The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Forget Dropshipping. This Side Hustle Is 10x Easier (and Smarter) ⏐ Ep. #210

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

Check out my newsletter at ⁠https://TKOPOD.com⁠ and join my new community at ⁠https://TKOwners.com⁠━I sat down with  Cody Schneider  and we broke down what might be the easiest business you can start online right now. Cody walked me through how to launch a fully automated print on demand business using AI-generated graphics, Etsy, and tools like Everbee, Printify, and N8N. We talked about how to find winning products with data, spin up thousands of listings without touching a design tool, and scale the whole thing using automations and zero inventory.Then we riffed on a killer idea: building a merch automation agency for creators. Cody showed me exactly how he’d pitch creators, find their catchphrases, design the merch, cold email them, and even handle all fulfillment using platforms like Fourthwall. If you want a smart, low-cost way to make money with AI and automation, this is it.You can follow Cody on YouTube and X to see more of what he’s building.Enjoy!---Ask me a question on or off the show here: https://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: https://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: https://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: https://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: https://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: https://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: https://tkopod.co/p-os---

It's a great first business. It's not complicated. Basically zero startup costs and like has a ton of opportunity to grow. You can make 100 brand a year doing this strategy. The goal here is just like, I'm just trying to make passive income, right? That whole thing could be automated. Chat GPT can go in one shot these now. I love print on demand, especially when compared to drop shipping.

All this stuff's coming from China. It takes a month to get to work. It's probably crappy quality, weird packaging. And then the seller is hardly making any money because you really have to use paid ads to make drop shipping work. Worst case, you learn and you make money on the next thing because of what you learned. Best case, you make a lot of money. So what do you have to lose? Okay, I had my friend Cody Schneider on the podcast. And if you like idea guys, AI ideas, tactical ideas, how to start a

business, how to grow a business, unique business ideas that you can start with very little money. He's your guy. I had some of the most fun I've ever had while recording an episode. I'm not exaggerating. I already know Cody's going to be a returned guest. Today, we talked all about print on demand business opportunities. He's had Etsy stores for a decade. He's done all kinds of print on demand. with these AI image generation capabilities, it is easier to start a print on demand business than ever before. We got super tactical nitty-gritty. I break down terms for you in a more simple way. Here's a quick glossary. He mentions Roas. That's return on ad spend, how much money you make from the money you spend on ads. He mentions JSON, which is just a way of displaying data.

And he mentions N8N, which is a piece of software that offers automation capabilities. You're going to love this one. Enjoy. Everything that I'm going to share today is like you could learn this in a weekend if you put like eight hours into it. Yeah. So first one I want to start with because I think it'll be just different for your audience is do you know a lot about like print on demand? Do you know that category? Cool. Yeah. So like Etsy is a huge place for print on demand. But traditionally like if you wanted to go and create like a ton of graphics for print on demand, it used to take, you know, hours. You'd have to have like some type of tedious. Yeah, like design, you know, skill set. So there's this opportunity right now. But I think this is like a weekend business you

could start, that's like basically zero startup costs and like has a ton of opportunity to grow. So it's basically, it's doing Etsy print on demand, but using AI generated graphics. I'm going to break down all this. For how you do this is basically you need to go and do product research on Etsy for which are the best selling products. So there's tons of tools that do this. My friend owns one of these companies. It's called Everby.

And let me bring it up and I can show you what this looks like. So basically, it's Matt, do you know Jungle Skagit? Scott, Chris? Oh yeah. For Amazon, right? Totally. So it's basically Jungle Scout, but for Etsy. And what it does is it helps you identify, like, best-selling products on Etsy. So it's a Chrome extension. They also have like a web app version of it. But what it does is it'll show you the products. So you go to Etsy and you search a keyword like, we'll say like horse shirt, you know, or we'll say horse sweatshirt, something very generic. And then from here, you're going to find these like these products that are selling well and how you identify those is using a software

like Everbee that basically will show you like the estimated search volume it'll show you the estimated sales the estimated revenue so what this allows for you to do then is that say we identify like hey this this one is working you know selling super well right I can then take that image so I'll take a screenshot of this and I go to the chat GPT API and I say you know generate a version of this basically. So now to break this down what this ends up looking like, you have the keywords that they're like basically optimizing for. So all of these, you put those in the title. The description ends up being exactly the same, do the exact same pricing structure. And then now you can, because of these AI tools, you can go and generate these images for this

print on demand catalog that like before like you would have to have, you know, some type of skill set to even be able to like, you know, like design this or like some type of, like, like drawing capability, right? It's, you know, chat GPT can go in one shot these now. And what we're doing this or the experiment we've been running with is like just vector style images. So stuff where it's like very like black and white. An example of this would be, you know, something like this as an example.

Less variables for chat GPT to screw it up. Exactly. Yeah. But like, you know, okay. It's running in this direction. It's, it's going to like perfectly make a version of this. But it's an entirely new version.

Now you said chat, GBT API. Are you just using the app? or using like something that you buy. You could use just the chat GBT app. We're doing this at scale, right? So we're like, okay, let's go generate a thousand. Like we're going to find a thousand winning products. And we're going to go generate a thousand different, you know, images.

But if you wanted to start this out manually, you could go to chat GPT. And here, let's just like do it actually. So I'm curious to see. Are you using Everby for like the scale and automation part or just for the research? Just for the research. Once we've identified the URL, so like an Everby, you can have it where it basically you can download the. search as a CSV. So the Chrome extension runs. It shows you the best winning products from this page.

You've downloaded as a CSV. We'll take those top 10 winners and then we'll go and generate, you know, graphics based off of those top 10 winners. Something to think about for people, if they're going to do this is I would stay away from words and like phrases as much as you can. Okay. Yep. You can kind of turn into a just a nightmare to like from a trademark standpoint. You can look up these trademarks. So like, for example, dogs and horses make me happy. So like, some random person probably owns that trademark. And occasionally, they'll just go to all of the main like sellers. Like, of course, this make me happy.

Trademark, they'll go to all the main sellers and ask for like the sellers to take them down. And you'll get flagged as like a, like basically, you know, abusing the trademark, which gets a like a negative like mark against your Etsy shop. And so if you get like three of them, you typically like, yeah, you get shuts down. They flag your social and you have to like, you know, basically restart the whole process. So I would just stick with generics. Those just safer. And again, because this is a scale of a volume game, like, how can I get 10,000 listings on Etsy live? That's, you know, that's what you're trying to do here. So, but yeah, but you can do this with the chat GBT,

like just the web app or you can use the chat. GBT image API. You provide the image type. And all this can be done with no code. Like it can be done with like make.com, super easy, which is an automation. You can do this with N8N, which is an automation. And N8N is a little bit more complicated. unless you know this trick. So with N8N, there is just JIS. So with N8N, it's just JSON is how they structure the flows. So like with Make, you basically have to go through and like set up each of the nodes.

But I can just go and tell AI to make an N8N JSON file for the flow that I'm trying to create. So we're going to just do this right now. I'm using Perplexity Proxity Pro. Perplexity Pro is Claude 4. And so I'm going to say make N8N JSON file or JSON flow for the following workflow. And we'll do take image from Google Drive, send to chat GPT API, save image to new Google Drive folder. And what it's going to do right here is it's basically going to go and write the N8N JSON code. And then I can just take that into my N8N instance. I can copy and paste that in. And it's

basically going to like work right out of the box is like what we're seeing. It's like Claude is so good at writing this type of JSON code. It's ridiculous. So you can see this being rendered here. Let me see if I can break that down for everyone. So stuff like Zapier or was the automation platform pre-AI. Of course they do AI stuff. But that's like they invented automations. Right. N8N is the AI first, more complex, but more feature-rich version of Zapier or Make.com. You're saying NN is kind of tricky, difficult to work with if you're a non-coder because of these JSON files, but if you pay 20 bucks a month for Perplexity Pro, which uses Claude 4 on the backend, and you prompt it as you just showed, which will put in the show notes, you can get

around that confusion and anyone, even the layman like myself, can use N8N successfully, correct? 100%. Absolutely. That's exactly it. Why N&N is so powerful is because it has a ton of community nodes. And it can also just do webhooks really easily. So even if there isn't a node, like, for example, there's no Zapier or make.com integration. With a web hook, you can call most APIs.

And an API is just basically like an end point that you can say, hey, I want this back from you. Right. And then you like, just a way for software to talk to each other. Exactly. Exactly. And then it sends that information back. And so that is how you can basically, like, Like, you know, this is a really small version of this.

Where this extends to, and you can even get further is like, okay, cool, I identified all of the winning products on Etsy. I extracted the photos from all those winning products, you know, scraping, using something like scraping or, you know, any of these like scraping softwares. Honestly, Appify would probably work for this as well. And then once I have all those images in a Google Drive folder, I can be like, okay, like do this flow. But I want to extend this flow out even further. I want you to also upload this to Printify automatically for me, add it to, you know, shirts, to sweatshirts, to mugs, you know, all the different variations that you could sell of the same graphic. And then within Printify, you can just bulk select one click publish and it goes live on Etsy. And so that's like the whole like, you know, process that you can do with this.

So if your automation, sorry, go ahead. Oh, I was just going to say, yeah, questions. Happy to answer anything. So with what you're doing, you're, you're. using N8N and other similar tools to scale this, this Etsy strategy. What is your goal? Like, are you just reselling stuff on Etsy? Are you cross-selling, you know, bestsellers on Etsy on other platforms on your own Shopify site? What is your whole goal with this? Yeah. I mean, you could take these same graphics and go to like Amazon merch, which is like another category.

Etsy we found is this like, I've also sold on Etsy for like the last, whatever it is, like 10 plus years. So we just know the platform way better. But the thing. with this is basically, it's just a volume game. Like you're trying to get 10,000 listings up. Yeah. And the margin on these shirts. 50 of them will be good and the rest of them won't make any money. Exactly. You know, it's the classic rule, like 80-20 rule, right? Where it's like 20% of your products are going to make 80% of your revenue. It's going to be that same strategy. You don't know what's going to win.

But the arbitrage here is that to create these graphics, like I used to like, we used to do this. We would hire like offshore talent. They were like, you know, doing like illustrator files. They could only do like one a day. So I got 10 of them working in the Philippines doing one a day. I mean, it was just like a massive operation. Now you can do that same thing. but like without any humans, maybe one person running this, just a one, you know, just you

basically running this. Yeah. And get to a scale where the listings are out of volume size that you're just creating more surface area. And really the to break down like why this works. So Etsy is a platform that already has a bunch of organic search traffic for a lot of these keywords. Like if I go and search, you know, a horse sweatshirt on Google, like Etsy's going to come up in

those top listings. You're going to see them here. That's, yeah, that's Amazon. So what you're doing is basically what they would call Parasite SEO. You're using the domain authority and the current rankings of these websites to get like sales. So for example, Etsy's here. Somebody clicks into horse sweatshirt. If you rank in that top position for horse sweatshirt, you're going to just get sales.

As long as the graphic is something that people want to buy. And you know what people want to buy because we already did the research with Everby to identify those things. right and so what you're basically like this is solving is the cold start problem of how do I get you know like how do I get trust enough for people to buy this from me yeah when I lean on a platform chicken in the egg I can solve that's that cold start problem so yeah and for those listening parasite SEO is just like a parasite it's just SEO where you don't have any authority you have no reputation online Google doesn't know you exist you just latch on to someone like Etsy and say hey I'm relevant now exactly exactly and you're you're really just using like you could

We could go and look at this, actually. Like for all of the, let me bring this up. So like, do you see this forward slash market URL? Mm-hmm. So that means they have this like sub-directory on the entire website. Like that's where all of their product collection pages was what they would be called. So Etsy has created 19 million of those. And we have the opportunity basically to go and build products for all 19 million that we can then show up in front of.

Right. So they have all this traffic that they're trying. And like, how do they make money? They make money when somebody comes in and makes a purchase. So if your products, if somebody comes in and they make a purchase, you rank higher within their internal search algorithm. And then they're doing all the work for you, though, to show up for, you know, 18K gold chain for grounding shoes for briar rose ring. I mean, also if you're trying to find product categories that are like new and like quickly like becoming like like like searched at these. actually a great place to do research for this. So do that search. What I did is site,

colon, Etsy.com forward slash market. You select tools on Google. And then I can say, show me in the past 24 hours. And so it's going to give me all of the pages. Yeah. That's it. That's what we're here for, Cody. That's why people watch this. Totally. And so here's some of them that come up. It's gag portraits, tweedy bird phone case, gold filled shoot or gold filled Canada. Some of them don't make any sense, right? But at least this gives you an understanding of the, like, Etsy is seeing that people are starting to search these. And so it is building out these pages programmatically based off this data.

That is their real business is basically huge marketplace, looking at the data, building pages to, like, get this free traffic. And then, you know, categorizing all the products appropriately to increase the sales as much as possible, right? And so this is like a really quick and easy way to like, find a product category that's growing quickly. Offensive, like offensive get well soon cards. This is a great one.

Like that you could just like literally only build a shop. Yeah. Around that. Use AI to generate the graphics and the images. Yeah, yeah. Canva, right? And use a like a print on demand company. Some like gelato, I think they have these.

That will actually like print these cards and send them to people. So you know what's crazy to me is so many of these trends start with short form video. Like all of a sudden someone posts on TikTok. about Dubai chocolate, which no one's ever heard of. And this video goes mega viral, gets 100 million views. And then it just starts disseminating it out on TikTok. And you have hundreds and thousands of people posting out Dubai chocolate. And then you go to this tool, you go to Google with this trick, and you search Dubai

chocolate. And then days, weeks, months later, you start to see it down to kind of filter down the funnel. Now people are making purchasing decisions based on this, what started as one viral video. And then it becomes more and more saturated. And you can look at the Google Trends chart and it goes up. and then it goes down. But what you're showing us enables people to get ahead of that, right? Because as soon as people go from TikTok to I want to buy, it's going to show up right here

and you won't be too late. 100%. 100%. And the whole point of this too is you're not guessing, right? You're not guessing about any of this. All this is data driven. The only AI part of this is the human labor. There's nothing else that's happening.

The goal here is just like, I'm just trying to make passive income, right? Like this is a passive income type of business. that's just an online business version. And I'm not saying you're not going to get like crazy wealthy doing this, except I know you can do that, right? But it's like in reality, the average person like you can do it. It's just it's a lot of work. But like realistically, like you could act you can make another hundred grand a year

doing this strategy. It's not unreasonable. This was like one of the first businesses that I ran was basically a version of this. So anyway, yeah. So let me summarize the opportunity. So you're going to Etsy. You're using that tool ever. you're finding winning products.

Then you're using an N8N template, which you make in Perplexity Pro. That template will go out and connect your research with your chat GPT API, find winning products. And then once you find them, you're using the same keywords, similar pictures to post them on the same platform.

And that's something that a lot of people are like, all right, this is retail arbitrage. I buy on Amazon, sell on Walmarts. Buy on eBay, sell on Facebook. Like, no.

Like, you just find the winners and sell them on the same platform where the demand's already proven. And then the magic of print on demand is you're not buying any t-shirts. You're not taking possession of any of this stuff. Like you're just sending all of these orders through an API, through an automation to a big warehouse in, you know, Kansas City, Missouri.

And they're shipping out the hats and sweatshirts all over the world, right? While you make, you know, cents to dollars on every little transaction. 100%. I mean, the costs for this are so cheap too, right? I think an Etsy listing now, I don't know if it's 20 or 30 cents. I can't remember. But again, you pay that premium because they have all the traffic. So you don't have to solve the traffic problem.

You just have to make the product that's most likely to sell. Yeah. So their cost is basically like the subscription for something like an ever be. The cost to generate the image. And then basically the listing fee on Etsy. Last thing, too, on the image generation side, an actual technical thing, you'll go and remove the background from those images that they provide back. One of them is like BG background.

A lot of, yeah. Yeah, hundreds of those. Basically, you'll get it into that, that, version where it's like a PNG where it has a clear background. That's what you're what you're actually doing in a printify. But just making sure, you know, trying to over. So you remove the background. You remove the background before you send it, send it to chat GBT through the API.

Remove the background before you send it to printify. So you would scrape it from Etsy, send it to chat GBT, get the image back, send it to a background remover, get the image back, send that to printify, send that to Etsy. Okay. At what point, if any, is your. manual involvement needed throughout this process. That whole thing could be automated. Like they would just be the research on the front end.

In reality, you could probably automate that in some capacity. There's just like not a great tool out there for it, but you can. But the thing is like a lot of this stuff is so fun. Like why automate the research? It's so fun. Totally. Totally. And then the posting, the final process of like posting them live within Printify or within,

you know, printful. Those are the two pieces. That whole middle section, which is all the labor, like that can basically be removed. right so yeah okay first of all like this isn't like very tangible but for those listening this stuff that he's describing like setting up an automation your first automation for the first time and just seeing it work is just the best feeling in the world it's just so fun like it's you know skydiving level fun so this isn't like you know yeah you can make money scrubbing toilets i talk about that stuff that's not fun scrubbing toilets objectively is not fun this is fun and you know worst case you make no

money, but you learn and you make money on the next thing because of what you learned. Best case, you make a lot of money. So what do you have to lose? No, 100%. Have you ever found a situation since you've been on Etsy for so long where there is an advantage to take a winning product that's just winning organically, copy it and just put paid ads behind it because you know that your cost per acquisition will be low enough? Yeah, great question.

Google ads in particular or like shopping ads, absolutely, right? If you're seeing like this horse shirt is absolutely crushing it on Etsy. We know that like Etsy ranks for horse sweatshirt on page one. And like a majority of the traffic has to be coming from that. You throw up a Shopify store and, you know, run like Google shopping ads directly to that. And Google shopping ads just so like people understand what those are, are the ads. Let me screen share and I can show you what they look like in the actual like search results. But it's the ads that look like like, again, let's do a horse sweatshirt. It's these here where it's like these like, you know, the images, these are all Google Shopping ads.

So how you do these is you basically set up like a Shopify store. You then connect it to Google shopping. So it pulls in all of your skew data. And then within Google ads, you can say, hey, I want you to bid on this keyword or sweatshirt and show this specific product for that keyword. So you could double down on this. And then what this turns into is it's just like an arbitrage game and you're like, it's a Roaz game.

Right. So it's like I put a dollar in and maybe two. $2 comes out. So like maybe my margin isn't crazy good. Right. And what I mean by that is like for every dollar I spend in ads, I get like, you know, $2 back in revenue. And that so and say your margin on that second dollar is only, you know, 20%, which is like

probably what you'll end up seeing. So it's like, I'm only making like 20 cents off of every dollar I spend. But if I go and spend, you know, 100 grand and like that 20 cents starting to suddenly looks big. The arbitrage here as well. And also again, just more. sauce for everybody is that ad spend if you have an amex or a chase sapphire card they're the amics card i can't remember the name of it but they get amex gives you four x points on every dollar you

spend on paid ads and sapphire gives you three x points on every dollar you spend on paid ads and so what that translates into is like yeah maybe you're making the super small margin and like oh yeah we're getting 25 you know whatever like 20 grand a month off of the shirt or or yeah two grand a month top of the shirt. But you can use this as a way to like go and stack points. So it's like, oh, you want to take a, you know, a trip to southern France and want to fly business class, you know, all the way there. And then also stay in a hotel for free. You're basically spending money to make small fractions of money. And then the byproduct of that is like layering on these. So I have friends that do this. I've done this in the past as well. So I love print

on demand, especially when compared to drop shipping, you know, 10 years ago drop shipping was everything. But when you really break down the business model, it's pretty crappy. Like all this stuff is coming from China. Some woman in middle America buys this $30 thing. It takes a month to get to her. She likely chart, filed dispute against her credit card by then. By the time it gets there, it's probably crappy quality. It comes in this weird packaging.

The branding is not the same as the person she thought she bought it from. And then the seller is hardly making any money because you really have to use paid ads to make drop shipping work. And then, like, you might be selling these handheld blenders that were all rage on TikTok at the time. And then by the time it arrives, it's not cool anymore. No one wants it. But with print on demand, as long as we're wearing t-shirts, sweatshirts, hats, there's going to be a business there. And they're not coming from China. They're coming from any number of factories. And these big companies like Printify have a half dozen factories all over the country so you can still

get the shirt in a few days. If the design or the pattern goes out of style, you lose nothing. Totally. You have no inventory you're sitting on. You have no sunk costs. I think it's also just a better business, like the biology of the business is better, right? Like, I always is crazy to me all the, like everybody that goes into drop shipping because it's like, you can never sell a drop shipping company, right? Like, like, full stop, period. But I could sell it for an on demand company. Like, I could sell you all the IP I own, all the graphics I own and also the like cash flow that I own and like flip that like on a marketplace or sell it to something else. Well, and N-N templates have value now. Oh, 100%. Three months ago, they didn't exist. Today they're actually valuable. People

sell them. Totally. Totally. Yeah. It's a great first business. It's low, it's low cost. It's very approachable. It's very clear. Like, it's like it's not complicated. The math is easy. So anyway. You acquire a half a dozen skills that you can use with so many other things. Thousand percent, dude. A thousand percent. I say this all the time on my podcast. Like, generally speaking, this first business, whatever it is that you do, it's not going to work. Like, statistically speaking, everything we're talking about right now won't work. Because that's numbers. Law of large numbers. Most businesses, work. But the idea is to get you started, get your foot in the door, get in the game so you can

acquire these skills and pivot towards something that does eventually work. 100%. It's not just hoodies and sweatshirts. Like there's so many things that you can create. Stickers, notebooks. Stickers, custom notebooks. Printables, right? Hoosies. Have you done anything with printables? Yeah, totally. Absolutely. Yeah, like, you know, cut kids coloring books. There's also like this, I to call it print on demand, but it's like digital assets. So like Excel templates and like procreate color palettes. Like there's there's thousands of these different like categories that you can go into. And the idea here is that it's like it's a non asset type business. But like I can go down the like anything that's digital and anything that you could sell on the print on demand side,

there's like a ton of opportunity there. But I think the thing to remember is like don't get pigeonholed into like, oh, it's got to be sweatshirts and t-shirts alone. Like, you can make really good margins on stickers. You can make really good margins on like even mugs, right? Or like whatever. There's so many of these companies now that are competing against each other. So they're always adding new skew types. Like, you know, baby jumpers.

And like a huge, a big piece of this too that like a lot of people make a lot of money is doing custom ones. Like print on demand custom. And what I mean by that is with laser engraving or. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Something like that. Or even like, you know, brides like, yeah. are going out, like they want to get custom jackets made that are embroidered. So it's like a debt, like you go and you find like an embroidery on demand company.

And you like custom embroider their names to denim jackets so that when they go to Nashville, like they all are matching, right, or whatever. Like there's that that's a huge category of this too is that custom component. And so I don't think you just have to do like, you know, that graphic thing that I was describing. There's all of these different layers to this that you can kind of unravel. Yeah. It's really just finding. And it's easier than ever to find these print-on-demand companies, right?

Like when I started out, there was like two companies. Now it's like, I go to perplexity and I'm like, list 100 print-on-demand companies and the unique things that they sell. And it's like, boom. Like, here's a list. Let's do a little ideation freestyle, no prep. I'm in the middle of launching a store like for myself called tkosore.com where you can buy shirts and stuff because it's a no-brainer. I'm using a company called fourth wall to do it. And it's basically print on demand for creators.

What opportunity do you see? If I were to say, gun to your head, Cody, I need you to come up with a business idea that merges print on demand with creators. Because most creators out there aren't selling merch, right? A lot of them are. A lot of times it's like the first thing they go to. Like, how do I monetize? Let's sell a T-shirt.

But even so, like just statistically, most creators aren't selling anything. Maybe they do brand and stuff for other companies or something. They're collecting emails. But how would you do that? what type of an automation would you set up to go out to all the creators, say on Instagram, they have over 100,000 followers, maybe pick a niche, not pick a niche, DM them and say, hey, I will make like a, I'm not answering the question for myself. I will make a fully, a fully functional store for you.

And all I charge is 5% of revenue, pay me nothing up front. And then you just use something like fourth wall on the back end. What do you? Yeah, I think it's brilliant. I'll walk you through how I would do it exactly, like play by play. So the first thing I would do is I would go and I would look for like phrases or like keyword phrases that they say often in their content. So like one that's one of mine. I was going to say that.

Dang it. Yeah. So what I can't. One of mine on my channel is I say a thousand percent, a thousand percent. Yeah. And I always like in the comments, people will just like, you know, basically like flame me about it. And like even my family. Yep.

It's just it's one of those things. So you go and identify and take the transcripts of all the things that they published. you identify those phrases that are recurring and you basically analyze that cool here's these ones that they're saying often that's what the merch turns into right like I'm just imagining a dad hat that says a thousand percent comma a thousand percent or something ridiculous right so then you take that and you now have these merch ideas I would go to the creator and I would be like I would pitch them literal like examples of the ideas like hey you're yeah you say this a lot you have to make it real for them exactly they're not going to be able to imagine what you have in mind show them

a dad had that has some you know something on it right that is like a part of their community is there something you say often chris oh yeah yeah i start every single short-form video with look at this freaking guy right here over a thousand times yeah i was just going to say like i have this now if you're listening and you want to start this with me i'm sorry it's too late you drop the ball okay but if someone would have slid into my dms and said chris i just bought tkos store dot com the domain it's all yours i set up a site for you look at this shirt the shirt says look at this freaking guy right here It's all yours. I just want 5% of revenue. I'll add new designs. I'll do everything. I'll manage it. I'll manage everything. Logistics. I don't know how simple it is on the back end. At least, you know, the average creator doesn't. He's just using another company to do this. I would have said, yes, I want a T-shirt store eventually. You just saved me all the hassle. I have three and a half million followers. Like that could have been a big customer for him, but I had to do it myself. Totally. Totally. And I think that is going to be the differentiator is coming to them with examples. It's not like pitching like this. esoteric like to your point like you bought the domain the Shopify store already exists.

Oh you know we shut that down too like all this could be done and like yeah right. It's a $10 domain. Shopify's free trial for 30 days like you don't need to spend hardly any money to do this. Totally. So you built this. You got this setup now. How do you actually reach out to them? DMs is one of them.

If they're YouTube creators, you can go and you can get the email addresses from their profiles. So. Appleify for that. Yep. Totally. So let me look. you up corner. Oh man,

you're a butchering that name. It's my, spelling is not my gift. You're not even subscribed to me. What are you doing? I know, dude. This is on my personal.

It's on my main. But anyways, I can do this. I hit this. I get their email. Awesome. Right there. Cool.

I reached out. Cold email is I built you a merch store all lowercase. That's the subject line. Yeah, I'm opening that email. 100% I'm opening that. Yeah. Yep.

And then explain what you did. link to the actual actual merch, give them a proposal, ask them for an interview. So how do you do this at scale? You can go and you can use something like Appify. They have a YouTube channel email scraper. There's an endpoint. I don't know which one it is. You'll have to look through these.

But basically you can go and just imagine I go and I scrape every one of these channels, every creator. And then I cold email reach out to them. And what you could probably do is be like, hey, if you want to see it like your store, just like email me back, yes. And I'll send you the URL. And then you make it. And then you build you back. And then you build.

Right. How do you actually do this cold email, right? At scale. Like say you're trying to email a thousand people a month. So to do that, you go find that email. And then you would go and you'd validate that email with something called million verifier, which is an email validation software. Basically checks whether it's like, you know, like a valid email or.

DNS score. Exactly, exactly. So or, you know, if it's a catch-all or do not send, right? And this, the reason you have to do this is if you send a bunch of cold email to like, like bad emails, it'll basically just like ruin the IP of that email address that you're sending from. And so it would just ruin the reputation from a deliverability standpoint. So once I validated that email, I then go into something like instantly AI and I set up a cold

email campaign. And I just literally that I'm sending the exact same thing to all the creators. and I'm just saying like I built you a merch store right like that is the subject line yeah and be like you know if they like answer yes like just you know respond yes and I'll send you the link to the to the store yep and then like they respond yes you quickly build you got a fish on the line yep you quickly build the store and then immediately that turns into a lead and then you basically have a business right out of this that side it's a great idea actually this is like a really really really good idea yeah okay Cody's proud of me Cody's

proud of me. I'm a nobody, man. I just see a lot of stuff, right? Just like you. So it's like, when you see good stuff, you're like, that is, that is, that is, that's good content. And what's going to happen is like, this is what I do. Like, let's say someone with a million followers response says yes. And then I said it to him. And then they like it is they sign me up. I send him a contract. He signs up. And now I'm crunching my numbers. I'm just like, I just seen one percent, one of 15 dollars profit per shirt. I get five percent of that yet. I'm going to make $100,000 a month and then you launch and you make like $2,000 a month. And then you're like, oh, and then you're like, I'm making $2,000 a month like from a cold

email, just for my time. I just typed in the right words on my keyboard and I created $2,000 a month. I just need to do that 10 more times. And I've got a quarter million a year. Like, that's what happens. Like either in my experience, either you don't get anywhere close to your projections, but you still have an awesome business and you learn a ton. Or you 10x your projections and you're like, holy crap, so many more people want this birch than I

ever imagined. I thought I'd make a hundred grand. I'm making 500 grand, you know. One thing to add is like I would focus on creators that are long form too. I think that short form creators don't have as much like per social relationship. And so like I would go to, you know, all of these creators that have long form content where it's like if somebody's sitting down and spending an hour listening to Utah, right, like, and they're doing that weekly. Like you're basically brainwashing them over a 90 day. period. Like if they show up for 98 or they go and binge your whole back catalog.

All right. You're in luck because Cody is coming back on in a week. So be sure to subscribe, share with a friend. And we're going to chat all things AI business ideas.