762: Buy Buttons, 10 Years Later

25:27Oh, I'm interested in sports equipment. I'm interested in collectibles or trading cards. And it kind of will show you stuff that's related to those categories. Yeah, so like when you come in as a buyer, whatever you click during that initial onboarding process, that's the shows that are gonna pop up and generate for you via the algorithm. And that's what's so beautiful is you're not going to get hit with a bunch of things that you're not interested in. It's going to show you what you actually want to buy. Okay. So similar to other social platforms at this stage, where it's less about the followers, it's more about the algorithm.

25:59And if you can be engaging and entertaining on camera, it's going to feed it to more people. In that episode, again, episode 740, Clinton gave some tips on how you might source inventory and how you might grow your following on whatnot. One of the interesting things he told me was that his margins are generally lower on whatnot sales than for his traditional brick and mortar shop, but that that inventory turns so much faster. And because of that, it can actually make more money. I think he did something like $2 million in whatnot sales last year. Just wild. Actually, good episodes to check out on sourcing is my chat with Shannon Jean in episode 731.

26:36He's got the liquidation auction tabs like all fired up. He's showing me where to look for deals from Costco and all these other stores, liquidation returns. He's talking about red flags, pricing research, shipping, all of that stuff. Another platform that didn't make the 2016 version is OutSchool. And this is an online class marketplace for school-age kids. Grownups had Udemy and Coursera and Skillshare, but there wasn't that much for kids. So Amir Nathu created this platform, starting with coding and STEM classes. And he starts to get a toehold in the homeschool market, but then he really gains a lot of traction during the 2020 era for obvious reasons.

27:16And the cool part is because it's crowdsourced, anybody can put a class up on any topic almost. And you started to see a really wide variety of classes going beyond just academics. I'm talking about Lego building classes, art classes, Pokemon, veterinary science, voiceover training, and perhaps my favorite of all, video games. This is Devin Ricks in episode 499 on how she makes money online teaching video game classes for kids. What a time to be alive. So the way that I have made this side hustle work is I actually teach kids how to play video games. I'm an online teacher with a company called OutSchool.

27:56OutSchool is just this really awesome hub of classes, everything from algebra to pottery to piano to video games. And so I offer different video game classes and kids can enroll in my classes and they get to come and play video games with me. I help them with maybe levels that they're having a hard time with or solving puzzles in different video games. And I get paid to play with them. Wow. That's so cool. And very inspiring. OutSchool is this peer-to-peer marketplace where there's parents and kids on one side, focused on K through 12 age group for the sake of reference and their parents. And on the other side is this group of teachers putting up their own classes and usually live taught group classes where, okay, we're going to gather at this time virtually, and we're going to go through this subject matter.

28:44And then sometimes we're going to do it every Tuesday for four weeks or something like that. Is that the case? Or do you have kind of a set schedule? Like Tuesday afternoons, we're doing this. Wednesday afternoons, we're doing this. Yeah, exactly. So without school, it's usually a once a week meeting. Mine are social clubs. So we meet once a week from now until I can't make it work for my schedule anymore. Sometimes teachers will have it be for four weeks or three weeks for specific classes, but it's exactly that. It's just this online space. We usually, we meet through Zoom and the students sign in and then I just am there and kind of guiding the conversation, making sure everyone gets a turn, making sure everyone is heard.

29:22But it's this safe space where students are able to come and meet other people who like video games like they do. because unlike adults, kids, they don't have the right tools to navigate the internet. So it's hard for them to find these social groups for online play. And so what OutSchool does is it has created this space where teachers are background checked and parents feel safe letting their children log in online. All the sessions are recorded and then they can play together and it's a good environment for them. Yeah. We would call this a buy buttons platform, Go where the cash is already flowing.

29:57And here's a platform that has a built-in audience where it's relatively easy. You've got to go through this background check process. You've got to come up with an idea of what you're going to teach. But relatively easy to put your thing out there for sale and have people come and do business with you. We caught up with Devin a couple years after this initial interview in episode 611, when she'd grown from around$4 ,000 a month to now running a six-figure business on OutSchool, really by expanding her class offerings and bringing on other gamers to staff them. Such an inspiring story and one that reminds me there really is a niche for everything.

30:34Now for this next platform, it's actually been around since 2006. So I'm going to call that a miss on my part, not including it in the buy buttons book. And that's teachers pay teachers or TPT. It's got a big niche audience of millions of buyers in the education space. And you don't actually have to be a teacher to sell on there. It's a marketplace for digital products, for worksheets and lesson plans. And I connected with Rob Phelan, who had grown his TPT storefront to around$2 ,000 a month in relatively passive income. Here's Rob from episode 644 on the types of products he's found to sell best and how you might come up with product ideas yourself.

31:16What I'm finding is that teachers don't want shallow. They want deep. They want quality. They want something that's going to be this amazing exchange of value. And we know that that's like a core thing when it comes to creating any product or for any business is that the customer has to feel like, yes, that was an amazing exchange of value. And you as the seller have to feel like that was really worth my time as well. So I find with my store, I create personal finance education products for teachers. So that is my niche. I'm very much focused on financial educators, mostly in the high school space.

31:45and what I'm finding is that I don't want to create an entire curriculum for them. What I want is for them to have their own curriculum in place and then they're coming to me when they want something extra, something better. They've identified a part of their curriculum that doesn't really feel great. Students are bored. They wish it was better. They wish it was more exciting or engaging and that's when they come find my store and that's what I try to serve is I want products that are going to get students talking to each other, engaged with the materials and using personal finance in a practical way so they end up learning a much deeper lesson from that than just a teacher lecturing in front of the room.

32:15Okay, so rather than creating something for social studies and something for English writing and something for math, it's like, no, no, no, my niche here is the personal finance space. Do you think that's important to build some level of credibility or like niche down to a certain topic inside your store? I do. I don't think TPT is a throw your net wide and you'll end up coming out ahead kind of thing. I think the more niche down you are, the better you're actually going to do, even though you do make your audience smaller, which does seem counterintuitive. I love the idea of like the 1000 true fans, like finding that group of 1000 people who would want to buy your product and then really making sure you serve those.

32:52For me, that was financial educators. I was in the space myself, didn't really like what was out there in terms of major product offerings. So from Dave Ramsey or Jumpstart or Junior Achievement. And I started creating resources for my own classroom. So I still teach full time in public high school education. And I just was like, okay, like I use this. I think it's good. Let me throw it out there and see what other teachers think. And I found that if I kept creating personal finance resources, teachers were excited, they were coming back. I ventured into math a little bit, because that's also my certification.

33:22And it was a very crowded space. And like high school math is such a general idea that it's hard to win that that market share as easily as it will be to say like, No, I am high school personal finance, small individual resources that are going to enhance what you're already doing. Yeah, I love this example of hate, this is something that I was creating for my own class for my own use. And then maybe there's a way to sell that sawdust to sell that, you know, to reach a wider audience. I think there's so many examples of files and templates and things that we've built in our own businesses that, you know, maybe you could license that out to somebody else.

33:53Maybe it's a way to get paid over and over again from that work that you did once kind of like a behind the scenes type of product. I think that's really cool. The other thing that might be interesting here is there was some semi recent legislation where personal finance education is becoming a graduation requirement in more and more states where it's like, you know, math, people have been teaching math for hundreds of years in high school. But, you know, this is a newer sub like the personal finance focus, maybe a newer subject where maybe it's a bluer ocean to go and try and compete in. Yeah.

34:26And I think when you try and think of a new business idea, thinking about what is trending currently, or what's coming down the road that you can maybe hop on and be an early adopter on or an early creator on personal finance is sort of that thing. And that was just by luck for me. Like, that's what I'm passionate about. That's what I work in. And it just happens to be a very growing industry in terms of education, because more and more states are mandating it. And then the problem teachers have is they're not trained in it. So they often get tossed this class like, hey, you, you're going to teach about money next year.

34:53And they're a social studies teacher, they're a math teacher, they're maybe a business teacher, but they've never taught personal finance before. So there's a huge demand for how do I do this? And I need resources that really, really walk me through this very simply because I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm not an expert yet at this content area. I encourage you to check out that full interview with Rob to learn more. It is episode 644 in your archives. And there could also be an opportunity if you're selling digital products on Etsy to syndicate some of your best selling listings over there.

35:23If it's a fit in the education space and kind of double dip on Teachers Pay Teachers. And here's one that's not completely passive, but does have machines doing a good chunk of the work for you. And that's the laundry service Poplin. More and more people seem to be outsourcing this chore. And apps like Poplin are helping match busy people with side hustlers who want to get paid to do other people's laundry. Mona Lisa Escobedo was featured on entrepreneur.com this year, earning a reported average of eight to $11 ,000 a month. Now this gig entails using your own washing machine and picking up clothes from clients, washing and folding them, returning them, usually within 24 hours.

36:02So you're going to have the availability to do kind of a quick turnaround there. And it looks like you get paid by the pound. This article says Mona Lisa is earning a buck 16 per pound of laundry and doing five to 12 orders a day, probably multiple pounds in each order. And so yes, you've got to fold it, you've got to pick it up from the customer. You've got to return it. But the washer and dryer are doing most of the work here. And I suppose if you've got a flexible work from home gig as your main job could be viable as a side hustle. This profile says Mona Lisa is a personnel specialist for the Navy.

36:34So maybe it is a side hustle for her. She says Poplin has this ranking system that kind of restricts new laundry providers to fewer orders at the start, which means early on, you've got to take on the orders that nobody else wants. Maybe they're farther away from your house. And so your income, she says, becomes more predictable once you kind of build up your rank and your reputation and you start getting regular customers. And her strategy is to do what she calls a cluster the orders from families that are in the same area on the same day to minimize your drive time, right? You got to optimize for that because like other gig apps, you're paying your own mileage and you're also paying the extra utility bill of running laundry non-stop.

37:15But it's a true buy buttons marketplace play. She doesn't do any outside marketing and is on track to make an extra$90 ,000 this year doing laundry. Now, there's another platform that has kind of quietly become the biggest garage sale in human history. And it's free and that's Facebook Marketplace. And there's an interesting side hustle we've been covering the last few years that actually lets you tap into that huge audience of buyers with very little risk, like getting products to resell without any upfront inventory cost. This is through a service called ShareTown that recruits local reps, probably hundreds of Side Hustle Show listeners at this point, to pick up bulky product return requests.

37:56Think mattresses, think furniture, think exercise equipment. So you do need a vehicle big enough to hold that stuff. You need a place to store it. But the reps that I've connected with report earning anywhere from $150 to$250 per flip with ShareTown feeding them the pickup requests. So in that sense, it's almost like a double buy buttons marketplace play. Once you've got the item, you clean it up, you photograph it, and you list it for resale, mostly on Facebook marketplace. Matt and Hannah Lee actually turned their ShareTown side hustle into a full-time income stream, flipping up to 60 items per month.

38:32Here's how they described their marketing strategy on marketplace in episode 687. I would say my number one tip, and I think this applies to a lot of side hustles, is just consistency. I post mattresses every single day and I've posted mattresses every single day for eight years. They seem to reward like the recency of that listing. So yeah, and then it's just, I just think old stuff just becomes stale and stops getting views and stuff like that. If I've got something up that's getting lots of attention, I think that again, the way algorithms work, It's telling other people to keep clicking on it because, wow, look how many people have already clicked on it.

39:10But if something just like for whatever reason didn't get any traction, I'll take it down. I might change the photo or change the ad a little bit and just repost it. And I just do it over and over. And I think that is a big difference because getting the item is hard work and time consuming, but relatively straightforward. I think that people can get discouraged because they aren't moving things. And I think that all has to do with selling things. Yes, they're not selling things. They're like, man, I picked all these up. Everybody says it's great, but they're not selling. I think that the big difference maker is how much energy they're putting into that item.

39:51Is it all Facebook Marketplace? Are there other channels that you like for reselling? We use some other ones. Facebook is definitely the most lucrative or the biggest bang for our buck as far as time yields the most sales yeah for sure offer up is pretty good i've seen that kind of decline recently i don't know why um but that we haven't we used to get there's a time there where we were getting quite a lot of interest there we still get some every week from that but and then we used to craigslist but i feel like the bigger the other ones get the less people are utilizing something like craigslist or whatever your local you know online 10 20 years ago craigslist was the only the game in town and that was the place to go for all this furniture stuff yeah so i think it's kind of slowly dwindling out i used to make a point to list there because again that consistency mindset i've always been like i'm gonna put some effort into every single avenue so that i have no reason then i know i did everything i could do you know does share town give you a pricing guidance on well this is the product that you have this is like suggested list price or something anything like that or based on the condition of it like maybe it's a sliding scale every item has what we call a minimum ad price.

41:00So that's all based off of numbers that they found to be successful for that item. So you're able to list above that price if you want to, but you can't list below that price. And that kind of helps so that we're not undercutting other people in our area or, you know, that type of things. And then they have a set price per item that we're required to pay once we sell it. So that's just a taste of the ShareTown side hustle tapping into the massive audience that is Facebook marketplace. If you want to learn more, check out our full ShareTown review, that full interview with Matt and Hannah, or submit an application at sidehustlenation.com slash ShareTown.

41:40There really is a marketplace for just about everything these days. One of the most interesting examples I've come across was Summer Fisher in Australia, whose business was renting out dresses. And like a lot of these other examples, it wasn't about creating demand from scratch, but rather stepping in front of demand that was already out there. Yeah, there's online sites where you can rent dresses, basically. So they're different in every country. So for us in Australia, there's a site called The Vault. A big one in the US and the UK is By Rotation. So there's several of these type of websites and they're kind of peer-to-peer lending.

42:18So basically, You can put up your own wardrobe or, like I do, run it as a business and rent to other people. There was one like bag borrow or steal. Is that one? Or was that just like for buying handbags? I don't know if it was a rental service too. I'm trying to think of like the last. You can rent bags on these sites as well. Okay. Do you play around in that space or strictly dresses? No, I don't really because bags are really expensive to buy. And I just, because I self-insure all my items, I just don't want to play with that. Right, right, right. Yeah. What's a sweet spot for cost of acquisition, like brand style?

42:54And there's a lot of different factors that must go into the purchase side of it to decide, well, what might there be demand for? It's quite nuanced. So it will depend on, it's like the intersection of brand, style, size, all these things that kind of come together to get a dress that's in demand. I would say that as opposed to when I'm reselling, when I'm renting, it does need to be a fairly recent style, like within the last 18 months, but definitely, but usually even within the last six months is that will be like the most popular styles. Whereas when I'm reselling, you know, that's not as relevant.

43:33And then a lot of it will be like, did a celebrity wear it? Is it the color of that season? Is it winter or summer? I rent a lot to wedding guests. So a lot of people who are going to weddings and just are going to wear that item once. So there's a lot of that with the sizing. You do have to look at the market. So a lot of girls in their early twenties will get into dress rentals and they will tend to rent those smaller sizes. And I've found pretty good success with renting like slightly like mid sizes, I guess it would be called. So yeah, just slightly larger, not the teeny tiny sizes. So yeah, but it does depend on the brand too, because some of those brands do do better in the really small sizes.

44:15I bet you never thought about bridesmaid dresses as an asset class before, but there it is. Summer was doing 150 grand a year renting out dresses in episode 652. So lots of examples of Buy Button's marketplace that didn't make the book in 2016. Even some older ones I missed in my research for that like Teachers Pay Teachers and recently we had Sue Antinoro on about her estate sale business that relied on a site called Auction Ninja to move all the inventory. People just love to bid, she said, and that business could clear up to$5 ,000 in a weekend helping people empty out their houses. Lou Shaver was on the show this summer with his construction loan draw inspection business.

44:58And sure enough, he named a handful of marketplaces where the banks go to connect with inspectors like him. No outside marketing necessary. Up next, we're taking the buy buttons strategy offline. Maybe you've got a side hustle that doesn't necessarily lend itself well to a pre-existing marketplace, the good news is you can still apply the broader strategy here of going where the cash is already flowing. Some examples of entrepreneurs doing just that coming up right after this. I found there are two types of people, those with more business ideas than they have time and those who find themselves kind of sitting and waiting for the perfect idea to fall in their lap.

45:37And I've been both in my career, though lately definitely more of the former. But if there's a common thread among side hustle show guests it's that they took that first step before they felt truly ready before it felt perfect so if you've been kicking around an idea let this be your permission slip to launch our partner shopify makes it easy to look professional and polished right out of the gate even if you still got some doubts behind the scenes every hero needs a sidekick and for millions of businesses it's shopify handling payments tracking inventory and helping convert up to 36 % more sales with their ShopPay checkout.

46:11Launching before Black Friday means you can take advantage of the extra online traffic. If you're ready to launch your business before Black Friday, go to shopify.com slash side hustle to start your free trial. That's shopify.com slash side hustle. Go to shopify.com slash side hustle today to hear your first. Isn't that really where you should be spending your time as a business owner? That one line was a pretty effective sales pitch for me in bringing on some help in the topic area of my business. And they were right. That task wasn't where I should have been allocating my limited hours. And if I had to guess, you probably shouldn't be in the weeds with payroll processing, payroll tax deadlines, or other administrative to-dos either.

46:54That's where our partner Gusto comes in. Gusto is online payroll and benefits software built for small businesses. It's all in remote friendly and incredibly easy to use so you can pay, hire, onboard and support your team from anywhere. Wouldn't it be sweet to automate this stuff, payroll tax filing, simple direct deposits, health benefits, 401ks, offer letters, onboarding docs? Gusto does it all and you don't pay a cent until you run your first payroll. Try Gusto today at gusto.com slash side hustle and get three months free when you run your first payroll. That's three months of free payroll at gusto.com slash side hustle.

47:31One more time, it's gusto.com slash side hustle. All right, we're back and we're talking how to take the buy buttons strategy offline. One interesting recent example comes from Vlad Priyadko, the founder of Coffee Bike, a mobile coffee shop in Vancouver, BC. And in this business, it was all about getting in front of a thirsty crowd. They just weren't where he thought they'd be at first. Here's Vlad from episode 754. I intentionally was building the unit for this one specific location in Vancouver, which was a complete disaster. So it was thousands of people crossing every few hours. It was between a subway and a bus station.

48:12But the issue was people are so much in a rush that none of them were actually willing to stop in between switching from subway to the bus. I even put a big like slow down, enjoy the cup of coffee, the bus is coming every one minute, 45 seconds. I couldn't break the mindset of these specific people. I just moved a couple blocks down to the next subway station where people were coming out and going to their offices. And that was like X5 of sales just by switching two blocks. The flexibility of the concept allows you to play around with so many different variables, with so many different locations that you will 100 % find a winner if you are actually committed to finding one.

48:59I switched locations and it was good. Then I was like, what else can I do to make it work? So in this specific office area, I went to like 10 different offices and I told them, hey guys, I'm gonna come to each of you, like let's say the first three offices, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, then office number one, 10 to 11, then office number two, 11 to 12, office number three, 12 to one. and this kind of scarcity of my presence would push people to come out and get excited about me coming. I had some extra new pastries, some drinks. After that, I started to receive recognition and I started to be invited for events.

49:37That opened up me a huge revenue stream, which actually contributes to more than half of our revenue in Vancouver, Canada right now with my personally owned coffee bikes. Okay. Did you do anything? I love this approach of going to the office buildings. You trying to approach the building manager or who, like, who do you talk to to say, like, I'm going to park out here Monday, Wednesday, Friday from nine to 10 in the morning. Just being nice, entering the first person I see, I'm trying to kind of dig who's in charge. Usually it would be just a reception desk. She has like some sort of internal communication system, like a Slack or or Discord, or something similar, and she would just send a quick message, hey, now this coffee guy is going to come serve Monday, Wednesdays, Fridays, and slowly, slowly I would build up my recruitment customer base.

50:22I would also spend every single evening with my laptop researching, getting emails like LinkedIn, Facebook even, kind of like an FBI creep sort of situation. I would just try to find the best people in different industries and approach them with my little enterprise. This is how a small business startup works. You grind in the morning and you keep on grinding in the evening if you really want to make the best out of it. Yeah, it's trying to find where there's a large concentration of people who might want your product and how can I kind of shortcut my way in front of them? Oh, I can go to the subway station.

50:58Oh, I can go to these office managers or these receptionists. They can send out a Slack message to everybody in the building. Like that's pretty powerful to say like, and I like this scarcity. I'm only going to be here for a couple hours If you want it, come and get it. Otherwise, I'm moving to the next building. And the mobility of the business lends itself well to that. Again,$7.54 if you want to learn more about the mobile barista business. Another big unlock for Vlad was private events where he'd make up to$275 an hour pouring coffee. Pretty cool gig, especially when you compare that to a barista gig at a regular coffee shop.

51:30Now, another really unique side hustle we covered was Summer Ray's Aura Photography business where she would take your picture, really record you for several minutes, and then her proprietary software would detect your energy fields and spit back out this like colorized Polaroid looking type picture. And it was$44 per session. And really the whole business was built on the buy buttons strategy of tapping into other people's audiences. So she started with some local retail stores and would set up like a pop up event that got enough traction to do some sessions at local street fairs, farmers markets type of things.

52:06But her biggest wins came from going after even larger events with larger crowds. And sometimes there's a fee associated with getting in front of that crowd, which can be intimidating for a younger business. Here's Summer from episode 707 describing how she was able to get into a country music festival and how much she made that weekend. So the first music festival that I applied to was 600 bucks. They took 20%. And when I applied, I was just getting going and I said, hey, here's an example of a Saturday farmer's market. I think I did like 50 photos and it was kind of an all day thing. But I think because you're a music festival, I'd have more conversion than at a farmer's market.

52:49And full disclosure, I don't have 600 bucks to pay you. So could you just take it out of the payment? And for some reason, she said yes. Okay. And that ended up being a great festival and they just took the 600 bucks out of my payment. It sounds like there's almost an application or like a bidding process. Well, like, okay, well, 20 % of the rev share sounds great, but well, how much are you really going to sell here? It's like, you almost have to pump yourself up. I think we could do really well. It's because they're like, well, we got limited real estate and we want to make sure we can make the most out of it.

53:16But yeah, you got some track record prior to going into that. Yeah. And it's been a beautiful teacher of like, just ask, just put yourself out there. I've always heard in entrepreneurial spaces, if you're not embarrassed by your performance six months ago, you launched too late. You're not acting swiftly enough. And when I look at my first photos, and when I think of my first events, I could cry right now. And it keeps getting better every time. So it's been a beautiful teacher of acting imperfectly because people really just enjoy a really novel experience. And it's really cool being surrounded by kind of similar vendors and you being the oddball.

53:54It sets you up for people being kind of inquisitive about what's going on. And then to close the sale, you just kind of have to be personable. Yeah, as people walk by, they have some level of curiosity. They say, well, what is this? How does it work? And then you put the hard sell on them. Yeah, basically, again, I'm reiterating every time every booth I look back on and I see so many errors and I remind myself that my customers don't see those. That's me trying to chase something better. But as an example, so right now what I've been doing is I have, you know, little rainbow garlands that go around the edge of my booth at the entrance to make it look cute.

54:26And I just have clothes pins and I hang Polaroids of previous sessions that I've done. I've got like 20 or 30 out. I try to pick them that look very different. So it invites curiosity. But a pain point I've found currently is if I can get people close enough that they can see the Polaroids, they get interested, then I get to have the conversation with them. Then they kind of get in that dance with me and they often will come sit for me and enjoy the session. But my new thing is I'm trying to grab that curiosity from further away, not needing them within 10 or 20 feet of my booth. So currently I've got in production is I printed like a big background with like blown up pictures that are really large.

55:05So hopefully I can grab that inquisitive thing from further away. Do you recall how much that music festival ended up making you after the booth fee and the revenue share? I did the first day. So this was a country music festival as well. So it was a big push because this is not, you know, it wasn't really like hippie wellness zone. You know what I mean? The first day I sold out, I didn't bring enough film. I did a little over a hundred sessions and had to leave early. And then the next day I did about a hundred sessions again. So I made like after paying all my fees and stuff, I think I made about five grand that weekend.

55:42Wow. Just a Friday and Saturday. Yeah, it was amazing. And that's the one that I met someone who's now booked me for her wedding. So that's another like check with a comma coming next year from that one event. Wow,$5 ,000 in a week. Everyone's like, I'm a believer. Show me the energy fields now. This is good. Again, that's Summer Rae from episode 707 with her Aura Photography side hustle. Maybe an up-and-coming service you can bring to your area and follow some of her same marketing tactics. And while the festivals are one-off hits, your business might need a more steady flow of traffic. I think that's true if you're operating more on volume, like Mike Hoffman's vending machine operation.

56:24It's just like real estate, where it's location, location, location. You could have the newest products, the newest products, the newest machines, but if nobody ever walks by, it's going to be hard to make a sale. So I asked Mike for some of the criteria he looks for in scouting a potential location and how you might start the conversation. I can picture like a senior center down the road from us. There's got to be some nearby apartment buildings. How do I find the decision maker there? What does that initial conversation look like? What's my opener? It's super easy. I think the first thing is the examples you just rattled off.

56:57So senior center and let's say an apartment complex, the thing they all have in common is they have a front desk person that works there. So you can just roll right in there. They're not going to know you from anyone else. And you can just say, hey, is your general manager or your property manager in today? And if she's like, oh, no, you can always ask for the business card and send an email. But yeah, that's exactly what I did that first location I landed. I was like, hey, is your manager in? And she happened to be in. She's like, oh, my gosh, we want to move forward. It's just such a low barrier to entry by just doing that pop in.

57:28Your ask was like, tell me about your current vending situation. Like, what's that line? Yeah. Or just like, do you want to provide modern amenities? And then you just start asking questions about foot traffic to qualify them. So how many people live here or how many units are here? And they'll say, okay, Nick, there's 200 units. And then you're like, okay, well, how many people live in those units? Cause some might be two or three bedroom. They're like, oh, 400 people. Like right away, you're sitting on a 1500 to two grand gold mine just with that. Is there a minimum residency or occupancy that you're looking for?

58:00Yeah. Yeah, we like to target 100 units as a minimum or 100 plus employees. Okay, 100 residential units or 100 employees. It's hard to imagine an office building without this in there already. But you're finding like, this building has been here for 25 years. No one has ever asked us about vending before. You know, that's a great idea. Like, does that happen? All the time. And in fact, what you'd be really surprised about is we're taking over a lot of the market. So current user, let's say that location, they probably already have vending machines that aren't being stocked because the baby boomer generation doesn't use a cell phone.

58:37The only way they can track inventory is driving by the property where like on my phone across the country, I can look at all my vending machines, even my micro market in Philadelphia and see what I've done in sales in the last hour. So then I can get ahead of what needs stocked before it actually shows up empty customer facing. I'm like, okay, we've sold eight out of 10 salads. We have two left. We need to backfill those salads. Where right now, these places we're taking over for, they either have vending machines that are broken. They have vending machines that don't allow credit card usage.

59:11Well, guess what? 80 % of your sales are going to be with card, not cash anymore. Yeah. So it's not so much that they have never considered vending. It's that their existing provider is not living up to expectations or it could be doing better. Yeah, it's like either that existing provider took on a bigger, let's say the Coke provider of Washington has vending as a side service. Well, is that Coke provider more worried about topping off the cafeteria with Coke in the school? Or are they more worried about the teacher's lounge vending machine? Did you give any thought to buying a route that already existed as a way to kind of jumpstart this?

59:51I can see how that would appeal to people, but I can also see like, well, there's a lot of sweat equity to be had and just like doing the cold calls and making a few placements yourself. Yeah. So I'm always looking for good deals when it comes to buying routes. I have a student that started in my like vending printer community where I help people get going last January and he went from zero machines to 20 machines. And about half of those came from buying routes for sale. And the other half came from finding leads, sending cold emails, getting a response kind of on repeat. So I see both sides of it.

1:00:23The hard part you need to be careful of is don't get caught up in how many machines are part of that sale or how many locations they have vending machines in. You want to focus on revenue per machine because that's where I really like I would rather get one senior center that's doing a thousand bucks a month than five machines at five jiffy lubes doing a thousand bucks total a month. Get yourself in front of a hungry crowd and even better, a hungry crowd that lives or works there so they can buy from you consistently. That's Mike Hoffman from Vendingpreneurs and episode 599 of the Side Hustle Show, which I'll be sure to link up in the show notes for this one.

1:01:04Next week, you'll meet another entrepreneur who took this same buy buttons strategy offline for a really interesting community boards business essentially selling advertising into busy restaurants taking advantage of a flow of traffic that was already happening and finding a creative way to add value and insert himself into it make sure to hit that subscribe button so you don't miss it big thanks to all our amazing guests for sharing their insight big thanks to our sponsors for helping make this content free for everyone you can hit up sidehustlenation.com slash deals for all the latest offers from our sponsors in one place.

1:01:40Thank you for supporting the advertisers that support the show. That is it for me. Thank you so much for tuning in. Until next time, let's go out there and make something happen. And I'll catch you in the next edition of the Side Hustle Show. Hustle on.