I once ran a $30k/month marketing team

Years back, I built out a marketing team for a client.

Copywriter, media buyer, designers, 2 assistants, a couple of freelancers filling the gaps, and me as the CMO. We got results, but we (me included) also ran up a staff bill of around $30k a month.

That number was fine for them. For many founders of growing businesses, it's a fantasy.

Which is why AI is the great leveller.

Yesterday I promised to show you the "calculator moment", the breakdown of what it would cost for me to hire the same team for VP. I've priced this out 3 ways to really highlight how powerful AI can be.

Option 1. Hire the team.

The most straightforward option. Just hire people good at what they do to handle this stuff.

Now, if I was hiring people, this is what it would cost based on 2026 US average salaries*...

... research assistant to find 150ish deals every day = $3,750 a month​
... content writer for the pages = $4,900 a month​
... email marketer for the daily sends, onboarding, and trigger emails = $4,870 a month​
... social media manager for the posts = $5,050 a month​
... graphic designer for the carousels and reels as well as website work = $4,520 a month

That's about $23,000 a month full-time, before anyone builds or maintains the machine they'd all work in.

Go fractional, hire them all part-time, and you're still around $12,500 a month on the low end.

My old client's $30k bill suddenly looks pretty normal, right?

Option 2. Do it all yourself.

For this, I've estimated the average time to complete the tasks from the timeline I sent a few days back.

... deal research and price verification = 2 hours for maybe 30 books per day (my system adds ~150)
... writing the book pages = 2 hours (this is hard to estimate as the system writes about 20,000 words per day. I doubt anyone could do that in a full day to be honest)
... the daily email = 90 minutes​
... two carousels and two reels = 2 hours​
... publishing across five platforms, twice, 45 minutes
... price checks, the system refreshes 1,200 books an hour, you could spot-check 50 in an hour while the rest go stale
... responding to comments with relevant links = all day, maybe 10 minutes every hour for new commetns

That's a minimum of 8.5 hours of grunt work a day, for a cut-down version of the output.

Price your time at $100 an hour and you're at $850+ a day. Call it $25k a month, and none of it is the work that actually needs you.

Option 3. The way I run it.

Using AI to help build the system, I'm saving a tonne of cash. Here's the real breakdown of what I'm paying and using.

• API 1 = $40 / month (I will be able ot get rid of this when I get access to the Amazon API directly - reducing this to $0)
• API 2 = $50 / month (I'm trying to drop this one as well - could realistically drop to $0 as well)
• AI content writing = ~$1 / day or $~30 / month
• Hosting for VPS - $5 / month (this includes...)
  • My Manychat system which saves me another $100-$300 / month depending on usage)
  • Self-hosted n8n (which is free) saves me $20 / month from their hosted service
  • My private Mail service which replaces about $50 / month minimum for something like Kit

All in, about $125 a month, or ~$4 per day.

Compare the 3 different methods and the savings are huge.

... the hired team, $12,500 to $23,000
... your own hours, roughly $25,000
... my version, $125

At least 100x cheaper than either, and it's the only one where the output doesn't shrink. I can scale this system to do more, with marginal cost increase.

That's a full growth team running your marketing for less than $5 a day.

Fair warning, it's not magic. The build takes a few days up front, and I spend an hour or two a week on maintenance and improvements. But, you'd be doing that with any team.

Tomorrow I'll tell you how I'm planning on helping 10 businesses with this. Watch your inbox.

Speak soon,

Pete "bring a calculator" Boyle

*2026 US average salaries via PayScale, Glassdoor, Indeed and ZipRecruiter. Your market may vary. It won't vary enough to change the conclusion.