The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Create and Growth Hack Your Own Subreddit. HoldCo Bros discuss! Ep. #92
Episode Date: November 15, 2024HoldCo Bros are back! Nik and I discuss four exciting ideas, but in this first part, we talk about two main ideas: growing a subreddit as a powerful business tool and a creative business-in-a-box solu...tion for wantrepreneurs. We talk about how to effectively use Reddit as a growth hack, including automation tools like Zapier and AI, and also brainstorm a comprehensive package for those starting side hustles, but this is only Part 1 - stay tuned for the Part 2 next week!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 Introduction02:50 Navigating Reddit for Growth06:09 Leveraging AI and Automation09:06 Practical Applications for Entrepreneurs12:01 Creative Marketing Strategies14:48 Innovative Business Ideas18:10 Exploring New Monetization Opportunities20:38 Business in a box idea
Transcript
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Welcome to the Kerner office. This is Chris Kerner here and it's Friday. So today is Holdco Bros with my partner, Nick of the podcast, Nickonomics. And we talked about four different things today that I'm very excited about. The second half of this podcast will be next Friday. And the four ideas we talk about are a Reddit growth hack. So anyone could have and grow their own subreddit, which is very, very powerful. We talked about a business and a box idea that anyone could monetize. We talked about a cool website that tracks any changes made and how you can make money on it. And we landed on something really, really, really,
dealing with car dealerships. It could be really profitable for anyone listening. And then our fourth
idea was a CPA idea how you could piggyback on CPAs to make money helping people save on their taxes.
Super good. You're going to love it. But we will interrupt ourselves in the middle of one of these segments and
continue it a week from today. So please like and subscribe, share with a friend. And we'll see you next time.
What is the big social media platform that is now publicly traded that is full of toxicity that people
don't really take very seriously with an orange logo. Oh, Trump media? Reddit.
Oh, dude, Reddit is so freaking toxic. It's so toxic. Honestly, and this surprised me, Reddit,
most toxic. You know what the second? Threads. Threads. Threads is the freaking worst. The worst.
I thought of Twitter. It's not Twitter. It's threads. There's some angry cat moms over there.
That's true. And don't mess with cats.
Okay, all right, Reddit, go.
Anyway, so I've got all these platforms where I publish my content.
And I've got like an, I call it a, yo, strategy.
Everything everywhere all at once, okay?
That's true.
So if I put out a bang or tweet, I want that repurpose everywhere.
Okay, but I'm not putting on Reddit because Reddit's different, right?
You've got to put it in subreddits.
And if you do, people are going to downvote you, they're going to call you stupid and it hurts my feelings.
Okay.
It genuinely does.
Yeah.
And so.
So I was thinking, I was like, all right, you can't really grow a Reddit account.
I have an aged Reddit account.
I have 40 Reddit gold, which is a lot.
And the algorithm likes me when I post a Reddit because I have so much karma.
But you don't really grow Reddit accounts.
You can follow a Reddit account, but people don't really do that, right?
You follow subreddit.
You grow subredits, right?
You with me?
Yeah, totally.
It's a different dynamic, right?
Like other social platforms, it's about the person.
on Reddit it's about the topic. Exactly. And so I've posted in the entrepreneurship subreddit,
the side hustle subreddit, a bunch of times, and they've done well. But this doesn't really get
you anything. It can't even really get you clicks because as soon as you add a link, they'll delete
your post most times, unless you find some sneaky ways around it, which is another podcast for another
day. So I thought, I need my own subreddit. And this just needs to be a place where I just published
my content. And I'm the, I'm the judge and the jury and the executioner. And I'm the judge and the jury and the
executioner and I control what goes in and what comes out and I can put in whatever links I want,
right? Yeah. So then I start going down this rabbit hole and it's like, well, how do you create,
like, okay, anyone can create a subreddit? How do you grow it? Because you just post in there. It's just
you. It doesn't go anywhere unless people start cross posting it. You have to already have
members. It's a big catch 22. Then those members have to share it either externally to other platforms
where people see it and then they happen to join your subreddit. Or you can cross post it. Or you can
cross-post it to other subredits, which is tricky because many subredits, if not most of them,
don't even allow cross-posting.
So what I would do in this case, I would take my long tweet about how to start a tree-truing
business.
I would post it in my subreddit and then I would go cross-post it to the Home Service subreddit,
this sweaty start a subreddit, yada, yada, yada, all the tangential subredits.
But even if a subreddit does allow for cross-posting, the crossposts don't do as well.
It's like retweeting.
A retweet doesn't do nearly as well as the original tweet, right?
Yeah.
And I know this for a fact because I've posted the same thing originally in a subreddit and then
cross posted to another subreddit and it gets 2% of the views.
I had to get creative.
And what do we do when we have constraints, Nick?
We get creative.
Yes.
Okay.
So I created a subreddit called Biz Ideas.
B-I-Z ideas.
One more.
There's already a business ideas.
There's already a business underscore ideas.
And so this isn't anything new.
But that's something I talk about a lot.
So I created a biz ideas, one person in there, me.
I'm the only moderator, only person.
So then I start repurposing a bunch of my old Twitter content.
And I start cross-posting it.
And it does okay.
And I get, you know, 5, 10, 20, 30, 40 people to join my subreddit, which is cool,
especially because they don't know who I am.
They just like the content and they joined.
But, you know, you've got kind of a low ceiling on that.
So I think, okay, how can I get AI involved?
How can I get Zapier involved?
Okay.
So here's where it gets interesting.
Okay?
You ready?
Chris.
What's up?
You had my interest, but now you have my attention.
No, you don't have my interest, but now you have my respect.
All right.
So there are limits with Reddit's API.
They don't want you, they don't want the AP.
permissions to be able to post comments.
So that has to be done manually.
But it will read comments.
And you can use AI to respond to comments.
You just can't post them unless you do it manually.
So here's what I did.
I went to Zapier and I had it search for every time something was posted in any subreddit
worldwide with the word idea in the title.
Not business idea, but just idea.
Okay.
Okay.
And then I had a field.
I had it filter out all of the posts that were media only because AI can't understand that
in the way that I want it to.
Some people say, wow, this looks like a bad idea.
And then they put in a video of something crazy happening.
That doesn't apply.
And so if there's only media, filter it out.
If it was posted, the filter says if it was posted in the last 30 minutes and it already
has at least four up votes.
Then, only then, which only applies about 10% of the time.
write a comment that says this, huh, what an interesting idea. But you know what? Any good idea could be a good
business idea. Here's how I'd turn this into a business. And then AI comes up with whatever, right?
Sometimes it's pretty smart. Sometimes it's not. And then at the end of it, there's a line break and it says
TBH, all lowercase. I have it put in misspellings. I have it do all lowercase. It really doesn't
look like AI. It really doesn't. Okay. And then the last sentence is like, TB8, this post is probably a
better fit for R slash biz ideas, which is a direct hyperlink to my subreddit. Yeah. Okay. So instead of
controlling the posts, I'm in the comments. And I'm only piggybacking on posts that are growing
popularity really quickly. I'm filtering out everything else. And so 10 or hundreds of times a day,
I'm posting comments in all these random subreddits with the smart sounding business idea linking back to my subreddit.
Is it working?
Yeah, it's working.
I've got like 200 and something members in there.
And I've only posted like nine comments.
All right.
Here's my question.
I love it.
Like for what?
Why are you growing a subreddit?
You're a dictator who's like, I only want kind words around me.
No, no, no, no, no.
It's flassery.
No, if that were the case, I wouldn't post on threads or really anywhere.
Because here's the thing, you get someone to join your subreddit, you can send them a welcome message with as many hyperlinks as you want.
Here's my newsletter.
Here's XYZ.
That ends up in their inbox.
So that's cool.
Second of all, I can pin any post I want.
I can highlight it.
I can pin it.
I can post all of my content with as many links as I want.
And like the algorithm doesn't mind.
Like the only people that mind on Reddit that these things happen are the moderators.
And I'm the only moderator.
Yeah.
So I get a bunch of strangers in there that have no idea who I am.
Hopefully thousands or tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands.
And then I can just start repurposing all of my content with links to my newsletter and get,
it's just another channel.
My question was misunderstood.
I get why you're doing it.
Right.
And like, hey, we're trying to grow an audience, social media.
But like if I'm just listening, I'm an entrepreneur.
like, okay, cool, you told me a growth hack to grow Reddit.
Like, what does that do?
What does that do for a just typical entrepreneur?
Give me an example of someone that just owns like a regular business and I'll apply it to that.
Let's say somebody who has a digital marketing agency.
Perfect example.
You softballed me.
Love it.
I didn't even mean to.
All right.
So let's say I could set up a Zapier.
I could create a subreddit called, we're not just going to do digital marketing.
we're going to go more niche than that.
We're going to say Google Business Profile.
Google Business Profile agencies, GBP agency, R slash GBP agency,
okay, owners or whatever.
And then I'm going to set up a ZAP that searches for anything that says SEO,
SCM, marketing, email, I'm going to go niche,
I'm going to go broad all along the marketing spectrum, content marketing, anything.
It doesn't take very long to set up all these triggers.
And then I'm going to create.
I'm going to use Open AIs API to say, to basically take a post about anything marketing
and apply it to Google Business Profile.
Right.
So I'll say, somehow take this post and say, you know what?
Like, yeah, SEO is great.
But most people that have digital marketing agencies don't have a physical presence.
So they don't think that Google Business profile is relevant to them.
But it actually is.
Here's why.
Here's the three reasons why it's relevant.
And it's like, honestly, like, I learned this from R slash.
GPP agency owners, right? And so you could just leave comments there everywhere. Maybe it's not
owners, but it's like business owners where it depends. Do you want to sell something to agency
owners or do you want to sell your services to business owners, your GPP? This strategy would be
here towards somebody who already believes in the power of social media to essentially market or
identify customers. And it's just another channel for them to go out and find people who are
interested in their services. Is that fair? Yeah. Yeah. It's a it's an untapped marketing channel.
What people don't know, I don't know how much we've talked about this, but like one of the things
that I've always admired about you is your ability to leverage underutilized marketing channels.
Reddit is one of those. So you've been writing on Reddit for years and you really cut your teeth
on Reddit. Nick Huber was the same way, right? Like he started writing on Reddit and then it translated
really well to social media. Huber's terrible on camera. You are not. So I think you have a much higher
sealing the need us. But like your ability to write copy is incredibly important in growing businesses.
So while Reddit sucks, I do think it's a really good testing ground for ideas to go out and
test. And we've launched several businesses, tested several ideas, gotten lots of leads off of Reddit
in non-traditional ways. This feels like a much more scalable way to get leads off of Reddit.
Whereas in the past, like you're saying, you had not only did you go have to find a subreddit that was
perfect for that type of business, you then had to write a post that went viral.
Whereas if you own the subreddit, you can control the information and people are coming,
like you're tracking the right type of people and your content will play even better.
It's true.
Did you know that the sweaty startup subreddit has like over 200,000 people in it?
No.
Owned by Huber?
Yeah.
I didn't know that.
It's like a really popular one.
Yeah.
That makes sense.
He figured this out years ago.
Yeah, but he doesn't really use it much.
And maybe that's for a reason that I haven't learned yet.
Yeah.
A couple cool things.
So I posted my tree business long form thread from a year ago.
in the business underscore ideas subreddit,
which has a couple hundred thousand people in it.
And it did really well.
I got 600,000 views.
But early on,
one of the commenters was like,
you're just ripping off Chris Kerner.
You're just this,
you're just copy pasting Chris Kerner.
And my name on Reddit is not my name.
It's an anonymous name.
So I was like,
and so they deleted it.
And I was like,
guys,
I am him.
I am him.
Like,
I promise.
Like,
I'll verify it any way you want.
And then the moderator,
luckily,
like the main moderator was like,
Oh, you are. Oh my gosh. Chris Kerner is in our subreddit. So he made it live again. And then I
DMed him and I thanked him. And I was like, hey, I'd really love to start syndicating my content in here,
but you don't allow links. Like, can we work out a deal? Because like thousands of people shared
this post in other subredits, which grew your channel. And theoretically, thousands of people could
click, which would grow my channel. Like, is there some symbiotic relationship we could work out here?
And he was like, hey, I'll tell you what. You can post whatever.
you want in here once a week with a link to whatever you want and we won't delete it.
So I was like, first of all, that's awesome. Second of all, what a cool model. It's like a,
it's like a, it's like a, you scratch my back, I scratch yours. We each kind of grow each other,
but I don't know if anyone really doing that on Reddit. So that's something else.
I love these ideas like to take it political. If you look at the last election that we just had,
the Democrats spent something like, they had like a billion dollars that they could spend on
President Harris's election campaign.
And they ended up going $20 million in debt.
So they not only spent the billion, but they went into debt.
I want to say the Trump team spent like somewhere in the ballpark of like $300 million.
But the Harris campaign spent on traditional media.
They had Beyonce come out.
They had celebrities come out.
They went on all the shows.
They bought advertising.
Like it's almost like the difference between a well-funded startup and a scrappy startup.
You know what I mean?
Like they just waste.
They have constraints.
They got to get creative.
Right.
And so Trump, and he did this in the first two times that he ran, he has a lot of earned media because he's just a personality.
So if he goes on anything, people are going to tune into it.
But he did the podcast circuit.
And she did call her daddy, but it didn't really get good ratings.
But he did Joe Rogan.
He did, I can't remember the name of the other comedian who has a show.
But he did these shows.
And he reached the audience that ended up kind of getting him the election, which were young men.
Like that kind of swamp.
Yeah.
That was a big difference maker.
And I'm not like making a judgment on one way or the other.
But I've now been listening to political commentary that are like,
all right.
If you are watching this clip right now,
you are watching this on YouTube.
And if you are a fan of podcasts,
please check on my podcast while you're at it because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't
on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTube that aren't on podcasts.
So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkotepod.com.
Also my newsletter will throw that in there.
There are no ads.
It's weekly.
It's different content than my podcast and YouTube.
Newsletter.
com.
you'll see the link and we'll see you there like this election was decided by podcasts and you're
going to see a massive shift in spending in podcasts in non-traditional media because traditional media is
not reaching people in the same ways that it used to so this to me is an example of going to
Reddit and finding a way to reach people that is creative that will probably there will be an
arbitrage year right like if you can move in early you're going to see an outsized return on that
it was jd vance was on theo vons podcast i think that's what you're
Well, I know J.D. Vance was on Theo Vaughn's podcast, but then Trump went on, I can't remember his name. He's the guy with dark hair, has a mustache. I don't know. Anyways, he's a comedian as well. But. Well, and then, I mean, then Rogan endorsed him the night before the election. That doesn't hurt. Did you see that? No, it doesn't. That doesn't hurt at all. The weird thing is that, like, Kamala Harris wouldn't go to Joe Rogan. Right. Yeah. Right. Again. Maybe out of pride or.
I think it was a little bit of pride, but like Trump did. Trump went and kissed the ring. And he.
reached the audience that he needed to reach in order to win the election. My personal opinion is
Kamala is not great in those interview styles, right? She doesn't have good interviews.
Trump does. Like Trump is charismatic and you like him. Whereas Kamala isn't that. And that's what's
interesting about presidential elections. It seems like the candidate who's best on camera
wins. Every time. Every time. The charismatic. The guy with the Riz. You got to have Riz.
like Joe Biden beat Trump, but that was just because there was a huge back, like that would be the only case in the last 30 years that I would say.
It's an outlier.
It doesn't work.
But actually, there's one more.
So Reagan, way better on camera.
JFK when he won, way better on camera.
But Reagan, better on camera.
Then you have George H.W. Bush, not better on camera, but he's kind of a continuation of Ronald Reagan.
Bill Clinton, better on camera.
George W. Bush versus Al Gore.
I mean, come on, way better on camera.
versus John Kerry, way better on camera.
Barack Obama versus John McCain, way better on camera.
Donald Trump, Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump, way better on camera.
So it's like, if you're more charismatic, you're going to win the presidency.
I don't know that that's the best way to elect the president.
You know what I mean?
But I think he knew that.
And it's the same with marketing.
If you can figure out a way to reach people that aren't being reached by traditional
media, there is an arbitrage there that you can play.
And this Reddit idea is perfect for that.
And I think why the Reddit idea works is because back
to politics. Generally speaking, the moderators of these subredits lean very left, right? Which you could
argue is very anti-capitalist. Therefore, like no links in here, no promotion in here, nothing.
So if you can find a way to be the moderator of your own little kingdom and put as many links in there
as you want, you could still capture the audience that is hundreds of millions of daily active users
without having to have links be suppressed. I think it's a freaking great idea. Look at the top 10
media podcasts, news media podcasts. Eight of the top 10 are conservative. Two of the top 10 are liberal.
And like they're both by the same woman, Keros Swisher. On with Keros Swisher and Pivot. The rest are Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and Charlie Kirk and all these other guys.
But it's because traditional media has like left this hole where, you know, those conservatives don't feel like they're being spoken to. So they've got to go and create their own media platforms.
It's probably going to be the same way in Reddit, right? Like you have all of these subreddit.
that are just so tightly controlled by people
that if you get somebody like you or Huber
and you create your own subreddit,
it's going to be popular just because of the novelty.
Like it's just different.
It's swimming in a different direction side.
I like that idea.
One more idea to grow a subreddit that anyone could use.
You ready?
So it's pretty common for people to launch podcasts.
Just interview podcasts, right?
And it's not too difficult to find people to interview
that are like more,
I have a bigger presence than you, right?
There are a lot of like big name people on podcasts that you've never heard of.
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Another way to grow a subreddit is to kind of take the same angle, but find those people to do
AMAs.
Ask me anything inside your brand new subreddit.
So like to grow my subreddit, I'm going to do an AMA one day.
I'm going to push it out to all of my channels and I'm going to host it in my subreddit.
So you go in there and like you, you don't have to join to participate, but you probably will.
or I could make the permissions in the subreddit to, if you comment, you have to be a member of the
subreddit.
So technically you can't.
Does that make sense?
Yeah, it makes sense.
That would be an interesting way to grow our podcast.
Think about growing, like having an economic subreddit or the Kerner office subreddit.
And you post every episode.
And that's just the forum where people can go and comment on it.
Right.
And they have interactions like, oh, I didn't like this.
I like that.
And then you set up like you're doing with Zapier.
I had Zach Prince on.
It's like, all right, every post on Reddit that mentioned Zach Prince.
whatever, you got to set up an if-then statement.
We have a comment and it points us back to his interview.
That's a good idea.
Yeah.
And then they like, they subscribe, they listen and you're getting a community of people.
The flip side is it can get really toxic really quick.
Now, if you control the subreddit, then you can kick people out.
But that would be a really freaking, that potentially could be an exceptional growth hack for podcasting.
Anyways, the problem with Reddit is you've spent so many years on Reddit.
So it's like you've got to catch people up to help them understand why it's a good idea.
So you had to do that.
All right.
Cool.
Yeah.
Chris, I got some cool ideas.
Do you want to listen to Silver tsunami idea, business in a box idea, CPA idea.
Business and a box.
Okay.
So that's funny.
I should have known you're going to do that.
I know that this already exists, okay?
But hear me out.
I think there needs to be a DIY service for side hustlers.
And you've started businesses.
I've started businesses.
You've started way more businesses than I've started from scratch.
It's a freaking nightmare to get your books cleaned up.
It's a freaking nightmare to know where you are relative to where you thought you would be.
What's your revenue?
What's your cost per unit?
What are your gross margins?
Like, you don't know any of that stuff early on.
You're just going.
And you're trying to look for little signals so that you know whether or not you're moving in the right direction.
But it's hard to get those KPI's.
And even if you wanted to start getting those KPI's, it's like,
all right, I need a CRM, but do I need HubSpot?
Like, do I need to pay or do I need Salesforce?
Do I need to be paying $1,000 a month for this stuff?
Okay, I need accounting, but do I need quickbooks?
I need to incorporate, but do I need to go to legal Zoom?
Do I need to have an attorney?
Like, there's just all of these kind of things that you go through as a business owner
when you're getting up and running.
But people like you and I have growth tactic and we kind of have a tech stack that we use now.
Right?
It's like, okay, we kind of use Google Sheets until we get to a certain.
certain level. And then we we kind of professionalize it. So I think that there's an opportunity for
someone to create a business in a box that says basically, here are the tools that you need to get
started. And then here are the integrations that you need to create. Go for people who are trying
to do side hustles. So like accounting, bank accounts, finance, invoicing software, all of those
things. Cool. Here's Stripe. Here's Google Sheets. Here's the Zapier API or integration that you
to have that's pulling from those things.
Here's how you can set it up so you can look atometrics.
Great.
Operations.
This is how you're tracking customers.
You can't afford HubSpot, but set up your Google Sheets this way so that you're
getting customer information like this.
Inventory management, okay, you're not ready for an inventory management system.
This is how you should set up Google Sheets in order to get this stuff going.
So, oh, you're finally ready to incorporate.
This is what you should do.
Don't go to an attorney yet.
Go to these websites.
incorporate. This is how you start the bank account, et cetera. It's like very easy. Like anybody could
create it using chat GPT, but you would go and look at the things that typical businesses use
and then create this business in a box because entrepreneurship is only becoming more popular.
People are only getting more and more interested in doing side hustles. But the headache of getting
stuff cleaned up, of having clean books, of understanding where your metrics are is just such a
problem that you kind of have to figure it out yourself. It'd be nice to just have a plug-in-play system
that says you're getting started, use this. What does it look like? Like, is it?
it is it a website is it an app where is it hosted what i would do so this is what i would go i would
it would be like a digital product that you could sell and it would be a spreadsheet with a google
doc that's it and so the google doc would sort of lay out all right here are the here are the five
areas of your business finance and it would go through our invoicing accounting revenue right
and then there'd be links to here the spreadsheets that you should use how to set them up
and then there would be operations cool
This is how you set up your internal CRM, right?
And then links of how to set it up.
So like it would take a while to set up.
Like we'd have to actually go through it and create it.
But once it was created,
it would just,
it would be a very cheap version of kind of setting up your back end systems.
It's so funny you bring this up because I've had over the last week,
I've had a very similar idea.
I wasn't calling at this.
And it doesn't look like that.
But it achieves the same purpose and it solves the same problem.
Go on.
This is just really funny.
this is something else I've been excited about before I go there. So how is it customized to whatever
niche or industry that person is doing? Or is it broad enough to where it applies to basically
anyone? I think you can upsell those things, right? Like if you were trying to make more money off
of it, but it would just be broad. We would say that in the disclaimers. Like, look, you're going to
have to tailor this, but these are the systems that you could use. You're going to have to tailor anything.
If you bought QuickBooks, you're going to have to tailor it. If you bought HubSpot, you're going to have to
tailor it. If you bought job or like any of these other systems, you're going to have to tailor it,
right? So it'd be the same as any of those other systems. It's funny because it reminds me of
who was someone in my family, my aunt or something, she always says, you know, I might have
screwed up or raising my kids, but they don't make a book about this. Like how to parent 101.
It's kind of like that. It's like a business version of that. Like how to business. Okay. Love it.
Definitely solving a problem. Here's what I was thinking. The new year's coming. A lot of people are
going to have a new year's resolution to start a business, right? Or a side hustle, right? The problem that
you outline absolutely exists. How to incorporate, where to incorporate, which one to choose? Do I even
incorporate? Do I need a customer first? Do I need a business plan first? I hear Chris talks about this,
Nick talks about this. Alex Formosie talks about this. Like, what do I do? Where do I start?
I thought about doing like an eight to 12 week email based cohort, like a course. Okay.
But every Monday, that email is going to show up. And it's, it's an email with instruct.
like a to-do list, but it's also an accountability partner.
And then on Sunday, you get another email for follow-up with a form to fill out saying like,
here's what I did.
I found my first customer this week.
I got a logo this week.
I got a website this week.
And there is a cost to it.
Let's say it's $200 for the whole thing.
It starts on January 1st.
But every week you fill out the type form or whatever it is and say, I did all my steps.
you get a refunded a proportional amount.
So by the end of it, if you do everything you're supposed to do,
and you, that means you actually have a business with paying customers.
And as a cherry on top, you didn't pay anything for any of that.
You get a full refund.
But statistically speaking, most people would not do most of it.
They would flame out after a couple weeks.
So it could still be a profitable business while still earning the goodwill of doing it for free.
because if you do what you say you're going to do, it's free.
If you don't, you pay.
So you know who Jason Calcanus is on?
Oh, yeah.
It's, yeah.
So he has an accelerator, incubator.
I can't remember exactly what it's called, but it's Founder University.
I think it's the name of it, found a university.
And it costs money.
But if you complete it, you get a full refund.
Yeah.
Because his thing is like, hey, I want you to have skin in the game.
And it's kind of like that, right?
But he, he's not really doing it to make money.
He's trying to get people into his ecosystem, et cetera.
would you make money off of this or are you just like that would be a cool thing it would be it would be a cool
thing to do and it would make money yeah because a certain percentage of them are not and it's not
all or nothing right you make 50% of the way done and that's interesting and i think people should
be rewarded for doing some of it and not necessarily all of it you know yeah i don't know i don't know
it would i would think it would be in the hundreds i think that's a freaking great idea
Yeah.
And for me, the business in a box thing would be probably building out some programmatic
SEO around like what should I do to, you know, start my business.
Oh, that's a great idea.
Yeah.
That's a great idea.
When should I incorporate?
Like all those Google terms and I'm sure that there are like other high ranking things,
but it would just be, hey, here's like the $50 packet, DIY, like do it yourself, business
in a box.
And then it would just literally just be passive.
You create it one time and it's just spitting out based on programmatic SEO.
This is just such a perfect example of how like the distribution idea can make the business idea a thousand times better.
Because I think programmatic SEO would be just the most brilliant way to build that business because of all of the endless combinations of words and sentences.
How do I incorporate my barber business, tree care business, HVAC business,
Plumbing. Just for that one, just incorporate, you have thousands of landing pages,
thousands of search terms that people are sure. How do I find customers for my thousand,
like how do I, you have thousands of questions that people are searching for. And then
thousands. So theoretically, you have millions of landing pages answering questions that people
are asking that could all have a link to a paid product. What's been really fun about the last
like six months is this was a whole world that I didn't know. And I'm still like way behind where
you are but it's fun to have these conversations now where I'm like somewhat understanding some of
the distribution and growth hack portions of it because then like I can actually add value
whereas before it was just like that sounds like a cool idea but the distribution piece like you
said is like so important to understand like how okay cool great idea how are you going to get it out there
yeah oh oh man that's really good I like that a lot oh Chris all right I want you to give me some ideas
I'm going to plant you with an idea, and I want you to give me some implementation ideas.
Hear me with your best show.
So 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 distilled.distill.io.
And what distilled does?
I'm going to pull it up.
It notifies you if something on a website changed.
changes. Okay. Now, you can tell by the way they're pushing their website that most people use it
for ticket sales. Okay. So as a family, we are going to the Alabama Auburn game at the end of the
month, the Iron Bowl. And I'm cheap. I don't want to buy tickets when they're 200 bucks each.
I want to buy them when they're 100 bucks each. But when are tickets the cheapest? Now, if it's a
concert ticket, statistically speaking, you're better off waiting until the last minute. But with sports
tickets, it can range.
Like Auburn, if they're ranked in two weeks, they're going to be more expensive.
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 ticket master and stuff up and all those guys, they don't really have services for
this because that doesn't work to their incentivization.
They want you to buy right now.
And that's why they're always going to tell you, going fast, price will be higher tomorrow,
right?
And so you can use distill.
the I.O to notify, to be notified when a ticket price drops for any event, for any section,
for any seat. Super cool. It's a little unintuitive to use. Like, it's kind of tricky to use.
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. Maybe it only works on Ticketmaster, only works on StubHub. It's $10 a year.
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. It could be something like that, like tens of dollars a year for a service.
But more broadly speaking, how could you use this to make money? Who's using Distilledaio?
right now. Like who are there? They have to be a company, right? Yeah, I'm sure that they have like a target
demographic or a target customer. That's what I was saying is like it, they're, the messaging on
their website is like towards the ticket, 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. I'm probably,
going to already be in them like let's say it's a food product that just dropped or it's a it's a new
blog article that Chris posts right like I'm going to be on his email on his email 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 yeah I'll give you some ideas so
let's say it's a shop if I say okay come back next Friday for part two and
you know what please leave me a five-star review while you're at it because i need some more of
those love you guys
