6 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022

Okay, this idea is called Milo Again.

Okay, what is Milo?

So Milo is a company that got started back in the day that a guy who came on the pod, Jack Abraham, started.

Yeah.

And what Milo did was a very simple thing. Milo said, if you, if you said, oh, I need to go buy Scotch tape, It would say you would just type it. It was a search engine for finding where you can go buy a specific product in person. So you'd be like, I want to buy, uh, you know, whatever, like, um, whatever, a Philips razor or something like that. You just type it in and it would be like, it's in stock at this Target near you. So it took where you are and then it knew all the store's inventory and it just told you if the product's in stock right there. And like, there's like the world is moving towards e-commerce. Yes. But there's still like a very healthy slice of people that go shop in real stores and or they want something now today and they don't want to wait for it to be delivered in an X amount of time. And so this idea of Milo, Milo got bought by eBay for like $75 million after like a couple of years. And then it kind of like, you know, like many acquisitions, it just sort of faded away and disappeared inside of eBay. But this idea is still a great idea, dude.

I completely agree, man. I tried buying something the other day, like some chairs or something, and I had to go to like 8 different, like, homedepot.com, tractorsupply.com, lowes.com, walmart.com.

Even when you go, you're seeing the generic thing. You're not seeing like, you're saying like, does Home Depot carry this?

Okay.

Yeah. Now let's go to store locator, type in my thing.

It sucks.

And then I have to go to each one and do that.

And it's like, sucks.

I completely agree. I needed kids cough medicine. And I was like, dude, I just need to know, do you have kids Robitussin or not?

And then like usually like CVS or Home Depot or whatever, they— you type something in and they're like, this isn't near you. And it's like, oh well, because up here it says my zip code is like, you know, 8 hours away when I was on vacation. You don't have like an easy way where it's just like search, you know what I mean? Uh, it's— I completely agree, it takes forever. And I was trying to do this the other day, it's a pain in the back— pain in the ass. I was using Google Shopping, but it's not easy.

Exactly. And I know it's also hard to build, right? Because you have to have like real-time inventory of physical stores.

Yeah, but that's not that hard. If you go to Target and ask for like a vacuum, you— they go to target.com and like type in like that vacuum to figure out where it is in the store, right?

So it's in some system. So you would need to build like integrations with like the major backend inventory systems in order to be able to do this. And you have a really strong reason why they should give you that access. It's like, hey dude, I'm going to send you a customer. Like, I'm going to send you foot traffic to your store. Like, is there anything a store wants more than foot traffic to the store? I don't think so. So, you know, like to me, Milo is an idea. And by the way, this just general thing, which is companies that go get it, that get acquired and then like kind of like dissolve in the big company. Just go restart those companies like 3 years later.

Yeah, I actually think that's a really fantastic idea. That's one of— so that business model, I have said that I hate the advertising business model. I don't entirely hate it, but I do hate that when you're a publisher and you have to say stuff that you don't really want to because of an advertiser. But it's— I don't love that model, but I love non-publishing business advertising models. Because it's the perfect alignment. So basically with Milo, you have a site that gets lots of traffic and then you allow someone to pay money for a per-click or a per-view basis. And it's very fair. It's the easiest sales process. I think I'm all about that.

Right. Uh, okay. I got some more random ideas. This is all these, these ideas, by the way, they're a little bit more like the tipsy, the drunk ideas, the, uh, so this might be another drunk idea segment. I might have to take a fake shot here and we might do drunk ideas because these are, these are, you know, very, very loose.

No, Milo again is all right.

Good bad ideas are bad ideas, but they're the good version. Like, I'm giving you a good bad idea.

Did— have you ever asked— did you ever ask that guy Jack, uh, what he— if you could— we could just email him and be like, is this cool? Was it— would this work again?

Oh no, I didn't ask him. Yeah, we should ask him. We'll see what he says. But also, people should know this: when a founder goes into a space, they can tell you a lot of things about it, but they have so much scar tissue about that space that they will always tell you, like, um, 9 times out of 10, I should say, 9 times out of 10, they're going to tell you don't do it because they have trauma. And like, you shouldn't necessarily listen to the don't do it. You should listen to all the reasons why they say don't do it and then assess, are those still true, or do I have a compelling reason why those are no longer true? Um, but yeah, we should, we should ask them. All right, so here's my, here's drunk idea. Number 2. All right. You're, um, you take Zoom calls, right?

Yeah. You got a pulse?

Yeah. What's the experience like? Okay. Let's say you had a meeting with me before the era of Zoom. We were meeting in person. You come to my office for a meeting. What's that experience like while you're waiting for that meeting? And just in that 3 minutes before the meeting, what, what do you get?

So lately nothing, but I recently did something where they had an ad on Zoom. And I thought that was intriguing.

No, no, in real life, what do you get? What's the best version of a real life— before your meeting, you show up at the building, you've done this, you've done it.

Yeah, water.

Famous New York bougie places, you've been there. Someone attractive greets you, they ask you if you need anything to drink, they give you the drink, that you have a seat, you look around, they got art everywhere, you start to feel like, wow, this company's pretty cool, huh? Like, yeah, oh, look at that, they got that wall over there with all the like cool, you know, little hand—

awards that they won. Yeah.

You know, like I went to one the other day and like the bathroom sign— oh, by the way, this is another drunk idea, but this is coming next, coming next drunk idea. The bathroom sign of this thing was, uh, it didn't say men, it said Batman, and they had like a cape on the guy, little silhouette, I guess. And I was like, ah, these guys, they like to have a good time. These guys got a great sense of humor. So I got all this, all this information, all this persuasion before I even went into the meeting.

Which, where, which office is this?

I can't say, but we, um, but Zoom needs this. Zoom needs a waiting room experience. This is a feature for some product manager at Zoom. We need a dope waiting room experience, or even, even it can be built off Zoom, right? There's like whatever, a trillion Zoom calls a day. Give me a dope waiting room where I can send somebody that's connected to the Zoom call, and then when they're ready, they can come in. But before that, they get a branded They get a branded experience, a virtual office, a virtual vibe of who they're dealing with, what that person's all about, and, uh, create a little, a little website, a little website space for them to, uh, to hang out and have some fun, have a drink, enjoy themselves.

I did this call with a company. I forget what they're making. Maybe they're making a game. And I logged in and I was like a little bit early and they had like a teaser video, like a 1-minute-long teaser video. And because they were the host of the Zoom, it automatically played. And so when I got to have the meeting, I was like pretty psyched up. Yeah, I was psyched up. It was awesome. It was really cool. And it almost felt like they were like buying it. I was like, is this— what is this new feature? Is this— was that an ad that you paid Zoom to play? And they're like, no, they have this new feature where they allow you to show like an AMP video, like a video prior to the meeting starting. And it was really cool. But dude, how about the fact that Zoom has been— we've been in a pandemic for 3 or 2 years and It's like the same shit over and over and over again.

Yeah. No features and the stock cut in half.

What's going on? Yeah, this is not good.

I'm more mad about one of those than the other. I'll let them figure out which is actually bothering me.

And there's so many people that go to that landing page where it says like, click here to open up Zoom and it's just a blank. Yeah, it's a blank page. There's so much real estate there.

I get there when I've already clicked a Zoom link. Guess what? I do want to open Zoom. You didn't have to re-ask me, dude. Yes means yes.

Zoom on SimilarWeb. Zoom.com gets 1.7 billion visits a month, and it's the 26th most popular website in the world. And that page is just this blank page. I cannot believe that they can make maybe hundreds of millions of dollars a year just in like an ad.

But yeah, just like the new Batman movie needs to play like a 15-second trailer to everybody today. Like, that's what, that's what needs to happen.

For real. I do think that that's like so much wasted space.

Yeah, I'm, I'm more in the meeting room, the waiting room bucket. I want you to be able to like say something about who you are by showing what, you know, you can decorate it. You can put your little drinks there, a little interactive thing. You can play Jenga, you can do whatever you want, right? Like make it, make it cool. All right. So that's one idea. The second one is what I teased a second ago. It's called I Don't Have a Personality, Give Me One, or I'm Not Funny, Make Me Funny. It's a, it's a store like Spencer's. Back in the day, remember Spencer's?

Or what? I just went to Hot Topic. I just went to one the other day. Yeah, it's awesome. All right, that's the joke.

That's the actual joke.

For me and Sarah, we had like a date night on Friday and we're like, you want to go walk around the mall and go to the food court? So we did, and it was awesome.

Date night, that's awesome.

It was awesome, man. It was so much fun.

So Spencer's is still a thing?

Yes, and Hot Topic. We went to both of them. And this shirt that I'm got— that I'm wearing, I bought it from Abercrombie. Dude, Abercrombie's cool right now.

I believe you. I believe you. Um, so my idea is it's the B2B version of Spencer's. So it's just shit for you to put around the office that's going to make your office more fun and interesting.

I think we should workshop that name a little bit though. What was your name? I don't have a personality. Please give me one.

Yeah. Maybe there's an acronym in there. Yeah, like we want, like it needs to be a word that's like Botox, but it's for injecting personality into your company instead of like filler into your like lips. So, so basically what this is, Botox for your company. What it's going to do is it takes all the common items of an office, of any office. So bathroom door plaque, you know, like bathroom door signs, uh, the exit sign, the emergency exit sign, uh, meeting room things, little tchotchkes on the table for meetings. You know, like your welcome desk sign-in mat and, and like little bell, you know, like it's just all items like that. And then it'll make you seem like the fun, interesting version of your company because we just have them. We take the common and we do it uncommonly.

And that's what we do here. We have this exit sign. Do you remember this? We had this exit sign at the dojo where over the exit side someone wrote IPO because that was, that was like Exactly. That was the goal. The, the goal exit was an IPO. So we had an IPO sign instead of an exit sign. Uh, it was pretty awesome. But, uh, I completely agree that this could be cool.

Yeah, like, oh, this toilet paper. Opportunity. Opportunity in that toilet paper roll. There's an opportunity in the bathroom mirrors. There's opportunity everywhere in your office to demonstrate a little personality.

One time when I went to VaynerMedia, they had Vayner branded bottles of water. It was awesome. And I still remember it and it stuck out. Have you ever been to a company that has had their own branded bottles? It was just—

No, but I also, I don't feel like I would have thought that was awesome. Why do you think that was so awesome? Was the label like just looked amazing or something?

I just— it was weird. I thought it was cool. It was quirky. It stood out. It was just a bot. I mean, it was just a normal cheap Costco bottle of water. And somehow some company, they had probably paid a quarter per bottle and they just wrapped it. It just had their label on it. I thought it was neat.

I remember when I went to Twitch for the first time when we were trying to sell the company. And they were like, you want anything to drink? You know, here's the little fridge. And I opened up, there was a, it was my first time ever seeing boxed water. And so I was like, huh, boxed water, fun. I thought it was like their gimmick. And I was like, that's cool. I picked it up. Have you ever drank boxed water? Tastes nasty, by the way. Doesn't taste good. Tastes disgusting. And also you're drinking from the old school, like milk carton.

Yeah. It's like drinking orange juice. It's like drinking orange juice out of like a thermo, like a metal thermos. It just doesn't taste good.

It doesn't, doesn't taste right. And then it doesn't even look right or feel right. So now I'm in this meeting trying to sell my company, biggest day of my life. And I'm like a toddler drinking from this like carton of water and like the thing was just getting all wet and disintegrating. And I was like, oh God, like, do you have a, do you have like a dumpster I can go throw this away in? Cause it doesn't fit in any normal trash can.

It's like a paper straw.

All right, here's my next drunk idea.

Sean's like, fuck, fuck them turtles.

Choke on these. I don't want to, I don't want to choke myself. To save the turtles. That's what was happening with the boxed water. I have moved straight to the end. All right, so the, the next one is— I don't know what I need to call this. I need a catchy name. I'm gonna call it, um, Discord Property Managers, because I can't think of a name. Okay, so basically there's a ton of Discords out there now. Basically this is like community managers is a job title, right? A lot of people have communities. Communities are all the rage now, and there's a ton of Discords, especially in the crypto world. It's a ton of Discords.

They're so hard to figure out that are just like noisy.

There's spammers and scammers, and then there's new people coming in. They never use Discord, they never use crypto. This is a confusion all around. I think somebody should build the best property management company for your Discord. Just be like, dude, we are the best at managing Discord and we will manage your Discord for this flat fee and just build a brand around being an amazing property manager for your digital property, for your digital spaces.

That's a great idea. So VaynerMedia, who we'll talk about them again, when they started, their whole thing was like, social media's new. We're like the guys, you know, we know how to handle it. And basically most of their job titles were called community managers, or early on a popular job title at their company was a community manager, which basically just meant we'll comment on everyone's comment. Uh, you know, if you're, uh, Oreos, and someone like makes a comment on about Oreos, we just reply. And I actually think that you— and they got big that way. I bet you VaynerMedia makes $200+ million in revenue. It's a big-ass company, and you do the exact same thing, but now the new community, or the new social, is community. And I think that you better—

yeah, you know David Spinks?

Yeah, of course.

He was— he was—

it was way early.

He was way early, dude. He just— if he started that like 2 years ago instead of 7 years ago, That would be like a $100 million company right now. And, uh, he was just a little too early and he didn't make it all the way.

So David Spinks had this company called CMX Summit. It originally was a conference for community managers. Then it was like an online community and everything. And he sold it. I don't even remember who.

Well, the big idea was like, you have a, you have a CEO, then you have a CTO. They handle, they're, they're in charge of the technical part of things. You have a CIO, they're the chief information officer. CSO, CMO for marketing. So you have all these C-suites and his belief was that community is going to be a big part of companies. And so you're going to have a CXO, I think was the thing they were going for, which is like a, a chief community officer or some shit like that. I don't know why it was X, CMX. I don't know what they were trying to do, but like basically it was, this is going to be a job title at the C-suite level. And then you're going to have then like a senior community manager and then like a junior community manager. And like, this is a whole new job function and he was right. I don't know how to do it. And he was totally right. And totally early, which is the same thing as being totally wrong. That's what sucks.

Yeah, he was totally right and totally early. I completely agree. He was on that like it felt like 10 years ago. Yeah, but I think this is a good idea. It would be a pain in the butt to run an agency, but I think this is an agency that could crush.

Let me give you— okay, can I give you two ideas? So there's a guy— I mean, these are, these are 100% stolen from another podcast I heard. So I listen to the Bill Simmons podcast, the sports podcast, and Bill has his buddy Kevin Wild or Wilds, something like that. He comes on and he does half-baked ideas. What's that? And he is, he is like, we need to get him on this pod because his half-baked ideas are like, he does drunk ideas and he's been doing this for years and it's just a running bit. This guy, he only comes on like twice a year, but when he does, he's got these amazing ones. So can I give you, yeah, the two most recent ones he did? And he's, by the way, he's amazing at pitching them. He's even better. Me at pitching these, these drunk ideas. All right, so first one is called Fit Furniture. Okay, Fit Furniture. You might be wondering, what is, what is Fit Furniture? I've been hearing a lot about it lately. Do we make the highest quality furniture? No, we do not. Do we have the best prices? Sure don't. Do we have furniture that fits through doorways? You bet your ass we do, because moving furniture is a requirement of furniture. And all furniture is built as if everybody's home has just open walls that you can just drag these things through. So fit furniture is furniture optimized to fit through the standard doorway width.

That's, you know, do you know, uh, Lovesac? You remember Lovesac?

Yeah, of course. So they're huge beanbags, right?

Yeah, but their new shtick is furniture that fits through a door. It's modular. Oh my God, it's a, it's a, it's a couch that you take apart. And I tried. So at my Airbnb, the way it works, these guys are idiots. They put a spiral staircase going up and you on the second floor and that's the only stairs and you can't carry anything up a spiral staircase. So I was like, I can't get a couch unless I could take it apart. And there was this company in Texas and they're the couch guys and they take apart your couch just for this problem. They take the whole thing apart and they rebuild it wherever you want it. And I was like, all right, well, I can't do that. So I looked at— I looked at— because it's an Airbnb, I don't want a fancy couch. I looked at Lovesac. They're interesting, but it's like $3,000 for one of their couches or $4,000 for one of the couches. So I ended up going with a futon because I could build a futon upstairs. But dude, it was such a pain finding a couch that could fit into certain doorways that wasn't like over $5,000. I completely agree.

If you want to pay 5-star prices for that college experience, Sam's Short-Term Rentals has got you covered. Sleep on a futon. 5 stars.

No, we don't call it a futon because we call it a pullout couch because it's like Crazy comfortable. It's basically like a mattress that you can sit on sometimes. But, uh, yeah, I didn't— I was embarrassed to call people— I was embarrassed to call it a futon, that's for sure.

That was your nickname in college, right?

Yeah.

All right, let me give you his second idea. His second idea is called bulletin board material. So this is for— this for— I think this is for you. I think you are the target market for this. So It's for somebody, somebody who you got a little chip on your shoulder and you like it. It's that chip on your shoulder has made you who you are today. There would be no hustle if there weren't any doubters.

Dude, they say skeptics, chips on shoulders create chips in pockets.

Exactly. But what happens if you grew up around nice people? You don't have a chip on your shoulder, or maybe you had that chip, sold the hustle, and now everybody tells you you're so great. You don't—

or you are so unlucky that you had a healthy father. Mother who treated you well, like, you know, like, fuck me, right?

You can do anything.

That's such a disadvantage because I grew up in an emotional, emotionally healthy household.

The biggest disadvantage there is.

The biggest.

And with money, we help solve that problem. We are for the healthy middle-class family who has lost their edge. And what Bullshit Mormon Material is, is it is haters as a service. And so what we do is We go and find the people— oh, my first— people love the podcast every day. People love the podcast. But guess what? In some corners of the internet, there's people who hate this podcast. And so what Haters as a Service does is it compiles that information and it takes out the real toxic stuff that's gonna, you know, give you nightmares at night. So there's some filtering, and it just drips to you a little motivation every week that just reminds you that some people believe you can't do it. That some people say you're not so prepared for this podcast. Some people say, Sean, your camera's not working and you, you know, you got to get that sorted. And so it just gives you that healthy dose of hater aid. It's like, be your best.

And we just hire a bunch of immigrant mothers whose children are grown and they have some free time and they're like, well, you know, your brother's a doctor, Sean, you know. Exactly.

I actually know two women who could run the service single-handedly. I'm not going to name any names. They could serve thousands of customers.

Well, you know, you know, it's not too late to go back to school.

So Haters as a Service, uh, what do you think of that idea? You enter—

yeah, yeah, I'm down. We'll just call it like— it has to— it just— you're just nagging people all day.

Yeah, exactly.

Uh, and it's for theimmigrantmom.com.

Yeah, yeah, live like an immigrant.

Yeah, there's a reason why immigrants are always the best. Immigrantmentality.com.

All right. Yeah, those are, those are my drunk ideas. You got any drunk ideas?

I feel like I'm not creative like you. All my ideas are just like legitimate money-making ideas, you know?

It's hard for me to come up with bad ideas.

How do you do it? Yeah, I'm like the Lady Gaga of ideas. There are no deep hits or there's no deep tracks. Hits only.

All right. That's it. That's the episode.