How Nick Saraev Went From A Neuroscience Lab To Building Maker School And LeftClick

Before he taught AI automation on YouTube, Nick Saraev co-authored a physiology paper. It came out of Simon Fraser University's Department of Biomedical Physiology and Kinesiology in 2018 and studied nerve endings in the rat tail artery.³ He sums up how he got from that lab to running AI businesses in one line: "In simple terms, I act first, and figure things out later."¹

Early life and education

Saraev describes himself as Bulgarian-Canadian. He was born in February 1996, and his family came to Canada from Bulgaria in the 1990s.^2,4 He grew up in Vancouver. Money was tight for most of his childhood, and his parents often worked fourteen or fifteen hours a day.¹ He now lives in Calgary.²

He studied behavioral neuroscience at Simon Fraser University. In his third year he won a little under $5,000 in grant money for research on the peripheral nervous system.¹

A run of small businesses

He started his first business at 19, in college.⁴ With friends he threw nightclub and campus events, which made about $30,000 over eighteen months. He and a friend then produced around twenty online courses that made over $80,000. Next came a door-to-door local marketing agency and a videography business, which COVID-19 restrictions cut "to $0 overnight."¹

He taught himself programming in a little over five months from free computer science curricula, and has no programming degree.^1,4

Early AI products

In 2020 he built 1SecondPainting, which generated abstract paintings with an AI model. It reached 423 points on Hacker News in July 2020, and the Russian tech site Shazoo covered it a few days later.^5,6 The site closed after five years and more than 230,000 paintings.⁷

With a partner named Noah he then built 1SecondCopy, an AI-assisted writing agency on GPT-3. He says it grew to "a little under $100,000/month."¹ It stopped operating on March 1, 2026.⁸

LeftClick

Saraev and Noah founded LeftClick in 2022 as an AI and process automation consultancy.^1,9 It stalled near $25,000 a month and the partners split. Working alone, he changed the model. He broke his services "into a small set of very leveraged templates (like one-and-done cold email systems, or one-click CRMs)" and sold only those, and he says the business then passed $72,000 in one month.¹

Today LeftClick builds "AI systems that generate leads, close deals, and scale operations" for B2B companies. It lists MrBeast, Notion and Wix among the brands Saraev and his team have worked with.¹⁰

YouTube and Maker School

He started posting on YouTube about six months after running LeftClick alone. A free series on Make.com took the channel to about 10,000 subscribers within three months. He found the videos "were now doing the majority of my sales work."¹ On October 24, 2026, the main channel had 568,000 subscribers and 25.8 million views.¹¹ His six-hour n8n course from April 2025 and his four-hour course on building with AI coding agents from February 2026 have passed 1.3 million and 2.7 million views.^17,18 He also runs Nick Saraev Daily and co-hosts Stacked Podcast with Jack Roberts.^19,20

His first paid Skool community, Make Money With Make, opened in May 2024 and filled in about ten days.^1,12 Maker School followed on September 5, 2024. It costs $184 a month and promises: "Get your first paying AI client in 90d or your money back." On October 24, 2026, it had 2,658 members.¹³ He spent at least an hour every morning answering members and calls that habit "almost entirely the reason" Maker School grew.¹

In 2025 Maker School "became the #1 community by revenue on Skool," and he won the Skool Games.^4,15 He then spoke on stage next to Alex Hormozi and Sam Ovens.¹⁶ In June 2026 he opened a free community, Maker Zero, which had 33,653 members on October 24, 2026.¹⁴

What he teaches

His core lesson is to productize. He moved from custom projects to templates, then to information products, and each step scaled further.¹ He is also frank about where the money is in a boom: "And in a gold rush, there's always plenty of money to be made selling shovels."¹

In November 2025 he changed course. He wrote that building automations will soon seem "as quaint as hand-stitching dresses in the 1850s," and that he would teach people to navigate the future of work instead.²¹

"Knowledge is already mostly free. Soon, implementation will be free as well."

In March 2026 he set himself a new standard: "In short, I should stop doing the right amount of work and start doing the right work."²²

Press and interviews

ATAK Interactive ranked him eighth of 17 AI YouTubers in February 2026 and called him "one of the most technically skilled creators in the AI automation space."²³ He has been interviewed on the Personal IPO Podcast and on Skool News.^24,34

Controversy

Saraev's best-known criticism is that he earns more from teaching people to start AI agencies than from running one. Anonymous Reddit users have made the case since 2025. One wrote that "someone making 90k a month or 2 million a year from an advertising agency, does not have time to make content on youtube," and another that "most of these automation gurus are making 100 times the money from communities than the selling the automation itself."^35,36 The review site ScamRisk, which promotes a competing business model, wrote that "his most profitable business model appears to be teaching the automation model, rather than operating it."³⁷

His own writing largely agrees on where the money comes from. In November 2025 he wrote: "I have made many millions of dollars teaching people how to wire together various APIs & drag and drop various nodes together." In the same essay he said LeftClick would take no more sales calls or implementation work and would pass inquiries to other providers.²¹ He has pushed back on the "guru" label on camera, saying "I do resent that claim," and in July 2025 he filmed himself starting a new agency campaign from zero "to prove it's NOT luck."^38,39

In September 2026 he posted on X that "Spotify, Apple Music, and streaming in general is over" because AI music had become "very, very good." The post drew more replies than likes. A follow-up said people who tell others their AI music is worse "are retarded and should be shamed for it," and the original was mocked on Reddit's r/LinkedInLunatics.^40,41,42

His contributor biography says he has been "featured in Popular Mechanics, Apple News, & Bloomberg" and is "an Amazon Kindle best-seller."⁴³ Popular Mechanics did profile him in 2021, in an article about longevity research.⁴⁴ Industry Leaders To Follow could not find the Bloomberg or Apple News coverage or a Kindle book. Two October 2026 reviews of Maker School, both from sites that earn affiliate fees, also note that the conditions of its 90-day refund guarantee are not published.^45,46

Associated with

He and fellow AI automation YouTuber Nate Herk discussed pricing AI work together on Nick Saraev Daily in July 2025.²⁵ Their Skool communities opened six weeks apart: Maker School on September 5, 2024, and Herk's AI Automation Society on October 15, 2024.^13,26 Both released long free n8n courses in the spring of 2025.^17,27 ATAK Interactive ranked Herk fifth and Saraev eighth.²³

He and Liam Ottley, who created the AI Automation Agency model, both teach people to start AI automation businesses.²⁸ Both publish "build and sell" courses on YouTube.^17,29 ATAK Interactive placed them back to back, Ottley seventh and Saraev eighth.²³

He and Eric Kavelaars are both Canadian. Both struck out on their own at 19: Kavelaars left Western University at that age, and Saraev started his first business in college. Both also ran marketing agencies before moving into AI.^1,2,4,30

He and AI developer Eric Otten both teach AI automation and n8n on YouTube.^17,31,32 Both opened Skool communities in May 2024: Otten's EricsLab AI Community on May 5 and Saraev's Make Money With Make ten days later.^12,33

Where to follow Nick Saraev

• YouTube: @nicksaraev
• Community: Maker School on Skool
• Website: nicksaraev.com
• Company: LeftClick
• X: @nicksaraev