Як я побудував бізнес на AI за $1 мільйон у 2026 році: крок‑за‑кроком для CEO

Over the past 12 months, I built a $5 million AI business that attracted investment from some of the top names in the go to market space, large LinkedIn influencers, and even the founder of Lovable himself. Now, through this process, I learned a bunch. I made a few mistakes. Most importantly, I overshot my goal by a long shot. So, in this video, I want to take you through each crucial step that helped me build this multi-million dollar business, teach you mistakes that you can avoid, and show you how AI can literally change your life. if you use it the right way. But first, let me give you some context. The business I built is called Bond. You can check it out in the description. And surprise, surprise, it didn't start like most Silicon Valley stories. There was no epic moment. I didn't build it in the garage. And it didn't start with a pitch deck. It actually started with one of my students. This over here is a booty. And this is basically all his fault. You see, in the program, I had a module teaching people how to do outreach to book customer discovery interviews to figure out if his idea had feet. Andy took this framework and used two tools that he was learning make and air table to basically automate the whole process. And using this automation plus his niece, he was actually booking eight meetings a week. So I gave that to more students. They were using it and also booking meetings. As things usually go with me, I get very curious and I started doing research. I started looking what are the tools out there that allow you to do outreach. And I found one in particular called Clay that allow you to create these sophisticated outbound systems. However, it was just very expensive. I dug a little deeper and I found that there was this multi-million dollar agency model around this tool because it was so complicated to figure out how to use it. Sales teams literally had to hire an engineer called a go to market engineer to get this thing to work. And that's when it clicked. What if we could get the skills of a goto market engineer to be implemented by someone who is not technical and of course without having to hire an expensive agency? And that was the birth of bond insight that turned into a $5 million business. So today, I'm going to break down the five phases to build a million-doll AI business from validating your idea all the way to building a reliable growth engine. So, we'll talk about the step-by-step method, the exact tools that I would use, and the mistakes that cost me months and lots of money so that you can skip them entirely. Now, it's time to jump in. Let's go. So, the first phase is where most people blow it before they even get started. They come up with an idea, get super excited, jump right into building, and then end up spending the next 6 to 12 months building something that other people don't want or not willing to pay for. And I'll be honest, I got this wrong as well. This phase is called validation. And there are two main steps that I would take if I were to start all over again. And if you do these two right, you're going to save yourself from a world [music] of pain. Now, the first step of this phase is research. But before we jump into that, what are we actually validating? Well, there are three main factors. Who is the customer? What is the problem that we're actually solving? And are people willing to actually pay for it? Then instead of wasting your time building business plans, writing financial forecasts, let's do some research with these amazing AI tools that are now at our disposal. In this phase, our main goal is to find a problem worth solving. [music] So the research I like doing is not about the industry, how much it's growing, this that the other. It's actually just about what customers are currently facing as problems that I'm thinking I'm going to solve. So I want to find actual people inside of forums, on Reddit, on Twitter talking about these problems and expressing the specific things that are frustrating them about a process, a workflow, or a situation. [music] Because if we find a problem, people are willing to pay to solve it. So this first light research phase should only take a couple of hours maximum because the majority of your time should be spent doing the second part of this process. [music] My favorite research tools right now are either Claude Co-work or Manis. So let me show you how I do it specifically. This is Cloud Co-work. It's a platform just like Cloud Code, but it has more guard rails, so it's more focused for nontechnical people. And I actually use a software called Whisper Flow to speak to my apps. So I click into this chat box, and now I'm just going to give it a prompt. Now, with Bond, we were trying to solve a problem that has to do with outbound. So, I would want to do some research around that. So, here's the prompt that I would use. Could you please spin up a research agent that goes on forums, Reddit, and other places where people could be talking about outbound and specifically figure out the things that people are frustrated about in this industry? I'm looking to find specific quotes and overall trends and the things that people don't like about the current state of outbound because I'm looking to solve them. Boom. That automatically populates now this field. And I'm going to go ahead and let's go. Now, here it's asking a couple more questions. the actual tools. I'm going to say yes. It's going to do the research and it's going to build a report for me. Now, while we're waiting for this to spin up, let's talk about the most important part of validation. That's actually talking to customers who you think have this problem and you're going to try to solve it for them. Let's find out if that's true. Step one, write a customer discovery interview. You can go to any one of your LLM's Chat GPT and just basically ask for it to write a customer discovery questionnaire for you to use for your specific use case. Then you need to build a list of ideal prospects that you're basically going to reach out to and try to book a meeting 15 minutes where you're going to ask them the questions on that questionnaire and find out if there's even a problem. Core mistake here, do not do not do not talk about your product. You can tell them at the beginning that you'll tell them about your idea at the end. Then you want to make sure you hop on Zoom with a notetaker that's already following so that you can have all the notes and can focus on that interview. And at the end of that, you're going to gather those notes together and feed them all to AI and ask it to figure out if there actually is a problem where it sees those problems. And that's going to allow you to fine-tune the idea. But Christian, there are multiple people I think would actually buy this product. Great. Split them into three groups and try to interview at least three people in each one of those three groups. That's nine interviews. And you'll probably find that one, if not two, will not have a problem at all. And then you dig deeper once you find the one that does have an actual problem. Stay very open because sometimes you actually stumble upon ideas that are way better to solve than what you initially went out to go after. Now, our favorite tool for customer discovery outreach is obviously Bond because we built it specifically for that. But it literally allows you to just type out who you're looking to go after and it will find those profiles and then you can find emails, you can find phone numbers, and you can even personalize your copy after doing deep research about that person. All within a couple of seconds with no technical skills. Oh, I almost forgot. Notetakers. I use Fireflies, but there are many others out there. Great results are in. I see that data quality is a problem. I see that deliverability is an issue. Reply rates are collapsing. Pricing feels like a trap. And manual work kills reps. So, at the end of this validation, I would feed all of your research and all of the transcripts of your interviews to AI and ask it what it thinks you should solve for. And now that we have a problem, we know who we're solving it for. Time to jump in the next step. Now, the second phase of this process is to launch. Christian, we didn't even build anything. What are you talking about? That's exactly how it should feel because the earlier you can launch, the earlier that you can get actual feedback that guides you in the right direction. And there are a couple steps to this. Follow me closely. You see, to build a business, we need to get sales. And sales is actually the concept of selling someone on an outcome. The product is actually just the way that that person receives that outcome. But to sell, we need to turn that outcome into an offer. an offer that very specifically is going to be sitting on a website or landing page that people are going to buy into or not. Don't worry, of course, we're going to build a product, but the point is that we first need to have an offer here. Again, I would go to one of your LLMs and basically describe the product that you're trying to offer and then tell [music] it to turn that into an irresistible offer. In fact, because the next step of this process is going to be to turn it into a website, we can actually do both of these at the same time. Let me explain. Now, again, I'm going to open up the LLM of my choice. In this case, I'm just going to Claude because that's the one that I like. You can use whichever one you like. And here's what I'm going to say. Pay attention to [music] the wording. I have the idea for a business. The name of this business is going to be called Bond. And it's basically an outbound tool that helps people create highly personalized outbound campaigns. I wanted to solve the problem of building a highly targeted list. Also be able to do deep research about that list, find emails and validate them, find phone numbers, and finally use all of that context to write highly personalized outreach messages. Now, here's the catch. I want you to then turn that into a website structure and I would like that to be written like a direct response marketer. Now pay attention to that. I described the overall idea. Then I kind of talked about the problem that I'm solving and then I asked it how to actually write this. Now a direct response marketer is professional at writing copy that converts. Getting people to take action when they go onto a website. So I'm going to add that at the end. I highly recommend you [music] do the same. Now we're going to see what it comes back with and I'm basically going to fine-tune it. Okay. Okay, so as we can see right here, it's already built a first version of the landing page and we can pretty much check it out here and describe what we like, what we don't like. In this case, it has a lot of copywriting because the goal of it is to try to convert people. Now, this is usually not the tool of choice to actually build and deploy websites, but it's going to be a really good starting point for me to be able to then fine-tune some of these things. And once I'm ready, I'm pretty much going to tell it, hey, could you basically break this down now into a structure that I'm going to feed to my AI coding platform? And that's how we're going to build this website out. So, I'm going to come back here and just say, could you please turn this landing page into a full prompt that I can actually use to build this out in an AI coding platform like lovable.dev. Be as precise as possible. I want this to be very techforward. I want it to be simple and classy. I want the main key color to be a tone of blue, but I want the overall website to be in dark mode. Create that starter prompt for me. So now I'm asking it to create a starter prompt that I'm going to be able to feed to an AI coding platform. Let's go. And while that cooks, my friends, this is lovable.dev, and it is my favorite AI coding platforms to build websites, but also to build full apps, specifically web apps. Once I have this starter prompt, I'm actually just going to grab it and feed it straight into this platform. Before even building a website, I know that I want to have a little bit more inspiration of the creative direction or maybe the style, the design. And of course, we know that we need to come up with branding and content, which is the next step before we actually jump into building a website. So, for the brand name, I actually don't start with a name. I start with a domain because it's going to be way harder to find the domain. I already bought the domains around Bond, but potentially I could just go and look up for names that are involve Bond, right? So obviously bond.com is going to be taken. I'm already going to start seeing some different ones and alternatives that I could use. So I could use an alternative like bond.1, bond.design, bond.io. It only cost $288,000. Anyway, the point is you want to basically find a brand that's available. And usually I only go for things that cost about $11 is like the cheapest you can find. [music] So sometimes you can find things like get bond. You could choose to put a couple letters before like go bond or we could also choose to put something after. So our website is actually askbond.ai. But again there are multiple ways you can go here. I would either go for the com the.io or.ai if you have an AI company. Once we have the domain and we bought it, I like to go and get inspiration for design. I love to go to these website builders because they have lots of templates and I can just choose the style that I like. Let me show you how that works. This is Web Flow, a really cool app builder for specifically like web designers who want lots of control. A little bit more complex to learn, but they have just such beautiful like builds in here. So, I could just come inside of some of these and find a website that looks pretty cool. So, what I'm going to do is come in here and find something that I like and try to replicate it. Okay, so I found this one that I find pretty cool. And I was going for kind of a blue. I know that I said I like dark mode, but I think light mode is also pretty badass. So, I'm going to just take some screenshots of different sections here so that this can actually help to mimic this afterwards. And I'll show you how I do that in just a second inside the app builder. But at this point, I'm really just going to take screenshots of the different sections of the website so that I can give a sense to the AI what it needs to copy. And now we have the essentials of a brand. The last thing you'd be missing is a logo. For that, I either go to Upwork and get one done or I play around inside of things like Nano Banana. Plenty of ways to do that. I'll let you figure that one out. Now, we're ready to go inside of Lovable. So, I copy that full prompt. And we know there's going to be a lot of copywriting on it because this specific one had that. And I'm basically just going to upload it like this. And we're going to see in a couple minutes what it cooks up for us. From there, we're going to be able to make all the adaptations before we actually launch. Okay. Okay, so now this is finished cooking and we can check out the preview of it. Let's go ahead and see what we have. Excellent. Some nice animations. Here is kind of a pain slide that brings them through all the pain. This looks really clean. We have these little animations which make it look really nice. If we hover over them, we also see those little adaptations. And this already would be a very good thing to go [music] to market with so that we can talk about this idea, do the customer discovery interviews and fine-tune this website based on what we're hearing the customers want to solve are willing to pay for. Right? Let me quickly show you however how you can now convert this into the design of your choice. I can basically go down here into the chat and add the specific attachments. In this case, I'm going to grab all the screenshots and this is the prompt I'm going to give it. Okay, I have just uploaded some screenshots. I would like for you to copy the design system, including the color usage, including the fonts, including the tone and everything from this brand book. Copy these screenshots. I would like for my website to look as close as possible to what I'm uploading right now. Cool. And we're just going to run with that. We're going to be able to have a little nap now because obviously this is going to take another couple minutes. I'm just going to let it cook. Okay. So, this is now the new look and feel that we have for it. And we can obviously adapt a huge number of things here, but I think that here we came to a pretty cool next [music] version. It looks similar, not as beautiful, but it's in the same styling. And I think this is good enough for us to now launch. The last step I'll do in here, I'm pretty much going to publish it right here. Now, at first, when you publish it, it's basically just going to have a URL. I'm going to go ahead and continue on that one. Continue here. Continue. [music] Continue. Publish. And now we're going to have a URL which is going to be bond.lovable.app. So now I'm going to be able to basically grab that link and share it to people. Of course, we're going to be able to attach the domain that we found inside here to this right as I check out here. You see? So I could have just adapted it and connected it to that one. Very easy to do. And now my friends, we have a website. We have to go out there and start talking to customers and start figuring out how we want to fine-tune this offer. And in parallel, [music] we jump into the next step. So now we turned this idea into an offer. We built it into a website. We started doing outreach, talking to people. Now we're starting to get into this motion where we have people. They're giving us feedback. And some of those people are going to be our first customers. This next phase is super important and probably the phase where you will end up sinking the most money if you do not do this correctly. And that, my friends, is the build phase. You now have to take this idea, the problem you're solving, the people, the feedback, etc., and actually build a first product. The one thing I would recommend is building your MVP. But first off, what is an MVP? An MVP is literally the minimum viable product. Some people call it the minimum lovable product that basically will solve the problem and people will be willing to pay for. At this point, we have an assumption of the people who are going to be using this [music] and willing to pay for it. But it's not until we put a product in their hands that we're going to find out whether this solves the problem or not. And I have two AI coding platforms for nontechnical people that I use all the time to build these first MVPs. The first one is Lovable. We've talked about that to build the website. The second one is Base 44. You can find both links below. They're relatively similar, but you can spin up full apps by just prompting it in plain English. And I'm going to show you a quick strategy to be able to do that quickly, effectively, so you can get that in the hands of your customers [music] tomorrow. Yes, you've guessed it. We're going back into Claude or ChatgBT, whichever one you use, to basically create a document that's super important to get started. It's called a PRD, product requirement document. This basically maps out exactly what you want in your [music] app. The design style, the key functionalities inside that app, the user flow or how they're actually going to be using that, and usually also the tech or the tech stack. Now, in this case, I don't really use this last one because for those two builders, we're not going to need it. they actually use technology out of the box that's going to be better than what we're trying to recommend and we might just confuse it on that front. So, we're going to use the same process that we used to create that website structure inside of Collad to do the same thing for our PRD. Okay. I would like to now turn the offer that we talked about into a minimum viable product. I'm going to be building this inside of lovable.dev and I would like for you to be able to create a product requirement document that basically breaks down what would be the best minimum viable product to basically bring to market first. I would like for that to include all of the usual things except for the technology stack because we're going to allow Lovable to use the tech that it wants to use to build this first version. Turn that PRD into a starter prompt to build this app for me. And then it's going to come back to a prompt that we're going to be able to use to build the first version of the app. And probably the best part about AI is that because it does the work for you, you have these in between times when it's processing where you can literally just have a little nap. So, I think I'm just going to do that. [laughter] Now, one of the big mistakes we made at Bond was to build way too much before we actually went to market. And then we launched the first version of the product and realized that the intended customers actually wanted something different. [music] And so that forced us to build a whole new product to go to market with over the past couple months. You won't have to suffer through that because you're just going to basically build multiple MVPs, find the winner. I just jumped into Lovable, dumped that right in there, and I'm going to show you the first version in just a minute. And by the way, your AI business could be a totally different idea that does not require the app to be built. Just figure out the quickest way to build the first version of that product. It could even be a service and then deliver that as soon as possible. Okay, let's check it out. It seems like a first version here. New campaign. Great. Describe your customers. B2B SAS founders in the US. Let's see what it can do. Target audience. Confirm this. Yes. Then [music] it's showing us first prospect list. Very cool. Obviously, this information is not real data. We would have to connect this to a data provider. Very cool. Now, it's doing research about these individuals. Now, it's going to generate messaging. If I [music] click on this, this looks pretty cool. It's a first version again. And my recommendation would actually not be to build this entire thing because to get all of these pieces working together, you'd have to connect to multiple data providers, which is what we've had to do with Bond. pretty cool for one prompt. I would highly recommend you check out Lovable and Base 44 if you want to learn a little bit more so that you can actually build this all the way at the end. This process of the first MVP should not take any more than one week flat. [music] And just to be crystal clear here, if I were to build an MVP for Bond again, I would only start with build a list. So find prospects. Then I could do all the other complex stuff. But if we get that one feature working and people are willing to pay for it, then we know we can move into the next phase. Fourth phase, the most important phase, monetization. Until you don't have a first dollar in bank, we don't have a business, we have a money hole. So hopefully at this point, we have the customer, we have a product that's solving the problem. And now we need to jump into making our first bucks in revenue. And I can tell you those first dollars are actually the best, not because you made money, but because it's validation that you're on the right path. So no, you're not going to charge some of your old customers. is what you have to do is go out and run more campaigns, [music] do more outreach to go and find your next customers, your first paying customers. A great strategy here is to give a limited time discount for people who are on board early. So you don't have to think about getting 100 million customers. You don't have to worry about getting even 100 customers. You literally need to get your first five customers. [music] And because usually we need to get very quick feedback on the work that we're doing, we won't be able to invest in certain channels that can get us long-term customers. For example, this YouTube channel took me years to actually build it to the point at which people were following me. If you started doing SEO or AEO today, you're actually going to see the results of those with traffic in six, maybe 12 months. So, there are lots of distribution channels we simply can't go after, which is why direct outreach and continuing to build out personalized messaging campaigns is going to be the best approach. I'd probably say paid ads could be interesting, too, but sometimes you can't really target people as effectively. [music] But to charge people, we need to understand a business model, right? And so the best way to do this is go and check out an article by Dave Parker where he just breaks down these 14, come up with the one you think has the best opportunity of making money, figure out a [music] starting price point, and basically give a 50% discount on that. And if you're not able to do that, you know that you're still in the pre-product market fit phase, right? The only thing you really have to do is to be incredibly honest with yourself about what is not working. and that is by feedback from customers. [music] Don't be scared to change your product, who you're targeting, or the business model that you're using. You have to be aggressive in that testing. And when you find the right combo, that's when you're going to be ready to start investing, [music] finding a technical co-founder potentially to build the next version of that product that works, raising capital if you want to go the VC route, or of course jumping into what the next [music] entire world of your startup will look like, jumping into growth. That's exactly what phase [music] 5 is all about. Okay, so once you've started monetizing and you're starting to find product market fit, everything changes. It's now time to go from product market fit to product channel fit. That's basically the process through which we're going to go and figure out which one of the distribution channels or which sales and marketing method is going to be the most effective specifically for the product that you're building. So, first off, we double down on personalized outreach. And the next thing we're going to do is we can start investing in channels that are actually going to be able to see success. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but in the next couple of months. We can now take long-term investments in our growth. And there are three specific areas I would invest my time and money in. Once we have personalized outreach working for us at scale, we're bringing in customers. I would actually start creating organic content. The reason for that is that organic content is going to start driving actual trust with people who are going to become future customers. Now, I'd highly recommend for you to do this on LinkedIn because it's the easiest place where you can find information about the people that you're trying to target potentially. And the best part is that cold outreach and organic content works really nicely because now you can retarget people who are your ideal customers who interact [music] with your posts. In fact, it's an easy thing that you can currently do inside of Bond as well as just building out full campaigns. Let me show you. Right here is a post where I was talking about Bond in action and I got a huge number of people actually interacting with it. We have 519 comments. And so I can simply grab the link to this post. I can go to Bond. I can ask it to simply build me a list of people who interacted with this post. I'm going to add that link. And basically, it's going to start building out a table of the people who commented, of the people who liked that post. And then I can actually qualify to see if they're the right people to go after. Research them, do personalized outreach to them. Let me just show you. They're all just showing up here. And we can see the exact comment. In this case, I asked them to comment Rev 2026 if they wanted a specific lead magnet. And now I have all these people inside of a table. But this is where it gets really interesting. [music] The next thing you can do is start retargeting these people with paid ads. Because you know that they've showed interest because they're in your ideal customer profile. You can now create ads that retarget them on multiple other platforms including YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and more. And that trifecta, my friends, is an amazing growth engine. [music] Personalized outbound with organic content and retargeting with paid ads, which starts bringing in a lot of leads. And then we start hitting the next bottleneck in our business. And this is something that we're currently structuring inside of our team at Bond, which is basically the ability to automate the processes inside your business. Why? Well, because you have customers now who need customer support. You have to create organic content and need a system to do that effectively. You might have to hire people like a sales team that you're going to also have to manage. And the list pretty much goes on as your company starts to grow with revenue. So instead of telling you what you should do here, I'm actually going to tell you what we are doing internally to make our operations incredibly lean and scalable so we can address the mass that's starting to come in in terms of demand. You see, in 2026, there is new tech that came out that absolutely changed the game. And it's the beginning of AGI, which is basically autonomous AI agents. Think of them like Jarvis. You can pretty much ask them what to do and they can perform it at the same level, if not better, than you can. So the release of OpenClaw was a big aha moment similar to Chat GPT where people could now actually build and replicate exact humans, feed them skills that it would be able to be trained on that can take actions within the apps that you already use. We're mainly going to be editors of what AI is doing in the future. in fact in the very near future. And so we've implemented Open Claw inside of our revenue operations system that makes it incredibly effective to follow up with people to talk to our CRM to automate a huge number of tasks that we would usually have to do manually. On the software building side of things, we've built a full system leveraging claude code. This of course a booty took care of cuz he's a G. But basically, we've built a system around building software that makes it much more effective. And yes, Abooty currently has more than three subscriptions to claude code to make that happen. But the point is that you can leverage these technologies to automate your existing systems, which means that you can scale your company without having to scale headcount. And last month, we actually multiplied our revenue by multiple folds just by implementing this technology and launching a new product. So the goal here is not to automate everything. is to actually see where in your business you're requiring to put a lot of your time and to only automating those things that work manually at first. Overautomating again can be another one of those dramatic mistakes that makes you basically waste a bunch of time for things that really don't move the needle. So figure out where you're wasting your time and try to automate as many of those things as possible and know that there are entire parts of your business that you can basically automate with AI as well. But the story, my friends, is far from finished. And if you're in the phase where you're just starting to get started and maybe want to build a first app, maybe using Lovable, I highly recommend that you check out this video and don't forget to subscribe to the channel because we're going to be giving you so much more value of how we build and scale this business and also how you can build and launch businesses, too. Let's go.