Build guide

I Tried Building an AI Automation Agency at 22. Here's What Happened After 75 Days

What actually happened in the first 75 days of building an AI automation agency at 22.

VapiMake.com
Dec 30, 2025
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This one's a story, not a build-along - here's the write-up version.

What happened

I spent 75 days building an AI automation agency from zero. This is the honest scoreboard, the mistakes, and the handful of tools that actually moved the needle.

Quick origin story: I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole into Liam Ottley's vlog channel, which led me to his main channel, which made me start believing in the whole mission. The pitch is simple - around 90% of small businesses have no idea how much AI automation could do for their specific workflows. The job is to act like a transformation partner: understand what problems they have, figure out what gets transformed with automation.

I've been around the online business space long enough to watch the e-commerce era and the SMMA wave come and go. My bet is AI automation agencies are the next one - and worst case, you build skills in the fastest-growing tech space. There's no lose-lose here.

The scoreboard at day 75

The graphs don't do it justice, but that's the real state of it. Not a Lambo screenshot - a start.

The six tools that changed everything

  1. Wispr Flow - probably the most useful pickup of the whole run. Your brain moves faster than your hands can type. Instead of typing and retyping a prompt into ChatGPT, you just say what you want fixed. It cleans the ums and filler on the way out. Mandatory.
  2. A YouTube speed controller - a Chrome extension that pushes playback past the built-in 2x cap. A lot of these videos ramble about nothing (like right now); fast-forward through it and keep the actual content.
  3. Screen Studio - what I record and edit these videos with. Makes the quality 10x better out of the box.
  4. A transcript → summary pipeline - once you're in this space you have a firehose of 10-20 videos a day you "should" watch. For the ones you only need the gist of: drop the link into youtube-transcript.io, copy the transcript, and run it through a summary prompt. Two-minute read instead of a 20-minute video on 2x.
  5. Notion - my brain. All the operational side of the business lives there: logins, everyday tasks, which projects are active. I run my personal life on it too.
  6. Google Workspace - where the actual work lives: system prompts, iterations, presentations, content folders.

Content is real estate

One idea that pushed me to start posting: as the AI automation industry grows, your content becomes more valuable. Anyone starting right now is an early adopter. Don't wait for perfection - my first posted build was a tweet bot. Post anything. The edits get better on their own, and you slowly figure out which tools you actually want in your stack.

Voice agents: least work, most reward

Of everything I built, voice agents were the highest reward for the least work. Instead of a small business hiring a full-time receptionist, they get an agent that's available 24/7 and never misses a lead - plus bilingual support, which makes customers comfortable. Those two points alone make it gold to a small business. I used Vapi for the system prompt side and ElevenLabs for the bilingual voices.

What I'd steal from this

Resources

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