The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Q&A: Reverse engineer any Shopify store, developing new products and more! Ep. #030

Episode Date: June 18, 2024

Another Q&A episode, albeit 1 day late this time!Timestamps further down. Enjoy!---Ask me a question on or off the show here: http://form.typeform.com/to/Eb8KaY0pLearn more about me: http://chrisjkoerner.comLearn about my company: http://cofounders.comFollow me on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/mhp_guyFree weekly business ideas newsletter: https://newsletter.chrisjkoerner.com/---01:45- Turning a Genius Idea into an Amazon ProductA guy had a brilliant product idea he wanted to develop and sell on Amazon but didn't know where to begin.16:15- Finding and Improving Niche Products to Sell on AmazonA guy wanted to know how to find niche products to sell that no one else is selling or identify existing products with pain points he could fix.24:14- Amazon FBA and Retail Arbitrage Insights: A Guide to E-commerce SuccessA person asked about using Amazon FBA to make passive income, adding to a series of questions about selling e-commerce products on Amazon or Shopify and developing unique products.28:25- Starting a Tutoring BusinessA college student successfully growing his tutoring business through Facebook groups sought advice. I provided him with some tips to enhance his success.38:09- Exploring AI Business OpportunitiesA person asked "What AI business should I start? I responded with two promising ideas.

There's a URL suffix that you can add to any Shopify store that will show you all of their products by best to worse selling. Okay. Okay. I've done this before. So basically use builtwith.com to find a bunch of Shopify stores. And then you're going to take a spreadsheet, put all of their URLs, and then use the concatenate function to attach the same URL suffix to all of these different Shopify store URLs. and then you'll be able to see you can do this manually or hire a VA to do this exactly which of their products sell the most in that current moment.

Welcome to the corner office. We had five call in and or pre-submitted questions from entrepreneurs and want entrepreneurs today. The first guy had a really genius product idea that he wants to develop and sell on Amazon, but he had no idea where to start. Next guy wanted to know how can I find niche products to sell that no one else is selling. Maybe people are already selling them, but they've got some pain points that I want to fix. The third person was a pre-sidmitted question about using Amazon FBA, as in fulfilled by Amazon,

to make passive income. So that's three in a row that all develop around selling e-commerce stuff on Amazon or Shopify or developing products. Pretty cool stuff. Fourth person has a tutoring business growing exclusively through Facebook groups and having some success, but he needed advice. He's a young guy. He's in college, and he's doing well.

but I gave him some tips and the last person was pre-submitted asking about what AI business should I start. What AI business would you start, Chris? And so I gave him two decent ideas. And I hope you like and subscribe and share this with your friends, including your grandma, because we all love your grandma. Hey, how are you, Gil? Good. How are you? Good.

Thanks for joining. Yeah, thanks for having you. So if I pull up your question, I don't really know anything about you. I want, you've got an idea and you want some feedback on it. Yeah, so basically I've been a entrepreneur for 10 years. Life's being busy with the kids. Got a four-year-old son who has autism. So he's taking up a lot of time.

We've got a 20-month-old. But we're getting to a point where I have some time to finally start to do a project for myself. I've done other things in the past where I started things up. Nothing really took off. I'd freelance graphic design as like renting a trailer and outdoorsy kind of thing. But I'm interested in starting like an item to sell on Amazon. So I just have an idea. I guess I'm looking for a little bit of validation for my idea.

And if it's good, maybe what would be the first steps into like having a baby? Okay. So before we talk about your product idea, what first gave you the idea to sell something on Amazon? I just with the amount of time that I have, because I could always try to do freelancing, but I'm just like with the kids and everything, I just wanted to do something where I can sell an item and just be on the back and not having to deal with like clients and stuff like that at this point in my life. The ever elusive passive income, right?

Well, yeah, I guess passive income, elusive passive income, but I mean, obviously I know that it's going to be a lot of work. Yeah. So, so yeah. Was there like, do you follow someone on social media that has been talking about this? What first gave you that idea? For like doing an Amazon item? Well, I've been listening to, you know, No King, and I read his book.

You know, I've been the Rameet C.80s, it's in Paris and all that. So I wanted to address a pain point that I was having in my life. And so that's where my idea was, well, it'd be awesome if I had this product, even for myself. There has to be someone else out there that has the same paypoints. Yeah. Okay. All right. What is your product an idea?

So I have, it's an issue with my glasses. I have three pairs of glasses that I use. and they're scattered all over the place. And whenever I go somewhere, I have to take off three of them because computer, distance, sunglasses, prescription, and they're all over the place,

and it looks like this. And they're just like, it's just kind of a pain to find them and everything. So I thought it would be great if I had a product where I had these cases that were all magnetic, that could just stick together. And so to keep everything organized in one spot, but then also maybe for,

travel have like a little case that they could fit in. So just that, yeah. So that's pretty much the idea. I've reached out to friends and family about it and asked it for feedback. And I've gotten good feedback. My sister was like, that's a great idea. I would totally buy that. One of my best friends was like, I wouldn't buy that.

Does he have glasses? He does. Why wouldn't he buy it? He said, I wouldn't buy that, but I can see how some like really old people. I can see why a senile person would buy this, but I wouldn't. Exactly. I mean, honestly, it's nice to have friends that are honest with you because I can't tell you how many friends have told me, oh, yeah, I would do that. And then I actually do it.

And they're like, oh, well, let me, you know. Yeah. You had some say, I would buy it. And one said I wouldn't. How many people have you talked to specifically? I've reached that to all my family. So probably like almost 10 people. Okay.

And what percentage would buy it? Some of them don't have glasses, so don't wear glasses. So I would say that the people that wore glasses told me, yes, except for my friend Adam. Now, would it be like a magnet that holds them together? Would it be a case? What would it look like exactly? I was envisioning something like that's just like a rectangular case like this, and they would have a magnetic panel on the inside, like a very thin magnetic panel.

And then they were all just together. And then we put it inside a little container that would have. have a little space for like your wallet watch or something else. Yeah. Maybe. I think you could put on your bed on your stand next to your night stand or anywhere. Okay. So it really could just look like I'm picturing something to shape almost like a matchbox, right?

Just something rectangular, but as thin as possible that had magnets on the inside that just they could stand alone as their own case, but they also, they're stuck together, right? Yes. I like that idea because it's not like. Like, you could just take existing stuff and piece it together, right? You don't have to go get molds made. I like it for that reason. I mean, you could even make that in your living room, just with magnets and boxes, right?

Yeah. And I was thinking I would do it, start with just taking some cardboard, some cartons, and just like cutting it all up and just just to get the visual of what it looks like. So one problem I foresee with this is selling it on Amazon because on Amazon, you've got to match search traffic. And people are, have you done any research on Amazon searches like with Jungle Scout to see what type of glasses accessory people are already searching for today? I haven't looked on with Jungle Scout.

I did search on Amazon for glasses cases and like Google and stuff. I didn't see a product like this out there that existed yet. But I feel like it's so that it was like hard to keyword search it. Yeah. something like that. Okay. Because you can look at glasses cases and you're just going to pop up generic cases. Yeah. So I'll tell you all the reasons why I do and don't like this idea. I like it because you could put it together in your living room pretty easily. You could buy existing things and put it together. It's cheap. It's cheap to buy. It's cheap to make.

And it serves what, 30% have glasses, maybe 20, 30% of the overall population. You could ship it fairly cheaply. It's lightweight. It's under 13 ounces, which is key, which means you can ship it with USPS first class, which is significantly cheaper than priority. So I like that. Why I don't like it is,

wait, another reason why I really, really like it. The biggest reason is it's very short form virulable. Right? In a five second clip, you could show people exactly what the value proposition is. And so I feel like that more than outweighs the lack of search traffic on Amazon for it.

If you get this in the right hands on Instagram and TikTok, it could go massively viral. The problem with that is that you're going to want to push them to Amazon as opposed to a Shopify site because that's where people are comfortable. And so you've got to name this something very specific. And so you're going to create Amazon search traffic instead of try to. piggyback on something else. And so I would make it like a something with the word mag in it, like mag case or just something silly like rhino case, something, I would do a lot of research on the name. I think the name is incredibly important in this case, whereas most of the times I don't think the name is very important. Make it something very brandable, like with a color or a

shape or like purple rectangle or purple rhino or something to where when you go into Amazon today and you start typing it, there is no autocomplete. Like Amazon doesn't know where you you're going with it. Because you can, like, it's just hard to link to things in short form video. So you just want to call it something. So people know what to search for. Now then, eventually, you can have a Shopify site, which is the same name. And I would definitely recommend getting only a dot com of that name, like not your name plus case, but like just your name.com. So then, because some people are going to go to TikTok to search it. Some people will go to YouTube to search it, some will go to Amazon and some will go to Google to search it. You want to be creating

all of that search traffic from a brand new invented term. I really, really like that about it, because I've seen stupid short form videos of products like this that have 30 million views, 50 million views. Yeah. Perfect case study for you. Kevin Espiritu. Do you know who that is? He founded the Epic Gardening Channel. He was recently interviewed on my first million, and he sells a very viral product that's like a knee brace that helps you kneel in the garden better and they cannot keep them in stock. And the reason why is because A, it fills a need and B, it is so viral videoable, right? It is just so easily, it so easily portrays the value proposition in five seconds or less.

Even three seconds. His video is just like someone kneeling in the garden with a brace around it. And it's like, I get it immediately. I need it. I want it. It's springtime. I'm gardening. Product market fit.

Product audience fit. Viral video fit. All of the above. So I really like the idea for that reason. Why I don't like the idea is it could be copied. Okay. So someone could see your viral video and then just start piggybacking. And I think if you're first, you will stay first, but they're just going to start chipping

away your market share. And I don't like that you can't sell it for that much because if you want, to lean on paid ads for this, you need it to be like at least a $50 product, which this is not, right? Yeah. What do you think this would be at? 20 or less? I think it just has to be cheap. Yeah.

It couldn't be tried to make it like a little of a luxury item or something with like super nice and like you should have two versions. You should have a super like a leather or pleather version and then a plastic version. I think a lot of people will upgrade to the nicer version once they try the cheap version. and see that they like it. I do think this is a good idea. It's not going to be passive at all, but I think it'll be more successful than what something passive might be. Yeah, Andrew, it would be awesome. I mean, awesome if this were something that eventually it would replace my income that I'm getting for my job, you know, because right now I'm working full time. That's the end goal is to

create something on the side that eventually will allow me to quit my job. Yep. How long have you had this idea ever since the noah kagan book came out so when that book came out i read it and uh that's what like spurred me to think i'm going to think about something that i have a pain point that i to fix so that's so probably how long has that book been out a couple months a month yeah yeah are you like an ideas guy are you always having ideas yeah okay i mean that's okay and this if this is one that you just can't get out of your head then i think that's sending a signal to its efficacy. I'm an ideas guy, but a lot of them just come and go. But if it sticks around, then I got to do something about it. Okay. Yeah. So building it, like you're saying,

just create some prototypes at home and start out for what would you think would be the next step after that? I would try to make like a hundred in your living room and try to sell those to friends and family in Facebook groups or whatever. Start doing a lot more market research in Facebook groups. for people that might buy this and on Reddit and just learning either by posting and asking or just reading old comments what they would like this to look like. And then I would make 100. I would sell them to friends and family and ask for all the feedback in the world, make changes. Maybe they're going to want round corners or something. Make changes based on that. And then find out how long it takes you to assemble these things from raw materials to finish product and assign that

into your cost. I'm like, all right, if I sell this for 20 bucks, it's going to, If I pay someone $20 an hour, being conservative to put these together, I can do 10 an hour. They're probably only going to do five per hour. So if I'm conservative on their wage, and I'm conservative on the time, it's going to cost a dollar per labor to put these together. It costs $4 to make them. I've got a 75% gross margin. That's a really good margin.

If I add in shipping, that cuts my margin to 50%. Do all that math. And then start to play around with actually selling these on Amazon. And I would just list them on Amazon. see how it goes, see if you can capture any organic traffic. And then phase three would be try to get this video in the hands of someone that can make it go viral. Just start DMing people or on your own personal account or make an account just, you definitely want to make an account just for this product. And then see if you can push some ads behind it on Instagram Reels.

And if your, if your CPM on these ads is really, really low, then it means that Instagram is showing it for free to a lot more people because they're engaging with it and it's keeping them on the platform. Most times I don't recommend you push like Instagram Reels via ads, but this is a paid product and that you will want to do that with this. Okay. And you think it's better to do that than try to have something manufactured like in China or designed and manufactured in China?

Yeah. I just, I would order the raw materials from China, but assemble them here because it's going to be very. very expensive once these are assembled to get them here in shipping containers. And it's, that just adds another layer of complexity. So let's say you're just putting, you're ordering identical boxes and putting three of them together and then two magnets in between the three boxes and putting them together. It's going to be very expensive for them to be assembled in China and then shipped here. Like literally three times more expensive because of all the volume. Because when you ship

stuff, you've got physical weight and then you have what's going to be. called. Oh, what's, what's it called? It's like the weight volume. The cost based on, I don't remember what the phrase is for it. But if it's very simple to assemble these, I would recommend doing it in-house and being in control of that process. Because one thing that could sink you is if, you know, your first shipment of 10,000 of these are all put together wrong that could crush you. And then a competitor could swoop right in and take the number one spot. Okay. Cool. So, all right. Yeah, man. Awesome. Well, let me know how it goes. I want to hear. I'm excited about this for you. I think it's a good idea. I was prepared to tell you

it was a bad idea, but I don't think it is. Awesome. Great. Thank you so much, Chris. You're welcome. Appreciate your time. Yep. Good luck. All right. Nat, I'm letting that in. Nat, how are you? I'm good. So your question is around finding products with high demand. So why don't you tell me exactly what you're looking for? I'm used to finding demand for apps, right? More apps, but I don't know how the physical goods work. So, for example, when I want to find demand for a mobile app, I want to go to search ads or sensor tower to find that, okay, the ad has a good search volume. But for physical goods, I don't know, right? Do you go to Google keywords to find that this product is actually good, or do you go to Facebook search ads to find the demand?

Because otherwise, it's a waste of my time to focus on a certain product that I know will not have demand. Yeah. That was it. I'm naive about the physical goods. But you do have experience with the apps you're saying? Yeah, for intangible goods or mobile apps, yes. Now, are you just trying to resell existing products that might be like be hot or trending right now? No, not really. I'm more like a creator. I like to create my own product, but then it's starting from something existing, right? So improve on something that already exists. Mm-hmm. Okay. So you want to find a, find a popular product, people are already buying, might have a deficiency of some sort, and then you want to put your touch on it and make it better and then sell that.

Yeah, exactly. Okay. Have you looked at Jungle Scout yet? No. So try that. That's specifically for Amazon. I think they're launching to other platforms or they already have, but that will show you exactly what is hot on Amazon and exactly what's trending, how many units, and it's not

perfectly accurate, but it's directionally accurate. how many units they're selling per month or how many dollars they're making per month. And then you can also go to Alibaba and Ali Express and Timu and look at what they're pushing the most, like start searching different categories and start paying attention to how they're ranking your search results because that's probably what's popular right now. Furthermore, there is a, I don't remember this. So you're going to have to Google it. But there's a URL suffix that you can add to any Shopify store that will show you all of their products by best to worst selling.

Okay. Okay. I've done this before. So basically use builtwith.com to find a bunch of Shopify stores. And then you're going to take a spreadsheet, put all of their URLs, and then use the concatenate function to attach the same URL suffix to all of these different Shopify store URLs. And then you'll be able to see you can do this manually or hire a VA to do this exactly which of their products sell the most in that current moment. Okay.

I'm also interested in the competition, right? Because in mobile apps, you can see the popularity, like people searching for this product, and you can also see the competition, right? So by definition, when I see high volume of search, but high competition, then it's more, it's a red ocean, right? It's more difficult to compete. You have to compete with price or with ads, which is, I don't like those games. So I was thinking, is there something similar that I can find high volume search below competition?

Like maybe Shopify for the high volume, they have a lot of stores that are pursuing the same customers. Right. Is that a way to do that? I believe so. I know there are tools out there that do that. Nothing is coming to mind offhand. But there's a tool called, I think, Gummy Search, which does that for Reddit. it will show you what topics are talked about the most in any given subreddit and like what

comments have certain like appearances a certain number of appearances for specific products or comments within subredits. Okay. Gummy search works great. But as far as finding out how much competition there is, I know that Jungle Scout does that on Amazon. You can see how many, it will show you right there in the Chrome extension, how many sellers sell that exact product.

And then I think you can use. even add products to like your watch list to watch over time to see if they're going up or down in popularity or competition. Yeah, this gummy search looks interesting to me. Yeah, it's pretty cool. But then hopefully you don't mind me asking this. The Reddit is difficult to self-promote, right? So how do you use this gummy search?

You find where the demand is, but then is there a way to self-promote on? Oh, yeah. So I wrote a newsletter on this like four or five months ago. So if you go to newsletter.chrisjkirner.com, there's one specifically about how to go viral on Reddit. There is a way to do it. It's very replicable. You just have to tell your story and show people what you're building in a very informative way with a good hook and a good title. And then once it starts taking off, then you can edit the post to add a link directly to your product or service. if you put the link in there in the beginning, then it will never take off because it's too obviously promotional.

Do you put the link in the first time that you write the post or at the end, you edit the post? No links at all. Like in the beginning, it just looks very value at. And then at the end, you're like, edit,

oh, wow, this is taking off. Thank you so much for anyone asking. Because a lot of times the comments will be asking, like, what's your product? You know?

I see. And so then you can even comment directly on those commenters with your link as well. Okay. So at the end of the engagement, engagement after you have certain posts, people commenting in a couple hours. Yeah, because Reddit will show you exactly how many people are viewing and reading your post

in any given moment. And you'll see it start to accelerate. And so if it never accelerates, then there's never a point to add the link. But as it's like, all right, 100 views an hour, 1,000 views an hour,

5,000 views an hour. And also you want to go in the subreddit and sort by top post by month, by day, all time. And you want to make your post a lot, like that one, right? Like if it's braggadocious or if it's humble or if it's telling a story, like it's different based on the subreddit, but just try to recreate what posts have already been viral in that

subrette with whatever you're doing. Yeah, use the formula. Yeah. If you go viral with a certain Reddit post, do you copy paste for other subredits? Or do you with the same account? Because it will look like spammy, right? Yeah. check your profile? You do have to use the same account. Most people are not going to check your

profile. You just have to do it in the right way because it's really hard to have a lot of Reddit accounts that have good karma. You can buy Reddit accounts and I've had some luck with that, but eventually they're likely to get banned if you keep doing that. And that reminds, I have 10 minutes, right? So yeah, you're good. That reminds me that the Google SEO algorithm change, right? Which to me, it's like prioritizing organic content. It's used by humans, right? Because people have used the AI organic content, quote unquote. What are you using now for SEO to rank high in SEO? Are you bullshit on quota? No, we haven't changed anything. Maybe we should. But we're just, we're keep doing,

we haven't really seen a hit yet. So. Yeah, I'm being hit. Okay. I think it's still pretty early as far as like the AI changes are concerned in SEO. Okay. Yeah, sounds good. I'll check this. Go-Me search. It looks interesting to me. Yeah.

And I'll check the Jungle Scout. Yep. Thanks for all the good advice on Twitter. Of course. Always like your post. Thank you, Nat. I appreciate that. All right.

We'll see you later. All right, man. Thank you. Bye. Bye. All right. I love this question. I'm 24 W-2 finance job, eventually want to start a business of some sort.

I'm married with a baby on the way in the fall, which does limit my risk tolerance. However, I'm not afraid to take smart risks. I'm looking to build something in off hours from work. A business that's promoted often is Amazon FBA or retail arbitrage. I haven't heard you speak on this in the past. I was curious your take. Could this be viable for making a five-figure income on the side that could give me leverage to jump into something else. Or does the capped ceiling make it less attractive option compared to

other alternatives? Would love to hear your thoughts. But also, if there are any go-to steps, you would take if you were in my position of looking to start in entrepreneurship. So, all right, I have many thoughts on this. He's asking if he can use retail arbitrage or Amazon FBA or whatever to make money on the side. So the previous caller just asked me about this, but he's doing something different. He wants to develop a real physical product that's unique, that he sells on Amazon. And if you remember, I suggested that he assembled this in his house, import the raw materials from China, and basically own the whole vertical, except the logistics and the third party side of logistics, which he's going to give to Amazon. But the Shopify side,

he will manage himself. I owned a third party logistics company, and even I would not suggest to most companies that they outsource that, with rare exception. I don't like the idea of people using FBA or arbitrage in most instances to try to make money. I think this market is very crowded because of the fact that there are so many other 24-year-olds that tried this, tasted some success. Maybe they made a $2,000 profit in a month. And then they went to Instagram and they saw a guy talking about how he makes $200,000 a month. And he thought, hmm, I bet there's a lot more money in teaching people how to do this than there is in me doing this myself because, man, this is actually a grind. This is, you know, e-commerce is not passive.

It is very hard. And you're competing with everyone in the world. And so there is more money in teaching people how to do Amazon FBA than there is in starting Amazon FBA. Now, if you're a big company already doing it, great, or if you want to invest a lot of time and money into research and development, importing stuff from China, that's one thing. But if you're just trying to make a side income, I don't recommend Amazon FBA. okay because you're going to be competing with everyone else that is buying a course from that

23 year old shirtless dude that post pictures of himself with other people's Lamborghinis okay i would definitely recommend starting something that you learn about on the internet from someone who is not incentivized to sell you that thing for instance i'm always tweeting about home service businesses about gutter cleaning about seamless gutters about lawn care about pressure washing. And I'm not trying to sell you a course on how to start a pressure washing business. I'm going to show you in a 1500 retreat how to do it yourself. And if you do it, great, if you don't, great. I'm not incentivized if you do that or not. Okay. So find people that are putting out good content, encouraging you to start businesses that are not monetarily incentivized

to get you to start that business. And that's probably going to be a good business. But that content is hard to find. Mostly it's on Twitter. Actually, there's a lot on YouTube because people, people on YouTube are incentivized by YouTube to get more views so YouTube can pay them. Most of them are not selling courses directly. So I do see really high quality how to start a business content on YouTube. But generally speaking, there is a direct correlation between how ugly a business is and how much profit you can make from it. Whereas there is also direct correlation between how sexy and passive a business looks and how much money you're likely to lose on it. because of the fact that people are simply incentivized to make riches look very easy as the hook

so they can sell you a course. And then once you bought the course, they don't care what happens to you. They don't care if you win or lose. So those are my thoughts on that. Hey, how's it going? Good. How are you, man? I'm pretty good. Pretty good. Good. Welcome to the thanks for having you're in your office. Of course. So I want to hear about your tutoring business and what you're struggling with. Yeah, so I started back in November. It started off pretty slowly. I was trying to do Facebook ads, but I really had no clue what I was doing. I never tried Facebook ads before, and I was trying to bring it, but obviously that didn't work out. So I moved into actually going into Facebook groups, so like mom and dad groups, school districts. And I was just saying,

hey, I'm a college kid and I'm looking to tutor online. And if anyone's interested. So like that's sort of message. And so real quick, you are doing. doing this virtually. So geography is not a concern. Right. And you're doing all the tutoring yourself or you have employees? I'm doing all myself right now. Okay. All right. So you started joining Facebook groups and how do that go? Okay. I was able to get a lot of responses and people saying, yeah, I need tutoring. And, you know, they were responding and I get a lot of direct messages, people that were interested in it. But the conversions on that were really low. But one thing I did notice is that when I was able to get people on an introduction call, I was always able to get like at least one session with them.

Okay. And so that. Your close rate is high from your sales calls basically. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Do you have any idea of the exact percentage close rate or an approximate? In terms of like the amount that I got on the intro calls. Yeah. Like how many people did you convert based on how many intro calls you had?

So I probably had maybe eight intro calls and I think seven out of the eight I was able to. Wow. Like, at least do with some, you know, some people, I was able to get as consistent customers for, like, months out of time. But others, it was like one. And then they didn't schedule another one after that. So of the seven, how many would you say were ended up being recurring versus a one-off? About four of them. I was able to, I tutored them for probably about two months. Okay. Because I started back in November. So, like, obviously the school year ended and not really doing it right now.

But I'm trying to prepare for the next year. And then how much are you charging? And then how often are your lessons? So like how much revenue does a two-month-long customer represent to you? So a two-month customer, so I would do about one to two sessions a week, and they would be 30-minute sessions, and I would charge $24.99 for those half-hour sessions. And so I would probably make roughly $1,5, $150 every month. Okay, so $25 for half an hour, twice a week for a couple months? Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever experimented with your pricing at all? No, I pretty much had the same pricing structure throughout the whole time. And I was also, one thing that I also wanted to change going into next year, I was hoping to get some advice on this. I was charging the same price, like regardless of the group that I was tutoring. So like high school, middle school, I was charged the same price. And looking back on that, probably wasn't that good an idea. Yeah.

When you go in, are you able to acquire customers outside of these Facebook groups or has that been your only way. So I did get one through, well, I got two through like word of mouth and like recommendations from someone who I was already tutoring. And I got like one more from like a recommendation from like my mom's friend, some like that sort of deal. Okay. But mostly Facebook groups. Yeah. Yeah. What is your pitch in the Facebook group? What do you say to them? Yeah. So I haven't pulled up here actually. So it says, hello parents. I'm a first year student at Washu and I'm a virtual tutor. If your child could use some help in algebra geometry or any cave through 12 math concepts,

feel free to send me a message. I have availability every day of the week and I'd love to help. So that was the message I would send out to the groups. That same message every time. Have you played around with it at all? Yeah. Well, I would say like hello parents of insert town. Okay.

But that was pretty much the most I would do with that. And so are you in Seattle then? No, I'm in St. Louis. Oh, okay. And it's Washington University? Yeah, Washington University in San. Okay, not University of Washington in Washington. Yeah, not University of Washington.

And are you posting in Facebook groups that are geographically nearby or no? I did, yeah. I did post in a lot that we're nearby. I sort of started in this area and then I just went everywhere. You can probably look up a random school initiative Facebook group if I see my post in there. Yeah. Okay. Now, what was the call to action at the end again?

Or are you asking them to DM you? Yeah, I said, feel free to send me a message. I have availability every day of the week. And I'd love to help. Okay. And do people ever comment? Yeah, yeah. I get a lot of comments from people just asking questions like how much does it cost? You know, like I said online. Well, some people would ask that even though it said online, but just people inquiring about what subjects I was doing. So the first thing I would do, I think you're doing a lot of stuff right. I like that you're, even though you're virtual, you're posting nearby, because. they have that affinity to you. I like that you're saying you're a college student because people want to support that. I think the fact that you're closing 90% of your calls means that you could be charging a lot more. And you might be able to make twice as much for doing the same amount of work. I imagine these calls don't take that long. They probably just want to like- Right. It's like 10 minutes. Yeah. They just want to make sure you're a real person that you sound and seem nice, right? I would have your call to action be more incentivizing for them to comment because

Facebook loves comments. Now, I know people are commenting, but if you just call the action them to comment instead of DM you, it will tell the Facebook group's algorithm that whatever you're saying is more interesting than average. And it will, it will, because you know, like I own Facebook groups and I'll post something really interesting. And Facebook will only show it to 5% of the group members. But as people start commenting, they will naturally start showing it to more and more. Oh, okay. Gotcha. I didn't know that. That's how that works. Yeah, yeah, they'll say, oh, this is interesting. More people might want to see this.

So try to incentivize comments. Definitely raise your prices. I would basically also put some sort of sense of urgency in there where it's like, hey, like, I just had a cancellation. I've got a couple slots I still need to fill. They usually go pretty fast as opposed to saying, I've got all the time in the world. It's like, well, how good is he if he has all the time in the world, you know? Yeah, yeah.

Definitely, like, I have two slots left. And it's like, oh, oh, I got to do something. something, you know? Right. Or I would also take, I think, what subjects are you tutoring for specifically? So I do, it's mainly math. So I'll do algebra geometry, pre-calculus. Okay. So a couple more ideas. Are you listed on any marketplaces? Because I know there are some marketplaces that match tutors with parents. Are you on any of them? Yeah, I was on one called tutors.com. Okay. You can pretty much pay for leads and, you know, like, you'll pay like a $20 flat fee or whatever. And then they'll have someone and message you that's looking for a tutor. That's cool. Okay. So I would definitely recommend,

look for other niche tutoring marketplaces. Do you have an Upwork account? No, I don't. I would definitely make an Upwork account because you can, you know, you'll pay Upwork $5 to acquire a customer, but then you can pull them off Upwork so you don't have to pay any fees and have them as a recurring customer. That's how I found my son a tutor. I just thought to go to Upwork. Most people don't do that, but I think there is a self-selection in there where people that are like posting, to Upwork are like more white collar, maybe more able to pay you more per hour, right? Right. I would also go to all those marketplaces, all those platforms for tutors and try to reverse

engineer them by seeing like you click the drop down, like subjects. What do they have listed first? Because I guarantee you whatever the listing first is the most popular. I feel like algebra is one of the most sought after subjects. And then in your Facebook post, you can take that data and lead with that. the subjects that are the most, maybe not math, but more granular, like geometry, algebra, or whatever it is, algebra one, algebra two, or go into other Facebook groups for parents and start searching for words like algebra, math, geometry, and find Facebook groups

for parents that aren't local, but have like hundreds of thousands of people, just because you're going to use those to try to get data and just search for specific terms, language arts, math, science, and see which ones are appearing the most often. Same with Next door. Same strategy on Nextdoor. What are parents asking for the most? And then in the comments of those posts, what are people complaining about? And what are their pain points?

What are their biggest pain points? And then lead with those in your local Facebook groups. They might only have 5,000 people in them. Right. Okay. Gotcha. Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah, I think you're on the right track with Facebook groups because they're

unlimited amounts of those and it doesn't you could do it all over the world right so once you hone in that process and know all right if i'm in a red state i'm going to post about this if i'm in a blue state i'm gonna like you're going to learn so many different little tactics to where you'll be hiring people to help fill all that demand okay so you recommend i like i wait so i sort of fill up a lot of sessions and then start delegating the tutoring to other people yes yeah you want you want to be like drowning in work before you really start hiring other people because then you that's when you're going to be forced to learn all these scaling mechanisms. Right.

Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Yeah, man. Well, I'm excited. I want to hear how it goes. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much for the advice. Yeah.

That's very helpful. No problem. Luke, good luck. Thank you. Yep. See it. Have a good one. Bye.

This person says, I'm very interested in AI and the potential you see with it. Is there any practical use case or idea you have about starting a business related to AI, whether it be an AI agency, implementation into existing service businesses, teaching people AI, automation integration with Zapier slash make. In essence, if you were to force to make money slash start a business related around AI, what would you do? Specifically, if you have limited capital, a lot of free time, but the ability to learn no code software and technical things. Thanks. Great question. Here's what I would do. I would help business owners and individuals make LLMs, language learning models,

specifically from their email accounts. There's a big hole in the market, and I think eventually it's going to get filled with Google or OpenAI. But right now, these big companies are very afraid to tie AI to our inboxes because of the privacy concerns around that. But there are a dozen ways to throw something together. And so anytime I see an industry that's emerging where people are finding creative hacks and workarounds to put something together, that's usually a really big opportunity.

And so I think there's a world where you could approach people like me that has an inbox, which with lots of data in it, for instance, I raise money for RV parks. And in one of my inboxes, Chris at co-founders.com, that's the only one I use to email with potential investors or current investors. And they ask all of the same questions, 15 to 20 questions. How does bonus depreciation work? What's the minimum investment size? I would love for someone that could go into my inbox, export all those emails.

And I've done this myself. It's grind. It is possible. But it takes a long time. And then it takes a long time to learn how to interact with that on a regular basis. Anyway, someone that could take all of my emails and segregate out the ones that are only with investors. And I don't want a chat bot.

I want basically a repository of answers where I could just plug in answers anytime a potential investor asked that question. I think there's a world where you can do that at a service, as a service, primarily to businesses that have employees that are all asked the same types of questions. Chatbots have been around. They are around. But this is different. You need to like, you can make FAQs out of your inbox or something, something like that. But I also really like the idea of automation agencies charging $2,000 to $3,000 a month to basically be that person, that company calls on anytime they, need an automation made. Maybe the automation doesn't use AI at all. Maybe it does. So for Texas snacks, I built this thing that will automatically email customers the day that their package arrives. And then when they email them, it'll even include a tidbit about the city that they live in.

So it does not look AI generated. And it has really increased a repeat order rate because people feel like they're creating a one-on-one relationship with the brand. Whereas usually when brands send emails, it's full-color, splashy. It looks very professional, but it's not personal at all. And I think email is moving away from that. So to answer your question, I see two things, help craft LLMs from AI and make the data in those LLMs very accessible and just automation agencies that may use AI and may not. Because most small to medium-sized companies have automation needs, but they can't afford, or they can't even justify hiring someone that costs $6,000 to $10,000 a month. They'd much rather pay you $2,000 a month, maybe $4,000 the first month and then $1,500 ongoing

to fix things as they break because they will break. Thanks for joining us on the Kerner office today. Hope you learned a bunch, and I hope you subscribe and share with a friend, and we'll see you next time.