most of us are probably familiar with the term social media marketing agency or SMMA because everybody likes their four-letter acronyms this is a business model started back in the early to mid2010s where essentially a bunch of business owners had no idea how to incorporate social media into their marketing mix and so young whippers snappers like myself put on our ball caps and our boots we went out door knockocking and cold calling and we sold these people on the idea that we could do it for them because we were digital natives because we grew up with this technology and because there was a massive opportunity right around the corner so as I'm sure you guys could imagine a lot of people made a ton of money and everything that I've said so far hopefully you guys could see is currently paralleling what is going on right now with AI too and so the thesis of my video basically what I'm going to be talking about is that AI agencies are the new social media marketing agencies i'm going to contrast them i'm going to talk about why I think AI agencies are actually much better than social media marketing agencies but I'm also going to do a couple other things on top of me talking about the benefits and how much money you could make with this industry i'm also going to talk about some of the cons that I'm seeing okay some of the negatives and hopefully I'm going to dispel some of the frequently asked questions that I see when people enter my communities and my products and so on and so forth looking to make bank in this gold rush so the very first thing I want to talk before I get into anything else is that this is a very simple business model i know you're thinking no it's not it's artificial intelligence there's no way it can be simple but it is you're only about a week or two away from realistically being able to make a lot of money in this niche you don't need a lot of concrete crystallized knowledge but just because something is simple does not mean that it's easy in fact I would go as far as to say as the simplicity of a business model the simpler that it is the harder it tends to be as a result and so if you come into a business model like this or even SMMA or website design or or whatever agency model that you are looking at and you think that it's going to be easy because it's simple you're dead wrong it's probably going to be a lot more work than you're comfortable with so right off the bat just dispel yourself with the notion that simple is easy and that this business model qualifies because it unfortunately does not first thing I want to do is I just want to compare social media marketing agencies to the AI automation agencies we'll throw around some acronyms in a moment but um essentially hopefully it's clear that on the left hand side this is the SMAS today it's a very competitive niche there are a lot of people and not a lot of money going around and on the right hand side here we have AIAS or AAAS or I don't know AIAS or ABCDS no I'm just kidding there are a lot of acronyms here basically these all come out as agency model that sells AI and automation services to mostly SMB small to mid-size businesses okay now if you contrast that with the left which is all crowded and there's like no room for anything on the right you just have these giant bags of money sharpied with the the term AI on them floating around in the water and there are very few people here this is basically your blue ocean okay this over here this SMMA model is sort of your red ocean so if you're going to start a business today and you were looking for the one with the lowest barrier to entry SMMAS and AA automation agencies they have very similar levels of barrier to entry to be honest with you but the ones on the left the SMAS are just way way more competitive right now and you know there are a couple other things to get into so number one the same explosion patterns that we're seeing from SMMA back in 2014 2015 they're happening right now with AI although I think the slope of the curve is a lot higher so this is the SMMA this is sort of like the A I A A okay the second is that the customer lifetime value of people that are purchasing AI projects tend to just be a lot bigger than the customer lifetime value that you could make out of you know a social media marketing agency package the comparative value is a lot lower for social media marketing because people sort of understand how Facebook works now it's been around for long enough social media platforms have been around for long enough people get the whole SMMA model but AI as a business model there's still a lot of perceived hype and so and I mean this in the best way possible you can take advantage of that perceived hype in order to sell projects for a lot more people are just very excited about this and I understand why it's a transformative technology right so you can actually just sell upfront like a one-time project or recurring for substantially more i've seen people sell projects over $200,000 i haven't sold a project that large on a one-off for AI automation but I've seen that done before and on average you could sell things between 15 to $50,000 if we're talking CLB so customer lifetime value for a client another main point I'm going to make is that SMMA is huge because every business needs a Facebook page right but if you think about like the businesses that could actually capitalize on those Facebook pages it's actually very few like in reality a lot of people thought that they could make Facebook pages and make a ton of money with them or something you know using the social media marketing agency to help set it up and stuff but I mean how many HVAC companies actually make a ton of money through Facebook very few how many you know flower shops down the street actually make a lot of money with Facebook very few the point I'm making is that this was a specific tool for marketing but AI is a lot more foundational it's not just a specific lead generation channel what AI is is it is the foundational underpinning of all future businesses from this point onwards ai handles your communication ai handles your decision ai handles your logic ai handles the legal aspect of your business it's going to handle all the customer support it is essentially going to be your business and so instead of there being one or two opportunities to use let's say Facebook or something in a business 10 years ago there's 10 or 15 opportunities for every business to sell AI and automation services to okay and so because of that the total market size if you think about it you know is at least 10 to 15 times bigger right there is a lot bigger and it's a lot less saturated as a result so if you were to choose right now you know you could choose SMA on the lefth hand side here it' be really high competition you'd have relatively low customer lifetime value or project size it'd be kind of be like a red ocean you know whereas if you were to go with the AI agency model the commit to rate high opportunity here you have a large opportunity with very little competition comparatively as of the time of this recording anyway average project size substantially higher because people get to ride that hype wave and really it's a blue ocean as of the time of this recording so hopefully you know ding- ding winner winner chicken dinner um hopefully you guys are seeing that the AIA or AIA or the AAA definitely it's way better than the SMMA right now and same thing with you know a bunch of the other services you could do like web design we'll talk about web design in a second but like this is sort of like the pre SMMA so definitely don't choose web design if you guys want to get into something make your first few bucks doing services okay so why now well as we see there's a lot of stuff going on today that parallels stuff that happened in 1995 okay so and this is what this really is is this is like a repetition of the same trend the same cycle so back in 20 well actually let's start even earlier back in 1995 okay websites became a thing and so companies realized they could use websites as a marketing mechanism and so there exploded this whole new business model called the website designer or the website design agency or website developer the website development agency and so basically this whole new ecosystem sprang up overnight okay that happened in 1995 you know basically up until like maybe early 2010s that was the majority period then in 2014 to 2016 SMMA exploded when businesses started seeing these social media platforms and realizing hey I have no idea how the hell this works but I feel like I could make some marketing money with them well that's the exact same pattern that's happening now there's a lot of confusion about AI because the perceived difficulty of getting to learn it is is quite high which I'll talk about but this is what is currently creating a massive service opportunity like there was with websites they're also you know I mean I could throw as many stats at you as I want because everybody and their mom is talking about AI right now but there's a lot of money that is coming into artificial intelligence over the course of the next few years people are creating whole financial products that are just subsets of AI companies they are creating whole technology businesses that are solely about optimizing a very tiny aspect of part of an AI model that you know hundreds or thousands of companies are using whole new hardware companies are cropping up there's a very large financial opportunity just to have the word AI in your business nowadays another thing is most of the businesses you would realistically work with in any service model just don't know how to implement AI they think it's a lot harder than it actually is okay and so anytime you have a new technology you have a group of people that don't know fully how to use it i will say that the proportion of people that don't know how to use it is going to go down over time which is why starting early is probably the best way of going about it and then yeah the last bit here is just history repeats it's just like websites in 1995 where basically business discovers that there's some money to be made with this business hires like a website agency and then website agency makes a little bit of money with us and that helps the business make money just like there's that symbiotic relationship between the business the website agency the exact same thing happened with the business and the SMMA with social media pages and the exact same thing is happening right now with AI automation agencies okay with you know reducing the cost of labor automatically responding to your emails following up with clients autonomously generating leads using one of various automated mechanisms and so on and so forth so you know you kind of have a choice here back in '95 people that got on the website trend obviously made web agencies and the majority of these people made money maybe not the majority of these people but the people that approached it intelligently made money in 2014 social media happened people that approached it intelligently made money well right now AI technology is booming and so essentially the people that are going to approach this intelligently are going to make money and I think just due to the foundational nature of AI I don't know how many more of these big cycles there are realistically going to be and I don't mean to say this as like an alarmist or something but you know AI is not really like the industrial revolution sam Alman said it best the other day it's more like the renaissance there is like a fundamentally different future ahead of us and how that is going to look economically is still very much in the air if AI can do the vast majority of things that most service workers can do at a certain point then where are we going to put the service workers and what are they going to do right if they can replicate human thought processes to a certain degree what the heck is our economy going to look like in a future where human thought processes are not valued our whole economy is called a knowledge economy for a reason right anywh who that's more philosophy for you little bit of of a reality check right now ai agencies compared to most other service businesses have way less competition per potential client okay smma and other business models just have significantly lower project values than AI there's a lot of enterprise companies currently getting into AI okay um the stats has enterprise adoption at 63% um and climbing but I think that this is actually a good opportunity for small to mid-size businesses which is why I frame this as an opportunity for small to mid-size businesses because you know the big like AI players are pitching their services to these enterprise companies and the enterprise companies are adopting it but that just leaves like the mom and pop shops essentially or like the solarreneur businesses or like the small to midsize companies that have been operating with the same principles and procedures over the course of the last 5 years out in the dust and to be honest these are the businesses that most human beings interact with these are the businesses that most people interface with as part of their economy if we can help optimize this I think there's both more of a payoff for us financially because there's just going to be a lot of missed opportunities that these big AI companies will not offer their services or their infrastructure to but I also think it's just better for the world right most people interact with small to mid-size businesses on a daily basis i think we can help them a lot so a lot of businesses are planning AI investment only 21% of these 97% of businesses have so I mean you know just do the math there that's what 76% of all businesses on planet Earth with money in their hands that are considering spending it on various things you know some automation chat bots i don't personally recommend selling them right now but I thought I'd mention them lead generation AI some sort of voice assistant or something people have money in their hands and they are willing to spend it the reason why they're willing to spend it is I just want you to think okay there's this person over here her name is Sally and Sally is lovely business owner that's operated I don't know maybe like a recruitment business for the last like 15 years i can't really draw the smile okay I can That's a weird eye sally hope you're doing okay all right and Sally she hasn't really had the time to learn AI or really get deep into into it because she's just been really busy operating a business she's been busy feeding people's families to be honest she's been uh busy dealing with her competition but all of a sudden one day Sally notices that things are getting harder for her she's noticing that the competing recruitment businesses around her are growing faster and they're doing more and that her margins are going down and that it's more difficult to get customers okay and in the news every day she hears about this term AI you know AI AI she hears Chad GPT companies are now implementing voice bots companies are implementing X Y and Z what's happening right now is Sally is getting pushed out of the market when Sally gets to that point where she's feeling pushed out of the market Sally is obviously very afraid and fear is the primary motivator by which people spend their money okay so a lot of people are in Sally's shoes right now and I don't mean this in a negative or sort of like Mchavelian sense but when people are confused and they're afraid and maybe they're a little excited that is the best time to sell them and that's really where you can make the most money doing so all right so yeah a lot of digital agencies right now not a lot of AI companies i think comparatively if you were to try and go into the former niche versus the latter you'd just be shooting yourself in the foot i think if your business model and you know our current day and beyond does not include the term AI you're just leaving a lot of money on the table so you know if you were to try something in the digital agency space there's like a 60 to1 ratio essentially of US businesses and then digital agencies right now okay you're probably going to be operating in a much more red ocean to begin with whereas if you're doing you know let's say an AI um agency sort of business model there's significantly fewer AI companies out there it's also significantly um younger business model so they're probably not as mature sophisticated the ratio is a lot better for you and so you can also charge significantly more a project size just going off of simple supply demand economics so if we just do some very simple money math here okay very very simple money math this is the AI A Chad these are the you know SMMA and website Pepe frogs i'm going to get cancelled for that um it's a lot easier for for this fella over here to make the money right if we just do a little bit of math you know if you if you wanted to make 30,000 bucks a month you might need 10 clients at 3K if you ran an SMMA if you wanted to do equivalent with an AI agency and you sold mid to high ticket projects you sold some sort of all-in-one fractional AI retainer you know essentially what I do you might only need two or three clients at you know 510 or $15,000 to hit that same goal okay you're also seeing significantly higher profit margins and because AI is just leveraged by nature you also need many many fewer hires okay many fewer hires i mean um you know when I hit $72,000 a month with my AI agency I did it with myself plus a VA try and find a traditional agency or SMMA service where you could make you know I mean it depends on how you want to pitch this i did the vast majority of the business but even if you divide that by two that's like a $36,000 um revenue per staff member RP or RPS or whatever right like like find an find an SMA model where you're going to do that okay the really cool thing about AI solutions is they're also very reusable across clients and so you know if you sell something to client A realistically you just copy and paste that with client B you can't really do that with social media marketing social media marketing is pretty unique for every client if I'm honest but the way that I see AI solutions is these are basically like honestly they're kind of like Lego blocks okay this is supposed to be a Lego block and I'm just looking like a pimply cube anyway they're basically like Lego blocks okay and so you know you could take this Lego block you could just get the exact same Lego block and you could put it on another business because usually this is some internal mechanism of the business is not always super customerf facing and even if it is customerf facing you can still reuse the vast majority of it and yeah you can build like good recurring revenue streams with AI automation i've done it i'm currently doing it a lot of people in my communities and groups are doing it a lot of people that are watching my YouTube video right now are doing it if you are I'd love it if you just dropped in the comments um how much money you are currently making with AI automation just to show other people that this sort of stuff is possible okay cool so you know again two different paths here you know if you do the SMMA path versus the A agency path I think you'll very quickly and easily see uh which one is better right a agency path is obviously significantly higher project size you're working on more exciting technologies there's lower overhead because you're probably using AI in your business you're learning about how to use AI in your own business while helping other people do other businesses so you're arming yourself for the future you're going to end up with a lot more margins and you're just going to be a lot happier you know the social media marketing agency the math is a little bit different so why do I think that you know most of the people that are watching this video are probably better positioned to do cool things with it well the first thing is you know if you've been watching my videos for a while you'll know that I'm big on no code tools so I came up basically doing make.com tutorials showing people how to use these no code tools to go out there and actually like build things that make people money so nowadays we have these no code tools basically okay and no code tools have eliminated the vast majority of development costs the vast majority of development costs used to need a whole team of developers and now it's basically like hey team or you just use a software product that's like 15 or 20 bucks a month so obviously most people nowadays are just going to opt to use the software product cost 15 20 bucks a month the thing is the rest of the market hasn't really caught up yet for most people most small to mid-size businesses um they're still thinking oh crap I'm going to need to hire a team they still assign a very high level of difficulty to this stuff and that's where you can offer a ton of perceived value coming in using a simpler implementation method like make.com nan one of these no code or simple AI builder tools delivering the same quality product but doing it faster doing it better and then also doing it in a more maintainable way for them so really you're benefiting the client at the end of the day okay also very basic AI knowledge can put you ahead of 90% of the market let me draw you a quick little example okay this is you and your life and this is today and this is when you chose to learn AI well this is 2 weeks from now now between today and 2 weeks from now you could realistically gain all of the knowledge that you need to start a $5 to $10,000 a month business because the perceived difficulty the perceived hurdle to getting up and running okay this is like the perceived perception of difficulty is actually very different from the actual difficulty most people think that AI is what is in black here they think "Oh my god I have to become a developer i have to learn everything that there is to know about artificial intelligence i have to become a professional uh uh server host prof you know I have to become an engineer i have to do all this stuff okay the reality is you do not have to do that most of these tools work really easily and conveniently out of the box for you and the AI automation industry is not actually like an academic thing we're not actually like engineers as in we are like building like engineering solutions we're not actually creating the models we're not actually really creating the technology all we're doing if I am completely and bluntly honest with you is we're using tools that have been developed by engineers we're using tools and mathematical constructs that have been developed by theoreticians like physicists and these extraordinarily intelligent people and then we are turning them into simple and very malleable little Lego blocks that we can plug and play into businesses so we're not actually doing to be honest like the very extraordinarily intellectually difficult part and so most other people think that we are which is why the perception of difficulty the perception of the hurdle you need to overcome is very high when in reality it's it's quite low indeed this is like the ground this is you i mean what is the amount of time and effort that it takes to get here versus you know all the way up here it's a lot easier than most people think I guess is the point that I'm making all right there's also a lot of free resources out there like like the ones on my channel to show you how to do so including obviously free resources and paid resources like Maker School which is a 90-day path to competency takes you two or three hours daily and at the end of it you're guaranteed your very first AN automation agency client and nowadays compared to you know the pioneers in the SMMA industry you actually have like tons of resources tons of knowledge tons of accessibility if the barrier to entry with social media marketing was I don't know like like this then you know this is the ground and that's the barrier to entry with social media marketing the barrier to entry with this stuff because of all the free resources tools and and templates and blueprints with videos like mine uh It's so much lower it's not even funny you I'm sure that there are probably 13 or 14 year olds out there right now that are currently making money with this business model and I'm not even saying that as an exaggeration i've had a few of them send me emails so there's no experience required there's no coding knowledge needed because it's covered by these no code tools uh there's tons of free resources okay you spend I don't know 30 60 90 days learning you gain basic AI skills you get maybe your first free client or first paid client then you hit your first actual big project and I mean before you know it within the space of a couple of months you can basically completely transform your current financial situation and the benefit of this is whereas all other businesses typically have relatively high capital investment costs something like this might have a capital investment cost of like $500 when all said and done now I'm not going to lie to you it's not free to start any business model right if you join my programs you have to pay even more money to join the program but usually you could save a lot of money because um we give you discounts and and blueprints and templates and also just point you in the right direction q&a and stuff but but even if you're starting from scratch like you're going to have to spend a little bit of money with any business model if you're going to SMMA you typically need like you know social media scheduling services which cost you a little bit of money per month you need like access and authentication services which cost you a little bit of money per month you need you know like business infrastructure like project management whatever this is the exact same thing just keep in mind that these are all digital tools and so you're not actually having to like go procure a heavy piece of machinery or something realistically your costs usually end up being just a few hundred bucks a month so you might spend this over the course of a few months and then you know at the end of it you might have $10,000 you might make a 20x ROI and you might eventually scale up this business enough to retire your mom and live in fantasy land for the rest of your life now the reason why I say all that stuff at the end is because you know it is simple but again that doesn't mean that it's easy you can look at these 1 2 3 4 and fivestep processes like I've laid them out here and you could say "Wow that's it that's all I need to do." But I mean how many people are actually willing to spend you know hell even a third of that 30 days doing something consistently every day in a row very few people right and so the barrier to entry is never the knowledge with the stuff okay knowledge is no longer the barrier to entry honestly artificial intelligence is rendering that obsolete the barrier to entry really is just your consistency it's your focus it's your ability to like do a thing repeatedly and consistently for like a month at a time and if you head over to maker school or make moneywithmake.com my communities you will see that basically everybody that does some form of daily accountability where they just do the thing that is laid out in front of them and they do it every single day for 30 60 or 90 days inevitably reaches some level of of massive success and it's incredible to see so they would have done this with any business model they just happen to pick AI and automation because you know I convinced them or you know they happened to like my content or a friend of theirs told them to get into it they would have been successful with any business model but because they chose A in automation they were significantly more successful they made multiples on their timing okay anyway uh first mover advantage so you know first movers basically become default industry experts like think of the here in my garage guy think about Mr lopez right you know he was one of the first movers in SMMA i'm sure he's made many dozens of millions of dollars at this point if you wouldn't he probably wouldn't live in that super swanky mansion the benefit in being a first mover as well is that you get to explore a bunch of niches when they're relatively untapped and so you actually get to set the market rates for things which is pretty great and you get to take advantage of that first market rate before you know there ends up being a dog pile of competition and then it ends up ultimately being like a race down to the bottom and then yeah you know it's it's one of the main benefits and I think one of the reasons why so many people are getting in right now we are currently establishing the market rates for this stuff we are establishing the value we are currently establishing how to go about doing this thing if you guys want to be part of that first mover advantage you know my recommendation for you is to get going pretty quick anyway last thing I'll mention here before I sign off is just a blueprint and like a practical how-to because when I was watching a bunch YouTube videos and I was considering business models back in the day one thing that I really hated was they would stoke me up about this awesome opportunity or they would show me this cool way of doing business or open my eyes to the possibility or or opportunity somewhere and then they just would be like "Okay well that's it." You know join my program or or pay me money or whatnot obviously I am offering a service at this point where I help people do all the stuff that I'm talking about faster right that's my value but what I'd like to do is I'd like to at least democratize the knowledge that anybody can get started and then once you have a couple of quick wins maybe then you know if you're that sort of person that is okay taking more time you can come to me and and so on so here's a quick little blueprint that I'm going to give you a quick little 90-day plan and I've talked permutations of this 90-day plan before but in this video I'm just going to give you the entire thing laid out and then if you guys want you can check my last video you can check some of the videos that I published in the last couple of weeks with like a step-by-step granular guide on how to get all this stuff up and running so days 1 to 14 this is like your day-to-day guide okay set up your business infrastructure pick two or three niches pick a business name create a website using Web Flow or Card or Lovable or Bolt set up affiliates for all of your platforms between days 15 to 30 launch your lead generation so start sending cold emails i recommend 90 a day start sending Upwork applications i recommend 10 a day join a bunch of relevant communities AI automation communities as well but communities in the niches that you picked earlier start making posts and becoming wellknown in these communities days 31 to 90 okay rinse and repeat and do that every single day for the next like two and a half months just do 90 cold emails do 10 Upwork applications and do two or three community posts by the end of it you will have assembled a massive list massive list of wins once you're done with that oh I think I said 50 over here my bad anyway I recommend 90 90 emails 10 applications three community posts once you're done with that you will have inevitably gotten a ton of interest with your services if you guys want to see exactly how to do this I'm publishing a video in the next couple days where I will legitimately spin up a whole AI automation business from scratch in front of you and get a meeting legitimately from scratch i'll probably do it in like two or three hours knowing my track record after you've done this and you've gotten some interest and maybe you've gotten your very first deal then just increase your prices okay increase them five 10 20 or 30% depending on how confident you are and just cycle that over and over and over again until you reach some level of money that you're happy and comfortable with i got to say this is the simple but not easy part right here okay because this all sounds incredibly simple but just because something is simple again doesn't mean that you can actually do it without a modeicum of will and I think that's what a lot of people here are probably struggling with so my recommendation for you is make it easy on yourself okay get some sort of accountability partner if you guys really want to start this thing you yes you you know call up a friend of yours that might have talked about starting business or somebody that maybe is a little bit further ahead than you are in their career and say "Hey I really want to do this new business model that Nick was telling me about would you mind if at the end of every day I just texted you a screenshot of all of my progress and if one day I don't send you a screenshot of my progress just call me a jackass okay i mean make a public declaration on your Facebook or social media i mean tell your mom or your dad you're trying to do this cool thing and you just want them to check in on you every once in a while these little accountability mechanisms go a really long way and they help change it from something that might be simple but very very hard to something that you know while still hard is manageable and consistent as long as you look at it as a daily thing okay so let's just make this 90 10 Upwork apps three community posts get to it and you know here's a more granular road map of what that actually looks like there's some platforms that I recommend over here instantly Upwork and School hopefully I'm not going to like beat a dead horse at this point because I've talked about how to do all this stuff a million in one times hopefully by this point you understand how AI automation agencies are like social media marketing agencies just like SMMA eventually got pretty saturated just like SMMA got extraordinarily competitive I do think that there is of course a limited life cycle of any business model so you know just to be pragmatic focus more on the strategy that underlies how this business model works than the specific tactics that I'm showing you or that you might be seeing because tactics tend to expire with market competition with saturation and with just the dynamics of the economy changing but if you understand the strategy then it doesn't matter what tactic you may or may not be using today you'll always have the skills to develop a new tactic later on that fits with the current market conditions hopefully everything I'm telling you so far makes sense this is why I firmly believe that AI agencies are the modern social media marketing agencies if you guys want to see the AI agency business model play out in real time for you check out Maker School it's my zero to one accountability roadmap where I legitimately give you a giant list of tasks to do every single day day one do this day two do that day three do that you go down this linearly top to bottom and by the end of this 90-day period you will have your first AI automation customer guaranteed or your money back it is by far the simplest and straightest line road map to actually acquiring your first AI automation customer which is why I think so many people have just joined like a frenzy over the last little bit uh we just crossed 2,000 members so I'd really appreciate it if you joined uh if you are on the fence and considering doing this sometime in the near future thank you very much for watching this and I very much appreciate your love on all of the recent videos you guys have made it this far you are real ones like subscribe do all that fun stuff that gets me to the top of the YouTube algo and I'll catch youall later thanks so much