Starting a Business Has Never Been Easier. Here’s How to Win

There is no excuse for you to not be able to build something right now.

I just had a call with a guy that's selling a $7,000 a month service and this is a service that anyone could do automations as a service. AI automations.

I met a kid this week and he's like, I sold my first company and I have eight duplexes. And then I have kind of a side business that is showing people how to implement automations. I have 140 clients, so I'm like, wait a second, you're making 16 grand a month passively.

Why the freak are you here?

And he's like, honestly, I just want a steady paycheck and to feel like I'm safe and I'm just going to make bets on all these other things. It blew my mind. He's 24 years old and it's all automated. Could you imagine having AI when you were 24?

Yeah, I can, because right now I feel like a kid in a candy store and everything's free. Nick, has it ever been easier to do mass outbound outreach to people that you're trying to sell something to? No, never been easier. We have so many tools. AI tools. One prompt, few clicks instantly lemless gmask. You can send hundreds and thousands of cold emails. Right. AI calls, ringless voicemail drops, text messages. Right. We are getting inundated with sales messages. And as marketers, we're inundating others with sales messages. Correct? Correct. All right. So you got to stand out more. More than ever. So I just had a call with a guy that's selling a $7,000 a month service to Fortune 500 companies and he's doing it exclusively through three things. Are you ready? And this is a service that anyone could do, automations as a service, AI automations stuff that a lot of people listening to this are already doing or playing with themselves. But ironically, people at Fortune 500 companies have no idea about. So he's doing three things. He has a really good pitch in his cold email. He only sells in person and he has a 33% close rate in person. And he has a guarantee as part of his offer. Okay. And this is a guarantee that you and I have kind of seen floated out there in different contexts, but not like this.

So he's pulling from the Bramozi playbook.

He's got a good offer. Yeah, he's got a really good offer. But this, it's a very simple offer guarantee. So he says, I want to meet with you for 30 minutes in person. I promise You, I can find ways to save you so much more money than what my service costs. If I can't, for whatever reason, if you don't want to be a customer of mine, I will donate X amount to a charity of your choice. Really? And there's a second part to this. He proactively tells them how young he is. And he's like in his 20s or 30s, like early 30s, mid-20s, somewhere in there, he's not insanely young. And he says that combo of being young yet offering to donate money to a charity of their choice to that market to like Fortune 500 white collar workers just crushes. And so he has a 33% close rate, $7,000 a month. Very, very low churn. What do you think?

What's his offering?

He basically helps save them money by automating tasks that they have employees do. So he'll go look at how many jobs they have posted on LinkedIn and on Indeed. And basically say, hey, I'm not trying to like take your jobs. I'm trying to prevent you from having to hire more people. I want to sit down with your employees in person, face to face, teach them how to use AI. But first I want to ask them questions about their roles and responsibilities and use that to build automations that will make them like, have superpowers in their role. So I'm not going to go in there and say, hey, AI is going to replace you. Answer all these questions for me. It's like, no. Answer all these questions for me and you're going to be a rock star employee.

I met a kid this week. I say, kid is in, in his mid-20s who's doing something very similar. So I won't say the company, but I went and met with a kid who's an accountant at a company. We're having a conversation and in the middle of the conversation we're talking about AI. And he's like, yeah, actually after I sold my first company, I decided to get more into AI. I was like, wait, what? You're an accountant here. What are you talking about? He's like, yeah, well, I sold my first company and I have eight duplexes that we own and that income actually supports us. And then I have kind of a side business that is showing people how to implement automations into their companies, specifically focusing on CPA firms. I was like, what? How many clients do you have? He's like, I have 140 clients.

What? What is he charging?

This part blew my mind. 50 bucks a month. Oh, dude, listen to this. 50 bucks a month. And he's providing accounting services. He's automated the whole process. He's like, they love me. We automate accounting services. But then he also upsells them for implementing automations, right? So then he makes more money that way. But just the accounting services are also eight grand a month. And he's like, these are sticky customers. They're not going away. I'm like, wait a second, you're making 16 grand a month passively. Why the freak are you here? Like, why are you an accountant at this company? And he's like, honestly, some stuff happened with my dad when I was younger. I saw how rough it was for him and a job is so important to me. I just want a steady paycheck and to feel like I'm safe and. And I'm just going to make bets on all these other things. I was like, it blew my mind. How simply He's 24 years old, but just how simply he apparently has acquired all these accounting customers and it's all automated. He's like, I spend an hour a week basically on this business. So not only has cold outreach become easier than it ever has been, but the ability to implement and like, actually do what you say you're going to do has become easier than it ever has been. And you get people here who are just. They're going into these businesses and creating real money for themselves. Like, how much was this guy you interviewed making a year?

I don't know. I don't know how many customers he had, but he was doing really well.

Could you imagine having AI when you were 24?

Yeah, I can, because I feel like it right now. I feel like a kid in a candy store and everything's free. I'm in Willy Wonka's chocolate Factory and he says, take all you can hold. I'm in a Mr. Beast video where he gives me 10 grand to go in a grocery store. This is the best period of my life. I'm in my renaissance era, baby.

You are in repl it four hours a day.

Oh, and I love every second of it.

What I just said. Like, not only has it never been easier to do cold outreach, but the ability to fulfill has never been easier. And that's where I think you have, like, your superpower has always been on cold outreach. So juice that up a little bit.

Okay?

You're a little bit better at cold outreach now with AI but now you can fulfill, bro. Like, the opportunities are endless. You can build literally anything you want. What did you build? Last week we were on Whole cobros. And you're like, hey, I have this idea. And what did you throw up? How to use AI.

How to use AI.com? yeah. Unbundled subreddit.

Yeah, you got to log in, you got to submit ideas, you can vote on them, you can comment. You built the whole website and now you've got a community of people who are contributing AI ideas. Like there is no excuse for you to not be able to build something right now. It's insane.

So here's how this works. I make you free videos. I actually know what I'm talking about. I have no greasy sales pitch at the end. And if you implement what I talk about, you'll make a lot more money and have a better life. And all I ask for in return is, is that you hit the subscribe button and maybe even the notification bell. Just like that. Thank you. Honestly, it gives me like as cheesy as it sounds. I get tingles just thinking about it. Up until six months ago, what did I do if I had an idea that was technical, that required some code? I'm going to get Justin, my brother in law on the phone. Justin is extremely bright. He's a 10x developer. He's busy, he makes a ton of money. He's like, yeah, I'll get to you when I can get to you. Because he has worked on so many projects for me, you, us, that just never materialized and he put ton of hours into them. Now I don't have to bug Justin at all. I'm going to his house in a couple weeks and we can just bro down about disc golf. I can build my own stuff now. If he were to see my code, he'd probably laugh me out of the room. But I don't care because it works. I don't even know how to read my code. Where do I see my code? I don't know.

What is a computer? The files are in the computer.

Are you my grandson? I've got some piggyback ideas. All right.

Okay.

So for those new to the pod, we like talking about piggybacking, which is instead of like starting from scratch and finding your own customers fresh, just plug into another business and piggyback on their customers in a non competitive way. For example, I want to start a stump grinding business. Let's go find a bunch of homeowners. No, let's go find a bunch of tree trimming businesses that are willing to outsource all of their stump grinding on a weekly basis. Right. Piggybacking one on one. I'VE got two ideas in one here, and I'll just explain what people are watching. These are called fabric ceilings, and they're super popular in Greece and elsewhere in Europe, and I think they need to be here in the US and here's how you should do it. I call it the piggyback method. I've already done content about people that install pergolas. It costs, like, 8 to $12,000 to install a pergola. But look how they look. They're ugly. Who wants that? If I were you, I'd go find a dozen or two of these pergola installation businesses and piggyback on them. Say, hey, I install fabric ceilings on pergolas. You need to offer this as an upcharge. I know how to do it. You upcharge a thousand bucks. I have 200 of that for you just for referring me, and I'll do all the work. Let's say Your costs are 200 bucks, your labor takes a couple hours, and you're making two to three hundred dollars an hour to install something that ob looks awesome and that people would pay for. So I made a business plan for it right here. What do you think?

Dude, I think it's amazing. Like, literally, I just got a quote last week to have a pergola on our deck. $15,000. And, like, what are you doing? And we want it now. I wouldn't do that because we want it for the winter. And, like, the snow's just gonna, like, wreck that. But I think it's an amazing piggyback method.

Yeah. For those only listening, a fabric ceiling is like, it just looks all wavy. It blows with the wind. It offers more shade. It looks really cool. And it's something that's being done in the Mediterranean but not really out west. And so bring something over there over here. Piggyback. With pergola installation businesses, they make more money. You tap into their customer base. Bada bing, bada boom.

Okay, Bada bing, bada boom.

So, Nick, one of our most popular Holdco Bros. Episodes ever was from July 10, episode 37, B2B stump grinding. For those just catching up, we talked about, hypothetically, B2B stump grinding. Then we did a public experiment. We called every tree trimming business in Houston, yada, yada, yada. And this guy Tyler and subsequently several others went out and started B2B sump grinding businesses, which, as far as we know, wasn't a thing. Like, stump grinding was not a B2B type of business, but now it is. So you could say we kind of Invented a new industry. But I found a new. I found a new B2B stump grinding for us. Okay, you ready?

I'm here for it, dude.

Yeah. Story time. So I went to my friend Ed's house. You've met Ed. He just put in a pool. And Ed is like me. He's kind of cheap. Doesn't spend too much if he doesn't have to. And he used to be a home builder, so he knows a bunch of subcontractors and he can get stuff done around the house very cheaply. He put in a pool, Nice pool. Not plain, not extravagant. Middle of the range, middle of the pack pool, little slide, little waterfall, medium size. And he like, was very prudent about what he spent on it. What do you think that thing costs?

$50,000?

150,000. Oh. What? Yeah, that's like going rate and that's like a good price for a pool like that. And you'd be like, yeah, it's nice.

So I have a pool and it has like a liner in it. I don't even know what to call it. Like acrylic.

It's like a proper.

It's like a real pool. What you have is a doughboy that.

You have ground above ground. That's what they have in Alabama. No. So 150 grand. And in all seriousness, 20, 19, you could get that pool for 70 grand. You cannot get a pool in Texas under 100 grand. You just. It's not going to happen. Okay, so that's the, that's the backstory then I'm talking to our business partner, James Fast Tree Care, and he says, chris, I just met this guy. Or he operates excavators. He doesn't even own an excavator. And for those listening, excavator, it's a. It's a friggin. It's a bucket truck excavator.

Hardly knower.

You know, it's a big digging machine, okay. And I rented one to dig a culvert. It's a lot of fun. I'd never used one before. I just hopped on it, started pulling levers and I dug a bunch of holes in the ground. Anyway, this guy has a B2B pool digging business. He has no website, he has no Google business profile, he has a phone number and a handful of relationships with pool companies. Okay? Pool company goes into Mary Jones's house and says, yeah, 150 grand for this pool. Cool. Can you show me an itemized invoice? Sure. Digging. $5,000. This guy. Hey, hey. I Got a job for you. Five grand. You good for it? Yeah, sure. He goes to United Rentals. He picks up the excavator. He pays about $700 for it for the day. These things cost about 70, 80 grand to buy, but you can finance them and lease them. And he goes there for about four hours, digs out a pool. He's on his merry little way. $5,000. What are we talking about here?

So who's he piggybacking off of?

Pool companies. Pool companies just sub everything out. Then they're going to go find a framing company to put the forms in, all the two by fours, and they're going to find a plaster company. Then they're going to find a landscaping company to put all the tiles in around it. Then they're going to go buy the slide from a third party. They're just like home builders. They're just subcontracting everything out. And the homeowner just. It's just another line item. So they're not super price sensitive. The pool companies aren't.

Okay, first of all, I love this idea because effectively what Tyler did is he bought a stump grinder and then rented it out. That's effectively what he did.

Right?

Like, these true trimming businesses don't want to spend $20,000 or whatever the. No, it's more than that. $50,000 on a stump grinder. And so they are renting it out from Tyler and Tyler goes and he fixes it. This is the same problem, right? These pooled contractors, they don't want to have an excavator, so they're renting it out from this guy. I really like this idea of piggybacking, and I was doing it while you're talking. Piggybacking off of high ticket home services. So literally, as you were talking, this is what I did. I asked Chat GPT, what are some high ticket home purchases like a pool and tree trimming. So pools it names, tree trimming, landscaping, redesign, and hardscaping. So this is just off the top of my head, all right, go find contractors that do the landscaping. And maybe you're the guy that they don't want to run it to the dump. So you're like, hey, dumpster rentals, right? What's the big ticket purchase item that they don't want to do? Maybe it's disposal, deck and patio installation. It's going to do. That's going to be disposable as well. That would be an amazing one to piggyback off. If you just contact all these Contractors and say, hey, I have a dumpster.

I'll come pick up your old deck.

Don't even buy a dumpster. Do what I did last weekend when we took down our bubble in the back over the tennis court. We just had two trailers and then loaded the trailers up and took them to the dump. So you could start just cash flowing by getting a trailer and, you know, having a hitch on your truck. But then you buy a dumpster anyways. That would be really interesting. Oh, fencing installation. How could you piggyback off a fencing installation?

You could have, like, auger as a service. Like digging the post holes.

Yeah, that's.

I've hired guys to come out and do that. Like, I'll get my fence repaired and I'll plant trees at the same time. So it's like a 350 bucks. Come out and dig 13 holes for me. Dude.

That could be the same for landscaping. Let's, like, if somebody's going and doing a big backyard landscaping, having somebody come out with a bobcat or something just to grade the land right, because they don't want to have the expense of that bobcat.

Okay, cool.

I'll be the guy who actually comes out and moves dirt around.

Let's remind our listeners of what Tyler the stump rental. The stump grinder did. He bought a $60,000 stump grinder, but he. He financed it. His payments, like, 450amonth. His truck financed 450amonth. His trailer finance parking. He pays, like 250 bucks a month for a lot. He doesn't have a building. Like, he works from home. Like, you don't have to have $60,000 to start a business like this.

Well, and the way to validate it is so simple. It's the same way that Tyler did it. You scrape a list of the type of contractors that you want to piggyback off of. You find a market to test it in, see if there's demand there. If there's demand there.

Before you spend a dollar.

Yeah, before you spend a dollar. See if there's demand there. And then if there's demand, you actually jump into it. You actually start booking jobs and doing it. That's what Tyler did. And in his first month. I can't remember what he did in his first month. I think he did like $7,500 his first month.

He did 9,000 his first, and then like 20,000 his second. Right.

And just two months ago. I don't know what he did last month, but just two months ago, he did $30,000. He's making good money as a solopreneur and hopefully he expands. But these are the home services piece in my mind is such a freaking cool opportunity to piggyback off of these companies that have effectively distribution. Dude, this is mind blowing. Gen Z and Millennials are the most entrepreneurial generation we've ever seen. Check this out.

According to like what metric I'm going.

To tell you right now. So there was a recent study, I think that U.S. bank just published, 36% of Gen Z and Millennials who are business owners plan to acquire a business from a retiring owner. Only 54% of current owners though have a formal succession plan. So there's this gap in the marketplace and I think there's a huge opportunity right now for these individuals who are trying to figure out how do I take advantage of AI to utilize AI to help them figure out how to take advantage of it? Does that make sense what I'm saying? I know that's like super stupid and.

Meta, but one more time for the ADHD years in the back, I'll say.

It a different way. Last year, 72% of business owners thought AI was going to play an important role. 2024. This year, 87%, a 15 point swing.

Right?

So like there's value.

Very surprising to me because isn't it? I would feel like there'd be like 25% of holdouts and they're just going to like out of pride, ego, whatever. Like, no, this is just a fad. But for that margin to cut in half in one year is shocking to me.

It's insane. But not only that they're utilizing AI in their business and from the report, they're mainly utilizing it as like a better search engine.

Right?

So they're like using ChatGPT, whatever, as a counselor, so to speak. But I actually think there's a really, really good opportunity for them to use ChatGPT as a therapist and as like a business coach. So I went to ChatGPT and I literally asked it this prompt, are you ready? You've seen people say, like, the best way to use AI and to fix a prompt is to use AI to fix your prompt. This is the same way. Like the best way to find an opportunity for you to, to take advantage of something is to use AI to help you find that opportunity to take advantage of something. So we've talked about quizzes. I'm just going to bring this up really quickly, but I think that people need to start using AI as an interactive conversational as opposed to just Hey, I put this in and it spits it out. And I think that there's a market for people to create GPTs very simply that enable the interaction. Does that make sense, what I said?

I think so. It removes friction so people don't have to think as much about what to ask.

Yeah. All you have to do is give it, like, create a custom GPT that has a prompt. You could have a custom GPT that's like, hey, you're helping this person decide on which business to buy. Ask them these questions. How much capital do they have? What's their experience?

And to anyone listening that thinks that sounds too complex, you're literally just going into ChatGPT, you're clicking Projects, you're creating a project with instructions. Right.

That's literally all it is, in fact. Do you want me to share my screen?

Yeah. All right.

So I'm in chat GPT. I'm here, I have. These are all my GPTs. Over here I have projects, blah, blah, blah. Now people get overwhelmed because they think, oh, GPT. That sounds complicated. It's not complicated. It's literally just a saved prompt. What I'll do over here is I'll come to this business research assistant and I'll just show you what this looks like. Edit GPT. And now I'm looking at what the GPT is on the back end. And you can see here, I named it. Here's a quick description. It generates business research, blah, blah, blah. But then I actually created this. This GPT assists users in drafting a comprehensive business research document using a structured approach.

And let me guess, you use ChatGPT to write its own instructions. Oh. Huh.

I don't know.

Did I, Chris?

Huh?

Yes.

That's exactly like, I went to ChatGPT and I was like, hey, help me write this prompt. This is what I'm trying to do. And I want to create a custom GPT. It doesn't even have to be like, you can literally say just that. Help me write a GPT prompt for finding the best business use cases at a carnival. You don't like. Go do that. And it will help you write this prompt. I literally just took it, copied and pasted it, and now it tells the GPT exactly how to work. I hit update, boom. And now I have a business research assistant. So what I'm saying is you can do this and sell it to people. You can. You can put it on the GPT store within Chat GPT, or you can sell it as a wrapper, it doesn't matter. But let's Say that you're really good at helping people understand. I don't know how to write a book. Okay, I'm gonna go take my knowledge. It's here in my head. This is the exact process for writing a book. Please write a prompt for this that enables other people to write books. You throw it into a GPT and now you have a custom GPT that you can share. If you get it approved in OpenAI store, you could actually share that GPT with people. You can sell it or you could.

Just go to replit and say make a very simple chat window, just a wrapper with this prompt and then you.

Can show that anywhere 100%. So my point is I wasn't trying to be overly technical with it. And it's not even a major idea. It's just use AI to help you identify what opportunities are available to you. Like this kid, right? He's going to Fortune 500 companies because apparently he has a skill set with automation. I would bet you could approach Fortune 500 companies or SMBs with your skill set of cold outreach. Or somebody maybe has a really good skill set with, I don't know, some type of architecture. But find whatever your skill set is, build a custom GPT around it and you can actually sell that to help people find their own opportunities.

I kind of love that you told me that that CPA guy is only charging 50amonth. I didn't think you were going there. But I think that people get so partially our fault. They get so hung up on like a high ticket monthly recurring revenue. Right? We talk about it a lot that it's like I have an automation agency. I have a short form video editing agency, I have an outbound agency, whatever, it's 2000 month, 1500, 4000 and they have a really hard time getting customers and they're like what is wrong? What happened? But this guy is like, okay, I know what I'm offering. It's very, very low lift hands off for me. I'm going to charge 50 bucks a month at enough customers that's a six figure, fairly passive income. But I'm going to have these upsells once I get my foot in the door. They see me and trust me and know that I know what I'm talking about. They're going to buy all kinds of stuff from me and so let's be patient. So video is cool. But you know what's better? Long form audio via podcast and my newsletter, tkopod.com go there to subscribe for free to my newsletter. It's one email a week. Very tactical. And then go to my audio podcast. Three episodes a week. Stuff like this. You're going to love it. All free. No sleazy sales pitch. Tkopod.com you might be listening and think.

And you might be think this like, oh, this kid doesn't know pricing. That's what I thought. I was like, oh, he doesn't even know what to charge.

Oh, that's cute. That's cute.

He's dramatically under undercharging, right? Because how much is outsourced bookkeeping a month? In our experience, hundreds. Hundreds. Sometimes in the low thousands. In my experience, it's like between a thousand and two thousand dollars a month. If you're doing it onshore, if you're doing it offshore, you can do it for cheaper, right? And so I asked him, I was like, dude, do you even know what people charge for this? He's like, yeah, about twelve hundred dollars a month. And I was like, okay. He's not like he even knows what the pricing is. And like you just said, he has purposely picked this $50 price because he knows it's going to be sticky for these customers and he can fulfill on it. It blew my mind.

Oh, man. I was having a conversation earlier today, and this guy asked me what my approach is in starting a business, which is a very broad question. But he's like, you want to rush to monetization, right? That's what you talk about, Chris, right? You get monetized as fast as possible. And as he said that, I kind of thought of a framework. And what I told him was, it's not about running towards monetization as fast as possible. It's about running away from friction as fast as possible. Because that's all I'm asking you to do. This is more of a mind game than anything, right? So when I tell you, go get your first dollar, preferably from someone that isn't related to you, it's not so you can, like, get rich faster. It's because every second it takes for you to get that first dollar is more friction slash, less momentum for you to actually do the thing. The higher likelihood that you'll just abandon this whole entrepreneurship thing altogether. You need to keep the momentum going that is the most important part of starting anything.

Well, how many businesses?

It's 50 bucks a month. Then it's 50 bucks a month. I've started about 80 businesses.

You started 80 businesses? Why have you started 80 businesses? It's because 75 of them didn't reduce friction fast enough and you moved on to the next thing. I mean, 75 is too much. But you get my point, right? It's like you're very good about, cut my losses, cut my losses. I'm out of here. And to your point, it's not about running towards monetization, because I think probably of those 80 businesses you started, 75 of them did monetize. The question was, how well did they monetize? How quickly could you get to scale? Were there margins there?

It's juice worth the squeeze.

Was the juice worth the squeeze?

Right.

And if you're trying to get into entrepreneurship, that's the whole goal. As quickly as possible, find the one thing that you can be better than anybody else at, get there really fast, and then exploit it over and over and over and over again. And the most successful people do that. They don't continue to just test, test, test, test, test forever.

Yep. All right.

Can I bring up an idea?

I got to hear what you got. Please.

Okay.

No, go.

My dad's here. He decided to drive up, like, last minute yesterday. We have a broken sprinkler out front. It's been broken for two weeks. I've been trying to get somebody out to the house to fix it. I know in my head that it's not hard to fix sprinklers, but I know in my heart that I am not mechanically inclined at all. So I've left it, and I've just been, like, waiting. And now that my dad's here, he's helping me fix it. And it's been a lot of fun this week as well. I started talking to this guy on Twitter, and for whatever reason, I started looking at his profile and. Can I show you? I'm going to share my screen really fast, I promise. This all makes sense. This is his business.

So what I'm looking at is metal shop fantasy camp for those listening.

What it is, is it's a camp where anybody can come. And for four hours, he just teaches them how to make a couple of things. There's a cool video on the website, and you can actually look at what classes are here. One hour, introduction to welding. $130 per participant. How to make a cube, $250 per participant. Steel bowl welding class, $190. Right. So he's got all these classes. People come in. He's not certifying them so they can go work on a building. Yeah, they're just learning how to weld.

And so for funsies.

For funsies. So I had that conversation with him, with this guy, my dad comes over and shows me how much of a man I am not. And it hit me. How many men are there like me who don't know how to change oil, who don't know how to change. I don't know any electrical in the house, who don't know how to do a simple project, who don't know how to fix the sprinkler heads, but they have the means where they could actually attend one of these fantasy camps to learn how to fix things themselves. Maybe it's a fantasy camp around landscaping. Maybe it's a fantasy camp around, like, changing the oil. But they all get together, they have an instructor, and it's. It's one weekend. Again, they're not certifying them to start businesses, but these are local sort of chapters, if you will, where I could just go and learn how to freaking fix a sprinkler head without having to go on YouTube. Does that make sense?

Yep.

Okay. Because I could go on YouTube and watch how to fix a sprinkler head, but that's not me actually going and getting my hands dirty. What do you think?

I love it. I love it. I'm trying to boil it down to the first principles. Why is this guy. Why is this guy successful? Right. Could you take that model and copy and paste it to anything, like landscaping? Or is welding something special, something unique? And first of all, I think that there have probably been studies done. I'm completely guessing that millennials, more than any other generation, just don't know how to do stuff with their hands. We didn't have to learn. Right?

Yeah.

We've had phones for the last 15 years. Okay. So there's something there. But I also think if we boil it down to first principles, most millennial men would like to learn. My pull out trash drawer was broken, and it was such a small job. No handyman wanted to come out there. So I figured out how to do it, and it took me like, three hours. And it was so simple. And I know it probably would have taken a handyman 15 minutes, but you know what? Every single time I open that drawer to throw something away, I feel so good about myself. I feel amazing. It was worth every second of the time that it took me to do it. Right. Yeah. So I. I guarantee you there's a business to be had here. But my counterpoint is I think welding is something unique. I think first principles, men want to create things with their hands. Right. A cube, a metal bowl. Like, I think there's something innate in us of taking raw materials, organizing it into something tangible and something useful that we could show our wives. And hopefully they're proud of us about it. Right? I mean, hopefully, like, I know my wife's proud of me, but like others, right?

I know my wife's proud of me.

So. So with this as a business concept, I would think you would need to find something that's similar to welding. And maybe it's not like drywall, because that's kind of like fixing something around the house, but maybe it is something like woodworking or cabinetry where they're actually creating something. Does that make sense? I think totally makes sense.

So you really think it has to be married with creation?

I think so, yeah.

Because I'm looking at it from, from, like, my perspective. If there is something local where I could go and meet up with somebody and I could learn about plumbing. Here's some of the list. I have plumbing, electrical, landscaping, yard maintenance, DIY projects. I would go. For me, that's the biggest hang up is like, I'll go watch something on YouTube, but I still want somebody there is like, wait, is this how I hold it? Is this how I actually get the joint to fit? To get. Like, I don't. I don't understand how to do it. And I'm like, yeah, insecure about it.

And I think a key part is being in a class full of other people that are, like, openly insecure about it too. You know, there's like a judgment free zone.

Well, and that's what like, our generation is unique in that sense. Like, our parents, generations, they would never show that. But we're all like, yeah, I don't know how to do that, man. I'm an idiot. Can you please show me how to do. Yeah, but like, this house, I have hundreds of stations. There are hundreds of sprinkler heads. I'm going to be like, I need to learn how to change the sprinkler head. Otherwise I'm going to pay like $10,000 a year for some handyman to just come over to my house and show me how to fix it.

Yeah.

Can I tell you the domain I bought?

Oh, dude, you're asking a junkie if he wants some crack. Kidding me?

Please, I want some crack. Fantasy handyman camp.

Oh, that's a good one.

Yeah. Yeah, I know you hated it just by the way you said it. Gosh dang it.

Cancel it. It's seven syllables. Cancel it. Seven syllables. That's my only. That's my only beast.

Seven syllables.

Seven syllables.

But I do think there'd be a Local component to where you could kind of organize these. Let's say you're a flipper in an area. Let's say you're just a general contractor and you want to increase your business. It's the bro mosey example where, yeah, you'll show them exactly what to do, but they're going to call you for the implementation. Like, you'll give away all the secrets. This is how you, whatever, Change the oil on a car or change the brake pads, carburetor, whatever. But they're still going to call you the handyman because they're like, oh, wait a second. He showed me how to do that one time, but I don't know if I want to do it. So I could see this as a really cool lead magnet situation for a young contractor of some sort. Mechanic, plumber, electrician, whatever. Where on the weekends or during the week, they just hold these classes and show guys like us how to freaking change stuff.

I love it. All right. I have a business idea that I shamelessly ripped from you that I think someone listening should start, like, this afternoon.

Okay, I'm ready for it.

You ready?

Butt hurt.

All right.

But I'm ready for it.

So you told me about a month ago that you were using ChatGPT to play trivia games with your sons, correct? Yeah. Okay, so about a week after you told me that, I was on a date with my 9 year old boy and we were driving around and, you know, sometimes it's hard thinking of things to talk to your sons about or your kids, Right? Yeah. How was your day? Good. What do you like to do? I don't know. And so ChatGPT can really be a relationship enhancer. And so I took a page out of your playbook. I used the ChatGPT voice to speech feature, which is amazing. Like, if I'm on my phone using ChatGPT, I rarely type anymore. I just talk to it.

It's amazing.

And I'm kind of like my uncle who only does, like, speech to text. I'm like that version now with CHAT GPT. Everyone in the room can hear me. Yeah.

Hey, Chat GPT. I have a fungal infection on my scrotum.

I was just gonna say fungal infection. I was just gonna say that. I'm like, in the middle of church. Fungal infection. Third toe causes.

Did we quickly talk about how much I hate the new voice?

I hate it. I don't want you to pause. I don't want to hear you breathing. I don't want to hear you chuckling. Be a robot.

Be Fast like mine. I don't know if yours sounds like this. This is exactly what mine sounds like. Okay. Yeah. So what happens in these? I'm like, I don't stop. I want you to sound authority.

1.5X.

Why is that not an option?

It will speak faster. It will. Yeah, just say speak faster. And it objectively does, but you have to say it every time you start a new chat anyways, you're on a.

Nice date with your son and you start using that mode.

And so I took your playbook and I said, hey, I'm a dad. My 9 year old is here. Make a trivia game between us where we can compete against each other, but make each of our questions, like, age appropriate. And it was amazing. It kept track of the score. It asked him questions about Pokemon, it asked me questions about world history or whatever. We had a great time. And I wonder if this is like, you know, you know, Web 1.0 was like late 90s, early 2000s. 2.0 is like mobile, right? And Web 2.0, you know, brought us all into our screens, which is a shame. I'm very hopeful that Web 3.0, slash, the new AI that we have in front of us, is going to hopefully bring us more together. It can, like, augment. Supplement our relationships. Because if it weren't for this, we would have just been like, sitting there in silence listening to brand new, which could be worse. We just had this. We were joking and we talk about the questions and what? Oh, and it just. It just brought us together.

Can I.

So here's the idea. Yes, please.

Well, I was just gonna say this is a quick up level. I've started doing that now with two of my boys and me. So there's three of us and each one of us have different topics. So like Otto, my youngest, he didn't. He's like, I don't like geography. I want to do Minecraft. His trivia category was Minecraft. Mine was geography. Royces was history.

Oh, cool.

And then we played it and like, Otto ended up winning. I don't know how he knows so much freaking about Minecraft, but it was so fun, man, because then, because each. It was a game for, like, each one of us that we were playing together. It wasn't like, let's play Risk and two of the three people actually hate Risk, but the one person, you know what I mean? It's like, it was really fun. It was really cool.

Now that you mentioned that, like, are there even games that exist? Like, there are games where it's like, the minimum age is three. Like Uno, we're all on the same level. And the older people are like, I'm bored. There's no strategy here. The younger people are like, this is fun. Has there ever been a game, like, other than some random obscure board game that works like that? You know, it's like literally on everyone's level.

You're going to laugh at me. I think a game like Dungeons and Dragons is like that in the sense that it's. I've never played it, but it's like you can tailor it to each person. And so it's like, oh, I'm a third level mage and I have my little bag of tricks or whatever and, you know, another person's an archer. I don't know. But like, it is unique to each one of them. But no, I don't think that there is a game like that because it was just. It's too hard. Like, there had been no way to actually do it up to this point.

Right. Anyway, the idea is someone needs to build a version of this in a mobile app, a wrapper. You could use Lovable, Replit, Windsurf, Cursor, Bolt, New Vercel. Like, you pick all of them can build mobile apps so easy, like three bucks a month, maybe $20 lifetime. You could charge for this and like, you would have user engagement. It would bring the. The kids would go to it. The dad was go like. And you don't have to make this like a family trivia game. Like, you could literally make this father son trivia, like mother daughter trivia, as niche as you want and then test all the marketing angles. Like, once you build one, it's significantly easier to build four or five other types of trivia games. Insert any niche you want and then see which one just resonates and takes off.

I thought about building it and really the way you would do it is you'd have a screen up front that was like, okay, what topics are is this person interested in and what age are they? And then once you have that, you can play the game because on the back end you would prompt it to say, make sure that each question is tailored to their age and it's age. Like, age appropriate level of difficulty is going to be balanced or made for each age. So like the back end, super easy. You want to know the reason I haven't done it. This is going to be really stupid. I'm worried that it would do really well and I'd like, wake up and I'd have. And I'd have like $1,000 in API charges. You know what I mean? Just because, like, so many people, all.

Of a sudden they're doing this problem you could have.

What are you talking about? I know, I know. Crass.

That's like the most backhanded compliment ever. You know why I'm not doing this 99% of the population? Because I'm lazy. I just haven't done it.

It's like.

No, I'm just. I'm genuinely worried it would be. I wouldn't know what to do with all that newfound wealth. No.

Because then I have to figure out how do I integrate the payment? And I'm like, crap.

Because that's the problem. You want to have, Nick.

That's why we're different, Chris. Because I start looking into it and it's like, oh, hey, GitHub, will you please do an audit of my code? Or Supabase, do an audit of my code. And it's like, fatal error here, security protocol is missing here, flaw here. And I'm like, oh, crap. If I'm going to do like a. If I'm going to have a payment model, I can't have all this crap. And then I got to get somebody else to finish developing it. Those are like the cascading steps that stop me from actually doing it. Okay, so what you wanted to hear?

No one cares. Work harder.

I do love that idea, man.

I do.

I. I do freaking like that idea.

Someone's going to build this. Someone listening to this will build this. And I hope it's possible for them.

It should be me, and I have it.

Yep. All right. All right, what you got?

Well, a quick follow on. Owen and I are developing this thing called One Life Tale, and part of the experience is an AI guided or like, AI facilitated conversation where family members can call at the same time because they're in different locations, but it will spur them to tell stories about things. Like, you know when you get together with your family at the holidays?

Yeah.

You tell the same five stories over and over. Yeah. Remember that one time, Chris, where you just freaking showed up on the way home from school and you had one bag of candy and one bag of fruit and you were just happy as could be.

Well, every time I'm with my. My parents, they tell me the story about me waking up in the middle of the night as a four year old to sneak pizza out of the fridge and I accidentally snuck the jalapeno pizza and I woke up crying and screaming with a jug of milk in my hand in my underwear. Okay. It's embarrassing. Don't tell that in front of my friends.

You were diagnosed with habanero, but as.

I like to call it, habuttonero.

Anyways, like, who captures those stories? And unless you're with the family that's all together. So anyways, a part of this app is capturing those stories and AI is facilitating the conversations. So to your point, I think in a weird way there will be AI facilitated human interaction. Like it's, it's, it's going to happen.

I really like that idea, actually. And we have like next to our dining room table, it's called, it's like a little card game. It's called table cards or something. And it's specifically for generating conversations at the dinner table with your kids. So you just pull out a card and it's like a thought provoking question. It's not customized to your family. They've sold millions of those things. So to me, it's like a personalized version of that in a digital form. What I think you should have it do is connect to either your icloud photo album or your Google photo album, whichever you use, and use that to pull up questions like, tell me about the vacation you took to Orange beach in 2017.

Smart. Yeah, that would be, that would be amazing because it's just going and mining things that are already there. So this app is actually. Do you remember when we talked like last November, and I said one of my favorite ideas would be to capture stories of people in assisted living facilities?

Yeah. Wasn't that episode 101? I think it was back on, like December 6th. How to cash in on the $16 billion genealogy boom with AI tools.

That was it. So, like the, the general premise behind the idea was we have these generations that are passing away. My dad's here this week, which we're getting a bunch of stories. What happens to those stories? They die with that generation. Or it's like, oh, you, you remember that story your dad used to tell you? So my dad is telling my, my son all these stories and guess what they're wearing this week, Chris? They're wearing my limitless pendant. They're capturing all the stories and like, I don't have to be there for it. And so we're capturing it to be able to catalog that. Anyway, anyway, so we, we had that idea last year and the premise is to let families capture these stories even when their family member is in an assisted living facility. And then to like, go to these facilities, set up a room, capture the information, and then create a product for them where that. That story exists. So Owen liked that idea, and he already had a product that was similar, but it wasn't geared towards the elderly population. And he's now, like, retooled it, and we're focusing it on this, on capturing stories. He's got 11 labs on the back end that is taking their voices. And so now you'll have, you know, grandma's voice, mom's voice, dad's voice. It's also facilitating conversations with people, whether you can capture the conversation that they're having about the stories. Like, we were just talking about. Oh, remember that time when you were 16, you were such an idiot, you crashed that car. So now there's, like, a repository of these stories, and what it will do then is take the stories and the input from each person, and it will create, like, a consolidated story effectively with a narrator who's telling it. I just love that piece of it because now we can actually capture the cool things that have happened and the stories that have passed from older generations. And, like, my kids can hear it because my dad tells a story about when he was captured by the Indians and almost cooked alive or the time that he beat some guy up who was a bounty hunter that because he was swearing at him too much. Like, it's. These are just funny stories that you. You probably will forget over time.

Oh, okay. I love all of it. I love everything you're saying to me right now. But I think I just leveled up our original idea. This is so obvious in retrospect. So we had talked about putting, like, some sort of a booth or a laptop or something lightweight in an assisted living facility where someone could walk up to it. They could be prompted once again, because they might not remember all the most relevant stories. So the voice agent would just start talking to them and get all these stories out of them and record Quorum. Why not just make this an app that's just an AI voice agent or a phone number that you call anyone in the assisted living facility that has a phone or the person themselves with their own phone could just start talking to an AI agent, and they probably wouldn't even know it's an AI agent. And it would ask them, like, tell us about this. Tell us about your time in the war. Tell us about. And it would. It's the same idea, except done through an app or. Or through a literal phone number.

Yeah. I think the only hard part with that would be to get them to adopt it and to utilize it. Although I think once you got them to use it once. They're going to use it over and over and over again because all of us have that, like, innate desire to connect with other humans. And, dude, it feels like you're talking to another human, right? Like, you're having a conversation. You're telling stories back and forth. And when you get to that age, generally, you're more interested in, like, telling your story than you are necessarily of, like, hearing everybody else's stuff. So all you have to do is prompt them. They start talking, and then you capture it. I think it's a great idea.

It's a banger.

All right, so this brings me to my favorite idea of the week. Last week, you talked about piggybacking. It's one of our frameworks. Another one of our frameworks is riding tailwinds. Tidal waves, all right? And there are a couple of big tidal waves. One big tidal wave is the aging population like we just talked about. Another really, really big tidal wave is the lack of skilled labor. And I want to go through some statistics to sort of set this up. So right now, we are short 550,000 plumbers, 600,000 auto mechanics, 80,000 electricians. Right now, okay?

In just in the U.S. just in the United States.

By 2033, almost 2 million unfilled manufacturing jobs, which is crazy. Our generation grew up, and it was basically like, if you don't go to college, you don't want to end up like that guy. And they point to the plumber or the electrician, and it kind of screwed a whole generation of craftsmen out of the job force, right? And so now these guys are getting my growth started. Now these guys are retiring, and there's not enough people to replace them. But what we're seeing also is this other massive tidal wave, an aging infrastructure within the United States. Homes are aging like crazy. So stuff's falling apart. Are people selling it and just moving to new builds? There are some people moving to new builds, which also need tradesmen, but people also need to fix up their house. Maybe they remodel their kitchen, or maybe the electrical's going bad. Like, we just replaced our. Our panel here at our house because it was a big problem. So we know that there's these sort of big tidal waves happening. The number of craftsmen is going way down. There's a big demand for it because we have an aging population and we have an aging infrastructure in the United States. But then you also have guys like me and you, and we did talk about this idea last week, but we have guys like me and you who don't really know what to do with their hands. I'm going to tell you right now, Chris, I can't build it, but I think someone needs to build it. I bought the domain handyman mentors dot com. Why isn't there somewhere for people like you and I to go and just find a handyman mentor? Not even like, oh, I need to find a guy to go and fix my H Vac or whatever. Right. Because if you go right now and you try to find a business that's going to fix your H vac or your plumbing or your electrical, how booked out are they? They're like weeks or months booked out. They're not going to come to your house. I don't necessarily need a union bonded licensed plumber to come to my house. I just need a guy who knows how to his way around the kitchen to come show me how to change a couple of pipes.

Like if your. If your dad lived in town. Right. If you.

Exactly. Or your uncle or whoever you're close with, like, literally a mentor that can show you how to do this stuff. Because it's not complicated and I'm not. I'm not going to sue somebody. But I'm also. I don't want to wait for, you know, my air conditioning to get fixed in the summertime maybe, and maybe H Vac is too complicated. But I think there are a lot of things that you could fix around your house. And if we're just waiting on a company to fix it, we're going to be waiting a long time. So why not take back some of that lead time and some of that demand and start hooking up guys like you and I with local mentors who know how to do this stuff so that we can learn how to do it, so we can learn how to actually just the easy stuff instead of waiting on a freaking electrician to come out because my breaker tripped and I don't know how to flip the switch back. You know what I mean?

So you're saying, like, not to connect millennials with handymen, but with like, other older dudes, like boomers that just kind of know their way around a house?

Yeah, I went to Home Depot today. Who helped me at Home Depot today? This older boomer, super nice guy, super knowledgeable, probably just is working at Home Depot after he retired. Actually, not probably.

I asked him.

He's working at Home Depot after he retired because he knows his way around the yard, basically.

And he was like, that's every Home Depot employee.

That is every Home Depot employee that's What? And honestly, if I need help at.

Home Depot, I'm not walking up to the Millennial. Well, dude, we got white hair on a brother.

We got there. I'm with my dad, and he's like, oh, don't worry. We'll just ask one of the guys there. They'll know. And I'm like, dad, I don't think he can just do that. And we walk up there and my dad finds this, finds one guy. And I'm like, oh, yeah, go ask him. He's like, no, no, he won't know. And he was like, a guy like, our age.

He does not have New Balances. Hold on.

Oh, his hands look so soft. What is he doing moisturizing every day?

Come on.

Anyway, so. So he went and found this guy. Just walked and they just started talking about it. And so he comes over. But it's that, right? Like, I don't necessarily need the local guy who owns an H VAC company. I just need the retired guy who probably is feeling useless and maybe doesn't see his kids as much as he would like to. I need that guy to, like, connect with me so he can just show me how to do stuff around my house. And I would start. I honestly would start at Home depot and, like, 100%. What do you think?

That's. That's. I was going to say, like, get your first customers, start this locally, pick your city, go to Home Depot and Lowe's every different shift, and round up as many guys as you can and just start with the database. It's a marketplace, so build the supply side first. Right? You get their name, phone, email. Right. And this is very much a do things that don't scale thing. In the beginning, you're just making connections. Then you start finding helpless millennials like us to text you anytime they need help. And then you just play matchmaker, literally low tech. You just put them in a group text together and let them go out. And there's not even money exchanged. Maybe there is. Maybe you venmo the guy 20 bucks for helping or whatever, but you just kind of. You spend three months doing this just to get a feel for how the interactions are working. Maybe you find that the mentor ends up going to the guy's house 80% of the time. You didn't expect that to ever happen. You thought they would just hop on FaceTime, but because he's an older generation, he would rather just get his hands on it. Maybe that changes the pricing structure. Like, this is the type of business that you don't Want to approach it from like, oh, I know how this is going to go. I'm going to build it like this. No, this is innovative. This is new. Like, people aren't doing this. So you really want to start very, very flexible and be willing and ready to change your mind or pivot the offer, the pricing, the whatever, as quickly as you can.

Do you remember when you went and worked for Amazon for like a month? If people don't know this, it was amazing.

Yeah.

Chris had multiple businesses and for whatever reason, you're just like, I want to go work at Amazon because I want to see how it works.

I'll tell you why this, because we were running a third party logistics business and I wanted to know how the best in the game did it from the inside. And they hire anyone with a pulse. And luckily I have a pulse, so they hired me.

Game recognized game. I don't know. Jeff Bezos saw something in me and he said, I personally, I want you to run our Plano, Texas after hours of 3am and 6am shift.

It is crazy. Like, the warehouse I worked at was one of 23 DFW area warehouses. They only stocked shoes. And I worked the like 7pm to 7am shift on a forklift. And it was on this invisible track. I couldn't like go crazy with it and knock over all the pallet racks. You literally, you just press go. I could, I'll one day I'll make a whole episode about it because it was very interesting, but it was awesome. Well, dude.

And you. So you would call me at the end of every shift. That was when we talk multiple times a day, which we don't anymore because we're both have a family and are busy anyways. Do you remember like every day you'd come out and we'd have like a different idea. You're like, dude, we could start a business where we just bring a food truck to the Amazon offices. Or we could start a business where we just bring X, Y and Z. And what you wanted to do was place flyers on every car in the parking lot. I don't remember.

I still love that idea.

Okay.

No, I love that idea.

Yeah, that's what I would do. That's what I would do for this at the Home Depots. I would go find Home Depots and just be like, all right, the guys shopping here and the guys working here are my target mentors. We'd have to then fill the other side, which are the, you know, helpless millennials. Like, like you and I. I think that would be Maybe I'm, like, oversimplifying it.

I feel like that's. You could use Facebook ads for that, honestly.

Yeah.

You could use targeted Facebook ads to that geography.

And to me, what I would do is a simple like, hey, just pay through the app and pay us a percentage. Like, these guys aren't. The mentors, aren't doing it because they want to make a ton of money. So I'm sure, you know, it's not going to, like, turn into a business for them, but they probably would appreciate being paid something. And like, us helpless millennials are going to feel better about paying them than just feeling like we're taking advantage of this person. So there's going to be an exchange of value in some way or form. And that's where I think. Monetized.

Yeah. This is. I know I've never said this before, but, like, this one, this one's good. I don't like any business idea.

I know.

I really do like this for real.

I know.

And it's kind of. There's this dichotomy happening where on one hand, this is very much the type of business where you sweaty, you go out there, you put flyers on cars, you're shaking hands at Home Depot, you're doing things that don't scale. But once you see that it works in Greenville, Texas, like, it will work anywhere. Like, at that moment, it's like, okay, we're going venture scale here because we need to blow this up as quickly as possible. Whereas most businesses, I would really not suggest you raise a bunch of venture capital for. But I think this could be one where you do.

I know we've talked about this before, but it's almost like the. Remember when we talked about cable and the unbundling that happened, where it's like, there's all these platforms now they've unbundled it. First it was really bundled and then it was unbundled. To me, this. This feels like the unbundling of the social platforms.

Right.

It's like this is a very specific niche, but it is social. So you need some type of a platform in order for them to communicate and connect. And this feels like a really cool opportunity to do that.

Yeah. A couple other ways you could take this. You know our friend Hector?

Yeah. I'm having him on the pod this week.

He helps people start trade school businesses. And it's really interesting, but his bread and butter is selling like a certification course for H vac technicians. And once they pay like 8 or $12,000, that's fully funded by the government, he sends them an Oculus, like, $400, and they just log into it through some software that he actually. He didn't even build this. Like, I think he's just white labeling it. And they just put on their Oculus, and he showed me a video of it, and they're like, fixing H VAC units, like in the. In the Metaverse. Basically, you could use something, like, you could go that direction. You could build an Oculus app for this. Okay. More technical, more friction. To launch. To launching. I like your idea better, but that's another angle. The other angle is to do what I do when something breaks. This just happened with my H Vac. Two weeks ago, it stopped working. One of our units, and I went out there and. Have you ever used, like, the Chat GPT FaceTime feature? Yeah. Oh, man. I start FaceTime with Chat GPT. It's insane. And it's like. It's like, all right, here's what I'm looking at. My house isn't cooling. The fan's turning. House isn't cooling. And it's like, well, show me this coil down here. Show them the coil. It's like, okay, put your hand on it, Chris. Is it cold? It's not cold. I think you're out of Freon, or else your condenser is broken. Freon is going to be really cheap. The condenser is going to be like, three grand. Let me see your coils. Show them coils. Okay. What unit is this? Can you show me the label? It should be right on that left corner. Show them the label. Okay. You're nine years in. You might still be under warranty. Like, are you kidding me? How Valuable is this? $20 a month subscription. Like, that's kind of what we're talking about. It was being my mentor.

Yeah, so was being your mentor in a wrapper.

Take that, because I promise you, 93% of Americans don't know that that feature exists. They might be using ChatGPT every day. They don't know they can do that. No, put it in a wrapper. Call it handyman, mentor, you know, AI handyman, mentor or whatever. And just that. 10 bucks a month, 20 bucks a month, 100 bucks a year, and it just does that exact same thing.

Dude, I literally did the thing today. I looked at my sprinkler because my sprinkler was broken, and I was like, hey, I'm trying to figure out what's wrong with this. Like, what do you think could be wrong with it? It's like, well, it could be a couple things. It gives me three reasons. And one of the reasons was it might be a low point in the grass. And if it's a low point in the grass and the water pressure is going to build up and so you might need to put in a check valve. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. And I tested like three things and that's what it is. It was the freaking check valve. And I go to Home Depot and I'm talking to the guy and I was like, hey, do you think it might be something to do with the water pressure? Because it's all, it's all accumulating in the middle of the yard at the low point. And in Home Depot he was like, yes, that's a really good idea. I hadn't thought of that.

And you got that idea from Chad.

I got that idea from ChatGPT. Right. Like he wouldn't necessarily have known right away to be like, oh, is this at a low spot? But if you walked out into my yard, you would have seen right away like, oh, it's a low spot. That makes sense. The water pressure is high. You need a check valve because otherwise the sprinkler is not going to be able to handle the pressure that's currently present. Like, it blew my mind. It blew my mind that it could actually do that.

Oh my gosh.

And now I'm a handyman.

You're handyman.

Now I'm going to give you one more adjacent idea to this before we get into your last one.

Okay.

And this is a quick one. I also think that there's a way to do this for guys like me who are not handy, where you could have a YouTube based course and mail them a big package. And in the package would be some drywall, some electrical wiring, maybe a cover. And you go through the process of like building a small little drywall, right? Like I don't know, three by three. And then it walks you through, like, how do I cut out for the electrical outlet? Okay, how do I wire it? And so then by the end of it, you are getting the hands on experience, but you're also not trying to wreck your house. I think that would be a really cool idea to have a kit like that.

I saw that idea in our notes and I didn't really like it. But as you describe it, I really do. The reason I didn't like it because it's like shipping drywall. It's so. But like you're talking about fixing a patch and if you were to say, here's the course. Here's your shopping list. Go to Home Depot and buy this stuff. No, they're not going to Home Depot. They need to be frictionless. They need to click three times and then two days later have a package show up. And they've already paid. And you know what? Most of them, they're never even going to open the package. They're not going to do the thing, because that's human nature. But it doesn't matter they paid, right? Yeah, I like that idea a lot. Like how to split a wire.

What I would do, I would find it. I try to convince Mike Higgins to do this. I find a DIYer on like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube or whatever and just be like, dude, this would be an amazing offering. You should do this. And I would just piggyback off of them.

I love it.

All right, what do you got?

I got one. So I see this Instagram video of this newlywed, and she said, I forget how it went, but she basically says, I went and found every major company, Target, Bed, Bath and Beyond, yada, yada yada. And I found all of their addresses and I sent baby shower invites. It was either baby shower or wedding shower invites to all of them. And it was like 150 and 25 of them sent me gifts or gift cards or money or. Or something. And I started digging into it. And that's a thing. Like, people are doing that, especially women more and more when they have a baby or when they get married, they'll just mass send these invitations like paper.

Are they physical?

Okay, physical to companies just at like the corporate address, saying, like, I'm a huge fan of Target. I'm a huge fan of Bed, Bath and Beyond, yada, yada yada. Like, I'd love to invite you to my wedding. And it's really. They're just asking for free stuff. But it works because the people in charge of marketing for these companies know that when people get gifts, they post about it on social media. So it's free marketing for them. It's a win, win. And so this woman got hundreds or even thousands of dollars worth of free gifts simply by sending $40 worth of invitations. And she did it by hand. Like, she wrote them all out by hand. So I'm over here thinking, like, why is this not a service? Why can people not just pay 50 bucks to have invitations sent out to all of these companies? So you build a database and you could have a thousand companies in there, large and small, mom and pop owned businesses, Fortune 500 companies. Doesn't matter. And the people go to the website. How many invitations you want to send out? 50, 500, a thousand. And you just use an API for a direct mail company. Many of them have APIs. You're not in the direct mail business. You just have a website. You could build it with lovable or replit or whatever. And you pay money, and that money covers the cost of the envelopes. Do the invitations match the invitations she's sending her friends and family? Probably not. It doesn't matter. Who cares? No one knows. And you just take a margin. So let's say it costs 45 cents to send each one you want to send it to 100. That's $45. You charge $199 for this service. And then you can say, in our experience, our customers usually get about $500 or $1,000 worth of free gifts. What are we talking about, dude?

All right, I'm gonna upload for you.

Push up with Facebook ads.

I'm working with this guy. He wants to buy a business, and I'm, like, helping him try to find a business. And one of the things I told him was, you need to send out mailers of you right, Your family, hey, this is me. Here's a letter about me. And he's like, should I do, like, handwritten? And I told him, dude, this was what, 15 years ago when is either you or your wife got your realtor's license? And so you. My wife, you didn't actually write it, but you had, like, the computer handwrite it out or it was, like, printed in handwriting.

It just sent postcards. We just uploaded a CSV uploaded to postcard design. We were done.

Yeah. Okay. So I told him about that, and he's like, oh, interesting. And so he goes and does some research, and he finds this company. I think this is the one. It's called Ghost handwriter dot com. These are robots. The robots literally write on a piece of paper his messages. And so he wrote like a thousand of them. I can't remember exactly how much it costs. Not only the open rate, but the response rate is just so much higher when it looks like it was actually written, as opposed to just printed by a computer as it comes out. So you could even do it where you have a robot handwriting it. And this is exactly what it is.

Yep.

Ghost handwriting dot com. The other thing, similar but related. I talked to a guy this week. His company is called Hire Bus, and he's just built a bunch of apps, and one of the apps that he built specifically for home Services. And he built this on replit, right? This isn't like a overly complicated app. He pulled all of the addresses, and then he had that. I don't know how he wrote it, but he had that. Then go to Google street view of those houses, took a picture of that house, and then that house was put onto custom postcards. So when the homeowner goes out there, they're getting a postcard with their house on it, and they're looking at that postcard, and they're like, oh, this is interesting. And then there's a QR code on the bottom, and the QR code pops up to a video of him that is saying, like, hey, I'm looking for whatever. Whatever he was pitching. Engagement rate was 15%. He got 3% of them to schedule calls. And then 1% of. Of the hundred that he sent, the 1% closed. So for every hundred dollars that he spent, it was about $1 postcard. So for every 100 that he spent, he got, it was a $4,000 ticket item. Like, that was already mind blowing. But I'm like, what if you took it another step further and you were a window washing company or a roofing company or some. A gutter company, you get their Google Maps picture of their house, and then you have A.I. change their windows or you have A.I. change the paint color. Paint A.I.

Change.

Yep. Change the roof. Hey, this is what your house would look like with us. Give us a call if it's a hundred bucks. And you know, your close rate is a 1% close rate, and your average ticket size is $4,000. Like, what are we talking about here?

What are we talking about, dude?

All day, dude.

It's just. It's another way of removing friction. You knock on a homeowner's door and you say, hey, we paint your house white. It's like, okay, what's your clothes? Right on that. Whereas if you said, hey, we paint your house white, and you hold up a picture of their house painted white. Oh, my gosh, I liked my house. But that looks much better. It removes the friction of not knowing what the end result looks like.

I was just. I was just talking about the postcard. What about an app for the guys who go door to door? It's on their iPad, and they're like, hey, Lip, with the iPad, that's freaking.

You ever heard of it?

That would be incredible. Oh, you don't like that color? What about this color? Like, right then and there, you could show them what their house looked like.

Or even if it was direct Mail. Like you said, like in Texas. I swear, every house is red brick, right? Let's say you take a neighborhood of a thousand homes at a red brick, you send them all pictures of their house painted white. And most people that get that are not going to like what it looks like or else they would have already painted their house white. But guess what? That gets them talking. They're going to post a picture on Instagram. Ha ha. How ugly does this look? This. This idiot thought my house would look good white. Thank you for the free marketing.

You know, isn't he a idiot? I think that would be an incredible business to start and fairly easy to build.

These businesses didn't exist three months ago because the. The image generation capabilities weren't quite there yet. But it is now.

All right, I'm going to share my screen. Dude, check this out. We moved into a new house. I posted these pictures and I was like, hey, this is what the front of our house looks like. Okay? And I posted multiple pictures. You can see them over here. Here are the pictures of the same area in my house taken from different angles. I feel like the area is out of control. Can you make me an image of what it should look like and create me a plan for getting there? Right. So, like, look at this. It's just a mess. These are some of the pictures I uploaded. This is what it spits out. You ready? Look at that. You've been to my house.

Looks amazing.

Like, it looks incredible. And it does look. It does look like my house. And it literally created. Hey, here's the image and a plan for me. This is exactly what we're talking about. Like, help the homeowner see. Literally see not just in their mind's eye, but see what it might look like. How many more sales are you going to close? Oh, my gosh.

Forever. Amen and Amen. Thanks for listening today. Really appreciate you guys. I would love it if you shared with a friend and left me a five star review. Have a great weekend.