How to Make $3M a Year Buying Billboards

Oh shit. What is that? This is a business that went from $0 to more than $3 million by renting out other people's billboards. I like to think about this business like a digital real estate business. Tiny little rental units, no toilets, five figures invested and 12 to 18 months cash on cash return. Kind of interested, if you, like me, are interested in trying to figure out how can I make money on assets that work for me even when I'm. This industry is interesting. I was curious about this boring business of billboards. So I found two gentlemen who are projected to make $4 million a year without owning any billboards. Look at this. There's four ways I see to make money off of billboards. One, you can have print billboards, the ones that you see on the street. Two, you could have billboards like this. These are moving billboards. Check out this company, Agile. They basically take these on last mile trucks. Three, you could own digital billboards like the ones we just showed you before, the ones on the street. Or four, you start a company like these guys and you try to figure out as more people are vying for this one precious thing, our eyeballs, how could you be the solution to their problem of not getting enough of this? You had a moment that brought you this business. Tell me what happened.

We had an idea for a billboard campaign for a day just to make something viral out of it. We went to the people who owned the billboard. We told them, if you guys have free space, we want to buy a few hours or a day of advertising. They told us that's not really possible. They're not able to sell us one day. They have to do a minimum of a week or two because that's how their infrastructure is set up. And that's when it clicked for us. I got it. And we realized, hey, if we're able to automate that and get all that free inventory on a platform so people can access it without having to talk to someone, without having to go through the very complicated process of working with the media agency, then that's a big opportunity.

So a lot of times people think if you're going to do a tech business, something big in tech, you have to have a ton of money. But that wasn't the case for you guys. How much cash did you start with?

A couple of tens of thousands.

The coolest part, I think is that you went two years without getting VC funding or doing what so many people do these days, which is like, I have an idea, how about you fund it instead? You're like, no, no, no. We're going to put our own blood, sweat and tears into this. We're going to get not just an mvp, but a real VP up there and have, you know, hundreds of thousands of billboards in order for this to get rolling. What made you then decide, okay, we're ready. I'm going to bring in some capital and I'm going to take it to the next level.

So there were actually a couple of moments that ch made the trigger that, yeah, this is actually huge and it's a business. The first moment was when we got our first client. So we were always self serviced, the platform was always available, but people were afraid of billboards because when you're on a billboard, everybody sees it. It's not like on Facebook, when you have no idea who sees it. Your mom is going to see the billboard. So we got a client out of nowhere that bought like 20 bucks something in Bucharest. I really wanted to place an ad in Times Square. For me, Times Square was the mecca of billboards. And when we first got, in 2018, our first billboard board and first campaign in Times Square, it wasn't big, it was a couple of thousands, but it was our ad on the biggest bloody screen in Times Square. Ultimate trigger. If you want that, we can take this.

With a simple $18 billboard, we became the second most popular Reddit post of all time and were picked up by most major news outlets all the way to the top.

You hadn't done anything in billboards before. There was this huge, multi, multibillion dollar industry that you guys knew nothing about. You're from Romania, you're coming to the U.S. you're like, I got this, no problem. Like, how did you decide you were going to take the risk and why this marketplace?

Well, we were digital marketers, so all of us were doing stuff on YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, you name it. And we realized obviously the Internet marketing was already maturing, so there were less and less opportunities there. If we're able to apply some of the principles that we learned from online marketing to a legacy business like digital out of home or out of home in general, then that could be a huge opportunity. And we started learning the business because we didn't know how it was done. Honestly, it was good news from us because we wanted from that space because we were able to come up with a totally fresh perspective and actually look at it with more of a critic's eye and see the good part, but also see the bad part and how we can change that.

All right, so how does this actually work? If I own a billboard. What do you guys do for me?

Reach out to us. Our tech team will evaluate what players you have, the systems that you have, or recommend the system that can communicate with us. Once you're hooked up and you have a connectivity to the screen and we see your screen on the system, basically it's live. If you don't have to do anything but just approve the content, push the yes or no button.

So really you're kind of like a property manager for billboards.

We're looking at sort of like an Airbnb because we're renting out not to the big guys, but to the thousands of the small guys.

That makes sense.

One of the things that I really enjoy doing is taking something really old and bringing it to the day and age that we live with. Whether it's paying your taxes online with a credit card or taking a very old industry and making it accessible to everybody. Liter for us, it's the number one motivation that we get on a daily basis. Every time we see a company or an individual posting something on their Facebook or Instagram or TikTok, hey, that's my company. I'm there. It doesn't matter if they spend five bucks to be there. They're so happy. And you can tell the joy, hey, mom, I'm on a billboard. And billboards actually are one of the few mediums that still have that magic, you know, to make you accomplished, feel accomplished.

It's so true. I mean, look at all these guys. Like my friend Alex Zieberman launched a podcast. Now he puts it up on a billboard. Like another friend of mine launched a book. It's on a billboard. It almost makes people feel like, hey, it's a bigger deal than it is because it gets up here. And maybe even people don't realize that they could do that. You want to know the secrets to building billion dollar businesses? There's one thing most people don't do. Branding. So when I thought about building contrarian thinking, I referenced back to Nike and Apple from the 1984 commercial.

On January 24th, Apple Computer will introduce Macintosh 2.

Nike's Just do it swish campaign. They don't forget this. It's not a logo, it's a contract between them and their customer. Started thinking about creating our company's story. I went to 99designs by Vista. I created the first two logos of contrarian thinking and unconventional acquisitions at 99designs. Then this most recent go round, I made kind of a giant mistake. I spent $15,000 on a branding agency and their Stuff was awful. And so I actually went back to 99 Design and I said, what about we do a partnership? We together create the new logos for our new boring business brief. I set up a contest on 99designs for a little mascot, all for a couple hundred bucks. Because it turns out my drawing's not amazing, but theirs is. So we're going to do a giveaway. We're going to give away $500 in credit for you to create your own logo. Small businesses, one of the most important part is how do you get clients? How do you get sales? Turns out in this business, you guys have clients come to you because of the pain point. Tell them about it.

We don't really have a sales team. We're not that good at sales. We're just good at creating a system that works by itself. So basically, we have a lot of inbound demand because people will look up doorboard in a certain area and they have two options. They either email an agency or the landlord, and that takes forever to respond and it imposes higher minimum. Or they'll come on our platform and they see how easy it is. We actually have a case now with an agency from Europe that wants to advertise for McDonald's. So a big buyer, but they want to do it fast.

Anyone out there who wants to go fast? I want to go fast.

They're not able to do it for their agency, so they're doing it for our platform.

I mean, think about this. All of these industries are getting disrupted because people used to have to do this a lot. And guess what? Not everybody answers on the other end of the line. Just like Airbnb, Zillow, Redfin, all of these companies are removing the old incumbents and putting somebody like this guy in the middle. Now break down how the costs work on billboards like this. How do you price them? How do you make money off of them? How does that work?

So what's unique about our platform is we work with companies like this. We take credit card, right? Whether it's the weekly or the monthly, break it down into hours. We get the price per hour and then we add our markup on top of that. And then you have the price that the client like you gets for your ad to run for an hour.

So it's almost just like YouTube, AdSense in a way, or PPC on a Google website. You're like, this piece of real estate is worth X. You get X amount of this real estate for a certain amount of time. And because of that, we're going to Charge you for it. That's basically applied across all those 500,000 billboards.

Exactly. Basically why we add the extra markup. Of course, we're not an ngo. We are for business, but it's mostly for short term campaigns. If you have the money to do a long term campaign, definitely talk directly to the billboard owner, Go to them directly, pay them, make a deal. A long term deal. But if you want something tomorrow or two days from now and you only want it for two hours worse, we're kind of the only option.

What is important to know when buying your first digital billboard?

First of all, don't skim on price. Because you can get a lot of cheap billboards if you import them from China or anything like that, but the tech will not be there. Second of all, you want to have a good tech infrastructure so you're able to report to your advertisers, but you also want it to be flexible enough for it to be able to connect to platforms and be able to make.

Extra revenue on top of it.

What about location? How do you decide where a good billboard location is and how much you could make?

I think that's the most important part. So first of all, I would look at affluent neighborhoods, look at places that maybe don't have a lot of billboards that are kind of growing a lot.

So Miami is a great example of Miami because Brickell is booming now and.

You have a lot of people from New York moving here. There's not a lot of digital billboards. It's similar with real estate.

It does have.

If you can find something that people are very interested in now that has a lot of foot traffic or a lot of car traffic, then I think that's a good combination of a good location.

At the end of the day, I think you want to think about it yourself like you are an advertiser. If you are looking to run advertisements, do you have 10 to 20,000 cars passing by every day? Do you have a location where your target demographic is located? So if I want to sell something to food truck owners and my product is $100,000, this might be a good place to be. We're surrounded by food trucks. If I want to sell somebody sweaters in Miami in the middle of summer, this is probably not the spot for me. So think about what your goal is before you buy a billboard spot. Oh, it was amazing. In every business you get a lot of no's, but especially if you're going to disrupt a boring traditional business that's been around for 100 years. Tell us what people would say about you guys in the industry and why you kept going. Anyway, it was interesting when we first.

Started this and we were talking to people in the advertising space, they were telling us, yeah, that's never gonna happen. The space is controlled by a few players. You're never gonna have an end there.

Don't worry, Mr. Zuckerberg. Brighter men than you have tried and failed this class.

They're gonna disrupt their business. They're not gonna want it. When we were talking to potential clients, they were like, this is brilliant. Can you build this? I want this. And that's when we realized, hey, it's something that the industry, because it will disrupt their business, but it's something fans want. So that means if we manage to do it, that's a huge win for us. So we kept going. We went from two screens in Bucharest to half a million now worldwide. And it's going good. So something works.

So ask yourself, not only is it cool when you see yourself on your own billboard hint, but also, where can you break the mold? Where is something ridiculous that bothers you? Like taxi cab medallions and the fact that taxi cabs are disgusting, AKA Uber. Like the fact that billboards are so expensive to get on when they really shouldn't be. When you can take something that's been broken for a long time and fix it with a little bit of technology, that's where the billions are.

A million dollars isn't cool.

You know what's cool? You.

A billion dollars.