If I had to restart my AI agency from zero in 2026, I would focus on these three things. What to sell, who to sell it to, and how to actually get clients without spending a single dollar. I've been running my own AI agency for over a year now.
It's done multiple six figures. I've done hundreds of builds. And during that time, I've realized that these three questions, what to sell, who to sell it to, and how to actually sell it are the only ones that actually matter if you're someone who wants to turn AI into an actual profitable career.
And in this video, we're going to dive into all three of those questions and their answers. And luckily for you, none of this is really that complicated. Even the AI stuff is pretty simple.
It's just the execution that's difficult. But we're going to talk about the execution and the theory today. So, by the end of this video, you have a strong foundation to go into 2026, ready to start your own AI agency and make money in this booming space.
So, let's begin with what actually sells. And this is what trips people up the most because they think they need what you see here. They need 20, 30, 40, 50 AI agents and automations in their back pocket ready to go.
And they also need to be an AI expert, right? They need to be one step below someone with a PhD in machine learning. They need to know it all.
But the fact is the technical bar is way lower than you think. And the amount of automations and agents that actually sell that people actually buy is way smaller than this because it's really just these four AI systems or variations of them that people actually spend money on. And that's rag retrieval augmented generation, lead generation automations, voice agents, and content creation automations.
And the commonality between these all four is that they have a clear value ad and it's easy to explain the ROI to someone who isn't technical. So let's start with rag. Now rag retrieval augmented generation.
The ROI for this is that you're creating an AI system for the client that can connect to any data source they want. What does that mean? It means instead of just looking at chat GBT, you now have chat GBT that's a member of your team and has context of all your organization's best practices, the projects they're working on, etc.
Next is lead generation automations. Now, lead generation automations again have a very clear ROI. It's an automation.
It's an AI system that brings in more clients for your clients. It's going to source leads like this Google map scraper. It's going to enrich the leads like we see here with Tableau.
It's then going to create some sort of custom messaging where it takes all that data before spitting out that custom message and pushing it to somewhere where we can conduct cold outreach at scale like it instantly. Next, we have voice agents and the value ad here. Again, pretty simple to explain.
I have an AI system that can act as a sales rep or receptionist for a fraction of the cost and it works 24/7 and it's able to do essentially anything a Huing can do. As you can see here, this is an example of an inbound voice agent and it can check availability, get bookings, book appointments, modify appointments, cancel appointments, etc. , etc.
, etc. Very easy to tie into a CRM, and we can essentially give it any functionality we want. And then last on the list are content creation automations.
This is the one that's trending the most, and that's because these tools are getting so good, and you're seeing the popup everywhere. But they can be really simple. It can be a simple automation like this that just streamlines the entire video or image creation process or it can be something like this which is much more complicated.
And now while we aren't creating necessarily content with an automation like this this is all about content research and ideation and again creating a pipeline from idea to content. And out of all of them, I would say content creation, while it is the one that's trending the most, it's the hardest to execute well because it's so varied and a lot of it does depend on the creative skill of the user, but it's one that does sell and everyone is interested in this. So, that answers the question of what you sell and really what do you spend your time getting good at.
Now, let's be honest, if you are not technical at all, even though you don't need to necessarily know how to code to do any of these things, this is extremely daunting seeing these in front of you. So, is it realistic to go from completely non-technical to selling these in maybe a month? Yes.
Genuinely, yes. First of all, because you don't even need to become an expert in all four. There's people who make an entire living just selling something like voice agents, for example.
But you can get a pretty solid no code level of expertise to create these if you go through something like my N&N masterclass series that I'll link above. Truthfully, spending your weekends for a month gets you up to the technical level. That's good enough.
Beyond that, you just need to get good enough to understand where to go when you have a question because clients will ask you to create things that you've never created before. But if you know if that they're a possible and b the answers out there, that's enough to move forward with a project. And lastly, just so you know, all the templates that I've been showing here um you can get for free inside of my school community.
There's a link to that in the comments. So let's move on to question two which is who do I sell to? Now, there's kind of a spectrum here, right?
So, on one end of the spectrum, we have like mom and pop shops, right? Do we want to sell to mom and pop shops or that, you know, local nail salon around the corner? No.
Absolutely not. Why? Because they have no money.
Okay? They have no money. They have no idea what you're actually selling to them.
So, it's just not worth your time. Now, on the other end of the spectrum, right, we have like enterprise, right? Think very large companies.
Do you think these enterprise companies are going to listen to your pitch? Person who has never sold a single AI thing in their life and just started learning about AI the other month. No, they're just not going to listen to you.
You aren't at this level yet. And frankly, it's not worth either of your times. Nor do you even understand the like morass of red tape you're going to have to navigate to get those clients.
So, what does that leave? Well, it actually leaves us in this sort of like sweet spot, right? is the sweet spot of a smalish to medium-sized company that's doing anywhere from like 2 to 10 million ARR, right?
They have money, they have no time, but they have kind of dabbled in AI already and they've worked with, you know, outside freelancers and outside consultancies to do this sort of thing. So, they understand how this process works, right? This is the sweet spot.
You want people with money with no time who actually understand what it is you're selling. So this then drives the conversation to the idea of the niche. Do you need a niche?
Right? Is a specific industry you need to be targeting? Right?
Like do you need to be doing med spas or nail salons or do you need to be doing marketing companies? Right? What is the niche?
What is a bias? Well, at the beginning, I would say you do need a niche and why is that? Well, you need a niche because we need to solve your credibility issue.
Right? At the beginning, you've never sold a single client anything. You probably just got into AI a couple months ago.
Why would anybody buy from you? Well, the idea is you choose a niche and you start targeting people that you already have experience in that industry or you're really passionate about it, right? And the reason that gives you credibility is because when you go and you talk to these people, it's not about the AI, right?
It's actually not about AI at all at the beginning because you can't lean on that. That can't be your credibility that you're an AI expert because you're not. What you are though is a problem solver.
Okay? And you're a problem solver in that niche because you understand that niche. You've either lived it, you've been in their shoes, or you just understand it at a very deep level.
So your niche, that is where your expertise comes from. Because when you sit on the other end of a call with somebody and you say, "Hey, I understand your problem because I've lived your problem, been there, done that. Oh, by the way, now here's the AI tool that can help you solve it.
" Well, that has a lot more credibility than just saying like, "Oh, I did, you know, one AI automation with one guy one time. he's my case study, but it has nothing to do with your problem. Right?
That that doesn't sell. What sells is saying, "I understand your problem. I've been where you're at.
Here's a solution, and I know it works because again, I've done your thing. " And so, that's why you need to have a niche that leans on probably something you've done in the past, like a previous job or something or something that you're really passionate about, right? That's how you're going to choose your niche at the beginning because it also simultaneously solves your credibility issue.
Now, over time, you're going to get a lot of inbound leads that are kind of based on your personal brand, and we'll talk about in a second. And your niche becomes you don't really need it as much anymore because you've already built that trust. But this is how you figure out who you sell to and also like how would you sort of the niche creation.
Now, let's talk about the most important part, which is how do you get clients? And really, what we're talking about is driving demand. How do we drive demand for ourselves in our business?
And this is important to really internalize because at the beginning you're all going to be focused on this which is the AI piece, the supply side, right? How do I get technically competent? How do I actually deliver a product to someone that I promised them I would?
Right? It's important to do, but you're going to spend way too much time on this because in reality, you should spend probably 10% of your time on actually creating supply, getting good technically, and you should be spending 90% of your time driving demand. Because just think about it.
If you were the greatest NAN, you know, agent builder of all time and nobody knew who you were, you're going to make zero dollars, right? It's like Hermosi says, your problem is nobody knows you exist. On the other side of the equation, if you were just amazing at one thing, right?
If you were just amazing at creating agentic rag or just amazing at creating voice agents, yet a million people knew who you were and you were just a one-trick pony, you would be rich, right? You would literally be rich. So, it's important we understand how important driving demand is and then how to actually do it.
And how do we do it for free? Now, there's two ways to drive demand without spending a bunch of money. And the first one is leaning on your warp network.
Now, your warp network is friends, family, co-workers, former co-workers. And these are the people that are going to, I guarantee you, bring your first client. And it doesn't have to be a hard sell.
It's as simple as saying, "Hey, started an AI agency. I help you know businesses implement AI solutions. Do you know do you know anybody who would need my help or need my work?
That's it. They can read between the lines if they need your help, but I promise you if you reach out to enough people, and I'm talking 30, 40, 50 people, somebody will give you a warm lead. This is the easiest way to get clients right away.
You could get one tomorrow doing this. And the second way is through social media. Now, social media is going to be the exact opposite of the warm network because while the warm network, right, we can get a client very, very quickly on a very short timeline, but we're going to burn through the warm network very fast, right?
Very quickly, you know, the actual ROI and that goes down. You compare that to social media, right? It's actually going to take a long time for social media to get up and running.
But when it does, it's pretty meteoric. Okay? And over the long run, social media is what you're going to care about.
Now, everyone's scared of social media, right? easy for you to say, "Chase, you're here on YouTube actually doing this. " The problem is you're not going to be able to sustain a business on a warm network, and you probably aren't going to be able to sustain it long term on something like cold outreach either, unless you're just really, really good at it.
Social media also drives us inbound leads. And inbound leads are the gold leads, right? Because they already know who we are, right?
They've been seeing us on social media. And because they've seen us on social media, we've already built trust and confidence in them. the entire power dynamic has shifted because we don't really have to sell ourselves as much.
They already want to work with you. And think of the scale, right? If I make one video for 10 people, it's the same amount of work as if I make one video for 10 million people.
Okay? So, social media is the greatest lever you can pull today when it comes to marketing. And it isn't negotiable whether you're going to do this or not if you want to actually succeed with your AI agency in 2026.
So, we could do like a 10-hour video on social media and your AI agency, but let's just hit the highlights in about three minutes. So, first things first is the frequency, right? How often do you need to post for it to actually matter?
Well, first of all, you need to get it in your head that you need to be posting at least two times a day on short form. I'm talking Tik Tok, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts, right? Nice thing is you make one video for that, you just repost it on the other ones.
You also need to understand that it's going to take you about a 100 posts before you get any traction whatsoever. So that's almost two months of posting twice a day. Your posts are going to suck and you're going to get no positive feedback whatsoever.
This right here, 99% of people can't do it. And it's in large part why their AI agency will fail, right? They refuse to actually put in the work on social media to actually get a result, right?
You just need to outlast most people. People will not do this. I guarantee you 99.
99% of people will not do this. But this is what it requires just to get in the door. Okay?
That's just to get in the door. And then from there you continue that cadence and then you can actually get some feedback and data that matters of what people actually like. In terms of LinkedIn, right, this is one everyone should do because you don't actually have to get in front of a camera.
You should be doing it three times a week, right? I will say so myself, this is something I have slacked off on an extreme amount. But there is no excuse if you're serious about this and you're just getting started not to start doing LinkedIn three times a week.
The audience is more mature. There's actually less content and less competition on LinkedIn. And it's tech, so you actually don't have to do the psychological battle of going on camera.
And this actually is enough at the beginning, right? You just need a ton of short form content out there so people understand who you are, they see your face. Now, over time, specifically after you get over that 100 posts amount, you can start going more into long- form content.
Now, long form content, right, we're talking things like YouTube, we're talking things like long LinkedIn posts, right? Even better is something like an actual community, whether it's school, community, Discord, whatever. The idea here is they've seen your face all over the place on social media.
We're now pushing them down the funnel from the top to what I would really call the middle, right? Where they see long form stuff of you and they get a better idea of who you are and what you're about. It's here that they make the decision of whether they even want to work with you and give you money.
Okay? This gets their attention. They see your face.
They have what you're about. This is down here on YouTube long form stuff. This is where you actually display true competency.
This is where you actually display true personality. This is where really you build your personal brand. Okay.
The problem here is that you don't want to focus on this right away probably because you just don't have enough content or even know what you're doing. This is sort of your playground where you get to kind of like feel out and test things. And then eventually from here, you know, this is where you actually push them to whatever it is, right?
This is where you have like your website. This is where you have your actual offer, right? This is where there's a place where they can contact you and actually make money.
Now, we could go into way way more more detail about this. Hey, how do we do the funnel? Something with like mini chat, right?
How how do what's the really nitty-gritty of pushing them to these places? Um, out of the scope for this video, but that is a quick quick overview of kind of how you should think about social media. But the biggest thing is the frequency, right?
Everybody wants some sort of shortcut or everybody wants some sort of like AI avatar that's going to do it for them. No, you just need to post a ton 100 posts in 50 days. And really just look at creators that you like and copy their posts.
Not word for word, but their templates, their hooks, all that um frequency. But nobody does this. This is why everybody fails.
Everybody fails because of this. So that really though is how you market yourself and how you actually find clients, right? This is sort of the the funnel process, right?
This is the inbound funnel process of social media and that's how you get clients. So that's pretty much the video for today. Okay, in terms of additional resources, again, you can find all the templates inside of my free school.
I also have linked the paid school, the Chase AI Plus, where I go into more detail, like literally here's a 90-day, you know, guide of how to start your own AI agency. And I also include a social media playbook, which goes way deeper into this. Like we really go into everything from like how to optimize your profile, how to set up an inbound lead funnel using things like you know manyhat like how to do hooks, how to find template creators, all the social media uh playbook stuff is in the paid community as well.
But even if you don't do the paid stuff, definitely check out the free tons of free stuff. Um and yeah, let me know in the comments what you thought. Um, I really think this is a booming space and really I think it's a great space to get into because there's a lot of kind of just like garbage out there in the AI agency space and it's it's just a place that's like begging for more competent people to come in there who aren't just BSing everybody, right?
Who actually have some technical knowledge and aren't lifestyle influencers, but they're really trying to like use AI to help other people. So, um, again, let me know in the comments what you thought.
