Student to AI Agency to $9,000p/m AI Real Estate SaaS in 6 Months

I think I remember seeing you and the winds Channel and the accelerator just like banging out like win after I was like who the hell is this Hamza kid absolutely crushing again scaled it up all the way at about eight8 $9,000 in monthly recurring Revenue cuz who knew that one tiny YouTube video like that could just change my life as a uni student right the choice for me is I drop out at the same time there's always that part of me in the back of my brain which was telling me amza you should have a back up hello everyone and welcome back to the channel today we

have a special guest Hamza a member of my accelerator in the original 150 members back in uh this time last year and hum has gone on to do some incredible things in the real estate and AI space going from being a student working at an internship to starting his own AI automation agency and to pivoting down to an AI SAS after he found a pretty lucrative opportunity in the real estate space so I think hum's story in particular shows the hero's journey of a AAA owner or an AI entrepreneur and how you can get in and find your opportunity and he now getting um massive deal potential um and options for acquisition company later down the line so I think uh everyone can learn a lot from this and he's also going to be sharing if he was to start again what tips and tricks he give to people uh starting in his position so Hamza thank you for your time and I'm looking forward to sharing your story thank you for having me Liam yeah it's a pleasure to talk uh I kind of found Liam as he mentioned around April of last year and the story kind of started in the middle of an internship uh it was my first internship as a first year kind of University student I was hired for an engineering position I was so excited and on my first day of work my manager came in and gave me basically like a 10,000 row XEL document and my he told me my job for the whole four months that I was hired there was I to go through every single part search it online and write like a long kind of standardization number for it and that was it again and again and it was just brain dead work uh and it was so painfully boring that I started to put in my headphones and listen to YouTube videos and podcasts on the side and that's where I found Liam mle this guy who talking about Ai and implementing AI in businesses and all this cool stuff and so I was just listening to it while I'm doing this kind of brain dead job on the side and a kind of a realization moment happened why don't I just build something to automate this really boring process and so that's where I started I built an internal tool which used GPT to automatically write those standardizations uh and then use zapier to fill them in on onto Excel uh and I finished a year worth of work that they had for me to do that internship in like 10 minutes uh and it was my first kind of eye openening experience into how much value you can bring with these AI systems into large businesses and how little they really know about it and over the course of the remaining three months I had of that internship they ended up just transferring me to like the software department and I built a whole bunch of other internal tools for them to use even one to do like staff training for a bunch of the softwares that they were using one to automate a whole bunch of different procedures and that's where I kind of got started joined the accelerator uh as one of the first 150 members uh and then that's when I started my AAA and then in AAA it was kind of a rocky start I think when I had the internship it was awesome so much experience building stuff so much experience you know doing all that part but I don't have to look for clients I had the customer right there right the business self was kind of sorted it was just like development then I started and getting customers was just a nightmare um I remember those first couple of months I had up dental clinics I had up mental health agencies like th bu and stuff I hit up real estate agents like Realtors every Niche you can think of I was hitting them up and it was all just coming back as at zeros and so it took quite a while for me to kind of nail down the niche and what I could do uh and then kind of found my stride I think later that year when I had my first couple of sales and one of the big ones was in real estate appraisals so real estate appraisals is basically how people value properties it's a very small Niche most people have no idea how it works I didn't have any clue how it worked back then but I was talking to a real estate appraiser also just happened to be a bunch of my family is actually in appraisals over in the US which I didn't know too much about but when talking to them they kept describing hey we're filling in these forms for hours every single day the process is so redundant the software we're using were built in the 90s and they haven't been updated since then a whole bunch of those similar complaints to what I was hearing at the company that I was interning at and so I ended up just building them their first kind of internal tool just to automate one small part of the appraisal process and it was so successful with them saved them so much time that they recommended me to one of their friends who was also an appraiser I built them another tool which was to automate a slightly different part of their process they're like okay awesome this is great I brought it up to Canada from the US and then started marketing it here and there was just the demand was flowing in and everyone was just saying the same thing which is that we're looking for a way to make our process better but there's no alternative out there and so that's kind of where I pivoted from being a AAA taking on any sort of client any sort of customer doing all those marketing and building these AI Solutions into more of a SAS that's where Automax was born and so the way Automax works pretty much I made it was the all-in-one platform for appraisals which automated everything from when an appraiser starts the process they do their inspection all the way to finishing the appraisal I ended up hiring a bunch of devs at that time as well who I also found from the Excel so initially I was going on like the Discord back then before we had Circle and looking for devs and one guy really stood out to me talked to him we signed like an initial Contracting deal found another guy through him as well that he had on his team and that's where kind of the team started to get built up from there and then stuff kind of really started blowing up when I took some time off uni to work on it full time uh and then started signing a bunch more appraisals more clients scaled it up all the way to about eight8 $9,000 in monthly recurring revenue and we have some really exciting stuff going on in the next couple of months we have a potential deals for exclusivity with one of our clients and hopefully getting acquired by them as well within a year or two years and stuff is really blowing up in the real estate AI Market in Canada so yeah huge thanks to Liam for even starting all this because who knew that one tiny YouTube video like that could just changed my life as a uni student right uh so yeah it's been an awesome Journey that's awesome

man I think your story is such a great example of uh well one the internship aspect the value of exp of experience and you getting that early dose of experience and seeing firsthand what the soft can do I think people still come to this space with a lot of skepticism that AI it can't really help the businesses that well or like it's not that valuable or even using low code stuff like zapia Etc is not going to be that valuable but you were able to see it firsthand and I think that was really key in your journey and for anyone else who can take the same approach of saying okay where can I get some experience in your case it was through an internship and just that the right the cards kind of played out in the right way but taking the same approach of just any experience will do because you were able to take that experience and go straight into starting your own agency and then you're able to identify the use case through doing multiple clients for projects for clients identify that use case and then double down a niche down to that and eventually get to the point where you productize that into a house so if there's any example of the exact strategy I've been telling people to try and follow in the space to succeed um and you've been able to do it really rapidly within the first couple of projects I guess you were already finding a valuable solution and I think that comes down to you having that prior experience in the internship that allowed you to immediately start providing value so um if you want to give us a little bit more I think the most impressive thing about what you're doing right now and where this house is at um is the potential exclusivity that you've gotten so can you give us a little bit of background on I know you probably can't say too many details but I think the size of the firm that you're looking at working at will and working with um could really show just what level you're at and what the potential is for you because I think with a real estate is such a huge market and you are like right on the on the edge of that you're already into it but if you continue to like press this like screw this in and go deeper and deeper you're going to have an extremely valuable skill set as you as I'm sure you can explain with some of the deals that have come across your table recently yeah for sure I think appraisals specifically within real estate as well is an even kind of further Niche down kind of aspect of it that people don't even know how it works and so happens to be that there's really almost no competition in the space either the firm that we're talking to for exclusivity they're the largest firm in Canada that does appraisals like uncontested they have about 13 14 branches across the country they also have a sister branch in America which has another 150 appraisers with several different branches all over the country they also have a branch in Australia another branch in Europe as well right and so they're by far the largest firm in the country and the scale at which we could grow this working with them uh is massive I mean you can only imagine if you have 100 hundreds of dollars in monthly retainers per appraiser per user and hundreds of users at a Time the numbers just multiply and it works out to a really nice figure okay so

I think key thing to mention here is that you're managing all of this as a student yes you took off your six months you took your entrepreneurial break did work on the business but now you're back at school so you're faced with a pretty tricky decision here where you've taken the six months off you've kind of done what you intended to do which was find an opportunity here and get this thing rolling with and I mean that's some of the most incredible offers in kind of but opportunities that I've ever seen in front of someone like you have a very narrow implementation of AI that you've been able to create from scratch you've got this big company gigantic company who's basically saying hey look we want you to sell it to no one else and work with us exclusively um and you're also trying to juggle this aspect to being a student um can you talk us through your thought process right now and I mean you're wearing the University of water lot shirt here and you've also as you said we're being approached by people through University as the AI guy and that's leading to things through the government as well so can walk us through the uh your thought process right now as a student and you weighing these up but also some of those I think you mentioned governmental opportunities who getting just from doing what you've been doing I think there's a lot of help that I got from being a university student while I was doing all this stuff just because my university has a huge focus on entrepreneurship we have like a whole branch of the uni which is just dedicated to starting like helping students start startups and companies and grow them and stuff and so I was a part of that got some funding to help the start of automatic my company as well and so I think it was really instrumental in finding the right people as well right advisers and stuff as well but yeah this is the whole dilemma right is you're working full time on something you're putting your heart and soul into it and stuff's going really well but if you have to all of a sudden go back to school it's not like the work just stops the work just multiplies and adds on right you have all the stuff from your uh business working as well and then all the studies five courses full-time I on top of it so the choice for me is I drop out leave the Cozy degree behind and I pursue it full-time which is for sure enticing I think the opportunity is there I think that's been proven over the last couple of months and there's exciting stuff possible at the same time there's always that part of me in the back of my brain which was telling me amza you should have a backup and you know University is important it's something important for me in my life I know Liam you had a uh you ended up going the Dropout route as well and doing all that but I don't know it's just it's a bit of a mental struggle at this point there's all there's always a possib AI crashes and burns right a solar flare hits us and we're going back to the Stone Age or something and you have to find something else the important thing is that I don't think it's the degree that will get you success in life it's having the skills and the knowledge that are necessary to be able to provide value to people I could do that with the degree or without and so just weighing my options for the time being and potentially going to bigger opportunities like one of the connections that I got through my university is actually to the kind of Municipal board in Canada that does property tax valuation and so that's a different side from core appraisals but it's a massive Market because you have to appraise every single property in the country every year in order to find the government property tax that's millions and millions of dollars so no idea how big the deal is but it has a lot of zeros it's funny because the Ary of The Bu of the University having a entrepreneurship department but then like if it succeeds what am I going to do drop out so do they not have a like exit strategy so if we start a successful business in our entrepreneurship program we allow you to like or do you just have to at the end of the day make the decision hey look I'm done this is done well enough I'm having like a honorable discharge from the uni but I'm going on to bigger and B things like do they not have some kind of process for that so it's a mix of both I think the main thing that they do is they like recruit students that are in like the end of their degree and then they get them started on their start up at the end of their degree so as soon as they graduate they move to the incubator full-time and then they're only working on their startup fulltime I'm in second year so I have like two and a half years left if I was to yeah do it so way too early to do that so for people like me they literally come up to me and recommend hey Hamza why don't you just drop out and so is it conflicting with the university sometimes but ultimately it's all run by entrepreneurs as well a bunch of them are drop outs I guess the interesting part for you is trying to get a sufficient deal lined up whether that's going to be exclusivity and you can make that transition say okay I think like whether that's them hiring you or whether you're getting a nice contract from them would that be enough for you to drop this and go fulltime that might push me over the edge for

sure well I'm sure myself and everyone else are rooting for you I'm sure you're going to pull it off but I think your story is such a great example of acquiring specific knowledge and I I've been hopping on about this quite a lot recently and I'm going to continue to but the understanding how AI can be utilized within a given Niche we are still searching for there're waiting for I call them like empty Thrones right every niche in the world business world if you look at say smma for example there are guys who are established leaders they have established Brands and businesses in each of the different things whether it's Roofing or name any Niche you can imagine um we don't have that yet for AI and in your case you're starting to see the compounding benefits of being the AI guy and you'll notice that as soon as you start putting yourself out there more you get this weird kind of celebrity effect where everyone knows that AI is going to change the world and going to change their business everyone wants to be in touch with you and you're starting to see it compound in that real estate uh in the real estate sector and you're gaining that specific knowledge that no one else really has okay how AI ' got the appraisal section now you're going to go to maybe the property tax and you're going to have this wide view of everything in the OR at least at the Cutting Edge of how AI can help real estate so that's particularly what I'm most excited about for you and I think anyone who's looking to replicate the success can also follow that same route of starting whether that's Consulting whether that's just starting a personal brand and doing so Consulting initially like I did and then moving into an agency and using that as a vehicle to identify use cases and work with multiple clients and as you've done Niche down to it start a SAS whatever you need to do um to really bounce to pounce on that opportunity so looking back on your past I guess it's been a year and a bit in the space since you started watching the videos um if you could give advice to someone who starting again maybe starting in your position or just interested in getting into the space as a whole um what would you recommend to do um is there anything that you learned along the way that would be would have been a lot more helpful if you had known it a bit earlier I think one thing that's super important is to validate something before you go out and build and spend all this time and go into actually building it out right there's no point spending a year and a half or like several months building out the super complicated product that you think is going to change the world because it uses Ai and you go and talk to the customers and no one wants it right you gotta I mean even one of the guys I was talking to he had like a hardware product he built like a 3D printed prototype that did not work took some photos of it made like a fake video put on Kickstarter raised 250 Grand in a year to actually build out the product right that's his validation he knows it's worth it right and so there's hundreds and hundreds of stories of people like that I've been exposed to in the past couple months so talk to your customers get Lois get an agreement get something signed with them which shows that they're interested which shows that they have genuine need for whatever you're building and then go out and build it now with no Cod tools it's actually super easy to make that initial MVP you can go on voice flow and within like 15 minutes even you can have a super basic thing built up maximum like 2 hours if you want to add a little bit more functionality onto it maybe use zap here for some stuff as well so build out a super basic MVP and go talk to whoever you're wanting to talk to and the biggest thing is um in my experience Mass Outreach was not working as well as personalized Outreach I think personalization is massive especially with depending on which Niche you're working in initially I was using instantly I bought like three domains like 10 nine or 10 different emails and I was doing like 500 emails a month or whatever blasting it out and there the leads were just not engaged like if they got on a call rarely did they get on a call if they got on a call they're like why should we talk to a random guy that emailed us that is doing AI automations right as opposed to when I selected a niche tried to really go down into it in appraisals as well and start just dming people with personalized messages based off of their profile I had a really interesting call with uh Nico on the accelerator earlier on which was like we were super prepared going to the knowing what we wanted to do and during the call we booked a meeting with one of the guys that I ended up also signing as a client like a little bit later on as well right and so being personalized in your Outreach is super important for getting those first couple clients signed in and then once you start seeing the Stars line and the dominoes are kind of falling in place you just have to grind it out you have to get into the rhythm of doing it again and again and Building Systems at that point which will scale which is one of the things that I'm trying to do right now as well is even like build a team around myself that can scale so I'm not needed to do every single thing uh and yeah that's where I think you take it from that stage to the next stage not everyone has the same story that I had opportunities I had obviously there's an aspect of luck involved as well everyone has different paths and different exposures but as long as you have the same kind of end goal in mind regardless of your path I think you can find a way to make it happen sure yeah I think I remember

seeing you and the winds Channel and the accelerator just like banging out like win after I was like who the hell is this ham kid abolutely crushing but uh yeah so when it comes want to dig a little bit deeper into their personalized Outreach just so everyone's 100% clear on what you're doing so instead of getting a scraping a lead list from somewhere and putting it in blasting out Cod email and I guess at that point when you were doing the Cod email do you think it was ineffective because you didn't have a were you doing cold email and the messaging was built around I've built this for someone else and you actually had some kind of evidence of it or was it more just I can build you this would you be interested so I think those are two different phases of doing Cod Outreach right yeah for sure I think at that St I'd only had the internship experience and the stuff I built for that but it was nothing for a specific Niche like I was trying to called Outreach to dentists and I hadn't built anything for dentist I was trying to C Outreach to Mother clinic and done anything for them so it was more General I was trying to like use GPT to write personalized first lines but even with that the expense was up here and the results were just not cutting it for that in terms of personalization what it really was is I had a lead list of let's say 200 appraisers that I was connected to un LinkedIn I started I just made a profile really early on started just connecting to people also I found it strangely it was more successful connecting when I didn't write a connection message if I just send a connection requests they accepted but anytime they see a message because I think you're trying to sell them something exactly they they don't accept it right and so I just had like a basic profile on there with some like one post about real estate appraisals or something like that I just started connecting to people when I had 30 40 connections then uh instead of just like writing the same copy pasted email uh DM to each person me and Nico when we were on the call together we went to their profile found some of their recent posts comments or things that they liked personalized a DM specifically for them and sent that in and then we started getting responses way faster uh and so that was kind of what led into it yeah Nico's a wi

I'm so glad we got him on the team um okay so personalized Outreach do you think if you now moved it back to I mean now you've kind of got this exclusivity deal on the cards you think if you switch back and I don't know hopped on called Nico and got this start in but if you were to use the evidence you have now and maybe you built up your LinkedIn a bit more and you have more evidence to show what you're doing and you laser focused on just finding more appraises or finding more real estate firms you can talk to about potentially building different stuff outside of the appraiser space do you think you'd be getting a lot better results now with you Callo for sure I think it makes sense right now we have the niche we have the evidence we have the self the systems built in and so it's natural that's the way that uh reveals the hardest part about this whole thing and it's that's finding your lane and as you took a while to find that appraisal solution this is the most difficult part for anyone getting in we've only just niched my agency down to education and coaching solutions for those kind of businesses um it's not easy and I know anyone watching this who's like I just have no clue where to start with this AI thing I don't even know what tools to start working on I don't know like how I'm going to get in touch with people I I've got a bunch of videos I put one up here wherever it is that's the best one to started in terms of narrowing down your scope of what you're trying to learn I think a lot of beginners get overwhelmed initially thinking they have to do what flow and then make and then zap here and then air table and everything at once and while it is good to know everything at once if you can starting off just with okay I'm just going to do voice agents and voice agents is selling very well right now we're seeing in the school community and the accelerator as well if you just narrow down to a specific type of solution to start like you did playing around with the during the internship and getting familiar with Mak zpp here um that narrows down the scope of what you need to learn and that will sort of lead you to being able to make a certain set of solutions and from there you can try to PCH those Solutions or find people who are interested in them as well but it's that finding of the thing which is so difficult and we rely primarily if you if you're looking to get started and find your first couple clients is warm Outreach is the most important one I mean in your case you are using some connections with your family that you didn't really even know we doing appraises in the states and then uh personal branding as well so if you have warm connections guys watching this warm connections are your best chance and homasi has a great podcast well I guess it's a section of his audio book on warm reach CHS and the strategy he recommends all of you if you don't have your first couple clients you don't have anyone you'll allow you to get the experience like kza got in that uh in that internship do that warm Outreach strategy and try to find some people in your network you may not even think you have any but I promise you do and if that doesn't work then you go to inbound personal branding and try to build a personal brand around it so there's my little strategy session for the for the video um H if there's anything else on that or anyone getting started any advice you give for them feel free otherwise we can probably wrap things up yeah so friends and family first that's how I got started that's how virtually everyone gets started cuz that's the niche that you can have some competitive advantage in right there's hundreds of people out there that are even now doing AAA that are trying different niches how do you differentiate yourself being in the niche of dental clinics from 10 other guys are going to be in it you know someone in that Niche right there to get you started which gets you in the door as soon as your foot's in the door stuff will P up from that point right that's the hardest part so yeah go to friends and family see what happening there and then get on from that point onwards yeah thanks for having me Liam it was a pleasure talking to you yeah awesome thank you for your time hza we uh well myself and everyone else are so excited for what you what you're doing man um uh can't wait to maybe have another one of these calls in six months 12 months from now and you've cut a deal and you're making a whole bunch of money now um I'm so excited to see how you go with this real estate and AI Niche um because there's so much potential there as you know so uh looking forward to seeing you on the channel again soon and if anyone wants to get in touch with HS up more importantly the whole point of these interviews the main point is to be able to get some exposure on the people who are doing great work in the space so if any of you you can try to get in touch with me I might leave a a form down below if you want to apply for one of these interviews and you think you got something cool like Hamza but more importantly hamza's details are going to be down below so if you are interested in real estate for AI or anything related to real estate in AI or his services or working with them more closely or you have an opportunity you want to bring him in on then hum's linked will be down in the description and I really urge you all to reach out to them um before you get snapped up by someone else