I'm from South Asia and scaled my agency to $10K a month, but I decided to do my master's in Dublin, Ireland because a lot of opportunities are unavailable where I come from, so I needed a geographic change. If I could scale for more than 6 months I could scale to $25K a month, but with the added academic pressure on client delivery there are fewer hours every week. I also need a job after graduation to stay here. How would you suggest I proceed?
This is a highly specific situation, but I'll help you regardless without speaking in generalities. The way that you're approaching this is good. You have a good mindset. You're not limiting your beliefs as 'oh, I can't do this because I'm doing all these other things.' You obviously understand that you have to give something in order to get something, and what you are going to be giving is a little bit of your time, energy, and sanity. It sounds like your clear constraints are: you need a job after graduation to stay here. So you just need to get a job after graduation. Ideally, the job you should get after graduation should be something that is preferably digital, because the more digital the job is, the less logistical time you're going to have commuting to and from the office. This is all sunk time that you won't really be able to recoup. And when it's remote or digital, you could work on your own business a lot of the time at the same time. Obviously don't be a total [__] about that, but if you need to take a meeting during lunch or whatever, you can do so much easier when you're at home than if you are out and about — you'd have to hide it from people otherwise. So the situation you're in is not really all that crazy. It's the same sort of situation that people have when they just work 9-to-5 jobs or have some sort of full-time thing. I think what you just need to do is get a good job that aligns with your ability to produce the deliverables you want in your agency to make the money that you want. If you scale your agency to $10,000 a month in South Asia, presumably when you are in an area that has significantly higher buying power and an 8-hour time differential between North America — where most of the buying power is going to be — you'll be able to do everything that you've done already just far better over there in Dublin. Not to mention you're going to have a master's degree and all that stuff. So yeah, I don't really think you have anything to worry about. You've already done the most complicated and difficult thing, which is hitting $10,000 a month. You're one in a million, my friend. With all of that in there, yeah, you should be fine.
You know one of the major issues here is you're at $3K a month and want to hit $10K a month, so the gap is $7K a month. But because you're at a middling income level, I'd imagine it's $3K a month, and you probably don't have anything else; you really want to hold onto that and save every dollar. If you wanted to grow from $3K to $10K a month, you'd have to spend a lot of your money and risk some of it. What I mean by this is you're not sure about starting from scratch on Upwork for $10–15 an hour. You know, if you did that, you'd probably spend somewhere between $200 and $400 a month just on connect costs, if you really wanted to take it seriously. That's like 12% of maybe 15% of all your money. That's the thing I personally think is probably stopping you from saying yes. But the reality is, you've got to spend money to make money. My recommendation would be to take everything you're doing here—whatever $3,000 USD minus your living expenses, whatever you have left over—and spend it on marketing, on sales and marketing. Upwork is a great example. We just had a guy in Maker School, Sai Satoru, who's absolutely one of the coolest guys in this group. He has a relatively similar situation as you do. From $849 a month teaching kids to $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. A year and a half ago, he was teaching English to 9-year-olds in Chiang Rai for $849 a month. It was stable, predictable, and the wrong life. But he dove in on freelancing and AI automation, and now he's made $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. Granted, it's in 12 months, so it's not the same thing, but keep in mind that the majority of that money is pushed into the future. I imagine the way Sai probably started was he started with a $500 month, then a $1,000 month, then a $1,500 month, then a $2,000 month. And also, this is just Upwork; there are a million different ways you can make money online with AI and automation. I'm not telling you you have to do this necessarily, but it is a very simple and straight-line path for somebody in your situation. So what you could do is the first couple months, go on Upwork, make a grand, two grand, three grand, and then take that money and graduate to more efficient marketing approaches as well—things like cold email and so on. So that's what I would do. And $10K per month might seem really scary, but think about it: that's just three positions like this at maybe half the time spent on each. You could absolutely do that. Thank you very much, MZ Maestro. Your brains are half algorithms at this point. Basically, yeah, that's how I feel.
My audience is roughly 90 % male and 10 % female according to Google Analytics. My spoken English sits around B1‑B2 while my comprehension is C1‑C2, though I’m not entirely sure what those levels mean in practice. I’ve held the belief that I shouldn’t jump into the U.S. market until my English reaches C1 because the fees there are the highest, but I wonder whether that’s just a bias or if I should instead target places where my language is stronger even if the fees are five to ten times lower. The answer really depends on where you are: some countries let you earn outsized returns because they pay high fees and have lots of buyers for automation work—think Germany, French agencies, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg (I’ve had a couple projects there). If you’re in a poorer country like Bulgaria, I’d avoid niching down for local clients because the fees you could command would be much lower; it’s a tough call, and I wish I could do more there. Regarding running a digital nomad lifestyle with big time‑zone gaps, I haven’t found a perfect fix. When I lived in the Philippines for a few weeks I had to take calls at night, which was annoying and hurt my sleep and income. The reality is that a prospect’s reply is as close to money as you get, so you have to treat it like gold and be ready to respond. If a client is only available at 2 p.m. PT, that could be 4 a.m. in Thailand; asking to meet at 8 a.m. would make about half of them disappear. It’s therefore difficult to sustain a nomad schedule that avoids night work. You’ll do better by focusing on markets that are closer to your time zone—Thai firms pay less, but Singaporean or Chinese companies often pay more. I tried the nomad life myself, found it unsustainable (poor sleep, low earnings), though I did enjoy seeing new places and learning about myself. After I returned to a stable base, sat down, focused, and my results took off. In the end it’s a trade‑off: you sacrifice something—usually rest or income—for the travel experience. As for fitting agency work around a regular job, I’ve given you the best approach I can; thanks for the question.
I wouldn't do it all at once, as sexy as it sounds and as incredible as the big gurus on YouTube make working for yourself seem. There are a lot of problems with it too. The main one is you're going from an environment where everybody essentially has their day structured for them to an environment where you actually structure every waking moment of your day completely yourself. One of two things happens: it's really overwhelming and you end up not utilizing that time effectively, which leads to you making less money. That's basically the only thing that happens. You're starting this off as an infant — if this is the first time you've ever done self-employment, you have to learn that skill. It doesn't matter how long you've been in IT or how much time or energy you've invested in a specific niche; you're learning an entirely new skill from scratch. So rather than going from 100% corporate to 0% corporate overnight, I'd recommend tranching it or breaking it up. What we'll have people in Maker School do is try to get to 80% of their time in a full-time job. If they can get to 80%, most of their work's already done for them, because the jump from 100 to 80 means you can now introduce 20% of fully self-structured time where you work on your own business. Maybe instead of working 9 to 5, you work 9 to 3:30 — even an additional hour and a half. The second you learn to utilize that hour and a half effectively, it'll carry over to the rest of the time, and usually you don't even have to work a full 8 hours a day head-down after you've learned to be extraordinarily effective with that hour and a half. That's what I would do. I wouldn't go 100 to zero, because I did that for myself and I was completely lost for a very long time — on the brink of eviction multiple times, living in a converted garage, eating rice and beans all day. You don't need to make it that hard for yourself, especially if you're not going to be saving 6 to 12 months of expenses, because it's very difficult and not really worth it. The exhaustion you feel at your current job is probably going to be multiplied tenfold if you do the exact same thing and then switch. Alternatively, you'll make far less money, which leads to a different type of existential threat or exhaustion.
Cool man, I know you already have a full-time job, which is fantastic. You're probably working 6 to 8 hours on that job and then spending time on lead generation, client calls, and fulfillment. You're doing a lot, and it's natural to wonder if it's time to bring on help. Here's what I'd do: first, set a near‑term realistic income goal—for example, $25,000 a month. Add up your salary, income from custom projects, and any other income. See how far you are from that goal. Then calculate your current internal hourly rate (maybe around $100/hour). If you need an extra $10,000 to reach $25k, that's about 100 additional hours. Ask yourself if you have 100 hours in your schedule. If not, you don't necessarily need to hire; you could raise your prices or pursue higher‑paying clients. Doubling your rates would double your income for the same time, getting you a large share of the way there. You could also increase lead volume—more leads give you more opportunities to pick the best‑performing projects instead of settling for low‑rate work out of scarcity. My decision‑making mindset is based on expected value: I evaluate the expected value of taking on a client or making a decision and choose the option with the highest expected value at that moment. Regarding hiring, my experience shows it's not easy to post a job, review candidates, interview, and hire quickly; you add a daily management time sync. The equation for effective hiring is whether the daily management time plus the cost of paying someone is less than the value they create by doing the work. Early in a hire, you're often not profitable until they're onboarded, trained, and up to speed. So, unless you have a much higher goal—say $50k, $100k, or $200k a month—you probably don't need to hire right now. As for scaling an agency model, I do think it gets harder to scale beyond a certain point. It was harder for me at $72k/month than at $25k/month. After a certain point you're no longer just an automation agency; you become a niche‑specific service or system‑providing agency. For example, one community member scaled to $80k/month by pivoting from automation services to selling cold‑email systems—a lead‑generation focus. If you start as an automation agency but find a super‑high‑ROI CRM project, you'll quickly shift toward being a recruitment‑agency‑style CRM provider. If you stick with the pure AI‑automation‑agency idea, you'll likely plateau around a $1M annual run‑rate, because that's when you need to hire managers to manage people, which is tricky.