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.
Yeah, for sure. I would pivot a bit and brand yourself more as an AI consultant or strategic consultant who uses no-code tools rather than necessarily an AI automation agency. If you think about it, many people don't realize that as a beginner, most of your work as an agency owner is actually just freelancing—being a consultant, sole proprietor, independent contractor. So I would start there, providing services as an individual, and worry about building an agency that provides services later. Because actually doing the thing, getting good at the business, then building the business, hiring, managing, tracking time, payroll—those are two fundamentally different things. Get good at delivering business insights and knowledge, then building systems, and afterwards you can worry about scaling and hiring people.
Great question, and congratulations on the upcoming baby. If you're asking whether to take a job doing AI implementation for agencies or start your own freelancing AI implementation business, I'd recommend the freelancing route. You'll have far more freedom and flexibility over your schedule, even though you may need to outwork the alternative in the short term. In the long run, owning your time is a major part of what I enjoy discussing. Acting on knowledge is more important than just learning it. In Maker School, many people in your situation—working a stable job but wanting something more—find success through daily consistency: build an outreach habit where you connect with business owners who might need your services, and repeat that effort virtually every day. Over six months, that's about 180 days. Doing 10 unique, high‑quality custom outreach pieces per day yields roughly 1,850 touches. If those pieces are truly high quality and unique, the chance of not getting at least a 2‑3 % booking rate is very low—2 % of 1,850 is about 36 meetings. It's also unlikely you'd fail to turn at least one of those meetings into a paying client. If you really want to get started, just throw the kitchen sink at it: use every tool and tactic you can to generate leads and demonstrate value.
First, I’d join a community like Maker School—not just to use my own products but because membership gives you deep discounts (often a 10x return) on AI platform credits and payment‑processing fees. With those savings I’d start by learning a visual drag‑and‑drop automation builder (such as the n platform) for about four to six hours; that teaches you the fundamentals of systems, workflows, JSON, HTTP requests, etc., which accelerates everything else. Next I’d spend another four hours on a Claude‑code course that covers the technical setup, agent communication, model selection, and so on—roughly ten hours total. After that foundation, I’d devote virtually all remaining time to acquiring customers; the first 90 days would be less than 1% spent on learning and the rest on outreach. You need a customer to actually enter the arena, so I’d use Maker School’s day‑by‑day accountability to hit call and outreach targets, then loop back to upsell from any lower tier to higher ones as the relationship grows.
People often misinterpret what I said about the AI agency space only lasting three years. I never claimed a hard three‑year limit; I was using an analogy to peak oil. What I meant is that over the next three years a unit of work will generate higher returns than after that because you’ll be working in a fresh, unsaturated niche where dedicated software doesn’t yet exist. You’ll get better returns as a custom service provider in that niche. So yes, you can absolutely hit $25 K a month with an automation agency if you execute well and work efficiently.