The Strangest Businesses You Didn’t know Existed

0:00Welcome back to Secret Leaders. I'm Chris and I'm Dan and today we are talking about business ideas that you wouldn't think existed yet and why somehow they're still alive and function. sectioning and it's the new year so maybe you're thinking about the type of business that you might start so hopefully we can give you some ideas yeah I think we talked about this recently where you know if I was starting a business today what would I do and you know we get into this kind of conversations the the uh inescapable reality of being an entrepreneur are you either running a business and thinking about what other businesses you'd run instead or you've just left a business starting a new one you're thinking more and more and more it's just the curse isn't it you can't stop thinking about it the grass is always greener as well like no matter what you're always thinking that the exact positions opposite to yours is better than the position you're in what is what is one of the most interesting businesses that a guest has has run that you think is really interesting i mean we had uh tom castor on and i thought like i don't know a huge amount about sport but i know enough and he was talking about how their business had flourished in you know effectively becoming the manufacturer of team apparel.

1:14So, you know, they're doing like the Rangers. They worked with like Andy Murray. They're doing a lot of big teams. And I just hadn't heard about that type of like business and business model. And it seems like he was doing it very differently. I'm not sure it's something I'm interested in. However, like if you go and watch that episode, you will learn a hell of a lot about the idea of like working a partnership and like learning from a partnership. So very different. but i love so in back in december we interviewed the founder of omaze yes and other than saying that that is probably my top three favorite interviews ever yeah you've been doing it longer than me so i'd say it's my favorite ever oh really yeah yes it was absolutely 10 out of 10 quite like esoteric as well as well as a business conversation it had everything yeah um but omaze what an awesome business because as a as a function of yeah tell the audience as a function of trying to this is why i love it as a function of trying to do good which is give a lot of money to charities he's raised hundreds of millions of dollars for charity yeah as a function of that he's got to meet and do competitions with the pope arnold schwarzenegger lionel messi you know i was hanging out and bono walks in just non-stop and he's like couldn't have been a more low ego like these were not like big name droppy things he talked about dying yes four and a half minutes yeah but that's not a business i'd like to no i know but what an episode it was it was like nothing else i mean we are the most entertaining business show right that's our aim but like everyone should watch that episode like i it's very strange when you're doing a podcast like you're not always 100 present because you're trying to work out what's good for audience you want to work out what's good for your audience but also you can lose focus in a in a podcast and so i would say in that episode i didn't once lose focus and there was like a drill in the background yeah that's true i have to say i also looked at photos from that episode and you and me honestly look like the biggest fanboys they're all like this like a thumbnail every photo of us is like on the edge of our seats or laughing or just admiring him the team said the same thing they said like unbelievable episode and so yeah i mean i mean the business is amazing i agree with the business is amazing so like if you can find a business where you get to just hang out with celebrities and make loads of money and make people feel good where they win prizes and give loads to charity.

3:31Yeah, so definitely watch that episode. But now let's talk about some other businesses. Okay, I'm going to go first. Done a little research. And by me, I mean Jay. Thank you, Jay. Thank you, Jay. You can't see Jay, but Jay is in the room with us. Jay is this adonis that is just sitting in the room with us, intimidating us. Just like muscle man. Yeah. He has not skipped bicep day. We'll put it that way. Skipped the other days though. Anyway. All right. So the first category is kind of weird, right? So we found professional line standards. So there's a company in New York called Same Old Line Dudes.

4:06And what they do is basically people pay them to wait in line for anything. I like it. It's actually very smart. So you've got product launches, restaurant reservations, concert tickets, etc. They charge$25 an hour to stand in line for absolutely anything. And their revenue, they were reported at making over a million dollars by 2019. so there's enough demand there for people that want to do this um one line stander actually made over a thousand dollars just for standing in line for the iphone 14 launch for 48 hours i don't know if you ever wait in line for the iphone anymore is it cool enough i don't know but if you've got money and you can't be bothered and you want it yeah like maybe like wimbledon tickets yeah that's what i thought of immediately i was like i would pay someone to stand outside wimbledon and get me them tickets that's actually a really good example of that yeah because people like queuing and tense overnight that makes a lot of sense i would definitely do the same thing yeah yeah the one where when i heard this i was like i mean i'm not going to say that i love this but this is this is a bit of me um yeah you sound like a perfect kind of customer for this this i mean this yeah this is disposable income you're really really conscious of your time yeah and there are certain things not loads of things but certain things you really want yeah i have thought of lots of lots of examples of how i could use this company yeah yeah and i feel like you know it's one of those things where i always think and i try and explain this to people i always think that by saying that i would pay someone to wait for me they assumed that in the time i would create for myself i would then be working in that time but that's not the case not the aim i would like to do that while simultaneously sitting on the sofa and that would feel very good so yeah maybe i could become a customer i mean it sounds like you're right up the street to be honest with you i'm actually looking for a secondary income maybe i could be your line stander to be fair as well that job sounds quite nice couple of thousand i you know what i i have a thing about lines obviously i'm british so that we all have a thing about well it's more like when people get really annoyed about lines i i do take a completely different approach which is i'm like i like standing i was going to stand anyway like at this point okay i'm standing in between some people that's kind of annoying to an extent but all i was going to be doing is standing anyway so why don't i stand in this line i don't like standing but i do like the idea of doing nothing it's like when you get into a club it's so funny you get into a club you're in a line outside a club you get into the club yeah nightclub like a rave when did you last go to a rave mate a rave so you go to a rave all you do in a rave is stand around so you know what's the big difference between being in the line well the music is the answer but hey yeah no it sounds like a good job so i could i could stare into the abyss for hours that's a separate chat mate yeah all right what have you got for me so i don't want to like one up you no but the business is virtual queue holding okay so it's almost an identical concept it's for online queues so i could effectively pay someone to to hold my position in an online queue what's it called it's called virtual virtual queue holding really yeah so i've got a friend called imogen and she had a company called koudini which was essentially the same thing as like about virtual queuing and she exited for quite a few million recently no way yeah so the company was called aq right but yeah it's the same concept so your friend actually had a business that did this yeah they did this she did it for five six years she's exited it for north of 10 million quid what what's the setup of the business like um a lot of it is to do with retail of retail no but no i i don't know the ins and outs but a lot of it is to do with retail yeah because i because it's charges 20 to 100 dollars per successful queue position um and the the line from business insider was the business of virtual line sitting is booming so like automated systems for holding again i mean i'm like you know if i was you know the oasis tickets i missed out on yeah yeah which would have been really great if i'd got them but i missed out on them like oasis oh i love oasis Oh, really?

8:06Yeah. But I would have paid a virtual line holder to secure me those tickets. Absolutely. So I can see the need. Being a virtual line cure sounds a lot better than a physical line cure. I mean, I know I gave a big game chat about being in there with my Joe Rogan podcast, but I'd be just watching it on YouTube instead, sitting down and not in a queue. My understanding was it wasn't people. I thought it was systems. That makes more sense to it. I mean, if that is a job that's going, I think I would trade my job in for that. I mean there's no way people aren't just outsourcing that to the Philippines not paying someone in London to queue for you that's absurd digitally yeah sounds great when do we sign up I'll say I'm in the Philippines okay I've got a new one for you so professional mourners so have you ever been to a funeral yes have you ever noticed that there's people there who seem sad yes they're probably all from Rentamora Rentamora so Rent-A-Morner firm supplies professional grievers and it does it at a price point of £45 for two hours it does beg the question doesn't it which is like paid actors coming and crying it's just very I don't know it makes me feel terribly sad that people would not be crying at someone's wedding you have to hire a mourner you would have an absolutely stacked funeral hiring a mourner is ridiculous how English do you need to be you need to be really repressed you want a ball of funeral oh I see oh so your thinking is actually it's not about one or two mourners it's like you hire a hundred mourners and you make a whole scene when people come to your funeral they're like holy shit oh yeah yeah I didn't think about it like that okay I thought it was like get two mourners because no one's crying and it's really who was he oh my god yeah what do I know do you reckon that's what it's like and get people from like different countries like loads of like Russians oh and people be like why there's so many russians yeah i didn't even know that he knew john wick so that's where my mind went but yeah you're probably right okay i don't know if i am right about 45 pound for two hours so all right four and a half grand to basically pack out a funeral make you look like a baller yeah i mean you're dead so we're gonna spend four and a half why not that yeah makes sense actually i have a business for you on the same lines yeah yeah dead social dead social right okay so this company will manage your social media accounts post your death what i actually feel like my brother thought about launching that as a business for a long time really it would like keep it would like you know you would combine it with like ai and it would it would like distill your you know person into an ai and that ai of you would keep tweeting effectively for years to come which is not too dissimilar to what this company does you know they uh 20 for basic services 20 a month they will uh run your social media accounts after your deaths and post messages and so forth from your channels what do you think is like the point of that i think for an ordinary person i can't see the point other than some people maybe maybe it makes people happy but i think for like extraordinary people it'd be quite cool but give me an example i don't know george washington was still tweeting oh i see but you just get those pretty radical you get those like fake accounts that are like you know god has a twitter account and all this stuff so i guess like dead no that's very true yeah god still with us sorry um but you get you know let's say paris hilton so paris hilton dies okay no so if paris hilton dies everyone knows no i think we should pick someone who's alive to give the actual example of if paris hilton did die and you know that she's dead the whole world knows she's dead right what's the value genuinely of that account carrying on like who is that value for if that makes sense must be incredibly individual you know the digital legacy is the sort of word they use so yeah I mean maybe motivational quotes from Paris Hilton about I don't know what Paris Hilton does but I don't either I was going to make him her favourite Joe and the Jews drink she obviously like owns the Hilton hotels Air 2 Air 2 yeah yeah you've got like estate managers like you know when Michael Jackson dies his whole family is like their whole life is making sure they get as much out of Michael Jackson's content and legacy so you got the you got the family who's like you've got to keep the socials going we're still getting brand deals etc and you could set up an ai to do that nowadays yeah you could but that's the thing like the authenticity would be so off maybe i'm wrong maybe i'm just thinking about it like you know yeah you're so rational yeah legacy media way yeah like an idiot dumbo all right this is a company that you've definitely heard of given your um omnipresence on social media um it's called social blade do you know social blade is it it's is it a posting tool yeah just like uh analytics and yeah i have heard of it i've never used it yeah okay so basically they originally focused on instagram analytics yeah and they collect and resell yeah but they collect and resell public social media statistics so the point of what's so absurd about this is like all the stuff that they do is publicly available for free you can get all their information from instagram for free but they've done really good job of just basically creating an api and uh packaging yeah packaging it up and doing premium subscriptions so um they literally built an entire business on freely available public data with subscriptions ranging from like four bucks to a hundred bucks um and they built a multi-million dollar company i can buy that i mean i really can understand that i think there's so many businesses that do that it's all free as in make like readily free available information like dashboards into an ordered dashboard of ease and efficiency like i ran an agency and the agency would buy loads of products like that and because you would take the view that rather than your team going and like crawling all the accounts it would be like click and then all the accounts would filter into the dashboard and you'd have a perfect data set so i can buy that one it's true and i think there's i reckon there's loads of businesses like that all over the world okay unlike unlike my next business yeah which is professional bridesmaids professional bridesmaids so this one is for unpopular brides you wouldn't have had a hen party yet um but when you do if you are lacking bridesmaids you can sort of rent a bridesmaid oh that's depressing only if you need them what that's quite depressing so that is a bit more like my funeral example yeah founded 20 because you're not suddenly getting 100 bridesmaids you're basically only doing it if you've got no friends guess how much it costs to rent a bridesmaid on a per wedding basis three hundred dollars a grand so it's two to ten thousand dollars per wedding to rent a bridesmaid what what do you reckon the differentiation is between the two grand like a really boring one or a really fun one yeah the really charismatic one that everyone loves i'm thinking like owen wilson wedding crashes live at the top that's 10k yeah and then like maybe the same person who does the funerals also does the bridesmaids one well why not they're sort of you know whatever's happening on the day and they're available the use case is surely literally just super unpopular i mean they don't make make a huge amount of money they make 300 000 annually which is still a good amount of money um but interesting stat one of them has been a bridesmaid at 250 weddings fucking hell um so there you go that is a niche business i mean i don't understand it that's so depressing i think maybe a takeaway is there is so many ways to make money yeah i do actually think this like you know you're a few years older than me but when we were growing up there was um so unnecessary always necessary for him but it's so unnecessary there was like i often felt like there actually weren't that many available free jobs i mean obviously there was lots of jobs but now from like 16 onwards you can be like an uber driver there's so many digital services you can do all of these different things online you can rent yourself out i'm sure you could have back in the day but i think it just means there's loads of opportunities yeah even if they are a bit bizarre and why do i need to be older than you who know that we're just different jobs different times yeah back in my century yeah um okay i've got one for you i was actually just looking at the difference between what you get at two thousand dollars per wedding versus ten thousand dollars a wedding for one bridesmaid so at the top end you're getting you know you're getting bridesmaid speeches you're getting uh you know involvement in the main wedding party but then 2000s probably just attending just schmoozing around wow so you get main characters for the wedding and like paying two grand for someone to just come and show their face it feels a lot what was the funeral cost again um that was cheap 45 pound for two hours wow they need to start this is in pounds and that's in dollars that's a go that's all you need to know just don't know how to monetize things properly in the uk that's it okay so i've got another one for you this is the concept of a professional playlist curator so that probably sounds a little bit like a dj so i'll explain it um back in the day you would basically have djs would get um you know people go up to them and be like hey if you play my song well yeah exactly you play my song on the radio or you know on this like actually on this playlist and stuff i'll give you money and it'll boost you and you can obviously get more fame pocket the money yeah all that kind of stuff that's actually illegal so it's illegal to do it properly but actually you know on things like soundcloud and spotify there are now these playlists that have like tens of thousands millions of followers right and they love these the curation of these different djs and people that are actually putting together amazing playlists that are played all over the world so it's actually pretty smart they essentially connect artists with playlist curators so that the company's job is to put it's like a marketplace you know hey you have a song in electronic dance music i'll entree to these curators and we can get distribution for you um you pay one one to six dollars per song review and top curators make three to five grand a month it's kind of like distribution i suppose you see a lot of this on social media right where you're paying for distribution i mean if they know if they know music really well they know the playlist really well it's a very easy arbitrage for them isn't it exactly and you know if the song's actually good and it would have gone on there anyway why not get the extra little bit of money yeah i like it it's pretty smart and low lift incredibly low lift it's literally like getting paid to just do the job you're going to do anyway the funny thing is if you were like that that's one of those businesses we talk about occasionally which is like you could probably live in like bali and do that remotely on your computer definitely and make an awesome amount of money and not really work that really is like a four-hour work week business what's the weirdest business you've ever done you ever started anything odd so yeah so i've been doing it a while so i've had some successes you're not going to say secret leaders are you a bunch of weirdos in here secret leaders is killing it uh but no i have had some bizarre businesses that have uh sort of failed or i suppose like barely even got off the ground one was um i made like portable phone chargers in like 2011 it was called block and it was because it was a block and you would take it everywhere with you but uh uh just couldn't get them to sell and then the first few that sold did like basically blow up because of the the batteries and so forth and i remember being like i don't know if this is a business i want to be in it was coming from china and i'd already invested a lot and so quite quickly sold out to the guy that i was doing that with and was like i'm parting ways with this um the other weird business i did was i don't know why i got so fascinated once um i don't even have a dog nor have i ever had a dog but i like invested into and got really involved in this business called bark which was a sort of a high fashion dog apparel brand and literally it took up i was running verb at the time like verb was a really successful company and i was spending all my evenings working with a dog brand that was based in the north i was like it could be like the future like you know fashion brand like we could you know and then suddenly i was like it's just collars and leads for dogs what are you doing and again exited that business um losing money in both cases nice yeah what about you weirdest business you've ever launched or been involved in um so one that springs to mind i do have a good story for this uh it's called deal 52 i still have some of these at home so um long story short because i'm older than you yeah back in the day how did it work in 1902 when i was at university yeah um so in universities obviously there's lots of weatherspoons everywhere and you see you know students are all in their weatherspoons or in the pubs and you know one of the things that students love is drinking games so at the time when phones were uh supposed to be a mobile um at the time when phones were just starting to get smart with their cameras it was about 2012 um and qr codes first first first happened so i was the og of making a qr code business because this is in 2012 um basically went and got loads of i'll come on to this uh packs of playing cards so there's 52 playing cards in a pack there's two jokers that's 54 ad spaces was the way that i saw it right and so i went to advertisers um who wanted to advertise nationally to in pubs to students okay and i was Like we will give free packs of playing cards out at all the different Wetherspoons in Leeds and Nottingham and Manchester, et cetera, et cetera.

22:02And you, the advertisers will pay to advertise a promotion on the back of the card that can be redeemed inside that Wetherspoon. So it's great for like a Bacardi or whoever, right? Right. And there's going to be a QR code on there. And because mobile is the future and QR is the future, people will be able to scan that and you'll get a portal and you'll be able to change your deal throughout the year. because one of the biggest problems in physical printing anything is that it's printed it's done and we were like you could be a bit more interested you could like scan the code here and you could update your code every week so like actually thought it was a really interesting idea anyway um did it take off we did get it we did got it we got it all over the country we got it into all the different um universities was not expecting one one one round of it um because the business did go under because um one thing that because it's a physical product business and by the way this was a long precursor to heights because after this experience i said i'm never doing a physical business ever again and i went fully into digital and obviously then i failed a digital business and said fuck that i'm never doing digital again i'm doing physical um but um there was a story very close to here in london bridge um in borough market i basically completely shut down borough market because 50 52 cards and as i say two jokers 54 cards in a pack 10 000 of these were ordered and this comes as many crates and pallets pallets is essentially like a very large amount of something on a crate um three lorries turned up uh in borough market where my office was playing cards yeah and um basically we had totally forgotten we'd done everything all the advertising everything everything was all sorted we'd completely forgotten to figure out the distribution and so what happens when they drop off the thing what who is physically taking these things and dropping them off at all the just kind of like was so busy had forgotten this part and they didn't give a fuck so they literally dropped off these crates of playing cards on like the road side of the road yep in borough market and all these drop like people are absolutely nuts and a really random saving grace was my um my friend ran an advertising agency in a big warehouse like around the corner and because i worked in my dad's warehouse when i was 13 it's like one of my first jobs um so my dad used to work in fashion it had like a warehouse in tottenham i learned how to drive a forklift truck and so someone in borough market gave me their forklift truck because that's how you have to move pallets like that there's no other way and i drove those things into this and and we managed to sort out distribution like the next week but the lorries did not give a fuck they just literally dropped these things off so anyway as you might imagine any slight semblance of what would have been profit went so out the window trying to unfuck ourselves that weekend we spent thousands solving that problem and big lesson yeah in thinking things through but it was unbelievable how glaringly stupid that mistake was yeah that does sound like quite a lot of fun though it was a laugh yeah but stressful laugh as i've got older i think this thing becomes so present in my mind if i ever was to start another business it's like start a business with a big product as in like a big amount of money you make per product as in i know that sounds so basic and i know that i've been doing what do you mean what do you mean but as in like i would rather sell something where the product in itself is in not in the tens but in the hundreds or in the thousands if i can because i just feel like businesses the margin always ends up being squeezed yeah and i in a bigger product you just have more space one of the wisest things someone ever said to me um about building a business was he said um double the costs half the margin and if it still looks like a good business then crack on double the cost half the margin yeah i mean i would i would generally good business advice because i always like i have this sort of hangover the fact that i had a very successful agency and sold it and so so many agency people ask me the questions because agencies are very popular businesses and often great businesses but if you scale them and they're tough businesses.

26:09And you can come down from grace quite quickly on them. And when I meet young agencies, they don't have the growth and scaling costs in their businesses. And so they're achieving abnormal margins, like 30, 40%. They're like, yeah, we're the different ones. And I'm like, yeah, but if you scale a people business, at the end of the day, fundamentally, you will end up fitting similar to the groove that's existed for a long time before. And then they do scale and they end up roughly at 20%. And everyone ends up roughly at 20%. If you're exceptional, 25%. If you're like average, 15%. And that's just the nature of the game.

26:41But I think when you're younger, you feel like you can beat the statistics. I do think the one thing about doing, like having that experience I had and stuff is like one of the fun things about trying to do different kind of things when you're younger is just the shenanigans. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, you get a bit older and you get a bit risk-averse to those things because they seem like a less high effort. And so you just sort of avoid the shenanigans. For example, your businesses, super practical, high margin, big distribution, etc. Not a lot of room for shenanigans. No. But, you know, I guess you can sleep at night, which helps.

27:16Yeah, exactly. I actually don't know. I don't know what you would say about this, but I genuinely don't think I am half as risky as I used to be. I just don't. I think about things very differently. I think about things for much longer. I have to lose. I have all these rules about like, if I have a good idea, I have to sit on it. and if I like it in a month I can then consider it and like when I was younger I would think about something love it and start a business within like three days it's good discipline but like if you can if you can love it in a month then it really does say something about it but now I just wouldn't risk things like I did and I suppose like maybe that's more to lose maybe that's being a bit longer in the tooth in business things just go more wrong than you think they would and you still like bark right yeah I don't know if they exist if they do I I hope they're doing incredibly well.

28:05Yeah, they were actually lovely products. I've forgotten his name now as well. You'd look great in a little collar. A little dog collar? Yeah, a little dog collar and a lead. Well, that's another video altogether. Yeah. Okay. Next time on Secret Leaders. Christ. Jay, get us off this topic. Anyway, thanks for listening in to today's random business ideas. If you've got a random business idea, then let us know in the comment. Maybe we can rate it. Maybe Chris can roast it for you. Who knows? Yeah. Don't forget to subscribe to Secret Leaders on YouTube and give us five stars on all the audio channels.

28:36Thank you very much for listening to Secret Leaders. I'm Chris. And I'm Tim.