The Startup Ideas Podcast - My n8n AI agent scrapes Google Maps and makes $$$

Starting point is 00:00:00 So you want to start a boring business that prints cash, but you don't have the right idea. So you go on YouTube or you go on X and you see start an HVAC business, start a plumbing business. But the reality is a lot of those businesses are really competitive and difficult to get into. So I brought on the boring marketer and he shared, he revealed his sauce for how to find startup ideas in boring spaces that print money. And he does so by using these N-N-N workflows that scrapes Google Maps data, and then he actually uses AI to power the whole business. Now, I was hoping he was going to share this, and I had to convince him, but he finally did. And this entire episode is about how to actually find these ideas, how to actually build these businesses, and actually how to quietly print money with boring businesses using AI. Thank you to the boring marketer for spilling the sauce, and thank you to hosting your for sponsoring this episode.

Starting point is 00:01:04 Enjoy the episode, like, comment, so we can get started. We got the boring marketer on the pod. James, by the end of this episode, what are people going to take out of it? I want to help people find the perfect niche to go and start a boring local business. I think that this is a very overlooked opportunity. everyone's trying to create a sexy SaaS, and I want them to kind of look in their backyard for opportunities that can get them going. And are you going to use AI to help them figure that out? Of course, always do.

Starting point is 00:01:50 We're going to look at some workflows, some cool AI use cases, and we're going to talk a little bit about how I've used this information for my own boring local business. It's doing pretty well right now. Yeah, so basically there's this unfair advantage using AI to figure out which boring business to actually create. And James, by the end of this episode, are people going to have like the confidence, the prompts, the workflows to do this? Yep. They're going to have clear ideas where they should go attack. They're going to have some frameworks for how to think about what niche they should go after. And I'm going to walk them through workflows that, you know, they can copy and use on their own if they want. Great. Let's get into it. Let's do it. All right. So, you know, last time I was on, Greg, I was telling you about diesel dudes, which is, the local boring business that I started with one of my friends here in the Carolinas. And since I was on, that business has grown to do like a consistent like $30,000 a month in a very short amount of time.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Like, honestly, I've been pretty much blown away by like how quickly it's taken hold. And I've been doing some reflecting on like why it worked out well. And I'm going to try to translate some of the key like patterns that I've seen so far in its success. So there's a few things that people should be thinking about if they want to enter into the boring local business space. And the first thing is that you want to find underserved opportunities. So, you know, you look on X or whatever and there's a bunch of like MBAs and stuff like that. And everyone's like, I'm going to go and start rolling up plumbing companies or HVAC companies or accounting firms. And everyone's thinking about the same like three to five niches when they want to, you know, get into this type of space. So what I think people should

Starting point is 00:03:41 really be looking at is they should be going deeper and kind of ignoring the ones that everyone else is doing. What do I mean by that? If you think about like home services, for example, there's all these like little micro niches that have very high order value or customer value. So I'll just ramble off a few. And some people might know. know what these are. Some people might not. But hardscaping. So these are people that come and build like retaining walls at a house. Smart home automations or irrigation systems at a home. These are like $3,000 to $5,000 services on one job that someone comes out and accomplishes in basically a day. Other ones that I really like. Closet, redesign, and organization. Sounds super niche, but there's a lot of

Starting point is 00:04:32 wealthy people that want nice closets, believe it or not. The other one, garage organization and renovation. So my garage is an absolute disaster. I had a guy come out and give me a quote on refinishing my garage and making it look nice. And it was like a $15,000 quote. I was blown away. I need to sell a lot more like local business services in order to go and do that. But I was, I was pretty surprised as how few people were serving that market and how valuable a potential customer was. So high customer value underserved markets. So the next question someone might ask is, that sounds great, but how in the world do I actually find something like that? And that's where AI is going to come into play. All right. You caught my attention. All right. Cool. So the first,

Starting point is 00:05:20 the first thing that someone needs to do is basically take what I said, take that transcript right there. I want to find underserved local business ideas that don't include plumbing and HVAC and all the common ones you see people talking about on X. I need a high customer value. And I need this to be like an underserved market. So there's not a ton of providers. You know, you can say list out 20 different potential niches in various locations. Locations that I like to target are referred to as like tier two cities or tier three cities. So don't think about like Los Angeles or New York or, you know, Chicago or San Diego or something like that. I live in Charlotte. There's a ton of opportunity here. Think about like Nashville or Atlanta or, you know, Dallas, Texas or Denver, Colorado. They're

Starting point is 00:06:11 growing quick. They have, you know, wealthy people that are like moving there in droves. And that tells me that there's probably a lot of demand for services and not enough providers that can actually go and do the work. So you get a list of hypotheses, right? That's where I started. And, and And then the next thing that you're going to do is you're going to run those hypotheses through a workflow like this that I'm about to show you. This is a local niche research workflow. And I'm going to walk you through kind of the main points here. And, you know, this is like a pretty complicated workflow, as you can see. It took a long time to actually build it out, but it has a lot of value.

Starting point is 00:06:55 And in terms of this workflow, it's going to be available. in the marketers community. I'm just going to give it away for free there so that people can come up with all kinds of ideas. So if you want it, go to the vibemarketer.com, sign up. You'll find this inside as like a community benefit. But what it's going to do is it's going to look at one of my favorite treasure troves for market intelligence and opportunity identification. And that's Google Maps. So if you're looking for a service locally, one of the first things that you look at is Google. You're not going to chat GPT to find like local businesses that you want to go and hire, you're probably going to go to Google, you're going to look at reviews, you're going to see, you know, businesses that are close to you

Starting point is 00:07:37 and all that. So we created a scraper that goes out and takes these hypotheses for ideas and locations and runs them through this workflow in order to validate it, collect a bunch of data, and then let AI kind of synthesize it and tell you if it's a good idea or not. Make sense so far? Yeah, absolutely. All right. Cool. So, So basically, like I said, you're going to specify the niche and location that you want. It must be like a city and state. And then you can have like multiple keywords. So we're going to go out and scrape Google Maps.

Starting point is 00:08:10 So we're going to look at the titles of different businesses, their domain, their address, their contact info. And we're going to collect the reviews. So we're not just going to like look at the actual reviews. We want to understand review volume and velocity for one. So why volume and velocity? To me, that's a good signal that there's a lot of demand in the market. You know, we don't want to go into a market where there's like five Google reviews out there. We want enough volume coming through that we know that there's plenty of customer demand.

Starting point is 00:08:41 And then what we're going to do is actually look at those reviews and gather the sentiment around that service. So imagine, you know, you can go and find a niche that has, you know, hundreds of reviews every month, but customers are generally not happy. To me, that sounds like opportunity or arbitrage, right? Next thing, we're going to look at social presence. We're going to get Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn details of all of these businesses. We're going to capture what times these businesses are open. You know, for instance, maybe there's a gap in terms of, you know, certain businesses don't have nighttime hours or something like that. And this could be like an emergency service that people need.

Starting point is 00:09:18 So after we gather all of that data with this workflow, we're going to create. we're going to create some calculations. I kind of mentioned these a little bit, but how fast are new reviews coming in? How many players exist in that niche locally? Are customers satisfied? Is consistent service being offered? We're going to look at like the top 10 and the bottom 10 players

Starting point is 00:09:41 and really kind of identify who the market leaders are. So next step, like I said, AI market analysis. So we're going to get the data. Then we're going to look at the pattern. across the niches, missing high potential ideas within the niche, certain angles that a business could play on, what the opportunities are, et cetera. So I'll just give you like a quick look at what that looks like. And then I want to touch on how you can set up workflows like this really, really quickly and save a lot of money doing so. All right. So here's an example of the output. So I ran it

Starting point is 00:10:21 through like Charlotte, for example. And I've got landscaping. I've got cosmetic dentistry. I've got wedding design services, destination wedding planning, luxury tax advisory services, estate planning attorney for high net worth individuals, smart home automation installation, luxury home security systems, exotic car detailing services, custom car wraps, body contouring med spa, dermal fillers, sports chiropractor, custom pool builder, and outdoor kitchen designer. So we've got a lot of really interesting unique markets that aren't the ones that, you know, everyone's typically trying to go after. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:11:05 I mean, someone, I will say, someone's going to be looking at this and they're going to be like, all right, but I don't know the first thing about car wrapping. Yeah. So what do you say to someone like that? Well, what I say to someone like that, you know, the big opportunity here, you don't necessarily have to go and be an expert in any one of these markets to create a successful business here. So let's say you know nothing about car wrapping, but cars kind of interest you or something like that. One way you could play this is you could start a local newsletter that attracts the end

Starting point is 00:11:37 customer. So maybe for instance you start a local newsletter on car meetups in the area or something like that. You know, there's all kinds of them. I see like coffee in cars or, you know, antique car meetups or enthusiast groups. Enthusiast groups are also a great market to think about. So think about creating like a newsletter or a directory that's sort of broad within the niche. So that's one way that you can leverage AI quickly. You could vibe code up a directory site. You could vibe code a newsletter landing page. And then you could use some of the Claude Code SEO tactics that I talked about in our last video to get traffic to that site, to get subscribers, right? after you get subscribers, that puts you in a totally different position to attack a market.

Starting point is 00:12:23 You're not going to the exotic car service companies or whatever and saying, hey, like, I'm starting an agency. I really want to help you grow your business. You know, they get hundreds of those types of messages a month. You're saying, hey, I have one of the top newsletters in the local market with a bunch of car enthusiasts, and I want to figure out how I can pass them on to you. and I think it would really benefit your business. Is there a way that we could partner up or something like that?

Starting point is 00:12:51 So I think that's the way to frame it and to think about it. You know, you don't have to be an expert. If you know how to use some of these AI tools, you can attack these markets and really help out another one of these types of businesses. Yeah, I think the way to think about it is you're not going to be in the car wrapping business. You're actually going to be in the media business, like the car media business. And people think that the media business is actually a bad business to be. Because when they think of the media business, they think of like, you know, Time Warner or Conday Nast, you know, these big media conglomerates that have spent billions of dollars incubating and building these media assets.

Starting point is 00:13:28 The difference today is, you know, it just doesn't cost that much to create the media, you know, with all these AI tools. So if you can actually go and, you know, attract a high value customer, you know, and then ultimately pass them off from, from a lead gen perspective to someone else, get a cut of that, your margin is going to be super high, your costs are going to be pretty low, and your competition is going to be low. And that's why I'm interested. You still have my attention. Like, think about it. If you're going and trying to create like a national media company for like, you know,

Starting point is 00:14:06 vehicles and cars or something like that, there's going to be a lot of competition. Good luck. Yeah, good luck. Have fun. Go on Instagram. There's pages with like millions of followers. there's established websites getting millions of visitors a month. But if you narrow that down into a local niche and you create the best kind of like vehicle

Starting point is 00:14:26 media company in Nashville, Tennessee or something like that, your competition is going to be much smaller. And those media companies, if they even do exist, they're not an expert in leveraging AI to automate a lot of facets of this business, create high quality content quickly, and move fast. So I think that that's really kind of one of the opportunities for people in terms of this arbitrage that's out there. And in terms of like how big could this be like Nashville car wrapping? Like, you know, are we talking $50,000 a year of profit, $200,000 year of profit? Like, what are you thinking?

Starting point is 00:15:03 I mean, I can speak to like to the mobile diesel mechanic business in Charlotte and Columbia, right? If you think about that, you know, top of your mind. it probably doesn't sound like that big of an opportunity. However, average customer size currently is $1,600 per job. We get probably 10 inbound phone calls every single day. We can't even service all of the calls that we're getting right now. We're trying to hire up to keep up with the demand. So, you know, I think that this alone could be like a multiple seven-figure business in two locations.

Starting point is 00:15:41 So once we figure out those two locations and we have the playbush, and we can scale that out or whatever, you know, it can be really, really significant. Again, I'm going the route where I'm actually building out this infrastructure and the operations and hiring the people, but you don't have to do that. If I were doing it the way that we're talking about with more of a lead gen play or a legion model, there's really kind of two ways that you can approach that. One is, you know, you create that newsletter type thing and you acquire the end customers and you go to the business and you say, hey, like, I'm going to sell you leads for $100, $200 a piece or something

Starting point is 00:16:22 like that. You know, if a company's got like a $1,600 average customer value, they would happily pay that. That's probably what they pay on Google Ads or something to get a hot, qualified call coming into their business. And this is just another channel that could add some incremental opportunities for them. So, you know, imagine if you are able to. to get, I don't know, 200, 300 phone calls or hot leads a month for a business and in one of these markets that clearly have enough demand. I mean, your costs are pretty low. It could be a

Starting point is 00:16:54 $20, $30,000 a month company right there. All right. Let's continue. All right. So something that I want to highlight when setting up a workflow like this, let's say you're an entrepreneur or something just kind of getting, you know, a business like this going. You want to keep costs low. You want to move quickly, one of the tools that you should think about, which I use for this workflow, is Hostinger. So Hostinger allows you to create virtual private servers for your In-8-N workflows. So, you know, typically people would go to in-8-N, and they would sign up for a hosting account here, and they would be, you know, limited in terms of the amount of workflows they can run per month and they'd be spending, you know, anywhere from 20 to 50 to 100 or $200 a month to

Starting point is 00:17:40 run these workflows and host them, uh, online. So, wait, so James. Yeah. When, when you, when you say that, like I see the concurrent execution. So basically N8N limits the amount of workflow executions you can do at a given time. Is that what you're saying? Yeah, you get a certain amount of workflow runs per month per plan. So on the $100.

Starting point is 00:18:04 plan you get like two and a half thousand fifty dollar plan you get ten thousand uh you know bigger point is that uh you know it's fifty dollars a month we already subscribed a lot of sass tools i have so many and i'm like always trying to cut my costs so i use hostinger for this and i was able to you know get this hosted on the cloud uh for you know between like five and and seven dollars so and i can create unlimited workflows on there and uh and scale this up so in terms of like costs and scalability I think this is something people should look at when they're working with like tools like in and it in. Cool. Yep.

Starting point is 00:18:41 So easy process, choose your plan. You know, once you log into Hostinger, there's a virtual private server item over on the menu. You're just going to add a new virtual private server. Select your location where you want your server to be. Just type in in eight in, select it, hit next. You'll create a password to log in with. I didn't select these additional features. You can if you want.

Starting point is 00:19:08 And, you know, once you're in, you'll just create some in-aid-in credentials. And you'll be able to log directly into your workflows there. And it's self-hosted on your own private server for a lot cheaper than what you might typically pay. If you want to self-host your workflows, super easy. You just go to hostinger.com slash ship 10, SIP 10, to support the channel. Cool. Yeah, cheaper and more workflows. More for less. So, yeah. So, yeah, like basically, you know, we're getting the data here and I'll run through it a little bit more before we go to the next stage. So I just wanted to

Starting point is 00:19:49 talk about a couple of these, like, unique angles within these markets. So for landscaping, you don't need to go and start like a landscaping business. You could be the eco-friendly or sustainable landscaping service that, you know, specializes in water features and co-eastern. pond installation or something like that, right? So, you know, there's a lot of money in these micro niches in local markets. That's the main point that I want people to kind of take away. And Google Maps is like a great data source to go and look at, hey, is there a high number of reviews? Are there not that many providers in the market? And kind of look at those pattern match a little bit. And it's a great way to, you know, get over that, you know, mental tailspend of like, I don't know what

Starting point is 00:20:34 niche to target or whatnot. So let AI help you there and work with some data for it. So let's just take an example. Like, let's say you decided to pick the cosmetic dentistry market or something like that. And perhaps you have like a sub-angle or a sub-niche within it. Maybe you focus on like, you know, family service and you work well with kids or something like that. I don't know. So I fed in all of the review sentiment and the pain points that are coming from this Google Maps information into another workflow, which is a newsletter creation workflow. So this workflow here, it's going to feed in this data. We have an AI agent that's going to look at all of it. It's going to come up with a bunch of ideas in terms of like your topic, your angle,

Starting point is 00:21:24 subject lines, and some business rationale to decide if this is like a good newsletter issue or a good newsletter angle. So this creates amazing newsletters after it's able to collect all that Google Maps data. It's got a wealth of context that it's feeding into the agent. And, you know, I was really pleased with kind of like how it came out. So yeah, it's on all the pain points. Someone might be thinking about. Again, you could integrate things like, like local events or, you know, links or, you know, things of interest that the market might be into. And then you're addressing all the pain points and you've got a bunch of content that you can send out to get those leads.

Starting point is 00:22:08 It almost sounds too easy, dude. You know what I mean? I know. I know. Because like kind of what you're saying is like, all right. So I'm going to, I'm going to use Google Maps, which by the way, I've never even thought of using Google Maps as the data source, but makes complete sense. So I'm going to use Google Maps. data source to find reviews. And I'm going to find niches with sort of bad reviews with high velocity. So I'm going to find really good niches, validated.

Starting point is 00:22:34 And then you're going to use AI to actually essentially build the media completely reusing the words that people are using in Google reviews and just set it out on autopilot and just execute on this. Exactly, exactly. I mean, you could use any of the newsletter tools out there to build like a fast landing page or whatever, you know, build out some location or service pages or whatever that looks like. I mean, again, you could go to chat, GPT and say, hey, like, here's the niche that I chose. It's going to be cosmetic dentistry. What other like SEO pages or whatever could I put on here to get people to come and sign up for my newsletter? And, you know, you don't need to go crazy. and go into all the SEO keyword research tools and all that. I didn't do any of that for diesel dudes. And we get all of our traffic and leads from the search research I did on GPT5. So that's really all you need to do.

Starting point is 00:23:37 And I think this is a massive arbitrage. And nobody's really talking about it, which blows my mind. You say nobody's really talking about it. Nobody is talking about it. Literally on my timeline, it's literally all the same things, HVAC, plumbing, you know, pool cleaning. It's all the same thing. And what's going to happen is you're going to have a bunch of people who are just going to,

Starting point is 00:24:02 who have no business, you know, building in that space, go into an extremely competitive space with, by the way, a bunch of sharks. There's like a bunch of like, oh, yeah, Wall Street funded, you know, competition. And I know some of these people. And they're going to get their, you know, lunch eaten. Yeah, yeah. So, you know, like if you know enough about AI to be dangerous, you can build workflows, you can use, you know, the tools that are out there, things like that. This presents a great opportunity for you to create like a low cost business by doing the research right.

Starting point is 00:24:38 Like find those underserved markets in these tier two and tier three cities. Find your angle, create the media asset. And then you can resell the leads. You can get verified partners, whatever. you could do that to fund actually creating your own operation, if that's what you want to do after you learn enough over time. All right, man. Well, I appreciate you sharing the sauce.

Starting point is 00:25:03 You could have kept this one to yourself, but you're too good of a person. That's why I love you. I'm sure I'm going to get some competitors that are going to be trying to get into this and stuff, but that's okay. There's plenty of room for everybody to eat in this local niche. boring business space if they can use AI.

Starting point is 00:25:23 Mobile diesel gals? That's right. That's right. Plenty of business. Maybe I can send them some of our lead overflow that we have. I appreciate you. If people want to learn more about workflows, learn more about Vibe Marketing, learn more about using AI for boring businesses.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Where could they go? They should go to the vibemarketer.com. Sign up for the newsletter. We send out workflows like the one we talked about every week. We highlight all the cool things that are happening at the intersection of AI and marketing. And then we have a community where we've got like over 2,500 workflows and a directory we built for our members. I've got a new secret project that I launched exclusively within our community. You know all about it. Greg, we've been working on this for a while.

Starting point is 00:26:08 I think it's going to take vibe marketing as a whole to the next level. We're giving away a bunch of free credits there. I'm doing vibe sessions in the community every other week where I'm just getting on for like two hours at a time jamming with members. We're building out a mentor program. A lot of cool things happen in there. Amazing. I'll include the link to that in, to the buyer and the community in the show notes. I'll include the link to Hostinger in the show notes. I think we reached out to them and got a discount code, right? Yep, exactly. Yep, we got a discount code. Throw it in the show notes and people can save a lot of money on their workflows. I think it's SIP10.

Starting point is 00:26:53 And thanks again for hosting her for making this episode possible and getting James to, extract some sauce and I appreciate you. And I'll see you next time. Also, let us know what you want us to cover next. We're always looking for topics for what we should cover next. So, you know, I read every single comment. James goes in there and reaches comments too. So let us know and we'll sauce it up.

Starting point is 00:27:21 Awesome. Thanks for having me, Greg. Appreciate it. Thanks, my man.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - My n8n AI agent scrapes Google Maps and makes $$$

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