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.
Yeah, I like to think so as well. I deliver a ridiculous amount of value—whether it’s $60, $70, or whatever the current price is, sometimes around $3,000 depending on when you watch this. To make a long story short, I don’t actually recommend posting on YouTube for a while; most people see creators like me posting and assume that’s how you make money, so they feel they need to post and showcase their systems. I can only do that because I’ve already had success selling this through cold outreach and built a business model aside from YouTube. Only once I had the cash flow to justify spending time on YouTube did I start making videos consistently. Before you start making videos about a money‑making topic, get to the point where you’ve achieved more than 99% of people at that thing. If you’re a standout 1% with some accomplishment or social proof, people will be far more likely to listen to you. There are literally a million‑plus people waving light poles online talking about stuff they don’t really understand. When you can demonstrate real results—say, making $42,000 a month—and show how you did it, you cut through that noise much more easily. The key is to do it without bragging; come across as genuine, not ungrounded. Based on our interactions in Maker School, you’re not that kind of guy—you’re good. For me, it’s more about reputation than follower count; I care about the strength and quality of each follower, not just the number. I’m not missing out on money by focusing on goodwill; in fact, I’m accumulating more goodwill than pretty much anyone in the industry by doing this. Thanks for the advice—you totally get how to play the game.
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.
I don't promise people $170K/month — that's the info product and coaching space, which isn't what I teach. I teach the AI automation agency business model, which I scaled to about $72,000/month a year and a half ago, and since then I've been teaching people the rungs on the ladder up to that same number — not more than I ever actually achieved with that business myself. I moved into info products and coaching alongside it for the same reason I always talk about: if pressing one button pays you $1 and another pays $2, you press the $2 button. A lot of coaches shift entirely into coaching and consulting once they find that $2 button and never touch the underlying business again — I don't think that's optimal, because you lose touch with the thing you're teaching, and if you can't execute it anymore your coaching offer goes stale. I think I'm one of the few people who still actually does the thing I teach while also teaching it. I get the skepticism about coaching offers in general — I have it too. For the fuller breakdown of short-term revenue versus long-term scalability trade-offs behind this, I made a video specifically on it: 'Info products versus agencies in 2025.'
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.