Hi Reader,

As always I appreciate you being here! Here's what you'll find in today's email:

• He Built a $2M AI Business in Year One
• Claude's Scariest AI Model Yet
• A Sneak Peek at Next Week's Video
• New & Trending Posts
• Top AI Stories This Week

You read. I listen. Let me know what you think by replying to this email.

🤯 He Built a $2M AI Business in Year One

This week I sat down with Jon Cheney, who built a Fractional Chief AI Officer business to $2M in revenue and over $1M in profit in year one...

No dev team, no VC money, no technical background. The wild part? Jon started this venture with $400 and a weekend in Replit.

He then closed his first $15K contract by cold messaging CEOs on LinkedIn.

👉 ​Watch ​My Interview With Jon Cheney​

The gap is simple. Mid-market CEOs know they need AI but can't justify a $300K full-time Chief AI Officer hire.

Jon fills that middle on a flat retainer at roughly 1% of client revenue, usually $10K to $15K per month.

The STE Framework He Runs on Every Client

• Strategy: Sit in C-suite meetings, map where AI can move a real number, tie it to a KPI
• Transformation: Ship the work, vibe code custom tools, automate the grunt work
• Education: Train the team on what's actually possible (the piece most consultants skip)

Real World Example: One of his clients is a California staffing company with 5,000 workers. Jon's team built an AI voice agent and a vibe-coded intake platform in a few days.

Staff dropped from 3 to 1. Incident close time went from 39 days to 11. Over $140K in annual savings. That's the conversation a CEO wants when the retainer invoice hits.

🚨 Claude's Scariest AI Model Yet

I normally skip AI model updates in this newsletter but this one I can't ignore.

Anthropic just announced Claude Mythos Preview and said straight up they will not release it to the public. Here's why:

• Mythos scored 72.4% on a Firefox exploitation benchmark. Claude Opus 4.6 hit 14.4% on the same test
• It autonomously found a 27-year-old OpenBSD bug and a 16-year-old FFmpeg flaw nobody had caught
• Over 99% of the vulnerabilities it found are still unpatched

Here's where I get skeptical: Anthropic's IPO is coming soon. At the same time they announce a model "too dangerous to release," they then conveniently roll out an enterprise cybersecurity solution.

Coincidence? Feels like something straight out of big pharma's playbook. Manufacture the disease, sell the cure, inflate the stock price on the way in.

That said, the cybersecurity implications are still real... Worth paying attention to either way.

👀 Sneak Peek at Next Week's Video

I've been living inside Claude Code and the use cases keep stacking up. I probably spend 8+ hours a day in Claude Code lol.

Next week I'm dropping a video on how I vibe coded my own social media scheduler using Claude Code, the Blotato MCP, and a Google Workspace CLI.

No more n8n, Make, Zapier, or expensive SaaS tools like Hootsuite.

This is part of a bigger 'AI Marketing Operating System' I'm building to organize my whole operation. Keep an eye on your inbox next week!

What hit harder this week, the $2M playbook or the Mythos news? Hit reply and let me know!

Until Next Time 🫡
Ryan

P.S. Quick personal note. I'm partnering with Sabrina Ramonov to help her with Blotato's SEO. Sabrina is an inspiration of mine so this is an honor that she trusts me with Blotato's SEO strategy. The same SEO Blog Post Writer skill I'll be running for her is inside my Claude Code Skills Stack.

You can also join my free AI community with 730+ members using AI to level up their work.

📈 New & Trending Topics

Be sure to subscribe on YouTube if you haven't already 🤝

• ​The Fractional Chief AI Officer Playbook (Jon Cheney Interview)​
• ​My Interview With Sabrina Ramonov​
• ​How to Scrape LinkedIn Profiles With Claude Code​
• ​10 Claude Code Usage Tips to Save Tokens​

🚨 Top AI Stories This Week

I only try to provide AI stories that matter and cuts through the noise!

• ​Claude Launches Managed Agents APIs for Cloud-Hosted Agents​
• ​Claude Adds Enterprise Controls and Analytics to Claude Cowork​
• ​HeyGen Launches Avatar V with 15-Second Identity Capture​
• ​OpenAI Launches $100/Month ChatGPT Pro Tier with 5x More Codex Usage​
• ​Cursor Launches Remote Agent Control Feature​