Jared is exactly who we built the AI Adopters Club for: people who build and sell with AI, not just talk about it, trading what actually works over coffee. If that is you, host your local table at coffee.aiadopters.club.
Hey Adopter,
Most people hear “$100,000 a month with AI” and immediately want the tool. Jared Rhodenizer will tell you the tool is the last thing that matters.
Jared runs three businesses: online horse training with his brother, a streaming service for horse people, and a wizard-themed Airbnb with an AI portrait he built himself. AI runs underneath all of it. But the first thing out of his mouth when we sat down was a warning against the exact thing most people want to hear.
Here are the four lessons worth keeping.
“I don’t make the money with AI. My business makes the money, and AI is the thing that helps it make more.” - Jared Rhodenizer
1. AI doesn’t make the money. Your business does.
That line sounds like a humblebrag until you sit with it. AI amplifies an asset you already have. It does not supply one. The operators quietly winning right now all had something worth accelerating before the tools showed up: a skill, a list, a process, a reputation. If you are starting from zero, AI gives you a faster zero. Name the asset first, then point the accelerator at it.
2. The idea was never the moat. Distribution is.
The app stores are flooded with software nobody asked for, because building is finally easy. Which means the build was never the hard part. Getting the thing in front of people who will pay for it is. Jared’s whole edge is that he learned distribution the slow way, years before AI, and now AI just does more of it. The lesson is uncomfortable and freeing at the same time: stop polishing the product and start building the audience. The part you were avoiding is now the whole game.
3. Teach AI what you already know.
Here is the move that separates Jared from someone poking at a chatbot. He took decades of marketing principles, the stuff he learned from the people who wrote the book on direct response, and fed it into his system so the AI executes in that voice. Not AI instead of expertise. AI on top of expertise. This is the part nobody selling you a prompt pack wants to admit: your experience is worth more in this era, not less. The catch is that it only counts if you codify it. Get what is in your head into a form a machine can run.
4. Give AI a memory, or it stays a toy.
Jared’s system reads an index first, pulls only the files it needs, and writes a checkpoint after every working session. Boring. Also the entire difference between a clever demo and something that compounds. Most people’s AI forgets everything the moment they close the window, so every session starts from scratch and nothing ever gets better. A simple index and the discipline of logging will outperform a smarter model with no memory every single time. Structure beats horsepower.
There is a fifth lesson buried in all of this, and it is the one Jared kept circling back to: just start. The learning curve is smaller than the fear of it. “AI is coming whether you are ready or not,” he said, so the worst place to stand is the one where you are still deciding whether it is real.
Watch the full conversation: youtu.be/kvRKU2hxY4s
Adapt & Create,
Kamil
