# How to make your first $1,000 online with AI (No-BS Guide) ## Метаданные - **Канал:** Liam Ottley - **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8qLBD3U5w-c - **Дата:** 27.09.2025 - **Длительность:** 43:26 - **Просмотры:** 49,672 - **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/11790 ## Описание 📚 Join the #1 community for AI entrepreneurs, get all my resources & connect with 280k+ members: https://bit.ly/4nsFw1A 📈 Become a Wildly Profitable AI Entrepreneur: https://bit.ly/4mDi00x 🤝 Ready to transform your business with AI? Let's talk: https://bit.ly/3IJrZmZ 📋 Get our FREE 14-day playbook for finding high-impact AI opportunities in any business: https://bit.ly/14-day-playbook- Most beginners waste months cold-emailing people who aren’t even looking for AI help — and burn out before they ever get paid. But there’s a smarter way. In this video, I reveal a proven Upwork strategy that’s helping people land their first paid AI automation project within days, even if they have no coding background and zero client history. You’ll learn: - How to build a winning Upwork profile that instantly builds trust (and why a short video is your biggest advantage) - The exact proposal script that gets clients to reply — and how to avoid “ChatGPT-sounding” pitches that get ignored - A daily sys ## Транскрипт ### What We're Covering [] Most beginners burn out after months of sending cold emails to people who aren't even looking for help with AI. But a small group of people are using a very smart system to tap into a constant stream of clients who are actively looking to hire people for AI and automation. And this is allowing people to land their first paid project in days, not months. Today, I'm going to be breaking down that exact strategy, including the exact messages to send, how to set up your profile correctly, and showing how you can use this base and how to get these leads initially as a launch pad for a full-blown career in AI. Adam, mate, great to have you back on the channel um to break down this Upwork strategy that seems to be working very well for you and I've actually heard a lot about it from other people in the community as well. So, um it's very exciting on for people looking to get into AI who maybe don't have a technical background or just are struggling to get leads and ease into it. So, uh yeah, show us what you got, mate. I'm going to be giving away all of the source. So, Upwork is honestly my bread and butter. I'm in their expert vetted program and their top rated plus program and I've done over 100K on the platform itself. So, I'm one of their top performers. And not only that, but I actually have a twin brother who started before I did. He's also one of the top performers on Upwork. So, we can prove it's a repeatable pattern. And then we've done it for other people that are in our community that know me. So, these are some other people who are local from where I'm from that I've worked with. And you'll see that we all have very similar profiles and we're all following a very, very similar pattern. So, there is definitely a pattern to doing this. You just have to know how to do it. And so I'm going to give you all of that source plus real screenshots on how to win actual projects. I'm going to teach you all the steps that you need, the three-step process or the three skills that you need to master to get this to work. And I'm literally going to show you how to do it. So I'm super keen to get cracking and show you. ### What makes Upwork the best place to start [1:35] — If you just want to give us very briefly if someone's maybe not super familiar with Upwork, um I mean I hope everyone's familiar, but just like a very high level overview of like what actually this is. This is a client acquisition funnel for getting leads from Upwork for your AI projects. So Upwork's the world's largest global marketplace for talent or freelancer marketplace. It's pretty much like a job board. It's really good for people who have AI skills, particularly in a lot of those digital skills. A lot of people in that early stage, they struggle to find work. How do you connect with the right people, especially if you're selling all these kinds of AI offers? You want to connect with people. You don't know what skill to have. It gives you this like nice playground where you can go in, you can find clients, you can win work, they handle all the payments. It's the perfect beginner spot for anyone looking to get into AI. So, before I jump into ### Who is best suited for entrepreneurial freelancing [2:21] exactly how to do this and take you through the framework, I'm just going to touch on the typical people that are really suited to this entrepreneurial freelancing journey. And if you're watching this video, you're probably already in one of these three categories. But what I find from people that I coach and help do this, and everyone that I've seen really succeed in freelancing or in entrepreneurial endeavors in general, is they typically fit one of these three conditions. So they're unsatisfied with their current working arrangement, whether that's a lack of purpose, opportunities, or insufficient pay. They've got some sort of curiosity or passion to work on something outside work hours. In our case, it's probably AI. And you have an ability to persevere through setbacks and rejections and be able to learn from mistakes rather than giving up. Because yes, this is so doable, but you need to be able to break through rejections and barriers, especially in that first 1K, because a lot of people aren't going to want to work with you. And so you have to be able to just keep it moving and stay consistent and push through and that that's where everyone gets lost. Cool. So we've got these steps. Now the first step here is create freelancing profile. And you're probably sitting there being like why is that in front of Learn AI? The reason for that is because a lot of people get stuck in this phase and they never feel ready to actually go to the freelancing platforms and start looking for work cuz the work's already here. So, I say create your freelancing profile first so you can take a look at the job boards and actually get a feel for what people are looking for out there in the market. If you go to Upwork's job board and you just type AI, there's jobs every minute with people looking for like n experts, rag agents, pretty much everything in the AI space. The work is there. There's people paying 100 USD plus an hour. You can get high ticket clients there. You can get low ticket clients there. There's every type of client there. So, the work is there. I'm going to take you through in a moment exactly how to create a winning profile and how to stand out from 95% of the other profiles on Upwork. But that's step one. Step two is to learn AI. Now, if you're watching Liam Otley, you've probably already done a large part of this, but before jumping into — hopefully making all those courses for nothing, — putting out the free courses. — Exactly. So, before jumping in, you need to have some basic knowledge. Now, you'll see I've got this massive warning sign here. Learning knowledge is great, but if you never go out into the real world and put it into practice, that's part of the problem. Now, you're never going to feel ready. So, at some point, you have to take a leap of faith and just start doing it. So, some of the ways to learn these skills initially are unpaid work, personal projects, courses, communities, or YouTube. There's plenty of free content. In this age of AI, you have more access to knowledge than anyone has ever had by a long shot. — That's literally why we uh why we create the free courses here on YouTube, guys. So, they're all selected in my free school, but we have we're going through all the core things like AI agents. I got a 4-hour course like vibe coding and building software with AI. Got a 2-hour course on that. AI automation's Like, we keep rolling these out here so that you can at least get the entry point. There's all of this stuff, not just from me, but everyone else as well. So much content online, as I'm sure you've been drowning in. Um, but the learning part is definitely out there from a skill standpoint if you wanted to do this on a sho string budget. — Yeah. And so, I have no tertiary degree. I came from a construction background and I've delivered, you know, 50 plus projects through Upwork alone. I've been involved in 250. So all you can learn all these skills. You don't need to go to uni to learn how to code anymore that you can learn these. Like I learned everything I know off YouTube. I was pre — and on the job and in blogs and figuring it out. It's so possible. So pick a niche. Um start learning. If you're watching this video and you're in this space, you're probably already doing a lot of this, but don't get stuck here. I think the like you said the Upwork one's very interesting there because you get to like reverse engineer based off what demand you're seeing. So everyone's talking about an inm workflow on Upwork. Okay, I'm digging through and having a look. Okay, well maybe I should just look into that. There is an element of I just had an interview with you guys might have seen it by now um with Mikuel, one of my accelerator members, and he went through this process and he just narrowed down to just learning make just learning one thing getting really good at it. And if you can block out the noise of all the [ __ ] going in the AI automation space, there's so much opportunity in every one of these major categories, whether it's vibe coding or automations or agents, if you just pick one tool and get really good at it, and as long as you've connected that to, okay, there's enough demand on here, then you've got your thing. You've got the narrow area that you become an expert in. Um, and also like the you know those I think they're penguins or they're like birds or something and they throw themselves off the cliff. Uh, you might have seen those and they like fall so far all the way down you like there's no way this dude's surviving it. and they roll and they get up and they keep going down to the water. Like that has to be you guys at some point. Like you said, you have to pull the band-aid off. You can't get stuck in the learning phase. But all you need to do is make sure you've got like think they've got very like loose bones or something at that age. Like you need to be able to take that hit of the shock of the first freelancing gigs and the first like personal projects and free projects you do. Um but that's really what determines the people that get into the space versus the ones who spend their whole life learning it. And on that point, I'll show you in a moment exactly how you can write proposals to actually remove the risk for the client, get started on client work. And if you don't deliver the project, they don't pay. So, I'll show you exactly how to word that, but like it's free work experience. And if you deliver the project, which a lot of time, like especially when I was starting, there was a lot of times I was like 50% sure I could do it. I didn't know 100%. I hadn't done it before. I was like, I think I know how to do this. I've seen some videos. I'm pretty sure I can do this. Take on the job. I'll tell you exactly how to word your proposals so that if worst case scenario it's not possible or whatever the case is which in most cases it is possible but worst case scenario you're fine at the end of the day you just wasted time you still learn something you don't get paid so — the world doesn't end and they're going to forget about it you're just freaking move on you know — exactly and especially when you're in that 0 to 1k phase you're in the playground here you're learning the hard skills which are going to benefit you so much when you get to that 100k mount and you're making $20,000 deals you're dealing with enterprise as clients, you make you can make the mistakes here and you learn the hard lessons here so that when you get to doing it there, you're not causing serious problems that are actually big deals. So, what this phase is for, a lot of people come out of, you know, they come from a full-time job, they expect to be getting paid like $40, $50, $60 off the bat, no skills, no experience, whatever. — And I think the mentality for this first 1k needs to be, let's get paid a little bit amount of money, but you're really there for the learning. You're there to learn how to sell yourselves. sell yourself and how to handle client comms. You're there to learn the actual skills of your niche. And you're there to learn how to price your services to actually make money. You will make mistakes in all three of these categories when you're first starting. That's fine. As long as you learn the hard lessons, if you screw up a sales call, you screw up an invoice, whatever the case is, you underquote something, cool. You learned the skills, you got paid some money, we know for next time. I think the calling it crawl is is the best word for it I've I've heard because it literally is crawling. You feel like you're moving at a snail's pace. Like you are in your learning phase. Like if you do a job for free, you're on the good end of that deal. Like as a beginner, you are literally the ROI that is going to give for you long term in your career in the space. Those someone letting you come in and build stuff for them that becomes portfolio pieces. That becomes what compounds towards your bigger paid projects. you're still get even if you were paying them a bit like you were going out of pocket, you're probably still getting a better deal uh than they are. This is like what I call this the slow way to get rich with AI, which is what I wish people ask me more often is they always say, "What's the fastest way to do it? " Well, like the slowest way that like in 2 years, I guarantee you, you are living the life of your dreams and you have the funds, you have the freedom. The slow way is just doing this. It's going through and learning those hard lessons and easing into it. Um, but that's a pretty hard message to get through to some people. It's like you guaranteed way in two years you'll be where you want to be. — And when you hear like when you hear about all the people that have made it, they they're all talking about those 2 a. m. nights like those nights where the clients are screwing you over. Those clients where everything feels like it's collapsing. We've all done those nights. And when you come out the back end of those nights, that's what builds the confidence to walk around when you are at this level to be able to deal with these enterprise. like you walk, especially at a young age. If you're at a young age doing this, the confidence gets built because you know you've done the reps. You you know what you know you're good at what you do because you've done the hard work. If you just had it handed to you, you wouldn't walk around with that kind of confidence. So, in hindsight, you will love that you went through this. I always talk about all the crappy free work that I've done in my time. — Yeah. — Cool. So, what I'm going to talk about here that that stuff's all great ### How to create a winning profile (and why video is key) [10:50] but how do you actually do it? All right. So, how do we get to 1K on Upwork? There's three key things you need to nail to get to 1K on Upwork. One is create a winning profile. Now, I have I've I'm sure you have as well, Liam. I've hired a lot of people through Upwork as well. So, I know both sides of the scale from what I'm looking for as someone who's hiring people and how to position myself as a freelancer to win work. So, the first thing is create a winning profile. Now, I've got a full video on exactly how to do this from start to scratch, but covering it briefly, what are some of the things you can do to stand out from a large part of the crowd just based on a winning profile. The first one, and I honestly think that 80% of this is your biggest differentiator. If you look at the winning profiles that I've got here, look at the videos in all four of them. Straight away, you can see clear photos of the face. And what are we doing here? We're showing automatically we're building trust. Everything on this page is to build trust with a client. The only thing they care about when they get to this page is can I trust this person to deliver my solution. That's the only thing they care about. And so what contributes to that is can this person communicate well? Have they got the experience? Have they worked on previous projects? Do they know? Do they have the skills required to complete what I'm looking for? That's really it. And a video is the quickest way to differentiate yourself because if they open a video, they can see, oh, straight away, Adam can communicate clearly. He's got he he's got experience. He presents himself well. language. — Language. Exactly. All those kind of things. It's building trust straight away. They feel like they know me and that we haven't even had a call yet. So 80% is video. And this, you'd be surprised how many Upwork freelancers haven't got a video there. Invest. Take a little bit of time. Try and get a quiet area. See if you can get a good backdrop or edit it. This is not I made a I had a video on my profile way before this that was way worse. I green screened a weird background in my bedroom, but it got the job done. Whatever you can do, get it done. — Yeah. Don't let these little things be excuses not to like that's the classic beginner trap is oh I need a website and then they spend two months on the website like just get like business is all iterative it's like accepting that I'm not exactly where I want to be right now but it's enough to get things off the ground enough for me to start to get data back. So just yeah don't let that uh that mental bias cause you guys to slow down. You just need to get that video out. — Exactly. Use your phone if you have to. You can always change it later. Um, but just get this done and get to apply for jobs. So, clear profile photo, optimize title description. So, make sure that you've got like what do you do? If you work in AI, mention that. If you're doing rag, NAM, whatever the case is, throw that on your profile. Uh, optimize your title description. Portfolio. Now, if you've got any personal projects, anything relevant like that doesn't even need to be client work, but just make it look good. Throw it on there. And then reviews. Obviously, when you're starting, you're going to have zero of these. But the first project that you do, you need to go above and beyond to make sure you get five star good reviews. And when you finish the work, again, it's not about money. If the client's being a pain, you have to go above and beyond in those early days to get it done for them so that they're happy. Like, hey, really enjoyed working on this project for you. If you could end the contract and leave me a fivestar review, that would do wonders for my profile. Really appreciate working for you. Build those reviews. Even three or four. Once you've got three or four under your belt, the you you've completed the hardest part of making it to 100k as a freelancer to get your first three or four reviews. — And for those portfolio ones, can you kind of like game the system a bit where you might go on to a YouTube tutorial and just strip the automation from a YouTube tutorial, build it, and then you like put that as like it's a personal project or you go on to like lovable or like new replet agents just come out. you build something that looks cool and has some seemingly cool functionality and you can like pad out a portfolio that looks pretty legit to the untrained eye. Um, even to the trained eye, it's like how could you distinguish between automation that you made like you took from a YouTube tutorial or one that you made yourself? Like that's it's at the end it's the same thing. Um, so would you recommend gaming the system a bit like that? — There are so many ways to gain the system. I know people that win jobs that don't actually know how to complete them. They jump into school communities like yours. Uh for each of these niches and they actually just post a problem there and they're like I have this problem and they're basically getting people in these communities. Free consulting. — Exactly. Like I mean there's resources everywhere for this. You've got YouTube, you've got communities, you've got everything. At the end of the day, you can learn a lot of this on the job. So do not get stuck here. Win smaller jobs. If it's a $200 job, whatever. It doesn't need to be like an enterprise 100k project, 6 months, whatever. Pick something small. Start there and just use the resources that are available to the to you. There's so many out there. — Yeah. And like having those kind of crutches ready when you need them. Like this is what we like why the why my accelerator program started off in the very first place was that we knew people needed help and guidance on the development nontechnical people coming in. You're going to run into the development issues and there's like that troubleshooting like you just said. You can go into my free community and say, "Hey guys, I'm struggling with this. " I've really tried to incentivize and push a lot of the people who are developers and they're looking to get work and to build their reputation in the community to help people like that. So there's this whole ecosystem um of helping people. Um and also would you recommend the reviews because I know sometimes people like seed the reviews on their they get a few like them spend a few hundred to seed the reviews on their profile. Does that work? — So I was going to talk about this. I call it like Upwork farming. But yeah, you can call it whatever you want. — Yes, it works. What I will say with that though is it's kind of like cheating on a test. If you're cheating on a test and let's say you want to become a doctor and you've cheated on all the tests and then you go and become a doctor, you're not going to know how to operate on anybody because you cheated on all the tests and you don't actually know what you're doing. So yes, it works, but you need to be able to deliver what you're getting paid for at the end of the day. So you can seed an account and falsify some information on there, you know, get some reviews in there. That's great. It's great to get off the ground if you have the tech skills and you feel confident you can deliver things. It will help you sell. get leads in because those first few reviews are honestly so important on a profile. But if you're going to do that, just make sure that you have a plan for delivering things as well. But I I I'm not going to recommend it. Um but it's definitely an approach to use. It's an option. So that's how to create a winning profile. Now, the last thing I'll do here is just two points is one find you can search for talent on Upwork. So if you're a little bit unsure, you're like, "Ah, this is cool, but I still don't know what's right for my description or I still don't know how to lay this out. " You can find all of the top rated expert vetted talent on Upwork just by searching for them in the search bar here. Copy the people that you think are good. You look at some skills. Find some toprated freelancers that are already in that space. Copy their profile. — They're going to come copy you, bro. — Exactly. Well, I've already had a bunch of people copying me. It's what it is. — Um, jump I'm all for it. Jump in there. Copy whoever you need to copy. — Comes with the territory, bro. I have to say, [ __ ] it. You guys can just steal my [ __ ] like that's whatever. So — yeah, that that's the way it goes. The next thing I'll talk about ### Proposal scripts that actually work [17:30] actually is proposal writing. So one is a winning profile, but two is we have to master our proposal writing. And this is actually way simpler than people think. So before I jump into it, I want to show you what your proposals look like to clients. So this is the client dashboard on Upwork. This is a job I posted for a Next. js Superbase expert. So they see your basic stats. Now, when you're starting off, your stats are not going to be too crash hot, but they see this basic information. What they're looking at is the details here, and you'll see they see the first, let's call that a 100 words of your proposal. So, you might write like 20 paragraph proposal. They're only looking at the first 100 words. So, how do you write a winning proposal? Now, I'm going to take you through some screenshots. Now, this is actually my twin brother. He is a weapon on the sales side of things. Um, I'll show you some from me as well, but the way he I like the way he does it, it makes me laugh. But he pump he jumps in with scripts like this. So, let me show you. — So, right off the rip, mentioning like Sydney, — yeah, — obviously location. Yeah. — Couple of things people do wrong. One, chat GPT responses. 5 years ago, writing awesomely formatted things was amazing and people like, "Wow, this person's put so much effort in. They've got emojis in their message. It's six paragraphs. This is incredible. " Fast forward today, the less words the better and the less emojis the better. No one wants to see chat GPT proposals anymore. Get straight to the point as quick as possible. So like the way he comes in sometimes is all caps, I've done this already. Then you quickly lay a pitch. So it's I've done this already. Straight under that it's here's a loom video of me doing it. So automatically off the bat, you're solving two of the client's biggest concerns. — Does this person have the skills to do this? Can they communicate effectively? And can I trust this person to do it? you can achieve that in 1 2 3 4 five words and a loom video. Um, that's all you need. And that way you're showing up in here. You're not going, "Hi, my name's Adam. I love football and eating butter chicken, blah blah," and then getting down here. — Is that true? — I do. I do love photo chicken. — Me, too. — So, that's And like you'll see here, that's what he does every single time. Hey, would love to work on this project. recorded a video and straight away. Hey video, I'm Sydney based tub partner. So like you can see it's straight to the point. No mucking around — just looping in any credibility you can pull in as on a as need basis depending on the project and that video is the core of it. — Exactly. Like if it's AI related and you've done anything in AI, you've done something in the space. So you can go in and go I've done this already loom video of anything relevant to what they're looking at and it's that Loom video is really just to show you communicating and show over anything relevant. Then under that you can follow up with, you know, text and they're actually going to read that. — Just for like the uh the rookie who doesn't really know how this works on Upwork. So we're we are going out and searching through like what's the actual workflow for someone who's digging around for projects. So say for people coming on to this right now, we've seen what it looks like on their side, but so what's the actual like finding jobs? Cuz for people who don't know, you do actually have to go out there and send these proposals in, right? Like it's not like they just magically Oh, no. think you can get invited like as I'm sure once your profile gets up there you start to get invited as experts to a project but as a beginner it's all outbound but you're going outbound to people who are saying that they're looking for a certain thing right — yeah in the start honestly it's going to be all outbound later down the line you might start to get some inbound but the steps for that is you'll click this find work dropown then you go to I think it's job search or something like that you end up on the job page then you can search by keyword so if you let's say for example you specialize in NN workflows you can throw And in there you can filter by location, time zone. Like keep in mind what are your competitive advantages. Do you work in the European, US, Australian, whatever time zone you work in, you're going to have a competitive advantage in that time zone. Languages, — you're going to have competitive advantages in languages. You want to look at like look at your competitive points, look at the skills. You can filter by hourly rates as well. You can go for under, over, whatever the case is. Find a bunch of projects that look interesting. do a bit of research, hit apply job, and then you can come through this process. Um, and so I've got a ton of processes of me doing this, bunch of other people kind of going through this process like what it actually looks like and how we're shooting these messages through and — we'll link this board down below for these guys to check out, right, and have a dig through. — Step two is proposal writing. And as you can see there, it's the actual writing is dead simple. as few words as possible. It's really about just getting your um getting your experience together, being able to communicate on camera. Again, it's all about building ### Daily routine to guarantee your first job [22:05] trust. And the third part of this is sales and closing. So, you've made a winning prop profile. You've sent out a bunch of proposals. Now, keep in mind, if you're in your zero to 100 1K, I recommend waking up every morning and sending at least five proposals. And just do that every single day until you win a job. If you do that every single day without failure, — you you can't tell me that you're going to go every day until you're 70 years old and not get a job. It's not physically possible. — So, — jump over every day, five proposals out with this exact same approach. Work on your — first thing. Put it on the to-do list. Bang it out. — Bang it out. Work on and every time you're recording a Loom video, work on your use it as an opportunity to work on your communication skills. Get better at presenting, introducing yourself, displaying what you can do, displaying your skills. And inevitably what will happen is somebody will come back and they'll be like hey so and so love your experience or whatever the case is looks great can we jump on a meeting and usually most people want to get on a meeting like ASAP like they right now as soon as — on usually come on like super impatient like I know what I want like now how soon I'm always talking to freelancers on there and it's like oh yeah like maybe get could kick it off in a week and it's like you were just looking for that's the good thing about being new is that you can give them the speed that they want whereas someone like maybe in your position you're a bit busy. It's like they'd be lucky to sort of slot in next week. So, use your advantage as a not necessarily younger, but like a new person who's got more time and more availability and just be there like all the time ready to move quickly for them. As I tell you, as someone who uses Upwork a lot, that's the stuff. Those are the people that I go for if they can provide the proof. — And as a beginner, the easiest way to slide in. So, I forgot to mention this in here is you come in with that approach. the hook is, and this is like the Alex Hozi, you know, remove the risk side. The hook that you hit these people with is I'm new on Upwork. I've got these skills, but I'm just trying to develop my profile. So, I'm willing to go above and beyond and for my clients in these early phases to prove my worth. I can get started on this project ASAP. And if we can get the contract started and I don't deliver the project to your expectations or above, more than happy to give you a completely free refund, no questions asked. — And that stuff's supernatural on Upwork as well. You know, when you have these outside of Upwork and it's like, "Oh, I'm just starting out. Would you mind letting me work for you for free? " That sounds a lot worse than if I'm new to Upwork, like I've been doing this in like through my personal projects and privately. I'm just coming. It's a very normal thing to see new people coming on. It's like you could have the most you have an excuse like the most skilled AI automation expert in the world is probably not on Upwork, but if he came on to it at some point, he would be like seemingly low ranked, right? So you get out of jail free card there and you don't need to feel like such a phony cuz it happens all the time on the platform — 100%. And if you set up your profile correctly and you've got experience on there and a bit of a portfolio people buy that all the time like they like all right this person might have had a job working in the space of 10 years but he's new on Upwork or whatever the case is. So yeah, use that exact script there. Use that five times every day and eventually what will happen is someone will jump will want to jump on a call. So how do you how do ### How to handle sales calls as a beginner [25:02] these sales calls typically run? How do you close them? How do you actually get a contract started so that you can get on your road to 1k ear? Some of the rules, one, camera on, especially for that first call. Now, if you know someone for months, you've been working with them all the time, and you're, you know, you just got out of bed, no shirt on, whatever. Cool. In that scenario, no camera on. But this is, you got to remember this is the very first meeting that you're having with a potential client, your camera has to be on unless there's a seriously good reason that it can't be. Cuz I'm it's honestly a bit of a dealbreaker for a lot of these clients that are looking to hire people. They want to know who you are. Two, just have a good look like you're having a good time. Don't be too serious or too like people want to be friendly in these things. Um, pretty self-explanatory. And just be polite and professional. And honestly, those are communic. They're basic communication skills. All you really need to do is um communicate effectively, know you're doing. The whole point of the sales call is just to build trust and just to show the client that you can communicate and you can deliver what they're looking for. That's it. Uh, and don't expect to be a pro on the first call. When I jumped on my first few calls, I knew absolutely zero about tech. I was literally googling tech words. People were talking about like UIs and stuff. I had no idea what was going on. I was just googling that mid call and just pretending like I knew what was going on. — I had the same thing with my uh my consulting calls when I first started taking them off the channel um and doing like paid consulting calls. It was terrifying. I think this is like a crossing the rubric moment for people in their AI or like their business journey is taking those first calls into in sales calls and for me the first time doing those AI consulting calls you are ter I don't know anyone who wasn't like I had business experience before but this was still scary me like selling or like pitching my services as this new thing that I'd just been doing for a few months and I was getting I was taking $300 out of their pocket for that stuff and that so that the risks were elevated. Um, so if you guys I know how you're all going to feel in that moment of like, oh my gosh, I can't like this is a really scary moment for me to get on these calls, but it's just another one of those like scars that you have to pick up of going through maybe a couple dud calls. But if you let that push you down and end the journey for you, then that's like that's over, right? Like you have to push through those awful first calls. That is the difference between an entrepreneur and someone who's an entrepreneur. — It's literally like going on a roller coaster. The first time you look at it super high, you're like, "Oh, that's scary. " You do it one time and you're like, "Oh, that was actually fun. " Or, "That wasn't too bad. " And then you just keep going again. It's the exact same thing. Now, the way these calls typically format, honestly, like most of the discovery calls, and I'd call this a discovery call, they usually follow a similar structure to this in basic terms. Now, obviously, you don't need to follow a fixed structure, but usually the first two minutes is just like intros, try and come across as a friendly person. It is small talk, but at the same time, you don't want to be too serious. And — there's an art. — There's an art to it. small you pick it up — weather where do you live what time like the usual chat and you would pick these up. — Yeah, exactly. Um now the next So the way I is I sell or I envision sales calls is the same way that you the doctor behaves when you go to when you have a sore shoulder. So what happens is you go to a doctor, you walk in quick 2 minutes about how the day is going. Then the doctor sits there and goes okay what's the problem with your shoulder? and for 15 minutes you go, "Oh yeah, when I lift my shoulder or when I drive or when I lift boxes, this hurts. " Blah, blah. You spend $15 getting the pain off your chest. Then the next 10 minutes or so after that is the doctor going, "Okay, cool. " They take you through some steps to diagnose where the pain is. And then they start to offer you some solutions. So that's how that works. And then they basically map out the next steps and go, "All right, do these exercises for the next 3 weeks and that pain should go away. " Exact same process in tech. So typically people that are jumping on these calls, they've posted a job because they have a problem. So you got 2 minutes intro, then let them get it off their chest. Like you don't need to do any talking at this point, they have a problem. They they want to explain it. They don't want you to speak over them and just start talking. They don't care. U let them get it off their chest. Then start to propose some solutions that you can possible think of. Maybe tie some of your experience in there. Ask some follow-up questions. If you need to scope a document out after the call or whatever, that's fine as well. You don't need to solve every pro problem on this call. — That's a big one. Big one to keep in mind. You guys don't need to have all the answers right off the rope as a beginner. Like just say, look, I'll get it back to you within like a few hours. — Yeah, 100%. Be like, look, I'm familiar with that tool, but I just need to quickly read up on the documentation or I need to quickly just read up on this to be 100% sure before I can confirm it. I'll jump straight off this call and do a quick research and I'll forward that document over to you in the next 30 minutes. Whatever the case is, something like that. — And then the next one, this is big map. You got to map out the next steps. Now, you've got to remember that you need financial investment with whoever you're working with as soon as possible. The longer that you wait, the less chance that that the client's going to do that project. So, you need to map out the next steps. Now, especially if you're starting the 0 to 1k range, chances are you're probably doing smaller jobs, like a couple hundred, maybe less, or maybe slightly more than that. You want to try and get at least a contract started as soon as possible. Now, maybe they need a second follow-up call for whatever, but if you can, just try and suggest and be like, "Hey, look, I can get started on this today. I've got a completely free schedule. If we can get a contract open, I'll do I'll start making some headway today. I'll keep you posted. " And then, you know, if let's say it's a three-day project, I'll be like, "Look, I'm I think I can get this done in the next 2 3 days, whatever the case is. I really want to get cracking on this. If I can't deliver the project to your standards, I'll give you a completely free refund. I'm just really eager to get started with my Upwork profile and get some traction and I'm really looking forward to working with you. Um, and that's the next step. Contract started. If you need information from them, like you might if you're doing AI stuff, you probably need access to tools, more clarification on some of the scope, whatever the case is, you ask that as well, but try and get that contract open if you can at the end of the sale. — Yeah. — Cool. Now, I waffled on a bit there, but like if you know if you can do these three things, you this exact I mean honestly that exact same process is what people use in $100,000 businesses. Plus, at the end of the day, it's you're what you're doing here is diagnosing client problems, building a solution, getting contracts started, — getting the work done. — It's taking a lot of the tricky parts out of it, right? Like where the interest is like reaching out to them, handing the contracts and payments as well. That's another beginner thing that is like okay what contract do I use or like how do I take payments like our product's going to handle all this stuff for you um and also give you like line of re like recourse as well if there are issues with the contract — and what I'll say so this is these are the skills you in your core phase now the amount of times that I underqued my own services I did things way below the industry rate couldn't even tell you how many times I did that but it's cool because in this stage here it was all learning at that point it was just skills if you screw up charge someone $500 and you should have charged them $5,000. Believe me, you know the next time. So even if you make that mistake once, you will get better. And so that's where we move to this walking phase. So this is the inflection point. This is the crawl phase. If you can get through these steps and it's literally reps wake up every day, five proposals, jump on the sales calls. All right, got that must messed up that sales call. Didn't know what I was doing. — Five more proposals, next sales call. — It is like nice and linear. It's just like reps repeating that over and over again. — It is straight reps. And so you get to that 1K. I promise you when you get to 1K, I've seen so many people before that 1K come up with all the excuses under the sun on Upwork is saturated. All these different excuses. — U my brother actually got banned from Upwork for sending too many direct links. He started a new account 4 weeks ago and did 20K in the first I think it was 3 weeks he sent it to me here. — Damn. — 8. 5. Yeah. So 3 weeks. That's crazy, bro. — Yeah. So, believe me, like obviously — he knows. Yeah. Fresh profile. You can see it here. 20K. Um — he they stripped he' done 250 plus projects. They stripped the whole thing away cuz he kept sending out direct links and they got mad at him and banned his account. So, he recreated it. Um pretty much just to prove that like you can still do this in 2025. It's not saturated, but you do need to follow the approach that is above. And there's only going to be more demand coming from businesses every single freaking day. Like more and more of them are waking up. watching YouTube videos. There's more awareness. So, you're betting on a very good trend here. — 100%. You like 5K weeks is so doable. He obviously has some of the skills, but like I'm working with people that are doing exactly what it took me like years to do in 60 days or less. So, 100% you can still do this. It's about getting the reps in and following these steps and just learning, getting up, getting the reps in. So, you've gone to ### From $1K to $100K+: optimizing and scaling [33:40] that 1k mark. Now, if mark, you you're on the other side of the abyss. So, most people never get to this point. They're stuck in this this point. When you get to the 1K mark, you finally realize deep down that it's really it's so possible. Um, a lot of people don't even really believe it's possible. When you get to that mark, you're like, "Oh, wow. Okay, I actually know how this works. I I'm I'm confident. I've actually gotten here. " It's just reps and optimization there. So in the walking phase, this is typically 1 to 10k, you have the really basic skills that you need and this is all about optimization. So maybe like discovering a slightly more profitable niche. Maybe you've done a lot of NAM work, but then you realize like voice agents or there's a specific type of agent which you can build really quickly and there's people that are posting jobs for it that are like — two grand, — big contracts. Yeah. — What's working? What are people looking for right now? What's easy to build? you know, what are some things that are easier for me to deliver? You can learn how to smoothen your service life cycle. And what I mean by that is like, uh, you might have sent out some proposals, but you might have got screwed over on a couple of proposals you sent or you might have said some botchy things on a sales call and you're like, "That cost me or whatever the case is. " So, you can smoothen that stuff out, start to get better at how you operate. Improve on your sales calls. Um, grow your experience and knowledge and in turn, this is how your hourly rate grows. So if you're delivering quality work, which if you're working hard and you're learning AI skills, you're probably doing, you will start to get more and more work come in. And then what happens is you suddenly you're working 40 hours a week and it's like, oh wow, okay, I don't have time to get the next project on. So that's when you up your hourly rate. So you win the next project and you go back to the clients that were out before and be like, I I've just accepted this new project. Are you able to match this rate just so I can continue to prioritize your project as I grow my skills and grow my career? That's and that cycle continues. That's how the hourly rate starts climbing. So you might start at like 10 USD, 20 USD, whatever the case is. Get 40 hours a week there or whatever that is in fixed price projects. Basically, get busy, then increase the rate $10, do it again. All right, busy again, increase the rate another $10, do it again, and you keep climbing. And then we get to the running stage. So this is the 10 to 100k stage. you are starting to get in the flow of things of how to be a freelancer. Um, and you've basically learned a lot of the tough business lessons. You've made a lot of mistakes on quoting. You've screwed up some sales calls, but you've optimized. You've learned a niche that's profitable. You've learned how to handle client rejections. invoice and price your services properly to not get screwed over. You've learned a lot of the technical skills. You've learned everything. And this is how you can then feed into there's three pathways from here. one. And I know people that are happily just living the highly profitable freelancer life where they earn 100 USD an hour plus. Um they travel the world, which is what I'm currently doing, but they travel the world, they enjoy their life. Um it's super profitable. They're not no overheads winning. — Um or you can turn to an agency model, which is what I did, or you can turn to a product. But the skills that you learn here, like I bu I built 50 plus MVPs for clients prior to doing what I'm doing. I've built so many tech products in including my own which failed miserably before I started all of this. And what I learned is that if I jump straight into so this pathway here is the pathway that a lot of people try and take which is jumping straight into 100k plus agency or building a SAS product whatever the case is. I made so many mistakes that I got paid to learn in this approach so that when I came around to optimizing my agency, building my other businesses, which is down here, I was able to capitalize on all of the mistakes that I made, all of the hard work that I did, all the lessons that I learned here, so that I didn't make those same mistakes on 20K projects when it actually mattered. So, I also call this like the freelance scale method, but you learn this correctly. And I actually think it's one of the best ways to get into running businesses, owning products, whatever the case is, because you learn all of the crappy problems here. So, everyone complains about this period and they hate it. You realize that once you get on the other part of other side of this, all of the crappy experience that you had here, all the clients that disrespected your time, all of the long late nights that you had that nobody saw, — the lessons that you learned there mean that when you get to here and you're making those same decisions on a larger scale, you don't — that's why you're worth way more as well. You're worth so much more to your clients because you've been through that. You've dealt with shitty situations before. you know, how to navigate like manage projects end to end for like really high success rates. And that's really what that they're paying you for, right? It's what is can this guy take me from where I am now to where I want to go. Um, and I think I'll just throw in here the tricky I say the tricky thing is that in the AI space you've got these two different types of people looking at oh there's you got to split it down even more but broadly two categories of the hungry young person with tons of time and then you have the older person who's coming from a job or a 9 to5 or a career uh maybe 10 20 years and then they're trying to get in as well. So the time the time rich people the younger people I always recommend like this is like the shorefire way these this method of learning the skills and going through and grinding it and getting it's basically just building all your business and technical skills all in one go. Upwork is going to be giving you all those all the leads and action there. Um and it's literally the the guaranteed way in two years be where you want to be. Um what would you say on the other side of that is because this obviously relies on you being a freelancer and doing the work yourself. The tricky part is that there's so many people who want to get in maybe older, they're not as techsavvy or friendly. And this is a more gnarly issue that we try to solve. Um, but it's the people coming in who don't necessarily want to become the person who is doing the delivery. Um, which is a different massive segment of the market of people getting into AI. Um, but it's not as suitable for them. — Yeah. So, you can get out, you don't need to go this whole way by yourself. I probably got out of the delivery somewhere in here. Uh so once you earn an hourly rate that justifies being able to hire somebody else and obviously take that margin in the middle, you can go through this approach. You don't need to be a freelancer this whole way through. But you do need to be able to charge justify charging a certain amount of money that allows you to that financially justifies you being able to hire somebody else to help with delivery. And that relies on social proof primarily. I guess the interesting thing here would be if someone could as a perhaps older person who doesn't want to be super technical, they'd rather be like they've got a decent grip of things. I tell people just watch a few tutorials, watch like kind of the free courses that I put out, get a good understanding of the tools and how different solutions fit together that we usually build. Um, and then if you ran this method with one developer under you, and yeah, you might have to go out of pocket a bit, but the good thing is that the people who are older, they that they're cash rich or more much more cash rich than the younger people, but they're time poor. So it's like could you perhaps find a freelancer in like the school community or something and then you do all the proposing and outreach and you're actually delivering it through a freelancer. I think that would be an interesting experiment to run. — Yeah, I think that that honestly has a lot of legs to work as well. I mean so yeah, these are really it's really time versus money are the two trade-offs here. So the the route that I'm proposing doesn't require very much investment at all, but it does require time. So, if you're someone that probably doesn't have that much money, I highly recommend this approach. Um, cuz you're also going to learn a lot of the groundwork skills. If you're someone that has some more money and you want to invest in other people doing it, you want to be more of a managerial person. In my personal opinion, like managerial people that have an understanding of the actual delivery tend to manage better anyway. But obviously, there's people that kind of want to take that business operational standpoint. You can 100% do that and hire devs to work underneath you. If you're a really good salesperson, you know how to possibly, you know, get that social proof to be able to charge at higher rate. 100%. — Yeah. Well, mate, that's uh another absolute banger uh from Mr. Goodyear. Um that's been freaking awesome, man. And I think anyone watching this, this is plugging into Upwork and where all the people are out there actively searching for leads, you are making your job a hell of a lot easier. Um, it's just can you go through the gnarliness of getting set up on Upwork? And as Adam said here, it's absolutely worth it once you once you've got through it. There's obviously no matter how you get into business, business is hard no matter what you do. Uh, it's just can you find a relatively easier pathway and AI as a vehicle is relatively far easier and has much more uh long-term potential. And again, this Upwork strategy would be relatively easier than say doing a full cold outbound blast to try to get your clients. So, really appreciate you coming on to share this, man. — No worries, mate. Appreciate the opportunity again, Liam. Seems like we're chatting pretty regularly. Um, but yeah, appreciate it and I good luck to every freelancer out there that's trying to get into this cuz my one advice is it's at the end of the day, it's really just about not giving up in this stage and keep pushing through. It took me a year and a half to get to $1,000 earned. It took it's taken me four years to get here and I've worked with people that are doing it in 60 days. So, I really did it the hard way so that you guys don't have to um follow these. I did it with no mentors. It took me forever. Follow these tips and you can do it a hell of a lot quicker. Um and come back afterwards and preach the system cuz it definitely works. — Yeah, love it, mate. Um this stuff's really ours for the taking, guys. And it's just a matter of are you willing to do the work now? There's no like question about if this stuff works or if there's a way in for nontechnical people. It's literally just are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to get punched in the face enough and keep going? So, uh I think that's it's a good place to end, mate. — Yeah. Sweet. Feel free to connect to me here um if you want to connect.