The Frontier

Jake Woodhouse sells a $999 AI assessment for small businesses, promising to identify enough value in month one for the report to pay for itself.

A Deloitte report found one in three Australian businesses don't know where to start with AI. Woodhouse positions his assessment as solving this initial bottleneck, not just providing tool access.

Woodhouse's assessment process involves a 15-20 minute interview about the client's weekly structure, bottlenecks, and tasks they'd eliminate with a 'magic wand'. The transcript is processed through Claude with a proprietary prompt to generate a bespoke report.

He tested the service on himself. The report highlighted inefficiencies in post-production tasks like creating platform-specific captions and thumbnails, which consumed time he should spend on cold outreach for conversions.

For client Pete, an accountant charging $450 an hour, the assessment identified potential time savings worth $17,400 per month, making professional services a high-ROI target market.

For client Matt's gardening business, the report identified about $1,500 of value to unlock. This illustrated the service's applicability to trades, where AI can streamline backend operations but not replace physical work.

Woodhouse's own report recommended using Apollo, an email database tool he hadn't heard of. He used it to filter 3,300+ Australian accountant contacts, verifying data accuracy against LinkedIn profiles.

To avoid spam filters, he's implementing a cold email sequence, sending to 10 new contacts per weekday with staggered sends and automated follow-ups a week apart, targeting three sales from strangers in May.

Woodhouse argues AI inverts the knowledge requirement, making bespoke business advice accessible without an MBA. You take a specific scenario to an AI, get tailored advice, and no longer need generalized business books.

He rejects the idea of a post-scarcity, socialist AI utopia, grounding his view in Austrian economics. He believes scarcity drives value and AI will compress service delivery costs while making humans more efficient at providing value.

The real challenge isn't report fulfillment, which takes about an hour post-call, but customer acquisition. This frontline work substantially reduces the effective hourly rate of the $999 service.