How to Start My Favorite Car Business Idea for $0

Welcome to the Kerner office for another episode of Hold Cobros. 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 homebuilding 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, five 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 and 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 you know, 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 what. Like, do you charge extra for the bathrooms because those cost more per squ, or is it all included in lump sum price? You just don't know this stuff. 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 health care, 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 like what is the market rate? And that's where for. 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 rate 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. 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 are like, oh, I don't know, it depends. Like, 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. Listen, I know, but like for the average quality build you're doing, like 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 it all in a database. There's your database right now. You can use Programmatic to pull users to that. Or 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 you. 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 like 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 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. Like, it's just awkward. They have anxiety. A ton of people, like 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 Roadstore roadster, then the Model S, 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 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? Do they help with architecture, where are they getting their 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 we, 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, like, was it smoked in yada, yada, yada, you present it all and then 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, 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 name 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 CH 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 kind of that. But they also have physical locations where they will have cars on their app or their website and they're listed. And there's, it's like, 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? I 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 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 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. $6 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?

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

Like I was 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 sell gets even better. Think about this every time. Like, have you ever gotten searched for a new car or searched for a mortgage and then you put your phone number in?

Oh, don't start it. 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. It's like, I don't want to get my phone number. I'm going to get hit up by like 15 different people. It's 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 like, 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. And like 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 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 CarMax and I don't have to haggle, but I still have to get my freaking phone number. 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 going to go buy the Sienna for you. I'm going to 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 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 like?

At this point in the world, you and I are probably AI just talking.

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 want to give one more idea of how to scam a scammer.

Okay?

It's good content. So 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. All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform. Or you can go to tkopod.com Also, my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube.