# How This College Student Makes $20K/mo With AI

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lZcElZHO5no
- **Дата:** 05.10.2025
- **Длительность:** 41:11
- **Просмотры:** 12,941
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/11752

## Описание

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Summary ⤵️
Julian, a full-time university student, reveals how he pulled in $7.8K last month using AI automation despite starting with zero technical experience. We discuss the key factors behind his recent success.

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https://neptaai.com/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/julian-etauri

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## Транскрипт

### Introduction []

Dude, you should have seen this back of napkin math showed my revenue going like this. I looked to him and I was like, "Bro, I'm going to be making $500,000 a month by the end of the year. It's going to be sick. " End of the year old by and I was making like four grand or something. — Carli said it multiple times like do an insane amount of volume that you'd be stupid to fail. How do you go about attacking a platform and getting the best results possible with that platform? So many people that are like, "Hey, I want a system that does this and does that and pleases my wife and washes my hair. " And it's like, "Hey, man. " You can't get that now. When you're that authentic and you just tell somebody something that is directly against your self-interest to tell them, somebody's going to pay you $5,000 for the system, but you don't think the system is right for them. If you just tell them that, you'll make way more than $5,000 on that guy. — You literally went through the exact process that went in our head. So, it just proves every time like you went through this yourself. You're not just some YouTube guy who preaching but hasn't practiced it, right? It's kind of a controversial take possibly, but I kind of find that entrepreneurship is almost safer than getting a job. I think you know where I'm going with it, but it's basically like, hey guys, Julian here, co-founder of Nepta AI. So, since the last video with Nick where I mentioned doing roughly $8,000 a month in revenue, we've been able to triple that in the past 3 months. So really crazy, really exciting, really proud. I have just been able to achieve this through consistent outreach while providing the best service possible to my clients and from there getting referrals from them and getting second, third projects and uh obviously turning them into retainers as well. The next goal is definitely to keep this pace, staying very consistent and hopefully have our first 50k month. So thanks again. want to give this quick update and really appreciate Nick for everything he's done to help out through this journey. He's been amazing. Take care. — Julian, welcome. I feel really privileged to be able to chat with you, man. Last couple of months, I know have been pretty explosive for you. How you doing? — Thank you, Nick. I appreciate a lot. I'm doing well and uh thank you definitely for having me. — I would like to just dive right into things. How much you've made in the last 30 days? — This past month, July has been the best month. So, we did 7. 8 this month. — Sick, man. What was the big shift between the previous uh I guess 60 days and then the most recent 30 days would you say? — Yeah. Um I'd say the consistent effort for sure. So really have been sticking to the consistent daily outreach. So you know from those Upwork proposals to uh I personally do LinkedIn outreach um and I think just a compound of it um over time too. — Cool. Yeah. Lots of momentum. You joined Maker School when? Like six months ago approximately. Yeah, I joined I remember the exact date because it was the day before my birthday. So, January 4th, I joined Maker School. Yeah. — Nice, dude. Okay, cool. And then since then, I know you've tried a bunch of different approaches, but from my understanding, it sounds like you've really nailed this whole kind of upwork approach and that's what's driving you most of your leads. Yeah. — Yeah. I mean, nailed is a nice word. I think always trying to improve my processes as much as possible, but I found what's worked best for me now is emails. I preach emails and it was going well, but I wasn't the best at it. So, Upwork has by far five times a day that's been um what I find to be the best for myself. Uh LinkedIn outreach and I've started to add cold calling on top of it. — Cool. Yeah, cold calling can be great. I like it less so because of like the monetary impact to be honest and more so just like the motivational impact. Like I don't think I've ever felt as alive as when I'm just like on the phones all day. How many are you doing right now? — I set two hours a day Monday to Thursday. So Fridays I don't typically call because I find they'll always push a meeting to over the weekend. I'm trying to get them before that. — Um but again, like you said, it's not really nailed. It's figuring it out what's been working and adjusting as I go and learning a lot from other people too within the community. For sure. — Yeah, for sure. No, I appreciate that. Um, cool, man. What were you doing before you started all this stuff, Julian? — So, before starting, I had previously ran uh other businesses as well. So, I have a short-term rental business, so like Airbnbs basically under management. And I ran a home maintenance business. So the nitty-gritty contracting work of uh window cleaning, gutter cleaning, power washing. So that was my start for door todoor for sure. — O no way. So you actually have doortodoor experience. That makes the cold calling way easier, I take it. — Yeah. So it was the door to door and then cold calling all the doortodoor leads. So I definitely have used that experience um to help with this new endeavor. At first I was shying away from the cold call. I'll be honest. That was a bit uh even though I did it for like two years straight, still get a bit timid doing it, but now it's almost like uh like you mentioned before, exhilarating to try and call. I also think and aside from just the concrete skills that you've gained in your prior coal calling positions that you're now applying now, like the mindset of just hunting for your meals — can be extremely powerful. — That's exactly it. Fishing for my next deal, I like to say. — Absolutely. Yeah. Uh cool, man. So before you did all this um you had some what sounds like local services experience did some cold calling so you already knew about you know how to like acquire leads and whatnot. Did you have any AI experience or automation experience? — No I did not honestly terms of acquiring a customer I feel like it's very different from the local side to basically a digital world. You're kind of door knocking but digitally now. So any way possible, still calls, but emails, texts, um proposals, and everything. It was definitely uh a bit of an adjustment. And yeah, I kind of got into automations because I didn't have enough time between both businesses and school. I'm like, I I need to figure something out. So, the first automations that I kind of did was honestly just getting a CRM for my Airbnb business and putting automations within it. So, for guest messaging and inquiries and everything and from there it alleviated some of my time like, okay, this is great. And I kind of got obsessed with the word efficiency like how can I be as efficient as possible like 24/7? realized too like there's a there's an extent to that like you're not going to make your family life your dating life efficient but that was my first taste of it and from there I just really started doing a lot more research stumbled onto YouTube basically after last August so it's been about a year that I shut down the home business the home maintenance business and really looking like what's next I really love automations chat GBT had come out it's been about a year and It's just continuously improving and to YouTube I went self teaching myself and stumbled upon you. I'm sure like a lot of us have uh found you on YouTube. I like to say I got you very early on. I think maybe then you're at like 12,000 subscribers. Is that possible by way? — Yeah. And even then I'm like there's no way that you don't grow. Like this value is insane. Yeah. just really learning more and come January, I like pull the trigger. I made the commitment to hop into the community and got my first client in I think it was 10 days. Actually, just before this call, I looked on Upwork when I got it. It was January 14th that he gave the review. So, maybe even less than 10 days. I got the first client and haven't really looked back since. — Yeah, it must have been awesome. That first client experience, bro, — nothing like it. It's like literally money coming through a tiny little wire and being deposited into my bank account. Very different from a lot of the home services stuff. But back when I was doortodoor, like I would physically get people to sign the contract, right? Like physically get it. We'd either do check, you know, we'd have to get all their wire details or whatever. To be able to do all this completely through some I mean through my screen is an insane experience for the first couple of times. — That's Yeah, it's funny. You get exactly how it was. It's doing contracts, estimating in person, then signing on a piece of paper, manually putting it into your Google sheet, or even if you have a CRM. And now it's kind of like, I don't want to ever do that. Let me automate this and digitize it as much as possible, then that's exactly it. When you get that first paying customer, even though the first one, I'll be honest, was the lowest paying job. Like if I went for my like dollar to hour, it was like probably it's not even feasible. Like I probably went into negatives at that point, but it was just so it was so crazy like wow, somebody's actually paying me for this. And my confidence grew and that's why it was just so much more exciting. — For sure. I think that's probably the simplest way to explain why people shouldn't frown at various ways of making money. Like the first thing that you can do to get a client, you should. Because the second that you deliver yourself some positive feedback in your business model, you are golden, right? Like how many businesses have I just speaking out loud here, um — thinking out loud here, have I tried to start where I just bang my head against the wall and did whatever the hell and I did for months and I made zero dollars. — If I got even like a tiny little trickle of something, $50 deal, $100 deal or whatever, that would have validated that my approach is right and then I would have invested civily more time and effort. There's so much limiting beliefs surrounding this sort of stuff that I find just getting some win is enough to at least get you started, get that ball rolling down the hill and then you can do as you did now where you're running a business that's making almost 8,000 bucks uh in the last 30 days. So solid work there, man. And speaking of money, by the way, how high do you want to go? Like where is the goal here? — Yeah, so I'm not going to hit that goal I had initially set out. It was 100K by August. Maybe it was a bit unrealistic uh when you're starting a brand new business. Uh, I'm still hoping realistically, a measurable goal, a smart goal, maybe 60K by December. So, that just plays into account that school took a lot of my time. Unfortunately, I do now have a business partner, so it's helped a lot, like tremendously. Honestly, we have um another contractor worker, too, and we're growing. Um, but I don't think it's unrealistic that if I would have started in January and done this completely full-time that we could have hit for sure 100K come basically this next month. But, um, yeah, maybe in hindsight, uh, don't try and do too much at once. — Dude, I had this really funny experience with a friend of mine back when I was doing door to door and it was all about numbers. It was all law of averages. We said, "Hey, if we hit a 100 doors, on average, we'll book six meetings. And on average, if we do six meetings, we'll land one deal. " So, if we just hit a $100 doors every day, we'll get a deal every day. Now, if we price our thing at $2,000 a month, then that's six, you know, that's that's four deals uh basically that we do. Sorry, five deals a week. That's 20 deals a month. That's $40,000 a month. And let's say it turns. And so I think I looked at him and I was like, "Bro, I'm gonna be making $500,000 a month by the end of the year. So there's only so much you could do extrapolating, right? It's obviously good to get up and running and start hustling, but yeah, the uh the back of the navin math has failed me on many an occasion as well. — Yeah. And that's it's so funny cuz that's exactly how me and my partner were talking about it too. It's like, okay, we're going to hit 100K. We have to do XYZ outreaches per day. Um, but in reality, it's not as linear as we think it is. Um, but what is very promising is now that you do the volume, you actually start to see your stats uh become a lot more I guess real is the right word, like correct. Initially, I got people off of LinkedIn. It's like my closing rate was 100, — but that's not realistic uh at all. Like now the more meetings I'm taking, I could see, okay, I got a close rate of about 20%. If I take in 10 meetings, I can see how close two people to get like that's where you start reverse engineering everything. And again, uh not as linear as I thought it was. — Yeah, you definitely got to get into the weeds. Okay. So, to be clear, you made $30,000 in the last 6 months with automation and then the last 30 days you made 7,800. Is that right? — Yeah, exactly. Would you say that the takeoff in the previous 6 months versus this month was because of school taking up most of your time? — Yes. — Okay. And if you weren't in school, you probably would have done significantly more outreach, which kind of takes us to, you know, the volume game that you've been playing um over the course of the last month to get better results. — Yeah. Yeah, that's exactly it. Because I even took summer classes, that's why June and May were a bit slower. But it's been one month that consistent uh excuse my language balls to the wall outreach. Uh and it has been our best month. Yeah, — that's great. Yeah, I can totally see that just given that door to door experience and kind of that background with numbers like when you actually dive into the outreach things happen. I find it um funny because a lot of the time people will explain to me their whole situation and how like they're trying whatever they can and nothing's working blah blah and then I always just say like well how much outreach did you do in the last 7 days and then they'll be like well I sent 15 emails I had like two calls and that's it and I'm like well that's the problem right like if you just 10xed everything you get at least 10x the results not to mention all the knockon effects of you getting better at the process so I find it does tend to be pretty exponential from Now obviously there are those scaling constraints like you know you guys are going to have to hire like you were talking about and that's going to dampen it. Instead of it being like a really high slope thing it's going to be a lower slope thing. There also some things that you don't know if you guys are offering guarantees on the front end for all of your services then maybe you won't be able to fulfill some. You'll have to give some of the money back and so on and so forth. I don't know the particulars. Maybe we can dive into it in a second. But just want to say that uh when I see people in your shoes it makes me very excited I guess for the next couple months man. So, — I'm stoked to see where you take this for the rest of the summer. Are you going back to school in the fall? — That's um that's very Yes. As of right now, yes. Um — I won't cuz I'm so close to finishing. Um I won't not finish it. And I'm being honest. I'm just doing it uh for my mom if she wants me to get a diploma. And you know, at the end of the day, I don't think it's bad to have a diploma to fall uh to fall back on. But yeah, if that's just instead of being full-time, I'll be part-time to focus more on the business. That's something I'm we're still evaluated. So, we'll see there. And I wanted to just mention quickly like you mentioned like you asked everyone to see their stats and like, oh well, you've only done 12 messages and so on. I don't want to sit here and say that wasn't me. Like I think after month six, you offer that one-on-one and I was preparing all my staff for that 50-minute call. Like I get 15 minutes like I'm coming with as much factual stats as I can. And that was at the point where I hadn't consistently been doing as much outreach as I was. And I was almost I was complaining. I don't know to who I was feeling sorry for myself, but it was really like I don't have enough clients. I don't like what's going on. But then you look at the outreaches and I did I think in six months it was 79 Upwork proposals and 150 LinkedIn outreaches and even before you mention anything I'm like wow that is a really low volume. I think I did that just this month now. So yeah it sounds so simple but sometimes when you're in it you just don't even realize uh that just take a step back and like actually overview everything as a whole. — Definitely. And you can't blame people for not being able to do so because when you're starting a new business, there's just so many things that they have to pay attention to. Also, everybody has their own opinions on the best way to approach a business. And so, it's not just my advice. It's like 10 other people's conflicting advice. You got to work on your website. You got to focus on your mission and your values. brand. You need to understand your ideal customer persona. It's like, who the hell do I actually listen to here, right? But I find if you just peel away all the it does just always end up being, okay, so how many people have you talked to? And if you just start with that, then you could deal with all the rest of that stuff afterwards. It sounds like that's working for you. — Yeah, that's exactly it. — That's really cool, man. So, you're deciding I could tell just the way the answer that goes. Deciding how much school makes sense for you. I'm not here to tell you not to go to school. I went to school. I got a degree in behavioral neuroscience. I even worked in labs for a couple years. I just found that like they did not reward me financially anywhere near as much as just doing my own thing. And I think when you're like a capable and consistent individual, you can generate disproportionate outcomes doing your own thing versus doing somebody else's thing. So, not here to tell you not to go to school. I did the same thing. got the degree for the family um for the most part and I don't regret it one bit. I think you're on the right track there, man. — Thank you. Yeah, I think it does have to do as a also like societal norms a little bit. Not to get too philosophical, but it's like me personally like I won't you don't feel as smart unless you you'll have a degree. But that doesn't tie into a degree doesn't tie into how actually intelligent a person is and everything. But that can be a whole conversation for — get educational philosophy here. I want to scare away all the fans. Just kidding, man. All right. Uh well, let's follow then the actual strategy then. So you threw a bunch of stuff at the wall. Now, you're doing these three outreach methods primarily. You're doing LinkedIn DMs, which I've seen, by the way, and I thought they were incredible. Very well done. Um, Upwork apps, and then you're also doing cold calls. Um, do you know like what the numbers are? Do you have like recommended dailies that you hit or how do you approach these? — So, yes and no. Uh, calls I don't honestly. Um, terms of LinkedIn outreaches, it's 40. So, depending on your profile, you'll have a restriction. If you have sales navigator, it'll be 40 connects a day. And then from there, I have an automated messaging sequence that's going out. So it's messaging every time someone connects with me, they'll get a message 12 hours after we connect. — Um, so there it's more of a management aspect. I'll say about 30 messages a week are going out, but 40 connects are going out every single day. — Wow, that's interesting. So why is there like 40 connects going out, which is what, 200 a week if you're doing five days a week, and then only 30 messages? Is that just another volume thing? — Um volume thing, but just not everyone accepts your connection requests. So, — Oh, right. — That's um that's something I'm working on as well cuz um the request to sorry the acceptance for every single connect uh I'm about 20% which is more or less average maybe a little bit lower than average and you can do a couple things in testing to make it better. Then there's something else called inmails in um LinkedIn where if someone doesn't accept it, you can you have 50 inmails a month you can send out without them accepting you or not. If they respond, you get that email back. If they don't respond, you lose it. So after like five or six days, if no one responded, they'll still get like one message, but like that's a straight pitch right away. — So the stats are a bit I want to be a lot more um data driven. It's not horrible. I take weekly stats and me and my business partner go over it every single week. Uh but definitely like really breaking it down could be better for sure. — Cool. I'm right there with you. I'm glad that you guys are taking that data driven approach, but you're also not letting the tracking get in the way of actually doing the thing. I imagine you're using some automated tool to do the connect requests then. — Yeah. Yeah, I am. There's a few different ones. I honestly I can't really recommend one over the other. Um there's like expandi driy prosp is a new one and cindy io all have different benefits or so. So I'm initially tried with expand is like probably the top category or most popular one. Um but I'm using now something called cindy. io and they're fairly new too. So it's a bit of give and take like there's a lot of positives but there's some back and forth with uh some of their beta stuff but speak directly with their co-founder. They've been super nice. — That's cool. Yeah, I used to use L growth machine way back in the day. French company and uh you know you're from Montreal so you probably about that — but everything was in French. Website was in French. App was in French. Me and my business partner at the time were like Google translating stuff. I actually don't know if the app was in French. I don't remember that but the website definitely was and uh yeah I remember banging my head against the wall on numerous occasions to try and sort that out. Weird actually now that I'm thinking about it. We had such a French stack. We're using drop contact for email enrichment and they're French company and then you're using lraph fishing for LinkedIn outreach. So must have been French pricing. — Yeah. Um I just saw your post on LinkedIn too. You're trying to uh are you getting in like posting more content on there? What are you planning to do? — Yeah, I just kicked that off today. Uh which is pretty exciting simply because I've realized well the way that this works really when you get into content at scale typically you pick one platform, right? You become really good at the platform. So you put all your time and energy into that platform and then you grow like crazy but then you reach diminishing returns simply because the surface area becomes um I don't know there's just like limited surface area and how many people you can interact with. So then you keep pushing on that platform but then you know there's only a certain amount of return and you start getting marginal diminishing returns. So naturally you start exploring other platforms. So I started with YouTube right — like 100k subs or something like that and that was great and I'm still doing YouTube and I love YouTube and longer form is the way to go. But then uh we transitioned over to Instagram as well. Started Instagram. We found that sheer growth rate on Instagram was like way faster than YouTube. So we're almost at 300,000 subs on Instagram despite being at 150 or 160 I think by now on YouTube. And now I'm like okay so we're starting to see resistance on Instagram. So it's like hm what's the other platform that we can do? And so now we're doing LinkedIn. And the benefit to having multiple platforms, Julian, is rather the benefit to starting on one and then moving over to some other ones later is that you actually get to like use and transfer over some of the followers from the first platform to the next one gives you an instant boost, right? So it's like 100k YouTube followers. Instead of me trying halfass to kill two birds with one stone, doing YouTube and Instagram simultaneously, it's like started with YouTube. Oh, by the way, I have an Instagram and like 30% of people from YouTube immediately converted. Now I have a base on Instagram, so I get to grow that way faster. I'm going to do the same thing on LinkedIn and so on and so forth. That's my hope anyway. We'll see how that goes. — You mind if I and you can skip this question if you want, but do you mind if I ask kind of your systemized approach so that I can tell like you're really process driven and clearly uh data driven too because you're talking about basically your yield curves and uh so on. What's your system like? Are you hire are you using a hiring pipeline? Are you doing it yourself? — I get one person to focus on one platform. So, I focus on YouTube. I have somebody that focuses on Instagram. Now, I'm going to have somebody that focus on LinkedIn. I my newsletter. And the goal is you make that person entirely responsible for the success of that platform. You don't mix responsibilities. You don't mix uh you know things that they have to look at. So instead of somebody being responsible for Instagram and LinkedIn posts and editing shorts, it's like, no, all you do is you do LinkedIn. So if LinkedIn succeeds, it's because of you. I'm going to hype you the hell up. I'm going to award you whatever you know the incentive structure is that I'll reward you. Then if LinkedIn fails, it is also, you know, your responsibility. So people are naturally incentivized obviously to take ownership of stuff and then show up every day. Same approach that I took myself with YouTube. And I was just like, how do I replicate that sense of ownership in other people because these other people aren't me? They don't have the same like inherent incentive to represent my brand as well as me and stuff like that. So yeah, that's what I stumbled on. I think it makes the most sense. So I'm just going to keep on doing that. have one person for every platform going to make them own that platform. And then we do repurposing, right? So you know, I talk a lot on YouTube, my longest form content. So we get like an hour of content out or something from YouTube. Well, you can actually clip that and you can post that on Instagram, like two or three or four clips. So there's a little bit of repurposing going on. Yeah. asset sharing, but that's not the main point of it. The main point is just to like give one person a platform and let them run free with it. — Okay. And you're kind of sourcing these people from I'm assuming Upwork or Fiverr or your own network. — No, my own network exclusively. Here's another hack that I think people should pay more attention to. — If you're going to hire people to work with you for any sort of content, hire people that know your content. Just makes sense, right? Hire your own viewers. Can't tell you how many people that watch me are like video editors or content strategists or whatnot. It's like, well, why don't I just start there? These people already know me. They respect me. They really like my mindset and my vision. They know a lot about business process optimization because that's a big chunk of what I talk about. So, don't have to jump on freaking calls with them every day micromanaging them. And then, yeah, you just end up with people that are committed not only for financial or monetary reasons, but people that are committed to like the goal and the dream, which is just as important, I think, um, in like an actual organization like I'm quickly becoming. Yeah, it sounds like when you say it, it sounds so logical like yeah, why didn't I think of that? But um I guess because you done it or you done you've done that aspect already and that's something like I haven't reached yet. So um thanks for sharing that. — Yeah, no problem at all. So what would you say owning your own business then and hitting almost 8,000 bucks in uh in a month has enabled you to do that you couldn't do before as a lowly student? — That's a great loaded question there. Um, yeah. So, the one thing I love about, I guess, working for myself, right, is that I'm reaping all the rewards of my hard work. So, no matter what, um, if I made $1,000 or I made $10,000, it's my fault and it's my business partner's fault. It's our fault. But that's kind of the accountability aspect of it. So, I love that. It really counts on me. everything is on our shoulders. Um because I am someone that I want to see the benefits to the work I put in. And this is my I think you know where I'm going with it. But it's basically you get a job and it's awesome. I'm not saying jobs aren't secure, but it's out of your control if you lose your job or not. you know, the economy, uh, your company's cutting staff or anything. When you have your own business, everything for the most part is in your control. Like, if we go out of business, like, well, that's my fault that we go out of business. So, that's why I actually feel uh more secure having something on my own. And hopefully, I'll always have my own business. We'll see if anything happens. But, um, that's kind of how I've been wired, I guess. As long as I keep up that daily consistency with the outreach, I doubt that that'll ever happen. I think all the times in my own life where I had to go back from entrepreneurship to working some sort of 9 toive stop position. It's just been a direct result of me no longer doing that consistent daily outreach. Can't think of a single time in my life in which it wasn't. So, as long as you prioritize the stuff that matters, which is like you can't just have a hobby, you need a business. And for a business, you need customers. So, prioritize getting customers. You'll always be in business in some extent. — Yeah. That's exactly it. — All right. Let's talk about the actual skill development then because you said that you started this stuff with zero understanding of AI or automation. It's very much like a new thing for you. I'm sure you read about it before, but what platforms are you starting with? Um, and how have you gotten better at those platforms over time? How's that changed I guess? — Yeah, so initially no knowledge with any automations. I started on make. com. So building out simple I find it's a lot easier for user beginner friendly um creating simple automations within make. com and after a few clients that's when uh spoke with um kind of partnered up with my business partner he has been there more or less from the beginning as well and we've shifted more on to n now uh but this is where my transparency too is I'm not doing every single project anymore so we've kind of divided out and conquered so I'll speak I guess more on his development too if that helps. My skill development automations definitely night and day since getting into it. But him specifically too, I think it's he's better to talk about it with like 20 30x since the beginning like really just being in it dayto day and when he's probably the hardest worker I've ever seen in my life. So I feel bad sometimes like talking with you and being privileged to talk with you and he's not here to discuss it also. but he has put in insane amount of work too and yeah he had a bit more technical background than me. He's a engineer so of course he's a lot more familiar with coding but like you said exponential since diving into it but I don't know if that really answered your question. I think I just babbled there and didn't really answer too well. — No, that's fine. I'm curious what services or offers ended up being the most profitable for you. Yeah. So that's been a problem of ours too is that we ended up kind of picking a customization type of uh service offering. So you preach productization and that is something that we've been trying to do and we're kind of getting there now. At first it was the approach like okay real estate background. I love real estate. I think it's a very archaic industry. Let's dive into real estate. Kind of wideeyed naive but we didn't really know what to offer. And that's where now we've been able to kind of productize I guess our offer and it has been that we found a lot of pain point within lead management and CRM builds or database builds like that and creating uh automated follow-up systems. — I think that's natural. You know, you start with the custom projects just because that gives you the highest likelihood of being able to land something when you can match any customer need. Obviously, I think there's inherently demand for that. And uh eventually you kind of look back and you're like, "Hey, which projects made me the most money? What do people actually need? " You make a list of that and you're like, "All right, these three projects tended to make, you know, I've sold like 10 variants of these three projects. Hm, maybe I should look into productizing and packaging them. " Then you just organically productize or package them, start delivering them more efficiently, and then just get your marketing towards it. So, no magic silver bullet. You can definitely accelerate the process along with the productization that I'm talking about, but you know, I think the most important thing for beginners, uh, maybe until you hit like 15 or $20,000 a month is just like, hey, let's just load up our pipeline. Let's just get a bunch of projects and worry about where we land after. — Yeah. And that's exactly it. And it's funny, you literally went through the exact process that went in our head. And that that's it. Just trying to fill up like we were like okay like what work keeps coming back to us and we have made the most money on okay it's this system well let's just start narrowing our target towards people we think would need this system and then that's where the productization aspect of it is. And I think why this month has been so successful is of course the outreach but also identifying that offering has been way easier. It's like, okay, I'm going to target 20 people a day that I think could use this. And now that's what we're getting into. — Yeah. And then you get to enumerate all like the benefits of that. And then you get to be hyper specific about how that helps. When I uh started with the cold outreach sales, because that was the primary thing that I sold, cold outreach systems, — it was like two benefits. It was like we'll make you money and we'll save you time. But now, you know, looking back at it after a couple years, like the benefits page is huge. It's like 15 different things, you know, and it's just because we've like hyper gotten specific. It's not about the money. It's the fact that we make you like upfront help you narrow on your ideal customer persona. It's the fact that we help you like test a bunch of offers basically for free. It's the fact that you know we offer uh like our guarantee and so that at minimum you are going to be making some money or you're going to get some sort of benefit in so far that you will learn what offer resonates with the market. You get a bunch of data. You get this, you get that. You save money on this, that. You replace your headcount here. to your place headcount there. Like we got so deep into them that I guess it's impossible for somebody not to look at that after a while and just be like, "Yeah, okay, that makes sense. I should probably do that. " — Yeah, that's exactly it. And I think we're at the tip of what you just said. And I didn't know how actually deep you can get with everything like now, well, I guess it's starting to better understand the industry and the actual pain points, not the surface level ones, but the ones that are deeper. Yeah, I started tackling recruitment agencies a while ago. I don't know if you have experience working with recruitment agencies at all. — Uh, no, I tried. So, I followed the first month to a teish to a teaish. It was real estate and recruiting and I didn't do a third niche that I attacked. I think I tried marketing agencies. I wasn't too sure. And maybe it was a not the best approach, but it was kind of like, you know, I like let's just go with real estate and there's a problem within every industry like we'll discover it uh what we think. But yeah, as many conversation is possible and now it's really getting into it. A good example of the reason why I bring up the recruitment agencies is because you know when I started I was like hm um you know I'll help you make more money but then it quickly became like I will shorten your candidate sourcing and candidate presentation loop because it turns out that that's one of the major issues with recruitment agencies just takes them way too long to like source candidates and then get them through like some sort of interview qualification pipeline present them to their clients and stuff like that. And if you know a recruitment agency, let's say they do this on an average of like once every two months, right? So how many times can a two-month segment fit into a year? It's like 12 months divided by two equals six, right? It's like, okay, like a quick and easy way to make more money is just speed that up. So instead of it like 2 months, now it's 1 month. So you can fit 12 in the same period of time. And so now you make twice as much money. So that's a good example of I guess just going very deep into determining what is like the actual problem that's contributing to them not making enough money and then like being able to build systems specific to that to speak to them. I think you guys are going to organically figure that out with time. But yeah, the most important thing is just like talking to people and like hearing what they have to say and not just what some random dude on YouTube has to say. And you mentioned time. I swear it feels like there's not enough time in a day to get this all done constantly. It's just you wake up, go, but it's like I need more time. Um, and that's the whole point too of automation. So, it's a funny loop. — Yeah, you'll figure that out naturally. Don't sweat it. you know, you become you figure out how to like systematize by doing the thing a bunch. You know, like obviously you should take some time to step back and then figure out, you know, ways to economize parts of your process and delivery, but like the main alpha is just like just do it a bunch and then like you'll naturally figure out how to make things faster and you naturally will get faster. You'll start asking the right questions on sales calls. You'll start building things like forms. Yeah, volume is really like the panacea, man. Like pen panacea, whatever the word is. Volume really just solves everything. I've come to realize. — Yeah, that was um we was speaking about Hermosi before a little bit, but I just saw a quote of him and he said it multiple times that do an insane amount of volume that you just you'd be stupid to fail or something along those lines. — Yes, absolutely. And I think um volume and consistency just beats any sort of strategy or planning in the long run. If you are just the sort of person that can be like high volume and strategic and just consistently take massive action doesn't matter if like you're competing with PhD warden MBAs whatever the hell your experience with the real market will overcome that by volumes. Okay. I just got one kind of silly question to ask you before we wrap up. Most difficult client experience shittiest client experience. — Yeah. So definitely I won't name names but it was like a really big company we got through Upwork and we're like you know bit new to it like whoa like this company's awesome I just heard this guy speak on um I don't know if you listen to Diary of a CEO like he was a guest company was a guest I was like wow this is awesome and he wanted a voice agent — well it wasn't him it was one of his employees wanted a voice agent whatever he was handling it — and we were so excited and like just wanted to deliver that. We accepted this crazy unrealistic timeline of like I think it was 3 4 days or maybe a week max to create this voice agent and there was super unclear instructions too. — Um but it wouldn't really answer like I'm like hey can you give us more specification? He didn't want to hop on a call. It was just like here it is like figure it out get it done. So we rushed put in like 10 12 hour days just for that one specific voice agent all at the end all for it to come at the end to just be like well it doesn't sound humanlike enough and like are you kidding me like this is not this is something that's out of my control too. Uh and then he wasn't happy satisfied with it and of course like we care so much about like delivering and you preach it and it's a really big value of mine too. it's overd delivering and we were so upset that he was so upset um with it that were like you know don't even pay us. So we kind of wasted I guess a full week of hard work. Uh but it did come with lessons um expectation setting and really just making sure they fully understand the scope of everything and if it's just not the right fit then don't take on the client. — Definitely. I also think like being able to say this is not going to sound like that is really important. I have so many people that are like, "Hey, I want a system that does this and does that and pleases my wife and washes my hair and blah blah. " It's like, "Hey, man. " — You can't get that now. — And then being the guy, believe it or not, Julian, actually gives you like tons of value. Like, — when you're that authentic and you just tell somebody something that is directly against your self-interest to tell them, like you're on a sales call with somebody, somebody's going to pay you $5,000 for the system, but you don't think the system is right for them. You know what I mean? — Yeah. I've tried taking that approach. I always try to be super authentic. And I appreciate you mentioning that. It's something um definitely learned with that project and future projects that we take on to be super honest with everything. Even if it means like, hey, listen, I know what you're asking me. It won't work out as well as you think and losing like you mentioned that five sixk ticket price sometimes. But at least now you won't waste your time and create something unsatisfactory, too. — Yeah. If somebody asks you for something that's too good to be true, it probably is. — Yeah. Even though AI is really every 3 weeks there's like something new, a new update and everything, um it's still some things can't get done by automation or anything yet. One final piece of advice for somebody that's just starting their automation journey that's looking at you close 7,800 bucks in the last uh whatever 29 days or something and wondering, "Hey, that sounds great. I kind of want to do that, too. " — Yeah. Total transparency, it's not easy, but it is 1,000,000% doable. I'd say like, what do you have to lose? Really? I dive in as soon as possible if I think this is something that I like. For me, what it took was a monetary commitment. So joining the community and it's like okay like now it's time to go. You know I had to do that little leap. Um if you're scared to leave it's completely understandable. Uh getting a partner along the way too to help out and keep each other accountable is something I'd highly recommend and it's been a huge help. But yeah man like I'd really say to simplify all that just jump in. Like what do you have to lose? — Nike logo. Just do it. — Just do it right. — Thank you very much man. It's been a pleasure chatting with you, Julian. I'm really stoked to see you on our next case study call where you're going to be. I made $78,000 in the last 29 days and here's how. — You know, I I'm stoked for that as well. I hope it happens uh very shortly. — Crossing my fingers, man. Keep on showing up. Keep on asking the right questions and you will. Cheers. — Thanks a lot, Nick. I'll get one.