How She Built a $13k/m Agency Using Just ONE AI Automation

The more comfortable you are with failure, the more risks you're going to end up taking and the better your reward's going to get. I can't tell you the number of times people have been like, I just closed this amazing deal. And we're all so stoked for them. We're like, this is awesome. And it's like, all right, so how much money was it? We're still figuring that out. You didn't close them. You got a text message from them. That's what you did. Focusing on the solution first is the wrong approach. focusing on the problem and then interacting with the market as fast as you can to then define better solutions that are very specific to what people are willing to pay for and would generate them more revenue. That's the way to go. AI is seeing less and less as this silver bullet for all of the problems. Like people are realizing no like when you have one AI agent that tries to solve this big thing, things start to fall apart. I was just having a conversation with somebody else about the long-term evolution of AI and automation businesses. I came to the concept that AI automation businesses don't remain AI automation businesses for long. What ends up happening is here's how one of my community members who joined Maker School just 2 months ago is now making $13,000 a month with AI and automation. So my first experience was actually joining a big tech startup. I joined the company is called Flexport and they were creating software the first to really create software for supply chain and the mission that they were on was so ginormous. I was so excited to join. And I was a marketing operations intern at the time and I realized that one of the things that are important for me is the autonomy and a flexibility of going after big challenges and when you join like a company that is a little bit more established the amount of influence you have isn't as substantial. So I guess this was a little bit of an ego issue you know where it's like oh this is my first big internship but I want to change this company and I want to help them you know become bigger and greater. But I've learned a lot from being there and working with people making Flexport big. Flexport's former CMO helped me set up like promote a nonprofit that I was running for Ukraine in 2022. So great connections. From there, I moved to South Korea, which is one of the reasons I couldn't really stay working with Flexport because they had a lot of like regulations around who and where you can work with them from. in Korea got to work with like venture capital firm which was its own world very different to like the way that traditional VCs run in Silicon Valley but that time made me fall in love with startups even more so got to like interact with some Korean startups got back from Korea moved to India then in India I worked with like female entrepreneurs so it wasn't really like startups or SAS but those women in like rural slab communities of India were building real businesses that were changing like the lives of their families, their communities, employing people. So having a chance to kind of support them was pretty huge, too. And then finally moved back to San Francisco for a bit and worked on building my first ever startup, a bunch of my friends and I building plant care AI. The very first startup idea that I had in 2018, it was AI for regulatory compliance. very random just because the companies were IPOs. Very opportunistic idea. Then AI for plant care. I have no idea why we chose that. Neither of us could keep plants alive. Like all of my plants that you see, they probably are going to be gone in the next, you know, week or two cuz I was going to say they look pretty nice. You clearly know something. It's not going to stay alive for very long. None of us were that excited by the idea, but even more, we were young and impressionable and we really wanted to get startups right. And what that means is we ended up searching how to build a startup and trying to get every single thing right. Be like, "Oh, but how do we create customer personas and should we do this thing in MVP? " And just spend so much time strategizing over building. And while we were building, we were fortunate we got into this really cool Japanese accelerator that was backed by SoftBank. So by the time of the accelerator, we got to pitch to SoftBank executives. But because we were so stuck up in our head on getting this startup right, we didn't spend as much time building out the demo. Didn't have cool things to present at the end. The demo went okay, but it was a huge learning experience to like be always biased towards action. But in a way, it was a failure that carried some valuable lessons. Sounds like it. And you know, in practice, most do. But I like your point on building as opposed to just you know strategizing because at the end of the day unless you are consistently interfacing with the market and I think this is probably even trueer in like Silicon Valley for instance where so many of these ideas are big and grand and you know supposedly worldch changing like unless you consistently interact with the sort of people that you want to sell to you tend to lose kind of track of the whole point 100%. This is something I've learned from you. A lot of the times the solution that people come up with our idea for like plant care AI could be helpful could be not. We could have learned a very specific

pain points from interacting with people which we did but not enough but if we had more conversations we could have come up with something that was an AI but was solving a much bigger problem and it would have made that much difference for us in terms of what we were building. The thing that I've kind of heard from you and also in the community is sometimes focusing on the solution first is the wrong approach. So kind of focusing on the problem and then interacting with the market as fast as you can to then define better solutions that are very specific to what people are willing to pay for and what people think would generate them more revenue. That's the way to go. Yeah, for sure. Man, that makes me so happy. I also like the fact that you're like, "Hey, we might have not actually even ended up using AI. " Like I think AI is obviously the fancy thing that you want to slap on your startup for VC funding and whatnot, but like you don't actually need AI for a lot of customer problems. Yeah. And I mean right now even in Silicon Valley like one of the reasons I really like being here is people are incredibly smart. There are people who will kind of fall in for AI But like investors are catching up. People are not dumb here. So right now I run socially produced which is like a video marketing agency for tech startups. sweet of video marketing and content automations. And one of the reasons I love having tech founders and startups as ICP is because they are smart. They are going to sniff out and you have to constantly kind of improve and make sure that your solution makes sense and is most effective in order to you know secure the business and grow. And I think people are catching up on that. a lot of like AI is just this slapped on of like oh yeah sure we use like AI in this like minor part of our workflow but also that now AI is seeing less and less as this silver bullet for all of the problems like people are realizing no like when you have one AI agent that tries to solve this big thing start to fall apart technologically like you maybe need more deterministic workflows and more traditional SAS with like AI embedded in critical points and so it's not as smart to come in and say hey we just need this like one big AI agent is going to fix everything. So I think people are catching up especially in Silicon Valley like the knowledge transfer is happening very fast. So for sure because I'm sure there have been some investments in the past that haven't really you know amounted to the promises that were made. That's really cool. Okay. So tell me more about socially produced then and how content and automation weave together in your successes over the last couple of months. Yeah. So I started socially produced initially just as a content agency. Now it grown into being a video marketing service for tech startups. When I was starting, it was actually in summer of last year that I first had the idea. And initially I just thought I'll be creating videos. I didn't really know in which capacity it would be monetized or if I wanted to build a business. I was joking that in a way from like the fall of last year until maybe January I was running it as a boutique like video production thing like almost like a hobby. I was just like I like doing this. I like coming to this events and you know creating videos and now once I've made the decision to actually build a business around it it's much more strategic and focused on both like video production and some content automation for startups. Makes sense. Yeah, I like your point on boutique. You know, I was just talking to Assad last week. I'm not sure if you had a chance to look at that case study, but it was like, you know, if you don't have customers for your business, it is essentially a hobby. The proportion of your business that is a hobby decreases proportionally with the number of customers you acquire. So, it sounds like over the course of the last year, your business has become less hobby and more business and more business, right? Were there any like major changing points for you aside from joining our lovely community? Of course. Yeah. In the fall of last year, I've made the decision to run it as a business. Mhm. And the changing point came from me feeling ready to end this sbatical of two years that I've taken on. So I was working in startups non-stop since 2018 and then in 2024 when the war in Ukraine hit which is my home country that's created a huge dissonance about the world and my place in it and how I'm spending my time on earth. So I took kind of a break. I was working on a few projects here and there, but I was working in stuff like legal philosophy and poetry and whatnot and trying to figure out what I want to spend my time on. And so, it's very validating that eventually I lended back where I came from, you know, with tech and startups. And now that I've kind of focused on video and realized that that's something that both the market needs and I'm interested in working on, that's when I kind of made the conclusion that okay, I'm ready to get back into this in a more serious capacity and ready to build a business around it. And in November when I decided now, we're doing it seriously, I put together a landing page and pitched and got my first very big client. So that was kind of the first pivotal point. And then this year it's focusing more on scaling and actually focusing on retainer business rather than just oneoff projects. That's where I feel like I'm taking it on to the next step. Gotcha. Makes perfect sense. Yeah. You validated what works, right? You've got that. I mean, it's the micro version of the product market fit and now you're

just scaling it up. Makes perfect sense to me. Yeah. Can I ask um how much money did you make last month with this business? Yeah. So last month's we are at like 13,000. Quite far from the final goal that I want for a monthly retainer and I started to only count like retainer clients instead of oneoff like project income. We're on a good trajectory, I'd say. Yeah, that's fantastic. So uh tell me a little bit more about that. You're only counting retainer clients because those add to your quotequote MR, right? But um you also have some one-off clients as well. How did you structure like one-off client offerings versus retainer? Like what would you say are the differences here? The one-off clients were kind of my intro into the business world. That's when I was taking it from a hobby to a business and focusing on generating my first revenue. The goal and the structure for the one-off video production services was when there was a big tech event happening in Silicon Valley, which there are quite a bunch of, um, I would reach out and pitch and get to come to the event and create video at the event, which then would be like packaged to them in x number of videos. So yeah, it wasn't like content automations just yet. We are not essentially like a content automation agency. the emphasis is on video marketing and growth whereas the content automation is very much used internally and other kinds of automations as well like I've learned a lot from you on boarding and other like client satisfaction automations that we're using internally to create a really good customer experience because the thing is with our ICP which is tech founders tech startups a lot of the times it doesn't make sense to sell content automations because A, there's not going to be anyone who's going to be running it for them because their capacity is so small. There's like a small team focused on building very technical projects and B, they can probably build it out themselves and like make the software if they really want to. Yeah, I mean they're giant nerds. I understand. Uh, no. Jokes aside, it's interesting you touch on that point cuz I was just having a conversation with somebody else about like the long-term evolution of AI and automation businesses. And I came to the concept that AI automation businesses don't remain AI automation businesses for long. What ends up happening is you obviously test a variety of different automations. You build them for your own business. But then you find that when you sell the output of one specific automation to one specific customer, it delivers a disproportionate reward. So last week when I had sod on for instance, he started off as an AI and automation agency for the most part. He was selling a variety of different AI automation services. But his company essentially functioned as a software consultancy. It's like new project coming in. We're going to scope it. We're going to figure out how we can deliver the most value and then we're going to go line item by line item give you some deliverables and there we go. As he grew he shifted so that it wasn't like an all you can eat buffet at the AI automation agency restaurant. It was like oh actually I find when I sell to recruitment agencies I make way more money. Hm. Interesting. Now, what sorts of systems do I sell to recruitment agencies that make me more money? Well, it tends to be some sort of cold email system. Okay. And then you shift from being this AI automation big consultancy, which I think is a great place for people to start because you just learn so much and obviously you get very skilled at the technology into like a cold email agency specifically targeted towards, you know, recruitment businesses for instance. So, I think this is, you know, your journey is pretty interesting because I don't want to say it's in the other direction, but you're testing out various angles and various like retainer products and various recurring services with your clients, I'm sure. And when you find that product or the service that delivers you like a disproportionate return, that's when you slap a bunch of systems on it and then you start selling the outcomes of the automations, not necessarily the automations themselves. Does that make sense? Exactly. That's something that I can also charge premium for because the issue in a place where I am and with my SAP is not money. Like if I can show that something will deliver results or has like a potential to deliver the results then they are willing to pay whatever it takes to get this result if it makes sense for them right so it's not so much about saving on like oh my gosh like yes just give us the content automation we'll try to scrape our resources together like the time is a resource that they don't have and they just want the result most of the time so it made more sense to sell like the outcome and sell kind of a white glow service. And right now I'm exploring like potential directions for building a software. So like one of the hypothesis I have is once I can figure out ways to automate like video content production and figure out like the attribution and stuff that would really make us run this smoother and more effective at volume and high quality internally that we could package that as a software product and sell and very likely that other startups would benefit from like a more comprehensive solution. But then kind of similar to what you're sharing is the emphasis is again on figuring out not just like how do we automate everything within like video content production but what are the most revenue generating points within this video journey in video marketing that we

can then more clearly attribute to revenue and get more people interested in buying the software. I think I reached out to you initially because you posted a win and you closed some $10,000 a month client or something. Is that right? Yeah. Yeah. Um, what was the like initial lead generation strategy to get that client interested? Like were you doing things like cold DMs, cold outreach? Were you like doing like warm network reactivation? What I'm really interested in for you is like what's like a repeatable scalable way to grow the thing that you've obviously demonstrated you can go from zero to one with which is you know this retainer thing and then sell like 50 of them or something if that's something that you want to do. I wish I could say that I ran, you know, like 100 cold emails a day. That was just one of the hundred. That is not what happened. I've been lucky to reach for leads and opportunities that I'm able to close. And for this specific client, it was a warm inbound LinkedIn connect and then I just sent like a very casual check-in. So there's no kind of grand story about this. And then for my very first client which I lended the biggest venture capital firm in America as my client through cold outreach. And so in that case, this case as well, it was having an appropriate cold outreach or like warm outreach in this last case and then having the some preparation or some work to show for so when they go in and like see what I'm offering, there's some kind of results or some videos to back up what I'm offering to them. 100%. Yeah, this is that value based outreach, right? I mean nowadays the bar is so high with this stuff because the average person gets spammed so many freaking times that if you don't back it up with something it's like okay I mean how many emails have you gotten in the last 24 hours being like hey Anna I just recorded this Loom video can I send it over send me those people on Twitter they give me such an I have still kind of a nice tendency to me where I just like sometimes I want to respond and say like hey like this is bad like don't do this or like that I make a conscious step back and a decision of like they will learn that when people don't respond, that means the cold outreach was bad. And so I'm like, I will not engage with it in any way. This will be the lesson. And I think I also take that for myself. You know, when people don't respond to my cold outreach, I know that they probably seen it. Even if they're very high-profile, there's still a very likely chance that they've seen it. It was just bad and not worth their time to respond. And so the learning, you know, gets transferred to the next time I do a cold outreach. What sort of like did you put together an asset for this client of yours that you uh sourced through cold? Um, this was the initial one I guess back in I don't know if there's Yes, for that one I had like a huge proposal. So it was A6 andZ which is like a pretty big VC here in America and they were organizing like San Francisco Tech Week and I've done like videos previously with another big accelerator called Tech Stars. So I've shared like some of the examples from that like more pro bono fun project that I did that were like very relevant to their event. I wrote out like a very detailed proposal and I slapped it like two days before the event started. So, it was very timely. Had a great sales call, I guess, and they brought me on. Fascinating. I like that you timed it so that it was like 48 hours before. And I'm sure you made it very easy to say yes to. It was just like, "Hey, say yes. I'll be there with my camera, with my equipment. We'll do all the editing and we'll publish it in all these platforms. " That wasn't intentional. Actually, that week like prior to the event, I think it was on Wednesday when I decided that I'm either taking this business seriously and I'm like building a business or I'm going to go get a job because I was like there's no way around. I want to get finally back to like a normal level of income. This whole like period of me reading philosophy and doing podcasts about like AI governance is behind me. Like I want to get back to making money. I think it was like Wednesday. day, I was like, "Okay, well, we got to have some kind of landing page. " By Thursday night, I had the landing page done. By Friday, I was like, "Well, what's the next step? Like, where are we getting clients? " And then I found SF Techch Week. I was going to actually email every single person who's like sponsored this event. Like, I use AI to find their emails. And so, I started reaching out to them. And then on Saturday morning, I was like, why don't I just reach out to A6 and Z themselves and just pitch them. So, and we've closed it over the weekend. And on Monday, I was ready to go. So, it wasn't that intentional, but No, I think that's brilliant because you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. That's number one. Uh, number two, you could totally build like a scalable outbound strategy with that stuff. Anna, think about this. You're talking about scraping like events in San Francisco that are related to technology, right? Oh, there's so many sources where you could get that. Then what? You just need to identify the sponsors. That it's easy. You could totally crush this. I'm just like imagining a campaign where you are first in everybody's email inbox 48 hours before some event with some super crazy offer like hey you know we shot for A16Z a couple of months ago and like here's that here's this here's that here's what we're going to give you for free. Yeah, that's 100%. One of the problems is like with A6 andZ, they have much bigger budgets. So that's

something that they can afford in a way, but for a lot of the events, there is like a very streamlined budget and they usually go over it anyways. So coming in hot like a few days before the event might not be the best strategy, but there's definitely a way to like time it right to get a lot of them closed. The issue is I no longer want to focus on events because it is kind of a oneoff engagement. I'm shifting focus to getting clients that we can like have on a retainer for many months and years to come. Are you using any of these same things for your own business? Like obviously the best way for an SEO business to market is when the customers find them via SEO. And the best way for a video marketing business is for people to find them via video. Yeah. So I've been doing content myself mainly on LinkedIn. We've plateaued at some point because I've been writing this on my own for a while. I've realized that the way for me to service the clients is the best is to step back from content. But now that we have aesthetic cash flow, I can afford editors. So, it's going to be much easier for me to like start reinvesting back into like my content and my personal brand. And you're totally right. You know that this thing works when my founder brand works as well. So, that's definitely going to be the emphasis. And I'm slowly like getting back into Twitter, which is like a scary place to be. I've like I used to be on Twitter I think in 2021. Twitter growth, I think, is essentially different from growing on all of the platforms like LinkedIn with video or like YouTube, but it's worth it because that's where our ICP hangs out. So, makes sense. I'm sure I'm going to be seeing you and your like your tech Twitter bro DMs all up in my ex. com pretty soon. Yeah. I could make you $50,000 per month. Hey, Nick, fancy a quick automation for your lead gener. Wow, no way. I should have done that myself. Uh, it's funny. I got all these guys now with the school community that I run, right? They're all like, Nick, I can add 15 clients and make you $5,000. And I'm like, whoa, that's crazy. Maybe I should put you up on the offer, big duck. Then there's like some 16-year-old like in a wife beater, you know? That is so funny. and so cute. But yeah, they'll learn their lesson though. That's fine. Like, let them learn. I used to go uh I used to do door to door and I was like I looked like the you know super babyfaced when I was like 19 20 and I was like that's intense. So I would do that like knock on a door be like hey I'm going to make you all this money. So like I know firsthand how that is and you kind of do have to go through this initial introductory hazing. Like another thing that I'm starting to talk about more often in maker school is there's like this discord between comfort and then speed, right? Like if you want to do something fast, you necessarily have to sacrifice your comfort in order to do it. You know, going door todoor and having people laugh at you or pitching A16Z and having some intern be like what a loser or whatever. You know, in your specific case, that stuff's necessary for growth. I wouldn't even say it's optional. It's like necessary. Yeah, that's one of the reasons when I started talking about like cold email, I think this should be like the next lead genen strategy that I should focus on because I have a feeling that we are going to grow quickly to a stage where we would not need lead genen like at that level but I think that for character development I should do it. Like I think it's important. Yeah. For my character arc like I need to do cold spells and I need to fail and embarrass. I think I've already have quite a few both like Twitter DMs and other like DMs and I've met quite a few people that I've called DM like years ago in a very embarrassing way that once they followed me back on Twitter they're like hey like I see you texting me like please just don't read that message like just forget all about that start from the beginning. Okay. Um but I think yeah I think it's important. I think the more comfortable you are with failure, the more risks you're going to end up taking and the better your rewards going to get eventually. So cold email is important. Agreed. It's funny because we talked about what would happen if you were 10x the size, but what are your goals with this business? Like are you talking revenue goals? Do you want some sort of impact goal? Just off the top of your head, like where do you want to take socially produced? Yeah, definitely revenue goals is what we're focusing on. I've come a long way from starting startups focused on some kind of outside mission. I've essentially realized that each time that I would run a startup to like help people save their plants and make planet more green or help startups do this thing the death of an idealist. Ladies and gentlemen, like every single time I'd done that, I think reflecting back on it, it was quite egotistical. It was just like I want to make this big impact on this space and essentially the goal of a business is to generate revenue and my way of you know generating revenue is by helping other startups generate revenue by solving for their distribution with video content. So, one of the parts that I like about business is that there's very clear incentives.

Like, once you kind of push away all of the narratives, like we're all building something that solves problems for others that they are willing to pay to have solved. That's kind of how I'm framing it this time around. I also love video, but I think that's just kind of secondary. Mhm. And then in terms of the revenue goals, and maybe I'm thinking small, I think we might get much further than this, but my goal was to get to 50K a month by the end of the year, but from like the current conversations that I have with existing clients and how many other clients they can refer to us, I think we might surpass that goal much faster than December. But well, it's May, so that's another seven months from now. You acquired one client that pays you $10,000 a month. Yeah, we're just close another one. you're about to close another one or you just did. We did, but another really good tip that you've had like don't claim a client until the money hits your bank. So, we verbally agreed to another client, but the money has not hit the bank just yet. I'm crossing my fingers for you. I'm not sure if this is a local Silicon Valley or San Francisco connection. Those are definitely a lot stronger. But yeah, I'm glad that you brought that up cuz I can't tell you the number of times people have been like, I just closed this amazing deal. And we're all so stoked for them. We're like, this is awesome. And it's like, all right, so how much money was it? And it's like, we're still figuring that out. I'm like, you didn't close them. You got a text message from them. That's what you did. Even like an agreement signing. So, I'm not very big on the agreement side of things just because, you know, I work primarily with small to mid-size businesses and I work internationally. So, in practice, if I'm making like $5,000 per month off a client, client doesn't pay me for a couple months or whatever. My total owings are $10,000. It would cost me way more money to try and go after somebody, you know, than it would if I were to actually just go and acquire new clients for the $10,000. So logically speaking, like the agreements and stuff, to me, it's always just added friction. That said, I think there are a couple points where you can consider a client signed. If you have an agreement signed with them, there's some sort of legal binding and slash or if you have money sent or received, you know, in your pocket. So to anybody that's watching that might think that they have a client, you don't really have that client until those requirements are met. Unfortunately, that's the reality. And I've actually waited until sharing the win in the community. I'm not big on like sharing things publicly, but I felt like I owe it partially to you and to the community for my success. And so I wanted to kind of share that alongside of like the lessons that I've learned to see if they can help someone else. But I waited until I've had the money in the bank. We worked for two weeks together. I knew this is going to be like a serious retainer client to then share that this is like actually like, hey, this is a win, I guess. Very good call. I appreciate that. Yeah, obviously seeing wins in communities like Maker School, they help me and they help a lot of other people in the group overcome their limiting beliefs, but there's also this sort of gamification aspect where that's the metric that they go for. In a way, it's like a perverse Instagram. It's not necessarily the good thing to get a bunch of likes on your post, but I guess the way that I conceptualize it is like at least you're getting likes for making money as opposed to something else. And that's a challenge when you're building a personal brand, like a founder brand. For some of the decisions and some of business situations you end up with, you don't really want to have a feeling of public pressure and you don't want to feel like you're in a public eye as much when you're making this decisions. And so I felt like this kind of breakthrough that I've had in the business happened when I was in this quiet point in my life when I was just alone in my room for 2 and 1/2 weeks. I took a break from content. I decided I'm going to take it seriously and I've gotten through so far within that such a short period of time. And so making it public felt kind of weird like almost unnecessary and felt like I should continue building in quiet which I think I will for some time until I reach like a meaningful milestone. I was talking to another founder too who's big on like vlogging their journey on YouTube and I think it's fantastic but for me personally like I'm worried what percentage of my decisions will become kind of performative and shallow just because I feel the need to kind of like explain myself and make sense to people on YouTube. So there's that kind of concern and something to think through if you are sharing stuff whether it's like within a community or publicly on social media. Yeah, I definitely know what you mean. How are you dealing with that? Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. I'll answer that. But I think humans are consensus creatures. And so obviously we make decisions in part based off of the opinions of those around us. And so it's very important for the opinions of the people that you're taking into account to be good opinions. And when you blast out everything that you're doing socially, they don't all tend to be good opinions. can't tell you the number of like extraordinarily limiting beliefs I've seen when I started sharing my own business growth online and just like the weird takes and I really did have to put blinders on that as well and just be like hey like you know I'm not going to make any of these decisions because that person thinks it's a good idea or bad idea but because it's me you know so 100% with you there and I think there's a very intelligent mature way of thinking about branding there's another hidden cost I would say and that's that you are just

spending a lot of time on something that as you mentioned is performative but also So that just doesn't directly contribute to revenue in the short term. Yeah. Like if you have let's just say 10 hours in the day to keep the math really simple. You spend like an hour a day recording your vlog or touching it up or editing it. That's 10% that you are not utilizing that you could probably be doing lead genen with, right? And sure, maybe it's like technically still a form of lead genen, but the audience that's going to be watching Anna build her personal brand is very different from the audience that Anna might be targeting as like a video marketing agency. So that's something that I wish beginners understood a little bit more because I see a million bajillion, you know, day in the life of an entrepreneur on my journey to 10K month. And I'm like, I get it. I really do. And I think like the sharing culture is valuable and you're going to look back on this in a few years and probably be really stoked that you had it. But like, who's going to watch your stuff, man? Like unless you have some major accomplishment unless you're like focusing your time on revenue, unless you have the money that allows you to zoom out and not focus 100% of your time on revenue generation, like you should be focusing on the revenue generation. Yeah, content it takes a lot of time, especially when you're not formed as a founder yet and you don't have that experience of putting the blinders on and kind of have a compass and having had the experience of being in tough situations where you've made the right calls. you know, you are going to get influenced by all this random people. And then I do think that like a lot of the content ends up being performative, which isn't necessarily bad. Like maybe it makes more sense for you to act out, you know, the journey of a founder and you made this like in a cute little TV show and then you got partnerships and you become a content creator and that's fine as well. But and that's also something I think I've taken from you in a way where I've realized that sometimes and actually in most times probably the faster way to get to revenue is by focusing on direct actual regen where you're reaching out to clients and having something that they're willing to pay money for. But then once you do achieve that milestone, it's just so much easier to come in and say, "Hey, I have a business that makes 15k a month. " Because now all of a sudden you have all these people that are aspiring to this outcome and that would listen to you because you are kind of where they want to be. And from there it just becomes easier and easier to build the audience. And you're kind of right like with your videos as well. When you start a video saying like, "Hey, I'm Nick and I make this much amount of money in a month and I'm aspiring to be to like 2 million. " All of a sudden people are like, "Oh, this is the level where someone operates. This is their achievement and credibility. makes sense to listen and see what else this person has to say. Yeah. Uh well said. I think the idea is you just demonstrate some form of exceptionalism. Like what makes Lionel Messi interesting to watch, you know, the soccer player? It's like the fact that he's like the top 0001% in his field, which is some form of football that I will never be able to I can hardly chew gum and walk straight at the same time. But to me, as somebody that like isn't very good at that, like it's just inherently interesting to watch this guy like talk, man. He could be sitting on a subway scrolling through Instagram reels. Have you seen the um Canu Reeves in New York like on the subway and it's just like people that are like, "Oh my god, it's Can's just scrolling through his phone. " It's inherently interesting to see this dude who's like achieved top whatever 1% performance in acting. Just scroll through his phone, right? I think we're just like naturally drawn to some form of exceptionalism. I don't know why. Mirror neurons, some form of empathy, whatever. And like if you want to stand out in content, you have to perform some sort of thing super exceptionally well because it's just a million other people all doing the same And it's like if you don't have that, then why would somebody listen to you as opposed to somebody else? This is the same reason why when you made your wins post in Maker School blew the hell up, right? It's like oh my god, like she just did something we're all trying to do right now. That's crazy. And then like anytime you say anything now, people are listening, right? On a small scale because it's maker school, but the same applies to social media as well. Yeah. I think like I've reflected on that a while back and I think desire is one of the greatest ways to get people like motivated and interested like if you have something that they want whether it's money some social position any other thing that people want display outcomes that people want and they follow because of their desire makes sense to capitalize on that instead of spending all of this energy trying to like trick people into engaging with you by my gosh like coming up with this emotionally exaggerated stories or very creative cuts or whatnot. Yeah. Like the crazy short form stuff which I'm sure you see all the time in video. I mean I've I made them. So like I've we all kind of fall into this stuff. And when I first started actually with the idea of just making videos like before socially produced became a business thing. I was thinking of, oh, I can document my journey of building this thing from the ground up. Wouldn't that be cool? And then that plateaued pretty quickly and didn't bring the virality that I thought I would get cuz no one really cared and I think that was very fair of them not to care and I'm glad

that I didn't take that route to be honest. Yeah. I 100% resonate with you. This has been extraordinarily interesting, chat, Anna, because I feel like the agency space is services which aren't very glamorous. And I'm not going to on where you live, but I think that like in San Francisco, a lot of people that are there are very they're obsessed with that idea of impact that you mentioned, but so much so that like the primary thing for them is not customers. It's probably some form of fundraising or something initially. And hearing somebody that has operated in that environment now building and running a successful agency and just like your different take on all this stuff I guess has been really interesting. I was down in San Francisco a year and a half ago, something along those lines. There was a young man who was a terribly brilliant young guy who was fundraising for some voice agent call thing and he had seen my content and some of the systems that I had built and he was just like obsessed with this idea of getting me on as like one of his team members and then getting into YC or he had some YC connection or something and he kept on pitching me like day after day being like, "Dude, I need you. I'm willing to do anything to get you on board. You've actually made money with this and nobody else has. Trust me, it's like a crazy competitive advantage. I'm like, dude, competitive advantage, dude. Silicon Valley, man. You guys are got walking robots and Whimos and I'm making like 15 $20,000 with some AI automation. Why is that a competitive advantage? Well, anyway, I ended up going down there and seeing and you know, connecting and talking with a few people and like I learned that really is that really is a competitive advantage. Like the ability to actually sell a product and not necess like to a customer and not just to an investor. I've mentioned earlier in our conversation that there is that potential direction for us where we create a software product and one of the things that I know are already going to be like a big differentiator for us is that we have money and that's going to put us in a very different position when we're pitching to VCs if we are like I think I'm definitely more leaning towards bootstrapping and that's why kind of getting to higher numbers by the end of this year would be meaningful, but it puts you in a very different place of leverage. It invalidates the market demand, right? Because people are already willing to pay and they're willing to pay premium because you don't have this like perfect product. You have like a clunky product and then you have a service on top of and so people are willing to pay premium to solve this problem. you have like firsthand experience working with your ICP very intimately on getting like in our case to like a video marketing production system that would create results for them and then you also have revenue so you're not coming to them with no money no ability to like hire a team get to an MVP and you probably already have something working because you were able to like invest some of your revenue from the services into building this product and that is so much different to what like traditionally happens when someone comes with like just an idea and maybe like a strong technical talent. Okay, last point before I make you sell my community. For me, it's kind of the idea between like the standout brilliance and then like the slow steady incremental progress and I find personally as somebody that comes from the agency space, I'm just much more attracted to the latter. Just seems a lot more reliable to me. Yeah. Anna, how important would you say that Maker School was to your success? Yeah. So, let me like share my real thoughts. Oh, boy. I don't know. I would say that the biggest like change that it's made for me personally is that it helped me move away from this like boutique hobby kind of running business into making a decision to run an actually profitable business. So, I think that decision like I've had to make on my own, but being exposed to like the way that you run your company and your business through like your daily updates channels and then also seeing other people kind of struggle with the same limiting beliefs and the same questions and the same ways that they trick themselves into believing that they shouldn't be doing cold outreach or believing that, you know, a certain amount is not an option for them. like having exposure to that slapped me in the face a little bit and made me make a decision. And I think I would have been comfortable like as long as I wasn't like lying to myself, I would have been comfortable just having a hobby business, you know, just kind of being like, "Oh, this is like a chill comfortable life where I make some money. " But I knew that eventually this wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to build a serious business. that I got to see firsthand the actions and behaviors that people execute on a daily basis to get to the outcomes that I wanted to be. And once I saw that and saw how much of a dissonance it was with what I was focusing my time and energy on, I knew that I had to kind of take an action and stop kind of fooling myself. So that was the biggest thing. Another thing, there's also a lot of like tactical benefits. I'd say things that I could have figured out on myself, but would have taken me like so much more time.

you had information that I could search in maker school easily. So, let's say I didn't know what software I'm going to go with invoicing recurring clients and it was just so easy to be like, "Oh, do I want a Quickbook or should I pay 3% for Stripe? " That was a question. Type it up. You guys already had a discussion about it. And you're like, "Don't try to be cheap. Like, focus on, you know, providing frictionless experience for the client. " So, I sit myself down. I'm like, "Yeah, probably shouldn't be cheap. " Even though that was my initial inclination was coming from a place of scarcity, but client experience takes precedence. So, let's not be cheap. Let's pay for Stripe. The same I think was like for Panda do like just recently where I was like oh I should pay for Panda do subscription and almost like for a second I was like oh but I have five emails and I could have a docuign free trial for five months and I'm just like what are you doing? Like I also like looked up people talking about Pentadoc and someone else had the same concern. They're like, "Should I pay for Panda Dog because it's kind of expensive or should I go as a bunch of other random stuff? " And you or someone else was just like, "No, like pay for the Panda. " Like you have to believe in yourself and you have to have like a degree of abundance to run the business. It's not worth like an hour of your life to be sending out the silly proposals and then also it's not worth like having created the friction for the client. So that helped me be like, okay, I'm going to not make this scarcity like dissence. And the way that you know that happened is by just seeing the conversation happen in the maker school. And the last one, the last but not easy prepared, please. I'm not usually like a big endorser of things, but I think this was a great investment for my money. I got so much value out of this community. So thanks. Thanks for that. Um, but the last one was sales. And that one was so meaningful. both you've had like great sales documents I think for like lining out what you should do when you're like preparing a video pitch for the client so like an initial part of the sales how you should actually act on the sales call and the way that you should frame a sales call and then there's also the sales trainings with Connor that were just incredible and that had a huge difference and I have a funny story not a funny it wasn't funny but I have a story to showcase for it I had a dream tech company that I wanted to work with for a long time. They produced a podcast that I was listening to when I was working like in South Korea on this VC project. I took another short break to go to this cute little island called Jedju and I cycled for hours and I listened to that podcast and it inspired a lot of my kind of entrepreneurial aspirations. It was called Masters of Scale by Reed Huffman. It was very well produced podcast and shared entrepreneurial stories about really big cool tech founders. And one of the goals that I've had when things went well with A6 and Z was to get to work on an event for the Masters of Scale podcast. And I reached out to the team with a creative video outreach which ended up being successful. I didn't get into the event itself, but I started like a conversation chain with them and it dragged all the way into April until like our very last call came. And within that call, which essentially was a sales call, we caught up with the person who was my point of contact there. It was extremely vague. We ended the call like me not having any clear value prop and just coming from the space of this has been my dream like I wish we could you know create content for you and them being like we see your enthusiasm but we have no idea what the difference it would make for our business so it doesn't really make as much sense but they were willing to find some kind of agreement or common ground where we could experiment with their content and essentially the deal didn't go through which makes so much sense and I was left with this realization that in a sales call, which essentially this last call goal was a sales call. It's important to shut up about my own like aspirations and creative visions and just focus on understanding what the client wants and what kind of problem that they're struggling with. How can I position the and even forget about the solutions that I have in my head and just like really listen to what they want the way that they want it. Start generating hypothesis like do you want this type of videos or this type of videos? then ask them immediately. Being very open to hear no and that the solutions I'm offering are not making any sense and having that plan to readjust immediately. That was huge. And this is something that I've learned from the sales goals and like the questions that I've asked and the way that I was able to understand them was partially inspired by a lot of the sales materials that you had in the school. And so within that one week, like I've literally had one week where I knew that I'm going to have this sales call. My last sales call with my dream company went incredibly bad, like complete failure. I left it knowing that it was already really bad. And so I was like, well, we don't have much time here, so we got to like completely change the way that I approach sales. And so a lot of the materials and like the training was incredibly helpful. I really appreciate that. I love that point that you touched

on, which is that unfortunately clients don't actually really care that much about how passionate you are and how much you love them and all of this great stuff. They just want to know what you can do for them and your passion and stuff. It's marginal. Sure. Some people will like it, but it's a 1% thing. 99% of it's like, please, how much money can you make me? Exactly. And that's why when you ask me about like the mission versus the revenue generation, I think it's honest to say that we are focused on generating revenue. And it creates so much clarity and I cannot like emphasize enough how much I love clarity. Like it actually created me so much sense of like comfort and much more certainty in knowing that I am delivering on something that is going to generate revenue for this client. the client is going to be happy and I'll be happy working on it because I know that it's going to be fulfilling because working for the client and also help me retain the client. So, it's going to keep my business going. Like that sense of alignment with revenue is so crucial and it's so also comforting to me and that's why when we're planning the product content automations in a form of a product in the future I will 100% going to be prioritizing only on the parts where the content kind of directly ties into some kind of like revenue and revenue attributions because it's going to be so much clarity on like where I'm helping people make money and it's going to be much easier to sell. they're happier with the product. So, it's a good way to approach business. I think to paraphrase from one of my current coaching clients and good friends, Dylan Watkins, revenue is a clarifying function for business. If you just hold revenue above all else, then everything else that you do in service of revenue makes your life that much easier. 100%. Anna, thank you very much for making it on the call. I really appreciate having you hearing your journey, hearing how Silicon Valley agencies, revenue, and how all of these have intertwined to make you what sounds like a pretty formidable business person. I'm excited to see you 10x. Thanks. I'm excited, too. Thanks, Anna. Talk soon. Bye.