[Journey] From unemployed IT guy to making money with websites + AI

Hey everyone,

I've been reading quite a few journey threads here and decided to start my own.

The reason is pretty simple - I'm currently unemployed and have no income, so instead of just sitting around sending CVs and hoping someone hires me, I want to try to build something myself.

I'm from Europe and graduated in IT a few years ago. After university I worked in IT for several years, mainly with databases and backend. That was basically my main area of experience.

Then the company I worked for closed down.

And suddenly my nice little area of experience isn't looking so nice anymore. When I started looking at jobs again, I noticed that a lot of companies are looking for full-stack developers. My experience is much more specific, so finding something that fits has been harder than I expected.

I'm not completely new to the other side of development, though. For quite a long time I've been interested in frontend stuff as a hobby. I played around with WordPress and WooCommerce and made some simple websites for myself and other people. Nothing particularly impressive, but I liked doing it.

A few years ago I also created websites for a few people, so I still have some old contacts from that.

Then AI development tools became much better and I started playing around with them myself, mostly Claude Code. At first it was just small hobby projects. I'd have an idea, start building it, get stuck somewhere, ask AI, change things, break something else, fix it again... and repeat.

But after doing this for a while I got surprisingly comfortable with it. I'm not saying AI magically turned me into a senior full-stack developer. It didn't. But I can now take an idea, build something, understand enough of the code to work with it, troubleshoot problems and actually get things running.

So I started thinking:

Why not try to make money from it?

The obvious problem​

I know. "Another guy making websites with AI."

Probably one of the most competitive things you could choose right now. There are already tons of people offering websites, and AI has made it much easier for even more people to enter this market.

I'm aware of that.

But honestly, I don't have the luxury of waiting for some perfect business idea to appear. I need an income, and this is something I already have at least some experience with.

So I'm going to give it a shot.

What I'm going to offer​

The main focus will be websites - WordPress, WooCommerce, custom websites, small web apps/tools, and other small IT solutions where AI can help me build things faster.

I'm not planning to position myself as some huge software development agency. If a local business needs a decent website, I'll make one. If someone needs a WooCommerce store, I'll make one. If someone has a small annoying business problem that can be solved with a custom tool, I'll see if I can build it.

Pretty straightforward.

Getting the first clients​

First, I'm going after the old contacts.

I've built websites for a few people before, and their websites are now a few years old. So I'll contact them and basically ask whether they've thought about updating them. Maybe nobody will care. Maybe one of them will. We'll see.

After that comes cold outreach.

I'll mainly target companies in my own European country. One useful thing here is that there is a public company database, so I've already started building a little system around it.

This is probably the part I'm most interested in testing.

I made a scraper which collects company information from the public database and checks whether the company has a website listed. If there is no website, that's obviously a potential lead.

If there is a website, I don't automatically throw the company away. I have another part of the system which checks the website with AI and tries to determine whether it looks outdated, whether the design is decent, and generally classifies it.

If AI thinks the website looks good, I don't need to bother with it. If it looks bad or the result is questionable, it gets added to my admin panel. Then I check it myself.

The system also tries to find an email for the company through publicly available sources before adding the lead.

So instead of spending hours searching Google for random businesses, I can get a list of companies and then concentrate on actually reviewing them and contacting the relevant ones.

The outreach​

I'm not planning to immediately start blasting 10,000 automated emails.

For now, I'll send around 100 emails per day manually from my normal email. The basic structure will obviously be similar, but I'll look at each company before sending it. If there's something specific about their website, I'll mention it.

I also already have my own website with some portfolio examples, so at least I have something to show when somebody asks what I've done.

What I want to track​

I don't want this thread to become one of those journeys where someone says, "Day 47 — things are going great!" and then we never find out what actually happened.

I'll try to post the real numbers: how many companies I contacted, how many replied, how many were interested, calls, clients, revenue, and what happened with the things that didn't work.

If 100 emails produce nothing, I'll post that too.

That's actually one of the main reasons I'm making this thread.

I don't know if this will work. Maybe I'll get my first client quickly. Maybe I'll send 500 emails and get absolutely nowhere. Maybe I'll discover that businesses don't care about websites anymore. Maybe I'll end up changing the whole idea after a month.

No idea.

But I have the time right now, I have some relevant skills, and I need to start somewhere.

Starting point​

So that's where I'm starting: no job, no current income, some IT experience, some website experience, a lot of experimenting with AI, a lead-scraping system that I've already built, and a plan to start contacting businesses.

My first goal is not €10k/month or some crazy number.

First paying client.

Then we'll see.

I'll update this thread as things happen.

If anyone here has experience selling websites to local businesses, cold emailing, lead generation, or using AI for development, I'd really appreciate any advice.

And if you have questions about the system I've built or anything else I'm doing, ask away.

Let's see where this goes.

Great breakdown on the lead gen workflow. Since you are building custom tools and handling backend logic, your IT background will give you a serious edge over pure AI prompters. Good luck landing that first client.

Cold emails sent to businesses from a personal email always end up in spam. Is cold calling banned in Europe?

Full-stack developers are not in a better shape. I am a senior full-stack developer, and it's over for us. I still have my job, but I don't know for how much. AI is replacing us. If I would lose my job tommorow, I wouldn't go looking for another job as a software developer or anything that can be replaced by AI in the near future. It's a dead-end.
Anyways, good luck with your project.

Great breakdown of the lead generation workflow. Since you’re building custom tools and managing the backend logic, your IT background gives you a real advantage over people who rely solely on AI prompting. Best of luck landing your first client!

When you land the first project, could you separate the quoted price, deposit actually received, delivery hours, and remaining payment in the updates? A fixed-scope website and a custom tool can look like the same sale while taking very different amounts of work.

If you have the skills, give Upwork and Fiverr a try; landing those first few orders is the hardest part, but once you deliver good work, you'll attract plenty of clients.

Move outreach to a dedicated domain instead of your normal email before you scale past a handful of sends, since 100 cold emails a day from your main inbox will get it flagged fast.