The Simplest Side Hustle You Can Start Under $100

You turned a $90 investment into $50,000 in a year on the side.

Yeah. Yep.

Jeez.

You could start this for free if you really wanted to. I probably close 95% of my deals over Messenger or text.

Wow. Without having to hop on the call?

Nope. I didn't have an LLC for the first 2 cards that I sent out.

That's fine.

I always just would get caught up, you know, worrying about making sure the website looks good and the logo and all this. I was like, no, this time I'm not doing it. I'm just going to make sure I can actually make money before I go and spend money on doing all this stuff. And so it's like I started this business for less than $100. It's just kind of snowballed into something that I wasn't really expecting a year ago. I just wanted some extra money and now it's turned into this full-time thing.

We built a multimillion-dollar business with 5 or 6 pieces of direct mail to a few thousand repair shops.

And it worked.

So yeah, all that to say, like, you should dogfood it, right? You should eat your own dogfood and use your product to find more services for your product. So I just came across a 25-year-old on Instagram doing something wild. He turned $90 into $50 grand in one year from his phone. He's never cold called, he's never ran an ad, he's never even hopped on a Zoom. He closes 95% of his deals in Facebook Messenger of all places. And one plumber even paid him $1,100 after 5 texts. No skills, no experience, no employees. He pockets about half of everything he collects as profit. And at the end of this, he's gonna show me how to acquire as many customers as you'd ever want. And even more interestingly, he's gonna show me this weird Facebook trick that he uses to make plumbers and other local business owners DM him first. This isn't an AI business or a sweaty startup, but whether you wanna do this on the side or full-time, you're gonna love it. Please enjoy.

So what I do is I sell advertising space to local businesses in my area on shared postcards like this. So here's one that I did. And so I, you know, filled front and back. You know, here's another one that I did. And so I filled the ad space with local businesses. I only allow one business per category on the card. So I'm not going to put two landscapers against each other. So And they get full exposure for whatever services that they want to offer. And then I will send it out to the local area. So this, this card right here went out to 10,000 homeowners in the city right next to me. So I got businesses that service that area or were in that area. And then the way that I send it out is by using the USPS Every Door Direct Mail tool. So I don't need a mailing list or names to send these cards out.

And I'm, I'm just thinking, I'm trying to compare it to like something different, like a newsletter. And a newsletter is like a two-sided marketplace. You need the supply of the email addresses, which you got to go out and find paid ads, organic, you know, one by one by one. And then you need the demand from the advertisers, which is usually in the newsletter business, the harder part.

Yeah.

But you're over here saying like, I've got a marketplace, but I only need to fill half of it because I can legally, thanks to the US Post Service, EDDM, every door direct mail. I can mail anyone in the world that I want to mail for 40 cents or whatever, right?

Yeah.

I just need to find the advertisers for the postcards. Is that accurate?

Yeah. So I pick the area, I'll go on to the USPS Every Door Direct Mail tool and I'll type in the zip code that I want to target. And usually I'll sort by higher income just because they're mostly single family homes because you don't want to, you don't get a bunch of home service businesses like a landscaper, a roofer, and then send your card out to condos and apartments. You're just going to be wasting those people's money. And so pick the area and then I match the advertisers to that area. And so I'll sort by income and then I have a break-even point, right? So it's like I got to fill the front half of my card to cover printing and postage. It's 25 cents per home to send out a card.

That's to like buy the data or for the stamp to that home.

So this right here is the Adesha. Every card looks exactly the same. And so the cards will come printed with the indicia. And so it's $0.25 per mail piece. And so if you buy, you know, if you buy 10,000 mail pieces, it's $2,500 in postage. And then printing 10,000 of these cards right here, which this is like a, a 14-point. So it's a thicker, like cardstock type paper is a little bit nicer quality, stands out in the mail. And that's going to run you about $2,300 for 10,000. Of those cards shipped, printed to your house. So your cost is like about $4,800. And to fill the front of the cards, because I'll sell— this is a 3x4 inch space here, and then a double space. So I sold $600, $600, $600, $600, and then $9.99. Um, and then I have some half ones on here that I sold for $3.50.

And so basically you need to fill the front of your card to break even.

Yeah, to break even. And everything after that is profit. So I'll just post on Facebook and Facebook groups, you know, your local business networking groups or contracting groups. And I'll just say like, hey, you know, I'm putting together a shared postcard. It's going out to thousands of homes in, you know, whatever area I'm sending it to. I only feature one business per category. So it's first come, first serve. And then the business owners will comment below and, and then we'll take it to the DMs and, and then they'll purchase or they'll ask questions. And so we'll go from there. So that's one of my favorite prospecting methods is just posting in groups.

Okay, let me summarize 'cause I'm like, I'm about to get manic here in a minute. I'm about to get manic. So you don't need to like, you know, lick a bunch of envelopes and ship 'em out and have these days where you do, you don't do any of that. You find a printing company and there's tons of 'em.

Yeah.

And then you find the US Postal Service and you say, After you get your advertisers, your sponsors, you throw them all together, right? You design them, you put them in Canva or whatever, you drag them around to make them all fit. You send them to the printing company, you say, I need 10,000 of these. And then here's the address. And you probably give them like the US Postal Service address, I imagine.

Yeah.

Are you getting like a sample from them first just to make sure it doesn't look bad?

I have a printer that I've been printing through. He does a great job. So I already know that that printing, he does a great job printing, but if, you know, but there's plenty of other places, but I do recommend people go and try to get a sample from them first because, right, you don't want to have 10,000 cards show up to your house or 5,000 cards and they look like garbage.

Yeah.

And so, you know, 14-point UV gloss card with color on both sides is typically, you know, a good quality card with plenty of color on there. And so. I would just make sure that you know the kind of paper quality that you want, but that is just like good, like standard quality right there. So these printing companies, you can either get them printed and sent to your house. So I had these, this run of 10,000 cards sent to my house, uh, this run of 10,000 cards sent to my house and they will come pre bundled. Well, you need to get them pre bundled into hundreds for the USPS to actually accept them.

So. You can get a sample or you can just, you can have them shipped directly to you. Because from what I understand, USPS has like, they have like different distribution hubs. You've got like a post office, but then you have like a distribution hub. Yeah, DFW might have one or two, Salt Lake might have one, etc. So you can take it yourself, but you have to label it correctly. I used to have a direct mail business, so like, and it was a pain. It was, it was like a pain to get it all set up. But once you get it set up, it's gravy anyway. So once you're set up and you're confident with the quality you're getting from a vendor, theoretically, you could just say, they could send you the PDF. You're like, yep, looks good. Ship it to the post office. They ship it to the post office, it goes out, and then you're done. And the unit economics are, you spend about $5,000 and some time in aggregating these sponsors, mostly from Facebook groups. And then if you fill it out front and back, then you make about $9,000 to $10,000 revenue. So for every $10,000 mailing, you're hoping to profit between $4,000 and $5,000. Is that accurate?

Yes, that's correct.

And you don't really have any costs. You don't really need employees, at least until you're at scale, because you're not doing the printing, you're not doing the shipping. You're just connecting pieces, sending emails, sending Stripe links, pay your invoice, $400 for this landscaping service, $350 for the orthodontist, onward and so forth. Right.

Yep, that's correct.

How recurring is your business? How often do people want to do another and another and another mailing?

So yeah, that's a great question. So typically there are two different card types, I guess, in this industry that you can put together. So this is something called a 9x12 card. It's 9x12 inches. It typically goes out to 5,000 or 10,000 local homeowners. The ads are going to be, you know, a little bit more premium, a little more customized. Whereas something like this is a 6 by 11 inch card and we call this a community card and it will go out to 2,500 homeowners. And this, it's a better card for, you know, a local bakery, a restaurant, these, these lower ticket businesses that just want to offer a coupon to their local community because they're like a brick and mortar store. So I ran this one for 3 months. So I had them sign up for a 3 month run, whereas these ones they, they just ran one time, but I do have some repeats that carry over into the next cards. So I will always reach out to the, the previous advertisers. I'll say like, hey, you know, I'm putting together another card. It's going out to, you know, 5,000 homes and, you know, a city that's right next to the one I just sent my card out. You know, would you like to take a landscaping spot before I reach out to other landscapers? And it really depends on how you set it up. You can set it up to run monthly or you can set up to run once and just get these businesses the exposure to direct mail marketing and to a local community.

So you said the small ones are 6 by 11?

Yeah, 6 by 11 inches.

Hey, YouTube's fine, but what about when you're driving around? What about when you're mowing the lawn? You need my audio podcast, The Kerner Office. Just look up TKO Pod in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. And when you say a 3-month run, are you sending the same thing 3 times? Once a month for 3 months?

Yes, I'll send the, the same card. This one that I send out in 3 months, I send it to 3, I mean, different routes each month to kind of test different offers. But I'm going to put together another one that's going to go to the same routes with the same offers to get the same exposure. So I'm just— it's fun to test and try different things and see how different parts of the local community respond to the advertisers.

So Yeah, because if I'm a restaurant, I want repeated exposure, right? Like, I want to be on top of mind once a month for X number of months. Why is that different for a landscaping business? Why would they not want a monthly run as well?

That's a great question. And it, it just comes down to the particular landscaper. I think, you know, a landscaper should, a plumber should. I think the, you know, direct mail, especially utilizing the EDDM tool, is very It used to be, you know, direct mail used to be a big thing. And then once digital came along, direct mail kind of died down.

But it's like, it's back, baby.

Yeah. Direct mail doesn't work. Well, it's like your competitors are probably all thinking the same thing right now. Why don't you go in and own the mailbox? Like you can still run digital. It's not here to replace digital. It's not better. It's not worse. It's just another tool in your toolbox to, to utilize. And something like a shared postcard is just a great introduction. Into that world of direct mail.

Yeah. Here's what I think is wild. Like, there's so much regulation around emailing, like the CAN-SPAM Act of 2004 or whatever. You cannot just like send emails to someone soliciting something unless they opt in. Cool. Got it. Text message marketing is like super regulated, which I get. Who doesn't hate getting a spam text out of nowhere, right? Interrupting. Yeah, I get it. I hate it. There's a $5,000 fine per text sent, right? Which is crazy. But when it comes to forcing someone to— I have a 200-foot gap between my front door and my mailbox. 200 feet.

Yeah.

When it comes to forcing a human to walk up to 200 feet to their mailbox, risk getting hit by a car, in my case, check the mail. There's— that's totally fair game. Anyone can mail anything they want to anyone on the planet, right? Yeah, it's wild.

And it's funny that you, you mentioned something like that. Cause I do, like I, like I said, I post a lot of social media videos about this and I will get people that were just like, stop filling up my, my trash bins. Like you're sending crap to my house or you're terrible. Like people just hate on me for no reason. Like, is it really, is it really that hard to just like toss it in the recycling bin? Like, like genuinely. And then I always say like, but did you see something like this with local businesses? Like, how many times is this getting sent to your house? Because I guarantee you it's not getting sent to your house very often or at all.

So you're just confused.

Go, go complain to like Discover or Wells Fargo. You know, I get those things all the time in the mail. So yeah, I just think it's funny.

I think I just realized why it's legal. It reminds me of the bot problem that Twitter's had since day one. They have so many bots, and for a while they threw around the idea of like any new Twitter user had to have their card on file, which is crazy, right? Could you imagine Facebook or Instagram needing your credit card? Even if they didn't charge it, like they would have no users. That's so much friction, but it was so frictionless and easy for bots to create and multiply and multiply on Twitter that like Twitter just could not stop it. They had no idea how many users were real and how many were bots because it was free and frictionless. Sending an email, sending a text is free and frictionless. So I feel like just the fact that it costs money, to send mail is the reason why it's unregulated, right? It's anyone can send anything they want because you got to have money to do it. You know, that's kind of besides the point. But yeah, I'm sure that like you hear a lot from your sponsors, like let's say I'm a landscaping business, I just need one sale to make this work, right? I just need one sale out of 10,000. And you're like, absolutely. Yeah, that's it. Sign here.

Yeah.

Tell me about some of the What's the ROI that your sponsors have seen from this? Because I would imagine it's all across the board. You probably have people that are like, didn't hear a thing, not even a phone call. And they maybe did, maybe didn't, but they're not attributing it. They're not using a different phone number or whatever. And then you have other people that are like, dude, I got a $13,000 concrete repair job from this. You know, this is amazing.

Yeah. So that's a great question. That is actually one of the most common questions or objections that I get when I do this? What is going to be my ROI? And so I'll tell you what I tell them, which is I like, I can't guarantee ROI. I don't promise it. Like, I am selling you exposure. Like, you're getting exposure for into your local community the cheapest way possible, except unless you go and hang up door hangers yourself to 10,000 homes. But then you're paying with your time, which is the most expensive. And so I can't guarantee exposure because one, you know, the business type might not be something that homeowners might want. So I can't control that. Two, the offer on the ad. So I help these businesses try to come up with a good offer, but some just don't want to put an offer. They put weak offers. So I let them know the stronger the offer, typically the better results you're going to see. And then three, which is probably the most important, which is the system set up to actually keep track of leads. So I provide free dynamic QR code with every single ad. So I design all of the ads for free for the businesses. It's part of the purchase price. And I'll throw a dynamic QR code on there for them to keep track of scans. So I can see what kind of ads do better and the ads with the better offers and the more simple ads typically have seen more scans. But like, even then I can't control if somebody calls your number instead of scans the QR code because elderly, elderly person just might call you for their landscaping services. Well, if you don't have a unique offer tied into that ad, well, you're going to have no idea how or where that person came from. And so that being said, some businesses have seen, like you said, more results while others have not seen anything. So I had a bakery on my cards, dropped the cards off. The offer right here I have, it is free sweet pocket pie and/or cookie, no purchase necessary.

We're talking about Lehigh Bakery here.

This one is grapefruit and thyme.

Oh, okay. I love Lehigh Bakery. Shout out Lehigh Bakery.

So that's a great offer. Who doesn't want a free cookie? And it's going to 2,500 homes near her bakery. Well, dropped it off at the post office. The post office then distributed the cards the very next day. Well, she had 4 people walk in, redeemed the offer, and then bought. They all bought additional cookies. All 4? All 4 of them.

And then the day that they'd landed.

Exactly. And so she's like, I'm super, like, I'm so happy that you got on my, I got on your card because, you know, I had 4 people walk in and they bought additional things.

Like now you're dude, a free cookie to a Utahn is like crack to a crackhead, dude.

Exactly.

That is like the best offer in the world.

So I'm like, now if what you bake and what you make is good and these people are satisfied, well now they're gonna tell their neighbors, they're gonna tell their friends. It's like, your ROI, you know, like you're, you're still making money from this campaign. You just don't really know it. And then I had a carpet cleaning guy. He, we sent it out in May. He got a call in September for some, you know, to come clean carpets. So that was a little bit probably more delayed than he would have liked. And then I had a junk removal business that started getting a bunch of calls. Now I, I asked him if like where you Did you convert any? He never filled me in on that.

Dude, if I were you, I would make like a very sophisticated process about maniacally getting follow-up from your sponsors on how it's gone every week, every day, because that's going to be your best sales tool ever. Yeah, those case studies in the Facebook groups will sell more than you ever can.

Yeah, I need to, I need to be, because I, I'm very tedious when it comes to following up when they're interested. But then after I send it out, I'm just like, oh, hey, how'd it go? Like, what kind of results? Like, did you bring in what you thought it was going to bring in? Like, some of them just like never fill me in on it. And you're right. I do need to do that. I need to be more, be just as, you know, tedious with my follow-up. Yeah.

In the case of the bakery, like for the first day, do you know how it looked like over the next 2 or 3 weeks?

So I know, cause I, I had a couple extras that I gave to like one of my, my wife's friends. And so she went in and she redeemed it. And I think over the course of the 3-month run, I think she paid a total of $350 for that entire 3-month run. I think she said she had 15 to 18 people total come in.

Wow.

And redeem that coupon. And I don't, I don't know if they bought additional items. And so I do know that at least 4 or 5 people came in, they used the coupon, they bought stuff. You know, now they, now they know if, you know, if what you make is what she makes is good or not. So now they can, they'll probably share it with their friends, their neighbors. It'll be kind of that, that go-to spot. Like I kind of said earlier, a lot of these, a lot of these businesses don't really understand kind of like the, the exposure aspect of something like that. Like, yeah, you maybe month 2 wasn't as good or month 3 wasn't as good as month 1. But, you know, you did have people come in from it and you don't know how much they're going to spend over the course of the next year or two or however long your bakery is there. Because like one time I got Slim Chickens, a coupon in the mail for Slim Chickens, and I never heard of them, but they had a good offer. I went and redeemed it and I've probably paid for that entire mailing campaign myself over the last course of 3 years because I got the exposure to their business and I redeem their coupon. And so that's what I try to tell businesses, like at the end of the day, like you are getting exposure. I, I sell exposure. It's like, it's a mini billboard that's going into people's mailboxes.

Well, they say that, you know, 50% of marketing works, but you don't know what 50%. Yeah. And I mean, transparently, there's probably some clients, some industries, whether the offer is good or not, it's just not a great fit. You know, not every marketing channel is a great fit for every business. Have you seen any industries that this works particularly well for?

Home service industries work really well because, you know, like home cleaners, right? Everybody, whether you live in an apartment or a $10 million house, you know, sometimes you want your home cleaned. And then if you send it to the right area, landscapers do well, or just a lawn care guy. So if they only specialize in lawn care, and then I have a, like a dog yard scooping services, you know, junk haulers, carpet cleaning, window cleaning, plumbers, permanent holiday lighting. That's a huge thing in Utah. Real estate. So we ran— I ran an ad like, what is your home worth? Scan to find out instantly. That got a lot of scans, you know, to get people into an email list or, or whatever he wanted to do with that.

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There's a group of people that do this just kind of all across the nation, and I was able to connect with a guy in Ogden, so about an hour and a half away from me. And so he was kind of able to show me the ropes, like, okay, like how to, how to take it to the post office, like how to bundle everything and get everything ready to go. And we walked through pricing. And so I kind of just took his pricing and changed it. But typically, for a larger card, like 10,000 homes, you don't really want to be charging more than 10 cents per home for a typical, like average space. And an average space There's going to be 16 average, uh, spaces on a card typically. So you don't want to make sure that one of those 16 spaces like this is more than gonna be more than 10 cents. Um, so, you know, 6 cents per home for this space, and then this one's going to be 10 cents per home because it's a double space. You're getting double the exposure. And so, yeah, you just kind of play around with pricing. Some areas you can charge more, right? If you're in like Southern California, people are just typically used to paying more. So you can you could charge $800 for one of those spaces. Whereas like if you're in a smaller town in the Midwest, $600 might be too expensive. You might want to charge, you know, $450 or $500 for one of those, you know, average spaces. You just kind of play around with pricing and, you know, like if you fill your card up in, in 2 days, maybe you charge—

The price is too low. Yeah.

It takes you forever to fill up your card. You know, maybe, maybe you're not doing the outreach, enough outreach. Maybe you're not really helping them see the value or maybe you're charging too much. And so obviously if you're like, I want to make $20,000 on one of these cards and send it out to 5,000 people, well, that's just going to be unrealistic because yeah, you just, the value doesn't justify the price that you're charging. So you want to make sure like, okay, like $600, they get 3 by 4 inch space. I'm designing the ad for them for free. I give them free revisions. So if they hate the ad, I'm going to redesign the entire ad. I'll help them create a good offer. They don't really know where to start. And I provide a dynamic QR code for them so they don't have to go pay $20 a month for software or anything like that. So I keep track of the scans for them. And so I try to, you know, give them lots of value on the back end. So it's like, you're not going to have to worry about a thing. Yeah, pricing, you just kind of have to play around with it, right? You might. You know, if somebody's listening and wants to try this, like maybe you want to charge $700, you know, and you can always go lower.

So you're looking at like 5 to 10 cents per home depending on the size of the ad. Yeah, give or take.

Whereas like the smaller cards like this, like you could charge $250 for a 2.7 by 2.5 inch space, send it out to 2,500 homes. That's 10 cents a home. You can even charge $300, and that comes out to like, what, 12 cents per home? But the barrier of entry to get on that card is much lower. And so what I have found is that most of the businesses really just, as long as the reach is 2,500 homes or more, like in the thousands, they only are concerned with the price, right? And so like, yeah, you could have a way better deal and pay 6 cents to be on my 10,000 card, or you could pay 12 cents to be on my 2,500 run card. And for them, they'll probably go on the 2,500 card run because it's a, you know, they're not spending as much to get on that card. Where some people like this space right here, I messaged this plumber, I found him posting in a bunch of groups. And I, this is my first card that I ever did. And I was in the back of my truck, my dad's truck coming back from California from a wedding. And I just shot him a message. He said, yeah, I'm interested in the details, sent over the details and the mock of the mockup of my card, where it's going, how it all works. And I was charging $1,100 for that space. He said, I'll do the $1,100 space, send him the invoice. And it was paid and it took like 5 messages to sell that. So like some people when they get it, they like, they get it.

They just get it.

And they'll just, it's like, it does most of the heavy lifting for you.

Well, especially if they're already like hustling for customers in Facebook groups, like they're hungry. Yeah. They're actively marketing. Like those are the people you want to close. You don't want to try to convince someone to start marketing their business. It's just not going to work. Yeah, right. How many of these sales do you close like via DM or text? And then how many do you have to get on a call with?

I probably close 95% of my deals over Messenger or text. Wow.

So without having to hop on the call?

No, I sold— I sold this space to a guy over the phone, but because this real estate guy referred him to me, so he was already like a warm lead in, you know, 10 minutes, and he bought the $1,000 space for me. But yeah, most of the— most of these people, they come from my Facebook post. In fact, this card, every single business on this card except for 2 of them came from posting in Facebook groups. So I actually— I did do outreach for it, like via email, but most of the people that took the spot, they came, they saw my post, and then, you know, 30 or 40 businesses would comment, and I would just kind of sit there and kind of whittle them down a little bit and, and get spaces sold.

So are you able to share your screen and show a post, what one of your posts looks like?

Let's see, let me, let me get it pulled up here.

And for those listening, we'll describe what, what we're seeing here.

So here's one I posted April 1st.

Can you zoom in a little bit?

Yeah.

Okay, perfect.

So I'm putting together a little co-op of local businesses as a way to work together to reduce crazy marketing costs. Postcard will be sent to thousands of high-income homes in Draper featuring respected local businesses who serve that area. I don't allow competition, one from each industry. So it's first come, first serve.

First come, first serve. That's a solid way to end the post.

And then people go in and, you know, PM sent, they sent like this person right here. I just actually sold a $497 space to them yesterday over Messenger. And so, yeah, I just reach out to every single one of these businesses. Some of them, some of them just won't be a great fit. Like you were saying, like They have, you know, an e-commerce business and I, I'll feature, I featured a few e-commerce businesses before, but typically I'm like your kind of business, like, yeah, sure. You could send it and you're getting exposure, but like you need to probably spend more time doing organic and Facebook, running Facebook ads. So I will turn away businesses or like I get some B2B type businesses and I'm just like, look, this is going to homeowners. I can still share the details with you if you want. But like, I don't think this would probably be the best fit or the best use of your money. So some of these businesses, like more B2B businesses, and I just kind of, I've just turned them away. But so that's just one of my posts. Here's another one from March 18th, same post. So I kind of post the same thing. I don't, I will say that I don't spam it. I post once a week in these groups.

Okay. How many different groups are you posting in?

I've posted 10 at a time just because Facebook allows 10 total. But there are two that just like do really well. So I sometimes I will post just in those two groups and spend time in those two groups where sometimes I'll post in the other ones and like maybe one of those groups will get a comment because there's a very particular method that I like to do that I kind of discovered. So I'm kind of giving this the sauce here.

That's what this podcast is here for.

Perfect.

We need sauce.

So when I post, I will like my own post and then I will comment, comment or send me a DM if you're interested, so that my Facebook post gets a like and then a comment right away. And then I will take my business account, my business page. So Purple Mountain Advertising, excited for this one. And I will comment with that. I will like my posts and then I will go back into my personal account and I will, you know, reply to myself. So now I have proof.

It's social proof. You're engineering your own social proof. Yeah.

So I have, I have 3 comments and 2 likes. And so everybody else who's posted at that same time, well, my post is now going to get pushed above theirs and get put onto more feeds because it's Facebook's going to start recommending it as something that is worth viewing, I guess. And there's a very particular time you need to post at, which I have found is Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday between 6:45 PM and about 7:15 PM. People will post at 10 AM or 12 AM, like, I do custom websites. Well, the people that you're trying to serve are at work. They're not looking at Facebook. So by the time they get back from work, they check Facebook. Well, guess what? Your post is clear down in the feed. They're never going to see it. But I post at 6:45, 7-ish, dinner's over. They're kind of sitting down, they're scrolling Facebook, boom. My post is there. It's short and sweet. So I believe this part right here that says first come, first serve, or maybe just the first serve part will be cut off. But you don't want to have a super long post that requires people to click see more because people are lazy. They're not going to click see more. You're just adding another point of friction. Exactly. And so this post is short enough where they can get the idea and they'll comment. I mean, they do have to click see more. I think Facebook, I swear Facebook shortened it. A couple characters because I swear, you know, before it showed the entire post, but it still works great. And so yeah, I'll post in these groups, you know, once a week. I've posted twice before, but I don't want to come across as just spamming. But these groups are a great way to actually find businesses as well. And that's how I was able to sell that plumber on that $1,100 spot because he was posting in these groups. I was like, well, he's already open to getting his business name out there. And he's spending his time posting, so I'm just going to pitch it to him. And so I've made, you know, a fair amount of money just by being in Facebook groups, my local business Facebook groups.

So what types of groups do you have the most success in? Is it like the business networking groups that we're seeing here, or is it the like the local city groups, like, you know, residents of American Fork, you know, Salt Lake City neighbors, etc.?

Business ones. I— because the, the neighborhood ones, they, a lot of people are very, they don't like the advertisements as much.

And so it's harder to find posts or yeah.

Or they'll, it takes forever to get approved. And so I like these business networking groups because they get approved almost instantly or they don't have any, they don't have to get admin approval, but I'll typically stay out of the groups that just like, that are, you don't have to like really answer where you're from. And then you go into the group and it's just like a bunch of just like crazy stuff in there. You're like, What is this group? Like, who's moderating this? So I won't post in those, but like this Utah Business Networking one, they rarely get like these spammy posts. Like it's a bunch of people that are actually trying to network with each other. And so I like Utah Business Networking and there's another like Utah Business Networking page that those two I've seen the most, the most results from.

I mean, Josh, you know what you got to do, right? You need to start your own Facebook group. This is much easier unless you already have.

I do have one Utah County Business Networking.

Okay.

I haven't put much work into actually growing it, but I do have one.

People would be shocked at how organically you can get people to join your group by literally just creating it, filling out the info and waiting. No paid ads, no marketing, just waiting. And you know, you'll go a week and you won't have anyone, then you'll get 2 people. and you'll get 7 the next week, then you'll get 20. Then, and like, like they'll just start coming and you post like, welcome new members. Like we've all seen how it works in Facebook groups. You could do this with 10 different groups at the same time, like Utah HVAC owners, Utah home service businesses, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you could have like this network of Facebook groups.

Yeah.

Where you own the audience. Like you can approve every post. We did this for our Texas snacks, our Buc-ee's business. I heard about that. We owned Buc-ee's fans, Buc-ee's lovers, Buc-ee's. We, we bought them from other owners. We started them. They have hundreds of thousands of members. So when we have a new sale or a new coupon code or holiday, we just post and it gets shown to everyone. So it's a beautiful thing.

Yeah, it's awesome.

Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly, M-O-L-L-Y, at co-founders.com. That's one word, co-founders.com. Molly at co-founders.com. Tell her your story. And we'll give you $100 if we end up interviewing them. What have been your numbers so far? How long have you been doing this and what have been your revenue and sales numbers so far? Or revenue and profit numbers so far?

So I have it written down here. So just these shared cards in the last, so I started it in April about this time last year as a side hustle. You know, I wanted to, I was really inspired about Airbnb story, whether they had to, they created those like cereal boxes to fund Airbnb. So I was like, oh man, 'Cause I had an e-commerce brand that I was trying to grow and put money into paid ads. I was like, instead of setting up, I'm just going to start another business. And so I started last April. My revenue has been about $26K.

Nice.

Just to the shared cards, profit $14K. And then net profit would be probably about $11K. And so that, that's the shared cards. And then I've done solo cards for businesses. So just where it's just only their business. Mm. My margins aren't as great, but it takes— it's not— it's the effort. It's not as much. So solo cards, I've done about $13K.

Wow.

And in revenue and then net profit's been about $2K or $3K of net profit there.

So, so like $40,000 in revenue so far. Yeah. In profit, give or take. Yeah. What has been your best month ever and what have your recent months been?

I would say probably last summer, probably did. I put together a card. It took me about a month and a half to put the entire thing together. Probably $5,000 or $6,000 in that month of revenue just by posting in those Facebook groups.

Have you found other reliable ways of finding customers, sponsors?

Yeah. So that's just one of the methods. Obviously cold calling. I've sold, you know, sold a space or two over cold calling. Emailing is not my favorite. I know a lot of people could just absolutely crush it with email. I still, I don't know, I feel like emails get lost. Yeah. But driving around town, seeing yard signs, you know, those people, it's like, it's a goldmine. People, because they're, they're already open to the idea of physically advertising to the local community.

Oh, I see. Yard signs advertising businesses.

Yeah. So it's like, oh, power washing. Give them a, give them a call, give them a text. That's how I sold my very first spot. Was a junk removal guy. I was just like, hey, I'm putting this—

from a yard sign. Yeah.

And he's like, yeah, like, you know, he didn't really trust me, which I totally get it. You're getting a text out of the blue. And so we met up in person and we were able to, you know, talk and stuff. But yeah, emailing, cold calling, Facebook, driving around town, walking into businesses. You can just, you know, kind of set up a route, be mindful of busy hours and stuff. But I like to kind of do it digitally.

How important is it that you're local to the area that you're sending these mailers in?

You could be anywhere in the world and prospect any city within the United States and just use a, like a full service printing option. But being local gives you a benefit of knowing the area, right? So like I'm doing a city right now and prospecting a city that is, you know, 25 minutes north of me.

Yeah. Honestly, you could reference local things in any city just using ChatGPT or Claude.

Yeah. I tell people like, oh, like just get on Google Maps, Google Earth, just kind of do a virtual drive-through. Just kind of see like what the town is like, what kind of vibe are you getting from this town? At least get familiar somewhat with the town. Like you said, you know, ask ChatGPT, it could give you 100 facts about the town that you're about to prospect, but it just might be a little bit harder just because you're not like a local local. So somebody's like, hey, let's meet up. It's like, oh man, I'm I'm actually in New York. Well, why are you prospecting a city in Oklahoma? You know?

Right.

But I think like if you hop on a Zoom with them, I think you could easily sell spots anywhere.

And if I were you, I would test to get new customers. I would scrape a bunch of businesses in a specific industry and then send them a mailer that says like, your ad here, your ad here, like your plumbing ad here, your landscaping ad here. And then you could inside the like your ad here box, you could put like a case study, like, Lehigh, Utah plumber saw 300x ROI on his— and you could just send them to plumbers, you know, or to landscapers.

That's a great idea. I have been— I've never thought of that, but I have been thinking about actually starting to put money in ads because I haven't spent a cent.

Yeah, actually, well, it's like running ads to get more clients.

It's all been organic for me.

Oh, that's awesome.

But I was like, okay, you know, maybe I'm, I'm starting to take this from a side hustle into more of a full-time gig.

Yeah.

And so now I've been kind of I think I've been setting up my business like properly. Like I didn't, I didn't have an LLC for the first like 2 cards that I sent out.

That's fine.

I just was like, you know, like I need to, I've started, like I've done or started other businesses. I'm kind of like, you know, kind of like you, but on the beginning side of the journey where it's like, you just feel like you want to dip your hands into everything, everything you come across. Like I have to do that. I want to do that. I got to try it. And I always just would get caught up. Worrying about making sure the website looks good and the logo and all this. And I was like, no, this time I'm not doing it. I'm just going to make sure I can actually make money before I go and spend money on doing all this stuff. And so it's like, I started this business for less than, I don't know, probably like $100 maybe. Wow. I bought like 2 guides to kind of give me the right directions. They weren't as fleshed out as I would've liked, but you know, it kind of helped me point me in the right direction. And, but if I didn't have those, it was like, you could start this for free if you really wanted to.

You turned a $90 investment into $50,000 in a year on the side. Yeah. Jeez.

Yep.

Guys, tkowners.com. That's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about 1,000 people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO as in the Koerner office, tkowners.com. What else have you been doing to pay the bills since then?

So, you know, found out that my wife was pregnant in October and I was like, okay, like I need to actually kind of start thinking about maybe getting, you know, more set up, more established a little bit. And so I just started posting videos on social media about it and it did a lot better than I expected at the beginning. I was like, wow, okay. Which is how your 'One of your employees found me.' But that's— posting on social media has brought in a person who wanted to do a solo card. And then I have a financial service guy that he actually put in an order for 10,000 cards today that I will be getting sent off to the printers here after this. And so it's been a really interesting journey. This is kind of snowballed into something that, you know, I wasn't really expecting a year ago. I just wanted some extra money to, to put into one of my e-commerce businesses. And now it's turning into this full-time thing with an awesome— my community is awesome and there's a lot of great members in there. And I have a lot of fun doing that and making these videos.

So where did you get this idea from?

I saw it on TikTok and it came at the perfect time. And I think the TikTok had like 3 likes or 5 likes and a comment. And I was like, wait a minute, because I was looking for a business. I just wasn't sure what I was going to get started in. I was like, wait, this is something that seems super doable where I don't have to probably don't have to spend, you know, tons and tons and tons of time trying to make a dollar. And it's not like affiliate marketing or dropshipping or, you know, TikTok shopping. I'm not saying those don't work. They really work. But that was just something I just wasn't interested in. So yeah, I saw it and I gave it a try and I was able to connect, like I said, with that the guy who was doing this an hour, uh, hour and a half north of me, and he was able to show me the ropes. So it's been, it's been a really fun journey so far.

My last question: how did you land on 10,000 mailers or 2,500? Like, why not 100,000? Is it just like you just know your customers can't afford a— you know what I'm saying— like a $10,000 mailer or a $5,000 mailer?

I think it's just the printing, the way that they print them. They print like you can print 7,000 or print 8,000, but you know, 5, 2,500, 5, 10,000, those are just good solid numbers. And I think the way that they print them and cut them, and I think it's just like the most like cost-effective batches. You could do 7,000, you can do 11,000, 15,000, 13,000, whatever. But if you go onto like printing sites, it's like you, they have like 100, 200, 300, 400, 500, and it's like 2,500. I think 3,000, once you get 5,000, 10,000, 15,000, 20,000, 25,000. So I think they start to branch out by 5s. And so, you know, 10,000 is a pretty size, you know, because most towns are going to be, you know, 15,000, 20,000 people maybe. And so, you know, so 2,500 is a good entry, you know, smaller car typically, you don't have to charge as much per space, less cost. And so you can sell a a card like this, you know, in a day or two or three days, if you just sit down and prospect. Then something like a $5,000 or $10,000 card might take you a little bit longer, but they're all great. And it's a fantastic, it's a fantastic business to run, especially if you were looking for a side hustle to start. I think it's one of the best ones out there.

How much do you think you could scale this business?

I think you could really scale it to start doing other, so you can like, you could do other prints, marketing materials. So if you want to do business cards and kind of go that direction, But I think like with these AI tools, like AI agents, websites, you know, you could, so you could get into contact, use the shared postcard as a way to get into touch with these business owners. You establish a connection with them, trust, they get on your card, and then you upsell, you know, Facebook marketing services, or you have Facebook, you know, like for a package deal, you get Google SEO, Facebook marketing, and then a spot on our shared postcard. Or you could say, we'll build out, we'll build you out a website. Cause there's a lot of businesses that I get in touch with that just simply don't have websites. You know, they want to be on the card. I'm like, well, we need somewhere to lead them to. It's like we could build out a website on the backend and we could bundle it together. And so I think that's the way to do it. It's kind of, this is just kind of upsells. Yeah. Like you're, you're getting, you're kind of getting paid to, to get the leads. Essentially.

So I remembered I was going to say, I was going to tell a story. 12 years ago, I moved to Dallas from Huntsville, Alabama, and I moved here to expand my business. At the time, I was selling wholesale iPhone parts to iPhone repair stores. And the whole thesis for moving to Dallas was I realized in Alabama I was able to acquire customers much more easily if they were within a natural one-day shipping radius of us. The problem is that Huntsville, Alabama is only within one day shipping radius of like Atlanta, Birmingham, Nashville, not like huge, huge cities. And so once I realized that, and you know, the lifetime value of our customer was tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars. I talked to my wife and we looked at a map and I just started typing in zip codes on like the FedEx one day shipping calculator, you know, tool. And I realized if I lived in Dallas, I could ship to tens of millions of people overnight, but with ground shipping. Mm-hmm. So I could ship to San Antonio, Austin, Houston, Little Rock, Oklahoma City, Shreveport, Bentonville, and all that. This huge, huge area, tens of millions of people. And so we moved and my whole launch strategy for acquiring customers, which were local retail businesses, iPhone repair shops, was direct mail for whatever reason. And so I got, I got these 4x6 postcards printed. I got like 6 sets of them that all kind of went in order. And every week we would mail them out. So I scraped every single repair shop. I had this, you know, spreadsheet of like 3,000 of them or whatever. And every single week we would mail out a mailer. And slowly, you know, our traffic started coming and we got $1,000 order, $10,000 order, $500 order. And like for $2,000 or $3,000 worth of direct mail, It could have been more. I don't know. Yeah. Low thousands of dollars worth of direct mail. We built a multimillion-dollar business just from Dallas with 5 or 6 pieces of direct mail to a few thousand repair shops. And it worked. So, yeah, all that to say, like, you should dogfood it, right? You should eat your own dogfood and use your product to find more services for your product. Yeah, I think it'll work.

Yeah.

So Josh, thank you for your time. This has been great.

Thank you for having me. It's been awesome to talk to you.

Where can we find you and your community?

So you can go onto school and it is Make Money with Direct Mail. And then on Instagram and TikTok, it is @directmailjosh. And then I think on YouTube it's @directmailjosh too, or it's Make Money with Direct Mail. I don't, I can't remember if I switched those. So yeah.

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