A daily-vlog walk through comment Q&A, an unscripted business-building session, and the once-a-year discount math that adds $50,000 to a $300K-a-month business in a single day.
Posted
1 months ago
Duration
Format
Talking Head
educational
Views
1.2K
52 likes
57 · 43
Big Idea
The argument in one line.
Answering audience questions honestly and running simple, repeatable systems — like a once-a-year discount offered identically to every member — can add tens of thousands of dollars toward an ambitious revenue goal in a single day.
Who This Is For
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
You run or are building a coaching, community, or membership business and want to see how an annual-discount promo is actually priced and justified.
You're a service provider (video editor, cold caller, freelancer) unsure how to price or prove value in a market you assume is already saturated.
You're early in a business and unsure whether you've earned the right to start documenting your journey publicly.
SKIP IF…
You want a step-by-step tutorial on a specific AI tool or automation build — this is Q&A and business philosophy, not a build-along.
You're looking for polished, scripted content — this is an unscripted daily vlog format with visible screen-recording and comment triage.
TL;DR
The full version, fast.
Nick Saraev runs his daily YouTube vlog as a mix of comment Q&A, visible business strategizing, and channel-growth stats, aiming to hit $500K/month from a roughly $300K baseline. He answers reader questions on recovering a banned WhatsApp number, competing in saturated service markets by clearing a high bar on every visible detail, pricing services around client outcomes instead of hours, and deciding when a business is 'worth' documenting publicly (his bar: roughly $10K/month or top-1% results). The core mechanic he reveals: because his membership community can never lower its list price without alienating existing members, he instead runs a once-a-year 50%-off annual plan offered identically to everyone, converting new and existing members at the same time. He calculates this single promo adds roughly $50,000 to his $300K+/month revenue, closing most of the gap to his $500K goal within a single month.
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States the $500K/month goal against a ~$300K baseline and explains the three-part daily-vlog format: comment Q&A, building/strategizing in public, and growth stats.
00:24 – 01:48
02 · Comment triage ritual
Sorts the community tab by newest, explains a 3-4 day reply cutoff, and notes that replying with a commenter's name improves future comment quality even on obviously AI-generated comments.
01:48 – 07:51
03 · Robbie: WhatsApp ban recovery and doing your own sales calls
Answers a lead-gen operator whose WhatsApp Business number got banned (buy a new number or appeal) and whose partner runs all sales calls (get on the calls yourself instead of assuming your partner has a special gift).
07:51 – 11:53
04 · pranav8509: saturated niches, outcome pricing, selling with no proof
Argues 'saturated' markets just mean more low-quality entrants, describes the 7-out-of-10 checklist that won him Upwork clients at LeftClick, explains outcome-based pricing for video editing, and how to sell with zero case studies.
11:53 – 14:42
05 · WinnerStories + cold-calling-from-abroad Q&A
Names three filters for a new agentic-workflow agency's target niche, pushes back on jumping to cold calling before truly exhausting cold email, and explains getting a US EIN/LLC to legally call US leads from abroad.
14:42 – 17:57
06 · Homes by Higgs: is this worth documenting
A short-term-rental operator building his own ops software asks whether to document and sell it; Nick sets a rough $10K/month or top-1% bar for when a business is worth publicly documenting.
17:57 – 20:56
07 · Tangent, growth check-in, and the input-lag pattern
A high-school dance anecdote, then a mid-video stats check across his main channel, Daily Updates channel, Instagram, and Maker School, framed around the idea that growth always lags the work that caused it.
20:56 – 25:08
08 · Building a durable evergreen content backlog
Describes writing thoughts out before recording to raise delivery quality, and three evergreen content pillars (mindset essays, one-hour case-study interviews, systems thinking) meant to survive travel gaps and tool changes.
25:08 – 29:52
09 · The annual-discount promo math
Explains why a membership can't just lower its price, why a once-a-year discount offered to everyone equally solves that, and calculates that a 50%-off annual plan nets roughly $1,000 extra per signup — worth about $50,000 toward his $500K goal.
29:52 – 32:15
10 · Closing stats and the cheap-mic hack
Runs final growth numbers across all channels and reveals his lapel-mic audio was actually AirPods (after his real mic got dunked in water), recommending cheap earbuds plus compression as a budget audio hack.
Atomic Insights
Lines worth screenshotting.
A banned WhatsApp Business number is rarely a dead end — buy a new number, or file an appeal proving the outreach was opted-in.
The biggest unlock in a sales partnership can be dropping the assumption that a partner has some 'magic sales sauce' and getting on the calls yourself.
Competitive markets aren't a reason to avoid a niche — most competitors in saturated spaces are objectively bad, leaving room to dominate with basic execution.
Pushing every visible touchpoint (profile photo, cover letter, subject line) above a 7-out-of-10 bar is enough to stand out in a flooded market.
Outcome-based pricing works even for creative services like video editing: guarantee a lift in a metric the client already tracks, like watch time or CTR.
With zero case studies, run the service on your own business first, then bootstrap that self-generated result into the opening pitch for future clients.
Good first niches for a new agency share three traits: easily scrapable data, high-ticket average deal size (ideally $10K-$30K+), and low regulatory compliance burden.
Claiming to have 'gone deep' on cold email after a week and a half of clicking send on a campaign isn't depth — real depth takes months of daily iteration.
A foreign founder can get a US EIN and LLC in about a week for roughly $500-$600, unlocking the same domestic calling rights as any American company.
The rough bar for whether a business is worth publicly documenting is about $10,000/month or top-1% category results — below that, the story isn't credible yet.
Growth results consistently lag the work that caused them, so a channel can look flat for weeks after real effort resumes, then snap upward.
A subscription business can't simply lower its list price — existing members who paid more will churn near 100% out of a sense of unfairness.
A once-a-year discount offered identically to new and existing members avoids that fairness problem while still converting a wave of new signups.
Dropping an $1,884 annual plan to $1,104 (50% off) still nets roughly $1,000 in extra revenue per signup once average existing tenure is factored in.
Cheap wired earbuds can match an expensive lapel mic's clarity once paired with basic compression and an AI audio-cleanup pass.
Takeaway
A once-a-year discount, offered to everyone equally, can outrun a price cut.
WHAT TO LEARN
The video's real lesson isn't the annual promo alone — it's that consistent, unglamorous systems (comment replies, outcome-based pricing, evergreen content, fair pricing rules) compound into disproportionate results.
02Comment triage ritual
Sorting community comments by newest and replying to a self-imposed 3-4 day cutoff keeps engagement fresh without needing to answer everyone.
Naming the commenter in a reply, even to an obviously AI-generated comment, measurably improves the quality of comments an audience leaves afterward.
03Robbie: WhatsApp ban recovery and doing your own sales calls
A banned business number is usually solvable by purchasing a new number or filing an appeal that proves opted-in, GDPR-compliant outreach.
Deferring sales calls to a partner because they seem to have a 'sales gift' often just means no one has tested that assumption.
Getting on sales calls yourself, even without deep product knowledge, is often the fastest way to learn how to actually sell the product.
04pranav8509: saturated niches, outcome pricing, selling with no proof
A market feeling saturated usually just means more entrants, not more competent competitors — most submissions in a crowded market are low effort.
Enumerating every visible proxy of quality (photo, cover letter, grammar, subject line) and pushing each above a 7/10 bar is enough to dominate a flooded market.
Outcome-based offers work even for creative services like video editing: guarantee a lift in a metric the client already tracks, over a fixed trial period.
With zero case studies, run the service on your own business first, then use that self-generated result as the opening proof point with future clients.
05WinnerStories + cold-calling-from-abroad Q&A
Good first niches for a new agency have easily scrapable data, high-ticket average deal size (ideally $10K-$30K+), and low regulatory compliance burden.
Claiming to have 'gone deep' into cold email after a week and a half of clicking send on a campaign is not depth — expect months of daily iteration before real skill shows up.
A foreign founder can get a US EIN and LLC in about a week for roughly $500-$600, unlocking the same domestic calling and business rights as any US company.
06Homes by Higgs: is this worth documenting
The rough bar for whether a business is worth publicly documenting is about $10,000/month or top-1% results in its category — below that, the story isn't credible yet.
Time spent packaging and posting about a not-yet-successful business is close to pure opportunity cost compared to time spent making the business actually work.
07Tangent, growth check-in, and the input-lag pattern
Growth results consistently lag the work that caused them — a channel can look flat for weeks after real effort resumes, then snap upward.
Writing out talking points before recording produces a more organic, higher-clarity delivery than either full scripting or unprepared riffing.
08Building a durable evergreen content backlog
Long-running principle-based content is designed to survive tool and technology changes, unlike tutorial content tied to specific software.
One-hour, one-take case study interviews have close to a 1:1 production-to-published ratio, making them a high-leverage content format even when they underperform on views.
Maintaining 2-3 evergreen content pillars in a backlog prevents a full month-long publishing gap whenever travel or a busy period hits.
09The annual-discount promo math
A subscription business can never simply lower its list price — existing members who paid more will churn near 100% out of a sense of unfairness.
A once-a-year discount offered identically to every member, new or existing, avoids that fairness problem while still converting a wave of new signups.
Dropping an $1,884 annual plan to $1,104 (50% off) still nets roughly $1,000 in extra revenue per signup once average existing tenure is factored in.
A single well-timed annual promo can add tens of thousands of dollars in one day, closing most of the gap to an ambitious monthly revenue goal.
10Closing stats and the cheap-mic hack
Cheap wired earbuds can match an expensive lapel mic's clarity once paired with basic compression and an AI audio-cleanup pass.
Reporting exact subscriber and revenue numbers on every channel, even when growth is flat, keeps a build-in-public series honest and trackable over time.
Glossary
Terms worth knowing.
Outcome-based pricing
Charging a client based on a guaranteed improvement in a metric they care about, like watch time or click-through rate, instead of billing by the hour or project.
EIN
Employer Identification Number — a US tax ID that lets a foreign-owned business operate, open accounts, and make outbound calls with the same standing as any American company.
Annual promo / annual sequence
A once-a-year, time-limited discount on a subscription's annual plan, offered identically to new and existing customers to avoid punishing early buyers.
Input lag
The delay between doing consistent work and seeing its results show up in growth metrics — visible as a flat stretch before a channel's numbers accelerate.
“You can't just lower your price in school... you're gonna get like a 100% churn.”
specific, tactical pricing rule most creators haven't thought through→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote
The Script
Word for word.
Read-along
Don't just watch it. Burn it in.
See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.
17px
metaphorstory
Welcome to my daily updates channel where I show you guys how I'm running a business that does over 300,000 American freedom dollars per month. My goal is $500 a month, and this is essentially a day by day breakdown.
Now how I'm doing it, I start every video with some YouTube comic q and a just to fire myself up, wipe the crust off my eyes. Then I build and strategize in public before finally showing you guys some growth stats across my YouTube, my Instagram, and the rest of my products.
And speaking of YouTube, this is my main channel over here. We just published a video just a few seconds ago on GPT 5.6 Soul. Looks like it's doing reasonably well.
This is the daily updates channel where you guys are at right now. And I'm just gonna go to the community tab and then sort by new.
Otherwise, YouTube will hide most of your guys' comments I found. And I'll just scroll all the way down to the three day cutoff, I guess four day cutoff, and then start answering questions.
Okay? As you guys could see, if you guys are old heads on the channel, I've changed the format a little bit. I kinda like this.
Just kinda need to figure out how exactly to, you know, position myself. But I kinda like this because then you guys can see more of the page. Before I was sort of covering up the bottom right or the bottom left hand corner where usually, like, the agent would live.
So now I can do my agent coding and stuff like that without actually meaningfully interrupting anything, which is nice, just like this. Okay. Anyway, Robbie says, Nick, thanks so much for answering my questions.
Feels unreal having someone this big offer that, and it's helped so much. No problem. I got a couple more.
Could really use your help. I do lead gen email, WhatsApp, and WhatsApp calls, but only to leads who fill out a form and ask to be contacted. Sorry.
And ask to be contacted. It was all going good until recently when my WhatsApp business number got banned, presumably for spam, and it happened right when our outreach volume peaked. Now I'm down to email only trying to rebuild the text and call channels.
I'm EU based. How do you approach this if you were in my position? So you were doing a lot of text messages.
Were you doing outreach? No. Okay.
Only to leads who fill out a form and ask to be contacted. I mean, could just get a new WhatsApp number. No?
I don't see any reason why you can't just get new WhatsApp numbers. Tell me reasons why you can't get new WhatsApp numbers. I do understand that they are now doing some business verification and and so on and so forth, but that doesn't mean that you are totally screwed.
Did you purchase the number on WhatsApp? I'm unsure of exactly what the problem is here because you can always just purchase another number.
Right? I mean, if this number is banned presumably for spam, just purchase another number and then do it. You can also file an appeal if it was WhatsApp giving you the ban.
If it was your carrier giving you the ban, there are appeal channels, and you just need to prove legitimacy that the outreach and so on and so forth that you are doing are to customers that have explicitly opted in, a la GDPR, and so on and so forth. Hopefully, that makes sense. Anyway, I know the answer to articulating your thoughts better is generally just talk more, but my partner runs the sales calls while I do ops.
I can do appointment setting. Paused right now because of the above. How would you develop the skill in my situation?
Open the solutions outside business too. Yeah. I mean, on the articulation bit, you should just be doing the sales calls.
Obviously, your partner should run the sales calls if they are the person that is initially contacting the lead and getting in touch with them and stuff like that, you know, just for congruence's sake. But there's nothing stopping you from doing sales calls or being on sales calls. Probably one of the biggest unlocks I had is when I just stopped deferring and delegating all of the sales work to my partner because I thought my partner just had some magic sales sauce that I didn't.
The reality is they they really didn't. And I was reminded of this just a couple of weeks ago when I jumped on a call with one of my one of my business partners. Now I have a few.
Right? Because I run different businesses and stuff like that. And I just remember, like, you know, I was like, wow.
You know? This person really knows a lot about their product and how to sell them. But then I I jumped on a call and I was just like, woah.
Wait a second. Like, why did they say that? That seems kinda weird.
Hold on. They're talking about this? That seems suboptimal.
Why are they not asking the customer more questions about themselves? And then I was reminded, oh, wait a second. Right?
First principles, I'm actually really good at this stuff. I don't even need to know a lot about the products to know how to sell it.
And it made me be like, right. Right. Why the hell am I deferring and delegating these sales calls to this person?
Like, I really wanted to learn how the product worked and how best to sell, but I should be doing the sales calls myself. So guess what? I started jumping on a bunch of sales calls.
Now I deeply understand the product and how to articulate the benefits of some product. Yeah. You just gotta do it, Roby.
Hopefully, makes sense. Okay. I'm gonna drink this coffee because it's pretty early, and I gotta jump over to breakfast soon.
Hey, Nick. Can a service be scaled to 10 k a month? You usually talk about AI, but what about saturated niches like video editing?
How would I scale them since it's getting really cheap hourly rates in the market? What I've learned is that playing on outcomes rather than pure service would allow you to charge anything. But for video editing, you said to start selling your service as soon as possible.
How do you sell your service with no proofs? So it seems like there are a few questions inherently bundled into this one. The first is you're making a claim as to the, I guess, saturation of the video editing market.
The second one is how do you apply outcome based sales to niches like video editing that might inherently be more creative? And third is, how do you sell your service with no proofs?
Okay. How do you sell your service without case studies, social proof, and so on and so forth? The good news is there's pretty defined clear answers for all of these.
The first one, what about saturated niches like video editing? Are you suggesting that this niche is not saturated? I would say there are probably far more new market entrants into this niche, AI, than there are video editing.
And now a lot of people are applying AI to video editing, which, you know, is changing sort of the economics of what AI really means.
Is AI just AI automation using drag and drop back ends like NA done? Is it the development of AI agents? Or does AI now encompass virtually every single piece of knowledge work on Earth?
If so, there are a lot of market entrants. Right? Very, very saturated.
So there's no real fundamental difference. In fact, I typically like highly competitive markets because it suggests that there is an opportunity and there's money to be made. And the reality is just because something is competitive doesn't mean your competitors will do a good job.
If anything, found that in highly competitive markets, the average quality of a competitor is very poor, which allows me with just a little bit of first principles thinking to be like a million times better than them. For instance, Upwork is a great example of that because it's probably the stereotypical one that most beginners join with.
So when I was starting my, you know, when I was starting left click, my partner and I both ran our Upwork profiles. And we did we did something really simple.
We we just made, like, a job post. And, I mean, it helps that we had legitimately hired a number a few times, but we just made a job post in, like, the AI automation space for some job that we were, you know, looking to get hire looking to hire for.
And then we just saw, like, the massive inbound influx of applications, and I was floored by how horrific they were. You know, people would commonly be like, oh, Upwork's supersaturated. And this is back in, I don't know, 2021 or something, 2022.
People would be like, Upwork's super saturated. It's terrible. The average job gets like 50 proposals.
And then I'd look at the 50 proposals and I'd say, dude, 49 of these are like the worst spam, prints scams of all time.
It was like, hello, dear, in all caps, I help you with project.
And this was for, like, Western English jobs. This was for, like, high paying, you know, American domiciled San Francisco, California, high GDP, high average cost of project jobs. And I was like, this is freaking ridiculous.
Like, I can come in here and I can crush. So what did I do? I just enumerated all the different things that you could improve on an Upwork application to make a great first impression.
So, like, the profile pic, the little online for messages bubble, the little cover letter that you send, good spelling and grammar. I mean, back then, that was the play.
Now, it's actually a little bit different because of AI, but I digress. Showing, not telling. I mean, these are all, like, very basic things, but it follows the same formula.
Just go into a competitive niche and then enumerate all of the things that result in a customer being interested in you, and then just make sure that those are at least all seven out of tens and above. Make a big checklist. Right?
Is my profile pick a seven out of 10 and above? If so, done. Is my whatever seven out of 10 and above?
If I'm sending cold emails in a saturated space, is my subject line a seven out of 10 or above? If you can get a seven out of 10 across all, you know, barometers of interest, all of these proxies for, like, a good profile or a good piece of outreach or a good whatever cold call, yeah, you're not just gonna stand out.
You're going to dominate. It's not even close. So that's how you do it.
And then when you do it, you don't need to worry about selling for cheap hourly rates because you are gonna be the top 1% of the 1%. Just power law. Right?
Now how do you charge for outcomes with something like video editing? Well, I actually have a lot of people pitch me all the time outcome based for video editing, and this is the better outreach. This is the sort of people that I'll take people up take up.
So I'm working with a new editor from Instagram, for instance. Now, I mean, I kind of met him through Warm, but guy's really, really business minded, he's a killer. The way that you do this sort of thing is you reach out to the person, and then you say, hey.
I've managed channels for x y z big dick names before. Or, you know, I've done editing for blah blah blah. Or if you've done editing for any video whatsoever, it's very easy to accumulate views as a video editor because then you get to claim views on videos that you edited despite the fact that it was probably mostly the brand's growth that resulted in the views, not your amazing editing techniques.
But then you can say, you know, responsible for 50,000,000 views or something, or part of 50,000,000 view channels. And then, you know, I will guarantee you I improve your average x y z by x y z percent.
So for instance, watch time. I imp I'll guarantee you I can improve your average watch time by this much. That's one of the easiest pitches to make.
Because the way the actual offer would work for video editing is you would just like guarantee them this lift in a metric they give a lot of a shit about, which is, like, directly related to ad revenue. You do the best damn job ever.
K? So you take their starting statistic, maybe over the last ninety days, and then you would just run your thing for, like, a certain amount of time. You'd build a relationship with them while you do the video editing, show them how great of a service provider you are.
And by the end of the ninety day period, whether or not you even approve their thing, they will have worked with you. They will know you. They will like you.
They will presumably have gotten to, like, figure out a good working relationship with you. And I mean, like, ideally, you would crush this watch time improvement or if you're, like, thumbnail designer, your your CTR improvement or something.
But at the end of that period, lot of people are just going, hey, man. You know what? It's been great working with you.
No problem. Let's keep So you really don't have to worry about that, but just work work in outcomes.
Work in, like, watch time. That's a big thing for YouTubers just for, you know, for your knowledge. Impression CTR, which is like the click through rate on thumbnails if you're like a thumbnail designer, that sort of thing.
And then finally, how do you start selling your service with no proof? It's pretty straightforward. You just use your service on your own business.
So if I was selling cold email, I would use my service on my own business, and then I would get good at, like, generating opportunities. And then I would now be able to say, like, hey.
I generated 28 meetings in four days for an IT firm or, like, a software firm or an automation firm or an AI company. And now I just bootstrap that and roll that up into, you know, better and better proof with every client that I work with.
Hopefully, makes sense.
Winner stories has a hell of a winner story for us. He's starting an agentic workflow agency in his two questions. Number one, which industry should I offer my service to?
You should offer your service to digital industries whose data is easily scrapable. You should offer your service to high ticket industries, which the average order value, the average ticket price of a service is quite high, at least $5,000, ideally 10,000, 20,000, $30,000, or more.
And you should work in industries that are non compliant typically not that don't involve heavy compliance or regulate regulatory standards. What I mean by this is, if you were to try making your carving out your niche in health care, let's say, this early on where you have very little business experience, it would be very difficult for you to even get your first client to begin the flywheel of positive experience and accumulation.
So instead, you should focus on unregulated wild west style industries like agencies and so on and so forth. Number two, my main outreach method is cold emailing, but I haven't gotten a single client from that. I'm thinking of going deep into cold calling.
What would you do in my situation? Why would you go deep into cold calling if you haven't gone deep into cold emailing? If you haven't got a single client from something, can you even be said to have gone deep in it?
How many cold emails would be sent? This is nonsense talking. You almost certainly haven't sent that many cold emails, just the way that you're pitching this.
You certainly haven't, like, iterated as quickly as you should have. So it's unreasonable to expect that you would be good at something if you just started it and if you haven't spent a tremendous amount of time and effort in it.
And for those people that think, know, oh, I sent a thousand cold emails. You haven't spent a tremendous amount of time and effort in it. A thousand of cold emails is you just clicking go on a campaign for, I don't know, a week and a half or something like.
It takes a lot more work than that if you really want to get good at stuff. You know, we're talking two, three hours a day, pouring over your cold email copy, reading and learning everything you possibly can, you know, for months on end before you see any real improvement.
Any recommendation for somebody outside of The USA to get access to make phone calls to leads inside The USA, ideally with an American number? Thank you. Yeah.
I mean, you can you can just buy you can buy a lot of numbers these days. I mean, I've had some people ask me, you know, if I can get them numbers presumably for spam purposes and start in Clarivo.
So I don't wanna talk too much about this, but if this is legitimate outbound calling, as long as you have well, I mean, it's made easier if you have, like, an EIN.
That's an employer employer insurance number. It's basically like your tax ID. So I don't know if you have that.
You didn't mention this, but if you could set up, like, a simple US LLC or US c corp, which you can do on, like, a week now. I'm pretty sure you can get, like, a temporary EIN issued in, like, a week or two or something even now. The business setup landscape is so easy in The United States because they want to facilitate new business owners coming in and starting new things.
Even foreign business owners, because they're starting an American company, they'll pay American taxes. That is quite straightforward too. And then once you have the EIN, you have the exact same rights and privileges as literally any American company.
So, I mean, I would probably do that. It would cost you, I think, like $500 plus maybe like a one hundred and ten year or something.
Like, yeah, like a licensed registrar fee, and then you'd have to renew that every year. Then you would have tax obligations, but I'm assuming you're making some money.
That's personally what I did. Alright. Let's do one more.
Homes by Higgs. Fan of what you built. I run a short term rental business on nine acres.
Starting to document the journey, 20 came out in a similar format. And I can tell you used AI a lot of for a lot of these. Is that necessary?
The software that dominates the short term rental space is expensive and underwhelming. I know multiple operators running 40 properties and 2,000,000 in revenue are overpaying for tools like that don't fully solve their problems. And building these systems for myself regardless, direct booking site, AM messaging for guest stops, Wi Fi email capture, and a clean tone turn of rep for managing cleans and checklists.
Essentially, a short term rental operating system for mid tier operators. Being that I'm building it anyway, do think there's enough on market to justify selling and documenting, or would you focus elsewhere? Well, I mean, how much money are you making right now is really the big thing.
I think if you had told me how much money you're making right now, it'd be easier for me to answer this question. So in general, if anybody wants to ask me questions like this, I would encourage you to just, like, you know, just spill it. I mean, it's a YouTube thing.
You don't even it's not even like fully non anonymous. Right? Just tell us how much money you're making.
That's fine. I think if you were making, you know, 5 to $10,000 a month or if you had something worth talking about, then it it would be worth making videos on. If you don't have anything worth talking about when I say worth talking about, I mean, like, are you the 1% threshold or achievement at the thing that you are doing right now?
So I give her a 1%, you know, short term Airbnb operator, let's say, you're probably making $10,000 a month or something.
That just tends to be the litmus for for most people to be like, oh, this guy's serious. Right? So if you're not making that much money, I probably wouldn't spend any time documenting this at all.
I would spend my time working on the main thing rather than talking about the potential of some future where I will be succeeding with the main thing. Focus your time on, like, actually succeeding with the thing, not just, like, talking about it. Because as nice as social media and everything is, it's also a massive distraction.
And I think a lot of people end up in, like, this kind of narcissistic, ego filled local minima where they're just, like, looking at themselves all the time being like, oh, like, that one got 17 impressions.
Like, I need to make sure my hair is really well done for the video, and, oh, maybe I need a better microphone. It's just it's just all a waste of time. Right?
There's a reason I, like, wake up and I don't even wipe the crust for my eyes before I do this because it's just like it's very diff it's very easy to fall into that minima and then stay there for a long time. Very difficult to crawl out of if you don't actually see financial success with this stuff. And I know this because I just see this all the time in maker school.
You get, like, these young kids that are well intending and intelligent and ambitious, and they've made jack squat.
And then they're like, I'm gonna document my journey. But it's fueled by this like very solipsistic worldview that people inherently care about your journey.
Nobody cares about your journey until you've already made it. And so if you spend any time documenting your journey before you've already made it, this time is almost completely wasted. You can make some videos in your garage or something.
Sure. But do you need to post them? Do you need to create packaging for them?
Do you need to do any of this stuff? No. If you've really made it, you know, and you make a million dollars a month or something, you're some big financially successful person on the internet, and you want to go on the internet and build a brand, then post your first video or something after you've already made it.
Like, there there is no reason I can that I can see why you would even spend any time on this whatsoever. It is almost direct opportunity cost in every way, shape, and form. Rather, that's inaccurate.
There are many reasons I could see for why you would do it, but the costs greatly overshadow any of the short term benefits here. Alright. Hopefully, makes sense.
Hey. Nice seeing your face, Zayed. Good on you for putting that up.
Imagine being 15 and having the balls to just, like, expose yourself in front of tens of thousands of people like that.
Dude, I was, like, trembling to dance with funny story.
When I started high school, I was, like, really small. I mean, I'm still pretty small. Yeah.
I got some muscles. You know? I could I could prove it.
But when I started high school, was really small because I was put in a year above me. I was in, like, a bunch of split classes growing up because my school was really poor. It's, like, probably the one of the poorest inner city schools in East Vancouver.
Anyway, I was putting a bunch of these split classes, and they were, like, grade three, four. And I was just, you know, not super sociable, and I read a lot of books.
So, I was, like, smart enough to do some of the grade four work. Then at the end of the year, my teacher was said this to my parents. He she was like, hey.
You know, Nick actually has done, like, a lot of the grade four curriculum. You should probably stick him in grade five next year. Would save them a year.
My parents were like, woah. My are kids so smart? Obviously, they were like, he's gonna become doctor.
And then they were like, absolutely. So they moved me up one year. And then because of that, I was always like a year behind.
So I got put in high school, and I was, like, so small and meek because I hadn't hit puberty yet. My balls were in freaking the heavens. And, you know, I started with high school.
And at the time that this Zaid kid was, like, freaking exposing himself, showing himself to, like, 10,000 people or whatever, I was, like, lined up for, like, a school dance. And I remember, like, they paired it up with line dancing or square dancing or something where, like, you all the men were on one side and all the women were on the other side, and then you had to, like, pick one.
Well, not pick one rather, dance with one. And then you'd finish, and then you have to move over a little bit, dance with the other. You finish, you move over a little bit, dance with the other.
And there was, like, this, like, really pretty girl, you know, five or six people down. And I because I was, like, very nerdy, I was, like, terrified.
I was, like, shaking. My palms were sweaty, knees weak, arms were heavy. I, like, was so, like, crazy scared about this thing that I had timed down to, the millisecond, the average dance times per person, as well as the average amount of as well as the wall clock time left remaining in the session.
And I went to the washroom. Like, I sprinted over to the washroom and, you know, like, told oh, I'm sorry.
You know, one one second. I have to use the washroom. Sprinted over to the washroom.
I came back, and then I inserted myself back in the line. One person too early so that I wouldn't go to the really pretty girl because that's how scared I was of, like, doing anything like this.
And now there are kids out there like Zaid that are doing, you know, freaking business models at 15. It blows my mind.
I mean, Jesus Christ, man. Some of the the the potential here on YouTube is amazing.
That's why I love YouTube and just love the Internet more generally. Because on the Internet, you have literally an entire world at which you are drawing from.
Whereas, you know, the people that I surrounded myself with in high school just so happened to be from my specific area. You know, what we're seeing is really just like the best talent in the world. Okay.
Anyway, so how are we doing here? I got one subscriber from my video that I posted half an hour ago. Cool.
This video should perform reasonably well. Yeah. So, I mean, on the strategy end, I definitely did a fair amount of, you know, YouTube video prep and so on and so forth.
I also built some better systems for publishing YouTube videos. When I see comments like this, it's almost a 100% always AI, but I comment on them regardless simply because commenting shows people in my comments that I engage, which improves the probability that somebody will comment.
And the more comments and engagement you get on a post, typically, the better it performs. So I almost always do it.
I'll also typically go in here, and I'll see if they have a name that I can comment on because I find that that typically significantly improves the quality of the comments that I leave.
And it's just a little hack that I use to get more engagement, and also just, like, not be one of those loser creators that doesn't listen to their audience whatsoever. So that's nice. Anyway, yeah, let's talk building and strategizing in public, shall we?
So, yeah, what I'm chiefly focused on here in this hotel room here for the next couple days, and I got another one that I'm staying at, is and it's been great just being able to, like, lock in and think deeply about what it is I care about, and then what it is that I want.
And then actually, like, almost like a little Bill Gates mini reading week. Like, what what I need is I need, like, a backlog of high quality content that's evergreen that'll survive any new technological advancements, so I can't talk too much about tools. And so what I've decided to do instead is just talk about, like, mostly long running business principles in, like, Hermoese style, like, you know, 17 mindset shifts to change everything or whatever.
Now, obviously, I can't do that because I don't really have the credibility nor the giant shoulder muscles to, you know, make that worth anybody's time.
But yeah. I mean, that's really the idea. So I've come up with a giant giant list of all of these, and I'm pushing them out.
And it's just me kind of talking ad hoc about stuff. I mean, the benefit to all of us is, you know, if you write your thoughts first.
Typically, when you write, you get to select like a higher IQ portion of yourself. It's interesting. Your IQ basically goes up twenty, thirty points when you write, so you're able to make really cogent points.
And then if you just read that over three or four times before you do your video, and then you sort of just like, no. Okay.
First, gonna talk about this, then I'm gonna talk about that, then gonna talk about that. You can ultimately produce something that, like, comes across as very organic and is wonderful without needing to look at a script or whatnot, but that is ultimately driven by like a higher IQ version of yourself.
So that's pretty dope. Right? So, yeah, I mean, I just wrote down a bunch of things, talked a lot about my journey and then what led here, which I think is like good nurturing material.
I'm gonna have like some case studies in the bank. So one really high ROI thing that I do that doesn't perform very well on YouTube if we're looking at views, impressions, engagement, that sort of thing, but performs really well for monetization purposes are case studies where I just talk to somebody that's made it.
So that takes me one hour to do, like, a one hour video. It's like a one to one production to published content time, so the actual utilization is great. And then more like deep system stuff, but not like tool based system stuff.
More like thinking about systems. And I feel like this sort of content, all three of these unfortunately are not gonna perform very well, but they are gonna allow me to never be in a position where I take like a month trip somewhere and then I don't publish anything for the whole month.
Then I come back and I'm just like freaking uppercutting the YouTube algo constantly, you know. I'm just in the in the in the ring with them. So, yeah, I mean, that's more or less what I've been doing over the course of the last little bit last like twenty four, forty eight hours.
So, yeah, it's been fun. I mean, like, Maker Zero has grown tremendously in a very short period of time. We're 5.6 k now.
Right? And I was thinking about, like, a monetization cycle for that. And our upcoming annual sale is coming.
And this is gonna be the first time I've had, like, a free sort of mid audience that I could pitch this to. So this is gonna be, like, very good proof of concept, I would say, Maker Zero as well. So another thing that I did yesterday was I thought through, like, an annual discount sequence and how exactly I would push that.
The benefit to a good annual sequence, especially one where I make the annual price of maker school 50% lower than it normally 50% lower or essentially give them a 50% discount is you can't lower your price on school.
That's just if you do, then your current customers will hate you, obviously, because they'll be like, well, why is it that I get punished for signing up at a higher price, and now these losers get to come in at a lower price? So you can't just lower your price in school.
To be clear, if anybody's in my school community, you cannot lower your price in school. If anybody was thinking about making a school community, you cannot lower your price in school. Just don't do that.
You're gonna get, like, a 100% churn, basically, because everybody's just gonna leave. Then, you know, people that wanna stay will come in back at a lower price. You'll have immediately lost that rev.
But then people that will not have known about it will message you for the next year being like, hey, you lowered the price. I heard that my friend got in, blah blah blah. Now it's a clusterfuck.
But what you can do is you can improve like, you can't do something that improves the the experience of anybody that's not in your school community at the cost of the experience of people that are at in your school community right now.
But what you can do is you can offer the same discount to everybody, and that's what you should do, logically. You know, it's like both a moral obligation thing. It's like these people supported you, so obviously, should extend whatever you're extending to other people to them.
But it's also highly tactical and strategic because it's like, well, now I don't get crazy churn. So annuals work really well because you get to market them to new customers, people that have never been inside Maker School or whatever your info product is. And they go like, holy shit.
This is great. But you also get to upsell current non annual preexisting numbers to that. Then And they go, holy shit.
This is awesome. This is great. And because it occurs not very often and pretty sporadically, you you get you get usually like a big utilization, and then you also get like a massive chunk of, you know, one time revenue, which is cool.
Like, if you go from $1.84 to 1,104, which is what I'm gonna do, $1.84 a month, times 12, times point five, it's 50% off, is 1,104.
When you do that, you effectively make, like, a thousand dollars per person that signs up. Right?
Just with the deltas and the average amount of time people spend in the program prior to that, it's about half a month. So it just maths out the $90. And, you know, like, if I do this and I get 50 people in, I make an additional $50,000 this month.
If my goal for July is to have $500,000, my current revenue of approximately it's over 300 k now. It's like 320 k probably.
I just injected an additional 50 k. Not bad if I do say so myself. Now I only have a 130 k left.
Right? Like, it's it's actually pretty feasible if I run a big annual promo campaign this month that I can probably push to 500 k if I'm smart. So, yeah, that plus the new maker school sign ups plus, like, this whole strategy has me feeling pretty solid.
I think I can actually hit, the 500 goal. And it would be pretty pretty dope if I did that, like, literally within one month. I started making these daily updates again, like, twenty six days ago now, something like that.
Imagine me being like, my goal is 500 k a month, and then literally within twenty six days, I almost doubled my revenue. Would be stupid good.
K. Anyway, this is my main channel here. Let's do some gross stats now.
Four sixty eight eight eight nine. Sorry.
I'm a little under the weather as per usual. Count blows. This is my daily updates channel right over here.
So nineteen seven four one. That's grown by point 43% in the last twenty four hours.
My Instagram, it's like a weird glitch happen on one of my last videos where the audio was unfortunately really delayed, which kinda killed me, but we're fixing that now. It's 545393.
I don't know if that glitch is responsible for the lower growth, but certainly feels like it. And then this is 3387 Classic Brian Johnson.
03/3387. Cool. Which is a point a one point o 7% growth.
Check out Maker School. We jumped up to 2,111 members.
So we're now up about 40 from our lowest here at 20 '72. And, you know, what I find really fun when I do this sort of like long running stats stuff is you just see the the same sorts of stuff that I preach. I talk about like input lag leading to outputs in a delayed fashion.
You see that happening up here. I mean, like, I actually started publishing videos again, think over here, which is why I bolded it on the main channel rather.
But you could see that, I started up here and, you know, if we graph this over time, which I should actually do, it's kinda like this.
And now it's like this. And you're like, oh, look, what happened here? But oh, it's my face covering this?
Hopefully not. Yeah. No.
It's like, what happened here? It's like well, nothing happened here. Actually, all the work started way back here.
Just there's like this period of time, which is always gonna lag no matter what before you start growing. So that happened here. And yeah, you can see the the growth has been pretty crazy.
What is sad is we've only grown five, six, six, nine here. So either we are done squeezing out the easy followers or something else has happened.
I don't know. I mean, I'm making this video pretty early relative to yesterday, I think. So maybe that's why we have lower.
You know, it hasn't been a full 24 yet, but still. Yeah. So that's about it.
I also unfortunately realized that the audio in a couple of my last videos has been poor because I just don't have my microphone, I was using my little ear pods mic. But I was actually I I plunged my ear pods mic in a glass of water by accident.
So that's probably why the audio was pretty shit. The ear pods are actually normally incredibly good, which blows that yeah.
I literally, like, dropped my ear pods in a glass of water, and I was like, it'll be fine. And then I recorded with it.
Obviously, it's not fun. So So I'm actually just gonna go down to the store today and, like, buy new ear pods. But, yeah, crazy hack.
Like, you guys don't need those super expensive lapel mics or whatever. You you just buy cheap ear pods for $20, and you could have, like, as good of a mic, essentially.
It's not as good. You get a lot more background noise, but some intelligent compression can solve that pretty easily. And then if you're using a post processing tool like Ophonic, can, like, eliminate it 99%.
So k. Anyway, I am gonna go have some breakfast, put some freaking moisturizer on my face, and I will crush your day.
See y'all tomorrow.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
Nick opens by stating the stakes: a $500,000-a-month goal against a roughly $300,000 baseline, then explains the three-part ritual — comment Q&A, visible strategizing, and channel stats — that fills every episode of this build-in-public series, before diving into the reader questions that occupy most of the runtime. The title's payoff, an annual-discount promo worth roughly $50,000, doesn't land until the video's final third.
Frameworks
Named ideas worth stealing.
10:00list
The 7-out-of-10 Checklist
profile photo
cover letter
spelling and grammar
subject line
every other visible proxy of interest
Enumerate every visible touchpoint a prospect judges you on and push each one above a 7-out-of-10 bar; clearing that bar across the board is enough to dominate a crowded market like Upwork.
Steal forcold email / outreach profile audits
13:20list
Three Niche Filters for a New Agency
easily scrapable data
high-ticket average order value ($5K minimum, ideally $10K-$30K+)
low regulatory/compliance burden
Screen candidate niches for a new agency against these three traits before committing, especially with little business track record yet.
Steal foragency or service-business niche selection
27:30model
Annual Discount Math
A subscription's list price can never drop, but a once-a-year discount offered identically to new and existing members converts both without punishing early buyers; a 50%-off annual plan ($1,884 to $1,104) still nets roughly $1,000 extra per signup after accounting for average pre-existing tenure.
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A daily-updates vlog where an AI automation consultant answers subscriber questions live, argues boring blue-collar service businesses beat a white-collar hourly job, and closes by pulling up the actual spreadsheet behind his growth numbers.
A 30-minute unscripted Q&A where a $300K/month consultancy owner answers subscriber questions on cold email, pricing, and AI models, then makes the case for staying a generalist early and niching down only once growth stops compounding.
A live YouTube-comment Q&A where a $300K-a-month automation builder lays out the RACE framework for deciding which AI system a business should build first.
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.
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