Road to $25K/month
$0 / $25,000Phases
Decide who you serve and what you sell. Nothing downstream works until this is concrete.
Domains, site, mail. Boring plumbing that takes real calendar time — start the clocks early.
Three ways leads reach you: cold email, platform sales, communities. Build all three.
The minimum back office that lets you take money without friction. Keep it thin.
The daily ritual. This is the step that actually produces customers — the rest is setup.
Measure the first project honestly, then turn that measurement into a rate.
$0→$10K is agility and consistency. $10K→$25K is systems. Different games.
What this roadmap claims
Now that you understand the journey your customers are going to take, what’s the best way to go about actually building your automation business? That’s what this roadmap is for.
Below is a complete, step-by-step guide that will cover every step involved in building an automation business. If you follow this 110-step roadmap from start to finish you will end up with a successful business that does $25K/mo. I’m assuming no network, no referrals, and no pre-existing skills (aside from automation)—if you have any of those, it will be even easier.
It starts logically and then prioritizes daily sales activities until you acquire your first customer. Each subsequent step builds on the one before it and before long you have everything you need to create your automation business.
Original Whimsical board ↗Credit where it's due
The roadmap itself — all 21 steps, every checklist item and every resource link — is the work of Nick Saraev, published as a public Whimsical board: Roadmap to $25K/Month With Automation. Go read the original, and go watch his videos — this is a way to work through his roadmap, not a replacement for it.
- · All 21 step titles
- · Every checklist item beneath them (~90)
- · All 50 resource links, affiliate links included
- · The customer-journey flow and its prose
- · Every fill-in-the-blank field (74 of them)
- · Reader's notes and effort estimates
- · The phase grouping (Foundation, Channels, …)
- · Computed values: positioning, dates, $/hr
Inside each step those two are badged, so you never have to guess which you're reading. Where a blank exists it's usually because Nick's own checklist implies one — step 1 tells you to pick a market segment, then a system type, then write “I build X systems for Y niche”. So this edition gives you three boxes and assembles the sentence. The narrowing is his; the boxes are ours.
Built for the Maker Zero community — and for anyone else working Nick's roadmap, wherever you happen to be on it. Nobody starts on step 1 forever, and nobody is behind.
This site is unofficial. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or reviewed by Nick Saraev or Maker Zero. Resource links are preserved exactly as they appear on the board, including his affiliate links.