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.
It depends on your goals. If you teach people how to build automations, you’ll attract those who want to learn automation—mainly AI‑automation enthusiasts—leading to coaching, info‑product, or consulting opportunities. If you create content for businesses that need a system (e.g., HVAC, fitness, manufacturing), you’ll attract clients seeking implementation work, such as building a cold‑email system for a recruiting company. So decide whether you want to be known for knowledge‑based work or hands‑on implementation. Regarding what I shared next: I’m currently reviewing applications for an editor and a strategist. For editing, I’ve narrowed it to two candidates—one local and ambitious but less experienced, the other more experienced but with a time‑zone issue. I plan to make a decision by Friday after a paid trial: I’ll pay $150 for a 48‑hour test task, then evaluate the result and pick the best fit. For the strategist role, the main issue is writing quality; I need someone who can craft outlines and scripts that require minimal edits. I’ve shortlisted about five people and will decide soon. My hiring process uses a NAD canvas: start with a general app, then a pipeline where applicants fill out a general application, answer simple cues to show they can represent themselves and write well without relying on ChatGPT, then a paid trial, then evaluation and selection. In the meantime, I haven’t posted on my main channel for five or six days, but I plan to return to a daily publishing schedule. I believe I’m among the top producers in the AI‑automation space, and even less‑polished, consistent output will win over time. My goal is to maximize the minutes I spend sharing knowledge online, so I’ll keep publishing regularly. Finally, thanks to everyone who applied—if you like the content or find my answers helpful, please keep engaging.
I find it funny that typically the people that were the most progressive-minded, who always default to science with a capital S, are now disproportionately the people yelling at technology for replacing the various creative aspects of their being. Not understanding that all of these industries have already been captured big time by things like recording studios, record labels, musicians. This is a business, right? Now small one-shop creators actually have the ability to completely disrupt that economic model and get back to doing cool shit again for the purposes of doing cool shit, and actually really innovate. It sucks, but really what people are mourning is more so just the loss of a way of life that they spent a big chunk of time preparing for, and I can empathize with that and I don't mean to be a dick about it. When OpenAI came out with GPT-3 in 2020, I went for a really long walk and had tears in my eyes because I was like, 'wow, everything that I've spent all this time preparing for — at the time was writing — is soon going to be automated.' If AI can already write at this level in just a year's worth of advancements from GPT-2 to GPT-3, what's GPT-4 and GPT-5 and GPT-6 going to look like? Well, we have our answers now. What happened to the writing industry, which I spent so long getting into? My whole business model was destroyed, to be clear, and everybody's business model is going to get destroyed. But that's not a bad thing, it's exciting. Because you could be the person that is actually going about creating new business models on the bones of your fallen comrades.