The Koerner Office - Business Ideas and Deep Dives with Chris Koerner - You Don’t Need an Online Business to Get Rich ⏐Holdco Bros. Ep. #197

Episode Date: July 18, 2025

Check out my newsletter at TKOPOD.com and join my new community at TKOwners.comHoldCo Bros are back! In this episode, Nik and I dive into the power of zigging while everyone else zags. We break down the business behind The Flower Letters, a low churn $300K+ per month subscription built around physical mail and why this old school model is winning big. Then we riff on spin off ideas like analog pen pal chess games, choose your own adventure letters for kids, and using AI to co-write and print custom children’s stories. We also brainstorm a niche wedding vendor directory, a Vibe coded video game builder for fantasy nerds, and how white label AI wrappers can unlock passive income. This one's full of business models, AI ideas, and real examples of how to create scalable products around connection and creativity. Learn more about Nik here: http://linktr.ee/cofoundersnikShare your ideas with us:[e-mail]@cofounders.comTimestamps below. Enjoy!---Watch this on YouTube instead here: tkopod.co/p-ytAsk me a question on or off the show here: http://tkopod.co/p-askLearn more about me: http://tkopod.co/p-cjkLearn about my company: http://tkopod.co/p-cofFollow me on Twitter here: http://tkopod.co/p-xFree weekly business ideas newsletter: http://tkopod.co/p-nlShare this podcast: http://tkopod.co/p-allScrape small business data: http://tkopod.co/p-os---00:00 The Flower Letters Business Model02:54 Exploring the Concept of Analog Communication05:47 Innovative Business Ideas Inspired by Nostalgia09:05 The Role of AI in Personal Storytelling11:57 Creating Interactive Experiences for Kids14:51 The Future of AI and Human Connection17:45 Niche Market Opportunities in Wedding Services21:06 The Potential of Vibe Coding for Game Development

Most of everything is not on the internet, believe it or not. But that's like the most valuable stuff. I am so hyped on this idea, and someone needs to copy this. They send two letters per month to people paying $10 per month that tell a story. We're talking $310 grand a month. What? They're not doing paid ads. It's just word them out.

You're effectively piggybacking off of the USPS and the American taxpayer. They run the business by themselves from their home. I almost don't want to release this podcast episode because they're going to get freaking destroyed. All right, I want you to pull up theflowerletters.com. The flower letters? Yep. I am so hyped on this idea. Okay.

And someone needs to copy this. Can I tell you what this business is? Can I share my screen so that people can see it? I can sure. Nick, what do women love more than romance novels? I'll answer that for money. World War II history. Okay?

Fictional World War. I swear, every time I see my wife reading a book, It's about some terrible thing that happened during World War II. I don't know what it is, okay? Like flies and honey. Okay? This business, this website, theflowerletters.com, they send two letters, like handwritten, in quotations, not actually, but appearing handwritten, two letters per month to people paying $10 per month that tell a story. They're like reading love letters between two people during World War II.

and it has like stickers, it has like some artwork in there. It's really well done, really tastefully done. $10 a month, two letters per month. They have like six different themes or genres or storylines that you can follow. The churn is very low because it's like a book. They're like getting a book by letters. You don't want to cancel on month three because you don't know how it ends in month 12. And I know all the details of this business because I found a random blog article on USPS's

blog of all things because they're a massive customer of USPS. What are your immediate thoughts before I go further? My immediate thoughts, honestly, I love the idea. These guys are Mormons. And I went to the website to go look at it. And of course, the Clarks live in Utah, USA and have been married for... Pletown of Brandon, our friend. PG, brother.

I love it. I think that this is going to the... Like, if you're looking at a spectrum of things right now, instant gratification is what everybody goes for. Instant instant instant. And this is zinging while others are zagging. It's not instant gratification. It's a trickle of letters that are coming in. And I think that's a really smart play.

They're like, oh, okay, you want everything right now? We're not going to do that. We're going to go back and play into this niche. So I think that's a really interesting framework is like looking at what is popular right now and going the total opposite direction. And so anyways, yeah, I love that. All right. So this is what their volume is like. This was a year ago.

A year ago, they had 31,000 active subscribers. What? Okay, $10 a month. $31,000. Yeah. We're talking $310,000 a month. This was a year ago, and they're only four years old. I would bet they're closer to $400 or $500 grand a month at this point.

What? They're not doing paid ads. It's just word them out. It's just a good product. Okay. $3,000. month and it's two letters a month? Two letters a month. And the cost of a stamp at bulk is like less than 50 cents. Cost the paper printing. Like for sure it's under $2 all in like for your cogs.

Let's just say it's $2 all in. That's $60 grand a month of cogs. So their gross margins, $250,000 a month. Yeah, 80% give or take, 24 employees. Well, dude, do you know this? like in a lot of these businesses, you look at the cost of goods sold and their gross margin. You're like, oh, they're freaking crushing it. And then you look at below the line and you're like, oh, that's why their gross margins are so good is because they spend so much money on customer acquisition. They're on meta. They're on Google. They're doing pay per click.

They're doing SEO. Whatever. They're doing cold outreach. And so their net margins are nowhere near as good because they've got to pay so much money to acquire customers. But you just said they're not spending any money on marketing. That's what they said in this interview. I didn't see them on the meta ads library. So let's just say, let's just say back of the napkin,

$5 million a year, top line, $4 million a year after their cogs come out. They still have 24 employees, surely there are other costs, right? 24 employees, let's call it, I don't know, some of them are part-time, some of them are full-time, let's say, 75 grand a year. So, I'm cheesy, geez. Bro, like, I feel bad for them. I almost don't want to release this podcast episode because they're going to get freaking destroyed. What would stop somebody from coming in here? Investing, even if you invested like

$100,000 in paid ads, how many customers would you get? You could easily target people on Facebook in particular. You go to meta. You find people who are going to fit this profile. And then you just said the churn is exceptionally low. You lock them in. I'll get that 50 grand back in what a year, less than a year. And I'm like, and I'm already cashful positive in the first few months. If they're not doing any paid ads, like look at their website. It's not like, like they don't look overly sophisticated, I think somebody could come in here and just blow this business out of the water just by spending on some paid ads. But I don't think this would like hurt them. I think that would grow the pie, you know.

I think this is like a way of delivering this type of content that is innovative, new and unique, even though it's ironically using a very old fashioned way of communicating, I think that if someone were to come in and even if they didn't do paid ads, even though they just did a different genre. Same style, same level of quality, post-apocalyptic, space opera, interseller romance, Renaissance, like take, just go to Amazon and take all the top categories for women, sort, and then just pick one or five or ten, right? And take the same approach. This is a really cool business. This is a really cool business. This is one of those businesses where they probably looked at each other a year in and were like, is this real? Like, is the, is

the other shoe going to drop at some point? You know what I mean? Like, hey, we just made a half a million dollars selling letters to people. I think there's a good chance their net profit is over two million a year. Because at 24 employees, 75 grand each, that's 1.8 million a year. Like, they could be doing two million. I can't get to a scenario where they're not doing less than that. They're due, they're using the thing. We've talked about this. Like, one of the largest subsidies, marketing subsidies that nobody talks about is the United States Postal Service. The true cost of sending these letters is much more than you're paying for a stamp. And that's their main cost.

Like that's their distribution channel. So you're effectively piggybacking off of the USPS and the American taxpayer to get your cog so low that you're like your net margins are two million dollars a year. That's insane. Dude, and I looked at similar web of what their traffic is. They're getting 60,000 unique visitors per month. If you take a 3% conversion rate, that's 1,800 per month times 10, 18,000 of MRR added every month at a 3% conversion rate. Oh my gosh. Four years old in business.

So they're just relying on word of mouth and SEO. How long do you think it took them to get to the spot? Like how long do you think it took them to get to 31,000? Because they started in 2020. We're in the middle of 2025. Was it like, oh, divide by five, six thousand a year for the first five years? Well, it says they launched August 2020, great timing. Okay, perfect timing.

It says at first there were 38 subscribers who followed the romance of one couple. So they just had like one storyline to start through letters and postcards against the backdrop of historical events. Today they have 31,000 subscribers since 2020, more than 1.8 million letters have been mailed. they run the business by themselves, or they used to, from their home, and now they ship it from a warehouse and Orum, and they have four other series, like four other storylines you can follow. And they say many of their customers subscribe to multiple at the same time. So we're talking $20, $40, $50 a month from some customers instead of $10.

Dude, I have an amazing business idea to launch off of this. Let's go. Amazing. When I was a kid, my grandfather was really into chess. He wasn't a grandmaster, but he was, I don't even remember what the rating system is, But he was highly rated to play chess all the time. He loved it. He taught me how to play chess.

I'm not very good at it, but he taught me how to play chess. And every time I'd go over to his house, there'd be a chessboard on his table that was like in the middle of a game. I don't remember the first time he told it to me, but I must have at some point been like, Grandpa, why is that sitting there? And he explained to me that he had a pen pal that he would write letters to and they were in the middle of a chess game. And the chess game would last probably months because they would send a letter and tell

him, oh, I moved my night from F2 to L7 or whatever the metric is, right? Dude, so good. Oh. Yeah. Yeah. That's how he would play. And he had like a couple of friends that he was corresponding with. Why couldn't you bring that back with like a technology, I don't know, bent to it?

Why technology? You're saying because like how could you capture that value otherwise? No, no, no. What I'm saying is the technology bent to me would be on the marketing side. It wouldn't necessarily be the way that they're experiencing the quality. game together because like how do you acquire customers would be my I don't even know how I don't know how we did it the last time I'm pretty sure he did it through like there's probably some international chess federation and so like they have local chapters and that's how we met people but that would

be the only technology component to it is like okay how do you acquire customers and match people up but I'll tell you how you find customers oh okay hello dude you buy banner ads on chess.com and on the chess.com app these guys have like 26 million hits a month. It is the website. They have like 85% market share for playing chess. Did you just look that up as we were talking? Or did you know that? Yeah.

No, gosh, I was like, too. I knew that. Okay, rain man. Sorry, I take that back. They had 35 million visitors per month in June of 2020. In December 2020, they had 100 million users per month. 3x growth between 2020 and 2020. 22. Wow. Holy crap. That's an interesting framework going the opposite way from digital to analog and writing trends that are growing exponentially. I don't know, not even exponentially, but just like growing way faster than they shit. So if chess is taking off, is there a way to take it from the digital to the analog? And the answer to that would be yes, through something like this, right? Like, hey, we'll assign you to a pen pal. Now I could bastardize it and be like,

Oh, we'll just do it with AI and the AI will make the move and we'll send the letter like, yeah, you could do that. But really what you'd want to do is actually pair them with somebody who they're playing against. Yeah, yeah, at their skill level. Right, right, at their skill level. So there's a little bit of a marketplace component to it that would make it a little bit difficult.

But I think you could solve that through like Facebook groups. Dude, like what you did with Texas snacks, right? You wouldn't bought a Bucky's Facebook group. You could go and probably buy some chess groups, roll them up, merge them together. All of a sudden you got 10,000 members. You get a master list. of everybody and their ratings. They pay five bucks a month. And then you're the one that sends the correspondence between everybody. Right. Like you don't even ask them to send the correspondence. You're

like, hey, just make the move. You can, you can submit it here digitally and then we will actually send the letter. You don't have to worry about going and eating the stamp or writing it or any of those things. Yeah. Interesting. I would want to test that because I feel like there is something magical about putting a letter in the mailbox. there's especially something magical about walking out to the mailbox and getting a letter, right, which in your scenario, they would still experience that. There is a lot of friction to, you know, right, but maybe you get a kit or something, and it's like a kit.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Like post, like pre-stamped envelopes. It has the name and address on there. And literally all you do is they have, even have like, kind of like, you know, some board games come with like a card of like things that you fill out to keep track of the score. You would have like a chess, a paper chess board. they like draw arrows of their moves and they just mail it. And it's like, it's just, I feel like people are going to hear this and they're either

going to think it's the stupidest idea they, they've ever heard. And I respect that, but I hate them, or the most genius idea that they've ever heard. Because it's just complete the opposite direction. I think there's a lot of kids growing up who've never experienced getting a letter in the mail. They've gotten text messages. They've gotten emails. They've gotten FaceTime.

They've got like, but like, do there is something magical about a letter in the mail. They've probably gotten a lot of. Amazon packages in the mail, but like a letter in the mail that's addressed to them. So chess is one thing, but like bringing back pen pals somehow with kids, I think that would be a really interesting thing. Dude, what about like the flower letters but for kids? Like a kid's book sent to kids. And you could do one of two ideas.

You could do it one way. Like the flower letters is one day. You're reading stories about other people. Awesome. It could be a two-way conversation where the kid receives a letter with a pre-stamped, pre-paid envelope and like a blank page and they could write back and like customize what happens in the story like a choose your own adventure kid book oh that's such a good idea do you remember when we were kids grew up LDS the friend do you remember the friend of course okay so like we had this magazine in

the church it was the friend it was for kids and there was a section in the friend that you always turn to do you remember nope it was the stories at the end that the kids told so kids could write in and then every every month with the friend issue there would be like like a story from a kid and was like, this is Eduardo in Ecuador or this is Hans in Germany. And they would like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that was the best part. They do the same thing in the Leihona, like just personal stories from people. Yeah, but like I don't get the Leahona anywhere. Or at least I don't, I don't read through it with my kids anymore just because we have like,

we could go to your bad dad. Thumb follow me. Yeah, I'm a bad dad. I don't believe in that stuff anymore. No, but we can go to like Living Day scriptures or Thumb Follow me or like the YouTube channels and we can watch that stuff. but like something with like that component of kids sharing stories and having a way to connect with other kids, I think that would be so cool to see like they took the time to write it.

They have like a message that they're sending between one another. That would be a really interesting. Even though like it could be the letters that they're my son loves to read and he's just giving the letters in a series. Oh, dude. That would be so cool. You could just take a book, license the book. this might be more expensive. You take the book, you license the book, and then you just send them

chapters, you know, one month at a time. And it's like, oh, they finished early? Well, they got to wait for the next chapter. Yeah. That could be really cool. I like the idea of making an interactive kid's story through letters using AI on the back end. But like the delivery is very old school. And so a kid gets a letter, like a kid gets a letter with a story about a boy and his dog, right? And then the boy has some prompts, right, where he can change the, the, the, outcome of the story. And he's given ideas of how to change it, right? But it's really up to him. The letter gets sent back. It gets put into a machine. It gets opened automatically, scanned automatically, uploaded to Chad GPT automatically. Chad GPT knows the assignment. It writes back

back based on where the boy or the girl is taking the story. And then, you know, it uses a handwritten font. It makes it look personalized. It spits out a response. It nails it back to him. So the kid literally feels like someone is helping him write this story, but it's really AI. But it doesn't feel like AI. And then at the end of it, you get the freaking thing printed into a book. That's the upsell at the end. Dude. Okay.

I have you one better. So remember last year we were talking about capturing stories in assisted living facilities? We've created an app and we are going to roll it out. It's called One Life Tale. One of the components to it, though, my brother-in-law created was if you as a family member want to gift somebody something. So let's say, hey, you know what, Carson and Carson's probably too old for this at this point, but Carson's nine or ten. He's learning to read, I want to get Carson a gift for his birthday. I can go and enter information about Carson into this app and it will generate a story for Carson.

And then I can go to Barnes and Nobles and I can get it printed out and it will have like pictures and it will be a story. And Carson is the protagonist and he's reading about himself and I send it to him and it's like, oh, that's a really cool, thoughtful gift. In the same way you're saying the kid is helping write this story, it's like, yeah, I want to, I want to, I want to make sure I'm connected with my niece or my nephew or my cousins or whoever. Every month it sends me a prompt and it's like, when was the first time you met Carson? What's your favorite thing about Carson? What does he like to do?

What have you and Carson like to do? And then it's sending them this like story that AI generated obviously. But within the story, Carson's reading like, wait, how did it know that I love Skittles? How did it know that Nick and I actually went to the Branger's baseball game? You know what I mean? It's like weaving them into the story. I think that would be a really cool way to then bring. families who are distant to feel like, oh yeah, we're close.

I created that story with Carson. Oh, that's good. That's a really cool idea. Oh, that's so good because, you know, it's so easy to think, well, AI can just do everything. AI is just going to do everything because it knows everything because it's all on the internet. Right. Most of everything is not on the internet, believe it or not. Like, the internet doesn't know that the Bear Lake Boat Rentals place has,

more pontoon boat rentals than ski boat rentals. Like the owner knows, the employee knows, but that's not on the internet. That's not scraped by chat, GPT. So there's so much more institutional knowledge and one-on-one experiences that have never been recorded and will never been recorded.

But that's like the most valuable stuff. Like I use this limitless pendant. I could not, like I would love to prompt it and say, write an autobiography based on everything that's happened since the day I put this pendant on. And it could, but it would be very, it would be like reading a research report. It would be very vanilla because it doesn't know like what's in my heart, what's in my mind. It doesn't know my insecurities. Like it only knows things that I vocalize,

which is kind of like, hey, babe, what's for dinner tonight? You know, like, that's not very tight or like talking about business ideas. Like, that's not the most important stuff. So what you're describing is merging those two worlds, right? Like AI doesn't know that Carson and his cousin's first interaction was over, you know, throwing skittles into the pond. AI doesn't know that, but that book could know that because of the human element that you're adding to the story, right? Yeah. It's pulling out those pieces from you and your experience by asking you the right questions so that it can then create a story that allows you to be connected. I'm with you. Like, I think at first, like, we went through the waves of AI and you're like, oh my gosh, AI is going

to replace everything. Oh, this is going to change. And it is going to change the world. But the more and more I'm learning about AI, I'm like, you know what? Yes, it's going to change everything, but it's just going to change our lives. It's not going to eliminate. Like, there's not going to be mass layoffs and we're just not going to be, we're not going to do anything that anymore. We're still going to have things that we need to work on. And AI is not going to be able to pull out the things that we know are intrinsically valuable to us. So to me, that's a cool framework.

I think a lot of people are justified in feeling scared that the human experience. is going to turn into like a Wally experience, just sitting in a bubble and robots and computers do all these things to us. But I don't think that's going to happen for the same reason that when e-books were invented, physical books didn't go away. Physical books are thriving. They're doing better than ever. You just cannot replace in-person physical touch, feel, all those senses that are activated with an in-person experience. You can't fully replace that. It will always be superior, like an artificially generated experience or story or novel or or whatever, right? I had a conversation with my brother-in-law this week. He's in the film industry. He's an editor.

He's super creative. And I'm like, oh, are you using AI? And he's like, oh, absolutely not. Like he just, he hates AI. And the more we talked about it, it was be, yeah. Well, you know, I totally see it from his perspective. It's like, that's eliminating jobs in the entertainment space. The nicest way possible from like a scarcity mindset.

It's like, oh, AI's coming for me and I'm going to get eliminated. I was like, I was trying to help him see and understand like, well, here's the thing, like all the research that you do in order to write a script, when you're planning the shoot and you need to know the location and the weather that's coming up and which shop might work, like you're effectively just hiring an analyst. Why wouldn't you use it to do that? And now it's going to be so much cheaper to produce content and good content because good contents can stand out more than bad content.

You don't need a whole production company behind you. You don't need a whole studio behind you. You can go and create a show that used to cost $10 million for $10,000. dollars. It's going to take a while, I think for him to kind of get there. But I actually think that's what's going to happen with AI. So there's going to be an unlock of the large institutions aren't necessarily going to have the monopoly on things that they used to. Individuals now are going to have the power and ability to create things that they otherwise hadn't been able to up until this point. It's going to give them a lot more freedom. So to your point, it's like, yeah, we're not going to have the Wally experience because we don't want the Wally experience. No, we don't. And some people think they do, but they don't.

No, they don't. I sold my companies. You've sold businesses. And like for the first week, it's like, oh, cool, I don't have to work. And then you're like, I got to do something. I got to, you know, I got to go figure something out. Like, that's just the way we're wired. We like to work. The pie just grows, right? It's like the same principle I was listening to his other podcast. They were talking about Shopify. One of the big VCs passed on investing in Shopify because they crunched their numbers and they looked at the total e-commerce market. And they thought, man, pie in the sky scenario, if Shopify ever gets 20% of the e-commerce market, it's only a billion-dollar business. And we want a hundred billion-dollar business.

So, what they didn't foresee is that the e-commerce market would 20x in size. And Shopify only has like 3% of it instead of 20%, but they're a hundred billion-dollar business because the pie grew that much. So I think that's what AI is going to do is grow the pie. I think, you know, 10 years ago, it was unfathomable to have a trillion dollar company. Now we have a handful of them, right? Right now it's unfathomable to have a 10 or 100 trillion dollar company. But as the pie continues to grow, there's going to be a lot more of them, right? Because we're, we can't think about the future as the present looks today.

It's going to look much different with a much bigger pie. I literally just heard a podcast talking about this. Are you familiar with like meta, meta, meta's project Orion? No. So you've seen the meta, like, Ray. Is that like, I think so. Anyway, keep going. Yeah, you've seen the meta rayban glasses.

Yeah, yeah. Augmented reality, right? So Orion's basically, it's augmented reality. It was the acquired podcast, actually. And they had seen sort of a preview of it. And they were like, once I saw that, I knew that is the future. Okay. But they were doing some analysis.

And they're like, the amount of money that Meta has spent and is continuing to spend investing in the Orion project, even if they had the adoption that the iPhone had, starting in 2008 through today, they wouldn't be caps full of positive until 2045. So it's like an 18 year investment, right? And these are glasses that have augmented reality. And not only augmented reality, but you don't need AirPods. They actually feed the audio through the frame of the glasses and you can listen to things. Things pop up on the screen.

You can have text conversations. It kind of rethinks the way that we interface with technology. And their point was like, this is going to change the way that we interface with technology. But if meta's right, which, I mean, Mark's done a freaking phenomenal job of being right, then it's not going to be the iPhone market. It's going to be a totally different category that's going to be whatever, $2 trillion. And they're going to pay back much sooner than that. But it's our inability to understand compound growth and exponential growth that sometimes holds us back from understanding the opportunity that's in front of us. Yeah.

It's not going to be the iPhone market. It's going to be the market of people that have eyes, right? Yeah. Like AI is, AI is not disrupting technology. It's disrupting human labor, which is the biggest market in the world. Every job that everyone does,

it's going to take a slice of that. So you just have to think about it differently. It's built different. All right. We'll call this the vibe code idea of the week. Someone should use Replit or whatever to go vibe code one or both of these ideas. I have two of them.

I can't just do one. You ready? I'm ready, dude. Yes. You've got the knot.com. You've got Zola.com. Massive wedding marketplaces, right? If I own a wedding venue or if I'm a wedding photographer, I've got to list my services there.

Agreed? Agreed. I think someone needs to vibe code a marketplace or a directory for random off-the-wall niche wedding services. For instance, and I've posted content about a lot of these. There is a donkey in Arizona that they call the beer burrow, right? And people having a wedding, they're running. They rent out this donkey for $700 for a day. They put beers on the donkeys back because donkeys are meant to hold hundreds of pounds.

And the donkey just walks around the wedding and people grab beers off its back. And it's a gimmick, but it's extremely profitable because it's extremely Instagramable and it goes viral all the time. Okay. Or you've got charcutory carts, right? Or you've got like those 360-degree photo boots. Or you've got like a vintage camper photo booth. or like fake tattoo bars or like they have authentic Italian pizza trucks that only cater to weddings. All these random one-off things that people increasingly want more and more because they want their wedding to be unique,

Instagramable. They don't want it to be like all their friends weddings. It needs to be different. It needs to have a beer burrow. I think there needs to be a Zola or the knot.com for all of these random things. That is just the go-to for like the long-tail wedding niches and services. what do you think? Okay, so what are you building? You're building the website or you're building the like back end platform that is facilitating the transactions between them? Because the knot.com,

you're going through the knot, right? Like they're not just, you're not going there and saying like, oh, Joe Bob Smith does XYZ for waiting. I'm going to go contact Joe Bob Smith. You know what I mean? So I feel like it would start as a directory and it would morph into a marketplace, right? We all know marketplaces are hard. So we're going to start it as a directory. We're just going to scrape, very simply, we're going to scrape all of these random one-off services. We're going to use Replit to put it in a database and display it in an attractive way. And then you can sort, you can filter, and anyone that's about to get married can go to this website and look at all these cool. And it's free marketing. You're sending free leads to these people, right? And then over time,

as you build traction and as you build a name for yourself, then you reach out to the people that are getting leads and you're like, hey, you're getting leads from my website. I'm going to charge you now, or I'm going to take you off the website. That's the business. Wow, that's really cool. This is how I think you would do it. You would start in a market. Let's say you're in Dallas.

You do things that don't scale. So you find your list of 50 people or companies that are off the wall. What do you call it? The beer bureau. Beer borough? You got a puppy cuddled corner. You got a white wedding bounce castle. Dude, that's amazing.

Okay. So you're like, you're in Dallas and you individually reach out to these people and you're like, this is what I'm doing. Can I put you on my direction? And they would say yes. So you test it first and just see how you would set up this directory. Because in order for it to get traction, like you've got to get you've got to build SEO to it. Like you can't just throw it up and have it necessarily work. But going back to the directory's ideas that we had before, you're using it as a lead funnel for these businesses to use you for essentially marketing services. Once you build in Dallas, then I would go to other markets to actually test it. But I would start small. I would go in one market. do something that doesn't scale, see how it works, and then scale it. Yeah, I like starting in one local market. I don't think you need to ask permission, though.

You just throw them up on the website with their contact info and everything. It's permissionless. And then you could even use paid ads. You'd have to come out of pocket. But you could use paid ads to women that are about to get married to push traffic to it. Like you're doing free marketing for all of these people that you're listing, but then you're coming back and charging for them. Premium placement, banner ads, whatever.

I guess I was saying, like, do it. but I would still reach out to them to do that. What you're saying is like, hey, I already got you here. Are you willing to spend, give me $100 this month so I can run paid ads? Yeah. It's, hey, I listed you. You're welcome. Yep.

Yep. I listed to you. This is the idea. I'm not just a random person who's like, I have this idea that I'm going to execute. Like, no, you show them you're a serious person. And then you go to them and you're like, if you pay me $250 this month, I'm going to go run paid ads and we're going to see kind of what comes from this. I love this idea because a year ago, it wasn't. approachable to 98% of people listening to this. Because this is a pretty heavy website. There's

kind of a lot going on here. But I know for a fact, because I've built other directory websites, that you could build this with AI. You could vibe code it with natural language. The next vibe code idea I have is I really like the idea of white labeling, a vibe coding service like Loveable or Replit. I think Loveable is starting to offer white labeling. And so here's the idea. Here's the whole idea. A vibe coding app that's just white labeled, lovable, replet, whatever, because we don't know how to build a vibe coding app that's way above our heads. But it's for a certain niche, right? So call it lovable for video game designing. And it does everything that all these apps can already do. It's not special. It's just a wrapper. Instead of a Chad GPT wrapper, it's a vibe coding wrapper.

And I want to make a video game. Kids want to make them. Adults want to make them. It could be simple, like Pac-Man. It could be more complex. But how cool would it be to play a game that you built? Dude, I was just talking to my brother-in-law about this this week. Like, they love fantasy novels, and they've always been like, I want to write a fantasy book. And in order to do that, you had to get like concept art and you had to write the thing. And now with like mid-journey and chat CPC, you could write your own fantasy novel and have it actually turn out the way that you're hoping that it would turn out. I would add one thing to it. I think there's like a freemium or just like a really cheap model, which is what you just said, like,

I'll help you vibe code it through a wrapper. Cool. And I don't know exactly how you'd build it, but there's probably like specific things you need to have in the game. And so you'd build that into the prompt. And the wrapper would make sure that's like, oh, have you thought about your security architecture?

Or, oh, you didn't actually talk about all the attributes of your character. Make sure you do X, and Z. Right. So there's a way to build that out. But then I would have an upsell because it's really easy to build the first 80%

or 90%. It's that last 10 or 20% that you can vibe code to. And it's like, well, I don't, I don't know how to have this integrate with SuperBase. I don't, I don't know exactly how to create a stripe payment that integrates with this. And so that upcharge would then hook you up with somebody who is a technical person. They're an engineer and they can get you the last 10 to 20%. Yeah, that makes sense. That's a great idea.

I love it. It's all she wrote. Remember we were talking about the game that I play with my kids that I created? I had somebody email me. It was like, hey, I spent a couple hours on this. I loved what you guys were talking about. I created the game. So he went on Lovable, or was it Replit, one of those two, and just vibe coded it.

He vibe coded it and sent it to me as like a thank you. And he's been playing with his kids and updating it frequently. Yeah, it's freaking cool. Have you used it yet? Yeah. It's not exactly the way that I played the game. Like the trivia categories are a lot broader. I was just doing geography and Minecraft, but the categories he has are like really broad.

But yeah, I've used it. And it, like, it works. It's cool. I think it's really cool. That's awesome. All right, what do you think? Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the Kerner Office.