Lesson 1 · 16 min
The 43 opportunities look like 43 different businesses. Almost all of them fit into a few boxes. Building became easy and cheap, so anyone who only delivers the building competes on price. What a company buys is trust: someone who diagnoses, reviews, follows up and teaches. This lesson builds the filter you will use throughout the whole course.
Start the lesson
Goal: classify an opportunity into one of the 4 roles or into the building that loses value, and cut the candidates using the 5 criteria.
Every opportunity falls into one of them. Click each box.
Four roles sell trust. The fifth box is not forbidden: it is a piece of a service, not the whole service.
Three honest questions that come before the list.
Founder (full control, zero income for months), number 2 partner (half the stage, shared income), intrapreneur (an AI project from the inside, with a salary) and weekend (a day job, a business at night).
All four teach almost the same thing. Only the founder path charges the full price right away. If people depend on your income, starting with the lowest-risk path is sequencing, not cowardice.
Write down what you are running from and what you are running toward. Without both sides named, giving up tends to arrive in the first weeks without results.
Too much fuel also has a cost: set a time when work ends, even if it is one day a week.
Every opportunity has four steps. The first three trade hours for money and are mandatory: nobody teaches a method they have never carried out.
Notice step 4: teaching the method. That is exactly where the Trainer and the Mentor come in.
Saying "I run an AI agency" doesn't open doors: clients hear that every week. What works is finding the most expensive pain and solving it, with AI if it's the best tool. Sometimes it isn't.
Test: write your offer in one sentence and delete the technical words. If what's left is a sentence the owner of a bakery understands, you have an offer.
"I deploy AI in your company" gets ignored. "You get back 12 hours a week" gets read.
Every candidate goes through them. Two negative answers and it's off the list.
Someone barely keeping their head above water rarely invests in improvement. Prefer those who are already making revenue.
If you can't estimate how much the problem costs per month, you won't be able to defend your work either.
Industry background, contacts, or a skill most people don't have. Without that, you compete on price alone.
If the first demo takes three months, you give up before the payoff. And the opportunity you can stand to repeat is the one that builds a track record.
Mistake that breaks the filter: picking the most exciting one instead of the most likely one.
Replace the text between < > with your own. Use it in an AI assistant of your choice.
You are a positioning consultant. I'm going to give you my complete professional biography, including odd jobs, bad jobs, failed businesses and hobbies. Don't praise anything. My biography: <list each job, odd job, business or hobby on one line, with how long it lasted> Do three things: 1. For each item, write in one sentence what it taught me about PEOPLE, about PROCESS or about an INDUSTRY. If it taught nothing useful, write "disposable" and move on. 2. List the 3 industries where I can join a conversation and sound like an insider, not an outsider. Justify each one with the item from the biography that supports it. 3. For industry number 1, list the 5 expensive pains I have probably already seen happen in there and that could be solved today with automation or AI. Be specific. No "communication skills".
FILTER TABLE · <your name> · <date> Opportunity | Box (Consultant/Auditor/Mentor/Trainer/Building) | Client has money? | Expensive, measured pain? | Unfair advantage? | Proof in 1 week? | Can do it 100 times? | No. of YES ------------|------|-----|-----|-----|-----|-----|--- <no. and name> | <box> | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | Y/N | <0-5> Rule: 2 or more N = off the list. Building: write next to it which role it becomes part of.
Do this before lesson 2. The table stays with you through lesson 8.
Run the prompt with your complete biography, including the jobs you're embarrassed to mention: they tend to be the most useful.
Done when: you have 3 industries, each tied to a concrete item from your biography, and none of them fits just anyone.
Copy the table into a spreadsheet or note. Fill in the first row with the opportunity that attracts you most today, classifying the box and the five criteria.
Done when: the table exists, has the box and 5-criteria columns, and the first row is filled in with Y/N in all of them.
4 questions. The explanation appears after your attempt.
Question 1 of 4
An acquaintance wants to sell "AI websites" to local businesses. Which box does that fall into?
Question 2 of 4
Two opportunities attract you equally. What decides first?
Question 3 of 4
Candidate 1 in your table is boring and candidate 4 is fascinating. What do you do?
Question 4 of 4
What sets the Auditor apart from the Consultant?
Choose an option. The explanation appears after you answer.