The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Idea Improv: Turning Biz Ideas from Bad to Good in Real Time! Ep #066

Episode Date: September 16, 2024

I’m back with Sam Thompson for part two, where we get deeper into some really cool business ideas you could actually copy and make your own. In this episode, we talk about a niche content site called "View From Your Seat," where people take pictures of their stadium seats, a simple but highly profitable business. We also talk about the surprisingly lucrative world of custom signatures and why people are willing to pay for them, and more.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 Opening Highlights00:11 Niche Content Site and Custom Signature Business00:42 Paddle Boarding Business Idea02:26 Cycling and Squirrel Suit Concept06:22 What's a Good Score? Website Idea10:20 Where Do I Stand? Concept14:01 Affiliate Marketing and Tech Stack Optimization21:54 Exploring Niche Content Sites22:18 The Success of 'A View From My Seat'24:09 Monetization Strategies for Niche Sites28:47 Signature Templates: A Unique Product Category31:10 Business Models and Marketing Strategies42:28 Creative Ideas and Future Plans45:08 Conclusion and Contact Information

The hardest part for me about these segments is I want to listen to you so badly because what you're saying is so intelligent. But I cannot stop thinking about my way to hopefully level up what you're saying. Like, you know how I would grow this? I am listening. I heard all that. I am listening. Okay. You're going to like today.

Instead of talking about business ideas you could start, we talked about really cool business ideas that we found that you could copy. One is like a very niche content site. It's called View from Your Seat. where people take pictures of where they're sitting in a stadium. It's old school. It's low tech, but it just prints out money. And then we talked about a custom signature business industry. It's random.

I know, but we talked about how we could copy this, growth hacking, sending someone's custom signature to them via cold email to the type of person that would buy a custom signature. It's weird. I would never pay for this, but people do.

You're going to love it. Sam's great. We'll have them on again. Like, subscribe, share. We'll see you next time. Okay. So I got a dumb idea for you.

And I want you to make it good. Okay. Mm-hmm. You ready for it? I'm ready, dude. This has been in my business ideas list for years. So I went to Idaho a few years ago. I was paddle boarding.

You ever go paddle boarding? Yeah. So I think it's pretty boring. Once I went paddle boarding in a lake in Alabama that had the alligators in it and it was terrifying. Yeah, that's a hard pass. Yeah, hard pass. I was paddle boarding in a slow moving river in Idaho.

And it was a lot of fun because you're moving naturally, right? And one thing I noticed was when I like opened up my arms and the breeze came, I acted like a sail. Okay. And it pushed me faster. Like, oh, physics, cool. I'm like going full margarobro over here, right? Yeah, yeah. And so is there a world where you could build a stupid sail, like a physical sail that like you clip on your back or something that just helps you like, you don't need to be in a river?

most paddle boarders are in standing water, right? You go out on a lake and you can still paddle. You still get as much of a workout in as you want. But you got a little boost to make you go faster, make it more fun, whatever you think? Dude, I'm not mad. Have you seen the skydive suits? Like the squirrel skydive suits? Yep. It'd be a variation on that, dude. And I think you could. Yeah. I love this. I think that you could get away with different use cases. I think you could also sell that as a training device for like runners increase your wind resistance or or an acceleration for bikes if you're on the like going for a bike ride you could be like yo we'll get you the sale you get that wind on your back dude and we got you cruising you know what I mean all right

I got I got to paint a picture in your mind so all right we'll get back to the business idea but I like cycling right but I don't like doing it with others because the stereotype of cyclists being jerks is pretty true okay In my experience, a cyclist. So I go out by myself, I go on long bike rides. But when I do ride with others, when I have in the past, they have like their own language that they shout to each other, right? Like there'll be a whole peloton. There's like 50 of them.

And the guy in the front sees a pothole. And he's like, pot hole. And like they have this whole vocabulary. And that's one reason I don't like riding with them because I don't know what they're doing. And it freaks me out. Every time someone yells, I'm like, what's going? What's happening? Right.

Right. And so I'm just picturing all these cyclists as if they didn't look stupid enough, right? They're all wearing a squirrel suit in addition to their spandex. And the guy in the front just goes, elbows up. And they all do this. And they just catch this way. Shum. Oh, my gosh.

It would be so good. Yeah, it could be like ankle weights, a variation of ankle weights for runners or. I'm just saying, dude. Look, the shake weight sold like a hundred million dollars worth of shake weights. The stupider, the better. I'm just saying get yourself a resistance suit dude. Yeah. Because the algorithm loves comments.

And the more commenters say this is stupid. And that's like the most viral video ever is someone going for a jog in a squirrel suit. Like, dude, you get in there, you get a little bit of money, dude. You get Hussein Bolt as a spokesperson. You would say it like, dude, that's the reality though is you get a video of Yucin Bolt running one of those things. Bro, I promise you. Game over. Give him 49% of the.

business because that's what I'm saying dude just shoot and it's just that and you got to name it something stupid the name has to match it's got to be like this snuggy you know what I mean yeah it has to be like squirrel letics combined squirrel and athletics or squirrel speed it's so good it's so good I wonder how much did level it up I mean there's just so many use cases That is funny because I had this guy on my show once and he had an idea for a, it was like a space heater that was attached to a timer. So it's like when you wake up, your room would already be warm. And it made me think of Michael Scott's idea. Yes.

Yes. With the thing with the foreman. Yeah. And like we were kind of just ideating live and working through it. And it's like you don't need to develop this. Like you buy a space heater from China. You buy a timer from China. You put it together.

Even if there's no like soldering or technical, like you literally just put them together in one box. Maybe the only thing proprietary is your box and your branding on the box. And you just put the two things in the same. And he's like, what? You can't do that. There's nothing. I'm like, it doesn't matter. None of this matters.

Welcome to drop shipping, bro. That's Fugazi. You think Amazon cares that this isn't innovative? Right. No. And so how many things like that from China are like, you don't need a mold. You don't need R&D. You just take something and say, hey, this squirrel suit you have for the skyjumper's.

Like, can you just make it a little shorter there? Yeah, no problem. There's so many things like that. Literally, we'll do it in a week. Like, you can have a sample on your door in 30 days or less. Like, dude. Yeah, I like, I really want to get on a paddleboard right now. Dude, especially if we got one of our suits on.

I know. I mean, it was fun, man. It was literally fun. You're just getting blown around up. on the pedal board. Yeah, dude. No one's mad at all the ball. Well, for our first, like, I don't know what this segment is called, but the idea is to take something dumb to something smart and you-

Level-up. You shone brightly. Hey, dude. I'm shining through. I'm just trying to get another invite back. What can I say? All right. I got another one for you.

Yeah. So I'm embarrassed by this one. Okay. Because I got so excited about it in the moment. You ever have an idea and you're like, oh, this is it? And like, you buy a domain. And you do all that. And then the next morning, you start looking at mansions on Zilla.

Yeah. Yeah. And the next morning, you're like, I'm literally an idiot. There's nothing good about this idea. This was me. I never forget. I was in Hawaii with my family. And I think I was playing some dumb game on my phone.

Like Candy Crush, I don't know. And I got a really high score. And these games, they want you to think that you're really good. So you keep playing. And so I googled it. I was like, what's a good score for? I don't remember. Let's say it was Candy Crush.

Right. And this is embarrassing, but hey, we're being vulnerable here. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And there were no results. There were no. And it's like, what's a good score for this? Like, how do I know this is good? And so my idea in the moment is just simply a website, what's a good score.com. And it's just content. And I was, at first I was thinking like for games. It's just like programmatic. It's just content play. You get all the most popular games. You scrape them some steam or bestsellers, PlayStation, whatever. And then you just, what's good score for? X, Y, Z. and then you upload a bunch of data assuming that people are searching for this. And I think back then I did some research and people were. There wasn't like a, there was a random message board

for Fortnite or a subreddit, but there was no centralized place where people could like benchmark themselves in a game against other people. And then I thought, oh, maybe the bigger play here is like standardized tests. MCAT, L-SAT, SAT, A-C-T.

Spicy. Now, a lot of these people, like you're studying for the L-SAT, You kind of know what a good score is, right? But you might not know where you stand, right? What percentile are you? So it could be like a percentiles because everyone wants to know percentiles. I check my kids' percentiles for hiding weight like every month, right?

Yeah, yeah. And so I got so excited. Like me with my credit score, dude. There you go. Credit karma. Yeah. I need to bleep that out because they're not paying me to say that. No, dude.

Come on now. We got to get the affiliate code. So I remember I logged in a name cheap from the beach. I bought what's good score.com. I think I left Nick an audio message. And I was like, dude, you got to hear this. And I think I remember he was like, like, I'm sure it's great. He's like trying to be a good friend.

He's like, I've just not seen it yet. I need to think about it a little more. And then the next day, I was like, there's nothing good. That was so dumb. Okay, so make it good for me. What do we got? What do we got? How can we make this good?

Oh, that's a tough one to make good, bro. I like it. I think that like competitive benchmarking is like the backbone of a couple of couple of business like glass door right like it's the same sort of philosophy behind salaries right like where do i stack up against others maybe that's the domain where do i stand dot com where do i stand dot com yeah it's content aggregation of everyone needs to upload their own stuff it feels like there's a few sites that are like this like the rate my professors of the world right like i think the challenge with that one for where do i stand it's like what's the actual you

that the mass market gets out of that content. Rate my professor, it like, I get to change some of my decision making based on like what content other people have shared versus a very like, oh, where do I stand as just competitive benchmark? And on something like glass door works

because the impact of knowing that you are getting paid 20% less than all of your peers in the same location and the same thing gives you leverage to go make meaningful action on whatever. And it's a high value audience. Yeah, you know what I mean?

Versus like candy crush guys. It's like, is this a good score? Are people going to get that into participating in it on a third party versus just within the game itself? You know what I mean? I don't know. Yeah. Let me level it up then.

So forget games. Forget test scores. Okay. Where do I stand.com? Go back to your travel idea. Similar concept. Okay. I'm a 37-year-old white male living in the Northeast Dallas suburbs.

This is what I make per year. This is how many kids I have. These are the pills that I take or don't take. These are how many, I have three best friends. I have seven acquaintances. I've been divorced. Like, whatever. You lay it all out there.

You lay it bare. And it's like, where do I do? Where do I stand? How am I doing chat? Well, you fall underneath the national average of number of divorces in a lifetime. So like, you're doing it. And then it's like one of the most popular. subreddit is roast me, right? And so it's like, you can have a toggle. Yeah, you can have a toggle of like,

how brutal do you want me to be? It's like, be kind. Or you know what? Just be honest. Or it's just be like roast me. Right. And then it spits out all this data, like using data. And it's like, you're in the bottom 15%. Like you got to get your crap together. Here's how you could get your crap together affiliate link. You go to credit karma. You go to here. You go to here. Or it's like, you're doing really well. But have you thought about a wealth advisor? Here's a. So you're your wealth advisor, right? See, I like that one more. I think that goes viral.

Like, I think people would be so intrigued because I feel that way. Like, we've had a conversation about where like, I'm 27. I'm at a specific point in my career. And I don't always know how to compare, like, not that I'm trying to compare myself, but it's like outside of my immediate circle, I don't have a frame of reference around like how I'm pacing. And like in our conversation specifically like around income net worth and things like that. But like, where do I stand, dude?

Am I killing it? I can only do it off of like little bits of information, like top 1% income of age, right? Like I can use that as a benchmark. But having it all until a complete thing would be pretty dope. I think the Google trends and Google search data would prove out the fact that people want to know percentiles for income, right? I think that is a common thing to check. And if you Google any celebrity's name, what's like the first auto complete? It's like network or wife.

Yeah. So it's like it's playing on that. And it's kind of like a viral buzzfeed quiz, right? Plus AI. It would be like you'd have to put like celebrity where celebrity stand as the content strategy. And then the CTA would be like see how you compare. Oh. Like like yeah.

Dwayne the Rock Johnson is worth this much. He's had this much this. How do you compare load in all your information? Your BMI is 6% better than Oprah. Like you start to like actually. make the comparisons would be mad interesting. Or hey, think about it this way, like health and fitness. Where do I stand?

I'm 37 years old. Oh, upload your aura ring data. Connect to Strava. Connect to Garmin. Okay. I'm sure they have some tools like this, but it's like, okay, you're doing okay, Chris. You could do a little more cardio. You need more greens in your diet.

Here's a link to athletic greens. Yeah. Yeah, maybe that's it. Maybe it's like, where do I stand in all different types of categories, income, health, fitness, marriage, personal, mental health. relationships, everything. V1 of that doesn't even have to be based on user-generated stuff. You just train an LLM on all of the statistical data on every category that you want to talk about.

And then they fill out a type form. You pump it through Zapp, through chat, using that thing. And it pumps out a result. You could pump out a 50-page e-book for them on like, where do you stand on the seven made pillars of your life, health, wealth, relationship, kids, whatever you decide. Each has a prompt. Each creates a chapter.

It punts it all together. all using Zapier and you sling it. Here's another use case. So you familiar with the websites like partner stack? You heard of partner stack? Yeah, yeah. For sure. Like CJ, it's like an affiliate marketplaces, right?

Yes. So if I want an affiliate code to go shill Shopify, Shopify is going to say, hey, go to partner stack. They handle all that for us. You go to partner stack. You fill out your own profile. They approve you. It takes a day or two. Then they say you're approved.

Now you can get affiliate links for hundreds of companies, as opposed to have and go, all of them. Okay, so you go get approved a partner stack. And this recent for me, because I just got approved a partner stack, right? You go to partner stack and you export all of the affiliate links for tidy cow, type form, Shopify, everything. And then you go the tech route. Still, where do I stand?com? And it's like, hey, here's my tech stack. All right, I'm using tidy cal for this. Or I'm using Cal only for this. I'm using Google Workspace for this. And it's like, okay, it's pretty good. It could do better. TidyCal is actually 29 for lifetime. You're paying 30. 39 a month for Calumly.

Here's an affiliate link. Here's an affiliate link. Here's an affiliate link. And it's just, you don't even need to collect emails. It's just like a landing page with a form. It's like a business optimization bought. And it's free. Because you pick up all your rev on the back on a zoomed out kind of macro level of it.

I think the challenge with stuff like that comes down to providing enough context to improve the quality of the output. Because like take Callinley versus tidy cow. as an example. If you're optimizing for saving money, it's obvious that you would switch over if all else is equal. But if you're moving into like, how does this interact with other tools or how does this interact with the multiple team members or there's so much nuance that ends up happening over time that goes into the tool selection process that I'd be nervous, like, not nervous, but like aware of the fact that like you're not going to be able to capture all of that nuance. to make a high quality recommendation for everybody. Yeah. This is like the downside, not downside of AI, but like the risk of it is like overusing it,

where it might just be better as a blog post. Here's the stack that I would recommend. And the blog can just go viral versus building all this stuff to be like, input all your information. We'll give you a tool and we'll send you affiliate links. It's like, what if we just wrote a blog and made an affiliate link for it? Okay. Two more deviations of this idea.

Let's rip. So first of all, where do I stand.com is a premium domain for sale for $1,900. So honestly, that's not bad. I don't hate it. You could do any number of names for this. It doesn't have to be that. So one is to answer your question there, you could have much like the roast me, right? You have three toggle buttons.

On this, you could have three toggle buttons where it's like, what are you optimizing for, time savings, efficiency, or something else, right? or whatever it spits out, it's like, all right, this one's going to save you money, but it doesn't integrate with workspace. Okay, so buyer beware, but both options are affiliate links. So it doesn't care what you pick. Yeah. Right.

Yeah. That's, and have you heard of Andrew Wilkinson's new business? That's basically just like a referral site for influencers. I don't think so. Dude. Is it cool? Let me look at it up real quick. Dude, I don't know the name of this website, but I talked to someone that was like working

on it. And, well, I'll say that for after. So this website, all it does is it shows you like a day in the life of an influencer. Maybe Huberman, right? And it's like, I wake up and I get in my infrared sauna affiliate link. Infrared sauna affiliate link. And then I drink my Athletic Greens affiliate link. And then, and supposedly it's like what these influencers actually do, supposedly.

And it's just, it's like a blog article that's just static never changes. And there's just affiliates. That's it. like a standing website. That's sick. Yes. And I love stuff. I was talking to someone at Main Street that was working on it.

And they said it was, they were netting like 50 grand a month. Off affiliate. Yeah. Like that was the whole thing. And how passive is that? Right. Yeah. That's insane.

It could be a tool that like enables that for influencers where you connected to your IG account or something. And it's like, okay, here's your tech stack. Boom. Affiliate links. It could be in your link tree. It could do to. to tech stacks what link tree does to links.

But it's really just another link in your link tree. You see what I'm saying? It's like a standardized tech stack for anyone on the internet. Right. And the affiliate links could be affiliate links. Someone does need to do what Wilkinson is doing, but for companies. You can pull all of that data off of built with. Yeah.

Oh, yeah. Immediately. Like what tools does Salesforce use. Oh, we can do it with programmatic SEO and WebFlow Direct, dude. Come on. All the combinations of that. As I'm saying, all interlinked together, dual CMS companies paired with tools. They're just relational databases.

All have affiliate links that are ours. Here's what Salesforce uses. Here's what, I mean, even small companies. Here's what Texas snacks uses. Like Shopify plus Clavio, plus amps, plus, and it just creates this crazy web. And then you click on Clavio and go, here's all the other brands or businesses that we know uses this. Yeah.

It's like this tree, right? It's like Texas snacks uses Clavio. Click on Clavio. Clavio uses AMP, click on Amp. Amt uses and they're all affiliate links. It's all affiliate links that are all just pumping off cash. Oh my God. I don't hate that, dude.

That's a good. It's good. We got from Candy Crush to a trillion dollar business idea. That's sick. With a T. I like it. It's not cool anymore. A billion, dude.

Another thing I was thinking, because you were saying, like, how could you make sure that integrated? Like, for this tool, you could just connect your Gmail and it could read your emails and say, all right, you're using Callumly. I see your Slack billing notification. You're using Slack. Just like a one-click integration. And it could tell you what your tech stack was. And then it could say, you know, keep Slack. Slack's working really well for your use case.

But swap tidy cow with Callumly. I love that. That'd be sick. You don't have to get that smart with it. It's like, what are the other five competitors? Like, oh, you use Calonly. Here are five alternatives that we think makes sense. Yeah.

Like, we don't have to get that ingrated. Because if they're searching for it, they're looking for a solution. They're like, I'm tired. Let's like all of the ads say, are you tired of Caliomely? Here's five things that might be able to help you. Fill in team size. Then you sell all those leads on the back end, somebody else. Like, you're just getting all these business owners to say,

here's how much money we make. here's how much we spend on tech every year, let it ride, get all the data. I'd take that, dude. How much do you spend on marketing every year? 25,000? Dude, you should talk over the boys that quicker. Dude, you could bank money by selling the data. You could charge for the actual quiz and then you could have affiliate links.

Multiple monetization, dude. I wonder if there's a world, but you could charge based on the savings. Like, all right, everything we recommended you is going to save you $34,000 a month. I don't know if I can talk about it, but you should. talk to our buddy Connor about that. Okay. They're working on something like that. He's loosely.

I don't know, I don't know where they're at with it now, but like was loosely in conversations around some of that, like a cost savings. Oh, I know what he's looking at. It's a franchise, right? Yeah. We've been talking about that. I didn't know he was still looking at it. There was a few months ago.

I don't know if he still is. I had the conversation with him like two or three months ago. Dude, if you're that franchise, you're stupid for not using AI to help all this. Identify stuff. Lowest hanging fruit. Yeah, there's so much you could do with that, dude. I have two things that I think you might find interesting. I want to hear all three of them because two is not enough.

There can be a third. I can sneak in a third. All right. Give me some idea correct. Dude. So one is another super niche content site that I've seen lately that is in line like with the travel one that I sent you. And the fact that it just looks so old, but it gets so many views. I think it's a view from my seat.com.

What? There it is. Dude. So it's like this 1990s site and people upload the view from their seat at concerts and sporting events. The thing gets like a million clicks a month. Oh my gosh. And it's crowdsourced? Oh, all crowdsource 100%.

You just upload your own thing with the user generated content. It's all them uploading a photo from their seat at a specific stadium for a specific sporting event. And you can go find the exact views. Because all seat geek, I was buying tickets to the Kansas City Chiefs are playing the chargers at SoFi. And you go on Seat Geek or Ticketmaster or any of these things. And they give you like loosely of you. You know what I mean? Like this like the AI generated or.

Yeah, like from the section of what it generally looks like. And so I just went on Google and I typed in SoFi Stadium section. 3-0 whatever row one seats whatever so you got that SEO they own the SEO they owned it it was the first thing up there of view for my seat dot com and I pop in and there was like four photos of people that sat in the exact seats for football games that I was in and I was like yep that's exactly what's good and then two days ago and I didn't say this to anybody I did not say a word about this literally to a soul this was like a month and a half ago yes yesterday or two days ago my girlfriend gets tickets to the Dodgers from her work.

And she sends me a link from a view from my seat.com of the view that we're going to have at the Dodgers game. And I was like, oh my gosh. What is happening? It's a sign for the universe. I was like, dude, what is going on here? Like, these guys are killing it. I don't know their monetization. I don't know what any of it looks like.

But like one of those kind of niche content sites, like, where do I stand or whatever? or like a view for my seat.com, dude. Okay, this is amazing. Okay, so the other cruise business you told me about is vacations to go.com. Yes. And after I did a deep dive on that, I learned it's literally like a billion dollar business with a deep. Because cruise is such a high ticket item.

Right. Right. Once you realize that, it's like, oh, they're only selling in 5,000 cruises a year. And people go, you know what I'm saying? It makes sense. So I want to make like 10 to 20 websites like this. I want to find them that are like a, view for my seat. There's another one. I tweeted about this on my old Twitter account that's called

like next book in the series.com. You heard about that? No, I haven't seen it. It's just like, what's the next book in Lord of the Rings? And it's it's it. That's the whole way. It's been around for 15 years and it's ugly. It's never been updated. And they just print. It's just a thing. I want to find, dude, how about this? Like a directory of sites like this. A directory of growth hack it. Yeah. Stupid growth hackers like us. So we can just go like reverse engineer and learn and tinker like maybe too niche.

But do they sell anything of you for my seat? I don't know. But I was thinking like they should just be absolutely slinging ticket master. Oh yeah. Like I'm clicking around right now. I didn't see anything that was obvious monetization on it. But it's just like an OG forum, dude. Create a post with the seat in the stadium.

That's it. Okay. So I'm looking. It looks like they have affiliate links to hotels. View. I'm looking in my arc browser and it's blocking the ads. So I'm switching browsers. They're running like direct like display ads for sure.

Yeah. So like they basically have like booking.com API polling listings. They have a verbo display ad on the right side. So they're doing stuff. They're pushing stub hub. So if you go and click on, if you go to like concerts at the top, it has a list of all of the musicians. Oh, dude. They're probably.

Oh, geez. right, dude. They're probably okay. They're doing just fine. And then you click on, yeah, so you click on one of the artists and then it has all the arenas, but it also has all the upcoming events. And you can stub hub ticket them. Oh my gosh.

And what demographic of person buys $300 NFL tickets, right? Like such a high value audience here. Right, right. All of it. Concerts, team, the whole thing. This is one of those businesses that some millennials is going to buy one day and they're going to rebuild it. and they're just going to kill it.

And like, a view from my seat. It's too long of a domain name. We need to buy seats.com. We need to change. Like, the user interface isn't intuitive. It's going to make all these changes and just kill it. If I own this site, I would change nothing. No, I put an email pop up.

Yeah, for sure. You know what I mean? That's it. Just an email pop up. Oh, my gosh. Want to find deals on your favorite stuff? Email pop up. Dude, this is a good one.

This is really good. Super fire. I'm going to leave this open in my brother. It's fun. Dude, their map, on the map, you can go to look at all the venues that they have on the Google Maps overlay. It's fun. Okay. Yeah.

I like this a lot. I just went to a Rangers game on Monday, and I did not come across this website, but I did have fun. Dude, now you'll always know the view from your seat. I will. Dude, and this business has such a moat because they have all this user-generated content. It's like how we think about it with Creative OS. It's like, yeah, someone could come and build the same functionality, but no one at, without spending so much time, money and energy would be able to, like, create the actual,

like, supply of content. They have years and years of users uploading views from their seat. That's just like, you can't easily replicate that. You're not going to go send your SDR team to, like, a billion sporting events that's just not going to happen. Yeah. I feel like this business exists in the face of all these AI tools that basically do the same thing. And it's like, it exists because of this framework I have where it's like, we.

always prefer a human. There's a line. There's a price point at a certain price point. If it's 80% cheaper, AI is fine. But it's like we need an operator, first of all, no matter what AI tools are out there, you're going to need someone to run the thing, right? Which creates all these opportunities like Peter Lovell is taking advantage of. But it's like these pitchers, you can't do better. Like, you just can't do better than someone taking an actual picture from that actual seat. Right. At the actual event that you want to go to. Yes. It's unreal.

So good. So, all right. So you had two things. What's the other thing? Dude, the other one, it's a product category that a few, there's a few players that are participating in this. But it is people selling signature templates. So you'll go, you'll get an ad and it'll be somebody signing their name, really pretty, like calligraphy type stuff, like high quality signatures. and it's an ad for you to have an artist create your custom signature and send you training

materials on like stencils so you can learn how to sign. No. With this dude. We're talking an email signature or like a physical signature? No, no, like a physical like signing autograph. Like these people will create your autograph for you and then send you a stencil so that you can like practice signing it, I think these companies are a lot bigger than people think. Do you know the name of one?

I have some of their ads saved. You're exploding my brain right now. Anyone on the planet brings this idea to me and says, Chris, what do you think? I want to do this. I'm going to laugh them out of the room. And so you spend your time on something that will actually make you money. There's no demand here. Dude, I feel you.

I feel you. But I'm looking at photologo.com. Okay. I'm getting there. Yeah. You order your custom signature for $39 for an extra $40 upsell. It follows the same dynamic of like personalized stuff, right? Like handwritten letters at scale.

Yeah, you know what I mean? Or it's like, hey, I want to get a portrait painted of my dog, right? Where you like upload this custom thing and get this custom thing back. And so people are doing this with signatures. I'm not going to sit here and venture a guest on if they actually have professionally trained calligraphers, creating your custom signature, but like the odds of that are low. I think these are computer generated things. It's a hundred percent margin, sorry, 99% margin that you're like shipping them a piece of paper

that they can practice writing, which I don't even think they actually send it to you. I think they send you an email that you print out. I'm sure they have an upcharge, right, where you could get the physical one. And so I'll send you a few more of these, but they're all running ads aggressively. If you can aggressively run ads for a $40 product, you're doing just fine. And that's like the broad product, like product category that I like is like it mimics digital product or info product, right? Where it's like you're selling a zero cog item on Facebook, meaning like you're running,

for lack of a better word, the simplest financial game on ads possible where it's like revenue first ad spent. Right. And so if you can go and operate, if you're, you're running an e-com brand with true cogs, like your break-even Roaz goes up this well, right? Like, you have to have a 1.8 to break even. But on a digital product, you have to have a 1.00-0-0-0 to break even because you have no cogs. And so if you can even hit a 1.2 consistently and you can spend, like, say you can spend a $1,000 a day and at a 1.2 on a digital

product. Like, you're just actually profiting $200 a debt. Yeah. And I think that there are businesses like that, again, like going back to what we've talked about, a recurring theme of like, we're not trying to pitch somebody like a billion dollar idea, but like, do I think that there are people that can launch this exact thing and run at a 1.2 to 1.6x Roaz and spend $1,000, $2,000 a day and like net profit 150k a year? Yeah. it's not going to be like groundbreaking, but you can. The hardest part for me about these segments is I want to listen to you so badly because what you're saying is so intelligent,

but I cannot stop thinking about my way to hopefully level up what you're saying. You know how I would grow this? And I am listening. I heard all that. I am listening. There's two million real estate agents. I'm looking at their website. And here's a framework, right?

We need a little jingle. Muhammad worked that in. I need a little framework jingle. If you want to know who a business is selling to, look at who they're pointing to on their website, right? Like back when it was Support Shepherd, right? I was like, all right, who are they selling VAs for short form video editing, for bookkeeping? And it's like you just go and look like what are their case studies about?

What are their reviews about? What is the ordering of their services on their drop down homepage on the menu? If they put bookkeeping first, they're not stupid. They're probably leading people to where people already want to go. Okay, let's unbundle support Shepard and make support Shepard for bookkeeping only, right? So I'm looking at this website and they're talking about realtors, right? It's not like photo logo for realtors.com, but it's very clear they're doing this for because like realtors are signing documents all day every day. Realtors are more likely to be women.

All right, you can call me sexist, but realtors are more likely to be women and women are more likely to care about their appearance or vain things. Period. End story. And men stink, right? So there you go. I offset it. Men smell like crap. So there you go. But anyway, like, I would advertise this by scraping all two million email addresses of realtors and emailing them their own signature for free and saying, hey, Anne Frank, look what I got you. What do you like? What do you think? And two percent of them are going to be like, that's really cool. How do I buy that? Click to check out. 99 bucks. We'll send you the train. materials. It's a lot cheaper than Facebook ads. Cold email. I'm not mad. Yeah, there's so many that are just like that. Sam, I would not be surprised if this is not computer generated, if there actually is literally one person cranking out a thousand of these a day. Yeah. Yeah. How many of these could you knock out in an hour if you were practiced? Yeah, if you were like a calligraphy guy, like you could probably do one a minute without a problem. Do you remember the guy that was on Shark Tank, it was like, draw me a cat, draw me a picture of a cat.

I don't know. I'm going to look that up. Draw. Hold on. I want to draw cat for you.com. Okay. As seen on ABC's Shark Tank, been around for a decade plus, this guy, I mean, he says his numbers on Shark Tank, and it's probably even better now.

It's literally physically him drawing anyone a picture of a cat. And it was probably one of those. Dark Tank pitches that they included just to make fun of them. But dude, click on his calendar. Oh my gosh. This pains me. I want to partner with this guy. Click on his calendar.

He sold out for a year in advance. October, November, December. Oh, he's sold out forever. $25. It says it on the site. He's sold out for a year, dude. Oh, my gosh. So, all, first of all, this guy's not an idiot.

Clearly, he knows about supply and demand. He knows about economics 101. He must just do it for. for the love of the cats. But like, I just want to buy this from him and say, all right, first order of business instead of $25,

it's $250. Let's clear up your calendar. Second order of business. We're going to hire five more cat drawers. Anyway, my point is it makes me think of this because he literally does draw it himself. Like, look at his website.

He's drawn 22,000 of these things. Yeah, it's insane. 22, one, two, three times $25. So his lifetime revenue is half a million. from drawing cats 100% margin.

Like, who's Matt? You know what I'm saying? I just think there's stuff like that, dude. Yeah. This is the same business as the view of you from your seat because it's like, can AI do this? Yeah. But AI's not doing it. That's the moat.

That's why this guy will be around in 100 years, assuming he lives to be 150 years old. I mean, because he's doing it himself. That's the whole thing. He's not selling a picture of a cat. He's selling the uniqueness of him doing it himself. Yeah. He's going to be able to run it and do his thing and buy a new house and that's it. Yeah.

I wonder if there's something that photo logo could borrow from him. Like it's $40, but for $400, let's spend an hour kind of whiteboarding this on Zoom. Yeah, I found a, I'm looking at another one that is art logo.com. And they've got all sorts of additional options. like handwritten, written premium signature for 120, logos. Ooh,

their loss leader is an email signature generator and a business card maker. You can do those for free. Oh, my gosh. And then it's like, what do you guys? Okay, so then let's say I want just like a nice little signature. Choose your industry.

What do you want to say? Left handed right? Oh, you pick the ones that you like. additional notes and then they hit you with the upsell. You can have the head calligrapher do it for $79 if you want. You can do the top level for 49 or just a basic for 39. This art logo website, they have an embedded YouTube video. This video is 52 seconds and it just shows how they do it and it has 400,000 views. Dude, I'm saying. Like I think that it's print. Oh, dude, the upsells that they hit you with, all format packs, the signature

Learning pack is a PDF, a logo, adding new elements, email signatures, business card templates. You could get your AOV. I just selected two or three of those options. And my AOV is already at 213. And that's just from a social media pack, the signature itself and adding a logo element to it. And like your cogs on that, dude, are like the guy that made the signature. Like, yeah. For $10? Like, you're talking about. a 99% margin. 95, sure. Let's say it takes a minute to do a signature. You knock out 50 of these an hour, working a little buffer. 50 times 40, it's 2,000. You could pay your calligrapher quote. And anyone that draws well can call themselves a calligrapher. You can pay them $200 an hour,

400 grand a year. Your cogs is 10%. I'm the margin 90%. Yeah, I came across it. And I was like, this is interesting. Can I tell you why this business exists, in my opinion, two reasons. And they really go hand in hand. 10 years ago, 15 years ago, this business does not exist. The internet's around. It's live and well. It's doing great. Facebook's around.

It is such a visual business, right? It's no different than. You should see the TikTok and Instagram. I'm looking. 200,000 followers. The accounts that do them, no ads. They just say, all of it is replies to can you do whatever letter next? Can you do Chris?

And they just write this. Oh my gosh. And it goes crazy viral. and then everyone else requests the next. It's a self-ful, I'm telling you, like, it actually might be the perfect business. For today, it's sick. It's the same thing as like an ASMR pressure washing channel or a long-known channel.

It's like visual. It's inherently visual. And so it just grows because of technology advancements. Yeah. And they just literally record themselves, right? And names. Can you do Chris? But-up-poh.

And then I go in there and go, yo, can you do Sam? And then they do Sam. And then seven other people go, yo, can you? And then the algorithm is like, oh, everyone's commenting on this. Let's keep pushing it. Bro, I'm saying, like, I think that these things are like printing cash. Like, I've zeroed out. Part of me is like, I just want to, I want to test it.

Hit me with a little solo drop, Shopify store, a couple upsell. So you want to just rip this off blatantly? Straight up. I've gotten ads from four, five, six companies that all do this exact same thing. It's not like one company that's leading it. I've never heard of art logo until today. It's just the one that showed up on Google. And then you can go and you get into the interesting stuff of like,

this is one of those things that you could very easily, almost like Tabs Chocolate, where you can like empower a bunch of other creators to go and post with affiliates of like, cool, dude, here's our library of a thousand signature videos. Go post as many as you want. We'll give you 50%. Like go spin up your own perfect signature theme page.

Push it all back to our affiliate link. just post here's all the content here's all like it's already here and i just think it could pop bro now are we talking like a creative OS like model for this or is that something you could do or is that what you're talking about no i'm saying build the library of short form content give it to as many people that want to run up an instagram theme page as possible have all of them because if you could find a hundred people to all run a single signature theme page account. And you just give them all the content.

They set up their own scheduler. They pick their own music. They do whatever they want to grow it. They just run all of it. And a link in bio for all of them is 50 per. Like they just do our organic marketing at scale for us through 50 accounts versus us just doing it out of one branded account. Because like our margin can support a pretty hefty affiliate fee because it's no cogs.

Yeah. If we're doing $99 signatures, yeah, I'll give you $50. Post as much as you want. I don't care. Okay. here's another idea. I'm going to go back to Creative OS and you basically build a bank of these names, right? Like you basically take the 95% of all names in America.

You take the 1,000 most common first names, 1,000 most common last names. You use AI or some sort of software to make calligraphy versions of all this. Maybe let's say you have a Jane Doe. It's like, all right, Jane Doe might be a photographer. You take like the top 10 professions that want these signatures. She might be a photographer, a real estate agent, a lawyer, yada, yeah, yeah. I want you to make 10 versions of her of Jane Doe's logo. You do that a thousand times for each name, 10,000 names, 100,000 names, whatever.

And then you go to your example of affiliate and say for $50, $200, $200 a month, you have full access to my library. And you just go resell these. You go compete with photo logo and all them. It's super interesting. They just take whatever they want whenever they want for a monthly fee. You could probably just build an AI wrapper for it that creates the custom signature. You put in or you just pick like it's a font library.

at the end of the day. You pick like 30 fonts that they just put in the name. It creates these 30 variations of it. You can do that. Like even on like creative market.com, if you go to their font library, which they have handwritten calligraphy styles, you can put in the sample text that you want to see that font like as a thing.

So you just go put all the name in there and just grab all the fonts that look like good signatures and then just route them all through. And you can deliver 30 variations to somebody immediately. That's it. That's actually how that was going to work. You would sell it for $99. We're going to give you 10 variations of your name in different calligraphy styles. You would just route them all through. I mean, shoot, you could do it on a Google Doc and just have each of them have a different font class.

And you buy five or 10 commercial licenses from creative market. And you just have 10 font options and you program out and pop them in. Yeah, yeah. So it's an AI route. with a bunch of integrations on the back end to customize it even more. Customize the, yeah, the signature. Yeah, because I feel like you got to go one way or the other.

You got to go like AI wrapper. You just lean into it, but you add some more functionality to it. So you can't just replicate that in chat, GPT. Or you got to go completely away from AI and make it very hand-man. Yeah. Either one's cool. I'm down. Sam, you brought the heat today.

I do my best. This is, this might be one of. My favorite episodes ever. I'm just going to say it. I've said it before. They keep leveling up. This is good. Yeah.

That's all you can ask for. This is really good. So Sam, where can we find you? I'll link to all your stuff and all the places. But where would you like people to find you? Twitter is perfect at I'm Sam Thompson. And creativeOS.com, unlimited content.com. 72 hour sites.com if you need a website.

But that's it. CreativeOS.com is a library of the best. performing Facebook ads. Unlimited Content.com is a website that will put unlimited content on your website for long-tail SEO terms and 72-hour sites is a web design agency that's really good

and they get done in 72 hours. That's what he does and sells. So go support Sam. Okay, that wraps it up. I am tired. I'm exhausted. Sam's great. We're going to have them on again. Let me know if you like this and we'll have him back on very soon.