I QUIT My Software Engineering Job & Made $300k with Claude Code

Key Takeaways

I quit my six-figure software engineering job to sell AI solutions and it was the best decision I ever made. Making nearly $50,000 a month, getting $200,000 acquisition offers, >> [music] >> and being featured on Business Insider were just the start of my post 9-5 journey. Since then, I've helped countless other 9-5 workers build their own AI business >> [music] >> and in this video, I want to help you build a profitable AI business part-time. As you can see right here, I quit my $150,000 tech job to sell AI. I was a software engineer, but I've quit and like I said, it was the best decision I ever made. Now, what this video is not is a quit-your-job video. I'm not telling you to quit your job, nor is this a motivational speech of me trying to say, "Hey, come be like me." This is me telling you my story, the honest version, and what I wish I knew, honestly, before quitting my job to sell AI, and the steps that allowed me to become successful in it. Now, the leap is not the thing that helped me become successful in the AI business niche. It's not because I quit my job that I was able to make $50,000 a month. It's because I had a proper system in place. Now, let me walk you through that system, exactly how this all came to happen. Now, one quick thing before we start, one of my mentees, Ramsey, told me that before he started taking action, he used to watch videos like this for almost a year. What was different the day he decided to take action was he stopped pretending that he could do all this himself. That's [music] it. That was the only mental shift that occurred. Now, this is the gap that I couldn't let see, right? This is what you can build versus what they pay you for. >> [music] >> What I can build and what most software engineers and anyone with tech experience can build at this point, even without tech experience with the way cloud code is moving, you can build in just one Saturday an AI solution that is probably worth 5 to $10,000. Okay, this can be an AI voice receptionist. This can be an AI content OS. This can be some sort of AI lead generation system. >> [music] >> Everything can be built very quickly with the power of cloud code and cloud code work. Now, funny enough, my bi-weekly salary was about 5.2k, right? With about nearly $11,000 uh every month every month. So, [music] my salary, no matter how better I got my building, no matter how much more I learned about tech and AI, the salary was [music] the same, right? In every single passing day, I was basically paying a tax, right? Every 2 weeks, that that salary was not moving. Whereas, if I have my own business, >> [music] >> the more I learn, the more upgrade myself, the more I can move the needle forward, the more I can make. And this is why they say tech is golden handcuffs because you're paid nicely in tech. Let's be honest. I mean, you all can be making $150,000 if you're like me. You can be earning way more like 250k, 350k. If you look at levels.fyi, you can see a bunch of salaries of software engineers and it kind of rivals doctor salaries almost, right? But, the the problem with that is >> [music] >> you will always be under salary. You will always be restricted on your growth, right? You don't have limitless growth. You have a a a certain time frame of when you can get promoted, right? You're not getting promotion every year. You're most likely getting promoted maybe once your first year and then you have to wait 3 more years for your next promotion. So, your salary, right? [music] It will increase after like maybe year one, year two, year three, but then it's going to be stagnant for a bit until you become like a senior engineer or reach a senior position. And as your salary increases, your ability to leave is going to decrease cuz you're going to get complacent, you're going to get comfortable, right? I mean, if you're making $150,000 $250,000 a year, it is very easy to get comfortable and be like, "You know what? This is This is pretty nice. I like life like this." But, you know that you are you have a skill set of being able to do so much more. You have the potential to do so much more. I mean, if you have a tech, you know, experience and you're a developer, you can build faster than anyone else. Yes, cloud code makes it easy for no-code, you know, people like business majors or a marketing agencies to start building these solutions, but as a developer, you have that advantage. Cloud code, you can learn probably within 2 seconds. But, [music] you are someone who's in the golden handcuffs, you're not even taking that action, right? [music] So, every raise is almost like buying more of your freedom, right? The company knows that the the way they have their salary structured, the way they have the promotion structured, is to keep you in the company for longer. That's why they, you know, your stocks are vested, right? You have to be at the company for, let's say, 4 years until you get all your stock compensation. >> [music] >> Corporate America knows what they're doing. Now, the moment salary stopped mattering to me was on a late Thursday where my manager wanted something done the following day. And this task that was to be completed wasn't a part of my weekly sprint. It wasn't my assigned task under my team's, you know, weekly task structure. What this was was a task that was to build some sort of AI agent that would help the company, would help my team, but it wasn't a core responsibility. This is kind of like a side task that was expected of me just because I knew how to build AI agents. And at the time, this is very early. I mean, guys, this is like late 2024, early 2025, right? AI agents weren't what they are now. So, me having that skill despite being this patient so long, my manager, my my team, they knew and they knew I could deliver on this. But, [music] even if I did, even if I was able to, you know, build this and save the company tens of thousands of dollars cuz AI, obviously, is one of the best ROI investments any company can make, I was not getting paid more for this. In fact, the AI agent that was going to be I going I was going to build, if I had built that as an agency founder, I would probably charge about 25 grand for [music] maybe 20 grand. But, as a salaried employee, there's no bonus. Maybe $3,000 end-of-the-year bonus. I mean, come on. And I actually got like a 3.2k end-of-the-year bonus. Like, come on. [music] Like, that I am missing out on 8x the gains because I'm under salary. So, at that point, I mean, it really just stopped becoming about the salary. It became about how many more Thursdays. And I think that was the mental shift where I was like, "Yeah, I think I'm going to leave my company." And it was the craziest decision that all my friends thought I ever made as well as my family. My family was not happy about this. But, eventually, I did quit my job and there was a period where in the beginning, I was revamping my agency that I was running for some time at this [music] point. And I had good amount of success, but because of the revamp, I had to take a hit financially and the hit was much bigger than I expected. I mean, one of my softwares kind of started glitching and it resulted in a huge dip in revenue. So, [music] that first month after I quit, that software only brought in $2,000, whereas before that, it was bringing like $7,000 a month. And you know, $7,000 a month was a little bit under my $11,000 month salary, >> [music] >> but $2,000 is a lot a lot less. So, I had an email written to my old manager saying that, "Hey, is there any way that, you know, potentially I could come back? Maybe be talking to HR, whatever whatever, you know, it might be, right? >> [music] >> And I'm sure everyone who's ever, you know, done something on their own, maybe left their 9-5, had this exact same idea. I regret [music] leaving. Maybe I should have stayed. But, that's when um if you are able to make that decision of staying and betting on yourself, I think the best investment is on yourself, right? So, if you're betting on yourself to stay in this, [music] you know, hustle entrepreneurship life, it will pay off. As long as you're putting the work consistently, you're going to see gains. And this I'm about to show you the in the rest of this video, how quick this run-up happened after deciding not to send this email and [music] just stay with the journey. So, my first client after my horrible month and not sending the email, I began doing outreach on LinkedIn. Um and this is a very easy process to follow. The system is is pretty straightforward. From a high level, it's to do outreach on LinkedIn using LinkedIn Sales Navigator. There's certain filters you have to do to really dial in your ICP. Once you do that, you get them on a discovery call. And again, make sure on the discovery call you're following the certain steps that will help you close a deal. So, that would be pre-call assets, on-call um closing, as well as the post-call PRD that you send to the client. >> [music] >> They see the PRD, they get closed, and this was a $2,000 boring win, but this was enough to tell me that, "Okay, you know what? This agency is being revamped. It's being very good. Let's go ahead and double down on this system." So, good thing is once a machine works, you know, you can make it work again. Um and when you have a system, the more you turn the same system, the more results it's bringing in. You just got to add more fire into it. You just got to build more systems around it so that way that core system is constantly bringing in new revenue. So, this LinkedIn outreach system that I've been building for now 2 years has been my go-to strategy anytime I want to secure a a 2k deal, a 20k deal, or even a 35k deal, right? It'll be all through the exact same system. I just have to switch my ICP. That's Here's an example of the compounding that I quickly saw. So, if you look at my month one where I revamped my agency, it was 2k. Month two was 9k. Month three was 15k. Month four, which had a huge jump of nearly $10,000 from month three, was 25 grand. And this is because testimonials and credibility from the previous 3 months started piling up. Uh so, anytime I reached out to new client, I could just link a video demo of a previous project I had built to for a previous client to attract the new client. And this compounded. The more testimonials you get, the more video testimonials you get, the more proof of work, the more video demos you have of solutions you build, the easier it is to secure the next client. It creates a big snowball effect. By month five, I was nearly making quadruple my corporate income uh month to month. And at this point, you know, you you're not that guy who or girl who quit their job. You're someone who who has a business now. And [music] you know, my my business I was running part-time while at my company. This is not something that you have to, you know, do exclusively. You have to pick one. No, you can do both. In fact, I have most of them the mentees I work with are having their AI business part-time. Yes, some of them are earning more with their AI business than their full-time job, but they're still doing both. And the dual income, you know, is a great great lifestyle to live, right? It's a lot of income that you can generate. But again, it's not required to leave your job, but if you want to do full focus on the AI business, you know, it's it's it's a journey and it's very possible. And once you're hitting numbers like this, you know, you're no longer that person who is known for quitting their job, you're known as a person who has a business. Oh, you're a founder, you're an entrepreneur, you have a successful business. It's not no longer, "Oh, you're that guy who left his job last week." No, that's not you, right? You're the guy who runs a business that makes like 50K a month, right? That's the type of credibility you'll start getting in among your friends, your family, um among the online social media space if you do start posting online, uh furthermore. [music] And most people who quit would never cross this line, like this uh [music] I am a business owner, because what what's going to happen is they'll quit, they have no systems, nothing, so they try, you know, they try dirty scrappy methods to get clients, doesn't work out, not sustainable, now they're sending that email back to the manager asking for a job, which [music] you don't want to be doing if you already quit. Now, you don't have to quit, okay? This isn't Again, this is not a quit your job video. I have worked with so many clients now one-on-one helping them build their AI business. 99% of them are doing [music] this part-time. Yes, a good amount of them are making more money through their AI business than their full-time job, but that doesn't mean they have to quit the full-time job. I mean, who doesn't want dual income? Imagine you have a high-paying full-time job and you're able to have proper business systems where you can have AI business on the side that you maybe only spend 10 hours a week on. And now you're earning multiple six figures. Like this is honestly the new American dream uh of like 2026, right? To have a eat the multiple businesses, have a job with a business. So that way, worst-case scenario, if you ever get laid off from your company, you have a business to fall back on. I mean, Oracle just laid off 30,000 employees 4 days ago. Imagine that was you and you had no business to fall back on. That would be pretty sticky of a situation to be in. Now, I just walked you through the master version of this. And if you're still sitting there going, "Okay, cool. I know I can have this business, but I don't have a year of runway where I can maybe quit my job or I don't have enough time to have a job as well as an AI business." Well, this next part of the video is for you. Now, looking back on decision, was it a bit hasty? Maybe, okay? Because the story that you just heard, there was a lot of different factors that led me to the success. Cuz not everyone's going to make $40,000 a month in the like by their fifth [music] month, right? There was runway. I had the business prior, okay? So I it was already earning some money, so I had runway. Worst-case, my business depletes, I have money to fall back on. Then, I had existing skills. I was a developer, just like you if you're watching this video most likely. I could build, all right? I had these existing skills, so I could pick up new AI technologies very quickly. >> [music] >> And I mean, now at Cloud Code, you don't really need this portion anymore. You just need like some core training and you'll be fine. Timing. I was in a time where AI was I mean, it still is very early, but it was even earlier when I left my job. And then I had family support. Not everyone has a family that would be happy if they left their job and be willing to support them. I mean, my family was pretty upset with it, but they still supported me, they still believed in me. Some people don't have that, you know, family that believes in them, and that's totally understandable. So I had these factors going in for me, which allowed me to end up quitting my job. And if you removed any one of these in this story, it just might not happen, right? But again, the leap wasn't the thing that worked, it was just a thing that I did. The thing that actually worked was a system I eventually built. With proper AI systems for your own business, that's what's going to allow you to sell AI systems to other businesses without, you know, spending 30, 50 hours a week. Now, remember, I had no one to guide me, nor no blueprint to follow to be able to have a very profitable AI business. A lot was through trial and error. Now, on the flip side, I'm here to help you, so so you don't have to go through the same trial and errors I had to. The path that I wish I'd, you know, had was [music] would be the following. Stage one would be to keep the salary, okay? The paycheck is a funding. Every month, you know, you're able to get paid from your full-time job to figure out what the hell you want to do part-time and have it be profitable, all right? What AI solutions you want to build? What niche do you want to target? You have that mental freedom as well as a financial freedom to do so. Next, you want to build a machine. Spend your Saturdays building some sort of AI system. Maybe build two or three so you can test them all and see which AI system of yours people are actually willing to pay for. And you know, work on your ideation. Work do your proper competitor research. Work on your offers. Then, you want to validate. Can you get at least three clients while employed in the fourth to five-figure range? If so, you've cracked the code. 90% of AI agencies can't even get their first two clients because they have no sort of system, no lead acquisition system, no offer system, no proper ideation competitor research. I mean, I work with people who before they start working with me, they tell me, "Hey, I've been spending like 2 3 months building you know, this app or this uh website and or this agency and I have only about $600 per month in revenue." I'm like, "Man, 3 months only for $600 a month in revenue?" And mind you, they're they're spending like at least 20 30 hours a week on this. It's because they have no proper system that they're following, no offer system, like none of that stuff. So they're just spending all this time hitting a brick wall. And they're not able to go past that brick wall. >> [music] >> So, please before you ever decide to make any sort of jump that can be kind of risky, first three clients while employed and this will also help you not panic price, which basically means, you know, pricing your system at $500 setup fee with maybe only [music] $10 a month because you know that you need the paycheck, so you don't want to uh not lose a deal, right? I mean, if you're building a an AI system for example, car dealerships and you're only charging $500 one time, you're missing out on so much revenue, right? But if you have a job, you are able to know your worth, know your value, not panic price, and you can charge the $4,000, $5,000 setup fees that you deserve to charge for an AI system that helps, let's say, car dealerships secure more leads, right? And then eventually when your MRR is greater than your salary for 3 months straight, >> [music] >> that is when you can think about leaving, all right? If you want to. Again, I'm not here to tell you to, right? But that's that that was my motto. If I was able to make um more than my salary, then I decided that yeah, it's time to to leave, right? But granted, I I did do that for like multiple months on end, I didn't leave because I was able to balance both very easily and then dual income did feel nice, but it became to the point where I was like, "Okay, if I really want to make, you know, 50, 60, 70K a month, I got to leave, all right? If I really want to hit those super big goals, >> [music] >> this is the way." An example is two mentees of mine, uh Joshua Joseph, so the same person, and Chloe. They quit after just some traction in their AI business and they quit their media production design jobs. And then they then scale to $10,000 a month within the 6 weeks of working with me, right? [music] Right after they had left their media production job. But they already had some sort of motion in their AI business and they knew that, you know, they had people interested, no one was closed, so they didn't actually hit this step. It was a bit of a risky move, but I mean, it all worked out, right? Within 6 weeks they hit the 10K a month and this is their the screenshot they sent me or text they sent me um when they got their first client, which was amazing. Setup 2K and then monthly 490. I think it's in euros cuz they are in France. So, you know, the leap that I the the I quit my job, you know, title you see on YouTube that a lot of YouTubers use, it does make the YouTube title look nice, it makes the video look nice, but at the end of the day, it's a four-stage path/system that will actually get you to the results. Now, here's a readiness test that you need to follow. Uh the four numbers I look at before any mentee leaves that I work with. >> [music] >> One is runway. How many months can you survive? Because I don't want you to be pressed for funds. Second is side revenue. Uh what the machine is already doing? Like how much is your business currently making? >> [music] >> Right? I've had mentees who come in, you know, and will start working with me at 2K a month and I've helped them scale to 10K a month. And at that point is, you know, you're earning six figures a year, so of course you can quit. But then, I've had mentees who are starting from absolutely from $0, right? So they shouldn't quit until they're making like that 10K a month, 6K a month at least. Um >> [music] >> and then also the stability, right? How consistent is the revenue? Is there a revenue just like like spikes like this, like a M, right? Are you just making me some months making 5K, some months you're making like $100, some months it's back to 6K, another month it's like $800. If that's the case, you have no predictable lead acquisition system, which means that you have no predictable revenue, which is a huge problem. You can't have that. Next, [music] I look at the offer floor. What time uh frame are your deliveries happening under? Are you able to build a 20K solution 3 weeks? Are you able to build a 20K solution 3 months? Like how long does your delivery take? Because you can say, "Man, I just landed a 10K client." Congrats. But how long will delivery take? "Oh, 6 months." That 10K client is technically like at that point like what? One uh 1.5K a month, right? So, I can't see these four numbers from a YouTube video, right? And that's the honest limit of this format. I can't see your numbers. I don't know who's on the other side of this video, but I hope you have these numbers like set and you're following it, you're following everything I've said already. Now, everything I just walked you through is just one piece of what you need to make this all work, right? The rest of what you need to do is on this channel as well as all, you know, on the internet and you can spend months or maybe even years piecing together and miss out on a lot of opportunities, or you can join Agent Rise, which is Y101 mentorship program where I'll help you build a successful AI business. You have unlimited one-on-one calls with me, a vault with 40 plus pre-built AI operating systems that you can white label and sell, a community of 200 AI business entrepreneurs that are hungry and on the same mission as you, and full playbooks on marketing, lead acquisition, and business scaling that took me years to figure out. Click the first link in the description to apply, and let's work together.