As a beginner automator from India with no portfolio, how should I price my services, find clients (e.g., via cold email with Loom), and should I target the global market instead of local Indian clients due to price sensitivity?

#142 · No-frills guide to your first AI automation agency client

As a beginner automator from India with no portfolio, how should I price my services, find clients (e.g., via cold email with Loom), and should I target the global market instead of local Indian clients due to price sensitivity?

You should use value-based pricing: determine the direct savings and opportunity cost your automation provides the client over a month, then charge about a third of that value. For example, if you deliver $10,000 of value, charge $3,000/month. Without a portfolio, a reasonable starting rate is around $1,500/month. To find clients as a total beginner, use platforms like Upwork, Fiverr, or Freelancer.com that handle sales complexities—defining the problem, educating the client, positioning you as the solution—so you can get your first client at a low rate to learn and pay down knowledge debt. After gaining initial experience, you can move to cold email outreach. Regarding selling in India, focus on the global market because Indian clients are often price‑sensitive and less familiar with AI, while tier‑one countries pay more despite higher saturation.

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Related answers

youtube ↗Lead Generation

As someone in India, can I serve global clients and earn in dollars, or should I focus on local Indian businesses? Should I target tier‑one countries for higher pay despite saturation?

Local Indian automations are more affordable but the market is price‑sensitive and less familiar with AI, so earning in dollars is harder. I recommend targeting tier‑one (English‑speaking) countries because they pay the most per unit time, even though they’re more saturated. Success in the program comes from focusing on those markets, using cold email, Loom videos, and lead generation, while recognizing that response rates depend on how many others are contacting the same audience.

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youtube ↗Niches

I'm a complete beginner building an AI automation agency from India after joining Maker School. My main goal is to get global top-quality clients, not Indian clients, due to limited demand. Will my location limit me to only getting Indian leads, or can I truly attract and serve international clients from countries like the USA, UK, Canada, and Australia?

I can confidently tell you there are a lot of people I work with right now who are domiciled in India and work with people all over the world. The important thing, if you're living in a much lower cost-of-living country and attempting an arbitrage strategy to get paid way more than your local cost of living would mathematically suggest, is that you need to present as far away from cheap offshore talent or labor as humanly possible. Don't compete in the market as a commodity — compete in a market of one. Provide value, provide revenue impact, provide savings impact. Make sure everything you do isn't framed as 'I build systems' but as 'I build systems for a specific outcome.' As long as you position yourself as a high-value consultant, like I do, you can do this regardless of where you live.

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youtube ↗Niches

If I'm starting an AI automation agency today from a third-world country (Tunisia), with extremely limited capital, zero technical skills, no clients, and no portfolio, what niche and offer would you advise, and what should I learn or build first? Are niches different in developing nations versus developed ones?

Yes, optimal niches for a market like Tunisia will be very different from the optimal set of services for, say, North America. But you don't have to sell to people in your local target country — that's really the whole promise of the internet: you can sell into a market that's already well-established with clear, well-understood solutions to needs, the kind talked about and demonstrated on channels like mine. There's nothing that necessitates selling to your local market. If you're in Bangladesh, you don't have to sell only to your local Dhaka market — you can go global. The tradeoff as you go further away is cultural norms and time zones become less familiar. As long as you control for those two variables — either by offsetting your own schedule, or by consuming a lot of media from your target country to understand how people there think, which, keep in mind, is quite similar to how people in your own country think (human beings are human beings, 99.99% the same DNA, just some superficial design tweaks like CSS on an HTML website) — you'll be fine. You can follow the exact standard playbook and achieve good results wherever you are.

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youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I'm doing meta ads for local clients and earning about $1,000 a month. I want to get clients in first‑world countries and I'm unsure whether to focus on automations, internal systems, managing everything, or just ads. Should I start free, charge a little, and what’s the lowest‑friction way to land my first three‑to‑five overseas clients?

The reality is you don't know the answers to any of these questions and you will not figure them out if you keep only thinking. Thinking caps out quickly—most of the gains come in the first five minutes, then it plateaus around 70% certainty. You can get a bit more by thinking, but to move from 70% to 100% you have to actually go out and do it. Test each option—selling ads, selling systems, or a combination—collect the data, and only then decide which path truly works. You can't figure everything out now; you need to jump on the wagon, experiment, and let the results guide you.

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