- Published on
The Million Dollar AI Book Brand: A Blueprint for Success
- Authors
- Name
- Playland AI
- @playlandai
At 20 years old, Toronto's Joe Popelas used ChatGPT to craft a book brand valued at $930,000. Dive in to unravel the journey of a young entrepreneur balancing full-time education with building an AI-powered empire. Discover how Joe hit his first profitable day, his formula for AI-generated revenue, and what lies beyond the book brand.
Joe's Story & Background
Fresh out of high school in 2020, Joe embarked on his higher education journey at Queen's University as a computer science major. The academic environment would play a pivotal role, offering a mix of opportunities and challenges that would shape his future ventures in the world of AI.
Joe's first exposure to the business world wasn't an immediate success. An initial venture into dropshipping cost Joe a $6,000 setback, but it only fueled his curiosity and passion for entrepreneurship even more. His enthusiasm led him to connect with Greg Brockman, President and Co-Founder of OpenAI. This association led to him working on GPT-3 use cases alongside a talented group of developers, where he specifically refined a program that produces relevant copywriting material for E-commerce product descriptions.
With the experience gained from his work at OpenAI, Joe soon found himself getting inquiries on leveraging AI for varied business models. Seizing the opportunity, he ventured into providing AI consulting services for small to medium enterprises in 2022 via his startup, Elusive Profit.
The Million Dollar Business Idea
The beginnings were anything but smooth. To support himself during the early stages of his business, Popelas took up a part-time position at a sports store. But it wasn't long before fate presented a golden opportunity. A chance encounter with a publishing house in July of that year triggered a groundbreaking idea. Learning that this publisher raked in a whopping two million in monthly revenue, Joe immediately recognized the immense advantage AI could provide in producing books. Leveraging AI's rapid content creation, Joe could respond with agility to changing market demands, distinguishing his brand from competitors.
From AI Books to Profit
The young entrepreneur’s drive was unmatched. By tapping into ChatGPT's capabilities, he churned out 10 books in August alone. As September drew to a close, his collection boasted an impressive 40 titles. On October 3rd, his hard work bore fruit — he pocketed his first profit of $20. This was just a teaser of what was to come, as a mere two days later, he doubled his earnings to $40. Yet, it was December 28th that marked a monumental milestone: Joe's profits soared up to $1,000. With this pivotal moment, Joe's trajectory was nothing short of meteoric.
By the close of August 2023, Popelas had amassed an astounding profit of $390,000, with his brand valued at $930,000. Operating with a lucrative profit margin of about 70-80%, his only major cost was advertising. The cost of generating one book with GPT-3? A mere $3. Add to that the cost of a proofreader to ensure quality — though Joe reminds budding entrepreneurs that self-proofreading is a viable starting point. But what is the secret to his success?
The Blueprint for Success
Although his journey was dotted with costly lessons from rookie mistakes, Joe is a firm believer that a modest investment of $500 could kickstart this venture. This is how to do it:
Educate Yourself
The first step in your AI entrepreneurship journey is to take an interest in AI models and learn how to interact with them to get the best output by refining your prompt and settings.
Start with ChatGPT: a powerful model developed by OpenAI capable of generating human-like text based on the input it receives. It is essential to understand the model’s capabilities, experiment with different prompts, and adjust the settings to get the desired output.
Find Your Niche
Use Google Trends and Pinterest Trends to identify the most popular topics: These tools allow you to see the popularity of different topics over time. With them, you can identify trends and popular topics that you can target with your AI-generated content.
Be on the lookout for a niche with high traffic of ambitious individuals. Harness the power of emotional connection, presenting outcomes that resonate with their aspirations. Drive home the message that your product is the gateway to their success.
Generate a Book with AI
Begin with a skeleton: Let the AI model draft your book’s outline.
Go to the OpenAI Playground: a platform where you can experiment with AI models like GPT-3.5-turbo. You can use this platform to generate your book's outline and content.
Test variations of the following prompt:
- Write me a book outline on [Book Theme] with [X] Chapters.
- Chapters are counted with integers.
- Topics are bullet points under Chapter Topics.
- Each chapter has [X] topics.
Once you’ve developed each topic individually and copied the output text to a Google Doc make sure you format the text (including headings, fonts, and indents as desired) and ensure your book is readable.
Finally, design your book cover on Canva (or Photoshop if you’re more experienced): This graphic design web-based tool simplifies the design process. Ensure the design has the right dimensions for your book cover and add it to your Google Doc.
Save your eBook as a PDF and voila!
Create the Landing Page
Your landing page is the billboard of your brand value. It’s where potential customers first experience your brand’s essence. If your presentation is not great, you risk bounce rates hitting a roof upwards of 70-80%. That is a red flag signalling your brand’s need for refinement.
Build your own website with no-code website builders such as WordPress or Typedream. They provide a variety of templates and tools that you can use to create a professional-looking website.
Ensure that the design aligns with your brand identity. This includes using the same colours, fonts, and style as your brand. It also involves ensuring that the content on your website matches your brand's message and values.
Include mockups of your book cover as well as previews and teasers. This helps potential customers get a sense of what your book looks like and what it's about.
Purchase a self-hosted domain name and assign it to your website. A domain name is the web address that people use to access your website. By purchasing your own domain name, you can ensure that your website has a professional-looking URL.
Advertise Your Product
Joe’s winning strategy all boils down to Pinterest ads:
Install your Pinterest Tag: this unique identifier for your Pinterest profile is used to track your ad performance and measure the ROI of your social media efforts. It's a crucial tool for understanding how your ads are performing and where they're leading your audience. This tag must be embedded into your website.
Start off with Consideration Campaigns: these are all about getting clicks on your Pin, which will lead traffic to your website. Consideration campaigns give you a general idea about which niches you should be selling your product in. They help you understand your audience better and identify trends that you can leverage for your conversion campaigns.
Move into Conversion Campaigns: aimed at driving a specific type of conversion, such as a product sale. This allows you to dial into every single stat about how your users are interacting with your landing page. This data will help you optimize your campaigns and make them more effective.
The key to success with Pinterest ads is to test and optimize your campaigns constantly. Keep an eye on your metrics and adjust your strategies as necessary to ensure you're reaching your goals.
Beyond The Book Brand
Back to Joe Popelas, who did not stop at book publishing. With a proven method in place, he then thrust himself into a new venture where he channels his experience and success to instruct and guide aspiring entrepreneurs into the world of AI book publishing. He has personally taught over 500 students how to publish AI books with an average success rate of 18%. The result? He has grown the AI Publisher Pro community to over 12,500 members. Check out the link above to learn from the man himself.
If the story of Popelas is not impressive enough, then you should also know that he is still attending University and has enough time to produce EDM music in his spare time. You can check out his music on Spotify.
Entrepreneurship & AI
Looking ahead, the future of entrepreneurship and AI is bright. Entrepreneurs are known for their resilience and perseverance as they pursue their grand vision. With AI automation and its time-saving capabilities, they can use their resources more efficiently, creating new business models and allowing them to achieve a better work-life balance. Joe's journey is a testament to how AI is changing the business world and is paving the way for a new breed of entrepreneurs. Individuals like him have taken widespread awareness of artificial intelligence as their sign that this is it - their time to shine. As we move forward, they must stay perceptive to new advancements in AI to thrive in the current business environment. This might just be the best way to prepare for the future of entrepreneurship.
Resources
Joe Popelas' Free YouTube Course
Joe Popelas' LinkedIn Profile