11 Proven Businesses My Listeners Started + How to Copy Them - Ep. #345

So about a year ago, I said something on this channel. I said, if you ever start a business because of something you heard here, then email me. I wanna know. And people did, a lot of people. And so I have a folder with a bunch of 'em, and every number you're about to hear is what they told me. Now, keep in mind, I didn't audit anyone. I didn't look at their tax returns. I'm basing all of this on what they told me. But the purpose of this episode is to give you some ideas of businesses you can start based on people that already did it, because that's much less theoretical than just giving you an idea. These are ideas that are proven from people who listened to this podcast, got the idea from the podcast, then actually went out and did it. So hopefully you will find this to be even more applicable to you than the average Koerner Office episode. So here we go. You're gonna hear about people that got laid off, a teacher, college kid, a mom of 4, a couple of 6 and 7-year-olds. I pulled 11 stories for you today, and we're gonna get tactical and we're going to talk about what they did that you can do specifically. Things that you should take, things that you should leave. I'm gonna call every segment after the idea, the copy this version, right? What to charge, where the first customer is, and the one tool that you can't live without. And at the end of this, I have 5 very specific ideas of how you can find your first customer for any of these businesses for under $100. There might be other startup costs involved with the business, but specifically if you wanna find your first customer for under $100, I've got that at the end. So here in a minute, I'm gonna tell you about a dude that turned like broken mailboxes into $800 grand while keeping his day job. Halfway through the episode, We'll talk about a guy doing half a million dollars a year in pickleball courts in Nebraska in the wintertime. And at the end, one that didn't work and why I'm even more proud of that one than some of the wins. So let's go. Let's talk about Andrew. Andrew lives in Fort Worth, Texas, about an hour from me, and he made about $800,000 in 2 years from mailboxes. What happened is that Andrew watched the stuff I was putting out about my tree trimming business. He's not a tree guy. He never started a tree trimming business like I did, But something about that episode clicked for him. And here's what he told me. He said, I started a masonry business initially focused on brick mailboxes because if you live in Dallas-Fort Worth, you know every neighborhood has those brick mailboxes and every week someone backs into one and nobody wants that job. They're small jobs, right? The big masonry guys don't want a $400 mailbox. So Andrew did. The first move is that he knocked on doors on his own street. He found a new build. Right? And he offered to do their mailbox. That's it. And in my opinion, that's not even a very good idea because it's probably going to be a brick home and those masonry guys are probably going to be the one to do mailbox. But he did it and he got the job. Cost him about $2,000 to start. And he had a day job. He was 7 years into like a medical devices career and he's still there. Never quit. He spends about 15 to 20 hours a week on this business. But the magic about this business that he didn't expect was that the mailboxes got him into HOAs, homeowners associations. HOAs have a lot of mailboxes. And once the HOA trusts you with mailboxes, they're like, hey, can you do this retaining wall? Can you do this entrance? And after 2 years of saying yes to a bunch of things that, you know, gurus on Twitter would've told you to say no to, he's got 3 crews, 2 admins, and he is working on builder relationships. His best month, he did $80,000 at about 30% gross. profit margin and 15% net profit margin. He also told me, and I love this because it's very real, taking profits can be hard, right? It can be hard to like trust the business enough to first start to pull profits out of it. But this same guy also tried the washer dryer rental business and he got 60 customers with it, but ended up winding it down. Said it was, is quite painful of a business. And we're going to revisit that one later. So here's what you should copy. Brick mailbox repair here in Dallas-Fort Worth runs somewhere between $600 to $1,500 depending on whether it's just a patch or a rebuild. I would imagine those quotes are similar in other markets as well. Materials on a full rebuild are gonna be a couple hundred bucks. So one mailbox a weekend could be good money. It could be really good income. Your first customer is probably gonna be in a new build subdivision. The builder is gonna wanna put in the cheapest mailbox allowed by the HOA, and half of these are gonna be crooked within a couple years because Texas soil. So offer the first one at cost just for the before and after photo. Then you take that photo to the HOA board, right? Because the HOA is the one customer who owns 200 mailboxes. And then of course you'll watch Nextdoor for anyone, for posts about, you know, anyone know a mason? You can't really count on those. They'll probably be pretty few and far between, but they're highly motivated. Of course you want a website, but what's going to get the phone to ring will be a Google Business Profile with at least 10 photos. I mean, come on. This guy started the business with $2,000, knocked on a door, kept saying yes, and he made $800,000 in revenue within 2 years without quitting his job. Okay, let's talk about Walter. Walter's just north of Ann Arbor, Michigan, and this is one of the best emails I've ever gotten. Walter got let go in June from a consulting gig with no warning. Family of 4. He spent the summer interviewing, making it to final rounds and getting told, yeah, we're holding off until hiring until next year, over and over. But in August, he found this podcast and heard the episode about storage tote shelves, big wooden racks for like the 27-gallon totes. And we'll link to this in the show notes, but he thought, I can build that, costs almost nothing. I can sell where people already are. So he launched in August and he made $3,000. September, $8,000. October, $10,000 plus. And here's where his experience in supply chain shows up. He took his gross margin from 39% to to 58% in 90 days because of a magical thing called batch production. In other words, not just making one shelving unit at a time, but making all the same cuts at a time. He would buy the totes for customers with his military discount and resell them. These small little upsells add up over time. His wife told him, if you can pay the mortgage every month, I will handle the rest. And he told me verbatim, this podcast literally saved our mortgage. But here's the twist. When you deliver like a giant wooden shelf to someone's garage, they'd look at you and they're like, huh, you're handy. Do you know how to fix other stuff? And he kept getting asked that over and over. Kind of like the last story, he started saying yes. So he took November and December off from shelving and started a handyman company. This was 2025, by the way. Put up a website, CRM, the whole thing, launched it in January of 2026. First 2 weeks, almost $9,000 of jobs were booked. At 52% gross profit in the slow season. And he's doing 6 figures this year, his first full year. And like many, if not most businesses, that first thing, the first product or service you start with does not usually end up being the business. It's just what gets you started, what gets you going. So I say this a lot, but you cannot be too proud to start a business that seems too gimmicky or too small for you. You can't be too proud. And you can't be proud and broke at the same time. My wife just bought $2,000 worth of Swedish candy so we can sell them at farmers markets. That's about as humbling of a business as you get. And we aren't too proud, right? Because it's awesome and it's fun. So how do you copy Walter's business? Build one shelf. One, you can get plans for $10 on Etsy or have Claude ChatGPT make plans for you. Just build one. The lumber is going to cost you $150, $80, something like that. Lumber, screws, chop saw, and you sell these for $300 to $800 depending on the size. List it on Facebook Marketplace. That's where most of this happens before you ever build the second one. If it sells in a week, build 3 more. If it doesn't, then just wait, keep testing, boost the post, wait, drop the price. Every single time you make a delivery, you say, anything else around here need fixing while I've got the truck? Before you know it, you've got a handyman business, something that AI is not about to take from you. You don't even need a website, although you could vibe code one with, you know, 3 sentences and any given AI tool. You don't need one. You need a Google Business Profile, 10 pictures, and some low-margin shelf customers to feed you the bigger jobs. Okay. Number 3, Derek, Ocala, Florida. He started this business with $0. Derek was literally lying on the ground painting when my episode about Plant Bingo came on earlier this year. He almost skipped it. And then 10 minutes in, he decided to start a plant bingo business. So he went from ignore to I'm starting this business in 10 minutes. Sounds like me, very impulsive. We'll also link to that episode. It is what you could imagine. It's bingo where you win plants and it seems like a gimmick, but it works and it literally costs just about nothing to start because you could do it in your home, someone else's home. You could do it in a bar or a restaurant where they don't charge you because they're thrilled that you're bringing people there. You use Organic Instagram and Facebook to promote it, and you sell tickets in advance, and then you use those ticket sales to buy the plans. How did he start it, Derek? He walked into a bar, pitched it in person, and the owner said, I like where this is going. He built the entire digital side of the business and the, and the plan with Claude, and he told me he had never used any AI of any kind before this business. His first 2 events were in September of this year, as in last month, and this month so far, he's already done 4. 50% profit margins, $0 to start. And he considers himself a math guy. And he lives in what he calls the bingo capital of the universe, also known as God's waiting room, also known as Florida, where I spent my life from age 11 to 19. Wrestled a guy from Ocala once, Courtney James. I remember you. I beat him. His goal is 2 to 3 events a week next year, which is basically a full-time job that is also a party. It's full-time job income, But at a part-time job's time invested. So how to copy this? You want to pick the deadest weeknight at a bar with a patio. Call it a Tuesday. Walk in and say, I will fill this room on a Tuesday and you keep the bar tab. That's it. That's the pitch. That's the trade-off, right? Bars will say yes to that all day. You charge $20 to $30 per bingo card. You get plants from a wholesale nursery. They're all over the place. They're going to cost $5 to $10 each. So 40 people show up, you're grossing $800 to $1,000 and spending about $300 on plants. Do the math on that. One night a week. What tool do you need? Eventbrite, or simply a Stripe payment link, a local nursery that will sell at wholesale, and whatever AI you would like to write the Instagram posts. Derek had never even used one. $0, one walk into a bar. Okay. Number 4, David in Lafayette, Louisiana, a teacher and a basketball coach, started a Christmas light business. That time of year, David heard me talk about location-based names, so he called it Acadiana Christmas Lights, right? Name of the city plus the name of the industry. And here's his numbers straight from his email. His first season, he did $21,000 gross, $7,000 net. Second season, $75,000 gross, $35,000 net. And he told me that he was expecting $175,000 for season 3. His teaching salary is $45,000 to $48,000 a year. So season 2, on the side, He netted almost what his full-time job paid him. And yes, he is leaving teaching to scale it. It works because he owns the lights. Clients don't buy them. He custom cuts commercial-grade C9 strands to fit each house, and he installs these mid-October through mid-December, takes them down in January, and stores them at a storage unit. Clients sign 1 to 3-year contracts, so it's recurring. The lights are paid for after year 1. He bought all of next year's material at his supplier's end of season sale. And his crews in the winter are roofers because roofers have nothing to do in December. His marketing is bandit signs, right? Those little signs on the side of the road, you buy them for like $1 to $3 apiece. He does giveaways, Google organic. He gets referrals from customers, nothing too fancy. And yes, this fall he's adding porch pumpkins because his Christmas light clients are saying yes to it. Same customer, same house, one more season. So to copy this, well, it's October, you've got about 3 weeks. Price it the way he does by the linear foot. And the going rate in most markets is somewhere between $15 and $30 a foot installed, which puts a normal house at like $800 on the low end to $2,500 on the high end. Year 1, the price covers the lights. Year 2, the lights are basically free and it's almost all margin. You're just paying the crews. And you're not selling an install, you're selling like A 3-year contract that includes install, takedown, and storage. Your first customer is going to be on your own street. It's going to be the nicest 5 homes in your neighborhood, or the neighbor that you know really well. A bandit sign at the neighborhood entrance is golden, and you just want it to say Christmas lights and then a phone number and maybe a QR code. That's it. No logo, nothing fancy. You need a ladder. You need someone to sell you C9 lights, and that is one Google search away. And you need a roofer buddy who is slow in December. Probably a good time to mention that if you're starting any of these businesses, especially one where liability is involved like Christmas lights business, you're gonna want an LLC, a limited liability corporation, right? And the absolute best way, best place in the world to register an LLC is through bizze.com. That's bizze.com. I've been using them for years. They used to be called Incfile. Now they're Bizze. They sponsor this podcast. I use them regularly. It doesn't actually cost anything to use Busy. You still have to pay the state filing fees, which you pay to Busy and then they pass on to the state. But I dare you, go to your state website and try to figure it out for yourself. And it is brain damage in a can. Busy makes it easy, user-friendly, simple. They'll handle your registered agent service. If you don't know what that is, that's great because you don't need to if you use Busy. They'll give you an EIN number, AKA a tax ID number. They just have one-time payments, no sneaky subscriptions. And they are a family-owned business, which is what we're about here on the Koerner Office. It's built for people that just want their business to get legit, to get papered, to be real without getting nickel and dimed by the big guys out there. Do not get caught off guard with some stupid paper that didn't get filed, some scary letter in the mail. Just use Busy and you will never have to think about it again. Remember, an LLC, limited liability. If you don't use an LLC, you personally will be liable, you and all your assets. You put your business in an LLC and you will be protected. Okay, let's talk about pickleball courts. Cam, this one is the one that I've teased. Cam is in Omaha, Nebraska, and he has done $500,000 since February of this year, 2026. And Cam is honest about where he heard this one. It wasn't this channel, it was me on MFM talking about easy businesses that anyone can start. So I'll just take partial credit on this one. Cam and his buddy Luke both come from tech. Cam built websites and Luke worked at a software company, but neither one had ever built a pickleball court. By the way, if you notice, my hair is kind of spiky right now. It's because I just got done playing pickleball with my oldest and my second youngest, like an hour ago, and my sweat just dried. And so I'm living this. I'm doing this. They decided to build custom pickleball courts in Nebraska in the wintertime. They launched, and the first thing that happened was a cease and desist letter because guess what? You can't use the word sport court. It's a trademark. I know this Because I have a company that builds them. So they made a funny video about it and put it on their homepage. That is exactly what you do when you handle a cease and desist. You turn it into a David and Goliath story. The first move that they did was handwritten notes. Cam has a different business that does handwritten notes at scale. So he used his own product and sent notes to people who might wanna court. That got his first customer. And in this business, your first customer is worth like $30,000 to $60,000. And remember, these guys, Didn't know what they were doing. So they flew in help to learn more about, you know, laying concrete on the production side. And they build these courts with something called post-tension, which he says nobody in Nebraska was doing. And I'm not going to lie, I did not use post-tension on my court because I'm cheap, but I did on the foundation of my house. From what I understand, it's a bunch of cables in the concrete that you tighten that is kind of like rebar, but even more strong, I believe. Anyway, they started doing just backyards like mine, but now they do municipal stuff. 25% margins cost about 10 grand to start. But it is a full-time business making really good money. The lesson he gave me that I did not expect was that you should launch sooner in the wintertime if needs be, because cities set budgets in the wintertime. Okay, a little alpha for you. If you show up in the spring, that money is already allocated, it's already spent. So if you want to copy this, you don't need to know how to pour concrete. Cam didn't. You need to sell the court and sub the pour to a concrete crew that already exists in your town. How do you find that? Use something like Muse or Grokbot. To go reach out to a bunch of concrete guys on the internet for you. I'm assuming you're lazy here because I am, or you can just call them yourself. You're gonna want to target depending on the thickness of the concrete, which you're probably looking at like 5 to 7 inch thick concrete. If you're not doing post-tension, you're going to want to target like $6 to $7.50 per square foot. If you are doing post-tension, it's going to be a little higher than that, but you're not actually out there building sport courts yourself. You're subbing it all out. And depending on what payment terms you work out, you can start this for a lot less than $10,000. Remember, a backyard court is $30,000 to $60,000. 25% margin, that's $7,500 to $15,000 per court. Cam used handwritten notes to find his first customers. What's stopping you from doing the same? You can go to your city's website, find out when they approve the next year's budget, and show up 2 months before with a proposal. How do you build a proposal? Use AI. You can make an AI agent like Muse or Grokbot watch your state's RFP site, request for proposal, for the word pickleball and text you. I showed you how to do that like 2 episodes ago. Okay. Tom Berman, McKinney, Texas, basically my neighbor. And I like Tom's story because he tried 2 of my ideas and he's honest about both. Tom is a software engineer in big tech consulting. He's got a 3rd kid on the way and he told me, I'm over it. So he decided to build an exit ramp. He heard the vending episodes and the Kyler episode on appliance rental, and he did both. Vending was first. He used his network to land what he called an absolute rock star of a client, a hockey rink. And he treats vending like enterprise software sales. He sends proposals. He calls it account management with price discovery. And he told me that at a hockey rink, they will pay over $4 for a Smartwater without Batting an eye, and he's done $100 grand so far, $12,000 a month right now, 40% margins and $0 out of pocket because he put the machines on a 0% credit card and the cash flow paid it off in 3 months. I'm not telling you to do that. I'm just telling you that he did. And appliance rental, the other business he started, cost him $320 to start, which was like one washer dryer set and a couple hoses. And he had 100 customers in 3 months, which is insane growth in a very saturated market. And he's shutting it down. He's selling off the asset assets because, in his words, that business came with a lot of problems. And I will say that business came with a lot of problems in the context of another business because I've had businesses at certain times that were working and profitable, and I shut them down because I had other businesses at that same time that were much more fun or much easier or more profitable, right? So I'm sure if Tom had nothing else going on and needed to pay the mortgage, he would have kept. Going and kept growing. But in the context of his vending business that was doing much better, he decided to shut it down. But with a baby coming and managing all these units, something had to go, and he picked the one that was all sweat. But it's crazy here in one episode we're talking about 2 different people that hit between 60 and 100 appliance rental customers and then walked away from it. The idea clearly works. The question is whether you want to be the guy carrying the dryer. Know thyself. Forget the vending machine for a second. In the vending business, the business is the location. Tom got one rink and it's $12,000 a month. That's not normal. Results are not typical. Okay. But it just goes to show how important the right location is. So write a one-page proposal, not just a cold call. Put in that proposal who you are, what your story is, what goes in the cooler, what they get, what you charge, which is usually gonna be a cut or a free amenity. for their members. You're gonna put it into a place where people are stuck for 1 to 2 hours with a wallet. Skating rink, gyms, dance studios, car repair, tire shop, youth sports complexes, car dealership waiting rooms. Price above retail and people don't flinch because the alternative is just leaving and you're in business. And I've got a couple episodes about the vending business. I'll link to that as well. Let's talk about Tim, Tim Krupnik. Tim is the slow mover, number 7. Lives in Western North Carolina, Blue Ridge Mountains. And he watched the Alex Boyd brush clearing episode, which is on track to be my most viewed YouTube video of all time. He listened to almost the whole thing thinking, ah, cool story, not for me. All right, that's entertaining. And then at the very end, Alex mentioned a machine called a Green Climber. You may remember that. I'll link to that one as well. That's a remote-controlled mower built for steep slopes. And the light in his brain went on. Because Tim lives where there is no flat land and running a skid steer on a hillside is literally how you die. But a specialized slope machine? Nobody near him had one. So he did some research, talked to some realtors, engineering firms, and everyone said it would and should work. So he bought a trailer, built a website, started an LLC. Hopefully he's busy. Financing the machine took forever, but keep in mind, he did finance it, didn't pay cash. So because of the fact that it took so long, he paused this whole idea over the winter. And then an inquiry came through the website that he wasn't even checking on. He went out, looked at the job, bid it. He didn't even have the machine yet, remember? He won the job, then bought the machine, which is exactly how I would've told him to do it, and spent 9 days on the first job. But how much money did he make? $21,000 on his first job. Sent 4 more quotes out. He's got 2 moving forward worth about 8 grand. And all of this is a side gig next to a remote full-time job that he already has. And he told me something that I think about a lot. He said he's had to stop watching my content for a while or he would've switched businesses and delayed it. And that's pretty self-aware, but I kind of hate it. Okay? So don't listen to him. Keep listening to this podcast. But the takeaway here is find that one machine that nobody in your area owns but solves an expensive problem. Maybe if you live near a lake, it's one of those lake cleaning machines, right? I know that's really random. I did an episode like a year and a half about these teenagers in Chicago that Clean private ponds, and they sell a boat that's like a giant weed eater in a boat format. And no one in that area had one. They got one and now they make tons of money cleaning out lakes. But put up the website before you buy the expensive machine and let the inquiries tell you whether or not you should buy it. Tim's first job paid for most of the machine. So if you're in Hill Country, you can charge by the day for mowing slopes, and a day runs like a couple grand. Your first customer may come from a realtor, may come from just knocking on someone's door. It's probably going to be business to business. Oftentimes land realtors will have listings that don't sell because you can't even see the land very well, or civil engineering firms that need right-of-way cleared. Tim was quizzing both of these potential clients before he spent a dollar. The tools you need, you know, guys, come on, website, Facebook page, Google Business Profile. You know the drill. Okay. Let's talk about that Monticelli's. BJ and Genevieve in Cassadaga, New York. Genevieve is a middle school health and PE teacher. She's got 4 kids. She comes home drained every day. BJ, heard my 2 episodes earlier this year, I think February and March, about snail mail businesses, the flower letters and the tiny project one. He took the transcripts of both, fed it into probably ChatGPT, and they landed on Big Sister Letters, which is a monthly subscription where tween and teen girls get letters in the mail, like advice from a trusted big sister or something. And then the mom of these kids will get an email about what their daughters are getting in the mail. Their first move was just to post in a local Facebook mom group. They were looking for 10 founding moms and they promised the first month free to all 10 of them. They ended up getting 12, and then the next month they had 14, 5, and then 5. And right now they're at about 100 subscribers and their MRR, monthly recurring revenue, is about $1,000. It's small, it's early, but it's real. And their only regret in their words is that they should have done it sooner. So in my opinion, the most copy-pasteable part of their story is the 10 founding members post. Right? That makes it feel special and exclusive, and people want to be on the ground floor of something. You can do that with any business, not just this. Pick any community or group that you're already in and write, hey, I'm starting X. I want 10 founding members. You get the first month's free. Here's what you get. If you can't get 10 people to say yes to free, then you've learned something for $0. And I love to say you either win or you learn. And if you learn that nobody cares, that is the best thing you could learn because it means move on to the next idea. There's no shortage of them here. Just pick your next favorite. Snail mail subscription businesses run between $10 and $25 a month. You just need a Stripe link, printer, some stamps. It's pretty simple. And I know, 'cause my wife has a snail mail subscription business. Shout out snailmailsupperclub.com. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Okay, let's talk about Steve. Michigan freeze-dried candy. Michigan saw my freeze-dried candy video. This is a short-form video, not long. And bought a small Harvest Right freeze dryer. He started at farmers markets. It worked. So he bought a bigger one and then started doing fairs and carnivals. That worked even better. So he bought a second big one and moved into a commercial rented kitchen. And then late summer, he did the thing that makes this whole thing a story. He reached out to a local hospital about getting into their gift shop. I don't know why he thought of that. I never would've thought of that, but he didn't end up getting in the gift shop. But he worked out a deal with their fundraising department instead. And that's kind of how a lot of this works, right? We don't get what we're looking for, but we get something better. So now because of that idea, he has a contract with one of the largest hospital systems in Michigan. And what he does is set up in a different hospital each week and 20% of sales go back to the hospital. The hospital promotes him, nurses buy candy, everybody wins. Now he wants to sell the candy company and buy something else, which Steve, that's gonna be a whole different episode. But the takeaway I want you to get from this is Not about candy, it's about asking the hospital. So I say this phrase so much, but it's so true. Surface area, right? If you're selling at a farmer's market, that's a lot of surface area for interacting with a lot of people that are working professionals, and they potentially could bring you a lot more money in their job than as just a consumer at a farmer's market. So farmer's markets could and should be your foot in the door to much bigger opportunities like hospitals, schools, churches, bigger employers. And also it's just good. To get out there in the community and get to know people. So number 10, this one's quick. Catherine got an email from me, a newsletter about the appliance rental business where I say step 1, post a free ad on Facebook Marketplace. So she did it. 3 months later, she has 37 appliances out on rent and she's getting new customers every week from what started as one free post. Okay. Didn't mean to talk about 3 different appliance rental businesses in this, but here we are. 2 of them quit. One is still scaling. Same idea, different humans. Back to Facebook Marketplace. Post the thing before you have the thing. Find the demand before you spend any money fulfilling demand that you may or may not end up having. Here's story number 11, Graham. This one was a flop, but I'm proud of it. St. George, Utah. He started a business called Pumpkin Spice Porches. He heard the porch pumpkin stuff on this podcast, went all in. Hay bales, premium pumpkins, signature pumpkin spice scented wreaths. He hired a designer. He ran pumpkin drops around town. He hid cash prizes in pumpkins. which got a ton of engagement and followers. He even did, uh, the rocks and flyers in plastic bags thing from an episode I had a while back. I'll link to that as well with Daniel Cronauer. They did about 20 porches and the most common thing they heard was that's too much money because St. George, Utah is not Dallas, Texas. The pumpkinpreneurs who crush it are in dense, high-income markets. And he didn't learn that. He didn't know that until he tried it. But what he said to me was, even though it wasn't a big financial win, it was absolutely worth doing, he made 20 families happy. He gave his designer her dream job for about a season and learned more about marketing and positioning than any course, business college would've ever taught him. He also learned that the pumpkin drops, as fun as they were, pulled out the wrong crowd for a premium product, right? They brought out a lot of people that wanted something free or cheap, and that was not his customer, but it didn't cost him a decade of learning or bankruptcy, just a season of time, kind of like a, a semester in college. So I'm leaving this one in on purpose. 10 of the people in this story made money. Graham did the same thing that they all did. He picked an idea, made the first cheap move, and then found out. And that's, that's the whole game. Most of you guys are not going to hit $800 grand on the first swing, but you can all do at least what Graham did and go fail with some dignity and learn a whole bunch in the process. If you do want to start the porch pumpkin business, go look for the median home price in your zip code or the zip codes near you. And go see if anyone within 20 miles already charges $400 to decorate a porch. And if the answer to those 2 questions are nobody else is charging for this and homes are all cheap, then you could probably learn to not start this business in about 5 minutes. Okay, here's a lightning round. 10 more people, 20 seconds each, 'cause I could not fit them all and you guys have a lot to do today. So let's wrap this up. Donovan built the Story Post, a 6-week mystery story for kids ages 4 to 10, one letter a week in the mail, trading cards, a comic book at the end. Of course, he got this from the snail mail episodes. Emily, works at Boeing. She trains combat sports 4 to 6 days a week and is launching a hot tub maintenance service for Airbnb hosts in Seattle. She posted in a host group, she got her first lead in her first hour, and found over 200 hot tub Airbnbs within 45 minutes of her house. She has never cleaned a hot tub in her life, but she launches next month. Hosts told her that they pay $50 to $250 a month for this. Branko I think I'm saying that name right, runs a CNC machine shop and realized that every machine shop website looks like 2009. So he builds websites for machine shops. That's it. And plating and heat treat companies, whatever that is. But he got his first client last week and he's got 2 more he's about to close. So whatever industry you're in, your competitors' websites are your next business. Jonas does etched graffiti removal on storefront glass in New York. Okay. $300 to $1,200 is what he's getting per job, and his cost per job is sandpaper and, you know, some calories and polishing powder. He got the idea from the stump grinding episode, which has nothing to do with glass, and that's how ideas work. And then Drew— that's D-R-U— buys $130 picnic tables at Lowe's, stains them, and sells them on Facebook Marketplace for $300, or $330 with delivery. His delivery is on top of a Toyota Yaris. Scott's Kids, which reminds me of Scott's Tots, the infamous cringeworthy, uh, Office episode. Scott's kids are 6 and 7 years old and they run Hummingbird Authority. They designed packaging, they pitched store owners, and their product went live in the first grocery store this weekend. It's hummingbird food and it was inspired by my episode with my buddy Sam. Another mailbox business, Alexander fixes mailboxes. He is not a young guy. He says that he's better with his hands than with a computer, but even so, he had ChatGPT walk him through a website. He started this for under $100. And he gets at least one job a week at $200 to $400 each. His best week ever was $900. And then Antonio in the Bay Area, he's a mechanical engineer, new dad, started renting out appliances 2 weeks before he emailed me. He has 5 customers and he finds customers through door hangers in apartment complexes. Clay has a wife that launched sorbet-filled fruits in Australia after seeing a reel. Her first sale was $390 and she does Christmas deliveries. And Linda took the car dealership data idea that I posted about and cold called 20 dealerships. 4 said yes, 16 said no. She's using AI to price match and compare, you know, prices on makes and models of vehicles in local areas. But she got 4 freaking customers from 20 cold calls. Insane. And one thing that all of these have in common is that their first move was cheap and direct. It was a door knock. It was a cold call. It was a post on Facebook Marketplace, handwritten note, a cold email, walking into a bar about plant bingo. A post in a Facebook fricking mom group. Nobody ran ads first or learned how to run ads. They didn't build an app first. They found a human and they asked. Another thing they have in common, the startup costs were a joke. For Derek, $0. Alexander, mailbox repair, under $100. $320 for Tom, $2,000 for Andrew. The most expensive was $10,000 for Cam, the Sportcore business, and that's a construction business. The third thing that they had in common is that almost all of them kept their job. Andrew is in medical devices. Tom is in tech. Tim works remote. David taught for 2 seasons. Emily works at Boeing. You don't have to quit. In fact, usually you probably shouldn't quit. When you do go to quit, it's going to be the obvious choice. It won't be something that like you're really scared and concerned and worried about. Number 4, the business that they ended up in is usually not the one they started. And I've said this a million times. The first mailbox business turned into a masonry business. Walter, the shelving business turned into a handyman business. Steve started doing you know, freeze-dried fruits at farmers markets, that turned into a hospital contract. You can't plan out what the second business will look like. You can only start the first one. So the 5 things that you need to do, and every one of them is going to be under $100, and every one of them was made by someone in this video. So pick one tonight. Number 1, post the listing before you own the thing. Catherine, Tim, Walter, they all did that. Number 2, knock on 5 new builds like Andrew. Number 3, send 10 handwritten notes like Cam. 4, post 10 founding members, first month free in one local group. Doesn't have to be snail mail business. It could be any kind of business like the Monticellis. Number 5, walk into one bar on a Tuesday like Derek. And the thing I keep coming back to, I didn't do any of this. I didn't start any of this business. I'm talking into a microphone sitting in the air conditioning. Andrew's the one that knocked on the door. Walter's the one that built the shelves. Derek walked into a bar. I would not like doing that. You are one uncomfortable conversation with a stranger away from your dreams becoming fulfilled. And as cheesy as that sounds, it is literally true, right? So before you write that off, check yourself first before you wreck yourself, because it's true. So here is the ask. If one of these ideas worked for you, or if you took an idea from this channel and did anything with it, win or flop, I want to hear it. There is a form in the description, in the pinned comment. I would love to hear from you. Tell me the idea, how it did, and I might have you on the podcast. And if you love any of these ideas and want to hear more about them that I just talked about, comment below and Maybe I'll have him on the podcast and we'll talk to him for a half hour or so. We'll see you next time on the Koerner Office.