$50k/month selling AI automation services to small businesses

Appreciate the update! It just sounds like you've finally reached the limit of AI coding slop at this point. I've been following along what you did so far and your ideas were quite optimistic so to say. I also do not understand why you wanted to use RAG to store code from GitHub? :D If you need some more technical advice let me know!
Anyways, your AI service offer sounds quite interesting, best of luck with that, keep the updates coming
well the inclusion of a RAG was my attempt to basically create some kind of persistent memory for the coding agent as I worked. Too often I am working with it and it will have no memory of any of the work we've done, or the project at all, totally blank slate. So my idea was to basically have the RAG for it to consult when it didn't know something. But the issue then became that it never checked the fucking thing, never updated it, etc. Just became a distraction.

Anyway will be focusing more on the business side of things and less on the tech.
 
So my idea was to basically have the RAG for it to consult when it didn't know something
Yes, the idea of RAG is basically what you said. But you cannot just vectorise code from GitHub and then expect your RAG algorithm to come up with something sensible, it's more complicated than that. If you wanna dive in more detail about the technical side of things let me know - happy to help :eek:
 
Yes, the idea of RAG is basically what you said. But you cannot just vectorise code from GitHub and then expect your RAG algorithm to come up with something sensible, it's more complicated than that. If you wanna dive in more detail about the technical side of things let me know - happy to help :eek:
Also, some of the repos may be a complete crap
 
Have you thought about the fact that you’ll need to do everything manually to get good results? I mean, you’ll have to prepare many email templates using your client’s brand guidelines (logos, colors, text, etc.). Of course, you could use some AI to help with that, but if you want it to look professional and achieve the best results, you’ll need to do most of the work by hand. This will become an anchor if you want to scale the process.
 
I go through out your whole journey and it quite impressive and you are getting also success. But one thing is bothering me about your marketing journey. What marketing you are following?
like is it BHW sales thread or other?
I would like know your marketing strategies because after launching you got 10k in sales where bigger companies are doing also same methods to follow.

and honestly your determination is just pumping my adrenaline and motivating me. Keep it up. Thanks for your journey sharing with uss man
 
Yes, the idea of RAG is basically what you said. But you cannot just vectorise code from GitHub and then expect your RAG algorithm to come up with something sensible, it's more complicated than that. If you wanna dive in more detail about the technical side of things let me know - happy to help :eek:
Someone suggested a tool called datalayer, which is essentially a RAG in that it sits between you and the coding agent, forcing the agent to "think" through whatever docs you have added to it. Bottom line is that it will have more context for the project when you give it commands, which is a major problem. I haven't tested it yet.
Have you thought about the fact that you’ll need to do everything manually to get good results? I mean, you’ll have to prepare many email templates using your client’s brand guidelines (logos, colors, text, etc.). Of course, you could use some AI to help with that, but if you want it to look professional and achieve the best results, you’ll need to do most of the work by hand. This will become an anchor if you want to scale the process.
Yeah no actually. I send only plaintext emails and unless I get an ecom client I would suggest they also do only plain text emails. No logos or any of that nonsense. And I am not setting this up to just be a glorified freelancer, ideally I would have contractors doing the work for me. I have some lined up, I just need to close the deals. Any of this AI stuff that I am doing is pretty much only for in house use.
I go through out your whole journey and it quite impressive and you are getting also success. But one thing is bothering me about your marketing journey. What marketing you are following?
like is it BHW sales thread or other?
I would like know your marketing strategies because after launching you got 10k in sales where bigger companies are doing also same methods to follow.

and honestly your determination is just pumping my adrenaline and motivating me. Keep it up. Thanks for your journey sharing with uss man
Not sure what you mean G I haven't made a dollar yet from this let alone $10k. My goal is $10-15k/mo, but I obviously am nowhere near that.

Speaking of which, let's have a little update.

So basically, I have leaned into the email marketing. I ran a campaign to 18k leads in Nevada and Utah (I wanted small states first so I could scrape all biz leads), hit them with a personalized "hard sell" campaign, and let it run for a week or two so it hit around 12k of those.

From all that I only had 1 booked call. Kind of disappointing as I expected more, but I think what I need to do is change my approach or my lead gen strategy. I think what I may do is position it in a way that I just want to interview business owners in X industry and if they're free for a call. Nobody likes to get pitched, everyone likes to be interviewed. So I am currently in the process of setting up a new "interview" style campaign with a set of 15k leads that I will begin firing off today once the list is done getting verified.

Second, what I think I would like to do possibly is scrape LinkedIn posts for engagement, then make a list of those people and message them. "Hey I saw your comment on blahblah's post, thought I'd reach out..." That seems to do well from what I've read, but the downsides are that it's harder to scale because 1) there are fewer people who engage with linkedin posts, and 2) pulling emails from linkedin profiles adds an extra step that costs money.

Right now, I can use apify to scrape 50k leads for around $60. If I run those through a verifier, let's say 30% are good. I have a very affordable verifier that allows unlimited verifications for $10/mo, up to 100k/day. So $70 for let's say 20k verified leads, very decent.

Compare that to scraping Linkedin for posts (requires api credits or phantombuster subscription). Limited to like 100 profiles per day or something like htat. Then I need to run that through another thing that gets the emails, not cheap at all. Cheapest I found was Anymailfinder which is $400 for 12k credits, but costs 2 credits per verification. So 6k leads for $400.

6k for $400 vs 20k for $70. Not a hard choice, roughly 20x cheaper for the non personalized ones. Yes results will be worse, but I honestly at this point have so many domains and mailboxes that I don't even know how many I have. I am probably close to being able to send 10k per day.

I honestly really just want to get enough leads in to book my schedule and that of any salespeople I have.

I also looked into other options for setting appointments as well, such as building a predictive dialer and hosting it on AWS. Long story short, cold calling campaigns with VOIP are much harder to set up these days. I looked into SMS marketing (I have a lot of phones/sims from another project), and would be able to send around 100 cold SMS per day. Which honestly would probably be a good use of my time, but I kind of gave up when I couldn't figure out a way to drip them out automatically from a central dashboard on a computer. Like if I have to sit there and hold phones and press buttons with my thumbs I kind of lose interest. Maybe I could just do it anyway, even with 1-2 phones. Really would prefer something that just lets me pop in the sim, download an app, connect to a dashboard, load in some leads, add a spintext message, and let it drip throughout the day. Does that exist anywhere? Idk, maybe I'll check.

That said, my most immediate plan is to just get a buttload of leads and hit them with cold email to ask for an interview. If I can get 4-5 a day I'm happy, but I think the results will be much better. I've also coded an AI SDR that can reel leads in and book appointments from Instnatly directly. It's not perfect but with some minor tweaks should be fine.

Idk if I mnetioend it but I also have a database reactivation campaign (also a hard sell) that I am running with around 10k leads. I'm getting some responses, but nothing like what I would like. Very low response rates which is odd. I think it's the leads tbh, but I could be wrong. Reason I say that is that they are not targeted at all. I literally just chose a state and pulled all the leads from that state. Whereas the first campaign I ran was targeted towards dentists and solar companies.

So the real question becomes, how am I going to be able to scrape all these leads and verify their emails to feed the machine? Well, I am building a scraper + bulk email verifier that will scrape leads from Google Maps, verify the emails via API with a cheap solution, and then import them into an Instantly campaign to be emailed. Still working on it but hope to be finished with it by the end of the weekend.

So bottom line, here is the plan:

Continue warming domains/emails
Finish scraping + verifying + importing solution
Set up SMS dashboard thing for cold SMS marketing

I think that's basically it. However I will say that one more thing I think I need is to have more ready made solutions for customers that we can sell. Right now we are doing it on a custom basis, meaning we do a call with a customer, feed the transcript to a specialized GPT that generates an AI solution plan + proposal, and then send that to the customer. But I think having some kind of suite of 3-4 core services that we offer would be good too. Just to give them a taste before getting on the phone, or in situations where lets' say I meet someone in the real world and want to tell them what we can do. Having 3-4 ready offerings will sound better than "let's do a call so I can feed our transcript to AI and have it tell me what we should do for you."
 
Hi everyone, quick update. So bottom line, the more I do this the more I realize that the main bottleneck is always going to be leads/appointments. So my main focus for the past few weeks has been how to generate leads and book appointments. That is basically the problem I am trying to solve for myself.

And I think I have pretty much done it. After many failed attempts, I have figured out a way to get a very good response rate from business owners, which will finally allow me to crank my cold email. The method is simple, all you do is tell the lead that you want to interview them. You can say you have a podcast or not, but people are much more likely to agree to an interview than they are to a sales call. And on that interview, you can ask them whatever question you want and they'll happily answer it without holding back.

So long story short this is super effective. I recently hit a list of insurance people and have gotten around 15 interested responses. Mixed bag, not saying they're all amazing or super intelligent people. But the interest is there. The goal is to get them on the call, interview them, feed the transcript into an AI that creates a proposal, and then set up another call to go over the proposal.

In terms of creating this heavy lead gen for myself, I am currently using apify + apollo to scrape. That's somewhat effective, but costs will add up. Though tbh I could just drop like $500 on leads for the month and crank out 5k emails a day no problem, would probably be a much better use of my time than what I'v ebeen doing, which is trying to use claude code to write scrapers and bots for myself. That's been a fucking journey in and of itself. But very fun, I'm learning so much.

I set up a Google Maps scraper that used the Google API to find businesses and scrape emails from their websites. Thought it was all ready to go until I got a bill from Google for $800 which is mad overpriced and not worth it. For $800 via Apollo I could easily get 120-150k verified leads with my system. With google scraping once it's maxed out and debugged maybe I would get like 5k for that amount. Just not worth it.

However, on my way to trying to make these scrapers I've gotten myself a nice little education in software dev. I am not there yet but def approaching that level of confidence devs have where they're like, "I can build anything I want" - which if you are into marketing or business at all you can see how valuable that would be.

Anyway, right now I am revamping my scrapers to see if I can get them to work properly. But in the meantime, I am going to be scheduling these calls with people and emailing more leads and running more campaigns. I have so many emails now and they're just sitting there, I've been hesitating because I envisioned myself dumping thousands into leads when I could just make my own thing that finds them instead. But I have been able to reduce my costs because I found a very cheap email verifier tool that allows up to 100k/day for an insanely cheap price. Much better esp when you consider what these other sites cost.

My google maps scraper had the email verification built into it, meaning that it would scrape google maps for businesses, find their websites, scrape their websites for emails, and then use the email verifier API to parse the valid emails. I tried to add something where it would automatically put them in an Instantly campaign but could not get it to work.

Anyway, I think I just decided that I will budget like $500 for leads and load up some campaigns. I have my SDR all ready to go. Email verifier is ready to go. Once I get my free scraping methods up and running I'll be unstoppable. Will hopefully close a deal by the end of next week, but we'll see.
 
And I think I have pretty much done it. After many failed attempts, I have figured out a way to get a very good response rate from business owners, which will finally allow me to crank my cold email. The method is simple, all you do is tell the lead that you want to interview them. You can say you have a podcast or not, but people are much more likely to agree to an interview than they are to a sales call. And on that interview, you can ask them whatever question you want and they'll happily answer it without holding back.

So long story short this is super effective. I recently hit a list of insurance people and have gotten around 15 interested responses. Mixed bag, not saying they're all amazing or super intelligent people. But the interest is there. The goal is to get them on the call, interview them, feed the transcript into an AI that creates a proposal, and then set up another call to go over the proposal.

What do you plan to interview them about? How will you transition from "I'm interviewing you" to "I'm selling you something?
15 responses is a very good result so far. Congrats and good luck with the sales pitch. All it takes is one client to start and get your feet wet.
 
Outbound email and multiple warmed-up mailboxes seems like the right numbers game approach.
 
Read your thread before making this account and I'm following your thread as I look forward to make something similar, what mailbox provider are you using for your domains? Maybe you specified but I missed it? with 40 domains I imagine the costs can go up.
 
This looks/sounds great. I think you could actually just sell the lead gen automation only. I'd be interested :D
 
Thank you for sharing our journey and good luck!


1. Is there a way to use previous business leads for the new venture?
2. For your services, Upwork is a great lead generator. Can share the basic proven setup with you.
3. You've mentioned three services; they're connected, but each of them can be a business on its own. My suggestion would be to laser-focus on the service that will bring you more profit during the first stage.
 
So at this point in my career I have decided to pivot from my previous business into AI automation.
It seems like you had a pretty high income in business before. Can you share about your previous business (industry, journey from start to success,...) so that everyone can learn? Because all of us want to increase our income.
 
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