Case Study Of a Stack Certified AI Consultant
D'Aaron didn't come to Stack looking for a career change. He was already freelancing on the side of a full-time role, and had been for years.
For most of that time, he'd been a generalist — a little bit of coding, a little bit of design, a little bit of content, a little bit of whatever the person in front of him needed. Friends and contacts would reach out with random requests, and he'd figure it out. He knew he had value as someone skilled across multiple domains. He just didn't have an offer.
The issue wasn't capacity — he was doing the work. The issue was that the work had no shape.
"Before I joined Stack, I was kind of a meandering freelancer. Didn't really know exactly what I offered. Didn't know how to handle pivots."
Every time a request came in — a landing page, a draft, an MVP build — D'Aaron could deliver. But there was no positioning, no pricing structure, no repeatable way to turn a stranger's problem into a proposal. He was doing consulting in practice and freelance gigs in name.
Then AI started to change what he could do. Messing around with ChatGPT one day, he cracked a Stripe integration he'd been stuck on for weeks on another platform. The click moment wasn't that AI was useful — he already believed that. It was that the leverage was suddenly real. A day of research could now produce a week's worth of building. If he was feeling that as an individual, businesses were feeling it too.
An ad for Stack showed up around the same time. The pieces fell into place.
Why Stack — And Why He Stayed
The initial draw was the mentor list. Names D'Aaron had seen online, people he'd already been learning from at a distance. He assumed the value of Stack would come from direct access to those mentors.
He was half right. He met them. The conversations were good. But what actually kept him showing up week after week wasn't experts, but peers.
"What kept me was talking to people who were right next to me, building it. Some a little ahead of me, some a little behind."
The community became the engine. Other Stack members — Amadou, Anh, and others — were running into the same problems D'Aaron was, just at slightly different stages. Stack gave him language and frameworks. The peers gave him a sounding board, accountability, and the daily reminder that none of this gets built alone.
Working Through the Playbook
D'Aaron had paid for courses and communities before. Some had worked, some hadn't. He'd learned that the difference wasn't the price tag or the curriculum — it was whether he committed early.
So he set himself a goal: get through the eight-week Playbook as fast as possible by racing through the things he already knew and parking himself in the sections where he was genuinely weak.
The technical modules — prompt libraries, building a simple agent — he moved through quickly. The places where he slowed down were the parts that didn't come naturally to him as a builder: niche selection, ICP, discovery calls, the basic mechanics of running a sales conversation. He was up at night, journaling, writing things out, working through them by hand.
"Just hearing the language around an effective discovery call made me feel a little less like an imposter when I'd actually get on a call. That was already a huge boost forward that I would have just had to experiment and fail my way through."
He finished the Playbook and got Stack Certified three weeks ahead of schedule.
The Repositioning
Most of the Playbook was about what to do. The most valuable shift D'Aaron made was about who he was.
He came in expecting to position himself as a developer or design consultant — someone who builds. The repositioning happened in public, on LinkedIn. He'd been posting about builds and proposals, and nothing was landing. Then he posted something offhand about a workshop he was running — and an inbound came in. Then another.
"Someone reached out and said, 'I love your content. How often do you do these workshops? I might have a need.' And it just clicked."
D'Aaron had been trying to position himself as a builder. What the market was actually paying him for — and the work he was best at — was taking complicated AI systems and making them understandable for the humans who needed to use them. He's an AI education consultant. His background as a designer, developer, and content person became the foundation os the value he offered clients. He can speak about AI credibly because he's built with it. He can teach it because he's trained as a communicator.
The work he's doing now isn't generic "AI literacy" content. It's mapping intended outcomes inside a specific organization, identifying the right toolkit, building the curriculum or framework that gets people from where they are to where the business needs them to be. Sometimes that's a workshop. Sometimes it's a documented system. Sometimes it's a clear-eyed conversation that saves a client from spending a budget they don't need to spend.
The Business Today
D’Aaron is now working with three clients since joining Stack.
The first was a $1,500 MVP build — proposal drafted using Stacey, Stack's AI co-pilot, and closed through a LinkedIn inbound as he was finishing the Playbook. A second build followed shortly after. The third — the one now anchoring his monthly revenue — is a $4,000/month retainer doing the education work that defines his new positioning.
The first client landed about two months after joining. The retainer followed soon after once the repositioning was clear and he could communicate it to the client.
Then there's the pipeline. D'Aaron recently had lunch with the principal of a small local law firm — the kind of practice that wants to use AI but legitimately can't share client matters into Claude. They're scoping a workshop together: looking at on-device and local models, what runs on company-owned hardware, what playbook a small firm can actually adopt without violating client confidentiality. That kind of conversation — practical, constrained, education-led — is exactly the lane D'Aaron now occupies on purpose.
What This Adds Up To
D'Aaron still has his W2 job. The whole business has been built as a side hustle (so far).
He's now matching his full-time salary with consulting income. In effect, he's doubled his monthly income since joining Stack. His next milestone is a $2,000 gap — the difference between matching his W2 and surpassing it. Once he closes that, the conversation about what comes next gets serious.
The point isn't the math, though. The point is the shape. A year ago, D'Aaron was a freelancer who couldn't quite say what he did, taking work as it came, with no real ladder upward. Today, he has a category, a client base, a pipeline, a retainer, a peer group, and a clear next milestone. The work is repeatable now. That's the difference.
His Advice
"Come in ready to give. I hop on a lot of calls with founders who have questions that I've already got answers to. When I do that, people are more generous with their time with me. The more you give, the more you'll get in return."
It's a fitting note for someone who built a consulting business by becoming the person who makes complicated things easier for everyone else in the room.
D'Aaron Gonzalez is a Stack Certified AI Consultant focused on AI education, workshop design, and AI adoption consulting for organizations learning how to deploy these tools responsibly. If you're ready to turn a mix of skills into a real business with the same structured foundation, apply to Stack here.
