Sid from India works with a YouTuber on marketing, earning $1.5–2.5k after expenses. He asks how to increase his income further using AI, given his background as a video editor now managing a team.
If you’re earning $2,500 per year, you’re essentially being robbed in broad daylight; but if you’re making $2,000 per month ($24k per year), you’re on the lower end yet not necessarily being exploited. To think about your situation, imagine you’re paid $25,000 per year while generating $500,000 in value for the YouTuber—that’s about 5% of the value you create. Most people receive only 1–2% of the value they generate, while strong salespeople earn 15–20% through commissions. My advice for contractor‑partner roles like yours is to aim for 10–15% of the value you deliver, which translates to roughly a 10× return on investment for the client. If the client is smart, they’ll happily pay you $1 to make $10 for them. The mistake many people make is realizing they’re underpaid and then demanding more money outright—a losing approach that comes across as a loss‑based demand and triggers ego or risk‑aversion in business owners. Instead, frame the conversation around growth: remind the client of the results you’ve already delivered (e.g., over $3 million generated together), share your vision for scaling to $10 million, $20 million, or $30 million, and propose a concrete roadmap (start with X, then Y, then Z). Emphasize that you want to take on more responsibility because you believe you can execute better than others, and assure them you won’t take any of their time. Then, at the close, add that you want skin in the game—more upside when things go well, and a corresponding adjustment when they don’t. Present this structure directly to the client. Because you’re leading with growth and a clear path to multiply their business, the likelihood of them agreeing to partner on a new initiative is vastly higher than if you simply complained about pay. In short, if you’re only making a few thousand dollars a year, you are being underpaid; but if you’re earning tens of thousands per month, you’re in a reasonable position. My overall approach to every job or partnership discussion is to focus on mutual growth, not to threaten to walk away unless paid more—that’s blackmail and damages trust. Successful business owners refuse to negotiate with that kind of pressure. When you approach from a desire to grow the pie together, you’ll achieve far better outcomes.
Can I hit $5,000 a month with one or two clients? Absolutely. It's straightforward to do this. Hitting $5,000 a month with a client is almost the entry line to becoming a real agency owner. In the case of the person who asked this, I've had clients who paid me $20,000 to $30,000 a month for services. It's very straightforward and relatively simple: you simply need to provide a multiple on the money they are paying you. If someone is paying you $20,000 a month, as long as you're providing them $100,000, $150,000, or $200,000 a month in comparative value, they will happily pay you that amount. The reason this is difficult for people to understand is that it's at scales and scopes most find unimaginable. I first grasped this idea when my best friend Zach started working with a highly scaling content offer (some sort of automation offer). At the time I wasn't having much success, while Zach was decimating me in every way. I asked him how much money he made with this stuff; he said he made $45,000 last month. I asked how many clients he had, guessing 45, and he said he had one client paying him $45,000. I couldn't understand it because I had no experience with that. The reality is Zach was probably underpaid for the value he provided; realistically he should have been paid two and a half to three times that, given he was making the company millions per month. When you start thinking more about the value you provide and less about the sticker‑shock price, and if you can convince a client that this is true, you start being able to earn, quite honestly, unimaginable amounts of money from the right people who get it.
You're going to want to focus on partnerships in a situation like this. You're going to want to focus on big retainers where a percentage of your compensation is tied to the growth of the business. There are a few people in my life that make far more than this right now. One of my best friends is making around $1M-$1.5M every year with a single client. The way he did that is he came into the organization pretty small based off a referral. He proved his ability to do that one thing super well. He then built some systems for that one thing and said, "Hey guys, I actually just built a system that automated a fair chunk of the work I'm doing on a daily basis. I think I could make you guys way more money if you let me do this for other roles." They said "Yeah, absolutely." He started doing that. Eventually he moved into automating growth roles, and now he's taking a cut of whatever money he makes for the company, which is obviously a lot of money. So some sort of growth partnership, some sort of fractional COO-style gig, some sort of fractional CTO-style gig can be good if you want to juggle multiple, or you can just go balls deep like my buddy did with one — I think that's totally workable too. $150K-$1M per year per client logically speaking is just like $12K-$15K per month, so that's not that big of an ask. $1M per year per client is obviously bigger. That's probably the simplest and easiest way to do it. The sorts of businesses that are good to do this with are typically young people that do a highly scalable backend service — something like an information product, some sort of coaching, some sort of e-commerce thing that's highly scalable, where you can take a chunk of the revenue and the revenue tends to be quite large.
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.
The biggest one-time contract I sold was mid $220,000 for a project I called 'Uber for lumpers'—a system connecting companies needing lumpers (people who load/unload ships) with lumper workers. My business partner and I built it, but it was a total pain and not worth the time; it was one of the first projects we sold, so I took on custom work, but I don't recommend doing custom projects more than a couple times early on because there's little ROI on your time—my hourly rate is about $50. After that, I did a proposal generator system project that paid $1,500 and took only about 5–10 minutes to fulfill (plus ~30 minutes selling and a 30‑minute kickoff call). That gave a huge return on investment and unlocked the leverage idea: I could either make $225,000 in month‑one revenue from a big custom project, or I could create templates and sell the need, then spend five minutes copying a template I already built. Regarding agency requests, I get about 10 genuine agency inquiries per month; most want to invest $15K–$20K and work with me on a three‑month subscription at $5,900/month ($17,700 up front). I haven’t finalized my agency dynamics yet. The businesses that reach out most are high‑earning industries: fintech, software, financing/investing (e.g., underwriting firms that need automated financial data and email replies), and companies installing power grids that take a cut of hundred‑million‑dollar projects. My agency currently makes about $25,000 a month; from the $128,000 profit I mentioned, that’s roughly 20% of my income. Monthly profit isn’t the only metric—enterprise value matters. Info products are hard to sell because they’re tied to me; agencies have low multiples, whereas a SaaS product can achieve much higher multiples. I’m therefore building templates and done‑for‑you services, continuing to scale the agency for enterprise value and to stay connected to what I teach, because in coaching, when a system works, people often abandon it to teach it, which makes it outdated. I want to avoid that.
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