Where can I find clients for my automation agency?
If you're running an automation agency, you have three main options to find clients. First, Upwork: it's the simplest, straightest path for beginners to get your first dollar online, though the ROI is lower than other methods. Second, cold email: cost per acquisition is super low, you can scale it, and you can use AI to personalize outreach; check out my previous videos on my main channel @Nix for details on customizing and personalizing emails. Third, communities: post high-value content daily or every few days in groups where your target customers hang out; this frames you as an authority and quickly builds an inbound presence without the hard work of recording hundreds of videos. In Maker School I provide a daily regimen: send 10 Upwork applications, make a community post, and do cold email outreach each day. I recommend about 270 cold emails per day (nine mailboxes with 30 emails each). With a two-step sequence, that yields roughly 3,240 contacts per month, leading to about 90 engaged people, and assuming a third respond positively, you get around 30 leads per day—fantastic for your pipeline. This is what's working today given your photography background; you don't need to cold‑approach bigger businesses unless you want to, as it's often a pain.
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.
To be fair, we cover all this in Maker School, but I'll still dangle the carrot. There are other lead generation mechanisms you can use while warming up emails. Upwork is big—apply the same approach I recommend there: record customized Loom videos and send them via cold DMs instead. Find creators, influencers, or people doing work you think you can help with, record a video solving their problem, and send it across their social media platforms. There's a lot you can do here, but I wouldn't just wait 2 to 4 weeks; you could send many customized DMs in that time, and many would likely respond.
Cold email works fantastic for consultants. If you run a software development, no-code development, or AI automation agency, you are essentially a consultant. I regularly pitch people in the AI and automation vertical to use cold email to get clients, and I use it myself to get my own clients. The same system that works for you will work for any other consultant. You don't need to worry about whether it works for consultants—it does. Proof is in the pudding: if you're using the system to acquire clients, then by definition it's working. Additionally, you can explore niche packs inside Maker School and other systems you could sell, such as unique repurposing content creators, trend detectors, YouTube comment ideators, and tools like Vid IQ that help find liars for inbound flows. There are also YouTube-specific tools for long-form content creators. In short, cold email is great for consultants, coaches, and similar professionals.
I think the core problem isn’t the offer itself but the amount of outreach you’re doing. Based on the numbers you shared you’re probably doing far fewer outreach actions than a typical agency—maybe 24 × less than you think. If you tally every email, DM, call, or LinkedIn message you sent in the first month you’ll see you could have done many more. The growth equation is simple: more outreach equals more leads, which equals more clients. So before you scrap the model, double‑down on consistent, high‑volume outreach (cold email, LinkedIn, etc.) and track those metrics. Once you have a reliable pipeline you can decide whether to specialize, but the immediate fix is to increase outreach dramatically.