24:29Greg Isenberg · Listicle
8 GitHub Repos To Go Viral and Make Money
A nightly GitHub crawl through eight free repos and AI skills, from an auto-generated launch video to an agent that interviews you before you build.
October 8thThe argument in one line.
The real AI opportunity is not selling agents to tech people but using agents to build and fix funnels for $2M to $20M trades businesses, sold purely as more booked jobs from traffic they already buy.
Read if. Skip if.
READ IF YOU ARE…
- You can drive a coding agent and want a service business with clients who can actually afford you, instead of selling to broke solopreneurs.
- You run or want to start a small marketing agency and need a sharper offer than 'we do SEO and ads' for local service companies.
- You keep hearing about AI automation agencies and suspect the pitch falls flat with real-world business owners.
- You have no clients, no case studies and no audience, and want a concrete plan for landing the first local client.
- You like direct response (Chet Holmes, Jay Abraham, Dan Kennedy) and want to see those ideas applied with modern AI tooling.
SKIP IF…
- You want a technical tutorial on building the agent or MCP tools themselves; the tooling is shown, not taught.
- You are looking for a passive or fully automated income play; this is a relationship-heavy service business with a six-month runway.
- You want to sell voice agents or AI receptionists; the guest reports customers hanging up on exactly that.
The full version, fast.
Trades businesses doing $2M to $20M a year already pay around $129 per lead, yet their landing pages leak: they skip the ad's promise, hide 4.9-star ratings, and bury the booking button. The play is to sell the whole path from ad to free offer to page to follow-up, framed only as booked jobs and phone calls, never as AI. An agent finds and scores prospects, audits their pages and drafts a branded rebuild plus proposal in about 18 minutes. Win clients with a patient Dream 100, lumpy mail and local breakfasts, show the leak in dollars, price it as a $2,500 to $5,000 install plus $1,000 to $2,000 monthly, and do the first build free for a case study.
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Create a free account →Who's talking.
00:00hostGreg Isenberg
02:08guestJames Dickerson (The Boring Marketer)
Where the time goes.
00:00 – 01:23
01 · Cold open
Host frames the opportunity: sell AI-built work to Main Street, not to AI-pilled tech buyers.
01:23 – 02:08
02 · Sponsor: Brex
Sponsor read for Brex corporate cards and banking.
02:08 – 04:32
03 · Why sell AI to Main Street
The guest's background running local agencies and growing his own mobile diesel repair business with ads, funnels and local SEO.
04:32 – 07:26
04 · One sentence, 18 minutes to a pitch
A single prompt finds 100 Dallas plumbers, scores them, audits the top five and drafts a branded pitch, proposal and first email.
07:26 – 10:56
05 · The $2M to $20M opportunity
112,088 plumbing and HVAC companies average $2.66M, only 14% run on AI, and leads cost about $129. Target high-ticket, urgent trades.
10:56 – 12:38
06 · Underserved trades niches
Hood cleaning, implants, tree service, sport courts, turf, septic, crawl space, generators: pick the one your geography gives you an edge in.
12:38 – 15:02
07 · Auditing five Dallas plumbers
Four of five skip the ad's promise, three hide the rating, four bury booking. Personal AI agents are still too early; Google is the surface.
15:02 – 17:41
08 · Sell booked jobs, not AI
Start the list at $2M revenue, never lead with AI, and avoid voice agents that customers hang up on.
17:41 – 23:19
09 · The funnel offer and HVAC example
Sell the whole path to a booked job. Seven entry points for one HVAC company, plus how a tripwire liquidates ad spend.
23:19 – 24:14
10 · Matching ads to funnels
Route each search intent to its own funnel instead of sending all traffic to one page.
24:14 – 28:18
11 · Chet Holmes and the Dream 100
Patiently mail the best 167 prospects; month six produced 28 clients. Research your 100 to the nth degree with an agent.
28:18 – 31:37
12 · Branding and Meta ads for the firm
Brand like the trucks your clients run, then retarget a 25-mile radius with value-first Meta ads. No audience required.
31:37 – 34:31
13 · Lumpy mail and reciprocity
Send 20 owners a box with a brass fitting and their fixed page, plus stories on reciprocity and remarkable gestures.
34:31 – 36:02
14 · Find, pitch, deliver
Walk in with the finished work, not a deck, and invite owners to a teach-first AI breakfast.
36:02 – 37:37
15 · Showing owners the ROI
Put the leak on one sheet: 100 leads at $129, a fifth lost is $2,580 a month, one $1,714 job covers 13 leads.
37:37 – 41:45
16 · Pricing, first case study, mindset
Install plus monthly plus later upside, do the first build free for a case study, and commit to one market for six months.
41:45 – 42:33
17 · Reporting with AI
Send the owner five numbers every Monday; reporting is now a solved problem.
42:33 – 44:20
18 · Closing thoughts
Wrap-up, where to find the guest, and the free funnel library.
Lines worth screenshotting.
- Main Street owners do not buy AI; they buy booked jobs, and leading with 'AI agent' makes many of them think of a real estate agent.
- Start your prospect list at $2M in revenue, because a $5M plumber spending 3% on marketing has roughly $150K a year to work with.
- Thirteen to fifteen employees is a rough outside signal that a trades business is doing about $2M a year.
- In an audit of five well-reviewed Dallas plumbers running Google ads, four did not repeat their ad's promise on the landing page.
- Three of five 4.8-star plumbers never showed their Google rating anywhere on the page they were paying to send traffic to.
- Most local businesses have an ad and a page; almost none have a free offer or a follow-up sequence, and that gap is the product.
- A $79 tune-up tripwire is common among leading HVAC companies, yet 80 to 90 percent of the market runs nothing like it.
- Sending every ad to the same page kills conversion; a furnace-replacement search and a quick-service search deserve different funnels.
- Chet Holmes found 167 of 2,200 advertisers bought 95% of the ads, and his patient mailing to the rest produced 28 clients in month six.
- Most people quit cold outreach right before month five, which is exactly when the slow relationship approach starts paying.
- Mail 20 owners a brass pipe fitting and a before-and-after of their own page, not 2,000 owners a generic pitch, then call two days later.
- If a page loses a fifth of 100 leads at $129 each, about $2,580 a month disappears, and one $1,714 job covers 13 leads.
- Voice-agent receptionists can backfire with trades customers, who hang up asking whether it is 'a dumb AI thing'.
- Your first client costs you only tokens and time, so build it free in exchange for a case study and charge from client two.
- A brand that wins plumbers looks like a work van, not like Stripe or Apple; good branding is whatever the customer connects with.
Sell booked jobs to trades that already buy traffic
THE PLAYBOOK
The money is in fixing the leaky path between a trades company's paid ads and a booked job, priced on ROI and never pitched as AI.
04One sentence, 18 minutes to a pitch
- An agent can turn one sentence into 100 scored prospects, a phone-based audit of the top five, and a branded pitch in about 18 minutes.
- Scoring prospects by reviews, review velocity, technician count and revenue keeps you off the spray-and-pray list.
05The $2M to $20M opportunity
- Plumbing and HVAC alone is about 112,000 companies averaging $2.66M a year, and only 14% of owners say AI runs their business.
- Pick urgent, high-ticket work where one job is worth thousands; lawn care and restaurants are too low-ticket to fund real ROI.
06Underserved trades niches
- Look past plumbing and HVAC to hood cleaning, septic, crawl space, sport courts or generators, matched to what your region actually needs.
07Auditing five Dallas plumbers
- Phone-check pages for the ad's promise, the Google rating and a booking button on screen one; most paying advertisers miss at least one.
- Google Maps reviews remain the surface where homeowners choose contractors; personal AI agents are not there yet.
08Sell booked jobs, not AI
- Target $2M and up, roughly 13 to 15 staff, because those owners have a marketing budget and leaks that cost real money.
- Pitch more calls and booked jobs; many owners distrust AI, and voice-agent receptionists get hung up on.
09The funnel offer and HVAC example
- The product is the whole path: ad, free offer, matching pages and follow-up, since most locals have only an ad and a page.
- Test several entry points per company, such as a free check, $79 tripwire, instant price, quiz or owner video.
- A tripwire can pay back the ad cost of the click while still capturing emails from everyone who does not buy.
10Matching ads to funnels
- Send each search intent to its own funnel; one page for all traffic is a major conversion leak.
11Chet Holmes and the Dream 100
- Mail your best prospects every two weeks for months; Holmes waited until month six before 28 clients arrived at once.
- Research every Dream 100 company deeply with an agent so you know their reviews, sites and owners better than any competitor.
12Branding and Meta ads for the firm
- Brand the firm like a work van the trade respects, not like a polished tech startup.
- Value-first Meta ads targeted to a 25-mile radius make you a visible authority without needing an existing audience.
13Lumpy mail and reciprocity
- Lumpy mail with a real object and a before-and-after of their page, sent to 20 owners and followed by a call, cuts through.
- Small generous gestures create reciprocity and word-of-mouth that outlasts any pitch.
14Find, pitch, deliver
- Show up with the rebuilt page, a free-to-build proposal paid when it books jobs, and a short email instead of a slide deck.
- A teach-first breakfast for local owners builds in-person trust that owner-led trades still value.
15Showing owners the ROI
- Translate the leak into dollars on one sheet: a fifth of 100 leads at $129 is about $2,580 a month lost.
16Pricing, first case study, mindset
- Price as a $2,500 to $5,000 install, $1,000 to $2,000 monthly for testing and reporting, and possibly a share of upside later.
- With no track record, do the first build free for a case study, because your only real cost is tokens and time.
- Commit to one trade in one city for six months before judging results.
17Reporting with AI
- Report five numbers every Monday: leads, booked jobs, cost per booked job, response time and revenue from booked jobs.
- If leads rise but booked jobs stay flat, the problem is how the phone is answered, not the marketing.
Terms worth knowing.
- Funnel
- A sequence of ad, landing page, offer and follow-up messages designed to turn a stranger who clicks into a paying customer, rather than a single standalone web page.
- Tripwire offer
- A low-priced first purchase, such as a $79 tune-up, that builds trust and recovers advertising cost so later, bigger sales are profitable.
- Liquidating ad spend
- Earning back the cost of advertising through small upfront sales, so the leads and email addresses collected along the way cost close to nothing.
- Ad-to-page congruency
- Making the landing page repeat the exact promise of the ad that sent the visitor, so the click feels continuous and converts better.
- Dream 100
- Chet Holmes's method of picking a short list of ideal customers and marketing to them repeatedly and patiently over months until they buy.
- Lumpy mail
- Physical direct mail containing an object, so the package stands out on a desk and gets opened instead of tossed with flat letters.
- Strategy of preeminence
- Jay Abraham's principle of acting as a trusted advisor who puts the client's interests first, rather than as a vendor trying to close a sale.
- Voice of customer
- The exact words and concerns real customers use when describing a problem or provider, often mined from reviews and forums, used to write copy that resonates.
- MCP
- Model Context Protocol, a standard way to connect an AI agent to outside tools and data sources such as maps, websites or ad accounts.
Things they pointed at.
24:14bookThe Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes
26:30bookJay Abraham (strategy of preeminence)
27:20bookDan Kennedy (lumpy mail, message-to-market fit)
29:50toolMeta Ads MCP
29:50toolClaude Code
43:30channelThe Boring Marketer YouTube channel
Lines you could clip.
00:00
“While everyone is selling AI agents to AI-pilled people in San Francisco, there's a way bigger opportunity to sell AI agents to Main Street businesses.”
16:01
“Customers don't care about any of that. They care about revenue. They care about ROI.”
16:30
“A lot of them don't even know what an AI agent is. They think of an agent, they're thinking of a real estate agent.”
16:55
“I got so many voicemails from people being like, is this a dumb AI thing? And just hanging up.”
25:20
“Be patient and like be a snail and show up every day and add value.”
28:00
“Good branding is creating a feeling that your ICP connects with, and we can't forget that.”
38:46
“The cost to you is tokens and some of your time. Go and do it for free in exchange for a great case study or testimonial.”
31:00
“You don't even need to be the authority. You can just be an authority.”
Where the conversation goes.
00:00 – 04:32sparseFraming and credibility
04:32 – 15:02denseProspecting with an agent and choosing a market
15:02 – 24:14denseThe offer: funnels sold as booked jobs
24:14 – 36:02denseCustomer acquisition: Dream 100, branding, lumpy mail
36:02 – 41:45denseMoney: ROI math, pricing, first case study
41:45 – 44:20steadyRetention and close
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metaphoranalogystory
Today I'm going to let you in in a little secret. While everyone is selling AI agents to AI -pilled people in San Francisco, there's a way bigger opportunity to sell AI agents to Main Street businesses. And I think that there's going to be millions of dollars to be made if you understand how to do so.
now i wanted to bring on someone who's actually gone and done this before so he's going to share the tactics the techniques the strategies the niches to go after and it's actually my business partner mr boring marketing himself now he's gone and done it before and he's going to share everything in this master class for how to sell ai agents to main street businesses and by the end of this episode you'll have all the sauce you'll have the tactics you'll be able to get going right now so if you're someone who's looking for a business idea if you're looking to understand how to sell ai agents to main street this is the episode for you and even if you haven't even thought about it it's really really interesting because it's going to get your creative juices flowing it's going to connect your brain in a few different ways and you'll probably learn a few techniques a few books actually a few tools that you've never heard of before in this episode so i want to give a special thank you to james mr boring marketing for coming on and not holding anything back and giving all the
value to you. I can't wait to see what you build. I'm rooting for you.
Have a creative day and I'll see at the end of the episode. Today's episode is brought to you by Brex. My company's been on Brex for a year and a half, and I started because I kept hearing companies like Vercel, OpenAI, Anthropic were using Brex, and I figured if they're using it, why shouldn't I?
It's been a game changer. The thing that got me is how smooth it is. It's got high limit cards, it's got banking, it's got AI that handles the back office busy work like expense reports, which I don't want to do on its own.
It's really just built for this agentic world. If you're building something new, It's time to get Brex.
Check it out at brex .com slash solutions slash startups. Link in the description.
We got Mr. Boring Marketer James Dickerson on the podcast. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?
I'm going to help people think about how they can go and sell AI to Main Street. I think it's one of the biggest opportunities in AI. A lot of people are sleeping on it.
I want them to see the opportunity, know how to build an offer, find the right customers, and then charge what the work is worth. Yeah, and I think a lot of people are selling AI to AI -pilled people in San Francisco. And I think the goal of this episode is to show, I want you to show me and everyone the way around how you can actually sell AI to Main Street, why this is one of the greatest opportunities of our time.
And this isn't just a hook, right? This is like, you're going to show exactly how to do it. You're going to commit to that.
So by the end of this, people will truly understand the tactics, the techniques, the strategies around that. Is that right? That's it, man.
All right, let's get into it. All right, cool. So why should you listen to me about this topic?
Let's just start there. As you know, Greg, I started out owning agencies, serving local businesses, startups, things like that. all kinds of performance ads i've done social and seo and and all these different services for these exact type of businesses so have a lot of experience in the market i personally am an owner of a boring business a trades business here in charlotte north carolina and i've been able to grow it doing exactly what I'm going to talk about here today.
So I want to package all that together and just share with people like, hey, this is exactly how I would start an agency again, not just an agency that builds AI agents or does AI transformation, but like what's an offer that all these businesses really need and will be willing to pay for? How do you package it? How do you sell it?
Yeah. And what you've been able to do with your boring business, I think it's a mobile, what's called diesel dudes. Diesel dudes.
Yeah. It's a it's a mobile diesel repair business. So, you know, when a semi truck breaks down on the side of the road or something like that, we dispatch mechanics out there to get them moving again.
So it's a costly problem. It's high ticket size. And I've been able to really grow it through ads, funnels and local SEO.
So, you know, as I was kind of thinking about. hey, how can we help people go out there and capture this opportunity? I built a couple tools in boringfunnels .com that help people do just this.
But with Boring Funnels, I typed, hey, find me plumbers in Dallas worth pitching. So in about a minute, it went out there, scraped a bunch of information from Google Maps, Google, Yelp, all these different channels and found 100 different plumbers within that market. And then I size them up.
So I try to understand how many reviews are they getting? What's the review velocity there? How many employees or technicians do they have?
Can I find revenue information out there about the business? And I want to try to find a boring skilled trades business that's doing over $2 million a year in revenue. And we'll get into why that is.
And in plumbing and HVAC and stuff like that, that's actually pretty achievable. So there's a lot of these businesses out there. So in about a couple of minutes, my MCPs that I built went out and went through like their ads, their websites, everything, and found the exact leaks that these plumbers need to have fixed in terms of their customer generation funnel.
So we'll get into what that means. and stuff like that and then about 15 minutes later i had a pitch in their brand i had work done that's going to add real value to them i had their email address and then i had a dialed proposal in the first email so you know you remember how it was back in the day right doing this work was such a pain doing it manually, going to websites, trying to pay a bunch of money for credits to build lists and prospect.
And this is one area where agents and the right tools can really help you out. I think the most interesting thing to me here is the fact that you're not like carte blanche, you know, just spraying and praying. You're looking at who makes the most sense to pitch.
Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, you've talked a lot about finding a niche and things like that.
And, you know, it makes everything much more clear. Like you can dial your message to that customer. It helps you find exactly where to focus.
And there's cities like Dallas all around the country where, again, there are hundreds of these companies in your backyard making real money. And, you know, if you open up X, a lot of people are trying to sell to like solopreneurs or startups that. can't afford them, and then they're frustrated about getting bad clients or people not being able to afford their services.
And oftentimes that's just coming down in niche and market selection. Exactly. We won't go into specific examples of that because we're not gossipers, you and I, that's not our style, but you know it.
All right, let's continue. Okay, cool. So the opportunity here, $2 to $20 million local businesses, they can pay, they can afford it.
They have an idea that they might be behind. We can talk about what that looks like. And really nobody useful is showing up.
Like think about your own inbox out there if you're listening or watching. The cold emails, the cold LinkedIn DMs that you're getting, they're asking for a time commitment from you right out of the gate. Like, hey, can we hop on a demo and can I show you this cool thing that I built?
That's not how we're going to talk about getting in touch with these business owners. The offer. So again, we don't want to position around, hey, I can deploy an AI agent into your company and it's going to make you, you know, 10x more efficient and stuff like that.
What we do is we find boring businesses that are already advertising. They're already paying to get traffic to their website. OK, so the leak that we're fixing is we want to help them turn the traffic they're already paying for into more calls and more book jobs.
It's a pretty simple value proposition. They know ROI. They know investments.
They're spending on marketing. Maybe they have an agency that they've been paying for years that hasn't plugged these leaks. So how to find the customer?
We're going to combine like an old school and a new school approach. There's a great book that many people have read called The Ultimate Sales Machine by Chet Holmes. He has a strategy called the Dream 100.
We're going to talk about that. And then we're going to take some of the best direct to consumer strategies around building funnels and advertising into this to create something pretty special. You're firing me up.
You're literally firing me up. All right. All right.
Let's get into it. So, you know, like we talked about, this is absolutely massive. Let's just look at plumbing and HVAC companies.
You know, there's one hundred and twelve thousand of them roughly doing roughly two and a half million dollars a year on average. 14 % of owners say AI is fully part of how they run. They're paying a lot of money every single lead that they're trying to get into their business.
So tons, I mean, I don't know what 14 % of 112 ,000 is, maybe somewhere around, you know, 16, 17 ,000, something like that. There's a huge Delta out there and a massive market gap. And I think this is the arbitrage play to be thinking about.
All right. And the $129 lead thing is like. so important, right?
I mean, if you're doing this, you want to work with a company that is high lifetime, high LTV because there's just more money around, right? Yeah. You don't want to do like lawn maintenance.
You don't want to do restaurants. You don't want to do things that are low ticket. This comes down to niche selection.
So Where are customers valuable? Plumbing jobs are thousands of dollars potentially when someone gets dispatched and fixes an issue in someone's home.
And this is an urgent need. So a homeowner is ready to fix it. I had a leak in my ceiling two weeks ago.
Walked downstairs, water was literally coming out. My kid did something crazy to our shower. And that day I paid like $2 ,000 to have a water restoration guy come out and fix the issue.
So customers are willing to pay. What that means is that if you can get in front of those jobs more efficiently than the next guy and your competition isn't that sophisticated, there can be a huge ROI on those strategies. So if you can add an ROI and you can measure it and you can prove it, they're not going to want to leave you.
So one of my favorite things to talk about in this world here is that like, you know, a lot of people talk about plumbing and HVAC. That's where the roll ups are happening. The private equity firms are coming into and stuff like that.
But there are so many markets out there that have real demand, weak marketing and that nobody's actually really pitching at all. So just a few here. We don't have to spend time talking about all of these, but.
commercial hood cleaning. Restaurants are obligated to clean out the hoods over their stoves and stuff like that. There's like dental implants and orthodontics.
There's tree services, irrigation. I've seen a big trend here in the Carolinas about people installing high -end sport courts in their backyards or doing artificial turf installations so they don't have to mess with grass and landscaping and stuff. There's chimney sweeping.
gutter guard, septic services, crawl space. Just use your imagination. Screenshot this right here.
Go throw it into your AI or whatever and say, hey, let's build on this. Find me a niche that I should focus on. Based on where I live, because that's where your unfair advantage is going to be.
So maybe sports courts is a big deal in the Carolinas. But if you're in the Northeast, maybe it's snow removal. Yep.
Yep, exactly. Or backup generators, you know, getting those installed is a big job. And, you know, with the weather and stuff like that in the Northeast, like during the wintertime, there's a big demand spike for that type of thing.
So endless opportunities out there. It just takes a little bit of creativity to get outside of like what everyone else is trying to do.
OK, so like I took plumbers as an example and I took Dallas as an example and I use my MCP. and in cloud code and a couple things that i found analyzed a few of these companies that are rated 4 .8 or 4 .9 on google they have good reviews they do good work they've got a bunch of reviews so they're sizable businesses and they're all paying for google ads that week that i analyzed Four out of five of them didn't even repeat their ad's own promise, like on the landing page that they're sending traffic to.
So one of the biggest strategies in performance marketing is making sure that your ad and your landing page are tied up or they're congruent so that the prospect is kind of remembering the message or getting that communication from the ad that they clicked on. So that really helps conversion rate. Three of five of these companies didn't even show their Google rating on the landing page.
So this is a huge social proof point. especially if you have hundreds or thousands of reviews at 4 .8 or 4 .9. And then four out of five websites I looked at made you scroll past three screens to book a service.
So point being, there is so much low -hanging fruit out there and it's almost just staring you right in the face. What's your take on personal agent platforms? You know, Muse, Grokbot, Instinct, Dots by OpenAI.
Like, you know, is your view that... people this is going to be you know more and more mainstream consumers are going to be asking their muse agent or whatever for plumbers in dallas and that these companies need to be optimized or is it two in the future you know i think it's it's a bit in the future uh personally like you know i've looked at uh my diesel data to see if we're getting any customers finding us from chat gpt and stuff like that.
And I might get like a couple of visitors a week or something along those lines. I think that when people are searching for a service, I always check out the Google reviews, like on maps and stuff like that. So I think that's still the surface area.
I think Google has an incredible amount of data to serve up relevant and the right sort of solution providers. I have used AI mode on Google to find contractors. So I'm more bullish on Google than a lot of those those personal agents.
And I just don't know if they're there yet in the market. Okay. So we touched on this, but again, you know, find businesses doing real revenue.
They have a budget, a $5 million plumbing companies probably spending like 150 to $250 ,000 a year on marketing. Their leaks cost real money and you can show them like we talked about, you scroll down their site. someone doesn't have a way to book.
That's something visual. That's something that the owner can understand. And we're going to figure out how to package and communicate that to them.
All right. So again, you don't sell AI automation. You don't sell agents.
You talk about booked jobs and more phone calls and stuff like that. And that's one of the biggest things that I actually see out there on X, which is definitely like. in an AI bubble is people talk about, you know, I'm going to start an AI automation agency or an AI services agency, or I'm going to sell AI agents.
Customers don't care about any of that. They care about revenue. They care about ROI.
Never lead with I'm implementing AI into your local company. Their eyes glaze over. And a lot of them don't even know what an AI agent is, you know, like they think of an agent, they're thinking of a real estate agent.
Yep. A lot of these business owners are still from the generation that they're probably not adapting these tools and stuff like that. The market sophistication level just is not there with the majority of these types of companies.
Also, a lot of people don't like AI. From a branding perspective, AI actually, when you speak to most of the mainstream America, They have a sour taste in their mouth about AI for whatever reason.
Data centers coming and stuff like that. You don't want to sell something and then be up against someone who is like, whoa, I don't like AI. It's not about AI.
Yeah. I'm sure you've seen this. I've seen a lot about voice agents.
I've tested voice agents for my boring business, like an AI receptionist to answer the call and stuff. I got so many voicemails from people being like, is this a dumb AI thing? And just hanging up.
They know it's AI. They want to talk to a person. So I think while some of that might sound good or be very marketable, to go and raise money or attract attention from other AI -pilled people.
When push comes to shove, a lot of these things just don't really match up with how these businesses work in the real world. Okay, so we're gonna sell funnels. So I'm sure everyone's seen funnels out there in the wild.
They know what funnels are, hopefully by now. But maybe you've clicked an ad before, you've opened up a page, there's a juicy free offer. Like I'm gonna give you my SOPs or I'm going to invite you to a free workshop or webinar or something like that.
I'm going to have like an introductory offer with a guarantee that's really hard to say no to. So then after that, you have sales pages that really help to communicate why someone should become a customer. And if they don't buy right there, you have follow up systems that are sending SMS or email or whatever.
So this is what we want to implement for local businesses. Most of the agencies that are out there selling. You know, they're selling advertising, they're selling SEO, they're selling traffic.
But this really solves like the real problem, in my opinion, based off the data and all the sites that I've analyzed. It's not so much an advertising problem as much as it is, hey, the website is broken. There's no way to book a meeting or whatever.
And again, as I said, there's so many of these out there and it's low hanging fruit. so before like you know the age of ai and coding agents and all of that to go and build a funnel was a pretty manual process like you could use a drag and drop sort of like landing page builder if you want but you couldn't really get it on brand and there was a lot of like manual tweaking and back and forth and integrations you had to do Or you had to hire an agency to go and build that for you.
And agencies still charge $20 ,000 for a good funnel, for example. So I think this is the gap to fill. If you know how to use a coding agent, you can spin up these funnels quickly at a very high quality.
And if they're already paying for advertising, you can route that traffic to an optimized funnel and show them the lift that they're getting. So what does that look like? Let's just take an example HVAC company.
So I built these pages with boring funnels and I'm not selling it. There's a free library on there. If you want to log in and find funnels that actually work from real businesses, feel free to go and check that out.
You don't have to pay for it or whatever, but I built these with the paid tool. There's multiple different entry points that you can go and deploy and test for one of these types of businesses. There's the free check.
You know, someone lands on an ad and it's like, hey, are you having these problems? Here's the things you can go and look at. There's the $79 tune up.
I've looked at the leading like HVAC companies in my city and all of them typically have that. low price point tripwire offer that creators or DTC companies have, but the vast majority, 80, 90 % aren't doing anything like that. So to be competitive in the ad auctions, having that kind of like tripwire type offer to build trust and provide a good service is a really, really good funnel to build for a local business.
Can you explain that? Like what is a tripwire offer? Why is it important?
Does every business need it? Yeah. So let's say that I have, that I'm spending on ads and let's just take like me, for example, let's say I want to sell, you know, ultimately sell some software like Boring Funnels.
It's like MCP connectors for your agents to help you do all this stuff. Let's say I priced the free version that's out there at, you know, $20. So I'm spending on ads, maybe on meta.
It's like a dollar a click. And if I can get 20 visitors to the website, I spent $20 to get that traffic, right? If I can convert one out of those 20 for a $20 membership to that entry level version, I've liquidated my ad costs.
And then I've gotten 10, 15 people to give me their email address that I can then continue to market to. So it's a strategy of like liquidating your ad spend and trying to get to the point where you can essentially acquire leads for free and add a lot of value at the same time.
All right. So then you have like the instant price. Like, you know, I've been to a lot of service websites where, you know, I have to call, I have to set up a meeting, whatever.
That's frustrating. Like, give me what I want. I want to know how much this might cost for me so that I can make a decision.
The quiz, should I repair or replace, you know, my HVAC unit? The video, like maybe I answer that quiz and then I come to like a video sales letter where it's the owner on video building trust and saying, hey, like, you know, before you replace your furnace, I've recorded this for you. Here's the problems people make in that decision making process, et cetera.
And those are 20 to 30 thousand dollar installations that people are financing and stuff like that. So it's a big decision. Seeing the owner on camera walking you through how to make the right choice.
makes that company the trusted advisor versus someone trying to just get paid. And then there's a couple others like the advertorial and stuff, and then you have your follow -up sequences as well. But this feels very high value compared to, hey, I'm going to go and optimize your Google business profile and stuff like that, which could take months to get results.
Whereas if you help them convert the traffic they're getting today with a little bit better strategies taken from the leading creators, and direct -to -consumer businesses, you have something pretty good. Okay, so we kind of talked about these funnels just now, but screenshot this, pause it, check it out.
Here's how I would think about an ad to the page, to the follow -up page to get the booking for each of these, for the $79 tune -up, for the advertorial where you're teaching first instead of trying to sell first, and for the big -ticket repair or replace. Beautiful thing about this too is each of these funnels can be run for different like ad campaigns.
So I mentioned ad to landing page congruency. If people are searching for new furnace installation, maybe I send them to the repair or replace funnel. If they're searching for quick service, I send them to the $79 tune -up or something like that.
Most of these companies are all sending you know, the same traffic to the same pages. And that is really, really hurting their conversion rate.
Okay, so let's get into some of the strategies to go and acquire these customers if you think this is a good opportunity. So Chet Holmes from The Ultimate Sales Machine, he did this experiment. He talked about it in his book.
He built a list of like 2 ,200 advertisers and, you know, 167. of those advertisers bought 95 % of the ads. And the people who are buying the offer today are the ones that everyone's kind of like trying to go and get at the same time.
So they're hearing like lots of pitches and stuff like that. He focused on going out there and building the relationships with the folks that hadn't bought yet. So he took a longer term approach.
The point here is like, be patient and like and show up every day. and add value. And these business owners, they may start to trust you more so than the competition.
By month six, he got 28 clients in one month. So, you know, like good things take time. I think we're in this age with AI and stuff where a lot of people expect instant results.
You know, they go and build a list. They blast out a bunch of emails. They send some cold DMs on LinkedIn.
It didn't work right away and they quit. And then they go on to the next thing. This is just trying to say that, hey, like this is a long game and you got to go and add real value to actually get these business owners to trust you.
So, you know, again, like AI can make it easier, though, you know, build a list of the 100 companies you'd love to work with, you know, have your AI agent go out and research those. to the nth degree. Know everything about them.
Read their reviews. Crawl their websites. Look up the owners.
Stuff like that. Build a corpus of information on this Dream 100 list so you're the expert in this targeted group of people that you're trying to sell to. You should know everything about their businesses, about the industry.
That's really what it takes to stand out. Another one of my favorite authors is Jay Abraham.
And his principle was become the advisor, not a vendor. So add free value to this radius every single week. You don't have to have an audience to do it.
You can simply create creatives on Meta, for example, that are dialed to that audience. Meta's algorithm is really good. The people in your market, if your ads are about helping plumbers, will see those ads.
If you're just focused on adding value, not trying to get them to book a demo or call right away, I think long term, like Chet experienced, by month six, good things are going to start to happen. There's a strategy, too, that I'll show here called lumpy mail. And Dan Kennedy used to talk about this.
Sam Bovens talked about it. But imagine sending a box to these 100 folks on your Dream 100 list with a brass fitting. And, you know, a letter that has like a link to a page that you rebuilt them that says, hey, like you fix the plumbing leaks.
I'll fix the leaks on your website or or in your marketing. You know, it's dialed to that specific type of person. Message to market fit.
Dan Kennedy, another goat of direct response. One trade, one city. Again, know everything about how their customers talk.
There's plenty of information out there. You can go on Reddit. You can find how Redditors are talking in your city.
about service providers. Like I was looking at HVAC ones just yesterday because my heater's out downstairs and I found a good local one and folks don't want to go and work with the big PE backed ones. The voice of customer tells me that they want to support a local HVAC company that's been in business for a while.
So I found one that I'm going to call today actually. All right. So Couple more Jay Abraham strategies read Chet Holmes Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy I learned pretty much everything about direct response from from those guys.
So Another important aspect here to think about let's talk branding here for a second As we think about really being the only choice for your market branding comes into play I would brand the firm focus on something like this like call it leak proof in the in your marketing and you handle the plumbing so you know I think that you have great you know great brand for like a website impactful ads things like that if you want to run kind of a retargeting on meta approach or an ad approach in a certain radius you know you could do like UGC style ads you could send them to a landing page that uses you know that voice of customer that language that you're becoming an expert on or your agents are.
And maybe you have a free leak check or something like that that you're selling or giving away to them to add value. Yeah, I think the mistake a lot of people make here is from a branding perspective, they look at what a good brand looks like and they'll look at like Stripe or Apple and then they'll create. the brand off of that targeting Main Street America or these HVAC companies in their area.
What a good brand, as a creative director, everyone's going to say Stripe looks good, Apple, but as the customer here, they might not want a brand like that. They just might not connect with it. Good branding is creating a feeling that your ICP connects with, and we can't forget that.
Well said. Yeah. The fit with the market is really what determines a good brand.
That's right. So yeah, this is an example of a funnel you could go and enact with meta ads and open up a camera, record a quick video, have Claude edit it. Everyone's seen how good Opus 5 .5 is at making shorts and stuff.
You can also run meta ads and build campaigns from Claude Code. Meta has an MCP that can help you go in there and build out the campaigns too. So, you know these gaps Where it's like hey, I'm not an expert.
How do I do that? I don't know how to get some creative and put a campaign up like, you know AI has really removed those barriers for a lot of this stuff So again like everyone Or not everyone but a lot of people use not having an audience as a reason why they shouldn't do something you know, oh, but they have a big audience or I don't have an audience or whatever.
If you focus on a small market of like 25 mile radius of Dallas and you're only targeting plumbers, do you really think that it would take that long to become the authority if you're out there learning from the best creators in like the AI space, which is like the most hyper competitive sort of content and influence market in the world?
Yeah. And you don't even need to be the authority. You can just be on authority.
Correct. Correct. Just get on the map.
And if you're adding value and you're doing the type of research and stuff that we're talking about here, you're going to get some conversations started. I have no doubt in my mind. All right.
So I talked about lumpy mail. I think this is another good strategy. And when you start to stack.
these different approaches together you've got kind of the old school and the new school approach so the new school approach is maybe you have this like meta ads campaign old school approach is maybe you send them some lumpy mail this really stands out like when it comes to someone's office a lot of these businesses are owner -led or owner -driven they still open up the mail so you know to me if you have the right branding something clever it's a great approach to kind of get in front of them And again, you're not trying to sell them on your service right away here.
You're adding some value and maybe you're saying, hey, I want to invite you to breakfast or I'm hosting a meetup of, you know, other plumbing and HVAC companies next week. We'd love to feature you as a special guest or something like that, like flatter them a bit too, you know, old school. I think I've said this story on the pod before, but when you walk into a car chase store, When you walk in, they actually say, do you want flat water or sparkling water?
So you say sparkling water, say they come with this, you know, aluminum tray, really like these beautiful napkins, like thick napkins that probably cost like a dollar each.
they hand you this tray of Perrier and two pieces of Swiss chocolate. That's before you've looked around, you've done anything. They want you to feel good.
It's the law of reciprocity. If someone gives you value, you want to give value back. All of a sudden, you had no intentions of buying a Cartier tank, but you walk out there spending $10 ,000 because someone handed you a 35 -cent Swiss chocolate.
Another story there. Last night, I was at baseball practice for my kids and one of my good friends there, another dad, his dog actually just died. And he was like, yeah, you know, so nice today.
Our vet called us and she made a donation in our dog's name to the veterinary college where she went at Tufts or something like that. My first question to him was, who's your vet? I have two dogs and I want them to have the best care.
And wow, what a story that creates a moment, a marketable moment. And maybe she didn't even do that out of like, you know, a marketing approach. But if you have the goodwill of your prospects in mind and you're becoming their trusted advisor, which is the whole strategy of preeminence from Jay Abraham, like my friend will never go to another vet in his life with his animal, you know?
I mean, I want to just. rescue a dog right now and go to your vet just to work with that vet, you know? Exactly.
Exactly. So those moments are really powerful and not enough people even consider them. All right.
So, you know, you can go and do all of this stuff with AI these days. You know, you can build. Some people are more experienced than others.
A lot of people like to, you know, build their own solutions out there. A lot of the folks in like the boring marketing and community, though, are trying to start figuring out like, hey, how can I go and offer a service to these businesses?
So this is just like a screenshot of what the Boring Funnels product produces. But again, do whatever you want. I have a tool that helps me find the prospects, score the prospects, get the contact info, build the pitch, and then deliver a high value proposal with that build.
um, in about 15 minutes. So do it however you want, like no, you know, no obligation there, of course, but, uh, this is kind of how, how I approach it, find pitch and deliver. All right.
So, uh, you know, back to the old school stuff and AI meetup, a breakfast or something like that would be a nice touch. I think that a lot of these business owners still want to, you know, meet people that they do business with in person. You know, it's very important, especially if you're, you know, kind of in a local market.
I know you're big on IRL stuff, making a comeback and things of that nature. I think that there's a big opportunity to go out there and do it in your backyard, in your city for, you know, a specific market or maybe multiple. Okay, so again, like these business owners, you can show them the math here.
We kind of talked about that a little bit in terms of like, you know, cost per lead and things like that. Let's say they're spending on ads and they're getting 100 leads a month. It's $129 a lead.
You know, they're spending like $13 ,000 a month on leads. If the page loses about 20 % of those, they've got, you know, $2 ,600 kind of going nowhere or going out the door. You know, so one plumbing job at, you know, $1 ,714 pays for 13.
you know, of, of those leads that they're already getting. So if you can help them get a few new jobs a month, like if you're out there playing with these AI tools and stuff like that, designing and building, like if you think you can do a little bit better job than what they currently have, you can, you can start something in this space.
And realistically, if you're listening to this podcast, you can, because you understand way more than the average person in all these tools. And when you look at the websites and the experiences of some of these Main Street businesses, it's appalling, honestly, like you've shown, with how much they're leaving on the table.
Because for them, it's like they didn't have anything and now they just have something up. They just want to get something up. But it's in some ways remarkable that any of these websites or some of these websites convert at all.
Yeah, it really is. It really is. I agree.
So just in terms of pricing, this is kind of like the whole agency prices, software costs. It's a great time to create a high margin business, approach it like a service business, but running it with AI. And actually delivering and doing the work at a high quality is the easiest it's ever been.
Perhaps you have like... an introductory install where you build like a funnel and you take it live or something like that. And then, you know, monthly you're analyzing the data, you're testing, you're making updates, tweaks, you're actually measuring, you know, the call volume that's coming in and stuff like that.
Later, who knows, maybe there's like a performance angle too. You know, there's a lot of agencies that got their start that way. You know, hey, I'll only charge you when, you know, we get a job.
Or maybe you start with that if you're just getting started. So this brings up another point to me. I've had a lot of people ask me, hey, what if I've never done this before?
How can I go and, you know, build trust in the market and stuff if I don't have any clients? And I'm like, well, don't go try to sell them something. Go and do it for free and prove that what you're trying to do works.
The cost to you is tokens and some of your time. It's not like you have to go hire a team and do all this stuff to build out a new website or a funnel or a campaign for a local business. Go and do it for free in exchange for a great case study or testimonial.
Your only focus should be getting that one case study. And then once you have that, go and start charging. So don't overthink it.
Yeah, I think I get this feedback a lot in general. I mean, you mentioned I don't have an audience or people will say like, I don't have any, you know, case studies or things like that. And this is like, this is going to sound, the next 30 seconds are going to sound a little woo woo.
But like a bit of it is a mindset shift where it's like, you have to come into this and be like, I. I'm the best person to help plumbers in Dallas. And I'm going to spend the next six months, 12 months, 18 months of my life equipping these plumbers in Dallas with the information and the advice and the techniques and the strategies that they need in order for them to increase the ROI of what they are doing.
And you have to just wake up every morning and repeat that mantra to yourself. to actually believe it. And I know someone's listening to this and is probably like, well isn't that sort of like faking it until you make it?
It's not. I was watching Toby, co -founder, CEO of Shopify. Shopify is like a $150, $200 billion company.
The guy does the exact same thing to himself. So here you have a founder, CEO, one of the wealthiest people on the planet. repeating a mantra to himself because the power of positive thinking does help you.
I couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly right. And I'd love to actually see an episode on mindset sometime from you.
I would watch the heck out of that. There's a bunch of great books out there. I mean, Tony Robbins, man, his whole sort of thing is around around that and look at the leaders and out there in the world that, you know, that trust them.
Let me know if people want it. I, I haven't done any of that type of stuff in the past because I like to just focus on like the, the actual tactics and sauce and stuff like that. And I always felt that if I did something like that, like around mindset and stuff, you know, people would be like, where's the sauce?
Um, sometimes the sauce is, is And sometimes that is the sauce that you kind of need, but people don't really want it. But please let me know.
Cool. Man, I used to spend so much time reporting in my agencies. That's a solved problem.
AI can help you there. No worries when it comes to keeping people up to date and stuff. You can create looms.
You can hop on the phone with them. You've got all the data one prompt away. So be the expert in their business.
Know how it's working. you know, find pitch, deliver and focus on booking jobs for these businesses. And, you know, when it comes to, you know, mindset, I think also like, hey, you know, find a market, find a geography and go and do this one thing for six months and then report back and see how it goes.
Put the blinders on for a while and really just focus on adding value and see where you end up. So that's all I got here, Greg. That's not just all you got.
This has been super saucy, super interesting. I think in a lot of ways this whole episode doesn't feel like nothing you said was reinventing the wheel, but that's kind of the whole point. I love that you shined light on this opportunity.
Thank you for coming on.
a criminally underfollowed YouTube channel and you started to create more video content. So I'll include a link in the show notes in the description to go and subscribe to The Boring Marketer on YouTube. Anything else you'd like to leave people with, sir?
Well, my dogs are barking. So sorry about that if it comes in through the audio. You know, I just hope people got value out of this.
I think that, you know, coming back to the basics and stuff is important from time to time. It really helps me to kind of like step back and think through this type of thing and reflect when it comes to like building my own businesses. And yeah, I just hope people got value out of it.
My lead magnet and my funnel is at boringfunnels .com. If you want to go check out like a free library of, you know, what these funnels look like for various types of businesses, I find the best ones on the internet and share them for free. So check that out.
And Greg, really appreciate you having me, man. It's always, always a blast. Yeah.
Can't wait. I want you to come back. You know, you haven't been on in a while, but I want you to come back more often.
You're all, you're in the, in the trenches, learning how to use agents to, to do marketing. for all sorts of people, but mainstream, you know, in particular. So I hope people really like this episode, got value out of it and want you to come back soon.
So thank you again for coming on the show and I will see you next time. Thanks a lot, Greg. See you soon.
The Hook
The bait, then the rug-pull.
The title promises a $1,000-an-hour solo business. What the episode actually delivers is a slide-by-slide agency playbook: pick trades companies big enough to pay, find the leaks on pages they already buy traffic for, and never once say the word AI to the owner.
How they asked for the click.
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