Everything I'm Working on in March 2025 | Ep. # 148

All right, I'm going to do something a little different today. I'm going to speak off the cuff a little more. Back on January 1st, I released an episode that talked about everything I'm working on, and it did super well. I was pleasantly surprised because I recorded at a hotel in a rush, and I want to do something similar because I'm working on a lot of stuff. And a lot of times I spend so much time on content and interviewing other people about their businesses that I forget that I should talk about things that I'm doing because I'll. I'll be building stuff until the day I die. I like talking to my podcast audience, especially audio. No offense to everyone on YouTube, but I just feel like you guys are my bros and 15% of you are my sisters, I guess you could say. And I don't know, I just. I like talking more transparently both in my newsletter and on the podcast. It just feels more natural. Whereas in a short or in a video or on Twitter, I don't know, it feels too public. So here's everything I'm working on and everything I'm super excited about. I'll start with the business stuff, then I'll go personal stuff. So I found this YouTube channel a while back and I did a deep dive on it today. And they're in the home services niche and they've grown to 40 million followers across platforms in the last two years. And it's actually really incredible. And they're not optimized. No one's really talking about this guy. And honestly, I think I'm going to copy him. I'm going to hire someone and or partner with someone and we're going to launch something in a very similar niche and just see how it goes. Just as a test. So I can't really spill a lot of details right now, but I will, and I'm just really, really excited about it. I've been making a lot of sourdough bread lately and I don't know, I don't know why. I don't know. It's like Diablo building businesses slash baking bread. It's all the same. You're just creating and you're building or you're making videos or building a family. I just love creating. So it's been a lot of fun. And right now, if you're watching on YouTube, you see this finger. About 20 minutes ago, I was slicing into this bread with this brand new bread knife I got and I cut my finger through. Five minutes later I was cutting again and I cut the Same finger in a different spot. So I was just bleeding all over the place and all over the bread. But I, I'm loving it. And we have this farmer's market that's literally less than a mile from my house. We live in kind of a small town and my wife sells cookie bars there. And I really want to go sell some of this bread. I tweeted about this, so if you read that tweet, this will be a little redundant. But I think there's a world where I could sell $4 bread and have my cost under $2. Everything, labor, overhead, cogs, everything under $2. So 50, do 50 net profit. Now, keep in mind, I'll be baking this from my home. I really won't have any overhead, but I am working in labor as if I were paying people $20 an hour to make this for me. So you can already buy sourdough from about two different vendors at this farmer's market, but it's like nine to 12 bucks. And it's super crusty and it's kind of like artisanal. And it's something you buy for a special occasion. And I want to compete with like the bagged bread. I want this to be bread that moms make their kids sandwiches with and that they buy two, three loaves a week. So I just want to compete in a different way. Sourdough is just fun. It's literally water, flour and salt. That's it in time. And you make your starter and you mix your starter in and you let it rise and you do stretch and fold every 30 minutes and you find more efficient ways of doing it. And I just have a blast. So if you're listening to this and you like building, making, creating, start, get into sourdough. It's just fun. It's just fun now. No, you don't have to monetize everything, but I do because it's fun and I like it. So that's just something I've been excited about. Of course, I don't plan to make any money at this, but I plan for my kids to learn and I plan to have fun. And that's what's important. It's hailing right now and I can hear it. And my daughter just opened my office door with about a golf ball size hail in her hand. So there you go. Speaking of fun family businesses, I've been incentivizing my kids to sell all of our extra crap on Facebook Marketplace. We literally have like 12 old iPhones, tables, chairs, old furniture, stuff in the attic, thousands of Dollars worth of stuff that needs to be sold. And I just, it's, I just hate doing it. It's so tedious. And I have four kids and the youngest is almost nine. They old enough for this stuff and my oldest has a phone. So they get 40% of everything they sell and they can't have their screen time until they list at least one thing for sale. And they were kind of hemming and ha. It took weeks to get them motivated. And finally yesterday I turned off all the screen time on my son's phone, espn, including during March Madness, I know almost child abuse abuse and said, no, we're done. No more screen time until you have three things listed on Facebook Marketplace. So he grumbled and he finally got an old iPhone listed and about an hour ago this guy came and picked it up and my son was super nervous. He's like, can you meet him at the door? He's really shy. I'm like, I'm like, no, I'll, I'll go with you. I'll teach you how to do it. But like that's the suckiest part and I don't like it either. But you need to learn how to do that. So it's funny because like I talk a lot about rewiring your brain, making that first dollar on the Internet and my son's doing that when he's 14 and just what a valuable lesson to learn. They're going to make good money, they're going to learn a lot of lessons and I'm going to make some money too. And I highly encourage you, if you have kids, teach them the principles of buying and selling on a marketplace. Taking good pictures, good to strip, good descriptions, keyword stuffing, being super responsive. I posted a YouTube video about this a couple of months ago, in case you saw it. It's called like Facebook Marketplace Masterclass or something. But haven't watched that, so I've been excited about that lately. Conferences. I'm speaking at two conferences next week, back to back, one in Sundance, near Park City, HoldCo Conference. Nick and I are speaking about partnerships and Hold Cos holding companies and so that'll be fun and I'll go fly fishing there. So I'm excited about that. And then the next day I'm flying back to Dallas and speaking at SM Bash, Small medium sized business Bash. I spoke there in Salt Lake last year and I'm speaking about the role of a CEO. So if anyone's going to be there, I'd love to say, hey, that's going on next week. There's Five birthdays in my family starting two days from now. My daughter's birthday's on Thursday, and then my wife, My son's birthday is five weeks later. And then everyone else's birthday in my family is between that time. So it's going to be a crazy five weeks. I've been buying some domain names. $10 only. Stuff that's never been claimed. They call it hand registered. I've been trying to buy up a bunch of domain names that start or end with tko, as in the Kerner office. Preferably things like a tko, one syllable tk and then words that start with O or things that rhyme with O, like tko, bro, tko, show, stuff like that. So I already own a bunch. But I just bought TKown yesterday. O, W, N. I got an idea for it, but we're not sure about if I'll use it for that. And then TK owners. So that could be interesting. Yeah, I think I like that. And then today for my sourdough at the farmer's market idea, bought. I might have these words mixed up, but I think it's salt, flour, water.com and then water, salt, flour.com. that would be the name of the Sourdough brand. Just showing in the name, in the description, what it is, what you're buying. Something very simple with three ingredients. So I have way too many domain names. Most of them I end up let lapsing a year later because, you know, a year goes by and namecheap is like, do you still want this? I'm like, why did I buy that? No, I don't. But power law says that one of these will pay for all the others, and that's usually the case. Let's talk about AI tools. I've been in Replit a lot. Shout out to my new friend, Brian Skinner. He's been helping me finish some projects that I started on replit over the last few months. The last mile is really hard on replit. Relet is great for getting like something out there that you can play with, but it's still. It's still so undeveloped. You really need someone to get across the finish line. Unless you want to spend hours tinkering with it. Manus Manus is like an AI agent. It's kind of like an operator clone out of China that I got an invite to. I've been playing with. I was really impressed with it at first, and then like a lot of these tools, the more you play with it, the less impressed you get. And maybe because our perspective changes, our expectations change. But like today, I Was using manuscript to log into my Facebook page and invite people that have engaged with my post to follow my page 100 at a time. And after like 30 minutes of doing this, like just dragging it through this process, it finally said manus has stopped because the context window is too long. Please start a new chat. And it's like, what? All that was wasted? Like, wasted. So I'm, I'm just very much first world problems here. But I've been using Manus to organize my newsletters, to download them all as PDFs, to find cool viral videos about business, IDE to analyze basically the cities that download my podcast the most, to append population sizes to the cities that download my podcast, podcast the most. So I can find out where my podcast has the highest concentration of listeners. Stuff like that. To me, so far it's not a lot different than ChatGPT, but I'm seeing some promising things. I think I'm gonna make a YouTube video about how I'm using it. My newsletter has been growing fast. It's like it's at a very steady state right now. It's never been this consistent with growth. I'm adding 500 to a thousand subscribers a day. My son's calling me. I think he needs to be picked up from seminary. All right. Sorry about that. I had to go get my boy. Speaking of church, I just got a new job or calling in my church. I'm what's called the second counselor to the bishop or the pastor, like his second assistant. So that'll be a new challenge. I'm working with the 11 to 13 year old boys. We're going on a campout in a couple nights and tomorrow or tonight, if you're listening to this on Wednesday, I'm going to see Brand New, the best band of all time for their reunion show. First show is in Dallas. I've never been more excited for a concert in my life. If you're watching on YouTube, of course, the album cover right over my shoulder is Dejan Tendu by Brand New, the best album ever written. All right, back to business. I'm thinking about doing events like going on a tour and doing like a startup night or idea night or idea improv or I want to know what you're thinking. Like I really want to know what you guys think about this idea because I'm not talking about this anywhere but here on the podcast. What makes me nervous about this idea is that it's never been done that I know of. It's kind of unique and I don't Want to be the first to do something? I'd rather just copy something. I like it. Stand up comedians, right? If you're a comedian, you go on TikTok, you share your bits, you build an audience, you go on tour that is well established, works, but this is not a thing. And so what I'm thinking is go to like a venue, let's say it seats 500 to a thousand people and it's like an interactive venue where there's a big screen behind me and anyone can submit business ideas, ideas on their phone and maybe they submit like a terrible idea, like an obviously terrible idea, and then it pops up on the screen and then on the spot I try to make it a good idea and maybe I solicit feedback. There's a guy, one or two guys with microphones solicit feedback from the audience with their ideas and I could turn a bad idea good or I could take their sub ideas to the main idea and add to it. Kind of like I do with Sam and Nick and Connor on this podcast where one of us will say an idea and then it will end up somewhere totally different. It'll start stupid, it'll end awesome. I just think it'd be cool to do that live. Not like a live podcast where I just sit on stage with Connor or Sam or Nick or someone and just like talk about business, but like something a lot more interactive like that. We could do like a Shark Tank style competition where people from the audience could come up for 60 seconds, pitch their idea, cash prizes. I don't know, it's not fully fleshed out yet. I just think it would be a lot of fun. So I think I'm going to test it or something like it in Salt Lake Provo area in June and in Dallas sometime over the next few months just to see how it goes. And then everyone could meet each other before or afterwards and maybe people could launch stuff. Like maybe people could come up and pitch their idea and then someone in the crowd could partner with them or invest in them. So it wouldn't be a conference, probably be a couple hours and I don't know, that's like all I know about it right now. But I'd love to hear your feedback if you want to email me. Chris at co founders Speaking of the podcast, I'm putting a billboard up. You may have seen that tweet in Tomball, Texas, just north of Houston. It's going to be seven or seven hundred a month. I think the cost of the billboard vinyl is 950. That's a one time cost and then I'm getting a three month contract for 700amonth. It gets like 20,000 cars driving by it a day. It's on Main street in Tomball. It has a lot of visibility. It's on the right side of the road. It's not really competing with other billboards. I'm super excited about the design that Simon picked out. Simon is my YouTube thumbnail designer, editor, graphic designer. He's amazing. Simon, I love you. And so what I'm going to do is get eight different designs. It's going to have my podcast cover art on the left side. It'll say the Kerner office along the top. It's going to have icons for Spotify, Apple and YouTube. And then there's just going to be like two to four words right where it's like quit your job or still rat racing or best business podcast. I'm going to take eight different designs and I'm going to put a Facebook ad in that area. So I just, I want those people to see the Facebook ad. And literally the Facebook ad is going to be a picture of a billboard. Like not the design from the billboard, but like you're going to see like the frickin pole holding the thing up, trees off to the side. It's just going to be like an ad for the current office and it won't, it won't convert well. But I'm just trying to see which picture people click on the most and then the winner will get printed for 950 bucks on a billboard in Tomball, Texas for three months. So I'm really excited about that. I don't, I have no idea. I don't see podcast billboards, but I just, I have to know, I have to know how it'll perform. And you're probably wondering how are you going to track it? Well, I can't do a QR code because I'm using Clear Channel for billboards and that's against their policy because, you know, liability, distracted drivers and all that. But I know where all my podcasts are downloaded on a city level basis. And so I exported all my podcast data. It took like the 10 to 15 cities in and around Tomball. And, and I know exactly what percentage of my podcast listens in those cities and how many downloads they have. And so I'm just going to watch those cities closely and see if they grow proportionally or disproportionately to the other cities downloading my podcasts. That should be pretty accurate to tell me if it's growing or not. So very excited about that. I'll report back on how it's going. I've been hiring a lot of people, mostly for content stuff, mostly virtual assistants, editors, people to look at data. I religiously export my Shorts data to track retention. How many seconds are people watching on average? And to track shareability. What percentage of people are sharing my shorts reels? TikToks, preferably 1 to 3% of viewers are sharing. That means it's probably gonna go viral if it has good retention. If you want me to do an a, a podcast on how I look at my shorts data, how I try to go viral, I will. I just don't know if there's a lot of demand for that, but I love talking about it. Speaking of content, I have written on my mirror, my bathroom mirror, 10m in 10m. And I wrote that at the end of February. And it's 10 million in 10 months. 10 million cumulative followers by the end of the year, which is, you know, 10 more months in the year. And I'm behind my goal. I get. I get between 8,000 and 40,000 new followers a day across platforms combined. Lately, it's been closer to 8 than 40. But I need to average 25,000 a day, every day for the rest of the year to hit that goal. Right now I have about 2.5 million, but that's about twice what I had two months ago. So it's grown fast. And I don't. People ask, like, what's your end goal? What do you want to do? Like, I don't know. I just think it's good to have. I think it'd be really awesome to have a show like a TV show or a Netflix show, similar to Diners Dragons and Dies. But for businesses where I go into small businesses and I pick the owner's brain about how they find customers, how they make money, are they profitable, what product lines or service lines are the most profitable, unexpectedly profitable. Crazy stories, failures. Kind of like Guy Fieri. Guy Fieri walks in and says, how do you make this fetuccini Alfredo? And he's. He's a good host because he was in the restaurant industry for his whole career. And so he talks the talk and he walks the walk, and he knows the culture. And he's like, oh, you're putting in the white pepper instead of the black pepper. Because it, it goes well with a cardamom. Like, he speaks the language, but he's also still learning. So he's an expert, but he's also humble enough to still learn. And I would love to be like that, but for businesses. So. But I don't know if I would like that. That might be a grind traveling around. Like, I don't want to be away from my family. Right. So it's one of those things. Be careful what you wish for. I could see it being something that, like, I end up doing. Like I, I reach that goal, but then I don't end up liking it. So I don't know what my end goal is with content. I just know it's. It's good to have. And my ultimate goal is to get people to start businesses based on something they heard. And I have a running Google Doc entitled people that have started businesses based on things they've heard from me or something like that. And I add to it every time someone emails me or messages me. So if you ever started a business based on an idea you first heard from me, whether it be porch pumpkins or stump grinding or what have you, email me Chris co founders.com and I want to hear from you. Maybe I'll have you on the pod like Tyler we had on a couple of weeks ago with the stump grinding business. So love to hear from you, but I've been experimenting with recycling my shorts every week. I'm just now starting that. And it's kind of a risky bet. It's not something that people do, but the thesis is like, you know, Meta has billions of users and it wants. Meta is starved for content, especially on Facebook. Meta still has a billion daily active users, but they don't have as many creators anymore because they're all going to Instagram or TikTok or YouTube. And so this, there's this asymmetric opportunity where Meta is paying creators, trying to incentivize them to post reels, especially Facebook reels, not Instagram reels. And I'll tell you what, the Facebook audience is super, super valuable. I get like two to 300 subscribers a day. Over half of my newsletter subscribers are coming from Facebook. And my videos do better on Facebook than any other platform. And so, you know, I used to recycle the bangers every six months. And then it's like, let's try every three months, every month. So I've been trying every month and it's been working well on Facebook. But I want to try it every week though. I just got monetized on Facebook, which is cool. They don't really have a system. You just have to be invited. And it's substantial, making like four to seven hundred dollars a day. For doing the exact same stuff I was doing, just posting reels. That's it. No work on my part. So that's a six figure profit revenue line that just showed up. And I'm monetized on TikTok now, but you have to have videos over a minute to be monetized. So I've been making like one or 200 a day on TikTok on average. So that's been cool because I'm still getting newsletter subscribers from those same channels and those are even more valuable than the 20 to 60 cent RPM revenue per mil, revenue per thousand viewers that they pay me. TikTok is closer to 60 cents, which is awesome, but my videos don't do as well. Or Facebook is about 20 cents per minute very consistently, but the videos do very well. There's. I started a separate clips channel because my YouTube long form videos are not doing as well, which is a bummer because like for instance, my operator video got 50, 60,000 views. It was my best ever. But then I went on Greg Eisenberg's podcast and I basically did the same video and he's got 700,000 views and it's me, I'm doing the same stuff and it's his best performing YouTube video of all time. And I think the reason is because YouTube shorts and YouTube long form are so different. And the shorts I post really have nothing to do with this podcast. I'm not advertising my podcast, I'm not posting clips of my podcast. I'm just posting, posting, look at this freaking guy right here. Business ideas. And so it's a different audience. Whereas like people like Greg, he's not posting any shorts and so his YouTube audience is there for long form. And so I started a separate clips channel on YouTube where I can just post the look at these freaking guy videos. And then I'm. I'm only going to post either podcast shorts on that, my main YouTube channel, or I'm only going to post long form videos. So hopefully that turns around. I've really been focusing a lot on my audio podcast lately. Anytime someone subscribes my newsletter, I used to auto forward them to my YouTube page. And so my YouTube grew really fast last year. But the value of a podcast subscriber is much higher than the value of a YouTube subscriber. So on January 20th I redirected that traffic where now they go to my podcast page. And so my podcast has been growing a lot. A few months ago I was at like 35, 40,000 audio downloads a month. Today I'm at 75,000 audio downloads a month. So that's been awesome. I've been using Sparkloop to monetize my newsletter with co registration. So when you subscribe to me you get five recommendations of other newsletters to subscribe to and then they pay me one to seven dollars about a month later if that subscriber becomes a high quality, engaging subscriber. So the newsletter has really turned into a cash cow for a few different reasons. Sparkloop is paying me like two to three thousand dollars a week now for doing nothing extra. So that's really been compounding. And then I have a, an rv, mobile home park, investing masterclass slash community. It's like a bunch of modules, some video, some written. There's about 31 people in there and that's going great. And we meet every Wednesday as a group and I meet with everyone individually every month for a half hour and they're buying RV and mobile home parks and I'm just teaching them everything I know. So if you're interested in that, you can go to, you can email me as well. Chris Co founders com we've got repeat leads repeatleads.com it is a marketing agency primarily for local businesses. Not just home service businesses, but local businesses that rely on SEO, Google business profile, search engine marketing. So that's been going great as well. You can email me if you're interested in that. My crypto mining business has not been going well. It's been an absolute dumpster fire nightmare, big strain. And I've been talking about that for years or for a year now. So that's not really turning around, which is a bummer. It's not all Roses, Texas snacks. Our Buc EE's business has been crushing it. I stopped by the biggest gas station in the world, which is the BUC EE's in Sevierville, Tennessee, aka Eastern Tennessee, pigeon Forge area. And I took a video there, bought about $3,000 worth of shirts because we sell location specific shirts as well and we're just growing every month and my business partner Kirk manages that. He does a great job and we pay ourselves quarterly distributions from that and it's going really well. I'm going to do a Q and A episode here soon, probably a couple. I'm thinking one of them will be released next week, one the week after because it's been a while since I've done that. So you can go to tkopod.com scroll down to the very bottom and you'll see a way to record a voicemail. So if you've done that recently. Sorry I haven't gotten to you, but I will. Thank you so much for listening to this. Please leave me a five star review if I'm worthy of your five star review and email me chrisofounders.com if you have any feedback for the podcast, good or bad. I want to make it better. I want to know what segments or what types of episodes you like hearing the most because I like doing all of them and so I want to know what you like the most. Thanks for listening to the Kerner office. Please share with a friend. We'll see you next time.