Tristan says: Hey Nick, love your content. Been setting up my agency for the last couple of months. Actually just about to install my first automation for a popular wedding band over here in Scotland. They're on a free trial for 6 weeks and if they like it, we're going to go to a monthly plan. It's a system that receives all their inquiries, generates a quote, and makes a draft email for them. I suggested it purely from watching Instagram stories where they're saying, 'We're sorry for the slow responses.' Nice. So, you did some sort of outbound Instagram approach. Fantastic work. That's killer. I'm going to save them at least 15 hours a week. My question is, when it comes to pricing, how do I justify my price? Where should I even start?
So you said you're offering a free trial for 6 weeks, then moving to a monthly plan if they like it. I'll be honest—that's not a good way to pitch automations; you've done it, so you'll have to live with it. But think about it from their perspective: this is fear‑based because you get them used to the system for six weeks and then threaten to take it away unless they pay. I don't like operating that way. I prefer people to fall in love with the value so much they want to pay me hand over fist. Here's how I'd do it: offer the system build for free, and only if they absolutely love it would I ever ask them to pay. Then I'd make them love it so much that the natural question becomes, 'Hey Nick, how can I pay you?'—and I'd have them start that conversation with me, not wait until the end of a six‑week period. In terms of pricing, it's hard to give a exact number, but consider: how much money were they making before? How much are they making with the system? What's the opportunity cost of the leads they're missing? How much more money do you think they'd make with the system versus without it? How much time would you be saving them? Add all that up into a value number, then charge maybe a third or a quarter of that. For example, saving 15 hours a week is one part of the value—but it's not just about time savings. There's actually a lot more that goes into a system's value. If you notice, I listed time as one of the last value components. Fifteen hours a week at $50/hour is only $750 a week. But because we gained three more leads this week and the average lead value is $1,000, that's $3,000—four times the time‑savings value. That kind of 4× differential between front‑end and back‑end value is typical. Thank you, Builder Tutorials and Techul—much appreciated. Okay, I think I'll leave it there; hopefully this makes sense.
I build new systems rather than just maintain one, because you’d quickly run out of high‑ROI systems to apply to their business. The ROI from something like Lead‑en automation can be massive, which justifies the recurring payment, but if the retainer were only for maintenance of a single system you’d worry about endless revisions. I don’t think it’s wrong to charge a retainer even when the ongoing work is near zero, because the systems I build produce value independently—you don’t have to constantly watch over them. It’s like hiring an emergency plumber who charges $500 for a 30‑second fix; the fee reflects the expertise built over years, not just the time spent on the job. So the ongoing work doesn’t have to be zero for you to get paid, but you must continuously provide value—perhaps through a system that runs cold email autonomously, for example. What I provide on a monthly retainer includes: unlimited maintenance on all systems we’ve built together; a 15‑minute availability window each day (12 p.m. to 2 p.m. PT) where you can ask me any question and I’ll reply within about 15 minutes; a weekly strategy call (30‑45 minutes) where I slot into your business and tell you exactly what you need to do to make more money, essentially building a roadmap for the coming week; I also often create a big monthly roadmap at the start of the month or include a proposal with a list of 50 things I want to do when we begin working together, which I follow unless I provide a separate monthly roadmap; unlimited new project requests—you can make as many requests as you want and I’ll add them to my queue, though realistically I usually complete about one new project per week because I have templates and blueprints for most things, so I’m not spending eight hours a day fulfilling a $7,000‑a‑month client; there’s a lot of perceived value in this, comparable to what clients would pay for a standalone maintenance package, Q&A and training for the team, a weekly strategy call, or consultation at my hourly rate (around $800). Instead of building every project myself, I increasingly describe exactly what the system should look like or provide SOPs for your team to build it with their own tools, so I’m not a single point of failure and your team develops the skills to build these automations as well.
Right now you're focused on the savings, and I think that's the main thing you've understood automations to provide, but savings is a small fraction of the total value of an automation. Say you build a system that saves 10 salespeople 1 hour a week each — that's 40 hours a month, and if they're paid $50/hour that looks like a $2,000/month automation. That looks sizable, but it's only a small part of the value you're capable of providing. The big thing isn't the savings, it's the revenue: if you free up an hour of a salesperson's time and they can use it to close deals worth, say, $500 in that hour (amortized across their whole workload), you're not just saving $2,000, you're making them an extra $20,000. That's the difference between a savings mindset and a revenue mindset — it's opportunity cost. When I sell a cold email system, I don't say 'this saves you $50/month on cheaper leads,' I say 'this frees up 10 hours a month of your salespeople's time, worth $500/hour, meaning it makes you $5,000.' Reorient your pitch around revenue, not savings — savings only matters if you're working with a multi-billion dollar enterprise. On your second issue: 3,000 emails to one booked meeting is a 0.03% booked-meeting rate. Two meetings would be 0.06%, three would be 0.1% — that's totally fine, not the best ever (ideally 0.5-1%, a meeting every ~200 emails), but it proves it's possible. You've run the equivalent of a 10-minute mile; now make your copy better and run a 9-minute mile.
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.
First, I'd recognize that where I'm physically located has virtually no bearing on how much money I can make — there's some impact if I'm from a region associated with offshore workers pitching people used to different price expectations, but assuming it's just me going to a new area, it doesn't really matter where I work or live. Second, I'd spend $184 of the $300 on Maker School — not because I need the info, but because the program bundles something like $20,000 in signup discounts and credits to AI providers. After the $184, I'm down to $116 but now have roughly $3,000 in equivalent credits and discounts, which is basically a 15x return before I've even used the program's actual content. Those credits use API pricing rather than plan pricing, so I'd sign up for something like a Claude Code or Codex plan (~$20/month), and once I burn through the usage limits there, fall back on the banked API credits and discounts, giving me effectively unlimited use of coding tools for at least a month — and if I need more beyond that, I'd sign up for something like Kimi K2 or DeepSeek's plan, which are less intelligent per dollar than a frontier model but plenty for the low-intelligence tasks I actually need. That leaves about $90. I'd put roughly $40 into an Instantly plan and another $40 into mailboxes, leaving about $16, then use a lead-gen platform like Apify (discounted through Maker School) to pull a list of ~15,000 leads. I'd rinse those leads through the Instantly mailboxes every day for the next month — realistically budgeting time for mailbox warm-up — and just focus on outreach daily: hundreds of individual touchpoints a day, religiously checking and responding to replies first thing every morning, sending Loom videos to anyone showing interest, following up relentlessly, and adding responders on LinkedIn and their YouTube to learn everything about them so I squeeze maximum value out of every lead — making my 300 leads perform like someone else's 1,000. Then I'd front-load as many sales calls as possible, offer reasonably low rates to lock in a first client and bootstrap credibility, and over-deliver heavily to maximize the odds of turning it into a retainer. The core insight: if you're even halfway current on this space's developments, you already know more than 99.9% of everyone else, and that's an extremely powerful arbitrage window right now — so join a discount aggregator (doesn't have to be Maker School, though obviously I think it's the best one), and flip as much of your starting money as possible into bootstrapping outreach.