As a beginner, should I focus on learning automation skills and start a school, or should I first improve my communication skills and follow a roadmap?

#31 · How to Build AI Automation Offers (One-Time + Recurring)

As a beginner, should I focus on learning automation skills and start a school, or should I first improve my communication skills and follow a roadmap?

I’m happy to dive into that. I actually have a 110‑step roadmap that covers everything you need to get an automation business up and running, from the bare‑bones zero‑to‑one setup to how to make $25,000 a month with this model. It’s very granular and walks you through each step of building systems, finding clients, and scaling. That said, in my experience the highest ROI I’ve ever seen comes from improving your communication skills. If your spoken English is only okay, I’d recommend blocking the first hour of your day to focus on English training—whether that’s a course, a dedicated practice routine, or a language partner. English is still the dominant business language worldwide, and mastering it opens up geo‑arbitrage opportunities: you can work with clients in English‑speaking countries and earn salaries comparable to theirs while enjoying a much lower cost of living at home. Combine strong English with your automation expertise, and you’ll have a powerful combination that can crush it.

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I'm 18 and from Ethiopia (a third-world country). I'm interested in AI automations — would you recommend learning another high-income skill and building capital/soft skills first before entering the space, or should I start directly if it doesn't require much capital? ($500 here is worth about $10K+ in local buying power.)

Go directly into automations. There's no higher-income skill as of right now — it's a massive, exploding industry. Your buying-power arbitrage (roughly 20x in Ethiopia's case) means automation delivers a much higher quality of life per dollar earned, but that doesn't make it 20x easier — you'll face real friction, since a lot of people, especially in the West, look down on offshore workers from Ethiopia, Africa, the Philippines, or India due to unfair assumptions about work quality or English skills, even though that's silly. You'll also struggle at first because you don't have much business experience to know what to automate — you'll learn that through trial and error, but it'll make you a better business owner faster than something like copywriting, a traditional agency, or a cleaning business would. Even in the West, this skill delivers an extra 10-20x multiple on your time; the moment you land a client paying $2,000/month, that's roughly $40,000/month in US buying-power equivalent for you.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Can you give me a five‑step action plan to use AI and transition from time‑for‑money jobs to a remote lifestyle, given I'm a barber instructor who also does ATV repair and speaks Spanish?

First, keep your current income streams (barbering, ATV repair) while you allocate a small portion—maybe $300 a month—to learning one automation tool, such as Make.com or Zapier. Focus on mastering a single tool rather than juggling many; think of it as a pickaxe you can use for everything. Spend a few days watching a comprehensive course (e.g., my 6‑hour Make.com course) until you’re comfortable. Then take three concrete steps: 1) Choose a niche you want to serve. 2) Build an Upwork profile targeting that niche. 3) Start cold‑email outreach using the formula I described earlier. 4) Join relevant communities to network and share content. Keep the niche practical—look for markets where people are already spending money. Follow this five‑step plan, reinvest earnings into tools and education, and you’ll gradually shift from time‑for‑money work to a remote, AI‑enhanced business.

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youtube ↗Mindset

How do I know if I'm hitting the hammer right when starting an agency? Should I spend time looking for projects or learning the skill first, or a combo?

He says you first need to anchor what a lot of money means. AI automation agencies have the lowest barrier to entry and lowest capital cost—comparable to website design agencies in the late 1990s or social-media marketing agencies in the early 2010s. In this space, a lot of money is probably just a few hundred dollars. Any business outside this vertical will cost significantly more than a few hundred to get up and running over a three-month period, so you should expect to spend money to make money. Regarding your specific situation—bidding for email-setup projects on Upwork—lack of experience isn't a time issue; it takes only a couple of weeks to become proficient with any tool well enough that someone will pay you to save them time. So you should combine learning and prospecting. He recommends doing Maker School's introductory automation agency tutorials to gain foundational knowledge and learn to read the language of the tools. Once you understand the language, you can communicate with AI, use Google to find answers to specific questions, and you don't need to know how to do everything right away. The key question is whether a future version of you could solve this problem in the next couple of weeks—and the answer is almost always yes.

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If starting an AI journey from scratch today, what skill should I learn first, what roadmap would get me to $10k/month, and how long would it take? I’m overwhelmed and can’t afford your paid school, so I need free guidance.

You don’t need deep technical skill to make money with AI. Learn enough to build simple landing pages (e.g., a 4‑hour Claude course plus an hour of prompting) in about 5 hours. Then your real bottleneck is outreach—getting people to see your offer. Focus on getting eyes on your product/service; once you have traffic, you can convert and scale. This approach lets you start earning quickly without heavy technical investment.

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