Ronnie Nijmeh sold his software company and now runs solo. He shows how to treat AI like a team, not a search box, and turn one video into a full set of content. For solopreneurs and small business owners.
GROWTH PILLAR: AI & Automation
WHO THIS IS FOR: SMB owners / Solopreneurs
WHAT THEY'LL GAIN: A clear way to use AI as a working team, plus a real example of one video turning into a playbook, website audit, slide deck, social posts, and promo videos.
Most people use AI like Google. That's why it never gets real work done. Keep chatting, and you'll keep doing the work yourself.
Ronnie Nijmeh, founder of The Solo Creators, spent 18 years running a software company that served over 650,000 customers. He sold it, and now he runs a solo business. In this talk, he shows how one person can build a digital studio using AI. He explains why he works in Claude Code instead of the chat tab, even though he is not a coder. Then he runs one prompt for content automation. A single video becomes a playbook, website audit, slide deck, social posts, and promo videos in about 20 minutes. This is for solopreneurs and small business owners who want automation to handle content and repetitive work.
Key topics covered
Guest links
Full write-up: Read the full write-up
Supporting persons mentioned: Percy Barr (the East Trade Winds Mastermind clip in the demo, and the website audit request)
Past episodes: Browse all episodes
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Next Steps
Ronnie (00:05)
So we're going to talk about how you can build your solo business into a whole studio using AI. And I'm going to talk a little bit about really how to use this incredible frontier technology that most people don't understand. But it really super fast about me. I spent 18 years running a software company, served over 650,000 customers. I had a huge team, fully remote all around the world.
a lot of developers and marketer marketing, you know, support, designers, video editors, all of that stuff. And I sent almost over half a billion emails over that time, and I sold it all. And now I am solo and honestly I am a lot happier for it. it is so freeing to not have to deal with a million meetings and kind of do whatever you'd like to do.
And so what I use for everything is Claude Code. now it's kind of an important piece here because a lot of people, when they are using AI, they might use the chat feature like chat GPT or Claude the chat tab or you're using Gemini, things like that. but if you're using ChatGPT or if you're using Claude, flip over to the code or codex tab. That's where everything should live, even though you're not a coder.
I'm not a coder. It doesn't matter. everything should be in that tab. Why? Because it can do everything. It can open your files, your folders, it can browse web pages for you. It can deliver real work. like even more and and in a much higher capacity than on the chat tab. and then everything stays on your machine, it stays yours. so it's it's really, really powerful.
And this is, I think, the biggest thing to understand is is to think of yourself not as you're chatting to to use Google. Like I think a lot of people when they're using AI, it's sort of like you ask a question, you get an answer, and you just copy and paste, and maybe you implement things yourself. But I want you to start thinking of AI as really a team that has eyes, ears, hands, and they can actually get stuff done for you while you are away at a soccer game or wherever you are.
and so what really what you have to be doing is you want to think about, okay, what is my goal? And when you hand over that goal to the team, they can start, they meaning the AI, can fire up agents and subagents and they can split up the work and these agents can actually communicate sort of with each other and check each other's work, and then you actually get stuff done. That's really like the the stop thinking of it as Google and start thinking of it as employees that can actually get real work done.
so again, that's the fundamental shift. Shift, stop chatting, start managing. And I'm gonna show you an example workflow here. so this is the surprise, get ready. so I'm going to go through this I'm gonna give a video and a website. We're gonna lock the brand based on that content. and I actually gave one of
The Canada Growth Network videos, that's the little surprise. And then from there, I'm going to have it run a sequence of different AI skills and sort of a workflow. So first thing that's going to happen is it's going to watch the video, it's going to grab the transcript, quotes, kind of create a playbook out of it. It's going to audit the website. And then all of this information is going to allow us to design slides, create social graphics for Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, create a TikTok slideshow, fact checked anything.
Create some videos. And this is essentially what I'm about to show you right now. One prompt, one message is going to go in there. It's going to go through a sequence of skills that I build. It's not hard, and you can build these things out yourself as well. But I'm essentially going to run this content chain, give it the video, the website, and it's going to do the work. So without further ado, I'm just going to flip over to Claude. And I ran this just a little bit earlier. Again, so you can see, gonna make it a little bit bigger.
This is all I said. Run the content chain. This is one of the Canada Growth Network videos. This is the website. And it started to do all of this work, which was really cool. But this is just text. I'm not gonna make you read this right now. But what I'm gonna do is actually go into Finder and I'm gonna show you what it did. So this took about 20-ish minutes and it's all done on my computer. So the source video is this.
AI Voice (04:15)
Welcome to another East Trade Winds Mastermind with Percy.
Ronnie (04:18)
16
minute video. We're not going to watch it. There's a that's the video. And then it goes in using the watch it for me skill and it creates some quotes from the video. There's a particular one, Percy, that I really liked of yours. The worst time to plan is when you're sitting on the dock three beers in. Love that. That was hilarious. just talking about fall planning and so on. So this grabs quotes, and here's the full transcript as well.
And I'm gonna go to the next phase, which is the website audit. So the the website audit went through the Canada Growth Network, kind of put polls together some ideas of how to improve the site. This was actually Percy's request. He was looking for a website audit tool. you know, grabs screenshots and gives some ideas. So this was great, grabs the brand and the colors and the scheme. And then it also went and created this.
Slide deck. So I'm gonna make it a little smaller so you can see. So here's the slides. Now this slide deck was based on the video that I gave it. So it's using that as the foundation. It takes the video, it creates the quotes and the transcript. It created this. you know, even here, I didn't do any of this. This logo was grabbed from the website. It creates the slides, all the everything you see here, all the layout, everything is taken care of, which was pretty cool.
And also then recommends to watch the full episode. and that's the slide deck. Then the carousel was the probably the montage is the best here. This created the Instagram linked in images for social posts. So I did plug in, and this is separate, but I did plug in a connection to put custom images in here. So this costs, I think, like 50 cents or something like that to create these these images.
Or you can provide your own images, or you can just get free stock photos or have no images. But this was filled based on what was actually in the episode. So imagine you put out content, you have a podcast, or you have, you know, your YouTube videos or anything that you do, you can actually create posts automatically based on this. And I just created one, and this was a 16-minute video. I probably could create a bunch of these and then have these scheduled out and posted on LinkedIn and Instagram and so on.
TikTok, slightly different look and feel to TikTok. They tend to be really rustic, shall we say, on TikTok. this is what tends to work better there. And again, that was created as well. And then we get to the fact checking, nothing super exciting here, but it goes through and if there's any stats or data, it it researches and and verifies that information. And then a couple of things that I did as well. So this was a promo video that was made from.
the from the video.
AI Voice (06:58)
Most business owners lose the fall in the summer, right when the planning stops. Every launch needs sixty to
Ronnie (07:02)
Even
this voiceover is a local model that's free. It doesn't cost anything. You know, yes, you can use 11 Labs or any of these other tools, but my goal is how can we do things in a way where it's cheap or free? so we can see the video here, which was pretty cool. And then this one also now took clips from the video and created sort of a trailer.
Percy (07:26)
worst time to plan it is when you're sitting on the dock three beers in and you're and you're currently right you're thinking
Ronnie (07:30)
I don't know.
Percy (07:31)
about strategy for your for the fall. That's that's terrible time.
Ronnie (07:35)
It's
a 60 to 90 day window, and all of a sudden September becomes November. Which was pretty cool. And the final thing, and I added this at the end because this is something that's not released yet that I've been playing with the latest Opus 5.5 model from Claude, which by the time you're watching this could be on Opus 6, who knows? So there's a lot of new models all the time. But the latest model is really freaking good with videos and
I created this little video based again on the original video, the brand, the website.
AI Voice (08:09)
Most owners don't lose the fall in September. They lose it in June. Every launch, event, and podcast needs a 60 to 90 day runway. Wait until September, and September becomes November, then January. The worst time to plan is on the dock, three beers in. So pick your launch date, count back 90 days, and start there. Build your best fall with Canada Growth Network.
Ronnie (08:33)
Right, so all of this I didn't edit, I didn't touch, I didn't have to go back and forth with a video editor or staff. All of this was created by simply using Claude. And so when you're using your Claude or your Codex as an employee, you realize what is actually possible now. They can actually get real work done, and then you can actually have this automatically published onto your social media, or you can send emails out, or you can create products or videos and things like that.
so that was the sort of quick demo. Again, just sort of a quick summary. there's a website audit tool. This is again, Percy was was one of the members who requested this, where we can put together reports. This would be great if you have clients who you know, you you you run services for, you can actually show them this and maybe get clients for that. slide deck designer, this is another example of a real slide deck that was created with the images, the whole layout.
and then the other piece I mentioned blogs. so I have I created a skill that creates these blog posts for me. I posted 83 articles since the the end of June. all of these visuals, the text, the graphics, all of this was written, published, was researched, everything by the skill. And what's kind of cool about it is that it really
accelerated the the impressions and then the clicks as well in Google in a very short period of time. and you know this is something that would have taken a lot of time, money, effort in the past. so that's pretty pretty awesome. and the other thing is you know a lot of the things that I build are based on member requests. Like Percy, you you requested the audit. I have another client who said I want to get on podcast so I want to get on
Help me get onto podcasts. This is one that I'm going to be releasing soon that lets you find podcasts that are relevant and then help you draft an email that you would send to help get on become a guest on podcasts. And then the faceless video generator, which is what what I just demoed as well. so it's all really fun stuff that you can do, and anybody can do it. This is what's so incredible now is that you don't need to be technical at all. Like I'm not a coder, and you can say, well, but you've been doing this stuff for so long.
Here's William. William is one of my clients. He's 74 years old. Okay. he doesn't know how to code at all. Zero. Nothing. And he got his own website. And I didn't actually even tell him this step. I gave the skill to create the website. But he just was chatting away with Claude and he was able to get the site fully live on the internet by himself. And this is what it looks like. You can go to the site. It is unbelievable. This is someone who's not a freaking coder that can do this. So you can do this now. You just need to.
Tinker and experiment and play with AI. But don't think of it like a chat. You have to think of it like an actual employee. So, quick summary. Make sure you switch over to Claude Code or Codex. That is the most important piece of all of this. And then give your AI, your branding, your voice, your style. You know, create a second brain. This is what allows you to have content that's actually aligned with who you are.
And that means if you have presentations or videos or emails, any kind of content, you feed that all into it and it will start to talk like you and act like you. and then the last step is install proven skills and then actually delegate goals. So everything that I was just demoing, these are really simple skills, and skills are just a set of instructions that AI follows to build these things in a systematic way. so that is it. That is my presentation for now.