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8 Untapped Business Ideas You Can Start This Weekend ⏐Ep. #248

41m 28s

8 Untapped Business Ideas You Can Start This Weekend ⏐Ep. #248

The transcription covers a range of business ideas and strategies, such as building local newsletters, using lifetime warranties as unique selling points, and partnering with influencers to launch businesses. It includes examples of successful business models, like a man earning $70 million annually from selling merchandise. Additionally, it delves into the economics of Botox, discussing unit pricing, recurring revenue, and customer lifetime value calculations. The conversation also touches on customer churn rates and gross margins in the Botox business model.

Transcription

7648 Words, 41198 Characters

It's one of those ideas that you launch by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple of yeses that you might as well learn the skills and have an agency one to two grand a month per customer. He does micro his letters. 85,000 people, he's got 40,000 of them subscribing. He generated 230,000 and I think he's like on par for double that this year. That's a NAPLIS Maryland. Everyone loses their sunglasses. So with our sunglasses, lifetime warranty. No questions asked. Statistically speaking, they would have to file 10 claims to break even on them. This guy makes $70 million a year from selling merch. Anyone listening to this could make money by piggybacking on an influencer. Welcome to the corner office. This was one of my favorite hold cobrose ever and I'm not just saying that so you're listening. I'm saying that because we talked about like eight different business ideas that are all in different niches and I think you're going to love a lot of them. We talked about building a local newsletter and how that opportunity is open to anyone in the world. We talked about building a business around lifetime warranty as your unique value proposition, your UVP. We talked about starting a local Google My Business Agency charging $1,500 a month. We talked about a lot and I think you're going to love it. So enjoy and we'll see you next time. I got an idea for you. Let's do it. Do you remember when we were talking about partnering with influencers to launch businesses? You say you are and I said, if someone is an influencer and all they do is sell T-shirts, they don't know business. Yes. I've used that line many times with people now. Oh, thank you. There was one exception. I don't really want to get into, but I forgot to mention it because it proves you wrong. I get it. Virginity rocks. Are you familiar with them? No. I forgot. The guy sells a virginity rocks shirt. Oh, is it the video where he's like virginity? Danny Duncan. Danny Duncan. I don't know. He's a viral social media character. I don't know, but this guy makes like $70 million a year from selling virginity rocks merch. And that's his whole brand. From all the Christians who were like, oh, brothers, brothers, sister, Smith, have you seen the virginity rock sweatshirt or I think that's such a good message to send to the children? Yes. Yes. I was $70 million. Yes. Well, come again. That's what she said. That's a lot. That's a lot. Yeah. Like $70 million. A lot of money. More than 50. Yeah. On T-shirts and hoodies and hats. So like, there are exceptions to that. But. Oh. His whole brand, right? And when you get it right, it becomes its own viral effect. You see a shirt. You buy a shirt. So I don't want to give into that too much. But I thought of another idea of how anyone listening to this could make money by piggybacking on an influencer. Okay. Okay. There's a guy on Twitter that I follow and his name is Sawyer Merit and he's probably going to get hit up after this podcast. But Sawyer is a Tesla fanboy. That's his whole stick. Elon responds to his tweets frequently. He tweets about all the Elon companies and products and that's his whole stick. And it's actually kind of like a crypto Twitter account. It's quite easy to grow a Tesla Twitter account because the algorithm favors it. Yeah. It's such a polarizing topic. It's so polarized. You love it or you hate it, right? And so by nature of that, it's fairly easy to grow a Tesla account. Anyway, I think someone needs to partner with this guy and launch a newsletter of just like weekly Tesla news and updates, right? These are high ticket buyers. It's a highly educated audience and he's not monetizing with a newsletter. So you start with a free newsletter and then month or two later, you launch a paid newsletter where you launch, you basically do kind of like a seeking alpha or a Motley Fool, like an in-depth deep dive on one of Elon's stocks, right? And it's like you need to buy it, you need to short it, you know, we flew this drone over the factory and we can see there's a production run being withheld, like all this insider info. You just need to find one rider, give him a cut of your revenue. And it's like once a month, maybe it's 50 bucks a month, $500 a month, depending on where you want to go with it. But people can trade based on your newsletter. And these are people that are already buying his stocks anyway. What do we think? I think it's a genius way to take advantage of the influencers and their distribution channel. I think that's amazing because he's not about to do this, right? He's busy. I think a lot of times people have the fear of reaching out to guys like this and then just giving them the idea, like, oh, they're just going to go do it themselves. No, they're not. He's probably already has a half a dozen other plans in the works right now. So in general, I love the idea of finding guys like him that don't just have audiences, but that have smaller, more high value audiences and partnering with them to launch a newsletter. It could be a financial newsletter, maybe not. Yeah. Or looking at these influencers and saying, okay, what's their product audience fit? And like, if you have an idea of, all right, this would be perfect for this person's audience than going to them and partnering to sell that. This also reminds me of, do you know who Ryan is needing this? I had him on my podcast, an economics. Anyways, he does micro newsletters. One of the things that I was like, as I was talking to him, I thought it would be interesting is going out and identifying regionally influence, regional influencers, I guess is probably the best way to say it. So there's probably people in Dallas who are really big about the Dallas scene. There's probably people in Seattle or I know this people in Boise or people in San Francisco, whatever, these big cities where they have like big pull in those specific cities and going to them and implementing a newsletter for them, effectively what Ryan does and he does it in the napless, I think there's like, I want to say there's like 85,000 people that live in anapolis and 45,000 of them are on his newsletter. Yeah, yeah, it's mind blowing. But what he's done is he's effectively turned it into a newsletter that's the local newspaper. And so people place a bunch of ads and he makes great money placing ads in his newsletter. And so you could go to these regional influencers who are already kind of in the know, they know a lot of people in those markets offer to launch a newsletter for them that aggregates a lot of the information that their followers are already interested in. So like Amy Nix is Amy Nix or Amy Knox and down Nixon, yeah, yeah, Amy Nix, yeah, where it's like, you know, she's real estate and she's Dallas where it's like, okay, cool, Amy, you're going to be the real estate, the Dallas real estate person. And every week we're going to talk about the changing market conditions. We're going to talk about the inventory that's sold. We're going to talk about how many days to sale. We're going to talk about average list price in each one of these markets, et cetera, et cetera. And you put the getter that newsletter for her. She sends it out. She owns a distribution and then you own the cut, whatever you negotiate with her of that newsletter. So very similar to the way you're talking about doing a newsletter for Tesla. This would be like geographically specific to different regions of influencers. Okay. So I like that approach. That's an amazing idea, amazing idea. There's a guy, there's a YouTuber, there's a Dallas Realtor that is a YouTuber and his whole stick is real estate in DFW and he has 20, 30,000 subscribers and that's all he does. Right. He's like, yeah, he's not going to start a, he's not going to start a newsletter. Right. Why would he? Dude, our friend Sam, I don't want to say his last name because I don't know if he wants to be talking about this, but he started a local newsletter in California and he's acquiring subscribers with paid ads, 60 cents each, he's not monetizing, but get this. His long term 10 year, 20 year play is to become the mayor of that town. Really? And he wants to vertically integrate his newsletter into being the mayor one day. Dude, that was what was crazy about talking to Ryan is he was like, I'm in the know. Yeah. Commerce knows me. He's like, I go around town and people recognize me. Any restaurant that I want to get in and have a car like to get a seat at, I get a table at. And it's a napless Maryland. So it's like a nice town. It's high income. But now he's also like, I'm buying a port of potty, not port of potty business. Yeah, it's a port of potty business. It's a wedding bathroom, like the luxury bathroom rental. And I'm like, dude, now with your connections, you could go to the city. You could go to the local university. You could go to the naval academy and be like, you guys know who I am. Oh, yeah, of course. Can I put a bit in for this? Yeah, of course. Like, just by virtue of the fact that you're the guy in town, he's going to have so many business opportunities that come his way. But it's because he created this effective audience locally, this micro audience. I mean, you could get AI to write these too. You could just say, hey, take all the local news from an out from a napless. I think if you're partnering with influencers, it makes more sense to do this. But if you're doing it yourself, it makes more sense for you to write it. I agree with that. Ryan was saying that it's hard to do it with AI because the information he provides is so market specific. And he felt like his brand was built around the like quirky personal, personal, but to that end, like, that's where I'm like, okay, you find the local influencer and you find a local writer. Cool. And then you manage the process. Like, it's this isn't a hard game that we're playing. Like, okay, here are his numbers. I just went and found it. He's got 85,000 people that live in an appless 46% of his town are subscribed. All right. Geez. All right. So 85,000, let's just say 40,000 are subscribed. What do you think he did in revenue last year? No idea. 72,000. $240,000. That's crazy. Yeah. Does he have a paid version or just ads? It's just ads. There's no paid version. And he did like 80,000 dollars. How crazy. I just like that blew my mind that part of the conversation where I'm like, are you freaking kidding me? It's he like 85,000 people. He's got 40,000 of them subscribed. He generated 230,000. And I think he's like on par for double that this year. That's an appless Maryland. That's not freaking Dallas, Texas. I know. How long is it going to take for all of the 80,000 person cities to be saturated by a new letter? Decades. I mean, it doesn't have to be your city. No. No. No. And like, he's now trying to do this model where he like, I don't remember. That's not exactly a franchise, but he's like licensing it out to different markets. Mm-hmm. Again, he was a lot more concerned about the quality. I felt like you could centralize a lot of this stuff. You could have local editors, but a streamlined process of AI that generates the stories and then the local editors spend time curating it. Yeah. Just because AI is involved doesn't mean that the quality has to go down. It just means the editor is spending more time on the right things as opposed to the first draft. So. And you upload the 10 most relevant news articles to AI, you say, summarize this in bullet points, then that's just your starting point. Then you put your spin on it and make it quirky. Or what, like what I was thinking is with these agents now, you just have them crawl Twitter, Google, I don't know if Instagram or YouTube, but I know Twitter and Google. And it's like, all right, here are the keywords you're looking for, Annapolis. These streets, popular figures. And then every day you aggregate all of the news stories that came in and the editors just looking and seeing like, okay, what was interesting? What was not interesting? So there's that aspect. But then he also has the programmatic aspect to it where in his newsletter he's like, hear the concerts that are happening this summer. Here are the events, the sporting events that are going on this month. Here's what the weather looks like. He's like, I know it sounds weird, but everybody wants the freaking weather in this newsletter. Even though they have it on their phones, like people want the weather, there's a lot of things that could just be programmatic, just easily, very easily built out. But then there is like the editorial piece that I think would take some time. So anyways, I freaking love that idea. Here's another idea. So it is illegal to scrape a bunch of emails and add them to a mailing list, right? It's against the CAN spam act of 2004. You could go find a high value audience, like real estate agents. And you could use cold emailing software, like LEMLIST, MIXMACS, GMAS, whatever, scrape their emails and send cold emails to them. You're not opting them into a newsletter or a list. You're sending cold emails to them. This is, hey, first name, I know you're a realtor here in city name. I have this newsletter. We just talk about the real estate market here in city name. Would you mind if I sent it every week? And you're just sending manual cold emails with like three automated follow-ups, asking them if you can subscribe them. And it sounds tedious, but it's all automated. And then anytime they say yes, you can add that to Zapier, and you opt them in to your beehive to your newsletter. Are you subscribing like a newsletter growth hack? Is that what you're, is that what you're describing right now? Yeah. Yeah. Why would you not do that? You could. I think it's genius. There's two million realtors in the United States. You get 1% of them to opt in if you just had 1% of this market. Well, well, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's a $250 billion market, dude. If I just get 1% of 1%, that's all you need. That's $25 million, dude. It's crazy. Did you not hear me? I don't need a pitch deck. My pitch deck is 1% of $250 billion, or is that not enough for you? Oh, do you not know how to do math? Pull out your iPhone and type these numbers in. Dude, that would be really, yeah, that would be interesting to like, I want to start a massive newsletter. Everyone's like, everyone's always like, there's riches and niches. Let's start with a niche and then grow out. No, what if you're just like, now I want to do a newsletter to all the realtors in the nation. And you build it around a growth strategy as opposed to like, going niche. I think that'd be a really cool idea. Big is the new small. Think about that. Really? Yep. I usually tell my wife the opposite. Okay. What do you got for me? All right. You did an episode a little while ago and then you ended up actually putting a tweet out about it. But it's something I've thought a lot about and I think is really interesting. I think that there's a trend right now with people our age and older, especially people our age and younger, to spend money on health and beauty in particular. I'm not talking about necessarily the gym, I'm talking about spa's, ferment, you know, TRT, testosterone replacement therapy, other hormonal therapy treatments, Botox, laser treatments, just like lots of health related innovations, I guess that are coming down the market that are supposed to keep you young and be, help you look young. So one of the things you post about those Botox and I wanted to run through because I thought it was interesting how you were talking about SEO, how you go out and get customers. I thought it would be fun to run through and like actually describe the economics of Botox. Let's do it. All right. So I'm going to use me as an example. But let's say that I wanted to go and get Botox. Do you even know how you would ask for Botox? Are you like, I'd like to Botox please, like do you understand how it works? No, I don't. I don't do needles. When you have a natural beauty, it doesn't even register for you. You know what I'm saying? Totally. And I totally get it, dude. That's why it registers so well to me. So you buy Botox in units is what they're called. And so like for somebody like me who has a massive forehead to sign up a big brain as my father, if it's a, if it's a thousand units, do they call that a G unit or they actually do. They actually do. Oh, interesting. Yeah, yeah. So I've got a big head. I use a lot of units as my dad would say to my mom, what? You have the Jewish brain. Jews are smarter. They have bigger brains because my mom's Jewish and my dad's racist. And anyways, so like for me, at first time forehead, I'm probably going to do 40 units, right? But then they got, you know, these little things here or these things here or they got, you know, some lip filler and other places like there's probably like 12 units here. Some of this is from research, some of this is because I was asking my neighbor who's an NP and owns a wellness practice like how many units, right? So so that's just like to give a general idea. And then once you get Botox, you don't just get it once there would be no recurring revenue. Right? So of course. Well, yes, but what Botox does is it, it dens, not dens the nerves, but immobilizes the nerves in your face. And it, but it wears off after a period of time. And so you have to get maintenance doses. You have to get, you know, every three, four months is kind of what it's recommended to be. And so when you go back to get those doses, it's not necessarily, I'm not getting 40 on my forehead every time. I'm getting maybe 20, right? When you get two doses, do you ask for a dose dose? I hadn't thought of that. I do know that when you get doses under 10, it's called a micro dose, but yeah, yeah. But I'll have to ask about the dose dose from, we're so dumb, say it ourselves. All right. Next question. 40 units. Let's just say is on average what somebody, what a recurring customer gets, 40. How much is it a unit retail cost for? 10 bucks. Yeah. Somewhere in that ballpark is like 10 to $15 per unit. Do you know what the wholesale cost is? Like what the practice is buying those for? Five bucks. Yeah. Three and a half to $7. So let's just like easy math, we'll just say they have 50% gross margins. If I'm a customer and I'm coming three times a year, that average is out to be, let's just say $1,000 a year and recurring revenue from a person, does that make sense? Let's also say that they have a really high churn. Let's say like 20% of the people who get it the first time are like, I don't like this. But then the other 80% keep, you know, a maintenance for a long period of time. So the lifetime value of a customer, let's just say it's five years, last five years, is 3600, excuse me, the customer lifetime value is 3600 dollars. If you back out the gross margin, then it's about 1,800, no, sorry, $4,000, I'm not doing my math right here. Hold on. Five years, $1,000 a year, $5,000, okay? Back out the gross margin, $2,500, it's kind of your LTV. So one customer represents an LTV of $2,500. Guys, I have started dozens of businesses at this point and every once in a while, I'll see some random fee in my bank account that makes zero cents to me. And when you're dealing with international stuff, you see it all the time. It's not uncommon for currency conversions to eat three to five percent of every transaction. It's insane. But air wallets fixes this with things like multi currency accounts across 60 plus currencies, no double foreign transaction conversions, killing your margin. You can collect payments in euros, hold them in euros, pay suppliers in euros. One of that converting back and forth, over 150,000 businesses use them across 160 countries. They've got corporate cards and expense management built right in. So stop bleeding fees and go check out air wallets.com, your global business without borders. In my mind, I'm like, I wouldn't even need to open a practice. I have a neighbor who's like right behind me and he's an NP. Why wouldn't I just target local Facebook groups, local HOA groups, local, you know, PTA groups and go hard and find a neighborhood where there's also a nurse practitioner that can go and administer in people's homes, like concierge and just crush it that way. But I don't have the other side of the equation. I know that my customer lifetime value or my lifetime value is about $2,500. How much do you think it would cost to acquire a customer? This is the part where I don't know, and I know you've explored this on your podcast. You're looking at $4 a click through paid Google ads, but the question mark is what's your conversion rate once they click? $4 a click is pretty high, but at a $2500 LTV, let's say there's a 5% conversion that you would multiply it for by 20. So it's $100. Is 5% conversion a good conversion or a bad conversion? That'd be pretty good. It's not like amazing, but it's pretty good. Let's go with a bad conversion. 2%. So $200 customer acquisition cost. If you're only using Google ads, also highly dependent on the local market, but yeah, less than 10%. Like, why would you not do that all day? So you were just partnered with someone that's licensed to do this and you're the lead gen source and they're the absolutely. So there'd be two things you'd have to figure out. The first thing you'd have to figure out is, how do I identify practitioners in that neighborhood? Because I would prefer to have somebody who's looking at this as a side hustle. Right? Like, I'm not trying to start a practice that's just concierge. Like, I look at my neighbor, comes home at 5. And you know, if from like 5 to 7, 3 nights a week, he's getting people in and he's making an extra $10,000 more than that $30,000 a year, I'm sure he'd be open to that, right? So you'd first have to like identify kind of a neighborhood or an area. And then you'd have to identify who in that area is a practitioner that I can go and approach and ask if they want some extra work. I think the identifying the area is easy because you're just going to look at demographics. You're like, obviously, these are going to be higher income. You're going to look at age, all of those things. So that part might be easy. The harder part is going to be, how do you find people in those target areas that live in those areas that would be interested in this as a side hustle? I got you. Here's what you need. You're missing the third party here. You need a third person in this partnership. Okay. Okay. We've got, we've got, we need a, you're the Lou Perlman here. Okay. You're the Lou Perlman to the Backstreet Boys. Okay. Okay. But you've, you've, you've only assembled part of the Backstreet Boys. You're only assembling the NP to actually perform the procedure. I've only gotten a quarter. I don't have age yet. That's it. I don't have Ryan. JT? Forget it. JT. Come on. All right. Keep going. Anyway, no. You need a mom. You need a mom. You need a well-connected mom or, or at least a mom that's willing to post in a Facebook group. Because here's the post. Here's the post. Hey girls. Hey. I'm hosting a Botox party. We can get a discount. Like this is honestly, I hate to say this, edit this out, but don't, but this is like the perfect MLM pyramid scheme opportunity. Yes. Yes. Just find the party's, like, who is the Botox, like a Tupperware party? Yeah. Yes. This has to exist already, right? You need to find the women that did sell Lou LaRoe or new skin or Tahitia Nonejuice or you name it and then they don't anymore because the life's been on these things is like five years, but they have all the skills and the network, although they probably, they've probably burned the network by this point, but they just need to host parties. That's right. Add a discount. But how do you find them? I agree with that. How would you find them at scale? Oh, there's third party tools where you can search people on Facebook based on keywords. So you can search people that have ever posted about Lou LaRoe and if someone's posted about it, it means they were probably a distributor. Do you want to test this with me? Yes. Like, I could go for the purposes of this podcast. Yes. I could go to my neighbor and just be like, Hey, let us try this. We'll pay for the ads. We just want to see if you get put back. Yeah. We can spend 300 bucks and just see if he gets one customer from it or one person. And people listening could replicate this wherever they are. That'd be rad. All right. I love that. What are we calling this? Is this like a thing now? Apparently, we did the perfume segment. Now this is going to be like a return and report. Yeah. We'll call it the return and report segment. And for that small group, who knows what I'm talking about, you're going to be giggling to yourself. And for everybody else, you're going to be like, well, I'm returning to my part. I know it. I understand. It's physically speaking for the 3.2% of people that understands it. Or if you're in Europe, the 0.32% of people. So good. I like that idea. That's a good idea. It's a relationship idea. Literally no money. It's one of those ideas that you launch by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple of yeses. And I really do think it's a side hustle. Like, to me, I don't see this as like, oh, this is going to be real, though. Yeah. Good scale. I'm just saying like for an NP or a PA or a nurse who can administer Botox in a neighborhood and it was won't be every state. Some states are state specific on who can administer. You'd have to actually see the guidelines and who can administer. But if you find that person for that person, they're going to have a full time job. It's just like, oh, this would be cool. I could see, you know, two extra 10 people a week in my neighborhood. And from those 10 people, I'm going to earn an extra $20,000 a year. Another thing you could do here is once you prove out this model, you put it in a long PDF, make a course, and you could sell this to NP's. There doesn't need to be, there doesn't need to be a pasty white guy like yourself to play middleman. Right? You could just be two people here. And if I did do it, I'd have to be like, you know, built out of my mind like, have you ever wanted a car? I'm smiling. Yeah. But I mean, you could sell a course to people to basically make money on the side and then they could replace their income entirely with this. I love it. All right. I got one for you. Yes. Do you remember why about the domain name? I call this domain name number 732, domain name lifetime sandals dot com, no, I haven't talked about this in maybe six years, but I still on the domain name. Have you heard of shady rays? No. So shady rays, I think I'm getting the name right is a sunglasses company that blew up because of their UVP unique value proposition, okay? They came to the market and said, we have really nice glasses, sunglasses, but guess what? No questions asked. You break them. You lose them. No problem. We'll replace them. Just the framing. It's just a framing. And it's like, well, how do they make money? Well, they sell them, you know, so there's already high margin on sunglasses. And I've priced these out in China that cost $1.50 to make 50 cents to ship. You're in it $2.00, you sell them for $50 bucks, anytime someone files a claim. You just, okay, no problem. You just have to pay shipping, shipping's $5, cost three bucks. So you basically, you net even on shipping, right? $5 for shipping, you work your margin for the glasses into there. And so statistically speaking, they would have to file 10 claims for you to break even on them, right? And people, there's friction and they introduce strategic friction. I call it a strategicly introduced friction, believe it or not, they introduce friction. They're like, oh, fell at this form. Okay, do this. Call this number. And most people are like, eh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like statistically, even if there is no friction, 80, 90% of people will never file a claim. Like either they won't lose it or if they do lose it, they won't remember. They won't think too. So that idea has been done for sunglasses. But I think the same framework could be used in any industry, right? Lifetime warranty and just work it into the margin. And you might take a little beating up front because you don't know what the claims will be. So you're going to have to leave it loose. But once you learn, wow, okay, 2% of people are filing claims in the first six months, we could drop our prices even more or, oh, geez, 30% of people are filing claims. We got to raise our prices. And so that's why I bought lifetime sandals because I rotate through sandals like crazy. I break them all the time, right? So if I could pay 80 bucks for sandals and just, or if I could sell them for 80 dollars, import them for $3, they're small, they're cheap to ship, they're under 16 ounces. So they qualify for first class. You could totally do the same thing with sandals or something else. It probably have to be a high, like high ticket, high margin product. Like, so my brother-in-law has like, for whatever reason, gotten obsessed with things that are manufactured in China and he's like Raybrands and, you know, XYZ sunglasses are manufactured by the same manufacturer, oh my gosh, by the same factory, by the same people using the same types of products. But one is $300 and one is $20. So Raybrand, Raybrands is able to have this fat margin just because of the name as opposed to like the quality of the product. And so I would go and look at those types of products, probably the green manufacturing in China that are similar to other high ticket watch, right? Like, nice watches, rings, sunglasses are one, handbags might be one, sandals are one, and just go after that. It's like, okay, what's a high quality, high ticket product that we could replicate and have the lifetime warranty on and go that way? It doesn't Patagonia do it, like against damages or defects, I think that's what they're known for. It's similar but different. They don't ask questions. Maybe it's either Patagonia or North Face, Patagonia makes whatever. But like, there are stories of people who have like taken their 30 year worn boots back and gotten them for store credit, right? So yeah, yeah, there are definitely companies that do this. But this is different because it's like, if you lose it, that's the key differentiator. If you lose it altogether, they will replace it. Whereas Patagonia is like, if it rips, if there's a defect, bring it back, right? It does have to be something specific, a specific type of product. And it's kind of the honor system too, right? Yeah. Oh, I lost it. I'm sure they have protections worked in, but anyway, what you got, you got more? I tweeted a little while ago about DSOs, I've talked about DSOs in the past, their dental services organizations. And I'll do a quick primer on like what DSOs are. So dental services organizations exist primarily because in many states, there are regulations against entrepreneurs owning dental practices. Dentists can own practices, but me and you couldn't just go and start a practice from scratch. We would have to partner with the dentist. And the way that entrepreneurs and in particular private equity funds have gotten around this is they've created these things called dental services organizations where they don't own the practice, but they charge, you know, 50% management fee to the local clinic. And the local clinic is contractually obligated to use them and they send the money back. And so it's kind of like this work around some of them actually do on the clinics, but that's because they have a dentist who also is a partner in the DSO. But anyways, suffice it to say, this is a centralized organization that helps support practices in the field. And they offer things like HR, payroll, billing, collections, legal, all of those sort of administrative components that a physician just doesn't want to deal with. And you see this in the medical space with physicians as MSOs, medical services organizations, you see obviously DSOs, but I like this model because you're able to provide services at scale and you're not necessarily getting into operating the practices on a granular basis. So that's a quick primer on what DSOs are. I think, not just think, we both have a thesis that search is turning local. It's like Google My Business, which is now Google Business Profiles, are incredibly important to driving business at the local level. AI is obviously answering a lot of questions on Google that were otherwise driving traffic to websites who relied on that traffic like, what's a good recipe for tomato soup? That used to drive traffic to people's websites and it was like a lead funnel that then took them down the road to buy a cookbook from that website. Now Google just gives you the answer based on all the things that they're aggregating off of the internet. Well, you can't do that with local search yet. And so Google Business Profile is becoming increasingly more important with reviews and all the things. And we've talked about launching an agency to do actual Google Business Profiles in the past. But I think there's an interesting business, and this would be like a wholesaler of just hooking up parties, Google My Business Agencies, on one end DSOs on the other, and a middleman who just connects them, like almost like a lead gen organization, but specific to medical in particular. And the way that I would do this again back to like the local conversation that we were having is I would start looking at my local networks. Do I know any dentists? Do I know any physicians? And start, I mean, you see these people at barbecues, you see these people at your local kids events and you always make the small talk, oh, how are the bills doing this year? Oh, man, the dolphins really do suck. Can you believe laying kiffin still coaching, but Nick Sabin ain't, I'll tell you what. Anyways, and just ask them like, hey, you're a dentist, right? Yeah. Are you a part of a DSO? Are you a physician? Are you a part of a medical group? And the second they say yes or no, like just ask them, how are they finding leads? How are they? I'm curious. I'm starting to learn more about this. But there are a ton of accounts on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever that are easily findable that will provide those services. And then you don't need to be the one like, you don't need to start a Google business profile agency. You just are the middle man, you connect them, you get a fee and perpetuity, wash your hands and you're out. And so I think it's like localizing the lead gen space in your local community, not necessarily for dentists or medical or anyone that's on Google. It could be, right? I'm using them as examples, right? Because I think there are two really, really good examples. But like back to what we were talking about with my nurse practitioner neighbor, I know he's a nurse practitioner. Who could I hook him up with to get him more leads? Because I think that local lead generation and specifically focusing on local lead generation is going to become more and more important and more and more specialized. And they don't yet know who the new I guess agencies are that are specializing in this. So instead of them like figuring out on their own, you being proactive and then taking a piece of the referral by leveraging your network. Here's another idea. So same approach, same thesis, which I agree with, you approach the guy at the party and say, hey, you start talking about his practice. I know this is random, but I saw, I noticed on your Google business profile that X, Y, and Z, like you're not doing updates or you're not doing this. You're not doing X, Y or Z strategic thing that people should be doing to get more leads. Is there a reason why? Oh, I don't, I don't even think about that. He's like, dude, I don't know, man, like I know this other dentist who does those things and it drives like 60% of his business. Would you mind if I like, if you give me limited access and I can just start poking around in there and seeing if it helps your business, just very low pressure, no cost, anything. And then a month or two later, dude, I drove 38 calls to your office. Yeah, I've actually noticed it's been busy. Hey, I've actually started a business around this. Would you mind if I, would you mind paying me a thousand bucks a month to manage this? So would you white label it or would you be, you would actually do it? Just do it. Yeah, I think, because you're already like halfway there if you're finding the leads, you know, so it's like, yeah, depending on what your situation is in life, at that point, you might as well learn the skills and have an agency, one to two grand a month per customer. Yeah, let's get point. I'm like fascinated kind of obsessed with this idea of the local economy, not the local economy. It's not the local economy, it's the local economy. Thank you for clarifying. Sorry, I froze again, that makes more sense. All right, I got a little hack, a little life hack for anyone listening, okay? If you want to find out what to sell, so we all know native deodorant's origin story, he went to Etsy, he saw what was best selling, he saw that people were buying, not all natural deodorant, aluminum free, he started making it himself, he cracked Facebook ads, he sold it for a hundred million dollars in like nine months to, to proctor and gamble. There's another Etsy hack out there where go to Etsy, let the algorithm lead you and I love this hack for anything. Go create a brand new Facebook account on a new computer or a new browser with a proxy, whatever, or Instagram, Twitter, any of the social networks, see what the algorithm shows you when it doesn't know who you are, okay? Because that's going to show you what's interesting, what's trending. It's going to show you, like, the most viral things because it doesn't know what you want to see. Okay. That's really interesting. I've done this on Instagram recently and like my personal account, Instagram is all just females, gym clothes, bikinis, right? Sure. That's so weird. There must be a glitch. When I go to an outside account, it's like, you know, the news or almost like, do you know why that would be? Hmm. Oh, there's no way. There's no way of knowing. Okay, thank you, good. Okay. So go to Etsy, see what it's showing you. It's going to show you some really best sellers and that that alone is going to be a good tell as to what's selling well. Because if you create an account and you log in, you start making some searches looking around, then it's going to show you what it thinks you want to buy, not what is the biggest seller right now. But go find a popular Etsy seller based on how many previous sales they are that they have because Etsy will show you a lot of that data. And look at their reviews and let's say an Etsy seller sells 100 different items. Look at their most recent reviews and what items are everyone talking about in the reviews. And that's going to tell you on the biggest sellers, the best sellers, what the most popular items are because there are so many opportunities to unbundle Etsy to take products or products, like lines, pull them outside of Etsy, take them to Amazon, take them to Shopify. A lot of times it's already been done, right? It's not like a given that it hasn't been done. But there are arbitrage opportunities there where you look at the reviews. What are they talking about in the reviews? And you'll see what the best sellers are. I talked about finding out what Shopify best sellers are by pasting a URL suffix into a Shopify store. Where would you start with that? What do you mean? Would you go or would you have your wife like start looking? There we go. Like what would be the first filter you would search for? That depends on what you want to sell. I mean, let's do right now. Okay. So I open Etsy and I'm going to type in the word Texas because I've done this before for Texas snacks. So there's no way to sort like top sellers. You can filter by that, but it's not always accurate because it's combining with the algorithm to show you what it thinks that you want. And so I want to find sellers as in the account selling items. Not necessarily the actual items within the accounts. I'm looking at this store called just phone cases. Okay. Literally the name is just phone cases. And what are their best sellers? Nurse bags and nurse coasters. Really? Right. So to me, that's a big tell that someone that literally they're called just phone cases. Really, that's all we sell. They're selling a ton of nursing coasters and nursing bags. So he's like, okay, or maybe there's an idea there for an e-commerce store solely pointed at nurses, kind of like that scrubs company, I forget the name, that they throw publicly traded company. Fix. They're publicly traded and they just sell freaking scrubs to nurses. So. I love it. Okay. What do you think? What do you think a hold co-brose?

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. Discussion on business ideas and strategies like building local newsletters, offering lifetime warranty as a unique value proposition, and partnering with influencers.
  2. Examples of successful business models, like the case of a man making $70 million a year selling merchandise.
  3. Insights on Botox economics, including unit pricing, recurring revenue, and customer lifetime value.

Summary:

The transcription covers a range of business ideas and strategies, such as building local newsletters, using lifetime warranties as unique selling points, and partnering with influencers to launch businesses. It includes examples of successful business models, like a man earning $70 million annually from selling merchandise. Additionally, it delves into the economics of Botox, discussing unit pricing, recurring revenue, and customer lifetime value calculations.

The conversation also touches on customer churn rates and gross margins in the Botox business model.

FAQs

Starting a local newsletter, building a business around lifetime warranty, starting a local Google My Business Agency, partnering with influencers to launch businesses, creating newsletters for specific regions of influencers.

Partnering with influencers to launch a newsletter, providing in-depth insights on stocks, charging a subscription fee for exclusive content.

Botox is purchased in units, customers require maintenance doses every 3-4 months, practice earns recurring revenue from repeat customers with a high gross margin.

$2,500 per customer over a five-year period, considering an average annual spend of $1,000 and a 50% gross margin.

Using cold emailing software to approach real estate agents, sending manual cold emails with follow-ups to request subscription, aiming to tap into a $250 billion market with a 1% conversion rate.

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