Q&A: Facebook Group Marketing, AI Clones, Domain Name Investing & more⏐Ep. #130

Welcome to the Kerner office. It is Wednesday. Just like last Wednesday, I did a Q and A episode where I answered your questions. So let's get right to it today. All right, let's learn about an escape room business.

Hi Chris. Two quick questions. One, I read that you're waking up always early 5am and starting to work already. For me, that would be really a hassle. Do you believe in early birds and night owls? Or how do you see that in the work environment sometimes. Second one. We have an escape room based in Belgium and I think you would have some crazy marketing or marketing hack IDs to make it more lively and creating some buzz around the city where it's located. Maybe you have some ideas on that. Have a great day.

All right. I don't know how to pronounce your name, so I won't try, but awesome. We've got a caller from Europe here. Two questions. Am I a night owl? Am I an early bird? And the answer is yes. Neither one. Both. I don't know. Sometimes I stay up really late if I get in a flow state. Sometimes I wake up really early. If there's a lot I need to get done that day, it's about 50 50. I'm not super opinionated about either one. Do what works for you. I rely on caffeine heavily and they say it's not good for you. I know people trying to quit it, but why would you ever quit caffeine? I mean, come on. I noticed zero negative downsides. I don't notice any downsides to caffeine. I'm sure they're there. I don't know about them yet. Ignorance is bliss. I'm going to keep drinking my 250 milligrams a day or so. Next question. You have an escape room in Belgium? Creative growth, hacky marketing, viral stunts you could pull to grow your escape room. What a good, interesting, thought provoking question. I love these Instagram accounts I see of people hiding money across a random city. They'll take a $50 bill, they'll put it somewhere random like under a brick and throw. Then they'll just take a video panning just in the immediate area and then they'll post the exact time. They'll say like Austin, Texas, 2:37pm first to find it gets it. And these videos get hundreds of thousands of views. They get more views than people than there are in Austin, Texas. So you could totally do something like that. Put like a QR code or a cryptic symbol somewhere in Belgium. I don't know. Are you in Brussels and post it to your Instagram page. Or you could find local influencers and send them mystery boxes where they have to do stunts or find clues to even open the box. Maybe it's a box with a lockbox or combination on it. And don't even ask them to post about it. Just send it to them for free. Spend 2 or $300 making 5 or 10 of these things, and then see how many of them post organically and how much traffic does that bring to your business or your website. And then scale it from there, if the numbers work. I saw this Instagram video where someone printed out these flyers that had a QR code, and it said, I know you cheated on me. Well, now the secret is out. It was just that text with a QR code, and then when you scan it, it just directs to a local business's Instagram page. Do something like that. I feel like escape rooms are pretty well established at this point. There's gotta be good examples of competitors you have, even if here in America that have grown through viral methods like these. Great question. Either way. All right, let's go to Kate.

Hi, Chris. This is Kate from Australia. I have a really similar combination of toxic skills to you. I'm extremely impatient. I have a thousand ideas a day. I love starting businesses, but I kind of realized after 10 years of doing this, I don't love running them. I love coming up with them. I love ideation. I love putting it all together, and I love thinking about how great it could be. I have typically, basically never founded a business with a co founder, really. I think what I need is amazing operational people that can sort of take the baton for me and run with it. I really would love to have information on how you spend your day ideating, creating. I don't even know how many PTY ltds I have. I'm from Australia. It's like I also have a toddler that I homeschool. And I do truly believe that the. The day becomes what you make of it. How do you create operational success when you're ideating and someone needs to run it?

Oh, Kate, your question gives me tingles. This is such a good question. I love it so much, and I'm glad there are other weirdos out there like me. So, first of all, you need a Kirk in your life. Who's Kirk? Kirk is my very close friend, my business partner, my cousin, my partner at Texas snacks, our Buc EE's business man. If every crazy wacko like me and Kate had a Kirk in their lives. There would only be billionaires in this world. Okay, here's what it takes. This is an interesting framework that I. I'm obsessed with. No one will love your idea like you love your idea. It's kind of like kids. Ideas are like kids. We love our kids. We think they're freaking awesome. They can do no wrong. That's how business ideas are. That's why you should tell everyone about your business idea, because they're not going to steal it because they don't love it. It could be an amazing idea. They might actually freaking think it's a genius. They might think it's the best idea they've ever heard. But there's a 99.9% chance they won't steal it because it's not theirs. They didn't think of it. They didn't give birth to it. They don't have ownership of it. They haven't put in the sweat equity it takes to really build an amazing idea. So that's both a good and a bad thing. It's a good thing because you should share your ideas. There is a small chance it will get stolen, but I wouldn't worry about it. But the bad thing is when you go to find a partner that's supposed to be an operating partner, you got to sell them on your idea and they got to buy into it ideologically, maybe even literally. And that's really, really hard to get someone to do. How do I know this? Because I have friggin holdco called co founders.com where we partner with operators and we say, hey, here's some ideas. And we give them three for that reason, because we know that we cannot force them to love an idea. So we give them an option of 3. 3. They get to pick this. Maybe it's tree trimming. Okay, awesome. And they might fall in love with this idea. But guess what? James, my partner in the tree trimming business, he was at my house right here in this room just last week. We were talking. We spent half the day together just working. And he said, chris, I would have moved here from Ohio to start any business. Trees Cool. H Vac. Cool newsletter. Awesome. Doesn't matter. I just wanted to be in the game. I wanted to riff with you on ideas. It didn't matter to me. So even though he picked tree trimming, he would have picked anything. Okay, which proves my point even more. And James, I love you. So it's almost better if you find an operating partner that already has their own idea. Now, I know that kind of sounds like it's defeating the purpose because you need someone to run with your idea that you gave birth to and that you love. But what you can do is you can take their business idea and you can fall in love with customer acquisition ideas. Zero to one is not just taking a business from zero to one. It's taking a customer acquisition channel from zero to one, a sales channel, an employee from zero to one. You can have different quote, business ideas inside a parent business idea if that makes sense. Does that make sense? And so you need a Kirk. You need to find someone that you know, love and trust even if you don't know them today. You need to find them. You need to seek after them and meet them. They need to be the Yin to your Yang, the Kirk to your Chris. They need to be the ones to take it from 1 to 10, and you need to be the one to take it from 1 to 10. Now, that is hard because I've come to Kirk a dozen times over the last few years, say, kirk, let's launch this. That's launch this, let's launch that. And guess what? He doesn't have entrepreneurial add like I do. So he's like, oh, whoa, Kris, Texas Tax is actually doing great. There's so many things I want to be doing here. It's growing, but I have so many ideas I want to implement. Like, I am all in on this one business. I, I don't want to start this random business with you because this one's going great. Am I going to argue with that? No. So that is kind of an inherent problem with finding your Kirk, is they're only going to work want to work on that one idea. But it's also not a problem because if they're still working on that one idea, it means that idea is working quite well. So, tiger, don't change the stripes. You are who you are. Kate, don't do what I did and go give $100,000 to TCU in an effort to be more organizational, more corporate, and get your mba, lean into who you are, outsource your weaknesses, leverage your strengths, say with me, outsource your weaknesses, triple down on your strengths and that being 0 to 1 and find your Kirk. 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 dot. Okay, Laura, next.

So my question is around. I'm thinking about building a super hyper local Facebook group, newsletter and podcast that I can monetize with ads and sponsorships from local businesses who will want to get in front of this targeted growing list. So my main question is, what would you do to rapidly grow the email list, Facebook group, and the sponsor and ad revenue? And then as a follow up, an additional question is what other service might you suggest offering local businesses, say in the AI automation area that I could mostly offload to the suite of tools that's in go high level or other, you know, kind of integrations like Zapier. I'm tired of working with high workload clients, but still want to be able to offer a service that's easy to scale to local businesses who maybe are in that Twitter AI business bubble that we online nerds are all in.

So.

So thank you so much. Can't wait to hear what you think.

Laura, what a beautiful question. I hope by now you listened to my Q and A episode a week before today, last Wednesday, that would have been episode number 124, I believe, because I went on a 15 minute rant about newsletters. Okay, so go listen to that one if you haven't already. Okay, I might be telling you stuff here you already know. I don't know how much you've listened to my podcast, but if you don't already do this, you need to go to Twitter and follow creating Joss J A s. He has a local newsletter in Edmonton or Calgary, Alberta, Canada. He's doing great. He's crushing it. And then you need to follow LifeOf underscore Scoop. And that is Ryan Snedden of the Naptown Scoop in Annapolis, Maryland. Those are the two local newsletter gods. You may already follow them, but if you're listening to this and you don't, you should. They're much more knowledgeable in local newsletters than I am. But as I said last week, to be fair to you, you left this question like a month ago, long before I recorded last week. So as I said last week, it all comes down to paid ads, Facebook ads, and Facebook groups. Because you're in a local area, you're building a local newsletter. You can acquire customers for free in Facebook groups because you're one of them. You're one of your customer base. Therefore you have trust and authority. See if you can buy some local Facebook groups. Oh man, talk about cheap. Those are the cheapest Facebook groups you can find because how many people in the world want to buy Schenectady, New York's local buy, sell, garage sale Facebook group. Exactly zero people. Almost none of these local groups are monetized. You can use something like Group Boss to collect email addresses at the door. You can sponsor yourself. You can be vertically integrated. I would definitely do that. Aside from that, I would just do meta ads on Facebook and Instagram to people in your local area. You might have to pay a little more because the market is very limited. Right. You might have to spend $2 to acquire a subscriber as opposed to one if it were a worldwide or nationwide newsletter. But that's okay because your CPMs, aka your ad rates that you can charge on your newsletter are going to be two to four times what a normal newsletter would be because your market is that much more targeted. And then you want to monetize by offering a higher ticket service. White labeled on go High Level. Very smart. If you go to high level up.com you'll be able to use my affiliate link. Highlevelup.com forwards to my discount one month free. What would you sell on High Level? What would I sell? I would do like an AI, like an automated call service where AI answers calls on behalf of the business owner. That is a service that a high level can white label for you. Or just like an automated review request. Automated review responder. You could build like a full suite of Google business profile management on high level. Charge 500 to $2,000 a month. What a good business idea. Like this is just everything that a good business idea should have. You're vertically integrated. You're your own advertiser. You don't have to be your own advertiser, but if you are, you'll make a lot more money. You're going to white label something on High Level. You're leaning into AI. It's a newsletter. Like you're combining all the things I love about these business frameworks into one. So you're on the right track. You're going to crush it. All right, let's go to Kat and hey, can we talk about the female representation here? Come on. Loving it. Also, don't forget, if you're listening to this and you want to leave a question, tkopod.com scroll to the very bottom. You're going to see a widget where you can hit record. Leave me a question for me to answer on this podcast. You can make it anonymous or not. Let's go to Kat. Kate, then Kat.

Hi, Chris, it's Kat. And I have a question about crypto. I have a bunch of cool URLs for crypto like Syncoin and Mom Coin and Runcoin and a bunch of URLs for NFT like TheCoolestNFT.com. in fact, they're all dot coms, but I don't know what to do with them and how to put them to use. Do you have any ideas or resources I should look at? Is there a Making a crypto coin or NFTs for dummies that's worth using? I'm just a stay at home mom with a lot of big dreams and I'd like to do something fun and document the story along the way. Thanks for any help and if it's appropriate to bleep out any of these, please do. Thanks so much, Kat.

You are my spirit animal. You sound awesome. You're a domain name collector, just like me. It is so nice to know I'm not the only one out there. So I kind of have some bad news for you. I don't mean to throw water on your fire, and this is just my opinion, so feel free to ignore it. But that is why you called, after all. So, I'm obsessed with domain names and I've kind of been obsessed with crypto since 2016. Here's the thing, your URLs are awesome. Momcoin.com, simcoin awesome. Love it. Like, these are things I just heard from Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase, that I heard from him. Like, he's my friend. He tweeted that a million cryptocurrencies are being created every week. One million every week. I distinctly remember in 2016, 2017, there were 2,000 total. And I thought that was insane. What do we need 2,000 cryptocurrencies for? That is way too many. And now, a mere eight years later, there's a million created every week. But if you think about it in a different way, these aren't trying to compete with the US dollar or with Bitcoin or Ethereum. They're solving all kinds of problems. Problems. And honestly, most of them don't solve any problem. But they're more like a website than a cryptocurrency, right? They may enable you to stake an ownership claim in a creator or a business or a project or an NFT or whatever. Or they might just, you know, most of them are just stupid meme coins. Either way, the problem with having these domain names is that premium domain names are not that valuable to cryptocurrencies. Okay? I don't even need to search. And I know, there's already going to be a Mom Coin and a simcoin and maybe all of those other projects that you mentioned, and I presume because you didn't mention it, that they're not reaching out to you to buy your domain name. Now, that could be for one of two reasons. Number one, you don't have it listed on a marketplace like GoDaddy or Dan.com or I forget all the names of them. There's a bunch of marketplaces where you can take your domain names with a few clicks. You can just list them for sale. Does you no harm. You might as well do that. In fact, I would do that, like today, because then you can actually start getting offers for them. Now, people can offer you something for your domain name whether they're listed on a marketplace or not, but it's just a lot more friction. It's going to be harder for them to find you unless it's listed. So I'm assuming that these token owners aren't already reaching out to you, and that's for a good reason, because what does any cryptocurrency owner want? They want the price of their cryptocurrency to go up. Okay? And you could say, well, that means they need a good website because then more people will find them. But people aren't just Googling Mom Coin to buy it. That's not how cryptos spread. They spread in discord channels and in Telegram channels and on WhatsApp channels and on and on Twitter. That's where they're spreading. And on TikTok even, and Instagram, social media. And so the domain name is just really not that valuable for these random cryptocurrencies. Now, if Mom Coin, we all know there are examples of things like Shib Doge and fartcoin and what have you reaching tens of billion dollars or hundreds of billions of dollars of market cap. So there is precedent for Mom Coin to be a. A big thing. And if or when that happens, someone will come knocking for your premium domain name. So I do not advise you to let collapse or expire or to sell them for less than what you think they're worth. But I also don't think you should build a cryptocurrency just because you have domain name for them. Now, if you had a good domain name in another niche, like in an AI niche, or in something that's trending, like water quality or microplastics or longevity or something like that, then I might recommend building a domain name around that. But generally Speaking, that's what EMDs are for exact match domain names. Like if you had the domain name h vac, dallas or texas roofing.com, that's an EMD, an exact match domain name. In other words, people are searching for that exact term, which makes you more likely, not definitively, but more likely to rank highly in Google search results because there's more relevance there. So if you want to continue to be a domain name junkie like I am, keep looking, keep hunting for cool domain names. But I wouldn't look in the crypto niche for those reasons. But fingers crossed for you, that mom coin, whoever owns that just takes off. Maybe Elon tweets about it and they form a board and that board sits around the table and says, we really need to own the dot com. We just got to own it. So we don't want to pay any more than 100 grand for it, but let's spend up to 100 grand on momcoin.com and when they do, they're going to come to Cat and you're going to make six figures. All right, let's go to Justin.

Hey, guys. Love the podcast. I was listening to episode 78 where you were talking about cloning people and creating an AI bot around that, and I was wondering, wondering if you could dive into a little bit more detail about specifically how you'd set up the business around that, how you would partner with multiple people. Let's say you want to clone 5, 10, or 15 people. How would you go into business with them and partner with them? And how would you structure the business? That would be really interesting to hear that. Episode number 78 was a banger. That was awesome. And I'd love to hear your thoughts on going a little bit deeper.

Justin, you the man. Thank you for the kind words. You heard it here first. Episode 78, which was entitled how to Make Money by cloning others using AI from October 14th. Go back and listen to that. Here's what I would do, Justin. I would go to creators, community owners, community managers, influencers, creators, content creators, because that is a Persona that is monetizing their likeness, their image, their brand, their content. And they're probably not doing it as in depth as you're talking about doing with their content. So I would build an agent. And I'm only telling you to do this because I'm assuming you have the skills to do this, because it just sounds like you do. Okay, build an agent using Replit or OpenAI or whatever that. Let's say it takes the last 50 Instagram Reels that A creator posted, takes the transcripts from them and it turns it into a chatbot. And you find some automation to do this to 20 different creators in the background as you work 20 different chatbots. I know I'm oversimplifying it, but by the time this comes out, it'll probably be really easy based on how fast things are advancing. And then let's say 20. You want to take these 20 creators and you want to find as much contact info on them as you can. Their Strava profile, their PayPal profile, Instagram, Twitter, everything. Email, multiple email, phone number, get as much info as you can. Because they're getting hit up in the DMs all the time. So you want to hit them on other platforms avenues as well and say, hey, I built a chatbot for you. I think you're gonna love it, it's awesome. Okay, well what can I do with this? Well, if they have a paid community, then it could be a feature in their paid community. It could be another feature to add to get more members to their community. Or you know what you could do? You could even go to like school, SK O L or Kajabi or Collab. Go, Collab, K O L L A B or Gumroad or Etsy. Go to any of these places where people host communities, Facebook groups, anything. And this, the principle applies, right? This could be a feature that the owners of these communities or the creators sell to their members. Maybe it's a package deal with the community price, maybe it's extra, maybe it's free, but it's kind of time consuming. It's especially time consuming if you don't know how to use agents. Because even if you're adept at ChatGPT, which many of these creators probably are, they're still going to have to spend the time and finesse the prompting and get it just right so it doesn't hallucinate. You got to make sure it draws on all the data, not just some of it. You're going to know things like do I use Claude, do I use perplexity? ChatGPT, they're not going to know these things. And this is a valuable thing. And you could sell it to them for a one time package fee, or you could sell it to them for a percentage of revenue that they're able to resell it for. But I mean you got a lot of options at your disposal here. There's a lot of platforms out there with communities that you can scrape and I scraped the school communities. It's if you go to tkopod.com subscribe if you unless you already have scroll down there, do a control find on the Google Doc for School S K O O L and you will see hundreds or thousands of scraped school communities and it shows how much they all make. And you can start reaching out to those owners in there and you can say, hey, I'm going to give this to you for free, but for X dollars, I'm going to take all this other content that you have within your community, outside your community, from your emails, your Google Drive, whatever, and turn it into a chatbot. I'm going to clone you. All right, and that's it for today. We'll do more Q and A here soon on the Kerner office. Please share with a friend. Love you guys. See you next time.