How to Build a Thriving Business in the Middle of Nowhere

The quilting capital of the world. We have 16 quilt shops in town. Restaurant, hotel, stuff. We've created a Disneyland for quilters.

Everyone ignores those tiny towns.

Somebody make the baking version. Somebody make the woodworking version. All of these need somebody to say, this is my spot. If you're into this, do come here. There's 10,000 small towns that would all respond to this content. Really was the thing that made it big.

So it's $6 per issue and tens of thousands of subscribers.

Yeah, dude, it kills. It's like several million dollars a year just repurposing my YouTube. You don't have to ask permission. You can just do things. Just go build cool stuff.

So picture this for a minute. You've got a mom that loves quilting. You say to her, mom, this YouTube thing is kind of cool. What if we put up a camera, filmed you quilting, and put it on YouTube? Flash forward 10 years and you own a town in Missouri, all based on that quilting empire that all started with that one YouTube video. That's what happened to Aldon and his family. I met Al at a conference and I loved him immediately. He's got a lot of energy, a lot of good business ideas, and one of the most amazing stories I've ever come across. He owns the Missouri Star Quilt Company, which is supported by 16 different quilt shops in this tiny town of Missouri. He's got Airbnbs, restaurants, hotels, e commerce side YouTube channels. If he has a business idea around quilting, he's going to launch it. And so I wanted him to come on and ask him what his story was and what business ideas he has. In any niche. A lot of his ideas center around things you could start in tiny, tiny, small towns. Believe it or not, 97% of the US is considered rural. 46 million Americans live in towns of under 25,000 people. And there's a ton of business opportunity in small towns. So we get into that at the end. You're gonna love Al. He was on another podcast. It was one of the most popular ever. So I knew I had to have him on mine. And he's probably gonna come on again. Please share with a friend and enjoy. All right, Al, tell us who you are.

What's up, everybody? I'm Al Doane of the Missouri Star Quilt Company fame. Located just north of Kansas City in a beautiful, beautiful town of Hamilton, Missouri. Also, I have a very deep, resonant voice. So, ladies, you're welcome. And I lost my Voice As a 40 year old grown up singing at an Italian restaurant. In Mexico City, which is the best way to lose your voice. So here I am in all of my deep, resonant tones.

Okay, how many people live in Hamilton, Missouri?

Population 1,500. And our claim to fame before this, J.C. penney, the failed, bankrupt retailer, was born in a farmhouse outside of here. He didn't start his company here, that was in Wyoming, and really didn't care about this place very much. And then the city tore down the train depot in the center of town to move his boyhood home, one one room boyhood home, into the center of town and memorialize this town to him. I think it's done.

Wow.

But so then comes me, the quilting capital of the world. It's what I decided to turn it into. We have 16 quilt shops in town and restaurant and hotel style. Like, we've. We've created a Disneyland for quilters. And that's what we've turned Hamilton into now through our work at the Missouri Star Quilt Company.

Okay, I already know I'm going to have so many questions.

So let's go.

Let's start 16 quilt shops. Do you own 100% of all of those or what? What does the structure of those look like?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So we were a small town, right? Nobody was ever. There's never a reason to stop here. It's a little town in the. In the middle of a cornfield in the middle of nowhere. And. And so we started with one quilt shop and grew that. And the problem we had is nobody cared about this. No. Like, there's 3,000 quilt shops in America. And like, we were 3,001 to 0. Fanfare. So we launched the website Quilters DailyDeal.com I was trying to rip off steep and sheep and woo dot com. I thought, I thought those models were fun, but aimed at 20 year olds. And I said, what if I build one of those aimed at my mom? I bet, I bet she has money, much more money than I did. And it was true. We built a website. And then the Missouri Star Quilt Company had its own website and we were doing a great job there. And we had this little quilt shop. Well, we didn't have a warehouse. We were just shipping the inventory out of our retail location. And as we grew that, the idea was like, oh, well, now we filled this building, we need to open a second building. We can either open a warehouse or we'll open another quilt shop. And so we kept opening quilt shops. And then I, I had this. I've got like a marketer's brain. And I was like, who has the most quilt shop of any town in the world? Someplace in Germany, I think there's, like, four quilt shops in a town. And I said, I'm gonna murder these ladies. And I opened 10 quilt shops in our town. We just kept going. So we did them by theme. It's like the boutique fabrics and the kids fabric and the baby fabric and the novelty fabric and the solids and the florals and the reproductions and the, you know, seasonal and the wide fabrics and the modern. You know, there's like, all these different themes. So we built these stores as sort of monuments to this theme of fabric. That physical manifestation of our brand and of our shopping experience is what we try and build the online experience off of. Because selling fabric on the Internet is very hard to do. You have to. You have to be very thoughtful about, like, people. Their desire is to touch it and feel it and. And sort of experience it. Like, what's the hand? They'll say, what's. What's the feel? And I can't give them that. So I have to try and give them as much of the experience as I can so they trust that buying experience. And so now it's funny. So now we actually do have a couple of shops where, like, we just opened one called the Fabric Market. And this is. You know, anybody else couldn't have done this shop because it's strictly like a. Like a love letter to quilters. And what we did is we went and built a butcher, a butcher shop, and turned it into a fabric store. So you buy your fabric by the pound from behind the counter, and they put it. They put it on the paper and wrap it up with a string, and there's a bunch of, like, novelty stuff, and you're, you know, the old, like, rock candy jars and stuff, all that's filled with buttons and notions and needles and all that stuff. And so you go in, and it's like the coolest shopping experience anybody ever imagined around fabric. But again, as a standalone shop, I don't think it would exist anywhere but as cool shop number 16, where we're just trying to build, like, you go to Disneyland, dude. My favorite part about Disneyland was when I got into the Star Wars Village and they were doing the droid making, and you have all the stuff moving around, and it was just like, the coolest shopping experience. You wanted to do it. It was sort of this great thing that you got when you went there, and. And you got to customize and make your own thing. And I was like, that's what I'M trying to give my mom's demographic right, right. Like everybody will build that for a hot 30 year old like myself for whatever. But, but who's building it for like our moms? And yeah, they're the biggest consumer. Like largely they're ignored in the retail space.

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And so diving in and just saying I'm going to build the coolest experiences I can around retail for these people that, that are so full of love and so full of, of excitement, enthusiasm. And when you do it, man, they just like the love pours out of these people. They're so glad to be thought of and taken care of. And so we get to do that. This town of 16 quilt shops and you know the, the hotel experience is, it's a retreat center, sleeps 40 people and, and so you come with your girlfriends and stuff and you'll come and rent out a big chunk of it. You all sleep there and make quilts for three days and then go home. But again, like think about what else is your mom so excited to go and do for a couple of days? Like she's not looking forward to anything, maybe a cruise someday. But like something that's just for her, there's not a lot. And so us building this thing saying, hey, it's like it's quote camp. Come to quilt camp, you're going to go away For a week, get together with the girls. Every year you do this and you come and have a great time, like do that. And just building those experiences for people, man, we, we've had a blast doing it. It's been great.

So let me see if I, if I got this straight. You opened one quilt shop.

Yeah.

And then you open the Daily Deal site, right?

Yeah.

And that just kind of took off. And I want to get into that. No, no.

So. So it really, it really didn't. So the Daily Deal was fun. I like, this was 2009. I've still. I went back and looked at the Facebook post. Like it's memories. It showed me my post from 2009. It's like, hey, everybody, I made a quilt shop for my mom. Check it out. It's got like two likes, right? Like nobody cares. We put it up online and nobody came. Zero people. Because you launch a website and nobody knows. Like, nothing happens. And so we're, we're waiting. And I'm writing like the Woot.com version where they have the weird story and stuff. The whole thing. I was writing these most bizarre off the wall stories about like, I'd be like. And then I went to Treasure Island. My buddy Pinocchio got turned into a donkey and I got swallowed by a whale and I got pooped out and. Jumbo Rick Rack on sale for 395 yard my creative writing skills were just taking us in a much different direction than what my mom would like to read. We have somebody much better at it doing it now. And. But like in the beginning we do this and I do all this work and you put it up at midnight and nobody cared. And so then we got three weeks in. We got one sale from my cousin Jennifer. She was very sweet and.

Thank you, Jennifer.

And then we got like one. Every now and then we get one or two. And then one day, dude, I. I fat fingered my price. It was the Crazy Eights charm pack and it was supposed to be 388 because we bought it for like $4 and it was accidentally 88 cents. And. And we went on and we sold 11 of them. And it was like, dude, I have a video of me high five. Like we're jumping and like, can't believe. And we got eight sales.

And you lost money. You lost money. But. But you had 11 sales.

It was, it was 11 sales at $0.88 plus $5 in shipping. So my cost on that was $4 plus $2 to ship and they were paying almost $6. And most of the People bought another thing and I was like, whoa, lost leader. Like I, I stumbled upon a loss leader and discovered what that meant. It was like, this works. And so that changed the whole dynamic of our business. We got the 11 from there. And then the other thing that we started doing is I started like YouTube was only a year and a half old at that point. You know, YouTube started in 2006 and like 2008 we start this quilt shop. And so I started recording videos on a Canon digital elf where I would like manually zoom right Like I'm holding, I'm like the early ones, you can hear me whispering like mom. I could see, you know, like doing that kind of stuff.

Zoom by bending your elbows.

That's right, that's right. And, and I was editing on, on Windows Movie Maker while I was out consulting. You know, I'd fly to Pittsburgh and consult. Then at night in the hotel room, I'm editing quilting videos and, and didn't understand the algorithm or anything at that point. We just upload like five of them in a day and then a ton of people would come to the site and then it would all die down. We're like, all right. So then we started posting them once a week. They'd go out on Fridays and we get a big surge in traffic and then start growing our list. And we grew a newsletter and an audience around that. And the newsletter, dude, not even joking, we had like 60, almost 70 open rates on our, on our newsletter because we'd send it once a week. It was super high quality and it always led with the content that was free and a big value to our quilters. And again, remember, nobody was making cool content for these people. And so I was one of the very early ones saying, I don't care about video games or you know, hot 20 year olds traveling to Miami. I just want to talk to you. And we made this great content forum and spoke to them as humans and it worked out great. They loved us.

So with the Daily Deal site even have been possible without your YouTube channel.

It went without the YouTube channel for a little bit. It wouldn't, I mean it wouldn't been anything though in the beginning. Dude, 2009, when you launched a website, literally what, what we did is we launched, I, I was replying to blog posts in comments and replying to comments on disgust and like Live Nation I think was a comment engine. I was just like, oh, that's so cool. I saw this other great blog over here at Missouri, you know, like that and people would ban you and you'd get. You'd get shut down. Like, you do eight of them and they just. They know you're spamming. We went on like, Kijiji and Craigslist and tried to, like, respond to stuff there. Oh, that's so cool. Have you thought about listing, you know, like. Like trying to do that? And again, you're just getting. You're just getting blocked. Like, dude, the. My marketing brain back then, I was like, I don't know how to get this in front of a bunch of people. We're in the Yahoo. Directory. And what else, you know, like, where else do you go? And social media wasn't really a thing. You just had your wall that you posted on. I don't even think the friend feed was up yet or the newsfeed, maybe. It probably was, but like. But like, it wasn't get. Like, we couldn't just talk about the business anywhere realistically. And so the. The YouTube channel ended up being the only marketable thing that we really had because otherwise we're just on sale today. And. And in quilting, we don't have enough skus to. On sale today. A ton of stuff. Now we do that because we're big. But, like, at the time, man, you only. You didn't even have 30 products. Like, to put one on a deep discount every day would have killed us. Yeah, we had to be real creative with it, and the content really was what became the thing that made it big. So I guess, yes, it wouldn't have existed. But also, like, it definitely did exist without it. It just wasn't anything interesting.

And this was also during the early days of Groupon and Living Social too. So, like, the. The consumers were starting to behave in a way that really benefited this site. Right?

Yeah. Well, it's funny now because I feel like. I feel like the. The deal sites have sort of fallen out of favor. Right. It's still a big leader for us because it's such a part of our brand and things. But like. But like, I noticed for myself, I don't care what's on sale. If I don't. If I'm not shopping for a set of kitchenware, I don't care that one's half off. You know, Like, I'm not driven by that anymore. Where the earlier days of the Internet, the novelty was just the fact that something would be on sale for so much. How could this even exist? Was so exciting. But I feel like a lot of that has shifted now.

If I understand it correctly, you opened the first quilt shop and then you Started growing, and you really needed more warehouse space. Quote, warehouse space. But because of the fact that you're in small town, the price per square foot of a retail spot versus a warehouse spot is kind of about the same. So if we're going to fulfill online orders, why not do it in a retail spot? Is that kind of what you were thinking?

Yeah, well, that. That, yes. There were no warehouses to buy, so I. So I could only buy these other retail buildings. But also, I thought I invented this, and I don't think I did. But the retail warehouse, right, where, like, because they're fulfilling from stores, it didn't matter that I was out in the middle of nowhere. What I didn't want was for customers to drive all the way out, get here, and walk into my beautiful store and have nobody be here. And very low energy and some lady doing a crossword. Right? Like, that wasn't the experience I was trying to give. And so what I was trying to get out of them is, like, let's be fulfilling, or. So they're cutting and they're moving. I got 12 employees all buzzing around activity, and you open the door in this tiny town, you say, what is this? This.

You guys are crushing it.

Yeah. You're doing something, and this is great. And I'm immediately energized by what you're doing. And so that was. That was a lot of the intent was. Was I was manufacturing the energy, right. And trying to. Trying to create that momentum. That was kind of hard to do.

I've heard of restaurants doing this. Like, restaurants that are slow, they'll go rent, like, supercars and park them out front, or they're like. They'll do something to generate people outside the front door or inside. And it's all kind of manufactured, but it. It sends a signal that, hey, this place is cool. This place is interesting.

Yeah, yeah.

You were doing that before. It was cool.

100%, man.

Okay, so what were the big inflection points along the way? Like, zero to one stores, one to multiple. When did you really feel like we kind of own this town?

The big moments happened. One, when we built our warehouse, I think that was a big one for me. We had to do an SBA loan, the whole thing. And it was a. It was, like, not easy to do. We had to work really hard at it in order to get that to pull off. It was a disaster, an absolute disaster. But, like, we. Mainly because, like, I tried to do a lot of this stuff myself. I don't know if you've ever run into into any of that. I was like, pallet racking? You're going to charge me $10,000 to pallet racking? That's bull crap, dude. I can do that myself. And it turns out it's actually, like, I don't know. That's. That's pretty. Pretty good value to spend that to get the pallet racking done. And. And then I was like, oh, I need to run computers and stuff. Oh, this is a disaster, dude. I can't run the network for 100 computers and, like, pull all my own cable. Like, I. I screwed a bunch of that up. So it wasn't easy. But. But when we launched that, that's when I was like. I was like, dude, there's something magic here. Like, I'm doing. I'm doing a really good job. And we moved out of our existing stuff and moved out there, and, like, I had real warehouse employees. That was a big deal for us. The other part was we bought our. Our old hardware store, and our old hardware store was sort of a beacon in town, but it was. It was one of those that, like, the guy wanted to sell it. He didn't want to be there anymore, which is fine. And. And sorry, I've actually, You'll have to edit this out. I'm buying my wife's.

Now that I know you're buying your wife's birthday present, I'm not editing it out because that's hilarious.

I'm like. I'm trying to check out. They're asking so many questions. So my wife loves this girl on Instagram, Brioni. What's her name? Brioni Machin. She's over in the uk, and, dude, she's rad. And so she does these. These workshops on, like, Mosaic stuff, right?

Yeah, I'm looking at it now. It's.

It's cool. And I. Dude, all my DM. I've DM'd her, like, 10 times. I'm like, please let me distribute your stuff in the States. Your stuff's amazing. I think you're awesome. Let me do your stuff. And she's not. She's just this little shop, and most of her stuff is in, like, workshops and stuff. And so. So this is my big surprise, dude. I. I spend all year just trying to find, like, something I think my wife might jam on. And then I'm like, I'm getting this. I'm gonna send her over to. To London to do this thing.

We've got Mother's Day on Sunday. I don't have anything yet.

Oh, dude. Here's my move for that. So every year, okay, I. My kids buy. They don't buy this. I buy them a. Like, matching suits or last year was a chef costume, you know, like, like, so we'll do. We'll do suits this year or something. Then they'll make breakfast in bed. And it's. Dude, they're cute. They're six and four. These kids rolling in there. Mom's gonna love it. It's gonna be great. That's my. My hack for Mother's Day. It's just dress up in a little breakfast in bed. More golden.

Okay.

Okay.

Dress up is key.

Sorry, I got distracted, but the big inflection points. We bought this. This hardware store and turned that into, like, it was JCPenney's 500th store. And. And so, like, town loved it. We were able to restore a bunch. We get some old penny memorabilia and put in there and then made it into a thing. And with that, we ended up owning an entire city block in addition to our main couple of stores. I was like, oh, cool. And then we built the first building or the second building that we bought. Had a big vacant lot next to it. We ended up turning that into. I was watching a bunch of, like, pedestrian flow Ted talks on YouTube, and I was like, we just have a big Broadway. It's like one big straight road. And I would kill for one of those cool, like, courthouse towns that has the square around it. So, so easy to build the center of town around that. But, like, we had this big just strip. And so, like, I had to build a square for people to gather. And so I set it back, like, 50ft from the road and put a little plaza there and let people. So now they know where to park when they come to town. They see that it's the center. But we did the restaurants there. And so, like, once I started building sidewalks and putting in my own light posts and crap, like, I was like, all right, we've done a thing. This is a big moment. The other one, the other one, that was a big one for us, man, was like, probably 20 million a year. I've actually. I've got this chart I can share with you that my HR guy gave me or a buddy of mine that consulted and worked with us for a little bit. But there's, like, deliberate inflection points where it's like one to 10 employees. Then you have to recreate all the processes. Then at 28 employees, you. Everything breaks. You have to recreate the processes. 75 employees, 120, you know, like, as it keeps going, whether you're a service industry or a, or a software business, they each have very predictable moments of both revenue and employee counts where everything breaks. It's funny, man, because like, it's hard to be on top of that because you like. For me, I build, I built this warehouse picking solution and worked great for when me and Christy were in there picking away. And then all of a sudden you have 20 people using the same dumb process that I built and like to raise your hand and say, this process is broken. I am going to declare it broken and going to recreate it and think through what's the right way to do this for 20 people. Well, you can do that, anybody can do that. But it takes a lot of sort of intellectual honesty to break things that aren't broken, especially when you're running at breakneck speed trying to just get the new things out. And so to go look back at your process and be like, this isn't serving us anymore. I've got to fix this is really exhausting and very hard talent to build. But it was one that we, we've had to get good at because then you end up growing so fast and moving. You know, you move at those inflection points. If you don't voluntarily crack that bone and refuse it, it's going to come back to get you. So those are the other ones.

What percentage of Hamilton do you own today? Other buildings or businesses or.

When I say I own it, I, I own the downtown district. In our downtown district of the retail shops, I own all but two stores. And so, so there's probably 20ish buildings and we have like 18 of them, maybe a little more. And then we have the theater, we have an old library that we turned into a studio. Like you got all, we have all the things around it. But yeah, when you, when you drive through town, most of it is us. And most of that stuff, man, these small towns, our buildings always swapped hands for like 20 grand. There's an old almost going to fall down. You buy it for 20 grand, you have to put 100 grand into the brick so that it'll stand for another hundred years. And like, like tuck point all that stuff and get everything standing straight. And then you got to like fix the inside, which we just did like a shell. So a big drywall shell with new electrical and water and plumbing and all this stuff. And then you've got a retail shop that's going to stand for another 100 years. Whether my company goes out of business or not. This town is better off for it, which I love. We're in each one probably close to, like, 2, 300 grand, right? But, like, in. In whatever small town you're in, it doesn't, like. It's funny, man. Some of these places, if you're an hour away from an airport, not in, like, a national park, it's cheap. It's super cheap. Nobody quite knows what to do with it. The town's lost its identity. It doesn't really know what to do with itself. And, like, does anybody want to start a business on Main Street? We had. We had a Casey's gas station and a Subway sandwich shop. That was it. And nobody else. Like, there wasn't a reason for anybody else to start a business here because nobody was walking up and down Main street, so why would they? And so when you're creating that from nothing. I love, like, every e commerce brand, I think, should have as an homage to its community, like, start a little shop, put a thing in, and then put your office in the back or something, right? But like, yeah, put a representation, some physical manifestation of your brand on Main street so that you're contributing something and giving a little tax revenue or something to the area. Like, I think that's kind of important. I'm a big advocate of that.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you. Do you have any numbers on, like, annual visitors to Hamilton? How.

That's like a. Like 150. Just less than 150,000. And it's cool because, I mean, because we were in a Shopify store, we know. We know the zip codes of everybody that comes through and places a purchase. You get really good data, and it's. It's a bunch, man. What's crazy, though, is, like, Joe or natural ends. Waco. Magnolia down in Waco, she's doing like, 60,000 a week. Like, she's moving an odd 60,000 people a week. Yeah, they move a ton of people through there. Again, I actually have not looked at that. That was told to me. So I'm guessing, guys, I may be wrong, but it's a number that I aspire to, right? I'm like. I'm like, great, we can do it. But I mean, they've got such a density of people with, you know, and now we're from Dallas and in Waco with a bunch of, you know, like, right near Austin. It's, it's easy to build the destination of that, but it's actually not a very interesting visit. It's a shop, a bakery, and then they have a restaurant a couple miles away. And so like, you park and go there. It's cool. They built a cool experience. You walk.

Yeah, we've been food trucks.

Then go into the big store. But that's it, right?

It was just a line. I was just. Everything was just a line.

Yeah, yeah, that's right. When you think about, like, dude, if I could turn my little town into something great, do I deserve 10,000 people a week to come through here? Is the bakery incredible? Is the steakhouse awesome? Is that. Can I give a little bit of something else, a little personality to this town? Dude, I say all the time, like, like, when you're a hammer, everything's nailed. My hammer is for sure. You should build a town, dude. I wish Nintendo had a town. I'm a huge fan of Overwatch. I play Overwatch on the Xbox a bunch because I'm a child. I play it at night, you know, before I go to bed. My wife reads and I play and then we go to sleep. I'm not a bad husband. It's all right.

Sure.

But. Yeah, you know, but. But like, if.

We'll edit that out.

If that's my, if that's my thing, why can't I go to their big physical experience and do the stuff and dress up?

Yeah, you would, like, you're such a fan. You would pay.

And I'll go, I'll go spend a couple bucks and I'll eat at the dumb cafe with a couple cookie that shaped like my favorite player. And like, you, you spend the things and you do it. Yeah, right. Lord of the Rings. Lord of the Rings is funny because they have the trail. They have little stuff down in New Zealand, but like, still, man, some town could just be like, we are Lord of the Ringsville and they would capture all of that.

But you and any town could just raise their hand and be that, you know. Right?

That's right. Well, what's funny, because, like, because like, my wife got into beekeeping two years ago and I'm like, I immediately go where in America? There should be some town in Indiana that I send you to for two weeks and you're going to be an expert when you come home, you have all the gear and you Tried on all the things. We have twins, dude. You should be able to go to Lehigh, Utah, to the twins capital of the world, and race baby strollers and try out all 10 car seats. And you're going to spend $5,000 there because you're there with an intent to buy. Or you should be able to go to Wisconsin because you're into cheese making and go to that county. And each town, one town is blue cheese, and One town is Gouda 1. But, like, there's this identity that's given to these areas, and it doesn't have to be the entire town, but you need a district that is this thing. You say we embrace this identity. All you freaky freaks fly your freak flag here. And because what you're creating is you're creating a comic con for that space where we're like, even quilting, dude, they're. They're hoarders at home. They come here and they're connoisseurs and collectors, and people appreciate that they're artists and quilters. And then they got to go home to their kids who don't understand what they do, and just tell them that they got a basement full of fabric. But here they have an identity that's understood and appreciated. You're doing that with, you know, somebody make the baking version. Somebody make the woodworking version. Somebody make the, like, all of these. Need somebody to say, this is my spot. If you're into this too. Come here. Like, dude, there's a guy that, he sells fish tanks that I was talking to a year ago, and he's like, oh, we do a bunch of fish. And it's the mail order, so it's pretty complicated. We do a bunch of it. And I was like, bro, fishtown, Like. Like, yeah, dude, have you talked to anybody that runs, like, a sea water aquarium? They nerd out. They're growing their coral, and they got their fishes, their whole thing. And if you could walk into a storefront that's 2, 800 square feet, and it's just coral, and then one that's just whatever fish, and one that's just the. The worms and the eels, and one that's like, give a little identity to this stuff, your intent to buy is going to be through the roof. And as soon as that's your hobby, you love it. And you got to hedge that with your online sales because you probably can't justify that expense at the beginning. But, dude, I'm telling you, I'm. I'm a couple billion media impressions in on my story being told by Media just saying. Wait, you did what? You built a quilt town?

Hold on.

Let me put you on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Let me put you on CBS Sunday Morning. Let me put you on NBC Nightly News. Let me put you on NPR and 4.

It's just begging for a story, dude.

They love to tell it because I did something new and different and weird. And they've never told the story of Fish Town, and they've never told the story of Cheese Town.

And they need stuff to write about. So. Okay. My mind is like, going crazy right now.

How I. I love, I love when I find my fellow, like, small business nerds, dudes. I'm just like, yeah, just riff for days.

Yes. How many visitors was Hamilton getting 20 years ago, before any of this existed?

There was not a visitor. There wasn't a reason to stop.

Of the 150,000 a year, that's like 98%.

That's right.

Missouri Star.

Yeah. Anybody else was stopping at the gas station to get a slice of pizza and some fuel. That was it.

Do you have any data on, like, how many dollars you capture on average, like, across all of your entities from each visit?

I have like, like visitors to my. That spend with me. I know. Is that what you're asking? Are you talking like, like economics?

They go to the restaurant, then they go to shop.

So I don't have. I don't have the economic impact for the area. But it's funny, man, because when you try and do anything that's like, the economic impact is something that's. That's a very real number that people should care about. You go to a small town like us with a mayor and four aldermen, and you talk about economic impact and they have no idea what you mean.

But it's every. Like, it's actually affecting their lives more than any other town too. Right.

Our town did. I have such a distaste working with the government our town, because their. Their position is they don't, like, because we are successful, they don't want to do anything that might risk us being more successful. So any investment I try and make.

In the town, that's backwards.

They refute. I know.

It's so you should worship you.

You think, like, if I get called out of town, let me call up the biggest business guy and say, hey, how can we work together to get a park in? How can we work together? Like, here's the things that, that the community wants. Do you want any of these also? Let's work together. These small towns, do they don't have that. There's just. It's just a fear and like, and. And sort of a backwards thinking. I mean, they've never done business. Most of them are like employed bus drivers or jobless bozos. And it's just frustrating. It's frustrating. It's a frustrating political environment to work in for me out here. But like whatever I buy, I just get to do what I want with and go build great experiences in spite of the people that don't want you to do it. You don't have to ask permission. You can just do things. Just go build cool stuff.

You can. I have a T shirt that says you can just do things. So it's true. Where would someone start, like if they wanted to. Let's say they were. They have nothing. They just have an extreme interest like sourdough bread making. And they want to make a sourdough bread town. Like, what's step one?

So I got into this with a guy who wanted to build a creator town outside of Austin. And I was like, I don't think it'll work. I think well. And actually there's this great town out in Kansas, Humboldt, Kansas. Have you ever get a chance to go through? It's the. The town company is. They make all the trailer hitches sold in America or something, right? Like it's, it's. They've got a great business and they built an incredible town. They have beautiful gym. They bought all the downtown and fixed them all up and they have a French candy store and they have a cool bar and a hipster coffee shop and all this stuff. The idea was we'll build this and we think people will come visit. And they didn't. They built it and kind of nobody cares. Just a nice town in the middle of nowhere that nobody goes to. And so for us, we built. We built an audience, right? And we built a community and a company and pull people to it. So if you were going to build a sourdough, a sourdough bread town, I think you need to be a sourdough bread company first.

Or partner with one.

Or partner with one and bring it here and say we're going to do this for you, right? Like, like, you know, go. Go find your local dairy and you could build some amazing dairy experiences. Like here's the milk store and the cheese store and the, and the milkshake store and the ice cream store and the. And they all source to each other. But like we created an experience in what could have been a cute little gift shop. We created an experience you need to have the company not depend on the success of that retail shop in the beginning. And then, and then you, you need some like, spaces that are undervalued, nobody cares about. So go buy your one, but plan on buying like two or three and have enough that you have like, what you want is, you want to put on a billboard the sourdough capital of the Mountain West. The sourdough capital of, you know, the midweek. Like, whatever. It's, it's enough that you get to own the tagline because nobody's got three sourdough stores in a town. That's crazy.

Yeah.

And so now you do. And you've got, you've got the one that's all the starters and you've got the one that's all the cutting boards and the knives and the special things and like, and like presents and all that stuff. And then your last one is going to be your finished products and you're gonna buy. It's a bakery. It's the San Francisco style bakery. It's gonna have all the stuff in it and it's a delicious coffee shop and, and you have little baked treats, but mainly it's the bread that comes out of there. Kill it. Now you got that three. And if you're driving along the highway and you see the billboard for the sourdough capital of the whatever, will you turn off and go there? Absolutely you will. What did it cost you to get that? Well, it was $20,000 a building plus whatever you put into fixing them up that you've now financed over 30 years. Your monthly cost is two and a half thousand dollars, three grand. Right. It's, it's nothing. And then you have your retail experience that you build your product in there and one, maybe one employee per or one employee and cut holes in the wall and run it like a fairway at a. Out of Six Flags. And that one person is going to move between if the, if the traffic is slow. But like now you own the sourdough capital of the world. And that's, that makes it onto the website and that makes it into the, and the content that you get as you're telling that story to your audience. We bought these shops. Oh, we're gutting on me and me and the team are in here pulling this out. I'm thinking about this. Here's some sketches I'm going to share about Flywheel.

It grows.

You're producing this content that everybody loves. Your audience continues to grow. And then because you took your audience with you, they want to Come see the finished product. They just got to come and check it out, and they want to give you a hug because you did this amazing thing, and you don't need 10 to start. You need, like, you need three. You need enough that it's interesting. Two shops is fine, but, like, get three buildings and give me three experiences in each. And, like, put the billboard up and say, come check this out. That's worth it, dude. We'll pull off the road for the best cinnamon roll in the world. Absolutely. We'll pull off the world for sourdough capital of the world. If that's your. If that's your jam, you could teach.

Classes like artisan style baking.

Your wife's getting. You're getting into sourdough, like, and you're making bread. That's doing a cool thing. Great. Well, we offer a sourdough class on how to cut the designs, and you're going to practice on 10 loaves of sourdough in a day. We're going to teach you the thing, give you the stencils. You're going to do that and fill that up a couple times a week. I went to a cooking class down in Kansas City. My wife got me one for Christmas, which was awesome. And it's a. It's a kitchen store that does cooking classes in the back. And what they do is you. You pay to go there. And pretty much you hire a chef, and he comes and makes you the meal, but he demos it as he does it, so you're not. You're not actually cooking, but, like, oh, and you're doing this. Oh, wow. And he's like, it's just an interactive experience, but it's a dinner. It got me in their store. Everybody there spent 100 bucks on cookbooks and whatever else, and. And we sat and ate a good meal, and that was it. But, like, they sold out the tickets. They all sell out because they do one a week. It was killer. So if you're the sourdough place, right, like, do the sourdough, like, have the experience and you can come there. Like, come and stay for a week in our town and take. Sign up for the five pack of classes. You're gonna be there every night. You're gonna. You're gonna come out of here and you're just gonna love sourdough. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna do a cool thing. And then you go and get your local dairy to come and take the other side of the street. And now you. This abandoned town that nobody cared about. Well, now you have a real thing, and there's a reason to stop. There's a reason to live there. You want to walk up and down the street when you. When you get there and like, it's, it's. It's a big win. And you've saved your little town.

Of all these businesses that you started and opened in Hamilton. What have been like the unexpected. Cash cows. Like, maybe not a standalone business, but like a product line or something where you thought it would do okay. And it just really took off one we did, man.

So like, we had a big audience that we were like, that we were showing these tutorials to, right? And so we do these weekly tutorials. We don't make any money off of those specifically, but it's building our audience. They have an affinity to Missouri Star. And one thing that we did that was great was we started repurposing the tutorials. We take the last 10 tutorials and put them in the magazine. And so we started a magazine, put the last 10 tutorials in there, and then shipped that every. Every other month severity to people. And we needed like 10,000 subscribers to break even. We got that in the first like five hours. Like, it was just like, oh, we've got 10,000 subscribers. Cool. We got 50,000 subscribers. Cool. We've got.

And what were you charging?

So we were charging like six bucks because to print a magazine cost like 80 cents. And I was like. I was like, geez, the margins on this are great. And where most of those businesses break down is they have ad sales teams and all that stuff. I was like, I don't want to put any ads in this. This is just gonna be my product, it's gonna be my tutorials, and I'm gonna editorialize this. And so it took me a staff of three people. They make it, they print it, and it goes out to this big distribution list. And now I think it's like seven or eight bucks per, but. But it's a great magazine and it's just repurposing our existing content. But that was one that I'm like. I'm like, holy crap. There's. There's demand for this. People love reading it. It's sort of a. Like, we get to tell our story in there. When we got. We have a bunch of products. We have like a broad range of SKUs, like 30, 000 SKUs in our store sort of thing. And so you do a tutorial and that can show one line of fabric looks like 20 SKUs. And then you do four of those a week. Maybe we do another set of tutorials. That's eight in a month that you get out. Then you're going to send some emails. So there's still a problem with, like, getting to show enough product. And so the. Then the magazine comes out, that's another 10 collections times 20 products that get to be shown and put in the front of people's mind. Because the problem with any of these larger businesses is like, did people see the new stuff that we brought in? Did we do a good job surfacing that? And that's. That's. That's always a challenge. So we built this magazine, helped with that, made some good money for us, does a great job amplifying our message and lets people subscribe and be. Be loyal customers to us. That was. That was a surprising one that, like, I didn't think there was a much as much demand for that as there was.

So it's $6 per issue. One issue per month.

What, every other month? We do it every other month. Yeah.

Tens of thousands of subscribers.

Yeah, dude. It kills it. It kills several million dollars a year just repurposing my YouTube story. You make a magazine. No, you're a magazine. Probably wouldn't work for you.

I'm thinking about it right now. I'm thinking about a lot of things right now.

It's just a still from your short. And then, like, what you said, I just gotta flip through it on the toilet. Are you sick of looking at your phone? We'll save some hours on there and.

Look at me on paper.

Read my Tik Toks.

Well, like, people are paying you to be sold to in a different way, too. You're just selling more products through it.

Absolutely. Absolutely.

You answered that better than I could have ever imagined.

Yeah. You know, it's beautiful, Chris.

Thank you. I was sitting right here in my office two hours ago, talking to my cousin slash business partner, and we've been talking about, like, this home services business idea where. Think Groupon plus Costco plus Home services. It's Costco in that a homeowner could pay $20 a year. $20 a year to be on like a. Like a deals list. Right.

Okay.

And then. So that's what makes it like Costco. You pay 20 bucks a year. Therefore, every time a deal comes up, you feel like you need to buy it because you're paying for it. You're paying a yearly membership. And then let's say you launch in a neighborhood, you partner with a pressure washer. That pressure washer says, if I'm Going to do a driveway in the neighborhood, it's 350 bucks because I got to drive there, drive back. But if I do 10 homes in that neighborhood, it's 250 bucks because I can have economies of scale. So then you as the middleman come in to all the people on your list that have options for 20 bucks a year, say, hey, this week only.

Let me give you my idea. And then we can merge the two. Right?

So okay.

So did you know you're supposed to reseal your grout every seven years?

So video is cool. But you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter. Tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week, very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast, three episodes a week. Stuff like this, you're going to love it. All free, no sleazy sales. Tkopod.com okay, according to the big grout.

Resealers, water heater every year, did you know you like every year like, oh.

You'Re saying you play into that fear.

There's so much. Your fridge is supposed to get a cleaning once every two years and your dishwasher is supposed to get a filter replace and your washing machine has parts that are supposed to be updated. And the truth is none of us do any of that. There's no update that happens. And I think that there's a great model of like a dude in a truck that again goes and sells into a neighborhood and says, I'll do all of it for you. You're going to sign up, you're going to pay 200 bucks a month, 500 bucks a month, whatever it is, and I'm going to come one day a quarter. And you can even do the stuff where like did your light bulb go out? Well, shoot me a text and my great Filipino assistant is going to be my dispatcher and she's going to say, is this urgent? Because we can come and fix it right now or it can go on your list of stuff to get fixed when we get there. And, and then it's just part of the, part of the fee. And so you charge a little upcharge if you got to come out right away. Or you do the one day and like the one guy with a truck you could put, let's say you're doing one a day, but you need like 20 days free and you're 90 days and a quarter, right? You're doing 60, 70 homes. Call it probably less than that, 60 homes, right? And you're 60 homes at a thousand bucks or 500 bucks a month or whatever, whatever your fee, 200 bucks a month, whatever it ends up being. But they're paying for the one day that you're going to come there and do that quarterly maintenance that needs to happen. I love that because I think there's a lot of people that know they should. The idea of like having a maintenance person for your home, your wife can text, the garage door opener is broken and you say, I don't know, like I'm just go call a garage guy. And the fact that now you have a bunch of approved subs, you do the other thing as you were telling your idea. Like, what if you charged more? You charge like 200 bucks a month, but in exchange for that you get the, the deal version of all your filters delivered and taken care of and the deal version of all like all the normal maintenance stuff that you sign up for. You're going to go and negotiate your condoms and scale on a large scale for like toilet paper, all the home goods stuff that's going to be normal. And then you have this like exclusive price that you have access to. And all that gets delivered to your door once a month. You come through and just make your deliveries. Right. Like there's some version of that. Honestly, all three of those are probably great ideas that I would love to see somebody out there doing. That'd be killer.

Agreed. Yeah, I just, I just think it'd be interesting because we probably all need our, our driveway pressure washed, but we're not going to do it. But if someone said, Hey, 150 bucks off today, you're already paying for this. You're paying for the, the right to have this discount. I'd say sure, you know, well, especially.

If you build a cadence where like the guy comes through once every three months or once twice a year, he comes through then every time. Because you do the same with like the car cleaner guy. There's the folks that come and gas up your vehicles at home, right? Like, like, if you got me a deal on that, he's coming through once a week and it's like, oh sure, yeah, top it up. That's great. I love going to go and negotiating with those guys on behalf of your neighborhood to do a thing. I think that's clever. I firmly think that like, neighborhoods are sort of an underappreciated asset class. Thousand percent of like, of like, dude, little bodegas should exist in, in like, you know, small Phoenix subdivisions. And like, they should have a little like, they should have their own little personality in a gathering place and a spirit spot and a coffee shop amongst 300 homes out there that everybody can go to. It's not going into the city, you know, like, that's interesting. I think there's room for all that stuff to start to be a thing again and somebody that's like going and representing those neighborhoods to get deals and get people to come out and give services. I think it's super clever.

Agreed. We. We got to save that bodega idea because I want to dedicate a whole.

That's a good one, dude. I've got. I've actually drawn out the blueprint for this. I want to do it. I think about this stuff all the time in like 300 person towns. I'm from a 1500 person town in the middle of nowhere. Right. If rebar is the thing that disrupts the steel industry to, to, you know, shoot at Clayton Christensen and you know, I, I keep thinking about what's going to disrupt Dollar General. You know, how do I create an experience that doesn't even need an employee at all that I can go and drop in a 300 person town in the middle of nowhere that has, you know, nothing but like, they want to be able to gather in a spot. They want to be able to go and buy diapers if they need to in an emergency. How do I give that bodega type experience to a small town? If you can crack the nut that, there's 10,000 small towns from Wisconsin down to Alabama tomorrow that would all respond to this. I love it.

Yeah. Because Dollar General won't touch a town under 3,000.

I've seen them in towns like a thousand and we have 1500 there in our town. Right. So they have a small footprint concept that they do. But like, they're still constrained. I, I would love to put one in. I've got this little village township thing that's not even really a town. It's got a school and a little bit of other stuff, but then it's like a farm community. And I'm like, you could never afford to have somebody standing there all day waiting for somebody to come in and get a sale.

Yeah.

So if I could, if I could build the version of it. I think this is why I reached out to you last time. I was like, there's a vending concept in here somehow that like gives me a shopping experience and lets the town be proud of what they got. It's funny, in my, in my warehouse. Right. I've got a. I'VE got one of those like grab and go snack things. And so it's just all open. It's not a vending machine. You just grab your stuff, go to the thing and it tells you how much to pay, swipe your card and go. And I'm like, I kind of want one of those. But you have to key fob in. You know, I want to know who's coming in and opening the door. But then like go shop like a normal human and don't, don't put it all behind glass. There's something like that that I think starts to be meaningful.

Agreed. I really like that idea. Everyone ignores those tiny towns, especially if they haven't lived up near one or if it's not on their radar.

I've thought about this with, with, with like hotels, right? Real estate stuff. Because to build a 100 person hotel or 100 person apartment complex multifamily, like that's, that's right around when you start getting some of the economies of scale. Your maintenance guys taken care of enough and that, that's attractive. Some big real estate organization to roll up, they want to grab a couple of those. I've thought about this with, with, with like hotels, right? Real estate stuff because to build a hundred person hotel or 100 person apartment complex multifamily, like that's, that's right around when you start getting some of the economies to scale. Your maintenance guys taken care of enough and that, that's attractive. Some big real estate organization to roll up, they want to grab a couple of those. My town has like a 10 person multifamily apartment complex, right? It couldn't support 100 person one, but I have nine towns around me that are all the same small size. And I wonder if like can a 500 person town support a 10 unit apartment complex? And then, and then if you do 10 of those now you've got your 100 unit apartment complex. You still have the economies of scale because you need one property manager to go to each of those. It's within an hour driving. And now through, through much more creative financing and all that stuff, you've now created a 100 unit apartment complex that you probably couldn't have gone and got financing to do originally, but you could do them 10 units at a time at a million dollars instead of, you know, the hundred unit one at $10 million, it's much more tenable and you do a couple of those, all of a sudden you got a couple hundred units you can roll up and it's going to be Attractive with Starwood Real estate Group or something. Right? Like you can go, you can go move that around in an interesting way where before you made that asset class, no one's going to touch it.

I mean, my friend Kyler's doing this. He bought a six unit RV park in Mighton, Utah, and it is 100% full. Everyone pays on time. And he's just, he's starting to buy those up in all kinds of little towns and everyone pays online. He doesn't even need anyone to stop by. So that's something there.

He doesn't care what you do. I mean, you automate some of that stuff and put it on a normal cycle. If somebody's gonna go and put hands on it, make sure it's right. Real, right? And so like, as long as that exists there, there's even. I was playing with like an Airbnb concept, something like this. Like, you go to any tiny town, there's a couple people that are trying to go there to visit mom or they're passing through or something. And if you could create sort of the. It's, it's on Airbnb, but also we're built to book tonight. You know, there's some like, like this is, this is the rebar of hotels of like, yeah, great. We've got five, we got five Airbnbs. And then if they're not renting out, you long term them out for 700 bucks a month. There's always some kid coming out of high school that would love to not live at mom's house. And you just out, you're doing a few of these. I'm like, there's some model here where you tiny home your way into an entire nationwide Airbnb network or something, right? Like, I would love traveling with kids, man, I hate Santa to Hilton now alone, I love it. But when you've got kids and you need two bedrooms, like, those things just don't work. And if you gave me like, I know 30 minutes outside of any major city, they're sitting one of these, like owls, you know, Airbnb things. And, and I can go and grab one of those. And I know that it's cleaned, I know that's there. But like, somebody's just, they're expecting it to rent out once a week. They're not trying to get it to rent out nightly. And I'm going to come and flip the sheets of all of them one time in a week. You know, I think your labor distributes enough that you can actually pull something like that off. That's interesting to me.

Well, I think we're both out of time, dude.

Let's do this again. Man.

This was great. I want to have you on again. This is amazing. People are going to love you. Where can we find you if anyone has any questions?

I'm Dr. Bill Nye on all the socials.

Obviously.

We all picked our our moniker when we were 14 playing Unreal Tournament, didn't we? That's what we all did.

I mean my AIM screen name was wow. I like waffles. All caps.

See, and if you would have gotten rich sooner, you would never had to let that go. My problem was success came too early. I never had to go up and get a real email.

My main weakness is I got rich too young.

You know, I'm too caring. I'm too. I got rich.

You volunteer way too much.

Yeah, you know what it is?

Okay, let me know in the comments if you want me to have Al on the podcast again because he has way more stories and business ideas than we'll ever have time for.