- Ole Lehmann, a crypto trader who lost money when FTX crashed, spent months experimenting with and creating content with help from ChatGPT.
- Earlier this month, he launched a course teaching entrepreneurs how to use AI to create marketing content. So far, he's made over $175,000.
This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ole Lehmann, a 32-year-old entrepreneur based in Cyprus, about how he went from being a crypto trader to a content creator focused on AI. Insider verified his earnings and previous FTX holdings through videos and screenshots of his course's revenue dashboard and his FTX claims portal. This story has been edited for length and clarity.
November 11th of 2022 — the day the crypto exchange FTX crashed — was one of the worst days of my life. I really didn't know what to do afterwards, until I discovered ChatGPT. Now, I'm making six-figures teaching people how to use the AI technology.
I was a crypto trader and investor for over six years. I used FTX for most of my trading, and I put more funds into my account right around the time the platform collapsed.
When I lost all my money, I thought "Screw this whole crypto thing." I knew I wanted to do something with content, but it was tough to stay motivated. I didn't know how to rebuild.
Two weeks after the crash, OpenAI launched ChatGPT, and it really caught my interest. Like with crypto, I've fallen down rabbit holes where I would completely immerse myself all day into one activity, and as a trader, I learned how to spot trends and new developments early on. AI just happened to be the next big thing, so I thought "Oh, I could do that all day."
Starting in January, I was playing around with ChatGPT all the time. That month was also around the time I started to experiment with posting content about AI on my personal Twitter to see what landed.
Months later, I got much better at using ChatGPT, and in April, I created a new Twitter page called The AI Solopreneur, which offers tips on how to use AI to increase productivity. I specifically tailored my content to solopreneurs — entrepreneurs who run a business without any employees — since everybody was doing AI news.
With help from ChatGPT, I wrote multiple Twitter threads a day on AI-related topics like the ChatGPT prompts that could increase productivity and the AI-tools that could save hours of work — many of which racked up millions of views. Sixty-five days later, I got to 100,000 followers, and I started a separate AI Solopreneurship newsletter to go along with the page.
As my following continued to grow, some of my followers wanted to know what AI and prompts I use to help improve my content and drive traffic to my page, and asked if I was going to launch a course on this topic.
That's exactly what I did. Starting in June, I worked on the course for at least six hours every single day, which was stressful. Two months later, in early August, the AI Audience Accelerator course, which teaches solopreneurs how to use AI to create content that could help market their businesses, was born.
I had fears that the course wouldn't take off. A similar course that launched before mine didn't do well, and there are so many free AI courses online. I wondered if people would want to pay for mine, which starts at $179.
To my surprise, the launch went really well. In less than a month, I got 1,078 orders — most of whom are solopreneurs, content creators, and crypto people in their early 20s to mid 30s based in the US and Canada — and made $176,885 in gross revenue. This all happened crazy fast.
I think the course resonated with people because they want to learn how to save time on certain tasks so they can focus on running their business. Everyone says you have to create content to get customers, but most people don't have the time or frameworks for how to do that. AI is really a good way to solve these problems.
Still, I wouldn't call myself an AI expert. In fact, I hate that word. I simply use ChatGPT to help create my content, and continued to teach myself how to most effectively use the chatbot for that purpose as I crafted the course. Ultimately, I just wanted to share my learnings on AI.
Here are 5 tips on how to use generative AI to grow your social media presence:
1) Focus on learning no more than two AI tools at once: I've seen people try out 10 tools at a time and end up using none of them. I choose to focus on ChatGPT and Anthropic's chatbot called Claude.
2) Be specific about what you want and don't want in your content: When crafting your prompt, make sure to include specifics like the format, context, target audience, tone of voice you want to see — as well as constraints on what you don't want to see —in your content.
3) Train ChatGPT on past content that performed well: Feed the chatbot a piece of content, like an X thread, then ask it to learn from that example and to restructure the idea you're giving it based on the example's format and tone.
4) Talk to ChatGPT as if they were your employee or intern: Before writing your prompt, ask yourself "How would I explain what I need to my content writers" and talk to ChatGPT in that same way.
5) Create with AI, but edit manually: Even though I've used ChatGPT to help optimize my content, the magic comes when you flex your writing skills and tweak the generated response to give it personality.