What does entrepreneurship look like after AI and automation make selling your own work less viable? I hate the idea of being forced to become an influencer. What does that mean for you and what will you teach people to make money?
I think the fear of becoming an influencer is based on a vague idea of what an influencer is. I don’t want to be an influencer in the traditional sense, but influencing is essentially acquiring attention, and attention is the primary commodity today. We’re trying to capture seconds of attention from many people and channel it into some shared resource—video, platform, whatever the future holds. Right now being an influencer isn’t the most valuable thing; working on AGI in a big research lab probably is. When AGI arrives, influencing may become the number‑one activity for most humans, creating new jobs that are more about entertainment and status. I don’t know exactly what I’ll be doing in five years when small‑business problems are solved, but I’ll keep building a platform to influence people and distribute value.
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.
I think building systems for creators, influencers, or community owners can be valuable, but they have to be tailored to the creator’s voice. If you want to sell a system, it must deliver ROI and feel authentic; otherwise people can spot AI‑generated fluff. I usually keep the tone spartan and write as if it were an authentic piece. For community owners, a CRM that captures leads from DMs and tracks sign‑ups is useful. Automated DM reply services for short Instagram DMs can work, but I avoid them for my own community because authenticity is crucial. Authenticity will become a premium asset as more people automate. There are many business models where these tools make sense, especially for creators who care about profit, but many creators may not see much value. One high‑impact model is repurposing long‑form content—take a podcast or video, cut it into 10‑15 short posts for Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc. Each piece can be worth over $1,000. While larger companies have bigger budgets, individual creators can also generate significant revenue from this approach. The model is high‑leverage: a small team can produce massive output, and as long as you manage the multiple hats—engineering, sales, marketing—you’ll have a few years of strong demand before the market saturates.
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.
I came up with the idea of accelerating the transition to a more efficient economy about eight months ago, and I feel I've made a little bit of progress toward that. With 200,000 followers watching my long‑form content, the leverage is insane—if even 1% of them work with businesses, each might serve 10 to 100 businesses over their career, impacting 100 to 1,000 customers each. If we can improve those experiences by just 5% through automation, I'm already having a substantial effect on the global economy. While I like making money, it's not my primary goal; it's probably in my top five. Ultimately, I want to be a positive force for change in the world in my own way.