Map first, tools second
I spent six months buying AI tools before I had a strategy. Tools without a map is just a more expensive version of hoping.
Four million-dollar funnels built for clients, and then no clients at all. This is the whole thing, in order, with the numbers exactly as they were.
I started my business at 17 as a solo contractor for a marketing firm. No formal training, no roadmap, no idea what I was doing — just a hunger to figure it out.
That curiosity pulled me into marketing properly. Facebook ads. Google ads. Funnels. Email sequences. And I fell in love with it.
I also tried everything else. Affiliate marketing. Dropshipping. Amazon FBA. Every "make money online" model that promised fast results. Each one taught me something — about funnels, about psychology, about what actually makes people buy. None of them replaced my income. Between the courses, the tools and the programmes, I spent somewhere between $80,000 and $120,000 finding out what doesn't work.
Back then I was just running ads. And the ads got blamed for everything.
I'd send traffic to a client's sales page, the page wouldn't convert, their team would be slow to fix it — or wouldn't fix it at all — and somehow it came back on me. My ads were "broken."
Front-end ads on their own were averaging about a 0.8x ROAS. Which is exactly what you'd expect, because ads on the front end don't pay for themselves without testing and proper follow-up behind them. Nobody was doing that part.
So I stopped handing traffic over and hoping. I found ClickFunnels and Russell Brunson, and I learned the whole process myself. Not just the ads — the entire machine behind them. Pages, upsells, email sequences, follow-ups. All of it, before AI made any of it easy.
It worked. Four of my clients won ClickFunnels' Two Comma Club award — that's a million-dollar funnel. One of them brought me on stage to collect it with them.
Zero clients. Zero revenue. We were living in a home a family member had generously lent us. Bad internet. No pipeline. I spent six months trying to sell AI automation services and had absolutely nothing to show for it.
Then my wife told me she was pregnant.
I felt my whole body shut down. I thought this was it, I'm done. I need to get a job.
That wasn't a motivational moment. It was a desperate one. It was an "I have no choice but to figure this out right now" moment. A baby was coming, and I had nothing.
So I didn't launch a new offer. I didn't chase another platform. I went back to the one thing that had always worked whenever I actually committed to it — LinkedIn. But this time, out of pure necessity, I stopped dipping in and out of it and turned it into a proper system. Something I ran every single day, whether I felt like it or not.
First client came in month one. Then two more. Then eight clients in a single month.
Two months later, my son was born.
Eighteen months after he was born: $296,733 in revenue, our own home, a lead and conversion system running in 30–45 minutes a day, and the whole business running in about 5 hours a week servicing all clients.
By the end of it I had two boys under two — a toddler and a newborn — and I was still hitting my numbers. Because the system didn't need me sat at a desk to keep working.
That's the whole point, really. Not the money. The fact that it kept going when I couldn't. And that I got to be with my family every single day.
$296,733 is believable precisely because it's ugly. "Nearly $300k" isn't. "$300k+" would be a lie.
One thing worth being precise about: the 30–45 minutes refers to outreach and lead generation only. It does not mean the whole business ran in 30–45 minutes a day. Servicing clients took roughly 5 hours a week on top. Those are two separate numbers and merging them would make a better headline and a worse claim.
I spent six months buying AI tools before I had a strategy. Tools without a map is just a more expensive version of hoping.
A LinkedIn-only business is one policy change from nothing. I rebuilt this because that was true of mine, and it's true of yours.
Automate the repetitive 80%. The conversation, the judgement, the relationship — that stays you. If a message could go to anyone, don't send it.
When people ask me how I do it, I tell them. All of it. It's not rocket science, and pretending otherwise is how gurus behave.
For a while I sold a $3,000 programme and a $297 sprint. Two hundred people bought the sprint. Seventy showed up. Twenty-seven finished it.
I could have told myself the product was fine and the buyers were lazy. Plenty of people in this industry do. But the honest read is that high price plus high friction attracted people who weren't ready and repelled people who were — and then I had a sales process that needed calls, a pipeline and someone to close.
So I killed all of it. There's a free tier now, and one paid tier at $7 a month. No call, no closer, no ladder, cancel in one click.
It's a worse business model on paper for about a year. It's a much better one if what you actually want is for people to get a result — because at seven dollars nobody has to talk themselves into it, and anyone it isn't working for can walk away without an argument.
That's the whole reasoning. If you want the rest of the detail, it's in the community, and I'll answer anything you ask in there.
The community's free. I'm in there most days, and I'll tell you exactly what I'd do in your situation — same as I would have told anyone back when I had nothing.
Free to join · $7/month if you want the whole system · Cancel in one click