Excited to be here! I come from a business consulting background, mostly working with finance, operations, and problem-solving. My obsession with efficiency and systems brought me here — eager to learn, build, and deliver real value to businesses. Looking forward to connecting, sharing, and growing with all of you. Any advice for someone starting completely from 0?

"Hey everyone, my friend have been using templates and customizing them for his portfolio. Do you think that’s a good approach, or should he build everything from scratch?" i think he should start from scratch.. give me your opinion too

I don’t know what I don’t know… What you recommend to a beginner(me or anyone else) that is fairly new to AI, I really only use chatgpt. Looking for any suggestions to any tools or any concepts to start looking into. Context: I am an solopreneur that runs a coaching business.

I’ve been trying to close my first client under my own name but haven’t succeeded yet, despite having: Worked with top agencies and big freelance clients Delivered real products (voice AI, automation tools, etc) A strong portfolio with detailed case studies A clean, decent website (www.7gence.com) A decent LinkedIn profile with some traction https://www.linkedin.com/in/muhammad-anas-zeb?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app A solid automation catalog and some demos. Still, no conversions. If you’ve closed your first client, what helped you do it? Also, if you can refer me to a decision-maker, I’m open to sharing a good percentage of profit on any closed deal which you bring towards me!

And no, this isn't another AI-generated post. Yes, unfortunately I actually spent an hour typing this all out in the hope it provides you all with some real value. I wanted to get on here and pass on some lessons I’ve learned in the last year starting up in this space. I'm doing it because I keep seeing people making the same mistakes I did, overwhelmed by all the tools and struggling to find clients. By trade, I'm a mechanical engineer currently completing my master's degree. When I started out, I got the same general advice from many people but didn’t receive these kinds of thoughts on the concrete work of learning and selling. Fast forward to now, I'm the founding engineer for my AI consulting and automation agency, and we've worked with New York City law firms, Long Island-based Private Equity firms, and a number of small businesses. I've been answering a lot of similar questions from people in this Skool, so I wanted to pass on what I can and hopefully save you all some time and money. If you find this valuable, give it a like so it can help other people feel less lost when they start out. I don't mind answering questions, so if you have any, feel free to shoot me a DM and I'd be happy to help you out. Don't Start with Building!!! I recommend you don't start with building something when you currently don't know what businesses will actually pay for. I understand you need to know and be able to work around the basics of building these systems. To get to that point, I’d recommend the community videos and then Make academy for make.com and then some n8n tutorials. This should give you the actual foundational knowledge you need for your first few projects. Honestly, we learned how to actually finish some of our first projects on the job. Once we had our technical foundation, then we just spent a day or two learning the knowledge we needed to get the project done. Remember, you can always just run deep research prompts on LLMs to figure out the actual specifics of how to build something. As long as you confirm it’s possible when you take the contract, it’s not the worst option to build in a few extra days to get up to speed on what you need.