What automations should I sell to local businesses in a small market like Moldova where there's little competition?
You can sell any automation covered on my channel or in Maker School/Maker Zero—you already know what to sell. Focus on appointment‑based businesses; you’ll have higher conversion rates even though average order value is lower due to the local economy. Since nobody else is doing it yet, you’ll do well just by getting started.
No, as a beginner you should not target local businesses first. There’s a big list of things to target before going local—always start with digital, and consider hybrid or high‑cost‑of‑living countries before local. Local businesses are much harder to scrape leads for; you usually need to pull data via Google Maps API or address‑based scraping, which is hyper‑limited and raises the bar significantly. You’d have to invest far more money than for digital businesses, yet the pay is low, so the return isn’t worth it. Generally, these businesses have a high barrier to entry and offer little pay. If you want context, I’ll link a video about niches; three automation‑agency niches come with criteria I use, one of which is that they tend to be digital. For newcomers, that means definitely not targeting local businesses—it’s just a lot easier to pull the digital lever. If you’re experienced and see a genuine market opportunity with a particular type of local business, then I might consider it.
Everything is relative—you need to sell your automation for less if average labor productivity is much lower. There's also a case to be made for the opportunity cost saved by automation: if your automated approach is better than humans at something, shifting all ops to it reduces errors, increases reliability and speed, letting your company make more money on the top line, not just save on the bottom. Because of geo‑arbitrage you can still charge a multiple of the local rate and stay profitable, but you must be cognizant that the comparative value will be lower.
We have a bunch of people in Maker School experimenting with a wide landscape of niches, which is a benefit of being in the community. You can see which niches are working and which aren’t. HVAC, dentists, and law firms aren’t making a ton of money with automation because there aren’t enough of them to apply high‑volume, iterative strategies. I don’t recommend focusing on local services; instead go entirely digital and target industries with large headcounts that can benefit from automation without hurting profitability. The biggest boom right now is recruitment, which saw a surge of interest and will likely rise again. I also suggest experimenting with recruitment, older‑school agencies that haven’t caught up, MSPs, IT consultants, and similar businesses that can source leads automatically via tools like LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
The same issue that held you back here—lack of commitment—will repeat elsewhere. Success is a self‑fulfilling prophecy: commit long enough and it becomes unreasonable to fail. The Bulgarian market is less competitive and less sophisticated, so you’ll have pricing leverage, which is an advantage.