As a 14-year-old in Pakistan using Gmail for cold outreach with personalized Loom videos, am I doing things right? If not, how can I improve?
Hey man, congrats on getting started with any sort of business at 14 years old. The extent of my business knowledge at 14 was playing Runescape and reselling Rune Essence from west to east to west Varac bank. If you know any fellow Runescape entrepreneurs, let me know in the comments. In terms of doing this, I guess it's kind of like a video game, which makes sense. In terms of what you would do, I wonder if you're butchering the probability of success because you're 14 and doing a personalized Loom video. A lot of people won't take you seriously if you're 14 and visibly 14. I don't mean this to disincentivize you; I think what you're doing is fantastic. I wish I had started this business stuff around your age. But being pragmatic, if you're pitching to someone in their 30s or 40s, they'll wonder how young you are, whether you have experience, and if you've had time to build it. They likely won't see that you have a competitive advantage: your ability to learn things quickly, which is the only real skill set that will matter as we head toward the AI era at breakneck speed. Am I doing all things right? Yeah, I think so. For you, it's just about consistency. If you keep this up for a full year and do 10 of these every day, you'll accumulate 3,650 independent touch points. You're going to crush it.
If I could give one piece of advice to my younger self, it would be to understand that outputs lag behind inputs. When you put in a lot of work, you won’t see the results immediately because there’s a natural delay—often about a month—before the effort pays off. If you have a tight feedback loop and expect quick results, remind yourself that the lack of immediate outcomes doesn’t mean your effort was wasted; it’s just the system’s lag. To work with this, ground yourself in the belief that what you’re doing is right, based on the logic and research you’ve done. Trust that belief deeply, and keep going. For example, if you were to send ten Loom videos daily to creators you admire and message them on platforms like Instagram, LinkedIn, or X, you’d mathematically expect a result. By sticking with it over a long period, the inputs eventually catch up to the outputs, and you start seeing results. I learned this from my own experience: I blogged every day for 30 days as part of a challenge, saw almost no views, and felt discouraged. But a year later, those posts were ranking on Google’s first page, driving hundreds of hits and sales opportunities. Had I kept that pace, I would have become one of the more prolific bloggers online. The same pattern happened with my YouTube channel—once I committed to daily videos for a month, the market rewarded me later, and I grew into a bigger, respected creator in my space. So, if you believe in your work, give yourself grace and extra time—maybe double or triple your estimate for when results will appear. That heuristic makes success far more likely.
Great shout out to you, Zaid, for being 15 and pushing forward to improve your station in life. I understand money is tight where you're at, and as someone who was in a similar situation growing up, all I really wanted was more freedom and security—money was a constant issue at our dinner conversations, just like when my family immigrated from a former Soviet bloc country. So let's make it as cheap as humanly possible. At 15, many people will inherently not want to work with you because the biggest red flag for business owners is if you haven't done anything before; they don't want to risk reputation, money, time, or emotional state on someone unlikely to deliver. At 15, the assumption is you're young and haven't had time to do the thing, which will be a problem for you. My recommendation: you probably can't do anything that requires your face at least until you're older, unless your testosterone levels are through the roof and you have a Gandalf‑like beard—unlikely. I faced this at 21 with a baby face; people thought I was 16 knocking on doors and laughed me out of rooms. So strategically, don't copy what an adult does; adults selling to you won't take you seriously. Instead, try a faceless business model that leverages your inbuilt talents. A good example is faceless YouTube automation, which has blown up with the younger crowd because it leverages your strong taste in social media and ability to understand and follow trends—your brain is basically half algorithm anyway—and it doesn't require you to use your face. Running social media channels and brands, like TikTok or Instagram theme pages, teaches the same skills without needing your face on camera. You also don't need to learn a tremendous amount of automation to make this work; budget‑wise it's usually not crazy if you use free or low‑cost models. Remember, social media is free—you are the product—and you don't pay to use it for the most part. So, I understand you want to pursue this business model, but that's my honest recommendation. I don't have a lot of steps on how to do that; I'm just giving you my two cents. I would do that for a couple of years or give an example of that.
Well, logically I get what you're saying, but you're assuming it's a zero‑sum game—that if I give away my secrets they benefit and I gain nothing. Actually, it's not a zero‑sum game at all. Putting this content out there has significantly increased market demand for these services, creating a positive feedback loop where the demand growth outpaces whatever I've given away in knowledge. We live in a knowledge economy, and knowledge is the main thing. By giving what feels like very little knowledge—because I've already done all the work—I can provide overwhelming, ridiculous amounts of value, and you see that as a ton of value. That makes you far more likely to join my paid community, my programs, hire my agency, or work with me in a consulting context. In reality, I lose very little: people already know how to put together a proposal generator; I'm not exactly reinventing the wheel, and when I first started sharing, a lot of copycats appeared, but I'm fine with that. I firmly believe knowledge should not be gatekept. What I do gatekeep and charge for is the accountability—the one‑on‑one time with me. That's why this approach has worked well for me. Sam Ovens, the literal king of consulting, featured me in a video saying I make about $269,000 a month with my school (an information product). And giving this free YouTube content, despite not selling anything directly, has worked exceptionally well.
The limiting belief section in my career plan addresses whether I have any beliefs holding me back. I’ve had two such sections; the most recent one was written when I was earning $100,000 a month, where I mapped out how to reach $167,000 a month, then surpassed it to hit $400,000 a month. I concluded I don’t have any limiting beliefs for my current goals, though if my goal were a billion‑dollar business I’d likely have many. If I did have limiting beliefs, the most effective way to eliminate them is to repeatedly do the thing you’reafraid of—acting contrary to the belief changes your habits, which reshapes your beliefs and identity. It’s almost like reverse‑engineering the belief: instead of deep meditation or soul‑surgery, simply muster the courage to do the feared action once; doing it once makes repetition far more likely, and then you keep doing it. Action over knowledge, action over thinking—this is the straight‑line path to dissolving limiting beliefs. I personally had a big limiting belief about hitting $167,000 a month; I doubted I could reach that figure. My yearly goal was $2 million, which averages to $167,000 monthly—a target that felt realistic yet challenging within the realm of possibility, making it effective for growth. I then examined bottlenecks and beliefs, realized I could achieve the figure if I set my mind to it, and saw no fundamental reason why not. Later I recognized I’d already solved those earlier limiting beliefs, perhaps in an earlier blog post. Beyond mindset, I’ve been thinking about increasing the value of my videos—not just production value, but the actual business value they deliver. I’m considering lowering production effort a bit while raising the substantive value, inspired by an accountability partner who spends 20 hours per video and publishes once a week. I’m experimenting with higher‑value, intensive content on the main channel while keeping the daily updates as a lower‑effort, value‑rich format. I’m also planning to redesign the website to better showcase the team, edify collaborators like Noah, and highlight agency work. Future ideas include hosting live dinners in Calgary to build local community, and continuing to share stats and growth updates.
limiting beliefsaction over knowledgevideo valueagency