Selling shovels

Day 106 / 366

During the 1840s there was a Gold Rush in California. 100s or thousands of people rushed there to find gold and make a fortune. While a small number of them succeeded, the real people who made money were the companies that were selling picks, shovels, and pans to these people. Instead of depending on luck, they found an actual need for people and capitalized on it to make money.

The Gold Rush is used as an analogy now to describe any get-rich-quick opportunity. For instance, these days AI is the new Gold Rush. Everyone is trying to build an AI-based product and get rich. Startups are adding AI to their name and their products just to secure funding. But these are not the real winners here. The bulk of the money is going to the people selling shovels.

The biggest winner is Nvidia. They make the graphic cards that are used to run these AI models. You cannot have an AI tool make money without a cut indirectly going to Nvidia’s pockets. Interestingly, Nvidia profited in the last Crypto and Blockchain gold rush as well, since Graphic cards were required for the blockchain to function.

But you don’t have to be a giant like Nvidia to make use of this strategy. Plenty of smaller players are doing this as well.

Take for example the need for AI chatbots. Every company wants to add an AI chatbot to their websites, to stay relevant. So to capitalize on this, I saw on Twitter that someone created a website through which you can add an AI-powered chatbot to your site in minutes, with no coding required. And he is making 1000s of dollars per month off of it.

This is what I want to focus on now. I want to find a way to sell shovels.