I use AI constantly. Most days I'll run Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini at the same time — same question into all three, then the same follow-ups — and the combination is incredible. I know plenty of people are down on AI, but I use it because it works. If you're a solo operator without a team, learning to use these tools well is the closest thing to god mode I've found.
Run all three at once
Here's my actual workflow: I keep all three apps on my phone, take a prompt off the top of my head, paste the exact same thing into each one, and read all three answers. They're trained on different data, so they disagree in useful ways. The real trick is that I can then guide them into subjects I don't know well. I know a little human psychology; they know a lot. So I push them toward what I'm weak on and let the differences sharpen my thinking.
How I picked my community branding
A concrete example: I used AI to name my new community. I asked the models to tap into YouTube and into psychology and design a membership people would never want to cancel — something they'd want to belong to for life. Gemini was the first to land on calling it the "Jerry Banfield Family" while the others leaned toward "club." The family framing won me over instantly: it's a little mafia-esque — "welcome to the family" — and you don't leave a family. Imagine the cancel screen asking, "Are you sure you want to leave the family?" That's the feeling I wanted.
Asking AI for the best business model
I also brought it a real problem. I was frustrated with my income and my whole business system, so I asked the AI to walk through every monetization model and tell me what would fit me best. I came in with my own observations first — I'd watched other creators sell community memberships — and then had the models pressure-test the idea against everything I was seeing. That conversation is a big part of how my current system came together.
Each model has a different strength
They're not interchangeable. I use Claude — running in a Linux interface on my Windows PC — for the heavy lifting: pulling through thousands of hours of my videos and my books and turning them into blog posts. I'll have ChatGPT generate a thumbnail at the same time. And I'll send Gemini the more generic or technical questions, like fixing a MacBook-to-HDMI error, because it's plugged into YouTube and pulls tutorials well — though it tends to answer shorter and shallower than the others. One more thing: the paid versions are dramatically better than the free ones. Free gives you surface-level answers; the paid tiers are a different tool entirely.
Building a custom AI from my own content
The bigger project is taking everything I've ever said — the videos, the books, tens of millions of words — stripping out the repetition and the old calls to action, and training a custom model on it. The goal is that you could ask a very specific question — what I think about kissing on a first date, or my take on a specific coin — and get an answer drawn from everything I've actually said over the years. AI is what makes a one-person operation able to do that at all.
AI is god mode for solo operators
So if you're a loner trying to build something yourself, this is the advice: learn these tools and put real money into them. I'm paying around $140 a month across the three, and for the level of help I get, it's easily worth it. AI is the teammate I was missing.
This is the same toolset behind hosting my site on ICP with Claude Code. If you want more on building a business as a solo creator, watch my YouTube coaching playlist here.