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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Related answers

youtube ↗AI & Automation

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.

ai consultingcost per acquisitionltvlead generation

youtube ↗Agency Operations

I'd love to hear more about how you went from having no clients to landing your first few, and then how you scaled to 100K months. Specifically, how did you structure long-term deals with automation clients after building their systems, and what makes clients willing to pay a retainer once the automation is set up?

Are we talking no clients in general, in any of my businesses, or specifically automation? You might be talking about automation. The way I did automation was I just started out on Upwork — applied to like 10 to 20 Upwork jobs per day along with my business partner at the time, and the vast majority of them said no to us. We used a custom Loom-video-based approach: I'd record a Loom of me talking through the problem and send out a ton of those. I got really good at explaining automation problems consistently, and we scaled that automation agency pretty quickly to $15-20K a month. We languished around $20-40K a month for a while because my partner wanted to operate it as a software consultancy taking on custom projects with a big hired team, but that didn't really work — the engineers we hired could drag-and-drop in tools like Make.com but didn't understand the business side, so the automations they built were brittle. That's when I learned how difficult hiring is for something as complicated as a software/automation project. My partner and I eventually split up amicably — he wanted to focus on the consultancy side and building resellable equity, I didn't. I kept the business, focused on high-leverage applications of systems I'd already built, scaled up Upwork applications and cold email (reinvesting most of my income into cold email), and simplified the offer down to mostly cold email systems and one-click CRM templates. Around $35-45K/month I couldn't keep scaling that way, so I started pitching a fractional-COO model: I took a few smaller clients paying $3-4K/month and gave them massive 20-30 page proposals saying, 'I want $10K/month plus 7% of your business, and here's how I'll justify it by delivering $100K/month in value.' That worked for a couple of clients, my revenue shot up, and combined with old clients coming back that same month I hit $72K in revenue (not all of it was recurring).

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youtube ↗Offers

I switched from SMMA to AI automation and I'm confused about what to offer. Should I offer speed-to-lead or CRM automations, or are there top automations to sell? And should I target local businesses or online businesses like coaches or e-commerce stores?

My recommendation is always to focus on systems that solve for RACE. R stands for reach: systems that increase the number of eyeballs a customer gets on their brand. A stands for acquire: the number of people who click through that interest and actually do something, like book a meeting, book a demo or download the app. C stands for convert: the number of people who go from that middle step to actually paying. E stands for expand. It's a simple, high-level framework, but it will save and make you far more money than building systems that improve some bookkeeping process's efficiency by 14%. That doesn't make you money and it doesn't make them money; it just saves a small margin of a small margin. You can only save 100% of the money a company makes, but you can technically make a company infinite money. So focus on growth.

ai automationoffersrace frameworkgrowth