How to Make $130k a Month As a Solo Developer

you know my first client actually came Reddit post and uh they were interested in the product and can I ask how much they paid you for that somewhere in the low six figures you don't necessarily have to start with great connections putting out great work is uh really probably the best thing you can do to get clients as a Founder that your job is to replace yourself as fast as humanly possible at every role because you start with every role I would say like the biggest danger as a Founder is not that you starve it's

that you drown one of the things I think that I I wish I had done differently looking back is all right bit of a different video today I'm joined with Andy Walters a guy that I met on Twitter exactly three or four weeks ago uh but this episode SLV video concept was just too good to pass up so we're doing our first remote one today Andy well thanks for coming on yeah happy to be here so I'm going to read out the Tweet which is actually how I found you there were two tweets the first

one was from someone else and it said chatted with someone today doing $30,000 a month with four clients building basic AI apps the clients needed to show investors that they were AI forward and were willing to pay and so Andy replies to this I'm making $130,000 a month doing this started as a solo Dev 10 months ago and now up to a team of nine we work with sased midmarket Legacy companies building custom generative Ai implementations and so Andy I think the purpose of this episode or like the goal with this is I really want

to be able to give everyone listening the blueprint to be able to go from solo Dev that like kind of knows a little bit of AI to also making $100,000 a month you think that's possible yeah absolutely it's possible I'm I'm suppose I'm living proof so yeah 100% so let's start off with like zooming out what is this agency and how does it work yeah so we're generative Ai consultancy and Dev shop and we kind of have two arms we solve two problems one is what to build with generative Ai and the other problem we

solve is finding the re ources to build it well so um you know there's a lot of folks on the Consulting side uh that are curious about generative AI they know that they need to do something with generative AI at their company they're not sure what and so we have a framework that we can walk people through to help them rank opportunities and really find like high Roi opportunities to uh to execute on and then on the development side you know we're we're we're grinding we're building out uh the solutions that we've either proposed or

clients have come to us with and so when did you start this agency so we started about 10 months ago mon started with just me it started with just you okay so if we want to start from the very beginning someone's listening to this and they want to get to 100K a month the first thing they have to do is figure out their first client so where does your first client come from that's great you know my first client actually came so before uh this company I had a SAS company and uh it would that

was a super small operation it was it was Bare about was me a co-founder and um we had a client reach out to us after we did a uh I think it was a Reddit post and uh they were interested in the product but really we just started talking and they started talking about their business and what they wanted to do with generative Ai and um so we created a relationship and they were our our first client and what were the terms like what were you actually selling them so selling them you know time materials

Uh custom development right so um we worked with them to um take their company from being a so it's the company is called local Falcon I can talk about them that they're totally cool with it and they're a local SEO platform so they will tell you like how you're ranking within a one mile radius on Google Maps um but although they were good at telling you how you're ranking they they weren't great yet at telling you like how you could improve your rankings like tailored specific device and so uh we designed an AI system that

would do that for the users and still running today and still gets really uh sort of rave reviews from their user base so that's the solution we ended up delivering and can I ask how much they paid you for that yeah good question uh offhand it's tough for me to say but probably probably somewhere in the low six figures um so we did a a series of things for them we did um you know some Consulting work around what what the right solution would be to build um and also kind of getting the domain expertise

out of their heads and into uh software um we also did reporting for them so we built a bunch of reports that that have these tailored recommendations and then we also built an assistant um so over so that's why it's it's a hard to say exactly offand how much one particular piece of it costs but on the order of low six figures uh that account has been been worth and we love them they're great clients and so this is like spread monthly right like not just pitching them hey you're going to pay us $200,000 for

XYZ a month right right no um nope we we uh we charge on a on an hourly basis time and materials and so yeah we started with a it started just me and then uh I brought in one of my um friends who I had known who also had a a generative AI uh SAS company that he let go and um that was like the big step for me kind of like an aha moment when I was able to all in the agency was making money with somebody else's time not just mine that that the

light bulb kind of went on like oh this is scalable just keep doing this and you can build a business and what was your friend initially doing so uh he initially and still to this day he's a developer on the count so he was just helping with the feature work right like we kind of divide and conquered and um he built certain features he he really did a lot of the AI assistant work so yeah makes sense and so a lot of people are kind of able to get their first client right whether it's through

Reddit whether it's through a friend of a friend whether it's through posting on LinkedIn what but then how did you go from that first one to number two number three number four Etc right yeah great question um and on the first client bit I would say like you know we sort of got lucky and that we had that client reach out to us um but if you're a Dev and you're starting out and you don't necessarily have some connections like that like one thing you can do is just like put out something cool put out

cool work um where people will see that like oh this guy knows how to do like in my case dtive Ai and the people's kind of you know juices will get flowing their creative juices and they may reach out to you that's that's happened to me every time I put out something cool even on Twitter I will get people reach out to me and be like hey you know uh we're trying to look something uh look to build something similar so um you don't necessarily have to start with great connections and I would say like

as a Founder I think I have a pretty like I've started with a pretty how to say it like a network that's not full of a bunch of rich and famous people just waiting to throw money at me you know um because sometimes I look at other Founders and like wow you you went to Stanford and like no surprise you got a billion dollars in funding on day one or whatever you know um that was not me and so like you don't you don't have to have that but putting out great work is is uh

really probably the best thing you can do to get clients um you know in terms of the spe specific tactics we used um we've had success in a couple of different channels so one has been uh outbound cold email and outb outbound uh LinkedIn so you've had success with outbound cold emails yeah shockingly I did not expect it to work how does it work so I went into uh this a I got referred to this agency another founder friend of mine uh said yeah they they've done a good job um and so I talked to

them uh they it's called the vth group they're great and um I had a meeting with them and I was like look I want to be your best client because I need leads so like what do I do like you tell me and I'll just take your suggestions right and so uh they said okay the number one thing is just do what we tell you to do on copy don't fight us on the copy and I'm like okay so what should we put in the copy and they said do this and so our uh our

emails basically run something like this the subject line is something like do you like whiskey and then the pitches like hey for you know we we'd like to send you a bottle of Whistle Pig for one shot at uh pitching you on how we can help your company with J to AI clients are turning to us for process automation help with their Tech Team so on um let us know something like that and man I'm telling you that has opened so many doors shocking shocking numbers of doors course it's easily paid for itself in terms

of the cost of the the account uh with vth and um yeah so we you know I've got like 50 bottles of whiskey at my house at any given time and we're just like rolling through it uh for our sales appointments that's so interesting and so let's say you kind of send that email out do you have a follow-up sequence or is that just one email enough um no there is a follow-up sequence it's you know like I forget exactly what it is um part part of the reason that I got an agency to do

it was like cold email just sucks like trying to manage all the domains and all of the nonsense that goes into it like email warming and all those deliverability everything God like I'm an engineer I could figure it out but I really don't want to the same reason I pay somebody to mow my lawn instead of doing it myself like please someone else make this your problem I will happily pay you right um so anyway so I don't remember the exact follow-ups but it's stuff like well how about would any mornings work I think that's

one of them I don't remember there's a few different uh uh sequences that uh they run um and yeah it generates generates leads believe it or not that's so interesting and how much did this agency cost uh it's 2500 a month so not a b00 a month that's very worth it absolutely okay so that's how your cold emails worked let's talk about LinkedIn Outreach so um LinkedIn Outreach so I use uh something called LinkedIn helper which is a little bot that sits on your uh on your LinkedIn profile and um just messages people and well

actually does a couple things it likes and comments or no it doesn't comment I don't like the comment thing but it does like posts of people and then it'll go back and I think follow them and then after that it'll go and um shoot them an opening message I use the same pitch like hey love to send you a bottle of whiskey and it's a great pitch people love it yep and so that's opened doors for us too it sounds like it's a lot simpler than people make it out to be it's just having a

good hook I'm telling you about what worked I should also tell you about all the things that didn't work because I tried what are some of the things that you thought would work that didn't I tried so many things and like probably all the things I tried would have worked if I kept going but it was just the level of investment so one thing I tried was like a webinar thing right and so like I got got uh my buddy together that the other developer I was with we put on this webinar and it took

so much effort so much effort like 20% of the people who signed up came and not that many people really signed up anyway and we got like zero zero leads from that whatsoever um and yeah so not a great not a great solution I tried Google ads um freaking nightmare to manage Google ads if you're trying to do it yourself they they nickel and dime you in every possible way and they'll get you like the they'll get you clicks but like I I was like oh I'm getting so many clicks and I looked like where's

it coming from like well video games like people on their mobile phone are clicking on your app like okay this is not like thanks for the clicks Google I'm glad I paid for that so like that was a pain um and I don't know there's probably other stuff too that's not coming to mind but I tried a number of things and these were the ones that seemed to work now the the other thing too is like after you get going and you do good work then you you know we have gotten refer and that's that's

been a huge part of our business I would say that's probably 50 to 60% maybe now um but in the beginning we didn't have we didn't have anything really to show so except for like that makes sense yeah during the summer I was starting to put together a fund or was starting to raise a fund and there was this one called email sequence that worked like magic and the subject was intro and I I I totally ripped this from Adcock was his yeah yeah BR yeah oh right the figure guy yeah yeah yeah exactly and

so the the Emil was the subject was intro and then I'm reading out the email it was um hey so and so my name is Omar Wasim and I'm the founder of olif a private accelerator for Muslim Founders advised by Partners at and then I listed a bunch of VC firms prior to this I was the first growth hire at Founders Inc um a venture fund studio and the CMO of an algorithmic stable coin we raised $20 million from a16z and exited for 2 billion do you have time for a call and every single person

obviously not every single person but a lot of people uh I think it was something like 60% reply reply rate replied to it and said yes absolutely would love time for a call here's my calendar link adding my assistant whatever and the fact that I had intro it was the highest uh open rate especially cuz like investors cuz that's the people we were targeting are very likely to open intro emails versus you know maybe a software engineer or any other person that makes sense yeah that's genius a 60% open or reply rate is like wild

like off the charts wild that's amazing you know one of the things I would say too is like I was pretty excited by how successful the uh the campaign was with uh cold email but looking back I'm actually not sure that it was that tactic that was so amazing so much as it as it is that just there is a lot of hunger and interest in generative AI right now like just a kind of ambient interest and so it's it's it was timed really well um yeah yeah I think the timing and the product are

a big part like even for this email every single person I sent it to was a Muslim like investor or GP based in like the Middle East or the Gulf Coast and so all of those people to hear about a Muslim accelerator based in San Francisco that's very personally interesting to them my roommate uh has an agency that I helped him start up called Founders arm basically what they do is they connect early stage startups with um with virtual assistants specifically that are meant for like grow so like influencer marketing cold emails whatever and I

remember one of the first things he did when he started the company was he went on my podcast and he made the subject line saw you on Omar's pod and then comma and then some like question and he opened it with a picture of himself and then he said hey and it's like some long email about how he wasted his time at his last company and felt like his whole life was a sham and then he figured out delegation virtual assistance whatever and the email was just funny and so everyone was replying to him and

I'll try to get a screenshot but they were like yo I love this email so much this is the best cold email I've ever gotten want to get on a call just because of how good this email was and a few months later like you know there was whatever nurturing sequence and a lot of those people started to close and there was like an aspect of obviously they know me they were on my podcast there's like 50 people they know it's not just an email that's sent to everyone there's a level of personalization that comes

from knowing that there's a warm intro knowing that they watched their podcast and then maybe being curious to hear what he would have to say about their podcast and every single person on my podcast is a startup founder and he was selling specifically to Startup Founders and it was a very targeted Niche product and so everyone would get on a call with him that is awesome yeah and and the thing I think like for people who are starting out the thing is like just keep trying like you'll stumble on something that works eventually as long

as you sort of keep at it right and like don't be like stupid about it but like if you if you keep at it you'll probably find something because there's a ton of demand out there right now for for generative AI stuff so like you know this or that like the tactic doesn't really so matter so much as just getting out there and trying that's the main thing and so now let's assume that the person watching this has gotten their first couple of clients what are the mistakes or what are the pitfalls that you kind

of fall into after you had your first few clients yeah um let's see I think there's some mistakes I avoided and so I'll talk about those um you know I came from a background of having worked at Dev shops and worked as a like I I started as a Dev and then worked my way into project management and then like leadership so I was like managing director and VP of a couple of different Dev shops a few different and so I've I've kind of been around the block I've seen where these things can can go

off the rails um not that I'm a genius edit or whatever but I had a little bit of like a unfair advantage and that I i' done some of this before so you know one of the things I was very careful to do is as soon as as soon as we got to a scale where we could support it I brought in a project manager which was only recently but it was it was a perfect timing that is so important to have somebody who is keeping track of details and who's who whose job it is

to make sure that you're delivering that you're on track with scope uh that you're managing risk properly those are that let's just an extremely important thing thing that you could you could easily Miss um I would say like the the biggest danger as a as a Founder is not that you starve it's that you drown right like if you it's probably not that you're going to be starving for work it's the bigger danger is you're just going to be drowning and work you've got so much and you start not being able to deliver well and

then that is a death spiral for your for your company um so so that was one thing um I also work to abstract my from the day-to-day coding as as fast as I could although I love coding it's really fun um at the same time uh it's not sustainable to to have to like run the business and be the coder like I was because you're wearing all the hats in the beginning but eventually you you've got to get out of uh out of the coding to some degree you know like I still code a little

bit like a little side project here or there for clients or whatever that's kind of that's super fun and keeps me fresh but um but that's a that's another thing I think that I did well um some mistakes let's see one of the things I think that I I wish I had done differently looking back is brought in and it would have been hard to do but still bringing in talent that is ready to uh work 40 50 60 hours a week um just kind of like animal animal level talent I was really looking for

at the beginning I was looking for other folks who could like throw 10 20 hours a week to help me out which is great and they're all great people um and at the same time now our culture has shifted and so now we're looking for like a different type of person who's got a lot more to to invest and throw it and really really we're looking for people is it's their main thing right so maybe it would have been possible to um to have to to get to that point a little bit earlier in the

journey might have been good um yeah I'm sure there's other mistakes I'm sure they'll come up as as we're talking they'll come to me how did you decide on pricing because I feel like one thing people do wrong a lot is they underprice or they comp completely overpriced yeah it's a great Point um boy pricing is is so hard uh it's I think it's one of the hardest things that Founders have to deal with um I went off of kind of what i' known about how much software development typically goes for so like I said

I worked in a leadership so I kind of knew like a standard rate card for if if you go to an agency and get work done um but I came from the web world doing that stuff so and I knew generative AI was pretty hot so like in the web world you know you're you're charging a lot if you're 150 an hour like I think a lot of um a lot of folks in the web like agency web agency you are like 100 to 150 hour especially if you have offshore Talent um we so I

just added 50 bucks basically right so we charge 200 an hour and my pitch to clients is like um you know if you go to Silicon Valley you're going to find three four $500 an hour for an AI engineer um but we don't live in Silicon Valley so we can Arbitrage cost of living and that's that pitch seems to work well so so if you're $200 an hour though or sorry if you're at $200 an hour though and that's like 40 hours a week that in itself is 8 000 right there yeah and so correct

multiply that by four that's around $32,000 per like ticket that you're or per client oh yeah for sure who's paying these who is who has this much money like who who is paying for developers and paying agencies like I think about okay startups they're able to get really high quality talent for like 15 to 20K a month yeah or liketh maybe maybe so yeah yeah I mean yes most startups can I think but there are there are reasons why uh startups might go with agencies and actually a big part of our clientele is startups there's

a couple reasons one is you know the founder may not have um a a tech team to start with right and they may be in a situation where they need to move fast and have access to a team that can scale up and down very easily so if you hire employees right you've got those are mths you then have to feed sort of continuously with a at least not without some serious pain in removing them and so if you hire an agency you get uh you get like super high quality Talent right out of the

gate and it's scalable and um you also get somebody else who's responsibility is to manage the the technical risk on a product and and theoretically that agency depending on how they're structured may even absorb some of the risk in case things go badly right so you get a little bit more of a guarantee that um the product that you want to build is going to be built so um so those are some of the reasons that I think uh startup Founders can choose to work with agencies of course like like you said like you know

most startups are not that way they want to build an in-house uh team and and that's totally fine we've the other thing too is like sometimes it's just hard to find talent that really gets generative AI like right now it's still so Niche like I know like I live on Twitter probably a lot of your listeners on Twitter and it feels like everybody knows about this generative AI Niche is kind of crazy right right right right but once you get into the real world like that's not the case I mean startups more so uh everybody

if if you if you're startup now you don't have generative AI expertise like what are you doing but at the same time it's still hard to find the talent like there's a there's a lot of Engineers who know nothing about generative AI who couldn't build you a rag application if if you wanted them to right so um yeah so so demonstrating like uh technical leadership uh is is key and if you can do that there may be a reason to uh to pay a little bit more for for an agency so what kinds of companies

are paying for it what are some of the demographics of the people that are paying you right now yeah so we have a few different clusters of clients we have like a startup slash SAS uh cluster where um you know it's anything from like a startup needing like we're doing some really interesting things I can't say too much but in like the the uh audio AI space where we're training models um from scratch so you could could need deep ml stuff uh all the way up to like uh hey we have an existing startup or

an existing SAS company and we want to bring generative AI features in so we want to build an AI system on top of our stack something like that um so that's kind of that cluster um another cluster is is uh what I would call um kind of Legacy companies or companies that that have Legacy technology sets so um that's a lot of like internal process automation uh that's another another big piece um and those are our big ones um you know we are trying to push more now that the the company is growing we're trying

to push more into the Enterprise space and so uh Lear learning more about like the the Microsoft version of all of the AI uh the generative AI stuff out there um and those clients are you know much bigger contracts much bigger um Scopes and you know those are typically your you know Billion Dollar Plus type of Enterprises we're not there yet but we're trying to push into it absolutely so let's take the first cluster and kind of break it down you're saying these are startups you're kind of building sometimes more technical kind of like building

out features for them what stage are these companies at I'm assuming if they're able to pay you the amount of money that you're asking they're at least series a series B actually no a lot of them are seed um although we interesting yeah absolutely yeah because you know if you if you get a decent enough sized seed round um you can you can fund uh a company like ours working with you for to like a single generative AI engineer for a reasonable amount of time um so yeah so it's actually a lot of seed and

you're reaching out to the CEOs or who are you targeting in Apollo only CEOs I I really I've realized now that like well especially a smaller company it's with smaller teams like I guess under maybe 50 people I I really don't talk to anybody other than the CEO because nobody else has the kind of strategic um uh directive and impetus to bring generative AI into their company and the the ability to make the to make it happen from the P strings right so they're really the the the person that makes sense to talk to and

are these like YC companies or are they like they're based in like Austin New York places that AR literally San Francisco they're not YC companies now no um we I don't think we've ever worked with a kind of traditional SF funded company mm interesting so these are just like startups that are still tech companies but they're not based in San Francisco they don't have access to the water engineers at the hackathons yeah exactly exactly like the Nashville startups the uh you know Pennsylvania startups like yeah these these folks are out there and they're just like

wildly underserved that's awesome okay and then if we take the second cluster these are you know kind of larger companies that are Legacy companies and you're helping them maybe add their workflows or build an assistant or whatever who are you reaching out to at these bigger companies those companies the CTO is our kind of go to um very similar like the CTO typically has generative AI on their road map they know they need to do something they're struggling with like do we do we hire the talent internally or do we um or do we go

outside for outside expertise and so part of the way we pitch ourselves there is like hey you know we can also kind of teach your developers as we're going along how to do some of this stuff so there's a little bit of like a learn by osmosis um Pitch there and um but some companies also don't care about that and they just want us to solve a single problem and that's fine um so it kind of depends on the company and so these are also like you're reaching out to CTO these are what 11 to

50 people companies are they bigger or what kind of companies biger bigger more like um 200 to you know I don't know call it 5,000 uh person type companies yeah and you're reaching out directly to the CTO on like Apollo or something yeah exactly or my agency is yeah 100% And like it's shocking how like I I get a ton of cold email all the time and like occasionally I do respond right and as long as you're just one of the ones that like occasionally gets a response if you send out enough like you'll get

a response you know now you how many emails you're sending out per week uh that that's such a great question I think it's like 10,000 a month I think is what we do yeah if you're up for it after this we're going to take like five minutes and figure out the answers to these open questions put them in an email and put it in the description so if anyone wants to get access to the email templates or whatever they can get them for free I'm down awesome but damn that's so interesting I feel like cold

email is so overlooked I lit just saw a tweet yesterday that went viral which was like bro just stop worrying about cold email and go build a Tik Tok yeah and that's the thing I was going to say like you know there's a ton of channels right and like you can you can probably find success on on any of those channels I think it's about finding the channel that works for you um and that has seem to work well like Twitter's also worked well for us too we've gotten a reasonable amount of business um actually

we've got a huge amount of business from from Twitter um but that has been very kind of random like I find Twitter to be a place that's difficult to like consistently get results from but if I have a TW like that tweet that I that you started the podcast off with that went viral and then people reached out to me from that like which was that sort of thing happens like every so often and then it can be valuable um so yeah I I it's not that I'm like necessarily a huge believer in coldy Mill

as like the great the greatest Channel or whatever it's more just like try it and see what works and like keep going you know and there's probably I mean as we are growing I'm becoming more and more um interested in in being brought in as the expert in a situation where like so one of the other things we did we just became uh partners with llama index so we're now listed as expert Partners on their uh website and so building Partnerships like that we have another one that we just signed with a company called tiny

fish that puts out a product called Agent ql which is a um um agent framework not surprisingly but focus on RPA um we're now a Professional Services partner with them so building Partnerships can be a great way to to get deal flow as well because then you're not even having to sell your yourself somebody else who is running into the deal flow organically is just recommending you and that is like so much better because then you're brought in as the expert so um you know the the I won't lie like the leads we get from

cold email they are harder to close than those other leads so because so how do you set up your referral systems yeah I mean our referrals is basic it's like we'll give you 7 and a half% of uh uh of the contract value within the first 6 months which is really good and that incentivizes people to to want to do it right um why 7 and a half% I don't I don't know I like why is it why is it any yeah I don't know I looked at different partner programs and like a lot of

them are like around 5% some are 10 and like seven and a half sounded to me like like significant yeah it seems significant enough um like could I get away with less like I don't know maybe but I'm also just happy to make people you know really want to refer us so um yeah yeah I I can't say there's much more logic that went into that decision there's an agency that I've never worked with them personally but I'm friends with the founder uh they're like a Content writing agency based out of New York and they're

called verbatim labs and so they have a very insanely good kind of like Client List slack open phone whatever and their whole thing is he will literally go hire like the best content writers edit torial writers whatever that he can find poach them from larger organizations and then you know install them into whatever companies he works with and he sends out these like case studies SL like um yeah kind of like updates to people he considers friends via an email list and he will and I'll see those and I'll like I'll read the case study

I'll see like the results and now every time someone comes to me and they're like hey I'm trying to do anything in like the written scope that like I know he's done before I send them to just because I'm invested in seeing how good his agency is from the case studies that he sent me as someone that has never I don't think I've actually I don't think I've ever actually told him that like hey by the way I've sent like 30 people your away this month but I just know that they're really good and so

I want my friends who are building companies that I've invested in or I'm friends with the founders to go through them because I've seen the results he gets for everyone else and so I think that building up a private email list of people who you share updates with regularly is super helpful for referrals yeah that's sounds great I should do that I like it I had um back going back to like my example of my roommate who has his recruitment firm he will post updates on LinkedIn and Twitter so like kind of what I told

you just now with verbatim but he'll just go an update like had a great month this month uh our biggest month of growth ever and then just like share the stories and like share his learnings as he's building this company because this is the first company he's ever built and he'll make that post talking about like this new client that he helped or something challenge he overcame or even just like random pictures of the beach when we go to the beach he'll just put like a photo dump on Twitter with some like learnings and then

he'll get like six new like leads coming in warm saying like been following your content for a while yes um I love that beach that you just went to I wanted to reach out like the most like random obscure reasons for reaching out and 3 days later I get the text of like just close these guys they're locked in for X you know whatever for the first month and I'm like wow yeah totally I know that yeah that's great I got to be honest like I'm not great at the social media game really like although

we got although this this whole thing happened based on a tweet like still like I'm not a regular poster like I know I need to do it and I've been working with an agency to see if they can help me do the content um but like yeah that it's a great thing to do and it is one of the I saw this meme the other day that was like Founders like I just got into this build cool and now a sudden I have to be a content creator like it's like like what I have to

do this now like why I didn't sign up for this but it's kind of true like you got to figure out company now yeah I mean everyone's dumping money into paid ads too like the setion really is organic free content no doubt and there's other tracks or other channels you know like I've been speaking more recently so that's been that's been good that's been fun I definitely get leads from that um and like I think another thing too is just like demonstrating technical expertise going deep I see a lot of people successfully do that I

I don't do that um but I've seen a lot of people have success with it it just it takes a ton of time right you really got to like write like do something interesting and make it uh public on like Reddit or Twitter or whatever um but if you do that like that absolutely generates leads too so there's so many ways there's so many ways how did you get into speaking um kind of fell into it I was I was the high or the Junior High chaplain in my in my in my school and so

I yeah so I did public speaking like every week I spoke in front of my class and that taught me a lot about public speaking and so I'm like pretty comfortable on stage and so um but anyway like only in the last couple of months I started to get some gigs around that um and every one of them was just like friends who were like hey you know I I've got this thing coming up and I'd love for you to you to talk or whatever um it was quite organic I don't have like a super

I don't know put together like plan on it or whatever but it just sort of fell fell into place and um yeah but it's been it's been great and you know there's always a place for people who can speak English and Tech you know like if you can explain if you can Bridge those two things like you you will be in demand right because most people don't understand Tech certainly most people don't understand AI but if you can explain it in a way that's understandable people like that they follow that they find that valuable um

like maybe not so much on Twitter because everybody's super technical on Twitter right but like if you're if you're able to do that to like for like clients in the real world um that's a massive massive value um and then so if we were to try to wrap everything you've learned in the last 10 months because you started this agency less than a year ago which is insane what are like the two or three main Frameworks that someone needs to take to go from zero to one with their own Dev agency that's a good question

two or three Frameworks um one thing is like you need to understand as a as a Founder that your job is to replace yourself as fast as humanly possible at every role because you start with every role um and so you you start as a programmer you start as the marketer you start as the um content development person you start as the finance person right um and so as soon as humanly possible you have to get yourself out of those roles at least in the day-to-day of those roles um so that you can focus on

building the business and if you don't do that you'll just be bogged down and uh stressed um and you'll will be unable to to scale so I think that's something that's helped is I was I was able to do that and that allowed us to move pretty quickly um another thing thing is you've got to you've got to just like we've been talking about you've got to figure out top of funnel there there are a ton of books out there a great one like Alex horos has a great book um $100 million leads I think

it is um yeah yeah there's like if you're looking for Frameworks like that guy's got it uh got it down pat and um but you've got to figure out top of funnel and like don't get complacent don't don't just count on doing good work if you just do good work maybe you'll grow maybe but like you've got to you got to put in the The Blood Sweat and Tears on really every front that you possibly can that's giving you the uh the returns because top of funnel is the the hardest problem to solve once you

solve top of funnel like you know if I get a project and I don't have a Dev uh I just go hire the dev right the the hard part is not hiring devs the hard part is getting the clients right so like that like if you can solve that like that's the key lever to to push for growth um and then yeah I think another thing to be concerned about which I didn't you know was part part of was and maybe it's just because it happened so fast I don't know but like at the beginning

I kept telling myself like H this this whole thing could fall apart like it isn't really real like like H whatever like you know and and I didn't like part of me didn't want to take it too seriously because I didn't want it like if it failed I didn't want to be like oh it's my life's dream my life's work but now I realize like okay it is kind of real and culture matters a ton right and I wasn't very cognizant of like the culture I was creating uh it just sort of happened organically like

it does at every company um but um having having your culture defined knowing what your values are and then finding people who match those Val values is extremely important so like the people you bring in at the beginning of your journey will Define your culture so make sure that those are awesome people that are consistent with your values um that's so important so I don't know I don't know if that's everything you need but those are some good things probably that's awesome dude yeah I feel like that's super helpful and I'm sure that now that

you've been on this episode people are probably going to you're probably going to get at least six to seven people in your DMs now just asking you to hire them for your agency I love it I love it yeah I you know I take uh Zuckerberg's advice on this like look for Drive look for curiosity and look for ethics like those are those are really good things to look for in especially in a startup like Drive is so incredibly important so important so and I asked this question at the end of every episode which is

if we were to do this podcast again in a year what is the thing that you would have want to accomplish to consider the past year of success ah well I do have a plan so so um I've got a 5-year plan and so I actually know like we need to be at a revenue Target of uh basically like two and a half million uh is where I want us to be next year um and we need to have about uh about 40% or I'm sorry I'm sorry about uh 80% as many devs as we

have now so an additional 80% devs um and probably another PM so if we get there like in terms of the the raw figures like that will be a success at a deeper level I think um you know I want to move the company from now so like one thing I did is I started with contractors uh rather than employees because contract like at an agency if you lose a client then you still have a bunch of mouths to feed uh and you're not making any money right so if you but if you work with

contractors like hey really sorry this happened but I you know there's no more work and they're contractors they get it they go on to the next contract life is good so I've started the company that way but where I want to move the company is to um you know uh not that to employees uh and who are people who are more um or or get the team that I have even more invested in the success of the company so I think like um I will consider it a success in a year if the team that

I have is even more coherent even more um invested in our success um and you know even even more um execution uh excellent I would say because we we definitely can work on our on our execution level so um yeah so those are some some deeper things well nice you thanks for coming on yeah absolutely it's been great sweet