The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - If People Pay for This, Your Idea Will Work Too | Ep. #174

Episode Date: May 26, 2025

Check out my newsletter at TKOPOD.com and join my new community at TKOwners.com.I sat down with Brandon Doyle (x.com/_BrandonDoyle_) for part 2 of our two-part episode, if you haven’t listened to part 1 yet, go check out Ep. #171. In this one, we talked about how the weirdest business ideas can actually make the most money. We started with Excel esports, horse hair competitions, and a $7M business turning YouTube tutorials into magazines. Then we riffed on viral marketing stunts like the ghost-free home guarantee, crazy no-code competitions with live commentary, and even a “Most Dangerous Game” style footrace. Toward the end, we dove into how physical products like magazines or plaques could become the next big thing in a world obsessed with digital.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 The Power of Unique Business Ideas03:03 Creative Event Marketing Strategies05:53 Innovative Competition Concepts09:13 Survival Challenges and Unique Experiences12:04 Viral Marketing and Content Creation14:55 Physical Products from Digital Content18:11 Quirky Marketing Ideas for Real Estate21:02 Embracing Creativity in Business

People will pay money for anything. Pride and ego prevents us from making more money. How many people would not do this because they don't want to look stupid or be embarrassed? It doesn't need to be a good idea. It just needs to get people talking. There's the Financial Modeling World Cup, which is a real thing. And then there's Excel Esports. They're selling general admission tickets for $30.

They are getting thousands of sign-ups. I think people would pay thousands for that experience, honestly. He has a $7 million a year business repurposing their YouTube tutorials into physical magazine. Insert YouTube video URL, spit out magazine. What are we doing? Why wouldn't it work for mine? All right. This is part two of my episode with Brandon Doyle.

Go back a week ago today. Listen to part one. You don't really need to listen to them in order. It's just a bunch of cool growth hack, business ideas, and you're going to love it. Please share with a friend and enjoy. So I'm on Instagram and I see this viral video of a horse that is like someone shaved these crazy intricate patterns into its hair. Right? Like beautiful.

It looks like a tattoo. Like huge, huge patterns. And then I learned that this video was promoting some like horse hair competition event in no name city, like Clovis City, California with 7,000 people. Like this is like not LA. This is like Central Valley, California where no one lives. They're selling general admission tickets for $30. They're selling, you know, you could admit your horse to be judged and graded for $110.

You can have a booth like a sponsored booth for $320. and they are getting thousands of signups for people to come bring their horses, their horses that have cool haircuts. And then for other people to just come look at them. Yeah. Yeah, that's genius. Well, it's a genius idea to make money, first of all. Also, for whoever, if it's a barber that's putting this on,

it's a great way for him to get lots of new clients for his barbers shop, as well as all the other barbers. Yeah, I thought that was an awesome idea. So then I was thinking, okay, what other industries could do this? if you're a version of this, because you can't always, I don't think you'll always be able to charge for the event, but it could be a cool event that's free.

That's a fun competition. So I was thinking like, if you're a window cleaning company, just have the event be, bring me the dirtiest cars, the dirtiest cars you can, bring them in, and I will speed clean it for free

and you tie me or whatever. That's fun. Another one would be, you get accountants in a room, and you bring a bunch of people that need their taxes done, and you have a race to see who can get the taxes done the fastest. And do it for free. But like, there are ways that you can be creative

and have fun events that get eyeballs and you get customers. And obviously this barber struck gold with his idea. I think there's a good saying that there's no such thing as a boring business. There's only boring content. So nobody has a boring business. You just got to be creative with the content sometimes. Well, dude, there's like at least two companies doing this with Excel. There's the Financial Modeling World Cup, which is a real thing.

People live stream their screens, crunching Excel numbers. And then there's it's called Excel Esports, which is basically a direct competitor to the financial modeling World Cup. I'm sorry, but if people will pay money to compete in and watch that, they will pay money for anything. Okay, anything that people are passionate about. One of those has been on ESPN2. They've streamed like the championship on one of those. I saw it while scrolling. So yeah.

Yeah, that's crazy. I mean, like Microsoft, Notion, Airtable, they sponsor these events. It costs up to $100 to compete in these events. Like, why not like a vibe marketing or a vibe coding live streaming event or competition? It could be worldwide. It could be like Twitch. It could be like, just picture this. You get a bunch of vibe marketers.

and you get them all in the same Google Meet. And one of the requirements is they have to share their screen. And you say, all right, the idea is an app that keeps track of your golf score. And we will grade you on these five categories. Or maybe you say the actual idea after all this because people are going to get started early. Yeah. We're going to grade you on these five categories. User interface, user design.

What does your database look like? ease of use. And it's basically like first person to be to submit your. successful like Apple App Store application wins $5,000. Yeah. Right. And then they just share their screens. And then you have a commentator, someone who knows what they're talking about.

Like, okay, this guy, oh, look at him. He's moving these pixels around. Oh, he's going for Replit. Oh my gosh. This guy's going for Windsurf. I didn't know WinSurf was good for Apple apps. That would sell. I'm sorry.

But like, what are we doing? We need to do that. You should do that. You know what you could do. You could crowdsource people from Twitter or whatever or just go. to like go to lovable and bull and flutter flow

and rep and be like hey I want you to send me one person that's going to use yours and we're going to showcase the top six in real time and let's see who wins and it'll be a fun you know we're not going to talk about

about any of your platforms or whatever but we'll have a live commentator like you were saying but that'd be a really fun event oh my gosh I'm like this is the look on my face when I'm like really thinking deeply about something. You should actually do. I feel like you need to limit it to like 10 people because there's only so much you can look at on a screen. Maybe even like nine people. So it's like a three by three grid on a computer screen, right? Yeah, that would be good. So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking

about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell just like that. Thank you. You probably want to have some sort of filtering mechanism. We don't need to find like the Nikita beers of the world. But just like your average stay at home marketing bro vibe coder. Like I think it needs to be like a non-coder, right? Yeah, that would be best. Yeah. Someone that maybe knows a little, you know, a little bit of their way around. But yeah, a non-coder would be, that'd be cool. Yeah. I think Bolt is doing something like this.

But it's in person. Have you heard about that like a hackathon or something? I saw something. that was a one-on-one a few weeks ago. On Twitter, I think I saw that. You know, you could also do the like Paul Bunyan versus the chainsaw version. You could, the Paul Bunyan being an actual coder who's coding the whole time, chainsaw version being replet or flutter flow or bolt or whatever. And theoretically, the second version is going to be faster for sure. you would assume, but maybe not if the other coder is like really good.

But you could basically have an expert coder and then a novice replet user one-on-one who can do the golf score tracker app the fastest and the best. Because maybe, you know, with the expert coder, you would think, oh, their database is going to look better and all that kind of stuff. But maybe the novice replet user will still get across the finish line way faster. And I don't know, but I think a version. of that would be interesting too. I'm just having a very hard time focusing right now. I just, I'm just thinking like, oh, like maybe you don't charge anyone anything to start, but maybe you charge

like something very nominal to the nine coders just so they feel more invested and they're actually going to take a serious like 20, 30, 40 bucks, right? It's like an entry fee. Okay. You're not trying to make money on this. And then do you think you charge spectators or not? You just make that free. You can almost do the reverse. You could do the AOL strategy. You could say anyone who comes gets this many tokens for free to our X, whatever you are. Yeah. I like the idea of doing it with like a sponsorship from Replit or something,

but that's just another level of friction to prevent anyone from launching it, myself included. Then you got to find somebody at it. So like if you're just going to, if you want to make some money doing this without having to talk to any decision makers, you can do this. It's like $5 to spectate. And the coders, the vibe marketers, they pay $20 as an entry fee. Only nine people. And you pay $5 to watch.

And then the winner gets like half of the pot, like half of the door fees. That kind of incentivizes the entrance, the competitors, to invite their friends and family to come watch. Because if they win, they get a bigger share of the pie. But you could also do it where it's like, it is a 60 minute clock. All right. And whoever gets the furthest wins. And so it's graded based on predetermined categories based on how it looks after an hour, whether it's done or not. Yeah, that would be awesome.

And so one person might have beautiful design, but it's just not functional or vice versa. But they're all graded the same. Yeah. I want to do this. Very different version of this, but the same business model was a very small business that I had in high school, which was based off of the short story of Most Dangerous game. I don't know if you ever read that. That sounds familiar. We had to read it in R.

It was mandatory reading, but it was short, so I read it. I didn't use the cliff notes on this one. It was a story about like a guy hunts a human on an island. Anyway, after we read it, we all became obsessed. So I would organize most dangerous game competitions where everyone would have to pay 20 bucks towards the pot. And what it was was you would know the end location of the race before the event started. You wouldn't know the start location, though.

So then all the racers would be taken to the start. start location on the day of, it'd be in the evening. And there were also shooters who would shoot you with the paintball gun, who also had to pay the entrance fee of 20 bucks each. And whoever the first racer is to get to the end without getting hit gets half the pot, the shooters get the pot of each person they hit. And then I would just take the difference. So, anyway, interesting. That reminds me of an idea I had like 10 years ago. If you ever heard of Diet Bet, Are you that? Dietbat.com set up or join a weight loss challenge.

This website gets 5,000 visitors a month. I think it used to be a lot bigger. But I had the idea of survival bet.com. Because like any, any dude out there is like in our primal core. We want to know. Potentially. What's that? This is potentially morbid.

Yeah. Potentially morbid. Yeah. No, it's like it's more of like who can survive or thrive the best out in the wilderness for a week or whatever. And of course, you've got to sign waivers at the ying yang. You don't want people to sue you if someone gets sick. But it's kind of like the show alone. Have you ever seen a loan? Such a good show. Yeah, crazy. But it's just for like the everyday man. And it's going to cost like $3,000 to do it. Yeah. And you just need someone that can rent or borrow or steal

or own 50 to 500 acres of land anywhere. And you, maybe they go through like a 24 hour crash course of training, how to start fires, and everyone gets the same level of training. And then they go out there and survive. And based on like predetermined things, who wins? And maybe you share the prize pot with everyone. But like my dad went to a survival school in southern Utah when he was like early 20s. And they don't have it anymore. And along, I think they, oh, like a month.

I think it was like 30 days. He spent like a week training. But then he was all by himself. for 30 days, like in the desert, trying to survive. And his dad did it. And they said it was like a life-changing experience, like a pivotal moment in their lives. And I just think that like first principles that taps into something that we all want to know, like, how could I do?

Like, what would it be like to not have a phone for a month or a week or three days in this case? I think someone could do really, really well. It's kind of like a tough mutter on steroids, you know? It's a lot of money. It's kind of elite. But it's hard. It's like plays into the do hard things trend that David Goggins cultures of the world.

But as an Eagle Scout myself, the wilderness survival of merit badge was one of my favorite marra badges that I had to get, which you had to last for 24 hours, just off of what you could make. And you had to, you know, make your own little shelter, you're on fire and stuff. So I think it's innate in lots of people, especially men, would be very intrigued by this idea. I think people would pay thousands for that experience. Yeah. Honestly. Well, people pay thousands to get beat up and reamed by Marines. So I know. Don't get me started. Yeah. On the vibe marketing front, I do think that that is something that a lot of small businesses, home service companies

could and should definitely do, aka, give people a peek behind their curtains of your business, show behind the scenes content. If you're a lawyer and you have a tough case, you know, bleep out the names of the case when you're talking about it, but show you talking to your other lawyers or paralegals or whatever about a heated conversation about the stance that you think you should take or whatever. That'd be super important content. Or if you're an accountant and you're running the numbers

and you found a really big unlock for one of your clients where they can take advantage of, you know, some thing to offset their taxes, start record and record your screen and talk through like this is a common thing that people miss but i just found it here's what i would recommend if i were you you know if you have a home-based business this is what a lot people forget or i don't know i mean you can always think of interesting stuff and just do that and show it off don't always just show like before and after before and after yeah yeah yeah i have like conversations with business centers all the time and they tell me these

crazy stories and i'm like that could go viral like just you telling that stuff story into the camera. That could go viral. It's just people, you know, not everyone has to post content, but yeah. If crazy things are happening, then tell the internet about it. Yeah. I got a random off the wall idea for you. Okay. I was not trying to flex, but I was recently featured in the Alabama alumni magazine. Tens of people read this. Tens of people. Okay. But something very interesting happened. I got an email from a company a few days after it was published. And it's a physical magazine only. And this company is called That's Great News.com. And this email, it looked personalized at first, but then it was clear it wasn't.

If you go to That's Great News.com, it's very clear what they do. They've got a decent landing page because I can see what they do. They do. They were like, Chris, congratulations. You were just featured by the Alabama Alumni Magazine. We would love to send you a plaque with like featuring a page from this with like Plexiglass over it and yada, yada. At first I thought, oh, this is cool. Like, this is just a gift from the University of Alabama to say thanks for taking the time to be in our magazine or whatever. And then I'm like, no, no, this is really good marketing. And then I saw on the fine print of the email, it's like, we are not associated with the University of Alabama in any way. And I'm like, okay.

Yeah, yeah. It's just, they just have a feeler out there. And like, I literally don't think that article is anywhere on the internet. But this company must subscribe maybe to all the university alumni magazines. And someone literally goes through and reads them. Chris Kerner, Googles my name, finds my email, emails me. They must be doing all that work because they have a high close rate, right? Yeah.

I mean, I would bet that their close rates like 50%. Who wouldn't want to commemorate this thing where they were just happily featured in with the thing that, you know, it might cost you 40 bucks or whatever because I'm sure they're charging for it. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, everybody likes, especially if, you know, it's like an alumni magazine. Everyone's, you know, most people are pretty proud of where they went to college. So, yeah, that's a super smart idea.

I did a little digging into this company. And they've been around for a while. And they seem to have a pretty big presence. Like, think of all the random magazines out there or newspapers that we don't even know exists, right? Yeah. This company, they have had a website since 2003. Like, that sounds like a moat to me. That sounds like they're crushing it.

I had Al Don on my podcast a week or so. ago and he has a seven million dollar a year business repurposing their YouTube tutorials into physical magazine. Yeah. That's crazy. The magazine, do you hear that? Yeah, yeah. The magazine cost them 80 cents.

Yeah. And they charge like $7 every two months for it. And he didn't think it would be anything. And it's a seven figure profit business. So people are paying to hear him again or to read him. Yeah. Okay. First of all.

So video is cool, but you know what's better? Long form. via podcast and my newsletter. TKOPod.com. Go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast, three episodes a week, stuff like this. You're going to love it. All free. No sleazy sales bitch. TKOPod.com. Someone could do that business as a service for any YouTube channel. I don't think it would work for mine. Actually, it could work for mine. Like, why wouldn't it work for mine? Like business ideas in a magazine, you know? Yeah. But especially longer form, people that do longer form or tutorials like,

why not. Yeah. And like the more AI takes over, the more we're online, the more we want a physical magazine. Like I subscribe to Texas Monthly and D Magazine. I don't read them often, but I pay for them. They're sitting three feet away from me. It's just cool to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and read a magazine. So there's a guy on Twitter.

I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but his first name, the epic gardening guy. Yeah. Kevin Espion. Kevin. I'm just thinking like he and they, his team, really high quality content. Someone should totally approach him and say, hey, I'll do it. It'll be a magazine. It'll be like the Home and Garden magazine, but just you to your customers, you know, maybe it's once a quarter because maybe there's not enough for monthly versions or

whatever. Yep. And, you know, you'll sell 12 bucks a quarter and your cost is only going to be two bucks to me. We do ask that you promote it according to this schedule, maybe one email per week, one mid-roll ad per week. But all we take is. 20% off the top line. And you plug into existing audiences. I don't think there's any niche off limits for this. Gaming, entertainment, like, I think certain niches would have much higher opt-in rates than others, right? Like, I don't know how many, like Mr. Beast recap magazines are going to be sold on a percentage basis, right? But I think this is a lot of marketing has four million YouTube subscribers on one of their several channels. Yes. Yeah. I guarantee you a lot of those people.

would lot, and they have two million on Instagram, those are the only ones I'm going to check right now. A lot of those people would love a quarterly magazine from that. And he could incorporate it into his videos. He's like, yeah, on this, not even as an ad, but like in this session, we put an exclusive thing in here, yada, yada, yada. And it's like, oh, wow, without having to waste like a midroll ad spot, he could incorporate it into his current videos. I think someone should do this, that's great news idea for like any online article. Like, who's stopping, like, say you're featured in tech, tech crunch, right? Why couldn't you print out that article and get it on a physical plaque and mail to you?

Why wouldn't you want that? Yeah, that'd be cheap. And dude, for either idea, for the That's Great News or for the magazine thing, that could be an app that you build in Replit. It could just be a prompt. Yeah, true. Insert YouTube video URL, spit out magazine. Yeah. What are we doing?

Okay, here's one more idea. Let's do it. This is for Nathan for you fans, Nathan Fielder. He always did, he did, he did seasons of that show. crazy marketing ideas. Basically every episode was a marketing class. Always tout his degree from some online business college in Canada, start of each episode.

But they're all funny if you haven't watched them. That's a plug for the listeners. Anyway, so, like, if you're a realtor, make it your pitch on every single Instagram video that you post or TikTok or YouTube or whatever. Make sure everyone knows that you certify, there are zero ghosts in that home. You already exercise them or whatever

and have the ghost-free guarantee with a little badge. You're going to go viral in your little local market for that and get some PR and it would just be funny. And guess who's going to stand out from all the other realtors in your area? It's going to be you because everybody else is the same exact thing. So like, how can you do something weird and funny that's obviously tongue and cheek? but yes you can get eyeballs like dude yeah here's a thought the framework that comes to me is like how

much pride and ego prevents us from making more money like how many people would not do this because they don't want to look stupid or be embarrassed because everyone's going to think i'm an idiot they're going to talk about me you want people to talk about you the people that matter the people that know that it's a brilliant marketing stunt will see you as brilliant yeah here's a stat for you 45% of people believe in ghosts. 45%. There's your market. I believe in them.

So I would like to know if the house I was buying didn't have them. Yeah, that would be nice. At least not the bad ones. Yeah. I think there's something to that. It could be like a certifying body, right? Yeah. Where like for 10 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever, you get like a stamp or a digital stamp or a seal of approval or something.

Yeah. It's not like we're asking you to go do a TikTok damn. in front of the camera. It's just you're just saying, hey, it's ghost free guarantee. That's your slogan. Oh, you don't have the GFG. I'm sorry, what was that? And you could even do like a bottoms up approach where you do like some grassroots campaign to have like the home shoppers asks the realtors. It's, do you remember, was it, I don't remember one of like the 90s gene brands. That's how they grew like crazy. Jor dash, Jor dash, J-O-R-D-C-H remember them. They just asked all their friends and family to call up all the JCPenny's every day and say,

do you have Jordash? Do you care Jordash? And then after a month of that, they pitch JCPenny and like, oh my gosh, everyone's asking about you. That's the thing. It's bottoms up, right?

You can even say Facebook, show me all the people that are home shopping right now. And then you could pitch the GFG guarantee to them so they could, and do it on a very confined radius, like one city only, but high ad spend for that one city where they're getting beat up all the time.

And then the realtors, we'll naturally see it as well because they're probably going to fall into the algorithm. Yeah. Oh my gosh. My brain's exploding. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. I do like Nathan Filder's idea to have poop flavored frozen yogurt.

Oh, my gosh. Like some sort of crazy frozen yogurt flavor just to get people in the door and talking about it. The funny thing is almost all of his things actually worked. Like you remember the pizza one where it's like, if it's not there within 10 minutes, you get a free one and they always just show it up with the small free one. Yeah. Yeah. It was like a Tatino's pizza. It gets people talking.

It's interesting. It doesn't need to be a good idea. It just needs to get people talking. Yeah. Yeah. So funny. All right, Brandon. Okay.

Well, thanks. All right. What did you think? Lots of ideas. Go out and start something. Share this with a friend. Leave me a five-so review. And I really appreciate you.