How to Use AI to Clone Others for Profit

Welcome to the Kerner office, the show for more business ideas and growth strategies and deep dives than your brain even has the space to comprehend. I'm Chris Kerner and today I had my good friend Sam Thompson back on the pod. And guys, think about it. I only have people back on the pod because their pods do well, because you guys like them and you listen to them all the way through and you say, chris, please bring Shannon or Sam or Nick or Connor back on. That's why he's back on, because they're great guests. Sam and I talked about a bunch of things such as cloning, as in digital cloning, using AI, clone yourself, clone others, charge people for access to yours or someone else's clone, be an agent for people that might have data worth cloning. We talked about some cool digital product opportunities, some new tech out there, lots of cool business ideas. Sam lives in the digital world when it comes to startups and entrepreneurship. So he is a good counterbalance to myself and other guests that are more likely to talk about physical products or physical service businesses or sweaty startups. So I like to have a little bit of everything on the pod. So enjoy, share with a friend, and we'll see you next time.

So we got Friend of the Pod back on Sam Thompson.

We're gonna riff on some ideas. I have no idea what this episode will bring. We didn't share any notes.

He doesn't know what I've got. I don't know what he's got.

How you doing, Sam?

Oh, another day, another data set. Can't complain, dude. Just out here ripping ideas left and right, taking sales calls, sending emails. Dude, life of a hustler, bro.

That's right.

These are all the shiny objects that we don't chase, that someone should.

Oh, the absolute battle to not chase these things is so real.

A lot of times the shiny object is more profitable or promising than what you're doing.

That's the hard part is like, especially in early stage stuff, right? Especially like services like all of that. The margin hit that you take once you get north of 20 or 30k a month is like, it's meaningful and you actually feel it and it changes what the business is, where it's like, hey, is this like becoming an enterprise value play where this thing can exist without me, or am I trying to stack as much cash as humanly possible right now as an individual? And like, that dynamic has been weird with the shiny object of like, I could go make monthly personally more money by doing this thing. But there's no Like, I don't want to say there's no value in it, but like, much less than what I currently do. That's been the thought process. A lot of like, we're doing big things that quicker and unlimited and all of that. Like, yeah, I could go probably spend that time and energy on something else that would be higher profit margins or like more personal income based in a shorter amount of time. But no matter what, I'm always going to hit the point that a limit is at where like, oh, are we going to scale this? Or like, am I going to be a glorified freelancer forever running this little thing? And it's like the decision making process there so interesting.

And at the end of the day, it doesn't matter which path you choose because compounding doesn't care. You just got to keep grinding.

You just got to keep doing the thing. Dude, this is the conversation I had with Connor Abney the other day. I was like, what am I going to spend my time on? If I want to add stuff, I want to, like, I got to take stuff off my plate. And he was like, why just work harder.

I was like, parkinson's law.

Like, shoot, dude, you're not wrong.

There you go.

Sometimes you just got to do it.

Hit me with something. Give me a hit.

Oh, man, dude, I think so. I was talking to a buddy of mine the other night. Successful dude, sold his agency actually, funny enough, getting kind of into the global talent space, the whole thing. And we were having a similar conversation and we were talking about something that you and I have talked about before, which is selling digital products at scale, right? And I think the, the world has gotten used to that a little bit more with these people that are talking about selling products on Etsy. And it's like, hey, we're going to go build like a notion template that you can go and buy, right? Or similar to like on our last episode, the custom signature thing. Like, what are these things that are like super low cogs that you can scale up with paid ads? Custom signature cogs are $2. They're charging us 80, right? And I think there's a world that can exist there in the digital product space. And I think I wrote a Tweet on this two years ago about the easiest way to make 100k a year. It might be putting out AI generated content templates, whatever that means running ads, pushing on Etsy and just slinging these digital products where it's like you can charge $40 for a new mom organization notion template, right? You can Create it to be super niche down and just go, absolutely sling that on any of these marketplaces that exist for that sort of stuff. Then you layer in paid ads. Etsy has their own advertising product. Like, there's stuff you can do to kind of scale that up. I'm interested in that space of like, you could pick any niche how to bake the perfect muffin, right. Or like there's so many little things like that that like, sure, you're not going to go launch a $2,500 course on that, but do I think you could get 3,000 moms in middle America to like buy your notion template for 30 bucks and go make 100 grand? I do.

100% at that price point. 30 to $50 is it? If you had to rely on paid ads, is that expensive enough to make a profit or do you need a higher ticket offer down the funnel?

I understand exactly what you're saying. It's going to be so case by case, right? Like you might be able to in, in a. The fitness niche, you might be able to charge more, but your, your CO or your CAC will be higher cost of acquisition. Dude, there's a billion niches for this. Like, you could create a daily prayer book, right, where it's like, yep, there's 365 prayer slash journal prompts in this thing. And it's meant for high school seniors. Right? Like you can niche down into it and it's like you just have to do Snapchat ads. Yeah. You know what I'm saying? There's so many channels. It's like the thing that I like about digital products, especially for people that are like stepping into entrepreneurship and are specifically interested in like online digital Internet stuff, the weight on inventory, fulfillment, servicing, stuff like all of that, it just disappears. And I think that it forces people like the exercise of launching a or multiple digital products and trying to find channels that are profitable and work. Like, I think if someone spent six months doing that, testing different niches, different products, different positionings, I think what they would learn in that six months about advertising, how customers think, niche selection, product positioning. I just think that there's so much that can be derived out of that experience. Not to mention like, again, you could spend. It's like we talk about the signatures. It's like even if you're selling a product for 30 bucks and you can reliably acquire a customer for $20 digital product, you can go and spend $2,000 a day on ads, which sounds like a lot to some people, but you're not going to jump into doing that. But like you spend $2,000 and you earn $3,000. If you do that every single day, you just made $30,000 that month, which is like simplifying it. But like at the end of the day it's like if you can find a product that has a big enough market. And the nice thing with digital products is like you can manipulate your offer by typing different words, right? Like you can change a daily journal from being a mom's daily journal to a high school Daily Journal in five clicks. Like, not even to mention bringing AI into the equity. You can go make 15 digital products tonight. Please create an ebook about A, B, C and D and go test this stuff. And so I think that that's like, it's the lesson.

I think people do this all the time with drop shipping products. They'll spend six to 12 months sourcing these random things from China, like your bears, right? And the testing, sourcing. All right, I broke even, I lost money, I made a little money. And then they find a winner and then they go all in, which is great, but why not do the exact same thing for a digital product? And then you don't have any of that fulfillment risk or headache. Even if you're drop shipping, you're technically not fulfilling it. You got to wait two weeks, you're going to have refund issues. Stripe is going to cancel you. It is a grind. You got to develop the Shopify site. So I like that framework. I especially, I know you've seen this. So I won't even ask if you have those ads. They're all copying each other. They have the same copy and it's like, it's not cheap. It's not cheap because. Have you seen that?

Yeah, I've seen them.

Dude, I'm going to read one. I got it pulled up right here. It's not cheap. It's true. Some full size fridges cost less than this mini fridge. Yes, we could have made it cheaper, but then it'd be cheap. It wouldn't sound silent in your living room. It wouldn't be made with steel that's three times thicker. It wouldn't double as a bar cart. It wouldn't come with a 10 year warranty, yada, yada yada. It wouldn't have a 4.95 rating, have won GQ's home awards, yada. It looked cheap, it'd feel cheap, it'd work cheap. And cheap sucks. Like those ads kill it.

So right, right and so good.

Why not do the Same thing for a digital product. So back to the mom's idea. I was just emailing with a woman who I might have her on the pod. She makes 650 grand a year consulting new moms on sleep schedules. It's. She's like a sleep consultant for new moms and getting their babies to sleep through the night.

I've had three or four friends pay people for that. Yeah, good offer.

And so instead of selling a product that solves the same thing, make it a tenth of the price, which is still $300 instead of 3,000. And that's your ad copy. It's like, it's not cheap. That's $300 for a PDF. Yeah, we own that. But how expensive is your sleep or your sanity or your mental clarity or your mental health? And just going, it's like, wait, yeah, what? I'm supposed to be sleeping a third of my day. I'm only sleeping a tenth of my day because of this baby. I need to get the baby. Of course, $300 is worth it. So just take the same strategy with physical products and make your digital $30 product 10 times more expensive.

I'm not mad.

Why not?

Yeah, I think that attracts like. And the nice part is with that model, you can just test all of it. Right. Like, go build two landing pages, one with it priced at 79, one that it's priced at 300. Run the ads, see which one is profitable, see what your CAC is like. Play the exact same game.

You don't even need to. You can just use like, most people don't use Shopify for digital sales, but you can. You certainly can. And Shopify has apps that enable you to a B, test prices.

Right.

That way you don't need multiple landing pages.

Right? Right. I think it's the probably the least amount of friction to start that business. Like, you are not relying on booking calls, you're not relying on inventory, you're not relying on a team. Right. Like, it is you and a PDF and you are just trying to sell that PDF and like, long tail, like, short term, you're learning, you're testing, you're making some cash. Long tail, the goal really would be like, don't always just try to sell something that will sell, but like selling niches that you have some expertise or interest in. Because if you can get people, if you can get 3,000 moms to buy a guide about X, Y or Z, you now have 300 moms that are customers of yours that you can also sell other things. And so it's like step into whatever niche you're looking to step into and be like, hey, I'm really interested in helping roofers do whatever. Cool. Go sell a digital product to roofers and just try to break even top of funnel. And then you can go and sell them services or you can go and build the software for them or you can go and do kind of whatever and. And it's like it's the V1 of like what clickfunnels did. Right. Like Russell Brunson basically was like, we're gonna run this digital product called.com Secrets as a book that you can buy if you want to make more money on the Internet, you buy.com secrets. And then on the back end of that was, I mean they have a slew of digital products that are higher ticket but also their software. The number one thing that entrepreneurs like that are starting out have to prove to themselves is that they can acquire customers. That's it. If you can get leads and get sales, I would say it's the 80 20. Right. If you can't get leads, the business dies. So prove that you can do that. Learn how to do that. Like how? It's like what we're doing with unlimited, like we're proving that I can book 20 calls a week with Facebook ads. Sick. Like it makes the rest of the business 10 times easier because there's top of funnel revenue like growing like the rest of it solves itself because of that.

Yeah. All right.

I just got an idea as you were talking. So have you heard of Delphi? Delphi AI?

I don't think so.

There's a few companies doing this. They basically enable you to clone yourself. It's like an LLM. It's kind of pointed more towards people making content on the Internet as opposed to non content creators. Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I tested this like nine months ago. I had like an account manager. I was a beta user. I was not impressed. It was very manual. I send them my Google Drive links, YouTube videos and it just wasn't great. But I think it's gotten a ton better and it's only going to get better for sure. And so I want to use it eventually to upload all my stuff. And then maybe you could have me as a business partner for 20 bucks a month, you know, as opposed to having to give an actual business partner equity. And you could just chat with me whenever you want.

Right.

What tool would you use if I did this? What tool would use if I did that? How should I structure my Partnership with this real business partner. And you'll just pull on everything I've said about business partnerships or anything. Right? So that's cool. But why not be like an agent, like a talent agent, by finding people that will never hear about Delphi for years or anything like Delphi, maybe they're creating a lot of content and doing it all for them. And really you're just, like, uploading all their content and, like, prompt engineering a little bit and, like, packaging it nicely and pricing it and then taking like a 30% cut of their lifetime earnings.

Like, yeah, Yeah.

I was looking at the top 1,000 school groups, and we had a podcast about Nick and I a few weeks ago. And, like, the 13th most profitable school group, SK O L. It was like 80 grand a month. Some jazz guitarist in Spain named Mark Andre who teaches jazz guitar, and it's like, he's on. He's got YouTube. He has a course. You could do that. I call this the ethical bait and switch, where you reach out to him and you're like, hey, I put an LLM together of all of your content. So I cloned you.

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Hey, by the way, I cloned you. Would you like to see your clone?

Yeah.

And then once they respond, you're like, oh, shoot, I better clone them.

Yeah, you go. You make a clone.

Because you know only 5% of people will respond, right? So then you clone them. And then it's like, here's the pitch. You're going to give me your course. I'll buy your course, Give it to me for free, whatever. I'll go to all your publicly facing YouTube channels. I'll take all of your content you've ever made, ever. Stuff in your Google Drive that you never shared. I'll prompt in here. I'll make sure that, like it.

You don't sound like an idiot when.

People ask you questions. And then we're going to charge 20 bucks. A month to it. You're going to pitch it to your followers. I'm going to take 30% and I'll run the whole business.

What do you think? Oh, in love with it? Own a domain that I had a very similar concept for two years ago. Try signal.com dude, cut through the noise. Shiny object. That was never pursued. We tried it like the whole basis of it. I did this thing with Connor Abney a while ago that was basically like texting as a service I built. I did a live chat of that. Right. Like Casey, where I built this thing, but there was a real person on the back of it and AI now makes that 10 times more possible. Where it's like there's so many of those tools that are like, like Intro. Intro is like that. Or Mentor Pass, right? Where it's like you can sign up and get direct access to one of these thought leaders, experts, CEOs, whatever, to get their insights. The challenge with that, as somebody, I like know a bunch of guys that are on Intro as experts or on Mentor Pass. They don't have the time. And so it's like, yeah, that's a good offer. You come in and say, look, I'm going to grab all of your content and turn you into a model that allows for you to support people at scale. And we can drop the price because of it. Instead of you charging 500 bucks for a 30 minute call, you can charge 20 bucks a month for people to be able to just message with you. That's not really you. It's again it's 80, 20. It's like they'll get the majority of the value out of that experience with an AI version of you. Yeah, they might not get some of the details, but they're also paying 5% of what it would cost. And so I think it's like, I think it's a good model one as a, as an operator to go and do that. I also think it gets fun on like, on a humanity level. I think it like content already allows for shared learning to happen a lot faster. As a community of entrepreneurs, we are learning 10 times faster because everyone sharing content about what they're learning and so I can learn from your mistakes so that I don't make them. And that's awesome. It's moving entrepreneurship forward as a societal thing. But I think doing this where it's like taking content, it's just creating a bridge between the content that exists and helping people apply it to very specific problems that they have. Right. Like, oh, I know Chris has talked about this on the pod, but, like, I don't know what episode. And, like.

And I need 20 bucks myself.

Right, Right. Same where I'm like, I don't want to go, like, love you to death. You're my dog. The only episodes that I watch fully are the ones that I'm on. Right. And I'm like, I want to know what you and Nick are talking about and how it can help me on X, Y, and Z. The challenge is there's just 15 of my friends that have podcasts like that, and I don't have that much time.

And I'm like, number 13 on the priority scale.

Right.

I get it.

Look, it is what it is. No, you're moving up the ranks, dude.

Okay, cool.

But, yeah, and so I do think. I think that there is a place for that in the content consulting, like, space. Like, I think that is cool. And someone's gonna do it. They obviously are.

Yeah. I want every listener every time we talk about, like, content or making content or, like, all of these principles can be applied by working with or through a content creator, because 90 plus percent of people will never create content, which is fine. But 100% of people has the opportunity wide open to them to partner with someone that's doing it to leverage their.

Distribution, their audience, literally.

Here's another idea. This could be like an upsell, or it could be the same product. So you partner with Mark Andre to sell jazz guitar coaching, and it doesn't even replace the course. It doesn't cannibalize it. It's just different. And then the upsell is an accountability partner for Mark Andre. And I think this needs to be done via text message, via iMess, SMS, specifically for I. Because if it's a standalone app, it's like, that's hard. It's hard to get. How many messaging apps do we have? Too many.

Right?

Too many.

But if it's just. If it's just a number, it's like Chris Kerner's cell phone number. We're just texting.

We're.

Hey, man, I'm running this Facebook ads campaign. My CPM is this. Is this good for this industry? What would I say to that?

Right?

Yep.

And it could also be an accountability. But, hey, have you built your MVP yet? Hey, have you gotten your first customer today yet? Hey, Mixing in personal stories, dude, where's your bias for action? Because when I did this, I launched it in three hours, and I have. You know what I'm saying? Like, oh, gosh.

It's like, yeah, it's like dude, you've been trying to.

It's like it's like three weeks.

Like what are we doing?

Right?

Yeah.

If AI girlfriends are bringing up or blowing up, then why not AI business partners?

Yeah.

AI mentors.

No, I'm trust, I'm on the same wave. We've done it. We've proven that offer works with a non AI person. Right. Like we've put. I did it back when I was working at work week because they have all their creators, right. And so we built this system that basically would allow for people to sign up for SMS based cohorts with these experts. Right. And so it's like a little bit more structured than just like an available chatbot, right? Because we tried that and the challenge was retention or like you not even retention usage was weird because you weren't prompting anything, right. Versus saying hey, in the next month of your access to this, we're going to share A, B, C and D every other day. And then you have the opportunity to talk to the creator directly. And we just, I mean dude, the MVP was so simple. It was like a landing page with a stripe checkout. Once they paid, they gave us their phone number and we added them to open phone and we just ran the whole thing out of openfoam. I would have used, I would have used send Blue which is an awesome shout, shout out to the boys over there. I think he might have sold that company. But it's an imessage API and so the messages come through blue and so your read rate goes up, your reply rate goes up. Like all of the things we did, one or two cohorts and maybe made 10 grand in the month of trying it on the back of one creator. Just like AI was not where it was two years ago when I did that.

Or how did it go though? Like how was the reception or the churn?

It was good.

Yeah. I mean because we, well we. So we only did it as a one time buy. We didn't do monthly recurring which I think is important for stuff like this. Like I've been thinking about it a lot on just pricing because like unlimited pricing, I'm just paying attention to like what pricing does to things and I think that for something like that, let's just say the goal is to sell it for 20 bucks a month. I think that you're better off just only offering annual pricing. Right? Where like dude, the, the big thing that I hate watching entrepreneurs deal with and we deal with it all the time. Like churn, like battling churn on specifically low ticket Consumer products like this. If this was 20 bucks a month, we deal with it on Creative OS like it's just an interesting one. And so if you're already going to put all this money and effort behind getting them to buy, I would recommend doing only an annual plan at 250 because it's not like your annual plan's three grand, it's like it's 250.

Yeah.

Get the support for a year from X, Y or z person for 299 or 249 or whatever that is. And I don't think you see like a crazy drop in conversion rate between 20 bucks a month versus 249 for the year. But then you don't have to battle churn as aggressively like emotionally, like yeah, you know what I mean?

I think it's especially important for something like this because if someone doesn't adapt in that first month to really chatting with their Gone. Yeah, they're totally gone.

And you have to just like on subscription people don't think about that stuff. They're like oh, just the MRI numbers going up and it's like bro, like I promise you, you should be paying attention to your 30 day cohort, 90 day cohort and like really locking in on the act like activation for this that first seven days. Like the amount of effort and energy and intentionality that you need to put into the activation of like how do you turn somebody that's not used to talking to an AI via SMS into somebody that does that regularly? How do you train them, teach them, help them learn how to extract that value? I mean even the one that you just sent with Delphi. Delphi, like when you open up one of the profiles it gives you a list of like here's 15 sample questions to ask. Click on one of them, right? Like that's an activation mechanism for them. Like how do we get them to start the conversation? You gotta give them ideas, right? Like and learn. I mean even chat GPT has those in there. Like you open a new chat and there's four options, right? And so understanding that on a low ticket consumer product like that getting your product so ingrained in their normal behavior is almost more challenging than acquiring them at the top. Like finding the user is not the hard part. I put that tweet out yesterday. Like the two growth levers for early stage businesses are not necessarily like your CAC and cpa. Like it's your retention and referral. Like it's so product led. Especially when you have recurring services because you are trying to Keep them around. You're selling a one time product. It's a cactus AOV game like, but on recurring, you have to market. Even on websites, you have to market and sell the entire time. Like you don't stop selling and marketing your product when somebody signs up. Yeah, you have to keep reminding them of the value and keep providing the value and keep helping them extract the value. If you're trying to build something that's like sustainable longer term, or you should just go sell a course that you just sell at three grand and like get your cash out.

The best way to learn how to do all these things is to go sign up for something like Zapier or pipedrive or like a software that's growing so fast and just look at their funnel. What are they doing, what are they hitting you with and when? What type of messaging and why? It's like the, it's like the Facebook rule.

Zapiers is perfect, bro.

Yeah.

The Sooner you add 10 friends on Facebook, the less likely you are to turn. It's the same.

And that is the definition of activation. That was their metric. What does activation mean? Like on this it would be, you just recognize the pattern where it's like, all right, they sign up. If people that Send more than 10 messages to the bot in the first 48 hours are x percentage more likely to pay for the second month. Okay, cool. How do we incentivize them to send those 10 messages in a way that makes sense? Right? Like you have to just force the function.

I think the genius of this idea is it makes activation even easier because of the fact that it's a two way conversation. If I sign up for Zapier and I start getting five spam emails for them a day. Have you tried this Zap? Have you tried this? Have you tried our webhooks? Have you tried this Tables? It's like, dude, I'm done. But if I sign up for a service that is designed to message to and from me, then it's not going to be intrusive. If I get a text saying, hey, why don't you start a stump grinding business today? Here's how I would do it. Just like planting ideas. Like, man, this guy's actually giving me a lot of value. Huh? Okay, it's a chat, it's not a spam email, right?

Yeah. Especially if you can get the context and like, yeah, all of that. I think it's interesting and it's not technically the most challenging to build. You could build that entire thing off Zapier and Like an afternoon if you want to. And you're listening to this, go to Twitter advanced search and just type in hey casey.com and you'll see my entire thread on how to build this exact thing. Just plug into AI with zap. That's it. You're good.

It's like a lot of these creators like Mr. Beast, they're tackling the hardest industries, right? Consumer packaged goods, chocolate bars, lunchables. Like, if Mr. Beast had some sort of a software product, I feel like that's where creators are going to have to head to actually make money is having a SaaS product. This could be it. Personalize to each of them. You know, if you're a beauty influencer, then beauty tips, right? Upload a picture, you know, use copy ui. Upload a selfie every morning and be like, all right, what shade of makeup should I put on today?

Here's my outfit. What should I do with my eyeliner? Eyeshadow?

That's because I think we're moving away from what looks cool to what is my favorite creator think I should do? Or what would they wear today? Or what would they look like today? You know?

Yeah, I'm not mad about it. It's testable for sure. Yeah, you could test. I'm going to do this without building it. You know what I mean? Like, just build an LP with an email for a wait list and be like, I'm launching this. Have a direct conversation with me whenever you want via imessage. Sign up for the wait list instead of asking for their email. Get their phone number, duh, right? And then just plop them into a conversation with you. Yo, what's up? I'm Chris. And just see what happens.

Oh, man.

And then the upsells after that are endless.

Well, you also just have a direct communication channel, right? Everyone's sitting here being like, yo, you have to have a newsletter because what if the algo changes? I'm like, I don't want to run a newsletter. I just want everyone's phone number. I want to text you. Like, yeah, you know, it's like I forget the stats.

The next frontier, dude, I'm on open rate.

Yeah, I'm 20 SMS for sure. Especially with stuff like Send Blue. Like the iMessage API is a hack because you're not. The issue with SMS is really like the character limits, right? It's like it gets. I forget the number, but it's like 20 times as expensive to send SMS as it is email, right? Email is so cheap. You can go have 10,000 contacts on ConvertKit or Beehive or whatever for like a hundred bucks. But like when Twilio is charging you 0 oh, 4 cents in SMS into your list of 10,000 people, it's going to cost you 40 bucks or 400 bucks or whatever the math is. And so it's like you'd go to an imessage API where it's not SMS based. You don't have the character limits, you don't have the MMS triple credit stuff. And so like, I think that's a bigger unlock than people think. Just because you could send me an 1800 word text via iMessage, that doesn't count as 10 credits and cost you 40 cents to actually send to me. You know what I mean?

Yeah, yeah.

It's an interesting.

Cool.

If you could.

Yeah. If, like, let's say in my example I would upload a clone of me and then as like a bonus or maybe even included free. It's like all of Gary Vee's content or something. You'd have trademark issues and all that, but all of whatever, XYZ business content, that's like a thousand times more content than what I'm providing. And you could have a little toggle if it was in an app. In the app. Or you could just preface a text message with a symbol or something. All right, do I want to ask Chris or do I want to ask business database?

You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Because it's like, okay, that's what Chris thinks. What does this guy think? Or what does the general public think? Or what is like the entrepreneurship subreddit think? Not that they're going to let you scrape their whole subreddit, but you get what I'm saying, right?

Yeah. They'll let us. Yeah.

As if I asked permission.

Right. I'm saying. I don't know. That's so funny. Well, I like that.

All right, so that's two ideas.

I think there's a lot of places you go with both of those. Right. Like use it as the seed and go play. Like, I think it's pretty dope.

All right, what else you got for me? You got anything good?

There's like a broad stroke concept that I'm really interested in. Everyone's pretty familiar with the decoupling of Craigslist, right? Have you seen that graphic where it's like Craigslist broken out, Unbundling. Yeah, whatever. So it's like home sharing or renting turned into Airbnb and this turned into.

That ride sharing and.

Yeah, yeah, right. All of it and so it's like Craigslist was the og. All of these products came out of that. And so what I started to think about was like what are, what's today's Craigslist, right? Like what are businesses that are just so big that like could be unbundled to some degree? And I think it's data. Like I think hyper specific data products for two reasons. They function similar to like similarly to the digital ones, right? Like hey, this is low cogs for you to run. There's so many no code tools that are literally designed for database as a service. Companies like Adalo, Airtable, you do it in a bubble. Airtable, like Creative OS is a version of that, right? Where it's like we're software but it's a data company. We just. Our data asset is creative templates that are high performing for Facebook ads. And so like the infrastructure for that technically speaking is not super challenging. It's just how do you display, organize and allow for people to discover the data. And then I look at companies like Zoom Info or Apollo or whatever, right? Or like get cyber leads. There's these companies that like have all of these massive lead lists that have basically just scraped, scraped all of LinkedIn and the value prop that they're coming to you with, Crunch base or whatever, right? All of that. And so they come in and they say our value prop is twofold but they really focus on the quantity of the data. Like if you go read these guys websites they're like we have 10 plus million contacts, we have a hundred million contacts, we have 30 million contacts.

It means it all sucks, right? Right?

And I'm like, but all dude, these companies just keep paying because they can get the data out of those 30 million contacts that they're looking for. Those products are also generally speaking a little bit more expensive. Zoom Info specifically serves a much more enterprise like B2B World. But like we want that. Same with Built with is another one dude. Like built. The number of times people hit me up saying yo, can I borrow your built with account to grab one list? I just need one list. I don't want to pay $400 a month to get this one.

Do you have a paid account?

No, not anymore. Yeah, and then I paid for it and then everyone else, what do you think their churn? Dude, I'm sure their churn is probably stupid. But also they're like serving a totally different customer, right? But it's like okay, what happens if I say I have a bunch of relationships in the E Commerce Agency Space and all these guys want more leads. Okay, I'm gonna go on Upwork and I'm gonna ask somebody to go scrape me the contact info of the top three decision makers on every single Shopify plus store, right? Shopify plus, they're $2,000 or more. Get that list. Put that list into Adalo Bubble, Webflow, Airtable, one of these glide apps, right? Like one of these kind of data visualization tools that like makes it easier. And then just put a paywall on that, right? Where it's like, hey, for two, nine nine a year you can get access to every single top performing E Comm brands decision makers, right? And you just put a comparison like against Apollo directly of like you're either going to pay them fifteen hundred dollars a year for messy data that's hard to get to who you're looking for. We have a very specific list of these people that you can now get access to for a third of the price on an annual basis. Again, I would do annual pricing on that, not monthly, right? And then you go, okay, here's our tool. And then it's really like from a, from an operator perspective, you only are really trying to do two things, which is one, maintain data quality. That's your product, is the data itself. Because the actual software part of that is managed by a no code tool. You don't need to go make updates. You don't have to add functionality that. It's not your business. Your data business. Maintain good business on or maintain good data and market it. That's it. And like data, as much as Apollo or ZoomInfo or any of these people don't want you to believe, like data is so commoditized, like you just pop on upwork. And I promise for like $200 you could get the data list of really anything, millions, like literally whatever. You could be like, I want every single roofing business in, in Texas. And like, yep, I'd be like, all right, go to D7Lead Finder.com and get it for 100 bucks, bro. Like it's not hard to get. And so it's just putting a wrapper around it. And I think that there's opportunities for very niche specific database businesses to grow again. Like, are they going to go compete with Zoom Info from a billion dollar valuation perspective? No. Do I think you could go make half a million dollars a year on it? Yeah.

All right. I just got an idea that gave me an idea, a more specific idea with your framework. So cyber leads, they charge 200 bucks a month and what's special about them is they're companies that recently raised money.

Yes.

Really? Tech companies that recently raised money. And Nick and I talked this on about this on Holdco Bros. Of like, find a service that you can sell to those companies because they're just so.

Eager to spend money, ready to go, that just raised.

Yeah, which is why cyber leads works. Okay.

Right.

So what about cyber leads for home service business owner cell phone numbers.

Hi, sorry.

High ticket home service, American business owner cell phone names and numbers. Okay, so you scrape all the roofers, scrub out all the landlines.

Okay?

Yep.

Scrape out all the septic companies, anything that costs thousands of dollars. Fencing companies, painting companies, contractors, whatever. You only want the business owner cell phone numbers. Every week you get a new CSV in your inbox. Fresh leads. And it's for agency owners, because as an agency owner, you don't freaking care if they're in Portland or Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon. It doesn't matter.

Right?

But you want to talk to the owner. You want the decision maker.

What do you think?

Yeah. Where do I sign up? It's like, like, for real, though. Like, that's. It is like you are doing the data finding and cleaning on my behalf. And I should pay you to do that because it's valuable, right? It's like. And you, it's. It goes back to kind of the what we were talking about before we started recording. It's like you just built a better system that allows for you to go and do that better than I could do on my own. I don't want to pay you $5,000 a month for those leads, but I definitely will pay you $300 a month for those leads. Like, there's that middle ground. It's funny, it's like in the unlimited content manifesto that I was talking about, it's like, that's what it is. Like, people, I have this macro business thesis about where specifically the service and like tech bootstrap world ends up. And what I really think, it's like the old agency model is broken because of the commoditization of all of these tools. Right? Like you can go as a consumer or a business owner, go sign up for Semrush. You can go sign up for D7 lead finder. You can go. You can very easily go do all that. And the market is educated enough to know that they can. Right? Like I open up a Semrush dashboard to do a site audit for somebody. They've already seen it. They have a Semrush account, right? Like that the tools doesn't solve the problem. What is the 8020 of the lift? Right. And in your case, in that idea, it's the sourcing and cleaning of that data. Right. Your product is that you cleaned it and that they don't have to clean it themselves. It's done for them. Like we clean. You still have to call them. But we cleaned it. We did the hard part of it. And because we leveraged technology to do that, it didn't cost us that much to do. So we can pass those savings along to you while we still do it for you. And so it's like, again, affordable, transparent, done for you and effective. If those couple things can be achieved by a business, which they can now because tools exist and offshore labor makes things cheaper. And if you're just intentional around it, that's perfect. It's a perfect idea. And you could apply that to any industry.

Dude, I'm going to do this. I really like this, honestly.

You should do it.

Okay, thanks for listening to Sam and I riff on some business ideas. We'll have him on again soon and we will see you next time.