Why AI Automation Beginners Should Start on THIS Platform

Hey everybody, I've been seeing some interesting questions lately over on my daily updates channel, so I thought I'd bring a few over here. These are very common cues that I don't feel are adequately served by other sources. I think most people never really get a direct clear answer to a lot of these cuz the knowledge is often buried across threads or scattered in DMs, that sort of thing. Today, I want to change that. So, I've compiled the best and most impactful high ROI questions that I get asked regularly. And my goal is to give you unfiltered answers. This is going to be the same advice I'd give if we were having a private conversation. Let's

dive in. So, first question, Loki Productions 803840 says, "Do you need to start out on Upwork? " The answer to that is no. You don't need to start out anywhere. And it looks like Lean actually took those words out of my mouth. Upwork is just by far the easiest place to start for a number of reasons. The first I would say, you know, just off the top of my head, like if we go why Upwork is because as a beginner, sales is hard. And sales is composed of three parts. There is understanding the problem of the client. There's understanding the way to pitch a solution. There's also understanding how to stand out and be basically like the pick relative to all of the other solutions that they could pick. Okay, so like think about it. Customer has to understand the problem. You have to explain it to them. Customer also has to understand the solution. You have to pitch yours and then finally they have to pick you as the best service provider capable of fulfilling that solution. So the way that Upwork works is it basically just like covers the first and the second for you and then you just pay a little bit of money for connects and then fulfillment when you deliver the project a percentage in fees which is now up to I think 15% or so. used to be 20, they dropped it down to 10. Now I think it's like between 10 and 15. And then that leaves only this for you to actually like have to do. So all you really have to do is you have to make yourself the best pick relative to a bunch of other freelancers. And this is, you know, onethird of the work on the sales side of things, which as a beginner, if you can get the hardest part of the thing, which is sales, and can cut down two/irds of that work for you right off the bat, then obviously things are a lot easier. The second is um it minimizes what's called capital outlay. Okay, this is a more nuance point that I don't think a lot of people understand, but basically, you know, if this is a graph of let's say money spent over time and uh I don't know, we're just trying to track like the amount of money that you're going to need to spend in this business model or something like that to receive some sort of result. The way that most lead generation works is you kind of nothing here and then all of a sudden you spend a bunch of money on a bunch of platforms, okay? And then you don't spend any money until the next month and you spend a bunch more money on platforms the next month. Okay? So, what this is this is a huge capital outlay. What I mean by this is you have to spend money on things like cold email which is like you know maybe a hundred bucks immediately and you got to spend money I mean you know if you're doing like ads or something that's way more money if you're doing any sort of other like lead generation thing you get like uh expandi for LinkedIn or some sort of like drippy or something like that for x or auto adm for Instagram or some sort of outbound infrastructure. Think about it like as a beginner, you know, you might have to spend like $200. And the thing is, you're not going to see any sort of result on that $200 in a while. If we make green here, money gained, you know, you might spend all this money, then you'll get like nothing basically until this, right? And so what is this period? Okay, basically to make a long story short, the period between where you spend all the money and then when you finally like reach parody here, this is your outlay. Sorry, this is the outlay, I would say. Well, I guess it depends on like this is like sunk time with no feedback. You haven't received any positive feedback from the market. You haven't gotten any money. And so as a beginner, like this is the danger of that sunk, you know, money where you've put a bunch of money into something you haven't seen a result yet. Okay? So the longer that goes on, the less likely you are to stick with the business model. And if you think about it from my perspective, my whole goal is to just make you succeed with the business model because if you succeed at the business model, then I make way more money too, right? So we're all incentivized here. So that's how most uh marketing platforms work. Upwork is a lot easier. Okay? So this is like money, you know, spent or whatever over time. The way the network works is you just do some connects every day. So first day, let's say day one, you might spend, I don't know, $15 or something. Then day two, okay, you spend another 15 bucks. Day three, four, you spend another 15 bucks. And so on and so on and so forth. It's pretty linear. And then uh because it's so easy to get that sale, if you think about it like as in, you know, when you get a ROI from Upwork, like how long does it actually take? you can actually start see the results like very very quickly and the ROI tends to grow and then you know obviously it eventually outpaces the money that you spend but the point I'm making is like the gap between when you spend money and then when you start making money might be as short as like a couple of days realistically whereas this might be like a few weeks so you don't need to start out it's just a really good place to start if I'm being honest okay if you

ask these questions one of your videos I'd be super thankful no problem let's say the client says yes what's the next step I'm guessing we first need to sign an agreement how do you usually create it what should it include yeah great question Albert you have a lot of questions here screw it let's do it how do you usually create Uh I don't actually normally do like an agreement agreement. What I recommend is bundling everything together. Okay? So do a proposal then at the end of your proposal have like a one pager agreement then at the end of that have like a payment field. So the best way to do all of this stuff is in one shot cuz otherwise you send over a proposal then they have to sign it then you have to send over an agreement payment and then they have to pay it. That's like six things. And you know what like clients will drop off like 5 to 10% will drop off at every step. So by the end of it like you've lost 50% of people due to like logistical BS. So combine this into one. Just do like a blended and um I use Panda do for all this. It has that stuff built in. You're doing Gmail automation give you login and password to their main account. Gmail automation. Yeah. Like if you want to send outbound as them. You do need their account. You can do this in a number of ways. You can get their email and password on a kickoff call. Then you can log in on the kickoff call. While you're on their account during the kickoff call, you can then connect to make or nada or whatever. you will have to reoff I think like once every few months and if they change your password you'll have to reoff if they don't want to share it should we ask them for API access instead I mean like yeah but keep in mind that this is just being intellectually dishonest with clients if you have full API unscoped like API access to their account you have like their credentials right it's the same thing like you don't have their actual username or password cuz that's um hashed or whatever but like you can do anything that username and password would let you how do you actually test and set up things properly yeah you just use the API for it but I don't really recommend that you normally want to see how they usually reply well if you have API access my friend you can just query hey show me all emails that I've sent, right? You own their ass with API access just as much as you own their ass with login and password. So, like I wouldn't be intellectually dishonest and I wouldn't be like, "Oh, well, you don't actually share your credentials with me. I just get the API access. " It's like same Okay. Tokens and API usage. Who pays for the tokens? Uh, like AI tokens. Honestly, nowadays, I'm paying for most of the tokens just because it's so cheap. It makes zero difference to me and it just minimizes the friction. But if you want to be like complete, then you'd also get them to sign up like an open AI account. Keep in mind there's some nuance here because there's like rate limits and stuff too and like some clients don't have high rate limits but they want a high rate limit application to be built quickly. So, you know, I usually use my own open API key. If you're using your own API key, how do you keep track of it? It's not relevant in practice. I find the token usage now is like 10 20 bucks a month or something. I'm fine swallowing that up. How do you usually charge on one time setup fixed monthly? I do almost exclusively fixed monthlies now. That's just because I have a small recurring client base and I've chosen not to increase the size of the space cuz it would get away from the coaching and consulting offers that I'm doing. Um, when I was scaling my agency to 72K a month, I did almost exclusively onetime setup fees for an intro offer. Then after I did the intro offer, intro offer is like something quick and easy that you know you can get sorted and done for a client. I would try and upsell them all on a recurring service, aka recurring retainer. My retainer would be a fractional COO style retainer. You can get details on that on my website if you just want to jump over to leftclick. ai. I run you through what the fractional retainer looks like and the value and stuff. And then I also have one of my clients on revenue share still and I did revenue share as well for the fractional co offer. Revenue share is good. I don't know if I'd recommend doing it initially. Like you're probably better off just going for flat rate so that you validate this business model and you don't feel like you have to give them an arm and a leg to make any money. I would say like flat for a beginner is a win. Revenue share still a win, but it's a lot less of a win cuz like you're not actually capable of driving revenue a lot of the times. Before I even start this business, do I need to register a company to be able to invoice issues? Uh this is Yeah, you know, this is really going to depend. You're saying VAT, so you're probably European, I take it, Albert. Yeah, I'm not really sure. Like in Canada, for instance, I can just get up and running as a quote unquote sole proprietor and then I can just send an invoice as my name, Nick Sarrive. Uh I think it's even easier in America because they're very businessfriendly environment, but in your case, you may actually have to do some sort of company registration and I'm not like a tax lawyer accountant. So winners don't win

says, "Hick, please explain how you get recurring revenue beside affiliate links. I watch a big check of your videos only build the automation client and that's it. How's the same client keep paying you without working for them again and again? No way you can actually build 170k worth in the month. " Uh yeah, I don't Yeah, I don't make $170,000 on my automation AI agency stuff. That's crazy. Man, I feel like you've commented on my videos before cuz you're the guy. You're See Sisphus rolling the boulder up the hill. And every single time that I see your thing, I'm always like, "hm, this is a perfect analogy for Sisphus rolling the boulder up the hill. " So, the same client keeps paying you with you working for them again and again. It's not that you don't work for them again and again. You continue to work with them. Okay? over the course of the lifetime that you are working with a client, you build so many systems for them that the bulk of the value that you generate for them by, I don't know, the end of month six or something isn't actually in the time that you spend. It's in the systems that are producing value mostly autonomously. I'll give you an example like a cold email system for instance. This might take you a couple weeks to like get up and running, then dial in the offers and have something that actually starts producing them revenue, right? But after that couple weeks of you doing that initial work, like to be honest, it's mostly on autopilot. Obviously, somebody needs to come in and manage the responses. So obviously somebody needs to like you know iterate and stuff like that every once in a while but the marginal time is actually very low. Here's basically what it looks like if I could graph this for you. So if this is like results over here this is like effort. Yeah you got to do a lot of effort initially for very few results but honestly after a while you start just providing like I mean it's not entirely but like the slope of the line changes and so you don't actually need to provide as much effort in order for the client to continue accumulating results. Like when you have systems that do everything for them like generate leads, nurture leads autonomously, close leads to clients using some proposal generator or whatever, you know, um help with fulfillment. If you think about it, every month you're actually offering like a lot of value. You might be offering like 50k a month in value after you've done all this. So what are your actual monthly demands? Like they end up just being a lot lower if I'm being honest. So the whole idea isn't that you're scamming a client because you're not like working actively with them all the time. I work a lot less with my clients today than I used to, but I still work for them. But the place where I'm providing value tends to shift and it becomes more like strategic and automation consulting based than it is actually me building the automations. So to make a long story short, retainers. Yeah, retainers and subscriptions. You can't just do one-offs. One-offs are not where you drive the majority of the revenue here. Can you build 170k worth in a month? Yeah, I don't know if you can to be honest. Uh I never scaled my automation agency at $170,000 in a month. One of the reasons why I jumped off to information products and now the bulk of my revenue is information products is just because I started running into like an upper bound. Like friction the bigger that I got. And I'm not saying this to disincentivize people from doing this, but I just wrote about this on my blog. Actually, resistance. After scale to 72K, I earnestly tried to push further myself, but I found a significant amount of resistance. Monthly churn, that's an issue. The nature of microservices, that's another issue. Sometimes automations go down. The occasional fires and the fact that I only had around 60 hours in a week and my clients wanted most of them were to thank. So, I tried to work harder, faster, more efficiently, but there was clearly an upper limit to what I could do. Now, you can grow by hiring at this point, but I didn't really want to hire. So I just asked myself you know how do I make more money with less time invested going up a level of abstraction and then in my case doing info products. So I think agencies are probably to make a long story short like the best business model for beginners to get up and running with because if a beginner is starting an agency they benefit by the super low capital cost and then also just like the relatively easy like lead generation mechanisms I'd say and then there's no logistics there's no inventory there's no like delivery there's no yeah there's just like you don't actually have to deal with most of the things that people used to have to worry about with businesses but you grow faster but then you kind of cap out you know the way that I set up my own business probably not super optimal and I probably could skill to more than like $72,000 per month knowing what I know now. But per unit time of my work, you know, we were just talking about me doing 2,000 bucks in an hour with some consulting thing and even that not being enough, right? So that's my take on it. Okay. Is the A

automation agency saturated? Will be scalable 2026, 2027, 2028? Is a good business model in upcoming years like 2026 27? What are your thoughts on if anyone wants to join in those years? It's tough for me to say. Markets change pretty quickly. You know, I've definitely noticed that there's been a change in the market from 2022ish when I got started with a automation. So like will it be scalable in 2026, 2027, 2028? It depends on your definition of scalable I would say and good business model like listen the website design and development niche technically started 25 years ago at the turn of the 21st century right so back in like the 1990s late 1990s and the early 2000s people are still building businesses that make them 2030 $100,000 a month with website design but will I say is this the most effective use of your time I don't know I don't think so website design probably not social media marketing agencies probably not so will it be scalable depends on how far you want to scale it to is the going to be the best business model for beginners out there? No, probably not. Probably not like 2027. I think this year and next year probably, but um probably after 2027, no, just cuz it's going to like take more work in order to achieve the results that you're seeing today and there might be a better business model up them. So, I understand me telling you this is against my best interest to be clear. I think everybody on planet Earth would like that runs a business like mine would look you in the eyes and say this is going to be the best business model forever, but uh it's not right. Like markets change, tactics change, providing services is not going to be effective in an age where AI can do everything for you for sure. So yeah, just being blunt with you guys. There are going to be better business models. Why the hell does that matter? You're going to take everything that you need in order to get a successful business in Maker School now. And then you are going to know everything you need in order to iterate on your business model moving forward. Beginners, they want this like out of the box. This business model will work forever and it's like no forever. So don't focus on the business model. Focus on learning business. Focus on learning the concepts behind what makes this business model work. Because if you focus on learning the concepts behind the business model, then you can go into any business model you want. Hell, you could become a freaking waste management company. You could be good junk removal, garbage collection. You could make any one of these businesses work if you understand the foundational concepts that I talk about in Maker School. And that's why I called it Maker School because it's not like I called it AI automation school. I'm not wedded to the AI and automation business model. What I'm wedded to is how do I get beginners up and running from 0 to one as quickly and effectively as possible. Right now that happens to be this AI automation, but who knows if it will be in the future. Yeah, if anyone wants to join in those years, by all means. And I don't know, I might be totally full of Maybe it's going to be a great business model for the next 15 years. I have no idea. I don't personally think so because markets change quickly, but that's my thought.

We have Oliver Ford. He says, "Hey Nick, just a quick question. What do you think about productizing automation for resale as a form of an automation agency? An example would be creating a cold email plus LinkedIn outreach system and then selling the outcome as an offer. The entire business is in essence reselling this template. Yeah, that's a good idea. Rinse and repeat. The process of different scenarios built as opposed to subscription model as left clickers. Yeah, don't get me wrong, you can do this. There are no rules in business to be honest. Uh no hard rules anyway. And basically any rule that you could think of you can bend and shift and push around a little bit. So, you know, I want you to know that you can. It's just there are some pros and some cons to this method. Okay. So let's say we productize an automation for resell as a template and then you sell the outcome as an offer. It is no longer really an automation agency. Okay. What you are is you are an outreach agency. You have built systems. Sorry, you built one system and you do that system really well and then you're selling the outcome. You're not selling automation anymore. What you're doing is you're selling cold email. You're selling LinkedIn outreach. So we got a member of the community. His name is Sod who joined Make Money with Make and was a YouTube viewer probably from day one. And he did this and he scaled to $80,000 a month. I don't know how many months he had 80K, but he had at least one month $80,000 in revenue. The vast majority of that profit doing basically exactly this minus some of the LinkedIn outreach stuff. So once you know it's totally doable, it's just you're changing like in essence the business that you are doing. It's no longer really an automation agency. In addition, you're also doing a couple other things. Okay, so to be clear here, you are rinsing and repeat the process with different scenarios build subscription model. So, are you saying that this is not a subscription model? Okay, so to be clear, if you have, let's say, onetime revenue versus a subscription model. Okay, this is what it looks like. Let's pretend that onetime revenue here is in red and then subscription is going to be in green. Onetime revenue usually looks like this. Okay, this might be January. This might be February. This might be March. This might be April. If we contrast that with subscription or recurring revenue, this is typically what it looks like. to start at the same spot, but you'll see that instead of these big spikes that go up and down, what we have is we have a gradual increase in monthly recurring revenue that takes longer to rise, but typically is substantially more predictable and then we'll eventually outscale something like this. Like if the trend line and growth is like this on the one-time side, the trend line and growth in the um recurring model is kind of like this. Okay. So, why do I bring this up? I bring this up because there are pros and cons to one-time revenue versus contracted recurring revenue. If you sell a subscription like I do, you'll make a little bit less money up front typically, but that money will accumulate over time. Month two, you're not going to go back down to zero and have to resell everything. What you're going to have is a stable base minus some churn that occurred in the previous month essentially. So, pros and cons to both methods. What I recommend usually is, you know, if you want to follow my business model and sort of the way that I did it, I started off with one-time revenue and I did that so that I could spike my revenue really big. And I did that for the first month or two. And then after I had this massive revenue stockpile, I then took all that money and just shoved it into growth for some sort of recurring service instead. And so, because of that, I was able basically to have the best of both worlds. This is what I recommend for any service business model. you get that big initial spike, right? And then you're capable of taking that spike. And of course, you'll have some down, but because you've just, you know, gotten all of this money, you can invest a big chunk of this into growth and email systems and whatever, and then you can kind of start recouping. So, you know, as opposed to the previous model, which kind of looked like this, you know, you now get the benefit of that big spike. You get a ton of work at the beginning, you get maybe some referral opportunities, stuff like that. And that's sort of the difference between one time and subscription. So, I know I went a little bit further than the specific question, but I hope that makes sense. All right. Abdiaz says

"What services could be offered for e-commerce businesses as someone who wants to start an AI automation agency or coaches? " I guess this is as well. I'm confused which niche to go for and what services to offer. Yeah, good question. I think if you're running an e-commerce business, most of the lowhanging fruit would already be taken care of by platforms that do things like template out like product descriptions at this point or send recurring product emails or you have an item waiting in checkout, right? Like most of the major e-commerce platforms offer that sort of service. So, I think most of the low hanging fruit's kind of taken care of if I'm honest. And it's one of the reasons why like I haven't really been able to niche down in e-commerce, although I've definitely worked with a bunch of people that do. Typically for e-commerce, it depends on whether it's B2B or TOC. If it's B TOC and like it's predominantly B TOC then what I do is I try and convert the B TOC into B2B my problem anyway instead of selling the product and improving the client's ability to sell the product to consumers or maybe like B toC direct to consumer right same idea really now I think in I mean like this is like you know you go you sell something and ship it to their front door B to CC you might have some sort of retailer or something I don't know but I basically try and convert these into B2B problems where instead of me trying to help them sell more things to customers. What I do is I assist them in reaching out to things like retailers or distributors or influencers, partnerships, that sort of stuff. So, automations for stuff like that in practice usually means some sort of email campaign. I set up an affiliate funnel. My affiliate funnel is reaching out to influencers and stuff like that to like give free things to them to encourage them to sell. Man, you guys would not believe how shitty most influencer marketing services are. They're terrible. Influencer marketing services out like PR services stuff. As somebody that is now considered an influencer, they blow. Like you could uh spend 30 minutes on any one of these campaigns and you with a single one of my YouTube videos can 10x the results you're seeing from them. 90% of them are like, "Hello, dear. We're pleased to introduce you to new product here. We would love to offer you a generous affiliate percentage. Just click this link to sign up. Like these just suck, man. There's no personalization. There's no nothing. It's so easy to make these things better. So, what you do is you find people that have some sort of social media channel. You scrape the first video, the first real, the first LinkedIn post they made or whatever, like the most recent one. You paraphrase and summarize the post. Okay? So, it's one line. You just include that in the beginning of your outreach. You say, "Hey, Sally Nick here. I was just reading your post about insert paraphrased version here and I found insert other thing that I had AI summarized here. Pretty interesting. I'm thinking you might be a fit for the brand that I work with, which is called X, Y, and Z. To make your life as easy as possible. Here are the cliffotes. Does this sound interesting to you? Would you be interested at all? If so, we have an introductory promo offer. I'll pay you this much money today. No strings attached. just really want to make sure you guys have this in your pocket or I'll send you over a swag kit. You literally just respond with your address and you're good to go. If you just take that approach to any one of these influencer affiliate offers, you start printing. And so that's what I do with, you know, a lot of these retail businesses that just don't understand how to do that stuff. And this works really, really well. So yeah, I try and change a DTOC or B TOC problem into a B2B problem essentially. Aside from that, you can obviously help them in other ways. You know, you can do stuff like add AI to newsletter or marketing sequences for sure. So, you could take my approach of creating icebreaker variables, feed in some sort of survey or questionnaire as people sign up to the newsletter or maybe feed in their product history and then just do some sort of direct outreach to them like, "Hey, Sally, you know, Nick here, I founded cool hats. com and I know that you've bought a couple of our things at this point. by the way, hope you're enjoying this product or paraphrase version of the specific order that they made. Would love to hear more about like your thoughts on X, Y, and Z, where the company should go and so on and so forth. So, you can do that and really well. That'll be my recommendation. Then coaches and stuff, like don't get me wrong, your problem is not what services to offer e-commerce companies. Your problem is also not what niche should I choose. The problem is more so you feel like you need 100% confidence to be able to go after all these niches. If you really wanted to do this, you would just start now. you would pick three niches that you have like 70% confidence over and you'd start like doing LinkedIn cold outreach or sending them videos or you know signing up to Upwork and applying to jobs. So that's the problem you should really be solving here, not what niche to go after and what services to offer. Tyrone says, "Hey Nick, I've been

following your content for months and find it really amazing how much value you provide. " Thank you, Unreal. My question to you is in your experience, what are the limitations of using middleware automations in highly regulated industries like healthcare or finance? Oh man, that is getting cold. Are the regulations too tight to provide the kind of flexibility and value offered to small to mediumsiz businesses? I don't know what you mean by middleware automations like I understand obviously the thing you're going for, but like is that a term? If so, I don't hear it in my day-to-day. I take it what you mean by middleware automations here is you're referring to these sort of like serverless cloud backend things that we're calling with a bunch of dependencies, microservices like you know make is going to call ClickUp and then it's going to call OpenAI and then it might call DeepSeek some other thing, right? And because we're passing around information that people would probably consider sensitive, like healthcare info or finance info, are the regulations too tight to do this? So, no, they're not this, but they're definitely tighter than other situations. And because of that, I just don't really like dealing with it at all. Like in practice what you have to do if you want to do um these sorts of automations in healthcare and you're you know you're in the United States all of us is country dependent by the way and you're in the United States you can't just use make because make is not HIPPA compliant and so if you were to use make your tool that you do everything else for this you know you'd have some sort of final filter the great filter at the end of your sales process where they'd be like oh yeah okay cool so just to cover everything this is hipaco compliant this is that you have to be like oh it's not hypocompliant you know that block the Same thing with like uh with some financial regulations. It just makes your life way harder and you have to use alternative platforms and you also have to do things like anonymize customer data. So like in my case like I have a choice. Well I we all have a choice. You can choose to work with the niches that you want. That's kind of the amazing thing about being a business owner. There are no rules and so you get to determine whether or not the juice is worth the squeeze. In my case the juice is almost never worth the squeeze. So I just try and stay away from highly regulated industries and I stick in industries that are less regulated. And typically in practice this means working with smaller businesses. although I've of course worked with eight nine figure companies as well. So yeah, they aren't too tight to provide the kind of flexibility and value that I offer but you know it's a gradient and to me it's just like okay like what are the pros of working with these enterprise healthcare companies? Well I get bigger ticket sizes I typically get longer contracts there slower moving businesses so I can provide more like seemingly more value even with like a base level of knowledge in it. But what are the cons? It's like well now I have to like you know learn a whole new tech stack. I have to work with applications that I'm not very familiar with. I have to go through a bunch of and like anonymize customer data and stuff like that as opposed to, you know, if I want to build like a simple newsletter automation. I don't know. I might be like stringent to some regulatory checks. I might have some legal risk or downside. So, in my case, the cost or benefit is like, huh, I could get all of the same benefits if I just worked with other sorts of businesses. So, I'm just going to do that and then I don't have to worry about any of the cons, right? I could see some situations in which you're like really dead set on wanting to, I don't know, you have like tons of experience in an industry or you have like a massive network and you're like, "Okay, I want to work in that industry. " But I'd also just be a little bit more flexible. You know, if you're going to do that, just do another two industries as well simultaneously. The additional marginal unit of your time required to duplicate your approach across two other industries while you're doing your current one is very low. And you can realistically spend 6 hours in the main one every day, 1 hour on the second, and 1 hour in the third, and actually still be basically equivalent. Cuz most of the time and energy it takes to build like an outreach or lead genen system in one industry, it's just duplicatable, right? Like it's the same copy usually. It's like the same platform, same approach for the most part. So, you know, my recommendation would be do that. And then, yeah, I just I personally just stay away from those. But, you know, again, no real rules. I know a lot of people that are printing money in healthcare, don't get me wrong. They just, you know, use stuff like Caragon, which is a HIPPA compliant make alternative that costs like, you know, 500 bucks a month or something, right? Or they will self-host stuff and then they'll have to deal with like a bunch of related to that. Look, they say that they're very flexible. Okay, I'll leave it there. Albert says

"Hello, Nick. What was the biggest lesson you learned in your hardest AI project on your AI journey? I think the biggest lesson I learned was that it doesn't actually matter what you are selling. AI automation, these are all just fulfillment mechanisms. Doesn't actually really matter what it is that I'm selling. If you want to be a good business owner, you just learn everything around the fulfillment or the product. That may sound a little bit weird, but let me give you an example. Me selling AI and automation services is really no different than me selling plumbing services. Okay, I have a list of features and benefits. I have systems and infrastructure that I built for my business to handle leads and new orders. I have some rules of thumb that I use when selling the client. I have a sales script or sales skeleton. I have, you know, onboarding emails and so on and so forth. All of this stuff doesn't actually change industry to industry. The only thing that changes is the actual service that you provide. So, a lot of people, they learn about a new niche like AI and automation and then they're like, "Oh, this is going to revolutionize the world. This is what I need to do and then they start getting really into the weeds of the service that they're providing. " Now, listen, I love AI and automation. I'm probably one of the most passionate people on planet earth about this thing, but I'm also pragmatic in so far that I know that at the end of the day, this is just another business. This is just the tail end basically of a long line of things that I could sell. So for instance, this is the business. Okay. It's this big ginormous object and the actual service that you provide is just a small little corner or chunk of it. The weirdest pizza ever. Definitely Hawaiian. Okay. So, what this means is, right, you could swap out anything. These are your systems. These are your sales. This is your admin. This is your hiring. Right? There's so many of these things. This is your ads. This is your copy. This is your creative. This is your marketing, right? This is your taxes. Whatever. The only thing that we're swapping out here when we do you know service businesses is this little thing which is like the actual service that we deliver which in our case now is AI and automation. But if you get good at just building a business then you can do anything that you want. So that's probably the biggest and the hardest lesson I had to learn that these shiny objects don't actually matter. There are a ton of core foundational principles that you can learn in business that typically the only way you learn is just getting into it. And if you figure that out, you could sell anything. Same thing as when I was selling videography. I use a lot of the same ideas. Same thing as when I was selling $250, $300 a month Google My Business marketing services, you know. Same thing when I was selling my first few courses on Skillshare and Udemy. Same thing when I was selling events to drunk college kids. So, it's just the same thing basically. It's not really an AI journey. It's more of just like a general business journey. And there you have it. Hopefully these answers cleared up some of the confusion around building a successful automation

business. If this format was helpful and you guys want more of these direct answers, my daily updates channel is where all of this magic happens. I personally read and respond to every comment. It's become, in my opinion, this pretty big resource where people get detailed personalized advice. So for those ready to take that next step and surround themselves with people that are serious about building automation businesses, check out my daily updates. And then after that, check out Maker School. Our 90-day program has helped over 4,000 people turn the skills that I'm talking about into real income with most getting their first client within a month or two. Otherwise, make sure you subscribe here, check out the daily updates for more ongoing Q& A, and I'll see you all in the next one. Bye.