After 7 months building an Arabic-language school community teaching automation (300 videos, thousands spent on courses learning it myself), only about 20 people joined and most churned after month one, largely due to economic/payment friction in the Arab world. I'm pivoting to building an AIOS inside Claude Code to sell to Arabic SMEs, planning to make real revenue first and create content about the journey afterward. Two questions: is going cash-and-agency-first the right call, or am I wasting the audience I already built? And what's your honest take on selling a full AIOS (not single automations) to mid-sized companies?
What you did initially was backwards: you spent time learning, then immediately tried to build a brand/course business teaching it, before ever proving the skill made anyone money. That approach almost always grows slower and makes less money, because sitting through a course and absorbing information isn't actually a scarce or valuable skill on its own — what's valuable is having achieved real, provable outcomes for real businesses over time (case studies, measurable revenue growth, real client results). What I did instead was learn the skill, go sell to businesses first, get them results, and only build a public brand once I had real results to point to and could speak confidently and specifically ('here's how I made $48,000 last month doing X'). When you're genuinely in the top 1% at something with proof behind it, people listen — the most compelling content angles are always some version of 'someone extremely good at X shares what they know,' and you can't fake that credibility, you have to earn it with real outcomes first. So yes — go agency/cash-first, get real case studies, then build the audience around that proof rather than around the learning itself.
personal brandcredibilitycase studiesaudience building
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
Well, logically I get what you're saying, but you're assuming it's a zero‑sum game—that if I give away my secrets they benefit and I gain nothing. Actually, it's not a zero‑sum game at all. Putting this content out there has significantly increased market demand for these services, creating a positive feedback loop where the demand growth outpaces whatever I've given away in knowledge. We live in a knowledge economy, and knowledge is the main thing. By giving what feels like very little knowledge—because I've already done all the work—I can provide overwhelming, ridiculous amounts of value, and you see that as a ton of value. That makes you far more likely to join my paid community, my programs, hire my agency, or work with me in a consulting context. In reality, I lose very little: people already know how to put together a proposal generator; I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel, and when I first started sharing, a lot of copycats appeared, but I'm fine with that. I firmly believe knowledge should not be gatekept. What I do gatekeep and charge for is the accountability—the one‑on‑one time with me. That's why this approach has worked well for me. Sam Ovens, the literal king of consulting, featured me in a video saying I make about $269,000 a month with my school (an information product). And giving this free YouTube content, despite not selling anything directly, has worked exceptionally well.
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.
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.