YouTube Sucks for New AI Automation Agencies (Avoid This)

I think YouTube is a terrible idea if you're just getting started as an AI and automation agency owner and this video is going to convince you as to why and this is coming from somebody that scaled his own Ai and automation agency to 72,000 bucks in a month so I feel like my opinion here is somewhat credible we're going to do this whiteboard style as per usual and really there are three main reasons why YouTube absolutely blows I'm going to go through all three of them in time so the very first and most pertinent one I think for most people is as this brightly red clock probably alludes to it is that it takes a lot of time and more time than you probably think if you're going to start content for anything whether it's an automation agency or an SEO company or I don't know a flying saucer reporting business it's going to take a very long time to see any sort of result if I make a quick little graph for you and I'm going to draw a couple in this video but don't worry not too much this is in grade school this is my graph and on the left hand side here is money and at the bottom here is time basically the amount of money that you make over time with content is something like this okay and this may seem like a lot of money until I make a little Legend here and all of a sudden you see that this point on the graph you know is $1 so the reason why I draw it this way is because I just wanted to show you guys that for the vast majority of the life cycle of your business producing content you are going to produce less than a dollar this might be 90% of the total amount of time that you're running a company you're going to produce less than a dollar the only time in which you know this might actually start being worth it might be that last 10% of the life cycle of your company okay that's how it worked for me tons of other people that's how it is currently working it's going to continue to work so the first reason why is because it takes a while and most people misunderstand just how long it takes just to give you guys a practical example for my own business um you know this is my own YouTube channel the one that you're watching right now right we hit 52485 subscribers as of the time of this recording I have no doubt it's probably a lot higher by the time that you're watching it but if I just zoom in here really quickly I want to show you guys my first 30 days of recording I published a video every single day from February the 7th all the way up until March the 8th I believe is when I started um you know taking breaks and not being a uh complete psychopath about this but every one of these videos was 30 40 50 minutes long it basically took me something like 14 days of posting half an hour to an hour worth of content every day which might have taken even longer than that to record if I wasn't smart about how I did it before I saw any sort of traction at all what do you think that you could do yourself with that amount of time I mean even if it takes you I don't know 3 hours a day or something like that to produce this level of content what do you think you could do in 14 days or so if you didn't spend all that time making content okay in that first time up until I don't know like three4 of the way through I hadn't even made a dollar of AD Revenue it was only in my 20 whatever day that I started making any money with ad Revenue whatsoever and you know one thing this graph doesn't show you is how YouTube basically immediately retroactively took away my ad Revenue again and I was making like $10 a day for the vast majority of my lifetime I didn't make a single dollar off of this channel until this point and then I barely made any money off of this channel until at least a few months later when I started finally getting a high enough volume for inbound leads to kick in now this is a pretty exceptional Journey if I'm honest and I'm trying to show this to you guys as a negative case most people will make a tenth if not if that many subscribers in their first month of posting content um I've tried YouTube a number of times before so I obviously have a like up that's probably the least likely thing to happen to you to be honest so you know just to debias you it just takes a while it almost always just takes a lot longer than you think I've coached over 1,400 Ai and automation agencies at this point in time well at least that's how many people are currently in my programs with churn and stuff like that I think it's like 1,850 or something but um it it always takes way longer than anybody expects when they make content when they make a video on YouTube when they start pushing out shorts or whatever to see any sort of result and if you start with content you basically have to commit to the fact that for the first 90% of your life cycle you're going to be making less than basically $1 okay the area under this curve might amount to 83 cents or something and it might require you know 900 hours of your time so it takes a really long time that's number one okay the second is you are biased this is a psychological effect known as the frequency effect and it's currently duding you into thinking that YouTube is something that makes sense for your business and that you should do today in Li of some other Outreach methods which I'm going to show you in a few minutes the way that the frequency

bias Works in Psychology is if you see a lot of something you're more likely to tend to believe that it occurs very often but the reason why you think that content is the go-to for the automation agency space especially if you're at the start line is because you have essentially been bought into an algorithm that shows you a bunch of people making money in the AI and automation agency space so you think that it is disproportionately likely that you'll be able to get out there and make money with um AI and automation on YouTube as well the unfortunate reality is this frequency bias is at the heart of a number of common misunderstandings like why do people think airlines are more dangerous than cars well the reason why is because when you get into a car crash okay you don't make the global news but when any airplane anywhere in the world even so much as you know skids on the runway a few times there's bound to be 101 news reports about it so you as somebody that might consider getting on an airline at some point in time see the news report and then you start freaking the hell out and you think oh my God airplanes are so much more dangerous than cars when in reality okay Airline danger is like an order of magnitude safer than cars these are supposed to be less than simples not noses um anyway so the point that I'm trying to make is the exact same effect that makes 90 whatever perc of people misunderstand and miscalibrated their fear of flying versus driving is the same effect that makes you think that starting a YouTube channel for your AI and automation agency at the start line makes any sense at all unfortunately it doesn't the first the third reason I should say is that you don't have social proof okay and this is still under time when I say you don't have social proof I mean if you just started this new business you basically have no proof that you've actually done anything cool about it and if you don't have any proof that you've done anything cool about it there's no reason for anybody to listen to you because the way that content currently works is there are a million and one people trying to cram ideas down your head right now okay that's you really sad if you couldn't tell there are a million in one people talking in all of your ears all the time and the only way that you as a responsible consumer of the web operate is you look to see which one of these people actually has proof that they've done the thing that they're talking about who actually has Authority or credibility okay so if this dude has made 100K you're obviously much more likely to believe what they have to say take their advice and then ultimately use it to make some money but if all these other people you know 5K or they I don't know they've never made any money or they've made I don't know negative money or there's just no case study or any sort of proof here obviously you're going to tune them out the way that you operate here is exactly the same way that anybody that watches your content is going to operate so if you don't have anything notable if you don't have any accomplishment you're going to be lost to this big Vortex of a million other people screaming through megaphones that you know don't really make any noise the point that I'm trying to make is there's a much more effective path to Growing big on YouTube it's what I did it's where you go and Achieve something in the field that you are interested in being renowned in so in my casee it was the AI and automation space you go and Achieve something 72,000 bucks a month with your AI on automation agency $43,000 uh I don't know 1,850 coaching students whatever you do something cool that's notable that sets you apart and now you have some sort of credibility to actually be taken seriously when you talk about the freaking thing okay so the reality is you don't have social proof because you haven't spent any time trying and if you are at the start line of your business you have to do before you talk and if you talk before you do it becomes very clear that you don't really know what you're talking about you haven't really done the thing there are a million billion people here this is the 99% this is the 1% over here so much StraightLine path to being big go do something with the time that you would otherwise spend talking about it and then you can come back and talk about the thing that you did and then you get to double dip because usually by the time that you've done something notable you don't have to spend all day doing that thing you have a little bit of time freed to be able to focus on YouTube or other content production uh or other lead generation research and development and then you can actually loop back around and you know start claiming a bunch of wins with the success start standing out and your growth will be a lot easier it's not going to be like most people's growths on YouTube okay it's going to be more like this AKA mine okay that's enough of me clapped my dick on the table let's talk about the

second major reason which is as I'm sure this probably implies money so you know how earlier I said it takes a long time to make even a tiny bit of money with content well the reality is per unit of your effort there are many other things that can make you a lot more money but even if we leave the opportunity cost of the equation out and the opportunity cost for unfamiliar is how much money you could have spent doing something else and that's what I'm going to talk about over here even if we leave out opportunity cost okay it actually still takes a fair amount of money for you to do this thing to begin with everybody will tell you that like gear doesn't matter okay like your production value and stuff like that doesn't matter the reality is gear actually does kind of matter it matters a bit it's not a ton but it does matter a bit so if you want gear you know you usually have to Shell out a few hundred bucks before you have something reasonable something okay I would say so you're going to be in some sort of like C cost you know capital investment phase for quite a while until you see some sort of recoup on that and considering how long it takes to make even a dollar you know if you spent I don't know $750 just buying a bunch of gear and some microphones or whatever like 90% of your business you're technically going to be in the red here okay that's a big capital investment for somebody that's just starting out in a business that has no liquid business uh sorry liquid capital or any sort of business experience or whatever so it costs a lot of money okay the second is that there is well I shouldn't say no but there is no good path from content to client people don't really talk about this a lot but the path from content to client especially if you're new and you don't really know what the hell you're doing sucks this is essentially referred to as your funnel it's actually hard to make a good funnel um if you want to do provide uh you know a automation agency Services it's easy to sell like info products and templates and stuff like that like I'm doing right now but you know when I started with this and I started getting a ton of implementation clients I tried to selling a l retainer it's actually really difficult to do so why well because you're a noob and because if you're a noob you don't really have like you don't know how to productize so you have no productization probably you have no established sales process you really have nothing none of anything I don't know what that was but that most certainly is not what I wanted to do okay I'm going to have to unfortunately give this a little refresh here because every now and then when I um zoom in super fast it bugs out like that yeah so you have no established sales process right no funnel no products basically no nothing so what happens when you actually have a lead when a lead comes your way well you'll be able to extract like one one 100th of the actual value of the lead that you otherwise would have if you had done something else first and figured out how to build all of these funnels and build uh you know strong productized uh recurring Services as part of something like my program maker school for instance um if you'd actually gone out and talked to customers okay you have nothing if somebody's interested in working with you you're almost certainly gonna fumble the ball and then you'll just have wasted a lead that might have been willing to pay you $20,000 but now we'll pay you some pittance $2,000 of that or something okay there's no use if you don't know what you're doing just jumping into content because now you're going to be talking about something you don't deeply or fully understand then you're going to be selling to an audience and attempting to imply that you do uh you're not going to be able to offer a good quality service do anything it's just you don't want to do this sort of thing people when you come um inbound they look to you as an authority they look obviously to you is person that's a little bit higher up on the hierarchy if that makes sense of service providers that they could pick from um you don't want to be misleading them like that okay so it's a poor path from content to funnel for the vast majority of people that's just how it works um another big reason is you know you think you're saving money because you know the alternative to creating content a lot of the time is uh you know you you I don't know do some sort of ads or you like uh like Outreach like I'm going to show you in a second you do some sort of cold email you do some sort of any one of these millions of things and you think hey content's great especially if I'm bootstrap in this business because What's the total cost of the content production well you know aside from that one-time capital investment of me having to buy the equipment or whatever maybe you already have the equipment if you're lucky aside from that I basically just transfer time into content and then the content makes me money passively so the actual startup cost is very minimal so you may think

you're saving money but you're not you're actually sacrificing a ton of time and the um cost of how much time you are investing in this thing that has no guaranteed returns and no real proof uh demonstrable Roi is sort of like I don't know if you guys ever seen that I think it's like that Calvin meme um where the guy's peeing into a well or something like that this is basically you man you are taking all of your money okay and you are just peeing directly into some well where you'll never see the pee again okay my analogies are definitely falling off here um I'm going to leave it there you have essentially uh a capital investment that you most likely have to make in terms of getting some sort of gear you have a poor path from content to client funnel you have uh you think saving money but you're not because of the opportunity cost of what you could be using all of that time energy and money for um to get much faster essentially Returns on your investment so as this little diagram alludes to the third main factor and why I don't recommend YouTube for a automation agencies is you just have so many better options okay like this charming young gentleman I'm assuming he's young and Charming uh has here you know you have A B C or D you have okay you have cold email which delivers much higher returns for newbies you have upwork which delivers much faster communities which is quasi social media anyway but much straighterline path then you have a variety of other you know approaches like LinkedIn DMS um Twitter DMS variety of other things which I'll get into so you have so many better options the opportunity cost of content is killing you one of the big issues I see in my communities especially recently because everybody and their mom starting to make videos around software platforms like nadn for instance is they will pour four to six hours a day of their lives into producing content and trying to convince people of something kind of like what I'm doing now to be honest um when they have no uh when there are so many other options they could be taking that have a higher expected value so uh if you're unfamiliar with expected value is basically what is the percentage chance that I will win okay times what is the expected payoff of the thing when I do win so for instance let's say okay you expect or anticipate content to make you $10 million what is the actual chance that you'll succeed here it's very low very low 0. 01 time 10 million is 100k okay compare that to something like let's say cold email the expected value of succeeding at Cold email might be much lower it might be $1 million but the percentage chance that you win might be 15 15% if you do the math the expected value equation now comes out to 150k even though the total payoff of choosing to try content and become a big YouTube influencer or something like that even if the total payoff is much higher $10 million when you multiply It Out by How likely it is to actually happen you end up with about 100K of value whereas this cold email approach which seems annoying and uh spammy and you know it seems low value and it seems silly and it seems uh like what everybody else is doing to make money even if that has a much lower expected value here okay the probability of that working out is much higher so um this is basically always going to be the winner winter chicken dinner so I use this expected value framework in order to determine uh which action to choose or which lead generation method to choose all the time and content's one of those situations where you typically have very high payoff okay but as I mentioned only if you are in the top 1% of content producers right make 99% of the content then they money 99% of the content producers make 1% of the content 1% of the money so this is where it's at this is where I hope to be very soon but even I you know I anticipate the likelihood of me achieving something like that is pretty low which is why I still hedge my bets and I have other things going on that don't necessarily only rely on content okay so that's just cold email for instance um upwork you know if I were to

show you guys a quick example of this upwork is an even crazier example is it's almost guaranteed maybe it's like 0. 5 okay but the prob you know the actual total amount of money you might make on upwork is a lot lower but still you end up making more money still ends up being a higher expected value than something like this you know if we kind of rank this as a tier list this would be the worst this would be kind of second then this one at least the time of this recording would be kind of the first okay so um that's the first thing I wanted to talk about in relation to other options the other thing I wanted to talk about was this community approach if you've never heard of this then I'll tell you about it right now but basically communities are like content but better in basically every way for beginners so if you're unaware of what a community is just to make this a little more practical just open up your browser and head to school. com you'll be taken to sorry open up your browser go to school. com Discovery you'll be taken to a page that looks something like this where basically there are communities created all over the world for anything that you could possibly think of and these communities what they are really is they're mini social media platforms they're like a mini LinkedIn like a mini YouTube like a mini Twitter but they're filled with people that only do the thing that you actually care about okay so I don't know if you are a videographer I always use the videographer examp but if you are a videographer and maybe you do primarily weddings or something like that what you can do is you can join a wedding videography Community okay or you could join the 15K filmmaker Community or the wedding filmmaker Academy okay let's do this one for instance what you'll get if you get in there this lovely guy Alexander and his team they're probably successful videographers that work primarily with people in the you know people looking for weddings stuff what you get is you just get a buch of people that are already in your Niche that basically want exactly what you'd be talking about anyway so what the community approach is it's posting content but it's posting content on places where the people that you're talking to are much more likely to want what you have anyway so instead of doing something like posting aimlessly on YouTube to an audience that probably doesn't give a crap about you to be honest where you have no proof or established expertise or anything like that well you can do is you could just post in communities like this instead all day you can do the exact same thing you otherwise would it on your social media but you can go so much easier faster um and more effectively to the top okay communities are a fantastic business model I run one right now just called maker school and I see people in maker school all the time start posting and providing value talking about their experiences about their accountability okay and the second that they do stuff like this uh after you know a week or two weeks or three weeks of being consistent about and actually talking about things that people care about providing real value in the content that they produce they inevitably get picked up they start doing work they start uh building business Partnerships and relationships basically doing all the stuff that you're probably looking for by starting YouTube just in a very compressed uh compress time scale okay and I honestly think that all of the time like if I had access to communities back when I started YouTube I would have eventually started YouTube anyway but I definitely would not have before I'd you know squeeze as much value as I possibly could have out of the community approach so basically I guess what I'm trying to say is you know if you are planning on doing YouTube content instead of doing YouTube content as total beginner do communities first do that for a few months okay build up some brand Authority and notoriety build up a bunch of connections build up communities are basically like the I don't know if you guys have ever played runes Gap it's like the lumbridge training grounds okay of content it is so much easier to kill the monsters over there it's so much easier to gain expp and level up your RPG character uh it's you know every step you take is like on that airport treadmill that sends you uh you know three times as far or something like that in the same amount of time if you do it in the community versus if you just start blasting content out on YouTube to basically fight in this big Battlefield that you don't understand that has so much happening behind the scenes that uh makes the likelihood of you actually achieving what you want very low okay so variety of other things that you could do the really cool thing about running an Aon automation agency is basically any lead generation method that we have we can immediately put on autopilot using um you know Ai and automation approaches using large language models and using no code tools so if you guys do anything else here these approaches are going to be 3 to 10x as powerful as if some marketing agency or some consultancy or something like that tried to do the same thing you have a hell of an opportunity with this stuff and that opportunity just doesn't really exist with YouTube to be honest because you still need to for the most part record like a real human being's face so you know I don't mean to

disincentivize you or crush your hopes and dreams um I just want you guys to have a realistic idea of what's going on behind the scenes when you choose to you know create a YouTube channel or try and get clients for Content uh sorry for an AI automation agency using content you know I had a pretty easy way with it all things considered basically everybody that started around the same time as me that tried doing the same things as me has had a substantially harder time to do it so whether it's because of pre-existing skill or whether it's just because you know eventually you strike uh oil when you hit a vein in a particular place I don't know but um these sorts of results that you see every day are probably biasing your expectations towards thinking you're going to win quicker than you actually will my recommendation for anybody that's at the start line is to go back to that expected value section where I ran you through those equations and look for options that you can do today that have the highest likelihood of succeeding even if they don't necessarily have the highest payoff because the higher the likelihood of success the more you can at least start accumulating some wins and then start getting into a place where you have the ability to you know show off one of those accomplishments like we talked about earlier monetarily or otherwise then you have something that makes you stand out that's unique in the market and once you have that you can worry about YouTube could start creating content on LinkedIn or Twitter or something of that nature um but my Earnest recommendation what I always tell to every one of my members in maker school and make money with make is don't do that yet right wait until it just gets marketly easier because you've actually achieved something of value awesome hope you guys appreciated that video I wanted to do an FAQ sty one today just because I've been getting a ton of people asking me exactly this question across all of my channels this one my daily update uh you know I'm having some people ask me this question on my new podcast with Matt Larson as well um so I'll leave it there but if you have anything else that you guys want answered in this style with the Whiteboard just drop it down below we're happy to do so I really appreciate all of your guys' comments and encouragement uh on every video that I put out so much love to everybody that's been doing that if you just do me a solid and subscribe if you haven't already that would uh take me to the moon really appreciate it and have a lovely rest of the day I'll catch you on the next video