I get asked all the time how to hit $10,000 a month selling AI services, and most people make it way harder than it needs to be. So let me walk through the exact strategy I'd use if I were starting over tomorrow. You need roughly two to three clients a month paying $1,500 to $2,500 each for productized deliverables—something like a CRM setup, a cold email system, or a lead gen automation. These are scoped tightly enough that you can deliver each one in a week or less, which means you're not drowning in revision cycles or scope creep. To fill that pipeline, I'd send around 150 cold emails a day across five warmed-up accounts at 30 sends each. When you factor in sequence steps, that averages out to about 75 new prospects per day. At a 3% positive reply rate—which is roughly where my own campaigns land—that's two to three warm conversations per day. Close one or two a week, and you're at $10,000 a month. The thing that accelerates this beyond cold email is Loom personalization. On Upwork or in direct outreach, a 2-3 minute Loom where you walk through the prospect's specific problem and show a mock-up of your solution will outperform a text proposal every single time. You're demonstrating competence before they've paid you a cent, and that collapses the trust gap that normally takes weeks of back-and-forth to close. Once you land that first client—even if it's $200 or $500—the upsell path is where the real money lives. One of our first clients at LeftClick started as a $500 Upwork gig and turned into a $16,000 recurring engagement. The initial project was just the client feeling me out, and once I delivered well, the bigger work followed naturally. That's why I tell everyone in Maker School to take whatever they can get early on, even if the rate feels low. People who closed their first project within 30 days averaged over 5x the total revenue of people who spent months chasing a perfect first deal. And when you start bumping up against your capacity ceiling, productize before you hire. At $5,000 a month, anyone you can afford is going to need heavy training and won't match your output quality. Instead, take your $5,000 custom builds and package them into a $2,000 standardized deliverable you can ship five times a month. I broke this all down on my channel with live demos of the Loom outreach, the Instantly email setup, and the full lead scraping workflow. Link in the comments. P.S. I teach this process inside Maker School—over 2,000 members building AI automation businesses and landing clients within their first month or two: https://bit.ly/4l09oQQ