How I Turned Simple AI Prompt Engineering Into a 7-Figure Business Using Just Three Sentences—And Why Most People Miss It

 This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Mark Kashef, founder of AI automation agency Prompt Advisers.

The demand for Claude Code specialists has surged 938% on Fiverr over the past six months, as businesses seek freelancers who can use the AI coding tool to automate their workflows, build AI agents and ship products faster, according to the 2026 edition of Fiverr’s Business Trends Index.

I got a master’s in management and AI in 2019. One of the biggest things that I learned was prompt engineering. So before it was even mainstream, I had a competitive edge. Then, in late 2022, a few days after ChatGPT launched, I started a company called Prompt Advisers. The whole idea was to help people learn how to prompt.

Prompt engineering was popular. People were selling prompts and prompt packages. I was one of the first people to post on Fiverr saying, “I will write your prompts for you.” The business went from behaving very mediocrely in the first month to getting so much demand in the first quarter of 2023. But I was pricing super low because I didn’t even know if there was a market for prompt engineering. Of course, there ended up being a market and then some. We went from charging $10 per prompt to $50 per prompt to hundreds of dollars for a couple of pages’ worth of prompts. 

Becoming the top result for “prompt engineering” on Fiverr

Back when you really had to spoon-feed the AI — when we had GPT-3.5 Turbo, etc. — we became top on Fiverr for the keyword “prompt engineering.” So we got about 50,000 impressions a month just for that one keyword. Then Fiverr reached out to do some PR; we were featured in some articles with other companies. It put us on the map and gave us more legitimacy. From there, we started branching off into different avenues of AI. 

At the time, I had a full-time role working in data science as a manager. I’m very risk-averse and wanted to make sure that I was always respectful to my team. I didn’t want to live two lives at the cost of one. So I was basically working on my business from 4:30 a.m. to 9 a.m. every day, then 5 p.m. to 9 p.m. every night. Making money on the side is great, but when you go from side money for yourself to hiring a business partner and then five people, you have to worry about paying salaries. I had to make sure there was enough demand to sustain the business. 

Posting on YouTube leads to more inbound requests

Then, about a year and a half ago, I also started posting on YouTube, and that did really well. Inbound requests exploded, and with the Fiverr business, compounded into a snowball effect. I could have quit my job and gone full-time with the prompt engineering business last August, but out of risk aversion and pessimism, I waited. I needed to see if the AI boom had longevity or was just a series of micro bubbles. Once I felt confident I understood the trends, I left that data science role at the end of 2025. 

These days, the requests I receive from businesses looking for help with AI are very different from those I got two or three years ago. I’m teaching companies how to fish, versus purely doing projects for them on an ad hoc basis. There’s been a fundamental shift with models and services like Claude Code and CoWork. They became good enough to cut out a lot of work. Instead of spending two weeks explaining the ins and outs of their company so a freelancer can understand how to solve its problems with AI, entrepreneurs know the problem and what the solution looks like — they just need help harnessing the power of AI. 

AI workshops and consulting for small and large businesses

So I do a lot of AI workshops and AI consulting. The consulting involves businesses saying, “Hey, we think AI is magical. Are we eligible to use it the way we expect to?” And in many cases, these businesses aren’t. Using AI is a luxury. It’s not a right. A business only earns that luxury by having a clean back of house, meaning it has proper systems set up and data that doesn’t look like a complete mess. You have some SOPs on how you do one thing end-to-end that anyone could follow. If you have all that, then you can use AI really effectively. That’s when you get the real power of it. So we help people audit their existing interfaces and backends. We give them the tough love and the education.

Once in a while, a bigger company might ask if we can just do the AI solution for them. So those implementation conversations now become a derivative of the first engagement, which is, “Can you teach us?” And then they realize, “We’re cool to do this 80%, but could you help us do this 20%?”

The problem with custom development in AI

In 2023 and 2024, the business was 70% to 80% custom development, and then the rest was consulting and education. After last year, we flipped the business. It’s 70% consulting and education, 30% custom development. That’s because custom development in AI is kind of like death by a thousand cuts. The technology moves so fast, and the scope changes very fast. So we’re focused on very few enterprise clients for custom development.

But consulting is a revolving door of anywhere between 10 and 20 consults a month. Some of those consults are priced by the hour if they solely want an hour or two hours. Some of them want packages — “Could we pay for four hours of your time at some form of bulk discount?” And, “This is what our goal is to get to by the end of those four hours.”

We price workshops differently for small and medium businesses and enterprises because enterprises are more like special snowflakes. They want things much more tailored to their business, especially if they’re GDPR SOC 2 compliant. We have to play a different game. We have to teach things in different ways. They want to leave those conversations with certain departments being empowered in specific ways. 

A $2,500 prompt engineering package for Claude Code

So for small and medium businesses, we have packages now for $2,500 for a couple of hours, where we might walk through Claude Code, tailoring for every pain point the stakeholder has listed. That includes one-on-one consulting for 15 minutes with every attendee and an after-session for additional clarity. Then we do an $8,000-a-month retainer for companies that are super serious about keeping their pulse on everything that’s changing every month. 

When it comes to enterprise, we have packages ranging anywhere from $15,000 to over $50,000. It really depends on the length of the engagement and how many personnel we need on site.

Prompt Advisers hit 7 figures in revenue last year

Last year was the first year we crossed the seven-figure revenue mark. Running an AI business with a focus on custom development, we hit the $1 million milestone, but profitability was something we really needed to work on; in response to all the scope changes with AI projects, we had to hire and upskill developers. So we ran leaner on margin than we thought. This year, we expect the business to do about $1.5 million to $2 million, but at a much higher profit margin. 

Most of my advice for businesses that want to use AI comes down to three sentences, which I explain in more detail over hours. Clean your back of house. Make sure your systems can talk to each other. And understand what it means for you to be compliant, because that means different things to different people. 

You don’t have to be tech-savvy to use Claude Code

I run a community of 1,300 entrepreneurs, and many of them have slapped this label on themselves: “I’m non-technical.” It becomes a sort of virus. “I’m non-technical, ergo, that means I’m not eligible to use Claude Code.” There are a lot of limiting beliefs out there that we’ve been able to break.

If you can understand a couple of hours’ worth of principles, you might not be amazing with AI, but you’ll be passable enough to start the journey. And most people have the mindset that because Claude Code has the word code in there, they are not allowed to participate. Now, we’re seeing that the majority of people who are using Claude Code in our community are non-technical. They’re using it not to build things with code. It’s not even for websites. They’re using it for PowerPoint, for Excel, for Word documents. So they’re using Claude Code for non-technical work. 

My biggest advice would be to remove that mental block because it will only get easier to use this software, and you’ll be able to use more vague prompts to get to the same outcome. Meaning, if you can learn it now — if you know that you’re going to have to learn it at some point — instead of then, why not start now? It will only get easier. You’re basically guaranteed a return on investment by just upskilling yourself.

 This as-told-to story is based on a conversation with Mark Kashef, founder of AI automation agency Prompt Advisers.

The demand for Claude Code specialists has surged 938% on Fiverr over the past six months, as businesses seek freelancers who can use the AI coding tool to automate their workflows, build AI agents and ship products faster, according to the 2026 edition of Fiverr’s Business Trends Index.

I got a master’s in management and AI in 2019. One of the biggest things that I learned was prompt engineering. So before it was even mainstream, I had a competitive edge. Then, in late 2022, a few days after ChatGPT launched, I started a company called Prompt Advisers. The whole idea was to help people learn how to prompt.