What is the gender breakdown of your audience, is it worth targeting markets where my language is stronger despite lower fees, how can I work as a digital nomad with large time‑zone differences, and how should I run an agency while working a regular job?
My audience is roughly 90 % male and 10 % female according to Google Analytics. My spoken English sits around B1‑B2 while my comprehension is C1‑C2, though I’m not entirely sure what those levels mean in practice. I’ve held the belief that I shouldn’t jump into the U.S. market until my English reaches C1 because the fees there are the highest, but I wonder whether that’s just a bias or if I should instead target places where my language is stronger even if the fees are five to ten times lower. The answer really depends on where you are: some countries let you earn outsized returns because they pay high fees and have lots of buyers for automation work—think Germany, French agencies, the Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, Luxembourg (I’ve had a couple projects there). If you’re in a poorer country like Bulgaria, I’d avoid niching down for local clients because the fees you could command would be much lower; it’s a tough call, and I wish I could do more there. Regarding running a digital nomad lifestyle with big time‑zone gaps, I haven’t found a perfect fix. When I lived in the Philippines for a few weeks I had to take calls at night, which was annoying and hurt my sleep and income. The reality is that a prospect’s reply is as close to money as you get, so you have to treat it like gold and be ready to respond. If a client is only available at 2 p.m. PT, that could be 4 a.m. in Thailand; asking to meet at 8 a.m. would make about half of them disappear. It’s therefore difficult to sustain a nomad schedule that avoids night work. You’ll do better by focusing on markets that are closer to your time zone—Thai firms pay less, but Singaporean or Chinese companies often pay more. I tried the nomad life myself, found it unsustainable (poor sleep, low earnings), though I did enjoy seeing new places and learning about myself. After I returned to a stable base, sat down, focused, and my results took off. In the end it’s a trade‑off: you sacrifice something—usually rest or income—for the travel experience. As for fitting agency work around a regular job, I’ve given you the best approach I can; thanks for the question.
You know one of the major issues here is you're at $3K a month and want to hit $10K a month, so the gap is $7K a month. But because you're at a middling income level, I'd imagine it's $3K a month, and you probably don't have anything else; you really want to hold onto that and save every dollar. If you wanted to grow from $3K to $10K a month, you'd have to spend a lot of your money and risk some of it. What I mean by this is you're not sure about starting from scratch on Upwork for $10–15 an hour. You know, if you did that, you'd probably spend somewhere between $200 and $400 a month just on connect costs, if you really wanted to take it seriously. That's like 12% of maybe 15% of all your money. That's the thing I personally think is probably stopping you from saying yes. But the reality is, you've got to spend money to make money. My recommendation would be to take everything you're doing here—whatever $3,000 USD minus your living expenses, whatever you have left over—and spend it on marketing, on sales and marketing. Upwork is a great example. We just had a guy in Maker School, Sai Satoru, who's absolutely one of the coolest guys in this group. He has a relatively similar situation as you do. From $849 a month teaching kids to $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. A year and a half ago, he was teaching English to 9-year-olds in Chiang Rai for $849 a month. It was stable, predictable, and the wrong life. But he dove in on freelancing and AI automation, and now he's made $40,000 on Upwork in 12 months. Granted, it's in 12 months, so it's not the same thing, but keep in mind that the majority of that money is pushed into the future. I imagine the way Sai probably started was he started with a $500 month, then a $1,000 month, then a $1,500 month, then a $2,000 month. And also, this is just Upwork; there are a million different ways you can make money online with AI and automation. I'm not telling you you have to do this necessarily, but it is a very simple and straight-line path for somebody in your situation. So what you could do is the first couple months, go on Upwork, make a grand, two grand, three grand, and then take that money and graduate to more efficient marketing approaches as well—things like cold email and so on. So that's what I would do. And $10K per month might seem really scary, but think about it: that's just three positions like this at maybe half the time spent on each. You could absolutely do that. Thank you very much, MZ Maestro. Your brains are half algorithms at this point. Basically, yeah, that's how I feel.
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.
You're right about the pattern — Western clients often assume they'll get outsized leverage from working with someone in a lower cost-of-living country, and for the most part that assumption is rooted in real cost-of-living arbitrage, not racism (though it still often results in your work being unfairly assumed to be lower quality). You'll be fighting against that the whole way through, and there's no way to fully eliminate it short of working with clients entirely outside that dynamic — but you can lessen it. Two big things: (1) Raise your rate — the biggest immediate signal of 'cheap offshore labor' is a low headline rate (e.g. $5-15/hr on Upwork); charge like $45-65/hr, competitive with Western freelancers, instead. (2) Understand Western working-culture norms — they tend to be blunter, more direct, and (from my experience employing people across a dozen+ countries) they generally like agency and initiative much more than excessive deference. A common issue with hires from lower cost-of-living countries is being reluctant to voice opinions or take initiative for fear of being off-putting — but Western clients tend to respond well to it. So instead of constantly asking permission, act, then explain afterward if needed, rather than asking 'should I do this?' at every step.
Regarding Timo's Instagram question: it's not surprising that a large portion of your audience is in India and the EU given global population distribution; posting in English from Germany reaches a global audience, and your viewership roughly matches world averages—about 40‑50% from the United States, 5% from Canada, roughly 15% from India (about one‑eighth of your viewers), the rest spread across Spanish‑speaking Latin America, with German‑speaking viewers around 3‑5% and French‑speaking viewers a similar share. This pattern is simply a reflection of where people live. If you're concerned about the Indian audience because of lower purchasing power, that's a valid business consideration—you may not be able to sell a high‑ticket product to viewers who can't afford it—but remember that a view is a view, and your content still gains traction; initially about 40% of your Instagram views came from India, and even with that mix you still achieved 100,000 views per video, which attracted followers who assumed you were doing something right. As for what you should do, clarify whether your primary aim is to build a personal brand or to monetize, because those are distinct objectives. You don't need to monetize through a personal brand; many brands accumulate massive view counts yet have weak monetization. I won't prescribe a path, but I'll share my own approach: I entered social media not to become a social media personality but to lower my cost per booked meetings. When I sent cold emails, my cost per booked meeting was X, and I experimented to see if I could reduce it. The videos I create serve as a sales tool—I'm technically selling you while you watch, building trust through humor and a low‑ticket, money‑back‑guaranteed offer, which lets prospects decide to buy without me having to jump on a call. Now hundreds of thousands can watch and think, 'That makes sense; I'll give it a try.' My sole goal is to reduce cost per booked meeting; I never aimed for a half‑million‑subscriber channel, I arrived here by decreasing that cost. So ask yourself what the real purpose of all this effort is. On a lighter note, I've been looking at a puppy and decided to check out the Beyond 2 VR headset—it's the highest‑quality headset currently available, gorgeous, and extremely high quality; they scan your face with an iPhone and 3D‑print a perfect frame, which is insane. The headset also includes optional audio; I use the simple strap, but I previously owned a VR headset and played ping‑pong with my business partner, which was awesome. VR technology has advanced rapidly, and Bigscreen has been doing impressive work. I'm not interested in using VR for gaming; instead I see it as a portable workstation where I could bring a small keyboard, run AI agents or write on screen while I'm elsewhere. I also just enjoy VR, so I'm likely to buy it—having the money makes it an easy 'why not?' purchase, and I can earn enough for it in about half an hour. Beyond the headset, I've been developing a set of mega‑course topics—each four hours or longer—that I'm considering producing. For my own sanity I'm not sharing them yet, but you'll eventually see them on the big‑screen VR setup or later on YouTube as finished courses. I'm committing to ultra‑long‑form content because I believe it's the best way to demonstrate my work ethic and make a noticeable impact on YouTube; competitors can't easily match my speed and consistent quality. I've also innovated on a few formats, which makes me a formidable presence. I look forward to creating many of these mega courses and establishing a pipeline to release one or two every few days—imagine a four‑hour Nick course every day, which would be intense to consume. Separately, YouTube recently altered its view‑counting algorithm. The change caused a noticeable rise in views: after the update on the 25th, views on the 26th and 27th jumped, giving us over 10,000 views per day on the Stack channel and, when I checked my own Nick's Surf analytics, a dip on the 26th followed by a surge to 40,000 views on the 27th, as if someone turned a