Big Idea

The argument in one line.

The best AI services business isn't software sold to other builders, it's funnels built with a coding agent and sold to boring, high-ticket local businesses whose marketing, not their traffic, is the real problem.

Who This Is For

Read if. Skip if.

READ IF YOU ARE…

You've learned to use an AI coding agent and want a service business to sell, not another app pitched at other builders.
You're willing to cold-outreach local business owners (roofers, contractors, med spas) instead of selling to other marketers or founders.
You want a productized offer you can price and deliver in days, not a custom dev shop with ongoing scope creep.
You're comfortable auditing real websites and writing plain, benefit-first copy instead of technical AI language.

SKIP IF…

You're set on selling to SaaS founders, e-commerce brands, or other AI-fluent buyers, this is a Main Street playbook specifically.
You want a fully hands-off, automated business with no outreach, audits, or sales conversations.

TL;DR

The full version, fast.

Everyone selling AI is pitching other AI builders, while 36.2 million boring local businesses with $15,000-$32,000 tickets have barely touched it and are desperate for more booked jobs. The pitch isn't AI, it's funnels: landing pages, instant quotes, and follow-up sequences that convert the traffic a roofer or septic company already has, built in hours with a coding agent instead of the $15,000-$20,000 and four-to-six weeks it used to cost. Pick an unglamorous, high-ticket niche with weak online competition, audit the prospect's own site before pitching, and charge $2,500-$5,000 to install plus $1,500 a month to maintain, then prove it with one real case study before scaling outreach to a hundred businesses a day.

Free for members

Chat with this breakdown — free.

Sign in and you get 23 free chat messages on us — ask for the hook, quote a framework, find the exact transcript moment, generate a markdown action plan. Bring your own key when you want unlimited.

Create a free account →

Chapters

Where the time goes.

00:00 – 00:29

01 · Why sell AI to boring businesses

Opens with the core provocation: AI builders are selling to each other while Main Street businesses with high-ticket jobs are desperate for more booked work and almost nobody is pitching them.

00:29 – 01:58

02 · The business I'd start with AI right now

States the thesis directly: build funnels for boring local businesses with an AI coding agent, then walks through niche selection, offer design, client outreach, and a live demo.

01:58 – 03:41

03 · Why Main Street

Lays out the market size: 36.2 million US small businesses, 57% say reaching customers is their top problem, and only 19.8% use AI at all.

03:41 – 04:52

04 · Getting out of the AI bubble

Argues that X/Twitter's AI conversation is a bubble: call ten local businesses and ask about AI agents and almost none will know what you mean.

04:52 – 05:16

05 · The whole idea in four steps

Compresses the whole playbook into four steps: find a boring business with big tickets and bad marketing, sell booked jobs not AI, build the funnel fast with agents, then test and improve weekly.

05:16 – 06:54

06 · Five eras of local marketing

Walks the five eras of local marketing, from yellow pages to retainer agencies to today's one-person-plus-agents funnel builder, and argues each era got cheaper and harder to stand out in.

06:54 – 09:25

07 · What makes a boring business a good client

Six reasons boring businesses make great clients: big tickets, existing demand, bad marketing, little competition for their attention, an aging owner base about to turn over, and referral-driven trust.

09:25 – 10:52

08 · How to pick a niche

Gives five filters for picking a niche: ticket size, urgency, lead value above lead cost, weak online competition, and an owner-run crew of 2-20 people.

10:52 – 11:56

09 · Go one door down from the obvious

Lists specific niches one door down from the crowded plumbing and HVAC space, from garage floor coatings to septic to med spas, and which categories to skip entirely.

11:56 – 12:23

10 · A niche inside a niche

Uses a pool-company example to show how a niche inside a niche, like saunas nobody is marketing well, can be the real opening.

12:23 – 13:49

11 · Sell the result, not the tool

The core copywriting rule: never pitch the AI mechanism, pitch the booked-job result, and write in the customer's plain words since simple pages convert roughly twice as well as polished ones.

13:49 – 15:27

12 · Why funnels instead of ads or SEO

Explains the funnel mechanics, ad to landing page to success page to follow-up, and why fewer clicks from AI-driven search make the capture page matter more than ranking or ad spend alone.

15:27 – 16:34

13 · Why this works now

Names four forces that converged to make this the moment: coding agents build real pages fast, creative is nearly free, testing is cheap, and Main Street itself still hasn't adopted AI.

16:34 – 18:34

14 · Funnel types you can offer

Runs through six funnel types to offer a client: the free check, the instant price, the price-first tripwire, the quiz, the VSL explainer for big-ticket decisions, and the follow-up machine.

18:34 – 19:38

15 · Where Boring Funnels fits

Introduces boringfunnels.com, a library of real funnels an agent can search via MCP to deconstruct and rebuild a matching funnel for a client in a couple of prompts.

19:38 – 22:08

16 · What to charge

Breaks down pricing: a $2,500-$5,000 install plus a $1,500-a-month retainer, against tool costs of roughly $20-25 a month, because the market still prices funnels like they require a full team.

22:08 – 22:50

17 · Starting with no experience

For anyone starting with zero experience, the advice is to get one real case study first, even for free, before worrying about pricing.

22:50 – 25:11

18 · Finding and pitching clients

Lays out the client-finding system: a scorecard/offers/what-failed set of tracking files, scraping 100 businesses per city, an agent-run site audit, and sourcing owners through Google Maps, ad libraries, licensing boards, and local magazines.

25:11 – 26:24

19 · The sourcing prompt and what my audit found

Shares the exact agent prompt used to source and audit businesses, then the real Charlotte, NC results: 9 of 11 sites had no email capture, 8 had no price-first offer, and zero had an actual traffic problem.

26:24 – 27:48

20 · Turning the audit into a pitch

Turns the audit into ammunition, not a pitch deck: build the funnel in the prospect's own brand, offer a 24-48 hour turnaround, and verify the real owner before sending anything.

27:48 – 28:30

21 · The first email

Gives a model first cold email that names the exact friction found on the prospect's own site and attaches a rebuilt page, rather than a generic pitch.

28:30 – 34:02

22 · Demo: a roofing funnel from one prompt

Live demo: from one prompt describing a fictional Kansas City roofer, the agent researches competitors and voice-of-customer, then builds a full funnel (quiz, instant quote, booking confirmation, follow-up emails) with zero added design or copywriting input.

34:02 – 34:26

23 · Where this goes wrong

Names the common failure modes: spreading across too many niches at once, pitching AI instead of the result, and outreach that comes across as creepy rather than specific.

34:26 – 35:52

24 · Your challenge

Closes with a concrete challenge: pick one niche and metro, list and rank 100 businesses, build three pitch funnels for the top prospects, and send 20 short videos to see what responses come back.

Atomic Insights

Lines worth screenshotting.

36.2 million small businesses in the US say reaching customers is their biggest problem, yet only 19.8% of them use AI at all.
A roofing job averages $32,000, so landing one extra client every quarter is a bigger win for a local business than any SaaS subscription.
Only 18% of small businesses feel confident their marketing is working, which means the problem is usually conversion, not traffic.
In an 11-site local audit, zero businesses had a traffic problem; nine had no email capture and eight had no price-first offer.
Pages written at a fifth-to-seventh-grade reading level convert at 11.1% versus 5.3% for pages that sound professional.
Funnels that used to cost $15,000-$20,000 and four to six weeks to build can now be assembled by a coding agent in hours or days.
The pitch should never be the AI mechanism, it should be the result: a phone that rings and a calendar that fills.
The best niches sit one door down from the obvious ones everyone pitches, garage floor coatings or sauna installs instead of plumbing and HVAC.
Over half of small business owners are 55-plus, and 6 million businesses will change hands by 2035, opening the door to younger, AI-comfortable buyers.
Pricing in three layers works: a $2,500-$5,000 install, a $1,500-a-month retainer, and eventually a share of the upside once the funnel is proven.
Nine in ten marketing agencies use AI, but fewer than one in five of the local businesses they serve do.
The real audit finding was never a traffic problem, it was a follow-up problem: missed calls, no price-first step, no fast reply.
A cold-outreach email works best when it names a specific flaw found on the business's own site, not a generic pitch.
If leads go up but booked jobs don't, the problem is the phone and the follow-up, not the funnel.

Takeaway

Sell Funnels To Boring Businesses, Not AI

THE MAIN STREET PLAY

While AI builders pitch each other, 36.2 million high-ticket local businesses barely use AI and will pay agency prices for a funnel that converts the traffic they already have.

02The business I'd start with AI right now

If you've learned AI coding agents and want a service to sell, building funnels for local businesses is a more durable offer than another AI app pitched at other builders.

03Why Main Street

36.2 million small businesses report reaching customers as their top problem, and only 19.8% of them use AI at all, which means almost no competition for your attention.
Market size alone doesn't matter without access: most of these owners have never used an AI agent and wouldn't know how to ask one for help.

04Getting out of the AI bubble

Call ten real local businesses and ask about AI agents before building anything; if none of them know what you mean, that gap is your opportunity, not a reason to quit.

05The whole idea in four steps

The whole playbook compresses to four moves: pick a boring business with big tickets and bad marketing, sell booked jobs not AI, build the funnel fast with an agent, then test and improve weekly.

06Five eras of local marketing

Each era of local marketing, yellow pages, websites, retainer agencies, AI chatbots, got cheaper to run and harder to stand out in; the funnel-builder era is the newest gap, not the last one.

07What makes a boring business a good client

A $32,000 average roof job means landing one extra client a quarter is a massive, easy-to-justify win, unlike chasing low-ticket e-commerce or SaaS clients.
Only 18% of small businesses feel confident their marketing works, and over half the owners are 55+ with 6 million businesses changing hands by 2035, so turnover is opening doors right now.

08How to pick a niche

Score a niche on five filters before committing: ticket size, urgency, lead value above lead cost, weak online competition, and an owner-run crew of 2-20 people.

09Go one door down from the obvious

Skip the crowded plumbing and HVAC pitches and go one door down: garage floor coatings, hardscapes, saunas, cold plunges, landscape lighting, and restoration are less contested.
Skip restaurants, retail, anything under a $200 ticket, and franchises, since franchise buying decisions usually sit with corporate, not the local owner you can actually reach.

10A niche inside a niche

A niche inside a niche, like saunas a pool company's customers keep asking about but nobody markets well, is often a faster opening than a brand-new client search.

11Sell the result, not the tool

Never pitch the mechanism: say 'more booked jobs from the traffic you already get,' not 'AI marketing automation' or 'a chatbot.'
Pages written at a fifth-to-seventh-grade reading level convert at 11.1% versus 5.3% for pages that sound professional, so write in the customer's plain words, not jargon.

12Why funnels instead of ads or SEO

A funnel is the full path, ad or search click, optimized landing page, success page, follow-up sequence, and it's an easier pitch to differentiate than 'more traffic,' which every owner has already been sold before.
As AI search answers cut the number of clicks a buyer makes, the single page that catches them matters more than chasing rankings or ad spend.

13Why this works now

Four forces converged to make this the moment: coding agents now build real pages and tracking, creative is nearly free, testing is cheap, and Main Street still hasn't adopted AI even though agencies have.

14Funnel types you can offer

Match the funnel to the buying moment: a free check for low-urgency assessments, an instant-price tool for urgent jobs, a price-first tripwire offer, a quiz, or a VSL explainer for $10,000-plus decisions.
Every funnel needs a follow-up machine, SMS, email, retargeting, because the first visit rarely converts on its own.

15Where Boring Funnels fits

A library of real, currently-running funnels that an agent can search and deconstruct removes the back-and-forth of researching copy and layout from scratch for every new client.

16What to charge

Price in three layers: a $2,500-$5,000 install, a $1,500-a-month retainer, and eventually a share of the upside once the funnel is proven.
The arbitrage is real: the client pays agency prices for the result while the actual cost to you is agent time plus roughly $20-25 a month in tooling.

17Starting with no experience

With zero experience, the goal is one real case study, not a price list, build a couple of funnels for free or near-free first to learn the niche and earn proof.

18Finding and pitching clients

Track outreach in three plain files: a scorecard of who to call, an offers file logging what pitch language is working, and a what-failed file so you never repeat a dead pitch.
Source owners through Google Maps scraping (Apify), state licensing boards, trade associations, ad libraries, and local magazines, anyone buying a full-page ad is already proven to spend on marketing.

19The sourcing prompt and what my audit found

A real 11-site audit in Charlotte, NC found the pattern that matters: 9 of 11 sites had no email capture, 8 had no price-first step, 9 had phone problems, and zero had an actual traffic problem.
The lesson generalizes: before pitching anything, audit the prospect's own site as a homeowner would, and let the audit become your proof, not a pitch deck.

20Turning the audit into a pitch

Build the proposed funnel in the prospect's own brand before you ever talk to them, then offer a 24-48 hour turnaround; walking in with finished work beats any slide deck.

21The first email

The strongest cold email names the exact friction you found on their own site, for example, 'booking an inspection took four taps and got no reply,' then shows the fix already built.

22Demo: a roofing funnel from one prompt

A single prompt describing the business (ticket size, years in operation, lead volume, close rate, and the specific complaint: 'we're slow to call back') was enough for the agent to research competitors, find the voice-of-customer gap, and build a complete funnel.
The winning insight came from forum research, not opinion: homeowners report calling half a dozen contractors just to get one callback, so the funnel's entire promise became reply speed, not price.
The funnel kept working past the lead: it followed the estimate with line-by-line price transparency and buyer-education content, because the owner's actual leak was losing trust after the quote, not before it.

23Where this goes wrong

The most common failures are self-inflicted: targeting too many niches at once, pitching AI instead of the result, and outreach that reads as creepy rather than specific.
If leads go up but booked jobs don't, the real problem is the phone and the follow-up process, not the funnel itself, fix that before rebuilding anything.

Glossary

Terms worth knowing.

Funnel: A sequence of pages and follow-up messages, ad or search click to landing page to success page to follow-up, that turns a visitor into a booked customer.
Price-first step (tripwire): A small, low-cost offer placed early in a funnel, like a $99 inspection, that gets a prospect to commit before the bigger sale.
VSL (video sales letter): An owner-recorded explainer video used in a funnel to build trust and justify a high-ticket purchase before a customer talks to a salesperson.
Boring business: An unglamorous, high-ticket local service business such as roofing, septic, or waterproofing, chosen for easy ROI and low competition from AI-savvy marketers.
Scorecard / offers / what-failed files: Three plain-text working files used to track which businesses to call, which offer language is being tested, and which pitches have already failed so they aren't repeated.

Resources

Things they pointed at.

00:00toolClaude Code and Codex

18:34toolboringfunnels.com ↗

24:10toolApify

16:34productLeafFilter (instant-price funnel example)

16:34productMr. Rooter (price-first tripwire example)

Quotables

Lines you could clip.

00:10

“Everyone's building these AI products for each other. Meanwhile, the roofers paying $228 a lead to send somebody to a page of leaks.”

visceral cold-open contrast that sets the whole thesis in one line→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

09:11

“Nobody's DMing the septic guy.”

short, meme-able line that reframes the niche opportunity→ IG reel cold open↗ Tweet quote

12:25

“Owners buy a phone that rings and a calendar that fills.”

crisp reframe of the entire offer in one sentence→ newsletter pull-quote↗ Tweet quote

34:00

“If leads go up and book jobs don't, the problem is the phone, not the funnel.”

counterintuitive closing diagnostic that reframes a common failure→ TikTok hook↗ Tweet quote

The Script

Word for word.

Read-along

Don't just watch it. Burn it in.

See every word as it's spoken — crank it to 2× and still catch all of it. The same dual-channel trick behind Amazon's Kindle + Audible.

metaphoranalogy

Everyone's building these AI products for each other. Meanwhile, the roofers paying $228 a lead to send somebody to a page of leaks. There's 36 .2 million small businesses in the USA.

Few people are selling to them. Nobody's DMing the septic guy. Now it's you and your coding agent.

So I actually did this for 11 different local sites. Zero actually had a traffic problem. And I want to show you what was created with zero expertise in design and copywriting and funnel building.

Okay, I want to show you exactly how I would start an AI marketing services business that sells... to boring local businesses. We're going to walk through exactly how, what niches to target, what to sell, how to define your offer, how to find and pitch clients with AI agents, and how to build the work in hours instead of days or weeks.

This is really about finding a scalable offer and a clear opportunity that you can use AI to go and start, deliver, and scale. AI Services Masterclass, and it's all about how to sell AI to Main Street boring businesses. How can you get more customers with AI and how can you sell this as a service?

So the reason why I think this is such a big opportunity is because everyone's trying to create software. Software is getting disrupted. It's easy to copy.

And I actually think that one of the best opportunities is building solutions and services for the roofer down the street. Their jobs are worth $15 ,000, $20 ,000, and they just want the phone to ring. In the past, to provide that service, you had to hire a bunch of people.

You had to figure out how to execute services. And I've run multiple agencies, and I've sold millions of dollars in agency services to businesses just like this. All right, so let's just take a step back.

Why Main Street? Why boring local businesses? Why is this such a good opportunity?

It's huge. There's 36 .2 million small businesses in the USA. That's just in the US.

Think about global, even more. 57 % of these businesses say reaching customers is their biggest problem. That's the problem.

They want the phone to ring. They want more business. They want more booked jobs.

They don't want AI automation. They want revenue and profit and money in the bank. So 19 .8 % of US businesses use AI at all.

And if you've talked to your normal friends or if you walk up and down Main Street and you ask them how they're using AI, They're not using it how we are. We're in a little bubble here in the AI world, on X, in the communities that we're in and all of that.

And, you know, these folks have barely scratched the surface. They might send a prompt to chat GPT. There's no context.

They don't know what good looks like. They don't know how to ask the right questions. They don't even know how to, you know, do the basics like schedule things and stuff like that in their AI models, let alone, you know, build websites.

optimize it for conversions, you know, all of these different things that oftentimes feel like basics to us. So there's a huge opportunity and, you know, maybe 0 .001 % of these of the 19 .8%, have the ability to use these models and tools like we do.

We're in this bubble. Everyone, when you open up X and you look at your timeline, everyone's talking about it's over. There's no businesses left to start.

There's no moats anymore. People become consumed with what's on their timeline. They see these crazy demos about cloud code agents, MCPs, vibe coding, et cetera.

And they're all kind of selling to each other. Meanwhile, like I said, Main Street, they just want their phone to ring. They don't even know this world exists.

that we're in every day and we feel like it's all around us, right? So let's escape the bubble a little bit. And my recommendation would be, hey, go talk to some normal friends, go call up 10 local businesses or walk in their door and ask them how they use AI.

Ask them about AI agents. And I would bet that very few... even know what they are.

They've probably heard of them, but they have no idea how they could apply them to their company. The problem with most advice I see around this for people wanting to start an AI services business is that they make it sound way too AI. And the market sophistication and their understanding of this space is extremely nascent.

Okay, so here's the whole idea. Number one, find a boring business with big tickets and bad marketing. Two, don't sell it as AI.

Sell more booked jobs. Three, build a funnel with agents and days. We're going to get more into what I mean by that.

And then four, create a loop where you can test and offer improvements every week. All right. There's been kind of five eras of local marketing services here that I want to talk about.

You know, you have the old school days with yellow pages. You buy an ad. Maybe your phone will ring.

You can't really track it. You know, this isn't the digital era. Next, you have websites.

And, you know, within that era, there's huge opportunity to write like building websites for local businesses. People still do it the old school way. That was like a brochure and basically a form that nobody answered.

That turned into all these agencies with retainers and reports and dashboards and stuff like that. And that's been going on for a while. AI started to disrupt it.

But AI to a lot of people for quite some time is like chatbots or automations and things like that. And I think that most people I've talked to in my community have actually kind of struggled going and finding their place in the market and consistently growing it and getting customers. So I want to change the thinking a little bit.

little bit around what we're going to offer, how we're going to talk about it. So if you think about a local business, they've been pitched for SEO services or ad services or now automation services and things like that quite a bit. So you need something that feels new and different.

I want to talk about building funnels and going to the local business and saying, hey, I want to help you convert more of the website traffic and the phone calls that you get into book jobs. So each era has made it cheaper to kind of reach a customer and harder to stand out. So we're going to talk about how funnels can help you do that.

Now, a little more detail on boring businesses and why they're good clients. Big tickets. So a roof on average.

costs $32 ,000, all right? If you can help a roofing company, for example, get one client every six months or every quarter or something like that, that's a massive impact to a business and it's much easier to justify your fees. Don't go try to get direct -to -consumer e -commerce clients or SaaS clients or something like that.

You need to go for these big ticket. types of customers. They're easier to help.

There's more opportunity to help them. And then again, you can generate a stronger ROI, which is going to make it much harder for that customer to ever leave you. The demand exists.

So nobody needs convincing when the ceiling leaks. So you have to do a little bit better than the other companies, the other service providers, et cetera, that are helping these businesses out. So you're not trying to educate the market and, you know, teach them about something new that has a lengthy funnel.

You know, if somebody has a leak in their in their home, like they're ready to buy. They just want to find the one that can, you know, give them a quote quickly that they can trust that, you know, has a good presence that makes all that easy. And, you know, the marketing is bad.

Only 18 percent of SMBs feel confident that their marketing is working how it should today. So, again, if you look at the bubble, few people are selling to them. Everyone's trying to sell to, you know, the sexy AI company.

They're selling to the SaaS founders and things like that. So owners are changing. Over half of owners are 55 plus and 6 million businesses are going to change hands by 2035.

So the younger generation that does have a little bit more familiarity with, you know, digital and the importance and stuff like that is going to start taking over these businesses. They already are. um trust compounds uh you know one great job with a roofing company like you need one case study and uh you can get multiple referrals you can you know easily kind of narrow into that niche all right so you know nobody's dming the septic guy uh again don't be the ai expert be the ai expert or be the guy who helps garage floor companies in the southeast get more book jobs or turn the website traffic they already get into a phone that rings, something along those lines.

So when I think about picking a niche, there's a few different... a few different filters that I'd like to think about. Number one is ticket size.

We already talked about that. Number two is urgency. We don't want to have to educate the market.

We want to do a little bit better than the competition and figure out how we can siphon off a few of these in -demand services that have high tickets that are already going to get booked and fulfilled in the market and funnel them to our customer. So lead value versus lead cost. It should be lower cost to get a lead than it is the value of that lead.

The higher the ticket, the better they convert, the more ROI and difference you're going to see there. Weak online competition, beautiful thing. If you know how to use AI, you can go and analyze what niches in what local markets have weak competition online.

Think about it. You could build a list of 50 cities with over 300 ,000, 400 ,000 people, and you could quickly go and analyze all the websites. across 10 different niches to find which ones have weak digital competition pretty quick.

We want to find businesses that are owner run, easier to get in contact with the decision maker. They have a crew of two to 20 people. This is just kind of like a filter that helps us find businesses that are doing real revenue and could afford our services.

Okay. Go one door down from the obvious. This is another great piece of advice.

Everybody, when they want to go and sell into... Main Street, they think about plumbing and HVAC. Those are the two that everyone always kind of goes after.

And they're also the most competitive and the most crowded. So go one door down. Think about garage floor coatings, hardscapes, sauna and coal plunge installation, landscape lighting, emergency restoration services, sports car and artificial turf installation.

There's all kinds out there that you can go and find if you dig for it. So unglamorous big ticket items, roofing, foundations and crawl spaces, waterproofing, chimney services, septic services, commercial refrigeration, hood cleaning, fleet repair, med spas, orthodontics, dental implants, veterinarians, skip the restaurants, the retail.

Those are low ticket and franchises as a lot of the buyer decisions are made at the corporate level. And it's a little bit harder for you to get in touch with the decision maker. So find a niche inside a niche.

So high -end pools, customers kept asking about saunas. Saunas, $3 ,000 wholesale, $10 ,000 installed. Nobody's marketing it well.

That's the opening. So you can go to a pool company. You can say, hey, I can help you build a funnel and a digital experience to sell this additional service or something like that.

Think outside of the box. And that could just be the opening that you're looking for. Again, don't sell AI, sell the result.

Owners buy a phone that rings and a calendar that fills. So the pitch is never the tool. Don't say I'm going to give you an AI marketing automation or an AI marketing evaluation.

Say, you know, I'm going to help you find where you can get more book jobs from the website traffic that you already get today. You don't have to spend any more in ads. Not we'll build you a chat bot that replies to customer service requests.

I make sure every missed call that you get gets a reply in under a minute. Don't say I build you a new website. Say I build you a funnel for your website that makes your slow months full.

So talk in terms of benefits and results, not the features and the things that you're interested in. The business owner doesn't really care about any of those. Another tip, write in the customer's words.

So plain words, they convert twice as well as complicated stuff. So pages written at a fifth to seventh grade reading level convert at 11 .1 % versus 5 .3 % if they sound like a professional. So like hydrostatic pressure remediation, no.

Water in my basement every time it rains. So when you think about building a funnel for a client and building out a better, higher converting. website, landing page, digital experience, follow -up texts and emails, always talk in the customer's language and dumb it down.

So why funnels? Why do we want to think about funnels and not ads and SEO? So what is a funnel?

You've probably been through a funnel before. If you've ever clicked an ad from somebody like Alex Hormozy and he's given you a free template or an SOP or whatever, you're on his email list. He's given you a value exchange.

You've entered your information to receive something of value. So you've clicked an ad, you've seen an offer, which is typically on an optimized landing page. Then you're taken to a success page that might, you know, have you book a call on a calendar or purchase an entry -level item or something like that.

Then you're in a follow -up sequence and then perhaps you convert. These are the types of systems that we want to sell and install for these boring high -ticket local businesses. It's not SEO and it's not ads.

Again, business owners are inundated with this stuff. How different of a pitch can you actually give if you're trying to sell traffic? Can you really stand out as a service provider there?

I personally think that it's much easier to stand out selling funnels. All right. Search is shifting.

We all know that. A lot of customers are using AI now to find local businesses. These are showing up in Google results.

Fewer clicks make the page that catches them matter more, not less. So if there's fewer clicks on the journey to get to the website, to get to the page, we have to have much more powerful offers and copywriting and mechanisms to capture that individual into our funnel. So fourth, things landed at the same time here.

Funnels used to take a long time and a lot of money to build. So building out all of these Email sequences and conversion optimized pages, landing pages, success pages, thank you pages, writing the copy for all of them.

That used to cost $15 ,000 to $20 ,000 to pay a direct response consultant to do something like that. But coding agents can now build the work. They can build the pages, the emails, the tracking.

Creatives nearly free, job photos, before and afters, ads. You can use image models for a lot of this stuff too. Testing's cheap.

If they're cheap to build, they're cheap to test. They're cheap to optimize. And Main Street hasn't moved.

Nine in 10 agencies use AI fewer than one in five businesses do. So these four forces converging is why I think funnels are a great AI service offer. All right.

And the beautiful thing is now today, you don't have to be an expert to build a world -class funnel. That's kind of what the product boringfunnels .com that I've built offers. Imagine there's a roofer or a plumber or something like that.

Here's some different types of funnels that you can offer. The free check. So you click an ad, you go to a page, you've got kind of a free assessment that you build for a client.

So, hey, let's do your free roofing check. It takes five minutes, something like that. The instant price.

If it's an urgent service, they want to get a result and a quote right away. Maybe there's a funnel where you have a landing page. Someone can upload their photos.

You have an AI in the background to analyze the job and give them an instant and accurate quote. The price first step, same thing. The quiz, which option is right for me?

The explainer video for $10 ,000 plus decisions, also known as a video sales letter or a VSL. Typically, that looks like you get a free checklist on the thank you page. There's an owner.

driven video explaining how they're different, how they can help, why they should send somebody out to your house to give you a customized quote, how they're different, what the benefits are. And then you need a follow -up machine, SMS, emails, retargeting, things like that. Every funnel needs to continue to try to make the sale to people who have not completed that conversion action that we're trying to get to.

I've got some studies in boringfunnels .com that break down exactly what these funnels look like, shows you how to do the free check well. Same thing with the instant price. Check out Leaf Filter.

The price first step is a $99 offer that pays for the ads. That's also known as a tripwire or a liquidation offer. Check out how Mr.

Reuter does it. The quiz, I like to also escape kind of the world of only looking at. other boring local businesses when I analyze funnels in boringfunnels .com.

I've learned a lot from old school direct response marketers, people who sell info, people who sell education, direct to consumer marketers. And you can kind of see how they're structuring pages and offers and how they're converting traffic and apply them here. So an agent, you know, it builds what you ask for it.

If you use cloud code or codex, it won't. tell you what to ask for. And that's kind of why I built boringfunnels .com.

It helps your agent pick the right funnel for the business from real ones that are running, deconstruct it and build it in a couple prompts on behalf of a client, if you're servicing clients or even for your own business. So it really democratizes that funnel building knowledge that helps people convert the traffic they're getting into.

customers who are ready to buy or who click buy. I break down all of these funnels across the internet and you can connect your agent to that library via an MCP and it can search it, it can access it, it can see the components, see the design styles, the formats, the copywriting, so that when you build something, there's not back and forth and you're trying to go research copy and figure out how to construct all this.

It just does it for you. Okay. So what do you charge?

Where's the arbitrage? Owners, they pay agency prices for the result. You deliver it at software cost.

This is the beauty of AI services. You can use the AI in the background and you can sell and replace labor costs essentially and charge agency prices for the result. And it's a beautiful thing.

The customer, they'll happily pay $3 ,000 for an installation of a funnel with a $1 ,500 a month retainer if you can help them get these $20 ,000 jobs, right? Like the math. Easily works out what it costs you it costs you agents it costs you if you if you use something like boring funnels calm You know 299 a year to access the library and the MCP that works out to you know 20 some odd dollars a month And it gets smarter every single week as new funnels are being added and then you know a few cents and images once you connect your API key so that Boring Funnels can create client -ready images for the funnels and the landing pages and the websites and assets that you build and your time.

The market still prices this like it takes a team. So back in the day, like I said, you had a strategist, a copywriter, a designer, a developer. It was $10 ,000 to $20 ,000 to get a great funnel or a website for a local business.

And it took four to six weeks. Now it's you and your coding agent. Maybe it's a few hours.

Maybe it's a few days. If you show the client and they want to make changes or something like that, you do some custom integrations. Again, it's pennies on the dollar compared to what it used to be.

So how I recommend is pricing in three layers. So number one, you sell an install for $2 ,500 to $5 ,000 to install one of these funnels. So later you could even think about a share of the upside, which is an interesting way to scale your business and price based on success.

You have five clients, you do $1 ,500 a month retainers per client, that's $7 ,500 a month. You have the opportunity to go out across the country and you're not geographically limited to your backyard. You can target multiple cities offering the service for the niche that you select.

All right, so price on what a job is worth, never your hours, promise the work, not the money. A lot of people ask me this question. They're like, hey, how do I start with no experience?

Well, your goal is to just go get one good case study. So, you know, don't get so caught up on like pricing and stuff. If it's your time and tokens and something like, you know, Boring Funnels Pro, go and do a couple free funnels, get some case studies, get to know the industry, the client, the challenges, and then go and start charging.

Keep it simple. Remember, it doesn't take hiring a big team and finding people to get this done anymore. It's some of your time and some basic tools that allow you to get started.

So try that. Okay, finding and pitching clients. So you can think about sort of three different files.

or systems here, a scorecard. So you have a scorecard of who you're going to call. You're kind of ranking the niches and the businesses based on bad marketing, like I said.

So think of this as just like a gap analysis. All right. You know, go and find the local business websites, scrape their websites, have your agent analyze it against, you know, the funnels and find what the gaps are.

You know, your offers. So how are you positioning and how are you? selling your offer and kind of track what's working and what's not here in your MD files.

Just go and log every call that you have, upload the transcript to your agent. It can learn and get smarter over time and help you refine your pitch, who you're going after and all that. So again, scrape a hundred companies in one city or a couple of different cities.

Have your agent walk the site and audit them. Create an example of the funnel in their brand. Find the owner.

Do a video, a loom, something like that. uh you know with with a voiceover or of you kind of narrating it uh do a presentation over a 15 minute call and say hey i can install this for you um you know here's what it did last time i did it for you know the other roofing company in you know this city and that's your free case study or whatever that i said you should go and gather to help your own sales funnel going out and going over Google Maps with Appify.

You can look at your state's licensing board, trade associations, ad libraries. Ad libraries are awesome. Who's advertising in the roofing or the septic or the commercial hood cleaning market?

They're already spending money on ads. So you can say, hey, I see you're spending a lot of money on ads. Let me help you convert more of that traffic into customers.

You can also do the old school approach by going and getting your local high -end cities magazines. Whoever's buying full -page ads in there are spending $10 ,000 or $15 ,000 or $20 ,000 for an ad like that. So they're willing to invest in marketing.

They're probably spending a good amount, multiple six figures in ads per year. So help them get more out of that investment. That's what a funnel is all about.

So here's a prompt that you can use. You're a sourcing analyst for an agency that builds funnels for businesses in this metro. Keep businesses with 50 plus reviews at 4 .2 stars or better.

An owner who still runs it in a crew of two to 20. Note the site, whether they run Google or meta ads in any sign that they're growing, rank them by fit, mark every inference as an inference, go through the websites, you know, find the gaps, open the site. You're a homeowner with a problem who wants a price and a time.

How long does it take you to find the phone number and a way to. book? Is there a clear offer?

A price first step? What happens after the form? So list what stops you from booking first.

So I actually did this for 11 different local sites in my city, which is Charlotte, North Carolina. Nine had no email capture. Eight had no price first step, like, hey, a $79 roofing audit or something like that.

Nine had issues with their phone problems and zero actually had traffic problems. They were running ads. They were showing up on the first page for SEO and they had good positions and map packs.

So that's not really that painful of a problem. The painful problem is the conversions and the sales. Okay.

So the audits, your ammunition, you're going to get a lot of data from that audit. You need to craft it into something that you can go and pitch to the business owner. Build out the funnel and their brand marked as a proposal with a link that you can send.

You should walk them through it and say you can deploy it for them quickly, fast, in 24 hours, 48 hours. And it's there to talk in the customer's language. It's there to make sure they have a clear offer, a way to get in touch with you, fast follow -up sequences, things like that done for you.

All right. Finding the owner, you know, license records, Better Business Bureau, you know, put that to work and then, you know, verify before you send it out to to the list. Again, like I said, make a personal video and figure out how you can scale that.

Once you find your formula for the personal video and finding the business owner emails and you build your pitch, automate the scraping and the gap analysis and you start sending this out to 100 different businesses a day. I think that that's a very interesting way. to scale up your own lead generation.

And you could even be transparent and say, hey, this is my funnel. I want to build something like this for you. Okay.

Make the first email count. Booking and inspection took me four taps on your website and informed no reply. I rebuilt the pager on free inspection in your brand.

Here's the look. Is this worth 15 minutes of your time? So that's how you can approach people in the first email.

Okay. So we're going to get to a funnel for a roofing company here in just a minute that I built with Boring Funnels. So what you want to know is how many leads are you getting a month?

How many become jobs? What's the job worth? Do the math out loud and offer the install.

So they see their own numbers and their own business working better with your help.

I'm just going to hop in and show you this deep dive here. So I built out a funnel for a fake company that I invented called Keystone Roofing. And I said, hey, there's a roofer in Kansas City.

They get 60 to 80 leads a month. They close about one in six. So I had an agent impersonate the owner and answer different questions.

And I want to show you what was created with zero expertise. in design and copywriting and funnel building. It went out and did some research.

And every company promises a free inspection. Nobody commits to a reply time. Nobody follows up after the estimate was the assumption, the headline.

took that open ground, get a quote in one minute, and you don't have to wait for a callback. Make the reply the offer. Three short booking steps, a text back within a minute, the estimator confirms the same day.

Within forums, there is a common pain, about half a dozen calls to contractors to get one return to call. But that's voice of customer, and we're addressing that on the first screen of the funnel. Move three, follow the estimate, not just the lead.

The owner's leak. It was after the estimate. So the funnel keeps going past it.

Your estimate explained every line of the price. Five questions ask every roofer. So we're offering transparency and trust building here.

Boring Funnels Pro is offering that to this build. So the prompt here that got this started is I run Keystone Roofing in Kansas City. A full roof replacement averages about $14 ,000 and we do storm and leak repairs.

We've been a business for 22 years. We have a 4 .7 on Google. We get X number of leads per month.

Our website and door hangers after storms help us. We close only one in six. We're slow to call back, et cetera.

So this is some of the data that the prompt takes in. So then the agent gets to work and it goes and does a bunch of research. finds the voice of customer, the gaps in the market, and what kind of positioning we should take with our offer.

And then after that, it's going Boring Funnels Pro, starts the design, looks, copy, and the layout and the funnel all optimized for conversion. All right, so what a user gets here is look options that they can go and pick for their customer. It referenced multiple local advertisers in here.

It looked through the breakdowns like this that I have in the library. It analyzed Leefone, Baycrawl Space, and Sunrun in terms of what Keystone should include in their funnel. All right.

So and then here's why it made the decisions that it did. So the fake owner agent selected this look, which is a good look. It addresses the gaps and things, the voice of customer language.

Again, no additional prompts beyond the first one. So it created a quiz, even created all the images for it. How old your roof?

It's got four quick questions. The user can confirm it. Excuse me.

And then. It confirms the exact day and time in writing, and someone can add it to their calendar. Now, the only thing that you would need to do if you were doing this for a business is just connect it to the existing systems that they have, their CRM, something like that.

But all the logic and everything is built out, and you don't have to worry about designing a great landing page, designing the offer, the positioning, the different mechanisms of the funnel. All right, so again, you can log in and check this whole breakdown out. You can read the emails that send as the follow -up to this funnel and why they were created.

And really the only thing that would be needed here is a real story or a real social proof integrated. And Boring Funnels calls out what's needed to get that done.

Yeah, and another thing you can do is you can copy the full kind of briefs here for free. Whether you want to build something new with your coding agent and prove an existing page, copy or audit a site. So you could select this.

You could go and scrape the boring businesses. You could select audit my site. You could run it through this prompt.

You just copy it and it'll do a full breakdown and find all the information and use its logic to create something like this.

This is powerful ad spend. Let's say they spend nine K a month. They get, you know, 40 leads.

If you help them get more booked inspections, that's going to help them sell more roofs. And, you know, clearly that's a lot of value when you're selling $32 ,000 roofs. So these kinds of mechanisms and implementing them for clients are a no brainer again.

Better funnels, better offers, better copy, more persuasive design, layouts, structuring those together into steps that lead the customer through the journey that's going to get them on the phone or get a tech out to their house. It's that simple. And you don't have to be an expert with boringfunnels .com.

So if leads go up and book jobs don't, the problem is the phone, not the funnel. Fix the follow -up first. I've seen this go wrong.

People try to target too many niches at once. They try to sell AI. Their outreach is creepy, etc.

Test and learn and try to have conversations with real business owners talking about these mechanisms and you'll find your sweet spot with it. So just a little challenge, pick one niche and one metro, list 100 businesses, rank them out, an agent will walk the top 20 sites, build three pitch funnels with boring funnels, send 20 short emails with a video out to the list and see what kind of replies and conversations you get.

All right. Everyone's building these AI products for each other. Meanwhile, the roofer's paying $228 a lead to send somebody to a page that leaks.

Find the boring industries. There's plenty to go around. Check out boringfunnels .com.

You can check out the free library. You can get to know what funnels look like, what good looks like. You can copy some agent briefs.

Try it out. If you like, you can give Pro a try and build these funnels with one prompt that look great. Again, I've got all the design logic, the copywriting, the layouts, all the learnings from across the world of direct response, whether it's e -com or SaaS or info products, whatever it is.

given that as intelligence to the agent so that you can just click a couple buttons, enter in a prompt, and it spits these out, which is pretty incredible value. So thanks for listening. If you've made it this far, really appreciate you sticking around.

I hope this gave you a lot of value. Again, you can get on there for free. Poke around in the library.

Would love to know what you think.

The Hook

The bait, then the rug-pull.

While the AI crowd pitches coding agents to each other, 36.2 million boring local businesses, roofers, septic companies, med spas, are paying hundreds of dollars a lead to send traffic at broken websites. This masterclass walks through picking a niche, pricing the offer, and building a complete funnel for a fictional roofing company from a single prompt.

Frameworks

Named ideas worth stealing.

05:16list

Five Eras of Local Marketing

Yellow pages
Websites (brochure + form)
Agency retainers and dashboards
AI chatbots and automation
Funnel builder: one person + agents, tested weekly

A timeline showing how each era of local marketing made reach cheaper and differentiation harder, ending at today's one-person-plus-agent funnel model.

Steal forframing any cold-outreach pitch to a legacy industry as 'the next era,' not just another vendor

09:25list

Niche-Picking Filters

Ticket size
Urgency (no market education needed)
Lead value above lead cost
Weak online competition
Owner-run, crew of 2-20

Five filters for scoring whether a niche is worth targeting before any outreach starts.

Steal forany service business picking which vertical to specialize in

15:27list

Four Forces That Made This Work Now

Coding agents build real pages, emails, and tracking
Creative is nearly free
Testing is cheap
Main Street hasn't adopted AI yet

The convergence argument for why AI-built funnels for local business are a timing-sensitive opportunity, not a permanent one.

Steal forthe 'why now' section of any AI-services pitch deck

19:38list

Three Pricing Layers

$2,500-$5,000 funnel install
$1,500/month retainer
Share-of-upside pricing once proven

A pricing ladder that starts with a flat install fee, moves to a maintenance retainer, and graduates to success-based pricing.

Steal forpricing any productized AI service, not just funnels

25:11concept

The Sourcing and Audit Prompt

A reusable agent prompt that scores local businesses by review count, rating, owner-run status, and ad activity, then audits each site as a homeowner would: how long to find the phone number, is there a clear offer, what stops booking.

Steal forany cold-outreach pipeline that needs to turn a raw business list into ranked, evidenced prospects

CTA Breakdown

How they asked for the click.

VERBAL ASK

34:26link

“Check out boringfunnels.com. You can check out the free library, you can get to know what funnels look like, what good looks like. You can copy some agent briefs. Try it out. If you like, you can give Pro a try.”

Soft CTA woven into the closing recap and a concrete outreach challenge rather than a hard sales pitch; leads with the free tier before mentioning Pro.

MENTIONED ON CAMERA

18:34toolboringfunnels.com ↗

Storyboard