Pickaxe Co-Founder Shares How Knowledge Entrepreneurs Scale with AI!

Full video transcript

What’s going on guys? Darby here, GenAI University, joined today by Mike Gioia, who is the co-founder of Pickaxe, a powerful tool for monetizing your knowledge in the age of the knowledge entrepreneur. Mike is going to be on a panel at the Scale with AI Summit coming up here November 5th through 7th. This panel is set for November 7th. We’re going to be talking about knowledge entrepreneurship. And there’s also got a cool demonstration video of Pickaxe in action that Mike will be shooting after this video. Um, so you can watch that after here, but I wanted to introduce you guys quickly to Mike and just a little bit about who he is, what they’re building, who Pickaxe is for, and give you a little taste of what you can expect when you go to explore the tool and join us at the Scale with AI Summit. Mike, thanks for joining me today.

Thanks. I’m super excited. Generative AI is a huge opportunity for solopreneurs, small businesses, and anybody trying to make money online. And it’s really just an awesome way to scale yourself, which is literally the copy on our homepage and what the summit is all about. So, really excited to talk about how people can use generative AI to scale themselves and start making really cool businesses online.

I love it. And one of the things that got me excited about your tool last year when we first saw it was that you put a lot of these pieces of what a lot of these different applications were together in a way that made it actually quite simple and easy to start monetizing an AI app based on your knowledge, your frameworks, and a process or an outcome that you knew that you could create as a business owner or an entrepreneur. Can you give us like a kind of a high-level overview of your background in AI? What was the idea, or where did it even start for you guys to create Pickaxe, and how is it going since you guys have launched?

Totally. The idea came just from a passion for making cool stuff and putting it online, launching projects. So, my co-founders, Nathaniel, Ian, and myself have various backgrounds in tech, AI, design, these sorts of things. And early in 2022, we started to make AI projects, but it was hard. You needed some technical expertise. And as we launched more and more little fun side projects, like we made a little thing called UnTwitter, which was a totally AI-populated version of Twitter — it had AI bots that were like parodies of a crypto bro, a vegan, all sorts of things, right? And as we launched more of these fun projects, just experimenting with the technology, we realized there was a huge opportunity to let normal people, or non-technical people, make cool projects, express their creativity, scale their own knowledge and expertise. We started building Pickaxe, or what would become Pickaxe, which essentially is just a simple no-code platform, which, as you said, tries to cover the full spectrum of what you need to make an AI app, launch it, have people use it, monetize it, and run it like a small business.

So, the platform has four pillars. We let you create AI tools. We make it super simple. And as you said, this is like our motto throughout everything — usability, simplicity, make it simple. So, really, whenever we’re releasing a new feature, we’re really thinking about how do we actually make this simple and understandable for people. Then we let you deploy it. We let you either embed it into your own website so people can use it, or if you don’t have a website, we let you launch a very bare-bones web app that has your tools, sort of like a landing page, with basic functionality to let people make accounts and buy products from you, give you money, and let you monitor it. And that leads into the two final parts of the product, which are: we let you sell and monetize through a Stripe integration, and we let you manage the whole process, have insight into it, and iteratively improve your tools and make them better.

I love the simplicity of how you can get that studio set up and going, and it might be bare-bones, but it’s simple and it’s enough to get something out there that you could even just start giving away for free — you don’t have to charge for any of this, but you could charge on a credit basis or on a subscription basis. And to me, that simplicity is so key when it comes to a lot of the different tools that you’d have to duct-tape together to get a fully functioning app up and running. It takes a lot of that out of the picture for somebody just to get started, but I think it’s also a great stepping stone for learning how you can start to apply and integrate these different AI tools into a business, especially for someone that is already running a successful coaching or consulting or teaching practice. There’s so many use cases for its application. I’m curious what are some of the cool, fun, and interesting use cases that you’ve seen your own users use, that might give people some idea about what’s possible with this tool.

Totally. Honestly, there are many. Some of the stats we’re interested in: we have over 50,000 individual pickaxes made, over 4,000 studios launched, and across all those tools, they’ve been used over 5 million times. So, there’s a lot of activity on the platform. Now, some of the most popular use cases — you already mentioned one, which is if people already have a successful online business around knowledge entrepreneurship, selling coaching, consulting, a course, launching an AI product is a great way to create some side revenue. And we’re in the early days of AI right now, right? So we’re really the easiest way to get started with that, and then start iterating on it as the technology gets better. A lot of people love to take some of their most popular frameworks or courses, individual little “microservices,” and turn them into a couple AI tools so that they can scale infinitely. And a lot of times people sell this as a standalone product and have a lot of success with that, and a lot of times people just use it as lead generation — it’s a really interesting thing that stands out, right? If you’re sending someone an AI version of a tool that leads into your frameworks, it’s really exciting. And then the other thing that’s quite popular is people that are in a niche or a very specific vertical will make an AI app all around that. Someone will make one all about tax law, or these sorts of things — they’ll take a bunch of documents and books and proprietary knowledge and make a couple chatbots or tools around that, and then sell these specialized versions of ChatGPTs in a specific domain.

I think it’s really interesting, all the different use cases, but a lot of it comes down to specialization and tweaking, because one way I’ve seen people get overwhelmed, and rightfully so, even going to ChatGPT, is that it can do anything, but where do you even start? And the idea that someone mentioned to me a while back about using a tool like Pickaxe to create a product or service, is that of a micro-SaaS — how hyper-specific can you get on one problem that is extremely painful for somebody, that they deal with every day, and can you solve that problem with a simple AI application? The ones that nail that can have a lot of success from a relatively simple application where, on the user side, the functionality is easy to use — maybe there’s some fancy stuff going on in the back end — but I just see the ability to take something that you’ve got knowledge in. Let’s take an author for example, who is a genius or an expert in some field, still getting their readers to the result that their book is teaching — so many people don’t even get past the first or second chapter of a book. But if you now plug in an AI application with it, that you can say “answer these three questions, and I’ve trained this AI to use my frameworks to give you the result you’re looking for,” at least helping you take a stepping stone forward — that’s so powerful for helping people reach their goals. And I use the author example, but a course creator or teacher of any type — you always want to be setting up these micro-goals to help the people you’re teaching get results, because that’s going to lead back to them improving their life, and it’s cool to see these tools coming together that are making that level of impact now.

Micro-SaaS is a great word, and we should use that word, because that’s really what’s going on here. I think the lesson we hope to instill with people using Pickaxe is that with this new wave of AI tools, you don’t really need to be technical to make an online business — in fact, that’s no longer the best skill. You can resell AI applications, ChatGPT, and if you have marketing abilities, design chops, soft skills, that’s actually a lot more valuable. And if you’re using ChatGPT, you’re still in the minority of the population across the world, but you might think of it as this basic thing — there’s actually a ton of value in taking any LLM (Pickaxe is model-agnostic, so you can use Claude, Mistral, anything) and selling it in a vertical, in a very specific, designed, user-friendly way.

Yeah, I love that, and it ties right into the knowledge entrepreneur concept we’re going to be discussing on the panel during the summit — there’s going to be several other people on that panel, all in different areas of knowledge entrepreneurship. Being able to translate what’s in your head into something tangible — before, a lot of these applications would have required technical expertise, knowing how to code to some degree, or hiring developers. But we’re kind of in what I’ve heard called the golden age of entrepreneurship, and I think the truth is that if we’re in the business of solving problems, then there are so many problems AI is solving, but it’s also going to create new problems for us to solve. Being able to execute effectively on getting a tool out there that solves a very specific problem, without requiring you to be a coder, is huge, because we’re in the business of communicating and helping humans solve their own problems. And if we can articulate that problem, because we’re spending time with our customers and understanding them at a deeper level, then instead of taking three months to build an application that solves it, it could take three days or three hours. There’s so much power in that. And again, we’re talking about Pickaxe, but it’s a gateway into these other models — model-agnostic — this other technology that companies are literally investing hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars into. It’s insane how much money is being poured into the development of this technology. To me, all of that leads back to helping platforms like the one you’re building get stronger and better, because the more the large language models you’re tapping into are strengthening, developing, refining, and fine-tuning how you’re able to communicate with those platforms, the sky is the limit.

You’re building on top of some of the best companies in the world, so all the technology underneath gets better every couple of months, and it gets less expensive to use. If you’re building in this space, you really want to have a pioneer mindset and understand that you’re one of the early adopters of this, and it’s only going to get better every couple of months, so you can do more and more difficult and cool things.

I’ve seen someone online put it in a way that was really interesting — I’m not going to say it exactly the way it was said, but the general idea I took away was that what you’re building now is probably going to be obsolete in two years if that’s the only thing you’re building toward. But don’t let that deter you from building, because what you’re going to discover going through the process of building something that might be obsolete in two years is that you’re going to develop new insights and understandings and ways you can build on top of that. It’s happening so much faster than it used to, and in some cases that can be overwhelming to people — even to the point of “why would I even start building in the first place, I don’t even know how to keep up with this, it’s evolving so fast.” You and I are in the weeds of this a lot, because we’re building and our communities are all around these tools, but there’s a huge population in the world that’s tried ChatGPT a handful of times and doesn’t see where it’s at. But then you see the specific applications you can create with tools like Pickaxe that help bridge that gap and make those connections in a way that’s practical for the everyday user. Any advice to somebody getting into entrepreneurship, or who already is and has a desire to create a product? How would you recommend anyone go about starting to solve a problem, or a micro-SaaS? Are there any best practices, traits, or characteristics of entrepreneurs who are having more success, from what you’re seeing in your users?

Totally. Well, I’d say first, one thing that will never really be obsolete, or will take a while to become obsolete, is a strong brand in a field, or domain expertise. So if you already have some sort of brand, I think it’s pretty easy to figure out how to add AI into it, even if it’s just in an infant stage — if you can deliver some part of your domain expertise through AI, that’s great. Also think about the communities you’re in. A great example: a lot of Christian ministry services don’t regularly use ChatGPT, or maybe they do, but it’s just too open-ended for them. We’ve had a couple of customers who made very specific Bible study GPTs, and what they’ve done isn’t that difficult, really, but they’ve branded it and made it very usable in a way their community just loves — much simpler and much friendlier. By closing off some of the options and making it very specific, they’ve had a lot of success. So I would think about how you can make ChatGPT much more approachable, simple, and less open-ended for a specific group of people that you work with. ChatGPT is a chatbot-based thing, so it goes back and forth, which is incredibly open-ended. On Pickaxe, we let you build chatbots just like ChatGPT — it’s a popular medium — but we also let you do AI-powered forms. Some people don’t understand why you’d want to do that, but most of the money on our platform is probably made through these forms, because they’re a much less open-ended experience. You can have a couple text fields, a file upload, multiple choice, a dropdown. By taking away a lot of the options and labeling each field — “put in your job here, put in your resume here, put in your LinkedIn profile here, put your goal here” — and then just hitting submit, it makes it way more usable. So I’d think about a couple of really strong AI use cases you’ve tried to explain to some of your friends or community, but they just don’t really get it, or it’s too complicated, or too much work — and then just try to recreate that as a very closed-design experience. That’s often a recipe for success, at least on our platform.

Yeah, that’s great, and it doesn’t have to be overly complicated, but if you have that open-ended ChatGPT thing, someone coming into it thinks, “where do I even start to prompt it to do this?” I’ve seen the same on our end with some of our customers and clients in our community who have podcasts, where traditionally they’d have to interview guests, ask questions, do these things to get them to a certain point — but after using a Pickaxe they built to ask the right questions based on what they already know to be true from their field of expertise, they’re leading their clients down these paths, but it’s saving them a lot of time because they’re not having to interact one-on-one with every single client on a third Zoom call to get the answers they need. They’re asking their clients, “hey, fill out these five questions,” and it gives them basically what would have taken 30 minutes to an hour. If you’re a knowledge architect, you’re basically guiding people through knowledge, and I think you should take the same approach to AI — just guide them through it, give them direction, coach them on how to use it, and you can make a tool that dictates a lot of this to them.

That’s fantastic, and I think that’s a great segue to what people can check out in the next video, learning how to use Pickaxe, and how Mike approaches Pickaxe, and how you can build a Pickaxe for yourself. You’re going to be putting together a demonstration for us leading into the summit so people have an idea of how to use the tool, the best practices for how to approach it, and I’m sure you have some other ideas for what you’re going to demonstrate in that video. But I want to preface, leading into what you’re going to be sharing, that the possibilities are endless with these types of tools. I think really stepping into the next age of the knowledge entrepreneur, what we’re doing here is just keeping an open mind for those going into it and exploring these tools. I hope people watching what you’re demonstrating, and those joining us at the summit and in your panel and every other panel, ask: what good can you create with this, how can you create a positive impact on others, how can one of these tools allow you to serve people at a higher level? If you go in with that perspective, willing to learn, create, adjust, and adapt, you’re going to open up so many different doors you never might have seen before, because you don’t know what you don’t know. All of these tools, and Pickaxe as one that I personally use and get a lot of value from, are great tools that facilitate what else you’re doing to make an impact in the world. Before anyone hops into that video where you’re demonstrating, is there anybody in particular that you think Pickaxe is primarily for, that it would be a great tool to dive in and spend 20, 30 minutes getting a better feel for, or anything else you’d like to provide before folks go watch a full demo with you?

We think the platform is pretty easy to use for just about everybody, but I think in particular, knowledge entrepreneurs and marketers really take to the platform — we see tons of new ones every day on the platform making tools. I’d just say to anybody watching, there’s a huge amount of opportunity right now with AI, and in a very strange turn of events, it’s just open to anybody — the best technology in the world is offered via API to everybody, and you can build on top of it. So I would just encourage everybody to take advantage of this opportunity right now and explore using AI in their businesses and see what they can do with it.

Love it. All right guys, tune into that next video if you want to check out Mike demonstrating Pickaxe in action, and how to set up and start using the tool for yourself. Check the links and any information below this video for some special deals, as well as that next video Mike is putting together for folks that want to give Pickaxe a try. And make sure you go over to ScaleWithAISummit.com and register for the event — it’s going to be live November 5th through 7th, 2024. Those videos we’ll be adding to our YouTube channel, so subscribe here to AI University on YouTube so you get notified as we drop more of these demos, interviews, and hands-on workshops. Mike, thanks so much for your time, and looking forward to your demo.

Thanks.