What do you think about productizing automation for resale as an automation agency? For example, creating a cold email and LinkedIn Outreach system and selling the outcome as an offer, essentially reselling the template.
Don't get me wrong—you can do this; there are no hard rules in business, you can bend any rule you want. If you productize an automation for resale as a template and sell the outcome as an offer, you're no longer really an automation agency; you're an Outreach agency. You build one system, execute it well, and sell the outcome—you're selling cold email and LinkedIn Outreach, not automation itself. A community member named SOD did exactly this, scaling to $80,000 a month in revenue, with the vast majority of profit coming from this approach (minus some LinkedIn Outreach). It's totally doable; you're just shifting the essence of your business from automation agency to Outreach agency. Regarding one‑time versus subscription revenue: one‑time revenue looks like big spikes (e.g., January, February, March, April), while subscription revenue shows a gradual, predictable increase in monthly recurring revenue that eventually outscales the spike model if the trend lines favor it. Each has pros and cons—subscriptions give you a stable base minus churn, while one‑time gives big upfront cash but requires you to resell each time. What I usually recommend is to start with one‑time revenue to spike your cash flow quickly, stockpile that money, then reinvest it into a recurring service for growth. That way you get the best of both worlds: a big initial spike plus the ability to invest in growth and email systems, eventually recouping through the recurring model. This works for any service business model—get the big spike, then use that cash to fund growth. You’ll also benefit from referral opportunities and similar advantages that come with the early‑stage burst of work.
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.
I think packaging automation as a SaaS product is cool. I've done this before for many viewers. You can view it as a way to improve consolidation, but essentially you can treat SaaS as either green or blue—just a label. SaaS product growth over time is tricky at first, then you hit product-market fit and scale rapidly. For most of the lifetime, especially the first couple years, you make basically no money, unlike an agency or service implementation where you can earn a fair amount right away. Agency revenue tends to be up and down and hard to scale; after 2-3 years, an agency might still be where it started, while a SaaS product could have completely overshot it. So there are pros and cons depending on the time scale you plan for. Market dynamics also help—SaaS is becoming easier to build with no-code tools. Additionally, you can package an automation as a SaaS but still sell it as a service implementation. For example, take your automation workflow and have Lovable or Bolt create a simple front end for it. If you want more nuance, check out a video where I actually built one. I don't recall which specific video it is, but there's an example: me wearing a backward baseball cap, turning a 2K automation into a 10K SaaS no-code product using Lovable to package the automation I built as a SaaS product resembling a little proposal generator. You can try that approach, but still sell it as a service. Hopefully that answers your question.
I think the core problem isn’t the offer itself but the amount of outreach you’re doing. Based on the numbers you shared you’re probably doing far fewer outreach actions than a typical agency—maybe 24 × less than you think. If you tally every email, DM, call, or LinkedIn message you sent in the first month you’ll see you could have done many more. The growth equation is simple: more outreach equals more leads, which equals more clients. So before you scrap the model, double‑down on consistent, high‑volume outreach (cold email, LinkedIn, etc.) and track those metrics. Once you have a reliable pipeline you can decide whether to specialize, but the immediate fix is to increase outreach dramatically.
The ceiling is virtually unlimited. The reason why is because cold email is quite productizable — there are only a couple of steps that really require a lot of human intellect and muscle. A quick example of how you could productize a cold email agency so you get almost unlimited output for the same fixed input: you could automate the process of buying domains, which is achievable via API endpoints. You can automate setting up mailboxes, also achievable via API endpoints or browser automation. You can automate finding offers that have worked really well for clients in similar verticals — presumably if you wanted to productize a cold email agency you'd just work with people in the same vertical, then copy and paste those offers, make minor context-dependent modifications, and run them. You can automate the process of replying, and you can automate iterating and managing that. Now you shouldn't automate everything, but when it comes to productization and scaling to 70K a month or more, you typically just need the same inputs done very similarly over and over again with minor modifications. Cold email agencies are probably one of the simplest and easiest ways to do so — that's a major chunk of the revenue that got me to over $70,000 in a month. So just productize the hell out of things across the stack. But note that when you start an automation agency you typically do custom work across a big swath of different client verticals and niches, and that's pretty difficult to scale to 70K a month. So typically what you have to do is close it down to a subset of those niches, sell a subset of the products you're currently selling to that subset of niches, and in that way make everything really similar over and over and over again.