As a beginner feeling lost choosing a niche, I’ve picked the hospitality niche—specifically hotels. What’s your opinion on it?
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.
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.
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.
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.
You don't know what you don't know, so don't rely solely on your past experience to pick a niche. Instead, test multiple options in the market and let customers decide. Run several niches simultaneously, measure positive reply rates, booking rates, and revenue over time, then double down on the best performer. Treat this like a science experiment: avoid putting all your eggs in one basket too early; instead, try several, identify the easiest to succeed with, and then go all in.