So now ya know not having money didn't stop me at age 10... And it doesn't have to stop ANYONE! If you missed Part 2: ===>Here's the Rerun:-) In Part 2... I asked an IMPORTANT QUESTION. If the $5 or $10 I made from painting on the curb number was NOT the GOLD!... What WAS the GOLD? Why is it important? Because... People who struggle all their lives.... Struggle because they work for MONEY! I don't place blame on them. They TEACH/program/brainwash us to work for money in school and in society. Here's what I figured out as a young, geeky Ron Howard-looking kid. AFTER... I gave money to my mom. AFTER... I spent some on candy, walkie-talkies, and wrist rockets... I could go to the SAME PEOPLE I painted the address number for... ...and they were happy to pay for 💥OTHER STUFF I COULD TAKE OFF THEIR PLATES💥... 👉Weed pulling 👉Lawn Mowing 👉I even got to mow a cemetery for $100 a mow. (I thought I made it big!!) 👉Car washing 👉Light Carpentry stuff (but I sucked at that and had to stop.) The GOLD was the CUSTOMERS. PLEEEEEAAASSSSEEEE... Do NOT say, "I know. I know." Because MANY grown adults still don't know!! Who gets the GOLD if someone is selling on Amazon? The seller? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooo! Amazon keeps the GOLD. Who keeps the GOLD in UBER? The poor guy or gal driving their ASS off? Nooooooooooooooooooooooooo! UBER keeps the CUSTOMER! In many cases... They FORBID YOU... it's against TOS to even CONTACT the customer. That's not all. Most business owners, EVEN IF they keep the GOLD (Customer), don't do ANYTHING with the customer. And they make 1/10th the money they COULD BE MAKING.... 👉Do you know WHY? 👉HINT: It's the same BOTTLENECK I had as a kid. I didn't figure out how to remove this bottleneck until I was in my mid-THIRTIES... BY FORTY... I was a millionaire. That's HOW IMPORTANT it was and how fast I got out of the rat race. But... Again... It is too important for me to just shout out.

Plenty of us pour months into a "perfect opportunity"... that dies a slow, quiet little death. And nearly every time? We ran the whole thing BACKWARDS. (Last post I promised: (https://www.skool.com/royaltyrockstars/your-best-work-is-makin-you-exactly-0?p=19f98c6e) how to spot a table actually worth sitting at. Buckle up, 'cause this exact little 2-step has quietly made me a good chunk of my income.) See, most folks start with their THING. "I built this tool... now who on earth can I sell it to??" Backwards. That's how you end up begging strangers to give a hoot. Here's how I run it instead. Stupid simple. First? I go find the chips. That's all I care about. I forget my card even exists for a minute. I hunt for a table where money's ALREADY flying around. Where folks are buying something new every single week. I don't think about what I'm selling yet. At all. I just follow the money that's already moving. THEN... and only then... I peek at who's actually sitting at that hot table. And I'm looking for ONE specific player. The one already holding the A, the K, the Q, the Jack... where the only card they're missing is the exact dinky little 10 burning a hole in my pocket. THAT'S my person. If you're not into Poker… my card doesn't just "kinda help" them. It COMPLETES their royal flush. Guaranteed win! I don't have to sell that person… I don't have to deal with objections… I don't have to hand out discounts like it's candy… It's an instant, slam-dunk, no-brainer YES. Zero convincing. Zero begging. And then? Ohhh, then it gets good. I slide my card in. They send it out to their already-drooling crowd. The crowd buys. And a little slice slides into MY pocket... every single time they do... while I'm standing in the kitchen making coffee. No audience built. No ads run. Didn't even send the dang email. Chips first. Then the player who needs my card. Then I just... collect.

I was a broke, freckle-faced 10-year-old boy... I was the oldest of 4 kids... My mom was single... And broke too. But I didn't let that stop me. I figured out what I now call: "A Gravel to Gold Sitch" Let's come back to that... One of my "income streams" was painting curb numbers for homeowners and renters whose addresses were either faded or completely gone. I knew my "pitch" wasn't a pretty address number. It WAS not getting COLD PIZZA because the pizza guy couldn't find your address. It WAS the ambulance, police, or fire department that found their home when every SECOND COUNTS. I'd charge $5 to $10, depending on whether I painted one or two numbers for them. (some wanted the number on both sides of the entry) Now... My investment for materials... Was about $10 to get fresh stencils, paint brushes and black and white paint. (From memory, this was a few decades ago 😁) I could paint about 10-12 address numbers from my $10 investment. Which meant $50 to $60 + tips for revenue. A $10 investment with a $60 return for an afternoon in 1977 was pretty solid. A lot of men/women were not making that... This is what I call the "Gravel to Gold Sitch"... Paint and the supplies are GRAVEL. I had the PROCESS: Take the paint and turn it into address numbers so the pizza guy and emergency services could find homes fast. Once I turned the paint into an address number on a curb... I turned a little bit of paint (gravel) into (gold)... NOW... If You Think That The money Was The Gold... HUGE MISPERCEPTION Don't get me wrong... It bought Snickers bars, walkie-talkies, and other stuff when I was 10 years old... But that wasn't the GOLD REALLY. (Hang on tight for a sec.) So... Here was my big fat problem. I was a broke kid. My mom was broke. How did I get my "start-up" capital? I PRE-SOLD! I'd knock doors and when I got a "YES."... I just had them PAY ME UPFRONT... Then I'd bike it to the hardware store and buy my supplies! I still PRE-SELL most stuff to THIS DAY as a 58-year-old.

Imagine creating content decades ago that suddenly gets 600 million new sets of eyeballs without pitching thousands of companies, delivering on deadlines, or navigating scope creep. That’s what just happened to content creators who licensed their work to Getty Images. Getty just signed another AI partnership, this one with OpenAI. They dropped their entire content library inside ChatGPT where 600 million people search every single month. That is MILLIONS of images and videos that have been in Getty’s library since nearly the beginning of photography itself. Images from the 1800s sitting alongside a photo uploaded last week. All of it just got 600 million new sets of eyeballs. Some of the photographers who created that older content aren’t even alive anymore. Still getting new eyes. It’s so easy to look at old content and see a project that didn’t work. Something to replace. Something to scrap and move beyond. Getty looks at the same content and sees an asset. Getty keeps finding new people willing to pay for access to the same image. Newspapers. Magazines. Advertisers. Publishers. Websites. Designers. Perplexity. OpenAI. Who knows who’s next? Which makes me think about all the courses, recordings, and frameworks, sitting in personal libraries right now. While creators are asking, “What do I create next?” Getty keeps asking, “Who wants what we already have?”

Howdy Rockstars. 🤖 I gotta confess something that took me WAY too long to figure out. For years, I thought the hot new skill was building stuff with AI. I'd lose entire weekends to it. Tweaking agents, chasing whatever shiny new tool was FINALLY gonna change everything. I had a folder full of stuff I built. And almost none of it made a dime. Here's the part that stung… The building was never the hard part. Me, you, a 14-year-old with Claude and a free Saturday. AI got sooo good that "I built a tool" stopped being impressive. It's the price of admission now, not the prize. So if everybody can build… what's actually worth anything? Eyeballs! The RIGHT ones. And it's getting in front of eyeballs that no one wants to talk about, because it smells like "selling," and most "builders" would rather build for another six months than send one scary message. (I see it in every community I'm in. There's ALWAYS somebody asking "okay, but how do I actually sell this thing?") After realizing my “Projects” folder was gaining weight… I stopped trying to build for the sake of building... And I started partnering with people who already HAD eyeballs. I find an expert. Somebody who already teaches the thing, already has a room full of people hanging on their every word. Then I take what they already teach… and I turn it into AI tools that makes them look like HERO to their audience. They don't have to learn to build. I don't have to learn to sell. They just hand it to the people who already love them and we split the rev. That's how CreatorFinder did $19K before it ever officially "launched." I lived the other version of this for way too long… I was the guy with a hard drive full of brilliant tools and a checking account that didn't agree. Smartest builder in the room, quietly broke. And the worst part wasn't the money. It was looking like a guy who could make anything except a sale. That's the real trap. It was never "can I build it." It's "will anyone ever see it."