#57-How a man who has been earning from a side hustle course for 13 years used an AI employee on a single Mac mini to cut email time from 10 minutes to 1 minute
A sole proprietor who used to spend 10 minutes clearing a single email has reduced that time to under a minute by housing a "24/7 AI employee" on a single Mac mini. The monthly cost is $200 (about 30,000 yen). The same business owner also replaced an SEO agency he was previously paying $3,500 (about 530,000 yen) a month for with this AI employee.
Today, I listened to this podcast.
The Side Hustle Show Episode 738: "How to Build and Train Your 24/7 AI COO"
This is a show where Nick Loper invites sole proprietors who are building side hustles earning anywhere from tens of thousands to millions of yen a month while working their main jobs, and digs deep into how they do it.
The protagonist is Jacques Hopkins. He is a US-based sole proprietor who has been selling an online piano course called "Piano in 21 Days" for 13 years. He is not a celebrity in the piano industry. He is just an ordinary sole proprietor who has been running a single niche course for 13 years, aimed only at adults who want to learn piano, all by himself. He has made his living from that one course.
Three months ago, Jacques was exhausted from being pushed around by AI. He would open ChatGPT and close it, try Claude and get frustrated, and in the end, he couldn't apply any of it to his business. To borrow his words, he was scared and overwhelmed by AI.
Now, three months later, he has turned the business he ran alone into a small company that operates almost 24/7. That's because he hired one AI employee. The AI employee's name is "Rocky." It lives inside the Mac mini on his desk.
"Asking questions on ChatGPT" and "having an AI work as an employee" are two different things
Jacques explained how to use AI in four levels. This serves as the entry point for this article.
Level 1 is chat usage, where you ask ChatGPT or Claude questions and get answers. Many people stop here.
Level 2 is the stage of building "if this happens, do that" type automation using Zapier or Make.
Level 3 is AI agents. Entities that can even operate your computer in place of a human.
Level 4 is what he calls a "Personal AI Operator." An AI employee dedicated to you that remembers all your context. The more you use it, the more it learns how you work.
When I previously wrote about updating the "4-Hour Workweek" philosophy for the AI era (past article #33), I touched on the future where AI agents would replace the Tim Ferriss-style "outsourcing to human VAs." Even before that, I introduced a story about a consultant-turned-individual using AI to do the work of "six people" (#06). Jacques' case this time is an extension of that, and it is the current cutting edge of where a sole proprietor has actually stepped into Level 4.
Jacques was at Level 1 until three months ago. He suddenly jumped to Level 4. It is more accurate to say that he didn't skip the middle, but rather that he moved there all at once because the Level 4 system was ready.
When you hear about AI side hustles, you tend to imagine things like "writing something with ChatGPT and selling it" or "selling prompts." But what Jacques is doing is different. He re-accelerated his existing business by hiring one AI employee. This is the most interesting part of this story.
Email: 10 minutes to 1 minute; SEO: $3,500 a month to zero
Specifically, here is what Rocky is doing, based on Jacques' own statements.
Customer Support: Previously, a human support representative took about 10 minutes to reply to one email. This was because they had to log into multiple tools like Active Campaign and Go High Level to verify whether the sender was a customer or a prospect, what past conversations they had, and which lesson in the course they were stuck on. Now, Rocky gathers all the context within a minute and even creates a draft reply. His support staff member just reads the draft, checks it, and hits the send button. It has become less than a minute per email. 10 minutes to 1 minute, meaning the productivity of support operations has increased tenfold.
What is important here is the design that Rocky is not given the authority to "send." It stops at the draft stage, and the final decision is left to a human. Please remember this, as it is a structure that will also be effective in the "how to imitate this in Japan" section later.
SEO: This is work that was previously outsourced to an external SEO expert for $3,500 (about 530,000 yen) a month. Rocky connects via API with Google Search Console, audits all pages on the site, identifies pages with zero traffic, pages that are too similar, and broken links, and fixes them automatically. It even writes articles in his own writing style. Jacques has canceled this SEO agency and has Rocky do it all alone.
Dashboard: Affiliate sales, ad spend, newsletter signups, YouTube revenue, Mediavine ad income—Rocky automatically summarizes the "numbers scattered across various tools" problem common to sole proprietors into a single dashboard. What used to be updated daily by a human virtual assistant has now become real-time.
Morning Briefing: Every morning, Rocky sends one email like a morning newspaper saying, "This happened last night" and "These are today's priorities." Jacques can now grasp the state of his company in 3 minutes while drinking coffee.
Ad Management: Already connected to the Meta Ads (Facebook and Instagram ads) dashboard. It tells him what is working and what is about to stop. It even suggests new creatives.
Bookkeeping: This is apparently a work-in-progress project. Previously, the previous month's books wouldn't be ready until the middle of the following month, a common situation for sole proprietors where the data is almost useless by the time it's available. He is currently having Rocky build a system to view the books in real-time.
Jack runs all of this on a paid ChatGPT plan for $200 (about 30,000 yen) a month. The 530,000 yen he was paying for an SEO agency has disappeared, and on top of that, it handles other tasks as well. Jack himself says, "$20,000 a month (about 3 million yen) is what it feels like to hire an employee for $200 (about 30,000 yen) a month." In Japanese yen terms, it feels like hiring someone worth 3 million yen a month for just 30,000 yen.
And March 2026, three months after Jack started using Rocky, was his most profitable month since the pandemic began. The course he had been selling for 13 years hit a record high in profits just 3 months after hiring one AI employee.
The keys to the design are "limit to read-only permissions," "have it live on a Mac mini," and "assign tasks one by one."
From here on, this is a discussion on design for readers who already have a side hustle or sole proprietorship and want to follow suit. I will organize what Jack failed at and learned over three months into a reproducible model.
Key 1: Separate the hardware from your main machine
Rocky lives on a Mac mini. This is a different machine from Jack's work MacBook. You might want to ask, "Couldn't you just rent a VPS in the cloud?" but Jack clearly says, "Never put it on your main machine."
The reason is the same as when hiring a new human employee. No business owner would immediately share their personal computer with a new hire. The idea is to show the same courtesy to an AI employee.
There are two advantages to having it live on a separate machine. One is that even if the AI employee goes rogue, your main machine's data won't be damaged. The other is that if the AI employee messes up, you can disconnect it and restart it. In short, it's the same reason you give a human employee their own PC.
The Mac mini was chosen for three reasons: it's small, relatively cheap, and compatible with AI operator software. Apparently, an old MacBook could also be used as a substitute.
Key 2: The permissions granted should be "read-focused, with minimal write access"
Jack is very careful about limiting the permissions he gives Rocky.
Email account: Read-only. Can create drafts, but cannot send.
WordPress: Write access for some pages only (for SEO corrections).
Google Search Console / Ad accounts: Read-focused.
"Letting an AI employee do everything" sounds cool for a viral video, but in reality, if you cut corners here, you'll have an accident. Jack strongly advocates for "read-only at first." Have it write drafts, and have a human do the final check. His conclusion after three months is that this alone will definitely increase productivity.
Key 3: Assign tasks "one by one"
This was the first mistake Jack made. AI agents look like they can do anything, so you tend to want to hand over 5 or 10 jobs at once. But a few days or weeks later, things start breaking everywhere.
His recommendation is to first build one task until it works perfectly before moving on to the next. His own first task was a business dashboard. Just consolidating scattered numbers into one sheet. Once that was running stably, he added email support, then SEO, adding them one by one in that order.
Key 4: Use "reverse prompting" to design the requests
The last one is the most effective technique.
Usually, we command AI to "do this." Jack's contrarian approach is to ask, How can you best help me?.
Take SEO, for example. Instead of ordering it to "help with my SEO," you ask: "I'm struggling with SEO. What kind of system should we build so you can help me most efficiently?"
Then, the AI will design a system for you, saying, "Well, first let's connect to Google Search Console. Next, let me audit all your pages. Then..." You are essentially handing the role of the designer over to the AI.
Jack calls this "reverse prompting," and he says it's the biggest technique he has mastered in three months. He says you don't need knowledge on how to master AI. Just by honestly throwing your problems at it, the AI will figure out how to solve them. I think this is quite a blessing for sole proprietors.
Why copy this "now"?
The idea of a Level 4 AI operator has existed for a while. But listening to this podcast, I realized that in the last few months, it has suddenly dropped to a level that individuals can copy.
There are three reasons.
First, hardware has become cheaper. You can choose an inexpensive model of the Mac mini even when new, and you can secure one in the 30,000 to 50,000 yen range on the used market. Jack even mentions that "many stores are out of stock of Mac minis," which shows that more people are already buying them for the same purpose.
Second, the performance of AI models has improved to a level that can withstand the operations of a sole proprietorship. Jack runs his on the $200/month (approx. 30,000 yen) ChatGPT paid plan, but he says you can start with the $20/month (approx. 3,000 yen) plan. At 3,000 yen a month, it's an amount even someone who has just started a side hustle can try.
Third, the hurdle for setup has lowered. While Jack says "the setup itself is quite technical," he mentions that he solved even those technical bottlenecks by consulting with another AI (he uses Claude) in real-time. Ask the AI while you are stuck, and set up the AI. The idea of using AI to resolve bottlenecks is spreading, and this is the biggest factor that has brought it down to the side of sole proprietors.
Where you are likely to get stuck when copying this in Japan
If I reorganize this for Japanese readers, there are three points where you are likely to get stuck.
First: Buying the machine without being able to verbalize "what you are hiring it for." An AI employee is an employee you hire to solve your problems. The owner of the course that has been selling for 13 years had "I want to summarize scattered numbers" as his initial problem. What is your problem? If you can't write this down, the Mac mini will just become a decoration even if you buy it.
Second: Trying to "make it do everything." This was also Jack's biggest failure. Assign tasks one by one. Perfect one thing before moving to the next. This is the golden rule.
Third: Giving it too much authority. Especially in Japan, if email bodies are sent out on their own, your relationship with customers will collapse instantly. At first, only allow reading and drafting. Even just this will reduce 10 minutes to 1 minute.
From a side hustle perspective, this is not about an "AI side hustle," but rather a story of "having your own small business and re-accelerating it with AI." It could be a blog, note, minne shop, or private lessons that are already earning even a few tens of thousands of yen a month. What happens if you sit one AI employee behind your own small business that is already running to some extent? This is the direction that has already started rolling overseas as the next way for sole proprietors to grow.
What you can do today
Write down just one repetitive task that takes up the most of your time. Is it email replies, SNS drafts, or totaling numbers? Just one.
For that one task, ask ChatGPT ($20/month / approx. 3,000 yen) or Claude in a chat: "I am struggling with this. What kind of system should we build so you can help me most efficiently?" This is practice for reverse prompting. The AI will design it for you.
Once the design becomes clear, do not grant write access yet; first, have it create only drafts, and continue to perform the final check yourself. Even just this puts you at the entrance to what Jacques calls '10 minutes to 1 minute for emails'.
Introducing a Mac mini or turning it into an AI operator comes after that. Getting used to the 'have it create a draft and then inspect it' model for the very first task is the shortest path to having a 24-hour employee like Rocky in three months.
This note is a place where I translate and deliver the latest case studies of overseas micro-businesses, using business podcasts from English-speaking countries as primary sources.
Reference Information
Podcast: The Side Hustle Show Episode 738 'How to Build and Train Your 24/7 AI COO'https://www.sidehustlenation.com/how-to-build-your-own-ai-operator-with-openclaw/
Characters: Jacques Hopkins — Operator of 'Piano in 21 days' (an online course for learning to play piano in 21 days). This is his 10th appearance on the show, a record. Personal website: https://onlinecourseguy.com
Tools mentioned in the article: ChatGPT ($20/month / $200 plan), Claude (Anthropic), Whisper Flow (speech-to-text AI), Make.com, Zapier, Active Campaign, Go High Level
The first task Jacques recommended for delegating to AI: Business dashboard (the task of consolidating scattered numbers into one sheet)
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Notes regarding the figures in this article:
'10 minutes to 1 minute per email', 'Replacing $3,500/month SEO agency work', and 'March 2026 as the highest profit month' are statements made by Jacques himself on the podcast (Side Hustle Show #738). Third-party verification via primary sources is not possible.
The tool name 'Open Claw' is how Jacques refers to it on the show; the spelling and official name are based on the show notes.
$3,500/month = approx. 530,000 yen, $200/month = approx. 30,000 yen, and $20 = approx. 3,000 yen are calculated at an exchange rate of 1 dollar = 150 yen.
* Exchange rate is estimated at 1 dollar = 150 yen.
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