Do you recommend doing in-person B2B door knocking to get AI automation clients? Any tips or advice for doing it?
No, I don't recommend it as a real client-getting strategy. I do think you should try it once or twice in your life — spend a week and do a hundred door knocks — because it'll put hair on your chest (true for men and women alike). It's very difficult and pretty ego-destroying, but I don't think it'll actually make you money in the short term. One of my first jobs was petitioning strangers at SkyTrain stations for a transit referendum campaign, getting told to screw off constantly — from there I moved to fundraising for a women's rights charity doing child sponsorships, 8-9 hours a day making very little money. It builds resilience, but it's not an efficient way to land clients.
I don’t recommend B2B door knocking as a reliable way to earn money; it’s extremely tough and ego‑destroying, and you’re unlikely to make direct income from it, especially early on. However, doing it once or twice can teach valuable skills—generating attention, handling rejection, and persistence—similar to a commission‑based charity job I had where I earned about $15 CAD/hour standing at a transit station. The experience builds resilience and gives you a realistic sense of the effort required in sales, much like the old door‑to‑door vacuum sales model where you had to ‘eat what you killed.’ Use it for personal growth, not as a primary client‑acquisition channel.
Nick’s top advice for newcomers to AI automation is to show up daily for an extended period and focus on levers that truly move you toward making money. Key levers include talking to customers and putting yourself in front of 10 to 100 people each day; doing this for a year means contacting between 3,650 and 36,500 people. He stresses that the sheer serendipity of creating your own luck will eventually yield results, sharing his own experience of fundraising for child‑sponsorship charities by talking to hundreds of people a day for months, becoming a local celebrity and receiving party invitations—even without selling anything. He concludes that consistently putting yourself in front of many people will lead to winning.
Accept any and all work on Upwork—think of it as an elevator that instantly connects you to large businesses you’d never meet otherwise. Even as a total newbie, you can land a client doing $10–$20 million a year within a week, giving you a powerful case study like 'I helped a $10 million/year business achieve X, Y, Z.' At this stage, don’t worry about qualifying or tightening the funnel; go broad to bootstrap experience, collect case studies, and start making money. The creator shares a personal example: a friend who jumped on Upwork while he was door‑to‑door went from zero to a legitimate $30 000/month income in three‑to‑four months by maximizing opportunity and landing a big‑ticket client whose needs matched his skill set—something the creator missed while grinding door‑to‑door for $5 000/month.
No. But you can get away with saying, "Hey, you know, I built this stuff for an AI agency." You don’t need to specify that the AI agency is yours, just that you built it for an AI agency—your own. It’s like pulling yourself up by the bootstraps, which is super cool, and that’s what I recommend. Start there. Visualize it: you start with a project you built for an automation company, then use that to land a gig with a personal trainer company, and so on. Create multiple portfolio pieces or case studies—one for an automation company, one for a personal trainer, and one for an AI agency. With three simple systems you’ve built, you can sell a lead‑gen system that adds, for example, $1,535 in revenue in the first three weeks for a B2B SaaS business. Starting with a modest case study builds credibility, and once you have dollar signs in your case studies, it becomes much easier to attract higher‑paying clients.