The Side Hustle King: "Make $20K+/month without money, luck, or experience"

All right, I'm gonna say one sentence and then you could decide if this episode is for you If you're the type person who's got the entrepreneurial itch you want to do something you want to start a new business You want to get that extra five ten fifteen thousand dollars of income coming in every month? But you don't know which idea to do which idea to start with maybe you don't even have great ideas This is the episode for that person. We brought on Chris. He's sort of the side hustle king He loves to find simple no money up front easy businesses that can pull in cash quickly and then can grow from there And so Chris came on he's got about five ideas for us. I think you will love this episode with Chris All right, we got Chris corner here you are back because you have Absolute pipeline an absolute full stack of business ideas at all times like you know What's the open carry he's open carry with business ideas if people haven't seen it You got a great Instagram channel and YouTube channel podcast as well where you talk about Different business ideas and so that's what I want to do today, dude I have so I mean it's not Friday But I feel like we need to call this no filler Friday because there's no filler today all stuff no fluff All right, I have a friend who I want to ask you this question on his behalf I have a friend who is a real estate agent and he does well he makes I think you know Let's call it 250 300 thousand dollars a year been doing that for 10 years, but he's bored and he wants a little more scale He wants a little more he doesn't feel a sense of progress You know people always want a sense of progress and so he feels like you know, it's pretty hard to scale what he's doing there He's always poking around it. You know, should I buy this vending machine? Should I do this side hustle pressure washing? Whatever it is? Where does your head go as like look if I was trying to help you get off the real estate path and maybe have you have a more Entrepreneurial path. What do you what do you sell? What do you tell him? I would tell him to start reselling Reselling like Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items So you spend one 200 bucks you get what's called a resale certificate which tells the government I don't need to pay sales taxes on this because I'm passing it on a lot of these websites require that number from you in order to Sell you liquidation items. There's a website called gov deals There's a website called be stock on be stock you buy anything that people return to Costco I've done this myself another business. I've done I bought $7,000 worth of washers and dryers For 250 each on average and I'm selling them on Facebook marketplace for 750 to 900 each It's an amazing business because you don't need a warehouse You don't need a bunch of space just a garage and it's all sold on Facebook marketplace. I'm on be stock right now And I see that I can buy two pallets of men's gray champions sweatpants joggers for $48,000 in New Jersey Sounds great. I'm gonna get 1200 units What surprises a 48,000 I get 1200 units 40 bucks. That's not even a deal. What's going on? Oh wait wait? Oh, that's a retail value. Yeah, okay. I can buy this for seven grand So I can buy it for five bucks a pop And it's saying that the standard retail value of this would be 40 bucks a pop. And so you're saying you're gonna go buy You probably wouldn't buy sweatpants my guess But what would you be looking for product category wise? I like large appliances and outdoor furniture I think those are both great, especially this time of year not electronics Because there's a lot of variables back to binary outcomes. There's a lot of things that can break. There's a lot of testing involved I don't really like clothing personally, but This is a great business because you don't need to find customers You just list them on Facebook marketplace all your customers are there You have to buy right and you have to fulfill But the harder part is finding customers and you don't have to do that here So I'm looking at I get 58 used refrigerators buying them for $34 a unit $34 a unit for refrigerated telling you what's going on here I might do this but I might actually go do this just on sheer principle of $34 fridge I have to five fifty eight of them though And then you know you go to Facebook marketplace and you go look at what the fridges are selling for you look at the volume You look at how much the price one you're trying to find before you buy them Of course before I buy I'm gonna go check out and you're looking for probably two signals one is a price signal So what is the going rate for these things? And then how do you get a sense of is this gonna move? You watch it for a week and you see if they move you message the seller. What do you do? You literally list it before you even bid on it and then you just go to people just to just understand Yeah, and then if they're like, all right, I'm ready to come get it You're like actually I haven't bought it yet, you know, which was fine. You're being honest, but you're you're getting signals ish You're getting signals from the market before you take any risk that there's enough demand for it at a specific price point And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook marketplace. My sister is moving right now Mm-hmm, and they're listing like random Here's a hat. This is like an old hat like it's just a baseball cap and the guy drove 45 minutes to get a free cap You know put the place is like here's one drawer Not even a cabinet. It's just a drawer So I'm gonna go pay $7 for the drawer. It's unbelievable the amount of like liquidity in the Facebook marketplace It's on now. Well, and but the annoying thing is listing all this stuff. It's tedious, but right I just saw this tick-tock of a guy that used Claude co-work. He just took pictures of all his stuff He uploaded it to Claude. He said here's my stuff research what it costs list it talk to people on my behalf Here's my calendar availability. I don't care when as long as it's open Have people come to my house and pick it up and he did he sold everything like he was moving He needed to sell everything in his house and Claude sold all of it for so like that even the tedious part is now fixable That's kind of amazing actually you can tell it to do the whole thing you because I hate go look on B stock Create fake listings Decide which one is gonna be the most profitable for me and then run the whole process There's no reason that you know Claude bought couldn't do that No, totally four pallets of denim Onesies we could get Three dollars two dollars like a deal. All right. This is a very addictive website. This is very fun I gotta get off B stock right now. Otherwise, I will lose my afternoon Hey real quick if you like this episode of Chris and you want more He's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast and He's giving it away for free. So if you just go to the QR code That's on the screen or the link in the description below You can get his database of ideas and these are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work and this guy's done It before he's built a bunch of businesses that are successful So go ahead take advantage of this resource and now back to the zip-set All right, so reselling is where you tell him to start and you'd say that's the right place to start because what you're Optimizing for low risk because that's a lot of work. Yeah, I don't know if I kind of implied I was like my friend's kind of looking for a magic bullet like just one thing I do that's gonna work really well You know if I told him hey get out there and hustle. He's like, well, I know that I've been trying to avoid that part What's what's a business that's like? More of a business and less of a garage-sailing side hustle mm-hmm Probably implementing AI into small businesses like we talked about this last time I we might have talked about the first time and we'll be talking about it in years because I mean there's 800,000 management consultants in the United States. That's management, right? Almost a million people that are just management consultants in five years Sean How many people will be AI consultants like to small medium large any size business? Hmm every single small business Well, not just probably this large and small business is right now AI curious AI hungry and AI clueless at the same time mm-hmm those three things if you're curious and You they're certain that it can help They don't really know how they don't have the time and They're you know, they're not as tech forward as somebody who just eats and sprees of stuff like that combination creates a ton of opportunity But that's that's a still pretty broad picture mm-hmm. What's a more? Focused point of attack for something like that You go to your chamber of commerce and offer to give a free tutorial on AI teach them what Claude is seminar prompting skills Yeah for free vibe coding and then you've got your buddy in the back with a clipboard and you sign people up for AI audits And so you use the free seminar to get one foot in the door You get the free audit to get your second foot in the door and then by that point you're an AI god to them You're a genius and you're the only AI genius that that business owner knows right at that point. It's take my money Have you found a repeatable a repeatable use case where you're like, okay, maybe it's for one class of business like dentists or lawyers or restaurants or whatever or It's just a repeatable Solution so it's like oh pretty much every business needs this thing that AI can do for them Right, you know when when the internet started every business kind of needed a website But it was starting for scratch nobody had a website by definition at the beginning and over time everybody ended up getting a website So you knew that like just making the website was like the killer app It was like the killer service that everyone would need once and then you could sell it to them You can maintain it for them and do whatever for them, you know going for okay What's the equivalent of that today in today's world with AI? Voice agents pick up the phone answer the phone for you. Yep, and then chatbots Second kind of a distant second voice agents are really good The latency is not that bad at all anymore because the LLMs are smart enough to only be trained on your Content your data so it's not like any time a customer says what are your operating hours? It doesn't need to go like read the whole training manual, right? It just answers immediately So AI voice agents are like the best foot in the door for small businesses right now. Hmm. That's cool I like that it would be very interesting to hear from people who have done this If you if you've done this I reach out because everybody's kind of talked about this idea of like help businesses implement I think Mark Cuban is like hey if you're a kid, you know if you want to be successful go help businesses employee I think it's like obvious however, I haven't heard a ton of stories Maybe this is just me not being kind of looking for it But I haven't heard a ton of stories of the specifics around this and I'm always curious more about the specifics than the general so for example, I Saw this AI tool that was for meds boss and they were like look every med spa Offers, you know, I'm a little out of my depth here, but every bed spa is basically offering some sort of beauty Service to somebody so somebody's gonna come in they look one way They want to look another way and they have to believe that the med spa will get them from A to B So that's all the bed spa has to do for them And so what people were trying to do was figure out how can you through whether it's a voice agents a tool on your website? A quiz and upload your photo and I will show you the result of this product on your face, right? Like something like that. That's a pretty killer sales app for every med spa And so going into med spa specifically and just being like cool. Here's what we're gonna do We're gonna make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward and We're gonna build basically like a little sales tool for you that lives on your website That gives the customer the confidence that when they you know, it opens up their webcam and it Scans and then it says hey, we think you're a good candidate for XYZ Here's some photos of before and afters right like whatever it is some version of that and if you can go get you know 500 to a thousand med spas because they only have the same need right like they're not This is a universal need for all 10,000 of them and you go get 500 or a thousand Let's just use a thousand a thousand med spas that are gonna be paying you You know 50 hundred bucks a month So now you're doing $50,000 a month off of you know Finding one specific pain point for one specific type of business where off-the-shelf AI can actually solve their problem They're just not aware of it and don't know how to implement it. Yeah, so I can think of two specific examples One of them for medium-sized businesses and one for small businesses the medium-sized business guy I interviewed on my podcast current office last week This dude was named rocked by Omjad the CEO founder of replete on the Joe Rogan show So Omjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like this guy John Cheney He he started a business selling like custom vibe-coded replete apps into medium-sized businesses for $15,000 15 upfront and then like I think 1500 per month or something like that for like one call a month He did 2.5 million his first year 60% net margins this year. He's gonna do 8 million with a 50% net margins all built on replete Just vibe-coding custom apps for medium-sized businesses. What's that? It's like a custom app for a medium-sized business What does that even mean? Yeah, so let's say you're an HVAC business with you know, 30 crews He's gonna build you your own CRM So you're not paying like service Titan or any of the others $4,000 a month So immediately you get to capture the savings and you get to have your own CRM just for you So it's not even like AI enabled. It's just a replacement CRM That's built exactly as you have always wanted it or like an accounting practice that builds you a Communication tool or something to send P&Ls and balance sheets to all of your customers in an automated way Every month so that's like a higher ticket medium business medium-sized business and then another guy He does this for barbershops. He charges 2,500 bucks upfront and then 250 a month That's kind of like a good ratio 10% of whatever you charge up front You charge per month and his pitch to the barbershops are like hey, you're cutting hair all day But people need to make appointments So I'm just gonna make you an AI voice agent that will answer the phone as you for you If they ask if you're an agent an AI agent it will tell them but it won't be upfront and say upfront You know that I'm an agent right so it will say all right What time it's just synced with your calendar and it books slots for you So you will make more money and never talk on the phone again. That's the pitch make more money Never talk on the phone again. Don't lose trust with your customers because that's like the big pushback from business owners I don't want a robot answering my phone and it's like dude your customers need their problem solved Whether it's a robot or you or a text they need their hair cut So yeah net of net they would prefer to talk to you But they also just need a haircut and so they don't mind So he just copies and paste the same voice agent over and over because they're all barbershops He just swaps out the name and the operating hours and makes a calendar connection. He's good to go Like that I like the barber I like the barber voice agent Were there any other fun ideas that you had on the Swiss that you wanted to talk about what's a snail mail club Yeah, so that is that's kind of blowing up that snail mail subscription businesses are what like physical box Subscription businesses were five to ten years ago It's literally just a letter with a stamp and you can send your own photography your own poetry Letters my wife started one where she sends recipes It's like a cookbook club and she sends recipes to women and they cook it and every month has a theme grease Italy or whatever These are exploding right now mostly driven by organic tick-tock videos So sorry sorry explain what so that your title of this video is she makes one thousand dollars a day sending letters Who who who was making and how she make it a thousand dollars her name's Hannah She owns the tiny post and she writes like a letter like a heartfelt letter about her her life Whatever she finds important and then she put stickers in there and like handmade artwork nothing AI generated like it's all real It's all physical and that's an important part And she just like is documenting her life and sending things that are important to her to I think like six to seven thousand women Every single month and they love it and her churn is like two percent beautiful pink envelopes nailed it And she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters Yes, ten bucks a month 70% gross margins 30% net and she went from zero to 60k mrr in Seven months through like six tick-tock videos all organic no paid ad spend What is happening what ten bucks a month? That's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah what why are people doing this? What is going on we just we're sick of emails like we want like more mail who wants more mail we want mail We want to go to the mailbox and open a surprise We don't want junk mail this is for us and it's special and it's physical and real and that's all the rage right now This is unbelievable. Sorry. I'm just looking through her stuff. This is unreal Wow, the US Postal Service commented on her video saying great video mind if we repost and use it That's crazy, okay, so keeping us business. How did she get the people to do it? She had a big following or no? No, she didn't she just posted Tick-tock videos about what she was doing like her most viral video was a hidden camera in the kitchen as she explained to her husband What this business was that she was starting so he was like not getting it He's like an MBA finance guy and he's like you want to send letters and like that video got two million views and brought her like her first 1500 customers all organic Wow Okay, this is pretty crazy. So you said people are do this is like a trend now it is dude I so my wife and I and a friend we put on a non-profit farmers market for kids just last Saturday And I was out there like taking videos of these kids businesses and one of the seven-year-old girls and her four-year-old sister Had their own snail mail subscription business and there was a QR code to a shop if I say and they like draw pictures by hand and Send them out for ten bucks a month like it's incredible Wow, you know, I've always wanted something like this for kids Like you know kids have kids create so much art, right? And like it'd be cool if someone like cared about their art or like you know, they got something back And so I was wondering like is there some sort of pen pal mechanism that the parent would pay? So that the kids could kind of like Stuff the envelope with their art that they made that week or that month send it out and then they receive some sort of like either message back Video back or a letter back or something back where it's like, you know, oh my god I loved it, you know, whatever something from someone somewhere whether it's kids sending to kids or kids sending to like old people I don't know what the mechanism was but I feel like there should be something like this for kids art because kids generate so much art and Their excitement when someone's excited about their art is like so tangible so heartwarming that as a parent I would gladly pay ten bucks a month for my kids to feel like they had their little like their version of their Etsy store for their own art You know what I mean? Yeah, I love that that should be a thing There's something that's kind of similar where you can mail in all of your kids artwork to a woman and she will like Basically lay it all out on a canvas and make it like it's a super large mural of your kids artwork that's permanent So you get one whole canvas back to you. Yeah, that's a good idea. I like that That's another type of thing where it's like these heartwarming visual businesses that just could pop on tiktok and you just keep you know Tiktok becomes your customer acquisition funnel for the for things like that Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four-fifths of the pages Point is you miss a lot and unless you're using HubSpot the customer platform that gives you access to the data You need to grow your business the insights that are trapped in emails call logs transcripts all that unstructured data makes all the difference Because when you know more you grow more and so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it visit HubSpot.com So, you know, you've given a bunch of small stuff and small I mean in a like In a positive way, which is like quick easy to start accessible affordable Doesn't take a ton I'm curious. Do you have any ideas that are on the other side of the spectrum? Maybe a little more complicated or a little harder start, but wow the opportunity is large from it from your perspective Yeah, so did I ever tell you about the time where I I got a job at Amazon a few years ago? No, he did not as a pick-pick shipper to spy on them. Okay, so you go to the warehouse? Yep So I owned at the time a third-party logistics business and I wanted to learn how Amazon did it and so I went and got a job I stood in line, you know 15 bucks an hour They trained me how to drive a forklift and I loved it. I ate it up I like in the trainings everyone else was like half asleep and I'm like, okay What about this and like my manager was like, oh, you're gonna be a manager here your management material and the whole time I'm like dude. I'm like a secret spy but it I walked away with an idea that I think could be a billion dollar idea and that's providing food to the three or four million Amazon it doesn't have to be Amazon but Amazon warehouse workers There are no food options. These warehouses and distribution centers are usually kind of out in the middle of nowhere there might be like a You know a McDonald's or something they have like a cafeteria with vending machines But it's all garbage food and I thought like man if I were to start like partner with a catering business and put a flyer with a QR code on every car during every shift and Just have them because they all have like the same lunch break right basically They could pre-order food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone Ten bucks a pop. There's thousands of employees per warehouse This is something that would take some logistics. It would take some funding, but someone's gonna win here I it's not like one that I'm passionate about that I'm about to do hard to do It's one that I think someone will do. Yeah, that's interesting. So like where's What's an example? Where's like the Amazon warehouse? Where's the one that you went to was it out? Was it like this? Did you see the problem when you were there? Yeah? Yeah, that's how I got it It was in like like Irving or something Irving, Texas, but There's like 32 Amazon warehouses in Dallas, Fort Worth alone like and they're there's big as like three to six Costco's each So there's no shortage of demand and it could be manufacturing could be other types of warehouses Yeah, I wonder like if you could just even brand it as like the whatever eight dollar lunch club or some shit like that Right and it's basically cool. You sign up for this and you're gonna get an eight dollar lunch every day of And you just tick the box, you know, what did you want today? Yeah? We have two options three options each day and And you know, I've actually seen a couple of companies that are doing really well with So there's a lot of people trying to do robotic food production but food production is really really hard, right? So like stores like sweet green and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls But every bowl every salad at sweet green There's like a there's like more combinations of what could be in that salad than particles in the universe type of deal Right because it's like every every ingredient can be mixed and matched It's very difficult to to arrange for this and then you have to constantly keep all the ingredients stocked inside the machines It's like pretty tricky thing to do but there's a company that was providing these robots to the large companies that do like school lunches prison lunches corporate cafes basically where you're or like the grab-and-go options at of grocery stores where there's gonna be like five things in the Trit in the little like refrigerator tray you just grab and go and they're sealed with like a thing for those you're basically just scooping the same ingredient into 4,000 trays and that's the food prep and so it's way it's like a way more solvable problem because the robot just literally needs to be able to scoop the Same portion into the same thing 3,000 times in a row without getting tired. Well, that's actually what robots are good at And so they've been doing pretty well with getting these robots into these Large batch meal prep kitchens And so I wonder if you could basically do the same thing but for the the Amazon side, right? We get like you use these warehouses as your as your end customer and you're saying cool. I can basically Because I'm doing you know, 2000 of the same meal. I can actually have a highly automated, you know ghost kitchen here That's that's doing the work Yeah, I think you could still do both like I could see a one Amazon warehouse using both options Like the warm meal, you know deliver from somewhere else and then that as well Yeah, I would love to see someone just print a bunch of flyers put one on each car with a QR code to a stripe link and You know have a menu there and just see how many people pay right then You know if you don't start the business just refund them all but you could do that Maybe you know with a few hours and 30 bucks in paper like I'm just I I love Experiments like that like what would happen like how many people could I convert with only one flyer? All right, I'm gonna go let's go tote rentals Shawn Do you know what a tote rental is tote as in like a tote bag? Kinda like a tote rental box plastic box. Oh, okay. It's like the moving boxes That are like the hard plastic square moving boxes that stack on top of each other got it This is a Google Trends of tote rental as a search term over the last five years. We are spiking what? What's what's the trend that I'm missing out on here? Okay, here's what we're talking about so Ironically everyone has these cardboard boxes from Amazon, but we all also don't have them at hand when we go to move move house to house And so tote rentals as a service is a thing one tote rental Basically replaces 400 cardboard boxes over its lifetime. So you've got an eco angle It's it's like an asset that you pay 20 bucks for and it just pays for itself over and over and over You can start the business for a thousand bucks You work your way in to real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can give to their clients When they sell a home or buy a home So it's like a good like moving in or moving out gift from a realtor to a to a homeowner And it's it's different than like an edible arrangements or something generic So homeowners rent these you drop them off they pack all the crap in it then you pick them up later and You basically pay off the thing in your third or fourth rental and after that It's pure profit less any like labor or gas or more time we oh man The OGs will know this many years ago. We talked about a business that was doing this on the podcast I'm gonna get all this wrong now because it's been a long time But I believe there was some story where it's like in New York somebody basically bought you know A couple thousand dollars worth of these boxes. They're renting them out the boxes pay for themselves after two months And then basically became you know, it's the you know small version of a rental property, right? You're renting out equipment, but the beautiful thing about these is Tie need people don't want to own them. There's like no desire to really own these people need them in the moment to move you can have them be super branded and so It's it can become like a walking billboard or you can literally even sell the ads based on them and Then their equipment that even though they get kind of battered and bruised It's sort of expected so you don't need mint condition boxes in order to make this thing work I'm saying boxes. You said you call these totes toad rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this way? What's the what's the story here? I do I know a guy in Fort Wayne, Indiana of all places there's like a hundred thousand people there and he started going through real estate agents he bought these for himself for a move and He I think what he did was he brought lunch to like a Keller Williams office or something and said hey These are tote rentals. They're growing like crazy your clients want them. We're gonna give you some for free Toad's on the loans dominating Google's got the first five listings, but that's him But then there is there is a you know smarter moves toad rentals calm That's at the bottom of the page. So I don't know we'll see yeah, he's toad's on loan. I just looked it up Okay, cool. So it's on loan. He's crushing it. Let's give him a shout. Yes, his name is David Stillson All right, so David is out here 2024 and you said he went to the real estate office. He's using them for distribution initially and Okay, so you get 30 boxes for a hundred bucks to help with your move Yeah, so that's what he does He sells like packages based on the number of toads that they that they get and he's doing a few few grand a month So a few grand a month and this is do you think this is hey? This this is the type of business great just side income but going all in on it Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze or you think no no no It's just a matter of time till that's 15k 20k a month. Yeah, I think it's it's one of those businesses That's great as either or it's a perfect side hustle because you can keep your full-time job It's only a few hours a week what I love about it compared to other like rental businesses like a bounce house rental businesses With that those things are freaking heavy. You got to roll it up. You got to lug it out there You have to set up the bounce house. You often have to leave someone there to babysit to make sure kids don't break a leg And it's just a pain but these you just drop it off on the driveway and you come back and get it So very very low time investment. Okay All right to rentals and why is this exploding on Google trends right now? Why would this be going up? Is it? You know the moving is not going up. It's just the rental aspect or well Why do you think it's spiking right now? You know, it's like with any of these business ideas They just have their moment like five ten years ago. It was pressure washing like roof cleaning stuff like that It's just having its moment and I think it's a matter of education like people most people would prefer to use this than to have like Missized or misshapen cardboard boxes that collapse They've got to go like scrounging behind a grocery store or beg their friends in a Facebook group or like save their Amazon boxes Like it's just a better experience when you consider everything Oh, dude, if you are using cardboard boxes and you're moving and the just the amount of setup of each box Taping of each box labeling. It's it's ridiculous. You're wasting half your time there. All right. I like it. What else you got? What's next? All right, so let's go Let's go wall printer. What do you know about wall printers? Sean Wall printer as in yeah, you gotta give me a few more words. All right So picture like a 3d printer except it's on rollers and you bring it inside a retail store And it prints like images on a wall like a large mural or something like that. All you do is upload a jpeg I'm watching it now. So you're it's literally like a laser printer, but it's but instead of printing on a piece of paper It's it can go like a full Full wall of a building and it's printing like this video you have here is like a It's like a corporate office where it's printing a timeline history of the of the company on a wall Like you would walk into the office and see that. Okay. So I see this Tell me more So any business could use one of these let's say it's a boring corporate office. They want to spice it up a little bit Let's say it's a restaurant like what restaurant wouldn't want an inside or an outside mural like any business You name it any business and like the tote rentals. This is kind of an educational thing They didn't know as possible or they were paying some local artists like three grand to paint this because it took them like A month right this replaces the local artist. Sorry local artist not sorry, but a five foot eight wall Took your cost if you own the printer which you can get them for between four thousand and sixteen thousand You can finance them for like 50 to 150 bucks a month a five foot a five by eight foot wall Cost you eight dollars in ink and you can sell for that for about eight hundred dollars So literal 99 gross margin You don't need a retail space. You don't need a warehouse. You can keep it in your garage in your closet at home You just roll up upload the jpeg start printing pick it back up Well, okay ai's telling me that these units cost 35 to 65 thousand. I'm guessing those are more heavy Heavy duty versions of these It depends on how high you want to go That's kind of the differentiator and on the quality of the machine if you want to go like if you're doing like a high school gym Yeah, right putting like the basketball team on there. You're gonna need a more expensive one But that's a smaller market And i'm guessing you can also upcharge for the graphic design That you're gonna print because they may not have it and you could be like, oh, yeah, we will lay this out We'll give you the free we'll do all the designs for free You just pay us to print it right like and you could even maybe like Do a little bit of spec work with that because you might have templates like in this example you showed it's a corporate timeline Cool, that's a template Oh values, that's a template the menu. That's a template. You know, whatever like are about us founding history That's a template and you just basically say hey look. I put your brand in this And you could kind of automate that now with the ai So, you know, just go to their website pull there about us put it in our about us template send it to them as like a hey You know, I was at your store. I thought you could put you know Interesting putting this on the wall. Is it outbound you think for this or you think there's gonna be a lot of enough inbound I don't think people know wall printing as a right as a thing to go search for even Yeah, that's kind of like a tote rentals. I mean you want me to show show you the the google trends on this I mean in this in the spirit of a full disclosure here There's the google trends people are very similar They are This is very visual. It's like it's like pressure washing was five ten years ago. It's fun to watch you get the time lapse of it And it's perfect for short form video. So that's what you do. You just post organically You go print some walls for free just to get the content. I mean it's eight dollars for the ink And then you just post it and then whatever organic pieces of content pop off you just push paid ads spend behind that to a simple lead form and You close it you're not even able to do like if you I mean just to get this business off the ground Go knock on a hundred doors go to a hundred businesses and see what you can do You could just take a binder of your portfolio Um, go, you know, do a couple for free then do a binder portfolio and see what you can get going or um, or you know Even before you do your own Just take uh, you know images off instagram of what other people did and go around and say, hey, would you want this? Um, just just to even learn like where is the market? Like is there one type of business that's particularly Into this, you know, he's a real estate agent. So that you know, whatever whatever it is If you go to their website if you go to the wall printer.com the company that sells these machines The headline which is just so funny to me. It just says Instead of saying anything about their product the headline when you hit the website says those who never take risks will work Always work for someone who has Basically just tempting you to become an entrepreneur. This is sort of shaming you into becoming an entrepreneur, which yeah Honestly, it's always a bit of a red flag in my book anytime somebody's like really aggressive on the uh, You know be your own boss selling you that selling you that dream. I'm always a little skeptical of that but Uh, okay, this is interesting. How did you first find this wall printing niche? I saw an instagram video and Honestly, this is one of those video There's one of those businesses where you don't need to buy the thing and then like hope and pray that you find customers You can start posting other people's videos and say stuff like this is what wall printers can do instead of this is what my wall printer did Uh, or you just go post a facebook marketplace generates and leads throw up an ai generated website get some leads Then once you have like some bookings or something then you go finance a machine So you've given out two ideas so far that I would call like white belt businesses Is this the way basically Businesses you can you do as a starter business that doesn't take ton of capital ton of time ton of skill You don't need a big network And you can do these to get to that kind of two grand a month five grand a month ten grand a month You start getting that money rolling in and really get in the game as an entrepreneur Is that it's not the right way to frame the ideas that you're drawn to or that you like to share about like what? Give me like draw a box. Yeah, what is the what is the label of the box of these ideas? So all of my ideas are run through like my own personal filter Which is I've started over 80 businesses and I've learned what I hate what I love what most people hate what most people would probably love And I like to call those binary outcomes binary outcome businesses and that is a business that is just simple Like you put x in and you get out y a custom home building business is not that a home cleaning business is not that I want a business where it's just a very clear defined value that you add And then you get paid and you get a five star review. That's like one of my filters The other one which I heavily bias towards is Approachability and affordability Last time I was on the pod. I was talking about like some backyard businesses if you remember In in in ground trampoline. Yeah Yeah, and I talked about another business which was like the guy doll houses kits, right? Remember that one? Yeah And and sam was like dude that that backyard idea sucks But like I like the doll house idea But like if I were to run this you can tell I've been thinking about this in the shower like every day since right? This is like my moment and sam's not even here to defend himself When I run that through my filter, it's like how many people could launch a guy doll house Subscription business in the world and be successful and how approachable is that? That's like a kind of one hand. Yeah. Yeah, exactly and like it's not approachable It's pretty complex actually like designs and materials and shipping and all that branding the market all of it Yeah, right whereas any dude can go rent an excavator on facebook marketplace and start digging a hole for a trampoline So it's like not sexy, but it's much more approachable and there could be Three guys in every 30,000, you know person city owning that same business, which is what I love about it So you like so when you said binary businesses and you said, you know a home cleaning business not one luxury home builders not one but digging holes for Trampolines in ground trampolines is one explain the difference there Well, why what should one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category? But the second category has some additional benefits. What's the difference? Yeah So I'll just I'll speak to two businesses that I've actually started and not a hypothetical business like the trampoline one binary outcome so We I own a tree trimming business and it's the best business in the world because we need to do one of two things That's it. We need to remove a tree entirely Or we need to trim a tree like specific branches. So we show up This one cool. We cut it down. We throw it in the truck five star review 1500 bucks, right? We've never got less than a five star review ever and it's not because we're amazing operators It's just because it's simple, right Conversely, I've owned a house cleaning business and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck We were going through real estate agents because we thought hey, they have a lot of surface area that They're they're touching and talking to a lot of homeowners on a daily basis so they can refer out all these jobs And then we had to get 10 99s all these house cleaners because we didn't want employees And so we were finding these Super unreliable house cleaners. They had a vast array of equipment They would always show up late and sometimes the realtor would inspect the house sometimes the homeowner would They had varying degrees of quality and preferences and one would say hey There's a hair on my floor and the other one like didn't care It was just it was a recipe for one star reviews and for low margins and for people not showing up And it was complex but it like a complex business is fine if the juice is worth the squeeze and the margins are there Or it's high ticket, but it didn't have any of those things. So And so, you know, most people get tripped up with a business like the tree trimming business where they say, okay Yeah, I was listening to this podcast. I talked about tree trimming. It made sense. Yeah, I go we go we trim the trees We get 1500 bucks. What's not to love? That's awesome. And You know reality will hit as soon as they go start, you know, Sean's You know trees and trims.com go buy the domain. I'm ready. Uh, you know, I figure out how to I go watch a couple videos on trimming trees and then No customers, right? And so you always have this like bottleneck of I think for most people, they don't really understand how to get their first 10 100 customers to start getting the momentum that is required In order to to get going in a business and they sort of have all these false starts Because they have an idea they get really excited. They spend a bunch of time on the idea But not time acquiring customers So the the sort of perceived investment goes up and up and up and up and up but they're not getting any getting any ground yet And then when they can't really figure out how to get any sales or customers You know the excitement fades around the idea and they're on to the next one And I've seen this pattern over and over again in people in my life who want to be entrepreneurial but don't quite make it happen and so What is your method or you know, let's take the tree trimming example Let's say I'm now in a different city than you are, right? I'm in I'm over in Denver And let's say I'm in Denver and I want to start this business How do I use my time early on to get that initial momentum? Yeah, so let's boil down business. There's two tasks that any business owner needs to do They need to find customers. They need to fulfill customers. That's it. Like it's not like I need to get an LLC I need to make like you need to find customers and fulfill them and guess what net of net all things consider It's harder to find customers than fulfill them. Right. That's the harder thing So do the harder thing first Before you buy a wall printer before you buy a chainsaw before you even find a crew that you're going to sub out All the chainsaw work to find customers try to find customers or learn about how to acquire customers in any niche Because if you can learn facebook ads, then you can find customers in an e-com business or in a tree trimming business So right spend time up front trying to find customers not like learning how to cut and like if you shouldn't cut an oak tree in February and we learn that the hard way, right? There's like disease and stuff. Don't care or worry about any of that stuff Go to facebook marketplace and post I own a tree trimming business I can trim your tree see if anything happens if it doesn't then like feel it out How you still feeling about this still still enthused cool Then like learn some facebook ads or post to facebook groups or like do x y or z number of things until you get Some people that are raising their hands that aren't your mom or your sibling and saying I want you to trim my tree Now it's like okay now I got a fairy out of the field So rather than the kind of scatter shot because it's I can put up flyers and I can go to facebook groups and marketplace in craigslist And I can run facebook ads and google ads and yelp and I can do all those things What what worked for you with the tree trimming business? It was it well, it's funny because it's like I like to say the efficacy of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan Okay, so what works in this month may never work again It may never work until You know the next year during the same month because it sees it all you just never know So what worked to find our first customers was posting organically to facebook marketplace Even though facebook doesn't want you to post for services, right? You have to kind of find some tricky ways around that that worked, but we couldn't scale it But we didn't need to scale it because then we started using facebook ads with 15 second vertical videos And then that worked But what really scaled for us is referrals through real estate agents landlords and property managers That's like our big three And we just get referrals and we send them gifts and we follow up with them every month and every time there's a storm We get ahead of it before and then afterwards we say hey Can we help like referrals is our 80 20? But it took us all kinds of other methods of until we got to that point that was giving us a sense how Successful is this tree trimming business that you have? Yeah, so we do mid six figures a year in revenue and about half of that net profit And you're in one one market or yeah, just one one market dials forward Gotcha. Um, okay, amazing Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product I think you know this already. I use mercury for all of my businesses I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses We use mercury as our business banking across all of them and now they actually just launched a personal banking account So I have my personal account there. I moved off of wells fargo and chase. I'm just all in on mercury Why I like products that are easy to use I like products that get me and the problems that I have so like very easy to make a joint account with my wife Very easy to spin up virtual cards One click and I get savings yield. It's just has all the stuff that I need in one place So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely mercury I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more Mercury is a fintech not an fdic insured bank banking services are provided through choice financial group and column and a members fdic Let's do another one. What's another fun interesting business that business idea? Yeah So this is another one that I've actually done. Um, this is a great summer business Uh rv rentals as a service. Okay, so You got three types of rvs class a which is like a big tour bus looking thing, right very intimidating for most people Class b which is like a converted sprinter van Right van hashtag van life and then class c which is a like a motorhome, right? It's like the vehicle and the The home combined and then you've got like pull behind trailers. So Usually in most markets a class c a motorhome is the way to go And so there's a few platforms rv share and outdoorsy being the biggest That's like the uber and lift of the space These are great because you can finance them and i'm not advocating you should but you can finance them for 20 to 30 years Because they're treated like a home And so a 40 000 class c rv will cost you like between 250 and 600 bucks a month And you rent these things out for 150 to 400 bucks a night and in many markets People are fully booked. They're 40 to 80 percent booked and they pay for themselves in the first year or two So the the thesis is that the average rv owner really only uses their rv for five to 15 nights a year And so, you know, it just doesn't make good financial sense for people to buy an rv But to be on the business end of it to buy one and use it occasionally for your family block off your own dates And then list it on these marketplaces that are happy to bring you customers Um, it's a beautiful business. I've owned this business And what's the trick is that you got to be near like these national parks or like is like is location the key variable? What's the key variable like what's the difference between? 30 occupancy and 80 to 90 occupancy for these It's supply and demand based on your unit type So in some markets you're gonna have a lot more demand for pull-behind trailers because everyone has a truck And they're all going to Coachella or something right in other markets. There's more demand for class b or for class c So there's a very simple way to gauge what your supply and demand is and I actually I love this idea And I I got my MBA like six years ago and obviously I'm a terrible student So I was never paying attention and I was researching this idea in the back of the class And here's exactly what I did and this works for air b and b works for any like, you know, sharing platform so I would Act as if I were a consumer on rv sure or outdoorsy and I would say all right I want to book in for this weekend for three nights for class c and then it would say 47 results and then I would say all right one year from now Exact same weekend one year from now three nights class crv So all the same filters but the dates were a year from now and instead of 47 results It would say like 470 results So it's like interesting. All right, because no one's booking a year out Right, I I just want to know what the supply is right and what they like the market occupancy is So if those numbers were true, it's like wow, they're 90 90 booked for this unit Let's do the same search for the same dates but with class b 13 results this weekend 20 results a year from now. It's like, oh, okay Class a and then I just made a google sheet of all these things And I did this for like two hours in the back of my class and at the end of it I was like in my local market, which is north dalsford with suburbs. It was screaming to me class crv It's gotta have like six to nine people Yachty and we don't live near national parks like texas does not have good state or national parks It's just people want a machine So I went so far as to reach out to these platforms and said, hey, I just did this research Here's my google sheet Does this vibe with what your research shows because they see it all and they want me to buy units to rent mount on their platforms So they reached out and they're like, how did you figure this out? This is exactly matching like what our research shows people just need to buy class crvs I was like, I just ran searches on your website So all that said anyone anyone could do this in any market to find out like where the supply and the demand is And then just best principles apply if it's just take good pictures good description be hyper responsive And you'll win right? Yeah, it's actually pretty clever the kind of looking a year out versus the current uh current availability in order to figure out the how much booking uh How much the total supply is booked Because you would just rather be in an environment where there's just a lot of demand Right and and you can also look at reviews and you could do other things like that But like you said that that works for airbnb that works for rv share that works for any kind of like sharing economy type of service Yeah, it works on tour. Oh, I did it with like a cyber truck and learned like holy crap. There's way too many cyber trucks on tour It's just not a good investment But this is a great business because it's a perfect side hustle Like if you want an rv for your family, you can have one for free, right? Like there's your there's your clippable moment. It's a free rv and you get paid What I don't like about this business is the messy middle like You either need to own one rv and kind of do this a little bit on the side to make some extra money Or you need to own 10 plus and then just outsource everything hire a person like Yeah, go to like an rv rental or an rv storage lot, you know Spend 150 bucks a month to keep them not on your house and set up systems take youtube videos So people can know like how to clean it how to check in how to check out like The worst thing you could do here is own like two to four of them because your life is not it's not fun Yeah, it's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses, which is um The juice is not really worth the squeeze I I there's a reason I called them those sort of white belt businesses and that's not meant to be a director What it means is it's a you need a great you need a starting point as an entrepreneur Everybody starts somewhere and um, you know if you start off saying i'm gonna build tesla Unless you are truly truly special and gifted and unique, but guess what even elan didn't start with tesla right? He started with a much simpler business before that Um, and so, you know warb buffet was you know selling uh, he's putting arcade machine uh games in Barber shops like you know, everybody starts somewhere and in doing that you learn a lot You learn a lot about yourself you learn a lot about generating demand about operations about hiring about finance You learn in this like kind of safe sandbox And it's simple enough that you actually get started versus trying to go for the perfect business You really you really don't even get in the game is what i've what i've seen for most people And so i do like the idea of white belt businesses However, most of them almost by definition are pretty bad businesses to own and um, and you end up working a ton You get kind of like build yourself a job is is what happens i think in most cases and that's in the success scenario Of course, there's outliers, but i just wanted to say that out loud now i'm curious from your point of view What are the businesses that you see people talk about as if they're good businesses? But you're like dude i wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole Well oftentimes there are businesses and niches that are like really good to sell high ticket courses around And so it makes it seem on the surface like this is a great business when really it's like People are just making a lot of money selling you the idea that it's a great business and there are exceptions to this But i think one business that people Wrongly assume is passive Is vending machines like i i can't tell you how many people i've heard say like i just It's just a few vending machines and just extra thousand bucks a month just passive just make it sounds passive. It's not passive Sounds passive. Yeah, sure It's just not you know those vending machines break and the credit card readers break and you have to refill them and Your if it's if snack and drink they go bad you have to swap them out Is there anything truly passive by that definition? No, right? No, no That's just one that it has the perception of being passive and of being amazing And it i think it is net of net a good business It's just not nearly as good as a lot of people are selling you the idea on right Yeah, for me, there's like the um, I think your your test of how many people are trying to sell you high ticket courses and how Sleazy do they look? Uh, is is the is the best proxy you can sort of I don't even need to see the underlying business I could just tell from the from the landing page of the person who's trying to convince me It's a great business. And so, um, you know, there's these turnkey amazon fba businesses And of course you could build a great amazon business many people do but so i'm not saying there's not outliers in any of these But man, that's a brutal business to try to go into is to build these like turnkey generic amazon fba businesses YouTube faceless channels most drop shipping stuff like you know, all this is like anything that anything that is around stock trading Um, or any kind of trading strategy or trading courses like, you know, literally run away Yeah, i'm speaking of amazon fba. There's there are a few guys that went to federal prison overselling high ticket fba courses So that's public record because of what what was that? What put them in jail though? they promised guaranteed returns and in addition which that's enough to get you in trouble with the sec In addition to that, I believe at least one of them was just a Ponzi scheme They were just taking money and just buying cars with it Um, amazing. Well, chris, uh, always good having you on man. Uh, shout out your podcast. Where should people find you? The Kerner office. That's k o e r n e r t k o pod.com All right, man. Thanks for coming on. All right. Thanks, Sean I could be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel never looking back If you made it this far then you're gonna love what i'm about to tell you So there's this amazing entrepreneur named Neil Patel. He's been on mfm He's one of our favorite guests and he has a podcast it's called marketing school And it's brought to you by the hub spot podcast network marketing school brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches They have over a hundred million downloads and over 2,500 episodes Marketing school gives you bite-sized marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately whether you have a new website Or you already have this huge established business You're gonna learn about the latest SEO content marketing social media email marketing conversion optimization and general online marketing strategies that work today You can get marketing school wherever you get your podcast