Q&A: Wedding venues, vending machine locator, which side hustle, paid ads. Ep. #005. Small Business Ideas and Entrepreneurship

Hello, welcome to episode five of Kerner's Corner. Today we explored seven different things. So the first caller talked about a wedding venue and how to evaluate if he should open a wedding venue or how saturated is the market. What other ancillary services could he sell at the wedding venue? Second caller wanted to buy a vending machine location biz on acquire.com and coincidentally I had already spoken to the seller of this business via email about a month ago. Third caller wanted to talk about an an AI idea for large learning models for law firms. Actually he's trying to sell like basically an AI version of a training manual to law firms. Fourth guy has like a bunch of different side hustles and he just wants to know which one to focus on. He has a community as a newsletter. He also has a full time job that pays him pretty well. The next guy has a paid ads agency with one dentist client and he wants to know how do I find more customers? The sixth guy, or sorry, six girl, she was a female, wanted to know about Twitter Spaces. Is it worth it? Does Spaces work for growing an audience? And it's interesting because we had this conversation on Spaces and the last person wanted to evaluate opening a VA agency, which niche to chase, which revenue model to chase. It was pretty interesting. So seven callers in total. This was episode five. If you're listening on Spotify or Apple podcasts or any podcast, please subscribe. Like I just, I want to know if is this good? If it's good, then subscribe. If you're on YouTube, subscribe. That'd be great. I'd really appreciate it. We're going to switch up the format next week on episode six, we're going to do more pre submitted questions. So basically people will email me up front, they'll have a question and then I'll vet them more. That way there's no dead space in between callers. That way the questions can be more curated. They can still ask it live. I'm not going to do prep beforehand. We'll just know a general outline of what people are going to ask. That way if people have a question that's just not interesting, then we won't let them on the show, frankly. Or if they have a question that's very interesting, then we'll put it front and center. That way only the best content will make it here and we won't have any more. Oh, you're breaking up. Oh, like dead space. And just because Spaces is fine, but it's not perfect, there are some downsides to it. So it's just going to be a little more curated. I hope you like the format starting next week. But for now, enjoy today's episode. Welcome, this is Chris Kerner. This is episode five of Kerner's Corner. Thank you for listening in. Thank you for entrusting me with your valuable time. I am dialing in, so to speak, from Logan, Utah. It's very cold outside and I'm in my Grandma's house. She's 96 years old and you might literally hear her talking about the Biden assassination because she had a dream about that and she forgets it was a dream and we remind her every five minutes. So I love my grandma Marilyn. So yeah, you might be hearing her. I'm in her living room right now with all the doors closed. Anyway, welcome, this is Chris Kerner, Kerners Corner, Episode five of a ten week pilot test. I'm having fun so far. I hope you guys are enjoying it. I hope you're getting some value out of it. It's a good way to connect with a lot of people at scale. And then we upload it to podcasts and YouTube formats as well. So if that's your preferred route, then go check us out on Spotify or Apple or wherever. YouTube under Kerner's Corner. We'd love to have you. So just a quick reminder of how this works. You can get in line, so to speak, by hitting request to speak. And then you're going to tell me your question, your problem, your concern. And then I'm going to ask a bunch of follow up questions and then once I feel like I've grasped it well enough, we're going to cut you off kindly just to keep things flowing and then I'll answer you and then we'll go to the next person in the list and then every four callers we will put or Heath, my co host, will put a poll in the comments that will help us know what types of questions or answers you guys find most interesting. So we can lean into that. So Heath, are you there? Did I miss anything? You got it all. I will keep track. We'll post them in the thing. If you want to ask Chris a question, you can put it in the comments and that'll help me know who is interested. And I can add you that way too if the request button is not working. Perfect. Hey Matthew.

Chris, can you hear me? All right?

Yeah. Is that Matthew?

Yeah, it's Matthew.

Hey, good to talk to you, man.

Yeah, you too. So the question I have isn't for my business, it's actually for my wife. So she right now is running a cleaning business. It does about $20,000 per month. It's going great. But sometime over the next year or two, she wants to transition to a different business. And she has this dream business idea.

For her, which is it would be.

A quasi wedding venue, like, part, maybe gift shop. Like, ideally it's a couple of acres and she could do some gardening and sell some local food, host some community classes, local event, really, with the intent of, like, making a dent in the local community. That's something that she's really passionate about. And so as we think about making that a reality, like, we know it'll be fairly capital intensive. We have no experience in real estate, and we definitely would want it to be profitable and an actual business so it can sustain itself. So just as we're starting to think through how we could make this a reality, I'd just be curious to know how you would recommend we think about and plan for it.

Okay, so let's go back to the cleaning business. When you say in a year or two, what does she want to do with the cleaning business when she transitions to this wedding idea?

Yeah, she would probably try and sell it. It's not in a place right now where she could, but I think she's progressing and could be in a place maybe in a year where she could sell it for at least a couple hundred thousand dollars.

Okay, and is that. Is it like, is she outsourcing all the cleaning or is. Does she have her own crews that do the cleaning?

Yeah, they're all contractors and they. Yeah, so she actually runs the business in a separate state. It's run completely remotely.

Okay. Okay. And 20k is top line and it's somewhat profitable.

Yeah, about between 20 and 30% net is where it's sitting right now.

Okay, cool. And with the wedding venue, are you looking to buy an existing building or build a building or buy an existing wedding venue or repurpose a different type of real estate?

Yeah, it would probably be buying something existing that has some land around it. Like I said, if we ideally could get a couple of acres so that it could turn into more than just a wedding venue. But whatever is most, like, financially viable is probably what we would end up doing.

Okay, and are you willing to say where this would be?

That is very, like, to be determined.

Is it going to be near you or will it be remote like the cleaning business?

It would be where we're living.

Okay, and so back to the original question. You're curious how, like, what you could do to make this both for the community and like a nonprofit feel passion project, yet still be economically viable?

Yeah. Truth is it would be a business first with kind of the ancillary benefit of being able to help the community.

Okay, and have you done any research yet on what the competitive landscape looks like for wedding venues in the year? And would weddings be like the flagship product, whereas everything else like the garden, the gift shop, that would just be for fun to serve the community, but the weddings pay the bills. Is that accurate?

That is just an assumption on my end that wedding venues do. Would do the bulk of the revenue. The truth is that I don't know, it's. It's possible.

Like I would think so.

Community classes, local events, like they could contribute. But yeah, probably the wedding venue.

Okay, and have you already done research yet on how, like how competitive the wedding venue market is in your area?

We like very well maybe moving to another state in the next handful of years. So it's hard to do, but. So I don't have a good answer for that.

And would the venue be like where you're moving to or would you be leaving that area?

It would be where we're moving to and something that she would want to really build a brand and we'd probably be in that area for a decade plus.

Okay, and have you, have you already used Outscraper before?

No.

Okay. All right, I think I've got your prescription, so I'm going to give you the rundown. And thank you for calling in.

Sweet.

All right, so I love the wedding venue business. I've done quite a bit of research here because I'm actually seriously considering turning my own house into a wedding venue at some point. Long story short, my house would be probably better served as a commercial property than as a residential property. And so I've looked into this business a lot. I love the business. I think that one wedding a month would, in my case, it could pay the bills, it could pay the mortgage, and then anything after that would just be gross margin. So if I were Matthew, what I would do, you don't have to wait to move there. I would get on Outscraper and I would run a Google Maps search for all of the wedding venues in a. You can really travel for a wedding. Let's say 100 mile radius. Let's just say I have no idea where he's moving to. Let's say at Charlotte, North Carolina. Okay. So I would find all of the zip codes in 100 mile radius of Charlotte, North Carolina, and I would Run an outscraper search. It's really easy, user friendly to get all the wedding venues. And then I would go find a comparable metroplex. So go look at a list of all the metroplexes in the country by population size. Find one with similar demographics and similar population. So let's say, let's say Knoxville, Tennessee, and that's probably somewhat similar. And do another search and then do that two more times. Similar metroplexes, similar population sizes, similar cultures. Right. Because Seattle, Washington is very different from Memphis, Tennessee. And then I would use that data to determine a baseline. Okay, so let's just say Knoxville, Tennessee can support one wedding venue per 10,000 people. And I wish I had this research fresh. I have a Google Doc somewhere with all this wedding research. I know there's, I don't remember how many weddings there are per year, but and then say, all right, Knoxville, Tennessee has half a percent of the nation's population. So I'm just going to say, all right, there's a million weddings per year. That's 5,000 weddings per year in Knoxville, Tennessee and they have 36 wedding venues. Okay, so that means every wedding venue is doing however many weddings per day or per month or per week or whatever. And get that baseline, put them side by side in a Google sheet and say, all right, okay. In these other three markets outside of Charlotte, we can expect one venue to do 50 weddings per year. And then that's like phase one. That's the easy part. The harder part is hopping on the phone with a lot of these venues and saying, hey, I want to book a date or getting on the knot dot com. A lot of times they will sync their calendars with the Knot and say, all right, how booked is this venue and why are they booked? What's different about them? Or is there just a ton of demand and even the ugly venues are booked? And that way, all right, this baseline, like this random market over in Knoxville, Tennessee, actually this could really use a wedding venue based on the research I've done. Get your baseline and then get on the phone, find out how booked are these guys. In the future, maybe you learn that the average venue's booked out the next three months, but not six. And then you find this one city where the average venue is booked out nine months and then do all that same research in Charlotte and that way you can see how competitive is the market here. Or not. And, and you might just learn that it's oversaturated. You might learn it's under saturated and then use that info to make A decision. This is a big decision. There's not a lot of businesses that you have to go all in on. This kind of is. I would not recommend building a building. I would recommend buying one. It's almost always easier to buy one below replacement cost than to build one new. And then find a building that can be repurposed with other stuff in case the wedding stuff doesn't work out. Maybe as an Airbnb or something like that, and of course your pricing research. But the most important thing you want to do is find out how saturated your market is or not. And then let that guide your decision. Because if it's oversaturated and you've never done weddings before, then don't try to bank on the idea that ours will be better because you just don't know enough to know that everything looks good on paper. But when you actually get in the weeds, sometimes you learn, man, these wedding venues suck. Oh, they're not doing this, they're not doing that. And you're three years into the business and you're like, oh, that's why it seems like they suck, because this is a really hard business. I did the same thing with my third party logistics company. It's like, oh, wow, no one likes their E commerce fulfillment company. No. Oh, we could change. We could change the game. We're going to do that. We're going to do flat fee inside a variable. We're going to do this instead of this. We're going to do that. And then two years in, we were doing everything that everyone else was doing because they're doing all those things for a reason. So do the saturation research. Find out how your market looks, find a building that could be repurposed as other stuff and then go all in. And then expect for the wedding side of the business to be profitable without anything else, without the classes, without the garden, without the gift shop. That way you can at least cover your base. And then anything above that, the true passion project plays can just be cherry on top. That's what I would do. Hey, is this Meral?

That is.

Hey, how are you, man?

I'm good, I'm good. Yeah, I figured I was gonna wait and see what would happen, but it sounds like he didn't work out. But I'll be quick. So I came across a business on acquire.com and wanted to hear your thoughts on it. So, basic premise is it's a vending location finder business. And so the way it basically works is someone that's looking for a location basically goes to the site. They have a free consult with the person that runs the business. And then after that, they basically pay 500 bucks up front. The person goes to work and looks for a location and wherever they're located, once they find a location, secure it. They basically connect the person to the business, and then they get paid the second 500, and then that's the end of the story. So wondering if you think this is a potentially good business to buy. You have any questions for me?

Have you ever emailed me about this?

I haven't.

Okay. Is this business listed for 16 grand?

That's correct.

Okay. So the seller of this business emailed me on February 1, asking me kind of the other side of this question. Believe it or not, small world.

I actually did already meet with the seller and I had a conversation with her yesterday. Yesterday, actually. And it just. I feel like it has potential, but I don't know, I just wanted to hear your thoughts and see what you're thinking.

Yeah. So what do you like about this business and what are you scared of?

I like it because I've told you before, but I'm a sales guy. That aspect of the business seems like very approachable and it's okay. This is like my wheelhouse. The other aspect I like about it is the systems that she has in place and the way she's doing things aren't the most efficient. And I feel like adding in a va potentially using tools like you've mentioned before, outscraper things like that would really. Because she hasn't done any cold calling at all. She's only done emailing, so a lot of that stuff can be upgraded. And then her website is quite frankly crappy, so that's something too. And then she's also not doing any like paid search at all. She's getting everything through organic, which was obviously good. But yes, that's another potential thing.

How is her biggest competitor growing? I have both websites pulled up side by side. So their strategies, the biggest competitor, what.

They'Re doing in the space is they're not offering this done for you aspect. So what they're doing is they're saying, hey, you pay us X amount of dollars, we'll give you a list of 200 to 300 people and you got to go call them. And then we'll give you a cold call script. We'll give you an email script. So obviously that weighs very easy for the competitor, but the price point is lower at basically 200 or $300. And then the location finder is like a Thousand bucks for one location. If it's multiple, then it's a little less per unit.

So with this business that you're looking at, the kind of play is to just get on the phone, hit the payment, find somewhere to put a vending machine, and then sell that lead one time for a thousand bucks to the operator.

Exactly.

Okay. Has it been growing or shrinking for the last six months?

It seems like he hasn't really been putting too much time in it. She's launching another venture in the vending space. So I think this is sort of like, not really a priority. And so it just doesn't seem it has been growing. I think the potential is there. It's just. It is like buying a job. Like we've. Like we've heard before, where when she gets that person that wants to find a location, it basically will take anywhere from two to three days to find the location.

So is it a thousand bucks only if you for sure close a deal, or is that just to sell the lead?

No.

Yeah, it's a guarantee. So if you can't find a location for that person in like, 30 to 60 days. 30 days is what's on the website. Then it's basically a refund.

Okay. Have you thought of partnering with a Quinn Miller on something like this? Like an influencer in the space?

I did think of Quinn because I know he's, like, really big in the space, and I know he was actually on Twitter, like, when he first started back in 2020, like, selling leads to people. I know he was. He would basically just scrape and sell it for 50 bucks or 100 bucks. So he was doing that, but I haven't reached out to him about it.

No.

Okay. So here's what I would do if I were you. I would go find all of the vending influencers in the space. There can't be more than a hundred. Quinn is obviously one of them. I think Most are on TikTok. Try to get a hold of as many of them as you can. Tell them about this business. I don't know how you want to frame it. Maybe you want to say you're going to buy it, you're thinking of buying it, you own it, you're looking at it. I don't know. But what you can do is get some sort of a referral agreement in place. What I love about the high touch aspect is, is that you've got more money to work with. Yeah, you got to do more work, but you've got more money to work with. Equals higher referral fees. For people like Quinn, everyone that's following Quinn. Not everyone, but a lot of people that are following Quinn or the other influencers are trying to get rich with vending machines, right? Or they're already doing vending machines. It is the most targeted marketed marketing you could ever find. You'll have a higher ROI than both Facebook and Google Ad spend. I would try to cut three to five deals with guys like them, referral deals.

And.

And maybe it's, hey, if you bring me someone, I'll give you half, right? I'll. I'll give you like, I'll funnel half of this thousand bucks through you or a third or whatever.

Got it.

And then see if you can just get something like that penciled. And then only if you get that penciled, then you go ahead and buy the business. Cause at that point, you're basically de risked. It's hard because it's a marketplace that's very high touch. And I can't think of a lot of other examples like that. And so if you're confident on the vending location acquisition side, and that's just a funnel. That's just, I feed a thousand phone numbers into this system and I know it's going to spit out 30 sales, then check that box. That's done. You just need to put some legwork into that. And the other side of it are the buyers to these leads. And I also love this idea because it's geographically driven. It's like thumbtack, right? Thumbtack makes their business by selling the same lead or angie's list to 10 different H vac guys, 10 different roofing guys. But what's brilliant about that is there's 500 home services and there's 5,000 little cities and areas. And so you could sell that hundreds of thousands of times. And it's similar with this. You could sell. There's no shortage of markets that you can find locations for, but you need buyers in those markets. I think the hardest part of this marketplace is the buy side, because the sell side seems like math to me. But the buy side is all right. I just found this. I just found this gas station in schenectady that has four locations. This is a great deal. It's 4,000 bucks. But I have no one in Schenectady. But Quinn Miller probably has four people in Schenectady.

I got you.

Surely one of them's a buyer.

So you're saying finding the location is going to be the easy part, but the challenge is going to be finding a person in some remote place that. That goes to my website. So the best thing to do would be connect to the influencers in the space, figure out a kickback system for them, and if I can get some agreements in place, then that would de. Risk it a lot.

Yeah, because your vending locations are on Google Maps, on Outscaper and everywhere. You can find them easily. But the buyers are. Who knows they're on TikTok. Right?

Exactly.

So go find them. Perfect.

Chris, I appreciate it, man. Have a good one.

No problem. Go buy that ranch, man. Working on it.

All right, See you, man.

See it. It looks like we already have Tim in there. Tim, I'd love to hear from you and if anyone else wants to hop in line, that would be great.

Hey, Chris, like you, I am in an interesting spot. We're driving with a carload of kids, so you might hear them in the background. But excited to share a little bit about what I'm working on. And really here I think the big question for me is going to be a little bit on marketing and a little bit of next steps and to start poking some holes in this idea because I think I accidentally started a business.

Nice. That's exciting.

Yeah, yeah. If you want me to jump in, I can share what happened, but in. In October of last year, I. So for context, I own and operate a Chick Fil, a restaurant. And my HR leader was just getting overrun with just really random questions from our team members, employees, little things like, what's the PTO policy? How do I take off? Can I date a fellow employee? And I thought, man, ChatGPT would be a really cool tool to have to solve this. And so I thought, man, if I could just upload all of our policy manuals and I could upload some of our training materials and then just send a link to my team instead of them asking and taking up time for my HR director, what if they could just ask ChatGPT? So I went and attempted to do that and honestly did the job, but didn't do it super well. And then just through my experience, I got a lot. I just had a lot of concerns around the safety and security of uploading potentially proprietary information to Chat GPT. So, anyway, long story short, I mentioned to a friend of mine who had started his own AI company a few months back, and we built a tool where now you can upload large PDFs, really of any size now in the last couple days, even multiple PDFs, and you can ask questions of those PDFs, and we are working on a beta right Now, I think maybe close to maybe 30 people on the beta testing it out, but we've got a lot of really interesting responses from people who are in a lot of different industries who've said the concept and idea of being able to create your own database of PDFs and documents that's safe, I call it like, you give it the cloak of invisibility and allow anybody that you share that link with ask questions of. It could be really useful. Whether it's lawyers that are trying to look at massive amounts of data and quickly look through all their PDFs and documents, or it's somebody like me who runs a restaurant, we're trying to figure out how to market it. Who should we go after? What should we charge? Yeah, there's just. There's a lot of. I think there's more questions than anything else after having started this.

What of the 30 people that are using it, what are those people? Are they business owners? And how did you find them?

It's a mixture of. Yeah, it's a mixture of people so far. So I would say about 10 of them are lawyers. It's been very interesting. Started through myself and then Jared, I would just guess I call them Co founder Jared knows quite a few lawyers. And then I had a few lawyers just reach out to me via Twitter when I posted about this on Twitter. So just randomly and said, hey, what you're describing is something we'd like to use. We have a lot of concerns uploading things to ChatGPT or they were telling me that ChatGPT would make up case law. It was just fake case law. And so if they were able to essentially feed the backend, this would be really helpful. So I'd say about 30% are lawyers. We have a lot of academics, so people who are doing their master's or PhD work, they're on there. And then the rest would be just a conglomeration of business owners, etc. So that's been really interesting. The lawyers piece has been probably the most fascinating thing to uncover.

So you weren't looking for lawyers. That's just who happened to dm.

No, that's exactly right. That's exactly right. I was blown away. That's been the case. And which is interesting because I just assumed that lawyers wouldn't touch AI because it's the type of thing that's coming for their jobs. So maybe this was an answer to them of, hey, we can actually still utilize it and leverage it. Dozens and dozens and dozens of PDFs could be really helpful for, I assume For a lawyer. We're still learning this. This is just a few weeks in. That's been the thing that surprised me the most.

So do you see this ending up as not just being an HR software, but as an LLM software for whatever seems to have the most demand for it?

Yeah. Like, one of the thoughts we started to have is could you just essentially build a tool and have an API and it plugs into whatever database you want? That's been one route. The other has been, what if we just completely pivoted and said, let's just get a ton of law firms on this and be the number one provider of LLMs and like a safe way to use LLMs for. For lawyers? And could you get a law firm to pay a thousand bucks a month to subscribe to this powerful tool that we can just set over top of whatever database that they want to control and have it safely be used? And so that's been the one side. And then we also. I forgot to mention this. Chris is kind of on the marketing side. There's some, I would say, competitors in the space, but they're. I would say they're a little bit boring. It's. Read my PDF or PDF AI and they just sit on top of. There's a chrome extension for ChatGPT. This is its own. Yeah, it's. This is its own thing. It stands on its own. We are tapped into the OpenAI API, but on the branding side, we decided to call it DocUsage and tap into this idea of wizardry. A little Harry Potter feel I've been describing to people. I've said, hey, look, we offer the Deathly Hallows when it comes to LLMs, we've got the Harry Potter. Everybody's a Harry Potter fan. Like the Deathly Hallows, you've got the cloak of invisibility. Very, very important. So that's that safety and security. You have the Resurrection Stone, which is that and the Elder Wand are different elements of AI and its ability to wield massive control, but then also to bring back from the dead all this information at any given moment. So we've tried to market in that way as well.

Okay, cool. I think I've got all I need, so I'm going to analysis and we'll catch you later.

Love it.

Thank you, Tim.

Cool.

My pleasure.

All right, so I love this idea. I consider this like an AI wrapper or a ChatGPT wrapper, which. That's not a pejorative. That's fine. So in co founders, we're doing something similar with our company Volterra, where we're doing this for skilled nursing facilities and they upload all of their medical records and then our software scans it and says, hey, you need to be billing for this, you need to be billing for that. And so it basically turns a medical biller into a superhero, superhero medical biller. So we're doing this for skilled nursing facilities specifically so they can save more money by billing for codes that they're currently missing. Because right now in skilled nursing facilities, these medical billers are just doing control, find, control, find, and they're missing stuff. Okay, so I'm, I like this because this is a thing you're not inventing something new. But I do think the more this is becoming commoditized, so I think you need to find a niche within a niche, like we did. Right. Our niche was an LLM for skilled nursing facilities specifically, so they can save more money by billing for more things. Now, even though that's a niche within a niche, it's a massive market. So I think you should go with the legal route because that's, that's coming to you already. So take that signal as a good sign. And then I would leave your branding open ended on the front end, point it towards the legal system, but leave it open ended. And you don't really want to call it a read my PDF or a chatbot because a lot of these law firms like it's just going to look like any other thing as you already suggested. So I would have just like a features page with two to five different features after getting feedback from these 10 lawyers that have already reached out, like maybe they could upload all of their previous cases and their paralegals could just ask it questions like, hey, what was this one case? Or hey, what, what did we learn from all of our 2021 cases that we could apply to this case? And but I would really, you want to position yourself as the expert. And so I don't think you should make it easy for them to upload documents. I think you actually need to add some strategic friction to where they send you all the documents and then you upload them. That way you can hold some power. And it's not, it's equivalent of when I had my iPhone repair shop and someone would bring in an iPhone4 with the broken back glass and it was literally a 20 second repair. We say, all right, it's going to be a couple hours, okay, I'll just go run some errands. And they, we would have it fixed by the time they started their car. But you're introducing some strategic friction to make you seem more valuable than you actually are. I would also suggest that you look into Claude instead of OpenAI's API, because we found after much trial and error Claude to be a better LLM for stuff like this than OpenAI's API. So just to recap, I would look into Claude, I would stick with the lawyer angle, I would put three to four features on your website and those will be three to four niches within the legal niche. And then whatever people are gravitating towards, eventually change your branding to make that one thing the niche within the niche. Because maybe it's uploading Texas case law or maybe it's uploading whatever state they're in case law, or maybe it's uploading car crash case law or something to where the paralegals or the associates or whoever can just learn from it and ask it questions. And I think you should charge like a very low amount to start so you can capture market share like 100 bucks a month, which will be nothing to a law firm. And then once you're really ingrained in their system and people are asking it questions on a daily or multi times a day basis, you could end up charging whatever you want. That's what I would do if I were you. But I love the idea. I am going to read a question from one of our listeners. I will keep his name confidential. So this guy says if you were me, what would you cut and what would you double down? I'm doing too many things that aren't driving enough revenue. He has a full time job and then he has a bunch of side hustles. So his full time job pays him 98 grand a year. His bonus potential is 30 grand. On top of that he has a side hustle of an email list with 4000 people. 50% open rate, 5% click through rate. His LinkedIn following is 30 ish thousand. His ex following is a couple thousand. He does sponsored posts that bring about 600 bucks a month. And his newsletters ads, his newsletter ads bring about 200 bucks a month. And then he has a community that brings about 200 bucks a month. And then he does some consulting that brings about 1500 bucks a month. And then he also does some other consulting for solopreneurs. So he's basically asking what do I do? Do I quit my job? Do I pick one of these side hustles? Do I keep doing exactly what I'm doing? And I get this question a lot. It's tough because he's tasted both worlds. The convenience of the corporate world and not really having to do a lot and getting that check every two weeks versus the high upside potential of the grind. The side hustle. To me, I would go all in of all these things. So he's got LinkedIn, following an X following sponsored post newsletter ads. He's got a community, he's doing some consulting. I would go all in on the community. It seems to me like he's not monetizing his community a month. 200 bucks a month from 40,000 followers. I feel like there's a half a dozen different revenue models where he could make a lot more than that. Maybe it's he's not charging enough, maybe it's he's not offering enough value. And so even if it's 10 bucks a month, if there's just not enough value in there, then the price doesn't matter because a community takes time. So in a sense, it's almost better to charge $500 a month and offer more value because then people feel like if I'm paying this much for a community, then it's going to be a self fulfilling prophecy and they're going to put more time and effort into it and they want to make it worth their money more. It's like a Planet Fitness membership. You'd pay 10 bucks a month. You don't go, but if you pay 300 bucks a month for Equinox, you're going to go just two different models. So it seems like he's doing the Planet Fitness model without the other side of the equation. Planet Fitness, they offer a bunch of value. It's nice, clean gym, free pizza, they want to keep you fat. Free bagels, they want to keep you fat, but very, very cheap. And so I think you either got to crap or get off the pot. You got to go all in on Planet Fitness and keep it cheap, but offer a ton more value than what you're currently offering. Or you got to go full Equinox and offer a ton more value and expect people to contribute a lot more to the community, thus making more valuable, but also paying a lot more for that community. That's what I would do. All right, I've got one more question I'm going to cover from a listener. This guy says, I do Facebook, Instagram and Google Ads as a freelancer. I'm transitioning into this from being a professional photographer. He says, I've gotten most of the certificates through Meta and Google and I have some experience running these campaigns for a dentist who is a family friend. I'm really looking for a way to land more clients, but I don't know where to look. And most of my cold outreach doesn't result in anything. Are there any niches that you have in mind where I can help businesses generate leads through meta ads and Google Ads? I think the answer is right in front of you. You're already doing this for a dentist. Dentist is like the best category to sell to. They all want to get rich quick through something outside of dentistry. That's why they're very hesitant to invest in real or they're very willing to invest in real estate deals or agencies because they like a lot of people, they have it in their head that if they pay an agency 2,000amonth, that they're going to deliver them 20,000amonth. On one hand, dentists are oversaturated when it comes to agencies. On another hand, they seem oversaturated because dentists are so willing to pay agencies. So if you already have a client in one of the best verticals to sell agency work into, then I would sit down with him. He's a family friend, which is great because family friends are the most willing to pay you money and say, hey, can we go over, like, how this is actually helping you? Is this offering a lot of value to you? If so, what? Like, specifically like, I want you to tell me exactly what revenue came in your door that we could directly attribute to my ads to what I've done for you. Get a case study and then ask him, because all these dentists have other dentist friends. Can you. Can I do this for free for one of your friends for 30 days, just to see if it yields any fruit? Try to get two or three people to do it for free. They're just going to pay for the ad spend. You're going to do all the legwork. You can literally copy and paste the campaigns, swap out the geographies. If it's working. If it's working, then great. Copy and paste the campaigns, do it for free for 30 days, and then start charging and then only do agency work for dentists. That's what I would do. Your customer acquisition can be handled. They're all in these Facebook groups. You can go through the moderators of Facebook groups. I think that's a great business to be in. Hey, Lauren, are you there?

Yes, I am. I actually had a couple of questions for Tim, but since I've got you guys, I'm actually really curious. What are your thoughts on an optimal way to build out client or customer engagement across businesses through spaces. And I say that because I'm someone who has found followed different influencers or professional development folks like Tony Robbins and Dean Grazioso. And I really appreciate a lot of the platforms and the audiences that they have developed to this point. But I've noticed that seems to be a bit more Facebook and Instagram heavy. And when I look at the engagement of many of these figures or often authors like the guy who wrote Atomic Habits and whatnot, I don't see them engaging on Twitter or on X the same way. So I'm curious what you've observed in how you have leveraged X that may give you an edge compared to other individuals in a similar sphere, but not necessarily on this platform.

So are you asking this specifically with the intent to sell something to the James Clears of the world or to use it for your own corporation? What is your end goal with this?

I think how to grow and build it for myself and building kind of a consulting or coaching kind of a platform and business. But in observing other individuals who have gone before and used other platforms and I don't see additionally adopting X in a heavier, strong capacity, observing how at least you have leveraged it. I'm curious what you have found works for you and and if you have tried the other platforms or what makes you lean on X and as a kind of a practice that you would continue to promote or apply for yourself that you found works for your business here?

Yeah, great questions. I think that every platform serves a very specific audience. So X has worked for me because I like to write and I like to consume content on X and it just nat that just naturally means that I'm finding followers and connections on X that like the same things. And so for someone like James Clear of Atomic Habits, he might and are you insinuating that he's not leveraging X to the full potential that he could be? Is that what you're saying?

Candidly, with James Clear, I actually feel like he is more present on X than many authors like him. So whenever I talk with people in masterminds or other focuses on professional development, there's always the applied. I've read Atomic Habits and I've read the Miracle Morning and I've read Hal Elrod or other figures like that. And so I think James Clear actually does have a stronger presence on X, but I don't even see him hosting spaces. So when I look at someone like Tony Robbins or Dean Graziosi or Jenna Kutcher or Jasmine Star, those people don't seem to be on X and seem to lean on other social media platforms. So there seems to be an opportunity, opportunity for growth in utilizing X because it's not as highly adopted a platform in that world. So having observed and followed your threads for a while, I'm just curious what you have found works for you on this platform.

Like why it's been successful? For me, yes, that's a good question. Like I'm an introvert, right? I would prefer to write than to be on short form video. What I have noticed with this Kerner's Corner experiment is it's extremely hard to transfer followers from one platform to another. If I have a newsletter with 6,700 people on it, it's got a 60% open rate, great click rate, all the metrics are great. But that converts like a fraction of a percent to a Spotify follower or YouTube subscriber for whatever reason, right? Like these readers are used to consuming my content in that format, whether it's a newsletter or on X. And that's just their habit and it's just really hard to transfer people over. And so when you see someone, any creator or any influencer that has a big platform in one area but nothing or very little in another area, it's there's, it's one of two things. Either they're missing out on a big opportunity or, or whatever they're pitching or selling or talking about, it just doesn't fit well on that other community. One person that I've seen do that really well is Cody Sanchez. She started on X, but now she's everywhere. She has a million YouTube subscribers, she's got, she's everywhere all. But I think what that took was a full time content team, cameras all the time, paid ads, like just going all in, going hard, which I am not doing. And so I think it's really hard for someone like me who's like doing an experiment. Let's see how this goes to grow on other platforms versus someone who's willing to invest a ton of time, a ton of money in going to all the platforms at once when they've already made a name for themselves on one of the platforms.

Are there any tricks that you have found in drawing an existing audience or building hype or getting adoption, whether that's through co hosts or advanced promotion or anything like that?

I don't know. I'm still learning. I've got 70 something thousand followers and 41 of them are listening right now. That's a pretty bad conversion rate. And so I think this is really Efficient, because the podcast side of this is growing really fast. I say really fast is growing week over week. Every episode gets more and more downloads. The YouTube side is growing slowly. But I've had less listeners on Spaces every week since I started. The first week was like 90 concurrent and then it was like 80 and then 60 and 45 and right now we're at 44. So maybe we've bottomed out. But even though I'm here doing Spaces, this is only my fifth time ever doing it. And the jury's still out in my opinion. Like the jury's out for me. If Spaces is going to be around in five years, if this kind of this two way podcast or radio format really has legs, or if we're too early or if we're too late, I don't know. What I do know is that video spaces are performing really, really well. And I actually tried to make today's space a video space, but it was being very buggy. We ran a test on another account and it just was not working right. When people do like audio only spaces, let's say they normally get 50 concurrent listeners, they'll get 500 concurrent watchers if video. And so I think that has more of a future than audio. But I wish I could say I was an expert or I've been doing this longer, but I really don't know. I do it because these are conversations I'm going to have anyway. If I'm going to just have a podcast, then I might as well do it on Spaces and then I can just repurpose that same content. But I don't do it because I think it's like it builds more engagement or more loyal followers. That's my thesis. But the jury's kind of still out, you know what I'm saying?

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And I hadn't heard that observation about the video conversion here on Spaces before, so I will definitely keep my eye on that. Thank you so much for letting me throw you a couple of curve balls. I didn't mean to throw you.

No, this was great. Thank you for coming in.

Yeah, absolutely.

Chris.

Hey, Clifton.

Yeah, so second time on. Thanks again for having the spaces for us.

Absolutely.

Yeah. So I see a lot of these agencies popping up for global talent slash virtual assistants. I'm just wondering what your thoughts are on that. Is it going to be a race to the bottom on price? Should. If it's a good idea, you should one pick a niche, like a niche and focus not go too broad. What kind of how do you handle objections like a business that's telling you that they could just go on online jobs PH themselves, like, what value can you add as an agency owner?

So, great question. We are the very, very early innings of these VA agencies. It seems like we're not. It seems like we're saturated. Because if you're on Twitter, then every other week someone is announcing their VA agency. I think we're still very, very early because if you go walk around an average workforce and throw around the acronym va, no one knows what you're talking about. If you say virtual assistant, they probably think you're talking about AI or some app. So I think that's great for what you're looking at doing. What I think is tough is differentiating yourself. I don't think you're competing with onlinejobs, ph or upwork or any of them, because just there's always going to be a world for Indie.com and there's always going to be a world for recruiters. I think there's always going to be a world for upwork and there's always going to be a world for VA agencies. Right. A lot of people just want their handheld. And so in this world, you can go one of two routes. You can go pay me upfront 35% of their annual salary, which is going to be like three to four grand, which is a pretty big chunk for a small business owner.

Or.

Or it's going to be, I'm going to handhold your VA for you and upcharge them just like a temp agency would do here in the US. So I'm going to pay them $5 an hour and I'm going to charge you $8 an hour and I'm going to take a cut. That is an easier sell sale because there's no big upfront payment. But it's a harder business because you're hand holding these VAs all over the world. So what business would you prefer to be in with that in mind?

I would prefer to be in the second one. And I was actually thinking of outsourcing the back end of interviewing and handling the day to day to someone like John Matzner or the like. And I'll focus on the front end of finding businesses here to sell to.

Yeah, so that's great. So you're basically going to use John Matzner to white label all the work and then you're just going to do customer acquisition and hand them off.

Yeah. How does that sound?

That sounds great. I think what you should do is just Make a card template, a card website and literally copy and paste that site with 10 different sites, 10 different offers. We provide virtual assistants for piano tutors, we provide virtual assistants for graphic designers, whatever. And then just start hitting the pavement and seeing what resonates and what doesn't and then eventually go all in on that one niche.

Or is it better to find a like a make a partnership with a VA agency that's already established and get a commission for each sale?

How is that different than what we're talking about? I guess because you're still having to acquire customers, right?

It's the same job on my end, but it's a little bit different. John doesn't say it as if it's a commission. It's more like whole fulfill the back.

End for use Google Ads for this. There's so many little underutilized under monetized keywords on Google Ads. I think you should start with SEMrush or moz.com and find out like what people are searching for and let that guide your decision making on what 10 or five landing pages that you put out there to the world and then simply push paid ads to it and see what your cost per clicks are, see what your click through rates are, how many people are booking calls with you and just function as a customer acquisition engine that just feeds someone like John Matzner. And really there's so many different facets to this business that if you can hone in on customer acquisition on a specific niche or more than one niche, then you can make a lot of money and you don't have to do any of the fulfillment. It's like a lead gen agency, right? You're just handing everything off.

Because I'm looking for the easiest way into this because I do have a full time job at the moment and for me to do both ends would be much so I'm trying to think of the best model that I would have to do the least work. And also if maybe you have a niche in mind that might be the best, instead of testing 10 out or I should go the route of testing.

Out 10 niches, I would use the niche that has the most money, like the niche that directly correlates to revenue or the niche that has a binary outcome. Like for instance, let's look at the fractional C suite industry. It's much, much harder to sell a CMO a fractional CMO Chief Marketing Officer position than it is to sell a fractional CFO position. Because a CFO is, he has a very defined role he's going to do, he's going to show you the numbers, he's going to do the P. Ls, he's going to act as a controller, act as a bookkeeper, whatever they need him to do. And it's very clear, if the business owner gets the numbers at the beginning of the month, then he did his job. If he doesn't, then he didn't. Whereas a marketer is like, all right, we're doing this campaign and I'm talking to this partnership opportunity and this influence and it's, are you doing a good job? Because a lot of times with marketing it takes months or years to really attribute revenue to the right place. And so I look at this the same way. You want to find the niche where you can very clearly point to your VA adding X amount of quantifiable value to that business owner or that business. Anything that's nebulous or creative is just tough. I think that's why if you go to supportshepherd.com and you, if you just click at the dropdown menu, whatever is at the top is probably what they're selling the most of. And that's usually bookkeeping and graphic design. Because influencers need X amount of short form videos edited per week. And it's very clear. I got them done. You're awesome, you're doing a great job. And business owners need their books done every month. It's very clear. Whereas if you go to the bottom of that dropdown, you're going to see more specialty things like even executive assistant or virtual assistant or even paid ads because there's just, it's nebulous and it's hard to quantify if they're doing a good job. So I would not try to reinvent the wheel. If you want to know which niche is best, just copy paste what these other guys are doing, what they're pushing. Like what are their case studies saying? How many case studies do they have on other industries versus first not and then gravitate towards that.

Yeah, that's good advice. Thank you. And as far as, the easiest way to get into this is this like how you were saying before, to just make the sales and outsource the back end of the interviewing and the hiring and the day to day. Okay.

Yeah, I think so.

Okay, sounds good. Thank you so much.

All right. Yep. Thanks for calling in.

Okay.

All right. If we don't have anyone else, we're at the hour, so we're going to end this. Thank you for joining. Thank you for listening. I appreciate your time, and we will touch base next week.