One Person AI Business You Can Start in Minutes Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 Did you know that real estate agents are paying  30 to 50 bucks for one photo of a room that has furniture [music] in it that isn't really  there? One photo. And a house needs about six of these photos, so we're talking two  to 400 bucks per listing [music], and there are entire companies that do nothing  else but this. But here's the thing, that picture costs [music] about a penny to make  now thanks to AI.

00:17 This is a business that you need to start thanks to AI, and I'm going to build  the thing for you on [music] my screen today, and you're going to see the actual bill for every  single picture. You're going to have the prompt that builds the whole app, the staging prompt  [music] that makes a room actually look real, which is the one that matters, and you'll have  the exact email that I sent [music] to get customers.

00:38 It's all in a free Google Doc in the  description, and at the end, I'm going to have an AI agent email 100 real estate photographers while  I sit here and do nothing. I'm also going to show you the one rule that gets these photos yanked  off the MLS [music] because people are breaking it right now and they don't know it. So, the  business we're talking about is virtual staging.

00:57 Someone sends you a photo of an empty room. You  send back the same room with furniture in it, and you charge 25 bucks per photo or 149 bucks for  the whole listing. I'm going to build it on the Higgsfield API, which is the version of Higgsfield  where your own app talks straight to their models, and you pay per picture instead of uh  subscription. Higgsfield is a partner of the show.

01:17 I used them for a long time. Links  below. Let's go. Now, before I touch anything, here's why this is a business and why it's a good  one. An empty room photographs terribly. It looks small, it looks cold, and a buyer scrolling Zillow  at 11:13 at night scrolls right past it. And every agent knows this. The old fix is physical staging,  where a company brings real furniture into the house, and that can run like thousands of dollars  and takes a week.

01:39 So, agents started paying for virtual staging instead, and that has been a real  business for about 10 years with real companies and real prices. Don't believe me? Check out these  two businesses. BoxBrownie. What do they cost? $24 per image. How about this one? Stucco. Stuccococo.  Three C's. Pricing? $25 to $35 per photo. This is good. Competition is good.

02:07 This tells us that  we're not reinventing a new industry cuz that usually doesn't work out very well. And there  are other high-end agencies that charge $50 to $100 per picture. So, here's the math. You charge  25 or 20, which basically undercuts everybody. Six photos a listing is 150 bucks. 20 listings a  month is three grand. And your cost for these 120 pictures is pennies, low dollars, which I'll prove  to you later in the video with a real receipt.

02:28 So, we've got three grand coming in, a few bucks going  out, and you never have to meet anybody. Now, let's talk about the five people that will pay you  for this. Number one, solo real estate agents with a vacant listing. They feel this pain the most  because an empty house that sits is money out of their pocket every single month. And number two,  property managers.

02:48 Rentals get listed constantly, and nobody stages a rental, ever. It doesn't  make sense. Number three, home builders with spec homes, speculative homes, homes they're  building from the ground up with no buyer in mind yet. They've got three identical empty houses, and  they need them all to look different. Number four, flippers. They're already spending money to make  the place look good.

03:07 This is the cheapest thing on their list that will move the needle the most.  And number five, the one I'm building for, real estate photographers. And this is the smart one.  A photographer already shoots 50 listings a month, and already has the agent's trust, and already  sends them an invoice. He's got his foot in their door. So, you're not selling to 50 agents, you're  selling to one guy who sells to 50 agents.

03:28 Sell the one to sell the many. That's the whole game.  But, one thing before we build, you're going to hear me say the phrase API a lot. An API is just  what happens when your app talks to another app. No subscription, no seat, no monthly fee. You put  20 bucks in a wallet, and you pay per picture like a vending machine. And the part I actually  love, which you're going to see in a second, is that before it makes anything, it tells you  exactly what that picture is going to cost.

03:53 It's a receipt before the purchase. And that's kind of  rare in the age of AI. So, I'm going to go to this website console.hixfield.ai. Here's the setup and  I'm going in the exact order that you should go in. You would sign up if you don't already have  an account. I already do, so I'm just going to log in. Okay, so when using the API, you're going  to click on explore models.

04:13 And right now, if you sign up, you get 15% off their launch models. If  you add a valid credit card and a business email, you get $15 in free credits. And when you do this,  your one image model and two video models drops to up to 50%off the list price, which is the lowest  price on the market for something like this. And if you reach out to the sales team, that price can  lock for 12 months.

04:35 So, we're going to browse the image and the video models, and I'm just going to  pick this first one cuz it looks good. I'm going to click select discounts. Okay, we'll do select  that image model one, and then we're going to select two video models. I'll just do the top two.  Claim, confirm and claim. This is how I get my discount. Cool. Now I have the maximum discount.

04:58 Awesome. Now we're going to go to playground and then API keys. Okay, create API key. We'll  just call it staging 1.0. Create key. Okay, we're going to copy the API key by clicking that  button. And we're going to do this with a coding agent, so that's what we want. Remember, you got  to use a business email and add your credit card in order to claim these discounts.

05:24 And here's  what's really cool about this. You get the receipt before you purchase, try before you buy.  This is the image model that I chose. You would just put in your prompt right here, upload  whatever image you want to use right there, and it's going to tell you right right there how  much it will cost to generate that image. So, with whatever prompt this is and whatever  image that was in here as a placeholder, it would cost 37 cents for this.

05:46 Now, we're  using the API, aka another tool to do this, but we could still find out what it would cost  inside Hixfeld directly. And now, you're going to go to your favorite coding tool. It could  be codex on open AI, it could be cloud code, it could be replit. I like replit, so this is  how I'm going to build this little widget for myself. Go over to Replit, create new.

06:06 This is  my prompt. Make a simple web app that I can use to upload pictures of blank rooms and have the  Higgsfield API stage them with nice furniture. Just need to type a prompt and upload a file. Dead  simple. Ask me for the API key. Okay? Replit is asking for my Higgsfield API key right there. Just  paste that in. This key is saved securely. Okay, here we go.

06:28 Wow, that looks nice. Should we give  it a shot? I've got a picture of a blank room. Add modern furniture and some plants. That's  it. This could be a one-shot prompt. Oops, that didn't work. Not enough credits. Okay, good  to know. Got to add some credits. Right there, back to Higgsfield. Add funds. We'll start with  five bucks. All right, we have $5.

06:47 Now, let's try it again. Okay, this didn't show up before.  Apparently, you got to actually pay for this thing. Who would have thought? Now, we could use  this as an internal tool and we could do all this ourselves and then hand the pictures over to the  realtor or it could be self-serve. We could put this on the internet and enable people to use it.

07:07 Look at that. Boom, took about 10 seconds. Plants, modern furniture. The room looks the exact same,  same flooring, same window. Added some trees outside, why not? And added a picture on the wall.  It works. Everything works. Guys, keep in mind, I could have gotten really complex with this  prompt and talked about like HEIC photos, JPEG, convert it to this, but just no.

07:26 That's just  friction between the thing actually launching and stupid and it'll work. How about we try  another one? Hit the X. And you know what, we could also add a button to this app where you  just click generate and it will just put whatever it thinks is appropriate, right? If we don't  even know what to describe to put in the room, it might just be nice to not even  have to type in a prompt.

07:49 In fact, let's see if it works right now  if we do that. It won't let me. Allow me to click stage this room with no prompt,  so it'll just add something that it thinks looks nice. While we wait for that update to run on the  software, we're going to say add crappy furniture and way too much artwork. Let's go see how much  that first image cost us. 7 cents.

08:07 Not bad at all. All right. We have spent 7 cents on that first  picture. Just think about it, guys. That is a $30 photo. [laughter] It's crappy room, but it's a  $30 photo. Crappy furniture, way too much artwork. The reason that staging works is because people  want to be able to see themselves in the house, in the room. We're not creative people. We need  someone to remove that friction for us.

08:36 Okay, the button now only requires a photo when the  prompt is empty, the app sends yada yada yada. Allow me to upload all accepted photo file types.  Okay, here's the other version of this picture. Expensive artwork, nice antique furniture, cool.  Now, I don't want to wait around for customers to find me, never do. So, I'm going to hand a  list to my AI agent and it's going to go get them.

09:02 I'm going to use three different AI tools  in this video. Hicksfield being the best. Let's pop on over to Muse, which has been my AI agent  of choice here lately. Here's my prompt. Email 100 active and top-selling real estate agents about  my photo staging service. $25 per pic or 150 for the whole listing. Ask if they'd like to see a  free sample on a current listing of theirs as the closing call to action.

09:25 See, the reason I said  top-selling active is because most real estate agents don't sell any homes. Not many, but any,  right? There's over 2 million real estate agents and that just means they have an active license.  It doesn't mean they're actively selling. So, I want Muse to go out and find agents listed  on realtor.com, redfin.com, zillow.com based on how many homes they've sold recently.

09:47 So, I  know that they are a top-selling agent because I'm not going to sell this to agents that aren't  actually selling homes. All right? I can also have it do this to 1,000 people. Or I could have it  double up and find the websites for these same 100 people that it's finding email addresses  for and submit a contact form on their website as well for some redundancy.

10:08 But, it's just wild  to me that it's going to go do this for me while I'm just sitting here brewing down with you.  You know what? I'm going to go a step further. Um all caps, make them local to DFW and mention to  them I live here as well. Your close rate will go up by 10 to 30% if the people you're reaching  out to know that you're one of them, that you have something similar to them, that you live near  where they live.

10:29 Sell it before you have it. Got it. DFW only. That's already how we scoped it. One  of three stage sample to it. It's going to even put one of their listing addresses in the subject  line. Like it's going to be personalized to them. I'm Chris Kerner, I live here. DFW local, not  a beginner. I do virtual staging. 25 per photo, 150 for the whole listing.

10:50 Just reply yes and I'll  send it back. No call needed. That's a good cold email. Send from my personal email? Yes. Back over  here to Replit, it looks like this software now accepts every single image file source because  it wasn't before. So, that's cool. But, I will say you got to be careful when building software  because feature creep is a real thing.

11:06 You're going to want to keep tweaking, tweaking, fixing,  adding features, buttons, optimizing colors. Don't. Just don't. At a certain point you just got  to stop. Done is better than perfect. Guys, think about it. 100 different real estate photographers  now know that I Oh my gosh. Actually, I realized I didn't prompt it to email real estate  photographers.

11:23 I prompted it to re-email email real estate agents. So, I got to fix that. Let me  go fix that real quick. What I was about to say was 100 photographers now know that I exist. But,  really 100 agents know that I exist by accident. So, we got to email 100 more. But, you get the  idea. Here's the rule I promised you in the beginning of this video. This is the part that's  going to save you.

11:40 When you send a staged photo to an agent, it has to be labeled as virtually  staged, especially if you're in California because California passed a law AB 723 that kicked off  in January 1st of this year and digitally altered listing photos need a disclosure on them. If  you're in California, I hope you're not. But, in other states, it's up to your local MLS rules  and they're all a little different.

12:01 So, go look yours up. It'll take 2 minutes. Ask ChatGPT or  whatever. But, the line that matters everywhere is this. You want to stage the furniture, not the  house. You can add a couch, you can add a rug, lamp, art on the wall, but you can't renovate  the kitchen, right? This is according to a lot of regulations. And of course you can't. If someone  shows up to a house expecting to see a beautifully renovated kitchen and it's not there, that's not  a good look.

12:26 That's a bait and switch. You have wasted their time and you could be held liable  for that. So, furniture, fine. Permanent fixtures, appliances, renovations, not cool. Illegal. Okay?  You can't take out a power line, right? If it's in the front yard and it's ugly. No, because  that's actually there. You can't add in a lawn that isn't there. The test is whether a buyer  walks in the front door and feels lied to.

12:49 If they're surprised, you broke the rule. And agents  can lose listings over that. So, if you're careful about it, then they will respect you. And if they  respect you, then they will pay you. Last thing, and it's the one that I would actually go do. This  app that I just built does only one job. It puts furniture in an empty room. But, with the same key  and the same app, the same models on the back end, you can turn a daytime shot into a twilight shot.

13:13 You can change the lighting. You could do videos. That's what photographers sell. You could change  a cluttered yard into a clean yard or a gray sky into a blue sky. Each one of those can be its  own product or another line on the same invoice, and you don't need a new app or new build. It's  the same API key. You don't have to have four different businesses.

13:33 You're just writing four  different prompts. Guys, don't ever forget the first dollar in any business is the best, funnest  dollar you will ever earn on this big blue planet. And this one costs you about 7 cents to go get.  So, Higgsfield supports this channel and I support them. So, go to console.higgsfield.ai. Link is in  the description. You will get 15%off the launch models.

13:53 Put a real card, credit card in and a  business email, and they will also add $15 in free credits and you'll get up to 50%discounts.  And you get one image and two video models to work with. If you want to lock in that price  for 12 months, just reach out to their sales team. Everything's in the description, prompts,  everything. So, go stage your guest room and send it to a photographer.

14:11 And if you got a weird way  you're making money, I want you on the show. So, go to tkoyes.com and fill out the application  and we'll see you next time on the Corner