6 Scalable Startup Ideas (You Can Start Tomorrow)

0:00You're a side hustle away from changing your life. In this episode, I brought on Chris Koerner, who gave me his best ideas for side hustles that not only don't take a lot of money to start, but they can actually scale to be really big businesses. A side hustle could turn into a real company, and a real company can change your life. So in this episode, it's all about ideas that could generate cash flow, that can turn into real businesses anywhere between a few hundred thousand dollars a year to 50 million dollar a year businesses. Enjoy the episode.

0:42Welcoming my brother from another mother, Chris Kerner on the show, Startup Ideas podcast. He's back, I think for the third time. Chris, by the end of this episode, what are people going to learn? they are going to learn that they should not stay seated in their seat they need to this episode is successful if they pit pause and go out and do something and then come back days later and finish it and will you give people like specific ideas and sauce to get them out of their seats correct my name is christopher sauce kerner like that's the whole brand we're talking about here of course okay so as long as you could commit to the sauce and that i mean people do need to move their own legs but at least right yeah but you're gonna get them pretty close this will be saucy there's gonna be like four linguine noodles in there and it's just gonna be drowning in arrabbiata sauce okay and what and before we get in what type of categories of ideas are we talking about so we're gonna go um approachable low startup cost low friction to start um affordable but like I in my opinion everything is scalable right so the the question I just hate it when people say like is that even scalable like yes it's it's scalable the right question is how hard would it be to scale to that to whatever number because for some a hundred thousand dollars a year is scale to some a hundred million right so these are all scalable so these are ideas that can be anywhere from 10 grand a month all the way up to um shoot i mean eight figures a year 10 million dollars a year in revenue with double digit profit margins okay you you have my attention okay uh i'm gonna read some stats to you you ready yeah facebook marketplace we talked about facebook last year on maybe the last time i was on this facebook marketplace um facebook has over three billion monthly active users.

2:4416 % of those are monthly active users for Facebook Marketplace. Half a billion people use Facebook Marketplace. 16 % of active users log into Facebook for the sole purpose of shopping on Facebook Marketplace. And Facebook knew what they were doing. They saw that the wall wasn't very popular anymore. So they started adding groups and market, like they know what they're doing. They're smart, right? That's why we invest in Mark Zuckerberg. 51 % of all recent social media purchases so like not amazon social media purposes all happened on facebook marketplace okay like my point facebook marketplace is massive it's huge there are countless people that solely rely on facebook marketplace for their living um and i've got a bunch of ideas around this a lot of them like kind of like hands-on dirty sweaty but the first one is why is like no one building third-party apps for facebook marketplace apps that like scan items for you apps that like give you price alerts apps where you can like use the api in a compliant way to scrape and to find alpha and to see oh this dresser over here is listed for this but it's actually worth this on ebay like arbitrage apps i've already looked into it don't tell me the api permissions don't allow for it because they do people are not building apps on top of facebook marketplace and i don't know why that's crazy dude that's crazy billion users i was almost 100 convinced that it just was impossible right yeah like i vibe coded one that like scanned items it would reach out to people like i'm not an expert i don't even know how to code i vibe coded it and it worked for my use case i didn't like scale it i didn't sell it but like it is possible the api allows for it people would pay for it they make their living from facebook marketplace if they could have an edge they would pay for it no one's doing it ebay has thousands of apps built on top of it right some of those apps got acquired by ebay for hundreds of millions of dollars like there's something here there's no third-party apps for facebook marketplace not really like i found like a couple kind of janky ones but not nothing legitimate that's crazy it's crazy it's crazy i mean how big is the shopify app ecosystem right oh geez

5:09billions i think there's hundreds of thousands of shopify apps oh what does perplexity say so i said how big is shopify apps how much revenue through there So they've got 12 ,000 apps powering more than 87 % of merchant stores. I'm surprised there's not more. I mean, these apps earn, developers earned a billion dollars through it, driven by an average annual earnings near 100 ,000 per developer. Interesting. 7 ,000 developers with a 27 % increase in total apps from early 2024 to 2025. Wow.

5:51Pretty crazy. So what are the most popular third-party apps that help Facebook marketplace sellers besides Facebook, right? That's the question?

6:13Have you heard of these? Yeah, I mean, OfferUp, that's like a direct competitor. Mercari, I haven't heard of Depop. But Depop is for secondhand clothes and stuff like that. Wow, I've actually used it a lot and it says the audience focus is a young trendsetter so I must be a young trendsetter. I've always seen you as such. These are competitors to Facebook Marketplace. These aren't tools and apps that could help sellers. So this is food for thought. Thanks for that, Alpha. Dude, I'm telling you, I posted a video about appliance rentals on Facebook Marketplace and then a guy went and started doing lead gen.

6:55He posted appliances for rent in other markets and sells those leads to locals that are renting out appliances. And he vibe-coded his own internal app for posting, for responding automatically. People are doing this in the shadows, but not at scale. Which is what we like to hear. We like to hear about, that's where the alpha is, right? When people are doing things in the shadows and you can productize it. We like that you can vibe code a lot of these solutions to use things like cloud code. This could scale, right? This can scale really big. It doesn't cost you a lot of money to build this. You probably can build MVPs of this in a couple of weeks.

7:37You should be building something in this space. I have too many things to build, Greg. Come on. Well, should we go to the next? Yeah. So my business idea is not this product itself. I'll elaborate. This reminds me of one of my favorite quotes. First time founders focus on product. Second time founders focus on distribution. What is this product going on behind me? Day six of genius business ideas. It's literally a round piece of foam. That's it. You put it around your propeller when you're not driving the boat so kids don't hit their legs into it. They're selling thousands of these things because they're going viral because it's so simple, because people don't know how it works.

8:13That's distribution. 99 out of 100 people would have never launched this business because they would have thought, who's going to buy that? It's just a round piece of foam. There's nothing proprietary about it. Sometimes it pays to be a little naive and to understand human psychology. My favorite human psychology market. All right. So here's what I'm thinking. Anything is scalable. Anything can be sold with the right distribution and marketing. Would you agree? Yes. Like I could tweet about the dumbest thing at the dumbest price point and maybe sell none of them. And if Elon Musk retweets me, I'll sell some just because of the distribution, right?

8:47So we have two magical tools. You could argue two of the most magical tools that the internet has ever seen. And that's the short form video algorithm, right? And AI. So this tool that I showed is objectively dumb, right? I've had a boat. It's a piece of foam you put around the propeller. You don't leave it on the propeller as you're driving, you just, you leave it there when you're out there on the water parked. So a kid doesn't swim up against it and like cut their leg, which is like very unlikely because kids stay away from it. Whatever. It doesn't matter. What matters is that the distribution, right?

9:24It, they sell thousands of these things because of that video that was going on behind me, because, you know, nothing goes viral without half of people thinking you're dumb, you're an idiot. So half of people are like, this is stupid. This is useless. Yada, yada. And the algorithm's like, oh comments good spread it spread it spread it and the other half would be like this is awesome i could use this and so it sells right so ideas that were once dumb are no longer dumb because of short form video so why not use chadgbt cloud whatever ai to come up with all kinds of dumb product ideas and i guess i forgot the third piece of technology 3d printers all types of like seemingly dumb product ideas that match three things number one it can be 3d printed so you can make a prototype easily number two um it can be like ai would come up with it ai has the capacity of thinking of it and number three um it can spread in like a 10 like a five to 10 second video via short form video like how it works just showing you how it works in a video um and coming up with like a product studio and you don't really invest money in the product development until you have thousands of pre-orders demand you throw up a Shopify site whatever and you just start selling these dumb little products what do we think I like it where my mind goes to and I'm curious your thoughts on this is how do you how do you put AI on some of these ideas and the reason I say that is because especially on TikTok but in the world generally people hate AI people hate it like it's very very like they violently hate ai so i think that you can do a lot of these hardware ideas or physical product ideas that are quote-unquote dumb but you implement ai into it and purpose on purpose okay like you create like one ai feature which is like so yeah you know dumb pointless yeah pointless and and people are like why do we need ai and everything right like yeah What if it were that propeller that was voice-enabled?

11:32Yeah, exactly.

11:37But to some people, they're like, oh, I could see myself using that. And those are the people that buy your product. And that's the beauty, right? Is that these platforms have billions of active users, so you just need a small percentage of them to buy. But is that malicious? Is it worth people spending their time on this sort of stuff? Okay, so I get asked that question a lot. people will approach me with a business idea like chris what do you think what do you think and one of my first questions back to them is like what else do you have on your plate like what else are you looking at and some people are idea machines and the one they're asking me about is one of like 50 that they're kind of throwing around and some people are like it's all i got right and so i'm always very cautious to tell them like you're pretty biased because this is all you got the the statistical probability that the only idea you have being like the best use of your time and money is almost zero.

12:30So keep that in mind, irrespective of my opinion of the idea. It's probably not the right idea for you because you don't have anything to compare it against. Right. So if someone's listening to this and like, it all comes down to their background, do they have like a background in product development? Do they have a background in short form video or editing or whatever? Um, this could be the perfect idea for them. Um, but if someone has no experience or background in that or they're not insanely passionate about it or they have 50 other ideas then it's a terrible idea for them okay but that's fair that's fair yeah so it's good for some bad for others exactly yeah that's why like just this is my soapbox but like you just share your ideas and i know you agree with this we've both talked about this but don't withhold your ideas because Because like, Greg, you're going to come across something in the wild.

13:22Like I remember you had the idea of like having a certification program. You walk by your dentist, you walk by your now dentist and you saw best dentist in Miami. And one of your ideas was like, that needs to be a thing. Like who's going to become the certification program for X, Y, or Z industry. Right. Yeah. And you love that idea because you saw it, you own it, you experienced it. You gave that dentist thousands of dollars. and like maybe you know a guy in college who had like a certification like all of these life experiences led you to really loving that idea right yep and other people heard us talk about it and like that's stupid that's dumb right and so when we share our ideas the only chance of someone stealing it is if that other person has had like the exact same life as us they have the same work history the same personality they're also an introvert their mom also divorced their dad at age 14.

14:15These random things that we could never really quantify, they would have to also be true in order for them to maybe also love the idea. And then the qualifier is they have to actually go get around all the friction to doing something about it. There's one caveat, which is that is true on the internet. But when you're talking about, let's say, opening up a coffee shop in your town and it's a town of 700 and there's already a coffee shop then there is a defined pie and you're fighting for the pie but when you're building on the internet and you're doing what we're talking about which is short form spending money on meta ads building organic audiences writing memes all this stuff the pie is infinite and it's almost like the way you know it's really hard to even imagine it it's just like it's it's very similar to when you think about how big the world is like the planet earth or the universe we live in it's so big like how big is the universe you know how far is mars from here how far is you know how big is our galaxy that's like the internet it's infinite it's literally infinite 100 there's another exception to that and that's like um which is on the internet let's say you're evan spiegel founder of snapchat you're in a bar you're talking to like a facebook developer and you're like dude i'm starting this company i think it's really unique because our messages are going to disappear and the data showing is this like there's actually i know it sounds stupid but that's also a feature not a bug like yeah and that facebook developer is like interesting okay that's like a it's on the internet but it's a limited pie right and like that idea can be stolen partially because they have like kind of the same brain in a way um so like i or like patent patentable ideas you know like there are exceptions to what i'm saying but even with the facebook example like having you know i've advised some of the biggest social companies on the planet biggest tech companies on the planet someone like facebook is only copying your idea once it hits millions or hundreds of millions of users they need signals yeah the reality is if you're like the chief product officer of Facebook, you have all the ideas.

16:30You know all the ideas. The problem is you're only going to implement the ones that won't get you fired. The ones that have the most validation. I remember being in a meeting with Facebook at one point, or someone who worked at Facebook, and he was basically like, yeah, I was telling him about an idea that he should do. And he said, we will only do ideas that will generate between$1 billion and a hundred billion dollars a year of revenue so you know that's cute that's cute yeah exactly um all right what's what's your next idea that's that's that's a really good point um all right let me pull this bad boy up all right i'm gonna take a i'm gonna take a left turn here if you don't mind it's gonna go a little different we're gonna go right here guys i'm amped up about this business i'm a cyclist and i hate washing my bike everyone hates washing their bike germany is the world leader when it comes to health and fitness trends.

17:26And those trends always come out West. Here's exactly how you make a thousand bucks a day doing this. This is a mobile bike wash automated on a trailer. You know how many places you could post this up at? Bike park, bike shops, trailhead, cycling races with thousands of cyclists. All of them need this. And it's a perfect business right now because cycling has exploded in the last few years. E-bikes, mountain bikes, road bikes, gravel bikes. There are millions of cyclists in the U.S. spending thousands of dollars on their bikes. And these aren't casual riders. They're people that have five to$15 ,000 dollar bikes that care about maintenance, but they also don't have time or the desire to wash their own bike.

17:59It takes an hour. You need a hose, soap, brushes, degreasers. Most people are in apartments. They don't have a good outdoor space. So what do they do? They just don't wash their bikes or they pay a bike shop way too much money to do it and wait a week to get it back. But if you showed up at the trailhead after their ride with an automated bike wash, 20 bucks for a full wash and dry, forget about it. It takes five minutes. They pay you back on the road. Easy sale. 40 washes a day at 20 bucks each is 800 bucks in revenue no inventory no employees needed to start you just start with you and a trailer full details here look at this freaking thing right here all right what do we think i love this idea i also think that you could put these station put these put this product at like uh just popular bike paths right so in canada we have a at our house in Canada it's on a popular bike path you can actually uh for cyclists you can actually cycle for 130 kilometers on on this bike path and every maybe 15 kilometers there's a you know little station where people could hang out have a coffee have a bite to eat yeah exactly fix a flat so it's just like how do you and the cities operate that like the towns to operate it so i would do a deal with them and be like let's split the revenue on this like this is this just makes your bike path just more like a better experience so you're happy you're also getting some more revenue and then you have distribution there oh i love that sell them you sell a dozen of them to a city and just like charge an ongoing maintenance fee and instead of trying to make a thousand bucks in a day you might make 50 bucks a day but a lot more passively a lot more passively yeah i like that a lot yeah the other thing that comes to mind is like but how do you actually go and okay like let's say this is a good idea how do i actually go and build this like how do i manufacture this like what are the next steps i don't think you need to manufacture anything i think you start with a rented trailer a 200 pressure washer and like very manually you cleaning bikes in areas where there are dirty bikes right then and there right and then you you go from there you save your money and you buy one of these when you can afford it i don't think you have to start with that okay so you just basically prove it out with like you know yeah you just prove it out first yeah and you don't even need to buy it like those box trailers are like 10 grand you don't even need to buy one you can rent one from home depot or whatever have you uh are you a cyclist have you washed a bike no i've never washed a bike dude it's it's the worst I'm like, I have a road bike and a mountain bike and I'm not technically inclined.

20:38I'm not a handy guy. And these things are always breaking the gears. Like I just wish someone could just like ensure that like my bike was clean and maintained on a regular basis. And I don't ever have to think about it because half the time when I go to ride, like something's broke, something's dirty. Like that could be a whole other business on like a bike maintenance plan or whatever. There's a company called VeloFix that does like mobile bike repair. They come to you. that's a pretty big business actually i think they sell franchise territories but something like that but for ongoing maintenance um or you can have like a bike washing subscription with with this idea so cool i mean i like the idea i'm not a cyclist i don't like the idea of strapping into something and not being able to get out um that being said i see tons of cyclists i see it only getting bigger and when i'm coming up with a business idea i'd like to focus on people who have money and disposable income.

21:37And to your point in the video, people are spending five, 10, 15 grand on these things. So of course they want it to look clean. So I like this idea because you can focus on bikes, it's scalable, the MVP isn't crazy. And then maybe you can take that knowledge and then bring it to golf, tennis, other high-end sports and build your empire that way. Yeah, why aren't we washing golf clubs outside of the clubhouse? And even golf bags. I was with a friend the other day and he was like, yeah, I spent like$650 on my golf bag. I was like, that's how much these things cost? He's like, yeah, I just wanted it to look good.

22:24And I get it, but it's like in 10 years or 15 years or five years or three years it's not you know it's probably not going to look that good yeah well dude that gives me an idea like why not like contract with a clubhouse a golf course and have like some like cheaper amazon golf bags as loners and people roll up like these are like the daily golfers and i say hey well i'll wash your bag you go play golf just let me swap out your clubs real quick take the loaner by the time they're done with their nine or 18 holes their bag is spotless what are we doing yeah see it's it's kind of like what we were just talking about with sharing your ideas someone's listening to this that's not a golfer not a cyclist and they're like next skip you know and that's fine it's not for them but like there's a cyclist out there listening it's like oh my gosh yes that is true like everything he's saying about cycling is true this is the idea for me so the other the other thing that's happening now is i've got a friend who has a few car washes and he was telling me he's making most of his revenue from subscriptions.

23:27I was like, subscriptions? What are you talking about? He's like, yeah, well, because I own this local area, I basically was like, for$40 a month you can have unlimited car washes. And he's got a popular Instagram account in his local area. so he was able to create like a pretty big email list from that and then he just like hammered them and like hey get get on the subscription get on the subscription and people are like yeah this is dope like unlimited car washes this is amazing turns out they're only still going for like one car wash or two car washes a month right so with this with the bike idea with the cyclist idea it's like maybe it's a subscription where it's like for 25 bucks a month you get unlimited washes yeah i like that and then you strategically introduce some friction to getting those washes so they don't claim it as much as they might think but what are you trying to say you go and like break their legs uh hey no we're just talking here all right do we have time for another idea or two yeah let me uh let me go through this real quick two more ideas okay if you can oh i can um all right this is this one's a little this one's a little off the wall but it's good it's a very approachable so before i show this video i'm going to give you some uh background so i was a senior in college um i launched an iphone repair store a retail store on the busy road in tuscaloosa alabama called phone restore and it was not going well um students there were 30 000 alabama students that they didn't know I existed.

25:07And one night it was a Sunday night. I couldn't sleep. We were not, it was just not going well. And I had this idea for whatever reason to get custom printed wristbands, right? Now I don't go to bars. I've never even tasted alcohol, but I just know at bars, sometimes they give out wristbands. Are you overage or underage? Whatever. And in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, there's a lot of bars. And so I thought, is there a way to get those Tyvek disposable disposable wristbands custom printed with a message on it. I open it up and there's a, there was a, this was 2010. There were a bunch of websites that did this.

25:42So I ordered a whole box of them for like two cents a piece. And then I went to the bars and I just said, Hey, do you give out wristbands? Yeah. And this was like at like 3 PM, which is like, on one hand, it's like, don't sell the restaurants, don't sell the bars. And on the other hand, if you catch them at the right time, like they're there, they're not busy and they're there. So I would go and they weren't busy but open and i just say hey you give out wristbands yeah do you want to give out these instead of those sure yeah now we don't have to buy wristbands anymore cool and also i'd throw in like i'm a student you know help out a fellow student they were most likely a student too and they just start passing out my wristbands so these students would go out to the bar they would get drunk they would break their iphone they'd wake up with a broken iphone what happened last night they'd see their wristband and i have a picture of this also you can put it over the video if you want but uh it was like 15 off iphone repair at phone restore phone number address whatever and that completely changed the trajectory of the business that one idea late on a sunday night which just a side note i just love the fact that with any business you're one idea away from completely changing the outcome right and they say ideas are worthless amen brother ideas are everything.

26:53They're more important than ever today. Yeah. Um, so that's my backstory that made me see this and think, Oh, there's an opportunity here because then I went down this rabbit hole. I didn't pursue it much, but like, I need to have like a wristband advertising agency. I need to go find local businesses and, and they charge me and I, I go to bars and I match them up together and I take a cut of in between. That's a business idea. Like that's not really anything new. It's just kind of a new medium for it. Just an ad agency, right? Matching buyers and sellers. So that's an idea. But when I saw this video, I thought of that idea.

27:28So that's the backstory. Cool. Yep. I'm with you. All right here. Here's my biggest takeaway from this video. A lot of times we look for complicated or elaborate solutions to simple problems. This woman here is solving a real problem with a very simple solution. You don't need a chemical or a pill that changes the color of the drink when something's added to it. You don't need cameras or sensors, literally a sticker that you put on the drink. The brilliant part about this is it's recurring. You can sell these rolls of stickers to the bars and they'll buy from you and only you every single month.

27:56You can sell ad spots on the stickers with a QR code. It sells itself because it's virulable and it promotes safety and it's fear-based. It just has all the makings of a good business idea. Full details here. All right. So for those that are only listening, it's just, it's a round sticker. It's just a legitimate sticker that you put over your drink at the bar so it doesn't get spiked um so the idea is to monetize that to get your own stickers printed that do the same thing and sell them to bars sell advertising do your own ads whatever what do we think what what like what is a roll cost you know how much are they buying it for stickers are like a a cent and a half each oh really yeah so you you can do like a thousand stickers and sell it for how much um oh man let's see i would think like 50 bucks 10 10 so i mean a thousand stickers will probably cost you if it were sent each that'd be 10 bucks each that's not realistic it might cost you 25 or 30 bucks right so sell for one to 200 bucks a roll but you could sell like a case of five or six rolls you know and set them up on a on a subscription you could get their like name custom printed or whatever um and so i think like the potential downside that people are thinking about this is like well who's stopping like vista print from just like selling their own you know like just taking their round stickers and calling them you know anti-spike drink stickers well it's like it's competition right no one like these bar owners aren't going to think to go to vista print to get this brand new product that didn't exist they're going to buy it from the guy that conveniently walks in and solves the problem right there on the spot and you're thinking sell advertising on it too yeah you could that that'd be a bonus but you don't have to you just mark them up it's just it's an old product in a different way with a different package which has shown time and time and again like there's nothing too stupid like you just repackage something reframe it how it's used and you went would you sell this door to door or are you thinking also like meta ads so meta ads you know would probably work because it works for basically anything but i would scrape every single bar preferably in a local area just so you can preferably in your local area so you can have a tie to it and send them free samples like enough to where they could use them for a week or a night and i feel like it has like this this viral effect like people are going to post it to their stories and people are going to talk about it and they're going to be the bar in town that's like the sales pitch of like you're the safest bar in town because you're buying this from me and it costs you almost nothing and it's like it's a liability to not buy this from me what do you do how are you still in business not buying these stickers from me i saw this uh video from an entrepreneur her name's ty haney and she had this talk where she said i think she said cack here cack is the hack hold on let me pull it up Her pitch is basically how IRL events is what's going to drive customer acquisition in the day of AI.

31:01She says 2026 is going to be all about local experiential IRL. And I believe it's the hack.

31:10She's selling touching grass as a service as her business, which I think is really interesting. I'm just reading this here. he said you don't have to pay people to post people just show up so what i like about your idea is you're not going to have to pay people to post about their the bar right they're just going to take a picture of their drink and they're going to post it on instagram and they're going to tag the bar so it's free customers yes and take that a step further make the default sticker be your name your brand your qr qr code to your website that's the default for a little extra you can get generic plain ones for a little more than that you can get custom branded ones i like it all right what's it what's your next idea this is like along the same vein as the bike washing okay we're talking about trails we're talking about people getting outside and i just know that people love a good vending idea people love it everyone loves it who doesn't want a vending machine um so i'm going to share this well i think people like the idea of you buy a thing and it literally vends you passive income.

32:23I think that idea of vending machines, people equate to passive income. They do, which a lot has been said about passive income. We'll both agree that some income is more passive than others, but almost nothing is purely passive. Alright. Let's go. I'm going to sit here and wait for hours. You give me a good reason why these things at every trailhead in the world. The rocks cost between five and 20 cents each. You sell them for$2 each. That's a 90 % profit margin. Go collect your cash every week or so. Refill it with rocks and your printing money. Full details here. All right. It's like a shiny, cool rock vending machine by a trailhead or anywhere.

33:05It's simple. You can scale it. It's not food. It doesn't expire. It doesn't go bad. It doesn't get bugs. What do you think? It's so funny because you're literally selling rocks for two dollars or two euros but let me tell you greg um i've got four kids nine to 15 and we've talked you know about bucky's you know my tie to bucky's um something about the south i don't know kids want rocks in the south if you go to bucky's they have this station of shiny rocks it's just like this little cart it's like four by two feet and you got like a fake leather bag and you've got these shiny rocks and kids can scoop them out and they for like 25 bucks they can fill this little leather bag full of shiny rocks and my kids love it every kid loves it like it's a reason that so just to back out like bucky's square footage is like extremely well thought out right that's why one of their biggest complaints is no seating for food like they sell they have multiple restaurants in there but you can't sit down and eat anywhere and it's because it's not profitable for them to to put in tables right so when you consider that the fact that they have this in all of their stores means it crushes it does really well so kid this isn't really for adult the video shows an adult doing it this is for kids so anywhere there are kids um i think this would do well i like this idea i it reminds me of another like i'll take this idea that relates more to me so i live in you know miami beach and i see kids picking up seashells all the time so they come from places like Canada and they're on vacation and there's snow there's you know they're up to their knees in snow and they bring home seashells so not you know all the kids and not everyone gets the opportunity to go on the beach you know why not put a seashell dispenser at the airport or at restaurants um you know maybe they maybe they maybe they go to the beach and there's tons of jellyfish or whatever and they can't find any you know the right seashells so the idea is basically seashells in a vending machine i love that that's a no-brainer i love vending machines because it enables like offline a b testing right take one kind of generic vending machine and you just every month you just swap out something else swap out the sign swap out the product and just see what crushes because like in chris kerner's world if i could like wave my magic wand and and run this entire world i would just have random vending machines everywhere just so i could learn like what hits where like what random product in what random location in front of what demographic of person just crushes like i just found that interesting i like it i mean it's not my world i'm i'm like more in like this i you know my equivalent of that is like oh you know single purpose apps like in software to do one thing um and then you know using organic content or using meta ads to get a particular type of person in you know to that experience like facebook marketplace apps like maybe one thing that's greg's like that's i mean that that world sounds great for you but my world has like you know no hunger it's got peace i don't know like everyone has a decent income and a warm home i'm just quirky chris i don't judge i don't judge can we do uh one last idea i got one i got one so we were just talking greg before you hit uh record and you've got some pokemon cards in your background and we're similar ages i'm assuming and i had pokemon in middle school and but i've never been into like the breaking stuff the Logan Paul stuff.

36:56Like I'm not a card guy. I'm not a collectibles guy. But then I came across something on Twitter that, that it just immediately rang true to me. Have you heard of the Kabuto King? I have not. Okay. The Kabuto King is some anonymous dude on Twitter who started buying every single first edition Kabuto Pokemon card. Kabuto was one of the first set in the late nineties, 152 cards, fossil edition. These cards at the time he started buying were worth about 30 to 50 cents each ungraded. Okay. Um, now granted, like you said, Pokemon has outperformed the market, right. As an asset class, nobody, no one ever thought to buy like worthless, dumb characters that no one's ever thought about, especially if they're ungraded or not holographic.

37:48Like the only special thing about them is their first edition they're provably old from 1999 okay you tracking yeah i'm tracking but like kabuto is yeah it's probably one of the least attractive it's probably one of the like if i'm opening a pack and i'm getting a kabuto it's like it's i'm having a bad day yeah totally and that's that's the meme right that's the whole thing right doge coin. What's cool about Doge? It's a meme, right? So he's turned this lame Pokemon into an awesome Pokemon. He's turned it into a meme. And all he did was just start buying them and tweeting about it. Okay. And so now the price of a first edition Kabuto ungraded, I think last I checked is like 10 to$20.

38:34So he has influenced the price to go up 100 X plus over the course of about three months. and the graded ones are worth many hundreds of dollars and he's kind of started this movement this first edition pokemon movement and now there's like a ekans king and there's like five or six guys that are doing the same thing and they're just buying up every single card irrespective of the condition and just holding forever just expecting them to go up in value okay okay i'm with you time for my big reveal you should feel special greg because i've been doing this for months and I haven't told a soul about what I'm buying.

39:12I did post one short form video that I'm kind of doing this, but I didn't tell them what I'm buying. So this is the great reveal only on your podcast. I have been buying two different cards from 1999 fossil edition. Uh, first, uh, first edition only non-holographic ungraded any condition near mint heavily played It doesn't matter. And I have about a thousand of them so far. Okay. See this? That is crazy. It's crazy. And two different cards. So you can see how many. This is just some of them. Look at this. Look at this. I haven't even opened these ones yet. Okay. Are you buying them from eBay? I am.

39:58I'm buying them from eBay and TCGplayer.com, which I had never heard of until recently. which is like the place to buy and sell Pokemon cards. So we got Shelder and we got Krabby. So I had a chat with ChatGPT about this before I went all in. And I'm like, all right, here's Kabuto King. Here's what he's doing. I want to do the same thing. What card should I buy? And he's like, you don't want to go for like the cool ones, like Snorlax. You want to go for the lame ones, like the lamer the better, Pidgey, Caterpie, whatever. So for whatever reason, I landed on Shelder and Krabby. and i've purchased over a thousand of these at an average price of like including shipping dollar 80 call it two bucks um no i've spent more than that i've spent like 3 500 bucks so i think i've bought about 1700 total um for two bucks each give or take um and the price has gone up and i haven't told i haven't used my audience i haven't told anyone about what i'm buying until right now.

40:58Um, now what's my plan? Like, I don't know. This is just fun. Like it's really fun to have a mailbox full every single day. And I thought my kids would get into it. They'd be, dad, let's go open car. Like they don't care. Only I care. I have four kids. They don't care. So my idea is for other people to do this with the other 150 cards. Like the vast majority of these cards have been untouched they're 20 cents each you can buy some sellers sell 30 of them so for a dollar shipping you can order 30 cards for 20 bucks right and and then flip them is that the idea just hold just hold them and like if you want to take it a step further you go cabuto king's route and you make a meme out of it make a twitter account and you start post and you just sort all of his tweets from day one and you just copy the strategy you just post pictures you use his same verbiage and you just do that and you just sit on these forever and it's just supply and demand they're not making any more of these pokemon's not going away anytime soon they're cheap they're affordable and you sit on them and then the other thing you go ahead and how important is like the first edition nature of it that's important because they printed all kinds of runs so they it has to be first edition from 1999 but then there's also some alpha in there some cards are misprints like two to five percent of cards are misprints that are worth like instead of 20 cents they're worth 20 bucks so you pull those out um and then some cards are like mint condition and you send them in to get graded for 15 bucks each and they're worth 100 bucks so the trick is to kind of cull out the best of the best and the ones that have flaws and get those graded and then you can flip those right away to get all of your money back and then some but other than that you just sit on them forever what do we think um what do i think of the idea and in what context there's my answer thank you okay like from a that's a fun thing to do it's a 10 it's a 10 on 10 like the reason i recently started collecting pokemon cards by the way like i went just for the cool ones like there's a snorlax back there there's a charizard back there you know I'm not going to flex on everyone but there's this there's that you know so um I basically walked into the store and I was like I want the old school vintage I didn't really care if it was first edition I just wanted to like look back and like see my childhood that you know the card that I couldn't get as a child seeing it there is worth so much money and so much value and it makes me excited to be like walking to my office um and then as i started like getting into pokemon recently there was this wall street journal article that said that pokemon has outperformed the s &p and is like the best performing asset class and i was like whoa hold on a second should i be like selling my berkshire hathaway and buying a first edition Charizard.

44:07So I'm not surprised that this meme Pokemon first edition trend is happening. I think that, I mean not financial advice, but I think that in 20 years, 10 years, 15 years, the first editions are going to be worth more than they are today. Because Pokemon is such a nostalgic thing. I think that this is a great, this is like a Gary V go to a garage store, buy something for$5 and flip it idea. So if that's the thing you're into then I also think that's a 10 on 10 idea there. That being said, I'm kind of like, we're in an AI revolution and I'm buying like pidgeys and crabbies, you know? All right, well, I did promise at the beginning of this all of my ideas could scale to eight figures, did I not?

45:00You did. And then I backtracked it like a sissy and I said, accept this one. Well, I'm going to backtrack the backtrack. Okay. I'm going to say, this is an eight figure business and here's how you do it. Okay. There's your clip. Hey, clip that editor clip that. Okay. I got it. Um, someone needs to hire someone cheap,$50 ,000 a year, 40 hours a week to sit online and to buy every single first edition Pokemon card from 1999, regardless of the character, all 152, all the lame ones, right? because we're not doing Charizard, we're not doing Snorlax. Every single one, this is a full-time job. You're ordering, you're paying, you've got your Amex and you're unopening, you're opening them and you're categorizing them all.