The Startup Ideas Podcast - 6 Scalable Startup Ideas (You Can Start Tomorrow)

Episode Date: January 12, 2026

In this episode, I sat down with Chris Koerner and we go through a set of approachable startup ideas that start low-friction but can scale if you get distribution right. We start with a potential “app ecosystem” opportunity around Facebook Marketplace, plus a product-studio framework that combines short-form video, AI, and 3D printing to validate “dumb” products via demand before you invest. We then jump to more grounded, local-first ideas—bike washing/maintenance subscriptions, bar anti-spike stickers, and even vending-machine concepts like “shiny rock” drops at trailheads. We close with a weird Pokémon-card “meme + supply control” play inspired by the Kabuto King, including Chris’s own collecting “big reveal.” From there, I dig into why PSA-style grading feels slow and expensive, and we workshop a more modern grading experience (including a livestream/packaging angle and an AI-from-photo approach). Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 02:28 – Startup Idea 1: Facebook Marketplace App Studio 07:43 – Startup Idea 2: DTC Product Studio 17:05 – Startup Idea 3: Bike Washing/Maintenance Subscription 24:29 – Startup Idea 4: Anti-Drink-Spike Stickers 31:55 – Startup Idea 5: Shiny Rock Vending Machines 36:37 – Startup Idea 6: The Kabuto King and Card Grading Key Points I look for “alpha” where people are already obsessing, but the market structure is still primitive (like collectibles + grading). I treat “distribution” as the multiplier—short-form can make “dumb” products viable if the content loop is strong. I push for starting manually first (prove demand), then upgrading into infrastructure, subscriptions, and scale. I pay attention to marketplaces with huge usage but weak third-party tooling—there’s often a platform-layer opportunity there. I keep coming back to “repackaging” as a business model: same underlying thing, new wrapper, new buyer, new channel. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ The Vibe Marketer - Resources for people into vibe marketing/marketing with AI: https://www.thevibemarketer.com/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND CHRIS ON SOCIAL: X/Twitter: https://x.com/mhp_guy Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thekoerneroffice/ Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@thekoerneroffice

You're a side hustle away from changing your life. In this episode, I brought on Chris Kerner, who gave me his best ideas for side hustles that not only don't take a lot of money to start, but they can actually scale to be really big businesses. A side hustle could turn into a real company, and a real company can change your life. So in this episode, it's all about ideas that could generate cash flow, that can turn into real businesses anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars a year to 50 million dollar year businesses enjoy the episode welcoming my brother from another mother chris kurner

on the show startup ideas podcast he's back i think for the third time chris by the end of this episode what are people going to learn they are going to learn that they should not stay seated in their seat they need to this episode is successful if they hit pause and go out and do something And then come back days later and finish it. And will you give people like specific ideas and sauce to get them out of their seats? Greg, my name is Christopher Soss, Kner. Like, that's the whole brand. What are we talking about here?

Of course. Okay. So as long as you could commit to the sauce and that, I mean, people do need to move their own legs. But at least, right? Yeah. But you're going to get them pretty close. This will be saucy. There's going to be like four linguine noodles in there.

and it's just going to be drowning in Arabiata sauce. Okay. And before we get in, what type of categories of ideas are we talking about? So we're going to go approachable, low startup cost, low friction to start, affordable. But like, in my opinion, everything is scalable, right? So the question, I just hate it when people say, like, is that even scalable? Like, yes, it's scalable. The right question is, how hard would it be to?

to scale to that to whatever number. Because for some, $100,000 a year is scale to some $100 million, right? So these are all scalable. So these are ideas that can be anywhere from $10,000 a month all the way up to... Shoot, I mean, $8 figures a year, $10 million a year in revenue with double-digit profit margins. Okay. You have my attention. Okay.

I'm going to read some stats to you. You ready? Yeah. Facebook Marketplace. We talked about Facebook last year on maybe the last time I was on this. Facebook Marketplace. Facebook has over 3 billion monthly active users. 16% of those are monthly active users for Facebook Marketplace. Half a billion people use Facebook Marketplace. 16% of active users log into Facebook for the sole purpose of shopping on Facebook Marketplace. And Facebook knew what they were doing. They saw that the wall wasn't.

very popular anymore. So they started adding groups and market like they know what they're doing. They're smart, right? That's why we invest in Mark Zuckerberg. 51% of all recent social media purchases, so like not Amazon, social media purposes, all happened on Facebook Marketplace. Okay. Like my point, Facebook Marketplace is massive. It's huge. There are countless people that solely rely on Facebook Marketplace for their living. And I've got a bunch of ideas around this. A lot of them like, kind of like hands-on dirty sweaty but the first one is why is like no one building third-party apps for facebook marketplace apps that like scan items for you apps that like give you price alerts

apps where you can like use the API in a compliant way to scrape and to find alpha and to see oh this dresser over here is listed for this but it's actually worth this on eBay like arbitrage apps I've already looked into it don't tell me the API permissions don't allow for it because they do. People are not building apps on top of Facebook marketplace and I don't know why. That's crazy dude. Half a billion users. I was almost

100% convinced that it just was impossible. Right. Yeah. Like I vibe coded one that like scanned items it would reach out to people like I'm not an expert. I don't even know how to code. I vibe coded it and it worked for my use case. I didn't like scale it. I didn't sell it.

But like it is possible. The API allows for it. People would pay for it. They make their living from Facebook Marketplace. If they could have an edge, they would pay for it. No one's doing it. eBay has thousands of apps built on top of it. Some of those apps got acquired by eBay for hundreds of millions of dollars.

Like, there's something here. There's no third-party apps for Facebook Marketplace? Not really. Like, I found like a couple kind of janky ones, but nothing legitimate. That's crazy.

It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, how big is the Shopify app ecosystem, right? Oh, geez. Billions. I think there's hundreds of thousands of Shopify apps. Oh, what does perplexity say? So I said, how big is Shopify apps?

How much revenue through there? So they've got 12,000 apps powering more than 87% of merchant stores. I'm surprised there's not more. I mean, these apps earn, developers earned a billion dollars through it. driven by an average annual earnings near 100,000 per developer. Interesting. 7,000 developers with a 27% increase in total apps from early 2024 and 2025. Wow.

Pretty crazy. So what are the most popular third party apps that help Facebook marketplace sellers? besides Facebook, right? That's the question. Have you heard of these? Yeah, I mean, offer up, that's like a direct competitor, Mercari. I haven't heard of Deepop. But Deepop is like for secondhand clothes and stuff like that.

Wow, I've actually used it a lot. And it says the audience focus is a young trendsetter, so I must be a young trendsetter. I've always seen you as such. These are competitors to Facebook Marketplace. These aren't tools and apps that could help sellers. Yeah. So this is food for thought.

Thanks for that, Alpha. Dude, I'm telling you, like, I posted a video about appliance rentals on Facebook marketplace. And then a guy went and started doing lead gen. Like, he posted appliances for rent in other markets and sells those leads to locals that are renting out appliances. And he, like, vibecoded his own internal app for posting, for responding automatically. Like, people are doing this, like, in the shop.

right, but not at scale. Which is what we like to hear. We like to hear about that's where the alpha is, right? When people are doing things in the shadows and you can productize it, we like that you can vibe code a lot of these solutions too, use things like Claude Code. This could scale, right? This can scale really big. It doesn't cost you a lot of money to build this.

You probably can build MVP's of this in a couple weeks. Yep. You should be building something. I have too many things that built, Greg. Come on. Well, should we go to the next? Yeah. So my business idea is not this product itself.

I'll elaborate. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. First time founders focus on product. Second time founders focus on distribution. What is this product going on behind me? Day six of genius business ideas. It's literally a round piece of phone. That's it.

You put it around your propeller when you're not driving the boat. So kids don't hit their legs into it. They're selling thousands of these things. because they're going viral because it's so simple because people don't know how it works that's distribution 99 out of 100 people would have never launched this business because they would have thought who's going to buy that it's just a round piece of foam there's nothing proprietary about it sometimes it pays to be a little naive and to understand human psychology you get my favorite human psychology marketing all right so here's what I'm thinking um anything is scalable anything can be

sold with the right distribution in marketing would you agree yes like I could tweet about the dumbest thing at the dumbest price point and maybe sell none of them. And if Elon Musk retweets me, I'll sell some just because of the distribution, right? So we have two magical tools. You could argue two of the most magical tools that the internet has ever seen. And that's the short form video algorithm, right? And AI. So this tool that I showed is objectively dumb, right? I've had a boat. It's a piece of foam. You put around the propeller. propeller. You don't leave it on the propeller as you're driving. You just leave it there when you're out there on the water parked so a kid doesn't swim up against it and like cut their leg, which is like

very unlikely because kids stay away from it. Whatever, it doesn't matter. What matters is that the distribution, right? They sell thousands of these things because of that video that was going on behind me because, you know, nothing goes viral without half of people thinking you're dumb, you're an idiot. So half of people like, this is stupid, this is useless, yada, yada. And the algorithms like, Oh, comments, good. Spread it, spread it, spread it. And the other half of people are like, this is awesome. I could use this. And so it sells, right? So ideas that were once dumb are no longer dumb because of short form video. So why not use Chajibati Cloud, whatever, AI to come up with all kinds of dumb product ideas. And I guess I forgot the third piece of technology, 3D printers,

all types of like seemingly dumb product ideas that match three things. Number one, it can be 3D printed so you can make a prototype easily. Number two, it can be like AI would come up with it. AI has the capacity of thinking of it. And number three, it can spread in like a 10, like a five to 10 second video via short form video. Like how it works, just showing you how it works in a video and coming up with like a product studio. And you don't really invest money in the product development until you have thousands of pre-orders demand. You throw up a Shopify site.

whatever, and you just start selling these dumb little products. What do we think? I like it where my mind goes to, and I'm curious your thoughts on this, is how do you put AI on some of these ideas? And the reason I say that is because, especially on TikTok, but in the world generally, people hate AI. People hate it. Like it's very, very, like, they violently hate AI.

So I think that you can do a lot of these hardware ideas or physical product ideas that are quote unquote dumb, but you implement AI into it. On purpose? On purpose. Okay. Like you create like one AI feature, which is like so. Yeah. You know, dumb. Pointless.

Yeah. Pointless. And then people are like, why do we need AI and everything? Right. Like what if it were that propeller that was like voice enabled? Yeah, exactly. Like what? Yeah.

But to some people, they're like, oh, I could see myself using that. And those are the people that buy your product. And that's the beauty, right? Is that, you know, these platforms have billions of active users. So you just need a small percentage of them to buy. Yes. But is that like malicious? Like is this, is it worth people spending their time on this sort of stuff?

It's a, oh, okay. So I get asked that question a lot. Like, people will approach me with a business idea. Like, Chris, what do you think? What do you think? And one of my first questions back to them is like, what else do you have on your plate? Like, what else are you looking at? And some people are idea machines and the one they're asking me about is one of like 50 that they're kind of throwing

around. And some people are like, this is all I got. Right. And so I'm always very cautious to tell them like, you're pretty biased because this is all you got. The statistical probability that the only idea you have being like the best use of your time and money is almost zero. So keep that in mind. Irrespective of my opinion of the idea. It's probably not the right idea for you because you don't have anything to compare it against, right? So if someone's listening to this and like it all comes down to their background, do they have like a background in product development, do they have a background in short-form video or editing or whatever, this could be the perfect idea for them. But if someone has no experience or background in that or they're not insanely passionate about it or they have 50 other

ideas, then it's a terrible idea for them. Okay. That's fair. That's fair. Yeah. So it's good for some bad for others. Exactly. Yeah. That's why like just this is my soapbox, but like you just share your ideas. And I know you agree with this. We've both talked about this, but don't withhold your ideas because like Greg, you're going to come across something in the wild. Like I remember you had the idea of like having a certification program. You walk by your dentist. You walk by your now dentist and you saw best dentist in Miami. And one of your ideas was like, that needs to be a thing. Like who's going to become the certification program for X, Y, or Z industry, right? Yeah. And you love that idea because you saw it. You own it. You experienced it. You gave that dentist thousands of dollars.

And like maybe you know a guy in college who had like a certification. Like all of these life experiences led you to really loving that idea. Right. And other people heard us talk about it. I'm like, that's stupid. That's dumb. Right. And so when we share our ideas, the only chance of someone stealing.

it is if that other person has had like the exact same life as us. They had the same work history, the same personality. They're also an introvert. Their mom also divorced their dad at age 14. Like these random things that we could never really quantify, they would have to also be true in order for them to maybe also love the idea. And then the qualifier is they have to actually go like get around all the friction to doing something about it.

There's one caveat, which is that that is true on the internet. But when you're talking about, let's say, opening up a coffee shop in your town, and it's a town of 700, and there's already a coffee shop, then there is a defined pie and you're fighting for the pie. But when you're building on the internet and you're doing what we're talking about, which is short form, spending money on meta ads, building organic audiences, writing memes, all this stuff, the pie is infinite. And it's almost like the way, you know, it's really hard to even imagine it. It's just like it's very similar to when you think about how big the world is, like the planet Earth or the universe we live in. It's so big. Like how big is the universe? You know, how far is Mars from here?

How far is, you know, how big is our galaxy? That's like the internet. It's infinite. It's literally infinite. 100%. There's another exception to that. And that's like, which is on the internet. Let's say you're Evan Spiegel, founder of Snapchat.

You're in a bar. You're talking to like a Facebook developer. And you're like, dude, I'm starting this company. I think it's really unique because our messages are going to disappear. And the data is showing is this. Like there's actually, I know it sounds stupid, but that's also a feature, not a bug. And that Facebook developer is like, interesting. Okay.

That's like a, it's on the internet, but it's a limited pie. Right. And like that idea can be stolen partially because they have like kind of the same brain in a way. or like patent patentable ideas you know like there are exceptions to what I'm saying but even with the Facebook example like having you know I've advised some of the biggest social companies on the planet biggest tech companies on the planet someone like Facebook is only copying your idea once it hits millions or hundreds of millions of users they need signals yeah the reality is if you're like the chief product officer of Facebook you have

all the ideas. You know all the ideas. The problem is you're only going to implement the ones that won't get you fired. The ones that have the most validation. I remember being in a meeting with Facebook at one point or someone who worked at Facebook and he was basically like, yeah, I was telling him about an idea that he should do. And he said, we will only do ideas that will generate between $1 billion and $100 billion a year of revenue. know. So, you know, that's cute. That's cute. Yeah, exactly. All right, what's your next idea? That's, that's a really good point. All right, let me pull this bad boy up. All right, I'm going to take a, I'm going to take a left turn here, if you don't mind. It's going to go a little different.

Bigging thing right here. Guys, I'm amped up about this business. I'm a cyclist, and I hate washing my bike. Everyone hates washing their bike. Germany is the world leader when it comes to health and fitness trends and those trends always come out west. Here's exactly how you make a thousand bucks a day doing this. This is a mobile bike wash automated on a trailer. You know how many places you could post this up at? Bike park, bike shops, trailhead, cycling races with thousands of cyclists. All of them need this. And it's a perfect business right now because cycling has exploded in the last few years. E bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes. There are millions of cyclists in the U.S. spending thousands of dollars on their bikes. And these aren't casual riders.

They're people that have five to $15,000 bikes that care about maintenance. But they also don't have time or the desire to wash their own bike. It takes an hour. You need a hose, soap, brushes, degreecers. Most people are in apartments. They don't have a good outdoor space. So what do they do? They just don't wash their bikes.

Or they pay a bike shop way too much money to do it and wait a week to get it back. But if you showed up at the trailhead after their ride with an automated bike wash, $20 for a full wash and drug, forget about it. It takes five minutes. It takes five minutes. Each is $800 in revenue, no inventory. No employees needed to start. You just start with you and to trailer.

Full details here. Look at this freaking thing right here. All right, what do we think? I love this idea. I also think that you could put this product at like just popular bike paths, right? So in Canada, we have a, at our house in Canada, it's on a popular bike path. You can actually for cyclists. you can actually cycle for 130 kilometers on this bike path.

And every maybe 15 kilometers, there's a little station where people could hang out, have a coffee, have a bite to eat. Fix a flat. Yeah, exactly. Fix a flat. So it's just like how do you, and the cities operate that. Like the towns operate it.

So I would do a deal with them and be like, let's split the revenue on this. Like this is, this just makes, bike path just more like a better experience. So you're happy. You're also getting some more revenue. And then you have distribution there. Oh, I love that. You sell a dozen of them to a city and just like charge an ongoing maintenance fee. And instead of trying to make a thousand bucks in a day, you might make 50 bucks a day, but a lot more passively. A lot more passively. Yeah. I like that a lot. Yeah. The other thing that comes to mind is like, but how do you actually go in,

okay, like let's say this is a good idea. How do I actually go and build this? Like how do I manufacture this? Like what are the next steps? I don't think you need to manufacture anything. I think you start with a rented trailer, a $200 pressure washer, and like very manually you cleaning bikes in areas where there are dirty bikes right then and there. And then you go from there.

You save your money and you buy one of these when you can afford it. I don't think you have to start with that. Okay. So you just basically prove it out with like, you just prove it out first. Yeah. And you don't even need to buy it. Like those box trailers are like 10 grand. You don't even need to buy one.

You can rent one from Home Depot or whatever. Have you, are you a cyclist? Have you watched a bike? No, I've never watched a bike. Dude, it's the worst. I'm like, I have a road bike and a mountain bike. And I'm not technically inclined. I'm not a handy guy.

And these things are always breaking the gears. Like, I just wish someone could just like ensure that like my bike was clean and maintained on a regular basis. And I don't ever have to think about it. Because half the time when I go to ride, like something's broke, something's dirty. Like that could be a whole other business on like a bike maintenance plan or whatever. There's a company called VeloFix that does like mobile bike repair. They come to you. That's a pretty big business actually. I think they sell franchise territories, but something like that, but for ongoing maintenance. Or you can have like a bike washing subscription with with this idea. Cool. I mean, I like the idea. I'm not a cyclist.

I don't like the idea of strapping into something and not being able to get out. So that being said, I see tons of cyclists. I see it only getting bigger. And when I'm coming up with a business idea, I'd like to focus on people who have money and disposable income. And to your point in the video,

people are spending $5, $10, $15,000, grand on these things. So, like, of course they want it to look clean, right? So I like this idea because you can focus on bikes. It's scalable. The MVP isn't crazy. And then maybe you can take that knowledge and then bring it to, you know, golf, tennis, other high-end sports and build your empire that way. Yeah.

Why aren't we washing golf clubs outside of the clubhouse? And even golf bags. Like I was with a friend the other day and he was like, yeah, I spent like $650. on my golf bag. I was like, that's how much these things cost. He's like, yeah, I just, like, wanted it to look good. And, like, I get it. But it's like in 10 years or 15 years or five years or three years, it's not, you know, it's probably not going to look that good. Yeah. Well, dude, that gives me an idea. Like, why not like contract with a clubhouse, a golf course and have like some like cheaper Amazon golf bags as loaners and people roll up. Like, these are like the daily

golfers. And you say, hey, well, I'll wash your bag. You go play golf. Just let me swap out your clubs real quick. Take the loaner. By the time they're done with their nine or 18 holes, their bag is spotless. What do we do? Yeah. There you. It's kind of like what we were just talking about with sharing your ideas. Someone's listening to this. That's not a golfer, not a cyclist. And they're like, next, skip, you know. And that's fine. It's not for them. But like, there's a cyclist out there listening to this. Like, oh my gosh, yes, that is true. Like everything he's saying about cycling is true. this is the idea for me. The other thing that's happening now is I've got a friend who has a few car washes.

And he was telling me he's making most of his revenue from subscriptions. I was like, subscriptions. What are you talking about? He's like, yeah, well, because I own this local area, I basically was like, for $40 a month, you can have unlimited car washes. And I was able to, and he's got like a pocket. Instagram account in his local area. So he was able to create a pretty big email list from that.

And then he just like hammered them and like, hey, get on the subscription, get on the subscription. And people are like, yeah, this is dope. Like unlimited car washes is amazing. Turns out they're only still going for like one car wash or two car washes a month, right? So with this with the bike idea, with the cyclist idea, it's like maybe it's a subscription where it's like for 25 bucks a month, you get unlimited washes. Yeah, I like that.

And then you strategically introduce some friction to getting those washes so they don't claim it as much as they might think. But what are you trying to say? You go and like break their legs. No, hey. No, we're just talking here. All right. Do we have time for another idea or two? Yeah, let me go through this real quick.

Do two more ideas? Okay. If you can. Oh, I can. All right. This one's a little off the wall. but it's good. It's very approachable. So before I show this video, I'm going to give you some background. So I was a senior in college. I launched an iPhone repair store, a retail store on the

busy road in Tuscaloosa, Alabama called Phone Restore. And it was not going well. Students, there were 30,000 Alabama students, they didn't know I existed. And one night, it was a Sunday night, I couldn't sleep. We were not, it was just not going well. And I had this idea for whatever reason, to get custom printed wristbands, right? Now, I don't go to bars. I've never even tasted alcohol. But I just know at bars, sometimes they give out wristbands. Are you overage or underage, whatever?

And in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there's a lot of bars. And so I thought, is there a way to get those Tyvec disposable wristbands custom printed with a message on it? I open it up. And there's a, this was 2010. There were a bunch of websites that did this. So I ordered a whole box of them for like two cents a piece. And then I went to the bars and I just said, hey, do you give out wristbands?

Yeah. And this was like at like 3 p.m. Which is like on one hand, it's like don't sell the restaurants, don't sell the bars. And on the other hand, if you catch them at the right time, like they're there. They're not busy and they're there. So I would go and they weren't busy but open. And I just say, hey, you give out risk. Yeah.

Do you want to give out these instead of those? Sure. Yeah. Now we don't have to buy wristbands anymore. Cool. And also I'd throw in like, I'm a student, you know, help out of form. a fellow student. They were most likely a student too. And they just start passing out my wristbands. So these students would go out to the bar. They would get drunk. They would break their iPhone.

They'd wake up with a broken iPhone. What happened last night? They'd see their wristband. And I have a picture of this. You can put it over the video if you want. But it was like 15% off iPhone repair, phone restore, phone number, address, whatever. And that completely changed the trajectory of the business. That one idea laid on a Sunday night, which just, a side note, I just love the fact that with any business, you're one idea away from completely changing the outcome, right? And they say ideas are worthless. Amen, brother. Ideas are everything. They're more important than ever today. Yeah. So that's my backstory that made me see this and think, oh, there's an opportunity here. Because then I went down this rabbit hole. I didn't pursue it much,

but like, I need to have like a wristband advertising agency. I need to go find local businesses. And, and they charge me and I go to bars and I match them up together and I take a cut of in between. That's a business idea. Like that's not really anything new. It's just kind of a new medium for it. Just an ad agency, right? Matching buyers and sellers. So that's an idea. But when I saw this video, I thought of that idea. So that's the backstory. Cool. Yeah, I'm with you. Here. Here's my biggest takeaway from this video. A lot of times we look for complicated or elaborate solutions to simple problems. This woman here is solving a real problem. with a very simple solution. You don't need a chemical or a pill that changes the color of the

drink when something's added to it. You don't need cameras or sensors. Literally a sticker that you put on the drain. The brilliant part about this is it's recurring. You can sell these rolls of stickers to the bars and they'll buy from you and only you every single month. You can sell ad spots on the stickers with a QR code. It sells itself because it's virulable and it promotes safety and it's fear based. It just has all the makings of a good business idea. Full details here. All right. So for those that are only listening, it's just, it's a round sticker. It's just a legitimate sticker that you put over your drink at the bar so it doesn't get spiked. So the idea is to monetize that, to get your own stickers printed that do the same thing and sell them to bars,

sell advertising, do your own ads, whatever. What do we think? What, what, like, what is a role costs, you know, how much are they buying it for? Stickers are like a cent and a half each. Oh, really? Yeah. So you, you can do like a thousand stickers and sell it for how much um oh man let's see i would think like 50 bucks 10 so i mean a thousand stickers will probably cost you if it were sent each that'd be 10 bucks each that's not realistic it might cost you 25 or 30 bucks right so sell for one to 200 bucks a roll but you could sell like a case of five or six rolls you know and set them up on a on a subscription you could get their like name custom printed or whatever. And so I think like the potential downside that

people are thinking about this is like, well, who's stopping like Vista print from just like selling their own, you know, like just taking their round stickers and calling them, you know, anti-spike drink stickers. Well, it's like it's competition, right? No one, like these bar owners aren't going to think to go to Vista print to get this brand new product that didn't exist. They're going to buy it from the guy that conveniently walks in and solves a problem right there on the spot. And you're thinking sell advertising on it too? Yeah, you could. That'd be a bonus, but you don't have to. You just mark them up. It's just, it's an old product in a different way with a different package, which has shown time and time and again, like there's nothing too stupid.

Like you just repackage something, reframe it, how it's used, and you went. Would you sell this door to door? Are you thinking also like meta ads? So meta ads, you know, would probably work because it works for basically anything, but I would scrape every single bar, preferably in a local area, just so you can, preferably in your local area, so you can have a tie to it and send them free samples, like enough to where they could use them for a week or a night. And I feel like it has like this viral effect. Like people are going to post it to their stories and people are going to talk about it. And they're going to be the bar in town. That's like the sales pitch of like, you're the safest bar in town because you're buying this from me. And it costs you

almost nothing. And it's like, it's a liability to not buy this from me. What do you do? How are you still in business not buying these stickers from me? I saw this video from an entrepreneur. Her name's Ty Haney and she had this talk where she said, I think she said, KAC here, Kack is the hack. Hold on. Let me pull it up. She basically, her pitch is basically like how IRL events is what's going to drive customer acquisition in the day of AI. She says, 2026 is going to be all about local, experiential, IRL. And I believe it's the hack. So,

you know, she's selling, like, touching grass as a service is her business, which I think is really interesting. And she, you know, I'm just reading this here. He said, you don't have to pay people to post. People just show up. So what I'd like about your idea is you're not going to have to pay people to post about the bar, right? They're just going to take a picture of their drink and they're going to post it on Instagram.

And they're going to tag the bar. So it's free customers. Yes. And take that a step further. Make the default sticker be your name, your brand, your QR code to your website. That's the default. For a little extra, you can get generic plain ones. For a little more than that, you can get custom branded ones.

I like it. All right. What's your next idea? This is like along the same vein as the bike washing. Okay. We're talking about trails. We're talking about people. getting outside. And I just know that people love a good vending idea. People love it. Everyone loves

it. Who doesn't want a vending machine? So I'm going to share this. Well, I think people like the idea of you buy a thing and it literally vends you passive income. I think that that idea of vending machines, you know, people equate to passive income. They do, which, you know, a lot has been said about passive income. But we'll both agree that some income is more passive than others, but almost nothing is purely passive. All right. Let's go. Frickin thing right here, I'm going to sit here and wait for hours. While you give me a good reason why these things aren't at every trailhead in the world, the rocks cost between five and 20 cents each. You sell them for $2 each. That's a 90% profit margin. Go collect your cash every week or so. Refill it with rocks and your printing money. Full details here.

All right. It's like a shiny, cool rock vending machine by a trailhead or anywhere. It's simple. You can scale it. It's not food. It doesn't expire. It doesn't go bad. Doesn't get bugs. What do you think? It's so funny because like you're you're literally selling rocks for $2 or two euros. But let me tell you, Greg. I've got four kids, nine to 15. And we've talked, you know about Buckees. You know my tie to Buckees. Um, something about the South. I don't know. Kids want rocks in the South. If you go to Buckees, they have this station of shiny rocks. It's just like this little cart. It's like four by two feet. And you got like a fake leather bag and you've got these shiny rocks and kids can scoop them out. And they for like 25 bucks, they can fill this little leather bag full of shiny rocks. And my kids love it. Every kid loves it. Like it's a reason that. So just to back out like Bucky's square footage is like extremely well thought out, right?

That's why one of their biggest complaints is no seating for food. Like they sell, they have multiple restaurants in there, but you can't sit down and eat anywhere. And it's because it's not profitable for them to put in tables, right? So when you consider that, the fact that they have this in all of their stores means it crushes. It does really well. So this isn't really for adult. The video shows an adult doing it. This is for kids.

So anywhere there are kids. I think this would do well. I like this idea. It reminds me of another, like I'll take this idea that relates more to me. So I live in Miami Beach and I see kids picking up seashells all the time. So they come from places like Canada and they're on vacation and there's snow, you know, they're up to their knees and snow. And they bring home seashells.

So not all the kids and not everyone gets the opportunity to go on the beach. You know, why not put a seashell dispenser at the airport or at restaurants. You know, maybe they go to the beach and there's tons of jellyfish or whatever and they can't find any, you know, the right seashells. So the idea is basically seashells in a vending machine. I love that. that's a no-brainer. I love vending machines because it enables like offline A-B testing, right? Take one kind of generic vending machine and you just, every month, you just swap out something

else, swap out the sign, swap out the product, and just see what crushes. Because like in Chris Kerner's world, if I could like wave my magic wand and run this entire world, I would just have random vending machines everywhere. Just so I could learn like what hits where, like what random product in what random location in front of what demographic of person just crushes. Like, I just found that interesting. I like it. I mean, it's not my world.

I'm like more in like this, you know, my equivalent of that is like, you know, single purpose apps like in software. Sure. I do one thing. And then, you know, using organic content or using meta ads to get a particular type of person in, you know, to that experience. Like Facebook marketplace apps. I do one thing.

Greg's like, I mean, that world sounds great for you, but my world has like, you know, no hunger. It's got peace. I don't know. Like, everyone has a decent income and a warm home. I'm just quirky, Chris. I don't judge. I don't judge. Can we do one last idea?

I got one. I got one. So we were just talking, Greg, before you hit record. And you've got some Pokemon cards in your background. And we're similar ages, I'm assuming. and I had Pokemon in middle school, but I've never been into like the breaking stuff, the Logan Paul stuff.

Like I'm not a card guy. I'm not a collectibles guy. But then I came across something on Twitter that, that it just immediately rang true to me. Have you heard of the Cabuto King? I have not. Okay. The Cabudo King is some anonymous dude on Twitter who started buying

every single first edition Cabuto Pokemon card. Cabuto was one of the first set in the late 90s, 152 cards, fossil edition. These cards at the time he started buying were worth about 30 to 50 cents each ungraded. Now granted, like you said, Pokemon has outperformed the market, right, as an asset class. Nobody, no one ever thought to buy like worthless, dumb characters that no one's ever thought about, especially if they're ungraded or not holographic. Like the only special thing about them is their first edition. They're provably old from 1999.

Okay. You tracking? Yeah, I'm tracking. But like, Cabuto is, yeah, it's probably one of the least attractive. It's probably one of the,

like if I am opening a pack and I'm getting a cabuto, it's like I'm having a bad day. Yeah, totally. And that's, that's the meme, right? That's the whole thing,

right? Doge coin. What's cool about Doge? It's a meme, right? So he's turned this lame Pokemon into an awesome Pokemon. He's turned it into a meme. And all he did was just start buying them and tweeting about it. Okay.

And so now the price of a first edition Cabuto ungraded, I think last I checked, is like $10 to $20. So he has influenced the price to go up 100x plus over the course of about three months. And the graded ones are worth many hundreds of dollars. And he's kind of started this movement, this first edition Pokemon movement. And now there's like Eckanz King. And there's like five or six guys that are doing the same thing. And they're just buying up every single card, irrespective of the condition, and just holding forever.

Just expecting them to go up in value. Okay. Okay. I'm with you. So time for my big reveal. You should feel special, Greg, because I've been doing this for months. And I haven't told a soul about what I'm buying. I did post one short form video that I'm kind of.

kind of doing this, but I didn't tell them what I'm buying. So this is the great reveal. Only on your podcast. I have been buying two different cards from 1999, fossil edition. First edition only, non-holographic, ungraded, any condition near mint, heavily played, doesn't matter. And I have about a thousand of them so far. Okay. See this?

That is crazy. It's crazy. And two different. cards. So you can see how many. This is just some of them. Look at this. I haven't even open these ones yet. Okay. Are you buying them from eBay? I am. I'm buying them from eBay and TCG Player.com, which I had never heard of until recently, which is like the place to buy and sell Pokemon cards. So we got Sheldar and we got Craby. So I had a chat with Chat GPD about this before I went all in and I'm like, all right, here's Caboodo King. Here's what he's doing. I want to do this. I want to

do the same thing. What card should I buy? And he's like, you don't want to go for like the cool ones, like snorlax. You want to go for the lame ones, like the lame or the better, pidgy, catarpee, whatever. So for whatever reason, I landed on Sheldar and Craby. And I've purchased over a thousand of these at an average price of like, including shipping, $1.80, I call it two bucks. No, I've spent more than that. I've spent like $3,500. So I think I've bought about seven, 1,700 total for $2 each, give or take. And the price has gone up. And I haven't told, I haven't used my audience.

I haven't told anyone about what I'm buying until right now. Now, what's my plan? Like, I don't know. This is just fun. Like, it's really fun to have a mailbox full every single day. And I thought my kids would get into it. They'd be, oh, dad, let's go open cards. Like, they don't care.

Only I care. I have four kids. They don't care. So my idea is for other people to do this with the other 150 cards. Like the vast majority of these cards have been untouched. They're 20 cents each. You can buy some sellers sell 30 of them. So for a dollar shipping, you can order 30 cards for 20 bucks, right?

And then flip them? Is that the idea? Just hold. Just hold them. And like, if you want to take it a step further, you go Cabuto King's route and you make a meme out of it, make a Twitter account. And you start post and you just sort all of his tweets from day one and you just copy the strategy.

You post pictures. You use the same verbiage and you just do that. And you just sit on these forever. And it's just supply and demand. They're not making any more of these. Pokemon's not going away anytime soon. They're cheap. They're affordable.

And you sit on them. And then the other thing, go ahead. And how important is like the first edition nature of it? That's important because they printed all kinds of runs. So it has to be first edition from 1999. But then there's also some alpha in there. Some cards are misprints, like 2 to 5% of cards are misprints that are worth, like, instead of 20 cents, they're worth 20 bucks.

So you pull those out. And then some cards are like mint condition. And you send them in to get graded for 15 bucks each. And they're worth 100 bucks. So the trick is to kind of cull out the best of the best and the ones that have flaws and get those graded and then you can flip those right away to get all of your money back and then some. But other than that, you just sit on them forever. What do we think?

What do I think of the idea in what context? There's my answer. Thank you. Like from a, that's a fun thing to do. It's a 10 on 10. Like the reason I recently started collecting Pokemon cards, by the way, like I went just for the cool ones. Like there's a snorlax back there.

There's a Charzard back there. You know, I'm not going to flex on everyone, but there's this, there's that, you know? So I basically walked into the store and I was like, I want the old school vintage. I didn't really care if it was first edition. I just wanted to like look back and like see my childhood. That, you know, the card that I couldn't get as a child, seeing it there is worth so much money. and so much value. And it makes me excited to be like walking to my office.

And then as I started like getting into Pokemon recently, there was this Wall Street Journal article that said that Pokemon has outperformed the S&P and is like the best performing asset class. And I was like, whoa, hold on a second. Should I be like selling my Berkshire Hathaway and buying a first edition Charzard? So I'm not surprised that this. like meme, Pokemon, first edition, trend is happening. I think that, I mean, not financial advice,

but I think that in 20 years, 10 years, 15 years, like the first editions are going to be worth more than they are today. Because Pokemon is such a nostalgic thing. I think that this is a great, like this is like a Gary V, go to a garage, you know, store, buy something for $5 and flip it idea. So if that's the thing you're into, then I also think that's a 10 on 10 idea there.

That being said, I'm kind of like, we're in an AI revolution and I'm buying like piggies and crabbies, you know? All right, well, I did promise at the beginning of this, all of my ideas could scale to eight figures, did I not? You did. And then I backtracked it like a sissy. And I said, accept this one. Well, I'm going to backtrack the backtrack.

Okay. I'm going to say this is an eight figure business and here's how you do it. Okay? there's your clip hey clip that editor clip that okay got it um someone needs to hire someone cheap 50 000 a year 40 hours a week to sit online and to buy every single first edition Pokemon card from 1999 regardless of the character all 152 all the lame ones right because we're not doing charzard we're not doing snorlax every single one this is a full-time job you're ordering you're paying you've got your amex and you're unopening

You're opening them and you're categorizing them all. That's going to cost you about, let's see, give or take to buy like the vast majority of everything that's on the market. It's going to cost you $400,000. Okay. But over the next years and decades, you're the guy. Like you own everything. You own the supply.

And if slash win, not investment advice, the price goes 10 to 100 X, you've got an eight-figure business on your hands. Everyone has to go through you. A lot of people out there, Greg, they want the full set. First edition, all 152 cards from 1999. A lot of people want that and they collect that. How are they going to get that? They've got to go through you.

So there's the business. But how do you do that realistically? Not everyone has 400 grand sitting around. So how do you do that? You start by getting them graded, pulling out the best ones, getting immigrated, selling them to fund yourself along the way, right? That's what you do. This could be a business.

But here's the thing that I learned about grading is, and by the way, there's a business idea and like create a new PSA. How big of a business is PSA? Isn't it a racket? Oh, man. Why do they have that monopoly? I don't know. That's the real idea behind the idea is there needs to be a new PSA.

So PSA, from what I understand is, like, I've got a Charmander back there. And beautiful little Charmander. I think it's first edition. It might not be. It might be, but let's just say it's first edition. Actually, let's say it's not first edition. Let's say it's a reprint. And if I want to go and get it graded, which obviously I do, it's going to cost me $40 to $50.

Did you know that? Yeah. $40 to $50. You basically, how it works is you send it. There's like, I can go to my local card shop. They'll do it for me. They'll send it. I have to pay shipping.

There's probably margin that they're making on the shipping there too. And then I wait like three or four weeks. And they like, it's the grand reveal of like, it's a PSA 7. And it's like so arbitrary. There was actually an idea on idea of browser.com that was like a PSA, like an app that basically allowed transparency throughout the process and showed you like where your where your card is in the process. We're putting PSA on the blockchain.

That's what we're doing. Yeah. So if you were trying to compete with PSA, how would you do it? I was thinking about that as you were talking about it. I would, so like any industry, there's going to be an 80-20 rule. There's going to be a handful of players, card shops or buyers that control most of this. you need to get them on board. You need to give them equity in your business, right? Take a minority piece of the business, get all the incentives aligned and say, hey, this is a new PSA. This is BSA. This is better essay.

And you own a chunk of this business. I will give you pro rata distributions for doing so. You send all your cards through me. And we just need a critical mass. Like we need the 80, 20 of this. We need to get like the 10 biggest players or like 10 of the 30 biggest players on our side of the table. and then on all the eBL listings, all the listings, it's going to have BSA in the title. And everyone else is like, what? Who's this guy? BSA? Well, that guy's BSA? That guy. And it's going to appear like 100% of people are doing it because 10 of the biggest players are.

And then you become a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I don't like about that idea is I need to get so many people on board. And if I don't have the credibility in that space, then it's hard to do. So I'm wondering, like, how can you, like, what is the mind? micro version of competing with PSA look like. Maybe it's just like a $5 alternative. Yeah. It's just like we're going to grade it.

It's $5. And I think like one of the reasons why I like PSA, frankly, versus other grading services is it looks dope. Yeah. It looks high quality. It looks really good. And you can do that. You can do that for cheap. You can do that for cheap.

but I think like coming up with a, like a visual, something different. Something different and visually that looks, like people look at it and they're like, wow, that looks really cool. You know, this morning I walk by this, I think it was a Kia that looked like a range rover. And I was like, this car looks amazing. Who makes it? And I looked behind it. I was like Kia.

I thought it was like a $200,000 car. So just because, you know, you're building a Kia doesn't mean you can't make it look cool. Yeah. Packaging. You could make it kind of like an, remember Antiques Roadshow? Yeah. Right? You could make it, you could make a live stream aspect of it where you've got like a camera, you've got a light, you've got the camera pointing down at the card. And someone very engaging, entertaining is talking through her like, this guy, this card came from Bob and Omaha.

He got it for his son. Yeah. Let's look at this card. And it's fully transparent. And there's just a guy just riffing, just live streaming. You could clip it up. He could flip it over. You've got like a reveal.

You've got retention hacks in there. That's part of it. Like you could have kind of a grounds up viral effect of that. And then if you took it a step further, just create this David versus Goliath narrative and just like PSA is a scam. It's a scam. We're disrupting all that. Five bucks. Yeah.

And just like just go wild with the like we're persecuted and they're the big bad wolf. Okay. Here's the idea. Yeah, because I really like your live commerce piece of it. I think that's a trend that's only getting bigger. So you spend $5 to get it graded on this service. It sends you back, let's say, the Charmander. But there's also a chance that you get like a Charzard graded with it.

So it's basically like a, you get a graded. It's a game of chance. You're like, there needs to be a creator at the top who obviously, is big in the Pokemon scene or trading card scene. And he or she is the Willy Wonka of the space. And then you have these golden tickets that you give out. So why would I go to this $5 PSA? Well, it's not just that it's cheaper.

It's also like I want to play, I want to gamble a bit. And I want to see like if I'm going to get a Venusaur first edition, you know, when I get this graded. Can I take it a step further? Okay, yeah. That's why we can't hang out, right? This is a problem. Yeah.

So where's all the cost in this? We're shipping two ways. We're shipping back and forth. Even though they're small, cheap cards, you have to package it right, so you can't put it in an envelope. It still costs like low dollars to ship both directions, right? So it's cheaper and the user, the card owner, can use their iPhone 15 or whatever. to take a picture like in portrait mode or whatever. Maybe it's through an app, right?

Maybe it's through their like proprietary app. It's really just an app with like a camera wrapper in it. And they upload it and it has a unique identifier. And it's one picture for the front, one picture of the back, good lighting, just like if you're scanning in a check to your bank or whatever. And there's only one way shipping. And then they say, hey, congratulations. Your grade is 7.5.

We're going to mail the like the box that you display it into the address on your account. And then for $1.50, you ship like a baller looking box. Maybe it has like a shimmer to it. It's just different. It stands out. It's got your name. You could have like a nickname for the card. Like for your charmander, it'd be like Mandy, you know, or whatever.

Whatever you decide to call it and it would be, it would have the grade in there. It would just look and feel different. It'd be very organically shareable. What do we think? I love it. I love this idea. Dude, you could use AI to look at the picture, right? I was like, all right, there's a little smidge in the corner.

That docks a half a point. Think about how insane. People are spending $40 to $50 plus shipping, sending their cards somewhere, and then finding out in 2026, like four weeks later, what their card is graded. In a world with Amazon Prime, where we're all used to like things same day or next day. No. No, no, we're not doing this. This isn't 1982.

No. There's a good one. There's like six good ideas in there. I like having you on. You're an idea. a machine to say to say the least. So thank you for for being so generous with your ideas and for being you, for being awesome. I highly recommend people go and check out Chris's ecosystem. There'll be links where you can go and follow him and subscribe to all his things. But is there anything specific,

Chris, you want to leave people with? No, I mean, go start a business. Check out my podcast, the Kerner office. And go start a business. Go do something. Go do something. with this information. Right. Yeah. Take your legs and get them moving. That's right. Amen.

Yeah. All right. I'll see you next time, Chris. Thanks, Greg.