The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Everything I'm Working on in March 2025 | Ep. # 148

Episode Date: March 26, 2025

Dear diary, here are all the businesses I accidentally started this month. Timestamps 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 New Beginnings: Church and Personal Growth10:51 Innovative Event Ideas: Interactive Business Nights13:14 Marketing Strategies: Billboards and Audience Engagement16:03 Content Creation: Growth and Monetization Strategies18:20 Business Ventures: Successes and Challenges20:55 Community Engagement: Q&A and Listener Feedback

All right, I'm going to do something a little different today. I'm going to speak off the cuff a little more. Back on January 1st, I released an episode that talked about everything I'm working on. And it did super well. I was pleasantly surprised because I recorded at a hotel and a rush. And I want to do something similar because I'm working on a lot of stuff. And a lot of times I spend so much time on content and interviewing other people about their businesses that I forget that I should talk about things that I'm doing because I'll be building stuff until the day I die. I like talking to my podcast audience, especially audio. No offense to everyone on YouTube, but I just feel like you guys are my bros and 15% of you are my sisters, I guess you could say. And I don't know, I just like talking more transparently, both in my newsletter and on the podcast. It just feels more natural. Whereas in a short or in a video or on Twitter, I don't know, feels too public. So here's everything I'm working on and everything I'm super excited about. I'll start with the business stuff. Then I'll go personal. So I found this YouTube channel a while back, and I did a deep dive on it today. And they're in the home services niche. And they've grown to 40 million followers across platforms in the last two years. And it's actually really incredible. And they're not optimized. No one's really talking about this guy. And honestly, I think I'm going to copy them. I'm going to hire someone and or partner with

someone. And we're going to launch something in a very similar niche. And just see how it goes. Just as a test. So I can't really spill a lot of details right now, but I will. And I'm just really, really excited about it. I've been making a lot of sourdough bread lately. And I don't know. I don't know why. I don't know. It's like Diablo slash building businesses slash baking bread. It's all the same. You're just creating and you're building or you're making videos or building a family. I just love creating. So it's been a lot of fun. And right now, if you're watching on YouTube, you see this finger about 20 minutes ago, I was slicing into this bread with this brand new bread knife I got. And I cut my finger. Five minutes later, I was cutting again. And I cut the same finger in a different spot. So I was just,

bleeding all over the place and all over the bread, but I'm loving it. And we have this farmer's market that's literally less than a mile from my house. We live in kind of a small town and my wife sells cookie bars there. And I really want to go sell some of this bread. I tweeted about this. So if you read that tweet, this will be a little redundant, but I think there's a world where I could sell $4 bread and have my cost under $2. Everything, labor, overhead, hogs, everything under $2. So 50% net profit. Now, keep in mind, I'll be baking this from my home. I really won't have any overhead.

But I am working in labor as if I were paying people $20 an hour to make this for me. So you can already buy sourdough from about two different vendors at this farmer's market, but it's like nine to 12 bucks and it's super crusty and it's kind of like artisanal and it's something you buy for a special occasion. And I want to compete with like the bagged bread. I want this to be bread that moms make their kids sandwiches with and that they buy two, three loves a week. So I just want to compete in a different way. And sourdough is just fun. It's literally waterflower and salt. That's it in time. And you make your starter and you mix your starter in and you let it

rise and you do stretch and fold every 30 minutes and you find more efficient ways of doing it. And I just have a blast. So if you're listening to this and you like building, making, creating, start, get into sourdough. It's just fun. It's just fun. Now, no, you don't have to monetize everything, but I do because it's fun and I like it. So that's just something I've been excited about. Of course, I don't plan to make any money at this. I plan for my kids to learn and I plan to have fun. And that's what's important. It's hailing right now and I can hear it. And my daughter just opened my office door with about a golf ball size hail in her hand. So there you go. Speaking of fun family businesses, I've been incentivizing my kids to sell all of our extra crap on Facebook marketplace. We literally have like 12 old iPhones, tables, chairs, old furniture, stuff in the attic,

thousands of dollars worth of stuff that needs to be sold. And I just, I just hate doing it. It's so tedious. And I have four kids and the youngest is almost nine. They're old enough for this stuff. And my oldest has a phone. So they get 40% of everything they sell. And they can't have their screen time until they list at least one thing for sale. And they were kind of hemming and high. And it took weeks to get him motivated. And finally yesterday, I turned off all the screen time on my son's phone, ESPN including during March madness. I know, almost child abuse. And said, no, we're done. No more screen time until you have three things listed on Facebook Marketplace. So he grumbled and he finally got an old iPhone listed. And about an hour ago, this guy came and picked it up and my son was super nervous. He's like, can you meet him at the door?

He's really shy. I'm like, no, I'll go with you. I'll teach you how to do it. But like, that's the suckiest part. And I don't like it either. But you need to learn how to do that. So it's funny because I talk a lot about rewiring your brain, making that first dollar on the internet. And my son's doing that when he's 14. And just what a valuable lesson to learn. They're going to make good money. They're going to learn a lot of lessons. And I'm going to make some money too. And I highly encourage you if you have kids teach them the principles of buying and selling on a marketplace taking good pictures good to strip good descriptions keyword stuffing being super responsive i posted a youtube video about this a couple of months ago in case you saw it it's called like facebook marketplace masterclass or something

but haven't watched that so i've been excited about that lately conferences i'm speaking at two conferences next week back to back one in sundance near park city uh hold co conference nick and i are speaking about partnerships and hold co's holding companies and so that'll be fun and I'll go fly fishing there. So I'm excited about that. And then the next day, I'm flying back to Dallas and speaking at SM Bash, small, medium sized business bash. I spoke there in Salt Lake last year. And I'm speaking about the role of a CEO. So if anyone's going to be there, I'd love to say, hey, that's going on next week. There's five birthdays in my family starting two days from now. My daughter's birthday is on Thursday. And then my son's birthday is five weeks later. And then

everyone else's birthday in my family is between that time. So it's going to be a crazy five weeks. I've been buying some domain names. $10 only, stuff that's never been claimed. They call it hand registered. I've been trying to buy up a bunch of domain names that start or end with TKO as in the Kerner office. Preferably things like a TKO one syllable, TK. And then words that start with O or things that rhyme with O like TKO bro, TKO show, stuff like that. So I already own a bunch, but I just bought TK. Own yesterday, OWN. I got an idea for it, but we're not sure about if I'll use it for that. And then TK. Owners. So that could be interesting. Hey, I think I like that. And then today, for my sourdough at the farmer's market idea, but I might have these words mixed up, but I think

it's saltflower.com and then water saltflower.com. That would be the name of the sourdough brand. Just showing in the name in the description what it is, what you're buying, something very simple with three ingredients. So I have way too many domain names. Most of them I end up lapsing a year later because a year goes by and name cheap is like, do you still want this? I'm like, why did I buy that? No, I don't. But power loss says that one of these will pay for all the others and that's usually the case. Let's talk about AI tools. I've been in Replit a lot. Shout out to my new friend, Brian Skinner, he's been helping me finish some projects that I started on Replit over the last few months. The last mile is really hard on Replit. Replet is great for getting

like something out there that you can play with, but it's still, it's still so undeveloped. You really need someone to get across the finish line unless you want to spend hours tinkering with it. Manus. Manus is like an AI agent. It's kind of like an operator clone out of China that I got an invite to. I've been playing with. I was really impressed with it at first.

And then like a lot of these tools, the more you play with it, the less impressed you get. And maybe because our perspective changes, our expectations change. But like today, I was using Manis to log into my Facebook page and invite people. people that have engaged with my post to follow my page 100 at a time. And after like 30 minutes of doing this, like just dragging it through this process, it finally said, Manis has stopped because the context window is too long. Please start a new chat. And it's like, what? All that was wasted. Like wasted. So I'm just very much first world problems here. But I've been using Manis to organize my newsletters, to download them all as PDFs, to find cool viral videos about business ideas, to analyze

basically the cities that download my podcast the most to append population sizes to the cities that download my podcast the most so I can find out where my podcast has the highest concentration of listeners and stuff like that. To me, so far, it's not a lot different than chat GPT. But I'm seeing some promising things. I think I'm going to make a YouTube video about how I'm using it. My newsletter has been growing fast. It's like it's at a very steady state right now. It's never been this consistent with growth. I'm adding 500 to a thousand. subscribers a day. My son's calling me. I think he needs to be picked up from seminary. All right. Sorry about that. I had to go get my boy. Speaking of church, I just got a new job or

calling in my church on what's called the second counselor to the bishop or the pastor, like his second assistant. So that'll be a new challenge. I'm working with the 11 to 13 year old boys. We're going on a camp out in a couple nights. And tomorrow or tonight, if you're listening to this on Wednesday, I'm going to see brand new, the best band of all time for their reunion show. First shows in Dallas. I've never been more excited for a concert in my life. If you're watching on YouTube, of course, the album cover right over my shoulder is Dejontendu by brand new, the best album ever written. All right, back to business.

I'm thinking about doing events, like going on a tour and doing like a startup night or idea night or idea improv or I want to know what you're thinking. Like, I really want to know what you guys think about this idea because I'm not talking about this anywhere but here on the podcast. What makes me nervous about this idea is that it's never been done, that I'm not. I know of. It's kind of unique. And I don't want to be the first to do something. I'd rather just copy something. I like it. Stand up comedians. Right. If you're a comedian, you go on TikTok, you share your bits, you build an audience, you go on tour that is well-established works. But this is not a thing. And so what I'm thinking is go to like a venue. Let's say it seats 500 to a thousand people. And it's like an interactive venue where there's a big screen behind me and

anyone can submit business ideas on their phone. And maybe they submit like a terrible idea, like an obviously terrible idea. And then it pops up on the screen. And then on the spot, I try to make it a good idea. And maybe I solicit feedback. There's a guy, one or two guys with microphones, solicit feedback from the audience with their ideas. And I could turn a bad idea good. Or I could take their sub ideas to the main idea and add to it. Kind of like I do with Sam and Nick and Connor on this podcast where one of us will say an idea and then it will end up somewhere totally different. It'll start stupid. It'll end awesome. I just think it'd be cool. to do that live. Not like a live podcast where I just sit on stage with Connor or Sam or Nick or

someone and just like talk about business, but like something a lot more interactive like that. We could do like a Shark Tank style competition where people from the audience could come up for 60 seconds, pitch their idea, cash prizes. I don't know. It's not fully flushed out yet. I just think it would be a lot of fun. So I think I'm going to test it or something like it in Salt Lake Provo area in June and in Dallas sometime over the next few months just to see how it goes. And then everyone can meet each other before or afterwards. And maybe people could launch stuff. Like maybe people could come up and pitch their idea and then someone in the crowd could partner with them or invest in them. So it wouldn't be a conference. Probably be a couple hours. And I don't know. That's like all I

know about it right now. But I'd love to hear your feedback if you want to email me, Chris, at co-founders. Speaking of the podcast, I'm putting a billboard up. You may have seen that tweet in Tom Ball, Texas, just north of Houston. It's going to be seven or 700 a month, I think. The cost of the billboard vinyl is 950. That's a one-time cost. And then I'm getting a three-month contract for 700 a month. It gets like 20,000 cars driving by it a day. It's on Main Street in Tomball. It has a lot of visibility. It's on the right side of the road. It's not really competing with other billboards. I'm super excited about the design that Simon picked out. Simon is my YouTube thumbnail designer, editor, graphic design. He's amazing. Simon, I love you. And so what I'm going to do is get

eight different designs. It's going to have my podcast cover art on the left side. It'll say the corner office along the top it's going to have icons for spotify apple and youtube and then there's just going to be like two to four words right where it's like quit your job or still rat racing or best business podcast um i'm going to take eight different designs and i'm going to put a facebook ad in that area so i just i want those people to see the facebook ad and literally the facebook ad is going to be a picture of a billboard like not the design from the billboard but like you're going to see like the freaking pole holding the thing up trees off to the this side, it's just going to be like an ad for the current office. And it won't convert well, it won't

convert well. But I'm just trying to see which picture people click on the most. And then the winner will get printed for 950 bucks on a billboard in Tomball, Texas for three months. So I'm really excited about that. I don't, I have no idea. I don't see podcast billboards, but I just, I have to know. I have to know how it'll perform. And you're probably wondering, how you're going to track it? Well, I can't do a QR code because I'm using clear channel for the billboards. And that's against their policy because, you know, liability, distracted drivers and all that. But I know, where all my podcasts are downloaded on a city level basis. And so I exported all my podcast data. It took like the 10 to 15 cities in and around Tomball and I know exactly what percentage of my podcast

listens in those cities and how many downloads they have. And so I'm just going to watch those cities closely and see if they grow proportionally or disproportionately to the other cities downloading my podcasts. That should be pretty accurate to tell me if it's growing or not. So very excited about that. I'll report back on how it's going. I've been hiring a lot of people, mostly for content stuff, mostly virtual assistants, editors, people to look at data. I religiously export my shorts data to track retention. How many seconds are people watching on average? And to track shareability, what percentage of people are sharing my shorts, reels, TikToks? Preferably, one to three percent of viewers are sharing. That means it's probably

going to go viral if it has good retention. If you want me to do a podcast on how I look at my Shorts data, how I try to go viral, I will. I just don't know if there's a lot of demand for that, but I love talking about it. Speaking of content, I have written on my mirror, my bathroom mirror, 10M in 10M. And I wrote that at the end of February. And it's 10 million in 10 months, 10 million cumulative followers by the end of the year, which is, you know, 10 more months in the year. And I'm behind my goal. I get between 8,000 and 40,000 new followers a day across platforms combined. lately it's been closer to eight than 40 but i need to average 25 000 a day every day for the rest of the year to hit that goal right now i have about 2.5 million but that's about twice what i had two months ago

so it's grown fast and i don't people ask like what's your end goal what do you want to do i like i don't know i just think it's good to have i think it'd be really awesome to have a show like a tv show or netflix show similar to diners driveans and dyes but for businesses where i go into small businesses and I picked the owner's brain about how they find customers, how they make money, are they profitable? What product lines or service lines are the most profitable, unexpectedly profitable, crazy stories, failures. Kind of like Guy Fiati walks in and says, how do you make this Fetuccini Alfredo? And he's a good host because he was in the restaurant industry for his whole career. And so he talks the talk and he walks the walk and he knows the culture.

And he's like, oh, you're putting in the white peppers or the black pepper because it goes well with a cardamom. He speaks the language, but he's also still learning. So he's an expert, but he's also humble enough to still learn. And I would love to be like that, but for businesses. But I don't know if I would like that. That might be a grind to traveling around. Like, I don't want to be away from my family. Right. So it's one of those things. Be careful what you wish for it. I could see it being something that like I end up doing. Like I reached that goal, but then I don't end up liking it. So I don't know what my end goal is with content. I just know it's good to have. And my ultimate goal is to get people to start businesses

based on something they heard. And I have a running Google Doc entitled people that have started businesses based on things they've heard from me or something like that. And I add to it every time someone emails me or messages me. So if you ever started a business based on an idea you first heard from me, whether it it be porch pumpkins or stump grinding or what have you, email me, Chris at co-founders.com. And I want to hear from you. Maybe I'll have you on the pot like Tyler.

We had on a couple of weeks ago with a stump grinding business. So I'd love to hear from you. But I've been experimenting with recycling my shorts every week. I'm just now starting that. It's kind of a risky bet. It's not something that people do. But the thesis is like, you know, meta has billions of users and it wants meta is starved for content, especially on Facebook.

Meta still has a billion daily active users, but they don't have as many creators anymore because they're all going to Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. And so there's this asymmetric opportunity where meta is paying creators trying to incentivize them to post reels, especially Facebook reels, not Instagram rules. And I'll tell you what, the Facebook audience is super, super valuable. I get like two to 300 subscribers a day. Over half of my newsletter subscribers are coming from Facebook. And my videos do better on Facebook than any other platform.

And so, you know, I used to recycle the bangers every six months. And then it's like, let's try every three months, every month. So I've been trying every month and it's been working well on Facebook. But I want to try every week, though. I just got monetized on Facebook, which is cool. They don't really have a system. You just have to be invited. And it's substantial.

I'm making like $4 to $700 a day for doing the exact same stuff I was doing. Just posting reels. That's it. No work on my part. So that's a six-figure profit revenue line that just showed up. And I'm monetized on TikTok now, but you have to have videos over a minute to be monetized. So I've been making like one or 200 a day on TikTok on average. So that's been cool because I'm still getting newsletter subscribers from those same channels.

And those are even more valuable than the. the 20 to 60 cent RPM revenue per mill, revenue per thousand viewers that they pay me. TikTok is closer to 60 cents, which is awesome, but my videos don't do as well. Facebook is about 20 cents RPM very consistently, but the videos do very well there. I started a separate clips channel because my YouTube long form videos are not doing as well, which is a bummer because like, for instance, my operator video got 50, 60,000 views. It was my best ever. Then I went on Greg Eisenberg's podcast and I basically did the same video and he's got 700,000

views and it's me. I'm doing the same stuff and it's his best performing YouTube video of all time. And I think the reason is because YouTube shorts and YouTube long form are so different. And the shorts I post really have nothing to do with this podcast. I'm not advertising my podcast. I'm not posting clips of my podcast. I'm just posting and look at this freaking guy right here, business ideas. And so it's a different audience.

Whereas like people like Greg, he's not posting any shorts. And so his YouTube audience is. there for long form. And so I started a separate clips channel on YouTube where I can just post the look at these freaking guy videos. And then I'm only going to post either podcast shorts on that my main YouTube channel or I'm only going to post long form video. So hopefully that turns around. I've really been focusing a lot on my audio podcast lately. Anytime someone subscribes my newsletter, I used to auto forward them to my YouTube page. And so my YouTube grew really fast last year. But the value of a podcast subscriber is much higher than the value of a YouTube subscriber.

So on January 20th, I redirected that traffic where now they go to my podcast page. And so my podcast has been growing a lot. A few months ago, I was at like 35, 40,000 audio downloads a month. Today I'm at 75,000 audio downloads a month. So that's been awesome. I've been using Sparkloop to monetize my newsletter with co-registration. So when you subscribe to me, you get five recommendations of other newsletters to subscribe to. And then they pay me $1 to $7 about a month later if that subscriber becomes a

the high quality engaging subscriber. So the newsletter has really turned into a cash cow for a few different reasons. Sparkloop is paying me like $2,000 to $3,000 a week now for doing nothing extra. So that's really been compounding. And then I have an RV slash mobile home park investing masterclass slash community. It's like a bunch of modules, some video, some written. There's about 31 people in there. And that's going great.

and we meet every Wednesday as a group and I meet with everyone individually every month for a half hour and they're buying RV and mobile home parks and I'm just teaching them everything I know. So if you're interested in that, you can go to, you can email me as well, Chris at co-founders.com. We've got repeat leads. Repeatleads.com. It is a marketing agency primarily for local businesses, not just home service businesses, but local businesses that rely on CEO, Google business profile, search engine marketing. So that's been going great as well. You can email me if you're interested in that.

My crypto mining business has not been going well. It's been an absolute dumpster fire nightmare. Big strain. And I've been talking about that for years, for a year now. So that's not really turning around, which is a bummer. It's not all roses. Texas snacks, our Bucky's business has been crushing it. I stopped by the biggest gas station in the world,

which is the Buckees in Severeville, Tennessee, aka Eastern Tennessee Pigeon Forge area. And it took a video there, bought about $3,000 worth of shirts because we sell location-specific shirts as well. And we're just growing every month. And my business partner, Kirk, manages that. He does a great job. And we pay ourselves quarterly distributions from that.

And it's going really well. I'm going to do a Q&A episode here soon, probably a couple. I'm thinking one of them will be released next week, one the week after, because it's been a while since I've done that. So you can go to tkopod.com, scroll down to the very bottom, and you'll see a way to record a voicemail. So if you've done that recently, I'm sorry I haven't gotten you, but I will. Thank you so much for listening to this.

this, please leave me a five-star review. If I'm worthy of your five-star review and email me, Chris at co-founders.com. If you have any feedback for the podcast, good or bad, I want to make it better. I want to know what segments or what types of episodes you like hearing the most because I like doing all of them. And so I want to know what you like the most. Thanks for listening to the corner office. Please share it with a friend. We'll see you next time.