The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - A Billion Dollar Travel Business Idea Hiding in Plain Sight ft. Connor⏐Ep. #106

Episode Date: December 18, 2024

I sat down with Connor Gross (https://x.com/c_gro), a regular on the podcast. We got into some cool ideas once again. We started with used golf sets - why they’re easy to refurbish, flip, and scale. Then, we talked about aquascapes: personalized, high-ticket, very niche and profitable. We also talk about the cruise industry and why it’s a massive, untapped market for entrepreneurs. And we also talked about pianos and how they’re a nightmare to get rid of and the surprising business opportunities that come with solving that problem.Check out Connor’s free newsletter! https://www.bizbrainstorms.comTimestamps below. 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---00:00 Highlights - Introduction01:00 Exploring the Golf Club Business Idea01:55 Facebook Marketplace Opportunities03:21 High-Ticket Niche Markets06:38 Travel Agents and Cruise Bookings10:43 Shore Excursions and Travel Hacks18:04 Aquascapes: A New Business Idea20:30 Piano Disposal Business Model25:16 Conclusion and Key Takeaways

This is a billion dollar business. Cruise Line International Association says that 70% of cruises are booked through travel agents. That's just a middleman who's taking the margin. This ugly website. Eight million customers served, do the math on that. You know, a thousand dollar cruise times eight million. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's stupid.

These are people that we eat dinner with every night. They paid six times as much for the same experience. I think that that would be a really good niche to try to disrupt the cruise agent booking market. All right. Well, Connor, welcome back. You've been on like six or eight times now. It's always fun. Happy to be here.

And yeah, you brought some ideas today. Always, man. Yeah, this is my best. My most YouTube DM, whatever that metric looks like, show that I will go on from a podcast circuit standpoint. So I want to come with good ideas and I want people to either ripping up apart and told me that they started it and they want my blessing afterwards. So we can go down any way you want.

I'm excited. All right. Well, let's do this golf club. one. Yeah, cool. Do you golf? No. Okay, neither do I, but I'm trying to get into it. Okay, cool. Right now, I've just said no too many times to people that golf, and so I'm trying to get into it. So if you look up golf club dude. Golf club dude. So I don't know if this is big or not, but this is the one where I think this guy takes used golf clubs. Okay. And he refurbishes them. And, you know, his whole thing is villainizing, right like if you're a beginner don't spend money on the new sets whatever like come to my website

i'm going to buy all this stuff i'm like an expert golfer and i'll show you what you actually need and sell them to you for way cheaper so you said golf club dude but it's golf set dude is that right yeah it's it's totally golf set dude okay cool i just want to make sure so really interesting guy and really interesting business and it got me thinking i think facebook marketplace is the new craigslist by a long shot and this is not new or crazy information. But if you start looking up all of the different things that Facebook marketplace will sell, I think that you'll quickly realize that like there's a lot of opportunity to buy used stuff and refurbish it, polish it out, make it better, and try to sell it as a more

branded way online. Okay. Like golf sets? Golf sets as an example. So this is the first concept is like, what can you find that's also on Facebook marketplace that you can either be like the de facto guy for and like build a brand around that like if you're on X you can constantly will see like there's so many like something guy so like you know there's a mattress guy now there's a mattress guy there's there's a luxury watch guy right and there's like all of these

channels where you specialize in one niche and something that has a ton of volume for already and now you can become the expert on it and I think that people are willing to pay a premium on that where it's hey I'm okay buying second antibiotics so long as I'm not getting this room and this is where like the information and expertise comes in. You know, the reason there's the mattress guy, the reason that there's the luxury watch collection guy or the cigar guy, right? It's because, uh, I'm willing to spend the nice money, but like, I'm an amateur golfer.

I don't know too much about whiskey or Rolex or whatever. Like, come educate me. And so finding, finding niches that can cater to that, I think is very smart. I like it because social media is perfect for building trust at scale, right? So I was actually just emailing with the mattress guy like, last week. And I was like, what's your website? I don't have one. Well, what does like your funnel

look like? I hop on calls with people and I sell them $7,000 mattresses for $2,000. And I make a margin there. Oh, okay. And it's like, well, people trust you. Because if he were to screw over one person, they'd blast about it on Twitter and he's out of business. It's a beautiful way of doing business, right? So I think it's great for that reason. And I think it also needs to be high ticket. I think golf sets are about as low ticket as you can get. And there's still 500 bucks or whatever. Yep. But I completely agree, right?

Like, it's not worth getting into this business if you're going to be the book guy. And you sell somebody on a $12 book that you're like, they're great. But I do think that if you wanted to do it from a really any form of sport, I guess, as long as you can get like close to a $500 AOV average order value as the minimum, I think that's smart. Other ones that I can see working out really well would be like, like all things gym renovation wise or making sure that that's a kit. I think just building a business around what is something that you enjoy that is a large enough cam that also is expensive.

And so there's another one. This guy has over 10,000 followers on X and his name's Kevin Shen. And he does home video studio buildouts. So it'll sell two versions of this. So either so, the DIY course. And the DIY course is, you know, here's the best webcam. It's based in the price range. Like, here's how to configure that.

There's how to set it up. You know, if you put one little light in your background, like, it makes the effects 10 times better or whatever. And like, you can buy the course on that. Or they'll actually fly out to your home office or home studio, whatever. And they'll do the entire build out for you. So that way you don't feel it's a finger. And the part about that is like, that's a, I have no idea how much it costs. but I bet it's like a $20,000 package.

And like the other one is an info product business that probably is littered with affiliate links that can probably scale up very well, it's very efficiently as well. Like I'm on his website right now, dream studio course.com is what it's called. And if I scroll down to the pricing, okay, so just the essentials for a video curriculum,

$500. If you want to join a cohort-based course, It's $1,200. And then the done for you consulting, which is everything from professional background design, expert gear guidance. I think they fly out is $8,000. So like, yeah. But here's the hack on this, right? It's like he's done it for all the big guys.

Like Sam Pars, the Nick Sharmas, the Tiago Forte's. And so like, if you're doing it to that degree and you're just good and your tech focus, like, there's not a whole lot of extra variables. But now everyone sees these guys, like they are at public billboard for you, especially as their audiences grow. And I think that that can increasingly be a big business. Especially if you do it for free for them. It's like, hey, man, just mentioned me one time. I'm cool. Oh, man.

Why isn't there like a travel agent guy? Do you know the travel agents are still a thing, like in person, old school? My wife uses a travel agent. And like, you don't really pay for them because they're paid by the travel companies. So two things on that. I think one, one of my friends who like, I don't know, you kind of think of what I think of like my own, my grandparents would use the travel agent. Like it just feels outdated, right?

Now that you have all these middlemen, the expedius, whatever. But I do have a good friend of mine who's very tech forward and everything. And his whole thing is like they went on their honeymoon and they went to South Africa. And like some spots, it just is way more beneficial to have. the travel agent because you can't get the reservations you need. What I have found, and I'm trying to find it on my Twitter to make sure that I actually have the right thing, it's some crazy number of cruises are booked through travel agents. Like, I think, like, I'm going to make up this number and somebody fact check me on this,

but like I think it's like 80% of all people, all cruise tickets sold are booked through travel agents. I believe it. I mean, we've been on like 12 cruises and we've booked. most of them through an agent. Really? Yeah. The agent would like you to believe that they save you money,

and I think sometimes they do or they can. I don't know. It's just kind of how the industry operates. I don't even know why we do. But like when we start talking about a Royal Caribbean cruise again, we have like a lady that we call. We're like, hey, hook us up. And it's funny because she's always like,

well, you know, if you sign up today, you'll get $500 of onboard credits. And it's like, I go to royal Caribbean.com. It says the same thing. So, okay, so here's the thing. Cruise lines, a cruise line international association says that 70% of cruises are booked through travel agents. Okay, that's just a middleman who's taking a margin.

Like, can you build an Expedia only for cruises, a job board only for cruises, where it is the de facto everything that you need to know about? And then like going back to the creator-led brand, if you're really into cruises or like, you want to be a travel influencer and you want a niche, Like, one of the not so cool, like, you're probably not going to get flown out by Emirates in the $20,000 suite. Right. You probably could get a suite on a Royal Caribbean cruise line. And so I think that that would be a really good niche to try to disrupt the cruise agent booking market.

Well, so, dude, go to vacations to go.com. Have you been there? Never. This is what you're talking about. This is a billion dollar business. I did a deep dive on Twitter a while ago. It's literally a billion. business, this ugly website. Yeah, 8 million customers served in the last 40 years. Do the math

on that. You know, $1,000 cruise times 8 million. Are you kidding me? Yeah, it's stupid. It's, it's worthy of a deep dive. Why is this not just like the number one thing that people are are building right now? I think for like anyone aged 50 and over, which is like 80% of the cruise market, this is the thing. This is their Expedia. See, man, here's here's the thing that some of these like business idea podcasts, right, there's business ideas where I'm like, ah, that's such a good idea that I got to keep it in like the bottom parts of the notes app. It's that way like it doesn't come up and we're not too public about it. This would be one of those ideas that I feel like somebody should genuinely start.

Like cruises are such a big market. And if this is the website that is leading it for eight million travelers, that's insane. Dude, here's where I think the opportunity is. I've had this idea since the first time I went on a cruise, which was like 2009, okay, 15 years we're talking. So I'm a cheap skate, total cheap skate. If you go on a cruise, it's all a racket, right? They're going to break even on you, hopefully, luckily on the ticket, and then they're going to make money when you gamble and when you drink. But guess what? I don't do any of those things. And I eat more than the average human being. So ain't no cruise line making money on me.

But there is a third way where they make a lot of money, and that's on shore excursions. And you want to go snorkeling. You get to Costa Rica. You want to go ziplining. It's going to be $179 a person. And have you been on a cruise? No, no. Okay.

So you get off the boat and then there's going to be someone waiting for you, a local in a nice shirt. They're going to be holding a sign and you're going to go with them. And it's concierge. You're going to get in like a rickety school bus. They're going to take you in the middle of the jungle. And you get there. And then there's like a shack and you swipe your car.

Well, you've already paid, I guess. And it's tons of money and you're there for two or three hours and you have fun. And then they drive you back to the boat. They make sure that you're there in time. And when you're on the boat, it's this big scare tactic. It's genius because there's like sales pitches and announcements 24-7 on these boats. And so they're always like, all right, be sure to stop by. If you haven't booked your shore excursions yet.

And of course, they're going to do everything they can to get you to book that before you ever step foot on the boat. If you haven't, please go to our concierge's track. travel service and you can choose from many options. Once again, we will remind you, be sure to book only through Royal Caribbean because you won't be able to guarantee that you'll get back to your boat in time or that you'll be safe or that you won't get murdered and left in the jungle. Like, it's all scare tactics, but it's all a racket because it's the same companies.

It's the same businesses. I was going to say, like, we, I travel, I travel a good amount and I haven't really done much stuff through an agency and like, you know, I'll go to some spots my mom's like, be careful and it's like, hey, it's, it's fine. Like, you'll get way more scared based on the news. But if you look at the average American, I think there's some crazy stats of like 33% have never left their state and like 70% have never left the country. So it's like, to a lot of people, Mexico is a very scary place. Whereas like for others, it's like, it's Mexico. So yeah, I can agree with that 100%. And I think at an older age too, like as I know

now my parents also just got back from a cruise or whatever like and they're going with a bunch of their friends and like they just want to be hampered they don't want to have to think they don't want to think about it right exactly they want and they want to get excited about somebody else's idea of hey we're coming up to Germany like this is the oldest castle like you have to check it out and it's like 60 years of their lives have gone by they've never thought about this castle but this is now the number one thing they want to say because somebody said it's the best thing to do and so there's definitely an exciting element to that well dude it's like there's a whole hack to it so this is what i do i don't book anything when i get on the boat

we have no shore excursions planned when you get off the boat i i would bet 80 to 90 percent of people book shore excursions through the cruise line you walk off the boat and you're going to see all kinds of like huts people standing there wearing branded shirts and they're going to be selling you like hey are you going with this oh we haven't booked anything yet oh come do snorkeling and believe yada yada and like how much oh 120. No, you start walking away. Oh, 100. I did this in Belize as like a 22 year old. This guy's like, it's $120. I'm like, no, oh, 30. Come on, bro. Come on. I'm like, it's 30. It's $30. No, no, no, no. I'm like, okay, I'll go try the next guy. Do the old walk away. Okay, 30 bucks. Because like, the gas is paid for. The bus is there.

They're right there. It's free money to them. They're just going to give you a snorkel that they've given to a thousand other people. And we, so then we get on the bus. And, We're the only people on this bus that don't have like a fancy wristband that was booked through the cruise, right? But it's the same thing that everyone on the cruise paid for. It's like these are people that we eat dinner with every night. They paid six times as much for the same experience. And we're talking like, what'd you pay for this? 180?

What? How did you pay? It's like, I didn't buy through. So like, I think there needs to be a vacations to go or an Expedia for shore excursions. We're like vetted, local, trusted providers. And then that's your whole value prop is like, these are the same providers that Carnival and Royal Caribbean use. But you just have to, you get to skip the middleman. Yeah, that's great.

No, I love that. I think the hard part is getting through that connection. But I think if you go on shore and go on ground, I think that absolutely work. I just got back from, this is not really related to business at this point. But like, I got back from Jamaica last month. And I was, we were out in the water. And I quickly realized that the mafia just runs everything there because. Oh, really?

Yeah, we're just kind of drinking them. the water and hanging out and some guy just pulls up like basically at the beach with like a tube in the back and it's like hey come on like 30 dollars like come come for a ride on the tube and I like grab my girlfriend I was like come on let's go and she was a little iffy on it and then you see the guys on the shore like five big dudes look at that guy and go no and they're like if this guy point to me wants to go for a ride here they have to come through us and they pay us and then we'll give you something because this is our beach and like you can't just come around and take cut of it. So that was, we didn't end up going on the tube afterwards.

Jeez. Dude. But I will, I will say I do think that that would absolutely work. Dude, real quick, that story reminds me of a crazy story that I just heard on Sunday. Not related to anything we're talking about, but it's good content and it's a good story. So I think you and everyone listening will like it. So I'm in church. I'm teaching Sunday school with this, my buddy Tom. And I don't remember what we're talking about, but he starts talking about his Sunday school teacher when he was a kid. His name was Gordon Hall. And I'm saying his name publicly because this is all public record. But he had he orchestrated one of the biggest Ponzi schemes of all time in Arizona in like the 90s, 80s and 90s.

And he was all tied up with the mafia doing stock manipulation. Right. And he was like he had a 52,000 square foot house. 52,000. It's too much. He had a billboard on the top that said Gordon Hall's mansion. Okay. That's what kind of guy.

guy this, this guy was. But here's the crazy thing. He got sentenced to prison. He's in prison today. He's still alive. He'll be in there for like 14 more years. And he was all tied up with the mafia to manipulate these stock prices and to get a better deal. This is as I understand it. I might be misremembering something. He like sold out the mafia. And you will not find this on the news anywhere. But this is a true story from my friend Tom who went to church with his whole family. A year to the day that he was sentenced to prison, his daughter. Gordon's daughter died suspiciously. Like they called it anorexia, but she wasn't even like that skinny.

She just like died. And they're like, oh, I guess it was anorexia. And then a year later to the day on this two year anniversary, his son died in a hit and run where they never found the driver. This true story. Like this will be in Netflix documentary one day. That's crazy. Isn't that terrible?

I can't even fathom. like how people get into these schemes that are that elaborate that then have people like I don't know I guess like living in Manhattan right now like all the United healthcare stuff I don't I know it's a big thing throughout the whole country but also just right now too like yeah we're putting out hits people like covering up murders people going to jail for 20 years like it's crazy we live in a weird world we do anyway that was a little tangent we both have ADD so it makes sense but well like to bring it back to the full beginning of the golf set dude, the thing that I was going to say is of the other verticals of things that can be done, one that I think would be really good that nobody talks

about that. It's new to me. So, I don't know if it's new to everyone, aquascapes. So aquascapes are basically like the love of trying to build up an aquarium. And so you're trying to build up a tank. You want to have, you know, these types of pebbles on the ground. You want this water filter. You want this base for your thing.

whatever, like it's the same people who geek out about their home office set up or their desk set up or whatever else, like wants a cool aquascape. And so this is a really big community. Like there's 162,000 people in this subreddit. And I guarantee you, if somebody goes on Instagram and picks up the tagline, the aquascape guy, and start just reviewing all of these different products. And like, if there's all this stuff like you have to be passionate enough about it, and you have to like know what you're talking about.

Like eventually you'll probably get into the game of like, all right, I now know all of these rare fish species. But if that's something that interests you, this business would work. It would absolutely would work. Like, tanks go for like anywhere from 100 to like several thousand dollars. And you can do so many different ranges that like even just building out content on this, like the money from the affiliate revenue alone would be enough for a very valuable business. Dude, it's making me think of this video I saw that had like 100 million views.

I'm going to text a variation of it to you. It is an aquarium with like a hollow. I just texted it to you. A hollow cavity built out in the middle for a cat to sit in and look around. Yeah. And so, oh, geez. You could totally be the aquascape guy.

I think that the magic is high ticket, preferably like small enough to ship. Like watches perfect, right? And like car dealership guy. perfect because people ship cars across the country all the time, right? Even though they're huge, the price point, it works. Don't really the couches. Unless, like, maybe, I don't know, like, the Facebook marketplace is, it's furniture go lower.

And so, like, it just seems hard. Like, people want somebody to come by and pick up their stuff. So if you're willing to do that and you can refurbish it well, maybe there's a game there. But yeah, that's, I think that's a good one. The one that I'll just throw out the opportunity here and I don't have a clear solution, but I know it's a big problem is P. are a nightmare to get rid of us. I don't know if you've run over this.

Dude, I've tweeted about this. I did. I'm doing a whole video about this. Yeah, dude. Oh, like, you tweeted about this recently. Like two months ago? So, I mean, we own storage facilities. Like, it's, every time you take over a facility, you have to go through and, like, look

through all the units and figure out what the junk is, whatever. And, like, we opened up one actually in Fort Worth. And we opened up, like, four units. And each unit had, like, 10 pianos. Like, oh no. Like, what a nightmare. So it's like, they're hard to dispose of like, you can take it with the dump.

The dump freaking charges you like by the pound basically. Piano's like heavy as hell. So like truly the best thing that we could do is a try to like just try to auction them off. Like, and not even auction like free free piano. We would call local churches see if anyone wants them donated. But like not all of them are even in great shape. So I don't know if there's a business model here. There is.

Really big problems. There is one. Okay. What you got? So, dude, I was on threads. I was on threads and I posted something about something. I don't remember. And this guy commented and he's like, I assumed he worked for a moving company, but he didn't

say. He's like, my boss used to do this when we got slow. We didn't have any jobs. He would hop on Facebook marketplace and copy and paste the same message saying, we'll come pick up your piano for $250. As in you pay us $250 to come get it. And they've got big box trucks just sitting there. They're not doing anything.

And he's like, we would pick up five, six, seven in a day once, or every now and then. So then I went to Facebook Marketplace out of curiosity. I went to the center of Dallas and I set a 50 mile radius. So it got all of DFW. Guess how many free pianos are listed every day in DFW? It's like 55 to 65 a day. Free. People can't get rid of them.

No. It's like a liability. And so it's just, it's a numbers game. You could literally say, I'm going to be by Fort Worth on Thursday with my box truck. This is my business. We're called Pianammovers.com. It's going to be 250 bucks. We'll take it out of your house.

We just show up. You don't have to do anything. We'll open the door even. And you just on Monday, you DM 60 people, Tuesday, 60 people, Wednesday, 60 people. Maybe you have 10 appointments set up by Thursday. You rent a U-Haul for $59.99 a day plus 75 cents a mile. You don't even buy a box truck. You just go pick up.

all those suckers up, drop them off at the dump. Yep. I completely agree on all that. I think the only step further that I would take it is, is there any way that you can make money? Because the dump's going to charge you, like to dump all of these banners. It's still profitable. I believe it. 100%. I believe it. Especially when it's low, right? Like, you know, you can still make some money there. I think the next iteration is like, is there something you can do to the piano to make money to get paid to pick it up and to get paid to dispose of it? I know that I'm going to get the entire process wrong here. So I apologize to anyone listening. But like there is somebody that I met a long time ago.

And he picks up tires. He gets paid to take the tires. His tires also are kind of a pain in the ass. And he has some machinery that I converts it into power. into what into powder into power like electricity because that's the thing i think i think he just cuts them up i think he cuts them up and like they're used for like turn pellets or something like yeah there's like it's like artificial mulch and they'll paint it brown and it's it's very expensive because it's permanent mulch you don't have to replace it every spring so maybe that's sort of i'm

blanking on it slightly but like the business model of getting paid to take the thing and then get rid of it is a very good business model. It's like negative cogs. Yeah. Yeah. Negative cogs, cash up front. All that's good. Dude, when I posted about this, it was very polarizing because everyone was saying, you can't throw pianos away. What are you doing? That's art. And it's like, we need to stop buying crap. We're buying crap. We've got to do something with it. I'd love to sell it. Trust me. I would love to sell it. But what are we going to do? I just respond to all those people and tell them that you have 50 pianos for them at their doorstep if they want to pick them up.

Like, hey, listen, I'm not throwing them away anymore. They're all yours. They're free. Take them. People were like, well, what if you, like, assemble them in a warehouse and then you donate them to, like, assisted living facilities? And it's like, if they wanted or needed them, they would go get one for free on Facebook marketplace.

No one wants these things. Yep. Agreed. We got way more topics then. The other ones are way more research, too, but that was fun. Basically, takeaways here, find a high-price product, builds content around it. And like you can like the cool part here is like you're not manufacturing stuff. You're becoming a knowledgeable subject matters.

Like you're basically a travel agent for a product. Like you know enough about the space such that you can say, hey, don't buy this said, buy this fish tank by this tank. Don't buy this piano. Buy this one. Like I bet one for music would also work really well just in general. But besides the point. Yeah.

Yeah. Like smaller instruments that are higher ticket violin. and stuff. I'm planning on learning how to kite board next month, and I think, like, I'm going to rent all of the equipment at first, but then afterwards there's going to be a subject matter where I'm going to need to learn which kite and what board to buy, et cetera, and, like, same goes with skis, same goes with whatever else.

And so, like, anything where there's, like, a little bit of a beginner ramp-up curve, and you can be that person to catch them on that ramp up as they're getting more content, and now they trust you in the beginning of that journey, and they're willing to have a high LTV, get them there. Love it. All right, what do you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.