# How I Went From Charging $500 to $21K for AI Infrastructure

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM
- **Дата:** 06.07.2025
- **Длительность:** 19:12
- **Просмотры:** 18,412

## Описание

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Summary ⤵️
In this video, I break down how I went from charging $500 to $21K for AI automation by focusing on six key strategies. I share how I flooded my pipeline, solved richer problems, stopped trading hours for dollars, and ultimately built a high-ticket, productized offer.

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Why watch?
If this is your first view—hi, I’m Nick! TLDR: I spent six years building automated businesses with Make.com (most notably 1SecondCopy, a content company that hit 7 figures). Today a lot of people talk about automation, but I’ve noticed that very few have practical, real world success making money with it. So this channel is me chiming in and showing you what *real* systems that make *real* revenue look like.

Hopefully I can help you improve your business, and in doing so, the rest of your life 🙏

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Chapters
00:00 Introduction
00:28 1. Flood your pipeline
02:27 2. Land and expand
04:36 3. Stop trading hours for dollars
10:14 4. Solve richer problems
12:34 5. Don't sell features, sell futures
14:20 6. Productize or die
18:44 Outro

## Содержание

### [0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM) Introduction

If you're watching this video, you're probably not charging enough. And guess what? You already know that. If you didn't, you wouldn't have clicked on it. So, charging more is not a complicated thing, but it does require a mindset shift. Some people have this mindset shift automatically by virtue of their surroundings, their family, and their situation. Other people, like me, and probably you, need to learn it manually. In this video, I'm going to give you my best shot at explaining how to charge more specifically for AI and automation services, but you can apply this to any agency business. So number one, flood

### [0:28](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=28s) 1. Flood your pipeline

your pipeline. When I say flood your pipeline, I legitimately mean expand your top of funnel as much as humanly possible and cram as many leads into that pipeline as you can. The reason why is because the issue with not charging enough usually stems from having a scarce or limited set of options and clients that you could charge stuff to. So the straightest line path to charging more is just to give yourself more options. Hypothetically, if you had three potential client options today, okay, three leads that said yes to you. The first said yes for $1,000, the second said yes for $1,500, and the third said yes for $2,000. Which one would you pick? Obviously, the $2,000 one, right? Well, the shortest line path to making more money is by getting 10 times as many people in there. And just do both to natural statistics and then just the packages and products that you're selling. You'll have a variety of people at different price ranges. Now, instead of you being forced to pick between a,000, $1,500, and then $2,000 client, you might have 15 options. one at $10,000, the other at $8,000, the other at 1,500, the other at 500, the other at 750, the other at $1,895. What are you going to do? You're just going to rank them top to bottom and pick the one that's willing to pay you the most money for your time. So, another reason why a lot of people are afraid of flooding their pipeline is because they're really worried about not being able to fulfill the work or whatever. Well, there are two things I'll say to this. Number one, you can always just say no. You having a lead is significantly better than you not having a lead. At least you have access to that opportunity. But when push comes to shove, if you legitimately can't take on that work, you can always just say no to them for one. And then for two, somewhere in the process of building a extraordinarily high volume lead funnel, you will acquire skills that will naturally enable you to be better on sales calls, better during the interaction, and ultimately charge more money. Your ability to charge is really all just based off your perceived authority, the nonchalants of the prices that you deal with, and then your target audience. So flooding your pipeline represents a quick and easy way to just knock it out of the park on all of those

### [2:27](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=147s) 2. Land and expand

metrics. Number two, land and expand. When I say land and expand, what I mean here is to prioritize the acquisition of the client over all else. This is similar in nature to flooding your pipeline. We're at the very top of the funnel now. We're one step down when it comes to the actual sales side of things. If you just land as many clients as humanly possible at the beginning of your journey, if you just get really good at demand generation and so on and so forth, it'll enable you to deliver very quick wins and then upsell significantly bigger engagements which allow you to do things like lock in retainers. Now, the thing about the AI and automation agency business model specifically, not any agency, but ours, is that we have very high lifetime values. LTV is a fantastic three-letter acronym and one that I think about pretty much all the time when I'm selling these services because the very first client project that you might sell might only net you $500,000, $2,000. If you get in the habit of building in a recurring service and then offering that recurring service to every one of your clients, you'll find that while the initial average order value might be really low at $500,000, $1,500 over the lifetime of that client engagement, let's say 6 months at an average $3,000, you're adding on something like another 20k. So LTVs in the 20, 30, $50, $100,000 range here are not uncommon. And if you can get in the habit of just landing clients as quickly as humanly possible, acquiring as many of them as you can and then worrying about how to price higher later through upsells and that sort of thing, you'll do a lot better. I had a client once that I sold something like $500 to. It was sometime in the first three or four weeks of me starting the AI automation agency. That client over their lifetime paid me over 16 grand. Now, when I acquired them for 500 bucks, I was obviously thinking, man, what a cheap client. You know, I can't do anything right. Whatever. I need this client to pay the bills. But I segueed that person into a structured upsell formula that enabled me to eventually pitch them on a retainer over $4,000 a month. And then, you know, as I talked about, get a crazy high lifetime value. So, that is how you do it. You frontload acquisition. After you're done front-loading acquisition, you have significantly more opportunities. You're no longer thinking scarcely, and you can start doing things like running bi-weekly or quarterly follow-up campaigns to pass clientele to

### [4:36](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=276s) 3. Stop trading hours for dollars

reactivate. The point three is to stop trading hours for dollars. Now, when I say dollars, everybody here just like instinctively nods their head and says yes. But how many of you guys actually go out and stop trading your hours for dollars? So, I could talk about this topic all day, and I actually do in Maker School, where I show people how to get their first automation customer in 90 days or their money back, but I'm going to leave it pretty short here. The reality is if you position your experience in hours, you're almost always shortch changing yourself because the value that you provide as a service, you know, somebody in the service sector is not in the amount of time it takes to do the thing. It is in the amount of time and energy that you spent over the course of the last x years building up the skills that enable you to now do the thing. If you simply charge for current implementation time, not only are you shortch changing yourself, but you are also by default misaligning incentives. If you're a fantastic service provider, you're probably going to do things really quickly. Now, in my case, I can build naden, make. com, and other automated flows in like 15, 20 minutes that might take somebody else 10 hours. Why should I be compensated 140th of the amount that they are? Obviously, I'm going to charge more money based off that hourly rate than they would. But hopefully you guys see my point. The ratio is just so disproportionate, it doesn't make sense. So, when you get really good at something, make sure to align incentives as opposed to misaligncentives. If you're going to charge somebody something and that something is based on your time, that's almost impossible to do because the better you are at something, the faster you're going to be able to deliver that. I also find it pretty dishonest. One big issue that I see in the agency space is when people inflate their hours. They say something like, "This project h this is going to take me 15 hours. " And then they spend 20 hours on it and they build a client 30 hours for it. So, what's the alternative to trading hours for dollars? It is called valuebased pricing. Now, if you haven't heard of valuebased pricing before, in a nutshell, what you do is you do a little bit of math in your head. You start a conversation with the prospect. You ask them, "What problem are you struggling with? " As they tell you about the problems that they're struggling with, you quantify a dollar value that problem or those sets of problems are costing them. And then you calculate direct savings that you would be able to generate by solving that problem. And then also the opportunity cost of you solving that problem for them, aka them not having that problem. how much better would their business be? So, I'll give you a quick example. Let's say you build a simple automated invoice follow-up system for a client and you're like, "What the hell do I price? Nick told me not to price hourly, so clearly I need a different way. " In conversations with the client, you realize that right now they are spending hypothetically 10 hours a month of somebody that they are paying $50 an hour to do the invoice follow-ups for. So, the direct expense on that is 10 hours * $50 an hour equals $500. If you were not a very competent service provider, if you weren't thinking about revenue and you were only thinking about savings, you'd actually stop here and you'd say, "Well, my automation only saves them $500. Therefore, the value is $500. " But the value of your automation is significantly higher than that. And not only the value of your automation, the value of you as a business consultant is significantly higher than that. Why? Because you're not calculating the opportunity cost. Now, the opportunity cost is so much bigger by default, and this is really what you should be focusing on. So, we have the $500 in savings. Now, let's also hypothetically say that because they have a manual invoice process, on average, they miss one invoice that they otherwise would have collected, instead of collecting within 30 days, they collect within 45 days. Well, mathematically, if you collect invoices on a 45day cadence instead of a 30-day cadence, let's say for some recurring service, what you're doing is you are lengthening the invoice cycle, meaning that you are capable of fitting fewer invoice cycles in a year. Mathematically, if you have 12 invoice cycles at a 30-day period, then you have 20 invoice cycles at a 45day period, that means that company, assuming that, you know, we average it out at one missed invoice per month pushed back to a 45day period, is legitimately losing 30% of their entire revenue. Now, you could certainly debate the merits with me all day about whether having this system would truly lead to that or if this is just a hypothetical or theoretical calculation, and that's okay. The thing that's important is that the client agrees with you and that the client believes it and internalizes it. And often times what I find is when I throw an opportunity cost metric at the client, that actually ends up severely undervaluing the actual dollar value impact of my service because there's a lot that I'm not even considering. And there's also a lot of like missed psychological impact that them simply having a growing business would improve. So let's hypothetically say this business makes $100,000 per year. Well, if they're missing 30% approximately of their revenue, the total value of the system is no longer just $500 in savings. It's $500 in savings plus $30,000 a year. So 500 * 12 is 6,000. 6,000 plus 30,000 is 36,000. The total value of the system that you're delivering is 36 grand a year, which is actually pretty dang chunky. So now you're not pitching based off of hours. What you're doing is you're identifying the total value of your automation or your service to the client and you're pitching a portion of that. Generally speaking, the portion that you can pitch is somewhere between 30 to 50%. If it's direct savings based, 50% is usually my ceiling. If it's more revenue based, you know, simply because every business has different margins. I usually charge between 20 to 30% of that. In a nutshell, if you were delivering an automation or a service that solved a $36,000 a year problem for that client, I might go as much as charging seven to maybe $10,000 in value per year. So now you're no longer thinking like a builder. You're thinking like a consultant. partner. And this is one of the simplest and straightest line paths to pricing

### [10:14](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=614s) 4. Solve richer problems

more. Point four is to solve richer problems. If I give you two target audiences here, let's say the first are dog walkers in Milwaukee and the second are financiers in New York. Which one do you think is going to have more money available to pay me? Obviously, the financeers, right? So, this is the simplest possible explanation of why it makes sense to solve rich people problems. Now that you understand value based pricing, you know that the problems that the dog walker would be facing in terms of the opportunity cost and maybe their total expenses, you know the total scope of problems that you might be able to solve with an automation for them might equate to about $100,000 a year. But the finance here, you might be able to solve a $10 million a year problem. So just by default, you are doing something like a 100x the total possible revenue and pricing amount. One of the quickest and simplest ways to make more money is literally just like talking to the people that are loaded and trying to solve their problems as opposed to talking to the people that are maybe a little poorer and trying to solve theirs. There's also a question of volume here. I mean, if you had the option to make $10,000 a month servicing three clients or 15 clients, wouldn't you rather make $10,000 a month servicing three clients? This isn't a hard and fast rule, but you're probably going to spend a lot less time servicing those three clients than you'd service 15 clients, assuming that you have some sort of standardized service, which I'll touch on in a moment. But the point that I'm making is simply by virtue of the fact that you're working with wealthier people, you get to eliminate a lot of the fixed costs in the agency business model. Like, if you work with more people by default, basically every time that you sign on a new client, you're going to need to do some sort of kickoff call. client comms or client management. You're going to need to do some sort of back and forth, basically. And these fixed costs tend to be very similar whether you're working with a really rich client or really poor client. So it's like, well, if these are going to be the similar cost, I might as well make way more upside than a much smaller amount of upside. And you can talk all day about how, well, think about the downside risk. The more clients you have, the lower the probability of any one of those clients leaving negatively impacting your revenue and whatnot. And while I think this is true if we're talking like a big public company that's making, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars a year, I definitely don't think that this is true if we're just talking like an AI and automation business that's maybe somewhere in the $5,000 a month to $50,000 a month range. So for me, I always focus on solving richer people problems because I'm solving richer people problems. I can thus charge richer people prices. Point five is

### [12:34](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=754s) 5. Don't sell features, sell futures

don't sell features, sell futures. Instead of you trying to sell a technical implementation of your NADN workflow and how it improves efficiency by 33% in some metric that only you care about being a nerd like I am, focus more on the outcomes that is delivering. Talk return on investment. You know, if you're going to use a three-letter acronym, let it be ROI and not API. You know, clients don't care about things like relative metrics for the most part, and they definitely don't care about things like this cloud service provider is 7% more efficient than that cloud service provider. What clients care about is can you put money in their pocket? And actually, if you could like abstract away the entire service of yours, like everything that you do, and just give it to them as a black box and say, "Hey, if you put $5 into this black box, you'll get $50 back. " clients would prefer that versus $5 and then we're going to do this triple authentication thing, pass it through a four layer LLM with uh egente logic. They'd much prefer the former because they just don't have to worry about it. They don't have anything to think about. Client lives are busy enough as is if you're working in the B2B space. You don't want to add on more work for them. If anything, they're paying you to remove work for them, right? So, ideally, in like a hyperefficient futuristic economy, everything is just a black box. Everything is an interface. A client pays $5 and they receive $50 in return. They get a 10x ROI. Budget allocation becomes extraordinarily simple. Then you also remove a lot of the friction like clients understanding what this stuff is, wondering at, you know, how to do it best, getting confused because every time they type a query into chat GBT, it spits out something completely and utterly wrong at them and so on and so forth. Treat your service as a black box and then sell futures, not features.

### [14:20](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=860s) 6. Productize or die

Point six is productize or die. Now, if you can't standardize a business, you can't scale it. This is unfortunate and something that I had to learn the hard way many, many times. But if you can't standardize, if you can't make the service delivery as close to the same as humanly possible every time you deliver it, you'll have to hit a cap necessarily. And that cap depends on just, you know, how productive you are as a person. But even the most productive people tend to hit a cap reasonably low. So, I think that at least for this business model as the time of this recording, that cap is somewhere between maybe $30 to $50,000 on average. If you're like extraordinarily talented, I think you as a solo business person could make a little bit more than that. I think if maybe you don't have as many of the productivity foundations, you're probably going to cap out somewhere between $5 to $10,000 a month. Obviously, you can add team members and scale the business that way, but it's much more efficient and much more effective to standardize the business model and then productize. basically build a systematic business then try and band-aid over it by just throwing manpower at it. I think we've all seen or dealt with businesses that like are foundationally wrong that just have like some issue in their business model that makes it extraordinarily difficult and extraordinarily terrible for customers to interact with and then they just think hm well every time I hire another person that allows us to expand by xyz percentage. So what they do logically is they just throw a bunch of people at the problem. Well, had they just before all of this taken a step back and asked, "How can we systematize this? How can we standardize it? How can we scale it the best? How can we build like a modular sort of business that can expand with as minimal a headcount as humanly possible? " They never would have found themselves in those shoes to begin with. And that's what I recommend for you. So, instead of like worrying about I got to hire people, I got to scale this business model immediately, like actually build the foundations of the business model. Build scalability into the business model as opposed to just trying to band-aid stuff over it. Now, what do I mean by productization? I mean really simply from a highlevel overview take whatever service that you are providing look back at the last 10 clients that you provided the service for and just write down what you did for all 10 of those clients. Get the similarities between them and just say that okay the similarity steps the steps that I did that were the same for client 1 2 3 4 10 whatever these are going to be the steps that I do for all clients moving forward. Trim out all the fluff. variable things. And then once you have this giant list of steps, almost like a big checklist of how you deliver your service, you are now 80% of the way to productizing it. From there, it's as simple as taking that list of checklist steps, asking yourself, is this checklist step necessary? And also, is there a way that I could do this checklist step or maybe 80% of this checklist step that doesn't require human input? It doesn't actually require me to spend my time. Odds are you'll probably find that like a third of those checklist steps are immediately taken off your plate. And at that point, you're going to have an 8020 list of optimized checklist points that you can continue delivering the service yourself under. Or you could build completely automated systems like an AI and automation business to take more of that off your plate. Simple and easy and quick example is let's hypothetically say previously you had three steps. You sent an email over to the client to book a calendar meeting and then they booked the you guys jumped on a kickoff call to start your service. after the kickoff call, you sent them a form asking them to fill out whatever information. So that is something like four or five steps. Well, if you take a systems mindset to that, you'll realize that you could actually squeeze all of that thing into one or two steps. Instead of, for instance, sending them over an email, asking them to book on the calendar, what you could do is you could make booking on your calendar a necessary part of, let's say, paying your service or signing your proposal. That way, the second that they will have paid your service or signed your proposal, you don't need additional back and forth. You can actually just have them book on your calendar immediately. you will both know what time that kickoff call is occurring. Additionally, instead of you sending a form after the call, you could actually just collaboratively fill out the form on the call with the client. Maybe it'll lengthen the call by 5 or 10 minutes, but now you've taken four or five steps and you've squished them down to one or two. This is the sort of thinking that, as you could see, is pretty surface level. I think anybody that has a reasonable understanding of how the AI agency business model works and come up with steps like these with, you know, maybe 30 minutes of just scratching your head and staring at a big list of checklist items. But these are the sorts of ways that you turn, you know, this haphazard business where every service delivery is completely different into this reliable, scalable, and repeatable machine that prints money, not while you sleep, but at certainly at higher leverage points than most other people.

### [18:44](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ite9u07MhsM&t=1124s) Outro

So, on the topic of pricing, I have a super detailed video guide which breaks down all of the different ways that you could value and price AI automation services. Definitely give that a listen if you guys like this sort of thing. Otherwise, let me know what mindset shifts make the biggest difference in your AI and automation business, as well as how you plan on implementing these moving forward. Just want to let everybody here know that I really appreciate all your time. the positive comments, and I really, really appreciate the subscriptions. I'll see you on the next

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