Creative Ways to Sell More Stuff + More Biz Ideas. HoldCo Bros Are Back! Ep #059

I think there's a world where you can help better educate ride sharing drivers. There's millions of them in the US alone, where they can make extra money in keeping their job and they can make you money as well.

I want to hear your idea though.

For instance, welcome to the Kerner office where we discuss business ideas and growth advice. That's what we do here. I love business and entrepreneurship and so I talk about it. We talked about at least four different ideas today. We talked about how to empower a global gig economy ride sharing workforce to be referral partners for you, to sell things for you so they can make more money doing what they're already doing and they can make you more money as well. We talked about some ideas in the wedding space that tied to my Tweet about the Knot.com, how you could compete with the knot. We talked about wholesale flooring business, how you could start a wholesale flooring business just by acting as matchmaker between a local or an influencer and a supplier. And then the last thing we talked about, AI automation agencies and how we're kind of early on those and we just talked about a general framework where look at tech startups that just raised a round of funding, see what they're buying, see what they're spending all of that other people's money on and that's going to be what we see. The more commonplace product or service here in two to five years, they kind of lead the pack. So I really like this episode. I hope you do too. Please like and subscribe and share with your friends. I don't have enough reviews in the app Store, Spotify, Apple or wherever. Please leave me a five star review. If you're gonna leave me a four star last review, just don't, okay? I don't want to see it. I don't want to hear it. Okay, just getting. But seriously, thanks for listening. I tweeted about cars for Doordash. Did you see that one? Nick, did you see that again?

I saw you and I heard you say it.

And you have notifications for my tweets too. So you go. You have no excuse, no excuse at all, dude. Yeah, no excuse. Every time I have outstanding texts from you. Just know that when I tweet and I have outstanding texts from you, I know that I have outstanding. And I'm tweeting anyway. I'm gonna. I'm tweeting even harder when I have outstanding texts from you. Oh my gosh, you're laughing because you know how much truth there is to that oh, yeah.

So anyways, I know about the Uber for DoorDash cars. Will you just explain it to the audience so they're caught up?

Yeah, because they don't know when really. They probably know about it more. They probably read the dang tweet, Nick. Because over a million people did. All right, so I'm on Instagram, and I tell you what, Nick, I get so many business ideas from Instagram, it is just a treasure trove. Okay? I see this guru, and I don't want to call him out, but he's definitely a guru looking dude who is selling a course on how to buy and rent out cars for doordashers. Okay? He's selling a course. And it's this whole shtick. It's this whole thing on Instagram. And so I start looking into this because this is an industry I'd never heard of. Now, I knew that people, like, rent out cars to Uber drivers. Like, the whole industry of buying vehicles and renting them to Uber drivers has been around for a decade. Right.

It's like fleet management. You own a fleet of cars.

Exactly. Yeah.

Yeah.

This is very specific to DoorDash, because DoorDash is the only rideshare service that does not have an age limit to their cars. They don't care. And I'm assuming it's because the end user doesn't even see the car. They don't interact with the car, they don't get in the car like an Uber rider might. Right, right. And so that creates this opportunity, this market for people to sell or rent older cars to door dashers that have bad credit. If you have bad credit, you can't buy a car. It's a good idea. Bad credit and or no cash. Right. So very much a high headache business because of the. The clientele you're dealing with. You've got to buy car trackers. You need expensive insurance. You've got people not paying you. It's a tough business to be in.

And now I remember the tweet that I posted to this tweet. Do you remember what I said?

Nope.

We should call this business Presto Cars.

I don't want to talk about that.

I can't believe you didn't see that.

No, I did. Now I remember.

All right, keep going.

Okay, so I want to talk about that. I already tweeted about it. It's an interesting opportunity. People are doing it successfully. They're making money. I don't recommend it. I would never do it. Okay. For all those headache reasons. They're easier ways to make money. But here's a philosophic segment for you. Little. Little philosophical segment. Little philosophic segment, real quick. All right, I'm not gonna get on the soapbox, but. And then I'll get back to the idea. I think the future's bright, but I think a lot of things about the future are a little depressing to me. I've heard people, like, on mfm, they talk about AI and how AI is gonna solve our loneliness problem. People are more lonely than ever, but with these AI friends and the metaverse, and we're gonna have connectedness. And I just think that it's completely false. I think that we are lonelier than ever because social media has provided a false sense of togetherness, which. It's worse than. No, togetherness. Right? You're seeing all the best. Everyone's talked about this. I'm not saying anything new, but I think that we are lonely because social media is like this poison pill. We think it's healing us and it's hurting us. Okay. And I think that, like, the metaverse is going to make that worse. Whereas a lot of people, you know, friend.com raised $2 million. That was all over the news. A lot of people think that AI plus the metaverse is going to solve this, solve that issue. So there's that meta.

Meta ain't gonna make it better.

Oh, okay, okay. So social media, the metaverse, provides us a false sense of togetherness. AI provides a false sense of intelligence, right, where we lean on it too much. And yeah, it can be a tool to make us better, but it also can incentivize us to not actually learn things for ourselves and ride sharing services. I'm getting back to the original point. Provides a false sense of employment or job security. Okay. Wouldn't you agree?

I don't know if I agree with that. I can agree with the premise just for the sake of this argument, but I would say people who are doing ride sharing are not looking at it as, like, a job, like job security. They're looking at it as either something that they can do to control their time, something that they can do as a side hustle, something that supplements their income. Like, I. I get what you're saying.

The perception of ride sharing, but I don't think the data proves that out. I think most ride sharing drivers are immigrants and they're poor, and they're in a car 80 hours a week scraping together a living. And that's honestly my same argument against raising the minimum wage more and more and more and more and More because it's like I just need, if I make $15 an hour, then I can pay my bills. And no one's really addressing the fact that, like, these jobs shouldn't be permanent jobs. Like, these jobs should get us to a more permanent, stable position. And I feel like ride sharing is very similar and like it gets people by just enough to stay where they are, to stay poor. And I don't like that aspect of it on paper. You know, Uber and to their shareholders are like, we're providing millions of jobs. And it's like in actuality, it's like they've, it's better than nothing. But if they didn't have that opportunity, it might be just enough kick in the butt for them to go, like back to school or to go get a full time job with a salary. Right. Who knows?

I fundamentally disagree with you, but we don't need to argue about that point.

Oh, okay.

Nobody wants to be driving an Uber for the rest of their life. Nobody wants to have that as their job.

Like, they don't want to work at McDonald's for the rest of their life either. Right.

So in my mind, if they were going to use that as a swift kick in the butt, like, they're just going to be the type of person who would use it as a swift kick in the butt. You know what I mean? Not raising the minimum wage isn't going, or, excuse me, raising the minimum wage isn't going to make them necessarily more likely to not get their way out of poverty or to not get their way out of that situation. An Uber driver making an extra buck an hour isn't necessarily, it's like, oh, well, I'm making extra buck now. Well, I don't need to improve my life. Like, okay, what are you going to earn an extra $3,000 this year? If you wanted to improve the quality of your life, you're still going to pursue an education or you're going to get a specialty degree or you're going to, you know, get into professional services. The driving as an Uber driver in my mind is just an opportunity for you to get by until you can get to a place where you are.

Able to think that's what it should be. I agree that, but I don't think that's what it is, is what I'm saying.

Okay, I want to hear your idea.

Like there's. Anyway. Anyway. So with that in mind, that gave me the idea for the doordash tweet. I think there's a world where you can help better Educate ride sharing drivers. There's millions of them in the US Alone, where they can make extra money in keeping their job and they can make you money as well. For instance, find a high ticket service like real estate or insurance, okay? You've got some regulations like people have to be licensed. There's laws around referrals and whatnot. But what if you taught a free class? Let's say you're in Dallas and you advertise in a Facebook group for Dallas Uber drivers and you taught a free class on insurance and how insurance work, life insurance, health insurance, real estate, whatever. And you educated them and you taught them on how it works and how they can sell it. Once again, at a certain point, they're probably going to have to get licensed or registered or whatnot. But then when they're in the car driving these people that are about to buy a house, about to sell a house, people like people that are riding in Ubers, many of them are in this transitory phase of life where they're actually more likely to buy something like this. And in addition, I think the sentiment that I have and you have towards ride sharing drivers and that, that must kind of suck, right? That must kind of. Especially if you have to do it 80 hours a week. My theory that people are inherently good and they want to help others. Which is why when James reaches out to sell a tree trimming service, he says, I'm young, I'm a business owner. Like, it works, right? He's playing on that. I think there's a world where you can educate Uber drivers on these things. And then when they get in the car with people that are likely more affluent or in this transitory phase, they could say, hey, on the side, I sell health insur. Or I sell car insurance or whatever, or real estate. Do you have any needs? Even if they're not a full time health insurance or real estate agent, they could be a lead source for you, a health insurance or real estate agent and take like a 25% commission just by having conversations. What do we think?

Or having a sign in the car, like maybe there's some building that's like first tier.

Yeah, that's like lowest friction, which, like people are doing that. There are businesses built around ads in rideshare services. Right.

But here's my knee jerk reaction. I don't like the idea because I don't want to talk to my Uber driver. I don't want to make small talk. And I think most people don't want to make small talk. And so you're Essentially incentivizing these Uber drivers to talk to people in the car that probably already don't want to have the conversation. However, I do love the idea of not the writer being the customer, but the driver. There are probably these courses. I don't even know what to call them. Yeah, courses that you can get through a lot of it by listening. And so going to these Uber drivers and saying, hey, do you want to better your life? By. I'll pick one. I mean, you said life insurance salesman. By becoming a licensed life insurance salesman, here's the course you can do the majority of it. Listening. You still have to set aside time to take the quizzes and all that stuff. But many of them are probably kept from improving their lives because they're driving all the time. So could you sell something to them that allows them to drive and be listening to that stuff and improving their lives that then helps them get out of the motivated ones?

Right, I'll take your level up and I'm gonna level it up again. Okay, Sell something to them. No, but let me contradict myself real quick. I cannot sell something to them because it's. They don't have much money. Right. That's not the game. But maybe you do sell something to them, even if for $20. Because if people buy something, they're more likely to take action on it. Right. Let's say it's an audiobook on how to be a life insurance salesman. You give it to a hundred people for free. 10% of them ever listen to the thing. You sell a hundred of them, A hundred people it for $20 and 40% of them listen to it. Right. It's like it's a net win for everyone. And you're only charging money because philosophically they will be more likely to take action on it. So there's both sides of the argument. I love the idea of not them not coming to a physical class because of course, like, that's friction. That's hard. They're busy. But giving them the audio for free and having them listen and learn in the car, maybe. Shoot, Nick. Maybe this is what gets the person in the car to actually be willing to talk to them. Like, oh, what are you listening to? It's like, oh, you know, I'm just trying to. Trying to become a life insurance salesman. Do you have any needs right now? To your point about not wanting to talk to them? I don't either, but my wife does and I know a lot of people that do. So it's like we might not be representative. True. Anyway, Keep going. True.

Okay, so you and I both know somebody named Gabor who we met on our mission in Hungary. And Gabor, he was not one of the first guys to sell. What was it? Was it. It wasn't Tahitian noni juice.

It was New Skin. New Skin.

New Skin. Yeah. So there was this MLM called New Skin. And like, any mlm, if you get in early, you're one of the rich people, right? Cause, like, you have a huge downline. Well, Gabor didn't get in early, but he was looking at this as an opportunity to better his life. And I don't know if you remember this or not, because you didn't speak Hungarian super well at the time, but he would tell us about his prospecting. He was like, every day I need to talk to this many people. And anywhere he went, he would be trying to close the sale. Like, on the. Dude, I was about to say on the villa. Moshe.

Oh, geez, I'm so sorry. I forgot English for a minute.

So on the train, anybody he's sitting next to. On the bus, anybody he's sitting next to when he's walking, like, he would just talk to everybody about new skin. He would try to sell us as missionaries and be like, hey, your dad's into new skin, right? Like, could I talk to your dad? But it was because he saw this, like, opportunity to improve. I think giving them some type of a sales training would be the way to go, because think about how many interactions they're having on a daily basis. And they could then try these sales techniques, like, in real time. Hey, talk to the next person about their family. Get them to open up. Like, it's just teaching them conversation. And this won't be like every Uber driver, but to me, it feels like sales would be a natural fit to train these drivers and then to get a lot of reps in talking to different people, because they're put in these situations to teach them how to be better salesmen. And, like, you know, immigrants work freaking hard, and they're good salespeople.

They get the job done.

Any of them are enterprising, huh? Oh, they get the.

They get the job done. Can I level you up again?

Please do.

All right. You give them sales training, like you said, totally free. But okay, here. Here it is. Here it is. Here it is. You don't sell it to them. You with me? You don't sell it to them. You don't sell it to them. But you. It's a course. It's a free course where they have to go online and answer questions. Right? That's the accountability. There's modules to answer. And maybe you, maybe you pay them when they're done. Okay. And you just work that into the margins. And it's a gamble in the beginning, it's a gamble before you know how fruitful it will actually be. Maybe it's a hundred bucks is all right. So you teach them sales training, and maybe you don't even put the sales training together. You just go buy someone else's. You know something, you give them the sales training, you format it for ride sharing workers specifically, and then you create like a marketplace of people that they can sell for around the country. So, yeah, you have to be an insurance agent for them to be a referral partner for you. Most people listening to this are not insurance agents or real estate agents. Right. You just create a marketplace. We're like, hey, all right, what do you want to sell? Do you want to sell this high ticket thing? You want to sell real estate for this guy over in Texas? Do you want to sell insurance for this guy in Florida? And you just became this. You just become this matchmaker for people that sell a high ticket service and then people that you're teaching how to sell.

I do love this idea of unconventional sales channels and figuring out ways to leverage them. Like, you're really good at this. You've done that with Reddit, you've done it with Twitter. You've done it. Like, you talk about finding somebody's information on Strava and then cold contacting them. So, like, this feels like there's a brand there. Yeah, there's something there. To figure out a way to leverage an unconventional sales channel, which would be Uber drivers and the time hairdressers.

Like someone that has a job where they're spending one on one captive audience time with someone.

Right. Yeah, I like that one.

It's a good one. All right, I got another one for you. Did you see my Tweet about the not.com?

Did I see it? Yes, I did see it.

Okay. You didn't read it. That's okay. It's okay. I don't read all of yours either. We can be open here.

Yes, we have open relationship.

So you know how I talked about using this house as a wedding venue before?

Yes.

Right. And I was just curious. So I went to the knot and I was going to do what I always do when I'm curious about something, and that's like list it, sell it, gather data on it before I actually do anything. Right. So I thought okay, I'm going to go list my property on the Knot.com and see if I get any inbound inquiries for people to host weddings here. Cause I already have pictures, whatever. And I get there and there's like, there's nowhere to list it. You've gotta like book a sales call. I'm like, oh, this is annoying. Yeah. Cause I didn't know how they monetized. I didn't know if they took a percentage of everything. Right. Cause it's a lead gen company. So lead gen companies do one of two things. They sell you leads or they sell you a placement on their website or they take a percentage of whatever jobs they generate for you. Right.

And the not.com is essentially a place where you can go look and say, hey, locally, what wedding venues are available?

That how it works. Any wedding vendor, anything. Photography, photo booth, you name it. Luxury trailer, bathroom rentals.

Got it. Got it.

And so I hop on this call with this, with this girl and she's just like. It's just every sales tactic in the book. And she's like nervous.

Let me just ask you this, Chris. How important is the experience of the wedding to you?

There was some of that.

Oh yeah.

And she's like, chris, how much money would you like to make on our platform? I'm like, oh geez. That's just. You just flip a switch and you just turn on the money machine for me. Is that what you do? Oh my gosh. And so it's an hour long call and she gets to the pricing at the end of it and it's. So they have three tiers. 5,400amonth for their most expensive tier. Just to be licensed. Yeah. What? Yeah.

Is that $5,400 a month for venue or is that just any vendor for.

A venue, which I would assume is like the most expensive thing. Right. And then it was like 2500 and then it was like 1200. And the whole way they do their pricing is how much placement, priority placement do they give you in the top of the search results. That's it. That's the only difference. Okay. And she was like, so for $5,300 a month you get 832 leads. For $2,500 a month you get 456 leads. And for $1200 a month you get 258 leads. Whatever. It was in the specific.

Really?

And I'm like, how do you control for that? Right. In a season? Per month. Per month. This is a seasonal. And she told me that she's like, this is a very seasonal business. Like, people start, like, like, so it's like these conflicting messages, right? Very, very seasonal. We're about to get into the busy season because people get married in the warm months and they start planning in the cold months. So it's like, now's the best time, Chris. Best time to sign up. And you know what? If you sign right now, I can give you a 10% discount. I'm just like, oh, my gosh, I'm not going to sign right now. I had all these red, red flags going off. I know. Legion. I do. Legion, right? You can't control the volume of leads. Like, even if you, you pull a lever on your Google Ads or Facebook ads, like, when you raise your ad spend, the effectiveness goes down. Like, you just don't know. And so I thought back to this documentary I watched on Ashley Madison. Remember Ashley Madison?

Oh, you're dirty, man.

You watched that thing? I did. My wife.

Can we just talk about how. How as an aside, when the Ashley Madison emails got leaked, both of us that day were searching as many emails as humanly possible to find if there was anybody we knew on that list.

I did not sleep for five days straight. I'm such a snoop.

The first thing we both searched for, I was like, Kerner. And you were like, very first, very.

And then I, like, I try all the, the different ways to spell your name. Like, maybe he's clever. Oh, geez. N, I, C, K. Oh, no, he's good. He is good. You go to your bishop. You go to your last bishop, your stake president, your pastor.

Oh, my gosh. I. Dude, I totally remember that. When it came out, I was like, are you freaking? Oh, I'm so curious.

I remember because there was no, like, database. You had to go on the Dark Web to search for it. That's when I learned how to use the Dark Web. I have to know.

If you want Chris to learn a new technology, tell him there's something he can snoop about using that technology.

Oh, don't get your journal around me. And don't get it around Nick either. That's another story for another day.

All right, sorry. So you're watching the Ashley Madison documentary.

Anyway, so everyone knew that Ashley Madison's big downfall. And by the way, they're still in business, so they never really fell. I mean, their big downfall is their, their data leak. But that opened up the doors for the FBI to start investigating them, where they found out that, like 90% of their leads quote, like, inbound messages from women to Men were fake, right? Totally fake. Because the number one problem that any dating platform app, website has is there's 10 to 1 ratio of men to women. What do you want to say? You got something funny?

No, I was waiting for that punchline. It's like, yeah, I'm shocked. Wait a second. It was 10 to 1, men to women on Ashley Madison, it was like 20 to 1.

Right. Of course.

Freaking horn dog. Men are the ones signing up.

Yes.

For the Ashley Madison's and the Tenders and like all those other websites. Not women.

Yes.

Sorry.

And so their whole pricing system was set up around credits, and a credit was like an inbound or an outbound message. And so they would. They had a whole system of bots. They were like, way ahead of their time. I mean, this was way before AI and they had chatbots that were like, hello, Roger. And they were these boomers. Boomer men were having these conversations with chatbots. And like, if me and you were ever on Ashley Madison, we would have known in five seconds, like, oh, geez, okay, you're doing bots. Okay. All right, we're done here. But that wasn't their client base, Right. They were boomers.

That and the fact that anytime you introduce sex into a critical thinking conversation or situation, it's true. Your critical thinking just goes out the window. Right? So, like, these guys were probably like, hey, where are you located, Sarah? The chat bot's like, I am located in the northwestern hemisphere. It's like, wait, why would anyone say northwestern hemisphere?

And.

But like, the boomer's like, okay, I like the way you talk. You're very specific.

You know, they must be educated. Do you go to Alabama?

You must be educated. Have you ever hunted before? I am not allowed in my programming to talk about hunting or killing animals.

I want to go to the island anyway. So, like, the investigators were like, oh, wow, this is just all fraud. Like, this is all fraud. There are no women on this platform. And I. I think it literally was like 97 men. Right. Like, even for a dating platform, it was way, way up there. And so my point is, I'm. I don't want the. Not to sue me, but they are highly incentivized to provide leads that just happen to never close to people paying them $5,300 a month. Right.

And the fact that they're telling you, hey, you will get this many leads is like a yellow flag.

Yes. And that is something that I feel would be very easy to keep quiet. Like, really? There just needs to be like one well paid person at the company that is in charge of that, that knows about that, who could pull it off? Right? Yeah, just leads.

I mean, I guess they are. They're charging per lead. They're telling you their pricing structure based on the number of leads that they're going to generate.

Yeah. So then I start looking at these subreddits and Better Business Bureau reviews and forums and people are not happy with them. Like not happy at all.

And people are saying, knot or not.

Hundreds of leads, no closings. I just went down this rabbit hole and I was like, this is very interesting. And so the business idea here is to go scrape the knot, shamelessly scrape it all. Get all of their customers, all of their vendors, you know, they're all paying thousands of dollars a month to be there. Likely a majority of them are not happy. You get one or two jobs a month or a year and it kind of pays for itself and it's like you just don't churn. But I. Someone commented on the post that was from the space, very well educated in the wedding space. And he said basically like Covid and Instagram changed everything for them. People go to Instagram to plan their weddings. Now they go to Pinterest to plan their weddings. They're not thinking to go to the knot anymore. So just like consumer behavior changing as wreck them. So they're even more incentivized allegedly to provide fake leads to their customers. And so anyway, back to the idea. Scrape all of them. Start with either one geographic area, say Texas, or one niche, like wedding photographers. Scrape them all. Reach out to them, say, hey, list on our website for free. We're like the knot, except free. Literally no strings attached, no charges. And then over time, as people start to actually get leads, you could use paid ads. As people start to get leads, then you can say, all right, it's going to be $5 per lead or it's going to be 5% of any jobs booked through us. What do you think?

Do I mean the marketing rights itself, it could have so many tongue in cheek ads. Check out our wedding videos, no strings attached. Or like we won't tie you up with our user agreements. I don't know, I'm terrible at marketing, but like, dude, it'd be so easy. Just freaking whiff it out post after post. I think that's actually a really good idea. I think it's a really good idea. And what I find interesting is someone who's tell. I can't remember who's telling me this, but someone in the software world, tech in Particular. They're like, look, anytime I talk to a tech company and I'm gonna, I'm gonna lump the knot in with a tech company just because it's subscription based. Automatically I negotiate harder than I ever have negotiated anything. Because it's 90% margin for them.

Yeah. And they're sophisticated. Right.

So like to be charging $5,600 a month. A month.

53. Yeah.

Seems outrageous to me. And if you were to do the math. If I was a wedding venue and I just did the math on what a normal customer acquisition cost was. Can't be $5,300, can it? No, that seems outrageous.

No, they're owned by private equity now. They sold.

You should tag. Did you tag the wedding venue guy in it?

No.

Alex. That would be interesting to get his perspective.

Yeah, I should have. Yeah.

This is his space.

I can't believe how expensive weddings venues are. I mean, we're talking four to 20 grand a pop.

Yeah. It's because we're Mormon. It's like if we had a reception, it's either in our backyard or at the steak center.

We had seven Hot and Ready's for my wedding. Little Caesars. We just called it good.

We just threw up some streamers over the basketball hoops. It was like.

Yep.

It transformed it.

You had streamers? We just counted the hoop itself as streamers.

I still remember to this day when my father in law was like years after our wedding, he's like, I'm surprised you guys didn't take the money. I'm like, what? What are you talking about take the money? He's like, well, we would have paid you the same amount that we invested in like getting the yard ready. They spent like ten grand like redoing stuff in the backyard for the reception. And I was like, that was an option. I would have freaking been at the steak center for 10 grand.

Your wife didn't take him up? No.

I'm surprised. Well, she didn't know either. She had the same reaction as me because we would, we would have taken the money.

I mean, shoot for our wedding, Nick. We just put up a projector and we just played the episode of the Office where Jim and Pam get married. Like that was our wedding. Yeah, it was really nice. It was actually really sweet. It's a great episode.

How quickly you just went is actually really nice. It was a tender moment that I still remember to this day. I wrote in my journal. Can you define what a wholesaler is for the audience?

A wholesaler is someone that sells a good to a Reseller at usually a discounted price from retail.

So Chris has had several of these types of businesses. His very first one was LCD Cycle, where you were a wholesaler of cell phone repair parts. He would go and source the parts from China. He'd be the intermediary, and then he'd sell to retail repair shops that then sold them to the end customer. Buc ee's is, yeah, you're kind of a wholesaler and a reseller in one with Texas snacks. We've done a similar model with Mining Syndicate and are potentially doing a similar model with perfume vending. So wholesaling is a thing. And there's kind of two big reasons why wholesaling exists. One is because of economies of scale. The local repair shop in the LCD Cycle example that was that are fixing phones, they don't have the same pricing power as a wholesaler who's going and buying hundreds of thousands of units at a time. They're buying maybe tens of units at a time. But a wholesaler buying hundreds of thousands of units at a time can push down and negotiate the cost per unit, which makes it much, much cheaper for them to then get that product and sell it to a customer as as opposed to doing it themselves. So that's the first reason why wholesaling is a thing. Economies of scale. The second thing that I'm starting to notice is asymmetric knowledge, which means people don't know how to interface and interact with international manufacturers. We saw this when we launched Mining Syndicate. Nobody knew how to buy a miner directly from the manufacturer. There was only the resellers that they were buying them from. And so Chris is like, I have relationships there. And you just started reaching out to your relationships, got in touch with a couple manufacturers. Boom. We now have relationships with manufacturers and resellers in China. We're able to import the miners and sell them. We're doing a similar thing with Perfumatic, I think, and this could be our business. But, you know, there's the other guy. No risk, no party on Twitter, who. Who does this as well. I think there's a business for showing local influencers or people who do a lot of work within a specific geographic area that are well known how to enter the wholesaling game. So Mike Higgins, for example, he's big in, I think, Madison, Wisconsin. I think that's where he is, near Green Bay. And he does a lot of flips. He texts me the other day and he was like, hey, do you think Chris would help me understand how to be a wholesaler? Of flooring, I think, was. I think flooring was the thing. And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure you. He'd have a conversation with you about it. And it just. It got me thinking. It's like, yeah, yeah, Mike knows that market really well, and people know Mike within that market. Why couldn't he become a wholesale distributor within that market? Typically, the reason is because he doesn't even know where to start. Like, how would he even find something to resell? How does he even become a wholesaler? Like. And that was his question to me. And I was like, well, I'd go look on Alibaba, see if anybody's reselling flooring there. And then I would go and talk to the manufacturer who's listing on Alibaba and see if they have any relationships outside of that. Like, that's the first place. But that's scary. It's intimidating. And so what if Mike could be like, hey, Chris, I'll pay you $20,000. Just show me how to do it. I'll take care of the fulfillment. I'll take care of the lead gen. You show me how to do international importing or working with manufacturers overseas, and you're done. You don't have to worry about any of the fulfillment. You don't have to worry about any of the product. You're just essentially doing consulting, and it's an agency that way. And especially as the world becomes more and more interconnected, the ability to interface with manufacturers and understand how customs work, all the things you need to be negotiating in a contract. I mean, the first time you send a wire internationally for hundreds of thousands of dollars is a freaking scary proposition in and of itself. So I think that there could be a cool business with showing people how to become wholesalers within their own markets.

Do you want to teach them how to be a wholesaler or just use them as, like, a distribution channel? Like, hey, you know, all the flippers in town, let me give you a 5% cut of all the flooring that you. You sell to them. And you could be the face of it.

Even that's a better idea. I was thinking you just teach them like, it's just an education business, but it's actually probably a better way to do it is to find someone who has the distribution.

I mean, you remove the friction. You say, hey, your name is Mike Higgins. Go to HigginsFlooring.com, what's Higgins Flooring? Go look at it. He goes, and it's like his face on it. Shop button. He's like, what? Who is this? It's like, yeah, I built this for you. I manage it. I'm going to push product through it. I just need you to stand behind it.

Let's say you did that, but you had like 10 people. Mike is in Madison, Wisconsin, but you had somebody in Denver and he had somebody in Iowa and he had somebody in Florida, whatever. And could you have, like a network of these local distributors that would allow you to negotiate the economies of scale? Probably be some logistics nightmares, but maybe you have your main warehouse in, let's say Denver, and the wholesalers are then actually just pulling from the warehouse because they've got a network of other wholesalers that they're working with to buy these products. I don't know. That's just like an idea that you could.

Yeah, you hate it. Just copy and paste the same website for everyone, Right?

It's the same thing. It's the same payment methods. It's all managed on the back end. It's literally just plug and play. Oh, you're my Kiggins.

Cool.

We'll throw up a website for you because we've already got the template. All we need from you is a headshot, a bio, and, I don't know, a link to your company. And we'll throw up everything else. All the education, all the links, all the payment portals, all the pictures, all the brochures and information.

Instead of even going to local guys, there's a zillion people on Instagram in, like, DIY niche, right? Like home renovations, home flipping, DIY anything. There's so many people out there doing that. And the way they monetize is they don't. Or they'll have like an Amazon storefront and make 2% of anything anyone buys on Amazon. You can just do it through them.

What if you went to some of the big local, I don't know, construction guys, builders, and said, what are you paying for your flooring? Okay, what if I could negotiate you this price and then you just take a percentage of the savings? Like, Mike may not be doing the volume necessary to support that. He might have the network to sell into. But, like, what if you went to the home builder in that area? Like, a national home builder is probably going to have the wholesaling relationships, but a local regional player might not. And so there could be some economies of scale that they. I just don't. I don't know the space well enough to know whether or not that could be a thing.

I don't know either. I. I think if most home builders are probably Going to have a relationship with like a local flooring company that they're already using. And so maybe, yeah, maybe the pitch is just, hey, circumvent that retail flooring company that's paying all that overhead and they're just passing it on to you and we'll just sell it directly to you from the vendor. Because, like, what you said, right, we could bulk purchasing power.

That was it.

I like it.

So we kind of live in a social media bubble, right? We know about artificial intelligence, we know about ChatGPT. But the truth is that like the vast majority of business owners and operators and people in the economy, they don't really know about it. They don't really know what you can do with it. And even in our space, you start talking about like autonomous agents and people's eyes glaze over because they just have no idea what you're talking about. The other funny thing I think is like, if you ask a random person on the street what chat GPT is, they might know, like, probably 50, 50 shot. If you asked a random person on the street what Zapier is, what percentage knows what Zapier is?

2.

Yeah, it's like way lower. So Zapier, for those who don't know, essentially allows you to create API or, excuse me, integrations using API calls from different technologies within your business. It's a simple. That's like a simplified way to explain it anyways. So I think if you picked one thing and focused on one type of business, you could crush in a hyper local market. Like we were talking about helping those types of businesses implement artificial intelligence workflows in their business so that they could save money. And the way I think about it is there. There are like five areas of business finance. So that's like accounting, accounts payable, payroll, all that stuff. There's operations, which is the actual fulfillment and service of a product. There's marketing. So you're like trying to get people to know about your product. There's the product itself. So designing the user experience, making sure that it's quality. And then there's managing people. Like, those are the five things in a business. Finance, operations, marketing, people, and product. What I would do is I would go to any business, pick a random business, and I would say, all right, step one, let's list everything that you're currently doing manually. Oh, okay, I guess we could do that. So like, anything that requires you to hit a key, let's just write it all out. That's an. It'd be a long exercise, but that's like an easy exercise to do. The next thing I would do is, okay, tell me what your source of truth is. And when I say source of truth. Chris has heard me say this a lot, but it's like, what's the backbone system that you use? In healthcare we have this thing called an ehr, Electronic Health Record. In healthcare, that's usually the source of truth. In home services we have systems like what's jobber? What would you call jobber?

CRM.

It is a CRM. Okay, so you have CRMs that are essentially the source of truth for home services companies. That's where you go to see the client profile, how many jobs you did, how much you charged, all of those things. So you want to identify what the source of truth is within an organization and then start understanding what does and what does not integrate with the source of truth. Step three would be to list all of the softwares that a company uses individually. Like if I went to any company right now and was like, hey, tell me your tech stack. You can bet they're probably lose using at least four different softwares. Their email, the CRM, invoicing, accounting. Like those are easily, those are just like four different types of softwares that they're using. So steps one through three, everything being done manually in a list. Step two, identify the source of truth. So like what is the system that they're using? Step three, list out all of the softwares used individually outside of the source of truth, everything else that they're using. And then step four would be essentially to identify what zaps or what API integrations there are, connecting the source of truth with the softwares that they're using outside of the source of truth. Nine times out of ten, the stuff that they're doing manually is going to be in the softwares that they're using outside of that source of truth. That's like what I would do in going for a business. And I honestly, I think you could charge either project based, hey, one time $10,000 and I'll guarantee that you eliminate a position or you save X number of dollars. It could be SaaS based where you're, where you go in, you help them work through this, you implement something and then you check in with them on a monthly basis. There's like a retainer. I would think the SaaS is probably a better idea because they're going to have ongoing questions like the second Marilyn gets in there and is like, oh, should I hit this key? And the cell's not locked and everything just blows up and they're like, what happened? Are you my grandson? Like, is this going to be. This is going to be a problem. Like, they're going to call you anyways. So I think somebody who understands artificial intelligence, someone who understands the automation process, could go hyperlocal if they have time, and just find businesses one by one to do that exact framework, find the opportunities, and then charge them a project fee and a monthly recurring fee to manage their systems ongoing.

I love it. I think it needs to just be tied to a grand slam offer, like anything. I think the pitch needs to be, basically, I will help you automate your business for free, no questions asked. I'm going to sit down with you. It's going to take three hours. I'm going to give you all the tools you need to automate your business and to eliminate a position or to double your productivity, whatever it is. That's the whole offer is. It's free. So you do all this. You're like, all right, well, you're obviously going to use Go high level for this and you're going to use Zapier to connect this to this. And then you're going to use Jobber to connect this to that. And then you, you've got. Obviously you have to use Streak to integrate with your Gmail and you got to use Workspace, because that way. Oh, oh, okay.

No, no, I'm playing. I'm playing the business owner who you're explaining this to.

Oh, just you're laying this all out there and it's very strategic. Like, they're going to feel left behind. Like, oh, geez, there's so much out there I don't know that this guy knows. This guy's brilliant.

Right.

At the end of the three hours, it's like, here's. Yeah, good luck. Yeah, let me know. Let me know how this goes. Oh, well, could you help? Oh, I mean, I don't know. For a small fee. Right. Because I think if you go into it and it's like, I have an automation agency. I'm going to help you save money or time on your business. What does it cost? Well, it's $5,000 and then $500 a month. It's like, who is this freaking yahoo? How do I know he's going to add me any value? But you only give the pitch once they see your value, and it's a gamble. You could waste three hours. Not everyone's going to say yes. And maybe you could. Over time, you might shrink that down to 30 minutes, but you're going to.

Gather information in that conversation in those three hours. Like, it's going to. You're just getting your reps in so that you can improve it for the next pitch. Dude, I freaking love this. I love, like, bringing ideas to you that I think are cool ideas, and then you're like, okay, yeah, yeah. How would I get that in the hands of the end user? It's just. It's like a muscle in my brain. I just don't have.

That's what we're doing here. We're just leveling each other up.

I freaking love it. There's levels.

That's the game. I got one more for you. That's a good idea. I like that idea. That's already an industry. There's a couple guys on Twitter doing it mostly for, like, other tech startups that have just raised money. Here's a framework. Here's a framework. All right. Framework. Segment, find.

Framework.

So we've all heard that, like, what the rich guys or what the tech guys are doing on the weekend is what everyone will be doing in five years, right?

Ketamine, mdma, lsd.

There you go. Lds, Psilocybin, lds. I had to make sure you heard it. Here's another framework. The things that recently funded tech companies are spending money on is what everyone, every business owner will be spending on in three to five. That's like a whole category. That's a whole thing. There's a whole industry around selling to people on Crunchbase whose profile says they just raised around. That's a whole category of people to sell to because they have a bunch of OPM other people's money and they're ready to spend it. They want to grow. They want to buy agency services. They want to buy expensive B2B SaaS. They want to hire placement services. They need to hire a cmo, a CEO.

They just raised money and they're like, I'm a big boy. I got money behind me. I got to put this money to work. I got my big boy pants on.

Exactly.

Yes.

We've seen over time that the companies that are spending on this, like an automation agency. There's a guy on Twitter that charges three grand a month for his automation agency, and this is what he does. But he's the only buyers are people that just raised around. But not. I say the only. Those are his primary buyers. But in five years, why wouldn't a restaurant be buying that? If he can eliminate a couple positions or boost his sales or boost his margins or something, they will be.

And it makes sense because the people that are willing to buy right now are companies that understand the technology, that the restaurants may not understand it yet.

Right.

There may not be the value proposition that they understand. And so they're getting the reps in with people who already get why they're doing it. It kind of reminds me of Groupon or getting on Facebook or getting on Instagram or like, hey, you. You got to get on Google business profile. And 10 years ago, or when we were in college and like, there were businesses built around helping these companies essentially come online. It kind of feels like that to me. Like, this is the next wave you're helping companies.

It's exactly what I'm saying. Yeah. It's like 10 years ago, if you had a Google business verified profile, you were, like, ahead of the curve. And today it's tablespeaks and it's a little different because you don't really have to pay for that. It's still the same anyway, so I love that idea. And if you launch that today with a local business, you might be too early. That's my one kind of caveat. Downside, it might be hard to get an orthodontist to pay $2,000 a month for this, even if it could bring him $6,000 a month of value or 10. But maybe not. Maybe we're not too early. Maybe it's the age of the orthodontist that matters.

I like that framework, though. Companies that just raised. What are they spending money on? And then.

That's a tweet. That's my tweet. Could you.

Mine could, you know, I said, could you then figure out how to essentially translate that to Main Street? And then that's a cool offering for people.

Yeah, that's good. Okay. What do you think of those ideas? Please share it with a friend if they come to mind as you listen to it and leave me a review, I would really appreciate that because I don't really ask for it and I don't have a lot on the App Store, so it'd be good to get some more. Have a great day.