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Sit with a small business owner for 45 minutes, prescribe 3-7 off-the-shelf AI tools, charge $999 — then upsell a $1,500/month concierge retainer at $1,000 an hour
~15 sold in 2026 · 50-60% convert to implementation · AI Concierge retainer: 5 clients at $1,200-$2,000/mo, $8K MRR in the first 10 days
"Your client is literally paying you to uncover opportunities for them to pay you more. That's what a good audit does." The $999 is not the business — it's the diagnostic that makes the $5,000 build an easy yes.
Fewer bars = easier, cheaper, or faster for an AI-assisted solo builder. Editorial judgments based on the case details.
Corey Gannon operates out of Charlotte, North Carolina, and sells what he calls an AI Tools Assessment. The premise is that essentially every American small business needs AI and almost none of them are using it — his estimate is that "maybe 5% of companies are using any AI tool other than ChatGPT." His clients are small business owners with two to twenty employees doing $500K to $5M a year in revenue. The offer is a 45-minute structured interview in which he identifies bottlenecks, followed by a report prescribing three to seven off-the-shelf tools that will reclaim five to ten hours a week. If he can't find at least five hours of opportunity, the client gets a full refund. Price: $999. In 2026 he'd sold about fifteen of them at the time of the interview. The critical point, which he makes repeatedly, is that this is not the business. "$999 is just the door." Between 50% and 60% of assessment clients ask him to implement what he prescribed, and the lifetime value of an assessment client ends up at "3, 5, 10K or more." The upsell he's most excited about is the AI Concierge — a monthly retainer for two 45-minute working sessions where he sits on Zoom and helps the owner build Claude skills. He didn't know if anyone would buy it, so he simply told everyone he spoke to. "Of the first six people that I told about this offer, I closed five of them and generated — where I'm at 8K — I was at 8K MRR in the first 10 days. And I kept raising my price for everybody that said yes, and people kept saying yes." He quoted the first client at $1,200 a month, the next two at $1,500, the fourth at $1,800 and the fifth at $2,000. He's capping the roster at six.
Seven methods, all local, none needing capital or an audience, and they split neatly into fast and slow. Fast is door knocking: one stranger who acted on this advice walked into 30 local service businesses asking for the owner or manager, booked five meetings and closed two clients.
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Data credibility: Founder interview on Greg Isenberg's podcast, self-reported and unverified — no dashboards, invoices or client lists are shown at any point. The core figures come directly from Corey Gannon: ~15 assessments sold in 2026 at $999, 50-60% conversion to implementation, project prices of $1,500/$3,000/$3,500/$8,000, and five AI Concierge clients at $1,200/$1,500/$1,500/$1,800/$2,000 a month producing '8K MRR in the first 10 days' from six conversations. Two of the most quotable acquisition results are third-hand — the door-knocking outcome (30 doors → 5 meetings → 2 clients) came from an Instagram DM from a stranger, and the office-hours outcome (11 attendees, 2 follow-ups) is about a member of his paid community. Client-side benefits ('average client saves about seven hours a week', 'average tool cost about $60 a month') are his own estimates with no measurement methodology given. He promotes a free report template at audittemplate.ai and references a paid community, both commercial interests in this playbook appearing credible.
The first product is a diagnostic priced to be profitable on its own: $999 for a 45-minute structured interview plus a report prescribing three to seven off-the-shelf tools that reclaim five to ten hours a week. Buyers are owners with two to twenty employees doing $500,000 to $5 million a year.
The diagnostic is the engine rather than the product. Between 50% and 60% of assessment clients ask him to implement what he prescribed, taking lifetime value to three, five, ten thousand or more, so the $999 pays for its own sales process and the client funds the discovery of what they will buy next.
Two things in this model take months to pay and give no signal meanwhile: the meetup, where clients arrive from events three through six, and building in public, where early on there is genuinely nothing to post.
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