The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - Riffing on Ideas with Connor: Candles and Apps. Ep. #90

Episode Date: November 11, 2024

I sat down with Connor Gross (https://x.com/c_gro), a familiar face on the podcast, to dive into some exciting new ideas and business strategies. We talked about productivity and how to truly gauge an employee's work speed, the challenges of the candle industry (since Connor’s dad owns a big candle business in New Jersey), and some innovative concepts for tackling these markets. This conversation was so packed with insights that we had to split it into two episodes! Make sure to tune in next week for Part 2, which, trust me, is even better. Check out Connor’s free newsletter! https://www.bizbrainstorms.comTimestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 Introduction and Guest Overview00:57 Employee Productivity and Remote Work Challenges02:48 Upwork and Multi-Job Dilemma05:13 Management Solutions and Business Ideas08:24 Speed and Efficiency in the Workplace15:04 Candle Business and Unique Branding Ideas17:06 Unusual Preferences and Niche Markets17:19 Innovative Packaging Ideas18:07 Candle Industry Insights18:47 Marketing Strategies and Unique Selling Points19:58 Exploring New Candle Concepts20:23 The Liquid Death Approach22:21 Refillable Candles and Home Decor27:53 Scratch and Sniff Marketing28:25 Collaborations and Personalization31:33 Pet-Themed Candles and Programmatic SEO

Welcome to the Kerner Office. I had a friend of the pod back on today. Connor Gross. He's been on at least two episodes so far. I know number 43, number 67, and maybe something else I can't remember. Conner's an idea machine and I love his ideas. And I got so much energy from this chat with Connor. We had to split into two episodes. You'll hear the next one next week. And I promise you the next one's even better than the one you're about to hear, which is awesome. Connor's the guy that I talked to about grill cleaning and programmatic SEO. We talked about two kind of core ideas and then some smaller ideas within them. One in like the time. tracking space slash productivity space slash how can I test to see if employees or future employees work fast? No one really talks about that. We talk about productivity, not being lazy, being smart, working hard. What about working fast? And then we talked about some ideas in the candle space because Conner's dad owns a big candle business in New Jersey. So you're going to love this one. Come back next week for part two with Connor. Share it with a friend. We'll see you next time. Literally this week I get a call from someone. He's like, I think my employees, and I'm not going to say

his name at all, so there's no incriminating evidence. He's like, I think my employee has two jobs. I was like, well, is he doing a good job of work? He's like, yes. I was like, all right, well, why do you think that? He's slow to respond. He works remote. Can't find him on LinkedIn anymore. So I also looked at my bike. I think he just deleted his LinkedIn profile. And then I got really suspicious. So keep in mind, I'm not saying my friend is sane. He's definitely a little crazy, but he said I looked up house where he lives on payroll. It's a $1.7 million house. I know how much this guy makes. It's not 1.7.

And I was like, all right, man. Well, like, first of all, people have trust funds, people have rich spouses, people get inheritance. Like, you know, I wouldn't judge the house situation. But all I will say is that he's not alone. You know, I've had three people within the last probably three months who have told me and they're all entrepreneurial friends that they think that their employee has a second job. And, you know, the telltale signs can be pretty pretty.

easy, obvious, they're slow to answer things. You know, maybe they screen shared and a suspicious email or Slack popped up, whatever. They're not on LinkedIn or maybe even worse. They are on LinkedIn, but they don't list to your company on LinkedIn. There's some things there in terms of how to tell. It's definitely something that people would pay for. But even like for myself, right, like, I want to know.

I'm going to make my employees download a Chrome extension or Slack extension or whatever to spy on them. Like, I'm just not that type of boss, nor do I care enough at all. But I would want to know. And so, like, what do, this is more of a problem than it is a business. Like, how do you solve that? Like, what does that look like? Man, I'm thinking, this is a little awkward to say.

But I've had an employee in the past that I hired on Upwork. And Upwork is very interesting because it will tell you how many open jobs any employee has at any even time, any person on Upwork, right? And so I have people that I currently employ on upwork that I can say they have nine, 10, 13 open jobs. Now, big asterisk because a lot of times, like, there are jobs that I opened years ago that I never closed. And technically on their profile, it says they still have an open job with me. So, but it doesn't count.

But there are ways you can tell and that you can see how many hours they've worked on that job. So if I see a job, it will say open job with this company. since March 2021, you know, 862 hours work. I can do the math and know, wow, this guy's doing 15 hours a week consistently. Huh, he's doing 10 hours a week here. He's doing five here. He's doing, oh, that's why he's not answering my emails, right? But that's just Upwork, right?

So Upwork solves for that for Upwork. But outside of Upwork, where most of the world lives, that is a problem. And so I'm over here thinking, like, to install a Chrome extension on someone that you've already hired is like, there's just no going back from that. Like you said, right? And you said that. It's like it would just kill the culture or kill the vibe. Just not going to work.

But is there a way you could do it tactfully? I'm the fan of like getting ahead of things. Like for instance, when I hire someone at this point, I just tell them like, hey, I don't want to hop on calls ever. Whereas if I tell someone three months into the job, hey, I don't want to hop on calls. It's like, wow, you don't like me. It's like, no, it's not you. But if I tell them that up front, then they don't take offense because it's just now they know from day one.

And so I wonder if there's a world where on day one, it's like, hey, this is what we do. You do have to install this Chrome extension. It sucks. But this is a low margin business. And like we wouldn't be in business if it weren't for this. So I hope that's not a problem. And their response to that, one throwaway sentence is going to tell you everything you need to know. You might not even ever have to.

You might not go through with them or you might go through with them and never. even install it because they're clearly not worried about it, right? It could just be like a litmus test on the front of it. No, so I completely agree with all of that. I have also noticed the same thing with the Upwork stuff, random story there that I don't have to go into. But yeah, I think, I think that it's probably more of a management solve than it is maybe a product or a solution. Now, the only two, because I spent some time trying to just prep for this and like, the only two solutions I could come up with are so overkill that they wouldn't be good solutions. The first is invent an entirely new payroll processor that tells you when one social security number is on two

payroll processors. I was thinking some sort of a centralized database that companies could refer to. Well, so that's maybe. So this is ADP, it's Gusto, whatever, but like, you know, ADP reports a lot of their payroll data to the U.S. government for like census and job bureau data, now whether or not they would report the number of double payrolls. I don't know. This seems a little bit to micro and exposure focus. Second's idea is can you do a glass door for employees? I'm sure that must have already been solved for before.

But like even in the back of my mind, like I have one employee for reference that I'm thinking of just like bad experience. Not going to get into a lot of the specifics, but like ended up letting her go, a whole thing there. I would be really, like, I'm not going to reach out when she gets a new job. I hope she gets a new job, whatever, but like, I would like the new employer to know what happens. Or, like, I think that that's fair.

And also, myself as an employer, like, I would want to know if somebody had a bad experience and they're just great on an interview, but then they become problematic. And, you know, I think that that could be an interesting concept. The tough part is that, like, probably over biases for bad, but I don't know. It's tough. It's kind of like, it reminds me of like the, their, needs to be a review system for Zillow, for realtors or for homes, right? Like people that went on a walkthrough, they could review, hey, avoid, you know, don't waste your time. And I think

a lot of these problems are like, you have such a selection bias at play where it's like the worst employees would never opt into it. And so you see like all these employees magically have a 4.9 rating, you know, because they're pushing it. And it might not even mean they're good. So then it's not even working. I wonder if the bigger issue is more of a management style. Like, I'm just of the firm belief that 80% of employees don't have enough to do, right? I mean, it's really the 80-20 rule, but it's like, just go talk to anyone and be honest with them. I talked to a guy last week that make 350 grand for Amazon. And he's like, I work 12 hours a week, like, max. And my performance reports are amazing. And my boss loves me. And I keep getting promotions. And like, I think that's a lot

more common than people realize. Yeah. Yeah, I completely agree. I think it'll be interesting to see how it shakes out in the next couple years, but maybe the solution. I think what you got at originally is expectations up front, probably also hiring less, right? Like, that way you would know if they're not doing the work.

I also do think, like, even our employees right now, like, I don't think they necessarily have a ton to do. It's November right now. Like, we're finishing out the year. But yeah, I agree with that. So probably more of a management solution than a true violence. business, which I kind of felt like coming in, but I like breaking down the problems when I hear them.

Yeah. Well, no, let me take your management solution and turn it into what could be a viable business. I think there needs to be a test. Some, you know, they have like personality tests, right? Are you INTP or ENFJ or introvert or extrovert or you're blue or red or whatever? There needs to be a test for employers to give to impending employees to take that can gauge and measure how fast they work, right? That's something I never hear people talk about.

You talk about, are they productive, are they not? Are they lazy? Are they hardworking? But no one talks about how fast you can work, right? How quickly you can rip through a spreadsheet or rip through an email. Like, you probably have experienced this. I have a friend named Brandon. He's experienced this where Parkinson's law is very real thing for those listening.

If you don't know what it is, it's like work slash time expands or contracts to fit whatever you give to it. So if you're in high school and you have four weeks to do your science fair project, you're going to do it in four weeks. If you have to do it tomorrow, you're going to do it by tomorrow. Like, I am such a believer in Parkinson's law. So if I had this standardized test that I could give to employees during the interview process before they're hired that sent them through, like it gave them like a faux inbox. Right. And it's like, all right, clear the inbox.

Hit inbox zero. Go to this spreadsheet, you know, basic tasks, basic formula, clear this, solve for this. And it was like, you just had a barometer of what is a fast employee and what is a slow employee. Because that way, like, I can hire four of those guys. Yeah. Or I can hire one guy to fill four roles if he's that fast because it really is an 80, 20 rule. I just, oh, man. Like, so it's maddening sometimes when I outsource something.

And it's like, are you on yet? I think that that is one of the best ideas I've heard in a minute solely because I think it's, easy to build. And if you aggressively give it out for free slash whatever, the referrals that come in from it, assuming that it's like qualified and good would be great. So I mean, you know that I'm working on this recruiting business right now. And like, don't have to go into that a ton. All I want to say is that we recently hired US-based customer support roles for a fast-growing e-commerce business. One of their biggest criteria is was type speed. I'm like, I think I'm nice on a computer. I think I'm like very, very fast in terms of typing.

I took a typing test that they wanted me to administer to all of their candidates. And I got like 75 words per minute. They want all of their candidates to be at least 60, which, you know, your job was responding to tickets. It's a volume game that makes sense. It felt a little weird to administer to people after the interview. But like, I was like, that's fine. We got to the final round with like five really good applicants.

and I think it was like four of the five or maybe it was three of the five scored like 35 words a minute and I was like wow I was like I wouldn't eat like I thought I was fast and then you know at some point it gets margin on like 60 felt right to me like I was like wow you can't use a computer I was like yeah I didn't like call me privilege it's fine but like we had you know typing test stuff in like the fourth fifth grade uh-huh hold hardware PCs like to your point on, hey, whether or not it's a screening and a criteria to join, like the typing speed honestly might, to your point, or learning keyboard shortcuts, and maybe that's a training when they join or whatever.

Like, whatever that looks like, I do think that would be really, really valuable for a lot of new hires. Yeah. Or dude, even like I used this Mac app. It's called, I think you would like this. It's called Word Counter, I think. Word counter, I think. It's this one solo founder built it like a decade.

to go. He's the only guy. And it's the only app that I can find that does this. It's like $20 for a lifetime license. And it tracks how many words you type per day across mail messages, Excel, Slack, Chrome, whatever, whatever app, individually or in aggregate. And it was shocking for me to realize how many words I'm typing. Yesterday was like my all-time high for the last four months. I typed 6,800 words yesterday. Damn. 6,800. But it's like, cool. that's Parkinson's law. You just take on all these companies and projects and employees, and then you just,

you rip through it so much faster. You're like, I'm not going to put an email signature here. I'm not going to use pleasantries. I'm not going to add that period. That's a typo. People are going to think I'm dumb. I don't care. I'm going to leave all the typos because what do I care that they think I'm dumb?

No, I'm going to rip through these emails. Like, it's only 15 years to get there. But if you could see how many words, someone in a role where that is correlated to productivity. If you're not taking screenshots, you're not checking in, I think that would, that would give you, that would get you a lot of the way there. I can put it to agree. That's cool. I like that a lot. I really like that. And to your point, this was your idea, like, you make this free because you want this to become the de facto standard. You want all these companies to start using it, right? Like, introvert and extrovert is household word. Like, I want whatever X, Y, or Z

household word that's related to this test to become commonplace. Because then, I mean, your monetization. angles are endless at that point. There are a lot of paid ones, right? Like the paid ones are, is it predictive IQ? I don't know. If you look up like employee personality tests or something like that ahead of time, predictive index, maybe it's called, there are a lot of paid ones.

I do think, to your point, can you get a more free version of this? And then upsell something else afterwards, it gets more exciting. Dude, honestly, I would administer this test as an employer. as just like, I wouldn't tell them we're measuring their productivity or their speed. I would just say like, hey, this is like a, it's a trial run. And we're going to pay you for it, right? We'll pay you whatever your normal rate would be. And it's just so you can kind of get a feel for how we work.

And then you give me feedback when you're done on what you thought. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, you're getting feedback. It's kind of a trick. Yeah. And at the end of it, you're seeing all these metrics that they don't even know that you're tracking, you know. 100%. 100%.

Cool. I like that. That's cool. Me too. You could use AI to build that. Like, hey, here's what I'm thinking. What should I, like, how should I use Zapier? Like, how do I fill a faux inbox? Like, what type of Excel formulas should I use? Like, it should be like kind of skillful, but not really. It's going to make a little sandbox. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Man, that's good. I like that one. My dad, all my life, like, I think, oh, wait, he bought this business when I was 11 and I didn't know what, like, buying a business. Was there anything there? But a candle manufacturing business in South Jersey. Summers, scraping wax off glass, selling candles, making cold calls to mom and pop shops. And, you know, now he's owned this business now, what is the math on this? 15 years, something like that. And he probably is going to sell it soon. He's grown the business pretty sizably all under their own brand.

But the entrepreneurial, direct-to-consumer e-commerce brain and me is always thinking, damn, how can I launch a bunch of sub candle brands? And to be honestly, like his candle brands are not super unique from anyone else. It's just if his 15 years plus the previous owners, 15 years, you know, they got 30 years in the industry of selling the candles. So they've built a little bit of a brand for themselves. But I feel like it would be really fun to launch like the liquid death candles and start with, I don't know what that looks like, but like the classic candle company.

company and candle decor is everything from all baked goods, crisp cotton, you know, some kind of like luscious smell and fragrance. Nobody wants their things to smell bad. So I think that's kind of off the table. It's kind of more of a gag gift. But like, can you create really intense branding that can appeal to a different audience and get a lot of headlines? What do you think?

What about like a mystery candle where it's not going to be, it's not going to be something bad, but it's going to be something random. And you could even, you can even put them in themes, like a wood shop mystery candle. And it might smell like cedar. It might smell like pine or sawdust or something. Or just like a man cave theme mystery candle. And it could smell like motor oil or just something. I don't know what it is. This is kind of random. But there's a small percentage of the population that genuinely likes the smell of skunk myself. Like we drive by a skunk. And like my whole family's like, oh, gosh, roll up the windows and I genuinely love it. Okay, so that's weird. Maybe there's some, it is weird, but maybe there's something there. You know that there's a

subreddit for people like you, I'm sure? Probably, yeah. But so, okay, so one thing I can think of is like drive coffee. I don't know if you know this company, but they do really cool packaging design. And so they kind of, this weird, like intersection of people who love plastic cars slash adventure or whatever is the brand and the people who enjoy their coffee. They sell coffee beans in motor oil cans with like really sexy packaging. That could be cool. But as far as like what you're saying too, the candle market is pretty segmented in terms of like gag gifts, which is like the surprise.

I know that there are candle companies that do like hide a diamond ring in one out of every 50,000 candles that I love that concept. And then the other side is like the cozy in home, right? Like candle sales plummet in the summertime, but they perform really well in the winter, fall time, obviously. One thing that most people don't know about with the candle industry is that big players like Yankee will often, you make candles in two batches. You pour the wax, you let it sit, you adjust the wicks, you then reheat it so that way it's all straight, and then you pour the top layer of wax as well. That way you're not just like dousing a candle wick

and wax. That's how the manufacturing works. That second portion of wax, Yankee, a lot of the big guys, where they put all of their fragrance. So when you're at a store and you're smelling it and you're sniffing it, it smells really fragrance because the fragrance is the expensive thing, not the wax here, right? Top-heavy. It's a top-heavy candle, yeah. Like, you could probably have a pretty good marketing campaign.

I've been pushing my data to this for a while of just emphasizing the difference and educating the customers on that core difference. I think that that would be really valuable and something that you can kind of like create an enemy out of, which would be nice. Would you, your dad isn't direct consumer already? He's only doing like wholesale, white label stuff? No, they're like a third, a third, a third. It's a third Amazon, third.

No, no, it's probably more like, 1% Amazon, 15% direct to consumer and then whatever the Delta is a 55% wholesale. Okay. And is he doing anything unique right now or is it just kind of your generic stuff? Pretty generic. Like, he's listening to this, which I doubt he is, you know, it's a great candle. It's a great product. But I will say, and he's straight away from this a little bit, but honest and partially because this is also a little saturated, they had a very Christian Catholic emphasis when they bought the business. Since then, it's slightly watered down. They don't lean into that that hard. Like, if you looked at the brand, you wouldn't necessarily know it unless you can know it for 20 years. They have moved away from that a little bit. I do think if they went super hard in that category, where it's like,

Hey, every candle has a, I am I blanking on the word? What's, like, is it a testimony? A testament quote at the bottom and you see it after you burn on the wax. Maybe there's something there. But honestly, I think above all else, if you're, if you want to call it the liquid death of candles, what did the liquid death do differently? All right, they took a really boring category and they made it pretty extreme, pretty counterculture. And then they also changed the packaging.

Almost no water bottles were in aluminum cans prior to this. So when you think of a candle, the first thing that comes to mind is probably some kind of glass packaging. Or maybe there's some kind of like ceramic looking thing that you can buy on Amazon, some kind of votive jars as well. But like for the most part, it's all glass. And so you see the wax. Can you redesign the packaging to make it look like another piece of home decor than your house? Or do you want to have it be designed entirely for one room, right? Do you want to sell bathroom candles?

Therefore, do you make it white and porcelain like the toilet? Do you want to only sew candles for the outdoors? Do you want to only sew candles to go by your fireplace? Like pick the vessel that probably has the highest tan and can like also stand out and differentiate from the glass products. And then I think you just have to go really extreme in the marketing. And so what does that look like? Is it, you know, do you take the liquid death like crazy rock star punk culture approach?

Probably not. but can you do like, oh, I don't know it would be a really good one? And I've actually, oh, I thought about this for a while. Do you know 19 crimes?

No. Okay. 19 crimes is a wine company. If you look up their bottles online, they're awesome. It's like a black and white photo of a prisoner in front of a cell. And they, like if you hover like an app over the,

over the bottle, they like kind of animates it. It's like, I was arrested for this, X, Y, Z reasons. And so it's pretty cool. I've always wanted him to do. do something similar. And if you think about the type of people that are buying candles, it can also

be like the rom-com and they really like fiction. And like, can you cross over that world with the candle world at all? Where there's some kind of story involved or there's characters that you like really enjoy, you know, something like that. I wonder if you could take, what about the concept of a refillable candle? And I know there's some weirdness with the WIC, but I think you could do it right, where you put something on top of the vessel to hold the wick in place. Like, what if he found some popular Shopify stores or even like a home goods or Hobby Lobby that sells some sort of a decoration or a vase? And like on Shopify, if you put some like a URL suffix, you can sort all of their products

by bestsellers, right? Because basically just find some sort of a home goods decoration that's already like top 1% bestsellers, copy the design somehow, and then sell a candle inside that with like a subscription where you could order the wax in the future and you'd have to melt it down, but refill it over time. So it's a permanent fixture that is always a candle that you could always refill. So they have melters. Melters are basically a nightstand looking things. They don't have to be a nightstands, but they're nightstands. There's also ones that you can plug in. And they need to put the wax specifically on top. It burns it all. That can absolutely

work. And maybe the entire game plan is, hey, we don't want to have something we light. We want to have something that cast a stronger fragrance. I like that idea. I think the vessel is the big question here, right? Because like in the same way that they're selling aluminum cans versus plastic, what do you sell? It's the opposite to. Maybe you downsell it.

Maybe you sell them without the vessel. And then there's just a plate that collects all the wax. That might get messy. I don't know. I like, more broadly speaking, I like the concept of liquid death for X, right? Yeah. that needs to be a thing. I think liquid death worked so well because A, the founder, I forget his name, is a freaking

marketing genius, right? B, it's water, right? So you can make water punk rock and you're not going to really alienate a market, right? If you sell something that everyone needs, you can go as niche as you want and it can become over time as broad as you want. Whereas with candles, you know, it's going to be hard to convince a dude that doesn't normally buy candles to buy candles, right? So maybe that's the M.O as well, right? Like, you know, I think you see a lot of people raise VC money and they'll go after the, hey, I want to make a men's makeup brand. I think one of them just recently went under went under.

Like, yeah, men don't want to wear makeup. But from a candle standpoint, right, I do think that you could probably have more of a crossover if it's like, oh, this candle helps you focus. Oh, candle, give the illusion to your messy apartment when you bring a girl over that like it's actually not. not so bad. Stuff like that. I think to really solve for, specifically candles. Just throwing this out there is like hard as hell to sell online. People want to smell it. So I don't really know the answer for that. Like is it you send a little sample pack.

Last thing I would say on the liquid death for X category, I have a friend whose friend started a business. And I freaking love it. It's called Titan Caskets. And Titan Caskets is essentially the liquid. liquid death for caskets. So they take a very, you know, when people die and I just did this whole write up on funeral homes and if they're a good business or whatever, like people are very much of

caregivers and they want to be there for you and whatever. Cascar is like, they ran a Valentine's Day special called buy now, die later. And they're very aggressive in terms of their marketing. They do a really cool, fun approach. It's like irreverent marketing. It's all irreverent. Like that's probably the best word for it. Exactly. And it's on a category that you would never think of, but crazy high AOB, right? Like, you know, these eight, nine, $10,000 caskets. I'm looking at the website right now. They're like punk rock. They got like stickers on them. Like, it looks like the back of my Jeep in high school. Yeah. And they also just did a whole, they made the casket. I don't know if you saw this or not for the Yeti and Liquid Death collab. Yeti and Liquid Death raffled off a casket for like $70, $80,000. And they, they,

They manufactured the casket that essentially looked like a Yeti cooler as a casket, and then they filled it up with liquid death and ice and whatever. Wow. Yeah. That's random, but that's awesome. But pretty cool. Yes, I think the liquid death for X category, you have to begin of marketing, pick a big tam, and then find something that also has to serve a little bit more of a problem, right? Like in liquid death's case, the kind of problem that they were solving was, I want to drink water. at a concert without looking like a wuss.

And that, you know, it's, oh, it'll be a middle of light. I can't tell. And I do think that you're finding something like that could be very beneficial. Dude, I'll also say the mango chainsaw liquid death is the best sparkling water on the planet. It's so good. Hard disagree. What? I would love, I would, hey, big sparkling water guy over here.

Love the Topochicos. I'm a mountain valley guy usually through and through. But like, the mango, I think it's too sweet for me. me. That's why I like it. Oh, yeah. That's fair. One, I think they were selling it at like a Chipotle in on Austin one time or something like that. And yeah, a little bit too sweet for me.

Dude, I just got an idea. I just got an idea. Okay, I'm sitting up. So what we're thinking, we're having like this, you know, the front brain in my conversation is conversing with you in the back grain. The back of my brain is just thinking like the smooth brain is just thinking candle ideas, right? And so I'm thinking, you mentioned smell. How do you sell a smell over the?

the internet. Well, it's hard. Can you send out samples? Then I start thinking direct mail, you know, could you do like a scratch-a-sniff, direct mail? And it's like, that could be interesting. On like a postcard, you could put 12 different samples. I'm obsessed with this one, QR code right here. You order from your phone, Apple pay, frictionless. Love it, right? Especially if it's a subscription. Because direct mail is expensive, right? This would be even more expensive, I presume, putting smells on something. But if it were a subscription, you know, your AOV could be in the hundreds. So that's interesting, but then I'm thinking, okay, what about a little co-marketing? What about finding companies that are already spending a bunch of money on direct mail?

Zillions of them, right? It's the only thing I get in my mailbox. Let's say it's like a nationwide, like Century 21 or someone that has a really big direct mail budget and doing a co-branding campaign with them and say, hey, just give me like the left third of your envelope. If you're spending 36 cents per envelope for a 4x6 and it's 41 cents for a 5 by 7, let me just, you know, you only need 4 by 6. Let me get the rest.

I'll pay you a couple pennies. I save 80%. You net out ahead or even or make up, you know, make a little more money. And I'm going to put these samples on everything. I think it would work. Yeah. Honestly, I have not even thought about the concept of a scratch and sniff in the longest time. But I 100% do think that it would work.

I also think that it would work from a gifting time. If you want to put it in a bunch of just like catalogs and Q4 gifts, because that's what a ton of mail goes out as well. I do think that would be especially because that's when that intent is highest. Dude, we got to bring snatch scratch and sniff back. Like it's the physical. It's like it's has the, the first principles of like you're revealing something. What is it going to be?

So the other thing that if you want to, I've liked this idea. I'm so deep in the candle world at this point, and I haven't really thought about it, honestly, in a while. So it's called, let me just Google it first before I say it. Yeah, okay, birth date can't birth date. You know about this? I think so. John Fiatina's company.

Oh, wow, their site has changed a little bit since I've got on it last. I don't think I do know about this. There's one, it was like a hometown candles. Do you remember them? No. Oh, oh, homesick. Oh, homesick is great. Yeah, homesick.com.

They were all over Facebook. Homestick crushes. Homestock does a really good job. And I think they do like, you know, they're right now they're selling a Jerry's apartment in Yankee Stadium fragrance and, you know, Barbie Dreamhouse. Like they crush it on the partnership clabs. Everything's awesome. The birth date ones, they target people who are into horoscopes, horoscopes.

So, like, I can send you a candle for your birthday. And the fragrances, I think, are like one of three. but on the front it says like June 23rd Pisces here's what your sign tells me about you all of this stuff actually Dan not going to lie their site changed a lot since I've been on it last but it's probably merchandise 10 times better birth date pendant this is crazy $185 Scott are you are you on this website right now yeah I'm looking at it yeah birthday pendant this is got to be an expensive website they definitely they definitely didn't make here very interesting now. So yeah. Lots to do in the candle space.

Here's a follow up on this. I have the in on the manufacturing fronts. All right. If anyone knows, has a candle idea, let me know. Down to play ball. The very last one that I'll say is that I only think people love more than, you know, friends and gifts for birthdays is their pets. And so the last thing I'll say is, can you have a fragrance that maybe isn't wet dog, but smells better than that, like freshly groomed dog. And then you send me a photo of your dog and I print Fluffy on the front of a candle and you have a stick for that would go over really well too. Oh, dude. Yeah. Like, or that just more speaking more broadly, like

incorporate pets with anything. Because pets is a standalone industry. Everyone knows is amazing. But just a pet collab with any consumer package good. Yeah. That's really interesting. Anyway, that's good. Programmatic SEO on homesick candles, one for every niche town in America. I mean, that could be a thing. I know. I thought you were joking, but I'm like, no, this sounds like a good idea, Connor. Niche ideas of all time, but I like it.

Oh, man. Even programmatic aside, like if you were just doing like hyper-targeted Google ads to people in those areas, or people that used to live in those areas but now live in somewhere else. Yeah, I like it. Okay, don't forget to come back next week. I promise part two is even better in part one. Please subscribe on Apple or Spotify or wherever you are and share this with a friend.