The Side Hustle King: “I’m making $8K/DAY from easy businesses”

alright this guy might be the king of side hustle he makes about three million dollars a year off of six or seven different side hustle different streams of income and normally all the advice you here is about focus focus all in on one thing this guy is like mister shiny object syndrome so i love to having monty 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 kinda 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 gonna send to my sister you know my brother because i think they would like to do these businesses i think these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he's gotten where i think he's making eight thousand dollars per day of free cash flow off of these side hustle per day that's pretty crazy so enjoy this episode it's all about the weird crazy side hustle that anybody could do if you just got a little bit of hustle i feel like got the rude to work i know why i could be what i want to put at all in it like a day's off on a road travel never looking back alright what's up we got chris here chris you are a crazy guy you a mad man gotta and one of the reasons i wanted you on here is because most business advice on the internet sounds like this you gotta focus you gotta lock in you gotta grind do you have to just go all in on one thing focus focus focus and you're like the exact opposite you're a dude right you see a shiny object you chase it and you're not a ashamed to say it that's actually your strategy we were talking before this and you're telling me that you have i think started thirty different businesses that crossed over fifty thousand in revenue maybe thirty five and you said you have six different revenue streams right now that each produce over a hundred thousand dollars of cash flow for you and i was the math on some of your numbers and i think basically just on your side hustle you're making like eight thousand dollars a day of cash flow and i think that is amazing i wanna hear what your side hustle are i wanna hear what other side hustle you found because you find these like random simple businesses that are cool i wanna hear which ones do you think are cool that other people couldn't go do for their own side hustle and i wanna 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 alright there here we go look at this freaking thing right here and i see a basically a gulf putting green so like the 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 ten thousand dollars if you hit a hole in one it's a hundred and eleven yards away you get this like plaque if you hit the hole in one and so what 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 is that it yeah it's kind of like think of like un bundling 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 golf has a one in twenty five thousand chance of getting a hole in one on a part three which this is k and and so this company in new zealand it's right off the road on this lake they have announced multiple times that they pay out on average once every two weeks so i can use math to say alright these guys and i know how much they sell balls for it's like forty bucks for twenty five balls or something and they have a sensor in the hole and they have divers go get the balls every couple weeks yeah there's like a scuba diver yeah swimming around the thing 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 five hundred thousand dollars 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 new zealand but it's off the side of the road it's not even like mir golf course or tourist attractions you just think this is just in a random area right now yeah alright so let's say we wanted to do this those brainstorm to run this together and maybe we'll actually do maybe we'll find a a listener to run this for us to make it happen but like we'll make this a mfa k study alright mh so how would we do this in order to make this happen you know quickly like get momentum and then have it actually work have it actually be successful so to me it's all about piggyback right i don't wanna guess where the golfers are like right 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 you go you go to golf course in like after the eighteenth hole there's just like a putting green where you can sell it would be like that okay take your nearest pond put a floating green out there put a tea and have a little ipad with a stand and say here's your ball just like a driving range twenty balls twenty bucks or whatever ten thousand dollars 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 dollar so you yeah you could do this as a service and say we'll install this you're gonna have more net income without doing any work we're gonna take thirty percent of all your revenue as a fee okay i kinda love this idea but you need the water for this floating thing right or what 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 it's like the ocean whatever like i think i'm glad you brought that up because i think the water is a key point like as men we wanna throw rocks in the water yeah just i think usually there's a there's a there's something that it like my testosterone went up like fifteen points just looking at this like i could i could do this right like it if it was literally just like oh like here's just like a whole here's those the nineteenth hole right you could try you could brand oh this is the nineteenth hole just having that obstacle of mother nature there yes there's something to that i mean you went either way so you get it on the green you feel awesome you get a hole in one you win ten thousand dollars 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 gonna get content out of this also you're gonna have your buddy film you or we set up a camera here where you like an instagram worthy story for you know for for this thing how much how much do you say people pay to take a swing at this or you know they buy ten balls or thirty it's like twenty bucks or like thirty five bucks for twenty balls or fifty bucks for forty balls something like that get so you get like twenty to forty hacks at it to do the home yeah that's pretty good every guy thinks he can do it right of course or that today by be and also golf you're already like i don't know what the average spend is of a golf day like of a of a golf outing i don't like 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 there's the tips there's the food there's the the beer along the way there's all this like money spent do to spend an extra forty bucks to have a blast with your buddies at the end or to have a story or to 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 gonna say though that you would do it just on the route to the golf course you know there's a lot of golfer for traffic who's gonna take a roadside stop here and and try to do this do i mean you could do that too like i'm picturing like a freeway with a a lake over to the right and an exit nearby you rent the billboard right above it arrow pointing down ten thousand dollars for a floating hole in one and people can just pull off and do it like it doesn't have to be a golf of 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 right and it's like let's say you have a one in a hundred chance it's a it's a it's an outdoor casino yes exactly exactly what what is a solution and what is ro what is crap what are all these games these are games or 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 hedge and that what you're saying is to do the same thing yeah even like a putting green in a mall or something or or a walk outdoor shopping area let's say you've got like a one in five hundred chance of making a thirty foot putt right so you say hey thirty foot putt you get it we'll give you five hundred bucks and you just do the math and you say alright i'm you you know every three thousand dollars i get i'm gonna pay out five hundred bucks statistically speaking dude it i love this idea if you if you wanna do this idea email me sean at jean 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 will kinda make it a thing because you i think part of it is the branding and the novelty factor and you wanna 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 fifty miles an hour down a road you know what i mean yeah i like the name nineteenth hole that's a good one it's good right we might need to snag that domain name before this goes live alright so i love the hole in one golf course alright give me the next side hustle idea okay well i wanna 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 i'd facebook marketplace has one billion monthly active users just that task crazy and no one's talking about it what are we doing so i've got a i've got a story for you i've got a story bed 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 fencing services is that what you're saying or answering the request for fencing server what are they actually doing yeah like they're just posting hey i put up fences cedar six foot eight dollars per linear foot and then people message him and he goes out and gives a quote and he the seven thousand dollar job like there's nothing paid there's no paid ads this is just one organic post that takes in five minutes and he'll refresh it every couple of dude i don't know if you saw this we did this episode with high schoolers i think it was like a high school versus shark tank i saw that yeah and there was a kid who was i think seventeen eighteen 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 was like window washing or like i was gutter gutter cleaning it was there there there's their highlight it was like gutter cleaning and his entire business model was off of next door so he's like yeah i just started this in my neighborhood where i live i went on next door and i said that i do this and i serviced you know the last year i serviced sixty homes in this neighborhood of six hundred homes or whatever it was for gutter cleaning and that generated i'm making up the numbers now because i don't remember off top of my head but it was like five hundred thousand in revenue and we were like what he's like yeah i just post on there that this is what i do and then it's people in our neighborhood i was so could you post in the next neighborhood he's like 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 just as everybody should do like you know yeah what is my kid doing you what are they teaching you in pre k right now we gotta get after it with this next door you know next door 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 gonna tell me yeah this is this is an outlier example k results not guaranteed but twenty twenty twenty one china had canceled bitcoin mining right twenty twenty one 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 ten thousand dollars so you go type in the name of the model and you see them listed cool but i thought the the hosting price because if you buy a bit bitcoin miner you have to host it at like a data center and it's usually like two hundred bucks a month for the hosting fee so i just posted organically a facebook marketplace bitcoin mining hosting service but instead of putting in the price of the minor which turns people off ten thousand dollars and thousand dollars great yeah i put in the price of the hosting two hundred dollars and then when you click into it in the description it's like it's actually two hundred for hosting here's the cost of the minors i'm not exaggerating that one ad and i had it going on multiple accounts we would refresh it but no paid like no paid did nine point eight million dollars all on facebook marketplace in three months profit like this isn't like you're oh and we spent nine point eight million in ads like right profit that's like the potential and kind of an extreme outlier but i have other more you were just to be clear you were selling minors that you had that you already owned or what were you doing we were pre selling them and then ordering from them china we had a positive cash flow con conversion cycle in additional alright so you went on facebook ads you specifically did the marketplace ads is that right not even ads we were just posting just posting it's just organic posting so 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 did you do that yeah we use vas in multiple facebook accounts and we posted in multiple cities because most people wanna buy from someone local and the funnel was you know va answers 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 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 mh i don't know how to go or i don't trust spending ten thousand dollars on alibaba or all the express and so you would then do that and you'd have a margin what was the rough margin on something like that call it thirty percent thirty five like in high ticket so and this one i'm guessing didn't last in the sense that like you know in twenty twenty five 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 fro ness 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 it like would you do this like are you planning to do this again if the mining market you know gets 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 is chris liked to spend his money on oh man on my family we go in cool vacations and starting more businesses 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 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 ten business owners i hey if i bring you a customer give me three hundred dollars 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 out most most service people most small business owners don't even think this way right oh yeah yeah i mean you could literally build an agency to just post a 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 k office and he has a six figure business just building not shelving but garage shelving on wheels with costco tote like that's it only with organic facebook marketplace post and he net profits hundred and eighty thousand dollars a year that's the whole business right garage shelving on facebook marketplace alright he has a three hundred dollars saw and he goes and buys his two by fours and he 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 ten here and we've probably done two or three so give me give me more alright any idea want you want no any idea you wanna 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 one challenge are you talking about something else different yeah this is a good one so i went you've seen a arrest development i assume of course okay so there's money in the banana stand we all know that i went to first day we with harvard that's what they teach you yes so i went to ba island with my family last year and we went to the banana stand for whatever reason this one street it has like seven banana dance and there's one that's supposedly the best and i shelled out like eight dollars each for these bananas covered in chocolate and nuts and i made a video 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 you do you want nuts or no nuts in banana people worry 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 but exactly i don't i don't remember the exact your girl over here i still your banana the this one little shop that's like three hundred square feet is doing like seven million a year in frozen bananas like and what's the margin on an eight dollar 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 ba bo island for the bananas once i was there i i got them but there are ba islands all over the world and most of them have no banana like so it's this idea isn't just about ben banana it's about taking something really unique and novel maybe it's like the old western tiny photo booths that you see in pigeon forge maybe it's like funnel cake or like the mini donuts that you see in ga berg like take something like that and just test it i'm not saying it's gonna 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 kind of frozen chocolate bananas or is it that in that area on that street it's kinda known for this and you see a line and so you see the line you start doing it like i wonder if that like it's kinda like an organ transplant i wonder if there's like that you know donor reject shares or the 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 the the greatest chance you've had you would have for success is taking specifically a tourist trap and putting it in a different tours 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 i have a friend in in pigeon fortune tennessee that owns an indoor sled facility you can't tell me that wouldn't work in other tourist traps they have the same type of demographic there you know yeah yeah that makes sense okay give me another one how about toasted tours what is this this is a alright this this is a northern california by you this guy took a a forty foot shipping container put it on the back of a semi truck cut out the walls put hand rails on there put tables in their chairs in there and he takes people wine tours it's a party bus but it's not even a bus it's a shipping container that is open air open area 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 crush 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 this first year with like sixty percent margins what i like about some of these is that they are visually viral so you know but the definition of viral vitality people get it wrong people think it's a word mouth word mouth is actually a different thing word mouth is i like this so much i wanna tell my friends about it mh viral is actually more like a sneeze you spread a virus without even wanting to spread it right this was like back when 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 emails if you got tagged in a photo and people can't resist be on somebody put a photo up of me on the internet i must see this and that's how facebook grew early on i was like this this one viral loop and then there's this other types of viral one is like this i'm 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 the hole 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 remark on you're talking about it with people you notice it you wanna do it the act of somebody else doing it made you wanna do 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 dude i i have some really good good examples of visually viral stuff to have you seen that guy that does like he'll mow people's lawns for free please have you soon who is this guy okay this guy out of kansas or something young guy he owned a lawn care business a small kinda of struggling business and one day he sets up his tripod sp b mowing and sb b pressure washing he sets up a tripod in instead youtube channel now right so this guy has forty five million followers across platforms combined forty five million and all he does is he sets up a tripod he puts on a mic he walks up to the door and says hey your long looks like crap mind if i mow it for free what's the catch i publish this to youtube but make money cool and then he mo it for free with a time lapse video visually firearms arms it yeah yes we wanna see the outcome the retention is there so the platforms push like what is it gonna look like when he's done and this guy i mean what is the value of forty five million social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business right abe dude look at this by the way like if you just sort it by popular you know he stacks the thing so there's the visual viral part of before and after which humans wanna complete that they want to know that the solution then you have the sort of novelty surprised factor like oh this guy doing this for free that's interesting why i wanna 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 fake home he cop approaches me while i'm mowing this deserted home and tells me this homeowner stunned at had how wide the sidewalks are right her tears said it all my prayers have been answered so this guy has this he works skill stack where he's got you know the the lawn care this sort of that's one skill that okay he's 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 the how many lawn care guys are really good at content i don't know zero like you know 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 hustle and the ones that you currently have so let's do some of the fun ones the one i met you one on is about buck and so for people who don't know could you explain just how crazy of a business buck is and then the side hustle you created off the back of buck so yeah buck is like your redneck disney gas station they're about half the size of costco there's fifty one locations and they do like sixty to eighty million in revenue per year each and it's just if if you haven't been there there's nothing like it's like a real so the math on that is like three billion dollars in revenue on fifty gas stations yeah yeah what yeah what i've never been doing a buck what what makes a buck so great is it even a gas station or is it just something else with 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 beaver walking around the the cleanest bathrooms you'll ever find there's nothing else like it you just walk in and your your mace from the get go okay before you tell me your side hustle off the back of that what's the quick kinda 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 three billion dollars in revenue on fifty one gas stations they founded like forty years ago this is kind named arch he was called buck 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 and tumble 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 yeah if anybody like i was just on a road trip we drove to tahoe and it's a three three hour drive roughly but there these patches where you need to stop in the middle and the bar is so low for rest 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 asian 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 and that's on those drives and that maybe is like one of the golden insights for them yeah it's just they you walk in and your a captive audience you can buy lunch you can buy gas most people just park at the pump something 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 and hop out alright what is this business you created on top of buck or like your side hustle for buck 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 buck and he was from utah 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 so i go to buck dot com i looked for the shop button and it wasn't there they didn't sell a line anything not food snack shirts anything and i just like i just sat there in silence i felt like capitalism was being murdered like what is why what like 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're running a three p third party logistics business at the time really hard business and we thought we could launch this business for them as like a permission 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 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 etcetera no response just crickets so at that point it's like alright let's take this into our own hands so most people give up there right try to partner most people won't even call cold email but if you do cold email you give up when they don't reply yep exactly so we bought beaver snacks dot com because that's their mascot it was a beaver and i went to thumb pack and i hired a photographer for like two hundred dollars and i i documented all this i have pictures of all this i took my four kids and wife to the nearest buck and my wife and i split up i said you get merch i'll get snacks if it has a buck logo on it buy like i don't want the doritos or the coke it because they white label a bunch of stuff right okay i only want something with a buck logo so we spent like three thousand dollars we had a receipt this long we took it back to the warehouse was the lady like wow what are he 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're bringing 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 beaver snacks dot 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 thirty eight 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 doing and so you weren't afraid because most people try to be laying low doing this because hey we don't have an official you took the opposite approach you're like hey can i use this story to get some attention whether it'd be good or bad is that right yeah because i thought 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 it's gonna be interesting right maybe i have to fill my pantry with snacks like three thousand hours with the snacks and my kids eat in the next seven years we had a guest come commodity and he said you know do what makes the best story women in doubt like when you're at a fork in the road do whichever whichever path will make the best story you chose the path that'll will make the best story here okay so yes and i heard get prior 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 imitate 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 buck i'm a third party reseller and i'm clear about that they really don't have grounds to sue me so i started coal emailing people they loved the story and i started getting on the phone with their reporters and any tips on that so you know i've learned this with with with p r which is that there's p r 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 news came out and some people thought there's gonna 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 av test on his website so he at athena dot com it's like a shower a a a clean shower heads so he was he runs at ab b 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 because it costs more to make it at america but you know here you go you have a choice and the results were something crazy twenty five thousand visits or something like that and there were literally zero checkout on the american product there's 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 gonna show people will buy and 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 forty major publications now he got tons of traffic to the site tons of backlinks his seo went way it was a genius quick acting move on the back of the tariff news when most people were playing defense like me in e comm 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 i get dms all the time from people wanting something from me and ninety eight percent 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 because i wanna post about cool things yeah you know my job is to post interesting things but yes please send it to me so once you realized 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 wanna get buck attention and if i don't then i'm gonna run this business as well as i can oh so you told the reporters that upfront yeah oh okay gotcha but by the way give us the headline because you know we're talking about the titles we haven't mentioned how well it's done can you give us some numbers should 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 two hundred grand in his first thirty days resell buck goods online that was it and so texas monthly reach out to me they're the biggest texas news publication and they were like we love this we're gonna make this a feature story give me everything you can so we talked to we talked to talk and then later that afternoon they're like chris good news buck 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 he's great i'm glad you were able to get a hold of them so i get on the phone with him and he's like listen we actually don't mind what you're doing i don't like the name beaver snacks we're beaver it's kinda confusing i don't like that your colors are yellow we're kinda yellow 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 gonna sign anything but we're not gonna come after you like we will support you and so we did we made those changes and then they link to us what a school last general counsel is that's pretty rare yeah yeah and then they link 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 copycat but on the other hand we have like the biggest seo mode that we could ever hope for so wait how do you skip a step you said their headline was two hundred thousand dollars and thirty days but you didn't say how you got the two hundred thousand dollars and thirty 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 we put everything as in stock 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 to two hundred a thousand the articles initially were just like texas man starts shop to sell buck stuff online correct yeah they've written about a since then but in the beginning it was texas man they called it text pat instead of expat they're like texas man launches online buck store for text pat that was like the big headline then that's how i'll like a a a person from texas who's no longer in texas but misses their stacks but missus yeah and that that was the whole thesis because these buck are in like en 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 bo 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 that was this a flash in the pan or is it still doing well this business has grown twenty to fifty percent per year every single year steady eddie we just we are completely riding on the coat of buck and we are not ashamed to admit that so could you say how about revenue do you guys are doing on this thing we're doing between three and five hundred thousand a month profit with very very little paid out spend and the funny thing is here you go buy it retail right you don't have like a wholesale discount they're not good giving it to you at a cut so you you buy retail and then you just mark it up what ten twenty percent or something what do would do you do we mark it up a hundred percent oh okay because you're like you want twenty if you wanted 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 fifteen twenty percent net margin and that happens to be about a hundred percent markup right that's amazing okay so that's one of your side hustle we said that there was you know like six that were each you know six years i don't know if we get to all six but give me another one so what's another of your side hustle right now they're contributing to your your cash flow so we started a pet cremation business and that's a fun one that one's actually very profitable that's a fun one it is fun free fun for you maybe yeah okay so so explain how'd did you get the idea and then what is it and have it did 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 d w they do as much business as five veterinary clinics and he learned about the industry and how pet cremation has like ninety 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 with there's more dogs than children that's that's like the whole thesis there's more dogs than children only getting crazier and cremation has ninety percent margins most of the operators are sixty 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 and the the the search traffic was high so we launched the business around that thesis so sorry to explain you went to you went to the google's ads keyword tool right that's where you went to to kinda diligence the the the demand for and you found obviously the holy grail low low competition high ticket and what was the third growth or demand like volume high volume low competition high ticket yeah holy grail and so you start one of these and here 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 a little bit about this business i don't i know nothing about the pet cremation business what did you do in the first ninety days to make this business come to life because i like the speed with which you operate we're gonna talk about another one in a second that i think it's like a quick off the ground version of these ideas and you very much are a zero to one kind 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 kinda like side hustle passive income there's nothing passive about you i feel like you are mister 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 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 in the inspiration of parish you actually act on it very quickly and you have you have a high high bias for action so what are the first ninety years ninety years or so days look like when you have a new idea and maybe you could use this one as an example or 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 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 are willing in love stuff i could do from my boxer 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 dud let's move on right but also a lot of the times by the end of the 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 business what did you so the thesis here started with this relationship that my business partner had 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 gonna get you more veterinarian clinics because we're really good at sales okay and then to the vet hey you need to raise your prices you're way too low you're gonna make even more margin working through a middleman believe it or not because we're gonna be we're gonna only do one thing we're gonna pick up pets and we're gonna drop them off and so there was a big conflict of interest interest here because the cremation facility owner was about to lose the 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 middle with this and and actually connecting the two dots the really high volume vet clinic with the cremation 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 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 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 gonna lose some margin on this biggest customer because we're inserting ourselves we're gonna take some of it but we're gonna 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 yeah we we need to be able to do that for to make this work yep and so our thesis was if that the conversation doesn't go well the the business there's no issues right it's eight and an asymmetric bet but if it does then we have you know the the hardest part we have customers in revenue through the door from day one if they're if they're if they agree to this exactly yeah and then you went and tried to recreate that with you know getting fifteen other vendor 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 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 will be very caring and respectful in some cases they don't even have to pay anymore and we'll just beat we'll just pick out 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 competent is is is weak competition right like he's not looking to prove that he's a genius 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 a business with the fax machine to compete against him like yes that actually works i we own a tree turing 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 sump grinding but b to b not stump grinding that goes through homeowners but only the ones that goes through the other treat companies because we own a company and we could see it from the inside so i had a thesis i i hired a virtual assistant and today i would just use a an ai voice agent and i took the city of houston and i scrapped every single treat make business in houston there was about a thousand and i had this virtual assistant call every single one and not tape did they answer did the number work if they did answer say do you use grind stump if yes then would you ever outsource that if yes then how much would you pay so i spent like two hundred dollars getting this rs i i'd i'm not familiar with the tree trimming business surprise surprise so why it does a tree business not also do the stump why is that a separate problem that they don't like to deal with yeah great question so a tree business needs sometimes a bucket truck to get up high and a chainsaw right but that's only half the battle then you gotta 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 gotta pull on a trailer whereas before you don't even need a trailer it's just a whole different system and they gotta go rent it they stand in line they pay three hundred dollars they rent it they put gas in it they drive it back to the job site they grind it then they gotta bring it back and it's like it it eats into their profit and so i thought okay if a tree trimming company could just outsource all of their grinding b to b only is there an opportunity there so the assistant goes she calls everybody she asked and would they be willing to to outsource that and are people just saying yeah yeah we we'd be willing outsource that is that like a can you get that clear of a signal just off of a a va phone call so only twenty two percent of people answered the phone 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 seven dollars 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 okay i like that you did one recently you had this instagram video i'm gonna actually play it here but i love this video for a couple of reasons one just the ideas is fun but the the two like you know your energy and what you're describing here is is pretty great so here i'll love this this is you talking about starting a pickle ball facility freaking thing right here i'm right here in my warehouse slash shop and it is twenty one hundred square feet and i'm putting a business here it's called secret pickle and it's gonna be ninety nine bucks a month i'm on the cap at two hundred members twenty thousand dollars a month there are seventy seven hundred people within ten minutes of here that play pickle ball every week and i just need two hundred of them to make this a six figure business no employees twenty four seven key card access right there cameras bathroom vending machines already in the next sixty days we're adding drywall wall we're painting and lines i'm the bathroom back there if you wanna watch me fail you wanna watch me win follow i'll document the whole journey we'll get the the business plan here basically you're standing into 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 hilarious little hook and so can you add some color to this so where's the what's the origin of this idea how's is 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 twenty live on like a ranch or something but 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 secret pizza in i think it's the cosmo in vegas yeah haven't there yeah i love that place yeah that place does like nine million a year in pizza and they don't have a google pro really 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 pickle ball and i i just thought okay i'm gonna run some facebook ads gonna go to my shop i'm gonna take three videos i'm gonna abc b c to test them on facebook ads instant form six mile radius sorry was your ad a video like this what you're saying i'm gonna build this here yes or was it like a a mock that was one of the three i'm yeah the one you showed was one of my three ads yeah and what what were the other two are they like finished product like a rendering or what what did you do 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 what you say i ran some facebook ads give people a sense of how you do that right everyone in the end i know who does this they have you know a certain budget like hey i'm gonna run five i'm gonna spend five hundred dollars and i'm looking for like maybe this cost per click or i'm looking for this much net conversion of people signing up to my waitlist 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 yeah we got delayed eight 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 to sort of validate that hey cool if this works at five hundred dollars i think i'd be able to spend maybe a thousand or five thousand dollars in order to get my two hundred members or you know fifty thousand dollars to get my two hundred members whatever it is yeah 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 and i started it at twenty five dollars a day per video so seventy five dollars 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 form with nineteen questions that are very granular what is your skill level at pick how often do you play how much do you do doubles or singles because all of this is gonna determine how many members i can take on and the whole the whole thesis is to be one pickle ball court indoors nice private air conditioning that people pay one to two hundred dollars a month for so i don't want the pros that play twice a today i like it's a very finite resource i want people that hardly ever play like the plan of fitness model except expensive so i want you want my cake eat it too yeah yeah yeah but i knew five percent of americans play pickle ball weekly and i knew within six miles of me there's two hundred thousand people so i needed like there's like five to seven thousand 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 lt tv the lifetime value is gonna be about a thousand dollars but i think it's actually a lot more because no one place pickle ball alone so i get one customer they're gonna bring two to three or four right what i learned was i'm converting like i don't the lt tv is still to be determined but i'm able to convert new customers at twelve dollars each and so how many members does this secret does this exist now like this i don't know when you post building it out i'm i'm literally putting a septic tank in the building right now like it's being built but i'm gonna cost you to do this so you already had the structure there how much are you gonna put into making a pickle court to bring this idea to life on the low end twenty thousand realistically thirty to forty that's it wow i would have guessed it's more yeah well it has air conditioning i i need to expand the building because i need room for a bathroom and then i need to add a bathroom so if if i didn't need a bathroom it would be much less they don't need to paint lines so anybody could just google maps pickle ball court in your area right like wherever you live you could under 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 kinda shitty or it's outdoors and right or this one over here it's always overrun 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 a private pickle wall gym a membership right one core two court three court whatever and so the math you're saying here are you charging a hundred bucks or what do you end up charging i'm gonna end up charging one forty nine alright so you're so you're charging one forty nine are you still targeting two hundred members or did you find out that that assumption was too high too low it's it's i can accept around a hundred and fifty members if i accept the right members alright and so you're talking about twenty two thousand a month of top line revenue from this and you're saying it might cost you in this case twenty grand thirty grand to to build i think somebody else let's just assume it's even seventy five thousand dollars let's triple the price mh it's build out because maybe their space needs it or you're just being conservative so you got twenty two thousand coming in top line is there any op x here do you need a person there is it like do you have a key membership thing like that need what is your monthly cost in terms of like you know roughly you think utilities everything else yeah key card entry twenty four seven online booking system through a third party app cameras no employees cleaner that comes there i'm gonna use the cleaner i use for my house she'll go 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 fifteen hundred a month two thousand a month alright so you're talking about like you know ninety percent profit margins on this but let's be conservative let's even say eighty percent mh that would be roughly generating about seventeen to eighteen thousand a month in cash flow off of pickle off of one pickle ball court yeah that's pretty crazy to be yeah and it's actually pretty unique i used deep research to to see if are there any other private indoor courts that only have one to two courts because there's a lot of franchises that have fifteen 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 and play pickle all i'm like dude nobody wants to be seen playing pick no but maybe they just don't wanna wait right yeah know they weren't available they're not able to get courts and so there there are very few of these and anyone this is something anyone could do like with some facebook ads you don't need to buy a building or have a bill you could go rent a building and and run some facebook ads before you even sign a lease like what we're talking about what are we doing here doing that alright now let's be realistic because you know there's a lot of people on the internet who will say building it's so good so easy look at this the math is the math is math 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 gonna be like customer support inquiries like that are a lot higher than i thought breaking the ac going out in july and texas zoning issues it it's not the type of business where you're gonna have a hard time finding customers but pick your problems there all problems i think it's gonna be customer support 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 i would much rather try to sell or market something then 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 offload floated to somebody else yeah exactly give me some of your beliefs here so what what like you do all these random things you have all these random ideas actions come from thoughts thoughts come from beliefs so what are the beliefs that are leading you to do all these random actions like starting this pickle ball secret pickle ball court or going and and you know being like buck should sell online i'll do it for them and now i'm gonna do this as a publicity stunt maybe a partner with you me maybe this is 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 mh talk about that one and then give you some of your other ones yeah i think focus is overrated because compounding doesn't care like the 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 gonna keep going with it 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 this eye 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 gonna 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 curiosity because you're gonna 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 mh 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 yes the focus actually does work but it's not the only way and it's a lot of fun to not focus is actually what i'm hearing you have a similar thing i'm gonna read you this i want you to 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 are 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 you're a hostess at a michelin star restaurant in new york manhattan you're slammed twenty four seven people coming in and out people yell whatever and then you gotta host this in des morn iowa in a diner and they're usually pretty slow and then you know soccer team pulls up and like oh i table for fifteen she's like oh my gosh for fifteen oh jeez what do i do like to 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 talked to like oh i couldn't 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's just like took on way too much and and now he's able to do way more than ever before because the less important thing just kinda fall off the plate that's parkinson's law you you 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 mh 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 because the answer is not gonna be what you would want 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 the cancer is not a hundred percent right i think david go 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 thirty percent left like the brain quits before the body and the brain will stop you as a safety mechanism third when you still have thirty percent left to give and i don't know if the numbers is right but i think directional he's correct when it comes to like what you're physically capable of and then in terms of what you're you know creatively or ambitious 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 thirty percent 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 and maybe it's maybe it is take on an extra project or maybe it is but sometimes it's just go faster sometimes we just think bigger and the you know these all sound cliche but they're yeah they are are cliche for a reason they've been around for thousands 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 hesitation that people have and so i 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 because you're you know the count argument is well you yeah you're twenty one years old and you don't have a kids and a mortgage you 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 twenty three and twenty nine and i was building all these businesses throughout that time i never miss dinner i travel very rarely i never miss 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 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 fifty states we go all over the world 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 i get it i don't think that's what what what about 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 average entrepreneurial bear yeah the perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar i definitely time batch like if i have seven calls that week i'll try to put them all in the same afternoon i think a lot of people kinda feel ins 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 right but when you have so many ideas like so many ad campaigns i wanna run or newsletters i wanna write like i don't have time feeling i i 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 admittedly and i i don't worry about context switching i used to really stress like alright just we could do this for thirty minutes do this don't context switch like i feel like with anything in life we we can evolve to it we can become a lot more acclimated to it and so i'm always context switching always and right 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 long term in business the more i realize this to be true if you wanna be a billionaire you gotta innovate and focus 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 twist 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 twist 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 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 twenty four seven and they all they sold were steak tacos that's it and you said alright they've got more demand than supply alright this town could use another taco shop alright i'm gonna copy them i'm a do it even better people want more variety they want steak and chicken and there's no drinks you can even get drinks there yeah i'm gonna do this i'm gonna do this that every change you make is another variable to like to screw me at a risk risk you yeah like you you're gonna you're let's say you copy them for verbatim and you open you're gonna 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 gonna learn all these things that are gonna force you to have to change things but if you do that before you know if that copying works or not you're just gonna increase the likelihood of of screwing it up and thus not being successful that's interesting you know mon who's come on this podcast couple times has this phrase he calls it being a shameless a shameless clone and so he says you know i'm a shameless clone of the buffett and mu philosophy 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 i take it on is 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 because 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 he's uses a certain bright lights so that he's more visible at night you have to be a idiot to be across the street see that guy doing it and then for your own stubborn ness not just do those things implement those best practices and so pride yeah yeah pride and i 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 twist on the business but you you know you bring up an interesting point which is that baking in all those twists up upfront is a bit of unnecessary risk i think there's a view that entrepreneurs are risk takers when actually the risk minimize and you 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 a big asymmetric reward for it they're not gonna do and so 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 is it's not true if you're trying to be a founder go through yc c build the next big thing the next breakout app which is gonna be you know the next social network you can't just copy facebook is it's not gonna work right the next of the next ride sharing servers can't just be uber right they do have to innovate they do have to do self driving cards like a way mower 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 this stuff that's like global greatness move the world forward disrupt a totally in 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 i have a very annoying phrase i say a bunch is in my companies anytime we have run into an issue and people are bitch pitching 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 in it you're in an e comm business to 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 now i was talking actually a friend yesterday who's yeah this guy's almost a 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 fifteen years he's raising money for his projects it never wanted to do it always wanted to use his own capital but you finally sort of london and realize 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 gonna raise money and i go dude every real estate guy i no 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 ten 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 this 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 three p and you know three p right and it's like the worst nobody likes your three p it's it's impossible and so we saw all the other three deals 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 three p because 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 oh that's why like so that's another signals 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 yeah especially if they're successful right don't copy somebody who's failing but if they're successful you could start with that and say alright can i do that as well 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 with the idea it feels really satisfying when you've you're the first to do something that's i mean that's amazing i'm very proud of that whenever i've tried to do that but it that gets talked about a lot because 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 wanna 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 mid with meme my over again right right my my first was yeah i i read about this iphone repair shop making thirty grand a month and i thought i can make thirty 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 you gotta you gotta you gotta be done like i like i chris this is man i we you still have like half of the dock of other ideas in small business in like you know random businesses that you've come across that we could go for i think maybe maybe we do a part two if people like this one to have chris back if you if you like chris either tweet at me or put it in the youtube comments would be best that you know bring them back because i think this a lot of fun i really love the little nooks and cra of the economy that you go looking in to find these you know dump 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 x y z and that's great i love that stuff but those aren't in episodes i can send to my sister or my mom because those businesses are kind of out of reach for what they wanna do but i i think what's cool about you know the businesses you talk about you know your pickle ball court just the stuff that anybody could do chris thanks for coming on maybe giving people shout shout out your your twitter your podcast whatever you want people to go check out yeah the k office podcast is where i published three times a weeks spelled like my last name and it's on your hat so that's right never miss dot com yes always be promoting that's right alright man thanks for coming on thanks sean i feel like i could rude word i know i could be what i want to from at all in in like a days off on a travel never looking back