Last week I sat down with Denis, a member of our community who did over $100,000 in his first year selling AI services.

I learned so many tips/tricks that I'm planning to apply to our business, and I'm going to share some of those with you in this email.

One caveat that I want to get ahead of before we dive in because people love using this as an excuse: Denis has a 30-year IT background. But he said it himself: this is not a huge factor in his success as an AI consultant.

He attributes his success to his bias towards taking action, his willingness to fail, and his persistence in chasing after deals.

You can watch my full conversation with Denis here.

Most of his deals are simple, and his sales calls tend to take longer than his actual builds.

A friend he once built a website for referred him to a woman who runs retreats, wrote a book, and had spent two years trying to get her content organized and sellable. Denis spent about an hour on a call with her, recorded it, fed the transcript and her book into Claude, and built her a sales page and backend in under an hour. When she saw it she told him it felt like reading into her soul.

She was super impressed with the build but immediately assumed she couldn't afford it. Denis used a classic sales technique to close the deal, but I'll get to that in a sec.

Denis emphasized that new operators tend to price based on what they did: the hours, the tool, or the build. But clients don't care about your effort, they just want a result. Denis's rule for that is dead simple.

Price the outcome, not the build.

Another example from Denis's business: he spoke with a husband and wife running a power equipment company. Two people, half a million dollars in inventory, so slammed that they stop answering the phone on Saturdays. Denis ran a free 15-minute assessment, upsold a $1,000 paid assessment, and found roughly 15 hours a week they could get back (she called that an understatement). If their time is worth $150 an hour, that ends up being about $10,000 a month in savings, $120,000 a year.

He charged 10 percent of the annual savings ($12,000) for an AI Concierge engagement paid over four months, with a 45-minute call every week. Then they own the system.

I want to address a very common objection I hear all the time: "If I only sell four months, I lose the recurring revenue." But here's what actually happens with my own concierge clients.

By month four we've uncovered a dozen other things they need. The deeper you get into the weeds with clients, the more opportunities you find to do more work for them.

The retreat client was the other half. Denis was told she watched her money closely. So instead of leading with his price, he told her what a build like hers normally runs: around $10,000 plus $500 a month. Then he said that for her scope he would do it for $2,000 and $100 a month. She didn't blink.

Anchor high, then land where the scope actually belongs.

Here's how to run it in your own business:

Step 1: Start free.

Offer a 15-minute assessment. Listen to where the owner is stuck and point them to one AI tool that would help. It removes the "I'm scared of AI" wall.

Step 2: Sell the paid assessment.

If there's a fit, sell a one-hour assessment for $1,000. Record it. That transcript is the raw material for everything that comes next.

Step 3: Find the hours.

List every manual task from the transcript. Checking email, social posts, matching invoices to orders, quotes. Add up the hours per week and multiply by what the owner's time is worth. That number is your real price anchor.

Step 4: Price at 10 percent of annual savings.

$10,000 a month saved is $120,000 a year, which makes it a $12,000 engagement. Deliver it over four months, half up front, with a weekly 45-minute build-and-coach call. They own it when you're done.

Step 5: Anchor before you quote.

Say what the market charges for the build first. Then give your number for their scope. It makes the yes a no brainer.

Step 6: Load their context, then build.

The call transcript plus anything they've already written (a book, old proposals, past emails) goes into Claude before you build a thing. That's why the first draft sounds like them.

Step 7: Plan month four now.

Keep a running list of everything out of scope. That list is your next proposal.

One free conversation leads to one paid assessment, which leads to an engagement with pricing tied to the hours you hand back, and a build that takes less time than the sales call.

- Corey

PS: If you want to join Denis and 346 others actively building an AI consulting business, join us inside AI Operator Academy. If you don't land a client within 90 days we refund 100% of your money.

A few notes/tweets/cool things sourced from the AI community.

1)

Anthropic @AnthropicAI We’re committing a portion of Anthropic’s shares to the Anthropic Public Benefit Fund, a new wholly owned entity dedicated entirely to the public benefit. It will start off with 5% of our shares. For every 50% increase in the company’s value over a set baseline, we can 6:07 PM • Oct 18, 2026 1399 Retweets 18133 Likes Read 1800 replies

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Is this the start of universal basic income?

2)

Paul Graham @paulg If customers won't buy your stuff, try asking what they would buy. This sounds obvious, but surprisingly few founders do it, and it often yields valuable insights. 7:12 PM • Oct 13, 2026 359 Retweets 6194 Likes Read 266 replies

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Seems so obvious yet nobody does this.

3)

shub @shubgaur It’s finally here… bring your product to Grok Bot as a connector, let @bot users discover you, and give your customers even more value. This is one of the top requests from founders- excited to see what you build (& to finally gain back control of my DMs)! Submit below ⏬ 6:24 PM • Oct 14, 2026 9 Retweets 322 Likes Read 30 replies

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Huge opportunity to get your product in the hands of millions of bots (and thousands of people).

Thanks for reading the Corey's Notes newsletter. I'd appreciate it if you sent it to a friend that might find it interesting.

Be sure to check out t he Build With AI podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to learn how to integrate AI into your business, you'll love it.

Be back next week.

-Corey