I made $2.7 million in 6 months selling AI products

• Chris Winfield owns a brand-coaching company that helps small businesses and entrepreneurs.
• He discovered AI using Dall-E in 2021 and later became fascinated by ChatGPT and other AI tools.
• By selling AI products and using AI tools, Winfield earned $2.7 million in the last 6 months.

As told this story is based on a transcribed conversation with Chris Winfield, owner of Super Connector Media and Understanding AI, which has been edited for length and clarity.

I had been in the PR business for eight years when I started experimenting with artificial intelligence tools like Jasper and Copy.AI in 2021. They can create copy for email newsletters and social media that captures my brand voice. I was excited and thought, “This is the coolest thing ever.”

Little did I know what AI was on the horizon.

Before starting my company Understanding AI, That helps other business owners leverage AI tools, I own a PR agency and brand-coaching company called Super Connector Media. I founded it with my partner, Jane GottliebIn March 2018.

Having a PR agency was not my dream, so I sold the agency side in 2022.

I used my downtime to learn AI

I remember being blown away when Dal-E was released last summer. I could type something into the tool, and it would make a picture – it felt incredible.

I no longer had to manage an agency and had more time on my hands to explore AI tools.

Later that fall, ChatGPT was released. I started experimenting with how to use it for Super Connector media. At that time, our main focus was running personal-branding workshops.

I’d ask ChatGPT to help define our ideal client and write journal entries to match that persona, then turn the journal entries into ad copy.

Every hour I spent learning ChatGPT felt like I got 40 hours back. I have never used anything that could give me results so quickly.

In late 2022 I began sharing what I was learning with my audience of business owners and entrepreneurs on Facebook and via email.

People wanted to learn about generative AI but already felt left behind

Talking to my audience through direct messages and market-research calls, I find that business owners who haven’t tried ChatGPT yet are overwhelmed. They thought AI was everywhere and they were already behind.

I know AI can improve their businesses and workflows if they can overcome their fears. So Jane and I started teaching AI use cases for businesses through paid online challenges.

We completed our first challenge in January and had 350 customers. We promoted the challenges on social media and through our email list of over 120,000 people, as well as through paid advertising on Meta’s platform.

We started with a $25,000 advertising budget for the challenges.

After the challenge, if someone wants more support, we offer courses and “mastermind” programs that cost in the four-figures and low five-figures, respectively.

These packages show people how to grow a profitable personal brand and business online using AI to streamline the business-building process.

Teaching AI to our audience has skyrocketed revenue and growth

We now run six-figure ad campaigns per challenge and over 40,000 people have paid to be part of our challenges in the past eight months.

Since we added AI products in January, our revenue has jumped to $2.7 million in sales.

We started Understanding AI with eight Super Connector team members and expanded to 17 to help with sales, promotions, video and customer support.

We make money by teaching people how to use AI tools, but we also use AI tools to increase our revenue.

How I use AI to improve the workflow of my own business

I use ChatGPT to help create marketing materials. AI generates 80% of the content and my input is the remaining 20%. Sometimes I add my own voice. Other times I just change the title. I always remind my clients that AI is not a perfect replacement for your brand voice.

Once you’ve mastered one tool, you can build your AI stack.

I have found that memes work well in advertising and supermeme.AI Helps you create memes from text input.

I recently uploaded ads with AI-generated memes and they turned into a campaign that wasn’t doing well. The ads we created with Supermeme reduced our cost per click by 72%. This is a tool that takes less than 1% of my time but makes a huge difference.

I spend between $5,000 and $7,500 monthly on AI tools. It varies based on how many tools I’m testing.

When thinking about investing time in a new tool, I follow three rules. If I hear about a tool from three sources or people I trust, I’ll spend time looking into it. Otherwise, all new AI tools may just become shiny objects.

I will then consider whether the tool will be useful for my business and whether I can teach many people to use it. I try to find tools that are useful for small-business owners so that I can teach them as part of my AI program.

Sales AI almost doubled our revenue during the challenges

WooSender is an AI-powered sales assistant we’ve been using since April. If someone applies for our “Mastermind” program, I can assign the lead to one of our two salespeople, and WooSender reaches out to the potential customer as if it were a salesperson with on-brand messaging.

The tool automatically searches for available times in the seller’s calendar. If someone replies that they want to book a demo, it books the appointment, sends a calendar invite, and sends a confirmation to that person.

After we implemented WooSender, we doubled our sales for the next challenge.

In July, we hired a second vendor because our challenges were growing in popularity. AI has helped improve his close percentage.

Before AI tools, you had to listen to hours of cell calls to provide feedback. Now we use Chorus, which detects conversion drop-off points. For example, our salesperson spent a lot of time on the call discussing deliverables. When we removed that segment, our sales increased.

Chorus helped us identify bonuses for our package. This tool tracks patterns and key phrases in customer calls and helped us understand that people want prompts, so we now include them.

We’ve made over $2 million in 2023 helping people understand AI because the AI ​​tools we’ve implemented in our own businesses ensure nothing’s cracked. Every individual is spoken to and followed up, which is critical to the growth of our business. Marketing without sales is useless and now we can do it cheaply with AI.