Should I stick with the CRO niche for startups or start testing AI automation, and if I stay with CRO what strategies do you recommend to grow it?

#280 · stop auditing your prospects, just assume the problem

Should I stick with the CRO niche for startups or start testing AI automation, and if I stay with CRO what strategies do you recommend to grow it?

It’s very difficult to know whether to stick with CRO or test AI automation without knowing your revenue or how long you’ve been at it. At the end of the day, those are the only two variables that matter for deciding whether to keep doing something or move on. If you’re asking this question, you’re likely not achieving the results you expected; that could be due to your expectations or your actual performance relative to reasonable expectations. AI automation is a solid niche, but CRO is directly defensible from a revenue perspective. Imagine a company making $100,000 a month with their CRO. If you offer to double their CRO, you’re offering an additional $100,000 per month because their funnel is their only revenue source. At $100,000 a month, you can charge 10‑15% as a service provider, yielding $10,000‑$15,000 per month from that client alone. All else equal, that’s a 7‑10x ROI—a strong offer right out of the gate. You can pair it with a fixed‑price guarantee (e.g., guarantee X improvement in conversion rate or you don’t pay, money‑back, free landing page) to get them in the door, improve CRO, and move to a longer‑term, performance‑based relationship. I don’t think CRO is a bad niche, nor is it at risk of being automated away; automation or AI would actually let you do more with it. The fact you’re asking this suggests you’re doing something wrong. Specific strategies: How many customer contacts are you making per day? Are you contacting and selling to at least 100 people daily for this service? If not, and you haven’t done that for 90 days straight (≈9,000 contacts), keep going until you hit that mark. After about 9,000 contacts you’ll have a reasonable sense of how it works. If you can’t do it, can’t hack it, or just suck at it, there’s no shame in moving on to something that works. I believe AI automation is probably the best service‑based business model to start, which is why I teach it in Maker School (my 90‑day accountability program), but I’m not dismissing your model because you’re not winning yet.

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I'm creating automations for a warehouse management system with ~4,000 SKUs but have no WMS experience. Should I treat it like a CRM?

No, you're absolutely right—warehouse management systems, enterprise resource planning, and inventory management systems are essentially dressed-up CRMs. If you understand how spreadsheets work, you'll understand how WMS and similar systems work; their UX is often clunky, but that's fine. Regarding VR 180 cameras: they're stereo cameras with a wide field of view that feel immersive in a VR headset; still early days with resolution needing work, but they could become a big industry in 5–10 years. I haven't used them yet, but they look exciting—two lenses recreating human field of view. I film them with OBS Studio. On your AI automation ideas for cold email: AI meeting note‑taking that sends key subjects and actionable steps to participants and updates the CRM is great. Automated email tagging and filtering is great. An AI concierge for Airbnbs and hotels answering common questions is reasonable. I'm not aiming to become a millionaire; I just want to sell simple sub‑$1K services to get off the ground. For mailboxes, I wouldn't recommend Hostinger for cold email—there's a reason big players avoid it. I'd suggest Zapmail at about $3.50 per mailbox (up to 10 or 100 mailboxes), which also handles DNS setup. Regarding pivoting into AI and automation: if I didn't think it made sense, I wouldn't be making videos about it all day, so my work already shows it's a good move. On starting an agency with no clients: outreach isn't a simple yes/no; it's about volume. How many outreach pieces did you send? How many Upwork or freelancer applications? How many community posts? How many people have you talked to, and over what time? If you haven't done enough, it's not that you're not good enough—it's just that you haven't put in the reps. Expecting results without sufficient effort is unreasonable. Why people fail to make money online: mostly because they can't stick with something long enough to see results. They expect success after a few days or weeks, like learning piano to a concert level in two weeks—impossible. You need years of effort; don't compare your chapter one to someone else's chapter 100. On hiring versus doing it yourself: hiring someone on Upwork or Fiverr to build templates isn't more efficient if your metric is cost or time, because you pay for work you could do yourself and add communication overhead. The only real efficiency gain is doing less of the work you dislike, but at this stage I'd optimize for making $100K rather than avoiding work you enjoy. On growing a coaching business: first, stop over‑analyzing your 'why' and start acting. Determine a set of daily revenue‑generating activities you can do every day for the next year that will drive the results you care about—financial goals. Define what you're selling (information/coaching). Put your offer in front of people, articulate how it solves their problems, and improve the offer as you deliver it. Learn and deliver in tandem. Reinvest profits to systemize outreach, lead gen, and sales, freeing time for systematization and growth. For example, join school communities and each day respond to ten women with health‑improvement suggestions, then move conversations to DMs, calls, and present your coaching offer. As you earn money, you can make the process more sophisticated.

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youtube ↗Lead Generation

what's your view on AI consulting? What's the current cost per acquisition for an AI agency client?

My view on AI consulting is that there’s no real difference—it’s just consulting repackaged. Whenever you see terms like AI automation, AI consulting, AI growth systems, or AI operators, they’re all the same thing; people are just trying to sell a business model and differentiate themselves in a crowded space, which in content is called packaging. At its core, this is foundational marketing: nothing has really changed since the SMMA craze; we’re still selling marketing systems, just rebranded as AI automation. Most AI automation sellers are actually selling marketing systems—content repurposing, social media automation—so it’s just repackaging. Regarding cost per acquisition for an AI agency client, it depends entirely on your lead‑generation mechanism. If you run an inbound funnel with massive distribution, your CPA is essentially just your time on new inquiries—near zero. If you’re doing Upwork applications at $2 each and need about 33 applications to land a client, your CPA is $66. If you run a cold‑email campaign spending $450 per month and sending roughly 3,000 emails to land three clients, your CPA is about $150. However, CPA alone means nothing unless you also know the order value or lifetime value of the clients. For example, if Pete’s CPA is $64 and he sells a product for $1,000 on average, his CPA is 6.4% of revenue. If Samantha’s CPA is $150 and she sells for $10,000 on average, her CPA is only 1.5% of revenue. You also need to factor in referrals and other variables to judge which business is truly more successful. After that, I mention I’m running out of time because I have a podcast with Jack Roberts. We’ve become fast friends after initially being hesitant to collaborate due to a scarcity mindset. We now chat regularly, run a podcast together, and plan to play video games like Halo, Fortnite, or League of Legends while streaming, which I think will be fun and more engaging. I’m even considering buying a gaming computer just to stream with Jack weekly. Ultimately, I’m moving into Twitch streaming to play video games all day.

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youtube ↗Lead Generation

I work with a digital marketing agency that wants to add an AI chatbot to a client's website, but the site gets little organic traffic. Is it worth implementing the chatbot, or should we first focus on getting traffic to the site?

What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.

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youtube ↗AI & Automation

Nick, I want to start working in the AI sector and I'm thinking of beginning with AI automation. The problem is that everything changes so fast. New tools keep coming out, so I'm confused about where to start. At first, I planned to learn NA. Then I started seeing agentic workflows everywhere. Now there's AIOS as well. Over the last 3 to 4 months, I watched videos on different topics, but instead of getting clarity, I'm just become more confused. Since you work on advanced AI project yourself, I'd appreciate your guidance to hit $10,000 per month. If you starting from scratch today, what would you learn first? When would you start offering services? And how do you get your first few clients?

First, I’d join a community like Maker School—not just to use my own products but because membership gives you deep discounts (often a 10x return) on AI platform credits and payment‑processing fees. With those savings I’d start by learning a visual drag‑and‑drop automation builder (such as the n platform) for about four to six hours; that teaches you the fundamentals of systems, workflows, JSON, HTTP requests, etc., which accelerates everything else. Next I’d spend another four hours on a Claude‑code course that covers the technical setup, agent communication, model selection, and so on—roughly ten hours total. After that foundation, I’d devote virtually all remaining time to acquiring customers; the first 90 days would be less than 1% spent on learning and the rest on outreach. You need a customer to actually enter the arena, so I’d use Maker School’s day‑by‑day accountability to hit call and outreach targets, then loop back to upsell from any lower tier to higher ones as the relationship grows.

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