The Startup Ideas Podcast - 5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)

Episode Date: August 27, 2024

I’m joined by Chris Koerner who owns 8 RV parks + 7 companies, as we jam on 5 ideas he would start tomorrow:1) Content Management for underserved platforms • Instagram Reels can be cross-posted to Facebook• FB Reels get massive organic reach (100k+ views/hr)• Clickable links allowed in comments (unlike IG)• Opportunity: Build a tool/agency to automate this for creators2) Programmatic SEO Franchise• Use tools like Zapier, TagParrot, Whalesync to create 1000s of local landing pages• Target undersaturated home services niches• Sell as a "business in a box" for $10k + monthly fee• Cheaper than a franchise, potentially huge ROI3) Viral-Content Finder• Content often goes viral on one platform, unknown on others• AI could scan for viral content in your niche across platforms• Automatically repurpose & post to your accounts• Bonus: Add viral potential prediction feature4) "Lifetime Warranty" DTC Brand • Inspired by Shady Rays ($130M sunglasses brand)• Offer lifetime replacements, factor cost into pricing• Apply to other niches: flip flops, accessories, etc.• Key: High margins + emotional connection to product5) Shopify Abandoned Cart Call Center • Human outreach converts WAY better than automated messages• Target high AOV Shopify stores (100$+)• Offer no upfront cost, take % of recovered salesWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND CHRIS ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/mhp_guyInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekoerneroffice/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thekoerneroffice/videos0:00 Intro02:16 Startup Idea 1: Content Management for underserved platforms 10:24 Startup Idea 2:  Programmatic SEO Franchise19:21 Startup Idea 3:  Viral-Content Finder27:15 Startup Idea 4:  "Lifetime Warranty" DTC Brand 30:46 Startup Idea 5:  Shopify Abandoned Cart Call Center 35:09 Most Valuable Platform for Personal Brand Discussion 39:42 Greg’s Elon Story

Like, what's the scale of a big lead gen business? They can easily get to be multiple eight figures in revenue, especially if they're in a profitable niche. So I think the thesis that Facebook is only for people over 65, which is basically in our world, we're kind of like, that's what Facebook is, isn't necessarily true. The long and short of it is, if you have a Shopify store, there's a zillion shopify apps, third party. tools that will help you increase your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout rate. Automated SMS, emails, Shopify has their own native solution to this. But the best converting fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart, there are two different things, is to get a person on the phone.

This is a gift that you're giving people that this exists, that there's, this is like an arbitrage opportunity. There's also an agency idea here. where I think the tagline could be something like, and we are live, Chris Kerner, you're on the pod, thank God, thank God, because you are an idea machine. You own eight RV parks,

you own seven companies, and you're constantly sharing ideas with the world. I needed to have you on the Startup Ideas podcast, and you said yes. Absolutely. I needed to be here. This is where I get my energy. This is like my caffeine.

This is your people. You're going to get a lot of comments on YouTube and stuff like that. People are going to be like, I, Chris Guy. Yeah, he's one of us. Yes. I hope so. I hope so. Yeah.

All right. So you have a list of ideas. Let's start from the top. And let's give it to the people. Give them some actionable, tactical ideas. Each one of these ideas are better than the next. So let's get right into it. Okay.

So you might need to build on this first one because it's, it's 40% baked. So I just started posting Instagram Reels for the first time in my life a few months ago. It's a whole new world to me. And, you know, in the Instagram settings, you can check the little toggle button that says crosspost to Facebook. I'm like, yeah, what the heck? So I started a Facebook page, zero followers, cross posted. And then one day I log in there and it's like, wow, some of these videos are really getting a lot of views. And so as an afterthought, I commented on my.

own thing and I shilled all my links to all my things and people started clicking. I used tracking links. So then I had a video start going viral and it was getting like 100,000 views an hour or so. And I was like, oh, let me do that again. Let me put my links in there. Because in Instagram, key differentiator, there are no clickable links in the comments. On Facebook, there are. And so I put in all my links and then literally within seconds, I refreshed my, uh, but a tiny URL. And I was getting dozens of clicks, like a minute. And then like hundreds of clicks every couple minutes.

And people were subscribing to my newsletter and subscribed my YouTube and podcast. And it was a site to behold. And it was just this unlock where it's like, wow. It's almost like we've moved on from Facebook. Right. Like it's all about Instagram ads. We're all on Instagram crushes. And it's great.

But Facebook's over here like, hey, we've got 2.5 billion monthly. active users, like, we're still here, we're still doing fine. And so that's the backdrop. And I just think that a lot of creators, if not the vast majority of creators, are ignoring Facebook reels. And they're not taking advantage of that valuable real estate, the top comet, the top pin comet. And so I think there's a world where you could build a tool to automate that, a simple tool. Maybe it's a Chrome extension or something, five bucks a month, where any creator, as soon as they cross post that automatically pins a top comment on their Instagram. Or you could build an agency like tool where you play middleman between creators that don't really care to pin anything in

their top comment and creators that do. Like, hey, you're in the makeup niche. Hey, I sell a makeup product. We'll give you a 20% affiliate income. Just automatically pin these links in the top comment. What do you think? So first of all, I was going to put this out there. I need to get this off my chest for a long time. I still log into Facebook, like probably once a week. I'm just putting it out there. You know, yes, I'm a 35-year-old male. And yes, I do log into Facebook from time to time. And that's because sometimes their emails bring me back. Sometimes their memory emails bring me back. I'm very like nostalgic person. So I'm always like, oh, what was I doing on this day, eight years, 11 years ago.

The birthdays, sometimes I'll be like, I think it's my friend Jeremy's birthday that I went to high school with, but it could be tomorrow. So let me go check Facebook. I think there's a lot of millennials who are actually on quote-unquote Facebook, like count as weekly active users

or monthly active users, that if you ask them, hey, are you on Facebook? they probably say no. It's kind of like how, how when you ask, you know, when you look at the polls, people just say they don't vote for Trump, but secretly they vote for Trump. Yeah. That's, that's where we're at with Facebook. Jim Gaffigan had a stand-up bit about McDonald's. He's like, everyone's like, oh, McDonald's. I don't need McDonald's. Like, look at their sales. Like, you guys just don't admit it. Everyone's eating McDonald's. It's delicious. It's like,

who's eating it, right? Like, there's someone eating it. Yeah. So that's what we're out with Facebook. So I think the thesis that Facebook is only for people over 65, which is basically in our world, we're kind of like, that's what Facebook is, isn't necessarily true. Don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses.

They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into a one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast. But the main thing is, most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a chance. cheat. The idea bank is your startup shortcut.

Just click below to get access. Your next cash-loving business is waiting for you. Yes, it is for older people. It does skew older, but it's not necessarily just for old people. There are some random WAUs like me, weekly active users. This is a gift that you're giving people, that this exists, that there's, this is like an arbitrage opportunity. I do think that there's obviously this is a growth idea.

So anyone who's building anything could go and now start posting cross-promoting. So thank you for sharing that. There's also an agency idea here where I think the tagline could be something like, we go where you don't have time to go. And it's basically there's a bunch of social networks. There's a bunch of places where you know you probably should be there, but you don't have the time because you really, if you're building an audience,

you want to focus on one platform or two at most. So for example, Cora, like everyone knows that, you know, answering questions on Cora is really great for SEO and drives traffic. But no one has, who does that? Do you know anyone who does that? I did that in 2014. And it went great.

I got millions of views, but it's, you know, it's been 10 years. So no, I don't. Yeah, neither do I. You know, neither do I. But like, I go on to Google sometimes and Cora comes up and I'm like, that was a great answer. And just like Facebook, Cora's over here like, hey, we're still here. We're actually doing fine.

In fact, people are forgetting about us and you shouldn't. Totally. So I think there's an agency like that you can build here, small to medium sized business, businesses you approach and you say like, we'll do it for you. there's also focusing it just on creators. So you're like, hey, for $500 a month, I'll go do this for you. You don't have time to do it. You're not thinking about it.

I'll do it for you. Or threads. I mean, if someone were to cold email me right now and say, hey, a few hundred bucks a month, I'm just going to copy and paste all of your long form tweets, starting with the ones that did the best, the threads. Because from what I've researched, there's no API that allows for that right now. And shoot, you roll in Quora while you're at it. Just repurpose all the best performing long-form tweets as Quora questions and not answers.

Totally. We can call that threadheads.com. I love it. It is interesting because with all the opportunities that API and Zapier creates, type and like air table and all that, for the platforms that don't allow for those things, there's still an opportunity to just have someone overseas do it affordably. you still make a really good margin with it

because you're literally copying and pasting. Yep. Cool. Anything else before we hop on to the next one? No, no, I think that's it. All right, what's Numero dose? All right, number two, programmatic SEO. Been around for a little while.

I feel like it's making a comeback. There's a startup that just got funded. Have you heard of them? I can't remember their name. but they're basically, you know, one-click programmatic SEO implementation using AI. Very, very expensive, by the way. Like, I want to say it's like $5,000 a month, maybe up front and $1,000 a month. I'm over here thinking, like, man, you're using AI.

Why are you charging so much? This is what I would pay a human to do it. Anyway, we started a programmatic SEO agency, or not agency, a project, and we just did it all ourselves. And I won't tell you the niche because I don't want people to copy me, but we didn't do anything special in that we just went to Google keyword tool and said, what's a home service that everyone's searching for that no one's bidding on? And there's hundreds.

And we could talk about that all day. So we picked one that we were familiar with. We went to Webflow. We used this tool called Tag Parrot, Whale, Sink, and then Blever table, tied it all together, It auto indexes. Wait, I got to explain what those tools do for people who don't know what that is. So WhaleSync, I believe, it auto indexes all of your pages.

And tag parrot will, I could be getting this wrong, but it will give you keywords in your niches. And so basically, Zapier enables us to connect all these things. and start pushing out content to thousands of websites. So we went to the five most search keywords in our niche that have low competition, and we built 1,100 landing pages for each one of them, 100 for the top 100 Canadian cities by population and 1,000 of the top. American cities by population, because Canada is about 10% as big as American. That left us with 5,500 landing pages, and we started getting clicks,

loss of clicks and leads, like actual leads worth hundreds of dollars. And this just kind of unlocked something for me. So we didn't invent programmatic SEO. It's been around for a while. But the idea of a programmatic SEO agency that acts more of an alternative to a franchise. So if I'm, you know, 30 to 50 something working in 95, wanting to break out into entrepreneurship, I'm looking at pressure washing franchises and poop scooping franchise and what have you, framing this as an alternative to a franchise of like, hey, we found this whole.

service, maybe it's gutter cleaning, that very few people are bidding on and a lot of people are searching for, we will charge you $10,000 and deliver this business to you, quote, business, like with a bow on it. You still have to manage it. You still have to respond to leads. It's yours after that. And then we'll charge like a nominal fee per month to maintain things for you and fix them as they break versus just starting a programmatic SEO agency. And it's like, five grand to make a programmatic website. Like it's just the framing of it is a little different. That's interesting.

So basically what you're saying is, let's just say painting, like house painting. So I'll use programmatic SEO to generate, you know, a ton of demand in house painting in Miami Beach. And I built the landing pages and suite of landing pages. It's generate, you know, I've built the SEO juice. It's working. I just need someone to fulfill the service at a high quality. And I'm willing to basically partner with someone to, and then basically split the revenue

with them. So basically focusing on cash-flowing businesses, I would imagine, local businesses, because SEO is especially good for local. And is that what you're saying? So I didn't even give enough detail. That's one thing you could do. You could use this as a platform to launch a brand new painting business, like an actual business where you're doing the painting in Miami.

And you hit all the neighborhoods. You get all the zip codes in the areas and you start generating leads that way. Or you could sell this as a franchise that's like a lead gen franchise. Where it's like we're going to put, you know, house painting in city name in 10,000 different American cities. You're going to get leads. And then you're going to sell those leads to house painters. in those local areas. So basically it's like a lead generation franchise.

Do you know much about lead gen businesses? I feel like they're not really talked too much about in like tech Twitter, Silicon Valley. Yeah, I love it. I love lead generation businesses. Who's doing, like who can we study that does lead generation really well? And like what's the scale of a big lead gen business? Who can we study? I'm not sure on that.

But they can easily get to be multiple eight figures in revenue, especially if they're in a profitable niche. For instance, there's a nationwide dumpster rental company. And unless you know what you're looking for, you would never know that they don't actually have a presence in all these cities because they have Google My Business profiles. They have reviews on all these profiles. They have all the city names. But there is no physical location. They're just selling these leads to local dumpster rental companies. But the hard part of the lead generation business is finding a centralized buyer for all the leads.

Otherwise, you're having to wrangle up 500 different house painters and begging them to say, hey, my leads are better than Thumbtack or Angie's List. And so I think the key here is to pick an industry that's fairly consolidated that has big players, maybe their franchises, maybe it's just a big national chain where you can talk to one person who has locations in hundreds of cities and say, hey, I'm going to give you the first hundred leads for free. You're going to love them. After that, I'm going to charge you 40 bucks every time we send a lead your way. It's just one point of contact. I was driving with a buddy of mine. He's a big real estate agent. And we get to a red light

and we see these signs that say we buy houses for cash and then a phone number. So it was like a bit of a lull in the conversation. So I just like brought it up. up, you know, making small talk. I'm like, I wonder who actually sells their house by calling these phone numbers. It's also like a really nice area. It just, it didn't really make that much sense to me. If you're going to sell your house, your house is, you know, the average house in Miami Beach is at least a million dollars, let's say, are you really going to call this random phone number? And then he goes, oh, you don't understand. This is actually a lead gen business. So they have these signs all over North America. And then they call these people, they get insight to people who are

kind of on the fence if they want to sell their house. They're just basically fishing to see like, what is their house worth? So, and there's so many people that are just curious that, you know, oh, if it's, if you can sell your house for $1.2 million today, yeah, maybe you would. But if it's only worth $800,000, maybe not. And then they sell those leads. I don't know who they sell it to. Are they selling it to other real estate brokers? Are they selling it to private equity who want to, you know, Blackstone, who want to buy them? I don't know. But it was just interesting to see how, you know, this one funnel that isn't digital at all is probably crushing it.

Yeah. So I love those signs. They're all over Texas. And they work. They're mostly selling them to wholesalers. or they're using them themselves as a wholesaler. Are you familiar with real estate wholesaling? No.

So basically, you put up a bandit sign. You get a phone call and say, hey, I just got divorced. I really need to sell my house. And you go look at it in person and you say, okay, well, you know, I can only pay $300,000. We're like, well, Zillow says this worth for it. Yeah, but I can pay cash in closing 30 days. Okay, I'll sell it for $300,000. You get it under contract.

Maybe you put in $500 earnest money. And then you take the contract and you go sell it. to the end flipper or investor for $20,000 to $30,000. And so this is a whole subgenre that's taught in, you know, hotel seminars all over the country where, you know, how to how to make millions in real estate without putting any money in. It's wholesaling. And it's really kind of scuzzy. There's a lot of shady stuff that happens, but a lot of it originates with those bandit signs

at intersections. Idea number three, what do you got for us? All right. So AI Tool 2. automatically repurpose viral content in your niche across platforms. So one thing that's surprising to me is that something that's going viral over here, let's say TikTok, people on Twitter or Instagram have no clue about. For instance, I post about entrepreneurship. And so back in October, I saw an article. And it was on like some random CBS affiliate site on CBS 13, DallasForworth.com

or something. And it was about a high school here in Dallas, Fort Worth, that is opening only for entrepreneurs. And the whole downstairs was dedicated to entrepreneurship. The upstairs was dedicated as a high school. And I put it in like my content bank, like things to tweet about one day back in October. And then a couple months ago, I was like, oh, yeah, let's get around to this. And I just tweeted about it offhand. And it went massively viral. And then I posted about it on Instagram, and it went massively viral. But it was nothing new. And I don't even think it was viral on the CBS website.

It just resonated with people. And there have been other times where I've seen something that went viral. And then I repurposed it and just kind of talked about it. And it goes viral over there. And so, you know, six months ago, this is all a very manual process. But today, I feel like there's a prompt you could do that says, hey, here's all my keywords, put it into Claude or, or, or, you know, Open AI or something. Here's all my keywords is what I'm looking for. These are the metrics that I would like to see, maybe number of comments, number of shares. I want you to fill my inbox every

morning and tell me like, how viral is it or how much engagement is it getting and what platform is it on today? And then I want you to go ahead and repurpose it for me on my platform of choice. And it's just a numbers game. There's only one thing that's missing from this idea that. I would love, which is give me a prediction of how many impressions, likes, follows I'm going to get from posting this. And I know that's not going to be perfect and sometimes it's going to be wrong. But I think that one killer feature around tell me how many impressions, start with one platform. How many impressions will I get on Twitter? That itself is so, so, so valuable. And I think you're absolutely right. There's, there isn't really, um, a lot of data on, on the life cycle of content

and news stories. And I know I would be willing to pay for a service that serve that up to me on a silver platter. I care less about scheduling it and automating it to be, to be honest, because there's, there's tons of platforms that do that. But I think that there's a huge opportunity around, definitely an eight-figure opportunity around exactly the trending nature of stories and content. Have you found any good AI tools that will, like an LLM that will enable you to upload all your tweets and say, like, write 10 more tweets in my voice based on, like, here are my tweets, here's all the engagements I got on these. based on what you see goes viral for me, write me five tweets in my voice that is likely to go viral. Have you seen anything like that? I created a Greg GPT, like a custom GPT. I uploaded all my newsletters that I've written for years, all my tweets. I exported all my tweets. I trained it on that. And it's not there. Like I don't get, I'll say, I'll give it, hey, I want to write a tweet. Here's my outline.

you know, write it in a listical format like I normally write it. And it's just, maybe it's just I, I just hate anything that isn't me personally. Because it's my voice. But so maybe it's me. But I actually think that, I don't know, man, it's just not there yet. It's not there yet. I agree. Yeah.

Have you tried Delphi, have you heard of that? that's basically D-E-L-P-H-I. It's like create a clone of yourself. Oh, Delphi, yeah. I tried that with the same thing and uploaded YouTube videos and I just I wasn't happy with it.

Like I'm sure you are too. I'm very picky about what I don't have any ghost writers or anything. So I would love for it to say like, hey, you wrote about these eight really interesting business ideas? Here's 80 more that are just as interesting, right about these.

And I'm not even getting that. friend of the pot, I won't say who he started a billion dollar business, sent me a text yesterday. Hey brother, do you do your own writing or do you work with a writer? And I wrote 100% myself. And he's like, you have no idea how much I was hoping you say working with a writer or working with AI. We're going to say this and people listening are going to be like, oh, I wish they were just going to say the one, here's one tool I used. There isn't one tool you can use. You can definitely use AI.

You can definitely use chat GPT or clode, as I say. Clode to train a little bit and be like right in this style. It's not going to get you ready to post material. But it might get you, it's not going to get you from point A to Z, but it might get you from point A to B. That's the state of where we are with AI writing and AI content. It could get you from a point A to B, which is great. It moves you forward and that's awesome.

One thing, I'll give a tip for content creation and using some of these AI tools. What you can do is you can give in an outline of here's the tweet I want to write, and this is the style I wanted to be in. ask me questions if you don't know how to do this or you're missing any information and then it becomes your writing assistant. So you've now turned

you've now turned chatGBT into a writing assistant and you're going back and forth and then the chances that it gets from point A to B is instead of 30%, it's like 70%. Yeah, it's like tell. me what to ask you. Yeah. What's my problem? You just, you'd be honest. You'd be vulnerable with it. And you're like,

listen, I know you might not know me. I know we're just getting to know each other. Like, make it fun. Have fun with chat GPT a little bit. Yeah. I like it. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI. I could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com. And that's why I use boringmarketing.com. And that's why

I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. All right. Next idea. Number four, let's let's let's, I like this idea. Tell me more about it. Okay. So shady raise is a $130 million. Um, sunglasses brand and their entire business is built on their lifetime warranty. And so forget like Patagonian what all the other brands do, because that's a different expensive product. Shady Ray said, we know that you're going to break or lose your sunglasses. Don't worry about it. We will replace them. No questions asked. So it's not like, you know, you have to return them if they're broken. It's if you lose them, we will replace them. And then they work like a

restocking fee into it to where they break even on all the replacements. They work the numbers into it where they're like, all right, you know, most people replace their glasses 0.7 times over their lifetime. So, and then they, the lifetime warranty allows them to charge a lot more than a competitor and they crush it. So I just love the idea of copy pasting this exact value proposition in any other industries, such as sandals, like flip flops, lifetime sandals. Same thing, right? You can go to Ali Express and buy nice looking flip flops for three to four dollars.

Shipping is 50 cents. to a dollar, sell them for $50 to $70. You have amazing gross margins. You charge $5. Every time someone needs to replace them, the $5 covers the $3 in shipping and the $2 sandals, and you're great. So it's just all, it's a whole business built around a lifetime warranty value prop in an industry where it doesn't exist today.

Okay, so this is the first time I've heard of Shady Ray's. Did you know that they have this VIP program? I don't think so. So the way the stocking fee works is the restocking fee is if you lose your glasses, if you're a part of the VIP program, it's like $15 to restock. But if you're not a part of the VIP program, it's like $20, let's say. Brilliant. And to join the VI. And you get, you know, what do you get by being a VIP is you get like 5% extra discount, priority order, early access to sales.

dedicated customer support. Now, it would be really smart if they charge for this VIP program. I don't know if they charge for it. Yeah, I was going to say, what does it cost? They should. They should. I don't know.

It doesn't say. It just says, it just says, are you in? So I'm not in. I'm just going to go ahead and... So I guess you just have to have made two purchases within 12 months. Wow.

Okay, so that could be optimized. That could be optimized. I think if I'm them, I'm creating a $5 to $10 a month. Call it even $4 a month, something no-brainer. And the whole goal is to get you to buy more things. So I love it.

I love your idea. I think there's probably a hundred other niches you can go and apply this to. Yeah, this is brilliant. Shady raised was like, all right, you know, we've got 60% net margins. Like, well, I'd really like to have my cake and eat it too. Like, how do we get more loyalty out of this? Maybe a little more recurring revenue and they just launched this. It's bold, but I love it. Love it. Do you the next one? Yeah, this is your last one. This is your last idea. So, oh, geez. Should I go for the Shopify or the

Etsy one? Go with the Shopify one. Okay. You pass the test because that's the one I wanted to go for. So this business is proven. People aren't doing it, but it's proven. I know it's proven because I've done it. I launched it when I owned a 3PL, a third-party logistics business as a side project. It worked. It was great.

But we abandoned it because opportunity costs, we found something better. So the long and short of it is, if you have a Shopify store, there's a zillion shop of apps, third-party tools that will help you increase your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout rate automated SMS emails you know shopify has their own native solution to this but the best converting um fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart there are two different things is to get a person on the phone right to get them on the phone um we could talk about using AI for this there's tools that have you know AI voice cloning we won't talk about all that we're talking about a literal call center of preferably like stay at home

moms, like a demographic that matches the customer that just says, hey, you know, you had this makeup in your car, but you didn't check out, can I give you a 30% off discount? Like, what, what, did you have any questions? And a lot of times they're like, yeah, I just didn't understand, like, is shipping three days or 10? It wasn't clear. So A, you get this amazing feedback that's hard to quantify. B, you get, you know, your conversion rate. If it goes from two to two and a half percent, your sales increased by 25 percent. It's amazing. And so we tested this with our own brand and it worked. But what wasn't great about it was that our AOV, our average order value was like 60 bucks. And it was kind of a tight profit business. And so it financially didn't make sense. But

there's a lot of products out there that have an AOV of 100 plus or that have 80% gross margins where your your cost, your labor cost to make these calls is like, you know, single digit dollars. Call it three to six dollars. And it can really, really make a big difference on your conversion rate and on getting feedback. So the business here is to just be an agency. Use built with.

Extract all this Shopify plus stores and say, hey, I know you're not doing this because no one's doing this, but I know this works. Here's a no-brainer offer. we won't charge you anything. We're just going to take 20% of everything that we convert. If we don't convert it, we won't charge anything. And we'll give you all the feedback we get about your store for free. Okay.

And say someone wants to start this business, how do they get to the Shopify emergence? Someone might be listening to this and be like, yeah, cool. I like that there's a no-brainer offer. I love the ICP. I love that it's going to bring in monthly cash flow. But I just don't know how I would get to you hundreds. if not thousands of merchants. So you go to builtwith.com

and it's $450, which I'm too cheap. So I go to Upwork and I post a job that just says, hey, I need someone with a built with account. I'll give you $20. Just run a quick export for me. I've done this before. There are people that have Upwork accounts that have built with accounts and $20 and you can have

all 3 million Shopify stores contact info in your inbox. And then from there, just use your imagination. You can cold column, cold email, cold text them. And I would start, like I would name it something broad, but my branding on my website would be in a very specific niche like apparel or makeup, something high margin and or high ticket. And in my pitch, it's like, we only do this for makeup shop five plus brands. That's it.

Then you build some good MRR with that. You make a name for yourself. And then as you start to exhaust that niche, you broaden out and offer it to anyone else. My man, drop them gold. Appreciate you. Coming on, where could people get to know you a little bit better on the internet? Yeah, the Kerner Office, podcast, YouTube channel. Spelled like my last name.

Beautiful. You got a last question for me? What's on your mind? I want to know what platform are you most excited about growing your personal brand on today? What are you most bullish on? And why? I mean, it's really just this podcast YouTube thing. You know, the startup ideas podcast, Spotify, Apple, YouTube.

And why? Just because it's the, it really does build affinity with people. and if they listen to every week, that affinity compounds. And it's cool. It's really cool. Like, especially the audience that I'm attracting right now, which is a lot of people building indie hackers, people who, you know, are at their desk job,

but at Google or something, but daydreaming about building a startup zero to one. Like we talked about the beginning. These are your people. These are my people. and I feel lucky I get to, this is my job. Like, I don't do this full time, right? I just get to come on here a couple hours a week and jam ideas.

And someone told me this morning, yeah, I love the startup ideas podcast. It's like junk food for my entrepreneurial brain. I know how I feel about that, junk food, but I get it. I get it, right? Yeah. There's ideas people and there's not ideas people. and there's this, people say like, whoa, oh, ideas are nothing. Execution is everything.

But that's not how we talk about ideas. Like when we talk about ideas, we're talking about, okay, here's this Shopify abandoned card idea, but here's actually how you'd go and start it. And here's the idea of, like, the sub ideas on how to do it. And so I don't know where this podcast goes, and I don't know where this YouTube goes, but I'm getting energy from it, that's for sure. Yeah. Okay.

Last question. Along the same vein, if you take a YouTube subscribe, a loyal YouTube subscriber, a loyal podcast listener, and then a loyal newsletter subscriber, three things, in my opinion, like the three best type of followers or subscribers. And someone comes to you and says, hey, wave a magic wand, and you can buy as many as you want of all three, what do you offer to pay them for each one? Right. So three bucks for newsletter, two bucks for YouTube, one dollar for podcast. You know what I'm saying? Where do you rank? Because I could say like, which is the most valuable? But that doesn't tell

me what the waiting is for each. It's a trick question because I know a lot of, I'm not going to name them, but I know a lot of other podcast like B2B creator type people who have tons of subscribers. but it's low quality views and low quality comments and just low quality. Let's say we know they're high quality and they're not just a subscriber, but they're watching or listening or reading every week. I think that YouTube is the most valuable because they're listening to you, they're watching you, and they see you. So I don't know, a YouTube subscriber, if it's high quality,

$7. I would say close second is probably Spotify and Apple like audio listeners maybe $6 and then newsletter subscribers

quite low like a dollar or less. Interesting. I wonder if you're going to get a bunch of spam emails after this thing. Hey, I'll buy you all the YouTube followers you want. Oh, no. $7?

Here's $100,000. No, and that's like, I'm not trying to grow my YouTube to five million subscribers. I'm not trying to grow my podcast of 20 million, you know, followers, stuff like that. I'm, I want to grow slow and steady. And I want people every week. There's more and more people. And it just feels like this groundswell. And it's just, and I don't need to be Lex Friedman.

I don't want to be that big. I just want this group of people who are interested in building stuff. And I do think that audio and video is the best. I will say this past weekend something cool happened to me. I'm drinking my coffee. And actually, I drank a few coffees and that got me to tweet a lot. Usually you can tell that I have a lot of coffee is when I'm tweeting a lot. That's how I get it out.

And I tweet something. And then all of a sudden, I see my notifications blowing up. Who replies to me? Elon Musk. Oh, that's my bucket list. Dang it. Could you believe that? Oh, what did he say? What was the context? So, okay, I'll pull it up. Oh, I've been dreaming. I tweeted out Tesla yesterday. It went massively viral. Nothing from Elon. It's like he doesn't even know who I am. I'm sorry about that. That must suck. You know, that must suck. So here's what went down. So I go, the current state of the X algorithm is your tweet will literally never be seen by a soul, or you go ballistic with one to 100 million impressions and nothing in between.

So then he goes, I agree, we need to fix this. So then I go, I want to help. First of all, context. It's 114, it was like 1113 or something or whatever. I got that, you know, it was like 11 something when I got that, when I saw it. And I was on my way to go work out with a friend. And I wouldn't be late. So I was like, oh my God, Elon Musk just tweeted at me.

And I don't have Twitter on my phone because it's smart. Yeah. Right? Because I'm a, yeah, I'm not going to put a Twitter on my phone. Of course not. You know why. So I'm like, I'll download Twitter. I download Twitter.

I responded. I just responded quickly. And yeah, I was like, I want to help. I advise some of the biggest social apps before, like, TikTok and Reddit, DMs open. So then I'm like doing dumbbells, just like checking Twitter. My DMs, I'm like, is Elon writing? Is Elon writing?

Is Elon writing? Because I don't have notifications again because I'm a sane person. Yeah. Okay. And then one more quick thing happen. that Elon said. So then he said, because Robert Scoboble,

this other guy was like, oh no, here's what he said. Hold on. Elon Musk writes, I saw his post because a friend sent it to me. Forwarding links is taken as a signal, but should be a far stronger signal.

So first of all, the fact that someone forwarded my tweet to him is insane. Yeah. And then then the fact that he later tweeted out that he's changing the Twitter algorithm to focus more on small accounts, and he acknowledged it. So like, did I just change social media? I hope not. I'm not a smaller account. I don't want to be deeper. I was like, I've got almost 400,000 followers.

Did I just read it for myself? That's amazing. You're totally true. Like, things are doing nothing or going crazy viral. But I think it's a net positive. Yeah. And that's the story of how I met Elon Musk, and he never DM'd me. There's still time. I'm jealous.

All right, Chris. This has been fun. I'll catch you later. All right. Thanks, Craig.