How to Run a Profitable One-person Internet Business Using AI

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast How Do You Use ChatGPT? I go in depth with Ben Tossell, the founder of Ben’s Bites, a daily AI newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers, and an investor in early-stage AI startups. We dive into leveraging AI to identify opportunities online, run businesses efficiently, and evaluate their performance. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

You can build and run a one-person internet business that earns half a million dollars in annual revenue—with AI. My guest for this episode, Ben Tossell, showed me how. 

Ben Tossell runs Ben’s Bites, an incredible daily AI newsletter with over 100,000 subscribers that I read every day, and invests in promising early-stage AI startups. He’s also an experienced founder whose no-code platform Makerpad was acquired by Zapier. 

Ben is really good at identifying profitable internet businesses that can be run with a small team and not a lot of capital. I sat down with Ben to understand how he has integrated AI into his workflow to find business opportunities online, run these ventures efficiently, and evaluate their performance. As we talk, Ben takes me through the remarkable toolkit of AI tools he has assembled for each of these functions.

This episode is a must-watch for anyone who is curious about using AI to bootstrap a profitable internet business. Here’s a taste:

• Opt for the optimum AI tool. As AI evolves, Ben believes that using different AI tools to determine which one is most appropriate for a given use case is a valuable exercise. “Which tool is best for this thing versus I’m just going to default to ChatGPT for everything” is a question about which he often reminds himself.
• ChatGPT as a business strategist. When Ben finds a business model interesting, his AI tool of choice is ChatGPT. He analyzes the model by asking ChatGPT questions like, “What's a similar kind of business to this? Where else would this kind of thing be useful? How would you think about building that kind of company?”

Ben is fascinated by companies that package and sell data in useful ways, convinced that a solo entrepreneur could viably scale such a business to $500,000 a year. A leader in this industry is market intelligence company Yardstiq, which offers access to interviews conducted by analysts with Fortune 500 companies that use software tools, with the aim of helping prospective purchasers gain a deeper understanding of the software before making a big investment.

In this interview, Ben walks us through how he dove deep into Yardstiq’s business to better understand the industry. Ben’s starting point was a screenshot shared by the Yardstiq CEO on Twitter that captured a transcribed snippet of an interview conducted by its analysts.