Double Your Income With AI in 3 Months (Here's the Stack) — Silicon Valley Girl Podcast

Marina Mogilko: I've interviewed over 50 founders and tech leaders in the past year and I kept asking all of them the same question. What AI tool has actually changed how you work and how you make money? Not what sounds cool, what you've invested in. What do you actually open up every morning? When did you have this aha moment with AI? Six tools kept coming up. I'm going to show you each one, who uses it, and exactly how it's making them money. And at the end, I'll tell you which two I personally can't stop using. Yang Xiao is the CEO of Opus Clip, an AI video company that went from zero to 50 million users and a 215 million valuation in 2 and a half years. And his number one AI tool is unsurprisingly ChatGPT. And some of you might think, really, I thought founders running huge companies should be operating fleets of agents and custom AI systems. Why ChatGPT?

Yang Xiao: The number one AI skill should actually go for first principle. It doesn't matter if you're using AI for designing your poster, coding your prototype. I think everyone should treat AI as your thinking partner or even thought partner. Which means that when you are having a problem of understanding your users, when you are having problems managing your teams, when you are having problems figuring out your pricing or all the critical decisions in your lifetime when you are a founder, I think traditionally you would just reach out to your coach or some more senior people or people with relevant experience to ask for their advice. But I think in this era of AI, you should run through it with Gemini or ChatGPT. They are actually a very senior, very important thinking partner. Instead of asking one line of questions, throw as much context as possible and do more than 20 rounds of back and forth communications. You will be mindblowingly enlightened through these conversations. So nowadays that's how I practice myself.

Marina Mogilko: Do you have a certain daily practice that you have? I talked to Mustafa Suleyman on this podcast. He's the CEO of Microsoft AI and he shared that every single day he would talk to Copilot and just tell Copilot about what the day has been like and the decision that he's made and how those decisions made him feel. So that when in 3 months he has something like a similar problem, he still talks to the same thread and Copilot says, "Oh, when you made that decision 3 months ago, you actually regret it. So this time let's do this." Is there something similar that you have?

Yang Xiao: Yeah, exactly. Because I think the current chatbot memory is so powerful. What I do monthly, one of my monthly rituals is that I ask ChatGPT about what are my major decisions in the past month and give me some comments and feedback on them.

Marina Mogilko: But that means you shared every single decision?

Yang Xiao: I shared everything, yeah.

Marina Mogilko: How does it work? Every night you just sit and tell it these are the decisions I made or how?

Yang Xiao: Yeah. Sometimes I talk to the AI in that way and sometimes I would just forward my decision or capture screenshots of our group discussion. I drop a link of my document, a PRD or a spec, that kind of thing. I kind of forced myself to document.

Marina Mogilko: To document it. Magic starts happening when you stop asking ChatGPT one-line questions and start feeding it every decision, every screenshot, every document. Then it turns into the advisor that catches mistakes before they cost you money. What I can say from my own personal perspective, I use Gemini, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Claude. I feel like when I need support, like emotional support in a business decision, when I want someone to be on my side, I go to ChatGPT. It's always that LLM that supports me in any decision, understands every feeling. But sometimes I don't want that, so I go to another model. Mo Gawdat, former chief business officer at Google X, takes this even further. He makes three AIs fight for the best answer before ChatGPT gives him the final version.

Mo Gawdat: You have to question and you have to question deeply. If you remember 2016, if you searched Google, Google gave you a million and a half answers and said, "I don't know the truth. You make up your mind."

Marina Mogilko: We didn't allow ourselves to have monopoly on what reality is.

Mo Gawdat: You asked ChatGPT in 2023 and it said, "Yeah, that's the answer. 100% that's the answer."

Marina Mogilko: And then you tell it, "No," and it'd be like, "Oh, yeah, by the way, you're right."

Mo Gawdat: Correct. Not true.

Marina Mogilko: Correct. And so what does that mean? It means that it's up to you still to find the truth even though it comes to you in a format that appears to be true. And so what I do is I pit them against each other. I'm not a big fan of ChatGPT anyway. But I start from Gemini who feels like a scientist to me, but an American scientist if you don't mind me saying, and then go to Deep Seek.

Mo Gawdat: And say what's missing in this?

Marina Mogilko: And Deep Seek would say, "Oh, that's too American. This is missing that and this and the motivation of this and the politics."

Mo Gawdat: Here's a business idea. A chat that compares everything.

Marina Mogilko: Compares them to each other and then I take it and sometimes give it to ChatGPT and say, "Can you write this better?"

Mo Gawdat: Yeah. I don't mean that in a bad way. You're the California girl, the Silicon Valley girl. So ChatGPT is a bit California. It just wants you to hear what you want to hear. So it writes it really nice.

Marina Mogilko: Yeah, it writes it elegantly. It gives it to you and then I give that back to Gemini or Claude or whatever and you keep doing that. Remember when I was studying engineering, we were not allowed scientific calculators. Can you imagine I'm that old? And when they gave me a scientific calculator it reduced my problem solving time by 50%.

Mo Gawdat: Most people use AI to work less. The smart ones use it to earn more.

Marina Mogilko: Most of my friends would take that 50% extra, finish their exams and go out and sit with their girlfriends. I would take the 50% extra and do the solution twice. That's the chance you have today. AI is going to make you dumb if you outsource your problem solving to AI. AI is going to make you the smartest you've ever been if you take the parts that are not natural to the human brain—things like crunching a massive amount of information, things like searching at speed—and get the AI to do the work so that you do the intelligence. If you keep doing that, I believe that today I am borrowing maybe 80 IQ points from my AIs. An 80 IQ points is very significant because AI IQ is exponential. So the additional 80 is bigger than all of my IQ.

Mo Gawdat: For me, when it comes to work, when it comes to actually making money, if you've been watching this channel, you know what's coming next. Claude, right?

Marina Mogilko: My entire team works in Claude projects. Now the same team of producers that we had a year ago puts out twice the content every month, which actually doubled our revenue. It all started with one podcast with Ken Katanfouch, who co-founded AI Classes at Stanford with Andrew Ng, one of the most influential figures in the AI field. After that conversation I went home and rebuilt how my whole team operates and a few weeks later we got the results.

Ken Katanfouch: At Workera we are a big Anthropic shop internally. We use a lot of Claude. All our engineers are on this version of Claude called Claude Code Max, which is very powerful for coding. Across the company we have things that we call skills. Anthropic calls it skills where you can think of them as files that define a certain way of doing a certain thing—like here is how we recruit at Workera or here is our brand guidelines. This is the font we use. This is how we speak. These are the color palettes that you can use. Before, if an engineer wanted to build a website, they would have to call the marketing team at the end and say, "Can you review the font? Can you review the alignment? Can you review XYZ?" Today, because it's all coded, you don't need to talk to a human anymore. The engineer just asks the LLM, "Can you verify that the copywriting is correct, the color palette is right," and they know that the marketing team has maintained that code.

Marina Mogilko: I love that. And so it cuts communication and it's very powerful. You gain so much speed and it creates so much more time for the marketing team to think about whether we need to change our font rather than every day talking to an engineer and saying, "No, change that font, change that font."

Ken Katanfouch: Do you check the result afterwards?

Marina Mogilko: Yeah, the engineers do.

Ken Katan Fouch: Here's what I did after that podcast. We're on so many social media channels. We're on Instagram YouTube channels. So I built a cloud project for every single social media. There's a LinkedIn cloud project, newsletter cloud project. And for example, if we take this YouTube's cloud project, it has everything baked in. My voice, my past episode performance, and that's all in notion. So it's connected directly to our database, the topics my audience actually engages with, and my interview style. Now it knows my channel so well, it gives me better advice than most expensive strategists. And by the way, I'm not saying that we stopped getting outside help like a strategy because sometimes those people suggest something we haven't even thought about and Claude hasn't even thought about. One of the strategists suggested we work on GEO, generative engine optimization, but Claude did the whole strategy and actually helped us work on it without us having to hire somebody who specializes in that. And most people still have no idea this is possible, which makes helping others set up their AI a seriously underrated niche. Now, we're starting to use AI agents, too. And the workflow that inspired me the most was Alli Miller. She's an ex Amazon AI leader. And what she built for herself is insane. So, the last two years we've seen a big paradigm shift about a year and a half ago into new age agentic AI. Two years ago, you could ask AI to do research for you, you'd get back a synthesis and you would have to take that knowledge and then do something with it. But now the AI system that you're using or multiple agents can take action on your behalf. So when I look at an AI assistant that I just ask questions to and get an answer back versus a thing that is meaningfully taking delegated work from me and managing multiple hours worth of work and workflows, this felt like 20 to 30% productive. Depending on the task this is anywhere between 2x and 10x.

Marina Mogilko: So you're saying you actually have an AI agent who's your assistant who's doing things for you. Can you describe what it actually does?

Alli Miller: Yeah, I have 36 proactive workflows with 28 master agents and each of them spin up probably two on average. So, call it 50ish sub agents.

Marina Mogilko: So that's almost a thousand agents, almost 2,000 agents.

Alli Miller: Not per workflow, just as a total. So it's somewhere around a hundred total agents. But what I look at is what can AI do that I don't have to kick off? This is one of the biggest changes and I think any single person even if you're just asking it like hey find me industry news this morning if you know that you're going to go to it every single morning and ask that question that process of asking not just the task itself and the prompt itself but the task should be automated. So if there's a competitor that you want to check in on every single morning, that should be scheduled.

Marina Mogilko: You can schedule things inside of Claude Co-work, inside of Codeex, inside of Claude Code. You can schedule things within all of these tools so that while you're sleeping or doing other things or on a walk or hanging out with your dog, things can be running on your behalf. So when I say 36 proactive workflows, those are the things that my hands are up and they're constantly coming in as a new stream. Is that an email that you're getting every day or how does it look like?

Alli Miller: That's a good question. Most of them are emails. I have them routed into different folders, but just two examples. Every single Friday morning, I have a recap of all of the urgent emails that I have not yet responded to, ranked by urgency, drafted replies so that I can get to it faster. It includes the ability to delegate to people on my team and reminders if I don't reply to those emails. So, that's a Friday proactive agent that is scraping my Gmail for the last five days and gets me a download. Second one is morning briefing. So, every morning I wake up, my AI agent has already been working for me for several hours, which is great. And I wake up and I get this full readout of industry news, things that are happening in New York City or San Francisco that day so I can just have a social life. I get kickoffs for my meetings. So, if I'm having a client meeting and I'll be sitting down with a Fortune 500 CEO or maybe it's their CFO and I haven't met with them yet, then in that proactive system in that morning brief, all I have to do is write back with a keyword and I can kick off an AI agent to make assets for that meeting. Another hack that everyone who's watching this should copy is guidelines files that tell every AI on your team how you write, how you think, what to never do. We built ours for every team member and every platform, podcast, YouTube, Instagram, newsletter. And before we uploaded those files, every draft came back generic and very AI-ish. And I spent some time rewriting so it sounds like me. Three documents do this work. Anti-AI writing style: how to never sound like AI, no generic AI phrasing, no filler, no clichés. My voice profile: how I actually write, tone, rhythm, openings, endings, my favorite texts, vocabulary. And the fact dossier: all the verified context about me, my work, my audience that stays consistent everywhere. I share all these full templates, breakdowns, and instructions alongside other AI workflows in my newsletter, Futureproof. If you subscribe using the link below, I will send you the exact three-step workflow that we use. The link is in the description.

Marina Mogilko: Speaking of the newsletter, that's actually a perfect way to show you the next tool. Tool number three is called Design.com. And thank you so much design.com for sponsoring this segment of the video. This one is for founders, freelancers, consultants, anyone building income outside of a 9-to-5. It's an AI design platform that handles your entire brand in one place. Think logos, websites, business cards, social posts, presentations. The thing is, in 2026, your competitors can launch a product in a weekend. AI has collapsed the build cycle. It's no longer a moat. What's left to compete on is how you understand your audience, how you feel the problem, and how credible you look the second someone lands on your page. Most first-time founders ship with a logo that doesn't match their website, and socials that don't match either. Design.com closes that gap by turning a complex, fragmented design process into something simple, fast, and professional. Let me show you how it works. So, I'm building this free newsletter and we call it Futureproof by Silicon Valley Girl and I'll use it to walk you through a few key features. Let's start with the basics. Logo creation. I type in the name and I hit generate. The AI instantly creates a full set of logos tailored specifically to my brand. So, I started guiding it further. I add our brand color red and include keywords like newsletter, AI, career. So, design.com actually understands what Futureproof is about. Then I pick a style direction, abstract, mascot, corporate, classic, vintage, and the AI refines the results around it. From there, I fine-tune everything through the AI chat. Replace by Silicon Valley Girl as a tagline below the name. Make the background white and the text red. Replace the typewriter icon with the laptop. All simple prompts, no design skills needed. And here's the most useful part. Once your logo is set, the platform automatically generates branded versions of everything else. You can create everything yourself in minutes with AI. A website, letterheads, social posts, invoices, even a full presentation, all powered by a library of over one million AI-enhanced designs. 100% commercially safe and ready for real business use. The link to design.com is in the description. You can try it for free. The next one is not really a single tool. It's a trend that I'm seeing in interview after interview across dozens of different tools. It's vibe coding. You describe what you want in normal language and the AI writes the code for you. I recently sat down with Gary Vaynerchuk, early investor in Facebook, Twitter, and Uber and he said something worth remembering. Learning to vibe code right now is a real window to build wealth and that window won't stay open forever.

Gary Vaynerchuk: My intuition is it has the chance to create hyper micro wealth. The fragmentation of vibe coding and all this stuff and the stuff we're already seeing, kids building out products very quickly and having success. If I lost my reputation and my personal brand, but I kept my knowledge of how to make content on social, I would build an app that's $5 to $50 a month and I would make unlimited organic content on LinkedIn, Twitter, Tik Tok and try to get customers.

Marina Mogilko: That's very interesting approach. I just talked to Bill Gurley who's a legendary investor and he told me you can't even imagine how many websites are there that are just passport photos that charge you $6. And yes, AI can do that, but because we're still so used to going to a website and paying and they're making tens of thousands of dollars a month and we just don't realize it. For me as a person in Silicon Valley, I'm looking at all the businesses and I'm thinking, okay, I can totally see how Anthropic releases new lines of code tomorrow and this business is done.

Gary Vaynerchuk: That's not how consumers work.

Marina Mogilko: He's right. It's not how it works. And in fact, I would argue what I do for a living and what I'm obsessed with actually explodes in this next era. It's all going to be about brand because you have to discover it. There in 30 years by default, somebody will be like, "Oh, let me go to the main AI thing and I don't need to." But there is going to be a long period of time here.

Gary Vaynerchuk: So, there is this long tail. We still need to adjust where as humans, we take some time to adjust to new reality.

Marina Mogilko: When you're Silicon Valley girl and you even know who Bill Gurley is, you live in a different world than the 99.9% of people on Earth who've never heard of Bill.

Gary Vaynerchuk: And that's opportunity for everyone who's listening.

Marina Mogilko: Correct. Because transitioning to that era together with small companies, small businesses, other people educating them. I feel there is a lot of potential there. Gary's right. And it's already happening inside billion-dollar companies with employees who aren't coders and aren't experts. Listen to what Duolingo CEO Leo Fonan told me about two of his team members.

Leo Fonan: We now teach chess on Duolingo. For a long time we only taught languages. Now we teach a few other things. Chess is the latest course we added. This course got started by two people neither of whom knew chess neither of whom knew how to program. They basically validated the first prototype of it. Now the final version that is actually in the app of course we put some engineers in there. But they really got very far in a span of about 6 months. They created the whole curriculum for chess. They created a prototype of the app entirely with AI. And these people did not know any chess.

Marina Mogilko: And whose idea was that? Was it their idea to do that?

Leo Fonan: It was their idea to do that. They also wanted to add chess. They came to me a year earlier to say we want to add chess. I said I don't want to add chess because it's just a game and we're an education app. But what happened was that a few months later I talked to the minister of education of my country. I'm from Guatemala. And she said to me, "Our education system, our public education system in Guatemala is so broken that I'm considering sending every student a chessboard so that at least they'll learn logical thinking."

Marina Mogilko: And when she said that to me, I thought, "Oh, wow. Okay, this is actually part of education."

Leo Fonan: So then this is when I told them, "Okay, you can add the chess course." But I said to them, I don't have any engineers to give you, so go ahead. And they figured it out.

Marina Mogilko: Six months?

Leo Fonan: About six months.

Marina Mogilko: And now it's your fastest growing course.

Leo Fonan: At this point we have 7 million daily active users that are learning chess.

Marina Mogilko: Wow. This is fascinating. Can you tell me step by step what was their process? So if somebody's watching and they're like, "Wow, if Duolingo is able to do such a spin-off, which is different from languages, if I want to start something with AI and build a fast growing product, what are the five steps they need to take?"

Leo Fonan: These two guys, the first thing they did was probably learn chess probably because they didn't know any chess. And that's one of the reasons they wanted to add it because they themselves wanted to learn chess. But after that, what they did is they really started looking at the different tools that are out there for learning chess. They were basically doing market research, trying to figure out what's out there for learning chess. They found that what was out there was not all that great. And then they decided to start coding something. To be fair, this person does have some technical knowledge. They're not an engineer, but they have some technical knowledge. So they downloaded Cursor and at first they made just chess puzzles. Then they realized that the AI was not very good at making chess puzzles. So then they decided to train it with an online database of a lot of different chess puzzles. They trained the AI with that and it got a lot better. And then after that, what they started doing was just more and more mobile prototypes for me to play with until I told them that it was good enough to really put it in the app.

Marina Mogilko: We're talking about all these tools. We're probably in less than 1% of population who actually uses these tools. With social media, I remember when I started 12 years ago, it was a really small percentage of creators. Now it's the whole industry. It's so much harder to break in. I have 35 people on my team. I'm sitting in the studio that I built in my house. It's the whole thing. It's my full-time job. I still have my company, but I don't run it day-to-day because I don't have time. I have this. The same thing is happening with AI. We're in less than 1% actually using it very actively. And there's so much opportunity right now. Speeding up your work, teaching others how to use this stuff. Realize that you have this limited amount of time where you can use AI to your advantage. And if you're watching this video, you're already in that small group of people who's going to become much more productive. I just came back from TED and everyone was talking about how in a few years a lot of companies will lose to their competitors because their competitors increase their margins by a lot by using AI. So you can not only increase your productivity with AI, but also find people like you and help them do that. Maybe it's your new business, maybe it's whatever it is. But I just want you to realize we're still very early and this is the worst version of AI that we're seeing right now. Yes, it makes mistakes, but it's already amazing and it's only going to get better from here. And the thing that you should be working on right now is learning how to communicate with AI the right way. If I can create a list of top three AI related game changers in my life in the past few months, this one is going to be top three. I stopped typing. I talk to my computer. I talk to my phone. I talk to my iPad. I use an app called Whisper Flow. I installed it across all my devices and my prompting became so much better. Ellie Miller told me to complain to my AI. You know how easy it is to complain when you're talking versus typing? When I'm speaking, I naturally give way more context than I'd ever bothered typing. So my posts, emails, and drafts, they sound more like me. And it saves me so much time. Complain to AI. You can say, "Oh my god, Marina and Ellie were telling me to make all of these contact stocks. It feels like it's going to take so much time." Claude is likely to come back and go, "Wait a second. I will ask you the three questions that will give me the highest signal and therefore we will only use 5 minutes of your time." And we'll at least get you started with some context so that I at least moved away from completely generic into 50% Ellie zone. And then I can save 100% Ellie zone for later. But you got to start.

Yang Xiao, Mo Gawdat, Ken Katanfouch, and other founders: And here's what I noticed. People who are advanced in AI are not the ones paying the most to their AI tool. They are the ones spending the most hours inside one, giving it context, playing with it, adding files, building processes. Alex Mashrab built Hicksville to 200 million in revenue in 9 months. And here is how he uses AI. I am an immigrant so it just takes quite a bit of effort to come with a logical linear story line. GPT-3 mini became my coach. Really this was the first aha moment for me. The second aha moment was around Gemini 3 Pro model. I felt that my economic productivity really depends on how much I use Gemini 3 model. These capabilities of the model which can process voice, which can make images, but which also has deep reasoning capabilities and deep research. This was mind-blowing to me. So that's why I feel that my economic throughput really depends on how much I use Gemini 3 today.

Marina Mogilko: I also love using Gemini. Here's my use case. So Gemini is Google's product and Google owns YouTube. So it actually understands what makes a video work on that platform. It's trained on a lot more data versus other LLMs. So what I do, I upload the script of a video I'm about to shoot and ask it to identify where viewers are likely to drop off. And I can do the same with a video that's already recorded. For example, I sit down in an interview. It's 1 hour. And I'm like, okay, we need 40 minutes. I go to Gemini, upload the transcript, and I'm like, identify the least interesting parts that would affect how the video is performing. So here's the six tools the richest AI founders are using right now. Pick one today. Start with whatever is blocking your income. Perplexity Computer lets you connect your QuickBooks, your Fidelity, your Charles Schwab if you're interested in investing. Claude is really good at spotting patterns. ChatGPT is very supportive. So if you need a strategist, I'd go to ChatGPT. If you're more into deep analytical thinking, spreadsheets, tables, that's Claude and Gemini. It's a matter of giving them information and tailoring them for yourself.

And as I mentioned, two more for me personally: Perplexity Computer. So on the 15th of every month, it pulls from my QuickBooks and sends me a full picture. My margin, projected tax owed, tax strategies I can run this month to lower the bill, comparison to my last year, what's eating into my profit. All of this high-level CFO type of review. I used to use my accountant who charges by the hour. Now I use Perplexity Computer and it also runs my investments. I actually used Claude before that to create my investment strategy and Perplexity executes it. So I am investing heavily in S&P 500. I'm buying Google stock. I'm buying Meta. I'm buying Microsoft. But I want to be dollar cost averaging and I want to buy them on the right days. So Perplexity Computer tracks when the dip is happening and tells me to buy on that day. That's my dollar cost averaging. And also, because I receive those emails regularly, I feel like I'm more disciplined when it comes to investing.

The second one is Granola. Every meeting I take gets recorded, transcribed, and sorted. At the start of every new meeting with the same person, I have, first of all, a clean list of follow-ups waiting. What we agreed on last time, what I still owe them, what they still owe me. So we don't start from scratch. And then I heard somebody say, "If you're not recording your team's conversations, you're basically losing on a lot of decisions." I totally agree. Granola now has folders for every team member and I can upload them to Claude, run them against that person's KPIs and numbers. I feel like my Claude is becoming a digital COO. Of course, I still have my COO and we make strategic decisions together, but we're able to accomplish so much more because we actually have this operational analyst. And there is a rule that I now run for myself: If it's repetitive and if it's not work that depends on my creativity, I automate it. In 2026, it is not optional. So if you want to stay ahead of AI and keep growing your income, please subscribe to this channel because here I'm dedicated to sharing the most practical tips with you. And see you in the next one. Bye-bye.