Is there a way to join your team? I built an app that might be valuable for you and your clients, and I'm looking to build my own business, join a team, and add as much value as I can. I have B2B closing/sales/marketing experience and just finished a CS engineering degree building with AI.
When you approach somebody in my position asking to work with them, you can't just hand over a list of your CV — a CS degree, sales experience, following me for a while — that's not inherently compelling, and nobody will tell you this unless you're in a position like mine: when someone says 'can I work with you, I'll even do it for free,' that's not valuable to me, because money isn't the constraint right now, results are. There's a tier list for this kind of pitch. C-tier: 'I want to work with you for free, here are my skills' — the problem is I still have to do the labor of figuring out where you fit in my org, which takes time and energy and isn't sexy. B-tier: 'I've already done some work for you for free, here it is, can you fit me in somewhere?' A-tier, the best: 'I noticed you're leaving X on the table, I already fixed it for free, I want to keep fixing it and I'll charge you a fraction of the value it creates — this takes zero time and energy on your end, I'll manage it all myself.' The reason A-tier wins is I don't have to evaluate you (you've proven it), don't have to place you (you've already found where you add value), and don't have to manage you (you handle it yourself). In any situation where money isn't the bottleneck and results are, this is what you want to do when approaching anybody bigger than you — show up as a self-starter who's already solved a problem for them.
It's fairly straightforward: you contact big‑ticket decision‑makers the same way you contact anyone else. These people have less time, so their threshold for what deserves their attention is higher—think of turning up the difficulty in a game from medium to hard or extreme. It's still possible; many people succeed at extreme difficulty, though it's a bit harder overall. Their main concern is the extra marginal time they'd have to spend managing you to get a project from start to finish. New business owners often think the amount of money is what matters, but it's really the value you provide and the time that value frees them up. Beginners might say they'll work for free or do anything, but high‑level executives don't care about that; offering marginal value would actually cost them more time than it's worth. The way to pitch them is to make them certain that working with you won't consume any more of their time—that you're 100% self‑managed and will immediately solve a direct need that's currently costing them money, on which you can deliver multiples. It's not about offering to work for free or cheap; instead, you say, 'Hey Pete, I know you're suffering from XYZ problem because I've worked with a big name trying to solve it before—it cost them $48 million a year (or $400 k a year). We've solved it and made them $1.5 million. I've already started working on this for you. I know your time is valuable, so this requires no supervision. I've already eliminated XYZ % of this leak, and I want to continue doing this for you. If I do, you're likely to make this much or that much money. All I'm asking for is a simple okay from you, maybe a 10‑minute call to shake hands and orient you. I'll have no ongoing management costs and am entirely self‑directed. You can think of it as you spending just 5 or 10 minutes of your time and receiving a fix for a $40‑$50 k/month problem. People love this approach because it shows you understand how many directions their time is pulled into. My recommendation: pitch anyone whose problem is worth over half a million dollars a year—which really isn't that much when you think about it.
Think about it from my perspective — I'm already making a lot of money and don't need more talent, so the only way this becomes worth my while is if you do all the work for me upfront. Identify a specific problem I'm suffering from that's costing me money, solve it, and package the solution so all I have to do is click one button — don't make me come up with the problem, the solution, or a management structure for you. Don't pitch like 'I'd like a job, I'm feeling lost' — instead, put yourself in the shoes of the person you're reaching out to, understand what they're actually struggling with, do all the work, then present it: 'I think I can make you this much money — all you need to do is respond with X, Y, Z. Say yes and I'll get started immediately, you can pay me after it's done.' That's how you pitch working for someone for free. I'm good right now and probably will be until $300-400K/month, but when I am hiring again, the people who've engaged with my content will be the first I look to — you can copy this approach for other people too.
Well, I think you're just giving yourself reasons why you can't succeed instead of seeing this as a massive opportunity. The fact that you have all this blue-collar work is what legitimizes you—you actually understand how these ships run, which is the core fundamental of what you're trying to tell me. An AI person who's credible in AI but lacks that blue-collar experience has very little of that. The most successful outbound campaigns I've run aren't outsiders trying to sell marketing services for your niche; they're people who actually work in your niche and have worked there with a company for years. So here's what we tried: first, I positioned myself as an outsider trying to tell you how to do things better; second, I positioned myself as one of you, having gone through the same struggles, ups, and downs, approaching it from your perspective. The second approach worked really well. You actually have a gold mine here—your 15 years of experience is extremely credible. I'm sure you don't have white-collar credibility from corporate meetings, but you're the person who actually does the job. I think you'll be surprised at how many corporate types will look at that and say, 'Okay, yeah, this guy probably knows more than some XYZ analyst fresh from a Stanford master's.' So what would I do? Okay, you have no track record because you're trying to go from 0 to 100 right off the bat. The probability of landing a $300,000 client for a widespread AI rollout is quite low. My recommendation: start small. In Maker School, we typically put people on the simplest, easiest job platforms like Upwork or Freelancer.com so they can say, 'Hey, I've worked with a real paying client,' which immediately gets you 80% of the way to being able to pitch whoever you want. The scariest thing for a client is working with a freelancer or agency that's never worked with a client before—you're putting your reputation on the line, especially doubly so if you're a big business with a lot to lose. So hopefully that makes sense. I would just get going; you don't have to stay in the maritime space. As long as you have some AI experience working with real paid clients, you're fine—maybe make that your first go-to. [Snorts] I want you to know that everything you've talked about so far—this maritime stuff—is very similar to oil and gas. In Alberta, where I used to live, my partner Cody works with tons of oil and gas companies and routinely sells $100,000 to $200,000 websites—yeah, $100,000 for a website, which sounds insane but is true. He does this using the mechanisms I've talked about, gaining credibility from smaller sources and building it up, plus his blue-collar background. I'm sure you understand where I'm coming from; I wouldn't treat this as a negative, I treat it as a positive. [gasps]
Yeah, I thought a lot about this. I just spent a month in Europe with my girlfriend, celebrating her break after medical school—she's now a doctor and doesn't get many breaks, so this was a big one for her. I tagged along for the ride and had some fun. While I was on that break, I was still doing Maker School and running a couple of my businesses, but not at the same level of intensity. [snorts] Despite maxing out my life in the relationships category, I was really lagging behind on health and career. I realized I was repeating the same mistake I'd made before—maximizing relationships or health at the cost of other categories. So now I'm trying to be much more consistent across all categories. I've realized that, at least in my business, to progress and keep it fun, I need some sort of goal. That's why the 1 million subscriber goal exists—some might call it naive, but it's a goal. The reality is I won't get in the exact perfect direction right away, but I need to get moving in a direction, then eventually sit down, recalibrate, and see if that's the direction I really want to go in, maybe change or pivot. So if I want to get a month like this—pretty cool because it's a direct reflection of how engaged and high-quality people find my content—I think that's a pretty good near-term goal to strive for, because if people like my content they're more likely to want to pay me money. Subscribers and views are more superficial, but financially not much has changed, which is nice. So I just want to push towards financials. Okay, almost had it to you—good to have you back. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO or AIEO agency, which is like AI optimization. Sorry, I'm realizing the sun is going to really crush me here—give me one sec. [pause] That's much better. I'm running LinkedIn outbound for an AEO agency. This is my current script: any comments? Hey name, just Google use case twice and check chat GPT—it keeps showing up instead of the company. So I put together a one-page doc on what exactly is happening and how to flip it. Hmm. I can see what you're saying. Do you want it? Yeah, what are you going to do—are you going to send this in the thing? Yeah, that really didn't work. My issue with stuff like this is: if you really had it and you really did just put together a quick one-page doc, you would have sent it right away. This was basically a gimmick that worked pretty well a while ago—maybe like two and a half years ago—but nowadays people's value radars are quite different; they want a lot more value up front. So if you can't send that value up front, people will notice unfortunately. So I know: if there was a way to actually generate the doc and then send it via LinkedIn, I would do that. You can make the doc seem human-written. You know, refer to them by first name like 'Hey Peter.' Uh, so I know you run XYZ business and you have yet to hear about me, but I put this together for you because I think I can offer a lot of value, and my mom always told me to give people value up front. I don't know—some silly like that. You could probably do that in the document, send it over, and have some success. But um yeah, the cool thing about LinkedIn is you can only really send like 20 to 30 of these a day. And links aren't treated the same as they are in cold email; you don't have the same deliverability impact. So you could absolutely just send the links. So, just send the value. Nick We seem to only vote for jesters and fake people in office. He would fit right in. Everything is a grift to these people. We do love the grift. Thank you. Insightful. Jared says, 'Hey Nick, glad to see you're back making this content. Question, how do you think about how you want to be remembered outside of externally weighted indicators of success? How does that shape what you're pursuing? Have come back to this question many times personally in recent months. Appreciate the values always.' Yeah, you know, I love that we're moving to more meaning-based questions, and it looks like a lot of people here who have had success following some of thebusiness