The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Make Money by Cloning Others Using AI. Ep. #78

Episode Date: October 14, 2024

I sat down with my good friend Sam Thompson (https://x.com/ImSamThompson) and in this episode we talk about using AI to clone yourself, clone others, and make money by offering access to those clones. We also cover some cool new digital product opportunities and new tech business ideas. Sam lives in the digital startup world, and he's the perfect balance to our usual guests who focus on physical products or service businesses.Timestamps 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 Introduction and Guest Reintroduction00:28 Diving into Digital Cloning and AI01:08 Exploring Digital Product Opportunities01:32 Challenges and Strategies in Digital Entrepreneurship03:42 Monetizing Digital Products at Scale13:45 The Potential of AI in Content Creation21:29 Building an SMS-Based Cohort System21:48 Challenges and Solutions in Retention23:02 Pricing Strategies for Subscription Services24:19 Importance of Activation in Consumer Products25:44 Leveraging Data for Business Growth33:01 Exploring Niche Data Products33:24 Unbundling Craigslist: New Business Opportunities38:30 Cyber Leads for Home Service Businesses42:01 Conclusion and Final Thoughts

Welcome to the Kerner Office, the show for more business ideas and growth strategies and deep dives, than your brain even has the space to comprehend. I'm Chris Kerner and today I had my good friend Sam Thompson back on the pod. And guys, think about it. I only have people back on the pod because their pods do well because you guys like them and you listen to them all the way through and you say, Chris, please bring Shannon or Sam or Nick or Connor back on. That's why he's back on because they're great guests. Sam and I talked about a bunch of things such as cloning, as in digital cloning using AI, clone yourself, clone others, charge people for access to yours or someone else's clone, be an agent for people that might have data worth cloning. We talked about some cool digital product opportunities, some new tech out there, lots of cool business ideas.

Sam lives in the digital world when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship. So he is a good counterbalance to myself and other guests that are more likely to talk about physical products. or physical service businesses or sweaty startups. So I like to have a little bit of everything on the pod. So enjoy. Share with a friend of the friend. And we'll see you next time. So we got friend of the pod back on, Sam Thompson.

We're going to riff on some ideas. I have no idea what this episode will bring. We didn't share any notes. He doesn't know what I've got. I don't know what he's got. How you doing, Sam? Oh, another day. Another dataset.

Can't complain, dude. Just out here ripping ideas left and right, taking sales calls, sending emails, dude. Life of a hustler, bro. That's right. These are all the shiny objects that we don't chase, that someone should. Oh, the absolute battle to not chase these things is so real. A lot of times the shiny object is more profitable or promising than what you're doing.

That's the hard part is especially in early stage stuff, especially like services, like all of that. Like the margin hit that you take once you get north of 20 or 30K a month is it's meaningful and you actually feel it and it changes what the business is where it's like, hey, is this like becoming an enterprise value play where this thing can exist without me? Or am I trying to stack as much cash as humanly possible right now as an individual? And like that dynamic has been weird with the shiny object of like, I can go make monthly personally more money by doing this thing. But I don't want to say there's no value in it, but like much less than what I currently do. That's been the thought process. we're doing big things that quicker and unlimited and all of that.

Yeah, I could go probably spend that time and energy on something else. That would be higher profit margins or like more personal income based in a shorter amount of time. But no matter what, I'm always going to hit the point that unlimited that. We're like, oh, are we going to scale this or like, am I going to be a glorified freelancer forever running this little thing? And it's like the decision making process there.

So interesting. And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter which path you choose because compounding doesn't care. You just got to keep grinding. You just got to keep doing the thing, dude. It was the conversation I had with Connor Avenue the other day. I was like, dude, what am I going to spend my time on? If I want to add stuff, I want to like, I got to take stuff off my plate. And he was like, why?

Just work harder. I was like, Parkinson's law. Like, shoot, dude, you're not wrong. There you go. Sometimes you just got to do it. Hit me with something. Give me a hit. Oh, man, dude.

I think, so I was talking to, I was talking to a buddy of mine the other night, successful dude, sold his agency, actually funny enough, getting kind of into the global talent space, the whole thing. And we were having a similar conversation. And we were talking about something that you and I've talked about before, which is selling digital products at scale, right? And I think the world has gotten used to that a little bit more with these people that are talking about selling products on Etsy.

And it's like, hey, we're going to go build like a Notion template that you can go and buy. Or similar to like on our last episode, the custom signature thing. Like what are these things that are like super low cogs that you can scale up with paid ads? Custom signature cogs are $2. They're charging us 80. And I think there's a world that can exist there in the digital product space. And I think I wrote a tweet on this two years ago about. the easiest way to make 100K a year.

It might be putting out AI generated content templates, whatever that means, running ads, pushing on Etsy and just slinging these digital products where it's like you can charge $40 for a new mom organization Notion template. Right? You can create it to be super niche down and like just go absolutely sling that. on any of these marketplaces that exists for that sort of stuff. Then you layer in paid ads. Etsy has their own advertising product.

There's stuff you can do to kind of scale that up. I'm interested in that space of you could pick any niche. How to bake the perfect muffin, right? Or like there's so many little things like that. Sure, you're not going to go launch a $2,500 course on that. But do I think you could get 3,000 moms in middle America? to buy your notion template for 30 bucks and go make 100 grand. I do.

100%. At that price point, $30 to $50, if you had to rely on paid ads, is that expensive enough to make a profit or do you need a higher ticket offer down the funnel? I understand exactly what you're saying. It's going to be so case by case, right? Like, you might be able to, in the fitness niche, you might be able to charge more, but you're caught or your, KAC will be higher cost of acquisition.

I mean, dude, there's a billion niches for this. Like, you could create a daily prayer book, right? Where it's like, yep, there's 365 prayer slash journal prompts in this thing. And it's meant for high school seniors, right? Like, you can just niche down into it. And it's like, you just have to play the game. Yeah, you know what I'm saying? There's so many channels.

It's like the thing that I like about digital products, especially for people that are like stepping into entrepreneurship and are specifically interested in like online digital internet stuff, the weight on inventory fulfillment, servicing stuff. Like all of that is just disappears. And I think that it forces people like the exercise of launching a or multi. to pull digital products and trying to find channels that are profitable and work. I think if someone spent six months doing that, testing different niches, different products, different positionings, I think what they would learn in that six months about advertising, how customers think, niche selection, product positioning. I just think that there's so much that could be derived out of that experience,

not to mention, like, again, you could spend, it's like we talk about this, the signatures. It's like even if you're selling a product for 30 bucks and you can reliably acquire a customer for $20, digital product, you can go and spend $2,000 a day on ads, which sounds like a lot to some people, but you're not going to jump into doing that. But like you spend $2,000 and you earn $3,000. If you do that every single day, you just made $30,000 that month, which is like, $7,000. simplifying it, but at the end of the day, it's like if you can find a product that has a big enough market, and the nice thing with digital products is like you can manipulate your offer

by typing different words, right? Yeah. You can change a daily journal from being a mom's daily journal to a high school daily journal to it like in five clicks, like not even to mention bringing AI into the aquatic. Like you can go make 15 digital products tonight. Like, please. create an ebook about ABC and D and like go test this stuff. And so I think it's the lesson. I think people do this all the time with drop shipping products. They'll spend six to 12 months

sourcing these random things from China like your bears, right? And the testing sourcing, all right. I broke even. I lost money. I made a little money. And then they find a winner and then they go all in, which is great. But why not do the exact same thing for a digital product? And then you don't have any of that fulfillment risk or headache. Even if you're drop shipping, you're technically not fulfilling it. You got to wait two weeks. You're going to have refund issues. Stripe is going to cancel you.

It is a grind. You've got to develop the Shopify site. So I like that framework. I especially, I know you've seen this. So I won't even ask if you have. But you know those ads, they're all copying each other. They have the same copy. And it's like, it's not cheap.

It's not cheap because, have you seen that? Yeah, I've seen them. Dude, I'm going to read one. I got it pulled up right here. It's not cheap. It's true. Some full-sized fridges cost less than this mini-fridge. Yes, we could have made it cheaper, but then it'd be cheap.

It wouldn't sound silent in your living room. It wouldn't be made with steel that's three times thicker. It wouldn't double as a bar cart. It wouldn't come with a 10-year warranty. It wouldn't have a 4.95 rating. I've won GQ's home awards. It looked cheap. It'd feel cheap.

It'd work cheap. And cheap sucks. Like, those ads kill it. So good. So good. Why not do the same thing for a digital product? So back to the mom's idea. I was just emailing with a woman who I might have her on the pod.

She makes $650,000 a year consulting new moms on sleep schedules. She's like a sleep consultant for new moms and getting their babies to sleep through the night. I've had three or four friends pay people for that. Yeah. It's a good offer. And so instead of selling a product that solves the same thing, make it a tenth of the price, which is still $300 instead of $3,000, and that's your ad copy. It's like it's not cheap.

Yeah, it's $300 for a PDF. Yeah, we own that. But how expensive is your sleep or your sanity or your mental clarity or your mental health, right? And just going in, it's like, well, yeah, what? I'm supposed to be sleeping a third of my day. I'm only sleeping a tenth of my day because of this baby. I need to get the baby.

Of course, $300 is worth it. So just take the same strategy with physical products. and make your digital $30 product 10 times more expensive. I'm not mad. Why not? Yeah, I think that it's, I think that tracks. Like,

and the nice part is like, with that model, you can just test all of it, right? Yeah, like go build two landing pages, one with it priced at 79, one that it's priced at 300.

Run the ads. See which one is profitable. See what your cack is. Like, play the exact same game. You don't even need to. You can just use, use, like most people don't use Shopify for digital sales, but you can. You certainly can. And Shopify

has apps that enable you to A, B, test prices. Right. That way, you don't need multiple landing pages, right? Right. I think one, it's the, probably the least amount of friction to start that business, right? Like, you are not relying on booking calls. You're not relying on inventory. You're not relying on a team, right? Like, it is you and a PDF and you are just trying to sell that PDF. And like long tail, like short term, you're learning, you're testing, you're making some cash. Longtail, the goal really would be like, don't always just try to sell something that will sell, but like selling niches that you have some expertise are interest in. Because if you can get people, if you can get 3,000 moms to buy a guide about X, Y, or Z,

you now have 300 moms that are customers of yours that you can also sell other things. And so it's go step into whatever niche you're looking to step into and be like, hey, I'm really interested in like helping roofers do whatever. Cool, go sell a digital product to roofers and just try to break even top of funnel. And then you can go and sell them services or you can go and build the software for them or you can go and do kind of whatever. And it's like it's the V1 of like what. ClickFunnels did, right? Russell Brunson basically was like,

we're going to run this digital product called dot com secrets as a book that you can buy. If you want to make more money on the internet, you buy dot com secrets. And then on the back end of that was, I mean, they have a slew of digital products that are higher ticket, but also their software. The number one thing that entrepreneurs like that are starting out have to prove

to themselves is that they can acquire customers. That's it. If you can get leads and get sales, it's like I would say that's the, it's the 80-20, right? If you can't get leads, the business dies. So prove that you can do that, learn how to do that. Like how it's like what we're doing with unlimited. Like we're proving that I can book 20 calls a week with Facebook ads.

Yeah. Like it makes the rest of the business 10 times easier because there's top of funnel revenue. Like growing. Like the rest of it solves itself because of that. Yeah. All right. I just got an idea as you were talking. So you heard of Delphi AI?

I don't think so. There's a few companies doing this. They basically enable you to clone yourself. It's like an LLM. It's kind of pointed more towards people making content on the internet as opposed to non-contract creators. Yeah. I think it's really interesting.

I tested this nine months ago. I had an account manager. I was a beta user. I was not impressed. It was very manual. I send them my Google Drive links, YouTube videos, and it just wasn't great. But I think it's gotten a ton better, and it's only going to get better. For sure.

And so I want to use it eventually to upload all my stuff. And then maybe, you know, you can have me as a business partner for 20 bucks a month, as opposed to having to give an actual business partner equity. And you can just chat with me whenever you want, right? What tool would you use if I did this? What tool would you use it did that? How should I structure my partnership with this real business partner? and you'll just pull on everything I've said about business partnerships or anything, right?

So that's cool. But why not be like an agent, kind of like a talent agent by finding people that will never hear about Delphi for years or anything like Delphi? Maybe they're creating a lot of content and doing it all for them. And really, you're just like uploading all their content and like prompt engineering a little bit and packaging it nicely and pricing it and then taking like a 30% cut of their lifetime learning. It's like, yeah.

I was looking at the top 1,000 school groups. And we had a podcast about this, Nick and I a few weeks ago. And like the 13th most profitable school group, S-K-O-L, it was like 80 grand a month some jazz guitarist in Spain named Mark Andre, who teaches jazz guitar. And it's like he's on, he's at YouTube, he has a course. You could do that. I call this the ethical bait and switch where you reach out to them and you're like, hey, I put an LLM together of all of your content.

So I cloned you. Hey, by the way, I cloned you. Would you like to see your clone? Yeah. And then once they respond, you're like, oh, shoot, I better clone them. Yeah, you go. And then because, you know, only 5% of people will respond. So then you clone them.

And then it's like, here's the pitch. You're going to give me your course. I'll buy your course. Give it to me for free, whatever. I'll go to all your publicly facing YouTube channels. I'll take all of your content you've ever made, ever, stuff in your Google Drive that you never shared. I'll prompt engineer.

I'll make sure that, like, you don't sound like an idiot when people ask you questions. And then we're going to charge 20 bucks a month to it. You're going to pitch it to your followers. I'm going to take 30% and I'll run the whole business. What do you think? Oh, in love with it. I own a domain that I had a very similar concept for like two years ago.

Try signal.com, dude, cut through the noise. Shiny object that was never pursued. Not really. We tried it. The whole basis of it. I did this thing with Connor Abney a while ago. That was basically like texting as a service. I did a live chat of that, right?

Like Casey where I built this thing, but there was a real person on the back of it. And AI now makes that 10 times more possible, where it's like, I mean, there's so many of those tools that are like intro. Intro is like that or mentor pass, right? Where it's like you can sign up and get direct access to one of these thought leaders,

expert, CEOs, whatever, to get their insights. The challenge with that as somebody, I like know a bunch of guys that are on intro as experts or on mentor past, they don't have the time. And so it's like, yeah, that's a good offer. You come in and say, look,

I'm going to grab all of your content and turn you into a model that allows for you to support people at scale. And we can drop the price because of it. Instead of you charging 500 bucks for a 30 minute call, you can charge 20 bucks a month for people. to be able to just message with you, that's not really you. It's like, it's again, it's 80, 20. It's like they'll get the majority of the value out of that experience with an AI

version of you. Yeah, they might not get some of the details. But like, they're also paying 5% of what it would cost. And so I think it's like, I think it's a good model one as a, as an operator to go and do that. I also think it gets fun on like a, on a, on a huge. humanity level. I think it like content already allows for shared learning to happen a lot faster. As a community of entrepreneurs, we are learning 10 times faster because everyone is sharing

content about what they're learning. And so like I can learn from your mistakes so that I don't make them. And that's awesome. It's moving entrepreneurship forward as a societal thing. But I think doing this where it's like taking content, it's just creating a bridge between the content that exists and helping people apply it to very specific problems that they have. Right. Like, oh, I know Chris has talked about this on the pod, but I don't know what episode. And like, and I need this for myself. Right, right.

Same. Where I'm like, I don't want to go like, love you to death. You're my dog. The only episodes that I watch fully are the ones that I'm on. Right. And so it's like, but I'm like, I want to know what you and Nick are talking about and how it can help me on. X, Y, and Z. The challenge is there's just 15 of my friends that have podcasts like that, and I don't have

that much time. And I'm like number 13 on the priority scale. Hey, I get it. Look, it is what it is. No, you're moving up the ranks, dude. Okay, cool, cool. But yeah. And so I do think, I think that there is a place for them in the content, consulting space.

I think that that is cool. And someone's going to do it. They obviously are. Yeah. I want like every listener. Every time we talk about like content or making content, all of these principles can be applied by working with or through a content creator. Because 90 plus percent of people will never create content, which is fine.

But 100% of people has the opportunity wide open to them to partner with someone that's doing it to leverage their distribution, their audience. Literally. Here's another idea. This could be like an upsell or it could be the same product. So you partner with. Mark Andre to sell jazz guitar coaching. And it doesn't even replace the course.

It doesn't cannibalize it. It's just different. And then the upsell is an accountability partner for Mark Andre. And I think this needs to be done via text message, via IMS. Yeah, SMS. Specifically for I. Because if it's a standalone app, it's like, that's hard. It's hard to get.

How many messaging apps do we have? Too many. But if it's just a number, it's like Chris Kernner's cell phone number. We're just texting. We're born. Hey, man, I'm running this Facebook ads campaign. My CPM is good for this industry. What would I say to that?

Right? Yep. And it could also be an accountability. But hey, have you built your MVP yet? Hey, have you gotten your first customer today yet? Hey, you know, mixing in personal stories. Dude, where's your bias for action? Because when I did this, I launched it in three hours.

And I have, you know what I'm saying? Like, oh, gosh. It's like. Yeah. It's like, dude, you've been trying to LLC for three means. Like, what are we doing? Right. Yeah.

If AI girlfriends are blowing up, then why not AI business partners? Yeah. AI mentors. No, I'm not. Trust. I'm on the same way. If we've done it, we've proven that offer works with a non-AI person, right? Like, we've put, I did it back when I was working at work week because they have all their creators, right?

And so we built this system that basically, like, would allow for people to sign. sign up for SMS-based cohorts with these experts, right? And so it's like a little bit more structured than just like an available chatbot, right? Because like we tried that and the challenge was retention or like you, not even retention. Usage was weird because you weren't prompting anything, right? Versus saying, hey, in the next month of your access to this, we're going to share ABC and B every other day. and then you have the opportunity to talk to the creator directly. And we just, I mean, dude, the MVP was so simple.

It was like a landing page with a stripe checkout. Once they paid, they gave us their phone number and we added them to open phone. And we just ran the whole thing out of open phone. I would have used, I would have used Send Blue, which is an awesome shout out to the boys over there. I think you might have sold that company, but it's an I message API. And so the messages come through blue. And so your read rate goes up, your reply rate goes up, like all of the things. We did one or two cohorts and I don't know, maybe made 10 grand in the month of trying it on the back of one creator.

Just like, AI was not where it was two years ago when I did that. How did it go though? Like how was the reception or the churn? It was good. Yeah. I mean, because we, well, we, so we only did it as a one time buy. We didn't do monthly recurring, which I think is important for stuff like this. Like I have, I've been thinking about it.

a lot on just pricing because like unlimited pricing like I'm just paying attention to what pricing does to things and I think that for something like that let's just say the goal is to sell it for 20 bucks a month I think that you're better off just only offering annual pricing right we're like dude the the big thing that I hate watching entrepreneurs deal with and we deal with it all the time it's like churn like battling churn on specifically low-ticket consumer products. Like this, if this was 20 bucks a month, we deal with it on Creative OS. Like, it's just an interesting one.

And so it's like if you're already going to put all this money and effort behind getting them to buy, I would recommend doing only an annual plan at 250. Because it's not like your annual plan's three grand. It's like, it's 250. Yeah. Get the support for a year from X, Y, or Z person for 299 or 249. or whatever that is. And I don't think you see like a crazy drop in conversion rate between 20 bucks a month

versus 249 for the year. But then you don't have to battle churn as aggressively, like emotionally. Yeah. You know what I mean? I think it's especially important for something like this because if someone doesn't adapt in that first month to really chatting with the clone. Yeah. They're totally gone.

And you have to just like on subscription, people don't think about that stuff. They're like, oh, just the MRR number is going up. And it's like, bro, like, I promise you should be paying attention to your 30 day cohort, 90 day cohort. And like really locking in on the act like activation for this, that first seven days, like the amount of effort and energy and intentionality that you need to put into the activation of like, how do you turn somebody that's not used to talking to an AI via SMS into somebody that does that regularly? How do you train them, teach them, help them learn how to extract that value? I mean, even the one that you just sent with Delphi, Delphi, like when you open up one of the profiles, it gives you a list of like, here's 15 sample questions to ask, click on one of them. Right. That's an activation mechanism for them.

Yeah. How do we get them to start the conversation? You got to give them ideas. Right. Like, and learn. I mean, even chat GPT has those in there. Like you open a new chat. There's like four options.

Right. And so it's like, yeah, understanding that on a low ticket consumer product like that, getting your product so ingrained in their normal behavior is, is almost more challenging than acquiring them at the top. Like finding the user is not the hard part. I put that tweet out yesterday.

It's like all like the two growth levers for early stage businesses are not necessarily like your KAC and CPA. Like it's your retention and referral. Like it's. it's so product-led, especially when you have recurring services because you are trying to keep them around. You're selling a one-time product as a cacta-o-v gang. But on recurring, like, you have to market, even on websites, you have to market and sell the entire time. You don't stop selling and marketing your product when somebody signs up.

Yeah. You have to keep reminding them of the value and keep providing. the value and keep helping them extract the value if you're trying to build something that's like sustainable longer term. Or you should just go sell a course that you just sell at three grand and get your cash out. The best way to learn how to do all these things is to go sign up for something like Zapier or Pipe Drive or like a software that's growing so fast and just look at their funnel. What are they doing? What are they hitting you with and when? What type of messaging and why? It's like the Facebook rule.

Zapiers is perfect, well. Yeah. The sooner you add 10 friends on Facebook, the less likely you are to turn. It's the same principle. And that is the definition of activation. That was their metric. What does activation mean? Like on this, it would be you just recognize the pattern where it's like, all right,

they sign up. If people that send more than 10 messages to the bot in the first 48 hours are X percentage more likely to pay for the second month. Okay, cool. How do we incentivize them to send those 10 messages in a way that makes sense, right? Like, you have to just force the function. I think the genius of this idea is it makes activation even easier

because of the fact that it's a two-way conversation. If I sign up for Zapier and I start getting five spam emails for them a day, if you try this, Zapp, if you try this, have you tried our web hooks, if you tried this, tables, it's like, dude, I'm done. But if I sign up for a service that is designed to message to it and from me, then it's not going to be intrusive if I get a text saying, hey, why don't you start a stump grinding business today? Here's how I would do it.

Right. It's just like planting ideas like, man, this guy's actually giving me a lot of value. Huh. Okay. It's a chat. It's not a spam email. Right. Yeah.

Especially if you can get the context and like, yeah, all of that. I think that's, it's interesting. And it's not technically the most challenging to build. You could build that entire thing off Zapier and like an afternoon. If you want to and you're listening to this, go to Twitter advance search and just type in Hey Casey.com. And you'll see my entire threat on how to build this exact thing. Just plug into AI. That's it.

You're good. It's like a lot of these creators like Mr. Beast, they're tackling the hardest industries. Right? Consumer package goods. chocolate bars, lunchables. Like, if Mr. V's had some sort of a software product, like I feel like that's where

creators are going to have to head to actually make money is having a SaaS product, and this could be it. Personalized to each of them. If you're a beauty influencer, then beauty tips. Right. U.S. upload a picture, use company you I.

upload a selfie every morning and be like, all right, what shade of makeup should I put on today? Yeah. Here's my outfit. What should I do? with my eyeliner. You know, I shadow.

Because, like, we're moving away from what looks cool to what does my favorite creator think I should do? Or what would they wear today? Or what would they look like today? You know? Yeah. I'm not mad at that. Oh, man.

It's testable for sure. Hmm. Yeah. I mean, you could test it without building it. You know what I mean? Like, just build an LP with an email for a wait list and be like, I'm launching this, have a direct. conversation with me whenever you want via i message sign up for the wait list instead of asking for

their email get their phone number duh right and then just plop them into a conversation with you yo what's up i'm chris and just see what happens oh man and then the upsells after that are endless well you also just have a direct communication channel right everyone sitting here being like you have to have a newsletter because what if the algo changes? I'm like, I don't want to run a newsletter. I just want everyone's phone number. I want to text you. Like, yeah.

I forget the stats. The next frontier. I mean, dude, I'm like 98% open rate. Yeah, I'm long on SMS for sure, especially with stuff like send blue. Like the I message API is a hack because you're not. The issue with SMS is really like the character limits. Right. It's like it gets, I forget the number.

but it's 20 times as expensive to send SMS as it is email. Email is so cheap. You can go have 10,000 contacts on ConvertKit or Beehive or whatever for like 100 bucks. But like when Twilio is charging you 0.04 cents in SMS, send to your list of 10,000 people. It's going to cost you 40 bucks or 400 bucks or whatever the math is. And so it's like you'd go to an IMessage API where it's not SMS based. You don't have the character limits. You don't have the MMS triple credit stuff.

And so I think that's a bigger unlock than people think. Just because you could send me an 1800 word text via I message that doesn't count as 10 credits and cost you 40 cents to actually send me. You know what I mean? Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting one. I think it'd be cool if you could.

Yeah. If like, let's say in my example, I would upload a clone of. me and then as like a bonus or maybe even included free, it's like all of Gary V's content or something. You'd have trademark issues and all that. But all of whatever XYZ business content that's like a thousand times more content than what I'm providing. And you can have a little toggle if it was in an app in the app or you could just preface a text message with a symbol or something.

Right. And it's like, all right, do I want to ask Chris or do I want to ask business database? You know what I'm saying? Yeah. because it's like okay that's what Chris thinks what does this guy think or what is the general public thing or what is like the entrepreneurship subreddit think not that they're going to let you scrape their whole subreddit but you get what I'm saying right like they'll let us yeah as if I ask permission right I'm saying I don't know that's so funny well I like all right so

That's two ideas. I think there's a lot of places you can go with both of those, right? Use that as the seed and go play. Like, I think that's pretty dope. All right. What else you got for me? You got anything good? There's like a broad stroke concept that I'm really interested in.

Everyone's pretty familiar with the decoupling of Craigslist, right? Have you seen that graphic where it's like Craigslist is broken out, unbundling, yeah, whatever. So it's like the home sharing or renting turn into Airbnb and this turned into that and just ride sharing and dating and yeah right all of it and so it's like craigslist was the OG all of these products came out of that and so what i started think about was like what are what's today's craigslist right like what are businesses that are just so big that could be unbundled to some degree and i think it's data like i think hyper specific data products for two reasons they function similar to

like similarly to the digital ones right like hey this is low cogs for you to run there's so many no code tools that are literally designed for database as a service companies like Adala air table you do it in a mobile air table

like creative OS is a version of that right where it's like we're software but it's a data company we just our data asset is creative templates that are high performance warming for Facebook ads. And so like the infrastructure for that, technically speaking, is not super challenging. It's just how do you display, organize, and allow for people to discover the data.

And then I look at companies like Zoom Info or Apollo or whatever, right, or get cyber leads. There's these companies that like have all of these massive lead lists that have basically just scraped all of LinkedIn. And the value prop that they're coming to you with is crunch base or whatever. Right. All of that. And so they come in and they say our value prop is twofold, but they really focus on the quantity of the data. If you go read these guys' websites, they're like, we have 10 plus million contacts. We have 100 million contacts.

We have 30 million contacts. It means it all sucks. Right. And I'm like, but all, dude, these companies just keep paying because they can get the data out of those 30 million contacts that they're looking for. Those products are also generally speaking a little bit more expensive. Zoom info specifically serves a much more enterprise like B2B world, but we want that.

Same with built with is another one, dude. The number of times people hit me up saying, yo, can I borrow your built with account to grab one list? I just need one list. I don't want to pay $400 a month to get this one list. Do you have a paid account?

No, not anymore. Yeah, Richie Richer. And then I paid for it. And then everyone asked me. What is your turn is? Dude, I'm sure. Their turn is probably stupid. But also they're like serving a totally different customer, right?

But it's like, okay, what happens if I say, I have a bunch of relationships in the e-commerce agency space. And all these guys want more leads. Okay. I'm going to go on Upwork and I'm going to ask somebody to go scrape me the contact info of the top three decision makers on every single Shopify Plus store, right? Shopify Plus, they're $2,000 or more. Get that list. Put that list into Adalo, bubble, Webflow, Airtable, one of these glide apps, right? Like one of these kind of data visualization tools that like makes it easier. And then just put a paywall on that. Right? Where it's like, hey, for $2.99 a year, you can get access to every single top

performing e-com brands decision makers right and you just put a comparison like against apollo directly of like you're either going to pay them $1,500 a year for messy data that's hard to get to who you're looking for we have a very specific list of these people that you can now get access to for a third of the price on an annual basis again i would do annual pricing on that not monthly and then you go okay here's our tool. And then it's really like from a from an operator perspective, you only are really trying to do two things, which is one, maintain data quality. That's your product is the data itself. Because the actual software part of that is managed by a no code tool. You don't need to go make

updates. You don't have to add functionality that it's not your business, your data business. Maintain good business on or maintain good data and market it. Like that's it. And like data. as much as Apollo or Zoom info or any of these people, I don't want you to believe, like data is so commoditized. Like, you can just pop on Upwork and I promise for $100, you could get the data list of really anything you can.

Like literally, whatever. You could be like, I want every single roofing business in Texas. And I'd be like, all right, go to D7leadfinder.com and get it for $100. Like,

it's not hard to get that data. And so it's just putting a wrapper around it. it. And I think that there's opportunities for very niche specific database businesses to grow. Again, are they going to go compete with Zoom info from a billion dollar valuation perspective? No, do I think you could go make half a million dollars a year on it? Yeah. All right. I just got an idea.

That gave me a more specific idea with your framework. So cyber leads, they charge $200 bucks a month. And what's special about them is they're companies that really, recently raised money. Yes. Really tech companies that recently raised money. And Nick and I talked about this on hold co-brose of like, find a service that you can sell to those companies because they're just so eager to spend

money. Ready to go. Right. That just raised. Yeah. Which is why Cyber Leads works. Okay. Right.

So what about Cyber Leads for home service business owner cell phone numbers? Hi. Sorry. High ticket home service, American business owner, cell phone names and numbers. numbers. Okay. So you scrape all the roofers, scrub out all the landlines, okay? Yep. Scrap out all the septic companies, anything that costs thousands of dollars, fencing companies, painting companies, contractors, whatever. You only want the business owner's cell phone numbers. Every week, you get a new CSV in your inbox, fresh leads. And it's for agency owners. Because as an agency owner, you don't

freaking care if they're in Portland or Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. It doesn't matter. Right. But you want to talk to the owner. You want the decision maker. What do you think? Yeah. Where do I sign up? Yeah. It's like like for real though. Like that's it is like you are doing the data finding and cleaning on my behalf and I should pay you to do that because it's value. Right. It's like and you, it goes back to kind of the what we're talking about before we started recording. It's like you just built a better system that allows for you to go and do that better than I could do on my own. I don't want to pay you $5,000 a month for those leads, but I definitely will pay you $300 a month for those leads. There's that middle ground. It's funny. It's like in the unlimited content manifesto that I was

talking about. It's like that's what it is. I have this macro business thesis about where specifically the service and like tech bootstrap world ends up. And what I really think, it's like the old agency model is kind of broken. because of the commoditization of all of these tools, right? Like, you can go as a consumer or a business owner go sign up for Semrush. You can go sign up for D7 Lead Finder. You can go, you can very easily go do all that. And the market is educated enough to know that they can.

Right. Like, I open up a Semrush dashboard to do a site audit for somebody. They've already seen it. They have a Semrush account, right? Like, the tools doesn't solve the problem. It's like, what is the 80-20 of the lift? and then in your case, in that idea, it's the sourcing and cleaning of that data.

Your product is that you cleaned it and that they don't have to clean it themselves. It's done for them. Like we cleaned, you still have to call them, but we cleaned it. We did the hard part of it. And because we leveraged technology to do that,

it didn't cost us that much to do so we can pass those savings along to you while we still do it for you. And so it's like, again, affordable. transparent, done for you, and effective. If those couple of things can be achieved by a business, which they can now because tools exist and offshore labor makes things cheaper.

And if you're just intentional around it, that's perfect. It's a perfect idea. And you could apply that to any industry. Dude, I'm going to do this. I really like this, honestly. You should do it. Okay. Thanks for listening to Sam and I, Riff on some business ideas.

We'll have him on again soon. And we will see you next time.