How I'd Make Money with AI in 2026 (if I had to Start Over)

I'll make over $1 million from AI this year, and I'm only 23 years old. When I started, I was renting a crappy apartment, and now I'm talking to you guys from my own place in Chicago after spending multiple days with 9-figure entrepreneurs like Alex Hormozi and speaking at conferences all over the United States. But let's say I had to start over with no YouTube channel, no money, and let's say I even forgot everything that I know about AI automation. In this video, I'll give you guys a blueprint with the exact steps that I followed. But unlike all of the other videos on this topic, I'll give you guys real steps you can take today to make your first few thousand all the way to your first million dollars with AI. I'll also give you a scorecard for each stage of the process that shows you how long it takes, the expertise it requires, and the income potential. I'll even give you action steps for each stage so you know exactly what to do next. I want to make this the most actionable video you've ever seen about making money with AI by someone who's actually doing it every day in the trenches. Here's the good news. You don't need to know everything about automation to get started. You don't need to write code or understand every single little integration in N8N or master complicated databases right away. So stage number 1 is freelancing with AI modules. Instead of building everything from scratch, you can utilize N8N templates. These are prebuilt workflows that other people have already created and have shared with the community so that you can reuse them. All you have to do is import them, connect the client's accounts, and adjust a few details. They're like Lego bricks. At first, you might only know how to use one block, say an AI receptionist. Later, you add more: a review request bot, a support agent, a newsletter ghostwriter. Each new block you learn gives you another offer you can sell. And when you've connected enough blocks, you can snap them together into bigger systems. It's a huge shortcut. Rather than reinventing the wheel, you take what's already working, plug it in, and deliver results quickly. The key is not to sell everything to everyone. It's to master one block at a time, prove you know how it works, and prove that it provides value to a client. And then only sell it to clients who need that specific outcome. That's how you build confidence and credibility without getting overwhelmed. This is where I think you should start prioritizing reps over outcomes because it's really going to help you start to think like a business owner and see how you can provide value to them. The BUILD framework. B stands for block by block. Start with a single edit and template. Don't try to master everything at once. Just pick one. The U stands for understand the use case. Ask what kind of businesses would this template help the most? For example, an AI receptionist template could help dentists, HVAC, med spas. An email support agent could help e-commerce shops and service providers. A newsletter ghostwriter agent could help coaches and SaaS founders. The I stands for install and imitate. Import the template into N8N, run it with test data until you understand every single step that's going into it. Because like I said, you're not going to be able to take a template and go sell it to a business. You're going to be able to take a template, customize it a little bit, and then sell it to a business. Then build a simple 60-second demo of you showing how it works and the value that it adds. And then the L stands for land the first client. Reach out to businesses who clearly need that automation. Your pitch can be something like, hey, I built a Workflow that solves X pain point. I've got a 60-second demo showing how this system works. You want me to set it up for you? The D stands for document and duplicate. Once it's live, measure the before and after results. Things like time saved, errors reduced, and revenue gained. This becomes a case study for future clients. Then you can move on to the next template and repeat. And to show you guys this in action, let me tell you a quick story from inside my community. One of our members, Jerome, didn't consider himself an expert in NNN at all. But he saw one of my free templates for a newsletter writing agent. The workflow was super simple. Every morning it would research a specific topic, draft a newsletter in the client's tone of voice, and deliver it ready to send to their audience. So what Jerome did was he took that workflow and ran it so he could understand it really well. And then more importantly, he understood the pain that businesses feel around producing consistent newsletters. So we tweaked the system prompts a little bit and the research configuration so that the whole newsletter was tailored towards the client's industry and matched their brand voice. That tiny adjustment was all that it took to make it valuable for this specific client. And he was able to be seen as valuable because he didn't just pitch the workflow. He showed the math. He figured out how long their team was spending on research and writing. If they were spending about an hour every single day and he was able to automate 90% of that process, he just gave them back roughly 5 hours a week or 20 hours a month. Over the course of the year, that adds up to potentially tens of thousands of dollars in saved labor costs and freed up focus. That's why the client was happy to pay, not because Jerome had a template, but for the outcome that the template delivered. So here's your practical application. Don't try to master everything at once. Pick one template, learn it deeply, understand how to customize it, and sell that outcome. Create a demo video that makes the benefit obvious. Pitch it to a handful of businesses that need exactly that solution. As you close deals, stack more templates into your toolkit and gradually expand your offerings. Now here's a reality check and scores for this method. Speed to money is going to be an 8 out of 10 because you can close your first deal within days if you pick up a clear use case and you show a quick demo. It's probably one of the fastest ways to get paid while you're learning. Ease for beginners, 6 outta 10. Templates lower the technical barrier, but you still need to understand how to configure them and more importantly, how to frame the business value. And then income potential, 3 outta 10. Freelancing with modules is a great way to get started and build proof, but income usually caps in the mid to high 4 figures per month unless you evolve into consulting or retainers. Because once you've delivered a few projects as a freelancer, something big becomes obvious. Most businesses don't even know what they should be automating. They know AI's changing everything, but they're confused about where to start. What's possible, and what actually saves money. And that's where you step into the next stage: AI consulting. As a consultant, you're no longer just offering one automation, one template. You're offering clarity. You audit the business, find the biggest opportunities, and design a roadmap for how AI can transform their operations. Sometimes you'll still use modules from templates to implement quick wins and build trust. At True Horizon, we have a library of templates that we just plug in to cut down our development time. But often you'll need to create workflows from scratch, custom builds that fit the company's exact processes and tech stack. That's why this stage requires much more knowledge than freelancing. You need to understand a wide variety of automations, how to measure cost savings, and how to scope complex projects. The upside here is that it can pay far more because you might be able to charge something like $5,000 just for the AI business audit and then make another $20,000 to even $100,000 implementing that entire plan and system. So for this stage, we're using the SCAN framework. S stands for study the business. Run discovery calls with executives, ask about bottlenecks, recurring tasks, staffing costs, and customer complaints. Gather as much detail as possible about how much time and money are currently being spent manually. The C stands for calculate the opportunity. Translate these inefficiencies into numbers that a business owner can actually understand. So if a process costs $200,000 a year in labor and AI can cut it by 70%, that's $140,000 savings opportunity. Show this in black and white so clients can clearly see the ROI. That way it doesn't become a cost to work with you. It becomes an investment with a measurable return. The A stands for architect the solution. Design a roadmap. Some workflows will be plug and play from existing templates. Others will need to be built from scratch. At this stage, you're not just delivering a tool, you're designing a system that touches multiple departments. Finally, the N stands for narrate the results. Unlike the freelancer stage where your case studies prove you can build, consultant case studies prove that you can deliver business-wide ROI and that you are an expert in figuring out what opportunities need automation. Then you take those case studies, put them on your website, share them on LinkedIn, Twitter, or YouTube, and that's how you can start to attract new consulting clients. The algorithms nowadays are super advanced. If you put something out there, it will find people that find that interesting. One of my first real consulting projects happened back when I was working completely solo. Instead of trying to juggle multiple clients, I thought that I might just want to go really deep with one and provide as much value as I could. The idea was simple. If I could become a trusted partner for a single business, I'd build more trust, land referrals, and create a long-term relationship. So the client originally came to me wanting a personal assistant, but after 4 discovery calls, we walked through his day and his team's day. And we found something much higher leverage, which was customer support. Tickets were coming in 7 days a week, but employees were only answering them during the weekdays. That meant potentially slow responses, frustrated customers, and employees stuck doing work that they didn't enjoy. So instead of starting with a personal assistant, we decided to build a customer support workflow. And really the hardest part of the system was getting all of the knowledge-based information into something that the agent could then use in order to accurately respond to customers. But the team instantly got back over 10 hours a week. Customers started getting answers around the clock, and the business had a foundation that they could scale off of. So that right there is what consulting's all about. You're not just building what the client asks for, you're digging into their operations, finding true bottlenecks, and designing the solution that creates the biggest return. Because there's all these tangible benefits like time saved and hours saved, but there's also intangibles like the quality of life of your employees. So here's how you can apply this to your own consulting business today. Use your freelancer case studies as your entry ticket into consulting. Once you're consulting, create new case studies that show measurable ROI from audits and implementations. Turn those into content, short posts, articles, breakdowns, videos, anything that positions you as an expert worth tens thousands of dollars per engagement. Expand your technical range so you can confidently build custom workflows when templates aren't enough. And then you can potentially charge in two places: once for the audit and once for the implementation. Just make sure to price based on value so it's a no-brainer for the client. So here's the reality check and the scorecard. Speed to money, we've got a 6 out of 10. Deals can take longer, you have to work your way up to this stage, but audit retainers can close fast when you have proof. Ease for beginners is a 4 out of 10. It requires both technical range and consulting credibility. Income potential, 6 out of 10. A handful of strong consulting case studies can land 6-figure projects and set you up for 7 figures annually. Once again, just wanted to hammer this home. Your first case studies should come from freelancing, but consulting is where you start producing the kind of results that make executives line up to work with you. And the more you share those as content, the more clients will come to you instead of you chasing them. But at some point, what happens is you'll hit the limit of what you can do alone. You can only take so many calls, design so many systems, and build so many automations yourself. If you want to scale past that point, the answer is to turn your consulting business into a true AI automation agency. So stage 3 here is to scale into an AI partner business. Unlike freelancing or solo consulting, the partner model is about building a team around you. This is more commonly referred to and known as the AI automation agency. However, at True Horizon AI, we call ourselves an AI partner because we think in terms of long-term partnerships rather than one-off projects. And that is exactly what the majority of clients are looking for as well. You start by bringing on developers to handle the technical builds. That frees you up to focus more on audits, consulting, and high-level strategy. As your demand grows, you add salespeople or appointment setters who can fill your pipeline. That way you're not spending hours every day doing outreach. You're closing deals, running audits, and positioning yourself as the expert. It's important though that you went through freelancing and consulting so that you understand exactly what it takes to be successful in those roles so you can then hire for those roles. This model works because it allows you to basically multiply your time. Instead of being stuck in delivery, you shift your focus to brand authority and client client relationships while your team executes the builds. And if you do it right, the upside is massive. An agency built on consulting foundations can easily hit over $1 million in annual revenue. Scale it further with more developers and a sales team, and you could grow to $10 million per year or more. And here's some perspective. Big firms like McKinsey, BCG, Accenture, they charge hundreds of thousands of dollars just for an AI consultation or audit. That doesn't even include hands-on implementation yet. Accenture alone booked over $600 million in AI consulting revenue in a single quarter and more than $2.6 billion in half of a year. Now, most Most businesses that are outside of the Fortune 500 cannot afford that. So that's the huge opportunity for you. If you can walk into a mid-sized company, diagnose inefficiencies, design the roadmap, and then actually build the automations as well, you can charge a fraction of what the big firms do and still deliver way more value. This is the market that most people are overlooking, and it's wide open right now. So of course, we've got another actionable framework for you guys. This one is the GROW framework. The G stands for get developers. Hire 1 or 2 developers who can reliably deliver builds. Start by offloading the most time-consuming technical work so you can stay client-facing, managing the relationship and keeping the clients happy. The R stands for retain authority. Keep yourself positioned as the strategist and thought leader. You're still running audits, mapping ROI, and guiding system design. The developers are executing on your vision. The O is for onboard sales. Once your delivery is stable, bring in sales reps or appointment setters. Their job is to book calls and keep your pipeline full so you can focus on closing bigger deals and leading your team. And the W is win with brand. At this stage, your personal brand is your biggest asset. Share your case studies, your content, and thought leadership at scale. You're no longer just the automation guy. You're a trusted name in automation for your niche. So when I started solo consulting, I hit that ceiling fast where I needed to bring on more people. I was closing deals, but between discovery calls, building, delivery, I was getting maxed out. That's when I realized if I wanted to grow, it was a matter of hiring more people to help me out. That's when I partnered up with my co-founders at True Horizon, Milan and Tyler. And that was the start of our business together. Once we had a team, everything changed. We were able to scale up developers, start bringing on more roles like salespeople and project managers, and we could just move a lot quicker on delivery. And we learned a lot more throughout all that process. The size of the deals we could close got bigger and bigger as we had more capacity and also more expertise. At first, that looked like, you know, $4,000 builds, $6,000 builds, maybe a $12,000 build. And now we're signing deals worth hundreds of thousands of dollars because companies now see us as a long-term partner rather than just another AI dev shop. So my recommendation would be before you make this leap of bringing on people, you want to make sure that you build a solid foundation. Here's a quick little checklist of when you might be ready to start scaling into an agency or an AI partner business. You have consistent consulting clients and can close projects reliably. You've built case studies that prove ROI and attract inbound leads. You have more work than you can handle alone and you need help with delivery. You've built a personal brand strong enough to attract opportunities consistently. Once those pieces are in place, the next logical step is to hire developers for delivery, bring on sales for support, so you can focus on what really scales the business: consulting, relationships, and brand authority. So the reality check and scorecard for this stage is speed to money, 5 out of 10. Hiring takes time, but scaling capacity can quickly push revenue higher. Ease for beginners is a 2 out of 10. You should only start here after mastering consulting because as you bring on people and you expand your team, you're adding a lot of moving pieces. Income potential is an 8 out of 10 because if you do this right, you can hit millions of dollars annually. Just remember that this model is not your first step. Don't run before you walk. Of course, there's a catch when you scale into an agency: expenses. Developers, salespeople, maybe even advertising costs, all of that starts to add up. So while a million-dollar-per-year agency may sound impressive, once you pay out salaries and overhead, you might only keep half of that in profit. Still a great number, But here's the part that might shock you. I actually make the most amount of my money in a completely different way, and that's by teaching AI automation. So that's exactly what stage 4 is all about. Right now, I make over $150,000 per month in pure profit from teaching AI automation. No payroll, no big expenses, just me sharing what I know, which is exactly why you guys are listening to me right now. I create YouTube videos where I show off really unique and cool automations that I've built. These can't just be cookie-cutter workflows. You have to know what you're doing because there's no hiding if the automation isn't working or impressive. And what I started doing since the beginning was just giving out my templates for free. At the end of the video, I'd say, hey, if you want this, if you want to play around with it to learn it better, you can grab it for free in my school community. So I'm providing all of this value in my free group, and then I promote my paid community, which is currently $89 a month, soon to increase. In the communities, not only do members get templates, videos, and live calls with me, but they also get tech support because they're all trying to figure out the previous stages that we just talked about and start delivering AI automations to their clients. But anyways, that's the whole funnel. Videos, free school group, paid group, almost all of it is pure profit. So the framework here is the SHARE framework. S stands for show. Demonstrate automations that are genuinely unique and valuable. Teaching only works if people say, wow, I didn't know you could do that, or wow, that really helps me out. H stands for hook. Invite your viewers to get a resource from you for free. This free value add builds trust and helps you start to build up a community. The A stands for attract. In the free group, deliver consistent value. This builds trust and warms people up for the next step. The R stands for recommend. Present the paid community as the natural next move for those who want deeper access, advanced templates, and live calls. And then the E stands for expand. Keep producing videos and templates. Every new automation you build becomes content that grows your audience and recurring revenue. And what's great about this is if you've been following the previous stages where you've been sharing your case studies online, you might have already started to build up a bit of a following and trust, which is exactly why I started my YouTube channel. It wasn't because I thought it would become my full-time job or a business in itself. I honestly just wanted a way to teach myself better and also just kind of build up a digital portfolio so then when I started to reach out to clients, I could say, hey, check out my YouTube if you want to see some other stuff that I've worked on. Some people wanted to work with me, some people then reached out wanting me to build custom automations, and some people were reaching out just for the templates in my videos, which is exactly why I spun up the free school just as a place to post all the templates and start to build some community. And then when I had that free community already growing, I had some people reaching out for deeper tech support or deeper mentorship. and that's when I decided to launch the paid community. So now I have a very simple model. In my videos, I say, hey, if you want my business to work with you, then go here. If you want the free template, go here. And if you want deeper support with other builders, then go here. And I know this is a ton of information that I just threw at you guys, so I'm putting this entire video into a resource pack that you can all go get completely for free in my free school community. Link for that's down in the description. Moving on to the practical application of this stage, teaching is the most advanced step in the journey. This is because there's no hiding if you don't know what you're doing. Your automations need to be sharp, original, and battle-tested. The good news is everything that you've done up to now prepares you for this moment. Freelancing taught you how to build modules and land clients. Consulting taught you how to identify business problems and communicate ROI. And building an AI partner business taught you how to build authority and manage demand. So by the time you reach this stage of teaching, you've already built the skills, case studies, maybe even a small following, and the confidence to share your knowledge publicly and get paid for it. And you may be thinking that it sounds tough because you don't have a huge audience and it's going to be tough to grow. But one thing that I've noticed in my community is actually, and in other larger communities online, is that sometimes people really do crave the smaller feel of a community. Exactly why some people like to be in a small town rather than a big city. So there's always an opportunity for you to build a community as long as people trust you and your voice. And of course, there has to be some sort of knowledge gap between the people you're attracting and you. You don't have to be a complete expert. There's lots of people that know more about NN and AI than I do. but I know more than the people that are likely joining my community. Anyways, the reality check and scorecard here: speed to money, 4 out of 10. Building an audience takes time, but once you have one, conversions are relatively quick. And like I said earlier, the social algorithms have never been as advanced as they are now. So if you're really delivering value, it will get put in front of people who are looking for that type of value. You just have to be consistent with your content. Ease for beginners is a 1 out of 10. This is probably the hardest step. There's no shortcut. You have to be skilled and confident in your teaching. And then income potential, we're giving this one a 10 out of 10 because teaching can scale infinitely with recurring subscriptions, courses, content, sponsorships, etc. And once again, teaching AI automation is the endgame. It's where authority, proof, and technical mastery converge. If you follow the process from freelancer to consultant to an agency, you'll be ready to step into teaching and build an audience that can fund you for life. So let's just take a breath for a second and recap. If you want to make real money with AI automation, you don't need to jump straight into an agency on day one. There's a natural progression, a staircase that you can climb one step at a time. And here's the full roadmap once again. Freelancer. Start small, use templates as Lego blocks, and land your first $500 to $2,000 projects. Build your confidence, your case studies, and your proof. Consultant. Move up to strategy. Audit businesses, identify ROI, and design custom workflows. Charge for the audit, and then charge for the implementation, and start building credibility through case studies, and content. Agency: Scale your consulting practice by hiring developers and sales support. Focus on audits, relationships, and building your brand. With the right team under you, you can push past $1 million a year. And then finally, be a teacher: Share your knowledge publicly through YouTube, free communities, LinkedIn, paid memberships. Teach unique, impressive automations that prove your authority. This is the highest leverage play with the potential for unlimited recurring revenue. So the big picture: The journey isn't about picking one model and skipping the rest. It's about stacking skills in the right order. Freelancing gets you proof, consulting gets you credibility, agency gets you scale, and teaching gets you freedom. Each step prepares you for the next. That's why trying to start with an agency is a trap, because once again, you're trying to run before you can walk. But if you follow the roadmap, every step feels natural, and your income compounds as you climb. These stages are pretty much the exact steps that I took. Now I have absolute confidence that you could take everything that we just covered today on your own and get results you previously thought weren't possible. And if that were your only option, it would be a worthy path to take. But what if there was another option? You see, from here, you have two choices. The first choice is to go at it alone. You can piece together YouTube tutorials, look at Reddit threads, and try to reverse engineer what works. You may spend months of trial and error, getting stuck on a single technical glitch for days, and wondering if you're even learning the right things. So what if there was another way? What if I could play an active role in your success, teaching you and answering your questions? What if you had my entire team of developers to help you when you got stuck? How would that change things for you? Do you think, in that situation, I could empower you with the resources at my disposal to stack the deck in your favor and make your success much more likely? So let's be clear, I'm not guaranteeing you're going to make any money whatsoever. That obviously all depends on your work ethic. What I am guaranteeing is I can make this path easier and faster for you because I've already walked that path myself. So here's the thing. Everything that I've shown you so far, it all fits together, and I've put everything I've learned into one place. It's called AI Automation Society Plus. But before I tell you what's inside, I just want to be clear. This isn't just another course. It's a complete ecosystem. It's designed for one purpose: to give you the exact skills that equal money in the AI economy. First, the foundation. We call this Agent Zero. I start from zero, how to think about AI, how to install the tools, and how to build your first automations from a blank canvas. Next, we have the strategy, a course called 10 Hours to 10 Seconds, because building an automation is one thing, but knowing what to build, that's everything. I'll show you how to walk into any business, find the process that wastes 10 hours a week, and shrink it to 10 minutes. That's how you justify charging $10,000 or more because you're selling ROI not just the tech. Then, the proving ground. We frequently run hackathons and building challenges. The whole community focuses on one type of automation, you build alongside others, submit your project, and the winner takes home a cash prize. But even if you don't win, you walk away with something way more valuable, which is a brand new, high-level automation for your portfolio. And of course, the community aspect. Thousands of members are already inside. It's the most popular, fastest growing premium tech community on Skool. People are building, learning, and earning every single day. And finally, we have the bonuses for annual members. If you join on the annual plan, you also unlock the One Person AI Automation Agency. Inside this playbook is my entire system for landing your first clients and really positioning yourself in a business owner's mind as an AI expert. I give you my discovery call scripts, ROI calculators, and the proposal templates that have closed over a million dollars of deals for our AI partner business. This isn't theory, it's my entire AI partner blueprint. And you also get a brand new YouTube growth course, a playbook that I've used to grow my channel and my school groups over $150,000 per month. Of pure profit. And this isn't going to be generic. I'm not teaching you about the basics of YouTube. I'll be talking about specifically how to build an AI automation YouTube channel and monetize your expertise. All of this is included for annual members. So let me recap real quick. You get Agent Zero, the foundations. You get 10 Hours to 10 Seconds, the consulting framework. You get the monthly hackathons, the proving ground for your portfolio. You get the community, the fastest growing network of AI builders anywhere online. And if you go annual, you get the one-person AI automation agency and the YouTube Growth Course. But before you see the price, there's one thing you need to know. The price for this community is not static. It goes up every 3 months. As we add more value, we raise the price for new members. It's the only way to reward our early members. The price you see when you click on the link is the lowest price it will ever be. And when you join today, you lock in that rate for life. So what does it take to get access to this entire skill building system? The link for that is down in the description. Go there to see the special pricing we've reserved for you. When you get on that page, you'll see everything we've talked about and you can get started immediately. So you can go to that link right now, you'll also get a huge discount when you sign up for annual. So not only am I giving you more resources, but I'm charging less, not more. The reason why? I want to reward people who are willing to make a long-term commitment to their success. Because that's what it takes. Depending on when you're watching this, I'm also rolling out advanced material on how to go from building automation to building custom software. You'll learn all the technical skills necessary to build web apps people can log into, it saves information, and you can charge ongoing fees for access. Tomorrow you're either gonna be digging around on YouTube trying to figure everything out, or you'll be followed by systems and talking with me directly inside the community where I can guide you from a total beginner to selling automation services to eventually start your own YouTube channel and community. So you're not just making a choice about buying our membership, you're making a choice about what your future's going to be like. A year from now, your future will be different depending on the decision you make right now. So I hope it's an obvious choice. Click the link in the description to learn more, and appreciate you guys listening to me today. I'll see you inside. Thanks everyone.