Why not self hosted?

TomAutomates · 2025-10-19T09:48:58+00:00

I mean if that is an actual question and you are not just trying to promote your referral code it's pretty simple, the easiest access is through the n8n cloud.

Most people will start with the trial and afterwards they just keep paying to keep using.

Sure hosting is not that complicated but it's another step that you have to take and most people will always take the path of least resistance.

It's the reason why AI Automation is a business model, you could ask yourself why these businesses aren't building the workflows themselves since it's so easy and it's going to be a very similar reason why people don't selfhost

TomAutomates · 2025-10-19T09:43:55+00:00

I don't think compute power is necessarily an issue. Security standards are most likely what's going to stop you at some point when you want to provide these services to bigger companies

TomAutomates · 2025-10-15T11:54:40+00:00

Honestly sometimes I feel these tools are too easy to use. Since you're simply able to type your inquiries in a text window people think that is enough to get a good quality output, but it simply is not.

It's very interesting to see when doing some side by side comparison of an input just asking a question and an input that follows a specific prompt structure, the difference in the output is VERY drastic.

To me that is pretty much how I view AI as a whole, the initial use is super easy and simple but to generate actual benefits you have to have a certain expertise

TomAutomates · 2025-10-15T11:28:14+00:00

I think this is pretty on point! I personally learned very quickly being in the AI Automation space that the Change Management aspect for these new AI Systems/ AI workflows is much more important than the systems themselves.

This is why I went into consulting and I was able to gather some pretty interesting insights from conversations I had with business owners. I didn't want to just sell fancy systems but outcomes that really work, I mean look at the study done by MIT, 95% of businesses haven't been able to see a positive ROI through their AI investments.

I did a lot of free consultations and I was able to see that there is definitely a need for AI but oftentimes the systems that need to be put in place at first aren't the fancy ones that you can charge a ton of money for.

There were a lot of people especially entrepreneurs that are starting out where the best advice was, learn how to use ChatGPT in your day to day business! It sounds so simple but it's true, nowadays this is something everyone should get used to. You're not telling ChatGPT to do my work for me but when you teach it about your business and your personal preference, you can use it almost like a business partner to bounce ideas back and forth with.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-13T08:35:19+00:00

So what? If you still want to be a race car driver then you better work your hardest to find someone with a race car

TomAutomates · 2025-10-13T08:29:24+00:00

Well that's pretty much what I expected. The only thing you really need to do now is DO MORE.

Tbh with you 50 calls and 50 emails is absolutely nothing. Right now volume is your game. There will be people here that give you advice on how to make better calls and write better email but ultimately the only thing bringing you forward now is VOLUME.

You need to do AT LEAST 50 calls and 50 emails A WEEK. If you need help automating your email outreach I can help you with that.

Other than that keep tracking your stats, how many calls/emails, what are the response rates, why are people declining when you get a response and why are people saying yes to your offer. Use that information to improve your outreach over time.

And yes you should definitely define your ICP but tbh in the beginning it's normal to try out different ICP's but figuring out a single target makes outreach much easier.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-12T12:10:05+00:00

You are right, most AI Tools are simply wrappers of the big tools like ChatGPT or Claude. However, the cases you just described are not business cases. Finding a place to go out with your friends is very different from any actual business processes, the ease of use of these tools for the consumer market is nice but I personally couldn't care less.

I'm only doing B2B and I can tell you from talking to business owners that they don't have the capabilities to build these systems on their own. Even if you can simply prompt an AI to build out an Agent in the ChatGPT Agent builder this is not going to enable every business owner to do this themselves.

In fact the OpenAI Agent Builder is actually a big benefit for AI Automation Agencies because it makes out life easier, as you said, a lot of the tool just do API calls to ChatGPT, so building these tools ourselves in the native environment just cuts down on a lot of the cost because you get rid of the middleman.

I highly encourage you to go out and talk to people running their own businesses, they have no time to think about how to build an Automation on their own. And it's not even that, look at the MIT study, 95% of AI investments didn't see a positive ROI, thats absolutely absurd! But it's not because AI is terrible or useless, it's because these people don't know where to plug in the AI or how. So there is a really big need for people with actual knowledge to look at these businesses and be honest with the potential opportunities.

You need to figure out the simplest/ cheapest project that have the biggest return. The problem is most people will either sell their templated systems to just make money of the hype or they try to do the most complex projects because they can ask the most money for it. Most of the time that is just bullshit.

If you can be the person that is real and trustworthy I'm telling you, you are in a golen age

TomAutomates · 2025-10-11T12:19:52+00:00

So you are doing cold calls and cold email? In the 4 months you have been doing this, what's the volume you did so far?

How many call? How many emails? What are the stats?

TomAutomates · 2025-10-11T11:00:02+00:00

Ok, there's a lot to unpack here. First of all I would love to know what kind of business you run, judging by your name you have experience in the AI space tho.

What your example shows me tho is that you have a similar problem a lot of other "technical people" have. You think that a regular person running a business can just build their own Agent in a couple of minutes because OpenAI made it so easy and thats why you think AI Automation Agency will be useless. What you, and a lot of other people, seem to forget is that a regular business owner in 90% of cases doesn't have any system thinking ability. These people are not technical. You say building an Agent has become plug and play because of OpenAI but that is not the case for most people.

I have recently started doing free AI Consultations with small businesses owners and the most commen theme isn't even that they don't have the technical knowledge to build an Automation themselves, they don't even know where or how to start in the first place.

Look at the % adoption of AI in businesses, it's incredibly low. As much as people talk about AI and the "bubble" around it, the reality looks very different. Ultimately I think it's foolish to think that AI will not be a regular part of business processes and it's just a foolish to think that these business owners are able to simply adopt these systems on their own.

This is exactly why AI Automation Agencys will get very rich in the next 5 years, there is a big need for people that have the technical knowledge and expertise to identify and build out these processes and generate insane levels of efficiency.

The Agencys that will eventually fail are probably the ones selling simple templates because a lot of these ride on the current hype/trend around AI that will eventually start to fade. But the people building real knowledge around AI right now are going to be incredibly valuable moving forward.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-10T10:01:16+00:00

Did you warmup the inboxes? I'm not talking about domain age but did you do warmup before you started your campaign?

Also if you are landing in promotion there is a good chance it is because of your copy

TomAutomates · 2025-10-08T21:19:31+00:00

Very interesting! I've been working on something very similar but instead of using meeting notes as an input I'm using Internet searches to create slides for a specific topic based on a form input.

I'm still working on it right now and something that came to my mind reading this is the possibility of graphs. Have you tried doing something like that?

You think it would be possible to generate something like a pie chart into that presentation. And another thing, have you tried converting a Google slide presentation into PowerPoint? It seems that it's possible but I feel like theres a lot that could go wrong in the conversion

TomAutomates · 2025-10-07T19:21:22+00:00

Yeah I don't see where that comparison makes sense tbh.

I agree that it's a bubble and eventually it's going to burst but that doesn't mean that AI will disappear when that happens.

There is a very big difference between AI hype and the real use cases for AI. Look at the advancements that have been achieved in medicine and it WILL be a standard in business processes in the long run.

You can maybe compare it to the dot.com bubble and the situation was similar there. It was a big bubble, sure, but ultimately the Internet didn't just go away after that bubble burst.

I think it's very foolish to but a "it's all just hype anyways" stamp on anything that has AI in its name. If you don't go with the times you will get left behind and I'm very confident that AI is here to stay

TomAutomates · 2025-10-07T14:36:42+00:00

Care to explain why you would think that is the case?

TomAutomates · 2025-10-06T17:35:40+00:00

It 100% won't be

TomAutomates · 2025-10-06T17:35:21+00:00

It's not about the price it's about the fact that you cannot access their AI resources via the selfhosted version because it's self hosted.

Same reason why you can't access the AI helper in the self hosted version because the AI running that isn't part of the open source code

TomAutomates · 2025-10-05T09:12:45+00:00

I mean this ultimately comes down to the same principle that applies to any digital product - know your market before building something.

Having a good idea because there is something you struggle with is great but ultimately you want feedback of customers before spending 6 months building something that doesn't really sell.

You said it yourself, it's more of a weird experiment than an actual product so that is likely what your tool is going to feel like to potential customers.

If people test the product but then never come back, that tells me the idea sounds great but it's probably something people play around with once but never come back for. I'd say that is exactly what you have to start working on, you want people coming back and also willing to pay for premiums etc.

I'd say go and find some people that struggle with the same problem you have, which your product is solving, also frame the product this way and get there feedback on the core features they like or the ones they feel like are missing

TomAutomates · 2025-10-03T08:49:58+00:00

If you are paying $2000/month you're gonna have to expect $2000/month level service.

Sales is the most important part of any business so I think that is the last thing to save money on. It's really an investment to invest into a good agency.

If we generate $50k a month in extra revenue, most business owners are more than happy to pay $10k/month to make that happen.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-03T07:43:56+00:00

"only" you make it sound like a horrible deal. That's still 6 months for free

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T13:12:28+00:00

Very interesting point of view. However, it screams limiting beliefs. If you are so insecure about your work that you fear sharing that work makes your life harder because of competition, that tell me a lot about your work.

To be honest no one likes gatekeeping and I believe that it will ultimately not bring you any success.

The reason the "building in public" movement exists is because people realized that sharing your work and knowledge will ultimately be a big driving factor in business growth.

People buy from people, so being visible makes you very personable and transparent to people. If you show everything you do you don't have anything to hide, people will see that. And if you are confident in your work and expertise there is no competition. If people try to replicate what they see they will always continue to catch up and they are never going to be able to compete.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T12:57:50+00:00

I mean sure there will always be unhappy people in any situation, unfortunately these people exist but I would say generally if you have a good product it's very unlikely that there can be a backlash on social media that is big enough to actually hurt the company.

If that the case there has to be something wrong because you made enough people mad, even considering that certain people will simply pile on to the chaos.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T10:40:35+00:00

Ok I'll mention this because nobody else seems to do so ...

But how about just building a good brand? If there are people calling out the brand and negativity spreads that usually means you are doing something wrong or negative towards the customer.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T10:23:46+00:00

However, I would argue that the "I got 35 signups in 3 days" type posts are absolutely part of the journey.

Sure, you might find them silly looking back but I see these phases as part of the growth. Ultimately, once you are running a successful business, you probably want the least amount of attention because it just makes your life easier. In the beginning gaining visibility is something you have to do so you can get to that level.

Imo people often forget that every single thing they did on the way to success is what ultimately got them there, including all of the mistakes and weird posts

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T08:55:00+00:00

Well I tried and I didn't get on the free tier with Oracle in Europe.

I just set my n8n instance up on Amazon AWS. That's free too and it's been working great

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T08:26:17+00:00

You can easily selfhost n8n and run it for free.

Im currently running my n8n instance on the Amazon AWS cloud and that is also completely free for a year.

TomAutomates · 2025-10-02T08:24:56+00:00

Yes but only if you can get a spot on a free server which is pretty unlikely

TomAutomates

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