The Side Hustle King: 11 Easy Businesses Anyone Can Start

24:48I don't know. I don't care. Right. Right. But another thing, perfume vending machines started in Dubai. Now they're everywhere. Okay. And what's this one that you're referring to? This manicure thing? Yeah. I mean, they're in airports in dubai and like outside of nightclubs and you just stick your hand in there and it gives you a manicure so it's a little it looks like a printer almost so it's like you basically put your hand in the robot printer and you get a manicure uh is it cheaper is it faster what's the like kind of core edge that this has over uh you know going to like a nail traditional nail salon yeah it's like a one-third the price and a lot faster all right that's interesting by the way speaking of have you guys seen risbot what's that i'm gonna chat you up what's a risbot all right so you've seen like tesla's like humanoid robot sam i think you invested in figure um you know people like the next big thing is basically these artificial intelligence super cutting edge robots.

25:53Well, somebody made RizBot and it's going super viral on TikTok right now. So what this robot does, basically it runs up to a human, and the run is hilarious that the robot does, and then it'll stop in front of a girl and then it'll put out its hand to kiss their hand and then it'll, from its audio, from its speakers, it'll start playing romantic music and this person in public, this woman, is just like, what's happening right now? What's the what's the outcome of this the owner is like sick i have no idea my robot just i was gonna reach you the views on their last 10 videos 37 million 15 million 8 million 19 million 18 million my robot just seduced a lady it's just this funny lovable robot that wears a little like cowboy hat and he runs around like trying to like spit game at at people it's it's amazing it's just this amazing viral thing that's happening like i think i think that what's gonna happen here is that you're going to have like before you have the humanoid robots that can like do warehouse work and like assemble cars on the assembly line you're going to have basically like pet robot you're going to have just like a goofy robot that's kind of fun and like a little party trick that you can make like that doesn't have it has like you know one one hundredth of the functionality but can make you know a hundred million dollars you know off of an idea like that dude do you guys want to see a sick robot i have nothing to do with this company i just think it's cool go to matic robots.com so n-a-t-i-c okay yeah let me tell you the story i met this guy and uh i just thought his robot looked awesome so i started dming him and i got one and it's basically like a 12 or 11 hundred dollar rumba but it vacuums and it mops your house but there's a bunch of like really like nifty features on there and this is only like cool if you're into gadgets but it looks you know how rumba like you'll hear it like bumping into shit because that's how it like tells if it's like it It uses cameras and it maps out your house.

27:50But it has all these tiny features. When I got it and I turned it on, the battery was fully charged and it said, Hello, Parr family. I'm here to clean for you. It was like... In a British accent. Yeah, these little tiny features. But the guy who started this company, he's been working on this for eight years. And he raised a bunch of money and he's just been in the lab now for eight or nine years. And after eight or nine years of tinkering, his goal was to build the perfect Roomba. And he has it. I think, after like nine years of working on this, and it's finally for sale. And I thought it was really cool.

28:23Chris, what do you think? I'm thinking of how I could monetize it. Well, by selling a$1 ,200 vacuum, I think that's... No, no, come on. They know how I can... Yeah, I would go to cleaning businesses and rent it out to them for$100 a month, and they show up to a house to clean it, and they could just hit play, then they could do everything else, save an hour on every cleaning. Dude, imagine if you hired a cleaner, and they showed up, and then they just put their Roomba down, pushed play and walked away or they just sit on their phone for like two hours it'd be amazing listen up the old playbook is slowing you down ai broke the funnel loop marketing fixes it it's a new era for marketers ai is capturing search traffic channels are fragmented and generating leads feels less predictable than ever before hubspot's loop marketing playbook will guide you through this unprecedented disruption it's the system your marketing teams should use to move faster, connect deeper, and grow smarter.

29:16The modern growth playbook for the AI era. Built by HubSpot, designed for today's marketer. Get the Loop Marketing Playbook at hubspot.com slash loop dash marketing to find out more and leave your competition behind. All right, back to the pod. What other ideas you got? This is a Sam idea. Is this the one that says dollhouses for men, parentheses, Sam will love it. Yeah, that's the one. What's this idea? Should we watch it? Yeah, let's watch the video.

30:10business plan here yeah i'm sold so it's basically all right so uh we're watching this video it's basically it's exactly how it sounds you are literally building a home like framing it with like the drywall and everything else and this guy is crazy he's using a proper nail gun and you're building a very real life replica of a house i'm in this sounds awesome i spend my time doing this with engines like when when my wife's pregnant we like you know you can't like do too much you kind of like kind of sit around a lot. We got into Legos and now we like to build like replica V8 engines. It's a very nerdy thing, but it's kind of like what we like to do instead of watching TV.

30:46This seems so much better. I would love to build a house. Is this a company that's making this or is this like a hobbyist? This guy just did it. Wow. Yeah, you're right. Because this is basically like, you know, people who love to play, you know, flight simulator. And it's like, oh, you're playing a video game. They're like, this is not a video game. Like I'm flying this plane right now for real. It's like, it is so realistic that it like moves into another category. And it seems like that's what this is, right? So like, instead of like Lego or like oversimplification, this is almost like just miniature complexity.

31:20So it's like, no, this is like as real as the real deal, but just on a small scale, we don't have to actually do all the like the true work. And so it's like this like escape, it's this whole new category, basically. does this video have a lot of when this guy posted this does have a lot of like organic traction like people like yeah i want this oh yeah and that video that you just watched of mine got like 20 million views like there's demand for this yeah that's cool so you would basically just create these as kits and then the sales process is just to do this over and over again like you just make content of you building more and more elaborate you know elaborate or funny or like hey I'm going to like make the house from full house.

32:01So it's like, yeah, that's the tick tock content. It could be a subscription too. Yeah. Just buy the kit and, and make the thing like be, be a man, but kind of not for real. Yeah. Yeah. It's called be a man. Yeah. Yeah. This is pretty cool. There's a store near my house. It's called tiny dollhouse.com and you walk in and it is tiny doll houses, but it is the most meticulously made dolls and doll houses that I have ever seen so for example instead of a doll house they'll have like a store a replica store and like the little bags of Lay's potato chips are like hand painted or like uh you know like the Reese's peanut butter cups that you can buy at the counter and like each human being or doll is like a perfect like reenactment of like whatever period it's supposed to be a replica of and as everyone listening it's one of those things where you're like like oh it's so weird you're into that whatever everyone who sees this is like this is amazing this is so cool i get it now i'm not going to buy my daughter a three thousand dollar dollhouse but you'd buy one for yourself but i'd buy one for myself i earned the money this is crazy i mean do the police just like oh there's a murder oh let's just stop by the tiny dollhouse because those are the creeps who are definitely behind all these murders Yeah, like if you walk in, you automatically join a watch list.

33:28Yeah, you should. We're not saying you did it, but we're saying you thought about it. Yeah. That's the point of a watch list, which is you haven't yet, but maybe you will. And you definitely sign one of those when you walk in. Okay, I like this business. This one, Sam, you got to give it a strong score on the Sam scale. So I think I would give it a seven or eight. this is hard. Have you guys ever put together a complicated Lego set? It's amazing how they think of all this stuff. Doing the directions for something like this is so freaking hard. But I do think you could charge$1 ,000 plus for it.

34:08So yeah, it's pretty cool. Yeah, I like because the hardest part of any business is how are you going to get customers? I think that's unless you're doing a hard tech startup where it's like, we're going to try to create a robot or a machine that does something that no machine has ever done before. Like that's one class of business where the hard part is, can you make science fiction a reality? For most businesses, the hard part is, great, how am I going to get customers? And I think the sort of amateur approach is always like, oh, this product is cool. I think I would like to make and sell that product.

34:41And it's like, cool. You know that most of your life, 90 % of your life is going to be spent just doing the marketing to try to get customers for the thing. And what I like about this is that you can work backwards from the content that would go viral. Like this is content that would go viral repeatedly and that will be your sales engine to sell your kits. Is this a huge business? No, but could you basically have, you know, three SKUs and charge, you know, a thousand dollars per each one of these kits and just get this like hobbyist market that other people have, you know, sort of ignored or overlooked?

35:12Yeah, I definitely think you could do that. I think, and you could do it with just viral content. I mean, really any of these ideas you could film yourself doing and sell, right? Digging out in ground pools, porch pumpkins. What would you do for this guvdeals.com? So there are these liquidation marketplaces where you can buy Costco returns and everything that the TSA confiscates, you can buy for like pennies on the dollar. Well, Chris, you wrote good headlines. You should start with the headline. So the headline here you wrote was how to make a thousand dollars a day selling TSA liquidation items.

35:44Yeah. Okay. You have my attention. So tell me more. Yeah. So, I mean, you go through the TSA and they take your pocket knife and then they give it to this website, it sounds like a nonprofit. It's not a nonprofit. It just has the word governor. It's very much a.com and they sell this crap. And then you're in the liquidation game. You buy pallets worth of crap and then you split it up and sell it on Facebook marketplace. So if I go to govdeals.com, this is where you go buy the stuff, right? So what should I click? You go, you go by category here or - I'll tell you what to do. Yeah. So the other website that does this is bstock bstock.com they have like a contract with costco to sell all of their part of the government by the way who who is like gov deals who the heck's making this and how do they get the inventory some freaking dude that has a friend at the government i have no idea but the the alpha here is setting filters for your local area and finding things that are too big too expensive to ship right like old police cars or something um and i've been on this website by the way to try and buy and school bus a humvee i wanted to buy like you could buy like military equipment yeah i've definitely been on this site okay so i'm looking near me and um let's see i gotta i gotta refrigerate a vaccine refrigerator an electric scooter uh what am i looking for what's the what are the needles in the haystack that i really want here Chris?

37:10Well, what you should do and can do is build an agent, right? Like just a vibe code, an agent that finds items for sale according to your filters, right? Like let's say under$3 ,000 within a hundred miles of your zip code. And then it just posts them all for sale on Facebook marketplace at a set markup, call it like 80%. And so you just list all these things on Facebook marketplace and whatever just starts taking off, getting a ton of hits and inquiries, then you actually go spend the money to buy the thing. Gotcha. Okay, okay. So you're just going to relist all of these things. Yeah. And then basically ship on demand.

37:45You sort of drop ship the government confiscated items. Yep. Dude, this is fantastic. I'm looking at B-Stock. B-Stock.com has raised$80 million from a PE firm and they do something like$200 million a year in sales. I want to shop on this. I love going on eBay and looking for stuff. This is really cool. There's a 2020 McLaren for$150 ,000, Sam, right now. On B-Stock or on GovDeals? On GovDeals. Dude, if it's on GovDeals, that means it was repossessed or used in a crime. So it's got a good story to it. Look, GTA 6 is not out yet. This is the closest thing you can get to it. Have you guys heard of 260SampleSales.com?

38:27No, what is that? So 260SampleSales.com. So basically, do you guys know how TJ Maxx... The tagline says, IYKY, if you know, you know. I don't know. In fact, I don't know. Should I just leave the site? Is that the headline? That's like the Google description. That's obnoxious.

38:48So, 260 sample sales. So, I think it's in Miami, New York, and LA. And so, you know how TJ Maxx, what they do is they convince Nike or whatever to give them last year's stuff. The stuff that didn't sell. and they don't want to put in their store because they don't want to look bad, whatever. These guys do this, but with typically nicer brands, not like significantly nicer, but nicer stuff. So like Todd Snyder, I've seen him do it with Buck Mason. I think brands where something might cost $200 to$300 for a sweater. These guys do it all over New York City. And what they do is they rent out a vacant space and it's very bare bones.

39:27It's just racks of clothes, like portable racks of clothes. and you walk in and things are dirt cheap and it's amazing. And every time I see a 260 sale, they have these pop-ups. You sign up to get alerted and then they do a pop-up for a week at a time. The line is out the door. It's crazy. They are doing so much volume. The demand is huge. I thought, Sean, you actually told me about 260 sale. So is it like significantly cheaper, basically? Significantly cheaper. Yeah, like 10 % of the price. So a$300 item will literally be 30 bucks. And it looks like they're kind of doing a membership model, right?

40:00to like you pay is it you pay to be a member and then because of that you're going to get to shop early i think you get early shopping access but it is really cool i've bought so much stuff from these places and it's uh it's great it's great it's like one of these businesses where you had no i had no idea that this existed but it makes sense like where do what have you bought because every picture on this website is like a very extreme looking piece of fashion just like nothing crazy like like boxers cargo shorts from todd snyder like and i and what happened was i i fall victim oh this said it's it was three hundred dollars but right now it's fifteen dollars i have to get this that's like that's like that's like the energy i'm leaving money on the table yeah yeah but i love 260 sale let's do another one what's a what's another fun one you have?

40:55How about this mobile fuel delivery? You see this one? I've never seen this. No, mobile fuel delivery. What is this? So people are paying to not have to go to the gas station anymore. And the churn is next to zero. People get addicted to it. The guy just kind of, you have an app, you set up an appointment, he'll come top off your tank, you pay a markup on the gas, and then you pay a monthly subscription fee. His, I think his lifetime value or his revenue per year per customer is$5 ,000. And his lifetime value is super high. That's insane. So this is DoorDash for gas? Pretty much, yeah. You know how people, when they get an electric car and they're like, oh, it's so great not to go to the gas station.

41:37I hate that. How else are you supposed to get like a Diet Pepsi to Slim Jim? Do you know what I mean? Like I need to go to the gas station. Same. I feel guilty when I pull up to the gas station in my Tesla, like everyone's judging me. So how, by the way, one of the comments on this video is Dubai has this. Oh. So it might be another Dubai business. So how much more expensive is the gas? So if I, let's say it's$100 normally for me to fill up my tank, what would it be with something like this? So he'll take the average price of all the gas stations within like a five mile radius of the customer's house and mark it up like 20%.

42:13All right. What about this like novelty ice cream thing? Because my kids go nuts for the ice cream truck whenever it comes around. Yeah. And I just can't believe he doesn't come around more often. Like, it's like a once-a-month thing. I'm like, dog, we all buy every time you're here. Like, why are you just not here more often? Where do you go? I just come here every day. Like, at the park, basically, as soon as the ice cream truck pulls up, every single kid goes and gets an ice cream. And the truck literally looks like it's nostalgic. Like, the idea of an ice cream truck is nostalgic. But also, the truck actually looks like it's from 1988 also.

42:46And, like, the menu does, too. And so I'm just looking at it thinking, like, this is nostalgic, but actually, it's just old. which is not what you want. So Chris, what's your ice cream idea? So this is like a$300 or$400 machine. And it's basically like a frozen cylinder that you pour flavored cream over, melted ice cream, and then it scrapes it off and you put it in a little container and it's ice cream. It's virulable, very visual ice cream that sells itself. You can do it on a busy street corner or farmer's markets. You prove out the demand in like an affordable way and then you scale from there.

43:21It looks like a stack of hay or something. So on your Instagram, I'm just reading TikTok. It just says that you're doing, are you saying like a different idea every day? Because on here it says you're on day 57. And apparently someone makes fun of you because the top quote was, does the ice cream taste good? I don't know. And I don't care. That's just a hack to get more people to follow me. I mean. Which is what? Just say this is day 57 because then they follow like, oh, I want to see day 58, but there's no day. That's the big secret. There's no day. You've been doing this for like two years. Come on.

44:00Wait, really? So this isn't actually day 57? You just made it up? Well, I mean, I post three ideas a day and my editor will add day whatever to any of them. There's no rhyme or reason. It just helps. It works. Spugazi. Come on, what do you want? It could be day 57. It could be. You've posted all these ideas and, you know, you find something that somebody's doing. You're like, oh, genius. This could be a thing. Boom, genius. This could be a thing. What's kind of like if you step back and you have a takeaway from this whole thing? Maybe the takeaway is about the types of ideas. Maybe the takeaway is what you've seen in the comments or people's reaction.

44:40Or maybe the takeaway is in, you know, the action you've seen some people take off these. Like, what are the actual lessons you've had now after posting, I don't know how many, you know, hundreds of these videos? People are very creative in coming up with excuses and reasons why they won't do something. Right? Very creative. Like, if you look at my comments, some of the most commented things are, yeah, what about insurance? What about liability? You buy insurance. That's what insurance is for. Oh, this is so good. Why don't you do it? Why don't you? I have, like, 13 businesses. I can't do all of them.

45:16I'm sorry for giving you an idea. People like we will, if we were as creative at actually starting and executing on things as we are coming up with excuses why it wouldn't work, like we'd all be millionaires by now. Yeah, the comment section of Instagram and TikTok on any viral video is like where I would send my worst enemy. If I was like, you should learn, adopt this mindset. This will serve you well. And I would just send my enemies there. and one by one, they would all become incapable people who focus on the absolute wrong things, right? On the viral videos, not on like, you know, niche small community videos or things with like a strong loyal audience or whatever.

45:56I'm talking about just stuff that just pops off. Okay, so you got 10 million views. The top, you know, it's like, oh, this person made it. And it's like, well, people who've made it are ruining America. It's like, what? That's your takeaway from this like success story is like success is bad or, you know, whatever. The amount of poor, poor quality thinking and attitudes in the comment sections is pretty wild on a big video. Do you guys read the comments? I read the comments on our YouTube videos. I don't really read them to get feedback, though, if that makes sense. I read them and I reply to people because I'm like, oh, it's cool that you care enough to write.

46:41So I'm going to, like, I want to talk to you. That's cool. But I don't, like, look at it and think to myself, oh, I'm going to do that because that would defeat the purpose of what I'm trying to do. You know, the Rick Rubin quote, which is the greatest thing, the nicest thing you could do for your audience is ignore them completely. If you're a creator, you're an artist, you're trying to make something, like, you should make the thing you want to make and then let the chips fall where they may. That has become, like, much more the philosophy I have. If you want feedback on like a specific thing, cool, you go ask certain people that you respect for that feedback.

47:15But like you don't just react to what's in the comments. Yeah, I agree with your philosophy and also it's hard. Hard like psychologically to avoid it, you mean? Well, you get a huge dopamine rush. So like if we do something that hits and you're like, I didn't even have fun doing that, but it hit. You still get a dopamine rush. and you can record something that people love and it falls flat and you're like, that doesn't feel wonderful right now, even though it felt great when I recorded it. I like to say you can't go viral without half of everyone thinking you're an idiot, right? It just comes with the territory or else it wouldn't go viral.

47:55Doesn't that seem like a pretty toxic game to play? If you're reading the comments, yeah. But not just toxic for your mentality, but almost toxic in the sense of like, you know, I'm a sports fan and I used to love growing up watching SportsCenter. And SportsCenter used to be a bunch of people who love sports showing you the highlights, the coolest shit that you missed, and making some jokes along the way. And then if you fast forward to ESPN today, it's basically like debate shows where one guy is going to say the craziest shit ever and the other guy is going to fight him. And they're like, cool, do you believe any of that shit you're saying?

48:31They're like, what does that have to do with this? The key differentiator is, do you believe it? And everything I post, like I, that's a, that's like a checkbox in my mind before I hit publish is do I actually believe what I'm saying? Sometimes I believe something that's controversial and that people think is idiotic and I post it and it usually does well, but I'm not in the game of publishing things that are just bombastic to get, to get views if I don't believe it. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction. Well, I've used Mercury for years now.

49:07And let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean, branded invoice. Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, Well, go to mercury.com and get started in minutes.

49:37Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC. Chris, have you done anything else cool in your businesses since the last time we talked? So you pivoted your tree trimming business. Last time we talked on here, you were like, all right, I got like a dozen businesses that are doing in total like, you know, two or three million a year in free cash flow. Has anything cool happened in your portfolio? I'm almost ready to open my secret pickleball club that we talked about last time.

50:07Okay. What's been, so that's been a little while. So it seemed like you were going to like open that up quick. Have you run into like real world bumps doing that? Yeah, I have to expand my metal building. And it's really hard finding a company that wants to do that because it's a small job. There's companies that want to build metal buildings and barn dominiums from the ground up. But that was the hardest part. What was the idea again? Like you had a space and you had like a shed or a big, big kind of barn in your backyard. Yeah. And you called it a secret pickleball club? Secret pickleball, yep.

50:36And you were like, I'm going to have 100-something members or 200 members or something like that who pay me, what was it? 100 bucks a month, yep. 100 bucks a month, and all I got to do is basically run this kind of no-employee backyard pickleball club for people. Yep, and it's almost open. Well, Chris, I see one thing in your little, I'm on your TikTok feed right here. you have it's like kids gym equipment and i just bought a little bit of this for my home gym because like my kids always come down and want to like be in the gym with me or like kind of bug me while i'm working out like they just think it's like playtime and i need like a thing to occupy them and so i've bought some of this like fisher price looking gym equipment and there's there's a couple of problems with it one is like kids get bored of it fairly fast two it's really ugly so like you have like a red, yellow, green, blue suddenly like all over your gym, which like was, is not that color.

51:34So it kind of like trashes up your gym. And I actually like the thing that kids like is basically obstacle courses. And so I think the kids gym equipment to make is basically like a easy to set up like little obstacle course or like the equivalent of like a few very, like it comes with like, like a McDonald's menu of like 12 different courses you could just set up. and that would occupy my kids for 30 minutes and it'd be really fun. I mean, I do this manually every day with my kids. I basically like create obstacle courses in my house. And like, Chris, have you seen The Nugget? No. Sam, do you know about The Nugget?

52:08Oh yeah, I'm a Nugget owner. So yeah. Oh yeah, yeah, yeah. These modular, yeah. So The Nugget is this incredible business where they created kids' furniture, but it's not, doesn't look like furniture, right? Because if you thought of kids' furniture from first principles, as Elon would say, then you would make this. You would make something with no hard edges, no corners that they can get cut on. It would basically look like a toy, which is what the Nugget is. It's like, you know, a couple of foam kind of base pieces and then a foam triangle, foam circle, whatever. And so you get these like shapes that you can just set up as a couch when you're not using it or when you want to just sit.

52:46Or you can fold them up and create like basically a jungle gym. And moms go nuts for this thing. I don't know if you've seen like the Nugget owners, like Facebook groups. It's like 100 ,000 members of moms who just like love the nugget and they want the new colors of the nugget or they want like ideas and like, oh, if you buy two nuggets, you can create this in your house. Kids love the nugget. Parents love the nugget. And it's basically this like modular piece of furniture. It's like a mix of furniture and a toy. And I think like, you know, there's there should be more of that. This business has scaled.

53:18I think their plant is like I think they started in like North Carolina or something. but they do you know 50 60 70 million a year in revenue on uh on the nugget it's like a real like legit business actually i think that estimate might be actually actually dramatically low might be i might actually be double that by now i looked into it for the first time like a couple years ago and and uh was thinking about potentially competing with them yeah i bought one after you told me about it it seems it's amazing and what do you think the revenue is now um let me see they They had posted, I remember it was like 75 million a while back, but I imagine it's over north of 100 million now would be my guess.

53:57And profitable business that was bootstrapped. No investors as far as I could find. And so they, but there was a bunch of opportunities. Like one, the nugget was quite expensive. And so making a lower cost nugget was like, you know, one option. to um you could always like basically like if you could do the nugget but get into retail because they weren't in retail and so like i remember thinking like somebody should do the costco like costco basically has like knockoff versions of everything so if you see peloton you walk into costco and there's something called like i don't even know what it's called you know echelon echelon it like looks exactly the same the name fucking rhymes and it's like this is peloton cool Like there's Oura Ring, which is like the kind of like fancy fitness tracker.

54:42And they're like, boom, we have the like, whatever, the Zora Ring. They'll have like the Costco brand partnered version of these. Costco doesn't make it. They just find a company who's like plays at the right price points for Costco. Dude, that's pretty much what my company also did with the skim. We just aren't going to raise any VC and I could sell for less and make more money. I mean, it's the same thing. That's what Echelon did. I mean, that's the difference. What's the difference? How are you guys different? Well, we didn't raise VC, therefore we can make less profit and get more rich. Are you different?

55:10The spelling? I can't do read. I bet I can tell you where the Nugget found all their customers from. Facebook ads. Yeah, yeah, of course. It's all Facebook ads. That's it. Everywhere you look is just Facebook ads. And they did have, to be clear, like insane word of mouth. Like, you know, like people really love this product and will show, you know, like when we do play dates, like inevitably the parents are like, oh, what is that? Right? We tell people it has some virality to it as well. It's a great product, and they did a great job. But I think there's more opportunities like that in the kind of kids' space where you make something that's functional, that kids find fun, but doesn't clutter up and make your house look ugly at the same time.

55:54Yeah. I wonder if you could do the Casper mattress version of this and build a nugget competitor that you can shrink down to make shipping costs cheaper. I think that's how it comes, isn't it? Yeah, it does come like that. It comes rolled in a thing, and then you let it expand for two days when it gets to your house. Chris, what's your favorite business of all the businesses that you own? I'm curious. Oh, man. Of the ones I currently own? Yeah. Yes. Oh, man. What's the best business? The one you're like, oh, this is… RV Parks. I like my RV Parks. Say more words. I don't understand why people invest in single-family or multifamily, right?

56:35with a mobile home or an RV park, you don't maintain the units. You just maintain the infrastructure under the ground. It's a hedge against the economy. When the economy's good, the millennials and the boomers are traveling. You got short-term stays. When the economy tanks, you got people living in your RV parks full-time. So you hedge it both ways. What's your RV park called? Well, I have ownership in nine of them. What's like one of them? Moose Creek near Glacier National Park. Why don't you just buy more of these then? Well, I am. Okay, so I'm looking at this Moose Creek. What is Streamside?

57:13That's our holding company that owns all of them. We have 29. And then I'm looking at, there's a very nice website. So when I think RV park, I thought like trailer park, but this looks like fancy thing. Yeah. Am I dumb or there's just like - No, I've done both. Yeah. Yeah. This is more like KOA. This is for short-term stays. They're near national or state parks. People stay one to three nights at a time. Trailer parks, people live there full-time, month to month or year to year. So you went near a national park, you buy a piece of land, you get it zoned and permitted, I assume. And then basically people bring their RVs there.

57:51So you're not building mobile homes. They bring their RV there and they get to park it and they pay you a fee to park there. That's what this is? Yeah, we don't really build. We'll expand, but we're usually buying existing parks and adding value. Okay, great. But that's what this is. And then how do I, if I just want to come short-term stay, you have stuff sitting there that I could just go use or I have to bring my RV? You bring your RV. Yeah. Okay, so there's no just like... Yeah, it basically just has a way to easily change the water. It has electric hookups and it might have a pool or some type of lounge that you can hang out in.

58:26Can you walk through the business of all these? So you said you buy them, you don't build them. So you bought, whether it's this one or another one, so like how much did you buy this for? This one we bought for$8 million, and it was doing$700 ,000 a year. So like a 9 % cap rate, give or take. So you go, you put down$2 million,$3 million? What'd you put down? We put down 20%, so$1.6 million. We raised 40 % from investors, and we financed through a bank the remainder. Okay, so you put down 1.6 and then 40 % of the 8 million, you also put down as equity. So you had less debt than typical. So you have 40 % debt on this thing.

59:09You buy it. It was making, what you said,$700 ,000 of profit at the time. And then you said, we add value. So what was the play to add the value to this one? So this one was open five months a year, whereas it could have been open six months a year. So it opened on May 15th, closed on like October 15th. We opened from May 1st to October 31st, right? So we added a month of occupancy. That sounds pretty simple, right? That's part of it. And by the way, you talk to the owners and you're like, hey guys, how come you don't do that? And they were just like, ah, we just, that's how we do things or what?

59:43No good reason. Like we're happy. Yeah, we're good. It makes good money. And then we bought an acre next door or two acres next door and we expanded into it. So the rents were under market. We raised rents. We added more pad sites. We expanded the season. And now it's doing like 1.2 million a year of net profit. And it would be maybe still a nine cap rate? Or was that like a sign of the times? We bought it under market. It was probably worth an eight cap when we bought it. So at like a seven and a half cap, it's an eight figure park now. Yeah, so that's like a$15 million thing now. So if you went and you sold it today, if it's stabilized and it's working well because you did raise the rents, you add more pads, you extend the seasonality by 15 % or the open window and whatever else you said you did.

1:00:33And so now, let's say it's a$15 million thing. You go sell this, you will end up turning 1.6 of equity into something like 3.2 or maybe more because you have carry on the investor thing, something like that? Well, more because we're packaging it with 28 other parks. So we have$150 million worth of parks under management. And then we have a portfolio worth$111 million under contract right now. So by the end of the year, we'll have$260 million worth of parks under management. That way, our cap rate comes way down. We could sell the whole thing for a six cap to private. And how do we? Me and my partners.

1:01:10I'm a co-GP in this fund. So you have two or three? Three partners. Do you operate in this or you're just like a... You don't want me operating, Sean. Come on. What value do you provide? What do you do? I help with marketing and with fundraising. I'm an idea guy with a great personality. Something everybody wants. That's usually my pitch. Strategy. Quote, strategy. Okay, so RV Parks is your best business. Yeah, but I've been doing this for seven years. So I've been doing it with this company for two, but I was doing it with a couple other partners seven years ago. Did you ever have a job or you're always doing your own thing?

1:01:46Always doing my own thing. Which of the eight things has been the biggest financial success for you? This will probably end up that when we exit, which will probably be within a couple of years. But I've had two different e-commerce brands that were eight-figure businesses. One I exited and one I did not. Which one did you exit? We sold wholesale iPhone parts for seven years to iPhone repair stores. Okay. And so, um, if you were, if I cleaned your slate, if I took away all your businesses, gave you all your free time back, right? You know, everything you know today about the world, but I give you all your time back.

1:02:23What would you go really hard at? If you, if I was like, Hey, do something like you're going to go do something now. You're starting from scratch. One thing. You know, everything you need to know, but you got to do one thing. Yeah. Where does your brain go? Not like, what would you do specifically, like specifically maybe, because maybe you don't know that, but like what immediately comes to mind when I asked that question? I would want to ride a tidal wave. And I would want to ride what I know. And I know small business, right? Medium, large, know nothing about it. I know small business inside and out.

1:02:51And so the tidal wave is AI. And I would want to implement AI in small businesses for free to get my foot in the door, earn their trust, show myself as an expert, and then start charging. And I would just have a simple AI automation slash implementation agency for small to medium-sized businesses. What do you think is an example? What would be like a hero example of like small business? Here's an example of a small business. And here's an example of how AI would help that small business, like clear, no brainer. Boom. You know, like that's the one I would kind of try to rinse and repeat. Yep. The simplest thing is setting up an AI voice answering agent 24-7 for small business owners that don't pick up the phone after hours because they're with their family, right?

1:03:35It's just an AI robot and you can plug into other, you know, software services that already offer this. You don't have to have any technical knowledge. You charge a flat monthly fee. And if there's an emergency, then it would patch the call through to the business owner. Like if it's a plumbing emergency, otherwise it would just, it's just like a smarter voicemail system. I would start there. We've had a lot of people say that. I've had a couple of friends do it. I know Alex Lieberman's doing it, Sean. I don't know if, do you know Grant Wilkinson? um Grant's one of my good buddies he started this thing I'm looking at the website now so originally this guy he was like hey I want to work on something do you have any like ideas I can work on and I told him like three things and all three failed miserably and he's uh he's a he's an engineer and he was like I'm just going to do this agency thing it's called Rosedale Rosedale.ai and like he's just doing agency work that automates a variety of tasks using AI and like customers are just begging for him to do shit for him.

1:04:31And there's like dozens and dozens and dozens of these services. And I'm seeing this firsthand what's going on with Grant's business and people are just begging like they need it's simple. These you think these businesses are doing well, like they're going gangbusters like these AI kind of implementer for businesses. It depends what you define as gangbusters. But can you make can the owner make seven figures a year, one million dollars a year for sure? Can you get to two to three, four million dollars a year in revenue for sure. Is it a lot of work? Yeah, it's a service. But if you're like your goal is to like, make money and work 40 hours a week and have a business.

1:05:06Yeah, I think it's like there's massive demand for it. Now, how does that scale beyond to be as big as you know, maybe 100 200$300 million a year? I'm not sure. But like some people will figure it out and agencies that is a scale. People always say agencies aren't scalable. No, it's definitely scalable. You're just gonna have to have 1000 employees. uh like it's it'll work it's just gonna be really hard but that's that's not bad at all yeah yeah it's scalable you like pain yeah it's what is your pain tolerance is the question not is this scalable but yeah i mean you don't have a bunch of friends that are doing this right now i've met a few people but my uh my understanding was that like you know for a lot of these businesses they don't really know how ai can help them so you basically have to kind of go bespoke can figure out like, oh, what's your problem set?

1:05:54And how do we use AI to do this? And like the AI part is almost like the easy part. And then it's like, how do you get like the adoption and the buy-in and the like, you know, all of that stuff. And so I think there is like definitely desire and demand to like, I think everyone generally feels like, oh, I should probably be using AI to like do stuff better. But when the business owner themselves is clueless about like where the AI can plug in, you need something like what Chris is talking about, which is like, hey, here's a generic problem that I can see from the outside that you see as a no-brainer for you.

1:06:25And if I could find that match, I could do that specific implementation. I think beyond that's a little bit harder. The more interesting plays to me have always been, you understand where like AI is changing the game and then you basically go buy a business at a fair price today. And then you're like, cool, my value add is that I'm going to use AI to like drop 10 points of margin to the bottom line. You know, I could take this from a 10 % EBIT of business to a 20 % EBITDA business just by doing this, right? Like just by doing this one thing. You know, like I can get rid of all these people who I have doing stuff because I can automate all of that at a higher accuracy, higher speed using AI.

1:07:05So I think like the play is you go figure out what's the right type of business for that? Is it a bookkeeping business? Is it something else? And you basically go and you say, all right, I can buy this business for$25 million. It's an established business with a book of clients already. and I know that I have this lever of AI that the 55, 65-year-old business owner wasn't going to do. And I bought it at a fair price, but I can make this thing more valuable and I can capture$10,$20 million in two years of work without the hustle of scaling an agency. So I like that play. I like that version of this play much better, personally.

1:07:41Do you know anyone that's going on after that now? There's a lot of people. I think there's like full funds, like private equity funds that are doing this. They're like, Like, cool, we're going to do private equity. But typically the private equity play was like, you know, maybe we offshore things or maybe we just cut headcount or we centralize certain things. And now they're like, the play is AI. We're going to go in and we're going to add AI in these three ways. You know, kind of what Chris said, like AI on the like sales automation side, AI on operations automation, and AI to just like, you know, maybe reduce headcount across the board on product or whatever, you know, maybe it's engineering or something like that.

1:08:18and um so there you know there's a lot of people trying to do that i don't know how well it's going because they're not like you know talking a lot on twitter about like how great it's going yeah we'll see chris what do you want to be where you want to be in 10 years i just want to keep starting businesses man i just chase product market fit that's what i do but why because i I'm chasing dopamine. That's the flavor of dopamine you like? Yeah. My focus, my version of focus is focusing on my superpower, not on one business. And my superpower is seeing and executing on opportunities really, really fast.

1:08:58Well, don't you get worn out having to manage or work with people who run your shit and not as good as you want them to? Yeah. I mean, I've had like 15 different business partners. And so nowadays, I'm much more likely to find a business partner that takes the vast majority of the business so I could have more slices of small pieces of pie. So there's low expectations from me. And I just go into a partnership, eyes wide open, saying, hey, I'm going to be super distracted, FYI. If you think I'm going to put in 10 hours a week, it's probably going to be two. So adjust your expectations and equity accordingly.

1:09:34And it took me 15 years to learn that, but that's just how I prefer to do things. Where do you think 10 years from now, what's going to make it a huge win for you? It's probably going to be a SaaS business that I launch and promote with my audience that has a big exit. That's where I see this heading. What kind of SaaS? Well, I'm building like a QuickBooks competitor right now. And when I say I, I mean my brother-in-law, who's like a 10X developer, like an AI-enabled QuickBooks competitor. So maybe that'll be it. but maybe that won't even be a thing in six months. I don't know. Yeah, that's pretty cool.

1:10:11I think that's good, like, product audience fit for you, I would think. Yeah, yeah. That's a super competitive space, unfortunately. I know. So that's interesting. No, but listen, I, you know, I've got almost 4 million followers that like me, you know, and most people hate QuickBooks. They hate Xero. and if it's AI enabled and it's cheaper and I use it and I talk about it I'm not trying to beat QuickBooks or beat Zero I'm just trying to build a cool business that cash flows you know what are you going to call it lazy books bookkeeping for people who hate bookkeeping lazy books that's pretty I like that you start with names you seem like a guy who starts with a name totally you get the name early yeah yeah I start with the domain name and the marketing why is that makes it real for you it kind of like like forces clarity of thought around the product?

1:11:07Like, why do you think that's important? It's more that I start with a marketing channel, right, in mind, and then I build an idea around that. And oftentimes the name and the brand goes hand in hand with the marketing channel, right? I don't like building ideas and see if people will want it. You know, I want to see if they will want it and then build the idea. What was name number two and three? There was none. It's Lazy Books. I tried Thin Books. I couldn't find that domain. LazyBooks was one where I was actually able to convince the seller to sell it to me. But I was really just thinking of like a slimmed down QuickBooks competitor that had, you know, the 20 % of features you only really need that never breaks, you know, that never disconnects from your bank account.

1:11:51That was the thought process there. You and Dharmesh, man, you're all about the domain names. Did you guys, did you see Sean? He gave the country of Antigua, I think it was. Did you see what happened? No. What do you do? It was a very small article at TechCrunch, at TechCrunch.com. I saw that. It said, Darmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot. I don't remember exactly, but I think it said he gave them Antigua.ai and paid them$800 ,000 to make that their official domain name. I don't understand why he paid them to make that their official domain name, but Antigua.ai is now the country's official domain name.

1:12:32Well,.ai is actually, it stands for.antigua. Like most of their revenue is coming from, yeah, all of those registrations. Yeah. And so, but I don't know why Darmash is just like slowly making inroads with a variety of countries, starting with domain names. And before we know it, the next 20 years, he's going to have an army. This like isn't out of, this isn't out of the realm if you know Darmash. Chris, hopefully you had a great time. We like having you on. It was a blast. Thanks, man. Thanks for coming, man. Thanks for having me. You're an interesting guy with interesting ideas, and we appreciate you big time.

1:13:08Go ahead. Promote it. TKOPod.com. It's the Kerner Office podcast. I didn't want to talk about it, but here, I don't even know I had this on, but here we are. TKOPod.com. Chris, what does your shirt say? It says, look at this freaking thing right here. Ah, that's your line. Short from videos, yeah. You're committed to the bit, and I appreciate that. I respect your commitment to the bit. Thank you. That's it. That's the pod. Thank you, Chris. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back. All right, let's take a quick break because as you know, we are on the HubSpot Podcast Network, but we're not the only ones.

1:13:49There's other podcasts on this network too, and maybe you liked them. Maybe you should check them out. One of them that I want to draw your attention to is called Nudge by Phil Agnew. And whether you're a marketer or a salesperson and you're looking for the small changes you could make, the new habits you could do, the small decisions you could make that will make a big difference, That's what that podcast is all about. Check it out. It's called Nudge, and you can get it wherever you get your podcasts.