There are quite a few niches I'd love to target, but I don't have direct experience in them, and the niches I do have experience in aren't necessarily viable for automation. What should I do?
Think about it logically — if you needed experience in a niche before entering it, how would anyone ever do anything? You always have to start at the start line somewhere. A heart surgeon still has to perform their first heart surgery; a cold email pro still has to send their first cold email. Don't stress about this — you don't need to be a pro in anything before getting going. You just have to take the scary first steps, because they're the only way to move forward.
Yes, you certainly can learn five to ten automations for one niche, apply them there, and then expand. I actually recommend picking three niches to start. Since you have no coding experience, you don't need any—none of this requires coding. If you want to see what it looks like, check out my recently published video where I cover exactly this question. I sourced some questions from the daily updates channel; you can head over to the 100KI expert answers for your most common questions. We were trying a new format where one of the questions was 'what niche should I pick?' and 'what automation should I sell?' So I give you a packaged version of that.
My three rules for picking a niche: it must be high ticket (customers paying $5k–$15k), digital (you can scrape data and plug into tools like LinkedIn scraper or Airscale to get leads), and low compliance (avoid fintech, healthcare, etc., as a beginner to skip the activation energy of dealing with regulations).
There are a couple of ways to discover the problems your niche faces so you can build relevant automations. First, join communities related to your niche—subreddits, forums, schools, groups—and scroll through to see what people are complaining about, what bottlenecks they mention, and what they're not good at. That will give you a list of pain points. While I was explaining that, I happened to look at my watch and noticed I'd ripped the strap—an Orient Bambino that was a graduation gift. It's a shame, but it's a reminder that even small mishaps happen. Beyond community research, you can also look at low‑hanging fruit: talk directly to people in the niche, observe their daily workflows, and identify repetitive tasks that could be automated. The distance between you and knowing what to build is often just a day of focused outreach and listening.
You don't know what you don't know, so don't rely solely on your past experience to pick a niche. Instead, test multiple options in the market and let customers decide. Run several niches simultaneously, measure positive reply rates, booking rates, and revenue over time, then double down on the best performer. Treat this like a science experiment: avoid putting all your eggs in one basket too early; instead, try several, identify the easiest to succeed with, and then go all in.