The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - How to Start a $90K/Month Cold Email Agency. Ep #057

Episode Date: August 26, 2024

I sat down with Sam Thompson, a true growth hacker at his core. We talked about how to start a cold emailing agency. We also talked about a dozen different tools and using cold email to grow your own business in unique ways, like sending targeted campaigns from 100 to 10 million emails using AI tools. Sam shares strategies on leveraging influencers to sell high-ticket products with no upfront costs, ensuring demand before you invest a dollar.  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---01:48 Meet Sam Thompson: Growth Hacker Extraordinaire03:30 Sam's Superpower: Connecting Puzzle Pieces07:24 The Power of Cold Email Automation08:52 Innovative Business Ideas with Cold Email15:59 Mass Cold Email Campaigns: A Case Study21:46 Exploring Cold Email Strategies23:01 The Power of Facebook Ads23:53 Neon Bears: A Case Study26:09 Capitalizing on Viral Products27:47 Innovative Business Models30:59 Perfume Vending Business Update31:48 High Ticket Product Strategies34:23 Building a Sales Business41:34 Final Thoughts and Reflections

Here's another idea. So you talk about like going on the cold email side, going niche, going small. He's only emailing 100 people. It works great. I think there's room for a cold email agency that goes completely the opposite direction. Because I think most email agencies today are in the middle where it's like they're going to email thousands of people a month. But now they have tools like mail scale instantly where like with a couple clicks, you can create a hundred email accounts, right? With a hundred different proxies. You can warm up all. hundred over the 21 day period. And then you can be sending 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 cold emails a month or a day, whatever you

want. Like use your imagination. I'm going to try this actually with, welcome to the Kerner office. You are going to love today's episode because I interviewed my friend Sam Thompson and he is a growth hacker at his core. He has all kinds of knowledge about tools and growth hacking tools and cold emailing and all this. So we talked a lot about starting.

cold emailing agency. We talked about a dozen different tools, not just a cold emailing agency, but using cold email to grow your own business in unique ways. Maybe you have an agency that sends 100 emails a month that's highly niche, highly targeted. Maybe you have one that sends 10 million emails a month, which is no one's really doing, but with AI is possible now. Anyway, so we talk a lot about cold emailing, some growth hacks. And then we talk about using influencers to sell high ticket products where you never have to buy it. You can gauge demand before you invest a dollar. It was like pure content, pure meat, no milk all throughout this. Here's a couple acronyms that he used that you might not know.

Tam is total addressable market. CAC is customer acquisition cost. LTV is lifetime value. Anyway, enjoy. Okay, well, Sam, welcome to the Kerner office. This is my friend Sam, and we were office mates. And then he moved back to California. And I love Sam because he's a lot like myself.

And I love myself as well. And Sam, why don't you tell us who you are and what you're about? Sick, dude. This is always my least favorite part of being on any podcast ever. How do I describe what I do? Been in internet entrepreneurship since I was like 15 flipping iPhones on eBay. We're at 27 now. Basically, I've touched everything under the sun when it comes to online business with so many successes and failures along the way. Right now, super focused on running Quicker HQ, which is a holding company of digital service providers, mostly in web, SEO and PPC, a mix of traditional service and then tech enabled. I wouldn't push it into software quite yet, but getting there, but tech enabled service for

sure. And then also co-founder of CreativeOS, which is a software that helps e-commerce brands, essentially provide templates for ad creatives and emails and landing pages to help them improve conversion rates full funnel. And so those are really the two things that I'm focused on right now. there's a handful of business ideas that that I want to go and chase, but my mantra for 2024 is no new businesses. And so we're trying to, I know, dude, it's led to many sleepless nights and just waking up sweating. But it's, yeah, I need to get these couple things where they need to go and then we'll

start to explore new options. Well, that gives you lots of opportunities to talk about what you're not going to launch on this podcast. You know, dude, you know, I'm in. We'll see if someone else can take advantage. Okay. What would you say your superpower is in life or in business or both? I'd say probably connecting puzzle pieces is like I think I have a pretty good view of like how things plugged together, which like you can see very tangibly in a bunch of like the no code stuff. Right. Like that's a very direct example of like, oh, tool A meets tool B to create whatever result. But I think that like living through that logic is what allows me to do everything. Because I've seen a lot of stuff and so I can just see how things.

play into each other a little bit better than I think some people can and then being able just go and execute on that. Yeah. I mean, we've had so many conversations where I told you an idea and you're like, have you thought about trying this or attacking it this way or this tool or this person on Instagram? You need to go copy what he's doing. Yeah. So I would agree you're good at that.

Kind of like a, you know, they have super connectors for people and you're like a super connector for ideas and tools, right? All the little tools and hacks. I'm over here like, I know, have you heard of Shopify? And you're like, Chrome. I was like how we met actually. You were like, we were talking about Shopify. And I was like, oh, have you ever heard of this tool?

And then remember we were at Holco. Was it Holcom? No. At Main Street. At Main Street. And you were like, dude, this thing has improved our stuff by 70%. And I was like, oh, amped. One combo.

Yeah. Amped. Yeah. And now Mr. Beast uses amped. Look at that, dude. Look at that. I'm an unofficial advisor. to Mr. Beast. I'm going to go ahead and announce it right now because this is actually true. Sam told me

about this pop-up software called Amped in-person at Main Street. We went and installed on our website. It worked amazingly. Like the e-commerce manager for Mr. Beast followed me on Twitter. I DMed him. He was like, hey, what's up, man? He DM me first, which was amazing. And he's like, hey, I love your content. And I was like, hey, wow. Okay, cool. And I made him a loom about Amped. And I was like, dude, you got to try this on Mr. Beast's website. He never responds. And then three months later, there's this big announcement about how his website's crushing it because of ham. And so that came from you through me, through that guy,

all the way to Mr. Beast. Now Mr. Beast is making even more billions of dollars. And we're not because of your idea. You know what it is, dude? It's okay. It's all good karma. Also, by the way, this is not an ad for AMP, but I think they're doing something shady.

Like, this is obviously not an ad for AMM now. But like, we, so we're cheap. And we, Amped is like $400 a month and my partner is even more cheap than I am. And he was like, I'm going to see if I can recreate what this pop up does in Clavio. And he did. And it's the same thing. It's four questions, same questions, same answers. You click it strategically introduced friction.

And it's like 40% less conversion rate. We've had the same thing. My buddy Bobby Callahan from Ratentia, who is the one that told me about Amt. So he's actually the unofficial advisor to Mr. Peace. Yeah, he runs a retentio agency. They're like one of the best retention agencies and direct consumer. And he had his team do the exact same thing for multiple clients, like direct one to one dupe and could never create the results and has no idea what it's about.

Dude, you know what I think it is? And I don't know how they would pull this off without people knowing. But I think they're just doing what retention does. And that's just like snag emails on the back end through cookies without like the, and technically it's legal. right. That's why retention is this huge business. They would be out of business if it were against the Cans Bam Act or whatever. But I think they're just supplementing.

I think they're just supplementing with what else could it be? I don't know. Like the only thing that we've thought was like like speed. But I don't know if it'd have that big of an impact if it's like, you know. Yeah. Like I don't know. I don't know. It's an interesting one. I haven't done the deep dive, but I'll ping Bobby and let you know what's up. Okay.

All right. I want to start with something that I just learned this morning. Okay. Yeah. A little idea. So I have a podcast, obviously. And I get emails probably once a day from people asking. It's basically an agency for people trying to get other podcasters on my podcast to grow their podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. And these cold emails are the worst. And so, hey, my name is Sharon from so and so. It's like 700 words. And they just plug in the name of my podcast, which is the Kerner Office dash business ideas slash growth hack. So it's like, I really love listening to the Kerner Office dash business ideas slash growth. It's like stop. Just stop. I do the same thing.

My LinkedIn name, I put the rocket ship emoji in it. So then I know when someone just scrapes it, I'm just getting the scrape because then the rocket shows up in email. Well, when I was anonymous on Twitter, my name was mobile home park guy. My first name was mobile. And people would say, hey, mobile, how are you doing today? Yeah. Anyway. So I get these emails and it's always from the same lady named Sharon.

And they're like giving the whole bio of this person that they're representing. Anyway, I just got the scoop on this agency. Oh, got it. She has 60 customers paying $1,500 a month to guarantee four podcast interviews a month. Yeah. 90 grand a month, basically all profit from a cold email automation. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm not mad about it. I'm not mad. I mean, I am, but I'm not. So here's my genius, innovative business idea, exactly copy that except better. That's it. For sure. For sure.

It's like, yeah, I would do it. I mean, like the piece of guaranteeing the placements is the interesting part. I do think like on a macro though, I mean, we've had some conversations about my buddy Jack, but like applying cold email to like very specific use cases like that. Talk about the connector thing. You can keep them anonymous if you want. I'll keep them anonymous. You can change the industry or whatever.

Yeah, so basically he's a sick dude. I'm trying to think about how to talk about this anonymously, dude. It's so hard. That's okay. I'm trying to think, I got it. I got it. Okay. You ready?

Yeah. He helps international students get into the schools that they're trying to get into. Yeah, yeah. That's perfect. He basically applies B2B cold email outreach techniques and strategies to help international students connect with advisors at major major universities. But it's a cold email agency like at the bones, right? Like it's just a cold email agency.

Like we're going to set up your flows. We're going to write your personalized lines. We're going to do, right, all of the stuff that is cold email. But instead of trying to generate leads for a business the same way everybody else is, he's doing it for students. And he's the brilliance is he's selling it to desperate parents. I say desperate, but like highly motivated parents that will do anything. to get their kid into the school that they want to get him into, right?

Right. And so it's like, name your price. And what is he charging? Between 3 and 5K per kid. And he only does that niche. So if I go to him and say, hey, I do cold email for podcasting, it's, no, I don't do that. No, not at all. And so it's the same for the podcast one where it's cold email applied to a very specific use case.

And I think there's more like, you know what I mean? I think there's, it goes back to the question you said before we started recording. Like there's people that are in specific niches that like that's valuable to. I think one one is like that I've been thinking about is like a lower priced version of that for creators. Right. Like if you can go get a creator that has 30,000 followers on Instagram and 30,000 on TikTok that wants to get brand deals. right and you just build out a directory of all of the email addresses of all the direct to consumer brands and say this person likes fitness and fashion and be able to send

X number of cold emails on behalf of the influencer to try to connect them with the brand rep I think that you could charge 500 bucks a month to send 100 emails a month to a creator right and there's hundreds of thousands of people that want to monetize their social like that And so like it's that same model of it's like what we used to do for like musicians. Like everyone thinks about Facebook ads is like lead gen, right? But there's dudes out there that are running Facebook ad agencies to help musicians get more streams. Right. And it's just like applying the same skill set to an underserved market.

Like how do you connect that? And it can happen in all different growth channels times a billion different industries. I agree. And it's somewhat risk. because it's unproven, right? Like, it's always sexy on the surface to say, I'm going to take this and put it over here because no one's doing it. Well, either no one's doing it because they haven't done it yet and it's going to crush

or because people have tried it and it didn't work. So they went back to what's already working, right? Right. How much is your buddy on this cold email agency making? How many customers does you have last you check? I think he's, he probably averages between like 40 and 60 a month, like, consistent. Yeah.

I'm assuming 80 to 90% margin. Like his team is super lean. Like it's not like he just uses cold email tools. Like it's not. And he's also not doing like mass. Like these are targeted emails to the specific schools that these international students want to get into. And so he's only really sending 100 emails for them. And so it's not.

Yeah, it's not the most complicated thing. What I like about that business is you can just recycle the same emails. You've got all the emails for the schools or the recruiters or who, ever. And with a lot of cold email agencies, you can sell someone, but then they're like, okay, where are my leads? And you're like, you don't have leads? Oh, can you get me my leads? It's like, that's a whole other business. But with this, that question's already answered. He's just using the same leads for everyone. What I don't like about that business is the fact that the churn is just by nature of the business, probably high because two, three months, you're good,

you're done. You've succeeded. And he doesn't, he actually doesn't sell it as recurrent. It's one time. Oh, wow. He goes, he goes high. ticket one-time purchase. I like it. Because of that, right? Like the moment the student gets into the school, like they, they don't need them anymore. Yeah. So he just was like, we're not going to deal with that.

The thing that I really like about that business is it's a forever replenishing tan. Yeah. There you go. Like forever. What you lose in recurring, you gain in more people entering every semester. Every. Yeah. Like unless people are going to stop having kids that they want to send to college, like he's got, I don't know what it is in the U.S., but like millions and millions of people that are now becoming his target market that weren't two years ago.

And when he sees success with the oldest kid, his LTV a year and a half later, right? And so like over, over time, I mean, look, we've had long conversations. I think he could run a very, very substantial business. It already is. Like, yeah. It's really like his first business. Like, well,

to me, a good analogy would be like a massage envy, which is like highly recurring. You sign up for membership. People keep coming back and that's what makes it a great business versus a zip line business where it's like there's no recurring business. But you get to enjoy new tourists coming into town. Right.

Every day, every month. Right. There's always a fresh crop of people. Right. They're just tradeoffs. And what tradeoffs do you want to make? It's the question. Here's another idea.

So you talked about going on the cold email side, going niche, going small. He's only emailing 100 people. It works great. I think there's room for a cold email agency that goes completely the opposite direction. Because I think most email agencies today are in the middle where it's like they're going to email thousands of people a month. But now they have tools like mail scale instantly where like with a couple clicks, you you can create 100 email accounts, right, with 100 different proxies. You can warm up all 100 over the 21 day period.

And then you can be sending 10,000, 20,000, 50,000 cold emails a month or a day, whatever you want. Like use your imagination. I'm going to try this actually with, so I'm launching another podcast. We haven't even talked about this. Not a business podcast. It's total nonprofit. It's for my religion.

And I'm going to be interviewing parents of grown children to talk about it. It's called How'd You Do It? Like tell me how you raised your kids and kept them in the faith, right? So I'm not going to monetize it or anything, but I want to grow it. I want people to hear it, right? Right. And so I'm not going to tell you how, but I have acquired the list of like hundreds of thousands of alumni for any university, right, based on whatever school they went to. And so to grow the podcast, I'm going to use cold email, which no one does because the economics don't really make sense, right?

Right. It's like, hey, subscribe to my podcast. It's not even monetized. And your click rate is 2%. Like it doesn't make sense. But I think with these new AI tools out there, it does. And so I'm going to basically email everyone that ever went to BYU and say like, hey, did you go to BYU? Just a simple question.

And it's like, okay, who is this? And my response rate should be like 20 to 30 percent because I'll follow up. And then once they say yes, it's like, okay, awesome. I assume you listen to podcasts. I just launched us. I'm really passionate about. I don't monetize it. So it's funny.

Like you use that as a sales pitch that I don't make any money on this. That's my sales pitch is you should listen to this because I have nothing to gain other than your eternal life. Right. And then it's like and then once they respond, I just have an auto responder to say, awesome. Thank you so much. Here's a link to it. So like it's strategically introduced friction.

You don't send a link right up front. That could get you blacklisted anyway. You start a conversation. once you qualify them, then you have an automation, just send a link to the podcast. What do you think? I'm viving on that for sure. I like that scale. Have you seen my Twitter thread the send 1.4 million cold emails in 11 days?

I think so. Yeah, using just Google. Did you do that with like your Instagram agency business? Yeah, like way back in the day, like 20. And G-Mass and G-Mass. Yeah, G-Mass. Yeah, we had like 50 G-Suite accounts that were sent. sending between 1,000 and 2,000 emails programmatically a day using Google Sheets and Gmas.

I don't remember all the stats off the top of my head. And the reality on that sort of thing is it has to be a mass market product. You're run out of emails. Right. Like it has to be like literally, you know, you can't go sling some niche service to that. And for us it was a community for like content creators. And so similar to you, I won't get into the details of how we acquired the list, but had a fat list of all of these Instagram creators and just literally blasted them all.

And all of it was leading into products that were to support people and getting brand deals. And so our subject line was brand opportunity for at their username. And so it wasn't like, right? Like it wasn't like a pitch to do. anything. It was just like, hey, we came across your profile. We have a couple brands that we thought would be a good fit. If you're interested, apply here to give us your details. And we had, we sent like 1.4 million. I want to say we had over 100,000 applications and like 30 or 40,000 people end up in the community working with brands, growing, buying our digital products,

signing up for the software, like the whole ecosystem that we had. And so, yeah, I think mass cold email is an interesting game. It's just very dependent on the market. The size of the market. Yeah. Like, in your use case, that's brilliant. That's perfect. Like, I'd run that game.

Yeah. I mean, and you could do it with, you could do with a lot of stuff. But you agree that a lot of people aren't doing that. Like, there are indie hackers out there like you and I that are doing it for themselves. But I think most agencies are like, all right, I have this B2B SaaS customer. I'm going to get them five appointments a week and I'm going to charge four grand a month for that. Yeah. Yeah. And I think a lot of that also, though, that comes down. If you were going to sell that as an agency, your TAM as the agency is small. And I think that's a challenge of like who's going to hire

that agency to go that mass market. If I had to pick one, if I was going to go serve an agency, which like there's guys that do this. It would be micro-influencer seeding for e-com brands. Oh, yeah. You know, there's guys like, yeah, like, hey, let me send you free, like a free something. And like the guys over at, I forget the name of their company, kinship. Kinship does something similar to that, which like maybe they don't anymore, but that was like loosely the vibe for a while was like, we're going to go and just like blast emails

out to all these micro-influencers. Josh Durham on Twitter. has played in that world a little bit. That would be like if I was going to start an agency for Mass Cold Email, it would be in like sparking UGC affiliate programs for Ecom brands. Like we're going to go hit everybody that has. User generated content for Ecom brands would be my play. Because you can see like Quagga House, H-U-E-G-A,

I don't know if I'm saying that right. Their hat brand or like just a lifestyle brand, they run all of their Facebook ads to join. their affiliate program. And then when you join their affiliate program, you get a code. You get a coupon code for your first purchase. And so that's their actual top of funnel. Like I get ad.

I have not bought a product from them. The only ads that I ever see from them are to join their ambassador program. And so they're using paid to go and pursue that. Cold is just another channel that can lever into that same mechanism. And so that would be if I had to like pick an industry to go and do mass cold email for, I think e-com is the way. That's so interesting that their funnel is that because, shoot, you might spend $40 or $50 to find an affiliate. And then how many of those affiliates are actually going to do stuff for you?

I don't know. And what percentage of them, they've been running those ads for 12 months. Like, I've talked about this with my friends last year. Like, it's definitely a thing. And it's like what percentage of applicants end up buying? What's the average LTV of an affiliate versus, or, an ambassador versus just a standard customer, right? Like, I'd be so, I'd love to see their data.

I just, I want to know. That's the stuff that's interesting to me. I just love these industries that are like, there's just so much opportunity still out there. And these are the things I've talked about here on the pod, like roll-ups. There's like 3,000 different industries and maybe like 45 of them have been rolled up. Okay. So we got a long way to go.

We've got cold email agencies, right? There's 3,000 different industries and like cold email agencies are selling actively into like 1% of them, right? And then you've got Facebook ads. Going in the Facebook ad library and just shopping around, typing in random keywords and seeing, okay, t-shirt, t-shirt, course, course, got it, got, got. Oh, interesting. This guy is selling toolshed plans on with a Facebook ad. Huh. I could go to Etsy and buy toolshed plans for $5. He's selling the same thing for $50. Huh. Like there are so many things you can sell with Facebook and Google ads that just haven't been thought about yet.

Right. Right. And so then when you see something that breaks your frame, it's like, all right, this person's losing money and they just have, they don't know it yet. Or they're just learning and this is a test and it won't be around in a week. Or, wow, I can tell by the comments that this ad has been running the same ad for 18 months. Directly in the ad library, you can see it where it's like, oh, this one's been cruising for a minute. I mean, that's what happened with me on bear. years, right? When I saw that, I was like looking for competitors.

Tell us about that business and experience. Just briefly, what was your thesis there? I didn't even have one, dude. I was just on the internet like I do. What did you see on Facebook? I saw an actual local business, a brick and mortar in L.A. that was essentially saying there's like these acrylic or like plastic bear molds, right? And you could go to their shop and it was like a date night activity where you can go and paint these bears, right? And it was dope. Like you can pour the paint over it. And it was like this very visual experience. And they were, I think they're at like 20 or 30,000 followers. They've had a couple posts go viral. I was like, oh, like, that's a sick product. I don't want to have to go in to their physical location in LA to do this. I just want to be able to buy it on the internet and do

it at my house. And so I just went over to Handy Dandy Alley Express and started doing some digging and found the kits for those bears. Did they look the exact same? Is this where the shop was buying them from? Yeah, literally. Like, yeah, directly the exact same situation. Let me just make sure I have this right. It was a one retail local business in L.A.

They were going viral for this product that they only had on site. They didn't sell them online at all. No, you're like, okay. You could buy the blank bear on like the in the footer on their website. Like it wasn't, you can buy paint. You couldn't like it was not. they weren't focused on ecom at all. They're good at art, bad at business.

Yeah. Because it's like if you have anything go viral on Instagram, like a lot of times, like, let's say you have an HVAC business and you have a funny video go or like you see those car, those car businesses are going viral, right? Or they'll remix an Instagram video and then like, hey, come to Cleveland Dodge Chevrolet. Like you can't do anything with that. Right. It's cool.

It's funny. But if you have a retail business that sell stuff in a boutique that could sell online, And you go viral, as in 99% of people viewing that could never go to your store and you don't capitalize on it. Then it just means like you're in it for the love of the game and not for business. And that's fine. But for people like us, anyway, keep going. I want to play. I'm like, I'll play online.

That's fine. And so, yeah, just I found the product on Ali Express with eight different kits with eight different colors. I went over to Solo Drop, which is a Shopify plug in for one product stores that are conversion optimized. Big fan of those guys over there. Built the store in an afternoon, made some ad creatives with Creative OS. Of course. Obviously. And then launched the ads and did, I don't know, a couple thousand bucks in the first week at about break-even between ad spending cogs.

And this was four or five months ago. And definitely could have turned on the Jets. I was like, I took the videos from that local. business and turn those into ads. I just put an overlay over their caption to like just test it to see what was going on. Or in like Googled fluid bears is like what they're technically called. Gender fluid bears. Yeah, yeah, yeah, the most gender fluid.

But yeah, and so ran those and KAC was good. Like margin could have been improved if I went to like not just drop shipping them directly off Ali Express. Like if I was going to go buy 5,000 bears, I could get them for like a buck 50 each. And so margin could have gone up. But yeah, just ended up being like not worth the time at the time. Yeah, the opportunity cost was too long. Yeah, like I was like, am I really like we have.

Yeah, I can't be I can't be put in two hours a day into like really turning this into a thing. But it's the same thing where like there's just people selling stuff through channels that like you don't even realize this happening. And then you go like, oh wait, like I can apply my own skill sets of that. Like how do you play? Yeah. Okay. Here's an idea that just came to me. So back to the, so this is the whole framework of finding a physical location business that is doing really well on social media and not trying to capitalize on it, right?

There's probably no shortage of those. Back to my example of these car dealerships that will take a viral video format and then they'll remix it three, four, six seconds into it and then say, hey, they'll kind of comment on it. Have you seen that? And they'll say, come down to, you know, Chrysler Dodge Chevrolet, we have a deal like, okay, that's hilarious, but no one's coming. into your car dealership. You could round up all the car dealerships doing that. You could build a concierge, a concierge, which is a thing. There's one called Car Edge. I had this business myself 10 years ago with Nick. It was called Presto Cars. You go to the auctions. People pay you $800 to $1,000 to $1,000. They say, this is the car I want. Here's my price range. There's no haggling.

You buy it a wholesale and you ship it around the country to them, right? And they save a few grand, and they don't have to have the typical in-store experience, which everyone hates. You can go to these guys and just say, hey, you don't need to do anything. Just post videos about us every now and then. Or you could just white label it. You say, hey, Cleveland Chevy Dodge now offers concierge's car buying service around the country and they don't do anything. They just white label the whole service to one company in the middle of the country that is going to auctions and buying cars and shipping it all over the country. Yeah, I love it. I love it. That's like a no brainer. It's a no brainer because these dealerships are never going to do that themselves. No, they never touch it. Like they don't even,

And they don't even have that thought. You know what I mean? They're just like, like their whole team is sitting there like, how do we get more people to walk in the door tomorrow? Right. Not like how we maximize value creation off the back of this traffic. Like that's just not how people think most people. But I'm with that.

I think there's so many businesses like that. I also have been thinking about like when you talk about entrepreneurship and like people stepping into it for the first time, I think there's like a lot of glory that goes into wanting to run this massive enterprise. and like, oh, I'm going to go make millions and millions of dollars, which like, not saying that shouldn't be the goal. But I think like a business like that is perfect, like a car salesman to go and run who's probably making 80 to 120 a year. Do I think that he could go net 300 to 400 by doing that?

Yeah. Yeah. And it's not like, oh, you're going to go net $5 million a year off this. Like you could. But like, do I think that there's like. Like, there's so many businesses like that that people could go and just like actually double their income and have the freedom to like run your own thing that where it doesn't have to be massive. It doesn't have to be. You don't have to raise VC.

Like you could be a single dude that just doing that and go change your life in a less meaning less meaningful way of like, oh, I'm going to go make five million bucks. But it's like, dude, for the homie that's making 80 grand a year, like making two. hundred matters. Doing the same stuff. The same thing. Like you're still selling cars, gee. Like, just do it in a little bit more of an efficient manner that like, you know. Dude, so I told you about this perfume vending business, right?

A little bit. I told you you about this perfume. No, no, I'm saying like the updates. Yes. Yeah, yeah. So I've already talked to all about. So I won't go into it. Long story short, Sam is the one that told me about this perfume vending business back

in March. I reached out to them. We started a conversation. It fell apart, not fell apart, but we just didn't follow up. I moved on to something else. And then I went to my content library two weeks ago. I saw this video and I was like, I'm going to kind of remix this and say, oh, I think you should do this. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I post a video. It goes viral. Thousands of people reach out wanting to buy these machines, reach out to the company, put up a website, capture all the leads. Now, my best sales guy has been having calls all week. We've sent out six figures worth of invoices. Nothing has been paid yet, I will say, but it's looking really good. Anyway, that's not the point. The point of this is to say one thing that I'm going to start testing is finding other high-ticket products like that on Instagram that already has a video that goes viral.

For instance, I saw one that is like the most rant. This is a product that no one would ever think of. It is a wood drying machine. Like it's a mobile kiln for drying out wood. Because like if you want to have a barbecue restaurant, you can't just cut down an oak tree and throw it in the smoker. You got to season it and it takes six months. or you put it in a kiln and you can dry it over a couple days, right? Time is money.

And so there are businesses that do this. But these guys sell this thing and it's 20 grand. And what's unique about it is it attaches to a 20 or 40 foot shipping container. Interesting. Yeah. And they've had these videos go, and I say viral loosely, they've gotten like 500,000 views on Instagram. But like how many of those are actually going to buy? Very few.

And so I'm starting to experiment. since the perfume vending one went viral with taking videos like that, green screening myself over him and saying stuff like, this one hasn't come out yet, but like, here's how I'd attack this industry. I'd go partner with all the tree trimming businesses. I'd buy one of these, put it in my backyard, buy a shipping container for three grand and say, hey, instead of paying $300 to the dump to dump off all your oak trees, I'll take him for free.

Drop them off at my property. You dry them yourself and you sell them to barbecue restaurants. So your cost of goods sold is basically zero or even negative. like don't pay the dump 300, pay me 100. So you get paid to take the product for free. So it's like a negative cogs business model. And then you throw it in this dryer, which this new technology makes this whole business model possible. Otherwise, it's not even viable.

And then I know I've read articles that there's a huge shortage of barbecue smoking wood right now. And so the prices are through the roof per cord. And so there's more demand than supply. And so then you just go, now you're in the distribution business. you could sell the wood to a current distributor because they need more supply too, so you don't have to actually deliver it to a treat your meat business. Anyway, the idea isn't even that. The idea is to take videos of high ticket products that enable, like enable entrepreneurship and add value to the video in the hopes that one in 10 goes viral. And then as I see it start to go

viral, I do exactly what I did. I put up. Yeah, same. Yeah, I make a landing page just to capture the leads. and then it's like forcing a partnership. And then you reach out to the owner and say, hey, I have all these leads. Do you want to buy the leads? Do you want me to sell these products? And I think it'd be really interesting if I could build just a sales business, like selling all of these products.

All that stuff. You ever watch workaholics? Yeah. So like that's what they do. That's what the three guys and workaholics do in their call center. They're just always selling stupid stuff. stuff, whatever they can. The other one you can do is you ever seen those mobile wall printers?

I already, I did a video on that last week, dude. There we go, dude. Stuff like that. It didn't take off, but yeah. And then all of a sudden, you've got, you've got thousands of people that want to spend $8 grand on a mobile wall printer. And a big reason they want to buy it is because in 20 seconds, you gave them a good idea of how to use it.

Right, right. It versus just the thing itself. Yeah. And then you capture the leads and you go to the, business and they're just like, dude, screw you. I don't care about you. We'll sell it. Because what happened with me is tons of people went, they literally just Googled perfume vending machine. And they reached out to the manufacturer. And of course they're going to. And so they're swamped with leads. So they know that my video was effective. And it just depends on, do you find a company

that wants to play ball or do you find a company that's prideful? And they're like, dude, you don't know anything about our product. We don't want to work with you. It's like, okay, then I'm going to throw these leads away or sell them to your competitor. Right. Like one of the options. Yeah, it's like forcing a partnership. Anyway, what do you think of that? I like it. I think it's wrapping the bizop info product sale pipeline around a more physical business asset, which I like, right? Because like there's people that do that on the digital product side all the time, right? Here's how to launch an Airbnb business. Here's how to launch a painting company. Here's how to launch a plumbing shop. here, right? And you can go buy these curriculums, right, of like how to go and do it versus like,

people will choose doing those instead of buying a franchise, right? Like, they'll be like, I'll rather pay 10K for the blueprint, right? Gym launch is very similar, right? But the interesting part about this is if you're tying it to the actual thing, right? Oh, I'm actually going to sell you the coffee cart. I'm going to sell you the smoker. I'm going to sell you the perfume vending machine. Like, whatever the actual asset is that can be monetized, it's an interesting one. Like, I bet you there's more, there's like a lot of those out there. There's got it. Like, it's like instead of selling like everyone's doing, not everyone, but there's a handful of people that are trying to help you launch like a window cleaning business or like a screen cleaning

business specifically. And it's like the screen cleaning machine, like the actual device, right? is like 800 bucks, $1,600, something like that. And it's like, instead of just selling them the information on how to go and start it, being like,

I'll sell you the thing. This is what you need to go and do it. It's like, it's almost like starter kits, like physical starter kits, which is dope, which like even though, like you want to talk deeper,

like we should be going to the guys that sell the curriculums. Right? Here's like, what curriculum? We're going to, we're going to help you start a home service cleaning business, a home cleaning business, right? You go to them and say, look, dude, for everyone that buys your $6,000 program, I also want to sell them this $1,200 starter pack that includes the mops, that includes the whatever,

right? Like, whatever the things are, like the physical things that they're, you already know that they're going to go buy if they're going to go and do this. Like, here's your window cleaning starter clip. You have the mop. You have the screen cleaner. You have the ba-da-bada, it all fits in the back of a Prius. You know what I mean?

Like, you can go and sell this pack. And, like, you have the most captive audience. You just give the people that sell the course a cut on, like it's affiliate, right? Like, it's kind of sick, dude. Like business starterkits.com and it's physical products. Oh. Little physical product business. And then you just go to everyone that's slinging.

I don't know, dude. I'll Venmo you whatever half the price. I bet it's open. Business starter kits.com. It's premium. Two grand. You know, dude, I don't hate it. I know.

Little Shopify store. It's just small business. Yeah, like, yeah, we'll sell you the smoker. We'll sell you the perfume vending machine. We'll sell you the whatever. Yep. And everything is just white labeled. Like once an order is placed, you just outsource it.

Yeah. You just ship them 17 things from Ali Express. I don't hate it, dude. You know? Yeah. What's cool about social media is like, they talked about this on MFM where they said like, usually you're not looking for a home run. Like everyone's looking for a silver bullet.

They're looking for a home run. But at the end of the day, like consistency is what wins the game. Right. There's not going to be, you're not going to have an overnight success, 99% of the time. But what's cool about like social media is every time you post. you're up to bat, right? It's like, this could be a home run. This could be a grand slam.

And it's like, I've got time today. Let's post 10 times. If my viral rate is 5%, let's post 20 times a day and get one a day. And then it's like, only once it goes viral, then the legwork begins of like, all right, let's buy the domain. Let's put up the card. Let's do the Zapier. Let's reach out to the manufacturer.

Tell them it's about to get crazy. Can we get an exclusive distributorship here in Texas or the U.S.? Because what's ideal is if the manufacturer does not sell directly. They only sell through distributors. Right. That's kind of hard to find. But when you do find it, everyone reaches out around you. And then they're like, no, you got to go talk to Chris.

We don't sell directly. Yeah. Yeah. I love it. I think that's the move. And I like that logic, dude. It's like, it's similar like where you're like, we're going to go test a bunch of stuff on the lowest barrier to entry, which for you is posting a TikTok or an Instagram video.

And then once the date. data tells you what's good, then you go and do it, which is like very similar strategically to what we do with unlimited content, right? Where we're like, yo, we're going to go put out 30 posts. Two or three of those are going to carry the most weight. And those are the ones that then we are going to go put a bunch of effort into to turn into a conversion funnel. Like we're not going to go, you know, all these other SEO agencies are like, we're going

to write four really, really, really good articles. And it's like, yeah, that's awesome. But you don't know if they're going to get any traffic. Statistically, maybe none of us. them do well. Right. It's like let's go put it. It's like shotgun then sniper, right? Let's go put as much out there and then we'll know where the targets are and then go lock in. It's that same thing. And I think a lot of people like in the indie hacker community specifically will go and build these products and then be like, oh, it's built. Now I need to market it. And it's like,

I'm not, it's like people think about product market fit flip where they like build this product. And then they try to like get it into the market. And I'm like, why don't you just go to the market first. They'll tell you what they want. And you get guaranteed product market fit because you just built what they told you to. Yep. That's going to be one of the chapters in my book. Sell it before you have it. Anyway, like that has been a lot of meat, a lot of content. The retention on this episode better be killing it. So if you like Sam, I like Sam. I like Sam. And I want to have them back on again. So let me know in the comments. Sam, where can we find you? On Twitter. I'm Sam Thompson. Is it I am or I'm? I'm. I've been thinking about changing it. But like, it's gotten me

this far. So yeah, you know, it's a tough one. You got to keep it. So yeah, Sam's an awesome follow. And I, I just remember what I was going to say. You're talking about unlimited content and how it's a spray and prey approach. It's funny because you're doing, we're using you for our pet cremation stuff. And you pumped out a ton of articles for us. And the one that is getting 90% of the traffic is signs your dog with diabetes is dying for whatever reason. Everyone's searching for that. Dude, you know, there's been a handful of those. We have a, another client in the dog space. And it's like a dog poop picking up business.

And one of the articles that's doing the best for them is why do dogs eat cat poop? Absolutely crushing. That's so weird. So good. So good. Oh, man. Don't, brother. I appreciate it.

All right. Thanks for your time. Yeah. We'll talk. Peace. Okay. Let me know in the comments if I should have Sam back on because all we do is talk business ideas and growth hacks.

Thanks a lot.