The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - You Don’t Need a Big Idea. AI Can Clone These Giants for You w/ Sam ⏐ Ep. #202

Episode Date: July 30, 2025

Check out my newsletter at ⁠TKOPOD.com⁠ and join my new community at ⁠TKOwners.com⁠.I sat down with Sam Thompson again and we talked about why it’s never been easier to clone massive SaaS companies and sell the same functionality for 90% less. We broke down how AI is turning platforms like Salesforce, AppFolio, and RentManager into overpriced dinosaurs, and how you can use tools like BuiltWith, G2, and Manus to reverse-engineer their features and customers. Sam even shared how he ran paid traffic to a $1 trial landing page before building the product—and people bought it. We also talked about his new strategy for selling backlinks like products in a Shopify-style marketplace, why form factor changes (like caffeinated gum or chewable toothpaste) are underrated business models, and how his hummingbird nectar side hustle is still going strong. You can find Sam on Twitter (⁠https://x.com/ImSamThompson⁠) and check out what he's up to at ⁠https://www.unlimitedcontent.com/⁠Timestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: ⁠tkopod.co/p-yt⁠Ask me a question on or off the show here: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-ask⁠Learn more about me: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cjk⁠Learn about my company: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-cof⁠Follow me on Twitter here: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-x⁠Free weekly business ideas newsletter: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-nl⁠Share this podcast: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-all⁠Scrape small business data: ⁠http://tkopod.co/p-os⁠---00:00 Disruption in Software Pricing02:58 The Commoditization of Services05:52 AI and the Future of Business09:08 Innovative Business Ideas and Form Factors12:04 The Rise of Transparency in Business14:57 Exploring New Market Opportunities17:53 Backlink Strategies and SEO Insights20:45 Testing New Business Models24:04 The Value of High-Quality Backlinks

I built a clone of Appfolio using AI, and I know you're paying $2,300 a month. I charge $23 a month. That's what's going to happen with vibe coding and AI. They're going to have competitors that do just as much, if not more, for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you? I'm a big fan of form factor. Try create.com. Phenomenal products.

All he did really was, like, change the form factor of creatine. And he was like, bums. These other guys took toothpaste, and they just turned it into chewable. heard of a run gum it's just gum with caffeine for running guess what their sales are 28 million dollars all right you'll remember sam he was just on last week we had to keep talking about these business ideas please enjoy two companies huge companies rentmanager dot com app folio dot com they're just they're CRMs and rent collectors for landlords property managers okay and they are so expensive go to their website and it's like click you know call us for pricing enterprise or schedule a demo or they charge

door. It's five bucks per month per door. And it's like to you and I, we've got a three or four rental properties, whatever. But for a lot of companies, that's thousands of dollars a month. And what do they do? It's just software that can now be vibrated. Okay. So someone listening to this, someone within the sound of my voice do exactly this. Dude, you go to built with. Billwith.com, 450 bucks a month. Don't spend that. Go to Upwork.com. Little post, free post. You've spent zero dollars say, I need a Built With export of all of the Appfolio and Rent Manager websites. And you can get this. I've checked on BuiltWith because they use subdomains, right?

You go to pay your rent. You go to Appfolio.john's rental homes.com, right? Yep. Very easy to scrape this list. Boom. Now you have all of their customers. Okay. And then you just start a cold emailing campaign and you say, hey, I see you use Appfolio.

I built a clone of Appfolio using AI. And I know you're paying $2,300 a month. I charge $23 a month for unlimited units. Unlimited. Like that's what's going to happen with vibe coding and AI. Yeah. Is the sales forces of the world, the oracles, these big stodgy companies that charge way too much because they can because coding is hard, or at least it was until a year ago,

they are going to get disrupted out the ying yang. They're going to have competitors that do just as much, if not more, for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you? That's my rent. 100%. Yeah. No, you're on, you're spot on. I mean, like, I see it.

There's, I forget the guy's name. There's a guy on Twitter that did it where he was doing that for Buzz Sprout or like any of the social media scheduling apps. Oh, his company is called Post Bridge. Post Bridge. I forget his name, but it's post. I think it's postbridge.com. And that's basically his entire business model was like.

It's like buffer. Okay. Yeah, buffer like any of those. Like, and it's just social. scheduling and it's way cheaper. These are commodities now. CRMs are commodities. Yep.

Social media scheduling. Callenly, that's a commodity. Like a year ago, these were proprietary IP driven assets. Today they are replicable commodities. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that, I mean, we've seen it happen with internal tooling, right? Now with AI, it's the arc that continues to be of like internal tools or software

that we would have been paying for and a special. on companies that are bigger that are spending $2 million a year on Salesforce that are spending $82,000 a month on Appfolio where like you can come in and you don't even have to go from $2,200 to $22 a month. You could even go to $220 a month. Right. And mathematically, they're still good. And so, yeah, I think that that will be a very interesting macro trend. I'm curious how that impacts stock, like the stock markets. I know, right?

Like, that'll be a super interesting one. Like, they're too entrenched, right? Like, if you're a billion dollar company, it's still way too much work to go swap to something a little cheaper, right? But they're going to lose the lower and lower mid markets that like, I don't know if it was you or somebody else was talking about their buddy that like rebuilt something for them and like charged his own business. Like the company that he worked for, he rebuilt their CRM or whatever it was.

and save them a bunch of money and then like got paid as the service like as of the SaaS guy as this new software that he built and it's like I see that happening more and more and more like it forces the incumbents to like really double down on which I think transparently is what I think will end up happening is I don't think that the sales forces of the world are dumb I think that they will just say, hey, we are launching an AI co-pilot for Salesforce, right, that allows for you to make all these customizations and stuff a little bit easier, right? Like, they're going to have to react in some way. The pricing, like price becomes the biggest, you clone and charge less, right?

Yeah. Like, price is then your value prop. I think the slippery slope of that is it's literally a race to the bottom. You agree. Like an absolute race. If you can capture that first batch of $23 a month customers, they're never going to leave you for something that's 19 a month. They're not going to, yeah, they're going to, it's sticky. It's like the rate of diminishing returns.

Like they're not going to leave to save $4 a month. Look what I'm doing here. Hit it. Yeah. No, they would. They would. But there is a floor to it somewhere. Yeah.

All right. For those listening only, I went to g2.com, which is the website for software reviews. And it's just such a good website to mine data. And nowadays, we don't have to do this ourselves nor we can use AI. So I went to G2 and I went to software. I went to sales tools. I went to CRMs. And of course, Salesforce is number one.

They have 23,360 reviews. Salesforce sales cloud. Okay. I took the URL, copied it. And then I'm going to go to Manus, which is what I use for just doing like quick one-off agent tasks. Okay. And this is, I think I have the $20 a month account.

nothing too crazy. And I'm going to paste the URL in here. And I click the little agent button. And I'm going to say, I want you to find all of the features of Salesforce that get referenced the most in a positive way. So you can do one of two approaches. The surface level is like, I want to find all the complaints that people have about Salesforce. So I can fix all that. Now, I want to find the, you know, because Salesforce says, 1,800,000 million features. I want to find the five that everyone's talking about because that means it's the five features that everyone uses.

It's funny because these companies pay thousands of dollars a month for Salesforce and most of their employees are just using it to search by email address. They just want to know their customer's email address, right? So I just want to know like what are those three Salesforce features that everyone uses, the most basic ones because then I'm going to build a really lightweight Salesforce alternative that only has those three features. Yes, we can feature creep later. We can add whatever we want later.

But like it's a feature, not a bug of us having less features, if that makes sense. So I'm going to say, I want you to find all the features of Salesforce to get referenced the most in a positive way. And then it'll just get to work. It's scraping.

And it'll go to page two. It'll go to page three. And then it will tell us like what type of CRM to build. What would you do here differently? No, I, dude, I just, thinking that like we talk a lot about pros and cons of AI but also do I just love AI it's just it's just awesome it's just amazing oh got to get the verification there you go that's all right

it will handle the errors on its own you have to reply dude I'm using have you heard of cora cora dot computer I don't think so it's an email agent and they were invited only now they're open to everyone it summarizes your emails it's finally the email agent that can like learn from how you email and then it will draft them and then you can choose to send them or not. Anyway, Lindy does something similar and I'm using both of them in my inbox today to just summarize my emails. And I was joking with Kamal that like they were fighting and like I was thinking like, we're probably not too far away when like we have competing agents that are like going and canceling each other's like monthly. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're not too far away. Yeah.

Like did you know you could save this? many dollars by canceling Lindy, dude? I'll just do all that work for you. Dude, that's a whole other business. Imagine embedding yourself in a company with 10,000 employees and saying, hey, I'm going to install AI agents on all your inboxes. So your employees spend an hour less per day emailing. And you just install a $10 month software for them. That's it. Yeah. It's like the role of all the integration specialists at the software companies, right? Like you go buy an enterprise plan from, I don't know, like a superhuman or a Cora, or, right, like any of those types of tools.

And they're like, yeah, we're going to help you roll this out with all of the team members and all of that. It's the same, like, as the race to the bottom happens, I think that there's a world, like, that was the bet that we made with unlimited content, right? Like the individual components of AI, technical, writing, and backlinks are all getting commoditized via AI tools. Yeah. Right. Search Atlas, AI, auto, really good. there's nine million blog writing tools backlinks as we talked about before is like the own its own thing it's just like pay to play and that's what we aligned ourselves to is like cool we know that our costs

as an agency to fulfill on these services are getting cheaper and cheaper and cheaper and cheaper let's align ourselves as the service provider on top of those knowing that the market knows that where we're not selling we're not selling the fact that we have like some secret sauce that you couldn't access. It's like, no, no, no, we're using all of these tools. We're going to save you the time. And if you were to go and do this yourself, you would spend the same amount of money that you pay us to do it. We have economies of scale and expertise. Can we align ourselves to that a little bit more directly versus like going out here and being like, oh, $2,000 a month SEO agency. We don't tell you what we do. I'm like, no, no, no, we're using the best tools on the market. We tell you that. It's

why we charge $500 a month, not $2,000, because we're just the operator sitting on top of that being strategic using the tools for you. And so, like, I don't know, I've been thinking about that more and more as all this happens of like there is this kind of microservice layer on top of this AI stuff, of the people that don't either do not have the time nor the desire to learn how to use the tools, but know that they can leverage them and just aligning your price point to that better. where like we're super sticky now because like we're not $2,000 a month. You're not looking at us like to we're spending 30 grand a year on this agency.

Like I saw this AI tool can do it for 99 bucks a month. And it's like no, no. Yeah. Oh, the guys at the limit are using that tool and this tool and this tool. And I'm only getting charged 500 a month. Like it's the transparency thing. Like the world is moving in the in the way of transparency. You can't hide anymore.

You don't want to. It's like a parent saying, well, I don't want to talk to my. kids about porn or drugs because then they're going to go that's going to give them the idea to go shoot guns and look at porn it's like dude you got to get ahead of it it's a matter of if not when yeah yeah i don't want to talk to my customers about these AI alternatives because then there's you got to embrace those alternatives because they're about to embrace them from someone and they'd rather do it with a party that they already work with no and trust yep might as well be later they our game yeah to a tea okay sour drinks i'm going to call it right now

I'm starting to see it. You think it's up into the right? Dude, this is what Google Trends shows. I mean, it's slow. Yeah. But why not? What are the spikes, dude? What are those spikes every year?

Is it always like, dude, April comes around and people get on their little sour kick? They're like, dude, it's summer. Let's get sour. Dude. Here's an idea. I want to buy Celsius or ghost energy drinks that don't have caffeine. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. 100% dude so there's there's a brand based out of Sweden called noco and oh cc oh they have

caffeinated versions and then they have non-caffeinated that have bcc aAs in them the amino acids they actually have a green apple that is oh phenomenal dude sour green apple soda is so good i bought some ingredients on amazon i'm gonna start messing around with sour drinks i'm gonna make a sour busy juice. Yeah. Some citric acid and some malic acid. That's all you need. All I'm saying, sell it as a mix.

I know. For sure. It's so much easier. It's only dry goods, dude. That's what I've, that's what I've been learning with my hummingbirds. What would you know about selling bag powders on the internet? Look, dude.

Every, every soda is just sugar water, dude. You know what I mean? It's all the same thing. Speaking of sugar water, any update there? I told you I ran to the supply chain issues and all of that. I bought the mini bags. I've been getting repeat orders off of the QR code on the back of the back. And so like, you know, maybe a couple times a week I'll get a little 68 bucks.

I had a $100 purchase two days ago, dude, off a repeat buyer. They bought three bags in April and then bought six bags. And you'll love it. And my book, $100 a.OV, dude. Got to get the book, dude. Hummingbird Attraction 101. If for no other reason, you can't let this business die because it's my third most viewed YouTube video of all time.

It's never going to die. $150,000 views. I'm really excited to get on the pod 12 months from now. Okay. Because I started this one like right at the very beginning of hummingbird season. Right? And so like I had to work through the kinks during the busy season. Now I've got kinks ironed out, dude.

and I'm ready for next year. I have some bad news for you. This is going to keep you up all night. This guy tagged me on Instagram and it's called Hummingbird Hype Fuel. Hell yeah. And I have to imagine, since he tagged me on this, he learned about this from the pod. So you're inspiring some competitors here. That's fine.

You're going to go broke, man. I know. It's all good, dude. I love competition. Yeah, no, it's all good. I think more people should. Market share is big, dude. The market's big.

Like I was saying, we went up to Sequoia National Park for the fourth. And we stayed at this Airbnb like an hour and a half outside the park. And it was like, I'm talking the middle of nowhere. There was one one commercial facility that was the bar, the restaurant, the general store, the all of it. And I walk in there, dude. And they've got, I'm talking this place stocks like one box a raisin brand, right? it like limited inventory. You know what they did have though?

Hummingbird nectar. I was like, catch me up here, dude. Camp Nelson. That's hilarious. I'll be up here. It's all good. I'm going to make it happen.

All right. Well, we'll follow up every time you're on. I'm going to ask you. All good. I mean, it'll be pretty boring, I think,

in the winter. But I don't know. I'm going to play with it. Dude, not to jump around too much. There are a few TikTok. accounts are a few companies on TikTok growing like crazy and their whole niche is like extremely sour homemade candy.

Yeah. So and they've got hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers and people get the reaction videos when they try it. Yep. Who's doing that for shippable powders? Like it would be even easier to ship than count than candy for drinks. Yeah. Like I'm a big fan of form factor.

Right. Like when I think about business ideas and stuff or changing form factors. Yeah, where it's like you sell protein, right, loosely. But like inside of that you have protein powders, protein shakes, protein drinks, protein bars, protein gummies. Like you have all of these form factors. And I think that there's like you could go. I mean, you see it with the with creatine, right?

With try create.com. phenomenal product where he was just like, all he did, and we talked about this before, right? It's like, all he did really was like change the form factor of creatine. It was always sold as a powder that you added to smoothies or drinks. And he was like, gums. Right. And it's like he's not selling anything new.

He's still selling creatine. Just the form factor of that is a little bit different. I've just been thinking about that a lot of like, you know, people put pressure on themselves, like come up with this like genius new business idea. right because you start you when you're coming up in entrepreneurship you're looking at the zucks you're looking at Elon you're looking at these like I'm going to call them inventors more than entrepreneurs right like inventors like versus like business guys that like took something that people are buying and operated a better business around a specific thing and I think there's

tons of those little form factor type offshoots of existing things that people can go and jump on really easily. Like, because you're not reinventing the wheel. You're just changing. Maybe you are reinventing the wheel. No, you're not really. You're just like, you're adding, you're like, my wheel has four spokes instead of six, dude. Yeah.

It's like, but it's still a wheel. Right. Did you see that like hands free toothbrush that they're selling? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. They have like tens of millions of dollars of sales. Yeah.

I have zero. I mean, everyone uses a toothbrush, hopefully. I mean, maybe it on Alabama. But outside of Alabama, everyone uses a toothbrush. I heard rumors about North Dakota, too. I don't know. And it's just they're changing the form factor. And then these other guys, direct to consumer guys, took toothpaste and they just turned it into like a chewable.

And it's like, oh, yeah, you don't have time to brush your teeth. Let's do the 80, 20 of brushing teeth and just chew this. Yeah, 100%. It's just form factor. What was that? Is that bites? I think so. Bites did that.

Yeah. Again, yeah, it's toothpaste. Dude, they just changed. It's a, I mean, neuro gum is another phenomenal example of that. Like, it's caffeinated gum. Like, they're still, they're selling the same thing that Red Bull is selling. It's just gum, right? There's another dude that's doing caffeinated.

I don't know if it's a chocolate bar or a protein bar. I forget the name of it now. But it's the same thing. It's like, yeah, just like a little something special in this same form factor that people buy on a different use case that they want. Game over. Well, dude, have you heard of run gum? You and I talked about it before, yeah.

Best name ever, exactly what we're talking about. It's just gum with caffeine for running. Guess what their sales are, $28 million. Yeah, I mean. And you can get a copaccar to make that for you. For sure. Go find a company on ThomasNet that makes gum and say, hey, throw 22 milligrams of caffeine in there. For sure.

And then you go find a packager. Yeah. It's like the big, what's the big Codiac cakes? Yep. Right. That's a protein pancake mixes. It's a billion dollar business. Right.

It's like they still sell pancakes, bro. But it's, I like looking at opportunity kind of through that lens a little bit where it's like, what else is is a form factor thing. I think about it on, on, even on services. Like one thing that we're starting. starting to do on like the backlinks, like an SEO backlinks side is like backlinks traditionally are like, I'm not going to say hard to get, but you have to like know what you're doing to go and get them.

Right. Like you got to go to the right suppliers. It's easy to get screwed on a fiver where someone's like, I'll get you 500 backlinks for six cents. And it's like, dude, they're low quality, right? Like all of that. And then the way that you normally would go about procuring good backlinks is through an agency, right? which you're either paying a heavy retainer on or a markup, really, on those.

And it's like, dude, why can't, why can't you just buy backlinks on a Shopify store? Hmm. Right. Like, why can't you just log in? We buy a lot of backlinks for all of our clients. And we deal with the pain of going to 97 different providers of which one provider could have six good backlinks and three bad backlinks. And like, we've done that.

Like, we've spent the. money to know all of those pieces. I was like, dude, what happens if I just put it all in one? And it's like, okay. It's just a different form factor. You know what I mean? I like this. I like this. All right, two ideas for you. Yeah. Sub ideas. Number one, you just, it's literally a Shopify store as if you're looking at a merch store. And it's, it's backlinks, but you reveal what the back link is. I understand the risk in that that someone will circumvent you, but they don't know the person to reach out to at the company. For instance, I got an email today from a follower and that said, hey, check out this article about Buckees in Barron's, Barron's news,

like Barron's.com. And he's like, they mentioned you. And I clicked on the article. And they linked to us like five times in an article. They have these products and these products and they sell Buckees because they don't sell online. And then I go to maus.com, free domain authority checker. And I type in Barron's.com, 89 domain authority out of 100. And it just came, I didn't ask for it. So to your point, there's a Shopify store. And this would be hard, right? I'm not saying this would be easy. It's hard to get backlinks.

But once you have someone at a company, are there large or small to provide backlinks, then you can have that person give you all kinds of backlinks. So you say, all right, now I got a guy at Barron's. He might not say yes to everything. If he doesn't say yes, then you refund him. 100%. And you say, all right, $150, Barron's backlink. Or that's idea number one.

ID number two as part of this form factor is you just filter by domain authority rankings. So it's like $150 for one backlink with from a domain authority that's between 85 and 92. So you don't know it's barons. No one can circumvent you. You know what you're getting because that's the problem with almost every backlink site out there is that they can promise it's high quality. They're usually not. You might need above 50 domain authority. And for those listening, domain authority is just like.

like literally a score between zero and 100 of how much authority a website has according to Google, right? And the value of a backlink from a higher domain authority site means more to your SEO rankings because of their, you're like borrowing the domain. In Google's eyes, if somebody of that high caliber links to your site, you must also be of high caliber. And so your domain authority will go up. Your rankings go up by getting mentioned in high authority site.

Yes. And to give you an example of what it can do, that article on Barron's went live yesterday. I went and looked at our Google Analytics and I saw that Barron's.com was our 19th most popular referring site for the day, which is bad. It's not good. It was like 17 clicks. But I don't care about that. Because what you can't quantify immediately is what that does for your domain authority for your keyword rankings across thousands of keywords. Right. So yeah, if Buckees.com links to us on their homepage, it's going to be number one. And it's going to be the most life-changing thing ever for the company. But their domain authority is much, much lower than someone like Bairns. So, yeah, I would prefer Buckees, but all else equal. I want any site, whether it's relevant to Texas snacks or not to have high domain authority, right? Yep. And so the model that I'm playing with is, yeah, basically go in, get full transparency on all of them and order, like, literally, like you said, like get a backlink on Barron's for X price, which like, backlinks are relatively paid to play anyways.

Like you might have a connect at Barron's, but like if you want him to be doing that regularly, the man's getting the man or woman or they is getting paid. Right. Like, yeah, I'll pay you 150 bucks. And then I go to the client and in our model at unlimited content, it's just a 15% flat markup that we're very transparent about. But other agencies will mark that up 400%.

Like, and they won't tell you who it's through or what it's for, right? Like, it's just kind of an opaque world. And so, like, I think I'm going to follow more of, like, the Costco membership model of like, look, we're not going to charge a markup on any of these backlinks, but you have to pay us $100 a month for access to them. Yeah. So are you saying you're going to actually test this?

I already did. Dude, we're not supposed to actually do things on this podcast. We just talk about things, right? Dude, I know. It's fitting that we talk today. I literally was like sitting around last night. Lauren was packing envelopes for our, save the dates.

And we were just watching cheaper by the dozen. And I just had my laptop open. I was like, I should just test this funnel, dude. Like, let's just see if we can do it. And so launched a $1 free trial funnel.

Zero. Dude, I do not have the marketplace built. Like I tinkered in Shopify, but like nothing that I could show to a customer. But like, yeah, hey, sign up for this $1 trial and let's see what happens.

We got some homies coming through, dude, on Facebook ads. So you just, you say you built a funnel. You just launched a Facebook ad campaign to just like a landing page that went to a one, a $1 trial stripe payment link just to see if I could get cold traffic to pay for it. What was the offer? Do you want to show your landing page? Yeah, yeah. I can do that.

Let me see this. What did you build the landing page with? Oh, perspective, dude. You better put my affiliate link in your, in your gosh, dang. I will. I will. I'll hook you up. Prospective landing pages.

Perspective.com. Perspective. Yeah. Okay. Screen share. You are like the tool master. You know every tool. Thanks, dude.

In the world. You're a giant tool. I'm a big tool, dude. Yeah. So this is the lander. Super simple. It looks horrible on desktop because no one's looking at it on desktop of a Facebook ad.

But like literally the Costco of backlinks. Stop wasting money on low quality backings. Get real results without the markup. Direct access to wholesale link prices for $83 a month. 100% money back guaranteed placements. Done. What do you get? High quality backlinks for a fraction of the price.

Access to all of our partners. No markups or middlemen, right? That's just the value stack. We already do a bunch of press releases for all of our clients and unlimited content. So we do this super. Yeah, from ourselves, basically. but like yeah so we'll just rip that case studies and the nice for me which is a little bit different than what some other people can do which is like just to be super transparent is like these are clients of

unlimited content so i can i can actually say their case like you've got a little unfair advantage here yeah like we've done this that's a good that's a good framework because people should launch businesses where they have an unfair advantage and everyone listening to this has an unfair advantage in something maybe it's your your background your history the job you have what you're passionate about it doesn't have to be a bunch of money. Yeah. It doesn't have to be your network. All of it. And so yeah, that's basically it's like, I'm sitting up in my chair now. Yeah. So I can sit here and like put case studies because like these are people that we actually bought backlinks for using the same backlinks that we're going to sell. Right. So it's like I can I can do that a little bit easier than

somebody popping in and being like how much can I just make up the number of customers like. Yeah. You decide your own ethical line. But like we since we have unlimited, I can do that better. Yeah. But yeah. Start ranking. Like. become a member, browse inventory all the way through, all the FAQs, all the fun stuff. So. And then just ran the ads at that. What did you do to the people that paid? Did you email them or?

Yeah, immediately. And just refunded them and said that we'd reach out when the platform's ready. Okay. Wow. Obviously, you're not going to be profitable at a dollar, right? But what was your like your cost per acquisition or cost per lead? We average like $21 for that dollar. Which like, that's really good.

I have no VS. Yeah, like I'm happy. I mean, it's an 83. You're telling them it's an $83 month offer. Yeah. That's not a secret. So it's in my brain, I go, cool, if 25% convert on that trial on break even on, I haven't decided if I'm going to like, like, this was very early stage testing.

Right. And so like I haven't decided between a three day trial or a seven day trial, right? Like, and it's all just a cash conversion cycle question of like, cool, if I can get people at 80, if I can get $20 trial. at 83. I'm either in a 25% trial conversion rate, I'm breaking even on a three, it will be three, five or seven days.

Like I'm not going to do a 30 day trial. And so then I can go and spend on ads pretty aggressively. But it was cool. Like it's one of those. It's like you just get the, and to be clear, I also turn the ads off because I don't have a product to sell, but I like prove that I could sell it.

So now I get to go build it next week and it'll go live. Maybe by the time this episode comes out, depending on how fast Mohammed is, but, you know, he's pretty fast. He's quick. I know. Dude, there's so much I want to say. First of all, anyone listening, Sam is a bro. He's a bro of the pod and he's inviting people to compete with him because he's also trying this.

But we don't hold back the juicer. We don't withhold secrets, right? Come compete, dude. Come hang out. I love it. And if you listen to episode 164, that was like my most downloaded audio episode ever. It's about a guy that builds directories. And I don't remember who is $50 or $500.

I don't remember. But in the episode, he talked about how he really shilled out for a very relevant backlink to his directory. And that $50 or $500 investment nets him like $2,000 to $3,000 a month in like just like Mediavine ads on his directory. That's it. 100%. And that's the power of a good back, not a backlink, but a good backlink.

It has to be relevant. It has to have high domain authority. We got up a nine hour conversation around backlinks. We spent a bunch of money on them and all of our SEO agencies. But it's like you get the right one in there. And you think about backlink placements strategically. You can actually see like massive lift. Like what we think about when we look at clients is like backlinks are like paid ads a

bit, right? Like, if you're ranking, if anyone's like, thinks about how they use Google, there's kind of like three buckets, like three tiers of what we call like click density. And so like the highest clicked on links are one, two, and three, right? So like top three is where you see the most, the most clicks, right? Then you have seven through 10, right? The rest of the first page. And then you have 11 and on, right? Kind of like class. classic Pareto principle, right, where you get the clicks. What we do from a strategic perspective, and we're thinking about backlinks is we go and look for where you're on the

cusp of the next tier, right? Because for you guys, like, let's take Texas snacks as an example, it's like if you're ranking number 11 for something and then you go get $300 worth of relevant backlinks for that 11 page and move to number 10 or number nine, you actually can arbitrage the cost because you're not, Yep. The difference between being number eight and number seven is pretty minimal, but the difference between nine and 11 is meaningful.

Same with like or seven and six or five and three, right? It's like. Yeah. And so when you're when you're thinking about that and a lot of this is going to be educating people on how to self-serve backlinks and like be smart about how they go about it, we are going to offer a free backlink strategy when you sign up as a member. So like we'll help them kind of coach them into best using our product. But like when you're going to.

through and doing those, those are the opportunities that you're looking for of like, yeah, like a $500 backlink could equal spending $500 a month on Google ads if you're buying the right one. You just only have to pay for it once or as frequently as your competitors are buying backlinks, right? Like, that's the thing. It's so funny how I mean, like Google and Facebook, these trillion dollar companies and a large reason for that is because of like just the slow death of ads. because we set these daily budgets. It's like, yeah, I'll do 20 bucks a day. That's not much.

That's $600 a month. Like what else in your life? $700 a year. Do you pay $600 a month for? But you break it down on a daily basis, which is why you always see ads that's like for less than a price of coffee per day. Like that stuff works, right? So when it comes to backlinks, it's like $500 for a backling.

Are you an idiot? That's going to pay dividends for a decade. Whereas your Facebook ad, once you turn that $20, a day budget off, it doesn't care about you anymore. It's forgotten about you. I just had a sick idea off the back of that, which is I'm definitely going to let people buy backlinks with buy now, pay later. Like Klarna?

Yeah, I'm for sure. I'm for sure going to put Klarna on this thing. Why would you? Yeah, you get this, you get this backlink for four equal payments, zero percent interest. If I can buy a $1.50 hot dog at Costco on buy now, pay later. You should buy backlinks with it. saying I'll throw it on there. I'll see what's good. Oh my gosh. Dude. So that'll be a fun one. That's a good idea. I really like the idea of saying

not like by 10 backlings, but by this backlink from these guys, this one from these guys, this one from these guys. All right, what do you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner office.