$1,000,000 AI Automation & Agents Advice for 5 Hours Straight

So, I've spent many years selling automations and systems and businesses. I have made basically every mistake possible and learn exactly what separates six-figure automation businesses from those that never make it past their first client. Today, I want to condense all of that harder knowledge into 5 hours of the most valuable AI automation business advice you will ever get, absolutely free. My name is Nick. I've scaled my own AI automation agency to over 72,000 bucks a month. And I lead nearly 2,800 entrepreneurs in my community, Maker School, where most members land their first client within one or two months of joining. Now, here's the thing that most people don't know about AI automation. Most people obsess over AI models and flashy tech demos. But the people that actually make serious money on this are focused on completely different things. They are not the most technical people in the room. They're also not the ones that understand the code or how to drag and drop modules and so on and so forth. What they do understand are business fundamentals, client psychology, how to position yourselves in markets, and so on and so forth. So, this comprehensive guide is meant to take you on a complete journey from technical foundations to six figure scaling strategies. We're going to be covering the brutal realities I learned selling automations for over 2 years. The sales psychology that actually works with business owners, why most people target the wrong markets, which five industries are desperately paying premium prices right now, the technical essentials that do matter if you guys want to do this, and then the systematic approach to fixing every major agency problem you're suffering from. Finally, I'm actually going to build a complete AI system live from scratch that you guys could sell to clients for 2,000 bucks a pop immediately. And by the end of these five hours, I want you to have everything you need to start a profitable AI business or upscale your existing one well past six figures. Plus, I'll give you guys a real system you guys can deploy and sell right away. I've added timestamps for every section of the description. So, just bookmark this video right now. You guys are going to want to reference those insights again and again as you build that business. And whether you're starting from zero, you're already an AI freelancer and you guys just want to level up, this is your road map to building a futureproof automation business this year. So, let's dive into the foundations. Before we get into client acquisition and business strategy, we need to establish the technical foundations that everything else builds on. So, I just really quickly want to get the 8020 of what actually matters in a automation out of the way. That's APIs, web hooks, AI prompting, and the development approaches that separate professionals from hobbyists. Here's what most people get wrong. They think that you need to be some sort of like coding wizard in order to find success in the space. But the reality is you just need to understand enough technical skills to talk about reliable systems. Then you focus the majority of your energy on the business side of things. This next section is going to give you exactly that. It's the core technical competencies that you need in order to speak the language without getting lost in unnecessary complexity and so on and so forth. Once you have these foundations locked down, everything that we're going to cover next will be about sales, market selection, and then scaling. And all of this is going to make total sense to you. Without them, you're going to be building your business on pretty shaky ground. So, let's dive in. 80% of AI automation basics in less than 30 minutes. That's what we're going to be talking about today. I'm going to be giving you guys the core foundational concepts you need to start and then scale an A automation business in a fraction of the time of your competitors. I scaled my own a automation agency to $72,000 per month. So, I've learned a fair amount along the way. I also now coach almost 2,000 people on how to do the same. Naturally, I pick up on a lot of patterns. So, that's what we're going to be covering. This is you unfortunate person faced with a decision. Do you want to spend a 100 hours learning a bunch of BS or do you want to spend less than an hour? Let's do half an hour actually to acquire 80% of the basics. I believe you've chosen right. Why don't we jump right into the very first point and it is the most boring point ever. You're probably like, "Nick, why did you start with this point?" Well, it's because I think a lot of people see AI automation as this hype train and this big bubble and I want to push back against that. AI automation is not really all of that. It is just like any other business. Don't get caught up in the hype. Don't get caught up in the shiny objects. The skills that make you a successful AI automation business owner are the exact same skills that make you a successful plumber. They're the exact same skills that make you a successful recruitment agency owner. They're the exact same skills that make you a successful e-commerce business owner. I'm going to draw a business model on the right hand side here. And I just want you guys to kind of like see what which business models this matches. Okay, we start with our lead genen. And there's a variety of things that we do for lead genen. We could do cold email. Okay, maybe we do PPC, that's pay-per-click ads. Maybe we do referrals. These are all ways of getting people interested in your business. And what do you do with all these lead genen mechanisms? Well, you then shuttle them to some sort of conversion. So, usually this is a sales call. Okay. What happens on the sales call? Usually, you'll send a proposal of some kind, also known as a quote or an estimate. After that point the person becomes a client. When they become a client you then fulfill and ideally at the very end of this there would be some sort of retention mechanism that you know gets them back in through some other call and then you just repeat and this is this is really what makes you money. Okay. So I just drew that and that is how all AI automation businesses work. Um but kind of just like zoom out a little bit if if you squint what you'll notice is this doesn't just apply to AI automation businesses. That exact funnel that I drew literally applies to like 90% of B2B businesses all over the world. And so I say this to mean the only difference between an AI automation business and the vast majority of other businesses that you may or may not have experience with. The only difference is this section right here. It's that little fulfillment section. Okay? So, you know, in a plumbing business or whatever, that might be, I don't know, repairs. That might be, you know, new pipes. In a recruitment business, that might be a candidate being placed. In a PPC agency, that might be, you know, some ad creatives being developed or something. The point is, the fulfillment is the different part. Okay, that's the AI automation part. But everything else, your ability to drive leads, your ability to close those leads, your ability to impress the hell out of those leads, whatever, all of this stuff is foundational and is shared with literally every other major digital business model today. So, the reason why I say all this is because don't focus 90% of your energy on that tiny little bit at the end that just happens to be AI automation. If you guys really want to crush it at this business model, focus the vast majority of your energy on the same foundational concepts that you'd have to learn in any business. Focus on your ability to drive leads. Focus on your ability to sell to those leads. Focus on your ability to retain customers after they've made it through your pipeline. If you guys are incredible at that, and even if you happen to be second rate at AI automation, you guys will make way more money than if it was the other way around. Okay? So, the fundamentals are always what make your automation agency or business successful. It's never fancy fancy tech. It's never your implementation. Um, don't overthink the technical aspects like I see a lot of people coming from, you know, programming or development or engineering backgrounds do. Um, and and certainly don't underthink the business side of things because the number one thing that I see when people enter uh my communities and my groups and my products, they're always like, "Hey, Nick, you know, I'm I'm an engineer and I'm great at building products, but I'm not very good at marketing." And then I'm like, "All right, well then you're not very good at being a business owner. So, we need to fix that first, right? Your development and engineering skills, those things can wait. We need to make sure that you're a good marketer. We need to make sure you're a good salesperson. And ultimately, we need to make sure that you're good at business development if we are to develop a business." Cool. So, I mean, you know, understated hopefully, but uh yeah, I think that's probably one of the most important parts. Now that I've covered that, we can actually start getting into some technicals. Okay, so I think a lot of people that are watching this are probably at the start line of their AI automation business. I mean, if you weren't, likelihood of you watching content like this is probably lower. So, um I know real Sherlock Holmes over here, but one of the core foundational parts of AI automation agency fulfillment, uh is your ability to use an API. So, an API just stands for application programming interface. And um all that really means, did I actually get that right? API stands for application programming interface. All right, cool. Good god. I don't think I've actually spelled this out in a very long time. Got to love acronyms. Um, all that really means is it's just a essentially for our purposes it is a server URL somewhere in the internet that we can send a request to and then we can get things back. And the cool part about APIs for us is you know those AI automation tools that we tend to really know and love. Stuff like make.com stuff like nadn stuff like zapier stuff like lindy all these drag and drop no code platforms which are really what most people think about when they think AI automation. Well these don't have built-in integrations with every platform that you might want to connect them to for business purposes. Okay, in those situations, we need to use an API or an application programming interface to build our own connection to those services to allow us to get a job done. I want to say that if you only use built-in integrations, not only is your ability to do anything actually really cool for the client severely limited, a lot of the time the client scales just do that stuff themselves by dragging and dropping modules across the screen. But not only is it super limited, you can't really drive as much value as you realistically could out of any platform because a lot of the time the simple endpoints that are exposed by make.com or Zapier or any event or whatever um you know they're just a lot more parameters. There are a lot more options uh in the API versus just the the drag and drop. So what I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to run through how to connect to an API and I'm going to do it using two tools that are really popular right now, make.com and naden. And hopefully this is going to give you guys a walkthrough what I look for when I connect to an API. Um, as we see the number one thing that I always do immediately is I look for Oth. Then I look for a way to copy and paste a simple example and then from there I basically build a minimum viable API call that just works. The second I have something that works which usually involves some method endpoint and header shenanigans. The second I have something that works everything else is so much easier. So um yeah, let me show you one example in make.com and then I'll show you another example in uh N8N as well. What's the API we're going to be connecting to? It's this really cool one called Fire Call. I've been using Firewall a lot more recently. Essentially what firecrawl is is just a way to scrape like any website and then return the results in what's called markdown. So this is my website right over here. Okay, leftclick.ai growth systems for B2B companies. Got a handsome photo of myself in the top right hand corner. Then a bunch of other BS. I'll save you guys the time. Essentially what we do is um you know they have this little playground here so you guys can visually see what's going on. But let's say I want to run a scraper for a leftclick.AI. Essentially what's happening is on the back end it's spinning up its own server and then it's calling my website and then it's extracting all the data for me and then what I end up getting in return is I end up getting this markdown here and markdown is just a compressed version of the HTML on the website. So I have like access to formatting with these headers. I have access to the links. I have access to basically everything I'd need. What's the value in scraping websites and stuff like this? Well, I talk about scraping a lot. Most of the examples in this video are going to be all scraping based. Um, just because I think there's like tremendous um kind of strategic sales value. Uh, but you know, the vast majority of the time anytime you're whipping up an email campaign for somebody or you're sending any sort of outreach or you're doing any sort of marketing that really matters, you're going to be doing some sort of scraping in Aon Automation. So, I just wanted to make sure this is hyper relevant. Okay, cool. So, um, that's more or less the the playground. So, what I want to do now is I want to run this through API. I'm going to open up my make.com scenario over here. Uh, I just have it called API call example. The first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to open up an HTTP request. And then what I always start with is the make a request module right over here. Okay. So now I'm going to head over to Firecrawl. And what do I want to do? I want to use their API, right? So I'm going to go firecrawl API. I always just Google the API that I'm looking for. And I see there's an API reference here. Awesome. Looks good. Now I'm confronted with kind of an intimidating page. SDKs, APIs, like what are all these threeletter acronyms? Well, the good news is this specific API is actually pretty upto-date and it's pretty clean. Um, not all APIs are like this, but essentially the very first and most important thing that I'm looking for is always the authentication. I think I might have called it authorization back here, but really what I meant was authentication. Okay, so we need to authenticate. Now, the way that authentication typically works is there there are two or three primary methods nowadays. Um, the simplest one is what we see over here, which is why I picked this API and it's called authorization bearer. Now, authorization bearer is super simple and it's super straightforward. And essentially all this means is we need to add a header in our HTTP request that includes the term authorization and then the value of that needs to say bearer and then a space and then we need to have our API key. Okay, I think this nuance is lost on a lot of people. At least it certainly was for me when I got start started with all this stuff. So, I'm just going to show you guys what this actually looks like step by step with this real API and then I'm just going to um change my API key afterwards so you guys don't all run up my fire crawl dev. Uh okay, cool. So, let me just see here. Um, what endpoint do we really want to call? I guess let's find an endpoint. So, I'm going to find the simplest possible endpoint. I'm just going to try recreating the playground request. So, I think it's a scrape, right? I'm just going to click scrape. And what do we see here? Post scrape. Okay, cool. The very um important thing is on the right hand side, you see how there's this curl request. And usually most APIs nowadays will have a big snippet of code. Well, this is where I basically go to copy and paste a a code block with everything I need as quickly as humanly possible. Now, what we see is if I go back to my um Excala draw here, we start with the authorization and we figured out how to do that. That's fine. Now, we're going to look for a copy paste example and then we're going to put together a minimum viable API call. So, we've done this. Okay, we've done this and now we just need to put together this minimum viable API call inside of make. So, I'm just going to drag these docs all the way over to the left side so I could just very quickly and easily accessmake.com. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to copy all the fields that are relevant. Now, the fields that are always relevant are always going to be the URL. So, I just grabbed the URL directly from here. I'm going to copy and I'm going to paste it inside of my URL bar. The method, which if you guys remember said post over here, it's usually going to be get or post. And then the headers. So, authorization bearer token. This is where we put our API key. Okay. So, in make I'm going to go down to headers. go authorization. Then I need to type bearer. And now I need my API key. So where am I going to get that? Top right hand corner. I'm going to go to my um fire crawl. Then I'm going to go down API keys. Obviously every platform that you're using is going to have a different UX for API keys and stuff, but this is what firecalls looks like. Okay. And then I'm going to go to API key. And I'm just going to copy this API key. I'll go back to make and I'm just going to paste that in. Okay. So now we have the authorization taken care of, which is really cool. The next thing we need is if we go back to this doc, you see how um there's a uh content type application JSON header. Well, in make it's really easy to do. You just go body type and then you go raw and then content type you just set to JSON application/json and then uh under request content. That's where this data flag is going to come in. And it's always a data flag in a post request. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually just going to copy this entire thing. Okay, I'm going to go back into my make and then I'm going to paste it in. And all I want is I want my URL, which in this case is being covered with a string. So I'm just going to paste in leftclick.ai. Now you see there are a ton of options here. Include tags, exclude tags. Usually in APIs like this, anytime you see these strings with this, it's kind of like this code. This is just like a standin or like a template or like a placeholder. So I'm just going to get rid of all of these. And to be honest, do I do I even need any of these? I don't really think so. It looks like the only thing I actually need is just the body, right? I'm just going to remove all other options but this URL. Maybe I'll leave the mark down, too. Okay, get that out. Going to make sure that everything is still formatted in JavaScript object notation. That's definitely a good skill to learn if you guys are using APIs. And then I'm going to rightclick this and press run this module only. I see it's taken some time. It's a pretty good sign. Usually when things take time and on make.com side, that means you're not getting an instant error. And what do I see if I go down to the bottom of the screen? Metadata markdown. I have all my markdown in this variable over here. If I scroll even further down, I have my entire website. And then I also have a bunch of other fields like source URL, scrape ID, description, title for my meta, all that stuff. So what have I done here, guys? I've successfully built an API request, inmake.com. As you see, it only took maybe 2 or 3 minutes as long as you know where to look and where to start. I'm going to do the exact same thing now in naden. And you'll see it's actually even simpler because, you know, the solutions usually do a fair job of giving you what's called a curl request. And you can actually just copy and paste a curl request directly into NAD. Does most of the work for you. So now I'm going to open up an NADN. um uh workflow over here and then I'm just going to type in HTTP request. Same thing as before. Then you see in the top rightand corner it says import curl. What you can do is you can actually just grab this curl, copy all of it. Okay, curl is just a way that you send a request using your terminal. Then I'm going to click import curl. Paste it all over here. Import. And then now we've actually automatically filled out all of that data. Okay. By just copying and pasting a curl request. This is why a lot of people like NA. and it ends a little bit more developer friendly and geared towards people doing API integrations and stuff like that. I need an API token. So, I'm just going to copy this over, go back over here, paste this in. Super easy. Now, what else did we have? We just had a URL, right? So, I'm just going to go httpsleftclick.ai. And then I'll leave the formats part and just delete everything else. This to me looks like pretty good JSON. If you're ever unsure whether something is good JSON, just go to jsonformmatterater.com, paste in your JSON, then click format or beautify. If it works, you're going to get something like that. If it doesn't work, let's say we have an extra comma, it's going to tell you where the error is. And usually you'll be able to look at the fifth line and then be like, "Oh, okay. I have an extra comma there." Anyway, now that we know that that's good, I'm just going to go back over here and I'm going to click test step. Same as before, we do not get an instant error. What we do get is we get the data on the website scraped ready for us basically instantly. Okay, so yeah, API calls are not magic. They're actually pretty easy and pretty simple and pretty straightforward. You just have to be smart about how you use them. So next up, let's talk a little bit about the other side of the equation. We just talked about sending data. Well, let's now talk about receiving data. And the best way to receive data is using something called a web hook. A web hook, to make a long story short, is just like an API call is a way to connect something that doesn't have a connector built into your note platform. Uh it's a way to create your own connection um sending data out. A web hook is just a way to do that for sending data in. So web hook is just a custom URL basically that you are creating that enables you to point other services to you and then when you do something like maybe you change a record or you update a status or uh some new email comes in or whatever you can actually trigger a web hook on the make.com or the nadn or whatever your note code tool is end to start some flow. Okay so highly encourage you guys to figure this out because if you do figure it will make you unstoppable. Learning web hooks and learning APIs are probably like the two I don't know I'd say they're probably like the two highest leverage things to learn in the actual AI automation fulfillment side of things aside from you know this business skills we talked about earlier. So how exactly would you do that? Well in make it's pretty easy. All you do so you just go to this web hook node or module what you want is custom web hook. Okay then you create a custom web hook and I'll just say my example web hook. And now what you have is you have a server essentially that is willing to receive a request. All you need to do is send a request to this server and then you are going to trigger your make.com flow. So if I click run once, you'll see it's waiting. Okay, the simplest request you could send with a web hook is actually just you trying to access a website. So if I just take the URL, which was this one up here, and then I paste it in, what do you think is going to happen if I press enter? Well, my browser is going to send a request over to this web hook URL, which is going to trigger my flow. So I just press the button. As you see, it says accepted. And then if I go back here, this make.com operation, it actually got triggered, which is pretty crazy. Now, there's some built-in logic with web hooks that they don't really teach you about, but because web hooks are just a server request, you can also do things like pass query parameter uh query parameters over. So, um, if I were to put a question mark and then say query parameters equal example, then press enter, what you see is I now have access to a variable called query parameters. Now, I'm doing this with a browser, but you can actually do this with any service you want. You can do this with u monday.com. You can do this with ClickUp. There are a variety of different ways to do this. If I go over to app.clickup.com, which is just a simple project management tool that I really like, then I click on their automations uh feature. You'll see here that if I click manage all automations, I have the ability to set up an automation where when I do something, basically I can fire off a web hook request. Now, if I fire off a web hook request, if I paste this URL in here, then I just say, I don't know, task created. So, every time I create a task, I'm going to call a web hook. I do this. Okay. Then I go back to my make scenario, run this, go back to my ClickUp, and again, ClickUp can be whatever the hell you want. It doesn't have to be ClickUp. It could be monday.com. It could be Panda. Basically, every one of these tools has a web hook feature. Then, if I say this is an example record, I press enter. Then I go back here. What you'll see is ClickUp just triggered that web hook and then sent it over to the address that I listed, which has now enabled me to start a flow in my no code tool. So it's as simple as that. Does not have to get more complicated. So I'm sure you guys can imagine NADN is basically the exact same thing. There is a web hook node. The only difference between um uh make.com web hooks and then NADN web hooks are there's a test URL and production URL. Um and generally when you are testing something you need to have this web hook- test in the URL. When it is live and it's ready for production and your your workflow is on, it needs to just say web hook. You also need to specify the method. It needs to be either a get or a post. that I'll leave all that to specific programming videos. Um, it's more or less the exact same flow here. So, if you know how web hooks work, you're already 90% of the way to being what I'd call a good automator. Um, you know, web hooks, API requests, these are basically like the tools of the trade. And to be honest, anytime you're using a built-in automation or, you know, a drag and drop node anyway, all you're doing is you're you're you're using web hooks, they're just not telling you that you're using web hooks or you're using API calls, they're just not telling you that you're using API calls. All right. Okay, cool. Next up, I want to talk how to prompt AI models effectively. As the AI and AI automation probably implies, most of our work involves weaving in artificial intelligence into some sort of business process. So, I have the simplest possible way to think of this and I'm going to give it to you right now. There are basically three types of prompts and these three types of prompts are present across more or less all of the current at large language model tools. There is a system prompt, okay, there is a user prompt and then there is a assistant prompt. These are the three types. Now, the way to prompt an AI and to consistently achieve pretty good results, you know, you got to go a lot deeper if you want to get amazing results, but if you want pretty good results, results that are enough for you to whip up a flow in a few seconds and then impress a business owner, what you need to know is that the system prompt is how the model identifies. So this is where you say you are a data entry professional or something or you say you are a skilled recruiter. You are the president of the United States. I don't know whatever the heck you want it to role play as. This is the identity that you're giving the model. Okay. The user is where you give it a task where you say your task is to do a thing. Then the assistant prompt, okay, is what the AI gives you back. And usually the way that I like to do things is I like to have the assistant give me back my stuff as a JavaScript object notation um JSON uh string. So it's going to look like this with curly braces with a key and a value. The reason why I do that is because when you get in the habit of doing this, you can then very easily integrate this with any tool on planet Earth. You're using what's called structured data. And once you have structure to your data, you can obviously um you know forward that over to some software platform, parse out the keys, add the values to to other variables and stuff. It's pretty cool. Okay, so that's more or less what this looks like. just to run you guys through it very quickly with an NAND flow that I built to personalize um real client or real lead data. I've since sold this system many times. I've also put this up on MakerSchool and make moneywithmake.com, my two automation communities. We've had many, many people sell this. This is exactly what a real functional system that you guys can charge money for looks like. Um the AI model for this system essentially has a system prompt where we say you're a helpful intelligent writing assistant. That's its identity. And then we have a user prompt where we give it the task. Your task is to personalize an email. You'll do this by taking a prospect's LinkedIn profile and then editing five templates for different sections of the email. Subject line, icebreaker, elevator pitch, call to action, and a PS field. Your templates are below. Then I give it some templates. Then I give it some guidelines. Then finally, to make a long story short, I say respond in JSON using this format. Okay. Then what do I have? Well, this is where things get a little bit more complicated and where most people kind of lose me, but essentially after um the system prompt, you put a user prompt. After the user prompt, you put a second user prompt where you actually give it the data that you want it to operate off of. And then finally, when you're done, the AI will return essentially an an assistant prompt. So, this is sort of the behind the scenes, sort of, you know, the the best way to think about using this sort of stuff um live. And it's what I follow every single time that I build a system that prints money. I mean, I I follow this card blanch. I'm going to have this Excala draw in the uh description, so you guys can just click the link, look at this exact structure, and use it in your own platform. Um, I'm using uh just nad for that example. But keep in mind, you can do the exact same thing in make.com, exact same thing in Zapier. That's why I drew this out just so you guys had something that's platform agnostic. Okay. Number five is to use what's called testdriven development. Now, I don't think a lot of people fully understand what this means. But usually the way that people will build out workflows is they will try and in their head map out what the whole thing looks like and then they'll drag and drop like 50 modules together and then click run or test. Then obviously there'll be an error at some point during the flow and then when the error occurs they're not entirely sure where they need to go to fix it or why it happened in the first place. Don't do that. Instead do what's called testdriven development. When you start building stuff, okay, start by dropping the first module in. Okay, then test to make sure the first module works. Test to make sure that with the inputs that you provide that module, everything the outputs are as expected. Once you're done with that, then and only then do you drop module 2 down. Then you test module 2. Then and only then do you move on to module 3 and so on and so on and so forth. The reason why is because if something in your flow breaks, okay, and you know that everything up until here was perfect and then all of a sudden there started being a break right over here. Where do you think your error is? Obviously, the error is right over here. So, this is where you're going to look. The reason why this is valuable is because when you're building systems, debugging, the process of going through and trying to figure out what the problem is is a massive time sync. It's like a binary search tree in technical terms. It's super freaking expensive time-wise. But then if you test driven develop like I'm doing here, every time you test a module after you put it in, it actually just it's a fixed time cost. It takes like 30 seconds every time you do that. Your flow has 10 modules. What are you doing? You're testing for 5 minutes total and you know the whole thing works and you know exactly where the debug um is, right? So instead of your uh debugging kind of looking like this, if this is time and this is um I don't know let's say debug time and this is like your step in process basically your debug time looks like this which is a lot more consistent uh like this a lot more consistent a lot more measurable and a lot more reliable. Okay, so just a much simpler and easier way to think about it. When you guys create something, okay, just like I tested the web hook, test the web hook first before putting down uh the next module. Okay, when you're done with uh whatever you're testing, actually test the whole flow again. Okay, right click on it, click run this module only, and say, hm, you know, did the uh value y come out like I expected? Yes, it did. Okay, great. Now I can move on. The second habit of this, your builds are going to be a lot faster. Okay. Okay. And then the last thing I wanted to cover is anytime you're building something, start at the end. Don't start at the beginning. So, you know how earlier I was talking test-driven development. Start with module one, start with module two. Well, actually, I was kind of being tongue-in-cheek. What you should really do is, let's say you have 10 modules in your in your desired flow. What you want to do is you actually want to start with module 10. You want to test to make sure module 10 works, then you want to work backwards to module 9. You want to test to make sure module 9 works. Then you want to work backwards to module 8. Now, I know you're probably thinking this is silly, but let me give you a quick example flow. Let's say you have a very simple proposal generator. Okay, this is a proposal generator flow that I've built and shown on my channel many times. The way that this works is usually you will have some form. You will have the salesperson full information about the prospect in this form during a sales call. You'll then have AI to generate content whether that's a copy for a proposal, maybe you're customizing an email to send out or something. Then you will customize an asset. So either a Google Slides or a Panda doc. Then finally, you'll send an email with the Google Slides proposal. How would I actually build this thing? I actually wouldn't build it left to right. What I would do is I would start with the last module. Okay, this is where I'd start. I'd actually put down a module that sends the email that I want that contains a link to the Google Slides proposal. You know, if my flow starting left to right is supposed to start with a type form or something, I wouldn't actually start with the type form. What I would do is I'd go all the way on the right here and I start with the email. Okay? I would have send an email all the way on the right. I would then add an example of the data that I want along with the attachment type that I want. I would do all of this and then I would test it. I would make sure it lands. And only when I make sure that it lands. Only when I make sure that the end does what I want to do would I then work backwards, which in this case might be a Google Slides module or something. Okay. So maybe now um I would do Google Slides and then I would go create presentation from a template. Now this is a little bit backwards. So I'd stick it right over here. Then you know after that what would I do? I would go and I would add an open AI node. Okay. I would test to make sure that open AI node works. And then I would uh we're doing create a completion and make sure that's all good to go. Okay. Then maybe before that I have some other data processing stuff. But the point that I'm making is I would actually this entire time work this way, not this way. And there are a couple reasons for this, but to make a long story short, when you work backwards, what you're doing is you're eliminating wasted time on all of those paths that lead nowhere. So if this is the flow at the end of it, okay, it's four modules or nodes. In order to create it, what you actually had to do is you had to make this and then you had to try this and then that didn't work and then you had to go back here and you had to try this and maybe that worked. But then you tried this and that didn't work. You tried that and then you got back here. Okay. And then finally you got over here. So like this is the the the actual flow. And I think I drew an extra one here, didn't I? Yeah, I did. That's all right. But during the building process, you experimented with all these weird ass paths. It didn't actually lead anywhere. These are all wasted time. Okay. It's kind of like how you have like a million in one ways, okay, to make it to X over here. So, these are all the ways that you could go. If you just started at X and then picked one of these, let's say, let's make this blue. Let's say this one here, you'd actually only ever spend that time building it backwards and traversing that one path. You don't actually have to try all the all the candidate paths, it's called. So, yeah, start at the end, not at the beginning. easily the simplest and most straightforward way to getting this done. If your goal is to send an AI written email, how to AI write the email first and then send it. Don't actually like start with the trigger. Don't start with all the introductory logic. Don't do any of that. All right, hopefully that makes sense. Awesome. So, you now understand the core technical skills that make AI automation possible. That's APIs, web hooks, proper AI prompting, and then test-driven development. But here's where most technically skilled people fail. They think that mastering the technology behind something is enough to actually build a successful business. But knowing how to implement a tool is very different from actually running a company. So next I'm going to show you the brutal reality behind selling a automations. One that I suffered from for a good 2 to three years. And the idea is hopefully these lessons can save you months of struggle and thousands of dollars in lost revenue. So the next section isn't about building better systems. It's actually about understanding a automation as an actual business model. Uh the mindset shifts that determine your income ceiling and also the strategic decisions that separate sixf figureure agencies from those that are sort of stuck at a few thousand per month. in that weird limbo and can't get anywhere. These are the insights that I wish I had somebody share with me on day one. They're the difference between playing with cool technology as a hobby and then actually taking that using it to build a real business. I've sold AI automations for 749 days and now I make over 170 grand a month. Here is literally everything that I wish that I knew on day one when I got started. I've made basically every mistake under the sun and my hope is by doing so you guys aren't going to have to. So, I'm going to deliver this blackboard style in the way that I normally do. Let's start with the biggest which is the reality of AI and automation. And automation sounds really fancy. It sounds really new. It sounds very special. Has the word AI and automation in it. How cool. But the reality is AI automation is just a business. The exact same rules apply to a automation that apply to literally any other business out there. Whether it's a plumber, whether it's your aunt's flower shop down the street, whether it's NASA, you know, whatever it is, the same rules are going to apply. You're going to have some sort of lead genen at the top end. Okay? Then you're going to have some sort of sales to convert those leads. Then you're going to have some sort of fulfillment to fulfill the promises that you made during the sale. Then finally, hopefully you'll have some sort of mechanism to retain people. And once they retain people, you'll either cycle them to um sales or you'll go right back to fulfillment, eliminating that step completely. So this isn't just AI and automation. This is any business model. The only thing that's really unique about AI and automation is this part right over here. This fulfillment step is usually, you know, the building of systems that solve particular business problems. Okay? I've said this in a number of my videos, but I think it's really important because there's so many people getting into the space nowadays. This is just a business like any other business. It's just a specific sort of thing that we're selling. So everything that you've been able to learn about other businesses applies here as well. The only thing that it doesn't apply to is this section. Okay? So anything you've ever learned about lead genen, you you can leverage it in a automation. Anything you've ever learned about sales, you can leverage it. Anything that you want ever learned about retention, you can leverage it. The only real thing that's a little bit different here is just the way that you build systems relative to the fulfillment of some other service. Let's say marketing or or websites or something. Okay, that's the biggest thing. So, just to get that out of the way, now that that's good, we can actually talk um real things that, you know, I I wish that I I actually knew on on day one. And the first is that business value is a lot more important than like the the technical value of the solution. Most clients don't actually care about the systems I deliver. It's really interesting because I I brand myself uh as like a systems person, but the reality is most clients don't actually care about systems, right? They couldn't be damned whether you're building a cool AI automated system to do it or you're sending it to some offshore agency to have it done for you. The only thing they really care about are the results. Okay? They care about the results. Uh they care about the cost in order to deliver those results. Basically, if you look at these two, they they care about the return on investment. So whether you do it through some fancy AI and automated system or you do it yourself working 45hour days somehow or you you know have some some blend of both human and automated means in order to fulfill something. Customers don't actually care about the system that you built. Um your make.com or n automation is awesome but like nobody actually really gives a So I'm being real. What they care about is they care about the return on investment. They spend $1,000 with you. How much money are they going to make? Right? If they invest $10,000 on the system are they going to make over $80,000 or whatever their their ROI threshold is. So, I'm saying this because I've had so many situations in my life where I have frontloaded the technical aspect of it. And I've just talked a tech all day. Cool system, cool model. Here's what the flow is going to look like. Here's what all this stuff does. They don't actually care about that. Right? When you're selling a service to a business, B2B, you're selling to another business, and businesses really talk just in terms of of dollars and return. Next, focus on fundamentals, not fancy tech. I can't tell you how many months of my life I spent chasing down various rabbit holes to learn new technologies. Can't tell you how many months of my life I spent learning a specific tool stack because I thought the specific tool stack was going to be amazing. The reality is any noode or any automation or hell even any like programming platform cursor or VS code or whatever these all do the same thing. Okay, these allow you to build systems in the cloud for the most part that accomplish some sort of customer problem. So all you need to do is just learn one of them. They're all the same at the end of the day. Sure, some will allow you to do things easier. Some will allow you to do things for a little bit less money. Some allow you to do things faster. That's totally understandable, right? Naden versus Make versus Zap Your Lindy, all those other platforms, they all have their pros and cons. But all you really need to do in order to check off that little box of the um business side of things that we talked about here, this fulfillment stuff, all you need to do to check this is you just need to learn one. So, if you really want to make money with this stuff, do not bounce around every new fancy drop, okay? Just focus on mastering one platform or one solution. Get really good at it. Spend three whole months in it. Pre-commit 90 full days. I promise you uh you won't regret it. When you get really good at that one thing, you use that for all the subsequent builds. You'll be faster, more efficient. Um the client will be happier and you'll be able to focus again on the things that actually matter, which is your ability to drive business value, not technicals. In a similar vein, clients care about results. They don't care about how you got there. So, this is really interesting to me because I used to get in the habit of trying to like justify all the work that I was doing to clients. And this is a really big problem when I was starting out. You know, like I would feel like a client wasn't really paying me enough money. I thought, you know, I did way more work than $500 worth of a project. I want to get paid more for it. The reality is uh it doesn't matter how much work I put in to get something done. What matters is what we agreed on initially and then the value that I drive. If I'm not driving value because I took a very circuitous pathway to get to the system I built for a client and it doesn't matter. Client doesn't care. Clients again they care about dollars for the most part. They care about the deliverables. There's a difference between applied systems and academic systems. So a lot of people get into AI automation thinking that they're going to learn a lot about artificial intelligence. They're going to get to play around with like models. They're going to get to play around with training. The unfortunate reality is um what we are we're basically applying systems that other people have built. We're not building the AI. We're not building the super the super cool chat GBT consumer model. We're taking these technologies that other people have basically you know spent their entire lives theorizing and writing on you know uh chalkboards about and doing all this complicated math over and then we are asking ourselves how can we apply this technology into a business and actually have that produce a demonstrable ROI for the business. You know, if you really want to make a ton of money with the services model I'm showing you guys and a bunch of other people on YouTube are showing you guys. It's not actually about like developing some cool proprietary new system that has nothing to do with it. It's just how can we take systems that already exist or how can we take tools that already exist and incorporate them into systems that solve a particular customer problem. Finally, you just sell solutions. You don't sell tech. So solution obviously begs the question in order for there to be a solution there has to be a problem. So if you get good at selling solutions, not technology, you know, just a wider answer to somebody's prayers, you will virtually always guarantee yourself an income source. So you don't have to worry about any of that. I'm going to show you guys two paths that I see some new AI and automation agencies go down. Okay. Um basically the first path focuses on tech and the second path focuses on business. So if you focus on tech like I see a lot of people that enter my communities and my programs and leave comments on my YouTube videos do unfortunately um you know you're going to be delivering extraordinarily complex solutions. These complex solutions are going to take a lot more time for you to deliver and then people are going to subjectively see them as a lot less valuable. So it's going to be more time. It's going to be less pay. You're going to spend your time working on these academic systems or trying to like build something really cool that doesn't really matter anyway. You're going to spend a bunch of time trying to make it technically perfect, which the clients don't care about. And you're going to grow really slowly and you're going to scale in a very limited capacity. Instead, if you take a business focus like I recommend you do, not the tech focus, you're going to focus on simple solutions that work. You're going to focus on literally taking automations from my channel and maybe a couple of other people's channels that talk about using this stuff specifically for business purposes where you're going to, you know, browse through templates and and look for ways to solve problems using the templates, not look for templates and then try and figure out the problems afterwards. You're going to find simple solutions that work that aren't freaking rocket science, okay? Then you're going to apply them to real businesses. You're going to focus on client results. What's the deliverable they get? What's the ROI? Then ultimately, you're going to grow a lot faster and scale your business like this as opposed to something like this. So be blue. Blue is where we're at. blue is what I want you guys to be. That's sort of number one. Number two is a big mindset shift that I had about halfway through running my own automation business because listen, I'm not like a mindset or like a belief guru. Really, I focus just on how do we strategically and tactically implement systems like this into businesses and then how do we make money selling those things, right? But I think there is something to be said about mindsets and how they help you do that. So, I had a big mindset shift. Basically, I've come to realize that your beliefs determine your ceiling. Okay? I used to think that was your inherent capability that determined your ceiling. I thought there are some people out there that are just better. They're faster, they're more efficient, they're more intelligent, they have more business experience, they have more connections, they have more of all this stuff. Okay. What I've unfortunately had to realize um and that I wish I had internalized earlier is that stuff. It's just like if you're lining up in a marathon and you know, somebody fires the gun so everybody starts. All of those things that I talked about are advantages that will buy that person an additional.5 seconds off the start line. That's it. That doesn't mean anything. Okay? 0.5 seconds in a marathon means absolutely nothing. Sure, it'll help them get going from their perspective. they're going to be ahead of you for a real long time, I guess, you know, half a whole second or whatever. But the people that actually make it, the ceiling of how fast you go or how far you can run is entirely based off your beliefs. If you believe that making a $10,000 a month revenue or income or whatever is very difficult or it's impossible or or whatever, it is going to be very difficult or near damn right impossible to do. If you believe that drag and drop modules across a screen and working from your laptop in, I don't know, Bali or Indonesia or Thailand or Australia, where wherever the heck you are, Australians probably don't want to work on Australia, but you guys get my point, then it's going to be very difficult to make money dragging and dropping modules across the screen and working from your laptop. But if you treat it as no big deal, if you see that there are thousands if not millions of other people out there that are doing the exact same thing and if you can find a way to convince yourself that it's not a big deal really to be making a ton of money or to be reaching a lot of people or to be implementing cool technologies and cool businesses, then the likelihood you actually achieve that thing is so much higher. Okay, I see this at basically every top performer in their field, whether it's a politician or it's an athlete or it's a business person, the work that they do, they see as just really objectively not a big deal. Ever since I adopted this, I started being like, well, what am I really doing at the end of the day? I'm doing some lead genen activities. I'm doing some sales calls. I'm not like hitting the pipeline, you know what I mean? I'm not like hustling my ass off in order to do this. I'm like working essentially like a desk job that I built for myself here. The second that I started doing that, my income shot through the roof cuz my belief was, hey, this is no big deal. And so, if you really just want that sort of unflapable, unfasable confidence, rewire your brain to think that what you're doing is just not really a big deal. Cuz objectively, it isn't. We're not exactly hunting tigers in the savannah anymore, right? We're sitting down. We're trying to take tools that other people that are extraordinarily intelligent and driven and motivated have have have built and sweat and and bled over, okay, and then and then take those and implement them into businesses and actually just produce an ROI. What we're doing is really not that incredible or amazing or whatever. Um and and the amazing thing is if you think about it from that perspective, you can still build the best lifestyle on planet Earth for yourself despite the fact that it's nothing super special, which which is, you know, what I think is actually special. Okay, next big thing is to focus on revenue generating activities, not busy work. I spent the big bulk of my first few months as an Amaz focusing on busy work. I focused on stuff like, hey, I got to get the perfect website. Hey, I need to print out business cards. Hey, I need to uh post on Facebook. Hey, I need to show activity on Instagram and LinkedIn. Hey, I need to go to um I don't know, networking events or something. Okay. And I guess what I'm trying to say is I was um I was spending time on literally everything except for work. Um you know, I was trying to make my stuff look pretty. I was trying to make myself look legitimate and professional. Um but actually, the more that you the more time that you spend trying to look legitimate and professional, the less likely you're actually to be legitimate and professional. Actually, the guys that end up being legitimate and professional, they always start not looking legitimate and professional at all because they just get going and then they start they have like a cardboard box for an office and they they start talking to homeless people on the street to try and sell them services. Do you know what I mean? Like like that's the way that you make it. Okay, if you have that sort of mindset, if you focus on revenue generating activities, a read talking to customers here instead of busy work, it is inevitable that given enough time, you will make it. Uh on that note, most revenue does not come from glamorous activities. I used to think that, you know, the best and coolest companies on planet earth had the most amazing and intricate sales funnels. My salesunnel here is the simplest legitimately. It was cold email, Upwork. I did a little bit of community posting. I did some like cold DMs. Okay, that's it. You just do the most boring, unsexy, unglamorous activities just repeatedly for a long enough period of time and then you make it. So, if I just focused on that literally from day one instead of day 100 like I eventually realized, I would have been so much further ahead. It would be crazy. On that note, you know, we talked about doing things for a really long time. Successful automation entrepreneurs aren't special. They're consistent. So, just repeat after me. Humans are persistence hunters. This is really the one thing that makes us stand out. Okay? When we have a goal, it is not our ability to sprint at the goal that makes us really good at achieving the goal. It's just the ability to dog after it for long enough. Even if you're walking or jogging or going really slowly or or from your perspective, things are barely changing. If you just continue doing it for long enough, you continue doing those boring, unglamorous, unsexy lead generation activities for 2 years, you'll eventually make it. Yeah. On that note, what I've come to realize is that in order to really crush it, I've needed to treat business like a game with specific levers to pull. Now, I make a ton of analogies. I used to play a lot of Runescape as a kid or like Maple Story. I used to play like obviously a lot of competitive shooters like Call of Duty and stuff like that. Like I think a large portion of my audience, which is primarily male and between 20 and and age 40 probably understands these video games have ways to be exploited. They are exploitable. You if you're playing Super Smash Brothers with your friend or whatever or some arcade fighter, you know, Street Fighter or Tekken or whatever, if you press a certain combination of buttons in rapid succession, it's kind of like an exploit. It's like a hack, you know, like the enemy can't react because they're just too busy getting hit with the fastest little tiny punch all day. I forget the character. Uh who is it? Like I don't know, falcon punch guy. Uh the point I'm trying to make is there's like a certain combination of moves that just make you extraordinarily likely to beat your enemy and everybody on planet Earth just says, "Well, that's cheating." Well, that's exactly what you need to do in business if you want to get ahead. You need to do those sets of moves that everybody else is like, "As you're cheating, man. What are you going to do? You're going to make an Upwork profile? That's a that's not a business. What are you talking about?" You need to take the lowest hanging fruit and you just need to attack it consistently and systematically. You just need to spam the A button or the X button or whatever controller you're playing on or you know my other analogy is a casino. If you wander into a casino and you see a slot machine and every time you pull this little lever, it just goes 777 and you're like, "Oh my god, I'm rich. I won." But then, you know, instead of you giving a getting a million dollars, what you do is you make $1. Okay, it's not exactly glamorous. Okay, you made a dollar. But what if this this machine's rigged and every time you pull you make a dollar? Wouldn't you despite how much money I mean, you know, if you're a quadrillion, probably not. But for for most reasonable people, wouldn't you just sit there and just pull that lever all day? Like even if it just makes you a dollar and I mean, you know, your arm's getting kind of tired. I mean, it's pretty consistent, right? Like it's boring and it's like I could do here I could do this for 17 hours and, you know, I'd just be looking at the same screen all day going 777. But you know how much money you'd make by the end of that day assuming you pull that lever every 10 seconds or whatever? It'd be insane. So this is basically the way that business works. So you will find a slot machine with like a broken lever that just rings 777 makes you win every time and and it pays out a slight little bit more money than all of the other slot machines. That's what you do. So just treat it like a game. Treat it like Super Smash Bros or Call of Duty. Go spawn camping, you know? Treat it like Runescape, right? Like fish for the lobsters in the specific optimized way and you will win. Personally, I think that a big issue that a lot of people have with businesses is that they focus too much on like the intentionality and the mission and the values at the start line before they've even like played the game for a little bit. And like when you're they're they're trying to like design the perfect life before they even know what it is that they can do and what they can't do, right? Within the constraints of the game. So I was kind of like that. I started to really take off the second that I just zoomed out and was like, "Wait a second. Why don't I play the game a little bit?" And then I'll kind of feel out what I want my perfect life to look like after doing that for a bit. Um so go figure. Okay, so real success usually looks really boring from the outside. Now I kind of touched on that with the consistency aspect and like the 777, but it does look pretty boring from the outside. And then small consistent actions are way more powerful than spread dyke heroic efforts. So I meant to write sporadic. So is what it is. Can't win them all. If this is your starting point, you guys are right over here and you guys kind of want to run through and determine what are some of these revenue generating activities. I guess what I'm trying to say is when I build these out, I basically say what are two possible universes or futures. If you focus on non-revenue activities or you focus on revenue activities, if you focus on non-revenue activities, you're going to spend years working on the perfect landing page. You're going to spend months telling all your friends about what an amazing business opportunity this is and about all your ideas for this angle and how we're going to implement X, Y, and Z and do this amazing market. Okay? Nothing's ever going to come out of it. you're going to be busy as hell 24/7. You're not going to get any results because you're just afraid to like bend over and pick up the dime you see on the street cuz you think it's not worth your time. Or you feel afraid to sign up to the freelance platform that everybody looks down upon. Or you feel afraid to to pull the lever, you know, a bunch even though everybody's like, "Well, that only gives you a dollar, right?" These are all self-reinforcing limiting beliefs. If you think something is hard, it's more likely to be hard and it'll force you to stagnate. And if you contrast that with revenue based activities like talking to potential clients. So, you know, I mentioned a bunch here, but like cold email is really big right now, which I'll touch on a little bit more later. Obviously, Upwork is one of my faves, but you know, there are a bunch of other ones. Fiverr, Toptal, and so on and so forth. This is a really cool one in Europe that is starting to pick up some traction. I think it's called Malt. Malt. Yeah, malt.com. So, if you just get on these things that a lot of people don't consider real businesses, just talk to enough customers, you kind of figure it all out later. Same thing with community posting. Then you'll get a bunch of real feedback and opportunities. And then you'll be able to kind of start that cycle, that feedback loop that eventually just makes you better and better and better. And then even if you had limiting beliefs by doing this over and over and over again, you basically get to collect what are called like reference experience. You get a big list of wins basically. And then the way that your mind works is every time you're contemplating making a decision, it just looks at the total number of wins versus failures when you've tried to do that thing and you know how intensely you felt those. And then if you have more wins than you have failures, it'll be like, "All right, well, it's really not that big of a deal." So you'll actually be able to convince yourself of something just through pure action, even if you didn't believe in it begins uh at the beginning. Anyway, that's how you get your mindset shift started. You then consistently start executing our revenue based activities. You compound results and then yeah, that's how you essentially establish new belief systems. So there's only so much like soul surgery you could do just talking to yourself in your room alone or writing your your teenth journal entry talk, you know, about all the things that you want out of life. A lot of the time you really just want to like make something happen. You just have to start and you have to not know exactly where you're going, but you just have to believe and trust that you are the sort of person that can take feedback and then iterate and improve your strategy, your angle of attack. And I think that really at the core is what confidence is. It's the ability to say, "Hey, I don't actually know the right answers right now, but I'm confident that if I just do this for long enough, I'll eventually figure it out." Couple of necessary evils that I wish that I knew a little bit about before, and the biggest one for me, at least for Aon automation agencies, was custom projects. So, I know previously we were talking about mindset and before that we were talking about general business. Well, now we're really diving into like what is specifics about an AI and automation agency that I wish I knew. We got we got some funny memes in here. What is a custom project? Basically, a custom project is one where there is a custom scope. So, if you guys have ever worked on any sort of freelance platforms before, you'll know that a lot of the time it's like, "Hey, I'm looking for a freelance that can help me do X, Y, and Z." And X, Y, and Z is like this thing that they want done, right? This is in contrast to templated projects where you've actually built out the thing before, okay? and then somebody says, "Hey, I want a sales system." And you're like, "Oh, okay. Well, here is a sales system." Right? Obviously, templated projects are a lot easier to scale because you don't have to do any work. But custom projects are a lot easier to sell because you can do specifically what it is the customer is asking for. Okay? So, yeah. Um, custom projects are custom scope. They're usually kind of like long kind of like arduous affairs. They require a lot more client management because, you know, you have to go back and forth with a client. There's usually some sort of like revision period or something like that involved. And basically like this is what it is to be like a you know if you think about it like a service business you are servicing a client. And usually a lot of the time when you do custom project it's a different route every time. You start here and this is a goal. The first time that you do it you might go like this. The second time that you take this path you might go like this. The third time you try and deliver some project maybe you I don't know takes you a lot longer than you thought it would and then eventually you get to it. Um so because of this now that we're all on the same page a lot of people think that custom products suck and that you should never do custom products. So a big recommendation in a automation generally if you go on a lot of other people's um channels and stuff like that they say you should never ever do custom projects. Custom projects are unscalable and never make it with custom projects. Uh but I always disagree custom projects are like training wheels. When you get started with something you have to make it as easy as humanly possible for somebody to say yes to you because you have no experience, no credibility, no real skill. You're probably not the best automator. Um you basically just have to make it as easy as possible for somebody to say yes to you. So you can at least get that flywheel that we started talking about in the last section started, right? And custom projects are the simplest and most straightforward way to do that. So despite the fact that it's not scalable and it's kind of like eating a Twinkie diet for the rest of your life, you know, it's like if you're in a bind, um, custom projects are the best way to get started. Then you can worry about scaling and doing like the hyper optimized business model after you hit that inflection point and actually like see a little bit of growth. Okay, so yeah, the danger is that they're time intensive. They have very unpredictable scopes. A lot of people think that they create revenue plateaus and burnout. And they definitely do. If you just do your custom projects all day, you won't be able to scale past maybe like 15 or 20k a month. Hell, some people 5k, right? It really depends on your own productivity and the sorts of projects you take on, but they become really accessible to beginners. So, you should just take them really quickly. And then the real value is they just help you pay your knowledge debt down quickly. I'll talk about debt a little bit later, but basically when everybody's at the start line of a business, they they and start line of anything, they just have all these debts that they don't are, you know, really realize exist. They have like skill debt, knowledge debt, they have client management debt, they have like, I don't know, limiting belief debt, they have confidence debt. They have a bunch of debt. And the easiest and quickest way to pay down that debt is just to get started, even if you don't really know what you're doing. So, what I recommend you do with custom projects is I actually recommend that your first step is like, I got to go custom. Okay, I got to go custom and I just got to like build stuff out for people because it's going to maximize the surface area. It's going to maximize the amount of experience you get in the shortest possible time. Is it going to maximize the money that you make in the shortest possible time? No, but it's going to maximize the experience which when you zoom out will eventually maximize the amount of money you make. So use custom products to learn and then you basically like kind of graduate to productized services or templated services like I was talking about earlier. Usually the best timeline looks like 0 to 3 months kind of focused mostly on custom projects. Then after you spend some time productizing then after that you actually like scale. This little section here with the custom projects. This is a graph of your revenue over time. You know like at the beginning you're probably not going to be making a lot of money. you're going to like shoot up every time you get a project and you'll make like zero the next time and then maybe the next project's a little bit bigger, but it's not very scalable and predictable. Eventually, you'll get over to the point at which you're actually productizing and you have enough money and then it's usually like a lot more linear from there. So, yeah, that's my recommendation for you guys. Just start with custom projects. Try and do them within the first 3 months or so. If you find yourself doing custom projects after 3 months or maybe between 5 to 10k in revenue, the likelihood is you're probably going to plateau. But uh yeah, looking back, I I definitely would have done more custom projects if I could. I tried to, you know, productize or template a little bit too early before I really knew enough about the problem I was trying to solve to do so. And that yielded a plateau for me right around $15ish,000 for 3 or 4 months that we did not effectively break through until I did a bunch more custom projects. I remember me and my business partner, I should say, landed one that was just about $10,000. And it was in working through that custom project that I learned enough about how a automation works in general and the problems that my audience was suffering from that I could actually take that next step, start templating and then start spiking my rev. We got two paths here, right? If you go custom products forever, you are going to have short-term revenue spikes with long fulfillment periods. You're you're plateauing and you're going to burn out, probably stagnate and go back to square one. Um, but if you do it for, you know, 0 to 3 months, then right after you're done, you can start productizing really quickly, create templates and systems using all that knowledge that you just built, and then grow consistently with a scalable business. All right. Next, I want to talk about some unsexy legion that actually works. So, if I had just taken into account the various unsexy ways to make money when I was at the start line of my business, I'd probably be a lot further ahead than I am right now. But again, I was kind of focused on the sexy ones, right? Like, I spent a lot of time dabbling in paperclick ads because I thought paperclick ads were just really sexy. I thought that like, okay, if I want to be a successful business, I need to run ads because that's what all other successful businesses do. But I didn't actually stop and ask myself why. Like, I just kind of tried to pattern match what they were doing. And pattern matching is okay, but you know, it's a very big business usually that's running ads or they they've worked through some funnel or they spent a lot of money. And it's usually different from like a beginner who doesn't have any money. They don't have any experience. They don't know what their their offer is. They don't have product market fit. So, yeah, as I mentioned before, best lead genen, always unsexy. Go for the unsexy ones. If I had two lead genen approaches here, okay, one was sexy and one was unsexy and that was all that I knew about them. Literally, there was nothing like one just looked really cool and it was all futuristic and automated, whatever, and the other was like boring and lame and it's like you could have been doing that for the last 50 years. I would actually choose the unsexy one every time because odds are that would be the higher ROI producing one versus the sexy one. Everybody wants to do the sexy stuff, right? And so because everybody floods over to the sexy side, the unsexy side usually ends up being the the hidden gem and then eventually the unsexy side becomes sexy and then we, you know, find a new unsexy lead genen approach. But yeah, so you know, when you have people avoiding a platform, for instance, like Upwork or Fiverr or Toptal or Malt or whatnot because of some preconceived notions about profitability, you know, obviously there's there's less competition and there's a lot more opportunity. Okay, I'll run you through some Upwork success strategies. I've recorded a bunch of videos on exactly how to get up and running with Upwork. So, I'd recommend if you really want to learn a little bit more about how Upwork works, definitely check those videos out and get that deep dive. But just as like a, you know, from a bird's eye view, a lot of other people, for instance, are really hesitant to make like custom videos. So, I just did custom videos on Upwork. I recorded a custom video solving a person's problem. And I did that every day, and I did like 10 of those every day for a very long time. Eventually, I'd sent, you know, a couple thousand of these. And because the custom videos had such a high return on investment, when somebody actually watched my video, they were so much more likely to convert. I was able to take a platform that most people think you can't make more than like $500 on per project and I was able to routinely get clients that were over $15,000 in CLV. That's pretty wild, right? Like that's a 30x on people's beliefs versus what I actually did. variety of other success strategies. By optimizing my profile and by figuring out what the actual problem is that I was solving and by doing some some pointed copyrightiting and by making minor tweaks to my profile photos and so on and so forth, I was able to just crush it and take kind of like an engine that a lot of people might have just walked by at some junk heap and be like, "Hey, you know what? There's actually a lot of value in that engine. I can actually tune that puppy up and slap it in a car and maybe it's not the newest and most amazing engine, but I can make that thing go way faster with a proper tuneup." I'm not a car guy if you guys could tell. Uh anyway, yeah, there are a lot of psychological barriers that stop people from using these methods. So, as long as you're just the sort of person that cares more about the return on investment than anything else, then you'll be just fine. Another big thing that I'll talk about in a second is cold email. So, variety of cold email approaches that generate two to 5% reply rates. You really don't need more than a 2 to 5% reply rate to crush it, right? You send like 500 emails a day, hypothetically. Even if you received a 5% reply rate on the 500 emails a day, that's 25 replies. If even five of those are positive, you can convert like one of those um to a meeting a day. So you have like one meeting a day basically. Do you know how many companies out there have one meeting a day? Like no companies have one meeting a day. It's crazy how few businesses have the ability to have one meeting a month. Okay. Vast majority of services businesses out there only get their business through referrals. Which means they got one in a blue moon and they will hound that one customer to the ends of the earth and try and do the best and most amazing job ever. So the please sir, may I have a referral um thing actually happens for them. But that's so unstable, right? I mean, month by month, they're they're all over the place. If you could build a consistent lead generation strategy that gets you one meeting a day, okay? And you can actually do that with a 5%, you know, hell, even with like a 2% repier, you can probably get a meeting a day if you send enough emails with just doing the same thing all day. You do that for like two or three hund bucks a month realistically with caring costs. Like you're in like the top.1% of businesses already. You just do that for a year, you'll be you you'll be making $50 $100,000 a month assuming you play your cards right. Yeah. There's another big model called communities which I wish that I had known a lot more about earlier. here. I mean, now obviously I run communities so I can actually firsthand see the value and the power that they had. But communities were just getting started right around the time when I was getting started with my automation agency. Like I joined a couple of communities. A really cool one that I was in was called Demand Curve. And because I was in this community, I basically, you know, there were people that previously would have been so inaccessible to me to to to even be able to talk to. they were like up there shrouded and in light, you know, it's like they had freaking halos on and I was like down here and, you know, there's like 20 layers of people in between us just in terms of skill and capability and execution and potential and stuff. Um, but in a community, um, they kind of flatten all of that, right? Like you're just a member just like basically everybody else. So even if there's people out there that are like extraordinarily rich and powerful, if they're in the same community as you, you could literally just shoot them over a message and like connect with somebody that you might have otherwise never been able to. So anyway, the reason I bring that up is because I wish that I had known about communities way earlier. I think it would have made a lot more money. highly recommend that you guys do not sleep on communities and because they are blowing up right now and it's a great opportunity to get into a bunch of communities for either very low amount of money or for free and then use the relationships that you create in those communities now even if it's just 10 minutes of checking your posts on your top three communities a day and responding to them building like a digital reputation a digital presence and then in a few months using that to just like build a sales empire and then yeah focus on the ROI not how cool the method seems so okay there's some sexy um lead genen approaches and then there's some unsexy ones so Let's look at the sexy ones. Some really sexy ones are content. Okay, so like YouTube, that's super sexy right now. Everybody's talking about YouTube. Everybody's like, "Man, Nick, uh, should I make a YouTube channel? Nick, please, should I, you know, make a YouTube like you because your YouTube's so great and you're making a ton of money off it and stuff." Um, the reality of the situation is if you try and start a YouTube channel right now, you have no experience, no skills, no nothing. You're just doing the ads thing all over again. You're just copying a successful creator like myself, but you don't really know what goes into it. you're just trying to like copy the I don't know like the the the the form of it, not necessarily the function of it. So content's really sexy and very few people actually make money with content. I want to say like 99.9% of people will like spend all their lives trying to produce content. They never make a dollar from it. Don't don't focus on content. Look sexy. It's nice. You get tons of followers. Everything's cool. Um you don't really see the the reality that goes into it. Don't focus on things that are really high effort. Don't focus on things like ads for instance. Okay. Um and don't focus, you know, stay away from things that have long times to ROI. Instead, focus on the unsexy, boring stuff, like direct outreach. That's by far the least sexy and most boring thing here. But it works. You just send people DMs and you just send people cold emails day in and day out for a very, very long period of time. Here are three. Upwork. You get direct access to buyers that are actually looking for people to solve specific problems for them. They've already done all the work sourcing the people. They're on their hands and knees salivating, waiting for you to give them a treat. They spend some poultry sum, maybe a couple bucks, in order to make the connection request or reply. that these are real customers. How many connects do you actually have to spend in order to like talk to somebody that you otherwise would have never been able to talk to? Really, just a few dollars. Treat it that way and I think you'll see there's a very large return on your investment. Same thing with um you know, cold email platforms like instantly. And then communities like school, right? None of these are very sexy. I'm not going to lie. A lot of people look down on them. A lot of people are going to think, "Oh, you do cold email? No way. You're a spammer." It's like, "Well, that's what you think." When I was in college and um you know, I was trying to throw it was an event management company in college. I was doing a bunch of promoting for one of my parties and we were trying to like fill the joint up. This bar that we were throwing our party at had like never seen more than like 50 people in it at one time. So we we were committed and proven to trying to get more than 50 people in. One of the most viral and simplest marketing strategies for us. You know what it was? We would print out a bunch of posters. Then we just go into the bathrooms above the urinals for the guys or at the backs of the bathroom stall doors for the girls. And we would just have people either myself, you know, for the guys or we pay a girl to do it or just, you know, a girl was part of our friend group, she'd go do it. um and just and just paste them in the bathrooms. So when people were taking a piss, they just looked at our freaking posters all day. That is probably the least sexy marketing method ever. But we had like 400 people at that event and that was like the primary way that we did it aside from some Facebook uh marketing as well. That lineup was out the freaking, you know, almost down the mountain. I went to university in a freaking mountain. Like crazy stuff. The least sexy marketing opportunity ever. It's funny. Every time I tell that story, people are like, "Really? People actually go because and I'm like, yeah." Cuz nobody else was doing it, man. You have I don't know how many people go to my university, but a lot of people probably 50,000 people saw that while idally taking a piss and being like, "All right, well, yeah, I'm going to be up there anyway. Might as well drop by, you know?" I mean, I go to the bar every now and then. Why don't I just go at that specific time? The these these unsexy marketing methods just crush. Okay. And when it comes to AI automation agencies, Upwork is one, instantly is one, school's another one, and these are the ones that I'd recommend that you do. Okay? Here are a couple other things that I wish I knew more about early on, and that's the idea of daily systems. So, I'll give you a quick story. I remember one time we were scraping some leads or something and we had to run some campaign and we had to send it and we had to do it very very quickly. There's some opportunity out there, some piece of news that like recently hit and we want to capitalize on it and I was chatting with somebody I was working with at the time and we needed to like scrape 500 emails. I remember telling him like, "Hey, like, okay, if you do 250, I do 250. We could probably do this in the next couple hours, right?" And he's like, "Well, dude, I'm not going to like scrape emails." Like, come on, man. That's like a that's like an assistance job. Let's just get let's just get one of our assistants to do it while uh you know, we focus on more important things. But this is the rate limiting step. This is the most important step. In order for us to send emails, we need to have the emails, right? So I was like, "No, dude. Like we should do this ourselves. This is really boring. And I know it's annoying, but we got to do this ourselves." And you know, the guy I was working with was just like, "Ah, I don't really want to do it." Anyway, I tell you this because what I've come to realize is that throughout my entire business career, I have always been the bottleneck. So if I can get better at doing something, then the entire rest of my business usually increases at least a proportionate amount. If I am the bottleneck, okay, then I get 50% faster at scraping leads or something like that or I get 50% uh more more accountable or 50% more committed, my business will grow at least by 50%. So it's like a direct onetoone relationship between myself and then the company and companies that I run. So I don't know if this is just me. I personally think a lot of entrepreneurs like this. The best way that I have come to massively increase my potential and my capability is by building daily systems that stick and just doing a lot of very small boring things like I don't know scraping leads for instance or whatever every day for a very long period of time. If you can just get into the habit of building super simple systems, I don't mean automations, I mean like your own systems. I wake up, I go to my coffee machine, I make coffee while the coffee is steeping, I dripping, right? While the coffee is dripping, I open up my laptop and I respond to three emails and then I go back, get my coffee cup, pound it back, respond to another three. Legitimately, if you could just build a simple system like that, that might make you 10% more effective, your revenue might go from 100,000 to $110,000 in 3 months. I know it sounds really simple, and I know it sounds really dumb, but we are the bottlenecks in our companies. So, if we can just become a little bit faster and a little bit better, the potential is is insane. So, systems beat motivation and they beat willpower every time essentially. And the systems don't have to be complicated. they can be boring and unsexy like I was talking about earlier. Another one of my systems is my daily community management right now. So, I went from not knowing anything about communities um a year ago to being I think I'm top three or top four by revenue on school right now. School being the largest community platform on planet Earth. So, I went from like being nobody and not knowing anything to like being one of the top ones. Do you know what the simple system that enabled me to do that was? When I wake up, my laptop is usually on my nightstand. I will roll over all crusty head and I'll grab my laptop and as I wake up I will go through and just respond to all of the community posts and leave a comment on everybody. Uh because I save, you know, 15 or 20 minutes like slowly waking up when I do this. Um and because it's the very first thing that I do, I knock it out before I do anything else. That simple system has enabled me to build a suite of information products that now generate me over $100,000 a month. Sounds simple, but again, it's boring. It's unsexy and it works. So anyway, focus on revenue generating activities. When I say revenue generate activities, I mean talking to customers. I mean setting aside 15 minutes every morning to go through and do three Upwork applications. I mean setting aside 30 minutes every morning to respond to a bunch of community posts or DM five people on your school community that you find interesting or send cold DMs with a video breaking down 10 people's Instagram profiles and just do that every day for like a year. Structure your environment to make important work inevitable. I was talking about rolling over and getting my laptop. I think that's a really good example. But some other examples are, you know, make your workplace a little bit more effective or a little bit more efficient to work in. If you are working on a really crappy computer right now and it like negatively impacts your ability to do some sort of custom Loom video or whatever, like invest a little bit of your money into like a nice computer so you have like an easier experience. If you find yourself hating your work because your back hurts after a while, like invest in like a nice chair. Structure your environment to basically make important work not only inevitable, but I think more importantly enjoyable as well. And then yeah, you know, I've gotten more accomplished in one or two hours of consistent daily action every day. I don't know how many hours realistically I'm spending on all of this combined now. I think it's like three or four. So maybe not just one or two. I've gotten more done in that time period and I'll usually like, you know, I finish with my most important daily actions by 9 or 10 a.m. than most people will do all the way up till, you know, 5 6 7 8 p.m. And that's just because I frontload the most important stuff and I do it. In order to do this, obviously, you need to identify your lever. So in my case right now, because I'm um shifting primarily to information products, for instance, like coaching and YouTube and stuff like that, my lever, the most important thing for me to press is content. So, what have I been doing every single day? I've been publishing a video and I've done this now for the last couple weeks and my engagement's through the roof. I'm making more money now than I ever read before. You know, another one might be communities for me. Okay, when the vast majority of my revenue was uh from my agency offerings, okay, every morning, what did what did I do? I did cold email 30 minutes. I would go through my cold email stack. I would make one tiny change, one improvement to every cold email campaign that I have. I'd do some copyrightiting. I'd analyze the replies. I'd think about better ways to do it. I'd build systems that enable me to do it better. I would do Upwork, okay? And I would do um between I mean some days I did 20, but at least 10 applications a day for a very long period of time. I would do this just immediately the second I woke up. Why? These are my levers, right? I'd send emails. I'd send cold outreach to people that I found important. I would have certain numbers I need to hit and I would just do them. The shape of that is going to change, you know, depending on the sort of business model that you're doing. At the end of the day, the system of just doing the most important thing immediately does not. I'm big on streaks. I uh believe strongly in streaks. The power of streaks for me is immense. I don't want to lose a day not doing my outreach because I, you know, see in my calendar I've gotten 29 days the 30 days of the month. I really don't want to lose that last one. So I call this whole idea momentum. And you only build momentum through consecutive days of action. Um so for me, you know, I focus on momentum. I focus on streaks. If I just build up enough momentum over a long enough period of time, I basically inevitably become unstoppable. And I didn't know that when I started, which is really unfortunate. And I think I could have been a lot better had I learned that earlier. I have a couple of example stories that I could throw at you guys, but I think I'll I think I'll leave it there. Know the video is getting a little bit long. And then yeah, um I touched on this, but design your lifestyle to minimize friction for important work. Okay, so if you guys want to like do this really efficiently, here's my recommendation. When you start, okay, you want to build an AN automation business. The very first thing you do is you identify your revenue generating levers. You list them out. You itemize. You're like, okay, my revenue generating lever, right? You know, right now is this and then this and then, you know, after that it's this. Okay. And then it's like, all right, so how do I structure my environment such a way that I could do these three things every day for a full year? That's my litmus test, right? So it's like, okay, maybe I restructure where my computer is. Hm, maybe I wake up at a different time so I can record my stuff or send my my outreach or do stuff like uninterrupted or hm maybe I block my phone or I I put my phone in my car before I start my work or something. Design your environment to minimize the friction. Set some minimums for these. So maybe this is 10, maybe this is, I don't know, 30 minutes. It's tough to quantify this because obviously it depends on the systems you have. Then maybe this is another 15 minutes. Okay, set your timers. Build your daily minimum viable action. Then just build some accountability structure. It's like, okay, like by the end of the day at 11:59 p.m. I need to have these three things done. If not, I'll text three people and tell them a I'm a loser and buy them all coffee or something, right? If you just do that every day for 30 days, you will crush. And it doesn't have to be for 30 days, but I do like the finality of a month. I think a month is very powerful. So yeah, you know, if you guys can just follow that, I think regardless of what business model you're using, whether it's AI automation or whether it's something else, you guys are inevitably going to crush. Now, the big thing I want to talk about is client psychology, what actually matters. So, we touched on this initially. We got to focus on results here, not implementation. So, I don't actually talk about software and systems unless somebody asks me. I will say, hey, I can totally do what you're asking for. For context, last month, I built a really similar system for somebody else and that enabled them to achieve an additional $25,000 a month in monthly recurring revenue. we did this through this cool mechanism, but I'm not telling them about the software. I'm not telling them about any of this stuff until somebody asks me. The vast majority of the time when I say stuff like this, people are just like, "That sounds awesome." Okay, great. Just do that. Just do whatever you just told me. And that's that's awesome. Like unless somebody specifically says, "Hey, so what is the system that you're going to be using in order to build this? What tools are you going to be using? What no code tool are you going to be using? What programming wires, scripts, servers, all this stuff? How you going to do it?" I don't I don't even tell them anymore. When I started, I told them everything. But what I've come to realize is clients actually prefer the simplicity of like a blackbox system. What is a blackbox system? It's something that they can put money into and then get a lot more money out of. And a client doesn't actually care about this. They don't care. All they care about is that this works. So if they can see that they put in this and then they get that, they'll be very happy and they don't ever need to peer inside of this big black box. The behind the scenes journey is invisible to the client and should be. A couple other little tips I want to give you guys right off the top of my head. Prioritize the first demo experience above all. So, like I I don't mean demo as demo. Like don't don't brand or pitch it as a demo, but like the first time you demo a thing, uh the first time you show them a service, the first time you show them the money that you've been able to generate for somebody else. Like actually think really deeply about how you want to construct that experience cuz first impressions matter a lot. Like I think just poundfor-pound, they're probably like four to five times as valuable as like subsequent second, third, nth impressions. So um you should spend, you know, four to five times the time to to really nail that first one I would say. So yeah, speak their language business. Um don't speak yours technical. And then if you have to spend a ton of effort and time on something, do it on the stuff that's visible for the client. Okay? Don't do it on the stuff that like they can't really see. So what I mean by this is like, hm, you know, well, should we spend 800 hours trying to make this system work for all sorts of data under the sun for hexadesimal inputs and binary inputs and like fourth number system inputs and fifth and sixth and seventh and whatever. Uh, no, no, nobody cares about like you mastering every single edge case. So, don't worry about all that stuff the client's never actually going to enter in as an input to your form or your flow. Instead, it's like, what should you actually be spending an extreme amount of effort on? This is going to sound dumb, but it's like if your system generates an email or something, make the email really pretty. You know, if your system generates a Google doc, make the font nice on the Google doc. Make the colors cool. Look a little bit into design and aesthetics. The stuff that the customer actually sees is oftentimes much more important than all the work that went into producing it. Believe it or not, we are entering an era where it's like form over function in many in many cases. So, design and presentation matter a lot more than uh than you think. So, you know, your actual work might actually be, you know, you have a bunch of technical challenges, tons of implementation details, you have to pick the software, you have to do tons of bug fixes, you have to make all these architecture decisions. The reality is client doesn't care about any of this stuff. It's irrelevant to whether or not they're going to want to pay you or get you on for a follow-up project. You know what the client actually sees? They see that initial um showcase where you run them through the system. They see the uh quality of the interface like what do the emails look like? They see whether or not it solves their problem. Wow, man. This sol this is exactly what I want. This I was totally struggling with this for a while. And also most importantly, was it on time? You know, he told me Tuesday, it's Thursday. People are going to think less of you for that. You know, deliver stuff on time. It doesn't have to be difficult. Um, but if you focus on client satisfaction and things that impact client satisfaction instead of stuff that makes you happy, okay, you're going to get some follow-up work, and that's where the that's where the money is. We make money on follow-up work and and retaining our customers. Next up, I want to talk a little bit about leverage. So, leverage is the idea that you can produce a greater output from a smaller input. The idea about leverage is kind of where the name comes from is the idea of a lever. Okay? Okay. And a lever, just to make a long story short, is kind of like if you have a big rock over here, this is a boulder and it's 10 lb. The distance between this point where the boulder is and then this um thing called a fulcrum, you know, this is just like X. I know we're doing math right now, but bear with me. In order to lift this up, what you need to do is you need to apply the same amount of weight that that thing is just on the other side at the same distance from the fulccom. Okay, so you have kind of a couple options to lift this thing up. Basically, you could you could provide 10 pounds of force here. But what if you go further along the line? Okay, if you're at 2x, believe it or not, actually, just mathematically, in order to lift this 10 pound boulder, you only need to put 5 lbs of force in here. The place at which you choose to apply force is very important is basically the metaphor. I don't know if it was Archimedes or or one of the the old Greek guys, but he said, "Give me a lever long enough and I will move the world." The idea being that like, you know, if we if we can just stretch this puppy out really, really long and eventually we can go, I don't know, like a like a 100x, you could literally have a gust of wind applied to this thing and that gust of wind would be enough to lift this 10 pound rock. I should have made this a thousand pounds or something, but hopefully you guys can see my point. So, now that we're done with the physics stuff, uh what is leverage? It's just more output from less input. And the way you do it is you do it by applying force in a very particular place. This is at the definition of why automation is great. Actually, the whole the whole industry is all about leverage. You can make systems that apply pressure at a specific point. Well, then you can massively improve the profitability of a system itself. So, anyway, the first thing I do nowadays, I calculate the ROI before I do any sort of automation. How much money is the customer currently making on their time? Okay? Okay. And then I lay things out as like a pipeline left to right. And then once I see this pipeline left to right, and I'm like, "Okay, what are they currently doing? Hm, I wonder what points there are that I could apply a little bit of pressure by building an automated system that would massively increase leverage. So templates are your biggest leverage point when you're building a system for a customer because it kind of lets you start at 80% complete. Uh, you know, instead of you having to spend a month building a solution and like working through all the weeds or whatever, you can actually get something that works pretty good in like 5 minutes and then you just make a couple of fine tweaks to the blueprint or template and then you upload it to the no code tool. These are personal leverage systems. This is about you, right? But you know, if you find a way to use templates, what you could do is you could massively improve or increase their results by putting a tiny bit of force up at like the specific points that that matter. In a templates case, that might be you could tell a client, hey, I'm going to deliver this for you at 72 hours. I don't actually recommend delivering projects much faster than that because the longer you take a project to fulfill a project, usually it's correlated with the client thinking that you had to do more work in order to do so and they're willing to compensate a little bit more for it. But, you know, you could have that be one of like your your benefits. And you could use templates in order to like significantly out compete everybody else that's pitching them at like 3 or 4 weeks. Get that initial business and then, you know, have your company scale from there. You could spend less time on it. You could do a lot of things, but that's just one simple example of leverage. I personally don't believe in automating highv value client touch points. I don't automate anything in my community, for instance, because there's a lot of perceived value in just you talking to me. Why would I automate that? I mean, why would I give anybody the impression that I am not personally the one talking to you? What are highv value client touch points in the agency space? Um, it's like your initial call, your initial contact. I see so many people out there that are like, "hm, what if I create an AI voice caller and have my AI voice caller close the client?" It's like, clients don't care about that. Clients definitely don't want that. Do not have the first point of contact with you, which is a very high leverage point of contact, be an automated system that kind of screws up half the time, right? So, it's about just choosing, picking and choosing where you apply that force. I mentioned this previously, but design matters just as much as function. Some tasks are actually worth doing manually forever. So, I check my bank balance every morning. Takes me five minutes. I copy over some transactions between accounts and stuff like that. And I have like a record of all the money that I've spent the last 24 hours. I do that manually. It's actually worth me doing it manually because it takes me 5 minutes and then I know exactly how much money went into my account yesterday, exactly how much money is going out, which is very, very powerful to have as a business owner. Anyway, the point I'm basically making is lay out the system from start to finish. Okay, just on paper. This is a client system. You know, this is um this is sort of the first thing that happens. the second thing that happens, the third thing that happens, the fourth thing that happens, and this the fifth thing that happens. Once you have it on paper, then you get just lay it out in front of you. Then you can choose what points you should build systems for. Hm, I can really automate four. And if I automate four, the whole throughput of the pipeline is going to go up. The customer will be able to make a lot more money. Or maybe I'll do one and four, but I'm not going to touch two, three, and five cuz they're they're okay right now. So once you've systematized first, you've identified the points of high leverage, then you can go ahead and build systems that scale up. Here's like a quick little flowchart or decision tree basically of how exactly to go about employing this process. So is it a high leverage activity? If yes, is it client facing? If yes, is personal touch critical? If yes, you should do manually. Okay, you should do manually, 100% manually. There should be no robots involved in the process. You should create templates and SOPs. Then you should revisit this periodically just in case and then grow your business that way. If it is not a high leverage activity, then very easily consider automating or delegating that. build systems that enable you to, you know, achieve 80% of it with like 20% of the work. If it's worth it for you to build an automation, like actually spend the time going through the process of putting together an automation, which may realistically take a few hours, then you know it's worth it. Build the automation, monitor the effectiveness, and then optimize. But if it's not worth it, then a lot of the time there are a lot of systems that are in my business nowadays, they're like, I should not have tried automating initially. So, I just keep them manually because, you know, there's some very simple things to do as a person that if you do them yourself will massively improve leverage. One thing that I've started, well, I'm not doing them as much anymore. One thing that I started doing after about I think like eight or nine months my agency was I started recording customized videos walking people through a proposal. So, I had like completely automated my proposal process, which is great. I think the proposal generator is fantastic. So, highly recommend it. This doesn't change um my recommendation to use it. But um I found that like when I recorded a custom two-minute video and then I attached it to the proposal and in that video I literally just walked through my proposal top down saying, "Hey Peter, how's it going? Just wanted to record a quick video for you walking through my proposal." My conversion rate went up something like 15%. So my conversion rate already was like 15%. So I basically doubled my conversion rate for two extra minutes of work. Super simple, super easy. Why? It was the warmth. It was the perceived value of like having a consultant walk you through the thing. It's like, hm, this is really complicated, but if I watch that video, then I'll I'll know everything that I need to know in 2 minutes. and then oh man that Nick guy is so nice. I like working with him. I want to work with professionals like that. You know, is it fully automated anymore? No, it's not. But I was able to double my conversion rate with just a little bit of manual work applied at the right place. Hopefully you guys appreciated all of the points that I made in this video. These are all points that I wish I could write on a letter and bury in a time machine and have go back 30 or 40 years. Um, unfortunately I can't. So the second best thing I can do is just help as many of you guys avoid making the same mistakes that I did by getting your belief systems right from day one, getting the systems right from day one, and just understanding the fundamental concepts of leverage for instance and like the idea of doing some things manually even though we're an AN automation agency. Really just not different from any other business if I'm real. So most of the same tactics and tips that I'm helping you guys apply to your current AN automation company will apply for all future businesses. If you internalize these early, you'll be a lot better off than if you try and sort them out later. All right, so you now understand both the technical foundations and the business realities of being an a automation freelancer or agency owner. But even with really good technical skills and the right business mindset, I do find most a automation freelancers still fail at this next part, which is actually selling the service to business owners. You're about to discover why most a automation providers are basically unknowingly sabotaging their own sales by focusing on what I think are completely the wrong things. And that's what I'm going to talk about in this section. and I'm going to reveal the fundamental shift in sales psychology that transforms how business owners perceive the quality of your service. Instead of being seen as just another tech provider, the idea here is we want to position you as a strategic partner that they can't afford to lose. This is where technical knowledge meets sales psychology. And getting this right is the difference between struggling to close deals and then having clients that are actually genuinely excited to work with you because I think you can deliver return on investment. Most people are pitching AI services completely backwards and it's killing their AI business. Over the last two years, I've sold several hundred,000 worth of AI automations to companies. And I did this through a variety of ways. Cold email, Upwork, communities, and now organically through my own YouTube. In this video, I'm going to show you the three critical shifts in sales strategy that enabled me to scale my own AI automation agency from zero all the way to 72K per month. And what's really interesting is none of them have anything to do with the technology itself. Let's get into it. Business owners care about outcomes, not technology. The biggest mistake I see AI automation agencies make is they obsess over the technology instead of the outcomes that that technology delivers. Let me be brutally honest. Most business owners don't actually care whether you're using GPT40. They don't care if you're using Claude. They don't care if you're using DeepSeek or any other custom LLM that you might or might not have fine-tuned yourself. Uh what they care about are results. When I first started pitching AI services, I would go into excruciating levels of detail about the models and the workflows and basically all the technical aspects. I actually remember back in the day I did this one call where I spent like 15 minutes just explaining to the CEO how the automation worked under the hood how the model was trained all the various technical aspects the parameters and stuff like that. Um they explicitly said to me that's great but how much money is this going to make me? Here's what business owners actually care about. Will this make me money? Will this save me money? Will this reduce my risk? Will this give me an edge over my competitors? Before you mention a single technical detail, essentially that's what you need to focus on. So uh my recommendation for you is to nail down these three points. Focus on revenue impact. Exactly how is this system going to drive more revenue. Is it going to drive more revenue because of the hyperparameters and how they were tuned? No. No business owner really cares about that. Okay. What they care about is how that system is going to interplay with the market, usually with real customers or real clients in order to convince them to open up their wallets and checkbooks and pay the company more money. So that's what you need to focus on. The second big thing is cost reduction. So how much money is this system going to save? And the third is time leverage aka specifically um whose time is this going to free up and what is that person going to do with that free and available time. So when I shifted from saying stuff like we'll build you a GPT4 powered lead qualification system to something that's more benefits focused aka I don't know we'll build you a system that converts 30% more leads without adding headcount. Uh, my close rate went up significantly and yours can too. Businesses want proven solutions, not cutting edge experiments. The second critical mistake I see is when people pitch novel and unproven AI solutions instead of the more battle tested ones that I and many other people have used that have consistently delivered results for many years. Um, I'm talking like NAN AI agents. I'm talking about more flexible technologies, MCP servers and stuff like that. things that while really cool and are probably the way that the industry is headed aren't really capable of driving consistent and valuable return on investments today or if they are capable are not capable of delivering more than a competing available technology like a traditional AI automation for instance. So when I first started my agency I was always chasing the newest capabilities. I would experiment with different models day after day, different approaches day after day and I figured that like I was just adding to my rolodex, right? The more knowledge that I knew, the more clients would be impressed by the technology um that you know I I understood. I had to learn a cold hard reality check which is that most businesses with real money to spend don't want to be your guinea pig. They're not spending money on R&D or research and development. They're spending money on marketing usually to produce some sort of ROI. So businesses in general, they want solutions that will work for other businesses with a proven return on investment. Here's an early pitch of mine that failed miserably. We can build you an AI system that uses the latest models to automatically write all of your marketing content. It's revolutionary, cutting edge technology, and nobody else is using it. That sounds nice. Definitely a lot of words, but do those words really mean anything to the customer? I mean, spoiler alert, no. So, here's how to win. Take that exact pitch and phrase it in ways that the customer understands and in ways that the customer can conceptualize your value. What's something that most customers are concerned about? They're actually concerned about reliability. They're concerned about the reputation. They're concerned about the amount of money this is going to take. They're concerned that you haven't actually done this before. They're concerned that they're going to get scammed. Okay? There's this big list of essentially things that customers worry about at the back of their minds. I'm not inventing any of this stuff. This stuff is very tried and true. It's been written about for much longer than I've been alive. If you just take these ideas and you rephrase that previous pitch, you might have something like this. We've built the same system for three companies in your industry. Company A saw $420,000 of new revenue in just 6 months. Company B reduced all of their costs by 65% and company C generated 38 more qualified leads a day. Here's how it works. I again had to find this out the hard way when I was building my own AI automation agency. I would get on tons of calls and I was super jazzed about the technology. Obviously, who wouldn't be? But when clients actually responded to me, when they actually, you know, gave me their business was only when I showed them specific systems I built before for other clients and results that those systems had produced. In other words, I frontloaded with social proof. I showed them that, you know, I have been pre-selected. I've been validated by other customers. Other people have trusted me enough to pay me their money, meaning that the likelihood that I am going to be a total and abject failure for you is lower. I wasn't focused on how crazy and new and amazing the technology was. customers actually care less about that than you might think. They much prefer like proven, repeatable, reliable solutions that have worked for years um compared to ones that, you know, might be new and and and hot off the press. In my community, the members that consistently land clients are almost never the ones with the most technical knowledge. And I've seen over 1500 of them now. They're ones that can clearly demonstrate proven results from systems that they've already built or they can imply experience and social proof with systems that other people have built. So to recap, focus on specific problems that the customer has confirmed that they have. Show examples of solutions that you've actually already built before and then provide concrete results wherever possible. At the end of the day, innovation and you know, your ability to revolutionize an industry, these things get attention, but it's proven reliability that ultimately gets the check. Business owners want partners, not tools. The third major mistake I see AI agencies make is they position themselves as basically little tool providers instead of the owners of outcomes instead of the owners or partners of a business. In reality, businesses already have way too many tools. They don't want another one. They don't want a fancy chat box that they can send messages to that can add things to their CRM. Okay? What they want is a system that invalidates the need for them to have to worry about putting anything into the CRM to begin with. They have software stacks upon software stacks. They have thousands. I mean, most businesses that I come into are spending thousands of dollars of extra money that they don't need to on tools that they never use. So, the last thing they need is another complicated system to figure out or waste their time on, right? What most businesses are actually looking for is they're looking for somebody to take ownership of delivering an outcome or a deliverable. Now, I learned this lesson myself probably over a dozen times now. It's a very hard lesson to learn, but when I shifted from selling one-off automation projects to longerterm retainer relationships where I guaranteed specific results, my income went through the roof. both because of leverage but also because I stopped being just somebody that you went to to get a specific job done or get a tool built or whatever. And I started being a strategic partner that you know the person could rely on not to just build the spec that they were given but to actually come up with a new spec. Now in my automation agency I noticed something really interesting. When I pitch clients on building an AI system the push back was always about price. But when I started by pitching I will generate you Xqualified leads per month using an AI automation system that I will build manage and take care of completely. the conversation would completely change. Uh, basically the same concerns that I had before, the ones about price disappeared and instead the price seemed reasonable because I was taking complete and utter ownership over the outcome. The cost was less important than the deliverable that I was providing. Now, it's not just my experience. Um, in my community, the most successful agency owners don't just drop off a tool and say good luck. They stick around. They ensure that it delivers the promised results. They deliver a return on investment. And you know, when they pitch people, they don't pitch people as I will build you a system. They pitch people as, "I will generate you a return on investment. I will make you $15,000 in the next 30 days or you don't pay." They will conceptualize this as a no-brainer outcome. Not necessarily a dream, but like a definable goal that you can actually achieve. So, yeah, sell the outcome, don't sell the tool. Uh, take responsibility for delivering results. If you are positioning yourself as a partner and equal to them, you have to be willing to also accept the responsibility that entails. and then ultimately structure the pricing around the value of that outcome, not how many hours it takes. This approach doesn't just close more clients, it also creates stickier client relationships. And stickier client relationships and automation and really, if I'm honest, any sort of agency space is the path to real wealth, MR. The businesses that pay the most for AI services aren't buying access to technology. They're buying peace of mind that somebody is competent enough to handle an important business function for them and make a ton of money. Now that we understand that business owners want return and they want outcomes more than they necessarily want the fancy new Deepseek model off the block, let's talk about how to position your AI automation services to match and ultimately exceed those expectations. Um, I've basically developed this framework that I've been using both in my community and also in my client relationships. And I'm going to share with you this framework. It's substantially improved my own ability to both close and then retain. And it's something that I consider really integral to just my day-to-day work as an A automation agency owner. So step one is start with their specific business problem. Don't start by talking about AI. Just focus entirely on the problem that customer is experiencing. I might say something like, "So you mentioned you guys are struggling to qualify your leads quickly enough and you think that your sales team is wasting time on poor fit prospects. Is that right? Well, tell me about that." I don't actually bring up AI until I'm very, very clear what the problem is. And usually, to be honest, when somebody jumps on a call with me, they're expecting me to start talking about AI. Usually it gets to the point where, you know, I haven't talked about AI or automation or anything for like 20 or 30 minutes into the call and finally they're at the point where they're like, "Nick, are you going to talk about AI and automation? When are we going to do that?" I'm like, "Well, we're going to do that once I fully understand your business problem." When I get to the point where I do and then I drop, okay, well, here's the technology that's going to help. It hits that much harder cuz we basically just spent the last 20 or 30 minutes focusing on their pain points anyway. So, that's step one. Step two is to quantify the cost of the problem that you've just spent the last 20 or 30 minutes pressing on. This might be something like, "So, how much does a single lead cost you?" $15,000. Okay. Um, if you're losing $15,000 and your current approach loses you two to three customers a month, how much is that in total? 30 to45,000. So, based on what you've told me, this cost you roughly 30K a month in wasted sales time, missed opportunities, and growth. Is that a fair conceptualization? I will, you know, I don't just shove the words in their mouth. Essentially, I will uncover exactly how much money the problem is costing them in their own words, and then I'll usually have them do some sort of confirmation of it. So now you know we've uncovered the problem. We're not talking about AI or automation at all. We're just uncovering the problem. Then we're quantifying the problem. Step three is you present your solution in terms of its ability to solve those problems, not in terms of their technical features. So now that I understand the problem, my solution is okay, great. I'll build you a system that pre-qualifies leads automatically. It'll ensure your sales team only speaks with really high potential prospects. You can keep your closers on the highest ROI deals. You can farm off anything that's not qualified or not high ROI to people that might be a little bit worse. This is going to typically increase conversion rates by 10 to 20%. We'll trial it out on you for a month. Don't achieve XYZ outcome. You don't pay, but I'm extraordinarily confident it will. Lastly, step four is to back it up with proof. So, you don't just say your solution. You say, "I've implemented similar systems for clients in the retail vertical and they see an average ROI of 300% within the first 60 days." Right? What you're doing now is you're positioning your solution as the solution to their problem. Then you're saying, "And by the way, if you're worried about this, I've already done the same thing for all of these other people." And last but not least, you talk about pricing. When you talk about pricing, don't worry about it, okay? Don't It's not weird. If somebody jumps on a sales call with you, they're expecting to chat about pricing. The best way to do it is to frame your pricing in terms of ROI, not cost. So, you might say something like, "The monthly investment is $5,225, which based on the numbers we discussed should deliver a 4 to 6x ROI within your first month. I of course guarantee my service, and this is very important to me. I want to make sure you generate multiples on your investment. And so we're going to do everything in our power to make sure that that is so. So I do this approach myself. I've seen this approach work across dozens of industries and hundreds of clients. The key ultimately is that AI is barely mentioned. It is just the means to the end. It's not the star of the show. Okay? Don't lose the forest for the trees. As an agency owner, your job is solving business problems. It's not building cool fun AI things. So while AI is novel and it will give you that attention, at least at the first interaction, ultimately nobody really cares about it. Um, I've heard it said that nobody cares about the hammer. They care about the house that it builds. AI is just your hammer. The the business outcome is the house. All right, so a lot of that's just theory. Let's talk about how you can actually implement this approach in your pitches and your marketing immediately. Uh, step one, if you are watching this video right now and you think that you suffer from this problem, audit your current messaging. Check out your website, then check out your proposals, then check out your pitch deck, and really just check out anywhere that you're talking about your services. Count how many times you mention AI, okay, versus specific business outcomes. If you're mentioning the the tech more than the results, that's a red flag. Um, you know, count up the number of times you're pressing on a painoint versus just being like, "Hey, we have really cool technology." And if you you do the second more than you do the first, you got yourself a major problem. You need to reduce the number of times that you're talking about AI. The second big tip is to restructure your discovery calls. When I work with clients in my community, I usually give them a simple discovery or sales call structure. I spend the first 70% of the call asking the customer about their business problems and their goals. Then I spent around 20% presenting my solution, which is always framed in terms of their business outcomes. Then I'll spend maybe the last 10% doing some sort of objection or concern handling or discussing next steps. What a lot of people will do is they'll spend 10% of the time listening to the customer, 10% of the time offering their solution, then 80% of the time trying to handle objections. I don't think you need to handle objections anywhere near as much as most people say. If you're very studious with your consultative sales, if you're robust and consistent in that approach, you know, you you've usually handled most of the objections up front by demonstrating what an ROI this would deliver. So, don't dive into technical explanations until specifically asked. And even if somebody does specifically ask you, keep it high level. Just always bring it right back to business impact and don't worry too much about the objections. Try and handle them all up front. The third thing is reframe your case studies. Okay, the simplest and easiest hack to do this. If your current case studies are AI powered cold email system, instead name that case study how client X generated 35 new meetings in 30 days using our AI system. So focus on the result first. Then only worry about the system or the implementation at the very end. If you have a case study, your case study isn't I built an AI powered cold outreach system that generated $100,000. It's I generated $100,000 with an AI powered cold outreach system. Now, a lot of people resist this approach because they want to show off their technical expertise. But the thing is, the people that can afford to pay you well don't have the technical knowledge to really care or evaluate what any of this stuff means anyway. The only thing they actually care about is how confidently you can deliver the outcomes that they want. In the business world, complexity does not sell. It is clarity that sells. So, I have a lot of people bring up a variety of objections at this point. Some of them are valid, some of them aren't. I'm just going to cover like a big list of FAQs essentially and then answer those FAQs. And the number one objection I get is what if my clients are specifically asking about the AI technology? And it's true. Some clients are going to ask you technical questions, especially nowadays when AI is hot and trendy and these clients want to learn about AI and they want to feel like they have a part in their destiny. When this happens, I will give them a brief simple explanation, but almost immediately after pivot back to business outcomes. So I'll say something like, uh, the specific model we use matters far less than the results that that model delivers. we're using some variant of GPT40 and based on our testing, this approach will give you XYZ result. Maybe another objection might be something like, well, yeah, Nick, but I don't have a lot of business experience, but I do have a lot of AI and technical experience. And I get it. You want to show that you know your stuff, but expertise is demonstrated through results, not really fancy workflows or complicated systems. In my experience, if you throw in technical terms, that actually often backfires on you. Um, sometimes clients will think that you are using that complexity to justify your high prices. they will think that you are essentially gatekeeping knowledge um and that you're better than them and that you know you're g you're gatekeeping that knowledge or gate gatekeeping that information as a source of value and I don't think that that's true. I mean it's like it's almost like a car deal like like a car dealership or something like do you really need a car dealership anymore just to be real with you? I mean, in the year 20, well, I'm not going to mention the date cuz I was told by a YouTube strategist to never mention a date in a video, but in insert a current year, do you really need to go to a car dealership and puddle around for 45 minutes to an hour going back and forth with uh, you know, some representative about something that you may or may not really need. No, it's an extraordinarily inefficient means of achieving your desired result, which is to buy a freaking car. Okay? Uh, it's kind of like that. Like when you start talking in fancy words and big jargon and oh this puppet can fit 420 horsepower in there like you you lose a lot of trust from the customer. My goal is to make it as easy as humanly possible for the customer to understand what the return on investment is so that they could just decide ASAP really quickly so that if they're not into it I don't waste my damn time anymore. That should be your goal as well. Another really common objection is what if they want to know how it works? And there's a difference between explaining the implementation process versus going deep on like AI architecture. instead of saying, "Oh, you know, uh, that's a great question. We actually trained our model using this multimodal approach and, um, I don't know, we we're we're working off a fine-tuned branch of, you know, Deepseek, R, whatever. Focus on the workflow. You know, we'll set up the system. We'll connect it to your existing tools. We'll train it on your data and we'll have it operational within 14 days. Then we'll monitor performance and optimize based on the results. And if we need to, we'll actually add some more examples to the prompt." Right? You can talk about the AI and you can talk about the specifics so long as somewhere at the end of that you tie that back into what the customer actually cares about which is the return on investment. Another common objection is my prospects don't value what they don't understand. And this is pretty backwards thinking. Most business owners don't understand how their website's code works or what it was built with but their website still makes them money. Right? You don't need to understand every tiny feature or every tiny component in order to understand the bigger picture. I mean, scientists understand how the brain creates thought, but not necessarily the underpinnings behind every single like, you know, atom in the cell, right? When I coach AI automation agency owners in my own community, I usually find ones that are struggling to close deals are almost always the ones that are overexplaining and overengineering their tech. The ones that close consistently are usually relentlessly focused on business outcomes. I think if you make this shift, you guys aren't only going to close more deals. You'll also be able to charge significantly more for the same work, and you might even be able to get away with doing it simpler and easier than you think. I used to do freelance software engineering and I can tell you 100% that I charge much more money now dragging and dropping modules across the screen than I ever did before when I was building out some complex blackbox script. All right, so let me wrap this up by summarizing the key mindset shifts and strategies that you guys are going to need to make in order to sell high ROI AI services. The first is to focus on outcomes, not AI technology. The second is to emphasize proven solutions, not cutting edge experiments. The third is to position yourself as an outcome owner. So somebody that owns results, not a provider of tools, not just a little code monkey. If you implement these three strategic shifts in your AI business, I mean, it's virtually guaranteed that both your close rates are going to improve, but so will the quality of your relationships and the quality of your general life. All right, awesome. So you now know how to position and sell your AI automation services in such a way that resonates with business owners. The idea is we now focus on outcomes, not technology. But even with a strong sales pitch, you can still waste months, if not years, targeting wrong markets entirely. So my idea here is I want to show you why one of the most commonly recommended target markets, which is local businesses, is actually a trap that keeps the vast majority of a automation freelancers stuck in these really low revenue cycles, especially people that live in relatively low cost of living areas. The idea behind this next section is to save you months of frustration by showing you exactly which markets to avoid and why. Before we show you where to focus your efforts, it's crucial you understand where not to waste your time. So, it's not about discouraging, it's about directing that energy towards people that have money in their hands that can actually reward your skills appropriately. I've seen a lot of people talking about how local businesses are a gold mine for AI and automation services. I really don't think that they are. I scaled my own AI and automation agency to 72K a month. And in this video, I just want to break down a few of the reasons why I do not recommend going after local businesses and I want to give you guys some alternatives instead. So, I titled this why I don't sell AI to local businesses despite what gurus claim. It's funny because a bunch of dudes are just calling me a guru earlier. And uh I do resent that claim, but you know, when you get big enough, people start calling you whatever the hell they want. I guess this makes sense if you're doing NAND, if you're doing make.com, if you're selling agents, if you're selling traditional AI automations built in OpenAI, whatever you are selling, this is going to apply for you. Okay. Basically, local businesses are generally not a good client profile to go for because of three major issues. The first is some lead genen problems, then value perception problems, then finally some financial constraints. So, I'm just going to go over all of these with you guys and then give you some alternatives that I think might be a little bit better. Biggest issue with local businesses is just the limited geographic pool that you're operating under and the difficulty and relative inaccessibility of scraping large amounts of local businesses to pitch some services. So, what I mean is you have a limited geographic pool, right? How many HVAC businesses are there in Chattanooga? If your niche is HVAC businesses in Chattanooga, you can only really, you know, shoot your shot like 200 times. If your niche is, you know, B2B creative agencies in the United States, for instance, you could shoot your shot hundreds of thousands of times. Uh, in which option do you think would teach you more? Which one do you think you get better at doing the thing? Obviously, the latter, right? As a result of the fact that you have to scrape local. Usually you have to use these like Google Maps base scrapers or you have to like scrape some sort of big directory, yellow pages or whatnot. So, the cost of doing this is usually a lot higher than something like Apollo or LinkedIn. Now, that's not to say just cuz the cost is high you shouldn't do this. But, if you combine it in conjunction with all the other points I'm going to make, I think you'll see why. There are some exceptions where it costs a lot to get an audience list, but then you make way more money on the audience list cuz nobody else is doing it. It's kind of like a barrier to entry, but this isn't really one of those cuz local businesses get pitched all the freaking time. It's also difficult to scale the outreach and all this just leads to poor ROI and your own marketing spend. So, I'll walk through a lot of this in more detail in a second and give you guys those alternatives. But yeah, that's that's the high level view and I just want to give people the 8020 within 5 minutes of the video. The second issue is value perception problems. Local business owners, as crappy as it is for me to say, typically have pretty low technical literacy. I mean like if you think about it, the internet is where most of the money today is made, right? So if a business is doing it like brick and mortar, either they're super passionate about what they're doing and they're technically literate, which is very unlikely, or they're just like they kind of lack the ability to get on the internet and make a thriving and successful internet business and take advantage of like the multiples of leverage and stuff. So they're kind of operating from that lower technical literacy standpoint. Now, there are lots of opportunities in local businesses, don't get me wrong. One big move I'm seeing right now are a lot of private equity companies rolling up like 50 or 500 dental clinics or 50 or 500 other local Botox clinics or something like that and then implementing some of our AI and automations in those. But usually you're not working with a local business. You're working with a private equity firm. You're working with a company doing the roll up. You know what I mean? Anyway, uh they have pretty low technical literacy which means it's difficult for them to really understand everything that you're talking about honestly just from a bird's eye view. You have to do a lot of explaining and you usually have to justify, you know, the problem that they're facing that they don't even realize the solution that you have for them. You have to explain that, too. Then you have to say why you're the right fit for it. Isn't that just a ton of work? Well, why do you have to do that every time, right? There's so many better options out there. A lot of your sales calls just end up being education as opposed to selling. And I've sold to, I mean, over a 100 local businesses probably at this point. I used to do doortodoor selling marketing services and like the introductory marketing automation services way back before AI and automation as an industry was even a thing back in in 2018 and 2019. Most of my business was education and now I steer clear of that and basically the further away I've gotten from local businesses the more money that I've made if I'm honest. Um a lot of them are also kind of skeptical of digital solutions. A lot of them don't even know what catchy BT is or don't know how to do it. So you just get very long sales cycles with the stuff. Okay. And then the third quick bullet point to get you most of the value of this video quickly is a lot of them have financial constraints. I realized the other day um that with the money that I'm making, I could rent out several floors of an office tower in my city, Calgary. Calgary is some of the cheapest rent in Canada to be honest for commercial space right now. So, it's not exactly a massive accomplishment, but it just kind of hit me, you know, that I, as an internet business, am so disconnected from ever having to worry about any of that stuff. It just blows my mind. You know, I don't have to pay for rent. Maybe I'll pay $300 or $400 for some local co-working space just so I can get my tea and, you know, drink their really watered down beer on Fridays and have fun with the gang. Uh, but I'm not I'm not doing that as a core requirement of my business, right? You know, if you're running a local services business, your office is a core requirement of your business. Your warehouse core requirement of your business. All this stuff is a core requirement. And so if you have to spend an additional 10% of your margin before you've even done anything else with the money, before you delivered even a scent of value to anybody, then right off the bat, you're operating at disadvantage, right? So they typically have tight profit margins. Kind of kind of sucks. They also typically have high physical overhead. And then they have like no dedicated tech budget. I mean, their their budget that I would spend on a bunch of software platforms, they have to spend on keeping the lights on, man. Heating in the winter. It's crazy to think about, honestly. So yeah, a lot of them are pretty price sensitive. It's not to say that companies with low profit margins are bad because if you can change let's say a company with 5% profit margins to 10% what you've done is you've added objectively 5% margin but subjectively to then you have doubled their bottom line right so it's not that that's inherently bad but just to give you guys some context the physical the overhead and then the tech budget are a big issue. Okay, cool. So, let me just run you through in a little bit more detail and then maybe I'll give you guys some more examples and I'll give you guys some some alternative things you can do. And I'm also just going to throw a bunch of funny memes at you because I was told that that's how that's how you maximize engagement on these videos. So, it's a lead genen nightmare. Okay, local businesses are geographically constrained like I was talking about earlier. So, the pool of potential clients shrinks dramatically when you target local businesses versus digital businesses. I gave you guys an example of HVAC in HVAC in Chattanooga, but I mean like you know millions of examples, right? Dentists in Vancouver. I actually think dentists are like the best AI and automation niche out of all the possible local businesses you could work with to be honest. But like even like dentists in Vancouver, how many are you going to get, right? So a lot of the time when you're doing like a really high throughput um high volume outreach, like you need a lot of leads to test stuff, like if you don't have leads to test stuff on, you know, the likelihood that your offer is ever going to be really good is is kind of low. So you kind of do need to like burn a few of these leads. And if you only have like 200, 300 contacts per city or whatever, like you really going to make it that big? I don't think so. Also, then it costs a lot more to do that testing and burning and so on and so forth. If you do digital businesses, there's like a million in one ways to scrape leads. Like, it's not even close, right? You would just search for whatever you want on Google and then you would have a Google SER with, you know, 8 billion agency, you know, like B2B creative agency in Delaware. Even if you do a digital business using a location or something, you will get like a billion businesses. And then you could just have some sort of scraper go through all those businesses, list all those websites. Have a scraper go through all those websites, get the email addresses on those websites, or use something like any mail finder, whatever. If you do the brickandmortar sort of businesses, odds are a lot of them don't even have websites. They operate entirely off of Facebook pages. And I mean, like this is just more pre-selection bias. Like if they don't even have the money to have a website or they don't even know what a website is worth to their business, then do you really want to be working with them? they don't have pre-existing systems that print money then your value as an AI automation person is quite low relatively speaking because your value is mostly you take something that works okay then you just skyrocket it you take a pre-existing system and then you skyrocket it you don't like build new systems I mean you can but it's usually a lot more difficult to do that this is the 0ero to one problem which if you could solve you just wrote it disproportionately but the much easier problem to solve is the one to 100 problem how do you 100x something that's working and that's what we do uh really easily yeah a lot of the Lead databases are outdated or incomplete. Time spent on personalization for local businesses doesn't scale. Outreach experiments that would take days with digital businesses take months with local ones easily. There are some kind of creative ways of doing local outreach. I've heard of people. There are a couple services out there like swag box services or business holder placard services or whatever where you can for a very low fee actually just like have a bunch of stuff laser printed that seems customized to the person and then you can actually ship them over to their address and it might cost you $2 or $3 a lead. So if you have a really small number of people working in a city, you can't actually use that. But keep in mind that like these are very high cost outreach methods, right? So most people that are watching these videos tend to be more in the beginner side of things. And if you guys are at the beginner side of things, odds are you don't have a lot of disposable income. So yeah, maybe not until you're like super super high up there and have the the money to piss into the wind. Yeah. So here's just a visual representation because I want to offer both visual and text representations. Here's like an example issue where, you know, if you wanted to do local HVAC companies, you want to do NYC, 200 potential clients. Well, we have more than 200 here. I think I was probably kind of ahead of myself. Let's say that there's like, I don't know, 1500 potential clients. We send 1500 emails. Then from this, maybe we get like 10 responses or something. We get three sales calls. We get one client. After we're done with that one client, we got to go to a new city. And NYC is one of the big cities. All right. Now, um, you know, I'm not trying to say that out of the 1500 CL uh leads, you're only going to get eight responses. It just, this all depends on your math, but I'm not talking about the math right now. I'm talking about your actual approach. I'm just talking about, you know, a few example scenarios, hypotheticals to illustrate how unlikely it is that you're going to really crush it with this. Okay. Another big issue again is that value perception. So, um, this is one of the funnier memes. You can't really understand the value of AI and automation for your client. You have to teach them, right? So, because they lack the technical understanding of this stuff, a lot of your sales call is going to be spent educating them. And I mean, educating is great, and that is a big chunk of like a consultant's job for sure, but you don't want to be educating that much. Okay? Local businesses usually don't use these tools. And so, what's interesting is the the perceived value of one of these tools can be um higher or lower. It's weird. Like, there's like two audiences. The first audience is like, "Wow, you can do this. That's crazy. That'll completely change my business." The other person's like, "Yeah, but why would I need that?" Obviously, the first person is easier to work with because they see a ton of value with it. But can they even do a lot with that is kind of the issue. And then when you actually want to roll out a system, like I'll give you guys an example for one of my um uh one of my like dental dental clients a while back. They had seminars that they did and then they signed people up at the seminars and they were doing this like really manual approach where the person at the end of the seminar would actually give all of the people pieces of paper with like sign up cards. If they wanted to sign up for some program, they could do it. So everybody had to like wait there at the end of the presentation and fill this in. So I was like, "Hey, why don't we do like a digital approach?" So me and my business partner at the time whipped up like an iPad based system with like a type form and you would log in and then you'd fill the type form and you know submit the information and it worked great. It was it was awesome. But do you know how long it took to test that thing? We had to wait until the next seminar. Then once the seminar happened, we had to actually like see the respondents of the seminar happened live. And then the next time the seminar happened, we'd make a couple of changes and see how that went. The next time another seminar would happen, it was like every 2 3 weeks, right? And the volume of data we were getting was basically nothing. And to be honest, we weren't even working in that person's cities. it was difficult for us to actually see what was going on with the iPads and make recommendations as to where to place them along the seminar route and stuff. So, I mean like imagine if it was just digital form, right? How much easier would it be? Um, in hindsight, there are many better ways we could do it. We could have just um gotten the uh data of uh like all the we could have just gotten all the cell phone numbers, the SMS numbers, and just SMS everybody a link to a form and then everybody at the exact same time would have all gotten SMS messages. They all would have whipped out their phone on the seminar and it would have been clear like, "Hey, we just sent you guys an SMS with a link to this form. or if you guys are interested in this, just fill it on your phone right now. But whatever. I mean, you know, we all make mistakes, including me working with local business owners. So, yeah, you just have to constantly dumb down technical explanations. No real point. The contrast is with digital business owners who a lot of them already use Zapier, CRM, and no code tools. They immediately grasp the value proposition. And like most people on digital now, they use like chatb2. They understand how AI works. They're like inherently interested in it. So, you don't have to do any of that stuff if you're selling a digital business. So, here's like two examples of just how sales calls go. Let's say you're selling somebody that does HVAC. You might spend the first 15 minutes explaining what the CRM is, then explaining some automation concepts, then 15 minutes justifying why it's better than paper, 10 minutes on an actual solution, and then once you're done with all this, you haven't actually built up the value. You've just like basically educated them. So, what happens? Well, the owner obviously only cares about the price. They don't want to pitch you. And then you got a follow-up call, more education. It just takes a lot longer to get to the point where somebody's actually interested in your service. Well, guess what? All that education is just done for you with like digital people. Not always, but a lot of the time. So now you just discuss, okay, what's your current tool stack? Okay, what's your workflow like? Okay, how much money are you making? Okay, great. Here's what an implementation would look like. Okay, great. Here's what some ROI metrics that we think might look like. Okay, great. We can make that decision right now. Shorter sales cycle just means more money. Like imagine if you have a pipeline. I'm going to draw a pipeline again, guys. I'm so sorry. I know that all the time this looks like private parts, but whatever. I'm doing it. That's uh I'm going to take a drawing class at some point. Um anyway, this is your this is your business. Okay, say you have uh I don't know, one Okay, let's say you one lead a week. So, one lead a week goes through your pipeline, makes you $5,000. Okay, at the end of it, they're happy. If you could just you could do a couple things to improve the amount of money that you make, right? You could change the amount of money you charge per lead from $5,000 to $10,000. So, if you do this, you will have changed $5,000 to $10,000, right? That's great. But another thing you could do is you could actually just change the length of your sales cycle. So instead of one lead a week, okay, maybe it's two leads a week. Well, now you've just done the exact same thing. Instead of you making $5,000 per week, you're now making $10,000 per week. But you've done it without changing the price. All you've changed is you changed the sales velocity. You change the throughput. So um variety of different ways to increase the total amount of money a company is making. But one of them is literally just like speed up how long it takes for people to make decisions and buy in. And then finally, there's the financial reality here. Where is that money? I don't know. Guy can't see it anywhere here. You know, they just have tighter margins. They have less money to spend on growth. They have additional expenses that they need to pay for, right? So, customer acquisition cost, lifetime value ratio is poor. This is um this is really the big part of this, so I'll just list it. A lot of the time, your lifetime value is going to be substantially lower with an in-person business. And then the customer acquisition cost won't really appreciably change. So, it just doesn't really make too much sense. I would say you have to spend money on rent. You have to spend money on a bunch of expenses and line items that you just don't with other businesses. Yeah, honestly, like I have a funny story to tell you guys. When I was living with my best friend Jonno, we were super into business and we were making like absolutely no money, but I was making like 4,000 bucks a month or something. These are Canadian dollars, by the way, which is like a fraction of what an American dollar is. Even back then, it's like 1.2 or 1.3. So, Jonno was selling his speakers, which were very expensive cuz we used to do some DJing together, and like they were like the top-of-the-line speakers, really, really nice. So, for several thousand. And there was some dude that wanted to buy it. So, the dude came up through Craigslist and then went up the elevator, knocked on the door, came in, looked the speakers, right? But while I was listening to Jonno and this guy talk, I realized that this guy was running a business that was making over $2 million a year. Now, put yourself in my shoes, okay? I I had no real business experience. I had a business that was barely covering my personal expenses. I was broke as essentially. And I hear this guy's making $2 million a year. I'm like, "Oh my god, I got to meet this guy right now. This is a big high roller. what the hell is he doing buying, you know, speakers off of Craigslist, right? So anyway, I butt in. I'm like, "Yo, Jonno, let's let's case this guy, right? Let's figure out how he's running his business." And he starts telling us that he runs a local it's like a local cleaning or a window washing business, I think. And we start asking him more questions. And, you know, we kind of like we guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy guy likes us by the end of the uh you know 10 or 15 minutes and we start talking business you know oh I run this uh this this videography company. Oh I'm doing like marketing services. Oh we're doing weddings. We're doing all this stuff. And then eventually gets to the point where I'm like, "So, dude, like of the, you know, the $2 million top line, that's crazy. Like, what are you guys keeping?" And the guy confidently looks at me, confidently. And he's like, "Oh, we're between 6 to 10%." And I'm like, "What? 6 to 10%. Are you freaking kidding me?" So, of the $2 million you guys are making, $120 a year profit. And he splitting this with a partner. And it hit me in that moment that my small little dingy business which is doing marketing services and videos that made $4,000 a month. I was making almost as much money as that guy that was making uh $170,000 a month just because I was digital and because I was doing everything from my laptop and I didn't have to worry about any of this stuff. All right. Are you going to find 6 to 10% margin local businesses everywhere? No, you won't. I think that's honestly on the the lower end of the sort of business that he was running and I think he probably could have made a lot better and you know what I'm telling you guys now. But yeah, you got a lot of issues. Your AI services end up being a much higher proportion of the person's budget and so they're a lot less likely to want to work with you relative to something like a digital business, right? Which if you just work your way down this little cost waterfall can be a very small portion of the budget. All right, so hopefully I just convinced you. I don't know if I did, but hopefully I did. And if I didn't, feel free to drop a comment down below. I'm happy to debate you guys or maybe talk shop a little bit more. There are of course some exceptions to every rule. Don't take this as me forcing you guys to work with digital businesses, but you know, for most beginners, just a lot easier to get up and running with a digital one than it is an inerson one. To me, the inerson ones have just never really been worth it. Awesome. So, you now know which markets to avoid. Those local businesses may seem appealing, but obviously create endless headaches. They create really tight margins and then a lot of them low technical literacy like we talked about. But let's now flip to the positive side. So, now that we know what not to do, what should we do? What are the industries that are not only willing to pay premium rates for a automation, but that are actually desperate for those solutions right now? Aka, they have pain points that you can press on. Well, I'm going to show you five of them. You're about to see exactly where the money is right now. These are the specific industries, why they're so profitable, and also what type of systems they're eager to buy that you can build. The next section is meant to transform you from somebody who might get lucky with a client here or there to somebody who strategically targets highv value markets with confidence. These aren't theoretical opportunities. These are the actual industries where my community members consistently close $3 to $15,000 deals. Let's get into it. Here are five industries desperately paying for AI automation today. Let's start it off with number one, the coaching and consulting business. First off the bat, coaching and consulting is awesome for AI and automation agencies primarily because of the very high engagement cost. Okay, what that means is if you can land, let's say, one client for an average coaching or consulting business, you can make them $10,000. And let's say you charge, I don't know, $5,000. Well, with just one client, you're already producing a 2x ROI. What if you get a coaching and consulting business, three clients? Well, now you're making $30,000. On that $5,000 cost, you're basically producing a 6x multiple. So, AI automation agencies that are specifically involved in growth tend to find this niche very, very good and very profitable to work with for that result. Another thing is they rely on personalized communication a lot. Usually you have some head guy or chick that is like the personality. Okay, I say Sam uh Sam Ovens here, not Sam Alman for a specific reason. Obviously, he is that person in his business. And to some extent, no matter how many sub coaches you will get on your team, okay? If this is the amount of revenue you're making, this is the amount of time you're making, they generally scale onetoone, right? one unit of time, maybe one hour of that coach might be worth, I don't know, $2,000 or something. So, if you want to make $20,000, how many hours do you have to spend? Well, 10 hours, right? 10 * 2,000 is 20,000. So, what this means is if you can build automated systems that increase the angle or the slope of this line even just a tiny bit through some sort of system that just makes that person's time 5% more efficient. And this is the angle. Okay? over a long enough period of time, you can earn them a ton of money and that's where your services come really in handy and they tend to be willing to pay you high prices to justify that. Another big issue is there's a very high customer acquisition cost. This makes sense, right? If the engagement cost is very high, if when you get them a new customer, the customer tends to pay like 10K, it's not uncommon at all that the business will spend, I don't know, like $1,000 to acquire that customer. And actually, just a little bit of an aside here, not related to automation agencies. If you can find a business model in which the customer acquisition cost and then the average order value or the engagement cost is really out of whack, aka you get a ton of average order value for very little customer acquisition cost. That's a great niche because you can just pour tons of money in and then make large multiples on this, right? Usually there's some gotchas or some catches, but this is a big one for AI and automation here because you usually can improve margins. If you can improve margins by a few percentage points, think about taking something from 20% to 21%. And then think about taking something from 10% to 11%. If you can bring somebody's margins from 20 to 21, you're improving by about 5%. Their business is making 5% more money. If you can go from 10 to 11%, you're actually improving their entire company by about 10%. Mathematically, this relationship holds true even more so for very, very low margin businesses. Let's say you start at 3%, you go to 5%. I mean, if you think about it logically, my math ain't so good. Five over three. What's that? You're improving that person's business by like 30% or something like that. Again, math ain't are good. Don't hold me on it. But you can have a very outsized impact with very little actual work. A lot of coaches and consultants have recurring revenue models. So my communities, Maker School and Makeoneywith Make.com, for instance, they may not cost very much upfront, but if you extrapolate them over the course of a year or two, you can make a ton of money obviously per person so long as you continue delivering value. And there are a couple of other issues here like admin tasks which are shared between a bunch of the niches I'm going to show you. Um you know a lot of these uh coaches and consultants are like information people so they track their progress and metrics that makes it pretty easy for you to jump in there. And then it's pretty reputation based so if you can deliver a higher or better quality customer experience you typically go very far. Um here are a bunch of automations and systems that I've talked about on my channel that you guys could sell. I've talked about client onboarding flows which just automate the hell out of these things. That's great to sell. content delivery system. Some sort of like content multiplier is great. So, some sort of repurposing or whatnot. Some sort of payment collection, automated invoice follow-up is great because typically that's the way that these uh services do business. Some sort of community management automations or systems. And again, when I say systems, this doesn't have to necessarily be a like cloud system. This can actually just be a series of SOPs or some sort of process documentation, some sort of follow-ups. Um, lead nurturing can be really big for these guys. Um, you know, even like rag FAQ chatbot. So you can make like an AI version of a coach. This is uh pretty interesting nowadays where you feed all of the YouTube videos, all of the content in their communities, all of the documents that they've written into this ragbot and then basically just have it be like the artificial intelligence version of Nick or of Sam Ovens. Usually charge a little bit on that. So lots of really cool systems here. You guys are going to get this doc just embedded in the description. Feel free to check that out. But for the sake of time, let's move on to industry number two, which is recruitment, staffing, and offshore talent agencies. All right, so I think we all know who this beautiful bastard is. Recruitment is essentially, for those of you that don't know, the process of pitching a company on your ability to hire the best talent for that company. Okay, so if you are working with a recruitment business, the reason why this is such a fantastic niche to be in is because if you think about it, these recruitment businesses deal with hundreds if not thousands of candidates every single week. They're constantly in communication with them and usually the communication tends to be pretty similar and they have a lot of stages they need to move people through. Okay. So, anytime you have high volume of repetitive tasks, anytime you have like lots of manual communication, you basically have an automation gold mine. And that's where um you know, one of the reasons why recruitment, staffing, and offshore talent agencies are just blowing the hell up right now as a niche for AI automation agencies. Tons of people in maker school make money with make are printing money working with these niches specifically because if you can again, I don't know, automate 10% of um a thousand tasks, you can obviously demonstrate a lot of value to the company. Another thing is these recruitment companies because they deal with really high volume repetitive tasks. If you can just find a way to like log things which I'll talk about in a second and if you can like make that logging consistent you can typically deliver a lot of value for them too. So every time a new uh candidate replies or something like that you can log that to some sheet showing the average candidate conversion rate or average candidate reply rate. Stuff like this is really really good and it's quite a low hanging fruit. A lot of the time you also have like kind of a digital first industry so techsavvy. A lot of the time recruiters just already understand things like cold email platforms, which is nice. And then again, notice how we have 5 to 20k placements here. So, uh, one of my clients that I used to work with was an awesome executive recruiting firm. And the way that they place C and high B suite level staff members was they were doing, I think it was like 20% or something like that of first years. What that means is if they're placing a $200,000 role, right, they make 20% of the first year salary. So, the company pays them 40,000. How cool is that? Okay, imagine making $40,000 in a single customer you land one of these clients. If you're a growth AI automation agency like I am, uh, you know, an agency that specializes specifically in driving lead flow, improving, uh, you know, conversions, um, I don't know, like improving sales and and breaking constraints and and bottlenecks uh, on that end. Obviously, if you could just get them one more per month, you could justify maybe up to like a $10,000 a month service, which is great. And that's only one. I mean, if you can get them multiple. Geez. And then yeah, they usually have uh very datari databases, right? And then some of these models are recurring, which obviously just multiplies whatever you're doing by whatever the average churn is. So lots of really cool systems you could sell them that I've talked about on my channel and in my communities as well. Candidate pipelines, um candidate sourcing systems. These are basically just cold email systems. Okay. Um you could also do obviously employer sourcing systems. That's really cool. So that's just outreach. Automating some of the client comms or some of the candidate comms as well is pretty big. So instead of you having to, I don't know, like have a team of 20 recruitment agents whose sole jobs it is to message candidates back and do all that laborious communication, you can actually automate the vast majority of it and then you could just have them show up on calls and stuff just with some intelligent stage changes, some email watchers and and whatnot. You can do things like automated reference checks. This is kind of neat. There's some APIs that you can call that'll automatically do some things as well as including like, you know, record checks and and so on and so forth. Um, and then you could also do obviously personalized cold outreach to uh to employers and stuff. Okay, as well as candidate reactivation systems, placement tracking dashboards. Man, have I talked about a lot of systems on my channel. Let's move on to niche number three, the digital marketing and creative agency. Now, I've talked about this a lot. Okay, uh digital marketing creative agencies are fantastic for people like us. The main reason why is because one, you have high engagement costs again of three I mean 3 to 50k at a certain point. I'm pulling numbers out of my ass. You can charge $150,000 for an agency project if you're pitching to the right people. Most uh smaller B2B agencies that do, I don't know, PPC or creative or ads or or I don't know, SEO or whatever, they may charge like two or three,000 bucks a month, right? But um anyway, this is a super digital industry and the more digital an industry is, the easier it is for you to acquire these leads in the first place. So if you think about like your likelihood of winning is just a big equation and on the very beginning of this equation which for you guys would be over here okay the very first factor um if that's just really high and really easy to do if you just scrape all digital agencies in the United States in legitimately like 5 minutes with Apollo or Ampify or LinkedIn uh then obviously everything else downstream is going to be a lot easier to do right also these guys typically check their email inboxes quite a bit I say this as an agency owner who used to run a digital marketing business um so uh you typically have pretty direct line to communication, a direct line to making something happen. And yeah, I'm I'm a big fan of this uh of this niche personally, and this is probably one of the most common ones that I'll build systems for. They also typically have pretty crappy margins. They also typically have low billable time and heavy admin. Now, average agency margins might be like 30% to 40%. Right? Contrast that with my business, for instance, which might be like 80% to 90%. Now again, if we just do that math comparison, if I were to add 5% margins to this business, well, maybe I just took them from 30 to 35%. Which is a 16th growth of the business. If I were to add 5% to this business, well, maybe I just took them from 80 to 85%, which that's like a 1/16th or something like that. That's 16. That's 116th. It's going to be a lot harder to justify any business that is not a low margin business. Okay. Another big issue is typically this is a very low barrier to entry industry to begin with. So the people that come in, they don't really know how to do things like client communication. And so there are a lot of very simple systems you can implement to substantially improve the quality of their communication, the quality of things like their their timelines, the quality of things like their time tracking. And yeah, you know, it's kind of a low bar. The reason why is because you just don't really need anything to start an agency. That's actually one of the benefits of AI automation agencies if you think about it. You know, back in the day, you used to have to spend several hundred or maybe thousands of dollars to get a business up and running. You had a bunch of capital expenses. You need to get an office. You needed to procure a bunch of equipment and heavy materials and stuff like that. Nowadays, with an AI automation agency, the cost is literally you watch a few of my YouTube videos and then you spend a few hundred and voila, you now have like a fully thriving business that's registered with the government. That's pretty badass, right? But, you know, that also means because it's easier, you get a lot less talented entrance into the market that need help with simpler systems that you can deliver outsized values with. So, yeah, I'd say that these are the vast majority of the main reasons here. Here's some automations you could sell them. I want to say with this niche, you could sell any of the former automations of this one, too. And you could sell any of these to basically any of the other businesses. Agencies are like the core fundamental business model here. Recruitment agencies, offshore talent agencies. There's still types of agencies. So, anyway, a PM automation is really big. What does that mean? And that means you do something like a monday.com or a ClickUp or maybe I don't know an ASA build, maybe like some sort of Slack project management build. And what you do is you you help them break down tasks which typically involve multiple people on a team and give them one centralized place to coordinate all this stuff which just makes their lives a lot easier. Client intake systems, again just because the low bar, building a simple client intake system where they just get an email or something like that when they sign up adds a ton of value. um some sort of resource allocation dashboard. Now, this is typically done automatically if you're using a service like Harvest or um I don't know some of these like more advanced time trackers, but inside of some CRM like ClickUp, for instance, and I believe ASA as well uh and probably monday.com, probably not Slack, though. Uh you can actually just automate like the creation of a dashboard that shows where people's times are spent at various parts of their week, which can be pretty important. Same thing with the time tracking. A big thing is invoice and payment automation obviously because you know the bar is very low and so if you can employ some sort of system to collect on invoices that are outstanding typically the the company can make a ton more money. I mean I can't tell you the number of times the the main issue with a a new agency that I come in to consult with is literally they just have like $50,000 in outstanding revenue that they haven't collected on. And I'm like all right so is are they just not paying you? Did you just do a terrible job? And it's like, no, we just keep on forgetting to send the invoices and then it's 3 months later and then the person just doesn't really want to pay us, right? They kind of forget about it or something. This is, believe it or not, a very real issue. Um, anytime I come into a new agency and I do any sort of consulting, like one of the first things I check is like, okay, do you have some sort of system that consolidates and then consistently follows up on invoices? No. All right. Well, I mean, that's a big problem. Let's start there. Obviously, since agencies typically deal with proposals, um, and proposals are typically these beautiful branded things, if you can just automate the hell out of this process, maybe with like a form that somebody fills out that templates out a proposal, sends an email, and then, I don't know, follows up or something like that a week later, you can add a ton of value to the sales process there. Yeah, you can do other stuff like client feedback collection, organization of assets, doing some sort of human in the loop, Q&A, and then obviously AI for for the production of assets as well. It's pretty big nowadays. Really big niche, big fan of it. Let's go to B2B tech and hight touch SAS companies for number four. These hight touch SAS companies are pretty great. When I say hight touch, just to distinguish, there's um there's kind of two different types of SAS companies. There's low touch SAS. Low touch SAS is basically like a simple photo editing app or something that costs five bucks a month. The idea is that company is low because they don't require human beings to manage you. They just build a beautiful onboarding experience. They have some FAQs. They have some guides in their software platform and then it's just hands-off. You pay a small monthly amount. Obviously, you get onboarded through these automated methods and everything is good. Now, contrast that to a hightouch software as a service company. Hightouch software as a service companies are typically a lot bigger. They work with like older and more established niches and they cost way more money. And in order to work with one of these, you usually need to sign up for some sort of demo. You need to have their sales team walk you through things. You need to contact them. Okay? You guys want examples of this? Check out any of my previous niche videos. I'll literally show you guys like example websites where I walk you through uh their sales flows and and you know how they sign people up and how that distinguishes between high and low touch. But the issue with low touch obviously hopefully you guys could see what the problem is right off the bat. I mean you know if you're going $9 per month and even if somebody stays with you for a year $9 per month times a year is 108 I think 108 bucks right that's your lifetime value of the customer. Contrast that with a hight touch SAS. Hight touch SAS might be $500 a month and it might stay for a full year. Now, if they stay for a full year, that's $6,000, okay, on the low end. And a lot of these are way higher. This is usually just like the introductory price plan. You might be paying like $1,800 a month. And the average person might stand for 24 months. And uh I don't know, that's like over $20,000. I think it's like 24K or something close to it. So, as you guys can see, the multiples tend to add up. So, high customer lifetime value. Cha-ching. Done. They also typically have complex multi-touch sales cycles. So like I said, they have like demos and stuff. Hight touch SAS companies sales processes tend to reflect agency sales process quite a bit with their proposals and their quotes and their estimates. So that makes this a very good niche to come into because you can build all the same systems you build for, you know, some sort of agency that produces way more of a multiple on their time, but you can do so for this business with no additional cost or resource on your end. you produce way more money for them, which is obviously always a win. Typically, at least in my experience anyway, and I've said this a couple times, and you know, I haven't had anybody just super disagree with me yet, so I'm going to keep on saying it. Um, stack of disconnected tools, most of the hight touch SAS companies that I've worked with, uh, they tend to be companies that like raised a fair amount of money over the last couple years. And so, when you when you when you spend a bunch of money that isn't yours, you tend to be a lot less effective and efficient in the way that you allocate that. When companies grow really quickly, they end up with this big stack of disconnected tools that typically cost a lot of money. And a lot of these high-tech SAS companies, if I'm honest, use other hightouch SAS companies as like parts of their fulfillment arm or like, you know, for to to manage their business or whatever. Um, and typically like these are just a lot of money. So, I actually have produced a sizable amount of value literally just coming into a hightouch SAS business, auditing their whole tech stack from start to finish, and then I don't know, giving them two or $3,000 a month back because I find much lower cost or lower paying alternatives. Think about that. May not seem like a lot, but if I could save a company $2,000 a month, if I could do that in the first month, I just saved them $24,000 a year within the first month, how many months does that buy me essentially to come in and then produce a demonstrable ROI before I have to worry about, I don't know, my position or my status as their agency partner. Quite a lot. Okay. And that's every month. This opportunity cost that you're saving them forever. They typically track things a lot. So, datadriven decision-making, I mean, these people work with software, right? So, a lot of KPIs in software also makes them pretty automation friendly, I would say. And typically you can also get some help and resources from the dev guys, some web hook or something like that because the person that is typically buying the service tends to be very nuanced. It's like usually some financial services technology company or some health companies, whatever, right? Some some super nuanced problem that's at the intersection of 17 different problems right over here. That's usually their SAS audience. That's who they deal with. There's typically like some very nuanced pain points that they deal with. And if you can build even simple systems that improve their ability to tackle or deal with those pain points even a bit, you can demonstrate a ton of value. And typically because this is a SAS company, you know, SAS companies tend to have really good margins, right? So a high touch SAS company less so because you have sales teams and stuff, but if you have over 70% margins, that's actually a positive, not a negative, like I was talking about before, because that typically means they just have a lot of disposable income. That plus the fact that a lot of these companies raise and have fundraising rounds, you know, a year or two ago earliest, then that means that you you typically have a lot of money to play around with or a little bit less I want to say scrupulous when it comes to hiring you. Obviously, I'm just giving all this to you through the lens of my own experience. These are all companies that I've obviously worked with, but that's yeah, those are my those are my beliefs on that matter. Lots of cool systems you can sell these guys. Lead qualification systems. This is essentially just like a CRM. CRM comes in, depending on the cost of the person or their answers to whatever your sales questionnaire was or your contact us questionnaire, you route them to specific people. You could do some sort of demo booking automation. You could personalize the hell out of your outreach. What's really cool about hightouch SAS companies is you can typically do outbound. Now, you can't really do outbound very well for like low touch SAS companies. I mean, I've done it before, but I don't know. I just find people are a lot less likely to care. Usually, the primary sales mechanism with these low touch SAS companies is like ads. It's either ads or it's organic or it's some sort of personal branding. With high touch, you can actually get away with running like cold email campaigns at scale. I guess just because it's such a more like human sort of business model where you know it's expected there's going to be somebody demoing you and somebody selling you that these sales people's times just slot right into this pre-existing process. But yeah, I've sold a lot of personalized sales outreach as well, which I'd recommend. And then I mean there are a bunch of other systems here. I think I'll just leave it at that because I want to make sure this video can be under 30 minutes. But yeah, a lot of lot of value here. Oh, probably the last one I'll cover is just support tickets. This is probably one of the only places where I think an NAD AI agent actually makes sense today as of the time of this recording because you could just have very simple like a support routing system where basically every time a new ticket comes in to a specific email address or something, you could just add it to your NAD agent and then you could have just that agent call like one or two predefined tools which just do things like, you know, calculate the refund percentage. If the amount of money that this person has asked for refunds for in the past is lower than the amount of money that they've paid you and your ratio is, I don't know, 2% or something, just automatically process it. Or, I don't know, some automated feedback collection mechanism with somebody decides to cancel on you. A lot of different ways you could do this, but um I actually think the customer support is probably the only situation in which these agents make sense as of the time of this recording. So, you could sell that as well. And yeah, that takes us to the final niche, which is financial services/ companies. Now, um I should make a caveat to all this stuff. The issue with these and the reason why I'm saying them last, well, if you find a if you find a company like Jordan Bellfors, then absolutely go for it. I don't think you'll have any of the issues that I'm talking about. But the one issue with this niche, okay, is depending on how big the company is and how into upholding regulations they can be, you may have to deal with some regulations. You guys know how healthcare you have to deal with like um obiscation of customer details and stuff like I don't know patient records and so on and so forth have to comply by HIPPA. Well, there are some financial companies like financial services companies that think a lot similarly to that and you know there are a lot of these regulations and whatnot that they have to uphold and if you don't take every single box and if you don't do all these systems on your own hardware and your own software and like on prem and off the cloud and so on and so forth, this can be kind of annoying. But not all companies are like this. I've worked with a few that aren't. Um let me just run you through some of the logic first. So we can talk about that afterwards. The first is very high client lifetime value. The second is they have ongoing uh reporting and compliance. This compliance aspect, okay, you can actually automate large portions of compliance, which is awesome. Um, so tons of value in automating compliance. This is usually like the big burden in a lot of these businesses. And if you can just be like, hey, I can automate, you know, 30% of all the compliance here. So that it's just like human in the loop Q&A. Uh, these companies will love you. A lot of hight touch client communication obviously. So tracking that communication, building systems and SOPs around that communication um is a lot of value. And then also a lot of these companies have just way too much admin. They don't have a lot of advising. The benefit is a lot of these guys typically work with like spreadsheet tools and stuff like that anyway. So if they're familiar with how to do this sort of stuff and if they're using it all um if you're using spreadsheets and databases informally already, then usually you could sprinkle in very little work. Okay. But um you could have an outsized impact on their processes with a couple of make.com automations or nend flows or something. A lot of these uh financial services companies that have MR obviously that gives you a ton of leverage with automation like I think I said lifetime value here but really I mean that's just like per engagement or or whatever. I think a lot of these financial services companies can be up to 500k realistically. Obviously really high customer acquisition cost. So because of that you know the the better you can make their margins the happier they'll be. That plus the compliance burden I think is really the main value. And yeah, there are a couple of cool systems that uh I built before on my channel that I'll run you guys through. Um, obviously client onboarding is really big. What's interesting with these financial services companies I find is a lot of the clients that you work with uh I don't know if it's just like older school or it's just a byproduct of just like the the finance mindset, but customer relationships are very very important. If you can make a customer relationship even 5% better, if you can make a person feel paid attention to even 5% more, if instead of some sort of automated calendar reminder, you could make it seem like you wrote that yourself. or instead of some sort of clearly templated introductory onboarding message or email, you can make it seem like you wrote that yourself right there. Uh, typically there are large implications as to the health of that relationship over time. And because these customers tend to be so sticky and a little bit older school, at least in my experience, that sort of value goes a really really long way. So if you can make it like very hightouch and perceivably customized, then these relationships can pay hundreds of thousands if not millions. Okay, cool. Um, then content personalization, which kind of feeds into that. You do things like compliance monitoring or some sort of automated compliance automated Q&A. And then a lot of the time, another thing that I find silly is these people, they usually use some sort of like document or file service a lot. Like they'll use like Google Sheets or Google Docs or they'll use like Excel or they use One Drive or whatnot. Literally just like coming in from an outsers's view, somebody that hasn't actually been inside of the company and just organizing everything for them can actually have a tremendous amount of value. You could have some sort of project manager or CRM or whatever they're using and every time a new record gets created, you could just create a Google Drive that houses all of the data and assets for that particular record and you could come in and you could be the hot shot that just like, you know, improve their margins by 5% by doing so. So, I think there's a lot of alpha in these like older school industries, but what's really cool about this business is a lot of it's just like text based. So, you could just slot in a lot of these um AI workflows in without much of an issue. Cool. So, you now have a complete strategic framework. You got the technical foundations, the business understanding, the sales psychology, the market awareness, and you also have a couple of highv value industries that you could target right now. Now, knowing what to do and then successfully executing on that are two very different things. So, what I want to do right now is show you a systematic approach to solving the five most common problems that kill a automation agencies and freelancers. And that's a automation agencies and freelancers that might even have great technical skills and good market knowledge. I consider this final section like an operational playbook. I'm going to show you how to generate consistent leads. I'm going to show you how to onboard clients properly. We're going to talk about how to manage your comms like a pro, deliver projects that turn clients into raving fans and advocates, and then finally, retain clients for long-term monthly recurring revenue. This is where everything comes together. The whole idea is we're going to turn your knowledge into a systematically successful business model that smoothly scales and is able to do so predictively. I'm going to show you how to fix 90% of your AI agency problems in just 30 days. And it's not magic. I know that this industry is booming right now and there are a lot of beginners that don't fully understand how agencies work in general that are flooding in. What I want to do in this video is just show you guys the simple levers that you could pull that not a lot of people talk about because they're not very sexy and they're not very glamorous that if consistently pulled and pulled the right way are going to drive the majority of your revenue. So let's talk about them. The first is lead generation. Lead generation is pretty straightforward, right? It is you driving traffic at the very top end of your business. Now the thing about Legion that most people don't understand is that lead genen solves the vast majority of the downstream issues that people think that you need to tackle individually. Let me give you an example. In the agency space you have a variety of possible issues. The first issue is obviously lead genen. So you don't have leads to begin with. So I think it's pretty safe to say that if your problem is legen lead genen solves lead genen. The second big issue that a lot of people have is project management. What I mean by this is they end up with so many projects that they don't really have the ability to fulfill new ones that come in through the queue. And naturally, I mean, it kind of makes logical sense. If you have too many projects, obviously you think, well, I should probably turn the tap off and not generate leads anymore. But believe it or not, Legion actually solves project management wos too. Because if you have a choice between four leads, one is $50, another is $150, another is $500, and the last one is $1,500. Which one are you going to pick? You're obviously going to pick the $1,500 one. Right? Now, let's say hypothetically you ramped up lead genen a little bit more, and you actually had to pick between another four. You had a th an extra $1,000 client here, another $1,500 here, another $2,500 here, and then a $10,000 client over here. For an equivalent unit of time, which one of these would you rather pick? Obviously, the $10,000 client over here, right? Well, most people don't have access to that choice. They don't have abundance in their business because what they do is when they run into project management issues at the three or four client mark, they start feeling overwhelmed, they think, "Hey, I got to turn lead genen off." not fully realizing that not having enough leads is a problem that is contributing to you hitting a low revenue ceiling in the first place. If you guys generate more leads, even if you guys are currently feeling overwhelmed, if you guys keep the tap running through lead generation activities like Upwork or cold email or community posting or cold DMs or or client reactivation, well, then you're going to be more likely to be in a situation like this where you have the pick of the litter, let's say, and you can actually ignore the very lowpaying projects that don't actually meaningfully contribute to your revenue and instead preferentially focus on the high revenue projects that do. So, believe it or not, um, lead genen actually solves project management woes, too. Okay, you get to pick the highest quality, highest paying clients that require the least demand from you as well. So, lead genen solves lead genen. Legen solves project management. Leen solves pricing. Hopefully, that's self-evident in the way that we did things there. Leadgen solves system complexity. So, a big issue in AI and automation is the systems that we build tend to be very complex. And so, we typically start off with custom scopes because it's the easiest way to get a project. And when you do custom scopes, you have to obviously scope the thing. You have to build according to client spec. you have to do a lot of client revisions and stuff like that. This is all very natural part of any agency. But the real leverage in this business model is unlocked when you move away from custom projects and you move towards productized solutions. Now the issue is most people think well how the hell do I sell a productized solution? It's such a specific sort of packaged offer, right? Like it's not, hey, I'm a client and I'm suffering from this exact issue. Can you build me something that solves that? Instead, it's almost like I have a prepackaged solution that deals with X, Y, and Z issues. And obviously when you have a product that you need to find customers to conform to, it's harder to sell versus a set of customer needs that you can conform to as an agency. Well, believe it or not, lead genen solves system complexity as well because when you have more access to leads, what you can do is you can just pick the simplest system that pays you the most money per unit time that your agency provides. So, not only does it solve your project management wos because you get to pick the simple projects and the pricing woes because you get to pick the higher paying ones and the lead genen wos because obviously you have leads, it also solves the system complexity woes because you can start selling and scaling systems that are a little bit simpler and more productized. Okay, so I guess what I'm trying to say is lead generation is like the cure all in business. If you just have a ton of leads, everything else just sort of solves itself to be real. So naturally, your priority when running an agency is just always having leads. And that's why I and many other people recommend selling things as quickly as humanly possible before you've even established the deliverable or the fulfillment. You don't actually need to be that good at AI automation to start drowning in leads. And it's much better to be in the situation where you're drowning in leads but you're not very good at AI automation than the inverse. You're really good at AI automation and then you're not drowning in leads. Okay, you don't have any. It's a drought. So, how do you do this? Well, you choose one or two high impact outreach methods and then you just execute consistently on these outreach methods with minimums for 10 plus days. This is not a magic number. Feel free to do this for longer or maybe a little bit shorter. I guess the point that I'm trying to make though is don't turn this on and off very frequently. If you are going to start some sort of lead generation mechanism, let's say cold email or or outbound Upwork applications or whatever, you just need to do so consistently for a certain amount of time before really being able to measure whether or not it works. And the reason why is because the market has a lot of built-in lag. When you submit a cold email or you send an Upwork application or you cold DM somebody on LinkedIn or you blast uh 10 Loom videos out to a bunch of people that you think might be interested in your product or service, it takes them time to open it. And because it takes them time to open it and receive it, it also takes you time to get feedback on that. Takes you time to get the views and the opens and the yeses and the nos. So if you don't execute consistently for a certain amount of time, if you don't give the market the time to catch up to that lag, it's very difficult for you to actually make data driven decisions. Now we're in a very dataentric industry. So this is one of the main points of failure that I see beginners that get into it do. They actually try and iterate a little too quickly. But yeah, if you acknowledge that the market has lag, then you can sort of get the best of both worlds. You can be data driven while also like actually being statistically significant. So typically you want to target somewhere between 20 to 50 quality leads per week is your minimum viable standard. And you want to do this across those 1 to two high impact outreach methods. What does that mean? Well, you have five working days between Monday to Friday. You do 10 Upwork applications per day. That is 50 quality leads. You have seven working days. You choose to go every single day. Well, then that's just seven leads a day. Maybe you're sending cold emails or cold DMs or something of that nature. Now, when lead genen works, you get to choose better clients and command higher prices. So, initially when you're at the very beginning of your lead genen journey, you're probably not going to have too many leads to work with, right? You're also not going to have too many people that might be interested in your services. though you're probably going to have to choose the crappier clients with the lower prices. But as you scale up and as you get more leads available to you, you will necessarily be able to choose the ones that reward you the best. And that's really why lead genen is that paliative cure all that I recommend you focus on if you want to solve 90% of your agency problems in 30 days. Last but not least, consistency matters more than perfection. So just stick with your chosen method. Run it and gun it for at least, you know, 10 12 days or so before trying to make material changes to it. And if you are consistent about this and you internalize what I'm saying right now, it is simply a matter of time before you are successful. Just make sure that you're not hopping between shiny object and shiny object because there are a lot of shiny objects and it's very easy to get your attention pulled away which ultimately reduces the total volume of lead genen that you are able to produce. So if I could give you guys a simple SOP, when you start lead genen, what you do is you create a consistent daily process. And to make a long story short, what this daily process is is you will wake up and you will send x cold emails. You might then send Y Upwork apps. You might then write Z community posts. There are a variety of other lead genen mechanisms, but we'll keep this simple for now. Then you just do that every day for 10 days. After you're done with your initial test set, this is the same thing that a scientist does. They formulate a hypothesis on what's going to work. They run a test for a predefined period of time and then they perform using the scientific method some sort of analysis and iteration. Once you're done with that, then you can optimize your messaging and your targeting. Once you find the successful approach, then you just scale it. And then once you're done with all that, you can get a ton of quality leads every single week. Okay? Now, keep in mind that the beginning of any journey is going to be slow, but eventually you hit an inflection point where you figure it out and you can scale relatively consistently. The second big thing that people are currently sleeping on and the thing that I would recommend you solve if you want to solve 90% of your agency problems in 30 days is onboarding. Okay, we talked about the initial lead generation, which is sort of the top of the funnel. That is the first thing that customers will see of you. And because it is the first part of the funnel, typically just widening that first part significantly increases the throughput of that funnel. But the second big thing you need to do is you need to onboard clients properly. What does that mean? That means you need some sort of structured onboarding process. And a structured onboarding process doesn't have to be extraordinarily complex or anything like that. In general, a structured onboarding process just means that immediately after the client pays you something, you just need to give them something in return. You know how like when you're selling a product like some widget or something on Amazon or maybe on your e-commerce store, when a customer pays something, they tend to receive that product reasonably quickly or at least they receive some email order confirmation or whatever that they paid the money. One of the lowest hanging fruit in agencies, especially for our niche, just because we have such a low barrier to entry and it's so exciting and so many new people are flooding in is a customer will pay you and then you just don't see it for a little while. Maybe like 3 or 4 hours or something like that. Or maybe they pay you before you go to bed and then when you wake up in the morning, you're like, "Oh my goodness, I just got a bunch of money." Well, the whole goal in structured onboarding is just to minimize the gap between something leaving the customer's hands, like money, and then you giving something back to the customer. You know how services take a long time to fulfill. They're not really like the widgets that you sell on Amazon or whatever. Because of that, you need to find a stop gap that still allows you to deliver value immediately in response to a customer giving you money. This whole concept is essentially called minimizing buyer's remorse and it's one of the most important things that you can do in order to set off a successful project and also increase the likelihood that they're going to want to work with you again, which is important. Okay, so I know that was a big verbal yap rigomeroll battle there, but what does that actually mean? It means create templates for welcome emails, create templates for questionnaires, it means create a simple template for, you know, immediately after you sign a new deal, what is the immediate email that they receive? Okay, immediately after somebody pays you, try and host a kickoff call within maybe 24 to 48 hours of that signature or payment transfer. And this doesn't have to be a very intense kickoff call. I have a ton of SOPs for this, but in short, just make sure that you inform them as to what the project is going to look like. You revisit your project expectations. You talk a little bit about the timeline and then if there are any questions or things that need to be set up before you can actually begin the project, just deal with that. um two-factor authentication is a pretty common need in AI and automation agency space obviously because we tend to deal with platforms that the customer is using. You know, we also tend to set up platforms on behalf of customers and so on and so forth. So that's more or less all a kickoff call is just make sure that after the customer pays you, you have some sort of facetime with them so that you leave them feeling good, not like, oh my god, I just spent a bunch of money and got nothing. Last but not least, this is an opportunity for you to document your communication protocols and then set some response time expectations. Another really low hanging fruit, not just in AI automation agencies, but any agencies, is typically clients expect to be communicated with a lot more than they actually are. So, here is another little SOP that you guys can follow to fix most of those agency problems. The second that somebody pays, send a welcome email. Say, "Hey, thanks so much for paying. Thanks so much for getting on board. I'm really excited to have you." Here's how these things typically go. First, we're going to book a kickoff call. You can do so using this calendar here. After that, I'm going to ask you these questions. After that, we're going to sign up to these platforms. can't wait and super excited to work with you. Doesn't need to be anything more complex than that. But if you've ever wondered why some of the people or vendors that you might have worked with in the past come across as professional and other ones come across as unprofessional, it's cuz the professional ones have all this stuff down pat. So if you want to just jumpstart your agency and get so much further ahead than 99% of other ones just right off the bat, just get that professionalism dialed in, get that buyer's remorse minimization and stuff like that sorted. So you might send a welcome email, then you might deliver some sort of onboarding questionnaire. You might then review the client responses. Maybe it's like a form or something. On your kickoff call, you'll cover that with them. Then you'll create some sort of project roadmap. Set up some comm's channels like Slack or email. And then when you actually begin your project implementation, you will do so much better and easier. And with the client knowing what to expect than otherwise. Okay, so just to recap, so far we've covered Legion. Next up is onboarding. And now I'm going to talk about the third most important thing to do, which is to optimize your communications. Now, to be blunt, onboarding is a form of communication, but I'm talking not about the specific project kickoff time. Now, I'm talking about what you actually do with the client after you've secured your AI automation project. Now, essentially, my recommendation is the biggest issue that I see here is clients just feel like they're out of the loop. AI automation agency projects tend to be pretty complicated scope-wise, especially custom projects that most people will sell initially. They tend to have a lot of moving parts. And so, because of that, clients expect to be communicated with reasonably regularly. Now, a lot of people are afraid to communicate with clients with the regularity that I recommend because they think that every time they communicate with a client is like an opportunity for the client to change the scope on them or say, "I don't like this or I don't like that." But the reality is the second that I started changing my communication style from what it was previously, which was maybe some sort of weekly comm style to legitimately either a daily comm style or maybe like once every two days or so, essentially just significantly increasing the frequency. My earnings went through the roof. my ability to retain clients and resell them and upsell them on new and related projects also went through the roof. And this was one of the ways that I scaled my own automation agency to 72K a month. So, what does that mean? Well, I recommend establishing a 1 to 2 hour daily communication window with a 15 or 20 minute response guarantee. This may seem really scary to you guys, but my recommendation for you is pick a 2-hour window that you're just going to be working anyway. say, "You can reach me within 15 to 20 minutes Monday to Friday on Slack if you send me a message between 12:00 p.m. and 2:00 p.m. PT." Okay? Make sure to establish the time zone so people don't send you messages at odd hours. And then what you do is this is the time window you give to all of your clients, not just one of them. Okay? You don't need a 2-hour time window for client A, a 2-hour time window for client B, and a 2-hour window for client C. What you do is you just batch all of them, and that is your time home at the computer or in your office or something. The reality is most clients will not actually take you up on this offer. Most clients are busy and they're okay having you do most of the work without necessarily checking in or talking every single day. That's okay. But this provides you the appearance of being omnipresent without actually being omnipresent. And when they eventually do inevitably send you a message, you can deal with it. Then you don't have to worry about responding to them at 9:30 p.m. at night or something like that like you hear most client horror stories revolve around, right? Unreasonable expectations surrounding hours and stuff like that. Cuz what you've done is you've actually established those expectations ahead of time. Okay? And then regardless of progress, a simple and easy way to get ahead of things is to send proactive updates every 1 to two days. What I mean by this is schedule a Monday, Wednesday, and a Friday update cadence where 8 a.m. or something like that. The first thing you do when you step into the office is you just send them a simple templated message. Hey Pete, just wanted to fill you in on where we're at. Yesterday we finished X, Y, and Z. Today we're focusing on X, Y, and Z. No um action needed on your end. Just wanted to make sure you were in the loop. Okay. Clients love that absolutely adore when people do stuff like this because it is extraordinarily like time efficient. It lets them know where the project is at without requiring anything in return and it gives them that feeling of professionalism and white glove service. Gives them the feeling that you are handling what they are paying you to handle. Okay. This also allows you to batch client comms to prevent constant interruptions which are a big issue with clients. If anybody is watching this that has worked with a client, please comment down below about how right this is because this is one of the biggest issues that I think most agencies probably suffer from. But like clients contacting you at all hours of the day leads to you stopping what you are doing and then having to deal with that client demand and then getting back to what you're doing. That's called context switching. If you guys have ever done lots of context switching, you'll know that it's super unproductive and it's one of the reasons why you leave yourself feeling so unfulfilled and that's why so many people's revenue ceilings are so low because they just can't juggle more than like two or three client projects cuz they're constantly omnipresent with the client. If you start getting in the habit of minimizing context switching, you'll be significantly more productive as a result. And then you can also handle client comms on your time, not their time. Aside from that, set clear expectations about response times outside your window. If you have reasonable windows, like a one to two hour daily comm window, and then you give people proactive updates, they won't expect you to be omnipresent. And if you don't respond to them outside of that window, that'll be okay. And then finally, create templates for common update scenarios to save time. What do I mean by this? I don't mean automation templates. What I mean is just have like two or three email templates that you just vary time and time again where you say something like, "Hey Pete, just checking in. Hey Pete, hope you're doing well. Hey Pete, wanted to fill you in on our progress. Right? Have two or three of these. And then all you do is you just go to your template bank and copy and paste it. A really quick and easy way to do this on a Mac is you just go over to your system settings. Then you go to text replacements. Then what you do is you legitimately just create an update one. You say, "Hey, just checking in on XYZ. Here's where we're at. Update. Thanks, Nick." Okay, what do you do next? Well, anytime you have some text, you just go update one just like this. And now check it out. I have my whole update right over here. These sorts of simple daily client management optimizations don't seem like they make a very big difference. But the main value you'll save here is not necessarily the time you're typing out. The value and the time that you're going to save is you not having to think about stuff like this and just having a prepared system every Monday, Wednesday, or Friday. or who knows, maybe Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday. Or maybe you give client updates on Saturdays, right? The exact specifics of the schedule that you're going to pick totally varies and it's up to you. There is no real right answer. And I'm sure that my own recommended cadence isn't necessarily perfect either, but it's close enough. And what you'll find in the agency space is close enough is usually about as perfect as you can get anyway. So, here's what the SOP for that looks like. When you start work with a client, make sure to set those daily communication expectations during the kickoff call. After you inform the clients of the protocol, then just set your proactive updates. When the client responds to you, okay? Just batch it for the next day at that time window that you've given them that you are going to respond to them in. And then if you have any issues, just address them during that dedicated window. This will help you document all communications. Ultimately, create templates and stuff like that, which will handle future clients easier. And in this way, you're just going to have a giant library of client com templates and then uh value that you'll be able to carry forward to seem more and more professional. The fourth major issue is deliveries. Okay, so a big problem that I see a lot of beginners do is they focus on the wrong things. They focus on things that they consider valuable, usually the technical implementation details and then they ignore or they spend very little time on the things that clients consider valuable, which tend to be just the simple immediately visual things that you're generating with your AI automation. I mean stuff like the Google doc you're making. I mean stuff like the Slack notification you're sending. I mean stuff like the the delivery video that you record where you walk through your automation from start to finish. Believe it or not, if you're going to spend time on anything in your agency, spend time on this stuff cuz this is the stuff that makes the big difference. Clients don't see your AI automation. They don't see the Make.com or NAN scenarios or workflows, respectively. What they see is the deliverable, the output, and that's what you should be optimizing for. Okay? So, don't focus on the backend complexity when you deliver. Focus on spending your time on that like 8020 of the stuff that the clients actually see when you do your initial demo. And most people will have some sort of demo where they do the delivery. It'll be either a video delivery or it'll be like a call where the client will want to be walked through. Make sure that that demo is as perfect as possible because if you can nail that demo, even if the rest of your project or your product is not as nice as it could be, that's the thing that they're going to be judging you off of. Likewise, if you spend a million bajillion hours trying to make the most amazing system and then when it comes time to demo it for the client, you screw it up. The client will not give a crap about the million bajillion hours that you spend on the system. They'll care about the crappy demo that you delivered. So, that's what you want to be perfect. If you want to make your impression count, then optimize the areas that you interface with the client in which the client interfaces with the system. Also, invest heavily in the visual design of things. So, a good example of that is this is a video I recorded a while ago that essentially shows how to take a $2,000 automation that's built in make.com, then turn it into a 10K SAS. So, what I mean by this is there are a bunch of no code or vibe coding tools. In this case, Lovable, but there's also Bolt. I think Figma now has a tool and and so on and so forth where you can essentially take this backend automation and you can wrap it in a really beautiful, sexy, sleek interface to improve the perceived value of the system. Look for opportunities to do that stuff. Hell, if you do a type form in your system, make sure to spend an additional 30 minutes after you're done building the system, making that type form look as sexy as possible. Add the client logo to things. Read an introductory design book. I can recommend Steve Schroers and Adam Watans, I believe their names are at the guys that currently run Tailwind CSS. And then create professional templates for anything that's client-f facing. Make sure the spacing's nice. Make sure the font's nice. If you have a Calendarly or a cal.com link or something like that where the clients have to book on, make sure your profile picture looks good. This is the stuff that the client will interact with. And to be frank, this is the stuff they're going to judge you on. My recommendation is you actually allocate more of your time to the front end of your app than you do the back end. Okay? So, actually more of the time that you spend on your AI automation agency should be on the way things look than the way things actually work. So look and feel, aka aesthetics or form is actually more important than function a lot of the time. I know it's counterintuitive and I know it's against every guiding ethos of development in general, but this is just the way the market works and if you really want to crush it, this is what you have to do. Okay, here's a quick and easy SOP. Step one, identify all client touch points. Step two, prioritize the visual elements of those touch points. Step three, create some sort of intuitive user interface that they can navigate. Prepare a perfect demo. And you tend to get pretty good at demos when you do them day in and day out. Just look at me. And then finally, document with some sort of visual guides before collecting feedback on experience so that the next time you do it for the next client or even the same client for a future project, you can do it better and better and better. The last and most important point of all is the idea of retention. This is a major problem point that I see a lot of AI agencies suffer from. And essentially what retention refers to is after you're done done working with a client, your ability to get them on a follow-up project is your ability to retain them. And retention is always better than new acquisition. Okay? If there's one major takeaway you're going to get from this video, focus on this. All of the rest of the steps above, the onboarding, the communication, the delivery details, and so on and so forth, they all focus on your ability to retain clients as opposed to just always have to acquire new ones. Why? Well, retaining clients allows you to take advantage of leverage. You get to, let's say, get somebody on a retainer so that instead of just working with them on a one-off project on month one, you get $3,000 a month every month for 6 months or something like that. I mean, that's that's inherent leverage. Working with the same client is easier. It's better. It's more enjoyable. You guys know your work styles, you can typically demand more money for it as a result. It also allows you to get very deeply involved with the client business, which is where you can drive the most value. I don't drive the most value for new clients. I drive the most value for clients whose businesses I deeply understand, whose niches I've gotten to get and and kind of gro and get deeper with over the course of a year or two. And this also allows you to get into things like revenue shares, deeper financial relationships with clients, and even in some situations equity. Like I've had a few situations where clients have actually given me portions of their business to help them manage it. That's not possible on the first offer. Okay. So, what does that mean? Well, the minute that you deliver a project and you make sure that your delivery is sexy and perfect and so on and so forth like we just talked about, that's when you pitch another project. The reason why is cuz this principle called reciprocity. When a client is overwhelmed with value and you just shown them and solved all the problems that they suffer from, they're going to feel like there's some sort of reciprocity, reciprocal relationship there. And what you want to do is you want to take advantage of that time window. What you don't want to do is you don't want to deliver an awesome project and say, "Okay, great. Thank you very much and talk to you never and then in a year follow up with them and say, "Hey, I have an idea for a new project." What you want to do is as you do the delivery, you want to say, "Hey, here's a delivery. Here's the amazing project that I just did. Here's a bunch of extra free stuff that you didn't even ask me for. By the way, while I was doing this project, I noticed that you were currently doing X, Y, and Z. I know this is out of left field, but I think I can actually make you another $5,000 or $10,000 a month with a couple of simple tweaks. If you're interested in that after you're done being impressed at the value I just delivered, let me know. We could set up a call." That's the vibe that allows you to get those repeat and recurring clients and ultimately scale your agency with some sort of monthly recurring revenue. Okay? And that involves identifying related challenges that clients won't recognize themselves. You're taking the outside view, but usually when you do some sort of initial one-off project, you get at least some visibility in client systems, which allows you to do this. Additionally, there are just some systems that most clients want. Stuff like outbound lead generation systems, for instance, stuff like marketing systems, stuff like autoresponders and CRM. If you tend to work with one niche, you'll find that most businesses like specific types of projects and those projects just recur. So, what you can do is even if you don't know a specific thing that you can give that client, something that's like hyper related to the project that you just delivered, you could have a library of three or four common follow-ups and then you could just offer them to all of the clients that you do initial one-off projects with in order to improve the probability of retention. Likewise, when you're presenting these opportunities, focus on business impact. If you guys remember my example from a minute ago, feel free to rewind the video if you want. I talked about I could make you another5 to $10,000. I didn't say, "Hey, I can make your processes 13% more efficient." Customers don't really care about efficiency. What customers care about is top-end revenue, bottom line margins, or just founder chaos. Essentially, make their lives a little bit easier. Finally, make taking the next step as simple and as low friction as possible. Don't say, "Hey, what do you think about X, Y, and Z?" Instead, say, "Hey, here's the opportunity. Here's all the money I think I might be able to make you and or save you. Here's a calendar link. Feel free to book anytime in the next 48 hours. I can walk you through what that looks like. Make it as simple and as easy for them to just naturally lead from project A to project B and you'll build yourselves a recurring revenue machine that operates not while you sleep but at very high multiples per unit time. If you want to talk about an SOP for this step, what you do is you complete your current project. After you're done, you identify a related challenge. You prepare a simple solution proposal. Then when you deliver the current project, you do your new pitch at the same time. If the client's interested, then you schedule a discussion using some sort of calendar link. And then ultimately, you close that follow-up project, too. And when you do the follow-up project, assuming that you're smart about it, you can pitch a lot higher money because you can tie it directly to return on investment. If they say no, then you can just follow up with them in 2 3 4 5 6 months. Then re-engage strategic time. Usually sometime, you know, you delivered some more value. So maybe you do some sort of quarterly check-in. You say, "Hey, client X, had a blast working with you last quarter. You know, I thought that maybe I could give you a little bit more value." So, here's a bunch of free stuff. And by the way, I think I can save you55 or $10,000 a month if you're interested. Here's a quick call link. Let me know. Here's some brief top level details about what that looks like. Okay, awesome. So, you now have the complete business framework. We got everything from the technical foundations, the business reality to the sales psychology, market targeting, and operational systems that solve most major agency problems. And finally, here's where we're going to switch from strategy to execution. I want to show you guys how to build a complete AI system live from absolute scratch using NADN. It's not just any system. It's a graphic design agent that generates logos and ad creatives and style guides and as well as any visual asset a client needs, plus handles revisions until those things are perfect. The idea is to just marry a lot of the business stuff that we just talked about with the actual technical realities and hopefully allow you to look at them in a new light. You know, this isn't just a cool fancy technology anymore. Now, these are outcomes that you can actually deliver for businesses. Finally, more importantly, this is a system you can sell to clients for 2,000 bucks a pop or more like right now. I'm going to show you guys my entire thought process. I'm going to show you guys all the deadends and detours and ultimately what real highv value AI development looks like from first principles. So, let's build this AI system from scratch. Hey, today I'm going to build a graphic design AI agent live in front of you that generates logos, ad creatives, style guides, literally any visual asset you guys want 24/7, plus lets you review it and revise it until these assets are perfect. Also, I'm going to include a chatbot that you guys can install in client workspaces and sell it for a,000 bucks a pop or more. Templates, blueprints, everything you guys need is down below in the description. If this is your first time here, my name is Nick. I've scaled my own AI and automation agency at over 72,000 bucks a month. And I'm now leading the biggest AI automation community by revenue with almost 3,000 automation freelancers and agency owners. I'm going to build this entire thing from scratch using Naden. I'm going to walk you guys through my entire thought process. I'll also show you all the deadends and detours so you guys could see what actual real high value AI development looks like from first principles. If that sounds like something you guys want to get into, this is a video for you. Let's do it. Okay, so this is the system. It's an AI agent built in N8. And AI agents have their pros and their cons, but one of the most valuable and best use cases for them is this sort of like gradual iterative design. Their ability to come up with cool prompts and then their ability to work with you until something is to the point that you like it. So in situations where accuracy is less of a big deal, um they're fantastic. And this is the design pattern I've chosen for this system. The way that it works is essentially you send it a message saying, "Hey, how's it going?" It then goes through and selects the OpenAI chat model, stores a bunch of stuff in memory, and then it has access to a number of tools. We can generate a logo, a style guide, a gradient background. We can upscale images, and then we can feed things back into the OpenA API to do a revision process, which I've mapped out. But you can add arbitrarily many of these subworkflows. The way that they're working to be specific is we are basically downloading a pre-existing asset using a high-quality service like Canva. So there's a style guide, for instance, and then we're having it use that style guide as like an example of the thing that we want. And it does a pretty good job of mimicking the layout, mimicking the way that things look, and then just adding in our own data. So that's more or less what we're going to do here. We've also exposed a little chat endpoint over here. Then I just made some minor design changes. So you guys could take this, upload it into your business, sell it to people as like a chat endpoint. Do more or less whatever you want. But in this case, I'm just going to communicate with it directly through this little widget. And what we're going to do to start is we're just going to generate a style guide. So I'll say, "Hey, I want to generate a style guide." I'll show you guys the upscale functionality as well in a second. We also baked in logic to like have it ask you things and, you know, follow up. So I don't know, let's call it like leftclick, uh, preferred colors, pastel hues, rainbow, gradient, soft light, ethereal. I want minimalistic flat icon design with no outlines. And then for fonts, I want serif fonts. Um, and then style guide will be yeah, nothing. Okay, let's just go go for it. It's going to take all of that data and it's going to use it to generate a request which is now feeding into our style guide generator. Style guide generator was the um one that was using that example that I showed you earlier. Kind of look like this. So, what it's going to do is going to take this and it's just going to modify it so that you know instead of it saying orange or something, it's going to say what we want it to say, which in my case is going to be left click. Okay. Okay. And then once it's done, it returns it in a link format, which is kind of cool. This is what the leftclick brand looks like. Um, reasonably high quality. I didn't specify the date that I started the company, but that's something you can do as well. So, as you can see, it did match pretty closely to what we were looking for. Um, and I personally think that this is extraordinarily sexy. So, what I'm going to do next is I'll say upscale this. Let's do 2x for now. What it's going to do is going to take that image that we just outputed, send it over to the replicate API. Replicate being the service that does all the stuff. Um, and then yeah, we now have the upscaled image over here, which is twice as big. It's also much sharper, which is really nice. So now this is something that might be like client ready. You could actually send it over to a client or maybe, you know, you're using this internally or whatnot. And then, yeah, just to show you guys an example of like a bunch of the other things you can do. I also had it like generate me a gradient background. Generate a gradient background based on these colors. Light pink. Let's do greenish pastel. Okay. So now what it's going to do is going to go down that third route. That's going to generate me a gradient background using another example that I provided. Okay. And though it generated me a nice pastel gradient. Opening that up. As you guys could see, we do have that beautiful pastel color. We could upscale it. We could do whatever we want. We could also ask it to change things. Hey, this is great, but could you make it darker? So now I'm going to ask it, could you make it darker? It's going to ask me for some clarification. Yes, make them deeper, more saturated pastel tones. The reason why you do this is because if you just ask it to make a change for you, um it's very uh general. So this allows us to cut the fluff and get hyper specific and then now we go through an edit or revise route which allows us to close the loop and it's uh one thing that a lot of these graphic design team tools are missing. I should also note we expose an endpoint where you could use this. Um so you could copy and paste this URL, send it over to a client, have the client specific templates or style guide stuff for that particular instance. Um, and then if I go to the darker edited version, you can see that it's done some some edits. So, you could dial back the edits. You can make them even more intense. I'm not a big fan of this one, but is what it is. Uh, better than having to hire a fiber designer or something, right? And that's the system. All right. So, as I mentioned, this is a live build, meaning I'm looking at a blank canvas now. I've yet to actually do anything. The only thing I actually have is a road map here. And this road map is just me thinking through what I believe is going to be how I'm going to proceed with the system. I don't actually know for sure, though. And the reason why I'm showing you guys this and leaving in all the detours and all the ugly bits is because I actually think this is a much better and easier way for you guys to learn how to build systems than just looking at the finished product. I think that seeing the detours that go into an actual live development process, seeing some of the mistakes that I make, seeing how I deal with debugging and stuff like that, I think that's actually just very valuable. And when I was learning naden and make.com and just no code and in general, I followed creators that did stuff like this specifically because they left it all in. I liked seeing their thought process. It was very informative. So yeah, all I have so far is this road map and this is what I think the system is going to look like in a nutshell. Um I want to start by building a workflow that just generates an image using OpenAI's GPT image 1. This is the current most advanced uh you know image model that I have access to and it's also in the open AAI stack. So it makes it really easy to do everything I want to do. But the reason why I'm starting with the actual image generation is because I always just like to start at the end and then once I verify I can actually do the thing that I want to do, which in this case is going to be generate some designs. Then I'll work backwards to, you know, putting together the agent logic and making it all nice and pretty. So, we're going to verify this first of all. Then I'm thinking we're probably just going to connect it straight to the NA agent, start setting up some prompts, and then I believe I'll have to build different routes for different asset types. I don't know for sure, but I'm thinking like, you know, we'll have a logo, but what if somebody wants to design like a style guide, right? That's a pretty common thing for a design firm to do. What if maybe we want some sort of ad creative or maybe some website design? I think what I'm going to have to do, and I'm not entirely sure yet, but I believe that this is going to be fire, is I'm going to start with just one route. After I verify that that route works, I'm going to create like a logo preset. Then I'm going to create like a style guide preset. Then I'm going to create like an ad creative preset. And maybe I'll do two or three for now. I don't actually know how many I'm going to go down, but I'm going to provide you guys the way and the nugget that you will need to build out however many of these you want. And the idea is like I'm just going to use winning templates that other people have already created for these things. I'm going to go on like Canva and I'm going to find examples of style guides that crush and then I'm going to provide it to GPT image one alongside a prompt. So that way we're going to take a template which we know looks super sexy and then we're just going to say, "Hey, I want you to do something like this, but here's a bunch of information about the specific client request." That's how I think we're going to do things. I'm not entirely sure, but yeah, we'll give it a go. Then I want to build some AO apps scaling functionality into the designer. And for those of you guys that don't know, ABS scaling basically just means like if an image is 1024 x,024 pixels, we just scale it up to 2048* 20048. So we just increase the quality of it. AI is pretty good at that and that'll avoid this from just being a simple agent chatbt wrapper, which I think a lot of agents are. Then I'm going to build some way to revise the images to make them better and like, you know, make some adjustments cuz revisions are pretty common. And then finally, I'll make it pretty and package it. Okay, this is everything in a nutshell that I'm going to try my best to do right now. In reality, we're going to have some detours. We're going to hit some stumbling blocks. Whatever. Let's get to it. First thing I want to do is I just want to verify, can I actually generate an image using GBT image one? In order to do that, I'll hit over here, click trigger manually. And then what I want is I want the OpenAI node. I'm going to click on that button. The specific node I want is generate an image. Now, I'm going to assume you guys don't have a credential. So, I actually set this up alongside you. Then scroll down here and what we need to do is we need to fill in this API key section. So in order to do that just head over to platform.openai.com log in. I believe I'm already logged in. Yes, I am. Then I go to the top rightand corner settings. Go to API keys and just create a new secret key. So I'll just say I don't know like NAN June the 10th. You can see that I actually did this cuz I wanted to already have one, but spur the moment decided I would redo it. Cool. Now I'm going to copy this and I'm going to go down here. If anybody wonders why I was exposed my damn OpenAI keys, this is why. I'm going to save. Somebody ran the hell up my account the other day. Okay, open account 3. And then down here under model, it's a GPT image one. So, let's click that. And let's just verify we can actually do something cool. So, minimalistic flat logo for a brand called leftclick no text inspired by Google's flat iconic design. Let's do that. What sort of options we have? Quality for demo. I'm just going to go low. And then resolution. Looks like we can change a resolution to 1024, 10, 1536 or 1536. Okay. So, I'm just going to click execute step. The reason why I'm doing this, again, just to be clear, is I always like starting at the end. And I recommend you guys start at the end, too. Don't start at the beginning when you do a system like this. Start at the end. Verify you can do the thing that everybody is paying you to do anyway. Hardcode all the data. In our case, we're hard coding the prompt and stuff. And only once we've verified that that works are am I actually going to bother putting together an agent or something. Okay. All right. So, data. I'm gonna click view. What do we got? That looks kind of cool. I mean, do I actually think it looks cool? No, I don't like the outline. Oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. Actually, I think when I put it on a dark background, it look like trash. Now that it's on a light background, it actually looks okay. Um, why don't I do no outlines? I don't really like the outlines. Let's do pastel hues and color tones. Let's do that. I'm just going to play around with it a little bit. I imagine this is why I'm thinking we need some revision feature. I imagine people are going to want to go back and forth a little bit, right? Insert their own things. So, yeah, I'm just trying to see what sort of like user experience the people that are using this are going to have. And I think this is somewhat realistic. So, it's a view. Oh, that's so clean. That's the logo right there. Look at that. Oh, that's way better than my current logo. I might actually steal that. Just save this. Okay, we'll call it binary data. Awesome. So, we verified this. Uh, do you notice how right now the output is in binary, though? I don't really like this. I imagine this is going to serve a problem. I don't know for sure, but like rather than having it be output in binary, why don't I um just add it to a Google Drive. So, I'll go to Google Drive. They have an uh node called upload a file. So, I'm just going to my Google Drive account. As opposed to just showing you guys how to set up the credential here, I'm not going to because I actually did have my Google client ID and secret leaked and that did lead me to paying quite a lot of money. So, I'm just going to give you guys the docs for this. Just click on open docs. If you guys want to connect Google Drive, you do have to set up what's called a Google Cloud console. And then after that, you have to create a you have to authorize the Google Drive app. And then after that's done, you create a project. And then in the project, you get a client ID and a client secret. So assuming that you've done this now, and there's many videos out there, just Google, you know, Google Drive and ADN authentication. Assuming you've done this, what we want to do is we want to go to file name. I'll just say design parent drive my drive root folder. Okay. Input data field name. This just needs to match this. So it matches this. So I'm good. So, okay, now that I have all this stuff, why don't I just pin this and I click execute workflow. You guys probably can't see this cuz in the bottom right, but it says problem in node Google Drive, the operation expects the nodes input data to contain a binary file data, but none was found item zero. So, why is this occurring? It's occurring because in N8, if you pin I I just realized a second after I did it, if you pin a binary output, it doesn't work. So, you actually have to rerun the whole thing, which kind of blows, but whatever. Let's just rerun it. Let's see what happens. The way that I I do debugging is I always just take a deep breath anytime I see a bug. H. And then I ask myself, okay, what node is the problem arising from? And then I find that just like isolates the problem and it makes a lot easier to know where to go. And you know, sometimes you don't know the node. Looks like that actually worked. Um, there are a lot of links on the right hand side. I think it's web view. This is the one I'm going to paste in. And we're going to see does it pop up. Cool. So, as you can see, it took a different approach this time. It didn't take that like little mouse gradient thing, which is unfortunate cuz I like that one more, but whatever. It did upload the thing and we got a web view link. So, let me just see. Can I see this in incognito? Can't really see that in incognito. That's unfortunate. Is there some way I can like make this more accessible? H a properties. What the hell does that mean? I don't know. Properties. The hell does that mean? I don't know. Keep revision forever. OCR language. Yeah, I don't know. Let's see. Is there a node that that can make this just accessible to everybody? Hm. Share file probably. Let's see. Google Drive account file resource share the file. I I want to map by ID. I'll go expression. And I'm just going to map this here. Okay, that looks good to me. And then permissions. What do I want? I want ro writer. So, I want the person to be able to edit it. And then it'll be anyone. So, anyone gets this. I don't know what file discovery is. Oh, I don't want to make mine Googled Google. Okay. Now, if I pin this now, will this work? Maybe it will. I don't know. Hopefully, it will. Let's see. Okay, it worked. Cool. So now this is now accessible to anybody. So I'm going to open up an incognito, paste in my link. Can I see it? Yes, I can. Fantastic. Cool, cool, cool. All right. So what does this mean, ladies, gentlemen, and anybody else that's watching this? Uh, we are now done the first hurdle. Okay, so this is now complete. 100% good to go. We've now built a workflow that generates the image using opens GBT1. Now it's time to make this really fancy and build in some agent logic. Okay, so what I want to do is I want to connect this to an NAN AI agent and set up prompts. So in case you guys have never used an AI agent before, I used to all over AI agents all the time to be honest, but recently the technology has gotten to a point where AI agents are actually somewhat reliable, which is nice. So what they are is that this node right over here where you connect a chat model, memory, and a tool. In order to have this stop being read, we need to connect a chat trigger to it. So that's what I'm going to do here and drag it. Then under chat model, I'm going to type open AI. The one that I'm just currently addicted to using is GPT 4.1. I just use it for everything. I don't use the mini. I just pay full price. Why? Cuz I'm a badass. Then I do sampling temperature 0.7. That looks pretty cool to me. And then memory. I always just do simple memory. Now GPT 4.1's context window is so big that you can actually totally get away with having like a 5,000 context window or something. I'm just going to do 10. But I just want you to know that this is like irrelevant now. Context window doesn't matter. And before I do this, let's just actually go ahead and chat with us. So, open chat. Hey, what's up? Just want to show you guys what this looks like in case anybody here is new to AI agents. So, what happened is I sent the chat message and then it thought for a second and then it passed over to the chat model. Sent my message. Hey, what's up? Hey, not much. Just here ready to help. What's up with you? And then it went back here, added it to memory and then it kind of responded and output this. Can you design me an image, good sir? No, I don't believe so. Why? Because it can't help you because it doesn't have access to a tool. But now what we're going to do is we're actually going to give it access to a tool. Tool is going to make everything super hunky dory. So now I'm going to go call NA workflow tool. So call this tool to generate a design. We'll say design for now, not image. I'm going to go create a subworkflow in personal. This is going to open up a new window. And now we can actually add the thing that we will be calling. Okay. It'll ask us to change the input schema. So what sort of data do we want to provide to it using AI? I want to provide the image prompt for sure. the resolution probably because that was a field. Uh and then let me see what what else do we got actually uh prompt resolution. We should add the type as well. Like I don't know for sure what the logic is going to be here but uh hypothetically let's just say we have three types. We have logo style guide. Let's just say background for now. Logo, style guide, and background. Okay. And we're going to like you know hardcode those in. So okay. Anyway, now we have a sub workflow. Why don't we call this GPT image one generator? Okay. Then in brackets, what was the title of this? I always like to organize them. AI graphic designer. So this one's just in brackets going to be a graphic designer. That's how I know that the AI graphic designer agent is calling this. And then what am I going to do? I'm actually just going to copy all of this. Well, cut it and paste it in here. I'm going to remove this when clicking execute workflow. And then I'll feed this in directly. So what I've done now is I've taken the logic with the image generation at the very end and I've added it to the subworkflow and I'm connecting that subworkflow as a tool to the main agent called AI graphic designer. Okay. So now when executed by a flow, what do we have? Oh, I think there's one more thing we might need actually. You see the file name? I'm going to I'm going to have it create a file name too. I'm going to go over here. I'll go a file name. Okay. All right. So once we have all this Okay. How do we actually map the fields and like make our agent be capable of sending data to this subworkflow and then receiving it? What we need to do is we need to map them by clicking execute step. It's now just going to output a bunch of examples here. What I want to do is I just want to like give it something. So image prompt simple flat minimalistic icon with a C similar to the Google logo. Flat no outline. Let's do that. Resolution. I don't actually remember what the resolution types were. Already forgotten. 1,024. Okay. So, let's just double check. Anytime you want to double check what the actual like code value is of a field, just go from fix to expression. So, this is 1024 x024. So, you know, I just feed in a string basically. So, let me go over here. Let's just pretend that this is actually 1024 x024. Image type. For now, we'll go logo and then file name. What do we want to do? Like uh C logo logo. Let's do that. Okay. Save. Great. Now that this is done, we actually need to map this. So, let me delete this. Image prompt goes here. Quality. We'll just keep it as low for now cuz I don't want to burn my tokens and I'm just testing. Resolution will go here. Uh what else do we need? Google Drive. Okay. So, we we we don't actually have access to anything until we run this. That's how N9 works. So, we just have to execute this workflow. I'm just going to decouple it from the subsequent node so it doesn't run all the way. Then once I'm done with that, um, yeah, we'll, uh, we'll connect it and then map everything. Okay, I'm seeing that it just finished. Let's view this. Now we got the logo. It's a C instead of a G. The copyright claims, so I can hear them from here. Uh, what we do now is we go back to schema. And then what do I want? I want the file name. Stick that here. C logo. That looks good to me. Fine. Upload data file. That's good. Uh, can I Oh, you know what? I can't actually pin this. Do you guys remember there was that issue? All right. Well, that's fine. Everything else here looks okay, I think. I believe. I am not sure. Is it okay? You know, I think we have to edit uh edit some fields here actually too, which is annoying. Yeah, I think the way that the agent works is input goes here, output goes here. So, if the output node is the Google Drive share node, it's not going to work. I'm not entirely sure, but I think I need to use an edit fields node. Kind of sucks, but whatever. We'll go manual mapping. We'll go weblink. I think that's the only thing we need. Web view link. Anything else? Maybe we'll just add the initial prompt as well, just in case we need the initial prompt for editing purposes. Uh, do I not have the initial prompt? Where the hell is the initial prompt, man? Why is this so long? H, why is this so long? We'll call this initial prompt. We'll call this file name as well. Okay. Oh, and then we'll also call this uh file uh image type. Okay. I'm just providing a bunch of additional data just in case. Uh we can now just pause these. Execute the workflow. Does this output what I was expecting? Web view link. Copy. Paste C logo. Nice. That does work. All right. All right. All right. I think we're now ready to actually call this agent and just see what happens. Let's give it a try. So, let me just add a system message and say you are helpful intelligent design assistant. You generate high quality designs using the provided tools. I'll say when you receive an image from a tool, wrap it wrap it in nice looking markdown ATX format and present it to the user. Uh markdown is just a simple way that you can format image outputs and just make it really pretty. And let's just rename this now to generate design. And I'm just going to go general for now. Okay, I believe NAN also has a tidy up selection now, which is cool. So, just um doing that. And now let's clear our previous output and say, "Hey, how's it going?" It says, "Hello, I'm doing well. How can I assist you with your designing today?" I'd like to generate a logo. What is the name or text for the logo? Let's go. Left click. Left click. No, left click. But don't include the text. Minimalistic, flat, no outlines, gradient, Google colors. Um, let's do a mouse pointer. Then let's go company. All right. Awesome. Just sent it all in. I'm not seeing anything here. Oh, my bad. I forgot the most important part of the prompt. Uh, which is the fact you have to have AI do it all. So, sorry. Anytime you're working with an agent, let the model define all of the parameters. Okay. All right. All right. I'm just going to say try again, it should now be okay. Crossing my fingers. Okay. The fact that it's already taking some time to generate is good. Hey, don't be like me. Um, there's a little bit of nuance there. they're inside of your AI agent tool fields. You can actually specify the data that you send over there. And what we're doing is we're always letting AI define that logic no matter what. So, just always make sure to go down here, click define automatically by the model. Okay. Anyway, it looks like it's giving me the logo, but I can't actually click it. Why can't I click it? H I think there's a bug of some kind. This is the input. This is the output. Let's go here. Odd. It looks like the output was generated fine. Oh, hold on a second. Ah, no. There there is some problem with this. I'm copying the JSON, not the actual output. All I want is the output. So, no. How do we actually see just the output data? It did the mouse. The mouse looks pretty cool. has some slight gradients and stuff, but um why isn't this wrapped? Maybe call this tool to generate a design, then return the web view link in markdown ATX format so the user can click it and open a new tab. Maybe we try that. All right, let's do this one more time. Repeat this, please. Oh, and you know what? There's um some option here to pass through binary images. Let's do that as well, just in case that I'm missing something. Okay, I think this now worked. View logo, leftclick, mouse pointer. Clicking on it. Nice. Okay, cool. We got our little leftclick mouse pointer in there. Beautiful. Beautiful. Awesome. I should probably clarify. That's the name of my company. That's why I keep on saying left click over and over and over again. Cool. So, what have we done now, ladies, gentlemen? We have connected to any agent. We set up the prompts. Our next step is to build routes with design presets for different asset types. You're probably wondering, Nick, what the hell is a design preset? Well, here's what I'm thinking. I know for a fact that if you give OpenAI GPT image one, an example of something that you want, and then you say, hey, I want you to do it kind of like this, but I want you to just swap out a bunch of stuff. It'll actually do a pretty good job. So, what I want to do is I want to give it a bunch of examples of things that I like that I've verified are great designs, and then I want to have it like change it up a little bit. Now the thing is I know for a fact that you also just can't use the GPT generate image node here. We have to actually take a different approach which kind of sucks. If I go to OpenAI here, you see how there's if I type image or something. There's only analyze an image or generate an image. There's no actual like edit an image here. Unfortunately, there's nothing for for editing an image. So you can't actually supply an image as an input through their thing that I know of. I mean maybe I'm stupid. I don't know. Yeah, I I don't believe you can. I think you tech Yeah, I think you have to do an API call. So, that kind of sucks, right? But whatever. We'll make it work regardless. Somewhere in here, I have a cyclic content generator that I generated forever ago. And I was playing around with image 01 or GPT image one and I came into the HTTP request. So, I'm just going to copy this being lazy, but I'll run you guys through what it looks like. Basically, previously I was using Dolly3 to generate images of handdrawn squiggly cute subjects to put in a newsletter. And the newsletter reports are actually pretty great. Um, but I was just testing it with GBT image, but I'll actually show you guys what it looks like. Let's just paste it back in here. Uh, should I paste it here or should I paste? Okay, anyway, let's paste it here. And then I'm just going to add a manual trigger. So, what I want to do is, um, this is an HTTP request to the OpenAI back end, which does V1 images edits. Okay, I'll run you guys through how to set all this stuff up and I'll pretend that I'm, you know, doing it live for you the first time, even though I'm copying this over from another workflow. But I I want you guys to know that like I copy stuff from previous workflows all the time. Like you want to talk about live builds like 70% of my live builds are just like hm how the hell did I do that API spec before and this is normal and it's actually recommended. Like I recommend you do this because every time you do an HTTP request like this you are building a component. Why not make use of that component again? I mean AI automation is all about leverage, right? So that's what I'm doing. And yeah, I mean this is very similar to what I want to do. But anyway, let me actually show you guys an example of it first and then we'll I'll kind of kind of run you through the rest of this. Let's actually just use my Google Drive. That'll be easier. I'm going to download the file as binary and then I'm going to send it over to GPT image. What am I going to do for the image? I'll go to Canva and then I'm going to do style guide. Yes, this is where I make all my crappy thumbnails. That is definitely not me. Let's go. I guess just create then style guide. I want to see style guide doc. Is that really the only thing that we have for style guides? Wow, that sucks. Actually, my goodness, that's terrible. A brand guide. I think it's called a brand guide. Um, I'm going to go brand guide. Okay. Yeah, this is what I wanted. Okay. Okay. Okay. You see this? This is what I'm going to use as an example. I'm going to feed this into AI and I'm going to say, "Hey, I want you to generate stuff that's kind of like this. Let's do a PNG for now. We're not going to do the same aspect ratio, I don't think. Maybe we'll do 1536 or whatever." But I'm going to download this. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to upload this to Google Drive. And then I'm going to access this. So, let's go drive. So, now what I'm going to do is I'm going to drag this over here. I don't know why that isn't coming in. I'm then going to open this. Um, I need to grab the link. So, I'll go share and then I'm just going to copy this link. This is the ID over here. So, if I just copy this and then go back to my AI workflow, I I can actually just paste the ID directly in here. This should download my file now as binary. We'll see. But, um, yeah, let's execute this step. We should have a binary file, right? View. All right, cool. That's pretty big, but whatever. We'll feed it into a one. So data using this image as inspiration let's create a new style guide for a dark and moody brand called leftclick ink use sans sarah fonts and dark pastel hues along yes for design. Okay so now what I'm going to do is I'm going to feed this in and then can we do resolution? Oh, I don't know if we can do resolution as output. H. All right, whatever. I'm going to try execute stop. Okay, now the output of this is always going to be B64_JSON. That just stands for base 64. It's kind of annoying, but what you can do is you can pin this node. And then let's just pin the rest of this over here. You can go base 64 convert to file. Feed in this data and put output in file. And then mime type. I think you have to go image image. Uh, I actually kind of forgot. Uh, I think it's PNG. Yes, PNG. Image.png. There we go. And this will actually now create a PNG for you. At least it should create a PNG for you. We'll see. Right now, we actually have a PNG that we can view and download. And what does the actual PNG look like? Check this out. Leftclick ink S 2018. Left click ink. Left slick ink. Nice. Fonts. Quicksand. Quicksand color palette mouse pouring. It's dark and it's moody. And this is our color palette. Listen, that's actually pretty good. I mean, that looks clean as hell. If I could generate these sorts of brand guides on demand, and this is like part of the work that I did. Hell yeah. So, I'm thinking this is going to be the approach I'm going to take for all of the content. We're going to do like templated for style guides. We're going to do templated for I don't know. I'll probably do like a nice background gradient just to make my life easy and show you guys what's possible. And then I'll do some for logos, too. And we'll just like pass this in. Now that I'm thinking about it, we can actually just add HTTP requests as tools. So we could probably just map this one to one. That's going to be so easy. Basically, what I'm thinking of doing is we're gonna have this call this generate logo. Okay, if we generate a logo, this is the tool we call. Then I'll say if you want to generate a style guide, then call that other tool. If you want to generate something else, then call that other tool. So this is just going to be our logo generator right here. Okay. Then what I want to do is I want to do HTTP request. actually want to map this HTTP request from this. So, unfortunately, there's no way to map it. You just have to kind of copy and paste it one over one because the HTTP request nodes are a little different. But I know that it's a post. Nope. Post. I know that the authentication's predefined credential type. Under credential type, I'm going to go open AI. This will allow you to actually collect or select the same credential that you created for OpenAI earlier. So, even though you're doing an HTTP request, you don't have to rebuild the wheel. Then underneath uh let's see what else did I do underneath body we have to do form so send body content type form data I think and then we just go one for one model GPT image one and then n binary file image and then that last one is going to be the prompt sorry prompt we can have AI fill this in maybe I'll have that in for now and then I think that's all we need to do I'm not entirely sure probably let's just give it some instructions here as well. Call this tool to generate a style guide. Then return the web view link in markdown x formats so the user can click it and open a new tab. Okay. Okay. So, after we call the HTTP request, the generate um style guide, we actually do have to um now that I'm thinking about it, do a couple a little bit of post-processing, right? So, it's not actually that when we generate a style guide, first we have to generate a bunch of binary using this. So, let's think. Okay, maybe we have one thing that downloads a specific file and then we'll download this file and I think it's called orange something, right? No, this one right over here. Then we'll call this the gener uh grab style guide example. Then we'll feed that in here. And then we're also going to convert the file. Do we have any processing? No, we don't actually have the ability to do any processing. It's kind of annoying. Okay. Actually, now that I'm thinking about it, it probably makes less sense to do it this way. and it makes more sense just to feed it in as a subworkflow. As cool as it would be just to bang this out in one shot and then I, you know, I could edit it here. There's also the simplicity aspect. I like the idea of them all looking the same, feeling and working the same. Uh, and then obviously I wouldn't have to do this get style guide example, right? Yeah, probably makes sense. So, I think I'll call it there. You know, we're just going to duplicate this. Instead of a logo, it's going to be a style guide. Then return the web view link in markdown format. And then what I'm going to do is I'm just going to create a new subworkflow. And instead of it being, you know, GBT1, I'll call this logo generator. This one right over here is going to be called style guide generator. I'll go back to my style guide generator. And then copy this. Paste this in here. Now we should be able to Yeah, if you think about it, download this file. generate the image and then convert it to a file and then upload it to Google Drive at the very end as well. Why am I uploading to Google Drive? Because I want the format of this to be the same as the other generate which has the Google Drive upload and then share basically at the end. Uh did I do this again for some reason? I think I did. That's stupid. Let me delete that. Right. So now we should be able to map this from the previous node. The only difference is it's going to be base 64. We're still going to upload it from data. Then we should also get when executed by another workflow. So I just want to make sure the schemas are the same. So can I just copy this? Is that going to work? I don't really know. Nah, you can't just paste one uh one node to another like that. We have to manually put them in. It kind of sucks, but it's what it is. Let's just manate four. Image prompt is the first thing. Resolution is the second thing. Image type is the third thing. And then file name is the fourth thing. We're going to execute this step. We now have access to all of these. So let me plug it in. Let's just copy these as examples for this so that we can actually run it too. So that's one. This is another I don't like how it always goes on new lines here. It's kind of annoying. This is now going to be style guide. And let's do 1536. And then this one down here is going to be called C logo. And we'll say image prompt is style guide for leftclick. A dark moody brand with sans sarah font and a frightening pastel frightening trying a pleasant pastel hue. Okay, that sounds sufficiently that I think you could pass off for graphic design work. I'm going to get uh some hate for that, I take it. Uh generate image using GPD image one. So, what are we going to feed in here? Using this image as inspiration. No, we're not. What we're going to do is we're going to feed this in. I'll say create. Then I'm just going to feed this in using this image as inspiration. Create. And then going to do all that. Okay. Then after we're done with this, we are going to convert the file. Uh I think this is the right field. I'm not entirely sure. Then we're going to upload the file and that should be fine. Just data with the file name. And then we're going to share the file, which also looks good to me. And then just copying the last thing from here. I'm then going to grab the Google Drive web view link. Cool, cool, cool. Let's drag all this now. And then let's just tidy up selection. Space them out all nicely. very very big fan of that feature. And then I just want to run this once just make sure that it works. Well, not make sure that it works. No way in hell it's going to work on the first go. Things never work on the first go. Um, but I'm just giving this a test. Oh my goodness. It might actually work in one shot. Good lord. I think it just worked in one shot. Okay, generate image. We generated it. Let's move on. We then generated or we grabbed the data. Oh my goodness. Talk about spooky. That's pretty funny. I like it. It's actually pretty close to my own logo. What does that say about me? Uh, okay. And then what? Web view link. We don't have web view link. Why not? Oh, because this one's called Google Drive, too. There we go. So, it was null. So, that wouldn't have actually worked. Cool. Um, just because I changed the way that the things were named a bit under edit fields. Everything else work though? Yeah, everything else worked. Okay, cool. So, now we should actually be able to like specify two different assets that we're generating. I should note that these run times are going to be a little while. Uh, but that's okay. Let's give it a try. So, AI agent, it's going to have two tools. You're helpful intelligent design assistant. You generate high quality designs using the provided tools. And I always like to just like make it really clear what those tools are. Right? Logo and generate style guide. When you receive an image from a tool, set the user. The only two things you can generate are logos and style guides. Make sure to clarify which as well as any additional information needed. So your prompt is optimal. The prompt you send to the image model is optimal. Okay, great. Looks good to me. Am I missing anything? I don't think so. We're going to refresh this. Open this. Hey, what's going on? Hot stuff. Hi, I'm here to help you create amazing logos and style guides. If you have a brand, project or idea in mind, just let me know what you need. Logo, style guide, or both. Okay, let's start with a logo. And I'm kind of curious, what sort of questions is it going to ask me? So, name or text? Let's say workflow loop. I want it sleek, clean, minimal, flat icon style. Um, pleasant pastel hues reminiscent of the Google logo. Pick whatever images you'd like. Pick whatever symbols you'd like. Okay, send that over. We should now call the generate logo. And we are calling the generate logo. Cool. I should also note that all the images that were generated so far using the low resolution. So, it's like about as crappy as it'll ever be. But hey, just zoom out a little bit here just so that I could see the outputs and I could see the messages that I'm sending. Okay, it's done. We should now return it. Clicking it open workflow loop. Very, very cool. I really like this. The only downside is, as you see, there are still some issues with the text processing. That actually still looks pretty sweet, though. Not going to lie. I mean, this does a much better job than I'd ever be able to do. Okay, great. I'd now like you to generate a style guide base it on the prompt I sent you above light pleasant etc. Okay, it should now turn that prompt that I used to generate the logo into a concordant style guide which should have some sort of similar data. Let's go to input style guide for workflow loop with a sleek clean minimalist flat icon style. Pleasant pastel hues reminiscent of the Google logo and ensure an overall light modern and inviting feel include suggested logo use color palette typography iconography and sample branding elements. Looks like it's feeding in a resolution that is not possible though 1792 * 1024. That may be a little bad. Uh we should probably specify the resolutions, right? We should supported resolutions. Let's go 1024 * 1024. can already tell that's going to be a bug. Um 1536 and then 1536. Cool. We should probably add this to the other one as well so it doesn't screw that up later. Yeah. So, we did run into an issue with that. Oh, wow. No, we didn't. Very cool. Look at this. Oh, so clean. Type typography. Regular iconography. Workflow loop. workflow. Oh, this is very, very sexy. I am surprised it's that sexy, honestly. Was not expecting that at all. I like the green as well. Very cool. Very cool. So, now we have like a designer inhouse basically that we can send this stuff off to. Um, let's do one more. And I'm going to breeze through this just because, you know, I want this to be like a very domain specific thing. So, like what's something that we always get asked for? Generate some cool gradient or something. Instead of you having to build like a gradient tool, you could totally just do this. So, let's do it. I'm just going to copy and paste this. instead of style guide, it's just going to be like gradient background. So, let me rename this. We'll go gradient background. By the way, I'm using manual stuff for all this, but like you could just press space and then you can rename. Um, they've updated their hotkeys, which is pretty nice. This is going to be gradient background. So, space, let's go generate gradient background over here. I'll say call this tool to generate a gradient background. Then return the web view link and markdown so the user can click it and open a new tab. Then I give you some supported resolutions. Very cool. Image prompt. Whatever. I actually need to generate a new subworkflow, right? This one needs to be for gradient image background. Let's just copy this. Very cool. Very cool. Then I just basically want to, you know, duplicate this workflow. If you think about it, all this is going to be the same. Logic here is going to be the same. We're going to hook this puppy up. And now we just need to add those four schema types. So, I think it was image prompt. I think it was resolution. I think it was image type. And then I think it was file name. And it doesn't look like we're actually going to use image type. Um, why? Because I'm a silly goose. That's why. What am I going to do now? Just to make my life a lot easier. This is about as fast as I'd do it if I wasn't explaining everything. I'd say gradient for left click. Dark moody brand. Simple gradient background for left click. a dark moody brand that prefers dark pastel tones. Okay, looks good. Now, the file that I'm going to download has to be a gradient background. So, I like the noisy gradient backgrounds. Let me see if I can add noise to it. Oh, you see that? Oh, I love them noisy back. Oh, look at this. Oh, that's so sexy. Let's do that one. Open image and new tab. We're going to download this now. Uh oh, AVIF. No, sorry. We need a PNG. I I don't actually know for sure what you can use, but um this is way too big. I don't want to spend all that money. Okay, we'll use something that's midsize like this. This is JPG. I don't actually know if JPG is fine. Why don't I go JPG to PNG just in case? Um it probably works. Yeah, you know what? I think it does work. Open AI API image. Can we support like a JPG? Let me just double check this really quickly. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, we can do just JPEG. So, let's just do JPEG. So, I'm going to grab this now. Oops. I'm just going to paste this somewhere. Let me just rename this to cool gradient background. Cool gradient background is now uploaded. We should be able to click this button to show the file location. And we got it. Um, so how are we going to get the ID? I'm just going to copy the link again. I'm going to grab this URL. Now I can delete all this stuff because I don't need it anymore. Okay. Uh where are we here? I think it's this one. So I'm just paste this ID in. And then generate the image. I'm going to say using this image as inspiration. Create. That should be good. Revert to file. Upload. Share. And this field should say Google 2. Okay, it does. Awesome. So now what we're going to do is we're just going to run it. We're going to see how this one works. You'll notice that while I do all of this, I test after every run. Um, when I say every run, I mean every run. Like I legitimately test after more or less any change that I make. And the reason why is because it's just much more effective. Like let's say I were to run into some issue at some point with any part of my flow and I didn't know what the issue was. Well, now that I because I test everything and then I do the next thing after, I know that if there's any issue with any part of my flow, it is the specific thing that I'm testing. It's nothing before or after. Okay. So, let's go to edit fields here. Let's see the web view link and let's see how it did generating that gradient. I mean, it's okay. It's not the best gradient I've ever seen, but it is pretty dark and moody, so I think that works. Let me just see what sort of size was sent to it. I mean, you know, we we said low resolution, so I imagine that's why it was kind of grainy back there, but what kind of size was sent to it? 1536 by 1024. Does that 1536 x 1024? I don't know. It's tall. It's tall for sure. It's taller than it is wide. You know, this this would have been square. Something like that, but this is taller than it is wide. All right. Whatever. I'll leave it at that. Looks pretty good to me. So now we have three tools. An AI graphic design tool for gradient images, one for style guides and one for logos. Notice how the logo I just left without any preset or example, but you guys could do whatever preset or example you want for any of this. The idea is I just want to give you guys the nuggets that you could use to make this better. Um, so where do we go from here? Well, we've actually done this now. So we now have our Asian capable of doing this. So, why don't I do one more just little test with the gradient tool and then from there we'll mark that as done. Let me not mark that as done until we're 100% sure. So, let's refresh this. Generate me a cool breezy gradient background. Cool, breezy, light blue, almost ethereal gradient background. Okay. And you know, I think I just realized we've only given it two tools. Generate logo, generate style guide, and generate gradient background. Logos, style guides, and gradient backgrounds. Just so it doesn't make a uh make a major mistake. Still, the fact that it's taking a while to generate is a really good sign. We have our little sweat shop in the background. Let's see what that other reel background looks like. Oh, that is so much better. Oh, look how clean that is. I really like that. What sort of logo design do you think would fit with this? What do you think? H Okay, this is great. I like all of this. Let's generate a logo for workflow loop using your above tone above uh directions. We're going to take those directions. We're then going to feed that into the generate logo. And now you guys can see how there's a little bit of back and forth. you know, we're actually capable of having it generate something, asking it for some more refinement as a result, then feeding that into the next thing. This is very similar to the end result that I want to get to. The one final thing we need is we need a way to revise images. Well, I guess two final things. I want a way to upscale images cuz I don't like the resolutions that are provided. And I also want a way to um upscale im uh revise images. Okay, so look at this. This looks really sexy. It did make that mistake with the eye again. But hey, I mean, what what are you going to We have magic intelligence in the can. Are you really going to break a blood vessel or something because it forgot a tiny subset of pixels here? I definitely wouldn't. Um, so that's pretty cool. I'm pretty stoked on this. I'm building this in part because somebody asked me in a previous video about this, but also because I've wanted something like this for myself. So, I'm pretty stoked on it. Let's now talk about that third last step, which is building an AI upscaling functionality into the designer. Upscaling is just an HTTP request with the image. Basically, um there's a a variety of upscalers out there. I'm thinking replicate upscaler. And I know for sure that there are a few. The one I'm thinking using is this Google one. So, it's just going to upscale it two to four times. Pretty simple, pretty high quality. The way that you do this is you need to create an account. So, I haven't I don't think I've done this yet. Okay. So, I just signed in. Now, I'm authorizing. Cool. So, now I want to run with this API. Uh I just want to do curl requests. Looks like this is how you do it. I'm just going to copy this over into this. And what am I going to do now? Well, now I can actually do just an HTTP request. Like that's fine. Going to import the curl. Paste this in. I don't know what EOM means. I have no idea to be honest. Call this tool to upscale an image. And then let me see what sort of parameters can we provide. So, we need Yeah, we need our API key. So, I'm going to grab the API key in a sec, but that's it. Just input image upscale factor X4. Okay. For upscale factor, you can you can write 2x or 4x. Nothing else. Okay, let's just be very clear about that. We need the replicate API token. So, how the hell do I get the API token? Dashboard private AI models. I honestly don't know. Who knows? Oh, API tokens. There we go. All right. This my default API token. We're going to go back here. Feed that in. So, do I need a dollar sign? No, probably not. Just feed in the token. Right. This is going to be the URL that I'm feeding in. So, let's just double check. So, this is my old one. Let's just give this a try. Um, the only thing that I really care about at this point is giving it a try. So, let's give it a try. Payment required. Check your payment details. All right, so that makes sense. Should probably add some payment details. That looks good to me. So, can I now just call this please? Okay, we're now upscaling the image. That's pretty neat. Um, looks like the output is called output. Sorry. Well, damn, that is upscaled as hell. Okay, cool. So now we have the ability to upscale return the output response zero output parameter wrapped in markdown nice markdown ATX format for the user actually I mean I guess the model's going to do it all but whatever let's now call this upscale image okay and now why don't we do this we do need to change one thing this over here is going to the dollar sign from AI and this is going to be like the input image URL. Then this over here is also going to have to be from AI. This is how you sort of do 50, you know, 50% upscale factor. Okay. So now I don't know for sure if this is going to work, but we'll give it a try. Let's just clear everything. Clear execution. Clear this. Hey, what's up? What tools do you have available? Oh, and I think I need to ask add one more tool here. Then you can also upscale them. Okay. What tools do you have available? We ask. And what will it say? It'll say we can generate these three or upscale them. Okay, great. Generate me Oops. me a super funky Dory gradient. We want funky and we want dory, baby. Let's make a funky Dory. Super funky. Yeah, I think I should record these videos with sunglasses on for max funk. I got that that max funk on. All right. Uh, let's see what we got here. Let's go. Chop chop. Giant galaxy brain. I got places I need to be. You know, I think when the robot uprising occurs, they're coming for me first because I just make them generate super funky dory gradient backgrounds. Great. Please upscale this. Now, it should do your request is invalid. Now, why is the request invalid? No. Why is the request invalid? Tell me what was your input, man. Can we see the input that we are feeding into this or is it just going to give me the error? image input URL is this. Oh, that's why. Oh, yeah. We can't uh we can't feed a Google Drive link in. It's not going to work. I think what we need to do is we need to feed in a direct uh image link. One sec. This is the gradient background. No, this looks good. We have the download function on, don't we? So what was the object forex and then the UC right? Your request is invalid. Could we just pin all of these? I'd kind of forget if you could just pin these. Hm. All right. One sec. Let's just see if we could hardcode this and make this work. Yeah, it's a Google Drive link for sure. Definitely a Google Drive link. Uh how about this? If we feed this in, is this going to work? Let's see. 4x. Uh, why is the four red? Okay, let's just go to imager. Imager. Open up this. Uh, and then go over here. Feed that in. Quest is invalid or cannot be. H. Is is there some issue here that I'm not understanding? Because I thought this worked fine earlier. Let's go back to the replicate API. Let's see what my usage this month has been so far. Two cents, right? So, no. No. Here's the upscaler, right? So, curl request input. This is the Is it only a PNG that this works with? Maybe. If I just feed this example in again and then I say 2x, is it going to work fine? If it does, then yeah, definitely an image. No, there's um actually just like some fundamental image with this. Okay, so it's not actually me. That's great. Um, that's fantastic. This is really good. Authorization content type application JSON prefer weight. Oh, X2. Oh, okay. My bad. So, I just made a very simple mistake where I was saying X2. I was saying um 2X when it should be X2. So, let's see now if this works on my Google Drive file. That was fast. I don't know if that works. It says output and null. So, I don't think that this works as an input. Okay. Well, now let's try this again. We're going to unpin all this. Going to get the link here. Try again. Feed that in. No, I I definitely just want it to finish. I don't want to wait like this. Oh, right, right, right. Sorry, I didn't I mapped it wrong. Right, right. I got to go um dollar sign from AI. And then this has to be input image URL. Then this over here has to be dollar sign from AI. And this one has to be upscale factor, right? Just make sure this looks good. Yes, it does. Okay. Try again. Let's do that. Oh, did we run out? I think we ran out. So, use the funky dory. It's now feeding in the funky door. It's taking some sweet ass time. This is a good sign. Hey, there's the super funky dory upscaled gradient. Look at that. Oh, that's so much better. Wow. Clean. Look at that. Oh, I'm so excited about this. All right, sweet. So, now we have the upscaling functionality built in. Wonderful. And hell, it even actually just like put the whole file in here. Why did it put the whole file in here? Do we have the binary or something? I don't know. Weird. Super cool, though. Super cool. Um, got the input image URL. Looks like it actually converted into a downloadable Google Drive file. So, I don't even need to make any edits. And yeah, we now have that. All right. So, we can head over here. Build AI upscaling functionality into designer. build a way to revise images is that's the last thing that we kind of need to do if you think about it. So, how are we going to do that? Well, we use something very similar to what I just showed you guys a moment ago with the generate style guide, generate gradient background. At least this is what I'm thinking. You know, we want to edit the image, right? So, in order to edit the image, we're going to have to feed in some previous image obviously. And then we're going to say no, make these minor adjustments to it. So, what am I going to do? I'm just going to copy what I did for gradient background. Then, I'm going to drag this over here. Okay. And then this one here will be called edit. Let's say edit /revise image. Call this tool to edit or revise an image. Only call this if you are explicitly asked to change something. Okay. And then supported resolutions. We're going to include those. And then I'm going to create a new subworkflow. This is now subworkflow number four. This subworkflow is going to be called the same thing as the rest of these. Just for organizational purposes, I'll just call this image editor. Maybe design editor revisor or something. And then over here, just going to copy all of these nodes, paste them right the hell back in, making use of previous time and logic. And then what I'm also going to do is I'm just going to get the uh right input schema like I had before. So I'm going to add image prompt including one new one. We'll do resolution. We'll do image type. Then we will do file name as well. Then the last one we're going to do is we're going to go previous image URL. The reason why we're feeding in the previous image URL is because we're then going to download the file directly from there. So, we actually just map it by URL. Okay. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to go grab the pinned output. I'm going to go back to this. Change it. The last thing is though, I want the previous image URL. And what do I want? Let's do this. I think this is this. Yeah, I believe this is okay for URL. I'm going to feed this in. Leave this and let's just say make this darker. 24. This is revision and this is workflow loop logo. Okay. So now when this is executed, we should feed this in. Grab the previous image URL, which I don't know if this is going to work. We're going to find out. Then generate an image using GPT image one. Then I'm going to say this is the former image. The client wants these revisions. Make them. Let's just try that. Okay. So, first thing is I'm just going to test to make sure the Google Drive node works with that URL mapped in. Does it? It does. So, we've now got the image back inside of NADN. We're now going to generate the image using GPT1. It's automatically going to model. Okay. And we also have the image prompt that we're pulling, which is good. After we're generating it, we're going to convert it. Then we're going to upload it. So that's cool. And then we're going to go Google Drive. Cool. And then we're going to edit the fields again. We're going to return everything. We want Google Drive to web view link, right? I think it's two. Yeah. Cool. So, honestly, we we should have everything that we need now. I'm not entirely sure, but why don't we just try one whole run through from start to finish with the adjustments that we asked for. Uh where we're going to feed in the actual image itself plus a request to change and we're going to see how all this stuff goes. Crossing my fingers here. That looks like it worked reasonably well. Now we're editing the fields. Let's see. Is this a change visible? Well, it definitely did make it darker and it fixed the workflow loop. Um, realistically, if I were to get this, I would probably see this and then I would say, well, I don't I didn't want it this dark. I mean, the background's black, you know. Realistically, I would say, you know, make this darker without changing the background, right? So, maybe there's going to be some issue where like when people make these changes, it'll specifically always screw up the background. I don't know for sure. make them without materially changing anything not explicitly asked for, including backgrounds if relevant. Okay, I'm just going to try this one more time and just see if my minor little correction solved this one edge case. Now, obviously the issue with agents in general is that there's just so many edge cases, so many things that people could ask, right? So, we're not entirely 100% sure if this is necessarily going to cover all the edge cases, but we know that it can cover the specific background one, and that's okay. and then we can slowly build in some more um suggestions I would say to guide it towards the right answer. Okay, so now with this adjustment I'm just going to paste this in and see if we can grab the same thing. Maybe the issue is not necessarily that we should guide the rails at the generate image side. Maybe what we need to do is we need to force the user to construct a more explicit change. Make the logo part of this a darker blueish color. And maybe we have some sort of, you know, I like this, but make the logo part of the design a darker bluish color. Keep the background light white for transparency reasons. Let's do that. So maybe the problem is actually earlier up in the chain and we can achieve similar results if we adjust the way that the agent is making the call. And over here we say only call this if you're explicitly asked to change something. Make sure that the user has explicitly defined what edits or change that they want. Right? Something like that I think could work re realistically. It may also have something to do with the resolution. Maybe because we're having it generate like the lowest quality or something like that. Maybe it's just not as good. I don't know. But yeah, I mean this obviously is significantly darker than the previous design. Um which is nice. So, I think if I were to compare this design to this one, I obviously like this design more, but um you know, also maybe Oh, wow. Look, it didn't even really change the shape at all. Very, very barely. I mean, you know, there were some minor adjustments to sizing and stuff like this, but still pretty solid. Okay, so I think that's what we need to do. So, I'm just going to go back to the agent, then I'll say. Then you can also upscale them. And finally, you can revise them. If you are asked to adjust or revise an image, ask the user to define their changes as explicitly as possible. Okay, let's try this now. I'm going to open the chat again and I will say, "Hey, uh, well, let's just verify. Does this work? Hey, could you make funky Dory darker? Let's see if it's going to ask me. Uh, okay. So, there there is an issue with this. Why is there an issue with this? Oh, right. Right. We're missing one um field here which we can define automatically. There we go. Okay. Maybe we add give them a very simplistic ask uh the parameters values in Oh, interesting. Image link I use to make the gradient darker. Why? What did we feed in here? Interesting. Well, we got to go up the stack again. So, opening a chat model, right? So, edit revise. So, what do we feed in? Replicate delivery. What the heck is this? H. Previous image URL was replicate delivery. I don't think it was. Oh, yes, it was. Huh. Doesn't look like the URL is incorrect, though. Why is it when I copy this, I'm pasting the wrong link? Oh, this looks good to me. Can I access this without being signed in? Yes, I can. Strange. We need to be able to feed in the input URL, the previous image URL in order for it to do something with it. Right. So, what's going on here then? This is the designer. I fed in the previous image URL. So, let me unpin this. Maybe it has something to do with the pins. I don't entirely remember to be honest. We then download the previous image URL. Okay. Generate the image using that downloaded thing. Google Drive 2 3. Okay. Hm. Let's try again. Getting the same details again. Are we feeding in something that we shouldn't be feeding in? H I'm going to view the subexcution and see what data was fed in. Okay. Okay. So, when executed by another workflow, we did feed in the replicate data. Looks like Google Drive. Oh. Oh, of course Google Drive can't download the replicate data. That would be silly. Okay, so this is an edge case and I'm glad we found it. Most of the changes that we're going to ask for are presumably going to be changes to the the source files that are generated from the gradient generator, the SA generator, or the logo generator. But in this case, I asked it to make a change using the upscaled image itself. And the likelihood of that occurring is low because it just doesn't really make logical sense. Why would you upscale the image and then be like, "No, actually, I want to change the upscaled image." Silly, right? So, what we should probably do instead of this is we should have some routes available where if somebody uploads a non- Googlele image, we should download the image and then we should upload it to Google and then continue with the route. That makes sense to me. So yeah, that's probably the the best way to do it. Are there any other things that we might do? No, this is the only route where this would be immediately applicable. Yeah, that's it. No other route. Why? Because logically this is the only route in which we would need something like that. So what we have to do is we have to switch and I will say if previous image URL contains we will say um Google then we go down route number one otherwise if previous image URL does not contain Google then I want to go down route number two so or route number one I should say so this should be route number zero right this should be route number one um Google this should be non Google. Okay. So, Google goes down here. Non- Googlele is actually going to do an HTTP request to that data first. And it's unfortunate, but I have to grab the execution history from here, don't I? Yes, I do. So, bear with me one second. Let's bring this up. Can we change this to be JavaScript? Yes, we can. Let's do this. Let's go back here. And then what I want is I need to pin this just like I was doing before. Oh, this is not what I wanted. Um, this is what I wanted. And then Oh, no, no, no, no, nope. I actually wanted the real data, but it looks like I'm copying the schema over. Why is that? It's pretty annoying. Can I just copy this whole thing or is it No, it is definitely going to do that. That's really crappy. Can I just copy this manually and then it'll work? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, that works. Let's go here. Nice. So, we should now have everything, I think. Save. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, now it's feeding the replicate URL in for our test. Because it's feeding the replicate URL in our test, it should always go down to this, which means we can feed in previous image URL here. What we're going to want to do is we're just going to want to download the file. And um I'll be honest, I don't remember how to download a file. So, let's just give it a go. That is an invalid URL, ladies and gentlemen. That is very invalid. So, why don't we delete this? Execute the workflow. Are we downloading the file? Hey, we are down downloading the file. Okay, great, great, great. So, then what we do is we upload this to Google Drive. You don't have to do this, mind you, but I'm doing it because I uh am a stickler for consistency. You know, like if everything else is going to be like this, then I'm going to include the same logic everywhere. So, if it's Google, it's going to go in here. Oh, sorry. And then if it's not Google, it's going to go in here. So, no matter what, uh, it should always get JSON previous image URL. And I think that's enough to close the chain. I may be wrong. I don't know. I might need a merge node or something. But, uh, why don't we just select everything and then how do we tidy up selection? Was it shift option t? Nice. I don't really like how it tidies it up, but what are you going to do? Execute workflow. Download. Upload. The parameters value is invalid. Why? Because this output is not going to be called previous image URL. Obviously, this is going to be called web view link. I'll go if make an expression here. Dollar sign if. Can we do that? Yeah. dollar sign if JSON previous image URL then we'll do JSON previous image URL then if not we'll go JSON dot web view link probably uh I'm not seeing this web view link I think that's sufficient I don't know for sure I think this is going to grab the webb link Um, no, this shouldn't. Okay, let's try this again. Okay, it's now downloading the file, generating the image using GP21. Okay, cool. So, I think that logic worked. Let's see. So, it downloaded this URL. Cool. Cool. Which is nice. We now put in a little bit of code here just to route it correctly. And uh yeah, we should now be good to go. So now, no matter what happens, we will always generate uh the right thing, which is nice. At least that's the idea anyway. And that is how you do a debug. That seemed like a pretty material issue. Obviously, we had to implement like different logic in order to handle it. And yeah, still pretty cool. Let's see what it looked like. Change is indeed much darker and much funkier. Okay, we are funk maxing. So given the funk maxing, let us now try. I'm going to be angry. I'm going to say try again. I fix it. Is now calling edit revise image. And we did not error out immediately. Meaning the editing is actually occurring as we speak. The logic was correct. I can close all this stuff. We can go back to the main route. What a beautiful, cool, simple, and easy example uh of an AI agent that actually adds value. Super cool. Super cool. You know, just 3 or 4 months ago, these agents had nowhere near as much accuracy or reliability. I'm happy to say that the hype bubble that I saw explode over the course of the last little bit is now finally gotten a little bit more reasonable. And these agents are actually a little more uh yeah, they're a little more valuable. Just the fact that it can automatically convert like a Google Drive file URL to a download link is pretty sweet. So awesome guys, that is that we are now done with that second last chunk. Building a way to revise them just to close the loop. Now all we need to do is make a pretty and package it. What do I mean by make it a pretty and package it? Well, this is cool that it's like kind of in Nad, right? But who actually cares about that? Definitely nobody that you'll be selling this to. Definitely nobody that maybe you'll install this in the business of. What we need to do is we need to take this out of NA now and we need to embed it on a website or give people a link. We also need to change the style and make it really pretty. I mean we are selling a design thing at the end of the day, right? So what are some ways to do that? Simplest, most straightforward way is in the AI agent side, you guys can actually like generate a link. What I'm going to do is when it says when chat message received, click publicly available. We'll do hosted chat for now. And now if you guys just go inactive to active, you save this. paste this in. You actually now have a link and that link allows you to communicate with this agent. So, it's saying that his name is Nathan Natan, right? But, uh, it's obviously not. The cool thing is we can customize this to be whatever we want. So, maybe I'll just say, "Hi, it's your graphic design agent. How can I help? I can generate a logo, style guide, or background gradient for you. Let me know how I can help." Okay, so let me just test this. Uh, not test test. Sorry. Let's just exit this out. We can clear the logs and the execution history. I think I need to save first, then refresh. Cool. And now we can actually go back and then we can change the font and the style and all that stuff. So, how do we do that? Uh, title. So, title is hi there up here. So, why don't we call this leftclick design agent? Maybe we'll do a little wave. Subtitle. What's subtitle? Subtitle is over here. So, maybe we'll go I'm your friendly neighborhood design agent. Is that how you spell neighborhood? I think it's yelling at me cuz I'm Canadian. Yes, it is. I'm your friendly neighborhood design agent. And I need to save this. Cool. Then underneath we can now go custom chat styling. Now, this is going to seem pretty intimidating to a lot of you guys. You guys, what the hell's going on here? Custom chat, chat color, primary, chat color, whatever. Base layout, right? Uh, you can actually just add whatever the heck you want here. So, you know, window dimensions, you change the height of the embed, the input area color, you can override any class that you want with like the chat message functionality. So, if I save this now and I go back here and I refresh, you'll see that this is now different. Why? Because it added some sort of like Times New Roman style to it. I don't really like the Times New Roman style. So, uh, let's just not do Times New Roman. No, thank you. Why don't we do Robboto first? I like Robboto. We'll do Robboto. That seems pretty nice. If I save this and refresh this now, I'm still getting that weird thing, I think. Why is that? Maybe because I don't have access to Robboto. Let's open up this puppy. Apple system. Seigo UI. Uh, what's Seigo UI? Sanserf is at the end. I think Sans serif should be at the beginning. probably I probably just don't have most of the fonts that I'd want to be honest. Why don't I just remove this? Yeah. Okay, cool. Nice. Um, that's all right. I just double change it, which is why it asked me. Why don't we change the uh palette a little bit? So, I don't like this blue. Um, let's go over here. If you guys like don't know what element is responsible for this, just go over here, go styles, and then find that blue. See where it says background chat-er background. You guys can actually change this. So, I always go to like Tailwind colors. And then I just generate like a nice nice background gradient. And um I'm I'm a big fan of these colors here. They're kind of like greenish, tealish, whatever. Um let's do let's do 800. So that's this. So, I'm going to go back over here to the code and then where it said, what was it again? Chat header paddic or chat header. Go over here to where it says chat header color. And it's just going to take from this variable. I don't really want that. I'm actually just going to hard code it. Um, sorry, I keep on clicking test chat, but that's not what we want to click. And I know I'm alt tabbing back and forth quite a bit, but okay. So, that actually changed the font. That's not what I wanted to do at all. Not in the slightest. Um, I believe we can't actually Yeah, that kind of sucks. We can't actually um reverse this easily. So, that blows. We can just go FF FFF. That should be fine. FF is just white. Cool. Nice. That looks a little bit more left clicky. Uh, maybe we'll go even darker than that, to be honest. Maybe we'll go down here. You know, I'll go back here. Nice. That's much darker and much cleaner. Uh, we can also change the background color. It looks like the background color is this weird kind of like light thing. I don't really like it. So, I think it's probably h chat input background probably. So, I'm just going to change this all to white. Like I don't think this is white. Is this white? Might be white. If it's white, I'm cooked, man. You can hardly see colors anymore. No, this is white. This is not white. Obviously, they change the colors of this for a reason. Anyway, I guess the point that I'm making is you can actually go through and you can change basically every aspect of this. Um, you can also embed this on a website, which is kind of neat. So, as opposed to me having just this URL that I chat with, um, I can also embed it. But, uh, yeah, you guys can go arbitrarily deep on this if you want. you know, just uh take this, feed it into chat GPT, then ask it to design you like a color palette or something. And then, you know, we can actually do this side by side with let's do 03 Pro, which is like the most advanced model. So, I'm going to feed this in. I'll say this is a custom chat style for an N8 chatbot. I've attached an image of the N8N chatbot visuals as well. adjust the color palette and design so it's minimalistic, sleek, and uses a pastel blue color instead of the teal. Now, I'm going to go over here. Going to I guess hide this somewhere where it doesn't see it. It does see it. That's unfortunate. I think it'll be smart enough to know that that's actually part of its input. Paste that in there. And now we are going to click go. What's going to do now is send this off to 03 Pro. Okay. And the end result is uh we got this cool kind of sleek white design. I just called a design agent and said message anytime. You can you can just get rid of the stuff if you want. Obviously you can actually customize the hell out of this. Like I just changed a few of the colors around, but you can package this and make it as sexy as you want. Uh you can assign your own URL to it. A lot of different ways you can implement this in your own organization if you wanted to as well. Anyway, let's just have it actually go and do something that we want. So, hey, let's see what it says. How can I assist you with your design needs today? Would you like a logo, a style guide, or a gradient background? Let me know what you're looking for. Big fan of the I don't know, light pastel blue vibe. Thinking of creating a new brand around it. Cool. Color featuring light pastel blue as the main color. Sure, let's do it. Yeah, let's make a light blue pastel logo, but I want it to be flat and minimalistic, sort of like Google's, but with variations of that light blue color. In terms of what the company is, it's called Whirlpool Automation. I don't want any text in there. Help me brainstorm something. a prompt first. Let's do that. So, it's going to help me come up with a prompt now. Flat minimalistic logo using only variations of light pastel blue abstract geometric whirlpool or swirling shapes. Nice. I like that. Cool. Now, it's actually going out and generating the design. So, that's pretty nice. Cool. Looks like we got something. Let's take a peek. Nice. This looks pretty interesting. I like that it's geometric. I'm not a big fan of this exactly, to be honest. So, why don't I say yes, I like this, but could you add sections to the whirlpool? I want them to be varying hues of that light blue. So now we're going to test out the revision feature. Essentially what should be occurring is we're going to have it distinct sections or segments. Yes, that's right. Okay, we're now um clarifying because if you guys remember, I asked it to clarify the hell out of any revision or design request so that it was as simple and as straightforward and as exact as possible. Now, we're sending off the revision track. So, it's going through and it's actually revising the design for us. And then we now have that finished. So, let me take a peek at it. I like this. If you notice, these are now slightly different colors, which is kind of cool. Um I like the fact that this one here is a noticeably darker shade of blue. And to be honest, this almost looks like the OpenAI logo. Anyway, that's kind of cool. Um, yeah, looks great. Upscale the hell out of this, please. So, now it's going to send that over to replicate and then it's going to deliver a higher quality one. Okay, now I'm going to check out the upscaled version. If we zoom in, you'll see there are these slight little artifacts um around it. The reason why we have these artifacts is uh this is just been trained on millions of images that human beings find sharper. And what's really interesting is they found that when you have a slight little outline like this, human beings rate the images sharper, aka higher resolution, aka better quality. And so, you know, I'll be honest, this this does seem significantly better quality to me. You guys may not be able to tell just through the uh the camera, but yeah, this is like sharp as hell. It's super clean. The lines are very exact. So, I like it a lot. All right. Anyway, so this isn't really enough for me. Let's go a little bit further and let's ask for a whole style guide. Great work. I'd like a style guide for a brand. Um, in the same fashion, let's have it now take my request and let's convert it into some sort of prompt. Now, what it's done is it's basically under the hood converted my request to a prompt. And now it's sent that out. And now it is now generating me a style guide. Similar, if you guys remember, to the template that I sent it over. So, in terms of what to expect, it's not just whipping stuff out of its ass. Like, it knows what I want essentially. Okay, so we've now generated a style guide. If I take a look at it, you can see that we Oh, look. I like what I did with the O rollpool automation. Here's the logo. Here's that. Here's the typography. Robboto color palette. Oo, I love the color gradient icons. Now, now we're not feeding in the logo that we just generated automatically into the style guide. So, um, ideally, we'd probably do the style guide first and we'd look at the style guides logo and then, I don't know, maybe make some minor adjustments or something like that. We could obviously have built in the functionality to like, hey, when you're making the style guide, if anybody asked for any other image, then add that image to the style guide. But still pretty clean. I found it really interesting how it like picked uh inter and robboto here and then it even provided us some icons and stuff like that uh which is neat. Okay, awesome. Now let's do a light gradient background. So now it's going to generate me light gradient background. Okay, and now we have a beautiful white uh/blue gradient as well. Just going to download that. And if we just and if we just head over here, I just want to show you guys what these assets look like on a brand board because I don't think they're you can really fully appreciate them without it. Um, these are really high quality assets. Like this is no joke. This is this is really good stuff. I mean, you know, I used to I mean, it looks like the colors here are just a tiny bit different. We could have asked it to revise it so that the hues were just a bit off. Um, but still, uh, these are really high quality assets. These are things that you otherwise would have had to pay people for realistically just a few months ago. And the fact that we can generate them all autonomously using AI, you know, is one of the craziest things ever. So, let me just download this one as well. Arrange this right over here. I mean, like the fact that we just got all of these for nothing and we have a system that can now generate these things on demand basically for people, scale it up. So maybe instead of just doing the gradient background, the logo, the style guide or whatever, now you're doing some sort of like advertising stuff that's specific to the template or format that you like or characters for some video game or whatever. Um, the value in a system like this is that you basically get to do whatever the heck you want. And you know, I've hopefully shown you guys how to build the start of a system like this, but there's no reason why you just have to stick to these three or these four tools. You guys could realistically expand this to be however complicated you want. Okay, the core parts of the logic obviously uh we started at the end. So we just verified that we could do what we wanted to do before we actually spent all the time, effort and energy building logic to do it. As we debugged as issues came up, you know, we took a deep breath. We sort of confronted them step by step. We took advantage of a couple of simple straightforward APIs. We took advantage of some built-in NN functionality like import curl and so on and so forth. And yeah, the end result is ultimately a pretty high quality system. So whether you want to install something like this in your own business or whether you want to sell a package service like this to other people, the world is your oyster and you can do whatever the heck you want with it. Great work. You've now completed the most comprehensive aation business education available anywhere absolutely free. You've gone from someone who might have been curious about how a automation works to somebody that is hopefully equipped with the technical foundations, the business strategy, the sales psychology, the market intelligence, and also the operational systems that actually work. So, you're no longer a beginner, just wondering if this is possible or if this is something that you could do. The idea is you now have complete road maps to building thriving automation businesses for yourself. Feel free to reference any part of this master class. I got a bunch of timestamps below. So, just make sure you bookmark the video and then come back anytime you want to brush up on specific strategies. The hard reality is that everything that you just learned here is completely worthless unless you execute on it. The gap between people who understand a automation and those who actually make money with it is not knowledge cuz you already have that. Anybody can get that in a few hours. It's execution. It's consistency. And it's also having the right support system to stay accountable. So that's why I created Maker School. It's my 90-day accountability program. And the whole idea here is I want to guarantee your first a automation client or your money back. Inside you'll find the day-by-day roadmap that removes a lot of the guesswork, copy paste templates for outreach and proposals that are actually closing deals right now. And I'm also going to give you a library of proven automation blueprints you could sell immediately. You're also getting some weekly facetime with me, over $21,000 in discounts, the same tools that I showed you just a moment ago, and then a community of almost 3,000 entrepreneurs who are already succeeding with strategies just like this. So, yeah, the biggest challenge isn't learning what to do. You guys already know that, and I think most people do. It's knowing what to prioritize every day, how to stay consistent with your actions, and so on and so forth. So, instead of wondering what should I work on today, pick something ahead of time, focus on it, be consistent for a very long period of time, and you will eventually win. Anyway, just wanted to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making it to the end of this video. If you guys are still here, you are real ones. If you guys like this sort of stuff, please comment, like, subscribe. I certainly hope to see you inside of Maker School. But either way, have a lovely rest of the day and I'll catch you all in the next vid.