What's going on everybody Nick here so title of the video I made 10251 14 bucks the other month and I wanted to give you guys a comprehensive breakdown of exactly how I did it in this video including a detailed walkthrough of my stripe uh the strategy I used to come up with the products and the services that I sold I wanted to give you guys a look into the daily step-by-step actions you need to take to Actually make money like this which I feel like a lot of people leave out uh and I also want
to talk about the principles and the the the mindset behind what I think is necessary in order to make this amount of money consistent before anybody accuses me of being a trust fund kid my family was bankrupt for the majority of my childhood so I consider this video basically my obligation to help give back to kids that may be in a similar Situation to where I was growing up so this is going to be a realistic look at what it takes in order to make this amount of money specifically in the service agency and then
the coaching space if this sounds like something you guys want to learn more about potentially figure out how to do for yourselves then stay tuned and let's get into it all right so the way this video is going to work is I'm actually going to Give you guys like a line item by line item breakdown of all of the various Revenue sources that went into that $2,514 I'm going to share my strategy behind it the products and services that I sell the various like deliverables that I need to maintain on a daily weekly or monthly
basis in order to like make that money um and basically you guys are just going to get my unfiltered thoughts on everything top to bottom so the first thing I'm going to show you Guys is just my stripe um the reason why is because in videos like this this is what people expect to see at the beginning uh as you can see I processed 97,7 7860 through stripe it was almost double when I processed the previous period and this is all from August the 1st to August the 31st I have various Revenue spikes I now
have some Mr which uh was pretty new to me because I wasn't processing a lot of that stuff through stripe I have about 200 new customers although keep in mind that a lot of these are weight list uh customers that aren't actually active I'll get into that later same thing with active and then new subscribers and stuff like that so never in my life did I think I would be almost seeing like a sixf figure stripe amount on a monthly basis and that kind of blows my mind but let me break down exactly what went
into that money all right so my first big Revenue Source here was my automation Agency which yielded me $2,614 cents in the month of August if you're unfamiliar with my automation agency maybe you're new here um it's called left click. and our whole pitch is we build hands-off growth systems for B2B Founders so we help you find the perfect offer we help you automate your lead acquisition and solve your project management woses all while scaling your B2B business to a figures um if you click this button you will book an intro Call with yours truly
uh you have to fill out you know like a little form here to run through some questions about your business and that sort of thing and now uh we also offer when I say we I say that Loosely it's really just me and a virtual assistant right now uh but we offer um you know some standardized retainer packages that you can actually just purchase with a click so previously you know I did call only now you can just buy this um with just uh just one Click on a little stripe page so yeah uh I'll
run you through everything that you guys need to know about this business basically I set this up um I guess this would be like 2022 now right around the time that chat GPT came out the reason why is because I noticed that well one um I was running another business which I'll show you guys the revenue for in a second but I was running another business that depended on people not really knowing about chbt and not really Understanding AI so when AI came out right when chaty BT hit the books and everybody was like holy
crap I can just have ai write my now uh I was a little bit lost and I was pretty scared to be honest I was like oh Jesus like my Competitive Edge is gone so me and my business partner at the time we asked ourselves Hey listen you know if our current business is declining because of AI is there any business that would take off because of AI and this is the first One that came to mind it was helping people Implement um Automation and AI flows into their businesses to help them like increase their
leverage right fire their staff members that sort of thing I don't say that because I'm evil like I don't want people to fire their staff members as I have so commonly been accused of um but you know this is a big thing that most business owners are thinking about how do I get rid of Staff replace them with robots at a tenth of The price right so anyway I started out doing most of my lead sourcing through um upwork primarily uh the reason why is because that was just the simplest upwork is like the simplest
and most straightforward place to go to if you have no established portfolio no real history um I had sort of a unique approach because I would record a customized video of me solving the problem that they listed on their proposal I usually take me like three to Five minutes and then I just give them the whole video and sometimes I'd even give them the system that they asked for in The Proposal obviously this assassinated me being really good at automation systems which I consider myself to be you know one of the foremost experts on a
particular software platform which is called make.com um but that that crushed it I did really really well on upwork in just a couple of months and yeah that helped Me build like a lot of foundational I want to say client management knowledge in the space so that's my recommendation anybody that is in automation agencies or wants to you know learn how to do this sort of thing uh the number one most important thing for you is just to get some clients under your belt the second that you understand like the real scope of one or
two projects you are so much further ahead than everybody else that's just spinning their wheels Thinking about how to build the perfect business any who um um after that I looked into cold email because I was using that quite heavily for my content business which I'll again get into in a second and uh I ran a number of offers that didn't really work they didn't really make any money um until I found one that did that was specifically selling the same system I was using to sell them so I was selling them on a cold
email system using cold email uh And from there my Revenue was able to scale all the way up to about $722,000 a month a little bit over um and that's where I peaked and immediately after that I started thinking about other ways that I could scale my income even further which is what sort of takes me to today with YouTube and stuff like that so if I break this down into actual services that I provide here's more or less what it looks like the first thing I provide is Consulting so I'll provide Both one-off Consulting
and then I'll do Consulting as part of my monthly retainers and what I mean by Consulting is you know a business owner will come to me with a problem and the problem to be honest the vast majority of the time is I'm not getting enough business I don't have enough leads I don't have enough throughput through my Pipeline and then they just ask me Nick what would you do in my shoes how do you think you would solve it and so as you Can imagine um this has got to be one of the most interesting
careers that you know you could possibly pick I'm not meaning like you know what's it like de uh deoe you know I'm not I'm not talking about that kind of consulting which I think is just super unnecessary and Bloated most of the time uh where people just hire Consultants to justify some managerial decision I'm talking about like real boots on the ground Consulting of like a small to midsize business like How do I go from $50,000 a month to $100,000 a month Nick what would you do it's got to be one of the most interesting
things in the world so I will you know ask them everything about their business I'll learn whatever I can I will often times create documents or resources like road maps or step-by steps or Sops or simple systems that I've seen work really well at the other businesses that I've consulted with um and you know in that way I basically Become stronger every time that I get a new client because I learn you know either a new vertical or a new problem set or a new limiting belief on behalf of my client and that sort of
thing so Consulting is pretty awesome I'm a big fan of it um it's probably one of my favorite parts of the job I'm sure you guys could tell but I really like talking I will never shut the up I'm kidding um so that's that the second thing I do is I do one-off automation Projects so um when I say one-off automation projects I mean like I will build out systems using this platform make.com for companies and this is like primarily the the first few months of of my automation agency where this is mostly what I
was doing so you know somebody would be like hey Nick I want a system that scrapes a web page or something and then uh I don't know helps me update some database and I would build out a scraper that would scrape The web page maybe every day or every week or something like that then it would send a request to some server which would catch it then upload it to the database pretty simple stuff um this is a simple four module system that I'm just using internally for my own business it runs once an hour
scrapes the member count of my community make money with make.com and then cues up a message but yeah as I'm sure you can imagine these can grow more or less Arbitrarily complex now the issue with one-off automation projects just before I continue is well there are two uh the first issue is you're treated as a builder not like a strategy person or like a partner like when you do one-off automation products most of the time people sort of already know what they want from you and then they just give the project to you and they're
like hey I just want somebody that can do it Basically like I've already done the blueprint I just want you know a pair of hands to go out there and actually build it out um and this is okay and you can still make a ton of money with it right like I I made a ton of money doing one-off automation projects nothing wrong with it whatsoever um at one point my hourly rate went from like before it was maybe like 100 bucks an hour to all the way up like 400 bucks an hour just building
like a couple systems dragging And dropping modules across the screen it's incredible but like if you really want to unlock actual leverage you can't just be a builder forever you need to scale past the building and you need to scale into like strategy and like partnership and so one-off automation projects make that really difficult that's problem number one problem number two is the cost per acquisition on one of these one-off automation projects can be pretty high like if a one-off Automation projects for a cold email system which is something that I very commonly build it's
like I don't know $2,000 or something like that if the cost per acquisition for that is $200 then I'm basically giving up 10% of the project every time I win one right so I'm only ever making 90% on that project um you know this is just sort of how it is these are Big projects these several thousand dollars worth so typically you need to pay a little bit more in order To acquire so I thought long and hard about how I was going to beat this and what I and my business partner ended up coming
up with was uh was monthly retainers it's not like we revolutionized you know consulting or anything or the automation agency space retainers are obviously well known as a business model but but if you think about it monthly retainers allow you to go from being just some guy that builds to like actually taking that step Towards being a partner or being a consultant or a strategist because instead of somebody just handing you something and saying okay now do it you say hey what are your goals your goals are this okay over the next few months here's
how we can get there we can build this system we could build that system we could build that system and then they start trusting you a lot more obviously it becomes substantially easier to upsell your services and you also get Pretty sticky because if you think about it like your fingers are sort of in every pot right like if you're on a monthly retainer or you're probably building out systems for their crms you're building out systems for their project management systems uh PMS you're building out uh systems for like I don't know their onboarding right
their email you have access to everything right A lot of the time people don't really want to let you go because they're just like Well that guy that guy kind of runs my whole business so this is where my monthly retainer option comes in and this is where um I started selling these like fractional coo packages that were anywhere from like $4,400 a month to right now where there $6,900 a month so I have a pretty strong retainer base and this is is just one of the reasons why I feel honestly pretty good on like
a day-to-day or week- toe basis I'm never like concerned about my money because I Know that like no matter what as long as I continue doing good service for these customers um I'm I'm good uh in terms of my actual like day-to-day service for monthly retainers um I do a weekly call so it's like a consulting or strategy call in the strategy call I will cover everything that I've done in the last week then I'll cover uh sometimes I'll cover like current news if it's industry relevant um and then I'll cover like proposed systems for
the next week and Then a lot of the time this just ends up being like me helping them solve hot button problems as well with my Consulting knowledge as I mentioned earlier so that's part of the the monthly retainer um in the past I offered like an hourly package so I might do something that equates to about 100 bucks an hour so maybe you buy 40 hours and then you get sorry you buy you spend $4,000 you get about 40 hours or so um I move I've moved away from that Just because I don't really
like my value Being Framed in terms of hours I much prefer my value Being Framed just in terms of like my business relationship there's that old adash with the Plumber where like the plumber will I don't know like come to some woman's house and then he'll make one knock and then it'll fix the woman's pipes and he'll be like that'll be 500 bucks and she's really pissed off at him because she's like you just spent 5 Seconds why Am I paying you 500 bucks for 5 seconds obviously the moral of the story is you're not
paying me for the 5 Seconds you're paying me for the years it took me to get to the point where I could solve your problem in 5 seconds uh so yeah I don't really like framing my services in terms of hours anymore but I'm not going to lie to you guys it's the easiest way to get started with an automation agency and if you get started with a monthly retainer if like you work With somebody on an hourly basis to start it's so easy to transition to a monthly retainer because you say well listen I'll
give you a discount on the $50 an hour and now you only pay me 40 but then you just got to buy like you know 50 hours prepay or something like that uh so yeah that's uh that's more or less it in a nutshell there three services Consulting oneof Automation and the monthly retainers the second Revenue source that contributed to the $12,000 Was my content Agency 1 second copy which yielded $2,296 now if you're unfamiliar with my cont content agency this is our website uh we essentially do books blogs and magazine articles for I mean
like agencies uh mostly SAS companies fintech companies at this point I would say um and the way that we do this is we operate like an internal like content pipeline in clickup that uh will assign work to people as necessary template out Tasks and then the writers will use artificial intelligence to help sort of bootstrap themselves right a little bit faster and better and really like the value prop here is we do an Arbitrage on like usually the projects that we get we charge a flat uh per word rate on so we will charge like
n cents a word right nine or 10 cents or something like that I I'm not even really involved in the day-to-day management anymore so I have to check okay so eight cents a word now I think most of them is probably nine cents a word um so we'll charge N9 cents a word right so somebody wants a thousand-word article then that's 90 bucks um but then the way that most other agencies will do it is they will hire writers and then pay them a fraction of that and they'll say well we charge 9 cents a
word we're going to pay our writers 5 cents a word then we're going to make 4 cents a word right um and that seems pretty cool but the real Trick to one second copy was when we moved away from paying writers on a perw basis and we move towards paying them on an hourly basis instead hourly payments for payroll like if you run um any sort of business that has staff or or contractors or whatnot uh a lot of people consider that dangerous because you know products can quickly go over scope but if you're smart
about how you train your staff and if you implement systems that allow projects to or Force Projects to be UND scope constantly sorry under uh under budget constantly um then you avoid that and you can usually make multiples on what you would have paid a contractor for a fixed price job if that all sounds like magic to you let me just put it this way um for that $90 article if we paid our writers you know $50 for that we would have made $40 right as opposed to that if we instead just paid one writer
at $15 an hour and it took them two hours to do the job Then it's only costing us 30 bucks and then we make 60 bucks instead of 40 bucks so it's basically 1.5x the profit so the second that we started implementing this we brought in artificial intelligence obviously and that made our writers write even faster and even better and so we were able to like you know basically just make multiples and multiples on this hourly rate uh to fixed price differential and I think that was really the key to this Business it wasn't even
my idea it was my business partner's idea who was brilliant at like process um management and Sops and that sort of thing so in terms of services the biggest one is obviously content writing and that's sort of like top dog we also do like SEO optimization sometimes people will give us articles that have been written by other people or articles that have been written by Ai and then we'll just turn that into an SEO optimized article now The biggest like point of value sort of like how this business Works under the hood is through a
pretty complicated pipeline that we built out forever ago so that is not page that I wanted to show you guys there you go um basically the way this works is this is a pipeline built in clickup that automatically assigns incoming tasks to writers based off of a templating system so you'll come in and then I don't know you'll go over here and then you'll make a new Task and you'll just call it like uh left click I guess we don't have anything for left click one second to copy so you have anything for that um
nordvpn okay cool maybe we'll do something for like nordvpn or something like that when you give this button a click what it'll do is it'll actually go and it'll template a bunch of tasks um with like the client tone of voice the client uh I don't know like the the the style guide the brief and all that stuff Um so it's a pretty autonomous system we also have an app now which unfortunately was not working very well in the month of August at all we had to do a ton of refunds sorry I think it's
like app. one second copy right yeah there you go uh where you you sign into to your app and then instead of you having to do this sort of thing through like uh instead of us having to do this manually we'll just click this add content button you as a client will Share whatever piece you want with us or whatever brief and then it'll automatically be added into our pipeline for us which is obviously a lot more preferable because we have no management costs we have no issues you provide the same style brief every time
you know it's a lot simpler um I'm not going to lie this is a massive pain in my ass to build uh I would not consider myself a super fantastic developer or anything like that uh this probably took me like Several weeks of just I don't know face down constantly smashing my head against the keyboard trying to make this work I don't even remember what I built this in it's probably NEX or nujs or something yeah it was n which uh I mean I love n it's really cool but man it was that a pain
in the ass I did not know how to develop a full stack app until that point in time I used a bunch of like really hacky workarounds which I would not recommend um so you know Looking back it was great to have an app and the app was making up a sizable portion of our Revenue at one point but realistically that that wasn't really the juice um the juice was the pipeline which is you know totally manageable through people uh but yeah so we started out this business primarily through um upwork again uh I want
to say like probably more than half of our initial Revenue came from upwork for the first few months and then we branched out into Providing um sample articles to people using artificial intellig for the most part this was way before most people knew that artificial intelligence was capable of writing pieces so obviously we had a ton of perceived leverage there we would say Hey you know do you want like an article written by an award-winning journalist that's been published in all these fantastic places we'll give you one for free and if you like the quality
then we can talk about Working together further and if you think about it like back in 2021 nobody knew what chat GPT was GPT 4 wasn't even a thing right people were like oh wow that's like that's actually pretty intense okay sure give me one and we'd ask for a keyword we'd ask for a title they'd give it to us and then we just pump that straight through gpt3 make a couple of edits obviously we had humans in the loop and then we'd uh we'd send that back and the reactions That we were getting from
that marginal cost which is like I don't know five bucks a sample were crazy we had I don't know I think it was over like a 10% response rate on our cold emails and we were sending them on Mass using a platform called outreach.io I don't know if outreach.io is still like the main no I don't think this is like a a good or the best cold email platform nowadays I think you probably do much better if You're using something instantly or smartly but at the time yeah Outreach was pretty sick and the really cool
part here was we built out a system that would um take as input an email reply so every time somebody replied to one of our emails we would categorize that email and then if it was a sample article so if they said yeah I want to do the sample here's the keyword we would automatically take that instantly and then assign it to a writer in the Queue using artificial intelligence and this was like years before anybody else is doing any of this which you know we're pretty proud of because we basically like built the building
block that now people do on a daily basis um I mean that's like a feature that tons of these cold email platforms now provide and charge a fair amount of money for so yeah it was like basically completely autonomous completely hands off for quite a while and that email system Allowed us to scale to $90,000 a month where we peaked um as you can see now you know we are a far cry from that but it's just part and parcel um I saw the writing on the wall for this business quite a while ago and
it's not necessarily that I don't believe that this business can still grow I just think that um you know per unit time invested in terms of my effort it'll grow less than the other things that I'm now building all right Revenue Source Number three is school it generated me 6,968 25 in the month of August so this is obviously the biggest Revenue Source it's also the new kit on the Block product that I launched and I'm going to get deep into the strategy behind this I'm going get deep into how I you know operate and
manage my product and really just give you guys a behind the scenes of what operating you know 60,000 or almost $61,000 a month School looks like so if you're unfamiliar with school it's A community building program um communities are actually relatively new business model I don't want to say they're new but they've been popularized quite recently um and schools probably like the largest community provider right now just because Alex horoi who is also a very big um guy in like the service agency and the coaching space recently invested a fair amount of money into it
although I believe it was initially originally built by Sam ovens Who um exited consulting.com a few years ago too so obviously a lot of Heavy Hitters here and they banking on communities being a big thing um I think when they you know showed a bunch of interest and they started launching bu of these promotional things school as a concept in community is a concept blew up even more but basically the main value proposition of a community well I guess there are a couple but one of the main value propositions is it's like a Group of
entrepreneurs for the most part that are working on the exact same thing as you that share resources share wins and share losses openly so instead of you just having to blindly search you know through the solution space of how to grow one of your one of your companies whether it's an agency or photography business or whatever they're all sorts of communities you get to leverage other people's wins other people's failures and then usually like A course or program Creator like myself will compile a bunch of resource and just centralize everything for you so you know
that's one of the value props of this community um I set it up because way back in March right after I launched my YouTube channel it started growing a little bit I started having a bunch people being like hey Nick I think you'd be perfect for a community have you considered launching community and I was like the hell's a community man I didn't Even know so I had to start doing a little bit of research and then I looked into what went into building the community and I was like man that sounds like a ton
of work you know have to manage this thing every day I have to it's like it's like turbo Reddit or something for making money I was like it sounds cool but I don't know I'm just going to stick to my YouTube videos so I kept doing that for like another month and then April came by and I had a bunch Of other projects for my um for my automation agency that took up a fair amount of my time and then may came by and somewhere around miday or whatever I think the number of comments I
was getting per YouTube video like if I got 10 comments per YouTube video because I was much smaller back then like five of them would be hey Nick are you gonna make that freaking Community or what so I was like geeez well I guess I have market demand for it but I don't know Like I I don't know if I can really do a good job on this to be honest and as you'll see doubt is a pretty major part of what enabled me to make the 100K um but uh yeah you know I ended
up like going and joining a few other people's School communities I ended up just like looking and seeing what the main value propositions were there and I noticed that the vast majority of the people that had school communities they didn't really get the value of these things I Think they didn't really conceptualize the value in in in the way that people would would understand like if I go to this about page here like there are a few value props right but the simplest value prop is you get a bunch of templates you know they're the
best templates they save you tens of thousands of dollars they save you hundreds of hours you just copy and paste these templates in your system you'll get what like the best and the Brightest in the space you're doing I saw that very very infrequently um weekly office hours nobody was offering something like this where it was like Hey you know once a week you're going to get all the information that you need or you're going to get like a personal private QA with me so I added that um courses right so I think some people
were offering courses at the time but I like to think that my course was of substantially higher quality than most Other communities and then you know the last value prop was the networking with a group of ambitious people in your space one thing that I noticed that a lot of these communities did wrong is they just like didn't really moderate and I I think they kind of LED through like I don't really know what I want to call it um and I'm mindful of my words here but there's a lot of ego involved in like
the making money process I want to say or like the owning your own Business and it almost contributed to this culture of I don't know it wasn't like fear or anything but it was like this culture of you not being open to sharing what's going on in your business so I solved this by making my community cap really low I said that I'd cap it at 400 members it would never go a single person above 400 the reason why it's 4001 here is I just have like an admin in the course that's you know help
or the community that's helping me moderate It but you know when it's a much smaller nit Community obviously people feel a lot more comfortable sharing I also uh just shared like I probably over shared a lot of my own life what was going on with me um I think the way that I wrote all the messages and all the copy made it clear that like yo this isn't like some I don't know some Finance bro Community where it's like everybody here's tough and we're all big boys you know uh I I wanted to make sure
that Anybody could join I wanted to make sure that anybody that joined felt comfortable just talking about what's going on in their business sharing it without fear that like they're adding competitors or whatever and yeah you know I think I to be honest I think I did a really good job there are obviously some benefits to that as well um you know I was able to upsell my coaching here so for instance you can get one-on W uh video consultations with Me you know 15 minutes 295 30 minutes 500 60 Minutes 870 and people started
taking me up on this when I started using my community as like the mid-level funnel and then I Pro started providing discounts to members of the community which helped incentivize that um there obviously other benefits as well if you think about this in terms of like broader business infrastructure one thing that I didn't realize when I started this coaching space is there are Multiple levels to the stuff so you know like the bottom level you're usually looking to turn people that have never really you know won a client or don't really know what they're doing
in business and turn them into the sort of person that runs a business and then sort of like at the second level is you're turning somebody that runs a business into somebody that like crushes it at business somebody that makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month For instance um and so you know I miscalibrated a little bit because I made a general purpose community that just solved everybody's problem and everybody's complaint uh but you know obviously it still ended up being hyper profitable especially because this Niche is just growing as quickly as it is
too so what's been really interesting for me over the course of the last few months is is my Revenue has transitioned from primary early agencies Right Where I Was Capping out at 72,000 to now the bulk of my income coming from school like my agency income um in August was7 something thousand and my school income was $60,000 it's about 1.5 times as much and seeing the transition there from primarily like providing services to people with some outcome to helping people like grow their own businesses has probably been the most fulfilling thing that I've ever done
to date so that's impretty sick I really like it um In terms of the actual services that I provide as part of uh makemoney withth make.com and my other community now which called maker school which um I think is more granular targeted to that uh new entrepreneur sort of audience I provide daily QA so literally every day I will come on here and then I will scroll through and then I will open every single notification that I get and then I will try and answer every single one that I can um sometimes I can't Answer
every single one because sometimes the C the questions that I get are like pretty intense like people want me to I don't know solve like a business problem that like would create a system that they could sell for $3,000 or something sometimes I do it anyway just because it's like good practice for me and I always like to keep my skills sharp um because there's just so many different Industries these guys work with like some work with e-commerce Businesses which I don't work with other people work with uh like security businesses Healthcare businesses uh but
for the most part I will go through and answer as many of these as I can usually in like a couple of hours and then assuming that I answer all of these questions um then you know I kind of leave it for the day and then the next day I'll I'll go on I'll just repeat the process um that's the very first thing that I do which is probably like one of The more valuable things I'm being honest just the daily QA accountability and that sort of thing the second thing is I'll do loom roasts
so I'll go on the community let me just look up roast and I have a couple of different um threads here one's called a roast your agency so what happens is somebody will post their Agency on this website sorry on this um link and then I will go through it all and record a pretty detailed video just giving them my detailed Thoughts while clearly not having a shirt on um over Loom as I you know break down the agency break down what I would do break down why I think they can improve their copy or
something like that and I think the real point of value here is most people do not have anybody in their life that's just willing to give some to them straight like most people are going to send their first website off to their friends be like go guys I'm building an agency what Do you guys think and the guys that are receiving that they're your friends and they don't want to hurt your feelings obviously and they also have a vested interest in maintaining the Friendship so most of the time they're going to be like dude that
looks great nice job keep going right but I'm not like that I just tell people earnestly what I think um and I've offended a fair number of people if I'm being honest I remember one time I roasted a guys agency then he Quit the community like within five minutes of me delivering that rust so whatever but the main value prop here is you know I'm just I'm just going to tell you exactly what I think about this all the time because I don't really have a vested interest in like being your friend or anything like
that I obviously would like to be your friend if Poss possible and I think I'm a lot of people's friends now but you know the the whole point of this is for me to Give you exactly what you need to grow and most of the time people want to get where I'm at right so uh they take my opinion as gospel probably like 70 80% of the time I want to say and it hits a lot harder when it's from somebody that you look up to um which enables them to make the changes faster than
you know waiting a year or something for the market to have to show it to them instead so I do upwork roasts I'll roast people's upper profile I'll do agency Roasts so I roast people's agencies um I do copy roast so people will send me like cold email campaigns that aren't performing well or that might be performing well and they'll be like Nick what would you do to make it better and this usually takes up like another half hour or so of my day um so you know at this point we're maybe at like an
hour and a half or something like that maybe two hours I want to say then every Wednesday at 9:00 a.m. Mt I'll do a weekly office hour and this is definitely the key point of value for a lot of people in the group um when we started our turnout was a lot higher than it is now I think our very first turnout was like 70 or 80 or something and basically way that it works is people will go over here and then they'll ask me questions oh sorry that's the recording one sec let's Do this
one here so people will ask me a ten of questions so you know hey um is there any pre-work data prep you do to create new automations is it beneficial to create separate YouTube playlist for different niches what's the best way to go about doing market research right I'll just take those questions live and then I'll just answer all of them on my on my video call um just for organizational purposes I'll usually mute everybody on the call and then I'll Just like make it so that we can't see their faces or them picking their
noses or something um and then I'll just screen share and then run through the questions question by question and then at the end um I have a little space open where I think it's 15 minutes of the hourlong call if you are unable to ask a question ahead of time in the weekly office hour thread you can actually just come straight to the zoom and just ask your question directly and I'll answer It so a lot of people find a ton of value in this um I think that this is probably one of the more
valuable parts of the community it's obviously one of the parts that takes a lot of you know my time and preparation I don't just spend the hour on the video I'll actually like do a little bit of prep work ahead of time maybe like half an hour or so just walking through my head hm like is this the best way that I could answer this question I don't just Want to do it off the top of my head because sometimes I don't know to be completely honest another point of value here and another thing that
I have to do is I have to make programs so um I say 14-day agency here and maker School 14 day agency was my first iteration of this which later transformed into maker school but essentially if you go to classroom in tool you'll see that there are a bunch of these modules that you can choose so the weekly office hour Recordings you know we record every weekly office hour for instance and posted here but more importantly we have the blueprint library and stuff like that more importantly um we have these courses or these programs and
so here's a program right here called 14 days to build your agency this is my first program and what I do is I put a bunch of information like in text and then I'll also record um like a video usually a very very long video walking people Through how to do everything that they need to do in order to build out their automation agency so you know the idea is this just multiplies my leverage a little bit so that I no longer have to be um present all of the time I don't actually have to
physically be on a call on that Weekly office hour in order for people to like continue making progress and moving forward and then the idea is they do this right maybe they do like one two three a week or something like That and then if they have a question about it then they ask me in the weekly office hour I solve that question I solve their problem and then they can come back and like continue making progress so a lot of people made uh a lot of agencies with this program after I built this program
I was think about a better way to do it because I noticed that the number one issue was just the accountability and I ended up settling on a new structure called maker school Which is basically like a daily accountability program where I will actually go through and then I will walk people through like everything that they need to do on a daily basis I'll say Hey you know on day one do this and then do that on day two do this and then do that I'll show them everything that they need to do in like
a little loom video um so in terms of the production Val is pretty straightforward for you to make for me to make I did have like lock myself in My room for like a week but you know is what it is um and now that's offering a ton of value and what I've done since then is I actually made a new community called maker school and maker School actually just surpassed uh make money with make.com in terms of number of members but basically maker school just like takes that one program and then just makes that
like I I charge specifically just for that program and I charge a much lower amount on a monthly Basis than what I'm doing for uh makemoney withth make.com yeah I realize I'm rambling on a little bit but um that's another point of value next one's called Fireside Chats so I work with with one of my automation Partners his name is Santi santi's awesome I love this guy and he's taken it upon himself to build out um after somebody in the community asked for it like a fireside chat sort of like Q&A session where we take
people from our community that are Really good at stuff like this guy Carl here who you know was running a $100,000 a month PPC agency and then they will come on and then basically do their own weekly office hour with a QA session as well so we have had all sorts of people in here we've had people in automation we've had people in paperclick ads we've had people that have been consultants for decades we've had people that have built out SAS companies using make.com and that's another really big point of Value and what I really
like about this too is if you think about it from my perspective the rest of this community stuff like it's pretty bottlenecked on me right it's it's based around my time it's based around my personality and whatnot obviously people like me a lot which is why they're in my community but this is the first thing that I built within one of my structures that is not actually dependent on me like I'll show up and I'll try and motivate people and Encourage them and you know thankk them profusely for for doing one of these fir side
chats but I didn't actually deliver the presentation it's not actually me and so in this way I'm slowly increasing the amount of Leverage in this community which I think is pretty cool and I'm open to even expanding fireside chat so maybe we have like two per week or something like that uh I'm just currently waiting for a little more demand the key thing that worked really Well with this community was this member cap of 400 um you know I know a lot of other communities out there have been launched by people in the automation space
and they're typically uncapped and so they grow pretty explosively if I'm being honest uh that's cool but with this community I really wanted to keep that tight-knit feel and I also like the idea of a cohort of people that start off as sort of beginners and then over over several months become better and Better and better and that's actually what happened we've had a number of people that have come in and they've been making like $2,000 a month and you know now they're making 20 30 $40,000 a month so it's crazy seeing that Evolution for
one if you think about it strategically from my perspective I'm also sort of ensuring myself customers for future products that I build by doing this because you know these people that have made this massive progress if I were to launch let's say a higher ticket product that might be I don't know like 10,000 bucks a month or something like that and it's just like unfettered access to me five calls a week you know I answer all the questions I help you build out the systems I over theh shoulder consult whatever the coaching setup is um
you know the equation in people's minds is well when I paid Nick 20 bucks a month he delivered $2,000 a month worth of value When I paid him $1,000 a month he delivered $20,000 a month worth of value or $200,000 a month I bet you if I pay him 10K he'll deliver me $2 million a month worth of value or something like that right and obviously this is all um uh prefaced upon the notion that I can actually deliver that value but uh I got to say like when I started this I definitely doubted my
coaching abilities a little bit I mean it was the first time that I'd done coaching not Consulting but over the course of the last few months I've become substantially more confident in it I've definitely realized just how valuable having somebody like me look over your shoulder you know like clap you on the back every time you win or guide you to the correct answer if you make a mistake really is so after putting in this 400 member cap though um obviously if you think about it from my perspective like I'm not making as much money
because I Can't grow past 400 members so I did two things in order to make more money with this community the first is I started increasing the prices so instead of it being like I think we started at 28 or $38 or something um instead of just keeping it at that every 10 or 20 or 30 members or maybe 40 members back then I would increase the price by I believe $10 and so it ended up capping at $128 a month so1 28 time 40 right that's uh I don't know about 50,000 but not all
of These members are paying the $128 a month most of them are somewhere between probably the average like 98 or something like that but after I got this you'll notice this big red notification has been staring me in the face for you know the last 45 minutes there are currently 452 other people that want to get into this community um if I were just to let them all in and then they all paid $128 or whatever obviously that' you know bump up my Revenue by Another 100 Grand which is pretty awesome right but then I
would also be kind of destroying my credibility a little bit and then I would also be defeating the whole purpose of this community so I like to think that the decisions that I'm making here are principled they enable me to provide one-on-one support to all the people that are currently in I'm not just running like a cash grab and just looking to let as many people in as Possible to like squeeze it for a few months and get the hell out like you know I think some other people might be but the benefit to this
um just to bring it all around is you know when you have 752 people that want to get into your community like it's very impractical that of them are actually going to be able to make it in right I mean our turn is really low um I think it's like one every couple days realistically so I mean that's like 15 20 people a month Something like that if that so you know how many months would it take to get through 750 people like 30 seven or something like that which is three years it's not very
practical for a lot of these people to get in but every now and then there'll be somebody that you know is pretty well establishing business that wants to get in regardless and they were like Nick how much money do you want me to pay you to let me in right and I was thinking about it from a Strategic perspective so what I ended up doing was I created I should preface this with the fact that um there's no way for school to automatically handle weight lists or there wasn't when I came up with this so
I actually had to make my own system called makemoney withm make.com with my own little landing page that actually took um instead of monthly payments annual payments and the idea was if you pay annually I'm going to bump you to the Front of the weit list the average annual weit time was something like let's see here well now it's only uh 3 days I need to update this it's no longer 3 days I think it's like 4 days or something like that but essentially um you know this now represented a way where I could price
differentiate and people that wanted to pay me a ton more money like 12 times the money at least in the first month or 11 times the money or something like that could now do it And I could substantially improve my short-term Revenue which is awesome obviously one of the biggest um problems with communities as well is churn and so this helps mitigate a lot of as well which is valuable to me so yeah another thing is I find people that pay the annual plan are also substantially more committed they're a lot more engaged they're obviously
a lot I don't want to say they're a lot more ambitious out of necessity because you know they just Tend to have more money for sure but they they do tend to be more ambitious as well which is quite nice and then from there you know they end up winning disproportionately more and then they get a bigger return on their investment and then other people in the group are like oh how the hell would that guy do it and it's like that guy paid annually H right and then it sort of starts flywheel which is
quite beneficial from my perspective all right my next big Revenue Source well big is a relative term uh but my next Revenue Source was gumroad for $1,613 48 so gumroad is just a platform where um you can basically host digital products and then have those digital products managed for you and then sold or something so this is my gumroad for that month of August and the vast majority of my income came from a few blueprints that I put up basically the way this works is like if you go to any One of my YouTube videos
they'll be like a gumroad link and I think uh I don't even remember where this gumroad link is I'm just trying to like get the link directly in my browser but I'm just going to click here instead so let's just sort this based off Revenue oh I think that'll be descending yeah basically way that it works is after I'm done with a video um I come up with uh usually like a Blueprint or something or some sort of lead magnet and then I will add that to my YouTube description just as a link and then
by me doing this um I'm basically showing people like hey you know I'm giving you all this stuff for free just click this link and then you'll download it but then what's really interesting and I think when I really realized that I had like product brand fit or something or or brand Market fit was I uh I made it free and Then I said you could get this for free you don't have to pay anything um you can also donate if you want to and then you know people have now donated over $1,000 for this
I think in just the last few months which is pretty crazy $690 for that one $224 for that one right um so it's a lot of these people just opting in to paying me money which is pretty cool um and that makes me feel freaking amazing because I'm like wow I must be offering a disproportion amount Of value for people to do that the reason why I came up with this is because um the way that I was doing blueprints before was simply inefficient I didn't actually think that I was going to make any money
off this but like you know some people make $1,600 a month and that's their whole income and I get to make that basically completely passively through gumroad or just sick yeah previously you had to download um blueprints through like a a Google Drive Link or something and it was just really impractical and you could see all the Json and all the code so all I did was I moved to gumroad because I thought it'd be a better experience for other people not necessarily because I thought that there was some Grand strategy that would enable me
to make more money all right um the next source of Revenue was YouTube ads which made me $1 17239 in August so yeah YouTube ads are obviously pretty awesome um I will say My YouTube Revenue has tanked recently the reason why is because well I think the reason why is because I tried updating all of my YouTube videos at once and I went through like 70 videos and just like all tabbed super quickly and I think what happened is I like loaded a ton of ads something like that and then me loading that ton of
ads like crushed me um H I don't know why that says 846 oh hold on so it's not that I Generated 846 in August it's that the payout from I bet you this is what happened the payout from uh July probably hit right yeah okay so pay to July hit and you can actually see when the revenue tanked right I was making $114 a day on YouTube ads which is you know over 3,000 bucks a month then all of a sudden they call it their content warning or something invalid traffic warning I don't know um
I'm not going to speak ill about YouTube Since obviously they built my whole business but I definitely did not have any invalid traffic there guys uh any who so yeah YouTube ads made me $1,723 195 um the reason I'm I'm making that money is obviously because I my videos that just means that I show ads so if you're watching this with an ad blocker thank you you probably helped me make a few sense in just the last couple of minutes um I very much appreciate it and yeah I sort of tested between monetizing My videos
and then not and what I found was really interesting was I think YouTube was boosting monetized videos or something because the videos that I monetized actually ended up with slightly more views than videos that I didn't monetize not entirely sure why I don't know if you call this a corrupt practice if you want they're obviously just getting their bag but for me it was even less about about the monetization aspect and it was just more about me Getting the views and getting the reach um so I'm obviously happy to make $1,700 a month through YouTube
no issues there my last Revenue source for the month of August was affiliate Revenue which made me [Music] partner stack um impact or something and then some of them pay out 30 days other ones pay out like 60 days and I think like companies can come up their own freaking payout procedures so it's Actually this is very difficult for me to calculate the 9379 but this comes from platforms like instantly um appify uh make.com Phantom Buster right these all have affiliate uh links that I now include in my YouTube descriptions and I also include as
part of my community signups so when somebody comes into my community particularly my lowest ticket Community maker school you know they don't really know what they're doing for the most part so they're going To sign up to whatever software platform I put in front of them as long as I make sure that it's affordable and it's high quality um and so that's what I've done I basically built it like an onboarding flow where people will sign up to my affiliate platform and then I get a little chunk of that money every single month so obviously
very cool and I like it all right so now that we finished with the whole financial breakdown I just want to talk about a couple of Principles um particularly principles and then maybe some mindset because this is probably my favorite part of YouTube videos that I used to watch that did stuff like this where people would just so I go through the revenue and break it down as I'm sure you guys could tell I'm not like the typical YouTuber and so far that I don't really make everything super polished and you know probably hasn't been
as uh pound-for-pound as efficient TimeWise as some other videos But that's actually one of the one of the principles that I want to talk about so I'm just going to run through guys I'm going to run you guys through my own mindset here and you know what I think has enabled me to hit like a sixf fig monthly Revenue the first is not to fear doubt but to embrace it what I mean by this is okay the month of August for instance I had no idea that offering annual memberships was going to work I was
actually really scared I was on a Walk with a really good friend of mine just a at a park here in Calgary and I was like man I have this massive problem where all these people are on the wait list and there's just no way they're going to get in and he's like well you know some of these people are probably willing to pay you whatever it takes to get in because that's just the value that they ascribe to you that they assign to you so you should find a way to you know um you
should find a way to Like offer different payment tiers that product differentiate that allow you to do that and I was so hung up on that I waited like two weeks and I was like should I do this can I do this I was really worried honestly I think that a lot of the time people on YouTube or people that make these large seemingly large amounts of money for a lot of us uh definitely a lot amount of money for me you know they they seem like they sort of have it all figured out right
And it's like oh that guy is just super mega confident and he understands everything strategically and he has like a 700 step plan or program and sometimes this is true sometimes you have these like genius masterminds that make these giant ass plans and they somehow actually work um but I think in reality that typically does not happen that definitely did not happen in my case basically what occurs is I heavily doubt myself and I think that by doubting Myself and my abilities I actually end up producing a slightly higher quality product than if I did
not doubt myself entirely so you can call this a pursuit of perfectionism or you can call this like a desire to do really well by your clients or Goodwill or whatever the hell but in my case every time that I've just embraced the doubt and I've said I really don't know if this is going to work it I'm going to do it anyway the results tend to be substantially Better than I think if I had just like went ahead with either the status quo or if I had been super confident this going to work um
ahead of time I know that Elon Musk talks a lot about this and I think elon's become quite the controversial figure recently but um you know I don't think that changes anything to do with the business that he's done in the past he talks a lot about doubt and how everybody always thinks that you know entrepreneurs are necessarily super Crazy and confident and cool and they have it all figured out but like he's actually always scared and uh I think about that a little bit as well I wouldn't say scared is the right term but
there's definitely just this big field of uncertainty in front of me most of the time when it comes to business and every time that I've just stepped through that uncertainty regardless I've usually made some big uh Revelation or broken some big Plateau so anytime that You feel yourself pushing in a direction of uncertainty there's this old stoic aphorism that says the obstacle is the way if that's the obstacle and if you sense an obstacle you should probably just go there anyway it's almost like a signpost saying hey man this is where success lies the second
thing I want to talk about is just focus on Revenue generating activities there are so many activities that I was doing on a daily basis that were not Revenue generating Like I want to say the vast majority of the activities that I was partaking in up until maybe seven months ago well maybe seven months ago isn't the right term maybe like a year ago we're not Revenue generating activities you know I would still make a fair amount of money because I was focused on a lot of activities and some of them happen to pan out
disproportionately but ever since I started like restricting my scope to Maybe top three top four top five daily actions which usually involves either some type of daily Outreach some type of content creation some type of sales call some type of getting on the you know getting on the phone with your clients or something of that nature um my revenue and my profit have both skyrocketed so you know as a key part of maker school um I get everybody to focus on daily revenue generating activities I've actually like restricted the number Of things that you can
do on a daily basis I've purposely slowed the program down and I say like okay all you do today is you apply to 10 jobs on this platform you you know uh create three cold email campaign offers and then you you know make a a piece of content on this community for instance um I I artificially restrict these because I want people never to get overwhelmed with all of the various pieces of involved in being a business Owner and an entrepreneur I only want them to focus on things that are like disproportionately Revenue generating like
you know Outreach sales content creation that sort of thing so if I could offer you one piece of advice this would definitely be it ever since I started focusing on Revenue generating activities like my hourly rate has shot way the hell out the last thing is just to talk openly about what you're you're doing I'm obviously a little biased here But again just like every time I've stepped through that wall of Doubt I've succeeded every time that I just talked openly about where I'm at whether it's like my Revenue whether it's my uncertainty about the
future whether it's about my strategy whether it's about my plans I've always succeeded more because of it so you can also think about this video as me being kind of a little bit biased right I know that every time in the past I've talked Openly about what I'm doing I succeed more so I'm like H maybe I should start talking openly about what I'm doing again maybe I'll succeed more I don't think this is going to directly drive me money but I think this just builds a c cure of Goodwill it builds a culture of
positivity builds a strong culture of reputation and you'd be very surprised at just how many people out there on the internet have fat stacks and they're willing to pay somebody that they like Trust and respect that's it for me if you guys have made it to the end of this video y'all are freaking Troopers I love every last one you thanks so much for watching if you have any comments or questions just leave them down below and I'll get back to them as soon as I can if you guys liked what you saw or heard
about maker school and makemoney withth make.com definitely ceue up to join those communities and again let me know if you have any questions surrounding Those um otherwise if y'all could like subscribe leave a comment down below for the
