In the past, building a successful company required years of hard work. In the age of AI, you can build your business in less than $500 over a weekend.
John Chaney founded Seek in 2016 and raised $13 million in venture capital over several years for the augmented reality social platform. It was ambitious, but it soon paid off in the form of an acquisition. He left with over $100 million and an entrepreneurial success story secured.
This experience stands in stark contrast to his latest venture, Artificial General Intelligence Proficiency Institute (GenAIPI). This company, which he founded last year, has achieved impressive results. By leveraging AI, he built the software over a weekend and had his first customer within a week.
Plus, it only cost a few hundred dollars to do it.
Cheney drew inspiration from his neighbors near Payson, who ranged from successful cattle ranchers to construction company owners and often had an average annual income of $20 million to $50 million. Although they had regular income, he realized they weren’t leveraging AI in ways he knew could benefit the company. And when he learned that many people weren’t even using ChatGPT, he urged him to do something about it.
“I needed to get GenAIPI out there and help these amazing business owners,” Cheney says. “They were going to get killed. If they weren’t prepared to defend themselves, the AI was going to beat them.”
There was a huge gap in knowledge about AI between Mr. Cheney and other executives. If they can understand it better, it means less busy work and more efficiency and output. They will have a chance to remain competitive in changing conditions.
To that end, we spent three days and nights creating course content for training business managers. They then posted quiz-style ads on Facebook and Meta to pique people’s curiosity about how much they knew or didn’t know about AI. Inevitably, this led them to his site. The ad got a lot of traffic, but sales didn’t come right away. His company was primed and ready to take on customers, so he acted proactively instead and it worked.
“One local business owner I contacted agreed to a $15,000 contract five days after I built GenAIPI,” he says. “After six weeks, we were up to $180,000 in revenue.” And within six months, he hit $1 million.
Considering the incredible speed at which companies across the country are adopting AI, GenAIPI is positioned to grow with AI. According to the 2025 AI Index Report, 78% of businesses nationwide are using AI, and it has definitely increased since then. There’s something even more eye-opening. The AI industry is projected to add nearly $16 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
These large numbers have caught the attention of people like Jake Merrill, co-founder of Infinity Pools. The GenAIPI customer is currently significantly implementing AI into his marketing and social media processes, which he hopes will help him achieve his goal of growing his business into a $100 million business over the next five years. After seeing Chaney’s LinkedIn post and already knowing about his past success with Seek, he wanted to see what his newest company could do for them. It’s still early days, but he thinks it’s heading in the right direction.
“There’s still a lot I don’t know and don’t understand. I’m running a business and trying to continue to grow. I’m not an expert in AI, nor do I claim to be, but I’m learning,” Merrill says. “I rely on [Jon Cheney] It means a lot to us that you can help us implement these tools. ”
AI is making existing companies more efficient and opening up opportunities for new companies to start operating for next to nothing. When Mr. Cheney analyzed everything he had built within a few days, he found that it would have cost much more to start the company 10 years ago, about $3.2 million as of 2016. This includes things like the amount of coding and paying for the educational content you create.
“One and a half years [can] Change it to 3-5 days. “Right now, the reduction in effort, risk and capital is 99.9% lower, which is great for someone with a lot of ideas,” Cheney says.
Not only is risk reduced when testing ideas is less expensive, but the time between having an idea and being able to launch it is greatly reduced.
“It’s risky to put money into a startup because you have to spend a lot of money to get to the point where you can prove a model. With AI, that whole paradigm is flipped on its head. That’s no longer the case,” Cheney says. “You can build a Utah software business in a weekend for a few hundred dollars and have customers by the next week.”
Still, Cheney says the entrepreneurial principles remain the same. Learning how to run your business efficiently is the first step. Being consistent is another issue.
“AI doesn’t just turn ideas into reality quickly. Yes, it can.” [help you] “But customers still have to become entrepreneurs and follow through,” Cheney says, “and an even smaller percentage of them do it.”
Cheney explains that he wants to help the world navigate the sharp curve of AI acceleration.
“A lot of people are going to lose their jobs because of AI. It’s already happening and it’s going to get worse. That’s what scares me. I believe in the power of AI. AI can do very good things. AI can do crazy work, but there will be collateral damage. The best way to combat that is to help as many people as possible understand, learn how to use, and collaborate with AI, so everyone can improve their capabilities.”
