How do I find coaches who are already making good money and need automation services?
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.
It's not that the competition is really high or that you're lazy. Realistically, it's a combination of multiple factors, but you're missing that you're not applying the right effort at the right place—being strategic with your effort. It's not that you're lazy if you don't get the results you want; often you simply haven't applied your high levels of willpower in the right tactical place.
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.
Coaching, especially digital coaching, offers extremely high ROI because service delivery is virtually instantaneous—coaches typically create an information product that clients can sell autonomously after purchase. I view myself as a coach/educator: I help clients achieve a specific outcome, build a business model, or reach a revenue goal, and they pay me for that expertise. The term 'coach' is broad, but I think of it as information‑product‑based coaching on the internet. Once the product is built, the client can sell it repeatedly without further work from me. Examples include Maker School, my communities, and other educational products I’ve sold: they require a large upfront time investment, but after that core asset is built, I don’t need to update or rebuild it for each client (though I do update Maker School periodically). As an operations person working with such clients, my focus is solely on pulling the growth lever—acquiring more clients—because the variable and fixed costs per new client are nearly zero; the only bottleneck is how many clients I can acquire. Thus I scale by increasing client volume, and fulfillment time per client remains extremely low after the core asset is ready, with daily check‑ins optimized.
You're thinking way too much. Stop thinking and start doing — you've been stuck asking this same kind of question for the better part of three or four weeks. This isn't a problem you need to be struggling with; you can answer it yourself in the next week just by putting your services in front of people. Don't worry about whether your service is valuable to them — that's an opinion you're generating in your own head, and it's usually wrong. Instead, go ask a bunch of people and let the market tell you.