Part 2/4: Every Business I've Ever Started. Ep. #021

Welcome to the Kerner office. And today will be part two of every business I've ever started. If you'd like to hear part one of this episode, go ahead to my timeline and scroll down a couple weeks. I think it was mid to late Aprilish. It's called part one of every business I've ever started. This is part two. So we left off with me telling a story about my quarter cows business and dragging my cow quite literally down a country road in northeast Texas. Oh, we left off there. Let's start off with, with Alabama Wholesale homes. That's number 23. When I was about 23, coincidentally maybe mid 20s, I learned about wholesaling homes. And I'd never heard of that before. And if you've never heard of it, wholesaling homes basically means getting a house or any piece of real estate under contract and assigning that contract to another party without ever purchasing it. Usually you have to put up earnest money and so you're risking that. But typically you can structure these deals where you find them off market. You put up a thousand bucks of earnest money and you find someone to actually buy the property and you make a spread. So you lock up a house under contract for 100 grand, you know it's worth 170. You assign it to someone for 135. There's things that I do and don't like about this business. I really don't like how shady it usually is. I would think most wholesalers are shady because it's just an inherently shady process. Usually you're incentivized to not disclose to either the buyers or the sellers that you're wholesaling the property. And so that means you have to lie and make it seem like you own the property. I didn't like that about it. And I also didn't like all of the tips and tricks that I had heard from these online gurus about how to talk down a homeowner regarding the value of their property. I remember one guy said, he's like, if you walk in a house and it's beautiful and you can't find anything wrong with it, but you just can't get, get them down to your price. You just gotta mention the layout because you can't fix the layout. Right? That's. The layout's always my fallback. Oh yeah, it's got this weird layout, but it's like, no matter what, always pull the layout card. And I was just like, man, I don't like that. That reminds me of my 2 week used car dealership. Stint, which was the last real job I ever had. It's just shady. I didn't like it. So I got two houses under contract that I actually picked up on like a government auction website. So I didn't actually have to deal with a sell. I had a thousand bucks earnest money on both of them and I lost the earnest money on both of them. That is my experience wholesaling. But I did buy the domain name Alabama Wholesale Homes and I drove some traffic to it through SEO and it was around for years, like years and years after I ever quit this business. And it brought in a bunch of leads from wholesalers and real estate investors. And I don't even know what I did with that business, honestly. I might still own the domain name, I might not. Who knows? Idea number 24 is Texas smokes. So this idea came for me when we were selling these little smokers from Buc EE's. So as you know, I own a company called Texas Snacks and We resell Buc EE's products and we noticed that these little hundred dollar smokers were selling really well. And I thought, man, this could be a standalone business, this could be a standalone website. And so the whole business was to just keep buying these smokers from Buc EE's, but just put it on a different Shopify site called Texas smokes.com and we were buying these for 100 bucks, selling them for 160, 170. They, they were really well made as far as smokers are concerned. And we paid, we drove some paid Facebook ads to the site and it went well. We sold a handful of them. And then we just realized this is never going to be as big as we think Texas Snacks could be or should be. This is just a distraction because of all the things I've done, Texas Snacks has been one of the most steady, just consistently growing businesses. And I don't want to screw that up. Right? I picked so many businesses that have been volatile and frankly hard to run. I didn't want to screw up Texas Snacks. So we ended up abandoning this website as well. Idea number 25 was called better Inbox and this was meant to be a small SaaS app or a Chrome extension or a web app. And the idea was to provide insights into how long it was taking me or my employees to respond to emails. There is one company that already does this, but I thought it was pretty clunky, too feature rich, too expensive. And I just wanted to know very simply, how long are you taking to respond to emails and you'd have to set up filters because you're not going to respond to spam. And there's some legwork that you got to put into it to make this work. Right. But this was something that I wanted to build for myself and for my team because I had a sales team at the time. And everyone knows that when you're in sales, the time it takes you to respond to a lead directly correlates to your likelihood of closing that lead. So I thought, why isn't this more common? Why can't I just see a report of how long it's taking me so I could better myself or my team to respond to emails? So I bought the domain name better inbox might have been.co or.com and I hired a VA to build this and I got distracted. Yep, that sound familiar? I got distracted and so I moved on. I still think it's a good idea, but it's not a big idea. And so in that sense it's not a good idea. Right. If it's. If the opportunity cost of chasing this idea is high, then in a sense it's not a good idea at all. Idea number 26. I do not look back at this business very fondly. It was called Halo Maids. I had T shirts printed, I had flyers printed. I bought a course or something from a guy named Rohan Gilkes. And he's still around. He's still doing the same thing. I think at the time it was called Launch 28, as in launch a business in 28 days, I assume. I think he's changed the name. But a lot of people have bought this business with success. I've heard good things. I've heard it's a good course. He's a good guy. And the whole idea is basically for it to be a drop service home cleaning business where you find the cleaners. Kind of like what we're doing with Fast Tree Care. You find the crew, you find the cleaners, you put up the marketing site, you drive traffic to it. You charge 200 bucks for a cleaning, you pay 120 bucks to your team and you just capture that margin. What a terrible business. Please, if you're listening to me, don't, don't start a home cleaning business, please. Of all the home service businesses you could start, this is one of the worst ones. There are so many ways to screw up. Is so low ticket. I know you're chasing that recurring angle. It's not going to come, okay? It's just not. You might get 20 to 30% recurring jobs. It is a race to the bottom on price. You're managing crews that are doing a terrible job. I know I'm being pretty pessimistic right now, but I'm an optimistic guy. So that should send a message to you to not start this business. Okay, I know it's tempting. The gurus are really good at guruing about home cleaning and pressure washing and all that. I would much rather do pressure washing. Binary outcome. That's something I like to talk about a lot. Pressure washing is a binary outcome. You show up, you clean the thing, you leave. With home cleaning, you've got different surfaces, different types of walls, different rooms. You've got to show up at a defined window. We were doing it for realtors. That made it extra hard. Maybe that was our mistake. There's just a zillion ways you can screw up. There are ways you can screw up in pressure washing, but I think there are far, far less ways. So that was Halo Mates and I started it with my friend Ed. And he's the same guy that I started a couple of these other businesses with. Great guy, Love him to death. He just didn't have a lot of time to contribute to this business. So we lost about 1 2,000 bucks. One thing that was interesting was we hired a bunch of high school kids, we took a ton of postcards, really attractive flyers, double sided, and we drove to Nebraska Furniture Mart. I say we. I didn't. Ed drove them to Nebraska Furniture Mart on a Saturday, which is the biggest furniture store in the world, partially owned by Warren Buffett, if not wholly owned by Warren Buffett. I tweeted about it once or twice and we put these flyers on cars, or at least they did for marketing because the thesis was these people are moving, they're moving in, they're moving out, they're going to need a home cleaner. And if they're moving in, even better because it could become a recurring job. I think we distributed 500 flyers. It may be brought one to two jobs. And so I love like one of my greatest pastimes. Genuinely, I'm no sarcasm here. I love testing marketing ideas, especially old school marketing ideas in new school business or new school marketing ideas. An old school business like that is my happy place. I will do that until the day I die because it is so fun. 80, 90% of the time it doesn't work right. You don't read articles about house cleaning companies growing with flyers at furniture stores for a reason because it's not working. But 10, 20% of the time it just crushes. And when it Does. You're not going to see me tweet about it. You're just not. Because it's. It's a hack. It's a growth hack. And I have tweeted this before. The effectiveness of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan. Okay? The more effective a growth hack, the shorter its lifespan. Period. End of story. But when you find a growth hack, you got to get it while the getting is good. You got to exploit it to the hilt because it will not stick around for long. Next business. We are number 27 now. Doomsday in a box. This was. And the word business for this I'm using very loosely. Sam Parr tweeted, man, I just wish I could, like, click a button and just get all of my survival prep gear. Like, I want to prep, I want to be a prepper, I want to have gear, I want to have water, food, storage, knives, you name it. But it's a lot of work and I don't have a lot of time. And so I went and bought the domain name Doomsday in a box. I threw up a landing page. This was in like, this was within 20, 30 minutes of his tweet. Threw up a landing page. I commented on his tweet and I said, here it is just to see if it would drive any signups. Once again, this is just me testing something and nothing happened. I got like three signups. I never did anything with it. This whole business quote business, less than 30 minutes. So you want to take it off the list, fine, sue me. But I'm calling it a business. 28 Oven Love Bake Shop. This was definitely a business. This was my wife's business. I love my wife very much and she is very, very good at bake baking treats. And so, yeah, I'm going to call it my business because we're married and I helped her with it. It was 90% her business. It was a bake shop. It was an online e commerce shopify store where she made cookie bars in our house about 20ft away from me. And they are the most amazing gourmet cookie bars ever. She sold them online and she sold them at the local farmer's market right down the road. And people love them. They're so good. The problem with this business, it's very hard to scale. It's very, very hard. She would hand cut all of these bars one by one by one. The cost is like 50, 60 cents per bar. She sold them for three to four bucks, which seems good, but the time it takes and you individually Wrap them, and then you individually put stickers on them, drive to the farmer's market, drive to the post office. It was a ton. She did it. She started during or shortly after Covid. She built a huge fan base, made a little money, lasted years. At one point, we even put a mini fridge on our front porch and friends would just come venmo us and buy them. If nothing else, it's a way for us to teach our kids entrepreneurship because they would help in the kitchen, they would help with the farmer's market, especially my daughter. We've got great, fond memories. No regrets from that business whatsoever. It's just not the best and highest use of our time. So that was Avenov Bakeshop. And there is something to that idea because I think there's a chain of not cookie shops, but cookie bar shops. It's called bars or something hipster ish. Of course, it started in Utah, growing. So there's something to that. Like cookies with a twist. Number 29 was chunky mailers. Chunky Mailers is an idea that I have had for years. And this idea started with a thesis of mine. Back to marketing ideas. Right, okay. Direct mail works. Clearly. That's why we all get junk mail every day. But what if we had direct mail that had just something inside of it? A lump, a penny, a toothpick, something, Some sort of a widget inside of it where you're like, huh, what is this? It makes you want to open it. Because most people never open their direct mail, rendering it ineffective. So I thought, huh, Chunky Mailers. This could be really interesting. I could order a ton of cheap widgets from China at a penny a piece. We could take a postcard or a flyer, stuff it an envelope with the widget. It could cost 40, 50 cents to ship. You've got to get bulk mail through the postal service. This could work. And it could be a great business because it's high ticket. Most people are going to order thousands of these things. And if they work, which they should, they got to be better than direct mail. Right? And they don't cost much more. So what's the downside? If they work, then they'll send these suckers every month. And so this is something that I just kept in the back of my mind. And then in 2019, I started to launch it and I even got a couple customers. Dentists. Love marketing to dentists. But that's right around the time when a partner approached me about starting to invest in mobile home parks. And that was a bigger opportunity and looking back. It was a bigger opportunity. I'm glad I pivoted. So I pivoted away from it. I still have the domain chunky mailers.com and then a year or two later, I tweeted about this idea in a thread and a guy named Christian Ruff, maybe you've seen him on Twitter, Ruf. He saw my tweet, he DM me. He's like, I love this idea. I've got time. I can hustle. I'm going to start this and we're going to call it Jumbo Mail Marketing. And he did. And I got my partner, Kirk involved, my partner at Texas Snacks, he was kind of the operator because we had a third party logistics company and someone's got to stuff and ship these mailers. Christian was operating out of South Carolina, I believe Kirk did most of the work. Christian did all the sales calls and the marketing, which was a lot of work. And I did very little. I just kind of connect, connected the parties and we got some customers, we got some case studies, and then we ended up selling it for a little bit of money to a couple other young hustlers that are running it today. And frankly, I don't know how well it's doing. I don't even know if I own any of this business. Maybe 1%, maybe 10. I don't know. Maybe Kirk does. I have not even thought of that business in a long time. Chunky mailers, number 30 crave. All right, I want you to flashback to 2016, 2017, Facebook. What was going viral on Facebook? It was food videos. Specifically. You put a DSLR camera above like a pot and you make a salad or a stir fry or something and you speed it up like a time lapse and it's 60 seconds or less. There's a company called Tasty doing this. I think they're still doing it. Surely you saw them 2016, 2017. Basically, tasty would put out a video of anything. They could make pancakes, bowl of cereal, cake, anything. And it would get tens or hundreds of millions of views. They were like the first person, the first company to unlock the fact that people want to see food get made in 30 seconds or less, 60 seconds or less. So I thought, okay, okay, there's a lot of demand for this. I could do this. I could take these dumb videos. What's it going to turn into? I have no idea. What does Tasty turn into? I think they now sell widgets in, in Walmart or, you know, kitchen appliances. And so me and my close friend, we rented a camera because he's, he's good at that stuff. And we got a dozen or two, two dozen recipes. We bought a bunch of ingredients and I just built my house. So we had this big nice kitchen and we made, we stayed up all night. It was like a 12 hour thing. We made like 12 videos in 12 or 24 hours. And then he edited them and it was called Crave instead of Tasty. And I think we started a couple social media pages for it. And then we were also partners in my LCD cycle business and it started really taking off and so we abandoned this and those videos are sitting in my Dropbox folder somewhere. So that was craven, number 31. Man, I might need to do a part three here. Number 31 is Haley. Now Haley was a. It was an outsourced global talent agency, just like shepherd, just like all of these global talent agencies, you see. And this stemmed from me basically seeing all these guys having success and having FOMO and thinking, okay, what they're doing is nothing special. They're posting jobs to upwork, they're building an internal database of global talent until they don't even need upwork anymore. And then they're just placing that talent with inbound leads. And there's no shortage of demand for this. So when we first launched co founders, the original thesis was to do cohorts of college students, 30 day cohorts, where we would take three hungry, high energy, grateful, optimistic college students. And I would meet with them twice per week via Zoom remotely. And beforehand I would give them ideas, business ideas, right? Maybe you need to start a short form video agency. Maybe you need to start a tree trimming business. And I would spend 30 days meeting with them two, three times a week during them, training them, teaching them how to use zapier tools, all these things so they could launch these businesses alongside us. That was phase one. Phase two, they become profit sharing partners of these businesses, assuming they made a profit and we met our 30 day goal. Phase three is they drop out of school or they graduate from school and they become a pro rata equity holder in these businesses. And I still love this idea. We're still kind of doing it because our first cohort, we did it with a guy named Sam, Juliana and Chloe. And with Sam, we launched a marketplace for business owners. And I'll talk about that later. With Juliana, we launched a different type of marketplace for business owners. And then with Chloe, we launched Haley, which was kind of like Shepherd. And we went viral on Reddit several times. We thought, I thought, okay, shepherd is doing really well, on Twitter, let's go attack a different platform. So we tried Reddit, drove a bunch of leads, bunch of calls, got a couple sales, nothing crazy. And this taught me that Twitter +global talent is perfect product, audience fit. Okay, that's kind of a newer term that I heard, and I love it. I use it all the time. The right product or service with the right platform, or the right influencer, right guru, whoever. For whatever reason, global talent plus Twitter equals magic. And so I couldn't recreate that on Reddit, and I didn't want to recreate it on Twitter because I thought it was already too crowded. This was like three years ago, two years ago, I don't know. It wasn't too crowded. It's still not too crowded. I've talked about that several times. So that business could still be rebooted. It's still around, the website's still there, but I just have no energy to do that right now. I believe in, in the concept. I believe in global talent. It's going to keep growing. It seems like a bubble on Twitter because we're all on Twitter all day, but I would reckon that 80 to 90% of the US workforce has no idea what the acronym VA means. So still ripe for disruption and growth. 32 millennial mortal Mormons. Okay, wow. This was summer of 2017. I was running LCD cycle and it was starting to slow down a bit. And so I got wandering eyes, as I tend to do. And at the time, WordPress blogs were just always going viral. Okay. The whole model was write content, distribute on Facebook. Facebook pushes it organically to. Your WordPress blog goes viral. You've got a blog and you collect emails, you sell stuff through the emails or you sell ads. Millennialmormons.com was the website. It was a kind of a tongue in cheek, part satirical, part faith based, part humor. It was a blog for millennial members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, such as myself. And I love this blog. I read it all the time. And I followed the two or three founders pretty closely on Facebook, on social media, and something kind of stupid happened. Over time, all three of these founders left the church. They lost their faith. I don't know if they became atheists or whatnot, but they no longer believed in the Mormon faith. And what really angered me, there's no better word for it than this. What angered me was the fact that they converted the site into what was a bait and switch. They started writing content that was critical or antagonistic of the church, that they were purporting to support. And so I thought that the right thing to do here would be shut down the site, put up a pop up that's like we no longer believe we're shutting the site down or we're selling it. But no, they just started distributing content to believing members that was engineered to pull them away from their faith. And I'm not a fan of that in any religion. I respect Muslims, I respect the Amish, anyone that. I especially respect cultures that have their religion at the forefront of their lives, because that's what I strive to do. And even if they're doing something that I don't theologically agree with, I really, really respect a commitment to a common goal and a shared purpose and a higher power. And it angered me that they were trying to pull people away from that. And so I can't remember if the founder posted about it on Facebook or if I cold emailed him, but one of the three founders had the idea to sell the business and I can't remember if that was my idea or his, but I bought it. I bought the business for a few thousand bucks. It didn't have much revenue and my whole intent was just to fix all this broken crap and just to keep it going. That's it. I was not trying to make any money whatsoever. This was a passion project and it was awesome. I was not alone in my distaste for this new format of the blog. And so I was able to recruit a dozen or so volunteers, writers, web designers, to write articles and to turn it around and to delete the anti articles and to just clean up the site. And we did and it was awesome. And we had a good thing going and we rebranded, we made a new logo and then it ended up just falling by the wayside. I don't even remember what happened. I had a couple cool guys, Bentley and Mike, I think, great guys that were helping me a ton and then a few others as well. And it just fell by the wayside. And now a couple years later, the president of our church, who we consider to be a prophet, came out and said, try not to say the word Mormons because that's just the name of our book. But that's not who we are. And the book is named after a person. We're members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. And so he really encouraged us to, couple years after this, a few years ago, to stop using that word altogether. So I don't know what we would have renamed it. And a lot of kind of blogs didn't rename it. They're just like, nah, I'm going to keep it the same. And a lot did. And I for sure would have, but I didn't need to because it's no longer around. So that was Millennial Mormons. Next one was Fast Tree Care. And Fast Tree Care is exciting because it's still going. Fast Tree Care was basically Cohort 2 of co founders, which was Zach and James. Zach started an AI newsletter which pivoted to what is now Volterra software that skilled nursing facilities use to save money. And James was over Fast Tree Care. I love James because when he first applied, I thought I was reading my own application because he had fixed iPhones in college. He was just a hustler. And that's pretty much the only thing we have in common. We actually are quite different. We come from quite different backgrounds. He's six foot, I don't know, eight, African American. He looks like an NFL offensive lineman. And his dad played for usc. Comes from a family of football players. He's the bomb. I love him. And I told him I gave him a few ideas faster. Here is one of them. And he's like, I like that tree business idea. I'm going to move to Dallas. I said, let's go. So he moved to Dallas. I let him stay here at my house for a few days. He found a place to live. I paid him a salary from day one. And I gave him the playbook. I gave him a truck. He still drives it today. And I basically told him what to do. I didn't do it for him. I didn't. I've never even been to one job site with him. I've never quoted one job with him. He's done it all himself. I just gave him a playbook. I answer his calls, we talk every week. I give him mentorship. And Fast Treak here is basically, it's a tree chirping business, but we don't do any of the jobs. We outsource 100% of the work at about 40 to 50% gross margins. We have virtually no overhead except gas and time. And it's a great business and we're growing. And we hosted a bootcamp for it a few months ago and we recorded it. And now we're selling that digital version of that boot camp and encouraging others to start tree businesses in their area. And it's awesome. And eventually we might pivot out of the physical tree trimming business and lean more into the content side of the business because it's working and we're encouraging people to start businesses. And that is my passion. So that's going great. Number 34. This also was not really a true business. It was more of a blog. This was 2009 or 2010. I was a college student. I had a couple. We had a good group of young, married college friends at the time. And meme pages were. I think it was like college humor. People of Walmart. I don't know if you remember that site peopleofwallmart.com that was really popular at the time. And we thought, man, there needs to be a people of Walmart for outrageous college fans, right? Just like literally just a WordPress blog with pictures of fans. Not just college, but sports fans. Maybe a video, maybe a picture, just something ridiculous. And at the time, or right now, as I say it, it sounds like such a stupid idea. But People of Walmart was a big thing and they made a lot of money from organic traffic in banner ads. So we wanted to be people of Walmart for sports, basically. And I had two partners in this. And we put up a blog, outfandish. Okay, outfandish.com and we put up a blog, we posted a few things, and then it just died. It just died. There's Nothing there. Number 35, door to Moore. This was me and my employees buying electronics door to door. And I still love this idea. I don't know why there aren't teams of people buying electronics door to door today. There are teams of people selling pest control, selling solar, selling roofing, and selling alarm systems. Why not buying electronics? I literally have 12 old iPads, Nintendo switch phones, laptops laying around my house that I am not about to go catalog, wipe clean, take pictures of, list on ebay, list on Facebook, marketplace, answer questions, package, ship. It is a pain. So the whole business model here is just show up at people's door, have a nice polo on that's embroidered, have your phone, your phone connects to, like Gazelle.com, where you can value these devices. You've got Venmo or Zelle on your phone or PayPal, and you say, hey, I'm here to buy your old devices. Can we come back later or can we buy them now? Do you know of any neighbors? It's a great business. So when I had phone restore a small chain of iPhone repair shops, our second biggest revenue line was buybacks. So people would come in and either get their device fixed or they would come in and we would say, your device is not fixable. We made 40, 50, 60 grand a month just buying devices. In store and selling on ebay. When things got slow, I would send my employees out to the neighborhoods and they would buy devices door to door. And it worked. And then you can go to schools and you can do e recycling drives, then you can do it in bulk and the parents will send the devices to school with their kids and they can put it in a box and you can go collect and then you pay the school money. And they're not as price sensitive. This is a great business and I think more people should do it. And I just wrote about this in my newsletter. So if you want to read that, go to ChrisJ Kerner, k o e R-N-E r.com and you'll see a link to subscribe to my newsletter. And I break this down in detail. Number 36, crypto advising. I consider this a business, even though it was more of a perpetual consulting gig. This was back in my McAfee days when I launched my token and I built a big following on Twitter on another account. 60, 70 something thousand followers. And so these crypto projects would reach out to me and say, hey, we want to make you an advisor in our company. We give you 1 to 3% of the total allocation of our tokens, which is like the crypto version of shares in the company. Maybe you come speak at a conference, maybe you tweet about us every now and then. And it was a great business. I made some pretty good money doing that, just being an advisor to these companies. And that lasted a couple years and it paid some good bills and I enjoyed it. And then crypto crashed. And it's funny because all these contacts, all these companies, they just kind of disappeared. They never really broke things off with me. They never really sent an email. We didn't ever tie it up. They just kind of disappeared into the night. And that's crypto number 37. My notes simply say, stripe with a new rag, because I'm not even pronouncing that right, most likely, but I met this guy on Facebook or somewhere, somewhere on the Internet who lived in India, who had an E commerce business. It was a Shopify store that he was driving ads to that was doing really well. And he was selling the dumbest crap. Just dumb kitchen gadgets, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb stuff, okay? But it was doing really well and it was all drop ship. And so here you have a guy in India drop shipping stuff from China to the US with Facebook ads. I don't even know what to say about that. Anyway, he had a problem because Stripe did not Want to operate in India. And maybe they still don't. I don't know. At least they didn't at the time. This was 2018, 2019 or so. And so he said, hey, can I use your stripe. Your stripe account, and I'll give you a cut of all my sales if I can use your stripe account. And I said, sure, let's do it. And so he gave me 10% of everything that came through that stripe account. And it was a good bit of money, just 10% off the top. And I did nothing. I did literally nothing. And it worked out great. And then I don't know if the Facebook ad algorithm changed, but this ended up shutting down and it went away. But I'm still friends with that guy, and he's a cool guy. All right, next, two businesses. I'm counting these as two. It's really just one, and I'm almost out of time here. Let's see how much time do I have? Yeah, about a time. Anyway, these will be the last two, and then I'm have to do a part three and maybe even a part four, because we're only to number 38. These last two businesses were 10 and $20 unlocks.com, $10 unlocks.com and $20 unlocks.com they were the same business. It's pretty clever, pretty automated. I used a software called Cubix C U B I X that would go scan Craigslist for newly listed iPhones for sale, and it would filter the ones that were locked to a carrier. Nowadays, this isn't really a thing, but back 2013, it's about 2013. You had phones that were either locked to AT&T or Verizon or Sprint or T Mobile. And then you had phones that were unlocked that could be used with any carrier worldwide. And unlocked phones are worth more because they're more compatible with things. And it only cost three to five dollars to unlock a phone. There were ebay sellers doing it. There's a bunch of places online you could find it. It was just asymmetric information. Most people didn't realize that their phone was unlockable. And so I would auto email people that had just then listed an iPhone for sale, and I would search the listing for either the word Sprint, T Mobile, Verizon, or AT&T. And that told me that it was locked. And I would say, hey, your Phone's worth approximately $50 more if it were unlocked. Why don't you unlock it before you sell it? You can do it at $10 unlock.com or you can do it at $20 unlock.com because I was just ab testing it and I wanted to see if they were price sensitive and they really weren't. $20 unlock.com got maybe 20% less business, but made a hundred percent more money. So they would go to the website, they would check out, they would submit their IMEI number that would go directly to this contact on ebay. He would unlock the phone and an automated email would go back to them that would say hey, restart your phone. It's unlocked. And so with virtually no interaction on my part, I was making some good money. But that just evented that it was a growth hack, right? Just like I said in the beginning of this episode. And it went away. I don't remember why it went away, if that software stopped working or there was too much competition, but it eventually went away. But I love that little business and I wish I had it today. Anyway, that concludes part two of every business I've ever started with. We will do a part three and maybe even a part four depending on how these last 30 or so businesses go. But thank you for listening. Please subscribe. If you know someone that is a entrepreneur or a wantrepreneur please send it to them cause I don't have ads. I would just love more people listening to this so I could spread the entrepreneurship gospel far and wide. Have a great day. I'll see you next time.