What is your take on the timeline of the opportunity for the automation business model? When will it be saturated?
It depends on your definition of saturation. As someone in the automation agency business daily, it's significantly more effective now than when I started a couple years ago. I see it sort of like peak oil. If you plot total volume over time, we're probably past the peak. So you could call it saturation, but at saturation it's actually more effective than now. It's tough to say exactly, maybe sometime in the next three years.
I think sometime over the next 2 to 3 years; I've been saying that for the last 6 months, maybe 2 to 2.5 years. Saturation is a relative term—just because something is called saturated doesn't mean you can't make money in it. Think of saturation like peak oil: the point where the most money is possible using the business model, after which it declines. However, interest in the model and the average impact of systems we build are increasing over time as AI technology improves, so you can still make a lot of money on the way down. If I were you, I'd get up and running with the stuff ASAP, because no market tactic lasts forever, and even if today's tactics stop working, there will be new business models I'll learn about and share with you.
Um, I don't necessarily think that the decline of automation agencies is inevitable. While SMMA's definitely experienced that fate, I don't believe the automation agency industry will decline simply because there won't be time for the same thing to happen to AI automation—by the time we reach that point, AI will be so good it will do the vast majority of the work for us. It's not just our industry that will decline; every industry on Earth will face decline. So this is still a market opportunity. Right now we're probably filling about 60% of the opportunity with the technology stack I use, but new technologies and approaches emerge daily, so there's still plenty of space. If you're not already in it, don't wait on the sidelines—jump in, take action, start a business, and begin doing stuff.
He explains that it's rarely the business model itself that fails after a few months of no results; it's usually the tactical implementation. He advises committing to outreach channels for at least 90 days, testing and iterating to maximize volume and effectiveness, treating the process like a scientific experiment—sending many emails to test different offers and picking the better performer. He emphasizes expected value per outreach action, noting that even if early results are zero, each effort has a small expected return that compounds over time, and you must keep improving until you see momentum before comparing to other mechanisms.
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I haven't thought about that in detail, so I don't have a detailed backup plan. I expect the core work of running an automation agency to remain viable for at least three to five years. Over that period the work will evolve—no‑code AI tools like pre‑draft generators will make many tasks more efficient. That doesn't mean you won't be able to run an agency; agents and other services will start to infiltrate the business model soon, but the model itself remains sound because the same shift will happen across the industry.