← All questions

#253 · your niche isn't saturated, your competitors are just bad

youtube ↗Niches

Can a service be scaled to $10K/month? What about saturated niches like video editing? How would I scale them given cheap hourly rates? How do you sell a service with no proof?

The first point: you're claiming the video editing market is saturated. I'd say there are far more new market entrants in AI than in video editing, and many are applying AI to video editing, changing the economics. Is AI just automation drag-and-drop backends, AI agents, or does it encompass all knowledge work? If so, there are many entrants, making it very saturated. However, I like highly competitive markets because they suggest opportunity and money to be made; competitors often do a poor job, so with a little first‑principles thinking you can be vastly better. For example, Upwork is saturated but the average proposal is terrible spam. By improving basic elements—profile picture, message bubble, cover letter, spelling/grammar—you can stand out and dominate. When you do that, you don't need to worry about cheap hourly rates because you'll be in the top 1% of the 1%, following a power‑law distribution. How to charge for outcomes with video editing: I often get pitched outcome‑based deals. The better outreach is to say you've managed channels for big names or done editing for any video, letting you claim views from those channels (even if the views came from brand growth). You can guarantee improvements in metrics like watch time or CTR. For instance, guarantee a lift in average watch time. You take their starting statistic over the last 90 days, run your service for a set period, build a relationship while editing, and by the end they'll know and like you, having worked with you. If you're a thumbnail designer, you could guarantee CTR improvement. Finally, how to start selling with no proof: use the service on your own business. If you were selling cold email, you'd run it on your own business, generate opportunities (e.g., 28 meetings in 4 days for an IT or software firm), then bootstrap that into proof with each client you work with.

videoeditingsaturatedoutcomenoproof

Related answers

youtube ↗Pricing

Is $3 per page a fair price for my WordPress automation service, or should I switch to a monthly/tiered model? Should I offer it for free initially to showcase value? Also, any advice on improving my recording and presentation skills despite limited camera experience?

Regarding your WordPress automation pricing: charging $3 per page (based on your two‑hour effort) undervalues the work because the marginal cost of running the automation is near zero. Instead of billing per run, give the system away for free on a pilot campaign to demonstrate its value, then switch to a tiered monthly fee—for example, around $2,895 for 1,000 campaigns per month. This aligns pricing with the client’s ongoing benefit and avoids messy usage‑based billing. On improving your recording and presentation skills: I was in the same boat—lots of door‑to‑door sales experience but almost no camera time. I fixed it by recording Loom videos daily at high volume. The trick is to mentally flip a switch: imagine an audience listening, just as you do when speaking to a real person, and then talk naturally. Repetition builds comfort, so keep creating content. Beyond that, I’ve been working on Maker School exclusives to reduce churn. I’ve posted long‑form videos (like an hour‑plus content‑machine walkthrough) and plan another exclusive (perhaps a calendar). Tracking metrics shows our monthly recurring revenue dipped from ~305 K to ~34.5 K, indicating a 23.6 % churn that I’m addressing with exclusive content. Even if Maker School vanished, I could fall back on my agency, scaling it to $150‑200 K/month and using that social proof to boost my YouTube channel. I’m also exploring private‑equity and other ventures, but the core takeaway is that the skills I’ve built—community building, content creation, sales process—are transferable to any business model.

pricingautomationwordpressmonthly
youtube ↗Lead Generation

I work with a digital marketing agency that wants to add an AI chatbot to a client's website, but the site gets little organic traffic. Is it worth implementing the chatbot, or should we first focus on getting traffic to the site?

What a great question. This is more a consulting and strategy perspective than a building one. Naturally, if you're trying to make more money and thinking, 'Ooh, what's a way to make more money? I know AI is all the rage—maybe we'll add an AI chatbot to our website,' but if the chatbot doesn't talk to anybody, it won't make you more money. You've stumbled on a universal problem for many service businesses: they just don't have any leads. The real point of value, the bottleneck you could fix, is usually lead generation. I don't know how many people visit their site daily, monthly, or yearly, so it's hard to suggest exactly what to do next, but you're on the right track. The usual thinking is: get leads first, then worry about optimizing how you deal with them, nurture them, and improve conversion rates later. In your opinion, what's the best automation to sell? Could you make a video on it? The best automation to sell is something that increases or encourages lead generation, which we discussed. One of the main systems I sell is a cold outreach system where I build distribution for someone from scratch for about $200–$300 a month ongoing. They start with zero leads in their pipeline—usually an agency—and after the system is set up, they get roughly 30 leads per month that want to book calls. This is a game-changer and easy to justify as an investment for companies whose bottleneck is lead generation, like most businesses under $50k–$100k per month in revenue. Think of it this way: I'm solving their most dire problem—no leads entering the business. I charge them $3,000–$4,000 a month, which is fine because without me they wouldn't even have a business making more than $3k–$4k a month. In my experience, the best automations to sell for small to mid-sized businesses are those that help the top of the funnel. If they already have an outbound system but aren't getting many leads, I'd recommend a speed-to-lead system. Anything close to the top of the funnel—whether outbound or inbound—helps a lot, and that's what I'd recommend.

lead generationai chatbotcold outreach
youtube ↗AI & Automation

I'm creating automations for a warehouse management system with ~4,000 SKUs but have no WMS experience. Should I treat it like a CRM?

No, you're absolutely right—warehouse management systems, enterprise resource planning, and inventory management systems are essentially dressed-up CRMs. If you understand how spreadsheets work, you'll understand how WMS and similar systems work; their UX is often clunky, but that's fine. Regarding VR 180 cameras: they're stereo cameras with a wide field of view that feel immersive in a VR headset; still early days with resolution needing work, but they could become a big industry in 5–10 years. I haven't used them yet, but they look exciting—two lenses recreating human field of view. I film them with OBS Studio. On your AI automation ideas for cold email: AI meeting note‑taking that sends key subjects and actionable steps to participants and updates the CRM is great. Automated email tagging and filtering is great. An AI concierge for Airbnbs and hotels answering common questions is reasonable. I'm not aiming to become a millionaire; I just want to sell simple sub‑$1K services to get off the ground. For mailboxes, I wouldn't recommend Hostinger for cold email—there's a reason big players avoid it. I'd suggest Zapmail at about $3.50 per mailbox (up to 10 or 100 mailboxes), which also handles DNS setup. Regarding pivoting into AI and automation: if I didn't think it made sense, I wouldn't be making videos about it all day, so my work already shows it's a good move. On starting an agency with no clients: outreach isn't a simple yes/no; it's about volume. How many outreach pieces did you send? How many Upwork or freelancer applications? How many community posts? How many people have you talked to, and over what time? If you haven't done enough, it's not that you're not good enough—it's just that you haven't put in the reps. Expecting results without sufficient effort is unreasonable. Why people fail to make money online: mostly because they can't stick with something long enough to see results. They expect success after a few days or weeks, like learning piano to a concert level in two weeks—impossible. You need years of effort; don't compare your chapter one to someone else's chapter 100. On hiring versus doing it yourself: hiring someone on Upwork or Fiverr to build templates isn't more efficient if your metric is cost or time, because you pay for work you could do yourself and add communication overhead. The only real efficiency gain is doing less of the work you dislike, but at this stage I'd optimize for making $100K rather than avoiding work you enjoy. On growing a coaching business: first, stop over‑analyzing your 'why' and start acting. Determine a set of daily revenue‑generating activities you can do every day for the next year that will drive the results you care about—financial goals. Define what you're selling (information/coaching). Put your offer in front of people, articulate how it solves their problems, and improve the offer as you deliver it. Learn and deliver in tandem. Reinvest profits to systemize outreach, lead gen, and sales, freeing time for systematization and growth. For example, join school communities and each day respond to ten women with health‑improvement suggestions, then move conversations to DMs, calls, and present your coaching offer. As you earn money, you can make the process more sophisticated.

warehouse managementvr 180cold emailai automation
youtube ↗Agency Operations

How do you handle pass-through credits for services like Appify, Chatp, and Instantly? Do the credits come out of your build, and how do you set this up?

No—I just get the client to pay for it. When I say pass through, the clients are paying for it. If you want to set it up, you have to do it manually, which sucks. You could update it once a month. If you have their Stripe, you could theoretically auto‑build using Stripe after calculating monthly token usage, but I don't think that's a good idea. The credits don't auto‑build; they stay manual. If you want to do pass‑through, tell the client how much the tokens cost at the end of the contract and then handle it. If you need it ongoing, you need a way to calculate token usage automatically. It's annoying, so I don't recommend it. Snapo thanks me for the free game. I record videos with OBS Studio; zooming or switching views is done live, not in post‑production, which cuts editing time and removes the need to publish to post. I've been building and documenting an automation as well. The fastest way to scale depends on where you are. If you lack demonstrated value, inbound won't work—you need proven results. I've built two agencies, one at $92K and another at $72K, and my agency will soon far exceed those numbers because I've grown the team. I've shown success doing what most people want: starting an agency in the agency space. People want to know how to do that, make money with it, bootstrap, and do cold emails. I'm good at all that, so when I talk about it it's like listening to a bank robber rate his top 10 heists, Lionel Messi rate his top 10 plays, or LeBron talk about dunking. I'm not claiming to be the LeBron of AI automation, but I am the LeBron of AI automation in terms of experience. If you don't have equivalent experience, inbound won't work. Your oldest video is 10 months old; if you've made less than $20K in 10 months (about $2K/month), you'd be better off starting with cold outreach instead of documenting your approach. I hate to say it, but that's the truth. The fastest way to scale really depends on your starting point. Hopefully I've made my point clear. I didn't start with YouTube videos; I made money first, got good at delivering value, then realized I could talk about it for hours, found it affordable to create content, gained authority, and started making videos—and it worked.

pass-throughcreditsStripescaling