Given the success of my last video on the topic, I thought I'd write a post + record a video all about practical, real-world automations you can sell right now to make money in the AI/automation space.

You'll find 43mins of accompanying video below (if you wanted a reference), or you can just read the content.

First, what makes a high-ROI automation?

There are three components to a great, high-ROI automation:

1. There's a clear deliverable! This is a document, email, CRM, line-item, email, etc.
2. It solves a hot-button pain point! This is something that impacts revenue.
3. You can template most of it! This is done through no-code platforms or other systems.

1. It produces a clear deliverable

Automations are all intangible cloud-based systems. It is difficult to clearly see their value. So the best automation systems produce something tangible—something the client can see, feel touch.

Examples: documents, emails, CRMs, assets, etc.

• Why? Because systems are by nature immaterial—they're processes, and software infrastructure is hard to visualize. Your goal is to turn your system from a "black box" into something your client can imagine touching, feeling.
• These produce immediate results, are easy to quantify, and they let you claim straightforward wins. This makes transitioning to a recurring product, like a retainer, much easier.
• Examples:
  1. A PDF generator system that produces a new asset (whitepaper, quote, estimate) every time a form is filled out.
  2. A comprehensive CRM that your client can navigate through, click buttons on, upload stuff to, interact with.
  3. A cold email system that generates an email, Slack notification, and a CRM entry every time it's responded to.

Even if your system doesn't need deliverables in order to work, you can often modify your system to include them. This greatly improves the perceived value of said system.

2. It solves a dire, hot-button pain point.

Simply put, businesses pay more for solutions to pressing problems.

• What is a "pressing problem"? Anything that impacts your ability to generate revenue, save money, or free founder time.
• The more urgent the need, the easier the sale. When a business is actively losing money or potential customers due to inefficiencies, they are willing to pay a percentage of that money to rectify the problem, and often pay more if it's rectified quickly (important later).
• Examples:
  1. your team of fulfillment staff is waiting around kicking rocks because there are no clients—your need is more sales.
  2. your support team is overwhelmed with inquiries and response times are lagging, leading to major churn—your need is more customer support.
  3. your invoice processing blows, and you routinely forget to follow up with people, send invoices, or collect on payments—your need is a better invoice process.
• Every day that the above problems aren't solved costs the business some theoretical sum: $1,000, say. When you build a system that solves it, you are (in essence) making them that money back, and you can charge some fraction of the "saved" money as the price for said system.

3. You can build it using templates

The best automations are ones you can build quickly using templates—because it minimizes your work while letting you generate a tangible return on client investment ASAP.

• The more templateable it is, too, the higher the leverage on said system. You will "build" it once, and then only ever have to "modify" it (a fraction of the time) whenever you sell.
• The theoretical ideal is a system that is entirely deliverable through API; i.e, you receive a payment, this triggers a flow, and that flow builds your client project autonomously. In practice this is difficult to attain, and some manual service is usually required.
• Examples:
  1. A CRM template you can "duplicate" into the client environment on your platform of choice (Notion, Asana, ClickUp).
  2. A series of blueprints you import into the client Make.com environment that you only make minor tweaks to afterwards.
  3. A "creative brief" your client fills out which triggers a flow that generates a business website.

So—let's look at these automations.

You can build these systems exactly as they're written, or produce variations of them. They fulfill all of the requirements above, or are built in such a way that you can modify them to do so (i.e swap ClickUp → Notion alongside a few changes).

I've talked about and have blueprints for all these systems scattered throughout my YouTube channel. You can find these blueprints on my Gumroad, and there are many that have been built more than once on different platforms.

All of them can be created using Make.com or another equivalent no-code tool (Zapier, N8N, etc). Again, if you want them for free to follow along, check out my Gumroad!

1. Deep Personalization System

This is a series of AI prompts that produces, as output, an extremely customized email using AI.

You can run this en masse on thousands of leads at a time, and produce an AI engine that reaches out to a near-infinite number of people per day. Your only upper bound is email inboxes and $ for ops.

1. It solves these hot-button pain points: money! reply rate! leads!
2. It produces a clear deliverable: customized leads in a spreadsheet, cold email platform, CRM, or all three. It also, as a byproduct, delivers replies.
3. You can create "templates" to make your work easy like this into the client environment.
4. You can build this in all major no code platforms (Make, N8N, Zapier, etc).
5. You can sell this anywhere from ~$1,500-$5,000 USD fixed price (no add-ons), as well as charge an hourly rate to implement it or make tweaks, as well as a monthly maintenance fee.

The output is a Google Sheet filled with several deeply personalized outreach columns based on my winning copywriting formula: icebreaker -> elevator pitch -> social proof -> CTA >. Adjust the prompt(s) as needed to generate your own!

2. Search Intent Lead Scraper

This is a massive improvement to normal lead scraping—it scrapes leads with specific pain points that you know are willing to pay money to have solved. It looks for job listings, scrapes their details, finds hiring managers, and then gets you their email address.

1. It solves these hot-button needs: money! reply rate! unqualified leads! no leads in queue! disorganized sales process! unutilized sales team! chaos!
2. It produces a clear deliverable (i.e the lead itself, which is an email address + series of fields in a Google Sheet or a cold email platform.
3. You can create blueprints in all major no-code platforms, alongside templated Google Sheets etc, to quickly copy/paste this.
4. You can sell this anywhere from ~$1,500-$5,000 USD fixed price (no add-ons), or a lower monthly retainer, as well as charge an hourly rate to implement it or make tweaks, as well as a monthly maintenance fee.

A sidenote, but this system is exactly what I would do, today, if I had to find myself a $200K/yr job. I would scrape job posts for high-ticket software or pharmaceutical sales (which are typically 'outside' gigs) and pitch the founder/CEO directly, just like I pitch my business.

$200K/yr is probably on the low end of what you could get if you were smart about it.

3. YouTube Parasite + Content Improvement System

This is a parasite system that scrapes YouTube videos, gets their transcripts, and then uses AI to find gaps in that content to improve. AI then writes better content for you and lets you repurpose that content for social media, YouTube scripts, and more.

1. It solves these hot-button needs: money! we have no ideas, no content, our content sucks, we're paying too much for content creators, our competitors are doing so much more/better than us, our current way of creating content is too expensive.
2. It produces a clear deliverable (i.e the social media posts and content scripts). You can take the core idea and modify it into whatever you'd like by changing the scraper and the subsequent steps.
3. You can template this out in all major no-code platforms to quickly copy-paste this.
4. You can sell this anywhere from ~$1,500-$5,000 USD fixed price (no add-ons), or a lower monthly retainer for production, as well as charge an hourly rate to implement it or make tweaks, as well as a maintenance or management fee.

In general, it's a run-of-the-mill content generation system—but with a twist. You can take the 'self-improving post' part as far as you want.

4. Automated Newsletter Production System

This is a simple content scraper that finds trending posts on Reddit (for a niche you specify), filters them using AI, and then curates those posts into a newsletter-style content format.

1. It solves these hot-button needs: money! we have no ideas, no content, our content sucks, we're paying too much for content creators, we want a newsletter but its too much work, our competitors are doing so much more/better than us, our current way of creating content is too expensive.
2. It produces a clear deliverable (i.e the newsletter, which you can email, text, add to your blog, etc). You can take the core idea and modify it into whatever you'd like by changing the proposal template.
3. You can template this out in all major no-code platforms to quickly copy-paste this.
4. You can sell this anywhere from ~$1,500-$10,000 USD fixed price (no add-ons), or a lower monthly retainer, as well as charge an hourly rate to implement it or make tweaks, as well as a maintenance or management fee.

End result is extremely high quality—100% packageable as a newsletter with minimal/automated edits.

5. Copy & Paste Automatic Hiring System

This is a hiring system that eliminates the need for back-and-forth with candidates. It uses a form to request a CV, then lets you accept or decline trials, then sends them a trial request, then lets you accept or decline onboarding, etc. You do no manual communication during this process—it is all auto.

1. It solves these hot-button pain points: hiring takes forever, our margins suck, we don't have enough staff, everything is always disorganized, hiring is cost inefficient, chaos.
2. It produces a clear deliverable (i.e a hired staff member, and/or emails that go to/from hires, automatic assets/documents, filled up records in your CRM. You can take the core idea and modify it into whatever you'd like by changing the specific platforms added.
3. You can template this out in all major no-code platforms to quickly copy-paste this.
4. You can sell this anywhere from ~$2,000-$10,000 USD fixed price (no add-ons), as well as charge an hourly rate to implement it or make tweaks, as well as a maintenance or management fee.

I've used this system at every single one of my companies since 1SecondCopy. Grateful to my business partner for suggesting a self-driven form trigger.

Closing thoughts

Hope you enjoyed. TLDR: build systems that solve hot problems (not cold ones), that produce real deliverables, that are templateable, and that don't depend on specific software tools. Go nuts.