5 Killer Businesses On Easy Mode In 2026

All right, I'm going to say one sentence and then you could decide if this episode is for you. If you're the type of person who's got the entrepreneurial itch, you want to do something. You want to start a new business. You want to get that extra 5, 10, $15,000 of income coming in every month, but you don't know which idea to do, which idea to start with. Maybe you don't even have great ideas. This is the episode for that person. We brought on Chris. He's sort of the side hustle king. He loves to find simple, no money upfront, easy businesses that can pull in cash quickly and then can grow from there. And so Chris came on. and he's got about five ideas for us. I think you will love this episode with Chris. All right, we got Chris Corner here. You're back because you have uh absolute pipeline, an absolute full stack of business ideas at all times. Like you know what's the um open carry? He's open carry with business ideas. If people haven't seen it, you got a great uh Instagram channel and YouTube channel podcast as well where you talk about um different business ideas. And so that's what I want to do today. Dude, I I have so many It's not Friday, but I feel like we need to call this no filler Friday cuz there's no filler today. All stuff, no fluff. All right. I have a friend who I want to ask you this question on his behalf. I have a friend who is a real estate agent and he does well. He makes I think yeah, let's call it $250 $300,000 a year. been doing that for 10 years, but he's bored and he wants a little more scale. He wants a little more he doesn't feel a sense of progress. You know, people always want a sense of progress. And so he feels like um you know, it's pretty hard to scale what he's doing there. He's always poking around at you know, should I buy this vending machine? Should I do this side hustle, pressure washing, whatever it is, where does your head go as like, look, if I was trying to help you get off the real estate path and maybe have have a more entrepreneurial path, what do you what do you sell? What do you tell them? I would tell them to start reselling um reselling like uh Costco liquidation items or government liquidation items. So you spend 1 200 bucks, you get what's called a resale certificate, which tells the government, I don't need to pay sales taxes on this cuz I'm passing it on. Uh a lot of these websites require that number from you in order to sell you liquidation items. There's a website called Govde Deals. There's a website called Btock. On BTO, you buy anything that people return to Costco. I've done this myself. Another business I've done, I bought $7,000 worth of washers and dryers um for $250 each on average, and I'm selling them on Facebook Marketplace for 750 to 900 each. It's an amazing business cuz you don't need a warehouse. You don't need a bunch of space, just a garage, and it's all sold on Facebook Marketplace. I'm on betock right now and I see that I can buy two pallets of men's gray champion sweatpants joggers for $48,000 in New Jersey. Sounds great. I'm going to get 1,200 units. What's the price? So 48,000 I get 1,200 units. 40 bucks. That's not even a deal. What's going on? Oh, wait. Oh, no. That's the retail value. Yeah. Okay, that makes sense. I can buy this for seven grand. So I can buy it for five bucks a pop. Um, and it's saying that the the standard retail value of this would be 40 bucks a pop. And so you're saying you're going to go buy you probably wouldn't buy sweatpants, my guess, but uh what what would you be looking for product category wise? I like large appliances and outdoor furniture. I think those are both great, especially this time of year. Not electronics because there's a lot of variables. Back to binary outcomes. There's a lot of things that can break. There's a lot of testing involved. I don't really like clothing personally, but this is a great business because you don't need to find customers. You just list them on Facebook Marketplace. All your customers are there. You have to buy, right? And you have to fulfill. But the harder part is finding customers. And you don't have to do that here. So, I'm looking at uh I get 58 used refrigerators. I'm buying them for $34 a unit. $34 a unit for a refrigerator. Telling you what's going on here. I might do this. I might actually go do this just on sheer principle. A $34 fridge. Uh I have to find 58 of them though. Um and then you know you go to Facebook Marketplace and you go look at what the fridges are selling for. You look at the volume and you look at how much the price point is. So you're trying to find and you do that before you buy them. Of course before I buy I'm going to go check out and you're looking for probably two signals. One is a price signal. So what is the going rate for these things? And then how do you get a sense of is this going to move? Uh you watch it for a week and you see if they move. You message the seller. you what what do you do? You literally list it before you even bid on it. And then you just go to people just to just to understand. Yeah. And then if they're like, "All right, I'm ready to come get it." You're like, "Actually, I haven't bought it yet." You know, which is fine. You're being honest, but you're you're getting signals is you're getting signals from the market before you take any risk that there's enough demand for it at a specific price point. And it is amazing what people will buy on Facebook Marketplace. wife's sister is moving right now and they're listing like random here's a hat. Here's like an old hat. Like it's just a baseball cap and the guy drove 45 minutes to get a free cap. Uh you know, put the like here's one drawer. Not even the cap. Here's just a drawer. Go pay $7 for the drawer. It's unbelievable the amount of like liquidity in the Facebook marketplace. It's unreal. Well, and but the annoying thing is listing all this stuff. It's tedious. But right, I just saw this uh Tik Tok of a guy that used Claude Co-work. He just took pictures of all his stuff. He uploaded it to Claude. He said, "Here's my stuff. Research what it costs, list it, talked to people on my behalf. Here's my calendar availability. I don't care when as long as it's open. Have people come to my house and pick it up." And he did. He sold like he was moving. He needed to sell everything in his house. And Claude sold all of it for him. So like that even the tedious part is now fixable. That's kind of amazing actually. You could tell it to do the whole thing. You could say, "Hey, go look on betock, create fake listings, decide which one is going to be the most profitable for me, and then run the whole process." There's no reason that, you know, Claudebot couldn't do that. No, totally. Four pallets of denim uh onesies. We could get $3, $2 a year. Sounds like a deal. Um All right. This is a very addictive website. This is This is very fun. I got to get off Betock right now, otherwise I will uh lose my afternoon. Hey, real quick. If you like this episode of Chris and you want more, he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast and um he's giving it away for free. So, if you just go to the QR code that's on the screen or the link in the description below, you can get his database of ideas and these are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work. And this guy's done it before. He's built a a bunch of businesses that are successful. So, go ahead, take advantage of this resource. And now back to this episode. All right. So, reselling is where you tell them to start. And you'd say that's the right place to start because what you're optimizing for low risk because that's a lot of work. Yeah. Uh I don't know if I kind of implied I was like, "My friend's kind of looking for a magic bullet. Like just one thing I do that's going to work really well." Um you know, if I told him, "Hey, get out there and hustle." He's like, "Well, I know that. I've been I've been trying to avoid that part." Um what's what's a business that's like um more of a business and less of a garage selling side hustle? probably implementing AI into small businesses. Like we talked about this last time. I we might have talked about it the first time and we'll be talking about it in years because I mean there's 800,000 management consultants in the United States. That's management, right? Almost a million people that are just management consultants. In 5 years, Sean, how many people will be AI consultants? Like to small, medium, large, any size business? Every single small business. Well, not even small business, large and small business is right now AI curious, AI hungry, and AI clueless at the same time. Those three things, if you're curious, and you they're certain that it can help. They don't really know how, they don't have the time, and they're, you know, they're not as tech forward as somebody who just eats and eats, breathes, and stuff that like that combination creates a ton of opportunity. But that's that's a still pretty broad picture. Mhm. What's a more um focused point of attack for something like that? You go to your chamber of commerce and offer to give a free tutorial on AI. Teach them what claimar prompting skills. Yeah. For free. Vibe coding. And then you've got your buddy in the back with a clipboard and you sign people up for AI audits. And so you use the the free seminar to get one foot in the door. You get the free audit to get your second foot in the door. And then by that point, you're an AI god to them. You're a genius. and you're the only AI genius that that business owner knows at that point it's take my money. Have you found a repeatable a repeatable use case where you're like okay maybe it's for one class of business like dentists or lawyers or uh restaurants or whatever or it's just a repeatable uh solution. So it's like oh pretty much every business needs this thing that AI can do for them right? You know when when the internet started every business kind of needed a website but it was just starting from scratch. Nobody had a website by definition at the beginning and over time everybody ended up getting a website. So you knew that like just making the website was like the killer app. It was like the killer service that everyone would need once and then you could sell it to them. You could maintain it for them and do whatever for them, you know, going forward. Okay. What's the equivalent of that today in today's world with AI? Voice agents pick up the phone, answer the phone for you. Yep. And then chat bots. Uh second, kind of a distant second. Voice agents are really good. The latency is not that bad at all anymore because the LLMs are smart enough to only be trained on your content, your data. So, it's not like anytime a customer says, "What are your operating hours?" It doesn't need to go like read the whole training manual, right? It just answers immediately. So, AI voice agents are like the best foot in the door for small businesses right now. That's cool. I like that. It would be very interesting to hear from people who have done this. uh if you if you've done this reach out because everybody's kind of talked about this idea of like help businesses implement I think Mark Cuban is like hey if you're a kid you know if you want to be successful go help businesses implement I think it's like obvious however I haven't heard a ton of stories maybe this is just me not being kind of looking for it but I haven't heard a ton of stories of the specifics around this and I'm always curious more about the specifics than the general so for example um I saw this AI tool that was for med spas and they were like look Every med spa offers, you know, I'm a little out of my depth here, but every med spa is basically offering some sort of beauty service to somebody. So, somebody's going to come in, they look one way, they want to look another way, and they have to believe that the med spa will get them from A to B. That's all that's all a med spa has to do for them. And so, what people were trying to do is figure out how can you through whether it's a voice agent, a tool on your website, a quiz, and upload your photo, and I will show you the result of this product on your face, right? Like something like that. That's a pretty killer sales app for every med spa. And so going into med spa specifically and just being like, cool, here's what we're going to do. We're going to make it where right now 95% of your curious and interested customers don't develop enough confidence to go forward and we're going to build basically like a little sales tool for you that lives on your website that gives the customer the confidence that when they, you know, it opens up the webcam and it scans and then it says, "Hey, we think you're a good candidate for XYZ. Here's some photos of before and afters." Right? like whatever it is, some version of that. And if you can go get, you know, 500 to a,000 med spas, because they all have the same need, right? Like they're not, this is a universal need for all 10,000 of them. And you go get 500 or a thousand, let's just use a,000 a,000 med spas that are going to be paying you, you know, 50 hundred bucks a month. So now you're doing 50,000 a month off of, you know, finding one specific pain point for one specific type of business where off-the-shelf AI can actually solve their problem. They're just not aware of it and don't know how to implement it. Yeah. So, I can think of two specific examples. One of them for medium-sized businesses and one for small businesses. The medium-sized business guy I interviewed on my podcast, the Kerner office last week. This dude was name dropped by Amjod, the the CEO founder of Replet on the Joe Rogan show. So, Amjad goes on Joe Rogan and he's like, "This guy John Cheney, he he started a business selling like custom vibecoded replet apps into medium-sized businesses for $15,000. 15 upfront and then like I think 1,500 uh per month or something like that for like one call a month. He did 2.5 million his first year, 60% net margins. This year, he's going to do 8 million uh with 50% net margins. All built on Replet, just vibe coding custom apps for medium-sized businesses. A custom app for a mediumsiz. What does that even mean? Yeah. So, let's say you're an HVAC business with, you know, 30 crews. He's going to build you you your own CRM. So, you're not paying like Service Titan or any of the others $4,000 a month. So, immediately you get to capture the savings and you get to have your own CRM just for you. So, it's not even like AI enabled. It's just a replacement CRM that's built exactly as you have always wanted it. Or like an accounting practice that builds you um a communication tool or something to send P&Ls and balance sheets to all of your customers in an automated way um every month. So that's like a higher ticket medium business, medium-siz business. And then another guy, he does this for barber shops. He charges 2500 bucks up front and then 250 a month. That's kind of like a good ratio. 10% of whatever you charge up front, you charge per month. And his pitch to the barber shops are like, "Hey, you're cutting hair all day, but people need to make appointments. So, I'm just going to make you an AI voice agent that will answer the phone as you for you." If they ask if you're an agent, an AI agent, it will tell them, but it won't be upfront and say upfront, you know, that I'm an agent, right? So, it will say, "All right, what time?" It's just synced with your calendar and it books slots for you. So, you will make more money and never talk on the phone again. That's the pitch. Make more money. Never talk on the phone again. Don't lose trust with your customers because that's like the big push back from business owners is I don't want a robot answering my phone. And it it's like dude, your customers need their problem solved. Whether it's a robot or you or a text, they need their hair cut. So yeah, net of net, they would prefer to talk to you, but they also just need a haircut and so they don't mind. So he just copies and pastes the same voice agent over and over cuz they're all barber shops. He just swaps out the name and the operating hours and makes a calendar connection. He's good to go. I like that. I like the barber. I like the Barber voice agent. The niche. Why not? Were there any other fun ideas that you had on this list that you wanted to talk about? What's the snail mail club? Yeah. So, that is that's kind of blowing up. That snail mail subscription businesses are what like physical box subscription businesses were 5 to 10 years ago. It's literally just a letter with a stamp and you can send your own photography, your own poetry, letters. My wife started one where she sends recipes. It's it's like a cookbook club and she sends recipes to women and they cook it and every month has a theme, Greece, Italy or whatever. These are exploding right now mostly driven by organic uh Tik Tok videos. So sorry, sorry. Explain. So, the your title of this video is she makes $1,000 a day sending letters. Who who who is making and how is she making $1,000? Her name's Hannah. She owns the Tiny Post and she writes like a a letter, like a heartfelt letter about her, her life, whatever she finds important. And then she puts stickers in there and like handmade artwork, nothing AI generated, like it's all real. It's all physical and that's an important part. and she just like is documenting her life and sending things that are important to her to I think like 6 to 7,000 women every single month and they love it and her churn is like 2% beautiful pink envelopes nailed it. Um and she's just writing about her life and people are paying to receive these letters. Yes. 10 bucks a month, 70% gross margins, 30% net. And she went from zero to 60k MR in seven months through like six Tik Tok videos, all organic, no paid ad spend. What is happening? What? 10 bucks a month? That's the price of Netflix and you're getting just one letter from Hannah. What? Why are people doing this? What is going on? We just We're sick of emails. Like, we want like more mail. Who wants more mail? We want mail. We want to go to the mailbox and open a surprise. We don't want junk mail. This is for us and it's special and it's physical and real and that's all the rage right now. This is unbelievable. Sorry, I'm just looking through her stuff. This is uh unreal. Wow. The US Postal Service commented on her video saying, "Great video. Mind if we repost and use it?" That's awesome. That's crazy. Okay, so how did she get the people to do it? She had a big following or no? No, she didn't. She just posted Tik Tok videos about what she was doing. Like her most viral video was a hidden camera in the kitchen as she explained to her husband what this business was that she was starting. So he was like not getting it. He's like an NBA finance guy. And he's like, "You want to send letters?" And like that video got 2 million views and brought her like her first 1500 customers all organic. Wow. Uh okay. This is pretty crazy. So you said people are doing this. This is like a trend now. It is, dude. I So, my wife and I and a friend, we put on a nonprofit farmers market for kids just last Saturday, and I was out there like taking videos of these kids' businesses, and one of the seven-year-old girls and her four-year-old sister had their own snail mail subscription business, and there was a QR code to a Shopify site, and they like draw pictures by hand and send them out for 10 bucks a month. Like, it's incredible. Wow. You know, I've always wanted something like this for kids. Like, you know, kids have kids create so much art, right? And like it'd be cool if someone like cared about their art or like, you know, they got something back. And so I I I was wondering like is there some sort of pen pal mechanism that the parent would pay so that the kids could kind of like stuff the envelope with their art that they made that week or that month, send it out and then they receive some sort of like either message back, video back or letter back or something back where it's like, you know, oh my god, I loved it. You know, whatever something from someone somewhere, whether it's kids sending to kids or kids sending to like old people. I don't I didn't know what the mechanism was, but I feel like there should be something like this for kids art cuz kids generate so much art and their excitement when someone's excited about their art is like so tangible, so heartwarming that as a parent, I would gladly pay 10 bucks a month for my kids to feel like they had their little like their version of their Etsy store for their own art. You know what I mean? Yeah. No, I love that. That should be a thing. There's something that's kind of similar where you can mail in all of your kids's artwork to a woman and she will like basically lay it all out on a canvas and make it like a a super large mural of your kids artwork that's permanent and then she'll send the whole canvas back to you. That's a cool idea. I like that. Um that's another type of thing where it's like these heartwarming visual businesses that just could pop on Tik Tok and you just keep, you know, Tik Tok becomes your customer acquisition funnel for for things like that. So um you know you've given a bunch of small stuff uh and small I mean in a like in a positive way which is like quick easy to start accessible affordable u doesn't take a ton um I'm curious do you have any ideas that are on the other side of the spectrum maybe a little more complicated or a little harder to start but wow the opportunity is is large from from your perspective. Yeah. So did I ever tell you about the time where I I got a job at Amazon a few years ago? No, he did not as a pickp pack shipper to spy on them. Okay. So, you go to the warehouse. Yep. So, I owned at the time a third party logistics business and I wanted to learn how Amazon did it. And so, I went and got a job. I stood in line, you know, 15 bucks an hour. They trained me how to drive a forklift and I loved it. I ate it up. I like in the trainings everyone else was like half asleep and I'm like, "Okay, what what about this?" And like my manager was like, "Oh, you're going to be a manager here. your management material. And the whole time I'm like, dude, I'm like a a secret spy. But it it I walked away with an idea that I think could be a billion dollar idea, and that's providing food to the 3 or 4 million Amazon. It doesn't have to be Amazon, but Amazon warehouse workers. There are no food options. These warehouses and distribution centers are usually kind of out in the middle of nowhere. There might be like a a you know, a McDonald's or something. They have like a a cafeteria with vending machines, but it's all garbage food. And I thought like, man, if I were to start like partner with a catering business and put a flyer with a QR code on every car during every shift and just have them cuz they all have like the same lunch break, right? Basically, they could pre-order food the day before and you could just deliver it all at once. Hey, here's all the food for everyone. 10 bucks a pop. There's thousands of employees per warehouse. This is something that would take some logistics. It would take some funding, but someone's going to win here. I I It's not like one that I'm passionate about that I'm about to do, but it's one that I think someone will do. Yeah. That's interesting. So, like where's um what's an example? Where is like uh the Amazon warehouse? Where's the one that you went to? Was it out? Was it like this? Did you see this problem when you were there? Yeah. Yeah, that's how I got it. It was in like like Irving or something. Irving, Texas. But there's like 32 Amazon warehouses in Dallas Fort Worth alone. Like and they're they're as big as like three to six Costco each. So there's no shortage of demand. And it could be manufacturing. It could be other types of warehouses. Yeah. I wonder like if you could just even brand it as like the whatever $8 lunch club or some like that, right? And it's basically cool. You sign up for this and you're going to get an $8 lunch every day of and you just tick the box. You know, what did you want today? Yeah, we have two options, three options each day. And um and you know, I I've actually seen a couple of companies that are doing really well with um so there's a lot of people trying to do robotic food production, but food production is really really hard, right? So like stores like Sweet Green and others are trying to build these custom machines to build their bowls, but every bowl, every salad at Sweet Green, there's like a there's like more combinations of what could be in that salad than Particles in the Universe type of deal, right? Because it's like every every ingredient can be mixed and matched. So it's very difficult to to arrange for this and then you have to constantly keep all the ingredients stocked inside the machines. It's like a pretty tricky thing to do. But there's a company that was providing these robots to the large uh companies that do like school lunches, prison lunches, corporate cafes, basic basically where or like the graband go options at uh grocery stores where there's going to be like five things in the in the little like refrigerator tray. you just grab and go and they're they're sealed with like a a thing for those. You're basically just scooping the same ingredient into 4,000 trays and that's the food prep. And so it's way it's like a way more solvable problem because the robot just literally needs to be able to scoop the same portion into the same thing 3,000 times in a row without getting tired. Well, that's actually what robots are good at. And so they've been doing pretty well with getting these robots into these um large batch meal prep kitchens. And so I wonder if you could basically do the same thing but for the the Amazon side, right? Like you use these warehouses as your as your end customer. And you're saying cool, I can basically because I'm doing, you know, 2,000 of the same meal, I can actually have a highly automated, you know, ghost kitchen here that's that's doing the work. Yeah, I I think you could still do both. I could see one Amazon warehouse using both options like the the warm meal, you know, delivered from somewhere else and then that as well. I would love to see someone just print a bunch of flyers, put one on each car with a QR code to a Stripe link and, you know, have a menu there and just see how many people pay and then, you know, if you don't start the business, just refund them all. But you could do that, you know, with a few hours and 30 bucks in paper. Like I'm just I I love experiments like that of like what would happen? Like how many people could could I convert with only one flyer? All right, I'm going to go let's go tote rentals. Sean, do you know what a tote rental is? Tote as in like a tote bag. Uh, kind of like a tote rental box. Plastic box. Oh, okay. It's like the moving boxes that are like the hard plastic square moving boxes that stack on top of each other. Got it. This is a Google trends of tote rental as a search term over the last 5 years. we are spiking. What What's uh what's the trend that I'm missing out on here? Okay, here's what we're talking about. So, ironically, everyone has these cardboard boxes from Amazon, but we all also don't have them at hand when we go to move move house to house. And so, tote rentals as a service is a thing. One tote um basically replaces 400 cardboard boxes over its lifetime. So, you've got an eco angle. Um, it's it's like an asset that you pay 20 bucks for and it just pays for itself over and over and over. You can start the business for a,000 bucks. You work your way into real estate agents and you can gift them like a tote rental gift card that they can gift to their clients when they sell a home or buy a home. So, it's like a good like moving in or moving out gift from a realtor to a to a homeowner. And it's it's different than like an edible arrangements or something generic. So homeowners rent these, you drop them off, they pack all their crap in it, then you pick them up later, and you basically pay off the thing in your third or fourth rental, and after that, it's pure profit, less any like labor or gas or or time. We Oh, man. The OG's will know this. Many years ago, we talked about a business that was doing this on the podcast. I'm going to get all this wrong now because it's been a long time, but I believe there was some story where it's like in New York, somebody had basically bought, you know, a couple thousand dollar worth of these boxes. They're renting them out. The boxes paid for themselves after 2 months and then basically became, you know, it's the, you know, small version of a rental property, right? You're renting out equipment. But the beautiful thing about these is high need. People don't want to own them. There's like no desire to really own these. Uh people need them in the moment to move. You can have them be super branded and so um it's it can become like a walking billboard or you could literally even sell the ad space on them. And then they're equipment that even though they get kind of battered and bruised, it's sort of expected. So you don't need mint condition boxes in order to make this thing work. Uh but I'm saying boxes, but you said you called these totes tote rentals. So do you know somebody who's doing this? Like what's the what's the story here? I do. I know a guy in uh Fort Wayne, Indiana of all places. There's like a 100,000 people there. And he started going through real estate agents. He bought these for himself for a move. And he I think what he did was he brought lunch to like a Keller Williams office or something and said, "Hey, these are tote rentals. They're growing like crazy. Your clients want them. We're going to give you some for free." Totes on alone's dominating Google. It's got the first five listings. But that's him. But then there is there is a you know smarterm movestotren rentals.com that's at the bottom of the page so I don't know we'll see. Yeah he's totes on loan. I just looked it up. Okay cool. So totes on loan. He's crushing it. Let's give him a sh. Yes. His name is David Stilson. All right. So David is out here 2024 and you said he went to the real estate office. He's using them for distribution initially and uh Okay. So you get 30 boxes for 100 bucks to help with your move. Yeah. So that's what he does. He sells like packages based on the number of totes that they that they get. And he's doing a few few grand a month. So a few grand a month. And this is Do you think this is Hey, this this is the type of business that's great just side income but going all in on it. Maybe the juicer isn't worth the squeeze. Or you think, no, no, no, it's just a matter of time till that's 15K, 20K a month. Yeah, I think it's it's one of those businesses that's great as either or. It's a perfect side hustle because you can keep your full-time job. It's only a few hours a week. What I love about it compared to other like rental businesses like a bounce house rental businesses with that those things are freaking heavy. You got to roll it up. You got to lug it out there. You have to set up the bounce house. You often have to leave someone there to babysit to make sure kids don't break a leg. Uh and it's just a pain. But these you just drop it off on the driveway and you come back and get it. Um so very very low time investment. Okay. Uh all right. To rentals. And why is this exploding on Google Trends right now? Why why would this be going up? Is it uh you know the moving's not going up? It's just the rental aspect or why why do you think it's spiking right now? You know, it's like with any of these business ideas, they just have their moment. Like 5 10 years ago, it was pressure washing, like roof cleaning, stuff like that. It's just having its moment. And I think it's an a matter of education. Like people, most people would prefer to use this than to have like missized or misshapen cardboard boxes that collapse. they've got to go like scring behind a grocery store or beg their friends in a Facebook group or like save their Amazon boxes. Like it's just a better experience when you consider everything. Oh, dude. If you are using cardboard boxes and you're moving and that just the amount of setup of each box, taping of each box, labeling, it's it's ridiculous. You're wasting half your time there. All right, I like it. Uh, what else you got? What's next? All right, so let's go let's go wall printer. What do you know about wall printers, Sean? wall printer as in you got to give me a few more words. All right. So, picture like a 3D printer except it's on rollers and you bring it inside a retail store and it prints like images on a wall like a large mural or something like that. All you do is upload a JPEG. I'm watching it now. So you're you're it's literally like a laser printer, but it's instead of printing on a piece of paper, it's it can go like a full full wall of a building and it's printing like this video you have here is like a um it's like a corporate office where it's printing a timeline history of the of the company on a wall. Like you would walk into the office and see that. Okay. So I see this um tell me more. So any business could use one of these. Let's say it's a boring corporate office. They want to spice it up a little bit. Let's say it's a restaurant, like what restaurant wouldn't want an inside or an outside mural? Like any business, you name it, any business. And like the tote rentals, this is kind of an educational thing. They didn't know it was possible or they were paying some local artist like three grand to paint this cuz it took them like a month, right? This replaces the local artist. Sorry, local artist, not sorry. But a 5 foot8 wall took your cost if you own the printer, which you can get them for between 4,000 and 16,000. You can finance them for like 50 to 150 bucks a month. A 5 foot a 5 by 8 ft wall cost you $8 in ink and you can sell for that for about $800. So literal 99% gross margin. You don't need a retail space. You don't need a warehouse. You can keep it in your garage, in your closet at home. You just roll up, upload the JPEG, start printing, pick it back up. Well, okay. AI is telling me that these units cost 35 to 65,000. I'm guessing those are more heavy heavy duty versions of these. Yeah, it depends on how high you want to go. That's kind of the differentiator and on the quality of the machine. If you want to go like if you're doing like a high school gym Yeah. Right. Putting like the basketball team on there, you're going to need a more expensive one. But that's a smaller market. And I'm guessing you can also upcharge for the graphic design that you're going to print cuz they may not have it. And you could be like, "Oh yeah, we will lay this out. We'll give you the free. We'll do all the designs for free. You just pay us to print it." Right? Like and you could even maybe like uh do a little bit of spec work with that because you might have templates like in this this example you showed it's a corporate timeline. Cool. That's a template. Um oh values that's a template. The menu that's a template you know whatever like our about us founding history that's a template. And you just basically say hey look I put your brand in this. And you could kind of automate that now with with AI. says, you know, just go to their website, pull their about us, put it in our about us template, send it to them as like a, hey, you know, I was at your store, thought you could put, you know, interest in putting this on the wall. Is it outbound, you think, to for this, or you think there's going to be a lot enough inbound? I don't think people know wall printing as a right as a thing to go search for even. Yeah, that's kind of like uh tote rentals. I mean, you want me to show show you the uh the Google Trends on this. I mean, in this in the spirit of a a full disclosure here, there's the Google trends. They're very similar. They are. This is very visual. It's like it's like pressure washing was 5 10 years ago. It's fun to watch. You get the time lapse of it and it's perfect for short form video. So, that's what you do. You just post organically. Um, you go print some walls for free just to get the content. I mean, it's $8 for the ink. Um, and then you just post it. And then whatever organic pieces of content uh pop off, you just push paid ad spend behind that to a simple lead form and uh you close it. You might even be able to do like if you I mean just to get this business off the ground, go knock on a 100 doors, go to 100 businesses and and see what you can do. You could take a binder of your portfolio um go you know do a couple for free and then do do a binder portfolio and see what you can get going. or um or you know even before you do your own just take uh you know images off Instagram of what other people did and go around and say hey would you want this um just just to even learn like where is the market like is there one type of business that's particularly into this you know is it real estate agents is it you know whatever whatever it is if you go to their if you go to the wallprinter.com the company that sells these machines the headline which is just so funny to me it just says instead of saying anything about their product. The headline when you hit the website says those who never take risks will work always work for someone who has basically just tempting you to become an entrepreneur. This is sort of shaming you into becoming an entrepreneur which uh honestly is always a bit of a red flag in my book. Any anytime somebody's like really aggressive on the uh you know be your own boss selling you that selling you that dream. I'm always a little skeptical of that. But uh okay, this is interesting. How did you first uh find this wall printing niche? I saw an Instagram video and honestly this is one of those video. This is one of those businesses where you don't need to buy the thing and then like hope and pray that you find customers. You can start posting other people's videos and say stuff like this is what wall printers can do instead of this is what my wall printer did. Uh or you just go post to Facebook marketplace, generate some leads, throw up an AI generated website, get some leads, then once you have like some bookings or something, then you go finance a machine. So you've given out two ideas so far that I would call like white belt businesses. Is this the way basically businesses you can you do as a starter business that doesn't take ton of capital, ton of time, ton of skill, you don't need a big network and you can do these to get to that kind of two grand a month, five grand a month, 10 grand a month to start getting that money rolling in and really get in the game as an entrepreneur. Is that is that the right way to frame the ideas that you're drawn to or that you like to share about? like what? Give me like draw a box. What is the what is the label of the box of these ideas? So, all of my ideas are run through like my own personal filter, which is I've started over 80 businesses and I've learned what I hate, what I love, what most people hate, what most people would probably love. And I like to call those binary outcomes, binary outcome businesses. And that is a business that is just simple. Like you put X in and you get out Y. A custom home building business is not that. A home cleaning business is not that. I want a business where it's just a very clear defined value that you add and then you get paid and you get a fivestar review. That's like one of my filters. The other one which I I heavily biased towards is approachability and affordability. Um last time I was on the pod I was talking about like some backyard businesses if you remember like in in in ground trampoline. Yeah. Yeah. And I talked about another business which was like the guy dollous kits, right? You remember that one? And and Sam was like, "Dude, that that backyard idea sucks, but like I like the dollhouse idea." But like, if I were to run this, you can tell I've been thinking about this in the shower like every day since, right? This is like my moment. And Sam's not even here to defend himself. When I run that through my filter, it's like, how many people could launch a guy dollhouse subscription business in the world and be successful? And how approachable is that? That's like a count on one hand. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And like it's not approachable. It's pretty complex actually, like designs and materials and shipping and all that, branding, educating the market, all of Right. Whereas any dude can go rent an excavator on Facebook Marketplace and start digging a hole for a trampoline. So, it's like not sexy, but it's much more approachable. And there could be three guys in every 30,000, you know, person city owning that same business, which is what I love about it. So you like so when you said binary businesses and you said you know a home cleaning business not one luxury home builders not one but digging holes for trampolines inground trampolines is one explain the difference there why what why should one one person be a little skeptical or weary of going into the first category but the second category has some additional benefits what what's the difference yeah so I'll just I'll speak to two businesses that I I've actually started and not a hypothetical business like the trampoline one um binary outcomes So, we I own a tree trimming business and it's the best business in the world cuz we need to do one of two things. That's it. We need to remove a tree entirely or we need to trim a tree like specific branches. So, we show up. This one, cool. We cut it down, we throw it in the truck, fivestar review, 1,500 bucks, right? We've never got less than a fivestar review ever. And it's not because we're amazing operators. It's just because it's simple, right? Conversely, I've owned a a house cleaning business and it was a nightmare. It was an absolute wreck. We were going through real estate agents cuz we thought, "Hey, they have a lot of surface area that they're they're touching and talking to a lot of homeowners on a daily basis so they can refer out all these jobs." And then we had to get 1099s, all these house cleaners cuz we didn't want employees. And so we were finding these super unreliable house cleaners. They had a vast array of equipment. They would always show up late and sometimes the realtor would inspect the house, sometimes the homeowner would. They had varying degrees of quality and preferences. And one would say, "Hey, there's a hair on my floor." And the other one like didn't care. It was just it was a recipe for one-star reviews and for low margins and for people not showing up. And it was complex, but it like a complex business is fine if the juice is worth the squeeze and the margins are there or it's high ticket, but it didn't have any of those things. So, and so, you know, most people get tripped up with a business like the tree trimming business where they say, "Okay, yeah, I was listening to this podcast. Guy talked about tree trim made sense. Yeah, go we go we trim the trees. We get 1,500 bucks. What's not to love?" That's awesome. And um you know, and reality will hit as soon as that goes start. you know, Sean's, you know, trees andtrims.com. We go buy the domain. I'm ready. Uh, you know, I figure out how to I go watch a couple videos on trimming trees and then no customers, right? And so, you always have this like bottleneck of I think for most people, they don't really understand how to get their first 10, 100 customers to start getting the momentum that is required in order to to to get going in a business. and they sort of have all these false starts because they have an idea, they get really excited, they spend a bunch of time on the idea, but not time acquiring customers. So, the the the sort of perceived investment goes up and up and up and up and up, but they're not getting any getting any ground yet. And then when they can't really figure out how to get any sales or customers, you know, the excitement fades around the idea, they're on to the next one. And I've seen this pattern over and over again in people in my life who want to be entrepreneurial but don't quite make it happen. And so what is your method or you know let's take the tree trimming example. Let's say I'm now in a different city than you are right I'm in I'm I'm over in Denver and let's say I'm in Denver and I want to start this business. How do I use my time early on to get that initial momentum? Yeah. So let's boil down business. There's two tasks that any business owner needs to do. They need to find customers. They need to fulfill customers. That's it. Like it's not like I need to get an LLC. I need to make like you need to find customers and fulfill them. And guess what? Net of net, all things considered, it's harder to find customers than fulfill them. That's the harder thing. So do the harder thing first before you buy a wall printer, before you buy a chainsaw, before you even find a crew that you're going to sub out all the chainsaw work to. Find customers. Try to find customers or learn about how to acquire customers in any niche. Because if you can learn Facebook ads, then you can find customers in an ecom business or in a tree trimming business. So, spend time upfront trying to find customers. Not like learning how to cut and like if you shouldn't cut an oak tree in February, and we learned that the hard way, right? There's like disease and stuff. Don't care or worry about any of that stuff. Go to Facebook Marketplace and post, "I own a tree shrooming business. I can trim your tree." See if anything happens. If it doesn't, then like feel it out. How you still feeling about this? Still still enthused? Cool. then like learn some Facebook ads or post to Facebook groups or like do x y or z number of things until you get some people that are raising their hands that aren't your mom or your your sibling and saying I want you to trim my tree. Now it's like okay now I got to figure out how to fulfill So rather than the kind of scattershot cuz it's I can put up flyers and I can go to Facebook groups and marketplace and Craigslist and I can run Facebook ads and Google ads and Yelp and I can do all those things. What what worked for you with the street business? It was it well it's funny because it's like I like to say the efficacy of a growth hack is directly correlated to its lifespan. Okay. So what works in this month may never work again. It may never work until you know the next year during the same month because it's seasonal. You you just never know. So what worked to find our first customers was posting organically to Facebook Marketplace. Even though Facebook doesn't want you to post for services, right? You have to kind of find some tricky ways around that. That worked, but we couldn't scale it, but it we didn't need to scale it because then we started using Facebook ads with 15-second vertical videos. And then that worked. But what really scaled for us is referrals through real estate agents, landlords, and property managers. That's like our big three. And we just get referrals and we send them gifts and we follow up with them every month. And every time there's a storm, we get ahead of it before and then afterwards we say, "Hey, can we help?" Like referrals is our 8020. But it took us all kinds of other methods of until we got to that point. That was Can you give us a sense how uh successful is this tree trimmer business that you have? Yeah. So we do mid6 figures a year in revenue and about half of that in net profit. And you're in one one market or Yeah, just one one market. Dallas Fort Worth. Gotcha. Um okay, amazing. Let's do another one. What's another fun interesting business that business uh idea you have? So this is another one that I've actually done. Um, this is a great summer business. Uh, RV rentals as a service. Okay, so you got three types of RVs. Class A, which is like a big tour bus looking thing, right? Very intimidating for most people. Class B, which is like a converted sprinter van, right? Van hashtag vanlife. And then class C, which is a like a motor home, right? It's like the vehicle and the the home combined. And then you've got like pull behind trailers. So, usually in most markets, a class C, a motor home is the way to go. And so, there's a few platforms, RV Share and Outdoorsy being the biggest. That's like the Uber and Lyft of the space. These are great because you can finance them. And I'm not advocating you should, but you can finance them for 20 to 30 years cuz they're treated like a home. And so, a $40,000 class C RV will cost you like between 250 and 600 bucks a month. And you rent these things out for 150 to 400 bucks a night. And in many markets, um, people are fully booked. They're 40 to 80% booked, and they pay for themselves in the first year or two. So the the thesis is that the average um RV owner really only uses their RV for 5 to 15 nights a year. And so, you know, it just doesn't make good financial sense for people to buy an RV. to be on the business end of it, to buy one and use it occasionally for your family, block off your own dates, and then list it on these marketplaces that are happy to bring you customers. Um, it's a beautiful business. I've owned this business. And what's the trick? Is it you got to be near like these national parks or like is like is location the key variable? What's the key variable? Like what's the difference between 30% occupancy and 80 to 90% occupancy for these? It's supply and demand based on your unit type. So, in some markets, you're going to have a lot more demand for pull behind trailers because everyone has a truck and they're all going to Coachella or something, right? In other markets, there's more demand for class B or for class C. So, there's a very simple way to gauge what your supply and demand is. And I actually I love this idea. Um, and I I got my MBA like 6 years ago, and obviously I'm a terrible student, so I was never paying attention. And I was researching this idea in the back of the class. And here's exactly what I did. And this works for Airbnb. It works for any like, you know, sharing platform. So I would act as if I were a consumer on RV Share or Outdoorsy. And I would say, "All right, I want a booking for this weekend for three nights for class C." And then it would say 47 results. And then I would say, "All right, one year from now, exact same weekend, one year from now, three nights, class CRV, so all the same filters, but the dates were a year from now." And instead of 47 results, it would say like 470 results. So I was like, "Interesting." All right, cuz no one's booking a year out. I I just want to know what the supply is, And what the the like the market occupancy is. So if those numbers were true, it's like, wow, they're 90 90% booked for this unit. Let's do the same search for the same dates but with class B. 13 results this weekend, 20 results a year from now. It's like, oh, okay, class A. And then I just made a Google sheet of all these things. And I did this for like 2 hours in the back of my class. And at the end of it, I was like, in my local market, which is north Dallas Fort Worth suburbs, it was screaming to me, class C RV, it's got to have like six to nine people, yada. And we don't live near national parks like Texas is does not have good state or national parks. It's just people want uh a machine. So I went so far as to reach out to these platforms and said, "Hey, I just did this research. Here's my Google sheet. Does this vibe with what your research shows?" Cuz they see it all. And they want me to buy units to rent them out on their platform. So they reached out and they're like, "How did you figure this out? This is exactly matching like what our research shows. People just need to buy class CRVs." I was like, I just ran searches on your website. So, all that said, anyone anyone could do this in any market to find out like where the supply and the demand is and then just best principles apply. It's just take good pictures, good description, be hyper responsive uh and you'll win, right? Yeah, it's actually pretty clever the kind of looking a year out versus the current uh current uh availability in order to figure out the h how much booking uh how much the total supply is booked. um because you would just rather be in an environment where there's just a lot of demand, right? And and you can also look at reviews and you could do other things like that. But like you said, that that works for Airbnb, that works for RV share, that works for any kind of like sharing economy type of service. Yeah, it works on Turo. I did it with like a Cyber Truck and learned like, holy crap, there's way too many Cyber Trucks on Turo. It's just not a good investment. Um but this is a great business because it's a perfect side hustle. Like if you want an RV for your family, you can have one for free, Like there's your there's your clipperable moment. It's a free RV and you get paid. What I don't like about this business is the messy middle. Like you either need to own one RV and kind of do this a little bit on the side to make some extra money or you need to own 10 plus and then just outsource everything. hire a person like you go to like an RV rental or an RV storage lot, you know, spend 150 bucks a month to keep them not on your house and set up systems, take YouTube videos so people can know like how to clean it, how to check in, how to check out. Like the worst thing you could do here is own like two to four of them because your life is not it's not fun. Yeah, that's kind of my read on actually the majority of these businesses, which is um the juice is not really worth the squeeze. I I that there's a reason I called them the sort of white belt businesses and that's not meant to be directory. What it means is it's a you need a great you need a starting point as an entrepreneur. Everybody starts somewhere and um you know if you start off saying I'm going to build Tesla unless you are truly truly special and gifted and unique. But guess what? Even Elon didn't start with Tesla, right? He started with a much simpler business before that. Um and so you know Warren Buffett was you know selling uh he's putting arcade machine uh games in uh barber shops like you know everybody starts somewhere and in doing that you learn a lot. You learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about generating demand about operations about hiring about finance. You you learn in this like kind of safe sandbox and it's simple enough that you actually get started versus trying to go for the perfect business. You really you really don't even get in the game is what I've what I've seen for most people. And so I do like the idea of white build businesses. But however, most of them almost by definition are pretty bad businesses to own and um and you end up working a ton. You kind of like build yourself a job is is what happened I think in most cases and that's in the success scenario. Of course there's outliers, but I just wanted to say that out loud. Now I'm curious from your point of view, what are the businesses that you see people talk about as if they're good businesses, but you're like, "Dude, I wouldn't touch that with a 10-ft pole." Well, often times there are businesses and niches that are like really good to sell high ticket courses around and so it makes it seem on the surface like this is a great business when really it's like people are just making a lot of money selling you the idea that it's a great business. And there are exceptions to this, but I think one business that people wrongly assume is passive is vending machines. Like I've I can't tell you how many people I've heard say like I just just a few vending machines and just extra thousand bucks a month just passive. Just make It sounds passive. Sounds passive though. Yeah, sure. It's just not. You know those vending machines break and the credit card readers break and you have to refill them and your if it's if snack and drink they go bad, you have to swap them out. Is anything truly passive by that definition? Right. No. No. That's just one that it has the perception of being passive and it being amazing and it I think it is net of net a good business. It's just not nearly as good as a lot of people are selling you the idea on. Right. Yeah. For me there's like the um I think your your test of how many people are trying to sell you high ticket courses and how sleazy do they look uh is is the is the best proxy. You can sort of I don't even need to see the underlying business. I can just tell from the from the landing page of the person who's trying to convince me it's a great business. And so, um, you know, there's these, uh, turnkey Amazon FBA businesses. And of course, you could build a great Amazon business. as many people do. But so, so I'm not saying there's not outliers in any of these, but man, that's a brutal business to try to go into is to build these like uh turnkey generic Amazon FBA businesses, YouTube faceless channels. Most drop shipping stuff like you know, all this is like anything that anything that is around stock trading um or any kind of trading strategy or trading course is like, you know, literally run away. Yeah. I'm speaking of Amazon FBA. There's there are a few guys that went to federal prison over selling high ticket FBA courses. So that's public record because of what what was the what put them in jail though? They promised guaranteed returns and in addition which that's enough to get you in trouble with the SEC. In addition to that, I believe at least one of them was just a Ponzi scheme. They were just taking money and just buying cars with Um, amazing. Well, Chris, uh, always good having you on, man. Uh, shout out your podcast. Where should people find you? The Kerner office. That's K O R N R Top Pod.com. All right, man. Thanks for coming on. All right. Thanks, Sean.