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Hey Innovator,
While our Private Mentorship has a 100% success rate - that’s not why students join.
If you think that sounds strange, you’re right. Even stranger is the fact that I’m not going to tell you why they joined.
I’ll do you one better - by the end of this email, they’ll tell you themselves.
(Btw, enrollment in the Incubator closes tomorrow. Details on all levels of the program are on this page.)
Let’s get to it:
Reason #1: High-Value Use Cases
So I just got off my first call with a new Private Mentorship student. Last week he joined the most advanced level of our AI Incubator program.
You’ll see this student’s new product at Demo Day in August, but the sneak-peek version is that it’s an AI-powered database built for a specific (and high-value) use case related to his expertise as a pharmacist.
And if you’ve watched our Demo Day replays, you saw all five Private Mentorship students from the January cohort show their new prototypes - now, if you look even closer, you’ll spot the trend:
Students usually have a high-value use case in mind for their AI processes and products. That’s true for all our students, even if they don’t have an idea going into it, but it’s especially true for our mentorship students.
(In our January cohort, our success rate across all students was 98.7%. However, among our mentorship students, it was 100%. I’m proud to say that we’re all about getting stuff done around here 🙂)
Since I’ve spent 30+ hours in 1:1 calls with my Private Mentorship students, I’ve also got other curious insights about what inspired them to join.
Reason #2: “Accountability is everything.” (and they’re playing to win)
Private Mentorship students have busy lives – but most importantly, they recognize that they’re so busy that they are liable to put the big, important things off if they don’t have the right level of accountability from an outside source.
You may have seen this in the Urgent vs. Important matrix, which looks like this:
(This is also called the Eisenhower Matrix after the former president and WW2 general, who used it to guide his own decision-making.)
The students who join the AI Incubator Private Mentorship recognize that building their new AI prototype falls in the top-left quadrant: important but not urgent.
These tasks are critical for strategic long-term growth. But they frequently get crowded out by the urgent and important tasks, and sometimes even the urgent but not important tasks (which we also call “putting out fires” or “answering email all day and then not being able to remember what you did for the last 8 hours”).
The way you fix this is by finding a coach, consultant or mentor to make sure you are forced to show up and do the Important But Not Urgent work for your long-term career and business growth. And that’s exactly what happens during our 6 weeks of Private Mentorship calls.
The world’s best executives, athletes, and top performers all have coaches in their corner - our mentorship students know this, and see both themselves and their project as a more than worthwhile investment.
Dr. Mircea Marzan, Medical Doctor, MBA and Non-Profit Executive
[Demo Day Project: Alzheimer’s Screening Report Generator]
“Initially I was looking just to get some basic training, but I decided that it makes much more sense to go for mentorship because the support, the guidelines and the direction were much more helpful than a simple do-it-yourself project.
You can do it on your own, but when you have a lot of things that are challenging your time and your agenda, it's much better to have a stronger commitment and involvement.”
Reason #3: “I want to learn AI, but not the hardscrabble way.” (because time is precious)
We know that Private Mentorship students value their time and mental energy. They’re busy, they have successful careers / companies, and they could easily devote all day to existing tasks before they even get around to the important long-term stuff like AI.
They also are smart and accomplished enough to take the “do it all yourself” route to learning AI if they really wanted to – watching dozens of hours of YouTube videos, reading all the documentation, trying to learn how to run some Python code or Zapier integrations by themselves. Many of them already have advanced degrees or are executives at their companies, so they can accomplish pretty much anything.
However, just like everyone else, they only have 24 hours in their day.
And because they are already maxing out their time with important and valuable things (their existing work + family time + staying healthy + the occasional vacation), they have to carefully consider the Opportunity Cost of every extra thing they do.
When I was a 21-year-old just out of college living in a sparsely furnished apartment with very little to do in my free time, my Opportunity Cost was near zero. I had plenty of empty time, so I could spend it without thinking about the trade-offs or efficiency of those choices.
But today, every moment of my day could be used for something valuable – growing my businesses, spending time with my wife and son, working out, and a dozen other things that I value at $200+ per hour. That means that every time I choose to add another task to my plate, it has to compete with a $200+ per hour alternative.
My Private Mentorship students are in this boat too. They always have high-value stuff they could be doing, so they want to find the absolute highest-efficiency way to spend their time. That eliminates the possibility of sifting through YouTube or Coursera for 40+ hours to figure out how to DIY one tiny piece of their AI idea. And it makes the investment in the Private Mentorship feel like a no-brainer in comparison to the lost time and income of going it alone.
Dr. Jessica Boyatt, Clinical Neuropsychologist
[Demo Day Project: NeuroScribe]
“I'm used to being an expert, in some fields, some areas, and I'm really not an expert in AI or software or any of this stuff. So to not get blocked by my lack of knowledge – I think that's probably the biggest change [as a result of the Private Mentorship].
My brother was doing like a ‘prompt training’ thing, and it was so clear to me how different the Incubator was, and especially at the Private Mentorship level, to what he was doing.
He learned very teeny tiny dots of “how do you write a prompt” for one teeny tiny thing. But the real benefit [of the Incubator] is that you zoom out and you zoom in.
You get the big picture of what AI could do. You think broadly about your ideas. But then, because I have access to [Rob] and we have weekly meetings, it holds me accountable. It also allows me to say, ‘I don't understand how that works.’ Or ‘I don't understand how to connect the dots here, but I have this other big idea.’ You can zoom out or zoom in, in ways that become truly useful.” Students repeatedly tell me that accountability, reasonable deadlines, and a personal relationship with me and my software engineers was more than worth it.
None of this is accidental though - we put in a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure they never get stuck or spin their wheels on tasks that claim to be “do it yourself” but are in fact time-consuming and cumbersome.
We also do things that some would call bold, like our…
Launch Guarantee
We give every mentorship student something you can’t get anywhere else – a Launch Guarantee. I personally guarantee that every Private Mentorship student will have a prototype to share with the world in 60 days, or you pay nothing.
This is insane – no other course, coach or consultant does this.
I can guarantee the Incubator Private Mentorship because I know the program works and I have 20+ years of software and entrepreneurship experience that I can use to make sure you launch a killer prototype on time.
Whether it’s Facebook, Intel, MIT, or our mentorship students, I make it my business to keep my promises - which is why we have a 100% success rate.
You spend 6 weeks with me in personal sessions, work with my professional software development team in 3 one-hour ‘build it with you’ sessions, get complete access to the Incubator curriculum and community ... and if you don’t come out of it with an AI prototype to share with your future customers, investors or partners, you get all your money back.
Dr. Laura Davies, Psychiatrist
[Demo Day Project: ForenPsych]
“I actually got an app that worked that never in a million years would have happened had I not done the Incubator.
I've been absolutely immersed in AI and in tech, and I get the newsletters, and always it says: ‘Plug and play. You can do this.’ When I do, they don't plug and play. And then I stop and then I go back to my day job. And having the Incubator forced me to find tools that actually worked for me and for what I wanted to work with and to do it on a schedule because Demo Day was coming up.
The private mentorship was fantastic because it meant that I had to hone down my idea. I tried to do it for a long time, just like when I was in school and I had to write a thesis. Working with Rob ... helped me narrow it down to something that actually worked.
This would no question have taken me six months ... Both working with Rob and having Demo Day coming up made this happen [in two months rather than six], and now I have a workable app.” If I sound a bit more direct than usual, it’s because I love that I get to do this for a living. Personally, I get a lot of fulfillment out of seeing every one of our students win. There’s just something special about launching a new idea out to the world and, after thinking on it some more, I think I know why.
It’s because every student I’ve ever worked with just wants to make this world a better place.
If that’s your kind of vibe too, then I’d be honored to help you cross that finish line.
The world ought to know more about you,
– Rob Howard
Founder of Innovating with AI
PS. The AI Incubator closes tomorrow (Friday) at 11:59pm. In order to respect my promise to my students, I can’t allow anyone to enroll after the deadline.
Here’s everything that’s included in the AI Incubator (the Essential Program, the Complete Program and the Private Mentorship).
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