If you had to start your AI journey from scratch today, what skill would you focus on first? What roadmap would you follow to go from 0 to $10k a month, and how long do you think it would realistically take?
Define what you mean by scratch. If you mean scratch in terms of my ability to use AI tools, but not scratch in terms of my ability to sell, I think I could go to $10,000 a month this month — probably in the next 15 days or so — with zero knowledge of any of the stuff. Because you'll find that the bottleneck is not really the tech skills. You could learn everything you need to know in presumably two or three days of full-time, 10 hours a day blasted against the keyboard. At the end of that three-day pipe, you'll be a very different person — you'll be able to use these tools far better than most other people can. From there, I would spend the other 13 or 14 days just pounding marketing and then eventually pounding sales. I would probably sell a fixed-price offer, keeping in mind that when you sell, you're selling in the domain of ideas. You're not necessarily selling a physical thing — you don't need to create a product in order to sell it. You just need to talk to a bunch of people about something that could be a product. Then I'd blast it. Assuming my outreach machine is more or less what I talk about in Maker School, I could probably book a meeting a day, two meetings a day, so I'd probably have like 20 meetings in the next 1.5 to 2 weeks, and then I'd probably close like a quarter of them — that's a pretty low conversion rate, but I'd probably close a quarter. So I'd just have to sell like $2,500 fixed price. If I absolutely crush it on one deal that I start today, then by the time 12 days comes around I might have even done a delivery, and that delivery might have allowed me to do an additional upsell. So maybe the LTV of a client would have been like 4K and I really only would have needed 2.5. That's probably what I would do if my goal was to make $10,000 a month.
First, I'd recognize that where I'm physically located has virtually no bearing on how much money I can make — there's some impact if I'm from a region associated with offshore workers pitching people used to different price expectations, but assuming it's just me going to a new area, it doesn't really matter where I work or live. Second, I'd spend $184 of the $300 on Maker School — not because I need the info, but because the program bundles something like $20,000 in signup discounts and credits to AI providers. After the $184, I'm down to $116 but now have roughly $3,000 in equivalent credits and discounts, which is basically a 15x return before I've even used the program's actual content. Those credits use API pricing rather than plan pricing, so I'd sign up for something like a Claude Code or Codex plan (~$20/month), and once I burn through the usage limits there, fall back on the banked API credits and discounts, giving me effectively unlimited use of coding tools for at least a month — and if I need more beyond that, I'd sign up for something like Kimi K2 or DeepSeek's plan, which are less intelligent per dollar than a frontier model but plenty for the low-intelligence tasks I actually need. That leaves about $90. I'd put roughly $40 into an Instantly plan and another $40 into mailboxes, leaving about $16, then use a lead-gen platform like Apify (discounted through Maker School) to pull a list of ~15,000 leads. I'd rinse those leads through the Instantly mailboxes every day for the next month — realistically budgeting time for mailbox warm-up — and just focus on outreach daily: hundreds of individual touchpoints a day, religiously checking and responding to replies first thing every morning, sending Loom videos to anyone showing interest, following up relentlessly, and adding responders on LinkedIn and their YouTube to learn everything about them so I squeeze maximum value out of every lead — making my 300 leads perform like someone else's 1,000. Then I'd front-load as many sales calls as possible, offer reasonably low rates to lock in a first client and bootstrap credibility, and over-deliver heavily to maximize the odds of turning it into a retainer. The core insight: if you're even halfway current on this space's developments, you already know more than 99.9% of everyone else, and that's an extremely powerful arbitrage window right now — so join a discount aggregator (doesn't have to be Maker School, though obviously I think it's the best one), and flip as much of your starting money as possible into bootstrapping outreach.
I started with Harvard CS50, then taught myself computer science from the ground up, excluding languages and compilers, distributed systems, and operating systems. I completed nanotech to Tetris, building a computer from scratch. After that, I learned AI from scratch via a course that just listed introductory material, then I began training models—first a TensorFlow model called Stalan 2 that generated faces, then Gwarn's 'This Wu Does Not Exist' which I turned into an anime face generator, which I found hilarious and turned into a business called One Second Painting. I scaled that to about $3,500 per month by selling AI-generated art, but Midjourney's release destroyed that business. I had been selling NFTs, which gave me hands‑on AI experience. I then used that experience to freelance write while aiming for $10k/month, employing GPT‑3 for content. I also spent six months to a year locked in my room learning make.com and Zapier, building automations for my One Second Painting business and later for a second venture with a business partner. Eventually the money came from disproportionate time invested, leading to a compressed business model: get your first customer quickly, then worry about everything later. I realized most of the low‑level AI skills I learned aren’t used today, but the practical experience with automation platforms like make.com and Zapier, plus building info products, allowed me to scale to $100k/month through a blend of an AI automation agency and information products.
The biggest one-time contract I sold was mid $220,000 for a project I called 'Uber for lumpers'—a system connecting companies needing lumpers (people who load/unload ships) with lumper workers. My business partner and I built it, but it was a total pain and not worth the time; it was one of the first projects we sold, so I took on custom work, but I don't recommend doing custom projects more than a couple times early on because there's little ROI on your time—my hourly rate is about $50. After that, I did a proposal generator system project that paid $1,500 and took only about 5–10 minutes to fulfill (plus ~30 minutes selling and a 30‑minute kickoff call). That gave a huge return on investment and unlocked the leverage idea: I could either make $225,000 in month‑one revenue from a big custom project, or I could create templates and sell the need, then spend five minutes copying a template I already built. Regarding agency requests, I get about 10 genuine agency inquiries per month; most want to invest $15K–$20K and work with me on a three‑month subscription at $5,900/month ($17,700 up front). I haven’t finalized my agency dynamics yet. The businesses that reach out most are high‑earning industries: fintech, software, financing/investing (e.g., underwriting firms that need automated financial data and email replies), and companies installing power grids that take a cut of hundred‑million‑dollar projects. My agency currently makes about $25,000 a month; from the $128,000 profit I mentioned, that’s roughly 20% of my income. Monthly profit isn’t the only metric—enterprise value matters. Info products are hard to sell because they’re tied to me; agencies have low multiples, whereas a SaaS product can achieve much higher multiples. I’m therefore building templates and done‑for‑you services, continuing to scale the agency for enterprise value and to stay connected to what I teach, because in coaching, when a system works, people often abandon it to teach it, which makes it outdated. I want to avoid that.
biggest contractuber for lumpersproposal generatoragency
What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.