In this episode, Jonathan “Mr. Jai Stream” Courtney addresses a common problem: people vibe-code projects that launch to “crickets” because they focus only on building and not on making money. He argues that the CEO’s primary role is promotion, not just technical development. Successful entrepreneurs like Sam Altman or Peter Levels spend a significant portion of their time promoting their businesses through podcasts, content, and networking. Courtney outlines a simple sales blueprint: first, generate traffic through organic (e.g., podcasts, social media) or paid (ads) methods. Second, direct that traffic into a “holding pattern”—like an email newsletter or podcast—where audiences are warmed up with valuable content. Third, move them to a “selling event,” such as a live webinar, email campaign, or retargeted ads, which converts some into customers. Those who don’t buy return to the holding pattern for future campaigns. He emphasizes that AI tools should support these steps, not drive them; for example, AI can help create marketing materials, but the foundational business strategy must come first. Without consistent traffic and a system to convert it, even the best-built products will fail to generate revenue.
So you vibe-coded a project, but then when you launch it, it's just crickets. No customers, no revenue, no passive income, nothing. Well, today's episode we bring in Jonathan aka Mr. Jai Stream Courtney, who teaches us, "Hey, how do you actually use AI to generate revenue to your vibe-coded project?" He starts the episode off with the foundations. He talks about what you need to know non-AI-related in order to build a business. After that, we get to the fun, share your screen, cloud code, cloud little tips and tricks and what you can do. But I encourage you to listen to the whole episode because I think people who listen to the whole episode are going to be a dangerous weapon who understand not just how to vibe-code but how to get customers to your vibe-coded project. We are back on the startup ideas podcast with Jonathan Jai Stream, Jai Stream, and David the ice cream Courtney. Welcome back. Mr. Jai Stream, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? Well, people are going to learn is how to actually make money using the AI tools and get users while also using the AI tools as a support. I think the reason I want to talk about this is because there's a huge conversation around how to technically use all these tools, all of the cool use cases. I sit down and just watch your tutorials and then just go and do that stuff. But I think what's missing from the conversation a little bit is the practical element of, well, what's the point in having a business that's not making any money? So I want to go into that side of it. I want to show you what the job of a CEO is. I want to remind maybe some parts of the audience what the job of a CEO is. I also want to show my blueprint for getting customers to buy things. Okay, so basically there's a lot of people who have vibe-coded a thing and they put it out there and it's crickets. What you're going to show people is how to go from crickets to dollar signs. I wish there was something that would rhyme with crickets. Crickets to money rickets. Exactly. Crickets to dollar signs. I would say that I use these tools like 20% of how much you and your audience use these tools. Because most of my time is focused as a CEO on how do I actually make money? How do I get users? How do I increase revenue for myself and clients? And so I just want to bring that cold money angle to all of this. Most of the hardcore vibe-coding stuff leave to you guys to make the cool products. For the people listening, watching this man named Jay Icecream, you're like, "Why should I trust this guy with an hour of my time?" This guy looks like a German or a Berlin version of Greg Eisenberg. Who is he? Is he even real? The answer is you've made millions of dollars using a lot of these techniques, right? Yes. I run a couple of businesses. Some of them are multi-seven figures. Some of them are seven figures. For example, facilitator.com is an example of one of my businesses that's out there that's public that people know about. I build businesses in the enterprise space in the B2C space and also help other people sell their stuff as well. So I do spend a lot of my time trying to figure out how to make money and how to sell stuff and how to turn something that's not selling into something that's selling. That's what I have been doing for the last 14 years. Oh yeah, my name business is called A.J. and Smart. If you want to find the main thing of it. Well, thank you for your life story. Let's get into it. Shit. Okay, look, before we get into this, I think that what's really important is to understand. I really want people to understand. If you're running a business, if you consider yourself the CEO of the business, there's a massive misconception out there. I'm on X all the time. I see this misconception building up that a building stuff, being able to build stuff and being able to build super complex systems using AI tools is basically your job and then somehow you make money. I have a lot of CEO friends that are really excited about all the AI stuff. What I always ask is, cool, you spent four or five days doing all this stuff. You've built all these cool systems. You've built all these automations. Are you making more money now? Or are you making any money now? I think these AI tools if used wrong and if you don't really understand your role as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, you can just lose loads of time procrastinating. These can be procrastination machines that you're basically building for yourself. For me, I want to point people in the direction of the most successful people in the AI space. Do you know the name of the CEO of Anthropic? Yeah. Do you know how he looks? He's bald, right? He's actually not. He's not. That was a good death, right? CEO bald. Yeah, CEO bald. Okay. You know who the CEO of Open AI is? Yeah. Sam Altman, good head of hair. Well, do you know the levels.ioxaccount? What's that guy's name? Peter levels. Okay. All of these people are like big in the AI space, right? They're all entrepreneurs. They're all CEOs. And something that they all have in common that no one ever points out is that these guys at least 50% of their job is promoting their businesses. And so for me, what I want to get in your head as a CEO or as an entrepreneur, if you're the person who's the founder CEO entrepreneur, your job is to promote your business. Of course, you want to build all the cool stuff. Of course, you want to make the thing, but your actual key job and then you build around yourself and build things that support that your key job is getting out there and promoting your business. And so when you look at someone that levels, when you look at Peter levels, when you look at his ex account today, the very first thing he has posted there is essentially a long form promotion for his photo AI tool. But people on X and people who are using all these AI tools, they're like marketing socks, like all you have to do is build it and then people will come to it. You just have to build great shit and then people that's not actually what's happening in real life. It's completely counterintuitive to the fact that you know the names of all the people who build all of your favorite tools because they're on every podcast because they're out there all the time making themselves known. And so this is what I really want to get across here just as like a pre amble is that your job as CEO is not your job description is not, hey, I'm going to use AI tools and get really good at them. Your job is not, hey, I'm going to build cool like little products. If you are not able to promote those things, no one's going to use them and it becomes completely little self-contained procrastination station that you're building for yourself. Like an analogy that I use for my friends is imagine you start a restaurant. You're like, this is going to be the best restaurant ever. You spend an entire year augmenting every machine, so it all works automated. It makes the perfect food. You know, you've got the perfect system set up. You can book everything. It's so easy. You just go online, but you literally never told even one person this place exists. That will die pretty quick even though you get to do your little fun procrastination thing. All that being said, I love all the AI tools. I'm going to show you how I'm going to use that, how I use them. But I want to show you how I actually use them in line with what my job is as a CEO, which is actually it's my job to get users. It's actually my job to make money. It's actually my job to make deals while at the same time I happen to be the person who also makes a lot of the stuff that we sell. And so if you're making a cool thing, if you're making a cool product, like for example, Greg has ideabrowser.com. Yet, Greg, how much of your time do you spend promoting all your businesses? I mean, this podcast is a huge part of your job, right? Yeah, it is. This is something I think that has gotten a little bit twisted in the whole builder space because people don't realize, oh, Greg and Peter put crazy effort into making sure that their content is useful and valuable so that people know about them and therefore people can figure out what it is that they are offering to the world. And if you were never to do a podcast and if you were never to create any content, no one would have a clue about any of this stuff. And so for me, I just want to get that baseline before I go into showing how I would recommend thinking about selling stuff. So let's open. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to show you a beautiful vibe-coded blueprint for how I think about selling the whole or how I think about selling stuff in general. So I put this together earlier just as like a, I mean, this is how I show it just to show a hold up to the screen. This is how I show it to my clients, like literally scrolled on a piece of paper. But I was like, I'm going on Greg's podcast. I'm going to actually show this in a fancy vibe-coded way. So what I'm also going to do is show the AI use cases for these steps as well. But I want to
I want there's no point in me doing this until people really understand the basics and understand how money is made in this selling products space. The first thing you talk about this, you talk about this all the time, but I'm just going to like really take a step back and show the key ideas. The first step is you need to figure out how to get traffic from somewhere and the only two categories of getting traffic are organic or paid. So either you're out here like me right now going on other people's podcasts, you're running events and networking, you're doing posts on social media free content or you're paying for ads on meta, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. I always recommend push that traffic not straight into the product, like not hey just buy my product. I always recommend push them into a holding pattern. So step two is the holding pattern. The holding pattern is basically where you're just slowly warming people up and it's like your email newsletter, it could be your podcast. So your podcast, for example, the startup idea is podcast is a great place that people get value from. You don't need to promote a lot of stuff there, but you're keeping people sort of in your space, in your world and the attention is on you, YouTube content, posts on X that keep people engaged. This is basically the holding pattern and that's almost like your daily content, your weekly content. The next thing and I think I would say a lot of people on X are okay at the first two. So they know how to post and create a lot of followers, create a lot of engagement. But I almost see nobody who's good at moving people from now I have some people listening to me to that turning into money. And so that's the next step. The next step is thinking, okay, I've got all of these people, they're watching what I'm doing, they're excited about what I'm doing. How do I move them to a selling event? And a selling event is something like, for example, a webinar I talk about these all the time. So you could do a live demo of your product and show people how it's being used. You see like companies like superhuman doing this all the time. You see almost all the AI companies doing demos where you can see how these products work. And you don't even necessarily need to do a pitch at the end. It's just you now see how this product works. You now see how valuable it is. That's a live workshop. That's a live webinar. That's a live demo. I'm running these all of the time for myself and my clients and my partners. Second thing is an email campaign. This could be as simple as like a string of three or four emails that lead people in your holding pattern to actually making a purchase. And you see these all the time. You can see the examples of this all over the place. And by the way, I just got hit with a webinar campaign from superhuman today because they want me to buy superhuman teams or they want me to upgrade to superhuman teams. And so I just got hit with a campaign to get me on one of their webinars. The other thing is if you want to pay and a lot of people don't realize this, you can retarget people with a paid campaign that are already in your world. So let's say you have like a couple of thousand emails that you've collected. You can actually put those into Facebook. And again, it's not like they take the exact emails. Not like it all perfectly lines up. You create a look-alike audience. And those emails can be used to retarget people on other platforms or similar types of people on other platforms to push them towards something. And the last thing which people don't really think about, if you're building a holding pattern, and for me, if I look into my email, like, okay, let's see the last 30 people who signed up, oh, this person has an email address at Microsoft.com. We work with enterprise clients. Let me see if I can reach out to this person and jump on a call with them and see if they would be interested in working with us. And so this selling event, which a lot of people just call campaigns, are the bridge between I'm holding people in this space to now I'm moving them over to they're buying something for me. They're getting a free trial. Or they're booking a call with me because they want to buy something expensive. And if they don't convert, which most won't convert, they go back into the holding pattern and they stay there until the next selling event. And if you look at the example of Peter levels, ex account, you could even take a look at like Jason Fried's ex account or any of the people that you associate with selling really great, interesting digital products who you wouldn't consider to be very marketing heavy. They are going on other people's podcasts to generate traffic, which pushes people into their world, whether that's their ex account or newsletter or their YouTube channels or whatever it is or the podcast, their own podcast. So it's from their traffic to your traffic. And they keep people there. This is where they're posting like their personal stuff and like Peter is always posting about like how to cook steaks in an air fryer and all of this stuff is happening there. That's not where you're generating traffic in the first place, but that's where that's happening. And then every so often you'll see them make a clear push to selling, a clear push to, okay, I want to have people push towards this thing now. And you saw on Peter's account, he did this e-girl post, which is now pinned on his account as we speak. And then he posted the bump in sales that happened after he did that post. And so I'm not saying by the way that he's cynically sitting there and being like, this is specifically a sales campaign. And this is how much I'm going to make whatever. Not that that would be a bad thing or anything. It's just that this is an activity that he's that that's happening from the holding pattern. It's an activity that's not just happening randomly from an ad. He's not he's not doing his sales pitch on podcasts that when he goes on other people's podcasts, he's going on other people's podcasts and people get confused about this by the way. Why is this person like, why is the CEO of Antropic right now at Davos getting interviewed by Bloomberg, right? Is it for the good of you man? No, like his job is he's a promoter. He's moving people from here to the holding pattern to their world to understand it. When I'm watching the interview with the CEO of Antropic, Darius, I am thinking he's doing a really good job at doing this sort of pre-pitch to enterprises, we're now going to understand, oh, Claude is the enterprise AI company. He's creating that attention, bringing people into that holding pattern and the selling events for Antropic, I mean, they have an outreach team because they're actually the company that goes and tries to get these big enterprise deals. But you know, you're following them on Twitter, you're on X and then they post about Claude Co-Work. You're in their world. You're in their sphere. You're hearing about these things. Again, those companies are huge. We don't have those types of budgets, but this is the general, I would say loop that's happening the whole time. We're always trying to get new traffic and let me do this in a meta way. I'm on your podcast now. I would like to get traffic, right? I'm trying to expose myself to new people who might not know me yet. The next step is ideally people are going to start searching who I am because I'm not, when you're on other people's content, you don't want to make a pitch. People are going to do the work themselves to figure out who I am, where I am, what I'm doing. They'll then fall into one of my holding patterns. It could be that they listen to the podcast, email newsletter, whatever it is. Eventually, as some of them have seen this week because we did a big campaign, they're going to get pushed towards something. Now it's a webinar. That webinar will be pushed them again towards some people doing enterprise calls with us. Some people buying cheaper B2C products with us. Then 90% of the rest of them fall back into the holding pattern bucket. As a promoter, ideally, you're waking up every morning and you're able to understand that this is like the oxygen of the business, essentially. For example, if there's no traffic coming in, if you're not doing any traffic building activities, then there's not going to be enough people in your holding pattern. When you run a selling event, there won't be enough people in that selling event or campaign, which means you're not going to have a lot of sales. For us, for example, we're running meta ads. I'm on this podcast. I'm always out there trying to get as many people into the holding pattern as possible. Our biggest holding pattern is our email newsletter. When I see that an extra 5,000 people have joined the newsletter, I can mentally say that that means another 200 people will turn up to the next webinar. That means another 12 people will buy something. The machinery starts to make sense. The motor, so to speak. Yeah. Oh, I should change it to the motor. By the way, look, check this out. I also have this little toggle here, which is, well, how do you use AI in all of these things? The reason I didn't have AI here upfront is because this is the core element of your job as a CEO to make money. Then AI is supporting these elements. I'll show you, I'll turn it on. And I'll show you how I literally. I'm using these tools. I'll open up the tools and I'll show you how I'm doing this. I'll show you how I'm creating a marketing campaign. I'll show you how I'm using flawed in particular to support my marketing activities that make money or grow traffic or keep people in the holding pattern, etc., etc. Let's turn on the AI use cases. [laughter] So, for the audio listeners, what am I looking at? You are looking at, "I have flipped a switch," which says, "Show AI use cases." And so, we're now in AI use case mode and underneath each of the activities, so let's say we're talking about going on other people's podcasts, "I have put a use case for how to use AI tools." And also, in the background, there are very beautiful stickers of me flying around all over the place and the cursor has changed to an ice cream. So it's gotten pretty serious, I would say. Right. I'm loving what I'm seeing right now, visually, and I never realize your, before we get into this, I never realize how similar you look to Jesus. Oh, yeah. Well, now at the hair like this, the next one of these blueprints will be the Jesus Blueprint. And so, why you have here, by the way, if you want, I put this as a versel, I made like a little versel version of this, if you want to put it in the description. We will. I've vibed coded it in like 20 minutes, so it's probably barely holding itself together. But what I want to show you, actually, is, so I don't think we need to go into all of these things. Maybe people can look those up or people can click on the link and they can see the ways to use AI for these things. But I think the best thing, and what I know about your podcast is people just want to see inside the software and see how it's actually being used. So I'll just jump in and show how I, I'll show you in a very meta way, how I prepared to go on your podcast today, and how I also transitioned from using Claude, standard to Claude code to go through the entire, like, flow of this. Sound good? Perfect. Sounds great. Cool. Let's jump into little baby cute Claude. Now, what I'm going to show you, most of your, I think most of your listeners, since they're so technical already, they're going to be like, yeah, I already know about this. But I know from talking to a lot of CEOs over the last two weeks, most people still don't understand how to use Claude properly, especially how to jump from Claude to Claude code when needed. So this is a project in Claude code called, sorry, this is a project in Claude. This was my essentially marketing assistant today for going on your podcast. What I wanted to do was, so you can see here in my little notebook, I just collected all of the physical notes that I had on this promoter concept that I wanted to talk about with you at the start of the podcast. And then I wanted to work with Claude to, number one, just create the graphic to explain to people. But number two, I wanted it to do some research on the last podcast episodes I did with you to figure out, like, what was working and what's not based on how many views and how many comments, etc. But also I wanted it to figure out like, where in my angle, like where in my script is it going to lose people's attention, especially for your audience? And the other thing is, I am, I don't prepare for stuff. I'm like one of these classic ADHD entrepreneurs. And so usually I just wing it. And I wanted it to kind of work with me in a creating almost like an ADHD friendly kind of overview because I don't want to be described either. And so the first thing I did here was I recorded just straight to my phone, like a 15 minute, like brain dump on all of the different things I was thinking about talking about in this podcast. And I dumped it into Claude. And I had it basically turned that into, actually it's back here, I had to turn that into a ADHD friendly, scannable document that I could just read in the background while I'm talking to you so that I don't forget what to do. And that, that, let me just open that for you here. So let's open the HTML. So on another screen, I have the notes of the things I don't want to forget in the background that I can fly through like this. You remember I talked about Dario, about Jason Fried, about levels. And the process of doing this and I'm bringing up the blueprint, the process of doing this helped me also figure out, okay, when I'm looking at this, I was like, maybe I should actually create the blueprint so that people understand what I'm talking about and create a visual of it. So step one is I dumped all of my verbal information into Claude. And probably like everyone else is doing my, my prompts are all done by Whisperflow. So I'm talking to Claude as well. So if you're not using Whisperflow or something like it, I would highly recommend using that. So you can just like, so I dumped my transcript or I dropped my audio file in there. Then I just talked to Claude for a while. And at the same time, while I was doing all these little projects, I'll just go back here, okay, while I was doing all of this, I was having it teach itself instructions for this particular project. So at the end of every one of these chats, so I gave it an initial instruction. It was like, I'm going to be a guest on Greg Eisenberg's startup ideas podcast today. You're going to be assisting me with putting together a strong content angle, strong ideas and strong strategy for delivering the most value to his audience. This is currently the most popular episode I've done with Greg. And then I had it at the end of each chat. I said, Hey, Claude, this was great. Now I want you to give me a pasteable set of instructions that I can put into your instructions for this podcast as we continue along with this episode. I also had it do in a separate chat. I had it do research on you. And so we also created a research document. So a research file. So it doesn't have to do that research fresh every single time in every single chat. It already went through your ex account. It already went through your YouTube account. And all of that led to me being able to create a really simple overview and then move on to, Hey, okay, let's create an infographic that represents how I want to zoom out of the big picture for customers and show them how this whole creator flow works. And by the way, prompts again, prompts of this detail are only really possible if you're able to verbally play with them and just just talk them out. And the cool thing here for anyone who doesn't already know how to do this is in normal Claude in the Claude project with all the context I've given it. I had it build this blueprint for me. And when I was relatively happy with it. So when it was at like this point where you know, also it's actually already, oh yeah. So it gave me this first simple version of it. And I was like, this is pretty fine. Then I asked it here. I said, cool, I'm going to move this project over to Claude code. So I'm going to take the HTML file. But what I need from you is to create a Claude MD file that gives you the Claude code, the entire context of this project as much context as possible. And so in this moment, I had to create the Claude MD file, the markdown file, and spit out the HTML file, downloaded all of them. And then I moved over to Claude code where I actually started building this little piece of software, this little piece of like one off marketing software. I'm sure your audience already deeply knows how all of this stuff works. But it's kind of fun anyway, just to see how it got brought over. So here you go. So I created a project folder then on my desktop, which was about this podcast. And I said, okay, I'm working on this promoter blueprint. Take a look at the Claude MD file to give yourself context. And then I wanted it to move into use ask user question mode or plan mode. And I had it just, like grill me on the ideas for the podcast again, which gave me even more context to work with, which then spat out the blueprint or the promoter blueprint that I showed you even though we spelled it wrong. And then I had it put it on GitHub, spit it out to Versel so that we are where we're at right now. It sounds like a lot of stuff, but all of that took about one hour, I would say, and almost all of it was happening in the background while I was doing other stuff as well. And so that's like a really super simple flow for any sort of CEO or marketer to go from, okay, I'm researching something to now I'm making a marketing element that I can use. In this case, I'm using it for the traffic part of my flow. I mean, if you want to see a more complex setup, for example, if we go
So here, I'll show you where I'm actually building out campaigns at a deeper level, let's say, a campaign that I hope make $450,000 this week will. I can't guarantee that it will make $450,000. I think it will, though. At least $350. Based on the hundreds of workshops and webinars you've done, it sounds like from what we talked about, it sounds like you're going to do between $250,000 and $500,000. Yeah, it's usually in that range. We are really. So we have like 4,000 webinars sign-ups right now, so we're hoping it can go much higher. So we're doing. basically, this is my A.J. and Smart Marketing Expert Brain. So this is where I. When I'm not building something, when I don't need cloud code, and actually I know I could just set up all of this on cloud code, but somehow I prefer using this interface when I'm just focusing on marketing stuff. I like to see the overview. So this is my marketing, copywriting machine, essentially, and you can see I'm using it for a lot of stuff here. And it is my first place I go to when I have a new email campaign that I want to run, or when I have a new webinar that I want to run. And the important element here is that I spend a lot of time setting up the files in the document. I have the books that I've written. I've had one of my favorite things here is a 17,766 line doc, which is me finding other people's marketing emails and just compiling them. And then learning from them, having cloud essentially boil down the main learnings and add them to the cloud MD file, which I'm still playing around with so it doesn't get too overwhelmed. But let me just show you how I would normally then move from the traffic phase maybe to the like cell phase or something. So what I'll do here is I'll say, okay, so I just finished a podcast episode with Greg Eisenberg. The topic was how I use AI tools as a CEO. And what I want to do, I'm going to give you the context of that. I'm going to put the cloud MD file here so you have the context of what I talked about about. What I want to do is I want to create a very simple like juicy downloadable or lead magnet that I could send people to after this episode that will bring them into my newsletter. So it's got to be something free. It's got to be something relevant to this episode that I'm doing with Greg Eisenberg. And I just want you to pump out about three lead magnet examples. Let's go. And so what I'll do is I'll bring in the file that we are using, the cloud MD file instruction file we're using for your project just so that I bring that context in here. As a one off thing, I don't want to bring it and replace this entire context here. And I'll have Opus sort of come up with the first feel for it. And it's not that you're as a CEO completely replacing your entire brain with cloud. You're once you, the thing that your brain is there to do is look for these opportunities as to think about, I mean, the traffic phase I want to move to the holding pattern phase. Let's see what it came up with. Okay, the promoter blueprint one pager, I think that would work well. So PDF of the four step framework. That's pretty good 50 prompts for the promoter CEO, this wipe file, the cave dweller audit. Are you building or promoting? That's really great. A quick self assessment that exposes the builder trap and why it works as provocative. That's actually pretty funny because one of the angles of this is like, you don't want to get stuck building stuff and not promoting. And so what I would do from here is then I would talk a little bit. I would take the transcript from this podcast if it was afterwards. And I would give it even more context, turn that into a lead magnet. Of course, I would then move to cloud code to create the lead magnet landing page and we're done. And so for me, this process used to be like me chatting with my team, which I still do, of course, but now we can do multiple projects at the same time. Me chatting with my team, then me asking a designer to make the landing, to make this blueprint, and me going off and trying to figure out what's the best way to put the get a landing page. Should we do it and click funnels? Should we do it in frame or now this entire process of marketing for me that maybe it would be a week for us to, okay, let's say a full lead magnet campaign two to three days to get it right. Now we're talking about half a day. And it just feels so much faster. You can make one-off campaigns that feel super custom to the content you're creating. And basically, that's it. That's basically how I'm using it. That's as far as I'm going. It's very lightweight. So I got a lot of thoughts. I think you kind of downplayed it. You're like, I know this audience knows these tools and stuff like that. I think that the way you use instructions, the way you're setting up projects, I think, is it's helpful to see how other people are using it, you know? I do. I learned it from your podcast. It's just helpful, right? It's helpful. It's like even the little tidbit around for marketing related projects, I just like to start with the cloud interface, like the back up, is interesting. Yeah, I'm getting better at moving or knowing when I want to move between cloud code and cloud. One thing I will say is, so a friend of mine who's running a company called PIPDEX, he's gone thousands of levels deeper than me into all this cloud code stuff, also watching your channel and learning from it. And his co-founder messaged me the other day and he was like, John, ask user question, use the ask user question skill for designing your webinar and ask it to really grill you. And so what I did is I trained a cloud project on the webinar structure that I like the best. And I have it do like a 30 minute ask user question flow on me. And the end result coming from that, when I'm doing it in cloud code, just because it's quicker, it feels quicker, just hitting the one, two, three, whatever, is something that's making me feel like I might just move the whole thing to cloud code. But for now, I'm just feeling good about having the two separate interfaces. I mean, for context, eight months ago, you barely knew what the stuff was, right? I didn't know. I remember we met in May. Yeah. And we were in San Francisco and I was going to all these AI events with you. And I was like, I'm basically using AI as a search engine. The end, like the search engine slash light assistant and it's a couple of months later. And every single interaction, every single business process at A.J. and Smart now hasn't AI automated element. But I will warn other CEOs out there. It's very easy to optimize for the wrong thing and end up spending. It's okay if it's for fun. But don't be me and Laura. And one of the things Laura said, she's running the business with me. She was like, I spend three days building this proposal builder. And then I asked Claude, would it be easier for me to use an off the shelf solution and then Claude gave me an off the shelf solution, off the shelf solution that we could have used from day one and have it all connected. And so there's the warning of you don't have to build everything completely custom and remembering your job as a promoter, remembering that your job is not just optimizing the crap out of everything. And the last thing, dude, we said this in May together on your podcast and I think it's more true than ever now. I don't think being efficient right now is the play. I think the play is scaling up like crazy. So like for me, I don't think the play is, oh, all of these processes can now be done by AI. So I'm just going to just do everything myself. I think the play is, if you already have a small team, keep them. And just now you have triple the size of the small team if everyone's using these tools. And you can do five campaigns a month instead of one. You can do so many more variations of Facebook ads instead of like what we used to do like updating them every six weeks. I think the play right now is abundance and like going big instead of obsessive efficiency. And I think Claude Codd allows you to really play big, like really play very big. It's so exciting. There's like, I basically feel like you can clone yourself and then just do more shit.
the challenges making sure you're doing stuff that actually hits your goals of revenue or users or whatever it is. Yeah, I feel like there's a lot of people who listen to this podcast and they, it's like their first time setting up Cloud Code and they'll set up like a thousand skills, like Cloud Skills, before like building one thing and it's like dude, like, no, no. Like, you could use things like skills, you could use, you know, sub agents, you could use Ralph Wiggum, you could use all these like advanced techniques, but to start with, you really just want to figure out, okay, what is it is? What am I, you know, what is my team look like, even if it's a team of one, what are the things? What are the jobs to be done? Yeah. And how can I use this to create bread or products, to promote more, to experiment more, and then just start making it part of your daily routine and then over time you're just, you're gonna learn, oh, okay, actually I could put a skill over here. I'm gonna do one skill. And then over time, like, it doesn't need to be, like, don't be that, you know, that person that measured twice is, which is the extra measure twice cut once. Just cut. Cut everything. Just cut. Just cut, cut, cut, cut. There's no, there's, so when I meet other entrepreneurs, the biggest sign for me that they're going to move very slowly is too much preparation. And I think these tools are so good, you can go straight into a project with them. Like with Claude code, I didn't, I didn't even do a test project. I was just like, I'm gonna see if I can make one of these campaign pages immediately. And by messing up, and by, for example, the first thing you might hit is like the context window becomes too long and then it compresses and then it forgets loads of stuff. And I'm like, what the hell? It's forgotten all the stuff I told it. And then you realize, oh, maybe like doing projects on Claude code is like doing little bits instead of all in one massive big mega prompt. And but I had to learn that by working with it on a real project. And so I definitely think less prep, more action and an understanding, especially if you're CEO or founder and understanding that your job is to grow your business to make money or to get investors or to get users. And your job is not to be optimizing your admin before you're even making money. I'm going to be doing a lot more episodes of the podcast that are like in this vein around vibe marketing basically. Like how do you how do you use AI to get more customers? I'm happy that you set the foundation around like, okay, before you even do this, you know, sexy vibe marketing stuff, you kind of have to understand the foundation. But, you know, thanks for coming on and dropping the sauce. And we'll include the link in the show notes description. If you want to use the ice cream cursor, by the way, was that them had to have a new idea? I just, oh yeah, like, so I was looking at it. And so it created, I wanted there to be a toggle to show the AI use cases. And then when I when I clicked the toggle, I was like, this is boring. So then I did the cut out of my face and put it in the background. And then I was like, this is still boring. Let's add an ice cream to the cursor. And I just kept adding stuff. I mean, I created a planner for me and my friends to go on vacation. It's called the wet boy vacation planner. And it's the most demonic thing you've ever seen. And so for me, that's the fun of cloud code is being able to just make very specific silly things as you're going on. So yeah, that wasn't a cloud idea. Cloud wouldn't recommend something like this. Yeah, we could do a whole episode on the wet boy summer vacation app for sure. So good. So good. All right. Thanks a lot, man. I appreciate anything you want to leave people with. Honestly, if you just accept that your role as a CEO is your promoter and don't be embarrassed about it, I know people get cringe about promoting themselves. If that's not what you want to do, find a co-founder who wants to do that. It is literally the job of a CEO. You're supposed to be out there talking about your business. And again, it's not a problem if you don't want to do it. You got to have someone in the company doing that job. It just won't work if you don't have that type of person who's willing to take the role. And just believe in yourself, love yourself. You know, it's all good. Hello. You know, that kind of stuff. All right. Perfect place to leave it. Thanks again. And I'll catch you next time. See ya. Yeah.
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Many people build AI projects (vibe-coding) but fail to generate revenue or users because they neglect the promotional and business side.
A CEO’s primary job is promoting the business—getting traffic, building an audience, and converting that into sales—not just building products.
The key sales framework is
AI tools should support these core business activities, not replace them; they are used for tasks like creating marketing campaigns, but the strategy must come first.
Summary:
In this episode, Jonathan “Mr. Jai Stream” Courtney addresses a common problem: people vibe-code projects that launch to “crickets” because they focus only on building and not on making money. He argues that the CEO’s primary role is promotion, not just technical development.
Successful entrepreneurs like Sam Altman or Peter Levels spend a significant portion of their time promoting their businesses through podcasts, content, and networking. , podcasts, social media) or paid (ads) methods. Second, direct that traffic into a “holding pattern”—like an email newsletter or podcast—where audiences are warmed up with valuable content.
Third, move them to a “selling event,” such as a live webinar, email campaign, or retargeted ads, which converts some into customers. Those who don’t buy return to the holding pattern for future campaigns. He emphasizes that AI tools should support these steps, not drive them; for example, AI can help create marketing materials, but the foundational business strategy must come first.
Without consistent traffic and a system to convert it, even the best-built products will fail to generate revenue.
FAQs
The episode teaches how to use AI tools to generate revenue and get customers for a vibe-coded project, moving from no activity to making money.
Many people think building great products with AI automatically leads to customers and money, but in reality, promoting your business is essential.
The CEO's main job is to promote the business and get users, not just build products. At least 50% of their time should be spent on promotion.
Traffic can come from organic sources like podcasts and social media posts, or paid sources like ads on Meta, TikTok, or YouTube.
A holding pattern is a place like an email newsletter or podcast where you warm up potential customers with valuable content, keeping them engaged before they buy.
A selling event is a campaign, such as a webinar or email sequence, that moves people from the holding pattern to making a purchase or booking a call.
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