Why are you aiming for $500k/month—is it for the money or intrinsic goals—and what's your biggest drive in life to become the biggest person in the space (money, helping people)?
Yeah, I thought a lot about this. I just spent a month in Europe with my girlfriend, celebrating her break after medical school—she's now a doctor and doesn't get many breaks, so this was a big one for her. I tagged along for the ride and had some fun. While I was on that break, I was still doing Maker School and running a couple of my businesses, but not at the same level of intensity. [snorts] Despite maxing out my life in the relationships category, I was really lagging behind on health and career. I realized I was repeating the same mistake I'd made before—maximizing relationships or health at the cost of other categories. So now I'm trying to be much more consistent across all categories. I've realized that, at least in my business, to progress and keep it fun, I need some sort of goal. That's why the 1 million subscriber goal exists—some might call it naive, but it's a goal. The reality is I won't get in the exact perfect direction right away, but I need to get moving in a direction, then eventually sit down, recalibrate, and see if that's the direction I really want to go in, maybe change or pivot. So if I want to get a month like this—pretty cool because it's a direct reflection of how engaged and high-quality people find my content—I think that's a pretty good near-term goal to strive for, because if people like my content they're more likely to want to pay me money. Subscribers and views are more superficial, but financially not much has changed, which is nice. So I just want to push towards financials. Okay, almost had it to you—good to have you back. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO or AIEO agency, which is like AI optimization. Sorry, I'm realizing the sun is going to really crush me here—give me one sec. [pause] That's much better. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO agency. This is my current script: any comments? Hey name, just Google use case twice and check chat GPT—it keeps showing up instead of the company. So I put together a one-page doc on what exactly is happening and how to flip it. Hmm. I can see what you're saying. Do you want it? Yeah, what are you going to do—are you going to send this in the thing? Yeah, that really didn't work. My issue with stuff like this is: if you really had it and you really did just put together a quick one-page doc, you would have sent it right away. This was basically a gimmick that worked pretty well a while ago—maybe like two and a half years ago—but nowadays people's value radars are quite different; they want a lot more value up front. So if you can't send that value up front, people will notice unfortunately. So I know: if there was a way to actually generate the doc and then send it via LinkedIn, I would do that. You can make the doc seem human-written. You know, refer to them by first name like 'Hey Peter.' Uh, so I know you run XYZ business and you have yet to hear about me, but I put this together for you because I think I can offer a lot of value, and my mom always told me to give people value up front. I don't know—some silly like that. You could probably do that in the document, send it over, and have some success. But um yeah, the cool thing about LinkedIn is you can only really send like 20 to 30 of these a day. And links aren't treated the same as they are in cold email; you don't have the same deliverability impact. So you could absolutely just send the links. So, just send the value. Nick We seem to only vote for jesters and fake people in office. He would fit right in. Everything is a grift to these people. We do love the grift. Thank you. Insightful. Jared says, 'Hey Nick, glad to see you're back making this content. Question, how do you think about how you want to be remembered outside of externally weighted indicators of success? How does that shape what you're pursuing? Have come back to this question many times personally in recent months. Appreciate the values always.' Yeah, you know, I love that we're moving to more meaning-based questions, and it looks like a lot of people here who have had success following some of thebusiness
I'm glad you're saying this because I'm actually doing that right now. I'm literally writing this out because I've reached a point where I don't have enough time to meaningfully progress on the projects I want, simply because I made over $400,000 last month, showing that everything I've done has worked well. The last blog post I mentioned was in September 2024, when I made $100,000—more than I could have hoped for—and I was ecstatic. However, I evaluated whether I was truly satisfied and found I wasn't. Now, for June, I've made $400,000 in profit, which is a 400% increase compared to September 2024, representing a compounding monthly growth rate of 15% on a business that generates outsized income. I've spoken on stage next to titans like Hormosi and Sam Ovens, been invited to podcasts with Tai Lopez and Dan Martell, and my friend group now consists primarily of people earning several hundred thousand dollars per month. I've made near-guaranteed future income and can retire anytime I want. The youthful gamut I took—believing I could earn a full-time lifetime salary in a few months through entrepreneurship—has paid off. So the question for me is: what do I want? I've realized I don't care as much about money as most people do, now that I have so much of it. I've always not cared much about money. Therefore, I'm satisfied with the money and want to focus on things not directly money-related, like impact, the quality and strength of my relationships, and my health, which I've sacrificed to make money. I can't optimize for both money and health; impact is the big one. Thanks for asking that question. I appreciate it, and you'll see this soon. Okay, so I'm just going to do one more thing: I'm going to do my brand stats and then call it for the day. We're probably going to change the structure of these daily updates—I'll still do brand stats and Q&A, but I'm not sure about the live building yet. My daily updates channel is at about 9,000 subscribers, so we should hit 10,000 soon, and my Instagram is at 285,000. We have some sponsorships queued up, including one for Lindy that hit 1.775 million views. The YouTube growth has plummeted because I'm not posting, so I need to step back to buy a couple more hours a day to strategize and get back to content, since neglecting the top of funnel would starve the products I make. I'm going to cap this video at exactly 20 minutes and then work on my packaging.
You know, the reason I've always been hesitant to do a day-in-the-life vlog is because my days are pretty boring. For the most part, I'm just sitting in front of my laptop doing the same revenue-generating activities I tell you to do. These activities might look a bit different now that my brand has taken off and been very successful—I now have more distribution and leverage, so I spend more time on the brand than on my agency. But generally, I wake up, sit in this chair, and type for about ten hours. It's boring, right? There's no real day-in-the-life for people who are 'on the up and up,' at least in my case, since my business model is entirely digital. If I were a door-to-door sales guy or traveling the world for high-ticket deals, it would be different, but I don't really think a day-in-the-life vlog is that valuable. It's more entertainment—like me sucking my own dick, which is pointless. Or like showing me at the gym for two hours, which I get can be motivating for people who want that lifestyle, but I'll be real: I don't think a lot of people want my life. Sure, I have a ton of money and I'm making a big impact; it looks cool from the outside, but there's a lot of work behind it. Work tends to be the separation line between those who don't have stuff and those who do. I could get philosophical, but I won't go super deep. However, a friend once told me something that stuck with me: 'Everybody on earth gets paid exactly the amount they deserve.' It blew my mind because it sounds like one of those unnecessary alpha-male bro sayings, but pragmatically, it's true. You get paid $5 an hour for a shitty dishwashing job you don't want to do; at some level you deserve that because you haven't taken the actions to get a $15 or $20-an-hour job. If you're in a partnership where someone treats you unfairly—giving you 30% and taking 70% while skimming you off the top—it's your fault; you're getting paid exactly what you deserve because you could have avoided that partnership, enforced better boundaries, or become more valuable than 30%. Likewise, if you run a business and your average order value is $500, you deserve that $500 because you were unable to position the product better to make more money. It's unreasonable to assume otherwise—that's how the economy works under capitalism. Just like when you start a new game, if you're bad at it, you just haven't spent enough time getting better. When you get your ass kicked in Super Smash Brothers, it's because you deserve it. That's one thing I'll mention that I don't think a lot of people realize.
No, no problem. I'm happy to I'm happy to answer. Yeah, it's a ton of money for sure—more money than 99 whatever percent of the world make. I did the math, and I think I'm probably one of the top few hundred earners in my country right now, which is stupid. So, yeah, it's kind of nutty. But I'll be honest: I've been acclimatized to a higher income lifestyle now for the better part of the last few years because it's not that I just made the school community and went from broke to really rich. That's not the come-up story. I ran an agency before this that also put me at like the top 1% income-wise. So, you'd have to go pretty far back to see Poor Nick. I have some photos. I'm sure I could show everybody here, but uh, yeah, like the if if we're talking the difference between poor Nick and then let's say the difference between Nick when he was making like $15,000 $20,000 a month, the major differences were quality of life purchases. I started being a lot more open to paying money for experiences and knowledge—so like buying programs and courses and that sort of stuff. And then also my health. A big big shift for me was when I booked this Muay Thai uh private coach who was like the owner of a Muay Thai gym and I would go into the Muay Thai gym and I just found like I wasn't getting the sort of like I really wanted to get really good at this and it was very important for me at the time uh you know to be able to defend myself and whatnot. So I paid like 600 bucks a month for this guy, and I remember just like when I told all of my friends at the time that I was doing my tie they're like wow like what are you doing group classes? I'm like no I'm doing private coaching. They're like teaching private coaching. How expensive was that? I was like it comes out like 600 600 700 bucks a month. They're like, 'You're spending $600 a month.' And I remember that for me was like, 'Oh yeah, I can just do that. That's incredible. I can actually spend money on like the top tier knowledge distillation from experts now.' And that was really cool. Aside from that, slightly nicer housing, of course. But I've never really been big on that. Um, I got a car, which is cool. Previous I was driving this old little manual stick shift Saturn Astra and it was like a fun car and stuff but um just a pain in the ass in the winters out here in Calgary just cuz you got to be a little tighter with the control if you don't want to like spin out on a hill and stuff. So now I have some you know four-door symmetrical all-wheel drive thing that just I don't even have to think about. And then uh yeah in recent months Ubers have been really helpful. Um what I've realized is you know all the time that I typically spend driving um I can just repurpose uh for Ubers and then I can just do work while I'm in the car. And when I say work, I just mean like respond to posts on school or something and just do little things that otherwise would have taken me time. Like when I'm at home or in the office, I can just do them while I'm Ubering or I can have a call with somebody or whatever. So, you know, on average it's like 30 minutes a day, right? So, I've actually been able to buy some of that back. And then better foods and stuff, too. Yeah. So, I'm not really big on the the material wealth and I don't really think I ever will be, but hopefully that answers your question there. Oh, uh, obviously the the peace of mind is really big. The peace of mind knowing that like I'm going to be okay no matter what happens. That's huge. I used to really really stress about that. Okay, brand stats. Let's just really quickly cover this. Uh if you guys don't know what this is, it's an unbroken chain of stats that I've been tracking for the better part of the last uh very long time where I track my main channel which is at 177,263 and I do my Instagram which I track using a tool called Blast Up. Gets my follower count in real time. I think it's 312,000. This appears to be lagging. Oh, it's not lagging. 314,326. And then what's my daily updates channel again? Anybody remember it? Let's see. 12,156
Well, yeah, I'm just going to pitch the same thing I just pitched to Christian. It sounds like you already know, but you should double down on the stuff that works. I'm going to post a video in a few hours that will run you through a bunch of client acquisition methods. So maybe get everything in the S tier list and just start spending some money on it. All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'm going to call it there and now do my brand stats. Thank you very much for listening. I'm thinking back and boy have I done a lot of videos today. If I was talking a little bit faster than usual, apologies on that. I don't like to do it this quick, but I just have somebody picking me up in exactly 7 minutes, and I wanted to make sure that I could get through some valuable content. So, let's see how many subscribers I gained. 47,494. That's almost 800. Good. Almost 1% growth. Instagram, for whatever reason, is not popping up. Come on, ladies and gentlemen. Come on. All right. I'm pretty sure it's 99,000. So, I'm just going to write 99,000. So, I unfortunately do not have the time to fix this. Okay. 98,500. My phone here. Yeah. No, my phone's not here. Sorry. Um, daily updates. Whoa. That's not me. Not me yet. Okay. 3,357. Um, 2.19% growth. So, I'm actually focusing less on the absolute numbers now and more on the percentage growth because the percentage growth is more representative. I got to scroll way up to get to this. But uh yeah, this is now past 95,000. So my Instagram is actually kind of up here. It's pretty crazy, huh? All right. I'd like to do a lot more, but um unfortunately I have to jet my uh yeah, my father's picking me up in a minute. We're going to spend some family time and uh to be honest, I just have a ton of videos I have to record. So I'm just going to take a breather and uh probably get back to this later this evening. But with all those new people that joined Maker School, um I just have one thing I want to share with you. First of all, we're at 1.9K members. Second of all, um it's at 131,000 MR with 16.62% churn. So everything that I've been doing churn reduction wise has been working. We've obviously got a big flood of signups recently. So that is decreasing the churn temporarily, but everything else that I'm doing with churn is working really well. I've made probably over $200,000 now if you do the churn math with just a few hours of work. I have a couple of daily um or community exclusives that I have to land, but you know, um what I really like is you just saw me do it all live on this channel. Make money with make just hit 429 members. Okay, so we just scaled it up. I just had my um my weekly office hour. We had a bunch of new people on there, but we've now gotten almost an additional 30 people in. A lot of them are really high quality, very intelligent, very ambitious people. So, everything that I have told you guys I was going to do, I'm doing. And hopefully you guys get to see what it looks like when you brainstorm, distill a list of strategies, pick a couple strategies, do them, and then do some iteration and testing later on. I'll leave it there. Hopefully you guys enjoy this sort of content. You'll really enjoy Maker School, and make money with Make. Thank you very much for watching. Looking forward to answering your questions.