What do you recommend for me to start? I feel lost and can't find a good automation to sell; I was thinking about an inbound calling agent for a real‑estate or dentist firm.

#48 · I Tried Every Lead Gen Approach So You Don't Have To

What do you recommend for me to start? I feel lost and can't find a good automation to sell; I was thinking about an inbound calling agent for a real‑estate or dentist firm.

Yeah, listen—feeling lost is completely okay. It’s fine to feel lost; the reality is you just have to make a move anyway. In modern entrepreneurship you basically have to lower your bar for what counts as “confident enough to succeed” and then just go for it. Decades ago, when starting a business required a lot more capital, you needed to be far more confident about ROI. Nowadays you can launch an AI automation agency with a couple hundred bucks, as I’ve shown multiple times, so you don’t need to be all that confident. The most important thing is just to get going. The idea that you can’t find a good AI automation to sell isn’t true; it’s that your standard for what counts as a “good” automation is just too high. Use the blueprints I’ve shown you, figure out the simplest three‑ or four‑module system you can, and start selling. Your biggest obstacle is yourself, not the niche or the specific firms you’re targeting. An inbound calling agent for real‑estate or dental offices could be great—just put something together, start talking to real customers with it, and you’ll quickly see how to improve the system into the high‑value solution you’re envisioning.

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I'm an 18‑year‑old full‑stack web developer with API and marketing theory knowledge. I'm unsure whether to start a marketing agency or an AI automation agency, especially since I'm in Saudi Arabia where few talk about this. Should I focus on building my personal brand as an AI expert first, given I have four to five months before university starts? What would you do in my position?

If I were you and thinking long‑term, I’d ask where everything is heading. Everything is moving toward AI and automation over the next five years; what happens after that is uncertain, but my honest advice is to choose the AI automation business model. I’ve found the most success with it and have run it four times. The main reason is leverage: AI and automation offer far more leverage than traditional marketing agencies. Traditional marketing agencies are declining—this model peaked around 2017‑2019 and has been falling since, partly due to market saturation and the rise of SaaS tools that automate tasks like scheduled posting, brand strategy, and marketing strategy. In contrast, the AI automation model is still early; it really took off around 2021‑2022 with ChatGPT, and I predict it will continue growing until about 2027‑2028, when AI agents could double the market and demand. After that, demand may dip slightly as agents become more advanced. If you're in Saudi Arabia, you're essentially seeing a delayed version of this curve, giving you a few extra years to ride the upward trend. So, if I were in your place, I’d go all‑in on AI automation.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

How does one even start to think like an automation developer? I can never come up with the ideas for automations on the spot.

Never say never. I've been in agencies for about 10 years — I got out of school and started a marketing agency, sent hundreds of proposals, talked to thousands of people, and basically seen the same business model pitched a thousand different ways. When you see something that many times, you start picking up on the trends. My recommendation: don't try to think like an automation developer, think like a business person in general. Every business is basically a pipeline: there's a customer, you pay some money to get that customer, your business adds value to what the customer wants (a project, knowledge, a product, whatever), and at the end you get a higher-quality thing you can charge more for. So there's a multiple on the value of the raw good versus the finished thing. That gives you three or four places to optimize right off the bat: lead gen and sales, fulfillment, and retention. Think of every business through that lens and the automation opportunities become obvious.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Is the market still open for newcomers to AI automation agencies, or is it saturated? As someone with an ML background considering whether to go all in on an agency or pursue AI engineer roles, what path would you recommend?

The market is never simply open or closed; it's always a matter of degree of difficulty. With your strong technical background, AI engineering involves building systems from scratch, while an AI agency uses existing systems and stitches them together at a higher level of abstraction—letting you launch faster and deliver value quicker, but you won't use all your ML skills. The trade‑off is that you'll also need to learn business ownership, which brings risk and downside; I went broke for most of my early adulthood learning that lesson. Your family’s advice to take a safe job comes from a place of protection, and over the next year or two they might be right, especially since software engineering roles are being deprecated. However, the top demand remains for people with real AI/ML engineering experience. If I were you, I’d use that experience to build your own model—perhaps a transformer—and create a few portfolio pieces (e.g., a nano‑GPT‑style project) to apply for AI/ML engineering jobs. In your spare time, learn no‑code basics with my tutorials so you can fall back on building with Make or NADN if job hunting stalls.

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How do I start an AI agency as a beginner, what skills should I learn, and what is the fastest roadmap from scratch?

Honestly, I can't hold your hand through everything, but here's a roadmap. Start with the Make.com playlist I created—Make for People Who Want to Make Real Money. Watch the first 12‑13 videos to get the basics, then move on to live builds. Join Maker School, my day‑by‑day accountability program, for hands‑on guidance. After that, create an Upwork profile. Upwork lets you see what clients are actually paying for and gives you simple connector projects rather than academic builds. Apply to jobs you have at least a 50 % chance of completing; you may need to send 20‑30 proposals before you land a client. Your first gigs will likely pay $30‑$50 an hour, especially if you're in a lower‑cost‑of‑living country, but they'll give you real customer problems to solve. Consistent Upwork work will transition you from an academic mindset to a real business mindset. If you struggle with Make.com, check out their Academy for day‑by‑day lessons.

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