About ten months ago I got my start in AI and immediately started testing offers. I wanted to find that perfect offer. One that:
- People would actually buy
- I enjoyed delivering
- Made real money
Took some time (and lots of trial & error) but I finally found it. And today I'm going to share the background story and how you can copy it.
Nine months ago I was at lunch with a friend. He's the top commercial real estate broker in a neighboring city. Listing properties, leasing properties, running an investment fund, and doing almost all of it manually.
Halfway through lunch he says, "Man, I wish I could just pay you $1,000 to follow me around for a day and tell me where I could be using AI in my business."
It was one of those moments I'll never forget because right away I knew it was a huge opportunity.
If a guy that successful and that busy needs this, thousands of other business owners do too.
So I got to work on V1 of what eventually became our AI Tools Assessment.
And V1 was ugly.
We offered free assessments to folks in our network by asking them to download Loom, record their working sessions 60 to 90 minutes at a time, and let us feed the footage to Google Gemini to find automation opportunities.
There was so much friction.
People didn't know how to use Loom. People were embarrassed the recording would catch them scrolling Reddit when they should have been working. And honestly, most people can't focus for an hour straight anyway.
So we scrapped it and switched to structured 45-minute interviews.
- Pull the pain points out of a conversation
- Run the transcript through Claude
- Find AI tools that fit
We eventually built a voice agent named Annie to run the interview for us.
Then a pattern showed up. After the assessment, clients didn't want us to run off and build things behind the curtain. They wanted handholding. Done-with-you-style consulting.
That quickly became my AI Concierge offer. Of the first 6 people I pitched, 5 of them said yes.
Client 1 - $1,200/month
Client 2 - $1,500/month
Client 3 - $1,500/month
Client 4 - $1,800/month
Client 5 - $2,000/month
I created $8,000 in monthly recurring revenue from 6 conversations in about 10 days.
After all that testing, I've synthesized the learnings into a simple, three-rung offer ladder: free mini assessment, paid assessment, AI concierge.
Here's how to build the ladder:
Step 1: Run free mini assessments.
A 15-minute discovery call where you ask what tasks are repetitive, where they're seeing friction, and what their time is worth per hour.
Then ask the magic wand question: "If you could fix one thing in your business, what would it be?"
Step 2: Research the fix between calls.
Take the transcript, find the pain point that's both high frequency and high friction, then find one off-the-shelf tool on futurepedia.io or theresanaiforthat.com.
If it's a judgment problem a tool can't fix, prescribe Claude Cowork. If it's a workflow proprietary to their business, prescribe a Claude skill.
Step 3: Prescribe in meeting two.
Give them the tool name, the cost, and the literal first step. Then gauge their appetite: "Do you want to implement this yourself, do it with me, or hand it off entirely?" 30 to 50% will pick a paid option.
Step 4: Sell the paid assessment at $1,000.
Same exact process as the mini assessment but with a bigger scope: a 45-minute interview pulling out 3 to 7 bottlenecks. Do your first two or three free for testimonials, then jump straight to $1,000.
I tested $200 and $500 on the way up. $1,000 is where people take it seriously. And do the interviews yourself for your first three to ten assessments before you even think about building a voice agent.
Step 5: Let AI build the report.
Feed the transcript to Claude and build the report in Claude Design.
Six parts:
- Executive summary
- Effort versus impact matrix
- Prescribed tools with costs
- 4-day quick win plan
- Upsell opportunities
- Quantified ROI (their hourly rate times hours saved, minus tool costs)
Most clients save 5 to 8 hours per week. Deliver within 48 hours, then walk it through on a 30-minute screen share.
Step 6: Upsell the concierge retainer.
Done-with-you consulting. A Jotform intake before the first call, then two 45-minute working sessions per month where you run AOA on every bottleneck: Audit the manual process on a screen share, Optimize it by cutting the fat, Automate it as a Claude skill on a scheduled task.
Add unlimited Voxer access with a 12-business-hour response guarantee and a Notion Hub logging every call, takeaway, and build.
Step 7: Price up the ladder.
Start at $1,000 a month. Land two clients, raise to $1,500. Land two more, raise to $2,000. Never go below $1,000. I'm at $2,000 with five clients and capping at six.
That's the whole ladder.
Free taste, paid diagnosis, monthly retainer. Every rung funds the next, every deliverable comes from a transcript plus Claude, and the margin is almost pure profit.
Build the free mini assessment this week. Reply and tell me who your first assessment is going to be with. I read every response.
- Corey
P.S. Here are some additional resources for you:
1) I made a 24 minute video explaining the entire offer ladder in detail here.
2) You can download the full Offer Ladder diagram here.
3) You can download the Mini Assessment Playbook here.
A few notes/tweets/cool things sourced from the AI community.
1)
How to make codex better at design.
2)
Micro tools are the best way to generate high-quality leads.
3)
10 real AI agent use cases.
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 the Build With AI podcast on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. If you're a non-technical entrepreneur who wants to learn how to make money with AI, you'll love it.
Be back next week.
-Corey
โ