The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he gave away these genius 7 profitable startup ideas
Mon, 27 May 2024
Join us for an engaging conversation with Cody Schneider, Co-founder of Swell AI, as we explore a variety of business ideas and opportunities ideal for first-time entrepreneurs. In this episode, we cover everything from marketing agencies and SaaS startups to talent management agencies. Cody shares his proven framework for taking any business from 0 to 1, providing valuable insights for aspiring founders. Whether you're looking to start your first million-dollar business or just curious about entrepreneurial strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this essential guide to launching a successful startup!🚀 My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membershipYou'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND CODY ON SOCIALCody’s startup: https://www.swellai.com/ X/Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/5fjdn8d7 LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/28e89f5rCody’s Keyword Google Sheet: https://tinyurl.com/4n8wx8thTo improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up to boringmarketing.comEpisode Timestamp00:00 Intro02:53 First business: Local only marketing agency20:27 Second business:Influencer marketing as a service28:40 Third business: Google Ads agency for XYZ40:28 Fourth business: Quickbooks app development studio46:01 Fifth business: TikTok SEO as a service54:35 Sixth business: A&R and talent agency for music artists1:04:07 Seventh business: Newsletter acquisition
This is a perfect first company for anybody to start. So it's Google Ads for XYZ. And then you create an agency that's around that specific thing. It's going to be like shooting fish in a barrel. All of these companies or people are searching for Google Ads for XYZ.
And if you go to the front page of Google, what's ranking for the majority of the pages at the top is a stack pack of three YouTube videos. So if you just name the video, Google ads for apartments, and you walk through literally, how do you set up Google ads for an apartment complex?
And you're just going deep on like the strategy, the tactics, the philosophy of this for a lot of people, they're going to look at this and be like, Oh my God, like, I don't want to do this. Like this looks mind numbing. So I'm going to go and I'm going to buy this service from a person. And then basically, you know, get 30 clients and that's a million dollar a year business.
Like I'm obsessed with this right now. It's like YouTube is the top of funnel for service businesses. Some kid who's 24 can go do this tomorrow. And I guarantee you, if you did a video a day for the next 200 days, you could easily be at 30 grand a month doing this. What is this, a week later?
So I guess it went well. So we recorded most viewed pod, most downloaded pod since the beginning. And I've had everyone from Alexis Ohanian on here, Jason Kalkanis, David Friedberg, Morgan Housel, Sahil Bloom, you name it. But I don't know, there's something about you. You're an idea machine that people couldn't get enough of you.
I love it, man. I'm stoked to be back. We got a lot more. I've got eight in the chamber, but two are software, one's a creator business, and the other ones are all like service companies. But anyways, I totally juiced the numbers, by the way. I was like just running Twitter ads. I wanted the top spot on the Greg YouTube channel. Yeah.
And you did. And it worked. So thank you. Let's start with service businesses because they're easy to start. And I want you just to bang through all these service business ideas because some of them are really good.
Cool. Should I start with the creator one or go to the service one?
Whatever you want. You can start with whatever you want. But what's important to me is that for every idea that you talk about, just being, giving people the tactics around like, here's the idea. And this is how I'd actually go about starting. Yeah, exactly. Cool.
Yeah. No, I'm down. All right. Let's rip. All right, so idea one, I want to start with this, the local only marketing agency for XYZ rich person service category. So let's break that down. So I did some consulting, this was years ago, for a CrossFit gym. Their customer lifetime value was like $1,700, if I remember right. And we could get people in the door for like 50 bucks.
And so for them, it was basically just like this money printer thing. All we were doing is it was Instagram ads to people that were like had a CrossFit interest that were in that area with like a certain income bracket. So on Facebook, you can actually target people that have like, you know, they're the top 1% of income earners within a geographical area.
And then you can combine that with an audience, audience interest targeting. So for CrossFit, but this same idea could be applied for like any type of business that's servicing these type of people. So think CrossFit, think like estheticians. You could do this with probably like tattoo removal. My whole strategy to go and build this list would be just like,
You can scrape all of these people's email addresses from their websites by using a service like Hunter.io. So the whole strategy is you go and you scrape Google Maps. Go to Fiverr right now, search Google Maps scraping, and you'll find somebody that's built out like a whole proxy server network that you can pay them $100 and they'll go scrape like 100,000 listings for you on Google Maps.
You give them a target keyword phrase, they're going to find every one of these companies. So say you're doing it for like CrossFit gyms. And why we're talking about like a specific category is that for once you figure out the marketing strategy to grow that business, you can use that exact same stack, that same marketing stack to like get people in the door.
So for them, what we did is we had an ebook download that was like, you know, how to gain muscle fast or something, you know, just something like that, basically. we basically send them to this free ebook download that would turn them into, or that would put them in an email nurture campaign.
And then we grew like their Instagram account by doing Instagram ads with like a call to action to follow that account to get more like Fitspo or something, if I remember correctly. But so once you have that whole marketing stack, you can just do that over and over again. And this is actually how you create like a great productized service company that is focusing on a specific vertical.
So like, again, again, to walk through the whole acquisition of new customers. You go and you scrape all of Google Maps for all of these companies. Their emails will be public because most of them put them on their website. So Hunter IO will find those. You can also use a tool called Phantom Buster.
Phantom Buster will go and it will scrape the entire website and it will reject any email that is publicly visible on that website. All those emails you then take and you use an email validation tool. The one I like right now is called Zero Bounce. Once you get those emails validated, then you can start doing cold email by like 20 different domains. That's probably all you would need for this.
You can do two inboxes per domain that you have. Use a software like Instantly. Use Microsoft, their admin, or Microsoft 365 to make all of the inboxes. So you'll have 40 inboxes in total. You can send 40 emails per inbox. And so on a daily basis, you'll be, or sorry, on a monthly basis, you'll be able to send 32,000 cold emails to that list.
So like with CrossFit gyms, if I remember right, and again, this is a couple years ago, so don't quote me on this. It's probably different numbers, but When I initially was looking at doing this, there was like 25,000 of them that I could find with contact information. And I mean, you could hit all of them within a quarter, basically, is the idea.
And if you can't sell that many of them, you have a problem. But to talk about this, like when it gets scaled up, like these marketing agencies that are for specific vertical, there's this company that nobody's ever heard of. It's called Suds Creative. The only reason I know about it is because I dated this girl who worked at this company. And she all they do is for car washes.
They are basically the marketing agency that does like all the marketing for basically every car wash that's in the United States. And it is the same stack of stuff that they do. They do like coupons and then they get people onto the subscriptions and it turns into this recurring revenue thing.
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But if you look on Zoom info, it says they do like 12 million a year. I know from insider information, it's like 5x that. And all they do are marketing car washes for car washes. And their acquisition strategy is literally exactly what I just talked about. So I think this is like a huge play for It's an operations game is what it comes down to.
But now with these AI tools, I mean, you could basically like build this whole stack out and build automations. And it's like, cool, like you onboard a client and it just like zero to one, all their Google ads, Facebook ads, you know, built a platform. a PDF ebook download for them. Like that whole, whole thing can be standardized and turned into a process.
And like where I was doing it previously with like offshore team members, you could do this with probably like one person with a stack of these tools behind them. Like all you would need is account reps. And then if they had a little bit of digital marketing knowledge, or you just get like a whole army of offshore talent, that's like focusing on each of the verticals.
So somebody that's focusing on only Google ads, somebody that's only focusing on Facebook ads, and then they know that they're playing and they're just optimizing for each of those. So. Yeah, I don't know if that's the one that... The one I'm most excited about, we're going to get to in a second. But yeah, anyway, just wanted to lay that out there for people.
So what I like about this one is it's local. And I think a lot of people, they think software, they think services. I want to go everywhere. And I think you brought up cars, which is really interesting. I heard a story of a company that is a marketing agency for car dealerships in Quebec. And dude, these, these websites that they're building, like look like they're from 1997.
Terrible man.
Terrible. And the business is doing $20 million a year, just marketing agency for like, they've got like, you know, a hundred clients. And, uh, they retain their clients, right? Totally. Yeah, they totally retain their clients. And this is just Quebec. So it's just, which is a market of seven, eight, nine million people, right? So I think CrossFit for insert geography, right?
It doesn't always have to be the United States too. There's other markets out there.
A thousand percent. I think the thing that people don't realize with this too, is there's a learning effect when you get that many clients that are all in the same category as well. So like, first off, you're not competing with people that are very sophisticated. Like tomorrow we could go and we could like optimize a Google, uh, my business listing and.
we could get it to page, you know, into the snack pack within 72 hours, right? With just like super simple SEO stuff. It's like, are the keywords in the description of the business? Is this completed? Are their phone? Like, this is things, these are things that are like basic standards when it comes to when you're playing at a global scale, right? But on this local scale, this is super easy to do.
Also, the people that they're typically interacting with that are providing these services within their geographies are really bad at this. The competition that you have is like this random dude that all he does is WordPress development. Oh, we also do SEO and we do all this paid ad stuff, but in reality, all he's doing is putting his skin over it.
You know, like a WordPress website block builder and then upselling all of these services.
And so when you come in with that expertise that's just focusing on that digital marketing component and then layer all these things together and have the learning effects that are happening from the knowledge that you gain from servicing all these clients within the same industry, you create this moat for yourself where it's just like you're going to be so much more committed.
And the thing with these types of industries is they all know each other. Like CrossFit's a great example of this. All the gym owners know each other because they're all in the same forums and they go to all the same events. And so you get this natural, just, I mean, I, we got, I think at one point I was the max I ever got to was, I think it was doing four gyms, um, at the peak of it, but it, it,
all of it was just referral based, right? Like I wasn't doing any big, it was just consulting work. So I think to, you know, to reiterate, like there's just so many positive things here. And like the challenge is operations. Like how do you, because a lot of them, they want FaceTime.
Like you, and so it's like on a weekly basis, like you need a 30 minute like call with them that you're having that conversation. And then how do you supplement that? Like you can use Loom and maybe you put them in a Slack channel or, you know, or like some type of community where they can talk to other members. There's ways that you could do this. But I think,
that the challenge that, you know, and this was when I was just starting my career was like, I don't know how I'm going to scale this out outside of myself. Like I could go get 10 clients. Right. But like now, how do I take that to a hundred? How do I take that to a thousand? It just needs a good operator to do that.
A couple of quick tips for people. So one is if you are targeting non-English speaking countries, like don't do cold emails in English. It sounds obvious, but you know, if you're sending emails to Germany, like it should be in German, shouldn't be in English. If you're sending emails to France, it should be in French. The second thing is use Loom. Don't just send characters in an email.
And I'm sure some people are going to be like, well, I don't speak German. So how am I supposed to go on Loom? Well, that's where you can use Eleven Labs and some of these other tools. Just use AI to basically... create it. And I'm sure you've got some ideas there. But I'm just seeing looms within emails convert just so much more than just straight up text.
Totally agree. I totally agree. I think something that I've seen be really successful lately is just show the growth graphs. So like we're building this new agency and like this is all I'm sending is it's like here's this graph that goes up into the right. And then I have a sequence of like four emails that are just graphs up into the right. And do you want to take a call?
And it works pretty well when you just like show don't tell. Right. It's that same idea. So yeah. I think with the video thing too, we're seeing this just be like the biggest leverage point too for founders to create. And it's really like, it's like one to many sales, right? Like I can do this single video and like, that's what marketing is traditionally.
Like people talk about marketing and it's like, they're like, build brand, build brand. It's like, no, like really what you're doing is you're like selling people on an idea at scale. So rather it was one-to-one, it's one-to-many. And that's like really the biggest differentiator between sales and marketing.
Like when you think about it different than that, you're actually not doing your job well, in my opinion, unless you're like a, you know, you're trying to differentiate a commodity brand like Coca-Cola or something like that. Then the rules kind of change, the biology of it changes. But yeah.
Yeah, I think that this one is like, especially if you're young, like if you're 22 and like, how do I get my first, you know, 10K a month so that I can be the most balling person out of anybody I know at college. Like this is the business that I would start tomorrow if I had to start from zero, right? It's like one of these types of things.
This is like 2024's version of college painting.
A hundred percent, a thousand percent. I mean, you could do this in a bunch of different categories too. Like you could do this, you know, it doesn't have to just be cold email as well. Like it could be, you know, do Instagram DMs, like wherever they spend time online, that's how you get in contact with them, right? Restaurants, it's like a lot of Facebook still. So it's just like, okay, just DMs.
DM them on Facebook, like figure out that whatever that channel is. And I mean, half the time you can just like cold call them as well too. And this is the scariest thing for people, but in like, it's such a volume game. Like you start to get numb to it. I think that that's the other thing with all this.
Like when it comes to any cold outreach, you, you get numb to like with enough reps, you just quit. Like it's like water on the back of a duck, right? It just like flows right off of you when somebody gets pissed off that you reached out to him because like,
there's a certain percentage of these people that they're going to look at this and they're going to be like, cool, like I pay you a grand a month and that turns into 15 grand new revenue for me like from a customer lifetime value point. Of course, I'm going to buy that, right? I'm going to go and buy that all day long.
And you could probably do a version of this where it's on a like a fee or it's basically based off of like the it's like it's performance marketing. Right. So we come in, it's whatever I convert, I get a percentage of that. In my experience, that just really depends on the small business. But a lot of them and
Also, like I would focus on these things, like again, things that rich people are buying in your neighborhood, right? Not like HVAC, not like any of this, those are super competitive, those service businesses.
They're also like not a great repeat purchase, like something that happens where it's like on a weekly or a monthly basis, like think about Pilates, think about bar classes, think about these types of companies where it's like I'm going in and I'm buying that thing regularly, Those are going to be the most effective places for you to create a bunch of inbound for them. That's super high valuable.
And it's not like, oh, I have to, you know, with HVAC, it's like, this is just a lead gen game, right? Because like, how often does your HVAC system go out? But in contrast, there's often a longer customer lifetime value, especially with these services that are focused on higher demographic people in the geography.
I'll give one idea that comes top of mind to this. So pools, so you can, you know, go find where the highest per capital amount of pools are private pools, which costs like 50 to a hundred grand. If you want to, you know, real pool and a try to sell them on a pool. And then you just sell that lead to whoever ends up making it. Um, B you can also sell them on, um, uh, upkeep of their pool.
So, you know, for like 200 bucks a month, we'll send someone who kind of like test the water and makes it all good. So I think that's, you know, an easy opportunity. And then you can also go to places where it's cold, where people have hot tubs. So think about like mountain towns, like. And that's the thing. The prompt here for people is don't go to the obvious HVAC stuff. That's obvious.
What are the non-obvious spaces to go into?
Totally. And again, I would like to look at like CrossFit, estheticians, pool cleaning companies, tattoo removal, like any of these things that are like high ticket that would be recurring. Even tattoo removal probably isn't a good one because it's like, okay, there's an end to that, right? You want something that there's no end to it.
Like if you own a pool, it's going to live on in perpetuity, right? Like That's the type of companies where this is the most interesting place to start these businesses. Also, just as a side note, there's this local SEO play that you can do. It's called Rank and Rent. You probably know about this.
For the audience, this idea is basically you create all of these websites that are geography optimized to rank for specific keywords like pool cleaning XYZ. And I'll give you two examples of this. So window cleaning is one of them. It's a regular recurring thing. I met this guy when I was dirt bagging.
I was in Redfish Lake in Stanley, Idaho, and he was living out of a van and he ran his company off of a laptop with a Starlink and he was doing 180 grand a month and he owned all of these websites all over the US. He started out as doing a window washing company in like San Diego and then scaled this up to this thing. And I mean, I was one of the crazy, you know, It's just like him, right?
That's the entire company. And all he's doing is selling leads that like other window washers. And then another one. So a friend is in the space of like selling like yachts, like yacht cruises. So it's like you start like rent yacht, you know, Florida or Miami or whatever, right? Owns sites that rank for that huge ticket item and then sells those leads.
And it was literally just like had a phone number up there. that person would call. So again, these are like little things that I think for like the, if you're deep in internet business culture, I've been here 15 plus years. I've probably tried every one of these at some point within my career.
They're like obvious things, but for, I think a lot of people, like they don't even realize that this is happening in the shadows, like behind all, you know, every Google search that you're doing, there's somebody that's like me, that's a degenerate, that's ranking a website, that's trying to get your contact information so that I can sell it to another company. What's your next idea?
So next idea, I wanna talk about the service business that is reach out for influencer marketing. So this is a larger trend that's happening within software, especially like B to SMB software, where you basically like have to create trust and teach people how to use the software at scale. And so this actually really,
kind of came from uh i was working or doing some consulting for a friend's company i was doing some seo work but their whole strategy for growing their entire like company and it's one of these uh things that's like a multi-million dollar company that you've never heard of before that's in a category that i'll probably never talk about because it's just so so much value um but the uh what it does is uh
basically their hold to growth strategy was focusing on just doing YouTube videos. So basically influencer reach out to YouTubers to have them talk about their product and show how to use this product. And then they have an affiliate play. So the structure of this is you basically would go and you'd make some type of affiliate commission for your software.
So 30% recurring as an example, and then you would go and you'd work with these influencers and say, Hey, I'm going to pay you $500 for this video. And then you'll also get all of these recurring commissions out of this. So basically,
he did this like himself in the beginning to just scale this up where he reached out to like 300 different YouTubers, found all their emails, went and commented on their videos, did this whole thing. Absolutely massive time suck, right? But he was in early stage of this foundership. So he had time and he had resources. Now he's at scale and he's like, I can't do this anymore.
And you can't, it's hard to hire a person to do this. And so this is where this idea comes from. So it's basically done for you, influencer marketing as a service. So how you would actually go and do this is you would go and you would find any like software that's being built. So like think of, you know, instantly think of any of these like companies that are building in public, right?
Any of these tools that, I mean, and there's hundreds of thousands of them. Just go on Twitter and you'll find somebody hawking something. You could do this with Swell and a Harpy. So the strategy then is, okay, I'm going to go and I'm going to find these software companies. I'm then going to say, hey, I'll do unlimited influencer outreach for you.
to these people that make youtube videos to these youtube influencers and how you actually do that is youtube actually will show you the email address of a youtuber but if you so if you go to the about section of a channel it's going to show you an email so those emails They are behind a Captcha. So again, go to Fiverr.
There's ways you could do this yourself, but the easiest way is go to Fiverr, search YouTube link building, or I think it's YouTube lead generation, something like that. They'll basically go and scrape all of these YouTube channels for you, find all the emails that are associated, and then you can cold email all of these people. Again, use just a cold email software.
And then you're basically just turning into a service company. But the idea is you go and you broker all of these relationships and all of these deals and charge two to three three K a month to do this for the company. So for them, they'd probably give you a budget. So, you know, using my friend's company, they would give, say, Hey, we have a 50 K this month to spend on influencer, uh, work.
So go find me the best, uh, uh, people to work with. So you go and you email 500 people. And then, uh, that turns into a certain amount of leads, uh, The kicker and how you can do this to be really effective is you then take all the people and you look at their different subscribers and view counts and the cost, and then you create a ratio of what those are to each other.
And then you can compare, okay, to see, oh, in this bell curve of people, this subset is actually underpricing themselves. So let's go with that subset and invest our capital there. And that's how you can create a greater ROI for your client. At that point, you're like, okay, we just did 100 videos.
Then you would go and you look at the affiliate commissions from all the people that you just did, create a report for them, and then show them, okay, these people are the ones that created the most impact to our revenue. Here's our ROI, basically our ROAS count. We're going to reinvest all the capital back into these people, and then we're going to cycle in a new group.
For him, where it gets to now is he has 30 core influencers that he works with that he knows is going to generate X amount of revenue per month.
But the knock-on effect that happens here, and this is how I would sell it to them, is that once you get enough influencers talking about your product in this category, then you'll start to see that up and coming influencers that are trying to build within that space will also review that product for you for free without paying them.
All they're doing is trying to do the affiliate game of get that 30% commission, right? So there's like this growth flywheel that gets built in this. I always talk about this like digital gravity. Like this is a way to build digital mass, but it's digital mass in relationship to attracting like affiliates. And as you get more affiliates in, more affiliates copy them.
And as more affiliates copy them, you get more affiliates in. And so it creates this like virtuous flywheel. But this is something that I know like every founder that I talk to that's in the influencer space is like, or sorry, in the software space. I, they're all trying to figure this out how to do this. They don't have time to do this. They don't know how to set this up.
And like what I just said, just lays out that whole process and you could a hundred percent capitalize on this. Like I've talked to like five friends already and like, is this something that would be interesting to you? And they're like, yes, a hundred percent. I would do this tomorrow for like two grand a month if it was just handled and I didn't have to think about it.
And I just got a report on a weekly and a monthly basis of what was happening.
Yeah, I think what pisses people off about working with influencer agencies is most of them are not really conversion rate focused or ROAS focused. They're kind of just like, give me some money and I'll get you some influencers. And that's the trade.
So if you can position this as revenue focused and just basically that whole story and on the website you tell the founder story of that and you tell the story of like, I was once one of those people. I spent a million dollars a month and I was generating $1,000 of sales. Mr. Beast even reviewed my product and it sucked. Some story like that, of course, has to be true.
But some story with a founder letter, similar to how Jason Freed has like,
really good founder letters like if you check once.com or any of his stuff he just he has a really good way of just talking about the bigger picture and then once you learn about once you scroll down and you read the founder letter you're like wow yes i have spent a bunch of money on influences and has gone nowhere so i think this idea plus founder letter has legs
A hundred percent. And then the inbound that you, all you have to do is just a YouTube channel for this. Like I'm obsessed with this right now. It's like YouTube is the top of funnel for service businesses. This is like going viral in the SEO community right now with like Julian Goldie and Jackie Chow. I'm not sure. Jack, he owns Indexy.
He's ripping right now, but all of them are basically doing the same strategy where it's like daily videos talking about whatever, like, basically it's just doing experiments in public. Like that's what it's coming down to. Like here's all the experiments I'm running. Here's what we learned. Here's what worked and here's what didn't. And their channels are just exploding, right?
Because of that daily posting that's happening. But what that turns into is all this inbound leads because you become an expert
that category so if you just talked about like yo here's all the influencer marketing that we're doing for all our clients make all the data anonymous and just show graphs that are going up into the right of their affiliate commissions that are like you know their affiliate revenues that are being paid out you could easily like build this thing i think that could be a part of this top of funnel i'd probably pair those two things together so do the cold email component cold dm and then pair this with like youtube on top of it and i think that that's going to become a standard i
also the segues into the creator business. So maybe we go there next and talk about this Google ads for XYZ thing. Cause I think this will be also like another, like you're trying to start your first company. This is a perfect first company to add for anybody to start. So.
Yeah, let's get in there. And just on the Jackie Chu side of things, I know a lot of people are listening to this and they're like, I'm not starting a YouTube channel. And I was actually one of those people who hated YouTube up until recently. But if you go to Jackie Chu's YouTube, Homie is not producing his stuff very...
super professionally it's a loom video with a good mic and like his iphone he's that and he's like he calls in from whatever hotel room he's out at that point it could be like two in the morning his hair is like disheveled like it's all good yes 100 because the content like and it doesn't matter like his videos maybe get 2 000 views right but if one percent of those people
of those 2000 views turn into a paying customer. And his base fee is like five grand for link building a month. That's $100,000 in new customer revenue. Like that's the game that you're playing here. And I think this is a larger trend. Like you, I think you're seeing this, but like long form content is how you actually convince people to buy things that are expensive.
Neil Patel just dropped this data. I think it was like two or three weeks ago, but they basically looked at like what produces more revenues for a company. that's in the B2B space or any type of service business. And they were looking at YouTube short or they're looking at short form content versus long form content. And like, 10 X more impactful was long form content. And it makes sense, right?
Like also Alex Ramos, he just switched to this. Like if you go look at all of his videos, he just switched from like 10 to 20, you know, 15 minute videos. And now they're all like an hour plus. Okay. Why is that happening? So I was talking to my friend, Brian and, uh, uh, NG, he's, uh, his company's called viral bangers. He writes, he writes scripts for YouTubers that, that are made to go viral.
And basically what he's talking about is like they're adopting what was traditionally called like a virtual sales letter. So what what's that company called that? Yeah, I can't think of the website. It was like one of the original like sell digital products. It's Russell Brunson's company. You know what I'm talking about? Yeah, ClickFunnels. Okay, so it's that idea.
But for some reason, that's cycling again back into the zeitgeist of people's mind, which is hilarious. It's like all of these 19-year-olds are discovering this now for the first time. And I'm like, oh, yeah, I just turned 32 weekends ago. This is why this is happening because of 10-year cycles here.
But what I'm getting into is that this is long-form content is how you build a super deep amount of trust with people to be able to sell those higher ticket items. And this is... Again, perfect segue into this next business I want to talk about. So it's Google Ads for XYZ.
And so if you go and you look for all the long tail keywords that are in when I say Google Ads for XYZ, think Google Ads for apartments, Google Ads for car dealerships, Google Ads for whatever that ends up being. So all of these companies or people are searching for Google Ads for XYZ.
You can, if you go and you look at the front page of Google for every one of those long tail keyword phrases, and Greg, I'll send you over this list so that the audience can get it. We'll drop it. We'll just put it in a Google sheet that anybody can go see and copy. Because I want like 30, I want tomorrow like 30 people to go and just start these YouTube channels.
And this is all they do because you could own this so easily. So you make Google ads for XYZ. And if you go to the front page of Google, What's ranking for the majority of the pages at the top is a stack pack of three YouTube videos.
So if you just name the video, Google ads for apartments, and you walk through literally how do you set up Google ads for an apartment complex that's trying to get like inbound leads to get people to apply for the apartment.
You're going to like get views, but the bigger thing is that you can rank on google for that high value keyword phrase That would be almost nearly impossible to rank for if you're trying to do it from an seo standpoint So the monetization strategy is pretty straightforward You build if there's a thousand different keywords that you can go after build as many videos around each of those as you can So make a thousand videos then
You're gonna get ad revenue from that to begin with because the watch time is probably gonna be long. So they're gonna be at least 20 to 30 minute tutorial videos talking through all the components of these things. What I would then do is you upsell some type of tool that has an affiliate commission that's super high value. So a great example of this is going to be something like Supermetrics.
So Supermetrics is this company that nobody knows about as well. It's like one of these other ones. It's a data pipeline tool to be able to get ads data and really only like marketing agencies use this, but it gets ads data from like Facebook ads, Google ads, search console, any data source that you would try to get data into.
And you can pipe that into spreadsheets, you can pipe it into Looker Studio, you can pipe it into like a business intelligence tool like Tableau, et cetera. And the crazy part with this is like some of the monthly pricing for some of their highest tiers is like two grand a month, right? So it's like an enterprise level software basically.
But incorporate, hey, you want to see, like you want to compare your Facebook ads or your Google ads like against each other in this specific way where you're going to need this tool. Supermetrics, if you go to the link below, you can get access to it, blah, blah, blah, right? So then you get an affiliate commission.
There's another, like there's so many ways that you could pepper in all of these other softwares that are secondary or tertiary related to this core Google ads thing that you're doing. But the long-term play is then this creates inbound leads for... for an agency that you create and you just have it be an unlimited Google ads agency. Right.
But if you, they just watched a video that's 30 minutes long of you setting up this thing and you're just going deep on like how, like all the, like the strategy, the tactics, the philosophy of this, that's going to be like for a lot of people, they're going to look at this and be like, Oh my God, like, I don't want to do this. Like this looks mind numbing.
So I'm going to go and I'm going to buy this service from a person. And then again, one of these words like charge three grand a month, you do unlimited Google ads. And, uh,
basically you know get 30 clients and that's a million dollar a year business but some kid who's 24 can go do this tomorrow easily and i guarantee you if you did a video a day for the next 200 days you could easily be at 30 grand a month doing this and like from all of the revenue streams that we just talked about right there and i think okay taking a step back putting a framework to what you just just said so if you do want to start an agency
100%.
Step two is you... just sign up to a few affiliate offers, you get anywhere between 20 and 40%. People don't realize how much some of these SaaS products are willing to give. And sometimes it's even lifetime deals. For example, you know, we host a lot of our communities on school. And school, which is actually Hermosi's, one of Hermosi and Sama Oven's business,
we get 40% of lifetime revenue of the $99 a month that people pay for it. So that's step two. And the outcome of step two is it subsidizes your customer acquisition cost. So it puts you into a... zero to negative CAC situation where you can go ahead and take some of that money and put it into ads to get more of your...
Your target, yeah, your ICP, whatever. Yeah, and I think this negative CAC thing is super interesting because you're basically... I'm seeing all the AI writers do this right now. There's like a million AI writers that are being created by these founders on Twitter. And every one of them, like if they're, you know... worth their weight in salt. All of them are doing this exact same thing.
It's like go to YouTube and it's daily videos, how to use it like an AI writer to create SEO content that ranks, right? And then that turns into this like viral funnel for them. They get paid off of all that because there's ads. And I think what people don't realize is that like if somebody is searching Google ads for XYZ, that's a super high value impression that's going to be bid on a lot, right?
So like MailChimp will pay a hell of a ton of money to be in front of that person because they're signaling they're trying to do digital marketing activities. So there's these categories that traditionally ads are way more expensive in. Finance is one. Digital advertising or digital marketing is one. You could go down the list. Travel is another one.
So if you're doing these types of videos, your RPM is going to be so high automatically just because you're in that. The watch time, the dwell time is going to be super high because it's a tutorial. And then Also that down funnel movement is going to be super high because it's like, if you look, if it's your first time looking at a Google ads dashboard, it is mind numbing.
Like nobody knows how to actually use it effectively. Like there's very few people that are super good at it. And so if you are like, you know, become an expert in this and for the people out there that are like, okay, how do I teach myself these things? Go to YouTube and go to like loves data or go to, uh, there's this guy named Julian. I think it's like metric school or something like that.
If you just look up like Google data studio tutorials and Google ads, Google data studio tutorials, you're going to find these people that in public, like create some of the best like tutorial content you've ever seen. And all of those, another great website is called analytics mania. And they are basically like, here's how to set up the analytics infrastructure for your website.
So you can actually do this tracking, et cetera. But again, In 30 days, over a summer, if you sat down and every day you just watched five hours of YouTube videos and played with this thing, you could 100% get to that place. Then you just start making videos about everything that you learned during that process.
And that's going to create this top of funnel to then allow you to create this agency over the long term. But that same playbook can be used in so many places. I think this is the thing that like... I wanna go back to what you said, like talking about the framework component. Like this could be done for Facebook ads, right?
Like Facebook ads for churches, Facebook ads for e-commerce, Facebook ads for lawyers. Like there's so many of these same searches. You could do that exact same thing. You could also do it like Google maps for truckers. Like I'm looking at these right now. Google Maps for boaters, Google Maps for RVs, like all of these different categories that you could go after.
So all these specific marketing tactics that people are trying to do. If you just become an authority in that and then you create an agency that's around that specific thing. I mean, all day you're just it's going to be like shooting fish in a barrel.
Yeah, and it doesn't cost really anything to get started. And the videos actually make you pretty accountable to actually learn and be good. Because you're not going to be doing tutorials on, you know, dashboards, Google Analytics dashboards, if you don't actually know what you're talking about. So it forces people to get from not good to good at the skill set.
Totally, totally. All right, we've been ripping. Should we do a software?
It's time for software.
All right, this one I'm like, I'm geeking over and I want it so bad, but I'm gonna just give it to people. So there's 4,000 keywords for XYZ QuickBooks integrations. This is insane, okay? So again, I'll add this list. I'll give it, we'll put it in the show notes of the show. You can go down, you can download it.
So what this is basically is people are trying to get data from other tools into QuickBooks. And really it's the accountant of that person that's trying to get this data from this real estate data and from this other tool into QuickBooks. And when you look, so we analyze the data for these. And we found that about 50% of them, 40 to 50% of them didn't have integrations that already existed.
So of those 4,000 keywords, there were not integrations that were on QuickBooks already. There wasn't like an app on the QuickBooks app store for that specific integration. So let's just talk through like the biology of this business because I think it's like madness. QuickBooks, huge company. So you can eat their scraps and still make a massive business here.
They have an app store, but there's not a ton of developer activity within that app store. So there's a ton of arbitrage that you can capitalize on. Now, when you look at the actual software that you're gonna be building, you're just doing a handshake. It's just a data transfer from one software. It's an API call from one place into another place. You don't even have to store that data.
You're just moving it back and forth between these platforms. And when it goes about the marketing strategy, all you would have to do is Google ads focusing on those long tail keywords to those landing pages. And then you make all of these long tail landing pages that are like in here. I'll read off some of the examples once I find them.
But basically you could just do SEO and SEM and that would be the entire growth strategy for this because it's so high intent that you're going to... If that person is like if there's no other integration in that space, like they're going to choose that solution because the only other option is they have to do this manually. And so there's no way that the account is going to do that.
So here I'll give you some of these QuickBooks integrations as an example of like all these different softwares that are built on top of this that like people are actively searching for. And again, there's tons of these that aren't built. So click up QuickBooks integration. Talic QuickBooks integration, BuilderTrend QuickBooks integration, Apple QuickBooks integration. I mean, the list goes on.
We'll add this below. But from a software standpoint, super easy build. I mean, you could build this probably with an offshore team in all reality. And then that just turns into a marketing game that you're doing. It's like, okay, how do I basically get the data? And you have to be, I guess you would have to build some metric of trust.
So like as the founder, I'd build like some type of public persona as well that they could go and see, oh, this is like a real person because you're touching all of this like business, like enterprise business data. But I think this is like a, I think this is probably a $30 million a year company
I 100% think that just based off of the search volume, based off of how many users of QuickBooks there are, and based off of how many people aren't building these integrations for this category. Like just go on QuickBooks, the app and like their app store and search some of these like these integration names. Like for example, like...
Search NetSuite, search BuilderTrend, search Clover, search Ramp, like all of these different ones. And you're going to find that like a large percentage of them, it's an integration that's even shown within the app store that you can just go and create. And they're also like very low competition keywords because there's nobody else in this category going after it.
300.
750 apps. Oh my God, dude. And half of them don't even have any reviews. So there's basically like 80, 70 apps that people use. It's a goldmine.
Also, you could probably sell this with cold outreach to accountants as well. Like, hey, we build custom integrations for data into QuickBooks, right? And just like cold email every one of them in the US and say it's like offered as a solution. But the kicker is like, hey, you build this custom integration and then you go and you sell it to everybody else, right?
So you get paid up front for that development cost. That's actually probably the way to do this without having any operating capital costs.
So... 29 million users of QuickBooks. And you know how many users Shopify has? How many? 4.6 million users. Which is a whole other framework for thinking about when you want to create software in one of these app ecosystems, look at how many apps are in the ecosystem versus how many users there are. And just go to where.
That would be a great data set. I would love to do that data set with you is find marketplaces. And we do like a public thing where it's like, okay, here's all, I would be super cool. I'd be super down. I'd be happy to like put some team behind it or something.
So yeah.
Amazing. Should we do next one?
Yeah. Let's, let's keep going.
Okay, cool. All right. So next one is TikTok SEO as a service for like fine dining and cocktail bars. So I saw this data like three weeks ago or four weeks ago that was talking about how Gen Z isn't even using Google to start searches for local search. It's like only happening on social. Like they go to IG or they go to TikTok and they search like
you know, X, you know, bars, Denver or whatever, right. Or, um, nightlife X, Y, Z location. And so it got me thinking about like, okay, most of these companies, like, especially if they're old traditionals, like I'm thinking like pizzerias and stuff like that, like there, there's no way they're have any strategy for this.
And so like, I think you could go to them and be like, okay, we're going to rank for blah, blah, blah location, you know, whatever keywords are high value to them. And then all it is, is it's just like you as a creator and you're just making like UGC content. That's like the five best pizzerias and, you know, whatever neighborhood of whatever city. Right.
And then you just start with whoever your clients is and you just run down through those. And I think that you could super quickly acquire a customer base. Because the thing that we're seeing is that with this type of SEO, you can almost refresh it on a monthly basis. And it still has as much impact as it did 30 days before.
So in contrast to traditional SEO, it's like, oh, I'm going to make this investment month one. And then maybe 12 months later, I start to feel the impact of what I did in that. It's a long-term investment with a longer-term time horizon. In contrast, when I'm looking at these socials, and we're actually seeing this with longer form video as well.
So if you're on YouTube as an example, and you're doing a 10 minute video that's focusing on a bottom of funnel keyword that's related to your company, you can probably do that same keyword every 30 days, 30 to 60 days. You could just come and do another video, based, you know, almost exactly the same that's running through that.
As long as you're doing enough content, like again, I'm talking about like you're doing daily posts, weekly posts or something like that. But I mean, I think that you could probably go and sell these companies like grand to two grand a month and get these, you know, get clients that are on this local scale to do this.
could probably do it more especially if you go for that higher echelon that's why i said like cocktail bars or like listening bars and you know fine dining so these places that are traditionally like they have a higher like income uh earner that would go to those locations if you can show them that like hey i can regularly get in front of these people and give suggestions of where to go
There's also probably a media play here too, where it's like, okay, you make all of these pages that are scattered all over the US and they're for all, you know, each of these locations and you basically like go and you make these videos for all of those places. And then I think that there's something like this feels like people haven't figured it out yet.
And it's such, it's a massive arbitrage for companies. Like you're, you're watching these local businesses that are these, you
experiential businesses go viral on these these apps and the thing that happens is when one viral moment happens here and this is like how you could probably sell the company you get this knock-on effect that happens where all of these other creators they start to include you in that because they saw that that video went viral where you went viral in and so it creates this like you know larger flywheel that spins rather than just the search volume that happens from that thing but again if you can rank for you know
best pizzeria, uptown Denver or whatever, right? Like you're probably going to create inbound that happens from that, especially from that younger generation if you're trying to get in front of them. And this is the only way that you're going to be able to get in front of them. Like all searches are going to go towards this. This is where it's starting.
This is where discovery is starting from a person's marketing journey now.
Yeah, I think the move is to create a set of accounts per city. So you do like cool spots, Denver. I also think that's step one. Step two then is,
probably a mix of using other people who've gone viral in that city and being like, I'll give you a hundred bucks if you review this other place and getting them to cross promote on their, their personal patient, you know, and the, the, the, your new page. And you'd be surprised like a lot of these people don't have that many followers and like a hundred, 200 bucks is like, Oh wow, that's amazing.
You're going to send me this cocktail bar and you're going to promote, promote me on that page is amazing. And then you just build up a bunch of these accounts that are essentially like Yelp for these different cities. And then once you have that, then you probably, you know, you probably, everything goes back to email. Then you probably figure out a way, how can I get these people?
Build this email list. It's a top of funnel.
Yeah. Probably not email because it's Gen Z. Probably text. Have you heard of Laylo yet? No. Tell me about it.
Okay. Startup. I think they're out of LA. I met the founder through Draftforce, actually. I was helping them with their SEO strategy. Basically, they're called a drop CRM. So it's like email list, SMS, and Instagram. And all three of those things you can like promote something through at the same time.
So it's going it's this is becoming like the standard in the music industry space right now is like this is the tool that you use if you want to basically like do good marketing. And I think that you could probably use something like this. So it's like you could even just grow that IG account and like TikTok will come to this as time goes on, like all of them will come to this as time goes on.
The reason that you can't do it with TikTok right now is like something to do with like bulk messaging. Instagram has a different privacy policy or different policies where if the person messages you first, you can respond back to them at scale. So how Lalo functions is basically you put on your story or a post, like reply with XY, exactly. DM me with XYZ keyword.
And then there's an auto like response back that occurs for that. But I think it's probably something like that that you could do. And I'm just imagining like all. So to think about the actual tactical components of this, you would make these videos that are like top five spots for X, Y, Z, whatever these keywords are that are related that, you know, would be high value.
You make these like I mean, it's just coming back to like BuzzFeed listicles. I think what you said is really interesting, though, because like this will replace Yelp. like nobody trusts Yelp and nobody trusts Google Maps. I mean, I go to like Reddit right now to like go find the top places. Like this actually is probably how I do it.
I'd go and I would go, I would look at Reddit, like top Mexican places and XYZ place. And then I'd be like, here's the top Mexican places and XYZ place that you've never heard of before. Rattle them off. And then that account would grow on it. You do that on Instagram reels, do that daily. And then you would go and layer on paid ad spend on top of that. So you can do paid ads.
I think I talked about this last episode, but just for the people that didn't hear it before, what you do is you basically do Instagram only ads with a call to action in the description to follow XYZ account for more content like this. So when it's our Instagram only ad, that ad is technically a hyperlink.
So when it shows up as the ad to the person, they can actually click into that, which takes them to the profile. And then you can build basically a follow funnel that happens through that whole process. So what we've seen before is like, we've gotten like 30 to 50 cent followers for that. But every person that touches that profile, you can put them into a remarketing audience.
And that remarketing audience can then, you can basically show that content to them over and over again. So it builds a brand within that space, right? But you could do that for every one of these places in the US. And then that would grow the actual channel. Use something like a Lalo. And then like you go to a company and you're like, yo, I've got an Instagram of 20,000 or whatever.
Like, do you want to do a promotion? It costs X. You give me some type of thing. And then you just lay out how it function. Lalo handles the whole thing. And then you're basically, you just turn into like a marketing, like, like, you know, as a service for these, for these brands. And then I would probably put them on like some type of subscription.
Like, how do you get a payout where it's like, you know, you're, it's a, it's a contract where it's quarterly or by quarter, you know, or, or, you know, two quarters or whatever that ends up being. And then you promise X, Y, Z amount of like a post a week every Thursday, you know, or whatever date that they're trying to be more like get more foot traffic.
You have you have something that goes out each of those days to get more people in the door.
Give me one last idea. I know I know we're pushing on time. I need it.
I know I got you this. What I just said actually like goes right into this next one. So I do a little bit of work in the. music industry out of Nashville specifically. Uh, so I, my friend, his name is Colby Acuff. Um, we grew up together. We're honestly just like drinking buddies, like specifically him and my brother.
And then I got involved, but I would go to the like bar at 7am and they would have been there all night just doing pull tabs, like gambling. People don't know what pull tabs are. It's literally like you buy like a whole raft of pull tabs and you just sit there and pull them. And like every, like, I think it's like every 20 you win. And so it's just kind of this like dopamine hit. Yeah.
But anyways, so he was going to go into like financial brokering or something, something in real estate or I don't even know. And he called me up one day and he's like, yo, I think I'm going to do this music thing. I'm like, all right, well, like this is how I do it if I was an issue. So we dropped an album and we started to look at the data together.
And I wasn't really involved for the first year, but it started to look really similar to like an internet business. Like all the economics were like that when it came to streams. And so I had this epiphany. I'm like, yo, I think we could grow this just like we grew grow any other digital product.
Like it's just functions that the biology of this thing is it function functions like a digital product. And so what we did is that exact thing I just talked about with the Instagram ads that grow the profile. And then I, what I would do is I'd have him go and I would like, we'd go to a studio and he would play every one of the songs off the album.
So we drop an album and then every like couple, every 30 days I'd get him in a studio and he would record live sessions of him playing the song. We take those, we chop them up into social, like schedule them out, you know, post or two posts a days across every channel. And then we'd run these ads on top of it to grow the account.
But what we started to see is that we could influence the amount of streams by growing the social account and by doing that exact process that I just talked about with growing those Instagram accounts. So what this turned into and once like as we got to this, the unit economics of this thing is like we put a dollar in and three dollars would come out.
But the crazy part about this is that once you get a fan and music, they don't churn. they come back to that back catalog over and over until the day that they die, right? So that catalog has an intrinsic value that lives on indefinitely, even past your own existence.
So from a business standpoint, I mean, this is why you look at Universal Music Group or Sony, like they're absolutely powerhouses of companies. It's because this media is built once, but it lives on basically for forever. which is really different than in comparisons like books. Like it's fewer books that last.
Music is kind of this thing that bridges generations, especially since it gets passed on from generation to generation.
So anyways, with all that- Music is like real estate in that sense.
Exactly. Exactly. It totally is. It totally is. So basically our strategy was like, let's get you as big as we can get you on streaming. And then we're going to wait till a label approaches you because there's this threshold right around 300,000 that labels will approach you. So 300,000 monthly listeners on Spotify a month.
And labels start to look at you because you're at a dollar amount where they realize that they can make money off of you, especially if they layer over like ad dollars and all of these other resources that they have available to them. So a label approached us. We then got him into a bidding war.
We flew out to Nashville and we just basically, you know, dog and pony showed him around to every label. He ended up signing with Sony Nashville. But I think that this same thing could be done at scale. And you go and you find these artists that, I mean, and there's millions of these musicians, right? Like they make great music, but they have no idea how to grow themselves.
And you go and you buy a percentage of their back catalog. So 20% as an example, right? And a lot of them are self-published. They use a service called DistroKid or CD Baby, which now some other parent company bought them. But basically, the cost to get these albums out the door is like five grand. A lot of the times, they're just doing it in their friend's basement.
But what you can see is that you can put a dollar into this thing. And hypothetically, you can make money off of that. for indefinitely into the future. So what this turns into is the exit strategy here.
And what I again found super interesting about this whole industry is that it functions a lot like software where you basically, if you own that percentage, the label wants to buy that back catalog. So they'll buy you out for that percentage value. And so you could have these mini exits, you could have these exits basically of all these people.
So if you got them over that threshold, over that tipping point, and like how I'd probably do this if I was going about it was like, I'd go and I'd find 10 musicians. I do this deal, this relationship with them. And then you figure out some type of structure where you're basically doing like a capital injection.
This is probably going to be capital intensive on the beginning part, but I'm talking like capital intensive as, oh, it's a grand a month in ad spend, right? Like, but for them, that's a huge amount of money, right? Yeah. So especially if they're like, you know, young and they're figuring they're just figuring out this music industry, please. So grow these people up.
And then once you get in one of these relationships with these labels or these management companies, you just basically are bringing them the cream of the crop that you just grew. So of these 10, probably two will hit. And you're like, yo, label, like I've got two that here's their growth metrics. You go sell them and you just turn this into this pipeline of a way to build.
So traditionally they'd call it like artist, what is it? Artist development, A&D. Yeah, yeah. And so this is this new way that you could do this, but it's fundable by the economics of the company. So the stream revenues could go back into the growth of the company. You basically have to create this catalyst event in the beginning.
And again, you probably have to put, I'm guessing like 10K aside over a 12 month period to get like one of these people off the ground. But of those two people that hit, it's going to turn into such like it's a venture portfolio at that point. It's the same. It functions the same. But the difference is that the company lifetime, like if you look at the S&P, it turns over every 20 years, right?
In contrast, this doesn't turn over. It lives on into the future for forever. And all of these people are accessible. Like you can DM all of these people tomorrow and be like, yo, we do stream growth. This is how we function. Like it functions. Can we jump on a call to see if this is interesting for you? We basically grow your streams. We take a percentage of revenues.
And then if we can get it big enough, we'll go and we introduce you to these companies that are these people that we know within the industry. And that's this whole like business model that is like something I really want to do as well. But again, it's like a time thing. So this is what it always comes down to.
You know, my favorite, part of you is. It's when you're 80% through a really good startup idea and you just know inherently that this is a good startup idea that you just get so... I just know it's going to work. You know it's going to work but you're like... It's so frustrating.
It's so frustrating. And I'm like, again, I wake up. I wish I could just focus on zero to one-ing things. That's actually what I'm best at. I was just talking to this company I'm helping out some stuff with. And for them, I am worthless after a series B. As soon as you get HR, I am your worst nightmare as an employee, as being involved in the company. Because
I just, I don't know how to function in those environments. Like what I'm really good at is like, okay, what are all these pieces and how do you synthesize them together? And I think that that's the thing. Like if I, like my dream long-term is like, can I just focus on that? It was interesting.
I was just doing this podcast and they're talking about like investing and how actually that's like, when you look at value investing, that's actually what it is at its core is like, you're spending all of your time analyzing all of this, like you know, these components of a, of a, of an organization or a company in a market. And then you synthesize that, that together.
And like, for me, it was like, I look at investing. I was just like the most boring thing that exists. Right. Like, it's just not interesting to me whatsoever. But after hearing that, I'm like, Oh, maybe this actually is the same part of like that entrepreneurial, you know, or I don't even call it like it's just business person brain. I hate the word entrepreneur. Cause it's just so like,
ridiculous. Like there's, there's, there's such a spectrum of this, you know, like it's like, uh, but like I'm talking like repeat foundership, like that's the level that I'm talking about with this. But they, I think that it'll be like, that's the part of this. That's the most fun. Right.
And like, that's why this, I, again, this podcast is, you're going to go, you're going to be a top, you're going to be a top 10 entrepreneurship podcast by the end of the year, because you're having these conversations and And they're going to turn into the viral moments. I mean, I'm looking at your YouTube channel on a daily basis and how quickly it's growing.
Like you're probably going to start, like your monthly compound growth is probably going to be at 20% a month, which means you're going to double every three and a half months, right? So you're going to be at 100K subs by end of year easily based off of your current growth metrics. But we know that there's going to be a compounding, or sorry, there's going to be like a,
like it's a compound growth effect right so the curve is going to go more vertical over time like that that that slope is going to increase so anyway by the way if you're if you haven't subscribed to this youtube channel what are you doing like what are you doing baby go do that and subscribe subscribe to his newsletter and if you do that enough he'll maybe have me back Yeah, exactly.
This will just be a monthly call. Greg, here's everything I've seen on Braindump all in this shit. Another one that we could get into is I think there's a newsletter consolidation opportunity right now. Beehive made it so easy to make newsletters that it flooded the market. And content is an absolute grind. Most people are not built for it. They're not built that way.
And so all of these companies right now could go and be acquired and you could roll them up, all of those subscribers into a single thing. I think you could absolutely... crush it and build easily a two to 10 million subscriber newsletter in this AI tech space based off of what we're seeing. And I'm talking, I have a friend that's doing this right now.
If I said the AI newsletter name, a lot of you would know what it is. It's one of the biggest ones. And for them, he's like, I'm getting subs at a cost that I could never get previously. Like in the entire existence of this and we've, you know, they've grown exceptionally well. But just thinking about that opportunity of like this roll up and you see it in all markets, right?
Like you have all these startups that come in and then you have economic turmoil and you have roll ups that occur in consolidation. And it's the same thing that's happening here. Those market forces are at work. And there's this, again, there's a huge opportunity to be able to meet it.
And then layering over the top of that, you layer over all of these like YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, long form YouTube content. Like why is Morning Brew and all of these places building all of these social channels now? Well, they realize, hey, this is great free top of funnel because for you page content just shows it to random people and we can get all these subs from it.
So it's the same thing. That is the play that you could do and then go and build these other companies, whether it's service businesses or any of the softwares that we're talking about on top of that. And you can zero to one these companies overnight without having to raise capital, without having to do any of this.
And this is really why I think that every company is turning into a media company is because it's economically more viable to do that than to do it in traditional ways.
If you were... If you're going to acquire one of these AI newsletters, how do you value some of these businesses? Let's say they have 100,000 subs. What do you pay per sub?
Great question. I would look, you know, it depends on if you're established or not. For like an established company, you can probably look at your CPM or cost per click or whatever that structure is that you're basically selling advertising for currently. And then look at, okay, if I get these more, you know, these subs on, what's the cost per sub to add them to my list?
And then what's the payback period of acquiring those new people? Like how much more can I charge basically by getting them added to that list? The thing with this is that there's this tipping point that happens when you get a list to, you know, 1 million, 2 million, like these larger sizes where there's just so few lists. And this is actually how the podcast industry works, right?
Like there's so few podcasts that produce all of the downloads that naturally what occurs is that you have all, like basically all podcasts when they get to a size get approached by some type of media network for some type of relationship. like 80% of all downloads come from, you know, 5% of the shows or something absolutely ridiculous. Right.
And so it basically like it has to, they have to be rolled up into this, like, and that's how most companies, like if you look at like a PNG, right? Like that's how they want to buy media.
They want to go to a single like media buyer or whatever and say, Hey, you know, we're trying to do X and then they go and they find whatever, we'll say 200 shows that they buy ads across that are, you know, within their, their target psychographic or demographic. But,
To put like a number on it, like if you could get email subs for under a dollar a piece, like so say it's a 20,000 person newsletter and like it's an active newsletter, like we'll say it's like open rates are averaging, we'll say 50 plus percent. And, you know, CTRs are in the range of, let's say, you know, 7% or 10%. like if you get that 15 grand, like I think that's a good buy, right?
Like that's coming in at what, 75 cents an email. And that to me is something that like would be incredibly hard to create if you're trying to do traditional acquisition strategies, whether that's, you know, paid ads or like cross promotion of newsletters, et cetera. So I think that that is like, to me, the challenge and the thing that I don't know and the thing that like my friend doesn't know is,
How are they going to roll this up into a single newsletter? Because long-term, you don't want to write multiple newsletters, right? You want to write a single newsletter because it's just like build once. It's an operations cost, right? That game is you're beating up costs, right? It's like... So I think that it's really how cheaply can you make it?
And then like, how good are you at doing sales at scale? So I ended up meeting him because he's like insane at cold email, like at scale. Right. Because they are constantly selling companies to like basically buy ad space on the newsletter. And cold email is like one of the most effective ways to do that. Right. But yeah, it was a long-winded answer.
But I think if you get them under a dollar, that would probably, to me, make sense just based off of what I've seen within the market.
Here's my take. And it's also a Warren Buffett take, which is if you're going to do an acquisition, it's all about a mispriced asset and a great brand. So I think the mistake that a lot of these newsletters are making is they're monetizing via ads. So to them, a subscriber is worth 75 cents or a dollar.
Whereas someone like us, so we actually have an agency called LCA that literally builds the biggest AI products out there. So we'll work with a Dropbox and be like, hey, let's go build an AI first version of Dropbox or the Googles of the world, that sort of thing. So a client to us is worth anywhere between one and two million bucks, something like that.
Now, if you look at a 100,000 person newsletter, if it's high quality, are there the chief product officers and the VP products of some of these large tech companies? Then it becomes a literal no-brainer. You can actually pay up to $5 or $10, who knows? So that's how you have to think about it. So the way to think about it, I think, is start with, a business that produces cash and is profitable.
And that's also the HubSpot model too, right? HubSpot created the CRM, high margins, and then they started acquiring media after they figured out that, okay, we've got this great margin business, let's go spend $20 million on the hustle.
Totally. Totally. I think that this is the bigger trend that's happening in all business. Do you know Aero Electronics? I think we talked about them last time. $6 billion market cap. They've basically been rolling up like crazy. electronic components at magazines and blogs and like, you know, any like industry publications for the last 60 years. That's their whole strategy, right?
They're just a content machine and they're selling a commodity products. That's the only way that they can do this. And I think that this is going to become the standard. Like this is how I think about owned media. Right. It's like it's this long term investment that can never be taken away from you.
And like as this thing grows and if it lives on long enough, like the cost, the upfront cost of starting that thing approaches zero over time. Right. So it's like an infinitely decreasing curve because you're just like amortizing it over like as many as long as the existence of the company happens. I think the other piece too that people don't realize is that it's marketing leverage.
Like why does a HubSpot or any of these other companies like, you know, and this is something that I learned when I was at Rupa Health.
Like we saw that we grew this podcast that became like known within the industry and companies that previously would not even take a call with us were inbounding being like, yo, can we sponsor the podcast, which allows for us to create relationships with them and then cross sell them into like our services and get in deeper business relationships with them.
And that is something that's incredibly valuable that people don't talk about is that you can create leverage, especially as small companies. And this is why I tell every startup what you should do tomorrow is you basically scrape every person in your target audience. You cold email every one of them. You cold DM every one of them.
You import them into Facebook ads, Google ads, LinkedIn ads, and run display ads to them across all those places. You then take that email or anybody that signs up, you put them into an email nurture and then you go and you create a podcast that's about that specific target ICP and like name it something that's like as specific and direct to them as possible.
So like literally their job title podcast. And then you build a newsletter that promotes that show. And I've like literally seen this and done this with companies where it's like in 12 months, we can get them from like, nobody knows who they are to they're now at a conference and the founder is recognized by somebody, right? And like, that is what the power is with these things.
But the bigger kicker is then suddenly, okay, I want to go negotiate with a larger company in this space. And somebody who I have no business talking to is now coming to me basically with their hands out being like, yo, I want to get this from you. Like I, and they don't know how to do this. They do not know how to build digital media.
So if you can figure out how to flex that muscle, like you're going to be so far ahead of everybody else that you're competing against over the next five to 10 years.
It's a good place to end. I mean, I can never end this, but I can, we can talk for hours, but we're not going to, we'll have to do a part three at some point. I love it, man. Having back whenever it's a good break in my day. I love it. Also, halfway through a double gin and tonic, so life is good. I'd love to see you fully done that gin and tonic and see what you spew out, actually.
Probably amazing stuff. I like the way your brain works. It's good. Thanks for having me, Greg. I always appreciate it. Cody Schneider XX on Twitter. and SwellAI.com. I'm going to link both in the show notes so people can easily get there. Anything else you'd like to say?
No, that's it. Only other thing, I'm just starting to roll out this Done For You service for podcasts, actually. That's like we grow newsletters for podcasts. If that's interesting to you, let me know. It doesn't matter to the industry or the category. We're focusing on B2B mainly to begin with, but we can grow newsletters by about 4,000 to 5,000 subscribers per month.
And if they're bigger newsletters, we can grow them by about 30% to 35% per month. So reach out if that's interesting.
I mean, I'm interested, bro. I'm interested.
Hit me up. I will. All right. Take care. All right. Cheers, brother.