Secrets to Starting a 7 Figure Grill Cleaning Business

Welcome to the Kerner office, guys. I don't know if my excitement or my energy comes through this podcast, but I just love doing this. Like you notice I'm doing a lot more interviews with recurring guests that have a ton of business ideas like I do. Let me know if you like these are. If you're getting sick of these guests, if you're getting sick of too many ideas, maybe we're not going deep enough. I really want to hear because I love doing it. Like I love going deep with one business owner about his or her industry that only gets you so far. I like talking about ideas and specifically how to tie distribution and or launch strategies with those ideas so you're not just left empty handed with an idea and no way to implement it. That's what I like to do. So let me know chris.com if I should keep leaning into episodes like these that are idea and execution heavy or if I should keep leaning into episodes with one founder where we go deep on his business, I want to know. I like them both, honestly. But the idea ones with recurring guests really give me a lot of energy and I think that energy makes for a better product in the end. So today I had Connor back on. Connor was on. We talked about Programmatic SEO together. He's an entrepreneur living in New York. He owns self storage businesses, recovery recruiting business and an e commerce business and a bunch of other things. And we man, we had a two part episode, the first one today, next one a week from today. And we talked today we talked about a grill cleaning business. Okay. Which is a thing. We're not inventing this but we brainstormed some ideas on how you could make this a higher margin and a more scalable business. And then we talked about a podcasting, a B test agency business where you could charge one to five grand a month to work for podcasters or YouTubers to help find which clips from their videos or audio segments are the most likely to resonate or go viral. And then I think we added one or two other kind of pseudo ideas thrown in there. But let me know what you think about these types and we will see you next time. All right, Connor. Well thank you for coming on the Kerner office. We're going to talk some business ideas today and tell me what the categories.

You have are again in terms of like the revenue amount.

Uh huh.

So I do this for my newsletter sometimes and I think it's just an easy way because not every idea is a billion dollar idea. And so I like to make things super actionable from like, you can do it and make revenue today to. You're gonna have to put some time and energy into this to actually make this a real company. But the categories are, I've got $100,000 a year idea, I've got $1 million a year idea. And that one might be a sneaky one. Like that one could probably be a $200 million a year business if done right. But we'll get to that in a second. And then the last two I would call our reliable $10 million a year businesses that if you do it right and you execute well and you go after the market, you will make $10 million a year. And I feel pretty strongly about that.

Oh, I feel like we should come up with a ratio or something where it's like you take the potential capital investment required and the potential outcome and you divide it and it's like a scoring system. That could be good. Yeah.

But even. Because even there are so many ideas and I've. It takes me a little bit of time to realize this, that if you just do them and you just execute for long enough, you'll grow the business. It's a time thing. And there are people way dumber than you and I who are making way more money because they've been in this business for 20 plus years. But there are also other businesses where you might go so hard at it and then just realize, hey, there are only so many swimmers ear supplements that I can sell because only X number of people get swimmers a year, every single year.

Right.

Like, it's a very capped market. And I feel like most of these are pretty much constrained around that or the fact that like, scaling gets more expensive than it's worth.

Okay, now when you say something is a hundred thousand dollar a year idea, does that mean like, that is the ceiling or like that is the ceiling before, like really having to change your strategy before you can scale. Like, it's a lot harder to scale past a hundred because in my opinion, like, big, basically anything you can scale.

To an extent, I think you can sell $100,000 of literally anything. The time and speed by which it takes to get to that 100,000, I think is the factor. So, I mean, we can get into this idea. And I'd be curious just based on what you were saying here. There are probably a lot of ways to make this idea a lot better. And specifically, I want to brainstorm about the upsells because that's, I think, how you get past 100,000. But this is someone. And it's post Labor Day now, so, like start planning and maybe get after it sometime April of next year. But I just got back. I live in Manhattan right now. My parents have a spot down on the Jersey Shore. And something that I was doing a lot this past weekend was grilling. And I'm realizing like, man, I'll go to the grocery store before a long weekend with some friends and I and we'll buy like $300 of just like every form of miscellaneous meat, like steaks, dogs, burgers, sausages, chicken, whatever. And by the end of the weekend, the grill looks nasty. There's chunks of things. There are like smokes stains everywhere. And you do that for a long enough time and you get a pretty gnarly looking grill. Spent a little bit time on Reddit over the weekend. Was also talking to my dad and I don't know who he contacted. I should have gotten more information about this, but they have a nice grill. Like, I don't want to downplay and make it seem like it's a regular grill. They have a nice grill. But he spent $300 to get this grill cleaned. And it got me thinking. I was like, that's a ton. I was like, that's a lot of money, B. Like, you got to think like, you do that once a year or whatever. At some point you're better off just buying a new grill every four or five years. But is there a price point where you can sell this service for $200 a year? Somebody comes in, they do a deep clean of all of the grates, get the smoke stains off, maybe there is a propane upsell or, you know, hey, I'll change that thing out for a $30 fee. I think if you do the math out on this, like the rough napkin math of what I was calculating was you had $200 per. Is at least up here in the Northeast different down where you're at in Texas, but at least up in the Northeast, this is the six month a year type of business. Let's say that you do two a day. So you're knocking out 12 a week, right? Maybe a little bit more, maybe a little bit less. That's about 75 grand a year. And if you're a college kid, you're a high school kid or just kind of home for the summer, looking to make a couple extra bucks, that is very good money for not working the entire year. So this is this hundred thousand dollar a year business, right? Like, at some point you got to start thinking to yourself, all right, if I want to scale this up, I got to have to hire someone to do sales, someone to sub out the work to. Like, it starts eating out. And that's why it might not make a whole lot of sense to scale. But I'd love to hear from your perspective, like, what are some things that we can add onto this business to make it that 100,000, 250,000, $500,000 a year business, Even just within one local market.

Okay. Love it. What I love about this business is the visual aspect of it. The before and after sells. It's a beautiful before and after picture. You know Isaac French on Twitter?

Yep.

He just had that tweet go insanely viral. 22 million views about the train car that he renovated. Paul Graham retweeted it. Everyone did. He thinks that the main reason is because his first picture was a before and after picture of the train car. And it just speaks to find a business, find a niche that relies on before and after pictures, and you'll win. Right?

Agreed.

Weight loss supplements, they know what they're doing. Okay. So I love that part about it. I have a theory that, like, you need the right tools to do a great job. Anything you do, whether it's a software tool or a manual tool, I feel like you could speed this process up with. With the right tools. Maybe it's like a Dremel tool or a sander attached to a brush. And you could have like a rectangular bucket full of soap and just it's shaped like the grills and so you could fully submerge it. You could have one being submerged while you're scrubbing the other one. I feel like you could really hack this to speed up the cleaning process. Where a homeowner might spend three hours doing it, you could do it in 30 minutes. At that point, 200 is really attractive. It's 400 bucks an hour. So I like that aspect of it.

A couple things on that that you just said, you know, from the visual standpoint, I don't know about you, but, like, if I'm listening to some kind of like ASMR video, it's without a doubt the pressure washing videos that you just see the oddly satisfying guy go up and down the driveway and you're like, yeah, like I'm watching this over any other TikTok out there. So I could see this absolutely. Applying for grill cleaning. As far as how can you speed it up? Right. Because yeah, most things that I was reading was talking about how it takes a good three hours, but it's primarily the great. It's primarily where you're actually cooking the thing that's being exposed to both the food and the flame that you're cleaning a lot. I wonder if you can do something similar to the subcontractors who are recharging all of these bird and lime scooters. Where you get a truck, you get a bunch of shelves on that truck, and you drive around a neighborhood or you fly up a neighborhood, whatever it looks like, and say, hey, I'm doing this. I'm going to be the cheapest in the area because I do it this way. I'll come by on Monday. I'll come back on Thursday before it's grill time, and I'm going to pick up all of your grates, and I'll sweep the entire neighborhood at once. I'll make sure it's labeled. You're getting your grate back, whatever. Because I think the way you have to do it is I think you have to, like, drop it in some form of, like, cleaning solution or acid for a couple of hours. And that's probably the biggest bottleneck. So can you bring it back somewhere where you just drop all of them in there at once and you kind of do it overnight and then slowly return them. And as you're returning them is when you finish it off with an extra polish. So I think that might decrease your fulfillment costs.

That's an amazing idea. I like that one a lot. You treat it like. In scouts, we used to do a canned food drive, right? Where it's like, all right, we're going to be back. Put your canned vegetables out on the doorstep. We'll be here on Tuesday. It's like, hey, I'll be in your backyard next Tuesday to grab your grates. So many puns you could do in this business. You could call it great success, like Borat G R A T E. Great success. You can have, like, a commercial vacuum, right? Where, like, it's. I'm picturing, like, a blower, but it's a vacuum on your back. And you roll up, you grab the grates, you put them in your bucket. You. You suck out all the stuff that you're leaving behind. It takes five minutes. Then you leave with the grates. You put, like, an identifying tag on the grates. Maybe it's a color, maybe it's a number. You gather them all up. You don't need to schedule times. You just need them to opt into it. And then you take them back to your warehouse. You soak them overnight. You use, like, a pressure washer. You just Lay them out, just clean them all. Like, your fulfillment time per unit could be like five minutes, in that case completely.

So I think that's how you can maybe get this point or this product or this service to a point where you can scale it. Because if you can reduce the fulfillment cost enough, then you can start hiring people to help you sub out some of the work. So that's decreasing the cost, which is the scalability issue. Right. What about the other side, which is like, can you get a reliable service where you're making more money than just the $200? And so other ideas that come to mind there, you know, propane tank replacements, like, that one's a little bit tough because, like, I can't confidently say if somebody's coming to the grill and they say, hey, just by the way, I noticed that your propane tank feels a little light. I've got another one in the car. Do you want me to swap it out? That could work. Recycling propane tanks is expensive, but like, obviously you can just swap them out at your local gas station. $25 upsell from that. That's an extra 10% on everything that you're making. Other ideas that come to mind, the obvious one, that kind of feels a little weird, but it's like, hey, see, you're cooking a lot of meat. Do you want to buy seasoning? That feels a little off. Like, I don't know if I'd buy a product as much from my service provider, but I could say like something I've been seeing pretty often pop up this summer is a lot of people talk about kind of like marinating slash cleaning a grill with an onion. So what you do is you cut the onion in half, stab it back with a fork, and kind of scrape it up and down along it. Maybe there's something that you can do with like onion juice spray to sell to people where it's like, hey, this keeps your grill clean, plus also marinates it. That alone might be a good product idea, but something to kind of increase that upsell value. Maybe it's in the outdoor area of the house. And another cleaning service, I don't know.

I got an idea for you. So I'm currently in the market for this. So we've got a grill. I've lived here eight years. I've cleaned it myself, like half heartedly. I've never had it professionally cleaned. Desperately needs it. So first of all, if someone put a flyer on my door, I'd be a buyer. Okay. Period. Because it would remove the friction. I don't have to think about it. Research anyone, yada, yada yada. But as far as upsells are concerned, I would say, all right, my customers are already the type of person that is grilling outside. Okay. So I'm just going to lean into that. So I would go to Alibaba and buy, you know like the ooni pizza ovens. Have you seen those?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Or rock boxes. Those are like five to seven hundred dollars. But you can find aftermarket or off brand identical copies of those on AliExpress for $150. And they work great. Some are wood pellet fired, some are propane fired. So you could order a shipment of those and you could have a van, the same van that you're using to collect all the grades. It's like a mini e commerce fulfillment center. You at all times, you keep three to four pizza ovens. You could get like custom grill tool set, like really high end ones but with good margin because you're getting it from China. Or you could go find like these Instagram accounts that post viral videos of like kitchen tools. That's just. And go find the videos that are the most viral. That's like a kitchen or a grill tool. Go buy those from AliExpress. And you just have these racks in your van that's just like this mini e commerce site. It's like hey, we're all done and do you want any? And you just like you open up your coat. Do you want a pizza oven? Do you want grill tools? Like, because you could mark a hundred dollars mark at the pizza oven. A hundred dollars and it's still 300 cheaper than an ooni. And that increases your margin by 50% just with that one upsell.

No, completely agreed on that.

All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube and if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcast. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform or you can go to tkopod.com also my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisj kerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there.

Yeah, and I think the other thing too to think about is like are there other things like I know for. I'm just thinking of like my parents kitchen now like you're talking about kind of the physical hard goods. And I think that there's absolutely a market there. But like, can you get more out of the service if you're already there as well too? Like things that I'm thinking of that they have would be everything from like an outdoor fridge. Does that need a scrub down for an extra $30? Pressure washing coolers? Pressure washing, Yeah. I think there's a lot of stuff and I like the idea of making the slightly more unique, no brainer, maybe once, one time a year service. And that gets your foot in the door. And then how can you land and expand that? And people who own grills probably own other types of things that need cleaning or they're willing to pay money, good money to get things deep clean. So I think that there's definitely an opportunity to expand a little bit more into there.

I like that a lot. Your customers are also someone that likes to keep things clean. Right. That person is probably a person that's more likely to get regular pressure washing done.

Yep. Right.

Whereas me, a freaking cheapskate, I own a pressure washer and I don't get anyone to clean my grill cause I'm cheap. So I'm probably not a good customer for that. But if they're paying for one, they'll probably pay for the other. So I love that idea. To me, it looks a lot like a Christmas light business where it's like you have a generalized service like lawn mowing or pressure washing for the hot months. And then you have a more niche service like Christmas lights or grill cleaning for the other months, the other season.

I really think that there's also, I'm just thinking like now I've got myself thinking about like the flavoring of the grates. I don't know. Like, I spent some time down in Austin, have a friend who is really good at cooking, and he grilled up, I remember this one time, salmon on like some kind of flavored wooden block. You know what I'm talking about?

Yes. They're cedar pallets.

I think that could totally work. Well, I don't know. I think he did it on the grill. They're not like the chips. Like it was like literally like a. Okay.

It looks like a cutting board, right?

Yes. Yeah.

And you put it on the grate and then you put the salmon on that and it like infuses it with flavor.

So I like that idea as well. Just from the standpoint of like that is a product that's also a consumable that over time they're going to go through. And if you're saying, hey, you're using this thing a ton, you know, increase the lifespan, cook some more of your stuff on these flavored pallets. Now, next thing, maybe they're calling you back to get another palate and they're like, hey, while you're here, you want to clean the grill as well. Just try to find a lot of different angles to attack it from.

I like that. Yeah, I said pallet. I meant plank. Like a.

Okay.

Right. It's like 4 by 8 inches or so. Yeah, yeah, yeah, I like that a lot. Yeah, you could have a van full of those too. Can I give you an idea? This idea is like four hours old. Okay. This is a live release. I'll give you the downside of this idea first. I'm going to crap on it before I even give it to you.

And what category is this idea is? If you had to put it in 100k? 1 million, 10 million.

I'm going to say a million. The one downside of this business is the who the customer is. And the customer is like creators or podcasters. And I don't really like selling to that audience because 99% of podcasts don't make any or don't have any money. Right? Yeah. But there are still lots of podcasts, software products or agencies out there that do really well because some people just want to have a good podcast whether it makes money or not. Right. So here's the idea. I have social accounts called at the Kerner office on all the platforms to. And the whole idea originally was to just post generated AI generated clips from my podcast to the platforms to push traffic to my podcast. But then I thought, let's just make original short form videos and direct people to my podcast. And that's worked a lot better. I don't regret doing that, but I just heard who does? Name Steven Bartlett, Diary of a CEO. So one thing that he does, I got this idea from him, the original idea. He'll like, post a bunch of clips AI generated to his podcast to learn what parts of the podcast are the most interesting. And then he'll either promote the podcast that way or he'll edit out the parts that aren't interesting. And so I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure he's putting out these AI generated clips before that podcast episode ever goes live. So he knows how to edit it, how to promote it, which is smart.

Yep.

Right. So what I just started doing today is I created second Instagram, TikTok YouTube shorts accounts called Kerneroffice clips where I'm only going to post AI generated clips from stuff like this. Me and you talking. Sometimes it's you talking, sometimes me, sometimes both. One head on the top, one head on the bottom. And then plenty of softwares out there will add in B roll, they'll add in captions and all that, right? For instance, I'm going to do this today after we're done, I'm going to upload this whole episode into the software. It's going to spit out five to 15 clips and I'm going to upload all of them basically at the same time to all three platforms because I don't care about these platforms. I have zero followers. I don't care. And then I'm just going to look at the retention and it's like, okay, oh, interesting. Everyone loved that grill idea. I'm going to make the title the grill idea. Everyone loved this. No one cares about that. But I thought that was the most interesting part. I guess it's not. Because the thing about YouTube, TikTok and Instagram, even if you have zero followers, it's going to show it to hundreds or thousands of people regardless. And then you're going to know like for instance, I did this for the first time today with an episode I had with Sam Thompson that hasn't aired yet. And I only did two clips. We were talking about the same kind of idea, but just kind of different parts of the idea. And one of them was a clear winner across all three platforms. And I'm like, that's an a B test. I didn't know you could a B test podcast, right? Yeah. So the idea here is to be an agency that just does this, right? It's like just send me your raw files, give me your Riverside login and I'll create the social accounts for you. Or you create them and you share it with me. And I'm just gonna send you a weekly report of okay, you've got three, these three episodes coming out next week. These need to be your angles. Here's your data. I did it all for you.

What do you think? I think what you're saying is 100% right, which is we're going to find the part of the episode that maybe you didn't even think was the most interesting, but it's actually going to be the most interesting. But we're going to find that just through sheer brute force of if it's an hour long episode, we're going to take 20 clips and maybe five minutes each or something like that. And we're going to publish all of them. We're going to kill the losers, we're going to double down on the winners. That's effectively what you're saying. And I think that is very smart. I think to your point, the downside is I, I also like, as a business owner, not so cheap as a podcaster, very cheap. And so like we outsource all of our editing overseas and I'm kind of banking on a combination of like my notes during a podcast episode of like, oh, he just said this thing like when Chris said the words the dog runs, like, that's when we start the clip. But like, that's the only way that I do it today. There's not a better way. And I think to your point, there, there absolutely should be a better way. I think if you want to even double down on this a little bit more and you want some, a version of this that I absolutely know people would be willing to pay for, it would have to be for ads, specifically video ads and like trying to test out hooks and angles and offers and all of that stuff and do it through the lens of organic because I'm sure like, just like myself, like, you've probably scrolled like you are into ultra running soon. You definitely have seen this. Then I'm sure you've probably been on Instagram and you've seen. Do you have knee pain or don't you just hate when you get that plantar fasty editor in the morning? You start watching immediately because you're like, yeah, that's very relatable to me. But it also could be organic content. So trying to test the same exact ad, piece of content, whatever, with like 20, 30 different hooks, seeing what gets the longest watch time. I've been working with a couple of advertising agencies lately on the recruiting side where this is super valuable for them. Like I had a conversation literally yesterday where he's like, hey, if somebody gets me an extra five seconds of watch time on this ad, that's probably a million dollar decision. Would I pay more for that? Absolutely. And so I think that's maybe another angle that you can go at it with. From a service standpoint, I think it's super valuable. Like a lot of the podcasts that I record, like I did one with Casey Miracle last and it's all about like real estate options and trading and stuff. Like that big part of that podcast was less so the 52 minute long episode. And I cared a lot more about the seven really great clips That I was going to get out of that question. I think just comes down to like, who's going to pay for it.

I love the ad idea because like you said, I mean, you have an e commerce business, $500 a day ad budget is. It's like, it's funny how that works too, right? Like, have you ever seen the memes where it's like $20 burger at the restaurant and it's like, oh, as opposed to like losing $2,000 in crypto. It's like, eh, whatever. It's kind of like that. It's like, oh geez, I need this new chrome extension. It's $8 a month. Is it worth it? I don't know. But then you bump your ads from 5 to $700 a day. Like we're talking 17,000amonth, which a lot of money to anyone in the world and you just don't even give it a second thought. So for a podcaster to spend $2,500 a month on this service to like maybe get more downloads, maybe get more retention. Right. But for an ads guy, an agency or an E comm brand owner or any business owner that's running ads, maybe they're only spending 3,000amonth, or maybe they're three spending 300,000amonth. That's a drop in the bucket to them.

What about. And this is not your idea exactly, but this is kind of where my mind's going now. Have you seen people who use fake podcasts as hooks?

Yes. Yes.

So I know I came across one. I'm forgetting what the brand itself was, but they did the iconic like red velvet folded curtain in the background that kind of made it look like they were on Rogan and they weren't the headset on and the mic and like they very clearly were not on Joe Rogan because it was like so sleazy. It was like just edited enough. But like from the default, it looks like the background that guests always have on Joe Rogan. And I've even like for a friend who runs a supplement brand before jumped on and he's like, hey, can you kind of like ask me these questions? Like ask questions that you think would be good and I'm going to answer on Zoom with like my background, whatever. So maybe there's some kind of opportunity as well with like an ad creative agency. This is not your idea at all, but just total random. An ad creative agency that specifically deals with podcast style hooks that can kind of capture you in from the beginning. So that way, like when you're watching this and you're scrolling because objectively, podcasts are interesting content, and this is what you're trying to do anyway to get the most downloads. Like, what can you say that makes it look like you're in the middle of the conversation that randomly plugs your product at the end? If you started off with the conversation here today and you're like, man, I found the number one gas station in the country. Every other gas station can go to hell. Because, like, I found the one. And it was coming across this time when I was taking my family, we were in an RV trip, and I stopped off, and I stopped off at one of 83 different stalls or pumps, and I walked in and I was like, damn, I got to get this stuff everywhere. And then I found there's actually this site you can get it online. It's called, you know, TexasNacks.com. like, you watch that doesn't feel like an ad. Doesn't read like an ad.

It's a bait and switch.

Yes. But it's objectively like, the thing. So I wonder. I don't know. You said, like, I think the Rogan part is sleazy. I think that this could be a pretty good idea from a. If, hey, pay me to 10 grand. And we will record 80 different hooks, and our team of writers and creative strategists will come up with a ton of different stories and angles that you can tell. We'll pause 15 minutes in. You can swap out your shirt and hat to make it look like a different thing to reduce creative fatigue. Have you walk into the other room to change up the background. Like, there's definitely ways to do it where I think you can probably get more out of it.

That's a really good idea. And in fact, I want to steal that copy for a Texas snacks video.

Do it.

Yeah, because it's like, wait, what gas station? Is it Wawa? Is it Bucky's? Is it Racetrack? Is it quick trip? And they're just like, they're not feeling like they're being sold to at all.

Yeah, right. Exactly. Yeah. And I think that's the whole point of it, right? Like, I don't know the amount of times that you'll hear someone, some nutrition person go on for a while, and then the last thing they say is athletic greens. And you're like, ah, shit, I knew it. There's definitely something there. But I do think that to just a circle back to your original point, the original idea, there's value there. I think it just is a question of like where the value is. And it's kind of like a Pick Fu esque service, you know Pickfu, right?

Yeah, I've used them. Not for a while. I need to use them more.

So I mean, people listening, like, quick 10 second overview. PickFu is in it. Not AB testing, kind of A B testing. You put up two variations of something and you give them your ideal demographics of who you want the opinion from and they will get you customer feedback on which one that person prefers. So you're basically just doing the most tried and true version of that and putting it to the algorithm from day one, because it's free to actually have the algorithm test it versus the credits that I think Pickfu charges. And I like the idea a lot. Like I would want to be a customer if I had a budget, bigger content budget, essentially.

How many podcasts are there do you think that make? Call it $500,000 a year in ads. It's very much a power law. Let's say. How many categories are there? Because in business you've got like 30 categories within business. Marketing, management, entrepreneurship. Let's say there's 200 categories and maybe the top 50 in all of them make good money.

Top 50 podcasts in each category. Yeah. The only thing I would say is I think that there are probably some categories that make dramatically more than others. Like I actually just looked this up today. Tim Ferriss charges $50,000 per ad. Sometimes have five ads in an episode. That's $250,000 per episode. The man puts out two episodes a week. That's $500,000 times 52. Like it's a good chunk of.

That's crazy.

Yeah, right. So yeah, from the power loss standpoint, the top guys make a lot of money and would absolutely pay for this and probably pay a pretty premium service for it. Would have to be a premium service because I think it's such a small market. But I mean, like even yourself, like this podcast I think is like, correct me if I'm wrong, like you guys broke at least for a week. Top 50 on the business charts, right?

Like we got to 30 on Spotify. We peaked at 30. But the charts are kind of misleading because it's. It depends on Apple and Spotify, but it uses like new subscriber or follower velocity. Right? So like transparently, I just told you what my download numbers were. They're not a secret. Like I was top. I was number 30 on Spotify getting like 2,500 downloads per episode. And to me, like, that's not very much. Like if I were to like go sell ads to this right now, it's like maybe a hundred grand a year. Maybe.

Yeah, I was gonna say like, you gotta think what you're charging $50 per cpm, 120 bucks an episode. But then like because you have this.

Brand value, then YouTube and you, I can do three per episode and then you roll in YouTube. But it's like, okay, if I'm making a hundred grand a year, top line, I'm not going to pay someone $2,500 a month to like increase my. That's a third of my revenue.

Right.

But let's say there's, let's say the top 25 of each of the 200 categories. That's 5,000 people, 5,000 podcasts that are. That's your tam potential market. And I would bet almost none of them are doing this themselves. I don't think any agencies are really doing this for. There are. They're not really heard of you get, you know, we'll play the, the spreadsheet porn game, which I hate, but that's really the only way you can do it. If you get 1% of that market, that's 50 customers, 2,500 bucks a month, 75 grand a month. It could be a million dollar business with 1% of the market.

Totally. Yes, I, I do agree with that. I think you can make a million dollars, I think with all of these things, right? This is where kind of like that, how big can the business be? You got to figure out what's an easier way to make a million dollars. And then I think try to chase the easiest things. But I completely agree. Especially if you have an in with a lot of these guys to start, then I think I would do it without a question. There are a lot of upsells. I like the idea of like can you upsell a lead magnet? Then get them on an email and then who's managing their email and how are they selling ads in the email? Should you be selling ads in the email for them? Like one of those businesses to get them in the door cheaply and then scale up with them? Assuming that you find success?

Here's something interesting. That's not an idea, but it's a scam that Nick and I just came across. We get podcasts every. Or emails every single day, maybe five times a week of hey, we want to have this entrepreneur on your podcast. Because they're so accomplished, we want them on your podcast. Or it's like, hey, we want you to come on our podcast. We get 10,000 downloads a month. And so Nick was just on a podcast, and I won't say which, but they were claiming to get half a million downloads a month. And you can go to podstatus.com and you can see where someone's been ranked. Like, you can pay bots to fake your ranking for like a few days at a time. Like, anyone can pay a hundred bucks to get a bunch of fake subscribers. But then you really cannot sustain that. Okay, but what you can do is you can pay bots for downloads and listens and it looks legit and you can pick the country they come from. So one thing that I'm seeing people do is they're paying 5 to $20 for 10,000 quote downloads. And then like Shopify comes around and says, hey, you know, what are your rates? Because, yeah, because they, they sponsor every podcast. And you're like, oh, here's my screenshot from Buzzsprout. I'm getting 500,000 downloads a month. They're like, okay, here's 10 grand, here's 20 grand.

And it's all fake. That sucks.

All a lie.

So first of all, I think that's super unethical to give you the similar version to that. It's a numbers game podcast. Should I say the name? Yeah, I'll say the name. Because I don't think it really matters and I don't really care. There's this real estate podcast called Best Ever Creepy, you know, two years back and in hindsight, like, I think just everyone goes on that show or like a lot of real estate people, the reason you haven't heard about them is because I don't think the shows are good. I think that like it was a 30 minute episode. The guy sounds like he got out of bed when he started recording it. He asked me like four of the most softball, layup, no research done questions I've ever heard of. And he's like, all right, that's a rep and whatever, like, finish up the episode. And I was like, damn, what a waste of my time. What a waste of your time. What a waste of the listeners time. Like, no one's happy with this. And I was talking to somebody else three months ago and that name came up again. And I found out they do all of these podcast episodes because it's such a big SEO game for them where whenever somebody search, like if you search my name, probably somewhere along the lines that podcast episode does show up. And they have a really elaborate funnel and big, big, big top of funnel to get a bunch of people who are interested in real estate into their funnel and buying their courses or buying their advisory services. And supposedly that makes a lot of money. Not good content, but a lot at the top of the funnel and then slowly moves you down, which I think. I don't think that's unethical. I just think that it's not what I would want to do. Yeah, but, yeah, that one's kind of interesting.

Yeah. I mean, paying bots for downloads and then selling ads based on that's outright fraud, in my opinion.

Yeah, it is. It's 100% fraud. They can be sued for that.

While we're talking about fraud, there's this one guy that I did a bunch of digging on. I won't say who his name is because I don't want to get sued, but have you ever heard of Social Blade?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It's like a tool where you can go back in time and see how many followers anyone on the Internet has gained over time. Really?

You posted this like a year or a couple months ago, right?

I did, I did. This guy has like.

You were. Yes.

He had millions of followers and he interviews very big name people. Like, very big name people. And I went and looked at the Social Blade and if you see, like, you know, it's possible, theoretically possible on Instagram to get 100,000 followers in a day if something goes really viral, but something has to go really viral. And so this guy added like millions of followers over the course of like, four or five days with nothing going viral. And it's very, very easy to buy fake followers on Instagram very easily. And then you can see in the comments, all the comments are fake. They're just all fire emojis. It's very easy to see in the comments that it's fake. So this guy's fake. He's completely fake. He's never done anything real in business. And he is charging 7, 500 per appearance, and he's doing three.

A day.

A day. And so it's like he scammed his way into being legit because I doubt he charges Grant Cardone. Right. And so now these important people see other people that are not quite as important that paid a lot of money, that no one advertises, and they're like, oh, this guy must be legit. So it's like, it's kind of like, catch me if you can. Right? He's like, he fakes being a pilot, he fakes being a surgeon, and then before you know it, he actually is a surgeon. He faked it until he actually made it, but it was all built on lies.

So would I do that? No. Do I think? And the biggest question here. So the biggest flaw here is the fact that people are paying money and being manipulated around how many people are actually watching it now. So that's the unethical. That is the pure fraud part of it. Especially if asked, right? If you say, hey, are all these downloads legit? I want to spend sponsorship money. And you say, yes, that's illegal. The thing that I probably don't have as much of a moral qualm with, and I've never done it, but, like, I wouldn't be against it is if you did that, and you did that as a measure to try to attract bigger name guests and you don't run ads and you don't charge people to be on the show. I can live with myself, I think, if I did that. Yeah, kind of try. Like, to be honest with you, I'm doing the YouTube stuff with the real estate pod to the real estate show that we're doing right now. And something that I'm realizing now is when we were running the Next Generation podcast, that would get like 2,000 to 3,000 downloads per episode. And like, I don't know, two years into doing it at that level, I was like, ah, this is just like, it's not grown as much as I want to. And you know, as well, like, podcasts are hard to grow. So I wanted to go YouTube first this time. And we're getting more natural and organic downloads without me having to promote it as much. But the downside of going YouTube first is that when you invite guests onto the show and they saw that the last episode got 20 views, it's like, hey, who am I? Who am I doing this for? You and me. Yeah, the podcast, like, it's actually kind of a benefit that the views are hidden because you can say, hey, just look at the names of who I've had on. So I think that's kind of interesting.

It is interesting. It's like podcasts are still such uncharted territory.

Oh, yeah.

Okay. What'd you think? Did I overhype it? I don't think so. A week from now, we'll have the second part of this episode with Connor again where we talk about a health product to help with endurance for athletes. That's very simple. Two ingredients. We'll talk about a construction permit database that you can pay a little bit of money for to sell individual leads to home service business owners for tens or hundreds of dollars. We talked about how to package and frame ideas in a different way to profit. And we talked about building market research reports for industries. And who could be a buyer of these? Could you charge 200? 2,000? 20,000. 200,000. And then Connor had an amazing idea of basically taking a gym and using it as like a wework for personal trainers.

So.

So a gym only for personal trainers, because today personal trainers use normal gyms and the customers are tied to the gym, so they can't really move them between gyms. So I really think you'll like this one a lot. Let me know if I should have Connor back on, and I will. And I'm just going to be honest. Even if you say I shouldn't, I'm probably going to anyway, because I like him a lot, so. But I do want your feedback. Enjoy.