The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - The Easy Way to Copy These $1M+ Online Businesses⏐Ep. #230
Episode Date: October 6, 2025Get 30 days free on HighLevel only with my link: https://www.gohighlevel.com/chris-koerner━Check out my newsletter at https://TKOPOD.com�...� and join my new community at https://TKOwners.com━In this solo episode I walk through how regular people are building real businesses by white labeling simple software. I break down a few examples that are already making serious money and show you exactly how to spot these opportunities yourself. I also share the process I use to dig into what’s working, how to find the products, the pricing, and even how they get customers. There are a few tools I use that make this whole thing a lot easier, and I show all of them in the episode.Meta Ad Library: https://www.facebook.com/ads/libraryWayback Machine: https://web.archive.orgTKOwners Community: https://www.tkowners.comBuiltWith: https://builtwith.comWappalyzer: https://www.wappalyzer.comCRFT Lookup: https://www.crft.studio/lookupStack Crawler: https://stackcrawler.comSimilarweb: https://www.similarweb.comWhatRuns: https://www.whatruns.comNerdyData: https://www.nerdydata.comIBISWorld: https://www.ibisworld.comSearchfunder: https://searchfunder.comDealroom: https://dealroom.coCB Insights: https://www.cbinsights.comPitchBook: https://pitchbook.comOwler: https://www.owler.comAlphaSense: https://www.alpha-sense.comSensor Tower: https://sensortower.comG2: https://www.g2.comBombora: https://bombora.comDistill: https://distill.ioVisualping: https://visualping.ioChangeTower: https://changetower.comAdEspresso: https://adespresso.comBigSpy: https://bigspy.comSocialPeta: https://www.socialpeta.comWisconsin franchise search tip: “WI franchise search” on GoogleEnjoy! ---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---
Transcript
Discussion (0)
They've got over 500 customers, let's say only 500.
That's $100,000 a month.
So you're telling me that these people have a business just because most real estate agents have never heard of or don't know how to use it?
Exactly.
That's exactly what I'm telling you.
Here's a secret.
You could totally copy and paste this.
Digital companies that are making between $10,000 and a million dollars a month.
There's so much you can do.
These are big businesses.
Million, 10 million, 100 million plus dollar businesses.
They're just copying a pasting.
So how do we reverse engineer them?
Every few months I like to shake things up.
bit. I like to stir the pot, if you will. And if you remember last summer, I posted this video right
here where I found a website that lets you reverse engineer companies, digital companies that are making
between $10,000 and a million a month. You know how much they're making, and I know how to reverse
engineer them and show you all the secrets so you can go copy them without an ounce of shame in your
body. So today, I'm going to do that all over again, except with different businesses and different
tactics. And by the end of this video, you are going to have more ideas of who to copy and how to
copy them than you will know what to do with. So without further ado, let's get going. Oh, and just in
case you don't care about reverse engineering any of these businesses I'm about to cover,
at the end of this video, I'm going to give you 17 other tools for reverse engineering any
business you'd ever want to reverse engineer on the internet. Okay, so by way of backstory,
there's a company out there called High Level. And every year, they have awards. And these awards are
given to people that have built the biggest businesses on high level. And high level is a software
platform that you can use to manage your customers, manage your relationships, you can run automations,
or what we'll be talking about today, is building an entire business on top of high level,
which is called white labeling, as if you were high level. So to break it down even more simply,
let's say I want to build text messaging software for real estate agents. Well, there's a problem.
I don't know how to do that. I don't know how to code and I never have. And I'll never learn,
because now I don't have to learn.
So I'm just going to go use high level and their text messaging platform,
branded as my own, call it my own, and sell it for a monthly fee to all of the customers
that I might happen to find.
Rinse and repeat that with CRM, customer relationship management software, AI voice agents,
funnels, appointment setting, form builders, on and on and on, you get the idea.
So they have this conference, and if you win a gold SaaSpreneur award,
it means you have over 100 sub accounts.
which means you have over 100 customers.
Platinum is over 500 customers and Diamond is over 1,000 customers.
Now, the craziest thing about this is that almost all of these businesses built on top of Go High Level
are charging between $50,000 and $5,000 per month per customer.
So these numbers start to get pretty silly after a while.
Now, what are you paying high level for the privilege of white labeling their software?
Between $200 and $500 a month.
So High Level is nice enough to list out all these award winners.
and we're smart enough to use Google to go to their websites and see what they charge,
which means that these 20-something companies right here each have over 1,000 customers
paying them between $50,000 and $5,000 a month.
These are big businesses, $1,000, $10 million, $100 million-plus dollar businesses.
It's not often that you can know the revenue of a privately held business.
And with a tricks I'm about to show you,
it's not often that you can find out how they acquired their customers,
how they got to where they are today.
What learning curves and headaches did they already go through
that you're going to be able to skip?
So enough talking.
Let's get into it.
I'm just going to start picking these willy-nilly at random.
No audience plants.
One bite.
Everyone knows the rules.
Now, I'm going to go straight to platinum first.
These are over 500 customers.
And I'm just going to start looking for names that look interesting.
So Astroblaster.
That looks like a game that my dad might have played in high school.
I'm going to copy it.
I'm going to open a new tab, and I'm just going to Google it.
Astroblaster.
Okay, first of all, that's their preview text on Google.
Not great.
The number one automation and text messaging platform for real estate professionals.
Okay.
I have to laugh as I see this because do you know how many texting automation platforms
for real estate professionals websites that I've seen?
There are so many, hundreds, thousands of them.
And I bet you anything, 70 to 90% of them are all built on top of go high level.
So you're telling me that these people have a business just because most real estate agents have never heard of high level or don't know how to use it?
Exactly.
That's exactly what I'm telling you.
That's how business works.
Isn't it beautiful?
Okay.
So I'm looking at their website.
I know nothing about these guys.
They've got some testimonials.
Awesome.
They're selling the time saving features, custom built dashboard.
They're just copying and pasting high level snapshots.
Scroll all the way down.
Okay.
$1,000 plus $100.
a month. So they're doing $50,000 a month recurring, not including the $1,000 that they charge
upfront. That's at a bare minimum because they have over 500 customers. They could have 997 for all I
know. And what are their costs on that? Almost nothing. So how do we reverse engineer them? How did they
do this? Well, we're going to go to one of my favorite websites of all time. The meta ads library.
Meta as in Mark Zuckerberg as in Facebook and Instagram and WhatsApp, etc. We're going to go to
the ad category, all ads, and we're going to type in Astroblaster. Okay, that's a VR thing. Okay.
They're not running any Facebook ads. That's interesting. Then we're going to go to my second favorite
website, the Wayback Machine. We're going to type in their domain name, the Astro Blaster. Ooh,
even better. They're doing between $50,000 and $100,000 a month, very profitably, and they've only
been around for two years. Okay. So we're going to go and see what did their homepage look
like on day one. And this is important because anytime we're reverse engineering someone,
we want to see how they got to where they are today. Because their pricing may have started out
as a flat fee or as $10 a month or as $1,000 a month. We need to see how they learn because that's
going to help frame the why, the why of why we should copy what we're going to copy. Because some
things we're going to leave. We don't want to infringe on their trademarks, intellectual property,
trade secrets, et cetera. We're not here to be unethical. We're here. We're here.
because we are growth mindset people.
We believe that the pie is plenty big enough for everyone.
And these guys, Astroblasters in this case, even if we crush it, they're never even going
to know we exist because there are two million real estate agents and these guys only have
a few hundred of them as customers.
And in fact, when someone copies your business, oftentimes, if not most of the time,
it makes your business grow even faster because it increases the awareness of your business.
Two examples with my porch pumpkins video right here.
I posted about this lady's porch pumpkin business.
She was the only one doing it.
Now there are hundreds, if not thousands of women doing it, which increase the awareness
that you can actually pay someone $600 to put porch pumpkins on your porch.
And now more women are like, oh, that's a thing?
I want that.
So the original woman that I posted about, even though now she has hundreds of competitors,
her business is growing faster than ever because the awareness has increased.
The same is true with appliance rental.
Now that people know you can rent an appliance for $60 a month on Facebook Marketplace,
there's much more room for all the competitors that are now out there because of this video that I posted.
And real quick, I'm clearly a fan of high level.
Otherwise, I wouldn't be talking about it.
If you want to say thanks for the value you're about to see in this video, just use my affiliate link.
You get 30 days free instead of 14.
It buys you a little more time to test it out before you buy it.
Okay, here's what their website used to look like.
It looks about the same.
They still had customer testimonials, same style of website, 81 U.S. markets, and their pricing,
which is the most important part. Same. Okay. So it looks like their pricing has been the same pretty much
from day one, which is good to know. If I were you copying this, I would not change the pricing.
This sounds like it's the sweet spot. Sometimes you can even do yourself a disservice by not charging
enough because you're not conveying the value of what you're offering well enough. It's very easy to say,
oh, they're 97 a month. I should be 77 a month and 500 up front instead of a thousand. No, stop. Don't do that.
Just copy it. Let's go to our handy friend Chad GPT.
say, tell me everything you know about how Astro Blaster grew and found customers. They are an
SMS platform for real estate agents. All right. So it looks like they're founded by a guy named
Jim Meal. He has an audience for wholesaling. In case you're unfamiliar, wholesaling is basically
finding homes or other pieces of real estate, getting them under contract and then selling the
contract for a profit instead of actually buying the property yourself. Okay. So it looks like they're
doing like a done for you system. They actually go out and scrape data and provide it to
you alongside the software instead of just saying, hey, here's the software, good luck on all that data.
This is them strategically removing friction, which is a first principle.
It's what you want to do in any business, in any setting.
Remove the friction to get customers and increase the friction for customers to leave you.
Okay, it looks like they have a handful of affiliates selling this for them.
They do regular calls, which is smart.
They're selling the outcome, not the features.
Now, I know what you might be thinking right now.
You're like, oh, okay, this guy has an audience.
He's a real estate guru.
I can't copy him.
Stop.
Stop.
Of course.
Of course you can.
Listen, anytime you're trying to reverse engineer a business that was founded by a guy or girl that
has an audience, you could still reverse engineer that.
You just need to bring that same product or service to someone that already has an audience,
partner with them, and make it happen.
So in this case, if I wanted to copy this verbatim, I'm going to go find any of the hundreds
of or thousands of people out there that already have an audience, but don't regularly use
or know about high level or all the SaaSpreneur awards or what white labeling even is,
you build this same thing, partner with them and say, hey, I built this awesome SMS automation
platform. And I know for a fact that we can get five to 10% of your audience to pay you $100 a month
for this plus $1,000 up front. How's about we split that revenue? I manage the software, the hard part,
the fulfillment, the offer, the website building, customer service, everything. All you got to do is
talk about it. That framework exists for any creator-led business. You don't have to be the creator.
In fact, I would suggest that you probably don't even try because it's hard, but you can partner
with them. How do you find them? Slide into their DMs on platforms where they are not actively
posting that much. Because if they're actively posting on Instagram, their DMs are flooded,
right? You are not going to stand out. But Strava, Twitter, Facebook, like their personal Facebook account,
not their business account. Those are places where they probably get notifications for their DMs,
but they're not crowded. You're not competing with other people trying to sell them stuff.
Okay, let's go to the next one. All right, we're going back to the awards page here.
We're going to keep looking under platinum and event rental systems. All right, that sounds like a very
corporate type business. So let's just go ahead and Google it. Event rental systems. Cool.
Event rental software, event rental systems. Looks like they're paying for Google ads.
That's good to know. We don't need a special ad library.
to see that. Party rental software. Okay. We're not going to click on their paid ad because we don't
want to charge of money. We're not that mean. Good looking website. I like it a lot. Book a free demo.
Stock photos. Got some animations here. Really good looking website. Here's a secret. This website's on
high level. You could totally copy and paste this. All right, 150 month, $250, $400 a month. I love this so
much. Okay, there's nothing to dogg on about this website. They've got testimonials. It's very clean. They have
animations. It's up to date. Good footer, social links, nothing to hate about this.
Now, go to solutions. Now, go to features. It's just like, it's like booking software for
bounce house rental businesses or catering companies. This is like features 101 for high level,
very basic stuff. Now, go to their pricing. Let's assume, you know, 70% of their customers are
probably going to be in here, 20% are going to be in here, 10% will be in here, give or take.
Let's just say it's 200 bucks a month on average.
They've got over 500 customers.
Let's say only 500.
That's $100,000 a month.
$100,000 a month for reselling high level.
But how are they finding customers?
You already know what we're going to do.
We're going to go to the meta ads library.
Event rental systems.
Okay, beautiful.
Ooh, very beautiful.
They have four active ads.
Oh, my gosh.
Oh, this is good.
Okay, this active ad has been running for 14 months.
14 months.
You don't understand how rare that is.
Facebook ad creatives go stale.
So this means one of two things, and I love both of them.
Number one, they're not babysitting their Facebook ads.
Huge mistake.
You will run out of money fast, which means they're not on top of the ball.
That could be the case, but I'm betting it's actually case number two, which is this first ad crushes.
This ad crushes.
I almost never see ads that are running for over.
four months, much less 14 months. It's simple. It's a simple image. Usually video ads crush.
In this case, again, either they don't know what they're doing, which they probably do.
Every time I underestimate a business, I regret it. So I'm going to overestimate them.
They probably know what they're doing. And sometimes simple text, transparent background,
stock photo ads work. Usually video ads work even better. So this is one of those rare cases
where I would actually suggest that you change part of their ad strategy and make just selfie videos
with before and after, like before a bounce house is inflated and after.
Even though you're not selling to people that are going to rent a bounce house, it's still
going to pop in the eyes of a bounce house video owner.
That's the point of this before and after.
And then these three ads have been running since June 2025, which as of the time I'm
recording this, that is about four months old.
So AI generated.
I mean, the emojis are dead giveaway.
It's beautiful.
It tells me that they're finding customers with Facebook ads, which really anyone can.
But if you can find customers in a software business charging $200 to $400 a month with Facebook ads, you are money.
I would bet you anything that when we look at the 2025 SaaSpreneur list, these guys are going to be in the platinum category with over 1,000 customers.
What is stopping you from starting an event rental software business?
Selling to bounce house rental companies, selling to people that rent mobile kitchens.
I had a video about that, too.
A guy crushes it, six figures a year renting out mobile kitchens.
ranges to catering companies. Let's see how long they've been in business. Back to the web archive.
Okay, been in business for about 15, 16 years. Not bad. Let's see what their website looked like
originally. Oh man, that is an ugly website. They have come a long way. And you know what?
High level didn't even exist back then, which is very, very interesting. So they discovered high
level. They probably had their own custom software and they said, actually this is better than what
we built through our blood, sweat, and tears. This is a very interesting case study.
Now, I love the offer here.
If you don't love our software after your site has been live for 90 days, we'll give you a check for $100 or we'll donate 150 to the charity of your choice.
That offer just crushes, by the way.
Offering to donate money to the charity of your choice, if they don't love it, crushes.
I've yet to see an industry where that offer just doesn't crush.
Usually the higher ticket, the better.
Also, in case you didn't know by now, in my private community, TK owners, we have a Slack channel all about building on Go High Level.
So check out TKowners.com.
come join us if you want to build businesses with cool people.
But as they say, we're not here for the small boy stuff.
Let's go ahead and see what some of these diamond award winners are doing
because the only thing better than 500 customers is 1,000 customers.
All right.
Let's go to Pipeline Pro.
Is this going to be sales pipeline?
Is this going to be like an oil pipeline software?
Let's see.
We're on the website.
Don't love the website.
You've got a 43-minute VSL video sales letter here.
Do you want to know what the number one thing is that separates
It's profitable businesses from...
Once again, I'm going to assume that the conversion rate on this 43-minute video is good.
That's why they have it.
I could be wrong.
We're about to see how long they've been in business.
They're leading with the problem.
It's a professional video.
You get the idea.
Okay.
That's just very valuable real estate here at the top.
Never, ever, ever underestimate how valuable the before the scroll real estate is.
Look at this.
All this white space that's wasted.
That serves me no value.
73% of people are never going to scroll.
They're just going to see it.
Nope, not for me.
You got to use that to hook them in.
Okay.
So, Pipeline Pro is an award-winning platform.
Okay, cool.
Ink 5,000.
That's cool.
Fastless growing.
I imagine they've been around for a while because in order to win that award,
you have to have like multiple years of growth in your track record.
Okay.
Lifetime access for $67.
So honestly, it doesn't look like they're trying to specialize in anything.
It's just like sales and marketing platform, which is what high level is.
Lifetime access for $67.
I click on it.
I'm taken to this like squeeze page, very standard, $13 upsell here.
That's 100% profit margin.
It's just a PDF basically.
Not bad.
I don't hate it.
No questions asked.
100% money back guarantee.
Okay.
You already know what we're going to do.
Facebook ads library.
Pipeline Pro.
They have five ads active launched last month and two months ago.
Cool.
Not much of a priority for them.
We go to the web archive.
We can see that this domain name has been active since
well for a long, long time.
2003, but it looks like it's only been doing this since like 2015.
It used to be appraisal workflow management.
That's interesting.
So instead of getting more niche, they've gotten more broad.
Yeah, that's a very, very bad website.
So at some point, they went from appraisal management software to software.
And I did a little digging around.
And their lifetime price used to be $35.
Today, it's $65.
So they've almost doubled their price.
Now, we don't really know what they're monthly recurring.
revenue is because it's a lifetime price. But here's the genius of this. There's multiple ways to
skin the cat. Okay. Most of these SaaSpreneur award winners have a monthly price because everyone loves
monthly recurring revenue. But that also means that they don't stand out from each other. If you're
the guy that offers a $67 lifetime price, then you look a lot more attractive than all of the other
companies selling the exact same white labeled software for one to $500 a month. Right. And here's the big
secret, Pipeline Pro pays $5 to $600 a month to high level to have thousands of customers.
Flat.
Like they add a customer, they add $0 in cost.
So a lifetime price makes sense when you're white labeling software.
That's a flat fee no matter how many sub accounts, aka customers that you have.
So I love that this became an example because they're not all monthly recurring.
There's other ways to do it.
And this guy probably stands out because it is a one-time fee.
And honestly, with the advent of these vibe coding tools, chat, GPT, software.
software becoming easier than ever to build, I think a lot more companies are going to be forced to
offer lifetime deals because the age of SaaS software as a service is slowly shrinking because
the developers, the coders are no longer in the driver's seat as much as they used to be.
The cost of everything is going down, down, down.
So you can milk that sweet, sweet monthly recurring revenue as long as you can or you can get
ahead of it and say from day one, I'm just going to offer a lifetime price for pipeline software
that other companies charge tens or hundreds of dollars a month for.
Okay, so let's do a rapidifier just to see what some of these other businesses are doing
because I'm very curious.
All right, which one stands out?
Let's say, R.E.I reply.
Okay, boom, boom, here we go.
Oh, man, that is one of the worst websites I've ever seen in my life.
And these guys are one of the biggest companies using high level.
Again, it's more real estate like software, automation software, which is fine, no shade.
works. There's two million real estate agents. You could insert that meme right here where it's just
Woody looking over and it's like everywhere. It's all just high level. All the software that we
use and see on a regular basis, it's all white label high level on the background. Crazy. Here's
another one, CRM voice. It's just an AI calling feature. It's just something that you can create
in a few clicks on high level. I did it right here in this video, link in the show notes. AI voice agents
are everything right now. Here's another one in the platinum tier, FG Funnels. They're just using
high level to build funnel builder, over a thousand customers a month, $129 a month,
six figures a month, seven figures a year, plus making funnels. All right, we only covered a small
handful of all of the kind of reverse engineering tips and tricks I have up my sleeve,
but I'm just going to like bullet point list out a ton of others that I use on a regular basis.
So let's say you want to find out the tech that a business is built with, the type of website
that they use to build it. The type of pixels or APIs or yada yada, yada, other tech jargon
that companies use that you want to copy.
Number one is built with.
They have a Chrome extension that's free.
You can use the website one at a time.
It's for free.
Or you can pay them way too much money,
$450 a month to like scrape millions of websites
that are built with Shopify, Wix, WordPress, whatever.
That's like the gold standard.
If you want to skip the line,
go to Upwork or Fiverr and say,
hey, I'm looking for someone that has a $450 a month
built with pro account to scrape results for me.
I'll give you $20.
per spreadsheet that you scrape, total life hack.
But an alternative to build width that's even cheaper, Rappelizer.
Another one, CRFT lookup.
Stack crawler does pretty much the same thing.
And if you want to know how much traffic a website gets, similar web.
That is the only one, similar web.
If you want to get even more technical on like what types of databases a website uses,
use what runs and nerdy data.
Okay, if you want to look at like market intelligence, company insights,
there's this company called Ibis World.
They have these $3,000 reports that I would never pay for.
But if you go to another company called SearchFunder, you can get all of the Ibis World
reports for free.
And it's a free account.
Actually, search funder might cost $100 or something.
I don't remember.
But it's basically you pay $100 and you get thousands of $3,000 reports for free.
Deal room, similar to CrunchBase, much cheaper.
It gives you insights on like startup data, fundraising data.
CB Insights and Pitchbook, very expensive, very good.
Also use Fiverr or Upwork to find someone that are.
already has an account that can run a quick search or two for you. Owler is really good for finding
competitors or alternatives. If you ever Google like alternatives to X, Y or Z, Owler is usually what
pops up. Alpha Sense and Data Breyer are also good. If you want to know how much money a franchisor
makes, like let's say you see a landscaping franchise driving by or McDonald's and you want to
know, man, how much does a McDonald's franchisee make? Just Google WI franchise search, which stands for
Wisconsin franchise search. The state of Wisconsin requires that all franchises publicly disclose
all of the financials of the parent company, which in turn tells you about what the franchisees
are making as well. If you want to know how many app downloads an app is getting on the iPhone or
Android app store, you're going to want to use sensor tower. With a free account, you can see,
wow, this app that identifies trees is making $300,000 a month. Then you go vibe code a copy.
If you want to see reviews for software and like upload all those reviews to chat GPT and say,
what features is this product missing that I can copy?
G2.
G2 is the best for that.
Bombora, B-O-M-B-O-R-A is also really good for stuff like that.
And if you want to see if a website changes, like let's say you want tickets to a sporting event and you need to see when they go live.
Or you want to see if your competitors pricing changes at any point.
You can use something like distill, visual ping, or change tower to basically,
track tiny little changes on any website on the internet. Super cool. Other more general things you can do
is look at another company's job listings. They'll often announce like new products or new features
and new initiatives inside their job listings or job descriptions. Their ad spying tools,
ad espresso, big spy, social peta. You can use those to spy on your competitor's ads,
which is much more granular and specific than the meta ads library. There's so much you can do.
You've got to be a little creative. If this video was valuable to you at all,
say thanks by hitting subscribe, sharing with a friend, leaving a comment, and of course, use
my affiliate link so I can get a little kickback. I use high level every single day. It's
genuinely something that I love and believe in. We'll see you next time on the Kerner office.
