If I only have $100, should I start the ad business straight or join your school community?
If you only have $100, you can't join my school community ($166/month). Instead, use free tactics first, then join after your first sale or $500. First step: get the Instantly Growth Plan at $37/month (instead of $97). Scrape leads using Apollo and Apify, which may cost another $30‑$40 depending on the actor you rent. This gives you cheap leads. Get a couple of mailboxes—use Zapmail for the cheapest option. With the Instantly growth plan and Zapmail, you’ll spend about $75 of your $100. Use the remaining $25 for a Loom subscription. Send 10 cold DMs with Loom videos explaining how you’ll fix a problem costing them a little money. That method is free. You can also join communities teaching similar Loom‑based outreach, record custom content, add value, and start there.
If you haven’t had a client yet, allocate part of the $1,000 to Upwork to buy your first job—it’s the simplest way to get started. Also invest in Maker School to learn the automation framework and get the curriculum. With the remaining budget, buy a modest number of mailboxes (around 20–21) and domains (about $50 for domains plus $70 for mailboxes, totaling ~$120). Use leftover funds to purchase leads. This approach lets you cover education, outreach tools, and lead acquisition while positioning you to land your first client through Upwork, provided you stay consistent and follow the program’s advice.
The Make Money with Make School community is now a premier automation community. It provides a zero-to-one daily accountability roadmap with step-by-step day-by-day actions; following it for 90 days guarantees your first client using our methods. It's straightforward and mainly about lead generation and doing the daily tasks. I've positioned it as a community for scaling what works from one to 100. If you already have an established business with some success in AI and automation—say a $5,000/month business—I show you how to scale it to $25,000/month and beyond. To reduce churn (nobody wants to leave, which is a great problem) and attract new members, I've switched the pricing from annual-only back to monthly, but the monthly fee is higher—around $350–$360 per month. I plan to keep increasing it until I balance new signups with churn. I haven't updated the showcase video yet, as you pointed out; I tend to fly by the seat of my pants with these details.
Well, if you don't already have access to one of my communities, I'd probably shamelessly plug it. I think you'd save a lot of money joining one of those. For example, one guy just shared 250,000 free mail credits. I'm not capable of doing the math, but you get free access to a bunch of stuff just by being part of the community, which usually vastly outweighs the money you're paying. So I might check whether make moneywithmake.com or maker school makes sense. I'd also sign up for accelerators and discount aggregators like Secret. They do things like: you pay a little bit of money and then you get six months free on Notion Plus, you get ad matching on TikTok, you get 25% off your plan purchases, you can save up to $9K. You save $1,000 in free credits in Air Table. Basically, when you have a little bit of money, you can multiply that money and then get access to all these platforms and significantly reduce your software expense. And then, in terms of tools, systems, resources, I would just 10x the outreach. Honestly, whatever netted you those first few clients, you've clearly validated that works. Just scale it the hell up, man.
No problem, you should definitely double down on other forms of outreach. There are two ways to get clients: money‑intensive methods, where you spend money to acquire clients fast, and time‑intensive methods, where you spend time instead of money. In Maker School I focus on money‑intensive tactics, but the amount of money needed is actually very low compared to most businesses. For example, cold email might cost around $220 a month (software, mailboxes, leads), which is about 44% of your $500 take‑home — still a lot when you also need to pay rent. Upwork Connects cost about $2.50 per application; using the Connect strategy 20 days a month adds roughly $250, bringing your total outreach spend to about $470, or 94% of your income. Clearly, spending that much on paid outreach isn’t realistic. If you don’t have money to spend, you trade your time for what that money would have bought you. Start with cold DMs: combine the best of my cold email and Upwork approaches, and send them on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, and Reddit — about 20 per platform each day. At three minutes per message, that’s roughly four hours a day, yielding around 1,200 outreach attempts per month. Even with a modest 5% reply rate and a 25% booking‑to‑close rate, you could land a few clients and start generating income. As you reinvest those earnings, your outreach becomes more scalable and your hourly effective rate improves. Another time‑intensive tactic is community posting: join relevant Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, answer questions daily for two weeks, then start posting your own value‑driven content. When you gain visibility and authority in those communities, people will DM you for help, letting you pitch your services and turn those interactions into leads. The core idea is to trade time for money early on; as your earnings grow, you can gradually shift back to money‑intensive methods and reduce the time you need to spend.