Roasting YOUR biz ideas live! Livestream glitched! Sorry to those that didn't get to ask a question

It. All right, welcome to the Kerner office. I want to do a little different episode today. I have had many of you submit your business ideas to me over the last month or two. I've got about 30 of them. I'm going to cover some of them and, and I want to roast them. And when I say roast, I mean that pretty liberally because I'm not really a mean guy. And I like most business ideas because I think almost any idea could work. I think the bigger question is should you launch something? Not would it work or not. So roast might not be the most accurate word, but rather grade them. I'm going to grade them and I'm going to vote them a stud or a dud. Your idea. Now I'm working with very limited info here because. Because I have like between three words and three sentences from all of these. And so a lot of times you get the best feedback and info from ideas when you just ask them 20 questions. And I don't have that luxury right now. So I'm also going to be live streaming this to YouTube and maybe someone will hop in and ask a question. Maybe not. If not, that's fine. I've got plenty of pre submitted stuff. But we're going to see how this goes and maybe it'll give you an idea to launch something of your own. Maybe you can copy one of these shamelessly and there's nothing wrong with that. So let's just get into it. I have two types of ideas. I have college student submitted ideas and then I have any type of person submitted ideas. So I will clarify before the idea so you know what type of person it's from. All right. First idea is from a college student named Anthony. He says I want to start a non profit called Project Earth. We where we would develop robots that clean our planet probably will never get to see it happen because of the unbelievable amount of funding it will take though. Anthony, I love your idea, I love your optimism and your willingness to start a non profit. But I suggest that you start with something easier. Even if it is a non profit. Start with a non profit that encourages college students to clean up around campus, right? Start there, get some traction and then branch out maybe to other campuses, maybe to non college students and start to make a name for yourself online and on social media that this is your thing, that you're trying to clean up our planet. And then at that point it will be significantly easier to raise funding if you want to use robots to do it. And hey, maybe you can get a partnership with Figure or with Tesla or with any of the three or four companies that are trying to build these robots right now. Maybe they can give you a couple for free because it's a non profit. So love the idea, but I don't think you should start with robots. I think you should start very simply and go from there. Okay, next idea from another. Another college student. I want to start a marketing agency for cash pay only psychiatrists. Okay. I love how niche this is already. So I'm already liking this idea. I have a direct in to a network of psychiatrists who share a pain point of not being able to book appointments for a certain audience. Competitive advantage is being able to work directly with a top psychiatrist in my area with which allows me to get clients and spin off more services off the back of my client base. All right, I'm just reading through this again to get a good feel for the question. Okay, so you've got an in, which I love. It's very niche, which I love. And it seems that there is a demand for this, which I love. So I don't see a problem with this. You don't have an in with one psychiatrist. You have an end with an in with a network of psychiatrists that seems to say that this is a common problem. So yes, I love this idea. This is a student and I think you should do it. So we've got a guy in the lobby. Let's let him in. Hey, what's going on?

Hello.

Hey, how are you?

I'm doing well, how are you?

Good. I'd love to hear your idea.

Yeah, thank you for letting me in.

Your, your camera's sideways, by the way. Perfect. All right. Now, did you come from the YouTube live link? Yes. Okay, awesome. Yeah. Let's hear your idea. Thank you.

Thank you for your time and thank you for letting me in. So I'm from India. I've been here for last 13 years. So back in India we have, we do have shop like a retail. Retail outlet.

Right.

Where they sell freshly made chips.

They make. I know.

Chips is a billion dollar mark. I'm talking about, I'm talking about potato chips.

And you're kind of, you're kind of breaking up there. I'm missing a few words.

Yeah. Is it, is it good now that's better.

Did you say chips is a billion dollar market?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm talking about potato chips.

Okay.

I'm not talking about AI Chips for now.

Yeah, gotcha. Okay.

Yeah. So they are freshly made and given to you and they are flavored with Whatever flavor you would like. So in United States, we buy a lot of chips. I mean, we all buy a lot of chips, right? But those are made long back, like outdated. I mean, at least a week, two or a month ago or a couple of months ago, right? And we buy, to us, we, we go to a store and buy it from them. Either it's hb, Whole Foods, whatever. In Texas. I'm in Texas too, right. So I was thinking of, me and my wife was thinking of an idea where, why don't we set up small shops where we, where we make chips from scratch, right? So you, you as a consumer customer, come into the store, hey, I want this potato chips with Buffalo ranch, right? Whatever flavor. So we make it in 5, 10 minutes and give it to you. So you enjoy hard served chips, right? And you go from there.

So let me just make sure I have this straight. So you basically have the potatoes maybe sliced, prepped, maybe sitting in water, ready to fry. Someone walks up and says, hey, I want the ranch chips. You say, all right, give me five minutes. And it's, it's kind of a fast, casual concept, solely focus on potato chips. That's it, right?

Yeah, potato chips. And it could be any other. But you could start with potato chips, right? And maintain high quality in terms of ingredients having. So a lot of people go to five guys because they use, they use peanut oil along with peanut oil along with french fries to give them a better quality. Right. So I just want to copy whatever is working. And wherever you go, when you buy chips, it has lot of ingredients which are not needed in chips. Right.

Would this be more of a place where you eat the chips on site or you bag them up and they take them with them?

Bag them up and take them.

Okay. Have you looked into like the popcorn shops that do this? I know there's one in McKinney called Mom and Popcorn. Have you, have you looked into them at all? No, I would look into that because it's basically what they do, except they don't, they won't make it on the spot for you. They just sell all kinds of different unique popcorn flavors like Buffalo Ranch and pizza. And it's actually really good pickle flavored, but it's also a candy store. So the popcorn is just one element of it. And I don't know what the percentage of sales the popcorn represents, but it's, it's primarily a sweet store in like a downtown walkable area that also sells popcorn. That reminds me of this. What, what I like about the idea is that it's high margin. No one's really filling this need. What I don't like about it is that it's, it's new and it's scary to me to invent a new food concept. So I think you should try it. You should test this idea. It would cost very, very little at a farmer's market. Just get a fryer and pay a hundred bucks and just see what people think. What is their feedback? Is it that much more remarkable to have a fresh chip from the fryer that hasn't. Doesn't have preservatives and all that? Or is it just like, yeah, this is a really good chip. But I wouldn't come back because at the end of the day, you're going to need people to come back and to like get addicted to a very specific flavor that you offer. Because if you're just having to sell to new customers all the time with a new concept, it doesn't work right. Like, crumble was kind of a new concept and it worked because people were coming back, you know, and the margins were really high. And I feel like the margins would be really high for what you're doing too. It just makes me nervous that it's. It's a new food concept. I just don't like being first got.

So the way to try it out is farmers market. That's what I thought as well. I mean, you get an old huge fryer and try it in farmers market and see the feedback and what people say.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. Another thing that makes me nervous is do people like, do. Are they really passionate about chips? Because it feels to me like in the chips versus French fry argument, French fries win. And you should also look into. There's a concept out of Utah that does like french fry only. French fries only, like loaded fries. Fry nachos. And they might do soda, like dirty sodas as well. I would look into that and kind of see what their business model is. You might be able to copy some aspects of what they're doing. But that, that also means the name of the business. See, I think it's called Fizz in Fries. F R Y Z. There's one location in Logan where I actually grew up. Y Z. I don't know if they have. Here's their website, looks like they're franchising. So yeah, I would be wary of copying these guys because it looks like they've only had one location for years because they have been in Logan for years and they have a franchise, Tab up. But it looks like it's just like collecting interest for people that might want to franchise. I don't think they're actually doing it.

Okay, the name is Fizz.

Fizz. And then the letter N Fries. F R Y Z. F R Y Z.

Okay, got it.

But I think just because of the fact that you have this idea and you like this idea, you've got to get it out of your head by testing it. You've got, you've got to cross that bridge to see if it's viable or not. Or else you're always just going to wonder. Yeah. So anyway, let me know how it goes.

Thank you. So no problem. I have another if you have time.

Yeah, let's hear it.

Okay, so this is a technology idea where you, I've been following you for a long time from Twitter newsletter and here, right. You, you work a lot on H Vac construction. I mean those kind of sector too, right. So I, I, I was seeing a lot of people when it comes to plumbing how or H Vac. So the prices are not fixed, right. People can, I mean every company has a different pricing structure and people can, people can give you any sort of price, right. So I thought of building. So I am a software engineering manager, right. And I have built products end to end, right. So I thought of building bidding platform where as a customer I put in my problem statement when I say problem statement or my need, my requirement. Right. And they could just, they could just type in few things and AI would autocorrect everything with a picture if needed. And it's a marketplace, a two sided marketplace where consumer puts in their need requirement. And we have bunch of H Vac companies sitting on the other side, right. Which would take in the request and whoever's. There could be multiple people submitting the quote, right. And multiple submitting the quote. And our platform will make it easy for the user showing the cheapest bid and going through their website scraping all the reviews and reviews and information that they have and providing necessary information for a customer to make an informed decision. Are these the right people to do it? Based on information that we see. Based on information that we see online. Right. And based on their bid. Right. And based on their presence outside.

So are you familiar with thumbtack?

Yeah, but they don't do real time, right?

What do you mean real time?

So these are all real time. You, you submit in your requirement and based on, based on what the other person, I mean the H Vac company, what the H Vac company feels about they submit you a quote, real time.

Well, thumbtack is, is pretty real time because the contractors are so eager to get the work because they pay thumbtack so much to be on there, that I use thumbtack as a consumer on a regular basis and I'll have quotes within a half hour. So it's pretty real time. I think this, this idea is pretty audacious. Thumbtack had to raise nine figures to do this, and they're doing it really well. I like the idea. I think it's good, but I think it's, it'd be really hard to test, like on a small scale. And then once you do, once your test results look good, you have to compete against thumbtack. And I don't like that about it. What I do like is, and this is where I thought you were going with this, is building a piece of software that you sell to H Vac companies that enables them to kind of like offer a menu of services to customers. And, and so like, let's say I type in Plano, Texas, H vac and I get 10 results and on nine of them I click and it's like, call us for a quote. Call us for a quote. Call us for a quote. And on the other one that I, I click, it's just like, hey, answer two questions and we'll give you a quote right now. So I like the idea of selling, you know, $200 a month software to H vac companies that enable them to easily give quotes to customers with like a, a big asterisk of, hey, when we get there, if we find out that it's not really as advertised, this quote is subject to change. But assuming that everything is accurate, yeah, it's going to be 250 bucks to replace whatever you think needs replacing. I like that idea because I don't think anyone's doing that. And it gives H Vac companies a leg up on their competitors or any pick. Pick any home service. Right. It gives them a leg up.

But how would it be different than thumbtack, as you said?

Because thumb, this isn't a marketplace. You're just selling a, an app, a widget that home service businesses can build into their existing platform. They don't have to build their company around. Could just be like a, a suffix on their URL, right? Like it's a new, A quote form basically, where instead of like submitting your name and number and address and then having someone call you, you submit your name and your number and what's going on, and then it gives you a price right away because some customers are like, I don't want to talk to you. I don't want to wait for your guy to show up two hours late. I just, I just want a price. And if someone can give me a price, I'm probably not going to shop around and find something 50 cheaper. I'm probably just going to go with you.

Yeah, nobody has time nowadays.

Exactly. I, I, I don't want to have five people come into my house to give a price. I'd rather pay a little more to just get a price and have someone come do it. So I do like that idea. Starting with one industry, just going all in on that industry and then branching out to other industries.

Thank you.

Of course.

I have a question. This is unrelated, but how do I invest with you on real estate?

You could shoot me an email. Chrisofounders.com Chris at what? Co founders. Just one word.

Co founders.

Yep.

Okay. Thank you.

Yeah, thank you. And thanks for coming on, man.

Take care. Thank you.

Yeah, you too. Bye. All right. Thank you. Abby. Shake. I hope I didn't say your name wrong. Thank you for coming in. He came from the YouTube Live link, which is awesome. There's a few more people watching on YouTube. Thank you, Kaylin Knight. I appreciate that. Very, very kind of you. If Anyone watching on YouTube has any business ideas or any business questions, this is kind of an ideas podcast. But any questions, hop in on the link that I posted and come ask it. Meanwhile, I'm going to read some more pre submitted questions. So this next one is from Luke. Luke says I do web development. I target small to medium businesses local. Looking for a professional easy to manage website. I also can do custom JavaScript features. That's all he told me. I assume that your idea is build websites for small to medium sized businesses. I think it's a great business. I think it was a good business in 1998. I think it's going to be a great business in 2038. It's kind of funny how no matter how many companies come out, Squarespace, Wix, Weebly Card, WordPress, Webflow, it doesn't matter. There will always be a market for an individual or a business owner to say, hey, just make this website for me always. Right? It doesn't matter how many tools there are. There's a dozen different AI tools that can build a website from a prompt. People are still going to want people to do it for them. So if that's your idea, Luke, I think it's a good idea. So that's three college student ideas. Let's hop over to the non college student ideas. This is from Conti. He says been mulling over starting a hydrosol biz. Essential oils. Think rosemary oil, eucalyptus, etc. I found a vendor in China that makes distilling units for half the price as USA made. Only problem is I don't have land to grow said plants but can outsource that from around the city. And I don't know if there is really a market to compete against the big players in the game that source globally with cheap labor. Conti, I don't really like this idea. I'll tell you why. You're already thinking along the lines of I want to get something from China. Okay? If you've already flipped that switch in your brain, you're like halfway there. So now the question you need to ask yourself is what is the most advantageous thing I can import from China to sell in the us? And in my opinion, I've done this a lot. The higher ticket the better. Period. End of story. Find an item that is small and expensive. Okay? For instance, we sell Bitcoin miners. We import them from China. They're not really small. There's about as big as like a desktop tower and they weigh 33 pounds. But even so we don't need to ship them in a container, right? I say small because I want you to ship them the via DHL air that makes all the difference in the world. You can have it from Hong Kong or Shenzhen or Guangzhou to your door within three days. And the higher the ticket the better because it means you can use paid ads to sell it. You don't have to sell as many. Of course, there's always a trade off. Higher ticket equals lower volume. But I like that trade off. I would much rather sell a thousand dollar item to ten people than a hundred dollar item to one hundred people any day of the week. So I don't like the essential oils idea. In a sense it is high ticket based on the size, but you're already looking at China. I don't like the idea that you have to grow something. You need land. I don't know anything about that market. I will admit I know it is kind of slimy. There is some, there are some bad actors in the space which I don't like that idea about it as well. I assume that something triggered you to give you this idea. I just, I don't like the idea of it being essential oils or something that you would have to grow. And I don't understand why you would have to grow something if you were going to import this from China. If you really want to do it, then import it from China to kind of test the model and see. Because maybe you find that there's a ton of pent up demand for a very specific type of oil that's just going gangbusters. If so great. Import it from China to prove the model and then go down the road of actually growing it and processing it yourself to boost your margins. If you. If the numbers make sense. Hello to everyone on YouTube. We got a handful here. Looks like we got a question in the comments. My company helps other companies sell their refurbished products on E commerce stores like Amazon, eBay, Walmart, etc. Okay, let me just. Yeah, I got ADHD. Now I'm gonna have to read that again because it went one ear out the other. My company helps other companies sell their refurbished products. Okay. On E commerce stores. Okay. Okay. Where would I start to capture traffic to send them to specific listings. The problem with E commerce places are their rules around buy box that change constantly. So I want to go after getting and owning traffic to be able to send them to specific listings dynamically. Interesting. Okay, so you're using these big marketplaces to help other companies sell their products that happen to be refurbished. You want to drive more traffic to those products so you can do a good job for your customers. But you don't know how to drive traffic to specific listings like a specific Amazon product. Right. Why? I mean, why can't you just use paid Amazon ads? Have you tried that? Or paid Walmart ads? I don't know of a way outside of that. That works very well. I'm pretty sure that you can even use paid Amazon ads to boost your listing. Listing on Google shopping results as well. Yeah, but maybe there's something I'm not understanding about that. All right, if you're on YouTube watching this, would love to have you click the link that I posted at the very top of the comments and hop in here, here and ask me. Or you can comment it below. Let's go to our next pre submitted questions. Right now. If you're just joining us, we are roasting business ideas. And I use that term loosely. I'm grading them. Is it a stud or a dud? John asks if he should sell 20 to 50 PDFs of nicely formatted market research for local service businesses. So I need a little more context. What type of market research is it? A restaurant. Consumer research. The fact that it's 20 to 50 I don't like. It's really, really hard to sell something at that price point. And it's hard to sell things to local service businesses. They are hard to sell to. Notoriously, most of them don't have employees. That means when they get a call, they're expecting, slash hoping it to be a customer. And if it's a salesperson, they tune out immediately. And they get calls from a lot of salespeople. Ask me how I know. All else equal, I'm only going on about 12 words here. I don't like that idea. I think it needs to be 300 to $50 instead of 20 to 50 and it's going to be, I think it's going to be hard to find customers. I think you need to go up market to more medium sized businesses and sell a multi thousand dollar market research product to them. Something that could make them more money somehow. Next question. Chad Kroger. All right. Lease. He wants to lease a tiny 100 square foot commercial space with street frontage in a dense city like New York. Customers pay $10 to spin a wheel. Think Wheel of Fortune. There's two possible outcomes. A shot of whiskey and pickle juice or a collectible Chad Kroger stickle sticker. Welcome to Pickleback or Nickelback. All right, Chad. Okay. I hate the idea of renting a commercial space in New York for this because man, you've got to sell a lot of ten dollar tickets to pay the rent on that. But I do like the idea of just being like a street vendor to test this concept because I think this spin the wheel concept just plays on our human emotion of wanting to win prizes, wanting to play the lottery, wanting to get rich quick. All right. I love the visual aspect of it, especially if it were like super lit up and bright and colorful and big. Like, like outrageously big. I tweeted about this when I went to New York with my family a year ago. I'll try to put it in the show notes where we were in New York just outside of Times Square and, and there were these immigrants with a platform that had like a rotating arm that you put your phone in and it plays that song on repeat. Welcome to New York. Right? And you pay 20 bucks and you stand on this platform and it just spins around you and takes a video and pictures, yada, yada yada. And I did a tweet about it and got over a million views because these guys are just cleaning up. This platform cost 2 grand on Amazon. I, I don't think they have to pay rent to be there on the street. I think they just have to get A license. They probably have to pay like a one time fee. I'm totally guessing, I could be wrong, but I don't think these guys are paying like a thousand bucks a month just to stand on the street because it wasn't like a food truck or a cart or anything. They're just on the street. I like the idea of you doing that exact same thing with this idea just to see how it goes. Prove the concept. I love the idea of testing concepts in high foot traffic areas like this because you can get feedback face to face, super valuable, super relevant feedback immediately from people that usually have money. They're in New York and they're either traveling there, which means they have money, or they live there, which means at least they have enough money to live there because it's very expensive. So thank you, Mr. Kroger for that idea. I've got another question here on YouTube. Quinster48, is it possible to build a $1 million revenue business in a year? Absolutely, it's possible. It happens all the time. It happens every day. The quickest I built a 1 million revenue business was a matter of two weeks. And that's not an exaggeration. I'm not. This isn't one of those Instagram videos where I'm like flexing in front of someone else's Lamborghini. I actually did. I sold bitcoin miners. They were $20,000 bitcoin miners. And it was right place, right time. I found product market fit, I found a good supplier. It was the culmination of seven different businesses that I had started in the past. Which that is an argument for starting a bunch of businesses and not just doing one thing is you're able to cross reference all these learnings. And so when you think about it, a million dollars in revenue is 50. $20,000 miners. 50 miners, that's it. I sold 50 products and over the course of a couple weeks. Our second month, we did $4.3 million. In the month of November 2021, in one month. Our second month, we launched October 1st. And that was like 12% profit, no funding. We all bootstrap. So it's not, we're not just talking top line. This was profitable. It's a great business and I still own that business. So yes, it's very, very possible. But you have to pick a business with higher ticket size, right? I'm gonna say that until the day I die. Maybe it's a pool company. You sell $100,000 pools, you just need 10. Okay, can you do that? Maybe It's a, let's say a driveway replacement company and your average ticket size is $10,000. You need to sell 100 driveways. Okay? So you find the older neighborhoods that have cracked up driveways and you start knocking on doors. Or you pay people to knock on doors and give them a thousand dollar commission. There's a zillion ways to make a million dollar revenue business in a year. The hard part is actually finding a way to make a profit out of that. Because when you see people online talking about how much they made, quote, that's like the worst business word in the English language. Oh, I made $4 million last year. They almost always mean top one. You could have lost a million out of that four. So the hard part is getting it to be profitable. Because there are many Silicon Valley companies that raised many millions of dollars that took a decade or more to be profitable, or raised nine figures and never became profitable and went out of business. So optimize for profit and not revenue. All right, YouTube's picking up. Come on. We got any more questions from YouTube? I would much prefer live questions, then pre submitted ones. But let's go to the next one. This is from Bayou. Bayou wants to buy two leaf blowers and a ladder, hire two people, pick a neighborhood and go door to door offering to clean the pine straw off of their roof. Right then plus $25 to bag and leave on their curb. Okay. Do I like this idea? No, I love this idea. It's a perfect idea. Right place, right time. You want to find neighborhoods that have the types of trees that are putting pine straw or leaves on the roof. You're right there. Most people don't want to get on the roof. I actually just cleaned my gutters myself. I'd been in my house for eight years. I'd never done it. I'd never had it done. And if someone would have just showed up at my door, I for sure would have paid him a couple hundred bucks to do it. I don't like the idea of you paying people to do it for you right off the bat. I want you to do it yourself, right off the bat, so you can know all the little nuances. What does Betty say? Well, when you tell her the price. Right. What is your objection? Like, what are your counters to all of the objections? I want you to do it yourself. Sell a hundred doors, make a little manual, and then start hiring people to do it. Or else you're never going to know what the most optimal way is to sell those services. If someone that doesn't really care about your business starts it from day one. So you want to test this, you got to test it yourself. I do the same thing to this day. I always will. And that testing phase is the funnest part. Okay, Someone on YouTube asked, How true do you find the saying build the plane when you are flying? That's 1,000% true. There's, there's no lie in that statement. That's what I do today. It's what I did when I was 12 years old. Here's another question, Anthony. If you started from zero with extremely limited resources, what type of business would you start? Not afraid to cold call. I would love some sort of Legion aspect. I would start a home service business. It's the fastest way to put cash money, profit in your pocket, period. And it's the fastest way to learn people skills and it's the fastest way to learn sales skills. And it's a no brainer because you're selling services that people are already in need of. You're not trying to convince them to buy a widget impulsively. This is something that they're either going to pay someone to do in the near future or that they're going to have to go out and do in 100 degree heat themselves. So here's a second option for you. Why do I keep looking over there? The camera's right there. I would flip stuff on Facebook, Marketplace or Craigslist. There are entire businesses of people that just flip furniture. Buy couch for 100, put in storage unit, sell for 500. I knew a guy that owned a box truck and he started by renting a U haul so he didn't even start with that and all he did was flip washers and dryers. That's it. Do you think that guy is ever going to go broke? Never. He set up alerts on Craigslist anytime a washer was listed. And he didn't even have automations. His alert was his only automation. He would reach.