Everyone's telling you to build an audience first. What if that's the slowest possible way to do it? If you listened to most gurus' advice, you'd grind for YEARS — posting content, building lists, hoping someone shows up. As a guy whose last Facebook post was 4 months ago... that advice sounds like a special kind of torture. Which is why I was just telling Rockstar Phil about a 23-year-old named Connor. Connor doesn't build audiences. He finds them. He looks for influencers with engaged followers, studies what their people actually want, then builds a simple AI tool specifically for that crowd. One of his tools does $45k/month. Even if he gave the influencer the lion's share... That's still over $10k/month on ONE tool. And because it doesn't take too much to build these thanks to AI... He's doing this with SEVERAL tools right now. Here's what most people overlook though... Connor didn't invent anything new. He didn't have some genius original idea. He took EXISTING frameworks — stuff already proven to work — and built tools around them for audiences that already existed. And I'm not talking about building the next Instagram. It could be as simple as a calculator. Something you could put together in a weekend. You can't scroll Instagram for 30 seconds these days without stumbling on an influencer with a huge audience and NO IDEA how to monetize it these days. Tomorrow, I'll give you a quick rundown of how my 9-year-old daughter made THREE of these tools in an afternoon over the weekend. In this with ya, Jason

Auctions are the damn funnest thing online, right? Ran a few myself. But managing them can be a pain depending on the platform. FB? Pain in the ass when it comes time to DM all the bidders. Can't even count how many sales we lost in the "Message Request" box. Got me thinking (can be very dangerous sometimes)... Other folks are having the same issues. Skool is the best option for auctions. But then you gotta start a Skool group, get it all setup, etc. And then there's the $99/mo nut if you don't get your auction up during the trial. Pricey if you only run one auction. What if you had a Skool group that's already setup to run your auction? You come in, run it, but don't have to worry about all the setup. Need to DM the bidders? ✔️ Email them? ✔️ Don't want to think about the group or the bill after? ✔️ Curious if that would help ya?

I was poking around a newsletter called every.to the other day… And I noticed something I'm seeing more and more. They charge $30 a month for their paid tier. But here's the thing about their paid plan… It's not JUST articles. They bundle in 4 AI tools. Writing tool. Email tool. File organizer. Voice dictation thing. Now… Are these tools some kind of revolutionary breakthrough? Not really. I've seen plenty of similar tools out there on the interwebs. But... They're just genuinely USEFUL to the people who read that newsletter. (Crazy concept, right?) If even 5% of their 100K+ subscribers are on their paid plan like me... That's $150K/month in revenue for them! And I got curious… How many newsletter creators out there would LOVE to have a reason for people to upgrade to paid? So I went looking. Substack alone has over 75,000 newsletters. Only about 27,000 of them even HAVE a paid option. Which means roughly 50,000 newsletter creators are building audiences... And making exactly ZERO from their subscribers! Sure, the smart ones MIGHT slip an ad or two in on occasion. But... 👉 Do you think ONE of those 50k newsletters might be interested if you showed up with tools that served their audience and offered to work out a deal? I'm gonna take a wild guess and say YES. AND… You don't need to land some huge partnership here. What if each deal only paid you $500 a month? Or $1,000? Then you turned around and rented that same tool out to another newsletter owner. Stack three of those up and suddenly you've got consistent royalty checks coming in from tools you built ONCE. The newsletter creator gets something valuable to offer their audience. You get paid every month whether you're working or not. I've seen this work myself. And newsletters are just ONE place you could run this play. Now… Here's where most people screw this up. They learn how to BUILD the tools… Then sit there with their thumb up their hindparts wondering why nobody's paying them.

Happy New Year! As I’m battling the crud from holiday travels (a story for another day)… I’ve been thinking about New Years resolutions and goals. And for the first time in YEARS… I’m NOT setting income goals for the year. Every January I used to pick a number... chase it like my golden doodle doing backyard zoomies... and then (assuming I caught it) just pick a BIGGER number the next year. Groundbreaking stuff, I know. But this year I'm trying something different... I'm setting ASSET GOALS instead. Not "how much MONEY can I make?" But "How many things can I OWN… that make money WITHOUT me doing more work?" It sounds like the same question... I promise you it’s not. Revenue goals were useful, but kept me on the treadmill. Hit the number? Great — now I’d get run FASTER next year to hit a bigger number. Asset goals are more like... collecting little money-printing machines and letting them hum in the background while I go touch grass and play with my kids. That’s why in 2026... My goal is to license out tiny AI tools to another 10-20 people as fast as possible. Microinfluencers. Folks with audiences. People who can actually USE what I've already built. They get a tool that helps their people. I get another revenue stream. I do as close to zero extra work as possible. (My favorite amount of work.) It's the easiest way I know for rockstars to stack royalty income with AI in 2026. And that's the mindset shift I'm challenging you with this year... Control assets. Don't chase revenue. Thanks to AI, this is getting EASIER than ever to do. Even for non-technical people who can barely spell AI. Here's to a 2026 full of collected assets and minimal chasing. In Your Corner, Jason PS — If you're not sure what counts as an "asset"... think: anything that can make money while you sleep, vacation, or binge Netflix. Courses, templates, tools, licenses. Stuff that works without you showing up every time.

So let's say you've got a tool idea — or you've already built something rough. Maybe it took a weekend, maybe you're still figuring out the technical stuff. Either way, you've got SOMETHING. Now what? This is the part I got wrong for a LOOOOOONG time. I used to pitch people on ideas. "Hey, I think we could build something cool together. What if we made a tool that does X for your audience?" And I'd get the polite nod — the "sounds interesting, let me think about it" — and then nothing would happen. It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out what was going on. When you pitch an idea, you're asking someone to imagine something that doesn't exist, believe it'll work, and trust that you'll actually build it. That's a lot of mental effort to ask from someone who doesn't know you. But when you show up with something already built — even a rough prototype — it's a completely different conversation. It's like the difference between asking someone if they wanna start a band together versus inviting them to jam with your band that's already got a gig next Friday. One is you asking them to take a leap of faith, and the other is just an invitation to join something that's already moving. Here's why this matters for royalty deals… When you build the tool first, you're not asking for permission or trying to convince them — you're offering something that already exists. "This does the thing. It works. You want to put your name on it and split the revenue, or should I take it to someone else?" And if they pass? You tweak it for the next creator's audience and offer it again, or you clone it and approach someone in a different niche. The tool stays yours either way. Now — I get that building something without knowing if anyone will want it feels risky. But... With today's AI and $20/month, you can spin up a working prototype in a few hours. I just got a check for $300 this weekend for something I built 6 months ago. And it continues to pay me every month.