How To Turn Your Expertise Into A 6-Figure AI Business (MY INTERVIEW WITH PICKAXE FOUNDER )

Michael Simmons

Jul 17, 2025

∙ Paid

Are you an expert who wants a turn-key solution for transforming your expertise into prompts and workflows you can monetize?

There is only one good solution that I’m aware of.

Literally just one!

It’s called Pickaxe.

Here’s the hole in the market:

While ChatGPT GPTs make it easy to make your prompts public, they aren’t possible to monetize.
While you can monetize Poe Bots, the customers aren’t yours.
You can create an AI wrapper SaaS app, but you need to be a coder.

Enter PickAxe.

It enables coaches, consultants, and other thought leaders to…

Create AI apps without being technical. This way, you can focus on what you do best.
Choose how they monetize: free, free trial with email, pay per usage, or monthly subscription.
Own the customer. You have the customer information, and you get customer payments with Stripe, which means that if you ever wanted to, you could move the subscriptions off of PickAxe.
Keep their trade secrets safe. It doesn’t train on your data.
See what their users do. Get a detailed dashboard showing how customers are using your app.
Embed each bot on their site. Embed a Pickaxe on any website that allows embeds, including Notion.
Personalize their bot’s responses for users. It allows you to specify user memories to collect, enabling your bots to personalize their responses to users.
Automate their expertise. Connect to other tools like Make.com so your bots can trigger entire workflows.

Despite all these features, I’m surprised by how few people are aware of PickAxe

So, I interviewed the founder, Nathaniel Mahowald.

What We Covered

During our conversation, we:

Explored Pickaxe's bootstrap journey to $500K revenue
Discussed the threat and opportunity AI presents to consultants
Examined successful customer case studies across diverse niches
Revealed Pickaxe's upcoming vibe coding capabilities beyond chat interfaces
Analyzed the power of user memory and CRM integration
Covered API usage for advanced automation workflows
Explored the future of agentic AI for consultants
Shared best practices for building successful AI tools
Discussed the importance of human connection in AI businesses
Learned about Pickaxe's unique customer-centric approach

If you're in the knowledge business and wondering how AI will impact your future, this conversation provides a roadmap.

The Bigger Picture

The transformation happening now:

We're witnessing the largest shift in knowledge work since the internet began. For the first time, coaches and consultants can turn their hard-won expertise into scalable software products without coding skills. This fundamentally reimagines how expertise gets delivered and monetized.

Why this matters:

The knowledge economy is at an inflection point. Those who embrace AI as a tool to amplify their expertise will scale beyond what was previously possible. Those who don't risk being displaced by AI that provides "good enough" and then “excellent” advice on more and more topics. The window to position yourself advantageously is open now.

The broader impact:

Nathaniel's sees a future where specialized consultants can deliver employee-like AI agents to other companies, democratizing access to high-level expertise that was previously only available through large consulting firms. This represents a massive opportunity for independent experts to compete at the enterprise level.

Disclosure: I’m a PickAxe Pro paying user. I decided to register for the affiliate program. So, if you sign up for PickAxe using this link, you will be supporting this newsletter.