If I Wanted to Make My First $100K/Month, I’d Do This

The exact blueprint I’d run from zero: what to sell, who to sell it to, how to sell it, and what to do once the customers show up.

Going from zero to a $100K month isn’t about grinding harder. It’s about following a proven blueprint.

My first two businesses failed. Not because I didn’t work hard, but because I didn’t know the right steps. Once I figured them out, I built and sold three multi-million dollar companies, and I’ve since walked thousands of business owners through these exact steps.

So grab a pen and write this down. Here’s the whole thing.

Step 1: Do the money math

Before you pick what to sell, decide what your $100K is actually made of. There are five ways to get there:

1. 1 person x $100K
2. 10 people x $10K
3. 100 people x $1,000
4. 1,000 people x $100
5. 10,000 people x $10

Now look at the extremes. One client at $100K is concentration risk, and it usually takes a mountain of skills to earn it. 10,000 people at $10 is a fantasy when you know about six people. Chasing $100 across 1,000 customers every month is a grind. And $10K deals feel like a lot when you’re starting.

What I like is the middle. You want to be more than a thousand, less than ten thousand. So start with a $1,000-a-month offer. Land about 100 customers at $1,000 each and you’re at $100K a month. That’s the target.

Run this same math with whatever your goal number is. Ours is 100K, so now we know the price. We just don’t know the product yet.

Step 2: Find the thing to sell

Start here: people only ever spend money on three things.

1. Time. Help me buy back my time and I’ve got unlimited capital.
2. Money. The easiest thing in the world to sell. “Want to make more money? Pay me some money, make more money.” That’s why sales training sells so well.
3. Status. Nobody thinks about this one. People pay extra to sit at the front of the room, drive certain cars, wear certain watches.

Pro tip: if you’re charging $1,000+ a month, sell to business owners. Small business owners can decide fast, because all three of those matter to them.

To find the actual offer, I use the Ikigai. It’s a Japanese framework built on four questions:

1. What do you love? If you don’t love it, you’ll quit doing it.
2. What are you good at? The better version of this question: what do people tell me I’m good at? Most of us discount our own skills. “Everybody knows this.” No, they don’t.
3. What does the world need? Go online. See what people are searching for and what topics are trending.
4. What will they pay for? This is the most important one. Plenty of people love doing something nobody will pay for. That’s a nice-to-have, not a must-have.

The center of those four is the thing you can do for the rest of your life that can literally make you millions.

Now, service or product? The easiest thing to start is a service. But the mistake is doing a bunch of custom work, because then you’re just selling your hours and there’s no leverage. Stay away from that. Products like apps, courses, and software are the other end, and they’re expensive and slow to build. Risky.

So here’s what I do: run a service, but package it like a product. A productized service means you do step one, step two, step three the same way for every customer, so you can make each step better over time. And if you get good at it, you can eventually turn that service into a product, funded by the money the service already paid you.

For the rest of this, I’ll use one example: an AI voice agent you sell to local businesses. Use your own if you want. I’ll just keep unpacking this one so you can see how it works.

Step 3: Build the offer

You know what you sell, how much you charge, and how many clients you need. Now put it all in one place a buyer can say yes to.

Rule one: don’t sell the work, sell the outcome. Don’t say “I do marketing for $1,000 a month.” Say “I’ll get you 10 new clients a month.” Features tell people what it is. Outcomes are what actually sell.

Then give them three tiers, not one. Most people make the mistake of offering a single option.

1. $500/month, do-it-yourself. All the playbooks you’d use internally to do this, except they run them.
2. $1,000/month, the core. This is the one you actually want to sell. You teach it and work with their team, so over time they can run it themselves while paying you monthly on retainer.
3. $10,000/month, done-for-you. Ten times the price, and you do everything for them.

The top and bottom tiers are decoys. What I want is to sell about 100 of the middle one every month to hit $100K. And the 10x tier does something sneaky: it makes the core offer look like an absolute steal.

Now design the offer itself, and yes, use AI. Every offer follows a format. Open the AI of your choice, give it everything from your Ikigai and the time / money / status work, then give it this prompt:

Build the offer for my productized service including every element of a great offer.

Every great offer has these pieces:

1. Outcome = the improvement you’re getting them in their business.
2. Deliverable = what they can expect from you every week and every month.
3. Price = what it costs. I like to call this “the investment.”
4. Risk reversal = “We guarantee 10 new leads a month.” “We guarantee one automated process that saves you 10 hours a week.”
5. Urgency = “I only have capacity for 5 new clients a month, and I’ve got 20 calls just like this this week. Want to lock in your spot? All I need right now is a $1,000 deposit.”

Then follow up with:

Build my premium and entry-level pricing tiers. Make my core offer look like an absolute steal.

And finally:

Send it to me as an offer doc I can send over chat as a link, and a pitch deck for sales calls. Ask me any question you need to get total clarity.

That last line is what I call reverse prompting. You make the AI interview you. Most people never teach that.

Quick note on the two documents. The offer doc is copywritten. The words walk the person through the offer and do the selling for you, right there in the document. The pitch deck is high-level. You present it in your own words on a call. The offer doc does the talking so you don’t have to.

One warning. When someone says “email it over so I can review it with my team,” that’s a no. They’ll take your beautiful doc and shop it around. “Oh, my buddy Bob does this.” And they hand your plan to Bob. Don’t do that.

Step 4: Create demand

Nobody is waiting for you. You have to create the leads. There are two engines: inbound, where people come to you, and outbound, where you go to them.

Don’t repeat my mistake. My first company was called Maritime Vacation. My dad wanted a cottage listing, I knew how to code, so I built him a website. Then I took it too far and built a whole app, and I sat there coding it for months. I built the product first. When I launched? Crickets.

When I started Flowtown, I did the opposite. I started with a blog and invested in content. It ended up doing over 350,000 unique visitors and drove 50,000 customers to our product. Instead of spamming people, I gave away my best stuff so they leaned in and asked, “what else do you have?”

Inbound is about talking to the pain. Here’s the hack: your offer doc already lists every deliverable. Go through it, and for each thing you’d do for a client, ask AI:

Give me 10 nuanced and observable problems my customer has around each of these pains.

Feed it your niche, like HVAC companies or small businesses. It’s basically an infinite content glitch. It hands you the specific scenarios your customer actually feels, and you make content that solves each one. Start with the hook. If I can explain my customer’s pain better than they can explain it to me, I’m the expert.

“But if I give it all away, what do they pay me for?” This is the cool part. What they pay for is the sequence. Step one might be “let’s audit what you’re doing today,” and step 100 is “let’s automate and set the whole thing up.” That order is the thing people buy. So in your content, you scramble it. Pain A1, then pain B2, across all the buckets. You give away everything you know how to do, but you keep the ordered process. I do this all the time. My videos give away my best stuff and teach people to solve their problems. The information of how you do what you do should be free.

Outbound is where most people jump straight to cold calling. Don’t start there.

1. Go to your phone first. Count your contacts right now. I bet it’s more than you think. Maybe 100, maybe 200. Some people have 20,000. That’s 20,000 people who can help you.
2. Ask past the person. Ask whoever you’re talking to if they know anybody with the problem. Half the time they go, “yeah, me.” Or they refer names. Then when you reach out, use the name: “I was talking to Bob, and Bob said I should reach out. I do this for people just like you. Is that something you have a problem with?”
3. Back it up with AI. If you run dry, tell it, “Build me a list of 100 people who need my services,” and get their phone and email. Tools like Social Sweep will pull and enrich the contacts from all your social and email connections into an address book you can actually call.

Then build a funnel: outbound, follow up, make the ask, close the deal. A simple spreadsheet to track your messages and follow-ups is enough to get you on a sales call, make the offer, and get paid.

Outbound is short-term, inbound is long-term. If you’re asking where I’d start, I’d start with outbound and run the content game in parallel. That’s how you build a foundation to hit $100K a month.

Step 5: Close the deal

The thing that stops most entrepreneurs is they won’t go door to door, won’t send the texts, won’t make the call. Not you. There are two ways to close: sell by chat, or make calls.

Sell by chat first. I’ve personally made eight figures over social media chat. When someone follows me, I ask them one question: are you here for the content, or are you looking for help growing your business? End on the “help” outcome, so they either say “oh, I’m just here for the content” or “actually, how can you help?” Then you ask questions, make them pain-aware, present your solution, and send the link to your offer doc. When they say “I’m in,” you send the payment link. I use Stripe. Set up an account, keep it simple, and watch them enter their card.

Pro tip for chat or call: bring up their objections before they do. They’re obstacles before they surface them, and objections after. So ask early: “Do you have a budget to solve this problem?” Handle them while they’re still obstacles.

Calls are simpler than you think. If you sell to businesses like real estate agents, HVAC, or lawyers, their numbers are online. Ask AI for a list. Here’s my cold-call opener: “I’ve got nothing to sell. I’m just curious whether you’re having this problem, and whether you’ve looked at solving it. If you have, this is what I do for people just like you, and we can schedule a quick call so I can dive deeper. I’m assuming you’re busy.” My job on a cold call is not to sell. It’s to qualify and book a meeting from a meeting.

Here’s roughly how one goes:

• “Hi, who am I speaking to?” “This is David.”
• “David, quick question. Have you spent any time looking at using AI to answer calls like this one, so you can book appointments while you’re working with clients? I’ve got nothing to sell, just wondering if it’s something you’re looking into.”
• “Honestly, not yet. I’ve just been busy.”
• “Most people in your space aren’t answering calls anymore, because the AI does it for them and they make more money. If I could show you how to do that, is that something you’d be interested in?”
• “Yeah, I like it. Fine, 15 minutes.”
• “Great. Do you have time tomorrow at this time? I’ll send you a Zoom link and demo the software live. Then I’ll text you the link to confirm.”

Book the meeting from the meeting. After that you can pre-qualify, give them a reason to show up, and say “let me know if there’s any reason you can’t make it.”

And don’t get discouraged. The first five calls are throwaways, so just get them done. Nobody cares. If it goes to voicemail, leave one and call right back. Most people have their phone on do not disturb, but a second call within a few seconds rings through. Over time, feed your script to AI and it’ll tell you exactly where you’re stumbling.

Every no gets you closer to a yes, and a yes gets you closer to $100K a month. My rule is to get to 100 no’s a day. Hit that level of rejection and you’re going to be rich.

One more thing: get paid before you spend. No equipment, no software, no anything until customers buy. Then tell them “I can only start in two weeks.” Close 10 customers in a week and you’ve bought yourself a week to get ready, with money already flowing in.

Step 6: Now build the thing

Notice this is last. You’ve already done the hardest parts of being an entrepreneur: the content, the chats, the calls, and you have customers. That’s the hard part.

If you’re building something with real lead time, like software, use the marketing and the calls to build a waitlist first. Say: “We’re just starting to call people in your area to see if there’s demand for this. If you’re interested, I can put you on the waitlist, but I need to get on a call with you.” Get on the call, show them what you’ve got, and watch them say “oh my god, that’s amazing.”

Build a waitlist of 10, 20, 50, 100 people and you have validated demand to go build. Better yet, have them pay to be on it. Every product I launch, I put up a website with a waitlist before I build a thing, and I let people pay $50 to jump to the top. That $50 is proof, with their own money, that they have the problem and want it solved the way I described it. No payment, no proof. And if I can pre-sell what I’m about to build, then I have the money to actually build it. With AI, this is the easiest part. You can stand up the site, the waitlist, the automation, even the payments, without knowing how to code.

So, are you going to do it?

Now you know the steps. Sit down and design the product or service. Run it through your Ikigai. Check it against time, money, or status. Use AI to craft the offer. Then start making the calls.

It sounds simple because it is. The only real question is whether today is the day you actually do the work. Don’t overcomplicate it. One clear offer, and one clear conversation where the right person has the pain and wants it solved the way you talk about it, will build the momentum you’ve been looking for.

Most people don’t even start. That’s not you.

-DM