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

All right, I'm gonna say one sentence and you could decide if this episode is for you. If you're the type person who's got the entrepreneurial itch, you want to do something. You want to start a new business. You want to get that extra $5,000, $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 upfront, easy business that can pull in cash quickly and then can grow from there. So Chris came on. He's got about five 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. I'll put on a road. Let's travel. All right, we got Chris corner here. You are back because you have an absolute pipeline, an absolute full stack of business ideas at all times. He's open carry with business ideas. If people haven't seen it, you got a great Instagram channel and YouTube channel podcasts as well where you talk about different business ideas. That's what I want to do today. I have so I'm going to. 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, let's call it $250,000, $300,000 a year. Been doing that for 10 years. He's bored. He wants a little more scale. He doesn't feel a sense of progress. People always want a sense of progress. He feels like it's pretty hard to scale what he's doing there. He's always poking around it. Should I buy this, bending machine? Should I do this side hustle, pressure washing, whatever it is? Where does your head go? Like, look, if I was trying to help you get off the real estate path and maybe have a more entrepreneurial path, what do you sell? What do you tell him? I would tell him to start reselling. Reselling like Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items. You spend one, 200 bucks. You get what's called a resale certificate, which tells the government, I don't need to pay sales taxes on this because I'm passing it on. A lot of these websites require that number from you in order to sell you liquidation items. There's a website called GubbDeals. There's a website called Be Stock. On Be Stock you buy anything that people return to Costco. I've done this myself, another business I've done. I bought $7,000 worth of washers and dryers for 250 each on average and I'm selling them on Facebook Marketplace for 750 to 900 each. It's an amazing business because you don't need a warehouse, you don't need a bunch of space just to garage and it's all sold on Facebook Marketplace. I'm on Be Stock right now and I see that I can buy two pallets of men's gray champion sweatpants, joggers for $48,000 in New Jersey. Sounds great. I'm going to get 1200 units. What surprised me is that it's a 48,000. I get 1200 units, 40 bucks. That's not even a deal. Let's go to it. Oh, wait, wait. Oh, no, that's the retail value. Yeah, okay. That makes sense. I can buy this for $7,000. It's a box of pop and it's saying that the standard retail value of this would be $40 to pop. So you're saying you're going to go buy, you probably wouldn't buy sweatpants, my guess, but what would you be looking for product category wise? I like larger appliances and outdoor furniture. I think those are both great, especially this time of year. Not electronics because there's a lot of variables back to binary outcomes. There's a lot of things that can break. There's a lot of testing involved. I don't really like clothing personally, but this is a great business because you don't need to find customers. You just list them on Facebook Marketplace. All your customers are there. You have to buy right and you have to fulfill, but the harder part is finding customers and you don't have to do that here. So I'm looking at, I get 58 used refrigerators, buying them for $34 a unit. $34 a unit for refrigerators. Telling you, let's go out on here. I might do this, but I might actually go do this. On sheer principle, a $34 fridge, I have to $5.58 of them though. Then 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 went. So you're trying to buy it. And you do that before you buy them? Of course. Before I buy, I'm going to 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? 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? Literally list it before you even bid on it. And then you just go ask people just to just understand. Yeah. And then if they're like, all right, I'm ready to come get it. You like, actually, I haven't bought it yet. You know, which was fine. You're being honest. But you're you're getting signals. Ish. You're getting signals from the market before you take any risk that there's enough demand for it at a specific price point. And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook Marketplace. My sister is moving right now. And they're listing like random. Here's a hat. Here's just like an old hat. Like it's just a baseball cap. And the guy drove 45 minutes to get a free cap. You know, put the point. And so it's like, here's one drawer. Not even the cap, no, here's just a drawer. So we're going to 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 I just saw this tick-tock of a guy that used clawed co-work. He just took pictures of all his stuff. He uploaded it to claw. 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's told like he was moving. He needed to sell everything in his house and clawed sold all of it for. So like that, even the tedious part is now fixable. That's kind of a raise it, actually. You can tell what to do the whole thing. You can say, hey, go look on B stock. If fake listings decide which one is going to be the most profitable for me and then run the whole process. There's no reason that you know, clawed bot couldn't do that. No, totally. Four pallets of denim onesies we could get $2. Sounds like a deal. All right, this is a very addictive website. This is a very fun. I got to get off B stock right now. Otherwise, I will lose my afternoon. Hey, real quick, if you like this episode of Chris and you want more, he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas, just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast and he's given it away for free. So if you just go to the QR code that's on the screen or the link in the description below, you can get his database of ideas. And these are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work. And this guy's done it before. He's built a bunch of businesses that are successful. So go ahead, take advantage of this resource and now back to the next 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 friends 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 trying to avoid that part. What's a business that's like more of a business and less of a garage selling side hustle? Mm-hmm. Probably implementing AI in small businesses. Like we talked about this last time. We might have talked about the first time and we'll be talking about it in years because I mean, there's 800,000 management consultants in the United States. That's management, right? Almost a million people that are just management consultants. In five years, Sean, how many people will be AI consultants? Like to small, medium, large, any size of business? Every single small business, well, not just 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 they're certain that it can help, they don't really know how, they don't have the time and they're, you know, they're not as tech forward as somebody who just eats and sprees and stuff. Like that combination creates a ton of opportunities. But that's a still pretty broad picture. What's a more focused point of attack for something like that? 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. Vibes coding. And then you've got your buddy in the back with a clipboard and you sign people up for AI audits. 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 use case where you're like, OK, 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? When the internet started, every business kind of needed a website. But it was starting to stress. Nobody had a website by definition at the beginning. And over time, everybody ended up getting a website. So you knew that 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 for it. OK, what's the equivalent of that today in today's world with AI? Voice agents. Pick up the phone. Answer them for you. Yep. And then chatbots second. Kind of a distant second. Voice agents are really good. The latency is not that bad at all anymore because the LLMs are smart enough to only be trained on your content, your data. So it's not like any time a customer says, what are your operating hours? It doesn't need to go like read the whole training manual, right? It just answers immediately. AI voice agents are like the best foot in the door for small businesses right now. - That's cool. I like that. It would be very interesting to hear from people who have done this. If you've done this, reach out. 'Cause everybody's kinda 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 wanna be successful, go help businesses employ 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, I saw this AI tool that was for MedSpos, and they were like, look, every MedSpos offers, you know, I'm a little odd in my death there, but every MedSpos basically offering some sort of beauty service to somebody. So somebody's gonna come in, they look one way, they wanna look another way, and they have to believe that the MedSpos will get them from A to B. So that's all the MedSpos has to do for them. And so what people were trying to do is figure out how can you through whether it's AI, voice agents, a tool on your website, a quiz, and upload your photo, and I will show you the result of this product on your face, right? Like something like that. That's a pretty killer sales app for every MedSpos. And so going into MedSpos specifically and just being like cool, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward, and we're gonna build basically like a little sales tool for you that lives on your website. That gives the customer the confidence that when they, it opens up the 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 after." It's like whatever it is. Some version of that. And if you can go get 500 to 1000 MedSpos because they only have the same need, right? Like this is a universal need for all 10,000 of them. And you can go get 500 or a thousand, let's just use 1000 MedSpos that are gonna be paying you $1,500 a month. So now you do a $1,500,000 a month off of 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 named dropped by Omjad, the CEO founder of Replet on the Joe Rogan show. So Omjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like, "Discide, John Cheney, he started a business selling like custom vibe-coded Replet apps into medium-sized businesses for $15,000. 15 upfront and then like, I think 1500 per month or something like that for like one call a month. He did 2.5 million his first year, 60% net margins. This year he's gonna do 8 million with 50% net margins. All built on Replet just vibe-coding custom apps for medium-sized businesses. - What's in these examples? - That's like a custom app for medium-sized businesses. What does that even mean? - Yeah, so let's say you're an HVAC business with 30 crews, he's gonna build you your own CRM. So you're not paying service tighten or any of the others $4,000 a month. So immediately you get to capture the savings and you get to have your own CRM just for you. So it's not even like AI enabled. It's just a replacement CRM that's built exactly as you have always wanted it. Or like an accounting practice that builds you a communication tool or something to send P&Ls and balance sheets to all of your customers in an automated way every month. So that's like a higher ticket medium-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 up front, you charge per month. And his pitch to the barbershops are like, "Hey, you're cutting hair all day but people need to make appointments." So I'm just gonna make you an AI voice agent that will answer the phone as you for you. If they ask if you're an agent, an AI agent, it will tell them but it won't be up front and say up front, you know, that I'm an agent. 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. So I don't wanna 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 pays the same voice agent over and over because they're all barbershops. He just swaps out the name in the operating hours and makes the calendar connection he's good to go. I like the barber voice agent. (laughing) The need for the major. - Yeah, why not? Will there any other fun ideas that you had on the Swiss that you wanted to talk about? What's the snail mail club? - Yeah, so that's kind of blowing up. That snail mail subscription businesses are what like physical box subscription businesses were five 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 like a cookbook club and she sends recipes to women and they cook it and every month has a theme, grease, Italy or whatever. These are exploding right now, mostly driven by organic TikTok videos. - So, sorry, explain it. So your title of this video is she makes $1,000 a day sending letters. Who was making and how was she making the $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 six to 7,000 women every single month. And they love it and her turn is like 2%. - Beautiful pink envelopes. - Nailed it. - And she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters? - Yes, 10 bucks a month, 70% gross margins, 30% net. And she went from zero to 60K MRR in seven months through like six TikTok videos. All organic, no paid ads spent. - What is happening? 10 bucks a month, that's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah, what are you doing? What the fuck? What is going on? - We just were sick of emails. Like we want like more mail? What's more mail? - We want mail. We want to go to the mailbox and open a surprise. We don't want junk mail. This is for us and it's special and it's physical and real and that's all the rage right now. - This is unbelievable. Sorry, I'm just looking through her stuff. This is unreal. - Wow, the US Postal Service commented on her video saying, "Create video, mind if we repost and use it?" (laughing) That's crazy. Okay, so keeping free 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 NBA finance guy and he's like, "You want to send letters?" And like that video got two million views and brought her like her first 1500 customers, all organic. - Wow. Okay, this is pretty crazy. So you said people would do this, is this like a trend now? - It is, dude, so my wife and I and a friend, we put on a nonprofit farmers market for kids just last Saturday and I was out there like taking videos of these kids' businesses and one of the seven year old girls and her four year old sister had their own snail mail subscription business. And there was a QR code to a Shopify site and they like draw pictures by hand and send them out for 10 bucks a month. Like it's incredible. Wow, you know, I've always wanted something like this for kids, like 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'm wondering like is there some sort of penpal 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, you know, whatever, something from someone somewhere, whether it's kids sending to kids or it's kids sending to like old people, I don't know what the mechanism was. But I feel like there should be something like this for kids art because kids generate so much art and their excitement when someone's excited about their art is like so tangible, so heartwarming. That as a parent, I would gladly pay 10 bucks a month for my kids to feel like they had their little like their version of their Etsy store for their own art, you know what I mean? Yeah, I love that, that should be a thing. There's something that's kind of similar where you can mail in all of your kids artwork to a woman and she will like basically lay it all out on a canvas and make it like it's a super large mural of your kids artwork that can permanent. So you get one of that. And then she'll send the whole canvas back to you. Oh yeah, that's a good idea, I like that. Yeah. That's another type of thing where it's like these heartwarming visual businesses that just kid pop on TikTok and you just keep, you know, TikTok becomes your customer acquisition funnel for things like that. (upbeat music) Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference. Because when you know more, you grow. more. And so if you want to read the whole book instead of just reading part of it, visit HubSpot.com. So you've given a bunch of small stuff and small, I mean 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 your perspective. Yeah, so did I ever tell you about the time where I got a job at Amazon a few years ago? No, he did that as a pick peck shipper to spy on them. Okay, so you go to the warehouse? Yep. So I owned at the time a third party logistics business and I wanted to learn how Amazon did it. And so I went and got a job. I stood in line, you know, 15 bucks an hour, they trained me how to drive a forklift and I loved it. I hated it up. I like in the training 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, your management material. And the whole time I'm like, dude, I'm like a secret spy. But it I walked away with an idea that I think could be a billion dollar idea. And that's providing food to the three or four million Amazon. It doesn't have to be Amazon, but Amazon warehouse workers. There are no food options. These warehouses and distribution centers are usually kind of out in the middle of nowhere. There might be like a, you know, a McDonald's or something. They have like a cafeteria with vending machines, but it's all garbage food. And I thought like man, if I were to start like partner with a catering business and put a flyer with a QR code on every car during every shift and just have them because they all have like the same lunch break. Right. Basically they could pre order food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone. Ten bucks a pop. There's thousands of employees per warehouse. This is something that would take some logistics. It would take some funding. But someone's going to win here. I wrote 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. 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 Irving or something Irving, Texas. But there's like 32 Amazon warehouses in Dallas, Fort Worth alone. And they're there's big as like three to six Costco's each. So there's no shortage of demand and it could be manufacturing. 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 going to get an $8 lunch every day of and you just tick the box. You know, what did you want today? Yeah. We have two options, three options each day. And 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. Food production is really, really hard, right? So like stores like sweet green and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls. But every bowl, every salad at sweet green, there's like a there's like more combinations of what could be in that salad than particles in the universe type of deal, right? Because it's like every, every ingredient can be mixed and matched. It's very difficult to arrange for this. And then you have to constantly keep all the ingredients stocked inside the machines. It's like pretty tricky thing to do. But there's a company that was providing these robots to the large companies that do like school lunches, prison lunches, corporate cafes, basically where you're like the grab and go options at grocery stores where there's going to be like five things in the in the little like refrigerator tray, you just grab and go and they're 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 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, that's doing the work. Yeah, I think you could still do both. I could see a one Amazon warehouse using both options, like the warm meal, you know, deliver from somewhere else. And then that as well. Yeah. I would love to see someone just print a bunch of flyers, put one on each car with a QR code to a striplink 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 with a few hours and 30 bucks in paper. Like I'm just, I love experiments like that. Like what would happen? Like how many people could I convert with only one flyer? All right. I'm going to go, let's go tote rentals. Sean, do you know what a tote rental is? Tote as in like a tote bag? Kind of like a tote rental box, plastic box. Oh, okay. It's like the moving boxes that are like the hard plastic square moving boxes that stack on top of each other. Got it? This is a Google trends of tote rental as a search term over the last five years. We are spiking. What'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 services thing, one tote rental, basically replaces 400 cardboard boxes over its lifetime. So you've got an eco angle. It's like an asset that you pay 20 bucks for and it just pays for itself over and over and over. You can start the business for a thousand bucks. You work your way in to real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can 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 real tour 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 the crap in it. Then you pick them up later and you basically pay off the thing in your third or fourth rental. And after that, it's pure profit, less any like labor or gas or more time. We, oh man, the OGs will know this many years ago, we talked about a business that was doing this on the podcast. I'm 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, $1000 worth of these boxes, they're renting them out. The boxes pay for themselves after two months. And then basically became, you know, it's the, you know, small version of a rental property, right? You're renting out equipment. But the beautiful thing about these is time need. People don't want to own them. There's like no desire to really own these people need them in the moment. You can have them be super branded. And so it's it can become like a walking billboard or you can literally even sell the ads based on them. And then their equipment that even though they get kind of battered and bruised, it's sort of expected. So you don't need mint condition boxes in order to make this thing work. I'm saying boxes, but you said you call these totes, totes rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this? So I, what's the, what's the story here? I do. I know a guy in Fort Wayne, Indiana of all places. There's like a hundred thousand people there. And he started going through real listed 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 tot rentals. They're growing like crazy. Your clients want them. We're going to give you some for free. Toats on alums dominating Google. It's got the first five listings. But that's him. But then there is, there is a, you know, smarter moves to rentals.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 it's 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, uh, okay. So you get 30 boxes for a hundred bucks to help with your moves. Yeah. So that's what he does. He sells like packages based on the number of totes that they get. And he's doing a few, few grand a month. So a few grand a month. And this is, do you think this is, hey, this, this is the type of business. Great. Just side income, but going all in on it, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze. Or you think, no, no, it's just a matter of time till that's 15 K 20 K a month. Yeah. I think it's, it's one of those businesses that's great as either or it's a perfect side hustle because you can keep your full time job. It's only a few hours a week. What I love about it compared to other like rental businesses, like a bounce house rental businesses with that those things are freaking heavy. You got to roll it up. You got to lug it out there. You have to set up the bounce house. You often have to leave someone there to babysit to make sure kids don't break a leg. And it's just a pain, but these you just drop it off on the driveway and you come back and get it. So very, very low time investment. Okay. All right. Two rentals. And why is this exploding on Google trends right now? Why would this be going up? Is it, uh, you know, moving is not going up. It's just the rental aspect or what, why do you think it's spiking right now? You know, it's like with any of these business ideas, they just have their moment like five, 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 miss size. or miss shape in cardboard boxes that collapse, they've gotta go like scrounge them behind a grocery store or beg their friends and 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 ridiculous. You're wasting half your time there. - All right, I like it. What else you got? What's next? - All right, so let's go. Let's go wall printer. What do you know about wall printers? - Sean. - Wall printer as in. - Yeah, you gotta give me a few more words. - All right, so picture like a 3D printer, except it's on rollers and you bring it inside a retail store and it prints like images on a wall, like a large mural or something like that. All you do is upload a JPEG. - I'm watching it now. So it's literally like a laser printer, but instead of printing on a piece of paper, it can go like a full wall of a building and it's printing, like this video you have here is like a corporate office where it's printing a timeline history of the company on the 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 Tut Rentals, this is kind of an educational thing. They didn't know as possible or they were paying some local artists like three grand to paint this 'cause it took them like a month, right? This replaces the local artist, sorry local artist, not sorry. But a five foot eight wall took your cost. If you own the printer, which you can get him for between 4,000 and 16,000, you can finance him for like 50 to 150 bucks a month. A five foot, a five by eight foot wall, costs you $8 an ink and you can sell for that for about $800. So literally 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 to 65,000. I'm guessing those are more 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 can 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 if 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, whatever. Like are about us founding history, that's a template. And you just basically say, hey look, I put your brand in this and you get to kind of automate that now with the AI. So just go to their website, pull there about us, put it in our about us template, send it to them as like, hey, I was at your store, I thought you could put, you know, putting this on the wall. Is it outbound, you think for this? Or you think there's going to be a lot of enough inbound. I don't think people know wall printing as a, right, as a thing to go search for even. Yeah, that's kind of like a tote rentals. I mean, you want me to show you the, the Google trends on this. (laughs) Okay, yes. In this spirit of a full disclosure here, there's the Google trends. People are searching similar. They are. This is very visual. It's like, it's like pressure washing was five, 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 ads spend behind that to a simple lead form and you close it. You're able to be able to do like, if you're, I mean, just to get this business off the ground and go knock on 100 doors, go to 100 businesses and then see what you can do. You can just take a binder of your portfolio, do a couple for free, then do a binder of portfolio and see what you can get going. Or even before you do your own, just take images off Instagram of what other people did and go around and say, hey, would you want this? Just to even learn, where is the market? Like is there one type of business that's particularly into this? Is it real estate agents? Is it whatever it is? If you go to their website, if you go to the wallprinter.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, they just tempting you to become an entrepreneur. This is sort of shaming you into becoming an entrepreneur, which, honestly, it's 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 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 a Facebook marketplace, generates and leads, throw up an AI generated website, I 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 way, basically businesses you can do as a starter business that doesn't take ton of capital, ton of time, ton of skill, you don't need a big network. And you can do these to get to that kind of two grand amount, five grand amount, ten grand amount, you start getting that money rolling in and really getting the game as an entrepreneur. 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 label of the box of these ideas? - So all of my ideas are run through like my own personal filter, which is I've started over 80 businesses and I've learned what I hate, what I love, what most people hate, what most people would probably love. And I like to call those binary outcomes, binary outcome businesses. And that is a business that is just simple. Like you put X in and you get out Y. A custom home building business is not that. A home cleaning business is not that. I want a business where it's just a very clear defined value that you add and then you get paid and you get a five star review. That's like one of my filters. The other one, which I heavily biased 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. And I talked about another business which was like the guide doll houses. - Kids, right. - Right, remember that one? - Yeah. - And Sam was like, dude, that backyard idea sucks. But like I like the doll house idea. But like if I were to run this, you can tell I've been thinking about this in the show or like every day since, right? This is like my moment. Sam's not even here to defend himself. But when I run that through my filter, it's like how many people could launch a guide doll house subscription business in the world and be successful? And how approachable is that? - That's like a kind of one hand. - Yeah. - Yeah, exactly. And like it's not approachable, it's pretty complex actually. Like designs and materials and shipping and all that. - Branding, 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 three guys in every 30,000 you know, person city owning that same business, which is what I love about it. - So you like, so when you said binary businesses and you said, you know, home cleaning business not one, luxury home builder is not one. But digging holes for trampolines, in ground trampolines is one, explain the difference there. - Well, why should one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category, but the second category has some additional benefits. What's the difference? - Yeah. So I'll just, I'll speak to two businesses that I've actually started in 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, five star review, 1500 bucks, right? We've never got less than a five star review ever. And it's not 'cause we're amazing operators. It's just because it's simple, right? Conversely, I've owned a house cleaning business and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck. We were going through real estate agents 'cause we thought, "Hey, they have a lot of surface area." Like they're touching and talking to a lot of homeowners on a daily basis so they can refer out all these jobs. And then we had to get 10.99s, all these house cleaners 'cause we didn't want employees. And so we were finding these super unreliable house cleaners. They had a vast array of equipment. They would always show up late. And sometimes the realtor would inspect the house, sometimes the homeowner would. They had varying degrees of quality and preferences. And one would say, "Hey, there's a hair on my floor." And the other one, like, didn't care. It was just, it was a recipe for one star reviews and for low margins and for people not showing up. And it was complex, but it, like, a complex business. is fine if the juices work 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, listen to this podcast. I talked about tree trim, it's made sense. Yeah, I go, we go and we trim the trees, we get $1500 bucks. What's not to love? That's awesome." And, you know, reality will hit, as soon as it goes start, you know, shans, you know, trees and trims.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 can 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. Now, they're onto the next one. And I've seen this pattern over and over again in people in my life who want to be entrepreneurial, but don't quite make it happen. And so, what is your method or, you know, let's take the tree trimming example, let's say I'm now in a different city than you are, right? I mean, I'm over in Denver. And let's say I'm in Denver and I want to start this business. How do I use my time early on to get that initial momentum? Yeah, so let's boil down business. There's two tasks that any business owner needs to do. They need to find customers, they need to fulfill customers. That's it. Like, it's not like, I need to get an LLC. I need to make like, you need to find customers and fulfill them. And guess what? Net of net, all things consider it's harder to find customers than fulfill them. 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-commerce 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 a nocturie 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 Ion 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 feel about this? Still, still, still, it do's 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 you're sibling and saying, I want you to trim my tree. Now it's like, okay, now I got a fairy out of the fill. So, yeah, I'm the resident. The kind of scatter shot because I could 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 was funny because it's like, I like to say the efficacy of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan. So, what works in this month may never work again. It may never work until, the next year or during the day month because it's seasonal, 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, you have to find some tricky ways around that. That worked, but we couldn't scale it. But we didn't need to scale it because then we started using Facebook ads with 15-second vertical videos. And then that worked. But what really scaled for us is referrals through real estate agents, landlords and property managers. That's like our big three. And we just get referrals and we send them gifts and we follow up with them every month and every time there's a storm, we get ahead of it before and then afterwards we say, hey, can we help? Like referrals is our 80/20, but it took us all kinds of other methods until we got to that point. Can you give us a sense how successful is this treatment business that you have? Yeah. So, we do mid-six figures a year in revenue and about half of that net profit. And you're in one market or? Yeah, just 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 seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like, it's really 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 call them NA members FDIC. Let's do another one. What's another fun, interesting business that business idea? Yeah. So this is another one that I've actually done. This is a great summer business. RV rentals as a service. Okay. So you got three types of RVs. Class A, which is like a big tour bus, looking thing, right? Very intimidating for most people. Class B, which is like a converted sprinter van, right? Hashtag van life. And then Class C, which is a like a motorhome, right? It's like the vehicle and 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 bucks a month. And you rent these things out for 150 to 400 bucks a night. And in many markets, people are fully booked. They're 40 to 80% 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 five to 15 nights a year. And so you know, it just doesn't make good financial sense for people to buy an RV. But to be on the business end of it, to buy one and use it occasionally for your family, block off your own dates, and then list it on these marketplaces that are happy to bring you customers. 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 six years ago. And obviously I'm a terrible student. So I was never paying attention. And I was researching this idea in the back of the class. And here's exactly what I did. And this works for Airbnb, it works for any like, you know, sharing platform. So I would act as if I were a consumer on RV sure outdoorsy. And I would say, all right, I want to book for this weekend for three nights for class C. Okay. And then it would say 47 results. And then I would say, all right, one year from now, exact same weekend, one year from now, three nights, class 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's 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 they lead like the market occupancy is. So if those numbers were true, it's like, wow, they're 90 90% booked for this unit. Let's do the same search for the same dates, but with class B, 13 results this weekend, 20 results a year from now. It's like, oh, okay. Class A. And then I just made a Google sheet of all these things. And I did this for like two hours in the back of my class. And at the end of it, I was like, in my local market, which is North Dallas, Fort Worth suburbs, it was screaming to me, class C RV. It's got to have like six to nine people. Yeah, and we don't live near national parks like Texas does not have good state or national parks. It's just people want a machine. So I went so far as to reach out to these platforms and said, Hey, I just did this research. Here's my Google sheet. Does this vibe with what your research shows? Because they see it all. And they want me to buy units to rent mine 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 if it's just take good pictures, good description, be hyper responsive and you'll win. Right. 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 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 cyber truck and learned like, holy crap, there's way too many cyber trucks 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. - There's your clippable moment. It's a free RV and you get paid. What I don't like about this business is the messy middle. Like you either need to own one RV and kind of do this a little bit on the side to make some extra money or you need to own 10 plus. And then just outsource everything. Higher a person like, yeah, go to like an RV rental or an RV storage lot, you know, spend 150 bucks a month to keep them not on your house and set up systems, take YouTube videos so people can know like how to clean it, how to check in, how to check out like, the worst thing you could do here is own like two to four of them because your life is not, it's not fun. (laughs) - Yeah, it's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses which is the juice is not really worth the squeeze. There's a reason I called them those sort of white belt businesses and that's not meant to be directory. What it means is you need a starting point as an entrepreneur. Every start of summer. And you know, if you start off saying, I'm gonna build Tesla. Unless you are truly, truly special and gifted in 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, War Buffet was, you know, selling, he's putting arcade machine games in barber shops. Like, you know, everybody starts somewhere. And in doing that, you learn a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about generating demand, about operations, about hiring, about finance. You learn in this kind of safe sandbox. And it's simple enough that you actually get started versus trying to go for the perfect business. You really don't even get in the game is what I've seen for most people. And so, I do like the idea of white belt businesses, but however, most of them, almost by definition, are pretty bad businesses to own. 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 pull. Well, oftentimes there are businesses and niches that are really good to sell high-dicket 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 can't tell you how many people I've heard say, like just a few vending machines and just extra thousand bucks a month, just passive, just make, it sounds passive. Yeah, sure. It's just not, you know, those vending machines break and the credit card readers break and you have to refill them and your, if it's snack and drink, they go bad, you have to swap them out. Is there anything truly passive by that definition? No, right. No, no, that's just one that it has the perception of being passive and of being amazing. And 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 you're, you're a test of how many people are trying to sell you high ticket courses and how slowly 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, there's these turnkey Amazon FBA businesses. And of course, you can build a great Amazon business. Many people do. But so, 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. (laughing) Amazing. Oh Chris, it was good having you on, man. Shout out your podcast. Where should people find you? The corner office. That's KOER&ER, TKOPod.com. All right, man, thanks for coming on. All right, thanks Sean. (upbeat music) If you made it this far, then you're gonna 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 that'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 a hundred million downloads and over 2,500 episodes. Marketing School gives you bite size marketing wisdom that you can implement immediately, whether you have a new website or you already have this huge established business, you're gonna learn about the latest SEO, content marketing, social media, email marketing, conversion optimization and general online marketing strategies that work today. You can get Marketing School or ever get your podcast.