The Side Hustle King: "Make $20K+/month without money, luck, or experience"

Free: 200 business ideas with execution plans, tools, and frameworks https://clickhubspot.com/ekfm Episode 811: Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) and Chris Koerner talk about the most overlooked businesses that anyone can start. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:54) IDEA 1: govdeals.com (6:52) IDEA 2: Bring AI to small businesses (14:51) IDEA 3: Snail mail club (19:48) $1B IDEA: Feed Amazon workers (24:38) IDEA 5: Tote rental (29:58) IDEA 6: Wall printer (43:57) IDEA 7: RV Rentals (50:45) Bad Business: Vending Machines — Links: • TKO - https://www.youtube.com/@thekoerneroffice — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — 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 • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'm gonna say one sentence and then you could decide if this episode is for you. If you're the type of person who's got the entrepreneurial itch, you want to do something, you want to start a new business, you want to get that extra five, 10, $15,000 of income coming in every month, but you don't know which idea to do, which idea to start with, maybe you don't even have great ideas. This is the episode for that person. We brought on Chris, he's sort of the side hustle king. He loves to find simple, no money upfront, easy businesses that can pull in cash quickly and then can grow from there. And so Chris came on, he's got about five ideas for us. I think you will love this episode with Chris.

• 0:41Shaan Puri?

  All right, we got Chris Koerner here. You are back because you have an absolute pipeline, an absolute full stack of business ideas at all times. Like, you know, what's the open carry? He's open carry with business ideas. If people haven't seen it, you got a great Instagram channel and YouTube channel podcast as well, where you talk about different business ideas. And so that's what I want to do today.

• 1:09Chris Koerner?

  Dude, I have so many. It's not Friday, but I feel like we need to call this No Filler Friday, because there's no filler today.

• 1:16Shaan Puri?

  All stuff, no fluff. All right. I have a friend who, I want to ask you this question on his behalf. I have a friend who is a real estate agent and he does well. He makes, I think, you know, let's call it $250,000, $300,000 a year. Been doing that for 10 years, but he's bored. And he wants a little more scale. He wants a little more, he doesn't feel a sense of progress, you know, people always want a sense of progress. And so he feels like, you know, it's pretty hard to scale what he's doing there. He's always poking around at, you know, should I buy this vending machine? Should I do this side hustle, pressure washing, whatever it is? Where does your head go as like, look, if I was trying to help you get off the real estate path and maybe have a more entrepreneurial path, what do you, what do you, what do you tell him?

• 1:56Chris Koerner?

  I would tell him to start reselling. Reselling like Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items. So you spend one, 200 bucks, you get what's called a resale certificate, which tells the government, I don't need to pay sales taxes on this because I'm passing it on. A lot of these websites require that number from you in order to sell you liquidation items. There's a website called GovDeals. There's a website called B Stock. On B Stock, you buy anything that people return to Costco. I've done this myself, another business I've done. I bought $7,000 worth of washers and dryers for 250 each on average, and I'm selling them on Facebook Marketplace for 750 to 900 each. It's an amazing business because you don't need a warehouse.

• 2:40Chris Koerner?

  You don't need a bunch of space, just a garage, and it's all sold on Facebook Marketplace.

• 2:45Shaan Puri?

  I'm on B Stock right now, and I see that I can buy two pallets of men's gray Champion sweatpants, joggers for $48,000 in New Jersey.

• 2:59Chris Koerner?

  Sounds great.

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to get 1,200 units. What's the price of 48,000? I get 1,200 units, 40 bucks? That's not even a deal. What's going on? Oh, wait, wait. Oh, no, that's the retail value.

• 3:09Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, okay.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  I can buy this for seven grand, so I can buy it for five bucks a pop. And it's saying that the standard retail value of this would be 40 bucks a pop. And so you're saying you're going to go buy, you probably wouldn't buy sweatpants, my guess, but what would you be looking for product category wise?

• 3:25Chris Koerner?

  I like large appliances and outdoor furniture. I think those are both great, especially this time of year. Not electronics, because there's a lot of variables back to binary outcomes. There's a lot of things that can break. There's a lot of testing involved. I don't really like clothing personally, but this is a great business because you don't need to find customers. You just list them on Facebook Marketplace. All your customers are there. You have to buy right. And you have to fulfill, but the harder part is finding customers and you don't have to do that here.

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  So I'm looking at, I get 58 used refrigerators, buying them for $34 a unit. $34 a unit for a refrigerator.

• 4:03Chris Koerner?

  Telling you.

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  What's going on here? I might do this much. I might actually go do this just on sheer principle of $34 fridge. I have to find 58 of them though. And then, you know, you go to Facebook Marketplace and you go look at what the fridges are selling for. You look at the volume, you look at how much the price one is, you're trying to find.

• 4:21Chris Koerner?

  Before you buy them.

• 4:22Shaan Puri?

  Of course. Before I buy, I'm going to go check out and you're looking for probably two signals. One is a price signal. So what is the going rate for these things? And then how do you get a sense of, is this going to move? You watch it for a week and you see if they move, you message the seller, what do you do?

• 4:37Chris Koerner?

  You literally list it before you even bid on it.

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  And then you just go to people just to understand.

• 4:43Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. And then if they're like, all right, I'm ready to come get it. You're like, actually I haven't bought it yet, you know? Which was fine. You're being honest, but you're, you're getting signals ish. You're getting signals from the market before you take any risk that there's enough demand for it at a specific price point.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook Marketplace. My sister is moving right now and they're listing like random. Here's a hat. Here's just an old hat. Like it's just a baseball cap and the guy drove 45 minutes to get a free cap. Put the, it's like, here's one drawer, not even a cabinet, here's just a drawer. So I'm going to go pay $7 for the drawer. It's unbelievable. The amount of like liquidity in the Facebook Marketplace. It's unreal.

• 5:26Chris Koerner?

  Well, and but the annoying thing is listing all this stuff. It's tedious, but I just saw this TikTok of a guy that used Claude cowork. He just took pictures of all his stuff. He uploaded it to Claude. He said, here's my stuff, research what it costs, list it. Talk to people on my behalf. Here's my calendar availability. I don't care when, as long as it's open, have people come to my house and pick it up. And he did. He sold every, like he was moving. He needed to sell everything in his house and Claude sold all of it for us. So like that, even the tedious part is now fixable.

• 5:58Shaan Puri?

  That's kind of amazing. Actually, you could tell it to do the whole thing. You could say, hey, go look on B stock. Create fake listings, decide which one is going to be the most profitable for me and then run the whole process. There's no reason that, you know, Claude Bot couldn't do that.

• 6:10Chris Koerner?

  No, totally.

• 6:12Shaan Puri?

  Four pallets of denim onesies we could get. Three dol- two dollars.

• 6:17Chris Koerner?

  Sounds like a deal.

• 6:18Shaan Puri?

  Um, all right. This is a very addictive website. This is, this is very fun. I gotta get off B stock right now, otherwise I will lose my afternoon. Hey, real quick, if you like this episode of Chris and you want more, he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas, just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast. And he's giving it away for free. So if you just go to the QR code that's on the screen or the link in the description below, you can get his database of ideas. And these are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work. And this guy's done it before. He's built a bunch of businesses that are successful. So go ahead, take advantage of this resource. And now back to this episode. All right. So reselling is where you tell them to start. And you'd say, that's the right place to start? Because what? You're optimizing for low risk? Cause that's a lot of work.

• 7:01Chris Koerner?

  Yeah.

• 7:02Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know if I kind of implied, I was like, my friend's kind of looking for a magic bullet. Like just one thing I do that's going to work really well. Uh, you know, if I told him, hey, get out there and hustle. He's like, well, I know that. I've been, I've been trying to avoid that part. Um, what's, what's a business that's like, um, more of a business and less of a garage sailing side hustle?

• 7:22Chris Koerner?

  Mm hmm. Probably implementing AI into small businesses. Like we talked about this last time. We might've talked about it the first time and we'll be talking about it in years because, I mean, there's 800,000 management consultants in the United States. That's management, right? Almost a million people that are just management consultants. In five years, Sean, how many people will be AI consultants? Like to small, medium, large, any size business?

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. Every single small business, well, not even small business, large and small business, is right now AI curious, AI hungry, and AI clueless at the same time.

• 8:00Chris Koerner?

  Mm hmm.

• 8:00Shaan Puri?

  Those three things, if you're curious and you, they're certain that it can help. They don't really know how. They don't have the time. And they're, you know, they're not as tech forward as somebody who just eats and sprees and stuff like that. That combination creates a ton of opportunities, but that's that's a still pretty broad picture.

• 8:20Chris Koerner?

  Uh huh.

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  What's a more focused point of attack for something like that?

• 8:24Chris Koerner?

  You go to your Chamber of Commerce and offer to give a free tutorial on AI. Teach them what Claude is.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  Seminar.

• 8:31Chris Koerner?

  Prompting skills. Yeah, for free vibe coding. And then you've got your buddy in the back with a clipboard and you sign people up for AI audits. And so you use the the free seminar to get one foot in the door. You get the free audit to get your second foot in the door. And then by that point, you're an AI god to them. You're a genius and you're the only AI genius that that business owner knows.

• 8:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:52Chris Koerner?

  At that point, it's take my money.

• 8:54Shaan Puri?

  Have you found a repeatable, a repeatable use case where you're like, okay, maybe it's for one class of business like dentists or lawyers or restaurants or whatever. Or it's just a repeatable solution. So it's like, oh, pretty much every business needs this thing that AI can do for them. Right? You know, when, when the internet started, every business kind of needed a website, but it was just starting from scratch. Nobody had a website by definition at the beginning. And over time, everybody ended up getting a website. So you knew that like just making the website was like the killer app. It was like the killer service that everyone would need once. And then you could sell it to them. You could maintain it for them and do whatever for them, you know, going for it. Okay, what's the equivalent of that today in today's world with AI?

• 9:35Chris Koerner?

  Voice agents.

• 9:36Shaan Puri?

  Pick up the phone, answer the phone for you.

• 9:38Chris Koerner?

  Yep. And then chatbots second, kind of a distant second. Voice agents are really good. The latency is not that bad at all anymore because the LLMs are smart enough to only be trained on your content, your data. So it's not like anytime a customer says, what are your operating hours? It doesn't need to go like read the whole training manual.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:58Chris Koerner?

  Right? It just answers immediately. So AI voice agents are like the best foot in the door for small businesses right now.

• 10:04Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. That's cool. I like that. It would be very interesting to hear from people who have done this. If you, if you've done this, I reach out because everybody's kind of talked about this idea of like help businesses implementing AI. I think Mark Cuban is like, hey, if you're a kid, you know, if you want to be successful, go help businesses employ. I think it's like obvious. However, I haven't heard a ton of stories. Maybe this is just me not being kind of looking for it, but I haven't heard a ton of stories of the specifics around this. And I'm always curious more about the specifics than the general. So for example, I saw this AI tool that was for med spas. And they were like, look, every med spa offers, you know, I'm a little out of my depth here, but every bed spa is basically offering some sort of beauty

• 10:46Shaan Puri?

  service to somebody. So somebody's going to come in, they look one way, they want to look another way, and they have to believe that the med spa will get them from A to B. That's all a bed spa has to do for them. And so what people were trying to do was figure out how can you through, whether it's a voice agent, it's a tool on your website, a quiz, upload your photo, and I will show you the result of this product on your face, right? Like something like that. That's a pretty killer sales app for every med spa. And so going into med spas specifically and just being like, cool, here's what we're gonna do. We're gonna make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward. And we're gonna build basically like a little sales tool for you that lives on your website that gives the customer the confidence that when they,

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  you know, it opens up their webcam and it scans and then it says, hey, we think you're a good candidate for XYZ. Here's some photos of before and afters, right? Like whatever it is, some version of that. And if you can go get, you know, 500 to 1,000 med spas, because they all have the same need, right? Like they're not, this is a universal need for all 10,000 of them. And you go get 500 or 1,000, let's just use 1,000, 1,000 med spas that are gonna be paying you, you know, 50, 100 bucks a month. So now you're doing 50, 100,000 dollars a month off of, you know, finding one specific pain point for one specific type of business where off the shelf AI can actually solve their problem. They're just not aware of it and don't know how to implement it.

• 12:07Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, so I can think of two specific examples. One of them for medium sized businesses and one for small businesses. The medium sized business guy I interviewed on my podcast, Kerner Office, last week. This dude was name dropped by Amjad, the CEO founder of Replit on the Joe Rogan Show. So Amjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like, this guy, John Cheney, he, he started a business selling like custom vibe coded Replit apps into medium sized businesses for 15,000 dollars. 15 upfront and then like, I think 1500 per month or something like that for like one call a month. He did 2.5 million his first year, 60% net margins. This year, he's going to do 8 million with 50% net margins.

• 12:50Chris Koerner?

  All built on Replit, just vibe coding custom apps for medium sized businesses.

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  What's a custom app for a medium sized business? What does that even mean?

• 12:57Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, so let's say you're an HVAC business with, you know, 30 crews. He's going to build you your own CRM. So you're not paying like Service Titan or any of the others $4,000 a month. So immediately you get to capture the savings and you get to have your own CRM just for you. So it's not even like AI enabled. It's just a replacement CRM that's built exactly as you have always wanted it. Or like an accounting practice that builds you a communication tool or something to send P&Ls and balance sheets to all of your customers in an automated way every month. So that's like a higher ticket, medium business, medium sized business. And then another guy, he does this for barber shops. He charges 2,500 bucks upfront and then 250 a month.

• 13:42Chris Koerner?

  That's kind of like a good ratio. 10% of whatever you charge upfront, you charge per month. And his pitch to the barber shops are like, hey, you're cutting hair all day, but people need to make appointments. So I'm just going to make you an AI voice agent that will answer the phone as you, for you. If they ask if you're an agent, an AI agent, it will tell them, but it won't be upfront and say upfront, you know, that I'm an agent.

• 14:04Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 14:04Chris Koerner?

  So it will say, all right, what time? It's just synced with your calendar and it books slots for you. So you will make more money and never talk on the phone again. That's the pitch. Make more money, never talk on the phone again. Don't lose trust with your customers because that's like the big pushback from business owners. It's, I don't want a robot answering my phone. And it's like, dude, your customers need their problem solved. Whether it's a robot or you or a text, they need their hair cut. So yeah, net of net, they would prefer to talk to you, but they also just need a haircut. And so they don't mind. So he just copies and pastes the same voice agent over and over because they're all barber shops. He just swaps out the name and the operating hours and makes the calendar connection. He's good to go.

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  I like that. I like the barber. I like the barber voice agent.

• 14:52Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, why not?

• 14:53Shaan Puri?

  Were there any other fun ideas that you had on the list that you wanted to talk about? What's a snail mail club?

• 14:58Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, so that is, that's kind of blowing up. That snail mail subscription businesses are what like physical box subscription businesses were five to 10 years ago. It's literally just a letter with a stamp and you can send your own photography, your own poetry, letters. My wife started one where she sends recipes. It's like a cookbook club and she sends recipes to women and they cook it. And every month has a theme, Greece, Italy, or whatever. These are exploding right now, mostly driven by organic TikTok videos.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  So, sorry, sorry. Explain. So your title of this video is she makes $1,000 a day sending letters. Who? Who is making and how is she making a thousand dollars?

• 15:40Chris Koerner?

  Her name's Hannah. She owns The Tiny Post and she writes like a letter, like a heartfelt letter about her, her life, whatever she finds important. And then she puts stickers in there and like handmade artwork, nothing AI generated, like it's all real, it's all physical. And that's an important part. And she just like is documenting her life and sending things that are important to her to, I think, like six to 7,000 women every single month. And they love it. And her churn is like 2%.

• 16:10Shaan Puri?

  Beautiful pink envelopes. Nailed it. And she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters?

• 16:21Chris Koerner?

  Yes, 10 bucks a month, 70% gross margins, 30% net. And she went from zero to 60K MRR in seven months through like six TikTok videos, all organic, no paid ad spend.

• 16:35Shaan Puri?

  What is happening? What? 10 bucks a month? That's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah? Why are people doing this? What is going on?

• 16:44Chris Koerner?

  We just, we're sick of emails. Like we want like-

• 16:46Shaan Puri?

  More mail? Who wants more mail?

• 16:48Chris Koerner?

  We want mail. We want to go to the mailbox and open a surprise. We don't want junk mail. This is for us and it's special and it's physical and real. And that's all the rage right now.

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  This is unbelievable. Sorry, I'm just looking through her stuff. This is unreal. While the US Postal Service commented on her video saying, great video, mind if we repost and use it?

• 17:08Shaan Puri?

  That's crazy. Okay.

• 17:10Chris Koerner?

  You're keeping us in business.

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  How did she get the people to do it? She had a big following or no?

• 17:15Chris Koerner?

  No, she didn't. She just posted TikTok videos about what she was doing. Like, her most viral video was a hidden camera in the kitchen as she explained to her husband what this business was that she was starting. So he was like, not getting it. He's like an MBA finance guy and he's like, you want to send letters? And like, that video got 2 million views and brought her like her first 1,500 customers. All organic.

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Okay, this is pretty crazy. So you said people are doing this? This is like a trend now?

• 17:45Chris Koerner?

  It is, dude. I, so my wife and I, and a friend, we put on a nonprofit farmer's market for kids just last Saturday. And I was out there like taking videos of these kids' businesses. And one of the seven-year-old girls and her four-year-old sister had their own Snail Mail subscription business. And there was a QR code to a Shopify site and they like draw pictures by hand and send them out for 10 bucks a month. Like, it's incredible.

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  Wow. You know, I've always wanted something like this for kids. Like, you know, kids have, kids create so much art, right? And like, it'd be cool if someone like cared about their art or like, you know, they got something back. And so I was wondering, like, is there some sort of pen pal mechanism that the parent would pay so that the kids could kind of like stuff the envelope with their art that they made that week or that month? Send it out and then they receive some sort of like either message back, video back, or a letter back, or something back where it's like, you know, oh my God, I loved it, you know, whatever, something from someone, somewhere. Whether it's kids sending to kids, or it's kids sending to like old people. I don't know, I didn't know what the mechanism was. But I feel like there should be something like this for kids' art because kids generate so much art and their excitement

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  when someone's excited about their art is like so tangible, so heartwarming. That as a parent, I would gladly pay 10 bucks a month for my kids to feel like they had their little like, their version of their Etsy store for their own art. You know what I mean?

• 19:07Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, no, I love that. That should be a thing. There's something that's kind of similar where you can mail in all of your kids artwork to a woman. And she will like basically lay it all out on a canvas and make it like a a super large mural of your kids artwork that's permanent.

• 19:23Shaan Puri?

  So you get one back.

• 19:23Chris Koerner?

  Send the whole canvas back to you.

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's a cool idea. I like that. That's another type of thing where it's like these heartwarming visual businesses that just could pop on TikTok. And you just keep, you know, TikTok becomes your customer acquisition funnel for the, for things like that. Today's episode is brought to you by HubSpot. Did you know that most businesses only use 20% of their data? That's like reading a book, but then tearing out four fifths of the pages. Point is you miss a lot. And unless you're using HubSpot, the customer platform that gives you access to the data you need to grow your business, the insights that are trapped in emails, call logs, transcripts, all that unstructured data makes all the difference because when you know more, you grow more. And so if you want to read the whole book, instead of just reading part of it, visit hubspot.com.

• 20:06Shaan Puri?

  So, um, you know, you've given a bunch of small stuff and small, I mean, in a like, in a positive way, which is like quick, easy to start, accessible, affordable, doesn't take a ton. I'm curious, do you have any ideas that are on the other side of the spectrum, maybe a little more complicated or a little harder start? But wow, the opportunity is, is large from, from your perspective.

• 20:28Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. So did I ever tell you about the time where I, I got a job at Amazon a few years ago?

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  No, you did not.

• 20:33Chris Koerner?

  As a pick pack shipper to spy on them.

• 20:36Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So you go to the warehouse?

• 20:38Chris Koerner?

  Yep. So I owned at the time, a third party logistics business and I wanted to learn how Amazon did it. And so I went and got a job. I stood in line, you know, 15 bucks an hour. They trained me how to drive a forklift and I loved it. I ate it up. I like in the trainings, everyone else was like half asleep and I'm like, okay, what, what about this? And like my manager was like, oh, you're going to be a manager here. You're management material. And the whole time I'm like, dude, I'm like a secret spy, but. It I walked away with an idea that I think could be a billion dollar idea. And that's providing food to the three or four million Amazon. It doesn't have to be Amazon, but Amazon warehouse workers. There are no food options.

• 21:20Chris Koerner?

  These warehouses and distribution centers are usually kind of out in the middle of nowhere. There might be like a, you know, a McDonald's or something. They have like a cafeteria with vending machines, but it's all garbage food. And I thought like, man, if I were to start like partner with a catering business and put a flyer with a QR code on every car during every shift. And just have them, because they all have like the same lunch break.

• 21:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:47Chris Koerner?

  Basically, they could preorder food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone. 10 bucks a pop. There's thousands of employees per warehouse. This is something that would take some logistics. It would take some funding, but someone's going to win here. I it's not like one that I'm passionate about, that I'm about to do.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  Hard to do.

• 22:06Chris Koerner?

  But it's one that I think someone will do. Yeah.

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  That's interesting. So like, where's, what's an example? Where's like the Amazon warehouse? Where's the one that you went to? Was it out? Was it like this? Did you see the problem when you were there?

• 22:18Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. Yeah, that's how I got it. It was in like, like Irving or something, Irving, Texas. But there's like 32 Amazon warehouses in Dallas Fort Worth alone. Like, and they're, they're as big as like three to six Costcos each. So there's no shortage of demand and it could be manufacturing. It could be other types of warehouses.

• 22:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I wonder like if you could just even brand it as like the whatever eight dollar lunch club or some shit like that. Right? And it's basically cool. You sign up for this and you're going to get an eight dollar lunch every day of, and you just tick the box. You know, what did you want today? Yeah, we have two options, three options each day. And, and you know, I've actually seen a couple of companies that are doing really well with. So there's a lot of people trying to do robotic food production, but food production is really, really hard. Right? So like. Stores like Sweetgreen and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls, but every bowl, every salad at Sweetgreen, there's like a, there's like more combinations of what could be in that salad than particles in the universe type of deal, right? Cause it's like every, every ingredient can be mixed and matched.

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  It's very difficult to, to arrange for this and then you have to constantly keep all the ingredients stocked inside the machines. It's like a pretty tricky thing to do. But there's a company that was providing these robots to the large companies that do like school lunches, prison lunches, corporate cafes, basically where you, or like the grab and go options at grocery stores, where there's gonna be like five things in the, in the little like refrigerator tray. You just grab and go and they're, they're sealed with like a thing. For those, you're basically just scooping the same ingredient into 4,000 trays and that's the food prep. And so it's way, it's like a way more solvable problem because the robot just literally needs to be able to scoop the same portion into the same thing,

• 24:03Shaan Puri?

  3,000 times in a row without getting tired. Well, that's actually what robots are good at. And so they've been doing pretty well with getting these robots into these um, large batch meal prep kitchens. And so I wonder if you could basically do the same thing, but for the, the Amazon side, right? Like you use these warehouses as your, as your end customer. And you're saying, cool, I can basically, because I'm doing, you know, 2,000 of the same meal, I can actually have a highly automated, you know, ghost kitchen here that's, that's doing the work.

• 24:34Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, I think you could still do both. Like I could see one Amazon warehouse using both options. Like the, the warm meal, you know, delivered from somewhere else and then that as well.

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:44Chris Koerner?

  I would love to see someone just print a bunch of flyers, put one on each car with a QR code to a Stripe link. And, you know, have a menu there and just see how many people pay. And then, you know, if you don't start the business, just refund them all. But you could do that, you know, with a few hours and 30 bucks in paper. Like I'm just, I, I love experiments like that. Like what would happen? Like how many people could, could I convert with only one flyer? All right, I'm gonna go, let's go tote rentals. Sean, do you know what a tote rental is?

• 25:15Shaan Puri?

  Tote as in like a tote bag?

• 25:18Chris Koerner?

  Uh, kinda like a tote rental box, plastic box.

• 25:21Shaan Puri?

  Oh, okay. It's like the moving boxes that are like the hard plastic square moving boxes that stack on top of each other. Got it?

• 25:30Chris Koerner?

  This is a Google Trends of tote rental as a search term over the last five years.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  We are spiking. What, what's, uh, what's the trend that I'm missing out on here?

• 25:39Chris Koerner?

  Okay, here's what we're talking about. So ironically, everyone has these cardboard boxes from Amazon, but we all also don't have them at hand when we go to move, move house to house. And so tote rentals as a service is a thing. One tote rental, um, basically replaces 400 cardboard boxes over its lifetime. So you've got an eco angle. Um, it's, it's like an asset that you pay 20 bucks for, and it just pays for itself over and over and over. You can start the business for a thousand bucks. You work your way in to real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can gift to their clients when they sell a home or buy a home. So it's like a good like moving in or moving out gift from a Realtor to a, to a homeowner.

• 26:24Chris Koerner?

  And it's, it's different than like an edible arrangements or something generic. So homeowners rent these, you drop them off, they pack all their crap in it, then you pick them up later. And you basically pay off the thing in your third or fourth rental. And after that, it's pure profit less any like labor or gas or more time.

• 26:41Shaan Puri?

  We, oh man, the OGs will know this. Many years ago, we talked about a business that was doing this on the podcast. I'm gonna get all this wrong now because it's been a long time. But I believe there was some story where it's like in New York, somebody had basically bought, you know, a couple thousand dollars worth of these boxes. They're renting them out, the boxes pay for themselves after two months. And then basically became, you know, it's the, you know, small version of a rental property, right? You're renting out equipment, but the beautiful thing about these is. High need. People don't want to own them. There's like no desire to really own these. People need them in the moment to move. You can have them be super branded and so it's it can become like a walking billboard or you could literally even sell the ad space on them.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  And then their equipment that even though they get kind of battered and bruised, it's sort of expected. So you don't need mint condition boxes in order to make this thing work. Uh, but I'm saying boxes, but you said you call these totes tote rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this? So what's the, what, what's the story here?

• 27:43Chris Koerner?

  I do. I know a guy in, uh, Fort Wayne, Indiana, of all places. There's like a hundred thousand people there. And he started going through real estate agents. He bought these for himself for a move. And he, I think what he did was he brought lunch to like a Keller Williams office or something and said, hey, these are tote rentals. They're growing like crazy. Your clients want them. We're going to give you some for free.

• 28:05Shaan Puri?

  Totes on loan is dominating Google. It's got the first five listings.

• 28:08Chris Koerner?

  But that's him.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  But then there is, there is a, you know, smarter moves tote rentals.com. That's at the bottom of the page. So I don't know. We'll see.

• 28:15Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, he's totes on loan. I just looked it up.

• 28:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. So totes on loan.

• 28:19Chris Koerner?

  He's crushing it.

• 28:20Shaan Puri?

  And let's give him a shout.

• 28:21Chris Koerner?

  Yes. His name is David Stillson.

• 28:23Shaan Puri?

  All right. So David is out here, 2024, and you said he went to the real estate office. He's using them for distribution initially. And, uh, okay. So you get 30 boxes for a hundred bucks to help with your move.

• 28:38Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. So that's what he does. He sells like packages based on the number of totes that they, that they get. And he's doing a few, few grand a month?

• 28:45Shaan Puri?

  So a few grand a month. And this is, do you think this is, hey, this, this is the type of business that's great? Just side income, but going all in on it. Maybe the juice isn't worth the squeeze or you think, no, no, no, it's just a matter of time till that's 15K, 20K a month.

• 29:00Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, I think it's, it's one of those businesses that's great as either or. It's a perfect side hustle because you can keep your full-time job. It's only a few hours a week. What I love about it compared to other like rental businesses, like a bounce house rental businesses. With that, those things are freaking heavy. You got to roll it up. You got to lug it out there. You have to set up the bounce house. You often have to leave someone there to babysit to make sure kids don't break a leg. And it's just a pain, but these you just drop it off on the driveway and you come back and get it. So very, very low time investment.

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right. Top rentals and why is this exploding on Google trends right now? Why, why would this be going up? Is it, you know, moving is not going up. It's just the rental aspect or why, why do you think it's spiking right now?

• 29:43Chris Koerner?

  You know, it's like with any of these business ideas, they just have their moment. Like five, 10 years ago, it was pressure washing, like roof cleaning, stuff like that. It's just having its moment and I think it's a matter of education. Like people, most people would prefer to use this than to have like mis-sized or misshapen cardboard boxes that collapsed. They've got to go like scrounge them behind a grocery store, beg their friends in a Facebook group or like save their Amazon boxes. Like it's just a better experience when you consider everything.

• 30:12Shaan Puri?

  Oh dude, if you are using cardboard boxes and you're moving and the just the amount of setup of each box, taping of each box, labeling it's, it's ridiculous. You're wasting half your time there. All right. I like it. What else you got? What's next?

• 30:24Chris Koerner?

  All right, so let's go.

• 30:28Chris Koerner?

  Let's go wall printer. What do you know about wall printers, Sean?

• 30:32Shaan Puri?

  Wall printer as in?

• 30:33Chris Koerner?

  Yeah.

• 30:34Shaan Puri?

  You gotta give me a few more words.

• 30:35Chris Koerner?

  All right. So picture like a 3D printer, except it's on rollers and you bring it inside a retail store and it prints like images on a wall, like a large mural or something like that. All you do is upload a JPEG.

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  I'm watching it now. So you're, it's literally like a laser printer, but it's instead of printing on a piece of paper, it's, it can go like a full, full wall of a building is printing. Like this video you have here is like a, it's like a corporate office where it's printing a timeline, history of the, of the company on a wall. Like you would walk into the office and see that. Okay. So I see this. Tell me more.

• 31:13Chris Koerner?

  So any business could use one of these. Let's say it's a boring corporate office. They want to spice it up a little bit. Let's say it's a restaurant, like what restaurant wouldn't want an inside or an outside mural? Like any business, you name it, any business. And like the tote rentals, this is kind of an educational thing. They didn't know it was possible, or they were paying some local artist like three grand to paint this because it took them like a month, right? This replaces the local artist, sorry, local artist, not sorry. But a five foot eight wall took your cost. If you own the printer, which you can get them for between 4,000 and 16,000. You can finance them for like 50 to 150 bucks a month.

• 31:51Chris Koerner?

  A five foot, a five by eight foot wall costs you $8 in ink and you can sell for that for about $800. So literal 99% gross margin. You don't need a retail space. You don't need a warehouse. You can keep it in your garage, in your closet at home. You just roll up, upload the JPG, start printing, pick it back up.

• 32:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, okay, AI is telling me that these units cost 35 to 65,000. I'm guessing those are more heavy duty, heavy duty versions of these?

• 32:20Chris Koerner?

  It depends on how high you want to go. That's kind of the differentiator and on the quality of the machine. If you want to go like, if you're doing like a high school gym.

• 32:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:28Chris Koerner?

  Right, putting like the basketball team on there, you're going to need a more expensive one. But that's a smaller market.

• 32:33Shaan Puri?

  And I'm guessing you can also upcharge for the graphic design that you're going to print because they may not have it and you could be like, oh yeah, we will lay this out. We'll give you the free, we'll do all the designs for free. You just pay us to print it, right? Like, and you could even maybe like do a little bit of spec work with that because you might have templates. Like in this example you showed, it's a corporate timeline. Cool, that's a template. Oh, values, that's a template. The menu, that's a template, whatever, like our about us founding history, that's a template. And you just basically say, hey, look, I put your brand in this. And you get to kind of automate that now with AI. So you know, just go to their website, pull their about us, put it in our about us template, send it to them as like a, hey, you know, I was at your store, I thought you could put, you know,

• 33:17Shaan Puri?

  interested in putting this on the wall. Is it outbound, you think for this? Or you think there's going to be a lot of enough inbound? I don't think people know wall printing as a.

• 33:26Chris Koerner?

  Right.

• 33:26Shaan Puri?

  As a thing to go search for even.

• 33:29Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, that's kind of like tote rentals. I mean, you want me to show you the Google Trends on this? I mean, in this, in the spirit of a full disclosure here, there's the Google Trends.

• 33:40Shaan Puri?

  People are searching for this.

• 33:42Chris Koerner?

  They are. This is very visual. It's like, it's like pressure washing was five, 10 years ago. It's fun to watch. You get the time lapse of it and it's perfect for short form video. So that's what you do. You just post organically. You go print some walls for free just to get the content. I mean, it's $8 for the ink and then you just post it and then whatever organic pieces of content pop off, you just push paid ad spend behind that to a simple lead form and you close it.

• 34:11Shaan Puri?

  You're able to be able to do like, if you, I mean, just to get this business off the ground, go knock on 100 doors, go to 100 businesses and see what you can do. You can take a binder of your portfolio, do a couple for free, then do a binder portfolio and see what you can get going or, or, you know, even before you do your own, just take, you know, images off Instagram of what other people did and go around and say, hey, would you want this? Just to even learn, like, where is the market? Like, is there one type of business that's particularly into this? You know, is it real estate agents? Is it, you know, whatever, whatever it is. If you go to their website, if you go to the wallprinter.com, the company that sells these machines, the headline, which is just so funny to me, it

• 34:52Shaan Puri?

  just says, instead of saying anything about their product, the headline when you hit the website says, "Those who never take risks will work, always work for someone who has." Basically, just tempting you to become an entrepreneur. This is sort of shaming you into becoming an entrepreneur, which honestly is always a bit of a red flag in my book. Anytime somebody's like really aggressive on the, you know, be your own boss, selling you that, selling you that dream. I'm always a little skeptical of that, but, okay, this is interesting. How did you first find this wall printing niche?

• 35:25Chris Koerner?

  I saw an Instagram video and honestly, this is one of those video, this is one of those businesses where you don't need to buy the thing and then like hope and pray that you find customers. You can start posting other people's videos and say stuff like, "This is what wall printers can do," instead of, "This is what my wall printer did." Or you just go post to Facebook Marketplace, generate some leads, throw up an AI-generated website, get some leads. Then, once you have like some bookings or something, then You go finance a machine.

• 35:53Shaan Puri?

  So you've given out two ideas so far that I would call like white belt businesses. Is this the way, basically businesses you can do as a starter business that doesn't take ton of capital, ton of time, ton of skill. You don't need a big network and you can do these to get to that kind of two grand a month, five grand a month, 10 grand a month and start getting that money rolling in and really get in the game as an entrepreneur. Is that, is that the right way to frame the ideas that you're drawn to or that you like to share about like what, give me like draw a box.

• 36:23Chris Koerner?

  Yeah.

• 36:23Shaan Puri?

  What is the, what is the label of the box of these ideas?

• 36:27Chris Koerner?

  So all of my ideas are run through like my own personal filter, which is I've started over 80 businesses and I've learned what I hate, what I love, what most people hate, what most people would probably love. And I like to call those binary outcomes, binary outcome businesses. And that is a business that is just simple. Like you put X in and you get out Y. A custom home building business is not that. A home cleaning business is not that. I want a business where it's just a very clear defined value that you add. And then you get paid and you get a five star review. That's like one of my filters. The other one, which I, I heavily biased towards is approachability and affordability. Last time I was on the pod, I was talking about like some backyard businesses. If you remember like.

• 37:10Shaan Puri?

  In, in, in ground trampoline. Yeah.

• 37:13Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. And I talked about another business, which was like the guy dollhouses kits.

• 37:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 37:18Chris Koerner?

  Right. Remember that one?

• 37:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:19Chris Koerner?

  And, and Sam was like, dude, that, that backyard idea sucks, but like, I like the dollhouse idea, but like, if I were to run this, you can tell I've been thinking about this in the shower, like every day since, right? This is like my moment and Sam's not even here to defend himself. When I run that through my filter, it's like, how many people could launch a guy dollhouse subscription business in the world and be successful? And how approachable is that? That's like a

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  Count on one hand, yeah.

• 37:45Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, exactly. And like, it's not approachable. It's pretty complex, actually, like designs and materials and shipping and all that.

• 37:52Shaan Puri?

  Branding, educating the market, all of it, yeah.

• 37:54Chris Koerner?

  Right. Whereas any dude can go rent an excavator on Facebook Marketplace and start digging a hole for a trampoline. So it's like, not sexy, but it's much more approachable. And there could be three guys in every thirty thousand, you know, person, city, owning that same business, which is what I love about it.

• 38:10Shaan Puri?

  So you like, so when you said binary businesses and you said, you know, home cleaning business, not one, luxury home builders, not one. But digging holes for trampolines, in-ground trampolines is one. Explain the difference there. Well, why, what, why should one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category, but the second category has some additional benefits? What, what's the difference?

• 38:31Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. So I'll just, I'll speak to two businesses that I've actually started and not a hypothetical business like the trampoline one. Binary outcome. So we, I own a tree trimming business and it's the best business in the world because we need to do one of two things. That's it. We need to remove a tree entirely, or we need to trim a tree, like specific branches. So we show up. This one, cool. We cut it down. We throw it in the truck, five-star review, fifteen hundred bucks, right? We've never got less than a five-star review, ever. And it's not because we're amazing operators. It's just because it's simple.

• 39:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:10Chris Koerner?

  Conversely, I've owned a house cleaning business. And it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck. We were going through real estate agents because we thought, hey, they have a lot of surface area that they're, they're touching and talking to a lot of homeowners on a daily basis, so they can refer out all these jobs. And then we had to get ten ninety-nines, all these house cleaners, because we didn't want employees. And so we were finding these super unreliable house cleaners. They had a vast array of equipment. They would always show up late. And sometimes the realtor would inspect the house, sometimes the homeowner would. They had varying degrees of quality and preferences. And one would say, hey, there's a hair on my floor. And the other one like, didn't care. It was just,

• 39:52Chris Koerner?

  it was a recipe for one-star reviews and for low margins and for people not showing up. And it was complex, but it like, a complex business is fine if the juice is worth the squeeze and the margins are there, or it's high ticket, but it didn't have any of those things. So.

• 40:07Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, most people get tripped up with a business like the tree trimming business where they say, "Okay, yeah, I was listening to this podcast, guy talked about tree trimming, it made sense." Yeah, I go, we go, we trim the trees, we get 1,500 bucks, what's not to love? That's awesome. And, you know, reality will hit as soon as I go start, you know, Sean's, you know, treesandtrims.com, go buy the domain, I'm ready. You know, I figure out how to, I go watch a couple of videos on trimming trees and then no customers, right? And so you always have this like bottleneck of, I think for most people, they don't really understand how to get their first 10, 100 customers to start getting the momentum that is required in order to get going in a business. And they sort of have all these false starts

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  because they have an idea, they get really excited, they spend a bunch of time on the idea, but not time acquiring customers. So the, the sort of perceived investment goes up and up and up and up and up, but they're not getting any, getting any ground yet. And then when they can't really figure out how to get any sales or customers, you know, the excitement fades around the idea and they're on to the next one. And I've seen this pattern over and over again in people in my life who want to be entrepreneurial, but don't quite make it happen. And so what is your method? Or, you know, let's take the tree trimming example, let's say I'm now in a different city than you are, right? I'm in, I'm over in Denver and let's say I'm in Denver and I want to start this business. How do I use my time early on to get that initial momentum?

• 41:35Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. So let's boil down business. There's two tasks that any business owner needs to do. They need to find customers, they need to fulfill customers. That's it. Like, it's not like I need to get an LLC, I need to make, like, you need to find customers and fulfill them. And guess what? Net of net, all things considered, it's harder to find customers than fulfill them.

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:54Chris Koerner?

  That's the harder thing. So do the harder thing first. Before you buy a wall printer, before you buy a chainsaw, before you even find a crew that you're going to sub out all the chainsaw work to, find customers, try to find customers or learn about how to acquire customers in any niche. Cause if you can learn Facebook ads, then you can find customers in an e-comm business or in a tree trimming business. So spend time upfront trying to find customers, not like learning how to cut and like, if you shouldn't cut an oak tree in February, and we learned that the hard way, right? There's like disease and stuff. Don't care or worry about any of that stuff. Go to Facebook Marketplace and post, I own a tree, show me business, I can trim your tree. See if anything happens. If it doesn't, then like feel it out. How are you still feeling

• 42:36Chris Koerner?

  about this? Still enthused? Cool. Then like learn some Facebook ads or post to Facebook groups or like do X, Y, or Z number of things until you get some people that are raising their hands that aren't your mom or your sibling and saying, I want you to trim my tree. Now it's like, okay, now I gotta figure out how to fulfill.

• 42:53Shaan Puri?

  So rather than the kind of scattershot, because I could put up flyers and I can go to Facebook groups and Marketplace and Craigslist and I can run Facebook ads and Google Ads and Yelp and I can do all those things. What worked for you with the tree trimming business?

• 43:05Chris Koerner?

  It was, well, it's funny because it's like, I like to say the efficacy of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan. Okay. So what works in this month may never work again. It may never work until, you know, the next year during the same month because it's seasonal. You just never know. So what worked to find our first customers was posting organically to Facebook Marketplace, even though Facebook doesn't want you to post for services.

• 43:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:32Chris Koerner?

  You have to kind of find some tricky ways around that. That worked, but we couldn't scale it. But we didn't need to scale it because then we started using Facebook ads with 15 second vertical videos. And then that worked. But what really scaled for us is referrals through real estate agents, landlords, and property managers. That's like our big three. And we just get referrals and we send them gifts and we follow up with them every month. And every time there's a storm, we get ahead of it before. And then afterwards, we say, hey, can we help? Like referrals is our 80/20, but it took us all kinds of other methods until we got to that point.

• 44:06Shaan Puri?

  Can you give us a sense, how successful is this tree trimming business that you have?

• 44:10Chris Koerner?

  Yeah. So we do mid six figures a year in revenue and about half of that in net profit.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  And you're in one market or?

• 44:17Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, just one market, Dallas Fort Worth.

• 44:20Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay, amazing.

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank.

• 45:08Shaan Puri?

  Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A. Members FDIC.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  Let's do another one. What's another fun, interesting business that, business idea you have?

• 45:19Chris Koerner?

  So this is another one that I've actually done. This is a great summer business. RV rentals as a service. Okay. So you got three types of RVs. Class A, which is like a big tour bus looking thing, right? Very intimidating for most people. Class B, which is like a converted Sprinter van, right? Van hashtag van life. And then class C, which is a, like a motor home, right? It's like the vehicle and the, the home combined. And then you've got like pull behind trailers. So usually in most markets, a class C, a motor home is the way to go. And so there's a few platforms, RV share and outdoorsy being the biggest. That's like the Uber and Lyft of the space. These are great because you can finance them.

• 46:03Chris Koerner?

  And I'm not advocating you should, but you can finance them for 20 to 30 years. Cause they're treated like a home. And so a $40,000 classy RV will cost you like between 250 and 600 bucks a month. And you rent these things out for 150 to 400 bucks a night. And in many markets, people are fully booked. They're 40 to 80% booked and they pay for themselves in the first year or two. So. The thesis is that the average RV owner really only uses their RV for five to 15 nights a year. And so, you know, it just doesn't make good financial sense for people to buy an RV. But to be on the business end of it, to buy one and use it occasionally for your

• 46:44Chris Koerner?

  family, block off your own dates, and then list it on these marketplaces that are happy to bring you customers, it's a beautiful business. I've owned this business.

• 46:53Shaan Puri?

  And what's the trick? Is it you gotta be near like these national parks? Or like, is like, is location the key variable? What's the key variable? Like, what's the difference between 30% occupancy and 80 to 90% occupancy for these?

• 47:05Chris Koerner?

  It's supply and demand based on your unit type. So in some markets, you're gonna have a lot more demand for pull behind trailers because everyone has a truck and they're all going to Coachella or something, right? In other markets, there's more demand for Class B or for Class C. So there's a very simple way to gauge what your supply and demand is. And I actually, I love this idea. And I got my MBA like six years ago, and obviously I'm a terrible student, so I was never paying attention. And I was researching this idea in the back of the class. And here's exactly what I did. And this works for Airbnb, it works for any like, you know, sharing platform. So I would act as if I were a consumer on

• 47:48Chris Koerner?

  RVshare or Outdoorsy, and I would say, all right, I want to book them for this weekend for three nights for a Class C. And then it would say 47 results. And then I would say, all right, one year from now, exact same weekend, one year from now, three nights, Class CRV. So all the same filters, but the dates were a year from now. And instead of 47 results, it would say like 470 results. So it's like, interesting. All right. Because no one's booking a year out. I just want to know what the supply is, and what the like the market occupancy is. So if those numbers were true, it's like, wow, they're 90, 90% booked for this unit. Let's do the same search for the same dates, but with Class B. 13 results this weekend, 20 results a year from now. It's like, oh, okay.

• 48:33Chris Koerner?

  Class A. And then I just made a Google Sheet of all these things. And I did this for like two hours in the back of my class. And at the end of it, I was like, in my local market, which is north Dallas, Fort Worth suburbs, it was screaming to me, class CRV, it's gotta have like six to nine people, yadda. And we don't live near national parks like Texas is, does not have good state or national parks. It's just people want a machine. So I went so far as to reach out to these platforms and said, hey, I just did this research. Here's my Google Sheet. Does this vibe with what your research shows? Because they see it all. And they want me to buy units to rent them out on their platform. So they reached out and they're like, how did you figure this out? This is exactly matching, like what our research shows. People

• 49:15Chris Koerner?

  just need to buy class CRVs. I was like, I just ran searches on your website. So, all that said, anyone, anyone could do this in any market to find out like where the supply and the demand is. And then just best principles apply. It's just take good pictures, good description, be hyper responsive, and you'll win.

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's actually pretty clever, the kind of looking a year out versus the current, current availability in order to figure out the, how much booking, how much the total supply is booked. Because you would just rather be in an environment where there's just a lot of demand, right? And you can also look at reviews and you could do other things like that. But like you said, that, that works for Airbnb, that works for RV share, that works for any kind of like sharing economy type of service.

• 49:59Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, it works on Turo. I did it with like a Cybertruck and learned like, holy crap, there's way too many Cybertrucks on Turo. It's just not a good investment. But this is a great business because it's a perfect side hustle. Like if you want an RV for your family, you can have one for free. Right. Like, there's your, there's your clipperable moment. It's a free RV, and you get paid. What I don't like about this business is the messy middle. Like, you either need to own one RV and kind of do this a little bit on the side to make some extra money, or you need to own 10 plus, and then just outsource everything, hire a person, like, yeah, go to like an RV rental or an RV storage lot, you know, spend 150 bucks a month to keep them not on your house and set up systems, take YouTube videos so people can

• 50:44Chris Koerner?

  know like how to clean it, how to check in, how to check out. Like, the worst thing you could do here is own like two to four of them, because your life is not, it's not fun.

• 50:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses, which is the juice is not really worth the squeeze. I, I, there's a reason I called them the sort of white belt businesses and that's not meant to be derogatory. What it means is it's a, you need a great, you need a starting point as an entrepreneur. Everybody starts a sunburn. And, um, you know, if you start off saying, I'm going to build Tesla, unless you are truly, truly special and gifted and unique, but guess what? Even Elon didn't start with Tesla, right? He started with a much simpler business before that. Um, and so, you know, Warren Buffett was, you know, selling, uh, he's putting arcade machine, uh, games in, uh, barber shops. Like, you know, everybody starts somewhere. And in doing that, you learn a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about generating demand, about operations, about hiring, about

• 51:37Shaan Puri?

  finance. You, you learn in this like kind of safe sandbox and it's simple enough that you actually get started versus trying to go for the perfect business. You really, you really don't even get in the game is what I've, what I've seen from most people. And so I do like the idea of white belt businesses, but however, most of them, almost by definition, are pretty bad businesses to own. And, um, and you end up working a ton. You kind of like build yourself a job is, is what happens, I think in most cases, and that's in the success scenario. Of course there's outliers, but I just wanted to say that out loud. Now I'm curious from your point of view, what are the businesses that you see people talk about as if they're good businesses, but you're like, dude, I wouldn't touch that with a 10 foot pole?

• 52:17Chris Koerner?

  Well, oftentimes there are businesses and niches that are like really good to sell high ticket courses around. And so it makes it seem on the surface like this is a great business when really it's like people are just making a lot of money selling you the idea that it's a great business. And there are exceptions to this, but I think one business that people wrongly assume is passive is vending machines. Like I've, I can't tell you how many people I've heard say like, I just, it's just a few vending machines and just extra thousand bucks a month, just passive, just make-

• 52:47Shaan Puri?

  It sounds passive.

• 52:48Chris Koerner?

  It's not passive.

• 52:48Shaan Puri?

  Sounds passive.

• 52:49Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, sure. It's just not, you know, those vending machines break and the credit card readers break and you have to refill them and your, if it's, if snack and drink, they go bad, you have to swap them out.

• 53:01Shaan Puri?

  Is anything truly passive by that definition?

• 53:03Chris Koerner?

  No.

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  Right?

• 53:04Chris Koerner?

  No, no, that's just one that it has the perception of being passive and it being amazing. And it, I think it is net of net, a good business. It's just not nearly as good as a lot of people are selling you the idea on.

• 53:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, for me, there's like the, I think your test of how many people are trying to sell you high-ticket courses and how sleazy do they look is the best proxy you can sort of, I don't even need to see the underlying business. I could just tell from the, from the landing page of the person who's trying to convince me it's a great business. And so, you know, there's these turnkey Amazon FBA businesses. And of course, you could build a great Amazon business. Many people do. But so I'm not saying there's not outliers in any of these. But man, that's a brutal business to try to go into is to build these like turnkey generic Amazon FBA businesses, YouTube faceless channels, most drop shipping stuff. Like, you know, all this is like, anything that, anything that is around stock

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  trading, or any kind of trading strategy or trading courses, like, you know, literally run away.

• 54:06Chris Koerner?

  Yeah, I'm, speaking of Amazon FBA, there's, there are a few guys that went to federal prison over selling high-ticket FBA courses. So that's public record.

• 54:14Shaan Puri?

  Because of what? What was that? What put them in jail, though?

• 54:17Chris Koerner?

  They promised guaranteed returns. And in addition, which that's enough to get you in trouble with the SEC. In addition to that, I believe at least one of them was just a Ponzi scheme. They were just taking money and just buying cars with it.

• 54:32Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. Well, Chris, always good having you on, man. Shout out your podcast. Where should people find you?

• 54:38Chris Koerner?

  The Kerner Office. That's K O E R N E R T K O pod.com.

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  All right, man. Thanks for coming on.

• 54:43Chris Koerner?

  All right. Thanks, Sean.

• 54:56Sam Parr?

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