How to sell AI to Main Street (Full Playbook)

Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP I sit down with James Dickerson, the Boring Marketer, who owns Diesel Dudes, a mobile diesel repair business in Charlotte, North Carolina, and spent years running agencies for local businesses. James shows how to sell AI-built funnels to Main Street trades businesses doing $2 million to $20 million a year, starting with a Boring Funnels search that found 100 Dallas plumbers worth pitching. He walks through the leaks he finds on their landing pages, the funnel offers he'd sell, and how he'd win clients with the Dream 100, lumpy mail, and local meetups. If you know how to use coding agents, this episode gives you a full playbook for a service business built around booked jobs. Build funnels that sell: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/boring_funnels Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 01:23 – Sponsor: Brex 02:08 – Why sell AI to Main Street 03:05 – James's Background 04:32 – Finding and Picking a Niche 07:26 – The $2M to $20M Opportunity 09:02 – Plumbing and HVAC Market Size 10:56 – Underserved Trades Niches 12:38 – Auditing Five Dallas Plumbers 13:50 – Personal Agents vs. Google 15:02 – Selling Booked Jobs and Phone Calls 17:41 – Funnel Offer Overview 19:43 – Funnel Example 23:19 – Matching Ads to Funnels 24:14 – Chet Holmes and the Dream 100 28:18 – Branding your Firm 30:04 – Meta Ads for your firm 31:37 – Stacking Old School and New School Marketing Strategy 34:31 – Find, Pitch, Deliver 36:02 – Showing Owners the ROI 37:37 – Pricing your Offer 41:45 – Reporting With AI 42:33 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Main Street trades businesses doing $2 million to $20 million a year have budgets and few useful pitches in their inbox. James sells booked jobs and phone calls, since owners care about revenue and ROI over AI. The biggest leaks sit on the landing page: missing ad promises, hidden Google ratings, and buried booking buttons. Funnels with tripwires, instant prices, quizzes, and owner videos turn paid traffic into booked jobs. The Dream 100, lumpy mail, and local meetups build trust with owners over months. One free build in exchange for a case study gets you to paid work. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JAMES ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/boringmarketer LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadickerson/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  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 masterclass 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.

• 0:44Greg Isenberg?

  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 you 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.

• 1:28Greg Isenberg?

  And I started because I kept hearing companies like Versell, 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/solutions/startups. Link in the description.

• 2:08Greg Isenberg?

  We got Mr. Boring Marketer James Dickerson on the podcast. By the end of this episode, what are people going to learn?

• 2:15Speaker 01

  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.

• 2:31Greg Isenberg?

  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?

• 3:02Speaker 01

  That's it, man.

• 3:04Greg Isenberg?

  All right, let's get into it.

• 3:05Speaker 01

  All right, cool. So why should you listen to me about this topic? Let's, let's just start there. As you know, Greg, like, I started out owning agencies, serving local businesses, startups, things like that. I've run all kinds of performance ads, I've done social and SEO 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,

• 3:49Speaker 01

  hey, this is exactly how I would start an agency again. Not just a 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?

• 4:06Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, and what you've been able to do with your boring business, I think it's a mobile, what's called Diesel Dudes?

• 4:11Speaker 01

  It's called 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? You know, I built a couple of 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,

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Google, you know, 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? You know, 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, you know, 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, my MCPs that I built

• 5:38Speaker 01

  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, how it was back in the day, right? Doing this work was such a pain, doing it manually, going to websites, trying to, you know, pay a bunch of money for, for credits to build lists and prospect.

• 6:18Speaker 01

  And this is one area where agents and the right tools can, can really help you out.

• 6:24Greg Isenberg?

  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, to, to pitch.

• 6:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, getting bad clients or people not being able to afford their services. And oftentimes, that's just coming down in niche and market selection.

• 7:17Greg Isenberg?

  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, you know it. All right, let's, let's continue.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  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, you know, getting in touch with these business owners, the offers. 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.

• 8:10Speaker 01

  What we do is we find boring businesses that are already advertising. They're already paying to get traffic to their website, okay? 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

• 8:51Speaker 01

  direct-to-consumer strategies around building funnels and advertising into this to create something pretty special.

• 8:58Greg Isenberg?

  You're firing me up. You're, you're literally firing me up. All right.

• 9:01Speaker 01

  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 112,000 of them roughly, doing roughly $2.5 million 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.

• 9:39Greg Isenberg?

  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, you know, around, right?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, you, 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, you know, where are, you know, customers valuable? Plumbing jobs are thousands of dollars potentially when someone gets, you know, 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 like did something crazy to our shower. And that day, I paid like $2,000 to have a water restoration guy come out and, and fix the issue. So customers are willing to pay.

• 10:39Speaker 01

  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, on, 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.

• 10:57Speaker 01

  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 rollups 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 you know, commercial hood cleaning. Restaurants are obligated to clean out the hoods over their, 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

• 11:38Speaker 01

  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, you know, grass and landscaping and stuff. There's chimney sweeping, gutter guards, septic services, crawl space. Like, just use your imagination, like screenshot this right here. Go throw it into your AI or whatever and say, hey, like, let's build on this. Find me a niche that I should focus on.

• 12:05Greg Isenberg?

  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, you know, snow removal.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  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 winter time, 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.

• 12:39Speaker 01

  Okay, so like, I took plumbers as an example, and I took Dallas as an example, and I used my MCP and in Claude code. And a couple of 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 ads' 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

• 13:24Speaker 01

  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.

• 13:50Greg Isenberg?

  What's your take on personal agent platforms? You know, Muse, Grokbot, Instaing, 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 too in the future?

• 14:16Speaker 01

  You know, I think it's, it's a bit in the future. Personally, like, you know, I've looked at my Diesel data to see if we're getting any customers finding us from ChatGPT 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, you know, 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, you know, 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

• 14:58Speaker 01

  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 company is probably spending like $150,000 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

• 15:41Speaker 01

  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, your local company. They, their eyes glaze over.

• 16:04Greg Isenberg?

  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.

• 16:11Speaker 01

  Yep, yep. And a lot of these business owners are still like, you know, from the generation that they're probably not adapting these tools and stuff like that, you know? They're, they're just not, the market sophistication level just is not there with the majority of these types of companies.

• 16:28Greg Isenberg?

  Also, a lot of people don't like AI. So when you set, when you, like, from a branding perspective, AI actually, when you speak to, you know, most of the mainstream America, like, they have like a sour taste in their mouth about AI, for whatever reason. Data centers coming, you know, and stuff like that. So, you know, you don't want to sell something and then be up against someone who, you know, is in, is like, whoa, I don't like AI, right? It's not about AI.

• 17:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, 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? Like, and just hanging up. Like, they know it's AI. They want to talk to a person. Like, so I think like, while some of that might sound good or be very marketable, you know, to go and raise money or attract attention from other AI-pilled people, you know, 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 going to sell funnels. So I'm sure

• 17:44Speaker 01

  everyone's seen funnels out there in the wild. They know what funnels are, hopefully by now. But, you know, maybe you've clicked an ad before, you've opened up a page, there's a juicy free offer. Like, I'm going to 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, you know, why someone should become a customer. And if they don't buy right there, you have follow-up systems that are, you know, sending SMS or email or whatever. So this is what we want to implement for local businesses.

• 18:28Speaker 01

  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, 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,

• 19:09Speaker 01

  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 like, an agency to go and build that for you. And, you know, 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 companies. So I built these pages with, with boring funnels. And there's like, I'm

• 19:52Speaker 01

  not selling it. There's a, there's a free like 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 know, you don't have to pay for it or whatever. But I built these with the paid tool. You know, there's like, multiple different entry points that you can go and deploy and test for one of these types of businesses. So 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, you know, low price point tripwire offer that, you know, creators or DTC companies have. But the vast

• 20:36Speaker 01

  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, for a local business.

• 20:49Greg Isenberg?

  Can you explain that? Like, what is a tripwire offer? Why is it important? Does every business need it?

• 20:58Speaker 01

  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,

• 21:40Speaker 01

  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?

• 22:20Speaker 01

  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, etc. And those are $20,000 to $30,000 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, you know, this feels very high value compared to, hey, I'm gonna go and optimize

• 23:04Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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.

• 23:48Speaker 01

  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, you know, quick service, I send them to the $79 tune-up or something like that. Most of these companies are all selling or 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

• 24:28Speaker 01

  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, you know, going out there and building the relationships with, you know, the folks that hadn't bought yet. So he took a longer-term approach. The point here is like, you know, be patient and like be a snail and show up every day and add value. And these business owners, they may start to trust you more so than the competition.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  By month six, he got 28 clients in one, you know, 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.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  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, you know, 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,

• 26:27Speaker 01

  not a vendor. So, you know, add free value to this radius every single week. You don't have to have an audience to do it. You can, you know, 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, you know, good things are gonna 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 Evans talked about it, but imagine sending

• 27:10Speaker 01

  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 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

• 27:52Speaker 01

  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 gonna call today, actually.

• 28:07Speaker 01

  All right, so a couple more Jay Abraham strategies, read Chet Holmes, Jay Abraham and Dan Kennedy. I learned pretty much everything about direct response 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 focused on something like this, like call it leak-proof, we fix the leaks 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.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  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, you know, maybe you have, you know, a free leak check or, you know, something like that, that you're selling or giving away to them to add value.

• 29:16Greg Isenberg?

  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 this HVAC company, HVAC companies in their area. And what a good brand, like from a, as a creative director, you know, everyone's gonna say Stripe looks good, Apple, but as, you know, the customer here, they might not want a brand like that, right? They just might not connect with it. So good branding is creating a feeling that your ICP connects with and we can't forget that.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Well said, yeah. You know, 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, you know, 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.

• 30:40Speaker 01

  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, you know?

• 31:17Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah. And you don't even need to be the authority. You can just be un-authority.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  Correct. Correct. Just get on the map. And if you're adding value, and you know, you're doing the type of research and stuff that we're talking about here, you know, 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

• 32:06Speaker 01

  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. Would love to feature you as a special guest, or something like that, like flatter them a bit, too, you know? Old school.

• 32:31Greg Isenberg?

  I think I've spoke, I've said this story on the pod before, but when you walk into a Carche store, when you walk in, they actually, they said, 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. And they, and they hand you this tray of Perrier and two pieces of Swiss chocolate. And that's before you've looked around, you've done anything, right? They're just, they're, they want you to feel good. They, and it's the law of reciprocity. Like, if someone gives you value, you want to give that value back. So all of a sudden, you had no intentions

• 33:15Greg Isenberg?

  of buying, buying a Carche tank, but you walk out there spending $10,000 because someone handed you with, you know, 35 cent Swiss chocolate.

• 33:23Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, another story there. Last night, I was at baseball practice for my kids. And one of my good friends there, another dad, he, his 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, where she went, at Tufts, or something like that. My first question to him was, who's your vet? You know?

• 33:52Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  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 veteran vet in his life with his animal, you know?

• 34:19Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, I want to just rescue a dog right now and go to your vet, just, just to work with that, work with that vet, you know?

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Exactly. Exactly. So those moments are really powerful, and not enough people even consider them. All right. So, you know, you can, you can go and do all of this stuff with, 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, in like the boring marketing in community, though, are trying to start, you know, figuring out like, hey, how can I go and offer a service to, you know, these businesses? So this is just like a screenshot of like what the boring funnels product produces. But again, like, do whatever you want. I have a tool that helps me, you know, find

• 35:06Speaker 01

  the prospects, score the prospects, get the contact info, build the pitch, and then deliver, you know, a high-value proposal with that build in about 15 minutes. So do it however you want, like, no, you know, no obligation there, of course. But this is kind of how, how I approach it. Find, pitch, and deliver. All right. So, 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,

• 35:46Speaker 01

  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. But 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,

• 36:28Speaker 01

  or going out the door. You know, so one plumbing job at, you know, $1,714 pays for 13, you know, 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.

• 36:55Greg Isenberg?

  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, some of these Main Street businesses, it's, it's appalling, honestly, with, I mean, 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, you know, it's in some ways remarkable that any of these websites, or some of these websites, convert at all.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it really is. It really is. I agree. So just in terms of pricing, like, this is kind of like the whole, like, you know, agency prices, software costs. Like, it's a great time to create a high-margin business, approach it like a service business, but, you know, running it with AI. And, you know, 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

• 38:18Speaker 01

  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, 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, like, don't go try to sell them something. Go and do it for free, and prove that what you're trying to do works, you know? The, the cost to you is tokens and some of your time, you know? It's not like you have to go hire a team and do all this stuff to build

• 39:03Speaker 01

  out like a new website, or a funnel, or a campaign for a local business. Go and do it for free, and 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.

• 39:19Greg Isenberg?

  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 am 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

• 40:04Greg Isenberg?

  are doing. And you have to just wake up every morning and repeat yourself, 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 actually just, you know, I was watching Toby, co-founder, CEO of Shopify. You know, Shopify is like 150, $200 billion company. The guy does the exact same thing to himself. So here you have a founder CEO, you know, one of the wealthiest people on the planet, is repeating a mantra to him, to himself, because the power of positive thinking does help you.

• 40:47Speaker 01

  I couldn't agree more. And I think that's exactly right. And I would love to, I'd love to actually see an episode on mindset sometime from you. Like, I would watch the heck out of that. There's a bunch of great books out there, like, I mean, Tony Robbins, man, like, you know, his whole sort of thing is around, around that. And look at the leaders and out there in the world that, you know, that trusts him.

• 41:11Greg Isenberg?

  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? Sometimes the sauce is,

• 41:37Greg Isenberg?

  And like, sometimes that is the sauce that you kind of need, but people don't really want it, but please let me know.

• 41:44Speaker 01

  Cool. Man, I used to spend so much time reporting in my agencies, like, that's a solved problem. You know, AI can help you there. No worries when it comes to, you know, 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, you know, 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.

• 42:25Speaker 01

  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.

• 42:33Greg Isenberg?

  That's not just all you got. You know, this has been super saucy, super interesting. I think in a lot of ways, this whole episode doesn't feel like, like nothing you said was like reinventing the wheel, but that's kind of like the whole point. I love that you shined light on this opportunity. Thank you for coming on. You know, you've got a criminally under-followed YouTube channel and you've 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?

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Well, my dogs are barking, so sorry about that if it comes in through the audio. But, 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, 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 in 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.

• 43:51Greg Isenberg?

  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

• 44:04Greg Isenberg?

  for all sorts of people, but mainstream, you know, in particular. So I hope people really liked 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.

• 44:18Speaker 01

  Thanks a lot, Greg. See you soon.