The Simplest Version of Running an Online Business

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

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Right now, we live in a world of many, many tools. We’ve lived in that world for the last twenty years. What would happen is somebody with a big brain who figured out they could solve a problem with software would develop a specialized piece of software for that one problem.

The people who figured out how to send emails at scale developed email sending tools. The people who figured out how to make someone swipe a credit card online developed CRMs and payment processing systems. The people who figured out how to get a website up online developed WordPress and all the website building tools, all the funnel builders, the Infusionsofts, the ClickFunnels, and everything else.

So we live in a world where we need a gazillion specialized tools to achieve things. There’s a different tool for tracking, a different tool for landing pages, a different tool for this and for that.

But the same mindset was applied to AI tools when AI showed up. A mass tool like ChatGPT launched and that was okay, but then they started breaking off. All of a sudden you had a specialized tool for analyzing contracts, even though ChatGPT could do it. Then you had companies develop tools for writing your email sequences and copy, although again, ChatGPT could do that too.

All it was, was people who were impressed with ChatGPT taking the ChatGPT API and saying, I’m going to train a model that will be specialized only in creating ads, and I’m going to call this software AI Ad Creator, and I’m going to sell it at a monthly subscription. It was just people taking advantage of the way the market develops. All kudos to them. They acted fast and made some money.

And then what happened was we found ourselves where we are today. At least twenty different AI tools, each doing something slightly different. Even though ChatGPT or Claude can do all of it, you just have to train it. But because humans are lazy, we want a specialized tool that just does the one thing.

[3:42] 

I quickly caught up with the program and I didn’t like it. I didn’t like having a million different tools. My team still uses some of them, but it becomes overwhelming very fast. One tool that generates videos, another tool that cuts that video into ten short clips for YouTube Shorts, another tool that generates images, another tool that writes articles, another tool that writes ads. It’s annoying. It’s genuinely annoying to always be switching between a gazillion different tools.

And the second reason it’s not practical anymore is the cost. If every single one of these tools costs just seventeen dollars and you need fifteen of them to run your business, that adds up fast. Sure, you can create incredible things, but seventeen dollars plus seventeen dollars plus seventeen dollars, fifteen times over, and suddenly you’re paying serious money.

So as far as I’m concerned, I would prefer one interface that delivers all of that at a lower cost and does a better job. And that’s exactly what I ended up building for myself, on the base of a platform we actually showed you with Harland Kilstein, called Manus.

This company is incredible. I’ve used my AI super assistant to build apps, build websites, build entire funnels, write the copy for those funnels and put them on the web, create promotions, manage my team, and handle podcast outreach. All one tool.

I need to keep engaging with it even when it has a bad day, because some days are better than others. Some days it’s just awful, every single thing done incorrectly, tripping over itself, making me angry. And some days it runs flawlessly, and I’m thinking, I’m on the cutting edge. I’m flying to space just from how smooth it is.

[6:19] 

All of a sudden, someone like me, who is not particularly technically capable, and I say that genuinely, I have a military education. I have no IT education. I don’t know how to write code. I didn’t go to business school. I don’t have an MBA or a PhD. And yet I can develop my own apps and build my own websites very quickly. I have very little understanding of design and aesthetics, and yet I can create practically flawless design, all from a prompt.

Now, where this gets really interesting is what my super assistant can do beyond just building things. It has access to my tools, it can do research for me, browse websites for me, even handle things that seem small but are incredibly time-consuming.

I can give it a link to a page where there’s a VSL, a video sales letter I want to examine. You know how VSLs work. You can play them but you can’t fast-forward, and you can’t easily get the video file. My assistant can go to that page, pull the video file, transcribe it, and then either let me read the transcription or give me a full marketing breakdown covering the unique selling proposition, the offer stack, the main idea, the unique mechanism, the biggest objection it overcomes, and the target market.

When it comes to funnel hacking, it can funnel hack anything. And it can do it in ten to fifteen minutes while I’m making coffee, spending time with my family, or walking around Lisbon. I don’t have to sit there watching it work unless I want to. I can just go do something else.

[9:05] 

It has context about me and my work. It has a persistent memory of what I worked on last week and what I completed six months ago. It knows my family members. If I say, hey, book a date night for me and Anastasia at our favorite restaurant, it knows to go to that restaurant’s website, secure a reservation, and put it in my calendar. It knows who Anastasia is. It knows all of that.

We’re talking about a future where running an online business will be even more simplified than it is today.

[10:03] 

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, transcripts, and other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus $3,000 worth of free bonuses including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.