BURRAQ
Academy
Course Outline
Track A
Track A · Eighteen and above · Twelve weeks · 36 evening sessions

The Earning Track

From no experience to a verified international profile with live proposals going out under supervision — and a first paid client targeted inside the twelve weeks.

THE SHAPE

Four phases, and only one of them is about tools

Most AI courses stop at the tools and leave the student holding a skill nobody has paid them for. This one spends a third of its hours on the part that actually converts skill into money: finding the client, writing the proposal, and closing the call.

Phase 1 · Weeks 1–2
The Rail
Foundations, prompting, and the money infrastructure built before it is needed
Phase 2 · Weeks 3–6
The Skill
One sellable specialism, built to a deliverable a client would pay for
Phase 3 · Weeks 7–8
The Proof
Portfolio, certifications, and a profile written to be found
Phase 4 · Weeks 9–12
The Hunt
Four weeks of supervised proposals, calls and closing

The rule that governs Phase 4

No student spends a single rupee of platform credit on a proposal the instructor has not read. Proposal credits are released weekly, against reviewed work, with a hard weekly cap. This is simultaneously the strongest cost control in the programme and the core of what the family is paying for.

PHASE 1 · WEEKS 1–2

Foundations and the money rail

The rail is built in the first fortnight, long before there is any money to put through it, so that when a first contract closes in Week 11 nothing is improvised.

Phase 1 — The Rail

WEEK 13 sessions

What AI actually is, and where the money is

  • Session 1 — The landscape without the hype: what a large language model is and is not, open versus closed models, tokens and context windows, and why "the worst AI you will ever use is today's". Essential terminology, in plain language.
  • Session 2 — The five business models AI actually pays for, and where a beginner in Karachi realistically enters. Choosing a lane: AI design and websites, or AI automation. Nobody leaves this session undecided.
  • Session 3 — Reading the market. Live walkthrough of real job postings on the instructor's own account: what clients ask for, what they pay, and the difference between a job post and the problem behind it.
You leave with A written one-line positioning statement, a chosen lane, and ten real job postings you have personally analysed.
Grounded in: 📚 Nate Herk — Agent Zero Foundations (Introduction to AI, LLMs, Data, JSON) · 📚 Jack Roberts — AI Automations Roadmap Level 1 · 📚 Rowan Cheung — AI Starter Kit (AI Fundamentals, Essential AI Terminology) · 📚 Ben AI — The 5 AI business models
WEEK 23 sessions

Prompting properly, and building the money rail

  • Session 4 — The six-step prompt formula: task, context, references, evaluate, iterate, format. Why most people's prompts fail. System prompt versus user prompt. Building a reusable prompt library you will use for twelve weeks.
  • Session 5 — Custom assistants and projects. Making a model behave like a specialist rather than a search engine. Reactive and dynamic prompting.
  • Session 6 — The money rail. FBR registration and filer status; PSEB freelancer registration; the bank appointment; foreign-currency retention; Payoneer; and the tax position in writing.
You leave with Filer registration submitted, PSEB registration submitted, a bank appointment booked as a group, and a personal prompt library.
Grounded in: 📚 Rowan Cheung — Mastering AI Conversations (six-step prompt formula, custom GPTs) · 📚 Nate Herk — Prompt Engineering for LLMs, User vs System Prompt, Reactive Prompting · Regulatory positions verified against FBR Section 154A and the State Bank's ESFCA framework

The tax position students are taught, in one line

Registered with PSEB and filing, a freelancer pays 0.25% of export proceeds as a final tax, deducted automatically by the bank when the money arrives. On eight hundred dollars a month that is two dollars. Unregistered and not filing, the same student pays 2% — eight times as much. This single session pays for a meaningful part of the fee.

PHASE 2 · WEEKS 3–6

One sellable skill, built to a real deliverable

Students commit to one of two lanes in Week 1 and go deep. Both lanes converge on the same thing by Week 6: a finished piece of work good enough that a stranger would pay for it.

Lane 1
AI Design & Websites
The door-opener. Fast to a first sale, visual, and easy for a client to judge. Uses the instructor's nine years of product visualisation directly.
Lane 2
AI Automation
The retainer. Slower to a first sale, but it is the lane that produces recurring monthly income rather than one-off projects.

Phase 2 — The Skill

WEEK 33 sessions

Lane 1: from prompt to a designed page · Lane 2: data, JSON and APIs

  • Lane 1 — Zero to a first AI-built site: prompt to first-draft layout, then concept, system, remix and upgrade. Visual hierarchy, colour and type for interfaces people scan. Why "AI slop" looks like AI slop, and the specific moves that lift it to award-level: depth, texture, real content.
  • Lane 2 — How data actually moves: JSON structure, APIs and HTTP requests, authentication and credentials, reading documentation without fear. This is the week that separates people who can automate from people who can only follow tutorials.
You leave with Lane 1: a designed, responsive page built from a brief. Lane 2: a working API call you wrote yourself, returning real data.
Grounded in: 📚 Design Rocket — Build AI Websites (zero-to-first AI site; AI slop → award-level design) · 📚 Nate Herk — n8n Masterclass (Data Types, APIs & HTTP Requests, JSON Handling)
WEEK 43 sessions

Lane 1: the full build · Lane 2: your first working automation

  • Lane 1 — A complete multi-page site for a real local business — chosen in Week 3 and briefed properly. Copy written with AI and edited by a human. Images generated and art-directed. Deployed live on a real domain.
  • Lane 2 — First end-to-end automation: trigger, logic, action. Nodes versus tools, credentials, pinning test data, conditional logic and error handling. Building something that runs without you watching it.
You leave with A live URL you can send to anybody, or an automation running on a schedule.
Grounded in: 📚 Design Rocket — Lovable rebuild + Figma AI UI workflow · 📚 Nate Herk — Familiarizing with n8n, Tools vs Nodes, Continue on Error · 📚 Jack Roberts — Build your first automation
WEEK 53 sessions

Going beyond the obvious build

  • Lane 1 — Motion, 3D and the details that make a page feel expensive. Cloning and reverse-engineering a site you admire as a learning method. Speed: how to deliver in days what agencies quote in weeks.
  • Lane 2 — AI agents proper: the agent node, chat models, choosing a model for a job, memory, text classifiers and information extractors, structured output parsing.
  • Both lanes — Human-in-the-loop and quality control. What you put in front of a client and what you never do.
You leave with A second, more ambitious piece of work — and the beginning of a point of view about your own craft.
Grounded in: 📚 Design Rocket — Exclusive Tutorials (clone any website; 3D with Spline; animated sites) · 📚 Nate Herk — AI Agent Node, Agent Memory, Human in the Loop, Output Parsing
WEEK 63 sessions

Process mapping: seeing the work a client cannot describe

  • Session — Intro to process mapping. The four pillars of a process worth automating. How to walk into any business and find three things worth money within twenty minutes.
  • Session — Return on investment, stated in the client's language. Turning "this saves nine hours a week" into a number and a price.
  • Session — Productising: turning a bespoke build into a repeatable offer with a fixed price — the difference between being hired and being booked.
You leave with A written, priced, productised offer — one paragraph, one price, one outcome.
Grounded in: 📚 Nate Herk — Intro to Process Mapping for AI Automations, The 4 Pillars of Automation-Worthy Processes, ROI of Automation Systems, How I Got Paid $1,200 for a 2-Hour Build
PHASE 3 · WEEKS 7–8

Proof, and a profile written to be found

Phase 3 — The Proof

WEEK 73 sessions

Portfolio, case studies and the video that closes

  • Session — A portfolio is not a gallery. Writing each piece as a case study: the client's problem, what you did, what changed. Three pieces, properly written.
  • Session — Your own portfolio site, live on your own domain, with your name on it.
  • Session — The Loom proposal. Recording a two-minute video that shows the client you already understand their problem — the single highest-converting technique taught in this course, and the one that lets a Pakistani freelancer beat a native English speaker on the same job.
You leave with A live portfolio site, three written case studies, and a recorded proposal video you have practised.
Grounded in: 📚 Design Rocket — Launch AI Agency (Loom proposal + three-day risk-free close; friends earning $3–4k/month without strong English) · 📚 Nate Herk — Sign Your First AI Automation Client
WEEK 83 sessions

The profile build — line by line, together

  • Session — The headline is a search title, not a job title. Photograph, overview paragraph, and the credibility sentence. Rate setting: why you start below the category average and how the ladder to $50 works.
  • Session — Certifications. Three, all free, all completed in class: Google Ads Search, Google Analytics and HubSpot SEO. Then the credibility paragraph they unlock.
  • Session — Identity verification, the rail tested end to end with a live test transaction, and profile review by the instructor before anything goes live.
You leave with A verified, complete, reviewed profile — and a payment rail that has already carried real money.
Grounded in: 📚 Rank Expand — UpWork Profile Creation; Earn Certifications for UpWork Profile ("we're going to get Google Ads Search certification, Google Analytics, and HubSpot SEO certification… it's 100% free") · 📚 AI Income Blueprint — Upwork profile and ranking sequence
THE METHOD

Seven ways in that almost nobody uses

The proposal strategies below are the instructor's own, developed across 102 contracts. They are the reason a new freelancer from Karachi can win against a crowded field, and they are taught nowhere else.

ONE

Bid on the problem, not the job

Every job post is a symptom, not a diagnosis. Name the real problem in the first two lines and the client stops reading the other twenty proposals.

TWO

The portfolio approach

Do a small piece of the work before you are hired and attach it. Costs an hour; removes all doubt.

THREE

The jobs-in-progress interceptor

Find work already being done badly and offer to finish it properly. The least competitive listing on the platform is the one someone has already messed up.

FOUR

First one free

Deliberate, scoped, and time-boxed — never open-ended. Converts scepticism into a paid second job.

FIVE

The platform-to-LinkedIn bridge

Turning a one-off contract into a direct, long-term relationship the legitimate way, once the platform relationship allows it.

SIX

Reverse hunting

Stop waiting for postings. Identify the businesses that need the work, then create the opening yourself.

SEVEN

Automation stack-up

Turning one delivered automation into three more for the same client. This is how a $300 job becomes a $997-a-month retainer.

AND

Written by hand, every time

Proposals are written by the student, not generated. Clients can tell, and the ones who cannot are not the clients you want.

Grounded in: 🗂️ Sajjad Ali Mughal — Upwork Strategies (personal method notes) · 🗂️ My AI Roadmap · 📚 Rank Expand — hand-written proposals over generated ones
PHASE 4 · WEEKS 9–12

Supervised hunting

Four weeks in which the student stops learning and starts working, with the instructor reading everything before it goes out. This is the part of the programme that cannot be recorded, cannot be scaled, and is the reason the batch is capped at twelve.

Phase 4 — The Hunt

WEEK 93 sessions

First proposals out

  • Job selection: which listings to ignore, and why most beginners burn their credits on jobs they were never going to win.
  • Writing four proposals in class, each reviewed line by line before submission.
  • Quota: four proposals this week. Deliberately low. Fewer and better beats more and worse, and the quota falls as quality rises.
You leave with Four researched, reviewed, submitted proposals — and the first replies.
Grounded in: 📚 Nate Herk — Maker School declining-application-quota method · 📚 AI Income Blueprint — easy-jobs-first ranking strategy
WEEK 103 sessions

The call

  • Handling the first client message. Response speed as a competitive weapon — one of the instructor's own reviews reads "within five minutes we were on a Google Meet."
  • Live mock discovery calls, recorded and critiqued. Scoping the job on the call. What to say when you do not know the answer.
  • Quoting: fixed price versus hourly, milestones, and the three-day risk-free close.
You leave with A rehearsed call script and a scope-and-quote template.
Grounded in: 📚 Design Rocket — Launch AI Agency (three-day risk-free close) · 📚 Nate Herk — Sign Your First AI Automation Client
WEEK 113 sessions

Deliver, and get the review that compounds

  • Delivering a first contract properly: communication cadence, scope discipline, and handling the client who asks for more.
  • Why the first review is worth more than the first payment, and exactly how to earn a five-star one.
  • Contingency: if no contract has landed by this week, the instructor subcontracts a real, paid piece of live client work to the strongest students — genuine work, genuine money, a genuine review.
You leave with Delivered work, or a real subcontracted piece in progress.
WEEK 123 sessions

From one job to an income

  • The retainer conversation: converting a completed project into a monthly arrangement. The automation stack-up in practice.
  • The rate ladder: when to raise your price, by how much, and the exact words to use with an existing client.
  • Ninety-day plan written by each student, plus the alumni group and the standing monthly review call.
You leave with A written ninety-day plan, a live profile with work on it, and a rail that pays.
Grounded in: 📚 Jack Roberts — productised $997/month retainer offers · 📚 Nate Herk — Monetizing AI Automation · 🗂️ My AI Roadmap — Day 0 → $10K/month sequence
WHAT IS AND IS NOT PROMISED

The honest version

Every outcome listed in the "You leave with" lines above is guaranteed, because every one of them is within the instructor's control. A first paid client is the target of the twelve weeks and it is what the method is built to produce — but it depends on the student's own hours and effort, and it is not guaranteed.

What is guaranteed in writing: attend ninety percent of sessions and submit every assigned proposal, and if you finish without a verified profile, a live portfolio, PSEB registration and a working payment account, the fee is refunded in full.