Building a successful company used to be a years-long endeavor. In the AI era, a business can be built over a weekend for under $500.
When Jon Cheney founded Seek in 2016, he raised $13 million in venture capital over a few years for the augmented reality social platform. It was ambitious, but it paid off with an acquisition shortly afterward. He exited, securing over $100 million and an entrepreneur success story.
The experience is in stark contrast with his latest venture, General Artificial Intelligence Proficiency Institute (or GenAIPI), a company he started last year with impressive results. By harnessing AI, he built software over a weekend and landed his first customer within a week.
What’s more, it only cost him a few hundred dollars to do it.
Cheney was inspired by his own Payson-adjacent neighbors, who ranged from successful cattle herders to construction company owners, often with an average annual company income between $20 and $50 million. While they had regular income, he noticed they were not using AI in the ways he knew it could benefit their enterprises. And when he learned many weren’t even using ChatGPT, it prompted him to do something about it.
“I needed to push GenAIPI out there and help these amazing business owners,” Cheney says. “They were going to get beat. AI was going to smash them if they weren’t ready to defend it.”
There was a significant gap in knowledge about AI between Cheney and other business owners. If they could understand it better, it would mean reducing busywork and increasing efficiency and output. They would have a chance at staying competitive in a changing landscape.
To that end, he spent three days and nights creating course content to train business owners. He then posted ads in the form of quizzes on Facebook and Meta, piquing curiosity when people discovered how much they did or didn’t know about AI. Inevitably, this led them to his site. The ads garnered a lot of visits, but no sales immediately followed. Since his company was prepped and ready for customers, he got proactive instead — and it worked.
“One local business owner I contacted agreed to a $15,000 contract five days after I’d built GenAIPI,” he says. “Six weeks later, I was up to $180,000 of revenue.” And within six months, he hit a million dollars.
Considering the staggeringly rapid rate of businesses adopting AI across the country, GenAIPI is positioned to grow along with it. A 2025 AI Index Report shows that 78% of companies nationwide use AI, which has undoubtedly increased since. Even more eye-opening: The AI industry is projected to add nearly $16 trillion to the global economy by 2030.
These large numbers are capturing the interest of people like Jake Merrill, co-founder of Infinity Pools. Now a GenAIPI client, he’s in the process of heavily implementing AI into his marketing and social media processes, and hopes it’ll help him reach his goal of growing into a $100 million business in the next five years. After seeing Cheney post on LinkedIn — and already being familiar with his past success at Seek — he wanted to see what his latest company could do for them. It’s still in its early stages, but he thinks they’re headed in the right direction.
“There’s so much I don’t know and understand yet, and I’m down the road of running my business and trying to keep growing. I’m not an AI expert — nor do I claim to be — but I’m learning,” Merrill says. “Relying on [Jon Cheney] to help us get those tools in place will be big for us.”
AI is opening opportunities for existing companies to become more efficient, and new companies to start for next to nothing. When Cheney analyzed all he’d built within a few days, he discovered it would have cost him far more to create his company 10 years ago, approximately $3.2 million in 2016. This would include the amount of coding, paying for the educational content he created and more.
“A year and a half [can] change to three to five days. The decrease in the amount of effort, risk and money is 99.9% lower at this point,” Cheney says. “For a guy who has a lot of ideas, that’s cool.”
When it doesn’t cost much to test an idea, not only is the risk reduced, but it also dramatically shortens the time between an idea in the shower and the ability to initiate it.
“Putting capital into startups is risky because you have to spend so much money in order to get to the point of proving the model. With AI, that entire paradigm is flipped on its head. It doesn’t apply anymore,” Cheney says. “A software business in Utah can be built in a weekend for a few hundred bucks, and it can have customers by the following week.”
Still, the principles of entrepreneurship have not changed, Cheney says. Learning how to run a business efficiently is a first step. Remaining consistent is another.
“It’s not just about AI quickly bringing the idea to life. Yes, I can [help you] do that, but customers still have to be entrepreneurs and follow through,” Cheney says. “There’s a smaller percentage willing to do so and make it happen.”
Cheney explains he wants to help the world successfully navigate the steep curve of AI acceleration.
“A lot of people will lose their jobs because of AI. It’s already happened, and it’s going to get worse. That scares me. I believe in the power of AI. It can do so much good. It can enable entrepreneurs like me to do crazy stuff with unreasonable timelines, but there will be collateral damage. The best way to fight that is to help as many people as possible to understand it, learn how to use it and then partner with it. That way, everyone increases their capabilities.”