I Bought 3 Vending Machines… My Earnings SHOCKED Me!

This is me collecting money from a vending machine. And again and again. All to answer one question. How much money can you actually make with a vending machine? So I'm doing it. I've got two weeks to see how much money I can make. Starting now. So here's the plan. Step one, get the machines. Step two, make them pop. Step three, find a location. Step four, load them up. Step five, collect the cash. I want to make as much as possible, so I bought three to figure out which one makes the most. Hi, man, by the way, I'm Cody. Good to meet you, Larry. Nice to meet you too. How do you decide what to put in it? Best sellers would probably be like Peanut M and Ms. I mean, Doritos. What sells terribly? Raisinets. That tracks. Those are gross. Who's eating a Raisinet? So how much did these cost me? 2,200. 2,200. And finally, wild card 850. So I'm all in for about 5,250 bucks. Let's hope we make some money. The two most important things if you want to make money with a vending machine are one, location. You need a lot of foot traffic. Two, product what you put in here. Right product, right place. Strategy one, we are going to have a healthy vending machine. Now, this is not that normal, but we're gonna fill this bad boy up with actually really expensive product, kind of premium stuff for like the fitness bros and people who are in the gym and wanna have really healthy stuff. Maybe a bunch of cool energy drinks from my buddies. Strategy two, we're gonna go standard. This is an unhealthy vending machine. We're going to put in here everything that we know normal vending machines have and see if we make more money with that. And then we got kids toys, which I don't think to explain because this thing is like Vegas for small toddlers. And I think they're gonna be into it. This one looks great. No need to do anything. Kids are gonna be super attracted. This one, boring, dull, ugly. We're not gonna make any money, so I gotta do something to make it pop. I'm thinking murals, motivational quotes, and a lot of color. But hold on a second. First we gotta change, like my onesie. Okay. I'm gonna paint these bad boys, but I'm not very good at painting. So I called my friend Bridget, artist, muralist. And we are gonna take these things and make them pop. Let's thinking like jiu jitsu gym. Dude, sweaty. Some kind of cool slogan, masculine vibes. Like it? Okay. Okay, second one. I'm thinking healthy gym, Something kind of funny. Little quote on it. Love it. Amazing. Should we get to painting? Let's do it. All right, let's see if I can do this. That's perfect. Really? Yeah. All right, Bridget, I'm going to let you finish the rest of this. I got to go buy the product to actually fill this bad boy. So I need to go buy some product. But before I can buy product to put in the vending machine, I got to figure out how much I can pay for each individual item or each unit, which is called unit economics. What do I want to do? I want to be able to buy things for less and sell them for more in order to have a profit margin, AKA money in my pocket at the end of the day. I know that on average, the industry in vending machines, they have a 15 to 30% profit margin, net profit margin, which means at the end of the day, if they make $100 in total revenue, they only take home 15 to 30 bucks per 100 bucks made. So in order to hit this, I gotta at least have a 50% gross margin or how much make on every single product that I sell because there are these other costs associated. We'll get more to those later. What am I going to do? Well, in my healthy vending machine, I think I can charge a little bit more per unit. So my price per unit is going to be $2 plus, which means that my cost can be a dollar or below in order for me to make a dollar. Now, my unhealthy vending machine, I don't think I'm going to be able to sell things for as much in there. So I think each unit I might be able to get like $1.50 for them, maybe a little bit more, which means that I can only spend 75 cents on them, which means if I do that, I'm going to have 75 cents that I get to take home instead. Now I have to charge 2x the price that I pay in order for me to have a profit margin that I think makes me industry average. If any of this seems too oversimplified or you're confused, click this link. There is a profit and loss statement which break this all down in a little spreadsheet exactly for you guys so you can go deeper. Now, I know my budget. Let's go shopping. Two for four. Great. That's what we need. This is so sick. We are gonna make so much money with these. Talk to me. Why'd we do this. What's with the color? Color is so important because it stands out. I feel like a lot of people like to play it safe and keep it basic, and that's just not what we do around here. Something you do with all your designs is basically like, how do we make this super targeted to the users? So, like, I see myself in this. This is our plan with the vending machine. Yeah. You've killed it, dude. I can't wait to see if we make a ton of money. You better. You better. I think these are going to crush, but I need these to go start making money for us right now. So let's see if we can find some locations for my new babies. Let's see if these guys let us play something. My. Thank you. It's a no. Time is running out. I need to find somewhere. Absolutely not. That was an opt out. They said yes. All right, we got one down. That took forever. Now we're ready. Calling the head of my gym, Cody. Hi. Thanks for taking my call. Jeremy. I have kind of a weird request as a member, I am getting these vending machines. I was wondering if we could try a little experiment for, like, two weeks. You said two weeks. Yeah. Let's try it for two weeks and then we'll see how it goes. Let's do it. Let's try it out. Let's do it. You're the man. This will be amazing. All right. Thanks, Jeremy. I kind of thought he'd say no, that it'd be embarrassing that I'd have to see him at the gym, but we're fine on our way to a gym to drop this bad boy off. They haven't seen the vending machine yet. This place is, like, super classy, and we're about to put a giant smiley face in it. We'll see how this goes. Hello. Okay, I'm stoked about this. We're going to place a vending machine. You want to kind of think about. Yeah, let's look at some places. We definitely don't want to do it here. Probably too much going on. Yeah. Right. So we think we're going to put it over here in this location. Yeah, I think this will be a great spot. Okay. Sick. So this will be a cool vibe. Amazing. Larry, we ready? Born ready. It's where my gym membership pays for itself. Down the middle, Larry. We're gonna put it right in the middle so it's centered. Yeah. Great. You ready for this? Okay, well, now we're just showing off, actually. Ready? Ta da. All right, so now I Need to get some help to fill these bad boys. Cause it takes about 15, 20 minutes to load the whole thing. Here's what I'm a little worried about. This stuff is expensive. We're putting high quality, prem premium, healthy stuff in here. The way that we figured out pricing, though, is we just made everything 30% more expensive. We're like, we need to have 30% margin in order for us to make some real profit here. We got Nutonic, which sells for 33 bucks. We're selling it for 50. We've got Quest Protein Chips. Those retail at 247 each. We're selling them for five bucks. Legendary Pop Tarts. 250 for five. We're gonna check these. We're gonna let these sit for a few days. We're gonna see how many sell, and if nobody's buying them because they're too expensive, we're going to sub them out. We also only bought about one third of the inventory because we were like, we don't want to have to buy the whole amount and have all this excess inventory. I've tried to find products that were hard to get. You can't just easily order them on Amazon. You had to go to their website. And so maybe the idea is that some of these products are unique and they're going to be like, I want to try that. This bad boy is live. You want to see it? Yeah. Okay, look what we got here. We got. So we have to set it up so the LED will be lit and they'll see how it's done. We'll see what happens. Yeah, I like it. We'll see what's up. It all sounds great. Do you want something? Yeah, I'll give it a try. Our first dollars. No big deal. Thanks, dude. Appreciate it. Yeah. Excited. Okay. So we put in a vending machine. We got it all set up. We got our first customer. We put our camera up so that we can see people using it again and again. And we filled it with the best healthy products we could find. Now we're on to the next vending machine. Hey. Hi. How's it going? I'm Cody. Hi, I'm Danny. What's up, man? Nice to meet you. You're running this joint, right? I am. Okay, so some options this way. So everybody who comes into the gym walks through here? Yep, Absolutely. Come in the front, Straight through here into our mat space. So our mat space over here we have really big kids class. Parents are all lined up against the walls. So another option is right here. This is sick. We got A plug up there. We'll put it right here. Everybody's got to walk by. We'll have our cool signage on the side. They'll be like, ah, look at that. Then they'll walk in. They put their kids stuff away. They'll kind of have to look at this while they're. I think that's awesome. Yeah. Excellent. All right, we found a location. Let's do this. Heavy foot traffic. Number one spot. Tons of parents. Absolutely. So basically, in this one, we've got the unhealthy vending machine, which is the natural vending machine. These are way cheaper. So that's the most expensive thing we have in here is three bucks. That's jerky feastables. Pocky sticks. Our cheapest thing in here is a buck. So we have like, Teddy Graham crackers. The idea is this is a volume game. If we're having four to five classes a day, 30 kids or 30 people on the mat, then another 30 people watching. We're talking about hundreds of people coming into this place every day and sitting and hanging out watching their kids for an hour. That's perfect. The idea is we can make up for the amount of cash that we need to make by having a lot of people buy. Larry, is it working? Looks that way. We're in business, baby. So we found the gym. We put it in the right spot. The machine actually works. Thank God. And so now we are going to see how much money we can make. And I ordered my first piece, and I gotta say, pretty damn good. I think this is going to work. Now we're for the plush bus. Hello. Hey, how's it going? Good, how are you? I'm Cody. Josh. Nice to meet you. Welcome to Juggle Moon Academy. Thank you. This is your spot. I'm guessing this is it. Let's hammer through what we're thinking. Okay. So this is the front entryway. How many people you got coming through a day, you think? Probably two, 300 at least. Wow. Okay. So we have a ton of people coming through. Lots of kids. Yeah. Right? Yeah. So we got spot one here. Kind of like it. Don't love it because I bet they don't hang out here. Right. They're definitely be in the gym. More after you. Holy shit. This is cool. This is crazier than I thought it was going to be. Yeah, there's a lot going on for sure. Okay. No Wonder you have 200 kids coming through here. This is madness there. I think this will be a perfect spot right here. Yeah. Parents hang out. Hi, parents. She's like I want to be on YouTube. I want to be on YouTube. You are now. As long as it's okay with mom. Can I ask you a question? Yeah. Do you like toys? Yes. Do you? Do you like stuffed animals? Yeah. Okay, we got a game for you later. I'm gonna hook you up. Larry, this thing looks ready. Should we rip it open and show it to him? Got a knife? Oh, fine. Ripped the nothing open. I'm kind of into this. There's a little violence for our YouTube channel. All right, let's open this bad boy. Dun, dun, dun. This is called the plush bus. Nice. And we need to plug it in. We need to make sure it works. And we need to get to work. Let's do it. Huh? Let's do it. I can see these little kids eyeballs. Are you watching them? Watch this right now. Because I am. Are these one of the little scam machines? Scam machines? Wow. It's like, too hard to get. Yeah, they're like, too hard to get. Okay, so we have to see if it actually worked. Hey. Oh, yeah. Nice. I think you go first, and then I saw your hand second. Huh? Okay. You got it, bro. Turn it around. Which one are you going for? Oh. Oh. Go for the chicken. What do you mean, go for the chicken? Go for the chicken's butt. All right. What are we doing with these hoarded kids? We're hoping that they buy a bunch of plushies. Or at least they try. So we put this plush bus in. It appears to be working. My money might be on this one. Actually winning or us driving the parents absolutely crazy. Let's see. So placing vending machines machines isn't just about convenience. It's about smart asset placement. A lot like real estate, actually. But successful operators kind of like savvy real estate investors. They understand that calculated risks can lead to big rewards. There is a way to dip your toes into real estate investing. That's as easy as starting with a single vending machine. It's called the Fundrise Flagship fund. So with the Fundrise Flagship fund, you don't need to put up your life savings. You can start small, like $10 small, and still get access to the kind of real estate deals that, you know, used to be off limits to regular people. This isn't about swinging for the fences and hoping you don't strike out. It's about making moves towards smart and steady growth. So check out the flagship fund so that you can be a player in this game. If that's interesting to you. Link below. Bad news. I was Excited to see the sales coming in, but literally not a dollar has come through. At first I was like, oh, wow, these are going to make all the money. But after looking at the cameras we set up, look at what I found. The card reader's broken and the cash doesn't work. Multiple times people come up and attempt to pay, but they walk away with nothing. The entire machine not functioning. We've got to call Larry and get him to go there and fix this. I don't know about you, but I never carry cash with me anymore, particularly at the gym. So we are missing out on nearly all customers right now. All right, we've had zero buyers at the one at the Jiu Jitsu gym. So let's see what's happening here. Oh, she likes my design. They're pointing it out. He likes it too. I told you this is gonna be Instagramable. Oh, they're talking about how they don't have any cash. Alright, so basically we're having a lot of problems and the card readers aren't working and one of them can't even take change or cash. The truth of the matter is it always takes longer than you think to start a business. And you're crazy to think that you're not gonna have something, some issue when you first open up, you're going to have issues. We're having them. I kind of expect them. It's just going to be, can we handle them and fix it? Yes, mother. We both want to know. Hey, O, look what we got here. Larry just replaced the motherboard, which means that we have. Let's verify this. Is he putting in cash? Does it work? The answer is yes. We're in business, baby. All right, so we got all three machines, semi operable. We've got the gym machine now available to take cash, and the Jiu Jitsu machine available to take cash. But the credit cards, that's when the money's gonna start to flow. Okay, I had to show you guys this because this is ridiculous. The plush bus is a totally different story. Look at this. Right now we have no plushies in there. And she looks upset about it. There's one lonely spider man that these kids are frantically trying to get. This is actually hysterical because this little rascal, she told me that this was a scam machine. Are these ones with scam machines? Listen, lad lady, looks like I was the one getting scammed. This is the state of the machine right now. Not good. We can't have the machine sat there empty, wasting valuable hours. Turns out the quickest I Can get any plushies there? Online is 24 hours. I also do have a couple teddies at home for being a kid. No, Albert is way too important. We gotta go fix a few things. We got a bunch of no name toys and then we also got stuff that kids love. Sonic, Minecraft, Pokemon. I think these are gonna be hot. So basically we're trying to hide the really, really good ones because they might be way too easy to win. We're gonna put some of the littles on top, make it not hard, but reasonable. Now let's see if these kids are winning and check if we're actually making any money here. Looks like we're making money, so that's good. But they're winning a bit too much for my liking still. So it is time to be the bad guy. We gotta break some kids hearts and change the clock claw. The manual is in here somewhere. This is a way to determine how much money you're gonna make. Ah, okay, we got it. So to lower the winning percentage, you have to change it. So the claw is appropriate for the size of animals that you have. Right now. It's on 60. Goes all the way to 100, 100 being the hardest or 99 being the hardest. 60 being kind of right in the middle, and then all the way down to the easiest. You get one every single time. And you change the claw so that you make sure you understand what your profit percentage could be. All right, this is more like it. Okay, I'm going to leave the plush bus now to do its thing. We're a few days in and have made not enough cash. Let's see what we can do here. So first up, I've convinced the owner of the gym to send an email to the members to let them know about the vending machine and what's in it. I'm not sure it will do much, but we'll see. Next idea. Crazy idea. The thing to understand about this audience is they are all about exclusivity and scarcity. So I think we might sell more if we make it clear these are cool products and this is the only place in Austin to buy them. So we printed this. I'm hoping this year will help get some interest. Okay, here's the thought. It's ridiculous. One, people might take pictures of it. Two, they're gonna be like, why would something in there make me look like Chris? Three, anything to get attention. Remember, most of advertising is called awareness advertising, which means top of funnel. It's just to let us know that something is there. So when we have a desire. The first thing we think about is the thing that we just saw. Recency bias. I've also decided to drop the price slightly to try and push those interested over the edge into buying. See, that's a great ad. We're gonna make so much money. I mean, who wouldn't want to look like this guy, huh? Let's see if I can get some excitement going myself. Hey, you look like you just did a super hard workout. I did. Can I interest you in a snack? Absolutely. I'm starving, actually. Amazing. Well, actually, do you want an energy drink first? I would love that. Oh, yeah. Pretty good. Delicious. This is our vending machine. So if you need protein or any healthy snacks. So it's like a legit vending machine, not full of artificial junk. It's like the Ferrari of vending machines, right? Exactly. Did I nail that? I think I did. I think it's working. So now we gotta go and see how much we've sold, what our inventory is, and what we need to replace. So we've sold 44 things so far in here, which is pretty good. You can see we've sold a few legendary. They like these blueberry ones. I'm shocked. Not more cookies. I love those cookies. Oh, wow. Check this out. These are selling well. The RX bar's no dice. These guys look like they're selling pretty good. Actually, I do love the cookie ones, so maybe that's why. And we've sold nothing from this bottom one. We really need to sell one of these $50 products at least once a month. That would really make our month each time. So we'll see if we can set ourselves up for success there. Now let's go to the Jiu Jitsu gym. Okay, this one is doing worse. I've got a similar game plan to the collective. It's important to remember this stuff isn't going on my social media, and I'm not doing anything you guys couldn't. I want to make it as clear as possible how much you can really make with these machines. And there is only so much you can do. So we're coming to our vending machine at the Jiu Jitsu gym because the unhealthy sacks, they're not selling very well. Oh, we're gonna replace with healthy snacks and see if that helps us. Also better for everybody. Let's first check out if we got any quarters. Nice. We got a few. I like that. We think the dollar machine's been broken. Oh, no. We got. Dang. We got some cash in There, nice. It's only been a few days actually working, so this should be good. We're gonna fill with these. This is a healthy, gummy snacks you won't feel guilty about. Before, we had a lot of unhealthy snacks. Now we've substituted with protein snacks with natural snacks with things that don't have Red 40 in it. And we're gonna see if that's what they really want. All right, one more thing. We gotta let the parents know we heard them. And we say, parents, we hear you. New and improved now with healthy snacks. All right, hooligans, time is nearly on up. I have one hour to see how much money we made with these vending machines. And I gotta be honest, I'm obsessed with these things. And it turns out everybody else is too. Look at these people. They're on them like white on rice. So today's the day we get the questions that we've been waiting for answered. How much money do we make? Which machine made the most? Actually, I'm looking at it right here. Will this be the business that we dreamed it's going to be? I think we should reset the bar first, though. The average vending machine make $75 to $300 in a month. So that's the bar we have to beat. Okay, moment of truth. Did my shenanigans increase sales at all? Do we have one of the best performing vending machines around? How many of these do you need to make 100k a year? That's what we're gonna figure out right now. Machine one, the jujitsu gym, where the guys are tough, but is the business tougher? Let's see how this shakes out. So it looks like we made $87 in two weeks. Let's extrapolate that out to the month. That means $174. So with my 30% margin, I'm making $52 a month profit. A couple ways to think about this. I need 47 machines to make 100k a year. That's not nothing. That's a lot of machines. But the way too to think about it is I think one machine takes you about two hours a month to manage. So I make $26 an hour salary or. Or $54,080 a year based on my hourly salary or rate, which is actually like a really cool way to think about it. Okay, Machine two, the fancy jam with the people who are hot, although I wouldn't notice because I'm a saint, obviously. So it shakes out at $313 we made in two weeks. So that's $626 a month. So with my 30% margin, I'm making $187.80 a month. Month in profit. A couple ways to think about this way. One, I need 13 machines to make 100k a year. That's not that many. That's actually kind of cool. Way two, one machine takes you two hours a month, remember? So I make $93.90 an hour or a salary if I was to extrapolate that out to $195,000 a year, which is cool. Machine three, our wild card. I'm so curious on this one. This is the plush bus. We made $295 in the first two weeks. 590 bucks a month then. So with my 30% margins, I'm making $177 a month profit. Are two ways to think about it. I need 14 machines still to make 100k a year. And then way two, since it takes me two hours a month to manage, I make about $88 an hour or a salary if I'm getting crazy with my extrapolations of $183,000 a year. So total $695 in two weeks. Which is actually kind of crazy because that is 1,391 bucks a month with three machines. Which means I earn 16,680 bucks per year with these things. If I replicate even just this amount with these three, I need about 16 of these to make 100k a year. And that would have me working like 32 hours a month. If we're kind of being loosey goosey here, you just call me Tim Ferriss. With my four hour work week, okay, our upfront costs were about 6,000 bucks. It's gonna take us five months for us to make that back. By the end of the year though, we think we could recoup our investment and we're profitable starting month one or two, which is pretty sweet. But I am actually really thrilled about our little money making robots. However, we're not lazy pieces of shit here. So I think we should build a real business off of this. We're officially at a place where we could consider making six figures a year off of vending machines and certainly where we could be making mid five figures a year off of it. But the point of this video isn't for us to be lazy passive income entrepreneurs. The point of this video is that we took a boring business. We made it a little bit more beautiful. And because of that, we get rewarded with more cash than the average vending machine. How much more cash? Well, we're making somewhere between two to five times the best performing vending machines out there. You see what happens? When you do good, you do well.