#272 · stop selling AI agents, sell this instead
Start with a service, productize it, then build software; use multiple lead gen methods, test, iterate.
I don't recommend productizing at the very beginning because you usually don't know what you don't know yet. To productize effectively, you need to fix your margins, understand your cost of goods, know how to hire people, and know what you can expect to pay for certain services. You can estimate some of these, but I still wouldn't recommend productizing right away. You're better off hitting the ground running, talking to people, and filling their needs rather than worrying about all that later. Once you're making about three or four thousand dollars a month, then you can start thinking about productizing.
Congratulations on getting to $500 a month—that’s already a solid start. To reach $10K you can largely repeat what got you to $500, but focus on a narrower set of services and scale them. Identify the channel that brought you your first lead—whether it was a warm referral or a cold outreach—and double‑down on that. Then raise your prices and keep iterating: pick the tactic that works best, increase pricing, repeat the cycle until you max out the market for that service. When you hit a ceiling, invest the profits into marketing or product differentiation, then move on to the next offering. While there isn’t a one‑size‑fits‑all step‑by‑step, a practical first move is to lock down an outbound lead‑generation system—cold email, cold LinkedIn, or cold DMs. With $500 a month you could allocate about $100 to a cold‑email tool and start sending targeted messages. Aim for daily habits: send a handful of high‑quality outreach messages each day (for example five “gold” DMs), which can add up to over a thousand touches by the time you’re 17. Consistency and incremental price increases are the core of the growth loop.
We already work with any industry on anything they need—AI systems, business software, automations. The simplest way to start productizing is not to invent a new service, but to look at what you’ve already delivered that clients liked and double down on that. Make a list of every project you’ve done over the past year, pull the email threads, project files, and note the industries and types of work. Patterns will emerge: you’ll see which systems you built most often and, more importantly, which ones generated the most revenue. Use that data to decide which services to package. Then, reach out to the clients you built those high‑value systems for, remind them of the results, and ask for referrals and repeat business. Reactivating past clients is a low‑effort way to generate upsells—typically a 3‑4% uptake rate, and I’ve seen 15‑20% when I first started. Identify the most profitable, least time‑intensive product you’ve created—often an automated follow‑up agent or similar—and turn it into a repeatable checklist or product. Streamline the delivery: ask if you really need three discovery calls or if a single call or a form will suffice, reducing time investment and allowing you to raise prices, which is pure leverage. In short, catalog your past work, find the high‑margin, low‑effort services, market them to similar clients, reactivate old customers, and refine the process into a sellable product.
I don't really think I'm going to push software on everybody. I get the diversification logic, and maybe it's not the optimal decision, but I only have so much time in a day, and the more things I split my attention across, the less effective I am at everything — if I do 10 things instead of 3, even spending the same total time, my effectiveness on each thing drops just from the mental overhead of juggling more. That's different from me doubling down on what already works, which is creating high-quality content. So I'm going to keep doing that instead of adding a software offering.