What's the best way to get leads for AI automation service? Should I choose one niche, one automation, or go multiple niches and automations? I did Upwork, got two clients, total of 60 bucks. I guess the competition is higher there or I'm just a lazy person.
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’d start with the three top‑performing niches I’ve identified: high‑touch SaaS businesses, recruitment firms, and coaches or consultants. These have proven to generate the highest ROI. For each niche I’d sell a suite of automation systems – an automated candidate‑placement hiring pipeline, a personalized cold‑email outreach system, an automated reporting/dashboard, an AI‑coach chatbot, and a coaching‑management CRM. I’ve documented all of these in a public doc, and you can even Google “best AI automation agency niche 2025” to see the same results.
Start by giving value up front: build a landing page for each prospect, show it to them, then offer to build the full website (or revisions) as a paid service. This lets you demonstrate value, increase reply rates, and later upsell AI automation. You can create many landing pages daily using AI tools (e.g., Claude Max) for little cost, then move clients into higher‑ticket automation services.
Yeah, listen—feeling lost is completely okay. It’s fine to feel lost; the reality is you just have to make a move anyway. In modern entrepreneurship you basically have to lower your bar for what counts as “confident enough to succeed” and then just go for it. Decades ago, when starting a business required a lot more capital, you needed to be far more confident about ROI. Nowadays you can launch an AI automation agency with a couple hundred bucks, as I’ve shown multiple times, so you don’t need to be all that confident. The most important thing is just to get going. The idea that you can’t find a good AI automation to sell isn’t true; it’s that your standard for what counts as a “good” automation is just too high. Use the blueprints I’ve shown you, figure out the simplest three‑ or four‑module system you can, and start selling. Your biggest obstacle is yourself, not the niche or the specific firms you’re targeting. An inbound calling agent for real‑estate or dental offices could be great—just put something together, start talking to real customers with it, and you’ll quickly see how to improve the system into the high‑value solution you’re envisioning.
With almost no budget, you can buy leads cheaply—services like LeadsFinder sell leads for about $0.50 per 1,000 (or $1.50 per 1,000 with emails), so a list of a thousand leads costs just a couple of dollars. Once you have leads, the best automation offer for web design agencies is a lead‑generation system, because most of them have no leads at all. You can sell them the same cold‑email or scraping setup you used to acquire them, then upsell speed‑to‑lead tools, simple CRMs, project‑management templates, and reactivation sequences that follow up with old leads. In short, start with a lead‑gen offer (the thing you’re already using to get clients), then layer on other automation services as they see results.