Rated two through six: the catalog as evidence

A method is only as good as its record. Here is ours: all thirty-four business courses in this catalog, each carrying a published exposure rating in its own frontmatter, sorted into bands. As you read the reasoning, run the five questions yourself on a few of these and see whether you land where we did. Disagreements are welcome. They mean you are using the method rather than borrowing our conclusions.

The twos: the machine works for you

Eleven businesses, and the pattern is uniform: the deliverable is a physical outcome produced at a customer's property, wrapped in local trust, often under a rule structure a human must satisfy.

The laundry pickup course says it directly: no model picks up a duffel, and no algorithm can return a bag your neighbor trusts onto their porch. The course also flags the one AI-shaped risk in that business, platform dependence, and that is the demand-gate question doing its job, not the deliverable question. Lawn care closes the same way: judged at the curb, and the parts software touches are the parts that got easier. Party rental is equipment economics plus event-day accountability. Micro bakery is cottage food law plus a physical product. Notary loan signing is pure accountability, a commission and a journal. Handyman and pressure washing and junk removal: trucks, tools, water, weight, blame.

The threes: a slice automates, the spine holds

The threes are the interesting band, because each contains a visible automation story that turns out not to touch the spine.

Video editing is the clearest. Auto-cutting, transcription, captioning, and first-pass assembly are all accelerating hard, and a flood of five-dollar gig workers races the bottom. But the edit hour that clients retain is judgment: pacing for retention, matching a creator's voice, knowing what to cut. The video editing course prices that trade on outcomes, not export speed, and its failure-modes lesson treats the AI question head on rather than pretending the tools are not there. Drone services: the aircraft fly themselves more each year, but the Part 107 license, the shot judgment, and the liability are human, and aerial work is either regulated or it is reckless. Remote home service lands at 3 because running crews at a distance adds software-mediated coordination without changing what happens at the door.

The fours: data trades with a human signature

The fours are businesses whose daily text-and-data work is heavily machine-doable, held down by a real accountability or physical layer.

Medicare billing is the deepest example: the whole revenue cycle is claims data, exactly the material machines process well, yet the course and the rating hold at 4 because a practice outsources the liability, the compliance, and the chasing. Phone flipping is an information-arbitrage trade, and the arbitrage compresses as everyone gets the same instant price data; the physical verification of a handset and the local buying conversation are what remain distinctively human. Podcast production sits at 4 for a demand-side reason you will meet properly later in this guide: audio slop flooded the directories, but the value was never in the audio file. It was in the guest relationship and the niche trust, and those hold.

The fives: the deliverable half-automates

The fives are knowledge and content businesses where a machine can now produce a credible version of the average deliverable.

KDP self-publishing is the canonical case, and the course is blunt: AI can write books, which is precisely why Amazon caps uploads and requires disclosure. What remains human is picking topics people search for, producing a book worth buying, and packaging it, which is why the course teaches niche research and craft rather than volume. Virtual assistant is the service version of the same squeeze, calendar and inbox work is automatable, and the course's answer is to climb the retainer ladder toward judgment work clients keep paying for. Online fitness coaching: programs generate instantly, accountability does not. YouTube: the monetization gate and the platform's policing hold some floor under human creators, and the audience relationship is the asset.

The sixes: the ceiling of what we will teach

Five businesses at the top of the teachable range, each kept in the catalog for a specific, argued reason.

Print on demand: anyone can generate a thousand designs a day, and everyone does, which floods search with slop. The deflection is niche selection, trademark discipline, and listings that get found, the exact craft the course teaches. The social media agency course carries the clearest statement in the fleet: production is increasingly automated, and what does not automate is the accountability layer, the baseline recorded honestly, the number translated into a dentist's language, the raise justified in month six. Recruitment sits at 6 because sourcing and screening automate fast, while the placement fee rides on trust and niche knowledge a machine cannot warranty. TikTok Shop and the creator stack are platform-native businesses where the platform's own enforcement is what keeps a human lane open at all.

Band by band, the scores are arguments you can audit. If two parts of the method pull harder than the rest when you run them, they will be the demand gate and the entry floor: where customers come from, and whether a beginner still has a first rung. Those two decide most of the answers.