I'm finding that learning, implementing, and creating an AI automation agency is really time-consuming and slow. Is it actually true that this stuff takes time, or am I just slow?
These things take time. There is no shortcut in life — you have to sit down and do the work. You're not slow, or rather, we're all slow. People making a ton of money usually just started earlier and put in a lot more work than you have. You can genuinely predict a lot of someone's success just by how many hours they've spent on the thing: if someone started at the same time as you and is making four times as much money, they've usually put in two to four times as much time — there are exponential gains the more time you put in, so the more you put in, the less you need for the same results going forward. Look at my YouTube channel versus smaller channels and compare total minutes of content published — it's almost a one-to-one relationship. I have about four times as much content as another creator I know, and I'm about four times as big as he is. It really is mostly just a matter of how much time you put in.
I don't think so. It takes way too long to get up and running. When you're starting something for the first time and try to monetize through a brand like a YouTube brand, it takes three steps: build the skill, use the skill to build the brand, then monetize the brand. That's a very long path from where you are to where you want to be. A much simpler, straighter path is to build the skill and sell the skill — two steps instead of three, and you can do it immediately. It takes maybe 10 hours to build the skill nowadays, to get to where you can do something valuable with AI even as a total newbie, and you can sell the skill in another 5 or 10 hours. Building a brand isn't like that; it could take months or years to pay off. So if you're starting a business for the first time, stay away from building a brand initially and just reach out directly to people struggling with problems you know how to solve. It's far easier and more straightforward.
He says you first need to anchor what a lot of money means. AI automation agencies have the lowest barrier to entry and lowest capital cost—comparable to website design agencies in the late 1990s or social-media marketing agencies in the early 2010s. In this space, a lot of money is probably just a few hundred dollars. Any business outside this vertical will cost significantly more than a few hundred to get up and running over a three-month period, so you should expect to spend money to make money. Regarding your specific situation—bidding for email-setup projects on Upwork—lack of experience isn't a time issue; it takes only a couple of weeks to become proficient with any tool well enough that someone will pay you to save them time. So you should combine learning and prospecting. He recommends doing Maker School's introductory automation agency tutorials to gain foundational knowledge and learn to read the language of the tools. Once you understand the language, you can communicate with AI, use Google to find answers to specific questions, and you don't need to know how to do everything right away. The key question is whether a future version of you could solve this problem in the next couple of weeks—and the answer is almost always yes.
Learning, implementing, and creating an AAA does take time; there’s no shortcut. You have to sit down and do the work. It’s not just you being slow—everyone is slow relative to those who started earlier and put in more work. Successful people usually spend two to four times as many hours as you to achieve four times the results, and there are exponential gains from putting in more time. He suggests looking at his YouTube output versus others: he has about four times as much content as a similar creator, which correlates with being four times as big. In short, results come from the amount of time invested.
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.