Oops! I Started 15 More Businesses. Episode 4/4 of "Every Business I've Every Started" Ep. #88

Welcome to the Kerner Office. It is 8:47pm on election night and I'm here to do business. It's what I love. This is part four of my four part series called Every Business I've Ever Started. I've said this many times. I've started 70, 75 somewhere in their businesses and I want to talk about all of them because I find it interesting and I hope you do too. So this is business number 58. And remember, these are not in sequential order. This is as I remember them. And number 58 is co founders, which is the holding company that I own with my best friend slash business partner nick@co founders.com and the original thesis for HO founders was to be a Holdco slash incubator, a kind of unique model that we invented to fill our needs. That's not fully a Holdco because we don't just buy or start companies and then keep them forever. It's not fully an incubator like Y Combinator because we aren't just incubating ideas. But rather it's a place for me to get all of these business ideas out of my head and into the minds of other talented entrepreneurs so I can fund them and fund the idea and take majority equity in the company and then coach them how to start it, how to run it. But they're starting it and they're running it. And I'm just kind of pointing the way. We did this about a year and a half ago with a couple companies. One that I've already spoken about, Fast Tree Care and the other one that I don't think I've spoken about yet, AI Guy, which was an AI focused newsletter. And before we even started these, we did a cohort with three college students, which I have talked about in previous episodes, that I trained via Zoom two to three times a week for 60 days or so. And that was a lot of fun. I still believe in the co Founder's thesis and the co Founder's model, but it is so time consuming. It's fun, it's enjoyable, but it takes a lot of time. And so right now the original plan slash model of Co founders is on hold while we do other business stuff like vending machines and pet cremations and you name it. We did spend 65 grand on the co founders.com domain name because it's such an awesome domain name and I'm going to use it for the rest of my life. And it's a great brand, it looks cool, it sounds cool. And when we do start new companies we put them under the Co Founders LLC umbrella. The real reason for co founders existing is to partner with young entrepreneurs. And we're going to revisit that at some point in the future. All right, business number 59 is copy paste site. I don't even know if this website is still around. And it. Is it still around? Very ugly. Copypastesite.com and this was an idea I had where it's like, okay, web design agencies are not unique, they're not new, they're well established, they've been around for 20 years. They'll be around for another 20 or 200 years. But what about a web design agency that had the unique value proposition of just saying, hey, you show me a website that's already out there on the Internet and we're going to copy and paste it. Now, do we mean that literally? No, but we're going to go to Built with and find out what is it built with? Is it Shopify, is it Webflow? Is it WordPress? Then we're going to recreate it. Exactly. Because a lot of people want a nice, sexy website, but they don't know what it should look like. They're not design focused or design oriented. And frankly, I'm not either. And so a lot of times when I get a new website built, that's what I do. I go find something kind of in my niche, maybe not at all in my niche, but usually it is. And then go find a virtual assistant to build it exactly for me. Verbatim, copy paste. So that was the idea with this business. I don't remember how I drove leads to it, but I did get some leads. Never really chased after it that hard. I kind of just wanted to throw the website up and see if there was any interest. And there was, but not enough to really get me to keep chasing it down. But someone could still run with this. It doesn't have to be called copy paste site. It could just be a web design agency. You copy other people's websites and you outsource all the work to a really talented virtual assistant and just give them a cut of the revenue. This is a good idea. You should steal this. What's interesting is you could find the virtual assistant on upwork and then you could use upwork to find jobs. Hundreds of web design jobs are posted from entrepreneurs and business owners like me to upwork every single day. And so don't think it's too simplistic to just play middleman on upwork between people fulfilling the actual work and then people actually looking for work to be done. That is a well established model and it works really well. All right, number 60 is called fulfillment Score and this was more of an app slash landing page than it was meant to be a whole business. So Fulfillment Score, I think it was fulfillmentscore. Com, I don't think it's live anymore, was meant to be like a calculator for e commerce brands. Find out how much they should be paying their third party logistics provider for fees. Right. So let's say you sold T shirts on a Shopify store and you also had some hats and you had some shoes. You would go to this website, you would type in how many products you sold, the approximate weight of them, the volume platform that you're on, and it would spit out, hey, no, no, no, that wasn't what it was. Sorry. I had to go to the web archive, type in fulfillmentscore.com and look up what it actually was because I completely forgot. So when I go to the website, it says, how do you know if your shipping carriers are ripping you off or not? As in usps, ups, dhl, we can help. We have millions of data points on what shipping costs should be for your e Commerce store. Get 15 seconds. Got 15 seconds to find out. See below. And then there were like six questions. Order ship per month, average shipping cost per order, average pounds per order, average days to arrive, shipping carrier used most and email address. So it's a lead magnet and it's a pretty good one because most e commerce brands are getting ripped off. They're paying way too much for shipping and a quick five minute conversation with their UPS rep could save them hundreds of thousands of dollars per year. And so we thought, huh, we can play middleman between our negotiated rates and another e commerce brand that doesn't have rates as good as ours. And we can capture a margin there. So basically we would loan out our FedEx or UPS account numbers to other e commerce brands with really good negotiated rates. We would mark them up a little bit, they would get better rates, we would make a margin on every package they shipped. That's what Fulfillment Score was. But the big play here was to use this as a lead magnet for third party logistics customers, AKA convince Shopify stores to outsource their fulfillment to us. So there's a couple different ways we could monetize here. We had this built in an hour or two. We never really did much with it, but I still think it's a good idea. All right, so this next one is a good story. It's called number 61 Josh Prout scam website so, man, do I have a story for you. I'll try to keep it brief because it's not super relevant to this episode, but I have so many stories of getting scammed. And that's either because I'm super naive and I'm easily scammable, or because I just go up to bat so many times and start these businesses and hire these random people, hire fast, fire fast, always launching these random things, finding myself in peculiar situations. There's. I just have a ton of surface area for getting scammed. Okay, this guy named Josh Prout. Long story short, in the early days of Mining Syndicate, he was posing as a hosting provider, as in like a crypto focused data center. And he sent us this beautiful deck. I had a call with him, he sounded awesome. He spoke the language, he knew the lingo, he was well versed in the industry. And we were really hungry to find hosting providers because we had. We were selling a ton of miners and we didn't have anywhere to put them. So this guy had a facility in San Antonio. We did our due diligence, we loaded up a U haul full of miners, you know, $700,000 full of hardware. We drove them down to San Antonio. We get there and no one's there. And we're like, what? But we had already paid a $50,000 deposit, which was industry standard at the time. That was not a red flag at all. No one was at this facility. Long story short, this guy had taken a pitch deck from LoopNet for a data center, did a control find and replace to make it more look like his data center changed some facts, changed his name, and completely scammed us out of these $50,000. And then he was going to try to scam us out of this hardware, which he was unsuccessful at doing. This was a huge blow. I still remember the day it happened. It was my son's birthday. We were living in Houston. It was very, very stressful. I was very angry. We called the cops, we called the FBI. No one would really help us. And I kind of had to get creative. And I may or may not have had to buy tracker for his motorcycle. And I may or may not have found out where he lived. And I hung out in the parking lot for a while and I put a tracker on his motorcycle and I found out what he was doing and where he was going and who he was and what his real identity was and that he had been scamming people since he was about 11 years old on Runescape. He was scamming people of from with their virtual gold in RuneScape as an 11 year old. And he was just a notorious lifetime scammer. And he was so clever and so creative, and he just would have. If he just would have directed this in a productive direction, this guy could have been a millionaire. Anyway, long story short, he ended up scamming someone else for like $400,000 and got caught across state lines. That was enough money to get the FBI interested. I joined the case. I assembled dozens of documents of evidence on him, got 35,000 of our $50,000 back, which was awesome because I expected to get none of it back. The banks actually did me a solid and froze his funds, which I did not expect to be on the other end of a difficult bank. I'm usually on the other end of it where they freeze my funds for something. So we got almost all of our money back. He ended up in jail. It was a felony. It was awesome. Anyway, I bought the domain names joshproud.com because that was his name. Joshua Prout, joshprout.com and Josh Prout scam. And I had a VA put. I don't even know if this website's still around. Someone's probably looking at it right now. I don't. You can look at the web archive. You can see what I'm talking about. And I wanted to make sure that I owned the SEO on his name so he could never get a job, so he could never live a productive life until he had actually paid for his crimes. So was that ever supposed to be monetized? No. But I hated this guy and he angered me. And so I made a website to showcase this to the world. And it worked. And the good guys won. Josh, if you want to come after me for slander or libel or whatever it is, good luck, because everything I said here is true. Also, you're probably in jail right now, so. You know, it's called Nomo Nomo Snore. And this is a contraption. And if you're watching on YouTube, I'm holding it right now. If you see this, this is a contraption to help prevent snoring while you're asleep, of course, because you don't snore while you're awake, but this was originally intended to be a neck brace. Just. You see this? I don't know how it works, but my friend Grant, I've talked about Grant a few times because he's a good friend. He lives 10 minutes away, and I just love the guy. And he comes up with the best Business ideas. And he had a thesis that, you know, you snore because your airway is blocked off. And so if you, you were to wear a neck brace to bed, then you wouldn't snore. And he struggles with snoring. So he tried it and it worked. So sample size of one, we thought, huh, that's interesting. We could sell an anti snore device with Facebook ads and the margin would be stupidly high and it'd be awesome. And it's called Nomo because like no more snore. And I partnered up with some college students to launch this. I think they put up a Shopify site, maybe they didn't, I can't remember. But it never got off the ground, so. But I still like this idea. I mean, guess what the margin is on this. That's stupid. So no more snore. Number 63 off marketers. Off marketers.com is one of my many websites and it looks a lot like copy paste site because it's the same card template. Off Marketers was originally meant to be an agency for off market asset sourcing. So let's say you want to buy a business or you want to buy a single family home or a mobile home park or an RV park, you would outsource that to me as an agency and pay me 1, 2, 3, 4, $5,000 a month to cold call. Not me personally, but people that work for me to cold call on behalf of you to find those off market assets. Because hey, a $3,000 investment could save you $300,000 on buying something off market compared to on market or, or it could be an agency for real estate brokerages to help find them listings. I love this idea. I don't know why it's not more common. I actually found a few customers for this and we launched and we did well and we just didn't give it enough attention. So I think the second month we like weren't doing a good enough job and we were distracted and so we ended up just giving the money back to our customers and pivoting. So that's still a good website. And one common thread of everything I've done in the mobile home and the RV park space is acquisitions. I love acquisitions, especially off market. At acquisitions. I'm pretty good at it. I love it. And one day I'll start this business up again. Number 64, AI guy. This is one that I just referenced a few minutes ago. It was an AI newsletter started by not me. I helped advise and point the way. But it was started by Zach, our first or second co founder ever. Inside co founders. And he did an amazing job and he learned everything there is to know about Facebook ads and Beehive and newsletters and copywriting and advertising. He learned so many skills and it grew fast and it was fun. And he got our cost per acquisition down to like 80 cents per email subscriber. And guess what? We still have these emails. So I was not planning on doing this, but if anyone wants to buy a very dormant AI newsletter with very high quality subscribers that have not been emailed in over a year, email me, Chris co founders.com and name your price. It's hosted in Beehive right now. I've been paying the Beehive bill for it, you know, 600, 800. A thousand dollars over the last year or year and a half. I do think it's possible to reactivate these subscribers. And it was kind of like the milk road for AI, which there's a lot of AI newsletters out there that are trying to be the milk road for AI, but guess what, there's room for a lot of them. So if anyone wants to buy it, I don't know, is it 5,000 bucks? Is it 500 bucks, 50 bucks somewhere in there? I don't know. But there's about 6,000 subscribers and with a five times a week newsletter, that's good for about two to $3,000 a month in ad revenue. Not bad. 50 cents per subscriber, give or take. So across 12 months, that could be $20,000 profit. 15, 20, 25 somewhere in there. Not a bad little business. So if you want to buy it, let me know because it's just sitting there. And we spent quite a few dollars to acquire those subscribers. Number 65, Startup Gems. Startup Gems was an experiment. It was a test. It was never meant to be a real business. There's a company out there called 11 labs that were basically the first to do AI voice cloning. And so as soon as 11 labs came out and I heard about it, I thought, this is amazing. I want to start an AI podcast with a clone of my voice, but fully AI. We'll use AI to write a script. There'll be five to 15 minute episodes about entrepreneurs that did cool things that we find from the Internet. Found a guy named Braden out in Denver to help manage this project with me. Slash for me. It was hosted on Buzzsprout and I posted about it on Reddit. It got like two or three hundred thousand views. I posted about it on Twitter. It got about the same amount of views. We got 1, 2, 3,000 downloads our first day, which is a lot for a podcast. And it was really just an experiment, like, can you tell this is AI? And really you could, like 80% of the time you couldn't. Then 10, 20% of the time you heard some weird intonations or just it kind of went off script for a while, but it was really cool and it sounded like me. It was kind of freaky. And so we put out like 80 something episodes. One a day for 80 something days. And then it was just not growing, it was shrinking. And I wanted to see if it could grow organically. I'd started a podcast before, like five, six years ago, but I only put out three episodes, so I'm not including that. Aside from that, I'd never started a podcast and I know they're hard to grow, but I wanted to see could a podcast grow on its own without me promoting it? Because I didn't want to promote, you know, an AI voice clone generated podcast that wasn't even monetized. That's just a waste of your attention. So I just wanted to tweet about it once and then see, you know, could it be shared organically enough to grow on its own? And it could not. 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 podcast. 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 newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. So when I launched this podcast, the Kerner Office, which was first called Kerner's Corner, until an awesome newsletter subscriber of mine emailed me and said, what about the Kerner Office? I just thought, that's perfect, that's perfect. I was so mad I hadn't thought of it. But whoever you are, I can't remember your name, but you're still in my inbox. Thank you for that suggestion because it was not my idea, it was yours. Anyway, when I started Kerner's Corner, I thought, nah, I already have 83 episodes of Startup Gems. That was the name of it. I'm just gonna start season two and Call it Kerner's Corner. My first episode ever. It was just like, hey, guys, this was a AI generated surprise. If you didn't know, now it's not going to be. This is actually really me speaking. And then after episode eight or nine, we changed the name to the Kerner office. And it's been a wonderful ride, and I don't plan on stopping anytime soon. Number 66, the no BS Crypto podcast. That was the first podcast I ever started, back during my McAfee days when I blew up on Twitter on another account for no BS Crypto. We had an airdrop, we had a white paper. We had a community with like 60,000 people in it, and seemingly a third of them were from Vietnam or Nigeria. That was a wild couple years of my life. You know when you get voicemails every week from John McAfee, which are still saved on my phone, by the way. A good six years later, I started a podcast around it and with my friend Grant, who invented Nomo Snore, and his brother Max, another good friend of mine. It was the three of us just brought down about crypto, and we flamed out after about three episodes. But when I look back at my download numbers there, I had no idea how good I had it. I was like, oh, this. Our first episode only got 3,000 downloads. Wow, this sucks. And now it's like, geez, that's actually a lot for a podcast. So I didn't know what I had there. Number 67. Twice used. Oh, man, what a dumpster fire. I still own the domain name. I love this domain name. Twice used dot com. When I was running LCD Cycle, which I talked about in episode one of this series. We had thousands of broken iPhone screens and broken iPhone back glass just sitting in our warehouse. And it looked awesome, right? Black glass that was broken and shattered. I thought, there's got to be some way we can recycle this. Now, keep in mind, the name of our company was LCD Cycle. So we were recycling most of them by sending them to China and having our vendors, you know, slice off the broken glass and the digitizer, put a new digitizer, new glue, new glass, shipping it back. But you know how you see, like, dead pixels on a screen sometimes? If an iPhone screen had that, it was irrecoverable. And so we had thousands of screens that were irrecoverable, unrecyclable, and they were just sitting. And so we launched a Kickstarter project. And I hope you don't Google this, because I'm sure it's still somewhere there on the Internet. Chris Kerner twice used Kickstarter. There is the most cringe worthy video you will ever see. The lowest quality sitting in a shady warehouse with Michael or Emily or one of my employees or both of them, I can't remember. And we invented, and my good friend tj, we invented these clocks that they still look pretty cool. Clocks made out of iPhone glass and coasters made out of broken iPhone glass. And a coffee table. An entire coffee table making a made out of broken iPhone glass. This could sell. Like, this could be a thing. I've seen things on Instagram with tens of millions of views that didn't look as cool as this. But this Kickstarter was just a dumpster fire. I got AOL to write about me and cnet and, you know, I worked my cold emailing magic and generated a bunch of buzz and we couldn't even raise like $8,000. So if you can generate all that attention and you can't raise more than $8,000, you don't have product market fit, you don't have a business. It was a waste of resources and time, but it was a learning experience. Okay, Kickstarter is hard. If you can crack the code, you know, figure out the mechanism of how it works, you can rinse and repeat over and over and over. I know a couple people that do that, but not for me. No, thank you. Number 68, fire and embers. This was the name of an LLC that my friend Nathan and I started to buy a barbecue restaurant called Big Ray's Barbecue in Allen, Texas. We still have this llc, Nathan, thank you for paying for it. If you're listening to this, it was probably three or four hundred dollars. We never bought the business. We met with Big Ray a couple times. I met an awesome broker in the process. But at the end of the day, he had a landlord that was not the nicest guy and he was not easy to work with. And we were very afraid, slash certain that if we were to sign a lease with the landlord and buy the business, the landlord would completely shaft us over and we'd be out. It was a $650,000 business and tons of opportunity, tons of upside, and really a passion project. Like no one buys a restaurant because they're psychologically sound. Clearly I'm not. And I knew that and I know that, but I wanted to do it. Nathan wanted to do it because he's a barbecue freak like I am. But it just didn't. It didn't come together. So number 69, pro in your pocket. This was a project that I was an advisor for. I didn't found it. He was a guy out of, I don't remember his name. He was out of Phoenix and he wanted to be a thumbtack competitor or an Angie's List competitor. And my brother in law Justin was the developer for it. Brilliant developer and they got some traction, but it's just, it's too hard. It was way too hard of a business. I was supposed to be like the marketing guy, but the product never even got far enough for me to have a chance to market it. So end of story number 70 lawyers in China. What a great story. I got screwed by one of my Chinese vendors a couple years ago out of like $200,000 worth of hardware. It got held up in customs and according to our contract, it was his responsibility. But when push came to shove and it actually got held up, he's like, it's not my responsibility. So we were very angry and this put us in a bad financial spot. And so I had to find a lawyer in China and I've got a good friend Brian in China, Brian Yin, who's my friend and translator every time I go there. And he had a lawyer that he put me in touch with. This lawyer was amazing. He was 450 an hour, which really isn't bad for an amazing lawyer. And I have this weird sickness where every time I meet someone that's just an absolute rock star, I just want to do more things with them. I want to help them start a business or start a business with them or just do something there. And so I went to him and said, I don't remember his name, the lawyer's name. It's like, what happens? What would you do if I brought you more customers? And he's like, I'll give you 30% of everything. I bill them forever. Like, wow, that's a lot of money. Let me see what I can do here. So I bought, I think it was chineselawsuit.com and the name of the business was Lawyers in China. And it was a wix website, super ugly. And it was basically just Google Ads. And I pointed Google Ads at Americans that were googling for these terms like international lawyer, Chinese lawyer, lawyer in China. Because guess what, China and America do a lot of business together and business disputes are pretty common. And what do you do as an American when you need a lawyer in China? So it was a lead gen service and we sent this guy a ton of leads and I learned about all kinds of weird lawsuits that were happening in all kinds of random, interesting industries. And I don't think any of them closed because, you know, it's not a high close rate for stuff like this, but it was going really well, and I was scaling it and increasing the ad spend until one day the lawyer is like, hey, I'm moving to Canada. I was like, what? Yeah, we can't do this anymore because I'm moving to Canada. Move my whole family to Canada. I don't like China. I'm like, do you have anyone else I can sell these leads to? He's like, no, not really. So that was the end of that. But it's still a good idea. It doesn't have to be China. It can be between any country. Two more my modern South. I was living in Alabama, and I read an article about this guy that started a business, and all he did in his business was assemble Ikea. No, I take that back. He didn't assemble IKEA furniture. He delivered IKEA furniture. So Huntsville, Alabama, population 250,000 people, was like three or four hours from Memphis, Tennessee, where the closest IKEA was. There was an IKEA in. In Atlanta three hours away, and an IKEA in Memphis three hours away. And this guy's whole business, I forget where he was located, was just placing IKEA orders. People would place IKEA orders on the website and then pay him for the IKEA order plus, like a 30% markup. And then he would go to Ikea in a big U haul or box truck truck and pick it all up and drive it back three hours and meet all the buyers in a parking lot, and they would load it up in their pickup trucks and go home. Beautiful. Love it. It reminds me of the. Of our Texas snacks, our Bucky's business. That's all he was doing. He was just, you know, reselling a product or a service. And this is still a good business idea. And so I started this. I put up an ugly website. It was called My Modern Self. And I got some customers, but I never, like, I never got far enough to actually go pick up furniture and deliver it, but I posted about it in Facebook groups or Craigslist or something. And I got a bunch of interested customers, but I pivoted like I always do. All right, this is the last one that I can remember. I guess I didn't include side vending or perfume vending or any of this modern stuff. So that would be number 73 or 74, but number 72 is animal aftercare. And that is a stealth project that we launched a few months ago I bought the domain name for $10 at animal-aftercare.com and this is a programmatic SEO website. What programmatic SEO is is you use automations and tools, Tag, Parrot webflow, zapier, Whale sync, airtable, Google sheets. You tie it all together and you programmatically create thousands of landing pages that tie keywords to geographical areas such as horse cremation in Louisville, Kentucky, pet euthanasia in Schenectady, New York, Whatever. So we had five different keywords that were highly searched. Dog cremation, pet cremation, horse euthanasia, dog euthanasia, pet euthanasia. I think that was the five. We took the top 1000 cities by population in the US and the top 100 cities by population in Canada because Canada is 10% of the size of America. Five keywords times 1100 markets equal 5500 landing pages. Each landing page having a form where people could say, hey, I need my dog cremated or my horse cremated or my cat euthanized or whatever it is. And you just over time you rank organically for tens or hundreds or thousands of search terms because in those local markets there's no one competing against you. Who's going to open a horse cremation facility in Schenectady to New York when there's no population to support it, but there's still people searching for it. So we just fill in all those gaps and this is an awesome business and it's meant to be a business where we just sell these leads to vet clinics, preferably large chains of vet clinics. Fun fact Mars from like Mars Candy bars. They own like the majority of the vet clinics in the United States, believe it or not. It might not be a majority, but it's like double digit percentage crazy. So the end goal for this business is to just sell all these leads to facilities so they can acquire new customers. We're getting leads for this business every single day. Multiple leads, zero ad spend. It's an awesome business and we're building programmatic sites for a couple friends and family on the side because it's incredible. Like no paid ads and you can still do paid ads. It just adds fuel to the fire. So that's number 72. That concludes this four part series of every business I've ever started. I hope you learned something. Thank you for listening. Please share this with friends. You can tell I love business. So thank you for entrusting me with your valuable time and we will see you next time.