Every now and then one of our students takes an idea and runs with it in a direction none of us expected. Joseph is one of those people. He came into our Champions community wanting to buy semi-passive websites and build a steady stream of passive income. Pretty standard stuff for a digital investor. What he ended up creating is something else entirely.
Today Joseph runs a six-figure AI branding business serving high-level executives, private equity figures, and heavily credentialed professionals. His minimum engagement is US$25,000. His average engagement sits around US$80,000. And in the last nine months alone, he’s pulled in roughly US$300,000 in work. He’s doing all of this on the side, by himself, using AI. If you’re building skills in the digital space, this one’s worth watching closely, because Joseph is right at the front of a wave most people haven’t even noticed. Make sure you watch the full interview below.
From Farm Kid to Geneticist to AI Branding Specialist
Here’s the part I love. Joseph isn’t some Silicon Valley wunderkind who was born writing code. He grew up on a large diversified farm in Michigan. His story sounds a lot like mine and Liz’s, honestly.
By training, he’s a geneticist, biochemist, and molecular biologist. From there he made what he jokingly called “the logical leap” into finance, running systematic quant trading strategies before moving into a startup focused on computational linguistics and psycholinguistics. That background matters, and I’ll come back to it, because it’s the secret ingredient in what he’s doing now.
Joseph found us the way a lot of our best students do. He heard Liz and me on Robert Kiyosaki’s podcast. He had a deep passion for passive income and wanted to build out another leg of it. So he joined Champions to learn how to buy and rank websites. That was the whole plan. Buy assets, build income, done.
But something shifted along the way, and it’s a lesson I want every digital investor to hear.
The Two Stools Strategy That Changed Everything
I’ve said this for years, and Joseph said it back to me almost word for word. There are two paths in this game, and the smart move is to do both. Buy the passive websites, and build the digital agency skills. He described it as “two stools.”
At first, Joseph was hyper-focused on buying passive income sites. That’s where his head was. But he realised something important. To actually learn how websites rank, how search works, and how digital marketing really functions, you have to get your hands dirty doing the agency work. We’ve seen this pattern play out time and again — it’s the same realisation that drives the digital agency gold rush that smart investors are tapping into right now.
“In terms of learning how to build websites and get them to rank, there’s a lot of value in practising that on the digital agency. I finally had an awakening.”
This is exactly why we push everyone through the agency component. It’s not just about earning agency income, although that’s lovely. It’s that the agency work teaches you the mechanics of the entire digital world. Joseph leaned in, and right as he did, the AI revolution hit search head-on. Because he’d built large language models himself from the ground up, he had a depth of understanding that most marketers simply don’t have. The timing was perfect.
If you want to learn this same combination of skills, buying digital assets and building high-value digital services, this is precisely what we teach inside our program. You can explore it here: the Digital Investors Program. It’s the training that gave Joseph the foundation to spot this opportunity in the first place.
What Is AI Branding, and Why Are People Paying $80,000 for It?
Let me explain what Joseph actually does, because when you get it, you’ll see why the price tags make sense.
Think about people where credentials and reputation are everything. Doctors. Lawyers. Finance executives. Fortune 50 and Fortune 100 caliber people. When someone searches their name in Google, or asks Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini about them, the answer that comes back genuinely matters. It affects deals, careers, and reputations built over decades.
Now here’s the problem. These large language models don’t actually know the truth about you. They build probabilistic guesses. And if you haven’t fed them a clear answer, they’ll just make one up. Worse, if there’s someone out there with your name and a shady past, the models can confuse the two of you.
Joseph told me about one client, a genuinely outstanding gentleman, who shared a name with someone who’d been prosecuted for murder. The AI models were muddying the two identities. That’s a nightmare for anyone whose reputation is their livelihood.
“Stop viewing your website as a vanity plate and view it as an information transmission mechanism into these large language models, to tell them exactly what you want them to know about you.”
In two weeks, Joseph fixed it. He built infrastructure that communicates clearly to the AI models, giving that person agency over their own narrative online. You can see the kind of premium personal branding work Joseph delivers through his firm josephbyrum.com. He’s careful not to call it reputation management, because that field has become toxic and cheap. What he delivers is something far more sophisticated and precise.
The Founder Effect Nobody Talks About
Here’s a technical gem Joseph shared that stopped me in my tracks. Inside these language models, there’s a concept called the founder effect. The models can’t reliably tell the difference between the founder of a company and the company itself. They blur together.
Joseph discovered that when you deliberately separate the two identities, giving the founder their own clean digital brand and the business its own, the search results for both go, in his words, “vertical.” They shoot up.
This is huge for small business owners with strong entrepreneurial founders. Joseph’s advice is simple. Do the business branding, but also do the founder’s personal brand, and keep them distinct. It enhances revenue for the business and dramatically strengthens both reputations at the same time. That’s a two-for-one most agencies don’t even know exists.
The Psycholinguistics Edge
Remember that startup background in psycholinguistics I mentioned? This is where it pays off.
Joseph describes his approach as “SEO on steroids.” The new search engines are language models, so the way you communicate matters enormously. If you present yourself in a way that doesn’t match how you actually speak and think, you create doubt in the system. The model gets confused about who you really are.
“If you can hyper-optimise your personal brand with the way you communicate, it makes it a lot easier for these search engines.”
What I found genuinely moving is how his clients react. Most people have never truly thought about their own bio, their own story, the words that represent them. When Joseph presents it back to them, cleanly aligned with how they actually communicate, he says the reaction nine times out of ten is, “Wow, I would not have said that myself, but that’s exactly me.”
How Joseph Prices Premium and Wins
Now let’s talk about the money, because I know that’s what a lot of you are waiting for.
Most people running small digital agencies would never dream of charging $80,000 for a single engagement. So how did Joseph get his head around premium pricing? He worked it out logically, not emotionally.
First, he knows exactly what he’s built. To replicate his technical solution, a client would need to stitch together at least five different tools, and he knows the price of every single one. Second, he knows what the PR and reputation management players charge. He priced accordingly, positioning himself deliberately at the premium end with a solution built to stay relevant over time.
“We’re delivering a very premium solution, so I’m charging a premium price. This is the easiest sale I’ve ever made in my life. By far.”
That line matters. Joseph describes the market as a “bifurcated distribution curve.” Some people don’t get it, and they don’t waste his time. But most people get it immediately. The only real question is whether they can pay and what price point suits them. When you’re talking to the right person, there’s barely any price resistance at all. If you’re stuck debating price, Joseph says, you’re probably talking to the wrong prospect.
Finding Clients Without LinkedIn or Cold Outreach
Here’s something that surprised even me. Joseph isn’t running Facebook ads. He isn’t doing cold LinkedIn outreach. Many of his clients don’t even have LinkedIn accounts.
He’s accessing a tier of the market that needs clean digital reputations but deliberately keeps a low profile. So how does he reach them? Two ways. First, his own personal network, built over an entire career, leaning into the segments he knew could use the service. Second, and increasingly, the network effect.
When you deliver a result this good for someone that influential, they talk. At dinners, at cocktail parties, in the circles these people move in, word travels fast. One happy client tells another, “You need to talk to this guy.” That’s word-of-mouth referral operating at the very top end of the market, and it’s the most powerful marketing there is. We’ve seen this same referral-driven growth fuel seven-figure digital agency businesses built by our own students.
The Real Lesson: AI Rewards People Willing to Do the Work
I asked Joseph about the fear so many people have around AI. Is it going to disrupt everything we teach? Is this kind of work still relevant?
His answer was emphatic. It’s more relevant than ever. And the people it’s most relevant for are those willing to roll up their sleeves and actually solve problems.
“The technical cheese has moved with AI. I consider that a feature, not a bug. It washes out the people who are pretending, and makes space for people who really want to figure out what’s going on and help people.”
Joseph made the point that this isn’t rocket science. In his words, “we’re not realigning the Hubble Telescope here.” You don’t need a PhD in mathematics. What you need is the willingness to sit down, read the actual documentation, think in systems, and solve real problems. Most people simply won’t do that. How many folks do you know who’ll actually go and read Google’s developer documents? Not many. That gap is exactly where the opportunity lives.
And people genuinely want help. Busy executives don’t have time to figure their own digital presence out. What they’re desperate for is someone credible who can say, “Here’s what we’re going to do, A through E, and it will work.” When you can deliver that with confidence, the work sells itself.
Why This Is Just the Beginning
Joseph believes we’re entering an era where billion-dollar companies will be run by teams of three, four, or five people, powered by AI. The personal branding piece alone, he says, is huge, and it’s an unmet market need that’s clearly there.
I couldn’t agree more. What Joseph has built in nine months is remarkable, and I genuinely think he’s only at the start of this wave. He started with one idea, buying passive websites, and went down a rabbit hole that turned into a thriving premium business. That’s the magic of building real skills in the digital world. You never quite know which door opens next.
The through-line for you, if you’re reading this, is simple. Learn AI. Learn how search really works now. Build the two stools, passive assets and high-value digital skills, so you’re positioned to spot opportunities like this when they appear in front of you.
That’s exactly the foundation we give our students. If Joseph’s story has lit something up in you, come and learn the skills that made it possible inside the Digital Investors Program. Or start with our free masterclass to see whether this world is for you. The people who lean in and do the work are the ones who win. Joseph is living proof.
