8 Untapped Business Ideas You Can Start This Weekend ⏐Ep. #248

It's one of those ideas that you launch by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple yeses. You might as well learn the skills and have an agency. One to two grand a month per customer.

He does micro newsletters. 85,000 people. He's got 40,000 of them subscribed. He generated 230,000, and I think he's, like, on par for double that this year. That's Annapolis, Maryland.

Everyone loses their sunglasses. So with our sunglasses, lifetime warranty, no questions asked, statistically speaking, they would have to file 10 claims. Break even on them. This guy makes $70 million a year from selling me. Anyone listening to this could make money by piggybacking on an influencer. Welcome to the Kerner office. This was one of my favorite Hold Cobros ever. And I'm not just saying that so you'll listen. I'm saying that because we talked about, like, eight different business ideas that are all in different niches, and I think you're going to love a lot of them. We talked about building a local newsletter and how that opportunity is open to anyone in the world. We talked about business building a business around lifetime warranty as your unique value proposition. Your uvp. We talked about starting a local Google, my business agency, charging 1500 bucks a month. We talked about a lot. And I think you're gonna love it. So enjoy, and we'll see you next time. I got an idea for you.

Let's do it.

Do you remember when we were talking about partnering with influencers to launch businesses, and I said, if someone is an influencer and all they do is sell T shirts, they don't know business?

Yes.

Okay.

Yeah. I've used that line many times with people now.

Oh, thank you. There was one exception I don't really want to get into, but I forgot to mention it because it proves you wrong.

I get it.

Virginity Rocks. You familiar with them?

No.

The guy sells a Virginity Rocks shirt.

Oh, is it the video where he's.

Like, Virginity Danny Duncan. Danny Duncan. I don't know. He's a viral social media character. I don't know. But this guy makes, like, $70 million a year from selling Virginity Rocks merch. And that's his whole brand.

From all the Christians who are like, oh, brother, brother. Sister Smith, have you seen the Virginity Rock sweatshirt? That's such a good message to send to the children.

Yes. Yes. $70 million.

Come again? That's what she said.

That's a lot. Yeah. Like 70 million. A lot of more than 50. Yeah. On t shirts and Hoodies and hats. So, like, there are exceptions to that. But oh, my gosh, that's like his whole brand. Right. And when you get it right, it becomes its own viral effect. You see a shirt, you buy a shirt. So I don't want to get into that too much, but I thought of another idea of how anyone listening to this could make money by piggybacking on an influencer. Okay, okay. There's a guy on Twitter that I follow and his name is Sawyer Merritt, and he's probably going to get hit up after this podcast. But Sawyer is a Tesla fanboy. That's his whole shtick. Elon responds to his tweets frequently. He tweets about all the Elon companies and products, and that's his whole shtick. And it's actually kind of like a crypto Twitter account. It's quite easy to grow a Tesla Twitter account because the algorithm favors it. Yeah, it's such a polarizing topic. It's so polarizing, you love it or you hate it. Right. And so by nature of that, it's fairly easy to grow a Tesla account. Anyway, I think someone needs to partner with this guy and launch a newsletter of just like weekly Tesla news and updates. Right. These are high ticket buyers. It's a highly educated audience, and he's not monetizing with a newsletter. So you start with a free newsletter and then a month or two later you launch a paid newsletter where you launch. You basically do kind of like a seeking Alpha or a motley fool, like an in depth deep dive on one of Elon's stocks. Right. And it's like you need to buy it, you need to short it. You know, we flew this drone over the factory and we can see there's a production run being withheld, like all this insider info. You just need to find one rider, give them a cut of your revenue, and it's like once a month, maybe it's 50 bucks a month, $500 a month, depending on where you want to go with it. But people can trade based on your newsletter. And these are people that are already buying his stocks anyway. What do we think?

I think it's. I think it's a genius way to take advantage of the influencers and their distribution channel. I think that's amazing because he's not.

About to do this, right? No, he's busy. I think a lot of times people have the fear of reaching out to guys like this and then just giving them the. The idea, like, oh, they're just going to go do it themselves. No, they're not. He's probably already has a half a dozen other plans in the works right now. So in general, I love the idea of finding guys like him that don't just have audiences, but that have smaller, more high value audiences and partnering with them to launch a newsletter. It could be a financial newsletter, maybe not.

Yeah. Or looking at these influencers and saying, okay, what's their product audience fit? And like, if you have an idea of all right, this would be perfect for this person's audience, then going to them and partnering to sell that. This also reminds me of. Do you, you know who Ryan Sneden is? I had him on. I had him on my podcast, Nickonomics. Anyways, he does micro newsletters. One of the things that I was like as I was talking to him, I thought would be interesting is going out and identifying regionally influence. Regional influencers, I guess is probably the best way to say it. So there's probably people in Dallas who are really big about the Dallas scene. There's probably people in Seattle or I know there's people in Boise or there's people in San, whatever, these big cities where they have like big poll in those specific cities and going to them and implementing a newsletter for them. Effectively, what Ryan does, and he does this in Annapolis, I think there's like, I want to say there's like 85, 000 people that live in Annapolis and 45, 000 of them are on his newsletter.

Yeah. Yep.

It's mind blowing. But what he's done is he's effectively turned it into a newsletter. That's the local newspaper. And so people place a bunch of ads and he makes great money placing ads in his newsletter. And so you could go to these regional influencers who are already kind of in the know, they know a lot of people in those markets offer to launch a newsletter for them that aggregates a lot of the information that their followers are already interested in. So like Amy Nicks. Is it Amy Nicks or Amy Knox in Dallas?

Nixon.

Yeah, yeah, Amy Nixon, where it's like, you know, she's real estate and she's Dallas, where it's like, okay, cool, Amy, you're going to be the, the real estate, the Dallas real estate person. And every week we're going to talk about the changing market conditions, we're going to talk about the inventory that's sold, we're going to talk about how many days to sale, we're going to talk about average list price in each one of these markets, et cetera, et Cetera. And you put together that newsletter for her, she sends it out, she owns a distribution, and then you own the cut, whatever you negotiate with her of that newsletter. So very similar to the way you're talking about doing a newsletter for Tesla. This would be like geographically specific to different regions of influencers. Like so I like that approach.

That's an amazing idea. Amazing idea. There's a guy, there's a, a YouTuber, there's a Dallas realtor that is a YouTuber and his whole shtick is real estate in DFW. And he has 20, 30,000 subscribers. And that's all he does, right? He's like, yeah, he's not going to start a, he's not going to start a newsletter. Right. Why would he do Our friend Sam, I don't want to say his last name because I don't know if he wants to be talking about this, but he started a local newsletter in California and he's acquiring subscribers with paid ads, 60 cents each. He's not monetizing. But get this, his long term, 10 year, 20 year play is to be become the mayor of that town. Really? And he wants to vertically integrate his newsletter into being the mayor one day.

Dude, that's what was crazy about talking to Ryan is he was like, I'm in the know, the chamber of commerce knows me. He's like, I go around town and people recognize me. Any restaurant that I want to get in and have a car, like to get a seat at, I get a table at. And it's Annapolis, Maryland. So it's like a nice town, it's high income. But now he's also like, I'm buying a porta potty. Not porta potty business. Yeah, it's a porta potty business.

It's a wedding bathroom. Yeah, like the luxury bathroom rental.

And I'm like, dude, now with your connections, you could go to the city, you could go to the local university, you could go to the Naval Academy and be like, you guys know who I am? Oh, yeah, of course. Can I put a bid in for this? Yeah, of course. Like just by virtue of the fact that you're the guy in town, he's going to have so many business opportunities that come his way. But it's because he created this effective audience locally, this micro audience.

I mean, you could get AI to write these too. I mean, you could just say, hey, take all the local news from Annapolis. I think if you're partnering with influencers, it makes more sense to do this. But if you're doing it yourself, it makes more sense for you to write it.

I agree with that. Ryan was saying that it's hard to do it with AI because the information he provides is so market specific. And he felt like his brand was built around the like, quirky, personal, personalized letter. But to that end, like, that's where I'm like, okay, you find the local influencer and you find a local writer.

Cool.

And then you manage the process like it's. This isn't a hard game that we're playing. Like, okay, here are his numbers. I just went and found it. He's got 85,000 people that live in Annapolis. 46% of his town are subscribed. Geez Louise. All right, so 85,000. Let's just say 40,000 are subscribed. What do you think he did in revenue last year?

No idea. $72,240,000. That's crazy.

Yeah.

Does he have a paid version or just ads?

It's just ads. There's no paid version. What did he like? $80,000.

That's crazy.

Like, how crazy? I. I just like. That blew my mind, that part of the conversation where I'm like, are you freaking kidding me? It's. He like 85, 000 people. He's got 40, 000 of them subscribing. He generated 230, 000. And I think he's like on par for double that this year. That's Annapolis, Maryland. That's not freaking Dallas, Texas.

I know. How long is it going to take for all of the 80, 000 person cities to be saturated by a newsletter? Decades. I mean, it doesn't have to be any city. No.

And like he's now trying to do this model where he like, I don't remember. It's not exactly a franchise, but he's like licensing it out to different markets. Again, he was a lot more concerned about the quality. I felt like you could centralize a lot of this stuff. You could have local editors, but a streamlined process of AI that generates the stories and then the local editors spend time curating it.

Yeah.

Just because AI is involved doesn't mean that the quality has to go down. It just means the editor is spending more time on the right things as opposed to the first draft.

So, yeah, you upload the 10 most relevant news articles to AI, you say, summarize this in bullet points, then that's just your starting point. Then you put your spin on it and make it quirky or what?

Like what I was thinking is, with these agents, now you just have them crawl, Twitter, Google, I don't know if Instagram or YouTube, but I know Twitter and Google. And it's like, all right, here are the keywords you're looking for. Annapolis, these streets, popular figures. And then every day you aggregate all of the news stories that came in. And the editor's just looking and seeing like, okay, what was interesting, what was not interesting. So there's that aspect. But then he also has the programmatic aspect to it, where in his newsletter he's like, here are the concerts that are happening this summer. Here are the events, the sporting events that are going on this month. Here's what the weather looks like. He's like, I know it sounds weird, but everybody wants the freaking weather in this newsletter, even though they have it on their phones. Like, people want the weather. There's a lot of things that could just be programmatic, just easily, very easily built out. But then there is like the editorial piece that I think would take some time. So anyways, I freaking love that idea.

Here's another idea. So it is illegal to scrape a bunch of emails and add them to a mailing list, right? It's against the can spam Act of 2004. You could go find a high value audience like real estate agents, and you could use cold emailing software like Lemlis, Mixmax, Gmask, whatever, scrape their emails and send cold emails to them. You're not opting them into a newsletter or a list. You're sending cold emails to them that says, hey, first name. I know you're a realtor here in City Name. I have this newsletter. We just talked about the real estate market here in City Name. Would you mind if I send it every week? And you're just sending manual cold emails with like three automated follow ups, asking them if you can subscribe them. And it sounds tedious, but it's all automated. And then anytime they say yes, you connect that to Zapier and you opt them in to your beehive, to your newsletter.

Are you subscribing like a newsletter growth hack? Is that what you're. Is that what you're describing right now?

Yeah, yeah.

Why would you not do that?

You could.

I think it's genius.

There's 2 million realtors in the United States. You get 1% of them to opt in. If you just had 1% of this market.

Bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro, bro. It's a $250 billion market, dude. If I just.

That's all you need.

That's $25 million, dude. It's crazy.

Did you not hear me? I don't need a pitch deck. My pitch deck is 1% of 250 billion. Or is that not enough for you?

Oh, do you not know how to do math? Pull out your iPhone and type these numbers in. Dude, that. That would be really. Yeah, that would be interesting to like. I want to start a massive newsletter. Everyone's like, everyone's always like, there's riches and niches. Start with a niche and then grow out. No. What if you're just like, nah, I want to do a newsletter to all the real realtors in the nation. And you build it around a growth strategy as opposed to, like, going niche.

Mm.

I think that'd be a really cool idea.

Big is the new small. Think about that.

Really?

Yep.

I usually tell my wife the opposite.

Okay, what do you got for me?

All right, you did an episode a little while ago and then you ended up actually putting a tweet out about it. But it's something I've thought a lot about and I think is really interesting. I think that there's a trend right now with people our age and older, especially people our age and younger, to spend money on health and beauty. In particular, I'm not talking about necessarily the gym. I'm talking about spas for men, you know, trt, testosterone replacement therapy, other hormonal therapy treatments, Botox, laser treatments. Just like lots of health related innovations, I guess, that are coming down the market that are, A, supposed to keep you young and B, help you look young. So one of the things you post about was Botox and I wanted to run through because I thought it was interesting how you were talking about SEO, how you go out and get customers. I thought it would be fun to run through and like, actually describe the economics of Botox.

Let's do it.

All right, so I'm going to use me as an example, but let's say that I wanted to go and get Botox. Do you even know how you would ask for Botox? Are you like, I'd like two Botox, please. Like, do you understand how it works?

No, I don't. No. I don't do needles. When you have a natural beauty, it doesn't even register for you. You know what I'm saying?

Totally. I totally get it, dude. That's why it registers so well to me. So you buy Botox in units is what they're called. And so, like, for somebody like me who has a massive forehead, it's a sign of a big brain.

As my father, if it's a thousand units. Do they call that a G unit or.

They actually do. They actually do.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah. So I've got a big head. I use a lot of units. As my dad would say to my mom, what, you have the Jewish brain. Jews are smarter. They have bigger brains because my mom's Jewish and my dad's racist. And anyways, so like for me, a first time forehead, I'm probably going to do 40 units, right? But then they got, you know, these little things here or these things here, or they got, you know, some lip filler and other places. Like, there's probably like 12 units here or some of this is from research. Some of this is because I was asking my neighbor who's an NP and owns a wellness practice, like, how many units? Right. So, so that's just like to give a general idea. And then once you get Botox, you don't just get it once.

There would be no recurring revenue. Right. So of course.

Well, partial, yes, but what Botox does is deadens, not deadens the nerves, but immobilizes the nerves in your face. And it, but it wears off after a period of time. And so you have to get maintenance doses. You have to get, you know, every three, four months is kind of what it's recommended to be. And so when you go back to get those doses, it's not necessarily. I'm not getting 40 on my forehead every time, I'm getting maybe 20. Right.

When you get two doses, do you ask for a dose? Dose?

I hadn't thought of that. I, I do know that when you get doses under 10, it's called a micro dose. But yeah, yeah, but I'll have to ask about the dose. Dose. We're so dumb.

I hate ourselves.

All right, next question. 40 units, let's just say, is on average what somebody, what a recurring customer gets? 40. How much is it a unit retail.

Costs for 10 bucks?

Yeah, somewhere in that ballpark, it's like 10 to 15 per unit. Do you know what the wholesale cost is? Like what the practice is buying those for five bucks? Yep, three and a half to seven dollars. So let's just like easy math. We'll just say they have 50% gross margins. If I'm a customer and I'm coming three times a year, that averages out to be, let's just say a thousand dollars a year in recurring revenue from a person. Does that make sense? Let's also say that they have a really high churn, let's say like 20 of the people who get it. The first time are like, I don't like this. But then the other 80% keep, you know, a maintenance for a long period of time. So the lifetime value of a customer, let's just say is five years, but lasts five years is 3,600. Excuse me, the customer lifetime value is $3,600. But if you back out the gross margin, then it's about 1,800. No, sorry, $4,000. I'm not doing my math right here. Hold on. Five years. Thousand dollars a year, $5,000. Okay, back out the gross margin. $2,500 is kind of your LTV. So one customer represents an LTV of $2,500.

Guys, I have started dozens of businesses at this point and every once in a while I'll see some random. That makes zero sense to me. And when you're dealing with international stuff, you see it all the time. It's not uncommon for currency conversions to eat 3 to 5% of every transaction. It's insane. But Airwallex fixes this with things like multi currency accounts across 60 plus currencies. No double foreign transaction conversions killing your margin. You can collect payments in euros, hold them in euros, pay suppliers in euros. None of that converting back and forth. Over 150,000 businesses use them across 160 countries. They've got corporate cards and expense management built right in. So stop bleeding fees and go check out airwallex.com your global business without borders.

In my mind I'm like, I wouldn't even need to open a practice. I have a neighbor who's like right behind me and he's an np. Why wouldn't I just target local Facebook groups, local HOA groups, local, you know, PTA groups, and go hard and find a neighborhood where there's also a nurse practitioner that can go and administer in people's homes like concierge, and just crush it that way. But I don't have the other side of the equation. I know that my customer lifetime value or my lifetime value is about $2500. How much do you think it would cost to acquire a customer? This is the part where I don't know. That's. And like I know you've, you like explored this on your podcast.

You're looking at like $4 a click through paid Google Ads. But the, the, the question mark is what's your conversion rate once they click? $4 a click is pretty high. But at a $2,500 LTV, let's say there's 5% conversion. Then you would multiply 4 by 20. So it's $100.

Is 5% conversion a good perversion or good conversion or bad?

That'd be pretty good. It's not, like, amazing, but it's pretty good.

Let's go with a bad conversion. 2%.

So. So $200 customer acquisition cost through if you're only using Google Ads. Also highly dependent on the local market, but, yeah, less than 10%.

Like, why would you not do that all day?

And so you would just partner with someone that's licensed to do this, and you're the lead gen source, and they're the.

Absolutely. So there'd be two things you'd have to figure out. The first thing you'd have to figure out is how do I identify practitioners in that neighborhood? Because I would prefer to have some. Somebody who's looking at this as a side hustle. Right? Like, I'm not trying to start a practice that's just concierge. Like, I look at my neighbor, comes home at five, and, you know, if from like five to seven, three nights a week, he's getting people in and he's making an extra $10,000. Well, more than that, $30,000 a year. I'm sure he'd be open to that. Right. So you'd first have to, like, identify kind of a neighborhood or an area, and then you'd have to identify who in that area is a practitioner that I can go and approach and ask if they want some extra work. I think the identifying the area is easy because you're just going to look at demographics. You're like, obviously these are going to be higher income. You're going to look at age, all of those things. So that part might be easy. The harder part is going to be, how do you find people in those target areas that live in those areas that would be interested in this as a side hustle.

I got you. Here's what you need. You're missing a third party here. You need. I need a third person in this partnership. Okay. Okay. We've got. We've got. We need a. You're the Lou Perlman here. Okay? You're the Lou Perlman to the Backstreet Boys.

Okay.

Okay. But you've. You're. You've only assembled part of the Backstreet, but you're only assembling the NP to actually perform the procedure.

I've only got Nick Carter. I don't have A.J.

That'S it. That's it.

I don't have J.T.

Forget it.

J.T.

Come.

All right, keep going.

Anyway, no you need a moment. You need a mom. You need a well connected mom or. Or at least a mom that's willing to post in a Facebook group. Because. Here's the post. Here's the post. Hey, girls. Hey. I'm hosting a Botox party. We can get a discount. Like, this is. Honestly, I hate to say this. Edit this out, but don't. But this is like the perfect MLM pyramid scheme opportunity.

Yes. Just find who parties who.

Is Botox like Tupperware party? Yeah. Yes.

This has to exist already, right?

You need to find the women that did sell Lularoe or New Skin or Tahitian Oni juice or you name it, and then they don't anymore because the lifespan on these things is like five years. But they have all the skills and the network. Although they probably. They probably burned the network by this point. But they just need to host parties. That's right. At a discount.

But how do you find them? I. I agree with that, but how would you find them at scale?

Oh, there's third party tools where you can search people on Facebook based on keywords. So you could search people that have ever posted about Lularoe. And if someone's posted about it, it means they were probably a distributor.

Do you want to test this with me?

Yes.

Like, I could go.

For the purposes of this podcast. Yes.

I could go to my neighbor and just be like, hey, let us try this. We'll pay for the ads. We just want to see if you get. Yeah, we can spend 300 bucks and just see if he gets one customer from it or one person.

And people listening could replicate this wherever they are.

That'd be rad. All right. I love that.

What are we calling this? Is. Is this a segment? Is this like a thing now?

Apparently. We did the perfume segment. Now this is going to be like a return and report. Yeah, we'll call it the return and report segment. And for that small group, who knows what I'm talking about, you're going to be giggling to yourself and everybody else. You're gonna be like, retain a report. I don't understand.

Statistically speaking, for the 3.2% of people that understands, or if you're In Europe, the 0.32% of people.

So good.

I like that idea. That's a good idea. It's a relationship idea. Literally no money. It's one of those ideas that you launch by making a couple dozen phone calls and finding a couple yeses.

And I really do think it's a side hustle. Like, to me, I don't see this as like, oh, this is going to be scale, though. It could scale. I'm just saying, like for an NP or a PA or a nurse who can administer Botox in a neighborhood. And it won't be every state. Some states are state specific on who can administer. You'd have to actually see the guidelines and who can administer. But if you find that person for that person, they're going to have a full time job. It's just like, oh, this would be cool. I could see, you know, two. An extra 10 people a week in my neighborhood. And from those 10 people, I'm going to earn an extra $20,000 a year.

Another thing you could do here is once you prove out this model, you put it in a long PDF, make a course, and you could sell this to nps. There doesn't need to be, there doesn't need to be a pasty white guy like yourself to play middleman. Right? It could just be two people here.

And if I did do it, I'd have to be like, you know, box out of my mind. Like, have you ever wanted to know cars? I'm smiling.

Yeah, but I mean, you could sell a course to people to do, basically make money on the side, and then they could replace their income entirely with this.

I love it.

All right, I got one for you.

Okay.

Do you remember why I bought the domain name? I call this domain name number732, domain name lifetimesandals.com.

Lifetime sandals.

No, I haven't talked about this in maybe six years, but I still own the domain name. Have you heard of Shady Rays?

No.

So Shady Rays, I think I'm getting the name right. Is a sunglasses company that blew up because of their U V. P. Unique value proposition. Okay. They came to the market and said, we have really nice glasses. Sunglasses. But guess what? Everyone loses their sunglasses. So with our sunglasses lifetime warranty, no questions asked, you break them, you lose them. No problem, we'll replace them.

Dang.

Just the framing. It's just the framing. And it's like, well, how do they make money? Well, they sell them. You know, there's already high margin on sunglasses. And I've priced these out in China. They cost $50 to make, 50 cents to ship, you're in it $2. You sell them for 50 bucks. Anytime someone files a claim, you just. Okay, no problem. You just have to pay shipping. Shipping's five bucks, cost three bucks. So you basically you net even on shipping, right? $5 for shipping. You work your margin for the glasses into there. And so statistically speaking, they would have to file 10 claims for you to break even on them, right? And people, there's friction and they introduce strategic friction. I call it strategically introduce friction. Believe it or not, they introduce friction. They're like, oh, fill out this form, okay? Do this, call this number. And most people are going, eh, yeah, yeah. And like statistically, even if there is no friction, 80, 90% of people will never file a claim. Like either they won't lose it or if they do lose it, they won't remember. They won't think to. So that idea has been done for sunglasses, but I think the same framework could be used in any industry, right? Lifetime warranty and just work it into the margin. And you might take a little beating up front because you don't know what the claims will be. So you're going to have to leave it loose. But once you learn, wow, okay, 2% of people are filing claims in the first six months. We could drop our prices even more or oh geez, 30% of people are filing claims. We got to raise our prices. And so that's why I bought lifetime sandals. Because I rotate through sandals like crazy. I break them all the time, right? So it's like if I could pay 80 bucks for sandals and just. Or if I could sell them for $80, import them for $3, they're small, they're cheap to ship, they're under 16 ounces, so they qualify for cost. You could totally do the same thing with sandals or something else.

It'd probably have to be a high, like high ticket, high margin product. Like so my brother in law has like for whatever reason gotten obsessed with things that are manufactured in China and he's like raybr, Ray Bans. And you know, XYZ sunglasses are manufactured by the same manufacturer. Oh my gosh. By the same factory, by the same people using the same types of products. But one is 301 is $20. So Raybrand Ray Bans is able to have this fat margin just because of the name as opposed to like the quality of the product. And so I would go and look at those types of products, probably they're being manufactured in China that are similar to other high ticket watch, right? Like nice watches, rings, sunglasses are one, handbags might be one, sandals are one. And just go after that. It's like, okay, what's, what's a high quality high ticket product that we could replicate and have the lifetime warranty on and go that way.

Doesn't Patagonia do it like against damages or defects? I think that's what they're known for. It's similar but different.

They don't ask questions. Maybe it's either Patagonia or North Face. I. Patagonia, whatever. But like there are stories of people who have like taken their 30 year worn boots back and, and gotten them for store credit. Right? Like so. Yeah, yeah, there are definitely companies that do this.

But this is different because it's like if you lose it, that's the key differentiator. If you lose it altogether, they will replace it. Whereas Patagonia is like if it rips, if there's a defect, bring it back. Right. It does have to be something specific, a specific type of product.

And it's kind of the honor system too, right?

Yeah.

Oh, I lost it.

I'm sure they have protections worked in. But anyway, what you got? You got more? What do you got for me?

I tweeted a little while ago about DSOs. I've talked about DSOs in the past. They're dental services organizations. And I'll do a quick primer like what DSOs are. So tweets. Dental services organizations exist primarily because in many states there are regulations against entrepreneurs owning dental practices. Dentists can own practices. But me and you couldn't just go and start a practice from scratch. We would have to partner with a dentist. And the way that entrepreneurs and in particular private equity funds have gotten around this is they've created these things called dental services organizations where they don't own the practice, but they charge, you know, 50% management fee to the local clinic and the local clinic is contractually obligated to use them and they send the money back. And so it's kind of like this workaround. Some of them actually do own the clinics that. But that's because they have a dentist who also is a partner in the dso. But anyways, suffice it to say this is a centralized organization that helps support practices in the field. And they offer things like hr, payroll, billing, collections, legal, all of those sort of administrative components that a physician just doesn't want to deal with. You see this in the medical space with physicians as MSOs, medical services organizations. You see, obviously DSOs. But I like this model because you're able to provide services at scale and you're not necessarily getting into operating the practices on a granular basis. So that's a quick primer on what DSOs are. I think. Not just think. We both have a thesis that search is turning local. We like Google my business, which is now Google. Business profiles are incredibly important to Driving business at the local level. AI is obviously answering a lot of questions on Google that were otherwise driving traffic to websites who relied on that traffic. Like what's a good recipe for tomato soup that used to drive traffic to people's websites and it was like a lead funnel that then took them down the road to buy a cookbook from that website. Now Google just gives you the answer based on all the things that they're aggregating off of the Internet. Well, you can't do that with local search yet. And so Google business profile is becoming increasingly more important with reviews and, and all this things. And we've talked about launching an agency to do actual Google business profiles in the past, but I think there's an interesting business and this would be like a wholesaler of just hooking up parties, Google my business agencies on one end, dsos on the other, and a middleman who just connects them. Like almost like a lead gen organization but specific to medical in particular. And the way that I would do this again back to like the local conversation that we were having is I would start looking at my local networks. Do I know any dentists? Do I know any physicians? And start, I mean you see these people at barbecues, you see these people at your local kids events and you, you always make the small talk, oh, how are the bills doing this year? Oh man, the Dolphins really do suck. Can you believe Lane Kiffin still coaching? But Nick Saban ain't. I tell you what. Anyways, and just ask them like, hey, you're a dentist, right? Yeah. Are you part of a DSO or you're a physician, Are you part of a medical group? And the second they say yes or no, like just ask them how are they finding leads?

How are they?

I'm curious, I'm starting to learn more about this, but there are a ton of accounts on Twitter, on Facebook, wherever that are easily findable that will provide those services. And then you don't need to be the one, like you don't need to start a Google business profile agency. You just are the middleman. You connect them, you get a fee in perpetuity, wash your hands and you're out. And so I think it's like localizing the lead gen space in your local community.

Not necessarily for dentist or medical or anyone that's on Google. It could be.

I'm using them as examples, right? Because I think they're two, two really, really good examples. But like back to what we were talking about with my nurse practitioner neighbor, I know he's a nurse practitioner who could I hook him up with to get him more leads? Because I think that local lead generation and, and specifically focusing on local lead generation is going to become more and more important and more and more specialized. And they don't yet know who the new, I guess, agencies are that are specializing in this. So instead of them, like, figuring out on their own you being proactive and then taking a piece of the referral.

By leveraging your network, here's another idea. So same approach, same thesis, which I agree with. You approach the guy at the party and say, hey, you start talking about his practice. I know this is random, but I saw, I noticed on your Google business profile that X, Y and Z, like you're not doing updates or you're not doing this. Not doing X, Y or Z strategic thing that people should be doing to get more leads. Is there a reason why? Oh, I don't. I don't even think about that. He's like, dude, I don't know, man. Like, I know this other dentist who does those things and it drives like 60% of his business. Would you mind if I, like, if you give me limited access and I can just start poking around in there and seeing if it helps your business? Just very low pressure, no cost anything. And then a month or two later, Dude, I drove 38 calls to your office. Yeah, I've actually noticed it's been busy. Hey, I've actually started a business around this. Would you mind if I. Would you mind paying me a thousand bucks a month to manage this?

So would you white label it or would you be. You would actually do it?

Just do it? I would just do it.

Yeah.

I think because you're already like halfway there if you're finding the leads, you know? So it's like depending on what your situation is in life at that point, you might as well learn the skills and have an agency. One to two grand a month per customer.

Yeah, that's a good point. I'm like, fascinated. Kind of obsessed with this idea of the local economy. Not the loco economy. It's not the local economy. It's the local economy.

Thank you for clarifying.

Sorry, I froze.

That makes more sense. All right, I got a little hack, little life hack for anyone listening. Okay. If you want to find out what to sell. So we all know native deodorant's origin story. He went to Etsy. He saw what was best selling. He saw that people were buying all natural deodorant, aluminum free. He started making it himself. He cracked Facebook ads. He sold it for $100 million in like nine months to Procter and Gamble. There's another Etsy hack out there. Where? Go to Etsy, let the algorithm lead you. And I love this hack for anything. Go create a brand new Facebook account on a new computer or a new browser with a proxy, whatever, or Instagram, Twitter, any of the social networks. See what the algorithm shows you when it doesn't know who you are. Okay. Because that's going to show you what's interesting, what's trending. It's going to show you like the most viral things because it doesn't know what you want to see. Okay, that's really interesting.

I've done this on Instagram recently and like my personal account on Instagram is all just females, gym clothes, bikinis.

Right?

But then when I go to.

That's so weird. There must be a glitch when I.

Go to an outside account. It's like, you know, the news or normal stuff. Do you know why that would be?

There's no way. Must be a glitch. There's no way of knowing.

Okay, thank you, God.

Okay, so go to Etsy, see what it's showing you. It's going to show you some really best sellers and that that alone is going to be a good tell as to what's selling well, because if you create an account and you log in, you start making some searches, looking around, then it's going to show you what it thinks you want to buy. Not what is the biggest seller right now, but go find a popular Etsy seller based on how many previous sales they are, they have. Because Etsy will show you a lot of that data and look at their reviews. And let's say an Etsy seller sells a hundred different items, look at their most recent reviews and what items is are everyone talking about in the reviews? And that's going to tell you on the biggest sellers, the best sellers, what the most popular items are. Because there are so many opportunities to unbundle bundle Etsy to take products or products, product lines, pull them outside of Etsy, take them to Amazon, take them to Shopify. A lot of times it's already been done, right? It's not like a given that it hasn't been done. But there are arbitrage opportunities there where you look at the reviews, what are they talking about in the reviews and you'll see what the best sellers are. I talked about finding out what Shopify bestsellers are by pasting a URL suffix into a Shopify store.

Where would you start with that?

What do you mean, would you go.

Or would you have your wife, like, start looking?

I would go, like.

What would be the first filter you would search for?

It depends on what you want to sell. I mean, let's do it right now. Okay, so I open Etsy and I'm going to type in the word Texas because I've done this before for Texas snacks. So there's no way.

There's no way to sort like top sellers.

You can filter by that, but it's not always accurate because it's combining with the algorithm to show you what it thinks that you want. And so I want to find sellers as in the account selling items, not necessarily the actual items within the accounts. I'm looking at this store called Just Phone Cases. Okay. Literally the name is Just Phone Cases. And what are their best sellers? Nurse Bags and Nurse Coasters.

Really?

Right. So to me, that's a big tell that someone that. Literally they're called Just Phone Cases. Really? That's all we sell. They're selling a ton of nursing coasters and nursing bags. So it's like, okay, maybe there's an idea there for an e commerce store solely pointed at nurses. Kind of like that scrubs company. I forget the name that they're a publicly traded company. Figs. They're publicly traded and they just sell freaking scrubs to nurses.

Jeez. Love it.

Okay, what do you think? What do you think of Holdco Bros? See you next time.