The $70 a Month That Replaced My $16,000 Website

The gap that matters in video production right now isn't between owners who use AI and owners who don't. It's between people who read about it and people whose business runs on it.

This episode is sixty days of receipts from inside a video production business coach's own company: the $16,000 website replaced by a $70 subscription, then replaced again by pages he owns outright. The subscriptions cancelled one by one (Otter, Grain, ElevenLabs, Calendly, Typeform) because an afternoon of building now does the job better. A registration page built and shipped in an evening, no page builder, no developer.

What you'll learn:

• Why the boring back office (follow-up emails, lead lists, landing pages, reporting) is where a video production company leaks money, and why that's now buildable
• The word-of-mouth ceiling: why referrals stall most video businesses between £80K and £150K, and why that's a systems problem, not a lead problem
• What eleven owners built in a room in London, including a prospecting engine that finds and scores fifty leads while you make coffee
• The tool circus warning: why subscribing to five AI tools this afternoon is the wrong move

After eight years coaching 178+ video production companies, this is the fastest shift Den has seen.

Thursday 6 August, one hour, live, free, two sittings so nobody's up at 3am. Twenty-five seats per session, cameras on, no replay.

Register: https://denlennie.com/london-recap

Learn about the VBA Elite Boardroom here: https://denlennie.com/mentoring

Mentoring options : www.denlennie.com

Connect with Den on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/den_lennie

Transcript

0:01

It's Sunday afternoon, and I'm at my desk in my office, where I have been for the last probably six weeks at my office on a Saturday and Sunday. And the reason for this is AI. So just today, I was working on something last night, and my mentor messaged me and said, "Why are you still using Lovable?" Now, Lovable is a website builder that's vibe coded, and it's very cutting edge. Essentially, I replaced my sixteen thousand dollar website with a device that's seventy dollars a month that I can just talk to and tell it what I want, and already it's obsolete. Because James said, "Why aren't you just building that in code?" And by code, I mean Claude code. So this morning, I had Lovable, I had a landing page software, websites, all inside platforms that I essentially rent. And by three o'clock this afternoon, the first pieces are back in my hand. I'm moving my website from Lovable to Claude Code, and I've saved myself about twelve hundred dollars a year. I built a registration page for a, a free event I'm holding on Thursday that was built and shipped in an evening without a page builder, without a developer. Here's the thing. I didn't hire anyone. I didn't have to go and outsource it. I described what I wanted, and it got built while I watched it. Now, this isn't a prediction episode. Everything in it happened in the last sixty days. So here's what I'm seeing. The gap now that matters isn't between people who either use AI and people who don't. It's between people who read about it and people whose businesses run on it. And I'm not talking about the generative AI footage thing here. I'm talking about running your business backend completely using AI as the engine. The pace is so rapid that me and my friends and my colleagues, my entrepreneur friends, are literally spending night and day, evenings and weekends immersing ourselves in this And almost daily, we find something we currently pay for monthly that we can now build ourselves in an afternoon. This isn't hypothetical. We've done it repeatedly. And the surprising fact is it's not the flashy demos, okay? It's the boring back office stuff, the follow-up emails, the lead lists, the landing pages, the reporting, the tracking. That's where the real money leaks, and that's what's now buildable. Now, this isn't about fire all of your tools tomorrow and cancel all your subscriptions. It's a compounding ef-effort. Small pieces weekly that you build that you then own forever. So let me just share some of the receipts I've got for the last sort of sixty days. Here's what I've been canceling this year so far: transcription tools, meeting note takers, voice generation, email monitoring. Each one replaced by something that we built that does the job better because it knows my business better. We've canceled Otter, Grain, Eleven Labs, Calendly, um, uh, form-based-- base Typeform. All of these things, they all add up and create quite a substantial monthly outgoing So here's what I, you know, where the automation tax, I think gets kinda compounded. Connector tools that charge you monthly to mu-- to move data between two systems you already pay for, you know? So for example, if you've gotta connect Calendly to your website, maybe you need to use Zapier. So these things are so annoying, and they're very complicated, and you can spend hours in automation. We've started writing scripts that do it all automatically. In fact, anything you can do with a mouse, AI can do for you. But I don't want it to... you to think that it's kinda like this autonomous machine. It's not. It's like you are still driving it, and you have to catch it because it's, uh, it makes mistakes. But today, we had a website we were hosting on Lovable, and I thought it was great. Twelve hundred dollars a year. Now, today, rebuilt the pages, loading faster, reads better, and I can edit directly by having a conversation on my Claude code window. It knows everything about me, my business, my branding. I don't have to, don't have to tell it anything. It knows 'cause it's stored. In London, in June, I hosted a two-day workshop. Eleven business owners, and we built working tools in the room. A prospecting engine that finds and scores fifty leads while you make coffee, and a nurture tool that keeps follow-up sharp when you'd normally go quiet. You know, one of the biggest obstacles I hear is if you're reaching out to someone on LinkedIn or someone sends you a message, and they sort of shut you down by going, "Oh, yeah, we got a supplier," or, "We're not really interested," or, "I'm sending this a showreel," it's often difficult to know what to say in return. So I built a tool based on all of my knowledge that you simply put in your LinkedIn profile, a bit about you, a bit about the client, a bit of background, and then the chat that you're having. And you can choose one of three different directions you can take the conversation, and it will take the most boring shutdown like "Send us a showreel," and it will turn it into an open-loop conversation. And the folks who've been using this said it's been changing their business and we'll be showing that on the workshop on Thursday in, in London, one of the attendees got a reply from a cold prospect inside of four hours, and he'd never done that level of outreach before. And it was someone in a perfect target market who was ultra interested in what they were doing. What we think, you know, a- as filmmakers we're not really business people, and so the business side can be taxing, and it can seem really challenging to find the time to do it properly. With this situation, Jim was gobsmacked that he had someone in his absolute target market and all he did was reach out to them and start this conversation using this tool. Now, at the end of that workshop, I put a camera on seven of them, and asked them for the biggest takeaway. And you know what? Not one of them said the AI. They said the room. Now, let's sit with that for a second What they meant was being in the room with other people going through this was the real power. So what does all this mean for a video business? Well, your clients are about to expect more, faster, cheaper, because their other suppliers are retooling. The craft doesn't protect you. The structure of your business will. You see, there's a ceiling with word of mouth and referrals, and almost every filmmaker I've ever met goes, "I've never had to do any marketing. I get by with word of mouth and referrals." And that will get you to somewhere between eighty and a hundred and fifty K. Then it stalls. Now everyone thinks that's a r- a lead problem, but it's not. It's a systems problem. And for the first time ever, the systems are really cheap to build. Now, this is about identity as well, and not tactics. The business owners who win this won't know most of the jargon, but they'll have the sharpest context on who they serve, how they sound, what they charge, and why. The AI just reads it. And look, if you've been using ChatGPT for a while and your memory's switched on, this has got... this is about to get a lot easier because it knows how you operate. So what we're gonna do is on this workshop on Thursday that I'm running, is it's about using less AI but used better. And in London we had two tools that we used that will beat ten used badly. So here's what you shouldn't do, and this is a kind of friendly warning. Don't go and subscribe to five AI tools this afternoon, and I would strongly advise you against any of these kind of ads that promise, an assistant that locks into Slack and does everything for you. They're just re-skinning what you can do yourself in Claude Code. It's what I call the tool circus, and it's where a lot of people are burning money right now. Now, AI in a chat window hits a wall that more skill won't fix. Fifty tabs of ChatGPT is still you doing the work, and it doesn't have the context. It's kind of having to be told each time. So I think what I wanna be clear about is you're, you're not gonna fundamentally reshape things in thirty days. What you can do in the next thirty days is rebuild the foundation. The compounding takes months, which is exactly why waiting costs more than it looks. This new system we are immersing ourselves in takes a while to build, but it reaches a point after what we call the build frenzy, where it starts to know so much about you that it can literally read your email and draft a reply that it will prevent you having to think about it, and it will draft it in your emails, and all you have to do is look at it, tweak it, and send it. Now, the good thing about tweaking it is if you don't like some of the language it's using, you teach your AI sitting on your folder to never use that language. There's some dead giveaways in AI and, you know, we gotta kinda train the AI not to use them. So here's what I'm doing on Thursday, and I realize it's quite short notice, but I'm like, I'm so in this that I just felt I should share what we did in London, plus what else I've learned in two free sessions. So I'm gonna be on for an hour or just over an hour live on what happened in London. The questions I asked eleven owners, the five problems that showed up in nearly every business, the tools we built and used, and what the attendees said that I didn't expect. So we're gonna be doing two sittings, so nobody's up at 3 AM. It's cameras on, capped at twenty-five in the room, so we can use it like a workshop, and there will be no replay If the room is the point, then sending your recording would be odd. Now, it's free, and I thought long and hard about this 'cause I don't really like doing free. But I'm only sending this to you if you're listening to this podcast or you're on my email subscriber list. So I figure that you've made a commitment, and I don't need to charge you to show up. Either you show up or you won't, it's completely fine. It's free. I'll spend about four, um, minutes at the end of the session telling you how you can carry on and help... get help from us if you want it. The other fifty-six are the content. And it's quite possible after an hour we'll go on and do some Q&A as well. So this is a one-off session, okay? It will not run again. Um, the link's in the show notes, or go to my website at danlenny.com. There will be a banner highlighting that on the homepage. So what I want you to think about is, where are you at with AI? What are you paying for every month in terms of your tech stack that you could own by Christmas? So if that sounds interesting to you, I will see you on Thursday. Now, that will be Wednesday evening in the US, Thursday in Australia on Thursday morning, and then Fri-- Thursday morning at ten AM in London, which will be Sydney and Melbourne seven PM Thursday night. Now, if you go to the website, all the details are there. I will see you then