The Side Hustle King: “I’m making $8K/DAY from easy businesses”

- June 18, 2025 (9 months ago) • 01:14:02

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	Alright. This guy might be the king of side hustles. He makes about $3,000,000 a year off of six or seven different side hustles—different streams of income. Normally all the advice you hear is about focus: "Focus, go all in on one thing." This guy is like Mr. Shiny Object Syndrome. I loved having him on. He's very fun, and he comes on and tells you the side-hustle ideas that he loves—things you could do. They're kind of weird businesses, but you could do them in almost any local market. On this podcast, sometimes we have really brilliant people, but they talk about stuff most people can't actually do. It's interesting to hear, but you can't really go do it. This is an episode I'm going to send to my sister and my brother-in-law because I think they'd like to do these businesses. I think these are things that anybody actually can do and get to where he's gotten. I think he's making $8,000 per day of free cash flow off these side hustles—that's pretty crazy. So enjoy this episode. It's all about the weird, crazy side hustles that anybody could do if you just got a little bit of hustle. Alright, what's up? We got Chris here. Chris, you are a crazy guy—you're a madman. One of the reasons I wanted you on here is because most business advice on the internet sounds like this: "You gotta focus, you gotta lock in, you gotta grind, you have to just go all in on one thing—focus, focus, focus." You're like the exact opposite. You're a dude who...
01:20	Chris Koerner	That's right.
01:21	Shaan Puri	"You see a shiny object, you chase it, and you're not ashamed to say it. That's actually your strategy. We were talking before this, and you were telling me that you have, I think, started 30 different businesses that crossed over $50,000 in revenue—maybe 35. Mm-hmm. You said you have six different revenue streams right now that each produce over $100,000 of cash flow for you. I was doing the math on some of your numbers, and I think basically just on your side hustles you're making about $8,000 a day of cash flow, and I think that is amazing. I want to hear what your side hustles are. I want to hear what other side hustles you found, because you find these random, simple businesses that are cool. I want to hear which ones you think are cool that other people can go do for their own side hustles, and I want to hear your philosophy as you go, because again, I think you defy some of the odds."
02:10	Chris Koerner	That sounds perfect. Absolutely—let's do it.
02:13	Shaan Puri	"So, tell me about some of the ideas you have that other people could do?"
02:17	Chris Koerner	Dude, I think you should pull up that video of the hole-in-one golf challenge. This is one I can't get out of my head. Alright — here we go.
02:24	Shaan Puri	Look at this freaking thing right here. I see basically a golf putting green — just the part where the hole is — and it's floating out in the ocean. You said that this driving range in New Zealand pays out $10,000 if you hit a hole-in-one. It's 111 yards away. You get this, like, "plaque" if you hit the hole-in-one. So what is the business here? They basically — it's like a carnival game. They charge you a little bit to try to hit a hole-in-one. Is that it?
02:54	Chris Koerner	Alright, it's kind of like unbundling a carnival. The business is math — they're just using math. Right? And here's the math. The average amateur golfer — and I don't golf, I hate golf — has a 1 in 25,000 chance of getting a hole-in-one on a par three (which this is, okay). So this company in New Zealand — it's right off the road on this lake — has announced multiple times that they pay out on average once every two weeks. I can use math to say, all right, these guys... I know how much they sell balls for: it's like $40 for 25 balls or something. They have a sensor in the hole, and they have divers go get the balls every couple of weeks.
03:34	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, there's, like, a scuba diver swimming around the thing. Is he there all the time, or does he just do that once a week—go and get all the balls?"
03:40	Chris Koerner	Just once a week. I can surmise, based on math and statistics, that this place nets profits like $300,000 to $500,000 a year, which is... there's nothing to see there. It's a little stand with a floating green one [unclear], one guy just standing there with an iPad. So why isn't this all over the place?
04:00	Shaan Puri	Wait, so you said this is just roadside in New Zealand?
04:03	Chris Koerner	There's one—there's one of these in the world that I know of, off the side of a road in New Zealand.
04:07	Shaan Puri	But it's off the side of the road. It's not even like a mini-golf course or tourist attraction — you're just saying this is in a random area right now. Yeah. Alright, so let's say we wanted to do this. Let's brainstorm this together, and maybe we'll actually do it. Maybe we'll find a listener to run this for us to make it happen. We'll make this an MFM case study. Alright. Hmm. So how would we do this in order to make it happen quickly—get momentum—and then have it actually work, actually be successful? </FormattedResponse>
04:33	Chris Koerner	So to me it's all about piggybacking. I don't want to guess where the golfers are. There are no golfers where this place is, but how much better would they be doing if there was already a captive audience right there? I would just find one golf course. You know how when you go to a golf course, after the eighteenth hole there's a putting green where you can chill? It would be like that. Take your nearest pond, put a floating green out there, put a tee, and have a little iPad on a stand that says, "Here's your ball" — just like a driving range. Twenty balls for $20, or whatever. $10,000 if you get a hole-in-one. It's a way for a golf course to earn additional revenue. They're not about to build a floating green and work out the logistics of it. So you could—yeah, you could do this as a service and say, "We'll install this. You're going to have more net income without doing any work; we'll take 30% of all your revenue as a fee."
05:24	Shaan Puri	Okay, I kinda love this idea, but you need the water for this floating thing, right? What are you suggesting? How would you do this if the golf course is not situated by, you know, the ocean...?
05:37	Chris Koerner	Whatever. I think I'm glad you brought that up, because I think the water is key. As men, we want to throw rocks in the water.
05:44	Shaan Puri	Yeah. I'm just— I think, visually, there's something. My testosterone went up like 15 points just looking at this. I could do this, right? If it was literally just a hole... like, here's just a hole — here's the nineteenth hole, right? You could...
05:59	Chris Koerner	Do that.
05:59	Shaan Puri	You could brand it: "Oh, this is the nineteenth hole." But just having that obstacle of Mother Nature there.
06:04	Chris Koerner	Yes.
06:05	Shaan Puri	There's something to that.
06:06	Chris Koerner	I mean, you win either way. If you get it on the green, you feel awesome. If you get a hole-in-one and win $10,000, you really feel awesome. If you miss, you see a splash — you can't lose. Or, worst-case scenario, you're just playing golf. You're paying money to play golf, which is why you're there in the first place.
06:23	Shaan Puri	"And you're going to get content out of this also. You're going to have your buddy film you, or we set up a camera here so you get an Instagram-worthy story for—yes, you know, for this thing. How much do you say people pay to take a swing at this? Do they buy 10 balls, or what do they do?"
06:37	Chris Koerner	"30. It's like $20, or like $35 for 20 balls, or $50 for 40 balls—something like that."
06:42	Shaan Puri	"Oh, so you get like 20 to 40 hacks at it to do it. Uh-huh. Yeah, that's pretty good."
06:48	Chris Koerner	And every guy thinks he can do it, right?
06:51	Shaan Puri	Of course... or that today might be a day. And also, golf — you're already, like, I don't know what the average spend is for a golf day, like a golf outing. I don't play golf personally, but there's the actual cost to play that day on the course; there's all the clubs and investments you've made; there's the cart; there's the tips; there's the food; there's the beer along the way. There's all this money spent. Dude, to spend an extra $40 to have a blast with your buddies at the end, or to have a story, or to just, you know, do something at the end — that's an absolute no-brainer. If you actually did this with the golf course, I thought you were gonna say, though, that you would do it just on the route to the golf course. You know, there's a lot of golfer traffic — who's gonna take a roadside stop here and try to do this?
07:33	Chris Koerner	I mean, you could do that too. I'm picturing a freeway with a lake to the right and an exit nearby. You rent the billboard right above it — arrow pointing down: "$10,000 for a floating hole-in-one" — and people can just pull off and do it. It doesn't have to be a golf course; you could use the same principle. To me, the principle is just math as a service. We're calling this a mass business, okay. </FormattedResponse>
07:56	Shaan Puri	Right, and...</FormattedResponse>
07:56	Chris Koerner	It's like, let's say you have a one-in-a-hundred chance.
07:59	Shaan Puri	"It's an outdoor casino."
08:02	Chris Koerner	Yes. Exactly right. Exactly.
08:03	Shaan Puri	What is a slot machine? What is roulette? What is craps? What are all these games? These are games where the house just said, "Cool — we'll take an edge. We'll take a map edge, and you get to play and have fun, right?" Yeah. But we—we take the edge. And what you're saying is to do the same thing.
08:17	Chris Koerner	Yeah. Even something like a putting green in a mall, or a walkable outdoor shopping area. Let's say you've got a 1-in-500 chance of making a 30-foot putt. So you say, "Hey—30-foot putt: you make it, we'll give you $500." And you just do the math. You say, "Alright, every $3,000 I get, I'm gonna pay out $500, statistically speaking."
08:37	Shaan Puri	"Dude, I love this idea. If you want to do this idea, email me at sean at sean puri. Chris and I will help you do this, and we'll document the journey. We'll put it out there in public — we'll kind of make it a thing, because I think part of it is the branding and the novelty factor. You want to see this online first, and then people will actually drive out to do it or plan to stop — not just whoever happens to see it and understand it while they're driving 50 miles an hour down the road. You know what I mean?"
09:03	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, I like the name Nineteenth Hole. That's a good one."
09:06	Shaan Puri	It's good, right? We might need...
09:07	Chris Koerner	To snag that domain name before this goes live.
09:12	Shaan Puri	Hey, I got a quick break because I want to tell you something cool. Our sponsor for this episode is HubSpot, but instead of the ad telling you about HubSpot, they wanted to do something useful for you. They did some research and found that a bunch of people in our community have side hustles. They start a business on the side, get it going, and then it becomes their main hustle over time. So instead of just telling you about the features of HubSpot, they wanted to give you something that will be useful for your side hustle. They put together a database of AI prompts—things you can put into ChatGPT or your favorite AI tool to help with your side hustle. Check it out; it's going to save you a bunch of time. I think it's a prompt database you should use to make your side hustle more successful. You can use this as your personal cheat sheet, your toolset to be a better operator with your side hustle. You can either scan the QR code that's on the screen or get the link in the description to access the AI prompt database. Alright, back to the show. Thanks, HubSpot. Alright, so I love the hole-in-one golf course. Alright, give me the next side hustle idea.
10:13	Chris Koerner	Okay, well, I want to talk about Facebook Marketplace. I feel like there's an entire economy in Facebook Marketplace. There are seven-figure business owners — let's say a fencing business. All they do is post to Facebook Marketplace organically once a week to get all their leads.
10:30	Shaan Puri	By the way, Facebook Marketplace has 1 billion monthly active users — just that tab.
10:34	Chris Koerner	Crazy, and no one's talking about it. What are we doing? I've got a story for you... I've a story.
10:42	Shaan Puri	By the way, explain the thing you just said real quick before you go to your story. So you said there are people who own local fencing companies whose entire sales machine is posting on Facebook—"fencing services." Is that what you're saying? Or are they answering requests for fencing service? What are they actually doing?
10:57	Chris Koerner	Yeah, they're just posting: "Hey, I put up cedar fences — six foot, $8 per linear foot." Then people message him. He goes out, gives a quote, and he has a $7,000 job. There's nothing paid — no paid ads. This is just one organic post that takes him five minutes, and he'll refresh it every couple of days.
11:14	Shaan Puri	Dude, I don't know if you saw this. We did an episode with high schoolers. I think it was like a high school version of "Shark Tank."
11:20	Chris Koerner	I saw that.
11:21	Shaan Puri	Yeah, and there was a kid who was, I think, 17 or 18 years old. His entire business — I forget even what the service was; it was home services of some kind. I don't remember.
11:27	Chris Koerner	It was, like, window washing or something.
11:29	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, it was like window washing or—oh, was gutter cleaning. Gutter cleaning was their highlight thing. Their entire business model was off of Nextdoor. So he's like, 'Yeah, I just started this in my neighborhood where I live. I went on Nextdoor and I said that I'd do this, and last year I serviced, you know, 60 homes in this neighborhood of 600 homes or whatever it was for gutter cleaning. That generated—I'm making up the numbers now because I don't remember off the top of my head—but it was like $500,000 in revenue.' And we were like, 'What?' He's like, 'I just post on there that this is what I do and then it's people in our neighborhood.' I was like, 'So could you post in the next neighborhood?' He's like, 'Yeah, I'm trying to figure out how to get around the—you know, like, yeah I can, I just haven't done that yet.' It's like, 'Wow, everybody should do this.' It's like, you know, 'What is my kid doing? What are they teaching you in pre-K right now? We gotta get after it with this Nextdoor—Nextdoor lead gen basically.' And so you're saying the same thing's happening at a bigger scale on Facebook Marketplace?"
12:22	Chris Koerner	Yeah — both great opportunities. Okay, great.
12:25	Shaan Puri	"So, tell me the story you're going to tell me."
12:26	Chris Koerner	Yeah, this is an outlier example — okay, results not guaranteed. In 2021, China had canceled Bitcoin mining. 2021 was a crazy year: a lot of money was being printed, and we started a Bitcoin mining facility. People were selling Bitcoin miners and hosting services on Facebook Marketplace. These miners cost $10,000. So you go type in the name of the model and you see them listed — cool. But I thought about the hosting price, because if you buy a Bitcoin miner you have to host it at a data center, and it's usually about $200 a month for the hosting fee. So I just posted, organically, a Facebook Marketplace Bitcoin-mining hosting service, but instead of putting in the price of the miner — which turns people off ($10,000).
13:12	Shaan Puri	$10,000. Great.</FormattedResponse>
13:13	Chris Koerner	Yeah. I put in the price of the hosting: $200. Then, when you click into it, in the description it's like, "it's actually $200 for hosting—here's the cost of the miners." I'm not exaggerating. That one ad—I had it running on multiple accounts. We would refresh it, but no paid [ads]. No paid [ads]. We did $9,800,000, all on Facebook Marketplace, in three months, profitably. This isn't like, "oh, and we spent $9,800,000 in ads."
13:39	Shaan Puri	Right.
13:40	Chris Koerner	Profitably — that's like the potential and kind of an extreme outlier. But I have other, more... and you? </FormattedResponse>
13:45	Shaan Puri	"Just to be clear, were you selling minors that you already owned, or what were you doing? We were..."
13:51	Chris Koerner	We were pre-selling them and then ordering them from China, so we had a positive cash flow conversion cycle in addition to all that. </FormattedResponse>
13:57	Shaan Puri	Alright, so you went on Facebook Ads. You specifically did the Marketplace ads — is that right?
14:02	Chris Koerner	Not even ads. We were just posting—just posting.
14:04	Shaan Puri	Alright—just organic posting. You're posting every day, you're posting it, and you're posting it in every city. Did you set up, like, a farm to post these? How'd you do that?
14:12	Chris Koerner	Yeah, we used VAs [virtual assistants] and multiple Facebook accounts. We posted in multiple cities because most people want to buy from someone local. The funnel was, you know, VAs answering responses, then they pushed people to a sales call, because it's hard to sell something so expensive over the internet. Once they got on the sales call, we would close about half of them.
14:32	Shaan Puri	Right. So—then you would close them, and you'd go order that same thing from China because there's a knowledge arbitrage here. Like... "I don't know how to go, or I don't trust spending $10,000 on Alibaba or AliExpress." And so you would then do that, and you'd have a margin. What was the rough margin on something like that? Call it 30%.
14:52	Chris Koerner	"30%, but like high-ticket. So... and this."
14:55	Shaan Puri	One, I'm guessing, didn't last in the sense that in 2025 maybe the same market dynamics—the demand and the supply—are not the same. Is that true?
15:03	Chris Koerner	Yep. Really, the biggest variable here is the frothiness of the mining market, which is not good right now. So I think this would work again if the mining market turned around more.
15:13	Shaan Puri	"When the time is right, would you do this? Are you planning to do this again if the mining market gets hyped again?"
15:20	Chris Koerner	Yes, yeah.
15:24	Shaan Puri	And how do you spend your money, dude? So, let's say you make a few million dollars doing something like this—what do you... what does Chris like to spend his money on?
15:31	Chris Koerner	Oh man. My family and I go on cool vacations, and I'm starting more businesses. I invest in real estate, but I just... I like starting businesses—it's the only thing I know.
15:43	Shaan Puri	But it seems like you start businesses that don't take a lot of capital.</FormattedResponse>
15:46	Chris Koerner	Yeah, that's true. But I like investing—tripling down on businesses that are more mature, where I can see a clear path to growth with more capital.
15:59	Shaan Puri	What's another Facebook Marketplace idea that somebody could do? Like, is it as simple as: "Hey, I noticed that there are garage shelving companies; they're not currently active in my area. I go talk to 10 business owners and say, 'Hey, if I bring you a customer, give me $300' — or whatever it is — and you do lead gen, because that business owner doesn't even think to do Facebook Marketplace activity?" </FormattedResponse>
16:20	Chris Koerner	Drive. Yeah.
16:20	Shaan Puri	Leads. Most service people—most small business owners—don't even think this way, right?
16:25	Chris Koerner	Oh, yeah, yeah. I mean, you could literally build an agency that just posts on Facebook Marketplace for business owners and sells them the leads, right?
16:31	Shaan Puri	Right.
16:32	Chris Koerner	But you mentioned shelving. I interviewed this guy named Alex on my podcast, The Kerner Office. He has a six-figure business just building—not shelving, but garage shelving on wheels with Costco totes. That's it. Only with organic Facebook Marketplace posts, and he nets $180,000 a year. That's the whole business, right? Garage shelving on Facebook Marketplace. Alright—he has a $300 saw, he goes and buys two-by-fours, and he didn't even have a truck for the first year and a half.
17:06	Shaan Puri	Right. Okay—what are your other ideas? I see a list of ten here, and we've probably done two or three. Give me... give me more.
17:14	Chris Koerner	Alright. Any idea?
17:15	Shaan Puri	You want — you want... No, no. Any idea? You want me to call?
17:17	Chris Koerner	"Out one of these. Just team me up."
17:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Take local tourist traps and put them in your home market. Is this like the "hole-in-one" challenge, or are you talking about something else?
17:24	Chris Koerner	Different. Yeah, this is a good one. So I went— you've seen Arrested Development, I assume? Of course. Okay, so there's the line, "There's money in the banana stand." We all know that went to... </FormattedResponse>
17:36	Shaan Puri	First day in Belleville, in Harvard. That's what they teach you, yes.
17:39	Chris Koerner	So, I went to Balboa Island with my family last year, and we went to the banana stand. For whatever reason, this one street has like seven banana stands, and there's one that's supposedly the best. I shelled out like $8 each for these bananas covered in chocolate and nuts. I made a video about... you know, how much profit these guys make. As I went to the window, I had to— I asked her, "How many of these do you sell a day? What's your busiest day ever? What's your slowest day ever?" All these people are behind you.
18:07	Shaan Puri	"Want or no nuts on people?"
18:11	Chris Koerner	They're ready, but I had to know. And then, to make matters worse, I pulled out my phone and made a video about how anyone could copy them. So, I'm a great guy, but... exactly — I don't remember the exact [phrase].
18:22	Shaan Puri	"Steal your girl over here, alright."
18:25	Chris Koerner	"Steal your banana." This one little shop — that's like 300 square feet — is doing about $7,000,000 a year in frozen bananas. What's the margin on an $8 banana with chocolate and peanuts? I just thought, why isn't this a thing? I didn't go to Balboa Island for the bananas, but once I was there I got them. There are Balboa Islands all over the world, and most of them have no banana stand. So this idea isn't just about a banana stand. It's about taking something really unique and novel. Maybe it's like the old western, timey photo booths you see in Pigeon Forge. Maybe it's funnel cake, or the mini-donuts you see in Gatlinburg. Take something like that and just test it. I'm not saying it's going to work, but you could test it very, very cheaply in other tourist markets or in non-tourist markets.
19:17	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. That's interesting. I wonder if that would work. I wonder how much of the appeal is that—do humans just like these kinds of frozen chocolate bananas? Or is it that, in that area or on that street, it's kind of known for this, and you see a line; because you see the line you start doing it? I wonder if it's kind of like an organ transplant. I wonder if there's donor rejection, or the host rejection of the organ, when you put one of these in a new area.
19:45	Chris Koerner	It could be. But I think that the greatest chance you'd have for success is taking, specifically, a tourist trap and putting it in a different tourist trap. It's like: this is a unique, novel thing that people don't buy when they're home. For instance, I have a friend in Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, who owns an indoor sledding facility. You can't tell me that wouldn't work in other tourist traps — they have the same type of demographic there.
20:11	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, that makes sense. Okay — give me another one. How about "Toasted Tours"? What is this?
20:17	Chris Koerner	Alright. This is in Northern California, by you. This guy took a 40-foot shipping container, put it on the back of a semi-truck, cut out the walls, added handrails, and put tables and chairs inside. He takes people on wine tours.
20:35	Shaan Puri	It's a party bus, but it's not even a bus—it's a shipping container.
20:39	Chris Koerner	"That is open air."
20:40	Shaan Puri	Open-air. Yeah, they like to cut out the sides.
20:43	Chris Koerner	Yes. So I'm swiping Instagram one day, and I see this video that just broke my frame. It's a shipping container, and people are dancing inside as it's going around a bend at high speed...
20:54	Shaan Puri	Like, "looks dangerous." What am I? </FormattedResponse>
20:55	Chris Koerner	Looking at it, this guy crushes it. In his first year, he had experience doing wine tours, but nothing like this. I think he did over $1 million his first year, with about 60% margins.
21:09	Shaan Puri	What I like about some of these is that they are visually viral... So, you know, the definition of virality—people get it wrong. People think it's "word-of-mouth." "Word-of-mouth" is actually a different thing. Word-of-mouth is: "I like this so much, I want to tell my friends about it."
21:23	Chris Koerner	Mmm-hmm.
21:24	Shaan Puri	Viral is actually more like a sneeze—you spread a virus without even wanting to spread it. This was back when Hotmail started. I'm just sending you an email; I'm not trying to tell you to use Hotmail. But because I'm sending you an email from my Hotmail address and at the bottom it says, "I sent this via Hotmail," they added that to the bottom of the email. It spread like a virus. That's how a lot of the big viral services actually spread. Facebook was like this, too. I'm uploading photos, I'm just tagging my friends. I'm not trying to tell them, "Hey, you should join Facebook; I'm having a grand old time here." They tagged a friend and it sent them an email saying, "You got tagged in a photo." People can't resist being like, "Somebody put a photo of me on the internet—I must see this." That's how Facebook grew early on: one viral loop. Then there are other types of virality. One is visually viral—it's not that the people on this truck were trying to tell everyone about it, but it's so novel-looking that I can't help but look at it and learn about it. I think the Hole-in-One Challenge has the same benefit. You see it; it's super interesting to look at. You get the concept right away and it's worth remarking on. You talk about it with people, you notice it, you want to do it. The act of somebody else doing it made you want to do it. So I like these things that are sort of walking billboard–style businesses because, once you get them going, they market themselves...
22:46	Chris Koerner	Dude, I have some really good examples of visually viral stuff. Have you seen that guy who mows people's lawns for free?
22:56	Shaan Puri	Please tell me you've seen that. </FormattedResponse>
22:57	Chris Koerner	Who is this guy? Okay—this guy is out of Kansas or something, a young guy. He owned a lawn care business, a small, kind of struggling business. One day he sets up his tripod... so he's mowing and so he's pressure washing. He sets up a tripod in his tripod [unclear].
23:10	Shaan Puri	YouTube channel now.
23:11	Chris Koerner	Right, so this guy has 45 million followers across platforms combined. All he does is set up a tripod, put on a mic, walk up to a door, and say, "Hey, your lawn looks like crap — mind if I mow it for free?" "What's the catch?" the homeowner asks. "I publish this to YouTube and make money," he replies. "Cool." Then he mows it for free with a time-lapse video. Visually, yes — we want to see the outcome. Retention is there, so the platforms push it.
23:36	Shaan Puri	What is it going to look like?
23:37	Chris Koerner	"When he's done with this guy—I mean, what is the value of 45 million social media followers versus the value of a local lawn care business?"
23:45	Shaan Puri	Right. I mean, dude, look at this — by the way, if you just sort by Popular, he stacks the things. First, there's the visual/viral element: before-and-after shots, which humans want to complete. They want to know the solution. Then there's the novelty/surprise factor: "Oh, this guy's doing this for free — that's interesting. Why? I want to know the answer." But then he stacks on drama. The top videos have titles like: > "Angry homeowner confronts me while I'm mowing this vacant home" > "Cop approaches me while I'm mowing this deserted home and tells me..." > "This homeowner, stunned at how wide the sidewalks are" — her tears said it all: "My prayers have been answered." So this guy has a skill stack. He has lawn-care skills — a skill that's worth only X dollars in the market — but then he layers on being really good at content. Those two together created rarity. How many lawn-care guys are really good at content? I don't know — zero. The number's less than a dozen. Suddenly he became rare, and when you're rare, you're valuable.
24:50	Chris Koerner	Exactly, yeah — that's really cool.
24:53	Shaan Puri	Okay, so let's jump in: side hustles and the ones that you currently have. Let's do some of the fun ones. The one I met you on is about Buc-ee's. So, for people who don't know, could you explain just how crazy of a business Buc-ee's is, and then the side hustle you created off the back of Buc-ee's?
25:10	Chris Koerner	Buc-ee's is like your "redneck Disney" gas station. They're about half the size of a Costco. There are 51 locations, and they each do about $60 million to $80 million in revenue per year. If you haven't been there, there's nothing like it — it's like a really... </FormattedResponse>
25:26	Shaan Puri	So, the math on that is like $3 billion in revenue on 50 gas stations. "Yeah—yeah? What? Well, I've never been to a Buc-ee's. What makes a Buc-ee's so great? Is it even a gas station, or is it just something else that happens to..."
25:39	Chris Koerner	Have Gas is a brand with a gas station. They have over 100 pumps. When you walk in, there's just things happening everywhere: tacos being made, people shouting about brisket, Beaver Nuggets T‑shirts, beavers walking around, and the cleanest bathrooms you'll ever find. There's nothing else like it. You just walk in and you're amazed from the get-go. Okay, before you... </FormattedResponse>
26:01	Shaan Puri	"Tell me your side hustle. Off the back of that, what's the quick origin story of this? Has this been around for like a hundred years? Who started it? Is this so successful? I mean, I've never heard that — $3 billion ($3,000,000,000) in revenue on 51 gas stations."
26:14	Chris Koerner	They founded it about 40 years ago. There was a guy named Arch — he was called "Bucky" as a kid — and he opened a gas station. Then they just started going bigger and bigger. They kept pushing the envelope. Their whole signature was this mascot: a cheesy-looking beaver that people just loved. Once they started selling merch — T-shirts and tumblers and all that — they just exploded. They're really unique in that they put themselves in far-flung areas. They're not in the city; they're on the way to a vacation spot or close to a vacation destination.
26:47	Shaan Puri	Oh, so it's like the perfect rest stop, right? Because, yeah—if anything, I was just on a road trip. We drove to Tahoe; it's a three-hour drive, roughly. But there are these patches where you need to stop in the middle, and the bar is so low for the rest-stop experience. It's basically a porta-potty in a good scenario. Then you get the trucker rest stops, a gas station, or maybe a little strip mall with a Starbucks. What you're saying is they built something actually really cool out on those drives, and that maybe is one of the golden insights for them.
27:22	Chris Koerner	Yeah, it's just — you walk in and you're a captive audience. You can buy lunch. You can buy gas. Most people just park at the pump. You can buy a T‑shirt. And the average ticket... I don't know what it is — they're privately traded — but people spend hundreds of dollars there. You're not just, like, buying a Celsius and hopping out.
27:37	Shaan Puri	Alright, what is this business you created on top of Buc-ee's? Or, like, your side hustle for Buc-ee's?
27:42	Chris Koerner	Yeah, so, back to what you said about me not being able to focus: I was in the middle of running this business that was growing and demanding all of our time and attention, and I took my business partner to Buc-ee's. He was from Utah; it was his first time. On the way home I distinctly remember this—I remember the overpass. I was driving. I'm ashamed to say I pulled out my phone and I said, "Kirk, these guys must kill it online." I said, "Do you know Disney does, like, X billion just through their online merch store? These guys must kill it." So I went to bucees.com and I looked for the "Shop" button, and it wasn't there. They didn't sell online—anything. Not food, snacks, shirts, anything. I just sat there in silence. I felt like capitalism was being murdered. Like, what is—why? What good reason is there for this? This was, like, six years ago. Then we just started talking and were like, "What if we launched a website for them? What if we went online for them?" We were running a 3PL (third-party logistics) business at the time—a really hard business—and we thought we could launch this business for them as a permissionless way to get their business end to end and get them as a customer. Maybe they'll try to sue us, but worst case it'll be a great story.
28:52	Shaan Puri	"And so, what did you do?"
28:53	Chris Koerner	So the first thing I did was start cold-emailing the founders, the executive team—everyone. I said, "Hey, you need to be online. We can do it for you. We'll build a Shopify store; we'll do everything end-to-end. We have a warehouse, shelf space, etc." No response. Just crickets. So at that point, it's like, "Alright—let's take this into our own hands."
29:09	Shaan Puri	So, most people give up there, right? They try to partner. Most people won't even cold email. But if you do cold email, you give up when they don't reply.
29:16	Chris Koerner	Yep — exactly. So we bought beaversnacks.com because their mascot was a beaver. I went to Thumbtack and hired a photographer for like $200, and I documented all this. I have pictures of all of it. I took my four kids and my wife to the nearest Buc-ee's. My wife and I split up. I said, "You get merch; I'll get snacks." I told her, "If it has a Buc-ee's logo on it, buy it. I don't want the Doritos or the Coke, because they white‑label a bunch of stuff. I only want something with a Buc-ee's logo." We spent about $3,000. We had a receipt this long. We took it back to the warehouse.
29:52	Shaan Puri	Was the lady like, "Wow, what are you—what are you doing?" They were...</FormattedResponse>
29:54	Chris Koerner	Everyone was looking at us, and I'm an introvert. I hated it; I felt so weird. I'm like, "Don't look at me — just let me do my thing." So we brought it all back to the warehouse, put it in this office, hired this photographer, and she took pictures of everything. We uploaded it as a CSV to Shopify and launched a website, beaversnacks.com. And I say "launch" — nobody knew it existed. The first thing I did was start scraping and cold-emailing every Texas reporter I could find: Eater, Southern Living, Texas Monthly, Fox News 38, San Antonio District — you name it. I just started saying, "Here's who I am, here's what I'm doing. Here's who I am, here's what I'm doing."
30:34	Shaan Puri	And so you weren't afraid? Because most people would try to lay low and do this—"hey, we don't have an official partnership." You took the opposite approach. You were like, "Hey, can I use this story to get some attention, whether it be good or bad?" Is that right?
30:46	Chris Koerner	Yeah, because I felt like, okay: worst-case scenario — cease and desist. We have a great story for a podcast one day. Best-case scenario is we get them as a customer, or this becomes a standalone business. Somewhere in between is going to be interesting, right? Maybe I have to fill my pantry with snacks — $3,000 worth of snacks — and my kids eat it for the next seven years.
31:05	Shaan Puri	We had a guest come on, and he said, "Do what makes the best story. When in doubt—when you're at a fork in the road, take whichever path will make the best story." You choose the path that'll make the best story here. Okay—so, you... yes.
31:15	Chris Koerner	And I heard that, did...
31:16	Shaan Puri	You get pressed.
31:16	Chris Koerner	I heard that episode and thought, "That's me — I agree with that." So I also did my research. It's called the first sale doctrine, which means anyone can resell whatever they want; they just can't pretend to be or imitate that brand. There was a guy who imitated Trader Joe's to do what I did. He called himself Pirate Joe's. The logo and store layout were similar, and he got sued out of existence. So I thought, "Okay — as long as I say I am not Bucky's, I'm a third‑party reseller and I'm clear about that, they really don't have grounds to sue me." I started cold‑emailing people. They loved the story, and I started getting on the phone with reporters.
31:53	Shaan Puri	So, any tips on that? I've learned this with PR — PR is a very specific niche game. Once you understand how a journalist thinks, you can reverse engineer what you need to actually do. For example, our buddy Ramon did this recently and went mega-viral because he understood that dynamic. He texted me and basically called the shot. He said: > "As soon as the tariff news came out... some people thought this is going to be horrible for businesses. Some people thought, 'Well, why don't those businesses just make it in America? We'll buy it if it's made in America.'" He launched an A/B test on his website, Athena.com [a showerhead product]. He offered two options: buy the one sourced from China or buy the one sourced from America. The American version cost a little more because it’s more expensive to manufacture in the U.S., but he gave consumers a choice. The results were wild: about 25,000 visits and literally zero checkouts on the American product, while there were a few hundred purchases of the Asian-made product. He ran the test knowing either outcome would give him a strong story — people either would buy made-in-America products or they wouldn't. He then took the results to journalists. It got written up in around 40 major publications, drove tons of traffic to the site, earned many backlinks, and boosted his SEO. It was a genius, quick-acting move on the back of the tariff news. While most people were playing defense — like me in e‑commerce, thinking, "Oh shit, I just need to survive" — he played offense. So, I’m curious: do you have any tips from your experience about how to get people to actually write about you?
33:33	Chris Koerner	Yeah. I mean, you have to understand that reporters want something cool to write about. I get DMs all the time from people wanting something from me, and 98% of them have nothing interesting to talk about. But if someone DM'd me and said, "Hey — I did this cool thing. Will you post about it?" I would, because I want to post about cool things.
33:53	Shaan Puri	Yeah, no — my job is to post interesting things.
33:55	Chris Koerner	Yes, please send it to me. Once you realize that, do something interesting—something cool—and then go tell as many people as you can about it. A small percentage of them will post about it, reporters included.
34:07	Shaan Puri	"How did you frame it at the time?"
34:09	Chris Koerner	I framed it as: "I am doing a viral marketing stunt, and I want to get Bucky's attention. If I don't, then I'm going to run this business as well as I can."
34:18	Shaan Puri	Oh—so you told the reporters that up front? Yeah. Oh, gotcha. But, by the way, give us the headline, because now we're talking about this Idols; we haven't mentioned how well it's done. Can you give us some numbers that give us an idea of, like, the success of this?
34:31	Chris Koerner	I mean, I'll tell you what the headline literally was: "Texas man makes $200 in his first 30 days reselling Buc-ee's goods online." That was it. So Texas Monthly reached out to me — they're the biggest Texas news publication — and they were like, "We love this. We're going to make this a feature story. Give me everything you can." We talked and talked and talked. Later that afternoon they said, "Chris, good news: Buc-ee's in-house counsel would love to chat." I was like, what's good about that? I'm dead. I'm dead in the water. But I said, okay, you told Buc-ee's. Great — I'm glad you were able to get a hold of them. I get on the phone with him and he's like, "Listen, we actually don't mind what you're doing. I don't like the name 'Beaver Snacks' — we're a beaver, it's kind of confusing. I don't like that your colors are yellow. We're kind of yellow. Change the name, put a disclaimer in your logo that persists throughout the whole website, put a disclaimer on every product page, and you have our blessing. We're not going to sign anything but we're not going to come after you. We will support you." So we did. We made those changes, and then they linked to us.
35:38	Shaan Puri	"On a cool-ass general counsel — that's pretty rare."
35:41	Chris Koerner	Yeah, yeah — and then they link to us in their FAQs, which is the most amazing backlink ever. So, on the one hand, going viral meant we got a million competitors and all these copycats. On the other hand, we have the biggest SEO moat we could ever hope for.
36:00	Shaan Puri	So wait—how? You skipped a step. You said their headline was $200,000 in 30 days, but you didn't say how you got the $200,000 in 30 days. How did you initially get that traction?
36:10	Chris Koerner	It was all based on those viral articles. We didn't do any paid ads — we just went viral. We put everything as "in stock" on Shopify. You can do that whether it's actually in stock or not, and we just started selling out.
36:22	Shaan Puri	So, the articles initially must not have been 200,000. The articles initially were just like: "Texas man starts shop to sell Bucky stuff online."
36:29	Chris Koerner	Correct. They've written about us since then. But in the beginning, it was "Texas man"—they called it "Texpats" instead of "expats." They were like, "Texas man launches online bucky store for Texpats." That was the big headline, and that's how...
36:43	Shaan Puri	Helped this go about like a person from Texas who's no longer in Texas but misses their stacks... misses them, yeah. </FormattedResponse>
36:48	Chris Koerner	That was the whole thesis. These Buc-ee's are in Ennis, Texas—places you'd never heard of because they're on the way to the beach. So if you fell in love with some random bohemian garlic jerky, you could never buy it again, right? That's where we came in: "buy it from us."
37:05	Shaan Puri	"And so, how's this business doing now? Was this a flash in the pan, or is it still doing well?"
37:09	Chris Koerner	This business has grown 20% to 50% per year — every single year. Steady Eddie. We are completely riding on the coattails of Buc-ee's [the convenience-store chain], and we are not ashamed.
37:20	Shaan Puri	"To admit that—so, can you say how much revenue you guys are doing on this?"
37:23	Chris Koerner	"We're doing between $3 and $500,000 a month, profitably, with very, very little paid ad spend."
37:29	Shaan Puri	And the funny thing is, here you go—buy it retail, right? You don't have a wholesale discount; they're not giving it to you at a cut. So you buy retail and then you just mark it up 10–20% or something. What do you do?
37:40	Chris Koerner	We mark it up 100%.
37:43	Shaan Puri	Oh, okay. Because you're like... if?
37:44	Chris Koerner	You want.
37:44	Shaan Puri	It's 20. If you want it that bad, here—this is, you know, your way to get it.
37:49	Chris Koerner	Honestly, we mark it up as much as we have to. I mean, you know, e-commerce: to make it a 20% net margin, and that happens to be about a 100% markup. </FormattedResponse>
37:58	Shaan Puri	Right — that's amazing. Okay, so that's one of your side hustles. We said there were six that were each six-figure. I don't know if we'll get to all six, but give me another one. So what's another of your side hustles right now that is contributing to your cash flow?
38:14	Chris Koerner	So we started a pet cremation business, and that's a fun one. That one's actually very profitable. That's a fun one — it is fun for fun.
38:24	Shaan Puri	For you, maybe — yeah. Okay, so explain: how did you get the idea, then? What is it, and how did you do it?
38:30	Chris Koerner	Okay, so it all started with a relationship that my business partner had with a very high-volume veterinary clinic here in DFW [Dallas–Fort Worth]. They do as much business as five veterinary clinics. He learned about the industry and how pet cremation has like 90%+ net margins. It's a very old-school business. But, you know, we've had this puppy boom during COVID, so all these puppies are five years old now. There's more dogs than children—that's like the whole thesis. There's more dogs than children; it's getting crazier. Cremation has 90% margins. Most of the operators are 60 years old. They're doing great; they're doing fine. They don't need ads; they don't need organic [marketing]. If you go look at the Google Keyword Tool, we saw that the search competition was low, the ticket size was high, and the search traffic was high. So we launched a business around that thesis. So—sorry—so explain.
39:28	Shaan Puri	You went to — you went to the Google Ads Keyword Tool, right? (mhm.) That's where you went to, kind of, do diligence on the demand for this.
39:35	Chris Koerner	"That's it."
39:35	Shaan Puri	"And you found, obviously, the holy grail: low, low competition, high-ticket—what was the third one, growth or demand?" </FormattedResponse>
39:42	Chris Koerner	High volume, low competition, high ticket. Yeah, it's the holy grail.
39:47	Shaan Puri	And so, you start one of these. Are you actually the service that does it, or are you the lead gen (lead generation)?
39:53	Chris Koerner	We both have two different businesses. One is a programmatic SEO site that generates leads for cremation facilities all over the country. The other is that we're just a middleman: we have refrigerated vans, and we pick up the frozen pets from the veterinarians and deliver them to the cremation facilities. We take a margin for that service.
40:16	Shaan Puri	Okay, gotcha. So, tell me a little about this business. I don't — I know nothing about the pet cremation business. What did you do in the first ninety days to make this business come to life? I like the speed with which you operate. We're going to talk about another one in a second that I think is a quick, off-the-ground version of these ideas. You very much are a zero-to-one kind of guy. I like that you do a lot of different things. I like that you're high energy and basically not lazy. There are a lot of people out here who sell this kind of side-hustle, passive-income thing. There's nothing passive about you. I feel like you are Mr. Active — you get after it once you have an idea. I have this phrase: "inspiration is perishable — ideas are avocados; they go brown very quickly." What's great about you is that you don't let the ideas and the inspiration perish. You actually act on them very quickly and you have a high, high bias to action. So, what do the first ninety or so days look like when you have a new idea? Maybe you could use this one as an example; if not, use a different one.
41:17	Chris Koerner	Yeah, I focus most of my energy on validating the idea with some ad spend or a couple of conversations. I don't do any extensive market research; I don't talk to any potential customers. I'm not saying there's no value in that — that's just not how I roll. I really, really like using tools like Facebook, like general publicly available tools that most people know and love.
41:43	Shaan Puri	"Stuff I could do from my boxers at home. That's what I like."
41:45	Chris Koerner	Right. Yes, and a lot of times, by the end of the day I realize, "oh, this is a dud — let's move on," right? But also a lot of the time, by the end of the day I'm like, "oh wow, there's something here. My thesis was true — let's put another day into..."
41:58	Shaan Puri	So... what would you do in this pet cremation business? What did you do? </FormattedResponse>
42:01	Chris Koerner	So, the thesis here started with a relationship that my business partner had. The pitch was: let's get the cremation facility owner and the veterinary clinic owner in the same room and pitch them this win. To the cremation facility owner: "Hey, we're going to get you a lot more veterinary clinics because we're really good at sales." To the vet: "Hey, you need to raise your prices. You're way too low. You'll make even more margin working through a middleman, believe it or not, because we're going to only do one thing: pick up pets and drop them off." There was a big conflict of interest here because the cremation facility owner was about to lose some margin. But we were selling him on the fact that we would bring him a lot more customers. Basically, this was a good example of what I normally do: if that conversation doesn't go well, I don't launch the business — I just move on.
42:54	Shaan Puri	And you weren't afraid that, when you put those two in the same room, they'd be like, "Great, yeah, we should do this. Who's this guy? What is he? Why do we need this guy?" Did you see any risk in putting yourself there as the middleman, and actually connecting the two dots — the really high-volume vet clinic with the information service that you thought they should be using?
43:11	Chris Koerner	Well, the thing is that they were already working together, right? So what you're saying was correct: that was the risk — we inserted ourselves, you're saying.
43:20	Shaan Puri	There was some friction. Uh-huh. There was some friction that you were offering to remove— is that right? "Yeah." And the friction in this case was what?
43:25	Chris Koerner	It was that the veterinarian—or the cremation facility owner—made all his margin on actually doing the cremation, and he was losing money on all the logistics. </FormattedResponse>
43:35	Shaan Puri	Okay.
43:36	Chris Koerner	But this customer we were talking to was one of his biggest customers. So we were saying, "Hey — you're going to lose some margin on this biggest customer because we're inserting ourselves. We're going to take some of it, but we're going to more than compensate for it by: (a) removing logistics from your plate; and (b) finding you more veterinary clinics."
43:53	Shaan Puri	And then, for the vet clinic, we're saying, "Hey, raise your price a little bit." Yeah — we need to be able to do that to make this work.
44:01	Chris Koerner	Yep. And so our thesis was: if that conversation doesn't go well, the business doesn't. No—an asymmetric bet.
44:08	Shaan Puri	But if it does, then we have — the hardest part: we have customers and revenue through the door from day one. Yep. If they agree to this — exactly. Yeah. Then you went and tried to recreate that by getting 15 other vendors. Now, most of them, I assume, already had a partner or some vendors for cremation services. So what's your sales pitch to them? How did you go and get more customers on board?
44:31	Chris Koerner	Yeah. Our sales pitch was: our competitors were very unsophisticated. They would literally walk through the front door of a veterinary clinic, take the frozen dogs, put them in a bag, and then walk out through the waiting room. So our pitch was, "That's our competition. We will never do that." We'd pull up out back in an unmarked van. We'd be very caring and respectful. In some cases, they don't even have to pay anymore — we'll just pick up the phone and be reliable. That was the pitch.
44:58	Shaan Puri	And is there something to learn here about — you know — so many of these simple businesses where the bar is really low? People are simply not doing any outreach; they're not doing any door-to-door sales. Have you made a killing? You know, Warren Buffett has said this before. He goes, "The secret to winning is weak competition." He's not looking to prove that he's a genius at the hardest games. He's looking for very weak competition where he can simply be competent and just do best practices. </FormattedResponse>
45:26	Chris Koerner	Oh, dude — it is so true. We see it on Twitter all the time: "go find a business with a fax machine and compete against him." Yes, that actually works. We own a tree-trimming business, and a big bottleneck for us is stump grinding. I thought, man, there needs to be a business that's just stump grinding, but B2B — not stump grinding that goes through homeowners, only the jobs that come through other tree-trimming companies. Because we own a tree-trimming company, we could see it from the inside. So I had a thesis. I hired a virtual assistant (today I would just use an AI voice agent). I took the city of Houston and scraped every single tree-trimming business in Houston — there were about a thousand. I had this virtual assistant call every single one and note: did they answer? Did the number work? If they did answer, ask, "Do you grind stumps?" If yes, "Would you ever outsource that?" If yes, "How much would you pay?" So I spent about $200 getting this.
46:27	Shaan Puri	Research. I'm not familiar with the tree-trimming business — surprise, surprise. So why does a tree-trimming business not also do the stumps? Why is that a separate problem that they don't like to deal with?
46:37	Chris Koerner	Yeah, great question. So a tree-trimming business sometimes needs a bucket truck to get up high and a chainsaw. But that's only half the battle. Then you have to get the stump out of the ground, or else you can't grow grass there. So it's a stump grinder — you've got to pull it on a trailer, whereas before you don't even need a trailer. It's just a whole different system. They have to go rent it: they stand in line, they pay $300, they rent it, they put gas in it, they drive it back to the job site, they grind it, then they have to bring it back. It eats into their profit. So I thought, okay: if a tree-trimming company could just outsource all of their stump grinding — B2B-only — is there an opportunity there?
47:13	Shaan Puri	So the assistant goes: she calls everybody. She asks them, "Would you be willing to outsource that?" And are people just saying, "Yeah, yeah, we'd be willing to outsource that"? Is that—like—can you get that clear of a signal just off of a VA's phone call?
47:26	Chris Koerner	"So, only 22% of people answered the phone."
47:31	Shaan Puri	That's it, and...
47:32	Chris Koerner	Of the ones that did, almost half said, "If I could outsource this, I would — gladly." Then we even got further down the script and asked, "Would you pay $77 per inch — or whatever — of diameter?" People answered yes. I published all that information on my podcast, and people went out and started some grinding businesses with the exact thesis. We learned the key takeaway: pick an industry where people seem to be doing well, call all of them, and see how many answer their phone. You can cross-reference that against the Google Keyword Tool and other publicly available data to see how much demand versus supply there is in any given market.
48:12	Shaan Puri	Okay — I like that. You did one recently; you had this Instagram video. I'm going to actually play it here. I love this video for a couple of reasons. One: the idea is fun. Two: "know your energy" — what you're describing here is pretty great. So, here — I love this. This is you talking about starting a pickleball facility.
48:32	Chris Koerner	This freaking thing right here — I'm in my warehouse/shop. It is 2,100 square feet and I'm putting a business here. It's called Secret Pickleball and it's gonna be $99 per month. I'm going to cap it at 200 members — that's $20,000 per month. There are 7,700 people within 10 minutes of here that play pickleball every week, and I just need 200 of them to make this a six-figure business. No employees. 24/7 key-card access, cameras, bathroom, vending machines already in. In the next 60 days we're adding drywall, painting lines, and adding the bathroom back there. If you wanna watch me fail or you wanna watch me win, follow and I'll document the whole journey... [transcript cuts off]
49:04	Shaan Puri	Business plan here. Basically, you're standing in this warehouse and you're like, "Look at this freaking thing right here," which is how you start all of your videos — and I think that's a hilarious little hook. So, can you add some color to this? Where's the—what's the origin of this idea? How's this going? Tell me more about this.
49:20	Chris Koerner	Yeah. So that shop I'm in in the video is basically in my backyard. It's at the back of my property. Historically, I've rented it out to landscaping businesses for, like, 25.
49:30	Shaan Puri	"Ranch or something. What—what is this?"
49:32	Chris Koerner	It's three acres, and it's very... yeah — it's at the back of my property. I was just thinking, what is the best and highest use of this property? Have you ever been to Secret Pizza in, I think, the Cosmo in Vegas?
49:46	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah — I love that place.
49:47	Chris Koerner	Yeah, that place does, like, 9,000,000 a year in pizza [sales], and they don't have a Google profile.
49:51	Shaan Puri	They don't.
49:52	Chris Koerner	Have no website.
49:53	Shaan Puri	Yeah, if people haven't been there, it's about five feet wide. It's like a tidy hallway—like in high school when your locker is on the side. It's basically that. They just sell slices of pizza at the Cosmo Hotel in Vegas.
50:04	Chris Koerner	Yes. So I was going for that — I call it Secret Pickleball. I just thought, "Okay, I'm going to run some Facebook ads. I'm going to go to my shop. I'm going to take three videos and A/B/C test them on Facebook Ads' Instant Form with a six-mile radius."
50:19	Shaan Puri	Sorry—was your ad a video like this, where you're saying, "I'm gonna build this here"?
50:23	Chris Koerner	Yes.
50:23	Shaan Puri	"Or was it like a mock-up?"
50:25	Chris Koerner	That was one of the three, yeah. The one you showed was one of my three ads, yeah.
50:29	Shaan Puri	And what were the other two? Were they finished products, like renderings? Or what did you do with one and the other?
50:34	Chris Koerner	One of them had a really bad AI image-rendering overlay for a split second, but that's it. I'm just standing in this empty warehouse.
50:43	Shaan Puri	When you say, "I ran some Facebook ads," give people a sense of how you do that. Right — everyone I know who does this has a certain budget. For example: "Hey, I'm going to run five [ads]. I'm going to spend $500, and I'm looking for maybe this cost per click, or I'm looking for this much net conversion of people signing up to my waitlist." Some people even have a fake checkout and then refund people afterward, saying, "Hey, sorry—this doesn't actually exist yet," or, "Yep, we got delayed, but it'll be out soon. I refunded you for now, but you know it's coming." They're looking for that funnel — the metrics to validate that, "Hey, cool. If this works at $500, I think I'd be able to spend maybe $1,000 or $5,000 in order to get my 200 members," or "$50,000 to get my 200 members," whatever it is. Can you explain your method for Facebook ad testing this?
51:27	Chris Koerner	Yeah, for sure. So I used one campaign, then three ad sets and three ads — one video for each ad set. I started it at $25 a day per video, so $75 a day total. My ad was a Facebook Instant Form asking for name, phone, email. After the Instant Form it forwarded them to a Typeform with 19 questions that are very granular: What is your skill level at pickleball? How often do you play? Do you do doubles or singles? All of this is going to determine how many members I can take on. The whole thesis is to have one pickleball court indoors — nice, private, air-conditioned — that people pay $100–$200 a month for. So I don't want the pros that play twice a day. It's a very finite resource. I want people that hardly ever play — like the Planet Fitness model, except expensive. I want repeat business too. I knew 5% of Americans play pickleball weekly, and I knew within six miles of me there's 200,000 people. So I needed... there's like 5,000 to 7,000 people in my local TAM [total addressable market], right? I was hoping I could convert someone for $100, because my guess is the LTV (lifetime value) is going to be about $1,000. But I think it's actually a lot more, because no one plays pickleball alone — if I get one customer, they're going to bring two, three, or four, right? What I learned was... the LTV is still to be determined, but I'm able to convert new customers at $12 each.
53:01	Shaan Puri	And so, how many members does this secret—does this exist now? I don't know when you posted this. </FormattedResponse>
53:05	Chris Koerner	I'm building it. I'm—I'm literally putting a septic tank in the building right now, like it's being built out. I'm...
53:11	Shaan Puri	"Alright, so—how much is it going to cost you to do this? You already have the structure there. How much are you going to put into making a pickleball court to bring this idea to life?"
53:18	Chris Koerner	On the low end, 20,000. Realistically, 30,000 to 40,000.
53:22	Shaan Puri	That's it. Wow. I would have guessed it's more.
53:25	Chris Koerner	Yeah, well, it has air conditioning. I need to expand the building because I need room for a bathroom, and then I need to add a bathroom. So if I didn't need a bathroom, it would be much less. And then I...
53:34	Shaan Puri	You need to paint lines so anybody could just Google Maps "pickleball court" in your area. Right—wherever you live, you could 100% Google Maps "pickleball." You could take a map and ask, "Where is there not space?" Then you could go drive to those spots and see, "Oh wow, that one's kinda shitty, or it's outdoors," or "This one over here is always overrun—it's always packed." You could literally map out: "Oh wow, I just need to take an industrial space and convert it to a private pickleball gym—a membership model: one court, two courts, three courts, whatever." And so, the math you're saying here... are you charging $100, or what did you end up charging?
54:11	Chris Koerner	"I'm gonna end up charging $1.49. Alright — so you're charging $1.49, are you?"
54:16	Shaan Puri	"Still targeting 200 members, or did you find that assumption was too high or too low?"
54:20	Chris Koerner	It's... I can accept around 150 members if I accept the right members.
54:26	Shaan Puri	Alright. So you're talking about $22,000 a month of top-line revenue from this, and you're saying it might cost you in this case $20,000–$30,000 to build. I think—let's just assume it's even $75,000; let's triple the price to build out because maybe their space needs it or you're just being conservative. So you've got $22,000 coming in top-line. Is there any opex here? Do you need a person? Is it a membership model? What is your monthly cost in terms of, roughly, utilities and everything else?
55:00	Chris Koerner	Yeah. Key-card entry: $24.07. Online booking system through a third-party app. Cameras. No employees. Cleaner: I'm going to use the cleaner I use for my house. She'll go there two to four times a week, depending on how dirty it gets. Insurance, utilities, internet: Including cleaning, we're talking about $1,500 a month to $2,000 a month.
55:22	Shaan Puri	Alright, so...
55:23	Chris Koerner	You're talking.</FormattedResponse>
55:23	Shaan Puri	About, like, you know, 90% profit margins on this. But let's be conservative — let's even say 80%. Mmm. That would be roughly generating about $17,000 to $18,000 a month in cash flow off of pickleball, off of one pickleball court. Mmm. Yeah, that's pretty crazy to me.
55:43	Chris Koerner	Yeah, and it's actually pretty unique. I use deep research to see if there are any other private indoor courts that only have one to two courts, because there are a lot of franchises that have 15 courts. A lot of the haters on Twitter were saying things like, "No one—no one would pay for this, because people want multiple courts. They want other people to see them play pickleball." I'm like, "Dude, nobody wants to be seen playing pickleball."
56:04	Shaan Puri	Well, no. But maybe they just don't want to wait, right? You know, they want...
56:07	Chris Koerner	Right. Available—not able to get courts, and so there are very few of these. And anyone—this is something anyone could do. With some Facebook ads, you don't need to buy a building or own one. You could rent a building and run some Facebook ads before you even sign a lease. Like, what are we talking about?
56:25	Shaan Puri	What are we doing here? What are we doing? Alright. Now let's be realistic. There are a lot of people on the internet who will say, "It's so good, so easy—look at this, the math is mathing." Where does a business like this actually suck? You've done enough businesses now to know that there is no such thing as a perfect business. In this one, realistically, why would this fail? What might you be getting wrong here? Or, at least, why would the numbers not be as rosy as they sound right now?
56:54	Chris Koerner	Yeah, it's gonna be like customer support inquiries — those are a lot higher than I thought. Things breaking: the AC going out in July in Texas, zoning issues... It's not the type of business where you're gonna have a hard time finding customers, but pick your problems. There will always be problems. I think it's going to be customer support, and, you know, getting calls at 3:00 a.m. from someone who's playing this random game in the middle of the night and the AC went out. What sort of problems do you like to pick? I would love to not have to worry about customer acquisition and operations. I'm terrible at operations. I would much rather try to sell or market something than operate it. So if it's marketing-heavy and I don't have an issue finding customers, that's my business.
57:45	Shaan Puri	And then the operations are either simple, or you've offloaded them to somebody else.
57:49	Chris Koerner	Yeah, exactly. Give me some of your beliefs here.
57:52	Shaan Puri	So, what—like, you do all these random things. You have all these random ideas. Actions come from thoughts; thoughts come from beliefs. So, what are the beliefs that are leading you to do all these random actions? For example: starting this secret pickleball court, or going in and, you know, being like, "Bucky should sell online — I'll do it for them," and now, "I'm gonna do this as a publicity stunt. Maybe they'll partner with them, maybe this will work, I don't know, maybe it'll just be a good story and I'll get sued out of existence." What are some of the beliefs that you have? We talked about one at the front, which is like, "focus is overrated." Mhm. Talk about that one, and then give...
58:23	Chris Koerner	"Tell me some of your other ones." "Yeah, I think focus is overrated because compounding doesn't care. The principle of compounding does not care if we're working on one thing or a dozen things. As long as we stay in the game—whatever that game is for us—and keep going, compounding is just going to keep going with us, right?" "So if you're curious about something—let's say you've got a side hustle and it's going well and you're like, 'What about this other side hustle?'—test it. Answer that question now. If you have a side hustle and it's like you're not sleeping because you're just cashing all these checks and customers are beating down your door, you're not going to be thinking, 'Oh, what about this shiny object?' You've got product–market fit—that's a signal, right?" "Just chase the signals. Chase the curiosities. You're going to learn something over here that you're able to apply over here—something no one else has ever thought of because they weren't doing these seven other things like you were." "So, net-net, if I had a gun to my head, I think you will be more wealthy if you do one thing, but you're more likely to be miserable and not have an enjoyable life."
59:27	Shaan Puri	Yes. So, focus actually does work, but it's not the only way. And it's a lot of fun to not focus — actually, that's what I'm... you have a similar thing. I'm going to read you this; I want you to give a little take on it. You said, "Say yes to everything, take on way too much, increase your capacity for stress, and let Parkinson's Law do its job." Most people have no clue what they are capable of because they don't take on too much and they never stress-test their life. You have something called the restaurant hostess analogy. Can you explain that a little bit?
59:55	Chris Koerner	Yeah, let's say you're a hostess at a Michelin-star restaurant in Manhattan, New York. You're slammed 24/7 — people coming in and out, people yelling, whatever. Then you have a hostess in Des Moines, Iowa, in a diner. They're usually pretty slow. Then, you know, a soccer team pulls up and it's, "Table for 15." She's like, "My gosh — table for 15? Oh geez, what do I do?" To the woman in New York, that's nothing. That's her norm; that's her new baseline. Most people I talk to are like, "Oh, I could never run a Facebook ad campaign because I have to clip my toenails that afternoon." What? They aren't doing enough. They think the barometer is down here, and they think people like Elon Musk are just — he's an alien, that's not even realistic. It's like, no. He's just taken on way too much, and now he's able to do more than ever before because the less important things just kind of fall off the plate. That's Parkinson's law: you bite off more than you can chew, and if you forget about it, then that's a signal that it was worth forgetting about.
01:01:02	Shaan Puri	Mhmm. Yeah. I think that if you ask people honestly, "What percent of your potential are you tapping into?" that's a pretty scary question for most people, because the answer is not going to be what you would want it to be. Very few people I know would honestly say 100%. That would require very low self-awareness. David Goggins has said something similar about training. He says, "The moment where your brain is ready to quit, your body still has 30% left." The brain quits before the body. The brain will stop you as a safety mechanism when you still have about 30% left to give. I don't know if the exact number is right, but directionally I think he's correct about physical capability. When it comes to what you're creatively or ambitiously capable of, I think it's kind of the same—and probably an even worse ratio. I think most people are tapping into less than 30% of what they're capable of doing. That doesn't mean you necessarily need to work 100 hours. It's more about your capacity to output, to be creative, and to go for it with full force on the things you're trying to pursue. Sometimes it means taking on an extra project. Sometimes it's just going faster. Sometimes it's thinking bigger. These all sound cliché, but they are cliché for a reason—they've been around for thousands of years because humans tend not to tap into how fast or how big they can go without the fears, doubts, and hesitations that hold them back. I agree with you. Are you a family guy as well? I guess the counterargument people might use is: "Well, you're 21 years old and you don't have kids or a mortgage," which someone might try to use to discredit the amount of output you have.
01:02:57	Chris Koerner	Yeah, I mean, I've got four kids. I had all four between the ages of 23 and 29, and I was building all these businesses throughout that time. I never missed dinner. I travel very rarely. I never missed a sporting event. I'm in my office from 7 to 4, give or take, working. Sometimes I pop out to hang out with the kids. I think it's important that my kids see me work, but it's also obviously important that I spend time with them. We go on a lot of vacations—four to six a year. We've seen all 50 states, and we go all over the world. "You can do both?"
01:03:32	Shaan Puri	> "Right. I think it's important for my kids to see me work. Unfortunately, my work just looks like me talking and laughing with friends, and so I don't think they get it. I don't think that's accurate. > > What about you? You said you're building your family and you work, let's say, seven to four. What are you doing during that seven-to-four period to make those hours count for more than maybe the average person is doing? Like, how do you have more productivity or more effect in those same number of hours? How do you structure your day? What are some things that you've noticed you do maybe better or differently than the average entrepreneurial bear?"
01:04:07	Chris Koerner	Yeah. The perfect day for me is nothing on my calendar. I definitely time-batch: if I have 7 calls that week, I'll try to put them all in the same afternoon. I think a lot of people feel insecure about having an open calendar because it's like a comfort blanket — "okay, now I know I'll be productive today," right? But when you have so many ideas — so many ad campaigns I want to run or newsletters I want to write — I don't have a problem filling my time. I don't use any fancy CRM, Notion, or anything. If a tab is open in my browser, it's a to-do list; when I close it, it's done. My notes app. A lot of caffeine, admittedly. I don't worry about context switching. I used to really stress: "alright, we could do this for 30 minutes, do this, don't context switch." But I feel like with anything in life, we can evolve to it; we can become more acclimated. So I'm always context-switching — always. I feel like I'm good at it because I've done it so much.
01:05:11	Shaan Puri	Another one of your beliefs: you said, "The longer I'm in business, the more I realize this to be true. If you want to be a billionaire, you have to innovate and focus. But to be a millionaire, you simply need to copy-paste. Don't even try to copy something that works and put your own twist on it — no twist. Stop twisting. Just copy what's working, and organically, over time you'll discover the tweaks on your own. You don't have to lead with all the twists, or you'll just screw it up."
01:05:32	Chris Koerner	Yeah, I think there should be, like, there needs to be a school or something on reverse engineering. It's an underrated skill. I'm in the Meta Ads Library and the web archive all the time. Let's say there was this taco restaurant in my town that had a line around the corner 24/7. All they sold were steak tacos. That's it. You think, "Alright, they've got more demand than supply. This town could use another taco shop." Alright, I'm gonna copy them — I'm gonna do it even better. People want more variety: they want steak and chicken, and there's no drinks — you can't even get drinks there. "I'm gonna do this, I'm gonna do that." But every change you make is another variable that increases the risk.
01:06:15	Shaan Puri	Risk you, yeah.
01:06:16	Chris Koerner	Like, let's say you copy them verbatim. When you open it, you're going to learn really quickly: "Oh — they're probably using that as their [unclear: 'of sale']." Not that... oh, this is why — because the [unclear: "onions"] they have to separate from the meat. You're going to learn all these things that will force you to change things. But if you make those changes before you know whether the copying actually works, you're just going to increase the likelihood of screwing it up and, thus, not being successful.
01:06:43	Shaan Puri	That's interesting. Mohnish Babrai, who's come on this podcast a couple of times, has a phrase—he calls it being a shameless cloner. He says, "I'm a shameless clone of the Buffett and Munger philosophy. I claim to have no good ideas except for one, which is to copy the good ideas that already exist out there. If I hear a good idea, I take it on as my own." He talks about what he calls the dumbest person in the world: the gas station across the street from a more successful gas station. You see the successful station's owner come out when a customer's there, wash their windows for them, price things a certain way, and use bright lights so he's more visible at night. You have to be a real idiot to be across the street, see that guy doing it, and then—out of your own stubbornness—not do those things and fail to implement those best practices.
01:07:32	Chris Koerner	It's pride, yeah.
01:07:33	Shaan Puri	Yeah — pride. I think there's a version of that in business. Like you said, you will organically end up putting your own twist on the business, but you bring up an interesting point: baking in all those twists up front is a bit of unnecessary risk. I think there's a view that entrepreneurs are risk-takers when actually they're risk minimizers. They're trying to take as little risk as is necessary, but are willing to take the necessary risks to do something. Unless there's a big asymmetric reward for it, they're not going to do it. I think you're right, and this is especially true at the local and service level. This is not true if you're trying to be a founder, go through YC [Y Combinator], and build the next big thing — the next breakout app or social network. You can't just copy Facebook; it's not going to work. The next ride-sharing service can't just be Uber. They do have to innovate — for example, with self-driving cars like Waymo. So this advice does not apply to people who are playing what I call the "business olympics", where they're trying to achieve global greatness: move the world forward, disrupt an entire industry. Yes, you absolutely need to be innovative there. But for people who are trying to become financially free, working backwards is not a bad way to go. I have a very annoying phrase I say a bunch: in my companies, anytime we run into an issue and people are bitching and moaning about it, I just say, "Well, we're probably not the first ones to have this problem." It's so true. You're an e‑commerce business, so suddenly you have this supply-chain problem. Well, guess what — a thousand or a million other e‑commerce businesses have had that same problem and they figured out a way to solve it. So what did they do? Let's start with that. I was talking to a friend yesterday — this guy's almost a billionaire, and he's in the real estate game. He has crushed it on real estate on his own, and now, for the first time after 15 years, he's raising money for his projects. He never wanted to do it; he always wanted to use his own capital, but he finally relented and realized, "Okay, I could do bigger scale and more projects if I raise capital from other people, not just use my own personal balance sheet." So I told him — he's giving me all his ideas about how he's going to raise money — and I was like, "Dude, every real estate guy I know raises money. Have you first looked at what they did? Like, why are you trying to figure this out on..."
01:09:45	Chris Koerner	Your own.</FormattedResponse>
01:09:46	Shaan Puri	"That's the hard way. There are no bonus points for doing this the hard way." Let's start by reverse-engineering what other people do. Go talk to five to ten other people who've already done this. See if there's a common blueprint. Try that, and only innovate where needed along the way. When you run into bottlenecks or walls while implementing that plan, ask yourself: > "Has anybody else ever solved this, and what did they do?" It turns out that, for most business problems, there is often a common problem and a common solution. We should try that first.
01:10:16	Chris Koerner	Yeah, like, we place our innovation on the wrong thing. We place it on features and benefits when we should be placing it on being innovative about copying how they're doing what they're doing. We had a 3PL—and you know 3PLs [third-party logistics providers], right?—and it's like the worst. Nobody likes their 3PL. It's impossible. So we saw all the other 3PLs out there when we launched and we were like, "Oh my gosh, they charge for storage and pick-and-pack and this and that, and they mark up shipping. These guys are idiots; it's so confusing." So we set out to innovate the industry: simple, flat pricing. But at the end of that two-year experience we looked like all the other 3PLs because we were like, "Oh—oh, they charge for storage because some companies go out of business and they're left with this big bill and they don't... oh, that's why." So that's another signal: if you see other competitors in your industry and your first thought is, "They're so stupid—why are they doing it this way?" it's probably for a reason. You just haven't learned that reason yet.
01:11:12	Shaan Puri	Yet, especially if they're successful, right? Don't copy somebody who's failing. But if they're successful, you can start with that and say, "Alright, can I do that as well?" You know, the reason I like this idea is because this is not the only way to win. I spent most of my life playing in the innovation space, and I really love that—it's super fun to be creative and to come up with an idea. That feels really satisfying when you're the first to do something. That's—I mean, that's amazing. I'm very proud of that whenever I've tried to do that. But that gets talked about a lot because, again, it sounds super noble. I think that does work, but there are many ways to win. What I like about what you're saying is that it is another way to win. You say, "Oh wow, those guys did that gutter-cleaning service using Nextdoor in their neighborhood in Massachusetts. I should do that in my neighborhood in California—let me start with that." I think more people should do that if they want to actually be successful, because that is another way to win. It's not the only way, but it's another way.
01:12:06	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, it's the midwit meme all over again. Right. My first business—I read about this iPhone repair shop making $30 a month, and I thought, 'I can make $30 a month fixing iPhones in my city.' It's kind of an ignorant thought, but it worked, and I did. So, you gotta be dumb... like I am."
01:12:29	Shaan Puri	Chris, this is fun, man. We still have half of the doc of other ideas in small business — random businesses you've come across that we could go for. I think maybe we do a part two if people like this one and want Chris back. If you like Chris, either tweet at me or put it in the YouTube comments — that would be the best way to bring him back. I think this is a lot of fun. I really love the little nooks and crannies of the economy that you go looking in to find — you know, stump grinding, the hole-in-one business, or the shipping-container wine tours. This is fun stuff. To be honest, sometimes on this podcast we have brilliant people talking about what you can do with AI and what you can do with X, Y, Z, and that's great — I love that stuff. But those aren't episodes I can send to my sister or my mom because those businesses are kind of out of reach for what they want to do. I think what's cool about the businesses you talk about — like your pickleball court — is that this is stuff anybody could do. Chris, thanks for coming on. Maybe give people a shout: your Twitter, your podcast, whatever you want people to go check out.
01:13:27	Chris Koerner	Yeah. The "Kerner Office Podcast" is where I publish three times a week — spelled like my last name.
01:13:32	Shaan Puri	And it's on your hat, so that's right — never missing out.
01:13:35	Chris Koerner	On kop.com.
01:13:37	Shaan Puri	"Always be promoting." "That's right." "All right, man — thanks for coming on."
01:13:41	Chris Koerner	Thanks, John.

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The Side Hustle King: “I’m making $8K/DAY from easy businesses”

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