It's virtually impossible not to make $10,000

Would I be able to pay my rent, or would I be eating rice and beans for the rest of my life? I remember coming home, and the main conversation topic at the dinner table was always money — never having enough of it, how much things cost, and how we were going to get more.

My mom was constantly sending me little clippings from ICBC, saying, "Hey, there's a job for $54,000 a year here, Nick. It's stable. We'll get benefits." But I didn't want $54,000 a year. I wanted to make more money than people make in decades, and I wanted to do it right now.

My family was telling me I was wrong, my friends were telling me I was crazy, and I was clearly willing to die for it.

that conviction. But eventually you make so much money that it becomes unreasonable to think you're not secure and stable. At some point I realized I had more money than I could ever possibly need. The current target is 500,000, which I think we'll probably hit this month.

The money ladder for beginners

What's your recommendation for people just starting out?

What I'm trying to say is remarkably simple: making your first $10,000 or $20,000 doesn't actually require any strategy. It's virtually impossible not to make $10,000 if you're talking to 2,500 people every single month. You don't need strategy. You don't need to be super intelligent, super charming, the most beautiful or charismatic person. The simplest way to make your first $10,000 really is just that.

How Nick describes himself

For those who don't know who you are, how do you call yourself professionally, and also personally? Are they two different Nicks?

Yeah. Professionally, I'd now call myself an AI educator. I watched that podcast back and thought, geez, that guy's full of hot air — so I don't do a lot of these. "AI educator" is the simplest way to put it, because I don't just do AI education on YouTube. I also run workshops, going into companies to deliver hands-on training sessions. It didn't always used to be that way. A couple of years ago I was mostly involved in actually implementing these systems. But as the technology has exponentially progressed, people care more about learning how to use it than having me install it in their business. So that's how I'd pitch myself now — that's what you'd see on the magazine cover: AI educator.

> And personally? What do you call yourself?

Hopefully a good man. If you mean my brand with friends and family — a good cook, for sure. Defining quality as a friend, I'd say. I don't talk much about that. If AI is my thing on YouTube, then outside of the internet it's cooking. I'm hooked on it. I used to be really poor. My best friend today is Riner, who's half Portuguese, half central-southern Indian. I remember eating rice and beans for roughly the 400th time one day, and he said, "Jesus, how are you surviving eating plain white rice with plain pinto beans? Let me spice that up for you." He took me to a grocery store in Vancouver with international food and taught me how to spice my lentils and beans. That was about 10 years ago, and I've been hooked ever since. That's the main thing I do outside of AI.

> That was 10 years ago, so you're 30 now, right?

Around 30. The host notes he knows this because Nick is his younger sister's age, and asks his birth year. I'm '93. The host jokes about a Korean skincare routine, and Nick laughs that he has no idea why his face is so red — maybe he's just excited to be there.

Back to the poor Nick of ten years ago

I watched your podcast and heard you call yourself a failure because your businesses failed a couple of times. I found that fascinating — I don't see you as a failure at all. People seeing you now probably don't even know you failed in the past; you just look like a really successful young man teaching high-value stuff on the internet. What I hope to do in this podcast is take you back to that day you barely mentioned — the poor Nick Sarv of 10 years ago — because that's where people can really relate. I want to hear what you were thinking and what your mindset was when you were starting a business.

I feel that. You can dig deep into anybody's life — anyone successful that you look up to — and you'll probably find a similar place. I would consider myself to have been very ambitious, and I still am. But I had absolutely nothing to show for it for the vast majority of my professional and working career. I was big on ideas but not really on execution. So to really understand, I've got to take you...

To explain where I started, I have to take you back to my family's background. They immigrated from Eastern Europe in the 90s, which was pretty difficult in Canada at the time. The country was going through a number of economic issues, and my parents chose to move to Alberta right around the time they had me. We also had other family problems: an extended family member came over and then had a stroke, and my parents had to pay their medical bills. Long story short, they had a lot of trouble.

By the time I was five or six and going to school, I'd come home and the main conversation topic at the dinner table was money — always about not having enough, about how much things cost, and about how we were going to get money. Every minute of the day was basically about how in God's name we could get ourselves security, comfort and stability.

As I grew older, as lovely as any family member is and as much as they want to provide for you, especially with the immigrant mentality, there was also the expectation that I would provide for them in turn. So they pushed me really hard into the highest-paying career they understood, which at the time was being a doctor. My whole school career and university were geared toward becoming a high-earning doctor who would sustain the family and give back.

That was rough, because as tangentially interesting as that stuff is, I didn't really care about it. As much as I'd love to say that being at the bedside of somebody sick would be rewarding, it just wasn't enjoyable to me. But my family was convinced that was the way to go.

So to round it out and answer your question: that was the mindset I had when I started entrepreneurship — a very academic one. I had been in school for the better part of the last 15 years of my life, just coming out into the real world. I had read a lot of textbooks and studied to pass a bunch of arbitrary exams to please my family, but I had very little in the way of real-world skills. The only job I'd had when I graduated was working at the local fair when I was 16. So I was very big on ideas and all these ways I was going to get rich, but had no real execution or experience to show for it.

"Yeah, that totally makes sense. So it was your parents' idea to become a doctor. I remember you actually graduated — you got the degree in neuroscience, you didn't drop out, which is super smart. After you finished, you didn't pursue the doctorate path, which is another five years of studying, right? What did your parents..."

When I told my parents I wasn't going to pursue the doctorate, it was pretty rough. There was a lot of disappointment and a lot of worry, and the two co-mingle into a very bad time. They want to support you, and they want you to be able to support yourself—and probably them in turn. When you say no to this beautiful plan that we've all dedicated a decade or more of our lives to, they were pretty worried and pretty sad.

My mom was constantly sending me little clippings from ICBC, where she worked, saying, "Hey, there's a job for $54,000 a year here, Nick. It's stable. We get benefits." But I'd tell her, "You understand the problem that you've caused. All we've ever talked about growing up is money, and now I want money. I don't want $54,000 a year. I want to make more money than people make in decades, and I want to do it right now."

It was pretty rough, but I'm happy to say we've since repaired our relationship quite a lot. There's no more disappointment. There's still worry when I talk about doing weird business stuff, but for the most part it's all like, "You did good, son."

"Weird business"—what kind of business is that, if it's public?

I've had all sorts of weird business ideas. For a while I was selling Venetian party masks. I had all sorts of e-commerce businesses, drop shipping businesses, supplements. Anyway.

You should have told your parents, "I'm going to be an artist, I'm going to drop out of medical school."

I've heard those Asian immigrant stories where it's "you become a doctor right now." I couldn't even begin to imagine what it would be like to say, "Yeah, I want to sell hand-painted masks on the internet."

My mom would have died if I told her that, because Asian parents are super strict. She said you go to the best school ever, and then you either marry a rich guy or get a really good job—lawyer, doctor, whatever.

I definitely did not go with that path. I was a salesperson for over ten years. I worked for the United Nations as an intern—that was my dream job. But once I got there, I quickly realized the place is so corrupted. I don't know if I can say that in public, but it is super corrupted. As soon as I saw that, I thought, I don't want to work for an organization that's not really clean. Not to get too political—that was my major, political science—but I quickly realized this wasn't the path I wanted.

Honestly, I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life, or what to even call myself. Having a mission is so important, which I want to talk to you more about, because you've mentioned on different podcasts that as soon as you hit your goal, you kind of feel lost. Growing up, I bet you always had the goal of making money to provide for your family, because that's similar to my background. I grew up really poor too—to the point where I could only spend $2 a day, so a peanut butter jelly sandwich was all I could eat. Pretty similar to your situation in college.

I want to go back to that time and talk about when you were poor and then made a lot of money—which is like $300k a month right now. There must have been a point where you thought, "That's it. I hit my goal, and now what?" So take me back to that day, Nick.

Yeah, for sure. $2 a day—that's brutal. I lived under those circumstances for so long that I just considered it normal: extraordinarily frugal—actually, I wouldn't even call it frugality, I was just a cheap bastard, splitting every damn bill I could avoid paying. I'd lived under that paradigm for so long that money was the main thing, and then eventually I made a ton of money, and it was just—the first real like

The first real taste of financial success I had — where it actually felt like, "Wow, this is good, I'm not just scraping by to pay this month's rent and maybe the next" — came when I was going door to door in Vancouver with my business partner Grinder. It had taken us a long time to get there, but after about a year I looked back at the books and realized we had made about $15,000 that month — Canadian dollars, "Trudeau bucks," not USD. That was a lot of money to me; my rent at the time was around $1,500 to $2,000.

That first moment of thinking "maybe I'm making enough money" was back when I was making maybe $6,000 or $7,000 a month in profit. It wasn't a lot, but it was enough to make me go, "Holy crap." At the time I was part of a big business mastermind — for those who don't know, a mastermind is essentially a group of broke people pitching each other and complaining about their problems all day. (I don't do one anymore.)

In that group we'd all talk about our money goals. The year before, when they asked how much I wanted to make, I said $2,000 — and I hit it. So this time I said $8,000. I remember thinking I wouldn't even need to keep working hard at $8,000 a month: I'd have achieved all my goals and then some, paid off my rent, probably been able to lease a car, and saved $2,000 a month — which seemed insane to me at the time.

And I remember that after actually achieving it, my reaction was just: "Hm, do I really need anything else?"

What I quickly realized after hitting that $8,000 a month was that without some sort of north star—whether financial or something else—I just drift off into no man's land. I don't mean I have a neurotic compulsion to make money, because I really don't. I've just come to realize it's a very simple and convenient way to be happy and fulfilled. After I made 8K a month, I found myself drifting: waking up late every morning with nothing to really do or care about. I'd be talking to clients, my door-to-door guys, and think, "What the hell? Who cares? Why do I even care about giving them a good experience? Their campaign's off, but eh, it's not that big of a deal." I just wasn't satisfied with the man I was when I didn't have a goal—even a goal other people would consider meaningless.

So what has successfully happened every single time as I've climbed this financial ladder is the same thing: I achieve a goal, then realize that without a goal I turn into somebody I don't like, so I set another one and raise it. Maybe it'll be 28,000, then 50,000, then 100,000, then 400,000. The current one is 500,000, which I think we'll probably hit this month. And if that happens—holy crap, right? A far cry from the guy who wanted to make two grand a month. But it'll be the same thing no matter what: if I just stop there, what am I doing? I'm sure there are better ways to do this, and some holistic psychologist would probably say, "That's an XYZ problem, you need to focus on your spiritual health or whatever." But it works really well for me, and I'm stoked as hell to wake up every morning. So is that not enough?

No, that's perfect. So you're driven by a number a little bit, right? Driven by a goal, I would say.

Yeah, some form of achievement. The easiest ones are the ones you can quantify. Imagine if your achievement was "be happy"—that sounds awesome, but how do you know? I love philosophy, and one of the questions is what is happiness, and you can go down a rabbit hole with that for sure. You can't quantify anything with happiness.

But 500K a month is fascinating—that's insane, Nick. I want to get to where you are and pick your brain on exactly how you got there, because a lot of listeners haven't even started their business, and some did but are struggling. You've been there at every single step. So let's talk about the money ladder: for people just starting out, what's your recommendation? Something similar to what you teach in Maker School, but in simple sentences—Maker School is such a valuable community, by the way. I'm forever grateful for that.

I appreciate that—Maker School is grateful for you as well; you delivered a lot of value. Well, I just had a hamburger in Vancouver a few days ago with a friend of mine, Jackie. He's really interesting because he'll just brute force everything. I don't think that's the best solution all the time, but it works really, really well at the beginning. He was like, "Dude, you could drop me on a freaking island in the middle of nowhere and I would make 10K a month." I asked how, and he said, "I would just caveman it. I'd go up to every single person on the island and say the same thing, and that's how I'd do it."

And I'm like, "Scam." Just kidding. [laughter] Hopefully not.

The point I'm trying to make is remarkably simple: to make your first $10,000 or $20,000, you don't actually need any strategy. All you typically need is a set of habits applied to something that produces more output than the input you provide. In other words, you need leverage. As Hormozi defines it in a recent video, if you put in X and get 10X back, that 10-to-1 ratio is leverage.

What are some examples of leverage? Knowing just 1% more than someone else about how to do something and offering to do it for them is leverage, because you're leveraging your knowledge for their money. Your multiple doesn't have to be 10x — it might be 1.5x — but as long as you have the tiniest bit of leverage, you can do what Jackie described with the caveman analogy: go up to every single person on the island and offer to do something. You don't need strategy, super intelligence, charm, beauty, or charisma. If you brute-force volume across enough people, you will eventually make money.

What's interesting at the 0-to-$10,000 mark is that the main bottleneck is simply doing the thing. The main discriminator between people who hit $10,000 a month and those who wallow forever in mediocrity is that the latter never actually do it. Ask any friend or family member who tried starting a business but never earned more than that how many people they've reached out to with their product, service, or offer — lifetime, they'll probably say something like 100 or 50. That number is frighteningly small.

By contrast, when I was making my first $10,000 a month, I was reaching out to somewhere around 80 people a day — 460 people a week, literally meeting them and shaking their hands, and about 2,500 people a month, sitting down with each one and pitching them. It's virtually impossible not to make $10,000 talking to 2,500 people every month. On average, you only need to make $4 per conversation to hit $10,000 a month, or roughly a 0.04% conversion rate on a $10,000 offer.

So to make a long story short: the simplest way to make your first $10,000 really is just frontloading volume. Find something you're slightly better at, then put it in front of, say, 10,000 people. By the end of those 10,000 people, I guarantee you'll have made something — if not $10,000, then you'll be well on your way to that initial goal.

>> That's exactly what you teach in your community — volume for this, volume for that. That's how I got my $3,000 deal, the very first time I made money online. I thought, "Holy cow, this actually works." I'm forever grateful for that opportunity you gave me and everyone else in the community, because that was the beginning. As soon as I made money online, I trusted the whole process — this is working, so what's next? Which raises the question: for people who have already hit 10K, what's the next step?

So, let's say you've done my crazy caveman strategy and just taken your club and bonked all these people on the head. Congratulations — that's basically the minimum entry ticket you need to be successful, and by doing so you've separated yourself from the 99.9% of human beings who haven't crossed that hurdle. But you can't keep doing that, because at this stage you'd effectively start at zero every month, do it again, start at zero again, and maybe get marginally better month to month. It's really hard to keep scaling a service business if you're just naively approaching everybody, offering whatever the heck they want.

Say you made it to $10,000 a month. To reach something like $50,000 a month with a service business, you'd have to systematize your work. It's not enough to go up to everybody and offer something — you need a set of products done the same way, at the same time, for a niche group of people with shared needs. If you talk to one of them, in all likelihood they'll have the same problem as the last ten people, and you can leverage that knowledge far more for people in the niche than for some random person out of niche.

To make a really simple example: if every project you do is for a different person doing a different thing, you'll never naturally carry over your experience from person one to person two. If person one says, "Nick, I want you to build me some marketing campaign," and person two says, "Nick, I want you to come into my studio and help me set up my desk," there's very little shared experience between those two. But if every person you work with wants the exact same thing or something very similar — say, "Nick, can you come in and help me build a growth system for my IT company, a cold email system" — then when I move from person one to person two, I've accumulated experience and gotten better and more efficient, and by person three, four, or five I can continuously improve my ability to deliver the service.

Philosophically, you just need to start doing the same thing: offering the same set of services and fulfilling them in the same sequence of steps. This is called productization. Strip away the fancy terminology, and productization just means moving your business from the naive volume, caveman approach — "I'll do anything for everybody, put a project in front of me and I'll get it done" — to "I am now only doing these sorts of projects, for these sorts of people, in this sort of way."

If you productize successfully, you can reach over $100,000 a month while still just applying volume to a productized business. There's this guy Brett from DesignJoy, who I cite pretty often: a one-man design agency making over $100,000 per month, and it's just him. You don't need a big hiring funnel, and you don't need to be super sophisticated about what your product is. You just need to have delivered something very similar to a very small subset of people for quite a while, and you'll inherently learn to deliver that service faster and better, increasing your leverage. So stage 0 to 1 was just "do a lot of it"; now that you're in the arena, stage 1 to 2 is systematizing it — that's the productization bit.

"Are you on stage two, Nick, for yourself?"

No. No, not really. Well, you need to understand it's logarithmic, right? They grow massively from jump to jump. It's not like stage 0 to 1 is $10,000 and stage 1 to 2 is $20,000 and stage 2 to 3 is $30,000. It's like stage 0 to 1 is $10,000; stage 1 to 2 is $50,000 to $100,000; stage 2 to 3 is like $500,000, a million; stage 3 to 4 is like $10 million. They're growing at these massive jumps. So no, I'm past stage two — I'm firmly onto stage three.

"You're going to hit 500K pretty soon. So, what are you working on so you can hit that goal?"

Yeah — stage 0 to 1 was volume, stage 1 to 2 was systematization, and stage 2 to 3...

The word I've been trying to settle on for the stage-two-to-three transition is either "leverage" or "distribution." What stages zero-to-one and one-to-two have in common is that it's still usually you doing the selling in some way, shape, or form. With the volume game, you're selling — you're just selling stupidly. With the productization or standardization game, you're selling intelligently. But there's still a bottleneck: it's physically you doing the sales. You can only jump on so many sales calls a day. When I was going door to door, I could talk to 80 people a day; realistically, you can do maybe five to eight sales meetings, since each runs half an hour to an hour plus admin afterward.

So if you want to unlock the next stage of growth for a mostly service business, you need media or some form of distribution. After I capped out what a single person could do with that business model, I asked how to make more money, and the answer was that the bottleneck was me — I only have so much time for sales calls each day.

I started looking at people with majorly successful businesses, and one thing they all had in common was a brand. By "brand" I mean they had a way to sell to people without being there. The "sell while you sleep" idea wasn't new to me — I'd seen social media brands before — but I hadn't realized just how valuable they were until that moment.

I couldn't sell any more than I already was, and I consistently hit a ceiling around $70,000 a month with my solo agency. No matter what I tried, I couldn't get past it. I considered hiring more people, but instead I looked at how others were doing it: people making $300,000–$400,000 as solo teams just had social media do the sales for them. So instead of jumping on sales calls, I started recording a bunch of videos. These videos are basically sales calls anyway — rather than talking to each person individually, I record one video that talks to many people and makes me a certain amount of money.

Nothing here is some dramatic unlock; hopefully it seems straightforward. But I don't think making money is all that complicated — it's difficult, but not complicated. The next stage is building a distribution engine that lets you sell without being there. Once you have that, you've fully unlocked your time and created a self-propagating engine, which you could probably scale to at least a million dollars a month. I'm still firmly in stage three. Stage four is interesting, but I can't say much about it because I don't really know yet — I'm still figuring out where we go from here.

Once you've scaled yourself as fully as humanly possible, growing further requires some kind of multiplication of media. You can only make so many videos and so much content yourself, so the next stage is getting other people to make your content for you — that's the next scale-up.

You see a lot of this over the last couple of years with controversial internet figures like Andrew Tate. He comes to mind because he had a very interesting sales strategy that happened to work extremely well for him: he had other people generate all the media for him and then propagate it across the internet through some kind of clipping campaign. In his case, he made something like $100 million — he was printing money.

That's far more than I'll probably make with my videos in the next couple of years, because I'm bottlenecked by just being one person.

The other speaker agreed this was the deep dive worth recommending, and the first speaker joked that he was the one learning here: "I'm picking your brain. I don't know if you realize."

When asked when his content journey started, he explained that he really got into it in 2024. He had experimented before with videos as lead generation and sales mechanisms, but those attempts never succeeded because he lacked the consistency muscle. The problem, he said, was trying to slingshot to stage three while actually at stage zero — you can't just jump the stages. He first had to develop habits that allowed him to sell, and to build a systematized, productized offering to sell, before he could finally make the videos and media.

The most recent attempt, the one that has worked quite well, began in 2024. He tried making as many videos as humanly possible — pumping out roughly a video a day. Once he figured out it was working, he couldn't stop, so he went all in and made a video every day for about a month and a half to two months.

The interviewer recalled first discovering him as one of only three creators he followed when entering the AI niche, alongside Nate Herk and Sabrina Ramabov. He recommends his videos to everyone because he explains things so clearly — the creator had said he wanted to explain things the way Alex Hormozi does, but in the interviewer's view he already does. That clarity is what convinced him the approach was working, and he joined the program afterward. He also admitted that when he first watched a video, he thought the creator might be AI-generated because he looked and sounded "too perfect," and even checked whether the lips matched the audio.

Noting how easily the creator seemed to publish daily, the interviewer asked how he finds time for all of it — the shorts, the daily accountability channel, running a business, and running a school. The creator welcomed the question, saying that since the interviewer is now entering stage three himself, the discussion about mining for ideas should be valuable for him.

One of the major bottlenecks in content production is ideation — coming up with naturally interesting ideas that you think other people would want to see. With YouTube specifically, there's a lot that goes into it, like thumbnails and packaging. The key to pumping out a lot of videos while keeping them high quality is removing that bottleneck entirely. Rather than me coming up with the ideas, I make my audience come up with my ideas. That gives me an infinite number of ideas, highly specifically tuned to what my audience wants to see.

For instance, on my daily updates channel, the whole reason I can pump these videos out so fast is that I literally just turn on the camera and answer people's questions. I don't have to come up with the questions — all I have to come up with are the answers. And if you've answered a hundred of these, they're virtually all the same. The viewers come up with the ideas for me.

Instagram is fairly straightforward too. You can make content there without any ideation because AI content is booming like crazy. All I do is subscribe to a bunch of newsletters where people do the ideation for me, and then we pick the idea — literally grab it line for line. Obviously I'll play around with it a little to make sure it's not a total garbage idea, but Instagram is a 6-to-10-second content format. It's not that crazy; you don't have to go super deep. Then boom — my viewers, or at least people I know and trust in the industry, are choosing my content ideas for me.

On YouTube, I come up with my own very interesting ideas. But I want you to know that I'm not pouring over some big spreadsheet of all possible ideas thinking, "Oh my god, how can I fit this in? I need this to trend."

Most of the videos I make are about stuff I'm working on anyway. I published a video on Linear as a project management tool, and people were like, "Whoa, Nick, this is crazy. Where did you get this? Who did you get this from?" And I'm like, no — you think ideation is my bottleneck because it's your bottleneck. But that's not my bottleneck at all. I just try to pump out as many videos as humanly possible on literally anything that comes to mind, and I just so happen to be building that for one of my businesses.

What I'm saying is that most of the time you'll spend creating any content, Sandy, is just "what the hell am I going to talk about today?" If you can cross that hurdle, then what you talk about is actually way less important. If you use interesting mechanisms — get your audience to ask you questions and answer those questions on video, subscribe to trusted newsletters in verticals you like that do the ideation for you, or just talk about the stuff you're already going to work on today — then it takes virtually no additional time. And yeah, you too can publish an hour and a half of video every single day and make it semantically valuable.

Oh, that's gold right there. Dang. Okay, I'm gonna take that strategy because I love it so much. Thank you for sharing that. But when you first started your content journey — and we're going to talk about that — what opportunity came to you because of content? I know MrBeast contacted you, that's amazing, and Steven Bartlett contacted you too. But when you first started your content, did you have some sort of imposter syndrome?

The videos I was making at the time were literally just me talking through what I was doing that day. Past a certain point, it's very difficult to have imposter syndrome if it's just stuff you're actually doing. To be clear, I did have imposter syndrome—everybody does. But the main issue I find with content creators who say, "Oh my god, I feel fake, I feel ungenuine," is that they're just not talking about stuff they actually do on a daily basis. They're not talking about things that have been pre-validated by the market, so they're constantly worrying: am I actually good enough? Is this actually all right? If I have a bunch of people asking me questions about my own personal life, how could I be an impostor about that? I'm just answering questions about my own life.

So you did have imposter syndrome before?

Yeah, for sure. And you're always going to have it—heart surgeons probably still have imposter syndrome when they do heart surgery. I think it's just about recognizing that no matter what you do or where you are, you will always have it. When the Diary of a CEO team was scouting for podcast guests— to be clear, it wasn't Steven who reached out to me, it was one of his team members, whose name I don't remember—when he reached out and said, "Hey, we might be interested in having you on, here are a couple of slots," I felt the imposter syndrome come back a bit. I was like, aren't you guys the show that had JD Vance on? Who the hell am I?

Like 50 million subscribers, that's what it is.

Same thing with MrBeast sending me a text—I was like, "Really?" Isn't there somebody else you could talk to?

I think if you just treat— I know it sounds kind of stupid, right? It's like a wild take, but it's kind of like you trek up a mountain for four years to visit the yogi who knows the answers to everything, you ask him what the meaning of life is, and he just says, "Good food." Hard-earned lessons you'd only get if you've actually done stuff. Anyway, the answer is not food.

I don't want to equate the two, but it really is straightforward if you think about it. How can you be an impostor if you're just dealing with things you actually do and work within your business? My first video was like, "Hey, here's how I made $48,412 or whatever the number was," and I was just walking people through everything I was doing on a daily basis. How could I possibly feel like an impostor if it's just my life I'm talking about?

The key here, though, is that if you want to be successful on the internet, you have to have a life worth talking about to begin with. You do have to become interesting, rather than just start talking about stuff without having achieved something genuine in an industry. Go and achieve something genuine in an industry, then come back and make videos about it. Most people put the cart before the horse—they start talking about stuff on the internet before they're really good at the thing they're talking about. But if you are good and you just talk about it all day—"Hey, here's a system I built for myself that made me 48 grand"—how could you possibly be paralyzed by impostor fear? I don't think that's reasonable.

So the key is you have to build something interesting, or live a life that's interesting for people to hear about, and then you can make content out of that. Did I hear that right?

Yeah, that's a reasonable paraphrase. The key is to do really cool things first, not just talk about cool things. The reason I feel far less like an impostor is that the stuff I talk about is just what I'm doing in my day-to-day life. I don't talk about things I'm not good at. If somebody asked me, "Hey Nick, how do you sail a boat?" I wouldn't say sailing is straightforward, because I don't know how to sail — I'd feel like a total impostor trying to explain it. But because people ask me specifically about AI, automation, or building a business from stage one to stage three, I can answer quite confidently.

When did you first get into AI, Nick?

It was back in 2019. I was experimenting with a little-known model called GPT-2, which is now obviously the granddaddy — seven ancestors up to GPT 5.6 Soul. I used it almost as a thought experiment to help design hooks and titles for articles I was writing. At the time I was a freelance article writer because my businesses weren't doing great and I needed to supplement my income with whatever I could do. And I was lazy, so I thought, "How do I get a robot to do this for me?" GPT-2 was kind of bad, but then GPT-3 came out shortly after, and I was so glad I'd spent that time learning how GPT-2 worked, because I could borrow all those learnings and apply them. GPT-3 wasn't a small step up — it was a massive unlock. I started implementing it for all my writing clients. One of my friends said, "Dude, you have something really cool in your hands. I guarantee I can help scale this business to $10,000 a month, and if not, I'll pay you" — he had some insane offer, and I said, "Sure, fine, whatever." But he did it. That was my first real big successful business, One Second Copy, which became Skil Millionaire.

I've been playing around with AI for a while, and at this point I've looked at enough LLM outputs that I could spot a slop comment from space. It doesn't even need an em dash in there — I just know.

No fluff, right?

No fluff, yeah. That's a big thing — no fluff, no "this but."

Correct me if I'm wrong, Nick: with One Second Copy, you started with your friend, but then he dropped out, or decided not to do it. Am I making things up?

I think you're thinking of my subsequent business, Left Click, because no one actually left One Second Copy. We crushed it — we even had somebody offer to buy us out. That was the first time I'd received an offer of that magnitude. To be clear, the offer wasn't massive — I think about a million dollars — but it was still like, "Holy crap, somebody wants to pay me a million dollars." It was the craziest thing ever.

That was fun. We didn't end up taking the buyout offer because we calculated we'd make more money keeping the business, so we kept it.

But let's go back to Left Click a bit, because your partner left, and then you almost gave up on that business — but something major happened right after you were about to give up.

For those who don't know, Leftclick came after One Second Copy had done really well — we were making about $90,000 a month, and I was stoked, thinking, "Okay, let's go all in on this." But then ChatGPT was released by OpenAI to a general audience. You have to understand that at the time nobody even knew AI could write anything. When ChatGPT launched, basically a million people got AGI-pilled instantly, thinking, "Holy crap, I can get this thing to write my content." Immediately after it was released, One Second Copy's margins started tanking, and our total revenue started tanking too. I was panicking — how were we going to make money? Maybe we should have sold the business after all.

My business partner at the time, Noah, and I had a lot of long talks about this, and we started thinking: rather than work in a business model where AI destroys us, can we find a business model where AI lets us grow faster and better? Essentially, can we find a model that grows in lockstep with AI distribution — because as more people learn about AI and its capabilities, they'll naturally want to employ it in their businesses.

I have to thank Noah for what came next. His father ran a software development consultancy, and from watching him his whole life, Noah was really interested in building systems for people. He said, "Hey, we could probably just sell the systems we built for One Second Copy to other businesses." I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard — why not just copy and paste One Second Copy's systems into all these other content-based businesses? He said, "Yeah, let's do it." That's how we started Leftclick, an AI automation agency, probably back in 2022 or so — I'd have to figure out my dates.

We kept trucking with this custom automation consultancy model for about a year, and things were going okay. But the thing about software consultancy — especially a custom, bespoke agency — is that every client wants something different, and you're building it custom for them. So you suffer from the same problem I mentioned earlier between stage one and stage two of the service business road: because every build is totally different from the previous one, you can't carry the experience forward, and it's difficult to get better and more systematized. We tried hiring a bunch of people to scale it, tried a bunch of different approaches, sold everything and anything under the sun, and worked with some really cool businesses as a result — but we could never crack maybe $35–40,000 a month.

After hitting our heads against the wall, Noah and I had a chat and decided to shut it down and spend our time and energy on something cooler independently. He took off and got blessed doing really cool things, working with a couple of really cool companies, and I ended up with a few clients. It was fine. We did that for a few months, and then I realized: wait a second, I feel like we're missing something. Noah and I were always building custom projects for people — why only custom projects? Maybe I just hadn't looked at it right.

Then I had a really big unlock. A client wanted basically the exact same thing as one of my old clients — word for word, it just happened to occur. I love it when that happens, because I get to copy the system I built for the old client for the new one. Easy. I don't remember exactly how much I made, but I made several thousand dollars in maybe an hour, because all I did was copy the same system verbatim, change the colors of a chat box or something, and deliver it. Then I thought: why don't I just do this all the time?

That's how I discovered productization. Not rocket science, right? But god, was that a hard-won lesson.

The interviewer notes that Nick explains things so simply that it seems like "not rocket science," yet few people succeed where he did, and asks why so many companies fail while he didn't.

Nick says he has reflected on this recently, and it boils down to two things: how long you stay in the ring and how much volume you're doing. The human brain is remarkable — feed it enough data in quick succession and it learns to improve. He compares it to a child learning language: a child's newly formed brain receives random sounds constantly, and within about a year it learns to distinguish phonemes, even though the raw sound data would mean nothing on a graph. The reason it works is simply that people are talking around the child all the time. That same principle — learning from inputs you couldn't conceivably understand a year earlier — applies to virtually anything, including business.

Some kids take a year and a half to learn to speak and get called slow; others learn in six months and get called geniuses. Barring physiological issues, Nick believes the difference is just the volume of stimulation received — the faster learner simply had more data for his spongy brain to soak up. He thinks about business the same way: he succeeded because he stayed in the ring long enough for his brain to pick it up naturally and learn the language of business.

The same applies to anything. People commonly work out for 14 days straight, then on day 15 say their back hurts and quit — but it normally takes at least two to three weeks to see any progress at all. They exit before reaching the good part, before seeing the fruits of their labor. Most people who quit in business do so prematurely, before staying in the ring long enough to start the positive flywheel. In his own case, he was simply very poor and needed the money: "I'm going to die or win." He just happened to stay in the ring long enough.

The interviewer recalls that Nick's mother kept sending him job listings around $54,000 a year while he was really poor, and asks what kept him from taking a job and staying in the business lane.

Nick admits part of it was youthful pride — he didn't want to admit he was wrong. He was genuinely worried about being evicted at one point because he couldn't make rent, and he acknowledges that in that situation you probably should just buckle down and get a job rather than insist you're going to make it and become a billionaire.

The interviewer observes that many of the biggest business owners have stories like that — showering at the YMCA next door, and so on. Nick agrees, but says part of it was also a logical evaluation of the alternative. He begins to explain, noting he's from Canada, and asks the interviewer, Sandy, if she's Canadian too.

Sandy replies that she's from Korea but lived in Canada — in Strathmore, Alberta. Nick is surprised to hear she's in the south, then returns to his point about the logical evaluation of the alternative.

Part of my decision was a logical evaluation of the alternatives. Figure out the average income where you live. When I did this math, it was somewhere around $50,000 a year, maybe $60,000 — let's use $50,000. The average person starts working at 25 and stops around 65, so that's 40 years. Do the math in your head: $50,000 × 40 years equals $2 million of value produced over their lifetime. That's not a lot at all — a person's life producing $2 million of economic value, and I'm speaking in CAD, not even USD.

So I looked at that and asked myself: do I think I could make more than $2 million if I threw some wacky thing at the wall and tried non-stop every single year for the next 40 years? The odds felt pretty damn high that I'd make way more than that. That's what I believed in. My family told me I was wrong, my friends told me I was crazy — "nobody around us does this, only randos on the internet." But it made sense to me, and I was clearly willing to die for that conviction. I just did not want that alternative.

Handling negative feedback from people close to you

When important people — your mom, dad, or best friends — say this isn't the right way, how do you overcome that?

If somebody tells you an idea is terrible, it would be stupid not to at least consider it. So when my family and friends said I had to stop, I did ask whether they had a point. But I didn't take their beliefs at face value, and I didn't take my own at face value either. I logically computed the probability of achieving this — or what the probability would need to be for it not to be a good choice. Back before ChatGPT we had Google, so I was googling average salaries and average working years, did the math, and it was right in front of me.

It was like somebody telling me the sky is green. The sky is not green, it's blue — but if everybody on Earth tells you the sky is green for long enough, eventually you'll look up and wonder if you're color blind. The point is: figure it out yourself.

Declining the Diary of a CEO interview

You said no to a Diary of a CEO interview — you ended up not going?

To be clear, it's not that I refused to be interviewed. I was really game for it. The availabilities they gave me were just logistically infeasible. When you're a small content creator relative to the big wigs on there, I imagine they slot you in last second — like, "this big name couldn't make it, want to fill in? It's tomorrow and it's 20,000 kilometers away." I just had a lot going on, so I couldn't make it.

The host asked whether MrBeast had wanted to work with him. Nick confirmed it: MrBeast sent him a DM saying he wanted to learn Claude from him. Nick agreed, gave him his number, and seconds later MrBeast was calling. Nick recalled thinking, "That's the guy who buys grocery stores and traps people inside them — what's he going to do if I don't pick up?" He picked up anyway, and they chatted about what MrBeast wanted. He can't discuss the details because of his non-disclosure agreement.

MrBeast's team flew him out to North Carolina to hang out with the crew, which he described as awesome — "what a bunch of killers." He ended up helping them with a bunch of AI work, and they now have a contract, working with the team every month.

The host congratulated him, saying that working with MrBeast — clearly number one on YouTube — puts him up there on his own. He then noted Nick was short on time but had a couple more questions to ask.

What inspires you, Nick, or what motivates you?

Initially, it was entirely financial — I needed money to be comfortable and secure in my life. But eventually you make so much money that it's unreasonable to think you're not secure and stable. Six months ago I really had to figure this out for myself: I have more money than I could ever possibly need, and I don't know if continuing to push for money is really the way — this despite my $500,000 a month goals we talked about before. So I've shifted my mindset around motivation.

Because of the scarcity I grew up with — how much money I felt I needed to make, how much we talked about it at the dinner table, how it basically controlled my whole life — and because of what I did to solve that goal, I now have a really big platform and the opportunity to genuinely positively impact the world. I didn't have that when I was broke as hell, wondering if I could pay rent or would eat rice and beans for the rest of my life. It's almost like I've been given the gift of potential impact by the work I've done.

I've realized I'm probably one of the people best suited to have a big knowledge impact on the automation of the economy. I tried to calculate total impact based on how many people watch my content, the percentage who probably have businesses or work with businesses, and the businesses I've already helped with dollar outcomes — estimating a kind of GDP impact, and it's pretty big. So my motivation now isn't just "make as much money as possible" — I love money, of course, but I don't want it to be my end-all be-all. I feel I can significantly accelerate the transition to a more efficient economy, and my content is aimed at that end.

Do you have any personal goals? Not 500k — I know that, and next it'll be a million. Just out of curiosity.

Marriage. Just kidding. — Probably at some point. — Is that a goal or just an inevitability? — I think it could be a personal wish.

I've had this silly dream ever since my friend got me really into cooking: cooking at a Michelin-star restaurant. I know it sounds dumb — some kind of Thai-Italian fusion or something at one of those high-end restaurants, just giving it my all. I'm confident that if somebody eats my food, they'll be okay with it — they won't send it back to the chef. That would be a really cool personal milestone.

You weren't joking when you said you're good at cooking — you're actually really good. — I haven't gone through cooking school or anything, so I'm sure I lack a variety of fundamentals, but I can make a roux if that's what you're asking. — If you're connected with any of these big restaurants, Sandy, let me know. It was pretty fun.

Okay, one final question — actually two, sorry. The one I've been dying to ask: I don't want to sound negative, but let's say you only have a month to live. What would you do, and what would you regret the most?

If I only had a month to live, I'd probably create so much content. I don't mean that in a "he has a month to live and he's just sitting in front of a camera" way, but if you think about it, a month to live means a month to give — and what better legacy to leave than trying to help as many people as humanly possible with the content I create? The tone would change pretty quickly; I probably wouldn't be making videos about second brains being dead or whatever I made a couple of days ago.

But yeah, that's probably what I'd do. I think people really need to understand just what a change is coming with AI more broadly. It's one thing when we automate little workflows here or there, but these models are automating human value production itself. I have a lot of interesting things to say on that front, and I'd do whatever I could to say as much of it as humanly possible before I kicked the bucket. And what would I regret? Not having done more of that — which is a great thing to reflect on. Maybe I should record a video after this.

A month to live means a month to give.

Nick should definitely do that. I worked in the funeral industry — that's where my sales background comes from — meaning I've been around thousands of older people, in their 80s and 90s, some past 100. So that question is something I think about very often: what would I regret if I died tomorrow, and what should I do today? I was curious whether something like that is in front of your head right now.

It's a great forcing function for clarity.

Is there any last thing you want to share with the audience, Nick — one last thought?

I've had a blast being here. Sandy, you are absolutely crushing it, and I'm stoked as hell to see it continue to climb. Can't wait to see you get to step four ahead of me.

Just a couple. And meet Mr. Beast.

A stone's throw away. Hey, Jimmy, you in there? You're next — just kidding. Thank you, Nick. You're the best. Thanks for being here; I know your time is so valuable, and I appreciate it.

No problem. Thanks, Eddie.