$100k AI Expert Answers Your Most Common Questions

Today I'm going to be answering the most commonly asked questions about how to start an AI automation agency in 2025 and scale it to $10,000 a month and beyond. These questions are going to cover a variety of topics from the systems themselves, the no code platforms, how to set up accounts, then how to actually start marketing with a little bit of money in your pocket. I'm going to do them Blackboard style and essentially what I've done is gone through my YouTube source the most popular questions that I found and just added them to this tool so that I

can draw on it and kind of explain my concepts visually. So the very first one's from study motivation 6838. They say, "How do I do outreach and get faster results if I'm willing to spend $100 or more on it? Should I do Loom videos or should I do assetbased approaches or should I send via automation? " So, what they're asking, just to make a long story short, is how would you start an AI agency today with a hundred bucks? And I like the hundred bucks answer. I just answered this on my daily updates channel, which is basically like a daily vlog channel. And I thought that this would be a great option for our first question cuz 100 bucks obviously it means different things to different people. But I think it's a good litmus test for how committed you are to get up and running with a business. Right? If you backtrack 5 10 or 20 years, businesses cost a lot more than 100 bucks to get up and running. So if you got 100 bucks and you're willing to invest in an AI agency, I think that that's a reasonable amount. That's something that can push you very far. So how would I actually go about doing this? Well, I would actually focus less on the AI agency part and more on the lead genen first. Okay. So, what I'm going to talk about is exactly the tools that I would use today for lead generation to get up and running as coste effectively as possible. And hopefully, we're going to leave some money in your pocket. So, the very first thing we need to do is we need to set up some sort of cold email system. Cold email obviously being the ability to send a large volume of outbound emails to strangers, incite their interest, nurture them, and then turn them into paying clients. This is repeatable, reliable, and there's very low cost per meetings right now relative to most other lead generation approaches. exactly how I would get up and running with this. I'd use this tool called cheapinboxes. com. I'm not affiliated with these guys, but they have by far the least cost mailboxes currently on the market. They're three bucks a month per mailbox. Every mailbox gets you between 20 or 30 outbound emails a day as the time of this recording, and they're all based on Google Workspace, which is awesome. If you guys scale up, you guys can actually get them for cheaper. So, 100 inboxes times this would be $250 for the ability to send about uh 3,000 emails a day. And then um you know if you go past a th000 inboxes you're at $2 per month. So it's 2,000 for the ability to send 30,000 emails a day. Needless to say, even with a few percentage points of reply rate, you guys could run several businesses worth with just the starter plan. From there, I'd hook up all these mailboxes to a tool called Instantly, which is the current best practice cold email sender, and you'll basically have state-of-the-art best performing cold email infrastructure for less than maybe $50. From there, I would use a lead aggregator service called Apollo. Now, Apollo is just a way that you can put in some parameters like the company vertical, like the title, like the location, like the industry, and stuff like that, and then get a big list of people that you might want to be able to pitch and sell your services to. And then Apollo leads cost a fair amount of money. So, what people are doing these days is they're actually scraping those Apollo leads using a service like Appify, which is sort of just like a data extractor, which allow you to pump in a URL with all of those people and then extract a bunch of email addresses, which is pretty cool. So, I've already done the math here in terms of how much it costs. If you guys get instantly, you guys are

paying 37 bucks. If you get two sending domains, you're paying 20 bucks. That's 57. If you get mailboxes via cheap inbox, it's 15 bucks. So, I think 62 or something like that now. And then finally, if you scrape a bunch of leads from Apollo via Apify using the service that I talked about earlier, you're going to be able to send about 1,500 emails in your first month. It's going to cost you three bucks. And the total is going to be somewhere around 75 bucks. Okay? I'm leaving a little bit of a buffer here because obviously uh the way that AI automation agencies work is you need to be able to automate stuff. So you're going to have to get a couple of additional tools. like a make. com subscription or self-host using naden, whatever tools you want, obviously. Okay, so that's our cold email right off the bat. And that's the very first and most effective thing that I'd set up. And why do I start with lead genen? Because if you don't have leads in a business, you don't have the ability to sell to people, you don't have a business. You just have something fun that you do for yourself on the weekends. Ultimately, we're about making money with the stuff. So, if we're going to have a business, let's start where it matters with the leads. The next thing I do is I get up and running some sort of video DM approach. What are video DMs? Well, basically these are like modern cold calls. You know how back in the day you would if you wanted to reach somebody at some business, pick up the phone, dial their number, and then give them some canned pitch. I'm sure we've all seen Wolf of Wall Street or something like that. Um, basically today's version of that is video DMs, usually using a platform called Loom. Now the benefit to videos are they are asynchronous. Okay, big benefit here is that they're asynchronous. What async means is that when you send the video, the other person on the other end of the line does not have to be around to watch that video. They could go, you know, maybe they're swimming or something or they're spending time with their kids. When they come back to their email inbox and they see your video, then they could watch it. The value of this over something like cold calling is hard for me to state. Back when I was cold calling with my very first digital marketing agency, Pacific Creative Group. Uh boy, I think this is five or six years ago now, maybe even longer, I would do between 50 to 80 either door knocks or cold calls every single day. And we kept that up for about a year. Now, these were awesome and they obviously landed us some results. I mean, if I didn't, I wouldn't have been able to scale that business to about $100,000 a year. Um, not massive, but also nothing trivial as well, as I'm sure you guys can imagine if you're just getting started with the stuff. But what I noticed is of the 50 and 80 of these cold calls that I did a day, more than half of the people that I would reach out to simply weren't available. If I made 50 calls, 25 of those calls literally would either not pick up or they would just be busy. So asynchronous video DM solves that. You get all the benefit of customizing your outreach. So having a real human being on the other end of the screen, you get to avoid any sort of asynchronous problem. And anecdotally, I also find that I get a lot more respect when I do this because I'm not really intruding on somebody's time. Okay. And it's a lot more scalable because I don't have to set aside a certain amount of my time in order to to do it. I don't have to set aside like a three-hour cold call block. It's actually more like, hey, you know, I have 5 minutes free before my next meeting. Why don't I send out a video DM really quick? Okay, so the best way to do video DMs, and by the way, this is what like everybody in every major marketing program or like agency accelerator or whatever is preaching right now. You basically just send like 50 of these puppies a day and eventually you make a ton of money. But what I recommend for this is this free platform called Loom. Loom is essentially if I click on this button, my Chrome extension here, see how there's a little window that just popped up in the bottom lefthand corner of my screen. This is just using my different camera, but this just allows you to do a bunch of stuff. You get to basically screen record just like I'm doing right now. And then after you're done with the screen recording, you just have a link. The benefit of the link is you could send that via any social media platform. Facebook DM, you could send that via Instagram XDM, you could send that via LinkedIn, right? And the value here is you are now capable of basically putting yourself, your personality, and you in front of another person and then pitching them on how you can solve a problem that they're suffering from. And if you keep your outreach at under 5 minutes, you can do it completely free. Cost you nothing. Okay, first of all, we had cold emails. Second video DM approach. And the last one I would probably do with the remaining maybe 20 bucks or so you have is Upwork. you guys are unfamiliar, Upwork is a really fun jobs platform that I've been pitching non-stop over the course of the last couple years because it's made me about $500,000 just on the platform alone, but significantly more if you take into account a lot of the serendipity and business relationships and whatnot that I've have. And essentially what Upwork is just a place where people post jobs for services that they are looking to have done for them. Okay? Okay. And if you want to start an AI and automation agency, that's one of the easiest, simplest, and best ways to go about doing it. Because as a total beginner, you usually don't know too much about sales to be completely honest. And so, a lot of the things that would normally trip up a beginner salesperson, like understanding what a problem is, understanding how to pitch a solution, understanding how to like really press a painoint and stuff like that, Upwork sort of takes care of for you because all you're really ever dealing with is just a list of jobs posted by people that have money in their hands that are willing to pay. So, there is a trade-off. Obviously, this costs a little bit of money, but Upwork is one of the simplest and easiest ways to get up and running that I've found. And uh usually it's going to cost you, I don't know, like a few bucks every time you make a request for a job app. So, because of a 20 or maybe $25 buffer here, you might actually be able to send out eight or 10 apps. Here's some example math. This is example math that I posted on my daily updates channel um just the other day. So, if you want to go more into detail on that, just check out uh my daily updates channel. That's um NickSarif Daily over here where I basically do Q& A every single day. You know, if you guys spend $100, if you're committed, and if you guys are consistent with how you do the outreach, you do them every single day for a long enough period of time, okay? You might get something like 1500 outbound emails with a 3% reply rate leading to 45 replies. 20% of those being positive, positive enough to land a meeting, leading nine leads, 10% closing rate, which might be one client or so. And then, let's say you close a deal for $3,000. You've invested a h 100red bucks and a bunch of your time to be clear, for maybe 2 or 3,000 bucks in Rev. Okay, it's not actually that scary. I know that this is just math that I'm putting on the screen, but if you guys want to check this sort of thing out for yourself, definitely check out Maker School, which is my community, where we basically get like five people making a wins post like, "Holy crap, I just made my first $2,000 client today. " And that happens every day. So, focus on speed over tools. Um, get revenue flowing before worrying about perfecting stuff and reinvest all of your profits into better tools and systems. This is exactly what I would do if I were in your shoes. Next question. Milan Joe Chickic, I hopefully I'm not butchering him, says, "What kind of automations do

you recommend for beginners to sell? Thanks for making educational, actually useful videos. " Thank you. And that question in a nutshell is basically, "What beginner automations are the easiest ones? Like, what should we actually get up and running with? " Now, I've listed a bunch over here, but I'm actually going to just run you through a few tabs that I have open with simple no code tools like Make. com and NAN, and run you through what I would consider some of the easiest and simplest automations to get up and running selling today. The first is a simple email categorization system. This was built in make. com. As you guys could see, that's what the purple on the lefth hand side looks like. If you guys are using NAND, we got a couple Nad ones in a second. Just hold your horses. Essentially, what this email categorization system does hopefully, I mean, it's in the name. It helps categorize emails as they come in. A lot of people really like this, believe it or not. And believe it or not, this is a very big point of value, especially for founders that are just swimming and drowning in uh in too many emails. The way it works is we catch new emails using this web hook module. We then um get to the email using a Gmail call and then we have an AI module. This little logo here is for OpenAI actually categorize the email into one of a variety of categories. So uh the categories that I'm using for this system for instance are sponsorship requests. In my case, I get a lot of people asking me, hey Nick, would you like to be sponsored for whatever I don't do sponsorship requests? Kind of cart blanch on my channel. So I just say no and then I pump them in here. Uh people selling me stuff, invoices and receipts. And then finally, a category called worthwhile where I actually get, you know, emails from people that I respond to. Terms of what this actually looks like, you can see inside of my Gmail, I have a people selling me stuff category, invoices and receipts, sponsorship requests. Basically, every time a new email comes in, we just categorize them into the right label and then, you know, a founder or in my case, me or maybe the business owner that you're selling this to just doesn't have to worry about stuff unless they're in the labels that they're actually interested in. Okay, simple, quick, and easy system. This thing takes less than 5 minutes to set up realistically if you know what you're doing. It's just linear. but there's one route and it's mostly as you guys see here just email modules um combined with one open AI call. Another really quick and easy system to set up is that same thing in NADN. NAD is built a little bit differently than make. com. But if you guys want to see what that same system looks like here, it's just replaced with a Gmail trigger and then instead of um that one open AI node, we're using what's called a text classifier. And then I just have a bunch of different categories. Your transactional emails, invoices, and receipts, cold outreach, sponsorship, blah blah. Basically, what'll happen is we'll put the email body inside of this text classifier. and then it'll just say, "Hey, this email seems to me like an invoice. " If that occurs, it goes down this invoices and receipts pathway, then finally just gets marked as red and kind of labeled. Another simple make. com scenario that you could sell to basically anybody with virtually no experience whatsoever is an automatic invoice collection system. Now, uh most businesses these days still operate off of manual invoices. So, let's say you're working with like an accountant or some sort of B2B manufacturing company or something. Usually the way it works is, you know, you're going B2B. they will perform a service for somebody else and then they will send them an invoice. Okay? And the only way that their company grows, they make money is if the person on the other end of the line actually pays that invoice. But a big issue in any sort of agency or any sort of like uh higher ticket service is usually it takes people a long time to pay that invoice. And believe it or not, a lot of people forget to pay invoices. So founders and business owners and salespeople have to commit a large portion of their day to literally just following up mindlessly about an invoice that was done. Well, this is a simple system that I whipped up in maybe 20 minutes or so on my channel either last year or a few months back. I forget exactly where this one is that literally just goes through a list of invoices and then it checks to see what day it currently is. And then if it's been, I don't know, 7 days since that invoice was sent, then it just creates a draft and follows up. If it's been 14 days, then it just creates a draft with different language. If it's been 21 days, it creates a draft with different language. It's been 28, 35, 42. Obviously, it just changes the language so it doesn't seem like you're sending the exact same templated email. Okay, pretty simple and straightforward. Here's a quick example of just a Google sheet with a bunch of invoices. You could take the same data source from anything, QuickBooks, you could do Stripe, you could do, I don't know, Wave Apps, you could do more or less any invoicing platform that allows you to list the invoices, which is most of them. Okay? And then you just have logic that checks to see what day it is and how many days it's been since before sending over an email that looks something like this. Hey, Nick. Hope you're doing well. Just wanted to check in on the invoice I sent over last week. Let me know if you have any questions. Does this seem like it's a major game changer? No. But a lot of the time, the highest ROI systems in life are those that don't seem like major game changers. They just help somebody take care of something that was draining, I don't know, 10 or 15% of their energy on a weekly basis. So, business owners really love this stuff, which is great. And this actually drives a revenue increase, which I also like. Another system that you guys could sell, this one's built in NAN, is an AI podcast repurposing engine. Basically, what this allows you to do is it just allows you to pump in any podcast or any long form piece of content into a simple form in NAND. After you pump it into this naden form, essentially the system is going to go and convert this YouTube URL into just a bunch of social media posts for you. Okay, the social media posts are pretty simple. They include images, they include text, and so on and so forth. And then the person can either post them manually to their profiles or they could automate the process with some sort of automated post system. I've shown how to do this just about a week or two ago. So, if you like this sort of thing, just check out my videos and type in AI podcast repurposing engine Nick. You'll find it. The last one is a video I just did the other day on a super simple but very high ROI system that's picking up a lot of steam recently. That's called assetbased cold outreach where basically you will scrape customer data using the two platforms I talked about earlier, Apollo and Ampify. Then you'll scrape their website. You'll extract a bunch of data from their profiles and from their website. Then you'll pass them through AI to generate a newsletter. This newsletter is then basically built as a custom asset where you show your value. You say, "Hey, I just built you this really cool newsletter. If you like this sort of thing, I have systems that allow you to generate these on demand, hundreds, if not thousands per day. And I know that giving value upfront is how you get ahead in this industry. So, here is the newsletter. Take it and do whatever you want with it. I'm not going to charge you a scent. Okay? So, hopefully you guys see there are a variety more systems over here. But any of these systems that improve your revenue, okay, or impact your margins positively are typically the simplest and the easiest for beginners to sell. Obviously, bonus points if the system itself is linear and maybe five or six modules. We saw a couple of them above, but generally the simplest and easiest ones to sell are the ones where you can justify the return on investment. You tell a business, "Hey, if you pay me $1,000 this system, okay, I'm estimating it'll make you $5,000 in return. " Obviously, it's hard to be uh blunt like that, if you don't have good experience, if you aren't very confident in the systems, you haven't sold them before. But when you get to that point, you'll find that pitching a product as a return on investment is the best way of going about scaling any sort of business. All right, another big

question I'm receiving is, should I niche down or go broad with building my agency? This was asked by Francisco Bu Martinez. He said, "Is LeftClick oriented toward a specific niche? " He's talking about my own agency, Leftclick. AI. We have a small AI agency and we're still in the custom projects phase. We're trying to pick a niche, but nothing seems to fit. He then goes on to ask me about how I'm doing my niche and so on and so forth. But to make a long story short, Francisco is basically saying, "Hey, do we niche down or do we go broad when building? " This is a really interesting question. There's actually a fair amount of nuance. So, the usual piece of advice here is you should niche down whenever possible and extraordinarily deep. And I understand when people say stuff like that. Uh, I get why. It becomes a lot easier to sell to a target audience if you're niched really, really deep down in it. That said, there's some nuance. The nuance is if you're a total beginner and you're just getting started, not just with AI and automation agencies, but with business in general, odds are you don't actually know how to pick a very good niche. So, my recommendation for you is don't just pick one niche, pick multiple niches. Okay? What I mean by this is you could pick three niches instead of one. Let's say you do SAS companies, software as a service. Let's also say you do agencies, so I don't know, B2B agencies or something. And let's also say that you work with um I don't know, MSPs or something like that. Okay, managed service providers. These are all acronyms. I know they're kind of annoying, but you tend to pick them up when you do enough of the stuff. Okay, so what you're thinking right off the top is well Nick, if I go into three niches, that's three times the work. How am I going to, you know, get all the benefits of just being super focused into one? Well, I recommend that you do three niches and you do it for 90 days and you just test and figure out which one works the best. Because as a beginner, if you put all your eggs in one basket and if you make a calibration error at the very beginning, which you're much more likely to do, you'll basically you won't have wasted 90 days, but the likelihood of you receiving some sort of positive feedback in your first 90 days is a lot lower. And in addition, three niches is not 3x the work. Okay, a lot of people think three niches is 3x the work, but it's not. Realistically, as an automation agency, a lot of the services you're going to sell to a SAS company are going to be able to be sold to agencies. And a lot of the services that you're going to sell to agencies, you could sell to managed service providers and vice versa. So, there's a lot of overlap. In reality, three niches is maybe 1. 5 times the work. Okay? Now, what is this? This means we get to pick three times the niches. We have three times the likelihood of success for just 50% more work. So, it's like 300% results for 150% the work. This is what we call leverage. And leverage is the name of the game in AI automation and just business in general. When you find free wins like this, you should take them. So to answer Francisco's question, my recommendation is that you niche down, but you niche for a pre-committed period of, let's say, 90 days, and you test three different niches simultaneously at the end of this approach. Okay, after your 90-day period, then pick the highest performer. Now, we do a slightly accelerated version of this in Maker School just because we send significantly more emails and because I'm assuming that people are significantly more motivated to do it than maybe some casual YouTube viewers that haven't put money down. I'm keeping this at 90 days for you. In Maker School, it's just 35 or 40 days or something like that before you do that process. If you guys like that accelerated approach, then definitely check out the program. All right, what other sorts of questions do we have? This lovely one from Gabrielle EQ9PR, what a lovely name. Says, "Hey Nick

I've been watching your content for a month now and I'm thinking of starting, but I'm wondering for a cold email system that uses instantly and other platforms you have to pay for in order to get benefits out of them. Should I cover the price by charging a small monthly maintenance fee or should I let the client pay? " I'm not sure the last part would please the client. So, in a nutshell, Gabrielle's asking, should clients pay for platforms like Instantly or should I Instantly? hot swap instantly for anything. Panda do make. com nadn right whatever service essentially that you need in order to build out the person's solution should you be paying for it or should the client so this is a nuance question and a lot of people just want to say you do this or you do this but let me give you some explanations here okay here is what happens if you pay okay if you pay your offer is really easy you basically say I do everything if you pay me $2,000 a month I will set up all your accounts for you I will manage those accounts I will build all the software in the accounts. And from your perspective, it's super simple. All you do is you pay my $2,000 a month invoice and everything is hunky dory. Okay. So, what does that mean? It's very low friction. It's very easy for the client to say yes. Okay. Easy to start, I should say. There are fewer hiccups cuz you don't got to deal with, I don't know, like 2FA or whatever. Well, I mean, you still do have to deal with 2FA, but there's like less hiccups and stuff like that. And from the client perspective, everything is bundled and it's simple and it's easy. Okay. Now, there's some cons to that, which I'll get into. Now, let's contrast the pros with if they pay. Now, if they pay, it's higher friction because now they have to spend a little bit more time and energy. They got to uh I don't know, instead of there being just one invoice that they pay every month, now they have to think about adding their card to two or three services, they actually have to sign up for them. But you have lower liability. What that means is you are not taking the risk of having all of these software platforms that you're constantly paying for every month. It also means there's no handoff. I hate to break it to you, but you're not going to be working with all of your clients forever. Sometimes things are going to change. Your needs Client essentially they're not going to want to maintain either a monthly relationship with you or something like that. What that means is you're going to need to hand off the tools and the software platforms if you're the one that's paying for them, right? So, if you guys have them take on all of the payments and all of the account setups and stuff like that initially, you just never have to worry about that. Also, if they pay, I like to think it's a little bit more ethical. Now, some people would disagree with me on this, but I want you just to think about it from the customer perspective. Let's say you build an awesome system and the system delivers a really big ROI and 3 months down the line you stop putting in the good work. Okay, but because you've built systems for that client for 3 months, they've slowly added more and more things to it. Now, if the client says, "Well, you know what? Nick really isn't putting in his fair share of the deal. I don't really think he's, you know, delivering me the value that he said he would, but at this point, half of my freaking business runs off of his Make. com account or NAN account. " What sort of perspective do you think that client is going to have? Do you think it's going to be a positive perspective? negative perspective? What sort of vibe is that relationship going to be like? I say this because I firmly believe against the use of, I guess, dark patterns in keeping a client on board. The last thing I want is for a client to feel like they need to keep paying me or else I'm just going to take away all their services, which to be honest is the unspoken implication here. I think that this sort of thing works. And I get a lot of questions to this nature. Well, Nick, shouldn't I pay for everything so that if the client wants to leave, I can kind of dangle that over their heads? But I've just never found this to be very conducive to like a long-term business relationship. I also don't really think that's beneficial from a reputational perspective. I much prefer to have like a rising seafloor where it's like I need to continuously provide a ton of value to that client and if I can't justify the value, if I can't deliver multiples on it, then they'll let me go because there's no additional incentive there. And you might think that that's not being strategic, but I like to think that's actually being very strategic because it forces me to continuously provide better and more and more value. Okay. So now that you know both sides and you know some of the pros and some of the cons, what do I do? I let the client pay for everything. I in fact actually set up a simple kickoff call with the client that's usually half an hour to maybe 45 minutes where when they sign up and they pay and money changes hands. I tell them, hey, I'm going to need you to sign up to three platforms over the course of the next 15 or 20 minutes or so. Then we're going to cover timelines. chat expectations and I'm going to be here on video call, so I'll be able to walk you through the sign up. By the end of it, you're going to know everything that you need to know in order to manage this. You're also going to have all the billing details and stuff like that set up. You're going to have total control over the platforms. And if you have any questions, you want to hot swap me with somebody else or you want to get your team members in here, whatever, you'll know how to do all that. Does that sound good? Okay, great. Let's get started. I get to basically kick off the relationship in my opinion on a pretty good foot. And then I also have no liability. There's no handoff needs. It's ethical. And despite that higher friction, I actually kind of treat this like an opportunity. Okay? And that opportunity is just to, you know, empower the client and make them feel like I have their best interest at heart, which ultimately I do. So that is how I personally do things. This is a very hot button issue. I see a lot of people asking this question all the time. There are some nuances here, but yeah, you get to create cleaner business relationship boundaries, give them ownership, and then also eliminate handoff headaches. So check this out. There's one more thing. You also get affiliate revenue. H yes. So in addition to all of these other four benefits, you can also just have the client sign up to an affiliate link that you provided. you frame yourself as a partner, which you are for a lot of these services. So, if you're an instantly partner, a Make. com partner or something, you actually get to leverage that, use that in order to usually give them some benefit, like a free month of Make. com or something like that or some discount for the service. So, you actually get to align incentives while you actually make more money. And in practice, when I was at the peak of my agency, this is somewhere between 3 to 5% free margin. Think about it. On a $72,000 a month agency, that's crazy. 3 to 5% margin could be the thing that separates you from an agency that fails and then an agency that succeeds. Now, if you did want to take that other approach and by all means, go for it. Just add a markup to that because you're doing additional work for the client, you might as well make a little bit of money. Anyway, that's my take on it. That's personally what I do and that's what I would recommend. All right, next

question is from Thought Vision. Nick, do you see any way to do this for someone with zero code experience? Are there any true no code offerings that could achieve this? Now, thoughtfision here, lovely candid flag by the way, um is basically saying if you have zero code experience, zero technical experience, if you are, I don't know, technically challenge, you just have a lot of trouble getting into this stuff, can we still do it? And if so, what is the best learning path for someone with zero programming experience? So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to run you through exactly what I would do if I were in your shoes right now and starting with zero technical experience. Now, to be clear, I have technical experience now. I spent the better part of the last five years or so uh five and a half years learning how to program and learning how to code uh learning how no code platforms work drag and dropping modules with make. com learning nadn learning AI and prompting and so on and so forth so I am sitting from kind of a privileged position here on my ivory tower or my golden throne but I want you to know that it is entirely doable and this is exactly what I would do if I were in your shoes I would start with make. com that's that purple platform that we were looking at earlier see how colorful it is and how friendly it is well it's colorful and friendly because it's easy and it's supposed to be introductory. It's supposed to ease people with no technical experience into building actual no code flows. Okay. Now, my recommendation for how to get up and running with that is watch my freemake. com playlist at nixmake. com. Now, I don't actually think nixmake. com works yet. Just double check. No, it does not. We are attempting to get that up and running. So, if it's not up by the time that you guys check this out, just type nicks arrive. com playlist. It is that easy. You will be directed to make for people who want to make real money. From there, you will have about 59 hours or something like that of make. com footage where I run you through everything from first principles aka what the dashboard looks like, what automations are, how to fire a web hook, what are the basics, what are every function, and I do it all with my cringy purple text thumbnails to accompany. Okay, so that is what I would do. That's how I get up and running ASAP. While watching, I'd focus on learning these key concepts. First is APIs, next is web hooks, the third is prompt engineering, and the last is test-driven development. I'd consider these probably the most important parts of automation as a service. And then if I just had a couple tips for it, it would be don't get stuck in theoretical learning. So build actual client-f facing automations. What I mean by this is don't just watch me do stuff. Actually like build alongside me. Like open up your make. com builder when I open up my make. com builder and then like instead of just watching me drag and drop the modules, actually drag and drop your own. Pause the video every 2 minutes or something like that just to try and recreate what I did. If you do this, you'll learn a lot faster than if you simply watch and passively consume the material. Active engagement is pretty necessary to learning. I know it's a little bit more work, but it's really not that much more work. You were going to spend 60 hours watching this stuff anyway. You might as well get two or three times the benefit from it, right? A couple of other resources you can check out like 80% of a automation in 30 minutes. Well, 29 minutes and then yeah, just try and apply what you learn immediately, even if it's imperfect. Your skills will compound quickly if you're solving real problems. The distance between you right now, okay, and then somebody that builds systems on a regular basis, aka an automator, I don't even know if that's a real word, but that's what we're rolling with. Might just be two weeks or so. Okay, even if you have zero coding experience, and I know some of this stuff will seem intimidating, it might only take you about two weeks of self-learning to actually get to the point where you could build business systems, maybe even less for some of you guys that have some technical experience. Okay, when I say some, I just mean like, you know, knowing how to use Excel or, I don't know, formulas and Google Sheets, that sort of stuff. So, the bar is actually pretty low. It's just about the agency and the ability to consistently execute. That's really like the barrier to entry in this industry. All right. Okay. Next great question comes from the lovely uh Tris 10J. He says, "Another question I

have is, how do you even crush tasks so fast? What's your strategy? I'm struggling in this finish duty/task fast. Took me 3 days to complete my website using Livable. I know for a fact that's too long. Sort of embarrassed. First of all, man, you don't got to be embarrassed at all because you're still making progress. You're still moving forward. And the vast majority of the people that you are comparing that you should be comparing yourself with, realistically, they're not moving forward at all. Like, you're comparing yourself against probably like the nicest, most manicured people that you see on YouTube and Instagram and all these social media platforms. Of course, they're going to move fast, right? because the cream bubbles to the top or whatever. Their strategies are what allowed them to uh for the most part, you know, succeed. But, you know, if you're at the start line of your business, you don't have all those strategies yet. You need to learn these strategies. So, it's totally natural that, you know, you can't do things as quickly as you're seeing other people do them or whatnot. If you just zoom out a little bit and realize that the vast majority, like 90% of the world is basically doing nothing, by nature, just by default, you're already in the 10% that does something. So, um, don't let that kind of get in your head. All right. Now, in terms of practical tips, basically the way that the market works today is that speed beats perfection more or less every time. What I'm seeing a lot of people do is probably because I don't know, just the way that media makes businesses out to be, they spend all this time planning. Okay? lining up the perfect sniper rifle shot. My Canadian is showing it. I don't even know how to do a sniper rifle, but uh they spend all their time trying to like get the aim right and the pitch and the winds and all the stuff so that their one shot is perfect, right? What inevitably happens though is the world moves so dang quickly that all that time they spent planning to take a shot over here becomes out of date because by the time they take that shot the target has already moved. Instead, what you want to do is you want to focus on feedback. So it's a very interesting concept that I saw earlier and saw this somewhere on Twitter and that's that feedback wins out over planning every time. Now what this means is instead of spending all your time planning and thinking, spend your time doing and then get results. Okay? Once you have some sort of result, make some change. Then go do it again. Then you'll get more feedback. And then once you have a positive feedback loop, you'll be able to make changes and keep up with the market and ultimately grow a lot faster than if you were just a plan. All right? Like if you think about it, let's say I'm on some big land. I don't know. This is I'm trying to think in American terms because it's probably what most people would understand, right? So I don't know, New York. I think that's on the eastern seabboard. Hopefully it is. Then over here is Portugal. Okay. Now, let's hypothetically say this over here is the Atlantic. You're taking a ship. Okay. And the port that you are attempting to get to is over here. And you're starting over here. Now, you're on you're on your boat. Okay. This is a really long distance. I can hardly even fathom in my head, my little puny human brain, how big of a distance it is between the east coast of the West and then the west coast of Europe. But it's massive. If you're a boat and you spend all your time kind of right over here at the very beginning trying to work out the perfect angle to go in order to get all the way over here. How likely do you think it is that you'll actually make it? Not very likely. There are a lot of things you have to contend with. There's the wind, there's the water, there are the rapids and the waves. There are changes that are occurring all the time essentially is what I'm trying to get to. And if you try and plan everything out in advance, the likelihood that you will be able to predict all of these dynamic systems before you actually take any sort of movement is very low. So what'll actually happen and what I see a lot of people do is they spend months or years thinking what direction am I going to go in? And then they finally figure something out, okay? And when they figure it out, they're actually pretty close. But what you see is, okay, over a long enough distance, being pretty close still isn't enough. Even if you're, you know, 80% of the way there, given a long enough time, your miscalibration will eventually fire you off, uh, I don't know, 500 km away from where you're trying to aim. Now, a much better alternative to this, okay, instead of spending all this time planning is feedback. What do I mean by this? Well, why don't you just go here for now? Once you're here, why don't you reassess and say, okay, hm, how far are we from the end goal? Hm, what's the weather conditions like? Hm, why don't you change your direction a little bit? Then maybe you go up here. Then you do the same thing over here. And then when you're really close to the point, you're like, "All right, I'm actually pretty close. I'm just going to go in this direction here. " This analogy that I'm trying to make is basically how I think about markets these days. And if you are the sort of person that tries to get everything perfect right off the bat, Tristanj and anybody else that might be watching this, um, the likelihood of you actually making it to your goals is very low. But if you're the sort of person that can just get going, focus on just the 80/20, focus on just moving forward and then calibrating and using feedback in order to adjust your direction. I can hardly explain to what degree that sets you apart from everyone else that's focused on planning. Okay? So get feedback from people. I mean, you know, our version of the rapids and the waves and the winds are users, their customers, their prospects. And drive it by actual people, not your own internal ideas and planning. the more time you spend making something perfect, the more money and opportunity you're leaving on the table because, you know, as the ship proceeds, you're actually making, you know, if this is our business, you're legitimately making a little bit of money here, right? You're like, you're actually making some sort of cash flow. I mean, that I know it's crazy for me to think about, but legitimately on the journey from here to here, you're legitimately making a ton of money. And I think my mouse is broken because I can't seem to draw. Yes, you're actually making money here, right? Why not make money first and then worry about what direction to go afterwards? I guess is to make a long story short. So, focus on a culture of iteration. It'll never fail you. All right, next question from the lovely Read Jammore, who actually just ended up joining Make Money with Make. Um, which I'm really stoked on. Great having you, Read. He says, "Hey, Nick. I always

get the feeling that I don't know enough despite the fact that I almost solely watch and spend time on YouTube educational videos of different creators and entrepreneurs, but it looks like to me that it's never enough. I always find new things, funnels, tools, concepts, frameworks, strategies, and so on that I feel overwhelmed and what I'm doing isn't enough despite the effort I feel I'm putting in to learn. " Now, Riad actually wrote more on this comment, but it's pretty long, so I just compressed it down into what I want to think is like the the core part of it. And to make a long story short, I believe what Riad was asking was, "What is your advice for beginners doing some sort of outreach with zero tech experience? " Sorry, what I meant to say here was zero experience in general. Let's do practical experience. So, you know, how do you actually get up and running with like outreach is like your first move, right? So, u my recommendations for this basically, um, day one, use Upwork and cold email. Don't wait till you're ready. Like I was just explaining Tristan's, create Loom videos for personalized outreach. As I mentioned, they're free if they're under 5 minutes. Stick to free and cheap tools in the beginning. You don't actually need fancy tech to land clients. You don't even need my community don't, you know, obviously I'm incentivized to pitch you on the services that I'm providing because I do earnestly believe that they help you achieve your results faster. But notice that I said I didn't say they help you achieve your results. Okay? you can still achieve all of these results for free uh watching all of my content and then maybe a few other choice people's content. The key is just actually do something with that. Don't just spend all day thinking about it. And then when you are positioning yourself because you have no practical experience, the best way to do it is position yourself as a problem solver, just a general problem solver, not a technology expert. Okay? We want to position ourselves as experts. But in reality, if you have zero practical experience, positioning yourself as an expert is I mean, one, it's a little bit dishonest because you're not actually an expert in whatever domain field it is that you are attempting to present yourself as an expert in, but two, people actually need problem solvers. They don't actually need like technological experts in specific thing. The reality is markets and technology and everything just moves so quickly that as I mentioned, the skill of being able to recalibrate what direction you're going. If we just go back to my little example here, aka solve problems because this is you solving a problem is actually more important than you being such an expert that you can just get it in one shot right off the get- go every time. So nowadays, and I actually pitch myself as a problem solver more than I pitch myself as a, you know, a specific sort of technology expert. I obviously am a technology expert, but that's the icing on the cake. What I really am as a problem solver, and that's what people like me for. All right. Then finally

Muhammad Cassim says, "Nick, question. And if I can handle, let's say, five clients at a time, and I currently have five active clients right now, should I stop my outreach until there are four, or should I keep going at the extra people into a wait list? What Muhammad's basically referring to is, "Hey man, when do I stop outreach? I'm doing a lot of outreach. I'm sending cold emails every day. I'm sending Upwork applications. I'm sending custom videos. I'm just like hustling. I'm busting my ass in order to get these clients, but obviously after a certain point, I'm going to get clients. So, when do I stop? " I have a very interesting point that I'm going to make for you guys and that's that lead genen solves everything. Okay, so my earnest recommendation never stop. What do I mean by solve everything? Well, obviously the lowhanging fruit is if you have no leads, lead genen solves that, right? What if you have too many leads? This is a controversial opinion, but if you have too many leads, if you just do more lead genen, it'll solve your problem if having too many leads. If you are overwhelmed with projects, your project management isn't keeping up. Believe it or not, lead genen is the issue. Uh solution to that issue. Leads legitimately solve everything in your business. Let me run you through my logic. Okay, obviously if you have no leads, Legion solves that, right? But how about let's say if you're feeling really overwhelmed like a Muhammad is here, he's saying, you know, I have five active clients. I'm starting to get really busy. I don't really know what to do. Well, the reason why you have five active clients right now is because you had to take them on. you had to accept because when you don't have a lot of clients and leads, you are in by default a position of scarcity. I'm sure you guys have heard this term before. What that means is let's say you have five leads. One of them is willing to spend $10. Another $50. $20. And then this last one here is willing to spend, I don't know, $40. Let's say your capacity is three. So you can only select three clients at a time. If your capacity was three, which client would you pick? Which ones? Well, obviously you pick the $40, the $50, and the 21, assuming that the work that they're asking for is similar or the same, right? So, Muhammad's in that position except he has five clients. And the thing is, he only has I I presume, you know, this many options, right? So, if he has this many options, what's he going to do with the new ones? He's going to take the $15 one, then $25 one. He's going to leave this 101, right? He's saying, "I'm really bottlenecked. I'm capped. You know, I can't go any further than Well, let me present a different hypothetical. What if Muhammad's cap was five clients? Okay, then what if he had the exact same number? Let me just copy and paste this down here. But then he also had some clients paying him $100, $150, some clients paying him $2,000 or willing to pay $2,000, then one client willing to pay $3,000. Okay, this stuff all adds up to, I don't know, like 150 bucks or something in total. But if he just reached out to more leads and if he got more leads in his pool, he would eventually be able to select the ones that pay a disproportionate amount of money. Which means if he wanted to make 10 or 15 times the 150 bucks, he could actually do so instead of working with five clients, just working with one client. You guys kind of see what I'm saying here? I'm saying that the reason why you're in a position where you feel overwhelmed is because you have to by nature accept every opportunity that you're given, even if every opportunity does not pay you a lot of money. But if you're in a position of privilege where you have access to 50 leads, you can actually pick and choose the best ones. You could ones that pay you the most money for the least work. So sure, you may be overwhelmed right now, but the second you wrap these projects up and start some new ones, you'll find that the work just gets incrementally easier over time. And the hard reality is that I don't think a lot of people at the start line understand is that there are a lot of golden goosees out there if you know where to look. There are a lot of people out there that are willing to spend $10,000 for a service that you might have been fulfilling for somebody else for $500. There's a 20x multiple there between the two. You work 20 times less for the same amount of money if you get the $10,000 client versus the $500 client. A lot of that depends on your ability to sell, which is sort of like confirmation bias. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy. But if you're in position of scarcity, you're going to be left holding the short straw. Awesome. Hopefully you guys

appreciated that video. I had a ton of fun putting it together. If you guys like these sorts of question and answer videos, just let me know down below. I have full belief that this will not perform as well as other videos, but I think the actual value of the knowledge that you're receiving is probably on par, if not higher with others. So, if there's enough demand for it, I'm happy to pump a couple more out. If you guys like seeing my questions and answers, feel free to jump into Maker School and get 10x more of it. This is basically all I do all day inside of the community. I custom respond to text posts. I record Loom videos, roasting your assets, and I do a lot more. or I've shown up every day for something like 200 days in a row now. I think that's one of the reasons why we're at the top of the school games leaderboards. If you guys already have a business, you guys want to take it the next level with some of the more scaling tips that I've talked about here, check out Make Money with Make. We just crossed 435 members with a new cap at 500 and we are significantly increasing the prices every 20 members that we get in. Thank you very much. Like, subscribe, do all the fun YouTube stuff, and you guys are still with me at the end. You're real ones. Looking forward to seeing you