Shia tagy asks: Is it wiser to target local businesses as a beginner in automation?
No, as a beginner you should not target local businesses first. There’s a big list of things to target before going local—always start with digital, and consider hybrid or high‑cost‑of‑living countries before local. Local businesses are much harder to scrape leads for; you usually need to pull data via Google Maps API or address‑based scraping, which is hyper‑limited and raises the bar significantly. You’d have to invest far more money than for digital businesses, yet the pay is low, so the return isn’t worth it. Generally, these businesses have a high barrier to entry and offer little pay. If you want context, I’ll link a video about niches; three automation‑agency niches come with criteria I use, one of which is that they tend to be digital. For newcomers, that means definitely not targeting local businesses—it’s just a lot easier to pull the digital lever. If you’re experienced and see a genuine market opportunity with a particular type of local business, then I might consider it.
We have a bunch of people in Maker School experimenting with a wide landscape of niches, which is a benefit of being in the community. You can see which niches are working and which aren’t. HVAC, dentists, and law firms aren’t making a ton of money with automation because there aren’t enough of them to apply high‑volume, iterative strategies. I don’t recommend focusing on local services; instead go entirely digital and target industries with large headcounts that can benefit from automation without hurting profitability. The biggest boom right now is recruitment, which saw a surge of interest and will likely rise again. I also suggest experimenting with recruitment, older‑school agencies that haven’t caught up, MSPs, IT consultants, and similar businesses that can source leads automatically via tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
If you are selling AI or automation services, working with local businesses is sort of a double-edged sword. The reason it's great is because you're working locally with businesses that typically don't have a lot of technical experience, so there's usually a big overhang between what is achievable with technology and what they are currently doing. Even a couple of little sprinkles of AI can really change their workflow and revolutionize their business. But the bad part of that double-edged sword is they're typically not very technically capable, which means they might struggle understanding the value of technology. You might actually have to build that value up in your explanations and sales calls from the floor all the way up to where the value actually is. A lot of people won't even realize why they might want to automate something like a purchase order automation — they'll just be like, well no, this is the same way we've always done things, and that's fine, and I don't really want to grow all that much anyway. That is pretty difficult to convince. If somebody's in a position where they're like, ah no, I'm cool doing it the same way I've always done it because they don't want more work anyway, how are you going to sell them on a big return on investment? Unfortunately, the same thing that leads to a lot of local business owners only having one simple brick-and-mortar storefront is the same thing that leads to them not really wanting to buy a service like this, because they just don't give a [care] about growth. Another thing is their data isn't scrapable, which is a problem. If you're trying to sell them voice and chat agents, it might be difficult to get enough of a base of local businesses in an email list to even pitch them a chat or voice agent to begin with. Your only way of doing that might be through something like cold calling, because a lot of these local businesses don't look at their email as much but they'll certainly look at their phone — they'll be around the front desk when people come into their shops. So that necessitates a change in strategy. These are all reasons why I don't really like local businesses. If you're wondering how you can implement AI features in digital businesses instead of local businesses, know that you are typically dealing with an audience that is more B2B oriented. They typically understand the economics of value exchange a little bit more. They understand the whole idea of, hey, I will provide you massive return on investment and I'll make a little bit for that, and here's how. They typically already use AI or have experience with AI, so it's not going to be starting from scratch — it'll just be a lot easier across the stack. And just be careful what you're selling them. For voice and chat agents for digital businesses, don't pick voice and chat agents before you've verified the niche. In general, don't pick the thing that you're going to sell before you know who you're going to sell it to. Experiment with a bunch of different approaches to a bunch of different people and then just go based off what works.
local businessdigital businessai agencyniche selection
You don’t have to choose just one—you can do both digital and local. Run a side‑by‑side experiment for about two weeks: target local businesses across the US and South Africa in one test, and digital businesses in the same regions in another. Measure how many people say yes in each, how difficult it is to scrape leads (using time as a metric), and what average order value you can pitch for digital versus physical offers. Let the data tell you which works better.
Go directly into automations. There's no higher-income skill as of right now — it's a massive, exploding industry. Your buying-power arbitrage (roughly 20x in Ethiopia's case) means automation delivers a much higher quality of life per dollar earned, but that doesn't make it 20x easier — you'll face real friction, since a lot of people, especially in the West, look down on offshore workers from Ethiopia, Africa, the Philippines, or India due to unfair assumptions about work quality or English skills, even though that's silly. You'll also struggle at first because you don't have much business experience to know what to automate — you'll learn that through trial and error, but it'll make you a better business owner faster than something like copywriting, a traditional agency, or a cleaning business would. Even in the West, this skill delivers an extra 10-20x multiple on your time; the moment you land a client paying $2,000/month, that's roughly $40,000/month in US buying-power equivalent for you.
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