If People Pay for This, Your Idea Will Work Too

People will pay money for anything. Pride and ego prevents us from making more money. How many people would not do this because they don't want to look stupid or be embarrassed? It doesn't need to be a good idea. It just needs to get people talking. There's the financial modeling World cup, which is a real thing. And then there's Excel esports. They're selling general admission tickets for $30. They are getting thousands of signups. I think people would pay thousands for that experience. Honestly, he has a $7 million a year business repurposing their YouTube tutorials into physical magazine insert YouTube video URL, spit out magazine. What are wouldn't have worked for mine. All right, this is part two of my episode with Brandon Doyle. Go back a week ago today, listen to part one. You don't really need to listen to them in order. It's just a bunch of cool growth hack business ideas and you're going to love it. Please share with a friend and enjoy. So I'm on Instagram and I see this viral video of a horse that is like someone shaved these crazy intricate patterns into its hair, right? Like beautiful. It looks like a tattoo. Like huge, huge patterns. And then I learned that this video was promoting some like horse hair competition event in no Name City, like Clovis city, California with 7,000 people. Like, this is like not LA. This is like Central Valley, California where no one lives. They're selling general admission tickets for $30. They're selling, you know, you could admit your horse to be judged and graded for $110. You can have a booth, like a sponsored booth for $320. And they are getting thousands of signups for people to come bring their horse, their horses that have cool haircuts and then for other people to just come look at them.

Yeah, yeah. That's genius.

Well, it's a genius idea to make.

Money first of all also for whoever. If it's a barber that's putting this on, it's a great way for him to get lots of new clients for his barbershop as well as all the other barbers. Yeah, I thought that was an awesome idea. So then I was thinking, okay, what other industries could do this if you were a version of this? Because you can't always, I don't think you'll always be able to charge for the event, but it could be a cool event that's free, that's a fun competition. So I was thinking like, if you're a window cleaning company, just have the event be bring me the Dirtiest cars. The dirtiest cars, you can bring them in and I will speed clean it for free and you time me or whatever that's one. Another one would be you get accountants in a room and you bring a bunch of people that need their taxes done and you have a race to see who can get the taxes done the fastest and do that for free. But like, yep, there are ways that you can be creative and have fun events that get eyeballs and you get customers. And obviously this barber struck gold with his idea. I think there's a good saying that there's no such thing as a boring business. There's only boring content. So nobody has a boring business. You just gotta be creative with the content sometimes.

Well, dude, there's like at least two companies doing this with Excel. There's the Financial Modeling World cup which is a real thing. People live stream their screens crunching Excel numbers. And then there's, it's called Excel Esports, which is basically a direct competitor to the Financial Modeling World Cup. I'm sorry, but if people will pay money to compete in and watch that, they will pay money for anything. Okay. Anything that people are passionate about.

One of those has been on ESPN too. They've streamed like the championship on one of those. I saw it while scrolling. So yeah, yeah, it's crazy.

I mean like Microsoft notion Airtable, they sponsor these events. It costs up to a hundred dollars to compete in these events. Like why not like, like a vibe marketing or a vibe coding live streaming event or competition. It could be worldwide, it could be like Twitch. It could be like just picture this, you get a bunch of vibe marketers and you get them all in the same Google Meet. And one of the requirements is they have to share their screen. And you say, all right, the idea is a, an app that keeps track of your golf score and we will grade you on these five categories. Or maybe you say the actual idea after all this because people are going to get started early. Yeah, we're going to grade you on these five categories. User interface, user design, what does your database look like? Ease of use. And it's basically like first person to be to submit your successful like Apple App store application wins $5,000. Yeah, right. And then they just share their screens and then you have a commentator, someone who knows what they're talking about. Like okay, this guy, oh, look at him, he's moving these pixels around. Oh, he's going for replit. Oh my gosh, this guy's going for Windsurf. I didn't know Windsurf was good for Apple apps that would sell. I'm sorry, but like what are we doing? We need to do that.

You should do that. You know, you could do, you could crowdsource people from Twitter or whatever or just go to like, go to Lovable and Bull and Flutter Flow and Replay and be like, hey, I want you to send me one person that's going to use yours. And we're going to, we're going to showcase the top six in real time and let's see who wins and it'll be fun. You know, we're not going to talk bad about any of your platforms or whatever, but we'll have a live commentator like you were saying. But that'd be a really fun event.

Oh my gosh. I'm like, this is the look on my face when I'm like really thinking.

Deeply about something you should actually do.

I feel like you need to limit it to like 10 people because there's only so much you can look at on a screen, maybe even like nine people. So it's like a three by three grid on a computer screen, right?

Yeah, that would be good.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is, is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you. You probably want to have some sort of filtering mechanism. We don't need to find like the Nikita Beers of the world, but just like your average stay at home marketing bro vibe coder. Like I think it needs to be like a non coder, right?

Yeah, that would be best. Yeah. Someone that maybe knows a little, you know, a little bit of their way around. But yeah, a non coder would be. That'd be cool.

Yeah, I think Bolt is doing something like this, but it's in person. Have you heard about that?

Like a hack competition. I saw something that was a one on one a few weeks ago on Twitter.

I think I saw that.

You know, you could also do the, the like Paul Bunyan versus the chainsaw version. You could. The Paul Bunyan being an actual coder who's coding the whole time. Chainsaw version being replit or Flutter Flow or Bolt or whatever. And theoretically the second version is going to be faster for sure. You would assume, but maybe not if the other coder is like really good, but you could basically have an expert coder and then a novice replit user, one on one, who can do the golf score tracker app the fastest and the best. Because maybe, you know, with the expert coder you, you would think, oh, their database is going to look better and all that kind of stuff, but maybe the novice replit user will still get across the finish line way faster. And I don't know, but I think a version of that would be interesting too.

I'm just having a very hard time focusing right now. I just, I'm just thinking like, oh, like maybe you don't charge anyone anything to start, but maybe you charge like something very nominal to the nine coders just so they feel more invested and they're actually gonna take it seriously. Like 20, 30, 40 bucks. Right? As like an entry fee. Okay. You're not trying to make money on this. And then do you think you charge spectators or not? You just make that free.

You can almost do the reverse. You could do the AOL strategy. You could say, anyone who comes gets this many tokens for free to our X, whatever you are.

Yeah, I like the idea of doing it with like a sponsorship from replit or something, but that's just another level of friction to prevent anyone from launching it, myself included. Then you gotta find someone. You gotta. So like, if you're just gonna. If you wanna make some money doing this without having to talk to any decision makers, you could do this. It's like $5 to spectate. And the coders, the five marketers, they pay $20 as an entry fee. Only nine people, and you pay $5 to watch. And then the winner gets like half of the pot, like half of the door fees. That kind of incentivizes the entrance, the competitors to invite their friends and family to come watch because if they win, they get a bigger share of the pie. But you could also do it where it's like, it is a 60 minute clock. All right? And whoever gets the furthest wins. And so it's graded based on predetermined categories based on how it looks after an hour, whether it's done or not.

Yeah, that'd be awesome.

And so one person might have beautiful design, but it's just not functional. Or vice versa. But they're all graded the same. Yeah, I want to do this very.

Different version of this, but the same business model was a very small business that I had in high school, which was based off of the short story of Most Dangerous Game. I don't know if you ever read.

That, but that sounds familiar.

We had to read it in R. It was mandatory reading, but it was a. It was short. So I read it. I didn't use the Cliff Notes on this one. Is a story about like a guy hunts a human. A human on an island. Anyway, after we read it, we all became obsessed. So I would organize Most Dangerous game competitions where everyone would have to pay 20 bucks towards the pot. And what it was was you would know the end location of the race before the event started. You wouldn't know the start location though. So then all the racers would be taken to the start location on the day of. It'd be in the evening. And there were also shooters who would shoot you with a paintball gun who also had to pay the entrance fee of 20 bucks each. And whoever the first racer is to get to the end without getting hit gets half the pot. The shooters get the pot of each person they hit and then I would just take the difference.

So anyway, interesting. That reminds me of an idea I had like 10 years ago. If you ever heard of Diet Bet, dietbet.com set up or join a weight loss challenge. This website gets 5,000 visitors a month. I think it used to be a lot bigger, but I had the idea of Survival bet dot com. Okay. Because like any, any dude out there is like in our primal core. We want to know potential. What's that?

This is potentially morbid.

Yeah, potentially.

Yeah.

No, it's like, it's, it's more of like who can survive or thrive the best out in the wilderness for a week or whatever. And of course you've got to sign waivers at the yin yang. You don't want people to sue you if someone gets sick. But it's kind of like the show alone. Have you ever seen Alone such a good show.

Yeah. Crazy.

But it's just for like the everyday man. And it's going to cost like $3,000 to do it.

Yeah.

And you just need someone that can rent or borrow or steal or own 50 to 500 acres of land anywhere. And you maybe they go through like a 24 hour crash course of training, how to start fires, yada. And everyone gets the same level of training and then they go out there and survive and based on like predetermined things.

Yeah.

Who wins? And maybe you share the prize pot with everyone. But like my dad went to a survival school in southern Utah when he was like early 20s and they don't have it anymore. And how long? I think they. Oh, like a month. I think it was like 30 days. He spent like a Week training. But then he was all by himself for 30 days like in the desert trying to survive. And his dad did it. And they said it was like a life changing experience, like a pivotal moment in their lives. And I just think that like first principles, that taps into something that we all want to know. Like, how could I do, like, what would it be like to not have a phone for a month or a week or three days? In this case, I think someone could do really, really well. It's kind of like a tough mudder on steroids. You know, it's a lot of money, it's kind of elite, but it's hard. It's like plays into the do hard things trend, the David Goggins cultures of the world.

But as an eagle Scout myself, the wilderness survival merit badge was one of my favorite merit badges that I had to get, which you had to last for 24 hours just off of what you could make. And you had to, you know, make your own little shelter, your own fire and stuff. So I think that's innate in lots of people, especially men, would be very intrigued by this idea.

I think people would pay thousands for that experience.

Yeah, honestly. Well, people pay thousands to get beat up and reamed by Marines. So.

I know, don't get me started.

Yeah. On the vibe marketing front, I do think that that is something that a lot of small businesses, home service companies could and should definitely do. AKA give people a peek behind the curtains of your business. Show behind the scenes content. If you're a lawyer and you have a tough case, you know, bleep out the names of the case when you're talking about it, but show you talking to your other lawyers or paralegals or whatever about like a heated conversation about the stance that you think you should take or whatever. That'd be super interesting. Content or I know if you're an accountant and you just, you're running the numbers and you found a really big unlock for one of your clients where they can take advantage of, you know, some thing to offset their taxes. Start record and record your screen and talk through like this is a common thing that people miss. But I just found it. Here's what I would recommend if I were you. You know, if you have a home based business, this is what a lot of people forget or I don't know, I mean you can always think of interesting stuff and just do that and show it off. Don't always just show like before and after. Before and after. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I have like conversations with business owners all the Time. And they tell me these crazy stories and I'm like, that could go viral. Like just you telling that story into the camera, that could go viral. Like, it's just people, you know, not everyone has to post content. But yeah, if crazy things are happening, then tell the Internet about it.

Yeah.

I got a random off the wall idea for you.

Okay.

I was not trying to flex, but I was recently featured in the Alabama Alumni Magazine. Tens of people read this. Tens of people. Okay. But something very interesting happened. I got an email from a company a few days after it was published. And it's a physical magazine only. And this company is called thatsgreatnews.com okay. And this email, it looked personalized at first, but then it was clear it wasn't. If you go to thatsgreatnews.com it's very clear what they do. They've got a decent landing page. Cause I can see what they do. They do. They were like, chris, congratulations. You were just featured by the Alabama Alumni Magazine. We would love to send you a plaque like, with like, featuring a page from this with like plexiglass over it and yada, yada, yada. At first I thought, oh, this is cool. Like, this is just a gift from the University of Alabama to say thanks for taking the time to be in our magazine or whatever. And then I'm like, no, no, this is really good marketing. And then I saw on the fine print of the email, it's like, we are not associated with the University of Alabama in any way. And I'm like, okay, yeah, yeah. It's just, they just have a feeler out there. And like, I literally don't think that article is anywhere on the Internet. But this company must subscribe maybe to all the university alumni magazines, and someone literally goes through and reads them. Chris Kerner, Google's My name, finds my email, emails me. They must be doing all that work because they have a high close rate, right?

Yeah, I mean, I, I would bet that their close rates like 50%. Who wouldn't want to commemorate this thing where they were just happily featured in with the thing that, you know, might cost you 40 bucks or whatever, because I'm sure they're charging for it. Yeah, but. But yeah, I mean, everybody likes. Especially if, you know, it's like an alumni magazine. Everyone's, you know, most people are pretty proud of where they went to college. So yeah, that's a super smart idea.

I did a little digging into this company and they've been around for a while and they seem to have a pretty big presence. Like, think of all the random magazines out there or newspapers that we don't even know exist. Right?

Yeah.

This company, they have had a website since 2003. Like that sounds like a moat to me. That sounds like they're crushing it. I had Al Doan on my podcast a week or so ago, and he has a $7 million a year business repurposing their YouTube tutorials into physical magazine.

Yeah.

Magazine.

That's crazy.

The magazine. Did you hear that?

Yeah, yeah.

The magazine cost them 80 cents.

Yeah.

And they charge like $7 every two months for it. And he didn't think it would be anything. And it's a seven figure profit business.

So people are paying. Why is it to hear him again or to read him?

Yeah. Okay, first of all, so video is cool, but you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast. And my newsletter, tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week. Very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. Three episodes a week. Stuff like this. You're gonna love it. All free. No sleazy sales pitch. Tkopod.com Someone could do that business as a service for any YouTube channel. It. I don't think it would work for mine, actually. It could work for mine. Like, why wouldn't it work for mine? Like business ideas in a magazine, you know?

Yeah. But especially longer form people that do longer form or tutorials. Like, why not?

Yeah. And like, the more AI takes over, the more we're online, the more we want a physical magazine. Like, I subscribe to Texas Monthly and D magazine. I don't read them often, but I pay for them. They're sitting three feet away from me. It's just cool to sit down on a Sunday afternoon and read a magazine.

So there's a guy on Twitter, I don't know how to pronounce his last name, but his first name, The Epic gardening guy. What's.

Yeah, Kevin Espirit. Kevin.

Kevin. I'm just thinking, like, he and they, his team make really high quality content. They. Someone should totally approach him and say, hey, I'll do it. It'll be a magazine. It'll be like the home and garden magazine, but just you to your customers. Oh, you know, maybe it's once a quarter because maybe there's not enough for monthly versions or whatever.

Yep.

And you know, you'll send 12 bucks a quarter and your cost is only gonna be two bucks to me.

We do ask that you promote it according to this schedule. Maybe one email per week, one mid roll ad per week. But all we take is 20% off the top line and you plug into existing audiences. I don't think there's any niche off limits for this gaming entertainment. Like I think certain niches would have much higher opt in rates than others. Right. Like I don't know how many like Mr. Beast recap magazines are going to be sold on a percentage basis. Right, Right.

But yeah, I think this has 4.

Million YouTube subscribers on one of their several channels.

Yes. Yeah. I guarantee you a lot of those people would love. And they have 2 million on Instagram. Those are the only ones I'm going to check right now. A lot of those people would love a quarterly magazine from that brand and.

He could incorporate it into his videos. He's like, yeah, on this, not even as an ad but like in this session you we put an exclusive thing in here, yada yada yada. And it's like oh wow. Without having to waste like a mid roll ad spot, he could incorporate it into his current videos. I think someone should do this. That's great news idea for like any online article. Like who's stopping? Like say you're Featured in Tech TechCrunch. Right. Why couldn't you print out that article and get it on a physical plaque and mail to you? Why wouldn't you want that? Yeah, that'd be dude with for either idea for the that's great news or for the magazine thing. Yeah, that could be an app that you build in replit. It could just be a prompt.

Yeah, true.

Insert YouTube video URL spit out magazine.

Yeah.

What are we doing?

Okay, here's one more idea.

Let's do it.

This is for Nathan. For you fans. Nathan Fielder. He always did. He did four seasons of that show. Crazy marketing ideas. Basically every episode was a marketing class. Always tout his degree from some online business college in Canada. Start of each episode. But they're all funny if you haven't watched them. That's a plug for the listeners anyway. So like if you're a realtor, make it your pitch on every, every single Instagram video that you post or TikTok or YouTube or whatever. Make sure everyone knows that you certified there are zero ghosts in that home. You already exercise them or whatever and have the ghost free guarantee with a little badge you're gonna go viral in your little local market for that and get some PR and it would just be funny. And guess who's going to stand out from all the other realtors in your area. It's going to be you because everybody else is the same exact thing. So, like, how can you do something weird and funny? That's obviously tongue in cheek, but yes, can get eyeballs.

Like, dude, yeah, here's a thought. The framework that comes to me is like, how much pride and ego prevents us from making more money. Like, how many people would not do this because they don't want to look stupid or be embarrassed because everyone's going to think I'm an idiot. They're going to talk about me. You want people to talk about you? The people that matter, the people that know that it's a brilliant marketing stunt will see you as brilliant.

Yeah.

Here's a stat for you. 45% of people believe in ghosts. 45%. There's your market.

Hey, I believe in them. So I would like to know if the house I was buying didn't have them.

So. Yeah, that would be nice.

At least not the bad ones.

Yeah, I think there's something to that. You could. It could be like a certifying body, right? Yeah, we're like for 10 bucks, 20 bucks, whatever. You get like a stamp or a digital stamp or a seal of approval or something.

Yeah. That's not like do a TikTok dance in front of the camera. It's just. You're just saying, hey, it's Ghost Free guarantee. That's slogan.

Oh, you don't have the gfg. I'm sorry, what was that? And you could even do like a bottoms up approach where you do like some grassroots campaign to have like the home shoppers ask the realtors. It's. Do you remember, was it. I don't remember. One of the, like the 90s Jean brands. That's how they grew like crazy. Jordache. Jordache G O R D I C H E Remember them? They just asked all their friends and family to call up all the JC Penney's every day and say, do you have Jordache? Do you care Jordache? Do you care Jordache? And then after a month of that, they pitch J.C. penney like, oh my gosh, everyone's asking about you.

That's very.

That's the thing. It's bottoms up, right. You can even say, facebook, show me all the people that are home shopping right now. And then you could pitch the GFG guarantee to them. So they could and like do it on a very confined radius, like one city only, but like high ad spend for that one city where they're getting beat up all the time. And then the Realtors will naturally see it as well, because they're probably going to fall into the algorithm.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh, my brain's exploding.

Yeah. Yeah. That's awesome.

I do like Nathan Filter's idea to have poop flavored frozen yogurt.

Oh, my gosh.

Like some sort of crazy frozen yogurt flavor just to get people in the door and talking about it.

The funny thing is, all of. Almost all of his things actually worked. Like, do you remember the pizza one where it was like, if it's not there within 10 minutes, you get a free one and they always just showed up with the small free one? Yeah, yeah.

It was like a Totino's pizza roll. It gets people talking. It's interesting. Like, it doesn't need to be a good idea. It just. To get people talking.

Yeah. Yeah. So funny.

All right, Brandon.

Okay, well, thanks.

All right, what you think? Lots of ideas. Go out and start something. Share this with a friend. Leave me a five star review, and I really appreciate you.