You give away automation tutorials for free on YouTube, yet you also sell the same automations to businesses. Aren't you worried that businesses will just use your free tutorials to build their own solutions instead of hiring you? How does this seemingly contradictory approach work for your business? I'm curious about your strategy.
Well, logically I get what you're saying, but you're assuming it's a zero‑sum game—that if I give away my secrets they benefit and I gain nothing. Actually, it's not a zero‑sum game at all. Putting this content out there has significantly increased market demand for these services, creating a positive feedback loop where the demand growth outpaces whatever I've given away in knowledge. We live in a knowledge economy, and knowledge is the main thing. By giving what feels like very little knowledge—because I've already done all the work—I can provide overwhelming, ridiculous amounts of value, and you see that as a ton of value. That makes you far more likely to join my paid community, my programs, hire my agency, or work with me in a consulting context. In reality, I lose very little: people already know how to put together a proposal generator; I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel, and when I first started sharing, a lot of copycats appeared, but I'm fine with that. I firmly believe knowledge should not be gatekept. What I do gatekeep and charge for is the accountability—the one‑on‑one time with me. That's why this approach has worked well for me. Sam Ovens, the literal king of consulting, featured me in a video saying I make about $269,000 a month with my school (an information product). And giving this free YouTube content, despite not selling anything directly, has worked exceptionally well.
Well, you guys don’t have any revenue or clients, so you’re really just working on a project. Your first priority should be solving the no‑clients, no‑revenue problem. Don’t waste time building out a product or website—just get something sold. I’d have you and your friends create profiles on Upwork, Freelancer.com, and Fiverr. Each day, pool your school money or whatever you can and submit ten Upwork applications. In those applications, tell prospects exactly what you can do (X, Y, Z) and how you’d approach their project, showing rather than just telling your experience. This avoids the inevitable ‘show me your portfolio’ question because you demonstrate your process. If you do this for three days you’ll have sent about ninety applications, and the odds of landing at least one $200 project are high. Once you have that $200 project, you now have a real business—you’ve made money online and can stop pretending. You’ll learn more from that small project than from hours of my talking. After you land a client, get them on a call and confirm the money is changing hands or there’s a monetary agreement, like escrow on a platform. If I built you a solution that automated all of this outreach and follow‑up, it would definitely save you time and money—that’s the vibe I’m advising. So give it a try.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
What you did initially was backwards: you spent time learning, then immediately tried to build a brand/course business teaching it, before ever proving the skill made anyone money. That approach almost always grows slower and makes less money, because sitting through a course and absorbing information isn't actually a scarce or valuable skill on its own — what's valuable is having achieved real, provable outcomes for real businesses over time (case studies, measurable revenue growth, real client results). What I did instead was learn the skill, go sell to businesses first, get them results, and only build a public brand once I had real results to point to and could speak confidently and specifically ('here's how I made $48,000 last month doing X'). When you're genuinely in the top 1% at something with proof behind it, people listen — the most compelling content angles are always some version of 'someone extremely good at X shares what they know,' and you can't fake that credibility, you have to earn it with real outcomes first. So yes — go agency/cash-first, get real case studies, then build the audience around that proof rather than around the learning itself.
personal brandcredibilitycase studiesaudience building
Outsourcing sales is a mistake; the sales skill is the only lever that will matter over the next five years, and agents can quickly learn the technical side, so you’d give away leverage and end up with roughly 30 % of the profit instead of 70 %. Sales is far more valuable than the technology itself—consider Netflix versus an AI‑generated clone: the clone lacks Netflix’s customer list, marketing, vendor relationships, and licensing, which are all distribution assets. Therefore, your focus should be on acquiring clients through cold outreach, not content creation or paid ads. Paid ads exchange money for time, which you don’t have; content creation also trades time for a delayed, uncertain payoff that could leave you without income for months. Instead, become excellent at cold outreach. Think of it as skipping the beginner zone in a game and fighting a level‑99 dragon: defeating one grants you twenty levels and lets you crush the beginners. Alternatively, cold outreach lets you sell your skills directly (one step) versus the longer path of building a skill, then a brand, then products, then sales. You’ll earn less in the long run but far more in the short term, which fits your one‑year goal to reach €3 k/month.