Case Study: 0 to 30k/mo in 3 months with an AI Assisted Agency

All right, what's up, everybody? Got my boy Daniel Werner here. So he is inside of an AI-assisted agency. And if I'm correct, Daniel, it was 3 months ago you started this current agency and you're at about $30K a month now. Is that right?

Yeah.

Nice. That's pretty damn fast. Now, before we get into explaining what Daniel does, how he did it, yada, yada, yada, etc., let me make a disclaimer to you that I'm not promising that you get those results. You could screw everything up even if you had access to the same resources as Daniel did. So the probability that you run a successful business, let alone reach $30K a month, is profoundly low. So don't expect it. But I want to have him on just so we can talk about how exactly you're doing that. If I'm correct, it looks like you'll probably end March at like $50K or something like that. Is that right?

Yeah, to be honest, we might hit $50K this week, so pretty stoked for it. That's right.

What do you do? What do you sell? Like, what's your business?

Yeah, so we actually started in a bunch of different weird business models, trying to run ads for people initially, and then we went into e-com CRO, and then we got into e-com email marketing. But we kind of arrived at cold email because it's what we were doing for ourselves to get clients, and that's what we were really good at. So selling cold email right now.

Nice. You kind of started your first agency in April 2025, and then cold email agency with us inside of AI Assistant Agency, that was in December, right?

Yeah. So I actually had an agency in South Africa before because I live in South Africa. So we were running that, but it was barely an agency. We had one client for like 2 years, you know, and then I moved into working in the US in April, and then cold email was from December.

Nice. Good stuff. Could you walk us through the building of this cold email agency from zero? What was the reason you switched to that initially, and And from there, starting that from zero, could you kind of take us like step by step into how you got to where you are now at $30K a month?

Yeah, 100%. I actually joined NCA in October or August, September, October. I can't remember the exact date because I was doing e-com CRO at the time and we went from $500 a month to $10K the next month. And then all of my clients churned because I did not know how to deliver essentially. And then pretty much when we got into CA, I was really just trying to figure everything out. I just could not get clients at all. I felt like I didn't really have the skills. And we kind of ended up at cold email just because I had a lot more confidence selling it, because I was confident in my ability to deliver results for myself. And I think I could kind of transfer that conviction to clients on sales calls. That was majority of the reason that we got to this position.

And it's like single-handedly the highest success rate business model for beginners of all time.

Yeah. The thing I was running into is, you know, when you first start an agency, when you're running ads or kind of any business model, I feel like you kind of have to start with really terrible, poor clients just to get your foot in the door and get XP points. But those clients, when you pitch them a retainer or setup fee or anything along those lines, and then you get into so much baseline cost for them already, they don't make a lot of money, and then you have to pitch them on ad spend as well. And I just feel it's a really hard sell to someone that doesn't have a lot of money, and you can't really go upmarket right off the bat if you don't know what you're doing. Cold email, it's kind of like, this is the infrastructure cost, no additional costs, and this is the ROI that you can see from it. So I feel like that's why it's easier to sell for beginners. That's what I found at least.

Yep, I agree. It's exactly what I say too. Having the ability to get people results ads is it's very uncommon ability. You have to be very good at marketing and direct response copy, and that's just— it tends to be a very long learning curve for people to actually become proficient at. How much do you charge your clients? Like, how does that work?

We started off on like a performance model where we were charging small tech fee every month and then pay per booked call, but I moved away from that, and now we have packages that start at $5K. Our top-end package that we just introduced is $30,000.

You followed what I said where it's like in the beginning you want to do low risk for the clients because you don't have any case studies or you need to work on performance basis and or have guarantee and then you get credibility and you have case studies and you're therefore able to charge money upfront. That's exactly what you did. What niches do you target? How does that work?

I actually, I don't know why, but B2B SaaS was just the one that kind of clicked for me. I found it was the easiest guys to sell to because they're technical and I feel like I'm pretty technical. So we got along quite well. I was in like working with property managers and stuff like that, but I ended up just moving exclusively into very high ticket B2B SaaS companies.

Cool. What have you learned about managing clients? Because now Now you obviously have many clients and before your previous agencies you had one. You reached this stage pretty fast.

Yeah, actually last month I could not deliver for clients. There was not enough time in a day to handle it. It was an absolute nightmare. Now I use AI just an absolute ton. My normal onboarding process for a client pre-AI was like, would take 8 hours to set everything up, maybe more. And it was just a nightmare to fulfill. But now I've pretty much automated everything. So I just say, hey Claude, onboard XYZ client and it has all the data from existing clients and then it sets them up within 5 minutes. Now it's a lot easier. We can deliver way quicker.

One of the things that people who are just starting out or kind of beginners are kind of like intimidated by are sales calls. Do you have a structure of the way that you conduct a sales call? Like, how does that work?

I think generally now I really want to disqualify people as early as possible so I don't waste a bunch of time. But essentially you got to set the frame kind of thing. You don't have to do all the small talk. You can just say, hey, you opted in on this day, right? And then you hop into framing. Then you kind of want to get into discovery, find a pain point. You want to drill into the pain point as much as possible. Once you've done that, you want to find out what the goal is and then you want to walk them through the mechanism and kind of explain and show them exactly what you teach. But like, show them how complicated it is where they look and they're like, okay, this guy's an expert. I didn't know any of these things existed. That was complicated. I'm happy to pay this. It's actually funny because we don't have any case studies live on the website, and every time I try to pitch someone just by speaking to them like this and not going in depth, they always ask for references and like a whole list and like a bunch of questions. If I'll run them through proper pitch deck, they're like, damn, I'm interested in this. It's very interesting. And that's kind of how we roll with it. Also, anything. You have to just put in a lot of reps. I used to— my stomach would go in a knot, like almost vomiting before every call out of pure nervousness. Like 30 calls or so, you're super comfortable with it and it becomes kind of second nature. So you kind of just got to face it and accept that after 30, 40 calls, you're going to be pretty locked in, and then, then you're fine to go from there.

And the thinking about it is so much worse than when you're actually on it. It's pretty funny.

Yeah, it's like a cold call, you know. It's like you sit there looking at the phone for like 10 minutes and you're like, yeah, I'm gonna click it. It's just a person, so it's quite easy. How do you get clients? How do you get your leads?

How does Cold email. That makes sense. I remember we had a conversation. I think it was last month. You messaged me. You're like, dude, I don't have enough time to fulfill for these clients. Like, what do I do? Do I shut the cold emails off? I remember telling you, I was like, never shut it off. Absolutely not. You can reduce it. Like, I think I told you to reduce it by like 50% or 60% or something. You probably understand why, because it's like, dude, you can only have confidence and you can only like feel good about yourself if you know there's more leads. If you just dry it up, you're going to start acting erratically. You can never, ever, ever turn the lead gen off ever.

And also, like, I find if I don't have a bunch of calls lined up for the next week, I will often be lenient on my disqualification. You know, I just know this client's terrible, that it's gonna give me a headache for the rest of the month. I'm just gonna try and make the sale so I can collect some cash. But if you turn the pipeline off, then you get a bit desperate, and that is probably the worst thing.

This is an interesting thing that I try to convey to people who are just starting. You said it earlier, you're gonna work with some shitty clients. It's gonna happen. It's gonna be people who are more difficult to get results with. You just have to do it to get your feet wet and like understand what you can and can't get results for. There's hard-coded answer. Like, what you're able to figure out is different from what somebody else is able to figure. It's just a skill. It's like playing a sport. You were just good at specific things, and other people are good at different specific things. You can play different positions. So it's interesting that you begin to discover who you should reject, because when you're just starting, you have zero conception of what a good business is and is not. You don't even know. You can't even conceive of what a good one looks like. How long did it take you to understand that? Like, who should I be rejecting or not? Are there any, like, specific things that you look for now that delineate that for you?

Yeah, I firstly think in the beginning it's going to happen. You just have to take on some really terrible clients just to get cash flow. And then I feel like you'll figure out pretty quickly who's like a really terrible client and who's a good one. And then I think you can use that to figure out who you're qualifying later on down the line.

Is there anything that you look for now, like any kind of tell for your clients where you know I've got to reject this person?

I want someone that makes a lot of money. That's pretty much my number one thing. If someone does not have, you know, at least 30 employees, it's like I'm pretty much going to cancel the call on them. Like, you are I want to make sure that they have a big enough TAM so we have enough people to reach out to and enough people to contact. I want to make sure that the average deal size is at least $10,000 a year, ideally more. And like ideally those kind of clients stay for multiple years. So the LTV is crazy, which makes our business like a no-brainer. And then yeah, that's pretty much it. Sometimes I look for people that have sales teams as well. I want to make sure maybe they have like 2 or 3 sales guys, but just for the most part, it's like the pre-call. I look for as many employees as possible so I can kind of predict revenue. High LTV, big TAM.

Exactly what I teach. What are you using AI for? Right. Right now?

Dude, everything. My entire onboarding flow is fully automated through AI. It pulls the Fathom call, pulls all the information from the onboarding call, then it will also pull all the info from the onboarding form, then it'll get all their sales call transcripts that they give us. It'll give their sample lead or get their sample lead lists. And then pretty much what we do is the initial client setup is set up fully, then it sends them an email with the sample leads, the sample copy, pretty much everything. And then from there, it literally completes the entire setup within 5 minutes. On the backend, obviously we have to fill up new lead lists, we have to scrape a bunch of leads, We have to make sure everything's like working properly and there's no issues with campaigns. We also have custom dashboards that are set up to manage that and to create new campaigns based on previous best performers. So fulfillment is pretty much done. All I really have to do is approve everything and just purchase the domains because I don't want to give access to my credit card.

How fast are you growing and where do you think you'll be in 6 months from now? What do you think you're capable of doing?

Since I went upmarket, price is no longer an objection. I ran a calculation and like the recent client I just onboarded, they make $40 million a year, right? Like 150 employees and what my top package costs, their business generates that in 15 minutes. Since I've gone upmarket, my interested leads and my close rates have actually gone up, even though I've pretty much tripled my pricing. It's very interesting because over the last 4 weeks, the business has almost 3x'd. So we went from $10K a month to almost $30K a month now. And I have so much in pipeline right now, and I'm confident we'll hit $50K this month. I feel like in 6 months, if we just keep this trajectory, we should be at $100K, to be honest with you. I know there's a lot of like operational bottlenecks. Yeah, that's what I'm thinking.

What What advice would you have for somebody who was in your position 6 months ago? They're kind of just starting, maybe they've done some freelance stuff. What would you tell this person to make as much money as possible as fast as possible?

I meet a lot of people and I think everyone these days is incredibly soft and I don't think people can sit in pain for a long enough time. You see that stuff on Instagram where it's like the guy living the dream life, but if you're not prepared to accept that it's going to be the most painful, terrible experience 12 to 24 months, like you can have fun at the same time, but you have to just do the thing you really, really don't want to do every single day for as long as possible. And then eventually I hope you hit a point where you don't really have to freak out every single morning when you wake up. I think that's the most important thing because oftentimes everything's available online now. Obviously coaching is invaluable. I like my business has 15x'd in 5 months from coaching, but like in the beginning there's so much info that you're consuming online. You probably know what to do to get started. And I think you just kind of have to accept it's going to be terrible and you just have to do the terrible things as long as possible.

Good stuff, bro. Appreciate you coming on. Everybody watching this, if you want to connect with Daniel, I'm going to leave links to his stuff in the description so you can follow him, whatever. And if you want to start your own AI-assisted agency, that'll be the first link in the description. You can check that out, like, subscribe, whatever. All right. Peace. Bye.