# How To Build a Profitable AI Business in 2025 (For Beginners)

## Метаданные

- **Канал:** Nick Saraev
- **YouTube:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQcXmY6rSVY
- **Дата:** 14.04.2025
- **Длительность:** 49:14
- **Просмотры:** 36,185
- **Источник:** https://ekstraktznaniy.ru/video/12321

## Описание

Join Maker School & get automation customer #1 + all my templates ⤵️
https://www.skool.com/makerschool/about?ref=e525fc95e7c346999dcec8e0e870e55d

Want to work with my team, automate your business, & scale? ⤵️
https://cal.com/team/leftclick/discovery?source=youtube

Watch me build my $300K/mo business live with daily videos + strategy ⤵️
https://www.youtube.com/@nicksaraevdaily

Excalidraw I used in this video ⤵️
https://excalidraw.com/#json=ivVWXlNvrvJtyZoP2087y,wL1_NX2569ibCUQobtztEg

Summary ⤵️
A step-by-step guide to launching a lean AI automation agency in 2025—starting with clientless income, then scaling to $12K/month through cold email, Upwork, and fast execution.

My software, tools, & deals (some give me kickbacks—thank you!)
🚀 Instantly: https://link.nicksaraev.com/instantly-short
📧 Anymailfinder: https://link.nicksaraev.com/amf-short
🤖 Apify: https://console.apify.com/sign-up (30% off with code NICK30)
🧑🏽💻 n8n: https://n8n.partnerlinks.io/h372ujv8cw80
📈 Rize: https://link.n

## Транскрипт

### Introduction []

Hey, today I'm going to show you how to build a profitable AI and automation business in 2025. Even if you're a complete beginner and have no prior skills, no business knowledge, you have no idea what you're doing. If you guys have been sitting on the sidelines for a while waiting for a sign to get into this business model, treat this as your sign. I'm going to walk you guys through everything you need to know from start to finish. And this business model works if you are using naden or make. com or I don't know, OpenAI or Claude or AI agents or not. whatever tools that you guys are using to do the AI and automation, that part is not relevant. What is relevant is the business pipeline that I'm about to run you guys through. Very first thing right off the

### 1. Clientless Money [0:35]

bat, this was not around when I started my AN automation agency, but it is for you. And uh what I'm calling this is clientless money. There are a lot of very lowhanging fruit where if you just take advantage of some of these at the very beginning of your AN automation business, you will essentially instantly be making 10ish% more margins than all other competing AI and automation businesses. And what I'm going to do in the next few minutes is I'm just going to guide you through what these strategies, tools, and techniques are. They work as of the time of this recording. If you're watching this in like five years or something, likelihood is these tools will have changed the way that they do their business. But yeah, let me just give you guys all the secret sauce. And if you watch this within a few months of this video going live, this will probably work for you. Okay, so just before I show you guys the pipeline

### Affiliate Programs [1:15]

basically the way that this is going to work is we are going to sign up to a bunch of affiliate platforms. Now, a big chunk of this business model is you basically getting clients to sign up to software platforms on your behalf. A lot of these software platforms can cost money. $100 a month, $200 a month, some even cost $300 a month or beyond. Now, if you're driving a very large return on investment for a client, the money that they're spending on the platform doesn't really matter too much to them. You're usually delivering multiples on it. But if they're spending that money to the platform and then there are affiliate platforms or affiliate uh techniques that allow you to take advantage and kind of recoup some of that, why don't we do it? we should probably do it anyway and then we can make a percentage of the money that the client is spending on the platform and just divert a few percentage points to us. In practice, these percentage points can be uh quite hefty. I want to say a lot of the platforms I'm going to show you in this video are going to have 30 to 40% affiliate payouts. So um essentially what we're going to do is we're going to sign up for affiliate platforms for all major tools. So make. com's obviously a big one, nadn's instantly is obviously a big one and so on and so forth. And this is going to create a passive revenue about 5 to 10% on all the tools that your clients ends up using. Um, there is a step-by-step process to get quickly approved for all these programs. I'm going to walk you through what some of those look like. And then I'm also going to cover some other ways that you can save a ton of money right off the bat using what are called coupon aggregators. So, first things first, you want to make some client list money. We're going to start with the affiliate program. So, I listed three here, make, naden, and instantly. Let me just walk you through all of them. There are 20% commission payouts if you sign up to make. You just go to make. com/yen-affiliate for that. There are 30% affiliate program referrals on naden and that lasts for a full 12 months. Just go to wwwv2. naden. io/affiliates. There are 40% recurring commissions for instantly. Just head over to instantly. /affiliate. This is a quick uh little pick of my own dashboard for instantly affiliates. I'm making anywhere between 4 and $5,000 a month US off of this. Now, obviously I'm now uh in the creator space and the coach space. So, the numbers of people that I get signing up to these platforms is a lot higher. But even when I was running my AI automation agency, I was making a good additional 1% margin literally just from this one tool. Uh, so you guys have 10 tools. I'm sure you guys could see how you'd make a bunch more. Let's just blitz fire through a bunch of other ones. Any MailFinder, this is um an email finder service. 30% commission on every referral right over here for 12 months. Appify. This is easily one of the best scrapers out there. And hey Jay, what's going on big guy? Hope you're doing well. Um 30% recurring commission up to 2. 5K per customer. Smart Lead, which is sort of Instantly's main competitor right now. 35% recurring monthly commissions for life. And then there are a variety of other ones. Okay. Now, I have an exhaustive list of every affiliate program, which you guys can find in my school community. Uh if you guys just head over to Maker School, and then you go over to classroom right over here, month two, and then we click on setup five software affiliate links. Down at the bottom, I have this giant list of basically all of the affiliates that I found that work for this business model. So, if you guys want to jump into Maker School and get that for yourself, feel free. Aside from that though, there are a couple of other ways you can make

### Coupon Aggregators [4:13]

a ton of money with this. The first is coupon aggregators. There are two main ones that I like to talk about. The first is called Secret. Other one's called AppSumo. I think most people have heard of this. I don't think a lot of people have heard of this, but maybe that's cuz it's technically a secret. The way that Secret works is essentially they negotiate a bunch of deals with popular software platforms. Considering the whole job of an automation uh service provider is to be like, you know, somebody that glues together a bunch of different software platforms. I think you guys can see the leverage here. So, you know, you could claim up to $6,000 for notion. You could get 6 months free on the plus plan. Wave $20,000 in payment processing for Stripe, which saves up to 500 if you do the math. Uh you get a bunch of free perplexity credits. Uh obviously, there are no code platforms like make where you get, you know, 20 240,000 operations for free. Google Workspace for our emails, web flow, right? I'll let you guys be the judge of this. Um I'm affiliated with join secret. I should let you guys know. So, if you guys choose to use the referral link in the description, just know that I'm going to be making a little bit of money off of that, but essentially, you pay one bulk sum to this platform, I think it's like $150 or something like that. Uh, apologies that I don't have the price off the top of my head, and you um just get access to this giant like coupon library. And then before you even start your business, you're kind of in the black, if that makes sense. You've already made a tiny bit of money off of all of the rest of these software subscriptions. Some of these have signup processes, so you don't actually just receive the coupon immediately. Just make sure to note that. But you can usually sign up multiple times or repeat your signups with just different email addresses or something if you need to. So, a lot of people in maker school and make money with make have taken advantage of the make. com one. So, they've gotten 240,000 operations. That's what the 12 months free um equates to. They've also done a lot of like Air Table stuff and there's Apollo stuff as well. Uh so, I'll leave you guys to that. Aside from that, AppSumo is another big deal aggregator. And basically the way that these guys work is they will give you lifetime um access to a platform. Instead of a monthly recurring SAS cost, you just pay like upfront $69 for a certain um you know, lead aggregator or whatever. And then in this way, you just get to arbitrage. You get to like pay now and then save for the rest of your AI and automation career. I personally don't use AppSumo a ton, but you know, you can also get a bunch of deals and stuff like that here. not affiliated with Absumo whatsoever. I just wanted to point that out because I see a lot of people using it. The way that I set up my AN automation business actually was I created an American company using a service called Stripe Atlas which normally costs um $500. Now I then redeemed a join secret credit for $250. So if you think about it, I also had to spend an additional I think it was $125 at the time. So I spent $125, then I spent $500 to set up my business and then I saved $250. We do the math on that. That's 625 divided by 250. Uh why can't I do that in my head? It's 375. There we go. Okay. After I did the $375, I redeemed $200 worth of uh sorry, $500 worth of Stripe um credits. So, I basically made $500 in all the money that I made later. After that, I also redeemed I think it was something like uh $5,000 in various software credit plat for platforms that I would have had to sign up. And then on top of that, I even uh signed up to a partner bank for Stripe Atlas, which I it's called Mercury. And then they ended up giving me an additional $500 after I deposited 10,000. So, okay, I don't I really don't think I'm going to be able to do the math now. This is 375 minus 6,000. So, you can kind of think of me as being in the black by 5,000. Uh oh, boy. 625, I think. Yeah. So, I was in the black 500 $5,625 before I even got started with my business. How cool is that? So, yeah, just wanted to show you guys that this is like what I would do um if I could start again. I didn't get to take advantage of all of these and I really, in hindsight, wish I had set up all my affiliates earlier, but this is the very first thing I would do if I wanted to get up and running with one of these businesses. You guys can get links to a lot of the stuff in the description, so feel free to check that out. But okay, I'm assuming that you've actually gone through all of this rigomearroll and you've actually signed up and you've got yourself this optimized thing which you know is saving money for people that are complete beginners as I've mentioned and now you guys are ready to actually go out and like do something with the automation knowledge. We have the big trampoline. We're basically just waiting for that double bounce. So uh how do you actually do it? Well, what I do is I build a minimum viable business.

### 2. Build your 'minimum viable business' [8:21]

You know how everybody talks about MVPs? It's like minimum viable product. Well, I call this my minimum viable business MV. So this is the MVB Chad right over here. Okay? And this is everybody else that does all this market research and all this analysis and they spend 5 years getting a business plan together before they actually go out and acquire their first customer. In this video, I'm going to run you through literally my entire minimum viable business strategy for Aon automation. I'll even walk through the specific steps that you guys need in order to get out there and scale up your business. This is working today. This is what people are doing I teach talk about all day. So let's get through it together. The very first thing I do if I'm setting up a minimum viable business, in our case, AI and automation, is I will define a niche.

### Defining your niche [9:04]

Okay? If you do everything for everybody, you technically do nothing for nobody. I believe that was Alex Ramos's famous quote a couple years ago, and it's true. If you are just a general services provider, you will never really get very far. People want to work with companies that understand specific and highly nuanced needs. And if you brand yourself as an Amiration agency that does everything, then the likelihood is you will not be perceived as such. So, you can make a ton of progress right off the bat simply by defining a niche. But you have to make sure you define a niche, right? A lot of people, they'll pick a niche that kind of sucks, okay? Like a really, really crappy niche, and then they'll waste, you know, 90 days or so of their life. I don't know why that's blue. They'll waste 90 days or so of their life just kind of muddling around in mediocrity because their niche itself is bad. I'll run you through some rules for a good niche, but first, the way that I actually go about defining my niche is I actually have a niche discovery exercise. um essentially where I just walk through a ton of different example niches, example service lines, and then I concatenate them together to make example positioning statements. So, what I've done is I've literally just had uh what is this like a list of 42 or 41 different niches or something? I guess 37 in total. And these are all niches that work. They're not the best niches in the whole wide world. Um but if you combine them with various service lines, so let's say you sell sales systems to website developers, well then your positioning statement, your actual niche is very narrow. You know, there are a lot of AI and automation agencies, but there are very few people selling sales systems specifically to website developers. Okay? There are very few people selling finance systems for IT consultants or product development systems for mobile app developers or CRO systems for cyber security people. Okay? If you pick three niches instead of just one, you also get the ability to try and test multiple of these simultaneously with basically no additional sunk cost because when you start one of these niches, you build all the infrastructure to do it. Um, all you need to do it to other niches is you usually just need to duplicate the process a little bit. Okay, so anyway, um, I define my niche. And really, instead of just one niche here, I should have said define three niches. That will make things a lot simpler. So after this, you're going to have three niches, okay? niche A, B, you're going to have niche C. Everything that you're going to do in the program, it's just going to set up one of these niches, okay? But you don't need to do three times the work in order to set it up for B and C. In reality, what it is it's kind of like 1. 5 times the work because you've already done all the hard work setting up the email systems, setting up your profiles, and doing all the outreach and stuff for niche A. In order to replicate that across B and C, you just need to like do a tiny bit more. So, 50% more work for three times the result is definitely free money. I'm always going to take free money when it's offered to me. And this is a really good example of doing so. So, what I would do in your shoes is I would go through this niche discovery exercise top to bottom. add in a bunch of other niches that you think may work based off of principles that I've talked about in previous videos. They tend to be digital first. They tend to have high ticket projects and they tend to be low regulation. So, if you guys find niches or industries that satisfy those uh those constraints, then fantastic. Pick three of them and then all you do is you commit to them for at least a 3-month period and promise yourself you're not going to change this niche before you've explored it fully. Okay? So, that is literally step one. This is what I teach people all the time. This is exactly what I would do if I were at the start line of my business again. Pick three niches. Check. We are now done with that. The second thing I do is I determine a business name. Now, a lot of people make this out to be way more difficult than it really is. I actually set a fiveminut timer and I pick as many business names as I can in a 5minute period. I'll use simple tools like namelics for instance

### Coming up with a business name [12:29]

where I will basically put in a couple of terms and then I will have this service combine them in eight quadrillion different ways. It's a free service at least as of the time of this recording. I've used this for years. I just get a bunch of business names. Agile, Fusion, Stream, Pipelines, Headway, Code, Reduction, Influence, Assus, Drive, Transform Hub, Flowship. Some of these sound incredible, right? What I would do is I would pick 10 that I like. Okay, just 10. You don't need to do any more than that. And then pump these into some sort of domain name finder, something like Pork Bun or NameCheep or something along those lines. I'll show you what that looks like in a second. From there, you can verify whether or not the. com is available, and then you can proceed with the next step. But yeah, I literally set a 5minute timer, find a business name. Whatever your business name is does not really matter. There's like a 0. 00001% of business names will matter. And then 99% of business names won't matter. Then like 1% of business names will just be terrible and you never want your business to be named that. But odds are you're going to be in the 99%. Don't sweat it too much. It's not that important of a decision. Okay. All right. After this, you need to find five

### Find 5 pieces of social proof/case studies [13:29]

pieces of social proof or five case studies. Now, if you don't know what I mean by this, I mean you need pieces of your history, of your corporate experience, of your past that demonstrate that you have done something valuable for somebody at some point in your life. If you don't have this, it's going to be very difficult to get up and running with all the cold email um the Upwork and then the community posting and just the general setting up of all the profiles I'm going to talk about after this. So, my recommendation for you is literally itemize your entire corporate history. A lot of you guys have worked with various jobs. Some very big companies. A lot of you guys have freelance experience. Go through every single one of those. Like I'm talking month by month. Open up your email, okay? And just search what did I send back in January 2022. How about February 2022? What was I talking about? Who was I talking to? And essentially just itemize a giant list of all of the biggest hell yeah look at me that you can find. Okay, I did this for myself just earlier and I came up with a list of five. I decided I wasn't going to use my YouTube well, you know, aside from tangentially the 70,000. I'm not going to use like any monetary things relating to myself. Um, this is what mine looks like. I scaled my own content marketing agency to 92k using AI. I've worked with global names like HP and then I put in brackets the market cap which are 36 billion and Fujitsu 38 billion. I run a YouTube channel on make. com with 70,000 subscribers. That's obviously very big. I've written for insert really big company names over here which are obviously big. Then I've been featured in some high-profile publications like Popular Mechanics and Apple News. Now you're probably looking at this and you're like, "Well, Nick, I'm a beginner. I thought that was the whole point. I don't really have great experience like this. And that's fine. Odds are you guys are going to have some sort of experience. It's not going to be as what's not going to get me banned on YouTube. Ah, screw it. You're not going to have really big dick experience if you're just right off the bat. And that's totally okay. Don't worry too much about that. Just find some experience. Find some value that you've driven for some company. You guys were a salesperson at a business and throughout the year that you were there, you sold $25,000 worth of products. Whether or not that's good compared to all the other sales people in the industry, that doesn't matter. you've actually demonstrated $25,000 worth of revenue value and you should be citing it and saying it wherever possible. So, I generated $25,000 in revenue for a B2B manufacturing company. That's fantastic case. That's a fantastic piece of experience. If you've gone through your whole corporate list and you have nothing, okay, you've just squeezed yourself dry. And to be honest, if you think you have, you probably haven't actually gone through your whole corporate experience. So, pause the video again, go through top to bottom. I guarantee you'll have at least one thing that's somewhat valuable, unless you're like 12 years old and you're just starting on the internet. Now, if you've gone through your entire thing, you don't have anything, then what you can do is you can actually go through my videos, all of my Make. com videos. I have a Make. com playlist called Make for People That Want to Make Real Money. I also have an NAN playlist called NAN for everyone. Go through both of these and then get all of the system blueprints that you can check out my Gumroad. Download them all. Okay? Make a couple of minor changes to them, minor adjustments. Maybe you swap a module here or there. You change one thing from GPT to a claude. Instead of generating Instagram posts, you generate LinkedIn post, something like that. Okay? Convince yourself that you have now materially improved or added on this system and made it yours. Okay? Convince yourself of that. And now when you write your case studies, now you could say stuff like, I built an AI podcast repurposing engine that produces 10 pieces of content uh in, I don't know, 30 seconds. Okay? Then in brackets, you could say estimated savings per piece. you do a little bit of quick math and you say, I don't know, 200 bucks or something like that. Even this is enough to let you go on with that next step. It doesn't have to be perfect. But the point I'm making is basically everybody here that is at this point in the video, you guys have something, okay? Whether you have a really big dick uh accomplishment like you've worked with Microsoft and you're a for ex Google or exfang software engineer or something kind of midterm like me. I scaled my own content marketing agency to $92,000 a month with AI. Or you have something a little bit smaller. I generated some revenue for a company back when I worked with them a few years ago. Or if you have nothing at all, you have at least some sort of example of automation work that you've done like I built a system that does X. I created a system that streamlines Y. Okay. Once you're at this point and you have this

### Buying a domain + sending domains [17:34]

just open up a Google doc and put this somewhere. You are now ready to proceed with the main outreach step, which is you need to buy a main domain and then however many sending domains that you want. So for me to disambiguate here a main domain is something like let's say my business was called circle. Okay and maybe it is who knows man maybe circles that is way too bright. Cirly is really taking over the world. I would do something and you know the term circley is not available. I would get something like circleyworkflows. com. Okay. I would spend I don't know I think this is like $11 or something like that. Right. Let's check circly workflows. I would spend $11 a year on this. Okay. This is going to be your main domain. After you get your main domain, what you want is you also want a bunch of secondaries or sending domains. Okay, there are variety of ways to do this. It's very difficult for me to create a video that is comprehensive and exhaustive and actually covers all the different ways to get up and running with mailboxes cuz there's probably like 20 or 30 as of the time of this recording. I'm just going to mention a couple. Okay, one thing that you can do is you could prepend, which means add text to the left of the uh domain, or post pend, which means um add text to the right of it. Uh you could prepend and postpend words like sendworkflows. com. Okay. Get circleyworkflows. com. Circleyworkflows kit. Circleyworkflows today. go circley workflows list uh anywhere between two to maybe five of these if you guys are complete beginners and then buy those domains too. What this will allow you to do is it'll allow you to have a main domain which is where your brand will live where you know your company will be basically which you'll use when you build your website later, your little online business card. Then it'll also allow you to have a bunch of subsidiaries or sending domains that you could send email from without negatively impacting the domain health or deliverability of your main domain. And this is really important and not a lot of people talk about this, but if you just start sending email straight from your main domain, uh, we're going to be sending a lot of email over the course of the rest of this video or at least talking about it, you're going to trash all of that and then the likelihood that you're actually going to be able to land in somebody's mailbox is very low. And also, who wants to send a bunch of proposals only for them to land in spam later, right? Definitely not me. So that's the um distinction there. Now, this isn't the only way to do things. There are a bunch of these third-party platforms now like zapmail. ai, inboxology. com, cheap inboxes, uh, premium inboxes. There there's so many of these. Okay. What these do is they'll actually go through the rigomearroll and the process of setting up all of the cold email infrastructure for you, usually at a slightly lower cost than if you do a lot of the stuff yourself. But keep in mind that when you do this, you are trusting an additional third party to, you know, deal with your email inboxes and stuff like that. And you also sort of lose out on learning what the process of doing all this stuff is on your own. Inside of Maker School, I personally recommend people still set them up at least once so that they know how to do the setup. And you also just learn a little bit about like, you know, DNS. You how to like verify domains and whatnot. It just adds to your tool stack. Um, because there are a lot of things that rely on these other things and knowing a little bit of that is usually good. But check out those platforms. cost compare if you guys are um on a budget and find one that works for you. Okay. After you are done with that step, what we do is we

### Create/publish your website [20:45]

create or publish a website. And I have three tools here. When I first initially came up with my programs, I was only using Web Flow to make my websites. But now you can use Lovable, you could use Card, you could use Bolt. dev. There are variety of other platforms that allow you to do this stuff. To be honest, a lot easier than my initial pick. And this is just how technology works, right? Things get easier over time. So what's an example of a website? Well, just head over to mine. It's leftclick. ai. Feel free to scroll through it and see how I position myself and branded myself. But some key rules of thumb. I do a lot of roasts of these sorts of websites in maker school and make moneywithmake. com. General rules of

### General rules of thumb for websites [21:17]

thumb are you want less text, not more. Okay? You want the text that you do have to mean something. You want to minimize images on the page that don't actually add to the value of what you are talking about. You want all of the buttons on your website to go to the same place. So, you don't want to have a contact us form and a calendar and an email and a phone number and a snail mail address on your website. That doesn't really help people that are interested in contacting you contact you through their preferred route. That just kind of confuses people. They don't really know what to do. Okay. You generally want some sort of social proof right off the bat. So, in my case, remember how I said I was uh featured in a couple of big publications? So, I just stick these right over here. After that, you want some sort of case study or some sort of like, you know, slap it on the table and just show people what you're made of. So, in my case, I've generated millions for B2B companies like yours with automation and AI. And then, you know, most of you guys at the beginning, the start line will not have case studies, but you're going to want to have some case studies in there eventually. After that, you're going to want to have some quote unquote reviews or testimonials or something. Uh, and then finally, at the end and bottom of your business, then you can start talking services. The number one problem that I see people make is they start with the services. But to be honest, nobody cares about the services you provide. If it says on the header of your website, or at least implies that you do AI and automation, most people at this point, they kind of understand what automation is. They understand what automation does, right? They understand that it's typically involving a no code tool. And you also have to ask yourself, okay, how did they get to my website in the first place? Most of them are finding it on Google. on the website because they saw an email that you sent saying, "Hey, I'm here to sell you AI and automation services or they got sent to it through Upwork or maybe something like that, right? " So, it's kind of like know your audience, right? The most important thing that people are going to be asking themselves right off the bat is who is this person? Why does it matter? Um, and then, you know, how can I get in touch? The services and whatnot. You always stick at the end. And then usually, and this is something

### Should you add pricing to your website? [23:04]

that I do, but usually I will have pricing on the website. I don't actually recommend having pricing on your website if you're a total beginner just because you don't really know how to price. You also like demonstrate your value and it's kind of risky to have a button that somebody can just click and then pay you money for, right? I personally wouldn't recommend it. I recommend just having some sort of funnel that goes to a call or whatnot. So that's it. I always just do onepage websites for this sort of stuff because the way that I see websites nowadays is these are uh business cards, right? These are literally business cards. There is nothing really of value on your website except that it is just a quick showcase of who you are. It implies that you have enough money and enough resources to put something cool together. I guess it's a way to showcase your personality, but for our industry, to be blunt, unless you're running some crazy inbound funnel, which most people aren't, that's all it is. It's not like something that's actively making you money. It's just like a check mark. This person has this requirement of being a business owner. When I used to go door to door way back in the day, and I was going 50 to 80 doors per day with my business partner, we were knocking, pitching people, and getting rejected left, right, and center. One of the most common questions I got from people was, "Do you have a business card? " "Hey, where's your business card? " "Hey, that sounds awesome. I'd love to see your business card. " Did they actually give a about my business card? Basically, none of them did. The only thing is the only thing they wanted to see was that I had spent the requisite amount of time and money to actually go and purchase some business cards. And that was seen as like a way to prove my legitimacy. Okay. If I didn't have a business card, people would just like, really, you don't have a business card and you're coming door to sell some services? That's pretty crazy, man. You know, you're just seen a lot less legitimately. Websites are basically the same thing. If you have a website, you just kind of tick that box and then the prospect can move on with their consideration of your offer. All right, next up, we need to set up the platforms that we signed up

### Get Instantly/Smartlead, scrape, and start sending [24:45]

for affiliates for. So, now that we have all the infrastructure to do cold email, which is by far the lowest cost per acquisition mechanism of acquiring clients these days, you set up instantly smart lead, you do some scraping and then you start sending. So, I have created several tutorials that show people how to do this. If you go through my YouTube videos, I show you how to get up and running instantly and and you know, scrape various data sources. So, I'm not going to rehash all that. That would probably take me three or four hours. But to make a long story short, this is instantly that cold email platform that I showed you the affiliate for. What you do is you take these mailboxes, okay? Um you take the domains, you set up a bunch of mailboxes on Google Workspace and whatnot, you connect them to instantly. If you use one of those platforms that I was showing you guys earlier, it'll actually usually just automatically do it for you and then do all of the math and the rigomearroll um in order to get you up and running. Let's say Zab Mail or Inboxology. Um after that, you need to scrape a bunch of leads. The current number one source that everybody's using to get this stuff is Apollo, which in and of itself is just a scraper that scraped LinkedIn a few years ago. The reason everybody goes to Apollo is just because it's way cheaper than LinkedIn. And you can also get like structured data like email addresses and phone numbers and stuff like that. But Apollo itself is too expensive these days for most people. So a bunch of solutions have come up on the internet that allow you to scrape Apollo, which again just scraped LinkedIn. And uh that's what I would recommend for this purpose. There a couple of Ampify Apollo scrapers. Uh this one over here, scrape up to 50K leads is pretty good. It's the one that we've been recommending throughout the program. It's a$120 per thousand leads. So if you get 800 email addresses, 700 email addresses out of those thousand leads, how much you're really spending per email address? It's like4 cents or. 3 cents or something like that. the math works out pretty good in your favor. So, I'll uh leave that for another one of my

### Create an Upwork profile [26:26]

videos. Next up, I would create an Upwork profile. A lot of people sleep on freelance platforms like Upwork, but this is the straightest line path to getting customer number one. The value with a freelance platform like Upwork, if you're unfamiliar, is essentially through all other sales methods. You need to know what the customer problem is. Then, solution that they're looking for is. And then, you also need to somehow prove that you are the best person for the job. Now, if you're a beginner and you don't even know where to start, right? you've only just added a niche to your niche discovery checklist and you've only just started creating all of this stuff. learning what businesses struggle with and the various problems they're in. The odds that you're going to be able to solve those first two problems, the problem, the solution, very low. Very, very low. So, what Upwork does is it basically for a small fee just gives you a bunch of leads that are looking to have their problem solved with specific solutions. Then the only thing that you need to do is you just need to prove why you're the best fit for the job. So it basically if you think about it mathematically it takes this job of yours as a salesperson which previously was problem solution and then why you and then just eliminates 2/3 of the problem. So this is the only problem to solve. This the only thing you need to answer and that is a much easier job than going through everything top to bottom learning the pain points and problems of the niche and then coming up with a variety of ways to pitch your solution. Okay. So, I would highly recommend everybody here get on Upwork. I know a lot of people sleep on it and a lot of people have various opinions about Upwork. Um, it's funny because, you know, a couple years ago when I started talking about this publicly, the public opinion on this was just like, "No way. Upwork's so crap. I can't believe you guys are doing this. That's not a real business. You can't start a real business. " Uh, you know, selling to leads on Upwork. Over that time period, I can almost confidently say I make more money than 99. 999% of them. And it's all thanks to this. So, as long as you can get up and running quickly, you can worry about the legitimacy of your business model, uh, you know, how scalable it is and all the rest of that stuff later. The first thing you need to do is just get a couple customers under your belt. Don't let you know, opinions or some random crappy comments you've seen on the internet or somebody's judgmental attitude towards a platform stop you from doing so. Okay. All right. So, I have a bunch of um, other steps here, but we're rounding it out. Um, next up

### Find communities related to your niches & join [28:38]

find communities related to your niches and join. So, another big thing that not a lot of people talk about is that there are variety of ways to source customers that don't actually involve cold email and Upwork or any sort of paid platform. As of the time of this recording, a really cool way to do so is on school. Okay, school is a community platform. It's where I host my own community, maker school and makemoneywithmake. com. Now, they have this cool discovery page. What you do is you pump in the niche that you just, you know, one of the three niches that you just found. So, let's say videographer, okay? You pump this in and then you just join a bunch of free communities. The value of this is what you're doing when you join a bunch of videography niches, assuming that's one of your um videography communities, niches, is you are essentially going directly to a place where your target audience just about their problems all day. So you get to see exactly what the problems that people are suffering from that are in your niche are right now which helps you solve that issue that I was talking about earlier that Upwork also solves. And then two, you also basically have a captive audience of people that suffer from problems that you can pitch to. Now the key in doing this intelligently is you have to not make your pitch seem like a pitch. Okay? You need to come into these communities and there are many there are hundreds of these communities just for you know cinema and videography alone. But you need to come in these communities. You need to not create a TV ad. Okay? What you need to do is you need to build some authority. reputation in the community by helping people and answering their questions, not asking for anything in return. You need to establish yourself as just somebody in the community by replying to posts, engaging with people, sending DMs. You do this for 15, 20 minutes a day for several weeks. And then finally, you start helping people solve concrete problems, then doing things like DM them afterwards, asking, "Hey, how's it going? Can I help you out anymore with this? " Oh, hey guys. Uh, I just came up with this really cool solution which solves this problem that I found somebody posting about last week. Actually, you just drag and drop a few modules in make. com. Here's a quick tutorial. If anybody uh wants the blueprint, just send me over a DM. I'll give it to you guys for free. Um, and you know, if anybody has any follow-up questions, just let me know. When you start getting in the habit of doing this and you're consistent enough that you can build uh, you know, some sort of reputation and then some sort of memorability, um, communities can end up being a really profitable lead generation channel as well. It's just it's not as direct. It's not a straight line of path as Upwork and cold email. So that's kind of step number god, where are we at now? Eight or nine? Yeah, I think that's step number eight. Step number nine is okay. So if you think about what we've done now is we've set

### Create proposal template [31:05]

up the minimum viable most of the minimum viable business. We've set up our marketing and lead genen channels. Well, what happens when we actually get somebody that's interested in our service? Obviously, we have to pitch them, right? So what we do next is we have to set up our sales stuff. Okay, so this is kind of like where we're at right here actually. So that's where something like a proposal template comes into play. The way that this business model works is basically you will uh talk to somebody, you will market, you will generate a lead. When you get a sufficient amount of interest, you will get them on a call of some kind, which is usually called a discovery call. Sometimes you may have a second call later on called a closing call where you actually do like the closing and the pitching of the service. Most of the time, in my case, I just do one. And then at the end of the call, you know, the person's on board, they really like what you have to say. You say something along the lines of, "Hey, I'll send you over a proposal with all this information and a little signature spot at the bottom, which you can pay on immediately upon signing. Does that sound good? Okay, great. " And then you go and you actually do it. This is how it works. This is how like money changes hands. In order to do that, we obviously need a proposal template of some kind, right? So, I have a variety of proposal templates in um Maker School over here. Maker School obviously being that automation community. If we jump on over to um classroom and then we go to month one, then scroll down to day number five and module number three, there are a bunch of uh well, first of all, I give like a step-by-step walkthrough of how to set up a proposal template in a platform called PandaOC. I guide you guys through more or less everything. Essentially, I'll just give you guys a quick look through. We start with a title page. Then you usually have a problem. You have a solution statement of some kind. You then have some sort of scope of work. Then you round it out with a timeline. Then finally, you have some sort of pricing where you usually have a pitch, usually like a signature line or something like that. Okay, so you need to set up some sort of proposal template. I usually do this in Panda just because I've used Panda for a while and I'm very comfortable with it, but there are a variety of other great platforms out there that you guys could use too. Better proposals is one. I'm not a fan of DocYign, but Hello Sign is pretty neat as well. And basically, you just need something that you can add a bunch of variables into when you have somebody that's interested, then send it within the hour. Okay, then almost last but not least, we need to set up Stripe

### Set up payment processors [33:13]

PayPal, or some other processor, right? So, now that we're done with the sales, it's like, okay, how do we actually like make money with this? Well, that's where we're at right now. So, we need to actually set up Stripe, PayPal, or some other mechanism by which we can receive funds when somebody does actually want to pay us. And my recommendation is Stripe. And I know Stripe isn't available everywhere. Not everybody can use Stripe. The trade-off with Stripe is it's something like I think 3% um processing fee, which you know, if you think about it, I mean, in my case, I made what, $170,000 last month. Uh the vast majority of that was processed through Stripe or a service using Stripe. So, I paid I think is my math that bad? I think it really is that bad. Hold on. I paid I think $5,100 um last month to Stripe. That seems about right to me. So, you might be thinking, man, that's a ton of money. But if you think about the amount of time and energy that Stripe saves people like me and people soon to be like you on actually doing the service, it's crazy. Well, there's some additional fees you have to pay for all this stuff. But they do things like automated tax compliance. um automated invoice follow-ups. They're also just like the cleanest and the simplest and the best user experience. And they're very integrable. So, I recommend them. I love them. I'm very happy to spend a couple percentage points in my business if it means I can make 500% later on because I'm faster. But you can also use, you know, PayPal. Okay, PayPal is very popular. A lot of people use PayPal. Um, I know that a lot of places in Asia use Payaneer. Okay. I really don't like Payaneer because every time somebody sends me an invoice with Payaneer, I have to go and like validate all this stuff and I've made all these accounts. It just still doesn't believe it doesn't believe who I am for some weird reason. But use Payaneer. You can do that as well. Um, if you're operating through Upwork, Upwork actually includes built-in payment processing, which is one of the reasons why I like it so much. So, you know, you don't actually have to like do this if you get an Upwork client, although I would recommend you have it set up in advance. And I'm sure you guys could tell there are like 500 other payment processors. Just Google payment processor and then insert like the name of your country or local. Okay. All right. Once you're done with that, we have literally everything we need to get going. The one thing that I'd recommend from here on out is you

### Set daily minimums (emails, UW applications, community posts) [35:09]

set some sort of daily minimum. So daily number of emails sent, daily number of Upwork apps community posts made. Now, I created a little template just to show you guys what that looks like. Um, you could literally have a Google Sheets activity tracker with four columns. One for date, the other for cold email, one for Upwork applications, one for community posts. Then if you have other lead generation mechanisms, well then you could just add them over here on the right and track them once a day. It really doesn't have to be any more complicated than that. I use Google Sheets tracker systems like that all the time and I make $170,000 a month as of the time of this recording. You do not have to make it any more complex. The one thing that you do have to do is you just have to be consistent. If you're going to do this thing, go back to the Google sheet at the end of the day and just fill it in. What you'll do is the next day you'll come on and you'll say, "Wow, yesterday I hit seven. Today I'm going to try and hit eight. " And it functions as an in-built accountability mechanism. Another really cool thing that you can do with Google Sheets, so you actually just share these with three or four of your friends. If you guys have people that are in your group that are starting similar sorts of businesses, well, now you can all have activity trackers that are accountability mechanisms and you can just have everybody go through everybody's at the end of the day and just give everybody a thumbs up or something like that if they did it. or just rag on your buddy if they fail to hit their 10 Upwork apps for the day. Okay, very simple, straightforward. Feel free to build it out like this if you want or build a better structure. But I guess my point is keep it simple, you know, whatever you're going to do. And last but not least, you now have everything basically set up for you to

### Sell to customers [36:29]

actually go and acquire customers. Okay, all these are sort of unscalable if you think about it, right? I mean, like the number of Upwork applications you send a day scales with your time directly. Number of community posts you make per day does scale with your time directly. a lot of the cold emails and looms and custom DMs that you're going to send if you do any sort of outreach, these things will scale with your time directly, but they're also the most important part of the business and they're the things that you should be spending all your time on. So, if you do this enough, and when I say enough, I mean, we have a ton of people in Maker School that make uh thousands of dollars in their first couple of months. I mean, this uh guy Cooper was at day 28 when he closed what looks to be over a $30,000 deal plus some equity. Um Barb, I think closed it in a few weeks. We have a variety of wins which you guys could check out here. If you do this sort of consistent daily outreach and daily compounding, you will eventually get on a sales call with a customer. And when you customer, all you need to do is some variation of what I'm calling the simplest sales call SOP currently out there. So, you will

### Simplest Sales Call SOP [37:26]

build some rapport. You'll So, you'll make some little joke. I always do one about how I am in Calgary, so I wrote a polar bear to work today cuz I'm Canadian. And they usually chuckle. You ask them why they're on the call with you. So, you literally just say, "Hey, listen. You get tons of cold emails a day. I can almost guarantee you that. So, what made mine stand out? " Okay. This will tell you literally exactly how to sell them, what they liked about you, what you can expand on. Then you ask them what their problems are. So, what would you say is the main problem right now? Why you haven't solved it yet? So, what stopped you from solving it yet? How much is it currently costing you? So, let's do a little bit of math here. This is preventing you from getting one customer a week, you're saying? Okay. And how much money is that customer usually ordering if this problem didn't exist? $5,000 worth of product. Okay. So, is it fair to say this is about $20,000 a month liability right now? All right. Awesome. And then finally, how quickly do you want it solved? Well, I think I have everything that I need. I guess my last question is just how quickly do you want this solved? You know, is this a let's do it today thing? Let's do it next month sort of thing. Fill me in. From here on out, you cover your experience in brief. So, you just give them a quick 30-se secondond summary of who you are and why it matters. Then you screen share and you show them an example of a solution that fixes their problem which you can either build live in front of them or if you have some, you know, templates or something that fit the specific problem. Uh maybe templates that you've gotten from my YouTube channel or my Gumroad or my communities, then you can do so then. And you just ask them, does this seem like something that would solve your problem? If their answer is yes, fantastic. You can either pitch them directly, okay, this will be $2,895. I could send over an invoice right now. Or you could send a proposal with costs, etc. within 60 minutes. Great. That sounds awesome. Let me whip together a proposal for you and I'll send it to you within the hour. It'll contain everything you need, plus a little signature field and even a place for you to pay an invoice um should you get to that point. Sound good? Great. Simplest sales call SOP. Anybody can do this. Um I'm going to include this in the description so you guys could take it and run with it. Obviously, I go into a lot more detail in my programs about what the ideal sales call looks like, but I think that's a highle enough view that should let everybody here get started and make some meaningful progress. All right. Finally, the last

### 3. Iterate after client #1 [39:35]

and I want to say most important part is we need to iterate. So, you yes you if you do this, you will definitely get your first customer. I mean, it's just a matter of time. Everything that I've talked about here is not it's not complex. It's very simple. It's difficult to do consistently and if you're the sort of person that can build habits and the consistency and accountability to do this for a very long period of time, you will inevitably be one of the big players on the internet today. Uh but it's not, you know, it's not easy. So if you could do it all day, um doing it all day is not enough. What you need to do is you need to iterate. So you need to make it better. What I mean by this is um you need to go through the following steps. And this is just my recommendation. This

### Circle of an AI Automation Agency [40:17]

is me just doing a bird's- eye view look at how most of the people in my program can succeed. and I just, you know, tried to tailor all my recommendations to them. But essentially what happens is you will acquire your first client, you do a great job, then all you do is increase prices and service quality by 30%. And then you repeat. Okay? Then along the way, you perform what's called a retrospective, which I'm going to get into in a moment. And then you do this to acquire client number two, then client number three, then client number four, and so on and so forth. every route around the wheel. You basically just charge a little bit more and then you get better at doing the service itself, which is why you're charging a little bit more. Okay, so this is the circle of life and an AI automation agency and this is what I would recommend everybody get in the habit of doing. One of the main uh problems that I see in my communities is, you know, Nick, I'm charging $500 to $1,000 per project and I've been doing this for the better part of last month. How do I get out of it? Well, literally just you just increase your prices. You just increase them by 30 40%. You throw them at the wallet. You see what sticks, okay? Eventually, you get good enough that you can pitch much higher costs. Eventually, you understand the client problems and needs and stuff like that to the point where that's not a big deal for you. Okay? But what is this step right over here? What is this retrospective? Let me cover it.

### Key Retrospectives [41:30]

Basically, there are three retros that I like to get people to do if you want to get in the chain of continuous improvement and then have your agency or your service or whatever you're really doing blow up. I focus these on the lead generation because this tends to be the biggest problem area for most people. And then I focus in the actual client fulfillment as well a little bit. So there are three retrospectives that I recommend you guys get in the habit of doing every time you get a client. Okay.

### 1. Cold Email [41:51]

First is every time that you send out a bunch of cold emails and that somehow lands in some sort of business opportunity. What you do is you determine the stats. So you count up all the emails you sent, that have been opened, you count up all the replies to those emails, you count up all the positive replies, then you count up the calls that resulted. And then you ultimately count up the deals. So, you are going to have a spreadsheet that actually looks like, you know, sent, opened, replied, positive replies, calls, then finally deals. Okay? And you'll do this every time you do a retrospective. And usually it'll do something, I don't know, you might send, let's say, I'm just going to be very easy here. A,000 and then 800 people will open. Open tracking isn't really big these days. It's kind of buggy, but I'm putting this in here just for um I guess posterity sake. Maybe you'll have, you know, 50 people reply. That's a reply rate of 50%. Sorry, at 5%. Then maybe of these you'll have 25 of these be positive replies. From these 25 positive replies, maybe you'll get 15 calls. Then maybe out of these you'll get three deals. Okay? So you have a spreadsheet that looks just like this. Then what you do now that you have all those numbers is you will go through all of your copy. You'll open up your instantly campaigns, your smart lead campaigns, everything that you need. You actually split test the short copy versus long copy. You'll split test little parts of copy. Like you'll throw in the word I instead of we. You'll um experiment with being very blunt but also being more laid-back. You'll experiment with including assets in your uh flow. ice breakers in your flow versus maybe templating it out. You'll experiment with copying templates off the internet, templates you've seen with me and weaving that into your flows. You'll experiment with taking a template and then making it very different and then you know seeing whether or not that works better. So I guess what I'm trying to say is you'll just do a bunch of split testing the actual campaign parameters itself. Okay? Then you'll go through your communications. You'll split test different sequences. So when I say sequences, I mean, you know, when somebody responds to you positively, what do you normally say? How do you handle that? How quickly do you respond to that? Do you respond quick enough? Is it an hour later? Is it 2 hours later? Is it 24 hours later? Ideally, you should be responding to positive inquiries within like a minute or two. You should be beling notifications to your phone like cut through any silence blockers and literally just like respond right now. It's an urgent critical opportunity. You should have templates ready to go that do most of it for you that allow you to make little changes. Okay. And finally, one thing that I didn't mention uh actually right over here, which I'll just add to them is um you also test your audiences. Okay, finally, once you're done with that, you say, "Okay, great. I have a list of learnings now. I'm going to make those changes. " And then you just keep on going. And you don't, you know, allow yourself to get so beat up that your campaign didn't perform very well or that, you know, you're not doing as good as you could. All you do is you just proceed through this loop over and over again every time you get a new client or, I don't know, every two weeks or so, however often you really feel is necessary. I just caution people against doing this too quickly. Um, you know, don't do this daily, for instance. It does not make you better. There's like a sweet spot and that sweet spot tends to be every week or two, assuming you're doing the steps that I lay out in my programs. Um, you're probably going to be getting a client every week or two, which is why I just say do it every time you get a client. Okay? Same thing with Upwork. You determine your stats. So

### 2. Upwork [44:44]

you'll have a spreadsheet. It'll say sent. Then, it'll say number of proposals viewed. replies or responses. It'll say the number of calls you've done. And then, it'll ultimately say the number of deals. So maybe you send 100 proposals, excuse me, maybe 40 of these proposals actually get viewed. Maybe 20 people actually reply to you. Maybe you have 10 calls and then maybe you close with three deals. Okay. From here, you'll go through the profiles. You'll test pictures. You'll test above the folds. You'll test videos. You'll test proposal CVs. You'll test literally everything that you can on the profile. You'll test changing all this stuff up. You'll test changing that the background color. doing the online for messages bubble, changing the title, changing the specialized profiles here, showing your earnings versus hiding your earnings. Okay, you'll do uh your portfolio. You will I can't believe I still have that on it. I've made just about $500,000 upper. You change your video. You'll change your uh portfolio blog posts and the writing and the summary of your work history and the hours per week that you're available and all that stuff. Okay, you'll go through this and you'll basically just try a bunch of stuff and see what works. Feedback is always better than planning because feedback involves you interfacing with the real market and that's what we're going for. Then again go through your comm split test different sequences and just see what sort of communication methods are ultimately responsible and you getting and the client what you can do better

### 3. Fulfillment [46:07]

and then finally ran it out with fulfillment retrospectives. So you have a couple of stats here that not a lot of people are aware of. Um but the big ones that I find important are sorry I said number of calls. I believe what I meant to say was number of projects. Uh so uh you know you'll have a spreadsheet that looks something like this. Projects, you'll have cycle time. Cycle time is how long it took for your project to enter your queue, your your desk basically and then leave and then be done. Okay? You will get number of revisions. You will get the cost of the project, you know, cost of goods sold. And you'll just have this little spreadsheet. Maybe you got three projects this month. Maybe on average your cycle time was 3. 5 weeks. That's pretty long, not going to lie. Maybe on average clients wanted four revisions. Well, that's a lot of revisions. Maybe on average your internal cost per project was, I don't know, $500 or um let's say your average project was $3,000, you know, maybe about 16%. These are all pretty high, right? These then give you everything you need to make them better the next generation essentially. Okay? Then go through all of your client comms. Go through every message sent, every call you've done, every email, etc. Then identify ways to improve. Some very low hanging fruit that I frequently see, people aren't contacting their clients enough. People will usually get a deal and then they'll just disappear for a week. Clients really like it when you give them updates every couple of days. One of the simplest and straightest ways that I basically doubled my bottom line was literally just setting a daily period where a client could reach me anytime that they wanted, then using that daily period to give them updates. It was took it took me like 5 minutes per day, not even. and I made vastly more money and a vastly lower return as a result of doing it. Okay, schedule something in your calendar, daily client update, just go through top to bottom, you know, what have I done for this person? that person? When you um also schedule an update when you actually have things to share with the client, it shows that you haven't forgotten about them, which is a big thing that they care about. Is this person just riding me for free and not actually doing any work? So, do tons of updates, give them deliverables, give them visuals, and then I don't know, maybe experiment with uh ways of getting everything up front. for AI automation. Usually that's stuff like 2FA, stuff like codes, stuff like credentials, stuff like API access and stuff like that. A lot of people um actually leave this till the end and they got to call the client 5 million times over the course of the next 3 weeks to drip out

### Outro [48:23]

access. Okay, great. So that is how to build a profitable AI business in 2025. And I tried to keep everything here as palatable and as simple for complete beginners to get up and running with. If you guys liked what you heard in this video, definitely check out Maker School because it's basically everything that I just ran through plus more just with a dayby-day accountability and then recommended minimums where I basically record videos for you every day, coaching you through the process of all these steps, showing you how to do them, and so on and so forth. You know, if you guys have made it to this point in the video, you probably like what you hear. You like the sort of content that I make. You guys are invested in seeing me grow or succeed in some way. Please leave a comment down below letting me know what you liked about the video. If you guys have any ideas for future videos, you want me to create content on something. I source most of my ideas just from you guys at this point, especially the motivated ones that make it to the end. So, that'd be really helpful. And then, yeah, just like the video, subscribe to the channel, do all that fun stuff and help me make it to the top of the AGO. Thanks so much, and I'm looking forward to hearing all about your wins. Juice.