The $400 AI Startup with Jon Cheney | [Sidecar Sync Episode 139]

Summary:

What if building a million-dollar business no longer required a team, funding rounds, or even technical expertise? In this episode of the Sidecar Sync, Mallory Mejias sits down with AI strategist and GenAIPI CEO Jon Cheney to explore how artificial intelligence is radically changing the economics of innovation. Jon shares the story of launching a company in a single weekend for just $400—and scaling it to $1M in six months—using a concept known as “vibe coding.” The conversation dives into what separates organizations that successfully adopt AI from those that stall, why execution matters more than ever, and how AI is unlocking entirely new forms of value creation beyond simple automation. If you’ve ever felt limited by budget, staff, or technical skills, this episode will challenge everything you thought was possible.

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https://genaipi.org/ 

Timestamps:

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Amith Nagarajan is the Chairman of Blue Cypress 🔗 https://BlueCypress.io, a family of purpose-driven companies and proud practitioners of Conscious Capitalism. The Blue Cypress companies focus on helping associations, non-profits, and other purpose-driven organizations achieve long-term success. Amith is also an active early-stage investor in B2B SaaS companies. He’s had the good fortune of nearly three decades of success as an entrepreneur and enjoys helping others in their journey.

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Mallory Mejias is passionate about creating opportunities for association professionals to learn, grow, and better serve their members using artificial intelligence. She enjoys blending creativity and innovation to produce fresh, meaningful content for the association space.

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Read the Transcript

🤖 Please note this transcript was generated using (you guessed it) AI, so please excuse any errors 🤖

[00:00:00:14 - 00:00:09:17]
Amith
 Welcome to the Sidecar Sync Podcast, your home for all things innovation, artificial intelligence and associations.

[00:00:09:17 - 00:00:23:13]
Mallory
 What if I told you that

[00:00:23:13 - 00:00:42:22]
Mallory
 a non-developer built a company in a single weekend with about $400 and grew it to a million dollars in revenue within six months? Today's guest will help you realize that we are entering a world where one person armed with the right tools and a good idea can build things that previously required an entire company.

[00:00:42:22 - 00:00:49:07]
Mallory
 John Cheney is an AI strategist, exited founder, and CEO of GenAI PI.

[00:00:49:07 - 00:00:59:14]
Mallory
 Before helping organizations become AI native, he built and sold a venture backed technology company after raising millions of dollars and leading a team through years of growth.

[00:01:00:24 - 00:01:03:24]
Mallory
 But in this episode, we focus on something very different.

[00:01:03:24 - 00:01:07:18]
Mallory
 How AI is changing the economics of innovation.

[00:01:08:19 - 00:01:11:24]
Mallory
 John shares how he launched a new business in a single weekend,

[00:01:11:24 - 00:01:23:17]
Mallory
 landed his first $15,000 contract almost immediately, and why he believes organizations of every size now have the opportunity to create entirely new forms of value.

[00:01:24:20 - 00:01:33:21]
Mallory
 We talk about vibe coding, AI adoption, what separates organizations that successfully implement AI from those that stall out after a few training sessions,

[00:01:33:21 - 00:01:41:17]
Mallory
 and why the biggest opportunity may not be doing existing work faster, but building things that simply weren't possible before.

[00:01:42:19 - 00:01:50:11]
Mallory
 If you've ever looked at a great idea and thought, "We don't have the budget, the staff, the technical expertise to make that happen,"

[00:01:50:11 - 00:01:57:13]
Mallory
 well, this conversation may change the way you think about what's possible. Everyone, please enjoy this interview with John Cheney.

[00:01:57:13 - 00:02:22:22]
Mallory
 Thank you so much for joining us on the Sidecar Sync podcast. We're thrilled to have you join us. I was telling you before the recording, I feel like there are some great synergies between the work that you do and the work that we're doing at Sidecar. So I'm excited to get into this conversation, but first, I always like to have our guests provide a little bit of information about who you are, your background, and what brought you to this moment in AI time.

[00:02:22:22 - 00:02:32:08]
Jon Cheney
 Well, thank you so much for having me, Mallory. Really excited to be here, and I certainly hope we can chat about some things that will be of value to the listeners.

[00:02:33:14 - 00:04:06:20]
Jon Cheney
 And, you know, I'm a technologist. I love, and by that I mean, I just love tech, right? If I were to just turn my camera around my home offal to you, like I'm almost a musician, right? I've got my piano behind me and I've got a saxophone there and some albums I've recorded, things like that. But I've got the Apple Vision Pro. I've got four computers. I actually have three pianos in here and just tech everywhere and all kinds of speakers and things. And I just love, I just love pushing buttons or I don't know what it is, but I love trying new things. And so my, you know, professionally I've been able to, you know, enjoy that for many, many years. Back in 2016, I founded a company in the augmented reality space actually, and ended up raising $13 million for that company, exited in 2023 in January. So a little over, I guess, three and a half years now. And, and then immediately dove into more things and AI just, you know, because I'm always at the cutting edge, like I just love to see like, what's next? I want to play with all that new stuff. But man, AI just really grabbed me, specifically vibe coding. I am not a developer. I am just an average business guy that likes cool stuff. And, but I have so many ideas like, like many of us do and vibe coding really, really unlocked me in a big way. And I could share some more stories about that in a little bit, but anyway, ended up founding GenAIPI officially about a year and a half ago. And you know, we're the general AI proficiency Institute.

[00:04:07:22 - 00:04:17:19]
Jon Cheney
 And we really, honestly, to put it really bluntly, the purpose of it is to make sure that people and businesses don't get steamrolled by AI, right?

[00:04:19:00 - 00:04:50:22]
Jon Cheney
 I mean, this is one of the biggest revolutions of our time. This is the big thing that happens for us right now, right? It's bigger than the internet. It's bigger than social. It's bigger than mobile. Uh, it's, it's even, I would say bigger than the PC, right? The personal computer when that became available, because, and here's why it's bigger than all of those different things, right? All of those were so impactful. They changed the way that we work and, and the way that the world works. But ultimately now AI can think for itself.

[00:04:52:09 - 00:05:52:10]
Jon Cheney
 Right. And then it can't really, right? I know I'm saying that a little bit. I'm saying that to ruffle some feathers, maybe just a tiny bit. Of course it can't actually think for itself. It has to be prompted, but it can act on its own after prompted and it can, and you can even set it up so that just regularly acts on its own. We're now in the, in the era of agentic AI, where it can do things on its own. And the computer as powerful as it is and the internet as powerful as it was. And our mobile phones, as powerful as they are, they still require us to, you know, it's kind of a one-to-one input. You, you do something, it does something right. And that's cool. Now you can tell AI one time and then it can just do it for forever, right? If you put it in a loop, they could just keep doing something for you over and over and over again. And so you create automations and you create things that automatically respond to your environment, to your business, to your, uh, to whatever's going on, and that is really exciting to me. So, um, so we exist, Geni API exists really to help companies, uh, navigate this.

[00:05:53:12 - 00:06:38:13]
Mallory
 Well, thank you for sharing that. We always say on the pod we're removing from an era where intelligence was scarce to an era where intelligence is abundant. And so we've also always been limited on the amount of people that we had on our team, the amount of intelligence that we had on our teams, and now we are not. So what can you create with that? I'm sure we'll get into the conversation with you on what you've created, but I want to, I want to zoom out just a little bit. So you talked about your, your company that you scaled and sold, but it, from my research, it looks like it started out as a treasure hunt business before turning into an augmented reality app. So I'm, can you give us just like a high level overview of how that happened? Cause I want, that's a first a treasure hunt business, but I love these entrepreneur stories. I feel like they're really, they encourage a lot of inspiration for our listeners.

[00:06:38:13 - 00:06:47:01]
Jon Cheney
 No, absolutely. And thank you for asking that. You know, if you were to look at, if you go look me up on, I don't know, LinkedIn or Instagram or whatever, you'll see that I have,

[00:06:48:09 - 00:07:31:06]
Jon Cheney
 instead of just focusing on one thing, I'm not like the AI guy, right? AI is a huge thing that I do, but you know, prior to starting seek, I, I was in the education tech space, right? Lots of training, the software, and I was, I was kind of the, the, you know, founder slash slash kind of VP slash managing director, you know, I kind of worked my way up quickly and I was just, I've always had a knack for running things. And I, I love, I also love selling, right? I love sales and, and part of the reason I love selling is because I love finding things that people need, figuring out how to create a solution that works and then, and then packaging it up and selling it. I love, which is just what a business is, right? I love entrepreneurship.

[00:07:32:15 - 00:08:04:04]
Jon Cheney
 And, um, I had been in this education tech space for a while and I was just getting a little bit bored, summing to schools like Harvard and Yale and Brown and whatever, it was fine. They were good, but schools like that, you know, they're really smart and they know that they are, and so because of that, it takes a long time to make change happen. And so it was just kind of good. Made tons of money. It was making, it was making really great money and decided, all right, it's time for me to start my own thing. And I had actually seen a, um, have you ever heard of the color run?

[00:08:05:06 - 00:08:05:20]
Mallory
 Uh, yes.

[00:08:05:20 - 00:09:35:14]
Jon Cheney
 Yeah. Yeah. So the color run, but I didn't actually know if it was still a thing. And a few weeks ago, I looked it up because I wondered if it was still going cause I haven't seen it in a while, but, but they got really big and there's just, it's such a simple concept, right? You put on a 5k, you give everybody bags of chalk, colored chalk and you let them throw it at each other during the event. Right. And so it creates amazing pictures and, you know, went viral and everyone's like, Oh, I want to do that. And they sign up for one in their city. But I learned that the guy that founded this was making $30 million a year doing it and I'm just like, that sounds cool. I want to do that. I want to make $30 million a year, you know, putting on fun events. And so I decided to do a treasure hunt, right? I decided to put on this thing. So we called it treasure Canyon. Me and my, uh, so I started it and my co-founder joined actually just about two months in and, and we, we really did it together. Got any mics? No, really a good guy. And, uh, and we started putting on these little mini events meeting up to our first big one, which was going to be a $10,000 treasure hunt and we wanted to put it up in the mountains here in Utah. And, you know, actually up there and you'd have to go find it and whatever. But we, we set it up as kind of a race similar to the color run, right? It was going to be 10 K for 10 K. Right. And so you'd have to do this big race, whatever, and solve clues along the way to figure out where, you know, so there's no map of the race, right? It's just there's clues, figure it out. Go. Right. And, um, anyway, so we started doing these mini hunts and it was great. We did our big event and, and, and even before we got to the event, um,

[00:09:36:15 - 00:09:40:04]
Jon Cheney
 a big app came out in 2016. Do you remember what that was?

[00:09:40:04 - 00:09:41:04]
Mallory
 The Pokemon Go.

[00:09:41:04 - 00:09:57:08]
Jon Cheney
 Bingo. Yeah. So Pokemon Go was downloaded by over a billion people. And, and I saw that and I was like, that's crazy. Like that's a big, like there's not a lot of things that a billion people consume. You've got like Michael Jackson,

[00:09:58:09 - 00:12:49:12]
Jon Cheney
 Coke, you know, water, you know, anyway, I mean, there's, there's not a lot of things that a billion people do. And so, uh, so I said, there's something here. And I was like, I think this augmented reality thing might have some legs. So we started working on an app kind of behind the scenes, even while we were still running the physical treasure hunts thing, and I'm not, I'm not a developer either. And so I had to go find somebody, uh, got him Chris white joined. And, uh, so we went and we found this, uh, this guy that could do it and, and he started kind of working on it. And, and basically when we did the day of the 10 K for 10 K events, right? The treasure Canyon main event, uh, we finished, well, we were up all night setting it up because we had to go out in the middle of the night and hide the treasure and hide the clues. And then we had these skeletons and all these fun things. And it was really cool. It was really fun, but we were really tired. Uh, by the time the event was done, maybe by about 11 AM that day, um, we all went to, I don't know, Denny's or something, some breakfast place and, and just sat and talked about it. And we're like, okay, we're going to go all in on the app. We're going to make this cause it's, cause it's really hard to do these physical events over and over and over again. So like, what if we just do it digitally and we just push a button and like place a digital treasure out on a map. So we ended up expanding it way beyond just kind of a single event. Um, seek the app, the app became seek, seek and you will find, right? And, and so, uh, it became an app where you could go and anytime, just like you could open up Pokemon go and you would see all these little Pokemon, you could go capture, um, all over the place. There were treasure chests all over the world. We actually had 70 million treasure chests by the time we were done. Um, and we figured out algorithms and things to do that. We even were paying people out in like Bangladesh in the middle of the night, you know, through fiber or something. One of the upwork, I think it was Upwork actually. We were, we were paying people to go and like, you know, click and drop chests all around these different places. We were putting them on college campuses and parks and all of these places, but you could go, you'd, you'd approach a place, you know, the GPS knew you were near the treasure chest and so you could then tap on it and it would open up your camera, you would see the thing there, whatever, and, um, the treasure chest there, you'd tap on it and open it. And then it was kind of a random prize game, right? And so you had a chance at winning Disneyland tickets, or maybe we actually started with cash, real cash. And so you could win like three cents, or maybe you'd win a dollar 20, right? It was random amounts with different levels of chance, right? So you had a high chance of getting our in-app digital coins, which were free. And you could buy keys with it and stuff like that. And then you had a low chance of winning real stuff or money. And, uh, and we had some people win thousands of dollars. We had, um, anyway, it was really awesome, really fun. And so we turned it into a marketing app actually. And so you could have a, um, a company, like our first big company, we got a bunch of small vocal ones, whatever, our first big one was actually Universal Pictures.

[00:12:50:13 - 00:13:00:05]
Jon Cheney
 And I happened to land them. I went to, um, uh, what is it? The San, uh, that's in San Antonio, uh, or Austin. I mean, sorry, South by Southwest.

[00:13:00:05 - 00:13:02:03]
Mallory
 South by Southwest. I knew that too. Okay.

[00:13:02:03 - 00:13:23:03]
Jon Cheney
 Got it. I know. And my brain was not thinking about it, but anyway, I met Universal Pictures at South by Southwest, told them what we were doing. And we had, you know, we had this, the cool thing was we had this ability to target geographical areas because of the map. And so, so a business, like, for example, we got a business locally here called Swig, Swig is just like 30, so huge.

[00:13:23:03 - 00:13:24:08]
Mallory
 It's getting a lot of press.

[00:13:24:08 - 00:13:26:03]
Jon Cheney
 No, yeah, they're all over the place.

[00:13:26:03 - 00:13:26:08]
Mallory
 Yeah.

[00:13:26:08 - 00:15:22:19]
Jon Cheney
 For sure. And so Swig, you know, each location could say, Hey, um, we want to target within 10 miles of our location and people can win within 10 miles. They can win a, like a half off or a free upgrade or a free drink or a free cookie with a purchase of a drink. You know, they could win some things like that. But then if they actually went to the store, there was a treasure chest at the store at the Swig and they could win a free hundred dollar gift card. They had a chance of winning like bigger prizes. So what, so our idea was we were going to drive people to these physical locations using augmented reality. And so it became pretty big. Um, we got up to a million users and, um, you know, got landed some big clients, Samsung six flags, like I said, universal pictures and lots of other ones. But we actually soon realized that. The, the really good piece of our technology was our augmented reality. We were really good at the technical augmented reality side. We assembled a great team at that point, we'd raised a few million dollars. But, um, we also as Pokemon go kind of died, you know, went billion users. And then, you know, obviously, you know, dropped pretty quickly, but after about a year, year and a half of doing that, we realized that the bigger opportunity was actually going to be with our augmented reality technology for e-commerce. And so we totally shifted, did a huge pivot. Um, and we actually had our same customers, right? The Samsung's and these other customers and companies, um, they wanted to use augmented reality to sell their products on their website using augmented reality. And so we had this cool tech and we ended up building a big, basically 3d content management system. And so we had, you know, our customers were, you know, Snapchat and Facebook and Google and, and Walmart and Costco and Nestle and Lego all over the place. And so ended up building a pretty awesome tech company out of that. Although I do miss the days of seek of the adventure. That was fun.

[00:15:22:19 - 00:15:48:12]
Mallory
 I, I think that's an incredible story. And I'm sitting here thinking, hi, I wonder, um, cause this is obviously not what the episode's about, but I wonder how this applies to associations. But then I'm thinking actually at their annual meetings, they often have associations. And I think we've explored this with sidecar to treasure hunts or visit this booth and, you know, get this certain perk. So I actually feel like the idea of augmented reality and treasure hunts could be potentially relevant for association leaders.

[00:15:48:12 - 00:16:43:23]
Jon Cheney
 Well, I think the bigger thing is experiential marketing. That's what it came down to. That's what these advertisers were super excited about. They're like, well, we've bought enough Google ads. That's boring. Right? Like, wow, I can do an adventure where we can target specific areas. I also, we also had it set up, you know, we were kind of back in the days when, you know, people weren't as mad about getting targeted. And so we knew if you were male or female, we knew your age, we knew your interest, we knew all these things because we had a profile and we would say, Hey, fill out your profile and then we'll, you know, you'll see prizes related to things you care about. If you like tennis, you'll see tennis items. If you, you know, if you don't, then you won't. Right. And so that's how we enticed people to just fill out this information. But then we had tons of data on people. And then, and then they're like, man, we can, we can put on a nationwide treasure hunt. Yeah, let's do it. Right. This is awesome. Right. And we could target other countries. We could, we could move it. We could adjust it. We could do so many cool things. So man, it just talking about it makes me want to go build it again. It was, it was fun. It was a lot of fun.

[00:16:43:23 - 00:17:22:12]
Mallory
 It sounds like fun. One thing I noticed a pattern that I noticed while you were telling that story is that you weren't a developer. So you had to find a co-founder or find our hire out in Bangladesh or you needed that support with actually building the application. And I think the interesting through line with that is that you built your company currently on your own, I believe, as a non-developer for a couple hundred dollars, something that we can talk about as vibe coding. So can you tell us what that experience was like for you as someone, I'm assuming you're fairly technical, but as a non-developer, what it was like building your current company on your own.

[00:17:22:12 - 00:19:24:01]
Jon Cheney
 Yeah. Yeah. I can, like I talked about in the beginning, right? I got on my gadgets and my tech. And so I, I understand how to push buttons, right? I can do that fairly well. And yes, I could, I could build a computer if I needed to, not necessarily hard building a computer is pretty easy. You buy about 12 or 14 different components and then wherever the plug fits, that's where it goes, you know, it's not that hard, but the point is yes, I was a little bit more technical and, um, in terms of just being comfortable going for it, but, uh, but yeah, you're, you're, you're exactly right. One of the things that I had disadvantage of here is I had started a business. I had done it, what I now call the hard way, right? Going and raising tons of capital and taking years to develop something. And by the way, not only is it hard, it's extremely taxing on them, on the mind. It's extremely taxing on your, on your just. Almost your agency a little bit, right? Because all of a sudden you're indebted to these investors, right? We ended up raising, like I said, $13 million throughout that. And that's not a small amount of money. And, and I did it the even harder way, which was a lot of those were angel investors. And so we had over 50 people on the cap table that had invested at one point, right? And, um, you know, that's tough, right? Because all these investors, they're also, they've been successful. And so they'll have their opinions. And so every time you do anything, half the people hate you, half the people think you're cool, right? And they're like, yeah, go for it. This is awesome. And it'll be like, no, that's too risky. Let's not try that. And anyway, you know, it's, it's tough. It's tough. And, um, and then, you know, because you're growing with, with other people's money or OPM, right, you get addicted to that OPM, right? And it, um, it becomes, it becomes, so a lot of companies go through this. They'll raise a bunch of capital and then they're like, we'll just be like Amazon. We'll operate at a loss for a long time until we eventually, you know, crossover. And, you know, all of a sudden now we're profitable, but a lot of companies don't. And they ended up, they ended up failing. We had to fire 90% of our workforce twice.

[00:19:25:09 - 00:22:38:10]
Jon Cheney
 Wow. You know, throughout that eight years, right? It was tough. We'd go up and then we wouldn't quite have enough money. We couldn't raise what we needed. And so we had to cut back from, from 24 people to four people. And then we built back up to, uh, to about 60 people and then we had to cut back. It wasn't actually 90% of that second time. We went from 60 to about 12, but big cut, you know, hurt for sure. And it's tough. This stuff is a meter too, right? Cause I care about my people and, and I don't like going through that. And so, and that's a tough way to build a business, right? And now let's, let's fast forward to today, right? Now here we've got AI, we've got vibe coding, we've got all these things. I, I had this idea, you know, I, I've been, again, this I'm the tech guy, right? And you know, a lot of people kind of looked to me and they talked to me about AI and I'm living in a neighborhood where, you know, we have a little ranch, little five acre ranch, and it's really fun. I've got a lot of neighbors that have been successful in whatever they've done. A lot of them are kind of like more blue collar, you know, ranchers and construction companies and things like that. And they're just killing it. Making 30 million, 50 million, big, big businesses, but just absolutely not technical at all. Right. And so they, you know, I'd talk to them and go to dinner or something, whatever. And they'd be like, tell me about it. Man, I just, I remember sitting down to somebody, this is probably a year and a half after a chat GPT came out and I was showing him some stuff. They're like, I've never even downloaded the app. I've never touched it before. I was like, what, how was that even possible? Download it right now. And he's like, I don't know how to use it. I'm like, dude, you just have to talk to it. It's not hard. It's isn't a difficult thing. Right. Just open it up. And I said, all right, what's a problem that you deal with as a construction company owner? Like what's the problem you deal with all the time? And he said, well, you know, we have these pipe calculations that are really tough and we have to get the exact fluid amount. We'd have to figure out how much, how big the pipe needs to be and where we need to do it and at these junctures. And anyway, I was like, okay, sounds complicated. Um, ask, you know, ask AI something that would normally take you a while to figure out, right? And he's like, yeah, I won't be able to figure this out. It's too hard. And I was like, you have no idea what you're talking about. And so he put it in and immediately it was just like, boom, instantaneous, all the right answers. He's like, this crazy. I was like, yeah. And so I ran into him probably about a month later and, um, and I said, Hey, how's the AI usage going? Right. And he's like, use it all day, every day. Everyone on my team uses it. I've required everybody to download it. That everyone's using it. And I was like, that's interesting. Right. And I was like, I wonder, I bet there's a lot of companies like this that aren't really using AI that are fullest potential. And that was a very basic use case, right? But let alone all the crazy vibe coding stuff I'd been doing. I said, I wonder if, if, if I could start a business that helps people learn AI, that helps businesses to figure it out and learn it. And, and I actually took the vision a little bit higher than that. I said, Hey, you know what? I want to, um, be the standard. I want to be the standard by which businesses measure their AI proficiency, right? Like the SAT or the ACT for, for this. Right. So I had this idea to kind of roll around in the back of my head. And then I post on social media a lot. Every day I post on LinkedIn two, three times a day. And, um, and I get a lot of business that way and a lot of followers and that's fine. And so I just decided I'm going to talk today about, or I'm going to, I'm going to try something. I woke up on a Thursday morning and I was like, okay,

[00:22:40:00 - 00:22:54:04]
Jon Cheney
 I'm going to try to build a business today, right? I'd been getting good at, at, uh, at vibe coding. I was like, I wonder if I could start a new idea today, a new piece of software and have my first paying customer in that software by tomorrow.

[00:22:55:22 - 00:23:11:07]
Jon Cheney
 Like, could I build a business and get all the way through to validation and paying customers in two days, basically. And so that was my goal. And so I posted on LinkedIn, I said, here's my goal. Just want to do, and people are like following. I want to see if you can do this. Right. Mostly they probably thought I was going to fail and that's fine.

[00:23:11:07 - 00:23:13:07]
Mallory
 Yeah. Well, entertainment. There's never that.

[00:23:13:07 - 00:24:24:18]
Jon Cheney
 Exactly. But I was like, I'm just going to try it. I'm going to do it publicly. We're going to see what happens. And so I, um, I started about 9am. Nothing crazy. It wasn't up super early. Just got to work and I started in chat GPT and I just said, here's my idea. And my idea was this, I could even pull up the prompt. Uh, but, but it was basically something along the lines of, I want to create like an AIQ tests, an AI IQ test. I called it the AIQ test and, um, it basically just tests them. And, and if they do well on the test, then we'll sell them a certification that says, Hey, from the general AI proficiency Institute, you, you know, you, you are good at AI, you can put this certification on your LinkedIn profile, whatever, right? If they're not, if they're not great at it, then we'll sell them courses and they can, they can learn and then take the test eventually after they've has all the courses, right? That was the idea. That was the basic kind of first prompt. And, uh, talked through it for probably a couple hours with chat GPT about here's the idea and here's what, what, what do we want to call this? And I had to figure out the general AI proficiency Institute and all those things, I wanted it originally to be AI PI is the AI proficiency Institute, but AIPI.org or something and all the dot coms and all those things were taken. And so I had to, I had to add the gen in front of it, Jenny API.

[00:24:25:23 - 00:26:32:16]
Jon Cheney
 And, uh, which ended up being good. Uh, it's a great brand for us now. And we've helped literally millions of people, but, um, but that's the end of the story, the, um, that weekend. So I worked all day Thursday worked all day Friday. And I was like, I'm just, I don't have the payment set up in a way that I want it to work, I had the website built. And, and, um, During while I was, you know, while the AI was coding, it was like, I'd be talking to it and I would prompt it and you have to wait. And then the vibe coding, the system just works. Right. And so while it did that, I set up the LLC. I said at the bank account, I set up a Facebook profile, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, like I built the whole business, all the infrastructure of everything so that I'm like, okay, I'm a real official business. I've got this going. I moved money over, did all this stuff, got the logo figured out, figured out the tagline, figured out marketing. I had AI, I worked with AI to create a bunch of marketing images and posts. So I could fill my Instagram feed and my Facebook page. So that somewhere to land on it, they would see a little bit of a history there. Right. There's posts and things are talking about AI. And so I did all that stuff while the AI was building. So it ended up taking me one day longer to build it. I worked Saturday as well. And Saturday at 3 AM, I said, okay. Everything looks good. If someone lands on this site, it feels like a real business now. There's social pages, there's all this stuff. And I'm like, okay, I'm going to launch these Facebook ads. And the Facebook ads were basically like, what's your AI queue? How good are you at AI? Right. Kind of taking people on to be like, come see how good you are. Right. And then they'd take the test and then they would go through my different funnels. And so I started the ads at 3 AM Saturday night, Sunday morning, you know, and then I don't work Sundays, I go to church. And so I just kind of, I first of all, I was tired. I'd been up till 3 AM two nights in a row. So I just go to church and just kind of let it go and enjoy the day. It took a nap in the afternoon and woke up Monday morning and said, okay, let's check the ad. It's like, how many purchases do I have? I'm so excited. And I got on and I had none. And I was like, what the heck, man? And so I looked at, I dug in and 120 people had clicked on the ad and visited the site, which is good. That means the ads were converting a little bit. At least they were bringing people in and a bunch of people taking the test.

[00:26:33:19 - 00:26:49:16]
Jon Cheney
 But I had a little misconfiguration with my Stripe. Purchases weren't working. It's like, dang it. Okay. So I went in and it took me like, I'm not getting you three minutes to fix the problem. And it was just a little, it was like upsetting that it had to be switched to make it live. That was what it was. I was still in test mode. That's all it was.

[00:26:51:03 - 00:27:16:07]
Jon Cheney
 I'm not a developer. And so I ran into a problem of not being a developer, right? I just didn't know to think through that. So fixed it. And, um, and then I'm like, okay, I'm still in the middle of this challenge. I'm like three, four days in now. I don't have any money yet. So how am I going to do this? And I was like, wait, I'm a sales guy. I'm going to just start calling some people. Right. So I jumped on LinkedIn. Actually, I started messaging a few people and I just said, Hey, I'd love to come, you know,

[00:27:17:13 - 00:28:14:10]
Jon Cheney
 administer this test for all your employees, give you guys a benchmark and then do some training for you guys. Right. And, you know, I'd love to chat and I got one person to say, yeah, I'll jump on a call, right. And it was a guy that I didn't know very well. I kind of, one of those guys you've met a few times, he's owned a company here. And, but he's like, Hey, I'll jump on a call. This is, we were talking about this. This is interesting. So I talked to him that day. By the end of that call, he'd agreed to a $15,000 contract. And I was like, okay, that's pretty cool. So I built this business in a weekend and got to my first revenue within, within basically five days. And, uh, and then from there I did $180,000 of revenue in the next six weeks. And, and then by six months I had hit a million and doing it all by myself, completely solo, uh, you know, with my AI team, of course. And then, um, and then I hired my first person, you know, about seven or eight months in, and now we have 28 employees and work with many, many businesses.

[00:28:14:10 - 00:29:12:00]
Mallory
 All right. Well, one props to you too. What an incredible story because we, as I told you before we started recording, we serve the world of associations. They are typically small teams. They are typically working with tight budgets. They don't have the head count for total, maybe launch some of the services and products that they want to. And I feel like that story just flips all that on its head because if you, you know, someone skilled, someone educated, intelligent can build a company in a weekend and get to a million dollars in revenue in six months, I mean, theoretically, that means anybody listening to this podcast could do something like that within their association as well. We talk a lot about having hackathons or dedicated like innovation workshops, things like that within your association. What if you did take a few days next quarter and told all of your staff go out and build something, do exactly what you did, John, I just think that is a crazy story to hear.

[00:29:12:00 - 00:30:24:03]
Jon Cheney
 Yeah, it's really fun. And yeah, let's, let's look at the numbers a little bit. Cause I think it's really telling and, and remember everyone listening in Mallory, I'm not that special. I'm just a normal guy. There's so many people out there that are smarter than me. There's so many people out there that are just as capable of figuring it out and diving in. Um, but here's the numbers I, so because I, I, you know, run other companies whenever and, and, and seeing it, I knew what it, I know what it takes to build a business and so I did some analysis and based on the lines of code that I, the amount, number of lines of code, the completeness of the company and everything that I'd done and all the content that was created by AI and all these tests and courses and everything that I'd built. I figured out that pre AI, it would have taken me 18 months to get to that point that it took me five days to get to. Okay. And because it was going to take me 18 months, I knew that I was going to have to pay, you know, a couple of developers doing, you know, front end, back end. And I was going to need to pay content people. I was going to need someone certainly in sales and marketing. And even if I paid a, you know, a CEO, you know, a very modest $40,000 a year as a startup, whatever, like very reasonable numbers that 18 months would cost me $3.2 million.

[00:30:25:09 - 00:31:41:23]
Jon Cheney
 Right. And so, you know, and that was kind of right in line with the way I built the last company and so with this, now let's look at what I saw 18 months, $3.2 million. That's the benchmark. That's the old way. The new way, it took me about $400, about $400 all in, and that's including the LLC registration, all of my vibe coding credits and different platforms I used. I paid $50 of that was a logo that I found a system that could do it kind of generate something and it cost me $50 to just buy it and get the rights for it. And so I did that and, you know, coming up with the name, registering everything, like all that stuff, $400 and it took me a few days. Right. And so we're talking, you know, if you do the math, like I'll just do it right here, lie, let's go $400 divided by 3, 2, 0, 0, 0, 0, 0. And then we'll go, we'll put a little parentheses behind that and we'll go minus one so we can see what that actually is. Okay. That is a 99.9875% reduction in needed capital. We're talking multiple orders of magnitude easier to start a business now. Right. I mean, you can literally get your seed money to start a business by driving Uber for three days.

[00:31:41:23 - 00:31:42:10]
Mallory
 Wow.

[00:31:42:10 - 00:32:26:23]
Jon Cheney
 Like there's no excuse anymore. Right. And it took me a weekend. It literally took me like three, you know, concentrated days, probably about 10 hours each day, maybe 12 hours. Right. So somewhere between 30 to 40 hours and 400 bucks and you've got a business and you just, now the one thing that I see a lot of people do, there's lots of people like, I built a cool business. Look at it. It's awesome. And they think they have a business because they've got a website, they've got an app, something they built. You don't have a business until you have a customer. Right. That's really what it is. You got to be, you also have to be unapologetic, unashamed, whatever. You got to get out there and tell people about it. You have to call people. You have to find that business and it can be done. It can be done. You just have to not be afraid.

[00:32:28:01 - 00:32:30:10]
Mallory
 Wow. What was that a 99.9?

[00:32:30:10 - 00:32:36:19]
Jon Cheney
 99.9875 or something like that. Right. But we'll just call it 99.9 to just make it easy.

[00:32:37:21 - 00:33:11:19]
Mallory
 Reduction. So if you don't have the head count, not a problem. If you don't have the budget, not a problem. What is that missing ingredient in your opinion, John? Because anyone could theoretically do this. You said you could get your seed money driving Uber. That's a great valid point. What is the magic ingredient that prevents a lot of people from taking that step? Or listening to this podcast, even me listening to you, it can almost feel a bit paralyzing of, I have so many options for our members. We could create so many things. So what, what do we create? Do you have any advice for that kind of thought process?

[00:33:12:19 - 00:33:54:23]
Jon Cheney
 So one thing that maybe I should give credit to myself a little bit for on is I had validated the need, right? I had discovered it over the past, you know, months and years of doing AI, using AI a lot, getting good at it, and then talking to my neighbors about it and being very out there and realizing, Hey, there's, there's, you know, a lot of people that need this. Like this could really help people. And, you know, if I, if I talked to my neighbor, he's got this construction company, all of a sudden, now he's got everybody using it. That's changed his business, right? And that's what he said. So I had kind of these, this validation of, Hey, this is a, a, a system, a product, I guess that people need. If I can systematize that result,

[00:33:55:24 - 00:34:17:03]
Jon Cheney
 then, you know, and I remember talking to Chad GPT about this specific guy. I said, look, this is what he did. This is what he did. And so we had to come up with systems. What is the system going to be? They can replicate that result over and over and over again. And so that's what I had to work on. And so I think the big thing is, um, I mean, there's probably several elements here, but number one, you have to, you have to know that there's a need. And, and, and the thing is.

[00:34:18:11 - 00:35:40:09]
Jon Cheney
 Everyone listening here, you all are experts at what you do, right? You've got your nonprofit for whatever it is. I actually have a nonprofit too, that I haven't really been able to spend enough time on. I kind of started it at the same time as this, and then this kind of cough and, and so I'll come back to it later. It's, it's related to music, related to pianos, actually. Um, basically just raising money and finding places that need pianos and figuring out how to get them there and then letting people donate their, their piano to a charity, getting a tax write off, and then I can place that piano in a place that needs it. Right. So anyway, so that's my, that's my little nonprofit. And, and again, I haven't, I haven't placed zero piano, so it doesn't really count. But that's the idea. And it's called the pianos promise. And eventually I'll get back to it and make it happen. But, but I think that you have to just say, okay, where is that need? What is the thing that I know and understand for me, it was AI and you know, AI in the workplace and things like that. I just kind of understood it and had it had a good thing. And then I sat down and just talked to Chad GPT. I made a plan and then executed the plan and I followed through. I think most of it is execution, execution, right? Ideas are really a dime a dozen. Right. That's where the, that's where, you know, the rubber meets the road is, is okay. It's cool that you had this idea in the shower, but when you got out of the shower, what did you do? Did you just dry off and, you know, get dressed and go back to your normal day? Or did you change something and say, no, I'm going to, I'm going to follow through on this idea? I think that's, that's really the big difference.

[00:35:40:09 - 00:36:11:19]
Mallory
 Yep. So validating that need, making sure that it exists and then actually going out and executing on your ideas. I love that. John, you've had the opportunity to work with businesses and individuals for the last year and a half or so on artificial intelligence. Have you noticed, um, any patterns in terms of the things that help the businesses that are successful with AI be successful? Do you feel like most of the businesses you've worked with are starting from kind of a level of zero and just kind of more in that education phase? What have you noticed in the past year and a half?

[00:36:11:19 - 00:37:18:15]
Jon Cheney
 That's a good question. I think I wish I could say that everyone's at the same spot, but a lot of companies, you know, a lot of companies have gotten to the point where their employees have a chat GPT subscription or a cloud subscription or something like that, and everyone's got access to it. And then you usually have like five people that are really gung-ho in the company, right? And then everyone else is kind of like, and some people aren't really using it at all. Right. And, and so I feel like what's missing and, and, and the, you know, the business model that we do now, the way that we help this is we come in and we put a fractional chief AI officer into the company. Right. And so we work with nonprofits and big companies and whatever we do, all that stuff, right? But we actually become that embedded leadership. And I think that's what it needs. Whether you hire somebody like us or you just hire somebody internally or assign someone internally. But the thing is most companies already are so busy. They don't have time for extra stuff. Right. The CEO is super busy. The CMO is super busy and the CTO is super busy if there is a CTO. Uh, and, and so they don't have time to say, okay, I'm now going to make sure that everyone is using AI and all of their departments and we're building automations and we're building systems and we're building dashboards.

[00:37:19:16 - 00:39:35:00]
Jon Cheney
 They're, people don't have time. And so I believe that every company needs a dedicated resource. That's just like, this is it. And I don't think that that resource by the way, should be a 22 year old kid out of college. That's just my opinion. The reason, the reason for that is that kid, while he might know a bunch of cool tricks with AI just hasn't ever been, doesn't have any business experience. Right. I think it needs to be somebody who's just been around a little bit. I mean, maybe they're 30 or 40 years old and you know, they're young enough that they can get the tech fast. They're ready to rock. Right. And, uh, but they actually have been around the block. They know why this matters in finance. They know how this HR issue actually affects this thing over here with product. And, you know, they understand how the company works. But I think that's a big thing. I think, I think one thing that, uh, the companies fail to do is to just put someone in charge. That's, that's the biggest thing, the biggest pattern that I've seen. Um, another thing that happens is a lot of companies will pay for like some AI training, right? They'll pay someone like me or you or someone to come in and say, Hey, we're going to do a seminar for a day and we're going to teach everybody how to do AI. And then everyone's really excited during the seminar and maybe even the day after like, man, that was so cool. And a few people maybe pick it up, but, but then, you know, back to the shower analogy, you get out of the shower and you dry off and you brush your teeth and you eat breakfast and now you're back into your routine, right? And you haven't adopted it. You haven't really made a change. And so a lot of people kind of know it's out there, but because someone isn't sitting there helping them actually apply it to their workload, their workday, their processes, their whatever, it just gets lost, right? It's just, it's, so it's, it's about adoption. It's, it's change management is really what it comes down to. People hate change. They're just resistant to it. They don't hate it. They just, we're not great at changing naturally. Right. And, and so that's, that's what it is. I don't think the people are maliciously or they're lazy or anything like that. I think it's just, we have our things and we're busy and we just got to get back to work and if AI isn't, you know, kind of spoon fed a little bit, right? To them and said like, no, here's how you're going to do it. Here's how we're going to sit down with you. We're going to work through this and then we're going to monitor this for a week. We're going to adjust it. Then we're going to monitor it for a month. And okay. Now you've actually completely changed the process.

[00:39:35:00 - 00:40:37:05]
Mallory
 Recently on the podcast, we covered the Microsoft work trends report, their 2026 edition, which is very much hitting on what you said and what we talk about a lot at Sidecar, which is individuals are seeing productivity gains with AI, but translating that individual gain to like organizational business wide change is really tough and it seems like a lot of businesses are struggling with that. Something that we do say often, and I guess it's a form of pushback in a way, but I'm curious to get your thought on it, is in the ideal world, we think the CEO or the executive director of the association should own AI as opposed to like outsourcing it to IT and saying like, IT you figure this AI stuff out because the leader is setting the vision of the association along with the board. So ideally you want to tie an AI to the vision of the association, mesh those and then act on it, right? So I'm curious what your thoughts are on that in terms of having a fractional chief AI officer from outside your business come in. Are they there more to help with the execution of that strategy or how do you see that balance?

[00:40:37:05 - 00:42:23:12]
Jon Cheney
 Yeah. So you're hearing all about these like forward development engineers and people and all these people coming from the outside. There's a very specific reason why we call it a fractional chief AI officer. This is a leadership issue. You're absolutely right. It must come from the C-suite. And so the idea of a chief AI officer is that they are sitting at the table with the CEO, CFO, CMO, and they're saying, "Hey guys, where are the opportunities and problems? Okay, great. Now you help me push this message down to everyone and then we'll actually implement, right? We'll be the hands that go in and make stuff happen, right? We'll help you build the dashboards. We'll help you vibe code. We'll teach people how to vibe code. We'll do all this stuff." We come in with a three-pronged approach of strategy, transformation, and education, right? And so it starts at the strategy level, at the leadership level. But the best implementations we do is where we have a kickoff meeting with the whole team, all hands meeting. The CEO starts and says, "Guys, we're now an AI native company. We're going to figure this out. These guys are going to help. They're working with me. They have my blessing and my direction to go and make this happen." Without that meeting, without that very clear direction from the CEO, people are going to be like, "Man, I don't really want to do it. I'm kind of busy," right? But if the CEO says, "Now look, you pay attention to John and his team. They're going to come and they're going to change you and you're going to love him because he's going to free you up a bunch of time and make you more money." And I've even seen companies, there's one public company we work with and a big, big, good, solid company, but they've been kind of talking about AI and trying to get people to do it, but no one's been listening, right? They've got Claude, they've got all these things, they've got subscriptions for everybody. But they finally said, "Okay, we're going to tie this to your pay."

[00:42:24:13 - 00:42:26:12]
Jon Cheney
 Right? If you can,

[00:42:27:14 - 00:43:23:22]
Jon Cheney
 not only this, so not only they have to pass certain things and like, "Hey, show that they're using AI," whatever, they do that, then they get a pay raise, right? And so, okay, now everyone's like, "Oh, wow. Hey, I've got a real financial incentive to be using AI because I can be 30% more efficient." They'll give them a 10% raise. That's a win for everyone, right? The company becomes more profitable, more capable, and the people get a raise. That's amazing. But even then, I'll go into companies and I'll say, "I want to challenge everyone to complete... If you can replace yourself, your entire function with AI, bring that to the CEO and you will get big time raises." Because now he can replace the whole department. He can replace whole functions. He can do that, right? And so you have people saying, "Okay, I'm going to do this." Now, I also believe this. I think this is so critical and I think a lot of the news and companies are getting it wrong. I believe that if you implement AI correctly, you will hire more people.

[00:43:23:22 - 00:43:26:10]
Mallory
 Ooh. Explain. Please.

[00:43:26:10 - 00:43:33:23]
Jon Cheney
 I mean, at least for us, we're seeing that, right? We're growing like crazy and you're AI-versed everywhere, right?

[00:43:35:01 - 00:43:36:12]
Jon Cheney
 The reality is,

[00:43:37:14 - 00:44:19:24]
Jon Cheney
 customers want to talk to people, right? If you have more customers, you need more people to talk to those people, right? You can absolutely make everybody more productive and more... You can cut costs and you can do all kinds of stuff where you don't have to maybe hire that extra person, but the individual contributors that are already there, they know the company. You don't want to get rid of those people. They're your gold, right? The AI should enable those people to just be more efficient and more effective and more productive. And yes, does it require some significant shuffling of the board? Absolutely. It certainly can, especially when you get to a certain point. Like we've gone in and we've literally replaced functions. It's like, "We don't need a person in that function anymore. What are we going to do with these 16 people?"

[00:44:21:04 - 00:44:43:06]
Jon Cheney
 Well, let's figure it out. Let's work on that. What are they good at? What can we do? What are the things? What are the projects and things you've wanted to do? Great. How can we use AI to push these people and train them and put them into that?" Now all of a sudden, you've got these companies building things that they never thought were possible before. Exactly. Right? I absolutely believe that a company that does it well will be expanding their workforce because of AI.

[00:44:43:06 - 00:45:29:15]
Mallory
 I think so much of this generative AI boom we've seen in the last few years has been focused on automating existing work, which is really powerful, but you're touching on this new idea, which is creating new forms of value that we couldn't have ever imagined prior. And I think that is the exciting part when it comes to conversations around job displacement. I also love what you said. I've never heard someone say that, but asking an employee or a staff member to attempt to replace themselves with AI. I think that's just a whole shift in terms of what's possible with this technology. The other side of that is I can see the staff are saying, "I'm not doing that. I don't want you to think that I can be replaced with technology." But then you've also shown incredible value in your work ethic and your abilities with this technology. So hopefully that makes you indispensable.

[00:45:29:15 - 00:45:34:22]
Jon Cheney
 You have to have a good leader for this to work. The CEO has to say, "Look,

[00:45:35:22 - 00:45:54:22]
Jon Cheney
 you've figured this out. You are going to get big time promotions." And so you frame it in a way that it's a huge win, a huge positive for those that figure it out. Now, the reality is this. Let's get just a little bit honest about this.

[00:45:56:01 - 00:45:59:07]
Jon Cheney
 Let's say you've got 10 people in a department all doing the same job.

[00:46:00:16 - 00:46:05:03]
Jon Cheney
 One person, two people work together. They figure it out. They're like,

[00:46:06:22 - 00:46:10:16]
Jon Cheney
 "We can sit and scroll Facebook all day now. AI is doing everything for us."

[00:46:11:18 - 00:46:44:00]
Jon Cheney
 So you could either incentivize, "Okay, hey, that's good," and just kind of leave things as is. We can say, "Hey, no, you two people, you need to come and you just show me how to do that." And then those other eight people, you're going to have some people that are like, "Yeah, I don't want to mess with it." They're going to be kind of the lower rung. And they're going to have some people that are like, "Yeah, that's cool. Let me figure out how to do that. Let's figure out how to do this. Oh, hey, what if we had this?" And that lower rung that's just going to say, "I don't want AI to touch it. This is my thing. This is my job."

[00:46:45:23 - 00:46:48:16]
Jon Cheney
 Those people unfortunately are going to end up without a job.

[00:46:50:07 - 00:46:54:14]
Jon Cheney
 They have to make an adjustment. This is something that is not optional.

[00:46:55:16 - 00:47:17:15]
Jon Cheney
 Every human needs to figure out how they can work with AI. If they can't figure it out, it's not that crazy. It would be like a farmer, 200 or 150 years ago. Really, we're talking more like 100 years ago. Industrial revolution, tractors, all these things. You've got a farmer that's like, "No, you know what? I've got my system.

[00:47:18:17 - 00:47:28:21]
Jon Cheney
 I go through and I'm going to do this and whatever." Or, "I've got my mules and they're working and I want to keep them happy and working and whatever because mules love to work." But

[00:47:30:13 - 00:47:51:19]
Jon Cheney
 then you've got a tractor next door and he's eating your lunch. It's just how it is. It's a competitive issue here. I like to tell people or I like to talk about this example because I think it really brings it like, "Can a plumbing company use AI?" Well, absolutely they can. Now, are the plumbers going to be replaced? No.

[00:47:53:04 - 00:48:43:23]
Jon Cheney
 But the business around the plumbing can totally be done. If I were to start a brand new company today, I am not a plumber by the way. That's not my strength. That's not John Cheney's strength. I'm going to hire someone to pick something. But if I were to start a plumbing company or an HVAC company today, I would eat the incumbent's lunch because I am going to be out there faster. I'm going to have personalized marketing in front of every single person because I can do that at scale. I can create 100 ads instead of two ads using AI. I'm going to have automated invoicing. I'm going to have automated systems. My customer communication is going to be off the charts awesome because AI is going to do it all. I'm going to have the equivalent of a 20 person team by myself and therefore my overhead is way lower. I can beat everyone on price.

[00:48:45:02 - 00:48:56:18]
Jon Cheney
 Everything that I'm doing is going to be slicker, smoother, faster, better, cheaper and better is in there too. Now, when it comes down to, "Okay, we need to actually fix someone's toilet," the human's going to come in and get to work.

[00:48:58:00 - 00:49:38:17]
Jon Cheney
 It's going to create jobs. I'm going to be building jobs. I'm going to be creating opportunity for people and for families. But if that other plumbing company is just like, "I'm just going to keep... We're good. We're good." That's the blockbuster story. That story will be told many, many, many times in this AI revolution. It's going to change. You got to adopt it. Be the worker, be the employee, be the person that says, "Okay, I get it. I see it. I need to do this. I'm going to figure it out. I'm going to dive in, jump on YouTube, find a thousand free courses, right? Come to somebody like Sidecar, like Jenny API. We'll help you. We have solutions to make that work, but ultimately, do it. Figure it out and do it. Be the one that makes the change happen.

[00:49:38:17 - 00:50:37:03]
Mallory
 Yep. I love it. And ultimately, in your plumbing example, really what you were doing is just reducing friction for the customer, providing them personalized information that they're looking for so they don't have to jump through a million hoops to get it, automated invoicing. We talk about reducing friction a lot for association members. John, the last thing I want to touch on is you're a musician. You said that. I am a creative as well. I am a performer. I don't know if you can relate to this, but as someone who talks a lot about AI and is overall quite optimistic about it, but is also in a creative industry, there's a lot of gridlock and a lot of, "Oh, I have a hard time talking to fellow performers about AI because generally they're the people, like you mentioned, the farmers who say, "Nope. We don't want anything to do with it. We don't want to touch it. We don't want to hear about it. We don't want anything to do with it." So have you had to grapple as a musician, as an AI optimist, I'll call you, with those two worlds? And how do you... I just think that's an interesting question to reflect on.

[00:50:37:03 - 00:50:40:01]
Jon Cheney
 Yeah. I got a lot of thoughts on this.

[00:50:41:06 - 00:50:47:05]
Jon Cheney
 So just so you have a little bit of frame of reference of kind of how much music is, I've released about 10 albums.

[00:50:47:05 - 00:50:48:00]
Mallory
 Wow.

[00:50:49:04 - 00:50:51:08]
Jon Cheney
 I write for full orchestra,

[00:50:52:08 - 00:51:18:05]
Jon Cheney
 solo piano. I do original stuff. I do Christmas arrangements and church arrangements and all kinds of things. And I do a lot and I really love it. I was a music major at one point at BYU for a little bit. And then I switched actually to a Chinese major, which feels weird. And there's a story behind that. But it was the fastest way for me to get out of college. That's what it was. I get tapped out of Chinese and get a lot of credits and do that fast. Because I knew I was an entrepreneur, but I wanted to get a degree just so that I had it.

[00:51:19:17 - 00:51:43:18]
Jon Cheney
 Anyway, but I love music. I love it. I'm a creator at heart. Ultimately, you just go follow me on my socials. You'll see, I just love to create it. I love to create adventures. In fact, I'm publishing a new website, johnchiney.com. Johnchiney.com has been up for a long time and it's all just about my music. But my new website is going to be a lot broader. And the theme is creation. Because I believe that

[00:51:45:17 - 00:51:48:10]
Jon Cheney
 creation is humanity's greatest superpower.

[00:51:49:13 - 00:52:25:01]
Jon Cheney
 It just absolutely is. We can create music, we can create art, we can create companies. We've talked about that a lot today. We can create humans. We can create gardens, we can create recipes, and we create. And also, think about all those things I just said, the creating companies, the recipes, and memories, and adventures, and all these things we can create. What is the feeling that's tied to most of those things? It's happiness, it's fulfillment, it's the best, greatest, all that. But here is where AI, AI can, by the way, write better music than me today, faster, instantaneously.

[00:52:26:10 - 00:52:33:24]
Jon Cheney
 It can create a script faster than any writer can. It can create art,

[00:52:35:09 - 00:52:36:12]
Jon Cheney
 social media,

[00:52:37:19 - 00:52:46:03]
Jon Cheney
 everything. And videos are getting to the point, it's not there yet, but it's getting to the point where it's like, "Oh, Cal, I think I would watch that movie."

[00:52:47:09 - 00:53:13:10]
Jon Cheney
 If this scene continued, if they just continue to do that, and people are, in fact, I just saw I was driving down the road in LA, one of my employees is actually an actor, a pretty prolific actor, a guy named Colin Ecclesfield. You've seen him in some movies out there. But anyway, we saw this billboard that was by Artlist. And Artlist is an AI thing, but it was talking about a new series by Artlist.

[00:53:14:17 - 00:53:55:23]
Jon Cheney
 And we were both like, "Wait, what is that?" We looked it up, and so there's this new Artlist TV, Artlist Studios, whatever. So it's a completely AI-generated TV show. And we watched the trailer for it, and we're like, "It's pretty good." I think I would watch that. I know it's AI. They're not trying to hide it. But man, that's a new type of entertainment. It's a new thing coming in. So if AI can create way faster, where did the humans survive? And here's where I think it really comes down to. We've had all kinds of tools, new digital tools. I'm sitting here at a digital piano, at a digital workstation. That's not new.

[00:53:57:11 - 00:54:04:13]
Jon Cheney
 But ultimately, where creation breaks down and fails is if there is no stewardship afterwards.

[00:54:05:18 - 00:54:37:16]
Jon Cheney
 Stewardship is what really makes creations go far. I can create this beautiful song, but if I don't share it with people and go put myself out there and hold a concert to show people, or even just publish it to Spotify and let people hear it, and then talk about it on my social media, and then submit it to be used for a commercial, or for a movie, or for whatever. It takes real work and care for your stewardship. If you just have a child and then leave them,

[00:54:38:19 - 00:55:03:11]
Jon Cheney
 that's a story that's been told many times. It doesn't work very well. But if you have a child and then you take care of them, and you love them, and you have real stewardship over that. If you create a business and you really take care of it, and you take care of the people and the product, and you push it, and you talk about it, it requires just a massive... That's where the real value is created. The joy is in that creation, and then there's even greater joy in taking it out there and making it actually impact the world.

[00:55:04:19 - 00:55:24:08]
Jon Cheney
 Seeing your creation almost take on a life of its own to then go and help so many people. I love getting messages for someone who just says, "Hey, I was listening to your music, and I was driving down the road, and I just realized that I hadn't cut anybody off. I wasn't honking at people, and someone else got me off, and I didn't care. It just brought me a little bit more peace." I was like, "Man, that's what it's about, right?"

[00:55:25:12 - 00:55:28:12]
Jon Cheney
 Can AI music do that too? Yeah, probably.

[00:55:30:12 - 00:56:03:04]
Jon Cheney
 Certainly in the future, it's going to get better and better and better. But the reality is, just because AI can make music, I find tons of joy in sitting at the piano and just letting it flow. And I de-stress that way. I compose, and I don't care if AI is making music or someone else is making music or whatever. I get that joy. Now, when I need to now make money with my music, that brings a little bit different thing in now. Okay, well, AI can create a thousand times more than me in a thousandth of the time.

[00:56:04:05 - 00:56:25:01]
Jon Cheney
 So how do I compete with that? Oh, you got to get creative. You got to figure out how you're going to be the product. You are the product, right? How are you going to have stewardship over it? How are you going to push it out there? AI is not showing up and having concerts in your local neighborhood. AI is not going to be talking about it. They might be able to talk about it on social media. You can automate social media posting with AI pretty easily.

[00:56:26:03 - 00:56:38:07]
Jon Cheney
 But ultimately, I believe that AI can help and enhance and make us create even bigger things. Just like I was not able to create a business solo prior.

[00:56:39:16 - 00:57:39:09]
Jon Cheney
 And yes, when I, during my first six months, when I made a million dollars, did I not hire developers and that therefore led to job loss or not job creation potentially? Yeah. Now I have 28 employees. And I'm going to be at 100 employees next year. And I'll be providing benefits and all these things from lots of wonderful people because I'm using AI to push that out because I'm stewarding it. I'm taking care of it. I think there's tremendous opportunities that AI will bring to the creative world that will further enable anybody to create. One thing I'm excited about, I don't know about you guys, but Netflix bought a company from Ben Affleck a few months ago. And that technology is so freaking cool. I'm a TV guy. I like movies. I've got Lord of the Rings, you know, Aragorn Sword hanging up on my wall here. I love movies and I love all that stuff. I'm really sad when I finish a series.

[00:57:40:14 - 00:57:51:21]
Jon Cheney
 I'm like, "Oh man, I'm going to miss these kind of, they're almost like your friends, right? I'm going to miss watching these people do cool stuff." Netflix is playing around with the idea that you could watch another episode of The Office,

[00:57:52:22 - 00:58:54:04]
Jon Cheney
 watch another episode that doesn't exist. And you are the director. All right, make an episode where Michael Scott does this, this, and this. And you know, there's a conflict over here and this is what, or make it funny or make it sad or whatever. Tell it, do whatever you want. And it'll just play that episode for you. And you're going to have fan-made fan fiction, right? This is not a new thing either. But now you have technology that can bring it to life for you and actually have those actors do that. And not only that, when done and licensed properly, those actors will make money from that. When their name, image, and likeness is used, they'll make more money from that. You might pay $30 to get an episode made for you, your own personal episode. And then you say, "This is pretty dang good. I'm going to post it." And then you can make money even on that episode as it goes popular and viral and whatever, and all the people involved in that, the music creators and everybody, everybody makes money in that. And so there's still tons of opportunity. It's just going to look so different, right? And that's what's hard for people to really figure out. But that's one example of a way that is going to create more content, bring more joy.

[00:58:55:04 - 00:59:09:05]
Jon Cheney
 And yeah, does it completely replace the need for actors and producers and directors and music people and you know, all that? No, no, it doesn't. It just changes it. It just changes it.

[00:59:09:05 - 00:59:30:05]
Mallory
 That's a really good place to wrap up this episode, John. We as humans are wired for creation. And I love the idea of stewardship too, taking care of what you create, putting it out there, and being brave, taking risks as a leader. I think all of that resonates with our association audience. Where can people keep up with you? Where can they find you? We'll drop some links in our show notes, but if you want to share those now, let our audience know.

[00:59:30:05 - 00:59:39:04]
Jon Cheney
 Of course, yeah. You know what? I post, you know, if you want to hear more professional side of things and lots of AI, LinkedIn is going to be your spot to find me. I post on X decently,

[00:59:40:14 - 00:59:58:16]
Jon Cheney
 but then I post a lot also on, you know, the Facebooks and Instagrams and things like that. If you want to see me playing with my new chickens and ducks. Actually, we just got some ducks in Decent. They're pretty fun and little, but they grow so fast. Anyway, at Cheney Piano is where you'll find me on those. So just my last name, Cheney Piano,

[01:00:00:01 - 01:00:01:10]
Jon Cheney
 is I think that's my ex,

[01:00:01:10 - 01:00:07:01]
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[01:00:17:19 - 01:00:34:18]
Mallory
 Thanks for tuning into the Sidecar Sync podcast. If you want to dive deeper into anything mentioned in this episode, please check out the links in our show notes. And if you're looking for more in-depth AI education for you, your entire team, or your members, head to sidecar.ai.

[01:00:34:18 - 01:00:37:24]
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