If I had to start over with no agency experience, only foundational business knowledge, how would I pick a niche?
I've owned a few profitable indoor mini golf businesses for three years and even attended some Los Vegas trainings with Horos's team to help grow them, but I'm a bit burnt out on brick and mortar and love the idea of running a one-man business, though I'm struggling to decide on an angle. Yeah, well said. So, if I had to start over with no agency knowledge, only my foundational business knowledge, what would I do? I'd definitely go back into agency work, even without any agency experience, because it's the quickest zero-to-one path for me. It's less important to get things perfect right away and more important to pick something quickly and then evolve alongside it. So I'd pick an agency model. My foundational business experience would help, but whether I had zero or a ton of experience, I'd still go into agencies. The only thing that might change that answer is distribution—if I had a large following and network, I might consider something else. But assuming I'm starting with no leverage, no distribution, no money, and just what's in my head, I'd absolutely start delivering services to clients, get a return on my time, use that to bootstrap my operations, grow them, and then be in a more financially privileged position with knowledge and experience in whatever niche I ended up picking. Hopefully that makes sense. Yeah, I'd start there and work my way down.
I understand the perspective, but I don't think most people here already have the business experience to launch and run an agency from scratch. Starting as a freelancer — doing the bulk of the work yourself early on — actually makes sense, because you need to learn how to deliver the service before you're capable of running a real business around it. Diving straight into hiring and infrastructure before you've learned to sell usually means losing the forest for the trees. The sequence that works: learn to sell first, then learn the service, then worry about business infrastructure once those are solid.
Marketing agencies are a great niche — I niche down into marketing agencies myself, I'm not particularly 'different' about it, and I still make more than most people doing an equivalent service. It really depends on how big you want to go: if you want to scale to $100M/year selling to marketing agencies broadly, you'll need to differentiate more. But if you're carving out a smaller niche, you can target whatever you want, especially if you already have relevant experience — that alone can make you stand out. A few good assets to send marketing/creative agencies: full HTML websites, built and hosted one-shot using an HTML template populated with AI based on context about the business.
My AI and automation agency makes significantly less money than my coaching. Coaching is extraordinarily scalable—when you run a YouTube channel with distribution like I do, the optimal next choice is to sell something hyperscalable with zero delivery or logistics, which is what my coaching stuff is. If you're a total beginner, your optimal choice changes depending on whether you have distribution: with distribution, you'd go for e‑commerce or info‑product with a templated service; without distribution, you'd run an agency because agencies let you get your first 10, 20, $50k in revenue super quickly. Agencies allow you to make a lot of money very quickly, but you tend to plateau relatively fast, with further gains being incremental. Contrast that with an information product business (like a community or SaaS), which has zero marginal cost after a fixed development cost, so you make little money at first but way more later. Does this make sense? From my perspective, when I started my agency I was up here, made money quickly, hit resistance, wanted to scale with as little headcount as possible, moved over here, and now I'm significantly higher. Would I recommend doing what I'm doing now to total beginners? No—many people throw away their businesses after starting coaching because they stop doing the main service, become disconnected from implementation, lose skill, and start teaching the wrong way. That's why this YouTube channel is valuable: I'm showing you how I actually generate leads for my agency. I want to change the fraction of my total revenue that comes from this channel; I don't think it's the most effective use of my time per dollar, but I believe it will indirectly lead to more money through authenticity, so I'm getting back to selling outbound for the agency, setting up more inbound funnels, adding calls‑to‑action at the end of videos, and going to hire a team eventually.
It's much, much more scalable to run an info/teaching business than an agency. Agencies are actually a lot more fragile — but when you're at the start line with no business experience and no revenue, agencies are the straightest line path to materializing revenue: zero to one, nothing is faster. You're trading that speed for the downside that agencies are fragile and much less scalable, since you need a lot more people to make them grow, and margins tend to get worse as you scale. Even if you sell an agency later, a lot of the time and energy spent building its equity often only nets you something like a 3x multiple — pretty low compared to other vehicles. So the equation that worked for me: front-load services first, make a ton of money fast (a few hundred thousand dollars, more than most people make), then take that money and put it into a more scalable vehicle. In my case that was building a better business model — teaching. All roads really do lead to info eventually; it's just a more optimized model. Instead of giving a man a fish, you teach him to fish and charge a monthly subscription for the knowledge — the revenue ends up a lot more predictable.