#55 · How to Pick a Niche for your AI Automation Agency in 2025
He says identifying problems is key; business skills are essentially effectiveness skills—being good at business means you're effective at applying yourself to points of highest leverage. He recommends the book *The Goal* by Eli Goldratt and the Farnam Street website for effective thinking, first‑principles reasoning, and understanding leverage intuitively.
I believe business skills outweigh technical skills because creating something functional is now easy with no‑code tools, but knowing whether it solves a real problem and delivers value is what truly matters— that’s a business skill. Focus on learning business skills: identify problems, apply yourself to points of highest leverage, and treat effectiveness as the core. These skills are also valuable life skills.
Psychology and sales are important, but the meta skill that really matters is consistency—being able to show up and do the work day after day. If someone has zero natural talent but a perfect consistency score, they’ll out‑perform someone with great psychology and sales but poor consistency. To win the ‘school games’ you need distribution, fund affiliates, and paid traffic, which you’re not currently doing. I’m not sure if I even want to win those games anymore; I’ve been inconsistent lately due to headaches and wildfire smoke, and I’m questioning whether I should keep pushing or let someone else take the win. The bottom line is that consistency beats raw skill, and without the supporting traffic and affiliate structures, even strong psychology and sales won’t get you far.
The most important skill is getting started and letting things work themselves out, which boils down to confidence built by proving you can handle uncertainty. Alongside that, agency, autonomy, a lower need for certainty, accountability, and consistency are crucial.
Focus on soft skills—especially sales—because the technical side of building products or services has become trivial with drag‑and‑drop tools and AI. The real leverage comes from being able to sell and communicate value; once you can sell, you can learn the needed technical details on the fly. The barrier to entry for technical work has shrunk to about 1% of what it was a few years ago, so sales skills remain the highest‑impact, high‑income competency.