I'd love to hear more about how you went from having no clients to landing your first few, and then how you scaled to 100K months. Specifically, how did you structure long-term deals with automation clients after building their systems, and what makes clients willing to pay a retainer once the automation is set up?
Are we talking no clients in general, in any of my businesses, or specifically automation? You might be talking about automation. The way I did automation was I just started out on Upwork — applied to like 10 to 20 Upwork jobs per day along with my business partner at the time, and the vast majority of them said no to us. We used a custom Loom-video-based approach: I'd record a Loom of me talking through the problem and send out a ton of those. I got really good at explaining automation problems consistently, and we scaled that automation agency pretty quickly to $15-20K a month. We languished around $20-40K a month for a while because my partner wanted to operate it as a software consultancy taking on custom projects with a big hired team, but that didn't really work — the engineers we hired could drag-and-drop in tools like Make.com but didn't understand the business side, so the automations they built were brittle. That's when I learned how difficult hiring is for something as complicated as a software/automation project. My partner and I eventually split up amicably — he wanted to focus on the consultancy side and building resellable equity, I didn't. I kept the business, focused on high-leverage applications of systems I'd already built, scaled up Upwork applications and cold email (reinvesting most of my income into cold email), and simplified the offer down to mostly cold email systems and one-click CRM templates. Around $35-45K/month I couldn't keep scaling that way, so I started pitching a fractional-COO model: I took a few smaller clients paying $3-4K/month and gave them massive 20-30 page proposals saying, 'I want $10K/month plus 7% of your business, and here's how I'll justify it by delivering $100K/month in value.' That worked for a couple of clients, my revenue shot up, and combined with old clients coming back that same month I hit $72K in revenue (not all of it was recurring).
I think we should start by clarifying terminology: I wouldn’t consider someone a client until they’ve paid money—or at least committed to paying for something, like a software subscription. Until money changes hands or an agreement is signed, it’s not a real client. Many people think a deal is closed when the prospect says yes, but it’s not truly closed until they sign or, better yet, pay the invoice. Saying yes is different from actually paying you. You said you started automation in November, learned it in two months, and since January you’ve only got two clients in the process of closing. Over roughly 60–70 days, if you’d done a daily outreach minimum—say 10 personalized Loom videos a day via Upwork, DMs, Instagram, X, etc.—you’d have contacted about 700 people. Yet only two showed interest, which is about 0.3% (2 out of 700), or roughly 1 in 350. That’s extremely low; to get one ‘yes’ you’d need to hear roughly 349 ‘nos’. If you’d done consistent, reliable outreach using the mechanisms I show in Maker School and on my channel (daily Loom videos, etc.), even if you were terrible at it, it would be statistically unlikely to get so few results. Typical response rates are around 2%, which would be about eight times better than what you’re seeing. So you likely reached out to far fewer people—maybe around 80 total, or about one per day. To improve, first be very clear about what ‘closed’ means—wait for payment or a signed agreement. Second, set a clear daily outreach minimum, like sending 10 customized Loom videos a day on platforms such as Upwork, Instagram, X, or via DM. Third, standardize your sales process: use a repeatable roadmap (like my ‘Roadmap to $25k a Month with Automation’) that funnels prospects into a meeting, then a sales call, then a detailed proposal or scope of work, and follow the same steps each time. Doing this builds infrastructure you can iterate on—run it for 10 clients, tweak, run another 10, and you’ll see conversion rates improve. That’s what I’d do if I were in your shoes.
Start with a fixed‑price project to deliver quick ROI, minimize friction, and test the client relationship. Once the project is done and value is shown, transition to a recurring service (retainer) to capitalize on the proven ROI and maximize lifetime value. This lets you learn the client’s business, build stronger relationships, and improve conversion from the initial project to the retainer. Most of an agency’s income comes from this recurring step. For an automation agency, the recurring work often evolves beyond pure automation delivery. Begin with custom automations to learn the market, then identify repeatable tasks, productize them, and eventually become a specialized agency (e.g., a cold‑email or CRM agency) that focuses on a narrow set of high‑value services. Because selling pure automation‑as‑a‑service is hard to scale due to variable scopes and staffing challenges, you add value to the retainer with extras like unlimited maintenance on past builds, weekly strategy calls, daily availability for questions, team training, discount aggregators, affiliate/partner perks, and brand association. These tangential line items boost the perceived value of the retainer and help you lock in long‑term clients.
Yeah, so for big builds, don't just do it all in one shot; avoid big all-encompassing systems because scope creep usually leads to a situation where you haven't clearly defined what you’ll do for the client, which is impossible to specify ahead of time, causing the client to expect something you didn’t agree to for payment, breeding resentment and harming the relationship. Instead, start with a small starter project that’s tightly scoped and agreed upon by both sides, then vibe each other out to learn what the client likes and demonstrate your aptitude—this lets you pitch more later and gives you insight into their business before committing to a massive scope. If you’re doing this for a company and need to send 10,000 depersonalized emails, think logically: using Make, first you get the leads (one op), then you iterate through the leads (n ops), generate icebreakers (another n ops), and optionally upload to Instantly (another n ops) or bulk‑upload to Google Sheets (effectively one op). Roughly, that’s about three n ops, or two n ops if you use the bulk‑upload shortcut. For 10,000 records that works out to roughly 20,000 operations, give or take. As for the Make plan, the $34‑per‑month Core plan gives you 40,000 ops, plenty of headroom; you don’t need the Pro plan unless you want better error handling, in which case the Pro plan is $62. You can start with Core and upgrade later, paying only the difference. On a personal note, I’m about twenty minutes into this video and feeling locked in; I’ve gotten more done today than in the past week because I’ve committed to stop daily posting on my main channel. My growth has slowed—my first‑24‑hour view‑to‑subscriber ratio dropped from about 15% (≈15,000 views on 100k subs) to around 5% (≈5,000 views). Comments suggest this is because my niche‑specific content has saturated its audience, and broadening the topic would attract less‑interested viewers. Elrico noted that my recent videos repeat earlier material, which may also be hurting growth, and suggested exploring other tools besides Make, like voice agents and live builds. Parker joked about throwing me on while cooking to start a riot over quitting daily, and shared ideas such as adding an automation bucket for publicly traded codes to save Coinbase money, using customer‑support headcount as an input for percentage assessments, and targeting big logos to pull in the right audience. My daily updates channel now has about 5,600 subscribers, while the main channel sits at 110,750. I’m checking follower‑count tools like Trend Hero, though I’m not sure about the daily‑limit metric. Reflecting on all this feedback, I’ve decided to stop posting daily and instead pursue a multifaceted strategy: focus on what makes me unique—my calm, low‑production‑value, high‑signal‑to‑noise conversational content—and develop a new, less‑replicable format. With my team, we’ve decided to pursue the “complete and utter uncopyable thing”: building a business with this stuff in front of everybody, doing it extraordinarily well by spending time generating leads, selling them, securing proposals, onboarding clients, fulfilling projects, and growing the company. Nobody else can replicate that live business‑building demonstration. My earlier live video of starting and selling an AI service in ten hours went viral precisely because it proved I can generate leads on camera; it’s a litmus test for knowing how to do this.
Thanks for the question. Shipping an automation isn't really needed—you don't need to ship it at all because the shipping happens during the building process. You start by talking with somebody who likes what you have to offer, get them on a call, discuss the problems and solutions, do quick math to see how much the problem is costing them, and pitch your solution at a fraction of that cost—usually around 30%. Once they agree, you send a proposal, they sign it and pay you a little money. I like doing a 50/50 upfront and then upon delivery structure for a small intro offer, then transitioning to a retainer fully paid up front at the beginning of each month. After they sign, you need to get them on a kickoff call to walk through expectations, scope, timelines, and confirm the scope again before starting work—this is your point of highest leverage. If there are project problems, deal with them now while you have some of their money and haven't done work yet, rather than at the end when they're holding money out on you. On the kickoff call, you also have them sign up to the necessary platforms (like Make.com or N8N) so they have everything they need upfront and you never have to bug them again for access; the only messages you'll get are positive happy updates. As a Make.com partner and NN verified creator, I get preferential treatment like a thousand free operations via affiliate promo codes, which adds 3‑5% to your margin because they use your affiliate links and trust you as an authority. You have no liability for recurring payments—they take that on. Before the end of the call, you have all the credentials so you never have to bug them again. That's how you actually go about doing the shipping. To find clients in the really early stages of your automation agency, join Maker School.