# 5 Mistakes I Regret After 667 Days of AI Entrepreneurship

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Liam Ottley
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FUgepQoySe4
- **Дата:** 07.11.2024
- **Длительность:** 14:34
- **Просмотры:** 18,233
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12250

## Описание

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My Vlog/BTS Channel: https://bit.ly/LiamOttleyVlogs

Exploration Milestone Strategy: https://youtu.be/aHxCpgohU68
How to Find a Developer: https://youtu.be/A7Cr8jM83Zs

In this video, I share the top 5 mistakes I made during my 667-day journey as an AI entrepreneur, aiming to help you navigate the complexities of starting and scaling your AI Automation Agency (AAA) more smoothly.

Timestamps:
0:00 - What We’re Covering
0:45 - Mistake #1
3:39 - Mistake #2 
5:49 - Mistake #3
8:34 - Mista

## Транскрипт

### What We’re Covering []

on the 4th of January 2023 I posted my first YouTube video marking my first official step into the world of AI entrepreneurship back then I knew absolutely nothing about making money with generative Ai and building businesses in the space but in the 667 days since that first video I've gone from a total beginner to building multiple AI businesses that have generated over $3 million in revenue for my team that team is now over 40 people based out of an office here in Oakland City that journey of course wasn't easy I made a lot of mistakes along the way that set me back that cost me a lot of money and taught me lessons I wish I'd known a lot earlier and so today I'm going to be breaking down my five biggest regrets my goal with this video is to help you avoid these same traps so that you can make more money faster without the Hard Knocks that myself and my team had to go through to get here first mistake was one that hit me very

### Mistake #1 [0:45]

early in my journey when I was starting my AI automation agency Morningside AI for those of you who are maybe new to the channel that's a business model where you are building and selling AI solutions to businesses and how to start and scale one of those businesses is really the main focus of the content I put out on this channel because it's bed on rant for beginners into this space when I was getting started part of the AI automation agency model is hiring developers eventually cuz you can't do it yourself some people can some people are developers and they come in and they've got a development skill set but at the end of the day you're trying to run a business and not be an AI freelancer for me having a background in online business um for the few years prior I knew that I could just go to upwork for hiring my vas and so I figured hey I'll just do the same thing and so I went on to upwork I searched for AI developers I filtered by top rated and the ones who have made a lot of money on the platform and I found what I thought was a good bunch of Freelancers to help me deliver my services and scale up the agency however across the course of running the agency over the next few months I realized that these Freelancers that you get off upwork particularly the ones that are top rated in the AI space are treating you like client number 10 or number eight or number five they have so much attention because they're top rated in an area that's exploding there's so much attention so many people like myself coming on to upwork to find them I just kept having these issues with projects over and over again where the freelancer was not being responsive to the client and I was having to step in and get all involved and really just making a mess and not delivering exactly what we said for the client because we realized eventually our developer was giving us a fraction of an attention rather than the full attention that we needed on the project to get it done this was really one of the first major learnings and a mistake that I made early on was going to upwork to try to find these AI developers now the new approach I would give to anyone looking to start an AI automation agency or even just hiring AI development Talent is to try to find firstly people who are aligned with the business model and the things you're trying to sell if you're like me and you run an AI automation agency it's key to be hiring people who are familiar with the kind of solutions and text act we build on I've been making videos for the past 2 years on this kind of topic about the solutions you can build what businesses are adopting and there's a typical text act that we use like voice flow and relevance Ai and zapier and make Etc and you need to be familiar with those platforms and the kinds of solutions that you build with it so that you don't have to train up this developer to understand what you're trying to sell so when you're looking for development Talent one you need to get that alignment making sure they know what kind of things you're going to be selling to the business so you don't have to retrain them and secondly you want to find someone who's not very good at marketing themselves it may sound bad but if they're not good at marketing themselves they're going to have less demand they're going to take on less projects and you can sort of have their attention in order to get the deliveries done that you need as soon as we were able to get off upw work and find people that match that criteria we were able to actually start getting a a bit of momentum up with successful deliveries that's really the lifeblood of your agency is getting those successful deliveries early on and as a little Pro tip if you're looking for the best place to hire those kinds of developers who are aligned on what you're trying to build as an AI automation agency owner and they likely aren't completely swamped with work because they're not that good at Market themselves and they just getting started then my free community is the best place to do it you can go in there you post in the hiring tab so many AI developers are in there looking for work that's the best place to get that's even where I Look to get them as well the second mistake that

### Mistake #2 [3:39]

I've made along my journey is not getting serious about systemizing my content production now if some of you have been watching my channel for a while you may be like well what do you mean you've posted like 100 something videoos and you've grown I went from Zer to 260,000 subscribers as we've at currently within almost 2 years so 18 months 20 months that's incredible growth but I think I got have got there a lot easier and a lot more smoothly and maybe even have got a lot more growth out of this really frothy early period of these online bubbles essentially like when there's so much attention on so crypto or AI anything that's new and exciting is drawing a lot of people in if you make good valuable content you can build an audience and build a following very quickly and while I have been able to do that I think I could have got more out of it if I'd been smarter about systemizing my content because in this day and age content really is a king and if you can do this correctly and at scale and set up the systems that you need to consistently put out valuable content you will go from just like making money online to being the number one in your category and taking the line share of earnings and looking back on my journey it's always been very chaotic it's like last minute uploads scrambling to get things put together and it's always pushing my team a lot the reason I didn't put a lot of effort in early on to really go deep and make systems that would allow me to easily put out a lot of valuable content was because of a bit of a internal struggle I didn't want to be the content guy I got into business to build businesses and do the actual day-to-day work and operations of running the business but more and more as I became better as a content creator and I hired people to do a lot of the day-to-day operations for me and my business it made more sense if you looked at it logically for me to put more and more effort into content but I would look at my schedule in the mornings and be like I'm spending so much time on all this content am I a content creator or am I a business person and that was a really difficult internal struggle for me but I've had to recently come to terms with people like hzi who spend majority of their time making content because that's the most valuable thing they can provided the business if you have the team behind you to back it up then getting serious about content creation and Building Systems and investing in it is one of the best things you can do for your business once you get it off the ground and once you have that team so if I could go back in time I'd likely approach it with a much more systematic approach saying look this is a major part of the business this is one of the key areas that I can provide value now that I have a team to help me with the rest of it there is nothing wrong as a Founder to be spending most of your time on the area that's going to help grow the business the most the third mistake is something

### Mistake #3 [5:49]

that I still struggle with to this day is being attracted to shiny objects and shiny object syndrome in the AI space there's so much new there's so much exciting there's so many opportunities and so many business plays that you could make one of the hardest things for myself and my team over the past year as my personal brain has kind of taken off and the whole point of me making YouTube channel like this was to attract the opportunities to me instead of having to go and mind them and find the interesting things and business opportunities myself I could create this Channel and would kind of be absorbed to me and attracted to me by my personal brand and that's exactly what's happened but it's a double-edged sword because on one side it does attract a lot of things to you and those opportunities are what we've built our businesses off now but it doesn't stop and they just keep coming and coming and they come in faster and faster as you grow more so one of my biggest mistakes early on was not having that muscle strengthened up to be able to say no to the exciting things that came along this materialized in ways like through Morningside AI my agency we would get these big leads that come through and it would be like H PWC or would be like we had this big military bidding contract there was these huge deals that would come in the pipeline and we'd all get really excited about it go oh and we spend like months negotiating going back and forth and more often than not they just ended up petering out and that's just because these big deals the likelihood of these big deals going through is so small and realistically you're better off spending time building momentum with smaller projects that you know you can get through and we would just get in this endless cycle of starting to make plans on the business based off these like pipe dream and low percentage deals that might go through I built an entire AI version of myself called AI Liam for my education business and while that did get like 18,000 people through and it made a big impact on a lot of people's Journeys it was still a distraction from the core business on the education side of making a really good program and in course as well and so it's been difficult for me over time to learn to say no to things for me and my team now the biggest thing stopping us from getting where we want to go is not being able to say no to all of these things that we know we could do that's the hardest part about it as you build your momentum you get opportunities where you know you could do it you know you can make money with that and that's when they become so much harder it's like yeah we could totally smash it we can make a lot of money with it but you have to learn to say no to those so that you can continue to focus on your main business and the way that me and my team do it is we measure these new opportunities against what we know we're working on right now and if they don't in the next 3 to 5 years have the same kind of outcome then of course it's an immediate no but even if they do and they're comparable or they're even might even bring in even more money than what we're working on right now it's still a question of what's the likelihood of us achieving that versus what we know it's like the devil you know versus the devil you don't and so and many times sticking with something that you know and continuing to scale that is going to be far better for you and have a much higher chance of success than jumping into something completely new that you don't know anything about so learning to say no to things that weren't helping my core business is something that I definitely wish I could have picked up earlier on my journey is able to saved me a lot of wasted effort basically on things that have not added up to what we're working on right now mistake

### Mistake #4 [8:34]

number four is based on something that's a little bit more tactical to AI automation agencies and that is not implementing exploration milestones in our sales process sooner in the early days of morning side AI we had a pretty basic sales process firstly we had a discovery call and so we hop on there and learn more about their business what they wanted us to build and then afterwards we take the learnings from that and take the scope of what they needed us to build and then we go to our development team and would ask hey look how long is this going to take can you give us an estimate on hours then we' take those hours we put it into a big proposal template make all this whole proposal up for them and estimate the cost and then we'd book a second call with them a proposal call and we' say hey look we want to present our proposal to you and then we'll hop on the call we present the proposal go through it okay this is going to be $155,000 this would the breakdown of the milestones and then we noticed we just do this over and over again and that the close rate on them was in the single digits we would send out so many proposals and get so few actually ending up as closed deals at a certain point my business partner Josh was getting sick of making so many of these proposals up for people that are not even going to convert that we decided to switch it up and at the end of one of our Discovery calls one time we just said suff it let's go hey uh the next step after this is what we're going to call an exploration Milestone where we're going to learn a little bit more about your business and we're going to do a feasibility test going to actually do a demo and a prototype of what the system would be and at the end of that we're going to be able to give you a report and then we'll more accurate quotation of the price and so we switched our sales process from being Discovery call to proposal call and basically everyone being able to make it down to the proposal call if they were interested to us immediately financially qualifying them and expecting them to get their wallet out and pay us something before he went and did the proposal this shift to a paid exploration it started off at $800 to start with now we do them for 23 $4,000 that was a great way for us early on to keep cash flow coming into the business but also to financially vet all of the people that were coming to us so my YouTube channel attracted a lot of interest and yes we would hop on Discovery calls with a lot of people but we immediately started asking for some financial compensation for the work we're about to do and this kind of financial qualific ification completely changed our business because yes we didn't get everyone onto an exploration but the ones that did we started closing at 80 to 90% on the full deal so by putting that barrier and stopping people from getting further and getting more of our time without paying us something and also being able to collect some cash on the way in and give us cash flow to fund the business in the early stages we were able to completely change the business and able to scale much more aggressively after that because we actually had a decent close rate I've actually got a full video breaking down the exploration Milestone strategy I'll put that in the description below and I've also got a video for how to find your first developer that kind of goes with mistake number one I'll put them both in the description and finally

### Mistake #5 [11:04]

mistake number five was competing and not collaborating when I first started in the AI space I was on YouTube I was making these videos there was obviously other creators that were popping up and as soon as I started making AI business focus videos and I saw other people making the same kind of content as me and kind of what I thought was hopping on my wave that I'd started I of course got a little bit defensive and I was like who the hell is this guy he's talking on the same topics as me I was when started all this stuff and like really stupid juvenile stuff and basically put me in a defensive position and made me a like anxious that I was going to fall off or something this is really the things that goes to your head as a content creator what I learned recently particularly this year was that there's a lot more to be gained from collaborating than from competing with people directly so what I decided to do earlier this year is to find all of the people making content in the niche that I'm in and there's AI solutions for business AI automation agency space there's a lot of new guys popping up and I was like let me extend the olive branch olive leaf Olive Branch I believe it is a p peaceful offering to them all and try to turn them from competitors into collaborators and into friends and that's exactly what I was able to do I've got a group of AI content creators that are in the space all of the guys that if you watch this kind of content a lot You' know every single one of them but they are now some of my best friends we hop on a call every single week they come out to Dubai with me we had an awesome Mastermind which was one of the highlights of this year for me also going to Thailand in early January together it's just such a better way to do business and make content to be in a group and in a room of people that have similar businesses to you working on similar problems and can help you as well one of the major things that I've gotten out of it is that when I have a question some of these guys are much smarter than me and they're much better developers I can ask them questions and they'll be able to help me out and help my business as well so while I can give back to them it's this really great exchange of collaboration and also friendship as well so that's something that I would have done sooner is to reach out to people one example that you guys may know is Brock Miser when he first started his channel I was like whoa who's this guy talking about AI automation agencies I immediately got defensive but later down the road I ended up reaching out to him getting him into this group and now he's one of my best friends in the space and we've got a great friendship as well so that's one thing for all of you if you're getting into this space particularly as a content creator there's so much more to be gained by collaboration and reaching out to people then directly competing not to get all woo and hippie but the frequency or the the energy that you have when you were on this collaboration level of these guys are my friends and we're all winning together is so much different to the scarcity mindset of being oh like I'm like these guys are going to take my lunch if you're in content creation or you're building these businesses I highly recommend you try to collaborate rather than try to direct compete with and that's something that I wish I did a lot earlier in my journey so those are the five mistakes that I regret on my journey in the AI space so far firstly we have hiring from upw workk don't do that underestimating the power of content systems I wish I prioritized building out robust system for Content creation sooner and not got my ego in the way and felt like I shouldn't be spending so much time on this because I should be doing other things it's a load of rubbish and H is a great example of that being the case mistake number three is getting distracted by too many shiny objects you have to learn to say no in order to grow the core business mistake number four was not implementing exploration Milestone sooner as I covered and finally mistake number five is competing and not collaborating with other people in the space so hope this been helpful those are some pretty hard fought and hard earned lessons of course I am extremely happy with where I am now and in my business I wouldn't really change anything but these are just examples if I had to go back and I could I have made of the changes sooner to get where I wanted to go a little bit faster these would have been them so I hope at least one of these is going to be helpful for you on your journey if you want to check out my other one where I'm breaking down the complete beginners blueprint making money with AI I put a lot of work into that one you can check that out up here but aside from that guys that's all for the video thank you so much for watching and I'll see you in the next one