Transcription
Welcome to the Ker Office. Another episode of Hold Cob Bros. You're going to like this one. So, if you've ever heard of School, that's Alex Hormozi's new company. I scraped every group on School, and it's a platform for launching a paid community. And so we broke down everything I scraped. And if you subscribe to my newsletter at keroffice.com, you can get the scrape; I'll give it away for free. It's really interesting to see what types of groups are making the most money, what types of communities. So we talk about that for a little bit. We talk about more lead generation business ideas with and without programmatic SEO. We talked lead magnets, how you can use them creatively. Then we talked about like bringing transparency to costs in home building and home renovations and how you could build like a glass door for X, Y, or Z for that. So enjoy. Please like, subscribe, share with your [Music] grandma.
All right, so we've got a friend of the Pod; he doesn't know us, but we know him really well, and he goes by Swoll Mosy, the Tank Top Titan, Hulk Mosy, Alex Gain Train Horos, Bronos, the No-Strip Negotiator, the Tank Top Tyrant. I don't know how you refer to him, but we strip trip gonna dip dip Horos. I get it; cut that out, Muhammad. Okay, you know what? I didn't have time to look at Chad GPT like you did. All right, get the freak out of here. Anyway, so for those that don't know, he recently invested in School, which is like a course platform, right? And it's interesting because how many things did he say no to before he invested in that? So he must have seen something here that we don't see. It's cool, right? I'm sure he knows what he's doing, but I was very curious, Nick. I'm a curious man, right? Don't say it. You have—I'm not gonna say it. Say it. You're by curious. Okay, all right. I had to let you get that joke. I'm not that, but I am curious. Glad that everyone now recognizes that you act like, "Oh, Nick, don't say that," but deep down we know you want it, cuz you're a diry boy, aren't you? You are so diry. For those that aren't watching on YouTube, his face didn't change; like, he was very good; he was locked in, but I knew you wanted to say that, so I let you say that. All right, keep going.
Anyway, so he bought School, and so I was curious, so I scraped every School group. I wanted to learn how much money are these guys making. What do you mean you scraped every School group? I don't know else to say. Are there groups public? Yeah, you can see how many members, how much they cost, what the name is. I didn't know the creator is. So I put them all in a spreadsheet. How do you scrape it? With the help of uh, Pakistani. Oh, okay. Say yeah. So if anyone wants that scrape, go subscribe to my newsletter at Kerneroffice.com, okay, and I'll send it to you. Anyway, it's super interesting because I wanted to see what are the commonalities between the most profitable groups, okay, and it's not going to surprise you. Hold on. So I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Yes, I'm assuming the listener feels the same way. So you can scrape it; you see it. How do you know that that they're the most profitable? Oh, because I can see how many members and how much they charge, and I can multiply. Okay, but like most—Mr. Yeah, so it is very unsurprising some of the results, and some of the results are quite surprising. So about 80% of the top 50 groups are all about either how to get rich or how to look better or how to get girls. Are you surprised by that? How to get rich, how to look better, or how to get girls? Yeah. And of those three categories, the 80/20 is how to get rich. So like the target demo for School are, I don't know, 20 to 34-year-old males. Yeah, that's so funny. Yeah, so but then the 20% is what was really interesting. The 20% of the top 50. So first of all, of the top 50, Nick, I want you to guess what the MRR is for the top 50 School groups, like on average. On average, yep. And then guess what the most is. I'm going to guess $150,000 monthly recurring revenue. Okay, and what the most is? I would guess the biggest School group, $3 million in MRR.
Okay, so this is a little old; I did this a couple months ago, so it's probably changed by now, but as of a couple months ago, the average of the top 50 School groups is $53,000 per month. Okay, and way overshot it. And yeah, but you were consistent in your overshooting. The most profitable, the most, the biggest is 555,000 a month, and that is a $1,000/month group with 555 people in it, and the name of the group is Roadmap to 100k with Your Personal Brand. We have a friend in the podcast who's on School; that's where his community is. I won't say his name. Is he in the top 50? I don't know what his name is because you didn't say it. Oh, I don't know. Never mind. I'll ask you after this. Go. Okay. Anyway, one thing I found surprising is the 20th biggest group is a jazz guitar accelerator, and it's this guy named Mark, a coach, Mark Andre, who has a YouTube channel with 72,000 subscribers, and this homeboy is making 55 grand a month by teaching people how to play jazz guitar. Yeah, $200 a month, and there's about 250 people in it. That's crazy. Did you look at his website at all? Jazz guitar? Yeah. Website is jazzguitarlessons.it, and he's 55 grand a month. Yeah, plus YouTube ad revenue, plus he sells a course, and plus he has another community on a different platform that I'd never heard of. Isn't that incredible? I gotta go talk to Jess. She said I'd never make money. He's a musician; there's no way. I couldn't do that. There's no way. I gotta make a call. But seriously though, like that is a profession that pays nothing that can pay a lot with the internet, with good distribution. It's a profession that pays nothing if you're not in the right geographies. So like their whole industry that supports the music industry that are not the famous rock stars, you know, Ed Sheeran, Coldplay, Taylor Swift, or whatever; they're studio musicians; they're people who teach at universities, like in the LA area. Just it's a massive industry, but if you don't live in LA, yeah, what do you do? You like offer local lessons to people; like, there's not really the same industry. You either have to be in one of those markets where there's massive demand for musicians below just the top-tier touring acts, or else you're not making much money. There's like a big gap here, but this guy—like where does this guy live? Does it say where he lives? I don't even know. I would bet he lives in Middle America. It's gonna be my total guess, and if he lives in LA, I'm gonna be super but hurt because it's like the rich get richer. Well, his name's—he's got kind of a weird name, and so I wouldn't be surprised if like he's in Europe or something. Oh, like European? Yeah. Okay. I found him on Instagram. Okay, we're going deep and stalking. Uh, he's in Quebec. He's in Quebec. Oh, he's in Quebec. Yeah. Okay. Okay, neighbors to the north. Okay, so I love it. Anyway, I love it. Yeah. Okay. You don't need to be a jazz guitar teacher to make money here, but what's stopping anyone from approaching music teachers and saying, "Hey, let me help you build a community and take like—you're like an agent to a music teacher, right? I'm going to take 20–30% of everything you make, and I'm going to reverse engineer what Mark Andre did. I'm going to go back, back and look at his first YouTube videos. I'm going to go to the web archive of his website, jazzguitarlessons.it, and I'm going to reverse engineer it, and I'm going to do that for you. I'll do all the work, and I'm gonna take 30% or 50%." What's interesting is like how many years into the internet are we? 30 years? Like 30 years of it being main, somewhat mainstream, right? And we're still finding use cases that they didn't even think of 30 years ago. Like School, is the technology really that different than it was, let's say, even 20 years ago? No, but but this is new, like people getting on School and creating communities that allow them to make a living to teach other people how to do their craft; that's a new thing. Like that's not something that's been around for 30-plus years. And and you see like School is exploding; like Hormozi is just the latest investor in a series of investors. This is going to be a billion-dollar-plus company because it facilitates learning at scale within communities, but it like it just boggles my mind. 30 years in, we're still finding original use cases to the internet. This isn't mobile; this isn't apps; this isn't Web 3.0, like where we're talking about crypto; this isn't even AI. This is like the original freaking internet providing this level of opportunity to people. It's crazy. I know. I was just listening to a podcast with the founder of Groupon, and his first hustle was like in the late 90s, early 2000s, and it was making websites for restaurants, and he started it, and he found a little success, but then his roommate started doing it, or he heard about someone else that was doing it, and he literally thought, "Great," and he quit it because he thought, "It's taken; my idea is taken," making websites for businesses. And it's like today, 30 years later, you can still make a lot of money making websites for businesses. In 30 years, there will be a zillion more AI tools that do that with one click, and some human will still make a lot of money building websites for businesses. This is totally different, but it's like oil a hundred years ago. You just went kind of anywhere, guessed, found some oil, and pumped it out of the ground, and it was super easy, right? But it's gotten harder and harder, and technology has evolved over time, and then I don't know, 20, 10 years ago, fracking gets discovered. Like it's not the same; I just dig one hole and I pump oil out; it's I dig a hole, and then it sort of disperses, and I'm able to draw a ton more oil per square foot or per square mile out of a field than I otherwise would have using traditional methods, but you're still doing the same thing, right? You're still pumping oil out of the ground, but they've done it in an economical way. Like that's how I kind of view the internet. Like in the beginning, it was just an oil rush, like, "Oh, there's oil here; I can just get anything that I can. Let's bring book resellers online; Amazon. Let's take music and bring it online, or videos and bring it online; YouTube." But now we're getting to the point where it's just continuing to niche down, and community I think is one of those things where it's still an unexploited opportunity for people on the internet. Yeah, and it just goes to show that as long as we're inventing things, we will never run out of new innovative ideas, business ideas, or otherwise. Like a lot of people have said, "Oh, well, all the good ideas are taken," like that might become true if we stop innovating altogether, but as long as there's new technology, there's new ideas around that technology. Yeah. Agreed. Can I hop to an idea? Not yet. I just want to say a funny thing about one of these School groups; little anecdote. So like basically half of these groups are how to get rich, right? Or more of them for sure. And there's one called Your Journey to Zero to $10,000 a Month Starts Here, and this is a couple months old, right? Okay. And the creator, he got 100 paying members to pay 150 a month, which is 15 grand a month, and the group no longer exists. So it's like one person did it, and he quit. He [Laughter] dropped. So good.
Speaking of Hormozi, have you seen the meme where it's like the random 20-year-old sends you a text, "Would you be opposed to me generating hundreds of leads for your business for free?" Right? Like because everybody reads hundred million doll leads or hundred million dollar deals, and like that's one of the things that Hormozi says basically is like, "Give away your services for free, and then like eventually you'll be able to charge for them, but you need to get some reps under your belt," etc. All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube, and if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it, because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube, and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Ker Office on any podcast platform, or you can go to TKOpod.com. Also, my newsletter—I'll throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly; it's different content than my podcast and YouTube. Newsletter: chrisjcorner.com. You'll see the link, and we'll see you there.
Setting this up for the audience, can you explain what a lead magnet is? A lead magnet is like a landing page or something, an offer, like a PDF, something enticing that makes people want to give you their info; they're lead. Here are some examples of lead magnets. There are calculators that you can do online, right? I wonder what my business is worth. Okay, Google, what is my business worth? Here's a business valuation calculator, and then you enter in—here's my revenue, here's my profit, here's how many employees I have, here's how fast I'm growing—and it spits out a valuation, but in order to get that valuation, you get the email. There are white papers or ebooks. You Google, "How do I start a tree trimming business," and then all of a sudden there's an ebook or a white paper that you get. Like lead magnets are nothing new, right? But it's surprising to me how many businesses still do not use lead magnets. They may use things like pay-per-click ads, right? They're paying Google or they're paying Facebook to rank higher in search or to show up in someone's feed. They may be doing things like SEO, search engine optimization, where they're paying somebody to create content for them or to optimize their website, etc. But easy things like a lead magnet, I don't see a lot of local businesses doing. A lot of digital businesses I see doing, but I don't see a lot of local businesses doing. So I think this is like the perfect idea for somebody who either wants a side hustle or who is like trying to get into entrepreneurship. And I think there are like one of two routes. I'd love to hear you build on this. Option one is you find one business that you really like, and you build one great lead magnet, and you then go out and sell it to a hundred of those types of businesses, right? So like you and I, we did the tree trimming course; we're like, "Hey, how to build a tree trimming business," and and we now have this white paper or this ebook, and we go to 50 tree trimming businesses and we say, "Hey, we've built this lead magnet; would you like to buy it from us?" And you can put it on your website for free, and you can pitch them and say, "Let me track the conversion. I want to see how many clicks this link gets. I want to see how many emails you get. Like we'll track this together, and then we can assign a value to it on the back end," or you can assign a value to it up front. That's a one; cookie-cutter; sell it to a bunch of people. The other option could be you just called, contact a lot of local businesses, um, show them the data on how important lead magnets are in order to generate more leads, and then offer to build them a lead magnet for free. You then charge either a percentage or a per-lead fee on the back end once it's implemented. So I go to my, I don't know, local gardener or I go to my local soccer shop, and I'm like, "Hey, I want to figure out a lead magnet for you," and so you sit down, you work with them, and you come up with this lead magnet. Can be a survey, a quiz, a calculator, whatever it is. So I think those are like two options that somebody could take, but I think especially as local search is becoming more and more important, helping local businesses with just that one niche, right? You don't have to be a marketing agency to everybody; you're just one thing. I'm going to do lead magnets for these businesses. Could be a really, really cool thing. What do you think? I like it. I think high-ticket would be better because the value of every lead should be worth a lot more, right? It's going to be an easier sale. Like you got a land—if you were to do it, you would focus on high-ticket service, so like not landscaping, but like foundation repair, where it's like an ebook, free guide of how to know if your foundation needs fixing. I actually made—when I partnered with Ed to do a custom home building business—I spent like 12 hours making an ebook of like how to pick a custom home builder because I picked a custom home builder once, and there was a—I'm cheap, right?—and there's so—there's a lot of nuances, and we interviewed a lot of them, and there's a lot of questions you want to ask, and so this was our lead magnet to find people that want, want to use us as a custom home builder. It took forever, but it was really high quality. Like I probably could have sold it as—in fact, I'm just giving myself the idea; I should probably sell that as like an Amazon book. Dude, totally could sell it like an—I already have; I never even used it. Like we never launched. Dude, and think about optimizing. I love how we're going on a rabbit hole on this. You could easily optimize search for that; you could easily rank for it, right? Like you could find it. Dude, that would be such an easy category too for you to go onto. Like a lot of people do this in Amazon where they're like, "I'm an Amazon bestseller," and it's like the C in the category was like hack it, yeah, you know, yeah, cat toys or something, you know, like I don't even know. I think that'd be—yeah, I think that'd be a really good idea. So I like it. I think the struggle here is convincing the people, not that they need a lead magnet because they might see the value in that, but convincing them or teaching them how to actually use the leads because if they're going to be paying for the lead magnet or for the leads, you got to get them to change their behavior from then on out. And if it's a 62-year-old roofing business owner, he's probably pretty set in his ways, you know. So I thought about this. Okay, the reason I like this business—I wouldn't want to do this business, but I think somebody who's like starting out and they want to get into this space, it'd be a great opportunity for them to meet a bunch of different businesses and create lead magnets, right? And just understand how to implement it because it's trackable; you can actually see who's clicking on it; you can get people's emails. It's fun too, yeah, because it's like the instant dopamine hit, right? It's like, "Oh, I got it; ding; I got an email; oh, I can't wait to see like what they actually filled out." But for me, that's where step two comes in, right? Like you start capturing all these leads, and you stay consistent with the business owner, and you review that, and you're like, "Hey, this month we generated 10 leads, but only two of them converted," or you sit down with them and ask them what was the conversion like because you don't necessarily know who converts to a customer; you just know what happened to the leads, and then you have an opportunity for those business owners who aren't converting well to talk to them. It's like, "Hey, you know, in your industry, you should be converting like 80% of these, and you're only converting 20%; what does your sales process look like after the leads, leads come in?" "Well, they sit in my inbox, and then Marie looks at them, she—and usually she sends an email to response, but honestly, she's just been sending cat pictures to them on accident," you know, like, you know what I mean? Yeah. You get your foot in the door with that business owner, and it's the typical venture saying of land and expand, right? Like you, you offer one offering, and then you're able to offer, expand those offerings with those business owners. If the leads are not converting, and if the leads are converting, great; you can go find other customers who are just—
Going to pay for the leads, and then you can implement the sales on the back end as well. But I think, in particular, for people who want to get into this space, it's a really good foot in the door and opportunity for them to expand services as they continue to grow. So that's my answer to your objection.
Yeah, it reminds me of your podcast interview with Maddie Mlan, because he did this with bariatric surgery centers. And I think people should do the same strategy with this, where they should pick one niche, one high-ticket niche, because you're getting your foot in the door by saying, "Hey, here's a lead magnet." You can frame your offer as a consultant for the industry, and that might be a lot more enticing to a 62-year-old roofing business owner because he knows what the young guys are doing; he sees what their competitors are doing; he probably has some FOMO. So if you go in the door and say, "Hey, like I'm only going to charge you based on every lead I bring in, but like I'm worth $600 an hour to you because I know what everyone in this industry is doing right now," I think the application of that's super interesting.
You could have it's like one of two people: Number one could be the industry expert. Like me, I work at home health and hospice for the last 10 years, and I want to be an entrepreneur and I'm trying to figure it out. Cool. I could target home health and hospice agencies with a lead magnet offering just to get my feet wet and understand how to grow a digital agency, let's say. But I'm coming from a place of expertise; like I know their industry, and I can offer it. I'd say the other end of the spectrum would be the 23-year-old who's maybe they just graduated college, or maybe they're just getting exposed to the stuff. I would probably pick between five and 10 industries, test it to see where you get the best response, and then niche down on one. I wouldn't necessarily niche down too early: A, you don't have a skill set yet, and B, you don't know which one of those is going to kind of take off. But once you find the one that's actually paying off the most, then I would like kind of forget everything else and double down on that one.
You know who does lead magnets the very best? It's like a SaaS tool, for instance. When I first started the podcast, I was trying to figure out how to edit something. I looked for these free tools because I'm cheap; I didn't want to pay anything—like a web-enabled video editing tool. "You're not cheap, you're frugal, Chris." Thank you, Mom. Thank you, Nick. These tools are so good because they'll let you edit the entire video; they'll do every—you'll go through all this, and then at the end it's like, "Okay, that's $49, please." It's like, "What? You can't export until you pay 40—" Oh, it's so, so good. It's strategically introduced friction, and it's like a bait and switch in a way, and it's the sunk cost fallacy, right? I already did all this; I spent all the time editing this video; now I have to pay the $49, and most people do.
For people who don't know, like marketing stuff is new for me. I've like bought and sold businesses and operated existing businesses; the growth hacking just has not been my tool set. That's your tool set, right? And so what I'm about to say you might roll your eyes at, but strategically introducing friction is freaking—that just hit me like a ton of bricks because we've been talking a lot about friction recently. I was like, "We don't want friction; we want as many leads as possible; we're trying to reduce friction because friction means less sales," but like flipping that on its head, strategically introduced friction probably also can increase sales. Like the inverse of that can also be true. It like, did I just stumble on something that is known by everybody, or is that—no, I don't—I like, I coined "strategically introduce friction." Other people call it other things. I wrote a whole newsletter on it a while ago. I'm obsessed with the concept of friction. We've been talking to a mutual friend about me writing a book, and I have like a whole chapter on friction, both using it and avoiding it in certain instances.
So when I lost weight, if I walked out in the kitchen and I was going to the office, I have to walk by the kitchen island, and if my wife had a plate of warm cookies right there, I was for sure going to eat three of them, right? Whereas if I'm still craving cookies and I walk by the same island, or there's no cookies, and Jesse's like, "Hey, Crumble is giving out free cookies, and it's a 5-minute drive," I'm not going—I'm not going to make that drive; I'm not going to eat those cookies because there's friction. So it's like when I lost weight, I had to strategically introduce friction so I didn't eat those bad things.
What you're talking about is why I like this idea of just starting with the lead magnet, is because in the process of understanding how to craft a lead magnet, create it, place it, track the data, you're going to learn stuff like this; you're going to learn about friction and, you know, introducing strategic friction and reducing as much friction as possible. Like these are just things you don't know, or—and they definitely don't teach you in school. Like we both got our MBAs; they're not sitting there; there isn't like friction 101. I learned about friction in my undergrad though, but like there isn't—there isn't sorry—sorry, there isn't friction, you know, 101, like how to reduce friction in the sales process; that's just not a thing. But anybody who's actually gone boots on the ground and done this stuff and is a practitioner, they know what the best tools are; they know the strategies; they know what works and what doesn't. So yeah, I think this is a really good idea to just get your feet wet and then expand from there.
Yeah, this is the type of stuff we're talking about with perfume vending and with the form—right, removing friction. The people that do this the best are like the—those online IQ tests you can take, or personality quizzes. You go to the landing page, and it will ask you the first question; they don't need your name, your email, or anything. You'll spend 30 minutes filling it out, and then they get your email at the end, and you better believe that like 99.9% of people that get to that put in their email because that's how they see the results.
Totally, it's genius. Yeah, I love it. While we're talking about lead magnets, I got a little segment; flows right into it. You ready? Lead magnets. We—I've talked about programmatic SEO a few times over the last few months on this podcast, and we have a stealth project right now that is programmatic SEO, and it's going very well, and it's a lot of fun. And for those that are just tuning in, programmatic SEO is programmatically creating thousands or tens of thousands of landing pages specific to a market, a thing, a—a problem to be solved, so you can organically rank for 1 to 10% of those 10,000 landing pages. It's super cool, and we've actually kind of, on the side, without announcing anything, we're doing agency work for other people wanting to launch programmatic websites. Right? Programmatic websites are expensive from an agency perspective, five to 15 grand, but the margin is high; the cost of performing the service is not very high.
So Nick, I want you—I've talked about introducing programmatic SEO to like searchers, right? So or people looking to buy a franchise; they're going to buy a $300,000 franchise. Why don't you say, "Hey, here's a lead gen business; it's not really a business; it's just a website, but we're already getting leads; it's 20 grand, and you just got to go find buyers for these leads because the leads are already coming in organically." You want to push paid ad spend behind it; you're going to get even a lot more. It's like, "Huh, I can spend 300 grand to buy a roofing franchise, or I can spend 20 grand to buy a lead generation business, AKA a programmatic website." Okay, I talked about that a couple of weeks ago. Let me ask some questions, clarify questions, both for me and the audience. When you say programmatic SEO, I know what SEO means: search engine optimization; we're either optimizing a website's flow and/or adding content to that website because the more content, the more backlinks, the—the higher that Google will rank you organically when somebody searches for something that your—a product that your company provides—product or service. Okay, so I get the SEO part; what does the programmatic mean? Does it like—is it automatically generating using artificial intelligence? Is it—we've created a template, and we're just like copying and pasting it a hundred times over? Help me understand a little bit better, like the programmatic part of SEO.
So picture a Google Sheet, a bunch of columns. One column has the top 10,000 cities in the United States by population; the other column has a keyword, such as grill cleaning, grill replacement, grill removal, or whatever. So it's like a keyword that is highly searched, preferably with low competition for people bidding on the keyword. Another column has a city, state, and another column has a fun fact about that city. The programmatic part is clicking a button and having an automation—not even AI, something like Zapier—put all those things together to create a landing page with a lead magnet with a form on the landing page. So if there is no company cleaning grills in Clarksville, Tennessee, you're probably going to rank first eventually because there's no competition. For—so it's just a shotgun approach; you'll never rank for 90% of these landing pages, and for 10% of them you're rank quite high.
Okay, and so you want to have programmatic SEO for services that aren't necessarily geographically constrained. So for example, what was the company that we wanted to start? Was it the kitchen cleaning soap that we wanted to sell? Wholesale degreaser? Yeah, degreaser. Okay, so if we wanted to start that company, we would use programmatic SEO because it doesn't matter where our customers are, but what does matter is their local—like if I'm in Clarksville, Tennessee, and I'm searching for degreaser, I want to be able to rank organically in Clarksville, Tennessee. It doesn't have to be tied to a geography; it could also be tied, for instance, how much do graphic designers make that graduated from Cornell? Right? Insert every university name; insert every university name; insert every job, and you've got thousands and thousands of landing pages that will rank like it. So it doesn't have to be tied to a geography or service; it could be a product or a service, or like how much do Bay Area engineers make? How much do Minneapolis engineers make? So there's a zillion ways you could do it. Let's say in—in the example brokerage, somebody wants to start a brokerage; we would build out a programmatic SEO campaign—I don't even know what to call it—that was just focused on generating organic leads for people who want to sell their business, right? For owners who are like, "How do I sell my business on Google?" We would rank early; there would be a lead magnet; they would fill out that lead magnet; we would take those leads, and then we would then talk to a searcher and say, "Hey, look, we've got this brokerage lead gen company; the leads are there; we don't have anybody to actually go and run down these leads; do you want to take this and run with it?" Is that kind of what you're saying?
Yeah, for—here's an example; there you could go to BizBuySell; you could scrape every single business broker they have; you could put their name and their location in columns in a Google Sheet, and then you could programmatically generate thousands of landing pages that says, "Best business broker in Minneapolis," in Orlando, in Tampa, and then you could just list them out—like everyone in Tampa that you scraped, you could just list on that website with a lead magnet. All the leads come to you, and then once you get a lead for a business broker in Tampa, Florida, then you can programmatically—if you want, you don't have to—reach out to that exact business broker because you have their email from when you scraped it and say, "Hey, I have a guy that owns a plumbing business in Tampa that wants to sell; how much do you want to pay for this lead, or do you want to give me 25% of your commission for this lead?" So are you thinking that this would be something—sorry, I think there's two things here, but like you said, we could do this and then hand it off to somebody. Are you thinking this would be like a business in a box where we're like, "Hey, searcher, I know you've been looking for a business; you haven't closed on it yet; you know the process of talking to sellers and working with brokers, so you might like this idea that we have; buy it from us," or is it like a rev share agreement where we're sharing equity with them? Like what would it look like for the business relationship?
On a different podcast, I talked about offering this as an alternative to buying a business to like a searcher or someone, right? And it's a lead gen business, like we're doing with our stealth project, right? Where you can say, "Hey, what we're giving you today is like—it's kind of the equivalent of—this is a good analogy of—instead of starting a restaurant from scratch, you're leasing um a building that has all the restaurant equipment, all the chairs, everything there; you still got to bring customers in the door; you still got to cook the food, but instead of paying 500 grand to buy all the stuff and build it all—almost like a ghost kitchen that you can rent the space out—well, kind of, but instead of like taking an empty shell of a building and turning into a restaurant, you can just rent like this old—old restaurant—pizza restaurant just failed; just be our new tenant; you could use all of his equipment, right? So you still got to do the hard part, but you're going to save 90% going into it. You got to do the hard part in either scenario.
What do you think are the best types of businesses to do this with? Are they products? Are they services? Are they geographically constrained? Are they, you know, things that don't matter with geography? Like how would you think about the types of businesses you would apply the programmatic SEO to? Okay, my preference—I don't know if it's the best, but it's what my preference—geographic service businesses. Our friend Sam Thompson built out a programmatic site for a company that was delivering alcohol, and they did it by neighborhood because they had to go state to state until they got regulatory approval. So they'd go into Dallas, and the—okay, Oak Cliff, Highland Park, Preston Hollow, and that's how they drove a ton of their business—just free, organically. I haven't even gotten to the ultimate idea yet. Sorry. Sorry, that's okay. It's okay; we got ADHD, both of us—so mostly you, but I do a little bit. So the idea here is instead of offering it as a business for sale, you could find a company, a midsize to large company that could use programmatic—okay, that could be a buyer for this. And let's say a searcher might pay 20 grand for this, but if you go to a company like, let's say Baker Brothers—you heard of Baker Brothers? They're like a plumbing company; they're like two or three hundred million dollar plumbing business—really big, right? Okay, and so you spend the time up front to build out a programmatic website for Baker Brothers, and then you approach them; you get the CEO on the phone somehow and say, "I want to sell this to you; like I guarantee you it will bring in x amount of new leads per month or per week; I've already built it; it's done; it's branded for you." And if they don't buy it, you could basically do a find and replace—Baker Brothers with the person you end up selling it to—and so—well, how much is it? What's 100 grand? So it's the same amount of work, the same product, but you—you've already built it, and you're selling it to someone that you know could afford it, and so the price is different; the framing is different; and the value to that end buyer is different because he has so many locations where he can serve all these end-user customers. That makes sense?
Yeah, and it's almost like you could say, "All right, I'm going to do this for the Western United States; right? I'm not going to do it for the whole United States; I'm going to do it for the West. Who are the top five largest plumbing companies in the Western United States?" And then you—you just target them, and you create—you could create kind of like a bidding war, right? Like show them, "Hey, this is how many leads I'm getting per week; you know, Harmon Brothers says that they're willing to pay I don't know $20,000, and the Johnson team—" I'm terrible with like plumbing names; they're all like Brothers—Mario, the Luigi brothers—the Mario brothers are willing to pay $50,000; what's your offer? It just introduces the competitive bidding dynamic to that service, and it kind of de-risks you spending the time to build it out. That's interesting. And if no one buys it, now you have a plumbing lead gen business, and you can just sell leads to these same companies. A lead to you is worth like $20, right? Let's say a plumbing company will pay $20 for your lead, okay? But if that plumbing—to that plumbing company, if they were vertically integrated and own the programmatic website, it's worth like $900 because that could be the lifetime value of any given customer. Yeah, that's interesting. So it's a dual-prong approach. If let's say that you offer it, and all of them only offer like 10 grand for it, and you're like, "Nah, no, this is worth 50 grand," then it's like, "Cool, if you don't want to buy it or you can't afford it, would you be one of my partners in these leads? Like in servicing these leads?" Right? So it's like, "Okay, yeah, my main goal is to sell it and just be done with it, but if I can't sell it for what I want to sell it for, cool, we'll just have an affiliate relationship where then I'll send you the leads, and the first person to respond to the lead gets the lead, and you pay me on a per-lead basis." That de-risks it even more. And you know what's even more genius about this that I hadn't thought of? Oh, let's say you go to the—the Baker Brothers, and you're say 100 grand—what are—it's a website, and it's like—they're like, "Well, dude, we could pay our developer five grand to—to copy this." It's like, "Yeah, you could, but that means there will be two of them, and you're going to be competing with one other person in all these far-flung markets, which will reduce the effectiveness of all these leads, both for me and you. I don't really care; I don't have a plumbing business." What you can copy is not going to be as good as what I'm offering you. Isn't that smart?
Yeah, that is smart. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting value proposition. Yeah, so there's so many things you could do. It's like you could copy this; okay, I don't care; I'll sell this to your competitor, or you could just buy all my leads; okay? Anytime I get a lead that's in these four states that you have a territory in, I'll sell them to you for 20 bucks a piece, or you can buy it from me today for 100 grand and then pay me $1,000 a month to fix things as they break. It seems like a no-brainer for me when you consider the local importance of search moving forward. Is a no-brainer. Did you say local—see—see SEO? It's like local search. We got to buy that website—loco search. I know, I know. Okay, if it seems like I cut you off—early—part two will be a week from today. Well, we'll see you then.