Need direction with many things 😭
I’m 23 years old, living in Hamilton Ontario (an hour from Toronto, Ontario) who just got laid off from my day job recently.
Last year in the summer I fell into the hype of starting my own ai business (as a side hustle at the time) selling AI receptionists, I got some response by cold emailing from my personal email account. I didn’t have any sales experience at the time so I lost the sale but it was a good learning experience for me.
Then I watched a few Nick Saraev videos and I followed what he showed in his video of how to start with $0 which I followed and got some responses and fulfilled them but then the worst thing of my life happened, which is.. my dad passed away and I gave up all the side hustles and stopped it for a few months. (Up until December)
This year I started back up and those few months that I was gone, the landscape shifted so dramatically and drastically.
No one wants ai receptionists anymore, my previous clients they themselves don’t want it anymore, I guess it’s still a bit gimmicky even if it is just for after hours booking, it gets the job done but it still isn’t gone to a level where local businesses especially in a place like Toronto are willing to adapt. (At least in my opinion)
I did some research with a few different ai models about the type of product or service based on my experience and my life would be better for me to sell as an entrepreneur and being in the locality in which I’m based, I got mixed results and some are saying to continue selling ai receptionists (which I already stated why not many businesses around me want it), another thing that I found was a service called “14 day cash clarity sprint” for contractors where in 2 weeks I clean up their books and find them undiscovered cash which they may have (basically a service that is not really an accountant or a bookkeeper but someone who categorizes and perfectly sorts documents and invoices and continuesly gives clients a dashboard of how much each job actually made them profit, basically helping them improve their margins and cash on hand)
Me as an inexperienced 23 year old found this business to be different enough to work in the contracting space as well as the location that I’m in, but then I had trouble with outreach. Most of these businesses don’t check their emails so cold email didn’t work. Then I tried Instagram DMs, which had a bit better response (which I interpreted as market validation) but horrible conversion (literally 0)
I couldn’t do cold calling cuz I had a job but I got laid off a couple of weeks ago because of budget cuts in the company so I don’t have a day job either. All I have is my side hustle, sort of slowly becoming my main hustle. After this had happened I started cold calling, but with contractors they’re very busy, they told me to F off, told me to send them an email (which they never read), told me to send them a text (which they probably deleted).
Obviously as I got laid off, I need money coming in and I need it asap. So I am getting abit desperate and that’s why I’m writing this post.
But I need help with direction from someone who started from scratch and build a business like this on
- should I start cold DMing again? (Requires low effort but relentless follow up; my follow up gave could use improvement)
- should I continue to cold call? (Requires high effort and high skill improvement; my cold calling skills could use improvement as well)
- how/when/at what point do I decide to alternate between the two methods of acquiring clients or switch methods entirely?
- a part of my brain thinks the early response I had with this product was not market validation but was a fluke and I mistook it as market validation, is that true?
- at what point do I switch my offer entirely and start thinking or looking at something else entirely that could make me some money faster?
(Even last night I was thinking of selling something else that A-already has a demand/market validation and is already a pain point or bottle neck in a certain industry or the other. B-is under threat because of AI and can also be solved by AI. C-doesn’t restrict me in local markets but is demandable world wide (especially in the US). D-doesnt require a lot of time being spent in upgrading my skills (though it is important) before making any money. E-Will have a much easier channel of client acquisition.)
In my free time I chat with different LLMs to see what they’re saying. Claude told me to keep going with this and try DMing for a week with persistence and a proper system and not to stop or pivot until I get to a 100 DMs sent and only then can we identify how effecting cold DMing is. If it’s effective, great. If not, switch to cold calling next week. Gpt told me to start selling AI receptionists again through cold calling local businesses again (which worked in the beginning, but through cold email, gpt is saying now try cold calling) Perplexity told me to try a new model entirely, Gemini told me to keep going (just like Claude did) but told me to start cold calling immediately and abandon DMs.
If you read this far, i genuinely appreciate you, thank you so much, God bless.