Codie Sanchez: I Went Through 500+ AI Tools — These Are the Ones That Help You Make Money
Codie Sanchez is not interested in AI tools that sound impressive in demos.
In a recent YouTube video, she went through more than 500 of them (yes, 500) looking for the ones that actually move the needle when you're trying to start a business and get a paying customer. Then she used them live, from zero to a real order, to prove the point.
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Start With Demand, Not an Idea
The first mistake Sanchez calls out is one most aspiring entrepreneurs make before they ever open a tool. They fall in love with an idea before finding out if anyone wants to buy it.
To find that answer with data instead of gut feeling, she uses Exploding Topics, an AI trend spotter that scans search traffic, social media and online retail to surface products with rising demand. From there, she runs every idea through what she calls the RRT test -- three questions that filter fast: Does the business resist a recession? Can you raise prices without losing customers? Can technology meaningfully improve the margins or output?
A yes to all three means the idea is worth building.
For the video, she landed on hands-free dog leashes. Pet spending in the U.S. exceeds $100 billion annually and has grown every year for a decade. Designer dog accessories already command premium prices. And while AI can't improve the leash itself, it can automate the entire advertising and selling operation around it. Three yeses.
Build the Avatar Before Anything Else
Before touching a website or a logo, Sanchez insists on deeply understanding the specific buyer. Not a broad category — one person, which she calls the avatar.
Her tool stack for this step uses three AIs for three distinct jobs. Perplexity handles research because it cites its sources, which reduces hallucination risk. ChatGPT builds a first draft of the customer profile fast. Then both outputs go into Claude, which she uses specifically for nuanced thinking and synthesis.
Her framing for each tool is worth remembering: Perplexity for real-world evidence, ChatGPT for speed and structure, Claude for depth and reasoning quality.
The avatar that emerged for the leash business was Jordan — a woman in her late 20s or early 30s who exercises regularly with her dog, juggles a coffee in one hand and a phone in the other and finds every regular leash slightly more annoying than it needs to be. That specific frustration becomes the center of everything built next.
The Branding Framework That Actually Works
Sanchez's branding philosophy comes down to three characters she calls the villain, the victim and the vow. The villain is the problem the customer is trying to escape. The victim is who the customer is before they find the product. The vow is the promise of life after.
For the leash brand, the villain is every cheap, tangled leash that fights back on every walk. The victim is Jordan, latte in hand, phone buzzing, dog pulling. The vow is hands-free freedom to walk, run, sip, and text at the same time. That story structure informs the name, the colors, the copy, and every word on the landing page before a single design decision gets made.
The logo came from using ChatGPT to write an optimized prompt for an image generation tool, then feeding that polished prompt in to get a professional result. What would have taken a designer weeks and a few thousand dollars happened in under four minutes. The branding output — a minimal, outdoorsy aesthetic with earth tones and clean line art — fed directly into the website builder.
The Landing Page Rules That Convert
Sanchez used Lovable, an AI website builder, and the first output was bad. She was clear about that. But the failure was instructive because it illustrated exactly what a high-converting landing page needs.
Everything important has to appear above the fold — the headline, the sub-headline and the call to action all visible before a single scroll happens. If a visitor has to scroll to understand what's being sold or why they should care, the sale is already lost.
The headline and sub-headline have to pass what Sanchez calls the loud music test. If you can't shout it to someone across a noisy bar and have them immediately understand what it does, it's too complicated. The first AI-generated version failed this test completely. The revised version — Walk your dog, hold your latte — passed it in four words.
Social proof has to appear before the fold, too. Think things like real customer names and real photos. A quote from Maya, 28, with her dog Biscuit, saying she cried on her first hands-free walk lands differently than "Verified Buyer says 5 stars." People believe customers; they don't believe brands.
Cold Traffic vs. Warm Traffic — and Why the Copy Is Completely Different
One of the sharper distinctions Sanchez draws is between the people who see an ad and the people who land on the site. Cold traffic has never heard of the brand and didn't ask for the ad. They have about two seconds before they scroll past. Warm traffic clicked through on purpose and gave attention voluntarily.
These two audiences need different words. Cold traffic copy leads with disruption — something that challenges what the viewer already believes and creates enough curiosity that they have to find out more. Warm traffic copy leads with the pain, not the product. Jordan doesn't care about the leash. She cares that every walk for the past year has been slightly more annoying than it needed to be.
For writing copy that stays consistently on brand, Sanchez uses Jasper AI, which lets her upload the brand voice, avatar profile and style guide once so every output sounds like the same company talking to the same person.
Automating the Customer Conversation
Sanchez's benchmark for predicting a business owner's revenue is a single question: How fast do you reply to potential customers? Her answer to the follow-up question — how do you do that at 11 p.m. when a customer is asking if the leash works for a 75-pound Bernese Mountain Dog — is Tidio, an AI chat tool that sits on the website.
Tidio answers questions in real time using a knowledge base the owner builds once and even acts as a salesperson to move visitors toward checkout. (The first order came in the same day the business launched!)
This article was provided by MoneyLion.com for informational purposes only and should not be construed as financial, legal or tax advice.
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