Hey, this is me building a $3 million year business and documenting every step. Uh, the way these videos always go is I start them off with some YouTube comment Q&A. That's just to deliver some value and then drive some growth on the channel cuz every comment just leads to more engagement and so on and so forth. Then I do some building and strategizing in public before finally doing some growth stats across YouTube, Instagram, and the rest of my products. So, if you don't know who I am, this is the main channel here. This is where I started. It's at 173,000 just about subs. Then, this is my daily updates channel that you guys are watching right now. When I say daily Q&A, what I mean is I literally just scroll all the way down to the very bottom of this big community comment thread and then I just answer. So, if you guys have any questions you want to ask me, literally leave them below any one of these daily updates videos and I'll eventually get to it. Now, as you can see, we're backed up quite a bit. I think we're coming up on four, maybe 5 days. So, let's see what the oldest question is and then let's answer it. Fortunately, GPT5 ain't looking too hot. Uh, if you guys wondering where the heck I am, I'm in a hotel room in Toronto right now. Lovely place. Just here for the day with the girlfriend. Okay. F1D142 says, "Little joke break. When Nick wants to get serious, somebody sends a Calendarly link." That's true. Hey Nick, thanks for everything, my man. I have a question regarding Maker School. And it is that if there are any tutorials on how to set up cold email campaigns from zero, including account setup, email warming, or you probably have a tutorial on YouTube. Yeah, for sure. This is um actually on day one, and I think actually you are in Maker School now, Rodrigo, so I'll leave it there. Um do you have any discount code for Upwork Connects? No, unfortunately. They haven't done anything like that in a very long time. Would you recommend going plus and upwork? Yes, I would. Mental calculus is if a platform offers some additional functionality for you. My my idea is basically they're incentivized to want you to succeed because if you succeed then they will form a correlation between your success and then you paying them more money. So I don't know if it 100% improves your ranking, your stats, all that stuff. But if I were Upwork, I would probably do something like that. So yeah, I always get the plus. I always turn on all their features. I always use every little check box that they offer me and stuff cuz yeah, like they're testing to see whether or not it works, right? So, how do you test stuff? Well, you need to give your customers more opportunities to, you know, interface with clients and stuff like that. Just makes logical sense to me. Okay. Islam Ahmed says, "Hey, Nick, love your content. Just starting. I had my first sales meeting in my life today. Felt like I'm the worst." You and me both, bro. I have been there. Uh, number one, what's your opinion on how to get better at sales? really straight line path is just doing a lot of it. Obviously, don't just do a lot of it in a vacuum. Do a lot of it and then regularly review your progress. If there is no regular review in a feedback loop, then it is not a feedback loop. It is a feedback plateau. Number two, I'm from Egypt and Stripe doesn't support Egypt and PayPal just keeps holding my money, which isn't practical. What's your opinion on how to receive payments from clients? Um, I have somebody I work with out in Egypt actually right now and they're using as a payment processor. So for payment processing purposes I think it's like 5%. You are going to pay a hefty premium but that's just part of life and just something that you have to do. Stripe I'm sure will soon support Egypt. Just a matter of time. Okay. Karanakar says hey Nick thanks for the video. I'm learning a automation and sharing my journey building a personal brand. How do I stand up from the competition and build an agency around it? The way you do this is you do not build your personal brand first. You do something really really impressive. you make some major accomplishment and then you work on building a personal brand after. If you start by building a personal brand, what you're basically doing is you're like putting the cart before the horse. You are focusing on the wrong metric at this point in time. Nobody really cares about you growing your personal brand if you are a nobody. It sucks for me to say, but people chiefly listen to those that have some accomplishment in the thing that they want to do. Do you want to become a pro uh soccer player? Okay. What sort of videos are you watching on YouTube? Are you watching a bunch of novice soccer players? No, you're watching pro soccer players play soccer, right? You're typing in Lionel Messi highlights. You know, Cristiano Ronaldo, best best goals. Same thing here. Um, you know, we don't want to watch a bunch of amateurs kick a ball around. We want to watch pros. So, the best way to become somebody worth watching is to become a pro. So, I I hate to, you know, absolutely and utterly on your dreams here of, you know, sharing the journey and whatnot. I think we've seen some examples of people doing this and then eventually becoming successful, but I would not call that the rule. I think a much clearer and more obvious rule is do cool and then, you know, record videos and talk about it um afterwards. Okay. Mr. Rap says, "Could you share who edits your Instagram videos?" No, that's proprietary information. Grateful guy says, "Heart heart. I'm a grateful guy for you." Uh NN says, "Hey, Nick, fellow Eastern European here. Is that okay? Is that all? I'm 17-year-old right now. I have about 600 bucks that I could spend. I have no experience in automation, sales, etc., and I want to make that money back as soon as possible, preferably in 1 to two months cuz money is tight. Do you recommend joining Maker School, and what steps do you recommend I take? Yes, I do recommend you join Maker School in this situation. You have enough of a runway to actually join Maker School and then spend that money allocated as effectively as possible. We also have a bunch of discount codes which will enable you to um, you know, spend that money more more intelligently. Instead of spending the $600 on operations and credits or whatever, you could be smart. Maybe make a make an application to make.com or nadn or bolt or lovable or whatever platforms. We have a ton and they're constantly switching swapping in and out. Uh and then you could, you know, save that money and spend it on outreach instead. Okay, legal stuff. I'll use my brother when I get a sales call cuz I'm so young. People probably won't take me seriously. So, should I find someone or just train my brother? That's tough. Um this is definitely a route that younger people can take. They could have somebody front for them on platforms that don't allow them to um actually like create profiles and stuff, do the sales, and then they just handle the fulfillment or maybe the client management. But yeah, that that first initial point of contact is going to be rough. Why does my hair look like I'm a freaking emo band member? There you go. Um that that's going to be a little bit tougher for sure. So yeah, I mean that's something that you could do. You could try training your brother. You are right on the cusp of like actually being able to work on these platforms. So tough for me to say, but um yeah. Q Elixy says, "Uh, hey man, do you think when building a automation systems like instant lead responders or follow-up systems, better to use SMS rather than email?" Uh, I think you should do a I think you should do all of them. Yeah, there's no reason why you shouldn't do all of them, right? If we're just being logical, um, do SMS and email, you know, obviously I would prioritize email first if I'm B2B because a lot of business owners use email. B TOC, I would prioritize SMS first because most human beings prioritize SMS. But keep in mind that there's just higher friction with SMS. So you got to do things like ATP and sometimes your number of requests aren't going to get approved. So hit or miss, but um yeah, you know, like in a world where you have unlimited resources, just do both. There's no reason not to, right? It's never an eitheror sort of situation here. Centil gives me a heart. Thank you. It's nice to see how genuine you are and how you handle all this pressure. Well, it's actually inspiring. Thank you for being here. Awesome. This is from my 14 takeaways from being on stage with Alex Herozi and Sam Ovens video. I was indeed a little nervous. Uh the best of Asha says, "Love how you explain it so simply. Most people have a secret sauce or the hack you need to know and you just share it. It's the most normal thing we talk about on a Tuesday. I really appreciate your work. Thank you very much, Asha. Good morning. Next is Ardasher. Ardasher is now in maker school. What's going on, Dasher? I'm currently struggling to confidently pick a niche for my agency. I understand to really succeed in a niche, you need to understand its internal processes, its pain points, how the sales cycle works. That's exactly where I'm stuck. Well, um before we even get into things, do not try and perfect your understanding of this niche at this moment in time. The entire point of you doing outreach in that niche right now is so that you can understand its internal processes, pain points, and how the sales cycle works. Okay? Straightest line path to doing this is just like engaging in the niche a lot. So don't try and perfect it. Um you're not going to get this information outside of sales calls and whatnot. You can get some cursory information 8020 from chat GPT or or YouTube videos or whatever, but anything further you are going to have to call. Okay. My background is in B2B LED manufacturing. I worked on the production side. Also got exposure to logistics and sales. have a solid understanding of how that space operates, how deals are made, how leads are handled. Now, I'm wondering, would it make sense to leverage that knowledge and offer AI power, lead genen systems, cold email plus automation to B2B product based businesses like LED manufacturers? Yes, you should absolutely do this. This should definitely be one of the three niches that you pick. The main reason why is cuz you have social proof in that niche. It's not actually about, you know, you understanding the sales cycle and stuff like that. While while important, the main thing is you have social proof. You could say, "Hey, I used to work with a 2.5 uh well, I don't know. I don't know how big these LED manufacturers are here, but let's just say a $25 million a year manufacturer out in XY andZ location. Um, I help them implement XY andZ system, which got them XY andZ result. Um, I want to copy and paste this in your business and I think I can do it and I'm very confident this would work. Therefore, I'm willing to do it for you for free or I'm willing to do it until you see a result or or whatever." Anyway, that's my approach there, Dasher. Thank you very much for joining Maker School. Looking looking forward to seeing you crush it. Congrats says Edgie. Thank you very much. Mind-blown countdown says, "Love seeing Horoszi and Sam talk about you." Hey, I know that guy. Alli says, "Lo, you mentioned here you probably don't look nervous, but I think you did look nervous, especially when consider that you're pretty well spoken. You're going in circles a few times while talking with them at the beginning." That's true. But hey, you did great. Uh, congrats says harsh Thank you very much. Um, what else we got here? Ruben says, "Brilliant video. As someone who's a bit deeper in the agency space, hearing you rattle off your daily thoughts. Your current revenue stage is super valuable. I'll continue to watch these for as long as you post them. Here's my question. I've hit $8,000 plus days with my agency and I'm now looking to use content as a catalyst for outbound or ad campaigns um so far. So, how do you recommend I start doing daily update videos in a similar format to yourself or more formatted videos with less frequency? I view content as a trust building asset rather than an acquisition channel. So, I'm not concerned with getting the most views possible. Would appreciate your thoughts on this. I view it very similarly. I've just gotten a bunch of views as a result of doing it for a very long time. So, I would just tell everybody what you do and just be open about the accomplishments that you've had. $8,000 in a day is great social proof. And I would start producing content surrounding cool, you know, agency tactics or strategies that you've implemented for your clients. If you go back in time and look at, let's say, Alex Hermoszy's recent videos just cuz you're commenting on that or Sam Ovens uh uh first few videos or or my first few videos, like they're all just about stuff that we were doing at the time, stuff that we found successful. And because we were doing them ourselves, we were obviously very confident in explaining how they worked. As a result of that, uh it was very easy for people to see that and go, "Oh, that guy knows his shit." You know, as you get bigger and bigger and bigger, necessarily what ends up happening is you kind of move like more top of funnel and stuff like that. Uh just because your main optimization metric starts being traffic generated as opposed to, you know, trust built and stuff like that. That's why you you probably have seen that change over time and that's why you're commenting on it. So, uh I would keep that in mind. But yeah, aside from that, I would just start producing videos and things that you find interesting. And in terms of the cadence, I absolutely recommend daily. Uh, you know, these big YouTube guru consultant guys say no. But, uh, I'll be honest, I've outgrown most of them. Well, a lot of them anyway, um, for B2B content with CPMs as high as mine are in my niche. And I think the best way to do that, at least when you're starting, is to post daily. So, I'm not doing that on my main channel anymore because I've just gotten to a kind of a big a big size. And I don't really know if it makes sense once you're at my size, you know, 170,000 followers or whatever, but uh when I was small and he hell, even on the daily updates channel, like zero to maybe 25, 30, 40k, definitely post daily. Sorry about that. Ree Queen says, "The goat, I love this interview on stage. Maybe one of the most impactful moments of content for me and yours." Thank you very much, Ree. Keyboard says, "Goat, I watch the whole video. Funny you say, Sam keeps it simple. I feel like you did the same when questioned how you won the school games. You said, I just do YouTube videos and put my school link first thing." You looked around as to ask, "Are you telling me people are running ads to this thing?" I was listening to your video the other day. My wife was like, "Why does the dude's voice sound like he hit puberty twice?" I said, "That's what 350K a month sounds like, honey. 400K." In all seriousness, you're an inspiration, bro. Congrats on your achievements. Wishing you more success. Thank you very much, bro. Very artful roller coaster. Boil the water. Good analogy. Thank you, Jensen. I was actually interested if you were nervous because you kept it together very well. Yeah, man. I was like I was I was pretty nervous, but you know, I think I mentioned it. um on that video. Like it was it was really awesome for me to do that. And then I realized like, hey, when's the last time I've actually been nervous about anything? It's been a very long time. So instead of me treating this as like, uh no, this sucks. I'm going to treat it as like, hey, this is freaking awesome, man. I haven't actually felt alive in months. And I don't mean that in a bad way. I mean that in a great way. It's like exciting. It's enjoyable. Okay. Next time for conversations, don't put them on 2x speed. Yeah. No, I realized that I made that mistake after I recorded that. So sorry about that. Daniel says, "This is the type of folk I folks I wish I knew sooner since it's never too late to do better. We'll see what happens in the next 365 days. Amazing content." Thank you. John says, "I hired and managed Nate Herk's team and now the community runs about 80% on autopilot with lower return and much higher profit per hour than Nate. I'd be happy to share what I've learned if you'd like." That's interesting. Is it really much higher profit per hour? Uh my profit per hour is like $7 $8,000 an hour right now. Actually, it's more because I've made a couple of changes recently. We're probably at like $10,000 an hour. So, John, if this is true, um yeah, you know, I'd love I'd love to connect with you and chat a bit more, but um what does much mean? I feel like a lot's riding on much. Um I don't know how big their their community is. I think it's like 150k or something now. So, what's that like 15 hours? If you're spending more than 15 hours a month on it, um well, and then you know, you're saying profit per hour. Like, dude, you got to keep in mind my profit's like 90 whatever percent, right? Like, it's super high. It's basically payment processing fees. Uh, and although I am going to start doing collabs and promos and stuff like that, um, engagement prizes and whatnot probably. So like my my profit on it is like 280K. So Nate would have to spend uh, and I imagine you're probably a growth operator, 20%. Nate would probably have to spend like eight hours a month across his two communities, which I don't I don't think is accurate. Anyway, I don't mean to on you, but I am very curious to hear what you have to say. So why don't you just send me an email? It'd be it'd be awesome to connect. Yeah. Um, Rev says, "You applauded him on his gym progress. Don't forget to mention he's on on testosterone." Yes, that is true. I'm sure he is on testosterone. Um, and I think he's mentioned it multiple times. It's very difficult to get that big naturally without it. Isin says, "Incredible video. Loved when you're breaking down Hormos and Sam's traits that made them successful. Thanks for making this." No problem. Abdal says, "Hey, Nick. I'm happy to see you. We're 20 years old and need your daily routine videos so we can learn from you." Thank you. We are 20 is interesting. We are the royal we perhaps back in medieval times. That's what people would say. They would use the equivalent of like we as like royal. Um so Abdullah is clearly from the royal family. Yeah. Daily routine video. I mean I woke up and then I started working. That's basically what I do every day. Not going to lie. And and I do it seven days a week. I mean you know it's like Saturday August the 9th right now and uh I'm on vacation in Toronto and I'm recording this video. Right. So, you just got to do it every single day. Check out Vanessa Van Edwards for body language testing. Thank you very much. Yeah, I appreciate that. Vanessa Van Edwards was great. I was actually competing with her back on the Skillshare days. Yeah. Prime Dent Removal says, "The school news event was my first intro to you and your channel. I've since binged your videos, including one of the 5-hour long videos. Now, I feel like I have some sort of grasp on how applied to service businesses. Really enjoyed this video. Thanks, man." Okay, cool. Um, thank you guys very much. I really appreciate it. I'm going to leave it there. Why don't we do some brand stats before wrapping up for today? Just want to show you guys where I'm at. Actually, before I do that, check this out. It's a cool hotel out in uh Toronto. We are right across the street. No. Yeah, there we go. We're right across the street from like the welcome to Toronto sign. I love this place. I like the big city vibe, not going to lie. Big city vibes is cool. I uh wasn't always for the big city vibe, but just after going to bigger cities after spending some time in like San Fran and um LA and stuff like that, I'm just realizing yeah, it's just awesome to be surrounded by so many people, so much life and vibrance. That said, um I feel like I have two personalities. One is like being in the center of the big city and the other is like being out in the middle of freaking nowhere. I lived um in a tiny little mountain town for a couple months and that was such an amazing experience too simply because of the quiet and like the focus that you get to build when you're out in the middle of nowhere. I had like 150 200 people. Good good season of my life. Um let's do some brand stats and then we'll wrap it up. Okay, brand stats for those of you that don't know. just a little spreadsheet that I've been a little it's a little spreadsheet that I've been tracking over the course of the last uh I guess seven months now where I just calculate my subscriber count on a daily basis and then write it down. And the goal for me is not to be precise. I don't really care about the precision. What I care about is the habit that I am building doing so and then the awareness of my stats. So I'd recommend people if you don't have any tracking going on, focus on tracking and then worrying about making it perfect later. and I focus more on the intentionality behind tracking than anything else. What you track and what you are intentional about tracking tends to improve. So me just looking at this even once a day um has made a really really big impact on my bottom line. I mean it's difficult for me to say but probably hundreds of thousands of dollars have been made in literally just looking at this every now and then. Well like every 24 hours or so. So yeah, as we see we have a lot of growth in the daily updates and then Instagram's sort of mid and then uh main channel is definitely pretty mid. And the reason why is because we just haven't posted here. Although we have posted here consistently for a very very long time. I think I believe if I just click on my channel now I'm up to 182 videos. So tomorrow should be halfway for the whole year which is pretty exciting, right? That means I will have published basically every day. I think I missed one or two days because I forgot to publish before the 12-h hour cut off or 24-hour cut off or maybe three days because I forgot to publish for the 24-hour cut off. Um, but that's, you know, a whole half year of just talking and we're almost at 12,000 subscribers already. Um, did it take me a lot of time? Yeah. But do I think that's terrible? No. I think it um, you know, also helped me learn problems that my customers were suffering from, answer questions. It was obviously a great bottom of funnel um, flow for uh, Maker School and make money with make. And it's also allowed me to build great relationships with so many of you guys. So, oh, not to mention helped me articulate how to solve those problems, which I think is really important. So, I'm going to keep doing them. Um although you know moving forward I I was I was considering I do a pause at the half year mark just because I wanted to like re-evaluate whether or not I'm doing the daily updates as effectively as I could be and like what I might need to change. So I may do that. I'm not entirely sure. I don't want to bust anybody's balls or like break a great amount of momentum. Maybe I'll do it live. Um but yeah, just wanted to fill you guys in on where I was with that. And then I'm looking forward to starting those Calgary dinners. So I've had a couple people reach out to me. Now I have to be honest. Um I can't just have the Calgary dinners be open to everybody. That would be very silly of me. And I think I would also run into just like issues on on my end. Uh if you make these things open to everybody, there's always like a bad apple that sort of spoils the bunch. So the way that I've seen people do this in practice is there's just some sort of like thing you have to do, some application you have to fill out or some form you must uh complete and that must include some information about you and the business that you are running. You know, I don't want to have people from high school joining and then I don't know. It's not that people from high school aren't capable, but I don't want to have somebody that's never done a sales call join one of these big dinners and then spend the entire time just squeezing somebody else for knowledge, you know? I I guess I sort of had to play a role as a matchmaker in that. So, yeah, if you run a business and you're in the Calgary area, um just shoot me over an email. Uh I'd love to hear kind of a little bit more about it and then maybe we could start uh we could start one of those dinners with you in a couple of weeks. We'll keep it small. It'll be like 5 to 10 people. Um, I'll probably have them every Thursday or not every Thursday, sorry, every couple of Thursdays. Um, yeah, you know, you'll let me know like a week ahead of time if you can make it. Then it'll just be casual. I'm not going to like rent out a big hall or anything. I'm just going to go down to a restaurant and just like reserve a table for, you know, between 5 to 10 people. Then I'll show up and then I'll have my lunch and or dinner and then uh, you know, you guys can come whenever the heck you want for about a 2-hour period or so. Sounds pretty cool, I think. and then it should get me in the habit of um doing these live events because I have realized just how much leverage is in like live events but I'm just not very good at them. That's one thing I learned when I went down to the school games. Okay, I'll leave it there. Have a lovely rest of the day and uh yeah, wish me fun and safe travels on my trip through Toronto. Cheers.