Do you think running Meta ads or any form of ads to find clients is worth it for AI automation?
Do I think running Meta ads for AI automation works? Absolutely. We have a lot of people that have done that and they've had success with it. I'm not a pro, so it's hard for me to tell you exactly how I would approach it or what I would do. But obviously you need to lead with a guarantee, just like you do with cold email. You need to lead with something that is aligned with what the customer wants and then also gives them virtually zero risk in saying yes to you. The key is you offer an insane guarantee up front, and then all you really do is verify whether or not they're the sort of company that you think could feasibly hit the guarantee on a call. This allows you to blow up your top of funnel, get a ton of people on calls, get your sales team nice and busy, and then later on you just get to only work with a small subset of people that you think could actually deliver. Why is that so smart? Because again, big top of funnel for a very small cost at the back end. And then you also get to learn a lot more about what your niche is, because you're doing things on a grassroots basis — kind of like how I'm responding to all these questions.
The instinct to offer acquisition-improving systems is good, but this specific idea is a poor system to lead with — this is the entry point to the entire business, the customer's very first interaction, and you're effectively building a worse storefront. If the AI performs even 5% worse than a human at this stage, you've lost 5% of the company's revenue outright — going from $100K/month to an expected $95K/month right off the bat — unless it's solving a genuine response-speed bottleneck. The money saved by automating this often isn't worth the money lost from a worse first interaction, similar to why a lot of companies that offshored customer-facing work to save money later walked it back.
meta adslead responsecustomer experienceautomation tradeoffs
Use a tiered outreach approach. First, pitch to people who have already paid you—past clients give you about 10× the results per hour compared to cold outreach. Next, go to those who have paid you before, then to prospects who almost paid but didn’t, then to people you’ve already reached out to, and finally to completely cold audiences. Each step down the tier cuts the expected return (≈5×, 2×, 1.5×, 1×). It’s analogous to retargeting ads: validate your offer with a warm audience before spending time on cold leads. In your case, start with the agency you built the invoicing system for, show them the ROI you delivered, and ask for referrals or additional work.
He said he definitely sees value in outbound AI‑personalized cold emails, describing a simple campaign where you tell business owners you want to buy their business for cash, offer a quick 24‑hour offer, and only move forward when they respond positively. He added that he’s less certain about meta ads but would rely on the outbound approach, and wrapped up with “All right, Kev, let me know how this goes.”
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.