I Studied 200 Automation Agencies: Here's What Works In 2025

hey so I just finished breaking down 200 AI automation agencies for my community of 1400 maker school to figure out exactly what is working today in the AI automation agency space exactly how people are hitting $10,000 a month and Beyond with this business model and what I'm basically doing in this video it's just breaking it all down for you and giving you guys a bunch of strategies okay so I don't know what this dude's name is it's handsome fow I see him all the time but hopefully this is going to be you at the end of this video printing money not for the US government this time the disclaimer here is uh this is what works in 2025 so if you're watching this video in 2027 or 2029 who knows um you know the internet May last until the end of time just know that you know uh approaches in any Market tend to work really well initially and then they just tend to reduce Effectiveness over time so just my due diligence here you if you're watching this really far in the future I'm not saying that this approach is still going to work what I'm saying is that they're working right now and I want you to focus Less on the particulars of the approach that I'm showing you and then more on just the deeper underlying uh I guess the the underlying theme or the underlying strategy as opposed to the tactics because you know tactics change strategy Remains the Same speaking of strategy the very first thing I'm going to touch on is what I'm calling asset-based cold Outreach so basically uh probably a third of the people that are printing money right now in a automation agency are doing some sort of asset based cold Outreach and what this means just in layman's terms this is you right and you are sad and this is your prospect and the prospect ECT is really busy and who knows maybe they're a little bit angry and uh anyway uh in order to get their attention what you need to do is you need to give them something right in order for you know for them to want to actually spend a second in chat with you need to give them something so what asset based cold Outreach is you basically go and you create an asset and you actually just give it to them and in exchange for that okay what they do is they just give you um it's supposed to be my rendition of a clock a few moments of their time where you can essentially make your pitch okay then after that happens you are happy and then their weird face is also happy that's what a happy person looks like so there are a couple of different ways to do this um but I want you to know that this is working really well right now and the reason why is because the bar for Value just continues to go up in cold Outreach uh what people were doing before is what I like to call personalized but boring what we would do is we would take data using some lead aggregator the simplest and easiest one was Apollo okay and for those of you guys that don't know Apollo it's just like this big lead database that allows you to list a bunch of people first name last name Title

Company LinkedIn profile email address and stuff and then you know for a fee you could essentially extract that and then get that in a big CSV file or something and then you know add that to your cold email campaign the thing about Apollo is it was really expensive right so um because people basically found a bunch of third-party workarounds and one of the ways that people um got Apollo data without actually paying for it all was this platform called appify now appify is just a big scraping Marketplace allows you to scrape whatever the hell you want including Twitter posts Facebook posts Instagram posts whatnot and essentially what people did is they took appify then use that to scrape a bunch of Apollo leads and then just get that CSV that I was telling you about except instead of a ton of money just be a little bit of money okay and what do you get at the end of the step you basically just get a spreadsheet and you know in the spreadsheet you have like the name URL of their LinkedIn profile you have you know hopefully their email and a bunch of stuff okay the thing is this approach did not yield enough data to really do meaningful um personalized Outreach with so what people would do after that is they would pass it through some sort of thirdparty API okay like lead magic or I don't know derek. apppp or Derek Dash app or something and basically these are just like approaches where if you feed in a LinkedIn profile this URL that I was telling you about to this service lead magic or um Derek Dasa you could basically turn that you know big CSV into an even more detailed file that also included a bunch of additional information like what the person wrote in their LinkedIn summary their bio uh maybe you could scrape posts and stuff like that and you know once you have all this data finally you would take all of this stuff here okay all of this then you would feed it into a cold email platform and there are a variety of cold email platform big one is instantly right now there's another one called smart lead which I'll jump to and basically these cold email platforms I appear to have jumped on the pricing page these cold email platforms um just take all of that uh data and then allow you to like send emails unmas to these people okay so look at that happy camper over here he's happy because he got a personalized email um same thing with you know smart lead and a bunch of these other cold email platforms all right so that was the previous approach and I'm just telling you guys all this because I want everybody to be on the same page in terms of context that was the exact thing that people were doing under the hood right this is like the secret strategy um and you know you can still produce results with this you can still make money with this but um you can't make as much money is if you use this approach here which new which a lot more people are doing now and that approach is basically where instead of you just personalizing a piece of Outreach and you know sending out an email saying like hey Peter I saw that you're running uh this company and I love that it's like a I don't know like a B2B manufacturing business and I only work with B2B manufacturing businesses instead of just telling people that oh my God this emails are customized what you do is you actually show them by giving them something that solves a problem now normally this would take a ton of time effort and work but now in the age of AI and abundance you can stuff that's valuable in half a second assuming you have access to the right data so let me just break this down for just like we had before we have this Apollo okay so we have the lead source and then we usually have some way to scrape that so appify in this case so instead of it costing a $3 signs it only

cost $1 sign but now we have a bunch of additional steps in between and what I like to do with these steps I like to call them my enrichment steps so we'll get all of the data from apify which includes a CSV with like the website of the person and the LinkedIn profile whatever and then what we do is we actually send that through like a flow using a no code tool something like make. com for instance or something like nadn okay and these tools essentially allow you to just drag and drop and do some do some automation for those of you guys that are you know just entering the industry and holy crap did naden just changed their website yes they did that's the sexiest thing I've ever seen and then uh what you do with this is you basically create flows that scrape the person's website and give you a ton of information about you know their website and their offerings and stuff so you go on every page of their website and scrape them scrape their social media so you check out their Instagram their Twitter their LinkedIn everything and then scrape I don't know maybe they have a podcast you scrape their podcast you scrape all the content that's basically about them on the Internet you can do this with a perplexity search or there a variety of different ways but basically what you do as a result of this is now you know in that spreadsheet that I showed you guys earlier well now you have a ton more data you have name you have I don't know like um like last post one post two post three and so on and so on and so forth you have all the podcasts you have everything that you could possibly need so now once you have all this data in a spreadsheet somewhere what do you do well now you just feed it into Ai and you ask AI hey uh and this really depends on your pitch and depends on your Market depend what you're going after but you could do something like hey you know I want you to create 22 titles for YouTube videos for this person based off of all of the information on their website and based off of what is currently working right now and AI can then add that to something like a Google Document or maybe some sort of text file or maybe upload it to a a you know notion page or something and then when you do the Outreach you do the same customized Outreach you did before but now you also do it with that gift that I was telling you guys about earlier okay and um that is definitely not how you draw a present but that's just we're going to use our imagination here folks so now what you do is you hand it to them on a silver platter and you say hey here's a bunch of free stuff you like this free stuff you want more well reply and then I'll figure it all out for you and that's how you get somebody interested in your offer okay so this isn't hypothetical like I've gotten a ton of the stuff um a lot of other people you know probably a bunch of people that are watching this video gotten a ton of stuff here's a quick

example of one of these things from a guy that actually ended up working with just because I was so blown away by it he sent me an email and he basically said hey Nick I've written 22 titles for you that you can use right now to improve your CTR let me know what you think Rock PS I've got a full YouTube script ready for you Nick it's complimentary to number one rule for a automations reply to my email and I'll send it to you then what did he do he literally you know I don't know if he used AI automation for this or he wrote it in S I have no idea but then he basically just spammed me with 20 whatever titles 22 it looks like um and think about it from my perspective as a YouTube Creator like this stuff's actually pretty valuable to me you know one of the main bottlenecks in my business is the creation of titles he just he literally just whether he did it himself or he had a do it he just solved a problem for me and he solved the problem for me before he even asked me for anything and then the email he basically just said hey Nick here is 22 titles for you I'm not asking for anything but if you like them let me know and maybe I'll make you some more okay and you know what was my impression was damn this guy knows how to freaking do business okay absolutely I responded to them and we did you know we did a pretty quick deal um so there you know there are a few dozen people in my community right now that are doing this exact approach they're not doing YouTube titles because obviously they're AI automation agencies that are specializing in slightly different things but they might do like a one-click CRM build they might do some sort of cold email template series or sequence that's customized they might do a whole newsletter for a business that they generate in one second the point isn't necessarily that asset needs to be incredible okay the point is that it needs to be so hyper customized that the person on the other end of the line gets the impression that you sat down literally physically sat down for 2 hours research everything about them then created it and handed it to them before you even asked for a second of their time because that is just the best impression that you can give in cold Outreach um you know like we're as technology and as this industry gets more mature and more sophisticated basically the bar for what is considered

good quality Outreach is going to continue to go up and that is so far ahead of what everybody else is doing that it's virtually like an an instant win I would say so that's a strategy that's working right now I have systems all over my YouTube that show how to build stuff just like this I have systems that show you guys how to generate assets PDFs using um Ai and some sort of data source I have tons of videos on how to use Apollo and appify to scrape data get stuff from social media scrape people's websites and so on and so forth um I'm just going to leave a little link up ahead if you guys want to watch the first one in my big series and yeah you know take it from there do whatever you have to do make it work okay the second really big strategy that's working right now and this has been working for a couple of years but I'm seeing this applied to a automation um specifically because you know we're a very technical audience and people tend to get lost in the product but basically it's sales before product okay little Amazon Smiley um before you build an automation or a system or template or your product try selling it and then only when somebody responds positively to you only when somebody's actually down to maybe buy the thing or maybe not buy the thing but like explore a little bit more about the thing only then do you actually sit down and build it now I know this Probably sounds crazy and a lot of people are like Nick that's just Bonkers why would you sell something that you don't even have how can you be sure that quality product is good and the reality is right now okay as of the time of this video that doesn't matter and if you try and do everything right and 100% by the book you're just not going to make it the industry is moving too quickly so this is what a lot of people a lot of AI automation people being you know technical um and you know like more from like a programming or developer background this is more or less what everybody's doing so they'll do some market research I see this all the time in my community um they'll spend like you know two or three days compiling a bunch of stuff they'll like read through communities of like a particular Niche videography is my go-to so they'll like they'll go videography communities then they'll like look for a bunch of communities here and then they'll scroll top to bottom and they'll look for pain points and then they'll do a bunch of you know total addressable Market whatever they have some little report at the end of and they're like okay this is a good idea I should probably do this and then what they'll do is they'll be like okay so what are problems that they're facing okay it's this problem so I don't know their video production pipelines suck I'm going to develop a product and so you know after that what do they do then they spend you know a week or two building this thing then only after they're done building this thing doing like backbreaking labor and spending I don't know like I've seen people spend like 3 four weeks building like a simple set of make. com templates or something it's pretty crazy then they'll try and sell it and then this period this might take another three or four weeks and then they realize that it fails okay and then it takes them like another week to just

muster up the courage to try again and then they freaking go back so this whole cycle is like six or seven weeks man if you go through two of these Cycles you could have built a whole lifestyle business in the meantime you just wasted an entire like business cycle a zero to 10 or 20K you know Journey it's crazy and so don't do this I don't really know how else to instill upon this point but the age of Costco you know uh is it with a c a t I think it's with a t Costco's whole like build it and they will come methodology where they put a bunch of warehouses in the middle of nowhere and their products are just so damn good that everybody comes that doesn't work for this industry um our current ERA of technology that doesn't really work for startups okay what we need to do is we need to validate our product as quickly as humanly possible so instead of build it we you know build it and then they will come I say sell it and once they're here then build it now it doesn't sound as nice it doesn't roll off the tongue but um we'll just say Nick surve 2025 just FY I want just quote me on this one doesn't sound as nice but trust me when I say this is what everybody that wins does okay what does that actually look like in um you know like if we just like examine a little flowchart here you sell first okay you validate fast and then finally you build after so that six to 7even we pipeline before well you're still going to do your market research for maybe a couple days then you're going to come up with an idea which might take you a couple days then you're going to try and sell it maybe you'll give yourself like a week to sell it and then guess what if it fails how long is this Loop now this Loop is now maybe like 9 to 10 days instead of six to seven weeks so you are six to seven times faster and concommittant you know if I could just um show you guys kind of what the growth rate of a company that does this versus that other company looks like I'd say it's about six to seven times faster if that green one is somebody that's doing this approach this orange like the traditional build and they will come approach okay and I mean like what you know if you're at like 13 or 14 weeks and you're staring down the barrel of a freaking bottle or gun or bottle or whatever the hell you want to stare down the barrel of um you know and you have very little Runway left you have no money I mean like that that's a big gap that might be like $100,000 right that's a lot don't let yourself be that orange line I guess and then the benefit is you know after you've succeeded then you spend the hours building so you're basically only spending time and energy on things that you have verified people actually want and the second that you like do this two or three times Well you basically have like a list of templates or a list of products that you can legitimately sell usually for months on end I mean you know these systems tend to solve core problems and it's not

that they're so like these are these are core long-lasting problems these aren't like automation problems you know what I mean it's like lead generation that's a core problem you figure out that like a specific spe type of company wants a specific type of lead generation and they're willing to pay a lot of money for it you could sell that thing for months or years you could make a ton of money off of it you could build your whole life around it you know that's kind of how I feel with my initial cold email I reach system proposal generator system and then some of the crms that I was selling I mean you know I essentially built my business around these things okay big thing number three that I see winners do that I typically see losers kind of screw up and I say losers here in a relative term but you know at the end of the day business is a game you know when you get into the AI and automation industry you can kind of pretend you're playing a game of chess or something right the people that tend to fail at that game of chess just tend to get a little bit bogged down in the complexity of things like self hosting so what is the number one Contender for you know worst contributor to this problem right now um naden okay naden as we all know is blown the hell up right now I mean they just had changed their beautiful website look super sexy probably pay a designer off a whole mansion in order to make it happen naden is awesome and it's gaining a ton of market share really quickly but what I find is somebody that has been in the space for the better part of the last couple years and that you know who focuses primarily not on um you know how cool the systems that I can build look and all amazing AI agents with the quadrillion tools that look like a piece of spaghetti you know I focus on the amount of money that you can drive from this stuff people that start with nadn they tend to be a little bit more technically oriented and then they just tend to get bogged down like the the technicalities of self-hosting and stuff and the issue with self-hosting is not that self-hosting itself sucks it's just that it requires a fair amount of expertise to figure out and then it adds like a ton of additional complexity to the process of actually building something for a client so what self-hosting does I find is it gives you the illusion that you're making all this progress and that you're moving forward and you figured out how to do your environment variables or whatever but you don't actually make money with it because you're not actually driving actionable business outcomes so naden is actually a really poor Contender for this I find and you know I'm just telling you guys what I see in my community I'm not trying to knock a platform here I love naden I use it all the time but uh you know if if I could create a ratio between like the people that start with make. com versus nadn and then how much money they make within maybe a month or two and the people that start with make. com i got to take a survey but my gut feeling is it's at least two to 3x than the people that serve with niden just because the people serve with n just get bogged down the technicalities okay so um yeah I just picked a couple of platforms here to show you guys like obviously you know I've been a big make. com fan for quite a while I built my whole you know um AI automation coaching business starting with make. com so I can't recommend make. com enough it costs a little bit more on the front end but because it's totally self uh a cloud hosted you know you don't have to deal with any of the implementation like the actual setting up or renting a server you do pay substantially more in the front end than something like a self-hosted NN setup but typically what you're doing is you're paying and then what you receive in return is a ton of your time and energy back and the ability to like very quickly gets things like ooth up and running so I'm a big fan of that um I don't really know why I threw the vapy logo in here I guess I just like vapy hello vapy how you doing anyway focus on cloud Solutions wherever possible you know uh if there's uh two options that you have okay the first is go through some lengthy thing to set up a server and uh you know like put all this time and energy into making sure the server works right and get all the bells and whistles to make sure that like your process time costs as few operations as possible if you're putting all that time and effort in what you're basically doing is you're doing another version of building the product before you start selling I would say if these products come out of the box and they work perfectly and all you have to do is pay like 30 or 40 or 50 bucks a month extra in order to have that product um well take that product sell it first and then worry about all that hosting and all that super high efficiency stuff later on down the line okay the last thing I'm going to talk about is what I'm calling Omni Channel lead generation um I see a lot of people doing this and I think the reason why this works is if we just zoom out a bit if you use Omni Channel Legion in concert with asset based cold Outreach you're basically maximizing the probability that somebody actually sees the asset that you spent a little bit more time and energy making like if you think about it this flow right over here this might actually cost you something every time that you run this thing you know you're going to have to spend a few cents scraping via appify then on maybe the operations in your no code tool or the large language model tokens to process all this stuff then you're going to have to spend some money for the cold email platform right so if you think about it you know if we've just dumped all this money in then logically speaking and we made this amazing asset and the probability of the person responding to us if they see the assets really high what's the bottleneck in our process the Bott is them seeing the asset so that's where Omni Channel Leen comes in and basically um you know the whole purpose of this is it maximizes the probability of people seeing our super high quality asset let me give you guys some context um before what a lot of people were doing is they were like just sending an email okay and in reality emails or I don't know upwork apps posts on social media or whatever these have a low probability of being seen if you send somebody a cold email and you even have like some minor issue with maybe your deliverability or something nowadays people get so many of these things and so many people Mark things to spam and you know these email pixel things automatically open the contents of the email and they use it to like AI summarize like Google and Outlook does they have such a low likelihood of actually seeing your asset that it's almost like why the hell did you even make it to begin with like if you're spending I don't know even like 10 cents okay which is actually quite a bit of money if you think about it per lead then basically what you're doing is before the person has even seen it you spend 10 cents okay in order for one person to see your Outreach you spent 50 cents and then what's the probability that they're actually going to get back to you or something I mean man that might be like $5 so what are you doing now you're just spending $5 for somebody to say no to you more or less and how many people how many NOS does it take to get a yes I don't know maybe 40 well maybe uh I don't know eight and then how many yeses does it take to actually like

sign a deal and like get on a you know get on a get on some sort of uh offer with you I don't know it could be like 10 so maybe you're spending $400 to acquire like a $1,000 CLI well now you just spent you know 40% of your margin anyway I do this to show you guys my thoughts on how I think about acquiring business and um cost per acquisition which is extraordinarily important and also to show you guys where that bottleneck is okay if you send a super customized piece of Outreach to somebody and there's only a 20% chance that they see it that means 80% of the time you're just throwing money away what people are doing now is they're doing multiple channels now if we were to say send an email that contains our asset send an igdm saying send a LinkedIn request that contains our asset and then also send an X message that contains our asset mathematically speaking the way that this works and this is some statistical thing that I just had to ask chat gbt about there's a term and one of you guys can tell me what it is um there's a 59% chance that they'll see it okay these aren't additive um but if you have a 20% chance sending of getting an email scene 20% chance of getting an Instagram DM a LinkedIn request scene and then a 20% chance of getting an X message scene well now you've basically tripled your odds and so right off the front end because you have this super valuable thing that'll basically guarantee you a conversation if it just gets in front of them you've tripled your odds of that happening and you basically this one strategy here will like 3x um what is called your throughput which are the number of leads that you can push through your pipeline so you know this is something that you can't do in isolation this is sort of like a strategy or a hack to use in concert with some sort of approach like um as I was mentioning up you're an asset based cold Outreach but it's something that's working really well right now and a couple of other ways that you can apply this and that I've seen people apply this are like uper caps um people will make a custom asset for the upwork job post that they are applying to like they will take the job description they'll feed it through Ai and then now that it's fed through AI um they'll go and make a Google doc with it then they'll go and they'll make like an actual system to make. com blueprint with it using AI you can do that by the way then they'll attach all the stuff inside of the Google Doc send it alongside their upwork application along with the loom video right but it's like okay we just spent like 50 cents doing that plus a few minutes of my time making that video so how do I maximize the probability of that being seen well you take all the client account information and then you find the person and then you know you apply um not only on upwork but you send them an email you hit them up on social media do all that stuff I should not that is not allowed by the upwork terms of service I've just seen some AI automation agencies do it alongside other people so you'd have to do that at your own risk um but yeah that's a big strategy that I've seen working super well and you know as I mentioned at the beginning of this video These are strategies at the end of the day I don't want you to F to pay attention to the very particulars of the tactics that I'm talking about because these tactics are going to work realistically for a couple of months and then they're not going to work as well if you spend a dollar and then right now you're making $10 on one of these you know in six months you'll spend a dollar and you'll make $5 right these things will just grow less effective as time uh with time as more people use them but if you pay attention to the core fundamentals here the things that drive all of these strategies they tend to be things like personalization giving people a ton of value upfront before you make any sort of ask um getting up and running not waiting for perfect conditions before you start um operating with lower levels of certainty even if you don't know what you're selling or whether you can build a product you go out there and sell it anyway and these are more like core foundational themes that any positive um any fast growing business owner usually has in their back pocket that have resulted in these tactics so if you understand the deeper themes you'll be able to recreate these tactics when the time comes and when you inevitably need new ones all right I think I'm done you yapping for the day good to be back if anybody has any questions about this stuff just drop me down a comment below more than happy to help out or answer if you guys are into building your own Ai and automation

agencies from scratch definitely check out maker school we got over 1,400 members in there right now really appreciate the time have a lovely rest of the day I'll catch you on the next video cheers