The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - White whale hunting and moat-building via tedious tasks. HoldCo Bros are back. Ep. #044

Episode Date: July 26, 2024

Discussing some white whale opportunities with Nik! We also chat about masterminds and how to build a mote with tedious tasks.Learn more about Nik: https://linktr.ee/cofoundersnikTimestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: tkopod.co/p-all Scrape small business data: tkopod.co/p-os ---00:35 Episode Overview: Masterminds and Strategic Partnerships01:22 Deep Dive into Masterminds02:52 The Value and Cost of Masterminds05:30 Mastermind Membership Dynamics11:01 Personal Experiences with Masterminds14:04 The Rise of Non Traditional Education18:59 A Billion Dollar Partnership19:32 Repatriation and Apple's Tax Strategy20:33 The Origin Story of Alchemy22:09 White Whale Business Opportunities22:15 The Best Buy Cold Email Story23:57 The White Whale Fund Concept26:54 Creative Prospecting with AI31:57 Odeko: Revolutionizing Coffee Supply Chains36:07 Artisan and Niche Marketplaces39:22 Concluding Thoughts and Farewell

After my oldest son was born, I had been cold emailing Best Buy. I owned this company called Phone Store. And we had four iPhone repair stores. And I wanted a white whale. And I've got lots of white whale stories that worked out. And I've got even more that didn't work out, right? And I got in touch with the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Best Buy. And she responded to me.

Welcome to the corner office. Today we had another episode of HoldCobros where Nick and I discuss a few things, but mostly two big topics. One, masterminds. No, we're not selling you a mastermind. But we think it's really interesting how masterminds make money and how people can learn from masterminds and how to suss out the crappy, scammy ones versus the good ones. The second thing we talked about was forming strategic partnerships, chasing white whales, doing really tedious tasks that build a moat in a business. Kind of like Plaid, it's a financial software company that did the tedious task of connecting APIs between tiny little credit unions and companies like Venmo.

It was very tedious and that became their moat or their IP. We talked about that. Honestly, it was a really good episode. I'm not going to lie. We riffed on a ton of ideas. We had a lot of energy, so I hope you enjoy. I talked to a guy this week. He's going to be on my podcast,

Nikonomics. His name is Justin Donald. He's an incredibly successful real estate investor who over time has started investing into a lot of other small businesses. His whole philosophy is like he's a lifestyle investor. He doesn't want to save, save, save, save. And then when he's 65, have a bunch of money to spend, he's like, no, I want to spend what I want to spend now. And I want my money to grow over time.

He wants his cake and to eat it too. Yeah, I don't see a problem with that. Anyways, I was asking him some of the things that he felt like had made him successful. Like what differentiated him? How did he see more success than most people in his position? He was talking about, you know, he made a plan, like the typical things. And then he goes, I'm a member of a lot of math. masterminds. And I was asking about that. You know what a mastermind is, right? Of course. Okay. So for those who

who don't know, a mastermind is essentially a peer group that people join to have self-improvement. It could be in a number of things. But mainly, it's going to be professionals who are joining these peer groups to grow their businesses, grow their networks, make more money, be more successful, et cetera. And most of these peer groups, these masterminds cost money, anywhere from $1,000 a year to $100,000 a year. This would be a very opportunistic time for us to say, by the way, masterminds are amazing. And coincidentally, we're launching one today.

It's so interesting. For only $17,000 a month, you too could have access to my Twitter account. Anyways, so he's telling me, he's like masterminds. I'm like, okay, tell me about masterminds. He's like, well, here's the thing. They do two things for him. The first thing is they give him not. He's like, the stuff that I learned in these masterminds, it's like I went to university.

I learned how to do different tax strategies. I learned how to do multifamily and real estate. I learned how to invest in private companies, things that he would have either had to have learned over time and iterated or like gone to school to have someone teach him how to do that stuff. So he got a ton of knowledge and he's a perpetual learner. Like he's like us, right? He's really curious.

He wants to learn a lot of things. Arguably a lot more relevant and higher quality knowledge than what you get in university. way more relevant, right? Because it's tailored and it's specific. He's like, he's thinking, okay, how do I take my real estate and turn it into something where I pay no income taxes? I'm going to talk to a guy who's 10 years ahead of me who's done it. And they talk to him. They're like, well, have you heard of bonus depreciation and accelerated depreciation? Have you heard of cost segregation studies? So like he's talking to people who have actually done it as opposed to like going and taking a course or figuring it out on his own. So there's a knowledge component to these masterminds.

And the second piece that he said is there's a network effect with these masterminds. He meets really interesting people. And over time, he's done deals with these people. And one of the things that he cited, he's like, somebody in my mastermind is the head of, I can't remember exactly what it is, like a family office that makes investment recommendations for the Ford's family, the Musk family, the Gates family, all of these like really, really wealthy families. So he's like, I get to tag along now on all their investments.

and I've made a ton of money on the investments that I've tagged along on. That's just one example of the types of relationships that I've built out of these masterminds. I want you to guess how much money he spends a year. No, no, no, before I do that, I want you to guess how many masterminds he's a part of. Well, I already know the answer to the first question because you tweeted about it. But how many masterminds? 14. That's two full-time jobs.

How do you keep up with that? He's a part of 14 masterminds. I think he's like treated them as a full-time job. Like, he really enjoys them, but there's also a ton of just economic benefit from it. And then the amount of money he pays per year to his mastermind, he couldn't tell me an exact number. He was more than willing to share, but he's like, I don't really know, but it's somewhere in the range of $350,000 to $500,000 a year. This isn't like a one-time initiation fee.

This is like a year. He swears by it. He's like, dude, it is the best investment that I could be making because it's paid off. all these dividends. Has he talked about churn? Like, how long has he been in all 14? Does he churn through him every now and then, try new ones? So on the podcast, he didn't specifically talk about that, but I talked to him a couple of months

ago when I first met him. And he does rotate in and out of a lot of masterminds. He has a few core masterminds that he's been a part of for a really long time. But then basically the way he looks at it, and he says this on the podcast, as he's like, well, I want to learn something. So I'm going to go find a mastermind that's kind of built around that thing. Like he built his own mastermind and is offering it to people. It's $55,000 a year.

But it's for professionals who have money that want to invest in private deals. And so that mastermind is just all about bringing in private investment opportunities to that group. And that's how he's gotten in on a lot of these investment opportunities. So he's like, if I want to learn something, I'm going to go and find the mastermind that's specific to it. He's like, but you have to do your research. You can't just join a mastermind because you saw an internet personality post about it. Or you think like, oh, well, my friend's doing it.

He's like, no, if you're going to spend money on it, be intentional about what they're offering, who are the people that are going to be there. What's the education? How often do they meet? All that stuff. So he's like, on the one hand, he's very, very, very intentional about it. And on the other hand, I look at it. I know you look at it.

It's like, half a million dollars a year. it like it just boggles my mind that he's paying that. I feel like there's two types of people that would pay this. There's, and I'm going to give him the benefit of the doubt because you seem to like him. I know nothing about him. He's probably very smart and he's probably very wealthy and he gets a lot of value out of these and he probably gets a five to 50x investment on his mastermind. Then there's the other, there's the other type of person that always wants a panacea,

a silver bullet, their hand to be held. One more mastermind and I'm going to make it. I just need that one idea and this one mastermind and I'm going to make. There are a lot of people out there. Like, those are the guys that pay Ty Lopez millions of dollars because they just need that one person and they're going to fix all their problems. Right. I was talking to Jess about this. And she just joined a tennis club here in Boise because the winners are super long and she wants to be able to do something year round.

Anyway, so she joins it. And the tennis club is like telling her all of the benefits that she might be able to get out of it. Or it's like, oh, if you come on Wednesdays, if you come on the third Wednesdays, every month. You get 50% off if you bring an extra person. And if they bring two people, they get 70% off. And they're like naming all the potential benefits out of it. And what I said to her was like, look, there are two types of people, almost exactly what you just said. They're the type of people who buy a membership and never use it. Or they use like 10% of it. The planet fitness. Planet Fitness. Crunch. Netflix maybe. Like just name your membership.

Those are the people they make their money off of. And then, there's the second group of people who are like the 10% of people that are just that are like they're going to use every benefit that you have that you offer they're going to take full advantage of it and then if you call them on it they're going to like pull up on their phones like well no it says here right here in a fine print you like you that's going to be jess that's jess right and it's a great quality that she has and i'm super grateful that she does have it because it's benefited me a ton on the back end but that's how i view Justin, like in these masterminds, is he goes and he's like, I'm going to get every ounce out of these masterminds because I'm going to learn a ton and then I'm going to apply that to things that

I'm doing. Whereas most people, like you said, kind of get sold on these masterminds and it's like a Thai Lopez-esque experience where they're like, oh, yeah, this is it. This is what I need in order to be successful. And it's like, no, you're just making another excuse for why you haven't done it yet. There's a selection bias at play where if those guys join the Tai Lopez mastermind, Ty Lopez quickly learns that and he says, okay, all right, all right, I need to change the quality of this mastermind to attract more of those guys that are looking for a silver bullet. And then by definition of the people that are joining it, it becomes a really low quality mastermind. Yeah. Whereas the ones that he's probably joining are the opposite.

They're more selective, right? I think that's one interesting psychological aspect of it. I think the other interesting psychological aspect of it is if you buy any high ticket item, you sort of have to justify it to yourself. like, oh yeah, of course it's worth everything because I spent $500,000. Like what else are you going to say to yourself? No, it's a waste of money every year, but I still pay it. Yeah. Like you have a need to justify that investment.

But what I find interesting about these masterminds is that a lot of people crap on them. Like you and I, we might look at them and be like, join another mastermind. Like, good luck, bro. Well, in our defense, probably most of them are garbage. Right? Yeah. But the people who buy into them, that's like my point is, There's a lot of people who want to learn.

Like, they want to know how to buy that first business. That's why your stuff, like your content in particular is so popular is because you're constantly posting about the next new idea, the next opportunity that could make somebody a million dollars. Somebody like me, like my content's more like, oh, isn't this interesting? If you're a leader and you go and you apply this theory, like freaking snooze fest, but you get people excited because it's teaching them how to make that first dollar. And so there's a lot of people who are interested in that.

I just constantly have this rub where I love educating those people, but then you also feel kind of slimy because you want to crap on these communities that people are essentially taking advantage of the good nature of the people who want to pay for that stuff. I've dabbled in this over the last six months in two different ways, one with you and one by myself. One was with the tree biz boot camp. We charged three grand for it. Was it three grand or five?

Five. 2,500 for virtual, five grand. And it was about 50, 50. you I we've never done that before we've never tested that or anything and I was so insecure about how good it had to like that is you know me I'm cheap right yeah like we spent a half hour before recording this to set up my $70 Amazon lights because I'm too cheap to buy something quality right and so the fact and I've never paid $5,000 for anything and so it's like we made sure that it was really really really freaking good and we ate at the best restaurant and we just packed it full of

value and we filmed it and it was good and people loved it. We sent out feedback and they had great reviews. I did a similar thing with an RV park investing masterclass, which is all virtual, three grand. And I just, it's so much money, but I wanted it to be really, really good because I'm insecure about it. And that's why I didn't really talk about it. I didn't sell it hard because it's like, ah, this feels greasy. This feels slimy. But guess what? Like, people are buying RV parks. Like, they're loving it. It's great. So it's like, I think a lot of it's pride and ego. If you have good knowledge, you've got to get over your ego, that cringe factor, because there's a whole world on the other side of being able to put up with a little bit of cringe, cringing it yourself, right?

There's a whole world over there. It's so true. Well, I mean, we're seeing it more and more, but more and more, it's going to become, community is becoming more and more important. And I think the need for knowledge or the thirst for knowledge, I mean, less and less people are. knowledge, books. Less and less people are enrolling in university, right? There's more and more entrepreneurship.

They want to learn how to do this stuff. And you're not going to learn it online from a university. You're going to learn it from people who have actually done it. So it's only going to come to people who are willing to teach how they've done it. And unfortunately, most of the time, those are snake oil salesmen. Well, unfortunately, there's another selection bias at play. For instance, Amazon sellers, right? FBA, that's the perfect example of, I just need to sell silver bullet.

Like, I can't quit my job. I should need that one thing that will give me passive income. Oh, Amazon. Amazon is going right. I order Amazon every day. You know how many times I've heard people say, oh, I order Amazon every day. Like, we all do. That's like saying you buy groceries every week, right?

And so people take that and they're like, oh, of course. I should need to sell stuff on Amazon. How do I do it? $5,000 course. And these guys that are selling these Amazon courses got a taste of making a little bit of money on Amazon. And then they learned that teaching people how to sell on Amazon is. more profitable than actually selling on Amazon. Because guess what?

Selling on Amazon is really hard and they crunch your margins. And it's logistically difficult. So it's just like the worst kind of float to the top and sell all these courses because there's more money in that than doing the actual thing. Totally agree. I totally agree. I have two more thoughts about this. I'm glad you brought this up because it's bubbling stuff to the surface.

You know who's like the most bullish on education in like this whole space, right? It's Alex Bro Mosy. It's brother Bromosey himself. Brother Bromosey. That's why he went all in on school is because he's sold. He's like traditional education is on the way out, like look at homeschooling, look at charts, look at higher education enrollment. It's all trending downward and untraditional education is trending upward.

And so he never promoted any of his portfolio businesses until he went all in on school. And because he just, he believes in the thesis of untraditional education. That's my first thought. I think that's awesome. I agree with it. Second thought, I'm close with someone. We both know him, but I won't mention him on the podcast who just joined a mastermind, $50,000 a year.

And he didn't even know if it was, he had already paid, but he didn't know if it was per year or not. And I was like, it's probably per year. It's probably per year. But it's the bigger pockets mastermind. And it's not just a bigger pockets mastermind. I think they have a bunch, but it's the founder of bigger pockets, like, personal mastermind and it's capped at 50 people, 50,000 each. And you have, of course, you have to go through the application process and they're very selective and it's very

strategically introduced friction to make sure that it seems exclusive. Of course. But I mean, we're talking 2.5 mil a year for a mastermind. And do they have like retreats and stuff? Yeah, but you pay extra for those. It's just, it blows my mind. But guess what? Like, this guy is raising money for real estate. and it's only for guys that are raising money for real estate. And he's probably going to be able to raise six or seven figures from this $50,000 mastermind, probably. The thing is, I believe in masterminds.

Like you said, you've got a selection bias. Anybody who's joining that mastermind, who's normal, what are they going to say? I got to justify this investment, right? And how do you justify the investment? I already described it. You do it one of two ways. You either get the right education, which they're going to be asking questions, They're going to be engaged.

They're going to be trying to learn as much they can. And you're going to build a network. So by virtue of the fact that you're paying to be there, you're incentivized to go network with other people. So it's like this isn't like a mix and mingle event where it's like, oh, I guess I'll show up or maybe I'll talk to somebody's like, no, I paid 50 grand. Like I'm going to talk to Chris.

Hey, Chris, what are you working on? Oh, that's cool. Could we partner on something? Like there is a real incentive for them to work together. So I think that in and of itself, is going to make it worthwhile for whoever, you know, the guys that you're talking about that paid 50 grand to be a part of that mastermind because the other guys in that mastermind want to make it worthwhile as well. It'll pay off in spades. But it won't be a one to one. Yeah, I mean,

I guess it can't be, right? Because it's so expensive. Bro, Mozy also, he, as part of like his origin story is he had $5,000 to his name and he pushed it all into this guru marketing mastermind. And it taught him about webinars. And webinars, he started pushing ads for gym launch to, a webinar and it didn't work, but then he tried something else and it did work. And he was like, that mastermind changed my life, yada, yada, yada. So he sold on it too. Even though it was like, he didn't even learn anything that led him to success. He learned something that planted a seed that he pivoted away from that led him to success. So what's the difference, right? He got that from it. It's true. You believe in masterminds. And I believe in the underrated movie masterminds with

Zach Alvinakis, Kristen Wigg, Kate McKinnon, Owen Wilson and Jason Sudecas. I mean, that is a roster. percent on rotten tomatoes. But what about that time when he says, when they farted on each other and he said, you just gave me a fart transplant. That's a great line. That's what I believe in. That's my ethos. It's an under.

It's an other. What do I got? All right. Ball's in my court. I want to talk to you about a white whale that I learned about. Okay? We like white whales. Triggered.

I don't know why it's been racing to this, but whatever. This is a company, an Irish. company that raised $2.5 million in seed funding and they probably didn't even need to. Oh, it is $255 million for me Lucky Charms. Okay. Okay. Okay. They raised $2.5 million and they basically their whole company was built on one

partnership with this little known company you may have heard of called Apple. Okay. You know what they do? You know what these guys do? They're out of Ireland. I already said that. They remanufacture, they manage all of Apple's iPhones, buybacks, trade-ins, whatever you want to call it, all of them.

One company out of Ireland. Apple doesn't do any of it themselves. So like you go to the Apple store, I want the new iPhone. Okay, well, we'll give you $100 credit for your old one. You trade in your old one. They send it to these guys. It's a billion dollar company that's, I'm sure they have other customers by now, but it's all based around Apple.

Does Apple own in the other? It blows my mind. I don't think so. It's an independent company. So I don't know if you know. It's funny. We don't talk about these things before we hop on this call. So this wasn't a plant.

So Apple in particular, but there's a lot of other large American corporations that shelter their profits overseas. Have you ever heard of the term repatriation? Mm-hmm. So the government, like a lot of elected officials, are like, we want Apple to repatriate that money because we need it back in the United States and we want to pay taxes on it. And that was a big reason or justification for the Trump tax cuts because he's like, well, they're just sitting overseas. We should bring them back, repatriate them, at least get some taxes for it.

But for Apple, Ireland is like the place where they house the majority of their profits. I wonder if there's some relationship there where it's like, well, we're already here in Ireland and maybe that's a huge, I don't even know, moneymaker for them. So they decided to partner with an Irish company in order to skirt American tax law or something. It's funny. A lot of times you hear like these origin stories and they sound really inspiring and beautiful. And sometimes they are. They actually are that story. But a lot of times like what this could be is like some Apple executive that was like, you know, we really shouldn't.

It's like there's too much liability for us to in-house this because of, you know, everything happening in China. We should really outsource this. Hey, Tim, what have I moved to Ireland and I just like happen to start a startup? And then maybe we meet over coffee one day. and then maybe I'm a billion dollar company. I'm just spitball in here. This conversation never happened. Like, honestly, it could be the case.

Absolutely could be the case. Absolutely. I mean, they're called Alchemy. This is on their homepage, $440 million in annual revenues. That's insane. Insane. That is insane. And that literally is a white whale.

You've heard like Sam Parr talks about. this, I think it's Sampar, where he's like, he wants to be a barnacle on a whale or like some saying of that where it's like he doesn't need to be the whale. He doesn't need to be Apple. You just need to figure out what company you can be to sort of tag along with Apple and ride their wave. I wonder if that conversation with Tim Cook, he's like, what are you going to call it? I don't know. I mean, really, we're just going to be like printing money. We're going to be like creating a hole out of thin air. How about alchemy? Alchemy is a great name. Oh, I like that. I'll tell you what.

Well, hey, Tim's from Auburn. He does kind of talk. I know. I know. Your accent was actually relevant for once. For once, what do you? What? You can say anything in a Southern accent, and it's just better.

It's just more funny. It's a good one. Anyway, but like maybe the origin story there is it was just some entrepreneur that pulled himself up by the bootstraps and kept cold emailing Apple until one day they answered and said, we had never even thought about buying back iPhones. Thank you for that idea. Yeah. Huh.

I wonder what are some other white whales like this? I got one for you. Let's go. You might not remember this story, but the day after my oldest son was born, I had been cold emailing Best Buy. I own this company called Phone Restore. And we had four iPhone repair stores, and I wanted a white whale. And I've got lots of white whale stories that worked out, and I've got even more that

didn't work out, right? And I got in touch with the CMO, the chief marketing officer of Best Buy, and she responded to me. And I was basically like, LinkedIn. Exactly. And I was like, Best Buy needs to be repairing phones. This was 2010. 2010. Like you got the Geek Squad. And that was a company they bought out and in-house. So I'm like, okay, there's precedent for Best Buy partnering with small local companies. Why not phone restore? Like, why isn't either Geeks Squad fixing these things? going to customers' houses, or why don't they have? And they bought a company called Magnolia Audiovisual. And so they in-house that, basically installing audiovisual stuff. So I thought, okay, there's two examples of Best Buy partnering with these small companies. Why not me? And I hopped

on a call with the CMO the day after my oldest son was born. And she was kind of like, oh, interesting. And then like they ghosted me, right? It didn't work out. And to this day, they're not fixing phones. Like, and their stock doesn't look great. And but they have learned that a lot of their profits are in services and not selling hardware, right? This could have been a perfect addition to them. They missed out. Too bad for them. Sorry, bro.

Look at me. Look at me. I got a podcast. And they're just, they're just slinging, they're slinging MacBooks up in Minnesota. Nerds. Oh, but I like the idea, more broadly speaking, of having a fund, a white whale fund, right? where you throw a little money at these guys that just have these dreams of partnering with the apples of the world.

And you just take a tiny single digit percentage equity and you're really just buying into their charisma. There is. And their plans. And maybe you lose 25 grand or maybe at 1,000 X's the White Whale Fund. Buy that domain. It's a good one. I wonder if like the better way would be to find executives at those organizations.

You recently started asking. this on your podcast, right? I can't remember exactly how you say it, but like, what businesses do you think would be good to start tangentially to your current business? What are you seeing in your industry, tangential to your industry that seem like amazing opportunities, but you're too focused to ever chase, but other people could do like that. That would be an amazing question to just like spam out and see who you get responses from at these executives of large companies. Because I'm sure that there are pain points that they have, that they're just not, that are not being addressed. And you ask that question.

hey, what are you seeing in your industry that other people aren't seeing? You gather some of this information and then you make a bet or a decision or maybe you recruit one of them or maybe you like because getting the idea from the insiders would be an amazing way. Jumpstart this. Back to our theory about alchemy and Apple. Of course they were seeing. Yeah, we should probably be repairing these in-house. Like how do we get this done? And then they just partner with somebody to outsource the fulfillment of it.

That would be a really cool fund. So yeah, okay, so you just took my idea and leveled it up. So forget my $25,000 angel checks into these, you know, young hustlers that have this big white whale dream. You go to the mid-level executives or even the middle managers that see this opportunity that have tasted entrepreneurship. Maybe they've been an entrepreneur in the past because a lot of people see opportunity, but they don't care about it. They don't even see it as opportunity. It's a pain point, but it's just like they look at it as a negative, like, oh, my job sucks because we don't know what to do with these iPhones. They just sit in drawers and then they depreciate.

And other people are like, oh, like if I worked at a company, are you kidding me? Like, I would be starting so many things. And so maybe the fund here is to raise $10 million and to go find these guys that are making $250,000 a year that see opportunity and want to execute on it. But they've got golden handcuffs, right? And you say, okay, instead of $25,000 check, here's a $500,000 check. This is going to float your salary for two to three years. and you're just going to get on the phone right after you quit.

Let me see you're non-compete. We're good. Okay. What state do you live in? Have our lawyer look over it. All right. I want you to go chase down those opportunities. We're going to pay for your salary and we're going to have 20% equity in whatever it is you do.

Dude, okay. Can I level it up again? Because this is one of the ideas I wanted to talk about today, but I think it would be perfect to pair with this. Do you remember in 2010, I can't remember when it was, when you decided you were going to mail physical letters to people that looked like they were handwritten, but they were really just typed out in handwriting. It was a real estate thing. I can't remember exactly. Yellow letters. Yeah. Yeah. Yellow letters. So Danny, my brother-in-law, he's looking for a business right now to buy. And he targeted 100 skilled nursing facilities. And he found information about each one of them.

And he found, anyways, he typed up the specific information. And then he used this company called click send.com where he like uploaded the text. They printed it out for him. They sent the letter. And he's gotten three or four leads that could be millions of dollars. Right. So I'm sitting there. I'm like hearing the story and I'm like, dude, if you had a list and in this example, let's say it's people. But in other examples, it could be businesses. If you had a list and you're like, these are 200 people that I'd like to cold outreach. and you upload it to chat GPT, and because chat GPT is going to go crawl the web, you could say,

give me one or two specific things about each one of these people based on their social media presence, based on a press release, whatever, something specific to them. And then you have sort of a template message like, hey, so-and-so, what opportunities are you seeing within your industry?

But there's a line in there that says, hey, so-and-so, I love how you think about X, Y, and Z. And so then you take what chat GPT goes and scrapes the web and finds unique to them, add it to that list, upload it to click send. And then you've got handwritten letters or, I mean, they also send like SMS text messages. They send LinkedIn. They send Twitter. Like they sent, you know, all the emails, all the other DMs.

But you've got high value list. You've got specific information that hopefully catches their attention. And then you've got a means of distribution to reach out to them. So I'm combining these two ideas because that could be a really. cool way to reach out to, let's say you identify 10 whale companies and then you find all the executives in those companies. You reach out to them with this approach and you just see kind of what comes back. And it's not going to take you 80 hours to do it like it might have taken it back in the day. It's funny you say that because before I called that Best Buy CMO, I met with my mentor,

John Nolan. And I was like, all right, how do I prep for this call? Like, what do I do? And he's like, we'll pull her up on LinkedIn. He's like, okay. And I think this is, she played, women's basketball at Gonzaga, I believe. You're like, okay, women's basketball at Gonzaga. And this guy does like psychological profiles for a living. Yeah. Right. It's like, okay, that means she's going to have this personality type.

That means you're going to need to approach it this way. And basically what you're saying is a scale version of that. Exactly. Right. Because that takes time. Yeah. But it works. It makes a huge difference.

So to level that up a little bit. So I use this ringless voicemail software. Right. And one click, you upload a bunch of, phone numbers. You record one voicemail. Hey, I'm actually looking to buy mobile home parks. Are you interested in selling yours? Please call me back. And it will drop a voicemail on their phone without their phone ever ringing. And it's awesome. And hardly anyone uses it. Light hack. Not legal. It is. It is. But you got to do it right. You can't do it on the do

not call list. Anyway, they just came out with a new feature where they, and I've been like waiting for this feature because it's like the technology's been there since chat, GPT. and you upload a list of names, and then it will take your voice, clone it, and it will say their first name in the beginning of the voicemail. Hey, Melissa, this is, hey, like, of course. Of course.

Dude, of course. So I haven't even used it yet, but the opportunities are endless. Well, and like I said, I didn't think about this until I was talking to Danny yesterday, but go on chat DBT right now and be like, who's Chris Kerner? And it, like, it will give you good information

that it's obviously pulled from Twitter or LinkedIn or like wherever you're posting. So you get a list of people. Yeah, there's going to be a lot of them that may or may not have good information, but there's going to be also a good few of them where you have really pertinent information that you can then tailor to a pitch. And it just like cuts down the time and amps up the like specificity of your pitch and the likelihood that they're actually going to read it and respond to it.

If you asked Chad GPT, for instance, like who Chris Kerner is, It doesn't know like about second families in Canada and stuff, right? Like it doesn't. Oh, yeah, okay. No, it doesn't know about your SSA. What? Oh, I had to. You had to.

He's bulldozing. He's bulldozing. Oh, geez. Well, I like that idea. White whale fund. Executive Fund. And creative prospecting now with ChatGPT, artificial intelligence. Mm-hmm.

Okay. I like it. I got one for you. You ready? Always. There is a company out there called Odeco, O-D-E-K-O. Okay. Okay.

And it is founded by a guy named Dane Adkinson. And I'm pretty sure he was a co-founder of Squarespace. Okay. And Squarespace is an interesting case to the in and of itself because they basically were one of the first companies to unlock how powerful podcast ads were. Podcasts, specifically. Oh, oh. I thought Squarespace was with the one with the anyways.

I'm sorry. Edit that out, Muhammad. It's an easy drag and drop website builder. Okay. They advertise on a podcast and it crushed. And so they basically said, we want all the podcasts like Casper did and athletic greens and all those.

Anyway, this guy, he sold his stake in Squarespace, I think, I don't know. And he started this company called Odeko. And they basically are the middleman between supply chain. and local coffee shops.

Basically, everyone except Starbucks and all the big name brand coffee shops. So they go to the growers, they go to the suppliers, and they match it with these local coffee shop vendors. And then in addition, they give them software. They do everything. And so coffee shops sign up with them and they buy their coffee through them and they buy their software through them. And it basically makes their lives a ton easier.

And they have grown from zero to 150 million. in their first two years doing this with coffee shops. Okay. I'm an idiot and I also wasn't listening. But is the software that helps manage all this stuff? And they also act as a middleman? That's part of it. It's like a marketplace where they match like coffee growers with coffee shops.

So it's a marketplace and a software and its supply chain management all in one platform that these independent coffee shops can use. So they don't have to buy from. in Cisco, like the $100 billion companies out there. But they also don't have to go start cold calling growers in Nicaragua. So it's effectively lowering the cost for local coffee shops to acquire. And opening the accessibility for them to source better coffee more easily. Right, because it's the marketplace.

Yeah. So I love this idea because coffee is just the first case study. I think it's a very hard business. I think it's extremely hard, very tedious. But I love businesses that are extremely tedious on the front end. Like, for instance, Plaid, right? Plaid was very tedious because Idaho Central Credit Union was never going to link with Venmo, right? And Plaid came in there and said, okay, we're going to learn Idaho Central Credit Union's API,

or we're going to build an API for them and it's going to suck. And it's going to cost us 15 grand in developer hours. but once we have it, we have it. And so we're going to do that with all the credit unions, all these random banks, everyone not named Chase or Bank of America, and we're going to put it all in one place, and all that data is going to siphon through us,

which is very valuable data because it's consumers purchasing behavior. We'll sell the data. I just love businesses that are built on an incredibly tedious process because that becomes a moat. It becomes a moat. Like people think you have to have this special IP or a bunch of fundraise. or this brand new idea to have a moat.

But oftentimes you just need to do something that's really sucky and tedious. We feel the same way about marketplaces. They're just really hard to build because you have to bring buyers and sellers to the marketplace. What you're describing is like a unicorn-esque idea where it's going to take a lot of time, a lot of money, a lot of education to get people on both sides of the platform. I'm not saying it's a bad idea. I'm just saying. So eventually, yes, but if you read the founding story of Odecker,

it started with him going to coffee shops in person every day and learning their needs and literally going to the same shop every day and observing and like doing things that really didn't scale very well and building out the product just for three coffee shops that were within a five minute walk of his house. This is where I was going with it. It's like coffee is an example of a broader trend that is happening, which is people want, what's the word, specialized niche product. right, like the episode in Portlandia where they're like, is this chicken locally sourced?

What was his name? Where does he come from? Right? Like they want products that are higher quality and that are niche. So I think coffee's an example. But if I was an entrepreneur looking at this who had experience in a niche product, let's say it was chocolate or let's say it was some other food commodity, I would go and try and find a small producer of that in South America, let's say.

and then work on the distribution end in the United States and kind of be the wholesale whole seller middleman because the hardest part of a changing preference is education. But if people are already educated on it and they're already like, oh, I want artisan. That was the word. I want artisan food. I want craft beer. I want these hyper specialized products. They already want that.

Then you're just bringing it to them. You're like, hi, can I introduce you to Juan? he runs locally sourced 100% organic farm in Guatemala that produces, you know what I mean? Like all of a sudden people are like, Juan's like, Guatemala or Guatemala? Juan's like,

I'm just a farmer, but okay. Juan's like, Nick, I went to school with you. We graduated from USC together. Shut up, Juan. Juan,

I need you to be like, yeah, grow up. Your dad manages a hedge fund. But it's just marketing at that point. It's all marketing. at that point. And if you can find one producer and then be the means of distribution, you can capture as a wholesaler sort of that margin in between because of your expertise.

So I like that aspect of it. Yeah, I think that's how Adeco started too. And then he realized that there was a bigger opportunity to in the, in like the software and the supply chain side of it, as opposed to just reselling stuff. Two more examples of people doing that. One is a company that let's do it. They basically went to Mexico and they sourced this, oh, It's a type of corn. Anyway, like authentic corn tortilla that of Mexico are made with three ingredients. Corn, lime, not like the fruit, but the, what, chemical? Disease.

The disease. And water. And they found this amazing supplier. And I say amazing supplier, but it was just like a random corn grower in O'Haka. And they started selling these tortillas. And it blew up. And they went viral. And they did really, really well.

And it was all based around one relationship. in Mexico. And they had to build that relationship by flying to Mexico and knocking on doors. Once they had it, they made a business out of it, which is kind of what you're saying. Exactly. Yeah, I remember that when you and Keith looked at actually doing it there in Alan. We did. That's expensive corn too. But what's interesting is like that corn was probably the exact same corn as the hundreds of farmers in that same central Mexican area. It was just like, they just needed to find one person that not had the best product, but that was willing to work with these Americans.

Yeah. And they did. All right. I got to get ready for this call. It's just going to be like that, huh? It do be like that sometimes. Okay. Well, is that it, Nick?

I think that's it, my friend. All right. Until next time. Until next time. See you, bro. Okay. That ends this episode of the Kernner Office slash HoldCobros.

Let me know what you think about the HoldCobros segment. And we will keep doing more and more and more and more of them. Please like and subscribe. Yada, yada. Love you guys. Bye.