How to Create & Monetize Your Own AI Tools

Full video transcript

What’s going on, guys - Darby here, GenAI University. If you just caught my video with Mike from Pickaxe, he’s going to be demonstrating in this video how to use their platform and get the most out of it as a knowledge entrepreneur. So sit back, relax, and watch Mike take you for a ride. Let’s go.

Hi, I’m Mike, one of the co-founders here at Pickaxe. I’m here in the Pickaxe offices - very simple, besides whiteboards, as you can see, as is usual for startups. And I’m really excited for you to learn more about Pickaxe and how you can use AI to scale your businesses.

At the Scale AI Summit, we think AI is a really awesome opportunity for knowledge entrepreneurs, or anyone who’s in the business of selling consulting, coaching, marketing knowledge. AI is a wonderful way for them to scale their business to be much bigger and more powerful, and that’s why on our homepage we say “scale yourself.” We think AI is a great way to do this.

So I just want to give you a quick tour of the product and what you can do with it, and kind of explain the ins and outs of it for anyone interested. So here we are on our homepage, and we’re actually looking at a pickaxe - a pickaxe is an AI tool that you can build on our platform with no code. This little chat box here, believe it or not, is a pickaxe that we made, and it will help you create tools - it’s kind of an automatic AI builder. So if you wanted to, you could talk to it and it’ll expand into a chat and start asking you some questions about yourself. I actually made this one myself, and it will ask me what my job is, my profession, if I have any documents or videos about how I do it, and then it will actually make me a pickaxe that gets emailed to me, and I can then put it into my account.

But for today I’m going to show you how to do it from scratch, because it’ll be a lot more instructive and a lot more informative for you. So there’s a couple elements of the product: you can create tools, you can then launch them, deploy them, like the way we did here, and you can even sell them - we have a whole storefront feature and sort of sell them as a micro-SaaS product. To start, though, I’m going to show you the Builder, where all our tools start from, and we’re going to build a chatbot together - a simple chatbot.

So here we are in our no-code Builder. It’s pretty simple: on the left-hand side here is where you build the tool, configure it, change settings. We have a place to write a prompt, a place to upload documents and train your AI, even a place to connect API actions - over here you can connect pre-existing ones, you can also build your own, and if you’re comfortable coding we even let you write little scripts to code, though the whole platform is intended to be no-code friendly. And then over here you can always test your chatbot at any moment, as you make changes you can test it right here.

So let’s build one together. We’ll make a very simple one - we’ll do a pickaxe assistant, a little thing that can answer questions about Pickaxe. We’ll call this our test pickaxe assistant. Over here we’re going to start by writing a prompt, and if you’ve used ChatGPT or most LLM products, you should be familiar with what a prompt is - it’s just instructions for an AI written in clear language. There’s no right or wrong way to do this, this is not a coding language, you can do it any way you want, but usually the more clear the better. It doesn’t even have to be English, it can be any language, because these things are multilingual out of the box.

So we’ll say: “You are a helpful assistant that answers the user’s questions about the AI company Pickaxe. You speak in a plain, friendly tone.” Great, so this is kind of the bare minimum - we can already start testing this tool out. All we did was add a couple sentences. Now we’re going to add a lot more, but this is what we’re going to do. And here we can always swap out the model that runs it - there’s OpenAI models, Mistral models, Claude models. We’ll use GPT-4, it’s the most recent model from OpenAI, and we’ll just ask, “What can you tell me about Pickaxe?”

This is actually kind of right, but it’s kind of missing a lot about Pickaxe, and that’s because Pickaxe is not in the training data very much for the tool - it’s probably scraped some information about Pickaxe, but a lot of the intricacies of Pickaxe are not in there. So we’re going to have to train the model a little bit, but luckily we make this very easy. So we’re going to go over to the Learn tab, and here we can add pieces of knowledge to our chatbot. We can add files - let’s add this Pickaxe pitch deck, which is kind of a pitch deck about what Pickaxe does, and here you can upload all types of files: PowerPoints, PDFs, TXT files, even CSV files - though be careful of that, because sometimes people’s cells are all over the place, but as long as it’s clear what’s going on the AI can read it.

We’ll also add this document that has a bunch of information about Pickaxe and commonly asked questions, so it’s rich with a bunch of information. And as you see, when we add something it actually tells us the size and also the chunks of information in it - it automatically chunks these things. We can always click in here and see what it’s pulled, we can even edit it and delete certain parts of it if we want to, so it’s a very powerful thing.

We can also add web pages - we could add the Pickaxe homepage, and it would scrape all the associated pages. This takes just a little bit of time, it’ll grab all of the related pages from that domain, and then we can instantly add them as documents. So it grabbed all these sorts of things, but I actually don’t want to add these - I want to show you, I’m going to add this YouTube video and show you that if you put in a YouTube video here, it actually visits the YouTube video and then grabs the audio transcript if it has one, and then throws it in here. So there’s all sorts of ways to add cool information.

And here are some advanced settings about how you want to configure all this - we won’t really get into most of it, but it’s interesting stuff, and it’s all about giving you easy control. For example, if you put in a website, you can decide whether it revisits the website every 24 hours, every week, every month, or never, to regrab the information. So there we have the YouTube video - this is literally me saying, “Hi, today I’m going to teach you…” - it’s an instructional video about how to use a part of our product, and now it’s in there.

So now we can say, “Hey, how do I make a studio with Pickaxe, and what does a studio do?” - a pretty specific question that it probably would not have known before. And here it is, it’s telling me everything, and this is indeed right: a studio is a way that you can bundle tools on Pickaxe and publish it as a web page and monetize it - it’s like our storefront component. There’s lots of other cool stuff you can do here: you can let people upload files, notice when I click this it lets them do that; you can let it generate images; all sorts of stuff. And if you’re more advanced, you can go to the Act Builder and start to connect it to Make.com, Zapier - there’s all sorts of stuff in here, a whole library of actions you can use.

But for the purpose of this, I’m just going to go through this - now this is a very basic tool. On average people spend about 8 to 11 minutes in our Builder tweaking this, some people spend a lot more time, but this is perfect for what we’ve got today. We can even add a little intro message here - we could say, “Ask me any question about Pickaxe you have.” And if we like this, we just hit continue - there’s a whole page here to help you, since you probably don’t want to use the Pickaxe logo, so you can upload your own, change - we have AI-generated images that pop up there, or of course you can upload your own - and once we like this, we can publish it.

So we’ve now gotten through the first part of the product, which is creating an AI tool - it’s right here, we can now test it, we can send it to people, do all sorts of stuff. So this is the same tool we just made - if you said, “Hey, what image model does Pickaxe use to generate images in the tools,” hopefully it’ll read all the information and tell me - let’s see - that’s perfectly, totally right: Flux is our default model, but if you use actions you can connect to Dolly or other models. So this is our tool, and every time people use it we’ll be able to see the things pop up here, so we can monitor what’s going on.

But now I’m going to show you how you can deploy it and how you can actually launch these as parts of your business in the real world. So we just go up to here, to the Deploy button - again, this is just the control panel for the tool, and we have two options, I’ll quickly show you them both. We can embed them into our own website, which just means putting them in as an iframe or a JavaScript embed - people can use them there, it’s pretty simple. There’s different types of embeds: iframe is definitely the one that’s the easiest, and we recommend it, but you can also do a floating action button, or the chat input, which is what we had on the homepage, where you say “hey” and it kind of pops out into this. So there’s all sorts of things, and we also let you do all sorts of stuff - you can remove the picture, change what the button text says, change the typography, the color, all sorts of stuff.

And when you’re ready, you just copy this code and paste it wherever you want, and it’ll render there, and it’s a live link to your pickaxe, so as you edit your pickaxe all the changes will be reflected there, and then you’ll see all the usage show up here. Again, I said “hey” over in the embedded instance, and now we see that conversation was here.

Now, the second way to deploy these things is a Studio, which is what that little video I added into the bot was about. A studio is for people that don’t have their own website or don’t have a place where they want to embed it, and it basically is a very simple, barebones web app or website where you can put one or multiple pickaxes and then share them with people, and it has some barebones functionality for monetizing and registering users - you can register users, monetize, set prices, and all sorts of stuff.

So here’s an example of one I made, kind of for internal use, but tons of people actually use it, though it’s for students, and here we can see everything we’d want to do to design a studio. Though before I get into this, I’m going to quickly show you some examples of ones, so you can have a concept of what these are. Here’s one where there’s a landing page for this thing that helps people with their Stata workflow - this is a pretty popular studio, it makes hundreds of bucks, and it’s basically just some AI tools built around this very specific niche of Stata, and they explain what it is and they have all the tools here, and you can try them, and here’s their pricing model.

Here’s the inside of a studio - this is a Bible verse studio, and this is basically a collection of tools that help people with Bible-study-related stuff, and this is a very popular one too, this one also makes hundreds of dollars, and it has all these tools built around very specific things, like a Bible reading plan generator, Bible chapter study thing, and yeah, this is what the inside of it looks like. Here’s one that’s all built around images, helps them create these coloring-book-type things - you can’t even try these tools if you don’t have an account or aren’t paying, this is their pricing tier, you can try it once for free, after that you’ve got to pay $5 a month or $50 a month. And here’s one for a collection of tools that help people with dating apps - so this one, you add a photo or image and it looks at it and helps you write pickup lines, these sorts of things. So those are some quick examples of studios.

This is what it looks like when you manage a studio - so here we have all the pages, right, we have our landing page, we have all the individual tools - these are just three tools that are all around Shakespeare and poetry, kind of for high school English students - there’s one that analyzes poems, you just paste them in, one that helps you find Shakespeare quotes, and you can always add more tools, you can add a page that’s not a tool, just a page that has text or embeddable videos on it, you can add folders to organize things under, and then you can control all the sort of things you’d want, from the landing page to the pricing page, to the sort of calls to action that people get across the thing, to sign, to log in, to sign up, like when they run out of uses - this is what they said, you might say you need to buy more uses to do that. So we really give you the ability to customize all parts of this, and one way to think about this is we let you build a very simple ChatGPT wrapper app or AI wrapper app - you can’t do everything, but all the things that would be important to running that, you can do here.

So we have all sorts of stuff to do here, then beyond that we have the ability to change a bunch of small design stuff, again like color, typography, buttons, all sorts of stuff, like white-labeling it, changing even the language of everything, adding images, all sorts of stuff. And then you can also monitor what people are doing here - now this isn’t a monetized studio so I don’t have any money coming in, I think it used to be, so there’s two subscribers there, but you can kind of see at a high level all the people here - I’d click and show you all the users, but then you’d see all their emails, so I won’t do that, but you can see a high-level overview of all the usage here. And you can also change all the tiers here, right, so you can make it public, invite-only, you can change if people are paying for a subscription, if it’s a one-time payment, if it’s free, you can add new tiers, you can change uses, you can change the prices - again, pretty much everything you’d want to do to run a simple ChatGPT wrapper app.

So that’s a quick overview of the three main pillars of our product: you can create AI tools with no code, connect them to other APIs, add documents to them, all sorts of stuff; then you can launch these tools, either as an embed on your own website or a standalone web app which we call Studio; then finally, you can monetize these tools - you can sell them and then run it as a business and monitor what people are doing with them.

And we’re constantly adding new features to all three of those pillars, we kind of jump between the two - right now we’re adding all sorts of extra functionality into the Builder, making it more powerful, but then soon we’ll add a lot of functionality into making the studios cooler and easier to monetize, and all sorts of stuff. And if you’re curious about any of these parts of the product, if you’re curious about Pickaxe, I suggest checking out our blog, but probably more importantly, going to our community forum - and this is also a big part of what Pickaxe is, which is we’re not just a product, we are a big community of pioneers in the space. We really - our ambition is to be the home of the internet for people that are launching these no-code AI businesses, for solopreneurs and knowledge entrepreneurs.

So we have a place where people talk about the actions and connecting them, we have a lot of people that build their own actions, like these API integrations, and let other people use them. We have a place to report bugs, of which there are many, but we’re very quick to fix them because we’re always building, improving this. We have a place for people to request features, we have a place where people just post general questions or comments about things, we have two guides, we have prompt help, we have questions, all sorts of stuff - so really this is also what we consider a key part of our product, actually, which is a community, a place to meet other people that are doing this, and we have all sorts of interesting events and material around that.

So I hope this was a helpful tour of Pickaxe. I really hope you check out our knowledge entrepreneur panel, it’s going to be awesome - Travis Roster, the co-founder of Kajabi and one of the angel investors and huge champions of Pickaxe, will be joining us. He’s brilliant on the topic of how to monetize your knowledge, and straight-up inspiring, I would say, about how to think about what you have to offer to other people that’s valuable, because everybody does. And he wrote an awesome book called “You In,” which is all about how you can examine yourself and find a cool business to start with what you know.

So anyways, I’m really looking forward to meeting some of you during the panel or the seminar, and yeah, I hope you drop by Pickaxe and check it out. Thank you so much.

All right, y’all, I hope you enjoyed that demonstration from Mike at Pickaxe about how to use their platform to turn your knowledge into something you can monetize, or at least start to get people better results for what you are helping people do and create in the world with generative AI. So if you liked that video, make sure that you subscribe to us on YouTube, and also make sure that you are registered for the free Scale With AI Summit coming up here, November 5th through 7th. Replays and recordings will be posted here on our YouTube channel, so make sure you are tuned in to get updates as those videos drop. All right, we’ll see you in the next video.