Transcript YouTube English auto-captions. ======================================================================== So, I want to start with a confession, and it's a little bit embarrassing, but it's current. So, right now, today, I'm paying for a mastermind that I haven't even shown up to since December, since like 6 months ago. The meetings are happening, I'm just not in them. I've got courses I bought that I've never opened, tools I paid for every month that I've logged into maybe once or twice. And for years, that was the whole pattern. I collected stuff, and after all of it, the one thing that I did not have, actually, was the only thing that actually counts, a single paying customer. So, here's what it took me way too long to see. It wasn't laziness, it was the opposite. It was the most doctor thing I could possibly do, because we're trained for a decade to never act until we are justified to have it, to be credentialed for it, to get the degree, pass the boards, finish the fellowship, earn the right before you're allowed to touch anything. And that instinct keeps patients alive, but in business, it can be a trap. I call it the credentialing trap. And it's the single biggest reason doctors never launch anything. We tell ourselves that we're preparing. I need a better website first. I need to build the course first. I need to learn all the AI tools first. We're not preparing, we're just collecting one more credential we don't need, so we don't have to ship the thing we're afraid to ship. So, here's the day it finally broke for me. The first real thing I ever sold was a workshop. I made more money during my lunch break selling that person on the workshop than I made that entire week as a physician. And that's the day that the collecting stopped, and that's what this episode is about. It's getting you to have your version of that workshop, that product, that service faster, because the truth is smaller than all the stuff we collect. It's one audience, one painful problem, one simple paid offer, one way to reach people. That's the whole thing. And that's where AI finally earns its keep. Not as magic, not as a replacement for your judgment, but as a part-time assistant or a full-time assistant who works nights and weekends and never gets tired. Where you're still seeing patients at Monday at 3:00, they're they're out there working for you day in and day out. Now, if you've been with me for the last few episodes, we've been on an AI run. We've talked about the tools, the agents, how to stop using AI like a search engine. So, this one points out all of that at a goal a lot of you have told me you want. You want to build something that pays you outside the clinic. So, here's why AI matters. As physicians, we're not short on expertise or on credibility or the ability to solve hard problems under pressure. We're short on time, we're short on clarity, and just that execution bandwidth. So, that gap between what you already know and what you think you know, that's the gap that AI closes. Now, before we touch on AI, I think you need a road map because if you don't know the terrain, AI will just help you build the wrong thing faster. So, there's five lanes a physician can drive in. Number one is the expertise business. This is coaching, consulting, advisory, helping with career transition, helping with performance or burnout coaching. You're selling what you know. Number two is the content business. So, this is your own newsletter, your course, your podcast, maybe your own YouTube channel, maybe you're building a paid community. It's slower to start, but there's a bigger ceiling for you. You start being able to scale things. Number three is that clinical adjacent business. This could be getting involved in telehealth, weight loss, longevity, hormones, sleep. It's still close to medicine, but you're doing it you're practicing medicine on your own terms. Fourth is the B2B side. This is B12 B track. This is could be in medtech or startups or advising pharma companies. Uh practice opportunity consulting, medical writing, speaking. They well they pay well and they can pay on time. And then fifth is your local clinic, your private pay practice. Cash pay, aesthetics, executive physicals, direct care. It's real overhead, but you can develop real margin. And the key is that AI can help you evaluate all these five lanes. It should not pick for you based on what sounds fun at 11:00 at night. But the right lane can fit five things. It can help you with your expertise, your schedule, your risk tolerance, the actual market demand, and your income goal. One thing we don't see it is excitement because when I help doctors get involved in these things and having their own road map, that's really is the fuel that I think spurs a lot of doctors in helping them with their career. Now, let's let us talk about what not to build first. And this can save you 4 to 6 months. And this is where smart doctors they really understand and really be able to grow and scale what they want to do. You don't want to start with a full course. You don't need to build the expensive website, the complicated funnels with the upsells and downsells, the app. I know doctors love apps, but I'm telling you this Don't start with the logo, the business cards, uh picking the branding between two shades of blue. Start with just one audience, one painful problem, one specific outcome, one small paid offer, and one simple way to reach the people who have that problem. Let me put it in words that you guys understand. Think of your chief complaint. You don't order the full workup before you've taken a history. You start with the one thing that actually matters to the patient. What hurts? And that's all AI is here to help you do is to simplify, but not overbuild faster. A confused doctor with a powerful tool just builds a fancy thing nobody wants. All right. I promise you I want to get this done for you over the weekend. How to build your side gig. Now, I want to get the expectations I want to help manage your expectations. You're not building the whole business this weekend. The goal is one thing you can put in front of a real person by Monday. So, step one, choose your lane. I'll give you five lanes. Choose it. Then open your AI tool and give it the real input. They can help you. Go over your background, your interest, the hours you actually have, your income goal. Now, don't overthink it. Docs, we love to overthink it. On which tool? Now, I am versed in a lot of different tools. Cloud co-work, chat GPT, Gemini Manas, open claw. I do it because I help other doctors decide help them to see what is the best AI tool for them. And I feel like I need to know all of them to do that. But, that's me cuz I'm not This isn't a shopping tool. I think these days the tool is interchangeable. We're seeing AI tools try to out-beat each other every week or month. The move is what matters, okay? Just start with something. Maybe something you're already comfortable. Open it up and you're ready to go. All right. Now, here's a prompt you can steal. Put this in your AI tool in your AI favorite AI tool. Based on my background as a physician, my interests, the hours I realistically have each week, and my income goal, give me five realistic side gig ideas I could test without quitting medicine. Then make it score each idea. Your audience, urgency, the ability to pay, ease of testing, the regulatory risk, the time required. What fits with your credibility? Now, you're not after the most exciting idea. You're after the shortest path to a yes. Step number two, I want you to define your audience and get specific because a vague audience builds a vague business that makes vague money, which is to say none. You don't want to say, "I help people get healthy." Right? A better way to phrase it is, "I help busy physicians lose 15 lb without bolting onto another complicated program onto a schedule that's already crazy." The more specific you get, the more someone hears it and think, "That sounds like me." Feed AI your rough audience and make it narrow by pain, by urgency, by ability to pay. Then push it three layers deeper than its first answer. All right. Step number three, create your first paid offer. Now, we all think too big here. We're thinking we're going to have a 30-hour full course, the membership. You're building the whole hospital. I just want you to open up the small clinic first, maybe a part-time clinic. A small paid offer that proves somebody's going to pay, a 60-to-90-minute strategy session, a four-week sprint, a paid workshop, a premium consult, an advisory package. It needs several things, and actually I condensed into seven, and AI can help with all of it. Who's this for? Who's this offer for? The problem, the outcome, the time frame, the delivery, and the price range. And then, the next step. If you miss that next step and you've got a beautiful offer, you've got a beautiful offer that goes nowhere. All right. Step number four. I've talked about the MVP, but I'm going to talk about the MSA, the minimum sales asset, minimum being the operative word. AI can draft these in an afternoon. A one-page landing page, a short bio, a consult script, an FAQ, a list of all the objections that your prospective client might have, five LinkedIn posts, five emails, a simple intake form. And that's it. AI can create all of those for you. What you're doing is you're testing demand. You're not trying to build the next meta, the next media company, right? Okay. Now, the next step is on you cuz AI can't do this for you. I want you to test it with the real people. AI can draft the outreach, can polish the message for you, can prep you for the call, but it can't validate your business in a vacuum. Real validation is a reply, a book call, a payment. That first book call is your first positive result. Everything before it is just a differential. Nothing else counts. All right, I want to give you some scenarios on here. Now, I'm keeping this anonymous, but you're out there and you know who you are who you are. I work with a lot of doctors in the last two decades. Now, all right, and I want to give you two examples. We have one doctor, brilliant clinician, she wanted to build something around prevention, specifically breast cancer prevention. It's important work. She put in the time. She built the course. She spent hours upon hours recording videos. And then she launched it. You know what happened? Nobody bought it. And it was hard to watch because she did almost everything right. The quality wasn't a problem. The premise was. People don't reach for their wallet to prevent a problem that they don't feel yet. Prevention is a value, but it's rarely a purchase. Now, I have another person. Another outstanding doctor. She's another physician I work with, an OBGYN. She didn't build a course. She didn't build a platform. She looked at her current patients already sitting in her practice, the ones who were already asking about their weight. And she said, "You know what? I've got a number of the people in my practice who could benefit from weight loss." And I'm sure you have the same in your own practice. What she did is she added a weight loss coaching program. But she built it around things that she liked. She helped them with the diet plans. She even set up where they would even go to local stores in her neighborhood. And she would have videos of her deciding what she would buy. She had amazing expertise. She has existing trust. and this is a problem that people were already losing sleep over, and they were already trying to solve on their own. That one program added $120,000 a year to her practice. The market does not pay you for how important a problem is. It pays you for how badly someone already wants it solved. And that's the difference between those two doctors. They're both intelligent, both have the same credentials, but one built it on something people needed, the other built it on something people wanted. And here's the trap with AI. It'll help you build either one in a weekend, just as fast, just as polished, but before you let it build anything, make sure it's pointed to the problem that people will actually pay you to fix. All right. Now, here's what's going to keep you going after the weekend, cuz once that first offer exists, AI can be your part-time assistant, the one who works while you sleep. It can summarize your prospect calls, it can draft your follow-ups, it can turn the questions people keep asking you into your next five posts. It can help build you checklists and worksheets. It can spin up a simple SOP. It can create one webinar into a month's worth of repurposed content. Every objection you hear, feed it back, and then continue to sharpen the offer. All right. One piece of work is going to feed the next. Now, here's the line, if you're to remember anything from my podcast episode, it's this. AI doesn't replace the work, it just reduces the drag. You're still doing the work that matters, you're just not doing it with a parking brake on. Okay. I do need to talk about guardrails, and I know I've said this every episode, but I want to keep it quick and short because I don't want you to do this. You never want to put in private health information into a random AI tool, ever. Don't ship it anything clinical or sensitive without reading it yourself first. Those are the two things. Never put in PHI, and always read everything before you send it out, okay? AI is like that resident. You're the attending. It can draft a note, it can run the workup, it can suggest a plan, but you're the one who eventually signs off on it. You stay the physician, the strategist, the final reviewer. Now, I don't like doing episodes where you just listen to it. I always want to give you guys an action plan. So, here's your assignment. It takes you about 30 minutes. I want you to open up your AI tool and have it give you one three side gig ideas built upon your actual expertise. Number two, the best audience for each one. And number three, the painful problem each audience already wants solved. Number four, one simple paid offer for each. Number five, build it a landing page outline for your best offer. Number six, five content ideas to test whether anyone even cares. And seven, a console call script. Oh, one more. And eight, three follow-up messages. All right. Let's give that that again cuz that was a lot and you may want to rewind it again. Three Number one, three side gig ideas built upon your actual expertise. Number two, the best audience for each one. Number three, the painful problem each audience already wants solved. Number four, a simple paid offer. Number five, a landing page outline. Six, give it five content ideas. Seven, a console call script. And then number eight, three follow-up messages. Then what you're doing, let AI do its thing. And then when it's done, it's going to give you some real good information that you can start using. And then when it's done, now it's your turn. You need to pick one idea and then put it in front of real people. All right. It's a lot of information. Let's bring it home here. Your degree gave you your expertise. That's done. You've earned it. AI gives you speed and that's new. But neither one is a business. You still need a clear audience, a painful problem, a real offer, and honest feedback from the market. No tool skips those, okay? So, bottom line, I don't want you to spend the next 6 months collecting tools, designing logos, building a course nobody asked for. That's that credentialing trap, all right? It feels like it's progress, but it's really just procrastination. Use AI to get the first test faster. Start small, validate fast, keep your clinical judgment in the loop always. Build a side gig one simple system at a time. Because here's the thing that I keep coming back to. Medicine can pay the bills, but AI builds that balance sheet. Now, if you want to help turning this into something real, then I highly encourage you to join our free school group, Doctors Online Success, at doctorsonlinesuccess.com. I do this with another fellow physician entrepreneur who's brilliant, Dr. Ann Truong. And at the time of this recording, we are going to help physicians with their AI. We're going to help you build agents in your own practice, in your own side gig, in your business. If that is of interest to you, come join the Doctors Online Success. We have a waiting list. We'll let you know when it opens. All right, guys. I love to work with you. Now is the time for you to start building something, all right? Make a difference. Remember, guys, you're going to have your ups and downs as physician entrepreneurs. Do something a little each day to get you closer to your goals and keep moving forward.