We Auctioned an AI Studio Build Live—Here's What Happened (and How to Build Your Own)

Full video transcript

Oh my goodness, y’all. Would you look at that? The auction that we were running for the AI custom studio build took off in the last 10-15 minutes or so. Made a post about a couple hours ago that we had 90 minutes left and we have our winner. It came right down to the wire. Let’s see. This is real time, y’all. This is not scripted. This is having a little bit of fun with an auction inside of our community.

For context here, y’all, we had a 24-hour auction starting at $1 on Wednesday this week for a custom AI Studio build, which I’m going to walk you through in this implementation power hour. Like the basics of getting started with Pickaxe, getting started with your own custom GPT studio. And I’m going to zoom in a little bit so you can see what the action was here. And we’re going to keep this conversation rolling as we continue to build out custom GPTs and studios, because this is incredibly useful to know how to do if you do any sort of coaching or consulting or educating and helping other people with resources that are AI related, without necessarily needing to give people access to your own ChatGPT account and being able to embed them in certain places.

So we started this auction off as just a fun way to see where things would go, to work directly with me to build out a custom AI studio. Bidding started at $1, and the auction started yesterday, 11:00 a.m. Central time, and ended 11:00 a.m. Central Standard Time today. The way that this auction ran was it starts off with a bid at the floor and then ends with the highest level bid. So the winner is going to be Ellen. Congratulations, Ellen. We’ll be reaching out to you over DM to set up our initial onboarding call. We’re going to work with you directly one-on-one to build the Pickaxe studio, but also the custom instructions that you can then apply to ChatGPT or other large language models like Claude, Gemini, that sort of thing.

So we’re going to work with Ellen, the winner of this process — discovery call, framework extraction, custom GPT development, studio setup — and then we’re going to asynchronously work together and collaborate over 90 days to make sure that this is set up and rolling. I hadn’t planned on putting this offer out there outside of this auction. Maybe if it’s of interest to other people in the community for extra help on this regard, I’m open to it, but I don’t have anything planned right now. This is stuff that I have set up in the past.

Examples for what you can build with an AI studio — these are things that I’ve built myself. There’s a ton of other examples out there inside of the Pickaxe community alone. But Pickaxe is a model-agnostic tool that’ll allow you to build custom GPTs that you can use to plug in with OpenAI, with Anthropic, with Gemini and Google, and other models.

You can create things like sales call analyzer tools to help you book more appointments for your sales calls. I’ve built a custom brand blueprint GPT — if you know what our Market Sauce buyer blueprint is, like a version of that, but a different variation for a PR agency that I work with, that they incorporate into their client onboarding. They do a discovery call with their client, they have a Fathom recording, they send me the Fathom recording, and then I run that through a custom GPT that I developed that gives them this six-to-seven-page customized blueprint output that they will then use as the starting point for getting their clients activated. It’s a super useful tool and helps their clients get a lot of clarity in the process of booking more press for their business.

We’ve also had one that’s had a lot of success in the buyer discovery and evaluation generation of reports for real estate agents, that they use as a resource to demonstrate how they are leveraging AI to help with identifying and creating campaigns that will attract the best buyers and sellers to the listings they’re looking to sell. Winning the listing is the first step before you can make any commissions off of selling a listing, and it’s a competitive market out there in real estate. This tool has been used to help agents close — just with one reported example here, using the studio that we developed with a partner, that helped them close an additional 100K plus in commissions. That’s obviously going to vary depending on who you are and what you do as your business, but it’s an example of how these tools applied in your specific workflow can be super impactful.

Another member of our community I worked with over the past six months to develop a few different tools and GPT resources. One of the ones that we started with was around their YouTube script writing. We took some of their existing YouTube videos that had the best amount of views and the best structure and style for how they wanted to write scripts, then trained a custom GPT inside of Pickaxe, and also directly inside of ChatGPT, on following that outline and process for writing scripts in their voice and their style and their format. The videos they’ve produced since that scripted model did extremely well compared to how their channel performed before.

So let’s go ahead and dive in and see what Pickaxe is from the start, or how to set up a studio. I’m going to use a really simple example of how you can go through the whole studio process, but we’re going to be doing more advanced mastery trainings on the AI studio process as a whole here in the community out of GenAI University on Skool. I would highly encourage you to join us on Skool and be a part of our community if you want to be a part of these live calls come 2026.

A very simple way that I can demonstrate what a studio is: think of it in terms of a standalone website that had one tool you could give people either free access to, or access to a multitude of tools. You can see a few examples in here — I built more studios that we’re not going to go into. One example is a spin-off studio, and when you subscribe to Pickaxe you can actually access these templates. This one’s a Quantum Sauce avatar, a tool I cloned and made in its own studio. That’s what you’ll see if you own a studio on Pickaxe — you’ll have pickaxes, which are the custom GPTs you’re developing, as their own individual pickaxes.

If I click into my Quantum Sauce pickaxe, I can see the cost it’s cost me to generate and use it. When you have an account through Pickaxe, it charges basically the same cost as what you would go directly to any of these models — you’re paying per use. So if you don’t use it as much, your membership or subscription will be far less than if you have a thousand students using it all day every day. You can also see the response history, so you can monitor what your clients are doing and how the actual conversation is being generated.

If I had a blank studio — quick sidebar here — you can make just a new pickaxe, which is just a tool, but this is going to show you how to build a whole studio. You can put tools inside of studios. Think of it like a hammer that you’re going to put inside your shed that holds a bunch of hammers. The pickaxe is one particular GPT. The studio hosts one or more GPTs. So I can create a new pickaxe or I can create a new studio. When I create a new studio, it’s going to create this type of interface, and then I would create a new pickaxe inside of the studio.

If this is your very first time getting into it, go through it once or twice — it becomes much easier to get this set up. As with anything, you get better at it with practice. If I go in and open up an existing pickaxe that I’ve made, you have the interface for what this pickaxe does. You have a prompt, and then you give it a role, a prompt frame. There’s configuration elements to it, and this is what Ellen and I will be working on mostly — what do we want this first GPT to do, what is the prompt and the role and the structure of this GPT going to be. Then, for example, you can test it inside of Pickaxe as well.

I’m just going to give it a basic description of what the brand or service or offer is — this is all context feeding. Context is everything when it comes to AI. You need to come into this with an understanding of any context or information that you’re bringing to the table out the gate. What is a description of what you’re trying to do, sell, offer. Then I can also just test my GPT. If you’ve built a custom GPT in ChatGPT it has a similar setup, where you have the ability to test on the right side and modify the prompts on the left side. It’s scanning the website, taking context in, and using that as a focal point to then execute the framework.

What I set this particular pickaxe tool, called Quantum Sauce, up to be is a strategic market analysis, an avatar simulation engine, and an opportunity synthesizer. The prime directive is to develop a complete, deeply researched competitive analysis while simulating buyer persona reactions to messaging, positioning, and strategic choices, and to uncover hidden opportunities for differentiation, domination, and blue ocean expansion. This was an elaborate prompt — it took me some time to put it together using Claude to help me structure the framework and exactly what I wanted to do.

What I really like about Pickaxe is you have the ability to create either a form-based bot or a chat-based bot. The chat-based is like jumping into ChatGPT asking it questions and it asking you responses back. A form-based is like what I did here, where I gave it information in specified fields and it took that as the seed context. Once it outputs all of that context, I can then engage in an actual conversational AI, conversationally, to continue to simulate and do what I need to do.

In Ellen’s case, it might be walking people through different questions — she’s building a friendly AI companion to help people turn their memories, lessons, and dreams into a beautiful legacy storybook. Inside the planner, you’ll find prompts, spaces for photos, a touch of inspiration to ensure it’s a joyful reflection, a chance to craft a legacy that feels vibrant, personal, and uniquely theirs. For Ellen, we might want to structure the AI chatbot to be a companion, in her tone of voice, extracting the right questions and helping people share their story through the conversational bot experience, and then once the stories, information, memories, and dreams are extracted, turn it into the legacy planner output. In some cases this stuff might take people days, weeks, or months to put together, but with the right GPT, the right studio, the right questions, the right workflow, we can condense that time down to a much faster path to those outputs.

There’s other ways you can fine-tune a pickaxe with your own specified company knowledge by adding information to a knowledge base. If I had a certain segment of our buyer’s brief book that I wanted it to know, I could give it a PDF or a TXT document of the book in its knowledge base, give it a bunch of different files, and give it settings for how it’s pulling that information and how much information it pulls per query.

Just giving an example of how you can get started building a new GPT very quickly — I publish it, and now I can see it inside my pickaxe folder. If I made a pickaxe listed, it shows on my studio page, so when I go to my website editor I can click the website directly and it appears inside my studio. Depending on what you’re doing and who you’re supporting, you might want multiple tools that each have a specific purpose and are trained on their own thing — you could think of them like individual AI employee-type resources that do specific tasks for you.

There’s a lot that can be done on the automation front. When you go to editing a GPT and go to the actions, some of these actions can trigger it to send you a summary of what a conversation was about, trigger it to send an email to somebody else, or trigger another workflow inside of Zapier, Make.com, or n8n that continues the process. It really depends on what the ultimate goal is of what you’re trying to accomplish with the workflow and where one of these pickaxe studios fits into it.

You can modify the studio details with a name, add a picture — that’s where some of the customization is. You can turn collect-user-history off; there are reasons you may not want to see what your users are saying, and that’s totally cool. You can go to access and make it public or private — private-only would be good for something you don’t want anyone who’s not a paid coaching client to ever see. You can link your Stripe dashboard to the studio, which means you can take payments, and Pickaxe takes a cut of Stripe payments if you go directly through here. If you want to set up a way to take payments outside of Pickaxe and then give people access to the studios, there are ways to do that too, though it takes a little more technical setup. On the pro plan you get access to studio API keys, and you can add stuff to the header, footer, and confirmation pages, like tracking codes, if you’re sending traffic there and want Google Analytics.

You can edit some of the messaging — if you want to give a free trial for anybody, one credit gives someone the ability to use it once before needing to create an account. You can have different products and different tiers set up. If I wanted to make a tool unlimited use for any guest, I select unlimited and save that; otherwise the default is five free uses, and then people have to create a free account to keep using it after that. For example, I cloned the products from another studio — Studio Pro Agency — where all the tools were subscribed to for $20 a month, giving access to all tools up to 125 credits used. If you wanted to add a different paywall tier, it’s as easy as adding a new product — I demoed a $1/month “basic” tier, monthly, visible, with 10 uses locked on a tool, so you can limit how many times people use a tool before needing to upgrade.

Another reason I don’t want to forget to mention: what if you don’t want to send people to a Pickaxe studio and instead want to send them to your own gated membership portal, or embed tools into a course you’re delivering? If I go to Quantum Sauce and want to embed this tool behind a members-only section on a membership platform like MemberStack or Webflow, I go to create deployment, and there are a few options — embed, WhatsApp (which is relatively new — you can connect pickaxes directly to a WhatsApp channel), and API. I opened the embed version, which is probably the most applicable — you have inline, chat, or popup options. You can customize what the inline embed looks like and embed it onto any landing page.

When you’re setting up your own studio, you can click the white label button, which removes any Pickaxe branding so it stays branded to you. You can adjust the visual styles — outline, drop shadow, make it look cool. You can add an email login so people need to set up email to use it in the first place. When you’re ready, you save the embed. Pickaxe also recently integrated with Circle, so if you use Circle for your community you can embed these directly into a Circle post — that’s a pretty cool use case, and I’d expect more platform integrations over time.

I copied the embed code and opened Lovable, which I use for quick landing page builds, and had it create a one-page landing page with the headline “Quantum Sauce” and the embed below, a flashing green neon “try Quantum Sauce for free” sign, a green-and-black Matrix color scheme, and a button linking to the subscribe page. That’s just having some fun demonstrating how, if you wanted to send this outside your Pickaxe studio, you could use vibe-coding tools like Lovable, Bolt, or Replit to whip up a quick landing page and send that out.

The takeaway is that once you’ve set up a pickaxe, you can create many different versions of these deployments and embed them in different areas. I’d recommend starting as simple as possible on the deployment side. Now you have the studio, where anytime somebody uses a deployment you can see how many people are using it and where.

We haven’t done the Pickaxe mastery workshop yet — that’s either coming in December or January. We were thinking about doing a Claude mastery workshop series in December too, but with these implementation power hours we may be able to cover both. While the Skool community section isn’t fully built out yet, we do have a series of training videos on the GenAI University YouTube channel, including one from the “Scale With AI” summit series — “Build AI Tools Fast: How Founders Leverage AI to Turn Their Expertise Into Profits” — with Nathaniel, the Pickaxe founder, which is a good starting point. We also have a few other trainings on the channel about other Pickaxe uses. I’m planning at least one three-part Pickaxe mastery workshop series in December or January so we can support people even more — information on that will be inside the Skool community.

Was this helpful and useful for seeing what Pickaxe can do? Ellen, congratulations again for winning the auction — I’ll be reaching out this afternoon and we’ll get things underway to start building your own custom AI studio with Pickaxe. Great to see everybody here. As always, keep coming AI on. See you on the other side.