggested hiring cheap editors from lower‑cost‑of‑living countries to polish the AI output—a scalable idea I initially dismissed because I wasn’t comfortable hiring. Eventually I took his advice, hired a team, trained them to use AI for writing, shifted from pre‑generated pieces to human‑assisted editing, and scaled the operation. We hit roughly $20 k a month, then later $90‑$92 k a month before ChatGPT‑3 launched, which drove down the value of our AI‑assisted writing as clients turned to pure AI. That decline prompted me to start Leftclick with Noah, aiming to move into an industry that grows with AI rather than shrinks. We picked a niche where we could apply the same systems we built at 1 Second Copy to other businesses—not just content writing—and it worked well.
I started with Harvard CS50, then taught myself computer science from the ground up, excluding languages and compilers, distributed systems, and operating systems. I completed nanotech to Tetris, building a computer from scratch. After that, I learned AI from scratch via a course that just listed introductory material, then I began training models—first a TensorFlow model called Stalan 2 that generated faces, then Gwarn's 'This Wu Does Not Exist' which I turned into an anime face generator, which I found hilarious and turned into a business called One Second Painting. I scaled that to about $3,500 per month by selling AI-generated art, but Midjourney's release destroyed that business. I had been selling NFTs, which gave me hands‑on AI experience. I then used that experience to freelance write while aiming for $10k/month, employing GPT‑3 for content. I also spent six months to a year locked in my room learning make.com and Zapier, building automations for my One Second Painting business and later for a second venture with a business partner. Eventually the money came from disproportionate time invested, leading to a compressed business model: get your first customer quickly, then worry about everything later. I realized most of the low‑level AI skills I learned aren’t used today, but the practical experience with automation platforms like make.com and Zapier, plus building info products, allowed me to scale to $100k/month through a blend of an AI automation agency and information products.
Started entrepreneurship at 19 by throwing parties and charging entry, hiring a big bouncer. This evolved into a promotions company called Savage Entertainment, which made little money and was mostly for fun. Experimented with Udemy courses, body language training, and various other projects, throwing many ideas at the wall to see what stuck. Began agency work in the early 20s, going door‑to‑door selling local Google My Business marketing services, made no money, took a job at a similar agency to learn how successful businesses operate, then restarted his own agency six months later with far more knowledge and hit the ground running. Took various odd jobs and lived in poor conditions while grinding for about five years before earning enough to stop relying on the bus or thrift stores. Launched several businesses—e‑commerce, dropshipping, SMMA, consultancies—most of which failed. COVID hit and knocked down a business that had been doing okay, prompting a shift to remote work, self‑teaching computer science, and freelancing software engineering gigs. In 2019 began experimenting with AI (GPT‑2), and when GPT‑3 dropped in 2020 he saw a major unlock: using the model’s story mode to generate Fiverr listings proved he could automate freelance writing. Scaled a Fiverr business from 1¢/word to 3¢/word, realized quality limits, partnered with Noah who brought in an admin assistant and built infrastructure, moved to Upwork and other platforms, and began charging ~9‑10¢/word. Hired editors, gained native model access, built training systems that hypercharged writers via AI (4‑5× productivity), grew to $92k in a month and received a buyout offer. After ChatGPT’s release, recognized the competitive advantage of pure AI writing was fading, so he launched an automation agency (Left Click) to implement AI technologies for clients. The agency was profitable from month one, built on a decade of agency and sales skills, and his key lesson is to have started digital work much earlier, which would have left him significantly further ahead.
Yeah, tackle the situation. To be abundantly clear, you can do anything without money, but it's just a lot more difficult. It's like taking a 5‑lb dumbbell curl and turning it into a 100‑lb curl — possible, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and training. If you have even $20 to put toward this, your life gets tremendously easier. My recommendation is not to start a business with literally zero; if you don't have money, get a job or something similar and run that side‑by‑side with your entrepreneurial effort. Necessity is the mother of invention, and people have found creative ways to bootstrap, but I prefer to just get a job. I've been there — I'd bring tea bags from home to Starbucks for hot water, and my business partner would bring cheap cream cheese and expired bagels to make low‑cost meals. It's not a good spot. It's much better to get a job for a couple of months, save a little money, and then try entrepreneurship afterward. To answer the spirit of your question, I would do cold DMs on social media platforms — LinkedIn, X.com, Instagram, and so on. Unlike email, where you need to pay for mailboxes, lead enrichment, and tools (around $97‑$40 a month), social media platforms are free; you only pay with your attention, and the algorithms give you equal access regardless of wealth or fame. You need good copywriting principles and attention‑grabbing techniques. For example, you could say, 'Hey Pete, I can save you $10,000 a month in the next 60 seconds. I'll give you everything for free at the end of this, whether or not you want to work together.' That kind of hook gets attention. Aim for 20‑40 DMs a day across these platforms. If you do that consistently for a month, you'll reach about 1,200 people. With good copy, good offers, and decent Loom videos, you'll absolutely drive results.
What you did initially was backwards: you spent time learning, then immediately tried to build a brand/course business teaching it, before ever proving the skill made anyone money. That approach almost always grows slower and makes less money, because sitting through a course and absorbing information isn't actually a scarce or valuable skill on its own — what's valuable is having achieved real, provable outcomes for real businesses over time (case studies, measurable revenue growth, real client results). What I did instead was learn the skill, go sell to businesses first, get them results, and only build a public brand once I had real results to point to and could speak confidently and specifically ('here's how I made $48,000 last month doing X'). When you're genuinely in the top 1% at something with proof behind it, people listen — the most compelling content angles are always some version of 'someone extremely good at X shares what they know,' and you can't fake that credibility, you have to earn it with real outcomes first. So yes — go agency/cash-first, get real case studies, then build the audience around that proof rather than around the learning itself.
personal brandcredibilitycase studiesaudience building