$20,000 Insights from Pickaxe with Mike Gioia and Aidan Crawford

Full video transcript

Uh customer of ours he reached out to me that was like Hey I just want to thank you for making this product I’ve made over $20,000 with it in this month and I was like oh let’s talk more tell me about this I want to help more customers do this how’s it going everyone we are tuning in with the scale with AI Summit for an hour with Mike Gioia from Pickaxe hey and I’m also here with Aidan Crawford he’s a Pickaxe customer a Pickaxe Superstar customer and.

We’ll be getting into what he’s doing how he’s doing it why he’s doing it and why it’s a good time to be doing exactly what he’s doing right now great we’ve got about an hour for this session I I knew you were probably going to bring someone on so thank you for for joining us Aidan yeah we’re here with the tail end of the 3-day live session series uh covered a lot in terms of AI how to use it for our business and how these different tools can be used in tandem with one another Pickaxe being one of those tools today’s session got a lot of Pickaxe users on the call with us and of course watching with us live here on YouTube uh to join today with Mike and Aidan and other people using Pickaxe to to share in some ways that people are winning with this tool in particular Mike if you had any ideas for how you wanted to maybe.

Introduce Aidan or anything else around um what Aidan is building or any updates on your end um totally let me give like a general Introduction to Pickaxe and and thanks for introducing me Darby and good to see some familiar faces in the audience Tyrese George I was disappointed you couldn’t come to our event on our little party launch party earlier this week so I’m gonna just assume that most of you know what Pickaxe is but I’m still going to give a quick two-minute Introduction to what it is so Pickaxe is a company that we started by accident like a year and a half ago we just made tools for ourselves published it online on Reddit a couple places and we had put an email address on the website and people started emailing us asking about features telling us stuff that was uh reporting bugs asking saying some things were broken and that has continued to this day a year and a half later people still.

Email us telling us we need to fix things and improve different things so it’s a product that just has been pulled out of us by AI entrepreneurs AI Consultants basically this group of people that span a wide swath of Industries and professions who are using AI to do their job better or to create products or servic to sell to people um and basically just use this incredible no code technology to run online businesses and sell online services so what Pickaxe is I’ll show you very quickly do let me share my screen so what Pickaxe is it is a place to build share monetize and iterate monitor on AI tools so the meat of the product is is this no code Builder this is two panels you can build a tool over here with natural language prompting so you don’t need to know any code you’re just wrri an instructions to what it can do you can use a variety of different models you can customize what it looks like you can add files into a knowledge base PDFs books.

Websites even YouTube videos you can even connect it to API via sort of an action system so you can have it trigger a a web hook you can have it generate an image search Google all sorts of stuff then once you’ve built an AI tool you have it in one of these Studios which are these little containers we give you they have a website where people can use it in and you can even set prices on it you can create little pay walls for some of the products and charge people per use in all sorts of cool ways so the product you there’s a lot more to it that’s like a if you already know what it is you already know what it is if you don’t I encourage you to come check it out we actually launched a new product a totally new redesigned product in the last couple weeks that I encourage you to check out so we even have a new homepage that is loading.

Slowly that iage you all to check out I don’t know why it’s not loading right now but there’s lots of different things you can do with Pickaxe the most a lot of things that people do with Pickaxe they make little products that they sell to people they make themselves more efficient and and one of the most interesting things to me running the company is just seeing all the different things people use it for because it is one of these sort of open-ended general purpose products that people do tons and tons of different things with so I’ve seen some people just make internal tools I’ve seen some people make little knowledge clones of themselves like a chat bot that people can talk to it’s very popular with the coaching and Consulting space I’ve seen people create lead generation tools for their website and we’ve just seen like a really wide.

Variety of things and today I wanted to bring on a customer of ours Aidan Crawford who I I talked to him a couple times when he first signed up and then he reached out to me a couple times it was like Hey I just want to thank you for making this product I’ve made over $20,000 with it in this month and I was like oh let’s talk more tell me about this I want to help more customers do this and he’ll tell you all about the specific of what he does but what I really like about Aidan and when we what we really got along on was just his basic outlook on what’s happening right now and the sort of advant the sort of opportunity that you or anyone working in this space has which is that the space is moving really quickly and to just strike while the iron is hot and to just do it and to just move on these opportunities you have and it’s never been easier to move quickly on these opportunities I’m going to hand it over to Aidan right now and Aidan we can maybe go back and forth okay cool your microphone’s on maybe.

Just quickly introduce yourself sure who you are what you were doing a few years ago and what you’re doing now and how it’s been assisted with AI all right great my name is Aidan Crawford I’m from Toronto so don’t hold me hold that against me if you’re all Americans um but let me just say that what I started with I’m a marketing guy I’m a writer for 20 years I’ve been in marketing but 2005 I started doing marketing for professional speakers so I got into that space that’s the niche and I was doing it a do-it-yourself marketing kind of business for years where I take care of their social media write all their content all that sort of stuff and of course I got gassed during covid and so I I pivoted and I started a community and it was soon after that that ChatGPT launched and from the very beginning I was playing with it as a a toy let’s just say as a toy so I was looking at the chat Bots that we were given this wasn’t on.

Pickaxe there was another thing that I was using before Pickaxe and it was the no code chat Bots and I had written a book called booked the Insiders guide for speaker selling to associations and I trained the chatbot on that book and the first thing I did was have like that turn it into a little conversation with the book but then I was thinking what a speak what is a problem that people like myself people who speak what what are one of the issues that they have and it’s creating uh Outreach they’re great at their topic but they’re not great at the Outreach so at the point I started building this it was ChatGPT was trained up to a data set of I think beginning of 2021 or something like that so it wasn’t live on the internet but what I had people do was put in a description of their topic and it would create a professional because it’s was filtered through my book a professional RFP a request for.

Speakers so it give the short description long description attendee takeaways benefits all that sort of stuff and I put it on I put it out there for my membership community of speakers and they were like wow this is crazy this is nuts and remember this wasn’t even going out of the internet this is just them giving their topic and it giving a giving them a generic write up then when ChatGPT opened up and started going live onto the internet I had it then research like generate that RFP but then go onto the internet and find events that are a good match for that RFP so now I’m expanding it even more now this is where Pickaxe comes in so the one I was using was very basic Pickaxe was a lot more advanced I I took advantage of a Pickaxe deal and I created the same type of tool on Pickaxe and I left it for my community and it became one of the biggest attractors to my community so we have weekly calls but a lot of people don’t join the calls they’re just there for the technology and the.

Tools and now the latest version of my keynote accelerator that I call it not only does the research on the event comes up with the top three challenges it creates a custom Introduction email a customized voicemail it integrates those challenges a follow-up email sequence and then the customized RFP at the bottom I would speak that’s a long way to introduce myself but how this how I made this 30 Grand in the last couple months is very simp is based on that I was speaking at Roosevelt University in Chicago back in uh November and I was doing it with a co-presenter and afterwards he said Hey how do we keep this going this was great the presentation was great how can we keep this going I said I’ve got these tools that will find events and then it hit me why don’t we just train one of those tools that I’ve built as a generic tool on only our stuff and just have it look for events that are just frust all we need to do is choose where we want to.

Speak and the date we want to speak and it’ll find all the events that are to our topic and so I built it and lo and behold it worked that’s the great thing about AI either it works or it doesn’t work it worked and every time I was telling a speaker buddy of mine yes there’s enough speakers that I would have speaker buddies and I would say this this cool this cool thing I built and they would say can you build me one I was like sure didn’t take me very long to build it give me 500 bucks I’ll build you a tool and then so 10 of them later everybody I was saying build me this tool okay I think I’ve got a product here every and as soon as I built it for everyone they all said the same thing this is awesome and you’re not charging enough the average Speaker gets paid between $4500 and $7500 to speak at an event right now people say that’s a lot of money for 45 minutes there’s a lot of research goes in beforehand customization all that stuff you lose a day it’s busy work but when I started this in this industry that was a.

Full-time gig finding events so I bumped that price from $500 to $1,000 now it’s $29.97 and the promise is if this finds you one additional paid event in a year it’s paid for itself it but it’ll find you a lot more than that because it’s trained on as Mike was saying their websites their PDFs their books transcripts from webinars they’ve done it’s trained on everything it’s only finding events that are perfect for them and because it’s that detailed it’s giving them a list of 20 events that they can apply to right away that they then put in a customizer which is also trained that customizes the Outreach with a customized email a customized voicemail the inter the email sequence and even the custom RFP now I could quickly show if Mike was to take this for a minute I can bring up the demo I can actually show you how it works but what I’ve done how I monetized it was I’ve got a I’ve got a Studio a Pickaxe Studio which is the Pickaxe equivalent of a store where I’ve got the dumbed down versions of my tool that.

People can subscribe to for 15 or 20 bucks a month and at the bottom of the tool whenever it gives a a result it says if you want unlimited customized access you can go to here so it gives an UPS sell at the end of it Darby did you have a question it looks like you might have a question no I just I think you’re so you’re inserting inside of the lower tier kind of throttled tool I could hey if you want more customized XYZ just head on over here and then you have a separate landing page that gives more details for that and that’s exactly it and what I’m finding is people are so excited by The Taste and once you tell them it’s because three grand is not chump change you’re like that’s a lot of money for a lot of people people um but if you say one extra gig a year pays for itself and basically I built this tool because it’s a tool that would have helped me in my business and so I’m looking at you guys thinking what is a tool that you could build on Pickaxe for.

Yourself or even on any other like any kind of agnostic no code Builder that would help your business because if it helps you it’s probably a product for somebody else and that’s where the money is if you build something for yourself and it works you go wow that’s great then it’s about marketing it and being first to Market with it the advantage we have as entrepreneurs is that we can do things quickly and we don’t have to send it to the AI the what they call the the Roundtable AI group that the that every that the bigger companies would have how do we implement this and it’s a six-month process we can build it right away and we can deploy it right away and we can sell it right away and that’s where our advantage is yeah you have an agility everyone here has an agility that bigger companies just don’t have so it’s really the advantage to use and then AI specifically products like Pickaxe give you even more agility to prototype things really quickly and one of the things I love one of the many things I love about Aidan’s use case and his.

Attitude was a lot of people try to make one product and then just sell it over and over for 50 bucks or 100 bucks because they think that scales more easily and in some ways it does but I think what Aidan did that’s really smart is he has a generic template for this where people can definitely see the potential and then he turns into a high ticket item to personalize for it for them I mean you tell me it and how long does it take once you’ve how long does it take to personalize one of these RFP writers to someone once they’ve given you the paid you for it so the way I’ve done it is I’ve got a Google form they fill in the Google form and then I just cut and paste the Google form I’ve got the in it’s like a hamburger so the top bun is the same everywhere the bottom bun is the same everywhere and in the middle it’s the stuff from the form and it’s basically a cut and paste so I’ve got it down to about 15 minutes per tool to get right and there’s some testing and I’ve got a I’ve developed a website so it’s behind a pay wall that so their tools aren’t just floating around everywhere I actually sell a subscription model so it’s a one-year.

The conversation continues with detailed discussion of pricing, upsell mechanics, the Pickaxe Studio storefront model, and audience Q&A covering topics such as knowledge base training, connecting external actions and APIs, and using image-generation platforms like DALL-E, Midjourney, Flux, Replicate, and Recraft AI inside Pickaxe tools. Toward the end, Mike Gioia confirmed that Pickaxe supports actions connecting to multiple image-generation platforms and aggregators, including dedicated actions for DALL-E, Midjourney, and Flux, plus connections to Replicate and Recraft AI as aggregators of multiple image models. The session closed with Mike and Aidan thanking each other and the audience, with Aidan noting he’s open to connecting on LinkedIn.