The easiest niche to scale to 10k/mo In 2024

Hey, my name is Jimmy Fung, and in today's video I will be breaking down how to pick the best niche for your lead generation agency. So I put together this flow charts and let's jump right into it. So the first thing I wanted to talk about was kind of the biggest mistakes people make when picking a niche, right? And I narrowed it down to six different common mistakes. Six of the most common mistakes, and literally the very first one is believing that you need a perfect niche niche. And I know when I was first starting out, my only generation agency, I made this mistake because you see a lot of different people online, there's a ton of different people making different videos about picking a niche. And people kind of position it as, here's the best niche, here's the perfect niche that you need to go into, that you need to sell to in order to successfully make money and successfully build your business. And in my opinion that's completely incorrect is there's no such thing as a perfect niche. And what I mean by that is every single niche works. It's just about how you approach it and the strategies that you implement in order to get results for your niche. So understand that you don't need a perfect niche. There's no such thing as a perfect niche. And I think the best part about selling lead generation as a service is because you're helping B2B companies generate more leads, generate more sales opportunities, generate more sales calls. It literally applies to a bunch of different industries and a bunch of different niches. And so the first thing you have to understand and yet to get into your head is there's no such thing as a perfect niche, and there's no such thing as needing a perfect niche. The second most common mistake I see people make, and for me, again, right, I made this mistake, was spending way too long to pick a niche. So when I first started my own lead generation agency, I think I probably spent almost two weeks just researching different niches, watching different YouTube videos, trying to pick again, the perfect niche. And this always ties back to thinking you need a perfect niche. But what I realized after just working with a bunch of different industries and helping a bunch of people start and scale their own lead generation agencies is it's just important that you pick one and you just go with it as a result, versus just, you know, spending two weeks, spending three weeks, spending even a couple of days trying to look for the best niche for you. This is something where, in my opinion, you should only spend an hour or two max if you want to get really good results and make money with your own lead generation agency. You can in a relatively short period of time. Because at the end of the day, picking a niche is really not that important because of the type of services that you're selling as a lead generation agency, because your service applies to a bunch of different industries. The third biggest mistake that people make is copying other people's niches. So when you see online, when you go on YouTube, if you see me, for example, I'm in recruitment agencies, it's very easy to just automatically say, well, this, this guy is doing recruitment agencies. He just made $50,000 a month selling to recruitment agencies. Let me just sell to that same niche as well. And I know this was one of the largest cardinal mistakes that I made when I was first starting out was I would just look at what everyone else was doing and just straight copying. And there's nothing wrong with getting inspiration from other people. In fact, I kind of recommend it because it's, in my opinion, kind of a smart thing to do. Because if other people are seeing success doing a specific thing, specific strategy, working with a specific niche, there's a very strong chance that it just works. If they're in it, it's because it works. But the problem with copying is blind copying. That's the problem with it is where you don't do any research, you don't do your own background thinking, your own critical thinking, and just blindly copy someone else's niche. Because at the end of the day, just because you copy someone else's niche does not mean you will see success, does not mean you make money and, and does not mean you see results. You have to put in the work and you need to use your own brain and kind of think about if that is the best path for you. It's kind of like if you were to go to university, right, or you were to go to college and all of your friends are studying business, you wouldn't just automatically go and study business as well. Because that might not be a good fit for your current skillset, for your experiences, for what you enjoy doing. You kind of need to just do your own research and think about the best scenario for you. And that's the exact same thing as copying other people's niche. The next mistake that I see people make is there's a lot of people online who say in order to pick the perfect niche, what you should first do is talk with your niche, set up these meetings to get their inputs, ask them for market feedback. And even though this works well, and I don't really see a problem with it. Personally, whenever I pick a niche, when I first started in the recruitment agency niche, I didn't talk to any recruitment agencies. In fact, I don't know a single person who ran a recruitment agency. When after that I transitioned into software development, I don't know a single person running a software development agency. And I think a lot of people think that you need to go and collect market data, which makes sense because that's part of the research. But there's more efficient ways to go and collect your data, collect your feedback than, than setting up 30 minute calls with recruitment agencies or 30 minute calls with marketing agencies, software development agencies, just to ask them a couple questions, right? There's a lot easier ways to go about doing that and I'm gonna share with you how to do that in today's video. But you 100% do not need to be talking with their niche. If you happen to know someone who runs a marketing agency and that's your friend, sure you could send them a text message, you could message them, ask them some questions, but at the end of the day, the main idea of what I'm talking about is how to do things quick. And, and if you spend a week or two weeks just setting up a few calls with different owners of, let's say, recruitment agencies, marketing agencies, you're just wasting time basically because you could find all the information you need through the power of the Internet, through Google, through ChatGPT, through Facebook groups. There's a lot of different ways that don't involve you needing to waste your time and waste the other person's time by jumping on these calls and just asking them some questions. The next biggest mistake I see people make is believing in saturation. And I'm going to go over that in a bit as well. But, but the overall gist of it is saturation does not exist. And I'm going to explain to you why. And then the final mistake that CBO make is niche hopping. So inside my own consulting business where I work with lead generation agency owners, one of the biggest things that I see is someone will just pick a niche. Let's say they're starting a marketing agencies and then they'll start sending emails and after three weeks they're not getting the results that they're looking for. Maybe they only had one or two sales calls, which by the way isn't even that bad if you're first starting out and, and then they automatically assume that it's the niche that doesn't work that they need to pick a new niche, joined to a different industry, or this or that. And that's one of the largest mistakes you can make. Because the way I see it is once you pick a niche, you want to stick with it for a couple of weeks minimum at least. You want to let your campaign run through. And the reason why is because in the beginning, you obviously wouldn't know what you're doing. Right. When I was first starting recruitment agencies, I didn't really know what I was doing. So the first few sales calls I ever took was. Was essentially burner calls, if that makes sense, where I was just getting the gist of it, learning the ins and outs of the industries. On the sales calls, I would hear terms like business development, retained search, contingency search. And in my mind, I was just like, what does this even mean? So it took me a couple calls to get into the industry to really learn what it is. And over time, I built a lot of momentum inside of that niche. So the biggest mistake people can make is starting with a niche, and two or three weeks in, they. They just jump to another niche because they're just not getting results. The thing that they should be doing instead is sticking to that niche, letting the campaign play out, scraping more leads and staying in that niche and just committing to a single niche for a sustained period of time. And then once they determine that they don't like that niche or it's just clearly not working, they need to reevaluate. And that's when it would be smart to pick a different niche. But as a whole, you should never just pick a niche and then switch two weeks later or switch three weeks later for no good reason. Right? And that's one of the largest mistakes I see people make. So jumping back into saturation, I put this little graph or little chart together. And what I mean by saturation is saturation really isn't real. What's real is noise. And what I mean by noise is, for example, inside my business, I get pitched a lot. Every single day, I probably get like 10 cold emails. I get 20 to 30 DMs on my Instagram. And it's just people pitching me a bunch of different services. So from that point of view, noise is real in the sense where people are just being bombarded with messages. And yes, different industries and different niches. Certain industries and certain niches get more noise than other industries. That's just a fact. But as a whole, saturation is not real. And what I mean by that is, if a niche is saturated, what that means is it clearly works, it has proof of concept. Because if, let's say marketing agencies, which is kind of like the first niche that everyone thinks of when they're trying to sell lead generation as a service, it's kind of like the default niche, there's a reason a lot of people do it. There's a reason you see a lot of different lead generation agencies selling to marketing agencies. And the reason why is because there's money in that niche. If it doesn't work, or if there's no way to make money inside the marketing agency niche, then obviously no one would do it. You know what I mean? So as a result, if you see a lot of people doing it, again, right, you don't want to just blindly copy people. But take that with a grain of salt and understand that if you see a lot of people doing it, it's because there's money there and it clearly works, right? But the main thing you have to do is you just have to be different. Because again, even inside my own business, I get pitched like 30 times a day now. And, and I look at every single outreach message. So for example, if you're watching this video and you sent me a dm, there's a very strong chance I looked at it and I just never replied. Especially if you're pitching to me. I never replied because I probably got like five other messages within that week saying the exact same thing. If you're trying to sell me copywriting or you're trying to sell me video editing services, I've seen the same scripts over and over again. People just kind of take it like a template and they're saying the exact same thing or the, the angle is the same and obviously it's not going to work. The way to see success in a niche that has a lot of noise is by being different. Be smart about it, right? Use your brain to think about what you can do to be different. Don't just copy what everyone else is doing right away. Which brings me back to the point of copying everyone else blindly. Don't use the same scripts. Try to come up with your own unique value proposition. Try to be a little bit more personalized in your outreach efforts. That is the way to get results in a noisy niche. So enough about market saturation. What are some good examples of good niches? Now back to the reason why I said a perfect niche does not exist is because what we're selling as a lead generation agency, especially if you're selling cold emails as a service, is it applies to a bunch of different industries, a bunch of different B2B industries. And, and what I did was right before this, right before this, recording this video, I used ChatGPT, right? I used the power AI and I just asked it, can you come up with a Short list of B2B industries where I would be able to sell cold outbound prospecting services? And it gave me a list of 15, right? We have SaaS with E commerce, with professional services, a law, accounting, marketing, manufacturing and industrial, healthcare, financial services. The list goes on. You could pause this video and take a look. But every single one of these industries work. Every single one of these niches work. Again, it's just about how you approach it. I know for myself, when I first started my own lead generation agency, I started with recruitment agencies. After that I pivoted into software development agencies and I did marketing agencies, PR firms, logistics companies. So I've sold cold emails as a service to. That's five industries right there, a bunch of different services. And it just works, and it works really well. And again, it's because of the type of service that you're selling. And I think one of the reasons why selling lead generation as a service is so easy to sell is because you're helping business owners make more money. You're helping business owners increase their sales revenues. And the way you're doing that is by generating them sales opportunities. And because of that, business owners see what you're selling as a direct correlation. Oh, if I pay Jimmy, if I work with Jimmy and I pay him $3,000, I can make back $30,000 in return. That's a 10x return on investment. It makes sense. And as a result, that's one of the reasons why I think selling lead generation as a service is relatively easy and is one of the easiest services to sell, especially compared to stuff like copywriting, video editing, Facebook ads, all of that stuff. So here are all examples of good niches. You could use that as inspiration. And what you need to do after this is to do research. And I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. So the next step is I put together kind of like a quick little framework in terms of a guideline to pick a niche. There's six little points that I want to outline here. The first one is the way you should think about picking a niche. You should not be asking yourself, what is the best niche, what is the perfect niche? What you should be asking yourself instead is, is there money in this niche? Meaning do the companies in this niche, do they actually make money and make a Lot of money. Are they high ticket or are they not? The second question you need to ask yourself is can you help them? Because again, yes, cold emails as a service, lead generation, a service works for a bunch of different industries, but you can't help everyone. There's just certain industries where there's just not really too much that you can do much for. So you need to ask yourself, can you actually help them? Do they have a problem and do you have the solution for that? And in terms of more specific guidelines towards picking a niche, the way I want to approach it is there's three general guidelines. The first one is that the niche that you pick should be broad and should not be too specific. So one of the biggest mistakes, and I probably should have put this in the mistakes, but one of the biggest mistakes I see people make is a lot of different people online, a lot of these different gurus on the Internet, on YouTube, they tell you to don't just pick a broad niche, sub niche. So rather than picking marketing agencies, pick Facebook ads agencies, pick UCG agencies. And even though I understand why they say that, I see as a massive flaw. And the reason why is if you're selling cold emails as a service, you want to, at least in the beginning, you want to make sure the industry that you're in is very broad. Meaning there's a lot of these companies, tens of thousands of these companies if possible. And the reason why is because when you're first starting out, you're first starting your lead generation agency, your processes, they're just not that efficient, right? Like you might have different gaps, maybe the landing page you built is not that good, maybe the VSL you put together isn't, that isn't the best. Maybe your code email scripts are not as direct as it could be. And as a result the results you're going to get will be very different. And what I mean by that is if you pick a very small niche, where let's say there's only 500 of these companies, you need to make sure you're maximizing each one of those 500 leads. You need to squeeze each lead to as much as you humanly can. But if you have inefficiencies in your process, it's going to be very hard to squeeze as much as you can. So as a result, that's kind of why I recommend picking a broad niche. Because at least in the beginning, while you're working on all your processes and trying to make them more efficient, you could outweigh that, which is pure volume and I'm not talking about spamming people. What I'm talking about is if you cold email 30,000 recruitment agencies, even if your process isn't the most efficient, even if your VSL isn't the best, even if your cold emails are not as direct as it could be, the sheer fact that you're cold emailing and you're reaching out to 30,000 of these business owners will mean that you're going to get results. It will kind of COVID all the different inefficiencies that you might have in the process. But if you're only emailing a small tam, a total accessible market, you really have to make sure everything that you have is, is just efficient. And as a complete beginner, that's not realistic, right? It's very unrealistic that the very first VSL you put together will be good. That's just not how it works. It's very unlikely that the first cold email campaign you put together will just work and get you a lot of replies. It's just unrealistic. And if you pick a really small sub niche, you're kind of just going to burn through your entire market. The next guideline is make sure whoever it is that you choose as an industry, as a niche, make make sure they're selling to other businesses. Pretty self explanatory. Make sure they're B2B. So if they're realtors and they're selling to consumers because they're helping people buy houses or sell houses, it's not going to work. If you're selling to gyms and gyms are just trying to get gym memberships from regular day to day people, that's not going to work as well. Make sure the industry that you pick, they sell to other businesses, they're B2B. And finally the third guideline is make sure they check their emails consistently. So there are certain industries where people just don't check the emails as much. So for example, certain companies in distributions, right? Or let's say plumbers, those are industries where, let's say a plumber, they might not be checking their emails as much as someone who runs a marketing agency or as much as someone who runs a recruitment agency or even a software development agency. Because emails is not the main channel of communication inside the industry. They now I'm not saying they don't check their emails, it's just they don't check it at the same frequency as someone who's running a software development agency. And as a result it's going to be a lot harder to get in contact with them. So these are kind of the six guidelines that I put together to help you pick a good niche. So any industry that you pick, just ask yourself these six questions and make sure you get answers that show you that this is a good niche. Moving on to conducting research. So this is where it's very important, because even if you pick a niche, you can't just randomly pick a random niche and just start blasting them with emails because they're not going to get results. What you need to do instead is making sure you're conducting research. So I put together a list of topics where you need to ask yourself. And after you do your research, make sure you're able to answer each of these questions. So the first question is understanding if the market they're in is growing or shrinking. What are the economic elements and how does it impact the demand for those industries? Make sure you understand general trends. The second one is understand how does companies inside that niche, inside the industry, how do they conduct business? Is it mainly online? Do they do it virtually? Is it over zooms? What does that look like? The third one is ask yourself how easy are they to contact? So if you pick a niche that is just very challenging to contact from these different lead databases, then obviously it's not going to be that effective and it's going to be very hard. You'll be working harder than you need to in order to get these leads and get their email addresses. The next thing you want to learn is what service do they provide and who do they help? Pretty straightforward. You want to understand what their business models are. If you're selling to recruitment agencies, understand what type of services fall under recruitment, who do they help and how does that look like? Right? So make sure you're doing research. This is very, very important. After that, understand what the typical sales process is. How do they generally generate leads? Is this an industry that's very reliant on word of mouth and referrals? Are a lot of them running ads? Are a lot of them organic leads? Are they already doing cold emails, cold calling? What does that kind of look like generally speaking? After that, understand how do they get paid and how much? And this is very important because if you're trying to sell to a low ticket industry, it's going to be very hard for you to make money because at the end of the day, as a lead generation agency, you want to be making thousands of dollars a month and it's going to be very challenging for you to, let's say charge 2,5k a month. If the services that your client is selling is only for 200 bucks a month, the math just doesn't math. But on the other hand, if you work with a very high ticket industry. So for example, that's one of the reasons why I work with recruitment agencies, because I understand that a recruitment agency, every client that they work with, every client that they sign, they literally take 30% of base salary. Meaning if the roles they're recruiting for are six figure roles, they literally make 25, $30,000 for every single client that they sign. And if they're making $30,000, it completely makes sense to pay me 2.5k after that. These are some of the questions in green that you just want to have answers to. How much do they make per sale? Pretty straightforward. Number two is how many clients do they need? Certain industries need more clients than others. As an example, recruitment agencies, they don't need 10 clients every single month. And even if there were 10 people offering to pay them a million dollars each as a recruitment agency, they wouldn't even have the bandwidth and the capacity to, to work with 100 clients a month. On the other hand, if you're working with SaaS companies, software companies, they might need 100 customers. And if they're only getting five customers a month, and obviously this depends on the ticket price, but generally speaking, five customers per month is not going to work inside the SaaS industry. Right. So those are differences that you need to understand is how many clients do they need? And that will also help you craft your offer for yourself when you're doing outreach to these companies. After that, understand behavioral archetypes. What I mean by that is understand the Persona of the people that you're reaching out to. Are they marketers? Right. If you're reaching out to marketing agencies and the founders of marketing agencies, they're probably marketers. On the other hand, if you're selling to software development agencies, the founder of software development agencies, there's a very strong chance that they have an engineering mind. The way they approach problem solving is through the lens of an engineer. They probably study computer science at school, software development in school. So the way they process information is completely different from someone who is a pure marketer, if that makes sense. So make sure you understand the behavioral archetypes and finally, make sure you understand jargon. Because every single industry have their own unique quirks in terms of how they explain the same concepts. As an example, lead generation, the term lead generation, if you're reaching out to recruitment agencies, they understand what lead generation means. But they use the word business development. Or another example would be for marketing agencies. You could approach them and say, we will help you get new clients, but you wouldn't use the word clients. If you're reaching out to software companies, you might use the word customers. You might use the word rather than sales. Cause you might use the word demo, you might use the word churn, stuff like that. Those are different little differences across each of these industries and its jargon. So make sure when you're picking your niche, make sure when you're picking your industry, make sure you're conducting research. And this is one of the largest mistakes. Again, I probably should have included this in the beginning of the video, but this is one of the largest mistakes people make is people get lazy and they don't conduct research. But I think the biggest thing you want to ask yourself is if you're serious about building your own lead generation agency, you're serious about making thousands of dollars a month, making $10,000 a month with their lead generation agency. Spend some time to do research. It doesn't take that long. This isn't a process that will take you two weeks to do research. It'll take you like two hours max to do research. And how can you expect to see success? How can you expect to make thousands of dollars if you aren't even willing to do the first step, which is research? So make sure you're doing research because a lot of people skip this step. And if you do research, that gives you a natural advantage for over the other 95% of people who are just too lazy to do research into that niche before they even reach out. So how do you actually conduct research? And again, this isn't a process where you need to spend three days doing research. This is a process where you're able to do it within an hour or two max. And what you want to do as a first step is, depending on the industry that you choose, go on YouTube and watch how to actually build that type of business. And the reason why you want to watch these videos is not because you want to build a recruitment agency, but it's because you want to put yourself in the shoes of a recruitment agency owner. And you want to understand how that business model works, how to make money, how they typically reach out to clients, to customers, and what their sales process looks like. So as an example, I put into my YouTube search how to start a recruitment agency. And this is literally the page that I see, right? There's so many different YouTube videos talking about how to build a staffing and recruitment agency. What I would suggest is watching a couple of these. So for example, maybe this first one is 30 minutes long. Watch through this video and see what this guy is saying, right? Watch this video. Just spend a couple minutes. You can even put this video at 2x speed if you need to, because you don't even need to understand the details. You just want to understand at a high level how people would think if they're doing a recruitment agency or if you choose SaaS, software companies, search up how to start a SaaS in 2024, how to start a marketing agency in 2024, and watch through two or three different videos until you feel like you understand at a high level how to actually start that type of business, the type of problems that people have, the type of problems that they solve, what services they sell, how they typically reach out to people, their clients, get customers, that type of thing. Very straightforward. Once you finish watching the YouTube video so that you understand how the actual business model works, your very next step is join different Facebook groups. So over here, this is my Facebook, and this is a Facebook group that I found. It's a recruitment and staffing firm Facebook group, right? The relevant recruiter for recruiting, staffing and executive search firms. And I actually joined this group because when I was first starting out the process, when I first starting my own lead generation agency, this is the exact step that I took. And the reason why you want to join these Facebook groups is again, so you can conduct a little bit more research. This is even better than the YouTube videos because there's 4.8 4800 people members inside this Facebook group. And the vast majority of these people are probably people who run recruitment agencies or people looking to start recruitment agency. So you want to join these groups and the reason why is because you just want to scroll through the Facebook group a little bit and see the type of things that people are talking about, right? You want to get some ideas as to some of the common problems people have. Because if these recruitment agencies, they have a problem, one of the first places, the first resources that they'll leverage are recruitment agency groups because they want to get the answers from all the other people running a recruitment agency, right? So make sure you scroll through this list and you just look at the type of posts that people are making, the type of comments, the type of questions that people are asking, right? So as an example, what we're looking for is, especially if you're selling lead generation service, you might want to see what people are doing to generate leads. So you can literally search stuff like business development, business development. And you want to see what people are asking for, right? So there's people. This guy did a training on business development. There's probably a reason why Donnie, this guy, he is doing a business development workshop is because people are, you know, struggling with this. So business development is lead generation. This guy has a couple of questions about marketing and business development. Business development and for recruiting and search firms is changing the traditional model of business development. So you just want to read through kind of these groups and there's always a couple of these groups. So whatever industry you're choosing, more likely than not, there's no numerous different Facebook groups. This is just as an example as a recruitment agency. And what you want to do is spend 20, 30 minutes just browsing through these Facebook groups until you understand and if you're seeing the same type of questions being asked. So if you see a bunch of people asking about what is the best way to do leads, what's the best way to do cold emails, then you know, it's a common question. So I'm just going to search up a cold email and let's see what shows up, right? So there's people. This is the guy who runs instantly. Has anyone ever used Apollo questions about effective marketing? There's just a lot of different questions, right? This one has six comments. There's probably a better Facebook group than this one, right? That's a little bit more active because this one does look a little bit dead. But the main idea is you want to see what people are saying so that you understand what that looks like. If you have any questions about picking a niche, picking your niche specific to the industry that you're choosing, you can also search that. So, for example, if you're unsure, for example, recruitment agencies, you're unsure what contingency means, you can search it. Contingency. I spelled it wrong. Contingency. And then you can see what people are saying, right? These people are all talking about contingency because we put it in the search term. And this is the process that I personally use in order to pick my niche, in order to do research. And this is the one that you need to be doing as well before you pick your niche. Niche for your own lead generation agency. So that's basically what you want to do in order to pick a niche for your own lead generation agency.