I was 24 and one year into my first job in advertising sales for Men’s Health. I loved my team, the social nature of the industry, and I believed in the product we sold. I had one hang-up. I was making $58,000 per year while delivering $1.2 million in sales revenue. I was making someone else twenty times my income. I had never planned to become an entrepreneur, but the maths made me ask a simple question. Could I sell something and make that money for myself?

This is a question many people ask themselves, but few act on it. This article will explain how you can leverage technology to solve a problem people are willing to pay you to solve. With advances in AI, nearly every service system is being disrupted, and for a short time early adopters, savvy businesses, and entrepreneurs can build highly profitable, scalable companies before competition reduces prices and tightens margins. This is not new. Technology has been disrupting industries since business began. This is where my journey started.

My phone rang. A friend from high school I had not seen in about eight years had accepted a job as a shooter-editor at a video production company in Sydney. He needed a place to stay until he could find a flat. At the same time, Facebook started to prioritise video and our advertising clients began asking for it in their campaigns. No lightning bolt moment. Just a pattern. People wanted video. I knew someone who could make it.

The first real opportunity was a Gatorade pitch alongside an editorial feature with the Australian cricket team. The brief needed social integration, so I added a Facebook video to our proposal. In media there is a simple rule: production should not exceed 20 percent of the total budget. On a $50,000 brief that meant $10,000 for production and, once print production costs were covered, $5,000 left for video.

In 2012 most agencies and production companies would not consider projects under $100,000. When I went looking for a supplier, people either did not reply to my enquiry or laughed at the budget. Even the in-house team at our parent company, Seven West Media, was not willing to help. It sounds wild now, but the tools of the day made everything slow and expensive. I asked my boss if I could brief someone I knew. He said yes.

That night I handed my friend, who was still crashing on our couch, the brief. Five thousand dollars. A day filming at the Men’s Health editorial photo shoot with the cricket team. I had no idea how professional videos were made, but I trusted his talent. I showed him Gatorade’s last Facebook video and asked if he could deliver the same quality. “Mate, I can do way better,” he said.

Unknown to me, the timing was important because video production technology had just changed. Canon’s 5D Mark III had just been released. It produced better image quality than many of the professional production cameras at around one tenth of the price. The compression it used, combined with Adobe Premiere Pro, made post-production roughly twice as fast and much cheaper to run. Put simply, quality, speed, and price had shifted in our favour thanks to this new technology. If this job had arrived only months earlier, we could not have delivered a video that met or exceeded our client’s expectations. Agencies and production companies were still tied to older, expensive systems and slower workflows. We were not.

The video was a success and the campaign went on to win an advertising award. The briefs continued to flow and I kept referring work until my friend said he would need to quit his job to keep up. This was the moment that changed my life. We had found a service in high demand that was not being catered to. I could sell the work and he could deliver it. Being young and bold, we both quit our jobs and started our first company. The plan was simple. I would meet as many of my advertising clients as possible to pitch our services.

We did not have a glossy deck. We had a short showreel from my now business partner’s personal work and a handful of Men’s Health videos, with a straight pitch: a production company that could deliver high-quality video at a fraction of the cost, at twice the speed. The pitch was well received, but from all the “we will work with you,” only two meetings converted to clients. Reebok and Spotify. But there was a catch.

Neither first job paid cash. Spotify needed a commercial spot for Tropfest but had no budget, and Reebok needed a profile of a CrossFit athlete but could only pay in contra, so we accepted one project with no budget and one with $3,500 in shoes and clothes. We had not made a dollar, but we were moving. Our portfolio was expanding and, with runs on the board, paid work was on its way.

Shortly after the Tropfest video, Spotify approved a $35,000 project in partnership with Jack Daniel’s. Reebok became a $50,000 per year client for the next five years. Combined with a steady stream of work from Men’s Health, our growing portfolio helped us win work for Tag Heuer, Mumm Champagne, and Dove. Looking back, the pattern is simple. Our business was built on quality, speed, and price made possible by new technology. The 5D Mark III put cinematic video within reach at a tenth of the equipment cost, with a workflow about twice as fast after the shoot. That is why we could deliver completed videos for around one twentieth of what many production companies were charging at the time. The same shift is why modern influencers can publish content that looks so polished as a solo creator. As the tech rolled into smaller cameras and then phones, the economics flipped.

The AI Opportunity

We are watching the same story play out with AI. Models like OpenAI’s Sora and Higgsfield AI are doing for production what the 5D Mark III did, only faster and at larger scale. The cost is a monthly subscription, the quality is high, and the workflow is about twenty times faster. The difference is scope. Camera tech impacted video production; AI is changing almost every professional service at once. The playbook is the same. Find a real problem people already pay to solve. Use new technology to deliver it at a fraction of the price, at equal or higher quality, and at greater speed. Early movers can charge a comparable price to current market rates at a significantly increased margin until the competition starts leveraging the same tools.

The next part of the story is less glamorous. Cash flow. We started with $10,000 of my own savings and another $10,000 from an investor. Half of our startup capital went on equipment and the website and the rest we held for cash flow. Our first projects did not generate revenue, and neither of us had the savings to survive more than three months without an income. We also realised that contract approval to final payment averaged 90 days. Even if we signed a contract on day one, we would not be fully paid before our initial capital ran out. Quitting our jobs before we had begun did not seem like the smartest option in hindsight. Depending on your business model, cash flow can lag, which is why it is critical to understand different billing and pricing models and their impact on cash flow. We will explore this in the next article.

Rather than accept defeat, we both took on other work to get through the first few months and, when the paying projects arrived, we decided to put my business partner on a small salary so he could work full time, while I went back to part-time work and juggled securing new projects with a regular job. The first twelve months continued like this until we hit our target milestone of $30,000 per month, which gave us enough cash to fuel growth while paying a modest wage. If you are bootstrapping your start-up, set a realistic revenue target and keep your job until you hit it. Alternatively, you can raise funds if you have a proven idea or your business can generate scalable profit. To quote Mike Hormozely, the best way to make money is by making other people money. We chose to bootstrap, but in hindsight raising money on our success would have helped us capitalise on the opportunity faster.

By the end of our third year we were at $500,000 in revenue, both on six-figure salaries, with two employees and nearly 20 percent profit. We had found a problem and a profitable way to solve it. We delivered high-quality video at speed and at a price the old production companies and agencies could not match. We solved our cash flow problem by taking on other work and set clear targets that enabled us to move into the business full time with confidence.

If you are searching for an idea, it’s unlikely you’ll find one in a vacuum. The best ideas live where you already work. They hide in the day-to-day problems you encounter. They appear when a client says we wish someone could just do X and no one does. Or borrow from a market that is ahead of yours. Take a proven model you have seen somewhere else and adapt it locally. You do not need an original idea. You need a valid problem, a buyer, and a way to deliver that can win on quality, speed, or price. New technology makes that possible. Your job is to notice the opportunity and act.