The Startup Ideas Podcast - 8 startup ideas backed by data/trends to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)

Episode Date: July 8, 2024

Cody Schneider the Manic Startup Idea Machine is back. He's full of 7 figure ideas:1) Blue Collar Startups (Window Cleaning, Power Washing, Lawn Mowing)Low start up costsOptimize Google My Business listingUse AI to write keyword-rich descriptionsScale into an agency, then buy portions of other companiesPotential for $1M-$5M/year business2) Costco-style Membership ClubTarget growing "Buy It For Life" subreddit (2.3M members)Curate high-quality, long-lasting productsOffer subscription model (like Costco)Potential for $5M-$20M/year business3) Dumb Appliances BrandCreate simple, long-lasting appliances (no smart features)Target people frustrated with over-complicated productsFocus on reliability and ease of usePotential for $1M-$10M/year business4) AI-Powered Print-on-Demand Mockup GeneratorUse AI to create product mockups for print-on-demandTarget $6.8B market growing at 18% YoYPotential for $1M-$10M/year business5) AI Grant Finder and WriterTap into $2.5B grant management software marketCreate all-in-one solution for finding and applying for grantsAutomate grant writing proces6) Programmatic SEO for E-commerceBuild massive websites with AI-generated contentTarget businesses with large product catalogsCreate millions of landing pages for long-tail keywords7) Curated Book Subscription ServiceUse AI to recommend books based on influencers/expertsTarget specific niches or industriesInclude key insights from recommended booksMonetize through subscriptions and Amazon affiliates8) Renewable Energy Land AcquisitionLeverage public data on best locations for wind/solar farmsConsider starting a fund to buy strategic locationsTake advantage of government subsidies and tax benefitsPotential for massive returns over 20-30 year periodWant 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: http://gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 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.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND CODY ON SOCIALCody’s startup: https://www.swellai.com/X/Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/5fjdn8d7LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/28e89f5rTo improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/Links Mentioned: Cody's Recommendation for Google Indexing Service: https://t.me/SpeedyIndexBot?start=5190421326Episode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:04 Startup Idea 1: Sweaty Startup14:41 Startup Idea 2: Sweaty Startup HoldCo27:17 Startup Idea 3: Buy-it-for-life brands Deal Club33:00 Startup Idea 4: Curated Book Subscription Box39:10 Startup Idea 5: Dumb Appliances47:21 Startup Idea 6: AI-Powered Print on Demand Mock up Business51:43 Startup Idea 7: Dynamic Landing Page Generator Agency55:31 Startup Idea 7: AI Grant Writer1:01:15 Startup Idea 8: Solar/Wind Farm

So first off, blue collar startups, all this sweaty startup people are always going off about how these businesses are the best businesses to start. In reality, like, what they never do is show you actually how to grow them. So that's what I want to talk about today. So each of these things are approachable. You can go get started with these businesses for like 150 bucks at your lows or Home Depot or whatever, you know, your ACE hardware is right next to you. I think it's one of these ideas that's like very deceptive when you look at it. Like you're like, oh, this is just some simple, dumb lifestyle business. but in reality, the game here is you go and you make this service business,

this sweaty startup or whatever the hell you want to call it. And then you learn these skill sets on how to market this type of business. You turn that into an agency, create this cash flow so that then I can go and I want to buy portions of these companies in specific geographies. So you're just thinking about this over a seven to 10 year period of climbing this ladder. When you scale this up, what this evolves into is when you own portions of these companies, this can turn into an unbelievable whole portfolio company. That whole thing that I'm talking about there is just basically like how you can go from

like baby entrepreneur to okay, you're playing at the pro level with the big dogs, right? Got to stretch it out, dude. You got to stretch it out. You need the intro music. We have to figure out how to do this. I won't like sip, you know, the SIP theme song playing as you're waiting in the waiting room. But when Cody Schneider comes on, it's like, um, m's, um, sipping time, baby.

Exactly, exactly. Exactly. I wanted like deep house techno, like techno bunker style. You think you're out of like late 90s rave. That's what we're going for. So anyway. Cody Schneider, you're back. You're ready to sit. You got a lot of blue collar ideas and some blue collar. I want to rip on those first because it's driving me crazy. Everybody always talks about how easy it is to start these businesses and then they never actually show you how to do this. And it's, actually so easy. So anyways, I want to go there and then we can dive into, there's a bunch of random stuff on that list that we got. But it's going to level up from like, you know, really approachable stuff into stuff that's, you know, kind of even out of my range of expertise or skill set so far. So should we do it? Let's do it. Hell yeah. All right. So first off, blue collar startups, all this sweaty startup people are always going off about how these businesses are the best businesses to start. In reality, like what they never do is show you actually how to grow them. So that's what I want to talk about today. So the three I'm going to use as an example is going to be

window cleaning. It's going to be power washing and it's going to be lawn mowing. And the reason for this is because you want to do something that neighbors can physically see looks different on the structure next to them because you can use that as a selling like a leverage point to go sell the whole neighborhood on that thing. So again, each of these things. are approachable. You can go get started with these businesses for like 150 bucks at your lows or Home Depot or whatever your Ace Hardware is right next to you. And then to actually get customers, I want to walk through the options that are here with this. So if you want to get like sophisticated with this, what it ends up looking like is you basically optimize a Google My Business Profile listing.

So with that listing, how you actually optimize that is you basically set up, you're going to need an address of some type. You can do a PO box. The best way is have some type of physical address. You can just tack it on to another business. So if you have a family member or something like that, that's the best way to do this. And then what you're going to then go do is you build citations for that business. So business citations, what these are basically websites that are like business directory websites. If you go to Fiverr.com, just Google, you know, just search in Fiver like business citations. You're going to find a guy. You're going to pay him 30 bucks. And he's going to make 300 citations for you. The reason we're doing this is when your business

information, whatever you put on Google, you want to use that exact thing on all the citations. When all that matches, Google looks at that as a trust metric. And this is actually how you can rank within the snack pack, which is the three when you go and you Google something

for anything local services. What shows up on page one is at the top of most of these pages is going to be three Google Maps listings. So how do you rank within that Google Maps listing? So you come up as one of those three. This is the way to do that. So you build all these citations. Google's going to be like,

oh, here's all these websites where it's all matching. So there's a trust that's built into that. Again, reviews are going to be a component of this. We found it to be less and less important to do reviews. What really matters is that the keyword phrases that you want to come up for being in the listing. You can just have AI write this. Go find all the keywords related to whatever the service that you're providing. So like window cleaning, Denver, window cleaning, you know, whatever the service area is, all the different variations.

And you basically have it write a description of that business, including all those keywords. and add that to the Google My Business Profile listing. I've even done this where I've just keyword stuff these listings before. Like I'm not like straight up listed out 30 different keywords and got it to rank for that as long as you're again building these citations out. Right. So that's how you can get inbound leads from the Google map side. And the other thing that I would do if I was waiting running. Just on that real quick.

Yeah. So when you say AI, I get AI to write this. Okay. which AI and how do you prompt it? So I would do something like chat. I would go to chat GPT or Claude. I'm really liking Claude lately. It's just way more human on the outputs that it's doing.

You give it the list of keywords that you're trying to have it right for. And you say, hey, write me a thousand word description of a business and name your company, whatever that is, and include these keywords in that output. Super simple. All it's going to do then is just going to write this article or write this description, in this business description that includes all those keywords phrases in it. But it's going to feel natural. It's going to feel like it's not just listing out the keywords like I'd said.

Like we've done in test. Although that works, this is going to be a more effective way to do that. So that's kind of the breakdown of this of how I would go about and do that. And then all of those keywords, you also want to include them in the service offering. There's a section within the Google My Business listing where you can just list out the services that you offer. those same keywords include those there. And that's going to help on the ranking side. And then images is the other component of it that we found to be really important. Reviews are way lower than people think. It's honestly shocking, especially in like smaller geographies. It really what matters is like,

is this an exact match for whatever this person is searching? And is there more business information that I can find off off of Google basically that's supporting that this is an actual company that does the service, that's in this location and here's, you know, it's phone number information, that type of thing. And again, all of this is like, you know, you can use a Google business phone number. Real phone numbers are more effective is what we found. If you can get, you know, even a cell phone and have that be the one that you're linked up to or use, you know, one of these like VoIP softwares, that'll work as well, any of those types of tools.

But basically, that's kind of, you know, to take a step back and run down through this whole thing of how you optimize these profiles. It's you want to find the keywords that you're trying to show up for that when you're you Google them right now from wherever you are, that map pack shows up on that front page, right? 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 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. So if the answer is yes, so it's like you found a keyword, it shows that map pack, then greenlight that keyword. You're going to include that in the description of the listing.

You're going to include that in the offering. It's like this like, you know, what you do and the services you offer section. Include that there as well. Whatever your highest target level keyword is, you can also include that in the listing title. There's a little bit gray area. This is not technically like you're not supposed to do this, but it can help with your ranking. So what I would suggest is whatever you name this business, name it with that exact keyword in it. So again, saying you're doing window cleaning, like try to get it as close to like Denver window cleaning company as possible, right?

Have you ever seen that meme and it's like tie near me? It's like this restaurant named tie near me. So the reason they're doing that is they're trying to basically like tie near me is a huge trafficked keyword. Right. And so they're trying to show up for that when somebody searches it in, you know, whatever city that it's in. So you're basically using that same strategy here. And then so that's how you optimize the listing and, you know, to use SEO terms, that's on page optimization.

And then the off pages and taking that exact data that you use to fill out that listing, the phone number, the address, the business title, et cetera. And you go and you build all these citations out, those listing citations. So that's kind of layer one of this. The next layer down from that is then you have to go and get those citations to actually be seen by Google. So what you can use is you can use an index. bot. I'll share the link that I have for this one. The one I'm liking right now is I think it's

called like Speedy Indexer. It's literally a telegram bot. That's the only way you can get access to it. But you give the list of citations that that person that you just bought this off fiber that they built and you send it to this bot and it will go and it will index the basically what it does is it drips traffic into these pages. And the reason we have to do this is because these citation websites are massive, right? We're talking about like 100. of millions of pages sometimes. And so Google doesn't allow enough crawl budget to actually go and see the entire website. And so what we do is we're basically like sending Pings to this specific URL and this company handles this for you. And it's super cheap. I'm talking like, you know,

a couple cents per listing that you're doing. Like, right? Like you can, this whole thing I'm talking about, you can do for under probably, you know, $300. You can get started with this entire company. And so once you've done that, it's Google's going to see them. It's going to, the indexing box will show you which ones have been indexed. And then it'll do about 50%. It's just hit or miss. That's how it is. It doesn't work always, right, with all these things. So then that, that, that, so say it gets, you know, 100 on the first go, whatever that 200 is that left, you just run it again. You run it indefinitely until all of these start to hit. So that's another component of this. If you do that, you're miles ahead of the people that you're competing against in

the space. And then the thing that you can go further with if you want to is you then take the Google Maps listing, and you can embed that listing. And so this is something that Google prioritizes as being, like, if somebody embeds that, then it's like a good, it's basically a signal that this is like a good resource, right? Think about when somebody embeds a YouTube video, when they embed a map, et cetera. It's a signaled off the page that this is, again, another real company. So you can use the service. It's called, oh, God, what's his name?

Kevin BBNs. If you just Google it, this website called Black App, World is going to come up. Do not take any other advice off of Black Hat World. And if this is like the sophisticated level of this, that's a layer down. And again, this is like, I would only go here if it's entirely necessary and you're trying to compete in like a very competitive market. I was wondering what you're going to say about that. Yes. So with all that said, what you can do is you basically can embed the Google Maps listing on this PBN network. So what a PBN network is is called a private blog network.

And a private blog network, imagine it's like thousands of blogs that this company owns that all internally link back to each other and are all basically like kind of juicing themselves up. So this used to be a way that you could like rank things previously. This was years ago. Now how people use them is they use them as like a tier two or a tier three link. So what this means is they're basically, you build your backlink and then you build links from other sites to the backlink that you built. that it gets seen. This is another way to get those sites indexed if you're trying to not do the speedy index bot. But again, that works so effectively, you don't need to do that. But to get back to this. So then you embed that Google Maps listing and then include the business information

there as well. And you can again get these for like, you know, I think 50 cents to get these published and basically these PBN articles made that includes this. It includes this embedded in the WordPress site. And that's another way for you to get these. But I mean, I've seen case studies and shout out Jackie Chow or true. I can't remember his last name or how to pronounce it correctly. So I'm totally butchering that. But he's just done unreal case studies on this type of stuff. And a lot of what I just talked about are methods that he's basically like kind of pioneered or shown out in public. And then we've used it on companies that we've, that, you know, my brother's in the medical space. And we do a bunch of stuff with like, you know, local business type of deal. And this is the

things that we've seen be effective and it's really just ripping off of a lot of what he's doing already. But yeah, man, that whole playbook is like, you just game Google Maps and you now have organic and beyond the leads. And the results from this type of work, like, we've seen it in like a week and a half go from like, it's not in that snack pack to it's in that snack pack when you do this type of work. It's like, I mean, I couldn't get that to happen in SEO if I tried, right? You know, the time horizons on traditional SEO to rank on the front page is like at least three months plus, like even if the site is like has some authority and has some, you know, that company has existed in that community for a long time. But this is a way to really quickly

go and do that. So yeah. And it good. Yeah. And once you, once you do that and you've done it, like you can point to success, you can do it for other companies too, right? That's exactly where I'm leading with all this. So like the game here is you go and you make this service business. It's a sweaty startup or whatever the hell you want to call it. And then you learn these skill sets on how to market this type of business. You turn that into an agency. And then you go and you cold email every window cleaning company in the U.S. and you're like, hey, window cleaning company.

Like, I know how to grow and get leads. Like, let's do a part, you know, I'm going to do marketing for you. Here's some set flat fee. Here's all the things that we're going to do. You can even do it on a performance basis. There's all these different models to do that. But before we jump and kind of to the next phase, there's two other things I want to talk about, just things that we've seen work and I think could be really effective for these businesses.

So the other one is direct mail. So you can use this company called lob.com. And what lob.com will do is like you build a flyer. It's going to be an 11 by 8 flyer. And you do it in Canva. I think that's the dimensions. Don't quote me on that. But basically build that out in Canva.

You can upload that into Lob. And then you can upload a list of addresses. that you were trying to send this direct mail out to. And the addresses you can go and if you just search like addresses and XYZ zip code, find the richest zip codes in your area. And that's where you want to send these to and offer that service to, right? So there's a direct mail play here. And then the other thing that you can also do is,

I mean, straight up just like putting flyers on doors is going to be like another piece of this. It's just like old school classic. And I'm talking from like, you're starting out from zero and you're trying to figure out, like, how do I get this to make me 100K a year and be my own boss? This is that this is all the things that I would layer on together. And again, this isn't a super heavy lift to do all of this. This is all like very accessible. And, you know, most people could do this. So, but anyways, so you got this company. It's established now. And you're like, all right, I know how to do this marketing. None of these other people know how to do these marketing. But they have businesses that are 15 years old. 20 years old that are in this space. So now you go out and you say, hey, we do digital marketing for these people. You basically make an agency, a digital agency. And you do some type of service feed. That's how I would do it because it would be a cash. I'm just trying to create cash flow. And the reason for that will come up in a second. So I'm trying to create this cash flow so that then I can go and I want to buy portions of these companies in specific geographies.

So you go and you just be like, hey, I want to buy 20% of your company. And we're going to handle all of your marketing for you. So you spend this upfront cost and you use the cash flow from your window cleaning company that you built initially. So you're just thinking about this over whatever, a seven year period, seven to 10 year period of climbing this ladder. What this evolves into is when you own portions of these companies and you have all of these geographies that you're servicing and say you own 20% of a window cleaning company or an HVAT company or whatever this ends up being, this can turn into an unbelievable portfolio company, like Holdings Company. An example of somebody that's done this, his name is James Dooley. He's this guy out of the UK,

absolute gangster, like just a legend. He's like a degenerate gambler too, so I love him. He like bets on horse racing and owns horses and breeds them. It's so sick. Like that is the dream. Literally, my dream is that. So anyway, he's done this where he basically goes in. He buys portions of these companies. And over a three-year period, I mean, they can basically double or triple these things, right? So when you think about from an investment standpoint, like he has the same playbook, he's running over and over again. It's the same skill sets. It's the same team members. He doesn't have to change any of that. All he's doing is he's just running those same plays in these different places. And that's how, I mean, he's an SEO guy. He's an SEO guy and a legit OG,

like classic. Yeah. Yeah. Totally. I mean, he's worth like a hundred million allegedly from a portfolio standpoint. The only thing I would do differently here would be I probably wouldn't buy 20% of these businesses with cash. I would just earn that equity kind of seller financed and be like, yeah, I'm not going to charge you for all these services. I'm, you know, but I'm going to, I'm going to do these things for you. And like, maybe you put some cash down. But, you know, I think that's a way to do it. Totally. And there's so many different ways that you can handle it. The biggest problem is getting the cash flow so that you have the leverage and the skill sets that you have that leverage. And that's like what that whole thing that I'm talking about there is just

basically like how you can go from like baby entrepreneur to okay, you're playing at the pro level with the big dogs. Right. And that again, it's like you could that that whole model that we just talked about. That's a three to five year sprint that if you really wanted to and you were like ready to grind like you could do that whole thing what we just described. And the other thing that I would do later on top of this. I know you'll love this is. I would film, I would do these services that you can film that are like satisfying. And then you put those on YouTube and that turns into another revenue stream for you long term. So like, have you seen the guys that like mow like lawns?

They like take like nasty ass lawns and they like trim them all up. And then they, I mean, they get like three million views, right? Same thing you do window cleaning. You can do it with, you do it with power washing. Like there's massive channels out there. And so just thinking about that layer. So that does two things. It's like that turns into a profit center for you.

you're going to get ads, you know, ad dollars off of that. But simultaneously, you're going to also get inbound leads from that because they're going to show people that are in that geography. Like if you lifts that in the description, like cleaning, you know, or mowing a lawn and, you know, blah, blah, blah, south Carolina. Like, it's going to, it's going to show that to people that are in that geography. It's going to understand that over time. And that's kind of the data.

Now, another layer of this year that you can, you can play into. Is it not Alex Hermose-esque a little bit? Because, I mean, he's, right? He did. The only thing I think that's missing a little bit from this story is what he did with, what was it called gym? Gym launch. Jim launch. So he was like, yeah, I had this gym and I, you know, grew it from X to Y. Like, I think the personal brand story is really like huge with this. You have to be able to say, I'm one of you. I did this. And I took it from A to B and then invest in content at that layer. 100%. 100%. I mean, we've talked about this on other episodes where it's like, hey, you go and you create YouTube videos showing people how to do this, right? Like how to do Google ads for window cleaning or whatever, right? Or how to do Facebook ads for window cleaning or how to even just what we just talked about on Google Maps, like how to rank your window cleaning business for Google Maps. What's naturally going to happen? People are going to watch this. They're going to be like, oh, my God, I don't have time for this. Like, can I just hire this kid? Boom. That turns into your first customer. But again, using yourself as the case study is always the most,

effective way to do this, right? It's like, we did this for my company that I owned, and here's the results. We can do this for your company that you own. And like we, the idea is we can basically expect results that are similar. It's a super simple idea, right? But it looks very, I think it's one of these ideas that's like very deceptive when you look at it. Like you're like, oh, this is just some simple, dumb lifestyle business. But in reality, like, when you scale this up and you look at the path of like where people, and Hormozzi is doing these exact same, right? thing, right? He's like, cool, I built these, like, he's now at that level where he's investing on other companies. Like, his investment in schools, an perfect example of this.

Where it's like, he's like, oh, well, I leveled up to these, to these layers. And now I'm at this, you know, pro level, which is where I buy portions of these other companies. And then I use my platform that I built to basically go and promote this, right? I mean, it's the same, it's the same thing you're doing. It's the same thing I'm doing. It's the same playbook, but in a totally different category. I like it. I like it. How big of an opportunity is this? I mean, just to use James as an example, like, again, if he owns, for my, from what I've seen, he owns about 150 different companies, equity and 150 different company. I think he goes after specific categories.

And then he, you know, for each major geography or each major metro area, he partners or buys a percentage of some company. And he always goes with some scrappy upstart, you know, some dude that's in his late 20s, that's got two kids that's like there to grind, right? And he's like, cool. I'm like, we're going to help. we're going to help you double triple your business over the next two to three years. And I mean, I think this is 100% a $100 million company, especially when you look at like what are,

I mean, these companies sell for a lot of money, especially if they have a foothold within an area. Right. If that, an HBAC company has been in an area for 20 years, right, like there's equity. There's just name brand equity in that over time. So when you go and you try to sell that to PE or whatever, or you just go and you do a bundle, right? There's probably a version of that as well where you sell the, percentages of each of these companies that you have in your holdings company that that that holdings company owns so before we move to the next idea i don't know if you saw this but cody sanchise bought a piece of uh resi brands you didn't see this no way yeah yeah so resy brands is like

you know i think it's the fastest growing painting painting franchise company in the united states insane they also own pinks yeah which is just killer Pink's is what you were talking about a little bit. They're out of Austin. Austin, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They're like visual, like, it looks like these guys. Dude, I have friends that wear the streetwear.

Yeah, I mean, I wear it. That's how insane. Exactly. Yeah. Right. Yeah. It's like 80s. It kind of looks like an 80s like porno.

80s is back. Porno guys are washing your. Look at the top billboard right now and it's all synth. Every song is leading with synth. It's synth or it's folk. That's the only thing that's happening right now. Or Tendrick, that's the outlier, the only outlier in that whole list. But anyway, sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off.

But it's related. I mean, it totally related. I think so basically the idea is they took window cleaning, but they wear these like, I don't know. It's like 80s porn mustache guys cleaning it. And it's so TikTok friendly. So Cody. You see him in a calendar. Yeah.

So Cody says, I would buy a calendar. A hundred percent. Cody Sanchez. ended up buying a big piece of the business. What do you think about that? I mean, it's brilliant. I think the only thing that I would be against with this type of stuff is like, I love when influencers buy companies that they have some type of distribution advantage with. So when they have an arbitrage that nobody else has access to, and maybe she does have that and we don't know about it. Like, again, I have no idea. But her audience of like, one entrepreneurs doesn't feel totally aligned,

unless she goes and she's like, yo, I'm going to franchise this thing. And then I just use my audience as the way to basically spin up. You know, we take the, we take the business. I mean, and that's honestly probably the angle that I would go out this room, like if I was in that position is, okay, we got 30 locations right now. Like, how do we turn that into 300 locations in the next three years? And then that's when you go and you approach traditional P.E. And I mean, you just have an absolutely massive exit, right? That's probably the bridge. Like, they just take the same marketing and they're just trying to get like a ton of top of funnel inbound of people that want to start, you know, business in a box companies and this feels like a business in a box company. But I would say this. Like, if you ever

see a brand that people are reping, that the product is unrelated, like the clothing is unrelated to the brand, that's when you know that that company is absolutely like going to rip and whatever category it's in. When you, when you, you can't, you can't fabricate that. It only happens like organically. And it only happens when you're doing something cool and original that like really people that are on the front of that that adoption curve or like oh yo like this is this is something i like i have a friend who's uh he's in the podcasting space and like this is how i know about this and like he reps the merch like to your point right like just wearing you out because it that it's the stylization on it is insane right and though that when you think about that and you see any company that that's

naturally happening immediately go okay that's that's like a business that you want to try to buy into they're doing something right you don't you don't even have to know what it is it's just a signal that this is this is a good thing. 100%. All right. What else you got? Cool. Have you heard of the Buy It for Life subreddit?

Tell me about it. Okay. So I stumbled on this thing. And basically what it is is there's this group of people that want to buy products that they're tired of consumerism. And they want to buy products that are like the highest quality they can. You know, it doesn't really matter the price. I want this thing to last for forever.

And so massive subreddit, insanely fast how it's growing. Like if you look at the data. And all that people do is they basically are like, hey, I'm trying to get like the best jacket for X or like these types of boots, right? Like Doc Martins that are actually good quality. What is the brand that I should go after and look for? And this subreddit is just dedicated to that. So it's all it is is people basically like question and answering. What is the best of XYZ category?

Like, I was just, how I stumbled on it, it is I was looking for the best blender, right? So I was like, I bought in so many blenders over my life. I mean, I'm, I can't take it anymore. Like, I want one. Like, what is it, what is it going to take to give me to one? And so they suggested, it was basically this like industrial blender. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like, you read the reviews on this and they're like, yo, I've had this for 80 years, right?

Like, I got, I just got a pass down. You know, my mom just passed it down to me type of thing. And so I think there's this whole subset of people. And what's interesting is all these people look like they have money because the products are not small price tax. We're talking about like, you know, $800 pairs of boots, right? Like that type of deal. And, you know, I mean, this blender was like two grand, right? But I think there's an angle here.

And I actually don't know what this company looks like. And that's what I want to throw out and, you know, to you and like have you kind of we can, we can rally off of it. But I think there's an angle where you do like a imagine like a William Sonoma, buy it for life, stumble upon crossover. So you just like are swiping through this and you're like discovering all of these products that are like the highest echelon of their category that they're in. So I think that's an angle of this. And I think you could probably pair that with like a deal monitor for these brands that are considered buy it for life brands. So you go and you scrape that subreddit. You find all of the buy it for life brands. And then you basically, I know there's these websites that exist.

I don't have a lot of experience in this. So bear with me for my ignorance. But you can basically set up monitors for these types of products so that whenever deals come on the market for, you know, it's really just probably like Google Trends is how a lot of this is happening. But whenever, or not Google Trends, Google, like, Google notifications or Google News or how you can set up like a listener. And then any time that you see a price drop, then that site, it goes up on there. You basically scrape it, just probably an affiliate play that's there. And there's probably a subscription on top of it because these people want to buy these goods, but they're looking for, oh, it's 30% off. Like these boots I've been looking for 30% off. So let me go buy

that. So anyways, I'll throw the mic to you. I'm curious your thoughts. I mean, this is, this isn't just any subreddit. This, this is probably one of the fastest growing subreddits. I think it has 2.3 million members. So this is, this is just like a macro trend around people are just tired of buying things that break. Totally. So I love the macro trend. You know, what does it look like? I don't know. I think that there's probably, like, it would be really cool if there was, you know, if I bought, you know, I almost like a Costco membership, but totally, buy it for life. It's like $100 a year. I get access to these amazing discounts. Every one of these products. And if one of these products breaks, we will, you know, not only bought, you know, lifetime guarantee, but we'll, we'll give 20 of them to, you know,

if it's a sweater, we'll give 20 sweaters to, you know, people who, you know, need sweaters, you know, and if it's a blender, we'll send 20, you know, 20 blenders to, you know, soup kitchen, that sort of thing. Totally, totally. So there's some type of, like, you know, community or some type of, I don't know, social cause that's tied into it. Dude, I think that's brilliant. I mean, it is probably just taking the Costco model, right?

And then you just turn into, like, you're just a marketplace distributor. And I mean, let's just do the math real quick, right? So say you had 10,000 people that were sub to this. It's $100 a year. And so you're coming out at, what is that, a million? So you're coming out in a million in revenues. Then you go and you negotiate relationships. You probably have to get it at a way larger scale.

It'd probably be like $100,000. But again, if there's 2.2 million people that are a part of this, just imagine getting 10% of those people on this list. So you're coming in at 220,000 people. So you get 220,000 people. they're paying you 100 a year. So that's going to be 22 million. Or no, 220 million. Is that right? I think so. No public math. Yeah, no public math. Yeah, no public math. And at that point, you go to these companies and you negotiate buys based on that, right? You just have like a Nauri division that that

focuses on this. But to zoom out to the macro trend thing, like, I think this is something that people are getting obsessed with. Like, how do I buy a knife that will last me for 20 years? Like, how do I buy, you know, everything in my home? Like, I, I'm so. tired of things breaking, like even when it's considered decent quality in the first two years of its existence. And it's funny because the next company that I'm going to pitch you is basically this. It's related to this. It's in the same vein, but an entirely different category.

But I like this. I like your idea of the membership thing. I think that this is actually the way that this would be the most profitable. And you just pass on the savings to the people, how you actually make money is based off the memberships. So can I pitch you, uh, pitch you an idea real quick that I had right before. this call. So I've been into, it's going to sound like dumb, but I've been into reading recently. Hell yeah. Yeah. Hell yeah. I can't read. So it's, you know, whenever I hear that from somebody,

I'm always very, I look fondly at it. There you go. So I've been enjoying books. And I've, I've been, like, whenever I hear someone recommend a book that, you know, maybe on a podcast or YouTube video, I always write it down instantly. Actually, I just instantly buy it. And after a certain point, I finished all those books. So I would say, let's say I'm a big Cody Schneider fan, which I am, by the way. I would go to chat, GBT, and I say, you know, here's Cody Schneider. This is who he is. Here's his link to his Twitter. What are the five must read books that Cody Schneider would recommend to me? I'm looking to get better at XYZ topic. CEO, organic marketing, whatever. So I think that there's an opportunity to basically create, I guess it's like a newsletter and it's like books that XYZ influencer would recommend. And it's, I don't know if it's weekly or monthly, but let's just say. It's probably a book club.

What if it's that where it's like you pay a subscription and then you're going and basically, because like I want this. Like you tell me like what are the top most influential books for the. this person that's in my category. Like, right, we do business for a living. Like, I want to know every book that every business person has ever referenced and influenced and influenced their career. And, like, I want to read that book, right? Because that's, that's the idea behind this. I mean, book clubs are already happening. It's just a different twist on it. So I, 100% there's something in this. Yeah. But I think with book clubs, what, you know, would a book club? I don't think it's a book club,

sorry. I mean, like, like, you get like a box, you know, just like those snack pack boxes. Like, just want like, cool, like four books show up month, you know, day one of the month. And it's like, this month we're highlighting, you know, X, Y, Z person. The reason we're highlighting them is because they did ABC. They're experts at, you know, one, two, and three. And these are the books that they said were most influential within their career. And that, boom, you know, you have that, those physical copies right there. You don't have to think about it. And it's like, I mean, you could probably do it in like different categories, too. Like, oh, I want to do art history or, you know, obsessed with, so stupid, but with like Roman history right now, I'm just like vinging this podcast.

I'm like, it's the history of Rome. It's the best podcast, dude. It's just this dude, like, you can tell just passion project, obsessed with it. He's just reading off the facts. And then he's like, yeah, and that guy was a fucking idiot. It's iconic. But anyway, like, I'm just imagining like that that's something that I think when I don't have to think about it, but I get the educational drip that I'm looking for.

I think that's valuable to anybody. That's like competing at a high level. They want to know everything about everybody they're competing against or has competed in the same category before them. Yeah. And I also think that if it's influencer based or creator based, you just target people that, you know, if it's for me, let's say, yeah, people who follow me on X, just get those people.

I'm sure you can get those emails for like pretty cheap. And then and then just send them. Like I think they're, you know, businesses have levels. So like level one of this is just the free email with like Greg Eisenberg would recommend these two books this month. And here's some key insights from those books. And then love, you know, the next level is join the book club to your point. And it's like you don't even have to, you know, for $99 a month, we'll just send it to you right away. And then the next level is maybe a membership that, you know, you know, synchronous event.

and digital stuff. That's the business. 100%. No, I think it's brilliant. Again, it's just, I'm like you or it's like, as soon as I hear a book that somebody mentions, I just like, yeah. I mean, that could be a feature of this too, right? It's like, you go and you scrape everything that they've ever been on or talked on.

And like, cool, what is the things that they've mentioned based off these transcripts? Because like people, I feel like every interview that I, besides this one that I go on, it's like, what books would you recommend? Or like, what are you listening to like that type of shit? And, I mean, just extract that out of there and just do rag over the top of it. Even if you haven't explicitly recommended the book, you can infer based on all the stuff that you've talked about, all the people that you've talked about, all the, all of that stuff. You like it? I love that.

Yeah. Green light. I think that that's another one. All right. It's super simple too. It's just you can use off the shelf tech. And I think the distribution is exactly what you said. like choose these figures that are already in public, like Huberman or whatever, right?

It could be anybody, any of these, any, anybody that's in any category. And then you're also making affiliate on Amazon. What is, exactly. Yeah, how much of, what's the percentage? I think is for books. Yeah. I mean, it's just great. I mean, it's, it's an unreal.

So, and again, I think there's layers of it too, right? It's like build big list. People, typically people who read have a higher income level. That's the trend. Shocking. So then you have. have an audience and the so you have the audience so you sell ads space on that you have the affiliates of the books sorry i'm still on the i'm still on the big insight that you gave that people who have

who read have a higher uh income level dude it's so stupid but so real it's it's crazy actually uh there there's like a direct correlation in relationship to this rather than listening to things like they often people that don't listen to things and who read more how have more money to spend. It's their filter. It's so weird. It's, it's, the economic data around it is actually wild. So, but, um, all right. To move on. Yes. Dumb appliances. All right. So I have a dishwasher. And it takes me seven button clicks to make it go. And it, every time I do it, I hate doing the dishes because of it. I despise doing the dishes because of it. And I think this is a larger trend. And the data shows this as well. Again, go to Reddit and look for people being like, what's the dumbest

dishwasher that I can find? What's the dumbest washing machine that I can find? What's the dumbest fridge that I can find? And again, I think this is a pushback from, it's a part of that larger trend of people just want things that last. They want things that they can fix and they can work on. And I think there's an opportunity. I would literally just call it dumb appliances. And your whole thing is like, we don't connect to the internet. We don't like, it just works. It's like maybe four buttons. That's the whole thing of whatever the minimum amount is to get the thing to function. It does that. Right. And I think there's a huge opportunity. And I think I would just sell it like that. Like we built the dumbest dishwasher. Like you plug it in and it runs. Like that's it.

And that's the angle that you go from. You talk about simplicity. You talk about it lasting for a long time. You buy it for life type of deal. And I think there's an opportunity to build a brand in that space. And then, I mean, I think the larger trend here is like, do you see that story where like some dude was like mining Bitcoin off of the fridge like off of the processor that was in his fridge? Like they like hacked his fridge and was like mining Bitcoin off it. And he's like, I couldn't figure out why my bandwidth on my network was so high. Like he's like, there's no way we're using, you know, whatever it was, some insane amount of data. And then they found that this was the reason. And I think everybody's like, I don't need this to be connected to the internet.

I don't want to chat with my fridge, my fridge to tell me. you what to do. The last thing people want is for a robot to tell them what to do. Think about when your seatbelt alarm goes off. You hate your car when it does that to you. Now, scale that up to your fridge telling you, oh, you need milk or whatever, or scale that up to AI when it's like, you can't ask that question. Like, that's not all right. Like, people are going to get pissed. You want to know how to red pill people? Tell them that they can't research the thing or learn about the thing that they're trying to learn. So, anyways, take a step back. I think there's an opportunity for dumb appliances just in every category within within the home.

I love it. I want to show you a quick tweet I saw today. Shilma note, my parents have had the same washer and dryer for almost my entire life. They bought them used in 1989, 35 years without issue. I've had to replace R washer twice in the nine years that I've had it. They really don't make them like they used to. And it's these like boxy, I guess general electric looks like, or Maytag. And then Nikita said, Nikita Beer, you can still buy them new.

It'll cost you two times the price of the most expensive LG, but they're totally worth it. 100%. And I think that's the larger trend that's happening, right? It's like, especially the, anybody that has basically disposable income, they're trying to, they're thinking about these things. And they just want that quality level at the highest level that they can get it. You can be the source for that in any form. You're going to get that customer loyalty. And then again, you can just move throughout the house. Like start with one.

Just everybody that you talk to has had this experience with a washing machine. Like the Samsung, like, it doesn't dry shit because the sensor's off of like when it's dry, right? And so I'm having to dry. I'm having to time dry it over and over again. But it auto turns itself off because it's saying that it's dry, but it's not. It's damp. I put my hand in and it's damp. I think for a lot of people, that's a huge frustration.

And so if you come to that and you solve that problem, like there's a massive market that you can go after. And I think it could be very cool, like calling it dumb appliance or stupid appliances or, you know, there's some name that's like in there that would tap into that frustration, that anger that people have with these. Okay, before you go on to your next idea, I want to give a dumb, a dumb idea based on this. So I saw a TikTok of like some like 19, maybe 1980 something Honda Civic that had like never been drive. and it sold for like a ton of money because it had like 10 miles on it or something and honestly I was looking at it and I was like this is the most beautiful car I've ever seen

so I think one of the one of the dumb appliance company ideas is you create a new car company no screens analog is hell all knobs a thousand percent you call it knobs or something

100%. Yeah, 100%. Have you seen the light phone? This is this larger trend that's happening where people are like, yo, I don't want all the sophistication. Like I want the minimum that gets the job done. Like all of the, it feels like bloat. So much bloat has happened.

And really, I think what this is in response to is the inflation and what's going on. Like always what this does is there's a contraction that naturally occurs after like a growth period. And I think that this is the response. Like this is where people are coming from with it where they're like you. I just want, if my phone just did GPS, I could text, I could call, I could do notes, and maybe I can read on it. Like, I don't want anything else. Like, I don't want, I don't want Instagram.

I don't want it tracking me. God knows what's happening with TikTok. And so I think that, again, like exactly to your point, like a dumb car, like a knobs car, right? And you just make it so you can work on it. I mean, we have this, we have this 1980 Chevy square body. It's just like baby blue. It's a four cylinder. And the thing is just like, it's the easiest end.

that you could ever work on, right? And that thing, like, if it breaks, we can just fix it, just at home. Like, you don't, there's no, there's, like, there's no computers in it. There's none of that, right? And I think that there's this segment of people that are growing that want that, that want these types of, these types of products. They're pushing back against, you know, the, the, the, what's happening from a modern, like, just, just the technology that's being built into this, that feels like fluff. It doesn't feel like it's adding value to what the goal is of people trying to accomplish with this tool, right? It's like, I just want my clothes washed.

Like, I don't, that's it, right? Like, I just want my car to get me from A to B. And I think there's this whole subset of people. And again, I think a lot of the times they have money. So that's why you could sell and make these kind of boutique brands in these spaces. Yeah. And I think it's, people want to go from point A to point B, but it's also people want these devices to be sacred.

So if everything has a screen on it, you're just constantly being overwhelmed and distracted. So the idea that you can hop into a 1987, whatever, Honda Civic, but it's pristine and there's no knobs, you know, you don't need Google Maps. You're just like, you're going for like a Sunday drive. You know what I mean? Like there's there isn't, there isn't a hundred, you know, serious XM radio stations, right? Like there's, you only put in like one channel and it's jazz. Yes. Totally. That's it. Totally. Totally. You're like intentionally limiting yourself and like through that finding like, you know, peace or whatever or whatever that, that thing is that we're all searching

for and never can find. So, I have a question for you. How much would you pay a year to not ever see marketing? You're asking the wrong guy because I'm probably like you, like I was watching. Only see marketing that you like. If you had some way to filter, and I'm saying like a hypothetical, I don't know how you'd actually do this. 10,000 dollars in the year. Yeah. I mean, I would go in that, I'd go up to 20 probably. I've just only seeing to choose when I see marketing and the marketing is filtered for what I really love. I would, I would 100%. I would pay money not to see it. I think that that is a part of the screen thing we're talking about. I'm even thinking about this. How do I have as few of screens everywhere like in my space? Because it's so much time is spent

on it now. And again, we work in this digital space, right? So like that's why it's a tool that we can use, but like you can find yourself just so often being just sucked into this thing. And it happens with every device now. So cool. Next one. Next one. Let's rock. Let's do it. All right.

So print on demand mock up business, right? So print on demand for the people that are uninitiated is basically they have all these products and you sell them and then they manufacture and ship them. It started out in the apparel space. That's the only reason I know about it because I spent a lot of time here in another life. And what you basically could do is build thousands of different variations of graphics out. You could put them on all these different skews of t-shirts, sweatshirts, you know, anything. And then this company, basically, when you sell it, you know,

through your website or whatever, they manufacture it and then they ship it out, but it looks like it's coming from you. It's basically functions as kind of like a 3PL as well. So the opportunity here, so the print-on-demand market size is about 6.8 billion. So it's growing out of like, I think it's like 18% compounding year over year. So it's growing super quickly, which is crazy when you think about it. The opportunity, I think, right now for somebody is go and you basically make mockups of the print-on-demand products. And people are already doing this traditionally, like a photographer, they would go and they'd shoot these super aesthetic, like basically of whatever skew that they're trying to sell, right? And there's all these items that are the most popular.

You can literally go to Printify or any of these print-on-demand sites and sort by most popular. and you'll see which of the items sell most often, right? So here's the angle, though, in the AI age. If I go and I prompt mid-journey, make me an image, you know, blah, blah, blah, aesthetic, here's the setting, the whole thing, but make them wearing a Gildan 2000 shirt, which is a skew, it's going to know what that is, and we've done this, because it trained itself off of all these images that say Gildan 2000 in it, right? So it understands what that is.

So there's this opportunity here, I think, to basically go. And just like we were talking with the cricket idea, same strategy, target people with the print on the man interest. You make them where it's like a drop pack of like, you know, here's a hundred or 50 different mockups of the Gildan 2000 shirt. But you have every variation. And you can go and find these keywords. If you just do Gildan mockup, right, you're going to find all these variations on like

Semrash or HRFs. and from that, I think you could build out the same type of company. It's just like an unlimited subscription. They get access to these constantly. You're constantly updating and just running it. And then as new skews drop or whatever, you just go and you refresh that. And then as aesthetics change, you go and you refresh that, etc. And probably the angle that I would think about this with is like go to something like Etsy

or any of these like these print-on-demand shops. You can find them all over. Find which are the best-selling products and the aesthetic that that product tabs currently, right? So maybe it's like Boho or whatever, right? Drop that into an AI and you'd be like, defined how this image looks. It lists out, okay, here's the aesthetic, whatever. And then you're like, okay, cool, I'm going to go generate all of these mockups. Now, the layer up from this is then you build a mockup generator. So you have all these images of Gildan 2000s that are in a Boho

style. And you're like, cool. Like, I just built this graphic that I want to be the tab go on top of that. And you basically have it where it's like, you know, you've designated this space. where it's like we're going to, you know, put that image on it. It does the overlay. So it looks like it's actually on the shirt, like the whole thing. And then you bulk generate, you know, we'll say 10 different variations. So it's basically a mock up generator that is a part of that as well. And I think that this is a, again, another million dollar a year company, if not $10 million a year, just based on the market size and how much sales, how much is happening in this space.

Can't believe you just gave that one for free. dude I this is all these things I wish I had time to build right like I sit here and I just like when I can't sleep and I'm in pure insomnia this is the things I think about I was just thinking about the epic gardening and like what I would do this is what I was thinking about this morning when I was like laying in bed it's like oh like I was him this is how I would do this and it was like it would just be a programmatic SEO play and then I you know naturally that's what I spent portion of this morning looking at is like all the angles to base. basically go and build out just like a massive website to increase their volume. Real quick. Real quick on that. Real quick on that. So he's a big YouTuber. I think he must have a million subscribers at this point.

And I believe he started- Is it's Kevin? I think it's Kevin, right? Kevin, I think he started selling seeds, different, you know, right? So rare seeds. Yeah. What would you do, you know, what's your advice to Kevin? The only reason I say this is because someone else might be like,

oh, I'll go and do that. Yeah. So I would look at like seeds, there's thousands of them, right? Which means there's millions of keyword variations for all those different seeds. So what's great when you have an e-commerce website that has a ton of skews that you're selling, you can basically mix and match like all of the different products that you're selling. This is how marketplaces actually work, right? Like if you look at an Etsy or Amazon, they have millions of landing pages that are dynamically created based off of the keywords that they're seeing people search for within the platform that they're ranking for on Google, etc.

So with AI now, you can basically do this and you can build out these massive sites when you're just a small company, right? There's actually a business that my co-founder and IMAX were thinking about building at one point. We ended up going with Swell and that's like, you know, what we're shipping on currently. But there's this opportunity to basically approach Shopify stores that have massive amounts of listings. And you're like, yo, like you've got 10,000 skews. We're going to programmatically dynamically spin up a million different landing pages. I'm going to go and I'm going to do auto indexing using Google's indexing API. For every key that you have, you can do 200 calls a day.

You can have 20 different accounts or 20 different projects on a Google Cloud account. So right there, that's what? That's 4,000 submissions a day that you can do to ask for crawl budget. And this can all be done. I mean, we built this whole thing out when we got somebody to pay us like three grand to do this. And then again, we just ended up going in a different direction just because we saw more market pull. But with all that said, the angle here is you basically take the same. products, but you can mix them up in all these different ways and build all these landing pages.

And a lot of the times what ends up happening is it's the same products. There's the same best selling products for XYZ seeds, right? We'll say like daffodils or whatever there's carnation, any of these different variations. But there's all of these long tail keywords that are being searched for that. And if you build landing pages for this, like I've seen this on websites that I've worked on where it's like we ship 10,000 landing pages and 14 days after publishing these, like just publishing them, like not even doing any indexing. We were accounting for almost 30% of the organic traffic that was happening on the site on a daily basis, right?

So increased it by 30% in 14 days and also increased the organic click volume by about 10% in 14 days. And so that's his company, great example of this. And you basically just build out this massive site and you turn it into our marketplace. And honestly, what I would probably then do, as soon as you have all of that search volume, you have all that domain trust, etc., then you open it up as a marketplace, a gardening marketplace where vendors can come on and you basically like charge a listing fee just a classic marketplace that play and you take a percentage of whatever the sales are that they're doing but i think that's that's that's the you know if i was in his shoes like that is what i would do and that's the

path i would follow and again this is peak manic insomnia so how i like you this is exactly how i love you but anyway hell yeah illiterate and manic as hell you know it man That's the only way I know how to live. Just gas down. I have two modes. It's either I'm like laying flat and not doing anything or I'm going as fast as I can. And that's how I like cities. That's how I like my life.

It's like either the biggest city you've ever been in or like in the middle of the woods. Like, you know, it's just both sides of the spectrum. It's the only place I know how to live. Cool. All right. Next one. AI and grants. Again, one of these has stumbled upon just looking at data.

And so grants, the industry, grant management software, the market size is $2.5 billion. Insane, had no idea. This is just like writing grants and submitting them and seeing if you got the money back, right? So I looked at the search volume in relationship. So AI grant finder, search volume for it, AI grant writer, search following for it. it's not a ton, but it's like growing quickly. And I think people are just realizing this is possible. So I think there's a market to punch in through here.

So what this looks like is totally a software play and AI power software play. I'm imagining what it ends up being is like it's an all in one solution where it's like you put in the type of, you know, information about your company and then access to all of the grant, you know, basically aggregation websites. And then what the AI does is it goes and it ranks stacks the grant opportunities against each other, based off of your information, finds the ones that are most likely for you to get money off of and you can factor in,

okay, what's the size, et cetera? And then you basically build a writer then on top of that. So it has your company's information and then it has what the grant is asking for, you know, whatever it is you need to provide to like from a proposal standpoint. And the AI is bridging that gap

to create, you know, to basically get this money for you. And I know the space is massive. So this is how most HUD housing is actually built. So a builder will go and they'll basically write, for grant money. So they can get this building, you know, basically subsidized for free.

And then 20 years after the building has existed, they'd then own that outright, right? But the government just built this thing that they're renting for is because they have to hit these affordable housing, like minimums. For my understanding, again, this isn't where I spend a lot of time. This isn't the space that I'm deeply in. But I had a friend that worked at one of these companies. She was just like, this is all she did was like basically manage a team that wrote grants for this builder. right so anyway yeah so this idea would actually rip it especially in in countries that are less like more socialist than the United States so thousand percent I did a quick uh perplexity search

um I'm here in Canada for the summer and um like just for students the Canadian government gives 3.2 billion dollars a year uh for grants And then you have film and art and you know what I'm talking about. So it's just. And no one, not no one, but most people don't want to actually go through the work and filling a grant. So this idea makes a lot of sense to me. Totally.

And the distribution play here is just copy Jenny AI. Look at their playbook. And basically that's the distribution mechanism. It's the same thing. Right. Do influencer type stuff that levels up into SEO. And I mean, I'm seeing this more and more. And I'm seeing software companies more and more.

basically do partnerships with the largest influencers in a space that are currently basically shilling some type of software that's in their category. And then they're like, yo, we're going to give you an actuality share, whatever, 5%, or something. And you're going to do X amount of posts or whatever, just, of course, to promote this thing. Like right at this moment, right, they're only getting whatever that percentage fee is from whatever the affiliate commission. And they're like, oh, if I can own this company, it's a way more valuable asset, right? I'm already promoting this other software that I'm an affiliate on.

How do I create this partnership with it? That's an idea in itself, by the way. You just, you look at what creators and celebrities are, are shilling naturally. Yep. And you can start with software and then just approach them and be like, hey,

I see your chilling Capcut. I'm going to go create a Capcut competitor for you. Exactly. Exactly. 100%. I think that's the new future is I think what's going to happen. And I think it's changing what the fuck, like where is venture going to fit into that?

Like you're telling me that like, I'm going to write you a check and then you're going to give 5% of this company away to this influencer. Like I think that traditional VC is going to look at that and be like, what do you mean? That's what we're doing. Like absolutely not. But what that does, I think the leverage has changed within all of this, right? Like now, if you want to be an excellent VC, like you have to have distribution. Like it's more important that ever.

I'm working with this VC company or this firm right now. We're growing their podcast email newsletter, right? Because they're like, yo, we're realizing like, this is how we want to be competitive. Like, we have to have distribution. Like, we have to create inbound of the best founders in the world. And it's to your, I think you said this on a different show that we were, that we recorded, but like, people think A16D is a venture company. It's like, no, they're a media company that does venture, right?

It's the opposite. It's the other way around. And I challenge every person that's listening to this to think about this now. You're no longer a company that makes media. You're a media company that makes products. No longer a product company that makes media. You're a media company that makes products. And I think that that is the thing that's happening.

And as soon as people realize that and adopt this, that's how they're creating competitive edge for themselves and whatever. And this works most effectively in industries that are not software, that are, you know, the grimy, like old school dirt under the fingernails types of businesses. Why do you think Paul Graham built Hacker News? 100%. Because you wanted every person that would be. his inbound target, right? And they curated it in the beginning from my understanding.

Like the things that would go to pay like, you know, top position. It was only the stuff that they found interesting, which naturally over time attracts the people that they want to basically write checks to, right? We have time for one last idea. Cool. All right. This one is a huge one. And I don't really know, I again, stumbled on this data and I just find it interesting. So it's a larger trend that's happening. But so nobody, a lot of people who know this, but I studied economics in college. This is actually what I'm really interested in. It's like big data trend analysis.

I always joke like I'm a practicing economist, which is they don't exist. That's called being, you know, an entrepreneur doing business, which again, they don't exist. So what's happening right now is that basically all of the states are having to write these documents for solar wind farms. Which geographies in the states are the best places to basically put wind and like to do renewable energy in that geography in that state? So if you go and you search, you know, Washington, best place for solar wind farm, Washington or best place for solar wind farm, Oregon. All of these public documents exist documenting, okay, here's the places where the wind's consistent. here's the energy that can produce per acre of land that exists there,

etc. So I think there's this opportunity. I saw this and immediately I'm just like, okay, gold mine. This is basically signaling where everybody's going to build these things. And I'm still working out the numbers. I'll probably actually publish everything that we're, because again, this is, I find this interesting. This is what I do in free time with all the free time I have.

But the, I think the angle here, there's a couple different angles, is basically like some of these areas. Like you can get an acre of land. Like we just found one where it was like $140, right, for an acre of land. And that acre of land, when you put wind on it, it's in one of these geographies that they're saying is like a high, a high, it's like an energy dense area for wind. And that acre of land can produce like $1,400 a year when you rent out the space. When you put one of these turbines on it, you can, the payback on the shit is insane, Greg. Okay, so an acre of land, again, imagine it costs you, we'll say $1,000, right?

You can get these turbines for every, and I'm probably going to mess up this information, so people correct us, but it's going to be close. But for every megawatt of energy like turbine that you produce, you can get them for about a million three. So you're into this thing for 1.4, right? And you need about an acre to an acre and a half per megawatt, from my understanding. What that turns into is that when you sell the energy that that turbine can produce, again, this is just based off of like quick Google search stuff.

We're going to do like probably a deeper document on this whole thing. But when you look at the energy that that can produce, it's in the range of $600,000 per year when you're selling it on the open market. I don't know what the margins are on any of this, but that's like the amount of energy that a single turbine can produce is that number. So that means that's true, right? That your payback period on this investment is 2.4. years, right? I'm over here and I'm looking at this and I'm thinking, holy fucking shit,

like this is going to be an absolute gold rush, right? Like, we think about what happened in, you know, wildcat oil days. Like, it's the same thing. They're defining these areas that are going to be high value. And like this was happening during that same period where you had, basically geologists were going and looking at these areas and saying, hey, this area is like strong likelihood oil, right? Like how did Getty, you know, make all of his, money. He used the data that the geologists were using. And that's like the angle that. And so I think there's a bunch of different plays here. I think there's like an angle where it's like you build a website that's aggregating all of these areas. They're like it's specific zip codes a lot of

the times. So anytime land like, you know, just land like raw land comes up in those areas. It comes up on that site. You're basically scraping all that. You're aggregating it and you have some type of email notification. I think that's the software play that's probably in here. The other plays you go and you, you know, you build basically a fund. and go and you buy up these locations. And I mean, right now the government's subsidizing these commercial, you know, projects. Like it's like 30% basically tax credits that you get back on this shit.

So you're telling me I can buy a turbine for it's one, you know, whatever, 1.3, but you're getting it for 800K. I mean, shit, that's a fucking, that's a, that's a residential home right now. Like that's insane. And so the crazy part about this too is like, again, if that payback period is right and please, somebody that knows way more about this. Like send me the, send us the information in the data because I'm, you know,

it's obsessed with this right now. And I want to know. And again, we're going to do all this research, but this is like just the last week of stuff that I've collected. So that payback period is 2.4 years. The average lifespan of one of these turbines is 30 years, right? So that means that 20, whatever, 27 out of the 30 years that this thing is exists. It's making you money, basically.

It's printing 600K a year. Again, just using what the market is paying for that. Again, there's a margin in there somewhere. I'm just using that. We'll talk to say that's top line revenue. So if you have a hundred of these things, right, that are running on a wind farm, like that, I mean, you just do the math, right? Like, that's 60 million. Sorry, yeah, that's 60 million. Yeah. Like, scale it up to 1,000. That's 600 million. Scale that up to 10,000. Like, it gets insane very quickly, right? And we're not talking about like massive things. And the government is investing in this. There's tailwinds behind it. The data is public. I think this is like, this is a massive thing.

that's way above my pay scale, but something that's very interesting that I'm looking at, like, you know, that's a 40-year time horizon type of deal. Yeah, I like it. Not enough people are talking about the tax benefits from it. There's a guy by the name of Anker Nagpal. He started carry.com. He didn't talk specifically about wind, but he did talk about solar. And I didn't know if, like, I don't know if you know this, but there's like crazy.

tax benefits if you invest in a commercial solar project. I had no idea. Yeah, upfront federal tax credit. There's depreciation that offsets federal and state. And you get the income stream from the project. So for example, he tweeted this. He was like, if you invest a million dollars in a solar project, you get 40% tax credit up front.

So it's literally $400,000 against your tax bill. That's number one. Then you get to depreciate the assets. it with time. So that's essentially a, he calls it a phantom loss that you deduct against your taxes. So these projects can be fully depreciated minus half the tax credit over five years. And then you get the income stream. So, you know, he, he says, you know, if you get five percent for 20 years, that's 50K a year. So he says, let's put it all together. For a million dollar investment, you get $400,000 tax credit upfront, $800,000 in federal depreciation, $800,000 in state

depreciation and then 50,000 a year for 20 years. And then I almost did, so I didn't believe it, honestly. So I texted like one of the, an entrepreneur who, who develops tons of these projects. He's in this space. He's in the space. So I was like, there's, I just said, I just texted it. I sent him the link to that tweet. Where do I send a bag? I was like, because I was, I was, I was suss, you know. So I was like, what have I been doing not investing in solar my whole? whole life. And then he said, lots of challenges making it work for W2 employees, but if you're not, it's amazing for business owners and high net worth folks. Lots of brain damage learning the tax code and finding slash diligence in deals. But yes, it's great and a great investment.

I mean, that's probably a company they spend out though, right? It's like you spend out this investment arm and also the tax code arm that's service clients that are investing in this. And they're paying you a percentage and you have some, you know, whatever, some type of fee that's built. So something I found fascinating is that last year in 2023, there was 10x the amount of investment in wind than there was in solar. Interesting. Even though solar is cheaper. Why is that? No idea. But this is just what's happening. I think it's like, so my, my girlfriend's from the semiconductor space, and she's a material science engineer. She did a bunch of shit in neuromorphic stuff. Basically way smarter than me, right? She can read. And so the,

What she said is that the upkeep on these solar panels is the challenge because there's breakage that occurs naturally, right? It's like a fucking piece of glass. So if like hail happens or you got to clean them off and those types of things, just like a lot of moving parts that are existing within a single unit. And so when you scale that up, it gets, you know, you have a lot of nodes that can go wrong, basically. Now in contrast, when you look like a turbine, it's like, yo, it's just a spinning, big spinning thing, right? The challenge is the manufacturing of them and the transport. Like, that's the issue. I mean, I don't know if you've ever been on a remote highway and, you know,

whole section is cut off because one of the wind blades is taking up both lanes and, you know, like that that's something that is happening, right? And so I think that they're figuring this out and the costs are coming down with this, but it's already cheaper than natural gas. And natural gas, it looks like can't go cheaper. So what's going to naturally happen in the market and solar is still getting cheaper. That's the crazier part with this. Like it looks like wind is kind of at its like, you know, threshold of decreasing costs. But solar looks like it can go further down. So this transition is going to happen, right?

Like the market is already solving for that. Like it's going to be cheaper than ever before to produce energy through these materials. Or sorry, through these, through wind and solar. Now it's just a matter of time. It's just like how can you basically ride this larger wave that's happening? And again, to your point, I don't even think you have to build these things. Just writing checks into this, right? Like you go and you build these other businesses.

But I mean, it's no brainer, right? what you just laid out. It's like, of course I'm going to win. Like it's going to win. We all know business, right? Like the thing that we're using currently and there's something that's cheaper, okay, yes, right? Also, the thing that I found super interesting is like a lot of the states that you

wouldn't think that would be investing in these renewables actually are. Texas is the leader right now. They're producing the most renewable energy in the U.S. And like historically, I mean, that is where oil comes from, right? Like the oil, like all of the old families there are all oil. families, right? But they're investing in this and they're just looking at, I mean, it's just, it just comes down to dollars and cents, right? This is cheaper to do this than it was. Also, these, I think it's very interesting when you start to think about this as a resource,

a natural resource that this, like traditionally natural resources when you look at them, it's like, you know, does that have timber, does have mining? Does that have these, you know, water rights, etc. And this is now an added natural resource. Suddenly, these states are becoming more valuable. Like, they're natural resources that they have. Like, you just invented two new categories. Do you get a lot of sun? Oh, do you have a lot of land? Cool. Like, you just solar farm, right? So when you look at like Northern Nevada as an example, like that's an asset that now suddenly exists, right? And again, do you have an area where it's like constant wind that's humming, right, and access to a grid? Okay, that's a solar

farm. And so you got this natural resource that now is coming to an existence. And so I think whenever this happens or has happened historically, like you see generational wealth come into existence. So yeah, that's, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's and that's, the whole thing was, you know, I have a tear coming slowly down my face. You're, you're an angel. I can hear the violin. Somewhere back there. Somewhere back there. If you've, if you've, if you've made it this far in the episode, the only, the only way we know to create more episodes is if you subscribe on YouTube, like on YouTube, comment on YouTube, we read the comments. And, uh, you know go check cody out he's a phenomenal twitter just google him stuff will come up it should and uh and on youtube if i don't come up i'm doing it wrong he's doing my job wrong and i'm very bad actually that's true but we'll include some links uh in the in the youtube description anyways thanks again cody you're a mother g thanks for hosting man i always always enjoy it you always make me think about it in a different way it's like so valuable to me so

my pleasure i'll see you later man later homie