This is not the "agency" hustle. It's smaller, more boring, and easier to start on a Tuesday evening.
The offer
Real-estate agents, coaches, and local service pros have thousands of raw phone videos and almost zero time to caption them. Offer $40 per video for stylized, branded captions delivered in 24 hours. If you stack 20 clients, that's $800/month at ~25 hours of actual work.
The stack
- Bolly.AI Pro for AI captions + brand templates
- A simple Notion page per client with their brand preset
- A Stripe link + a Loom for onboarding
How I got my first 5 clients
Cold DM to 40 local agents with a 15-second before/after video. 5 replies, 3 signed. Conversion was embarrassingly high because nobody else bothers to make the before/after — they pitch text.
The win isn't the caption software. The win is the 24-hour turnaround. That's what people will pay for.
Once you have 20 clients, the bottleneck is inbox management, not captioning. At that point, consider raising to $60 or hiring help. Or kill it and start a bigger thing with the $800 as runway.