A web designer who adopted AI for business workflows cut website drafts from hours to minutes, automated outreach, and now brings in $20K a month. The shift didn't require a big team or a new agency model — just a repeatable process built around AI tools. Here's the exact workflow, step by step, so you can copy it.
The building was never the hard part. This designer had spent years turning out WordPress sites, and he could make them look good — but getting a steady flow of clients was a completely different game. His days disappeared into cold emails, messaging local businesses on Facebook, and trying anything that might get a stranger interested. His offer was genuinely appealing: he'd build a free draft of their new website and show them how much sharper it could look. The problem was that every draft swallowed hours. He'd send it over by email and then wait — and all too often, nothing came back. Hours of unpaid work, gone.
That's the trap a lot of service businesses fall into: they're good at the work and lousy at the pipeline. Using AI for business was the thing that finally broke him out of it, and he took the operation to $20K a month.
From an afternoon per draft to a coffee break
The first change was how he built. He moved his website work over to Claude, and drafts that used to take hours started taking minutes. But here's the detail that actually matters: he'd spent years doing real web development, so he knew what a good result looks like. He wasn't accepting whatever the model handed him — he was steering it, catching its mistakes and reworking the weak parts.
That's the whole difference between AI as a shortcut and AI as a liability. If you don't know what "good" looks like, you can't tell when a model has handed you something broken. If you do, you get a massive speed boost without dropping quality.
Outreach became a system, not a grind
Then came the client side. He started using Swokei to find businesses that already have a website, analyse thousands of them in one pass, and turn real problems — dated design, weak SEO, slow loading, broken mobile layouts — into personalised outreach emails. Instead of spending his entire day hunting for prospects, he could run several campaigns at once.
That's a bigger shift than it sounds. A generic "hi, I can redesign your site" email gets ignored on sight. An email that says "your site crawls on mobile and your contact form is broken" gets read. The difference isn't effort — it's specificity.
The change almost nobody copies
The biggest shift had nothing to do with software. When someone replied, he stopped emailing the draft and hoping for the best. He picked up the phone, booked a meeting, and showed the new website live on the call.
Suddenly the client could see what they were buying, ask questions in real time, and talk the project through with him right there. That's a completely different conversation from "here's a link, let me know."
He also had to learn how to sell — evenings spent on YouTube sales tutorials, working on how he handled calls. He built the whole thing with a business partner and kept tightening the funnel from there.
What it means for you
You don't need to be a web designer to borrow this pattern. The shape of it is simple: use AI to make the expensive part cheap, use a tool to find where the problem actually exists, then talk to the person instead of hiding behind email. Here's how that plays out in different lives.
If you're a freelancer chasing income
Your bottleneck probably isn't skill — it's how many proposals you can send before you burn out. Swap the manual hunt for a prospect tool, and swap the "here's my portfolio" email for one that names a specific problem you found on their site. Then get on a call. Freelancers who quote in writing lose to freelancers who turn up on video and walk people through the work.
If you run a small business
Look at your own site before you judge anyone else's. Speed, mobile layout, SEO and plain old design are the four things buyers notice without realising they're noticing. If your pages load slowly on a phone, you're paying for that in lost enquiries every week and you'll never see the invoice.
If you work a 9-to-5
The most transferable habit is the draft-first move: instead of asking for a meeting to discuss a proposal, show up with a rough version already made. Same effort, ten times the credibility. It works for pitch decks, campaign ideas, internal tools — anything where you can produce a fast first pass and then refine it.
If you're a student
You've now got a tutor that never gets tired. But treat it like a junior assistant, not an oracle: ask it to explain its reasoning, then check the reasoning yourself. The students who get ahead aren't the ones who outsource their thinking — they're the ones who use AI to reach the interesting questions faster.
If you make things
Hours-to-minutes changes your creative options. You can afford to try three versions instead of committing to the first idea — sketch the layout, mock the landing page, generate five headline options and pick. Cheap experiments are the real gift here.
If you want a side income stream
What this guy built is a service business with a demo baked in. Pick one narrow niche, build one genuinely good example of what you'd do for them, and lead with that. Narrow beats broad every time — "websites for dental clinics" closes better than "websites for anyone."
How to try it right now
You can start today, and you can start for free.
Step 1: Pick one thing you already do well
Don't learn a new trade this week. Take something you can already deliver — a website, a logo, a spreadsheet cleanup, a social media plan — and make that the offer.
Step 2: Build the first version with Claude
Open Claude (there's a free tier) and describe the project in plain English: who the client is, what the page needs to do, what tone it should have. Ask for a first draft of the copy and the structure. If you want extra help with the surrounding tasks — rewriting, summarising, tidying — the free AI tools at MyKreaTool are a decent place to poke around.
Step 3: Fix it like someone who knows better
This is the step people skip. Read the draft critically, cut the filler, correct anything shaky, and rebuild the weak sections yourself. What you're selling is your judgement, not the model's first guess.
Step 4: Find people who actually have the problem
Use Swokei to pull a list of businesses with existing websites, then let it analyse them at scale — design, SEO, speed, mobile. You're hunting for obvious, fixable issues. Working through a batch of analysed sites will beat a pile of cold guesses every time.
Step 5: Write one email around one problem
Keep it short. Name the specific issue, say what it's probably costing them, offer to show a fix. No paragraphs about your passion for design.
Step 6: Call them
Reply comes in? Call. Book the meeting, share your screen, walk them through the draft live. It feels awkward the first few times and normal after a while. That's exactly why he spent his evenings on sales tutorials.
Upsides and what changes
Speed becomes your selling point
When a draft takes minutes instead of an afternoon, you can show real work before you're hired. That flips the sales conversation — you're no longer asking someone to imagine the result, you're letting them look at it.
The bottleneck moves
Once drafting and outreach are cheap, your limiting factor becomes conversations. That's good news, actually. Talking to people is a skill you can practise, and it doesn't cap out at the number of hours in your day the way manual prospecting does.
You find problems at scale
Analysing thousands of sites in one pass means you're no longer guessing who needs help. You work from evidence, which makes both the email and the call easier to write.
Limitations
Be clear-eyed about this. The $20K a month came after years of hands-on development experience and a lot of deliberate practice at selling — the AI didn't produce it on its own, and nobody hands you that number in a month. AI drafts still need a human who can spot broken layouts, weak copy and technical nonsense, which is precisely why his coding background mattered. Mass outreach has a nasty downside too: send sloppy, obviously templated emails at volume and you'll burn your domain reputation and annoy the exact people you wanted to work with, so the personalisation has to be real rather than a mail merge. Cold calling is genuinely uncomfortable at first, and some people never get comfortable with it — if that's you, video walkthroughs are a workable substitute. And none of this is a magic button: it's leverage stacked on top of skills you already have.
Conclusion
The interesting part of this story isn't the AI. It's that he changed three things at once — how fast he could produce, how precisely he could find the right people, and how he talked to them once they replied. Any one of those alone would have helped. Together, they compounded.
One action for today: pick a single business you'd genuinely like as a client, spend twenty minutes building a rough improvement of one thing on their site with Claude, and then call them. Not email — call.
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