AI transcript
All right. This guy might be the king of side hustles. He makes about $3 million a year off of
six or seven different side hustles, different streams of income. And normally all the advice
you hear is about focus, focus, go all in on one thing. This guy’s like Mr. Shiny object syndrome.
So I loved having him on. He’s very fun. And he comes on, he tells you the side hustle ideas that
he loves. So things that you could do, it’s kind of weird businesses, but you could do them really
in any local market. And on this podcast, sometimes we have really brilliant people,
but they talk about stuff that’s for most people, not something they could go do. It’s
interesting to hear, but you can’t really do it. This is an episode I’m going to send to my sister,
you know, my brother-in-law, because I think they would like to do these businesses. And I think
these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he’s gotten, where I think he’s making
$8,000 per day of free cashflow off of these side hustles per day. That’s pretty crazy. So enjoy this
episode. It’s all about the weird, crazy side hustles that anybody could do. If you just got a
little bit of hustle. All right, what’s up? We got Chris here. Chris, you are a crazy guy.
You’re a madman. And one of the reasons I wanted you on here is because most business advice on the
internet sounds like this. You got to focus, you got to lock in, you got to grind, you have to just
go all in on one thing, focus, focus, focus. And you’re like the exact opposite. You’re a dude who
you see a shiny object, you chase it. And you’re not ashamed to say it. That’s actually your strategy.
We were talking before this and you were telling me that you have, I think, started 30 different
businesses that crossed over 50,000 in revenue, maybe 35. You said you have six different revenue
streams right now that each produce over a hundred thousand dollars of cashflow for you. And I was doing
the math on some of your numbers. And I think basically just on your side hustles, you’re
making like $8,000 a day of cashflow. And I think that is amazing. I want to hear what your side
hustles are. I want to hear what other side hustles you’ve found because you find these like random,
simple businesses that are cool. I want to hear which ones you think are cool that other people
can go do for their own side hustles. And I want to hear your philosophy as you go, because again,
I think you defy some of the odds. That sounds perfect. Absolutely. Let’s do it.
So tell me about some of the ideas you have that other people could do.
Dude, I think you should pull up that video of the hole in one golf challenge.
This is one that I can’t get out of my head.
All right, so here we go. Look at this freaking thing right here. And I see a,
basically a golf putting green. So like the, we’re just the part where the hole is and it’s just
floating out in the ocean. And you said that this driving range in New Zealand pays out $10,000. If
you hit a hole in one, it’s 111 yards away. You get this like plaque if you hit the hole in one.
And so what is the business here? They basically, they, it’s like a carnival game. They charge you a
little bit to try to hit a hole in one. Is that it? Yeah. It’s kind of like, think of like
unbundling a carnival. It’s the business is math. They’re just using math. Right. And here’s the math.
The, the average amateur golfer, and I don’t golf. I hate golf, um, has a one in 25,000 chance of
getting a hole in one on a par three, which this is. Okay. And so this company in New Zealand,
it’s right off the road on this Lake, um, they have announced multiple times that they pay out
on average once every two weeks. So I can use math, uh, to say, all right, these guys, and I know how
much they sell balls for it’s like 40 bucks for 25 balls or something. Uh, and they have a sensor in
the hole and they have divers go get the balls every couple of weeks. Yeah. There’s like a scuba diver
swimming around the thing. Is he there all the time or he just does that once a week goes and gets all the
balls just once a week. And so I can surmise based on math and statistics that this place net profits
like three to $500,000 a year, which is, there’s nothing to see there. It’s a little stand with a
floating green. One guy just standing there with an iPad. So why isn’t this all over the place?
Wait, so you said this is just roadside in New Zealand. There’s one, there’s one of these in the
world that I know of off the side of a road in New Zealand, but it’s off the side of the road.
it’s not even like near a golf course or tourist attraction. You’re just saying this is just in
a random area right now. Yeah. All right. So let’s say we wanted to do this. Let’s brainstorm this
together and maybe we’ll actually do this. Maybe we’ll find a listener to run this for us to make
it happen. But like, we’ll make this an MFM case study. All right. So how would we do this in order
to make this happen, um, you know, quickly, like get momentum and then have it actually work,
have it actually be successful. So to me, it’s all about piggybacking, right? I don’t want to guess
where the golfers are. Like there are no golfers where this place is, but how much better would
they be doing if there was all already a captive audience right there? And so I would just find one
golf course. You know how you go, you go to a golf course and like after the 18th hole, there’s just
like a putting green where you can chill. It would be like that. Okay. Take your nearest pond, put a
floating green out there, put a tee and have a little iPad with a stand and say, here’s your ball. Just like a
driving range, 20 balls, 20 bucks or whatever, $10,000. If you get a hole in one and it’s a way
for a golf course to earn additional revenue. They’re not about to build a floating green and work
out the logistics of the point of sale. So you could, yeah, you could do this as a service and say,
we’ll install this. You’re going to have more net income without doing any work. We’re going to take
30% of all your revenue as a fee. Okay. I kind of love this idea, but you need the water for this
floating thing. Right. Or what do you, what are you suggesting? So like, how would you do this if
the golf course is not situated by like, you know, like in this case is like the ocean or whatever.
I think, I’m glad you brought that up. Cause I think the water is a key point. Like as men,
we want to throw rocks in the water. Yeah. I think visually there’s a, there’s a, there’s something
that like my testosterone went up like 15 points, just looking at this. Like I could, I could do this.
Right. Like if it was literally just like, uh, Oh, like here’s just like a hole. Here’s the 19th
hole. Right. You could do that. You could brand it. Oh, this is the 19th hole. But just having that
obstacle of mother nature there. Yes. There’s something to that. I mean, you win either way.
So you get it on the green, you feel awesome. You get a hole in one, you win $10,000. You really
feel awesome. You miss, you see a splash. You can’t lose. Or worst case scenario, you’re just playing
golf. You’re paying, you’re paying money to play golf, which is why you’re there in the first place.
And you’re going to get content out of this also. You’re going to have your buddy film you,
or we set up a camera here where you get like an Instagram worthy story for, you know, for,
for this thing. How much do you say people pay to take a swing at this? Or, you know,
they buy 10 balls or what do they do? It’s like 30, it’s like 20 bucks or like 35 bucks for 20
balls or 50 bucks for 40 balls, something like that. Oh, so you get like 20 to 40 hacks at it to do it.
Yeah. That’s pretty good. And every guy thinks he can do it. Right. Of course. Or that today might
be a day. And also golf, you’re already like, I don’t know what the average spend is of a golf day.
Like if an, of a golf outing, I don’t play golf personally, but like there’s the, there’s the
actual, like the cost to actually play that day on the course. There’s all the clubs investments
you’ve done. There’s the cat, there’s the tips, there’s the food, there’s the, the beer along the
way. There’s all this like money spent dude to spend an extra 40 bucks to have a blast with your
buddies at the end or to have a story or to just like, you know, do something at the end.
That’s an absolute no brainer. If you actually did this with the golf course,
I thought you were going to say though, that you would do it just on the route to the golf course.
You know, there’s a lot of golfer traffic. Who’s going to take a roadside stop here and try to do
this. I mean, you could do that too. Like I’m picturing like a freeway with a lake over to the
right and an exit nearby. You rent the billboard right above it, arrow pointing down $10,000 for a floating
hole in one and people can just pull off and do it. Like it doesn’t have to be a golf course.
I like, you could use the same principle. And to me, the principle is just math as a service,
right? We’re calling this a mass business. Okay. And it’s like, let’s say you have a one in a hundred
chance. It’s an outdoor casino. Yes, exactly. Exactly. What is a slot machine? What is roulette?
What is craps? What are all these games? These are games where the house just said, cool,
we’ll take an edge. We’ll take a math edge and you get to play and have fun. Right. Yeah. But we,
we take the edge and that you, what you’re saying is to do the same thing. Yeah. Even like a putting
green in a mall or something, or a walkable outdoor shopping area. Let’s say you’ve got like a one in
500 chance of making a 30 foot putt. Right. So you say, Hey, 30 foot putt, you get it. We’ll give
you 500 bucks. And you just do the math and you say, all right, I’m, you know, every $3,000 I get,
I’m going to pay out 500 bucks. Statistically speaking, dude, I love this idea. If you,
if you want to do this idea, email me Sean at Sean Puri. And then me and Chris, we will,
we will help you do this and we will document the journey. We’ll put it out there in the public.
We’ll kind of make it a thing because I think part of it is the branding and the novelty factor.
And you want to see this online first, and then people will actually drive out to do it,
or they’ll plan to stop. Not just whoever happens to see it and understand it while they’re driving
50 miles an hour down a road. You know what I mean? Yeah. I like the name 19th hole. That’s a good
one. It’s good, right? We might need to snag that domain name before this goes live.
All right. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot. They’re doing a big conference. This is their big
one. They do called inbound. They have a ton of great speakers that are coming to San Francisco,
September 3rd to September 5th. And it’s got a pretty incredible lineup. They have comedians like
Amy Poehler. They have Dario from Anthropik, Dwarkesh, Sean Evans from Hot Ones. And if you’re
somebody who’s in marketing or sales or AI, and you just want to know what’s going on, what’s coming
next, it’s a great event to go to. And hey, guess what? I’m going to be there. You can go to
inbound.com slash register to get your ticket to Inbound 2025. Again, September 3rd through 5th
in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.
All right. So I love the hole-in-one golf course. All right. Give me the next side hustle idea.
Okay. Well, I want to talk about Facebook Marketplace. I feel like there’s an entire
economy in Facebook Marketplace. There are seven-figure business owners, let’s say fencing
business. All they do is post to Facebook Marketplace organically once a week to get all their leads.
By the way, Facebook Marketplace has 1 billion monthly active users. Just that tab.
Crazy. And no one’s talking about it. What are we doing?
So I’ve got a story for you. I’ve got a story.
And by the way, just explain the thing you just said real quick before you go to your story. So
you said there’s people who own like local fencing companies. Their entire sales machine is posting
on Face Marketplace fencing services. Is that what you’re saying? Or answering the request for fencing
service? What are they actually doing?
Yeah. Like they’re just posting, hey, I put up fences, cedar six foot, $8 per linear foot. And
then people message him and he goes out and gives a quote and he has a $7,000 job. Like there’s nothing
paid. There’s no paid ads. This is just one organic post that takes him five minutes and he’ll refresh it
every couple of days.
Dude, I don’t know if you saw this. We did this episode with high schoolers. I think it was like
a high school version of Shark Tank.
I saw that. Yeah.
And there was a kid who was, I think, 17, 18 years old and his entire business, I forget even
what the service was. It was home services of some kind. I don’t remember.
It was like window washing or something.
Yeah. It was like window washing or like gutter cleaning.
Gutter cleaning.
Actually it was their highlight thing. It was like gutter cleaning. And his entire business
model was off of Nextdoor. So he’s like, yeah, I just started this in my neighborhood where I live.
I went on Nextdoor and I said that I do this and I serviced, you know, the last year I serviced 60
homes in this neighborhood of 600 homes or whatever it was for gutter cleaning. And that
generated, I’m making up the numbers now because I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it was
like 500,000 in revenue. And we were like, what? And he’s like, yeah, I just post on there that this
is what I do. And then it’s people in our neighborhood. And I was like, so could you post
in the next neighborhood? He’s like, yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to get around the, you know,
like, yeah, I can. I just haven’t done that yet. It’s like, wow, this is, everybody should do this.
Like, you know, what is my kid doing? What are they teaching you in pre-K right now? We got to get
after it with this Nextdoor, you know, Nextdoor lead gen, basically. And so you’re saying the same thing is
happening at a bigger scale on Facebook Marketplace. Yeah. Both great opportunities.
Okay, great. So tell me the story you’re going to tell me.
Yeah, this is, this is an outlier example. Okay. Results not guaranteed. But 2021, China had
canceled Bitcoin mining, right? 2021 was a crazy year, a lot of money being printed. And we started
a Bitcoin mining facility and people were selling Bitcoin miners and hosting services on Facebook
marketplace. And so these miners cost $10,000. So you go type in the name of the model and you see
them listed. Cool. But I thought, huh, the hosting price, because if you buy a Bitcoin miner, you have
to host it at like a data center. And it’s usually like 200 bucks a month for the hosting fee. So I just
posted organically to Facebook marketplace, Bitcoin mining hosting service. But instead of putting in the
price of the miner, which turns people off $10,000, $10,000, right? Yeah, I put in the price of the
hosting $200. And then when you click into it in the description, it’s like, it’s actually 200 for
hosting. Here’s the cost of the miners. I’m not exaggerating. That one ad, and I had it going on
multiple accounts, we would refresh it, but no paid, no paid. Did $9.8 million all on Facebook marketplace
in three months? Profitably. Like this isn’t like you’re, oh, and we spent $9.8 million in ads, like
profitably. That’s like the potential and kind of an extreme outlier, but I have other more normal
examples. Just to be clear, you were selling miners that you had, that you already owned or what were
you doing? We were pre-selling them and then ordering them from China. So we had a positive cashflow
conversion cycle in addition to all that. All right. So you went on Facebook ads, you specifically did the
marketplace ads. Is that right? Not even ads. We were just posting. Just posting. All right. Just
organic posting. And you’re posting every day. You’re posting it and you’re posting it in every
city. Did you set up like a farm to post these? How’d you do that? Yeah. We used VAs and multiple
Facebook accounts and we posted in multiple cities because most people want to buy from someone
local. Um, and the funnel was, you know, VA answers, uh, response. Then they pushed them to a sales
call because it’s hard to sell something so expensive over the internet. Once they got on the
sales call, we would close like half of them. Right. So, and so, and then you would close them
and then you’d go order that same thing from China because there’s like a knowledge arbitrage here of
like, I don’t know how to go, or I don’t trust spending $10,000 on Alibaba or Aliexpress. And so
you would then do that and you’d have a margin. What was the rough margin on something like that?
Call it 30%. 30%. But like high ticket. So. And this one I’m guessing didn’t last in the sense that
like, you know, in 2025, maybe the same market dynamics, the demand, the supply are not the
same. Is that true? Yep. Really? The biggest variable here is like the frothiness of the mining
market, which is not good right now. So I think this would work again if the mining market turned
around more. When the time is like, like, would you do this? Like, are you planning to do this again?
If the mining market, you know, gets, uh, gets hyped again?
Yes. Yeah. And how do you spend your money, dude? So let’s say you make a few million dollars
doing something like this. What do you, what does Chris like to spend his money on?
Oh man. Um, on my family, we go on cool vacations and starting more businesses. Um, I invest in real
estate, but I just, I like starting businesses is my, it’s the only thing I know, but it seems like
you start businesses that don’t take a lot of capital. Yeah, that’s true. But I like investing,
uh, like tripling down on businesses that are more mature along the way where I can see a clear path to
growth with more capital. What’s another Facebook marketplace idea that somebody could do? Like,
is it as simple as, Hey, I noticed that there are garage shelving companies. They’re not currently
active in my area. I go talk to 10 business owners. I say, Hey, if I bring you a customer,
give me $300 or whatever it is. And you do lead gen because that, that business owner doesn’t even
think to do Facebook marketplace activity to, to drive leads. Most, most service people,
most small business owners don’t even think this way. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can literally
build an agency that just posts to Facebook marketplace for business owners, sells them the
leads. Right. Right. But you mentioned shelving. I interviewed this guy named Alex on my podcast.
the Kerner office. And he has a six figure business just building, not shelving, but garage shelving
on wheels with Costco totes. Like that’s it. Uh, only with organic Facebook marketplace posts.
And he net profits $180,000 a year. That’s the whole business. Right. Garage shelving on Facebook
marketplace. I mean, he has a $300 saw and he goes and buys two by fours. And he didn’t even have a truck
for like the first year and a half. Right. Okay. What are your other ideas? I see a list of 10 here
and we’ve probably done two or three. So give me, give me more. All right. Any idea? No, no. Any
idea. You want me to just call out one of these? Just tee me up. Yeah. Take local tourist traps and put
them in your home market. Is this like the whole in one challenge or are you talking about something
else? Different? Yeah. This is a good one. So I went, you’ve seen a rest development, I assume.
Of course. Okay. So there’s money in the banana stand. We all know that. Um, I went to first day
of business school in Harvard. That’s what they teach you. Yeah. So I went to Balboa Island with my family
last year and we went to the banana stand for whatever reason, this one street, it has like seven banana
stands. And there’s one that’s supposedly the best. And I shelled out like $8 each for these bananas
covered in chocolate and nuts. And I made a video, uh, about, you know, how much profit these guys
make, because as I went to the window, I had to, I asked her, how many of these do you sell the day?
What’s your busiest day ever? What’s your slowest day ever? All these people are behind me. Do you
want nuts or no nuts on the banana? People were waiting, but I had to know. And then to make matters
worse, I pull out my phone and make a video about how anyone could copy them. So I’m a great guy,
steal your banana. This one little shop that’s like 300 square feet is doing like 7 million a year
in frozen bananas. Like, and what’s the margin on an $8 banana with chocolate and peanuts? And so I just
thought like, why isn’t this like, why isn’t this a thing? I didn’t go to Balboa Island for the bananas.
Once I was there, I got them, but there are Balboa islands all over the world. And most of them have
no banana stand. Like, so it’s, this idea isn’t just about banana stand. It’s about taking something
really unique and novel. Maybe it’s like the old Western timey photo booths that you see in Pigeon
Forge. Maybe it’s like, um, funnel cake or like the mini donuts that you see in Gatlinburg, like take
something like that and just test it. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but you could test it very,
very cheaply in other tourist markets or in non-tourist markets.
Yeah. That’s interesting. I wonder if that would work. Like, I wonder how much of the
appeal is that, Oh, humans just like these kinds of frozen chocolate bananas. Or is it that in that
area on that street, it’s kind of known for this and you see a line. And so you see the line and you
start doing it. Like, I wonder if that, like, it’s kind of like an organ transplant. I wonder if there’s
like that, you know, donor rejection or the host rejection of the, of the organ when you put one
of these in a new, in a new area. It could be, but I think that the greatest chance you’ve had,
you would have for success is taking specifically a tourist trap and putting it in a different tourist
trap where it’s like, right. This is a unique novel thing that people don’t buy when they’re home.
But like, for instance, um, I have a friend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee that owns an indoor
sledding facility. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t work in other tourist traps that have the same type of
demographic there, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, okay. Give me another one. How
about, um, toasted tours? What is this? This is a, all right. This, this is a Northern California
by you. This guy took a, a 40 foot shipping container, put it on the back of a semi truck,
cut out the walls, put handrails on there, put tables in their chairs in there. And he takes people
on wine tours. It’s a party bus, but it’s not even a bus. It’s a shipping container.
That’s open air. Open air. Yeah. They like cut out the sides. Yes. And so I’m swiping Instagram one
day and I see this video that just broke my frame. It’s the shipping container and people are like
dancing inside as it’s going around a bend at a high rate of speed. And it’s like dangerous.
What am I looking at? But this guy crushes it like his first year. And he had experience
doing like wine tours, but nothing like this. I think he did like over a million bucks his first
year with like 60% margins. What I like about some of these is that they are visually viral.
So, you know, the definition of virality, people get it wrong. People think it’s word of mouth.
Word of mouth is actually a different thing. Word of mouth is, I like this so much. I want to tell my
friends about it. Viral is actually more like a sneeze. You spread a virus without even wanting
to spread it. Right. This was like back when, uh, you know, Hotmail started. I’m just sending you an
email. I’m not trying to tell you to use Hotmail, but because I’m sending you an email from my Hotmail
address. And at the bottom, it says, I sent this via Hotmail. You know, they, they added that to the
bottom of the email. It spread like a virus. And that’s how, you know, a lot of the big viral
services actually spread. Facebook was like this, right? I’m, I’m uploading photos. I’m just tagging
my friends. I’m not trying to tell them, Hey, you should join Facebook. I’m having a grand old time
here. They tagged a friend. It sent them an email said you got tagged in a photo and people can’t resist
being like somebody put a photo up of me on the internet. I must see this. And that’s how Facebook
grew early on was like this, this one viral loop. And then there’s other types of virality. One is like
this visually viral where it’s not like the people on this truck. We’re trying to go tell everyone
about it, but it’s so novel looking that I can’t help, but look at it, learn about it. You know?
And, and I think the whole in one challenge has the same benefit, which is like, you see it. It’s super
interesting to look at. You get the concept right away. And it’s worth remarking on. You’re talking
about it with people. You notice it, you want to do it. The act of somebody else doing it made you want
to do it. And so I like these things that are sort of walking billboard style businesses because you
know, they market themselves once you get them going. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot
media. They have a cool new podcast that’s for AI called the next wave. It’s by Matt Wolf and Nathan
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Dude, I have some really good, uh, good examples of visually viral stuff.
Have you seen that guy that does like, he’ll mow people’s lawns for free?
Please tell me you’ve seen that.
Who’s this guy?
Okay. This guy out of Kansas or something. Young guy. He owned a lawn care business,
small kind of struggling business. And one day he sets up his tripod, SB mowing and SB pressure
washing. He sets up a tripod. He’s got a big YouTube channel now, right?
So this guy has 45 million followers across platforms combined. 45 million. And all he does
is he sets up a tripod. He puts on a mic. He walks up to the door. He says, Hey, your lawn looks like
crap. Mind if I mow it for free? What’s the catch? I publish this to YouTube and make money. Cool. And
then he mows it for free with a time-lapse video visually viral.
Transforms it.
Yeah.
Yes. We want to see the outcome. The retention is there. So the platforms push it. Like,
what is it going to look like when he’s done? And this guy, I mean, what is the value of 45 million
social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business?
Right. I mean, dude, look at this, by the way, like if you just sort by popular,
you know, he stacks the thing. So there’s the visual viral part of, uh, before and after,
which humans want to complete that. They want to know that the solution, then you have, um,
the sort of novelty surprise factor. Like, Oh, this guy’s doing this for free. That’s interesting.
Why? I want to know what’s the answer here. But then he stacks on drama. So the top videos are angry
home homeowner confronts me while I’m mowing this vacant home. Cop approaches me while I’m mowing this
deserted home and tells me this homeowner stunned at how wide the sidewalks are. Right. Her tears said
it all. My prayers have been answered. So this guy has this great skill stack where he’s got,
you know, the, the lawn care, this sort of, that’s one skill that, okay, is worth,
you know, only X dollars in the market of, of the economy, but then he stacks on being really good
at content. And those two together created a, how many lawn care guys are really good at content?
I don’t know. Zero. Like, you know, the, the numbers less than a dozen. And so suddenly he became
rare. And when you’re rare, you’re valuable. Exactly. Yeah. That’s really cool. Okay. So let’s jump in
side hustles and the ones that you currently have. So let’s do some of the fun ones. The one I met you
on is about Bucky’s. And so for people who don’t know, could you explain just how crazy of a business
Bucky’s is? And then the side hustle you created off the back of Bucky’s. Yeah. Bucky’s is like your
redneck Disney gas station. They’re about half the size of a Costco. There’s 51 locations and they do
like 60 to 80 million in revenue per year each. And it’s just, if you haven’t been there,
there’s nothing like, it’s like a religious. So the math on that is like 3 billion in revenue
on 50 gas stations. Yeah. Yeah. What? I’ve never been to a Bucky’s. What, what makes a Bucky’s so
great? Is it even a gas station or is it just something else that happens to have gas?
It’s a brand with a gas station. They have over a hundred pumps. You walk in,
there’s just things happening everywhere. You’ve got tacos being made. You’ve got people shouting
about brisket. You’ve got beaver nuggets, t-shirts, like beavers walking around the cleanest bathrooms
you’ll ever find. There’s nothing else like it. You just walk in and you’re, you’re amazed from the
get go. Okay. Before you tell me your side hustle off the back of that, what’s the quick kind of origin
story of this? Has this been around for like a hundred years? Who started it? Like, why is this so
successful? I mean, I’ve never heard that $3 billion in revenue on 51 gas stations.
They founded like 40 years ago. There’s a guy named Arch. He was called Bucky as a kid and he
opened a gas station and then they just started going bigger and bigger and bigger. They just kept
pushing the envelope and their whole signature was this mascot, just this cheesy looking beaver that
people just loved. And so once they started selling merch, t-shirts and tumblers and all that,
they just exploded. And they’re really unique in that they put themselves in far-flung areas.
They’re not like in the city. They’re on the way to a vacation or close to a vacation destination.
Oh, so it’s like the perfect rest stop, right? Because if anything, like I was just on a road
trip, we drove to Tahoe and it’s a three, three hour drive roughly, but there’s these patches where
you need to stop in the middle and the bar is so low for rest stop experience, right? It’s like,
you know, it’s basically a porta potty in a, in a good scenario. And then you get like the trucker rest
stops and you get a gas station. Then you get like maybe a little strip mall with the Starbucks. But
what you’re saying is they built something actually like really cool out in that’s on those drives. And
that maybe it’s like one of the golden insights for them.
Yeah. It’s just that you walk in and you’re a captive audience. You can buy lunch, you can buy gas.
Most people just park at the pump. You can buy a t-shirt and the average ticket. I don’t know what it is.
They’re privately traded, but people spend hundreds of dollars there. You’re not just like buying a
Celsius and hopping out.
All right. What is this business you created on top of Buc-ee’s or like your side hustle for Buc-ee’s?
Yeah. So back to what you said about me not being able to focus. I was in the middle of running this
business that was growing and demanding all of our time and attention. And I took my business partner
to Buc-ee’s and he was from Utah. It was his first time. And on the way home, I distinctly remember
this. I remember the overpass. I was driving. I’m ashamed to say I pulled out my phone and I said,
Kirk, these guys must kill it online. And I said, do you know what Disney does like X billion just
through their online merch store? These guys must kill it. So I go to Buc-ee’s.com. I look for the
shop button and it wasn’t there. They didn’t sell online. Anything, not food, snacks, shirts, anything.
And I just like, I just sat there in silence. I felt like capitalism was being murdered.
Like, what is, why? What good reason is there for this? And this was like six years ago.
And so then we just started talking and we’re just like, what if, what if we launched a website for
them? What if we went online for them? Because we were running a 3PL, third-party logistics business
at the time, really hard business. And we thought we could launch this business for them as like a
permissionless way to get their business end to end and get them as a customer. And maybe they’ll try to
sue us, but worst case, it’ll be a great story. And so what’d you do?
So the first thing I did was started cold emailing the founders, the executive team, everyone and
saying, Hey, you need to be online. We can do it for you. We’ll build a Shopify store. We’ll do
everything end to end. We have a warehouse, shelf space, et cetera. No response, just crickets.
So at that point, it’s like, all right, let’s take this into our own hands. So most people give up
there, right? Try to partner. Most people won’t even cold email, but if you do cold email,
you give up when they don’t reply. Yep, exactly. So we bought beaversnacks.com because that’s their
mascot was a beaver. And I went to Thumbtack and I hired a photographer for like $200. And I documented
all this. I have pictures of all this. I took my four kids and wife to the nearest Bucky’s and my wife
and I split up. I said, you get merch, I’ll get snacks. If it has a Bucky’s logo on it, buy it. Like,
I don’t want the Doritos or the Coke because they white label a bunch of stuff, right? Like I only
want something with a Bucky’s logo. So we spent like $3,000. We had a receipt this long. We took
it back to the warehouse. Was the lady like, wow, what are you doing? They were, everyone was looking
at us and I’m like an introvert. I hated it. I felt so weird. I’m like, don’t look at me. Just let me do
my thing. So we bring it all back to the warehouse. We put it in this office, hire this photographer
and she takes pictures of everything. We upload it in a CSV to Shopify. We launch a website,
beaversnacks.com. And I say launch, like nobody knew it existed. So the first thing I did was start
scraping and cold emailing every Texas reporter I could find. Eater, Southern Living, Texas Monthly,
Fox News 38, you know, San Antonio district, you name it. And I just start saying like, here’s who I am.
Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s who I am. Here’s what I’m doing.
And so you weren’t afraid because most people would try to be laying low doing this because,
hey, we don’t have an official partnership. You took the opposite approach. You’re like, hey,
can I use this story to get some attention, whether it be good or bad? Is that right?
Yeah. Cause I felt like, okay, worst case scenario, cease and desist. We have great story for a podcast
one day. Best case scenario, we get them as a customer or this is a standalone business.
Somewhere in between is going to be interesting, right? Maybe I have to fill my pantry with snacks,
like $3,000 worth of snacks and my kids eat it for the next seven years.
We had a guest come on and he said, you know, do what makes the best story. When in doubt,
like when you’re at a fork in the road, do whichever, take whichever path will make the best story.
You chose the path that will make the best story here. Okay. So yes. And I heard that episode and I
thought that’s me. I agree with that. So I also did my research and it’s called first sale doctrine,
which means anyone can sell, resell whatever they want. They just can’t pretend or imitate that brand,
right? Like the, there’s a guy that imitated Trader Joe’s to do what I did, but he called himself
Pirate Joe’s. The logo was similar. The store layout was similar and he got sued out of existence. So
I thought, okay, as long as I say, I am not Bucky’s, I’m a third party reseller and I’m clear about that.
They really don’t have grounds to sue me. So I started cold emailing people. They loved the story
and I started getting on the phone with reporters. And any tips on that? So, you know, I’ve learned
this with, with, with PR, which is that there’s PR is this very specific niche game. And once you
understand how a journalist thinks you can reverse engineer what you need to actually do. So like,
for example, our buddy Ramon did this recently, he went mega, mega viral because, and he knew this,
he texted me, he called a shot. He’s like, as soon as the tariff dues came out and some people thought
this is going to be horrible for businesses. Some people thought, well, why don’t those businesses
just make it in America? We’ll buy it if it’s made in America. And so he launches an AB test on his
website. So he, afina.com, it’s like a shower, a clean showerhead. So he was, he runs an AB test and he
says, you can either buy, buy the one that’s sourced out of China, or you could buy the one
that’s sourced out of America. And the American one costs a little bit more, uh, because it costs
more to make it in America. But you know, here you go, you have a choice. And the results were
something crazy, 25,000 visits or something like that. And there were literally zero checkouts on the
American product. There was a few hundred on the, on the, on the Asian made product. And he goes to the
journalist. He ran the test because he knew, look, either the results are going to show people will buy
made in America or they won’t. In either case, I have a very strong story and he goes and he gets
it written up. It’s been written up in like 40 major publications now. And he got tons of traffic
to the site, tons of backlinks. His SEO went way up. It was a genius, quick acting move on the back of
the tariff news. When most people were playing defense, like me in e-com, you’re like, oh shit,
I just need to survive. He went and played offense. So I was, I’m curious, do you have any tips from
your experience about how to get people to actually write about you?
Yeah. I mean, you have to understand that reporters want something cool to write about.
I get DMs all the time from people wanting something from me and 98% of them, they have nothing
interesting to talk about. But if someone DM me and said, Hey, I did this cool thing. Will you post
about it? I would. Cause I want to post about cool things. You know,
my job is to post interesting things. Yes, please send it to me. Um, so once you realize that,
like do something interesting, something cool, and then go tell as many people as you can about it.
And a small percentage of them will post about it. Reporters included. How did you frame it at the
time? I framed it as I am doing a viral marketing stunt and I want to get Bucky’s attention. And if I
don’t, then I’m going to run this business as well as I can. Oh, so you told the reporters that up
front. Yeah. Oh, okay. Gotcha. But by the way, give us the headline. Cause you know, we’re talking
about this title. So we haven’t mentioned how well it’s done. Can you give us some numbers that give
us an idea of like the success of this? I mean, I’ll tell you what the headline literally was.
And it was like, Texas man makes 200 grand in his first 30 days reselling Bucky’s goods online.
That was it. And so Texas monthly reached out to me. They’re the biggest Texas news publication.
And they were like, we love this. We’re going to make this a feature story. Give me everything
you can. So we talked, we talked, we talked, talked. And then later that afternoon, they’re
like, Chris, good news. Bucky’s in-house counsel would love to chat. And I’m like, what’s good
about that? Like I’m dead. I’m dead in the water. And so I was like, okay, you, you told Bucky’s
great. I’m glad you were able to get ahold of them. So I get on the phone with him and he’s
like, listen, we actually don’t mind what you’re doing. Uh, I don’t like the name Beaver
snacks. We’re a beaver. It’s kind of confusing. I don’t like that your colors are yellow. We’re
kind of yellow. Uh, change the name, put a disclaimer in your logo that is persist throughout
the whole website, put a disclaimer on every product page and you have our blessing. Like
we’re not going to sign anything, but we’re not going to come after you. Like we will support
you. And so we did, we made those changes and then they linked to us.
Cool ass general counsel. That’s pretty rare. Yeah. Yeah. And then they linked to us in their
FAQs, which is like the most amazing backlink ever. So on one hand going viral meant we got
a million competitors and like all these copycats. But on the other hand, we have like the biggest
SEO moat that we could ever hope for.
So wait, how did you skip to step? You said their headline was $200,000 in 30 days, but you
didn’t say how you got the $200,000 in 30 days. How did you initially get that traction?
It was all based on those viral articles. We didn’t do any paid ads. We just went viral.
Uh, we put everything as in stock, uh, you know, on Shopify, you can do that whether it’s in stock
or not. And we just started selling out. So the articles initially must not have been 200,000.
The articles initially were just like Texas man starts shop to sell Bucky stuff online.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. They’ve written about us since then, but in the beginning it was Texas
man, they called it Tex Pats instead of expats. They’re like Texas man launches online Bucky store
for Tex Pats. Um, that was like the big headline. Uh, and that’s how it helped us go viral.
Like a person from Texas who’s no longer in Texas, but misses their stacks, misses their Bucky’s.
Yeah. And that, that was the whole thesis because these Bucky’s are in like Ennis, Texas, like these
places that you’d never heard of because they’re on the way to the beach. And so if you fell in love
with this random bohemian garlic jerky, you could never buy it again. Right. And so that’s where we
came in, like buy it from us. And so how’s this business doing now? Was this a flash in the pan or
is it still doing well? This business has grown 20 to 50% per year, every single year. Steady Eddie.
We just, we are completely riding on the coattails of Bucky’s and we are not ashamed to admit that.
So can you say how much revenue you guys are doing on this thing?
We’re doing between three and 500,000 a month profitably with very, very little paid outspend.
And the funny thing is here, you go buy it retail, right? You don’t have like a wholesale discount.
They’re not, they’re not giving it to you at a cut. So you, you buy retail and then you just mark
it up what 10, 20% or something. What do you, what do you do?
We mark it up a hundred percent. Oh, okay. Cause you’re like, if you want it,
if you want it that bad here, this is the, you know, this is your way to get it.
Honestly, we mark it up as much as we have to. I mean, you know, e-commerce to make a 15,
20% net margin. And that happens to be about a hundred percent markup.
Right. That’s amazing. Okay. So that’s one of your side hustles. We said that there was,
you know, like six that were each, uh, you know, six figures. I don’t know if we’ll get to all
six, but give me another one. So what’s another of your side hustles right now that are contributing
to your, your cashflow? So we started a pet cremation business. Uh, and that’s a fun one.
That one’s actually very profitable. That’s a fun one for you, maybe. Okay. So explain how’d you get
the idea and then what is it and how’d you do it? Okay. So it all started with a relationship that my
business partner had with a very high volume veterinary clinic here in DFW. They do as much
business as five veterinary clinics. And he learned about the industry and how pet cremation has like
90 plus percent net margins. It’s a very old school business. And so there’s a, but you know, we’ve had
this puppy boom during COVID. So all these puppies are five years old now. Uh, there’s more dogs than
children. That’s, that’s like the whole thesis. There’s more dogs than children. It’s only getting
crazier and cremation has 90% margins. Most of the operators are 60 plus years old. They’re doing great.
They’re doing fine. They don’t need ads. They don’t need organic. And if you go look at the Google
keyword tool, we saw that the search competition was low. The ticket size was high. Uh, and the,
the, um, the search traffic was high. So we launched a business around that thesis.
Sorry. So explain, you went to, you went to, uh, the Google ads keyword tool, right? That’s where you
went to, to kind of diligence the, the, the demand for this. And you found obviously the holy grail,
low, low competition, high ticket. And what was the third one? Growth or demand?
Like volume, high volume, low competition, high ticket. Yeah. Holy grail. And so you start
one of these and you’re, you’re actually the service that does it or you’re the lead gen?
We are both. We have two different businesses. One is a programmatic SEO site that generates leads for
cremation facilities all over the country. And then the other one is we’re just a middleman. We have
refrigerated vans and we pick up the pets frozen from the facilities and deliver it from the
veterinarians. And then we deliver it to the cremation facilities and take a margin.
Okay. Gotcha. And so tell me a little about this business. I don’t, I know nothing about the pet
cremation business. What did you do in the first 90 days to make this business come to life? Cause I
like the speed with which you operate. We’re going to talk about another one in a second that I think
is like a quick off the ground version of these ideas. And you very much are a zero to one
kind of guy. Like, I like that you do a lot of different things. I like that you’re high energy
and you’re basically like not lazy. There’s a lot of people out here who sell this kind of like
side hustle, passive income. There’s nothing passive about you. I feel like you are Mr. Active actually,
in the sense that you get after it. Once you have an idea, you know, I have this phrase, like, you
know, inspiration is perishable. Ideas are avocados. They go brown very quickly. And I think what’s
great about you is that you don’t let the ideas and the inspiration perish. You
actually act on it very quickly and you have, you have a high, high bias reaction. So what are the
first 90 years, 90 or so days look like when you have a new idea? And maybe you could use this one
as an example, or if not, you could use a different one. Yeah. I focus most of my energy on validating
the idea with like some ad spend or a couple of conversations or whatnot. I, I don’t do any like
extensive market research. I don’t talk to any potential customers and I’m not saying there’s not value in
that. That’s just not how I roll. I really, really like using tools like Facebook, like
general publicly available tools that most people know and love. Stuff I can do from my boxers at home.
That’s what I like. Right. Yes. And a lot of times by the end of the day, I realized, oh, this is a dud.
Let’s move on. But also a lot of the times by the end of the day, I’m like, oh, wow, there’s something
here. My thesis was true. Let’s, let’s put another day into this. So, so like what, what would you do in
this pet cremation business? What did you do? So the thesis here started with this relationship that my
business partner had. Uh, and the pitch was let’s get the, the cremation facility owner and the veterinary
clinic owner in the same room together and pitch them this like win, win. Hey, we’re going to get you more
veterinary clinics because we’re really good at sales. Okay. And then to the vet, Hey, uh, you need to raise your
prices. You’re way too low. Uh, you’re going to make even more margin working through a middleman,
believe it or not, because we’re going to be, we’re going to only do one thing. We’re going to pick up
pets and we’re going to drop them off. And so there was a big conflict of interest interest here because
the cremation facility owner was about to lose some margin, but he was like, we were selling him on the
fact that we would bring him a lot more customers. And so basically this was a good like example of what I
normally do. If that conversation doesn’t go well, I don’t launch the business. I just move on.
And you weren’t afraid that when you put those two in the same room, they’re like, great. Yeah,
we should do this. Who’s this guy. What is it? Why do we need this guy? Did you see any risk in
putting yourself there as the middleman with this and actually connecting the two dots, the really high
volume vet clinic with the information service that you thought they should be using? Well, the thing is,
is that they were already working together. Right. And so what you’re saying was correct. That was the
risk. We insert ourselves. You’re saying there was some friction. There was some friction that you were
offering to remove. Is that right? Yeah. And the friction in this case was what? It was that the
veterinary or the cremation facility owner made all his margin on the actually doing the cremation and he
was losing money on all the logistics. Okay. But this customer we were talking to was one of his biggest
customers. And so we were saying, hey, you’re going to lose some margin on this biggest customer because
we’re inserting ourselves. We’re going to take some of it, but we’re going to more than compensate for it
by A, removing that logistics off your plate and B, finding you more veterinary clinics.
And then for the vet clinic, you were saying, hey, raise your price a little bit. And we need to be
able to do that for, to make this work. Yep. And so our thesis was, if that conversation doesn’t go well,
the business never launches. Right. It’s an asymmetric bet. But if it does, then we have,
you know, the hardest part, we have customers and revenue through the door from day one, if they’re,
if they agree to this. Exactly. Yeah. And then you went and tried to recreate that with, you know,
getting 15 other veterinary clinics. Now, most of them, I assume would already have had a partner or
some vendors for cremation services. And so what’s your sales pitch to them? How did you go and get more
customers on board? Yeah. Our sales pitch was like, our competitors were very unsophisticated. Like they
would literally walk through the front door of a veterinary clinic, get the frozen dogs, put them in a bag,
and then walk out the waiting room. And so our pitch was like, that’s our competition.
We will never do that. We’ll pull out back, unmarked van, we’ll be very caring and respectful.
In some cases, they don’t even have to pay anymore. And we’ll just be, we’ll just pick up the phone and
be reliable. That was the pitch. And is there something to learn here about like,
you know, there’s so many of these simple businesses where the bar is really low or people
are simply not doing any outreach. They’re not doing any door-to-door sales. Like, have you made
a killing and just, you know, Warren Buffett has said this before. He goes, the secret to winning
is low competition, is weak competition, right? Like he’s not looking to prove that he’s a genius at the
hardest games. He’s looking for very weak competition where he can simply be competent and
he could just do best practices. Oh dude, like it is so true. We see it on Twitter all the time. Like
just go, go find a business with the fax machine to compete against him. Like, yes, that actually
works. I, we own a tree trimming business and a big bottleneck for us is stump grinding. So we thought,
I thought, man, there needs to be a business that’s just stump grinding, but B2B. Not stump grinding
that goes through homeowners, but only the ones that goes through, uh, the other tree trimming
companies. Cause we own a tree trimming company and we could see it from the inside. So I had a thesis.
I hired a virtual assistant and today I would just use an AI voice agent. And I took the city of Houston
and I scraped every single tree trimming business in Houston. There was about a thousand. And I had this
virtual assistant call every single one and notate, did they answer? Did the number work? If they did answer,
say, do you use grind stumps? If yes, then would you ever outsource that? If yes, then how much would
you pay? So I spent like $200 getting this research. I, I, I’m not familiar with the tree trimming
business. Surprise, surprise. So why does a tree trimming business not also do the stumps? Why is
that a separate problem that they don’t like to deal with? Yeah. Great question. So a tree trimming
business needs sometimes a bucket truck to get up high and a chainsaw, right? But that’s only half the
battle. Then you got to get the stump out of the ground or else, you know, you can’t grow
grass there. And so it’s a, a stump grinder. You’ve got to pull on a trailer. Whereas before
you don’t even need a trailer. It’s just a whole different system and they got to go rent
it. They stand in line. They pay $300. They rent it. They put gas in it. They drive it back
to the job site. They grind it. Then they got to bring it back. And it’s like, it eats into
their profit. And so I thought, okay, if a tree trimming company could just outsource
all of their stump grinding B2B only, is there an opportunity there?
So the assistant goes, she calls everybody. She asked them, would they be willing to outsource
that? And are people just saying, yeah, yeah, we, we’d be willing to outsource that. Is that
like a, can you get that clear of a signal just off of a VA’s phone call?
So only 22% of people answered the phone. Um, that’s it. And of the ones that did almost half
of them said, if I could outsource this, I would gladly. And then we, then we even got further down
the script and said, would you pay seven, uh, $7 per inch or whatever of diameter? Yes. And then
I published all that info on my podcast and people went out and started some grinding businesses with
the exact thesis. And we learned, yeah, pick an industry where people seem to be doing well and
call all of them, see how many answer their phone. You can cross-reference that against like the Google
keyword tool and, you know, publicly available stuff and see how much demand for supply is there in any
given market. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They’re the fintech of choice for over
200,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is
because it has everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it’s super important
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world. And the old way with our, you know, more traditional bank, uh, that shall now be named. I try it
online. It would say, no, it would freeze my account. Then I’d have to go in, book an appointment,
speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn’t need. And then finally,
after, you know, 30 minutes there, then they charged me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible
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I question your judgment. So that’s it. You’ve heard on my first million. For more information,
check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes
for details. Okay. I like that. You did one recently. You had this, um, Instagram video. I’m going to
actually play it here, but I love this video for a couple of reasons. Uh, one, just the idea is fun,
but the, but two, like, you know, your energy and what you’re describing here is, is pretty great. So,
uh, here, I’ll love this. This is you talking about starting a pickleball facility.
This frigging thing right here. I’m right here in my warehouse slash shop. It is 2,100 square feet and
I’m putting a business here. It’s called secret pickleball and it’s going to be 99 bucks a month.
I’m going to cap it at 200 members, $20,000 a month. There are 7,700 people within 10 minutes of here that
play pickleball every week. And I just need 200 of them to make this a six figure business. No employees,
24, seven key card access right there. Cameras, bathroom, vending machines already in the next 60
days. We’re adding drywall. We’re painting lines, adding the bathroom back there. If you want to
watch me fail or you want to watch me win follow and I’ll document the whole journey or get the
business plan. Basically you’re standing in this warehouse and it’s, and you’re like, look at this
freaking thing right here, which is how you start all of your videos, which I think is a hilarious
little hook. So can you, uh, add some color to this? So where’s the, what’s the origin of this idea?
How’s this going? Tell me, tell me more about this idea. Yeah. So that shop that I’m in, in the video
is in my back backyard. Basically it’s at the back of my property. Historically, I’ve rented it out to
landscaping businesses for like 20, you live on like a ranch or something. What is this? It’s three acres
and it’s very like, yeah, it’s at the back of my, of my property. And so I was just thinking like,
what is the best and highest use of this property? And have you ever been to a secret pizza in,
I think it’s the Cosmo in Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. I love that place. Yeah. That place does like
9 million a year in pizza and they don’t have a Google profile. They don’t have no website.
Yeah. If people haven’t been there, it’s like five feet wide. It’s like a tidy hallway. Like
in high school, if your locker was like on the side, it’s basically that. And they just sell slices of
pizza at the Cosmo hotel in Vegas. Yes. So I was going for that. Like I call it secret pickleball
and I just thought, okay, I’m going to run some Facebook ads. I’m going to go to my shop. I’m
going to take three videos. I’m going to ABC test them on Facebook ads, instant form,
six mile radius. Sorry. Was your ad a video like this where you’re saying I’m going to build this
here or was it like a mock-up? That was one of the three. Yeah. The one you showed was one of my three
ads. Yeah. And what were the other two? Were they like finished product, like a rendering or what did
you do with the other two? One of them had like an AI, really bad AI image rendering, like overlay for a
split second, but that’s it. I’m just standing in this empty warehouse. And when you say I ran some
Facebook ads, give people a sense of how you do that. Right. Everyone again, I know who does this.
They have a, you know, a certain budget, like, Hey, I’m going to run five, I’m going to spend $500
and I’m looking for maybe this cost per click, or I’m looking for this much net conversion of people
signing up to my wait list or, or they even have a fake checkout. And then they refund people
afterwards saying like, Hey, sorry, this doesn’t actually exist yet. Or, you know, I’m still,
we got delayed, but it’ll be out soon. I refunded you for now, but you know, it’s coming. And they’re
looking for that funnel, the metrics to sort of validate that, Hey, cool. If this works at $500,
I think I’d be able to spend maybe a thousand or $5,000 in order to get my 200 members or, you know,
$50,000 to get my 200 members, whatever it is. Can you explain your method for Facebook ad testing
this? Yeah, for sure. So I used one campaign and then three ad sets and three ads, one video for
each ad set. And I started it at $25 a day per video. So $75 a day total. My ad was a Facebook
instant form asking for name, phone, email. Then after the instant form, it, it forwarded them to a type
platform with 19 questions that are very granular. What is your skill level at pickleball? How often
do you play? How much do you do doubles or singles? Cause all of this is going to determine how many
members I can take on. And the whole, the whole thesis is to be one pickleball court indoors, nice
private air conditioning, uh, that people pay one to $200 a month for. So I don’t want the pros that
play twice a day. I like, it’s a very finite resource. I want people that hardly ever play like the
planet fitness model, except expensive. I want, I just want to have my cake and eat it too.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I knew 5% of Americans play pickleball weekly. And I knew within six miles
of me, there’s 200,000 people. So I needed like, there’s like five to 7,000 people in my TAM, my local
TAM. Right. And I was hoping that I could convert someone for a hundred dollars because my guess is
that the LTV, the lifetime value is going to be about a thousand dollars. But I think it’s actually a lot
more because no one plays pickleball alone. So I get one customer, they’re going to bring two to three
or four. Right. What I learned was I’m converting, like, I don’t, the LTV is still to be determined,
but I’m able to convert new customers at $12 each.
And so how many members does this secret, does this exist now? Like this, I don’t know when you
posted this.
I’m building it out. I’m, I’m literally putting a septic tank in the building right now. Like it’s
being built out, but I’m accepting three orders.
How much is it going to cost you to do this? All right. So you already had the structure there.
How much are you going to put into making a pickleball court to bring this idea to life?
On the low end, 20,000. Realistically, 30 to 40.
That’s it. Wow. I would have guessed it’s more.
Yeah. Well, it has air conditioning. I need to expand the building because I need room for a
bathroom and then I need to add a bathroom. So if I didn’t need a bathroom, it would be much less.
And then I need to paint lines.
So anybody could just Google maps, pickleball court in your area, right? Like wherever you live,
you could Google maps, pickleball. You could just take a map and you could be like,
where is there not space? And then you could go drive them and just see, oh, wow, that one’s kind
of shitty or it’s outdoors. Right. Or this one over here, it’s always overrun. It’s always packed.
And you could literally just map out that, oh, wow. I just need to take an industrial space and
convert it to a private pickleball gym, a membership, right? One court, two court, three
court, whatever. And so the math you’re saying here, are you charging a hundred bucks or what’d
you end up charging? I’m going to end up charging 149. All right. So you’re, so you’re charging 149.
Are you still targeting 200 members or did you find out that that assumption was too high or too low?
It’s, it’s, I can accept around 150 members if I accept the right members.
All right. And so you’re talking about 22,000 a month of top line revenue from this. And you’re
saying it might cost you in this case, 20 grand, 30 grand to build. I think somebody else, let’s just
assume it’s even $75,000. Let’s triple the price to build out because maybe their space needs it or
you’re just being conservative. So you got 22,000 coming in top line. Is there any OPEX here? Do you need
a person there? Is it like, do you have a key membership thing like that? What is your monthly
cost in terms of like, you know, roughly you think utilities, everything else?
Yeah. Uh, key card entry 24 seven online booking system through a third party app cameras, no employees
cleaner that comes there. And I’m going to use the cleaner I use for my house. She’ll go there like
two to four times a week, depending on how dirty it gets insurance, utilities, internet. It’s like,
we’re talking, including cleaning 1500 a month, 2000 a month. All right. So you’re talking about
like, you know, 90% profit margins on this, but let’s be conservative. Let’s even say 80%.
That would be roughly generating about 17 to 18,000 a month in cashflow off of pickleball off of one
pickleball court. Yeah. That’s pretty crazy to me. Yeah. And it’s actually pretty unique. I use deep
research to, to see if other, any other private indoor courts that only have one to two courts,
because there’s a lot of franchises that have 15 courts. And a lot of the haters on Twitter were
saying that like, no one, no one would pay for this because people, they want multiple courts.
They want other people to see them play pickleball. I’m like, dude, nobody wants to be seen playing
pickleball. Well, no, but maybe they just don’t want to wait. Right. You know, they want, right.
They’re not able to get courts. Um, and so there, there are very few of these and, um, anyone,
this is something anyone could do like with some Facebook ads. You don’t need to buy a building or
have a building. You could go rent a building and run some Facebook ads before you even sign a lease.
Like what are we talking about? What are we doing here? All right. Now let’s be realistic. Uh, cause
you know, there’s a lot of people on the internet who will say it’s so good. So easy. Look at this.
The math is the math is math. And where does a business like this actually suck? You’ve done
enough businesses now to know that there is no such thing as these like perfect businesses. So in this
one, realistically, why would this fail? What might you be getting wrong here? Or maybe at least like,
why would the numbers not be as rosy as they sound right now? Yeah. It’s going to be like, uh, customer
support inquiries like that are a lot higher than I thought things breaking the AC going out in July in
Texas, um, zoning issues. Uh, it’s not the type of business where you’re going to have a hard time
finding customers, but pick your problems. There will always be problems. I think it’s going to be
customer support. Um, and you know, getting calls at three in the morning from someone that’s playing
this random game in the middle of the night and the AC went out. What sort of problems do you like to
pick? I would love to not have to worry about customer acquisition and operations. Like I am terrible at
operations. I would much rather try to sell or market something than operate it. So if it’s marketing
heavy and I don’t have an issue finding customers, that’s my business.
And then the operations either being simple or you all floated it to somebody else.
Yeah, exactly.
Give me some of your beliefs here. So what, what, like you do all these random things and you have all these random
ideas, actions come from thoughts, thoughts come from beliefs. And so what are the beliefs that are leading you to do
all these random actions, like starting this pickleball secret pickleball court or going in and, you know,
being like, Bucky should sell online. I’ll do it for them. And now I’m going to do this as a publicity stunt.
Maybe they’ll partner with me. Maybe this work. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll just be a good story and I’ll get sued out of
existence. Like what are some of the beliefs that you have? We talked about one at the front, which is like
focus is overrated. Talk about that one and then give me some of your other ones.
Yeah. I think focus is overrated because compounding doesn’t care. Like the principle of compounding does
not care if we’re working on one thing or a dozen things. As long as we stay in the game, whatever
that game is for us and keep going, compounding is just going to keep going with us. Right? So if you’re
curious about something, like, let’s say you’re, you’ve got a side hustle and it’s going well. And you’re
like, what about this side hustle? Test it. Like answer that question. Now, if you have a side hustle and
it’s like, you’re not sleeping because you’re just cashing all these checks and customers are beating
down your door, you’re not going to be thinking about, Oh, what about this shiny object? Like
you’ve got product market fit. That’s a signal, right? So just chase the signals, chase the curiosities
because you’re going to learn something over here that you’re able to apply over here that no one else
has ever thought of because they weren’t doing these seven other things like you were. So net of net,
I like, if I gun to my head, I think you will be more wealthy if you do one thing,
but you’re more likely to be miserable and not have an enjoyable life.
Yeah. So focus actually does work, but it’s not the only way. And it’s a lot of fun to not focus.
It’s actually what I mean. You have a similar thing. I’m going to read you this. I want you to
give a little take on it. You said, say yes to everything, take on way too much, increase your
capacity for stress and let Parkinson’s law do its job. Most people have no clue what they’re capable of
because they don’t take on too much and they never stress test their life. And you had something called
the restaurant hostess analogy. Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah. Let’s say you’re a hostess at a Michelin star restaurant in New York, Manhattan. You’re slammed 24
seven. People come in and out, people yelling, whatever. And then you’ve got a hostess in Des Moines,
Iowa in a diner, and they’re usually pretty slow. And then, you know, soccer team pulls up and like,
oh, I table for 15. And she’s like, oh my gosh, table for 15. Oh geez, what do I do?
Like to the woman in New York, like that’s nothing. That’s nothing because that’s her norm. That’s her,
her new baseline. Right? So most people that I talk to are like, oh, I could never run a Facebook ad
campaign because I have to clip my toenails that afternoon. Like what? Like they don’t, like they’re
not doing enough. They, they think that like the barometer is down here and they think people like
Elon Musk are just, he’s an alien. That’s not even realistic. And it’s like, no, he just like took on
way too much. And, and now he’s able to do way more than ever before because the less important things
just kind of fall off the plate. That’s Parkinson’s law. You bite off way more than you can chew.
And if you forget about it, then that’s a signal that it was worth forgetting about.
Yeah. I think that if you ask people, honestly, you said, what percent of your potential are you
tapping into? I think that’s a pretty scary question for most people. Um, because the answer is not going
to be what you would want it to be. Very few people I know, right? Like you almost have to be very low
self-awareness to be like a hundred percent, right? Like the answer is not a hundred percent.
Right. I think David Goggins has said this about when he trains and he says like, you know,
the moment where your brain is ready to quit when it’s over, your body still has 30% left.
Like the brain quits before the body and the brain will stop you as a safety mechanism
when you still have 30% left to give. And I don’t know if the number is right, but I think
directionally he’s correct when it comes to like what you’re physically capable of. And then in terms of
what you’re creatively or ambitiously capable of, I think it’s kind of the same thing. I think it’s
probably even a worse ratio than that. I think most people are tapping into less than 30% of what
they’re capable of doing. And it doesn’t mean you necessarily need to work a hundred hours. I think
it’s just like your capacity to output and to be creative and to go for it and go for it with full
force on the things that you’re trying to go for. Um, and maybe it’s, maybe it is take on an extra
project or maybe it is, but sometimes it’s just go faster. Sometimes it’s just think bigger. And the,
you know, these all sound cliche, but they’re, you know, they are, they are cliche for a reason.
They’ve been around for thousands of years because I think humans tend to have this problem where,
you know, we don’t actually tap into, you know, how fast we can go, how big we can go,
you know, what, what truly going for it looks like without, you know, the fears, doubts,
and hesitations that people have. And so I agree with you. You know, are you,
are you a family guy as well? Like, I guess like you’re doing a bunch of these businesses. Is that
cause you’re, you know, the counter argument is, well, yeah, you’re 21 years old and you don’t have
kids and a mortgage. You know, that would be a way that somebody would maybe try to discredit the amount
of output that you have. Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve got four kids. I had all four kids between the
ages of 23 and 29. And I was building all of these businesses throughout that time. I never missed
dinner. I travel very rarely. I never missed a sporting event and I’m in my office, you know,
from seven to four, give or take working. Sometimes I pop out to hang out with the kids,
but I think it’s important that my kids see me work. Uh, but it’s also obviously important that
I spend time with them. So we go on a lot of vacations, four to six a year. We’ve seen all 50
States. We go all over the world. Uh, you can do both period. Right. I think it’s important for my
kids to see me work. Unfortunately, my work just looks like me talking and laughing with friends.
And so I don’t think they get it. I don’t think that’s acting. Um, what about, um, what about,
you know, you said you’re building your family and you work, let’s say the seven to four,
what are you doing during that seven to four to make those hours count for more than maybe the average
person is doing? So like how, what do you do to have more productivity or more effect in those same
number of hours? Like how do you structure your day? What are some things that you you’ve noticed you do
maybe better or differently than the average, the average entrepreneurial bear?
Yeah. Um, the perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar. Um, I definitely time batch. Like
if I have seven calls that week, I’ll try to put them all in the same afternoon. Um, I think a lot
of people kind of feel insecure about having an open calendar because it’s like, it’s kind of like
a comfort blanket. Like, okay, now I know I’ll be productive today. Right. But when you have
so many ideas, like so many ad campaigns, I want to run or newsletters, I want to write,
like, I don’t have time filling, I don’t have problem filling my time. And so I, I don’t use
any fancy CRM notion or anything. If a tab is open in my browser, it’s a to do list. When I close it,
it’s done. My notes app, a lot of caffeine, uh, admittedly. And I don’t worry about context switching.
I used to really stress like, all right, let’s, we could do this for 30 minutes, do this. Don’t
context switch. Like, I feel like with anything in life, we can evolve to it. We can become a lot
more acclimated to it. And so I’m always context switching always. And I feel, I feel like I’m good
at it because I’ve done it so much. Another one of your beliefs, you said the longer I’m in business,
the more I realize this to be true. If you want to be a billionaire, you got to innovate and focus,
but to be a millionaire, you simply need to copy paste. Don’t even try to copy something
that works and put your own twist on it. No twists, stop twisting, just copy what’s working. And
organically over time, you’ll discover the tweaks on your own, but you don’t have to lead with all
the twists or you’ll just screw it up. Yeah. I think there should be like, there needs to be a school
or something on reverse engineering. Like it is an underrated skill. I’m in like the meta ads library
and the web archive all the time. Let’s say there was this taco restaurant that just in my town,
that had a line around the corner 24 seven and they, all they sold, uh, were steak tacos.
That’s it. And you said, all right, they’ve got more demand than supply. All right. This town could
use another taco shop. All right. I’m going to copy them. I’m going to do it even better. People want
more variety. They want steak and chicken and there’s no drinks. You can’t even get drinks there. Yeah.
I’m going to do this. I’m gonna do that. Every change you make is another variable to like,
to screwing it up. Risk. Risk you value. Yeah. Like you, you’re gonna, you’re, let’s say you copy
them verbatim and you open, you’re going to learn really quickly. Oh, oh, they’re probably using that
as their point of sale and not that. Oh, this is why, because the onions, they have to separate them
from the meat. Oh, like you’re going to learn all these things that are going to force you to have to
change things. But if you do that before, you know, if that copying works or not, you’re just going to
increase the likelihood of screwing it up and thus not being successful.
That’s interesting. You know, Monish Pabrai, who’s come on this podcast a couple of times,
has this phrase, he calls it being a shameless, a shameless cloner. And so he says, you know,
I’m a shameless clone of the Buffett and Munger philosophy. I, you know, I claim to have no,
no good ideas except for one, which is, you know, to copy the good ideas that already exist out there.
If I hear a good idea, I take it on as my own. Right. And he talks about, you know,
the dumbest person in the world is the gas station across the street from a more successful gas
station. He’s like, cause you know, you see that guy and that guy comes out when a customer’s there
and he washes their windows for them and he prices it a certain way. And he’s uses certain bright lights
so that he’s more visible at night. You have to be a real idiot to be across the street, see that guy
doing it. And then for your own stubbornness, not just do those things, implement those best practices.
And so pride. Yeah. Yeah. Pride. And I think there’s like, you know, a version of that in
business. And like you said, you will organically end up putting your own twists on the business,
but you, you know, you bring up an interesting point, which is that baking in all those twists
up front is a bit of unnecessary risk. I think there’s a view that entrepreneurs are risk takers
when actually the risk minimizers and, you know, they’re trying to take as little risk as is necessary,
but, but are willing to take the necessary risks in order to do something unless there’s like,
you know, a big asymmetric reward for it. They’re not going to do it. And so, um, you know, I think
that you’re right. And I think that this is very true for, especially at like the local level and
service level, like it’s not true. If you’re trying to be a founder, go through YC, build the next big
thing, the next breakout app, which is going to be, you know, the next social network, you can’t just
copy Facebook. It’s not going to work, right? The next, uh, the next ride sharing service can’t
just be Uber, right? They do have to innovate. They do have to do self-driving cars like a Waymo or
something like that. So this advice does not apply to people who are playing what I call the business
Olympics, where they’re trying to do the stuff that’s like global greatness, move the world forward,
disrupt a total industry. Yes, you absolutely do need to be innovative there. But in terms of people
who are trying to become financially free, you know, working backwards is not a bad way to go.
I have a very annoying phrase. I say a bunch, which is in my companies, anytime we have run into an
issue and people are bitching and moaning about it, I just say, well, we’re probably not the first
ones to have this problem, right? Because it’s so true. And you’re in an e-com business and suddenly
you have this supply chain problem. Well, guess what? A thousand or a million other e-commerce business
have had that same problem and they figured out a way to solve it. So what did they do? Let’s start
with that. I was talking to actually a friend yesterday who’s, yeah, this guy’s almost a billionaire
billionaire and he’s in the real estate game and he’s just crushed it on real estate on his own.
And now for the first time after 15 years, he’s raising money for his projects. He’d never wanted
to do it. He always wanted to use his own capital, but you know, finally sort of relented and realized,
okay, I could do bigger scale and do more projects. If I, if I raise capital from other people, not just
use my own personal balance sheet. And so I told him, I was like, you know, he’s giving me all his ideas
about how he’s going to raise money. And I’ll go, dude, every real estate guy I know raises money.
Have you first looked at what they did? Like, why are you trying to figure this out on your own?
That’s the hard way. There’s no bonus points for doing this the hard way. Like let’s just start by
reverse engineering what other people do. Like go talk to five to 10 other people who’ve already done
this. See if there’s a common blueprint, go try that and only innovate where needed along the way.
When you run into some bottlenecks or some walls that you hit along the way of trying to implement
that plan, because for most business problems, you can just ask the question, like,
has anybody else ever solved this? And what do they do? And turns out, it’s almost always like,
it’s very common. There’s a common problem. There is a common solution. And we should try that first.
Yeah. Like we, we place our innovation on the wrong thing. We place it on the features and the
benefits when we should be placing it on being innovative about copying how they’re doing what
they’re doing. We had a 3PL and you know, 3PLs, right? And it’s like the worst. Nobody likes your 3PL.
It’s, it’s impossible. And so we saw all the other 3PLs out there when we launched and we’re like,
oh my gosh, they charge for storage and pick and pack and this and that, and they mark up shipping.
These guys are idiots. It’s so confusing. So we set out to like innovate the industry,
simple, flat pricing. And like at the end of that two year experience, like we looked like all the
other 3PLs because we’re like, okay, oh, oh, they charge for storage because some companies go out of
business and then they’re left with this big bill and they don’t, oh, that’s why like, so that’s
another signal is if you see other competitors in your industry and your first thought is like,
they’re so stupid. Why are they doing it this way? Probably for a reason. Like you just haven’t learned
that reason yet.
Especially if they’re successful, right? Don’t copy somebody who’s failing, but if they’re successful,
you can start with that and say, all right, can I do that as well? And you know, the reason I like
this idea is because this is not the only way to win. I spent most of my life playing in the innovation
space and I really love that. It’s super fun to be creative and to come up with the idea that it feels
really satisfying when you’ve, you’re the first to do something. That’s a, I mean, that’s amazing.
I’m very proud of that whenever I’ve tried to do that, but that gets talked about a lot. Cause again,
it sounds super noble and I think that does work, but there are many ways to win. And what I like about
what you’re saying is that it is another way to win. You say, oh, wow, those guys did that gutter
cleaning service using next door and their neighborhood in Massachusetts. I should do that in my
neighborhood in California. Let me start with that. And, and I, and I think that more people
should do that if they want to actually like be successful in, because that is another way to win.
It’s not the only way, but it’s another way. Yeah. It’s the midwit meme all over again. Right. Right.
My, my first business was, yeah, I read about this iPhone repair shop making 30 grand a month.
And I thought I can make 30 grand a month fixing iPhones in my city. Like it’s kind of an ignorant
thought, but it worked and I did, you know, so you gotta, you gotta, you gotta be done. Like I,
like I am. Chris, this is fun, man. I, we still have like half of the doc of other ideas and small
business and like, you know, random businesses that you’ve come across that we could go for. I think
maybe, maybe we do a part two of people like this one, uh, to have Chris back. If you, if you like
Chris, uh, either tweet at me or, uh, put it in the YouTube comments would be best that, you know,
bring them back because I think this is a lot of fun. I really love the little nooks and crannies of the
looking in to find these, you know, stump grinding or the hole in one business or the shipping
container for, for wine tours. Like, you know, this is fun stuff that I think, you know, sometimes on
this podcast, to be honest, we have brilliant people talking about what you can do with AI and
what you could do with XYZ. And that’s great. I love that stuff, but those aren’t episodes I can
send to my sister or my mom because those businesses are kind of out of reach for what
they want to do. Uh, but I think what’s cool about, you know, the businesses you talk about,
you know, your pickleball court, this is stuff that anybody could do. Chris, thanks for coming
on. Maybe give people a shout, uh, shout out your, your Twitter, your podcast, whatever you want people
to go check out. Yeah. Uh, the Kerner office podcast is where I publish three times a week,
spelled like my last name. And it’s on your hat. So that’s right. Never miss an opportunity.
Yes. Always be promoting. That’s right. All right, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Sean.
All right. So when my employees joined Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff,
but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called copy that. Copy
that is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better. And the reason this is important
is because at work or even just in life, we communicate mostly via text right now, whether
we’re emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever. Most of the ways that we’re communicating
is by the written word. And so I made this thing called copy that that’s guaranteed to make you
write better. You can check it out. Copy that.com. I post every single person who leaves a review,
whether it’s good or bad, I post it on the website. And you’re going to see a trend,
which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise, something that’s so simple that they
laugh at. They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better?
But I promise you, it does. You got to try it at copy that.com. I guarantee it’s going
to change the way you write. Again, copy that.com.
six or seven different side hustles, different streams of income. And normally all the advice
you hear is about focus, focus, go all in on one thing. This guy’s like Mr. Shiny object syndrome.
So I loved having him on. He’s very fun. And he comes on, he tells you the side hustle ideas that
he loves. So things that you could do, it’s kind of weird businesses, but you could do them really
in any local market. And on this podcast, sometimes we have really brilliant people,
but they talk about stuff that’s for most people, not something they could go do. It’s
interesting to hear, but you can’t really do it. This is an episode I’m going to send to my sister,
you know, my brother-in-law, because I think they would like to do these businesses. And I think
these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he’s gotten, where I think he’s making
$8,000 per day of free cashflow off of these side hustles per day. That’s pretty crazy. So enjoy this
episode. It’s all about the weird, crazy side hustles that anybody could do. If you just got a
little bit of hustle. All right, what’s up? We got Chris here. Chris, you are a crazy guy.
You’re a madman. And one of the reasons I wanted you on here is because most business advice on the
internet sounds like this. You got to focus, you got to lock in, you got to grind, you have to just
go all in on one thing, focus, focus, focus. And you’re like the exact opposite. You’re a dude who
you see a shiny object, you chase it. And you’re not ashamed to say it. That’s actually your strategy.
We were talking before this and you were telling me that you have, I think, started 30 different
businesses that crossed over 50,000 in revenue, maybe 35. You said you have six different revenue
streams right now that each produce over a hundred thousand dollars of cashflow for you. And I was doing
the math on some of your numbers. And I think basically just on your side hustles, you’re
making like $8,000 a day of cashflow. And I think that is amazing. I want to hear what your side
hustles are. I want to hear what other side hustles you’ve found because you find these like random,
simple businesses that are cool. I want to hear which ones you think are cool that other people
can go do for their own side hustles. And I want to hear your philosophy as you go, because again,
I think you defy some of the odds. That sounds perfect. Absolutely. Let’s do it.
So tell me about some of the ideas you have that other people could do.
Dude, I think you should pull up that video of the hole in one golf challenge.
This is one that I can’t get out of my head.
All right, so here we go. Look at this freaking thing right here. And I see a,
basically a golf putting green. So like the, we’re just the part where the hole is and it’s just
floating out in the ocean. And you said that this driving range in New Zealand pays out $10,000. If
you hit a hole in one, it’s 111 yards away. You get this like plaque if you hit the hole in one.
And so what is the business here? They basically, they, it’s like a carnival game. They charge you a
little bit to try to hit a hole in one. Is that it? Yeah. It’s kind of like, think of like
unbundling a carnival. It’s the business is math. They’re just using math. Right. And here’s the math.
The, the average amateur golfer, and I don’t golf. I hate golf, um, has a one in 25,000 chance of
getting a hole in one on a par three, which this is. Okay. And so this company in New Zealand,
it’s right off the road on this Lake, um, they have announced multiple times that they pay out
on average once every two weeks. So I can use math, uh, to say, all right, these guys, and I know how
much they sell balls for it’s like 40 bucks for 25 balls or something. Uh, and they have a sensor in
the hole and they have divers go get the balls every couple of weeks. Yeah. There’s like a scuba diver
swimming around the thing. Is he there all the time or he just does that once a week goes and gets all the
balls just once a week. And so I can surmise based on math and statistics that this place net profits
like three to $500,000 a year, which is, there’s nothing to see there. It’s a little stand with a
floating green. One guy just standing there with an iPad. So why isn’t this all over the place?
Wait, so you said this is just roadside in New Zealand. There’s one, there’s one of these in the
world that I know of off the side of a road in New Zealand, but it’s off the side of the road.
it’s not even like near a golf course or tourist attraction. You’re just saying this is just in
a random area right now. Yeah. All right. So let’s say we wanted to do this. Let’s brainstorm this
together and maybe we’ll actually do this. Maybe we’ll find a listener to run this for us to make
it happen. But like, we’ll make this an MFM case study. All right. So how would we do this in order
to make this happen, um, you know, quickly, like get momentum and then have it actually work,
have it actually be successful. So to me, it’s all about piggybacking, right? I don’t want to guess
where the golfers are. Like there are no golfers where this place is, but how much better would
they be doing if there was all already a captive audience right there? And so I would just find one
golf course. You know how you go, you go to a golf course and like after the 18th hole, there’s just
like a putting green where you can chill. It would be like that. Okay. Take your nearest pond, put a
floating green out there, put a tee and have a little iPad with a stand and say, here’s your ball. Just like a
driving range, 20 balls, 20 bucks or whatever, $10,000. If you get a hole in one and it’s a way
for a golf course to earn additional revenue. They’re not about to build a floating green and work
out the logistics of the point of sale. So you could, yeah, you could do this as a service and say,
we’ll install this. You’re going to have more net income without doing any work. We’re going to take
30% of all your revenue as a fee. Okay. I kind of love this idea, but you need the water for this
floating thing. Right. Or what do you, what are you suggesting? So like, how would you do this if
the golf course is not situated by like, you know, like in this case is like the ocean or whatever.
I think, I’m glad you brought that up. Cause I think the water is a key point. Like as men,
we want to throw rocks in the water. Yeah. I think visually there’s a, there’s a, there’s something
that like my testosterone went up like 15 points, just looking at this. Like I could, I could do this.
Right. Like if it was literally just like, uh, Oh, like here’s just like a hole. Here’s the 19th
hole. Right. You could do that. You could brand it. Oh, this is the 19th hole. But just having that
obstacle of mother nature there. Yes. There’s something to that. I mean, you win either way.
So you get it on the green, you feel awesome. You get a hole in one, you win $10,000. You really
feel awesome. You miss, you see a splash. You can’t lose. Or worst case scenario, you’re just playing
golf. You’re paying, you’re paying money to play golf, which is why you’re there in the first place.
And you’re going to get content out of this also. You’re going to have your buddy film you,
or we set up a camera here where you get like an Instagram worthy story for, you know, for,
for this thing. How much do you say people pay to take a swing at this? Or, you know,
they buy 10 balls or what do they do? It’s like 30, it’s like 20 bucks or like 35 bucks for 20
balls or 50 bucks for 40 balls, something like that. Oh, so you get like 20 to 40 hacks at it to do it.
Yeah. That’s pretty good. And every guy thinks he can do it. Right. Of course. Or that today might
be a day. And also golf, you’re already like, I don’t know what the average spend is of a golf day.
Like if an, of a golf outing, I don’t play golf personally, but like there’s the, there’s the
actual, like the cost to actually play that day on the course. There’s all the clubs investments
you’ve done. There’s the cat, there’s the tips, there’s the food, there’s the, the beer along the
way. There’s all this like money spent dude to spend an extra 40 bucks to have a blast with your
buddies at the end or to have a story or to just like, you know, do something at the end.
That’s an absolute no brainer. If you actually did this with the golf course,
I thought you were going to say though, that you would do it just on the route to the golf course.
You know, there’s a lot of golfer traffic. Who’s going to take a roadside stop here and try to do
this. I mean, you could do that too. Like I’m picturing like a freeway with a lake over to the
right and an exit nearby. You rent the billboard right above it, arrow pointing down $10,000 for a floating
hole in one and people can just pull off and do it. Like it doesn’t have to be a golf course.
I like, you could use the same principle. And to me, the principle is just math as a service,
right? We’re calling this a mass business. Okay. And it’s like, let’s say you have a one in a hundred
chance. It’s an outdoor casino. Yes, exactly. Exactly. What is a slot machine? What is roulette?
What is craps? What are all these games? These are games where the house just said, cool,
we’ll take an edge. We’ll take a math edge and you get to play and have fun. Right. Yeah. But we,
we take the edge and that you, what you’re saying is to do the same thing. Yeah. Even like a putting
green in a mall or something, or a walkable outdoor shopping area. Let’s say you’ve got like a one in
500 chance of making a 30 foot putt. Right. So you say, Hey, 30 foot putt, you get it. We’ll give
you 500 bucks. And you just do the math and you say, all right, I’m, you know, every $3,000 I get,
I’m going to pay out 500 bucks. Statistically speaking, dude, I love this idea. If you,
if you want to do this idea, email me Sean at Sean Puri. And then me and Chris, we will,
we will help you do this and we will document the journey. We’ll put it out there in the public.
We’ll kind of make it a thing because I think part of it is the branding and the novelty factor.
And you want to see this online first, and then people will actually drive out to do it,
or they’ll plan to stop. Not just whoever happens to see it and understand it while they’re driving
50 miles an hour down a road. You know what I mean? Yeah. I like the name 19th hole. That’s a good
one. It’s good, right? We might need to snag that domain name before this goes live.
All right. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot. They’re doing a big conference. This is their big
one. They do called inbound. They have a ton of great speakers that are coming to San Francisco,
September 3rd to September 5th. And it’s got a pretty incredible lineup. They have comedians like
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in San Francisco. Hope to see you there.
All right. So I love the hole-in-one golf course. All right. Give me the next side hustle idea.
Okay. Well, I want to talk about Facebook Marketplace. I feel like there’s an entire
economy in Facebook Marketplace. There are seven-figure business owners, let’s say fencing
business. All they do is post to Facebook Marketplace organically once a week to get all their leads.
By the way, Facebook Marketplace has 1 billion monthly active users. Just that tab.
Crazy. And no one’s talking about it. What are we doing?
So I’ve got a story for you. I’ve got a story.
And by the way, just explain the thing you just said real quick before you go to your story. So
you said there’s people who own like local fencing companies. Their entire sales machine is posting
on Face Marketplace fencing services. Is that what you’re saying? Or answering the request for fencing
service? What are they actually doing?
Yeah. Like they’re just posting, hey, I put up fences, cedar six foot, $8 per linear foot. And
then people message him and he goes out and gives a quote and he has a $7,000 job. Like there’s nothing
paid. There’s no paid ads. This is just one organic post that takes him five minutes and he’ll refresh it
every couple of days.
Dude, I don’t know if you saw this. We did this episode with high schoolers. I think it was like
a high school version of Shark Tank.
I saw that. Yeah.
And there was a kid who was, I think, 17, 18 years old and his entire business, I forget even
what the service was. It was home services of some kind. I don’t remember.
It was like window washing or something.
Yeah. It was like window washing or like gutter cleaning.
Gutter cleaning.
Actually it was their highlight thing. It was like gutter cleaning. And his entire business
model was off of Nextdoor. So he’s like, yeah, I just started this in my neighborhood where I live.
I went on Nextdoor and I said that I do this and I serviced, you know, the last year I serviced 60
homes in this neighborhood of 600 homes or whatever it was for gutter cleaning. And that
generated, I’m making up the numbers now because I don’t remember off the top of my head, but it was
like 500,000 in revenue. And we were like, what? And he’s like, yeah, I just post on there that this
is what I do. And then it’s people in our neighborhood. And I was like, so could you post
in the next neighborhood? He’s like, yeah, I’m trying to figure out how to get around the, you know,
like, yeah, I can. I just haven’t done that yet. It’s like, wow, this is, everybody should do this.
Like, you know, what is my kid doing? What are they teaching you in pre-K right now? We got to get
after it with this Nextdoor, you know, Nextdoor lead gen, basically. And so you’re saying the same thing is
happening at a bigger scale on Facebook Marketplace. Yeah. Both great opportunities.
Okay, great. So tell me the story you’re going to tell me.
Yeah, this is, this is an outlier example. Okay. Results not guaranteed. But 2021, China had
canceled Bitcoin mining, right? 2021 was a crazy year, a lot of money being printed. And we started
a Bitcoin mining facility and people were selling Bitcoin miners and hosting services on Facebook
marketplace. And so these miners cost $10,000. So you go type in the name of the model and you see
them listed. Cool. But I thought, huh, the hosting price, because if you buy a Bitcoin miner, you have
to host it at like a data center. And it’s usually like 200 bucks a month for the hosting fee. So I just
posted organically to Facebook marketplace, Bitcoin mining hosting service. But instead of putting in the
price of the miner, which turns people off $10,000, $10,000, right? Yeah, I put in the price of the
hosting $200. And then when you click into it in the description, it’s like, it’s actually 200 for
hosting. Here’s the cost of the miners. I’m not exaggerating. That one ad, and I had it going on
multiple accounts, we would refresh it, but no paid, no paid. Did $9.8 million all on Facebook marketplace
in three months? Profitably. Like this isn’t like you’re, oh, and we spent $9.8 million in ads, like
profitably. That’s like the potential and kind of an extreme outlier, but I have other more normal
examples. Just to be clear, you were selling miners that you had, that you already owned or what were
you doing? We were pre-selling them and then ordering them from China. So we had a positive cashflow
conversion cycle in addition to all that. All right. So you went on Facebook ads, you specifically did the
marketplace ads. Is that right? Not even ads. We were just posting. Just posting. All right. Just
organic posting. And you’re posting every day. You’re posting it and you’re posting it in every
city. Did you set up like a farm to post these? How’d you do that? Yeah. We used VAs and multiple
Facebook accounts and we posted in multiple cities because most people want to buy from someone
local. Um, and the funnel was, you know, VA answers, uh, response. Then they pushed them to a sales
call because it’s hard to sell something so expensive over the internet. Once they got on the
sales call, we would close like half of them. Right. So, and so, and then you would close them
and then you’d go order that same thing from China because there’s like a knowledge arbitrage here of
like, I don’t know how to go, or I don’t trust spending $10,000 on Alibaba or Aliexpress. And so
you would then do that and you’d have a margin. What was the rough margin on something like that?
Call it 30%. 30%. But like high ticket. So. And this one I’m guessing didn’t last in the sense that
like, you know, in 2025, maybe the same market dynamics, the demand, the supply are not the
same. Is that true? Yep. Really? The biggest variable here is like the frothiness of the mining
market, which is not good right now. So I think this would work again if the mining market turned
around more. When the time is like, like, would you do this? Like, are you planning to do this again?
If the mining market, you know, gets, uh, gets hyped again?
Yes. Yeah. And how do you spend your money, dude? So let’s say you make a few million dollars
doing something like this. What do you, what does Chris like to spend his money on?
Oh man. Um, on my family, we go on cool vacations and starting more businesses. Um, I invest in real
estate, but I just, I like starting businesses is my, it’s the only thing I know, but it seems like
you start businesses that don’t take a lot of capital. Yeah, that’s true. But I like investing,
uh, like tripling down on businesses that are more mature along the way where I can see a clear path to
growth with more capital. What’s another Facebook marketplace idea that somebody could do? Like,
is it as simple as, Hey, I noticed that there are garage shelving companies. They’re not currently
active in my area. I go talk to 10 business owners. I say, Hey, if I bring you a customer,
give me $300 or whatever it is. And you do lead gen because that, that business owner doesn’t even
think to do Facebook marketplace activity to, to drive leads. Most, most service people,
most small business owners don’t even think this way. Right. Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can literally
build an agency that just posts to Facebook marketplace for business owners, sells them the
leads. Right. Right. But you mentioned shelving. I interviewed this guy named Alex on my podcast.
the Kerner office. And he has a six figure business just building, not shelving, but garage shelving
on wheels with Costco totes. Like that’s it. Uh, only with organic Facebook marketplace posts.
And he net profits $180,000 a year. That’s the whole business. Right. Garage shelving on Facebook
marketplace. I mean, he has a $300 saw and he goes and buys two by fours. And he didn’t even have a truck
for like the first year and a half. Right. Okay. What are your other ideas? I see a list of 10 here
and we’ve probably done two or three. So give me, give me more. All right. Any idea? No, no. Any
idea. You want me to just call out one of these? Just tee me up. Yeah. Take local tourist traps and put
them in your home market. Is this like the whole in one challenge or are you talking about something
else? Different? Yeah. This is a good one. So I went, you’ve seen a rest development, I assume.
Of course. Okay. So there’s money in the banana stand. We all know that. Um, I went to first day
of business school in Harvard. That’s what they teach you. Yeah. So I went to Balboa Island with my family
last year and we went to the banana stand for whatever reason, this one street, it has like seven banana
stands. And there’s one that’s supposedly the best. And I shelled out like $8 each for these bananas
covered in chocolate and nuts. And I made a video, uh, about, you know, how much profit these guys
make, because as I went to the window, I had to, I asked her, how many of these do you sell the day?
What’s your busiest day ever? What’s your slowest day ever? All these people are behind me. Do you
want nuts or no nuts on the banana? People were waiting, but I had to know. And then to make matters
worse, I pull out my phone and make a video about how anyone could copy them. So I’m a great guy,
steal your banana. This one little shop that’s like 300 square feet is doing like 7 million a year
in frozen bananas. Like, and what’s the margin on an $8 banana with chocolate and peanuts? And so I just
thought like, why isn’t this like, why isn’t this a thing? I didn’t go to Balboa Island for the bananas.
Once I was there, I got them, but there are Balboa islands all over the world. And most of them have
no banana stand. Like, so it’s, this idea isn’t just about banana stand. It’s about taking something
really unique and novel. Maybe it’s like the old Western timey photo booths that you see in Pigeon
Forge. Maybe it’s like, um, funnel cake or like the mini donuts that you see in Gatlinburg, like take
something like that and just test it. I’m not saying it’s going to work, but you could test it very,
very cheaply in other tourist markets or in non-tourist markets.
Yeah. That’s interesting. I wonder if that would work. Like, I wonder how much of the
appeal is that, Oh, humans just like these kinds of frozen chocolate bananas. Or is it that in that
area on that street, it’s kind of known for this and you see a line. And so you see the line and you
start doing it. Like, I wonder if that, like, it’s kind of like an organ transplant. I wonder if there’s
like that, you know, donor rejection or the host rejection of the, of the organ when you put one
of these in a new, in a new area. It could be, but I think that the greatest chance you’ve had,
you would have for success is taking specifically a tourist trap and putting it in a different tourist
trap where it’s like, right. This is a unique novel thing that people don’t buy when they’re home.
But like, for instance, um, I have a friend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee that owns an indoor
sledding facility. You can’t tell me that wouldn’t work in other tourist traps that have the same type of
demographic there, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That makes sense. Um, okay. Give me another one. How
about, um, toasted tours? What is this? This is a, all right. This, this is a Northern California
by you. This guy took a, a 40 foot shipping container, put it on the back of a semi truck,
cut out the walls, put handrails on there, put tables in their chairs in there. And he takes people
on wine tours. It’s a party bus, but it’s not even a bus. It’s a shipping container.
That’s open air. Open air. Yeah. They like cut out the sides. Yes. And so I’m swiping Instagram one
day and I see this video that just broke my frame. It’s the shipping container and people are like
dancing inside as it’s going around a bend at a high rate of speed. And it’s like dangerous.
What am I looking at? But this guy crushes it like his first year. And he had experience
doing like wine tours, but nothing like this. I think he did like over a million bucks his first
year with like 60% margins. What I like about some of these is that they are visually viral.
So, you know, the definition of virality, people get it wrong. People think it’s word of mouth.
Word of mouth is actually a different thing. Word of mouth is, I like this so much. I want to tell my
friends about it. Viral is actually more like a sneeze. You spread a virus without even wanting
to spread it. Right. This was like back when, uh, you know, Hotmail started. I’m just sending you an
email. I’m not trying to tell you to use Hotmail, but because I’m sending you an email from my Hotmail
address. And at the bottom, it says, I sent this via Hotmail. You know, they, they added that to the
bottom of the email. It spread like a virus. And that’s how, you know, a lot of the big viral
services actually spread. Facebook was like this, right? I’m, I’m uploading photos. I’m just tagging
my friends. I’m not trying to tell them, Hey, you should join Facebook. I’m having a grand old time
here. They tagged a friend. It sent them an email said you got tagged in a photo and people can’t resist
being like somebody put a photo up of me on the internet. I must see this. And that’s how Facebook
grew early on was like this, this one viral loop. And then there’s other types of virality. One is like
this visually viral where it’s not like the people on this truck. We’re trying to go tell everyone
about it, but it’s so novel looking that I can’t help, but look at it, learn about it. You know?
And, and I think the whole in one challenge has the same benefit, which is like, you see it. It’s super
interesting to look at. You get the concept right away. And it’s worth remarking on. You’re talking
about it with people. You notice it, you want to do it. The act of somebody else doing it made you want
to do it. And so I like these things that are sort of walking billboard style businesses because you
know, they market themselves once you get them going. This episode is brought to you by HubSpot
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Dude, I have some really good, uh, good examples of visually viral stuff.
Have you seen that guy that does like, he’ll mow people’s lawns for free?
Please tell me you’ve seen that.
Who’s this guy?
Okay. This guy out of Kansas or something. Young guy. He owned a lawn care business,
small kind of struggling business. And one day he sets up his tripod, SB mowing and SB pressure
washing. He sets up a tripod. He’s got a big YouTube channel now, right?
So this guy has 45 million followers across platforms combined. 45 million. And all he does
is he sets up a tripod. He puts on a mic. He walks up to the door. He says, Hey, your lawn looks like
crap. Mind if I mow it for free? What’s the catch? I publish this to YouTube and make money. Cool. And
then he mows it for free with a time-lapse video visually viral.
Transforms it.
Yeah.
Yes. We want to see the outcome. The retention is there. So the platforms push it. Like,
what is it going to look like when he’s done? And this guy, I mean, what is the value of 45 million
social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business?
Right. I mean, dude, look at this, by the way, like if you just sort by popular,
you know, he stacks the thing. So there’s the visual viral part of, uh, before and after,
which humans want to complete that. They want to know that the solution, then you have, um,
the sort of novelty surprise factor. Like, Oh, this guy’s doing this for free. That’s interesting.
Why? I want to know what’s the answer here. But then he stacks on drama. So the top videos are angry
home homeowner confronts me while I’m mowing this vacant home. Cop approaches me while I’m mowing this
deserted home and tells me this homeowner stunned at how wide the sidewalks are. Right. Her tears said
it all. My prayers have been answered. So this guy has this great skill stack where he’s got,
you know, the, the lawn care, this sort of, that’s one skill that, okay, is worth,
you know, only X dollars in the market of, of the economy, but then he stacks on being really good
at content. And those two together created a, how many lawn care guys are really good at content?
I don’t know. Zero. Like, you know, the, the numbers less than a dozen. And so suddenly he became
rare. And when you’re rare, you’re valuable. Exactly. Yeah. That’s really cool. Okay. So let’s jump in
side hustles and the ones that you currently have. So let’s do some of the fun ones. The one I met you
on is about Bucky’s. And so for people who don’t know, could you explain just how crazy of a business
Bucky’s is? And then the side hustle you created off the back of Bucky’s. Yeah. Bucky’s is like your
redneck Disney gas station. They’re about half the size of a Costco. There’s 51 locations and they do
like 60 to 80 million in revenue per year each. And it’s just, if you haven’t been there,
there’s nothing like, it’s like a religious. So the math on that is like 3 billion in revenue
on 50 gas stations. Yeah. Yeah. What? I’ve never been to a Bucky’s. What, what makes a Bucky’s so
great? Is it even a gas station or is it just something else that happens to have gas?
It’s a brand with a gas station. They have over a hundred pumps. You walk in,
there’s just things happening everywhere. You’ve got tacos being made. You’ve got people shouting
about brisket. You’ve got beaver nuggets, t-shirts, like beavers walking around the cleanest bathrooms
you’ll ever find. There’s nothing else like it. You just walk in and you’re, you’re amazed from the
get go. Okay. Before you tell me your side hustle off the back of that, what’s the quick kind of origin
story of this? Has this been around for like a hundred years? Who started it? Like, why is this so
successful? I mean, I’ve never heard that $3 billion in revenue on 51 gas stations.
They founded like 40 years ago. There’s a guy named Arch. He was called Bucky as a kid and he
opened a gas station and then they just started going bigger and bigger and bigger. They just kept
pushing the envelope and their whole signature was this mascot, just this cheesy looking beaver that
people just loved. And so once they started selling merch, t-shirts and tumblers and all that,
they just exploded. And they’re really unique in that they put themselves in far-flung areas.
They’re not like in the city. They’re on the way to a vacation or close to a vacation destination.
Oh, so it’s like the perfect rest stop, right? Because if anything, like I was just on a road
trip, we drove to Tahoe and it’s a three, three hour drive roughly, but there’s these patches where
you need to stop in the middle and the bar is so low for rest stop experience, right? It’s like,
you know, it’s basically a porta potty in a, in a good scenario. And then you get like the trucker rest
stops and you get a gas station. Then you get like maybe a little strip mall with the Starbucks. But
what you’re saying is they built something actually like really cool out in that’s on those drives. And
that maybe it’s like one of the golden insights for them.
Yeah. It’s just that you walk in and you’re a captive audience. You can buy lunch, you can buy gas.
Most people just park at the pump. You can buy a t-shirt and the average ticket. I don’t know what it is.
They’re privately traded, but people spend hundreds of dollars there. You’re not just like buying a
Celsius and hopping out.
All right. What is this business you created on top of Buc-ee’s or like your side hustle for Buc-ee’s?
Yeah. So back to what you said about me not being able to focus. I was in the middle of running this
business that was growing and demanding all of our time and attention. And I took my business partner
to Buc-ee’s and he was from Utah. It was his first time. And on the way home, I distinctly remember
this. I remember the overpass. I was driving. I’m ashamed to say I pulled out my phone and I said,
Kirk, these guys must kill it online. And I said, do you know what Disney does like X billion just
through their online merch store? These guys must kill it. So I go to Buc-ee’s.com. I look for the
shop button and it wasn’t there. They didn’t sell online. Anything, not food, snacks, shirts, anything.
And I just like, I just sat there in silence. I felt like capitalism was being murdered.
Like, what is, why? What good reason is there for this? And this was like six years ago.
And so then we just started talking and we’re just like, what if, what if we launched a website for
them? What if we went online for them? Because we were running a 3PL, third-party logistics business
at the time, really hard business. And we thought we could launch this business for them as like a
permissionless way to get their business end to end and get them as a customer. And maybe they’ll try to
sue us, but worst case, it’ll be a great story. And so what’d you do?
So the first thing I did was started cold emailing the founders, the executive team, everyone and
saying, Hey, you need to be online. We can do it for you. We’ll build a Shopify store. We’ll do
everything end to end. We have a warehouse, shelf space, et cetera. No response, just crickets.
So at that point, it’s like, all right, let’s take this into our own hands. So most people give up
there, right? Try to partner. Most people won’t even cold email, but if you do cold email,
you give up when they don’t reply. Yep, exactly. So we bought beaversnacks.com because that’s their
mascot was a beaver. And I went to Thumbtack and I hired a photographer for like $200. And I documented
all this. I have pictures of all this. I took my four kids and wife to the nearest Bucky’s and my wife
and I split up. I said, you get merch, I’ll get snacks. If it has a Bucky’s logo on it, buy it. Like,
I don’t want the Doritos or the Coke because they white label a bunch of stuff, right? Like I only
want something with a Bucky’s logo. So we spent like $3,000. We had a receipt this long. We took
it back to the warehouse. Was the lady like, wow, what are you doing? They were, everyone was looking
at us and I’m like an introvert. I hated it. I felt so weird. I’m like, don’t look at me. Just let me do
my thing. So we bring it all back to the warehouse. We put it in this office, hire this photographer
and she takes pictures of everything. We upload it in a CSV to Shopify. We launch a website,
beaversnacks.com. And I say launch, like nobody knew it existed. So the first thing I did was start
scraping and cold emailing every Texas reporter I could find. Eater, Southern Living, Texas Monthly,
Fox News 38, you know, San Antonio district, you name it. And I just start saying like, here’s who I am.
Here’s what I’m doing. Here’s who I am. Here’s what I’m doing.
And so you weren’t afraid because most people would try to be laying low doing this because,
hey, we don’t have an official partnership. You took the opposite approach. You’re like, hey,
can I use this story to get some attention, whether it be good or bad? Is that right?
Yeah. Cause I felt like, okay, worst case scenario, cease and desist. We have great story for a podcast
one day. Best case scenario, we get them as a customer or this is a standalone business.
Somewhere in between is going to be interesting, right? Maybe I have to fill my pantry with snacks,
like $3,000 worth of snacks and my kids eat it for the next seven years.
We had a guest come on and he said, you know, do what makes the best story. When in doubt,
like when you’re at a fork in the road, do whichever, take whichever path will make the best story.
You chose the path that will make the best story here. Okay. So yes. And I heard that episode and I
thought that’s me. I agree with that. So I also did my research and it’s called first sale doctrine,
which means anyone can sell, resell whatever they want. They just can’t pretend or imitate that brand,
right? Like the, there’s a guy that imitated Trader Joe’s to do what I did, but he called himself
Pirate Joe’s. The logo was similar. The store layout was similar and he got sued out of existence. So
I thought, okay, as long as I say, I am not Bucky’s, I’m a third party reseller and I’m clear about that.
They really don’t have grounds to sue me. So I started cold emailing people. They loved the story
and I started getting on the phone with reporters. And any tips on that? So, you know, I’ve learned
this with, with, with PR, which is that there’s PR is this very specific niche game. And once you
understand how a journalist thinks you can reverse engineer what you need to actually do. So like,
for example, our buddy Ramon did this recently, he went mega, mega viral because, and he knew this,
he texted me, he called a shot. He’s like, as soon as the tariff dues came out and some people thought
this is going to be horrible for businesses. Some people thought, well, why don’t those businesses
just make it in America? We’ll buy it if it’s made in America. And so he launches an AB test on his
website. So he, afina.com, it’s like a shower, a clean showerhead. So he was, he runs an AB test and he
says, you can either buy, buy the one that’s sourced out of China, or you could buy the one
that’s sourced out of America. And the American one costs a little bit more, uh, because it costs
more to make it in America. But you know, here you go, you have a choice. And the results were
something crazy, 25,000 visits or something like that. And there were literally zero checkouts on the
American product. There was a few hundred on the, on the, on the Asian made product. And he goes to the
journalist. He ran the test because he knew, look, either the results are going to show people will buy
made in America or they won’t. In either case, I have a very strong story and he goes and he gets
it written up. It’s been written up in like 40 major publications now. And he got tons of traffic
to the site, tons of backlinks. His SEO went way up. It was a genius, quick acting move on the back of
the tariff news. When most people were playing defense, like me in e-com, you’re like, oh shit,
I just need to survive. He went and played offense. So I was, I’m curious, do you have any tips from
your experience about how to get people to actually write about you?
Yeah. I mean, you have to understand that reporters want something cool to write about.
I get DMs all the time from people wanting something from me and 98% of them, they have nothing
interesting to talk about. But if someone DM me and said, Hey, I did this cool thing. Will you post
about it? I would. Cause I want to post about cool things. You know,
my job is to post interesting things. Yes, please send it to me. Um, so once you realize that,
like do something interesting, something cool, and then go tell as many people as you can about it.
And a small percentage of them will post about it. Reporters included. How did you frame it at the
time? I framed it as I am doing a viral marketing stunt and I want to get Bucky’s attention. And if I
don’t, then I’m going to run this business as well as I can. Oh, so you told the reporters that up
front. Yeah. Oh, okay. Gotcha. But by the way, give us the headline. Cause you know, we’re talking
about this title. So we haven’t mentioned how well it’s done. Can you give us some numbers that give
us an idea of like the success of this? I mean, I’ll tell you what the headline literally was.
And it was like, Texas man makes 200 grand in his first 30 days reselling Bucky’s goods online.
That was it. And so Texas monthly reached out to me. They’re the biggest Texas news publication.
And they were like, we love this. We’re going to make this a feature story. Give me everything
you can. So we talked, we talked, we talked, talked. And then later that afternoon, they’re
like, Chris, good news. Bucky’s in-house counsel would love to chat. And I’m like, what’s good
about that? Like I’m dead. I’m dead in the water. And so I was like, okay, you, you told Bucky’s
great. I’m glad you were able to get ahold of them. So I get on the phone with him and he’s
like, listen, we actually don’t mind what you’re doing. Uh, I don’t like the name Beaver
snacks. We’re a beaver. It’s kind of confusing. I don’t like that your colors are yellow. We’re
kind of yellow. Uh, change the name, put a disclaimer in your logo that is persist throughout
the whole website, put a disclaimer on every product page and you have our blessing. Like
we’re not going to sign anything, but we’re not going to come after you. Like we will support
you. And so we did, we made those changes and then they linked to us.
Cool ass general counsel. That’s pretty rare. Yeah. Yeah. And then they linked to us in their
FAQs, which is like the most amazing backlink ever. So on one hand going viral meant we got
a million competitors and like all these copycats. But on the other hand, we have like the biggest
SEO moat that we could ever hope for.
So wait, how did you skip to step? You said their headline was $200,000 in 30 days, but you
didn’t say how you got the $200,000 in 30 days. How did you initially get that traction?
It was all based on those viral articles. We didn’t do any paid ads. We just went viral.
Uh, we put everything as in stock, uh, you know, on Shopify, you can do that whether it’s in stock
or not. And we just started selling out. So the articles initially must not have been 200,000.
The articles initially were just like Texas man starts shop to sell Bucky stuff online.
Correct. Yeah. Yeah. They’ve written about us since then, but in the beginning it was Texas
man, they called it Tex Pats instead of expats. They’re like Texas man launches online Bucky store
for Tex Pats. Um, that was like the big headline. Uh, and that’s how it helped us go viral.
Like a person from Texas who’s no longer in Texas, but misses their stacks, misses their Bucky’s.
Yeah. And that, that was the whole thesis because these Bucky’s are in like Ennis, Texas, like these
places that you’d never heard of because they’re on the way to the beach. And so if you fell in love
with this random bohemian garlic jerky, you could never buy it again. Right. And so that’s where we
came in, like buy it from us. And so how’s this business doing now? Was this a flash in the pan or
is it still doing well? This business has grown 20 to 50% per year, every single year. Steady Eddie.
We just, we are completely riding on the coattails of Bucky’s and we are not ashamed to admit that.
So can you say how much revenue you guys are doing on this thing?
We’re doing between three and 500,000 a month profitably with very, very little paid outspend.
And the funny thing is here, you go buy it retail, right? You don’t have like a wholesale discount.
They’re not, they’re not giving it to you at a cut. So you, you buy retail and then you just mark
it up what 10, 20% or something. What do you, what do you do?
We mark it up a hundred percent. Oh, okay. Cause you’re like, if you want it,
if you want it that bad here, this is the, you know, this is your way to get it.
Honestly, we mark it up as much as we have to. I mean, you know, e-commerce to make a 15,
20% net margin. And that happens to be about a hundred percent markup.
Right. That’s amazing. Okay. So that’s one of your side hustles. We said that there was,
you know, like six that were each, uh, you know, six figures. I don’t know if we’ll get to all
six, but give me another one. So what’s another of your side hustles right now that are contributing
to your, your cashflow? So we started a pet cremation business. Uh, and that’s a fun one.
That one’s actually very profitable. That’s a fun one for you, maybe. Okay. So explain how’d you get
the idea and then what is it and how’d you do it? Okay. So it all started with a relationship that my
business partner had with a very high volume veterinary clinic here in DFW. They do as much
business as five veterinary clinics. And he learned about the industry and how pet cremation has like
90 plus percent net margins. It’s a very old school business. And so there’s a, but you know, we’ve had
this puppy boom during COVID. So all these puppies are five years old now. Uh, there’s more dogs than
children. That’s, that’s like the whole thesis. There’s more dogs than children. It’s only getting
crazier and cremation has 90% margins. Most of the operators are 60 plus years old. They’re doing great.
They’re doing fine. They don’t need ads. They don’t need organic. And if you go look at the Google
keyword tool, we saw that the search competition was low. The ticket size was high. Uh, and the,
the, um, the search traffic was high. So we launched a business around that thesis.
Sorry. So explain, you went to, you went to, uh, the Google ads keyword tool, right? That’s where you
went to, to kind of diligence the, the, the demand for this. And you found obviously the holy grail,
low, low competition, high ticket. And what was the third one? Growth or demand?
Like volume, high volume, low competition, high ticket. Yeah. Holy grail. And so you start
one of these and you’re, you’re actually the service that does it or you’re the lead gen?
We are both. We have two different businesses. One is a programmatic SEO site that generates leads for
cremation facilities all over the country. And then the other one is we’re just a middleman. We have
refrigerated vans and we pick up the pets frozen from the facilities and deliver it from the
veterinarians. And then we deliver it to the cremation facilities and take a margin.
Okay. Gotcha. And so tell me a little about this business. I don’t, I know nothing about the pet
cremation business. What did you do in the first 90 days to make this business come to life? Cause I
like the speed with which you operate. We’re going to talk about another one in a second that I think
is like a quick off the ground version of these ideas. And you very much are a zero to one
kind of guy. Like, I like that you do a lot of different things. I like that you’re high energy
and you’re basically like not lazy. There’s a lot of people out here who sell this kind of like
side hustle, passive income. There’s nothing passive about you. I feel like you are Mr. Active actually,
in the sense that you get after it. Once you have an idea, you know, I have this phrase, like, you
know, inspiration is perishable. Ideas are avocados. They go brown very quickly. And I think what’s
great about you is that you don’t let the ideas and the inspiration perish. You
actually act on it very quickly and you have, you have a high, high bias reaction. So what are the
first 90 years, 90 or so days look like when you have a new idea? And maybe you could use this one
as an example, or if not, you could use a different one. Yeah. I focus most of my energy on validating
the idea with like some ad spend or a couple of conversations or whatnot. I, I don’t do any like
extensive market research. I don’t talk to any potential customers and I’m not saying there’s not value in
that. That’s just not how I roll. I really, really like using tools like Facebook, like
general publicly available tools that most people know and love. Stuff I can do from my boxers at home.
That’s what I like. Right. Yes. And a lot of times by the end of the day, I realized, oh, this is a dud.
Let’s move on. But also a lot of the times by the end of the day, I’m like, oh, wow, there’s something
here. My thesis was true. Let’s, let’s put another day into this. So, so like what, what would you do in
this pet cremation business? What did you do? So the thesis here started with this relationship that my
business partner had. Uh, and the pitch was let’s get the, the cremation facility owner and the veterinary
clinic owner in the same room together and pitch them this like win, win. Hey, we’re going to get you more
veterinary clinics because we’re really good at sales. Okay. And then to the vet, Hey, uh, you need to raise your
prices. You’re way too low. Uh, you’re going to make even more margin working through a middleman,
believe it or not, because we’re going to be, we’re going to only do one thing. We’re going to pick up
pets and we’re going to drop them off. And so there was a big conflict of interest interest here because
the cremation facility owner was about to lose some margin, but he was like, we were selling him on the
fact that we would bring him a lot more customers. And so basically this was a good like example of what I
normally do. If that conversation doesn’t go well, I don’t launch the business. I just move on.
And you weren’t afraid that when you put those two in the same room, they’re like, great. Yeah,
we should do this. Who’s this guy. What is it? Why do we need this guy? Did you see any risk in
putting yourself there as the middleman with this and actually connecting the two dots, the really high
volume vet clinic with the information service that you thought they should be using? Well, the thing is,
is that they were already working together. Right. And so what you’re saying was correct. That was the
risk. We insert ourselves. You’re saying there was some friction. There was some friction that you were
offering to remove. Is that right? Yeah. And the friction in this case was what? It was that the
veterinary or the cremation facility owner made all his margin on the actually doing the cremation and he
was losing money on all the logistics. Okay. But this customer we were talking to was one of his biggest
customers. And so we were saying, hey, you’re going to lose some margin on this biggest customer because
we’re inserting ourselves. We’re going to take some of it, but we’re going to more than compensate for it
by A, removing that logistics off your plate and B, finding you more veterinary clinics.
And then for the vet clinic, you were saying, hey, raise your price a little bit. And we need to be
able to do that for, to make this work. Yep. And so our thesis was, if that conversation doesn’t go well,
the business never launches. Right. It’s an asymmetric bet. But if it does, then we have,
you know, the hardest part, we have customers and revenue through the door from day one, if they’re,
if they agree to this. Exactly. Yeah. And then you went and tried to recreate that with, you know,
getting 15 other veterinary clinics. Now, most of them, I assume would already have had a partner or
some vendors for cremation services. And so what’s your sales pitch to them? How did you go and get more
customers on board? Yeah. Our sales pitch was like, our competitors were very unsophisticated. Like they
would literally walk through the front door of a veterinary clinic, get the frozen dogs, put them in a bag,
and then walk out the waiting room. And so our pitch was like, that’s our competition.
We will never do that. We’ll pull out back, unmarked van, we’ll be very caring and respectful.
In some cases, they don’t even have to pay anymore. And we’ll just be, we’ll just pick up the phone and
be reliable. That was the pitch. And is there something to learn here about like,
you know, there’s so many of these simple businesses where the bar is really low or people
are simply not doing any outreach. They’re not doing any door-to-door sales. Like, have you made
a killing and just, you know, Warren Buffett has said this before. He goes, the secret to winning
is low competition, is weak competition, right? Like he’s not looking to prove that he’s a genius at the
hardest games. He’s looking for very weak competition where he can simply be competent and
he could just do best practices. Oh dude, like it is so true. We see it on Twitter all the time. Like
just go, go find a business with the fax machine to compete against him. Like, yes, that actually
works. I, we own a tree trimming business and a big bottleneck for us is stump grinding. So we thought,
I thought, man, there needs to be a business that’s just stump grinding, but B2B. Not stump grinding
that goes through homeowners, but only the ones that goes through, uh, the other tree trimming
companies. Cause we own a tree trimming company and we could see it from the inside. So I had a thesis.
I hired a virtual assistant and today I would just use an AI voice agent. And I took the city of Houston
and I scraped every single tree trimming business in Houston. There was about a thousand. And I had this
virtual assistant call every single one and notate, did they answer? Did the number work? If they did answer,
say, do you use grind stumps? If yes, then would you ever outsource that? If yes, then how much would
you pay? So I spent like $200 getting this research. I, I, I’m not familiar with the tree trimming
business. Surprise, surprise. So why does a tree trimming business not also do the stumps? Why is
that a separate problem that they don’t like to deal with? Yeah. Great question. So a tree trimming
business needs sometimes a bucket truck to get up high and a chainsaw, right? But that’s only half the
battle. Then you got to get the stump out of the ground or else, you know, you can’t grow
grass there. And so it’s a, a stump grinder. You’ve got to pull on a trailer. Whereas before
you don’t even need a trailer. It’s just a whole different system and they got to go rent
it. They stand in line. They pay $300. They rent it. They put gas in it. They drive it back
to the job site. They grind it. Then they got to bring it back. And it’s like, it eats into
their profit. And so I thought, okay, if a tree trimming company could just outsource
all of their stump grinding B2B only, is there an opportunity there?
So the assistant goes, she calls everybody. She asked them, would they be willing to outsource
that? And are people just saying, yeah, yeah, we, we’d be willing to outsource that. Is that
like a, can you get that clear of a signal just off of a VA’s phone call?
So only 22% of people answered the phone. Um, that’s it. And of the ones that did almost half
of them said, if I could outsource this, I would gladly. And then we, then we even got further down
the script and said, would you pay seven, uh, $7 per inch or whatever of diameter? Yes. And then
I published all that info on my podcast and people went out and started some grinding businesses with
the exact thesis. And we learned, yeah, pick an industry where people seem to be doing well and
call all of them, see how many answer their phone. You can cross-reference that against like the Google
keyword tool and, you know, publicly available stuff and see how much demand for supply is there in any
given market. Hey, this episode is brought to you by Mercury. They’re the fintech of choice for over
200,000 companies. I myself use it for eight different companies. The reason why we all choose it is
because it has everything you need under one roof. So like my e-commerce company, it’s super important
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world. And the old way with our, you know, more traditional bank, uh, that shall now be named. I try it
online. It would say, no, it would freeze my account. Then I’d have to go in, book an appointment,
speak to a specialist who would try to upsell me on something I didn’t need. And then finally,
after, you know, 30 minutes there, then they charged me 50 bucks for the pleasure of that terrible
interaction. And now with Mercury, I just go online, push two buttons and I’m done. It’s such a seamless
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I question your judgment. So that’s it. You’ve heard on my first million. For more information,
check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes
for details. Okay. I like that. You did one recently. You had this, um, Instagram video. I’m going to
actually play it here, but I love this video for a couple of reasons. Uh, one, just the idea is fun,
but the, but two, like, you know, your energy and what you’re describing here is, is pretty great. So,
uh, here, I’ll love this. This is you talking about starting a pickleball facility.
This frigging thing right here. I’m right here in my warehouse slash shop. It is 2,100 square feet and
I’m putting a business here. It’s called secret pickleball and it’s going to be 99 bucks a month.
I’m going to cap it at 200 members, $20,000 a month. There are 7,700 people within 10 minutes of here that
play pickleball every week. And I just need 200 of them to make this a six figure business. No employees,
24, seven key card access right there. Cameras, bathroom, vending machines already in the next 60
days. We’re adding drywall. We’re painting lines, adding the bathroom back there. If you want to
watch me fail or you want to watch me win follow and I’ll document the whole journey or get the
business plan. Basically you’re standing in this warehouse and it’s, and you’re like, look at this
freaking thing right here, which is how you start all of your videos, which I think is a hilarious
little hook. So can you, uh, add some color to this? So where’s the, what’s the origin of this idea?
How’s this going? Tell me, tell me more about this idea. Yeah. So that shop that I’m in, in the video
is in my back backyard. Basically it’s at the back of my property. Historically, I’ve rented it out to
landscaping businesses for like 20, you live on like a ranch or something. What is this? It’s three acres
and it’s very like, yeah, it’s at the back of my, of my property. And so I was just thinking like,
what is the best and highest use of this property? And have you ever been to a secret pizza in,
I think it’s the Cosmo in Vegas. Yeah. Yeah. I love that place. Yeah. That place does like
9 million a year in pizza and they don’t have a Google profile. They don’t have no website.
Yeah. If people haven’t been there, it’s like five feet wide. It’s like a tidy hallway. Like
in high school, if your locker was like on the side, it’s basically that. And they just sell slices of
pizza at the Cosmo hotel in Vegas. Yes. So I was going for that. Like I call it secret pickleball
and I just thought, okay, I’m going to run some Facebook ads. I’m going to go to my shop. I’m
going to take three videos. I’m going to ABC test them on Facebook ads, instant form,
six mile radius. Sorry. Was your ad a video like this where you’re saying I’m going to build this
here or was it like a mock-up? That was one of the three. Yeah. The one you showed was one of my three
ads. Yeah. And what were the other two? Were they like finished product, like a rendering or what did
you do with the other two? One of them had like an AI, really bad AI image rendering, like overlay for a
split second, but that’s it. I’m just standing in this empty warehouse. And when you say I ran some
Facebook ads, give people a sense of how you do that. Right. Everyone again, I know who does this.
They have a, you know, a certain budget, like, Hey, I’m going to run five, I’m going to spend $500
and I’m looking for maybe this cost per click, or I’m looking for this much net conversion of people
signing up to my wait list or, or they even have a fake checkout. And then they refund people
afterwards saying like, Hey, sorry, this doesn’t actually exist yet. Or, you know, I’m still,
we got delayed, but it’ll be out soon. I refunded you for now, but you know, it’s coming. And they’re
looking for that funnel, the metrics to sort of validate that, Hey, cool. If this works at $500,
I think I’d be able to spend maybe a thousand or $5,000 in order to get my 200 members or, you know,
$50,000 to get my 200 members, whatever it is. Can you explain your method for Facebook ad testing
this? Yeah, for sure. So I used one campaign and then three ad sets and three ads, one video for
each ad set. And I started it at $25 a day per video. So $75 a day total. My ad was a Facebook
instant form asking for name, phone, email. Then after the instant form, it, it forwarded them to a type
platform with 19 questions that are very granular. What is your skill level at pickleball? How often
do you play? How much do you do doubles or singles? Cause all of this is going to determine how many
members I can take on. And the whole, the whole thesis is to be one pickleball court indoors, nice
private air conditioning, uh, that people pay one to $200 a month for. So I don’t want the pros that
play twice a day. I like, it’s a very finite resource. I want people that hardly ever play like the
planet fitness model, except expensive. I want, I just want to have my cake and eat it too.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I knew 5% of Americans play pickleball weekly. And I knew within six miles
of me, there’s 200,000 people. So I needed like, there’s like five to 7,000 people in my TAM, my local
TAM. Right. And I was hoping that I could convert someone for a hundred dollars because my guess is
that the LTV, the lifetime value is going to be about a thousand dollars. But I think it’s actually a lot
more because no one plays pickleball alone. So I get one customer, they’re going to bring two to three
or four. Right. What I learned was I’m converting, like, I don’t, the LTV is still to be determined,
but I’m able to convert new customers at $12 each.
And so how many members does this secret, does this exist now? Like this, I don’t know when you
posted this.
I’m building it out. I’m, I’m literally putting a septic tank in the building right now. Like it’s
being built out, but I’m accepting three orders.
How much is it going to cost you to do this? All right. So you already had the structure there.
How much are you going to put into making a pickleball court to bring this idea to life?
On the low end, 20,000. Realistically, 30 to 40.
That’s it. Wow. I would have guessed it’s more.
Yeah. Well, it has air conditioning. I need to expand the building because I need room for a
bathroom and then I need to add a bathroom. So if I didn’t need a bathroom, it would be much less.
And then I need to paint lines.
So anybody could just Google maps, pickleball court in your area, right? Like wherever you live,
you could Google maps, pickleball. You could just take a map and you could be like,
where is there not space? And then you could go drive them and just see, oh, wow, that one’s kind
of shitty or it’s outdoors. Right. Or this one over here, it’s always overrun. It’s always packed.
And you could literally just map out that, oh, wow. I just need to take an industrial space and
convert it to a private pickleball gym, a membership, right? One court, two court, three
court, whatever. And so the math you’re saying here, are you charging a hundred bucks or what’d
you end up charging? I’m going to end up charging 149. All right. So you’re, so you’re charging 149.
Are you still targeting 200 members or did you find out that that assumption was too high or too low?
It’s, it’s, I can accept around 150 members if I accept the right members.
All right. And so you’re talking about 22,000 a month of top line revenue from this. And you’re
saying it might cost you in this case, 20 grand, 30 grand to build. I think somebody else, let’s just
assume it’s even $75,000. Let’s triple the price to build out because maybe their space needs it or
you’re just being conservative. So you got 22,000 coming in top line. Is there any OPEX here? Do you need
a person there? Is it like, do you have a key membership thing like that? What is your monthly
cost in terms of like, you know, roughly you think utilities, everything else?
Yeah. Uh, key card entry 24 seven online booking system through a third party app cameras, no employees
cleaner that comes there. And I’m going to use the cleaner I use for my house. She’ll go there like
two to four times a week, depending on how dirty it gets insurance, utilities, internet. It’s like,
we’re talking, including cleaning 1500 a month, 2000 a month. All right. So you’re talking about
like, you know, 90% profit margins on this, but let’s be conservative. Let’s even say 80%.
That would be roughly generating about 17 to 18,000 a month in cashflow off of pickleball off of one
pickleball court. Yeah. That’s pretty crazy to me. Yeah. And it’s actually pretty unique. I use deep
research to, to see if other, any other private indoor courts that only have one to two courts,
because there’s a lot of franchises that have 15 courts. And a lot of the haters on Twitter were
saying that like, no one, no one would pay for this because people, they want multiple courts.
They want other people to see them play pickleball. I’m like, dude, nobody wants to be seen playing
pickleball. Well, no, but maybe they just don’t want to wait. Right. You know, they want, right.
They’re not able to get courts. Um, and so there, there are very few of these and, um, anyone,
this is something anyone could do like with some Facebook ads. You don’t need to buy a building or
have a building. You could go rent a building and run some Facebook ads before you even sign a lease.
Like what are we talking about? What are we doing here? All right. Now let’s be realistic. Uh, cause
you know, there’s a lot of people on the internet who will say it’s so good. So easy. Look at this.
The math is the math is math. And where does a business like this actually suck? You’ve done
enough businesses now to know that there is no such thing as these like perfect businesses. So in this
one, realistically, why would this fail? What might you be getting wrong here? Or maybe at least like,
why would the numbers not be as rosy as they sound right now? Yeah. It’s going to be like, uh, customer
support inquiries like that are a lot higher than I thought things breaking the AC going out in July in
Texas, um, zoning issues. Uh, it’s not the type of business where you’re going to have a hard time
finding customers, but pick your problems. There will always be problems. I think it’s going to be
customer support. Um, and you know, getting calls at three in the morning from someone that’s playing
this random game in the middle of the night and the AC went out. What sort of problems do you like to
pick? I would love to not have to worry about customer acquisition and operations. Like I am terrible at
operations. I would much rather try to sell or market something than operate it. So if it’s marketing
heavy and I don’t have an issue finding customers, that’s my business.
And then the operations either being simple or you all floated it to somebody else.
Yeah, exactly.
Give me some of your beliefs here. So what, what, like you do all these random things and you have all these random
ideas, actions come from thoughts, thoughts come from beliefs. And so what are the beliefs that are leading you to do
all these random actions, like starting this pickleball secret pickleball court or going in and, you know,
being like, Bucky should sell online. I’ll do it for them. And now I’m going to do this as a publicity stunt.
Maybe they’ll partner with me. Maybe this work. I don’t know. Maybe it’ll just be a good story and I’ll get sued out of
existence. Like what are some of the beliefs that you have? We talked about one at the front, which is like
focus is overrated. Talk about that one and then give me some of your other ones.
Yeah. I think focus is overrated because compounding doesn’t care. Like the principle of compounding does
not care if we’re working on one thing or a dozen things. As long as we stay in the game, whatever
that game is for us and keep going, compounding is just going to keep going with us. Right? So if you’re
curious about something, like, let’s say you’re, you’ve got a side hustle and it’s going well. And you’re
like, what about this side hustle? Test it. Like answer that question. Now, if you have a side hustle and
it’s like, you’re not sleeping because you’re just cashing all these checks and customers are beating
down your door, you’re not going to be thinking about, Oh, what about this shiny object? Like
you’ve got product market fit. That’s a signal, right? So just chase the signals, chase the curiosities
because you’re going to learn something over here that you’re able to apply over here that no one else
has ever thought of because they weren’t doing these seven other things like you were. So net of net,
I like, if I gun to my head, I think you will be more wealthy if you do one thing,
but you’re more likely to be miserable and not have an enjoyable life.
Yeah. So focus actually does work, but it’s not the only way. And it’s a lot of fun to not focus.
It’s actually what I mean. You have a similar thing. I’m going to read you this. I want you to
give a little take on it. You said, say yes to everything, take on way too much, increase your
capacity for stress and let Parkinson’s law do its job. Most people have no clue what they’re capable of
because they don’t take on too much and they never stress test their life. And you had something called
the restaurant hostess analogy. Can you explain that a little bit?
Yeah. Let’s say you’re a hostess at a Michelin star restaurant in New York, Manhattan. You’re slammed 24
seven. People come in and out, people yelling, whatever. And then you’ve got a hostess in Des Moines,
Iowa in a diner, and they’re usually pretty slow. And then, you know, soccer team pulls up and like,
oh, I table for 15. And she’s like, oh my gosh, table for 15. Oh geez, what do I do?
Like to the woman in New York, like that’s nothing. That’s nothing because that’s her norm. That’s her,
her new baseline. Right? So most people that I talk to are like, oh, I could never run a Facebook ad
campaign because I have to clip my toenails that afternoon. Like what? Like they don’t, like they’re
not doing enough. They, they think that like the barometer is down here and they think people like
Elon Musk are just, he’s an alien. That’s not even realistic. And it’s like, no, he just like took on
way too much. And, and now he’s able to do way more than ever before because the less important things
just kind of fall off the plate. That’s Parkinson’s law. You bite off way more than you can chew.
And if you forget about it, then that’s a signal that it was worth forgetting about.
Yeah. I think that if you ask people, honestly, you said, what percent of your potential are you
tapping into? I think that’s a pretty scary question for most people. Um, because the answer is not going
to be what you would want it to be. Very few people I know, right? Like you almost have to be very low
self-awareness to be like a hundred percent, right? Like the answer is not a hundred percent.
Right. I think David Goggins has said this about when he trains and he says like, you know,
the moment where your brain is ready to quit when it’s over, your body still has 30% left.
Like the brain quits before the body and the brain will stop you as a safety mechanism
when you still have 30% left to give. And I don’t know if the number is right, but I think
directionally he’s correct when it comes to like what you’re physically capable of. And then in terms of
what you’re creatively or ambitiously capable of, I think it’s kind of the same thing. I think it’s
probably even a worse ratio than that. I think most people are tapping into less than 30% of what
they’re capable of doing. And it doesn’t mean you necessarily need to work a hundred hours. I think
it’s just like your capacity to output and to be creative and to go for it and go for it with full
force on the things that you’re trying to go for. Um, and maybe it’s, maybe it is take on an extra
project or maybe it is, but sometimes it’s just go faster. Sometimes it’s just think bigger. And the,
you know, these all sound cliche, but they’re, you know, they are, they are cliche for a reason.
They’ve been around for thousands of years because I think humans tend to have this problem where,
you know, we don’t actually tap into, you know, how fast we can go, how big we can go,
you know, what, what truly going for it looks like without, you know, the fears, doubts,
and hesitations that people have. And so I agree with you. You know, are you,
are you a family guy as well? Like, I guess like you’re doing a bunch of these businesses. Is that
cause you’re, you know, the counter argument is, well, yeah, you’re 21 years old and you don’t have
kids and a mortgage. You know, that would be a way that somebody would maybe try to discredit the amount
of output that you have. Yeah. I mean, I’ve, I’ve got four kids. I had all four kids between the
ages of 23 and 29. And I was building all of these businesses throughout that time. I never missed
dinner. I travel very rarely. I never missed a sporting event and I’m in my office, you know,
from seven to four, give or take working. Sometimes I pop out to hang out with the kids,
but I think it’s important that my kids see me work. Uh, but it’s also obviously important that
I spend time with them. So we go on a lot of vacations, four to six a year. We’ve seen all 50
States. We go all over the world. Uh, you can do both period. Right. I think it’s important for my
kids to see me work. Unfortunately, my work just looks like me talking and laughing with friends.
And so I don’t think they get it. I don’t think that’s acting. Um, what about, um, what about,
you know, you said you’re building your family and you work, let’s say the seven to four,
what are you doing during that seven to four to make those hours count for more than maybe the average
person is doing? So like how, what do you do to have more productivity or more effect in those same
number of hours? Like how do you structure your day? What are some things that you you’ve noticed you do
maybe better or differently than the average, the average entrepreneurial bear?
Yeah. Um, the perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar. Um, I definitely time batch. Like
if I have seven calls that week, I’ll try to put them all in the same afternoon. Um, I think a lot
of people kind of feel insecure about having an open calendar because it’s like, it’s kind of like
a comfort blanket. Like, okay, now I know I’ll be productive today. Right. But when you have
so many ideas, like so many ad campaigns, I want to run or newsletters, I want to write,
like, I don’t have time filling, I don’t have problem filling my time. And so I, I don’t use
any fancy CRM notion or anything. If a tab is open in my browser, it’s a to do list. When I close it,
it’s done. My notes app, a lot of caffeine, uh, admittedly. And I don’t worry about context switching.
I used to really stress like, all right, let’s, we could do this for 30 minutes, do this. Don’t
context switch. Like, I feel like with anything in life, we can evolve to it. We can become a lot
more acclimated to it. And so I’m always context switching always. And I feel, I feel like I’m good
at it because I’ve done it so much. Another one of your beliefs, you said the longer I’m in business,
the more I realize this to be true. If you want to be a billionaire, you got to innovate and focus,
but to be a millionaire, you simply need to copy paste. Don’t even try to copy something
that works and put your own twist on it. No twists, stop twisting, just copy what’s working. And
organically over time, you’ll discover the tweaks on your own, but you don’t have to lead with all
the twists or you’ll just screw it up. Yeah. I think there should be like, there needs to be a school
or something on reverse engineering. Like it is an underrated skill. I’m in like the meta ads library
and the web archive all the time. Let’s say there was this taco restaurant that just in my town,
that had a line around the corner 24 seven and they, all they sold, uh, were steak tacos.
That’s it. And you said, all right, they’ve got more demand than supply. All right. This town could
use another taco shop. All right. I’m going to copy them. I’m going to do it even better. People want
more variety. They want steak and chicken and there’s no drinks. You can’t even get drinks there. Yeah.
I’m going to do this. I’m gonna do that. Every change you make is another variable to like,
to screwing it up. Risk. Risk you value. Yeah. Like you, you’re gonna, you’re, let’s say you copy
them verbatim and you open, you’re going to learn really quickly. Oh, oh, they’re probably using that
as their point of sale and not that. Oh, this is why, because the onions, they have to separate them
from the meat. Oh, like you’re going to learn all these things that are going to force you to have to
change things. But if you do that before, you know, if that copying works or not, you’re just going to
increase the likelihood of screwing it up and thus not being successful.
That’s interesting. You know, Monish Pabrai, who’s come on this podcast a couple of times,
has this phrase, he calls it being a shameless, a shameless cloner. And so he says, you know,
I’m a shameless clone of the Buffett and Munger philosophy. I, you know, I claim to have no,
no good ideas except for one, which is, you know, to copy the good ideas that already exist out there.
If I hear a good idea, I take it on as my own. Right. And he talks about, you know,
the dumbest person in the world is the gas station across the street from a more successful gas
station. He’s like, cause you know, you see that guy and that guy comes out when a customer’s there
and he washes their windows for them and he prices it a certain way. And he’s uses certain bright lights
so that he’s more visible at night. You have to be a real idiot to be across the street, see that guy
doing it. And then for your own stubbornness, not just do those things, implement those best practices.
And so pride. Yeah. Yeah. Pride. And I think there’s like, you know, a version of that in
business. And like you said, you will organically end up putting your own twists on the business,
but you, you know, you bring up an interesting point, which is that baking in all those twists
up front is a bit of unnecessary risk. I think there’s a view that entrepreneurs are risk takers
when actually the risk minimizers and, you know, they’re trying to take as little risk as is necessary,
but, but are willing to take the necessary risks in order to do something unless there’s like,
you know, a big asymmetric reward for it. They’re not going to do it. And so, um, you know, I think
that you’re right. And I think that this is very true for, especially at like the local level and
service level, like it’s not true. If you’re trying to be a founder, go through YC, build the next big
thing, the next breakout app, which is going to be, you know, the next social network, you can’t just
copy Facebook. It’s not going to work, right? The next, uh, the next ride sharing service can’t
just be Uber, right? They do have to innovate. They do have to do self-driving cars like a Waymo or
something like that. So this advice does not apply to people who are playing what I call the business
Olympics, where they’re trying to do the stuff that’s like global greatness, move the world forward,
disrupt a total industry. Yes, you absolutely do need to be innovative there. But in terms of people
who are trying to become financially free, you know, working backwards is not a bad way to go.
I have a very annoying phrase. I say a bunch, which is in my companies, anytime we have run into an
issue and people are bitching and moaning about it, I just say, well, we’re probably not the first
ones to have this problem, right? Because it’s so true. And you’re in an e-com business and suddenly
you have this supply chain problem. Well, guess what? A thousand or a million other e-commerce business
have had that same problem and they figured out a way to solve it. So what did they do? Let’s start
with that. I was talking to actually a friend yesterday who’s, yeah, this guy’s almost a billionaire
billionaire and he’s in the real estate game and he’s just crushed it on real estate on his own.
And now for the first time after 15 years, he’s raising money for his projects. He’d never wanted
to do it. He always wanted to use his own capital, but you know, finally sort of relented and realized,
okay, I could do bigger scale and do more projects. If I, if I raise capital from other people, not just
use my own personal balance sheet. And so I told him, I was like, you know, he’s giving me all his ideas
about how he’s going to raise money. And I’ll go, dude, every real estate guy I know raises money.
Have you first looked at what they did? Like, why are you trying to figure this out on your own?
That’s the hard way. There’s no bonus points for doing this the hard way. Like let’s just start by
reverse engineering what other people do. Like go talk to five to 10 other people who’ve already done
this. See if there’s a common blueprint, go try that and only innovate where needed along the way.
When you run into some bottlenecks or some walls that you hit along the way of trying to implement
that plan, because for most business problems, you can just ask the question, like,
has anybody else ever solved this? And what do they do? And turns out, it’s almost always like,
it’s very common. There’s a common problem. There is a common solution. And we should try that first.
Yeah. Like we, we place our innovation on the wrong thing. We place it on the features and the
benefits when we should be placing it on being innovative about copying how they’re doing what
they’re doing. We had a 3PL and you know, 3PLs, right? And it’s like the worst. Nobody likes your 3PL.
It’s, it’s impossible. And so we saw all the other 3PLs out there when we launched and we’re like,
oh my gosh, they charge for storage and pick and pack and this and that, and they mark up shipping.
These guys are idiots. It’s so confusing. So we set out to like innovate the industry,
simple, flat pricing. And like at the end of that two year experience, like we looked like all the
other 3PLs because we’re like, okay, oh, oh, they charge for storage because some companies go out of
business and then they’re left with this big bill and they don’t, oh, that’s why like, so that’s
another signal is if you see other competitors in your industry and your first thought is like,
they’re so stupid. Why are they doing it this way? Probably for a reason. Like you just haven’t learned
that reason yet.
Especially if they’re successful, right? Don’t copy somebody who’s failing, but if they’re successful,
you can start with that and say, all right, can I do that as well? And you know, the reason I like
this idea is because this is not the only way to win. I spent most of my life playing in the innovation
space and I really love that. It’s super fun to be creative and to come up with the idea that it feels
really satisfying when you’ve, you’re the first to do something. That’s a, I mean, that’s amazing.
I’m very proud of that whenever I’ve tried to do that, but that gets talked about a lot. Cause again,
it sounds super noble and I think that does work, but there are many ways to win. And what I like about
what you’re saying is that it is another way to win. You say, oh, wow, those guys did that gutter
cleaning service using next door and their neighborhood in Massachusetts. I should do that in my
neighborhood in California. Let me start with that. And, and I, and I think that more people
should do that if they want to actually like be successful in, because that is another way to win.
It’s not the only way, but it’s another way. Yeah. It’s the midwit meme all over again. Right. Right.
My, my first business was, yeah, I read about this iPhone repair shop making 30 grand a month.
And I thought I can make 30 grand a month fixing iPhones in my city. Like it’s kind of an ignorant
thought, but it worked and I did, you know, so you gotta, you gotta, you gotta be done. Like I,
like I am. Chris, this is fun, man. I, we still have like half of the doc of other ideas and small
business and like, you know, random businesses that you’ve come across that we could go for. I think
maybe, maybe we do a part two of people like this one, uh, to have Chris back. If you, if you like
Chris, uh, either tweet at me or, uh, put it in the YouTube comments would be best that, you know,
bring them back because I think this is a lot of fun. I really love the little nooks and crannies of the
looking in to find these, you know, stump grinding or the hole in one business or the shipping
container for, for wine tours. Like, you know, this is fun stuff that I think, you know, sometimes on
this podcast, to be honest, we have brilliant people talking about what you can do with AI and
what you could do with XYZ. And that’s great. I love that stuff, but those aren’t episodes I can
send to my sister or my mom because those businesses are kind of out of reach for what
they want to do. Uh, but I think what’s cool about, you know, the businesses you talk about,
you know, your pickleball court, this is stuff that anybody could do. Chris, thanks for coming
on. Maybe give people a shout, uh, shout out your, your Twitter, your podcast, whatever you want people
to go check out. Yeah. Uh, the Kerner office podcast is where I publish three times a week,
spelled like my last name. And it’s on your hat. So that’s right. Never miss an opportunity.
Yes. Always be promoting. That’s right. All right, man. Thanks for coming on. Thanks, Sean.
All right. So when my employees joined Hampton, we have them do a whole bunch of onboarding stuff,
but the most important thing that they do is they go through this thing I made called copy that. Copy
that is a thing that I made that teaches people how to write better. And the reason this is important
is because at work or even just in life, we communicate mostly via text right now, whether
we’re emailing, slacking, blogging, texting, whatever. Most of the ways that we’re communicating
is by the written word. And so I made this thing called copy that that’s guaranteed to make you
write better. You can check it out. Copy that.com. I post every single person who leaves a review,
whether it’s good or bad, I post it on the website. And you’re going to see a trend,
which is that this is a very, very, very simple exercise, something that’s so simple that they
laugh at. They think, how is this going to actually impact us and make us write better?
But I promise you, it does. You got to try it at copy that.com. I guarantee it’s going
to change the way you write. Again, copy that.com.
Episode 717: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talks to Chris Koerner about how to make millions from local side hustles.
—
Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(2:13) Idea: Hole-in-one golf challenge
(12:24) Idea: Bitcoin mining
(16:00) Idea: Garage shelving
(17:18) Idea: Tourist traps for home markets
(20:13) Idea: Toasted tours
(24:56) Idea: Buc-ees snack arbitrage
(38:01) Idea: Pet cremation
(45:29) Idea: b2b stump grinding
(48:13) Idea: Pickleball court
(58:15) Focus is overrated
(59:34) Say yes to everything
(1:05:11) copy-paste millionaires
—
Links:
• Want to scale? Get the Side Hustler’s AI Prompt Database: https://clickhubspot.com/wnd
• The Koerner Office – https://tkopod.com/
—
Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
• Shaan’s weekly email – https://www.shaanpuri.com
• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents.
• Mercury – Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies!
Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC
—
Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth
• Sam’s List – http://samslist.co/
My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano
