The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - He Makes $4K/Day With This Weird Middleman Business - Ep. #295

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

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So this month, we're doing $120,000 revenue. Yeah, it's crazy. Our companies only existed for six months. I lived in a closet for the whole duration of that. In Norway, we're passively invoicing like $12,000 a month right now. Wow. I have my mom as customer service there. It's on autopilot.

Like, why cut off the revenue, right? Mom needs a job. Next week, we're doing a thousand cakes for one single company. Wow. Tell me your thoughts on the dead internet theory. What that has to do with this? The dead internet theory is that 99.99% of the content we consume on internet, emails, phone calls, videos such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI. So in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails.

We're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs or cold call anyone because there's going to be too much noise. So the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in, is physical gifting. Getting attention is absolutely everything. A, it buys your loyalty, B, it's a cheap way to stay top of mine, which is harder than ever today. I mean, sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending an email would probably make you seem annoying. Yeah. One thing your viewers might find interesting is like how I have my agents set up.

Yes. Yes. Very curious about that. I'm not involved in it. Every two hours, it checks my email. It goes and sources 20 new bakeries. It responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries until we have a deal. This sort of outreach would have been impossible just a year ago.

And I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries. So if someone's watching this right now and they're thinking like, okay, this works. It makes perfect sense. But I don't have anything to sell. What should I sell? So I come across this guy that started a business six weeks ago and he did $120,000 his second month. 40,000 of that was profit. What's he doing cold caking?

He's doing cold caking. And if you've never heard of that, it's because it's brand new. In a world where cold calls, texts, and emails are less effective than ever. this is the strategy you need to make a bunch of money selling whatever it is you sell. This story is freaking amazing. This guy's found viral a bunch of times, so I had to ask them all these questions for myself. Please enjoy. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now.

It would really mean a lot. Well, William, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do? Well, I'm William and I help you get customers by sending cake. We started like six months ago saying we're going to automate birthday deliveries with cake. did that in Norway sort of blew up and we decided let's think big and go to the States. So we moved to SF and said, let's do it in San Francisco as well. So you moved from Norway to San Francisco specifically to expand your cake shipping business. Yes.

I mean, I feel like if you could make a business work in Oslo, Norway, you could make a work anywhere. Exactly. But actually, the fun thing is we came to San Francisco and then we tried to do the same thing, the birthday thing. and nobody in San Francisco cared. Because I think the American culture is nobody cares about their employees. Oh, shoot. Okay.

Yeah. So we pivoted and yeah. Well, first of all, like Norway is tiny. It's freezing. It's, you know, middle of nowhere, northern Europe. And it's probably not very business friendly, I imagine, right? Well, it's definitely business friendly, but it's a smaller market, right? I mean, the whole population in all of Norway is five million people, right?

Oh, geez. That's like a little bigger than Utah. Exactly. Okay. So tell me what your business started as and what first gave you the idea for this business. And I know your model changed when you moved to SF. So explain exactly what the business model started as. The idea actually came from, I've worked in sales since I was 12 years old.

So I've always been chasing that. And in Norway there was almost like a hackathon, but for sales. So it was called a Norwegian championship of sales. and there's like a hundred sales rep that show up. I'm like stressed and nervous. I have no idea what I'm selling. And then I get a paper in front of me that says you're going to automate birthday deliveries with cake.

This was just randomly assigned to you at a competition. Yep. It's ridiculous. But that day I booked like 17 meetings in four hours. Like companies like KPMG. So I was like, okay, this is big. People want this. And from there, I started building a birthday solution.

Yeah. So, first of all, how did you book those 17 meetings? Just outbound cold calling to a list that they provided you? Yep. And what was your pitch to them? I don't remember exactly what I pitched back then, but I think it was something like, we started this new company, we're doing something crazy, we got investors on board, and we would like to give you a free cake if you'd like to take a meeting with us.

And then, like, I told them the idea, which was, we're going to automate your birthday deliveries. And everyone laughed at that because you get so many cold cakes, but when is someone, or you get so many cold calls, but when someone called you and asked if you want a cake, right? Yeah. So it was like a very smooth intro into the call and, yeah, just worked. Okay, so there's like a couple different gifts going on here. Like you want to give them a cake to get their attention, right?

But the quote unquote hypothetical startup that you just raise money for is something that automates birthday deliveries that like a large company would buy from you so they could better serve their employees. Is that right? Right. So let's say you have 40 employees and all of these employees you want to make sure they feel seen. So you do something for their birthday. Maybe you do something every time someone turns 30, 40, 50, not every single birthday.

Whatever. You have to recognize these people. And so at least in Norway, it's very normal to do that with cake. And what's the worst that can happen? Right. You remember someone but forget someone else. So we just figured, okay, let's just solve that pain and make that never be an issue again. And was the idea to integrate with like gusto and ADP?

paychecks and use that data to automate everything. Yep. I think that's also where we met the problem with it because when we were cold calling people, we were very aggressive with like, you have to sign up for this. And then we integrated with like 40 different HR systems. And we said, okay, let's scale this when we get to the US. So we did that and we AB tested like 40 different ads and none of them converted. So I think the good thing is this is a genuine cash cow business opportunity because

their attention is really good. Like if someone signs up for this, they're going to stay there. But the problem was when we tried to really scale this and make this a big company, we met the issue of this not being a big enough problem for someone to actually sign in with their HR system, make sure everything is okay without a human person pushing them. So that's, that's why we pivoted. But like, we grew that to $150,000 AR before we pivoted. Oh my gosh. Okay. I'm still confused about the competition aspect of this. At this sales competition, did they give all of the salespeople the same hypothetical startup the same offer yep okay so you weren't supposed to actually turn this into a business is that right that's right how many people were at this competition

like 50 yeah i mean there was like a thousand people watching but like 50 sales reps or more that competed so they just put us in rounds it was like i think they divided the day into five bulks of like one hours. So you cold called for one hour. Whoever had the least meetings after one hour, the 50% at least got knocked out. And then they did that five times until it was a final. And then the winner got like $10,000, I think. And how close did you get to winning?

Third place. I was one meeting away from first place. Oh, no. But still, I mean, I think I got $500 and I got the idea that made this happen. So were you on a team or was it just you cold calling for a first? five hours straight. Just me. Okay. Now, so of the 50 people, you were the only one that said, hey, like, I know this is just hypothetical here, but I'm actually going to start this business, because I had a lot of success here. And you were comparing it to previous cold calls that you made.

And you're like, geez, 17 calls and 17 booked appointments and five hours for something that has high LTV lifetime value, low churn. Like, I need to actually do this. I just started doing the numbers in my head. I was like, okay, so wait. So if a company would 40 employees sign up. That's $80 per cake and then 50% margins. Maybe I'm able to make that happen. Wait, that's like $5,000 a year. And then if I get sales reps to do this and I pay them $2,000 per client, then wait. The next year I'm just going to make full profit on that. So I just started doing the numbers and like calculating in my head. And it just made sense. Oh, man. And here's the thing. Like I'm a little surprised.

didn't work in the States because I just filmed a video, it hasn't gone live yet, but with this woman in Dallas that does corporate gifting. And a lot of what she does is four birthdays, but mostly it's like for, you know, high ticket enterprise SaaS where she'll send like the company will go to someone's LinkedIn and see they graduated from Syracuse and send like a highly curated box of like Syracuse alumni gear to someone in the hopes that they'll get a call with the sales rep. And she facilitates the logistics of all these gift boxes and she does very well. So like obviously corporate gifting is a well established industry here. Why do you think you couldn't break into that from with a birthday angle? Well, that's sort of what we're breaking into now, but from a sales angle, right?

I just think companies usually have two really large budgets and it's sales and it's engineering. You always want to sell your product and get more customers and you always want to build your product better so you get more customers. And so that's where the two largest budgets are. And everything else is just noise that you have to do to make the business go around. So I think it just wasn't a big enough pain for people to say, oh, I really want to prioritize this. Now, it is to be said after going like semi-viral with the cake thing the last couple of weeks, we have gotten inbound from people who are like, oh, we want to do cakes. But compared to the people that's inbounding us and saying we want to do cakes or cold cakes as I call them. It's just not comparable. And the same thing happened in

Norway. This is how I know what we're doing now is the right thing is we were on all the biggest news in Norway, like all the time because it's such a unique idea. And we got zero in balance from that. Everyone thought it was cool. And when we called, everyone knew about us and it was easier to sell. But the pain wasn't big enough for people to reach out and say, oh, I've been waiting for this the last five years. I think that that goes for a lot of businesses is it. just isn't the biggest priority. Like if you're good at sales, you can scale this and you can make it something, you probably make like a million dollars a year off and that's fine.

But I wanted to build a really big company and I think the path we've taken now is even better. Yeah. I mean, so the budget thing is smart. And this is similar, but you're more likely to sell a product or service that's most closely tied to revenue, right? Yeah. And so you doing this for salespeople to book more calls is directly tied to revenue.

therefore it's an easier sale for you as opposed to like help your employees maybe be 2% happier one day of the year you know it's like me in Norway the cultural the culture you know benefited that but in the US it's like how am I going to make more money from a birthday cake bro you know exactly I'll let that be said I never tried cold calling in the US I just went straight to ads so I definitely think there's someone watching this that could take this and run with it I think yeah I think it's a great idea. Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly, M-O-L-L-L-Y at co-founders.com. That's one word co-founders.com. Molly at co-founders.com,

tell her your story and we'll give you $100 if we end up interviewing them. Now, tell me your thoughts on the dead internet theory. That's a great question. And what that has to do with this? So AI is just getting better and better. I think we can all agree it's not going to D, it's not going to stop evolutionizing itself. So in a couple of years, AI will be so good that it's literally impossible to tell a human from AI. And in this world, I can spin up a Claude agent that makes 10,000 UDC videos or 100,000 emails that all feel supernatural and super human made. And so the dead internet theory is that 99.99% of the content we consume on internet, emails, phone calls, videos such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI and humans aren't going to use the

internet the same way we are today. It's going to be so much noise, it's going to be impossible to cut through. And I think, like, the first step to counter that is humans are going to get agents that, like, answer your phone or check your email and say, this is what you have to prioritize today. And then the second step is like the Elon Musk Vision, you have neuralinks and you're communicating completely off the internet the way we are today. So in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails. We're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs or cold call anyone because there's going to be too much noise. So the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in, is physical gifting.

If we can become the company that has the most data on what kind of gifts work, we become the next Apollo. or the next like real big GTM engine. Okay. So I love everything about this. Talk to me about, well, first of all, dead internet theory. Like,

I do think you're mostly correct, but also it's going to be agents talking to agents. Yes. Like it'll be agents reading cold emails. And sometimes an agent monitoring inbox will get a cold email that's relevant to what the owner of that inbox actually needs. For sure. And that agent is going to have credit card info and it's going to go buy things.

While we're out like hiking and, fishing and actually like it's going to improve the quality of life in a lot of ways because we're going to be sick of the internet you know oh yeah i view this is a good thing yeah oh yeah the internet will be busier and more bustling than ever but it's just going to be computers talking to computers right so you're saying like this breaks through that fourth wall so to speak the physical barrier and um you can still use agents to send these cakes and to do all the outbound like you could you could use an agent to do outbound cold email to get a physical physical cake in front of someone and then you kind of marry the best of both worlds.

Right. Yeah. And this can also like the way we're doing it today is we have a sequence where we first send the email that says, hey, in two days I'm sending you a cake. Is this the right address? And then we send the cake and then we follow up either through email or phone. And like an AI agent would respond to there's a cake coming to this address. Is it the right address?

Yeah. But the thing about the agents is they're never going to know what the human doesn't tell them. And a lot of sales is about making someone want something that they know they want it. And if you can't cut through the agent because the agent doesn't know the human wants it, then you have to get into the face of the human either through network or through like just a physical gift. Okay. So let's talk about like pure A-B test. What have you done to test?

Like let's say you get 10 people on the phone and on 10 of them, you just give them your pitch to whatever it is you're selling. And on the other 10, you send him a cake to then give them the pitch. Like, how much better of a conversion rate do you get from a cake? Well, cold calling has like, what, two, three percent conversion rate? Maybe you can pull off some stats on so you can correct me. It could be all over the map, right? If you're selling T-shirts, maybe 30 percent, if you're selling 30,000 dollar a month software could be 0.3 percent, you know? Exactly. So, but there's like an average there. And from the cakes we've sent out so far, 35% have converted into meetings, which is really just crazy. Wow. Yeah. So you send out

100 cakes and 35 meetings are booked for like, is it mostly software stuff, like Silicon Valley stuff? Yeah, that's mostly what we're getting. But I'm also getting like accountants in Miami reaching out, real estate brokers, like really anyone and everyone is reaching out and doing this. There's the one part where there's software companies trying to sell to other software companies, but there's also like next week, this is crazy, we're doing a thousand cakes next week for one single company. And this is a dentist software company, Archie.com. They're just sending it to a thousand dental offices in San Francisco, Florida, Houston, just all over it. Have they done a test yet?

No, it's, well, the thing is they reached out and did such a big order volume because they did the same thing with pizzas last year. Okay. So that was their test, so to speak. Yeah. Do you know what the economics were on their pizza campaign? Like how much they paid and how much they converted? Yeah. I do, but I don't want to say because I don't know if I'm allowed to. It was good. It was good enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it again. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Or is it, man, a thousand? Yeah, yeah. Okay. So tens of thousands. Yeah. They pay in like 50, 60, 70 bucks per cake for these at that volume. Clearly, you're not in the cake making business.

Are you just like drop shipping these from some of the ships cakes? You could say that. I mean, we put software on top of it to make logistics better. What we do is we, I have an AI agent and I'm happy to show you in a bit as well. That's constantly sourcing bakeries all across the US and London, Australia. And then it negotiates with the bakeries and says, hey, we're going to be buying all these cakes from you. So we need a 30% discount.

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. We've been in Forbes. We've been so and so on. And then they're like, okay, we'll take a chance. They give us a discount. And then someone like Archie reaches out, they need cakes in 10 different cities. We make a, we have a system where we just plot in all the 1,000 recipients.

And then we let them track all the orders. All the different bakeries are taking pictures per delivery and so on. So this is like 1,800 flowers, but for outbound sales. Basically, because that's what 1-800 flowers does. I would say that's pretty accurate. Now, are most of the cakes only traveling like, you know, 30 miles or less because of the localization of it? Yep, that's fair to say. I mean, for Archie, for instance, and we've done this a couple times, we did it for Rippling as well.

They wanted a couple, like, really special cakes in like very niche areas where we didn't want to spend time finding a bakery. So we just sent a cake on a flight. So that's possible as well. Does it matter at all if the cake is any good? Is there any correlation to close rate or book call rate? I definitely think so. I care a lot about the quality of the cake. We only partner with like organic, French patisseries make quality cakes because at least

my opinion is while that represents the quality of your company. So nobody wants to do that. Yeah. And so we're very picky about the bakeries we end up working with. There's a lot of cheap bakeries. We end up just saying, well, this isn't the right fit. Yeah. Do you have any data from your customers?

on the close rate being higher or lower once they get on these booked calls. It's a good question. Because here's what I'm thinking. Like there's a direct correlation to the effort you put into something and the potential outcome. Like if I film a video with a business owner and it's like this, talking ahead, he's in one state. I'm in another 50,000 views.

If I film the exact same video with the same content and I'm in person and we're grinding stumps together, we say the same words, but the viewer sees that I had to get on a plane or he had to get on a plane, we're out there sweating. And they take it more seriously. They take it more seriously. And I might get 500,000 views on that, right? So I would think that if I just, you know, dial for dollars, do cold calling all day to get these book calls to sell enterprise software, my close rate might be 15%. But if I, you know, if I use these cakes, I'm going to spend a lot more money.

But A, my book call rate goes way up. And B, theoretically, I would think that your close rate goes from 15 to 25, 30%, you know. I don't have the data on that. But it sounds logical. right so like one thing that's important is my cakes don't close you the sale it just gets you the media and gets you the attention the rest of the job you have to do yourself but i think there's something very psychological about wanting to give something back when someone gives you something yeah the law of reciprocity exactly that's what they do in like the turkish markets if you've ever

been in like turkey they're like they come in their store and they start giving you candy and they're like they're giving you so much because it's psychology. Yeah. So it sounds logical. If I were you, I would like hound my previous customers and say like, do you have any idea on what your close rate was on these that like the calls that came from these cakes? Because then you could put that front and center on your Atlantic page. And it's like that's true.

Increase your close rate like increase your book call rate by 32% and your close rate by 64%. Like that'd be huge. Like it's a net of net. You will make, you know, 360. 16% more money for every dollar spent on cakes first cold calling or whatever it is. Yeah, you're spot on. And I think like this data is so important for us to collect. Because long term, if this vision of the future becomes right, which I really do think it is, one, cakes are going to be overused. Everyone's going to get five cakes a day.

So we have to do more than cakes. And when we get to that point, sure, we're going to be a huge company already by then. But to become even huger, we have to collect the data on what. works. Like maybe we send a cake, but the close rate only goes up so and so much. But if we send something even more personal, and we can talk about what that could be as well, but maybe the close rate is even higher, but the book rate is lower. So all of this data is super important. I totally agree with you. Tell me about your number. So once you focused on the sales market in the US, what was your first month like, your first six months a year, et cetera, both from a revenue and profit perspective. Well, we've, our companies only existed for six months. Oh, wow. So it's

young and promising still. Well, in, in Norway, the birthday thing, we're passively enmoising like $12,000 a month right now. Wow. So you saw that side of the business going. Yeah, it's just running to, to be quite honest with you, I have my mom as customer service there. It's on autopilot. Like, why cut off the revenue, right? Mom needs a job. Yeah, sure. So we have that. We have that. going and when we got to the US, we did zero sales for the first two and a half months. Like I said, we were just trying to figure things out and really felt like we were hitting a wall. I was almost about to like just put down the company because of that.

I didn't see it becoming large enough. But then we cold cake, which I'm coining as a term, A16 Z, Sequoia, like a bunch of big venture capital firms. Yep. And that went viral. That hit the news and we got so many inbound. What was the message to these firms when you sent them a cake? What was the pitch?

So this wasn't my cake or like we sent the cake, but we were in Founders Inc. And a friend of my Andrew Anderson, who's like running a crypto platform that's really taken off. He was fundraising. So he put his whole pitch deck on like a 100 piece size cake. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And like it was just a bunch of text of everything he was doing. And the VCs loved it.

One of them posted it on X. They got like 300,000. views. That ended up in the biggest tech news in Europe. And from there, the ball is just like, it's been nonstop. Were you linked in those articles? Yeah, yeah. So it was amazing for him. He probably raised his round. Amazing for you. Great back link. Win, win, on the way around. Yep. And that's also the interesting thing about what we're doing now is it becomes this marketing loop. Because if you send a cake to X company, then X company might take a picture of that. Not only will they book a meeting with you, but they might take a picture of it and post it on social media.

and that gives you PR and then they might think oh, this worked on me because I just booked the meeting and posted on social media and then they reached out to me and say we want to do this as well. And that's what's happening right now. Like I'm getting in bounds from people that have caught Nick Hayken think this

is cool. So guys, tkowners.com. That's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about a thousand people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the corner office, TKowners.com. You know what you guys should try is what's it called like a like a singogram when like someone shows up in person and sings

to you. You have to do like cold mariachi. Yes. They sing a pitch like they sing a pitch to them. It would cost a lot more than a cake but the results could be a lot better right. Because the effort. I mean I'm down. Yeah. I love that you call the daymaker because you're not going all in on cakes. I agree with you. At some point, people are going to be getting too many cakes and it's just going to be a waste, right? Yeah. But that's fine. You just pivot. You do something else. So, okay, so first two and a half months, you're hitting roadblock of a roadblock. That goes viral, thanks to a tweet. What do your numbers look like after that point? So this month we're doing $120,000 revenue. Yeah, it's crazy. Six months in. Yeah, or I mean, this pivot is one and a half

month ago, right? Oh my gosh. So six weeks after pivoting, you're doing 120,000, month and growing double digit, I imagine, per month. Yeah, yeah. It's a lot of fun. What does your team look like? Do you have much overhead, like developers or anything? Or are you profitable today? No, honestly, we're cooked. I have a list of, no pun intended. Yeah. You're baked. We're baked. I have a list of 45 inbound leads right now from people that are like, we need cakes in Australia. We need cakes in Canada. We need cakes in Spain and Mexico. And we're just like we can't sleep at this point trying to fulfill them all. So we just have to fundraise and hire and keep this momentum going. So you're just putting all your money back into the business? Oh yeah. I mean, I just came home

came home from San Francisco after being there for three months. But I lived in a closet for the whole duration of that's probably all you can afford. It's so expensive there. It is. It really is. I would think you can get to this business to the point where you have a positive cash flow conversion cycle. You get paid on day one. You have net 30 payment terms with your bakeries, at least with many or most of them. We're profitable right now. Okay. Well, like that could be your natural fundraising.

Like that could prevent you from having to fundraise at all, right? That's true. Especially after you send a bakery, a bunch of businesses like, listen, your cake's delicious. It's working. We love working with you. But for cash strapped, if you want to keep getting business from us, we need to be able to you in 30 days or else we're going to have to go to the bakery down the street. Then you guys will be rolling in it. Yeah, for sure. Totally agree with you. We could bootstrap, but my vision is to be a lot

more than a cash cow business. And I think to do that, I want to scale even quicker. Yeah. Like, for instance, there's a lot of company or there's a couple of companies that I've done some deliveries now. They do one delivery batch. It goes successful. They order another one. It goes successful. And then they're like, okay, let's just make this recurring. Can you guys integrate with our HubSpot or Salesforce, so on and so on. There's, they're asking, some are asking for ping pong tables. Uh, instead of cakes. Yep.

So like, we want to be able to keep up with all of that demand. And to do that, I, I think the right move is to fundraise. Yeah. So you're right. This could be a cash cow business for sure. So on $120,000 in cakes, were you profiting 40 grand, 50 grand? Yeah. 30, 40 grand, yeah.

Okay. Okay, so let's say a lot of my audience, most of my audience is not on the coast. They're like in middle America, 25 to 55 year old, entrepreneurial, either, you know, about 40% are business owners, 60% are aspiring business owners. So if someone's watching this right now and they're thinking like, all right, I want to start a business or grow a business with something like this. I don't want to start a cake delivery business, right? He's got that lockdown, but I want to use this principle to make money.

What, like, and someone doesn't have an offer yet, let's say hypothetically. What types of offers or services or whatever could someone use with your cakes or with sending their own cakes or whatever to increase the likelihood of success based on what you've seen? Because if I sell T-shirts, right? It's like the unit economics don't make sense, right? But if I sell enterprise software, it does. It does make sense. Enterprise software isn't approachable to an individual that wants to start a business either,

right? I think it is, to be fair. I think anyone can make anything today. I mean, it says so on your t-shirt. But I guess you put it's true. It's true. I'm saying like a $4,000 a month product, you know, like Salesforce or whatever. Like agency services, sure, you vibe code an app.

Totally get it. In two weeks we're doing like 50 cakes with a SEO agency. And what they're doing is they're putting like a video. They're recording a loom video and they're putting a QR code on the cake. And then we're sending that out. So when people get the cake and they scan it, it's like a SEO audit of, of their website. Oh, that's cool. And that's cool. Also, there's just the virality moment of it. So I do agree if you're selling T-shirts, don't send cakes. But I think one of my biggest

lessons building this company is do crazy things, post about it, and you're going to go viral. And so for 100% all of our customers that have done like a huge amount of cakes, every single time it's gone viral. And it's ended up in the news. And it's just been a positive piece. our thing for just both us and for our customers. So I think one of the things we did is we had a unicorn cake that was huge. That went super viral. Another thing I did here back in Oslo before moving to SF, which I think is great. This is unrelated, but I think it will give an idea of how I want you to think is we hosted

this founder dinner. And we got all the best founders in Norway to be a part of this dinner. And then we're like, okay, how do we make this something people talk about? We hired or we released a llama. So we had this big venue. We had a private chap, seven-course dinner. And then we had a llama walking around in the venue. And we had a jazz band playing jazz.

And like that blew up as well, right? So I think like attention is everything. Getting attention is absolutely everything. And the cakes is right now like such a great thing, a way to get attention because it's still new. It's novel and so on. But if there's one tip I have, it's just do crazy things that get people's attention. And then post it.

Yeah. And post it. So agency services, I think that's a great idea. Like I have a community called PlaymakersAI.com. And I teach people how to be AI consultants or to start AI implementation agencies. And we talk a lot about customer acquisition. And we talk paid ads, all types of stuff. But this is like a no-brainer.

Like why not ship cakes to a medium-sized business that, you know, has $5 to $50 million in revenue? And instead of a QR code to an SEO, audit. It's a QR code to their website that gives them an AI audit that says like your business could be improved with AI, call me. And then you just upsell the heck out of them. It's a no brainer. Yeah, you can do anything. You're like I said, we have accountants and real estate agents doing this as well. So I think as long as you're as long as you think there is marketing coming from this and second of all, you have a high enough average contract value or LTV to make it make

sense, like send some cakes. It's, yeah. I mean, dude, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a, I'm a, I'm going to get a list every morning of properties that are expiring, right? They've been listed for six months and that the realtor that's the listing agent is about to lose yeah, lose the listing. A week before that expires, I'm going to send him a cake, right? There you go. Because even if it's a $500,000 residential home, that's 10 to 20 grand net to the realtor. If they close 10% of those, then what's an $80 cake, you know? Also, like, one thing is the cold cake, which, I mean, you're spot on. Another thing is the retention cake. Let's say you have some customers that you have for like a year and then you're like, thank you for being my customer for a year. Here's a cake. And that's like, what you're doing there is you're just going over the bar of expectations and that makes them think about you and talk about you

and refer you to more people. So you can do retention cakes, you could do cold cakes. You can, yeah, There's a lot of things to do with cakes. I mean, we hired a custom home builder for our home and paid him a whole lot of money. And every Christmas, we get like a box of nuts. You probably spends 40 bucks on him. And you know what? Anytime someone at church asked me, who'd you use for your home builder? I'm like, use him, use him for because of a $40 box of nuts.

You know, it works. It does. Yep. It keeps, if nothing else, if A, it buys your loyalty, B, it keeps you top of mind. It's a cheap way to stay top of mind, which is harder than. ever today. I mean, sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending a email would probably make you seem annoying. Yeah. This is amazing. Is there anything cool about the story that I neglected to ask you about before we wrap? There's so much cool things about the story. But I think this was a

great conversation. Well, I mean, 120 grand, your second month, profitable, incredible. I applaud you on what you've done. This is amazing. Do you know if any of the other 49 people tried to start a business like this. Well, actually, there's, there's been a lot of people that have reached out and like just said, hey man, I'm going to compete with you. Like anything, it's all about execution. If someone does want to start something similar, I encourage that, like, heck, we might even partner, right? Maybe I go like, okay, we have this brand and you can have this area and we'll take a split revenue. We almost franchise it, right? So one thing your viewers might find interesting is like how I have my agents set up to find these bakeries. Yes, yes. Very curious about that. Yeah, I meant to ask you.

You mentioned you have like these AI agencies. So the way I do it now is I have like this super prompt in in Claude Co work connected to a superhuman MCP. Superhuman is like an email system. The super prompt says like how you're supposed to negotiate. It says how you're supposed to find good bakeries like look at reviews, so on and so on. And then every single day, I'm not involved in it. Every two hours, it checks my email. And if I haven't found a bakery in the location I've told it to find it, it goes and sources 20 new bakeries, it responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries. And the initial email we send out is like an email that says, hey, we want to buy 200 cakes

in two weeks. Can we make it happen? And that catches the attention of the bakery. And they're like, yes, please. And then we go like, okay, you have to give us a discount. They give us a discount. If the discount is good enough, my agent sends that email to my personal email where I just give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on it. And if I give a thumbs back, it goes down or back to the bakery renegotiates more until we have a deal.

Yeah. Maybe that was complicated. But it's like... No, Claude Co-work, that's like I can wrap my mind around that. Yeah. That's incredible. That's how we do that. And that's allowed us to go from one bakery to like 15 bakeries in a month, which is...

Wow. Like this sort of outreach and like partner networking would have been impossible just a year ago, which is why like nobody has done this before because in reality this is so time consuming to sign up all these bakeries. And I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries. Yep. Yeah. The tediousness is the moat. It is. Right.

That's why that's why Platt is a billion dollar business because they went and made API connections with every random credit union and bank that had terrible API docs. They went and did the hard thing, hard thing to do that. And now they're the de facto solution for connecting financial institutions, right? The tediousness is the moat, is the first mover's advantage, is your competitive advantage. It's amazing. William, thank you. This is awesome. Where can we find you if we want to buy some cakes or learn more?

Hit me up on LinkedIn, William Lindholm. Hit me up on Instagram. If you're not on LinkedIn, that's also William Lynnholm. Okay. Thank you, William. Nice meeting you, man. Guys, I met what I said about playmakers.a.com. there's about 300 of us in there.

And we're all doing the same thing. We're starting AI consulting businesses. We're implementing AI into small and medium-sized businesses. And we're having a lot of success. So check out PlaymakersAI.com and shoot, use a cake to go find some customers. We've got over 100 hours of recorded content, including three to seven hours of live content with 25 different paid experts every single week. We'll see you there at PlaymakersAI.com.

If you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five-star review on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.