The Side Hustle King: "Make $20K+/month without money, luck, or experience"

All right, I'm gonna say one sentence and then you could decide if this episode is for you. If you're the type of person who's got the entrepreneurial itch, you want to do something, you wanna start a new business, you wanna get that extra five, ten, fifteen thousand dollars of income coming in every month. But you don't know which idea to do, which idea to start with. Maybe you don't even have great ideas.

This is the episode for that person. We brought on Chris. He's sort of the side hustle king. He loves to find simple, no money up front, easy businesses that can pull in cash quickly and then can grow from there. And so Chris came on, he's got about five ideas for us. I think you will love this episode. All right, we got Chris Corner here. You are back because you have uh an absolute pipeline, an absolute full stack of business ideas at all times.

Like, you know, what what's the um open carry? He's open carry with business ideas. If if people haven't seen it, you got a great uh Instagram channel and YouTube channel podcast as well where you talk about um different business ideas. And so that's what I want to do today. Dude, I I have so many uh it's not Friday, but I feel like we need to call this no filler Friday because there's no filler today.

All stuff, no fluff. All right. I have a friend who uh wanna ask you this question on his behalf. I have a friend who is a real estate agent and he does well. He makes, I think, yeah, let's call it$250,000,$300,000 a year. Been doing that for 10 years. But he's bored. And he wants a little more scale. He wants a little more and he doesn't feel a sense of progress, you know. People always want a sense of progress. And so

He feels like um, you know, it's pretty hard to scale what he's doing there. He's always poking around at, you know, should I buy this vending machine? Should I do this side hustle, pressure washing, whatever it is. Where does your head go? As like, look, if I was trying to help you get off the real estate path and maybe have a more entrepreneurial path, what do you what do you sell? What do you tell them?

I would tell them to start reselling. Um, reselling like uh Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items. So you spend one, two hundred bucks, you get what's called a resale certificate, which tells the government, I don't need to pay sales taxes on this because I'm passing it on. A lot of these websites require that number from you in order to sell you liquidation items.

There's a website called Gov Deals. There's a website called B Stock. On B Stock, you buy anything that people return to Costco. I've done this myself, another business I've done. I bought$7,000 worth of washers and dryers for$250 each on average. And I'm selling them on Facebook Marketplace for$750 to$900 each. It's an amazing business because you don't need a warehouse, you don't need a bunch of space, just a garage, and it's all sold on Facebook Marketplace.

I'm on B stock right now and I see that I can buy two pallets. Of men's gray champion sweatpants, joggers. For forty eight thousand dollars in New Jersey. That's great. I'm gonna get twelve hundred units. What's the price there? So forty eight thousand. I get twelve hundred units, forty bucks. That's not even a deal. What what's going on? Oh wait, wait. Oh no. That's the retail value. Yeah.

I could buy this for seven grand. So I can buy it for five bucks a pop. Um and it's saying that the the the standard retail value of this would be forty bucks a pop. And so you're saying you're gonna go buy You probably wouldn't buy sweatpants, my guess, but uh what what would you be looking for product category wise? I like large appliances and outdoor furniture. I think those are both great, especially this time of year. Not electronics.

Because there's a lot of variables back to binary outcomes. There's a lot of things that can break. There's a lot of testing involved. I don't really like clothing personally, but. This is a great business because you don't need to find customers. You just list them on Facebook Marketplace. All your customers are there. You have to buy right and you have to fulfill, but the harder part is finding customers and you don't have to do that here.

So I'm looking at uh I get fifty-eight used refrigerators. I'm buying them for thirty-four dollars a unit. Thirty-four dollars a unit for a refrigerator. Telling you. What's going on here? I might do this myself. I might actually go do this just on sheer principle. A thirty-four dollar fridge. Uh I I have to find fifty-eight of them though. Um and then you know, you go to Facebook Marketplace.

And you go look at what the fridges are selling for. You look at the volume and you look at how much the the price point is. Yeah, before you buy'em. Before I buy, I'm gonna go check out and you're looking for two probably two signals. One is a price signal. So what is the going rate for these things? And then how do you get a sense of is this gonna move? Uh you watch it for a week and you see if they move, you message the seller, you what do what do you do?

You literally list it before you even bid on it. And then you just ghost people just to s just to understand. Yeah, and then if they're like, All right, I'm ready to come get it, you're like, actually I haven't bought it yet, you know, which is fine. You're being honest, but you're you're getting signals ish. You're getting signals from the market before you take any risk. that there's enough demand for it at a specific price point.

And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook Marketplace. My sister is moving right now. And they're listing like random r like here's a hat. Here's like an old hat. Like it's just a baseball cap. And the guy drove forty-five minutes to get a free cap. Uh you know, put the put this is like here's one drawer. The w not even the cabinet. It's just a drawer. So we're gonna go pay seven dollars for the drawer. It's unbelievable the amount of like liquidity in the Facebook marketplace.

It's unreal. Well, and but the annoying thing is listing all this stuff. It's tedious. But right, I just saw this uh TikTok of a guy that used Claude Cowork. He just took pictures of all his stuff. He uploaded it to Claude. He said, Here's my stuff, research what it costs, list it. Talk to people on my behalf. Here's my calendar availability. I don't care when, as long as it's open, have people come to my house and pick it up.

And he did. He sold ev he like he was moving. He needed to sell everything in his house and Claude sold all of it for him. So like that even the tedious part is now fixable. That's kind of amazing actually. You could tell it to do the whole thing. You can say, hey, go look on B stock, create fake listings, decide which one is going to be the most profitable for me, and then run the whole process. There's no reason that, you know, ClaudeBot couldn't do that. No, totally.

Four pallets of denim uh onesies we could get. Three dollars two dollars a year. Sounds like a damn. Um all right, this is a very addictive website. This is this is very fun. Uh I gotta get off B stock right now, otherwise I will uh lose my afternoon. Hey, real quick, if you like this episode of Chris and you want more, he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas, just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast.

And he's giving it away for free. So if you just go to the QR code that's on the screen or the link in the description below, you can get his database of ideas. And these are like his blueprints. for companies that he thinks can work. And this guy's done it before. He's built a com a bunch of businesses that are successful. So go ahead, take advantage of this resource. And now back to the zippet. All right. So reselling is where you tell them to start.

And you'd say that's the right place to start because what, you're optimizing for low risk? Because that's a lot of work. Yeah. Uh I don't know if I kind of implied, I was like, my friend's kind of looking for a magic bullet. Like just one thing I do that's going to work really well. Um, you know, if I told him, hey, get out there and hustle, he's like, well, I know that. I've been I've been trying to avoid that part. Um what's what's a business that's like um

More of a business and less of a garage sailing side hustle. Mm-hmm. probably implementing AI into small businesses. Like we talked about this last time. I we might have talked about it the first time and we'll be talking about it in years because I mean, there's 800,000 management consultants in the United States. That's management, right? Almost a million people that are just management consultants.

In five years, Sean, how many people will be AI consultants? Like to small, medium, large, any size business? Mm-hmm. Every single small business Well, not even small business large and small business. Is right now AI curious, AI hungry, and AI clueless at the same time. Mm-hmm. Those three things, if you're curious and you you they're certain that it can help. They don't really know how. They don't have the time.

And they're, you know, they're not as tech forward as somebody who just eats and eats breeze and stuff. But like that combination creates a ton of opportunity. But that's a that's a still pretty broad picture. What's a more um focused point of attack for something like that? You go to your chamber of commerce and offer to give a free tutorial on AI. Teach them what claws.

Prompting skills. Yeah, for free. Vive coding. And then you've got your buddy in the back with a clipboard and you sign people up for AI audit. Yeah. One foot in the door, you get the free audit to get your second foot in the door. And then by that point, you're a an AI god to them. You're a genius. And you're the only AI genius that that business owner knows. Right. At that point, it's take my money.

d have you found a repeatable a repeatable use case where you're like, okay, maybe it's for one class of business like dentists or lawyers or uh restaurants or whatever. Or It's just a repeatable uh solution. So it's like, oh, pretty much every business needs this thing that AI can do for them.

Right. You know, when when the internet started, every business kind of needed a website. But it was just starting from scratch. Nobody had a website by definition at the beginning. And over time, everybody ended up getting a website.

So you knew that like just making the website was like the killer app. It was like the killer service that everyone would need once. And then you could sell it to them, you could maintain it for them and do whatever for them, you know, going forward. Okay. What's the equivalent of that today in today's world with AI? Voice agents. Pick up the phone, answer the phone for you.

Yep. And then chatbots uh second, kind of a distant second. Voice agents are really good. The latency is not that bad at all anymore because the LLMs are smart enough to only be trained on your content, your data. So it's not like anytime a customer says, What are your operating hours? It doesn't need to go like read the whole training manual. Right. It just answers immediately. So AI voice agents are like the best foot in the door for small businesses right now.

That's cool. I like that. It would be very interesting. to hear from people who have done this. Uh if you if you've done this, uh reach out. Because everybody's kind of talked about this idea of like help businesses implement. Yeah. I I think Mark Cuban is like, hey, if you're a kid, you know, if you want to be successful, go help businesses implement. I think it's like obvious. However, I haven't heard

Heard a ton of stories. Maybe this is just me not being kind of looking for it, but I haven't heard a ton of stories of the specifics around this. And I'm always curious more about the specifics than the general. So for example, um I saw this AI tool that was for med spas. And they were like, look, every med spa.

offers and yeah, I'm a little out of my depth here, but every med spa is basically offering some sort of beauty service to somebody. So somebody's gonna come in, they look one way, they want to look another way, and they have to believe that the med spa will get them from A to B.

That's all that's all a bed spot has to do for them. And so what people were trying to do was figure out how can you through whether it's AI voice agents, a tool on your website, a quiz, and upload your photo, and I will show you the result of this product. on your face, right? Like something like that. That's a pretty killer sales app.

For every med spa. And so going into med spa specifically and just being like, cool, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward. And we're gonna build basically like a little sales tool for you that lives on your website that gives the customer the confidence that when they, you know, it opens up their webcam and it

Scans and then it says, Hey, we think you're a good candidate for XYZ. Here's some photos of before and afters, right? Like whatever it is. Some version of that. And if you can go get, you know. five hundred to a thousand med spas because they all have the same need, right? Like they're not this is a universal need for all ten thousand of them. And you go get five hundred or a thousand, let's just use a thousand, a thousand med spas that are gonna be paying you

You know, 50, 100 bucks a month. So now you're doing$50,$100,000 a month off of, you know, finding one specific pain point for one specific type of business where off-the-shelf AI can actually solve their problem. They're just not aware of it and don't know how to implement. Yeah. So I can think of two specific examples, one of them for medium sized businesses and one for small businesses. The medium sized business guy I interviewed on my podcast.

Kerner Office last week. This dude was name dropped by Omjad, the CEO founder of Replit on the Joe Rogan show. So Omjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like, this guy, John Cheney, he he started a business selling like custom vibe coded replit apps into medium sized businesses for fifteen thousand dollars. 15 up front and then like I think fifteen hundred uh per month or something like that for like one call a month. He did two point five million his first year.

60% net margins. This year he's gonna do eight million uh with fifty percent net margins. All built on Replit, just vibe coding custom apps for medium-sized businesses. What's an example? outside guy. Custom app for a medium sized what does that even mean? So let's say you're an HVAC business with, you know.

30 crews, he's gonna build your you your own CRM. So you're not paying like Service Titan or any of the others$4,000 a month. So immediately you get to capture the savings and you get to have your own CRM just for you. So it's not even like AI enabled. It's just a replacement CRM that's built exactly as you have always wanted it. Or like an accounting practice that builds you a communication tool or something to send PLs and balance sheets to all of your customers.

in an automated way um every month. So that's like a higher ticket medium business, medium-sized business. And then another guy, he does this for barbershops. He charges$2,500 up front and then$250 a month. That's kind of like a good ratio. 10% of whatever you charge up front, you charge per month. And his pitch to the barbershops are like, Hey, you're cutting hair all day, but people need to make appointments. So I'm just gonna make you an AI voice agent.

that will answer the phone as you for you. If they ask if you're an agent, an AI agent, it will tell them, but it won't be up front and say up front, you know, that I'm an agent. Right. So it will say, all right, what time? It's just synced with your calendar. And it books slots for you. So you will make more money and never talk on the phone again. That's the pitch. Make more money, never talk on the phone again. Don't lose trust with your customers because

That's like the big pushback from business owners is I don't want a robot answering my phone. And it it's like, dude, your customers need their problem solved, whether it's a robot or you or text, they need their hair cut.

So yeah, net of net, they would prefer to talk to you, but they also just need a haircut. And so they don't mind. So he just copies and pastes the same voice agent over and over because they're all barbershops. He just swaps out the name and the operating hours and Makes the calendar connection, he's good to go.

I like that. I like the barber I like the barber voice agent. The niche of the niche. Were there any other fun ideas that you had on this list that you wanted to talk about? What's the snail mail club?

Yeah. So that is that's kind of blowing up. That snail mail subscription businesses are what like physical box subscription businesses were five to ten years ago. literally just a letter with a stamp and you can send your own photography, your own poetry, letters. My wife started one where she sends recipes. It's it's like a cookbook club and she

She sends recipes to women and they cook it and every month has a theme, Greece, Italy, or whatever. These are exploding right now, mostly driven by organic uh TikTok videos. So uh sorry, sorry, explain what so the your title of this video is She Makes$1,000 a day sending letters. Who? Who who is making and how is she making a thousand dollars? Her name's Hannah. She owns the Tiny Post and she writes like a a letter, like a heartfelt letter about. So

her life, whatever she finds important. And then she puts stickers in there and like handmade artwork. Nothing AI generated. Like it's all real. It's all physical. And that's an important part. And she just like is documenting her life and sending things that are important to her to I think like six to seven thousand women every single month. And they love it. And her churn is like 2%. Beautiful pink.

envelopes, nailed it. Um and she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters. Yes, $10 a month. 70% gross margins, 30% net. And she went from zero to 60 K MRR in seven months through like six TikTok videos. All organic, no paids at What is happening? What ten bucks a month? That's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah? What why are people doing this? What is going on? More mail? Who wants more mail?

We want mail. We want to go to the mailbox and open a surprise. We don't want junk mail. This is for us and it's special and it's physical and real. And that's all the rage right now. This is unbelievable. Sorry, I'm just looking through her stuff. This is uh unreal. Wow, the US Postal Service commented on her video saying, Great video. Mind if we repost and use it? That's awesome. That's crazy. Okay. How did she get the people to do it? She had a big following or no?

No, she didn't. She just posted TikTok videos about what she was doing. Like her most viral video was a hidden camera in the kitchen as she explained to her husband what this business was that she was starting. So he was like. not getting it. He's like an MBA finance guy and he's like, you want to send letters? And like that video got two million views and brought her like her first 1,500 customers, all organic.

Uh, okay. This is pretty crazy. So you said people are doing this as like a trend now? Det er! So my wife and I uh and a friend, we put on a nonprofit farmers market for kids just last Saturday. And I was out there like taking videos of these kids' businesses and one of the seven-year-old girls and her four year old sister.

had their own snail mail subscription business. And there was a QR code to a Shopify site and they like draw pictures by hand and send them out for 10 bucks a month. Like it's incredible. Wow. You know, I've always wanted something like this for kids. Like, you know, kids have kids create so much art, right? And like

It'd be cool if someone like cared about their art or like you know, they got something back. And so I I I was wondering like, is there some sort of pen pal mechanism that the parent would pay so that the kids could kind of like stuff the envelope with their art that they made that week or that month, send it out, and then they receive some sort of like either message back, video back, or a letter back or something back where it's like,

You know, oh my God, I loved it. Yeah, whatever. Something from someone somewhere. Whether it's kids sending to kids, or it's kids sending to like old people. I don't know. I didn't know what the mechanism was. But I feel like there should be something like this for kids' art because kids generate so much art.

And their excitement when someone's excited about their art is like so tangible, so heartwarming that as a parent I would gladly pay ten bucks a month for my kids to feel like they had their little like their version of their Etsy store for their own art. You know what I mean?

Yeah. No, I love that. That should be a thing. Uh there's something that's kind of similar where you can mail in all of your kids' artwork to a woman and she will like basically lay it all out on a canvas and make it like a a super large mural of your kids' artwork that's permanent. Send the whole canvas back to you. That's a cool idea. I like that. Yeah. Um that's another type of thing where it's like these heartwarming visual businesses that just could pop on TikTok.

And you just keep you know, th TikTok becomes your customer acquisition funnel for th for things like that. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business.

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So um, you know, you've given a bunch of small stuff. Uh and small I mean in a like in a positive way, which is like quick, easy to start, accessible, affordable, uh, doesn't take a ton. Uh I'm curious, do you have any ideas that are on the other side of the spectrum, maybe a little more complicated or a little harder to start? But wow. Well the opportunity is l is large from your perspective. Yeah. So did I ever tell you about the time where I I got a job at Amazon a few years ago?

He did not. As a pick pack shipper. To spy on them. Okay, so you go to the warehouse. Yep. So I owned at the time a third-party logistics business and I wanted to learn how Amazon did it. And so I went and got a job. I stood in line, you know, 15 bucks an hour. They trained me how to drive a forklift and I loved it. I ate it up.

I like in the trainings, everyone else was like half asleep and I'm like, okay, what what about this? And like my manager was like, Oh, you're gonna be a manager here. Your management material. And the whole time I'm like, dude, I'm like a a secret spy. But I walked away with an idea that I think could be a billion-dollar idea, and that's providing food to the three or four million Amazon, it doesn't have to be Amazon, but Amazon warehouse workers.

There are no food options. These warehouses and distribution centers are usually kind of out in the middle of nowhere. There might be like a a, you know, a McDonald's or something. They have like a cafeteria with vending machines, but it's all garbage food. And I I thought like, man, if I were to start like partner with a catering business and put a flyer with a QR code on every car during every shift.

and just have them'cause they all have like the same lunch break. Right. Basically they could pre-order food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone.

Ten bucks a pop. There's thousands of employees per warehouse. This is something that would take some logistics. It would take some funding. But someone's gonna win here. I re I re it's not like one that I'm passionate about that I'm about to do. It's hard to do. But it's one that I think someone will do. Yeah.

St uh uh that's interesting. So like where's um what's an example? Where's like uh the Amazon warehouse? Where's the one that you went to? Was it out was it like this? Did you see the problem when you were there? Yeah. Yeah, that's how I got it. It was in like like Irving or something, Irving, Texas. But there's like 32 Amazon warehouses in Dallas Fort Worth alone. Like and they're they're as big as like three to six Costco's each.

So there's no shortage of demand and it could be manufacturing, it could be other types of warehouses. Yeah, I wonder like if you could just even brand it as like the whatever eight dollar lunch club or some shit like that, right? And it's basically cool, you sign up for this and you're gonna get an eight dollar lunch every day. of and you just tick the box, you know, what did you want today? Yeah. We have two options, three options each day.

And um and you know, I I've actually seen a couple of companies that are doing really well with um so there's a lot of people trying to do robotic food production, but food production is really, really hard, right? So like

stores like Sweet Green and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls. But every bowl, every salad at Sweet Green, there's like a there's like more combinations of what could be in that salad than particles in the universe type of deal. Right. Cause it's like every every ingredient can be mixed and matched. So it's very difficult to

to arrange for this and then you have to constantly keep all the ingredients stocked inside the machines. It's like a pretty tricky thing to do. But there's a company that was providing these robots to the large c uh companies that do like school lunches, prison lunches.

corporate cafes, basic basically where you're uh or like the uh grab and go options at uh grocery stores where there's gonna be like five things in the tra in the little like refrigerator tray you just grab and go and they're they're sealed with like a a thing. For those, you're basically just scooping the same ingredient.

into four thousand trays and that's the food prep. And so it's way it's like a way more solvable problem because the robot just literally needs to be able to scoop the same portion into the same thing. 3,000 times in a row without getting tired. Well, like that's actually what robots are good at. And so they've been doing pretty well with getting these robots into these, um Large

batch meal prep kitchens. And so I wonder if you could basically do the same thing, but for the the Amazon side, right? Good like you use these warehouses as your as your end customer and you're saying, Cool, I can basically Because I'm doing, you know, 2,000 of the same meal, I can actually have a highly automated, you know, ghost catch in here that's do that's doing the work.

Yeah, I c I think you could still do both. Like I could see a one Amazon warehouse using both options. Like the the warm meal, you know, delivered from somewhere else, and then that as well. Yeah. I would love to see someone just print a bunch of flyers.

put one on each car with a QR code to a stripe link and you know have a menu there and just see how many people pay. Right. Then you know if you don't start the business, just refund them all. But you could do that, you know, with a few hours and thirty bucks and paper. Like I'm just I I love experiments like that. Like what would happen? Like how many people could could I convert with only one flyer? All right. I'm going to go. Let's go tote rentals. Sean, do you know what a tote rental is?

Tote as in like a tote bag? Uh kinda, like a tote rental box, plastic box. Oh okay. That are like the hard plastic square moving boxes that stack on top of each other. Got it? This is Google Trends of Tote Rental as a search term over the last five years. We are spiking. What? What's uh what's the trend that I'm missing out on here? Okay, here's what we're talking about. So

Ironically, everyone has these cardboard boxes from Amazon, but we all also don't have them at hand when we go to move, move house to house. And so tote rentals as a service is a thing. One tote rental basically replaces 400 cardboard boxes over its lifetime. So you've got an eco angle. Um, it's it's like an asset that you pay 20 bucks for and it just pays for itself over and over and over.

You can start the business for a thousand bucks. You work your way into real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can gift to their clients when they sell a home or buy a home. So it's like a good like moving in or moving out gift from a realtor to a to a homeowner. And it's it's different than like an edible arrangements or something generic. So

Homeowners rent these, you drop them off, they pack all their crap in it, then you pick them up later, and you basically pay off the thing in your third or fourth rental. And after that, it's pure profit less any like labor or gas or more time. We, oh man, the OGs will know this. Many years ago, we talked about a business that was doing this on the podcast.

I'm gonna get all this wrong now because it's been a long time. But I believe there was some story where it's like in New York, somebody had basically bought, you know, a couple of thousand dollars worth of these boxes. They're renting them out. The boxes pay for themselves after two months, and then basically it became You know, it's the, you know, small version of a rental property, right? You're renting out equipment. But the beautiful thing about these is.

Thai need. People don't want to own them. There's like no desire to really own these. Uh people need them in the moment to move. You can have them be super branded. And so um it's it can become like a walking billboard, or you can literally even sell the ads based on them. And then their equipment that even though they get kind of battered and bruised, it's sort of expected. So you don't need mint condition boxes in order to make this thing work.

Uh but I I'm saying boxes, but you said you called these totes, tote rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this? So what's the what well what's the story here? I do. I know a guy in uh Fort Wayne, Indiana, of all places. There's like a hundred thousand people there. And he started going through real estate agents. He bought these for himself for a move.

And he I think what he did was he brought lunch to like a Keller Williams office or something and said, Hey, these are tow rentals. They're growing like crazy. Your clients want them. We're gonna give you some for free. Uh de Toton alone's dominating Google. It's got the first five listings. That's him. And there is there is uh, you know, smarter moves to rentals dot com. That's at the bottom of the page. So I don't know, we'll see. Yeah, he's totes on loan. I just looked it up. Okay, cool.

He's crushing it. And let's give him a shot. Yes, his name is David Stilson. All right. So David is out here, twenty twenty-four, and you said he went to the real estate office. He's using them for distribution initially. And uh Okay, so you get thirty boxes for a hundred bucks to help with your move. Yeah, so that's what he does. He sells like packages based on the number of totes that they that they get. And he's doing a few few grand a month.

So a few grand a month. And this is, do you think this is, hey, this this is the type of business that's great, just side income, but going all in on it, maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze, or you think, no, no, no, it's just a matter of time till that's 15K, 20K a month.

Yeah, I think it's it's one of those businesses that's great as either or. It's a perfect side hustle because you can keep your full-time job. It's only a few hours a week. What I love about it compared to other like rental businesses, like a bounce house rental business is With that, those things are freaking heavy. You gotta roll it up. You gotta lug it out there. You have to set up the bounce house. You often have to leave someone there to babysit and make sure kids don't break a leg.

Uh and it's just a pain. But these you just drop it off on the driveway and you come back and get it. Um, so very, very low time investment. Okay. Uh all right, top rentals. And why is this exploding on Google Trends right now? Why why would this be going up? Is it uh you know, the moving's not going up? It's just the rental aspect or wh why why do you think it's spiking right now?

You know, it's like with any of these business ideas, they just have their moment. Like five, ten years ago, it was pressure washing, like roof cleaning, stuff like that. It's just having its moment. And I think it's an a a matter of education. Like People most people would prefer to use this than to have like missized or misshapen cardboard boxes that collapse. They've got to go like scrounge them behind a grocery store or beg their friends in a Facebook group.

or like save their Amazon boxes like it's just a better experience when you consider everything. Oh, dude, if you are using cardboard boxes and you're moving and the just the amount of t setup of each box, taping of each box, labeling, it's it's ridiculous. You're wasting half your time there. All right, I like it. Uh what else you got? What's next? All right. So let's go. Let's go wall printer. What do you know about wall printers, Sean?

A wall printer as in you gotta give me s a few more words. All right, so picture like a 3D printer, except it's on rollers and you bring it inside a retail store and it prints like images on a wall, like a large mural or something like that. All you do is upload a JPEG.

I'm watching it now. So you're you're it's literally like a laser printer, but it's the instead of printing on a piece of paper, it's it can go like a full full wall of a building and it's printing like this video you have here is like a um It's like a corporate office where it's printing a timeline history of the of the company on a wall. Like you would walk into the office and see that. Okay. So I see this. Um tell me more.

So any business could use one of these. Let's say it's a boring corporate office. They want to spice it up a little bit. Let's say it's a restaurant. Like what restaurant wouldn't want an inside or an outside mural? Like any business. you name it any business. And like the tote rentals, this is kind of an educational thing. They didn't know it was possible or

They were paying some local artist like three grand to paint this because it took them like a month, right? This replaces the local artist. Sorry, local artist, not sorry. But a five foot eight wall. To your cost, if you own the printer, which you can get them for between$4,000 and$16,000, you can finance them for like$50 to$150 a month. A five foot, a five by eight foot wall costs you eight dollars in ink and you can sell for that for about eight hundred dollars. So literal 99% gross margin.

You don't need a retail space. You don't need a warehouse. You can keep it in your garage, in your closet at home. You just roll up, upload the JPEG, start printing, pick it back up. Well, okay. AI is telling me that these units cost thirty five to sixty five thousand. I'm guessing those are more heavy duty heavy duty versions of these.

It depends on how high you want to go. That's kind of the differentiator and on the quality of the machine. If you want to go like, if you're doing like a high school gym, yeah, right, putting like the basketball team on there, you're gonna need a a more expensive one. But that's a smaller market.

And I'm guessing you can also upcharge for the graphic design that you're gonna print because they may not have it and you could be like, Oh yeah, we will lay this out. We'll give you the free we'll do the all the designs for free. You just pay us to print it, right? Like and you could even maybe like uh do a little bit of spec work with that'cause you might have templates like in this this example you showed, it's a corporate timeline. Cool. That's a template.

Um, oh, values, that's a template. The menu, that's a template. The you know, whatever, like art about us, founding history, that's a template. And you just basically say, hey, look, I put your brand in this. And you could kind of automate that now with uh with AI. So, you know, just go to their website, pull their about us, put it in our about us template, send it to them as like a hey.

You know, I was at your store. I thought you could put, you know, interest in putting this on the wall. Is it outbound, do you think, to for this? Or you think there's gonna be a lot of enough inbound? I I don't think people know wall printing as a Right. As a thing to go search for even. Yeah, that's kind of like uh tote rentals. I mean, you want me to show show you the uh the Google trends on this? Okay.

I mean, in this in the spirit of a a full disclosure here, there's the Google trends. People are similar. They are not. This is very visual. It's like it's like pressure washing was five, ten years ago. It's fun to watch. You get the time lapse of it and It's perfect for short form video. So that's what you do. You just post organically. Um, you go print some walls for free just to get the content. I mean,

It's eight dollars for the ink. Um, and then you just post it. And then whatever organic pieces of content uh pop off, you just push paid ad spend behind that to a simple lead form and uh He calls it.

You might even be able to do like if you I mean, just to get this business off the ground and go knock on a hundred doors. Go to a hundred businesses and and see what you can do. You can sh t take a binder of your portfolio Um go you know, do a couple for free and then do it do a binder portfolio and see what you can get going or um or you know even before you do your own.

Just take uh you know images off Instagram of what other people did and go around and say, Hey, would you want this? Um just just to even learn like where is the market? Like is there one type of business that's particularly into this, you know, is it real estate agents? Is it you know, whatever whatever it is?

If you go to their website, if you go to thewallprinter.com, the company that sells these machines, the headline, which is just f so funny to be, it just says, instead of saying anything about their product, the headline when you hit the website says, those who never take risks.

will work always work for someone who has. Basically just wow tempting you to become an entrepreneur. This is sort of shaming you into becoming an entrepreneur, which uh honestly is always a bit of a red flag in my book. Any anytime somebody's like really uh aggressive on the uh you know, be your own boss selling you that selling you that dream. I'm I'm always a little skeptical of that, but uh okay, this is interesting. How did you first uh find this wall printing niche?

I saw an Instagram video and Honestly, this is one of those video this is one of those businesses where you don't need to buy the thing and then like hope and pray that you find customers. You can start posting other people's videos and say stuff like, This is what wall printers can do instead of this is what my wall printer did.

Uh or you just go post a Facebook marketplace, generate some leads, throw up an AI generated website, get some leads. Then once you have like some bookings or something, then you go finance a machine. So you've given out two ideas so far that I would call like white belt businesses. Is this the way uh basically businesses you can use do as a starter business that doesn't take ton of capital, ton of time, ton of skill, you don't need a big network.

And you can do these to get to that kind of two grand a month, five grand a month, ten grand a month to start getting that money rolling in and really get in the game as an entrepreneur. Is that is that the right way to frame the ideas that you're drawn to or that you like to share about? Like what G give me like draw a box. What is the what is the label of the box of these ideas?

So all of my ideas are run through like my own personal filter, which is I've started over 80 businesses and I've learned what I hate, what I love, what most people hate, what most people would probably love. And I like to call those binary outcomes. Binary outcome businesses. And that is a business that is just simple. Like you put X in and you get out Y. A custom home building business is not that. A home cleaning business is not that.

I want a business where it's just a very clear defined value that you add and then you get paid and you get a five star review. That's like one of my filters. The other one, which I I heavily biased towards is approachability and affordability. Um, last time I was on the pod, I was talking about like some backyard businesses, if you remember. Yep. In in in ground trampoline, yeah.

Yeah. And I talked about another business, which was like the guy dollhouses kits. Right. Right. You remember that one? Yeah. And s and Sam was like, dude, that that backyard idea sucks. But like I like the dollhouse idea. But like if I were to run this, you can tell I've been thinking about this in the shower like every day since, right? This is like my moment. And Sam's not even here to defend himself. When I run that through my filter, it's like, how many people could launch a guy dollhouse?

subscription business in the world and be successful. And how approachable is that? That's like a Count them on one hand. Yeah, exactly. And like it's not approachable, it's pretty complex actually. Like designs and materials and shipping and all that. Branding, education. The market, all of it. Yeah.

Right. Whereas any dude can go rent an excavator on Facebook Marketplace and start digging a hole for a trampoline. So it's like not sexy, but it's much more approachable and there could be Three guys in every 30,000, you know, person city owning that same business, which is what I love about it. So you like so when you said binary businesses and you said, you know, home cleaning business not one, luxury home builders not one, but

Digging holes for trampolines, in ground trampolines is one. Explain the difference there. Well, why what should why should one one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category, but the second category has some additional benefits? What are what's the difference? Yeah. So I'll just I'll speak to two businesses that I I've actually started and not a hypothetical business like the trampoline one. Um binary outcome. So

We I own a tree trimming business and it's the best business in the world because we need to do one of two things. That's it. We need to remove a tree entirely or we need to trim a tree, like specific branches. So we show up. This one, cool. We cut it down, we throw it in the truck, five star review, 1500 bucks. Right. We've never got less than a five star review ever. And it's not because we're amazing operators. It's just because it's simple. Right.

Conversely, I've owned a house cleaning business. And it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck. We were going through real estate agents because we thought, hey, they have a lot of surface area. Like they're, they're touching and talking to a lot of homeowners on a daily basis so they can refer out all these jobs. And then we had to get 1099s, all these house cleaners, because we didn't want employees. And so we were finding these.

Super unreliable house cleaners. They had a vast array of equipment. They would always show up late. And sometimes the realtor would inspect the house, sometimes the homeowner would. They had varying degrees of quality and preferences. And one would say, Hey, there's a hair on my floor. And the other one like didn't care. It was just

It was a recipe for one star reviews and for low margins and for people not showing up. And it was complex, but it like a complex business is fine if the juice is worth the squeeze and the margins are there or it's high ticket, but it didn't have any of those things. So

And so, you know, most people get tripped up with a business like the tree trimming business where they say, okay, yeah, let's listen to this podcast. I talked about tree trimming. It made sense. Yeah, you go, we go, we trim the trees, we get$1,500. What's not to love? That's awesome. And um, you know, reality will hit as soon as they go start, you know, Sean's.

you know, treesand trims dot com. Go buy the domain. I'm ready. Uh you know, I figure out how to I go watch a couple videos on trimming trees and then No customers, right? And so you always have this like bottleneck of I think for most people, they don't really understand how to get their first ten, hundred customers to start getting the momentum that is required. in order to to to get going in a business. And they sort of have all these false starts.

because they have an idea, they get really excited, they spend a bunch of time on the idea, but not time acquiring customers. So the the the sort of perceived investment goes up and up and up and up and up, but they're not getting any getting any ground yet. And then when they can't really figure out how to get any sales or customers

You know, the excitement fades around the idea and uh they're on to the next one. And I've seen this pattern over and over again in people in my life who wanna be entrepreneurial but don't quite make it happen. And so What is your method or, you know, let's take the tree trimming example. Let's say I'm now in uh a different city than you are, right? I'm in uh I'm a I'm over in Denver.

And let's say I'm in Denver and I want to start this business. How do I use my time early on to get that initial momentum? Yeah. So let's boil down business. There's two tasks that any business owner needs to do. They need to find customers. They need to fulfill customers. That's it. Like it's not like I need to get an LLC. I need to make like you need to find customers and fulfill them. And guess what? Net of net, all things considered.

It's harder to find customers than fulfill them. Right. That's the harder thing. So do the harder thing first before you buy a wall printer, before you buy a chainsaw, before you even find a crew that you're gonna sub out all the chainsaw work to. Find customers. Try to find customers or learn about how to acquire customers in any niche. Cause if you can learn Facebook ads, then you can find customers in an e com business or in a tree trimming business. So

Spend time up front trying to find customers, not like learning how to cut and like if you shouldn't cut an oak tree in February, and we learn that the hard way, right? There's like disease and stuff. Don't care or worry about any of that stuff. Go to Facebook Marketplace and post, I own a tree trimming business, I can trim your tree. See if anything happens. If it doesn't, then like feel it out. How you still feeling about this? Still, still enthused? Cool.

Then like learn some Facebook ads or post to Facebook groups or like do X, Y, or Z number of things until you get some people that are raising their hands that aren't your mom or your sibling and saying, I want you to trim my tree. Now it's like, okay, now I gotta figure out how to fulfill.

So rather rather than the kind of scatter shot'cause it's I can put up flyers and I can go to Facebook groups and marketplace and Craigslist and I can run Facebook ads and Google ads and Yelp and I can do all those things. What what worked for you with the tree treatment business? It was it well it's funny'cause it's like I like to say the Efficacy of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan.

Okay. So what works in this month may never work again. It may never work until, you know, the next year during the same month because it's seasonal. You you just never know. So what worked to find our first customers was posting organically to Facebook Marketplace.

Even though Facebook doesn't want you to post for services. Right. You have to kind of find some tricky ways around that. That worked, but we couldn't scale it. But it we didn't need to scale it because then we started using Facebook ads with 15 second vertical videos. And then that worked. But what really scaled for us is referrals through real estate agents, landlords,

and property managers. That's like our big three. And we just get referrals and we send them gifts and we follow up with them every month. And every time there's a storm, we get ahead of it before and then afterwards we say, hey, can we help?

Like referrals is our 80 20, but it took us all kinds of other methods of until we got to that point. Can you give us a sense? How uh successful is this tree treatment business that you have? Yeah, so we do mid six figures a year in revenue and about half of that in net profit. In one one market or something. Yeah, just one one market, Dallas Fort Worth. Gotcha. Um, okay.

Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. So I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them.

And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on mercury. Why? Uh I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife, very easy to spin up virtual cards, uh, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place.

So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fist fight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column NA, members FDIC. Let's do another one. What's another fun, interesting business that business uh idea you have?

So this is another one that I've actually done. Um this is a great summer business. Uh RV rentals as a service. Okay. You got three types of RVs, class A, which is like a big tour bus looking thing, right? Very intimidating for most people. Class B, which is like a converted sprinter van, right? Van hashtag van life. And then class C, which is a like a motorhome, right? It's like the vehicle and the the home combined. And then you've got like pull behind trailers. So

Usually in most markets, a class C, a motorhome is the way to go. And so there's a few platforms, Rv Share and Outdoorsy being the biggest. That's like the Uber and Lyft of the space. These are great because you can finance them, and I'm not advocating you should, but you can finance them for 20 to 30 years.

Cause they're treated like a home. And so a forty thousand dollar class C RV will cost you like between two fifty and six hundred bucks a month. And you rent these things out for 150 to 400 bucks a night. And in many markets, um, people are fully booked, they're forty to eighty percent booked, and they pay for themselves in the first year or two. So The the thesis is that the average um RV owner really only uses their RV for five to fifteen nights a year.

And so you know, it just doesn't make good financial sense for people to buy an RV, but to be on the business end of it, to buy one and use it occasionally for your family, block off your own dates, and then list it on these marketplaces that are happy to bring you customers. Um it's a beautiful business. I've owned this business.

What's the trick? Is it you got to be near like these national parks or like is like is location the key variable? What's the key variable? Like, what's the difference between 30% occupancy and 80 to 90% occupancy for these? It's a Supply and demand based on your unit type. So in some markets, you're gonna have a lot more demand for pull behind trailers because everyone has a truck and they're all going to Coachella or something, right?

In other markets, there's more demand for class B or for class C. So there's a very simple way to gauge what your supply and demand is. And I actually I love this idea. Um, and I I got my MBA like six years ago, and obviously I'm a terrible student, so I was never paying attention and I was researching this idea in the back of the class, and here's exactly what I did. And this works for Airbnb, it works for any like you know, sharing platforms.

So I would act as if I were a consumer on RV Shore or Outdoorsy and I would say, all right, I want a booking for this weekend for three nights for class C. Okay. And then it would say 47 results. And then I would say, all right, one year from now, exact same weekend, one year from now, three nights, class CRV. So all the same filters, but the dates were a year from now.

And instead of 47 results, it would say like 470 results. So it's like interesting. All right. Cause no one's booking a year out. Right. I I just want to know what the supply is. Right. And what the the like the market occupancy is. So If those numbers were true, it's like, wow, they're ninety ninety percent booked for this unit. Let's do the same search for the same dates, but with class B. Thirteen results this weekend, twenty results a year from now. It's like, Oh, okay.

Class A. And then I just made a Google Sheet of all these things. And I did this for like two hours in the back of my class. And at the end of it, I was like, in my local market, which is north Dallas Fort Worth suburbs, it was screaming to me, class C R V. It's gotta have like six to nine people. Yada. And we don't live near national parks like Texas is does not have good state or national. It's just people want uh a machine. So I went so far as to reach out to these platforms.

And said, hey, I just did this research. Here's my Google Sheet. Does this vibe with what your research shows? Cause they see it all. And they want me to buy units to rent them out on their platform. So they reached out and they're like, how did you figure this out? This is exactly matching like what our research shows. People just need to buy class C RVs. I was like, I just ran searches on your website. So

All that said, anyone, anyone could do this in any market to find out like where the supply and the demand is. And then just best principles apply. Let's just take good pictures, good description, be hyper-responsive, uh, and you'll win. Right. Yeah, it's actually pretty clever the kind of looking a year out versus the current uh current uh availability in order to figure out the h how much booking uh uh h how much the total supply is booked um because you'd just rather be

in an environment where there's just a lot of demand, right? And and you can also look at reviews and you could do other things like that. But like you said, that that works for Airbnb, that works for R V share, that works for any kind of like sharing economy type of service. Yeah, it works on Turo. I did it with like a Cybertruck and learned like holy crap, there's way too many Cybertrucks on Turo. It's just not a good investment.

Um, but this is a great business because it's a perfect side hustle. Like if you want an RV for your family, you can have one for free. Right. Like there's your there's your clipperable moment. It's a free RV and you get paid. What I don't like about this business is the messy middle. Like

You either need to own one RV and kind of do this a little bit on the side to make some extra money, or you need to own 10 plus and then just outsource everything. Hire a person, like, yeah, go to like an RV rental or an RV storage lot, you know.

Spend$150 a month to keep them not on your house and set up systems, take YouTube videos so people can know like how to clean it, how to check in, how to check out. Like the worst thing you could do here is own like two to four of them because your life is not it's not fun.

Yeah, that's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses, which is um the juice is not really worth the squeeze. I I call that there's a reason I call them the sort of white belt businesses, and that's not meant to be directory. What it means is it's a gr you need a great you need a starting point as an entrepreneur.

Everybody started somewhere. And um, you know, s if you start off saying, I'm gonna build Tesla, unless you are truly, truly special and gifted and unique, but guess what? Even Elon didn't start with Tesla, right? He started with a a much simpler business before that. Um, and so you know, Ward Buffett was, you know, selling uh he's putting arcade machine uh games in uh barber shops. Like, you know, everybody starts somewhere.

And in doing that, you learn a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about generating demand, about operations, about hiring, about finance. You you learn in this like kind of safe sandbox.

And it's simple enough that you actually get started versus trying to go for the perfect business. You really is you really don't even get in the game, is what I've what I've seen for most people. And so I do like the idea of white-built businesses, but however, most of them almost by definition are pretty bad businesses to own.

And um and you end up working a ton, you kind of like build yourself a job is is what happens, I think, in most cases. And that's in the success scenario. Of course, there's outliers, but I just wanted to say that out loud. Now I'm curious from your point of view. What are the businesses that you see people talk about as if they're good businesses, but you're like, dude, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole?

Well, oftentimes there are businesses and niches that are like really good to sell high ticket courses around. And so it makes it seem on the surface like this is a great business when really it's like people are just making a lot of money selling you the idea that it's a great business. And there are exceptions to this, but I think one business that people wrongly assume is passive.

uh is vending machines. Like I've I can't tell you how many people I've heard say, like, I just just a few vending machines and just extra thousand bucks a month, just passive, just make it Sounds good. Sounds passive though. Sure. It's just not. You know, those vending machines break and the credit card readers break and you have to refill them and your if it's if snack and drink they go bad, you have to swap them out. Is anything truly passive by that definition?

No, right? No, no. That's just one that it has the perception of being passive and of being amazing. And it I think it is net of net a good business. It's just not nearly as good as a lot of people are selling you the idea on. Right. Yeah, for me there's like the um I think your your test of how many people are trying to sell you high-ticket courses and how sleazy do they look.

uh is is the is the best proxy. You can sort of I you know I don't even need to see the underlying business. I can just tell from the from the landing page of the person who's trying to convince me it's a great business. And so um yeah, there's these uh turnkey Amazon FBA businesses. And of course you could build a great Amazon business. Many people do, but so so I'm not saying there's not outliers in any of these.

But man, that's a brutal business to try to go into is to build these like uh turnkey generic Amazon FBA businesses, YouTube faceless channels, most drop shipping stuff. Like, you know, all this is like anything that anything that is around stock trading. Um or any kind of trading strategy or trading course is like, you know, literally run away. Yeah, I'm speaking of Amazon FBA, there's there are a few guys that went to federal prison overselling high ticket FBA courses. So that's public record.

Because of what? What was the what put them in jail though? They promised guaranteed returns. And in addition, which that's enough to get you in trouble with the SEC. In addition to that, I believe at least one of them was just a Ponzi scheme. They were just taking money and just buying cars with it. Um amazing. Well, Chris, uh always good having you on, man. Uh shout out your podcast. Where should people find you? The Kerner Office. That's K-O-E-R-N-E R T K-O-Pod.com.

All right, man. Thanks for coming on. All right, thanks, Sean. I put my law in it like no day song Let's travel, never looking back. If you made it this far, then you're gonna love what I'm about to tell you. So there's this amazing entrepreneur, his name is Neil Patel. He's been on MFM, he's one of our favorite guests, and he has a podcast. It's called Marketing School, and it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network.

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