Lesson 1 — What to expect at Prompt Entrepreneur HQ
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
Thank you so much for subscribing.
My name is Kyle and I run Prompt Entrepreneur. Hi hi!
I want to use this email to quickly introduce what we do here and give you some free gifts for signing up.
I’m here to teach you AI entrepreneurship.
What is that? It’s kinda new.
It’s building businesses by leveraging new AI technologies.
It’s merging two fields - one new, one as old as humanity.
Unlike a lot of the AI hype creators out there I’m going to show you how to use AI alongside solid business principals.
There’s no “make $10,000 with this AI tool” here. That’s BS and not my jam.
Instead you’ll be getting my 15+ years experience starting 30+ businesses, my years of teaching, mentoring and coaching entrepreneurship to over 40,000 students…
…combined with the latest AI technologies to make your life simpler.
That’s AI Entrepreneurship. The combination of two exciting fields.
What to expect
Every week I write 5,000+ words about a specific use of AI to start and grow businesses.
I call these my Prompt Playbooks.
They are each in their own right an — AI Business Course!
They are comprehensive step-by-step guides about how to deploy one kick-ass strategy in your business.
Here’s a screenshot of some past Playbooks:
Each one of those little squares is a 5,000-7,000 words AI Business Course — bridging the gap between AI and Entrepreneurship.
Every Monday you’ll get an issue that outlines the topic I’ll be discussing all week. The Monday issue is self-contained and enough for you to get started.
Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday are Parts 2, 3, 4, 5 of the Playbook.
Each day is 1000-1500 words of guide, guiding your through step by step.
Yes…it’s a kinda a mad amount of value (and work for me, believe me!)
And you get that all for free.
On Saturday we round everything up. Close out the week. I catch up on sleep on Sunday.
Then Monday you get a NEW 5-part playbook delivered to your inbox.
“Can I get access to your previous playbooks?”
Yes. I’ll talk more on that later. But if you’re AI obsessed like me or have a pressing problem AI can help you where. Go here.
Lesson 2 — Tick Tock
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
“It’s not the right time”
“The economy is bad at the moment”
“Later is better”
These and many others are the answers when I ask people why they haven’t started their business yet.
These are people who dream of having their own business, controlling their income and having more freedom in their lives.
But there is always a reason why now isn’t the right time.
Here’s a video I shot on this for a TikTok follower called Timothy:
Basically waiting for the right time is an excuse. Or, if we are being fancy: procrastination.
We’ve been in recession now for decades. That’s just the new norm it looks like!
There are plenty of reasons why starting a business in a recession is actually a great idea (I’ve written about this extensively but it’s too much for here - story of my life!).
The best time to start a basically right now.
And there’s a really good reason for this staring us right in the face: artificial intelligence.
AI has already started to remove jobs from the marketplace. This won’t change - it’ll accelerate.
In fact it’s going to remove whole roles, industries and sectors.
We’re about to be hit with a technology as disruptive as the internet. Potentially more so because the scope is wider, especially once robotics has its “ChatGPT moment” and catches up.
I’m not saying this because I hate AI and want it stopped. Quite the opposite. It’s an incredibly exciting next step for humans.
But: it’s going to be a messy few decades.
The fact of the matter is we just don’t know what it’s going to look like.
Noah Yuval Harari, the very smart dude who wrote Sapiens and Homo Deus, recently said on an interview that this is the first time in human history where we just don’t know what the next 2 decades hold in store.
Generally we have a rough idea of progress and comparing ourselves to 20 years ago society remains recognisable. But with AI in play all bets are off.
Start a business? Are you mad?
So why do I say it’s a good time to start a business? Seems counterintuitive right? If it’s going to be chaos then why would we want to start a business and leave the confines of a safe job?
Flexibility and resilience is the answer.
Right now if your main income is a 9-5 salary there’s a risk that that role my simply not exist in 5 years.
It doesn’t matter what the role is. There’s a chance here that it can be automated.
That’s a fragile system. It’s a chair with one leg. Kick that one leg out and it crashes down.
The way to build resilience is to have multiple sources of income.
Prompt Entrepreneur for example has 7 main revenue drivers - subscriptions, products, sponsorship, referrals, coaching, services, workshops.
If one gets knocked out it’s a pain. But it’s not game over. Because it’s a (ugly) chair with 7 legs!
I’m not saying owning a business is inherently better than a 9-5 job. I’m saying that structurally having multiple income streams is more stable. And as we enter a period where any one income stream can be destroyed it becomes safer bet to not rely on a single source.
And building multiple streams of income is much easier when you run the show.
As we enter decades of uncertainty it’s important that you build in flexibility and resiliency.
It’s no longer “oh I’d quite like to run my own business”.
It’s becoming “I need to take control of the future stability of my income”.
So, is it the wrong time? Absolutely not. It’s the right time.
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Here’s part 1 (free) from one of my AI Business Courses which dives even deeper into the subject: ‘AI and the Future of Work’.
In the previous lesson I told you about my Prompt Playbooks. Each one is like it’s own AI Business Course. They are detailed and actionable guides I write every week to help you not only survive but thrive in our new world of AI entrepreneurship.
That’ll give you a taster of what I write each and every week for my premium subs. If that looks pretty darn good you can find more details about getting your hands on all of them here.
Hopefully today’s email wasn’t too scary! Or if it was then hopefully it’s a nudge to do something!
In the next email I’m going to show you why AI is also a huge opportunity for entrepreneurs like yourself.
Talk soon,
Kyle
Lesson 3 — Robot Army
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
The last email was maybe heavy - talking about the end of work and jobs as we know them. It freaks some people out I now!
Let’s talk about the opportunity though. Because it’s massive.
I started my first online business 15+ years ago.
I’d just got divorced and was broke and depressed. So I decided to go live in Beijing and at least learn Mandarin Chinese whilst I was depressed.
Ever the practical one I am!
In Tim Ferriss’ book The Four Hour Workweek I’d read about giant posters that had all the most common Japanese characters on them. A useful learning aid for Japanese learners.
I wondered if a Chinese version existed. It did not. So… made it!
Here’s one in the wild in an American elementary school. Pretty neat.
Basically my first online business was:
designing the posters (fun yay!)
giving myself a crash course in commercial printing (meh)
getting them manufactured (expensive)
working out how to deal with inventory, shipping (nightmare)
building the website (ok fun again!)
creating the eCom system (difficult)
content marketing (learned from scratch, love love love)
me running customer service and returns (hate it)
and many many many…..many….more tasks
Because I i) had no money to hire people and ii) had to learn all the skills from scratch this was a LOT of work.
And I still haemorrhaged money.
See how large that poster is? Imagine shipping them around the world - big, heavy, abnormal dimension items that easily bend or get wet. Yeah… I got murdered by shipping costs and returns.
I was able to pivot and switch the business into digital only and turn it into a solid income. That’s a story for another time though.
The key thing here is how many hats I had to wear whilst starting my first business.
I had to be:
product creator
designer
web developer
marketer
analytics team
copywriter
customer service rep
And many many more roles. All simultaneously. Each with their own learning curve.
Talk about exhausting. It’s no wonder so many first-time entrepreneurs get lost and bounce off course.
This may have indeed happened to you before. You’ve tried to start something but got absolutely overwhelmed by all the tasks that needed doing. All the skills that needed learning. All the mistakes that had to be made to get to a level of competency.
I don’t blame you for stopping.
Here’s the good news though. All those roles? All those specialities? You no longer need an entire team. Or to have to learn all the skills yourselves.
Because AI gives us access to the skills. AI can cover all of those roles and more or leverage our own ability.
That’s specifically what Prompt Entrepreneur is about - giving you powerful prompts to fill in these roles and basically give you a team to start your first business.
AI as a business strategist in your pocket
Here’s just one example from a single Prompt Playbook.
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To get you in the mood and so you can follow along, here’s part 1 (free) from my AI Business Course: “Starting an Online Business using the Power of AI”
For this example we’re using AI as a business coach.
Having a coach early on is super helpful but often out of budget for first time entrepreneurs.
For example I personally offer this service - coaching and mentoring - but I would never recommend a first-time entrepreneur with an extremely limited budget hire me. I won’t even drop the link here for this reason.
So how can we get coaching without the high cost upfront?
Well if you’ve been paying attention you know the answer: AI.
That Playbook above gives you all the background and all the AI prompts needed to walk you through a powerful coaching process.
If you hired me and we walked through this process it would probably be $3000-5000. Using AI we can get pretty close for free.
For example here is a prompt to coach you through working out your business niche (copy and paste this into ChatGPT or Claude):
Act as a business coach
I am starting a new business and need to refine ideas and my niche
First query me on: What are you skills and abilities? Include professional and personal, formal qualifications and informal skills. What do people come to you for assistance with?
Based on the answers to these questions compile a list of at last 20 potential business niches.
Present the list in a table and ask me to provide, in preference order, my top 5.
Take my top 5 business niches and run a market analysis - analyse the market sizing, competitiveness and capital requirements.
Based on this rank the business niches from most attractive to least attractive.
Collect my top choice and give me 5 variants of that business, focused on different approaches, subniches, submarkets.
That’s one of 10+ prompts in that single Playbook. Each helping you build your business step by step.
It’s hard to grasp how monumental a shift this is without actually getting your hands dirty and using AI to build a business.
It’s night and day.
If you’ve previously tried to build a business prior to the release of ChatGPT then it’s time to go again.
When used properly (and I show you how to use AI correctly to avoid accuracy, bias, privacy issues) AI basically becomes your co-founding team. It gives you an immense leg up on the competition.
And allows you to build without having to hire or learn every skill under the sun.
If you want to unlock an army of skilled workers via more prompts like the one above then i) stay tuned for tomorrow’s email where I’ll be dropping more AI entrepreneurship value or ii) if you want all my Playbooks (AI Business Courses) past, present and future now now now check out the premium catalogue.
Talk soon,
Kyle
Lesson 4 — Mo' Money, Mo' Problems
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
How much money do you need to start a business?
It’s a common question I get. Here’s a vidja on it :
Some with money. Lots of money. Too much money actually.
When starting any business (with AI or not) the basics remain the same: the business must create something of value that is sold to the customer.
That value comes from the idea itself and whether you can create a product/service that fits what the market actually wants. If the market doesn’t value what you are creating the business will fail.
The problem with having too much money is that it’s possible ignore product-market fit. Instead you can spend your way through lack of market interest via advertising, PR, sponsorships and promotions. All pushing against the fact that no-one actually wants your crappy product.
This happens a lot in Silicon valley. Venture Capitalists will put a couple hundred mil into an idea. A massive team will build something and the marketing will crank into gear. And no-one wants it. The market doesn’t value the product. This is possible because there was too much cash.
Bootstrapping
Nowadays I always recommend starting with no/low cash and “boot-strapping”.
Bootstrapping is basically using funds from business to grow and expand. You can, by definition, only expand the business if it’s doing well. It uses internal investment from profits. If you aren’t making profit it doesn’t expand. Simple.
This makes sense. If you scale up a non-profitable business you dig a deeper hole. Your rate of “non-profitability” (ie. losing money!) accelerates and you just lose more money.
If instead you scale a profitable business you’ll make more profit.
And once you’ve proven that the business makes a profit it’s much easier to raise money if you need to.
How do you start a business with no money?
There are ways to start and structure a business so that you can kick it off and scale without cash.
The basic commandments are:
digital not physical
start with a service then convert to products
based on your personal expertise
First up, stay away from physical locations and products.
As soon as these are introduced you must have capital to start the business.
In the last email I talked about the GIANT, heavy, long Mandarin learning posters I used to ship around the world and how I lost a lot of money. I pivoted these to a digital version - a high resolution PDF that people could print at a local print shop. Immediately shot into profit by switching the same product from physical atoms to digital bits.
You can do physical stuff later. But for a first business? Stay away for now.
Second, start with a service and not products.
I love digital products. Most of my income comes from them. The amazing thing is once you’ve created the document, PDF, eBook, video course or whatever it is you can sell infinite copies with no additional cost. Digital products get you closest to the fabled “passive income” that gurus love to talk about.
But don’t immediately make a digital product. Why? You don’t yet know what your customers actually want. You’ll be making a digital product based on what you think they want. More often than not you’ll be wrong.
Because digital products take a long time to develop (ie. my video courses take 100+ hours easily) if you launch and no-one wants it you’ve lost weeks or months of work.
Instead start with basic service offerings. I’m talking coaching, mentoring, trouble shooting, implementing, freelance and contractor work.
This allows you to secure two vital wins. First you get paid immediately, unlike with products. It starts cashflow fast. Second, you get face time with customers. You get to sit with them and find out all the problems and challenges they have.
This, not the cash, is the value. Once you’ve worked with enough service clients you’ll recognise the same problems and challenges come up again and again.
These are the problems you will build your products around. These are the challenges that your products will solve.
We use data and feedback from actual customers to shape up our digital products. What about the services? We keep them but up the price - they become up-sales off the back of our digital products. Smart eh?
Third, build all of these off your expertise
What do you have to offer that will be of value to your customers but cost you nothing?
Your current skills, knowledge and expertise.
Base your business on what you already know. What you are already good at. This is the quickest way to add value to the market.
It means rooting your service and later your digital products in what you are an expert at - creating an expert business.
Scaling to profit
Simply following these three commandments will put you ahead of 90% of the other people trying to carve out a space online.
These guidelines help you quick rule out lots of losing bets. Dropshipping for instance fails the physical test. Kindle Direct Publishing fails the service first then product test. Starting a social media marketing agency fails the expertise check (unless of course this is your expertise).
Lots of guru-led “business opportunities” will exclude themselves automatically, saving you a lot of cash and potentially year of failed efforts.
Instead, by grounding the business in your expertise, starting with a service and rolling it into digital products you keep investment low and can naturally scale into profit.
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Lest this email ends up being 5000+ words (don’t tempt me!) here’s a Part 1 (free) where I dive into this topic.
So before you go investing your life savings into a business venture see how you can adapt it to the commandments we just covered.
There are so many other ways you can be smart when starting a business. And any one method (like the one we just covered) could save you a tonne of heartache and cost.
That’s how I structure my Prompt Playbooks - how can I make sure you don’t make similar mistakes to mine from the last 15+ years of entrepreneurship.
If you want access to all of them from the past and into the future (and a bunch more) you’ll want to check out Premium.
Now that (hopefully) you’ve realised money isn’t needed to start a business we’re going to go to the next big reason people have: time.
See you in the next lesson.
Kyle
Lesson 5 — Daylight's Burning
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
Starting a business takes time.
There’s no way around this I’m afraid.
Anything worthwhile will always take time.
Want to lose weight? Build muscle? Run a marathon? Time is needed.
Want to write a novel? Learn to paint? Play the guitar? Time is needed.
Anything worthwhile takes effort, applied consistently, over a period of time.
That’s what, by definition, makes it worthwhile and valuable.
If it was quick and easy to start a business (as some people will tell you) then it would very quickly lose its value. This is basic supply and demand:
if it’s fast and easy to start a business and the rewards are high then everyone will do it.
this has the effect of too many businesses, too much supply.
the customers have more to choose from, more competition
prices drop to a new lower equilibrium
the rewards for having a business drop
The fact that starting a business takes time and effort is why they are valuable.
Because most people will i) never act on their idea or ii) as soon as they realise the time required they’ll bounce off.
This is called barrier to entry in microeconomics. And it’s what makes owning a business so valuable.
So yes: starting a business will take time. If it did not it wouldn’t be worth it.
How do we reduce the time?
OK OK fine Kyle we get it - it takes time. But…can we reduce that time required?
Good news: yes you can.
Most of the time taken in starting a business comes from two sources:
not knowing the correct steps
failed starts and restarts
Both are connected - correct steps are the tactics, failed starts are the strategic level.
Strategy is knowing where you are going. What’s the business idea (more on this tomorrow) and the overall shape of the business. What value do we deliver using which vehicles.
Tactics is knowing the step by step so we can continuously be progressing forward towards the strategic goal. It’s everyday sitting down and knowing exactly what you need to be working on rather than floundering around doing random tasks.
Doing the actual work to set up a new business actually doesn’t take as long as you’d expect.
I’ve launched businesses that generate cash in less than a week. It’s very doable. But you need to know the strategic and tactical steps. Otherwise you spend months floundering around with zero direction.
This is why (good) courses and workshops are so valuable. They give you a structure to follow.
Courses from the right teachers can help you save a huge amount of time because you are following a well trodden path.
No - I’m not about to pitch you a course. You should know me better than that now! In that video I show some other people’s books - all of which I recommend you check out.
In fact I think any course, taken to its conclusion, can be valuable. The problem is that most students of entrepreneurship will skip around from one thing to the next, never completing one course of action.
This is what kills your momentum and (ultimately) takes up a lot of time.
I’ve designed the Prompt Playbooks to be extremely actionable guides - either tactical or strategic depending on the topic.
For example the screenshot below shows some example Playbooks. Building Online Services, Freelancing, Web Design Agency, Social media marketing agency are all strategic. They are complete business models. The others are more tactical, deployable in many business models:
Small sample screenshot. There are many many more! Like Over 60 more.
I design them specifically to be deployable within a week. In fact that’s how they are delivered in the premium newsletter - one Part a day for 5 days so people can follow along.
AI as a timesaver
If we combine this with the fact that we are now using AI to help us start our business then our timelines really start to compress.
Previously creating (for example) the copy for a Facebook advert to promote our product took lots of time. Or money if we hire an expert. Now with the right prompts and process we can have AI spin us up 50 potential ad copies, analyse them to suggest the best and prep up all the assets we need to launch our ads.
What was a task of several hours becomes, with the right prompts and processes in play, a 10 minute task.
Apply this across all your tasks and the time savings start adding up really fast.
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If you want to take a step back and use AI to overhaul your productivity, I’ve got you covered. Here’s part 1 (free) of an AI Business Course on personal productivity.
This has really become my mission at Prompt Entrepreneur.
Giving people the strategy, the business model, the overall play.
Then the step by step tactics walking them through the exact processes for getting it done.
And then layering in AI to make each and every step faster and more achievable.
Do we get AI to do all the work? Nope! Because it’ll be crap. Instead we combine AI prompts and business processes.
That’s the core of AI entrepreneurship.
And this is why even if you’ve not managed to get a business off the ground before I’m confident that we can do it this time. Considering the shifts in the world of work and money incoming from AI we’re just in time too!
I you are ready to get all of the Playbooks past and present make sure to check out Premium for this + a lot more.
Next up we’re going to talk about a big question I’m often asked - what business should you start?
Talk soon,
Kyle
Lesson 5 — Best Business Idea?
Hey Prompt Entrepreneur,
Your business idea is simultaneously the most and the least important aspect of your business.
How’s that?
Our business idea must:
precisely target a well defined market niche
provide value to that market niche
in a niche that is willing to pay for what you have to offer
Fail any one of these checks and the business idea will flop. That’s a non-negotiable. And that’s also why your business idea is the most important part of your business.
At the same time though we don’t need our idea to hit all of these criteria right out of the gate.
Chances are it will not.
Initial business ideas are worthless. Not even worth the paper they are written on. This is why asking for an NDA for a “great idea” will get you laughed out of the room.
It’s by getting our idea out into the market and adjusting it that we actually work out our real business.
By putting the idea in front of our market, failing to make an impact, adjusting our approach and refining until we land on something the market values we build something worthwhile.
We have a validated business idea, which is worth its weight in gold.
Burner business idea
Because of this it’s best to think of your starting idea as a burner.
You use it to get started and adapt and discard as needed.
For instance with my first online business:
I started with physical Chinese character posters that were expensive to ship and easily damaged
I pivoted to digital copies of the same poster for printing yourself
On top of this basic product I build courses and additional education resources as up-sales for higher profits
The original idea morphed to match the realities of the situation with the end business being an educational course company rather than a physical poster company.
Very likely the same will happen with your business. It will adapt and shift based on what the market wants and how you fulfil that need.
The only way to know this though is to launch and get out there into the market. This can’t be discovered by “research”. It can’t be figured out in secret. It requires going public and building with feedback from customers.
This method by the way is called “lean startup” and I use it in a number of my Prompt Playbooks on building digital products.
How to get that first idea?
OK this is all well and good but what’s my starter idea Kyle??
I recommend finding something that is at the intersection between:
what you enjoy doing
what you are good at
what there is a market for
If it’s something you don’t enjoy you won’t stick with it. Starting a business is hard. Don’t make it impossible by building something you hate. Even if you are successful why would you want that business?
If it’s something you aren’t good at then what value are you bringing to the market? Building a business is all about that value. If you have no skills or knowledge that provide value you won’t have a strong offering.
If there is no market for it then you have a hobby not a business. You might enjoy doing it and be good at it but there needs to be a market of people who are willing to pay you too.
The basic task I walk people through to find their starter business idea is to compile two lists.
Two lists
One list is what you enjoy doing. The types of tasks that put you in flow, not necessarily ones that bring you pleasure. For instance I like writing (creative) and I hate fiddling in Excel (analytical). I use realisations like this to construct the list of enjoyed activities.
The other list is what you are good at. Often this is stuff that we don’t think about being good at. Because once you become very competent at a task you stop thinking about it as difficult - you take it for granted. Because of this it’s helpful to do this task with someone else who knows you well (or ChatGPT) as a third party.
Once you have the two lists we look for overlap. These are areas where a business could potentially grow.
We then analyse each of these areas to check if there is a market. This is a more involved process but the basic idea is to look and see if other people have built businesses in this area. If yes: green flag. If no: red flag.
Next steps
This process is an important one. So important actually that I’ve created a whole course about it called the Niche Navigator. It walks you through the whole process in detail, complete with ChatGPT prompts for guidance and analysis.
Unfortunately this course is no long on the market!
It used to sell for anywhere between $50-100.
But don’t worry, you’re not missing out. Because I’ve added that course into the insanely generous bundle of AI Business Courses.
So the good news is, it’s now included in Premium.
It not only includes the AI Niche Navigator Course, but over 60 other AI Business Courses (I did say insanely generous).
OK real talk now.
I’ve now shared with you starting points on:
AI and Entrepreneurship
Starting your business with no money
Starting your business with very little time
Getting in 10x productivity mode
And more
If you’re serious about AI and Entrepreneurship. And you can see the way the world is moving.
I recommend getting premium, which includes 60+ AI Business Courses, which are — actionable, usable and fast.
We really are at an inflection point where AI is about to mess up a lot of people’s jobs, roles and livelihoods. It’s about to wreck shop.
I spend every day reading, researching and writing about AI in business and can see the tide turning. FYI my degree from Oxford is in history and one of my specialities was the history of science and paradigm shifts. We’re about to have the mother of all shifts. And humanity is not ready.
This isn’t rhetoric, it’s reality.
If I can help even a small handful of people to better prepare for this and even thrive as the changes come in then I’m happy.
Second, as you know it takes more than one nudge to get someone to act. We are all so bombarded with messaging as well as just muddling through our own lives day by day that we often forget to act.
Me just dropping in a link to Premium isn’t enough. Lots of you will think “sounds great I’ll do that later” and that’s the end of that.
I recommend moving on AI fast. Being the first to get hands on with it, like the hundreds of premium readers that understood this on day one of me starting ‘Prompt Entrepreneur’.
Until the next lesson, I’ll see you inside Premium.
Kyle
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PS — If you’ve made it this far I want to thank you (regardless if you buy premium or not). Email harminder@bstreetdigital.com (my business partner) and choose ANY one playbook you want, and he’ll send you it for free.
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https://promptentrepreneur.beehiiv.com/p/ai-and-the-future-of-work-part-1
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https://promptentrepreneur.beehiiv.com/p/prompt-playbook-starting-an-online-business-part-1
https://promptentrepreneur.beehiiv.com/p/starting-a-business-with-no-money-part-1
https://promptentrepreneur.beehiiv.com/p/personal-productivity-with-ai-part-1