Chris Koerner
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Absolutely. I needed to be here. This is where I get my energy. This is like my caffeine.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah. So I love those signs. They're all over Texas and they work. They're mostly selling them to wholesalers or they're using them themselves as a wholesaler. Are you familiar with real estate wholesaling? No. So basically, you put up a bandit sign. You get a phone call and say, hey, I just got divorced. I really need to sell my house.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And you go look at it in person and you say, okay, well, I can only pay $300,000. Well, Zillow says it's worth $400,000. Yeah, but I can pay cash and close in 30 days. Okay, I'll sell it for $300,000. You get it under contract. Maybe you put in $500 earnest money. And then you take the contract and you go sell it to the end flipper or investor for $20,000 to $30,000.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And so this is a whole sub-genre that's taught in hotel seminars all over the country where how to make millions in real estate without putting any money in, it's wholesaling. And it's really kind of scuzzy. There's a lot of shady stuff that happens, but a lot of it originates with those bandit signs at intersections.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
All right, so AI tool to automatically repurpose viral content in your niche across platforms. So one thing that's surprising to me is that something that's going viral over here, let's say TikTok, people on Twitter or Instagram have no clue about. For instance, I post about entrepreneurship.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And so back in October, I saw an article and it was on like some random CBS affiliate site, CBS 13, DallasFortWorth.com or something. And it was about a high school here in Dallas Fort Worth that is opening only for entrepreneurs. And the whole downstairs was dedicated to entrepreneurship. The upstairs was dedicated as a high school.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yes, I hope so. I hope so.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And I put it in like my content bank, like things to tweet about one day back in October. And then a couple months ago, I was like, oh, yeah, let's get around to this. And I just tweeted about it offhand, and it went massively viral. And then I posted about it on Instagram, and it went massively viral. But it was nothing new, and I don't even think it was viral on the CBS website.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
It just resonated with people. And there have been other times where I've seen something that went viral, and then I repurposed it and just kind of talked about it, and it goes viral over there. And so six months ago, this is all a very manual process. But today, I feel like there's a prompt you could do that says, hey, here's all my keywords. Put it into Cloud or OpenAI or something.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Here's all my keywords is what I'm looking for. These are the metrics that I would like to see, maybe number of comments, number of shares. I want you to fill my inbox every morning and tell me like, How viral is it? Or how much engagement is it getting? And what platform is it on today? And then I want you to go ahead and repurpose it for me on my platform of choice. And it's just a numbers game.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Have you found any good AI tools that will, like an LLM that will enable you to upload all your tweets and say like, write 10 more tweets in my voice based on, like, here are my tweets. Here's all the engagements I got on these. Based on what you see goes viral for me, Write me five tweets in my voice that is likely to go viral. Have you seen anything like that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Okay, so you might need to build on this first one because it's 40% baked. So I just started posting Instagram Reels for the first time in my life a few months ago. It's a whole new world to me. And in the Instagram settings, you can check the little toggle button that says cross-post to Facebook. I'm like, ah, what the heck? So I started a Facebook page, zero followers, cross-posted.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Have you tried Delphi? Have you heard of that? That's basically what D-E-L-P-H-I. It's like create a clone of yourself.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I tried that with the same thing and uploaded YouTube videos and I just, I wasn't happy with it. Like I'm, I'm sure you are too. I'm very picky about what I don't have any ghostwriters or anything. So I would love for it to say like, Hey, you wrote about these eight really interesting business ideas. Here's 80 more that are just as interesting. Right about these. And I'm not even getting that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah, it's like, tell me what to ask you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah. I like it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And then one day I log in there and it's like, wow, some of these videos are really getting a lot of views. And so as an afterthought, I commented on my own thing, and I shilled all my links to all my things. And people started clicking. I used tracking links. So then I had a video start going viral, and it was getting like 100,000 views an hour or so. And I was like, oh, let me do that again.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Okay. So Shady Rays is a $130 million sunglasses brand and their entire business is built on their lifetime warranty. And so forget like Patagonia and what all the other brands do, because that's a different expensive product. Shady Rays said, we know that you're going to break or lose your sunglasses. Don't worry about it. You know, we will replace them. No questions asked.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So it's not like, you know, you have to return them if they're broken. It's If you lose them, we will replace them. And then they work like a restocking fee into it to where they break even on all the replacements. They work the numbers into it where they're like, all right, most people replace their glasses 0.7 times over their lifetime.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And then the lifetime warranty allows them to charge a lot more than a competitor. And they crush it. So I just love the idea of copy pasting this exact value proposition in any other industries, such as sandals, flip flops, lifetime sandals. Same thing, right? You can go to AliExpress and buy nice looking flip flops for three to four dollars. Shipping is 50 cents to a dollar.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Sell them for 50 to 70 dollars. You have amazing gross margins. You charge five dollars every time someone needs to replace them. The $5 covers the $3 in shipping and the $2 sandals. And you're great. So it's a whole business built around a lifetime warranty value prop in an industry where it doesn't exist today.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah, I was going to say, what does it cost?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I'm just going to go ahead and... So I guess you just have to have made two purchases within 12 months.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah, this is brilliant. Shady Rays was like, all right, here we've got 60% net margins. Well, I'd really like to have my cake and eat it too. How do I get more loyalty out of this? Maybe a little more recurring revenue. And they just launched this. It's bold, but I love it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Want to hear the next one?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Let me put my links in there. Because in Instagram, key differentiator, there are no clickable links in the comments. On Facebook, there are. And so I put in all my links. And then literally within seconds, I refreshed my tiny URL. And I was getting dozens of clicks, like a minute. And then like hundreds of clicks every couple minutes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Oh, geez. Should I go for the Shopify or the Etsy one?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Okay. You passed the test because that's the one I wanted to go for. So this business is proven. Like people aren't doing it, but it's proven. I know it's proven because I've done it. I launched it when I owned a 3PL, a third-party logistics business as a side project. It worked. It was great. But we abandoned it because opportunity costs. We found something better.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So the long and short of it is if you have a Shopify store, there's a zillion Shopify apps, third-party tools that will help you increase your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout rate. Automated SMS, emails, you know, Shopify has their own native solution to this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
But the best converting fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart, there are two different things, is to get a person on the phone. Right. To get them on the phone. We could talk about using AI for this. There's tools that have, you know, AI voice cloning. We won't talk about all that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
We're talking about a literal call center, preferably like stay at home moms, like a demographic that matches the customer. that just says, hey, you had this makeup in your cart, but you didn't check out. Can I give you a 30% off discount? Did you have any questions? And a lot of times they're like, yeah, I just didn't understand. Is shipping three days or 10? It wasn't clear.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So A, you get this amazing feedback that's hard to quantify. B, you get your conversion rate if it goes from 2% to 2.5%. your sales increased by 25%. It's amazing. Um, and so we tested this with our own brand and it worked, but what wasn't great about it was that our AOV, our average order value was like 60 bucks and it was kind of a tight profit business.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And so it, it financially didn't make sense, but there's a lot of products out there that have an AOV of a hundred plus or that have 80% gross margins where your, your costs, your labor costs to, to make these calls are, It's like, you know, single digit dollars, call it three to six dollars. And it can really, really make a big difference on your conversion rate. And on getting feedback.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So the business here is to just be an agency. Use built with, extract all those Shopify plus stores and say, hey, I know you're not doing this because no one's doing this, but I know this works. Here's a no brainer offer. We won't charge you anything. We're just going to take 20% of everything that we convert. If we don't convert it, we won't charge anything.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And we'll give you all the feedback we get about your store for free.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So you go to builtwith.com and it's $450, which I'm too cheap. So I go to Upwork and I post a job that just says, hey, I need someone with a builtwith account. I'll give you 20 bucks. Just run a quick export for me. I've done this before. There are people that have Upwork accounts that have builtwith accounts and 20 bucks and you can have all 3 million Shopify stores contact info in your inbox.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And then from there, just use your imagination. You can cold call them, cold email, cold text them. And I would start, like I would name it something broad, but my branding on my website would be in a very specific niche, like apparel or makeup, something high margin and or high ticket. And in my pitch, it's like, we only do this for makeup Shopify plus brands. That's it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Then you build some good MRR with that. You make a name for yourself. And then as you start to exhaust that niche, you broaden out and offer it to anyone else.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And people were subscribing to my newsletter and subscribing to my YouTube and podcast. And it was a sight to behold. And it was just this unlock where it's like, wow. it's almost like we've moved on from Facebook, right? Like it's all about Instagram ads. We're all on Instagram and Instagram crushes and it's great. But Facebook's over here like, hey, we've got 2.5 billion monthly active users.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah. The Kerner Office podcast YouTube channel. Spelled like my last name.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I want to know what platform are you most excited about growing your personal brand on today? What are you most bullish on and why?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah. Okay. Last question is along the same vein. If you take a loyal YouTube subscriber, a loyal podcast listener, and then a loyal newsletter subscriber, three things, in my opinion, like the three best type of followers or subscribers, and someone comes to you and says, hey, wave a magic wand, and you can buy as many as you want of all three what do you offer to pay them for each one?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So $3 for newsletter, $2 for YouTube, $1 for podcast. You know what I'm saying? Where do you rank? Because I could say which is the most valuable, but that doesn't tell me what the weighting is for each.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Let's say we know they're high quality and they're not just a subscriber, but they're watching or listening or reading every week.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Like we're still here. We're still doing fine. And so that's the backdrop. And I just think that a lot of creators, if not the vast majority of creators are ignoring Facebook reels and they're not taking advantage of that valuable real estate, the top comment. the top pinned comment.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
$7.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Here's a hundred thousand.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Oh, that's my bucket list. Dang it. Could you believe that? Oh, what did he say? What was the context?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Oh, I've been dreaming. I tweeted about Tesla yesterday. It went massively viral. Nothing from Elon. It's like he doesn't even know who I am.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And so I think there's a world where you could build a tool to automate that, a simple tool, maybe it's a Chrome extension or something, five bucks a month, where any creator, as soon as they cross post, automatically pins a top comment on their Instagram.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
The long and short of it is, if you have a Shopify store, there's a zillion Shopify apps, third-party tools that will help you increase your abandoned cart and abandoned checkout rate. Automated SMS, emails, you know, Shopify has their own native solution to this. But the best converting fix for abandoned checkout or abandoned cart, they're two different things, is to get a person on the phone.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I hope not. I'm not a small.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
That's amazing. You're totally true. Like things are doing nothing or going crazy viral, but I think it's a net positive.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
There's still time. I'm jealous.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
All right. Thanks, Greg.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Or you could build an agency-like tool where you play middleman between creators that don't really care to pin anything in their top comment and creators that do. Like, hey, you're in the makeup niche. Hey, I sell a makeup product. We'll give you a 20% affiliate income. Just automatically pin these links in your top comment.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Jim Gaffigan had a stand-up bit about McDonald's. He's like, everyone's like, oh, McDonald's. I don't eat McDonald's. Like, look at their sales. Like, you guys just don't admit it. Everyone's eating McDonald's. It's delicious.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
They can easily get to be multiple eight figures in revenue, especially if they're in a profitable niche.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I did that in 2014. And it went great. I got millions of views. But it's been 10 years. So no, I don't.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And just like Facebook, Cora's over here like, hey, we're still here. We're actually doing fine. In fact, people are forgetting about us and you shouldn't.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah, or threads. I mean, if someone were to cold email me right now and say, hey, a few hundred bucks a month, I'm just going to copy and paste all of your long form tweets, starting with the ones that did the best, the threads. Because from what I've researched, there's no API that allows for that right now. And shoot, you roll in Quora while you're at it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Just repurpose all the best performing long form tweets as Quora questions and not answers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I love it. It is interesting because with all the opportunities that API and Zapier creates, like Airtable and all that, for the platforms that don't allow for those things, there's still an opportunity to just have someone overseas do it affordably. You still make a really good margin with it because you're literally copying and pasting.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
No, I think that's it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
All right, number two, programmatic SEO. Been around for a little while. I feel like it's making a comeback. There's a startup that just got funded. Have you heard of them? I can't remember their name. But they're basically one-click programmatic SEO implementation using AI. Very, very expensive, by the way. I want to say it's like $5,000 a month. Maybe up front in $1,000 a month.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
I'm over here thinking like, man, you're using AI. Why are you charging so much? This is what I would pay a human to do it. Anyway, we started a programmatic SEO agency or not agency, a project. And we just did it all ourselves. And I won't tell you the niche because I don't want people to copy me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
But we didn't do anything special in that we just went to Google keyword tool and said, what's a home service that everyone's searching for that no one's bidding on? And there's hundreds. And we could talk about that all day. So we picked one that we were familiar with. We went to Webflow. We used this tool called TagParrot, Whalesync, and then, I believe, Airtable. Tied it all together.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
It auto-indexes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So... Whale Sync, I believe, it auto-indexes all of your pages. And Tag Parrot will, I could be getting this wrong, but it will give you keywords in your niches automatically. And so basically Zapier enables us to connect all these things and start pushing out content to thousands of websites.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So we went to the five most searched keywords in our niche that have low competition and we built 1,100 landing pages for each one of them. 100 for the top 100 Canadian cities by population and 1,000 the top American cities by population because Canada is about 10% as big as America. That left us with 5,500 landing pages.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And we started getting clicks, lots of clicks and leads, like actual leads worth hundreds of dollars. And this just kind of unlocked something for me. So we didn't invent programmatic SEO. It's been around for a while. But the idea of a programmatic SEO agency that acts more of an alternative to a franchise. So if I'm 30 to 50 something years,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
working in 95, wanting to break out into entrepreneurship. I'm looking at pressure washing franchises and poop scooping franchises and what have you. Framing this as an alternative to a franchise of like, hey, we found this home service. Maybe it's gutter cleaning that very few people are bidding on and a lot of people are searching for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
We will charge you $10,000 and deliver this business to you, quote business, like with a bow on it. You still have to manage it. You still have to respond to leads. It's yours after that. And then we'll charge like a nominal fee per month to maintain things for you and fix them as they break versus just starting a programmatic SEO agency.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And it's like, eh, five grand to make a programmatic website. It's just the framing of it is a little different.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
So I didn't even give enough detail. That's one thing you could do. You could use this as a platform to launch a brand new painting business, like an actual business where you're doing the painting in Miami and you, you hit all the neighborhoods, you get all the zip codes in the areas and you start generating leads that way. Or you could sell this as a franchise. That's like a lead gen franchise.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Where it's like, we're going to put house painting in city name in 10,000 different American cities. You're going to get leads. And then you're going to sell those leads to house painters in those local areas. So basically, it's like a lead generation franchise.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Yeah, I love it. I love lead generation businesses.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
Who can we study? I'm not sure on that, but... they can easily get to be eight figure, multiple eight figures in revenue, especially if they're in a profitable niche. For instance, there is a, there's a nationwide dumpster rental company.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And unless you know what you're looking for, you would never know that they don't actually have a presence in all these cities because they have a Google, my business profiles, they have reviews on all these profiles. They have all the city names, but, There is no physical location. They're just selling these leads to local dumpster rental companies.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
But the hard part of the lead generation business is finding a centralized buyer for all the leads. Otherwise, you're having to wrangle up 500 different house painters and begging them to say, hey, my leads are better than Thumbtack or Angie's List.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
And so I think the key here is to pick an industry that's fairly consolidated, that has big players, maybe they're franchises, maybe it's just a big national chain where you can talk to one person who has locations in hundreds of cities and say, hey, I'm going to give you the first hundred leads for free. You're going to love them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
5 validated startup ideas to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)
After that, I'm going to charge you 40 bucks every time we send a lead your way. It's just one point of contact.