Nick, what do you think about sending real physical mail to business owners as an outreach method? For instance, sending 30 daily highly customized emails with QR codes that link to a Loom video and a handwritten signature, followed by a reminder email that the mail was sent and they should check it out.
You can actually set up a campaign right now that sends fully AI- and robot-written cards to people's real mailboxes, making it seem as if you wrote them by hand. One of my old clients, Rick Elmore, runs a company called Simply Noted, which uses robot arms to do the writing. This is valuable because in an era of overwhelming communication, people place a premium on customized communication that cannot be automated or replicated—most people don’t realize such robot arms exist. I used a similar tactic years ago when I went door‑to‑door with my business partner Grender; we bought business card holders printed with the person’s name and gave them to prospects we wanted to court. The approach scales easily. In any acquisition or outreach effort, the key is the cost of acquiring a customer—both time and money. Calculate your hourly rate, multiply by the time spent per deal, add the direct cost per card times the number of cards needed to close a deal, and you get the total cost including opportunity cost. If that total is around 10‑20 % of the revenue you generate, you have a viable model. Achieving a five‑ to ten‑fold return on that total cost lets you scale the method indefinitely. I’m a big fan of this idea.
You need to charge more, proportional to the value you provide. If you solve a $10,000-per-month money need, you can reasonably charge 30%–50% of that, i.e., $3,000–$5,000 per month. From the business owner's perspective, this is a simple ROI: hiring you should yield about a 3x return, acknowledging some uncertainty between the $3,000 fee and the $10,000 value. You can charge a proportion of the value delivered. Focus on profitability by charging significantly more for your services. On the expense side, avoid accruing unnecessary liabilities. Many who sell cold email or lead generation merely wrap a cold email product with minor added value and then bundle in unnecessary costs like email inboxes, platform fees, and domains. Instead, have the client pay for some of those costs so you're not left liable if you don't deliver results or fulfill guarantees. For example, one consulting client guaranteed a client $10,000 but only sought payment after delivering that amount; due to a long sales cycle, the client didn't receive the $10,000 for four or five months, while the consultant's ongoing email costs were $600–$700 per month, totaling $2,400–$2,800 over that period, yielding a 76% margin after COGS. Don't put yourself in that situation.
Josh's approach is perfect if you're not yet in the automation industry, don't have an automation business, or aren't freelancing; your only goal should be to go from zero to one as quickly as possible. Most people in Josh's situation try to jump from zero to a hundred right away, but the strategies for going from 0 to 1 are different from those needed to scale to 100. Josh is looking for a minimum viable strategy—similar to a minimum viable product—to avoid stagnation and quit, because he values feedback loops. This is the way I approach any business model in the 2020s, given how fast everything moves. Regarding your question about minimum tools and whether to focus on Upwork until you earn money: it depends on your financial situation. The quickest path from zero to one, in my experience, is to spam three methods: Upwork applications, cold emails, and community engagement. I call it spamming like a video game because, while quality matters, the law of large numbers ensures results if you send enough outreach. For Upwork, send many applications using a customized Loom video approach—record a short video saying, 'Hey, how's it going? I just saw your post for XYZ; let me show you exactly how I'd solve this.' Highlight your relevant experience (X, Y, Z) and past results. Even if you're new to Upwork, this personalized touch boosts your chances. For cold emails, use one of my offer formulas or cold email templates, then find an audience, split‑test two or three audiences, and gauge reply rates—especially positive replies. You can personalize with AI if you wish; my Nix cold email templates are available via the four‑step cold email copying system. For communities, identify groups and niches you're interested in (e.g., videography, dental clinic managers). Post hyper‑relevant content that provides value without selling immediately. For example, in a dental clinic manager community, share a strategy like 'end‑of‑insurance reactivation' that leaves voicemails about unused benefits. By consistently giving value over time, you become an authority and can start charging for your services. These three outreach methods—Upwork, cold emails, and community posting—constitute the minimum viable strategy for landing your first client.
First, check your math — 20,000 emails a month shouldn't cost $600. Using something like Amplify credits at roughly $1 per 1,000 leads, that's $20; a HyperGrowth-tier sending plan is about $97, so $117 there; for 20,000 emails over ~26 sending days at 700/day, you need about 25 mailboxes at roughly $4 each, so about $100. All in, that's more like $200-300/month including personalization/icebreakers — not as much as you think. Second, and more importantly: don't sell the cost, sell the expected ROI. Walk the client through it live: 'How much is an average client worth to you?' — say $2,000. 'How many refer another client?' — say 1 in 2. 'Do you upsell anything afterward?' 'How many months do they typically stay?' — say 3 months. That's a $6,000 lifetime value per customer; if half refer someone of similar value, multiply by 1.5 to get $9,000; add in any upsells and you land around $10,000 in total lifetime value per customer this system could add — at that point the $200-300/month in tooling cost looks trivial next to the value being generated.
Outreach is the main area where people underestimate the effort needed. Most people send only 10 or 20 emails a day and wonder why they're not making progress, not realizing others send 10,000 emails a day. This applies to any marketing: new PPC marketers create few campaigns and wonder why they aren't succeeding, while top performers test dozens of variations daily and invest serious money. The same pattern appears in affiliate sales and door-to-door outreach—initially aiming for a few doors, but high performers hit around 100 doors, 20 times more than expected. Product iteration also requires many more versions than anticipated; it's not just pulling a phone but involves miraculous invention and extensive prototyping. In any field—painting, developing Muay Thai form, etc.—you only see the tip of the iceberg. I assume this holds for everything. Hey Nick says he's running an AI-assisted podcast clipping business, transitioning from full-time work, with one client paying $10,000 a month, charging low to build a portfolio, workflow 70–90 minutes per episode, episodes 60–90 minutes long. You recently mentioned this topic.