Don't Sell AI Automations - Do THIS Instead!

This might sound counterintuitive, but you should not be selling AI automations. Here's 3 reasons why. The first reason is because the prices have been going down. So in economics, you have your supply and you have your demand, and if they are in sync, then everything's good. But if all of a sudden you got more demand than supply, there will be an upwards pressure on price until we get to a new equilibrium. But the reverse is also true. So when supply goes up and demand stays the same or goes lower, there will be a downwards pressure on price until we establish a new equilibrium, which is what's happening here. So the prices of AI automation services have been coming down as more and more people learn this skillset. And I never want to be in a business where my skillset becomes a commodity. Now, the second reason why you should not be selling AI automations is because it's hard to scale. You only have 24 hours in a day, and so there's only so many clients that you can take on. Also, every single business will have their own unique workflows and processes, so every single automation that you're building will be bespoke and custom. So it's hard to create this repetitive system that you can use over and over again. Even if it's in the same niche, I guarantee you they might use a different tool here than the other business, and so it's a whole new API integration that you will need to create for them. Now, the third reason why is because it's hard to staff your team. This kind of goes to the second point that I just talked about as well. Because it's not really scalable, every single project is unique, it's also hard to find talent. So one project might need someone with this particular skill set, but the other project will need someone with a different skill set. And so you're constantly interviewing and hiring people for every single job, and that is not a repeatable system. That is scalable, but there's a better solution to that. So instead of selling AI automations, why don't you find common themes to problems that these business owners have and turn those AI automations into a micro SaaS? And that's exactly what I'm going to show you how to do in today's training video here. So let's dive into it. You only need 2 tools to get started, and they are Zapier as well as lovable. So basically what we're going to first do is find a problem that we can solve, and then we can connect it to an AI automation or agent on the backend. And then this then will allow us to take on as many clients as we want. Every single person can now use our automation or agent because now we have that frontend. We can charge a lower fee to access our micro SaaS, but this is infinitely more scalable for us because we can take on one client, to 100 million different clients, right? All at the same time. All right, so without further ado, let's dive into it. So what I'm going to build today is a lead generation micro SaaS. So essentially, a lot of people come to me and they said, Helena, how do I find more leads? So I know it's a problem shared by many, many different business owners. So what we're going to do is use Lovable to build a front end, which is where the user can put in their search criteria for their leads, and then this is going to trigger a Zapier automation which is then going to search for those leads. And we're going to use a Zapier agent to build this. And best of all, we can build all of this without writing one single line of code. All right, let's dive into it now. So we're in Lovable, and we can put in our prompt here. So basically, just describe in a few sentences what you want this software to look like. Okay, I have finished my prompt here. I put in, I want to build a lead generation micro-SaaS. The interface should allow the user to put in a niche such as dentist, hairdresser, plumber, etc., and a location. The user should also be able to choose the number of leads they want to scrape, There will also be a login/logout system. There will be a settings tab where the users can see the amount of remaining leads that they have. 1 credit equals 1 lead. If they don't have enough credits, they will not be able to execute this request. All users start off with 100 free credits. Okay, so now we can tell Lovable to go off and actually build this micro SaaS for us, and it's quite fun to see because of how fast these vibe coding platforms can actually execute and build. So we can see that Lovable has already been thinking about what it wants to build. It's telling us the key things it wants to include in this app, and then it wants us to now connect this to Super Bass. So you go up here and you click on Manage Super Bass, Connect to Super Bass, and We want to connect this to a project. We have to create a new project here. So for every single Lovable project that you have, you will connect it to a new Super Bass project here. Okay, I have connected it to my Super Bass backend, and you can see we have the green connected button here. Now we are ready to rock and roll. So, I have connected to Super Bass, please continue building. All right, so it's been about a minute or 2, and our login page here is completed. Now, one thing Lovable forgot to add in was the forgot password button. So you can notice here that I told it to add it in. And again, we're just using English here to communicate and to code, which has never existed before. So like, if you were to write all the code for a login system from scratch, it would take you at least half a day to do so. And now we can do it within a matter of minutes. Like, the advanced advancement in terms of tech breakthroughs here is just enormous. So let's give this a test and see what happens here. So you can see we have login, logout, and if I go into my Super Bass account, we can actually see the users we have, and this is where we can configure all of the backend settings here, right? So you can see I already registered for an account. You can also go down here to the various different integrations to add or extend your database. There's a lot of functionalities in here. This is where you can see all of your users, any backend databases that you need. In the project settings, this is where you can configure and add in your API keys so that they are secure and they won't get stolen from other people. Okay, and if there is anything that you are confused about with Super Bass, you can even ask Lovable here in the chat. So if you turn on the chat, what it will do is it won't build something for you. You can just chat and ask it project questions. Okay, so let me log in here and I'll show you what the first version of our application now looks like. And as you can see, it's actually not much. We can see that what the fields that we have asked for are there. We can select the niche, the location, and the number of leads that we scrape here. And I actually just don't really like the bottom section here where it actually shows everything to us. Like, I would prefer that it's all in the settings section. So let's go back to the dashboard and let's ask it to remove this section. What we can do is just take a screenshot of the sections and then put it into Lovable. So you can see we can upload the different sections here and I can say I Don't like this section and it's repetitive. Please remove it. And then I had to make sure the chat is turned off and we can see that. Another thing we can do with Lovable is click on the edit button. And then once we click on this edit button, you can see we can highlight different sections. And this is another way we can tell AI exactly which section we want it to change up. All right, so while Lovable is thinking about this, what we're going to do is we are actually going to go into Zapier and start configuring our Zap. So inside of Zapier, we're going to go up here and click on Create New Zap, and we can use Copilot to create our Zap. Let's see how well Copilot works here. I need a webhook. All right, so we can see Zapier Copilot is thinking here, and it's going to build out the Zap for us, hopefully. So the less work we can do, the better. Okay, great. We can already see our webhook is already built. And then we have the email hook, email built here. Okay, so it did okay. It did skip the Zapier agent step in the middle here. All right, so the first step is we need the webhook, and then the second step of what we need is that it's a Zapier agent. And what the agent is going to do is that it's going to look for all the leads given the criteria that we have specified, and then it's going to send out everything in an email to the user. So that's the way we're going to configure this. Now, a webhook is basically a way for software to, to talk to another software. So just imagine you want to phone up your friend, right? You would need that friend's phone number in order to call them up. So for software, that phone number for one software to talk to another is called a webhook. Okay, so that's probably the simplest way to explain this. And so what's happening here is we need this webhook to communicate whenever a user puts in a request here. It can then go into our Zapier automation here. And so basically, whenever this webhook is called or triggered, Then this automation is going to run. So that's basically what we're saying here. All right. Now what we need to tell Lovable, we're going to, I'm going to click on the edit button, is whenever someone clicks on the generate leads button, it will call this webhook. Okay. Whenever the user clicks on the generate leads button. Call this webhook. Okay. And we also need to add in the information to store onto this webhook as well. So let's stop this for a second and say, and modify this a bit. Send the niche location and number of leads. In the webhook. Okay, because we would need to know the information to send over to Zapier, and the way that we are sending over this information is via a webhook. And I actually don't like that it has this section here as well, so I can say remove this section as well. Okay, so click on edit. And select this section and then click Enter. Okay, so now we have a clean UI with 3 fields that the user can choose from. I know it looks kind of plain here, but hey, if it works, it's a great MVP or minimum viable product for us to test to see if it's actually something that our target market will be interested in. Okay. So this is done. All right. So now let's say dentist. Let's test it out in New York City. And let's go with 10 leads and let's press on generate leads. Okay. And now we're going to go over here and click on test trigger and we can see, woo! Our trigger has been pulled and we can see that it's pulled in the request dentist, New York City, number of leads, 10. So that means that this trigger is working. So now we can continue with the selected records and now we create a Zapier agent. So what we see here, the step by step by step, this is called an automation. An agent can work within an automation as well. An agent is basically a tool that takes different LLMs or large language models and different tools, and you don't need to specify the step by step of how it works. It will just know what to do based on the prompt that you have given it. I have a more in-depth tutorial on this. I'll link it below as well if you want to check that out. So we can see here that we have selected Agent as the event. It's going to run Agent. It's going to be the action event. Now click Continue. And here is where we can select the agent to use. And of course we don't have an agent, so we need to create one here. So what we're going to do is go back to the dashboard here. Click on Agents right here, and now we can create a custom agent. These are all pre-made agents that we can use. Actually, they do have some sample ones for lead gen that we can take a look at. So you can see, instead of telling the agent you need to first scrape the news article time, then the date, then the title, then the publication, All you're doing is telling it, here's all the information to scrape, and the agent will do it. So it's not like a step-by-step-by-step formula, like an automation. It's more flexible than that. Okay. All right. So let's go ahead and create a new agent and let's put in our prompt here. Okay. So I have written out what I want this agent to do. So I told it its job is to search for leads in a certain niche and location. Its job is to return the number of results that the user asked for. So if I asked for 10 dental leads in Seattle, it will return 10 businesses. The output format will be a table with these columns: the name of the business, name of business owner, website, phone number, email, summary of business, and cold outreach email suggestion that we can take a look at. The outreach email will have to be short and to the point, no more than 3 sentences long. Now, we put all this instruction into the Zapier agent, and it's now going to create this agent for us. All right, so we can see our agent has been created, and based on, like, the instructions I have given to this agent, it has actually gone out and made it into a more detailed prompt here, which is great. Okay, so now we just need to add a trigger, and the trigger will be triggered by Zap because whenever this Zap runs, we want this agent to be triggered. Okay, so we can read over these instructions, make any changes we want, and then we can preview and test this agent just to make sure it's giving us the results that we want. Okay, so let's say niche dentist location of leads file just to test it out. All right, and now we can see our outreach agent is going out to complete these searches for us. Something else about Zapier Agent that I love is that You can connect this agent to 7,000+ applications. So we can actually do quite a lot here. Okay. And we can see the quote thought process that this agent is going through. So real quick, while it's doing that, I'll show you what a Zapier agent can do. You can click on add tool and you can insert any of these tools into your Zapier agent. So If you want it to have access to a calendar at some point, you just search for your Google Calendar here and you can add it in just with one click. Again, you know, no coding needed and specify the event that you want. Let's say we wanted to add an event and just like this, like we connected to a calendar, press save and you insert this into the appropriate spot where you want this agent to access that specific tool, right? So super duper easy to do this. And there's also a Copilot button here at the bottom, so you can chat with the Copilot to go back and forth and modify this Zap as you see fit. And we can see this is still running. Okay, so now after it's finished running, we can see we did get the table that we want. With the dental locations in, 5 dental locations in New York. Wow, quite impressive. And this is the result that we want. So now that our agent is working, we go back into our automations and we want to connect this agent into our automation here. And see, now that we have the agent created, now we can select this. And then we have the input message, right? So this is where we fill out the information that came through the webhook. So the niche is going to be the niche that the user entered. The location is going to be the location that the user entered. And number of leads will be the number of leads that they entered as well. So yes, we do want the Zap to pause until the agent replies. And lastly, we need a place for the agent to store its output once it finishes generating. Everything. And here, we just put a brief description of that output. So, let's click Continue. All right, so we can see that our agent response has been processed successfully, and we get a table with all of this information. So, everything's working correctly. But if something's not working correctly, here's how you can diagnose the issues. So, go over to your Agent section in your Zapier account, click on the agent, and you can go over to the activities to see exactly what happened inside of each of the runs, and it will actually give you an error message, and you can actually see it in the Needs Action tab here as well. So ours is working, so I'm going to click on Continue, and the last part is to send out an email to the user with all of this information. So we're going to use the Email by Zapier Zap here. And one reason for doing this is also because whenever you're using a Zap that's made by Zapier, it doesn't count towards the number of Zaps that you have inside of your account. So whenever possible, use the made by Zapier apps if you can. So the To field, so we're sending the email to the person who has requested this. Oh, and now I noticed that we actually did not send over this information. With our webhook. So as you're building this, you will notice sometimes you forget things. So now I had to go back to Lovable and tell it, please include the user's name and email into the webhook as well. And now whenever I do another run, it will also send the name and email of the user in the webhook as well. And let's go back here, continue, and let's tell it to find new records. Okay, see, our second record has come in, and we can see this time it did pull the niche, location, number of leads, user email, and username as well. So let's continue with this record. Now, let's go— the last step is to just email this out to the user that has requested these leads, right? So the to email, we had to go into the webhook, get the email address of the user, and the subject will be your scraped leads. Okay. And the body will be, hi, insert name, right, of user. Here's the leads. that you've requested. You can probably write a better email, but this is what I'm going with. And then we want to insert the table that we have just gotten back from the Run Agent. So here we press the Add button, and then we want the result of the agent response, right? So we're going to expand on Run Agents. And the agent response here is, is what we want, this table here. Okay. So from name will be my name. And then I can put in my email here, reply to product camps. Okay. And that is it. So let me now go into my email to show you what this email looks like. And boom, you can see We now have our lead in a nice table with the name of the business, the name of the owner, their phone number, their contact email, summary of their business, and even an outreach email that we can use. Okay, so now to make this app live, the last step we need to do is to go into Lovable here and actually publish the app. So by default, you will have a default web domain that's lovable.app. You can also add in your own custom domain here as well. So once you have purchased your domain, you just need to change the DNS records of that domain so that you can make this any domain that you want. But literally just one click, click on Publish, and this app is now live here. Now what's great about this in summary is that you can go from an idea in your head to an MVP that you can test out with your target audience within a matter of minutes. As you can see here, it took me about half an hour or so to create this app that I can now share with business owners who are coming to me with problems about lead generation. So the key here is to identify problems and then create a micro SaaS that includes a front end, back end, as well as automations that solves a unique problem for your prospects, for your clients. And this is great because it's infinitely scalable. So now instead of building a custom lead generation automation for every single client, now I have this one app and whenever someone comes to me with this specific need, I can now point them to this application and charge for it over and over again. This is how I can scale my time and also only have one automation to maintain. Whenever I want to improve on the software, I can just improve on the backend myself and all the users will be able to get all of the updates all at once. Instead of me having 10 different clients and fixing 10 automations, now I just fix one. So I love microsats for this reason, and with Vibe Coding tools, it has been easier than ever before to create microsats. I hope you'll give this a try. If you got anything out of this tutorial, please like and subscribe. Also, I have a free AI automations training that you can sign up for below as well, so make sure you get yourself registered in my free course if you want to dive deeper into AI Vibe Coding etc. Thank you so much for joining me for today's video, and I'll see you next time. Bye for now.