So You Tubers, Instagram influencers and Tik Tokers everywhere can be found saying you are one or two AI prompts away from millions of easy dollars.
The figures range from $100 a day in an hour to $2,700 a day, to $1.7m a month. All done with minimal fuss and AI… apparently.
Apparently all you need is a laptop, perhaps a ChatGPT subscription, maybe a Shopify account, a three-hour online course and the confidence to call yourself a “founder” in your LinkedIn headline. In fact, why the f*ck are any of us working at all when it’s all just so simple?
Then there’s the endless stream of:
“How I make $800k a month on Shopify”, “How I make 1.7m a month”, “The AI side hustle nobody is talking about” and a personal favourite “Make Fuck You Money”
REALITY STRIKES
Meanwhile, back in the real world, I speak to another business owner every single day who has seen sales plummet this year. Another intelligent young person stuck cycling through an ever-expanding list of minimum wage roles despite doing everything they were told would work, Degrees. Qualifications. Endless applications. Side hustles. Networking…But it doesn’t. Why not?
THE RULES ARE CHANGING
Well there is truth in the fact It’s becoming increasingly obvious to anyone with half a brain and an eye on business, that AI will reduce the need for a huge range of white-collar jobs. The is, in my view the type of change that saw people move from the fields to the factories in the Industrial Revolution.
So as far as I’m concerned in terms of scale, this Is more when than if. The even harder truth is that to a large degree it is already happening, especially in the small business world.
In 2012-14 I had over 10 employees at my first business. Now I can cope with 3. Every small business is using all manner of tech including Ai to reduce the need for employees. Writers. Designers. Analysts. Admin. Researchers. Junior marketing staff. Recruiters. Even developers are watching the ground shift underneath them, I have on good authority anything requiring researchers is being vastly reduced.
Which creates a strange contradiction online. On one side you’ve got people selling the dream of effortless wealth through AI, On the other side you’ve got actual businesses quietly fighting for survival. Whilst there are certainly some incredible success stories, guys like Mr Beast perhaps, who saw an opportunity with a new technology early and have built a massive business on top of it, people who have broken all boundaries and produced something truly impressive from it.
But let’s be honest, the above scenario is rare. More to the point, these people still worked their ass off and still did things most people wouldn’t have had the belief or patience to build.
The internet took entrepreneur culture and turned it into escapism, everyone became an internet millionaire, an influencer, everyone thinks a Youtube or Instagram account is going to turn on a money tap and simply put, it will not. You still need to build an actual business. The mindset is the same as it would have been for your great grandfather, the skill sets are all learnable and maybe Ai can help, but in this new frontier, using the tools at our disposal asks as many new questions as it answers old ones.
I know a bunch of people who run YouTube channels and some very large instagram accounts, some in the millions of followers, they are still working hard. I know a guy who closed his gym to run his YouTube channel, one that was very popular. A couple of years later he went back to running his gym, the channel was harder work than the gym and less rewarding both financially and spiritually.
Now mix this with the ever increasing regulations in the UK & Europe which essentially kills the desire for any business owner to ever wish to employ anyone, then perhaps it is increasingly looking like we need to rethink the way we work.
Anarchist Entrepreneurialism….
I set up Anarchist Entrepreneur(.com) to help young people escape wage slavery, to date I’ve done 99% of this for free. From what I can see, really detailed knowledge, perhaps mixed with critical thinking and crucially, with real world experience is still something Ai will struggle to imitate for a very long time, if ever.
Creative thinking is part of the human condition, well at least some humans, and. whilst Ai can provide valuable resources and time saving tools, it cannot come up with the idea’s itself, only bounce them through algorithms to assist inquisitive minds in shaping their thoughts into something they can execute. As entrepreneurs we must look at how things are moving and really be adaptive in our thinking as well as in our tasks.
ONLY THE NOISE COUNTS
Ryan Holiday, author and marketer, writes in Trust Me, I’m Lying, modern media ecosystems reward attention above truth. Outrage, aspiration and fantasy spread faster than nuance ever will.
The online business world has simply evolved into the latest version of the same cycle. First it was crypto experts during the boom years, then drop shipping gurus during lockdown, NFT prophets in 2021 and now AI automation kings in 2025.
Every era creates a new class of people selling the map to a goldmine they claim to have already found. And to be fair, some genuinely have, but the majority are simply monetising the idea of success rather than success itself.
I saw a great LinkedIn post recently from a videographer (annoyingly I lost it) talking about the number of people selling courses on how to make £10k a month as a videographer… The people advertising this clearly really wish to make their money from selling courses to videographers not doing videography. If they were so great at videography then you have to ask why they aren’t just doing that?
I saw a post on Linkedin saying you only had to be a little bit ahead of someone else to sell them your knowledge, hmmm, maybe, but as a BJJ Black belt I can say that whilst there is some truth in that, it is more relevant that learning from a high level person is totally different to learning from one a little ahead of you. In fact in the real world I see people who learn from lower level people and find they are solving the wrong problems, learning things that hamper future development and so on. This is down to the fact that the person they are learning from, has not got the complete picture yet…Wax on, wax off!
But all this said, at least on social media, Increasingly, the business model online isn’t doing the thing. It’s teaching other people how to do the thing. Or at least selling the fantasy that they can and that it’s so simple they just have to follow these three easy steps!
The Ferriss Effect
I produced some videos a few years back about how to start a lifestyle business and gave some step by step instructions on how to get started on the Entrepreneurial route, there were no promises of wealth or massive success, just a more rewarding way to live. At no point did I suggest it would be simple, in fact quite the opposite.
PLAY ON YOUTUBE
Like literally millions of others, I read the Tim Ferris book “The Four hour work week”. Within it’s pages there are many great principles in the book, but somewhere along the line, the internet took “designing a lifestyle business” and reinterpreted it as:
“Work as little as possible while expecting the magic money tree to make you a millionaire, passive income is the modern lottery win” and that is simply not realistic.
ROUTE TO MARKET IS MUCH EASIER THAN IT EVER WAS….
This it the part that is real. Opportunity that didn’t exist a less than thirty years ago is definitely there in a way our grandfathers couldn’t begin to think about, but the rules change very fast online and the big boys are firmly in charge. It may well be that the Anarchist Entrepreneur route is to reinvent how we use old school methods, to explore forgotten connections and to a degree at least, go against the herd.
It is true that a solo founder today can build websites, create marketing assets, analyse data, write sales copy, produce video content, automate customer service and run outbound campaigns, all at a scale that would have been impossible even ten years ago. But it is also true that we are paying more and more for the privilege and are facing ever increasing competition.
So route to market is much simpler than it ever was, but in some ways running a business is much more complex. The competition is now intense and the big internet players are using the same rules that could free some, to enslave many.
THE ONLINE COMPETITION IS NOW INTENSE
A sad fact of life now is that whilst many of us have built businesses we could not have done thirty years ago or less, we also now face competition from massive companies we once did not. for
Let take coffee beans as an example. Once upon a time not so long ago you opened a roastery and a small shop on the side, built a network and sold to a loyal bunch of customers, many of them being small coffee shops etc. Perhaps you ran some mail order but overall you likely sold to people within a few miles of your building.
Now you sell online and face competition from all over the world, Amazon, Tesco, Costco and more. Every aspect of what you do becomes more intense, more competitive. The money now is in innovation, service and to a degree being very smart about presentation, smart in a way that a business simply didn’t need to be not that long ago.
When you look at products such as clothing, sports equipment and essentially anything being made overseas and imported, now there is retail competition from the very vendors we usually buy from. Advances in digital technology has opened markets to cheap goods, Ai has solved customer service, cheap (ish) worldwide delivery has made shipping across seas quickly, more than possible. So now many of us have to rethink our strategies in far shorter time frames than ever before.
WRAP IT UP
I could go on and on with this subject but the truth is those of us involved with small business and not wishing to be part of that corporate rat race need to be ever smarter, ever more innovative and use the things that Ai cannot replace. We need to use our most human attributes to build real connections that matter more than the sum of their parts.
Brand building in the twenty first century is not so different to what it was before, just the delivery methods are different. Figuring out how to connect and supply something people want is the same question, just with slightly adjusted answers that run alongside the technology. Perhaps more of us in small business need to be Anarchist Entrepreneurs.
The Anarchist Entrepreneur 