Modern Creator
Why Modern Creator?
Nick Saraev Daily Updates · YouTube

quick question is killing your cold email

A 31-minute live Q&A vlog where a $4M/year operator tears down cold email copy, lays out a RAG knowledge-base pattern, and explains why building a brand before a business is the slowest path to cash.

Posted
yesterday
Duration
Format
Talking Head
educational
Views
913
54 likes
Big Idea

The argument in one line.

Cold email fails at the copy layer 60% of the time because senders extract before they give -- the fix is sequencing rapport and proof before the ask, not tightening the subject line.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…
  • You run cold email outreach and have sent 1,000+ emails with no booked calls and suspect your copy is the problem.
  • You are building an AI chatbot or internal knowledge base and want a grounded RAG architecture recommendation.
  • You are at $0-$10k/mo trying to understand what daily marketing discipline actually looks like at scale.
  • You are considering launching a community or course but have not validated cash flow from direct sales first.
  • You set revenue goals but keep missing them and are not sure if it is the goal or the direction that is wrong.
SKIP IF…
  • You want a deep-dive tutorial on any one of these topics -- this is a Q&A vlog that goes wide, not deep.
  • You are already past $100k/mo with marketing dialed in -- the cold email and non-negotiables content targets earlier stages.
TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Cold email dies at the copy level most of the time -- not the list, not the mailbox -- because senders ask before they give. This video walks through a live comment teardown showing how to sequence rapport, proof, and specificity before the ask. Beyond cold email, it covers the correct funnel order (marketing always tops the stack), a knowledge base RAG pattern using Pinecone and Claude, and a goal-setting model where directional progress beats one-shot target accuracy. It also delivers a sharp warning for anyone building a community product before they have direct-sales cash flow, and closes with a live tracker review of YouTube and Instagram growth stats.

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Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 01:00

01 · Format intro + channel context

$300k/mo currently, $500k/mo goal, 454k subs on main channel; format is YouTube Q&A, build/strategy, then growth stats

01:00 – 04:00

02 · Humanization flow

AI voice classifier: train on vocabulary and sentence length, get a distance metric, loop rewrites until AI text converges to your tone

04:00 – 13:30

03 · Cold email teardown

Live teardown of viewer comment: quick question opener analyzed, 60/20/10 failure breakdown, full live rewrite with correct sequencing

13:30 – 15:00

04 · Knowledge base architecture

Pinecone + Claude RAG pattern for customer-facing bots; security risk of over-indexed internal KBs; two or three constrained conversation routes in the system prompt

15:00 – 19:30

05 · Non-negotiables $10k to $100k/mo

Daily marketing first, always; one improvement per day compounds; funnel order -- marketing tops the stack; content as the highest-leverage marketing lever

19:30 – 24:00

06 · Cart-before-horse warning

Build direct-sales cash flow first, then build a brand that amplifies a community -- not the reverse; 5M followers at $10k/mo vs disciplined operator at $100k/mo

24:00 – 27:00

07 · Goal-setting philosophy

Goals as directional vectors: pick a target, move, learn in the doing, recalibrate. Even imperfect directional movement closes the gap to your real goal

27:00 – 29:30

08 · Life update -- moving day

Moving from Calgary, Alberta to Kelowna, BC; rationale is better studio separation from living space; expects productivity jump

29:30 – 31:31

09 · Growth stats + ManyChat upsell fix

Live review: YouTube main 454,924 subs (+0.16%), daily updates 18,933, Instagram 522,088; ManyChat being patched to pitch Maker School alongside resource delivery

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

  • Quick question in a cold email opener signals spam before the recipient reads a single word -- it announces the ask before any trust exists.
  • Copy is the reason cold email fails roughly 60% of the time; mailbox issues account for about 20%; market timing and external factors cover the remaining 10-20%.
  • The correct cold email order is: lead with rapport or research, prove you are worth knowing, then make the ask -- reversing this kills response rates.
  • An AI voice classifier trains on vocabulary choices and sentence length, produces a numeric distance metric, then lets you loop rewrites until AI-generated text converges to your voice.
  • Every org knowledge base is a security risk if indexed indiscriminately -- a customer-facing bot with payroll data ingested will answer salary questions on demand.
  • Standard RAG: take user message, query Pinecone for top 5-10 chunks, inject into prompt, then answer -- the retrieval step is what most implementations skip.
  • The marketing funnel in order: marketing, sales, transformation and onboarding, admin and logistics, then reactivation -- most founders skip to the middle and wonder why leads dry up.
  • One daily improvement to cold email compounds faster than occasional full rewrites -- even a single word change counts as long as it happens every day.
  • Building a brand to serve a product you have not sold yet is backwards -- build direct-sales cash flow first, then build the brand that amplifies it.
  • A creator with 5M followers making less than $10k/mo is almost always missing direct-sales discipline -- audience size is not a monetization proxy.
  • Content that sells is the most leveraged form of marketing because it eliminates the need to hire salespeople -- the video is doing the sales call.
  • Goal setting works best when you treat goals as directional vectors, not exact coordinates -- moving toward the right region makes progress even when the first target was wrong.
  • The non-negotiable from $1k to $100k/mo was always some form of daily marketing -- everything else came after that engine was running.
  • Low-ticket community products are hyper-optimized for time: one hour per day against a large member base generates disproportionate revenue compared to masterminds or 1-on-1 work.
  • Real estate inside a community -- pinned links, discount codes for tool partners -- monetizes behavior the creator was already doing.
Takeaway

Give before you ask, in every channel.

COLD EMAIL + BUSINESS

Whether it is an email, a pitch, or a community launch, the sequence matters more than the content -- rapport and proof have to land before the ask, every time.

02Humanization flow
  • An AI voice classifier trained on your vocabulary and sentence length produces a reusable distance metric -- any AI-generated text can be scored and iteratively rewritten until it matches your voice.
03Cold email teardown
  • Cold email fails at the copy layer roughly 60% of the time -- before changing domains or lists, rewrite the opening to give something before asking for anything.
  • The phrase quick question in an opener signals the email is about the sender, not the recipient, before the first sentence is finished.
  • A correct cold email sequence is: research-based opener that proves you did your homework, proof that you are worth talking to, then the ask -- never the reverse.
04Knowledge base architecture
  • Standard RAG: query a vector database for top 5-10 relevant chunks on every user message, inject them into the prompt, then answer -- the retrieval step is what most implementations skip.
  • A knowledge base RAG pipeline is only as safe as its ingestion scope -- never route internal or sensitive organizational data into a customer-facing bot.
05Non-negotiables $10k to $100k/mo
  • Marketing is always the top of the funnel -- if daily time allocation does not reflect that, the funnel starves from the top regardless of how good fulfillment is.
  • One improvement per day to your outbound copy compounds faster than occasional rewrites -- even a single word change counts, as long as the habit is daily.
  • Content that sells is the most leveraged marketing lever because it replaces the need to hire salespeople -- the video is doing the sales call at scale.
06Cart-before-horse warning
  • Build direct-sales cash flow before building a brand around a community product -- audiences with millions of followers routinely make less per month than disciplined operators with thousands.
07Goal-setting philosophy
  • Goal-setting works best as a directional practice -- pick a target that moves you roughly the right way, execute, learn what you actually want in the doing, then recalibrate.
Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Humanization flow
A machine-learning pipeline that trains a classifier on your vocabulary and sentence-length patterns to score how on-brand any AI-generated text is, then loops rewrites until the distance metric drops near zero.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
A pattern where a vector database is queried with the user's message before the LLM answers, injecting the most relevant stored content chunks into the prompt so the model answers from your knowledge base rather than general training data.
Pinecone
A managed vector database used to store and retrieve text embeddings for RAG pipelines -- the recommended tool for knowledge base backends.
Maker School
A low-ticket coaching community focused on helping people land their first clients in business; the host's primary community product and current largest income source.
ManyChat
Chat automation software for Instagram DMs; mentioned as an under-optimized lever being updated to also pitch the community product when delivering requested resources.
Linear
A project management and issue-tracking tool used as a personal operating system, integrated with Claude for task delegation and flagging work as agent-ready.
School / Skool
A community platform with a public leaderboard (School Games) that ranks communities by member engagement; the distribution channel for Maker School.
Resources

Things they pointed at.

01:00toolLucid (lucid.app) ↗
03:20toolLinear ↗
13:30toolPinecone ↗
13:30toolBotpress ↗
13:30toolClaude (Anthropic) ↗
09:38productFour-hour cold email course
29:30toolManyChat ↗
00:00productMaker School
00:00productLeft Click
Quotables

Lines you could clip.

04:31
“The very fact that you're saying quick question is increasing the amount of time it takes for me to read the email.”
Counterintuitive, standalone, lands without setup→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
06:29
“You're a total stranger on the internet, and essentially what you're doing is looking to extract value out of somebody.”
Frames the core cold email mistake in one sentence→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote
09:38
“Copy is why you bomb. It's maybe 60% of the time, always a copy issue.”
Punchy stat, zero fluff, authoritative→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
15:33
“As long as I had one improvement per day that I did every single day, I found that results would eventually grow.”
Clean discipline line, standalone, no setup needed→ IG reel↗ Tweet quote
19:29
“My content sells for me. So I don't actually need to hire salespeople because this video is doing sales.”
Clean leverage insight -- the meta-irony of saying it on a video that is selling is perfect→ TikTok hook or newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
21:51
“I would never start with the product in mind and then build a brand to make that product successful. Build the brand first.”
Contrarian sequencing take, no setup needed→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote
The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

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metaphoranalogystory
00:00Hey. Welcome to my daily updates where I show you how I'm running a $4,000,000 per year business in public. I'm currently trying to hit 500 k a month.
00:07Business is closer to 300 k a month right now. So there's about a 200 k a month gap that I need to fill. And what I do on this channel is I answer your questions and then I show you guys how I'm filling that gap, uh, in public.
00:17So we're gonna start with some YouTube comment q and a, then we're gonna build and strategize, and then finally, I'm gonna show you guys my actual growth stats across YouTube, Instagram, and my products. In case you didn't know, I have another channel over here, just Nick Sarayef, that's almost at four fifty five k subs.
00:30And then this is the one that you're currently watching. This is the comment thread, and I'm just gonna go all the way down to the bottom. I think three weeks is our cutoff, and then just start answering as many of these as I feasibly can today.
00:42Those of you guys that can't tell, I got a solid four and a half hours of sleep last night. So some of these answers are probably going to be in a hallucinogenic territory.
00:52But the reason why is because I'm moving. Normally, I have, like, a much more deliberate sort of camera setup and stuff like that, but we've since packed it all away. I'm literally in just like an empty studio or room right now.
01:03There's really nothing else here. And I'd show you guys the rest of my house, but it's just a bunch of boxes. Okay.
01:10Without further ado, let's answer however many questions we can. So Jaden says, Nick has replaced his morning coffee with making a video.
01:18Stop complaining. Why don't you make 400 k? Yeah.
01:22I haven't hit 400 k a month in probably like a month and a half, two months. So closer to 320 now, I would say.
01:29Thank you very much, Thibault. Why wouldn't you consider expanding the humanization flow idea into a video in the main channel since people like it, says Achmed. Yeah.
01:36That's a great idea. I I am. I just need to sit down and then do a a good recording.
01:40But the humanization flow for people that don't know is basically where you train an additional model on your voice. So when I say train here, you literally create a classifier.
01:50It's like a machine learning term that detects your voice with reasonable accuracy.
01:57And it does so based off your vocabulary choices, as well as your sentence length, couple of other features. But once you have that down, what you can do is you can feed in any other snippet of text and you can detect how far away it is from you.
02:09So when you have AI write a piece of text for you then, you can feed in the text that it generates, calculate the the distance from, let's say, like, Nick's tone of voice. Then what you can do is you can just have it rewrite it over and over and over and over and over again to get the distance smaller and smaller and smaller.
02:23You don't have essentially a metric that you can train and then run on. So then you can run a loop that, you know, checks in every five minutes and just comes up with a thousand possible ways to finish a sentence. So, yeah, there's a there's a fair amount of that.
02:37Hopefully, that makes sense. It's pretty cool. It's a cool idea.
02:39I'm sure some people are gonna swoop it, but we'll see. Jordan says, but beside a bunch of a s law products advertised on YouTube like personal a I o s, biz a I o s, etcetera. Is there a reason you haven't built a centralized command center that incorporates your CRM to do lists, ideas, health stuff, etcetera?
02:56Like, is there any reason you don't care to have something like a Hermes agent? Lack of economic value from your POV? Thanks.
03:01Genuinely curious on all of these, says Jordan. Yeah. For sure.
03:04I mean, I basically have one. It's it's my linear now. For those of you guys that don't know, linear is like a project management platform.
03:11It's typically an issue tracker for, you know, coding teams. Oh, the sun is gonna come up hard on my face.
03:17Anyway, we'll see how that looks. And, yeah, I mean, I basically just integrated it one for one with with Claude at this point.
03:23And I use Claude both to like track my to dos, but also manage it. If I tag anything as agent ready, for instance, then, you know, I I automatically delegate it to an agent.
03:34So for instance, here are bunch of tasks. Do a full curriculum sweep and see how we can reference resources more. Right?
03:38Bonus module for extreme lifestyle optimization. These are all sorts of tasks for me, myself. And then I actually have, like, subgroups for things like content.
03:47So you have, like, a content pipeline, for instance. And then, you know, I can use that to, let's say, delegate certain pieces of content to people, delegate it to my agents to run skills that do things for me. It's fairly straightforward.
03:57I mean, it's just like a your your average run of the mill CRM just with a bunch of agentic tooling. Yeah.
04:03I mean, honestly, that's that's all that you really need. Beyblade Knights says, hey Nick, fed Claude a bunch of your YouTube transcripts and Gamma Docs to build a Soraya knowledge base that guides me through getting my lead gen agency off the ground. I've sent about three k emails in total within the last three weeks starting at three to four niches.
04:19No sales calls booked yet. By sequence, high first name, quick question. I always find it really funny when people begin their emails with quick question because if it was really a quick question, if you didn't wanna make it the quickest, you would not say quick quest the very fact that you're saying this is increasing the amount of time it takes for me to read the email.
04:35Right? Do have a consistent way to get in front of new leads each month, or is this mostly coming from referrals? Oh.
04:41Uh, one of the reasons why stuff like this doesn't tend to work really well, Big Blade Nights and anybody else that's reading this, is you haven't given them any reason to answer your question yet.
04:52You're a total stranger on the internet, and essentially what you're doing is you're you're looking to extract value out of somebody. You're looking to extract information about their business. You're looking to extract time.
05:01And these are two things that it takes in order to answer your question. Why would I answer that question that you asked me? Like, there's no there's no value there.
05:10You go on to say you spent ten years in enterprise sales and had built outbound systems that put qualified calls in your calendar every month. That's at least a little bit valuable. Now I know like you're not a total stranger, not a total loser weirdo looking to get my info, but it's still not very valuable.
05:25And obviously, the order in which you're placing all of these elements are off. So, yeah, it's definitely the reason you're bombing. And copy, for the most part, is why you bomb.
05:34It's, you know, maybe 60% of the time, always a copy issue. Maybe twenty, thirty percent of the time, it's like a mailbox issue or like maybe like a list issue.
05:45Couple 10% of the time, it's like societal circumstances.
05:50You know, people are out on vacation. They're out of office. There's something in your market or industry which prevents people from getting back to you.
05:58But for the most part, it's almost always your your copy. So your copy blows. Just sucks.
06:03If you really wanted to crush this, you can check out my four hour cold email course. But to make a long story short, what you need to do is if you are gonna ask them for something, you need to make sure you've given them something in return. And that something doesn't need to be like information or something like that.
06:18But it it just needs to be a reason why they would respond to you. So for instance, you know, got a lot of people that reach out to me. Well, let's pretend I'm reaching out to Let's say your name is Sean.
06:27Hey, Sean. You know, dude, I see you in next daily updates all the time. Mad value drops.
06:34I know this is the first time you're hearing from me, but I used to do management consulting and worked on stuff really similar to what Nick talks about in his events.
06:45Wanted to reach out to you because I know scaling your acquisition channel is something important to you right now.
06:55And I'm very confident that I know how to target the sorts of leads that you want in your business.
07:01I spent ten years in enterprise sales and have delivered results like x, y, and z. Would you be interested in hearing how I might be able to help you?
07:12I'm so confident I could. I'd willingly guarantee you x result in a lot of time. Where's the ten minute chat?
07:19Can call you today, tomorrow afternoon, or even on the weekend, if that makes sense.
07:26Just let me know. Thanks, Nick. The reason why that email works way better than yours is because, one, I've led with something.
07:33I've given you some value. The value here is it's like rapport, relationship value. I've proven to you via social proof and whatnot.
07:41I mean, you can't really prove it. It's just text on a screen. Right?
07:43But I've shown you that I'm somebody actually worth talking to. I'm showing you I'm not, like, just spam. By the time I actually make my ask, we've actually spent all this time building a relationship together.
07:53And if I do whip my dick out slapping on the table, you know, I've closed all this money in enterprise deals. I've only done so after I've already like have opened you up across this like initial trust barrier.
08:05So by the time I actually ask you for something, it's like I'm giving you a lot. And I've proven to you that I'm actually somebody worse knowing or getting in touch with. At the very least, I'm a cool guy.
08:14You know, at least you're gonna be like, hey, man. That sounds really cool. I'm not super interested, but thanks for reaching out and actually doing your research.
08:20So make sure to approach it one to one. What's an elegant way of building a proper knowledge base like I described in the beginning? It really depends on your purpose.
08:27I mean, like, everybody wants to build a knowledge base for the purposes of knowledge bases. It's like, that's kinda dumb. You don't need a knowledge base for everything.
08:36It's nice to have a knowledge base to be able to ask AI questions about your business that otherwise would take some sort of database query. But it's not super relevant or important. So for instance, I mean, like, you know, if I was building some sort of chat knowledge base for, like, my website, I would feed all the publicly available information about me.
08:58I would feed in information about, like, left click softwares. I'd feed in information about, like, some of the big case studies we've had. And then I would give my chatbot whatever it is that I'm hosting it on, you know, Botpress or any then or, I don't know, harwiring it directly into some cloud API.
09:14I would I would I'd make sure the system prompt just includes like a template of the way I want conversations to go, two or three routes. Nothing super complicated, but enough to constrain the answers.
09:23And then I would embed all of the information in like pine cone or something, and I would just have Claude query pine cone prior to responding. Basically, every time I get a message, it feeds in all the system prompt, and then it takes the person's message, queries my Pinecone database for the closest five or 10 matches to what it is the person's asking for, injects it into that prompt, then answers with it.
09:47That's just standard. Right? But it needs to be very specific to what it is that the person's asking for.
09:52I can't just see it in everything. An issue with, like, these big general knowledge bases too, I find, is if they're used as internal tools, you're also giving yourself a security risk. I don't care that much about security, to be honest.
10:03But, uh, you know, if everybody and their mom can query a model that technically has access to knowledge base, including information that you may not necessarily want them to have, It's kinda shitty. Right? So I see a lot of people roll out these knowledge bases across their organization, and then all of a sudden, they have, like, information, like, literal, like, they can ask, hey, how much is Samantha making this year?
10:22Why? It's because the owner naively hooked up, like, the the the the enrollment database, the knowledge base, because somebody told them they needed to get on AI. It's just silly.
10:32You know what I mean? Hopefully, that makes sense. Jacko says, what were your non negotiable tasks going from ten k months to ten k months?
10:38Well, they're very similar, believe it or not, from going to, like, one k to a 10 month. And there was always some form of nonnegotiable daily marketing.
10:46Marketing is the very top of the funnel. In case you guys didn't know, it starts at marketing, and then it goes down to sales. And then you have some transformation event, and usually an onboarding fulfillment.
10:55And then at the very end, have all your administrative HR logistics. And then at the very, end, you have, like, reengagement, reactivation of the leads that you've already worked with.
11:04And so, you know, I own I've always started with the very first thing, the marketing. And so what marketing looks like for me now is quite different to than what it used to look like.
11:12What it used to look like predominantly was I was sending cold emails, and I was scaling that cold email, you know, funnel quite a bit.
11:20So, basically, every single day, I would have to spend a certain amount of time on cold email. I time box it. I don't remember exactly how much it was.
11:26Some days, probably like an hour. Some days, it was like two hours. And then I might also do one improvement to my cold emails per day.
11:34What I mean by that is, like, it can be the smallest improvement ever. I could be reading a copy, and I could be like, oh, I think this kinda sucks. I just wanna make one tiny change, so I change it to one word.
11:42Or it could be a full scale, like, campaign rewrite. But as long as I had one improvement per day that I did every single day, I found that results would eventually grow. And that's just a simple and easy way to make it a daily deliverable.
11:52Right? It's like wake up, respond to all outstanding leads on cold email, respond to all outstanding leads on platforms like Upwork, freelancer.com, Fiverr, whatever the hell.
12:02You know? And then do one improvement to my cold email campaign. Done.
12:05That's easy. And then, you know, do my sales and then do my client management after. Anyway, nowadays, it looks predominantly like content.
12:12So videos like this, for instance, videos on my main channel. Also responding to community members because that's obviously the lion's share of my income at the moment. If I respond well to community members, they tend to do a lot of my marketing for me.
12:24They both post wins threads. They advocate for me outside of the community.
12:30I become like a figurehead of school, so they're starting to market for me. You know, it's because I take care of my my group. Right?
12:37But it's not, you know, I love taking care of them, of course, but I'm also thinking like, okay, cool. Like, this is also a marketing activity for me. So as long as I start with some sort of marketing activity, and I'll spend, you know, probably 30% of my energy on that minimum.
12:48Some days, 50%, 60%, or more. You know, eventually, everything else has worked itself out for me. I don't think that's the same for everybody.
12:58Some people are probably pretty good at marketing already. But, you know, interestingly enough, I actually sucked at marketing. I sucked at sales.
13:03I sucked at all this stuff. I I was really gonna like the back end and systems thinking, but I sucked at all this. So I I really had to front load it all.
13:09You know, somebody in a slightly different position may get more benefit out of systematizing their business a little bit. Like, for me, the systematization was not really a big deal because I was just like, I'm just gonna get the leads.
13:20When I get enough leads, I'm gonna be facing a constraint where I can't fulfill them, and then I'll just figure it out. And that's just what I've always done. But I don't know.
13:27Maybe you're in a slightly different position. Maybe your marketing skills are also already awesome and you have tons of leads, and you just don't have an offer, that means you can feasibly fulfill it.
13:36And if that's the case, maybe spend some time working on your offer. Aside from that, yeah, I mean, like, get fired up.
13:44Stoked about this. If you, I don't know, if you can make an activity just get fired up.
13:50Look at the wall and be like, fuck yeah. Because if you don't enjoy what you're doing, you probably won't do it enough to, like, achieve some sort of outsized result of it.
14:00And so if you can find the fun in the activities that you do, the daily small activities, your longevity in this will be a lot higher, your probability of actually achieving your goal will also be a lot higher. So get really stoked on the work that you're doing as well.
14:15Joel says, quick question. Where do you think the highest paying customers are right now? YouTube, x, Instagram, or somebody else?
14:20Somewhere else, where should I be focusing? I'm planning to start a school community where I teach people how to build high end websites with AI. They won't be the generic template style sites everybody's creating right now.
14:28I'll be focused on teaching how to build the kind of sites you see from top companies. We'll go deep into advanced animation, smooth scrolling experiences, integrating tools like Spline. At the same time, I'll make sure to cover the fundamentals properly so people understand what they're building and can think like designers and devs and not just follow tutorials.
14:44Well, I mean, like, are you asking where to target people to market a school community?
14:51I think you've put the cart before the horse. It sounds like you're like, hey, I wanna start a school community. Where should I find customers?
14:57To be honest, when I approached where to find customers, like, when when I approached this, I already had customers.
15:05Like, I would never start with the product in mind and then be like, hey, how do I build a brand to make that product successful? I would actually just build the brand first, and then I make the product successful, if that makes sense. So if you're very first, like I don't know how far along you are in business or what sort of MRR numbers you've achieved.
15:22But if you probably if you hadn't done, like, 10 or $20,000 a month consistently, I don't think I would even try making a school community right now. It's a very poor monetization lever for somebody that, like, doesn't understand business. And, yeah, this is my opinion.
15:34I see a lot of people in you know, I'm part of the school community called Platinum, which is basically where they just put in a bunch of people that do really well with school and then have people that have big audiences, like 4,000,000, 5,000,000, 10,000,000, 20,000,000 on various social media platforms, ask them questions about how they can get started.
15:49And I'm happy to do that for Sam and Alex and everybody else. It's also just very interesting and rewarding for me to, like, connect with these guys. But a common thing I see is there'll be brands out there that have, like, 5,000,000 followers, and then they make less than 5 or 10 k a month.
16:07And I'm thinking, like, when I had, like, 50 k followers, I was financially underperforming them 15 or 20 times. It's like, why? And it's because, like, I didn't start with the whole, like, oh, I wanna run a school community, so I'm gonna build a brand.
16:23Sorry. I wanna run a school community. So I need to build a brand to, like, market to the school community.
16:28Like, I just started predominantly sales and marketing activities, and then I started with an agency. Once I had enough cash flow behind my belt, then I started building a brand.
16:36And then once I combined my monetization skills with the brand, I was able to make a ton of money. And then I just sort of followed the the white rabbit.
16:44And the white rabbit always just leads to higher levels of abstraction. Like, if you think about it, like, cold email can only make you so much money per unit time because you still have to do the sales. And then eventually, you have to hire people to do the sales.
16:54And not that this is not, um, doable, and a lot of people do run, like, big agencies, $2,300 k a month predominantly through cold email. But it is scaling a slightly less efficient business model. If you contrast that to creating content, my content sells for me.
17:07So I don't actually need to hire salespeople because this video is doing sales. My other videos are doing sales and so on and so forth. So I've actually eliminated that, and I don't need to hire at all.
17:16So I, you know, I basically, like, swallowed up the efficiencies, and I can just do them all myself. Anyway, I kinda forget what we're talking about here. This is the three or four hours of sleep hitting me.
17:27Yeah. Where should you be focusing? I mean, like, all leads are gonna be found on all these platforms.
17:33I think a question like that is too broad to effectively answer, but you can you can find great leads on YouTube. You can find great leads on Instagram. You can find great great leads on x.
17:43X is, like, where all the thinking is happening now anyway, to be honest, because thoughts are transmittable in 280 characters. Whereas, you know, YouTube, while still a great platform to learn things and whatnot, you can't, like, instantly transmit thoughts in 280 characters.
17:57You have to sit down and record a video. So that's kind of an interesting induction I've made. Okay.
18:04Deshaun says, can you walk us through how you go about goal setting? That's a great question. Yeah.
18:08I mean, goal setting, I think at the end of the day, you you just need a goal to start making progress towards something. And then that goal may or may not actually be your end goal, but, you know, at least you'll be moving.
18:19Like, hypothetically, let's say you're here. I don't have my tablet, so bear with me. This is you though.
18:24Okay? This little dot. And let's say, you know, your actual goal, which you don't know yet, you know, your hidden goal, the the one thing that you could achieve that would actually totally fulfill your life and make you really happy, it's actually just over here.
18:37Okay? Unfortunately, you can't just sit down in a forest and meditate and then figure that goal out. That's just not how life works.
18:45Typically, what you need to do is you need to actually interface with the real world, get some market experience, do things that you like and don't like. And it is only in the doing that you will figure out the goal that you like.
18:55But a lot of people spend their whole lives paralyzed or whatever. You're trying to one shot this goal. And, yeah, you're you're you're almost never gonna actually be able to, you know, one shot this all the way from here to to there.
19:10Right? Like, that's just not gonna happen. So much more effective way of going about this is instead of trying to one shot the goal, just pick another goal.
19:19Maybe pick a goal over here. K? And then you'll start making progress towards that goal.
19:26And maybe after you've achieved that goal, what you do is you pick another goal. Maybe this that goal's over here now. And then maybe you move over there.
19:34Then, you know, I don't know, a couple years later, you're like, hey, that goal's pretty awesome. I've achieved that goal. Let me go over here.
19:40And then a few years later, you make a goal that's like, I don't know, maybe over here. And then finally, later on in life, had some big, big stretch goal, then and you realize what it is that you like and you go here.
19:52This isn't a straight line path. Right? But you moving in this direction still got you closer to that end goal.
20:00I think about it from, like, a math perspective. Know, math are these things, you know, there's these components, and I don't know if it's linear algebra, probably. But basically, like, despite the fact that I'm not moving directly towards the goal, you can still kinda count it as me moving a little bit closer to that goal viewed in the dimension that I'm that I'm interested in.
20:19And so this is sort of like that dimension. It's like how long along this line that we progress that gets us closer to the goal.
20:26Well, despite the fact that I moved up here, I still kind of made a little bit of progress down here anyway. All this to say, I care most about when setting goals is not the actual goal that I'm setting at that moment in time. It's just the fact that I I think it's moving me directionally towards the ultimate goal, which will make me happy in my life.
20:44Sorry. Not just happy, but fulfilled and and overall. You know, achieving achieving like the most that I feel like I can be out of my life at any given point in time, which is probably the medical.
20:57So that wouldn't really work too much about it. Like, for instance, I had a goal to hit. Think I it was $2,000,000 a year initially.
21:06It was like my big goal when I came on this channel, I think. And I think I was at, a 130, and I wanted to hit, like, 160 because mathematically, that's how you hit 2,000,000 a year.
21:16And was that the end goal of my life? No.
21:19But I learned a lot while I was doing that goal about what it is that I actually like and what I want. And then I had to set another goal with $4,000,000 a year, and then I'd eventually achieve that. And was that, like, the most important goal that I could achieve?
21:31Probably not. But it taught me a lot. Taught me a lot.
21:35Also, let me grow products and services in directions that have actually made me very happy. Like, Maker School, for instance.
21:43I would not have had anywhere near as much life satisfaction or value had I not started that thing. It's now probably one of the most impactful things that I do. I just coach thousands of people to get their first customers, you know, to start, like, this super uncertain, scary, terrifying world of business, and do so in a way that doesn't make them feel lost and hopeless like I did every day for several years.
22:03That's really fulfilling. But I wouldn't have known had I not set that short term goal of wanting to make $4,000,000 a year. Right?
22:08The $6,000,000 goal, I think it's gonna be similar. The 1,000,000 subscriber goal, that's probably gonna be similar. Some of my relationship and health goals, those are pretty similar.
22:16Right? Probably not the end goal, but directionally correct, which is what's important. Alright.
22:23I think that's that. I yeah.
22:25I'm moving today. That's the big thing. Doing a lot of moving.
22:29So I don't know how much you guys know about Canada.
22:34Well, Canada, British Columbia, and Alberta. But moving from, you know, Calgary, Alberta to Kelowna, BC, it's gonna be pretty fun.
22:47It's been in the works for quite a while. Decided on this a few months back. I think it's the right move.
22:54Seems to be like a good middle ground between highly metropolitan living on the West Coast Of British Columbia, so Vancouver where I grew up.
23:04And then, let's just say less metropolitan, more like mountain y living, which is a lot of what I did out here in in Calgary. If you guys are familiar, we're pretty close to Banff, which is like a worldwide northern vacation destination in Canada.
23:18Seems really, really convenient, as mentioned. It's quite a drive, so we're probably gonna be driving for like four or five hours today and probably another like two, three hours tomorrow.
23:29I wanna do it myself because I thought it would be really fun, and it has been pretty fun. So we packed everything in boxes. We're gonna go pick up a U Haul in a few hours.
23:38It's gonna be great. Yeah. And then we're gonna unload.
23:42And I'm really stoked about having more studio space. Not like a bigger studio necessarily, but the way that my personal office is lined up with my living room is kind of annoying right now.
23:54It just means that, like, when we have friends over, I can't actually work because I'm just thinking like, ah, man. I could hear them, and they're disrupting me, and they can hear me. And now a lot of people are like, why don't you just, like, rent out a giant office?
24:07You know, you you can, but it's not that it's not as easy as most people make it out to be. What I've come to realize is like, everybody thinks that when you have money, everything's super easy. Like, they're like, oh, you just have a bajillion dollars, so why don't you just like rent out that office?
24:19An office across the street. It's like, you know, not everywhere has offices across the street. Right?
24:24I can't just go up to somebody who like has an apartment and be like, hey, could you convert this whole thing into a warehouse for me so I can film dope videos and park my car?
24:35So we just there was no office nearby that was actually worth the friction trade off because anything that was even remotely nearby would have had to either walk like twenty minutes for, like, drive. So anyway, I really like waking up in the morning, rolling out of bed, and then doing work. That's what I did today, you guys could tell, is to wipe in the crust from my eyes.
24:55And here, there just wasn't anything like that. I think Kelowna will be much better in that respect because the apartment that I'm in is like, first of all, it's very large. And second of all, it has like this nice long hallway, which like functionally separates my office from everywhere else, which means I will just have total peace and quiet.
25:11It doesn't matter how many people we have over. We can have friends, family, whatever. I'll still be able to do the things that I wanna get done every day.
25:19So, yeah. I mean, expect, like, just massive productivity coming out your boy, which I'm pretty excited about. I've had to take a hiatus from doing some of the school growth stuff that I started out, but happy to say that we've had a tremendous number of annual upgrades since I made these.
25:34I probably should attract them, but I probably I think we probably at least had 10, which if you think about it, you know, for, let's say, $1,500 or so.
25:42It's a good $15 lifetime lock in. I won't say no to that over the course of, you know, probably four days since I've done that. I can stay going at that clip.
25:51That'll be pretty fun. I think there are a couple of cool monetization angles for me.
25:57Sorry. Cool monetization angles for me with the school. I think annual is really big.
26:04So I'm gonna try and get as many people on annual as humanly possible. I have so many people asking me about these mastermind style things constantly, you know, like one on one style things.
26:14I'm very hesitant to wanna commit to that because I feel like the risk that I incur and the time that I would spend managing that is not proportional to the benefit that I would get. If you think about it right now, Maker School being a low ticket community is like hyper optimized for time.
26:28I will spend, you know, an hour a day on it, basically, every day, and then I'll make a boatload of money.
26:37But there are still, like, some interesting monetization paths. So for instance, we have a lot of people that are reaching out to me that work in companies whose software products I typically recommend in Maker School. And they're like, hey, could you just pin a link to our software product and we'd pay you x y z dollars?
26:51And then I'm like, well, I don't wanna be seen as somebody like shilling or pushing your your product. So, no, probably not. But then they're like, oh, it's okay.
26:59You could just do it in the exact same place that you currently do your products. Just, you know, make us first or I don't know.
27:07Add this discount code at checkout so you can track it. I'm like, really? That's it?
27:12And they're like, yeah. I mean, you had 10,000 people that have been through maker school.
27:16Basically, all of them need to sign up to a product. That's a lot of money for us. It's a lot of money for you.
27:21And I'm like, oh, yeah. I guess that's true. Real estate is very important.
27:25So that's a potential monetization path. I mean, I like that because it's just something I was doing anyway. I dislike that because it's not reflected in the school games ranking.
27:35But who knows? Maybe the school games won't be something that persists for the rest of all time. But anyway, yeah.
27:44Yeah. I got an update from my buddy who's down at these productions.
27:48Sounds like things are going pretty well. Gave me the good thumbs up there. So glad we're still continuing to provide value to them.
27:54I think he's doing sort of a blend of team training right now and, you know, some sort of some sort of design slash development. Got an update from another one of my partners at Left Click.
28:07Sounds like he had a pretty good call yesterday, which is nice. Somewhat promising. Currently, have that podcast with Lazarus coming up pretty soon, so that's exciting.
28:18That was a very funny podcast because he asked me all these personal questions about my life. And I've realized that most of the time on videos like this, I will aim to provide value in the form of knowledge and education.
28:32And I was expecting, he would ask me like, hey, so what are your thoughts on AI agents and how how should you use AI agents? But he was asking me stuff like, so tell me how you grew up and all that. And I was like, damn, I'm flattered, but people really care about this stuff.
28:46I guess we'll find out. Yeah. That's gonna be pretty pretty good to work out.
28:52I'm gonna go on a trip to Hawaii, probably with my family, Maybe two months. So I don't know if anybody here is in I haven't fully decided what island I wanna go on, but it'll probably be like a good, like, ten day trip down there.
29:06So if there's anybody in either one of those areas that wants to grab a coffee or chat, give me a shout. That'll be fun. I feel like the number of opportunities you have to see your family as you get older and then eventually start creating your own family, just fall off a cliff.
29:22And, you know, I'd like to spend some time with them while they're still, my family per se. Like, they are my main family.
29:28They are, you know, I don't they're not competing with my kids, my wife, you know, my big social circle, and so on. So, yeah, I mean, I'm really looking forward to that. That'll be a good time.
29:41And, yeah, I've realized this has turned into some somewhat of a therapy dump while the sun is just burning me. So let me just do some tracking, and then I can get on with my move. Let's give the people what they really want.
29:54K. Let's do the main channel. So 454924, which we think puts me at point 16% growth for the main channel.
30:06And then my daily updates channel is eighteen nine three three. Did we just lose a subscriber? Somebody just watched my videos and go, screw that guy.
30:16K. Let's check out my Instagram as well. 522088.
30:20It's good. Instagram, I think, has been okay the last few days.
30:25I mean, we had a big jump here because one of the videos that we posted performed pretty well. Oh, on that note, I'm fixing my my ManyChat phone. Actually, that's something that we're talking about.
30:35I realized that we're doing an okay job on ManyChat right now. But when you ask me for a resource, I just send you the resource.
30:42What makes more sense is I send you the resource, and I also pitch Maker School because we have, like, a thousand people a day asking me for the resource. If I pitch Maker School and we have even 20% of the people clicking on that, that's like an extra couple 100 visits a day. On average, I feel like I convert on Instagram.
30:58It's tough for me to know because I don't have direct metrics. I feel like I convert, like, one in somewhere between one in three hundred to one in 600. So that might be an one to two customers a day for that product, which should be valuable, and it would also require no change in my life.
31:09So we'll see how that goes, but, yeah, I just wanted to throw you guys in. Okay. Anyway, before the sun burns out my retinas, I would like to thank you for watching me today.
31:19If you have stuck with me for the full thirty one minutes and twenty three seconds, you are a goat, and I appreciate your time. Have a lovely rest of the day, I'll catch all y'all tomorrow's daily update from a very different location.
The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

The title does the work before the video starts: quick question is a phrase that kills cold email response rates, and the host spends the first third of this 31-minute update explaining exactly why -- live, against a real viewer's comment, with a full rewrite.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

09:38model

60/20/10 Cold Email Failure Breakdown

  1. 60% -- copy (the message itself)
  2. 20-30% -- mailbox or deliverability issues
  3. 10% -- external market circumstances

When cold email does not book calls, the culprit is almost always copy -- not the list or the domain health.

Steal fordiagnosing why an outbound campaign is underperforming before touching deliverability
07:40list

The Cold Email Sequence (correct order)

  1. Lead with rapport, research, or recognition
  2. Prove you are worth knowing (credentials, results, specificity)
  3. Make the ask
  4. Offer a guarantee or strong commitment
  5. Give clear scheduling options

The order of elements in a cold email determines whether the reader trusts you enough to respond -- value before ask, always.

Steal forcold outreach for any service or offer; also applies to direct message outreach on LinkedIn or X
15:33list

Business Funnel Stack

  1. Marketing
  2. Sales
  3. Transformation / Onboarding / Fulfillment
  4. Administrative / HR / Logistics
  5. Reactivation

Marketing is always the top of the funnel. Daily time allocation should reflect that hierarchy, especially at early stages.

Steal fortime-boxing daily work at any revenue stage; auditing where energy is going vs. where the bottleneck actually is
24:00concept

Directional Goal Setting

Pick any directional goal and start moving. The goal you pick is probably not your end goal -- but movement reveals what you actually want, and imperfect progress toward a nearby target still closes the gap to your real one.

Steal forcoaching clients stuck in analysis paralysis; framing why early-stage pivots are not failures
01:00model

Humanization Flow

  1. Collect writing samples as training data
  2. Train classifier on vocabulary and sentence-length features
  3. Feed AI-generated text into classifier to get a distance score
  4. Loop rewrites until distance metric converges near zero

A quantitative method for making AI-generated text stylistically indistinguishable from your own voice.

Steal foranyone using AI to write content at scale who wants output that does not read as generic
13:30model

RAG Knowledge Base Pattern

  1. Ingest curated content and generate embeddings
  2. Store in Pinecone or equivalent vector DB
  3. On user query: retrieve top 5-10 matching chunks
  4. Inject chunks into LLM prompt with a constrained system prompt
  5. Never index sensitive internal data in a customer-facing bot

Standard architecture for a chatbot that answers from your own knowledge base rather than general LLM training data.

Steal forbuilding a site chatbot, internal documentation assistant, or customer support agent
CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK
09:38product
“If you really wanted to crush this, you can check out my four hour cold email course.”

Dropped mid-teardown, organic -- no hard sell, no price mentioned. Positioned as the logical next step after diagnosing why the viewer's current approach fails.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA
01:00toolLucid (lucid.app) ↗
03:20toolLinear ↗
13:30toolPinecone ↗
13:30toolBotpress ↗
13:30toolClaude (Anthropic) ↗
29:30toolManyChat ↗
FROM THE DESCRIPTION
PRIMARY CTAWhere the creator wants you to go next.
OTHER LINKSAlso linked in the description.
Storyboard

Visual structure at a glance.

open -- format intro
hookopen -- format intro00:00
humanization flow
valuehumanization flow01:00
cold email comment on screen
valuecold email comment on screen04:08
extraction problem framed
valueextraction problem framed06:29
60/20/10 breakdown + CTA
cta60/20/10 breakdown + CTA09:38
RAG knowledge base
valueRAG knowledge base13:30
non-negotiables
valuenon-negotiables15:33
content as sales
valuecontent as sales19:29
brand vs. product sequencing
valuebrand vs. product sequencing21:51
goal-setting philosophy
valuegoal-setting philosophy24:00
live growth stats
ctalive growth stats29:53
Frame Gallery

Visual moments.

open -- format intro00:00Frame at 00:24 from quick question is killing your cold email00:24Frame at 00:59 from quick question is killing your cold email00:59Frame at 01:22 from quick question is killing your cold email01:22Frame at 01:46 from quick question is killing your cold email01:46Frame at 02:09 from quick question is killing your cold email02:09
open -- format intro00:00Frame at 00:24 from quick question is killing your cold email00:24Frame at 00:59 from quick question is killing your cold email00:59Frame at 01:22 from quick question is killing your cold email01:22Frame at 01:46 from quick question is killing your cold email01:46Frame at 02:09 from quick question is killing your cold email02:09humanization flow02:33Frame at 02:57 from quick question is killing your cold email02:57Frame at 03:20 from quick question is killing your cold email03:20Frame at 03:44 from quick question is killing your cold email03:44cold email comment on screen04:08Frame at 04:31 from quick question is killing your cold email04:31Frame at 04:55 from quick question is killing your cold email04:55Frame at 05:18 from quick question is killing your cold email05:18Frame at 05:42 from quick question is killing your cold email05:42Frame at 06:06 from quick question is killing your cold email06:06extraction problem framed06:29Frame at 06:53 from quick question is killing your cold email06:53Frame at 07:17 from quick question is killing your cold email07:17Frame at 07:40 from quick question is killing your cold email07:40Frame at 08:04 from quick question is killing your cold email08:04Frame at 08:27 from quick question is killing your cold email08:27Frame at 08:51 from quick question is killing your cold email08:51Frame at 09:15 from quick question is killing your cold email09:1560/20/10 breakdown + CTA09:38Frame at 10:02 from quick question is killing your cold email10:02Frame at 10:26 from quick question is killing your cold email10:26Frame at 10:49 from quick question is killing your cold email10:49Frame at 11:13 from quick question is killing your cold email11:13Frame at 11:36 from quick question is killing your cold email11:36Frame at 12:00 from quick question is killing your cold email12:00Frame at 12:24 from quick question is killing your cold email12:24Frame at 12:47 from quick question is killing your cold email12:47RAG knowledge base13:11Frame at 13:35 from quick question is killing your cold email13:35Frame at 13:58 from quick question is killing your cold email13:58Frame at 14:22 from quick question is killing your cold email14:22non-negotiables14:45Frame at 15:09 from quick question is killing your cold email15:09Frame at 15:33 from quick question is killing your cold email15:33Frame at 15:56 from quick question is killing your cold email15:56Frame at 16:20 from quick question is killing your cold email16:20Frame at 16:44 from quick question is killing your cold email16:44Frame at 17:07 from quick question is killing your cold email17:07Frame at 17:31 from quick question is killing your cold email17:31Frame at 17:54 from quick question is killing your cold email17:54Frame at 18:15 from quick question is killing your cold email18:15Frame at 18:42 from quick question is killing your cold email18:42Frame at 19:05 from quick question is killing your cold email19:05content as sales19:29Frame at 19:53 from quick question is killing your cold email19:53Frame at 20:16 from quick question is killing your cold email20:16Frame at 20:40 from quick question is killing your cold email20:40Frame at 20:56 from quick question is killing your cold email20:56Frame at 21:27 from quick question is killing your cold email21:27Frame at 21:51 from quick question is killing your cold email21:51brand vs. product sequencing22:14Frame at 22:29 from quick question is killing your cold email22:29Frame at 23:02 from quick question is killing your cold email23:02Frame at 23:25 from quick question is killing your cold email23:25Frame at 23:49 from quick question is killing your cold email23:49Frame at 24:12 from quick question is killing your cold email24:12goal-setting philosophy24:36Frame at 25:00 from quick question is killing your cold email25:00Frame at 25:23 from quick question is killing your cold email25:23Frame at 25:47 from quick question is killing your cold email25:47Frame at 26:11 from quick question is killing your cold email26:11Frame at 26:34 from quick question is killing your cold email26:34Frame at 26:58 from quick question is killing your cold email26:58Frame at 27:21 from quick question is killing your cold email27:21Frame at 27:45 from quick question is killing your cold email27:45Frame at 28:09 from quick question is killing your cold email28:09Frame at 28:32 from quick question is killing your cold email28:32Frame at 28:56 from quick question is killing your cold email28:56Frame at 29:20 from quick question is killing your cold email29:20live growth stats29:53Frame at 29:58 from quick question is killing your cold email29:58Frame at 30:30 from quick question is killing your cold email30:30Frame at 30:54 from quick question is killing your cold email30:54Frame at 31:18 from quick question is killing your cold email31:18
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