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#240 · the 4-letter acronym i use to find ai clients

youtube ↗Agency Operations

Jordan Michael Jordan asks if I’ve considered recording a series that shows the journey of starting an AI agency from zero, similar to a Maker School methodology.

Sure, I get the idea of creating a series that shows the journey from zero. I’ve already built a lot of proof for my AI agency. Over the years I’ve recorded sales calls, kept bank statements, and documented everything. I’ve even done a project on Upwork that started with just a dozen cold‑email calls. After about 12 calls I closed a few clients who didn’t even know who I was, and that gave me real case studies. I’ve also tried cold‑email and community‑post outreach, but hiding your reputation there is hard, so I haven’t pursued it further.

starting from zeroupworkcold email

Related answers

youtube ↗Lead Generation

How can I get back into my AI agency journey and start making money after pausing for exams, given I only tried cold calling a few days and built some basic automations?

If you've only tried cold outreach a few times, you need to do it 100–1,000 times more to see results. When I started, I knocked on about 3,000 doors over three months with a friend and made only $7—roughly the same outcome as 5–15 cold calls that got zero replies. At the beginning, lacking experience means you need many reps to win. I wouldn’t recommend cold calling for selling automations today; instead, send custom Loom videos. They avoid synchronous timing issues and gatekeepers, letting your message sit in the prospect’s inbox, which is far more effective—likely three to four times better use of your time.

cold callingloom videooutreachreps
youtube ↗Lead Generation

If you had no money and no audience starting from scratch, what would you do differently?

With no money and no audience, I’d go straight into cold outbound because I’m good at it—I’ve done door‑to‑door and learned what gets people to talk or kick you out. I’d start with Loom videos or manually written cold emails (not scalable but effective) to pitch people directly. Then I’d bootstrap: 10× the number of mailboxes, sell a simple AI service, and have clients cover costs to keep things simple and low‑cost. That’s the core approach. (After answering, I note I wasn’t going to record today but we’re doing it now, then I share my brand stats: YouTube 93,779, Instagram 127,175, daily updates channel 4,716.)

cold outboundloombootstrappingconsistency
youtube ↗Lead Generation

If you had to start your AI agency from scratch, what channel would you focus on first? Cold email, LinkedIn DMs, Instagram, Facebook groups, or something else? Why and what would your first 30 days look like?

Don’t limit yourself to one channel; test several and match each to your existing skill set. For example, if you’re strong at aesthetics, branding, and the first five minutes of conversation, you’ll do well on Upwork but might struggle with cold email. Run both in parallel, track results, and after a month double down on the winner. Set a consistent goal (e.g., 10 LinkedIn DMs a day, 100 cold emails a day, 20 Facebook‑group messages a day) and treat the experiment like a scientific test.

ai agencyoutreach channelsskill matchtesting
youtube ↗Client Acquisition

I'm in high school with no social proof to show prospects. What would you do in my situation, and how can I prove myself to clients?

Everybody suffers from this exact problem at the start line — it's not just an entrepreneurial problem, it's the job-market problem too (a junior dev job asking for 10 years of experience). You have to go through this like everyone else, but there are ways to fake it until you make it. The simplest: take systems I build on my channel (a lot of the free ones, plus more in Maker School) and rebuild them yourself. Then ask what kind of business each system would help — often digital agencies, since that's my niche. Once you've built a few systems yourself instead of just copying mine, you can say things like 'I built an automated cold email system that enriches contacts and adds a thousand leads a day' or 'I built an automatic proposal generator.' That's real social proof, even if it's not client work yet — you can honestly say you built it for an AI agency (your own) without claiming it was a paying client. That's pulling yourself up by the bootstraps. From there, use that first thing you built to land one real gig, then use that gig's result to build proof for the next one, and so on.

no experiencesocial proofgetting startedhigh school