Hey Nick, this is Ocean from Maker School. I made 3,387 from Upwork following the program. Quick plug, but I currently feel stuck mainly due to my work apps tanking despite getting 100% JSS and a much stronger portfolio. I've sent 142 over the past 30 days, only 16 reviewed with zero higher. So, you have a view rate of what's that like 8% something like that? No, 12%. The good news is I've been nailing the consistency as I'm approaching a 30-day posting streak and 22 days of five or more upper caps despite dealing with two jobs and a bunch of life issues, which derailed me initially from maker school. I've also restarted to learn cold email and scrape 2.7K from vain today. My question is, what would you do in my situation of about $1,500 in earnings from Upwork left and about 2,000 connects to spend. My goal is to make 5K per month to quit my job and be in one of your case studies when I make my first 10K a month as I believe I have quite a unique set of traits that could broaden the maker school demographic being Asian and also born in New Zealand.
You're sending about four proposals per day on average. If you increased that to 10 per day (2.5× more), you'd see roughly 2.5× more results. Your main bottleneck is the view rate, currently around 12 %; improving your CV, profile, how it stands out, and your writing to avoid generic templates could push that to 20‑25 %. Make sure the first 150 characters show you read the post, give something free, and present yourself as a professional. With a 12 % view rate, 16 viewed proposals translate to about five replies, which is rough but not hopeless. In my early days I sent 20‑25 proposals a day; I would have completed your 30‑day volume in about five and a half days, outperforming you six‑fold on views alone. Even without improving my view rate, that would have yielded roughly 90 views, around 30 replies, and three or four calls—enough to eventually land a deal. You can make up for any shortfall in volume with strategic effort, something I've done since day one. I'd still recommend you do it more effectively, but the principle holds.
Yeah, so for big builds, don't just do it all in one shot; avoid big all-encompassing systems because scope creep usually leads to a situation where you haven't clearly defined what you’ll do for the client, which is impossible to specify ahead of time, causing the client to expect something you didn’t agree to for payment, breeding resentment and harming the relationship. Instead, start with a small starter project that’s tightly scoped and agreed upon by both sides, then vibe each other out to learn what the client likes and demonstrate your aptitude—this lets you pitch more later and gives you insight into their business before committing to a massive scope. If you’re doing this for a company and need to send 10,000 depersonalized emails, think logically: using Make, first you get the leads (one op), then you iterate through the leads (n ops), generate icebreakers (another n ops), and optionally upload to Instantly (another n ops) or bulk‑upload to Google Sheets (effectively one op). Roughly, that’s about three n ops, or two n ops if you use the bulk‑upload shortcut. For 10,000 records that works out to roughly 20,000 operations, give or take. As for the Make plan, the $34‑per‑month Core plan gives you 40,000 ops, plenty of headroom; you don’t need the Pro plan unless you want better error handling, in which case the Pro plan is $62. You can start with Core and upgrade later, paying only the difference. On a personal note, I’m about twenty minutes into this video and feeling locked in; I’ve gotten more done today than in the past week because I’ve committed to stop daily posting on my main channel. My growth has slowed—my first‑24‑hour view‑to‑subscriber ratio dropped from about 15% (≈15,000 views on 100k subs) to around 5% (≈5,000 views). Comments suggest this is because my niche‑specific content has saturated its audience, and broadening the topic would attract less‑interested viewers. Elrico noted that my recent videos repeat earlier material, which may also be hurting growth, and suggested exploring other tools besides Make, like voice agents and live builds. Parker joked about throwing me on while cooking to start a riot over quitting daily, and shared ideas such as adding an automation bucket for publicly traded codes to save Coinbase money, using customer‑support headcount as an input for percentage assessments, and targeting big logos to pull in the right audience. My daily updates channel now has about 5,600 subscribers, while the main channel sits at 110,750. I’m checking follower‑count tools like Trend Hero, though I’m not sure about the daily‑limit metric. Reflecting on all this feedback, I’ve decided to stop posting daily and instead pursue a multifaceted strategy: focus on what makes me unique—my calm, low‑production‑value, high‑signal‑to‑noise conversational content—and develop a new, less‑replicable format. With my team, we’ve decided to pursue the “complete and utter uncopyable thing”: building a business with this stuff in front of everybody, doing it extraordinarily well by spending time generating leads, selling them, securing proposals, onboarding clients, fulfilling projects, and growing the company. Nobody else can replicate that live business‑building demonstration. My earlier live video of starting and selling an AI service in ten hours went viral precisely because it proved I can generate leads on camera; it’s a litmus test for knowing how to do this.
Break the funnel into ratios: viewed/sent = 4/24 ≈ 16.6%, replied/viewed = 2/4 = 50%, closed/replied = 1/2 = 50%. The bottleneck is always your lowest ratio — here, that's the 16.6% viewed rate. A 1-percentage-point improvement there (16.6% → 17.6%) is roughly a 6% relative change, versus a 1-point move on the 50% reply rate only being about a 2% relative change — so fix the biggest bottleneck first, not the smallest number. To raise your viewed-to-sent ratio: your cover letter/proposal text is the biggest lever (clients only see the first ~100 characters, so make it hyper-relevant to the specific job, not generic), pair it with some kind of built asset specific to them (shows real effort, not just a template), respond as fast as possible after the job posts, and use Upwork's paid 'boost' feature on top of all that. No need to drop your rate — fix the funnel instead.
Anyway, 8% positive reply and 29 email signs. Great. You're saying the emails are at 100% health. I wonder if it worked the first time you booked two calls and why it won't work out? Is that a numbers scam? Yeah, I mean like you know 800's not a lot really. So you probably just got lucky on the first 209 just to be blunt. You know, in reality your email reply rate is probably between 2.5% and 4%. And maybe right now you're just getting unlucky. I feel you about thinking you figured out the outreach, but don't sweat it too much. I mean, just scale it up. 2.5% isn't bad. Keep in mind though, this is like one of your first campaigns, so this is the worst it's ever going to be. So, it sounds like you're more demotivated and the stuck feeling is the problem more than the objective reality. Maybe do some thinking there. Yeah, if I were you, I'd just keep sending, scale up to like 2,000, do some iterations and split tests at 2.5%. That was my campaign on the watch me start and sell an AS service in 10 hours video—one of my most popular videos. I'm doing one-handed, so bear with me. But check this one out: 2.5% was my reply rate for that campaign, and I got about 10 or 11 positive replies in 10 hours. So you can do it, just a matter of scale.
Go to Upwork.com, click 'Find Work', type 'automation', and apply to recent posts—raw dog the GH LX expert for full snapshot design, GH LX form and automation setup, or an AI automation engineer role (10K spent). Build a fully spec'd email triage AI drafting service (200K spent); there's money everywhere if you know where to look. Apply to many, maybe five, set an hourly alarm to reload the page for new posts. Don't worry about proposals with 50+ bids—80% are junk like 'Hello dear, I'm an automation developer, I'll help you.' They're not customized, have no value, and people glaze over at m‑dashes or AI junk. There's still room to boost your posts, which many overlook. (Side note: I've been testing clickbait vs. high‑value long‑form, trying different terminals, etc.—but that's unrelated.) My Upwork profile is solid: $1K+ earned, top‑rated, five‑star reviews, 100% job success. Competition is growing, and my theory rate feels lower despite following tips. If I were you, I'd aim for a 10K/month milestone with some upfront capital, focusing on input goals rather than output. Upwork is full of people making 10K/month with little upfront investment; the niche is exploding, with a million new niches monthly as tools evolve rapidly. You could become a Higgs field expert or learn Open Claw—even a mediocre tool can sell if you know how to position it. The idea that things are getting harder is false; our niche hasn't grown as fast as the number of people, so competition is actually easier now than before. If supply and demand were equal, competition would be the same; if demand is lower, competition is higher; if demand is higher, competition is lower. Anyway, Leto, son of Paul Atreides—thanks.