I'm selling an Instagram/Facebook post automation to nonprofit animal shelters. I built it for a rabbit shelter freelance project for $200, and I want to scale it to other shelters. As a student, I'd like to try it even if it's not lucrative. I have about 10,000 leads. What tips do you have for pricing when selling to nonprofits? Should I sell it as an automation first or productize it right away? How should I structure my offer and pricing?
Sorry, my windows are open and it's getting noisy—give me a second. To make a long story short, you should always want to sell to people who have money; that's one of the quickest and easiest hacks. I'm not saying nonprofits have no money, but they're not as incentivized to spend it, and in my experience they tend to spend money worse than most other people unless they're directly tied to a governmental organization just wasting thousands. So, unless it's that kind of situation, the opportunity cost of not having your Instagram/Facebook automation is low—creating that content for a nonprofit isn't all that important, and expense minimization is also low because it's usually just a volunteer or intern doing the posting. I focus on opportunity cost and savings: what's the cost of not having this, and what expenses are you minimizing? For a nonprofit, the opportunity cost is probably pretty low, maybe around $500 a month at most if you strip away all the BS and get down to brass tacks. Compare that to a business where posting on Instagram/Facebook makes a massive difference to the bottom line—say they're losing $5,000 a month without it—then you could charge about $1,500 a month (30% of that value). That’s equivalent to serving ten animal shelters at the lower rate. Ultimately, if your goal is money, optimize for money; there are much straighter line paths to profit than trying to sell Instagram/Facebook post automations to animal shelters. Figure out your prime directive: if it's money, go after it, while still keeping your personal moral code—making automations for agencies isn’t ethically wrong to me.
No problem, you should definitely double down on other forms of outreach. There are two ways to get clients: money‑intensive methods, where you spend money to acquire clients fast, and time‑intensive methods, where you spend time instead of money. In Maker School I focus on money‑intensive tactics, but the amount of money needed is actually very low compared to most businesses. For example, cold email might cost around $220 a month (software, mailboxes, leads), which is about 44% of your $500 take‑home — still a lot when you also need to pay rent. Upwork Connects cost about $2.50 per application; using the Connect strategy 20 days a month adds roughly $250, bringing your total outreach spend to about $470, or 94% of your income. Clearly, spending that much on paid outreach isn’t realistic. If you don’t have money to spend, you trade your time for what that money would have bought you. Start with cold DMs: combine the best of my cold email and Upwork approaches, and send them on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Instagram, and Reddit — about 20 per platform each day. At three minutes per message, that’s roughly four hours a day, yielding around 1,200 outreach attempts per month. Even with a modest 5% reply rate and a 25% booking‑to‑close rate, you could land a few clients and start generating income. As you reinvest those earnings, your outreach becomes more scalable and your hourly effective rate improves. Another time‑intensive tactic is community posting: join relevant Slack, Discord, LinkedIn, Facebook groups, answer questions daily for two weeks, then start posting your own value‑driven content. When you gain visibility and authority in those communities, people will DM you for help, letting you pitch your services and turn those interactions into leads. The core idea is to trade time for money early on; as your earnings grow, you can gradually shift back to money‑intensive methods and reduce the time you need to spend.
Interesting that you point that out. That's probably a measure of buyer intent—if you're searching for the term, you already know what a website is, so it's a more mature market; you don't need to explain the value as much. You can just say your websites are better because of X, Y, Z, since people already know what the product is. You could do something similar with automations, but with automation services you need to be specific—like lead-gen automations, proposal generators, CRM automations, etc. If you're asking whether I've ever thought about paid ads for my own automation agency: I did experiment with paid ads when I first started, but I didn't see many results because I'm not very good at paid ads. That's why I've focused mostly on outbound work initially, and now that I'm doing more inbound, I don't really need paid ads. However, I am considering a retargeting campaign—just for transparency—where I retarget people who visited the Maker School 'About' page with YouTube and Facebook ads. As for the $20 a day to get good results: that's pretty great. I'm not sure about the exact customer lifetime value, but $20 a day is about $600 a month. Assuming you advertise on weekends, that's roughly one website per month. I don't know your COGS, but they're probably high unless you have a team. In Australian dollars, $600 a month is even less, which is great. I'm actually hiring someone right now to handle retargeting ads, looking to spend about $1,500 a month, and we'll see how it goes.
Yeah, tackle the situation. To be abundantly clear, you can do anything without money, but it's just a lot more difficult. It's like taking a 5‑lb dumbbell curl and turning it into a 100‑lb curl — possible, but it takes a lot of time, effort, and training. If you have even $20 to put toward this, your life gets tremendously easier. My recommendation is not to start a business with literally zero; if you don't have money, get a job or something similar and run that side‑by‑side with your entrepreneurial effort. Necessity is the mother of invention, and people have found creative ways to bootstrap, but I prefer to just get a job. I've been there — I'd bring tea bags from home to Starbucks for hot water, and my business partner would bring cheap cream cheese and expired bagels to make low‑cost meals. It's not a good spot. It's much better to get a job for a couple of months, save a little money, and then try entrepreneurship afterward. To answer the spirit of your question, I would do cold DMs on social media platforms — LinkedIn, X.com, Instagram, and so on. Unlike email, where you need to pay for mailboxes, lead enrichment, and tools (around $97‑$40 a month), social media platforms are free; you only pay with your attention, and the algorithms give you equal access regardless of wealth or fame. You need good copywriting principles and attention‑grabbing techniques. For example, you could say, 'Hey Pete, I can save you $10,000 a month in the next 60 seconds. I'll give you everything for free at the end of this, whether or not you want to work together.' That kind of hook gets attention. Aim for 20‑40 DMs a day across these platforms. If you do that consistently for a month, you'll reach about 1,200 people. With good copy, good offers, and decent Loom videos, you'll absolutely drive results.
What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.