About

Rich Schefren

Founder of Strategic Profits. He named the category Imprinted AI in 2026, after operating one on his own business since the end of 2024.

Rich Schefren wrote the Internet Business Manifesto in 2006 — the report that defined the first internet business era — and the A.I. Business Manifesto in 2026.

This page is the identity behind the category claim, and it carries only the credentials that bear on it. The fuller record lives at richschefren.com, where every claim is dated and its source named. What is here is what a reader needs in order to decide whether the category claim is worth taking seriously, and where to go to check it.

Why this claim, from this person

He has named an era before

The Internet Business Manifesto was released as a free PDF in June 2006 with no advertising behind it. It passed 100,000 downloads in eleven days, a figure that is not a retrospective estimate: the Manifesto is dated 26 June 2006 and The Missing Chapter, dated 7 July 2006, opens by reporting it. It has since passed 5 million downloads, the Manifesto alone. Its argument was that most people building online were opportunity seekers chasing tactics when what they needed was to become strategic entrepreneurs building an actual business.

He has called a structural shift before the market had language for it

In The Attention Age Doctrine, published 28 June 2007, he argued that the Information Age had ended: information had become free and infinite, attention had become the scarce resource, and attention was therefore the thing to build a business around. Facebook had only just opened to the public. There was no creator economy and no attention-economy discourse to join.

The thing he has always been paid for is judgment

For roughly a decade the best-known figures in internet marketing were being coached by him, and most were not saying so publicly, which is where the industry's name for him came from. He did not coin "Guru to the Gurus"; it was applied to him and it stuck. That matters here for a specific reason rather than as a compliment: the category is about capturing judgment, and judgment is the thing people were already paying him for privately when they had every incentive not to admit it.

He is reporting on a system he runs, not one he has designed for others

He began operating an AI system built on his own captured judgment at the end of 2024, and named the category in 2026. The field notes report what that changed, in aggregate patterns rather than counts. The mechanism is open source and public in Atlas and Imprint. The contents are not: the system ships empty, and only the owner's own decisions fill it.

The figures, and what kind of figures they are

The $15 billion is an aggregate of client revenue growth across twenty years and it is self-reported, which is how it is stated here and on richschefren.com rather than presented as audited. The largest single piece of it carries somebody else's name: Agora Publishing went from roughly $220 million to $1.25 billion in annual revenue over the period Rich brought the video sales letter format to it, and Bill Bonner, who founded Agora, is the one who said so.

What is deliberately not on this page

The businesses before the internet, the seven reports in full, the coaching lineage with each relationship tiered by what evidence exists for it, and the dated timeline with its sources are all at richschefren.com. They are not repeated here. Two pages on two domains competing to answer the same question is worse for a reader than one page that answers it and one page that points at it.

• The Record, a dated timeline with the source named for each claim
• The seven reports, 2006 to 2008, complete text, free and ungated
• The lineage, who he coached, tiered by what evidence exists
• Guru to the Gurus, the title and who conferred it
• The Internet Business Manifesto, the original 2006 document

Related

For the category itself, start at what Imprinted AI is. The glossary defines the terms it turns on, the questions answer the eleven that come up most, and the thirty-five lines are the argument compressed to the sentences that carry it.

Last updated: 28 July 2026