The Startup Ideas Podcast
6 startup ideas from the tech Warren Buffett (make $120k/mo)
Mon, 14 Oct 2024
Join me as I chat with Andrew Wilkinson, Co-Founder of Tiny, as we explore innovative startup ideas, and his frameworks for finding and building startupsTimestamps00:00 Intro01:55 Startup Idea 1: Robot Lawn-mowing Service/Directory17:54 Startup Idea 2: CPAP alternatives for Sleep Apnea26:24 Startup Idea 3: Computer Vision for Small Biz 32:03 Startup Idea 4: Negotiating as a Service 36:48 Startup Idea 5: Sperm Freezing Made Easy 42:50 Startup Idea 6: Community Building as a Service 1) Robot Lawnmower Revolution • Buy robot mowers, geofence yards• Start a mowing company with ZERO labor• ROI beats solar panels (6-12 month payback)• Opportunity: Review site for mowers (affiliate $$$)2) Sleep Apnea Gold Rush • Apple Watch can now diagnose sleep apnea• 80-90% of cases undiagnosed• Opportunities:a) Buy sleep clinicsb) DTC alternatives to CPAPc) App using Apple Watch datad) Financing for CPAP machines• Sleep tech is about to EXPLODE3) Computer Vision for Small Biz • Mount an old iPhone in your store• Get heat maps, customer behavior insights• Identify repeat vs. new customers• Enterprise-level tech now accessible to SMBs4) The Ultimate Negotiator • Most employees HATE negotiating• Idea: Outsourced negotiation for EVERYTHING• Houses, cars, software, office supplies• Take a % of savings5) Sperm Freezing Made Easy • Older fathers = higher risk of complications• Current process is awkward and clinical• Idea: At-home kit, ship back with dry ice• ZERO Google Ads competition (for now)6) Community Building as a Service • EO/YPO Forum model: Monthly deep discussions• Build trust, solve problems, forge friendships• Opportunities beyond just business groups• "Secular church" concept7) Bonus: Undiagnosed Illness Detection • Smartwatches can detect more than sleep apnea• AFib, hypertension, stress/anxiety• Huge market for early, non-invasive detection• The future of healthcare is on your wristWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas Work with me and my team: LCA — world’s best product design firm to build apps, websites and brands people love. https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Community Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses =http://communityempire.co/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND ANDREW ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/awilkinsonNever Enough: https://www.neverenough.com/Tiny: https://www.tiny.com/
The goal for any entrepreneur starting out is to make 100 to 200K a year. After that, everything is upside and gravy, but that gives you the launch pad with which to launch the good businesses.
The old way of creating startups was, you know, technical founder and maybe a designer, maybe a business guy. Now, I think today you kind of need idea gal or guy and a funnel guy or gal. Whenever you see that, it's like a lottery ticket. I almost don't want to air this episode.
I want to edit that out and I'm going to build this in Canada right now.
Andrew Wilkinson on the Startup Ideas pod. And I'm doing this new thing, Andrew, where when I start the pod, I ask, if you listen to the entire pod, what are you going to get out of this pod?
Man, I hope there's someone like driving their car and they pull over and get excited about an idea or something. I love like I like listening to the My First Million episodes where people are brainstorming and like Steph Smith or someone will go on and she just drops some cool idea that hits me. So hopefully one of these ideas hits somebody.
I've been doing this show, I've done like 100 plus episodes. And I will say the document you sent over with Startup Ideas is by far the most thorough document I have gotten back.
Really, I'm shocked and appalled to hear that because I did it in like three or four minutes.
And that's why I wanted to have you back on the pod. And let's get right into it. Yeah, man.
Awesome. Um, so how, how do you want to go about doing this? We can go start to bottom top to bottom. Okay. So, um, I've been deep diving on this because I have a big yard and I spend a lot of money on landscaping and I don't really know what they do. And so I started digging in and I realized that I was spending like thousands of dollars a month on lawn care and
because I've got a big backyard and a big front yard. You've been to my house. It's quite large, but not necessarily complicated or anything. And so I think just because it's big, I'm like a sucker. The landscaping guy comes to your house, and if you have a big house and you have a gate, he's like, you know what? I'm going to give this guy the rich guy charge. And so I realized that
I can basically buy a robot lawnmower. So for people that aren't familiar, it's basically like a Roomba, except it mows your lawn. And so you just put this thing outside and you geofence your lawn and you kind of tell it what to do. And every day or a couple days, it'll go and mow. And so...
um because you only mow your lawn like once a week or so um you can actually have one and it can do multiple yards and all that kind of stuff and so i just thought that was really interesting because the return on investment for this versus something like solar is crazy if you get solar panels you're looking at like a 10 to 20 year payback depending on where in the world you live
And a robot mower can pay itself off in like six to 12 months, pretty much, which is pretty crazy. And if you think about it, a Roomba kind of sucks because a house is a highly variable environment. So I've had Roombas for 20 years. Every couple of years, I get excited. I go and buy one. And over and over again, I have the same experience. And the experience is...
My kids drop toys, or there's cables, or it gets stuck underneath something, and it just doesn't work that well. Whereas a yard, there's really nothing in your yard. And so you can basically let these things go wild 24-7. So I think robot vacuums as a opportunity category is really interesting.
And I think that if I was to do anything, I would probably build a robot vacuum lawnmower review website. So I would do the best deep dive wire cutter style reviews of the robot lawnmowers, focus on SEO, and then do affiliate or something like that. Other opportunities, I think that you can certainly buy a dealership or something like that. That could be interesting.
The idea that I actually had was to start a lawn mowing company or buy a lawn mowing company that has a ton of customers. And instead of having laborers go do the work, you just pre-program everyone's yard and you literally just show up on Monday, for example, you drop the little drone and it goes and cuts their yard and then you pick it up at the end of the day.
And you just do that for a whole bunch of different people. And so if you think about it, a landscaping business It's a hard, crappy business because, you know, the margins are OK. You kind of have a 15 to 30 percent margin, but it's a lot of blue collar work and highly seasonal. And if you think about it with this, you could have like 10 robot mowers.
And just every day you go to 10 different houses and drop them off and pick them up at the end of the day. And you make all the money, basically pure profit other than the cost of maintenance on the mower. So kind of a random fun one.
It is random. It got me thinking, this is sort of a tangent, but it got me thinking, I'm not sure if this is a trend, but in my house in Canada, there's seven houses there. And the snow, there's a lot of snow there. There's a ton of snow, obviously. And the guy who was clearing the snow just was raising his prices, raising his prices, raising his prices to the point where, you know,
people got upset. So one of the guys on my street was like, I've got a pickup truck. I'm just going to go buy one of those plows and I'm going to knock on the seven houses and we'll just, this will be, I'll do it and we'll just, I'll do it just for the street.
So I think that there's, so okay, so for your robot idea, I'm wondering like the quickest way to start it, maybe it's you do something like that where you're like, I'm doing robot mowing just for the eight houses on my street. Don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses.
They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into one simple database. compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast. But the main thing is, most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The Idea Bank is your startup shortcut.
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Totally. I think you could probably do it as a neighborhood. I think if you have money, what I would do is I'd go and buy a small landscaping company that has like 20 or 30 customers. And I would just start very gently experimenting. So it's like, you know, you take one house and you see, does the owner notice? Does the owner do the math? Does the owner go and buy their own robot mower?
Because these mowers are five to $7,000. And so not that many people are going to go and buy it. Um, now they might try and get a discount. I think it depends on the person, but there's a certain class of person that just goes, if the mowing is good, I don't give a shit. I just want to pay an amount and I want it to just get handled. Um, so yeah, I think it's kind of interesting.
It doesn't worry you at all that it's such a physical business? When I hear this business, I'm like, wow, on one hand, this is really interesting. This could be a money printer, but on the other hand, software is so much, I understand it so much more. How do you think about that?
i think it's a launchpad business i i think um the the digital version of it where you do lawnmower reviews or whatever i think is relatively scalable it's probably like a business you can make like 300k to a million dollars a year but the physical stuff is much more for the scrappy person who doesn't know where to start and is willing to spend 5k or something on a startup business that can make them
100 to 200K a year. I always think the goal for any entrepreneur starting out is to make 100 to 200K a year. After that, everything is upside and gravy, but that gives you the launchpad with which to launch the good businesses. So you need the mediocre business first.
Um, usually, and I think, you know, if someone can start an affiliate website for this, that's better than having a physical mowing company. But the physical mowing company is so easy to get going with, in my opinion. So I don't know. I think it's like those kinds of businesses appeal to me because they're simple and they're not going anywhere.
And there's no like SEO rug pull that can really happen. But, um, but I hear you. It's not highly scalable.
And then just curious, affiliate businesses, how do you think about them? Do you like them? Curious. And Tiny, do you own a couple?
Well, I remember I was talking to one guy who's got a huge newsletter and he said, with one mention of Athletic Greens, I can make $50,000. And I was like, oh my God, that's kind of crazy. And I think affiliate has a bad reputation because...
You know, affiliate marketing is kind of like, hey, I'll go out and I'll make some cheesy ad and you'll click it because you want penis pills or something like that. And then I'll get a commission. That's like affiliate marketing OG version. When I think about affiliate marketing, I just think of it as capturing the money the advertiser would otherwise make.
So let's say that I have a newsletter with 100,000 subscribers and I'm charging $5,000 for an ad. We know the advertiser is making $20,000 off that ad or $10,000 off that ad if they're smarter. And I think it's just capturing more of that than what you would get paid up front. And you're taking a little more risk. So that's the way I think about affiliate.
I don't think that affiliate, if you have a newsletter, it all comes down to how much of a moat do you have around your audience? So if you're on Twitter, you're vulnerable to the algorithm, but it's free to post. But if you have a newsletter, it's direct to the consumer and you basically can keep pounding that as long as you want.
So I think if you're dependent on it and it's SEO vulnerable or algorithm vulnerable, then yeah, it's a bad business. But if you have this audience you've built for free, like you or me, it's kind of like, I see no downside as long as you're not doing something that's horrible. I recommend stuff on my newsletter and if it's an Amazon link, I'm like, yeah, why not?
I want to get paid for that, sure.
Totally. Yeah, I mean, you would put the link there anyways. So why not? I actually probably know the person you're talking about with the athletic green. You do, yeah. And that person makes $40,000 to $60,000 a month on athletic green commissions.
It's crazy.
So athletic greens, and I feel bad even saying the word athletic greens because we are not getting paid for this. But Athletic Greens, I believe, was doing 30% of affiliate lifetime commissions. So that means if you become on a subscription, I don't know what it costs, but let's say $100 a month, And you're going to get paid $30 a month until that customer turns.
It's crazy. I don't even know that Athletic Greens is a great product or anything like that, but I think that it's too big to fail in that there's too many people making too much money from it that they all want it to keep going.
you know like sahil or or huberman or any of these people that do this that talk about ag1 they want it to persist right because they're going to make so much money from it and i don't think it's like bad for you by any means but i think odds are it's like their margin on it is probably like 90 and so they have a lot of money to play with
for affiliate and they can differentiate by getting these huge influential people to talk about it as a result it's actually a really interesting strategy if you think about it because the greens products have been around forever like that's not a new idea it's just someone came out and was like let's apply this business model to that
Yeah, 100%. So that's the creator affiliate piece. And then there's the directory affiliate piece. So I've been increasingly obsessed with creating directories, like curated directories, and then just plugging in affiliate deals. And the reason why is in a world where there's so much information out there, people now want curation. That's one. And then number two, with programmatic SEO, i.e.
looking at what people are searching for and creating landing pages at scale. There's a huge opportunity right now to basically create a bunch of directories. I'm curious what you think, but if I was just starting out right now, one of the things I would do is create one directory a month in different topics where this lawn mowing idea could be one topic.
Did you see what Sam Parr did with accounting firms? Sam's List.
Sam's List, yes.
I don't know how it's worked out for him, but I thought that was really smart. I do wonder about the longevity of that. I don't use Google anymore. For everything, I go on Perplexity or ChatGPT now. And so if you build an affiliate directory, they're just going to scrape that, and then it'll inform the results. and you'll never get your links in or credit or anything like that.
So I don't really know if it's a good long-term strategy. I mean, how do you think about something like that? Is that like, I guess you just link the directory on your socials or something like that. And if you have a proprietary link, then it's fine.
Yeah. Well, I'm not of the belief that SEO is going to die. Like the, you know, I think SEO is going to evolve. If I was building this, what I would do is, I think there's a moment in time right now where there's just arbitrage with respect to SEO and AI tools. So I'd build it as much as possible. And then I would try to convert 8%, 6%, 10% of these people to email, basically.
That way, worst case scenario, you're not reliant on, if the world switches to perplexity, the whole world, then you're not reliant on... the search traffic. Although I do think that eventually these perplexities are going to give credit to where they're getting information from.
Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be too concerned about it, especially because it is that launchpad kind of business, right? It's like, you really need this to work for a couple of years. It's going to cost you zero and you can make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars and that's fine. I'm curious, when you start these directories, who is doing your follow-through execution?
Because my problem is always like, I have the idea and I have the social funnel. Like I have a similar audience to you and stuff, but I think you're doing a far better job of figuring out how to actually monetize it and track the funnel and stuff. Who's doing that for you? Are you doing that yourself or do you have a team?
I have a business partner. His name is Jordan and Jordan is your quintessential funnel guy. So, you know, you wake up in the morning and you're excited about ideas. He wakes up in the morning and he's excited about how do I how do I squeeze this funnel? And I think that, uh, the, the old way of creating startups was, you know, technical founder and maybe, maybe a designer, maybe a business guy.
Now I think today you kind of need idea, gal or guy and a funnel guy or gal. So I basically come up with an idea, give it to Jordan. Uh, you know, now I'm using, I don't know if you've used V zero, but I use Vercel V zero, which is basically a tool to use AI to wireframe out the ideas. So I wireframe out the ideas.
Um, and he, he really takes those ideas and then he dispatches it to a group of people. I will say ideas die unless they, unless they, you need an owner basically for an idea. Um, And so that's something I've learned is unless I have like one GM or one person on this idea, the idea loses steam despite the funnel guy.
Totally.
Let's move to the next idea.
Okay, so Apple Watch just released this thing where it will diagnose you with sleep apnea. For people that don't know, sleep apnea is a disorder where while you're sleeping, you basically kind of are snoring and your throat gets a little closed and you basically have this, you stop breathing briefly
And so it's like sometimes you're, you know, if your partner's in bed with you, they might hear you like gasping or stopping breathing or whatever, but a lot of people just don't know they have it. In fact, 80 to 90% of people who have sleep apnea are undiagnosed. Um, now a lot of people wear Apple watches.
And it'll just automatically one day pop up a little alert and say, dude, you have sleep apnea. And people are going to be like, what the hell is sleep apnea and what do I do? And so I think there's a big opportunity for this. I think that there's going to be a lot of beneficiaries, specifically sleep apnea clinics.
So there's these very rigorous processes you have to go through in order to get what's called a CPAP machine. A CPAP machine is this thing that you wear over your mouth or over your nose and it puts pushes air down your throat basically to keep your airway clear.
And in order to get one, uh, you have to go through this process of like getting formally diagnosed and talking to your doctor and getting a prescription and stuff. And so these guys have a stranglehold on, um, on the hardware. So you have a distributorship for like res med or one of these guys, uh, they charge like $2,000 for the machine.
I think one opportunity is simply just going out and buying a whole bunch of sleep apnea clinics and just betting on the macro. You just say, look, I think more and more people get diagnosed and we're going to sell a lot more hardware. Another way to do this would be to invest in the companies to do something similar. We talked about a site where you review these different hardwares and stuff.
The other thing that's interesting is a lot of people don't want to wear these CPAP machines. I mean, for good reason. You look like Bane from Batman. You have this huge, ridiculous thing on your face. And imagine you're going home with a girl you just met and you have to put on your CPAP machine. No one wants to do that. And so...
I think there's going to be more and more people popping up with alternative treatments. So there's these like oral devices that you can get, these appliances. And I think that if somebody did a really good job of D2C on that, I'm sure there's already providers out there already. Things like that will do very well.
The other idea I had is potentially to spin up an app that uses Apple's data from your Apple Watch to monitor your sleep apnea in more depth or something or coach you through it. And then the other idea I had was maybe doing a financing business that relates to buying the hardware. I'm sure that these places all offer financing, but maybe there's some kind of like...
You know, you advertise, you know, to people that, you know, have sleep apnea as the financer of choice or whatever for these devices. Yeah.
I like this one a lot. I'm wondering, you know, OK, why do I like it a lot is new technology comes out. Apple Watch sleep apnea detection feature. And most people look at it and they're like, cool. But not enough people look at it and be like, okay, what does this change and what business ideas can I come up with?
Yeah, I think that the same could be said for blood glucose. Another bet would be to say, you know, in the next five years, Apple will probably have a blood glucose sensor and that people will start monitoring things like that in their health more and more and more. And these are going to be big super cycle trends. So I think, yeah, literally like...
One tiny tweak to the Apple Watch is enough for millions or hundreds of millions of people to suddenly start thinking about a new health trend that they weren't previously aware of. I mean, I've been wearing a continuous glucose monitor from Dexcom for... probably seven years.
So I'm aware of blood sugar and it's quite shocking when you start monitoring your blood sugar, all these foods you think are healthy that actually aren't. And I think that's a huge potential trend, harder to profit on than the sleep apnea one. But yeah, there's lots of stuff like that.
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Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. So I don't know if you've been using Clode as like an ideas partner, but I have recently. And while you were talking, I just wanted to prompt it. I'll share my screen, show you what I prompted it.
Why do you use Clode instead of... Instead of ChatGPT.
Because I'm French-Canadian and Claude is, you know.
Sure.
Yeah. No, it's honestly 30% better. Like every answer you get is 30% better. So... The thing, the thing is chat GPT was better and then Claude recently caught up. Now chat GPT is getting better, but right now, as we're recording this, Claude is where you want to be.
So I asked it and for people who don't, who don't, who are not watching on YouTube, I just said, what are the illnesses like sleep apnea that are undiagnosed 80 to 90% of cases are undiagnosed. And then it gives me a list, hypertension, type two diabetes, celiac disease,
But when I was going through this, I realized that the Apple Watch is not going to be helpful for depression or might not be helpful for depression. So I said, you could identify, I asked Claude, you could identify sleep apnea with an Apple Watch. What are other undiagnosed illnesses like this? And then that's when it starts listing it off. AFib, which is arterial fibrillation.
Many smartwatches, including the Apple Watch, can detect irregular heart rhythms that indicate AFib. And then these, you know, very interesting. And I think millions of people have that. Hypertension, diabetes, stress and anxiety. Like, how cool is this?
Well, I think it's crazy. Like I just went through ADHD diagnosis and it's not rocket science, right? It's all stuff that could have been done with AI. Like they basically, they put you through like a memory test and some cognitive testing. They sit with you for an hour and they, you know, basically just go through a checklist and ask you a bunch of questions.
They go through like a process of like, you know, you tick boxes based on like symptoms and all that kind of stuff. And I think, There's something really crappy about the fact that in order to get diagnosed with a disorder with which really impacts a lot of people, it could be anxiety, depression, ADHD, you name it. You have to spend thousands of dollars or have insurance or whatever.
I think my diagnosis was like $2,000. And I recently saw a friend of mine is creating a startup to do this, to basically diagnose. You go through like a, you just say like something is wrong with me. Like, I don't know what it is, but like something's wrong with me and just do a mental health assessment. And it uses AI to basically say like, Hey, here's an entire picture of your mental health.
And here's all the ways that you could potentially tackle it. And I think that's really freaking cool because, And I think ADHD in general actually is a huge opportunity area. I think more and more people are recognizing it and it is widely undiagnosed. They estimate between 10 and 20 percent of people have it. So I think that's another interesting one, too.
I think you're right. I think you're right. Let's keep rolling. Let's go to idea number three.
My next one, this one is very, uh, very half baked, but I think that computer vision was something that was kind of like, you know, always five to 10 years away. Like I would see some cool startup come out in Silicon Valley and they would say, Oh, you know, you can install these sensors in your building or in your supermarket or whatever, and it'll do all this crazy stuff.
But it was always this thing where it was like, you got to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. It's not accessible to normal people. And a lot of people don't know this, but we own like four or five restaurants. We own a deli and a bunch of other stuff. And in that deli, there's a few things I would really love to understand.
So one, like basically what I want to do is like put a webcam, like a simple webcam, or even just take an old iPhone and just like put it up in a corner with a power cable or something like that. And I would love to see like a heat map of like, okay, where are people going? Where are they buying? Where are they lingering? What are they skipping?
And then I also love the idea of anonymized facial recognition. So the idea of saying this many people coming through the door are repeat customers. The repeat customers all come at 8 a.m. The new customers come on this day at this time. And I think that it would be really, really interesting.
And then the other thing that would be cool is to see where do people get confused or mixed up where, you know, they walk back and forth in certain places. And I just, to me, I feel like the technology is finally here. to do this, and I think it can be done very, very cheaply. And I'm sure someone has done this in an enterprise situation. I guarantee this exists.
What I want is for the small business owner to be able to access this, to install an app on your iPhone and just mount your iPhone somewhere. Did you see a demo of that guy? And he had those Ray-Ban sunglasses with the hidden camera and he was walking around New York. And when he walked up to people, it would use facial recognition and tell them who they were and what they did.
And do you see that?
No, I didn't see that.
Oh, dude, it's the craziest thing. So he's in a subway station and he's wearing these glasses and he would walk up to people and he'd go, oh my God, are you Greg Eisenberg? You're from the Startup Ideas podcast. And the people would be like, oh, thank you. Yes, I am. And they'd be friendly because they think they know this guy, but they don't.
It's just whispered in his ear who this person is and what they do and all this stuff. And so he's literally going up to people and random people. And at the subway terminal, there's all these interesting people. someone's like a great philanthropist. And then another guy is working on like some important political thing and he starts conversations with all of them.
And so it's this kind of vaguely terrifying tech demo. But at the same time, I was like, how cool is this that you could basically meet all these fascinating people? Like, do you ever go to like a nice hotel and you look around and you're like, all these people can afford to spend like two, $3,000 a night for a room.
I bet there's tons of interesting business people here, but I'll never know who they are.
That's really, really cool. I could see a world where you walk into your favorite store and it knows that you like listening to Drake and it's like cue the Drake song.
Greg's walking in.
That's really cool. When I was head of product strategy at WeWork, and not many people know this, but WeWork had one of the best AI ML teams in technology. And one of the most interesting use cases that we had, I don't think we ended up really productizing it, but it was this idea that every WeWork has cameras and how can you identify if there's smoke? Smoke that can turn into a fire.
How can you identify if someone has a gun that walks in? How can you identify if someone has a knife? And to me, that was like, Forget the co-working business. That piece of technology was the most interesting piece of technology that WeWork ever had.
That's so cool. I've actually read recently about something like this. They were replacing the security guards in sketchy high schools with this kind of technology and stuff. This stuff is so Panopticon where... I struggle with it because on one hand, I think it's so cool. And on the other hand, it's like absolute power corrupts absolutely. And whose hands is this stuff in?
I guess my question would be, how would you feel if you walked into my deli and you found out I'm using facial tracking technology, even if it's anonymized? I just think this is one of these things that our generation might be uncomfortable with, but our kids probably won't think twice about. But it is kind of creepy when you think about it.
It is creepy. I feel like on digital products, we all kind of know what's happening. But in the physical world, it takes it to the next level. I think there will be some backlash.
I mean, how cool would it be if you walk into my deli and the guy behind the counter gets a little notification. It's like, oh, Greg loves salami, whatever. And he's like, Greg, so great to see you. Do you want salami again? Think about how good you would feel. But it would be maybe a bit creepy if it was done poorly.
Someone in the comment section is going to be like, bro, when I walk into my deli, my guy gives me some salami when I walk in. I don't need some AI to help me do it.
Totally. Okay, another one. I'm huge on this. So when Chris and I were running the business day to day, like when we were running our agency, we were absolute maniacs about negotiation. So anything that we bought from...
office furniture to vendor contracts to software to even the coffee beans that we bought in bulk for the staff we negotiated everything we would go get multiple quotes we'd pit them against each other we would negotiate on payment terms all sorts of stuff and we saved an insane amount of money doing that and i realized Before that, I would just kind of be like, well, the price is the price.
And then Chris was a big haggler and got me to read a bunch of books. I realized, no, the price is not the price. Most people, if you ask them, will give you a big, huge discount. And so what I found over time, though, was as our company got bigger, I had to delegate negotiation. And no one wants to do negotiation. An employee does not care to do negotiation. First of all, it's really awkward.
It's really, really uncomfortable. Two, it slows everything down. You just want to choose the desk you want to buy and just buy it. And to get the deal takes like three weeks sometimes. So it's time. And then incentive. Why do they care? It's like, why is it worth it for them to spend all this time and money to save... a couple thousand dollars to you.
That's a couple thousand dollars of profit to them. What does that mean? It's like maybe another couple of dollars on their bonus or something like that. And so I have been, it's kind of been driving me crazy and I've tried to train people over and over again. I've been like, Hey, read like this negotiation book or use like, you know, use this GPT bot or whatever, but nobody ever does it.
And so, um, We actually started a company called TechSource about six months ago, and we started another one even three or four years ago, which we sold to Ramp actually, which is why we like recreated this business basically. But what it does is it negotiates software on your behalf.
So Amazon S3, any enterprise software, HubSpot, Rippling, you know, you name it, anything that you use, they will basically evaluate what what you're using, how many seats you have, and then they'll go and negotiate and do the procurement on your half. And the savings are insane. Like we've saved people like 60, 70% across some of their largest vendors.
So I'm obsessed with this idea, but for everything. So if I want to buy a house, I want to literally be like, hey, that's the house I want. You call the guy and you save me as much for every year. I'm going to give you 20% of everything you save under a certain amount. If the asking price is a million bucks and you get it for 800K, I'll give you 25% of the savings.
And I think that is a very interesting business idea. It really works best, obviously, with big purchases, houses, cars, that kind of stuff. But doing an acquisition of a car or a house, it's not a lot of work. you could probably do the actual negotiation in a few hours.
And so I think this is a great business for somebody who, A, loves to negotiate, and then B, would want to train up a sales force to do this. And that could be as simple as going to the Philippines or Latin America and just getting these people to read a couple books and hyper-incentivizing them and aligning them and giving them an LLM.
So as they're going through it, they just type the email response in and they rewrite the email accordingly or something. But yeah, I love this idea and I want to be a customer of whoever does it.
Yeah, I think this is also one of those ideas that makes sense right now because so many companies are trying to reduce costs right now. So you're swimming downstream here, you're not swimming upstream. And I agree with you, there's so many different verticals that you can take this in. So yeah, I like it.
Yeah, I think especially people, they don't think enough about these big purchases. They'll say like, well, the asking price on that house was X and it had previously sold for Y. And I think that just there's no price discovery. At the end of the day, anyone who's sold a house, like I've sold houses where the listing price is like a hope and a dream.
And then there's been other times where it's completely firm and I'm not willing to go under. But if someone asked the right questions of me, they would pretty quickly learn how much flexibility I have on pricing and stuff. Um, so yeah, I think that's a, that's a really cool one. Um, the other one that I have, I've got, let's see, I've got two more.
So the next one, um, I looked into this recently cause I'm getting older and as you get older, your sperm quality gets worse and they actually show that, um, older fathers have uglier children. So the older you get, the uglier and less symmetrical your kids faces will be. Not for sure. There's lots of good looking people, uh, who have good looking kids even when they're old. Um,
But so, you know, your risk of complications and autism and all sorts of other stuff go up. And so I think this is something that a lot of people should be doing and very few people I know are. And I think the reason that people don't do sperm freezing is, A, you know, no one really talks about it. Two, it's not something that's marketed to you. You know, I've never seen an ad for sperm freezing.
And then three, it's an awkward process. I don't want to go to some weird clinic and say,
go and have to like jerk off in a weird room with like I like I don't know it just seems very awkward and I think that if someone made it easy where I could impulse purchase it so let's say that I go I see an ad for it or some Instagram influencer talks about it I click a link and they literally just ship you a package with dry ice
and you do it at home and then ship it back, I think that could be really successful. This is a hard business to execute on because you need licensing and you need a facility and all sorts of other stuff. But I think whoever does it could do really, really well.
Just checking the Google Trends data on sperm freezing, and you can just see that it's going up. There's more and more interest in sperm freezing. And you're right, I've never... I've never once seen an ad for any of this. So I think there's an opportunity to build a real brand here.
Oh, it looks like there are a couple companies doing this, though. It's interesting. Legacy is one.
And then there's like... Yeah, but when I Google sperm freezing, the number one Google search result is...
no ad which is like that's crazy you'd love to see it that is how is there no ad you'd love to see that that alone i'm like that's crazy that there's no one advertising on literally i know same with me in my area literally i googled sperm freezing and there's no ad that's like a huge opportunity whenever you see that that's like a lot it's like a lottery ticket
I almost don't want to air this episode.
I want to edit that out and I'm going to build this in Canada right now. That's crazy. I wonder, I'm going to ask a chat GBT cause I'm not French Canadian. What, um, what, uh, what would be required to start a sperm testing facility or sorry for sperm banking.
And while you're doing that, I got a couple of names for sperm freezing. We can do like ice cold sperm.com.
There's a lot of really great name possibilities for that. Let's see. OK, so sperm banks are regulated in Canada. They're regulated. They have to be screened. Strict procedures. We look up startup costs.
But also just doing lead gen. Just buy the keywords, sell the leads.
Yeah, totally. Well, it's like there's that company. I think it's called Legacy. It looks like there's one. Legacy at Home Sprint. maybe we just go buy that company before this goes live. Yeah. Like this looks great, but yeah, it does not. Okay. Oh, interesting analysis. So it looks like they have, okay. So they have a home sperm testing.
They have home sperm improvement and they have home sperm freezing give legacy.com. Let's see if they've raised money. So they raised money in July actually. So pretty recently.
Interesting. And they raised it from like Silicon Valley people or yeah.
I'm going to follow this guy on X and message him.
When do you know when you see an idea out there? You have an idea and then you start to do some Googling and you're like, oh man, there's someone doing it. When do you know to continue or to stop?
Well, I think what I like is to say, okay, that guy's doing it in the States. Why don't I just copy this exact thing in Canada? And ultimately for me, it comes down to two things. One, how hard is the idea to execute and how costly? Would I need to raise money for it? Or is this thing I could just bootstrap myself? And how long to get validation?
But separately from that, it's ultimately who's the CEO going to be? Because that's the big problem I always have is like, I can have the world's best idea, but I'm not going to be able to run it. I've got tiny, I've got all these other things going on. So I need someone who can just take the baton and run with it. And then I can just like help promote it, strategize, all that kind of stuff.
So that's the key thing. Okay. It's looking like estimated startup costs of, oh, not too bad. Like, Well, okay. So it's like probably 20 or $30,000 a month to have all this stuff. It's like a bit of a bit of a pain in the ass to start, but it's definitely interesting.
I wonder if you could go in lease space from an existing sperm bank and just say like, Hey, like give us like a shelf to start and then we'll.
Exactly.
Yeah. Hmm. Interesting.
I feel like that's the move.
This is a good idea. I actually think this is really interesting. If anyone's listening to this and wants to start this business, they should email me and Greg because we will fund you.
Yes, we will. Okay. I think we got one last idea.
Yeah. So basically, have you ever done like EO or YPO for them?
I've never done it.
So I had a friend invite me to EO when I was 20 and I was just starting my company and I walk into the room and it's all these 40 to 50 year old dudes who have like, collar businesses or they're like investment managers or like, you know, guys that wear suits like business people.
And I was immediately allergic to that because I was like, you know, a 20 year old in a hoodie who's in tech and none of these people are in tech. And my immediate thought was like, well, what can I learn from these guys? Like, this is like so pointless. And I kind of say as much to my friend and he says, no, no, no, dude, trust me. You should join this.
Just make sure you do this thing called forum. And I had no idea what that was. But it turned out that EO Forum or YPO Forum is a format where once a month, you and five or six other entrepreneurs go into a conference room and you share everything that's going on in your life. So personal, family, and business. And so on day one of my first forum, I walk in the room.
It's a guy who runs a mapping company. someone who runs a popsicle company, another guy ran a puzzle company, a woodworking shop, and I forget, there's a couple others. And I'm just like, man, like, this is like, I'm not gonna learn anything. This doesn't make any sense.
Fast forward 10 years later, and there's some of my best friends, actually 15 years later, this was like 15, almost 20 years ago, actually. And one of them is the executor of my will. So these are actually my most trusted confidants. And what happened was over the course of time, you know, we all started out kind of nervous and we wouldn't share. We just talked about our businesses.
We'd be cautious. But over time, like shit happens. Like people get divorced. People deal with co-founder issues. People can't make payroll. They deal with like a psycho, uh, employee, all this stuff happens and you become this like bonded band of brothers.
And I found that has a, it's been like so helpful for me just for like making amazing friends, but then be also like in business, everything tastes like chicken and like talking about your problems is really rewarding as a group. Um, and so I had this experience of like this,
Deeply forged friendships occur when you have this ritual where you do this monthly thing in a rhythm and you share and you're deep and personal and there's shared trust because one of the key things in forum is nothing leaves the room. It's totally confidential. And so I've been thinking a lot about that.
And I think it's kind of a gift to be in business and get to do that because we have this shared language. If you and I met and we didn't have our businesses, it would be harder for us to get along. I'm sure we'd find all sorts of stuff to talk about, but when you're in business, you just have this shared language and you can bond.
And so I actually, I had a friend who was struggling with alcoholism and I went to an AA meeting like maybe two years ago. And I was like, oh, my God, this is like forum in an AA meeting. You stand up. There's a whole ritual. You stand up. Everything's confidential. You share these crazy stories of what's going on in your life or you tell stories or whatever.
And there's this feeling of like connectedness and like friendship and bonding. And it's like it's like church or something like that. And so. I think that there's an opportunity to create more of these sorts of groups. And I think sometimes they need to be around interests and sometimes they just need to be about friendship or group therapy because ultimately you're kind of doing group therapy.
And so, you know, Sam Parr did like Hampton for entrepreneurs, which is very similar to this. I think it would be interesting to try and find other subgroups where you can convince five or six people to get together in a format and share. And so the kind of grown up way people do this is like dinner parties and book groups. I think something deeper than that would be interesting.
So it's like right now I've got this, I've got my business forums, I've got
four different business forums that i do i do one a week but then i've also been meeting with this group of guys to talk about doing like a secular church and what i mean by that is not like starting a cult but just like having a weekly event that we do with a group of people and their families and trying to build that sense of community and so I don't know what is here.
I know there's something here, but I think it's a very unformed idea. But I think in this world where everything is going more and more online and churches exist less and less, I think people are looking for the sense of community. And there's a really great opportunity to do that, not only to make money, but also just to make great friends and do something positive.
This gets me thinking of my buddy started, his name's Antonio Neves. He started something in Los Angeles called Man Mornings. And he used to get together with a group of guys that they used to just drink, basically. And he realized that the best conversations and the most bonding happens in the mornings around coffee. And this is a guy who, I'm pretty sure he was a moderator for TED
and he's a professional moderator, professional speaker. He doesn't shy away that it's for men. Men need to share their feelings. I really appreciate that. I'm not saying, yes, it is like a boys club, but that could happen for females, it could happen for other people. My point is, I think that one of the reasons why it's your point.
One of the reasons why it's so successful and Tony is, is doing so well with it is because yeah, these people are looking for something more. They want to share and they're becoming best friends in this. Like it's just a coffee or going for a walk. It's beautiful.
Totally. I think it's probably the most rewarding thing that I've done is building these forum groups and seeing how interconnected I've created. I've created all these webs of friends who they're all people I knew for the most part individually, but now they're all friends. And it's crazy. I have groups where when everyone met, they were all really nervous.
And now we all go on annual trips every year. And like, we're just super, super connected, like really circle of trust and to have 20 or 30 people that are deep trust is like a really unique thing in this day and age. I feel like there's definitely like an epidemic of loneliness where
most people can't name you know two or three good friends that they have let alone 20. so yeah it's it's really powerful i don't know that it's a huge money maker i think like sam and what he's doing with hampton is because it's like high net worth ceos um but i think you could probably find other niches where it would be profitable but mostly this is a how do you make your life awesome
Like, I think about the concept, I said this to Nick Gray, I was like, you know, most people think they want to be a billionaire. What they actually want is to be a friend billionaire. Why do you want to be a billionaire? Because you've watched Honorage. You know, you're like, oh, if I have a billion dollars or I'm famous,
then you know i'll be like vinnie chase driving out with my entourage of bros and it'll be good times and parties and girls and all this stuff and in reality that's not what happens people get rich and they get like sad and isolated and people treat them differently and stuff and so they really want to be a friend billionaire and i think like nick is doing interesting work in that area of how do you ensure that your life is vibrant you're constantly meeting new people you have deep friendships
Uh, you're a magnet for interesting people. Like I think that is actually far more interesting than making money.
I couldn't agree more. And the, the funny part is though, is that like Tony who started man mornings, who did it out of the goodness of his heart, I wouldn't be surprised if that turns into like a really big business. Uh, just because he's so passionate about it and people want it so badly.
Not only that, but the business, it's not about, if you think about it, you are building this network. People pay $200,000 or $300,000 a year to go to Harvard or something like that. And the reason they do that is not because the education at Harvard is so much better.
It is maybe a little bit better, but mostly it's that you're going to school with all these super influential wealthy people that in the future will benefit you because they're gonna hire you for a job or give you opportunities or something. I think increasing your opportunity surface area by having a really interesting broad group of friends where you have high trust
is amazing because that Tony guy, maybe he makes no money on that business or this isn't even a business, just like he does for fun. But certainly if he ever starts a business in the future, maybe one of his investors or earliest employer co-founder comes from that group. I just think bad things have never happened to me when I put myself out there.
Well, I mean, you get trolls on Twitter and stuff, but like generally bad things don't happen when you put yourself out there and you build a great group of friends and high trust and that kind of stuff.
It's a beautiful place to end. Andrew, thanks for coming on. Namaste. Where could people get to know you better? I will say I've just read your book, Never Enough, and I loved it. Oh, thanks.
The best way to get to know me probably is to read my book. It's kind of a memoir about building my business. Yeah. if you want to understand me and how I tick and how I got to where I am, that is the best way.
Uh, you can check it out at never enough.com and also do a newsletter and a podcast where I really just kind of like talk to people I'm interested in and share products and stuff, random stuff I'm interested in. Um, and then if you have a business you want to sell, uh, you should go to tiny.com and you should email me and I'd love to buy your business if it's really good. That's my primary thing.
That's what I do for a living.
Especially if it's a sperm freezing business.
Yes. Yes. Sperm free, highly profitable sperm freezing or sleep apnea business.
You know who to call. All right. Thanks, man. I'll catch you later.
Thanks, dude. Bye-bye.