Build & Monetize Your Startup Using AI Tools (I'm Using Pickaxe!)

Full video transcript

In this video, I’m going to talk a bit about building an AI tool from scratch in 2025. I’ll preface this by saying that if you’re starting completely from scratch and this is your first step into the AI space, you’re going to want to take your time understanding the landscape of the different tools available to you. There are automation platforms like Make.com and n8n and Zapier — you can plug into a lot of different tools and APIs from OpenAI, Anthropic, and other large language models to power the tools you’re creating. But you need to come into it with a strategic plan for how you’re actually going to integrate something that’s going to be effective for your business.

If you’re not familiar with tools like Make, n8n, or setting up automations through Zapier, there are a lot of different alternatives out there these days, and it can take some time to learn. It can feel overwhelming. One tool I found that helps alleviate some of that overwhelm is called Pickaxe. Pickaxe is a tool that allows you to share your knowledge and build AI-powered frameworks around it. In a lot of cases, if you’re a coach, a consultant, or an entrepreneur with a process you’ve used — either internally operating your business or on the sales, marketing, or customer support front — a lot of those processes can be augmented and streamlined using tools like OpenAI or Anthropic (some of the big ones), plus a tool like Pickaxe to tie all those integrations together into one place and create specific workflows around it, whether it’s chat-enabled or a form-enabled input process.

The whole concept around generative AI and how it generates content, in a nutshell, is that the quality of input going in has a huge impact and influence on how the AI processes that information. So it’s really about having good, clean data at the end of the day, and depending on what model you’re tapping into and how much additional time you’ve spent tuning the different variations for how the AI gathers information. Otherwise it can be a lot to understand right out of the gate. Even setting up a lot of those automations — while people say it’s no-code, and much of it is — there’s still a different tool set in terms of how your brain works and operates to connect a lot of those pieces together. With something like Pickaxe, in my experience, it can alleviate the need to go work and play in a lot of these other platforms right out of the gate and start to test your ideas and tweak and modify your frameworks to get an idea out there.

While some may say this is just a GPT wrapper — which, depending on what you’re building, is what it is — on the flip side there’s an infinite amount of ideas and connections and things you’re able to make as a result of having a simple interface like Pickaxe that helps you tie these things together. How would you put up a paywall, a simple landing page that tells people about a product, and then an ad-powered tool that gets them a result? It’s a great way to build that first domino, so to speak, that would lead into additional products, offers, or services that you may ultimately want to be working on and helping people with.

So if we’re talking about creating a product or service that’s going to target a specific segment of the market, who is the 80/20 of your best, highest-value customer or client? And what is that first domino we can brainstorm and use AI to help us come up with — the thing that’s going to start a chain reaction leading them to becoming a customer or client, or ascending to some other offer you want to work with them on? You may be running a mastermind, selling physical or digital products, or running a home service or service-type business where you’re actually delivering a product to somebody, and it needs to have value to get them a result. Or you need to work on the delivery process to get results for your clients. Once you have a process you can replicate, creating little “pickaxes” to help you through it can address really specific areas that are causing your clients problems, and create a framework that helps solve those problems.

Maybe it’s your team using these tools to deliver a more packaged, refined product. But you could very quickly create something like an audit-type form if you have a lot of different criteria from an assessment you do with clients, and turn that into a one-, two-, three-, or four-page report. That might normally take you anywhere from a couple of minutes to a couple of hours, maybe more, depending on what your process looks like. Identifying points of resistance like that — where there’s a way to take the report generation process, which is part of your sales process, as a first domino — and condense the time it takes from, let’s say, an hour to five minutes, frees up your bandwidth on that specific part of a deliverable inside your sales process. And that first domino starts the chain reaction that ultimately leads to more clients for you.

So if you’re going to build an AI tool from scratch and you don’t want to get your hands into a tool like Make.com directly, you can get started very quickly with a tool like Pickaxe. When you have an account with them, you basically have access to a certain number of credits every month depending on your plan, or you can add your own API key, which is very simple and straightforward. There’s plenty of documentation out there on OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s front for how to get that API key, and that would apply if you’re using a lot more credits on your account.

There are a lot of different ways you can go with generative AI. If you’re utilizing it the way I described — with your current clients, looking for ways to streamline or automate processes and create those first dominoes or other types of tools that add value and help deliver a product or service to attract your highest-value clients — check out Pickaxe, or look at what Pickaxe can do, and then do your own research on what other tools might be out there. Pickaxe is a great, handy way to get projects up and running fast, and then as you’re building out the minimum viable version of that product and testing the deliverables, you can continue to invest more time into further development if it’s needed on a project, or if your custom Pickaxe is already doing exactly what you need it to do — while you’re still maybe refining the idea, getting more customers, and doing more of the other things in your business, rather than necessarily focusing on building out a tool.

If it is that first-domino type of tool, it’s going to be doing its work for you 24/7 as long as it’s running, without necessarily needing to come back and update it every single day. So you could charge for it, or you could give it away for free, but it’s going to lead people into the next way you can help them solve a problem — because this tool is helping them solve a really specific problem. In the world of AI and SaaS tools being built, there’s a lot of talk about more and more micro-SaaS products being AI-enabled to solve hyper-specific problems for your ideal target audience.

Check it out — it’s a cool tool — or do your research and go find a number of other tools out there that I haven’t tried. I’ve been using Pickaxe for a while and I find it really helpful for what I need to do right now. It’s really affordable to get started with. We have additional training on our channel that you can watch with Mike Joya, one of the co-founders at Pickaxe, walking through a number of demonstrations for how to use the tool. Let me know if you like it and how it helps you get your idea out there if you do use it, or if there’s anything specific you’re curious about — what a tool that’s able to create products like Pickaxe can do — because I’m still experimenting with it and we’re finding new use cases through the community as we talk about them on our mastermind calls and at different events. Looking forward to hearing how it goes for you if you do use it, and let me know if there are any other tools you’d like to learn more about and do some deep dives on, and we can take things from there. All right guys, see you in the next video. Keep coming on. Cheers.