The way to get rich just changed forever… and it has nothing to do with buying another tool, copying a prompt, or another AI course. That’s kiddie-pool stuff.
Most people use AI like a toy.
They spin up a website. A dashboard. An app they’ll never ship.
It feels like work. It isn’t. It’s just something neat to show your friends.
Rich people put AI to work. Real tasks. Real outputs.
The work you’ve been avoiding that actually makes money. AI that sells, delivers, and runs the business 24/7.
I’ve scaled AI companies past seven figures in under six months through Martell Ventures, and the formula is repeatable.
No BS, no “top 10 ChatGPT prompts.” Here it is.
Step 1: Find Your Bottleneck Before You Buy a Single Tool
AI makes problems stop being problems. So the real problem to solve is figuring out which problem to solve.
And there’s always one that matters more than the rest. That’s your bottleneck.
Here’s where almost everyone goes backwards:
They hear about a tool, subscribe, then go hunting for a problem it might solve. Do the opposite: find where you’re blocked, then point AI at it.
That’s why I always say buy back your time. The more time you free up, the more time you have for the things that actually make money.
When YourAtlas blew up after we featured them, the founder Omar was drowning. Calls and bookings flooding in faster than he could handle. He didn’t go buy a stack of tools. He looked at the bottleneck and realized his own product was the best thing to solve it.
Every business runs on the same five-stage chain:
- Attention: Do people know you exist?
- Leads: Are interested people giving you their contact info?
- Sales: Are conversations converting to purchases?
- Delivery: Are you fulfilling what you sold?
- Retention: Are customers sticking around and buying more?
Walk each stage and ask one question: If I 10x this tomorrow, does my revenue actually go up, or do I just create a bigger problem?
For most businesses, the break is early: not enough attention, or not enough leads.
Not enough leads means not enough sales, means not enough cash, means nothing to reinvest.
You’ve got opportunities leaking through the cracks right now. Find where the money is leaking — that’s where AI goes first.
Step 2: Use AI to Generate Revenue
Leads and sales are where money enters the business, so that’s where AI earns its keep first.
Here’s the unfair advantage: AI doesn’t feel rejection. It doesn’t get discouraged when a prospect ghosts.
Humans burn out on sales because they feel every “no.” AI doesn’t care.
Here’s 5 layers of using AI to get more sales:
Layer 1: Prospecting
AI builds your lead list. Tools like Manus, Claude Code, and Apex.host scrape socials and surface fresh people every week that match your exact criteria… without you lifting a finger.
Layer 2: Qualifying
Not every lead deserves your calendar. One of my companies had 20,000 leads sitting cold.
They didn’t want to talk to everyone, just the ones ready to buy.
We ran data enrichment, found the signals that flagged the perfect-fit buyers, and filtered out the rest.
Give AI three non-negotiable must-haves per prospect and let it screen everyone before a human gets on the phone.
Layer 3: Pitchy
Generic outreach is dead.
AI reads a prospect’s past messages with you, what they’re posting on social, and where they sit in the buying process…
…then writes a message so specific it sounds like it came from someone who knows them.
Hyper-personal, tuned to their situation, industry, and stage. At scale. Automatically.
Layer 4: Follow-Up
Most deals die in follow-up because the human moved on. AI doesn’t.
No reply triggers another hyper-personalized message or email, automatically, at the right cadence.
It doesn’t get tired and it doesn’t forget. The whole sequence runs without you.
Layer 5: Upsells
Here’s a number worth tattooing somewhere visible: it’s seven times easier to sell more to an existing customer than to land a new one.
AI watches your base for usage spikes, upcoming renewals, and engagement drop-offs, then crafts and sends the right message at exactly the right moment.
We built a product called Latch that does this automatically for us.
Revenue you’d otherwise leave on the table, captured in the background.
Step 3: Use AI to Deliver What You Just Sold
Selling is only half of it. Lots of businesses scale their sales engine and then drown in delivery.
People hit capacity, quality drops, clients churn.
AI has no capacity problem. It doesn’t sleep, doesn’t get upset, doesn’t talk back. It wakes up every day like, “I just want to see you win.”
AI can already do at least 80% of your work.
I know… ouch.
If you’ve got real domain expertise and you’re scared of losing your fingerprint, here’s how you keep it. The 10/80/10 rule:
The First 10% — Ideation.
The part only you can do. Open a chat, talk through ideas, share your expertise, and define what “done” actually looks like.
The Middle 80% — Execution.
Hand it off. AI builds the plan and does the work. Onboarding customers, building the dashboard, running the automation, the whole thing. Then have it check its own work against the criteria you set in the first 10%.
The Final 10% — Integration.
You come back in. Review it, add the strategic calls, the personal touch that makes it feel like you. You’re not removing yourself from the work. You’re removing yourself from the labor of it.
Step 4: Replace the Most Expensive Bottleneck — You
Now you’ve got AI selling and delivering. There’s one bottleneck left, and it’s the costly one. You.
You want to replace yourself before AI does.
I see two futures: either you work and create with AI, or you wake up one day working for it.
If you don’t learn to put AI to work, someone else will build one and take your spot.
The same way newspapers felt it when the internet showed up.
A few months ago I shut my whole company down for two days for an AI hackathon and told everyone to build the tools that would replace their own work.
They came back 10x more productive. Claude Code is now mandatory for everyone.
Scaling means making yourself less necessary every quarter (you’ll feel guilty at first, but lean into it).
Here’s how to make it brain-dead simple. I call it the Camcorder Method — I built it to hand work to team members, now I use it to hand work to AI:
- Record yourself doing the task.
- Feed the recording to AI.
- Iterate until AI can do 80% of it.
Do this with every task until it’s all covered. Finance, follow-up, hiring, all of it.
Especially the bottlenecks that would make you more money if they were solved.
The people who move first won’t compete with everyone else, they’ll lap them.
You don’t have to be an expert at any of this. Just don’t be last.
-DM