Your school data consulting model is solid, but the main lever is getting more eyes on your outreach. With cold DM, only about 20% of recipients actually see your message, and only a tiny fraction respond or convert. To dramatically improve results, you should multiply your touchpoints—send the same prospect a DM on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (Twitter), and email, for example. Because each platform gives roughly an independent 20% chance of being seen, using four channels raises the overall visibility to about 60%, effectively tripling your potential revenue without changing your offer. Beyond that, the real bottleneck is top‑of‑funnel visibility, so invest in content that attracts a broad audience (e.g., YouTube videos that aren’t just ‘how to be motivated’ but showcase specific processes like AI agent workflows or $20k/month side‑hustles). Continuously test different angles and formats to see what drives the most views, then double down on the winners. Remember, for most small‑to‑mid‑sized businesses, sales and marketing—the ability to get seen and start conversations—are the biggest constraints, so treat lead generation as your primary focus.
Your school data consulting model is solid, but the main lever is getting more eyes on your outreach. With cold DM, only about 20% of recipients actually see your message, and only a tiny fraction respond or convert. To dramatically improve results, you should multiply your touchpoints—send the same prospect a DM on LinkedIn, Instagram, X (Twitter), and email, for example. Because each platform gives roughly an independent 20% chance of being seen, using four channels raises the overall visibility to about 60%, effectively tripling your potential revenue without changing your offer. Beyond that, the real bottleneck is top‑of‑funnel visibility, so invest in content that attracts a broad audience (e.g., YouTube videos that aren’t just ‘how to be motivated’ but showcase specific processes like AI agent workflows or $20k/month side‑hustles). Continuously test different angles and formats to see what drives the most views, then double down on the winners. Remember, for most small‑to‑mid‑sized businesses, sales and marketing—the ability to get seen and start conversations—are the biggest constraints, so treat lead generation as your primary focus.
I use ClickUp as my main tool to store everything; it's visual and sufficient for my needs, so I don't need a real database like Superbase. I'll leave it there for now. Moving on to brand stats: my main channel has about 159,960 subscribers, Instagram around 26,648 followers, and the daily updates channel (where I answer questions) has about 8,844 subscribers. Subscriber growth is down to roughly 0.36% per day, Instagram growth around 2.62% per day, while the daily updates channel growth remains strong. Recently I posted about winning the school games, cross‑posted it to the schooler subreddit, and asked Sam Ovens and others to pin it to gain visibility and raise the standard in the school community. The post is long and was pinned, receiving comments from notable figures like Sam Ovens, Nate Herk, Spencer (who previously held the top spot), and Mr. Hormosi. I plan to meet them in the next couple of days. Although there's no direct ROI, I expect future returns from the connections and positive clout. On the sales front, I had to take down a posted sales call for Leftclick after the other party raised liability concerns; the first call already exposed potential issues, making me doubtful about continuing such posts. I’ve considered alternatives like sales coaching, role‑play sessions, or a podcast‑style format where I work with others and document the process, but these versions lack the perceived authenticity of a live, unfiltered sales call. Lead generation is doing well: Instantly launched an AI inbox manager, and the podcast campaign now yields a 2% reply rate, with about 1% positive replies. At my recommended volume of 270 emails per day, that translates to roughly one positive reply per day, or 20‑30 per month; I’m sending about ten times that volume, so I could scale up to ten calls per day if market capacity allows. I’ve also thought about simply giving people leads, but that raises logistical questions about booking calls and ensuring attendance without double‑booking. I’m open to any sensible solutions you might have. Finally, my channel’s relative growth rate has been declining, and I was about to publish a video intended to reverse that trend, though it hasn’t uploaded yet due to timing.
Fausto RDS says, 'Nick, how would you to about growing an audience starting from zero? I'm thinking Facebook and Instagram and YouTube. My ICP are service businesses, home services, and I sell custom software and automations. I got a lot of people asking questions like, how do I start my own brand and what's the best way to build an audience? Cuz they look at the way that I built my audience and they're like, well, Nick obviously puts a lot of time, effort, and care into it, so um you know, he'll he'll know. But I'll be honest, I just I just tried 10 different approaches and then I found one that happened to work. Um I did not come with like a highly strategic approach. What I did was I simply asked myself, what provides me the lowest CPMs, costs per meeting? >> [gasps] >> Which platform, if I test it for 30 to 60 to 90 days, will get me the lowest CPMs uh comparatively? And it turns out it was YouTube. So, rather than start at the end, which you're doing right now, which is growing an audience and starting from zero, start at the beginning, which is, hm, why do I want to grow an audience? Well, I work in the home service businesses uh niche. My current CPMs are $45. And that's not very scalable because our lifetime values are, you know, at some ratio where the cost of acquiring the customer to the lifetime value just doesn't make sense. So, how can I get lower CPMs? And then, rather than choosing Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, like you have here, uh just try a bunch and then determine which ones work after the fact. Pre-commit yourself to some sort of test. Cuz that's what I always do and uh that tends to work pretty well. But yeah, man, it's all 100% just about your cost per meeting, if I'm honest, or your cost per, you know, uh intent. In my case now with Maker School, driving a chunk of my revenue, it's it's cost per intent. It's cost per like, basically, each person visiting my landing page. >> [gasps] >> And that's way better than through cold email.'
If you haven’t considered it yet, let me walk you through it. LinkedIn is just one of many platforms; you can copy the same approach to virtually any other social media site. For example, on X you can skip the connect request, which would double your outreach, and on TikTok you could triple it. Facebook, Instagram, and other Meta platforms work similarly. If you’re running out of outreach capacity but still have time, simply expand to other platforms using the same method, making minor platform‑specific tweaks. On Instagram, a common hurdle is getting funneled into message requests; a strong opener like an open‑ended rhetorical question—e.g., 'Hey, do you do one‑on‑ones?'—can move prospects into your chat box. The core strategy stays the same; only the tactics change. Beyond social media, think about email, phone calls, or even walking up to a local business. With so many channels, a rational person could easily fill an 8‑hour day just reaching out. So, get after it—put the pedal to the metal. If you finish your outreach in the first hour, you could easily 7× your current volume, and with more reps you’ll gain efficiency and effectiveness.
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.