Building My AI Agency from Zero: Month 1 Retrospective

Thirty days ago I decided to make it official. The GitHub org was created, the Notion workspace was set up, and I told exactly three people. Here's what actually happened.

The Plan vs. Reality

The plan was clean: spend the first two weeks building a portfolio site, week three on outreach, week four on discovery calls. Reality laughed at the plan.

What I actually spent my time on: debugging a client's broken Zapier workflow that was silently swallowing form submissions (six hours), writing a cold email sequence I never sent (four hours), and refactoring my own site three times (don't ask).

What Moved the Needle

The single highest-leverage thing I did was publish a short breakdown of how I automated a client intake CRM using n8n and Airtable. It got picked up in a no-code newsletter and drove more inbound than anything else that month.

Lesson: show the work, don't just describe it.

Numbers

• Inbound leads: 4
• Proposals sent: 2
• Closed: 1 (small retainer, $800/mo)
• Hours billed: ~14

Not retirement-tier, but month one of a solo agency rarely is. Month two targets are already set.

Next Month

I'm doubling down on the content-to-client pipeline and starting the game project in parallel. More on that soon.