The Side Hustle King: "Make $20K+/month without money, luck, or experience"
Alright, I'm going to say one sentence and then you can decide if this episode is for you. If you're the type of 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 $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 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 5 ideas for us. I think you will love this episode with Chris.
I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel.
All right, we got Chris Corner here. You are back because you have, uh, an 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 many. 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 $250,000, $300,000 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 at, 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 them?
I would tell them to start reselling, reselling like Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items. So you spend $100, $200, 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 GovDeals. There's a website called B-Stock. On B-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 B-Stock right now and I see that I can buy 2 pallets of men's gray Champion sweatpants, joggers, for $48,000 in New Jersey.
Sounds great.
I'm gonna get 1,200 units. What's the price? So $48,000, I get 1,200 units, $40. That's not even a deal. What's going on? Oh wait, wait.
Oh no.
That's the retail value.
Yeah, okay.
That makes sense. I can buy this for $7 grand. So I can buy it for $5 a pop. And it's saying that the standard retail value of this would be $40 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. I like 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. I'm buying them for $34 a unit. $34 a unit for a refrigerator. Telling you what's going on here. I might do this, but I might actually go do this just on sheer principle. A $34 fridge. Uh, I have to find 58 of them though. Um, 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 and you look at how much the price point is.
So you're trying to— you do that 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 going to 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 ghost people just to, just to understand.
And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook Marketplace. My sister is moving right now 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. Uh, you know, put the— put this like, here's one drawer, not even the cabinet, here'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 unreal. Well, and but the annoying thing is listing all this stuff. It's tedious, but. Right. I just saw this TikTok of a guy that used Claude Cowork. 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 every— 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 could tell it to do the whole thing. You could say, hey, 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 bot couldn't do that.
No, totally.
4 pallets of denim onesies we could get. $3, $2 each.
Sounds like a deal.
All right, this is a very addictive website. This is very fun. I got to get off Beastock right now, otherwise I will lose my afternoon. Hey, real quick, if you like this episode with 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 this episode. 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 going to 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, 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 selling side hustle?
Mm-hmm. Probably implementing AI into small businesses. Like we talked about this last time. I, we might have talked about it 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 5 years, Sean, how many people will be AI consultants, like to small, medium, large, any size business.
Every single small business— well, not just small business, large and small business— is right now AI curious, AI hungry, and AI clueless at the same time. 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 breathes this stuff. Like that combination creates a ton of opportunity. But that's a still pretty broad picture. 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, good 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 the internet started, every business kind of needed a website, but it was just starting from 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 could maintain it for them and do whatever for them, you know, going forward. 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 anytime 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, reach out because everybody's kind of talked about this idea of like help businesses implement AI. I think Mark Cuban is like, hey, if you're a kid, you know, if you want to be successful, go help businesses implement AI. 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, um, I saw this AI tool that was for med spas, and they were like, look, every med spa offers— you know, I'm a little out of my depth here— but every med spa is basically offering some sort of beauty service to somebody. So somebody's going to 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 med 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 agent, 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 going to do. We're going to make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward. And we're going to 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 1,000 med spas because they all 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 1,000— let's just use 1,000— 1,000 med spas that are going to be paying you, you know, $50, $100 a month. So now you're doing $50,000, $100,000 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, The Corner Office, last week. This dude was name-dropped by Amjad, the CEO founder of Replit, on the Joe Rogan Show. So Amjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like, this guy John Cheney, he, he started a business selling like custom vibe-coded Replit apps into medium-sized businesses for $15,000, $15,000 upfront, and then like I think $1,500 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, uh, with 50% net margins, all built on Replit, just vibe coding custom apps for medium-sized businesses.
What's an example of 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, you your own CRM. So you're not paying like ServiceTitan 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. 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 up front and then $250 a month. That's kind of like a good ratio. 10% of whatever you charge upfront, 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 going to make you an AI voice agent that will answer the phone as you, for you. If they ask if you're an agent, an 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 is 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 pastes the same voice agent over and over because they're all barbershops. He just swaps out the name and the operating hours and makes the calendar connection. He's good to go. I like that.
I like the barber. I like the barber voice agent.
The niche of the niche. Yeah, why not?
Were there any other fun ideas that you had on this list 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 5 to 10 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, it's like a cookbook club, and she sends recipes to women and they cook it. And every month has a theme— Greece, Italy, or whatever. These are exploding right now, mostly driven by organic TikTok videos.
So, sorry, sorry, explain. So your title of this video is She Makes $1,000 a Day Sending Letters. Who, who, who is making and how is she making $1,000?
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 puts 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 6,000 to 7,000 women every single month. And they love it. And her churn is like 2%.
Beautiful pink envelopes. Nailed it. And she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters.
What is happening? What? $10 a month? That's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah. 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 I 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 awesome. That's crazy.
Okay, so she's creating— They're keeping us in business.
How did she get the people to do it? She had a big following or no?
No, she didn't. She just posted TikTok 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 2 million views and brought her like her first 1,500 customers, all organic.
Wow. Okay, this is pretty crazy. So you said people are doing this. This is like a trend now.
It is, dude. I, So my wife and I and a friend, we put on a nonprofit farmer's market for kids just last Saturday. And I was out there like taking videos of these kids' businesses. And one of the 7-year-old girls and her 4-year-old sister had their own snail mail subscription business. And there was a QR code to a Shopify site and they like draw pictures by hand and send them out for $10 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 letter back or something back where it's like, you know, oh my God, I loved it. Yeah, whatever. Something from someone somewhere, whether it's kids sending to kids or kids sending to like old people. I don't know.
I didn'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 $10 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. No, 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 a super large mural of your kid's artwork that's permanent. So you get one and then she'll send the whole canvas back to you.
Oh, that's a cool idea. I like that. Yeah. 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 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 4/5 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 to start? But wow, the opportunity is large from, from your perspective.
Yeah. So did I ever tell you about the time where I got a job at Amazon a few years ago?
No, you did not.
As a pick-pack 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 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 going to be a manager here. You're management material. And the whole time I'm like, dude, I'm like a 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 3 or 4 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 preorder food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone. $10 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 going to win here. I, it's not like one that I'm passionate about that I'm about to do.
Hard to do.
But it's one that I think someone will do.
Yeah. So 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, they're as big as like 3 to 6 Costcos each. So there's no shortage of demand, and it could be manufacturing, it could be other types of warehouses.
Yeah, I wonder like if you could just even brand it as like the whatever, $8 Lunch Club or some shit like that, right? And it's basically, cool, you sign up for this and you're gonna get an $8 lunch every day of— and you just tick the box, you know, what did you want today? Yeah, we have 2 options, 3 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 Sweetgreen and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls. But every bowl, every salad at Sweetgreen, 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 a 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 are, or like the grab-and-go options at grocery stores where there's going to be like 5 things in the, 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 Amazon side, right? Like you use these warehouses as your end customer and you're saying, cool, I can basically, because I'm doing, you know, 2,000 of the same meal, I can actually have a highly automated, you know, ghost kitchen here that's doing the work.
Yeah, I think you could still do both. Like I could see one Amazon warehouse using both options. Like the warm meal, you know, delivered 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. And then, you know, if you don't start the business, just refund them all. But you could do that, you know, with a few hours and $30 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. Sean, do you know what a tote rental is?
Tote as in like a tote bag?
Uh, 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 5 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 for and it just pays for itself over and over and over. You can start the business for $1,000. You work your way into real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can gift 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 different than like an Edible Arrangements or something generic. So Homeowners rent these, you drop them off, they pack all their 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 going to 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 had basically bought, you know, a couple thousand dollars worth of these boxes. They're renting them out. The boxes pay for themselves after 2 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 high 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 ad space 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. But I'm saying boxes, but you said you call these totes, tote rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this? So what's the, what's the story here?
I do. I know a guy in Fort Wayne, Indiana, of all places. There's like 100,000 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 going to give you some for free.
But that's him.
But then there is, there is a, you know, smartermovestoterentals.com that's at the bottom of the page. So I don't know. We'll see.
Yeah, he's Totes on Loan. I just looked it up.
Okay, cool.
So Totes on Loan, he's crushing it.
And let's give him a shout.
Yes. His name is David Stilson.
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 $100 to help with your move.
Yeah. So that's what he does. He sells like packages based on the number of totes 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 that's 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 business is 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. Tote rentals. And why is this exploding on Google Trends right now? Why would this be going up? Is it, you know, moving's not going up. It's just the rental aspect or 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 5, 10 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 mis-sized or misshapen cardboard boxes that collapse. They've got to go like scrounge them 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 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 got to 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 it's literally like a laser printer, but it's instead of printing on a piece of paper, it's— it can go like a full, full wall of a building. 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 it was possible, or they were paying some local artist like $3,000 to paint this because it took them like a month, right? This replaces the local artist. Sorry, local artist, not sorry, but a 5-foot-8 wall to your cost. If you own the printer, which you can get them for between $4,000 and $16,000, you can finance them for like $50 to $150 a month. A 5-foot, a 5 by 8-foot wall costs you $8 in ink and you can sell for that for about $800. 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 is telling me that these units cost $35,000 to $65,000. I'm guessing those are more heavy duty, 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 going to 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 going to 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 our 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 AI. So, you know, just go to their website, pull their 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, interested in putting this on the wall. Is it outbound, do 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, uh, tote rentals. I mean, you want me to show, show you the, uh, the Google Trends on this? I mean, in this, in the spirit of a full disclosure here, there's the Google Trends. People are searching for this. They are. This is very visual. It's like, it's like pressure washing was 5, 10 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 $8 for the ink, and then you just post it. And then whatever organic pieces of content pop off, you just push paid ad spend behind that to a simple lead form and you close it.
You might even be able to do like, if you're— I mean, just to get this business off the ground, go knock on 100 doors, go to 100 businesses and see what you can do. You can take a binder of your portfolio, you know, do a couple for free, then do a binder portfolio and see what you can get going. Or, you know, even before you do your own, just take, you know, images off Instagram of what other people did and go around and say, "Hey, would you want this?" Just to even learn like where is the market? Like, is there one type of business that's particularly into this? You know, is it real estate agents? Is it, you know, whatever it is. If you go to their website, if you go to thewallprinter.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 honestly is always a bit of a red flag in my book. Anytime somebody's like really aggressive on the you know, be your own boss, selling you that, selling you that dream. I'm always a little skeptical of that, but 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— this is 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. Or you just go post to Facebook Marketplace, generate some 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 do as a starter business that doesn't take a ton of capital, a ton of time, ton of skill. You don't need a big network. And you can do these to get to that kind of $2,000 a month, $5,000 a month, $10,000 a month. You start getting that money rolling in and really get in the game as an entrepreneur. Is that, is that 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 homebuilding 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 5-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.
Yep. In-ground trampoline.
Yeah. Yeah. And I talked about another business which was like the Guy dollhouse kits. Right. Right. Remember that one? Yeah. And, and Sam was like, dude, that, that backyard idea sucks. But like, I like the dollhouse 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 dollhouse subscription business in the world and be successful? And how approachable is that? That's like a—
count on 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, educating 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 3 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 builder's not one.
Mm-hmm.
But digging holes for trampolines, in-ground trampolines is one. Explain the difference there. Well, why, what should, why should one, one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category, but the second category has some additional benefits. What are, what's the difference?
Yeah, so I'll just, I'll speak to two businesses that I, 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 'cause 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. 5-star review, $1,500, right? We've never got less than a 5-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, a house cleaning business and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck. We were going through real estate agents cuz we thought, hey, they have a lot of surface area, like 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 1099s, 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 1-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. Guy talked about tree trimming. It made sense. Yeah, you go, we go, we trim the trees, we get $1,500. What's not to love? That's awesome. And, you know, reality will hit as soon as I go start, you know, Sean's, you know, treesandtrims.com, go buy the domain. I'm ready. 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 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 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 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, I'm over in Denver and let's say I'm in Denver and I wanna 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 considered, 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 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 learned 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 to figure out how to fulfill.
So rather than the kind of scattershot, because I can put up flyers and I can go to Facebook groups and Marketplace and Craigslist and I can run Facebook ads and Google ads and Yelp and I can do all those things. What worked for you with the tree trimming business?
It was, it, well, it's funny 'cause 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 'cause it's seasonal. You, 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 it— 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 3. 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 until we got to that point.
Can you give 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 in net profit.
And you're in one, one market or—
Yeah, just one, one market, Dallas-Fort Worth.
Gotcha. Okay.
Amazing.
Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. 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 7 or 8 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 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/personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Columb NA, members FDIC. Let's do another one. What's another fun, interesting business that— business idea you have?
So this is another one that I've actually done. This is a great summer business. RV rentals as a service. Okay, so you got 3 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 Lyft 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 a month. And you rent these things out for $150 to $400 a night. And in many markets, people are fully booked, they're 40 to 80% booked, and they pay for themselves in the first year or two. So the thesis is that the average RV owner really only uses their RV for 5 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. It's a beautiful business. I've owned this business.
And what's the trick? Is it 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 going to 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 got my MBA like 6 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 Airbnb, works for any like, you know, sharing platform. So I would act as if I were a consumer on RVShare or Outdoorsy, and I would say, all right, I want a booking for this weekend for 3 nights for a Class C. Okay. And then it would say 47 results. And then I would say, all right, 1 year from now, exact same weekend, 1 year from now, 3 nights, Class C RV. 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 was like, interesting. All right. Because no one's booking a year out, right? I just want to know what the supply is, right? And what the— like the market occupancy is. So if those numbers were true, it's like, wow, they're 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 2 hours in the back of my class.. And at the end of it, I was like, in my local market, which is North Dallas-Fort Worth suburbs, it was screaming to me, Class C RV, it's gotta have like 6 to 9 people, yada. And we don't live near national parks. Like Texas is, 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 them out on their platform. 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 C RVs. 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. 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, current availability in order to figure out the how much booking, 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 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 Turo. I did it with like a Cybertruck and learned like, holy crap, there's way too many Cybertrucks on Turo. 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+ and then just outsource everything. Hire a person like, you know, go to like an RV rental or an RV storage lot, you know, spend $150 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 2 to 4 of them. Because your life is not— it's not fun.
Yeah, that's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses, which is the juice is not really worth the squeeze. I call that— there's a reason I call them the sort of white belt businesses, and that's not meant to be derogatory. What it means is it's a— you need a great— you need a starting point as an entrepreneur. Everybody starts somewhere. And, you know, if you start off saying, I'm going to build Tesla, unless you are truly, truly special and gifted and unique, but Guess what? Even Elon didn't start with Tesla, right? He started with a much simpler business before that. And so, you know, Warren Buffett was, you know, selling— he's putting arcade machine games in barbershops. 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, and you end up working a ton. You kind of like build yourself a job 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've— 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 $1,000 a month, just passive.
Just make it—
sounds 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 you're— if it's— if snack and drink, they go bad, you have to swap them out.
Is anything truly passive by that definition?
No, no, no. That's just one that it has the perception of being passive and it 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— I think your test of how many people are trying to sell you high-ticket courses and how sleazy do they look 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, yeah, 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 dropshipping stuff. Like, you know, all this is like anything that, anything that is around stock trading or any kind of trading strategy or trading course is 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 over selling 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.
Amazing. Well, Chris, always good having you on, man. Shout out your podcast. Where should people find you?
The Koerner Office. That's koernerpod.com.
All right, man. Thanks for coming on.
All right. Thanks, Sean. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.
If you made it this far, then you're going to love what I'm about to tell you. So there's this amazing entrepreneur. His name's 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 HubSpot Podcast Network. Marketing School brings you daily actionable digital marketing lessons learned from years and years of being in the trenches. They have over 100 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 going to 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 podcasts.