Help business owners reactivate neglected email lists, identify valuable subscriber segments, generate revenue from those subscribers, and optionally turn the list into a community or local newsletter. The operator uses AI to analyze subscriber behavior, create segments, prepare outreach, and manage community setup.
Searchable transcript of The Most Profitable AI Business You've Never Heard Of — Chris Koerner on The Koerner Office Podcast (20:13). Search for a phrase, then click its timestamp to jump straight to that moment in the video.
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00:00 You don't think that business owner would pay you $1,000 a month to generate $12,000 a month for them? Okay, $1,000 a month. That's awesome. Just for using AI to do stuff for me. Can you find 10 business owners to pay you for that? Of course you can. This is so valuable to business owners and they have no idea it exists and they're not going to know about it for another 5 to 10 years.
00:16 But you know about it today and almost no one watching this video knew how to do any of this a few years ago. But now we have AI and congratulations, you're [music] now an expert. Several different ways of making money in this video. All it takes is typing one sentence. Real quick before anything else, so everything in this video works two different ways.
00:37 Way number one, you already have an email list. Way number two, and honestly this is probably the bigger opportunity, you know someone who has a list. And considering the fact that 10% of adults are business owners, you do know a lot of people that have a list. And this video is going to show you how to get paid to do for them what I'm about to do for myself.
00:53 Though consider the fact that there are millions of email lists out there, newsletters, small business email lists, friends and family, local, niche, church, real estate, doesn't matter. Almost none of them have ever done what you're about to watch. So even if you have zero subscribers, which most of you do, watch every click I make because every click you're going to be able to bill for.
01:12 Speaking from experience, a big email list does not automatically turn into revenue. It should, but only if you use it right. That's what we're going to solve for today. I have about 273,000 people on my newsletter. And then I also have a paid community. Both are great, but they're completely disconnected from each other. Members come from everywhere.
01:29 My podcast, social, YouTube, email, Instagram, they're all separate streams that I have to figure out a way to manage. Two separate products, two separate loginins. So today, I'm going to connect them and show you how you can do the same for yourself or for other businesses. And I'm doing this on camera. I'm going to share my screen and instead of just clicking around a dashboard, I'm going to talk to it because I have zero experience with this product I'm about to show you today.
01:51 That's why I'm going to use that product plus Claude to do it all for me cuz I'm a little bit lazy. You're a little bit lazy. You get it. Okay. You can do this with ChatGpt, Grock, Gemini. I'm going to do it with Claude. Everyone has an email platform. There's a lot of like community platforms out there, a lot of email platforms, but no one's ever put the two together until now.
02:07 That's what Beehive Communities just fixed. You can use your same list or any list that you upload into Beehive, and you can have your community and your list all in the same place. Except now there's going to be a room attached where those readers can actually find each other and talk about what you wrote or what your friend wrote, your business owner friend, whoever it is that you're working with.
02:26 Their stuff stops being just a quick read and it starts becoming a place that people come back to over and over again. I've never opened Beehive communities before this recording. I've used Beehive for over 2 years. It's great. Love it. Never tested this new product of theirs. We're on the same level here. That's the whole point. If I can figure this out on camera in real time, you can figure it out for a client.
02:43 So, in the first 15 minutes of this video, I'm going to show you how to connect the Beehive MCP to whatever AI you prefer, and we'll start building with that. And then after that, I'm going to show you what you can actually build with the community with or without the MCP. So, remember, I'm lazy. I don't want to figure all this out myself. So, I need to connect Beehive with the AI of my choice, in this case, Claude.
03:03 And then I can just ask Claude to log in and do all that stuff for me. Okay, very first thing I'm going to do, cuz I don't even know this. I'm going to Google Beehive MCP URL. Okay, we know what a URL means. MCP means model context protocol. Don't even worry about that. I'm not technical. I just know it means MCP equals use AI inside of another software tool.
03:21 You need a URL to connect it. So whether you're using Cloud, Chat, GPT, Gemini, or Grock, the MCP URL is this bad boy right here, and we'll put it in the description so you can copy and paste it. Now, next thing you're going to do, very simple. Go to your favorite AI, click on your name, click on settings, go to connectors, and then go add add custom connector.
03:42 Call it whatever you want. I'm going to call it Behive Communities, and then you're going to paste in that URL. This is you just telling Claude how secure you want it to be with this connection. I don't know what any of this means. I'm just going to keep it at the default settings. Click add. Now, it wants me to click connect. Now, it's simply having me click grant access cuz I'm already logged in in a different tab.
04:00 And then, right here, this is important. If you don't trust your AI to not screw up inside of Beehive, you're going to change these permissions to needs approval, blocked, always allow. I've been using this before. I trust it. And for the most important things like send an email or create an automation, Claude is going to want you to click that button because even if you have the permissions checked, it's usually afraid to do it.
04:20 So do your own research. But I'm going to leave always allow on all of these. Now we're connected. Now we can ask it to do whatever we want. Okay. So this blank claude screen is the before. And remember, this is the same empty shell that you're going to see when helping your plumbing business owner friend and better use his email list, aka newsletter.
04:36 We're using those two things interchange. So, I'm going to tell Claude, make me a beehive community that's attached to my the Kerner office newsletter. You can tell it to use the MCP for redundancy, but I'm pretty confident Claude's going to know what to do. Good news, your publication already has a community attached. I assume that just happened by default whenever Beehive added that feature.
04:54 I haven't done it. Says there's three channels in there. general newsletters, idea mode, 348 posts total, and those are all of the emails I've ever sent to my newsletter. It's not anything I've done within the community. Nobody moved those over manually. Behive publishes them into the community as they go out. The problem, and it's a big one, you have eight members out of a newsletter with 273,000 subscribers.
05:11 That's because I've never talked about it anywhere ever. And those eight people probably somehow found their way to my community. So, the room exists, but it's dead. Nobody's home. The fix is less. Build a community and more. Resurrect this one. We need a clear description uh of what the room is. conversation starters and figuring out who should be in here first.
05:28 Where do you want to start? And I don't want to do this one step at a time. And I know Fable 5, the model I'm using right now, is very powerful. So, I'm just going to say do all of them in order of importance. Tall order I just gave. Do all of them in order of importance. Also, if I were doing this for a friend that didn't already use Beehive, explain to me in four bullet points or less how to get his list into Beehive so we can immediately do the same to his list by connecting a community.
05:51 because most of you won't be able to just say, "Hey, log into my Beehive account." You're going to have to create one. Also, side note, please use my affiliate link. If you do that, it's in the description below. I'm not just pedaling something because they have an affiliate link. I actively use them. And if you're on my newsletter, which a lot of you probably are, you'll see the Beehive logo on the bottom.
06:08 Okay, so it's doing it. Save community post. It's like actively building stuff. Like, look at this code. I don't know what any of this means, but it's building stuff inside my Beehive account. So, I'm logged in to beehive left side community beta uh it beta be and uh eight members just as Claude said channels general newsletters idea mode people can talk about the emails that I sent if people want to partner up on a business idea that I'm emailing about it's only been about 2 minutes and here's what Claude has done fix
06:33 the identity of the room your best readers oh that's cool ranked from your actual opening click data 15 subscribers with 100% opening so if you are migrating an email list from Mailchimp or somewhere else, you can migrate that data as well. Clickthrough rate, open rate, lo, you know, how loyal any given subscriber is, you can give that to behive. So, you can still do the same thing.
06:55 Now, getting your friends listed into Beehive, export as list as a CSV, Mailchimp, Kit, Substack, import it into Beehive, verify as sending domain. If you don't know how to do it, just create a free Beehive account, connect it to Claude or whatever, and then say, "I have this email list exported from my friend's Mailchimp account. Here it is. Add it to Beehive for me, or at least tell me what to do so I can do it myself."
07:14 We need to remember in this 2026 world we live in, everyone on this planet needs to remember before they make any decision. Can AI do this for and you will be shocked once you actually dig in and if you don't know the answer, just ask AI. You'll be shocked how many of those questions get answered as yes. Here's what's actually wild to me. When I go to my community, click on discussions.
07:30 Now, think of this as like a subreddit, right? Like my Behive community is like a subreddit for my people, my subscribers. So, they can all congregate around that thing. Beehive automatically added all of my newsletters, my previous newsletter editions into this quote unquote subreddit of mine. Now, one of the glaring problems with AI is we're all excited about it, right?
07:49 But we just don't know what to do. I remember when I first started using Chad GPT, I made a stupid song for my brother-in-law Matt entitled Fragile Matt, cuz that's my very mean nickname for him. And I sent it to him. That was the first way I ever used AI. And because I didn't know I didn't know what else it could do. That's what this video is. That's what a lot of my videos are for.
08:06 So, I'm going to say act like you're my community manager. Give me a day one setup checklist in order of importance based on first principles of vibrant profitable communities. And I say vibrant because communities can be hard. It's a marketplace two-sided. You need readers and you need writers. You need people to engage with each other because if someone checks out the community and it looks dead, they're gone.
08:24 Chicken and egg problem right now. A lot of people have solved communities. It's definitely doable. When I tell Claude first principles, it's going to go find all kinds of random examples of profitable communities when their founders have got on random podcast and said, "Here's how I make a profitable community." Okay, I'm not going to read this prompt output cuz it's long, but you can see it.
08:43 Pause it here if you want. And the best part about everything I'm about to show you is if you copy what I do in your AI of choice with one simple sentence, you can convert that entire chat window into a skill that you can sell, put on a marketplace or whatever if other people want to better monetize their email list. Several different ways of making money in this video today.
09:03 Seed 10 to 20 founding members by hand. Now, those have to be very like super fans, highly engaged people. How do we figure out who they are? Super easy. I'm about to show you. Make the room's identity obvious in one read, as in what problem does this community solve for what type of person? Give every new member an assignment in the first city 60 seconds.
09:20 I'm sure all of you have joined a Facebook group or community where it's like, "Hey, tell us where you're from." Like, that's not because they care. It's because they want engagement. So, the place looks and you're most likely to get an active community from the people that just join, which is kind of counterintuitive. You might think, "Oh, my OG's, the people that have been here forever, they're going to be the most loyal."
09:36 No, they've probably already checked out. Just like a newsletter, the best time to promote something to someone that joins your newsletter is right when they join because they're hot to trot and they're excited, not a day, a month, or a year later. The second best time is years later when they've opened every email and they love you. But the vast majority of people never get to that point because there's a lot of distraction.
09:56 Okay? See three to five questions anyone can answer without feeling dumb. Keep channels to three to or four max. That's very important. You're going to get really excited. you're like business ideas channel, business partnerships channel, get to know each other channel, people that live in New York channel. You are just deliluding yourself. So you might even want to add five to six channels and then just know in a month or three you're going to cut that down to two to three, the ones that are the most active cuz you
10:16 won't know which ones will be most popular at the outset. You just got to see. Number six, you reply to every single comment for the first 14 days. Love it. Makes sense. They want to see that you're in there, that you're active. Install one weekly ritual. Same post, same day every week. Love it. Cuz with this, you can make it free. You can make it free then paid.
10:33 You can make it only paid. Whatever you want to do. So if your friend owns a plumbing business, surely his email list isn't going to want to join a community and talk about their plumbing issues together. No. But all of those people live in the same city and local newsletters are one of the best newsletter concepts right now. So what's stopping you from helping your plumbing business owner friend from launching a local newsletter off the back of his email list?
10:55 Because you have the rare luxury of knowing where all of those people live, even down to their home address. Okay. Now, we don't have time to go through all eight of these today, but we could if we wanted to. We're going to do the most important. I'm going to have it do the top three, but instead of telling me who my most loyal subscribers are, I'm going to go a step further and tell it to make a segment of those people.
11:14 And a segment is just a group of subscribers based on something interesting or unique about them. And then if I wanted to go a step further, I could say send an email to that segment and invite them all from Claude. And then I'm going to have to do number two and three because I think those are important as well and are not a very big lift. But I do think it's important if you get that list of 10, 20, 50 people that freaking love you or love the business owner that you're working with, do whatever you can to get them
11:36 on the phone because an email, especially to a person that's on the newsletter, feels automated and impersonal, even if you wrote it by hand without AI and sent them one by one by one, right? Okay. So, I was curious. You know me, I love shiny objects. So, I asked Claude, "What other variables can you measure and rank by with the MCP to find interesting subscribers?
11:54 Geography. Give me everything so I know how to make money with this MCP as an agency owner." Remember, chase all the shiny objects. Go down the rabbit holes. That's where the money is. Okay. Focus is overrated. Momentum is underrated. Surface area, broad exposure to ideas, concepts, learnings, testings, underrated. Okay. Engagement. The core product.
12:11 All right. That's cool. Geography. Yes. So, you can find exactly what [snorts] city every subscriber is in. even if they don't tell you when they subscribe, which who would? Loyalty and tenure, acquisition source, where do they come from? A a newsletter subscriber from Facebook is probably more or less valuable than one from YouTube. Paying subscribers, free subscribers, money signal, behavior over time, yada yada yada.
12:31 Do you think you could use this valuable data? You could also call it like reactivation. Of course, you can. Let's say you find a landscaping business owner that has an email list of 20,000. And that's not that unreasonable if they've been around for a number of years. 20,000. Cool. Half of those people don't know or care about the business anymore.
12:48 So, let's call it 10. Be conservative. Cool. Open rate on that is going to be 40%. So, let's call it 4,000 active subscribers. We're being conservative. That's only 20% of our original number. You don't think you could create an extra $2,000 worth of value to that business owner. With those 4,000 people, let's just say you had a 0.1% conversion rate, which would be four people.
13:08 Four people every month you get to do a new landscaping project. And these are like engaged people. These are people that already had an experience. They already paid the same business. So, it's not like a cold email. It's it's a hot email. Okay. 0.1% every month. And these landscaping projects are $3,000 each. Okay. Four people per month time 3,000.
13:26 That's $12,000 a month in revenue, not profit. You don't think that business owner would pay you $1,000 a month to generate $12,000 a month for them. And then to keep generating even more as his email list grows, because remember what I said earlier, those fresh subscribers are even better than the aged ones, right? So that 12,000 a month goes to 12,500 13,000 15, etc.
13:46 That would be a 12x return on investment that they paying you. Okay, $1,000 a month. That's awesome just for using AI to do stuff for me. Can you find 10 business owners to pay you for that? Of course you can. How many humans does the average person know? About 500, right? Facebook followers, 500ish, give or take. How many of those are business owners?
14:06 About 50. Cool. How many of those can you convince? Especially if it was no risk to them. and they don't have to pay you anything unless you actually generate revenue for them. And then of those that you actually generate revenue for, how many of them are going to tell their friends? And then the 50 becomes a hundred because of referrals because one person that's thrilled usually refers multiple, not just one.
14:25 This video was originally supposed to be about beehive communities and it still is and it's awesome and I'm using it and you can use it with Claude so you don't have to learn how to do anything. But most importantly, you need to manage the email list of people you know and help them make more money with it. What about people you don't know? Sure, them too.
14:42 They're just a lot harder to close. And I'm trying to make this video realistic. You can use ads. You can post in Facebook groups to local communities. Post on Reddit, yada yada yada. There's 33 million business owners in America alone. 400 million around the world. Yes, you can find 10 of them to pay you $1,000 a month each or more. More than 10, more than a thousand.
14:58 Your choice. And almost no one watching this video knew how to do any of this a few years ago, but now we have AI. And congratulations, you're now an expert. Okay. So, everything I just showed you was done with the intent to help you start a business, a community business using either uh the Beehive MCP through your favorite AI tool or just using Beehive Community directly, but I haven't actually showed you what the Beehive Community feature actually looks like.
15:23 So, let me do that real quick. First of all, let's lead with the thesis here, the title wave that we all want to ride. The thesis being that traditional education is dying a slow and painful death. Look at the numbers. parents electing to homeschool their kids exploding or people enrolling or choosing to not enroll in traditional colleges and universities.
15:41 It's not looking good and it's not surprising. I'm surprised we're so late on this. I'm very very very bullish on the future of people learning on the internet through communities and software tools like these. So, if you were to use Beehive Community to launch something, you'd be riding a title wave. That mythical title wave that we all want to ride when starting a business.
16:02 Okay, here is a placeholder of what beehive communities look like. Um, think of it like a Facebook group, a subreddit, and school all had a baby together. Okay, it centers around a feed, a central feed, uh, where you can post, react, respond, repost, everything. You can post events, comment on events, RSVP to events, all in one feed. Here is the messages tab where you can DM with your members as the community owner or where members can DM with each other because in any community the name of the game is interaction and
16:32 engagement. It's just not going to work unless people are communicating with each other and logging in. And then of course right here your notifications tab and then different channels within your community. So with mine, I might have business owners or home service business owners, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs, business curious, or I could get super niche and say make a community called, you know, appliance rental business starters or something.
16:54 Doesn't matter. There are no rules. Some of these might only have four, five, seven people in there, but it doesn't matter if they're hyperengaged. You could even have like an accountability sub where people post their wins or they hold each other accountable to stuff. Then right here is just where the newsletters you send out to your list get automatically published.
17:14 And then here's a couple channels that I have. Here's your dashboard where you can see number of members, post created, member participation percentage. Here list out all of your actual members. Here's the gamification features because of course everything has to be gamified. Now, and in the context of this, your gamification would be they'd get a badge if someone posted for the first time, if someone replied in the channel for the first time, if someone engaged in the community every day for a week, whatever it is you
17:39 want to set. Click on new badge. This one's called active, and the description is post daily for 7 days. And that could be for specific members or members in a segment. And you can just assign them there. Or you can make a segment based on how frequently they engage in a community, and it would auto assign. So you don't have to ever do this manually if you don't want.
17:58 Here's where you create new channels. You can make some free, some paid. Here are the discussions happening in the channels. Any events either in person or virtual, they would go here. You can sync it with your Luma account. Luma is a business that enables you to post and advertise events and webinars, etc. Settings, design, change how it looks, change the onboarding message, change the onboarding flow here.
18:19 So I click on boarding flow. If join community, wait for a minute, send a welcome message. You can add them to segments. You could put them in a flow where they get specific emails at certain intervals or once they do certain things in the community. And then of course, right here, you can sync all of your existing content and content moving forward and even sync your podcast as well.
18:38 What I love about this is just how simple and easy the user interface is. It's not clunky and you don't need to be technologically savvy to figure out how to make this thing work. And again, with the MCP, like I already showed you, you just connect it and ask it to do stuff. So you don't even need to interact with the user interface yourself if you don't want to.
18:55 And this is very multimodal, if you will, multimedia friendly. Pictures, images, video is soon to come if not already here. They can comment, react, reply, repost. And remember, these are available for any of the paid plans on Beehive. Now, this works ideally if you already have a newsletter cuz you can just invite your whole newsletter to it. But if you don't, then it should be a good impetus for you to start a newsletter.
19:16 I do like that flow better starting with a newsletter and then pushing them towards a community as opposed to the other way around because a newsletter is a much lower stakes ask than a community. But you do you. But remember, the most likely time a newsletter subscriber would ever even want to think about your community is the second they subscribe to your newsletter.
19:36 Not years later, unless they're hyper loyal and they've been dying to buy something from you or to respond to your call to action. But most people that are most likely to engage are going to be right when they subscribe to you. So take advantage of that moment in time. This is a title wave. I love Beehive. I literally do. Please use my affiliate link if you end up using them.
19:55 It would mean a lot. Go check out Beehive Communities. And if you want to try Beehive, you can use code Chris30 for 30% off your first 3 months. Remember, Substack takes 10% of everything. Behive takes 0%. If you want to see my other beehive videos, I've got about a half dozen. They're in the playlist link below. Thanks for hanging out on the Kerner