Create, Own, Scale: AI & Bitcoin for the Solopreneur

I'm Jordan, solopreneur and AI educator, and this is Create, Own, Scale: AI and Bitcoin for Solopreneurs.

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Let's just get this out of the way. We're Bitcoiners, and we're probably familiar with this kind of cycle. They print money with this inflationary regime, then it leads to some kind of economic turmoil, and then it's an excuse to print more money. This is why we Bitcoin.

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Throughout all of this turbulence, Bitcoin continues to rise in value. If you're measuring products or services against Bitcoin, your wealth is always going up. Bitcoin is a very powerful tool in these times. But there's another very powerful tool that I don't believe many people really register as much, especially in the Bitcoin space, and that is the power to start your own business from scratch and start generating cash flow.

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Quick show of hands. How many of you are business owners, entrepreneurs, solopreneurs, freelancers? And how many of you have a job, an employer? How many of you use AI in your daily work? There are probably even more hands that aren't going up for that. I believe the future of all work, whether you're a business owner or an employee, is bring your own agents, harnessing AI technology to coordinate labor on new scales never before possible.

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Let's talk about this in terms of Bitcoin and sovereignty. As we know, when we're renting services, they're not ours. If we keep our money in a bank, it's not our money. But when we own our keys, we own our coins. The same goes with running a platform for your business. You're using Squarespace or Wix or something. What if they don't want to be your service provider anymore? They can just cut you off at any time.

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Meanwhile, we can run our node. We can run BTCPay software from a Raspberry Pi in our house and start accepting payments or sending payments in a peer-to-peer global network that is completely decentralized and immune to this kind of financial transaction censorship.

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Taking it a step further, now we can run open source AI agents from our laptop. If you have the right kind of laptop, you can even run local inference, and you can run LLMs from the comfort of your own home. We'll get into that more in just a little bit.

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About 20 years ago, a book was published called The Sovereign Individual. They predicted the rise of a new economic actor in the digital information age. This new type of economic actor would be able to transcend jurisdictions, governments, and states, and go where they're treated best. This is because they can bring their wealth, they can bring their business, they can bring their livelihood.

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We've been seeing that in the last decade with the rise of the solopreneur, the one-person business, the creator. For example, you have your YouTube channel, you generate attention, you have the product you funnel that attention toward. These solopreneurs are digital nomads. You can live anywhere, you can go anywhere.

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But how many solopreneurs are actually Bitcoiners? I don't know, but I believe this leads us to a new age where we are sovereign producers more than ever before. We can now be in control of our stacks, of our tech stacks, of our infrastructure.

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Let's talk about what a solopreneur does from the ground up. You pretty much do everything. You run your whole business. You are the marketing department, you are the operations department, you're everything. This is a lot. A lot of times when you're building your business, you realize you're actually building yourself. You're developing yourself just as much as you're building your business.

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In my experience, in my latest iteration of being a solopreneur, about a year and a half ago I started over. I said, you know what, agency AI is so important. I need to figure out what these AI agents are all about. So I started a YouTube channel just to share what I was learning, and what I was learning was valuable to others.

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It turned into a school community, the AI Captains Academy, where now people come and learn AI agents from the ground up, learning the concepts and the foundational content, so you're not really dependent on certain tools that might go extinct next week.

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Then I was recently offered a full-time position as the head of user education at Venice, which is a privacy-focused, all-in-one AI company. I took that job. Why would I mention that while talking about solopreneurs? Because I believe we're heading into an age where the line between business owner and employee is going to blur and disappear.

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What's going to be important for anyone trying to make an income out there, especially digitally and even in the real world, is learning how to harness AI. I made this decision to go full time from a place of power. I didn't need the job. I had my business, but it offered me a situation that was optimal for me. I liked the idea. I liked focusing on just AI education and making content, as opposed to marketing and operations and all the things required to run my own business.

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What's key here is making these decisions from a place of power. Bitcoin gives us sovereignty over our money. AI gives us leverage over labor. We could call that production as well, but that sounded a little too communist for me, so let's just call it labor.

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The goal is freedom. We want independence in this life. That's probably why we're also drawn to Bitcoin. We see the number go up amid the economic turbulence in the world. We want to direct our life on our own terms, on our own time, and we don't want permission. We don't want to have to ask permission. We give ourselves the permission. We're sovereign individuals.

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If we zoom out a little bit and look at this sovereignty stack, as I like to call it, as a solopreneur, we have our sovereign money at the ground floor. Then we need to learn to harness machines in the middle. With those two building on top, and simplifying the equation, we eventually create the formula for independence in our lives.

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What is this machine leverage? First off, it's not just software. We think of AI on our computer. You can buy a robot on Amazon for less than $1,000 right now, give it an API key, and teach it to do things in your house. Now, maybe they're not that good yet, but it's coming.

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AI is not limited to software here. This is machine technology, machine intelligence. When we are harnessing machine intelligence, we are no longer business people, we're no longer humans selling our labor or our time. We're selling our creativity. We are strategists now. We're selling our taste, our judgment, our direction, and our vision. We're really getting to experience the full spectrum of human creativity because we no longer have to do the heavy lifting.

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That leads us to our formula of the day: create, own, scale, as a solo producer.

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If you have never started a business before, or you've never been a solopreneur, here's a little bit of what the grind looks like. You build, you share, you sell.

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What are we building? We're using AI vibe coding to build real products. With AI now, we can get so much done in so little time. We can iterate on concepts and ideas we have, and we can just make progress faster than ever before. We can use AI to build networks. We can build AI to develop new skills, both for ourselves and agent skills, and we can explore new ideas. Most importantly, we can iterate as we go.

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Meanwhile, we want to share. As solopreneurs, we have a personal brand. This personal brand helps market your product and also yourself, for maybe that job offer that comes one day. We want to build in public to provide value to others. We want to be real and vulnerable. In the age of AI slop, that's more important than ever. We don't need to be experts, we just need to be two steps ahead.

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If someone else is trying to solve that same problem, then we take those solutions that we discover through our problem-solving and create offers. High-ticket offers require our time, and we charge more for those. Low-ticket offers scale with our audience. They don't cost as much, but as your audience scales, you're making a lot more money from these low-touch offers. Not quite passive income, but pretty close.

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This is a flywheel. When you do these things together, you have a spinning machine that starts making you more money, building your audience, and expanding your own skills and your own knowledge and experience. This is create.

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But as Bitcoiners, we want to own. We want to own our stack. We don't want to rent everything. In the traditional paradigm up until this point, we use a platform, Stripe, whatever site we use to host our website, and we have our payment processor. They could just say no between us and the client, between us and our customer. There could just be a no, cutting off service.

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But with Bitcoin and AI, we can now leverage self-hosted infrastructure where we don't have to worry about the threat of being shut down, and we can save money on subscription fees. AI closes the technical gap.

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We've always imagined the cypherpunk vision of self-hosting our own infrastructure. Now this is possible for everyone because we can run an AI agent on our node. This is my Umbrel instance. I run a full Bitcoin node. I open up an agent in the terminal and I say, hey, I want a Lightning address. I don't want to use the Primal or Alby app. I don't want another domain. I want my domain.

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It just sets it up for me. I don't know how to do these things. I didn't go to school for systems administration. It sets up everything I need to run the Lightning address, and boom, now I have my Lightning address at my own name. It took a couple hours. I don't have any experience. I've never even run a Lightning node before.

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Pretty cool, right? We can now own our infrastructure because AI allows us to control it and manage it. We don't have to be engineers anymore. We can actually use Bitcoin to a new level, which blows my mind the more and more I think about it and what this means for the world.

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Self custody your Bitcoin, run a node on a Raspberry Pi at your house, and you can accept payments all over the world. One day our laptops will either be powerful enough to run self-hosted intelligence, or we'll run these LLMs from our home. You don't have to rent that. You don't even need the internet to use this intelligence.

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We're heading into an age of the sovereign producer. The more we can strive to own our full tech stacks, the more successful we're going to be in discovering freedom for our lives together. Bitcoin and AI allow us to own and control our full stack.

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Finally, scale. We're owning our infrastructure as we create. How do we scale? We're learning, building, sharing. We're attracting people to us. We're discovering the problems they need to solve, and we solve them for them. We productize that, we sell it, and then we save our money in Bitcoin. Obviously, we dollar cost average into Bitcoin.

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What happens every four years with Bitcoin? The number magically starts to go up a lot more than it was four years ago. This is a great opportunity to scale. We can level up every four years by deploying that capital in a manner that fits your strategy, whether you want to hire someone, you want to invest in GPUs or infrastructure, or maybe you want to quit your job and go all in on yourself.

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Every four years, you're given an opportunity here as long as you're strategically stacking your Bitcoin. Who knows, maybe within three or four cycles you'll be tasting that freedom that was once such a distant dream. Personally, that's kind of how it worked for me. It's taken several cycles.

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But you don't just stack Bitcoin as a savings vehicle. You use Bitcoin cycles as a way to deploy, grow your business, and develop yourself as a person. Ultimately, what we're left with is the magical wonder of compounding returns.

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Bitcoin is compounding returns over time, in a fiat world at least. The more you learn to harness AI agents, the more your capabilities of creation are going to rise with time. As you run your own business, you learn. You learn how to run a business, and that compounds over time as well.

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Imagine being able to start over tomorrow with full confidence. Okay, I lost my job. Teaching AI is no longer in style. Fine, I'll start over. No problem. Because I know how to run a business. I know how to provide value. I know how to host my own stack.

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With AI, the speed at which we can create, ship, and iterate approaches zero friction. It's up to you to learn what you want. This is what we teach in the Captains Academy. This is my community. You're the strategist now. AI is the builder. You can do anything, but you have to know what you want. You have to be able to communicate your intentions.

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That is the real challenge we face here as humans trying to achieve independence with our internet funny money and our AI technology, as we create, as we own our tech stacks, and as we scale and see compounding results.

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Create, own, scale. I'm working on a thesis here. I think there's something really fascinating about this time to be alive. You can check that out and contribute to the discussion. There's an open source GitHub repo.

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Tomorrow at 3:15 at the Open Source Stage, I'll be hosting a workshop for actually using AI to run your Bitcoin infrastructure. We're going to be doing that in action. Thank you. See you tomorrow.