Exactly How to Validate Your Business Idea for $15

And this is going to take half a day and then you're going to all this data and then you will literally know more about the pack and ship industry in Columbus, Ohio than anyone on the earth over the course of a half a day. Which is nerdy, but cool. This is exactly what I did when I opened my iPhone repair store 15 years ago. The principles still apply. And then we opened three more and we did the same thing and all of them were successful and we sold the business. Welcome to the Kerner office. So we have a quite a few new people joining us. So I wanted to break down the release schedule of these episodes because I really have three different types of episodes. The one you're about to hear today is the Q and A call in live show episode and those will only be released on Mondays. I also have the Holdco Bros Style episode where me and my business partner Nick just talk about business ideas. Those will come out on either Wednesday or Thursday and then I interview cool entrepreneurs that have really cool interesting businesses and those are released on either Wednesday, Thursday or Friday. So I either do two a week or three a week. Either Monday and Thursday or either Monday, Wednesday, Friday. So please enjoy. Today we did five segments with callers, all kind of shorter. I think you'll like it. The first one wants to open a pack and ship store. So I taught him how to see the competitive landscape of his area and I also advised him on that business model in general. Next guy has a local newsletter in Winnipeg, Canada that is growing like crazy and I grave I gave him a couple growth hack ideas and I love the local newsletter business. I love it. By the way, anyone in the world can start a local newsletter business. So we talk about the promise I see in that the third segment is an insurance software business and they want to build connections in the insurance industry and they don't know how. The fourth person has a web design business and he wants to pivot to a zapier automation business because in the web design business you only make two grand per website. In the Zapier automation business you make two grand every month. And really anyone can learn zapier in a few hours. The last person is is retiring from the Navy and he's moving to Japan and he wants to consult people on taxes. Specifically he wants to consult Americans moving to Japan or Singapore on their taxes. Very niche, very unique. And so I walked him through how to find customers there. Anyway, enjoy and then we will see you later this week. Michael, how are we doing?

Good, how are you?

Good. It is good. To talk to you. Let me pull up my notes. So yeah, why don't you ask me a question? I've got something here but let's hear it from the horses now, so to speak.

Yeah, no problem. I was just wondering, how do people evaluate whether whatever the business is, if that opportunity is saturated in a particular area or if there's opportunity, like whether it be, I don't know, an ice cream store or a independent pack and ship store, you know, like how do you find out whether there's an opportunity in a given area?

Great question. So are you able to say what you're looking to do? So my advice can be more specific.

The independent pack and ship store is what I had in mind. But yeah, I've sorted through different business ideas and for a while I was searching for land for self storage facilities and I know there was like a tool that those kind of people use to find something like this.

Mm, yeah, they have a lot of tools out there. So what about the pack and ship business model do you love?

I like that it's relatively cheap to start for me. 50, $60,000 I think gets the job done. Rather easy to scale out of it is my understanding.

Yeah. And where are you located?

Indianapolis.

Okay. What type of market research have you done already? And is that where you feel like you have to or want to open or are you flexible to moving?

I'm open to moving. Basically I just tried to look myself where do these stores currently exist and get a feel for how many of them there are and I mean maybe I could take that and compare it to different areas but yeah, it's just anecdotal experience at this point I would.

Say what first gave you the idea to. To start. And you're looking to start a pack and chip store, not. Not buy one, right?

Yeah, correct. I mean possibly looking for either, but yeah, I guess I've just been interested in starting a business and I'm not sure how. I know a little bit about your background, how you became interested in the cleaning, but kind of these things just seem to be populating all my Twitter feed. Honestly. Cleaning, remote cleaning business, pack and ship store.

All right, so I'll tell you how you can find out if it's saturated or not and then I'll tell you something else. So if I were you, I would go to useoutscraper.com I would find a city very comparable. So let's do this. I'm going to go to chat GPT right now. What city is comparable? Comparable in culture, density and size in the US too. So I'm asking ChatGPT what cities in the US are comparable in like average income, population etc to Indianapolis. So Columbus, Ohio, very similar population, similar size, similar cultures. Obviously they're neighboring states, so let's do this. So I would go to Columbus, Ohio and I would go to useoutscraper.com and I would go to their Google Maps scraping feature for Columbus and all of the outlying suburbs because the way it works is it's by city. And so if you just type in Columbus, then you're only going to get pack and ship stores in Columbus proper. But you want to know like the greater Columbus area because you want to know about the crater Indianapolis area. And so I would run a scrape. It'll just, it'll cost 10 bucks, take an hour and then you're going to get a spreadsheet of stores. I would remove all of the results that are not relevant. Right, you're going to get a FedEx store. Eh, that's not a competitor. You're going to get, you know, staples or whatever, take all those out and just look for independent pack and ship stores. Okay. Then you want to find the zip code that they're in and then go to Google and get a list, and I've done this before, of populations by zip code. And you want to place those populations next to the zip codes in your spreadsheet. So then you can say, all right, how many stores per person per zip code? And then you want to find a baseline. And then you got to take it a step further because if you're going to spend 50 or $60,000, you really, really got to do your research. So this is like phase four. And then you go in and you say, all right, okay, now I know which zip codes have the most stores per capita, not just the most stores, but per capita. And then you want to know the demographics of those zip codes. So then there's like a website that's like US state data or citystatedata.com you want to know which zip codes have what their crime levels are, what their average incomes are, what their population density is. All of these attributes, a bunch of columns in the same spreadsheets. And try to figure it out. Okay, Try to figure out like what a good baseline is for a sister city to Indianapolis. And then you're going to take it a step further. Then you're going to say, okay, based on this data, it looks like these three zip codes in Columbus are under saturated for pack and ship stores. So then you're going to get them on the phone, all of them, and you're going to say, you're going to pretend like you're a customer and say, hey, like I'm looking for a mailbox or yada yada yada. Try to ask questions and use chatbots to help generate more questions. Try to ask questions that give you a feel for their volume and be as bold as you want because who cares if you're going to offend some guy. Why are you being nosy about my business? Who cares? You're never going to talk to them again. They're a state away. And so just start brought down with them and you have many mailboxes. What are your hours, what are your costs? Get a bunch of data and get all that data on as many stores as you can. So now you're going to see, all right, zip codes with high crime are actually more busy, or zip codes with high crime are less busy, or zip codes with a higher population density are more busy. Which makes sense. And try to find holes in that market. Holes being where you might be able to open a store in Columbus. If you were to want to, that would be the most likely to be successful. And then like phase six or seven, you're going to go read their reviews. Okay, you're going to go to the web archive and you're going to go to whois.com, you're going to type in the URLs of these stores. How many of them have websites? Look at the reviews. When was the first review? How many years ago was it? So how new or old were these stores? And this is going to take half a day. And then you're going to all this data and then you will literally know more about the pack and ship industry in Columbus, Ohio than anyone on the earth over the course of a half a day, which is nerdy, but cool. This is exactly what I did when I opened my iPhone repair store 15 years ago. The principles still apply. And then we opened three more and we did the same thing and all of them were successful and we sold the business. So then you're going to take that data and you have to make the assumption that same data is going to be true for a city just a few hours away in a very comparable state. And then you're going to do all the same research and then you're going to find, you're going to know by this point what the baseline is. Okay, in other words, 50,000 people in a one hour radius that make an average of $40,000 a year that has a crime rate of 4% or whatever it is. You're going to know with 70, 80% certainty that a store in that area will be successful. And then you start looking for real estate in that area. And when you're negotiating a lease, you. You want to be sure that you have a short term lease with an option to extend because if this thing doesn't work out, you're going to know within a year and you want to be able to pull the plug in a year without being on the hook for four more years of a lease. Awesome.

That's fantastic advice. Thank you.

Yeah. Is that kind of what you were looking for? Yeah, absolutely.

I guess.

Just.

Any other thoughts on the general pack and ship store you might have? I'd be of course open to.

Well, I know a bit about that industry because I've been in the logistics industry. I don't really like that business that much. Just because of the opportunity cost of your time and money. I don't like retail businesses because I'm an introvert and I don't like dealing with customers. Maybe you're the opposite. I don't like, like, I. It's so maybe I'm saying this because all I do for a living is look at opportunities and business ideas and so I'm pretty picky. Right. But most people don't like. They don't. Their brain isn't sick and hardwired in the wrong way like mine is. So most people get a few ideas and they gravitate to one and that's great. But I, if I had 50 or 60,000 to work with, I would rather start a service business that doesn't have any overhead. A gutter cleaning business, landscaping business, a tree trimming business. I'm recommending. What? I know it doesn't mean it's the right option for you. That's just, that's a lot of money. You could buy a small franchise for $50,000. So I also recommend that you go to entrepreneur.com start reading on all the franchises out there and see if you can find a low cost franchise that's growing like crazy, that has really good unit economics, really good numbers, that is not in your area yet and start looking seriously into that. Awesome. Well, thank you so much. You're welcome. Yeah, let me know how it goes. I'm excited for you either way.

Will this be available to view anywhere?

Yep, It'll be on YouTube and my podcast.

Awesome. Thank you so much.

Yep. Thanks, Michael. See you. Bye. Hey, man.

Yeah, I mean, super Nice to meet you officially. I know we've chatted a little bit on Twitter.

Yeah.

And so it's been super nice following you and of now also write a little bit of content on Twitter. So my main question today is based around my local newsletter that I'm trying to build here in Winnipeg. Before that, I'll give a little bit of like quick context just so you have some background. I'm 23 right now. I graduated with like an architecture degree. Decided not to follow it. Currently I. My main thing is I am the operations guy for an offshore hiring company.

Okay.

Where I'm trying to grow that. That's my main thing. But have started this newsletter on the side. Not sure if you know who Ryan Snelden is. He's also on Twitter, but he.

Oh yeah, he's been on my show. Yeah.

So he's. He also grew a local, local newsletter as well.

Naptown Scoop.

Yeah, exactly. So kind of following his footsteps, I started this thing in like a Canadian city. It's called Winnipeg. Not sure if you know where that is, but it's right above. It's right above Minnesota here. So started that and I started that probably about 3ish months ago. And what got like a few subscribers, like 150 from Reddit, just got down the format and how it was doing and then started running paid ads to it. I would say May 22, as that's the main source of acquisition for most of these newsletters.

How much are you spending per subscriber?

Yeah, so currently I'm spending about A$25 Canadian.

That's good. That's really good.

Yeah. Which is well below what most acquisitions happen at. But the reason for that is there's a unique opportunity in Winnipeg, I would say, where it's a big city in terms of population. So it has like a population of 800,000 people, 900,000 people or something like that. So it's a big city. But the thing is that it's not a tech forward city. So it's not like Calgary or Vancouver or something where people know about like how to run newsletters and marketing and everything. It's still, I would say a fairly run on old, like old tech in a sense. Right. Like there's not that many people that know about things that are going on. So it's pretty easily, if I were to let's say even just replicate things from Twitter onto what's happening in Winnipeg. Like it's. There's a lot of arbitrage opportunities, I guess you can say. So I Started this newsletter because I saw that there were similar newsletters in like, Calgary, Ottawa and. And other Canadian cities, but there wasn't one in Winnipeg. So I've grown that to about in a month of running ads to now having 3, 500 subscribers. And then also. So I send it out three times a week right now. And in terms of Instagram followers, we started Instagram account on June 1.

And what's the name of the newsletter?

It's called Winnipeg Digest.

Okay. Anyway, sorry, Instagram page grew to what?

It's 2 at 8k now, so. 8k in a month.

Oh, wow. In a month. Wow.

Yeah. So, well, I have a little bit of background growing Instagram pages and stuff like that too. So that's played to my advantage, I would say. But we're right now posting like a reel a day, just talking about events and stuff that are going on around the city.

Yeah.

So I've grown that to 8K. And now the. Not the struggle, I would say, but the thing that I would, like, help with is how do I go about monetizing this thing? Should I even monetize this in the beginning in terms of what I'm doing for it right now? I have had, like, I would say four or five sponsors.

Okay.

I've talked to other local newsletter people and they've said, hey, building an Instagram audience gives you, like, local authority. So then you can talk to businesses and they'll take you a lot more seriously. First is that. Second is you want to sell this as like a package deal rather than selling it a cpms, because most local businesses don't know what a CPM is.

Yep.

So that's general feedback that I've gotten for now. I have had a few sponsors right now going about the way of like, hey, first three sponsors get like 80% off. Next three sponsors, 60% off, then 40 until we're at full price. Yeah, that's generally the best.

Okay, so you'd rather know how to get more sponsors or how to grow faster or both.

I think growing faster generally is like, for at least from what I understand is like Facebook ads for now is like going to be the main bread and butter, with the second thing being like, referrals. So I've started now incorporating not lead magnets, I guess you can say lead magnets, where, okay, you refer two people, you'll get like the top 150 restaurants in Winnipeg or something like that. So I started doing that and that started generating like a referral system slowly and more. And I'm getting very Good engagement. I'm getting folks saying this is amazing. You know, there wasn't a place like this. It's kind of the first time that we're able to see what's actually happening before the event is going to happen and so on and so forth. So that's been like super good engagement and everything. Now the main struggle is like, how do I go about monetizing this?

Yeah.

And can I monetize this at such a small scale or do I have to hit like 10k subs or something in an 800,000 city to then be able to monetize it?

What have you charged your three sponsors so far?

So I've been going at a CPM of $100. So right now my open rate is about 53 ish percent, 54%. So I've gone click rate is if I focus on it in an email then I can take it to about 12%. If I don't want to focus on it then I can keep it at like 4% as well. Yeah, like it's really dependent on how much do I want to keep the reader on my email versus if I want to drive the absolute rate. And then in terms of engagement, we also have a poll at the end of each kind of email just to see how if they liked it, didn't like it. And usually the engagement on that is like let's say 1500 people open the email. Around 50 to 55 people will answer that poll at the end.

That's pretty good. Yeah.

Yeah.

Because I mean I use Beehive. You're using Beehive. I have a poll, I have open rates. That's a good, that's a really good poll rate. I don't know what they call it, but poll percent.

Yeah.

So I just got a unique idea that could be brilliant, could be stupid. Have you thought about approaching. So first of all, I love the local news, better newsletter business idea. I've thought about doing it myself. I almost did it a couple of years ago. Have you reverse engineered the Capital Daily? Andrew Wilkinson's in Victoria.

In terms of what? So I've reverse engineered like a few newsletters in terms of like format and what they do and even like in terms of Instagram content. I follow like Boston, NY pages and so on and like will do my spin on those versions of content in terms of longer vision as well. The goal here for me is like, I don't know if I'm going to do ads for the next two years or three years or whatever it is, but Then eventually I would like to spin off other businesses from this as I will have like a local built audience.

Yeah.

You know, seeing potentially what ads do the best for me and then going off based off of that, I can just spin those businesses up myself or partner. What's up.

Yeah. Okay. First of all, I would go back to the Capital Daily because they're literally doing exactly what you're doing, and it's the same country. I would go look at their first 20 newsletters. Not just any 20, but their first. And you already have the format down, so don't worry about that. I would look at like when they added their first sponsor and what that sponsor was. Was it a bakery, was it a SaaS business? And I would just take notes of all that and say, like, okay, whatever Andrew Wilkinson's doing, I'm going to copy because he's a pretty smart guy. So I would just kind of look to that as inspiration. Another thing I would do that kind of just came to me is you can knock out two birds with one stone. If you approach local businesses in Winnipeg and say, hey, you've got what I need, I've got what you need. What do I have? I have an audience of 3,400 people, plus 8,000 on Instagram, and that's only over 28 days. Who knows where we'll be in the next, you know, 28 months? I want to advertise your auto repair shop. I want to write about it in my newsletter. And these guys are. I know my demographic is high income, they're white collar and yada, yada, yada, like, they're highly engaged, they're involved in their community. It is the type of audience that you want and that you need. So I want to talk about your auto repair shop in my newsletter. What do you have? You have an email list of 23,000 people of your customers. What if we do this? What if I, like, I advertise my newsletter to your email list or you share your email list with me, share in quotations, as in give it to me, and then I give you a highly discounted sponsorship or free. Or think about what, like if they had an email list of 20,000 that's worth $20,000 to you, that's 10 times more than what you would get from them as a sponsor. So you could give them a free sponsorship placement. They don't care. Like, they don't care about these emails. They probably hardly ever use the email list. And you can send them one email up front. And just like you could do it one of two ways you can do it. One way, which I don't recommend, where you just like work them into beehive. And now beehive has import limits. You'll have to get around. But work them in a beehive and just start emailing them as if nothing happened. I don't recommend that because you're unsubscribed and your bounce rate is going to go way high. First of all, no matter what you do, run them through an email checker. Because a lot of those emails are probably old and dormant and you want them to be. I would run them through three email checkers. I use bulk email checker. There's hundreds out there. Run them through three or four of them and only accept the cleanest, greenest ones that have no DNS issues or they're not like catch all emails and I would either give them a free sponsorship or a discounted sponsorship and just say I want to just add them to my email list. So sorry I didn't get to the second option. What I recommend doing is emailing all of them once and say, hey, you know, this is who we are. Yada yada yada. I'm partnered with owner of auto repair shop. I'm just going to start sending you the local news. If you don't want it, go ahead and unsubscribe right here and then work them into your flow.

So just for reference here, actually, so what we've started doing is another version of that. So there's a shop called, for example, the locals. They put on like a huge like 300 people, local vendor event type of thing. And they have an email list of like 10,000 people. We're doing something similar with them, but the way we're doing it with these folks is like they're just going to send out an email after the event saying, hey, if you're looking for local news, like go subscribe to this or something like that for in return, obviously, like us giving them a free sponsorship and making like a reel for them or something. I'm also doing that with another concert host person who has a bunch of these like past people emails, right? So people that have bought tickets in the past or whatever. And he's basically saying that he has about 16,000 people as well. And he reached out to me saying, hey, I would love to work together in some way now. I don't know how much. I don't know if I want to target that demographic or not. Right? Because it's. Because right now the email is More focused on like family friendly events and so on and so forth. Like his email list is more like people that like to go to raves and all that stuff. So. But yeah, so we have been trying to dabble in that world and I think we're trying to go more, more that route.

Yeah, I would just not even like, I would look at any, literally any business in Winnipeg as a potential referral partner with their email list. Because everyone has an email list. Most people don't utilize it like they should. And if they could trade something that they forgot about for something worth actual dollars that could bring them more business, it's a no brainer killer offer for them. And so it's like you're a marketplace issue. You've got, you need to sell ads, but you need to grow subscribers. I would focus more on growing subscribers because that's going to make selling ads even easier. And I like the idea of, of you know, sharing emails with other local businesses.

Noted. Yeah, I think we'll definitely start going more in that route. And then what would you say is like a good number and like I don't know if it's a specific number, if it's like a feeling that we'll have, but what's like a good number to like? Okay, now we're established enough to like. Okay, we don't need to do discounts and all that, but we can, we have a big enough email list that we can actually start now focusing on sponsors.

So what do you think would be.

A good number even right now with 3,500 folks? Right. What I'm scared of is me not being able to deliver a return on investment for that advertiser. Right. First is that. And second is like, I would obviously like to build a longer term relationship with these folks and trying to like, I don't want to chase the short dollars if I can't deliver on the results just yet. Right. And with such a small email list of like let's say 3500 people right now my pitch has been the same with like, hey, we have this many people, let's say a dentist. You have such a big, you have such a big like value that even if we bring one client to you that you, by just spending, let's say $200 with us and we can even get you one client, that's a huge return on investment for you. Right?

Yeah.

So that's generally been what my pitch has been.

Yeah. So one last thought and then I'm like almost out of time. I'm glad you said that. Because that led me to thinking this. That's one reason why I think you should reverse engineer the Capital Daily, because you're going to see what types of customers that they accepted as sponsors. And then you can see over time, like maybe you see for the first three months they only did restaurants, and then two years later, they're only doing dental offices. And. And that's probably because they learned that dental offices have a high roi. Cause you made a great point. And they're like, you've got to sell this to people where it actually works. If people don't click and if they don't buy, then it's not going to work and you're going to have to beat your head against the wall. So I think you should find the type of customers that the Capital Daily is finding, and I think you should experiment and find the right balance between either a customer that just wants brand exposure, that doesn't care about tracking, and they exist. Right. Like a Coca Cola billboard. How do you know if that works? You want to find customers like that, and then you want to find customers that have the right mix of high ticket and high volume. And so a hundred thousand dollars sports car, that's probably way too high ticket. It's like if you only sell one, then it pays for well, you're probably not going to even sell one. Whereas a dental office might be a great mix where they could sell two and it only cost them $200, and that brings them $8,000 in revenue. So you've just got to find that right mix. Because if you're trying to sell appetizers for a restaurant that then they might sell $100 worth of appetizers for a $300 ad placement. And it's too cheap.

Right, Makes sense. Makes sense.

I would experiment with. Yeah, I would experiment. I would take like a list, make A list of 10 different types of industries that fit that mold and just try all 10 of them, honestly, and just test it and just keep the data. Yep, yep. Tracker. All right. Thanks, man. Good luck. Bye.

Thank you.

All right, Romeo.

I'm Romal. I'm a software engineer. I work in financial services. Graduated two years ago, got my CFA done, but now I'm thinking of more of Andrew site. Start my own business with my friend. I started watching your content about a few months ago, and I learned a lot about just thinking about business. Case studies, really, marketing classes, really about how you think about marketing. It was amazing to. And now we have settled on this idea with my friend who is. Who Works in insurance and I am a software engineer and we're trying to start a business as co founders as a. Which is the idea is basically an underwriting AI copilot for insurers. So basically it allows them to do two things in the commercial and specialty insurance. It allows them to write more insurance with the same amount of workforce because AI does a lot of work for you. And the second thing it allows them to do is better due diligence using your manuals and guidelines. Better. And being able to do.

You would upload all that beforehand.

Exactly. So basically when the broker sends you all the information, you feed it in and the AI does the work to present it. Present the information in a good way to you to help with some of the due diligence. Also look up online, use your manual and all these things take all the information and better to you in a presentable way and it really speeds up the operation of doing the due diligence and being able to find things that you wouldn't even have thought about questions you wouldn't even have thought about using AI. So that's the idea we're trying to go for now. We are basically two broke people who work full time and we're trying to.

That's good. You have a PhD. You're poor, hungry and driven.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I am working on building the MVP as a software engineer. He's helping me with the technical specifications in networking and thinking about how we go about our plan investors. And our current plan is that we want to build the MVP for a particular niche because there's a lot of competitors out there. But there's a lot of fragmentation too in the industry because AI is so new that there isn't like a perfect solution that everyone uses that is standard across the industry as an underwriting workbench, as we call it, or an underwriting AI copilot. And they are all mammoths with like 15 million, $30 million in funding SaaS companies and like literally MIT PhDs as CEOs, MIT rocket scientists. So we are competing with the biggest mammoths you can possibly imagine. So I really like your idea about how you think about niches, right? You try to solve for a niche, expand from there and then I can go around finding more customers. And my question for you is how do I try to build more connections in insurance industry? Me as an outsider first of all. And my friend is an insider and we are based in Toronto, but he has a difficult time networking and telling people about the idea because he's working full time in his company and he doesn't want his company to know that he's working on this idea. So what we want to do is really find some person with a really big problem. For example, they're really struggling with construction insurance or directors and operations insurance. And we want to solve this niche specifically for them and market it to them that we are the best at this so that we can expand from there. And I really want to learn more about sales and marketing from you. Getting in the right places, making the right connections and expanding to find the right person with the MVP and for the MVP and build the product around them and then have them love it. Then expand to more users and then think about getting investors as we have traction.

Okay, so is your partner able to find customers or did he just kind of speak the language of the industry?

He speaks the language. He's basically we started off like also talking to people in the US a lot because US people wouldn't know him and they wouldn't like there's a chance that someone in Canada knows him and he talks to his boss, being like, oh, this person is up to this. So he's really scared about losing his job like that. But we're talking to people in the US basically cold outreach through LinkedIn and that's their methods right now. This code outputs through LinkedIn to underwriters and finding potential users and are you.

A, did you say you're a student right now?

I was a student two years ago. I'm working full time since the past two years.

Is your customer a company that is having insurance issues or is your customer an insurance agent?

It's an insurance company or an mga, a managing general agent and basically companies that write insurance to write insurance to businesses.

Okay.

So it can be in AIG or any kind of middle or small insurance company that just insurance.

Could one of your customers just be like Joe Smith in, you know, Plano, Texas that owns a state farm agency? Could that be a customer?

Not sure. But basically it's like a, it's like a SaaS. Right.

So someone who sells insurance products to homeowners or car owners, is that a customer of yours?

It's not brokers, it's insurance company. So if it's an insurance company or an nga, then yes. Yeah.

So like you have to sell this into a corporate setting or into a small business setting.

Basically a small or medium, a small, medium sized insurer or an mga.

Do you know of any of not a competing product but another SaaS or another app. That sells to the same customer, Maybe something different completely, but the same customer. Does anything come to mind?

Yeah. So basically, are you talking about like other software products out there that these insurers use? Is that what you ask?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So there's like tons of big products that these insurers use, like Guidewire to do their policy management, or there's basically a few different SaaS providers that help it, basically the entire insurance workflow within the industry.

So if I were you, I would find the guide wires. There's probably a couple dozen of them, these types of software that they might be selling a CRM, right? But it doesn't matter. Like they just need to be selling something to the same type of customer, the same job title as what you're selling to, and see if you can find as much info as you can find on the founder, like the original founder, a podcast that he was on, a blog that he wrote, a social media post, anything where he talks about how he started his business, how he got job.

That's what actually we're doing right now. Because like I said, this fragmentation in industry, right? So we are using the leverage of my friend working in the insurance company and being like, oh, I need to buy this underwriting copilot from you. And we literally getting our competitors on demos and basically have had a few demos with our direct competitors about who are doing the exact same thing to understand what they're doing, their journey, their product.

But on those demos, are you learning how they found their first customers or are you just learning more about the product?

They are usually people who are so well established in the industry with tons of connections, who are 20 years in and have like millions in funding. So I guess like it's, I, I didn't think deeply about it being a hard challenge for them to find that first customer. But yeah, I should think about that too.

I, I would like, I would find out before they had funding, when this was just an idea, how did they find their first customer and then their first 10 customers, what methods did they use? Was it maybe their dad owned a big insurance company and they had a cheat code? Maybe they just did cold outreach on LinkedIn, maybe they texted people, maybe they cold called people, maybe they went door to door. I would find that, like it's out there. You could find that even if you just got someone on the phone and were transparent with them and said, listen, I'm not competing with you. Like, I'm young, I'm hungry, I'm driven, I just want to know what would you do to get your first customers? Well, we did actually. We went to this one trade show. We went to 10 trade shows, but this one brought us 80% of our customers. It's like, oh, I need to get to that trade show. I think that will be your best bet. Like outside of learning Google Ads, like it's so niche, it's so specialized, you're selling to something very specific. So just copy what worked for someone selling a similar or selling anything into the same type of customer.

Okay. Okay. And I guess how do you go about networking and cold outreach after that, like in general to connect with more people in the industry as me being become an insider in the industry. How do you go about that?

Go to Google, type in Twitter advanced search. That's the only way you can find it. Go to a window will open, open up in Twitter, do an advanced search for my username for the phrase cold email. And I wrote like a thousand word multiple threads on exactly how to do that cold email at scale that works very, very effectively. And read that.

Okay.

All right, man, well, I wish you the best of luck and I want to hear how it goes.

Thank you so much. Thank you for your time.

Yep, no problem. See ya. Steven. Steven.

Chris.

How are you doing? Good, how are you doing?

Good.

Okay, so tell me about what you do and like what type of customers you have.

So I've had a web development company for about 10 years now and I'm trying to do this new. I have some clients who I do a lot of automation consulting for. And I'm trying to scale to a larger than just a web development company that services, you know, a small number, number of clients. And I realized I need a product. And so now I'm thinking, okay, everybody's using Zapier. So instead of trying to get people on Zapier, why don't I try to get people off of Zapier at a lower cost? And so I have my own automation platform that is comparable to Zapier. It's on my own system and set up. And then so I want to move people to my own automation platform, get them off Zapier. I can guarantee that I cut their cost at least in half. And then we, you know, we keep that client and we service their automations and then we have a whole engineering team that is experts at automation so we can build automations for them for very cheap, like 40 bucks an hour or even less. So that's what I'm doing. I'm just looking for clients who use Zapier. At a large ish kind of scale, probably spend 500 to a thousand a month on Zapier. And so now I'm trying to figure out how do I find these people? Because my whole business for 10 years has always been word of mouth and it's worked, but it's. I realize I can't scale that way. Yeah. So now I'm trying to figure out. I've done tons of marketing before, email marketing, Facebook marketing, Google Ads. I'm just not quite sure exactly how to find the right niche market for this target.

Okay, so can you speak to how many active customers you have versus how many like total people in your email.

Database you have active customers for? For my web development company, I mean probably 30. 30. And then I've got probably five who are super consistent that are basically the majority of my business.

Okay, so 30 that are like paying you regularly.

Yeah, in, in let's say six months. Probably 30.

Okay.

But you know, probably 70% of my income comes from five sure. Solid clients.

And of those 30, let's just kind of separate them. Five and 25. So like of the five, what size businesses do they have versus the 25? If you. I know you might not know exactly, but ballpark.

Yeah, well, they're under. All the five are under 100 employees except for one. One is like a giant corporate. But yeah, all five are under 100 employees over than more than 10 employees. And then the rest of the 30 are basically single. One or two employees are just by themselves, you know, so they're kind of a different market. Well, yeah, a lot of them are politicians. I do a lot of politicians, stuff like that, so. But yeah, or solopreneurs or very small shops.

How often do you speak on the phone or on Zoom to the 30 customers?

Not very often. I mean some of them I've never spoken on the phone. To some of them it's just all email.

Okay.

And I'm mostly doing their web development, not really any automation stuff. So it's kind of a little bit different.

And what CMS do you use for most of them?

WordPress.

Okay. Only WordPress.

I use Webflow too, if someone wants to pay for it and they want some advanced nice looking website. But 99% is WordPress or some custom application like Node JS or something. We build that out too, but it's a different kind of a different kind of client.

Okay, and how many automation clients do you have?

So that's probably only about four. Yeah, probably about four.

Where I'm in addition to the 30 or they're part of the 30.

No, that's part of the five main clients. That's basically what I'm doing for them, is running their whole automation operation.

Mm. Do you think that the 25 have a budget for automation on a monthly basis?

They don't need it, I don't think, no. I mean they could possibly have the budget if I had something magical for them.

I just have a hard time understanding why, how anyone could not use automation in some way. Let's talk about a customer that you have specifically that you don't think would need automation.

Okay, let's. Like a judge, for example, trying to get elected. They need a website. I do a lot of those, you know, political websites, things like that. It just needs to sit there, collect donations. And the only thing that they might need is social media marketing automation. I could see automation that they would need. But it's a very, you got to get into that market. So if you're going to do lawyers, you got to get into the niche market of lawyers and build automation that you can works with them and works with other lawyers. But you know, I do lawyers, H vac roofers, it's all over the place.

I'm just thinking like with a judge that's collecting donations, he's more likely to collect more donations or recurring donations if he's checking in with his donors regularly. And he doesn't have time to do that manually. I mean, so you could set up an outbound SMS or email automation and you can even use AI to personalize it. Like, hey man, I was just checking in on your family, like really just once again wanted to thank you for your support. Or just updates, right? Like things going well in the campaign. Here's the progress we've made, like marketing updates. Because I know in my business I raise money from investors, which isn't too dissimilar from accepting money from donors. And the more updates I give them on their investment, the more likely they are to reinvest on future deals. It's difference between like 40 and 60% reinvestment rate. And that takes automation. So I just like, I think that if you really, if you held their hands and got them on the phone specifically and said, hey, I was just thinking, man, like I think you could really benefit from this and here's why. Yada, yada, yada, statistic one, statistic two, statistic three. And this won't take any more time for you, but I mean it will cost a little money. There's a little bit upfront and a Little ongoing because things always break, yada, yada yada. I bet you anything like you should be able to convert a double digit percentage of your current customers to be a recurring automation customer because you've done the hardest part and you've sold them on why they should trust you and why they should pay you money. And it's a very tangential service. Right. You're not saying like, hey, I want to come clean your gutters. It's like it's all tech to them. Like it's all things they can't comprehend and it's all things that you can do for them. I would think you sure? Like I would take those 30 people and put them on a whiteboard and just start like just send them an email like, hey, I just want to check in on how everything's going. Like we send them a calendly link and just keep following up until you get them on the phone. But already have these ideas for them when you get them on the phone because they're not going to know about this. You have to plant the ideas and tell them why it's beneficial. And then maybe the conversion rate is crap or maybe it's 60%, but I would exhaust that first because that's the lowest hanging fruit. And then start thinking about like, how do I attack the legal industry, how do I do Google Ads or paid ads or go outside of word of mouth.

Right.

I mean you could double your business just by converting.

Yeah, that'd be nice. I mean that's what I want to do. So. Okay. Really appreciate that. It's a good thought.

Yeah, yeah, I would. Give that a shot and let me know how it goes.

All right, thank you. I know you're on tight schedule here, so. All right.

Yeah, thanks, Steven. Yeah. All right, bye.

See ya.

Andrew. I was perfect timing. So you are looking for career change.

That's right. I just finished 20 years in the Navy and I went through the ranks. Got as high as you could go in that time. And I don't really feel like working for a large organization anymore. So I started my own financial advisor and tax preparation business, which is a great business in the long run, but in the short term when you come from a very different field like the military, it's very hard to get started. So I'm looking for your perspective on things to do to kickstart.

Yeah. So you're going to be collecting retirement forever and you want to do something else because you know we're not meant to sit around all day.

Correct.

Now, what ideas do you already have?

Well, I. I've already formed the company, first of all.

Okay.

And so I've got some practice with just, like, friends and family in terms of a niche. I was largely, like, undefined.

Of who.

I want to serve. But I think I finally know, and I think my target market is serving Gen X and Millennials who are living in or dreaming of living in Japan and Singapore. Because actually, I know I've lived in Japan myself as part of the military. My wife's Japanese. We got half Japanese kids, and we understand Japanese law. And I'm also a licensed tax preparer, so I understand about, like, foreign tax credits and things like that that Americans need to know. Because once you live overseas, I don't know if people realize United States is one of, like, one or two countries where you still have to file every year. It doesn't matter that you left. You still got to file your taxes.

Yeah.

So, yeah, just being a generalist based on all the conversations I've had is probably going to get you nowhere. But if you can clearly define a target market by age and interest, that tends to lead to where all your marketing and social media content goes. And I was really struggling with that. But it just came to me yesterday that, you know, I'm similar to that age group. I've been through a lot of those pain points. We're even thinking of moving ourselves to Japan in the next year. So I think that might be a smart way to go.

Now, did you say Gen x or Gen Z plus millennials?

Gen X and millennials. Because I'm 45, so I was just in the bottom part of the Gen Xers.

Yep. Okay. So you specifically want to find Gen Xers and Millennials that are about to move or have recently moved to Japan or Singapore, and you want to monetize by helping them with their yearly tax prep or helping them with that plus.

Other things, plus financial planning. Because I'm also registered with the state.

Which state?

Pennsylvania. But you're allowed to take clients from all over.

Okay.

And then as long as you follow the rules.

So financial planning, not financial advising?

Well, it is financial advising, but it's not just investments. It's like the holistic approach that you see on Twitter from Thomas Koppelman and other people. Yeah, it's just like investments are in there, but they're pretty far down the list compared to other things in the person's life.

And is that monetizable by taking 1% of their investable assets or whatever?

That's one way to do it. You could also just do a flat subscription fee. I'm already approved to take 450amonth in financial planning fees from clients.

Are you thinking about flat fee lines?

Yeah, I think I'd prefer that. If people want to have me manage their investments, I'm also licensed to do that. And then I can take that, what's called the asset under management fee, the AUM, as you were just describing instead, in lieu of that. But I think most people who are around my age and younger probably feel comfortable just typing in their own trades. Like they just really need a coach for the overall experience more so than to actually manage the investments.

Okay, and are you pretty set on this idea? I mean, you filed your llc. Is. Is this where you're headed or are you open to other things? I'm not saying that because I don't like this idea. I'm just.

Within certain parameters, I'm pretty set.

Okay.

Because I've been already talk. You know, I filed more than a year ago, so in my last year in the Navy, I was doing both. I was like networking with other CPAs and, and financial advisors, trying to understand the business. And my thoughts have evolved a lot since a year ago. But I mean, it's only in the big picture. It's only confirmed strategically that I'm on the right path because I'm always a numbers guy anyway, since high school. And these sorts of businesses are a slow burn, but once they get going, it can. The clients tend to stick with you for 30 years and never leave if you prove your competence at least. So. So that appeals to me. I like helping people with money. I like serving people one on one. And so that's where I'm at.

Okay, I like it now. Have you. What are your marketing ideas for getting to. For finding this unique category of people?

I'm already on Twitter. That's how I found you. But barely post ever. And I don't have a lot of followers, so that would be one avenue if I could just like buckle down, get serious about posting once every day, especially with this more specific message to a specific audience and could probably get some better traction. We've already had a YouTube channel too, and it kind of suffered from the thing. Same thing. We weren't really speaking to anyone specifically, so we're basically speaking to no one. So. Yeah, so I like the videos we did, but it just. They just never went anywhere. So those would be my two main ones. I'm not sure you could really do much paid advertising, at least in the beginning, and get any Success. It tends to be word of mouth referrals, getting in front of people.

I would think that there's a decent amount of search volume for very specific things like moving to Japan or stuff like that. Right, like Google search volume.

Yeah. So that could be one area just with the paid, paid search option where certain keywords get me elevated in the list and that doesn't cost that much. So I'd be open to that.

Yeah. Do you have any idea about how many people are moving to those two countries per year?

I don't, but I have a feeling after the next election there might be a big wave. But there's already, already. I looked it up this morning. There's about 60,000 people living in Japan, Americans and there's about 30,000Americans living in Singapore. And it tends to be, you know, you got a big hub of people mostly working for American companies, earning pretty high wages, living comfortable lives. A lot of bankers, a lot of investment bankers, a lot of people at like Japanese car companies like Nissan would also have American employees at their headquarters. Self employment in Japan is quite complicated. There's. I'm sure that I've met a few of those people and I would be one of them if I move. But. But I have a huge advantage because my daughter's already Japanese. But just be a regular run of the mill American and say I just want to move there. Yeah, maybe not. But that's why I include Singapore too because they actually have a program where it's just income based. If you can show that you have a certain threshold above like about $15,000 a month in American based income, you can get a three year visa. So there may be that population more so in Singapore of self employed Americans compared to Japan. So I think it's enough of a base. And I like Singapore a lot. I've been there a few times. But I really know Japan like backwards and forwards.

So what about. I'm sure there are dozens of Facebook groups dedicated to this. Have you thought of at least posting in there or approaching those or even buying a Facebook group and just taking it over?

Yeah, no I haven't. I'm not a big like meta guy, but maybe you need to be if.

You'Re going to start this. I think there's a massive opportunity for people to buy Facebook groups because most Facebook groups are just a passion project. Some random person started it and it just grew on its own and it actually has value and 90% of them are not monetized. And even if they are, there's not really an Open market for it. We've bought Facebook groups for two to seven hundred dollars that had tens of thousands of people in it. These were Bucky's Facebook groups. So I think you should find Facebook groups for Japanese or Japan, Japanese expats, US expats and Singapore expats. Or even just like Singapore or Japan, like fan page Facebook groups. It seems to be American based and you really got to play the long game on these. I've done it, I've tried it both ways and if you just like cold dm, the administrator or the moderator, they're not going to be receptive. But if you join it and just start contributing and you get like the top contributor badge in there, this could take a couple weeks. It's not as hard as you might think to get like a badge in those groups and make a name for yourself and then start reaching out and just say like, hey man, like I love your group. Just so you know, like you're doing something great. It's very active. Kudos. That's it. And then a week later something else. And then a week later it's like hey listen, you know, have you ever thought about X, Y or Z? And a lot of times you can leave them in as a moderator but you have to be transferred ownership of the group or they could still kick you out after you buy it. So a lot of times you can buy it and then pay them a very menial amount to just keep moderating it or just keep them as a moderator so they can feel good about themselves. I would go that route because this is so niche. And then I think that, I think there will be targeted Google Ads that you could do for this as well. Another thing, back to YouTube. I have a friend that has a really, really good YouTube channel. It's called 2 and 20. Those are number 2 and 20. And they make really high quality long form YouTube videos about like geopolitical events in other countries. So they're based in Canada, but they make them about Australia, the us, politics, economics. And they have like eight videos but they've gotten hundreds of thousands and millions of views and they're faceless. There's just them talking. It's like a news channel. And so there is precedent for someone making and it takes them a long time to make these. But they didn't get any boost from Mr. Beast. They started at zero. They didn't do anything growth hacks or marketing. They just put out really high quality long form YouTube content about these other countries and economic events, etc. And then now they're monetized. They're making thousands of dollars just from Google AdSense or YouTube AdSense. And you could totally do that. Just focus on Japan and Singapore and just be like age crisis In Japan explained, 20 minute long video or where did Singapore get all its wealth from? Stuff like that. And it's not going to be as targeted, but it'll be pretty dang targeted. Yeah, you just, it's just YouTube's hard, right? It's a hard nut to crack. But I tell you this story as precedent that someone is doing something very similar with a lot of success without any paid ads or growth hacks or special knowledge.

Yeah, no, that sounds great, man.

Cool. Well, I hope that's helpful. And I want to know, I want to know what you do. I want to know the follow up.

That'd be great. I'll let you know in about a year.

Okay, thanks, Andrew.

All right, thank you.

Yeah, bye.