Start a $10K/Month AI Business in 90 Days — No Code, No Funding, No Team — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: Over the past few months, I've been talking to a lot of people building with AI, which is super exciting right now. Founders, investors, CEOs, and I asked them one question. If you had to start from zero in 2026 with no code, no team, no funding, just AI and a laptop, what would you build to make your first $10,000 a month?

And here's what I noticed. We keep reading headlines about someone raising a hundred million for their idea or reaching crazy valuations and we look at that and think, "Oh, that's what success looks like. That's the goal." But the thing is, there are many more people quietly making real money somewhere else entirely.

I talked to Daniel Priestley, a UK entrepreneur of the year, who took four of his agencies, automated each one using an AI platform. And one of them, Score App, started as a $15,000 client project his team used to build by hand. It now has 8,500 customers, grows 4% month over month, largely bootstrap, no crazy cost, just money. Nobody wrote a headline about that. And that's the actual opportunity right now. Take a small problem, solve it with AI, and make 10K a month.

So in this video, I pulled the exact playbook from people who've actually done it. What to build, how to find your niche, how to get customers with zero budget, and when you actually need investors. Spoiler: probably never.

I keep hearing this from so many entrepreneurs that you just start making money. It's so much easier now. And I want to start with, of course, the legendary Gary Vee because when I asked him if everything crashed tomorrow, Vayner Media gone, followers gone, what will you do with just a laptop and AI? He answered this.

Gary Vee: If I lost my reputation and my personal brand, but I kept my knowledge of how to make content on social, I would build an app that's $5 to $50 a month, and I would make unlimited organic content on LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok, and try to get customers. When you layer what I've been obsessed with the last 20 years, which is there is an advertising and brand building ecosystem called social media that does not cost you money. And that's the point about AI apps. It really doesn't cost you money anymore to build something in the way that I grew up. But the fact that you can actually get awareness, that you're one TikTok away from having people know who you are and building a platform, that's intoxicating.

Marina Mogilko: Build an app, make content, get customers. But what if I'm not a developer? How do I actually build the product? Here's what the CEO and founder of Replit, Amjad Masad, told me.

Amjad Masad: Everyone has an idea but for the most part the thing that's stopping them is that they don't have the technical skills or they don't have someone as a programmer. Growing up all my friends were like, "Hey, can you program this idea for me?" Well, now you could do it. We have a lot of stories where people have built their dream apps and they've had these ideas for like 20 years. We're talking about a CFO at a VC firm. He's a domain expert. He knows how to manage a VC fund and he never found the right tools for him and he had all these ideas on how to build them, but it's always hard to find engineering resources. So he used Replit and in three months he built his dream app and he went out and sold it and got a lot of contracts. And I think he made, he's on track to make 5 million. He quit his job. Now he's an entrepreneur.

Marina Mogilko: Have you seen any big mistakes that people make when building something with Replit? Because I know a lot of entrepreneurs are looking and they're probably thinking, "Okay, I'll build an app, but what's next? Any tips for marketing or any lessons that you've seen along the way?"

Amjad Masad: First of all, what we talked about with prompting: overcommunicate. Overcommunicate. Be resourceful. Replit environment gives you a lot of tools like the logs and things like that. Try to overcommunicate with the agent. I think that's the first tip that I would give. Even if you don't want to learn prompt engineering, just be overcommunicative. And the other thing is grit. Just not quitting after six hours is very differentiating actually. Most people just quit, so just keep going and don't quit.

Marina Mogilko: Okay. So building something is no longer the bottleneck and you can go from idea to product in days. This means the only thing that actually matters now is picking the right idea. I talked to the CEO of OpusClip and he gave me one of the best frameworks I've ever heard for finding a new niche that actually works.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: The market is becoming super competitive and there are for most of the markets or industries more than 20, 50 AI tools out there already. So the first principle I would say is to find a really niche business. Often times many people don't really understand what is a niche. For example, is restaurant business a niche? No. Is Chinese restaurant a niche? No. Is Sichuan Chinese restaurant business a niche? Still no. You have to drill down. There are so many different types of Sichuan food. And even for one specific vertical, are you going to target to be like the Chanel of Sichuan restaurants or the Zara or Uniqlo of Sichuan restaurants? The different pricing will match to different markets, different ICPs as well. So pick a really, really, really small niche that you cannot further segment it to start with.

Marina Mogilko: That's a good one.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: You have to ruthlessly segment your niche. The second thing is ideally pick something that's boring because the non-boring, the cool ones are definitely 10x or even 100x more competitive. You probably don't want to work in those areas. So you need to have a passion to build something for a boring industry but you solve a really big problem. And furthermore, ideally there are a lot of existing services. I think we are actually changing, redefining the term SaaS. Previously it was like software as a service. Nowadays it's becoming service as a software. So in that specific market niche, boring market niche, are there existing services done by agencies, by freelancers, or some internal tools or some hacky solutions, imperfect hacky solutions? That is your opportunity to tackle. So go through some boring test, go through some niche test, and go through some service test. These are my first principles to find a new business in 2026.

Marina Mogilko: Young says, "Pick a boring niche." Here's what that looks like in real life. I have this amazing story. So two days ago, my kids are on a school break and we went to a hotel and my daughter asked me for coloring sheets with cute deer and cute unicorns. I'm thinking, where do I find those? So I went to Google, Googled all of these sheets, and then I saw a website that told me I can generate 30 images like that for you. Choose your child's age, choose the theme. They said, pay me 50 cents and I'll generate 30 pages ready for you to print. And because we were in a rush, I'm thinking, 50 cents? Nothing. I'm just going to pay that. And I paid it immediately. I got my coloring sheets and I'm thinking, that's your real business. That's the real opportunity.

Here's the CEO of 11 Labs with a specific one that almost no one is doing yet.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: It will be voice specific, but I think it's so early that I think it's a huge one. There's definitely a lot of infrastructure being built for voice agents. We build it but other companies are too. And I think there is a big gap between voice agents and then actually deploying them in a lot of those businesses. And you don't have to have the engineering expertise to deploy those voice agents. The platform will frequently support a relatively self-served manner of taking it, but you can easily take that voice agent and deploy it in specific domains and most of the businesses in the world still don't know about it. If it's not venture scale business and you just want to make good money, I would try to take those voice agents and go to, let's say, local doctor's office and help them with appointment scheduling for the dentist so they can take appointments more easily and they can focus more on their work instead of a nurse doing that in between or missing appointments. That's actually one of the most common problems. I don't know the percentage but so frequently those appointments don't get booked because there's no one on the phone to take them. You can go to local mechanics and help them take appointments. And I think there's all of these requiring slight variation of the domain expertise that you need to know, and all of those businesses are in thousands to tens of thousands of dollars per month if you get it right. The infrastructure is there. You just need to bring it to those domains.

Marina Mogilko: Yeah, it's like B2B automate businesses with AI.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: Yeah. And small businesses all around.

Marina Mogilko: You don't have to be a coder.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: You don't have to be the coder. You just need to spend the time, call them, and ask or go to them.

Marina Mogilko: Mati just gave you a real business model. Go to local doctors, mechanics, make the offer, get the first clients. But here's the part people always underestimate. You get the clients and then what? Where do you actually keep them? Not on Instagram, not on TikTok. Once the algorithms change and suddenly your reach drops, your leads disappear and you're starting from zero again. That's why for me, email has always been the core. It's the one channel you actually own. Nobody can take it away from you. And if you look at most businesses, that's where a big part of their revenue actually comes from. So before you even scale, before you start adding complexity, I'd set this up first.

This part of this video is brought to you by Omniscent. And honestly, it's one of the first tools I'd plug into this kind of system. What I like is that it's not just email. You have everything in one place. Emails, SMS, push notifications, automations. So you're not stitching together five different tools and hoping they talk to each other. You build one system once and then it keeps working in the background while you focus on getting more clients. And the numbers are pretty wild. Their customers see around $79 back for every dollar spent. That's one of the highest ROIs you'll see in this space. Also, if you're already using something else and it's getting expensive as you grow, they'll actually migrate everything for you for free. Real people handle your contacts, automations, flows, SMS numbers. Usually takes 3 to 5 days, and your old system keeps running the whole time, so there's no risk of losing your clients. They offer 24/7 support by real humans. And what's actually valuable is that their average response time is under 5 minutes. If you want to try it, you can use my code, Marina. It gives you 30% off your first 3 months. I left the link in the description below. And now, let's get back to the video.

Okay, you have the niche, you have the tools. Now, what does the actual 90-day launch plan look like? Alex Mashrab built Hicksfield to 200 million in annual revenue in 9 months. He raised money before he had a single dollar in revenue. But when I asked him how to start from zero today, he said he'd do it completely differently.

Alex Mashrab: Focus on bringing the first dollar by day 30 of product development and maybe one million ARR by day 90 and then decide if someone needs VC funding or doesn't need. A lot of businesses can really scale to tens of millions of dollars today profitably with AI and for such businesses there is no need to attract VC funding. I can give you a very simple example. So there are websites that allow you to make professional photo shoots, basically for passport photos. Many of them make tens of millions of dollars.

Marina Mogilko: None of them are going to be venture capital backed businesses.

Alex Mashrab: Yeah. None of them are going to be venture capital backed business.

Marina Mogilko: Well, and you said something $1 million by day 90.

Alex Mashrab: ARR meaning 80K a month.

Marina Mogilko: 80K a month in three months. That's a lot. And so the playbook to achieve that is basically generate ads and launch them and test whether they're landing with your target audience.

Alex Mashrab: Paid ads are very difficult today. I think a lot of distribution comes through organic social media and creator integrations and just make sure that by day 30 there is monetization in place and then there is a way to constantly grow revenue to, let's say, one million ARR by day 90. Many successful companies scale very quickly today.

Marina Mogilko: Any tips on landing first customers in the first 30 days?

Alex Mashrab: Initially, at least last year, Twitter has been the social media where the distribution starts from. It starts from small communities, then it goes to AI news pages on X, then from AI news pages on X, it goes to Instagram news pages, then from Instagram news pages to creators, then it goes to Telegram and other social media. That's what we have seen with Hicksfield and with many other products as well that they went through the same journey of popularity and news through various social media but it all originated on X. I think now it's being changed today. A lot of companies try to use X to boost their products. The signal to noise ratio just drops. Twitter becomes less relevant but still it's the main place for new AI products launch.

Marina Mogilko: Alex just said you don't need investors and here's what's wild. Gurley spent decades backing the biggest companies in Silicon Valley and here's what he told me about why this is actually the right moment to move fast.

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: If you're a high agency individual who has confidence about driving their own career path, these tools are actually a jetpack. If you want to proactively learn, there's been no time in the history of the world where you can learn faster. And it's AI, but it's also podcasts like the stuff you do. There's interviews all over YouTube. You can learn faster than ever before. The thing to do right now is to run as fast as you can.

Marina Mogilko: If you have a friend who keeps saying they want to start something but don't know where to start, share this video with them. Okay, one last thing because after all these conversations, I kept thinking if the opportunity is this obvious, what's the real difference between people who make it work and people who give up?

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: There are a few things I could say here. One is launch, launch, launch. Just keep launching. Go launch, iterate. Even the same product, make another tweak. Show it in a different way. Iterate on your messaging. Do another video. Try to reach out to influencers to partner with them. I've seen a podcast. I launched it three or four different times with different messaging and different things.

Marina Mogilko: Interesting. So the first three times didn't work?

Gary Vee, Amjad Masad, Young Zhao, Mati Staniszewski, Alex Mashrabov, Bill Gurley: The first few times it didn't work. I think when we got on Hacker News the first time, it was when I said you can try all these different languages and I listed the languages—try Python, Ruby. That was before AI, and that was a hit because of the title change. And so again, it's grit, relentless resourcefulness, and just iteration, iteration, iteration.

Marina Mogilko: After all these conversations, this is what really stayed with me. The barrier to starting a business is basically gone. You don't need a team anymore. You don't need to know how to code. And in many cases, you don't even need funding. But what you need is speed because the people who are winning right now are not necessarily the smartest or the most technical. They are just the ones moving faster than everyone else. And that's really the shift. So if you zoom out, the playbook is actually simple. Pick a niche, build an MVP in 24 hours, get your first dollar by day 30, and use organic content as your distribution. If you want the step-by-step checklist for everything you just heard, it's in this week's newsletter. Link is in the description. And if this gave you the plan, the next episode gives you the speed. Alex Mashrab breaks down exactly how to go from zero to 1 million ARR annual run rate in 90 days. Watch it now.