I'm close to landing two retainers (a web agency and a consultant) and need guidance on selling their web design and coaching services, given I already sell my AI services. I'm booking two meetings a day using your advice. What framework or thoughts do you have for selling these services?
First, great job on locking in those retainers and crushing the cold‑email outreach—two meetings a day, five days a week is exactly the kind of consistency that works. To sell web design and coaching, start by watching my video 'Watch Me Start and Sell an AI Service in 10 Hours'; it walks through the exact copywriting and offer‑creation process I use. Then run a niche‑discovery exercise: pick a few niches (e.g., website agencies, video editors, real estate), go into the communities where those niches hang out (Facebook groups, Reddit, School pages), and pull out the actual questions people are asking. Don’t assume—let the community tell you their day‑to‑day struggles. Compile those questions; you’ll see recurring themes like follow‑up, content‑generation systems for clients, and clipping. From those pain points, craft simple, first‑principles solutions—ask yourself, ‘Could I do this?’ and use your copywriting skills to turn them into concrete offers. Source audiences that match those niches, then send targeted emails presenting the offers. Finally, create three offers and split‑test them against slightly different audiences to see which resonates best. That’s the exact framework I recommend for web design and coaching.
That's an interesting point. I think the whole idea here about not pitching a specific service makes sense, but I don't believe it works in practice. I've tried not doing that and just being a results‑focused person who generates revenue, but I find uptake is a lot better when you can draw the shape of a solution for a client and then say, 'This is how I make money.' It makes it more believable. The good news is you have the ability to test this yourself. You could make a general vague offer that is 100 % results‑based around whatever you want, then compare it with a more specific copywriting offer where you guarantee the same thing, or a specific PPC offer with the same guarantee. I think you could answer this question and satisfy that part of your brain that's itching to know, but it would be more powerful for you to try it yourself. As a five‑year copywriter you probably have some capital saved, so you could try it instantly on your own. Keep those AI systems in the background if you want, but you can also sell to traditional copywriting clients. This is basically the idea behind my business.
Obviously you're very financially and resource‑constrained, lacking a laptop, webcam, microphone, and custom domains, yet you’re actively thinking about how to get things done despite those limits — that mindset will take you far. When I say ‘asset,’ I’m referring to the asset‑based outreach strategy I’ve discussed before: you create a high‑quality, customized piece of value that solves a specific problem for a prospect, give it to them with little or no ask, and use it to break the ice instead of sending a plain cold email. These assets are high‑value and very effective when they truly address the prospect’s pain points, though they do require considerable time and effort to produce. Examples of assets include: using AI to generate newsletters from a prospect’s website, then formatting them into a polished newsletter (about 80‑90 % complete) that you send for free; for coaches or consultants, running an automation that pulls the top‑10 trending videos in their niche, feeding those titles into AI to generate a set of strong title ideas, and delivering those titles; video editors editing a prospect’s video and sending it over with a note like, “I love your channel; I’ve edited a bunch of your content for you — just wanted you to have it”; taking long‑form video content, running it through a short‑form clip generator (e.g., Opus, Stockclip) to produce a bunch of short clips, then sending those clips to an influencer or creator with a message such as, “I clipped your content for free; feel free to use it — I do this professionally and would be happy to help you further.” You can mix and match any of these ideas in your outreach. In your situation — no Loom video, no custom domain, no paid cold‑email tool, only an old PC and Gmail — your best leverage is your ability to build such assets rather than relying on pure sales skill. If you need a laptop for a Zoom call, borrowing one from a friend works well. Your resourcefulness and gumption are exactly what will move you forward.
Well, that's some good serendipity. I was wondering what combinations of AI workflows you'd recommend I sell for each niche. You're the right person to ask since you have experience with both niches. I am the right person to ask. I just made a video on this a couple months ago specifically for info product coaches, and I also have a bunch of agency videos. Let me recap the 80/20 of it so you don't have to watch another video of me talking. Should we go on the Sam Ovens side or the Hormozi side? I guess Hormozi had that book launch, so let's do the Hormozi side today. I just realized I placed them both on their respective sides—that's pretty funny. Okay, cool. So for info, you know, info is just a term I use for info product. Let's make this a bit smaller. For info, um, bunch of systems. Keep in mind this is typically high cash flow, high margin, very scalable if done right. I would sell a variety of different systems. First, a coaching management CRM or system. If you've ever designed a CRM or project manager, you can tweak it into a coaching pipeline and sell it directly to done-with-you coaching programs. I mean something like a ClickUp pipeline or an ASA pipeline. When a new student comes in or a new member of your coaching group, use webhooks to take the trigger event and create a new record in the CRM. The record would be first name, last name, assigned a stage, and you'd use updates to the stage column as triggers for other things. For example, when they go from onboarding to first week, they automatically receive a link to a Google Drive with an email saying, 'Hey Pete, so excited to have you for your first week. Here's how the next week is going to go. We'll give you a call on this day and that day to check in on your progress.' This has a lot of value, but to be relevant to your coaching business, you need to understand coaching. Another thing you can sell is an AI coach. After the big Hormozi book launch, one of the things he included was an AI Hormozi—a RAG chatbot not trained but with access to all the content I, Hormozi, Sam Ovens, or other big guys have talked about or done. The flow: compile all text from sources like YouTube transcripts or books into a knowledge base, then run a chatbot using RAG over that knowledge base. You can get this out of the box with tools like Bot Press, where you upload files (even audio) and they auto-transcribe and translate. AI coaches are great because coaches mostly answer similar questions, especially with beginners: 'How do I do this with $100 a month? Can I do this? Is this possible? Can I do this in X location? Is this really possible because my family works construction and I don't know if I can run this business lifestyle-wise?' With an AI coach, you give people an AI version of you that operates through text. If they want resources like YouTube links, they ask the AI coach first instead of taking up your time; it directs them where to go and what the answers are. We've tried creating a few for myself—they've worked reasonably well, though not the best I'd say. Third, most coaching things are inbound, so speed-to-lead systems are big. Speed-to-lead systems: when someone submits a request (e.g., clicks an ad and fills out a questionnaire), the system takes that data, uses AI to customize a reply, and sends it via SMS, email, or both. The goal is for people to feel attended to within the first few seconds—they get a response from you and think, 'Holy these guys are on top of it,' making them more likely to convert. These are really good systems to sell to info. You can also sell some of these to marketing agencies. Instead of coaching management systems, you sell like a CRM. For marketing agencies, you can sell outbound systems—generally email, cold email. Cold email systems give you instant distribution: you get a bunch of mailboxes, enrich leads using AI-based or automated approaches (like Mailinder, Ampify), then plug them into a cold email campaign that uses AI to write icebreakers similar to the speed-to-lead system and send out. Hopefully that clarifies.
Outsourcing sales is a mistake; the sales skill is the only lever that will matter over the next five years, and agents can quickly learn the technical side, so you’d give away leverage and end up with roughly 30 % of the profit instead of 70 %. Sales is far more valuable than the technology itself—consider Netflix versus an AI‑generated clone: the clone lacks Netflix’s customer list, marketing, vendor relationships, and licensing, which are all distribution assets. Therefore, your focus should be on acquiring clients through cold outreach, not content creation or paid ads. Paid ads exchange money for time, which you don’t have; content creation also trades time for a delayed, uncertain payoff that could leave you without income for months. Instead, become excellent at cold outreach. Think of it as skipping the beginner zone in a game and fighting a level‑99 dragon: defeating one grants you twenty levels and lets you crush the beginners. Alternatively, cold outreach lets you sell your skills directly (one step) versus the longer path of building a skill, then a brand, then products, then sales. You’ll earn less in the long run but far more in the short term, which fits your one‑year goal to reach €3 k/month.