What services do you recommend for coaching clients, how to find leads for coaches, and how to outreach to them?
Coaching, especially digital coaching, offers extremely high ROI because service delivery is virtually instantaneous—coaches typically create an information product that clients can sell autonomously after purchase. I view myself as a coach/educator: I help clients achieve a specific outcome, build a business model, or reach a revenue goal, and they pay me for that expertise. The term 'coach' is broad, but I think of it as information‑product‑based coaching on the internet. Once the product is built, the client can sell it repeatedly without further work from me. Examples include Maker School, my communities, and other educational products I’ve sold: they require a large upfront time investment, but after that core asset is built, I don’t need to update or rebuild it for each client (though I do update Maker School periodically). As an operations person working with such clients, my focus is solely on pulling the growth lever—acquiring more clients—because the variable and fixed costs per new client are nearly zero; the only bottleneck is how many clients I can acquire. Thus I scale by increasing client volume, and fulfillment time per client remains extremely low after the core asset is ready, with daily check‑ins optimized.
We already work with any industry on anything they need—AI systems, business software, automations. The simplest way to start productizing is not to invent a new service, but to look at what you’ve already delivered that clients liked and double down on that. Make a list of every project you’ve done over the past year, pull the email threads, project files, and note the industries and types of work. Patterns will emerge: you’ll see which systems you built most often and, more importantly, which ones generated the most revenue. Use that data to decide which services to package. Then, reach out to the clients you built those high‑value systems for, remind them of the results, and ask for referrals and repeat business. Reactivating past clients is a low‑effort way to generate upsells—typically a 3‑4% uptake rate, and I’ve seen 15‑20% when I first started. Identify the most profitable, least time‑intensive product you’ve created—often an automated follow‑up agent or similar—and turn it into a repeatable checklist or product. Streamline the delivery: ask if you really need three discovery calls or if a single call or a form will suffice, reducing time investment and allowing you to raise prices, which is pure leverage. In short, catalog your past work, find the high‑margin, low‑effort services, market them to similar clients, reactivate old customers, and refine the process into a sellable product.
To hit $10k/month with an AI content service for coaches, you need to solve a problem that currently costs the client $50k or more per year and then charge about 20% of that value. Examples include fixing inefficient ad‑set targeting that wastes >$50k/month in opportunity cost, improving ineffective ad creative, or building speed‑to‑lead systems that instantly capture and automate follow‑up via SMS or a call center. If a coach’s business is already making a few hundred thousand per month, boosting their top‑of‑funnel by just 10% (e.g., growing a $500k/month business by $50k/month) lets you charge $10k/month. In short, focus on delivering a measurable 10% increase in revenue through front‑end efficiencies, and the economics work out.
I don't have all my old clients; I've let go of many because the profitability per unit time spent on them is lower than focusing on other things. The relationship is different now that I have 150,000 subscribers versus when I had zero subscribers and got those early clients. With the clients I still have, the relationship is pretty good—I've even negotiated a bigger partnership with one of them. Early in my community, there were questions about whether I'd still have time for them as I shifted into information products and coaching. I decided to make time because it's important to practice what I teach. Many coaches and consultants build a successful business model, then teach it as an idea, realizing they make more money selling the model than delivering the service, so they stop doing the actual work. When they stop, they lose touch with the market. In our fast‑changing industry, an outdated approach won't work in six months, making it unethical and ineffective to sell outdated methods. That's why I do live building—showing how I acquire leads and sell stuff—so I stay current. Revealing the 'sauce' (my methods) actually increases my income; every time I've shared it, I've made more money.
Debs Automate asks how to find clients. I explain that despite frustration, we are in the greatest era for client acquisition. There are two main buckets: inbound, where you create valuable content and monetize attention via a funnel (selling a service or product), and outbound, where you reach out to people with something valuable and try to sell them one-on-one. I started with outbound, door-knocking to sell marketing packages. Outbound is harder than inbound, but learning outbound makes inbound easy. If you can sell to a stranger and convert them into a paying customer, virtually all business becomes straightforward, especially for those making $0–50k a month. To do outbound, start with a data source of people who may need your product or service—such as LinkedIn, Instagram, X, Reddit, or Google. Find a deficiency in what they are currently doing and offer to resolve it upfront for little or no cost, then provide a strong guarantee on the back end. The person who initially asked about finding clients hasn't explored all possible outreach opportunities; there are more ways to get clients now than ever before, which is an interesting challenge to crack.