After watching an update about where the video creation / editing / audio AI tools are at now, I thought I’d write about this “starting over” idea.
This is probably what I’d do if I had to start over.
With the core business element of utilizing AI but on the back-end rather than front-end.
Think operationally rather than building a SAAS company itself.
This is essentially what the sports betting play is, by leveraging AI in a very narrow field with the specialized knowledge of sports + betting industry.
But that’s not a business and it’s more of a long term approach.
This post is more around leveraging AI to create a profitable business from week 1.
There’s tons of these niche AI businesses that aren’t just the generic crappy “automate your business” type emails that I’ve been getting.
In this thought process, the “starting over”, we’re assuming the same skill set but zero resources.
So anything physical product related, at least initially is out of the question.
I also think Ecommerce has been the least impacted by AI so far in the business sector, vs B2B services or software/automation.
As well as the lag time, start-up costs, suppliers etc, just makes the timeline too long and the start-up costs too much for our example.
Which has been the case with the new build project…..
When you are in the early days, you pretty much are at the whim of other people’s timelines and pricing, if you have time + cash flow that’s not the end of the world but if you are starting up without these it’s a killer.
In business-to-business service based businesses though, that’s not the case.
In theory you can make a website using one of the AI builders, I like lovable but there’s a ton of great ones out there, learn the basics of Google ads, start running ads to the website and do some active outbound marketing at the same time and potentially have a paid client before the end of the day.
That assumes you have the skills to do that, but the physical tools are there and the timeline is short enough to be achievable.
For an Ecom store or a physical product business, unless you do this in reverse (either build the audience first or kickstarter route of pre-orders) it’s impossible to generate sales from day 0.
That’s why the B2B service based space is a good place to start.
Solve a problem. Add value. Get paid.
Option 1 - Video Marketing Agency
Video is one of the last authentic marketing channels in my opinion.
Although my writing style is very casual (and would be worse than AI), there’s a chance that anything/everything you read was written by AI.
Although the same issue can/will happen with video, there’s a reason people are still drawn to the authentic long form podcasts or interviews.
The depth of the connection is there and I don’t think AI will replace that long-form human conversational need anytime soon.
The perceived value of video is also a lot higher, mix this with social integration, shorts creation, imagery, copywriting and you could make a full video and social marketing agency that’s powered on top of a few AI softwares with 3 or 5 people that powers 50+ large clients.
Easily creating a £3-5+ Million a year agency with as little as 3-5 people.
Whereas a lot of social/video marketing agencies now are full of corporate bloat despite being start-ups in a lot of cases.
<Interesting Tangent>
This actually reminds me of an “advertising agency” I went to see whilst still based in Cardiff.
This business, at the time was seen as the best in Cardiff, “award winning” and all that BS.
I’d heard pretty bad things, but we had a mutual client (we did SEO they did Ad stuff) so I meet up with their team in their offices to discuss a few ideas and implementation.
I remember thinking, “this place is meant to be a start-up”.
It was a real dichotomy in person.
It was more like a mix of wannabe Google, mixed with a hundred year old corporate, dull insurance company.
30+ employees, all of which didn’t seem to be doing much at the time I was there.
Yet there was a ball pit….?
All very strange, and I remember thinking the maths wouldn’t add up.
Running the maths on how much value you’d have to add or output to have 30 employees standing around not doing much on a company that’s meant to be tech-first.
This isn’t a labour force or people-first business.
Looking back at this company for this post didn’t surprise me to see how this “leader” turned out.
Ball pit and all….
<tangent end>
Anyway, tangent over.
Video marketing agency.
I’d also mix this idea with one of the options below to get the true power out of this..
To be on the forefront of video AI and have the implementation capacity to record, edit, produce (albeit easier than 2 years ago) still takes a lot of time and energy, most won’t stay at the cutting edge of it, especially at scale.
If you can however you’ll benefit from the tech and economies of scale both sides
Option 2 - A Boring Business Powered by AI Marketing
2 examples come to mind straight away.
Accounting & legal services.
Both need some baseline levels of regulation, which is why these industries are so archaic and broken in the first place, but if you have this baseline qualifications, creating that B2B service model and just doing things WELL and properly makes life incredibly easy.
It’s easy because of the people you are competing against.
Competing against other businesses, many of whom have 6, 7 or 8 figure businesses that know absolutely nothing about marketing and very little about accounting practices for small ecommerce brands.
The issue with trendy digital marketing, affiliate marketing, influencer marketing, ecommerce etc is you are competing against high level marketers and people who know what they are doing.
It’s the same thing in trading and investing.
If I’m trying to make money in a market, is it easier for me to try to beat the S&P 500 market where trillions are traded by thousands of people smarter than me with infinite resources….
Or try to beat 2nd division French Rugby union…
Where there’s a real chance I could have a top 3 betting model for this tournament in the world.
It’s the same thing in business.
Compete against people and other businesses you can demolish with great product + proper marketing.
Power both with AI and you will win, as 99% of these other businesses in this space won’t even be using AI and definitely won’t be using it to it’s full potential ability in the space.
Another industry that comes to mind is estate agents, everyone seems to bitch about how terrible estate agents are (me too), and with good reason.
Most suck.
This is another example of a broken industry that will be destroyed by Ai + innovation in the next 10 years.
In the same way that the transport industry was with Uber.
The reason was Taxi services just weren’t that good.
You used to have to call, maybe someone picked up, told you they were coming and from there you just hoped they got to you, not knowing if they even would at all or annoyingly when they would.
Early Uber was f*cking magic. Even though Uber nowadays is not as good as it once was, early early Uber was incredible; cheaper, faster, tracked.
Obviously it won.
The same thing will happen in all these industries mentioned.
So if I were starting out I’d pick a niche industry within one of these boring, ripe for innovation spaces and niche right down into a narrow vertical.
If you want to get super creative with this boring business AI approach you can try to build a niched-down version of Uber in one of these verticals.
Probably something along the lines of freelancer-uber set-up instead of estate agents, where you have a freelancer show people around houses and do tasks, they directly communicate with landlords and SAAS companies like Goodlord cross the regulation barrier.
Almost like Taskrabbit for house viewings.
Something like this could connect landlords —> Marketing sites (Rightmove, Zoopla etc) —> Tenants —> <The Product in question> —> Goodlord —> Rental process completed.
Instead of waiting for useless estate agents that have the same issues of taxis.
In the same way that no-one only checks houses for sale are 1 estate agent now, they’ll use rightmove, zoopla and all these sites.
In the future I cannot see individual, old school estate agents surviving the next property pivot.
You can already see these things coming through the pipeline in other countries, but obviously the UK housing situation is pretty broken so I wouldn’t hold your breath.
The key would be utilizing proper processes built on top of AI to handle 99% of the grunt work, that other legacy businesses have not integrated.
The only issue is this is solving a big big problem so if we’re just looking for a cash-flowing business from day 1 this probably doesn’t make the cut as we need network efforts for something like this to work well, which take time and money to get to.
So instead we’ll keep out niche idea but niche down even further.
Option 3 - Industry Specific “X” Service
In this example I’ll use “marketing” as my “X", but in reality it could be any type of B2B service that’s specifically targeting a narrow niche or industry.
Design, Advertising, logistics, HR, legal, accounting, lighting, construction, hiring, anything.
Literally anything, the key is you just need to make this hyper specific to your industry (and ideally sub-industry), because this increases your value 100x vs being a generic provider.
People also know I joke about companies that provide “digital marketing services” - as in every single online marketing service under the sun? For £500/month….? What a great deal….
It’s the same idea as just doing one thing very well.
Do you want the person who’s a inch deep and a mile wide or a mile deep in the really specific problem you have?
This is also why I think GP’s are useless for a lot of things, but that’s a rant for another day.
The power of industry-specific-X was brought home for me when I went from being just an “SEO agency” to “Amazon SEO agency”.
Although the example is a little difficult because along the SEO agency journey I was really just learning a lot about actual business shit as well, which I didn’t know much about starting up, but the overarching point remains.
It took maybe 4 years to get to £100k/year revenue with the SEO agency, potentially more like 3 just because University/placement year makes it a bit messy and I’d been doing SEO (the skill) for years before that, but we’ll call it 4 years.
That’s revenue as well not profit, so a very long time considering the input of time and energy.
For the Amazon SEO branch, it took 8 months or so.
Even the organic traffic value went from essentially 0 ($183 value/month)
To over $20,000/month in less than a year (Oct 2017 —> Sept 2018).
ASC worked so well just because I understood the niche marketing side that was within an already developed broader skillset.
It’s very similar to the exact industry target, this was just an exact channel target, but I think industry works even better.
If you are trying to do any B2B service on a broad sense, imagine how much easier it would be if you double-niched-down to one target customer.
This is also why whenever someone says they do something very broad, espically if they haven’t been in business for a while, it’s almost always trash.
Think about the person who does “online marketing” vs the person who does “Instagram ads for accountants”….
If you are an accountancy who are you going to choose?
Who’s probably better at getting leads?
The double-niche-down idea is to go one or two levels deeper than you think necessary.
For example; “online marketing” — broad, useless.
One level down: “Search engine optimisation” — better, still generic though.
Two levels down “Conversion rate optimisation” — Good.
Three levels down “Conversion rate optimisation for supplement brands” — Perfect.
To some people that will seem crazy, far too niche.
Those people are idiots.
It is far far easier to massively niche down at the start and create insane value for a really targeted selection of people, and then as you become successful niche back up.
The funny thing is, non-health brands will still ask for CRO help…. That’s why it works so well.
A more common example would be something that follow this structure: “X Service for Y business”
E.G.:
Window cleaner for skyscrapers.
Florist for weddings
coffee shop for hippies
Home insurance for caravans
It can be in any type of business but when starting up on the service side, the more you niche down, the more value you can actually provide.
And the more value you provide, the higher you can price your services.
This is the key factor, because you become the perfect fit for that person its;
Easier to sell them..
You earn more.
You provide more value.
You become THE expert in the field.
You become the PERFECT fit for your target audience, so they automatically select you.
On some level we intrinsically already know this.
If a restaurant stated they did Chinese, Indian, pizzas, pasta, burgers, salads, BBQ, Mexican… You’d probably think it was shit.
You’d probably be right.
If they ONLY did chicken.
It would probably be pretty good.
If they only did Sushi for 75 years, it would probably be world class.
This holds true in B2B services as well.
Build the absolutely most niche offering you can and power it with AI.