Lesson 1 of 6
Level 1: Agent live
Get one AI agent answering real people
Clear condition: Level 1
Your AI agent served at least 5 real people with at least 10 replies in the last 30 days, on your account or a client's.
Most people who want to start an AI agency start in the wrong place. They design a logo, write a pitch deck, and go looking for clients before they have ever watched an AI agent talk to a real person. Then a prospect asks "can I see it working?" and there is nothing to show.
Level 1 fixes that. Before you sell anything, you get one agent live and answering real people.
What you are actually selling
Not software. A business's messages answered, and its calendar filled, under your name.
The deliverable is an AI agent that answers a business's Instagram DMs, WhatsApp, Messenger, SMS and website chat, books its appointments, and follows up with the people who went quiet. You set it up, you tune it, you report on it, and the client pays you every month. The common band for a local business is 200 to 500 dollars a month for a managed AI agent.
That is the whole model. Everything in this challenge is about doing that for one client, then three, then ten.
Pick a niche where a missed message is a missed booking
You do not need a big niche. You need one where the owner can tell you what a single booking is worth, and where they already get more messages than they can answer. Barbershops and hair salons, physio and podiatry clinics, med spas, real estate, music studios, wedding planners.
I learned this the hard way. Years before DM Champ, I watched clinics from Miami to Dubai drowning in WhatsApp and Instagram messages they could not answer fast enough. Different countries, same problem. That pattern is the reason DM Champ exists.
Pick the niche you understand best. If you have worked in it, or you know five owners in it by name, that is your niche.
Build the agent before you sell it
Set the agent up on your own business first, or on a made-up business in your niche. Write down what it sells, what it costs, how it should sound, and what it must never say. Connect a channel and let it answer your own inbound messages for a few days. Read every chat. Fix what it gets wrong.
A business owner who asks your demo agent about their own opening hours and gets a correct answer has already understood the product. That is worth more than any deck.
Two warnings from experience. First, testing from your own phone is fine for checking your setup, but it does not count as real traffic, here or anywhere else. The agent needs to talk to people who are not you. Second, if you use WhatsApp, never send the same message to a list of strangers in one burst from a fresh number. That is how numbers get banned. Let people come to you first: an Instagram post, a link in your bio, the chat widget on your site.
Do this now
- Create your account and run the setup wizard. Quick Start Guide
- Follow the first 30 minutes: connect a channel, write the instructions, create the agent. Your First 30 Minutes
- Tune how the agent talks, what it knows and when it hands over to you. AI Bot Setup
- If you go with WhatsApp Web, read the connection guide and the sending limits before you send anything. WhatsApp Web
- Put the agent where real people already message you, and read every chat for a week.
The video above is the full course. The first half is exactly this level: the wizard, the knowledge base, channels, the chat widget and tuning the playbook.
The ticks are only saved in this browser. Your level still comes from your account.
Bec Furraway went on holiday for two weeks. When she logged back in, her agent had been selling her courses the whole time, and had upsold one person 4 more courses and a subscription. Her words: not a single chat looked like it was trying to sell.
Do it in your own account
Your level moves when the real thing happens in DM Champ. Start the challenge and come back to this lesson as you go.
The challenge is free. DM Champ starts with a 7 day trial. Already playing? Continue opens your level in the app.