How to Get Your First AI Client For $0 Using Workflows (From $0-$5k per month)

So you're just beginning your AI journey, you're looking to win your first client and you don't want to invest. Well, I've made over very, very close to half a million in earnings on the Upwork platform in the last two years alone. Not only that, obviously I have my YouTube channel that you're watching me on now. I own multiple seven figure businesses so it's probably a good place for us to start when it comes down to winning my first client because I remember where, when, where I was and how I did it and those tools cost me $0. I paid nothing for them. And that is something that I'm going to share with you today, top to bottom, literally everything that I did and how I would do it again if I was you in your shoes. But before we do that, we have to look at a few core concepts around AI to reprogram your brain a little bit. Because AI in, in, in and of itself is not going to be able to generate revenue. It has to be applicable to businesses, business usage, time saving usage. And I'll get into all of this in a moment. But the first thing that I want you to get into your, into your brains and for you to understand is it's not what you pay a man, it's what he costs you. Right? I'll say it again, it's not what you pay a man, it's what he costs you. Okay? Now what that means is when you are building and selling AI solutions for small businesses and improving their success, improving their bottom line, improving their revenue, this practical sort of advice is that it doesn't, a company doesn't look at how much it's actually paying you. If you walked up to someone in the street now, right, and said to them, if you give me $20, I will give you $40. And you did the exchange at exactly the same time they would give you the $20 and take the $40 off of you. And that is exactly how you need to look at the quotation basis from an AI perspective before you even start to look at how we're going to win clients, which is inside of this, that is the mindset you need to have. Remember what you are saving for a company. It's so critical. So what is AI and why should small businesses care? Which is a question that you should ask yourself whether you're trying to sell the service or whether you are a small business business. So by definition, AI is a technology. It can perform tasks that require, that don't that usually require human input, but they can do it with human like intelligence. Analyze data. They can make decisions. It can automate processing periods. Business value when it comes down to business value, AI isn't just a cost. It's an investment that delivers returns by eliminating countless hours of repetitive low value work. Data entry is a big one. There's a the biggest one for me as well. Sales nurturing. The fact that businesses just sleep on their sales nurturing, that's a big one. Now time ROI. So for every £1 spent on AI solutions, businesses can reclaim five to ten pounds worth of productive time. Productive time. So that was previously lost to manual tasks. And when you understand that and you understand that you're actually saving them money. That's why you can charge money. That's why people exist in the first place. Time is the one resource that you can never get back no matter what happens. I bet everybody who's watching this video wishes they could go back in time and change something or they made a wrong decision at a specific time or well, AI helps small businesses stop wasting that time and brings you back into a position where your small business or your, your sales techniques are actually in a position where you should be adopting AI so you can get that time back and leave yourself in a position where you can ultimately from their scale like you can, it gives you the ability to be able to reduce it. Hiring should be at the bottom of your list. AI automation should be at the top of it. Now AI adoption in small businesses, when you look at like the market indicators and the growth and why this is something that is, is so appealing right now is that 78 of small businesses plan to adopt or increase AI usage in the next 12 months. So nearly 8 out of every 10 businesses over the next 12 months are going to invest in AI. So it's a good space to be in if you're selling it. And if you're a small business and you're not doing it, you fall into the 22% of where you're, you're going to be left behind and dinosaur and if not administrators through the door within three or four years because everybody else is going to have fully AI automated solutions for just about everything. No code AI solutions are growing at 30%, well just over a 30% rate annually. What that means is that more and more people are adopting the no code AI approach. But back in the day you would have to have a team of like 15 software engineers to upkeep your SaaS platform or whatever. Whereas in this day and age you're in a position where you can have no code platforms built like I do, then have someone like myself oversee them and keep the business functioning and ticking over where you used to need development backgrounds in order to be able to do it. That's why make.com and N8N are so powerful, N8N being the winner for me. But make.com and NAN are so powerful because no code AI solutions allow people with no programming background to understand business and be able to cut down the time average businesses say 15 to 25 hours a week with basic AI solutions. Before you even start talking about significant increases in sales, nurturing, etc. Just manual data entry, meeting summaries, reminders, fireflies updated note taking, HubSpot deal summaries and optimization deal stage automations. Some CRMs offer these things, some don't, but they're. They're not. When you knit them together with a no code platform, they are incredibly powerful. So the question is why now, right? The re. The answer to why now is that there's dramatically lower costs to implement at this stage than there will be in future and than there ever has been before. Because you don't need all of those developers. You have significantly improved accessibility. No coding required. Say no code lightly, they call it a no code platform. You do, you will end up understanding JavaScript, etc. In order to use like the code node which is the power node for nan. Literally it's why it's the winner. But you have the, the ability to be able to do it with, with no coding experience. Acute labor shortages driving automation needs. So you know, labor shortages for, for smaller manual tasks and that level of, of work is something that is going to become redundant and is something that you need to get ahead of. Just what I've told you there and explain there. The fact that 78 of small businesses plan to adopt or increase AI usage in the next 12 months shows you exactly where you should be putting your focus as a business or as a as a service. You need to ensure that you're in a position where you stay ahead of that of the pack because not only are they adopting it, some of them will be heavy adopters and your service will be far, far, far inferior if you do not do it. With no code solutions growing at 32% annually, that also means that you know the no code platforms are in a position where they're constantly evolving, improving their service and it gives you the opportunity to be able to press forward with it now as we move on the AI opportunity for service providers. So if you're a service provider here Right. And you're looking to try and win your first client with no money. Basic automations have low complexity and low value, but they have value. Okay, high complexity, a strategic AI implementation, very high complexity, highest value. But when you have custom solutions with higher select higher complexity and medium values and low complexity industry templates, medium complexity, high value, you're in a position where you can actually take automations, build them out and move them from low value as they are on the left side of the screen, well, top left of the screen to the right side of the screen and bottom left. Because you have already automated structures in place for businesses that you work with. If you've built a HubSpot automation for churn risk detection for a business, every inquiry that you get or everybody you find with a HubSpot CRM system, you can offer that service and 80% of the work is done. I'll get to that a little bit later. But the opportunity is the fact that you, it doesn't matter whether it's a basic automation with low complexity, it still has a value, it's just lower than if it's a higher complexity. But it's infinite how far you can go with it. You can literally automate businesses from top to bottom, seeing businesses fully AI that are generating like hundreds of thousands every month. So that's the sort of scope, the way you should sort of strategically look at it. Don't worry if you fall into this category of being basic automation, low complexity, low value, because you're significantly ahead of the pack anyway by being able to build basic automations. Oops. Now landing your first AI clients, no budget required. This is something that I did at the start of my journey. When I started my journey, I had no clients available to me from anywhere. I wasn't going to go and try and take clients from the agency that I work with because, because morally that is wrong. You stick with your, your own task. I landed on my, on my feet and said, right, I'm gonna now try and win and onboard clients. I was setting my alarm three times a night so that I could speak to clients in the U.S. 85% of my client base in the U.S. so I was in a position where I was going above and beyond. Never mind about the work that I was doing in the, in, in the day. Well, in this day and age and the growth that we've got, we're very lucky because these are the three places that I would start if I was looking to learn and earn. Okay, so Facebook communities are a massive opportunity when it comes to landing your first client. Join industry specific groups where your target clients already discuss pain points, offer genuine advice first, then direct solution inquiries to you. Your DMS go into these groups because AI is this wonderful magic box right now and there's a lot of business owners, small business owners and business people out there that are posting in these group with support on fixing their issues inside of their internal flows. Well, once you've built up a basic understanding, you will already know more than they they do. So you can reach out with advice and solutions and you would be surprised the amount of time, the times that you can, you know, instigate sales conversations later. Do not focus on it first, focus on genuine value for free. That is the key. Then later on if you fix that flow for them and you help them, they might need something else and they will come to you and they say well can you do it? And you'll say yeah, of course, if you can do it, yes, of course. And then you will be able to spark a relationship from there. A slow burner, but I got myself up to 15k a month from Facebook groups alone for Google Ads management back in the day. So that is something which is incredibly powerful, right? And is something is why I set my alarms the way that I did and it's why I worked. Now another, another way of winning projects is actually free school communities, eventually paid ones. Some of the paid communities out there, like Nick Sarayev's maker school, is that, you know, they're incredible for their value, offer lots of free templates that you can use, etc. But there are loads of free school communities that, that are available out there and you should participate in AI learning communities where founders and small business owners gather to understand new technology because you can position yourself as a helpful guy giving advice and then that can transpire into being paid platforms. And a lot of these schools do have collab sections where you can actually go and work alongside other people and, and do it. And obviously based off of my experience, like I've showed to you now, freelancing platforms like Upwork and Fiverr, I'm in the top 1% of work work freelancers globally in terms of my, my earnings on the platform. That doesn't include anything I've done off of the, off of the platform in terms of winning clients through Facebook groups or anything that is just platform only over the course of the last two and a half years or whatever it's been. But these are specific places where clients are actively looking for your service. The problem you'll face here Is that there's people like me who are experienced that you're up against when it comes to winning projects. But for smaller projects, getting yourself off the ground, cost efficiency, you can do that. It's key. But the core fundamental sort of note of this is that you don't need capital to start earning. You need to solve visible problems that you can see that businesses are already complaining about. You need. You'll find all that information inside of Facebook groups, school communities and you'll be able to work on those solutions and fix them from there. So that's important now. Key client acquisition principles focus on the problems, not the solution. Technology businesses care about the results, not how AI works. At the end of the production, once you've produced, they will expect you to explain what you've done. That's fine, but speak their language. Speak time saved, revenue increased, cost reduced, you know, conversion rates increase from a sales perspective, staffing costs, scalability enablement from AI solutions. Demonstrate before selling. So let me show you how this eliminates three hours of your day when you're getting off the ground. You can offer them for free. If you don't like it, you don't pay. But we'll implement this and we'll run it for a week and we'll see if you if you like it. A pro tip record a short video demo showing before and after time savings for maximum impact. If you have a flow like of a manual data entry task that a client's got, show them what they have to do now and then show them a loom of what actually happens and that will go a long way to giving you, to giving you a leg up. Video is key now. Building saleable AI flows. The no code advantage, right? Identify time sinks, build it on free flat free platforms measure time saved. Okay? Those are the three steps. Find tasks and business find tasks that businesses spend five plus hours on weekly. Data entry is massive. And it's a simple. The reason I bang on about data entry is because almost every business is struggling with it and suffocating with it. But you also have the ability to fix it relatively easily. No matter what platform they are on. It gives you the ability to be able to solve their their problems. Right? That is why data entry is a big one. Sales is also a big one. If you can automate two way agents, AI agents or use tools like closed bot, etc, they're not free, you see. So this is why I'm trying to keep it as a balance. But you know, data entry, moving one thing from HubSpot into Google Sheets or out of Google sheets into HubSpot into a Slack notification. These things that businesses aren't using, they're free, they're easy to set up but they save five plus hours a week for the business. So you can charge them for that. Like you, it's an important task if you aggregate them over a specific amount of teams. You won't believe the amount of times I've looked and there's 20 people in a business that waste five hours a week. You'd see it build on free platforms using free tiers of make.com chat GPT. You know Nan, I don't know why and I didn't put any in here. NAN should be in here because NAN is the king. NAN is where you should go. But if you are starting from scratch and you have no, no code understanding, I would advise that you go to MAKE because the. Just because of the interfaces. I'll show you right now so I'll showcase this to you. This is, this is a canvas inside of NAN and this is a canvas inside of make.com make.com has a specific amount of. You really going to make me do this has a specific amount of free integrations with APIs. So if we create a scenario here, right? This is what make.com looks like. From an overview. This is what NAN looks like. You can already tell that NAN looks a bit more daunting as you go through the systems of selecting like individual apps that you work with. So it's a little bit tougher on the on the skin than it is when you look at a make.com scenario. There are reasons why you should use nan over make.com but that's not what this video is about. Both of these platforms can get the job done. So. So I wouldn't worry. Forget about Zapier. That's my advice to you. I would focus on nanmake.com then measure time saved document exact time savings to create compelling value propositions. Especially if you do this for a business, maybe you have to go out there and do it for free for somebody first. That gives you an opportunity to be able to be in a position of next steps and scalability. It's going to be something that gives you the ability to showcase well this is how I did X4Y and saved a specific amount of time doing so. A quick win is many platforms offer free templates you can customize rather than building from scratch. So you know 30% of the systems that are available out there to you like those basic data entries I mentioned, Remote Spot and stuff. It's literally just credential connection. You just literally connect to their platforms and use that. Use the templates. Not only that inside of your individual nan. Sorry inside of your individual schools and Facebook communities. People will share these in the description of this video I'll put a couple of my downloadable flows that you can use so you can take them with you. But what you're looking for is high impact AI flows that sell themselves sales nurturing, automated email sequences, SMS sequences that analyze responses, adjust follow up messaging based on prospect engagement and keep their lead summary warm data entry, extracting information from invoices, receipts, forms and automatically populating databases and spreadsheets. Whatever the business requirement has content creation. Generate social media posts. You can do multiple different platforms, blog outlines, email newsletters from single prompts or product information and support triage like ticket and triage systems like Fresh Desk etc. Categorize and prioritize customer ticket routing, simple queries to automated responses and complex ones to staff so that you split them up so that all, all of the basic stuff is taken away. Forget the jargon. What I'm saying to you here is focus on where the value is for the company. Don't just go and try and create this massive AI fly, which is what a lot of people do, which is incredible about AI agents talking to one another. And there's an AI agent swarm. I do create content like this, don't get me wrong, to showcase value to you, to help you build them. But there has to be an end goal when you're selling it, like when you're actually selling the flow. There has to be an end goal. Well, what points? These four points on the page are not the only ones. There are others, but they're good places to start because it's where businesses spend a lot of time. Each of These solutions replace 10 to 20 hours of weekly manual work. The data entry one is a fantastic place for beginners because it's easier. The sales nurturing part is a bit more complex. But once you've nailed the sales nurturing. Every business is different on touch points. But you would be surprised by how many businesses don't even have SMS marketing or don't even send an email out when they receive an inquiry. Inquiry. Honestly, there is. It's ridiculous how far behind businesses are in terms of this at the moment. And it gives you the, the, the sort of the leg up, the compound advantage right to being in the AI space. Build once, sell many. So it's like the 8020 principle. After building your first AI solution AI solution 80 of the work is reusable for future clients. I touched on it earlier. If you built a data entry system that took invoicing information from Stripe from confirmed payments and put it in a Google sheet you already and then ping the message in Slack that the invoice was paid, let's say that was your flow. Well, when you've done that, you have that available to you. So the next time you're on a call with a client it might even be about something different, right? You might be talking about a different automation and you find out that they've got that, you know, they use Stripe, they, they use Google Sheets and they use Slack. You can say hey, well how about this? I've done this before. It saved 10 hours a week for the, for the client. You're. You compound your value by having these available to you to use. No, you can't just take them and plug them in because every business is different. But you do reduce the workload quite a bit by having those flows built already. And the 8020 rule is a really good principle to live by when it, when you, comes, when it, when it comes down to that. So getting started in your next steps, identify your first target market. I don't necessarily mean one industry here, but let's say you choose data entry. Think of a business that has a lot of data entry. Accountants have a lot of data entry but could get quite complex with what they're actually asking you to do. Any business as huge data entry problems. So you could just laser in on data entry as your introduction. Pick whatever you want, but you could laser in on data entry. Then you can, you know, sort of focus on, on that. Specializing beats generalizing when starting out because that gives you the ability to be able to reuse those flows and get yourself up to an income that you're happy with using them. The problem you're going to have is that you're going to go open Pandora's box when you start working with a business because you start working with the company and then when you start working with, with said company, they're going to want more, more and more complex automations. It's natural, right? Okay, that's fine. But for use case purposes, after watching this video, pick one of those individual things that I mentioned or your own whatever you think saves time. I'm just giving you advice from it from my experience. Build a demo. So create and complete one AI workflow that solves a common problem in your target market, right? Join communities, share value, participate in two to three online communities. I would urge you, depending on how aggressive you're trying to be with this. If you're all in in this, join as many as you physically can. Observe them, comment, engage, provide value, provide information. But never give away your golden goose of your actual solution. Just answer people's questions, learn, soak up information. If you want more free templates and detailed tutorials, you know, Visit. Visit my YouTube channel the links here. But you're watching me on YouTube now anyway, no doubt. So you you have it subscribe and I will sort of take you along this journey of how you, how you actually go about it. Maybe you want to see me do some upwork applications. Maybe you want to see me, you know, build sort of profiles in some communities on Facebook. Drop a comment in in the, in the, in the comments section and let me know what you want to see because I will build what you want and what you need to help get you from $0 to to. To making of money. But chat, GPT, nan, make dot com, they have free levels of platforms that you can use, so there's nothing to stop you getting started. Remember that it's not what you pay for AI, it's what it saves you. So start small, demonstrate value, scale from there. My name is Michael Elliot. Like and subscribe. Thank you for watching. I hope this helps you go and nail your first client because it certainly did me.