The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - 8 Untapped Business Ideas You Can Start This Weekend ⏐Ep. #248
Episode Date: November 17, 2025Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com�...� and join my new community at https://TKOwners.com━Manage your business finances globally and save on fees with Airwallex: https://www.airwallex.com━This was honestly one of my favorite HoldCo Bros sessions ever. We broke down the math on 8 different business ideas that are completely wide open right now.I’m talking about everything from simple local service arbitrage to high-level psychological pricing hacks. We even break down how one guy in a tiny town is generating a quarter-million dollars a year with zero employees.The opportunities are hiding in plain sight—you just have to know where to look.In this episode, we breakdown:The "Virginity Rocks" Case Study: How a simple brand does $70M/year.The Influencer Partnership Play: How to monetize someone else's audience (using Tesla as an example).The $240k Local Newsletter: How a guy in a small town makes a killing (and how you can copy him).The "Gray Hat" Growth Hack: A slightly controversial way to get high-value clients quickly.Botox Arbitrage: A genius way to partner with neighbors for a cash-flowing side hustle.The Lifetime Warranty Hack: A psychological pricing strategy that sounds crazy but prints money.The "Middleman" Agency: How to sell Local SEO to dentists without doing the work yourself.Reverse-Engineering Etsy: How to find best-selling products just by looking at reviews.Enjoy! ---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
It's one of those ideas that you launched by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple yeses.
You might as well learn the skills and have an agency, one to two grand a month per customer.
He does micro newsletters.
85,000 people, he's got 40,000 of them subscribed me.
He generated 230,000.
And I think he's like on par for double that this year.
That's Annapolis, Maryland.
Everyone loses their sunglasses.
So with our sunglasses, lifetime warranty.
No questions asked.
Statistically speaking, they would have to file 10 claims break even on them.
This guy makes $70 million a year from selling your merch.
Anyone listening to this could make money by piggybacking on an influencer.
Welcome to the Kerner office.
This was one of my favorite hold co-brose ever.
And I'm not just saying that so you'll listen.
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?
See, you are?
And I said, if someone is an influencer and all they do is sell t-shirts, they don't know business.
Yes.
Okay.
Yeah, 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.
You familiar with them?
No.
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 are like, oh, brother, sister, Smith.
have you seen the virginity rock sweatshirt?
I think that's such a good message to send to the children.
Yes, yes.
$70 million.
Come again.
That's what she said.
That's a lot.
Yeah.
Like 70 million.
A lot of money.
$70.
More than 50.
Yeah.
On T-shirts and hoodies and hats.
So like there are exceptions to that, but that's like 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 them to 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 Merritt.
And he's probably going to get hit up after this podcast.
But Sawyer is a Tesla fanboy.
That's his whole schick.
Elon responds to his tweets frequently.
He tweets about all the Elon companies and products and that's his whole stick.
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.
Because it's such a polarizing topic.
It's so polarizing.
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 a 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? No. 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, then going to them and
partnering to sell that.
This also reminds me of, do you, you know who Ryan Sneeden is?
Mm-hmm.
I had him on, I had him on my podcast in economics.
Anyways, he does micro-newsletters.
One of the things I was like, as I was talking to him, I thought 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 there's people in Boise.
years, people in San, whatever, these big cities where they have like big poll in those specific
cities and going to them and implementing a newsletter for them.
Effectively what Ryan does and he does this in Annapolis, I think there's like, I want to say
there's like 85,000 people that live in Annapolis and 45,000 of them are on his newsletter.
Yeah.
Yep.
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 it Amy Nix or
Amy Knox? And Dallas. Nixon. Yeah. Yeah, Amy Nixon. 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 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 sold we're going to talk about how many days to sale we're going to talk about
average list price and each one of these markets et cetera et cetera and you put together that newsletter for her
she sends it out she owns the 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.
So I like that approach.
That's an amazing idea.
Amazing idea.
There's a guy,
there's a,
a YouTuber.
There's a Dallas realtor that is a YouTuber and his whole schick is real estate in
DFW.
And he has 20, 30,000 subscribers.
And that's all he does.
Right.
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 time because I don't know if he wants to be talking about
this,
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's what was crazy about talking to Ryan is he was like, I'm in the no.
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
Annapolis Maryland so it's like a nice town it's high income but now he's also like I'm buying a
porta potty not port a potty business yeah it's a port of body business it's a wedding bathroom
yeah like the luxury bathroom rental and I'm like dude now with your connections 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 Annapolis. 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 personalized
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.
I guess 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 Annapolis, 46.
percent of his town are subscribed.
Jeez, boys.
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.
$2,000.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Does he have a paid version or just ads?
It's just ads.
There's no paid version.
And he netted like $80,000.
That's crazy.
Like 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 like 85,000 people.
He's got 40,000 of them subscribed me.
He generated 230,000.
And I think he's like on par for double that this year.
That's Annapolis, 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.
Any city.
No.
And like he's now trying to do this model where he like, I don't remember.
It's not exactly a franchise.
but he's licensing it out to different markets.
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's 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.
Yeah, 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 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 the news stories that came in
and the editors just looking and seeing like, okay, what was interesting? What was?
It's not interesting.
So there's that aspect.
But then he also has the programmatic aspect to it where in his newsletter, he's like,
here are 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 phone.
It's like people want the weather.
There's a lot of things that could just be programmatic, just easy, 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 Lem list, Mix, Max, 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 that says, 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 send 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 connect that to Zapier and you opt them in to your Beehive
to your newsletter.
Are you subscribing a like a newsletter growth hack?
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 one percent of an opt-in if you just had one percent of this market.
Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro.
It's a $250 billion market, dude.
If I just get one percent of one percent, 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.
Start with a niche and then grow out.
No, what if you're just like, no, I want to do a newsletter, do 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 spas,
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 a supposed to keep you young and b help you look young so one of the things
you post about was 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 two Botox, please.
Like, do you understand how it works?
No, I don't.
No, 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.
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, it's a sign of a big brain.
As my father.
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 is Jewish and my dad's racist.
And anyways.
So like for me,
your first time forehead,
I'm probably going to do 40 units.
Right.
But then they got.
you know, these little things here, 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, partially, yes, but what Botox does is it, it deadens, not deadens 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.
I hate 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 seven dollars.
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 averages 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 is five years, but lasts five years is 3600.
Excuse me.
The customer lifetime value is $3,600.
But if you back out the gross margin, then it's about $1,800.
No, sorry, $4,000.
I'm not doing my mouth 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 sense 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 3 to 5% of every transaction. It's insane. But Airwallix 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, none 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 airwallix.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 MP. 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.
I know you've, you like explored this on your podcast.
You're looking at like $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 $2,500 LTV, let's say there's 5% conversion, then you would multiply it four by $20.
So it's $100.
Is 5% conversion a good conversion or good conversion or bad?
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 through if you're only using Google ads also highly dependent on the local market
but yeah less than 10 percent like why would you not do that all day and so you were just partner
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 of five.
And, you know, if from like five to seven, three nights a week, he's getting people in and he's
making an extra $10,000, well, 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 the, you'd have to identify who in the, you're
that area as 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 a third party here.
You need a third person in this partnership.
Okay.
We've got, we've got, we need a, you're the Lou Pearlman here.
Okay.
You're the Lou Perlman to the Backstreet Boys.
Okay.
Okay.
But you've, you've only assembled part of the backstreet boy.
You're only assembling the NP to actually perform the procedure.
I've only got Nick Carter.
I don't have AJ.
That's it.
I don't have Ryan.
I don't have.
JT.
Forget it.
JT.
Come.
All right.
Keep going.
Anyway, no, you need a mom.
You need a mom.
You need a well-connected.
mom 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 who.
The party is like a lot of talk like a Tupperware party.
Yeah.
Yes.
This has to exist already.
Right.
You need to find the women that did sell Lula Rowe or New Skin or Tahitianoni juice 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 probably burn the network by this point.
But they just need to host parties.
That's right.
At 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 could search people that have ever posted about Lula Row.
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 to my name.
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 anything.
Yeah.
We could 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 a segment?
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, returning my part.
I don't understand.
Statistically 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 launched by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple yeses.
And I really do think it's a side hustle.
Like, does me I don't see this as like, oh, this is going to be.
It could scale.
I'm just saying like for an NP or a PA or a nurse who can administer Botox in a neighborhood.
And it 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, an 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 NPs.
There doesn't need to be, there doesn't need to be a pasty white guy like yourself to play middleman, right?
it could just be two people here.
And if I did do it, I'd have to be like, you know, bull up out of my mind.
Like, have you ever wanted to know cars?
I'm smiling.
Yeah.
You get it.
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.
Okay.
Do you remember why about the domain name?
I call this domain name number 700.
And 32.
Domain name Lifetime Sandals.com?
No.
I haven't talked about this in maybe six years, but I still own 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?
Everyone loses their sunglasses.
So with our sunglasses, lifetime warranty.
No questions asked.
You break them, you lose them.
No problem.
We'll replace them.
Dang.
Just the framing.
It's just a framing.
And it's like, well, how do they make money?
Well, they sell them.
There's already high margin on sunglasses.
And I've priced these out in China.
It costs $1.50 to make.
50 cents to ship.
You're in at $2.
You sell them for $50.
Anytime someone files a claim, you just, okay, no problem.
You just have to pay shipping.
Shipping's five bucks.
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 there's friction.
And they introduce strategic friction.
I call it strategically introduced friction, believe it or not.
They introduce friction.
They're like, oh, fill out this form.
Okay, do this.
Call this number.
And most people are going, 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
to.
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've 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 it's like if I could pay 80 bucks for sandals and just, or if I could sell them for $80,
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 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 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?
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 does.
Whatever.
But, like, there are stories of people who have, like, taken their third.
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 Patagoni 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.
Anyway, what you got?
You got more?
What do you got for me?
I tweeted a little while ago about DSOs.
I've talked about DSOs in the past.
They're 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.
Dennis can own practices, but me and you couldn't just.
just go and start a practice from scratch.
We would have to partner with a 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 workaround.
Some of them actually do own the clinics that, but that's because they have a.
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. 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.
We 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 this thing.
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 Lang Kiffin still?
coaching, but Nick Saban ain't. I tell you what. Anyways, and just ask them like, hey, you're a
dentist, right? Yeah, yeah. Are you a part of a DSO? Or you're a physician? Are you 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
You don't need to start a Google business profile agency.
You just are the middleman.
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 dentist or medical or anyone that's on Google.
It could be.
I'm using them as examples, right?
Because I think they're 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.
There'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 this practice.
I know this is random, but I saw, I notice 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.
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 see 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 pay 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.
I was 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,
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.
That's a good 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.
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 all natural deodorant, aluminum free.
He started making it himself.
He cracked Facebook ads.
He sold it for $100 million in like nine months to Procter & 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 on Instagram is all just females, gym clothes, bikinis, right? But then when I go to,
that's so weird. There must be a glitch. When I go to an outside account, it's like, you know, the news or
normal stuff. Do you know why that would be? Hmm. There's no way. Must be a glitch. There's no way of
knowing. Okay. Thank you. Good. Okay. So go. Go to. 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 have, because Etsy will show you a lot of that data. And look at their
reviews. And let's say an Etsy seller sells a hundred 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 product 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 bestsellers 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? I would go. Like what would be the first filter you would search for?
It 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's 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 it'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.
They show a publicly traded company.
Figs.
They're publicly traded and they just sell
freaking scrubs to nurses.
Jeez.
Love it.
Okay.
What'd you think?
What'd you think of hold co-brose?
See you next time.
