top low overhead, high profit digital business models for 2025

Summary

if I were starting from zero in 2025 and I wanted a digital business with low overhead and high margins, I’d build an accountability coaching practice. here’s why.

AI is collapsing the value of knowledge-based products. courses, ebooks, generic info, all of it is racing to zero because the knowledge is now free and instantly accessible. what AI cannot replicate is a human looking you in the eye and holding you accountable for what you said you’d do. that’s where the value moved.

two flavors of this model:

1. simple accountability. you’re not a domain expert, you’re the discipline. clients pay you to be the person they don’t want to disappoint. priced lower, scales with volume.

2. accountability with expertise. you bring a real edge, fitness coach, business coach, financial accountability, on top of the structure. priced higher, fewer clients, deeper outcomes.

how I’d start: use whatever email list and social following I have, even if it’s small. pick clients I can actually move the needle for. say no to the rest. add it to an existing business as a higher-ticket tier, or run it standalone.

the human need for accountability isn’t going anywhere. AI didn’t kill this model. AI made it the model.

Transcript

why accountability coaching wins in 2025

Today I’m going to be talking about a very simple offer that you could add to an existing business. Or if you’re looking to get started and scale, this is something that you could implement very easily with minimal resources at your disposal. This is something we’ve been testing for a while behind the scenes.

It’s been really awesome. And I have no doubt by the end of the year, it’s going to be an additional seventh figure revenue stream for us. So I want to talk a little bit more about it and how you can do this. Breaking it down. I think in 2025 one of the greatest opportunities out there is accountability coaching. In all honesty, I think that it is because with AI coming online, being able to answer a lot of questions and, you know, being able to fill in a lot of the gaps that in all honesty people had before, I think knowledge is not going to be as powerful as it used to be.

If you think online courses, uh, you know, things like that. I don’t think that’s going to be as powerful as it once was. I don’t think that’s what people are looking for. They can get most anything for free and that’s only going to become more and more robust as AI gets integrated into our lives.

So accountability coaching in all honesty is what I think is the best offer out there right now because humans need help. Humans need help to become better in every human out there is trying to get better in some degree. So you can add accountability coaching to almost any existing business and you can add accountability coaching to just as a brand new thing that you offer as a person to other people. But you have to be very clear whether it’s just accountability coaching or accountability coaching with expertise.

And I’ll kind of talk about the two different ones, but how I’m going to walk through the rest of this is if I had to start a business from scratch tomorrow, all of my current businesses are taking, taking away from me, what would I do? How would I scale a business into and do this offer specifically?

And then I’ll kind of step out of that every once in a while to let you know how you could probably do the same. So let’s go through it. Tomorrow morning I wake up, all businesses are shut down. I’m no longer able to make any revenue from an existing revenue stream. What do I do? Well, the first thing I’m going to do is I’m going to assess what my current assets are. And when I say assets, I’m going to be looking at audience.

So what do I have at my disposal? What can I access and engage with right away? So I’m going to be looking at social platforms. How many people do I have on YouTube, Instagram? How many email subscribers do I have? That’s going to be the biggest one for me. And those are my current assets that I’m going to be focused on.

I immediately will start double down on content. I’m already producing a lot of content, but now things got serious. I really need to ramp it up. So I’d be creating a significant amount of content almost immediately. And then I’d be putting together an offer. So what would that offer be? My offer would be accountability coaching to some degree with expertise.

what AI is collapsing and what it isn’t

And I’ll explain the difference. You can have accountability coaching with a relatively low TART ticket offer. You could have accountability coaching for somebody who needs a fitness accountability, nutritional accountability, business accountability, whatever accountability, and you don’t necessarily have to be an expert.

You can just hop on a call with someone for 15 minutes, 30 minutes per week and hold them accountable to their goals. And you’d have to get pretty good at having uncomfortable conversations when they’re not achieving them. And a lot of times people run around, run away from accountability when they’re no longer doing the things.

So you have to make sure that you’re actually holding people accountable. You can’t be okay when they say they didn’t do something, but that’s just accountability coaching. I think that it’s not only insanely easy to implement. If you are a decent coach or have any kind of coaching background, it’s also what people actually need. Most people know what to do. Like I said, information is not going to be a limiting factor.

It hasn’t been for a while with how people were able to access things through YouTube and other educational online free resources. But now with AI it’s going to become even easier. So being able to hold someone accountable when they can’t do the workout or hold someone accountable when they aren’t doing what they need to in business, that is going to be the game changer. So that’s what I would want to offer.

But I’d also add in my expertise. Now me specifically, that’s my competitive advantage. I’ve been doing online business for well over a decade, so I have a lot of experience I can add with accountability because I think accountability is the most important piece. We’ve worked with thousands of entrepreneurs and my businesses and we know for a fact people need accountability.

Accountability and community are one of the biggest parts of our business consulting business and it’s for a reason. People need community and they need accountability. Now going back to my expertise, I would want to know, I’d want to be able to fill the gaps for somebody who might be looking to do business consulting. That’s where I’d want to fill the gaps for somebody.

So I would hold them accountable, extreme accountability to not only their business growth, but their personal growth. And then at the same time, if they are asking questions about how to grow their business, I can help them come up with the right plan to move their business forward. So they are going to move forward with through my guidance and expertise.

simple accountability vs. accountability with expertise

If you don’t have the expertise side, you could very easily just add the accountability. You just can’t charge the same, right? If all you can do is hold someone accountable, maybe it’s a couple of hundred bucks a month. If you can hold someone with extreme accountability and kind of give them the plan and the map to follow. Now you can charge a couple thousand dollars a month.

Now let’s get down to how I would actually offer this. So what I would do, I have my assets, I have social media, I have my email newsletter. I would craft a form, a very simple form, but ultimately the form is going to be reverse engineered based off of the person I want to work with. So if I person I want to work with, you’re growth minded, they understand leverage, they don’t have real big money mindset issues.

I’m going to kind of first create my avatar. And then after I create my avatar, I’m going to create a form that helps me check all the boxes. So this is just a form somebody could fill out. Of course, name, email address, phone number, contact information, but then also several other questions to get to understand if they have any of the things I don’t want. Do they have money mindset problems?

Do they not understand how to sell me personally? I don’t really like to talk to people about how to get more leads, how to get more customers or how to sell things. I’ve done hundreds of sales calls. I’ve gotten a lot of leads. I’ve scaled a lot of businesses. I don’t really enjoy talking about how to have a sales conversation.

There are a lot of people doing that. Go learn sales skills somewhere else. I’m not interested in coaching somebody through that, but anything else in business is fair game. So ultimately that’s what I’d want to make sure that they’re after. They’re already growth minded. They have a big sway or bias towards personal development and they want to exercise, fitness, train, all those kinds of things.

So I know they’re on point. They want to read books, but at the same time they want to scale their business. They want to be there for their family. I’d be looking for somebody in all honesty, very similar to me because I’d know I’d be able to help that person. So once I have this form, I’m going to shoot it out to my email newsletter.

And I’m also going to put it on Instagram, Instagram stories. I’ll have Instagram, you know, flows through many chat, everything that I could possibly do to get as many people to fill out this form as I possibly could. Chances are I’ll have enough people on there to at least start making some revenue in the short term. Now, what would the actual offer be and how does this scale?

leveraging the assets you already have

Like what are the numbers actually look like? Well, my specific offer, what we’ve actually been testing in the background and has worked pretty well. We do a $5,000 onboard fee, $5,000 onboard fee, gets you a multi-hour planning session with a very high level coach, whether that’s me or somebody on the team.

Ultimately you get to dive in and really go bananas with your plan. Very specific with somebody who has the expertise, who can guide you through that process. And the plan, the goal here is to plan an extremely good quarter. I have so many different resources to be able to do this. We have checklists people can follow. We have all of these frameworks, we have exercises, we have every single thing that we would do.

Now my main goal in offering this is not to provide this person with more homework and more things to do. I want to be able to walk them through everything on a call so they only have to spend their time with me when we have time together. That way I’m not wasting their time by giving them five hours of work per week because I know how valuable their time is and I know how valuable my time is.

So I’d work through this onboarding process with them. We have a really good plan. Then after that it would be accountability. They’d have the option to then work with me on a monthly basis for anywhere between one to $3,000 per month. And that only determines how frequently we meet, whether we’re meeting every single week, every other week, or once a month, that would be up to them. But that would be my offer.

I would have a larger onboard fee so we can both really dive in and pay attention. And then an ongoing monthly fee to hold them accountable to this plan with again, coloring in between the lines and helping them fill in the color with all of my expertise on these accountability calls. So that’s ultimately what I would do.

That’s what I’d offer. So after someone fills out the form, I know that they are my avatar. I know my offer. That’s what I’m going to be pitching. So yes, I would have a sales conversation with somebody, but I wouldn’t really pitch. I don’t like pitching. I’ve done a lot of sales calls. What I would be doing is looking for somebody who has the right business size, the right mindset. And I know that I ultimately can really crush it with them.

We’d really dive into their problem on the call. It’d be a true discovery call. And then we would go through everything that we need to, to map out the next steps. I’d send them the offer via email and follow up with them relentlessly. And then I would have multiple people sign up for this offer at some point.

picking the right clients

Now, how does the math work out? Well, if I could get 25 people that I’m working with on a, and let’s just say, I’m not doing this with the team. I’m just doing it with me. If I could get 25 people that I’m working with and that would be depending on what, what level they signed up for. Let’s just assume it’s $2,000 per month.

So right in between that $1,000 and $3,000 per month. So maybe we’re meeting every other week. I have 25 people I’m working with either per quarter or ongoing. I have $5,000 come in for the onboard. That’s going to be $500,000 for the year. And then the price point of $2,000 per month brings it up to $600,000 for the year.

So I’m over a million dollar business right off the bat by just finding 25 people who I know I can crush it with 25 people. That’s it. And that’s over seven figure business. And it’s very, it would be more time intensive. Not going to lie. Like if, if we’re just looking at like, what could I do by myself?

What would be not scalable? It wouldn’t be a scalable coaching program. And so I just, and so until I started to hire other people, but maybe you’re not looking to do that. This is the easiest digital business that you could start these days. It’s coaching, but it’s not coaching on sales. It’s not coaching on mindset.

It’s accountability coaching. Now, accountability coaching with expertise I think is the next level. But if you don’t have that expertise, you can’t offer that. So don’t pretend like you do me personally. I have 15 years of business experience. I can help somebody solve almost any problem they might have.

So long as they’re behind me in the steps in business, I’m not going to try and help somebody with accountability or growth in an area that I’m not comfortable with, or I don’t understand. But ultimately I have a lot of expertise to be able to help people. Like I said, we’ve been testing this behind the scenes and it’s worked really well because a lot of people, they just need accountability. They know what to do.

So if you’re looking to start a digital business, you might not be able to offer the same and get to a million dollars run rate within a couple of weeks. I think that it’d be very possible to, to do that for me personally. And it’s something, like I said, we’re testing behind the scenes. If you have any questions about that, you can always shoot me a message, Instagram, reply to one of my emails, whatever. I can tell you more about it.

adding it to an existing business

But ultimately if you just added accountability coaching to any of your current existing offers, whether you are a fitness coach, you’re a chiropractor, you’re a PT, it doesn’t matter. Could you offer some sort of accountability coaching that you could have an employee do or you do and it’s maybe holding them accountable to their home exercise program or holding them accountable to their nutrition program, their macros, they’re checking in with quick messages on a daily basis and then also on a weekly basis and then you’re doing a call every week or every other week to hold them accountable. Coaching is simple.

I think I understand it so well because I’ve been a coach for such a long time. Started in the fitness industry, strength and conditioning coach, moved to a business coach at some point and it’s all worked out really well. But coaching is a superpower and I don’t think coaching is going anywhere. So I think adding levels of coaching and accountability to whatever you currently offer or just starting with that being your business altogether is a power move in 2025 because AI is coming. It’s going to take a lot of jobs.

Like I said, it’s going to disrupt a lot of industries, but the one I don’t think it’s going to disrupt for a while is this accountability coaching model because people suck and they always will. And I’m sure at some point we will get into our brains and we’ll be able to turn off that suck factor and we’ll be able to do anything that we want.

But I think humans are going to be very slow to want to adopt putting a chip in their brain that turns on and off parts of who they are. I think that’s going to take decades. I’m hoping it takes decades. So in the meantime you could offer something like this in your existing business or like I said, offer it all by yourself as just a standalone coaching program.

So hopefully you’ve gained something from this. The steps are simple. Assess what your assets are. If you don’t have a lot of assets, maybe you need to start working on those assets. Social media following, Instagram following, uh, you know, email newsletter, probably the most powerful one. And then from there, what’s your offer?

Can you add actual business consulting and accountability or just accountability? What can you do? What skillsets do you have? And then from there you got to make the pitch. You got to get out there. You got to get people on calls and you got to see if you can find the right fit. And that’s the biggest part of this. Making sure you have the right avatar, only work with people who you can crush it with.

And it’s hard to be selective if all my businesses got turned down, turned off overnight. But I know I can only help certain people. So I wouldn’t try to help anybody that I couldn’t actually help. So that’s it. That’s the business I would start if I was starting over right now in 2025 I think this is a great business model to either add to what you have or to start fresh, try harder, live bigger.