Transcription
Hi everyone! I scaled my AI automation business to $72,000 a month, and in this video, I want to talk about the three best AI automation agency niches in 2025.
I'm not just going to give you the niche; I'm going to give you problems to solve, solutions that you can sell them. Then I'm even going to talk about how exactly I would scrape and then reach out to these people today. If that sounds like something you guys want to learn, let's get into the video.
Okay, I'm going to cover these three niches in a second. Just before I do, I want to talk about what makes a niche great to begin with. The reason why I have to do this is because our industry moves super quickly. It's not enough just for me to give you these three niches on a silver platter, which I will, but I don't just want to do that. I also want to give you guys the skills you need to be able to pick any niche in the future, even if the underlying fundamentals of this technology change, which they surely will, by the way. It happens every few months.
So, what makes a great niche? Three rules of thumb:
First, digital, so not brick and mortar.
Second, mid-ticket plus; that means over $1,000 bucks per deal.
And third, as few regulations as possible. No HIPAA, stay away from healthcare, stay away from legal.
To give you guys some more context, you can think of niches in a couple of different ways. They can either be brick and mortar, which is a physical business out there in the real world with a storefront, or they can be digital, which is something like what I'm doing, something like what a lot of digital agencies do.
The issue that I find is many automation agencies, just because they're new and these businesses are accessible, will start with brick and mortar ones and then they'll find it very difficult to scale and make money. My recommendation is you go digital wherever possible.
Now, there are some reasons why. The first is it's very hard to source brick-and-mortar leads. If we're being practical, digital leads are very easy. Consider how difficult it would be to find a list of Knoxville HVAC companies versus just creative agencies across the United States. One is specific to Knoxville; there are probably only a few HVAC companies that operate in that jurisdiction, whereas the other is basically worldwide. In our hypothetical, across the United States, there could be tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands.
So, you can, in practice, get 10,000 plus leads in just a few days for a few hundred, maybe even less money. If you guys have watched my elite scraping tutorials, the second reason is that most brick-and-mortar clients just do not understand the value of automation anywhere near as much as digital ones.
Because the work that they do on a daily basis just does not involve these sorts of technologies. Think about Lucy, who owns a flower shop down the street. Is she really going to understand the value of a lead generation system? Is she even going to be able to employ a lead generation system, or maybe a CRM, or project manager, or proposal generator, and that sort of stuff? Probably not.
I don't mean to knock brick-and-mortar business owners; I know a lot, and they do fantastic. Some of them do much, much better than I do financially, but they just tend not to deal with this sort of stuff on a daily basis, whereas digital business owners do. They understand CRMs, project managers; they understand systems, at least from a bird's eye view, most of them, just because that's sort of what they have to do on a daily basis.
So, when a client understands the value of your service, you can obviously sell them for a lot more money than if they don't. The third big thing is that brick-and-mortar budgets, in my experience, are often a lot smaller. The reason why is because reach is sort of limited, and you have to contend with an additional line item, which is rent.
For the most part, if you run a digital business, you do not need to pay for rent. Rent, a lot of the time, can be a fair amount of money. It can be a substantial portion of an average brick-and-mortar business's total operating budget.
So, if you think about Lucy at that flower shop, she might make $155,000 a month on a good month. Her rent might be $2,000 or $3,000 of that, or more, so if you're in one of these ritzy cities like NYC or something, probably much more.
The last thing is that implementing stuff in real life is a lot tougher, in general, than implementing stuff solely through some digital interface, like we are doing as automation specialists.
So, a lot of the time, if you work with these brick-and-mortar businesses, if you want to economize or optimize their processes, you need to do things in the physical world too. Like, if somebody comes to your cashier register or whatever, you give them an iPad or something to have them put their information in instead, or maybe they can opt into some special thing.
For instance, that sort of stuff takes a lot longer to get a feedback loop because you have to tell the owner, "Hey, you know, put that iPad on your front desk. We're going to open up to this link. I want you to do X, Y, and Z thing," and then you actually have to test it out physically in reality.
There are a number of things that can go wrong with that. So, just to be totally pragmatic here, and it's not that any of these problems individually are like super massive disqualifiers, but just to be pragmatic, if you put all of them together, the bottom line is the internet is where the money changes hands.
It's a lot easier to work on the internet; it's where you should be working too. The second thing is mid-ticket plus. So, that just means that great niches are ones where a single customer nets the company $1,000 or more. Sorry if I'm jumping ahead; you can, of course, go lower than that, but you will lose one of your primary points of leverage.
The reason for this is because when you work with mid-ticket plus businesses, you have a couple forms of leverage. The first is sales leverage. That just means that if you can add a single customer to a mid-ticket plus business, whether it's through some lead generation or some reactivation campaign, the simplest systems ever, if you can get them a single additional customer, you will often pay for your own expense for months or years.
So, it's very easy for you to justify the money that you are charging a mid-ticket plus business. The second form of leverage is people leverage. Mid-ticket businesses, because they tend to be more expensive, tend to involve more people in the actual service delivery or fulfillment.
When you have a lot of people, you have a lot of opportunity to automate stuff. So, you don't just get sales leverage up here; you also get people leverage. And then I just threw this in; this is sort of anecdotal, but in my experience, when I work mid-ticket, I work with richer people.
I work with people that are a little bit more, they think about bigger things, right? More bigger picture thinkers, people that tend to have a little bit more money. So, there's a lot more referral opportunity for you. It's a lot easier for you to consolidate your reputation as an automation engineer, and then a lot of the time, these relationships are just better.
They're just more professional, right? People just tend to reward you more and appreciate the professionalism that you put in. So, I always go with mid-ticket plus. Now, it's basically my rule of thumb.
The third and last big rule is fewer regulations. I don't know how much of this stuff you guys have done at this point that you're watching my video. Some of you guys might be at the starting line of your business, $1,000 to $3,000. Other guys might be at $20,000, $30,000, $40,000, $50,000, whatever.
But one thing that I can say confidently is if you have a choice to work in two potential universes, one with a ton of regulation and then one with very little regulation, you're basically always going to want to favor the one with little regulation.
Because regulations just make everything harder. Great niches are in industries that have either very few regulations or they have regulations that, in practice, nobody gives a about.
So, I'll give you an example: healthcare, especially in the United States, can really suck because you have to use HIPAA-specific automation platforms. You have a bunch of data control policies; you have to anonymize customer data. You can't just use their first names or last names; you can't just use an API call to a large language model.
You have to use all these alternatives that are 10 times the money. Basically, the point that I'm making is all of this additional work is going to add, at minimum, 5 to 10 times the work, and you will probably not get paid 5 to 10 times the amount for the work.
So, just right off the cuff, working in a highly regulated industry slows you down and adds a lot of friction. It tends to just make all of this way harder.
Now, the caveat argument there that a lot of people give to me is, "Well, Nick, if I work in this industry that has a lot more regulation, a lot more friction to get into, then naturally the supply of the market will be a lot lower as well, meaning it'll be easier for me to come in. There'll be fewer other competitors," and so on and so forth.
I understand that, but I think it makes much more sense, especially if you're at the earlier side of your journey, to compete in high-volume industries. Industries not necessarily where there's little supply, but actually more supply.
Because, you know, you're not only making money, but you're also taking on a lot of self-education when you work with a higher volume of leads. For instance, you tend to learn and pick up the fundamentals of running a digital service business, specifically in this case an automation business, a lot faster.
Alex Rosi talks a lot about this idea of debt, like technical debt, education debt, client management skills debt, and I think that this is sort of in the same vein. So, even if the supply is less, yeah, it adds a minimum of 5 to 10 times the implementation cost, and you're not going to get paid 5 to 10 times the amount.
And then, yeah, I just wanted to say that new emerging or non-local markets are better. There are technically regulations around basically everything these days, but in my experience, only healthcare and legal are enforced in practice.
Now, just to cover everything, I'm not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice; this is just my own experience working across these industries.
Okay, are you guys ready to actually get into these three niches? I'm not only going to cover the niche itself; I'm going to cover how you can go out and scrape leads in that niche, how you can pitch them primarily using cold outreach, and then ultimately the exact systems that you can build and sell for them.
Let's get started.
All right, the first niche is high-touch software as a service. So, if you guys aren't familiar with software as a service, it is a business model where you will sign up for some sort of software on a subscription basis. They will provide a service to you, like Adobe, Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Instantly, Smart Lead, ClickUp, Monday.com, PandaDoc, whatever. They'll provide some service to you on a monthly basis, and as a result, you'll pay them some sort of recurring subscription.
Now, one thing that some people might not know is that SaaS is actually split into two. I'm just going to go with two types for now. In reality, it depends on who you're talking to, but there's low-touch SaaS and then there's high-touch SaaS.
Low-touch SaaS is just most of the software platforms you're probably familiar with. It's stuff like PandaDoc, Monday.com, Trello. The way that low-touch works is it's low-touch, so there are very few customer touchpoints with a real person in that business. Typically, the vast majority of it is automated. You will enter your email address, you'll enter your password, you'll create an account, you'll pay a little bit of money, and then voila, you have access to the software platform. Sounds pretty sweet, right?
But there's another variant to that, and that's called high-touch SaaS. High-touch SaaS just means it's still a software as a service model, but it tends to be very expensive. It tends to solve just one particular need, and usually very, very well and extensively. It tends to be marketed more towards enterprise people, and it's not automated.
Instead of it being a completely automated sign-up process, usually the way that high-touch SaaS works is you have to sign up for a demo. You'll be assigned an account executive or an account rep, and then these people will both demo the service, sell you, get you signed up, and then help you implement the thing into your business.
So, these sorts of businesses, because they require sales demos, they're high-cost, like a managed service, and they have high customer lifetime value. They tend to print money when you work with them, and when you manage to get a high-touch SaaS business as a client.
I have over 1,400 people across my automation communities, Maker School and Make Money with Make, and everybody that's doing high-touch SaaS right now, or at least everybody that's sending a sufficiently high volume of outbound outreach to high-touch SaaS, tends to be crushing it.
Why is it good? Let's just cover it one by one. The first is it's mid-ticket plus. They are often several hundred or thousand per month. Think about like a $500 managed subscription. If you manage to help them get a client that stays on for one year, that's $66,000 in their pocket. That's excluding upsells, which some of these businesses literally live and breathe off of.
Many customer touchpoints mean that you can automate a lot of these things. Kind of like before, you know, the more people in a business, typically the more room for automation. This typically solves a very strong need, especially for enterprise companies, and then many of these businesses have annual revenues of seven to eight figures.
The cool thing about this is they can also get into funding situations. Many of these high-touch businesses, because they're geared towards enterprise and they solve these super specific needs, a lot of them to do with AI and technology nowadays, can raise big funding rounds, and they have a lot of money to spend.
So, not only do you work with people that have more money, but they also have a lot of money to spend, and not all that money is their money, which is pretty sweet.
So, it's not enough just for me to talk about a niche. Although, you know, after this, I'll show you how to sell them, and I'll show you the products and services to pitch. Let me actually show you what these businesses look like.
Here's one called Senbird. Sbird basically is like an enterprise-level communication and chat API service. Do I know what the hell any of this stuff means? I'll be honest, not really. But that's because they're not marketing to me; they're marketing to a very specific customer avatar, which they sell for a lot of money.
If we go to their pricing page here, you see that even their lowest paid plan is $400 a month. And that's like their lowest monthly active user plan. If you scale it up to 10K, it's $500 a month for this thing. What if the average customer stays on for 18 months, right? 18 times 500 is $9,000, customer lifetime value.
If you charge somebody like $3,000 a month, if you get them a single customer, and maybe you get them five a month or something, but if you get them a single customer, you pay for yourself for three months, which is fantastic.
So, you know, that's Sbird. Another one here is called Check. What you'll find with a lot of these sorts of businesses when you go searching and doing the lead gen is not all of them will actually have pricing pages. In fact, the majority of them won't.
The reason why is because they want you to have to get in touch with a person in order to actually move forward with the process. So, this is me just doing a bunch of silly BS because I just want to, you know, submit my form and have them contact me.
But basically, what's going to happen when I click the submit button is they're going to assign me to a demo rep, most likely. I haven't actually filled out the specific page, but most likely they're going to assign me to some sort of demo rep. They're going to book me in on a calendar, and then they're going to try and sell me because, you know, it's a higher ticket, higher touch service.
A last example here, and I know I talked about not working in the healthcare industry, but I figured, you know, I just wanted to be as comprehensive as possible. A lot of these enterprise companies do work in regulated industries like healthcare. IMO Health is one of them. Same sort of vibe, right?
This website has worked with tons of these massive businesses before, and if you want to connect with them, if you want to work with them, you need to schedule a demo. As you can see, it's fairly in-depth. Somebody has to contact you, walk you through your needs, and, you know, because the service is so expensive and because it solves such a valuable service, usually, you know, companies like this can get away with it.
Okay, enough talking about what this company, what this industry or niche is and why it's so valuable. Let's actually get into how to sell. So, if I were, you know, tackling this right now and I had no resources, no knowledge of this, no expertise, or anything like that, this is exactly what I would do.
And I mean, I'm raising a hypothetical as if I did not know any of this stuff, but I do, and this is what I'm actually doing. So, the first thing that I do, and you kind of have a couple of choices here, you can either get a bunch of Apollo leads for SaaS companies. You can just go on Apollo.io, you can log in or make an account, I guess.
And the way that Apollo works is you basically have the ability to create giant lists of companies. So, go to company or, I don't know, maybe I'll go to industry and keywords, and then you can pick an industry here. So, maybe you want to work specifically looking for, I don't know, banking, insurance, financial services, businesses, and that sort of stuff.
Okay, what you do is you go in, you apply whatever filters you want, and I'm not going to walk you through the specific filters because obviously this is entirely up to you. You get lists of companies from Apollo, and then you enrich these using the tools that I'm going to talk about in a second.
You search specifically for SaaS companies that are above maybe, I don't know, 11 to 50 people, so they typically tend to work more enterprise. You use the term managed when you're doing the searches. You use a variety of terms that hone in on businesses like this. If you're not sure what those are, just check out alternatives to these three services and then build a keyword list based off of that.
So, that's one approach you could do. Another approach you could do is you could literally look on Indeed or LinkedIn jobs for, you know, literally you could just look for the term, I guess I got to sign in here, so give me one sec. You could look for the term software or sales.
So, I could go for sales, and I'm not going to do Calgary, which is where I'm at, but I'll do sales, and then I'm going to do a slightly higher salary, like $100,000. And then there are some additional filters that I could do here. I could look for mid-level to executive-level sales.
I could look for full-time roles. I could look for locations, industry, software development, insurance, like I mentioned, financial services, this sort of stuff. Then I could also throw in a couple of other keywords, and you know, these keywords are constantly changing; they're kind of up to you.
But maybe you type in like SaaS sales or something. What you'll see is you'll see a list of businesses. Now, because I'm in Canada, and you know, LinkedIn likes to show you results that are in the country that you are in, obviously, because a lot of them have regulatory requirements and stuff like that, I'm seeing Canadian businesses.
If you're here, if you're in the United States or somewhere else, you're going to see different ones, but these are the sorts of businesses that ultimately you can apply to. And the value in doing this approach is when you get a list of these, you can scrape them using a tool like Appify.
I mean, if you scrape, you know, lists using Appify, so if I just type in LinkedIn jobs over here, if you scrape that list using Appify, what you end up getting is you end up getting the company name, the company URL, a giant description of the business, the location. Hell, you get stuff like salaries, you know, experience levels required, sectors.
Okay, all you do is you just pump in the URL in here, and then with all this stuff, all you need to do—and I'm saying all you need to do a lot, but literally all you need to do—is you just get the decision-maker emails using a service like Any Mail Finder.
If you've never used Any Mail Finder before, it's super simple. You just go and type in the first and last name of the person and then, you know, the term, sorry, the website domain specifically. And what you'll do is you'll pump this in, and it'll literally return you a verified email maybe about 30% of the time and an unverified email the other 70% of the time of a person at that company.
You can also use something called a decision-maker search over here, where you look specifically for a person at one of these businesses. So, if I just go back here, I go to Senbird, and I grab that website, and then I'm looking for CEO, owner, president, founder, whatever.
If I search, we can actually go and we can find the email address of one of the people that you might be able to contact at that business, in this case, the co-founder and CEO. So, I would literally do this.
Okay, I'd get a giant list of these people, and then all I would do is I'd send them an email that says, "Hi, noticed you were hiring for account executives. I do a really cool thing that solves the need that you are looking for right now for an account executive, but I do it using systems. I just delivered amazing results for somebody else, and I believe I can give you similar results. I believe in this so strongly I will guarantee X dollars in the next 60 days, X leads in the next 60 days, X dollars saved in the next 60 days, or you're not going to pay a cent. Is this worth a chat?"
You send, I don't know, 1,000, 2,000, 3,000 of these every week. It's best if you personalize these using artificial intelligence and if you don't make the email seem templated because people like being talked to as if it's like a real person to a real person. They don't want to know that they're in a sequence.
If you do something like this, then you'll be able to sell the system I'm about to show you, and I think I said previous here, but I meant to say subsequent for at least $1,500 a pop. Then you'll be able to take that and then segue that into some sort of monthly recurring service where you could have it for $3,000, $4,000, $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 a month, depending on the company and depending on the needs that you fulfill.
Now, once you have that, what problems and systems do you actually sell? Well, here are two really simple ones that you can throw right off the bat. The first is a lead generation personalized cold email system. What I've found is a lot of these high-touch SaaS businesses, especially ones that are founded more than a couple of years ago, rely on super bloated sales teams and outdated outreach products that are usually a byproduct of them interfacing with enterprise companies so much.
They tend to just have shittier software because they're bigger, more bloated, they have more red tape, and they move a lot slower. So, you can deliver an insane amount of value just getting one of these businesses' sales teams, getting them, you know, 100 mailboxes, signing them up to Instantly or Smart Lead or something, doing some targeted lead scraping similar to what we just did in order to get this deal.
Okay, API's lead scrapers at the time of this recording are $1.20 per 1,000 leads. Crazy! And then sending them mass sequences that are personalized and customized that, you know, solve the problems that the target market or target audience is looking for.
You could sell them the system; you could even go as far as building in some sort of AI autoresponder to manage this, scale set meetings with, you know, closers and demo people on their team, then automatically forward those meetings to them. If you build this for the right high-touch SaaS company, you can build way more than $1,500. If you were to do this for something like Senbird, you would be able to prove some sort of results in them; you probably get away with like $10,000 or more.
So, a lot of potential there. The second system is a lot of these businesses naturally have bloated sales processes. You could very easily build a personalized proposal system and/or CRM for them. It's basically a cakewalk. Once you build a template the very first time, you can just copy and paste this over and over and over again, regardless of the business, so long as it's in a similar vertical.
So, what this means, if you're unfamiliar, is agencies and high-touch SaaS businesses both have very similar sales flows. Typically, you need to book a demo or a discovery call. Now, high-touch SaaS businesses will show off the service in the demo call; that's why it's called a demo. They're demoing the service.
Agencies will usually do what's called a discovery call, where they just tend to get to know more about you. But usually, what happens after this call is you'll either move into a closing call, and then after that, you'll send some sort of proposal, or you'll just immediately send a proposal for services.
The latter is what I like to do, but that is most of these companies' sales flows. So, what you can do, to make a long story short, is you could build a system that just makes this way faster. Instead of you having, as a salesperson, to write up some big long proposal draft with a bunch of details and stuff like that, what you can do, and what I've implemented in dozens of companies now, is you can just give them a simple form.
You can say, "Hey, before you end the sales call, I just want you to fill out this form." This form asks for a bunch of simple information like their name, their email address, their company, and then maybe some quick bullet points on the problem they're facing and the solution that they want. You type that in; this might take you less than 30 seconds to a minute during or at the end of the call.
You press enter, and then it goes into a system and automatically generates a proposal. I've built this system out and showed this on my channel many times. Anybody here that has watched a couple of my videos will know.
So, feel free to check out my channel; just type in like proposal generator, and you'll find a couple. I've also done this with the lead generation to personalized cold email system. So, both of these systems are literally, you know, you can go to my Gumroad, download the blueprints for free, and then get going and, you know, start selling these to make a ton of money.
So, that's niche number one. Let's cover niche number two now. I've talked about niche number two back in 2024's video, where I covered the three best AI automation agency niches. But luckily for us, this niche has not changed. This niche is still printing, and in fact, I go as far as to say it's actually printing even more money.
If you look at the success rates across both my communities, than it was previously. I don't know if this is just because more recruitment companies are now problem-aware and solution-aware. They understand that automation is a very simple and easy way to make them tons of money, or if we're just getting better at selling to them, but yeah, people are really loving recruitment right now, and recruitment is booming.
So, in case you don't know how recruitment works, if I run a recruitment company, basically what I'm doing is I'm finding candidates and then I'm placing those candidates in somebody else's business. So, let's say my client is a roofing business. This is not realistic, but let's say they're a roofing business, and they're looking for a very specific set of roofing skills for their next hire.
They would reach out to me and say, "Nick, I know you run a recruitment company; can you recruit a high-quality roofer for me?" I say, "Of course!" So, I go out, I have my systems and my job posts, and I list a bunch of things looking for roofers. I find 10 roofers, I interview each of them, and then I get like three that are amazing.
What I do then is I present these candidates to the roofing company and I say, "Which one do you want? This guy wants $80,000, this other guy wants $85,000, and this guy wants $75,000." They say, "I want the $75,000 one."
Then all you do to get paid as a recruitment company is you typically take a percentage of the first-year salary. That's like the simplest way to do it. There are other ways, obviously, some flat rates, some percentage of multiple-year salaries, but typically, in my experience, the simplest way is a percent of the first-year salary.
This sort of business model can do really, really well. Typically, recruitment companies have to handle a high volume of both applications and candidates. So, anytime a business handles a high volume of something, small percentage improvements can yield really big results.
If you know the average recruitment agency, in order to fulfill their work for a client, handles 300 applicants, and if you can build a system that just makes them 10% better at handling these apps or 10% faster, that's worth a ton of money to the recruitment business, and they're happily pay you money in return to solve that problem.
Another thing is, in that example I mentioned before with a $75,000 roofer, right? Let's say you take 20% of the first-year salary hypothetically, and again, this isn't realistic because most of the time, roofing is not something that people typically go to recruitment companies for. But anyway, $75,000 times 20% is $15,000.
So, as a recruitment agency, you will make $115,000 just making that placement. As you can imagine, this is pretty high lifetime customer value, especially if the customer comes back to you, right? If a single client requests one placement a year and they tend to stay with you for three years, $15,000 times 3 is $45,000.
That is a massive customer lifetime value, and if you get them a single client, they're going to like you a lot. The last is recruitment tends to be digital first. There are so many pain points regarding sourcing, screening, and communicating with candidates. No rent, no brick-and-mortar business; you can systemize a lot of this digitally and then use it to acquire clients for them too.
Let me give you some examples before I dive into what to do. This is Recruitment Partners Incorporated. I believe these guys are maybe in Calgary; that's probably why I picked them. I just Googled recruitment partners, and they happened to be the first thing that popped up.
So, you can see they're pitching both candidates and employers—candidates being people that are looking for jobs, employers that are looking for candidates to fill their jobs. And yeah, I'm not going to harp on this anymore; I think most of you guys probably understand what recruitment looks like.
This is an executive recruiting firm. Executive recruiting just means placing C-suite and VP people, and these tend to be obviously substantially more money upon a placement, meaning these companies have a higher customer lifetime value for the clients that do get in their network.
It's not uncommon for you to make over $100,000 on a single client. And let's actually get into how they sell these puppies. So, if you wanted to sell a recruitment agency today, and what I'm seeing people do across my two automation communities, over 1,400 people in total, maybe like 50ish people or so right now are targeting recruitment.
They are looking on Indeed and LinkedIn jobs for recruiter roles. They're scraping recruiter roles using something like Appify. They're getting decision-maker emails using something like Any Mail Finder, and then they're sending an email very similar to the last email, offering a guarantee and essentially saying, "Hey, noticed you were hiring for this job. I do a really cool thing helping recruitment businesses make this much money, and I just delivered $95,000 for another recruitment company. I can give you extraordinarily similar results, maybe even better, and I want to guarantee my service since I know you don't know me, and I want you to feel comfortable and confident about this. Is this worth a chat?"
Same thing as before. If you run a cold email campaign here, if you personalize them using AI, you'll get much better results. And if you don't, if you run this at scale, you can make a ton of money. I had somebody in my community go from, I believe, making $0 to over $80,000 in just a few months employing this exact approach that I'm telling you.
The systems themselves that you could sell, there are three. The first is a candidate placement system. So, you know, I talked about candidate placement earlier being the main thing that recruitment companies do, right? They often juggle hundreds of applicants per position, and then their job as a recruitment agency is filtering those applicants down into the highest quality subset before presenting them to the client.
Well, you can basically solve all of this with some automated hiring pipeline. I've built this out a couple of times on my channel already. Basically, what you do is you build out an end-to-end pipeline in a tool like ClickUp, Monday, or a similar platform.
All you do is you stage it. You say, I don't know, first pass, interview, second pass, interview, and then maybe considering for presentation or something. Maybe have four or five of these stages. What you do is when a new candidate comes in, they come into the CRM with the status first pass.
Then you, as a recruitment person or a contractor, go through this top to bottom. You just verify which ones make it into the interview stage. When you move them or click their stage and change it to interview, basically, you will automatically send them an email with a link to a calendar booking or something that gets them to the next stage of the process.
After that stage, they're now an interview. The people that pass, you just move them to the next one, second pass. Then they automatically get a bunch of assets, resources, questions, that sort of stuff. You can do this in whatever freaking way you want. I'm just throwing out random ideas here that may or may not actually be super great.
I don't know if I'd phrase it as first pass interview, second pass interview. I'd probably go like first pass, trial, interview, second interview, or something to be super secure. But the point I'm making is you could just automate the hell out of what is traditionally a very involved manual process, and now the recruitment agency staff is just a QA person.
This can print money for recruitment companies. It can massively reduce margins, which tend to be pretty high because it's such a people-focused industry, and it just makes things a lot more organized. It also allows you to upsell a system, which I'll talk about in a second.
The second thing you'd sell is a lead generation personalized cold email system. As you could see, this isn't the first time I'm bringing this up, and the reason why is because lead generation systems are by far the number one most in-demand thing right now in all of these niches I'm going to be showing you, except for maybe the next one.
But there are other lead generation approaches you could use, and the reason why is because lead generation is just the bottleneck that most businesses have, right? You could solve the tightest bottleneck; typically, you're worth a lot of money.
So anyway, recruitment companies struggle with consistently finding new clients or job openings. Older firms especially rely on these outdated methods like expensive job board subscriptions, which can charge them hundreds or thousands of dollars a month. Total waste of time.
So, what you can do is you can solve this with a cold email lead system. In a nutshell, and I've documented this multiple times on my channel, but you buy 10 domains, you link 30 mailboxes to Smart Lead or Instantly, you warm them up, you source 4,000 leads, and by the end of month one, you will have reached out to all 4,000 of these people with a response rate of around 4%.
Assuming that you use some of my copywriting tools, you'll have generated about 160 replies, many of which will have turned into justifiable sales opportunities. Hopefully, you know at least a third, maybe a quarter of these will result in positive replies, and then of that, maybe like 50, 60, 70% will convert to meetings.
That's still a lot of meetings, and you can, you know, obviously provide a lot of value to a recruitment company with a customer lifetime value of $5,000, $10,000, $15,000, $220,000.
Okay, the last system I want to cover is an automated dashboard system. So, the way that recruitment agencies work is, you know, as I mentioned, they typically deal with very high volumes of people, and because of that, they have many opportunities to collect data.
The issue is the vast majority of recruitment companies do not collect data, or at least if they do, their data collection sucks. But here's the really cool thing: you could use this as an upsell to the system that I talked about earlier.
Because if you think about it, if you have an automated hiring pipeline where, in order to trigger something to happen automatically, you need to change a status, well, you can also trigger them being added as a new row in a Google Sheet or something, or some sort of logging.
Then the second that you start logging people, well, now you can connect this to data visualization software. For the specific stack, I'm going to tell you guys about is you go to Google Sheets, you make some new recruitment database. You have like the first name, the last name, the email address, the stage, and a bunch of other information about the candidate, right?
When you trigger a status change inside of the CRM that you built for them, then all you do is you add a new row to this database. Okay? And then you just keep on going.
And then what you do is you connect this to something like Looker Studio. Looker Studio is just like data visualization dashboard software that connects to the data source that you just created a moment ago, Google Sheets, and allows you to visualize the number of people at different stages.
So now you know, okay, I had 108 people make it into the first pass, then 75 people make it into the interview, then 33 people make it to the second pass, then 15 people make it into the interview, then four people were presented for placement.
The second that you give a recruitment company data like this that's that granular, one, they're going to love you, and two, they're going to be able to make data-driven decisions that make their company a lot better.
So, as you can see, lots of opportunities here on the recruitment problems and systems. And obviously, if you follow a similar approach to niche one's approach, you can make a ton of money selling these.
The third big niche, and the one that I'm personally now a part of, is coaches and consultants. This industry is blowing the hell up right now. It's one of the fastest growing, in my opinion. If you're unfamiliar with what coaching and consulting is, if you think about like agencies, agencies typically provide the service, which is the building or the marketing or the pay-per-click ads or whatever.
Coaches and consultants, they help agencies or they help other businesses provide the service. So, they provide like strategy, tactics, they do coaching, they, you know, do accountability, they do testing, they do higher-level stuff.
Basically, the point that I'm making is they just provide a bunch of auxiliary support to the business to make the business better at servicing the needs of their clients. Things can get pretty complex in B2B because if you think about a lot of agencies, you're B2B to begin with.
So, it's like a B2B agency delivering work for another B2B agency, and that first B2B agency is being coached by like a B2B coaching consultancy practice. But the point that I'm making is coaches and consultants are just like auxiliary. They typically don't provide the actual service; they just inform you how to provide the service.
So, why is it good? It's very high ticket. Some of these agency coaching programs are tens of thousands of dollars per year. I run some agency coaching programs; right? My community is Maker School and Make Money with Make, and they're not tens of thousands of dollars a year. My most expensive was $1,382 a year as of the time of this recording.
But, you know, a lot of the other ones are super high ticket—$50,000, $100,000, especially masterminds and stuff like that. So, if you can get them a single additional client, obviously, you can bring home the bacon yourself.
The second reason is because it most often involves information products. Coaching is just all about information. It's strategy, tactics, guides, accountability systems, that sort of stuff, and these are typically very leveraged with no real inventory or fulfillment.
And then the third is a lot of these businesses can be pretty profitable. They have very large sales and marketing budgets that are primarily manually driven. So, you know, people will run ads, they'll run, I don't know, Instagram shoutouts on certain profiles, they'll do a variety of things in order to market their coaching or consultancy practice.
But these are primarily manually driven, and you can automate the hell out of these. So, to be concrete, here are a couple examples. One is me, and I'm just going to exit out of that before my YouTube video starts playing and screws up with my audio.
Another one that's probably more relevant is this is just some program that a friend of mine, I think, joined called Client Ascension. Some of you guys may be familiar with, oh geez, the name isn't coming to me right now, Daniel, I think, yeah, Mr. Fazzio.
Anyway, this is a program that helps you grow your agency or B2B business up to a certain amount of money. This is typically what they look like, and you know, odds are if you can help this guy Daniel with his business and you can offer even one or two percent improvements to maybe his bottom line or his margins or something, this is probably a several hundred thousand dollar business.
You'll be delivering a lot of value, and you'll be able to be compensated in kind. So, how do you actually go about selling them? Well, I'm a coaching consultant, so you're kind of hearing this from, you know, like the source here. This is exactly how people have sold me in the past, the successful ones anyway, and this is exactly what I would do if I were looking to sell to this niche myself.
The first thing is I would scrape YouTube, I would scrape school, and I'd scrape all other social media where coaches hang out. I use Appify; I'll show you that in a second. I then look for cross-platform information. I try to get their TikTok, I try to get their Instagram, I try to get their Twitter and X profiles.
I basically try to get everything. If you want to look at a practical example, what this might be, I'd go to Appify over here. Okay? And then there are a variety of scrapers that we could use. Probably the simplest one would be like YouTube channel fast, YouTube channel scraper, or maybe YouTube channel scraper.
There are a variety of them, but basically what happens is you feed in some parameters, and then it returns you like the titles of all their videos. It returns you like their descriptions and stuff like that. It returns you, you know, if they have an email, you can use an email channel finder.
You can get a bunch of information about like their links and LinkedIn and Instagram and stuff like that. You get sourced from there. What you do after that is, okay, so now you have, you know, a bunch of their information, and you stick it in a Google Sheet.
What you do is you pass all of this identifying information to GPT-4 or a large language model, and you do a personalization prompt that says, "Hey, here are the last three that this person created. Here are the last three posts this person made. Here's a bunch of stuff."
And then you just have it create a personalization prompt that says, "I don't know, loved your last post on pushing through adversity in uni. I had a really similar experience; I just wanted to tell you about it," or something.
You have some personalization prompt where then an artificial intelligence or large language model takes the last few posts that are topical and relevant and then converts that into a one-line icebreaker sort of variable that you can add to a cold email.
Then what you do is you create a custom asset. So, this is something like a Google Doc. This Google Doc will solve a very simple problem for them. It will create a bunch of high-quality YouTube titles, for instance, or outlines for content, or competitor analysis, or example funnels for a new community product.
Basically, what you do is you get AI to take all this data and then generate a really quick and easy little hit of value, which may not even be that valuable. I'm reminded of this guy that sold me successfully just a week and a half ago.
I think I sent him like, I think I sent him over $500. Now, he reached out to me and he said, "Hey Nick, here are 20 YouTube titles." By the way, if you're watching this, you crushed it, man. He said, "Hey Nick, here are a list of 20 YouTube titles. I know that I have to give you some value in order for you to take me seriously, so take them. I'm not like a cheapskate copywriter; you can do whatever you want with this."
And then if you find this interesting at all, just send me a message back. Here you go. And then he just gave it to me, and then there were 22 titles, and of them, I liked like four or five of them, and then I got value out of it before the guy even tried to talk to me.
He created something for me before, you know, I was even required to give anything back. So, if you do this, you can do this completely automatically. By the way, he probably did it manually. God bless his soul, but you can do this completely automatically.
Then people will freaking love you for it, and your reply rates on email campaigns like this are going to be at least 5%, probably closer to 10, 15, maybe even 20. So, what you do then is you enrich and find email addresses for each coach using something like Any Mail Finder, which I've already showed you, and then you just send them all an email.
Then, because you've already produced an asset, you also DM them across all of the platforms you could find using those scrapers—so their Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, you know, YouTube, whatever, school, all those platforms—just to make sure they see it.
Then you say, "Hey, here is a list of X thing that I think will do Y for you. It's totally free, no strings. I want to work with you, but I know value is how you get there. So, if you find this interesting, just shout back. If not, no hard feelings. Thanks."
You can just copy and paste this thing for all I care. Oh, keep in mind there are probably going to be several hundred other people copying and pasting it too, so you might want to vary the words or something like that.
But something like this would work extraordinarily well. I know because it's worked on me a number of times. I've seen it work on a ton of other people, and this is what people in my community are now starting to do to see results as well.
So, what you want to do is you want to run all this stuff at scale, book meetings, and then pitch them on any of the three new systems, or two next systems. Sell them for $1,500 plus. I think you can sell them for a lot more than that, to be honest.
And here are the systems that I would sell to coaches and consultants. The first is an AI coach. A common need in many low and mid-ticket coaching offers, one in my case and one in a lot of the other communities and groups that I'm a part of, is some sort of Q&A.
That's typically one of the line items or deliverables provided as part of you joining this community. Like, "Hey, if you have any questions about how to build an agency, or if you have any questions about how to create automations, just drop them down below, and somebody in our group will get back to you."
This is great, but what you'll find in practice is a lot of these questions end up being variants of earlier questions. So, this is like the same sorts of questions repeated over and over and over and over again. Essentially, you've already answered it either in a video or maybe a text post somewhere else or something of that nature.
So, here's what you do instead. You offer these people an AI coach. You take all of the videos that they've ever done; you take all of the YouTube posts, all the community posts, all the school, Circle posts, whatever, and you convert this into a retrieval-augmented generation chatbot.
This is just a fancy term for like the AI assistants or something that searches data up in a database, and then you call it AI Nick or something. And then next time anybody has a question, before they post it in the group, they just ask AI Nick.
This will work like 70-80% of the time if you do a pretty good job. It's not going to answer all the questions because it's rag, and rag is known to have a little, you know, to be bumpy at times. But this is going to handle 70-80% of all questions because it's basically just fuzzy search over a database of answers to questions.
If you do this, you could literally completely automate like one job or two jobs or three jobs depending on the size of this coaching company on day one. Because it doesn't take much more than like 24 hours to put together, you can literally automate like several jobs worth the very first or second day.
The other thing you could do is you could actually give them this as a product to sell to their members. You could say, "Hey, this isn't just something that's included in our program. If you want access to AI Nick, pay us $15 extra dollars a month or something, and this thing will handle, you know, all of the questions you have. It'll do a really good job. It's not perfect, but it'll do a really good job."
You use that as a first pass. So, not only are you saving them margin, but you can also have them sell this as a product to double or even triple their revenue. A lot of people are doing this right now.
I know a lot of other people in the AI automation agency space are doing this with their own brands. I haven't really done this because I think that there's a lot of value in my reputation in personally responding to these things.
But off the top of my head, I could tell you there's like 500 people that would eat this up right now if you just served it to them on a silver platter. So, that's number one.
Number two is a coaching management system. So, typically, the way coaching companies go, from my experience, is they tend to grow really quickly. There's some trend like SMMA or, in my case, AI or automation or AI agents.
With this trend, there's a lot of opportunity to make money. So, creators and coaches like myself will make content about it, and typically the growth curve looks something like this. Because, you know, so many people are interested in this, it's like selling shovels during a gold rush.
So many people are interested in this that so many people join the program. Very quickly, the person that runs said program does not have enough resources. They don't have enough people in order to fulfill the thing that they promised the people that they would do.
So, what tends to happen is they tend to hire shotgun, and they just tend to hire as many people as possible. They get customer success managers, coaching managers, CSMs, like account executives, whatever terminology you want to use for them.
They end up with this really bloated team that technically does the job, but they're all very inefficient, and they tend to be very different in terms of how they do the work because you didn't really have the time to train them all up to some standard.
Well, here's where my coaching management system comes in handy. Jesus, I'm such a dad. You can basically build a similar CRM or project management system, what I've shown you guys before, except what you do is when a new person comes into the coaching program, you just round-robin assign them to one of the many coaches that you have on staff.
Then this coach has a number of stages, just like our hiring system. There might be week one, where, you know, when somebody enters week one, they're automatically delivered a bunch of assets, Google Drive folders automatically unlock. They're automatically given a bunch of templated resources.
Then when they make it into week two, some other stuff gets unlocked for them. They receive another email with a bunch of info. Maybe there's a quiz at the end of week two. When they finish the quiz, they move on to week three.
Basically, this is an intensive end-to-end coaching management system that delivers the same coaching experience that the people are currently doing, just in like a completely and utterly standardized way.
And this is the sort of system that can honestly make a ton of money for the coaching company. They can eliminate a few of their coaches, for one—not that I want to hire or fire CSMs, but if you can, you might as well.
And then it can standardize the quality of the service and allow you to improve it. This can end up being like one of the most foundational parts of a coaching business, to be honest.
And, you know, if you can deliver the thing that becomes a foundation to the rest of their company, their livelihood, and their revenue, obviously, they're going to compensate you for it.
So, that's personally how I would do it. Remember, in order to sell them, you could just scrape YouTube, school, whatever medium that they're great on using something like Appify, personalize the hell out of it, create an asset, and then send it to them alongside some personalized messaging.
The reason why you're doing it across all these platforms is just because you'll have probably spent like 10 cents using AI to create this thing. You might as well maximize the probability that it gets seen, just sort of like recouping your sunk cost.
And then the reason why you sell the AI coach and the coaching management system is just because these are problems that people tend to suffer from.
So, just one quick review before I wrap this video up. We had three niches: we had high-touch SaaS. Okay, high-touch SaaS is mid-ticket plus, lots of customer touchpoints; they have very high revenues. These are the sorts of businesses you typically want to work with.
We had recruitment. Recruitment agencies typically deal with a ton of people, and when there's a ton of people in high volume, there's a lot of opportunity to make money. They also have very high customer lifetime values.
And then the third was coaches and consultants. Coaching and consulting is blowing up right now. They're super high ticket, and since they involve information products and margins tend to be good, companies like this typically have very large sales and marketing budgets that you can help with.
I hope you guys appreciated this video. I tried to make it as practical as possible for any aspiring AI automation freelancers or agencies. If you guys have any questions or suggestions about this, please drop them down below.
But I love doing videos more on the strategy and the tactics, although, you know, I also really enjoy doing videos doing the actual building as well. Thanks so much again! If you guys could do me a solid, like, subscribe, comment, do all that fun stuff to bump me up in the YouTube algo, I'll catch you on the next one. Cheers!