I made $23,000 yesterday. Here’s How I Did It.

• 60 plus articles published on LinkedIn.
• A newsletter with a 75% open rate.
• A comment on LinkedIn: “We should talk.”
• A dozen emails that went nowhere.
• 6 coffee chats that “might be something later.”
• Quite a few memos to make sure we are all on the same page.
• 3 proposals because suddenly a committee was involved.
• 1 long talk with my inner “Imposter” because this was a new industry, and a new vertical to me.

I made $23,000 the old-fashioned way. I worked for it.

Not from some funnel hack. Not because I discovered a “one weird AI trick.”

It took four months. Four months of calls, coffees, emails, proposals, rejections, rewrites, and follow-ups that went into the void. Four months of doing the unsexy work that no LinkedIn guru ever brags about because it doesn’t fit on a Canva slide.

Yesterday the invoice landed. That’s it. That’s the whole story.

The $23K didn’t come from shortcuts; it came from a pipeline I kept alive one polite follow-up at a time. It came from conversations where I brought a point of view, not just enthusiasm. It came from saying no to “quick favors” and  “Can we see a proof of concept first?”. That’s both giving away the milk and the cow. And my dignity.

It came from building trust.

I use AI every day. My clients have come to expect it. They see it as a signal: speed, depth, and cost efficiencies. AI gets me to sharper drafts, deeper insights, and cleaner structures, faster. But AI did not close this deal. Hacks, GPTS, and Hooks weren’t involved.

What closed the deal was face-to-face, human-to-human conversations. Lots of questions, but listening more than talking. Saying “I don’t know, but that’s what we’ll discover. Together.” That’s what moves people across the line. Not that I can spin out memos, narratives, and expanded strategies via well-considered discussions with an AI.

It was everything before the prompt.

That meant showing up for meetings 15 minutes early. Delivering meeting notes as promised. Dropping some links into their WhatsApp that help move the conversation forward, and signal that I am engaged in their problem before the deal is signed. You know, the stuff we did before AI was a thing. The work. Human work.

So no, I don’t have a GPT Hack to sell you. No mastermind group. No Bali lifestyle playbook. The only advice worth giving is this: do the work that compounds. Relationships compound. Reputation compounds. Thinking compounds. Showing up compounds.

AI is here. It’s not going away. It’s in my process every day. But let’s be clear: AI doesn’t build trust. AI doesn’t sit across a table and admit, “I don’t know, but let’s figure it out together.” AI doesn’t show up early, send the notes, or care about whether the links I dropped into a WhatsApp thread mattered.

But I do.

That’s how you “make $23K in a day.”

I’ll end with this – when I scheduled the meeting to close the business, it was done over a coffee. Face to face, not an email, not a video call, or a WA ping. The best part was that when the prospect, now my client, opened his notebook, to go thru some final questions, my business card was there, as a bookmark.

Before even getting to the questions, he took the card and held it for a moment. “I really like your card,” he said. “I don’t know why we stopped using these.”

If you want to make $23,000, I can’t help you, other than what I have already stated. If you want to make $123,000, maybe we can partner towards that. I always have time for a coffee and chat.

But if you want to spend $23K, or $123k, I can definitely show you how.