The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Forget Big Apps. That Tiny Tools Are Making Millions - Ep. #301

Episode Date: May 19, 2026

beehiiv is the newsletter platform I’ve used for over a year and a half because their data shows you exactly what’s working. Get 30% off three months at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠���⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠beehiiv.com/chris⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━Check out my newsletter at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and join my community at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠━In this solo episode I’m breaking down one of my favorite business ideas right now: API arbitrage and the great unbundling. I talk about how huge companies were built by unbundling parts of Craigslist, and why the same thing is happening today with tools like Apify, Clay, Zapier, OpenAI, and Claude. I share the story of Nico, who went from working in his family’s restaurant to building a software business doing $3,500/month in recurring revenue with almost no technical background. Then I walk through a bunch of simple business ideas anyone can build by wrapping existing tools in a cleaner, easier product. If you want to implement AI into small and medium sized businesses, check out https://www.playmakersai.com/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---

This is the asymmetric bet of the century. Costs the start is almost zero. The tools are either free or cheap. You could do this in an afternoon, literally. These can be $10,000 businesses, million dollar businesses, and even billion dollar businesses. Nico didn't have rich parents, didn't have an MBA, didn't have any experience, and he just did it.

He's proof that this is doable for a regular human being. He used to just make pasta. His whole life was hospitality. You don't have to build software. You don't have to invent anything new. Just put your own rims on it. Put your own face on it. If he can do it, anyone can do it.

When something works, window is short before everyone copies it. And the better it works, the shorter the window is. Cold email back in 2020 was insane. You can send 100 emails and get 15 replies. Today you've got to send 10,000 emails. Facebook ads in 2014. Google ads in 2005. You can buy a customer for two bucks. Today is 40. You got to get it while the getting's good. And that's usually today or yesterday. The phrase nothing is too niche has never been more true. Build lifestyle businesses. They are awesome. Let's talk 12 specific business ideas that you can build using the same playbook. Okay, I just got off a call with a guy who not that long ago was making pasta in his family's

restaurant in New Orleans. He'd never written a line of code in his life. And today, he's running a software business doing $3,500 a month in recurring revenue. No technical knowledge whatsoever. He wasn't even using AI. And the kicker is that anyone listening to this episode can do the exact same thing, literally. And it's all made possible by what I call the great unbundling, which is a concept, framework, whatever, that I'm obsessed with.

So by the end of this episode, you're going to have ideas, a plan, and probably an urge to open your favorite vibe coding app tonight and build something. So we're going to talk about what unbundling is, what platforms are ripe to be unbundled. And then at the end, we'll talk very specifically on what business ideas you should build in and around this unbundling concept that I'm about to describe to you. The guy I spoke to his name is Nico. I'm going to come back to him in a few minutes because his story is kind of the whole point of this episode. But before I tell you exactly how Nico did it, I'm going to show you. you a picture. If you're listening to this on audio, just imagine not showing anything too crazy. It's a screenshot of the Craigslist homepage. And on this screenshot are a bunch of arrows pointing to

different services, the personal section, the community section, discussion forms for sale, housing, jobs, etc. Then there are logos pointing to each of these sections, logos of companies you probably have heard of, Zillow, Airbnb, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Upwork, and many, many more. And yes, this website looks like it was designed in 1998 because it was. Time. tiny blue links. We've all seen it before. A bunch of columns of categories all crammed into one page, but what's wild is that almost every category on that page got turned into a billion dollar company, or hundred billion dollar company. Billion with a B, if you look at the housing section, apartments, rooms, sublets, rent, sale, that's the whole little corner of Craigslist that got

eaten by Zillow and Airbnb, Redfin, Realtor.com, etc. Zillow alone is worth, what, $12 billion, $1, Airbnb, $80 billion, all from one little column on Craigslist that got unbundled. If you look at the personals, strictly platonic, women seeking men, men seeking women, all that, boom, Tinder, $10 billion company pulled straight out of that column, jobs, accounting, finance, sales, marketing. Indeed, ZipRecruiter, Upwork, Indeed alone does over $3 billion a year in revenue. You look at the for sales section, antiques, appliances, bikes, electronics, offer up, Facebook marketplace, and many, many others, multi-billion-dollar,

businesses or the discussion forums, Reddit. Reddit was worth $7 billion at IPO or the services and gig section, Thumbtack, Shift gig, TaskRabbit, multiple hundred million dollar businesses. The next door, of course, we know all of these, okay? First of all, the unbundling of Craigslist is not done. It's still a work in progress for you or anyone else to capitalize on. Second of all, there's so many other things we can unbundle that isn't named Craigslist. Craigslist was unique because it had every feature in the world on one page, jobs, dating, housing, use stuff, whatever. And companies came along, picked one feature, slapped a clean design on it, made it mobile friendly and built a billion dollar business. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but we only

have so much time today. I'm not saying it was easy for them to do this, but they stole the users of Craigslist. They were more savvy. They cared more about one little feature, one little blue link than Craigslist did because Craigslist was trying to focus on hundreds of little blue links. Also, side note, unrelated to this episode. I kind of hate how Craigslist is this ugly. Like people think it's punk rock and it's cool, but it could have been something amazing. They could have provided thousands of jobs. It gets barely, I think, a couple million hits a month today, which is down like 95 to 99% from its peak. They could have innovated. They could have added a lot more value to the world. But now the rich got richer and Facebook marketplace is doing that job pretty well. That's fine. That's free market capitalism,

whatever. So the exact same thing is happening right now on dozens or hundreds of other websites, this unbundling. And over these last few years, it's happening with AI and APIs. Look at OpenAI, aka Chad GPT, as the new Craigslist, or Anthropic, aka Claude, as the new Craigslist. There's a company called Appify. Think of them as the new Craigslist. Clay, Clay.com, Zapier, and API Marketplace, the new Craigslist. Each one of these platforms bundles a thousand different features into a single tool, and the whole opportunity for the next decade is to unbundle them. Pick one feature, wrap it in a nice little app, charge a markup, own one niche. And up until three, two years ago,

This sexy, unbundling thing was only available to people that knew how to code, software engineers. But now it's available to all of us, to any of us, anyone that knows how to speak any given language. Any of us can own a niche. Nico, this guy I talked to, he calls it API arbitrage. And my knees got weak as soon as I heard those two words put together, because that sounds awesome. And it sounds like opportunity. And it might sound technical, but I'm going to explain it in Chad, GPT language right now. So it's going to make sense to anyone listening.

Okay. So you go to a website like Appify, which is like an app store for scrapers and AI tools. There's 30 plus thousand different Appify actors or apps or scrapers on this website. 30,000. You pick one of those off the shelf. Let's say it's a scraper that can pull every Instagram follower from any account. That scraper is going to cost you like pennies per thousand followers scraped. It's almost nothing.

And someone with a lot more technical knowledge than you built the scraper. You don't need to know how to build it. You just need to connect the API key. You build a dead simple website, vibe code it with your favorite vibe coding tool, put a search bar on it, charge customers one cent per follower pulled, five cents per follower pulled. It's a great deal for them. And you have like 95% profit margin on that. The customer doesn't know that Appify exists.

If they do know it exists, it might be a little too technical for them or complicated, or they might not like that it has a monthly fee. Oh, and like, please subscribe to the podcast. It's very hard to grow an audio podcast, especially. So it would mean a lot if on Apple or Spotify or whatever you'd, get your podcast, just hit follow or subscribe or whatever, and it'd mean a lot. Maybe the customer knows Appify exists. Maybe they don't. Regardless, it doesn't matter because they like your website better, even if they have to pay more for it. And your website also conveys the assumption that

you're better at focusing on only one thing. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. If you're only scraping one thing, then the customer assumes you're better at it than a competitor or then Apify even, which is the whole thing that you're white labeling. You're using to do all the hard work. That's API arbitrage. You're competing on price, customer support, and how easy your website is to use. You don't have to build software. You're just putting a simple storefront on top of someone else's software. So back to Nico. He's proof that this is doable for a regular human being. He used to just make pasta in his family's restaurant in New Orleans. His whole life was hospitality. He had no tech experience, no sales experience, nothing. He didn't even know what an API was.

He never heard those three words put together. Then COVID hit. He went to Mexico for a four-day vacation, beach, tacos, you know the drill. And he ended up staying for six months. He was in Touloum and Plyadel Carmen and he started meeting laptop people, you know, people working from laptops in coffee shops, et cetera. And he's like, you guys are working? What are you doing? Like, yeah, you know, we're software people. We work remote. This is, you know, before Chad, GPT. We make six figures where you live on the beach and his brain just kind of exploded. All he knew was the restaurant industry. So he went back to the States six months later and he's like, okay, done with restaurants. I like this Laptop life, and he got a job as a sales guy, as an SDR, sales development representative,

basically setting out appointments for salespeople, for closers. He's cold calling for software companies. It's kind of like the lowest wrong on the tech sales ladder. Brutal job, tons of rejection, LinkedIn DMs, cold calling, cold emails, etc. He's learning the game. And while at this job, he learns a tool called clay.com. And he had been getting these spreadsheets with leads and like using the same leads that all of his coworkers were using to get sales. And Clay, how helped him find anyone's email, their LinkedIn, their company. It helped him enrich the data. So he had, A, more ways to contact these people and B, more ways to find new people that his coworkers didn't have access to. Also, this is not a sponsored episode. It's not sponsored for Clay,

Appify, or anyone. Okay, it's just me talking. So he started using this tool and then his brain broke even more. He's like, wow, this is what tech can do. So early 2025, late 2024, he quit his job, tech sales job, and started building. Just started tinkering with these vibe coding tools, not knowing anything about how to code. He used Claude. He used Codex by OpenAI, and he found a buddy who is technical and could do the heavy lifting when it got out of reach for him. So he's the product guy, the idea guy. He tells AI what to build. His buddy fixes whatever AI might break. And then they ship it. And then as they grow, they scale, his technical friend helps make that happen. So he started with a Google Maps lead scraper. So you go to his website,

you type in gyms in Texas, and then you have a spreadsheet of every gym in Texas, right? Pretty cool. A lot of demand for stuff like that. There's also a lot of other websites doing it, but he didn't need any technical knowledge. He used, I think, an Appify actor, an API on the back end to do all the scraping. And he just vibe coded it into a nice, clean little website with a stripe integration. Charges 35 bucks a month. But he allowed customers to convert that 35 bucks into credits. So if they canceled their account, they could still come back nine months later and use the rest of their credits to scrape more. So people like that because a lot of us have subscription fatigue. and his business model actually respected how most of his customers used the tool,

which is a great learning in and of itself. So he's been doing this for like seven months and he's doing $3,500 in monthly recurring revenue. His costs are almost zero. His customer support is basically zero. It's a self-served product. And yeah, this is a guy who had no tech experience and he's doing well. And it's growing double digits every month. He's never done paid ads.

He just kind of told some friends about it in the sales space. They started using it. They started talking about it. And he's really found his success through word of mouth. He didn't have to invent scraping. You don't have to invent anything new. Just put your own rims on it. It's your own face on it.

If he can do it, anyone can do it. Okay. So now let's talk 12 specific business ideas that you can build using this same playbook. Then I'm going to do a bonus round of Apify like white label ideas that I'm just going to riff on because there's 30,000 actors. So a lot of stuff to talk about there. But we'll focus on only the best of the best. By the end of this, you should have at least one.

idea that makes you want to close this video, close Spotify or Apple, and go open your favorite vibe coding tool. That's the goal here. So idea number one, Appify actor rappers. Same thing that Nico did. You can do with Google Maps like Nico. You can do with something else. There's over 30,000 actors. And an actor is just a pre-built scraper or an AI tool that someone already built. You just put a wrapper on top of it. And if that sounds complex, you're just getting a key, a code from the actor, and you're pasting it into replet, lovable, codex, whatever vibe coding tool you use. And you're saying, hey, connect this thing with this website. That's it.

That's a wrapper. Instagram scraper, LinkedIn scraper, Facebook group scraper, Reddit, buy a $10 domain name, vibe code it, host it on the domain name. Good to go. You could do this in an afternoon, literally. Okay. Idea number two, Google Mapscraper. Like you can do it just all of Google Maps or you could do a dentist scraper,

roofers scraper, home service businesses scraper, Texas. small businesses scraper, lawyer scraper, anything. Nothing is too niche. The more niche you are, the better you can target your ads. Who's a buyer for this stuff? People like me, B2B sales team, cold callers, SDRs, marketing agencies, anyone who needs to build a list of local businesses. charge 35 bucks a month, sell credit packs that never expire and just run it. Post about it on LinkedIn to your 452 followers. You don't need to be an influencer. Idea number three, Amazon review scraper for direct consumer brands so they can kind of do Intel or reverse engineering of their competitors. Every Shopify brand or Amazon seller, there are millions of

these, direct consumer founder. They all want to know what their competitors are doing. What are complaining about? What do they love? What features are missing? What words are reviewers using? Right now, the only way to figure that out for most people is to manually read hundreds of reviews or to manually screenshot and copy and paste and drag it over to JGPT and have that read the reviews. Most people aren't even doing that. It's soul crushing work. But if you build a tool where someone paste in a competitor's Amazon URL. Your tool can scrape the last 500 reviews, run them through chat, GBT, and spit out a one-page report. Get the top compliments, top complaints, common phrases, suggested product improvements. The backend is all handled by an API key on Appify. You're also

using an open AI API key. They'll cost you pennies per report. You could charge 50 bucks a month, $100 bucks a month, $19 for a one-off report. I mean, you sell to the same people that are scraping this, right there's i don't know three or four million shopify brands there's a few million amazon independent sellers your potential customers are the same people wanting intel on each other the next idea can just be done with zapier zapier is in the apii marketplace and you just build a very simple automation and if you've never used zapier you can use ai within zapier to build this automation for you or you can just screenshot stuff over to chat gpt and have that teach you how to do it but build a customer service bot which is just a zapier flow you pay zapier 29 or

$59 a month for thousands of credits or hundreds or whatever it gives you. And if a business gets a customer service email into their inbox, Zapier will respond to the email through OpenAI. And its response will be based on knowledge that it gleanes from previous sent emails from the same inbox or from the website's FAQ page, the return policy, shipping policy, etc. If you think about customer service inboxes, we're just answering the same questions over and over. So your cost is going to be like cents or low dollars per month and you could charge 100 bucks a month per Shopify store. You've got 95 plus percent margins. They're going to save hours per week or per month. It's a great win-win. Every Shopify store owner hates customer

service. The tech is already built. You're just putting some tools together. Something just happened with Beehive that I think you might have missed. You can now connect your Beehive account directly to Claude, Chach, Upt, Gemini, or whatever AI tool that you use through something called, MCP. So last week, I connected my newsletter to Claude. And now I can sit in Claude and say, look at my open rates from the last 30 days and tell me which subject lines perform best. Or draft next week's newsletter based on the topics my audience clicked on the most this month. And Claude does it. It can see my real Beehive data, subscribers, engagement numbers, automations, revenue, everything. And I've already cut my weekly production time because I stopped

guessing what to write about and started letting the data decide for me. So instead of using AI to just write generic content, use AI to plug into your actual newsletter to make decisions based on what's already working. Beehive built this MCP so your favorite AI tool can be your newsletter strategist and your data scientists all in one. So move your email list over today and try Beehive 30% off for 30 days with code Chris 30 because this might be the simplest, highest leverage business you can build right now. Next idea could be a micro influencer marketplace. If you think a big agency's, big companies, they want. want to work with mega influencers like Mr. Beast, et cetera, but smaller brands know that micro influencers usually have a more loyal audience. They convert better, people with 5,000 to 100,000

followers. There's not really a good way to find them. Apify has dozens or hundreds of actors that do exactly that. They can scrape people from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, et cetera, that have a set amount of followers. You just build a wrapper on top of that. You can do it for a specific niche only, micro fitness influencers, micro food influencers, mom influencers, etc. Or you could just do, you know, we scrape micro influencers that have less than 50,000 followers. You could go that direction. You could turn this into a newsletter.

You could automatically scrape everyone and just email it out to everyone that subscribes for 10 bucks a month or whatever. I tried this idea, fun fact, back in 2019, but I gave up because scrapers were terrible back then. Next idea, there's a website called Import Yeti where you can see where companies are importing all of their stuff from, like specifically what's supplier, oftentimes what they're paying for it. But their subscription is kind of expensive. And there's an Appify actor that will scrape all that import Yeti stuff for you. So you build a wrapper on top of that to act similarly to import Yeti,

but just to point it to a different audience. You go there and type in Lulu Lemon and see where all of those are coming from and in what containers they're in and how long it takes to get here. It's pretty cool. I didn't even plan it this way, but it seems like a lot of these ideas could be sold to Shopify store owners. And you can go to upwork.com and you can hire a virtual assistant that probably already has a spreadsheet of every Shopify store because a zillion people like me have asked virtual assistants to scrape Shopify stores built with dot com. You can also buy every single of the three million or four million Shopify stores out there. So you get one scrape, one list of Shopify stores, you could sell 10, 20 different things to them and just see which one

resonates the most. Speaking of Upwork, why not an Upwork scraper? Their search tool is fine, but it's not specific enough for power users. So imagine if someone could just use natural language and type in something like Find Me, Ukrainian mobile developers with five plus years experience and at least a 4.8 star rating and 50,000 in earnings. Boom. Upwork has all that data, export it to a spreadsheet and charge 100 bucks a month agencies, recruiter, startup founders, anyone who hires freelancers. This scraper already exists on Appify. You just need to build on top of it. I mean, what's stopping you guys from building one of these? Why not unbundle clay.com itself? Clay is a service where you upload a bunch of leads and it corrects wrong data or it gives you more

data about that lead, about that person, a LinkedIn URL, etc. Why not build a clay that does only one of those things really well, really specifically? Because I would bet you, the vast majority of Clay's users are only using it for one of like 400 different things that they offer, like validating emails or attaching a first name to just an email address so they can send more personalized emails. So your service could literally be, we give you LinkedIn URLs or you give us emails. We give you LinkedIn URLs for that email address. And if you can spend some time learning paid ads, then you can test all of these ideas. Why not build five of these ideas?

Test all five with $100 bucks in ad spent each and then just run with the one that has the lowest cost per acquisition. Here's an idea I really love the niche Zillow. The more niche Zillow. This is like so obvious it hurts. So Zillow exists for residential, right? But there's no Zillow equivalent for any other category of real estate. If you want to go entirely commercial, you've got LoopNet, which is super expensive, only shows you a small percentage of search results and it's kind of garbage to use.

Then you have CREXI, which is better to use, but also expensive. And their salespeople will spam you to no end. So, yes, we have a couple tools for. Commercial, which is very broad, too broad, and then many tools for residential, Redfin, Realtor Zillow, et cetera. But why not narrow that down? RV parks, mobile parks, self-storage, Zillow for self-storage, right? As user-friendly as Zillow, that's very important here.

Don't undersell how important design is. Companies like Apple, Tesla, Airbnb would not be anywhere close to where they are today without their beautiful design. So yes, there are some websites where I can go shop for RV parks and for mobile in parks, but their design is garbage and they rely on individuals to find them and to list their RV parks. They're not pulling RV parks from CREXE and LoopNet through the MLS system. So they're marketplaces. Marketplaces are hard to launch and most don't succeed. So just scrape and tap in to other categories on Zillow and CREXE on Mundle them and pull them over to another website. Zillow for

laundromats. Zill for car washers, ATM routes, the biz by sell for vending routes, the biz by sell for billboards or convenience stores. Most of these have no good marketplaces. What's stopping you from scraping biz by sell for every single yogurt shop and putting them on a zillow for yogurt shops? Three years ago, it would have been probably pretty stupid to waste your time on something so random that may or may not work. But today, when you just got to prompt it a few times, why not throw a flyer at it? Or go to biz by sale, type in one state. You can do this, like Texas, scrape everything, okay, everything. And then a week later to the minute, scrape everything in Texas on biz by sale again and then subtract what's sold okay then do it again

in a week and do it again in a week and within a month you're going to know very quickly which categories are the hottest which categories of businesses are selling the fastest because biz by sale doesn't offer this to you you've got to kind of back end into it if you will once you learn that then unbundle biz by sell with only the hottest categories because if say restaurants don't sell well at all on biz by sell, then you're probably going to waste your time building an unbundled version of biz by cell for restaurants. Zillowl for duplexes, Zillow for fourplexes, etc. Okay, bonus round. These are a, you know, Appify actor, unbundled slash white label slash rapper ideas. It's all about the same thing. Shopify store scraper. I bet you a ton of the people that go to builtwit.com are just going there

to scrape Shopify stores. And you can see in their drop down, it's one of the top listed things. So they're making it easy for people to find. Build your builtwith.com, but for only Shopify stores. That needs to be a thing. Instead of 450 bucks a month, yes, that's what billed with charges. You're $4.50 a month. What does it matter? You don't have any cost or 45 bucks a month or whatever or $5 per scrape and credits and they can use it whenever. How about a TikTok hashtag trend scraper? Pick a niche, beauty, fitness, finance, whatever. Run a TikTok hashtag scraper every Monday morning. Compile the top trending sounds, hashtags, creators, email it out as a weekly trend report, charge marketing agencies, 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, but whatever. You do a little

work on Monday morning and that's it. Yelp scraper. Every roofer in Phoenix, every chiropractor in Atlanta, phone, email, owner name, review count, average rating, whatever. Sell it to local service businesses that want to require competitors or suppliers who want to pitch them, yada, yada, yada, yada. How about an app store scraper or Google Play score scraper? Trust pilot scraper, an Indeed job scraper. Unbundle Indeed. Make an Indeed just for nurse practitioners. Crunch base scraper for funding alerts or a Reddit niche sentiment scraper. Brands want to know what people are saying. about them on Reddit or on Twitter. Twitter just dropped their API costs, by the way.

It used to be kind of unreachable for most people. Now it's a lot cheaper. If you've been listening to this pod for a while, I'm sure that you've heard me say this, but I'm gonna say it again. The efficacy of a growth hack is inversely correlated with its lifespan, okay? Translation is when something works,

the window is short before everyone copies it. And the better it works, the shorter the time frame is. The shorter the window is. Cold email back in 2020, 2010 was insane. You could send 100 emails and get 15 replies. Today, you've got to send 10,000 emails to get 15 replies on a lot of different offers. Facebook ads in 2014. Google ads in 2005.

You could buy a customer for two bucks. Today it's 40. TikTok in 2020, like you got to get it while the getting's good. And that's usually today or yesterday. I feel like we're in year two or three of like a seven to 10 year time span. And seven, five years from now, there's going to be something else really hot. Another growth hack, but it's not going to be this. Think of it this way.

For the entire decade of the 2010s, every venture capital. on the planet was saying the same thing. They would say it on every podcast and write blogs about it, whatever. They would tell all the founders pitching them the same line. Don't just build a company that could just be a feature of another company. Like that's what Snapchat did, right? Disappearing text messages and photos. Other companies copied them. Guess what? Snapchat's still around. They're publicly traded. They're doing great. And they were founded while everyone was saying this. But today, it's all been flipped on its head. We used to think that data was everything, that these AI models were everything. and then Deepseek and other Chinese and non-Chinese companies came out and open-sourced AI models

that were about 80% as good as OpenAI or Anthropics. Now Open AI is scrambling. They're trying to build hardware because if the model's not the moat, then maybe hardware will be the moat. It's all been flipped on its head. The phrase nothing is too niche has never been more true. A feature can be a company. So that advice is officially dead in 2026. Build lifestyle businesses.

They are awesome. All these companies, clay, anthropic, open AI, apify, They're trying to be the everything platform for everyone, which means that every single feature inside of their platform is just sitting there waiting to be unbundled, begging for someone to come along, pull it out, give it some love, wrap it in a clean user interface and sell it to a very specific tribe of people. These can be $10,000 businesses, million dollar businesses, and even billion dollar businesses. If it could happen in the 2010s, it can happen today. Don't think you're competing with Open AI if you build Open AI for podiatrists, which would just be a chat GPT rapper for a podiatrist. You're not competing with them. It's different.

This is like the asymmetric bet of the century. The cost to start is almost zero. The tools are either free or cheap. Venture capitalists are funding these tech companies so they can offer us free trials, use them. And these big platforms can't and don't even want to move fast enough to fight you because who cares about us, right? We care about us.

We're doing this. Everyone's winning. So here's my CTA. Here's my call to action for you. I want you to do three things this week. Number one, go find something to unbundle. I don't care where you get it from. Appify Clay, Indeed, whatever. Don't overthink it. Just pick one. Then go to Replit or Claude or

Codex, whatever, and build a simple website with a search bar that has an API call to an Appify actor or to a scraper or to anything. You don't even need to launch it. Just build it. See how far you can get in an afternoon or a weekend. And I promise you're going to get further than you think. And if if nothing ever comes from it, at least you've learned some awesome skills. And if you or someone you know has a really cool story about building something, either software, hardware, service business, product business, I don't care that made decent money in a short amount of time, hit us up. Email Molly at cofounders.com or Kevin at cofounders.com. Tell them your story and we'll have you on the pod. And if you want to sell or implement AI into small to medium sized businesses,

check out PlaymakersAI.com. That is my company. We've got over 200 people in there doing exactly that, having a lot of success. Nico didn't have rich parents, didn't have an MBA, didn't have any experience. And he just did it. His 3,500 MRR today, eventually will be 5,000 and 10,000. maybe 20 or 30,000. Maybe he pivots and does something else. I don't know. But it's growing double digits a month and yours can too. We'd love it if you hit subscribe, share it with a friend, and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.