How 12 Everyday People Earn $5K+ Per Month with AI (Inspiring Stories)

Hey, this is a bunch of real people making money with AI consulting and automation. I'm going to show you their stories and then dive into some information about how they did so, tactic and strategy. No fluff. Let's get

right into it. So, the first is my main man Abb who closed $3,176 with a full-time job just 14 days into Maker School. Maker School is my automation community. Obviously, this is going to be kind of a soft pitch for it, but don't pay attention to the community part. Pay attention to his results and how he did it. So what he did was he sent a cold email campaign that achieved a reply rate of 7. 9% across almost 1100 leads and from that he signed two clients for the 3176. What's interesting is another three or four prospects told him to keep them in the loop for new year and so he's counting that at about 10k pipeline. My big takeaway is I never really count things that are in pipeline as actualized. avoiding that still 3,176 bucks and the tactic was use LinkedIn Sales Navigator which offered a free trial to generate a list of leads instantly which is a cold email platform to send to those leads. GPT40 mini to generate customized ice breakers so that those leads thought that this outreach was hyperpersonalized. Exa AI for browsing and getting web context about these people just five bucks for a thousand websites. any Mailfinder, which he purchased the 10,000 credit plan of. Then finally, he has a free trial hack for another platform here, Phantom Buster. Don't know what he's doing there, but apparently that allowed him to download a lot of leads. So, uh, main takeaways from his words, he's saying, "Treat cold email leads like gold. " I mean, cold email leads are typically pretty skeptical. They don't know who you are, and so you really do have to win over their attention at every step. But if you're good at doing this, like Abb, if you reply fast, follow up, and don't let them go cold, you can also achieve a very high reply rate and then good results. He's sharing some Stripe screenshots, a screenshot of his instantly dashboard with almost 53. 5% positive. Uh some information just about how to structure the thing that we helped him through. And then some more info from the actual prospect. We're a 1250 setup fee. It looks like a 1250 delivery with some other stuff as well.

Second major win was Dr. Samantha North. Now, Samantha is both a doctor and also extraordinarily good at what she does. So, as opposed to going outbound, which is what I usually recommend, she went inbound. Essentially, she created a tiny YouTube channel on AI and automation. Let me just give her a little shout out here cuz she's doing such a great job. She's absolutely crushing it. Um, she talks about a variety of things, essentially AI strategy for founders. And she publishes videos here. As you can see, she's got a modest subscriber count at 240. From what I can tell, and I've watched a couple of these now, her videos are pretty well thought out. She goes deep into details and it's like tactical actionable based similar to some of the content that I make. And essentially she posts these videos, right? And then down below after giving away a bunch of free value, she just has a calendar link. If you click on this calendar link, then you can book a time with her. And then she'll ask you a bunch of questions, you know, LinkedIn profile, company name, company website, all this stuff, which essentially just helps her like close you better. She knows a little bit more about your business. You can spend more time on the call actually focusing on needs. And uh yeah, that's how she does it. So essentially what happened was she made a bunch of these YouTube videos over the course of several months it looks like and she closed a 5,000 great British pound project. I think that's equivalent to like 6,500 USD entirely from YouTube. Now some takeaways here. Um when you do inbound, okay, prospects tend to just naturally like you because they just spent who knows 5 10 minutes maybe even like an hour consuming your content. So they genuinely like you. You're also positioned as an authority, right? because somebody is coming to you and then um odds are this person knows what they want. Now, if you contrast that with um inbound to outbound rather outbound, which is typically what I recommend, you know, the person inherently has no idea who you are. So, they're very skeptical. You have to build your proof. Okay? If you don't have um any sort of social proof or whatever, it's going to be very tough to go. And then a lot of the time they have zero clue what they want. So obviously inbound is preferable for a lot of people because they're like, "Well, I don't really like sales calls. having to, you know, build up all my authority and and disavow their skepticism and show them value and stuff like that. I much rather just like create YouTube videos from the comfort of my own home. " The unfortunate reality is this just tends to take a lot longer and so I only recommend it to people that are already established business owners that have already had some established wins. So Dr. Samantha North here That's what she did. She took her wins from outbound and from building projects for other people on platforms like Upwork and so on and so forth. And then she brought that over to YouTube and used her skill in order to land that deal. This is something that anybody here can do that has that requisite

knowledge. Now, Jotty over here signed $31,000 worth of a retainer. He took his MR from $8,000 to $18,000 for the next 3 months. A little over 3 months. I think it's about 10K a month. And essentially what he's doing is he's working as a Salesforce product owner. Salesforce being a particular CRM for from my understanding um academic publishing companies. So academic publishing companies are pretty big. They're definitely up mid-market. Uh and so these businesses typically use CRM that are a little bit broader in nature, a little bit more all-encompassing things like HubSpot, Salesforce, and other enterprise level CRM. Now, the way that Jotty did this from my understanding is he went up my warmth ladder. Okay? And if you don't know what the warmth ladder is, essentially at the very top of the ladder are the warmest prospects that you've ever met. These are people that you've already worked with in some capacity, but people that are directly in your network. And so you pitch them. Um down over here you have your okay leads. And then cold leads. Essentially what you do with the warmth ladder is you always just start top to bottom and you pitch to people that you already know that already like and trust you that already have some sort of pre-existing relationship with you. Jotty is a PhD student from my understanding. Um somewhere in Switzerland I believe or maybe Geneva if I'm butchering you Jotty. So sorry about that. But to make a long story short, he's already very intertwined with kind of that whole network, he has a bunch of contacts that are in academic publishing. And so for him, you know, as somebody that's starting this AI automation consulting sort of career, uh for him, the straightest line path was just to go to everybody in his network and pitch them on, you know, hey, can I assist you with X, Y, and Z, CRM, project management systems, AI systems, and so on and so forth. Now, typically what happens is you only have a few people in your network that are actual um good candidates for this. So once you're done with this, you then have to move down to the okay people on the warmth ladder. That's kind of the mid rung. People that you know maybe you've pitched in the past that haven't necessarily said yes. So these are past leads, past contacts, people that are like roughly in your network but not necessarily like firstderee connections, maybe seconds or thirds. And then after you're done with that, what job is going to do is go 100% cold and essentially run a system like um Abbec was doing earlier. Anoir

crushed an Upwork project for $7,500 upfront plus $1,200 a month. This is a simple accounts receivable automation system. What's really interesting about Anoir's story is the offer came in the day before he flew out for a Caribbean cruise. So, I mean, he almost pulled out of the deal because he figured, you know, this cruise is going to take up a lot of his time and he wouldn't be able to fulfill it and whatever. But, um, because of the advice of presumably a bunch of people in the community and, you know, just the general mindset of it all, he decided to go all in. He negotiated the deal, closed it, and then actually started the build while on the ocean. So, half work, half holiday, he says. He caps it off with some lessons learned. Mainly that there is no perfect time, that you can learn while doing that volume wins, one yes changes everything, and that action kills doubt. And essentially the strategy here is he uses a platform called Upwork, which is a freelancing kind of gig platform. Interested people that are looking for hires or roles to be filled will post jobs on these. He then searches for terms like automation, uh, you know, accounting, whatever his specific fields of expertise are. And then he just sends apps and he sends a lot of apps. As you said, as he said right over here, volume wins. It only takes one yes to change everything. I think $7,500 is a build fee. A lot of people here could probably understand how that could change somebody's life, especially if they're at the start of their career. So, if he can close a $7,500 job and a retainer from a ship in the Caribbean, anyone

can. Trey closed a $1,000 payday by upselling a previous client of his. Essentially, this was a Many Chat make to Beehive to CRM integration system. He's also doing newsletter redesigns. And then he has an AI email autoresponder for the newsletter just thanking people for signing up and that sort of stuff. So, he published his uh little Stripe screenshot here and then some information. Uh essentially, what I love about this is a lot of people think that once they sign up a client, that's it. They've made the money off of said client. But the vast majority of the money that you will make in any business, not just an AI consulting business, is in retained relationships. So relationships where a client pays you more over time. Uh what I mean by this is anytime you acquire a new client, you always have to pay what are called an acquisition costs. Okay? So you guys have probably seen this as a cost to acquire a customer, customer acquisition cost, CAC, something like that. But basically what that means is let's say Trey just closed $1,000 upfront and that's all he closed. He probably spent a little bit of money to do that. And sometimes you could spend a fair amount of money. Maybe he got the client through uh cold email like Aboc or Upwork or even YouTube or something. You can conceptualize the time you spend on YouTube is sort of a customer acquisition cost, right? Well, that means the very first deal you get from a customer, you're not actually making that full $1,000. You're actually only making $850. The cool thing about Trey is by adding on, okay, an additional $1,000. Now, what he's doing is it's $2,000 minus150. Meaning his actual total takeaway is 1,850, not 850. And if you do the math, what is 850 as a fraction of 2,000 versus 1,000? Well, mathematically, this over here is 92. 5% margin. 85% margin. So, what that means is every additional $1,000 deal increases Trey's total margin, making his business more profitable. And then ultimately more enjoyable, too, because you tend to enjoy working with people that you've already worked with more than working with a totally random new person that you've never worked with that doesn't understand your boundaries and doesn't have like a good uh you know, rhythm or cadence. So, to make a long story short, um Trey closed a $1,000 payday. He is no stranger to work. He's saying it should be between 15 to 20 hours of work. So, don't get me wrong, this isn't free money falling from the sky, but it's a good example of how you can take a pre-existing relationship and you can offer them more value. And in fact, using the warmth ladder analogy from Jotty, that's usually my recommendation.

Ethan locked in his third client last week. Really funny. He said, "When I started my company, I told my wife, if I can get my first paying client in 6 months, I'll keep going. " He's 2 months in, he's already got three. So, this man is also clearly no stranger to hard work. Um the specific deal is he's organizing QuickBooks data then building out a customer retention automation. So this could be quite sophisticated or quite simple depends on how Ethan scoped this project. I do not know more about that so I can't comment but $1,200 to set up and then a monthly uh $150 to maintain the automation. This is kind of interesting. Essentially, if you're a good builder, um you will rarely be asked to do any sort of upgrades or a maintenance or you'll rarely ever need to fix a workflow that's broken the simpler that it is. So, this sort of play, while I don't usually recommend charging retainers that are less than a,000 bucks or so, can work. If he has 10 clients on this, he's making an additional $1,500 a month. What's the probability that one of these super simple, straightforward three or four node automations fails in a month? Assuming that, you know, you're good at building, you've set up uh all of your data to be sanitized as it comes in, there's no misunderstandings with the client, and you're using dependencies that don't typically um you know, go out of service or uh or have usage issues. Pretty low, right? So, you can make a fair amount of money off the top. What I do like about offering some sort of maintenance retainer is it just keeps you in the loop and it keeps you uh coordinating with that client. So, when the time comes to upsell them on a project that's not $150 a month, but maybe $15,000 a month or something like that, you have an in. As I've mentioned, upselling and retaining is always faster and easier money than acquiring totally new clientele. So, Ethan acquired this one through Upwork. Obviously, he's doing very well. It's a very simple and straightforward path. I'm not going to say it's easy to do this work, but it is straightforward, and that's more than can be said for most industries. Marcos

went from 700 bucks to $3,200 in 60 days. Essentially, in the first two weeks of November, he hit 3,200 in revenue, whereas 60 days ago, he was at between 500 to 700 bucks. Um, he's calling it a six times jump. It is approximately six times. And the main reason he thinks that it has occurred is because he's charged a lot more. I would agree with him here. I happened to get on a call with Marcos about 6 months into his program. He took a couple months off. He wasn't entirely, you know, consistent and accountable. and he ran me through some of his past deals. And we realized that the vast majority of the deals that he had acquired up until that point were to the tune of a couple of hundred dollars each, which is obviously not a very sustainable pricing model. I mean, that puts his hourly rate at like five bucks, something like that. So, I told him that one of the quickest and easiest ways to make more money is literally just to charge more for the same work. I know it sounds silly, but um a lot of people think about this in terms of supply and demand, right? And so in microeconomics, if the supply is high, that means there is a lot of um available offer, then the demand aka the price that you can charge for a service is very low. And so because people are new to this, because they spend all their time on the internet, not actually talking to real customers, they think that the supply of other people that are doing what they are doing is super mega high, meaning they have to charge very little because the demand is very low, right? The reality is 90% of people have no idea what's possible with even technology 10 years ago. They simply are so focused on doing the work of their business that they haven't pulled their head out of the sand to see how much the world has changed. And so this supply side is a lot smaller than you think. You could literally just charge more money and triple demand, okay? And you'll make somewhere between two to three times more money because it's not like a onetoone relationship between how much you charge and how many people say yes to you. So, what I'm trying to say is a lot of people have the perception that they need to charge bottom barrel rates even on platforms like Upwork or through cold email just because they live on the internet. Uh, some kid a little while ago told me to touch grass. So, that's some Gen Z slang that I think probably makes sense to a lot of people that are listening. If you just go and touch grass, you realize that the size of the opportunity and the scope of it is a lot bigger than most people think. And the number of people that understand how to implement these sorts of technologies is a lot smaller than most people think. So, what this means is let's say you charge three times more. Okay? If more, you will not reduce your conversion rate by three. This does not mean your conversion rate CVR is cut in 1/3. Realistically, if you charge three times more, you might cut your CVR by, I don't know, two or something like that. Which means if you had five deals previously paying you 2K a month, okay, hypothetically, that's 10K in total. You could literally just charge more or triple your prices hypothetically to 6K. And it's not like you'd get uh proportionally the same amount of money. You would probably get three * 6K and you'd make 18K a month. This is for a variety of reasons. I'm not going to get into all of them, but one, a lot of the time people just don't really trust you if you don't charge enough money to get them excited and serious about something. There's a certain amount of commitment that people need to provide to a service provider in order to get them excited enough about the thing to follow through on their promises. And a lot of the time if you're charging, you know, a retainer that's, oh gosh, I don't know, like $200 a month or something like that for some big intensive service, which I see all the time in maker school from people that are well-intentioned but not very um capable or competent just yet. Clients will just say no to that at face value because they'll realize that you're not a competent service provider. They'll be like, "Are you kidding me? This guy wants to charge me $200 a month. He's probably never worked with anybody in his life. I'm not going to work with him. I'm going to go pay the other guy 2K a month. " I mean just the very uh mention of the fact that you're willing to work for that little pay disqualifies you and discredits you. So that's one way. There variety of other ones. Typically when you charge higher you just work with better people and better people require less time to manage and so you can typically just scale up your prices. Work with more make way more money simply as a byproduct of having enough time and then you can deliver higher quality services and so on and so forth. Um but to make a long story short he just charged more. Then he also leveled up the actual skill. One big issue with him was he didn't really believe in his ability to sell um which I think was in his case the delivery of a cold email system. Right. Yeah, that's right. So, he just got really good at doing cold email. He basically like upskilled, read a bunch of copywriting books, improved his list building, improved his targeting, the whole outbound stack. Then instead of charging $200, looks like he charged five times more. So, he closed a $1,000 setup. So, I mean like you know, is Marcos taking over the world with this $3,200 60 days? No, obviously not. But how inspiring is this for an entrepreneur that just could not make it past charging more than a couple hundred bucks for a service? Insane. Truid over

here signed an $8,500 contract. It was for a small CPA firm that wanted to automate their client reporting and tax projection process. So Truit started sending out Upwork applications basically from day one when he got into um Maker School our program. And he got in touch with them a really long time ago. But then he sent them a pitch and then they ghosted him, moved on. two weeks ago after so many months essentially they got back to him and said hey you know this is something that's still on our radar we want to move forward then he closed the hell out of it okay so another big limiting belief here is the outreach that you do today only works for today in reality what happens is if you're sending some campaign on anything whether it's Upwork or cold email or or something else okay if you have a 1% reply rate today and you sent that thing today tomorrow you might have a 2% % reply rate. Why? Because a lot of people are, as that Gen Z kid so eloquently explained to me, touching grass. They're not just in the office all the time. So, there's always some lag. And the longer time you give yourself, okay, between when you first um, you know, maybe send out a campaign and then when you evaluate its results, typically the better the results are going to be. And so this lag between input and output is why a lot of people iterate too quickly and they iterate themselves out of a meaningful approach. Like if your priors if your fundamental assumptions are correct then there is no reason why you should not continue putting in effort if you believe those priors are correct because it's simply a matter of market lag. Yes, your priors are correct. Yes, statistically speaking, you know, people will get back to you. Right now you're just being caught in the noise. So if that is you, keep on digging until you find those damn gems. Seth has a hell of a case

study. He closed $12,700 in one afternoon. To make a long story short, um a government shutdown pushed a project that he was doing for his day job into the new year. That gave him a bunch more time, somebody else that's working a full-time job. They ended up sending 12 applications on Upwork, booking eight calls and qualifying five. So, two were straightforward one-offs at a,000 bucks each. The other three wanted retainers, but opted for a first project to gauge fit. They came in hourly, a little over 2k total. He then moved fast on delivery to learn the ongoing work. Now, during that period of time, he then closed $3,200 a month. These were internal audits with a focus on identifying Hierroi automation. So, these were AI audits that he was doing before even building. He then made almost $3,200 plus a $2,600 a month retainer from his first client on Upwork. And now he's doing a variety of other deals. But essentially, it took him to 12. 7K. And what he's now doing is he's starting to um dive into cold email and LinkedIn DMs because we're seeing a lot of people crush it with LinkedIn DMs in the community. This is a great example of how um you can bootstrap yourself from basically zero. Not actually zero because he had a day job which financed this which is fantastic. It's a good spot to be in. By the way, if you don't have any money, don't try doing something like this. Go get yourself some freaking oxygen first. Okay? That's what cash is. Cash allows you to pull your head out from underwater, take a deep breath, and then actually like see where the hell you're going. Um you know, there's nothing wrong with having a job. When I was an entrepreneur in my early uh couple of years in my career, I always had this pride thing. I had to start my own business and I couldn't work for the man because that would make me lesser or something. Dude, I would have been so much further ahead if I had just like ate that ego and then work for the man because I would have had so much money that I could have used to spend on a variety of things like outreach tools, like infrastructure for my campaigns, like Upwork apps, and so on and so forth. Anyway, side note, this is a great limiting belief breaker cuz Seth basically took his business from zero to $12,700. And now what he's doing is he's taking a portion of this and I don't know how much. My recommendation is take maybe 15%. Then he's going to divert it over to growth. And you know if you do the math on that that's um I don't know probably like 1. 6k. Do you know how much growth you could buy with 1. 6k for starting from zero. I mean the average Upwork application takes somewhere between $2 to $3 right now. If you factor in the fact that um if you do a boost or a bid then the connects don't actually get spent. Um, average cold emails, a single mailbox is something like three bucks a month right now and can send 900 a month. That's 900 potential people that you're getting in contact with for $3 a month. You have to buy some domains and obviously software, but I mean that's the scale of leverage we're talking about here. There are a lot of communities out there you can join for like $50 or $100 a month that now give you massive access to a huge group of people that are just like on their hands and knees begging for somebody more competent to come in and solve it. you could easily jump in there, build authority, and then sell whatever the heck you want. And this is exactly what you should be doing if you find some initial success. Drew here

who's going by Lumio, um crushed almost $50,000 in 5 months. Now, he did this primarily through Discord groups. He joined Iman Gazi's Discord, didn't find much help there. But what he did find was a surplus of people who want small tasks completed like designs, websites, automations, editing. And essentially, he reached out to a bunch of people just on the Discord through freaking Discord DMs, which by the way, you could also do in school. You could do it on any other community platform, and got a client that was more or less a money printer where he manages this whole platform for voice agents and CRM. What I love about this is the self-awareness. He went to college for 3 years, made basically no money, and the first moment he got his client through a Discord, everything changed. Okay, he currently uh has secured eight clients. He's currently working with four. Okay, highest paying clients at $8,000 a month. Totally reasonable. Doesn't matter how many years you go to college if you're learning a skill set that's outdated, right? But you can go in with just a couple of months, focus that learning on ways to drive revenue through like actionable daily um outbound activities and so on and so forth. And you can make more money than you would have been in

30 years in school. Nissi is now at $10,000 a month. He said he'd do it in three months. He did it in five. Kudos to him for aiming high. But essentially, he also did this while keeping another job. So, it's not just 10 grand a month this fell is making now. It's presumably significantly more than that. Even takes a screenshot of his Mercury balance. So, Mercury is just a bank account in the United States that shows 10 gzen. And it's really big stuff because Nissi joined on June the 8th and has since literally published like a dayby-day kind of memorandum of everything that he's doing. I mean like he started off having absolutely no idea how the hell Google workspace worked or what IMAP was. He had no idea what go High Level was. He asked a bunch of questions about automation. Then he talked about, you know, setting up ManyHad for the first times and so on and so forth. And since then, he's gone through and massively leveled himself up. He started hiring from the community. I mean, he's absolutely crushing it. No doubt in my mind, this man's destined for $100,000 a month or more. What I like about that and just the community models in general is you can actually just see over time like people's progress like they join some group and then because they store their post history. You literally see the very first post somebody made and you can see them like stumbling around in darkness reaching out for help but but moving right like but actually pushing and then you could see how they put various pieces together. You could see the beginnings and emergences of their first wins all the way to today. So, super motivational stuff and I hope Nissa continues to crush as well as he's doing right now. Last mention, obligatory from

Azim. This was $11,000 in 29 days as a high school student. Azim is no stranger to AI and automations. He's published a bunch of YouTube videos on the subject. He has like a modestly sized channel. Um, but things really started working for him when he applied principles of daily accountability. He says he spent six months failing uh $3,000 in investment as a high school student. man, just zooming out a little bit, like spending six months as a high school student failing and then winning is incredible. I spent like two years as a young adult failing and even then I didn't win to this degree. He's been doing a variety of different approaches. Um, key for him has been this YouTube channel of his which he started publishing videos on how to do NADN builds and how to build AI agents and stuff like that very early on. What a great skill to cultivate at the age of 16 years old, huh? From there, you know, he landed some initial introductory clients from a variety of communities. He's since focused heavily on referrals, network-based sales. Um, he can't go on Upwork, which is the main platform that a lot of people here get their first zero to one with, probably at least 60%. Because he's under 18 and he's taken this not as a blocker, but as a challenge. And so instead, he's taken it upon himself to become an expert at cold email. So, he's spinning up all these mailboxes. He's pushing. Very, very motivational. His goal is to hit over $50,000 a month before December the 31st or I'll have to do something crazy. I do wonder what that crazy thing is, but suffice to say, I wish we all had your nuts at the age of 16, buddy. Congratulations. Okay, hopefully you

guys got some nuggets from this video. I want to shout out everybody that is in Maker School, anybody that is considering joining Maker School, and everybody that has put so much effort into ensuring not only their future, but also increasing the station of their families uh and the people around them. This technology is extraordinarily transformative and essentially over the course of the next few years as it is distributed more and more to people the people that are doing the distributing aka the companies that are implementing these things to small and mid-size businesses will continue winning. So yeah, just really stoked uh to even like have access to this information and be in such a group. If you guys have any questions about how to do stuff like this yourself, feel free to drop a comment down below. I'm more than happy to help and I'm sourcing ideas for next YouTube video. Uh, thank you very much for watching and hopefully you guys take at least one piece of information away from this towards your goals.