Encountering Roadblocks in Low-Code Development

As someone who has transitioned from a non-development background to learning low-code development, I've encountered my fair share of roadblocks. One of the most significant challenges is knowing when to continue investing time and effort into a particular platform or solution. I recall being frustrated with Zapier and Eden, platforms that I had invested considerable time in learning. While I gained valuable insights from these experiences, I eventually realized that they weren't the right fit for my business goals.

A crucial piece of advice that I've come to realize is that it's okay to quit or move on when faced with roadblocks. It's essential to acknowledge that you can't pour from an empty cup, and sometimes, it's better to cut your losses and focus on other areas. This mindset shift has been a game-changer for me, allowing me to prioritize my time and energy more effectively.

Finding the Sweet Spot Between Ease and Value

Another significant challenge in low-code development is finding that sweet spot between ease of delivery and value for clients. If a solution is too complex or difficult to implement, it can be stressful and ultimately lead to burnout. On the other hand, if a solution is too easy to deliver but lacks value for clients, it may not generate sufficient income. As someone who's built their business on low-code development, I've learned that finding this balance is crucial.

For some people, the work itself might be enjoyable, and that's where they find fulfillment. However, for others, like myself, it's essential to identify what type of work resonates with you. I've tried various solutions, platforms, and types of projects before committing to a particular area. This approach has allowed me to find what works best for my business, reducing the risk of investing too much time in an area that doesn't align with my goals.

The Importance of Focusing on What Fits

Ultimately, finding success in low-code development requires focus and direction. It's essential to identify your strengths, weaknesses, and areas of interest. For me, focusing on what fits rather than trying to be everything to everyone has been instrumental in my growth as a developer. By niching down to a specific area, I've gained expertise and built a reputation that attracts high-paying clients.

My journey with low-code development has been nothing short of transformative. From having no development background to becoming proficient in platforms like Make, it's been an incredible ride. If you're considering embarking on this path, I encourage you to take the time to explore different solutions, platforms, and types of projects. Don't be afraid to try new things and commit to a particular area only when you've found what works best for you.

SJ's Experience: A Case Study

I'd like to share SJ's experience as an example of someone who has successfully transitioned from a non-development background to low-code development. SJ had initially started with Make, learning the ins and outs of the platform before moving on to other areas. They've since developed custom projects for clients and are supplementing their income through these endeavors.

SJ's approach to learning and adapting to new platforms is a testament to the importance of flexibility and focus in low-code development. By taking the time to learn from their experiences and identifying what works best for their business, SJ has built a thriving career as a developer. I'd like to invite readers to check out SJ's Medium article and store, where they can see firsthand how they're using Make to deliver high-value solutions to clients.

Conclusion

Low-code development offers many opportunities for growth and success, but it also presents significant challenges, particularly when it comes to finding the right platform or solution. By acknowledging that it's okay to quit or move on, focusing on what fits your business goals, and taking the time to explore different areas of low-code development, you can overcome common roadblocks and build a thriving career as a developer.

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: ennow I see like how incredibly valuable it is and I would urge anyone to do the same that freedom is is pretty amazing to me for me it was like quite empowering to see like oh I I can actually build this where can I take this where are the limits and so far the limits are much further than I thought they were and the way I've been generating leades hey everyone and welcome back to the channel today we have a special guest SJ from my accelerator here to tell the story on how he's gone from someone who they don't know how to code or develop at all to being a make expert developer and now selling custom our Solutions at supplementing have each month um and more importantly the way that he's doing this and the way he's generating leads is the most interesting part of this conversation so um SJ it's great to have you on this uh on this call and I'm looking forward to hearing more about your interesting lead generation method that doesn't use YouTube or LinkedIn right thanks for having me all righty so first things first um tell us a little bit about yourself and your background um and let's get straight into the uh the method that you're using as well yeah I'm uh I'm SJ I'm from the Netherlands and uh for the past uh let's say close to a year I've been uh working doing some Dev work um mostly using make.com and the way I've been generating leads is writing articles on on medium it's been uh the source of most of my leads uh recently and just writing about what I make writing about what I build the fun uh the things that I enjoy has been generating quite a few eyes on my on my work and generating quite a few leads as well yeah we'll put a couple I know a lot of you guys are Skeptics and can't believe that people actually getting leads making money with things like medium so I'm going to put some of sj's uh leads that he's got mainly through Linkedin which we can go into the final on a second um but firstly just want to walk through um just such a great example of what I've been preaching for the last while now of uh if you were new to the space and in your case you you weren't technical you didn't have any development skill set but you just picked an area to get good at and you followed your own curiosity and you used Medium as the outlet for that creativity and for that that Curiosity that you were pursuing so I've done the same thing and I keep saying on YouTube the way that I got to my position is by following my curiosity and making YouTube videos about it and you've done the exact same thing on medium so can you walk us through your journey from being a complete newbie to the AI automation space to now making how well you can tell us how much money you're making per month um but that journey in particular and how you've used Medium as a as an outlet and a a feedback loop for you to start learning more but also making more money and getting leads yeah so um right when Chad GPT came out I was quite fascinated by it even by the the old uh 3.5 version which is like quite dumb compared to what we have now but I was still like fascinated by what it could do and I started looking for like practical ways I could use that straight away so I delv into I searched for like no code ways to to build fun stuff and it started with like summarizing my emails um and I used zier for that and I was like oh this is quite exciting like I can actually like build something practical without having to code and especially since I have no coding background at all um that was quite like fascinating to me and I thought like I've got to share this this is this is exciting stuff and people will probably find this exciting as well so that's how I started um I first started writing uh some stuff on substack and then uh later like after writing a bunch of Articles um I both discovered make.com and I really like fell in love with the platform like it has so many possibilities and it's quite easy to use um so now I write um a bunch of stuff about make.com and as I said like I discovered uh Medium as well and medium has uh just a really good ALG algorithm for Discovery so that's um how I'm generating quite a few eyes on my work um yeah so I I write articles uh I put quite a bit of effort into it into like practical ways you can use Ai and usually that leverages make.com and just putting in quite a lot of effort um and people seem to be excited about what they can build as well um so they read my read my work and that's how they learn about me and then I've got links to uh my LinkedIn as well uh links to a web shop where I provide the templates uh they're all for free but with like a pay what you can um yeah pay what you can set up so people can just if they want to have the free stuff that's all fine by me um but that's how they learn about what I do what I can do and um that's how they know how to reach out to me as well and through that way they reach out to me on LinkedIn ask me if I can build stuff um ask technical advice uh anything along those lines and I mean yeah people already know what I'm capable of um they don't have to like uh you don't have to convince them of anything since they're already familiar with my work anyway um and that just like uh makes the leads like much much better uh makes it much easier for me looking at at medium just as a platform like you're saying it's it's I'm so excited that that you've discovered this and I always thought that this might be a route that's possible but I didn't realize people were doing it already which is uh LinkedIn U medium can operate basically as the you the text based YouTube like you said there's a is an algorithm that's going to actually allow your stuff to float to the top and if good you create good content it will be seen it's not just like a WordPress blog um that that you post on and no one's really going to see unless you get picked up in SEO and you're not really going to be writing for SEO anyway so um I love the fact that you've jumped on this and I'm really excited to to be exposing people to this opportunity because for for myself as as someone who's got into YouTube I know the difficulty of me traveling traveling now the longer du buai I don't have my setup I don't have my camera and everything that that that makes it easy for me to make content um so it puts a lot of uh inertia and friction in the in the creation process and for me to continue to build my personal brand and generate leads so I think this is a great opportunity for anyone who uh doesn't want to put their face on on out on the internet who just wants to work away on learning these things and and create it using the same feedback loop that I've benefited from and and you have too um but doing it text based you can do it anywhere you can be on a plane you can be on a train you can do anything and you're just typing away on your on your computer so can you walk us through a bit of your experience with content creation on medium and and what your workflow is for or like firstly how you how you get inspiration for your builds and then how you how you build that out on a proper article that can get you some leads as for what I want to write about it's usually just fun projects that I um discover often it's um so let's say like open AI releases something new um say the assistance API or something or anthropic releases like function calling um I'm basically like I want to try this I want to see if I can build something using this um and it's basically like often it's either stuff that I problems that I run into myself that I solve for myself and I share with people um and also just like as I said discovery of anything that's newly released um and and I figure like let's let's see if I can make this work um that's how I often like found find my subjects that I want to write about and then I start playing around usually in make see if if I can make like a cool demo that's working and then I write about the uh the setup process and share it and one thing that's really great about medium um is that it incentivizes writing good articles by um like the algorithm pushes articles where people stay on it and they keep keep reading I think for YouTube it's probably pretty similar where like f retention is an important thing and they've got a similar um sort of style similar sort of way of approaching the algorithm in medium um which like I said like incentivizes quality uh it incentivizes like putting out work that people will actually read um and I've seen that that gets rewarded gets rewarded uh so if I put in a lot of effort make something that's nice and readable something that's approachable um with like a really cool demo cool subject then that tends to do really well that's that's so important because I think what stops a lot of people getting into content creation particularly on YouTube is the thought of putting all of this effort in and they're making a video and no one looks at it so it must be pretty reassuring for you knowing that hey if I find something cool and I put a lot of effort in and I create content about it then I'm going to be be rewarded and I think for any of you guys who are interested in looking into sj's medium I'll leave a link down below you can see some of the the engagement he got how much I think you got like 250 like whatever claps or whatever they have on medium so what sort of levels of Engagement are you seeing on these so this is actually quite interesting because one of the few uh one of the very first articles I put out on uh on medium it actually uses NAD but it's like an example of how you can do like local automations without sending over stuff to open AI so using like a local language model um with no code um and it's a it's it's a pretty basic uh or it's a pretty in-depth article but it's in the end it's called like a pretty basic setup but more like uh something people are very interested about and I mean that was one of the very first articles I put out uh on medium I did zero promotion for it and it's sitting at about I think well over 20k reads at this point so that's not even yeah and that I was only looking at those clap thing 20,000 so that is that the equivalent of a YouTube view um so I think YouTube few counts when someone clicks on it right this is actually someone staying on it for more than 30 seconds um wow so and it's got like I think the read percentage of people who stay on it is about like close to 70% which is pretty um like a pretty ridiculously high number I actually haven't really um done like that's the best article I've written so far uh and the others like they tend to do quite well I think overall I get a few 100 reads a day um which is like perfectly fine like that's more than plenty but it's one article like it sh up like about two weeks after it was released with absolutely zero promotion and I think at the time I had like probably between 50 and 100 followers um I'm sitting getting close to 500 which is like medium is not that much follower based but more so like the algorithm does its work yeah and and can you walk us through briefly because I know you're working a job at at the moment as well so for people who are interested in in running one of these agencies and and I mean just just making steps and strides into the AI space um while work another job can you break down um your job right now and and how much time that's taken up and then your agency and how much that's making you as supplemental income each month as well because you've also got your agency income and you've got the medium income as well and the other stuff you do so can you break down all of that please yeah so I um I still have like a day job regular job um where I work in logistics um I have a I've got a team that I manage uh I do that for about 24 28 hours a week um and it's all in the early morning so my days usually start at 5:30 um work from home so that's like super convenient but at 1 1: p.m. my my day job is basically over and then I work on all the other stuff so that's how I manage my time it's it's pretty like I I really like the combination I don't mind the hours um and then um so from 1: till like 56 maybe later whatever fits my schedule um like with medium nobody cares if I'm working late at night or if I work early mornings um that's all like something I can feel in myself um but yeah everything after one is um is usually like most of my time is put into this so either I'm doing some de work for someone building like Solutions um sometimes I help with coaching people with make and if I don't have either either of those things I usually like I'm playing around with new um new automations I'm building for myself and if I build something fun that I feel like sharing I I'll put it on medium and that's basically how it works um sometimes I put a lot of arttic work into articles um put out one a week or something sometimes it's a bit less um and it's consistent I'm I'm definitely getting more views um that's for sure um but it gives me quite a bit of Freedom um and right now I can basically pay all my bills from the uh the day job um but that's like I can only pay all my bills right not much on top of that um last month I earned um a little bit more than what I earned in my day job uh through the um the dev work uh through the AI agency stuff and then the um on top of that like medium is let's say just a few hundred bucks a month it brings in because medium's got like a decent uh monetization uh setup so there's like the one article I talked about earlier it brought in about 220 bucks over the last like five months or something it just keeps trickling in so every month that that article is good for like 20 30 bucks um and then there's a bunch of other articles who bring in a little bit as well um so if I would work on it actively it would be like maybe four 500 bucks a month um which is also like really nice uh on the side um a little bit extra and yeah it's like a nice little reliable income even if you don't have any leads like it's it's a nice bit on top right so you're not doing it for nothing yeah so for you with your with your agency um I assume there's some kind of point in the future where you're looking to to drop the job and go well all in on this um that will give you more time to write more articles and I'm just really interested in your plan to scale from here cuz um on one side I understand that you might just want to keep building those skills and getting even better and better and better and and picking up more skills and you've got a nice holding pattern here where you've got your your job income and you've also got your AG bringing in that basically the same as your job um yeah you're in a position where you can just continue to learn and and network more in the community as well um so what's your plan from here to say the end of the year and how much would you are you planning to be making by the end of the year with your agency and what strategies are are you putting in place to get there I'm definitely hoping to bring in like more reliably from the AI agency stuff um compared to the day job that's like the intention if I can uh go over that and then reliably do so like say get four months in a row where I go over that would be amazing and that would give me like opportunity to scale down the day job um and um I still quite like the day job so I wouldn't mind doing it for a little bit but I honestly like I I do want to have a steady income from uh from the AI stuff I enjoy it more and yeah if by by the end of the year I could like r ably earn more income uh through the AI agency stuff then that would give me like a lot of reason to just see if I can cut it out and only do the AI stuff um on top of that I want to get there by both doing some Dev work and also transitioning more into the coaching side of things so helping people build like make Solutions I'm enjoying that quite a lot like helping out other people like both through writing articles and actually like one-onone calls so that's something I want to move into as well we should probably be getting you getting you in as a as a a make specialist coach in the accelerator anyway so that's probably a conversation we need to have if you want to at least get started on the coach side I know you're already doing a bit in the accelerator right yeah yeah definitely like right now it's just um so if I've got some extra time I'll help people out it also gives me like a good feel of like what what problems are people facing what's like interesting content to write about to teach about as well so that's also a bit of an incentive for me to do uh to do that but um that's a direction I definitely want to go in and then I honestly like the last 6 month I've really just kind of liked not being um stuck to like having one title to my name I actually quite like the multi multi um like different job approach um and I can just switch between and that freedom is is pretty amazing to me yeah I think what you what you said there about the the coaching side as well is is really important for anyone looking to get into the space it's you learning the stuff and you going going deep on on really trying to figure out make and build Solutions and following your curiosity and posting about it not only is that going to bring you leads for your business but it also gives you the expertise and understanding that people are willing to pay for um as as coaching and for Education as well and I think there's equally as I always talk about the AI automation agency opportunity of selling these AI solutions to businesses is equally the same of teaching other entrepreneurs and business owners the the educational side as well so you learning this stuff and I really urge any of you to go then just pick something and get good at it because people are willing to pay either for you to build it for them or to teach them as well so you can do Consulting you can do education you can do programs but you can also be building the solutions as well and I find from my experience it's vital to keep doing both because you can continue to progress your learning and understanding by keeping working on those projects like I'm sure your your client projects you do really push the boundaries of what's possible because you have to learn new stuff and and work on different businesses that you're not familiar with so it extends your knowledge makes you even more of an expert while at the same time you can then go and sell information back to people and help them out in a coaching way so um I really like your approach there um and I'm excited to see you I'm be more than happy to help you out with getting some coaching work in the accelerator as well so um I think I just want to wrap things up here with a a a look back on on your progress and journey so far from someone who was not a developer to someone who's now um enjoying the freedom of having a second stream of income um if someone was interested in following in your footsteps to some degree and and coming in as a as a non-developer and learning a skill and gaining some sort of following and being present in a community as well and and now you're getting leads and referrals from people in the community how would you recommend someone Coes about getting into the space in the same sort of way that you have go and build fun stuff you know if you see like um hard right no no no I absolutely absolutely just enjoy the hell out of seeing if I can build something um so I think about like let's say a year ago or something I thought to myself can buil like a chat bu that I can talk to through telegram right so something pretty basic I have I had no clue at all to how to do this and I started with I think that was the early days like the first weeks I started with make and it took me like a whole day um to just like figure this out I had my conversation history stored in Google Sheets right as like the the solution to make it work and I actually got it to work and I I think I still have this scenario and if I look back at it it's like oh this is horrible but it was like incredibly important like for learning just try and see can I figure this out can I build this um and then um I don't think I shared that one but right now I've recently shared a a new article using the assistance API calling functions like all kinds of cool stuff I've got like this AI assistant I can talk to that can access my calendar and it's just I think I saw that I'll put it on screen this thing is like the biggest make scenario I've ever seen it's gigantic really come long way right it's kind of ridiculous but it's more to show like just um the learning process was just building stuff that I found enjoyable and then once I ran into the issue like okay I've really got to figure this out I delve into the academy so mak's got like a really good program for that um but I want to urge anyone who wants to get into the space just I mean start building some stuff and if you don't really know what to build then go look at what other people like you or myself are doing follow the tutorials try and build what and then maybe modify it a bit after I I keep saying this just steal and then modify if you want yeah no absolutely and if you can make it work um even if it's with the help of YouTube video like I mean for me it was like quite empowering to see like oh I I can actually build this m where can I take this where are the limits and so far the limits are much further than I thought they were so I think that's like a I mean Super basic but just go build fun stuff and document cuz if you had been learning that stuff in the background and not sharing it and not being I mean was it really intentional like I'm going to I'm going to make these medium post so that I can get leads or is it more just a a natural expression of hey I just want to kind of put this out there as well because that's what I keep saying if you want to shortcut the so so many people spend two to three months learning and then try two to three months of marketing their inste you could have just been learning and marketing the whole way and building a personal brand and and even for you right now you don't have an agency technically it's all just done under your personal brand and you're doing this custom development on make um that was such a a smart move to you but was that really the the plan all along to be marketing as you were learning um no not really honestly no I just yeah naturally and now I see like how incredibly valuable it is um and I would urge anyone to do the same to just try and write stuff even if barely anyone reads it like you're going to build up such a nice catalog of stuff you've built um and that's going to be like be impressive either way it's also like it builds trust in people who like find you right so when they when they look at what you've done and they see like this backlog of just oh this guy's been writing about this for a year um that instills quite a bit of trust in people like oh this guy knows what he's talking about I know something that a lot of people struggle with is they they might get started on a on a platform and they run into issues how are you able to to get past the the roadblocks that you encounter because I know we have coaches the accelerator but were you using them and we using the uh YouTube or finding up people at medium how are you able to to progress and when you ran into those roadblocks how are you able to to get past because this the main issue when people are trying to get into even low code development they run into one issue and just have no clue how to solve it so I think an important piece that I kind of um I never really consciously thought about it but part is like um it's okay to quit at times so so it's okay to just like drop something like I'm going to look at this another day um and then just move to something else and then go back to it later I think especially like the going back to it is also important but at times just like okay I mean cut your losses right um it's fine um especially like I put a bit of time into learning zapier I put a bit of time into learning Eden I even did some custom coding projects for clients and I'm basically I'm not really going to do those anymore at this point because I feel like i' I've learned my lesson there like right I I know there's some valuable stuff that I learned there as well but I'm just going to I mean got your losses at times it's fine um and you got to find that sweet spot between easy to deliver and valuable because like if you yeah it could be could be really valuable for the client but if it's very difficult for you to deliver it's going to be you I mean we're building these businesses to to give us freedom and to give us some fulfillment from the work that we do if you're yes you might be making good money per project but if it's extremely stressful and the clients are always unhappy because of these things are really difficult to do it's not really in my opinion it's not how I want to run my business and it's probably not you in arounds either for sure I also think um it's like find what fits right so for some people they really like the de work and that's there's something to be set for almost everything um like the the massive projects the big projects the small ones um and I found what fits me uh took go out tried a bunch of stuff um and now I've like basically committed a bit more um but I actually know like this is the thing that I really enjoy and I would like advise people as well just go try out different things don't commit to one thing at the start I think that would be like a pretty Dental choice to just like commit to something too soon um at some points like it absolutely makes sense to um to uh to Niche down to make a choice and for me that was with make like learning it and uh now I'm like reaping the rewards yeah you got to have some kind of focus on that whether that's niching down to a a given Niche and decid to be an expert there but like you said you can Niche down to a type of solution or or a platform but as a beginner it's going to be so much easier to have some kind of focus as to where you want to go deep on um and and like you said you're reaping the reward to that now so umj that's that's been awesome I hope you guys have got some inspiration there as someone who's who had no development background but is is just focused on learning this new platform make and has made it work and is now doing custom development projects on there and supplementing his income and and hopefully soon uh transitioning out to a to a full full scale agency so SJ it's it's a pleasure to have you in the community um and looking forward to getting you on some coaching calls with our guys but yeah uh if you don't wants to reach out um and get in touch with SJ about his make capabilities I'll leave his links down below um and you can go check out some of his um I guess kind of your funnel and the way you've got it set up I know you've got that little store I'll leave as much information down below for for everyone else including a medium so they can take a look at how you're doing things so appreciate the time and hopefully have you on at a later date um to to give us an updatenow I see like how incredibly valuable it is and I would urge anyone to do the same that freedom is is pretty amazing to me for me it was like quite empowering to see like oh I I can actually build this where can I take this where are the limits and so far the limits are much further than I thought they were and the way I've been generating leades hey everyone and welcome back to the channel today we have a special guest SJ from my accelerator here to tell the story on how he's gone from someone who they don't know how to code or develop at all to being a make expert developer and now selling custom our Solutions at supplementing have each month um and more importantly the way that he's doing this and the way he's generating leads is the most interesting part of this conversation so um SJ it's great to have you on this uh on this call and I'm looking forward to hearing more about your interesting lead generation method that doesn't use YouTube or LinkedIn right thanks for having me all righty so first things first um tell us a little bit about yourself and your background um and let's get straight into the uh the method that you're using as well yeah I'm uh I'm SJ I'm from the Netherlands and uh for the past uh let's say close to a year I've been uh working doing some Dev work um mostly using make.com and the way I've been generating leads is writing articles on on medium it's been uh the source of most of my leads uh recently and just writing about what I make writing about what I build the fun uh the things that I enjoy has been generating quite a few eyes on my on my work and generating quite a few leads as well yeah we'll put a couple I know a lot of you guys are Skeptics and can't believe that people actually getting leads making money with things like medium so I'm going to put some of sj's uh leads that he's got mainly through Linkedin which we can go into the final on a second um but firstly just want to walk through um just such a great example of what I've been preaching for the last while now of uh if you were new to the space and in your case you you weren't technical you didn't have any development skill set but you just picked an area to get good at and you followed your own curiosity and you used Medium as the outlet for that creativity and for that that Curiosity that you were pursuing so I've done the same thing and I keep saying on YouTube the way that I got to my position is by following my curiosity and making YouTube videos about it and you've done the exact same thing on medium so can you walk us through your journey from being a complete newbie to the AI automation space to now making how well you can tell us how much money you're making per month um but that journey in particular and how you've used Medium as a as an outlet and a a feedback loop for you to start learning more but also making more money and getting leads yeah so um right when Chad GPT came out I was quite fascinated by it even by the the old uh 3.5 version which is like quite dumb compared to what we have now but I was still like fascinated by what it could do and I started looking for like practical ways I could use that straight away so I delv into I searched for like no code ways to to build fun stuff and it started with like summarizing my emails um and I used zier for that and I was like oh this is quite exciting like I can actually like build something practical without having to code and especially since I have no coding background at all um that was quite like fascinating to me and I thought like I've got to share this this is this is exciting stuff and people will probably find this exciting as well so that's how I started um I first started writing uh some stuff on substack and then uh later like after writing a bunch of Articles um I both discovered make.com and I really like fell in love with the platform like it has so many possibilities and it's quite easy to use um so now I write um a bunch of stuff about make.com and as I said like I discovered uh Medium as well and medium has uh just a really good ALG algorithm for Discovery so that's um how I'm generating quite a few eyes on my work um yeah so I I write articles uh I put quite a bit of effort into it into like practical ways you can use Ai and usually that leverages make.com and just putting in quite a lot of effort um and people seem to be excited about what they can build as well um so they read my read my work and that's how they learn about me and then I've got links to uh my LinkedIn as well uh links to a web shop where I provide the templates uh they're all for free but with like a pay what you can um yeah pay what you can set up so people can just if they want to have the free stuff that's all fine by me um but that's how they learn about what I do what I can do and um that's how they know how to reach out to me as well and through that way they reach out to me on LinkedIn ask me if I can build stuff um ask technical advice uh anything along those lines and I mean yeah people already know what I'm capable of um they don't have to like uh you don't have to convince them of anything since they're already familiar with my work anyway um and that just like uh makes the leads like much much better uh makes it much easier for me looking at at medium just as a platform like you're saying it's it's I'm so excited that that you've discovered this and I always thought that this might be a route that's possible but I didn't realize people were doing it already which is uh LinkedIn U medium can operate basically as the you the text based YouTube like you said there's a is an algorithm that's going to actually allow your stuff to float to the top and if good you create good content it will be seen it's not just like a WordPress blog um that that you post on and no one's really going to see unless you get picked up in SEO and you're not really going to be writing for SEO anyway so um I love the fact that you've jumped on this and I'm really excited to to be exposing people to this opportunity because for for myself as as someone who's got into YouTube I know the difficulty of me traveling traveling now the longer du buai I don't have my setup I don't have my camera and everything that that that makes it easy for me to make content um so it puts a lot of uh inertia and friction in the in the creation process and for me to continue to build my personal brand and generate leads so I think this is a great opportunity for anyone who uh doesn't want to put their face on on out on the internet who just wants to work away on learning these things and and create it using the same feedback loop that I've benefited from and and you have too um but doing it text based you can do it anywhere you can be on a plane you can be on a train you can do anything and you're just typing away on your on your computer so can you walk us through a bit of your experience with content creation on medium and and what your workflow is for or like firstly how you how you get inspiration for your builds and then how you how you build that out on a proper article that can get you some leads as for what I want to write about it's usually just fun projects that I um discover often it's um so let's say like open AI releases something new um say the assistance API or something or anthropic releases like function calling um I'm basically like I want to try this I want to see if I can build something using this um and it's basically like often it's either stuff that I problems that I run into myself that I solve for myself and I share with people um and also just like as I said discovery of anything that's newly released um and and I figure like let's let's see if I can make this work um that's how I often like found find my subjects that I want to write about and then I start playing around usually in make see if if I can make like a cool demo that's working and then I write about the uh the setup process and share it and one thing that's really great about medium um is that it incentivizes writing good articles by um like the algorithm pushes articles where people stay on it and they keep keep reading I think for YouTube it's probably pretty similar where like f retention is an important thing and they've got a similar um sort of style similar sort of way of approaching the algorithm in medium um which like I said like incentivizes quality uh it incentivizes like putting out work that people will actually read um and I've seen that that gets rewarded gets rewarded uh so if I put in a lot of effort make something that's nice and readable something that's approachable um with like a really cool demo cool subject then that tends to do really well that's that's so important because I think what stops a lot of people getting into content creation particularly on YouTube is the thought of putting all of this effort in and they're making a video and no one looks at it so it must be pretty reassuring for you knowing that hey if I find something cool and I put a lot of effort in and I create content about it then I'm going to be be rewarded and I think for any of you guys who are interested in looking into sj's medium I'll leave a link down below you can see some of the the engagement he got how much I think you got like 250 like whatever claps or whatever they have on medium so what sort of levels of Engagement are you seeing on these so this is actually quite interesting because one of the few uh one of the very first articles I put out on uh on medium it actually uses NAD but it's like an example of how you can do like local automations without sending over stuff to open AI so using like a local language model um with no code um and it's a it's it's a pretty basic uh or it's a pretty in-depth article but it's in the end it's called like a pretty basic setup but more like uh something people are very interested about and I mean that was one of the very first articles I put out uh on medium I did zero promotion for it and it's sitting at about I think well over 20k reads at this point so that's not even yeah and that I was only looking at those clap thing 20,000 so that is that the equivalent of a YouTube view um so I think YouTube few counts when someone clicks on it right this is actually someone staying on it for more than 30 seconds um wow so and it's got like I think the read percentage of people who stay on it is about like close to 70% which is pretty um like a pretty ridiculously high number I actually haven't really um done like that's the best article I've written so far uh and the others like they tend to do quite well I think overall I get a few 100 reads a day um which is like perfectly fine like that's more than plenty but it's one article like it sh up like about two weeks after it was released with absolutely zero promotion and I think at the time I had like probably between 50 and 100 followers um I'm sitting getting close to 500 which is like medium is not that much follower based but more so like the algorithm does its work yeah and and can you walk us through briefly because I know you're working a job at at the moment as well so for people who are interested in in running one of these agencies and and I mean just just making steps and strides into the AI space um while work another job can you break down um your job right now and and how much time that's taken up and then your agency and how much that's making you as supplemental income each month as well because you've also got your agency income and you've got the medium income as well and the other stuff you do so can you break down all of that please yeah so I um I still have like a day job regular job um where I work in logistics um I have a I've got a team that I manage uh I do that for about 24 28 hours a week um and it's all in the early morning so my days usually start at 5:30 um work from home so that's like super convenient but at 1 1: p.m. my my day job is basically over and then I work on all the other stuff so that's how I manage my time it's it's pretty like I I really like the combination I don't mind the hours um and then um so from 1: till like 56 maybe later whatever fits my schedule um like with medium nobody cares if I'm working late at night or if I work early mornings um that's all like something I can feel in myself um but yeah everything after one is um is usually like most of my time is put into this so either I'm doing some de work for someone building like Solutions um sometimes I help with coaching people with make and if I don't have either either of those things I usually like I'm playing around with new um new automations I'm building for myself and if I build something fun that I feel like sharing I I'll put it on medium and that's basically how it works um sometimes I put a lot of arttic work into articles um put out one a week or something sometimes it's a bit less um and it's consistent I'm I'm definitely getting more views um that's for sure um but it gives me quite a bit of Freedom um and right now I can basically pay all my bills from the uh the day job um but that's like I can only pay all my bills right not much on top of that um last month I earned um a little bit more than what I earned in my day job uh through the um the dev work uh through the AI agency stuff and then the um on top of that like medium is let's say just a few hundred bucks a month it brings in because medium's got like a decent uh monetization uh setup so there's like the one article I talked about earlier it brought in about 220 bucks over the last like five months or something it just keeps trickling in so every month that that article is good for like 20 30 bucks um and then there's a bunch of other articles who bring in a little bit as well um so if I would work on it actively it would be like maybe four 500 bucks a month um which is also like really nice uh on the side um a little bit extra and yeah it's like a nice little reliable income even if you don't have any leads like it's it's a nice bit on top right so you're not doing it for nothing yeah so for you with your with your agency um I assume there's some kind of point in the future where you're looking to to drop the job and go well all in on this um that will give you more time to write more articles and I'm just really interested in your plan to scale from here cuz um on one side I understand that you might just want to keep building those skills and getting even better and better and better and and picking up more skills and you've got a nice holding pattern here where you've got your your job income and you've also got your AG bringing in that basically the same as your job um yeah you're in a position where you can just continue to learn and and network more in the community as well um so what's your plan from here to say the end of the year and how much would you are you planning to be making by the end of the year with your agency and what strategies are are you putting in place to get there I'm definitely hoping to bring in like more reliably from the AI agency stuff um compared to the day job that's like the intention if I can uh go over that and then reliably do so like say get four months in a row where I go over that would be amazing and that would give me like opportunity to scale down the day job um and um I still quite like the day job so I wouldn't mind doing it for a little bit but I honestly like I I do want to have a steady income from uh from the AI stuff I enjoy it more and yeah if by by the end of the year I could like r ably earn more income uh through the AI agency stuff then that would give me like a lot of reason to just see if I can cut it out and only do the AI stuff um on top of that I want to get there by both doing some Dev work and also transitioning more into the coaching side of things so helping people build like make Solutions I'm enjoying that quite a lot like helping out other people like both through writing articles and actually like one-onone calls so that's something I want to move into as well we should probably be getting you getting you in as a as a a make specialist coach in the accelerator anyway so that's probably a conversation we need to have if you want to at least get started on the coach side I know you're already doing a bit in the accelerator right yeah yeah definitely like right now it's just um so if I've got some extra time I'll help people out it also gives me like a good feel of like what what problems are people facing what's like interesting content to write about to teach about as well so that's also a bit of an incentive for me to do uh to do that but um that's a direction I definitely want to go in and then I honestly like the last 6 month I've really just kind of liked not being um stuck to like having one title to my name I actually quite like the multi multi um like different job approach um and I can just switch between and that freedom is is pretty amazing to me yeah I think what you what you said there about the the coaching side as well is is really important for anyone looking to get into the space it's you learning the stuff and you going going deep on on really trying to figure out make and build Solutions and following your curiosity and posting about it not only is that going to bring you leads for your business but it also gives you the expertise and understanding that people are willing to pay for um as as coaching and for Education as well and I think there's equally as I always talk about the AI automation agency opportunity of selling these AI solutions to businesses is equally the same of teaching other entrepreneurs and business owners the the educational side as well so you learning this stuff and I really urge any of you to go then just pick something and get good at it because people are willing to pay either for you to build it for them or to teach them as well so you can do Consulting you can do education you can do programs but you can also be building the solutions as well and I find from my experience it's vital to keep doing both because you can continue to progress your learning and understanding by keeping working on those projects like I'm sure your your client projects you do really push the boundaries of what's possible because you have to learn new stuff and and work on different businesses that you're not familiar with so it extends your knowledge makes you even more of an expert while at the same time you can then go and sell information back to people and help them out in a coaching way so um I really like your approach there um and I'm excited to see you I'm be more than happy to help you out with getting some coaching work in the accelerator as well so um I think I just want to wrap things up here with a a a look back on on your progress and journey so far from someone who was not a developer to someone who's now um enjoying the freedom of having a second stream of income um if someone was interested in following in your footsteps to some degree and and coming in as a as a non-developer and learning a skill and gaining some sort of following and being present in a community as well and and now you're getting leads and referrals from people in the community how would you recommend someone Coes about getting into the space in the same sort of way that you have go and build fun stuff you know if you see like um hard right no no no I absolutely absolutely just enjoy the hell out of seeing if I can build something um so I think about like let's say a year ago or something I thought to myself can buil like a chat bu that I can talk to through telegram right so something pretty basic I have I had no clue at all to how to do this and I started with I think that was the early days like the first weeks I started with make and it took me like a whole day um to just like figure this out I had my conversation history stored in Google Sheets right as like the the solution to make it work and I actually got it to work and I I think I still have this scenario and if I look back at it it's like oh this is horrible but it was like incredibly important like for learning just try and see can I figure this out can I build this um and then um I don't think I shared that one but right now I've recently shared a a new article using the assistance API calling functions like all kinds of cool stuff I've got like this AI assistant I can talk to that can access my calendar and it's just I think I saw that I'll put it on screen this thing is like the biggest make scenario I've ever seen it's gigantic really come long way right it's kind of ridiculous but it's more to show like just um the learning process was just building stuff that I found enjoyable and then once I ran into the issue like okay I've really got to figure this out I delve into the academy so mak's got like a really good program for that um but I want to urge anyone who wants to get into the space just I mean start building some stuff and if you don't really know what to build then go look at what other people like you or myself are doing follow the tutorials try and build what and then maybe modify it a bit after I I keep saying this just steal and then modify if you want yeah no absolutely and if you can make it work um even if it's with the help of YouTube video like I mean for me it was like quite empowering to see like oh I I can actually build this m where can I take this where are the limits and so far the limits are much further than I thought they were so I think that's like a I mean Super basic but just go build fun stuff and document cuz if you had been learning that stuff in the background and not sharing it and not being I mean was it really intentional like I'm going to I'm going to make these medium post so that I can get leads or is it more just a a natural expression of hey I just want to kind of put this out there as well because that's what I keep saying if you want to shortcut the so so many people spend two to three months learning and then try two to three months of marketing their inste you could have just been learning and marketing the whole way and building a personal brand and and even for you right now you don't have an agency technically it's all just done under your personal brand and you're doing this custom development on make um that was such a a smart move to you but was that really the the plan all along to be marketing as you were learning um no not really honestly no I just yeah naturally and now I see like how incredibly valuable it is um and I would urge anyone to do the same to just try and write stuff even if barely anyone reads it like you're going to build up such a nice catalog of stuff you've built um and that's going to be like be impressive either way it's also like it builds trust in people who like find you right so when they when they look at what you've done and they see like this backlog of just oh this guy's been writing about this for a year um that instills quite a bit of trust in people like oh this guy knows what he's talking about I know something that a lot of people struggle with is they they might get started on a on a platform and they run into issues how are you able to to get past the the roadblocks that you encounter because I know we have coaches the accelerator but were you using them and we using the uh YouTube or finding up people at medium how are you able to to progress and when you ran into those roadblocks how are you able to to get past because this the main issue when people are trying to get into even low code development they run into one issue and just have no clue how to solve it so I think an important piece that I kind of um I never really consciously thought about it but part is like um it's okay to quit at times so so it's okay to just like drop something like I'm going to look at this another day um and then just move to something else and then go back to it later I think especially like the going back to it is also important but at times just like okay I mean cut your losses right um it's fine um especially like I put a bit of time into learning zapier I put a bit of time into learning Eden I even did some custom coding projects for clients and I'm basically I'm not really going to do those anymore at this point because I feel like i' I've learned my lesson there like right I I know there's some valuable stuff that I learned there as well but I'm just going to I mean got your losses at times it's fine um and you got to find that sweet spot between easy to deliver and valuable because like if you yeah it could be could be really valuable for the client but if it's very difficult for you to deliver it's going to be you I mean we're building these businesses to to give us freedom and to give us some fulfillment from the work that we do if you're yes you might be making good money per project but if it's extremely stressful and the clients are always unhappy because of these things are really difficult to do it's not really in my opinion it's not how I want to run my business and it's probably not you in arounds either for sure I also think um it's like find what fits right so for some people they really like the de work and that's there's something to be set for almost everything um like the the massive projects the big projects the small ones um and I found what fits me uh took go out tried a bunch of stuff um and now I've like basically committed a bit more um but I actually know like this is the thing that I really enjoy and I would like advise people as well just go try out different things don't commit to one thing at the start I think that would be like a pretty Dental choice to just like commit to something too soon um at some points like it absolutely makes sense to um to uh to Niche down to make a choice and for me that was with make like learning it and uh now I'm like reaping the rewards yeah you got to have some kind of focus on that whether that's niching down to a a given Niche and decid to be an expert there but like you said you can Niche down to a type of solution or or a platform but as a beginner it's going to be so much easier to have some kind of focus as to where you want to go deep on um and and like you said you're reaping the reward to that now so umj that's that's been awesome I hope you guys have got some inspiration there as someone who's who had no development background but is is just focused on learning this new platform make and has made it work and is now doing custom development projects on there and supplementing his income and and hopefully soon uh transitioning out to a to a full full scale agency so SJ it's it's a pleasure to have you in the community um and looking forward to getting you on some coaching calls with our guys but yeah uh if you don't wants to reach out um and get in touch with SJ about his make capabilities I'll leave his links down below um and you can go check out some of his um I guess kind of your funnel and the way you've got it set up I know you've got that little store I'll leave as much information down below for for everyone else including a medium so they can take a look at how you're doing things so appreciate the time and hopefully have you on at a later date um to to give us an update