ok so i got laid off in february, lol. zoom call, 12 of us, lasted maybe 6 minutes. my manager said "navigating headwinds" like four times. i remember thinking at the time, what does that even mean. anyway. they hung up, i closed the laptop, sat on my couch and just kinda stared at the wall for an hour.
didn't cry or anything. didn't text my mom. i ordered tacos.
first two weeks were honestly… fine? i slept in. did all the chores i'd been putting off for months. watched a lot of youtube. told myself i was "taking some time." told my mom the same thing. she bought it for like a week, then started forwarding me job postings, which was annoying but i get it.
then the savings math started doing its thing in my head and i couldn't sleep.
rent is $1,650 a month. i had maybe 9 weeks of cash if i didn't do anything stupid. and every job posting in my field (marketing) had like 200 people applying and the listing was always something like "looking for someone with 5+ years in hubspot, salesforce, and marketo, growth mindset, must be comfortable wearing multiple hats" which is corporate speak for "we want one person to do 3 jobs for the salary of half a job." i'm 33. my resume says senior marketing associate at a company nobody outside marketing has ever heard of. cover letter, cover letter, cover letter. the cursor just blinking at me.
so naturally i started doomscrolling at 2am like a healthy person
the tiktok
ok this is the embarrassing part.
i was on tiktok at 2am and the algorithm had figured out i was unemployed because my fyp was just like… "how i quit my 9-5" content. most of it was bullshit obviously. but then this australian dude shows up, liam ottley, soft voice, sitting at a clean desk, holds up his phone to the camera, shows three stripe screenshots.
$24k. $31k. $28k. one month each.
caption was something like "selling AI receptionists to local businesses, this is what one month looks like"
i had no idea what an AI receptionist was. didn't know what vapi was. didn't even fully understand what he meant by "local business agency." but the screenshots looked legit and the comments were FULL of other people posting their own little stripe screenshots like "yep this is real, im at $8k MRR" and "started 4 months ago, $14k last month"
and i had 9 weeks of runway and zero pride left so i was like, ok fine. worst case i waste a saturday.
what he doesnt actually tell you
so i spent the next morning eating frosted flakes and watching like every liam video. and they all follow the same template. heres the niche (dentists, plumbers, salons, etc.). heres the tool (usually vapi, sometimes synthflow). heres the money (screenshot screenshot screenshot).
what is never in the video:
how to actually wire vapi up. what you actually charge. how you find a dentist who wants to pay you $1500/mo for a robot answering their phones. what you tell them when they go "wait how do i know this thing wont say something dumb to my patients." what happens when the system breaks at 2pm on a tuesday. like, actual operational stuff.
he doesnt put any of that in the video because the videos are basically ads for his $4k course. which is fine, im not even mad lol, thats the business. but i did NOT have $4k. i had like enough for groceries and to keep insurance going.
so i went to youtube. surely youtube would help right.
youtube made it worse honestly
searched "vapi tutorial." searched "ai agency for beginners." searched "how to sell ai to local businesses." got like 40+ tabs open in an hour and i was MORE confused than when i started which is impressive
every guy had a different stack. different prices. one guy said you should niche down on day 1, next guy said dont niche, test 5 niches at once. one guy said cold calling works great, next guy said cold calling will get you blocked instantly in 2026. one said you need a website, next said the website actually hurts conversion (?) just use a calendly link. there was a 19 year old kid bouncing in his chair and a 47 year old former enterprise sales guy and they were saying the OPPOSITE thing and they were both extremely confident about it
i closed the laptop and made tea. (im not a tea person normally but whatever it's a coping mechanism)
heres the thing about free youtube learning that nobody talks about. the info is all there technically. somewhere. but it's so fragmented and contradictory that you spend more time deciding WHO TO LISTEN TO than actually building anything. decision fatigue absolutely destroys your weekend and you end up with… nothing built. which is what happened to me, basically.
i needed someone to just hand me a path. like, just tell me which buttons to push, in what order.
buying a course (i was so against this)
ok so i grew up being told "the internet is free, never pay for information." which is mostly good advice. but i was clearly losing to that strategy.
budget was $200. anything over that and rent gets weird.
skool communities were like $97-$497/MONTH. so over 3 months thats basically as much as a liam cohort. nope.
coursera had some thing called "ai for business strategy." i skimmed the syllabus. it was like… a class. like an actual school class with discussion forums and a "week 3: introduction to neural networks" module. i dont need a neural network explainer. i need someone to tell me where the buy button is in vapi.
skillshare courses were all 45 mins total and ended right when they started getting good. like ok i now know what AI is, what do i DO
udemy - the good ones were from 2022 (so, ancient in AI years). the new ones had 60 reviews each from accounts that clearly bought it and dropped at minute 12.
i almost just gave up and went back to youtube tbh
THEN i found mindwand on reddit. someone had linked it in r/sidehustle, i think in a comment thread about coursiv (which is a different course, way more expensive). the reviews on mindwand were the thing that hooked me - they were oddly specific. people were quoting which lesson finally made it click. someone was complaining about a UI bug from like 2 releases ago. not the generic "great course!!!" you see on every other listing. and the price was way cheaper than i expected.
i screenshotted my chase balance, did the math twice (i actually did it twice because i didnt trust myself), and bought the 4 week plan. it was less than a tank of gas, basically.
ok so the course was actually good?
i had braced for the worst. my mental model going in was "guy reading slides into a webcam for 6 hours, i finish like 14% of it, i feel slightly worse about myself than before"
it was not that.
so it's broken up into days. each day is like 15 mins. there are these 4 characters that you follow and theyre basically 4 versions of me - the burnt out manager, the creator who cant focus, the freelancer drowning in client work, the salesperson dying inside. and the lessons arent like "heres the theory of prompting" - theyre like "marcus has a status update due in 10 minutes, his boss is mad, watch what he does." and then YOU do the same thing for your own work.
sounds gimmicky maybe. it worked tho. i actually finished it which has literally never happened to me before with any course. i think ive made it past 30% of like 0 other courses in my life. ZERO. with this one i was on day 14 by sunday night and day 28 by tuesday.
i think the real reason it works is that the format is dumbed down enough that you can do it WHEN YOURE TIRED. that's the thing. most courses get harder to come back to after a long day. this one i was doing on my couch with succession on in the background. and ok yes thats a backhanded compliment but like - finishing is the whole point. who cares if im doing it tired, im DOING it.
then nothing happened for 2 months
ok so. you take the course. you build the thing. and then? nothing happens. for a long time. nobody tells you about this part.
second weekend after starting i built my first AI receptionist for a fake HVAC business that i made up in my head. showed it to my actual cousin (who actually runs an HVAC company in suburban philly). he listened to it, smiled politely, said "yeah thats neat" and did not buy. lol.
i sent like 40 cold DMs to local business owners. 38 ghosted me. one said "send me a demo" then watched the demo and never replied. one said "we already have one" (THEY DID NOT have one, i checked, but ok).
i started posting short videos. "heres how AI answers a plumbing call." first vid: 80 views. second: 110. third: 64. i was changing everything - hooks, formats, with face vs without, music vs no music, captions vs no captions. just throwing stuff at the wall.
nothing was working. for a LONG time, nothing was working.
this is the part that no one fucking films for their tiktok. its 8 weeks of doing the thing and the thing is producing nothing. theyre filming month 6 when it works. not month 2 when it doesnt.
i almost quit twice. second time i actually did quit for 4 days. applied for a coffee shop job near my place. got the interview. was about to leave for it when i was like, ok if i take this i have to admit to myself that the whole AI thing was a dumb fantasy, and i wasnt quite ready to admit that yet. so i no showed the interview which is genuinely a really shitty thing i did, sorry to that manager on westmoreland, you deserved a text at least.
went back to making videos.
one video hit
mid may. i posted a video that was just a real recording of an AI phone system handling a "we have a clogged sink" call. you could hear the bot pick up, you could hear the customer relaxing on the other end because someone (something) actually answered at 8pm on a sunday. the audio was kinda muddy and i almost didnt post it.
180k views
12 DMs from real local business owners. 3 of them turned into paying customers - $400/mo each, one of them paid an extra setup fee. then a week later i posted basically the same video but for a dental office. 90k views. 2 more clients.
i'm not making liam ottley screenshot money lol. let me be clear about that. right now i make about $1,700/mo from the AI work, after costs. that's literally exactly my rent. that's it. that's my whole monthly income from this.
but. it's enough for now? it buys me time. time to keep posting. time to refine the demos. time to keep DMing dentists. time to not panic-apply to jobs that pay $58k and want me to wear multiple hats whatever the fuck that even means
im still applying to real jobs in the background, on the side. savings is slowly rebuilding. i sleep way better. the version of me sitting in that parking lot in february feels like a different guy.
the one tip everyone asks me for
people DM me now asking like, what was the trick, what format worked, what niche, what hook etc. and i hate that i dont have a good answer for them.
i really cant tell you. i did like 40+ videos. one of them blew up. the dental one and the plumbing one are basically the SAME video, same format, same hook structure. one did 90k the other did 12k. why? idk man. i shrugged and kept going.
the only thing i can honestly tell people, and it's the most annoying answer because its not a hack:
the people i've watched actually make this work are the ones who stayed in the boring middle longer than was reasonable. like, longer than felt healthy. if you quit at week 4, you dont see what week 5 was about to do. if you quit at week 7, you miss the week 8 hit. the prize is just locked behind some random number of weeks of nothing working, and the only key is staying in the room while nothing works.
thats it. thats the whole "secret." stick with it long enough and you'll figure out the bit you needed to figure out. sorry it isn't sexier i wish it was.
what i'd do differently if i started over
if you're broke-tuesday-night-version-of-me, here:
dont drop $4k on a cohort on day one. you literally do not know what you dont know yet. you'll burn the money on access you can't use.
pick ONE course that has actual structure. and finish it. not 30%. finish it. the completion is more important than which one you picked. the value is in your brain having the shape of what's possible end to end.
post your messy attempts on at least 2 platforms. dont pick one. you have no idea which one will hit and the cost of also-posting on the second one is like… 4 minutes.
set a 12-week mental timer. 12 weeks of consistent building/posting before you let yourself reevaluate. anything before that is just anxiety with a story attached. after 12 weeks you can honestly look at the data.
thats really all i got. im a guy who pays his rent now instead of refreshing his checking account every 6 hours wondering if he should sell his ps5. if youre at the refreshing-the-account part of this - i really hope something here was useful. dm me on tiktok if you want, im not selling anything, just curious how it goes for other people.