**Morning Side Update: Business Transition and Lessons Learned**

As we continue to evolve at Morning Side, I wanted to take a moment to share some updates with you all about our business transition and the lessons we've learned along the way.

**The Challenge of Custom AI Development**

One of the most difficult aspects of starting a general agency is finding an offer that people actually want. This has been a major challenge for us, and it's why we're now shifting towards a more niche-focused approach. Our custom AI development projects have been beneficial in learning how to run one of these businesses, but the complexity of running a custom AI development firm is too high now that we've committed to our education business and software.

**The Necessity of Niching Down**

To scale beyond low six figures per month, we need to adapt our model or shift into more of a niche model where there's less unknown and less managerial oversight needed. This means moving into a niche model, which is where we're going now. We've got a couple of products already deploying within the accelerator within our school community, and I'm super excited to keep you guys updated on where this is going.

**Sharing Learnings and Experience**

The whole point of this channel is for me to throw myself headfirst into the space and learn, then share as much of it as I can with you all. We've got experience in three main areas: agency, education, and software. By having my fingers in all these different pies at once, I'm able to share learnings in this channel with you.

**Life Update and Business Update**

I'm extremely grateful and happy with how my life over the past 18 months has gone. I've met so many awesome people like you watching this video through my community initiatives, events, and stuff like that – it's been absolutely incredible. Just keep going; these kind of opportunities don't just fall out of the sky unless you're doing the work.

**Lessons Learned**

We continued to persist at Morning Side pushing out these custom development projects, which are sometimes hair-pulling experiences. If we had given up and gone all-in on one or the other (or just education), eventually the opportunity revealed itself for us to be niching down to something that allows us to make our business better and more profitable and also create products that we can sell to other people with similar businesses.

**Conclusion**

That's all for me today. I appreciate you all, and it's been a hell of a ride so far. I'm excited to keep bringing you along on the rest of this journey with me. See you in the next video!

WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enso you read the title and you clicked on this video so you already know what I'm going to talk about so I think I'll just get straight into it so myself and the team morning side AI are niching down finally after 16 to 18 months of operation as a general agency um and I did mention this it's a good time to be talking about this cuz I said in a recent video on when to Niche down and how to Niche down which I'll put up here really important you watch that um it's got a ton of great information of what we're going through right now and I've always made this channel around sharing my journey in the space and we're going through the process now of niching morning side AI down and I know many of you have to start niched agencies and struggled to find an offer that resonated or or people were actually interested in or you struggled to build a product that was actually valuable and found product Market fit and so in that video I explain how you need to be using data and you need to be if you don't have an obvious Niche that you can jump into as someone with experience or connections um you need to operate as a general agency and as we've done work through building solutions for multiple clients and in our case eventually Building Solutions for ourself so that you're able to identify a a use case or an offer that you can sell that's actually valid and that people are actually going to want so to let the cat out of the bag myself and the team we're all here in South Africa at the moment hence the uh kind of casual setup here but um we uh have been working here for the past month really on the Strategic pivot for mornings side AI um and it's been this is my dream to be living and working with my my friends and and living the the entrepreneur lifestyle it's it's absolutely amazing and I'm so grateful for everything um in my life at the moment and I'm super happy that we found an opportunity to do a strategic pivot into a certain and that Niche is going to be the education and coaching Niche and this is because we have our own education and coaching business and we can get a two birds one stone equation and this is something I really urge you all to look for in business and something that I've learned I'm constantly learning as I go through this I it's not like I know know everything I have been learning as a as doing YouTube as running multiple businesses now as you have more stuff to manage it's about finding those two birds or three birds you're like the more birds with one stone the better you really need to be optimizing for that so whether that's it's creating content that you can then repurpose and it also provides some other value to your clients or if you can get that alignment in your efforts then you are able to get much more done with the same amount of energy so for us already having an education coaching business we were putting things in place and and deploying our developers from warning side AI over to our education business the the accelerator and and what we're doing on the school Community as well and there were areas of that that were highly inefficient and we were saying okay well we'll just take test just just very naturally took some of our morning side AI developers and put them onto the problems that we're facing on the accelerator and within the school community and sure enough we came up with some really valuable things that we would buildt out and were working extremely well for us and then we had a bit of a light bulb moment of okay well we can put our Morningside AI developers on making this business as as run as smoothly as possible as as minimal friction for myself and the team running it the best possible experience for our customers and to increase the success ratees and do everything we can to make sure both the customer is having an absolutely fantastic experience with some of these AI automations we build but also the team running it is able to focus on things that really matter rather than dealing with small uh day-to-day management things that could be automated with AI so we're in the process of building out a bunch of really cool automations I can't really tell you about them right now because I uh you need to give us a h head start on selling these things before I start yelling it from the roof um because I know you guys would be very quick to quick to copy and jump on the the same things we're selling um so I will release that at a later date but for now as an update for you all on what morning side AI is doing we are undergoing the Strategic p towards these education and coaching Solutions and we're going to be selling them using the evidence of what we've done on our business and say hey look we've now got this business that is is making more money it's it's getting better results for our clients we are very happy with running it there's a lot less operational complexity in drag we have to deal with these are the results would you be interested in these are the services we have a much more this is what you all need to be looking for when you're niching down going from a general agency is getting those data points and the data points of this AI solution provides this value is really the most difficult thing right now for anyone starting these businesses and that's why while the niched agency and having a clear set of products or or a narrower set of businesses that you serve is ideal for a number of reasons um it's the hardest part about that is finding an offer that people actually want and through morning side we've been able to find that within our own business and for all of you who are starting in general agency you need to be looking for the same opportunities um of is this thing high value how can I get some data that is going to allow me to go and sell it to other people effectively um so that's that's where we are right now we are phasing out we're moving some of our developers over to these education Solutions right now so we're still in the transitionary period um but we are going to be looking to move out over the next couple of months completely of our custom AI development and while that's been hugely beneficial for us to learn how to run one of these businesses and and share that all with you the complexity of running a custom AI development firm is is far too high now that we have our our commitment on the education business and we have a gent to the software so if we were just focusing on scaling the AI development firm which is really like custom code development firm basically everything we were doing just scaling that if that was all of our attention we could do that but in order for us to be able to scale that Beyond like low six figures per month we need to adapt the model or shift into more of a niche model where there's less unknown and there's less managerial oversight needed and less operational complexity in drag so moving into the niche model is where we're going now we've got a couple products that we're already deploying within the accelerator within our school community and I'm super excited to keep you guys updated on where this is going the whole point of this channel is for me to throw myself head first into the space and learn and then share as much of it I can with you all and I hope you've all enjoyed seeing this transition of what I'm doing I'm trying to go yes we started the agency we have an education business we've started the software I'm trying to get all of that experience and information to be able to share it with you all because there's so those are the three main opportunities there agency education and and software and by me having my fingers in all the different pies at once I'm able to share the learnings in here with you so I've got some really awesome learnings from ative over the past almost a year now and when I think there's enough of you who are ready to jump into this s space I'm happy to start sharing some of that as well so that's a bit of a Life Update business update um I'm uh extremely grateful and happy with with how my life of the past 18 months has gone um and I'm extremely happy to have met so many awesome people like you watching this video through my community iners events and stuff like that it's been absolutely incredible so I really urge all of you um you just have to keep going you have to just keep going and these kind of opportunities don't just fall out of the sky um unless you doing the work and so if we have continue to persist at morning side pushing out these Custom Custom development projects which are like pulling our hair out sometimes if we had just given up and going oh we'll just go all s or just go all education no we kept pushing on these custom development projects and eventually eventually the opportunity revealed itself for us to be niching down to something that allows us to one make our business better and more profitable and two also create products that we can sell to other people with similar businesses so yeah that's all for me um I appreciate you all and it's been a a hell of a ride so far and I'm excited to keep bringing you along on the rest of this journey with me so I'll see you in the next videoso you read the title and you clicked on this video so you already know what I'm going to talk about so I think I'll just get straight into it so myself and the team morning side AI are niching down finally after 16 to 18 months of operation as a general agency um and I did mention this it's a good time to be talking about this cuz I said in a recent video on when to Niche down and how to Niche down which I'll put up here really important you watch that um it's got a ton of great information of what we're going through right now and I've always made this channel around sharing my journey in the space and we're going through the process now of niching morning side AI down and I know many of you have to start niched agencies and struggled to find an offer that resonated or or people were actually interested in or you struggled to build a product that was actually valuable and found product Market fit and so in that video I explain how you need to be using data and you need to be if you don't have an obvious Niche that you can jump into as someone with experience or connections um you need to operate as a general agency and as we've done work through building solutions for multiple clients and in our case eventually Building Solutions for ourself so that you're able to identify a a use case or an offer that you can sell that's actually valid and that people are actually going to want so to let the cat out of the bag myself and the team we're all here in South Africa at the moment hence the uh kind of casual setup here but um we uh have been working here for the past month really on the Strategic pivot for mornings side AI um and it's been this is my dream to be living and working with my my friends and and living the the entrepreneur lifestyle it's it's absolutely amazing and I'm so grateful for everything um in my life at the moment and I'm super happy that we found an opportunity to do a strategic pivot into a certain and that Niche is going to be the education and coaching Niche and this is because we have our own education and coaching business and we can get a two birds one stone equation and this is something I really urge you all to look for in business and something that I've learned I'm constantly learning as I go through this I it's not like I know know everything I have been learning as a as doing YouTube as running multiple businesses now as you have more stuff to manage it's about finding those two birds or three birds you're like the more birds with one stone the better you really need to be optimizing for that so whether that's it's creating content that you can then repurpose and it also provides some other value to your clients or if you can get that alignment in your efforts then you are able to get much more done with the same amount of energy so for us already having an education coaching business we were putting things in place and and deploying our developers from warning side AI over to our education business the the accelerator and and what we're doing on the school Community as well and there were areas of that that were highly inefficient and we were saying okay well we'll just take test just just very naturally took some of our morning side AI developers and put them onto the problems that we're facing on the accelerator and within the school community and sure enough we came up with some really valuable things that we would buildt out and were working extremely well for us and then we had a bit of a light bulb moment of okay well we can put our Morningside AI developers on making this business as as run as smoothly as possible as as minimal friction for myself and the team running it the best possible experience for our customers and to increase the success ratees and do everything we can to make sure both the customer is having an absolutely fantastic experience with some of these AI automations we build but also the team running it is able to focus on things that really matter rather than dealing with small uh day-to-day management things that could be automated with AI so we're in the process of building out a bunch of really cool automations I can't really tell you about them right now because I uh you need to give us a h head start on selling these things before I start yelling it from the roof um because I know you guys would be very quick to quick to copy and jump on the the same things we're selling um so I will release that at a later date but for now as an update for you all on what morning side AI is doing we are undergoing the Strategic p towards these education and coaching Solutions and we're going to be selling them using the evidence of what we've done on our business and say hey look we've now got this business that is is making more money it's it's getting better results for our clients we are very happy with running it there's a lot less operational complexity in drag we have to deal with these are the results would you be interested in these are the services we have a much more this is what you all need to be looking for when you're niching down going from a general agency is getting those data points and the data points of this AI solution provides this value is really the most difficult thing right now for anyone starting these businesses and that's why while the niched agency and having a clear set of products or or a narrower set of businesses that you serve is ideal for a number of reasons um it's the hardest part about that is finding an offer that people actually want and through morning side we've been able to find that within our own business and for all of you who are starting in general agency you need to be looking for the same opportunities um of is this thing high value how can I get some data that is going to allow me to go and sell it to other people effectively um so that's that's where we are right now we are phasing out we're moving some of our developers over to these education Solutions right now so we're still in the transitionary period um but we are going to be looking to move out over the next couple of months completely of our custom AI development and while that's been hugely beneficial for us to learn how to run one of these businesses and and share that all with you the complexity of running a custom AI development firm is is far too high now that we have our our commitment on the education business and we have a gent to the software so if we were just focusing on scaling the AI development firm which is really like custom code development firm basically everything we were doing just scaling that if that was all of our attention we could do that but in order for us to be able to scale that Beyond like low six figures per month we need to adapt the model or shift into more of a niche model where there's less unknown and there's less managerial oversight needed and less operational complexity in drag so moving into the niche model is where we're going now we've got a couple products that we're already deploying within the accelerator within our school community and I'm super excited to keep you guys updated on where this is going the whole point of this channel is for me to throw myself head first into the space and learn and then share as much of it I can with you all and I hope you've all enjoyed seeing this transition of what I'm doing I'm trying to go yes we started the agency we have an education business we've started the software I'm trying to get all of that experience and information to be able to share it with you all because there's so those are the three main opportunities there agency education and and software and by me having my fingers in all the different pies at once I'm able to share the learnings in here with you so I've got some really awesome learnings from ative over the past almost a year now and when I think there's enough of you who are ready to jump into this s space I'm happy to start sharing some of that as well so that's a bit of a Life Update business update um I'm uh extremely grateful and happy with with how my life of the past 18 months has gone um and I'm extremely happy to have met so many awesome people like you watching this video through my community iners events and stuff like that it's been absolutely incredible so I really urge all of you um you just have to keep going you have to just keep going and these kind of opportunities don't just fall out of the sky um unless you doing the work and so if we have continue to persist at morning side pushing out these Custom Custom development projects which are like pulling our hair out sometimes if we had just given up and going oh we'll just go all s or just go all education no we kept pushing on these custom development projects and eventually eventually the opportunity revealed itself for us to be niching down to something that allows us to one make our business better and more profitable and two also create products that we can sell to other people with similar businesses so yeah that's all for me um I appreciate you all and it's been a a hell of a ride so far and I'm excited to keep bringing you along on the rest of this journey with me so I'll see you in the next video