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#149 · Generating leads for AI services live (no-fluff, no-guru)

youtube ↗Pricing

How much has your school community grown? Would you say it's now generating more revenue than your AI agency, especially with them teaching around automation systems and AI?

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.

agencycoachingrevenuescaling

Related answers

youtube ↗Agency Operations

How do you manage the balance between your personal brand and your agency, and does your content help get leads for your agency?

My personal brand now drives the vast majority of new conversations, opportunities, and clients for my agency; I couldn't run the agency at its current level without it. Initially, I did everything outbound—door-to-door—then moved to less intense but scalable outreach like cold calling, cold emailing, and cold DMs. Three to four months into my YouTube channel, I was making $40k–$50k a month from cold outbound with my agency. I started the YouTube channel to scale my agency, and shortly after, I landed a $20k deal without a single sales call, realizing I could use my subscriber base as a main lever for client acquisition. Many people try to skip the outreach step, thinking they can just start a YouTube channel and get clients from it. However, building a successful YouTube funnel is very difficult and risky; it often takes years of consistent content with no return. Moreover, if you lack outreach, sales, and marketing skills, you can't reliably turn strangers into paying customers. If your YouTube channel disappears or platform changes, you're left without a fallback. Therefore, I recommend not skipping the outreach step: first build a business using traditional outreach, marketing, and sales skills. Content is important, but the internet is full of people who only talk without doing. In my own agency, I no longer manage most projects myself; I have a consultant/account manager (Cody) and a backend/team manager (Geo) handling projects, while I act in an advisory capacity, especially for large enterprise deals like Mr. Beast that require many meetings. In short, you should spend your time and energy building skills that turn total strangers into paying customers. Once you've validated that ability—maybe earning $10k–$30k a month with your agency—you can then invest in more scalable outreach methods like your brand, Twitter, or YouTube channel.

personal brandagencyoutreachyoutube
youtube ↗Agency Operations

Why didn't you just build systems to scale your automation agency itself to $170k/month, instead of pivoting to teaching? It feels like you couldn't scale the agency as a one-man band unless you switched to teaching.

It's much, much more scalable to run an info/teaching business than an agency. Agencies are actually a lot more fragile — but when you're at the start line with no business experience and no revenue, agencies are the straightest line path to materializing revenue: zero to one, nothing is faster. You're trading that speed for the downside that agencies are fragile and much less scalable, since you need a lot more people to make them grow, and margins tend to get worse as you scale. Even if you sell an agency later, a lot of the time and energy spent building its equity often only nets you something like a 3x multiple — pretty low compared to other vehicles. So the equation that worked for me: front-load services first, make a ton of money fast (a few hundred thousand dollars, more than most people make), then take that money and put it into a more scalable vehicle. In my case that was building a better business model — teaching. All roads really do lead to info eventually; it's just a more optimized model. Instead of giving a man a fish, you teach him to fish and charge a monthly subscription for the knowledge — the revenue ends up a lot more predictable.

scalabilityagency vs info productbusiness model
youtube ↗Agency Operations

Isn't it a bit circular that you made 170K last month almost entirely from teaching other people how to make 170K per month?

I don't promise people $170K/month — that's the info product and coaching space, which isn't what I teach. I teach the AI automation agency business model, which I scaled to about $72,000/month a year and a half ago, and since then I've been teaching people the rungs on the ladder up to that same number — not more than I ever actually achieved with that business myself. I moved into info products and coaching alongside it for the same reason I always talk about: if pressing one button pays you $1 and another pays $2, you press the $2 button. A lot of coaches shift entirely into coaching and consulting once they find that $2 button and never touch the underlying business again — I don't think that's optimal, because you lose touch with the thing you're teaching, and if you can't execute it anymore your coaching offer goes stale. I think I'm one of the few people who still actually does the thing I teach while also teaching it. I get the skepticism about coaching offers in general — I have it too. For the fuller breakdown of short-term revenue versus long-term scalability trade-offs behind this, I made a video specifically on it: 'Info products versus agencies in 2025.'

info productscoachingbusiness model transparency
youtube ↗Lead Generation

I work with a digital marketing agency that wants to add an AI chatbot to a client's website, but the site gets little organic traffic. Is it worth implementing the chatbot, or should we first focus on getting traffic to the site?

What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.

lead generationai chatbotcold outreach