Nick Saraev's $335k/mo vs My 7-Fig Business: The Uncomfortable Truth About Your Excuses

Nick Sarayev recently won the school games with a 335k a month. One man community, no employees, no contractors. Maker school became the number one community by revenue on school and possibly the number one community on earth. He stood or sat on stage next to Alex Ormosi and Sam ovens. He is 28, he has millions in the bank. He says he can retire whenever he wants. Five, six years ago, he was knocking on doors, literally walking door to door in the cold, in the rain. And I've watched his story for a while. I've been part of his maker school and I thought, that's my path too. Except I started from a darker place, took a different route and I'm still climbing. Here's what's absolutely crazy about this though, right? Nick isn't special at all. I'm not special at all. He was knocking on doors, getting rejected. I was 19 with a baby and by 22, I hadn't left the house in six months. Right now, he's on stage with Alex or Mosey. I'm running multiple seven figure companies. Both of us are out here giving you the exact playbook for free. This isn't gatekept anymore. No information is withheld from you. Nick's telling you how he did it. I'm about to show you how our paths mirror each other and where they split. Because this works in AI, it works in Google Ads, it works in any arena where you can productise a skill and build leverage. The principles don't change. So if you're watching this thinking my situation's different to theirs, stick with me. Everyone's situation is different. Mine was different to Nick's and yet here we are, both successful. Let me show you where it started for both of us and why the beginning matters more than what you think it does. Nick talks loads about skill debt. When you start a business, you're not at zero, you're at negative a thousand, effectively. Right. Technical debt, the understanding of what you're doing. Sales debt, understanding how you actually sell. Client management debt. You don't know how to manage clients. He started knocking on doors in his early 20s. No brand, no portfolio, nothing. No referrals, nothing to back him up. Just conviction and ambition with nothing else. Like that was it. Does it sound familiar? Yeah, me too. Right, and that's the point. Except mine wasn't just business debt. At 19, I had a baby. Really, really young. By 21, the relationship with my partner was over. And then at 22, I completely fell apart. And I want you to imagine this literally close Your eyes, if you have to, right? Curtains closed for six months, not days. Months, same four walls. Drinking alone very heavily. I was crying in the shower, thinking the world was ending. Like, I felt like I'd lost my baby. My parents were scared I wouldn't make it through. And honestly, you know, there were days where I wasn't sure either. I had a phone book, right, obviously my phone and all that. Adding it was all the lads from the pub and a dealer. No plan, no future. Everything was bleak. I was going absolutely nowhere. And my heart is frozen because of those times, right? It's really a superpower, to be honest. But one day after that, I just. I woke up and I felt 1% better. There was no big moment, no big decision, right? There was nothing that happened. I just felt 1% lighter than the day before. So I did something small and then something else and then again. The rest is history. That pain is the reason why I am here today. It's what drive everything that come after that was driven from that scenario. And it also means that I'm absolutely lethal when things get hard. Now, a client emergency at 2:00am or something happens in my life and I'm like, mate, I've survived worse than your landing page breaking. Be honest. Have you ever felt like you were starting from so far behind that catching up felt impossible? That's where both Nick and I were about starting from the bottom. This is the thing. You'll do things other people will not do. And that's exactly what happened next. It's not all doom and gloom. Nick said something that made me laugh out loud in the. Prompted this video. And he said, I'd heard that all of these negative things about upwork. And then I decided, screw it, you know, screw market opinion. Let me give this a try myself. And I was like, same. Everyone said it was a race to the bottom. You couldn't get good clients there. Cheap clients, you know, really, really low retainers, impossible to escape. Basically career suicide. And we both ignored them completely. His edge, right? Custom loom videos, two to 10 minutes on the higher end. You know, actually solving the client's problem before they hired him. Well, guess what? Everyone else was copy and pasting proposals. He stood out instantly. And I did exactly the same thing. Loom applications on upwork. Deep dive audits, deep diving into their issues. Because I understood it from my career before showing the work, before asking for the money. Think about it. While everyone else is blasting templates, copy and paste, you record one video that actually solves their problem and shows that you Care and that you have taken time to look at their job post. Who do you think gets hired? I became a top 1% upwork freelancer with half a million earnings because of that. Nick did exactly the same thing. He's made over half a million on the platform. I've built a premier partner agency off the back of the relationships that spawn there. You know, other relationships that have happened since. The gurus were wrong. They normally are. Nick and I proved it. But getting clients wasn't just the first problem. What happened next is where most people get stuck first forever. And I almost did, too. So Nick found success and he hit 20 to 25k a month. And then he slammed into a wall, like the majority of us will. Right? I did exactly the same thing. But he admits it himself. You slam into a wall, you're juggling multiple clients at once. You're stressed. Gray hairs appearing, you know, can you see here, Nick, like, yeah, I'm the same. You know, you're tearing. He was tearing his hair out. And I. And I was doing the same thing. I watched that bit and I thought, mate, I had gray hairs. Like, at 25, like, you've done all right. He tried hiring. He hated management. Either that or he wasn't a good manager, which is what he said. And quality dropped. Clients churned. It caused him more work and headaches for the same amount of money. And he was just on this hamster wheel. Right? If you've ever thought, I just need to hire someone, pay attention, because that's the trap. That is the exact problem. I've run teams. I run teams now. I've managed 1.5 million a month ad budgets for one single client. I. I've personally overseen 30 client accounts in one go. Here's what 14 years taught me that Nick learned faster than I did. The bottleneck is rarely manpower. It's the shape of the business. You can't scale a broken system by adding people to it. You just break it even faster. Nick figured this out, right? This is why Nick is where he is. And so have I. The solution isn't always obvious. It can be counterintuitive as well. But when I finally understood it, everything changed. And let me show you what I mean. If you aggregated all of your custom work that you're doing now, it would probably be grouped into three, four, five different pillars. And Nick realized that all of his custom work was actually the same four things repeated with slight variations. Cold email systems proposal, automations, data connectors, monthly maintenance. Right. So we templated everything. He took all of those things, the cherries. And he templated everything. Here's the math that changed his life according to him. So before 40 hours, $125 an hour, five grand. After the implementation of templates, five hours at a thousand dollars an hour would give him 5k. Same deliverables, eight times more efficient. Let that sink in. He didn't work any harder, he didn't hire. He just stopped rebuilding the same wheel every single time. I call this building growth strategies. That's what I call it. You stop selling time, right? And you start selling systems that compound. My version of this is a bit different, right? I don't sell Google Ads Management and I obviously own an AI agency. But from a Google Ads point of view, I don't sell Google Ads Management. I sell a diagnostic and operating system, a measurement framework and controlled scalability. That's what I give to a client. Qualification agents that text back within 30 seconds and have two way SMS conversations. You know, negative keyword architectures that cut out 10% of wasted spend. Automation that filters noise and escalates signal. That's not flashy, right? It just prints outcomes. Nick templated make.com workflows. I template the entire growth stack. Ads, data, automation, handoff. It's the same principle, different arena. But here's where Nick did something that I'm only just catching up on now. And it's the reason he's on that stage with Alex Hormozy. Watch this for this next part, right? Nick Sarayev is Mario at and he's about to fight Bowser to get Princess. Okay, this is Nick's final unlock. And it's the most important piece. One loom video sells to one person, but one YouTube video sells to 10,000 or as many views as you get. He went to Mexico with his buddy, smoked some cigars on a rooftop and had the realization that content compounds in a way services never do. And the production of said content was what he needed to do to grow. Watch what happened next. 72k a month from his agency. So he still had that ticket ticking. Started recording daily. 30 videos in 30 days. 150k a month. Channel growing. Make a school. Taking off, you know, 335k a month in recurring revenue with a one man community. Number one on school by revenue. On stage with Alex Hormozi after he won the school games. This. What else do you want? He was in Vegas, stood on stage with Alex or Mosey and Sam Ovens. 220000 YouTube subscribers. Almost 400000 followers on Instagram, millions in the bank. Five years. That's how long it took from knocking on doors to standing on that stage, is my belief, from what I've seen of Nick. Five years of reps. Does that feel like a long time to you? Or does that feel like the best investment that you could ever make? Every door that he knocked on, from the first one to the last one, from the first loomy recorded to the last one that he recorded, from the first template he built to the last one he built and to every YouTube video that he created the to the ones he creates now. Reps on reps on reps. And now let me tell you where I am on that same ladder and why I think you can climb it too. Here's something Nick doesn't talk about explicitly, at least as far as I've seen. But it's woven for his story that he mentioned. And he has said this himself. His friend's group is now primarily people who have incomes exceeding hundreds of thousands of dollars per month. Right? That doesn't happen on accident. He's in rooms with Tai Lopez, Dan Martell, even a royal prince. My version, my phone book used to be a dealer and the lads from the pub. Now it's filled with millionaires of all sizes. Drake albums, you know, founders, agency owners, people building real things. Do you think that's a slight upgrade from where I used to be? Although to be fair, one thing I would say is that the millionaires takes back a lot slower. Right, but look at your phone right now. Who are the last five people you spoke to? Are they where you want to be or are they where you used to be? That shift doesn't happen overnight. It happened because I kept showing up, I kept delivering, I kept climbing. Your network is a lagging indicator of your work and your input. Nick's network took him to that stage with or Mosey. Mine's taking me somewhere too. So where do our paths actually split and what does that mean for you? This is the part that you need to hear. Nick's path. Door knocking, upwork agency. Then productizing all of his products as we've discussed. Then producing content 350k a month just under school games, hormozy stage. Okay, my path, rock bottom at 22, agency employee, solo consultant. Then I was managing 30 accounts personally hustling in Facebook groups, joined up work, built that out, started to work on a few other areas, cold email, etc, built a premier partner agency, top 1% Google Ads agency globally, multiple 7 figure businesses, AI automation layer content production Climbing. The difference between us, I spent 14 years in the paid media trenches before adding AI. Nick rode the AI wave earlier. He's 28. I started later, but went deeper on the acquisition side. So which path is right for you? It depends where you're starting from. If you're a marketer, agency owner or founder who already has traffic, leads and money, but your back end is leaking profit. I'm the bridge. I speak Google Ads and NAN boardroom, you know, in the morning, media buyer in the afternoon. It's one of those things. Nick's right. AI is leverage. But AI without a proven acquisition system is a fancy tool with nothing to automate. Nick went from knocking on doors to 335k a month. Number one community on school, standing next to Alex or mosey. Right. Five, six years. I went from curtains closed at 22, crying in the shower, parents scared I won't make it through to running multiple seven figure operations with a network of millionaires. 800 million in generating revenue for clients. Right. And, well, me as well. But, you know, two different starting points, same destination, success. I don't compare my chapter five to his chapter 20, but we ended up at the same destination. And why? Because we have the same principle. Systems over staff, leverage over labor, and outcomes over theater. If you've watched this far, then obviously you're not just casually browsing YouTube. You're trying to look for this sort of information. You're looking for the playbook. You're looking for the proof that it's possible. Well, you've just got both. Nick climbed to that stage. I'm climbing too. And so can you. If you've enjoyed this, please subscribe now. If you want to see exactly how I built the foundation. The five channels that took me from nothing to 500k freelancing. I made a whole video breaking it down. No fluff, just the platforms that you can go to. The approach, the exact approach, and what actually works. The links on the screen now and I'll see you in the next one.