Should I create content teaching automations or content for businesses that need systems?
It depends on your goals. If you teach people how to build automations, you’ll attract those who want to learn automation—mainly AI‑automation enthusiasts—leading to coaching, info‑product, or consulting opportunities. If you create content for businesses that need a system (e.g., HVAC, fitness, manufacturing), you’ll attract clients seeking implementation work, such as building a cold‑email system for a recruiting company. So decide whether you want to be known for knowledge‑based work or hands‑on implementation. Regarding what I shared next: I’m currently reviewing applications for an editor and a strategist. For editing, I’ve narrowed it to two candidates—one local and ambitious but less experienced, the other more experienced but with a time‑zone issue. I plan to make a decision by Friday after a paid trial: I’ll pay $150 for a 48‑hour test task, then evaluate the result and pick the best fit. For the strategist role, the main issue is writing quality; I need someone who can craft outlines and scripts that require minimal edits. I’ve shortlisted about five people and will decide soon. My hiring process uses a NAD canvas: start with a general app, then a pipeline where applicants fill out a general application, answer simple cues to show they can represent themselves and write well without relying on ChatGPT, then a paid trial, then evaluation and selection. In the meantime, I haven’t posted on my main channel for five or six days, but I plan to return to a daily publishing schedule. I believe I’m among the top producers in the AI‑automation space, and even less‑polished, consistent output will win over time. My goal is to maximize the minutes I spend sharing knowledge online, so I’ll keep publishing regularly. Finally, thanks to everyone who applied—if you like the content or find my answers helpful, please keep engaging.
No, you're absolutely right—warehouse management systems, enterprise resource planning, and inventory management systems are essentially dressed-up CRMs. If you understand how spreadsheets work, you'll understand how WMS and similar systems work; their UX is often clunky, but that's fine. Regarding VR 180 cameras: they're stereo cameras with a wide field of view that feel immersive in a VR headset; still early days with resolution needing work, but they could become a big industry in 5–10 years. I haven't used them yet, but they look exciting—two lenses recreating human field of view. I film them with OBS Studio. On your AI automation ideas for cold email: AI meeting note‑taking that sends key subjects and actionable steps to participants and updates the CRM is great. Automated email tagging and filtering is great. An AI concierge for Airbnbs and hotels answering common questions is reasonable. I'm not aiming to become a millionaire; I just want to sell simple sub‑$1K services to get off the ground. For mailboxes, I wouldn't recommend Hostinger for cold email—there's a reason big players avoid it. I'd suggest Zapmail at about $3.50 per mailbox (up to 10 or 100 mailboxes), which also handles DNS setup. Regarding pivoting into AI and automation: if I didn't think it made sense, I wouldn't be making videos about it all day, so my work already shows it's a good move. On starting an agency with no clients: outreach isn't a simple yes/no; it's about volume. How many outreach pieces did you send? How many Upwork or freelancer applications? How many community posts? How many people have you talked to, and over what time? If you haven't done enough, it's not that you're not good enough—it's just that you haven't put in the reps. Expecting results without sufficient effort is unreasonable. Why people fail to make money online: mostly because they can't stick with something long enough to see results. They expect success after a few days or weeks, like learning piano to a concert level in two weeks—impossible. You need years of effort; don't compare your chapter one to someone else's chapter 100. On hiring versus doing it yourself: hiring someone on Upwork or Fiverr to build templates isn't more efficient if your metric is cost or time, because you pay for work you could do yourself and add communication overhead. The only real efficiency gain is doing less of the work you dislike, but at this stage I'd optimize for making $100K rather than avoiding work you enjoy. On growing a coaching business: first, stop over‑analyzing your 'why' and start acting. Determine a set of daily revenue‑generating activities you can do every day for the next year that will drive the results you care about—financial goals. Define what you're selling (information/coaching). Put your offer in front of people, articulate how it solves their problems, and improve the offer as you deliver it. Learn and deliver in tandem. Reinvest profits to systemize outreach, lead gen, and sales, freeing time for systematization and growth. For example, join school communities and each day respond to ten women with health‑improvement suggestions, then move conversations to DMs, calls, and present your coaching offer. As you earn money, you can make the process more sophisticated.
Maker School works like this: you join, then go through a pre‑program where I walk you through my methodology and mindset for building a new business, giving you my high‑level view of how I've approached every business I've run. Next, you choose a path. If you lack automation experience, you enter the automation program, which covers an end‑to‑end process including cloud code. I now have a full course on generating media because I see that as the next frontier now that text is saturated. After finishing that (if you still lack automation experience) you move into the main program; if you already have automation experience you can jump straight into the main program. The main program is simply a daily checklist: each day you show up and I tell you what to do—like 'do this, do that.' As part of the checklist I share a video where I actually perform the task, so you learn by reading and watching, then you apply it to your own business. It's not drip‑fed; you can only advance further if you ask me directly and show evidence that you already have a successful business or similar result. I don't let everyone move forward automatically because most people's biggest obstacle is themselves—they get stuck thinking about future content, feel overwhelmed, and lose focus on the daily actions.
In terms of the checklist, I use an automation agency sales skeleton. Instead of a full script, which is hard to deliver naturally, I give a skeleton—a big list of topics to talk about. I start by building rapport, then set the schedule, and ask the big question: 'Why me now in this?' Because asking 'why now' usually gives the person all the ammunition needed to sell them. For example, they might say they need X, Y, Z, and that they love that I talked about X, Y, Z and think I'm the best person to help solve those. Then I know everything I need to sell them. Next, I ask about the actual audit questions: always map the customer journey from start to end of fulfillment. That means identifying where the customer first sees you—whether it's a Facebook inbound lead ad, a referral email thread, a cold email inbox, or a cold call. Then I walk through every step: lead generation, sales process (how a lead becomes a sales call, sending a calendar link, booking or not), closing the deal (proposal, agreement, invoice), onboarding, fulfillment, post‑fulfillment retention, and getting them back into the business. If any step is missing, I note what to do. By running the customer through this series and having them map their pipeline from start to finish, you usually know everything needed to make a reasonable analysis of their main bottlenecks and problems. Another useful question is revenue per employee (or cost per employee/contractor). For example, when I made over $100,000 a month with just me, my revenue per employee was $100,000, while most other businesses have $15,000–$20,000. This helps map businesses from high to low revenue per employee; the lower the revenue per employee, the more you can systematize the business, and the higher it is, the trickier it becomes. Finally, I also ask some sales history questions.
ai automationprocess auditcustomer journeyrevenue per employee
No problem at all. I don't think your situation is necessarily the hardest question I've gotten. You have four hours a day, which is more time than many people have—not to minimize your conditions. My father has scoliosis, which really affects his back; your girlfriend has asthma, and I've heard of adrenal insufficiency before, which can interfere with motivation, stimulation, sleep, etc. Obviously, that's a massive pain. Anyway, you've got four hours a day—a synthetic constraint. Artificial constraints, believe it or not, are actually good over the long term because they force you to be as effective and efficient as possible with every available minute. Whereas someone else might have a full day to do whatever they want, you don't; you have a rule set in place, an evolutionary pressure that will make you better and more effective with your time. So it's harder, but the flip side is you'll be significantly more effective five or ten years out. Where would you start? I'd recommend typing in 'nix arrive 80% of automation basics in 29 minutes'—a solid video that covers what you need to know to get up and running with AI automation. From there, you could take my AI automation NAD course, which is six hours and runs you through everything needed to build automations with NAD, because you'll have hit the 80/20 moment right before this, understanding some business fundamentals. Then, if you just go on my YouTube channel over here, you'll find the daily updates channel—a compilation of daily updates and other stuff—and my video 'Watch Me Start and Sell.' This one's a while ago, but okay; check it out as well—it's one of the most viewed videos on my channel. It runs you through AI automation basics, how to build a system out in an automation platform like NIN, and some AI fundamentals. How do we actually go about putting this in front of people? That's more or less it. Okay, so start there; as long as you're consistent and motivated, you've got this buddy. Okay, guys, I think I'm going to leave it there. One big thing I'm doing right now with the retrospective I'm writing—the big lifestyle audit and the big blog post—is just auditing where I'm spending my time. I've realized the daily update videos are unfortunately growing into more of a behemoth than I initially planned. The average post time over the last ~20 videos is about 47 minutes—too long. So it's hard for me to stay on top of all this stuff. I'm instituting a 20 to 25 minute maximum. I don't exactly know how fast I'll do these, but this will necessitate a change in the structure of the daily updates. Fortunately for me, unfortunately for a lot of people I was doing unstructured Q&A sessions for—which is all good—I'm still going to do Q&A and show up every day, but for my own time I'll have to change the structure and how I do it. I'm going to obviously try to implement, as I was just talking about EMOD, some sort of structure that lets me use this constraint positively: deliver more value per unit time, not less. That will buy me back about a half hour of my day, which is very much needed right now. A couple other things I'm going to do: I'm going to change how I'm doing my administration by hiring a virtual assistant again, and having the VA take care of a lot of my mundane email admin stuff. I've been dealing with all of my refund requests entirely on my own, which I understand is not optimal, but I've always just been like, 'well, screw it.' I've been dealing with one-off questions about the program entirely on my own. Somebody reached out to me asking, 'Hey, Nick, you know, how do I access my subscription portal for Maker School?' I'll actually go through and answer that question. I have like five or ten variants of those questions every day. If everyone takes a minute, you could see how these sorts of things add up—right? I answer one-off questions about, 'Hey, does Maker School include this?' or 'Does make money with Make.com include that?' It just ends up being a boatload of time. I'm going to be changing a little bit about how the agency is operating as well. I有