知识产品没死，它正在变成软件

00:00I think it's obvious that everything is changing right now. Business, the internet, social media, coding, art. It feels like what worked just last year doesn't work anymore. And since we're here to talk about the oneperson business or just online business as a whole, because it applies to everything, I'm not here to give you just some recycled advice, right? It's 2026. We're going into 2026. Everyone's creating the best business model to start in 2026 videos. I am too for the views. But with most of those videos, they're just saying the same thing they did in 2025. And that was okay when they were saying it last year and the year before because not much changed.

00:36So I'm not going to tell you to start an agency. I'm not going to tell you to start freelancing. I'm not going to tell you to even build an info product. I'm not even going to tell you to start coaching or consulting or whatever the popular business model was like starting a community or anything. And I've already talked about those plenty of times in the past. Just go look at the oneperson business playlist on my channel. But instead, I want to show you the business model that I think makes sense right now for the next two to three years, maybe. And the reason I'm making this video is because I keep seeing online, because they're trying to get views, too, that valuebased content is dead or info products are dead or coaching is dead.

01:17And what that's doing is it's making people feel like they just shouldn't start as a creator. they should just give up and not even try because they don't know what to do. But that's just kind of how things go when a new paradigm starts to emerge because it's not like that paradigm is figured out yet. It's it's not clear. Nobody can just tell you what to do. You kind of have to try new things and experiment until you create the new thing. So let's talk about how the oneperson business is changing and then let's talk about the future of education and specifically education products and then how you can actually take advantage of this like what you can literally start doing and learning

01:54today. So part one the oneperson business model is evolving because for the past few decades info products and coaching just reign supreme. That's what you did. If you wanted to be a creator and you didn't want to rely on sponsorships and ad revenue, you would build an info product or you would do coaching. And I think those were great things because with the internet, as one person, those were kind of your only options. That's how as one singular person, that is the caveat here, one singular person, not a team, you could start an entire business online. That's crazy. That's insane. One single person could be their own marketing content, sales, product, and even I guess HR department.

02:39You write content to get traffic without needing a physical business in the right location. You do something interesting with your life or learn one of your passions enough until you become somewhat of an expert. And then you share that thing with others in an educational or entertaining way. Your brand is you. Your content are little pieces of your mind. And your products are processes that solved a problem in your life and led to something better. Many people over complicate that. One example that I would always give is if you love productivity, that was one of your passions. You studied productivity. Then you start talking about productivity online.

03:14You iterate because your content isn't going to be good at first. So you improve it until it gets good and you start growing and then you use that traffic to feed into a product. What do you build for a product? I don't know. What do you buy? What did you buy that helped you with productivity? Was it a planner? In that case, you go to Amazon, you order the top five planners, you break them down, you use them, you deconstruct them, you understand what you do and don't like about the planners, and then you create your own. It doesn't even have to be a physical product. You can create a notion template or even a printable planner or a course plus those things.

03:49It It's really up to you. And in order to make 50,000, $100,000, $500,000 a year, it's really just those two levers, right? You write content, you get traffic, and depending on the amount of traffic you get and how good your product actually is, that results in the amount of money that you make. And the beautiful thing there is that your value isn't determined by an employer. Your value is practically uncapped depending on how many people you reach. So this quickly forces you to kind of remove the employment mindset from your mind because you can make so much more just as one person. The thing here is that this is never going to go away, but the vessel by which you do it will continue to change.

04:27So it may not be a planner that you print out anymore. Now my entire goal with my brand and these videos is to help you become futureproof. That's one of my passions. That's what I like educating and entertaining around. And becoming futurep proof to me is built around two pillars. The first is how do you figure out what you want in life which incorporates psychology, philosophy and personal development. And then number two is how do you succeed with that in today's world to reach that to what you want in life and that involves skill acquisition business technology and now AI. So previously on the internet the second part of that how do you succeed in today's world especially as one person that was largely handled by having a personal brand and creating an information product or coaching information and product and coaching

05:14they're kind of the same thing just one is one-on-one the other is mass scale and that info product could evolve from a simple ebook level one a course level two a cohort level three and a community level four but now since valuebased content and info products are dead I think there's something a bit deeper at play here. You still pursue your curiosities and interests and share it with other people. But the vessel for doing that is no longer a static PDF, a course, or a community. Now, before we continue into the things you're actually here for, I want to make something very clear. I am not on the jaded side that just thinks all info products are a scam.

05:49I think they are life-changing in many ways. Yes, sure, some are scams, obviously. I think they are the antidote to the negative aspects of traditional education, i.e. conformity and getting trained into a job that you hate and not seeing any other option, the default path. I do not think that info products are going away for good. I do not think that they are dead. What I say in this video will not apply to every single industry or niche. But as with any career sector right now, especially thanks to AI, the baseline that gets results has been raised. An average person at a low level of development can take the quick and easy route very easily.

06:28You can tell AI to generate an ebook on this topic, to write viral content on this topic, to generate some images and assets and call it art, and those can make some form of money. But those people will never compete with those who understand what's going on. In other words, it's never been easier to start a mediocre oneperson business. But if you don't want to be in the lower class, I hate saying that of the creator economy. and the lower the lower class absolutely exists. You need to understand something very important. So that leads into part two which is why info products are dying. And I promise you have to understand this.

07:04I know this is just theory before we actually get into but you have to change your mind. You have to understand what's going on. You don't understand by me giving you practical steps. If you just want the practical steps and you want to fail, then go take this YouTube video, paste it into some transcription tool like Eden and go ahead try and follow it and fail. Info products are dying because markets move through predictable stages of awareness and saturation. So Eugene Schwarz, legendary copywriter, categorized these into five stages. At level one, when nobody is in the market yet, you just state what your product does and that tends to do the job.

07:38Then competitors arrive and you have to make bigger claims. Then the market gets skeptical. So you explain your mechanism. So saying I will help you make money online started to sound like a scam and you had to be more specific like implement the two-hour content ecosystem. Shout out to you if you know what that's from. But then competitors copy that mechanism and finally everyone is exhausted by claims altogether and brand starts to be the major differentiator which is happening right now with personal branding. People crave the sense of belonging they get from joining a tribe with a mission. And I've talked about that before.

08:11I'll link a newsletter that I wrote on how your mission is your niche rather than a specific skill or topic. That will help you a lot if you don't know that yet. But community and authenticity matter more than who has the best sounding product. The thing is we've hit the final stage of market sophistication across the board with info products. So the really really good ones are still going to do really really good but the average ones which is average which is the majority most people are going to do really bad. And that also means that since we're kind of like at the top of this level, that authenticity in and of itself doesn't make a difference anymore.

08:50People are just tired of seeing courses and coaching. And it sucks because those things are impactful if you're a clear thinker. But there's more to this. The select few who are smart enough to transcend info products as a whole will be the ones who win. Now, transcending doesn't mean that you just leave them behind. It means that you evolve to the next level and integrate them because education and learning as a whole is just never going to go away. But since you are competing in the space as one single person, things can become saturated quite quickly. So what I'm going to tell you isn't going to be secure for long because the next level is just around the corner.

09:30Info products didn't last that long. Maybe like a decade, 10 years, 15 years. And the next phase isn't going to even last that long. maybe two to three years and who knows what business is going to look like after that. We will be building for tomorrow rather than building for a year from now. Imagine that. That speed of iteration is just going to continue to pick up. So you have to be very speedy because that's the main advantage of being one person, right? Speed and adaptability. You don't have all of this overhead. You don't have this team. You can pick up and change things tomorrow. You must constantly be moving and iterating if you want to reach the escape velocity that actually gives you the advantage that can't be taken away from from one person.

10:10What I mean is moving beyond the one person business after you've seen a good amount of success because you'll just be competing with the same amount of people forever. And of course, AI is just going to continue to make it easier and easier to copy the front runners. So, you're not going to be a front runner for long. I see this with my content, so to say, for the longest time. I'm not like this crazy guy who just creates all these trends, but once I have like an original idea for once, it gets copied very quick and then it doesn't even seem like an original idea anymore. And that that time from something being original to being non-original is just happening like really really fast.

10:46But there's good news here. Most people just don't do anything. That sounds harsh, but you're probably in an internet echo chamber of like ambitious people. If you're watching my videos, you're probably in that echo chamber. But the average person just still treats AI as like somewhere to ask questions or they hate AI. And that may never change because the average person doesn't use their free time to learn and explore. The average person just thinks that they can do one thing, see some success, then do it for the rest of their life, and then never do anything again because they were sold this elucory retirement where all of their efforts pay

11:22off and they can just chill for the rest of their life. And we all know that's not meaningful at all. The mechanical or linear way of life is not something to bet your future on because meaning is generated from struggle, status, and curiosity. The day you stop following one of those drives is the day that your life continues to get considerably worse. And finally, that leads to part three, which is the future of education products. And I want to start this off with a quote from my book, Purpose and Profit, that's free to read on my Substack. It's no longer about sitting in front of a government-trained expert and learning the same thing as everyone else to end up with a soontobe irrelevant skill stack.

12:03It's about finding someone you relate with, someone with a shared vision for the future. Now, if you've watched my videos, you know I've always held this firm belief, even when everyone else thinks that information products are a scam, that the creator economy is this interestbased education system that is far more effective than traditional schooling at teaching people the skills that are actually relevant. Right now, I believe that people learn more faster when they learn it from someone that they relate with. I believe that anyone can follow four to five people on a topic and become very good at that thing very fast.

12:36I still hold the belief that there is knowledge and experience that only you can acquire. And I think it's noble to both acquire it and pass it down. But the format or vessel of how we pass down that knowledge needs to evolve as it always has from speaking by the fire to sending letters to building libraries to the day everything changed when the internet was born. Static courses don't cut it anymore. And I mean they do, but it because it's not like they just go to zero one day, but the general market sentiment is burnt out. A 10-hour video library where someone just like sits down and watches it for 10 hours isn't something that people want that much anymore.

13:14It feels slow and they know that there is something out there that is more efficient. Plus, it doesn't help that 90% of people that buy a course don't actually go through it and don't even get results from it. And now with AI, anyone can just generate that information if they know what to ask, which is kind of unlikely because why would they be interested in the info product in the first place if they knew what to ask? That said, the future of education in my eyes is learning experiences rather than static courses. You're not only selling information anymore. You're practically selling a second version of your mind.

13:48You're selling your coaching services, so to say, but you aren't there. Instead, you pass off everything you know to the AI and let people learn at their own speed. Now, the question here is like, oh, but what about schools that are implementing AI to teach like this? Aren't you competing with them? No. Because schools teach people what they need to operate within society. Preferably, you're teaching people something that very few people know about and schools wouldn't even think to teach. You are placing a price tag on your own curiosity and self-improvement. So that leads into part four, which is how this actually works.

14:24AI is great for utility based tasks, but not so much for meaning based tasks. That is unless you find a way to work it into your workflow in a meaningful way, which I plan to talk about. I plan to do a video on the future of writing, but that will really apply to almost any skill. It's worth watching even if you're not a writer. As an example, I had AI do a ton of writing for me last month. I'm talking like 30 articles in 2 hours. But this isn't the typical writing that I would do in my newsletters that I derive a lot of meaning from because I would have to be a lot more critical of what the AI writes. So for this little project where I generated these 30 articles, I was building a help center for Eden for my software.

15:06That way I could have the support agent or future support agents reference that as a knowledge base when they have questions or they can ask questions to it because you can just ask questions with AI. So rather than reading through all of those 30 articles, the support agent can just surface the right answer when they need it. And since I wrote these and I have them all inside of a AI project, I can just add to them at any time. Whenever we release a new feature, I can just be like, "Hey, I need to write a help center article for this. Here's exactly what it does. ask me clarifying questions if you need. It's going to pull from the other help center articles and present like an outline for it.

15:40And then I'm going to be like, "Okay, looks good. Fill it in." And then I'm going to read over that and make sure it's all accurate. Which is funny because all of the anti-AI people, they always say like, "Oh, AI makes so much mistakes." Just read through and correct the mistakes. And that still saves you a ton of time. That doesn't mean that AI isn't good. And the other thing here is that we use Intercom, which is an incredible software. They are on the front lines. I'm actually surprised of how such a large corporation can change things so fast because they have Finn, their AI agent, which can now reference this knowledge base from our website and answer questions before our support agent does,

16:16which helps resolve the like redundant questions where there doesn't need to be a human in the loop. And if you're interested in how I did this, I really just went into Claude and I asked it, "Hey, go and research how other big companies like Notion or Miro or other companies structure their help center and propose a list of all the articles I need. Here's information about my company. Here's the features we have." And then it spat out a list. And he's like, "Okay, do you want me to go through and write these?" I'm like, "Yes, but ask clarifying questions along the way so that they're accurate. Do not make assumptions."

16:48And then I just spent like an hour or two going through answering the questions and all of the articles were spit out. And two hours sounds like a lot of time, but 30 articles, 30 decent articles takes a long time to write and it's just annoying, mind-numbing. Answering questions with the AI is like kind of more enjoyable. It's kind of like a game. It's fun. So outside of the help center, just take that same concept and apply it to courses or coaching or info products. Imagine a course, but the course material was actually a knowledge base. And the chatbot that you have isn't for support. The chatbot instead is there to help people learn, practice, and implement the knowledge base or the course.

17:28That's not on the front end. That's not something that people go through. They learn it in a more interactive manner. And I'm just talking about something that is relatively beginner level here, right? You're not going and building the next like uh billion-dollar software company. You're building something small scale that is the next level up from an info product that one person businesses can sell to a specific person on a specific topic. The thing here is that an AI helping you do something like write a newsletter or learn to write or write social media content kind of like a coach that's sitting next to you and correcting you and helping you learn is

18:00much more effective than the course itself. And so the distinction here is everyone thinks they should go and build the next thing that does all of it for you, right? the agent that just writes all of your social media content when I don't think that's the way to go, right? We're still talking about education products here. And I think those are inherently more valuable because people have the drive to learn and it's just a valuable thing to do. To think that AI is just going to make learning irrelevant is kind of silly. So this is what I mean by learning experiences. They're actually interacting. They're getting feedback.

18:33They're doing the thing with guidance. That's the main differentiator. That's the main value proposition because learning by doing is the best way to learn. So hopefully people just aren't stuck in tutorial hell anymore going through endless tutorials and courses. They come away from your quote unquote learning experience with something. They a final product just by nature of how you go through it because a lot of people that go through a course aren't actually going to do the thing. The other thing here is that this isn't new. Before mass education existed, this is exactly how knowledge was passed down, through apprenticeship.

19:09A blacksmith didn't hand his apprentice a manual and just say, "Figure it out." He worked alongside him, corrected his grip in real time, and pointed out mistakes as they happened. This is why I continue saying that we're going through the return of the artisan or the next renaissance because we're kind of looping back to a lot more meaningful things. We're kind of correcting the mistakes that came with industrialization because after that period of apprenticeship, we industrialized education. We needed to train thousands of workers quickly. So, we created the lecture model. One teacher, many students, standardized curriculum.

19:42It's efficient for scale, but it's terrible for actually learning, but it turned out to be great for indoctrinating. So, for the first time since the apprenticeship model, we can have personalized interactive guidance at scale. This won't click yet for people that just think AI is the worst thing in the world because they don't see this as an option. They see AI as a thing that just does everything and removes all of the meaningful things from our lives. But that is a choice. So if I were to do this as an example, I have my course, the 2-hour writer. I would create the modules for it and that would turn into a knowledge base.

20:15This is already done since I have the course. So you don't really skip that process. And then I would build some kind of interactive chatbot. I don't know exactly what it would look like. I'm not going to do this. I haven't done this. I'm building two companies right now. But if I were still a oneperson business, then this is probably something that I would take seriously. So, I built something like a small software, right? And this would take me a bit because I'm not a programmer. And I understand that the programming or vibe coding tools today still require you to learn a decent amount if you don't want to uh make a mistake and then not be able to solve it and then either have to hire

20:49someone or just quit. So, you're going to have to learn. But for something like this, an interactive chatbot, I think this is one of the simpler things that you can do. So in my example, the software would have like three tabs. There would be learn, practice, and create. And each of those would have their own prompts, which we'll talk about in a bit. So there'd be a learning prompt that guides people through how to learn. Or there'd be multiple prompts on each page, so people can click in order and kind of go through the interactive lessons, I guess you could say. And then in the practice tab, it would be kind of the same thing.

21:21It'd be prompts that take from the lessons and tell them to try something and then grades them on it. And then there would be the create tab, which is again kind of the same thing. So this leads into part five, which is how to build a micro SAS or software as a service. And this is going to be non-exhaustive. So again, I don't think that info products are going to be dead completely anytime soon. Education is just too important for the human brain. and choosing what to be educated on based on goals you derived for yourself is still one of the last moes. Learning is too foundational to the human experience to ever be fully commoditized.

21:56With that said, I think that info products are going to look more like software over the next few years. Rather than having an ebook to download, you have a website to visit or an app to install. And idea just came to mind. I feel like a lot of the course platforms are going to pivot in some large way to help people create courses better, right? Cuz they're all implementing agents and things that you can use to help you like build the course. But what about on the end user? How are they how is the AI going to bring value to the end user? So if you want to get into that industry of building a course or information product platform, then help people do this.

22:32Rather than having an ebook to download, you would have a website to visit or an app to install. I have a few business friends who are already doing this. I know one that created an offer creation app that helps you identify your best ideas, turn them into a compelling offer, and go beyond that. As another example, rather than selling something like a how to talk to girls ebook, course, or coaching program, you create a chatbot that simulates them talking to girls. This is a really this is a copout example, but it like teaches you how to text, right? That's one very profitable industry, which is unfortunate. But another example is rather than a productivity course, you create an AI that helps them identify their vision and outline their priority tasks and gives them notifications when things aren't complete.

23:16And it can even be integrated into like a simple to-do app. But that's just much more enticing than something like buy my course. Now, if you've been following any of my videos at all or if you've seen the prompts that I've given out, you kind of know what I'm getting at here. So, any of the prompts that I've sent to my email list, I'll link some of those in the description. Those could easily be turned into a micros software. You just have to create a UI for those things and set that as the system instructions. I've also taught how to create good prompts in my video how to use AI better than 99% of people. I think it's a few videos ago, but these would become the system prompts of your little AI app.

23:52So rather than creating a very general chat GBT, you create a hyperspecific chat or software that helps people learn, practice, and do the thing you were teaching about in the first place with the info product. The question here is, "But Dan, isn't building a chat GPT wrapper cheating?" Well, by that logic, building anything on the internet is cheating. Type form, a billion-dollar company, is just an HTML wrapper. Cursor is a GPT wrapper. Any info product you build is wrapped by the platform you build it on. And if AI is like the next cloud solution, which I think it is, every piece of software on the internet will be a wrapper.

24:24So yes, as one person who has to be savvy with their resources and use thirdparty tools, a chat GBT rapper is a great way to go. So you create the course kind of like you would the knowledge base for a help center. You build out all the articles. You practically create the course and then you create what's called a system prompt or multiple of these. So like we just talked about, a system prompt is a set of instructions you give to an AI before it talks to anyone. It defines the AI's personality, knowledge boundaries, and behavior rules. You think of this as programming the AI's identity. For example, if you're creating an AI writing coach, your system prompt might include the AI's role, so how the AI should act, its instructions, what exactly it should do step by step.

25:06Its knowledge base, so all of your frameworks, processes, and examples, its boundaries, what it should and shouldn't help with, and its personality, so how it talks, what tone it uses, how harsh or supportive it is. And the prompt is what makes your AI different from everyone else's. It's your specific knowledge, your frameworks, and your voice that can help thousands of people at once. Now, can people steal this? Probably. But they could have stolen anything you build. That's just like never a valid response. So, what if they steal my idea? Again, most people just don't do anything. And now, part six, how to actually build the software.

25:41And you just use a tool like Replet or Cursor, or you can even try Claude Code, which is a terminal app. And I haven't done this, but inside of Claude, there's like a code tab that you can click on. So maybe try that. And the thing here is that yes, you will have to learn how to use this, right? We've we've heard the AI hype and we know that AI just at least now isn't this thing that just solves all of our problems and lets us do nothing and just can execute commands exactly how we ask. I don't think it can ever do that, right? Cuz how can you get so much context into one sentence, right? You can say, "Hey, create this YouTube video for me."

26:21How is it going to know what kind of YouTube video, what kind of this, what kind of this? How is it structured? What's the pacing? What's the tone? How long? What are all of the ideas that you're going to include in there? Is it just going to assume those and make those up and then you're going to put it under your name? That's not how this stuff works. So, the best way to learn something like this is to one, just start tinkering and experimenting. Once you start tinkering and experimenting, then start watching YouTube tutorials on how to use those things. And you have to have a project that you're building toward.

26:50You have to have an idea for this quote unquote info product or evolved info product that you're building. And then when you watch the YouTube tutorials, they're not going to be about how to build that. So, you're going to have to adapt and apply what they teach to what you're doing. And if you get stuck, you can just ask AI how to do specific things. I do this all the time right now. I literally ask it how to do things in Photoshop or framer all the time and it pulls from the help centers of those things or forums. An example of what you can do here is you can just ask like give me a comprehensive guide on how to vibe code correctly and then you can ask it to create a comprehensive guide on what you're trying to build,

27:26right? How create a comprehensive guide on building this AI chat app with these many tabs on this specific topic with this knowledge base. ask clarifying questions on the product if you need it and I'm one singular person with this budget so on and so forth and you just converse. Now the thing here is that this is just like any other skill, right? You don't start riding a bike immediately. You kind of fall off and then you try again and it gets frustrating. Everyone's in this like like super they need the quick result really fast. If they don't get results the first time around then they quit. But that's not how skill acquisition works.

28:02You're going to feel weird. You're going to feel overwhelmed. you're going to feel like you're not making progress for a bit. That's just how it goes. You're going to have to build three to four apps before you feel like you can actually put a price tag on one. That's why it's important to start now because remember what I talked about is that the change is going to happen really fast. It's going to happen faster than before. Info products died in 10 to 15 years. This may die in 2 to 3 years and then after that we don't even know what things are going to look like and you're going to have to adapt on the fly. So the question now is where does your advantage actually lie?

28:33Your advantage isn't doing what AI can't do because that's a losing game. Your advantage is doing what only you would think to do with AI. Not everyone types the same thing into chat GPT or rep letter cursor. Meaning the output of those things are infinitely unique. Your unique combination of interests, experiences, and insights leads to prompts and products that nobody else would create. Naval Ravocant explains this as specific knowledge. Specific knowledge can't be trained for. It comes from pursuing genuine curiosity. building it will feel like play to you. It's often at the edge of knowledge. The person who spent 10 years obsessing over productivity and then they go and build this AI software is going to build something so much more nuanced and detailed than someone who hasn't spent that much time in their domain.

29:18And it's going to be so much better and more nuanced than the person who just goes to chat GPT or Claude and tells them to build a productivity app. And if that obsessed person has built an audience on social media with said specific knowledge around productivity, then they're at even more of an advantage. So, we talked about how info products are dead in this video. We're going to talk about the whole valuebased content thing is dead in another video. So, the irony here is that AI is making human knowledge more valuable, not less. That's crazy. That's like a crazy insight because AI made everyone fast. Anyone can make a course.

29:52Anyone can write content. Anyone can copy. anyone. But very few people are uncopyable. Very few people have spent years developing so much fine-tuned experience or taste that nobody would think to copy the details that make it work. Build the thing that only you would build. Links in the description for the things that I mentioned throughout this video. If you want to be notified when these videos go out or you want to read the newsletter version of this video, subscribe to my newsletter and you'll get that. And if you download the Substack app, you'll also get a a mobile notification when that newsletter goes out.

30:26And of course, you can sign up for the Eden weight list, which is the AI canvas and drive. So you can add any of your files. You can paste links like a YouTube video and it downloads them and transcribes them. So they can be searched and referenced with AI and then you can drag them onto a canvas. Any of your files, connect them to AI chats and work in this unique and different way. And the next round of people that we bring into Eden off of the wait list will happen late And then we'll start prepping for our full public launch. So, thank you for watching. Like, subscribe if you're still here. As always, it's just a button.

30:59I'll see you in the next video.