What if making money in ICP (Internet Computer Protocol) is actually easier by selling the skills and the opportunity to build on ICP than anything you're going to get with your coins? This has been a big revelation to me. Most of the people in ICP right now are just sitting there looking at the price and waiting for it to pump, and that's the whole monetization angle. That's been me too. But what I've realized is there's a lot more money to be made off of knowing what ICP can do and then getting paid to help people build on ICP, and the key first step to this is to build yourself on ICP.
The mess most businesses are stuck in on Web2
Let me back up to the bigger picture of where things are at. Right now there are all kinds of people, entrepreneurs, content creators, small businesses, medium and large businesses, that have their business built on Web2 with things that are very expensive. They have all these different software-as-a-service tools they have to plug in, nothing talks to anything else, and they can't use AI with it. It's a mess, right?
Even if you're thinking, "Okay, well, I'm not a developer, I can't go build anything for anybody," hear me out. On my website I've built an e-commerce platform. The Jerry Banfield comeback tour Founding 50 shirt is an example of what you can do with ICP that's extremely valuable other places. This is not hard. I'm not a developer, but I've made all this stuff just using AI. For example, I made the shirt design with AI. AI told me which company to use to get my shirts printed. I had the vision that I'd make Jerry Banfield shirts, but instead of just saying Jerry Banfield, they'd have a bunch of people's names on them. So I'm grateful that we already have people who will be on the shirt, and there are more spots open on it. What I've got there, though, is a working example of what can be built with Claude and/or ChatGPT and ICP. This is where there is some huge monetization potential, because almost no one knows what AI can do when combined with ICP right now. You've got people vibe coding stuff on Replit and Lovable, but in my experience they're bad and much more expensive, which is something I went into when I shared my Caffeine AI review of building apps on ICP by prompting.
How I rebuilt Angela's website on ICP for free
I'll give you another example. My friend Angela Hutchinson had her website on Replit, or maybe it was Lovable, it's one of those. I asked her, "How much are you paying for that?" She said $50 a month. I told her I'd rebuild it for her for free, because she's my friend. So I rebuilt her entire website for free with Claude, and it's hosted on ICP, and it hardly costs me anything to host it. She might have paid several hundred dollars if I had asked. I was just curious at this point to see how easy it was to do.
Do you want to know how easy it was? Ridiculously easy. I went into Claude Fable in the command line interface and opened up Claude. Now, the command line interface is the one thing that could be a little scary for some of you, because you need to install a bunch of Linux, but Claude will walk you through exactly how to do it. You just take screenshots and say, "Duh, how do I do this?" And it'll say, "Download that." And you say, "I downloaded it. Now what?" Then you say, "Oh, well, I don't know what to do now," and send another screenshot, and it says, "Click on open, install." You go through it like that until you get into the interface. There's not much to look at in it, but I just typed in a prompt. I said, "Hey, my friend Angela has a website," I gave it her website, and I said, "Copy it." That's all I had to do. It goes and grabs all the code and copies it. Then I said, "Deploy it on ICP." It uses the wallet I already had set up, and boom, her website is on ICP right now. It was this easy. It asked for a couple of things. It said, "I need her API key for this and that." As soon as she gave me those, it rebuilt the entire website.
But here's the kicker. Now she doesn't have to pay $50 a month. Now it's more securely hosted on ICP. Now it is also very easy to make updates. I just drop a picture in the folder and say, "Change the picture," or "Change Angela's header." It's that easy. If she wants any updates, she just sends them to me, I copy and paste them into an AI prompt, and boom.
You could be an AI web agency without being a web developer
So do you see what I'm telling you here? What I'm telling you is you could build a web developer business without being a web developer. You could become an AI web building agency without knowing how to build anything. All you have to do is have a Claude Fable subscription, or Claude Max or Ultra or whatever we're calling it now, and you just get clients. Your angle is that you can save them a ridiculous amount of money, because Angela is paying $50 a month for an incredibly basic website that's nearly free to host on ICP. Her website doesn't have anything fancy in it. It has an email collection form. It has a calendar. And people all over the place are paying $50 plus a month for a website just like hers. I covered what hosting actually costs when I wrote about building and hosting a website on ICP with AI.
So I could have charged her. I could have just said, "Give me $300 and that'll pay for your website, the hosting for the entire year, and the migration." She probably would have done that, but I just wanted to experiment. Well, the next person, I could say, "Give me $300, your hosting cost is zero, and I'll make updates for free." Boom. Now I'm just taking business in. And once you have the Claude Fable subscription, or Ultra or whatever it is where you have Claude Fable, then you can just keep building and building all these different websites.
You could even set up subscriptions. I could have told Angela, "Hey, why don't you set up a subscription, pay me $25 a month, and I'll host your website and update it." That would have cut her costs by 50%. That $25 a month I'd get for doing nothing most months. Occasionally she'd ask, "Can you update this or update that?" But imagine if I did that a hundred more times. I'd have $25 a hundred times a month coming in, I'd be spending almost nothing, and I'd have very little to do. That's a nice business model, sweet recurring income just sitting there. Maybe every day I'd need to make changes on somebody's website. I could scale that up. And $25 a month is pretty cheap too. Some of these people are paying a hundred, two hundred, several hundred dollars a month for a website that I could charge $25 or $50 a month for, and it would be on ICP.
So what I'm saying is, if you have the knowledge that ICP exists, I believe you have the most powerful knowledge right now. And I'm exploring how I can build my business off of this right now. How do I get clients? You could obviously cold email, cold text, or run video ads to get the clients. I could go directly to businesses. I could do mailers straight to businesses. There are lots of different ways to get clients. If you know people locally, you could get clients and referrals that way. If you can see businesses sitting out there, you could submit their contact forms. There are a lot of ways.
Step one: build your own website on ICP
All you need to do is, one, set up your own website. This is why it's so important. The first thing to do is see if you can build your own website yourself. I know Claude and ChatGPT have plugins right now with ICP, but they don't actually build and update. They just query. I checked that after Bobby talked about it, so I know it. You still need to use the command line interface, or Codex in ChatGPT, to do this. Once you build your own website on ICP, then you can do what I did with Angela. I showed Angela my website and said, "I built all this. It costs me almost nothing to host it every month. I could build this for you."
She literally had another guy that wanted to build a website for her too, because she just gets stuff for free. She had this guy from Miami who she started dating, and she got him to be the main performer at her event. He was laughing, because he drove all the way up, didn't get paid anything, and performed at this event, but he ended up with a girlfriend out of it. That's more than I got, but what I got was to see how easy this is to do for somebody else.
My website is pretty advanced. I have chat rooms on my website. I have direct messages. I have a fully functional shopping cart where you can get really advanced with the things you offer. The shirt product, for example, has two different levels. It has a fixed number of spots. When you claim your spot, it has the ability to pay with a card, and I can just swap out the card provider whenever I want or add other ones in. Then you can also pay with all these different cryptos, including JBBJ, my meme coin on ICP, and my JERRY meme coin on Robinhood, which I talked about when I shared how I sold 1,000 ICP for JERRY on Robinhood. This is a little bit crazy. I've got all these coins I accept on ICP. Then I have coins on Robinhood, ETH, Base, and Arbitrum. Some give discounts, some don't. This is incredible functionality. The hosting is very cheap. And look how advanced this is. Right next to that, I have games on my website.
So with the level of sophistication that my website has, if I built this kind of website for somebody else, I might be able to charge $500 or $1,000 a month for a website as advanced as this. I could allow somebody to replace their Discord, their Patreon, their Gumroad, their Kajabi, there are all kinds of things, the same way I replaced my own community when I shared how I rebuilt my Skool on ICP with Claude Fable. I could allow them to replace their full-time web developer. Instead, it's like, "Hey, copy that guy's website, build this functionality into it," and I just pay with my Claude Fable plan to do that. It's so easy.
So I am inviting everybody in the ICP community to start figuring out how you can make money building businesses on ICP, building your own business and helping other people get built on ICP, and if you want to talk it through with me, schedule a call with me. This to me is a perfect time, because once people know that they can build on ICP, and they're already using AI, they'll probably want to do it themselves. But right now, nobody even knows that this is possible.
The golden opportunity I missed all year
So this is the golden opportunity here. Imagine if, instead of uploading YouTube videos all year, I had just gone after clients. I might be making $10,000 plus a month right now, having clients and websites on ICP. I might have relatively little work to do. I might be paying several hundred dollars a month in cycles on ICP to host all these clients' websites. Then I'd be in the door for any other kind of services they need, too. And they'd be mostly stuck with me indefinitely, managing their website with AI. At this point, Angela could just have somebody else copy the same website and manage it for her, but there's no incentive. If I was charging her $25 a month, there'd be no incentive to move. It's cheap. So this is a golden opportunity.
This also helps ICP adoption, which I've argued before is how crypto mass adoption will only happen through ICP. In my opinion, the more websites and businesses we get built on ICP, the more the price will move up because of that, because we're buying cycles. And you don't even have to ever buy ICP to do this business model now. You can just go in the command line interface, scan the QR code, and pay directly with your credit card, which I will be doing from now on. I'm not going to buy ICP off an exchange and send it, because I can just charge my cycles straight off my credit card.
Now, if you want to talk to me about building this business, go to jerrybanfield.com and schedule a call with me, and I'll talk to you about the details.
Why this is my lane for ICP going forward
I'm looking at whether I want to build a business like this, because I want to have a business with nice recurring income and make lots of money where I can work anywhere in the world, the kind of thinking I laid out when I shared how AI can make you a millionaire if you change how you think. The business I'm talking about right now is absolutely ideal for that, because I could just get a bunch of clients, work anywhere in the world, and have a bunch of recurring income where probably 90% of the clients will be low maintenance. I'd just drop the ones that are high maintenance and sit there with the rest. So I'm thinking, well, I'm going to build a business like this, because I want to have 90% of clients like Angela that hardly need anything and would just pay monthly to have their website hosted. It's a sweet business opportunity.
I'm planning to pivot my channel to talking mostly about this business opportunity going forward, because I need my own lane for ICP. I've admitted before that I can't stop marketing ICP even if I want to, but Bobby does great with the bigger picture stuff, and Blockchain Pill does great with the news. I don't need to repeat what either of them is saying. What I see is this: okay, how are you going to actually make some money with ICP without speculating on the token price? Because, as I've said before, ICP is not going to save you on its own. Well, build a business on ICP. So I think that's my angle going forward, and you can follow where it leads in my ICP Crypto playlist.