I'm building an automation for coaches that streamlines their admin process. How do I actually find online coaches to sell it to, and validate there's a good enough need for this?
I'm pretty scrappy about this, so it's not going to be some super polished system. I'll literally just type a term like 'coach' into Apollo and start there. Questions like 'how do I find things' can trip people up for a very long time — people can burn an extra week just figuring this out. In that same week, I'll have already sent 1,500-2,000 emails and have real data to test with, before most people even get started. So practically: go to Apollo, clear your filters, type in 'coach,' and start working through the results that come up.
He recounts a conversation with someone in the agency space who said it’s hard to find coaches needing automation because everyone is trying to open a one‑service business. He advises not to trust opinions blindly given the flood of new entrants, but stresses that you can get clients in any niche—difficulty just varies. Some niches are simple like a hammer; others require nuanced lead generation, such as specialized directories or high‑intent sources. To find coaches making good money, he recommends talking to all coaches and letting those who see value in your services self‑select, then qualifying them on a call. Getting on many calls helps you spot response patterns.
To gather leads on Apollo for your target niches, start by building a list in Apollo (e.g., real estate agencies, hiring agencies, digital marketing agencies). Export that list’s URL and paste it into a scraper like Apify (or Ampify) to pull the data and extract email addresses—this is cheaper than scraping LinkedIn directly. If your initial list is too small (e.g., only 50 leads), broaden the filters (remove overly specific sectors) to increase volume. Export the results to CSV, then run them through a workflow that combines the emails with profile fields (such as headline, title) and uses AI to generate personalized one‑line icebreakers. Finally, feed those icebreakers and emails into a platform like Instantly to automate your outreach.
High ticket is going to be tough here, but there are some simple AI-enabled services you could sell to online coaches like myself. One is need determination: if they run big communities, have a big brand, or get lots of YouTube comments, you can quickly build systems that scan everything customers are asking about, unclear on, or explicitly asking for videos on, and turn that into content. It usually surfaces very interesting insights most people miss. You can also build an "ask a question" funnel into the coach's inbound flow, or just tell people at the end of content to leave a comment. I pick what content to do next almost entirely based on your comments. How do I know this works? Because that's what I do, and I built the system myself. You wouldn't believe how many brands ask me what my packaging and ideation flow is, and the answer is I usually start with questions my customers ask me. Beyond that, you can use AI to shorten the time it takes to reach out to someone interested in a high-ticket offer, say $1,000 to $5,000 a month with four or five months of average churn, which might be worth $20,000. The usual flow is ads, PPC or organic to a landing page with a book-a-call funnel, setters reaching out to book the appointment and maximize show rate, then the closer on the call. You can use AI to automate a large portion of that, cut speed to lead, improve the quality of the conversations through intelligent automated replies, and automate the follow-ups.
The vibe isn't that you already have the perfect system built before you pitch. To find companies hiring website developers: scrape LinkedIn Jobs (e.g. via Apify's LinkedIn Jobs scraper, roughly $1 per 1,000 results) filtered to a country and role like 'website developer in the United States,' enrich the company name/info, then find emails for the hiring team with a tool like Any Mail Finder, and email them directly. You don't need the whole delivery system built before you sell — I just sell first, and when someone says yes, that's when I figure out how to actually deliver it.
linkedin jobs scrapingwebsite dev clientssell first build later