how to make your first $1,000 online with AI (No-BS Guide)

Here's how to actually make your first thousand online with AI from somebody that scaled his own AI and automation service business to $72,000 per month and now runs communities teaching people how to do the same. Now, I'm creating

this video as sort of like a push back because I've seen a lot of people enter the AI and automation space recently that have no experience actually building out these systems. AI and automation sounds really flashy and obviously there's a lot of financial potential in there, but what it certainly isn't is easy. So, just because something is simple and just because something gets a lot of attention does not mean that it is easy. And I'm going to make that case in this video and then I'm going to give you guys a simple road map to avoid falling into the trap that I'm seeing a lot of people do right now. So, to make a long story short, the make money online landscape cuz rest assured that's what this is. It's the exact same thing as like the social media marketing agency fad of a few years ago, the web design drop shipping fad. What we're seeing right now is exactly that same thing. has been super saturated with tons of misleading opportunities. Now, it's true that AI has created a window for opportunities, but it's not in the way that most gurus present it. people are pitching it right now is it's like a passive income scheme. Okay? People are selling you AI businesses as if it requires no effort. It's going to make you money while you sleep. Let me tell you something. This specific business model, which people are selling you, but not totally formulating, is an agency service business model. You can't make money while you sleep with this. You need to get on sales calls with prospects. You need to hunch over laptops or MacBook screens, building, dragging, and dropping systems. You need to be whiteboarding flows. doing things like prompt engineering. So, reality check. The vast majority of these AI gurus have never built any successful businesses outside of just selling courses. If you want to make a determination as to how exactly to get up and running, focus on people that have actually done the thing that you want to do, not just people that talk about it. Okay? And also, passive income schemes rarely work for beginners without existing audiences. What you'll find is, and if you're a beginner, maybe this won't make the most sense to you, but there's a difference between inbound marketing and then outbound marketing. So, inbound marketing is when a customer comes to a business. In order for a business to get some sort of inbound marketing, obviously, that business needs distribution. It needs popularity. It needs some way to get the word out. right now. If you are a beginner business and you have no idea what the heck you're doing, you have no capital to invest, you have no ads to whip up, you have no idea how to position your product, you can't really do inbound marketing very well, if at all. So, what most of these businesses, accelerators, and courses are pitching you is inbound. In reality, if you're a total beginner, more or less, the only way that you can actually generate outsized opportunities is through outbound. So, it's not just sitting on your butt and, you know, hearing the chuch-ching noises while you sleep. What you have to do is you actually have to go and you have to hunt, you have to prospect, you have to, you know, get on the phone, you have to dial, you have to record Loom videos, you have to send cold emails, you have to put yourself out there over and over again. And what you'll find is that's not very sexy. So, very few people ultimately talk about that. But if you want to make a business uh work from scratch, especially in like a bootstrapped way, you can't focus on the inbound. Inbound just doesn't work. Okay? So, be very skeptical of anybody that's selling inbound to a total beginner audience for that reason. And then ultimately uh marketplaces end up flooded with tens of thousands of people that try the exact same thing that are being promoted. Now what I mean by this is unfortunately simply by virtue of the fact that beginners obviously want simple things that they could follow step by step. People confuse strategy with tactics. To be abundantly clear strategy and tactics are very different things. A tactic is something like uh cold email copy. a script. A tactic is like, I don't know, some sort of like advertising that you're copying. The strategy is the deeper reasons why you choose the tactics. It's like human psychology. It's like sales skills. It's like uh market understanding. Okay? So, if you just spend your entire life trying to copy the tactics, which is what ultimately these courses and programs get you really good at doing, the second that the market changes, you're not going to be able to accommodate. When markets get saturated with millions of people doing the exact same tactic, the only people that actually make it are people that understand the strategy because can generate new tactics anytime they want. But people that understand tactics, they have no idea what the underlying strategy is. So they are screwed. So don't be one of those tacticon people. Be a strategy only person. Now obviously the question is how the hell do you do that? Well, the

way that you do it is you avoid these productbased businesses. To make a long story short, when you're starting out as a beginner in entrepreneurship, you basically have a fundamental choice between two types of businesses. You have a product based business or you have a service-based business. Product based business is selling something like a widget on Amazon. Let's say it's e-commerce for the most part. It's stuff like information products, right? Called products for a reason. A service on the other hand is something that you do for somebody. It's like a landscaping gig. It's like HVAC. It's like plumbing. It's like digital marketing. like SEO, PPC, AI, and automation. Now, the core advantage of service businesses over product businesses is they require very little upfront investment. The only upfront investment you basically have to make in a service business is you have to use your time and developed skills to manage and fulfill the expectations of clients. But a lot of the time, you don't really have to invest that much money. And typically, nowhere near as much money as a product based business because you don't have to make the product. The benefit to this for beginners is if you are choosing a service business, you get this learn while you earn advantage that allows you to generate cash flow while also simultaneously deepening your understanding of client needs, industry problems, things like marketing, things like sales, and ultimately automation opportunities. So my recommendation for you is pick a service business. Okay? Pick AI automation agency as a model. Don't pick, you know, make a digital product and put it on some Notion template that's generated using AI and then try and sell it through inbound ads. That stuff just really doesn't work, guys. It sucks for me to say, but if you're a beginner, you have no idea where to even start with that stuff. It's much better focusing on the simple 0ero to one stuff that at least gets a few dollars in your bank account. And once you have that, you can worry about building these higher level flows and funnels and all that stuff afterwards. So, the service model allows you to monetize your skills. That's the main part. You're monetizing your skills. And you don't need any external funding for that. Each client project also becomes a paid case study. You get to learn while you earn for your growing business portfolio. And then you get to use that business portfolio to sell more people. If I could do like a simple SOP, that stands for standard operating procedure, something you're probably going to be building a lot of in business, this is what it would look like. You have lots of skills and time. If you choose a productbased approach, it's going to take you time to develop the product. A lot of the AI people are saying, "Well, it takes you five minutes. You whip up a template, a prompt, send it out. " Those just aren't very high quality yet. So, you can't exactly do that. You then launch your marketing for the product because you start with the product then you do marketing afterwards. That might take you another month. Okay. If you get your first sales, which is a big maybe because you don't really know what you're doing, you might make your first thousand or $2,000 in like a few months. That might take a like a crazy amount of time. As a beginner, the number one thing you don't have is you do not have feedback. And if you want to like stay in entrepreneurship and not fail like the 95% of people that try this, you need some sort of positive feedback as quickly as possible. Contrast that with a service-based approach. You do, I don't know, some sort of free or very low paid work to get your first case study. Use that case study to sell your first actual paid project. You then deliver some results. You make some more money. You take all that money, you reinvest it in skills, okay? Skill stacking. So, you learn sales, you learn marketing, you learn lead genen, you learn all these important things. Then you scale. And then finally, after you've scaled a business and after you've done all this, by the way, in like one to two months instead of four to six months, then you can just productize your service and then turn that thing from a series of steps that you have to do every time you onboard a new client to something like a product. Anyway, what does this mean? This is the definition of double dipping. And anytime you're in business, you look for opportunities to double dip. So, I guess to make a long story short, the TLDDR, too long, didn't read the cliff notes, whatever you want to call them, are if you're going to start this business model, avoid inboundbased business models that have you creating a product before you actually get out and sell it, and instead focus on service-based business models that let you learn while you earn. Now, the specific business model that I recommend

is AI, automation, agencies, or freelancing. All right, so this is different from all the fancy AI products that you're probably seeing a lot of people do. So what is an AI automation agency? Well, believe it or not, agencies are very old. Agencies are a collection usually of people that are good at something. So you have, I don't know, basically five or 10 freelancers. This is the idea of a traditional agency. Anyway, one person is like a PPC, another person's an SEO person, another person's like a copywriter, and they all combine forces, they collaborate, there's some sort of manager around them that, you know, coordinates their work and so on and so forth. And then they form an agency which can offer a collection of these services. And the idea is because these people are so great at their individual services when you combine them, they tend to exceed the sum total of their parts. You know, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. That's kind of the idea behind the agency. Then because the agency can maximize project acquisition because they have the resources, they can also do things like hire salespeople and then everybody just gets to specialize in their own thing. And as a result, the agency gets to grow. Now agencies have been around for a long time. The first kind of like legit agencies were the Madison Avenue advertising agencies back in I believe the late 50s or the early 60s. So that whole business model is not new. The only difference basically is that now there's just one really cool and kind of very all-encompassing service called AI automation which is just one of the service fulfillment pieces that an agency can provide. Okay. So what the AI automation agency business model is it's just a fulfillment mechanism for a very decades old business model. And that's why it's the ideal business model for beginners to start because there's still reasonably high demand. They're very low technical barriers and they're also actually really good profit margins relative to traditional agencies. But one thing I didn't mention here is that it is welldefined. People have been doing this for a very long time. So typically you don't really have to invent anything new. Like whereas you know a lot of the time these products you're going to have to invent something totally new and fill a need and get product market fit with services specifically agency services you don't have to do any of that. The whole business model has been working like a welloiled machine for the better part of the last 60 years. All that you do is you apply your own skill and your ability to fulfill the projects that come your way in order to operate it. And because there are a lot of these defined road maps, you get people like me, get people like a bunch of other YouTube creators that are agency specific that you know can show you how to do a pretty good job with this stuff to at least get from zero to one. Okay, there's another major reason why this is a pretty chunky opportunity right now. So AI is just the fulfillment part of an agency, right? So, it's nothing special in and of itself to run an AI automation agency. You still have to know how to run an agency. But because AI is so flashy right now, you can get away with offering that as a service, making more money, improved margins, and then you also get to do some templates. So, anyway, the second big reason why this is so valuable is because there are these no code tools like make. com and then naden and there also a few others that transformed this very high value service which used to be software engineering into something that is accessible to virtually anyone. These are drag and drop no code builders that allow you to set up pretty complicated workflows from your laptop with no actual programming experience which is pretty incredible. So my guess of this over here is that it's well defined. it is accessible. I like how my writing is getting worse every 5 seconds. If point number one is that it's well defined. Point number two is that it's very accessible now. Okay. And then point number three is that unlike other agency models like uh social media marketing agencies, I use an extra m there. They usually require some sort of constant ongoing work to maintain results. If you build a really good automated solution for somebody on retainer, that automated solution will actually continue delivering value even when you're not actually around to product forward. Now, does this mean that this is passive investment? you get to earn while you sleep? No. Obviously, you still need to be around there to shepherd it. But I guess the point that I'm making is there's a lot more inertia in AI and automation solutions because you're not just giving somebody a deliverable. What you're doing is you're building a system that produces deliverables. Okay? So, this is long-term. And not only is it long-term, personally, I think it's easier to justify high costs. They're also exceptionally higher profit margins than the vast majority of other old school agencies because of this long-term and high ticket thing. So margins of 70% plus are not uncommon. And then what's really cool is because these are cloud systems, you can actually template out the vast majority of them. Like a lot of people just want the same system built again and again and again or different clients want the exact same thing that you just delivered for client A. You know, they client B wants it, client C wants it, client D wants it. And because of that, you get to template and just copy and paste. meaning that you don't actually have to go from like, you know, zero all the way up to 100% of the fulfillment. You kind of shortcut it. You can actually get a project that's 80% of the way there and then just make a couple of changes and get it to that 100. That's a 5x leverage for those of you guys that are keeping track. Okay, so here's why this wins

over other real models. Drop shipping and ecom requires constant product sourcing and customer service. If anybody here has tried the drop shipping and ecom, you need to constantly be sourcing new products. There's an incredible amount of competition. You also have to focus big time on stuff like ads and stuff like tripwire offers and so on and so forth. And then, you know, you need to focus on customer service as well. If you're doing some sort of content creation with uh selling digital products, okay, where it's kind of like inbound, you have ongoing production of said product, you have a much lower or slower time to market, and then there's an uncertain monetization strategy. Don't get me wrong, if you build a digital product like I have now with my maker school and make moneywithmake. com, when you do finally grow, you grow really fast. But most beginners don't want to spend the first 3 years of their life making, I don't know, 25 cents. No, they obviously want to get up and running with something like an agency where instead of spending the vast majority of their introductory business period broke, they can actually make a little bit of money much quicker. And then if they wanted to, you know, eventually segue to some sort of digital product model, well, then they could do it then with money and resources. Okay? But, uh, most beginners don't want to spend all that time in that weird limbo. Most beginners would rather be like this orange graph here and get a lot more area under the curve. So the last thing is software development needs extensive technical skills and longer time horizons. What I'm doing is I'm just contrasting automation agency models to software development models, content creation models, and then drop shipping and ecom models here. And anyway, like there's no real point in getting in software dev anymore. Sorry to break your guys' hearts, but models are just getting to the point where they're good enough for vast majority of needs. That's where the whole term vibe coding has come from. Um, and you know, in all honesty, these are just going to continue getting better until they're just significantly better than most human developers. So, the age of human software developers is certainly coming to a close. That's why it makes sense to focus your time and leverage it less on the actual software implementation, more on templated solutions, no code solutions that allow clients to do some maintenance on their own and stuff like that. Now, if you wanted a quick little SOP, we're now writing an orange. Here's what you do. You build practice automations for one week. That's 7 days. Do some free work or low paid work to acquire your first result. You could do this on any platform. You can do this through DMs. warm network. Whatever you want. Get your first client through Upwork or cold email. Build solutions using templates. Get yourself 80% complete and then customize the final 20% for clients. When you deliver your first few solutions, you can do so at $1,000 to $2,000. That's way more money than a lot of people make when they're selling digital products in, let's say, the first month. Usually, if you sell digital products the first month, you are at negative $1,000. Then, when you build a solution, template it out for future clients. So, I don't know, save the blueprint or save the NAND template, save it in a folder labeled what it does, and then next time that you get a client, you'll have a massive library of reusable systems that allow you to scale with additional minimal work per client. So, you know, this sort of like takes both of the best parts of both the agency and then the SAS model. The best part of the agency model is that you get to make money quickly. The best part of the SAS model is that you tend to scale much quicker. And so, in reality, your revenue growth graph will look something like this, as opposed to something like this. or something like this. Blue is agency, red is SAS, and then orange is sort of what we're doing, which is sort of a combination of software and the agency model. Okay. So, in terms of getting started, there are variety of ways to do so. Obviously, I now operate a course where I show people how to do this zero to one called Maker School. I guide your hand and I walk you through like tasks on day one, tasks on day two, task on day three. I'm not just going to shill my product here, although obviously I wouldn't make a high quality product if I didn't really believe that it was the best solution. But anyway, starting an A automation agency requires surprising little preparation. What I mean is you can go from zero to your first client within 1 to two months. I think the fastest first client we've gotten now was within something like 15 minutes. Somebody sent an Upwork application. Upwork being a freelancing platform for an AI and automation agency. Job client got back to them immediately. They got back to the client immediately. They set up a call and within 15 minutes they had a proposal signed ready to go. So obviously 1 to two months is a reasonable thing for most total beginners to work towards. But I want you to know there are many cases in which that occurs much easier. Now, the minimum viable business of this AI automation model involves three skills. Basic automation skills, a specific service offering, and then one or two client acquisition methods. My recommendation is choose uh specific client acquisition methods rather than trying like a million approaches. And specifically, I'd recommend you use Upwork. Then I'd also recommend you use cold email. Okay, so three things. You need automation skills, and I'll show you how to get all these in a second. You need a specific type of service. And then finally, you need client acquisition methods. Also, if you want to be successful, you focus on completing projects rather than perfecting them. In reality, you're not going to be a fantastic or perfect developer on your first gig. If you spend all of your time trying to like deliver it perfectly and not just move on, you're not necessarily going to be able to take advantage of the momentum that my approach, which is just front-loading client acquisition, gives you. And then, yeah, just in terms of a basic curriculum, spend one week learning basic automation skills and then spend your next week creating a specific service offer and starting a lead genen process. So, here are the

tools that I would use. Make. com or naden, you don't need both. Instantly is a cold email platform. Ampify is a scraping platform. Apollo is a lead database. Upwork is a freelancing platform. Then Loom is a simple and easy way to just record videos. Kind of like this one where you're answering a client question. Three great videos that I'd recommend checking out. Uh, wow. That it's very interesting. I don't remember having that hairdo. Is $10,000 a month AI business over here. So, how to build a profitable AI business in 2025. Then 80% of AI automation basics in just 29 minutes. Then finally, if you guys want to get up and running with Naden, which is the current biggest platform, watch this nad full course, 6 hours that shows you how to build and sell automations and agents as well. So this is the curriculum. You start by learning some basic make. com and nen stuff. This video, if you watch it on 1. 5x means you could literally do this in about 4 hours. You could be 4 hours away from knowing everything you need to know about a platform like naden to actually get out there and start producing value for customers. Then just build a couple of simple practice automations. Most of my programs include this. uh then choose one specific service to offer. Then just start lead genen. So create an Upwork profile, set up a cold email system, apply to five Upwork jobs daily with a video, and then send a 100 targeted emails daily. Eventually, you're going to get some interest. Then you just book a discovery call and start the project. And then finally, you deliver your first client project, get your first case study. And you know what you do at the end? You just loop it around. You just do it over and over again. Well, I guess you don't do that part over and over again, but hopefully you guys see my point. Okay, some points to consider just before I wrap up. highly recommend you guys have a daily lead generation ritual. Now, this is what I was talking about. Outbound does not have a simple passive lead generation way. You can't just like generate leads passively. If you want to be the one that is doing the selling, which most of you guys are probably going to have to be the start line of your business, you need to put in the work. That doesn't mean you need to spend all day doing it. You can do it intelligently. And my recommendation for you is spend the first couple of hours of your day, first 60 to 90 minutes basically, dedicated exclusively to this free client acquisition system. free or lowcost client acquisition systems because by doing so, what you're doing is you're trading a little bit of your time for much faster growth later on. Then track everything. Use a simple spreadsheet. Monitor all of the outreach and the responses that you're sending, the cold DMs, the Loom videos, the cold emails, cold calls. I don't recommend cold calls, but I wanted to throw that in there just in case. All of the various outbound strategies that you're using, track them so you know what to change next week. And then just stick with it for 30 days. This seems like a very big ask, but if you could stick with something for 30 days, you're going to have more results with that thing than 98% of other people will that you know quit before the 30-day mark. Even if you are terrible at outreach on day one, by the end of day 30, assuming you consistently do some little output every single day, you're going to be great at outreach. Outreach is not some super scary intimidating thing. Outreach is extraordinarily straightforward. You just need to put in the reps. Think of it like the gym. You can't do all of the outreach bicep curls on one day or else all you'll do is just break your arm. Essentially, what you need to do is you need to drip it out. You need to do 60 bicep curls in day one, 60 bicep curls on day four, seven. You just need to keep that up as long as humanly possible. Then build a follow-up framework for all those leads. The vast majority of your deals are going to come from some sort of follow-up. Most people stop after one outbound message, but success, I find, typically requires at least three touches, if not more. And then add value in every message. One big thing that I think separates the amateur salespeople from the really good salespeople is the really good sales people are basically radically empathetic. And I didn't fully understand what this meant until quite recently actually. But really good sales people are so empathetic they can put themselves in the customer shoes and imagine what their reaction would be if you were to reach out to them. So if you want to be really good at outbound, what you need to do is you need to put yourself in your customer's shoes. What are you more likely to respond to? Hey, hey bro, how you doing? How long time no talk? Want to touch base? or hey man, I think I could make you another $43,000. I know this is totally out of left field, but here's a step-by-step road map and a guide I put together. No strings attached and you don't have to respond to this if you don't want. Obviously, the second, right? And even though you're saying things like you don't have to respond if you don't want and uh you know, no strings attached. When people see that much value thrown at them, they almost invariably do respond and there almost are invariably always strings attached. Okay. Anyway, focus on a multi- channel approach with that. Hit emails, hit LinkedIn. If you can hit phones after getting positively qualified over email and LinkedIn, then people are a lot more likely to get back to you. Finally, your mindset matters. Okay, your capacity to find clients matters more than your technical skills in the beginning. That's the bottleneck. Trading time for money is necessary at some level. If you want to grow faster, okay, you're going to have to invest money in that growth. And when you growth, you're going to cut down the amount of time it takes to do anything by leaps and bounds. But at the beginning, you don't have the money. So what is your only other piece of currency that you can exchange with? It is time. So at the beginning you might spend two to three hours a day doing pretty boring annoying things. That's just the nature of outbound and that's the nature of this AI automation business model. If you want to grow you got to grow consistently and reliably over time the you know big swings that the other AI gurus are going to be telling you do not really happen in practice. Okay. And then yeah embrace rejection. The way that outbound works and you know outbound is like a separate skill than the AI and automation side of this business. But more generally, the way that outbound works is every time you get a no, it just brings you a little bit closer to yes, provide some valuable feedback. Okay, so know that we talked about a lot in this video. Just wanted to fill your head with as many positive concepts as humanly possible to try and outdo or undo some of the more negative ones that I've seen recently. That's how you actually make your first thousand online using artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence is not the focus of the business model. Although it's called AI automation, you know, it's not AI that is doing the selling. It is you You can't just build something with AI and just expect people to come. What you have to do is you have to get in front of a ton of people, have them tell you what they want, and then ultimately build that thing for them afterwards. Earn while you learn. That's the whole idea of services over digital product

businesses. And then anytime that somebody tries to sell you a passive investment dream that allows you to earn completely while you sleep and not have to put any time or energy in and it's the secret method that everybody's using to make a billion dollars, obviously be understandably wary of it. If I'm being totally pragmatic and realistic with you and automation is a business model just like virtually any other business model. There's a reasonably short window of opportunity where you can get outsized returns with this business model. But if you guys focus less on the specific tactics, the specific, you know, base level ways to do the thing and you focus more on the strategies that underly a business model like AI and automation, then even if you miss the AI and automation wave, you'll be well positioned for anything that comes afterwards. If you guys like this sort of stuff and you guys want to actually start making money with AI and an even simpler and straighter line path than what I outlined in this video, check out Maker School. It's my 0ero to1 daily accountability roadmap where I hold your hand through the entire process of starting then scaling an AI and automation agency. We have over 2,400 members. I increase the price every 100 members or so just to reflect the increased value of the recordings that I'm adding, the templates, the resources, and the discussions. So, if you wanted to do this, get in now, grandfather that in lock in your price. Really appreciate everybody that makes it to the end of my videos. Thanks so much for watching. If you guys could do me a big solid like, comment, subscribe, do all the fun YouTube stuff to get me to the top of the Aago. And I'll catch you all in the next video.