How to Sell Car Negotiation as a Service + 3 More Ideas. Ep #071

I think we've landed on actually a really good idea here. Tell me, Nick, how much time would it take for a VA to call 15 car dealerships and have these conversations and then present this data in a spreadsheet to the end user and then to call back five of the car dealerships and negotiate with them? Welcome to the Kerner office for another episode of Holdco Bros. We continue our conversation from last week where we talk about pricing, transparency, lead generation, we talk about creating products for business owners and how to find and capitalize on distressed business opportunities. Also, we talked about the custom home building industry a bit because I had a startup in that space once, so I think you'll find that interesting. Anyway, please like and subscribe. Leave me a rating review. 5 stars only. Thank you very much and we'll see you next time. Okay, so last week we were talking about Programmatic SEO a lot, right? So we ended it. Here's another idea that I didn't even connect with Programmatic SEO, but you could use that to help grow this business. So this is a user submitted idea. This is not my business idea. I will credit to the person who sent it to me, which I can't remember his name. So sorry, guy, but I think it.

Was Dragonslayer 6 9.

Yeah, yeah, that was it. Anyway, so last episode we also talked about custom home building a little bit and how I wrote an ebook for that. And one thing that's very difficult about home renovations or custom home building is knowing what everything should cost. Okay, the price of a kitchen renovation in San Francisco is completely different from the price of a kitchen renovation in Omaha, Nebraska, or building a home. I was just, I saw a tweet yesterday of this guy, said, hey, home builders, please tell me, like, what you're charging nowadays per square foot for a starter home, basically is what he said. And there was a guy in California that said $400 per square foot. And there was a guy in the southeast that said $98 per square foot. Okay, crazy. And neither one included the land. And so I encountered this struggle when we hired a custom home builder because we didn't know what we should pay. And it's like, even if, all right, he's going to charge 130 a foot, you don't know what this tile should cost or what the carpet should cost, or do you charge extra for the bathrooms because those cost more per square foot or is it all included in lump sum price? You just don't know this stuff. And so the idea here is a glass door for things like this. So Glassdoor is unique because people can anonymously submit what they make, what their salary is for a specific company, a specific area, specific job, specific degree. There needs to be a glass door for something like this to make these costs transparent by market. And it's a little difficult because you can use Programmatic to grow it for sure, but you still need the user submitted content. Like it needs to be actual real content. But once you have this, the monetization angles are endless, right? Like you could sell ads to home builders or you could sell leads to home. Like, how much is a custom home building lead worth? What do you think about this?

I think first of all, I love it. I think there's a lot of industries that can apply to. I'm thinking in healthcare, for example, you donated a kidney, the cost to donate a kidney, for example, that surgery is dramatically different depending on the hospital you go to. And it's just because there's no pricing transparency. And the government like tries to give pricing transparency, but there isn't really a good platform or mechanism that allows people to see exactly what the charges are and how they compare across different healthcare settings. So that's just an example. But then it's like every other home service, right? What do you do when you want to get a remodel on your house? You get three quotes. What do you do when you want to go buy a car? You get three quotes like you're doing the work anyways to go out and find what is the market rate. And that's where for the businesses on the other side of the equation, there's a lot of arbitrage, right? Because they have asymmetric information. You as the buyer don't know what market rate is. And so they can quote you anything. And even if they quote you $200 and market is 100 and you decide to haggle with them and they're like, oh cool, I got you down to 150. They're still $50 above market. You know what I mean? So I think any of these platforms that allow for pricing transparency in typically opaque markets like custom home building, like healthcare, is a really cool idea. So yes, I love the idea.

I just thought of two ways you could build this. Like you could build out the content for this because that will be the hardest part. So I don't remember if it was a podcast with you or a different one of building a moat. It was us building a moat via tedious tasks. Remember that one, how Plaid the fintech company, they connected all these tiny credit union APIs any developer could do that, but they did it for everyone. And it took a lot of time and a lot of money. But that became their intellectual property, that became their moat. Right. Just these, all these random API integrations that no one wanted to spend the time to fix. You could do that with hiring a virtual assistant to call. So scrape every custom home builder in the country. And it's great because a lot of the phone numbers listed, I guarantee you are going to be the owner of the business because they're pretty small. Hire a VA with a script to pose as a potential interested customer and say, hey, what are you charging nowadays per square foot to build a home? And they're like, every single one of them. You're like, oh, I don't know, like, it depends. Would you want hand scraped wood floors? You want. There's so many things and they're going to be trained to get through all that noise. I know, but like for the average quality build you're doing, what are you averaging out at? 180 foot. Okay, cool. And does that include X, Y, Z, like asphalt shingles or terracotta or they have some like very specific features that move the needle a lot. Right. And then everything else they'll just ignore. And then they're putting it into a database. And so it's just one or two vas just hitting the phones, putting all in a database. There's your database right now you can use Programmatic to pull users to that or you can, you could do basically the same thing with VA and just join a zillion Facebook groups and ask the question, hey, what did you pay for your home and when did you build? Right. And you could just. That's a little more tedious because, you know, maybe a post doesn't get much action. Whereas if you call someone, you can control that or not. So you don't have to build a community of people to submit all this to you. You could go out and grab it from them.

I like the idea, and this wasn't what you were saying, but hearing you talk about it, of using VAS to almost negotiate on your behalf, where it's like, I don't know which custom home builder to go with. And then again we'd have to figure out the pricing. But you then go to Chris's company and it's like, hey, I have this team of VAs. They'll call around for you, give us your specs, we'll bring you the best prices and you can make a decision. Right. And then the homeowner can take a look at that stuff and make an assessment on what they want to spend the money on it or like which of those home builders they want to go after. Right? Because lots of people just don't like making phone calls. They don't want. It's just awkward. They have anxiety. A ton of people like the people don't like public speaking, they don't like talking on the phone. It's a real thing. But like in the process of that you're also capturing that data and putting it in a database, right? So you're like, it's almost like the Tesla strategy of first the roadster roadster, then the Model S, then model model, then the model 3 where high ticket first building a lot of the infrastructure, the know how and experience that'll then allow them to get to the Model 3 which was their, their mass produced electric vehicle. Like this would be a business that kind of helps people negotiate prices or at least get the data that they need in order to make an informed decision.

If specifically for custom home building or for anything.

Let's just say custom home building first, right? Let's just say that was the first business that we did this with is you tried to rank for people who are looking to find custom home builders. And I don't know what it would be, but it was like, hey, we help you find the best custom home builder. And basically the process was we call around, we get their prices and there's probably a number of things that people care about, right? Like do they help with architecture, do they like where are they getting the supplies from? Whatever. You put that all on the questionnaire and then you aggregate this data and then you feed it to the homeowner and they're then able to make a decision or determination on which one they want to meet with and then a decision of who they want to work with. But it's a way to be generating that data and information but get. But be getting paid for it at the same time as opposed to just generating the information, building the database and then figuring out the monetization model later.

I really like the concept of that. I would probably do it in a different industry because if you did that, you would have to find people that are about to want a custom home, which is like so niche would be really hard to do that. In fact, Ed and I were trying to do that when we had our business. It's like how do you find someone in that phase of life where like they're about to start shopping around? That's a really Valuable person to find, but a hard person to find. So I love the idea of doing that. You, basically you're doing research and negotiation as a service for a high ticket purchase, right? So maybe it's like a car, right? Like you're gonna. Because that's the worst experience ever. Everyone knows it. And so maybe the VA calls dozens of dealerships and they all have a Toyota Sienna, because that's for sure what they want. And you're asking all these annoying, ticky, tacky details, was it smoked in? You get all, you present it all. And then you, you present the information to the potential car buyer and they say, okay, I love these three. I don't like the other nine. I love these three. I want you to pit these people against each other so I can get the best price. And then they call them back and say, hey, I was the guy that asked a million questions about that car. Okay, I'm very interested. But this dealership right down the road, you it by name. They have this car, which they can see on the website. You're not BSing them. They're $3,000 lower. What can you do? And then all the person has to do is drive to the dealership and buy the car at the predetermined price. It's done. So it's not like a presto cars model where you're buying cars at wholesale for people and charging an $800 fee. It's using cheap global talent to do this whole rigmarole for someone in any local market.

I like the idea of charging a fee for that, not a percentage base of like potential savings because it's like, who knows if they're actually going to buy the vehicle? You may do all this work and they don't actually buy the vehicle. But there are a lot of apps, right? Like, I think TrueCar is one of them. Edmunds CarMax is that. But they also have physical locations where they will have cars on their app or their website and they're listed and it's a no haggle process. But that's the price. It's like the price is set. There's a margin in there that they're charging and it makes sense. But this is for people who are like, will you just do it for me? Like, I don't want to. I don't even want to scour the Internet. Can you just go negotiate on my behalf? This is what I want. Bring me the best three options and then we can make a determination.

I think we've landed on actually a really good idea Here. Tell me, Nick, how much time would it take for a VA to. To call 15 car dealerships and have these conversations and then present this data in a spreadsheet to the end user and then to call back five of the car dealerships and negotiate with them? How long would that entire process take?

A couple of days, maybe. Maybe.

And first of all, a lot of the info that they're going to be asking they could get from the website so they don't have to ask it. But hear me. Like, how many hours would it take a VA to do the research and then the negotiating?

Conservatively, I think conservatively, four hours.

Okay. And a VA could be like a good VA with a good accent. Six dollars an hour. They're not selling. They're not even selling. They're like a. They're like an inbound telemarketer more than anything.

Yes.

So $25 in labor. And what could you charge?

Yeah, let's round it up and say.

$50 for a $30,000 car. What's a reasonable fee to charge for something like this?

If you could say that you save them $2,000 on average. Charge them 500 bucks. You know what I mean?

Like, exactly. I was thinking $500. And you could also charge a percentage of what the list price is on the website versus what you save them.

You could. Yeah, you definitely could do that.

That'd be very alignment of interests.

The cell gets even better. Think about this every time. Have you ever gone and searched for a new car or searched for a mortgage and then you put your phone number in?

Oh, don't get started. I did this to my enemies. I got scammed by a guy on Craigslist once, and I put his phone number on lendingtree.com. that guy must have been hating his life. I have done that.

So anyways, everybody hates doing that. I don't want to get my phone number. I'm gonna get hit up by 15 different people. Like, hey, have you made a decision yet? Hey, are you still in the market six months later, you're still getting text messages. The VAs do all that crap. You don't have to give your phone number out. They could get a Google number that's in the area so it doesn't look like you're out of town or whatever. Any Google number. And they're the ones conversing with the dealership. And, like, the first couple conversations with the dealership anyways are over email or text.

Right.

Hey, this is Doug from the dealership. I saw you had an inquiry. What Are you interested this weekend? Right? It's like a go, you know, back and forth kind of text exchange first, and then you hop on a call. Obviously, you need to go to the dealership at some point, but, yeah, to me, that's a big selling point as well. It's like, hey, you don't have to give your phone number or email out to people. Like, I would much rather do that than, oh, I could go to. I could go to CarMax and I don't have to haggle, but I still have to get my freaking phone number. I said, I get emails all the time from CarMax.

This is a really good idea. Someone should start this. I'm very bullish about this idea because it's such a problem. Like, we've both been hearing for 20 years, the worst. Buying a used car. Buying a car is the worst buyer's experience on the world. Like, it always has been, it always will be. You're solving a real problem, and your offer is perfect. Hey, you know what? I'm gonna go buy this Sienna for you. I'm gonna charge you $0, period. There's no deposit, nothing. You only pay me based on 25% of what I save you from the list price on the website. It's a great offer. It's a real pain point that you're actually solving. And it's high ticket. And. And you could automate 80% of it. Like, you could literally set up these. A zap. A zapier integration to where these used car sellers could be having email conversations with AI the whole time, haggling back and forth. And then you only have the VA get them on the phone once you've whittled it down to the last three cars.

Like, at this point, it probably is A.I. just having a conversation with A.I. you know what I mean?

At this point in the world, you and I are probably AI just talking about, right?

Take me to the island. I want to go. I want to go to the island.

I really like this idea.

I do, too. I think that's a great idea. All right. It kind of dovetails on my next idea.

Before you go to that, I just. I want to give one more idea of how to scam a scammer.

Okay?

It's good content. You put their phone number into lendingtree.com and then. Nick, look at me. You need to look at. This is devious. So you need to look at my eyes. You go to Facebook Marketplace and you take the cutest picture of golden retriever puppies you can find. It has to be a golden retriever. And I have done this. And you post free golden retriever puppies and you put the address and the phone number of the person that scammed you in there. I promise you that person will be hating their Life. Back to $100 million offers from Alex Bromozi. There is no greater offer than a free golden retriever puppy. It works. It's effective. Trust me. You are Dr. Evil.

You're Evil, Chris.

Sorry. Proceed with your idea.

You've seen, we've all seen recently, a lot of like, AI is going to do this in your business, AI is going to do that in your business. Automation APIs, blah blah, blah. We've talked a couple of times. I know you and I have spoken about it. I heard you and Shannon talk about it, like of having an AI automation agency or just having an AI company that comes and helps businesses basically implement AI into their business, which I still think is a phenomenal idea. But I've been thinking about this recently as well. Even having the AI automation agency, there's still an education problem. They just don't know what AI is. Right? Is it chat DPT? Is it one of these LLMs? Is it diffusion AI where it's like creating cool pictures? Is it agents? I don't really know what it is.

Right.

So here's what I'm thinking and I think it's very simple. If I was an enterprising young man or woman, I would create a five part short course on not what is AI and not like how you can use AI today in your business. But also how do you identify opportunities for AI in your business? Because for me, that's the disconnect that I've seen is sure you can educate someone on what AI is. You could even educate someone on like, oh, here's all the places you could go. You could go to Huggy Face to see who's the best developer creating the best new open source models. Or this is chat GPT, this is Claude, this is whatever like cool. This is, this is how AI works and these are the tools. Great. But how do I know what tools to use? How do I know where I should put that in my business? Right? Like there to me there's a disconnect there. So I think a solution to that disconnect would be to create a little course. Five videos, three to five minutes in length each, like short. These don't need to be university level courses that just get a business owner, entrepreneur, boomer, anybody who doesn't know this stuff educated enough to take the next step of action.

Is it based around tools? Like I'm thinking like if this then videos, right? If this is your problem, then this tool is your answer. Kind of that type of stuff?

Not yet. To me that would be the next step. So this is exactly what I would do. And I even wrote this out. I was at the gym on the stair stepper and I wrote this out. So stair stepper. I would go to chat GPT and I would enter this exact prompt. I want to create a five part video course on how business owners can use AI to identify where they can use AI in their businesses today. Make sure that each section ties back to how it can apply to their business. For example, when explaining how LLMs work, highlight the fact that the more data they can easily export from their businesses and feed into these models, the more tailored the outcome will be for them. Part one should be an overview explainer of what AI is. Part two should be about the different types of AI tools out there. For example chatbots, LLMs, autonomous agents. Part three should be an explainer of how to identify your tech stack and how you can export your data. Part four should be how to identify opportunities for AI automation in your business. And part five should be teaching them how to assess the level of sophistication needed from utilizing ChatGPT to programming autonomous agents. I want each video to be three to five minutes in length, written at a fifth grade level. Please provide me a step by step guide to create this course. So that's the prompt like, and chatgpt will spit out an answer for that. And like I did this. It's shocking how good the answer is. It's shocking like how specific it gets. It references exact tools, it tells you what websites to go to and even like the explanations are really good and the analogies that it gives for people. And I think that you could take this, refine it, right? You'd have to do a couple of iterations on ChatGPT and you could create five short really good videos and sell it as like a $50 product for somebody who's like, hey, are you interested in to learn how AI works? And quality business Boom for sale.

Is this a video of like you like a talking head video or like an animated explainer video?

So I, what I would do is I would record the video like this, a talking head video, but then I would overlay it with animations showing them where they can go. And I'm not good enough. But I know that there are AI tools that you can use to create the animations for you. But I would probably go to an animator that I know and just throw in some stuff to each one of the videos and because basically the total length of the videos is going to be 25 minutes, like 15 to 25 minutes. And it'll cost you money. It'll probably cost you if you went like really high level with the animations. It would probably cost you 2 to $5,000 if you went really high level with the animations. But I think you could also do it before between five to five hundred to a thousand dollars. And I think you could price it at say fifty to a hundred dollars. And so if you sell five to ten of those, you've recouped your cost essentially to create the video. But I like anyways, I want to get your take on it.

I'm gonna Kevin o' Leary you. Okay, but how does it make money? That sounded a lot more aggressive than I actually am. I'm curious, like, what is your monetization strategy?

I thought I said that you're charging 50 to $100 for the course.

Okay, 50 to 100. What do you think the distribution strategy is?

I think you would have to be one of, obviously one of three ways. Either you're somebody who's on social media, you have a social media following. That's probably going to be the hardest because either you have it or you don't. And you can't just do that overnight.

You could find a guy to go through, though.

You could find a guy.

Little, little piggyback strat.

I think you could go to one of these companies and we like, we know one company where they just focus on Facebook in particular, where it's like, okay, you got to put some money behind paid ads, but once you get a lead, you know it's going to come in and you can convert it. It's on a high ticket course. You could put some money behind it to get it in front of people. So I think like, those would probably be the two ways that I would think of. But you're the distribution guy. What would you do?

First of all, a couple things going on in my head right now. I think there should be a rule on this podcast where it's like, you can't bring up an idea unless you bring up a way to distribute that idea or the business. Right. Isn't that good? Because I think that's kind of what, like a true guru, like a slimy guru. They're just like all idea, no execution, no distribution. Right. Ideas are cheap. Right. We all know that execution is what matters. And I think that's what's special about when you and I talk and other episodes on this podcast is they're almost always tied to an execution strategy, a distribution strategy. And I've always led with that. Like, I love thinking of a cool distribution idea and then putting an idea into it as opposed to the other way around. It reminds me of something else we got to talk about. So I'm just saying, like, you did that, but that should be like a rule where if one of us brings up an idea, not a way to execute it. No. You raise your hand like, dude, you gotta. I need more than that, bro.

I don't know. Because, like, I'm not as good at the distribution side of things. Right. So it'd be like, I'd want to hear your idea. Yeah.

Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that counts, right?

Right?

That would count. We just can't gloss over the execution, which you didn't. I'm just saying moving forward. All right, anyway, I love the idea and I'm going to hopefully level it up right here. So I think your price point needs to be right at what your cpa, your cost per acquisition would be on a Facebook ad. I think you take that prompt, you fine tune it perfectly, you're good to go, and then you say, all right, now take all that and make it for plumbers. Okay. Okay, perfect. Cool. Now you go run Facebook ads to plumbers and you sell it for, let's say you start it cheap, $20. And then you see that your CPA is 40. It costs $40 for someone to give you 20. Okay, now we're going to raise it to 60. And you keep raising or lowering the price until your cost per acquisition. Cause there's no cost to fulfill. It's all. It's a digital product. Your cost per acquisition is right around what the cost of the product is. That way your cost per acquisition is effectively zero. Correct. Which means you're not done yet. And then the high ticket offer is to get them on the phone, set up automations to where you're asking. You're holding them accountable. Hey, did you do it? Did you do the course? How did it go? Have you implemented anything? These are all automations. Get them to respond, get them on the phone, and then you sell a consulting offer. One hour a week on the phone, on zoom. They could be anywhere in the world. 3,000amonth. And so that's like the ultimate end game here is to use freaking AI to create something to compete with itself to get 10 customers that will make you $30,000 a month and take you five to 10 hours a week.

So you would take this course and essentially turn it into a lead backnet.

Yeah, I was going to tie. Thank you. I was going to tie it back to that last episode, the lead magnet. And lead magnets are often paid. This is strategically introduced friction. It's sif. Right. They're paying for themselves to become. They're paying to become your customers.

Yeah. That's interesting. That would be a really good lead. I wasn't even. I, I genuinely wasn't thinking of it as a lead magnet, but that would be a freaking really good lead magnet for the AI automation company.

Yeah. And I've been talking to my friend Trey, who I talk about a lot, who kind of has a whole business around lead magnets on Instagram specifically. And he said very clearly the percentage opt in rate to your lead magnet is directly attributed to how valuable that lead magnet is. And I've done this on Instagram, right. Where I try to get my Instagram followers to my free newsletter. That's my whole angle here. And so if I say I had a lead magnet that was for the perfume vending machines, one of my lead magnets was, hey, hit the word guide in the comments and I'll send you all the resources on this perfume vending machine. And what I'm sending them is like a YouTube video of a webinar and a calendar link. It's not a lot. Right. I just want their email candidly. But then I had another lead magnet that was my cold email guide and it took me an hour to aggregate this. I took and it was all my content. I took two newsletters all about cold emailing. I took all my tweets about cold emailing. I took Sam Thompson's tweet about cold emailing. I put all this stuff together in a Google Doc and I then I did made a video about cold emailing and then I put a lead magnet as like comment guide for my cold emailing guide. And my opt in rate was like significantly higher. Because a cold email guide can really help you make money. Like it's very valuable. Whereas like a YouTube video about a perfume vending machine is like meh, I can Google that.

You know, I think what's interesting, There are some YouTube accounts and Instagram accounts that are like just showing you how to write good prompts in chat GPT. I don't know if you've seen some of these. And like you and I have a business that we invested in and it started out as this. We thought, let's use ChatGPT, throw a thin skin over it and we'll help healthcare companies essentially identify things. It's now morphed into a company that's actually building code and it's a proper technology.

Skin is quite thick now.

Yeah, the scan is very ethic, but there's a lot that goes into prompt engineering is the point I was trying to make and that you have to ask it the right question in order to get the answer that you want. And these context windows, which are essentially the space bar that you're using to ask the question, are very large now like you can fit books in these context windows. So essentially you're asking the LLM a question and you're saying, hey, LLM, using all the knowledge that you have, I want you to read this book, use it as context and give me an answer on the top three things I should do in order to stand out as an applicant to my university. Right. Like that's how people are using it now. And so I think like, like you're saying for these AI automation businesses, my prompt was probably even too thin. Like I probably could do a lot better job of creating a prompt in order to create the training materials for these things. But even just showing people how to do the prompt would be an interesting business in and of itself.

Yeah, my one prompt hack, which is just the best prompt ever when you don't really know how to fine tune it, is just ask Chap GPT what to ask ChatGPT. Here's my problem. Here's what I want to ask you. I don't know how to ask it. How should I ask this to you? It works for everything.

Give me an example.

Okay, let's say I want to take a. I did a webinar a couple months ago for RV park investing. It was an hour long. I wanted to turn that into I don't even remember something outline. And I took the SRT file, which is like the captions file, the text, and I uploaded it and I was like, hey, make bullet points of this. And it did. And I was like, eh, I don't like it. And I was like, it wasn't what I was looking for. So I was like, hey, here's what I want to do, here's my intent, here's the content. What should I ask you? I don't remember what it told me exactly, but I ended up getting what I wanted. Okay, tell it what you're thinking and then how to ask the question to get what you want, dude?

That's really interesting because I think a lot of people. It's funny how this conversation has moved. I think a lot of people still use chat GPT like they use Google, where's the best restaurant in California?

And it's a hard habit to break, right?

Yeah, because it's like this really short question. But the magic in chat GPT is you can ask it questions with context. You can say like, hey, I had this conversation with 75 investors. Most of them have a median net worth of $5 million. They're all looking to put their money to work. I am trying to buy this park down the road. It's $10 million. I need teen of them to convert. But in order for them to feel comfortable with converting, like, they need to understand what the return on investment is. I don't really know what the return on investment is yet. Like, you know what I mean? So you say all of that in the prompt because that gives it the context necessary to then answer your question, which is, what's the best way for me to present this Data to get 15 of them to give me their money? Right. And that's the first question. And then from there you can iterate. But like, ChatGPT is not one sentence. Like, it's not optimized if you're just asking one sentence. It's like, here's a paragraph of things that you can use as context. Now help me answer this question.

It's so funny because I probably texted you this five years ago. I'm sure you forgot, but Ariel, my sister in law, listens to this podcast. She's wonderful. And her husband Matt, my brother in law. Five years ago, Ariel in the family group chat, she sent a screenshot of something that Matt had googled and left up on the computer accidentally. Okay. And I still refer back to this screenshot because Matt was ahead of his time for chat GPT. Like he's been asking Google these type of questions forever. Like he was ready for chat gbt. So his Google se all caps. I don't know if Matt's like 88 years old. I thought he was about 34. It's all caps. And this is exactly what he asked Google. I have thawed chicken and I want to cook for my wife. That's it. That was it. That was the question. All cap. I got to put it up in the YouTube video. It's saved in my Google Photos question. It's not even a question. Oh my God. It's just a statement. Google's like Sergey Brin stepped out of the computer. He's like, bro, what do you want from me? You're just too early on this AI stuff.

No, Sam Altman was doing quality assurance, and he saw that and he was like, I think we need to build something that can answer.

We need this guy on our team. We need this guy on our team. Oh, so good.

That is so freaking funny.

While we brought Silicon Valley into the discussion, so I was just listening to another podcast. It was similar to this. I don't want to name it. I don't like calling people out. I think it was funny. I'm not trying to make anyone feel bad.

I'll do it.

It's a podcast you might not be familiar with, but it's a pretty popular podcast. Okay. They talk about business ideas. And so they had this guy on, and I don't want to call him out. He's very well known in Silicon Valley. He's a multi billionaire. He's built some awesome companies, like, very much richer than us. Okay? Very successful, respectable. But the podcast host asked this guy, this billionaire, give me your two best business ideas. And I was like, oh, okay. I'm sitting up in my chair. I'm ready to go. Okay.

Okay.

This is gonna be good. This is a billionaire. He probably has the best ideas ever. You see where I'm going with this, right?

I do, yeah.

The first idea, I see some merit in it. But he was like, I can't stop thinking about this idea. This is gonna change the world. I just, like, I don't even want to talk about it because someone is gonna build this and I'm gonna have so much fomo. This is the idea. You ready?

Yeah.

It's an app that we're like a. Like a scratch off lottery ticket. I understand playing on the human emotion of liking to reveal things. Right. There's something innate there. So I get that he wanted there to be an app with an ad, like 20% off a bottle of Coca Cola at your local Walmart. An ad that you scratch off that everyone in the world scratches off at the same time each day. And it's always going to be an ad with a coupon. And it could be, like, a really good coupon or it could be a bad coupon.

That was his idea.

That's the idea. Spending time to reveal an ad.

That guy's so rich, he has no people around him that tell him he's an idiot anymore.

And the host, bless his heart, was like, yeah, okay.

Huh?

Okay. I like this part.

Like, he was doing his best oh, my gosh.

The next idea. You ready?

Yeah.

He goes, I love drawing in the shower. Like, I love. I've got this glass door in my shower and it steams up and I just love, like, writing a note to my wife in the steam and then. Cause it goes away. It's ephemeral. It's ephemeral. It's temporary. It's transitory. It comes and goes. It's fleeting. Like, our thoughts. Right. I'm hamming it up a little bit.

Yeah.

He's like, there needs to be an iPad app, and it's called, like, Steamy Shower Door, where you can just draw things on a steamy shower door, but then it's going to be gone. It's like Snapchat. It's not going to be around forever. Someone. This needs to be a thing. Someone needs to build this Interesting.

He's a billionaire. Like, these are novelty apps. You know what I mean? These are like.

Yeah. The podcast host related his first idea to Q Trivia, Right. Which was a worldwide phenomenon. The Rock hosted it. They gave away a million dollars one day. A live trivia show at the same time, every day, where millions of people would all participate at the same time. And he related, and I see that. I get that. It's feeling of community, togetherness. You could win real money. It's fun, you smart if you answer the questions. But I think that is so far removed than what his actual idea was. And so, yeah, that was his idea. And so it just made me grateful for this podcast that we discuss real ideas that are actually approachable, that could make real money.

Yeah, dude, that is. That's really funny. Yeah, he has.

I was like screaming at my AirPods, like, is, am I being trolled right now? This is crazy.

Oh, my gosh. Yeah. Spoiler alert. You were being trolled. You were being trolled.

I suppose I was.

I'm sorry.

Oh, oh, okay.

I had somebody on my podcast recently. She grew.

What's your podcast name?

Oh, Nickonomics. Sorry.

Oh, shoot. With a N, I, C, K or.

Oh, it's Nik. Oh, no.

Okay. Okay, cool.

Nickonomics. Okay. Her name's Catherine. I had her on my podcast, Nickonomics, and she started an E commerce company. And the E Commerce company sold essentially, productivity tools, journals, checklists, those types of things. She grows it. It does. Like, at its height, it was doing eight and a half million dollars a year in revenue. And she sells it in 2021 to a brand new private equity fund. Private equity fund. Runs it for a little while, like every Private equity fund. They think they know what they're doing and they're smarter than everybody. They, like, did away with the core offerings.

They pivoted.

And in 2023, I think in the beginning of 2023, basically, they called her. Oh, no, it was the end of 2022, they called her and were like, hey, we're shutting this down. Would you like to buy it back? And so she, like, didn't know at first. And then she's like, yeah, I'll buy it back. And she like, she bought it back for inventory, basically. She didn't tell me the exact price, but you can imagine probably a couple hundred thousand dollars. So she buys it back and now it's what? Yes.

What type of product? Sorry, what type of e commerce product?

So these were productivity tools, so journals, checklists, those types of things. The company's called Bestself Co.

Okay, anyway, so she.

She buys it back. And in buying it back, she like, is now doing everything that she wishes she would have done the first time, right? It's like, so she had like two years off. And during those two years, she's processed everything. And the company, it dropped from like 8 and a half million in revenue to 5. And it's currently doing right around 5. But it's way more profitable than when it was even at eight and a half million dollars, right? And she's like, I'm not worried about growing like crazy. So it got me thinking because I am obsessed with buying a business, a distressed business, either out of bankruptcy or for like pennies on the dollar that everybody else has overlooked and turning it around. Like, we hear stories about this all the time, right? And I don't know why, but I'm like, that would be so freaking cool to find a diamond in the rough. It's just being given away, it's being spun out. And so this is one of those things where it's like, I'm raising my hand. I don't know. I wanted to brainstorm with you. Like, how would we find a business like that? How would we go about systematically identifying business opportunities like this? Like, because we brainstormed all this before, it's like, well, we could go to just private equity funds and venture capital funds. Like, there are so many of them, and who do we reach out to? And like, it's. Anyways, that would be just really hard in and of itself. But I'm still just keep coming back to being obsessed with this idea of buying something for like pennies on the dollar.

I just thought of a funny Analogy. So you know how to find someone. We've talked about this before, but you've forgotten, so I'll remind you. Okay, but the funny analogy is there's like something in every business owner wants to do that. Right. Like anyone who started or bought or sold a business has this fantasy of doing exactly what you just described, myself included. And it's kind of like anyone that played sports in high school. Do you remember the movie in 2006, Invincible? It was about a 30 year old bartender and part time teacher from Philadelphia who became a walk on player for the Philadelphia Eagles. Yeah, yeah. That's who played Vince Papale. It's like the same fantasy. It's like, I'll put me in coach. Oh, I could do it. I could do it. Like the Rudy. It's like the Rudy fantasy, right?

Yes.

Because it's just, it's innate with every entrepreneur. So you do it by doing outreach to one, to do outreach to a hundred, to reach out to people that are like CPAs and tax prep guys and say, put me in touch with your ugliest customer. Like just the hairiest. Book the guy who's about to close his doors. I'm that guy's savior. I want to talk to that guy.

Ah, that is a freaking really good idea. And qualify it be like, I don't want the guy who's doing $100,000 a year.

I want a restaurant. I don't want. Yep.

I want the guy who's like 2 million a year in revenue. They've had a track record of success, but for whatever reason, they've run into TR to trouble, I think. And this triggered another thing that we've talked about in the past. How many businesses close their doors? They're just like done. They don't sell. They just like, they literally close their.

Doors, most of them.

But there is a lot of asset value there. Not necessarily like physical assets, but like customer lists.

Is is something that I tweeted about this.

Like I know.

Yeah.

And it could be the same type of outreach, right? Like CPAs. Hey2peop. I'm looking for two profiles of businesses, ones that have closed in the last five years that didn't sell and. Or businesses that are like on death's door that really need a lot of help that fit this profile. Because you could probably go back like they have clients who have just shut their doors and just reach out to them for something nominal and be like, hey, do you. What happened to your customer list? What are you doing with that? I'd be willing to assign some value to it.

Oh, my gosh. Yes. So, first of all, I did this outreach to CPAs a while ago. I was testing something, and one of the responses I still remember, I was like, hey, do you have any clients that are really struggling? They're about to close their business? And this one guy said, of course not, because I'm their cpa. Like, that's funny.

Like, that is such a stupid response, right?

Like, you're in charge of their business. It was funny, though. And the other thing I'm thinking of is when I tweeted about this, it was because I was on Facebook, Marketplace, and I saw someone saying, like, free wood. I'm a wood shop guy. I like doing woodworking. So I was like, oh, okay. And then the description was like, my dad has health issues, so he has to close his cabinetry business. Cabinetry businesses can be insanely profitable. Like, that is a very niche business that could scale to eight figures and beyond with, like, healthy 30% margins. Maybe it was a hundred thousand dollars business. Maybe a hundred million. I have no idea. I never even responded to it. But imagine going in there and saying, hey, I don't want to your pine or your oak. I want your customer list. Well, I don't really have a customer list. Well, like, I. Okay, you don't have a mailchimp account. That's fine. But do you have customers? Yes. I want to know who they are. Okay, cool. So you buy that, or maybe you just get it for free, and then you go find a more sophisticated cabinet company, because you're not about to start a cabinet business. Right. You knock on the door, this is a very personalized sale. And you say, hey, this guy around town just closed down. I want to call his customers representing your company. Right. As if I'm an employee, and say, hey, you were John's vendor, right? Yeah. Yeah. Maybe it's a custom home builder. Well, I'm at so and so now. We love your business. He closed down. He closed down. John closed down. Our prices are actually better, our customer service better. Like, our lead time is two weeks instead of John's, which was four weeks. And then you just take a delta on anything you close. It's very high ticket. You take 10, 20% on all the revenue you bring in from these customers that were just going to be thrown in the trash.

Okay, I'm going to take that. Level it up. Back to our distribution conversation. Nobody can bring an idea up without the distribution. This reminds me. Well, like, because I'm sitting here thinking, I'm like, how would you systematize that? How would you make that into something where you're, like, constantly getting inbound? You don't have to necessarily do a bunch of outbound cold. And it made me think of. You've driven around your neighborhood or your city and you've seen those yard signs. We buy ugly homes. You've seen those. It's like, yeah, but we're not looking for the nice houses. We want the crappy houses. Whatever. Could you do something like that to, like, play on that? To say, like, hey, we buy bankrupt businesses, or like, we buy, I don't know, some play there. That is just like Evergreen that people associate. It's like, oh, hey, we just shut down dad's business. You know what I just saw? I just saw these guys buy ugly businesses. Let's reach out to them. Like, anyways, that. Is there some funnel we could create for that? Is my idea, like, really stupid and you're laughing at it, or do you have, like, an idea that you're excited to share?

You tell me, Nick, am I a fan of taking proven and established marketing channels and moving it to a different industry? Do I even like that? Is that good?

Okay. Okay.

Are the ugly bandit signs. I know that say we buy ugly houses. We've seen those around for decades. They're on billboards. There's a nationwide franchise that does it. It clearly works. Okay, let me ask you this question. I'm going to softball you here. You ready?

Yep.

What percentage of people that drive by those signs are the target market? Not maybe are willing to sell their price for the price that they're asking, but have an ugly house that they could sell at the right price.

It's a good psychological trick because many people think that their house is ugly, Right? Like, one person's ugly house is actually someone else's dream home that they're wanting to move into. So I would guess that it's actually probably closer to, like 60%. But if you were asking me, like, what percentage of the market is actually what I would consider to be those ugly houses or whatever, yeah, I'd probably say like 10 to 20% of the market. But that's why I like it, because it's like a really cool psychological trick.

So first of all, I've been in that game. That's really what those signs are. Are wholesalers. They're not end investors. They're not even flippers. It's a guy that has no money that wants to get a house under contract and sell the contract to a flipper or an investor. Okay, so when I hear ugly house, I picture of driving through a neighborhood and seeing normal nice houses. And then the eyesore that's overgrown that has boards on the windows. So I'm thinking the number is closer to 5 to 10%. Let's just say it's 10%. Okay.

Okay.

Now that number is unknown because we haven't really done the research, but the number of business owners in America is 100% known. There's 32 million business owners in America and 330 million people in America. Therefore, 10% of not adults, but 10% of humans in America is a business owner. So call it 20% of adults. Right. And so if 20% of adults own a business, and we use that term very loosely, most businesses have no employees. Correct. But they're a business. None. Nonetheless. Therefore, if you were to put out an ugly yard sign for we buy ugly businesses, your market is twice as big than the owner of an ugly house. Why wouldn't it work?

Businesses are changing hands at a high clip right now. People are retiring.

Right.

I mean, the Silver Tsunami everybody is going gaga over.

Yeah.

Why wouldn't it work?

We'll have to see. Sounds like a really good test, dude.

And like, I think it would actually be even easier because you could target specific zip codes. Like we have all the information on income for different zip codes. So I want to only want to target zip codes that have a $75,000 earnings and above, because those. I'm going to guess that those are the ones that are business owners. Yeah, dude, that's. Yeah, that's interesting. That's an interesting way to think about it.

All right, I'm on namecheap right now.

Okay.

Oh, I found a new domain to buy. Ah, twist. Oh, twist my arm. Oh, twist my arm. I don't want to buy another domain. Oh, I guess I will if I have to. We buy ugly businesses dot com. By the time this pod goes live, I will be an owner of this domain name.

Nick.

This is going to be so like, dang it. I mistyped businesses and the real one isn't available anyway. It was taken seven years ago. Anyway, if this would work on a local level. Okay. Like we will see at some point a nationwide billion dollar brand with some sort of offer proposition like that we buy ugly businesses. Just like we buy ugly houses is a billion dollar franchise that you can buy into today.

Yeah. The question is, what are you doing with those leads? Right to your point, if we buy ugly houses is wholesaling them. What are you doing with leads for businesses for sale. This could go back like full circle to the very first company we talked about with a programmatic SEO where you're building a brokerage and you're just selling those leads off one by one.

So we buy ugly houses. The actual franchise, they are not wholesaling them. Most of the rinky dink bandit signs you see are from wholesalers. But if you see a billboard or a TV ad that say we buy ugly houses, those are flippers. Those are local flippers that bought into a franchise that provided the whole system for them to flip houses. So if this were a nationwide franchise, I could see it just being like a decision tree. If a cabinet business, then sell the list to a competitor. If a H vac business with million dollar plus EBITDA, sell the lead to a business broker for 25% of his commission. Right?

Yep. Makes sense.

This is a good pod. We're really smart and talented, Nick.

We're so good.

Our wives should love us. This is why our wives love us. Right? That's what I meant to say.

Let's call it Time of Death.

All right. This is a good one.

All right.

Okay, that's it for Holco Bros. We'll see you next week.