My experience breaking free from the 9 to 5 race (The “boring” way)
You might have seen these online gurus telling you how they make $100,000 a month simply by clicking a few buttons, showing their luxury cars and flexing their Rolex, telling you that if you buy their $499/month course you will get to the exact same point in no time. They sell you the dream, you buy the course expecting to get the same results, but soon you realize that it is not as easy as they tell you it is.
I was in the same place as you, trying to find the next big idea that would turn me into a “millionaire” before I turned 25, but after years of trial and error I finally found the method that allowed me to quit my 9 to 5 and start enjoying life.
The first dollar
So it was around 2022, I couldn’t make it to college and I already had some traditional jobs like customer service, personal assistant and others. But by October I was hired by a Lead Generation Agency where I worked as a VA for 3 months before being promoted to staff, where I met Sebastian, a guy about my age that was passionate about crypto and businesses. During lunch we used to hang out and talk about how college was a scam and how other people our age were becoming millionaires simply by using their computers, so we took the decision to quit our job after 8 months in and start an SMMA.
After months of studying the SMMA model, contacting leads and getting nowhere, we decided to take separate ways, but I was sad, because I had already quit a stable income and spent so much time learning about the business, about how to run Facebook Ads and got nothing in return.
So, after some time of thinking I decided to change the approach and I started contacting people via Facebook Groups, and decided to pitch the deal in a different way, so I decided to pitch a commission-only deal. This might not be the most attractive way, but that is what allowed me to make my first dollar. I got my first client, a Shein reseller that wanted to promote their products via social media. After the first month I was able to make my first $1000 from that deal alone. This was not life-changing money, but it allowed me to make my first dollars just with a computer and internet access.
The fall and the big opportunity (Discovering AI)
I continued working on the SMMA business by myself, delivering some good results to a few clients that I was able to get during the first months of the agency, but I realized that this business model was only scalable with a fixed price per client, but since almost every business has been through the same pitch and got nowhere, it was harder to get clients that were willing to pay a big amount on a monthly basis.
It was October 2025 and I had already lost several clients and wasn’t able to get more, so I was forced to go back to a traditional 9 to 5. I was so frustrated, after experiencing what not having a boss was like, I wasn’t happy with the idea of going back, but I had to do it.
I started working for a company that was doing an Amazon FBA business, but the work was really stressful because I wasn’t just handling the Amazon business, but I was also doing web and app development with AI, I was creating automations, chatbots (which I had never created before) and lots of other tech tasks without a college degree in computer science, and besides that I was also doing warehouse work at that company, all for the same exact salary. Until I realized something… I was already doing a lot of things with AI that other businesses need, like AI chatbots, websites, apps, etc. So that was the moment I decided to take another shot and start my own business using AI.
Escaping the 9 to 5
So it was mid February of 2026, I was tired of all the things I was doing for this company and being underpaid for my work, and I decided to run some Facebook Ads with the limited budget I had and decided to offer web development services. I got my very first client that requested an Online Store, so I used Shopify for this, but I noticed that there wasn’t much customization into it. Anyway, I got the Online Store completed and made a few hundred from that sale. But I noticed that it would take a lot of time to make the websites by myself, so I decided to start using the tool I was already using… Opencode.
After that first client I decided to quit the company where I was working, and decided to go all in on this. So I turned on the Facebook ads again and got another client, a window cleaning business, asking for a basic landing page. I realized that I could build the website with AI in 1 hour and sell it as a custom website, but the thing was that the client didn’t have much budget, so I closed that deal for $997. That deal helped me to get another client for a similar price, and then another and another.
Most people tell you that you can sell an AI website for $5000 and that you only need to sell 2 websites to make $10,000 a month. But let’s be honest, not all businesses are willing to pay a stranger $5000 for a website that they already know is built with AI. So that’s when I did the math… I don’t need 2 $5000 clients, which are really hard to get, but I can get 10 $997 clients and still make money from it. So I decided to pitch the websites at a lower price, and that’s when things changed.
The realistic results of this
I started pitching the websites around this $997 price and I was able to get more sales from this, which was better than pitching a $5000 website and making no sales. I can’t say that I made $10,000 from this or that I am making that now, but I was able to make between $3,500 and $5000 per month by selling them. Now, in September 2026, I still make AI websites for a living, making money from anywhere I want, enjoying some time with my family, working on more projects and working on other business ideas with the goal of hitting that $10,000 on MRR goal.
This story is not about how I became a millionaire with AI, but a proof that you can actually make a living with AI with the proper systems and simply by taking the time to learn and the courage to start a business. I didn’t have a guarantee that I could make it, but I decided to go all in and learned how to make AI work for me in order to be free.
Final Thoughts: Don’t go after the big fish, start small
Using AI to make money online is easy. The hardest part is to get people to pay you for using it, especially when they hear a big price for something they know can be done with AI. But once you learn that you don’t need one big client but 4 or 5 small clients to make it, you will be able to make it.
Challenge: Think about the skills you have, think about how you can use those skills to help other businesses and what would be a fair price that you would pay for what you do. Don’t think about big numbers, but be realistic, and start pitching your offer to a few friends to test your offer. Then, go ahead and start pitching some real clients.
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