Can you give examples of automation you’ve built for the real‑estate niche, and should I target freelancers, individuals, or companies and agencies?
I recommend targeting businesses with 1‑10 employees, so you can serve both freelancers/individuals and small agencies without making it exclusive. As for examples, I’ve built a cold‑email system for a brokerage that flips under‑priced homes. They had a list of about 50,000 contacts; the system pulled personal data, crafted personalized cold‑email campaigns, and generated massive responses—some reports suggest $50‑150 K in the first day. I also created automated property‑assessment tools that ingest a property’s square footage, regional price per square foot, distance to schools, crime rates, and other factors to output an instant valuation. These tools run on a custom platform (omake.com) and automate the entire assessment workflow. Both solutions have real value for real‑estate professionals and demonstrate the kind of automation you can sell in that niche.
Nick advises Jake to stick with packaged automation services rather than moving to custom projects, because custom work suffers from scope bloat and inefficiencies. He suggests leveraging Jake’s existing mortgage‑originator network: compile a list of all B2B clients and leads from that work, plus any other network connections. In a spreadsheet, put clients in column A, ways you could help them in column B, systems you could build or sell in column C, and pitch price in column D. Then warm‑pitch each contact by referencing your automation work and asking if they know anyone who might need it. Start with existing clients and leads, then expand to your wider network for referrals. This approach uses your proven problem‑solver reputation, making outreach far more effective than cold outreach. After exhausting warm contacts, you can still add a scalable outbound mechanism (e.g., B2B cold email) to reach strangers, but the warm path is the fastest route to revenue.
Focus on niches that have money and are digital—think B2B SaaS, PR agencies, or any service that can be delivered online. Avoid low‑ticket, brick‑and‑mortar niches like dog walking because lead sourcing is hard and expensive. To test, scrape lead lists (e.g., 2,000 contacts per niche across three or four niches) using a service like Leads Rapidly; that costs about $5 per thousand leads, so roughly $30 for 6,000 leads. You’ll also need about 12‑13 mailboxes at around $3.50 each, adding another $40‑$50, for a first‑month total of around $100‑$110. Send your cold emails, then compare which niches give the highest response rates, deepest funnel progress, and most revenue. Also look for mid‑ to high‑ticket offers, as they’re more likely to need automation.
We have a bunch of people in Maker School experimenting with a wide landscape of niches, which is a benefit of being in the community. You can see which niches are working and which aren’t. HVAC, dentists, and law firms aren’t making a ton of money with automation because there aren’t enough of them to apply high‑volume, iterative strategies. I don’t recommend focusing on local services; instead go entirely digital and target industries with large headcounts that can benefit from automation without hurting profitability. The biggest boom right now is recruitment, which saw a surge of interest and will likely rise again. I also suggest experimenting with recruitment, older‑school agencies that haven’t caught up, MSPs, IT consultants, and similar businesses that can source leads automatically via tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
I think hotels can be a good niche, but it really depends on what you’re selling them and how your hotel automations will improve their revenue and margins. For a digital agency, it’s pretty easy: you look at all the various automations you could build—especially the templated ones I talk about—and you can substantially improve the top of the funnel, lead nurturing, and conversion rate (via proposal automations and instant‑text‑back automations), and you can significantly increase the number of people you contact through cold email using tons of different mechanisms. For a hotel, though, people want to come in and book—that’s more B2C—so improving the top of the funnel with ads etc. feels more like lead and marketing than pure automation. Hospitality is labor‑heavy: the vast majority of COGS is people (cleaning, maid service, front‑desk staff). You can’t really automate cleaning a bed or maid service, but you can marginally automate front‑desk work with simple check‑in/check‑out flows. It’s not a bad niche; success hinges on what you’re selling them. My advice is to come up with five or ten realistic services you could sell a hotel, understand the hospitality space (maybe you already do), find a list of parts of an average hospitality company or hotel business that you think you can automate, make a list, and then test them all: send cold emails pitching each service, check Upwork for hotels, go into hospitality communities and start pitching, and see which ones generate the most interest. Hopefully that helps.