Perfume vending!? 6 Budget Friendly Businesses to Start in 2025

It's $2,000, maybe $2,500. You can put it on a pedestal or you can mount it to a wall. It's about the size of a large mailbox and it just looks like this. It's just, it's got like this glass display with five bottles of cologne or perfume. And then there's a little tube going into each bottle and then there's a credit card reader and five buttons underneath each one. You swipe your card for a dollar and, and you put your hand up to it or your neck or whatever and you pay a dollar to get one spray of perfume. And it's so it's like 90 plus percent margins. Welcome to the Kerner office. We have another Holdco Bros. Episode for you today where Nick and I talk business ideas. We had five business ideas this time I think we. One was an app idea. We had two different podcast ideas. We had an idea to do inbound co call center based on a specific niche. And then we had a couple of unique vending machine ideas followed by a content idea. Kind of like Diners Drive ins and dives, but better. So hope you enjoy, hope you have fun. Please like and subscribe and we'll see you next time. All right, so this is just kind of a kitschy little app idea. Okay. You know how I went on the. I went on a camp out with my church group about a month ago. We went to middle of nowhere Missouri, Beautiful, but very, very rural. And we went zip lining, yada yada yada. And then afterwards it's like, hey, we're going to go get ice cream at this random place. And there was this random gas station. I don't remember what it was called.

Random.

It was very run down. And there were no signs for ice cream out front, but they were known for having these massive stop me, stop me massive ice cream cones. Soft serve, where like the baby size was like 10 inches. The small size was like 16. And then large was like, it was like 3 pounds of ice cream on a cone. Okay.

Did they advertise that it was 10 inches, but it was actually like 6.

I'm gonna power through that. So there's no signage out front. It's just like gas station and country store.

There's.

It's nothing about ice cream out front, but then you walk in and then off to the left they have the little, you know, it's just soft serve machines and pictures of the ice cream cones so you know what size you're getting and it's huge. And they were as Big as advertised. Okay. And so that's what this place was known for. And I don't remember. Hold on, let me actually find it. One sec.

What did you search?

Large ice cream cones. Gas station, Arkansas. Okay, so this is.

There are some people who are AI prompt engineers. You are a Google prompt engineer, my friend.

I am. I am. So this place is like an hour from Bentonville, Arkansas, right near the border of Missouri in a city called. Geez. Garfield. Hold on. Garfield, Arkansas. Okay. And the gas station is called Shortstop. Conoco. Okay.

Okay.

So if you go look this up. Shortstop Conoco, 4.2 stars, 1400 reviews. And you can see the picture. Shortstop General store. Okay. Jewelry, leather, yada, yada, yada. And so my point is, you don't know this place sells ice cream. But like, ever, all the locals were like, you should go to Shortstop. You should go to Shortstop. Okay, so we went in and it was delicious ice cream. It was really good. And it's like if you go to a random part of the world or country, you want to get what that place is known for, right? You don't just want to go to McDonald's. You want to go to something unique. But how do you find that you can't go to Google Maps, you can't go to Yelp. Okay. So I think someone should build an app, like an app app. An iPhone app called Known for. Okay. And you tediously scrape. I don't. You could use AI to do it. You could use. You could. You could literally use AI to scrape all the reviews for the most common words, like who knows? Wow. We found a gas station in rural Arkansas where all the reviews are talking about ice cream. Hmm. There's something there. We're going to put that on the app. And it's like a Google Maps or Yelp, but for things that these place. Maybe it's New York City, maybe it's Garfield, Arkansas. Known for. That's what it's called. What do you think?

That's a good idea. What was. What was the original company that Sam Par launched?

I don't know.

I want to say it was something similar to this, where it was like New York City Specific X.

It was like a roommate matching service.

That's what it was. That's what it was, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Roommate matching. And he did this where it was like they went hyperlocal in certain markets and they aggregated the data and they got a ton of subscribers for it.

Right.

Because they were putting out it out. That's what it was. It was like this Restaurant. And this market is the Jerry Seinfeld of this market. Right. And people loved it because they're like, it is the Jerry Seinfeld.

That's hilarious. Yeah. They use that to make infographics to drive more users to their. Right, right, right. Because infographics would go viral.

It's the same idea of like you could.

Yeah, you could use the same marketing idea for this.

Right, right. A micro newsletter or anything else that's localized. But I love the name. That is a freaking great name. You already bought the domain, right?

No, it's not available. I got another good name for you.

Okay.

Sometimes the best business ideas are born from the best business names. Make that the hook. Muhammad. Here's a podcast. This is a podcast business idea name where you interview people that are like, what?

I think I know where you're going and I'm excited for it. Keep going.

I don't think you do.

Okay.

You interview people that like, work for companies or something. Maybe they're anonymous, maybe they're not, but they're kind of like whistleblowers. They're spilling the secrets of an organization or a person or influencer or something.

Is it called Dirty Dogs? Dunder Chip?

No.

Oh, okay.

It's called off the Record. What do you think.

That was a record Scratch that. I just did. That's a really good one.

It's a good name, right?

Dude, there could be an app too, off the record. Remember that app, Whisper?

Whisper, yeah. Yeah, it's kind of like that, but it's like a long form podcast or YouTube channel and it's like someone that works for Apple and they're like spilling these secrets and it like I did just. People love hearing secrets. It's in our human nature, you know.

I think there's a market for that in the sense that like, I'm trying to get feedback on my podcast right now and you know this. It's just hard to get people to actually fill out feedback. And when they do, they know you. And so they're like, it's so good. I listen to every episode. I love your humor.

Right. And thanks, Mom.

You just tend to discount that. You're just like, okay, cool. I mean, you like me, but I want to know the real feedback. And that would be a cool app idea or. Or whatever idea where it was like anonymous feedback that you could sift through. And I would probably get like toxic really quickly. But just somewhere you could go where it's like, I want to see, like, what does Whisper say about this company? Oh, interesting. Those are the things that actually people complain about, right? Just so you have a balanced side of both things. Like, you just know what you're getting into potentially with the company as you were talking. You know, I think what else would be like a really good podcast is identifying those types of companies, right? The short stop Conoco, Phillips or whatever, ice cream shop. And like flying to those places and filming, like, getting the ice cream, talking to the owner and just bringing awareness to that place. Because there's like, every city has that place. Like, oh, you gotta. You gotta try Steve's pizza place. This is the best paid place in three counties.

Tri state area.

In the. In the tri state. We're not the tri state, we're the do state. I'll tell you what. But that I like, that would be a really interesting. Like, I would watch that. And it doesn't just have to be food places, but food places. Obviously it's like really popular because like you said, you want to experience what that place is known for.

Yeah, well, that's what I'm trying to do with the business, right? Like, I'm going to a barbecue place in Tyler, Texas next month to film a video. And. And it's not like a Guy Fieri thing on, like, tell me how you make this brisket. It's like, tell me what you paid for this brisket and how many do you sell a day, right? And it's like, it is a twentieth of the size of the market as like diners drive ins and dives. But it's like, that's fine. I. I want to talk to only business owners anyway.

You could do it where it's just focused on food or you could do it where it's like, all right, this week I went to Rolling Suds and I went. Went with them on a job and we talked about the economics, right? And this week I went to this barbecue restaurant and on. I don't know. Lincoln, Nebraska, is known for corn husking. And when you go to Lincoln, you gotta go to this corn husking event. Like, you know what I mean? Just like something cool that you got to go see everywhere has that where it's like, oh, you got to go.

See this, or you got to go.

Eat at this place.

And.

And that could be cool. Like just going through the experience.

Known for. Yeah, maybe known for is just like a content series and not an app.

Oh, that's so good.

Gosh dang it, that's good.