You've said a teacher must practice what they teach; have you considered a high‑ticket offer for Make School members, or are you sticking with the low‑ticket model because your agency work consumes most of your time?
I think many agency owners become really good at what they do, then decide to teach it to make money. They start teaching, but soon they make so much money from teaching that they stop doing the agency work that gave them their skills. As a result, they lose touch with the specific tactics that helped them grow their agency, and end up teaching an outdated business model. If you’re not constantly practicing what you preach, you’ll get worse at it, and people can sense that. I have considered a high‑ticket offer, but it’s not as time‑leveraged as my Maker School community. I only spend a little time on Maker School each day—about an hour to an hour and a half—generating roughly $120k MRR, which works out to an effective hourly rate of nearly $3,000. A high‑ticket coaching offer would require far more personalized work: maybe one‑on‑one sessions every couple of weeks plus a few group calls each month, which drops the leverage and hourly return. I’m leaving money on the table by not moving clients up to a higher ticket, but the current model is far more leveraged and lets me run a successful business while working only a short time each day. Most people tell me I should chase high‑ticket offers and build a sales team, but I prefer to keep full ownership and work just an hour and a half a day. I’m still in the agency field because I believe it’s important to stay grounded in the work I teach.
It's much, much more scalable to run an info/teaching business than an agency. Agencies are actually a lot more fragile — but when you're at the start line with no business experience and no revenue, agencies are the straightest line path to materializing revenue: zero to one, nothing is faster. You're trading that speed for the downside that agencies are fragile and much less scalable, since you need a lot more people to make them grow, and margins tend to get worse as you scale. Even if you sell an agency later, a lot of the time and energy spent building its equity often only nets you something like a 3x multiple — pretty low compared to other vehicles. So the equation that worked for me: front-load services first, make a ton of money fast (a few hundred thousand dollars, more than most people make), then take that money and put it into a more scalable vehicle. In my case that was building a better business model — teaching. All roads really do lead to info eventually; it's just a more optimized model. Instead of giving a man a fish, you teach him to fish and charge a monthly subscription for the knowledge — the revenue ends up a lot more predictable.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
Yeah, so he's referring to my low-ticket product called Maker School. Now, I don't know if you guys know, but there's a difference between a low-ticket or a pretty affordable product, and then a high-ticket or a I don't know, maybe 5 to $10,000 per month product. Um mine is low-ticket. It costs a very little money in the grand scheme of things, specifically relative to the the amount of value that I provide. Um so, basically the way that, you know, my positioning and and mental model works is my audience was beginners. They're people that want to get their very first customer for a paying service. And so, odds are they're not going to have a lot of money. Uh they're not going to be able to afford a high-ticket product. Yet, at the same time, I also don't want a tremendous amount of responsibility. What I find typically occurs with a high-ticket product is you end up being responsible not for just creating the product and then marketing it. You also are responsible for selling it, actively selling it through like a high-ticket call funnel, a sales funnel, uh some sort of flow like that. And then finally, um I personally have worked with a lot of high-ticket products. Sorry, my alarm's going off. And I find that typically because they have to make crazy promises in order to justify the return on investment, uh a lot of them end up kind of falling prey to bad business practices and uh that sort of stuff. So, this is where people will get you on some coaching call that's $10,000 a month or whatever and then do whatever the hell they can to sell you. Typically, you know, you have people making poor financial decisions cuz they're all incentivized to push really hard and it just ends up I think souring the whole business model. So, I I wanted none of that. I wanted no calls. I wanted uh something very scalable. I wanted something super lean that I could manage entirely on my own without a sales system or sales team rather. And then I wanted to just be able to, you know, wake up, do my marketing, um um crush with the business model and then do the same thing the next day. And uh that's ultimately what, you know, I did with low-ticket MRR. Now, that's not to say I couldn't start some high-ticket coaching program, but I don't really want to make my money primarily through like a high-ticket program or anything like that. Uh I don't really want to make my money through any sort of programs. I'd much rather make my money through providing real tangible value to the world. Education is just one part of that. So, yeah, that's why I'm not doing that.
Well, you ended up joining anyway—just kidding. For anyone else here, I'd recommend a couple of hours, maybe two to three hours per day. The first couple of days might be a bit heavier: day one could be three to four hours, day two two to three hours, then from day three onward it settles to about two hours a day, maybe a little more. Some people take longer at the start, but that's okay. The reason this works quickly is that lead generation and outreach strategies become fast with practice because I make you do a lot of them. Regardless of initial timing, you'll eventually gravitate to a two‑to‑three‑hour daily workload, which most people can fit in. A core part of the program is daily accountability and habit tracking—not just learning a specific lead gen tactic or setting up automations. It's like going to the gym but for money: you show up daily, track your habits, and build consistency. Regarding money, it's hard to give a fixed number because it scales with how much outreach you do. My suggestion is about ten Upwork applications a day and roughly two thousand cold emails in the first month. In practice, most people end up spending an extra $100‑$150 per month on things like Upwork fees or cold‑email tools, due to limiting beliefs that hold them back. The beauty of Maker School is that the capital outlay is low: you spread the cost over three months, and the time to see results is short compared to typical businesses that require a big upfront spike with uncertain payoff. You also get discounts via coupon aggregators and my affiliate links, so give it a try.