The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Build & Sell $2K/Month Software with No Coding Experience. HoldCo Bros discuss! Ep. #95

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

HoldCo Bros are back! Nik and I sit down to continue our discussion from last week (check out Part 1 - Episode #92 if you missed it!). In this episode, we continue brainstorming cool business ideas, like how to capitalize on website change monitoring for arbitrage and creating a tax Sherpa concept for entrepreneurs. We also do our "marry, date, or kill" segment to assess which of these ideas are worth pursuing, testing, or dropping.Learn more about Nik here: http://linktr.ee/cofoundersnikTimestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Website Monitoring Idea11:50 CPA Idea20:52 Evaluating Business Ideas: Mary, Date, or Kill?

A local business that makes tens of millions of dollars a year that most people overlook. That is just so willing to spend thousands of dollars a month on X, Y, or Z. What is it? I found a website that's really, really interesting. And I want to monetize it somehow. I don't think you need to be a CPA. I think you can use chat GPT and just the stuff that's already out there, but just focus on helping entrepreneurs save.

Car dealership spend a stupid amount of money on marketing, direct mail, SEO, you name admit, if it might work, they will buy it. All of a sudden, you've got $92,000 that's gone away into a savings account that you're not paying taxes on. Welcome back to the Kerner Office. This is part two from what we started last week on Holtco Bros. We were talking about the business in a box idea and the Reddit idea and the website tracking idea. So we'll finish talking about those and then we'll talk about a cool CPA idea and then we'll do merit date or kill on all four of these ideas and see which one we like the most. Enjoy. I found a website that's really, really interesting.

And I want to monetize it somehow, but I'm coming up short. Is it called Wikipedia? No. It's called distill.io. And what distilled does, I'm going to pull it up. It notifies you if something on a website changes. Okay. So as a family, we are going to the Alabama Auburn game at the end of the month, the Iron Bowl.

But with sports tickets, it can range. If Alabama loses the next. two weeks, they're going to be cheaper, right? You just, you can't really know. You don't know when the best time is to buy them. And so you can use Distill.io to be notified when a ticket price drops. But I think there's a world where you could build a SaaS on top of this, where you could just build like a ticket notification system that's built on top of Distill the I.O. And it's stupid, simple, easy to use. It's $10 a year or something cheap. If you heard of Scott's cheap flights, It's kind of like that.

It's like 70 bucks a year. And it's kind of an insurance policy. I don't know how many times I'm going to travel this year. But if I get an email and it says the flights to Hawaii are 300 bucks right now, we're going to go to Hawaii. And I'm going to pay 70 bucks a year just for the opportunity to save, you know, $1,000 on tickets. How could you use this to make money? Who's using distilled.io right now? The messaging on their website is like towards the ticketing websites.

Take ticketing out of it. Why would I care if a website updated? here's the problem. If I cared enough for an website, like an update on a website changing, I'm probably going to be on their emails list. So it has to be something where you're interested enough to want to know about it, but not so interested, like, or there's not a mechanism to update people via a newsletter. I'll give you some ideas.

So let's say it's a Shopify site that sells a product that people obsess over. Texas snacks. We have some pretty advanced apps that will, notify people when something is back in stock if they choose to be notified. But I would bet that most Shopify stores don't have this. You go, look, they're out of stock. At some point or another, they go back in stock. And that just happens when some random employee may be a VA just changes a number in the settings and hit save. Then it goes back in stock. Most Shopify stores do not have a feature that will automatically notify people. Now, it might go in their next newsletter like days later, but it might be

sold out again by them. So it could work for niche products like this or websites. Like, let's say you're a major fan of some merch store or a food store that doesn't have a feature like this. It could work for that. It has to be a business that is capitalizing on being early. So one of the things that come to mind for me are a trading company. Let's let somebody say somebody who wants to invest in certain businesses. Publicly traded companies have to disclose every quarter and every year their financials. And those are 10Ks and 10 Qs. And so when the when the 10, 10K is published to their website because it'll be published to their website. How do you know that it's being published?

I mean, this can be one of those things where you're like, you automatically get a notification. You go and read through the 10K or the 10Q. And if you're first to go through it, actually pull out anything that's important, you can have a trading advantage. So that's one way. Although I'd have to believe that there are already things that you can do like that. You know what would be interesting. Sorry, this is like if you're a searcher and you're trying to buy a business, you could set up a bunch of, like, let's say you find like different target businesses, just different parameters. Anytime that there's a change on their website relative to address pricing leadership teams, I mean, that could be a signal to you that something's going on with the company.

I'm with you, man. There has to be something there. I'm going to read you some ideas that they, that they provide on their website. So legislative tracking, track budget, find grants, bill tracking, get legislative calendar alerts. Obviously, those websites are super outdated. Enterprise solutions, medicine and health, jobs, monitoring new jobs being posted, legal tracker, patents, real estate, track zoning laws, stuff like that. So basically any of these ideas, you could build a business on top of, right?

Like you could build a small SaaS tool that just tracks zoning law changes in Los Angeles County. There's a lot of people that would really need and want to know that as soon as possible or it could cost them a lot of money, right? That's true. Investigative content strategy, you spy on your competitors, ticketing, cybersecurity. And I was just thinking, more broadly speaking, as a framework, I love reaching out to companies like this and asking whoever is reading my email. How are people using this? In what creative ways are people using this? So do you remember when I used to have an RV that I rented out?

So I rented it on RV share. And I was getting my MBA at TCU at the time, which meant I had a lot of free time on my hands to surf the internet while I was supposed to be learning. And I distinctly remember sitting in class making a spreadsheet running all these searches on RV share, trying to reverse engineer what the most in demand type of RV was. You've got a class A, which looks like a tor bus, class B, which is like a converted van, and class C, which is like a motorhome, like an RV with the engine attached, right? And I distinctly remember saying, all right, Dallas County, for this weekend, how many Class A, B, Cs are available for rent? This weekend, no notice.

All right, there's 86 Class A's, there's 82 Class B's, and there's nine Class C's. Huh, interesting. Well, maybe there just aren't that many Class C's listed. Let's look six months out where few people have booked. Same search. Oh, there's 92 Class A's. There's 90 class Bs and there's 60 class C's interesting. So there's just about as many listed in each category, but class C is being rented by far the most.

So if I want to go out and buy an RV, let's say I haven't yet, I'm going to buy a Class C. And you can do this with Airbnb. What types of Airbnb's? We've talked about this in the past. You can reverse engineer just on Airbnb's homepage. What is the most in demand just by searching for this weekend and for a year out, right? I think I have an idea for this. Okay, hold it.

Yeah. Sorry, go out. No. All right. So I made this big spreadsheet and I was able to get really close on like what is the best type of RV to buy because then you look at the price and you're like, huh, the price for all three of these RVs are about the same. But a class C is rented four times as often.

Why would I buy something else? If I'm doing this as a business. Now, if I want to buy an RV from my family, it's another story. Yeah. And so I reached out to RV share at the time and they were pretty small at the time. And I said, hey, I'd love to talk to someone. I know I sound crazy. You know, look at my spreadsheet.

Am I in the ballpark here? Like, because I haven't bought the RV yet. I want to buy something that's good for my family. And also I can rent out. Turns out we wanted to buy a Class C anyway. And then I sent it to this guy and he's like, hey, can, do you have time for a call? I'm like, oh, yeah, I guess. So I help on the phone.

He's like, where did you get this data? I'm like from your homepage. He's like, this is exactly right. Like, I wish I could shout it from the rooftops. Like, Class C, Class C. Like, if you want to do RV. as a business, class C RVs. And I'm like, oh, cool, it worked.

And he was like super impressed, but I'm like, literally, I just ran searches on your website. So that is the framework here of just like, when you see something that's interesting, reach out to the business and be like, how can I make money with this? How are people making money with this? How are people using this in surprising ways? And you can come up with all kinds of ideas. Hearing you talk, I think this would be an interesting thing to do. Let's say that I'm a company that sells RVs, right?

And I'm trying to figure out a better way to convert on my landing page or on my sales page. Okay. I think what I would do is I would go and find 10 or 20 competitors and then just on their purchase pages, let's say, set up an automation for any time that there's a change and see if I can pull any patterns. Because it's like if they're all, maybe they've all changed the color of the buy now button or maybe they've all changed their script and they made it shorter, right? or maybe they're all changing it to mention financing as opposed to just paying cash. Like, who knows what the changes are? It'll take some sort of analysis on your end. But if you went and pulled maybe 20 competitors and then you're just seeing the updates as they come in,

it would allow you to make your conversion even better because you're seeing what's working for other people. Because they're not changing those things on those high leverage pages unless it's working. Yes. But your idea just gave me another idea. Okay. I'm in. Dude, okay. So a local business that makes tens of millions of dollars a year that most people overlook, that has a huge marketing budget that is just so willing to spend thousands of dollars a month on X, Y or Z SaaS tool to give them a little edge. What is it? Car dealerships. Car dealerships spend a stupid amount of money on marketing, direct mail, SEO, you name it. If it might work, they will buy it. Okay? And I know this because I have a friend now in the space. who sells software to these guys and they spend like crazy.

So dude, if I live, I used to work at a car dealership in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, right? If I'm a dealership owner in, if I own Nick Sabin, Nissan in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, I'm going to want to know how many Nissan's my local competitors are selling. You could go into them. And this distilled I.O costs like $10 a month, right? You could go into them and say, hey, I'm going to send you a daily report of all the cars that all of your competitors within a 30-mile radius sold the day before. Would that be helpful to know?

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Now we can, like, if all the ultimas are gone, then we can mark up our ultima. If there's a zillion altamas on the market, then we need to cut our ultima prices. Like, dude, how much would they pay for something like that? Give it for free for 30 days. I'm going to install it all for free. They don't know.

It takes you like 10 minutes. I'm going to start sending you the reports. And then we'll talk price in 30 days. But promise me you'll read the reports because it's going to be very valuable. that or real estate, right? Like how many homes did you sell? Real estate would be a really good one. But like real estate's a little trickier because it's in my experience, it's harder to sell into that.

Whereas car dealerships have this marketing budget on their line out of marketing budget that's massive. It's just like, yep, let's allocate three grand of this every month and see how it goes. Whereas real estate's a little more stodgy. I think the framework is literally where is there an arbitrage? you're quicker. If you're able to get information faster, where is there an arbitrage, and then you can reverse engineering to any business that has that function or component to it and use distil, I know. Yeah. I love it. All right. CPA or Silver tsunami? Well, you know the acronym CPA like gives me anxiety and makes me sleepy. So let's go Silver tsunami.

All right. Let's go CPA. So silver tsunami is the one I'm the most excited about. But I don't think we have enough time for it. All right. So, Chris, what's the biggest expense that employers have or business owners have that they feel like they have zero control over? Taxes. Taxes. Yeah.

Taxes, right? What I'm about to say, I don't think is a new idea or necessarily a novel idea, but I think it is novel in its application. But traditionally, you have a CPA, and CPAs are telling you, when to file. They're helping you with bookkeeping. They might even be helping you kind of go through some tax strategy, but usually tax strategy is like way down the list, right?

I think there's space for a tax shirpa, specifically for entrepreneurs. And when you're talking to a CPA, how often do you talk to Ross? As infrequently as I'm able to. Yeah, maybe once or twice a year. And it's usually around filing deadlines, right? just enough to not get audited and even so I've been audited. Yeah, but it's very rushed. You're like constantly feeling like you're under the gun where I think there's space is,

again, not in bookkeeping and accounting, not in tax filing and not in fractional CFO work. It's in helping entrepreneurs maximize their tax strategies. So here are some examples. What should I pay myself as an entrepreneur? There's rules around that. So you have to pay yourself something. Otherwise you get audited because you're avoiding certain tax. but you can't pay yourself too much.

Otherwise, you're not complying with the IRS's rules, okay? How should I handle retirement? Think of it like this. When you are a business owner, you can contribute to a 401K. Why is it important to contribute to a 401K? I have literally a 401k. Is that an ultramarathon? I don't know.

So good. That's the most responsible thing that I know nothing about. A 401k allows you to put pre-tax dollars into a savings. account that you don't have to pay. Listen to me, that you don't have to pay taxes on. So the idea is you're going to have a lower tax bracket when you retire than you do right now. So if I have $50,000 and I'm a business owner, I'm probably going to pay somewhere in the ballpark of like 30%, $15,000 in taxes. If I put that money into a 401k after I retire, and then my tax liability gets down that maybe 15%, well, I just cut my taxes in half, right? Here's the crazy thing.

You can contribute up to $23,000 a year to a 401k. But the company can also match 100%. So for you is the- Your company that you own? Your company that you own. So you can, now, you have to make sure you can match everybody's. You can't just match like the owners. Like there's certain rules.

But theoretically, you could put $46,000 away pre-tax into a savings account that just sits there. Then you're like, well, that's not that much money. Like, okay, well, does your wife do anything in the business? Yeah, she does something in the business. Great. Pay her salary and have it all go to the 401k and then match that 100%. All of a sudden, you've got $92,000 that's gone away into a savings account that you just saved taxes on.

You're not paying taxes on, right? And there are IRAs that you can contribute to what? I need to make a call. But then you can also pay your kids through the business. They can contribute to a 401K. You could also contribute to an IRA, which is different than a 401K, 411. and 401K has to be tied to a business, and IRA can be independent, and you can contribute to that. But the IRA limit of contributions is $7,500 a year.

Is that the rifle association? It is. Okay. Well, that's the, this is the IRA. So this is the international, international. International Revolutionary Association. Okay, cool. Okay, so that's savings.

Then there's how do I pay my spouse and kids? You can pay your kids and spouse through the business for doing actual work. Like, and it's not child labor laws, right? Mm-hmm. or just knowing what are potential big write-offs. Okay, maybe I could ride off a vehicle, but what else? You can ride off a certain percentage of your mortgage, but there are very specific rules, phone, internet, meals, vacations, then there's like real estate, how do I depreciate,

all that stuff. So, like, in my mind, that's very different than, hey, how do I file my taxes? And it's the tax Sherpa on your team. They would be separate from the person filing your taxes. Now, if you did this, like stay in your lane. Do not start doing bookkeeping. Do not do start doing your tax. There's plenty of money to be made in this lane.

Yeah. Stay in this lane and you are essentially the advocate for the business owner so that when the end of the year comes and the business owners having those conversations with his accountant, which we've all had, right? Well, you're talking to your CPA and you're like, well, could I write this off? And they're like, maybe they're like, hemming and hawing. Or you're like, oh, a friend of mine told me about this deduction. And they're like, yeah, yeah, that could work for you. And in the back of mind, you're like, why didn't you know that deduction? You know what I mean? They're just not thinking about it.

They have so many returns. So, like, this person's in your corner. They're looking for tax deductions, but you still got the check of your regular CPA who's like, that's good or bad, right? And then they can argue about it. And like, you don't have to argue about whether or not it's a reasonable tax deduction. So what I would do in terms of fulfillment, I don't think you need to be a CPA. I think you can use chat GPT and just the stuff that's already out there, but just focus on helping

entrepreneurs save. From a pricing standpoint, I'd be like, either. pay me $10,000 or 25% of whatever I save you. Yeah, I like the lottery. Very easily measurable. You get last year's tax returns. You just go through it. And then for distribution, I would just piggyback.

I would go to the tax and bookkeeping firms and just say like, hey, let me talk to your clients. Or I would also start, you know, be the Twitter, Instagram, YouTube tax guy where you're just putting out tax information. Like some of these accounts already exist. But I think just leaning into it and just be. being that, just being that meesh where you're providing value to entrepreneurs who aren't yet rich enough to have like their on staff CPA. Because like you get very rich. Yeah, there's lots of options. Yeah, yeah. You got to have a lot of money for that. There's, there's a lot more in the

messy middle than there is at the top. Yeah. And then like chat GPT, you can actually get to the answers of these things fairly quickly or at least point you in the right direction. So yeah, you're not a JP Morgan Chase private banker who's like giving tax advice, but you're still saying. You're people tens, in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on taxes. Yeah. I love this idea, honestly. And I love the piggyback idea, but I think you have to change the incentive structure to get the CPA in your corner and say, my pricing structure is 30% of any money saved,

and I'm going to give you 30% of that. So you're effectively going to get 10% of everything that I save this guy for just referring him. You don't have to do any work. I'll do all the work. and then he can be your advocate like, dude, I met this tax shirt,

but he's legit. Like, I'm like in the weeds in your returns. Like I know a lot of this stuff. Like I know a lot of this stuff, right? Like, but like this guy,

it's all he does and he doesn't charge you anything up front. He only charges if he saves you money. I like the idea of that, but, but CPAs are going to be like, as a fiduciary, I have to disclose that I'm going to be getting a kickback and I don't feel comfortable.

Like, you'd have to figure out some other way for them to be incentivized to do it. otherwise I just I think it would get messier if if you start paying them not because I don't think you should like you should pay them it would be way more valuable you'd probably get way more customers but I could just see a lot of CPAs kind of oh this feels dirty I need to tell my I could see it but if they like let's say you get ahead of that and say we do advise you tell your client you can do that you can yeah you can definitely do that and do you think honestly do you think clients would mind I'm not this isn't a leading question I don't know like

if my CPA came to me and said this and he's like, hey, he charges 30%. He is going to give me a cut out of that, but you don't have to pay me. You just pay him. I don't think I would mind. If I was the CPA, I would probably just say, hey, this is a service we provide and like not even tell them about the pricing structure. The biggest problem is going to be the CPA signing their name on recommendations. And if you make the CPA feel like, hey, look, we're just an advisory service.

You don't have time to go and find all these deductions. Let us do this. Like, we'll do all of the work. and the payment runs through you and then you'll cut us our portion of it. But you have final say over what deductions actually get approved. I think that actually probably the best way to do it because they're going to feel comfortable with it. The customer is going to feel like it's run through that agency and there's not going to be

any real issues. Okay. I like it. It's a good one. Thanks. All right, Nick. It's time for Mary Date or Kill. We've got the Reddit growth hack, business in a box idea, distill the I.O and the CPA

idea. Okay. Who's going first? You. For me, marry the CPA idea. Date. Oh, man. This is very selfish. Date. Distill. No, date, business in a box, kill, Reddit. Okay. And then distill is just in no man's land. Distill. The tracking software. Okay. What is your reasoning? No, no, no. You got to say yours first and then we say everything. Okay, okay. Married date or kill. Mary, I'm going to marry the Distilba I.O. plan for car dealership specifically. I really, really, really love that idea. I'm going to date the Reddit growth hack idea, and I'm going to kill the business in a box idea. It's so weird that we both married and dated our own ideas. No. It's just a coincidence. Distill.io, I just felt like I not yet cannot wrap my mind around like where would I use this? And how would I use this? Right. Same with the Reddit growth strategy. It's just like how exactly would I, would I do this? I think they're both really good marketing strategies. I just don't know about how to build a business around those.

That's fair. I didn't like distill until we got at the very end of it and talked about the car dealership idea. I love that idea because you could start generating those reports for the car dealership. without them ever opting in and just start emailing them to them. That's your distribution strategy. Get it to them for free. Yeah. And then you send an invoice. That's why I love that. Business in a box.

I killed that because it's just hard. I think it's just hard to wrap my mind around. And I date the Reddit growth hack idea because I think it's underutilized and more business people, more capitalists, should own their own subreddit so they can monetize it. Done. I love it. All right. That's a wrap.

That's a wrap. Jack. All right, what did you think? I legitimately want to go start that car dealership tracking idea. I think that could be very valuable. So if you start it, please email me. Let me know how it's going and we will feature you. Please share this with a friend, subscribe, and we'll see you next time.