How do you organize your tasks and your money — not just tasks for your business but for your life? What apps do you use, and how does the process look? Same for your finances.
I can't offer too much information about that. Unfortunately, operational security dictates that I should not be talking about where I'm storing my money. If you did want to know how I'm storing my money, specifically my actual day-to-day investments, I actually have that as a module inside of Maker School. Both for security's sake and the fact that I think agents are going to be scraping the hell out of all this information pretty quickly, I'm not going to give you guys where I'm banking and what my investments are. But anyway, a big app that I love to use for anything and everything task-related is Linear, and I've piped that into Raycast, which is my little launcher here and allows me to very quickly do whatever the hell I want. You can see my number one most used app is Beeper Desktop — that's because it's a unified messaging app that allows me to get WhatsApp, iMessage, and like 20 other tools all in one. Then it's really just Beeper for all comms, OBS for all my video, and Spotify, which is kind of quickly being phased out for Suno. And I take notes just using Linear. If I have a great idea for something, I'll just pump it in there. Linear is like the backend.
Managing everything can get chaotic. I don’t have a fancy CRM; I’m pretty disorganized. My Google Drive is filled with countless files with little naming conventions. I’m good at taking ideas from conception to a minimum viable product quickly, but after that it often becomes a mess. For example, a couple of hours ago I responded to 92 DMs for Maker School without any system—I just opened the DMs tab and worked through them top‑to‑bottom, which I do every few days. Most people at my level would have a proper CRM, support tickets, a refund person, etc., but I don’t. Realistically I probably have around 50 Google Sheets and 100 notes. To keep track, I use a note‑taking app called Godspeed. I write a line like “respond to school DMs,” and it creates a giant to‑do list that I see each morning. You can use any tool you like—Apple Notes, Google Docs, etc.
Yeah, it's probably your ability to verbalize that—your skill at explaining AI's value is what's lacking. These systems save time and money, but you can't just tell that to somebody; you need to first understand their specific problem, paraphrase it in your own words to show you get it, then expand on how that problem costs them time and money. After that, you present your system as a solution, estimating ROI based on past clients, maybe mentioning a big‑name client you built it for, and ask if it matches what they were looking for. Then you give a brief demo, showing what you can tweak. In doing so, you show how AI saves them time or money, rather than just stating it. Everybody knows AI helps, but you demonstrate it for their specific case. Automation means reducing labor cost; you show how to achieve that for their problem. You also mentioned your most profitable system is your cold outreach system. To break it down: there's a manual way and an automatic way. Manual: go to Apollo.com, create a search URL (e.g., for creative agencies), copy it, go to appi.com, type Apollo, pick the popular scraper ($120 per thousand leads), paste the URL, pay per thousand leads—you get output with names, emails, etc., export as CSV, feed into AI (using Make.com or Nad), generate personalized icebreakers via a message model, format as JSON, then upload to Instantly.ai or Smartlead. You handle copywriting yourself. The automatic way: set up a Google Drive watch folder with webhooks; when a lead sheet is uploaded, it triggers the same process automatically—scraping leads via Appify, adding them to Instantly in an automatic campaign, managing everything behind the scenes. This lets you incorporate multiple lead sources (conferences, Apollo, Zoom Info, LinkedIn, VA‑assembled leads). You also added lead nurturing: an autoresponder that replies instantly to instant‑email responses (e.g., between 6 pm and 7 am), giving the perception of attentiveness and buying time, which boosts response rates.
value communicationsales processcold outreachlead nurturing
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.
Well, if you don't already have access to one of my communities, I'd probably shamelessly plug it. I think you'd save a lot of money joining one of those. For example, one guy just shared 250,000 free mail credits. I'm not capable of doing the math, but you get free access to a bunch of stuff just by being part of the community, which usually vastly outweighs the money you're paying. So I might check whether make moneywithmake.com or maker school makes sense. I'd also sign up for accelerators and discount aggregators like Secret. They do things like: you pay a little bit of money and then you get six months free on Notion Plus, you get ad matching on TikTok, you get 25% off your plan purchases, you can save up to $9K. You save $1,000 in free credits in Air Table. Basically, when you have a little bit of money, you can multiply that money and then get access to all these platforms and significantly reduce your software expense. And then, in terms of tools, systems, resources, I would just 10x the outreach. Honestly, whatever netted you those first few clients, you've clearly validated that works. Just scale it the hell up, man.