How do I start an AI agency as a beginner, what skills should I learn, and what is the fastest roadmap from scratch?
Honestly, I can't hold your hand through everything, but here's a roadmap. Start with the Make.com playlist I created—Make for People Who Want to Make Real Money. Watch the first 12‑13 videos to get the basics, then move on to live builds. Join Maker School, my day‑by‑day accountability program, for hands‑on guidance. After that, create an Upwork profile. Upwork lets you see what clients are actually paying for and gives you simple connector projects rather than academic builds. Apply to jobs you have at least a 50 % chance of completing; you may need to send 20‑30 proposals before you land a client. Your first gigs will likely pay $30‑$50 an hour, especially if you're in a lower‑cost‑of‑living country, but they'll give you real customer problems to solve. Consistent Upwork work will transition you from an academic mindset to a real business mindset. If you struggle with Make.com, check out their Academy for day‑by‑day lessons.
He says you first need to anchor what a lot of money means. AI automation agencies have the lowest barrier to entry and lowest capital cost—comparable to website design agencies in the late 1990s or social-media marketing agencies in the early 2010s. In this space, a lot of money is probably just a few hundred dollars. Any business outside this vertical will cost significantly more than a few hundred to get up and running over a three-month period, so you should expect to spend money to make money. Regarding your specific situation—bidding for email-setup projects on Upwork—lack of experience isn't a time issue; it takes only a couple of weeks to become proficient with any tool well enough that someone will pay you to save them time. So you should combine learning and prospecting. He recommends doing Maker School's introductory automation agency tutorials to gain foundational knowledge and learn to read the language of the tools. Once you understand the language, you can communicate with AI, use Google to find answers to specific questions, and you don't need to know how to do everything right away. The key question is whether a future version of you could solve this problem in the next couple of weeks—and the answer is almost always yes.
Start with the "80% Automation Basics" video – it's about 29 minutes and covers the high‑level concepts. Then watch the "How I Made $100,000 a Month as an AI Solopreneur" video for a concrete example. After that, check out the "Build a Profitable AI Business in 2025 for Beginners" video. Once you have the basics, you can dive into the NAND course or the Make.com tutorials to learn how to actually build software and automation solutions, and also watch the "How to Build and Scale an Automation Agency" video for agency‑specific guidance.
AI will create ads, films, and music videos much faster and for far less money—no production or audio teams needed, as the AI handles scripting and auto‑fixes everything. The output comes from natural‑language prompting; those who know how to prompt the models will do best, though that skill will fade as models become better at prompting themselves. You can definitely earn $10k/month with this right now, maybe for a couple of years. I’m still a beginner in AI automation agencies, but I know some basics and have built a few automations. Your next step is to get in front of paying customers, articulate their needs and problems, and show how your solution helps. There’s no other path—it’s messy, like entering a gladiatorial arena with tigers; you have to win your first fight to earn praise. Start by signing up on Upwork or freelancer.com, treat yourself as a low‑paid API endpoint, gain experience and money, then move to cold email, ads, or other channels to build a sustainable method.
You don’t need deep technical skill to make money with AI. Learn enough to build simple landing pages (e.g., a 4‑hour Claude course plus an hour of prompting) in about 5 hours. Then your real bottleneck is outreach—getting people to see your offer. Focus on getting eyes on your product/service; once you have traffic, you can convert and scale. This approach lets you start earning quickly without heavy technical investment.