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So I caught a wave early
When AI voice first started coming out I started a business setting up AI Receptionists for businesses.
It would answer their missed calls, handle after hours calls, book appointments.
My primary 2 markets were cash pay medical clinics (like Botox, Cosmetic Surgery, MedSpas, etc) and home service companies.
Here's how the downward spiral happened
At first we had built and were selling our own AI SaaS platform
But REALLY quickly a bunch of super cheap ones started popping up that did the same exact thing or more than ours
And then after that, all the CRM's and business phone systems started just having AI Call Answering as a built in feature.
So there was really no need for our 3rd party software anymore.
What I pivoted to was JUST selling the set up, prompt engineering basically.
I shut down our software (almost everyone churned and went with the free options anyways) to save on hosting fees and stuff
And we were basically doing prompt engineering for people. They had the AI call answering feature free in their CRM, but we'd set it up to work right, because that was really hard at the time
THEN programs came out that made it really easy for these companies to generate the prompt on their own that worked just as good as what they were paying us for. So we were obsolete.
This all happened FAST. Like within the course of a year.
I went from closing multiple deals a week at $3,000 - $5,000 paid up front, to basically zero.
I took a break for awhile and haven't been doing much, I needed to decompress from it all
Now my bank account is in a free fall because of bills and I'm stressed trying to think what I should get into next.
I need to find something else I can sell in the 3-5k range, where I can do outbound so I don't have to run ads and wait around passively for deals to come in, and something that's in demand.
The AI worked so well because it was the trendy in demand thing at the time. It took almost no effort to close deals.
The only other thing I can think of would be just starting a marketing agency, but that's way more labor intensive.
Part of me thinks I quit too soon and should have just tried going up market, maybe Enterprise level.
Any thoughts?
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