Is it realistic to make $5,000 per month with a content systems business via a few high‑priced projects or many small ones? Can it be made recurring, or is it just one‑off? Can I reach $5k/month with one or two clients?

Can I hit $5,000 a month with one or two clients? Absolutely. It's straightforward to do this. Hitting $5,000 a month with a client is almost the entry line to becoming a real agency owner. In the case of the person who asked this, I've had clients who paid me $20,000 to $30,000 a month for services. It's very straightforward and relatively simple: you simply need to provide a multiple on the money they are paying you. If someone is paying you $20,000 a month, as long as you're providing them $100,000, $150,000, or $200,000 a month in comparative value, they will happily pay you that amount. The reason this is difficult for people to understand is that it's at scales and scopes most find unimaginable. I first grasped this idea when my best friend Zach started working with a highly scaling content offer (some sort of automation offer). At the time I wasn't having much success, while Zach was decimating me in every way. I asked him how much money he made with this stuff; he said he made $45,000 last month. I asked how many clients he had, guessing 45, and he said he had one client paying him $45,000. I couldn't understand it because I had no experience with that. The reality is Zach was probably underpaid for the value he provided; realistically he should have been paid two and a half to three times that, given he was making the company millions per month. When you start thinking more about the value you provide and less about the sticker‑shock price, and if you can convince a client that this is true, you start being able to earn, quite honestly, unimaginable amounts of money from the right people who get it.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Pricing

Sid from India works with a YouTuber on marketing, earning $1.5–2.5k after expenses. He asks how to increase his income further using AI, given his background as a video editor now managing a team.

If you’re earning $2,500 per year, you’re essentially being robbed in broad daylight; but if you’re making $2,000 per month ($24k per year), you’re on the lower end yet not necessarily being exploited. To think about your situation, imagine you’re paid $25,000 per year while generating $500,000 in value for the YouTuber—that’s about 5% of the value you create. Most people receive only 1–2% of the value they generate, while strong salespeople earn 15–20% through commissions. My advice for contractor‑partner roles like yours is to aim for 10–15% of the value you deliver, which translates to roughly a 10× return on investment for the client. If the client is smart, they’ll happily pay you $1 to make $10 for them. The mistake many people make is realizing they’re underpaid and then demanding more money outright—a losing approach that comes across as a loss‑based demand and triggers ego or risk‑aversion in business owners. Instead, frame the conversation around growth: remind the client of the results you’ve already delivered (e.g., over $3 million generated together), share your vision for scaling to $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million, and propose a concrete roadmap (start with X, then Y, then Z). Emphasize that you want to take on more responsibility because you believe you can execute better than others, and assure them you won’t take any of their time. Then, at the close, add that you want skin in the game—more upside when things go well, and a corresponding adjustment when they don’t. Present this structure directly to the client. Because you’re leading with growth and a clear path to multiply their business, the likelihood of them agreeing to partner on a new initiative is vastly higher than if you simply complained about pay. In short, if you’re only making a few thousand dollars a year, you are being underpaid; but if you’re earning tens of thousands per month, you’re in a reasonable position. My overall approach to every job or partnership discussion is to focus on mutual growth, not to threaten to walk away unless paid more—that’s blackmail and damages trust. Successful business owners refuse to negotiate with that kind of pressure. When you approach from a desire to grow the pie together, you’ll achieve far better outcomes.

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youtube ↗Agency Operations

I'd love to hear more about how you went from having no clients to landing your first few, and then how you scaled to 100K months. Specifically, how did you structure long-term deals with automation clients after building their systems, and what makes clients willing to pay a retainer once the automation is set up?

Are we talking no clients in general, in any of my businesses, or specifically automation? You might be talking about automation. The way I did automation was I just started out on Upwork — applied to like 10 to 20 Upwork jobs per day along with my business partner at the time, and the vast majority of them said no to us. We used a custom Loom-video-based approach: I'd record a Loom of me talking through the problem and send out a ton of those. I got really good at explaining automation problems consistently, and we scaled that automation agency pretty quickly to $15-20K a month. We languished around $20-40K a month for a while because my partner wanted to operate it as a software consultancy taking on custom projects with a big hired team, but that didn't really work — the engineers we hired could drag-and-drop in tools like Make.com but didn't understand the business side, so the automations they built were brittle. That's when I learned how difficult hiring is for something as complicated as a software/automation project. My partner and I eventually split up amicably — he wanted to focus on the consultancy side and building resellable equity, I didn't. I kept the business, focused on high-leverage applications of systems I'd already built, scaled up Upwork applications and cold email (reinvesting most of my income into cold email), and simplified the offer down to mostly cold email systems and one-click CRM templates. Around $35-45K/month I couldn't keep scaling that way, so I started pitching a fractional-COO model: I took a few smaller clients paying $3-4K/month and gave them massive 20-30 page proposals saying, 'I want $10K/month plus 7% of your business, and here's how I'll justify it by delivering $100K/month in value.' That worked for a couple of clients, my revenue shot up, and combined with old clients coming back that same month I hit $72K in revenue (not all of it was recurring).

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I'm an experienced software professional and I want to go big time in AI and automations. I'm trying to obtain high-value clients and ticket services north of $150K to $1M per year per client. What kind of areas or services do you think I can offer to tap into such value?

You're going to want to focus on partnerships in a situation like this. You're going to want to focus on big retainers where a percentage of your compensation is tied to the growth of the business. There are a few people in my life that make far more than this right now. One of my best friends is making around $1M-$1.5M every year with a single client. The way he did that is he came into the organization pretty small based off a referral. He proved his ability to do that one thing super well. He then built some systems for that one thing and said, "Hey guys, I actually just built a system that automated a fair chunk of the work I'm doing on a daily basis. I think I could make you guys way more money if you let me do this for other roles." They said "Yeah, absolutely." He started doing that. Eventually he moved into automating growth roles, and now he's taking a cut of whatever money he makes for the company, which is obviously a lot of money. So some sort of growth partnership, some sort of fractional COO-style gig, some sort of fractional CTO-style gig can be good if you want to juggle multiple, or you can just go balls deep like my buddy did with one — I think that's totally workable too. $150K-$1M per year per client logically speaking is just like $12K-$15K per month, so that's not that big of an ask. $1M per year per client is obviously bigger. That's probably the simplest and easiest way to do it. The sorts of businesses that are good to do this with are typically young people that do a highly scalable backend service — something like an information product, some sort of coaching, some sort of e-commerce thing that's highly scalable, where you can take a chunk of the revenue and the revenue tends to be quite large.

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youtube ↗Offers

How can I structure an offer to charge between $2.5K and $15K per month, given I currently can't charge more than $500/month?

Yeah, so this isn't true. I hit $10,000 and actually $25,000 without a set of templates that I resold; I was doing custom work much closer to what you're suggesting. And that's fine—you can hit those numbers without a strong templated or productized offer. The question is going beyond that: if you want to scale beyond $10K or $25K per month with a service, you need to start templating, systematizing, and standardizing. You can't just take on every custom project to build a unique ERP platform based on vendor data if you want a repeatable, scalable business. So, how do you structure an offer to charge $2.5K–$15K/month? First, understand that pricing depends on perceived and real value to the audience. Right now you're struggling to charge more than $500/month because you're likely delivering only $2K–$3K/month in value. To go beyond, identify problems you can solve for an audience willing to pay more. (I realized my pen wasn't plugged in—give me a second.) [plugging in pen] Here's the situation: you're charging $500/month and delivering maybe $2.5K–$5K/month. I was charging $5K/month while delivering $25K–$50K/month. The key is that you're looking at prices and thinking I'm charging 10× more, but I'm also delivering 10× more value. From the client's perspective, those who say yes to your $500/month expect a 5×–10× ROI, and the same people saying yes to me expect the same ROI. Thus, you don't need to fundamentally change how you construct the offer; you need to change the value you deliver and how you communicate it. For example, if you're building systems that save $50/hour for 5 hours/week, you save clients $250/week (~$1K/month). That's a cap because you're only saving money—saving money has a natural limit (you can only save 100% of what they make). Instead, build automations for sales, marketing, and growth. Saving a salesperson's time at $50/hour and redirecting it to selling yields far higher value: a strong salesperson on calls can produce ~$500/hour. Saving 5 hours/week at that rate saves $2,500/week or $10K/month. The system focused on saving keeps you poor; the system focused on growth makes you rich. Increase total organizational value by solving problems that are more costly to the organization. In practice, this means shifting from back-end fulfillment automations (hard to do) to front-end automations that directly drive growth, and convincing clients of that value.

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