Make $8K/day From These Side Hustles You’ve Never Heard Of

- September 22, 2025 (5 months ago) • 01:12:24

Transcript

Start Time	Speaker	Text
00:00	Shaan Puri	He's back — Part Two. We called him the "Side Hustle King" last time, which, by the way, is a pretty sick nickname we gave you.
00:06	Chris Koerner	"Pretty good. You're welcome. I don't know anything about anything other than business ideas, so let's go."
00:17	Shaan Puri	Your EP's first episode did almost a million downloads across all platforms. When you get a million downloads across all platforms, that's the best way to get buy-in and demand for Part Two [original phrase: "get back and divided" — unclear]. So we've got to do Part Two. I want to cue the Chicago Bulls '96 intro music for you because you came on and you had a legendary first performance. Do you feel the pressure of following up right now?
00:39	Chris Koerner	No pressure. You kidding me?</FormattedResponse>
00:41	Shaan Puri	And the reason people love your business ideas is because you have that girl-next-door energy. You have that relatable, "I could do that" vibe — that seems in my wheelhouse. I can get to $15,000 a month. I can get to $10,000 a month off that. That doesn't seem too hard. I love that. Sam loves that. We all love that. So if you've been — if you're one of the listeners who is looking for that kind of relatable, achievable side-hustle idea — not that these are all easy. I don't mean easy; I just mean it's not rocket science. Those are the types of ideas you got. Chris, welcome back to the pod.
01:20	Chris Koerner	Thank you for having.
01:21	Sam Parr	Man, so I wasn't on that. I was off that day, and I get messages from people trying to use me as the middleman to get to you or Sean, asking to do the driving range thing.
01:32	Shaan Puri	Yeah, the golf thing—okay. The golf thing got out of hand. We'll talk about that later. All right.
01:35	Chris Koerner	It's a banger.
01:36	Shaan Puri	So, Chris, let's start. You brought some ideas. We're gonna bring in some, we're gonna riff off these, we're gonna react to these. So where do you wanna start? Give me — let's start with the banger. Give me, give me one of the best businesses that you've seen that you think, "wow, anybody could do that; somebody else could do that."
01:52	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, you wanna go porch pumpkins?"
01:55	Shaan Puri	Okay, explain the idea, and then let's talk about it.
01:57	Chris Koerner	Alright, so I'm on Instagram and I see this woman decorating porches with pumpkins. I thought, that's genius — that's brilliant. It's just all visual; it sells really well on short-form video. I reached out to her. We spoke and I learned about her business: she's doing seven figures a year across three months. It could be seasonal — people want her to decorate their porches for Christmas, Thanksgiving, and flowers in the spring — but she doesn't want to. She just wants to do pumpkins. Over the last couple years, I've learned of other people doing quarterly flower deliveries, front-porch flower decorations, and Christmas decorations or lights. This could be a year-round business that starts with porch pumpkins.
02:37	Shaan Puri	Who—who is the lady? Can you say, "Let's give her..."?
02:39	Chris Koerner	A shout-out: Heather Torres. Heather Torres.
02:41	Sam Parr	Sean, is this the same person that we've talked about?</FormattedResponse>
02:43	Shaan Puri	We did talk about this once before, but there's actually a little twist to it now. So originally — and we can pull it up if you're on YouTube [we'll see what this means] — what does "porch pumpkin" mean? Basically, during the fall/Halloween season people want their house to look festive. They hire this lady and she comes over with, like, a throw-pillow overload of pumpkins and just decorates the front of your house. Cool. You pay her... how much does it cost roughly for, like, well, I am a customer?
03:12	Chris Koerner	So, 500 to 1,500, and she's there for...
03:15	Shaan Puri	Like an hour... You hired, you did this, you Porsche pumped.</FormattedResponse>
03:18	Chris Koerner	Into your... My wife saw it and she's like, "I need that in my life."
03:21	Shaan Puri	And okay... was it her who came, or was it, like, a minion?
03:24	Chris Koerner	She hasn't come yet. Our week is two weeks from now, and it won't be her—it'll be someone from her team.
03:30	Shaan Puri	Okay, amazing. So someone from her team comes out, they put a push pump in. Give me—give us a sense of how well she's doing. What do you know about the business? This one woman in Dallas who started this.
03:39	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, she's doing between 1,302,000 orders per year. Average order size is $800 to $1,200—call it $1,000."
03:50	Shaan Puri	Okay. So that's something like 1,500,000 to 2,000,000 in revenue.
03:54	Chris Koerner	Mhm.
03:55	Shaan Puri	And what's her cost? So she's got an inventory of pumpkins.
04:00	Chris Koerner	Yeah, it's about a 20% COGS.</FormattedResponse>
04:03	Shaan Puri	"20% COGS [cost of goods sold]. That's the labor and the like, and the pumpkins, which she reuses, I'm sure. Yes—she takes, she takes it away after... what? How long does it last for?"
04:11	Chris Koerner	Charges extra to take them away, because people don't know what to do with them. So that's an upsell.
04:16	Shaan Puri	Okay, so you can pay to have them removed. It's basically the Christmas-lights business, but she's just done it not on Christmas lights. It's actually much easier—you don't have to scale the roof or do all this dangerous stuff. Okay, amazing. And so, you know, this woman might be clearing a million dollars a year doing this. Do you know the origin story of this? How did she start doing it? Did she stumble into it? Was she a stay-at-home mom? What's her story?
04:40	Chris Koerner	Yeah. She's just a mom. She did it for herself. She posted it on Instagram, and her friends freaked out. She wasn't trying to start a business, so she started doing it as a favor—and then she monetized it.</FormattedResponse>
04:51	Shaan Puri	Okay, amazing. And so—you, well, one thing that wasn't there last time we talked about: this. Now, Sam, if you scroll down to the middle of the page, it's "one-on-one business coaching for your pumpkin business," and she's got...
05:03	Sam Parr	No way.
05:04	Shaan Puri	"She's got the boss-lady pose."
05:05	Chris Koerner	She owns the trademark, too.
05:07	Shaan Puri	She was angled with her arms crossed, which I think is also the pose I had for this podcast cover art. They put her in the boss lady pose, and she's selling one-on-one coaching now. So you get two sessions, an hour each, for $5,000—so YouTube can become a pumpkinpreneur.
05:24	Chris Koerner	There you go. She owns the trademark, so people can't start businesses with "porches" or "pumpkins" in the name without talking to her first. Interesting.
05:32	Sam Parr	"No way. What? Say—say her? I'm looking at your Instagram. What's her Instagram again?"
05:37	Chris Koerner	Yeah, it's just "porchpumpkins" — one word.
05:40	Shaan Puri	Oh my God — 43,000 followers now!
05:44	Sam Parr	Is this now more successful? Look — so on her [link-off thing], she's linking to your video that you did with her.
05:50	Chris Koerner	Oh, I didn't even know that. That's funny.
05:52	Sam Parr	"Yeah — do you have any association with her other than you just think she's cool?"
05:56	Chris Koerner	Nothing. No, she's just awesome.
05:58	Sam Parr	And so, is this coaching thing doing better than her actual main thing?
06:02	Chris Koerner	I don't know—I haven't talked to her about it. But she also started the fajita business during the same season as Porch Pumpkins. She's got, like, two retail locations where she cooks fajitas to go only, and she's crushing it at that. To-go fajitas—fajitas, yeah.
06:18	Shaan Puri	Alright — questionable decision on that one. Okay, so... what would you do? Let's say you live in Sam. What's it like — some middle-of-nowhere place? Like, wherever you are...
06:28	Sam Parr	From Kansas City, Missouri.
06:29	Shaan Puri	"Alright. You're from Kansas — you're in Kansas City, Missouri — and you're a stay-at-home mom. You're entrepreneurial; you've got that itch. What are you doing? How are you getting this business off the ground, Chris?" </FormattedResponse>
06:39	Chris Koerner	I'm going to go buy pumpkins for retail at the grocery store. Sorry, Heather, but I'm going to copy Heather's design based on what I see on Instagram: the same colors, in the same places, the same sizes. I'm going to film a time-lapse using my iPhone, and I'm going to post it to all the local mom groups, buy/sell groups, Facebook, Instagram—everywhere. Then I'll just watch the comments come in and start doing it for people in the comments.
07:03	Shaan Puri	By the way, not to be dismissive—this is really just me showing my own lack of skill. But you say, "Design, Doug: it's a pile of pumpkins."
07:11	Chris Koerner	Dude is.
07:11	Shaan Puri	This is a design. Apparently, there's something to it.
07:14	Chris Koerner	"I hear."
07:14	Shaan Puri	There's something to it, dude—like a flower arrangement. Like, if...
07:17	Chris Koerner	I'm gonna run around the hay bale. Go—where does the hay bale go?
07:19	Sam Parr	If you gave Sean a pumpkin patch on an empty porch, it would look... nothing.</FormattedResponse>
07:25	Shaan Puri	"Dude, don't do this as a challenge. Okay? I will blowtorch a pumpkin on my own porch, and I'm going to post it just to see how I do with my own."
07:35	Sam Parr	Some... there's some.
07:36	Shaan Puri	It's a pile of pumpkins.
07:38	Sam Parr	No, there's a little... like.
07:40	Shaan Puri	"You're drinking her Kool-Aid. She's got you all under her spell. Alright, so, Chris, you're going to go buy retail. You're not worried about your margins on that front, you know?"
07:49	Chris Koerner	Yep.
07:49	Shaan Puri	You're gonna make an Instagram account. You're gonna name it something not "Porch Pumpkins," because she's got the trademark for that. So what do you—"Patio Pumpkins"? What are we talking? Sure... [unclear: "front"]
07:57	Chris Koerner	Door, patio, patio, gourds.
07:59	Shaan Puri	"Okay. And now—how do you go get customers? That's the hard part of any business."
08:05	Chris Koerner	Yeah, I mean, you post 5 to 10 organic videos, see which one pops off the most, then you push paid ad spend behind it to people in your ZIP code.
08:14	Shaan Puri	Okay, so you're going to post organic content just as testing your creative, and then you're going to run paid on it. Yep, yeah — because you're basically selling a $500–$1,000 ticket item.
08:25	Chris Koerner	Yep.
08:25	Shaan Puri	So you have a lot of room to work with—to even acquire customers for, you know, $50 or $100. And then you...
08:33	Chris Koerner	You can worry about wholesale pricing and going to a farm or whatever... There's just unnecessary friction if you...
08:38	Shaan Puri	Do that upfront, okay? Same. </FormattedResponse>
08:40	Sam Parr	"Well, you said that she—you said that she was going to do something that prevents this from being just an October thing. Is that the course?"
08:47	Chris Koerner	No—she could. Other people are, but she doesn't want to. She's got kids. She's like, "This is my busy season," and she doesn't want to work on this business during the other seasons.
08:55	Shaan Puri	She got kids. She got fajitas, dude. She's got her hand.
08:59	Sam Parr	And how—what do you think her take-home is? What's your guess?</FormattedResponse>
09:01	Chris Koerner	I would guess 40–50% net. That's a guess.
09:05	Sam Parr	"Do you think she's working her ass off for two months out of the year, and then she's in deployment mode? Like, 'I'm getting up at 5 a.m., getting home at 11 p.m., and just grinding my ass off for two months to make $600,000.'"
09:18	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, dude. So we have a lady that... if you took my family's life expenses, it'd be like: oh, whatever—rent, utilities, insurance. And then not that far down the list you'd be like, "Who is the balloon queen?" That would be this lady my wife needs to hire for every kid's birthday and for every special occasion we're throwing.
09:47	Sam Parr	Dude, you're like her patron. You're like the king of Italy, and this is Michelangelo. You're keeping her afloat because the world needs more balloon art.
09:56	Shaan Puri	He shows up and I'm just like, "Oh—$1,200." You knocked on my door and $1,200 just left my bank account because this woman is going to make a beautiful balloon arch and a backdrop that we need. I guess we need it for every part — we need it for every part.
10:10	Chris Koerner	Gotta have it.
10:11	Shaan Puri	Okay, I have three kids, but we're spending like $7 to $10 a year on balloon arches. She's the porch pumpkin of my neighborhood, basically. One thing I've noticed with this is that you can kind of set a norm in any area. For example, Christmas lights are one of those things where there's almost a visible—and an invisible—peer pressure. The more houses on our block that do something, the more we feel like we have to do something.
10:42	Sam Parr	Yeah, I think I read about this in, like, a Peter Thiel tweet. It's called memetic desire. Yeah—like, to have balloon decorations in...
10:48	Chris Koerner	Up with the Joneses.
10:50	Shaan Puri	It's so memetic, bro. It's so memetic right now, and my life is so memetic. You've got kids' birthdays, you've got graduations — all this stuff where people are doing things on their front lawn. If it's your special day, you wake up, go outside, and it's like, "Oh, you guys did the thing for me." I think there's almost a porch pumpkins birthday skew and a graduation skew that she could create, which is basically just like, "Yo, we dress up your lawn so that you have this moment — your family did something for you and everybody knows it's your special day today." And so I think you're right, Chris, that this is not... the fall/Halloween season is really not where this thing is limited to. It might still be, you know, 40% of revenue, but it doesn't need to be 100% of revenue.
11:35	Sam Parr	But yeah — how cool is it that my mother-in-law is like this. She has a pillow company, and she's killing it. She pays herself a lot of money. I'm like, "Smithy, you know, how much are you spending on... how much are you spending on ads?" She's like, "Well, I spend, like, $100 a month." I'm like, "What's that turn into?" She tells me, "You know, $1,000 or something." I'm like, "Okay, so why aren't you spending more?" She's like, "Well, because I work three days a week and I'm happy." And I'm like, "But... but... but..." And that's kind of what this lady is. She's the same thing — you kind of have your lane and you're happy. So it sounds like she's winning. Yeah, you know what, for the rest of about...
12:08	Shaan Puri	The banker and the fisherman.
12:10	Sam Parr	Yeah.
12:10	Shaan Puri	And I was like, "Yo, this banker's onto something." That was my takeaway from that story. Hey, real quick — if you liked this episode of Chris and you want more, he's actually agreed to give away his entire database of 200 business ideas, just like the ones he's talking about on this podcast, and he's giving it away for free. So, if you just go to the QR code that's on the screen or the link in the description below, you can get his database of ideas. These are like his blueprints for companies that he thinks can work, and this guy's done it before — he's built a bunch of successful businesses. So go ahead, take advantage of this resource. And now, back to this episode. All right, Chris, give us another one. What's another idea? Pool — small-niche, cash-flow-type business?
12:52	Chris Koerner	Yeah, so I'm gonna take what you just said about memetic desire — "keeping up with the Joneses" — and it goes perfectly into this next one. We just got a sport court, and I think sport courts are the next pools.
13:04	Shaan Puri	Okay, explain what a sport court is.
13:06	Chris Koerner	A sport court is a multipurpose slab of concrete. You can put tiles down on it or paint lines on it. You can play pickleball, volleyball, soccer, and basketball—multiple sports on the same surface.
13:17	Shaan Puri	"Right. It's the thing you put in your backyard, in the concrete, and then they have this — almost, what do you call that? — kind of mesh-looking rubber thing on top."
13:26	Chris Koerner	"They're just like tiles — sport court tiles."
13:28	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so then you could play any kind of sport on top of that. You turned your backyard into something fun. Okay, go on.
13:34	Chris Koerner	Yeah, so three to five years ago, during COVID, everyone was getting pools out here. They were all getting pools, and pools were like $75. They're now $150. But now it's all about sport courts if you want to keep up with the Joneses. I'm trying to keep up with the Joneses too, so we just got a sport court this year. I got a bunch of quotes, and half of the companies wouldn't even call me back. The ones that did were just dudes like me — they looked like me, with a wrap truck — and I was like, "I know you're not going to be putting this sport court in. You're just subbing it all out. You're just a dirty marketer like I am." And so they would put me like...
14:08	Sam Parr	How did they respond?
14:10	Shaan Puri	To that.
14:10	Chris Koerner	I wouldn't tell them that to their faces. I only go on podcasts and say that about them, so they would quote me. Now we're talking a 30-by-70-foot sport court, which is good enough for half-court basketball and pickleball. That's what I got — that's what I wanted. They would charge me $50k–$60k. I can't do that. So I started getting quotes from subcontractors, going on Facebook Marketplace, looking for a concrete guy, a painter, a fencing guy, because you want to fence it in so the ball doesn't fly everywhere. Long story short, I got quotes to do all of it. It's in my backyard right now for about $30k — half the price. Then I started thinking, "Okay, there's a business here." I already have the subs; they're all affordable. What I'm doing is: I took my tree-trimming company and, with my operating partner, we're pivoting. We're moving away from trees, which have a $1,000 average order value, and we're going full-time into sport courts.
15:07	Sam Parr	"Oh my gosh, what's it called?"
15:10	Chris Koerner	Well, there's no website for it. It's not like... you need a cute...
15:12	Sam Parr	"Name, though."
15:13	Chris Koerner	I do have a cute name — I got the domain name, there's just nothing on it. It's called "Backyard Fun House" because we're selling the dream. We're not selling sport courts; we're selling the backyard you want — the backyard all your kids' friends want to come to. So you start with the sport court to get your foot in the door. Then you add the putting green, then the pool, then the fire pit and outdoor kitchen. Pretty soon they spend $200.
15:34	Shaan Puri	What you're doing is taking the business model of pool installation, which is a popular business model. You're basically saying: that's a pretty saturated market now. Any place that's pool‑weather friendly will have multiple pool installers and builders in that area. But you're noticing a trend where some people say, "Instead of the pool, or in addition to the pool, we want our backyard to be fun in a different way." Maybe for us the right market or the right thing is pickleball, basketball, soccer, or something similar. You're proposing that whatever the pool market is, there's going to be this new market where there aren't established players, and you can come in and fill that gap in your town. And, you suggest, anyone could do that in their own town. Is that the right way to summarize this idea?
16:21	Chris Koerner	If you look at Google Trends and the keyword tool, search queries are exploding for this. The supply is not keeping up with demand.
16:29	Shaan Puri	Yeah, I've seen this a bunch because I was house hunting and saw a lot of these. I had the same—it's funny, you were like, "you're selling the dream," because I saw it and I was like, "oh, so me and my wife are gonna—we're just gonna play pickleball." Have we ever played pickleball together? No. But obviously we'll start. Obviously that'll be the new us. Then my kids and their friends will come over and it'll be so cool. It became this... almost like a wow factor for certain houses we were looking at. They were trying to sell that as a bit of the x-factor for the home, so I kind of believed it. Also, Sam, we have some friends, Sieve and Xavier, who have a business called Enduring Ventures. They buy businesses, and one of the businesses they bought is a pool construction business. Sam, have you looked into it? Have you heard them talk about how great of a business this was for them?
17:17	Sam Parr	Yeah, I mean the one in Arizona.
17:19	Shaan Puri	Yeah, they have a business in Arizona. I think it's called Dolphin Pool, so if you're in Arizona, go get a Dolphin Pool. It's just been this steady compound. I think it's like a $2,030,000,000-a-year pool business that just serves that one geography. It's a very, you know, profitable business — I think it's cash-flowing. I mean, I don't know the specifics, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was $4 to $5 million a year of free cash flow generated from this pool business. And then, obviously, they're able to just serve—and that's just one market. Right? So I think the Sport Court alternative to pools... it's got some legs.
17:58	Chris Koerner	"Dude, I mean, I'm already generating leads for it. This isn't just hypothetical, okay?"
18:02	Sam Parr	"Where are the leads coming from—Facebook?"
18:04	Chris Koerner	"Not yet. I mean—where do all leads come from, Sam? It's all Meta. It's all Meta, right? That's where we all get our leads from."
18:11	Shaan Puri	"I don't know, but where do leads come from—Facebook?"
18:13	Chris Koerner	"That's it. There's only one place: short-form video — 15 seconds — selling the dream."
18:17	Sam Parr	"Just a sassy little bitch."
18:22	Chris Koerner	"You're making me blush. You're making me blush."
18:26	Sam Parr	All right, what's another one? </FormattedResponse>
18:28	Shaan Puri	Wait, Sam — I want your grades for these first two. </FormattedResponse>
18:30	Sam Parr	Okay. Love the pumpkin lady.
18:33	Shaan Puri	Pumpkin pins on the same scale—what is it?
18:36	Sam Parr	Yeah. So, for a very particular type of demographic who wants that lifestyle, I honestly think that's a 9 out of 10. OK — for sports court, I think that's a 3 out of 10. I don't want to work with some contractors. Like, I don't want to deal with people who are hungover. Well, how's that been?
18:49	Shaan Puri	"Where?"
18:49	Sam Parr	"How's that been, like, working with...?"
18:51	Chris Koerner	Slander. I'll tell you, working with dude.
18:53	Sam Parr	"I used to — I used to do landscaping. I could tell you; I know what they're like. You know what I'm saying? There's gonna be pill bottles all over the place..."
19:02	Chris Koerner	Just gotta work through some bad ones to find some good ones—just like employees, right?
19:07	Sam Parr	Well, there are different ratios of how many have to work there. Yeah. Are we talking about...?
19:11	Shaan Puri	It's a bougie-ass company called Hampton. Okay—yeah. He doesn't know the first thing about this. He's got a different brand of pill bottle for them.
19:18	Chris Koerner	To quote Harrison Ford: "Sam, that's what the money's for." Okay. That's what $30,000 net profit per job is for — it's for dealing with annoying subcontractors that show up with meth in their system.
19:32	Shaan Puri	"So you got a nine, you got a three. Hit us with your next one, Chris." </FormattedResponse>
19:35	Chris Koerner	Alright, so right next to my sport court we put an in‑ground trampoline. Okay — why an in‑ground trampoline? Because our trampoline blows over into the neighbor's yard every two years, like clockwork.
19:45	Sam Parr	And I've... dude, you're a great dad. You—you've got everything.
19:48	Chris Koerner	We're working on it. We want to be the backyard fun house, you know what I'm saying? Yeah. So we put in this in-ground trampoline. Sam, I want you to guess what it costs to put this thing in.
19:58	Sam Parr	$3
19:59	Chris Koerner	$10
20:00	Sam Parr	Yikes.
20:01	Chris Koerner	$10? Really? Yeah. $404,500 for the trampoline itself from a Shopify store that I found from Facebook ads. Right, of course. And then $5 for the digging—for digging it out. So this dude with an excavator (that he didn't even own; he just rented it) shows up with another dude. They spend four hours digging it out, putting down some weed barrier, and they walk out of there with $5. So I reached...
20:26	Sam Parr	Dads are keeping the economy afloat.
20:28	Chris Koerner	I'm telling you... So I start talking to him on the job site and I ask, "Where are you getting all your jobs?" He says, "From this e-commerce brand. They can't sell trampolines unless they have someone to dig them out for them, and he does." Which e-commerce? "It's trampolines.com," believe it or not — no affiliation. They can only sell trampolines that are in-ground if they have someone to dig them out. There's not, like, the guys who own excavators — they're too busy digging pools and have no interest in trampolines. So you don't need to go buy a $100,000 backhoe. You rent one when you get a job, dig the sucker out, and you get paid $5. Sorry.
21:05	Shaan Puri	"I... kind of zoned out because I thought this might be the same idea as Sport Court."
21:08	Sam Parr	But. </FormattedResponse>
21:08	Shaan Puri	Actually, it sounds like what you're saying is that trampolines.com gets the demand and they sell the trampoline, but they don't want to do the backyard dig. You can get the leads from them. Is that what you were saying? And how do you get the leads from them? Is it, like you're saying, that you gotta know a guy who knows a guy and do some business development with them? Or is there a portal you sign up for and say, "I'm in this area"?
21:31	Chris Koerner	And I reached out, and they're like, "Yeah, we don't even have our paid ads turned on right now because we can't sell — we don't have enough people digging these things out for us." </FormattedResponse>
21:40	Sam Parr	Dude, trampolines.com, by the way, is owned by someone who's part of the tribe — a Mormon — or he went to BYU. You guys do all the best stuff.
21:47	Chris Koerner	What can I say?
21:48	Sam Parr	Brad Mills owns trampolines.com. That sounds like a pretty fun job.
21:54	Chris Koerner	"I mean, you can't drink, you can't smoke, you install trampolines."
21:57	Shaan Puri	Yes. They have a map on the site showing certified installers and Premier Installers in different areas. If you're on trampolines.com, you can get a quote from an installer, and then they do all the work.
22:08	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, something like that."
22:10	Shaan Puri	Yeah, so you're saying become an installer.
22:12	Chris Koerner	Yeah, or just like—we have an excavator guy for our tree-trimming business, and we talk to him about other jobs that he does. He gets paid $5 to dig out pools, and it takes him a day—just him... playing with controls.
22:28	Sam Parr	This guy's listening. He's like...</FormattedResponse>
22:30	Chris Koerner	"What the..."
22:31	Sam Parr	Hello, Chris.
22:32	Chris Koerner	My four year.
22:32	Shaan Puri	Old son's dream job. I can't let him hear this podcast.
22:35	Chris Koerner	My overall view is high-ticket home service. In general, in a strong economy there is way more demand than supply in any of these little backyard businesses.
22:44	Shaan Puri	Okay. I like this backyard business theme you've given us — you've given us a bunch of those. Let's do a non-backyard business. So, you wrote something in our notes document?
22:53	Sam Parr	Give it a four. That one's a four, man. I don't want to dig holes. I don't want to dig holes.
22:57	Chris Koerner	It's fine.
22:59	Shaan Puri	If you do want to dig holes—what a hobby you would actually have.
23:03	Sam Parr	Yeah, on my time.
23:04	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah. "I don't want to get paid to do it—that ruins the fun. It's sacred art."
23:08	Sam Parr	"Yeah, don't meet your heroes, alright."
23:10	Shaan Puri	So you have this sentence on here that I don't understand, but I'm—it's provocative. It says, "What starts in Dubai will make its way to America." What does that mean?
23:20	Chris Koerner	I've been there twice, and they just live 10 years in the future. They experiment with all this stuff; they're very entrepreneurial, and a lot of what they experiment with never takes off. But if you see it in Dubai for 1–3 years, it's probably coming to the West, and we can get ahead of the trend.
23:35	Shaan Puri	What were examples of other things that—like, kind of—Dubai was early into that then propagated? Do you know of any others?
23:42	Chris Koerner	"Dubai Chocolate, for one. Are you familiar with that?"
23:45	Shaan Puri	No, what is Dubai chocolate?
23:46	Sam Parr	It's all the rage right now, and I've been getting it. I've fallen victim—I’ve eaten so much... hold on: dessert, chocolate pistachio, right? That thing.
23:53	Shaan Puri	"I don't know... what is this? What's different about Dubai chocolate?"
23:55	Sam Parr	"Oh my gosh, I have no idea."
23:56	Shaan Puri	But it's like this.
23:57	Chris Koerner	A chocolate bar stuffed with pistachios that looks cool on Instagram. </FormattedResponse>
24:01	Sam Parr	You know how three years ago the theme was pineapple, and last year it was—I think—pear? There's always a theme in food and in wrapping paper.
24:16	Chris Koerner	Two big categories: the...
24:17	Sam Parr	America's two largest exports—and right now, for some reason, it's pistachio-flavored chocolate. If you go to a bougie yogurt or ice cream place, you get yogurt or ice cream with pistachios—crushed up—and chocolate on it. Honestly, it's amazing. It's great, so I'm on board the hype train.
24:39	Chris Koerner	Well, they have whole mall kiosks selling just Dubai chocolate now. It's a whole industry. Will it be around in two years? I don't know — I don't care. Right, right. But another thing: perfume vending machines started in Dubai, and now they're everywhere.
24:54	Sam Parr	Okay, and what's this one that you're referring to — the manicure thing?
24:57	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, I mean, they're in airports in Dubai and, like, outside of nightclubs. You just stick your hand in there and it gives you a manicure."
25:05	Shaan Puri	So, it's a little— it looks like a printer almost. It's like you basically put your hand in the robot printer and you get a manicure. Is it cheaper? Is it faster? What's the core edge that this has over, you know, going to a traditional nail salon?
25:23	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, it's like one-third the price and a lot faster."
25:28	Sam Parr	"Alright, that's interesting."
25:29	Chris Koerner	By the way.
25:30	Shaan Puri	"Speaking of that, have you guys seen Rizbot?"
25:33	Sam Parr	What's that? I'm gonna chat you up. What's a Rizbot?
25:37	Shaan Puri	Alright, so you've seen Tesla's humanoid robot, Sam. I think you invested in Figure. People say the next big thing is basically these artificial-intelligence, super cutting-edge robots. Well, somebody made Rizbot, and it's going super viral on TikTok right now. What this robot does: it runs up to a human—the way the robot runs is hilarious—then it stops in front of a girl, holds out its hand as if to kiss her hand, and from its speakers it starts playing romantic music. The woman in public is just like, "What's happening right now?"
26:16	Sam Parr	"What's the outcome of this? The owner is... sick."
26:21	Shaan Puri	"I have no idea. My robot just... I was going to read you the views on their last 10 videos: 37,000,000; 15,000,000; 8,000,000; 19,000,000; 18,000,000."
26:29	Sam Parr	Like, my robot just seduced a lady.
26:31	Shaan Puri	It's just—it's this funny, lovable robot that wears a little cowboy hat. He runs around trying to "spit game" at people. It's amazing. It's this viral thing that's happening. I think what's going to happen here is that, before we have humanoid robots that can do warehouse work or assemble cars on an assembly line, we'll have basically pet robots. You'll have goofy robots that are kind of fun—a little party trick you can make. They won't have much functionality, maybe one one‑hundredth of it, but could still make, you know, $100 million off an idea like that.
27:09	Sam Parr	Dude, do you guys want to see a sick robot? I have nothing to do with this company—I just think it's cool. Go to maticrobots.com. So, is this the new Roomba? Okay, let me tell you the story. I met this guy and I thought his robot looked awesome, so I started DMing him and I got one. It's basically like a $1,200 or $1,100 Roomba, but it vacuums and mops your house. There are a bunch of really nifty features, and this is only cool if you're into gadgets. You know how a Roomba—you'll hear it bumping into stuff because that's how it tells where things are. This one uses cameras and maps out your house, but it has tiny features. When I got it and turned it on, the battery was fully charged and it said, "Hello, Par family. I'm here to clean for you." It had a little accent—these little, tiny features. The guy who started the company has been working on this for eight years. He raised a bunch of money and has been in the lab for eight or nine years. After eight or nine years of tinkering, his goal was to build the perfect Roomba, and I think he has it. After nine years of work, it's finally for sale, and I thought it was really cool.
28:20	Shaan Puri	"Chris, what do you think?"
28:21	Chris Koerner	I'm thinking about how I could monetize it.
28:23	Sam Parr	Well, by selling a $1,200 vacuum, I think that's something.
28:27	Chris Koerner	That I need.
28:27	Shaan Puri	To out. I can, yeah.
28:30	Chris Koerner	I would go to cleaning businesses and rent it out to them for $100 a month. They show up to a house to clean, and they could just hit "play"; then they could do everything else and save an hour on every cleaning.
28:39	Shaan Puri	Could you imagine if you hired a cleaner and they showed up, then just put their Roomba down, pushed play, and walked off? Or they just sat on their phone for two hours... It'd be amazing. What other ideas have you got?
28:48	Chris Koerner	This is a Sam idea. </FormattedResponse>
28:50	Shaan Puri	Is this the one that says "dollhouses for men (Sam will love it)"?
28:53	Chris Koerner	Yeah, that's the one.
28:55	Shaan Puri	Yeah, what's this idea?
28:56	Chris Koerner	"Should we watch it?" "Yeah."
28:58	Shaan Puri	"Let's watch. Let's watch the video."
28:59	Chris Koerner	Freaking guy right here. He's tapping into a $1 billion market that nobody is serving right now. Ask yourself real quick: what's the male version of dollhouses? Day three of Genius Business Ideas—follow for more. There isn't one, and that's the opportunity. Men are builders. We want to create with our hands, but nobody's selling us the materials to build miniature homes and structures like this. Look how many views this thing has—that's your demand. Grown men would pay serious money for high-quality miniature building kits. Myself included. I'm calling this the "guy dollhouse" market. Full business plan here.
29:28	Sam Parr	Yeah, I'm sold. So it's basically—alright, we're watching this video. It's base; it's exactly how it sounds: you are literally building a home—framing it, putting up the drywall and everything. This guy is crazy—he's using a proper nail gun, and you're building a very real-life replica of a house. I'm in. This sounds awesome. I spent my time doing this with engines. When my wife's pregnant, you know, you can't do too much; you have to kinda sit around a lot. We got into Legos, and now we like to build replica V8 engines. It's a very nerdy thing, but it's kinda what we like to do instead of watching TV. This seems so much better. I would love to build a house. Is this a company that's making this, or is this...?
30:08	Chris Koerner	Don't think so. This guy just did it. Wow.
30:10	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you're right. This is basically like—people who love to play flight simulator. It's like, "Oh, you're playing a video game," and they're like, "This is not a video game. I'm flying this plane right now for real." It's so realistic that it moves into another category, and it seems like that's what this is. So, instead of Lego or oversimplification, this is almost miniature complexity. It's like, no—this is as real as the real deal, but just on a small scale. We don't have to actually do all the true work, so it's an escape. This is a whole new category, basically. When this guy posts this video, does it get a lot of organic traction? Do people watch it and think, "Do I want this?"
30:55	Chris Koerner	Oh yeah — that video you just watched of mine got about 20 million views. There's demand for this.
31:00	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's cool. So you would basically just create these as kits, and then the sales process is just to do this over and over again. You just make content of you building more and more elaborate—funny or elaborate—or like, "Hey, I'm gonna make the house from Full House," so it's...
31:18	Chris Koerner	Like, yeah.
31:19	Shaan Puri	"That's the TikTok content."
31:20	Chris Koerner	But subscription, too.
31:21	Shaan Puri	Yeah. Just buy the kit and make the thing. Be—yeah, be a man, but kinda not for real.
31:26	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, yeah — I'm pretend."
31:30	Shaan Puri	It's called "Be a Man, Kinda."
31:34	Sam Parr	Yeah, this is pretty cool. There's a store near my house called Tinydollhouse.com. You walk in and it is tiny dollhouses, but they are the most meticulously made dolls and dollhouses that I have ever seen. For example, instead of a single dollhouse they'll have a replica store, and the little bags of Lay's potato chips are hand‑painted. The Reese's peanut butter cups you can buy at the counter are miniaturized, and each human being—or doll—is a perfect reenactment of whatever it's supposed to be a replica of [a real‑world person or scene]. To everyone listening, it's one of those things where you're like, "Oh, it's so weird—you're into that," or whatever. But everyone who sees it is like, "This is amazing. This is so cool. I get it now." I'm not going to buy my daughter a $3,000 dollhouse.
32:22	Chris Koerner	"But you'd buy one for yourself."
32:24	Sam Parr	"But I'd buy one for myself."
32:27	Shaan Puri	"I earn money. This is crazy. I mean... do the police just, like, 'Oh, there's a murder—oh, let's just stop by the tiny dollhouse, because those are the creeps who are definitely behind all this murder'?"
32:42	Sam Parr	Yeah — if you walk in, you automatically join a watch list.
32:45	Shaan Puri	Yeah, you should.
32:47	Sam Parr	We're not.
32:48	Shaan Puri	"Saying 'you did it,' but we're saying..."
32:50	Sam Parr	Yeah, there's a pump over there. That's the... of a watch list, which is: you haven't yet, but maybe you will. And you definitely sign one of those when you walk in.
33:03	Shaan Puri	"Okay, I like this business. This is my... this one, Sam — you gotta give it a strong score on the SAM scale."
33:08	Sam Parr	So, I think I would give it a 7 or 8. This is hard. Have you guys ever put together a complicated LEGO set? It's amazing how they think of all this stuff. Doing the directions for something like this is so freaking hard. But I do think you could charge $1,000+ for it. So yeah, it's pretty cool.
33:27	Shaan Puri	I like it because, you know, the hardest part of any business is: how are you going to get customers? I think that's true unless you're doing a hard‑tech startup, where you're trying to create a robot or a machine that does something no machine has ever done before. That's one class of business where the hard part is: can you make science fiction a reality? For most businesses, the hard part is: how am I going to get customers? The amateur approach is always: "Oh, this product is cool—I think I would like to make and sell that product." But most of your life—90% of your time—is going to be spent doing the marketing to try to get customers for that thing. What I like about this is that you can work backwards from the content that would go viral. This is content that would go viral repeatedly, and that will be your sales engine to sell your kits. Is this a huge business? No. But could you basically have three SKUs and charge $1,000 for each one of these kits and capture a hobbyist market that other people have overlooked? Yeah. I definitely think you could do that, and you could do it with just viral content.
34:34	Chris Koerner	I mean, really, any of these ideas you could film yourself doing and sell, right? Digging out in-ground pools, porch pumpkins. </FormattedResponse>
34:41	Sam Parr	"What would you do for this, GovDeals.com?"
34:44	Chris Koerner	There are these liquidation marketplaces where you can buy Costco returns. Everything that the TSA confiscates, you can buy for, like, pennies on the dollar. </FormattedResponse>
34:53	Shaan Puri	Well, Chris — you wrote good headlines. You should start with the headline. The headline here you wrote was: "How to Make $1,000 a Day Selling TSA Liquidation Items." Yeah... okay — you have my attention. So tell me more.
35:04	Chris Koerner	Yeah. You go through the TSA, and they take your pocket knife. Then they give it to this website — it sounds like a nonprofit, but it's not a nonprofit. It just has the word "govern" in it. It's very much a dot-com, and they sell this crap. Then you're in the liquidation game: you buy pallets worth of crap, split it up, and sell it on Facebook Marketplace.
35:23	Shaan Puri	So, if I go to govdeals.com, this is where you go to buy the stuff.
35:26	Chris Koerner	Right.
35:26	Shaan Puri	So, what should I click? You go by category here.
35:30	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, so the other website that does this is Beestock (beestock.com). They have a contract with Costco to sell off their returns."
35:39	Shaan Puri	The government, by the way—who... who... who is, like, "GovDeals"? Who the heck's making this, and how do they get the inventory?
35:43	Chris Koerner	Some freaking dude that has a friend at the government — I have no idea — but the alpha here is setting filters for your local area and finding things that are too big, too expensive to ship, right? Like old police cars or something. Okay, just on vacation.
36:01	Sam Parr	"I've been on this website, by the way, trying to buy a school bus... a Humvee. I wanted to buy—like, you can buy military equipment there. Yeah, I've definitely been on this site."
36:12	Shaan Puri	Okay, so I'm looking near me. Let's see: I got a — I got a vaccine refrigerator, an electric scooter. What am I looking for? What's — what are the "needles in the haystack" that I really want here, Chris?
36:27	Chris Koerner	Well, what you should do—and can do—is build an agent. Vibe-code an agent that finds items for sale according to your filters. For example: under $3,000 within 100 miles of your ZIP code. Then it posts them all for sale on Facebook Marketplace at a set markup—call it 80%. You just list all these things on Facebook Marketplace. If it starts taking off, getting a ton of hits and inquiries, then you actually go spend the money to buy the item.
36:56	Shaan Puri	Gotcha. Okay. So you're just going to relist all of these things, and then... yeah. And then, basically, ship on demand—buy on, you know, you sort of drop-ship the government-confiscated items.
37:07	Sam Parr	Yep, dude — this is fantastic. I'm looking at Beastock (beastock.com). They raised $80 million from a PE firm and do something like $200 million a year in sales. I wanna—I'm gonna shop on this. I love going on eBay and looking for stuff. This is really cool.
37:22	Shaan Puri	"There's a 2020 McLaren for $150,000, Sam, right now."
37:27	Sam Parr	"On BSOC or on GovDeals?"
37:28	Shaan Puri	On GovDeals.
37:29	Sam Parr	Dude, if it's on GovDeals, that means it was repossessed or previously used.</FormattedResponse>
37:32	Shaan Puri	Like a crime.
37:33	Sam Parr	Yeah, it's got a good story to it.
37:36	Shaan Puri	"Look, GTA Six is not out yet. This is the closest thing you can get to it."
37:40	Sam Parr	"Have you guys heard of 260SampleSales.com?" </FormattedResponse>
37:44	Shaan Puri	No. What is that?
37:46	Sam Parr	260samplesale.com. So, basically, do you guys know how TJ Maxx...?</FormattedResponse>
37:50	Shaan Puri	Dude, the tagline says "IYKYK" — "if you know, you know." I don't know, as in, in fact, I don't know. Should I just leave the site?
37:58	Sam Parr	Is that the headline?
38:00	Shaan Puri	"That's like the Google."
38:01	Sam Parr	That's obnoxious. So, Two Sixty Sample Sale — it's in, I think, Miami, New York, and L.A. You know how T.J. Maxx convinces Nike or whatever to give them last year's stuff, the stuff that didn't sell? They don't want to put it in their store because they don't want to look bad. These guys do the same thing but with typically nicer brands — not significantly nicer, but nicer stuff. Brands like Todd Snyder, and I've seen it with Buck Mason. These are brands where a sweater might cost $200 to $300. These guys do it all over New York City. What they do is rent out a vacant space; it's very bare bones — just racks of clothes, like portable racks. You walk in and things are dirt cheap. It's amazing. Every time I see a Two Sixty Sample Sale they have these pop-ups. You sign up to get alerted, and then they do a pop-up for a week at a time. The line is out the door — it's crazy. They are doing so much volume; the demand is huge. I thought, Sean, you actually told me about the Two Sixty Sample Sale.
39:07	Shaan Puri	"So, is it, like, significantly cheaper, basically?"
39:09	Sam Parr	Significantly cheaper—like one-tenth of the price. So a $300 item will literally be $30.</FormattedResponse>
39:15	Shaan Puri	"And it looks like they're kind of doing a membership model, right? So you pay—do you pay to be a member? And then, because of that, you're going to get to shop early."
39:22	Sam Parr	I think you get early shopping access, but it is really cool. I've bought so much stuff from these places, and it's—it's great. It's great. It's like one of these businesses where you had no—I had no idea that this existed, but it makes sense... like where.
39:36	Shaan Puri	"Do what you have. You bought it because every picture on this website is an extreme-looking fashion piece."
39:41	Sam Parr	Just like nothing crazy — like boxers, cargo shorts from Todd Snyder. And what happened was I fell victim: I saw a listing that said, "It was $300, but right now it's $15 — I have to get this." That's the energy in...
40:02	Shaan Puri	"I'm leaving money on the table, yeah."
40:06	Sam Parr	"But I love the $2.60 sale."
40:08	Shaan Puri	Let's do another one. What's another fun one? Do you have [one]?
40:11	Chris Koerner	How about this — mobile fuel delivery? You see this one?
40:15	Shaan Puri	I've never seen this — "No mobile fuel delivery." What is this?
40:18	Chris Koerner	So people are paying to not have to go to the gas station anymore, and the churn is next to zero. People get addicted to it. The guy just kind of: you have an app, you set up an appointment, he'll come top off your tank. You pay a markup on the gas and then you pay a monthly subscription fee. I think his revenue per year per customer is $5,000, and his lifetime value is super high.
40:44	Sam Parr	That's insane.
40:45	Shaan Puri	"So, there's a DoorDash for gas, pretty much."
40:48	Sam Parr	Yeah, you know how people, when they get—when they get an electric car, they're like, "Oh, it's so great not to go to the gas station"? I hate that. How else are we supposed to get, like, a Diet Pepsi or a Slim Jim? Do you know what I mean? I need to go to the gas station.
41:01	Chris Koerner	"Same. I feel guilty when I pull up to the gas station in my Tesla—like everyone's judging me."
41:07	Shaan Puri	But so, how—by the way—one of the comments on this video was, "Dubai has this." Oh, so it might be that... So, Dubai: how much more expensive is the gas? Let's say it's $100 normally for me to fill up my tank. What would it be with something like this?
41:22	Chris Koerner	So, he'll take the average price of all the gas stations within a five-mile radius of the customer's house and mark it up 20%.
41:30	Shaan Puri	Alright — what about this novelty ice cream thing? My kids go nuts for the ice cream truck whenever it comes around. I just can't believe it doesn't come around more often. It's like a once-a-month thing. I'm like, "dog, we buy — we all buy every time you're here. Why are you not here more? Where do you go?" I come here every day, like at the park. Basically, as soon as the ice cream truck pulls up, every single kid goes and gets an ice cream. The truck literally looks nostalgic. The idea of an ice cream truck is nostalgic, but the truck actually looks like it's from 1988, and the menu does too. I'm just looking at it thinking, "this is nostalgic, but actually it's just old," which is not what you want. So, Chris — what's your ice cream idea?
42:14	Chris Koerner	So this is like a $300 or $400 machine. It's basically a frozen cylinder that you pour flavored cream over; it melts the ice cream and then scrapes it off. You put it in a little container, and it's ice cream. It's viral—very visual ice cream that sells itself. You can do it on a busy street corner or at farmers' markets. You prove out the demand in an affordable way, and then you scale from there.
42:38	Shaan Puri	It looks like a stack of hay or something.
42:40	Sam Parr	Yeah, so on your Instagram — I'm just reading it, or TikTok — it just says that you're doing... Are you saying a different idea every day? Because on here it says you're on day 57, apparently. Someone made fun of you because the top quote was: "Does the ice cream taste good?" — "I don't know and I don't care."
42:59	Chris Koerner	"That's just a hack to get more people to follow me, I mean..."
43:03	Sam Parr	Which is what?
43:05	Chris Koerner	Just say, "This is Day 57," because then they follow it like, "Oh, I want to see Day 58." But there's no date. So did you ask the dude... secret? There's no date. </FormattedResponse>
43:12	Shaan Puri	Doing this for two years. Come on.
43:17	Sam Parr	"Wait—really? So this isn't actually Day 57? You just made it up?" </FormattedResponse>
43:20	Chris Koerner	Well, I mean, I post three ideas a day, and my editor will add "day whatever" to any of them. I don't know — there's no rhyme or reason. It just helps; it works. Spugazi, come on. </FormattedResponse>
43:32	Shaan Puri	"What do you want?"
43:33	Sam Parr	It could be Day 57.
43:35	Chris Koerner	It could be.
43:36	Shaan Puri	You've posted all these ideas, and you find something that somebody's doing and you're like, "Oh—genius. This could be a thing." Boom—genius, this could be a thing. If you step back and have a takeaway from this whole thing, maybe the takeaway is about the types of ideas. Maybe the takeaway is what you've seen in the comments or people's reactions. Or maybe the takeaway is in the action you've seen some people take from these. What are the actual lessons you've had now, after posting—I don't know how many, you know?
44:07	Chris Koerner	Hundreds—hundreds of these videos. People are very creative in coming up with excuses and reasons why they won't do something. Very creative. If you look at my comments, some of the most common things are: "What about insurance?" "What about liability?" You buy insurance—that's what insurance is for. "Oh, this is so good. Why don't you do it? Why don't you?" "I have, like, 13 businesses. I can't do all of them." I'm sorry for giving you an idea. People, if we were as creative at actually starting and executing on things as we are at coming up with excuses for why they wouldn't work, we'd all be millionaires by now.
44:45	Shaan Puri	Yeah. The comment section of Instagram and TikTok on any viral video is where I would send my worst enemy if I were like, "You should adopt this mindset — this will serve you well." I would just send my enemies there, and one by one they would all become incapable people who focus on the absolute wrong things. I'm talking about the viral videos, not niche small community videos or things with a strong, loyal audience. Just stuff that pops off. Okay, so you had 10 million views. The top reaction is like, "Oh, this person made it," and then people say, "Well, people who've made it are ruining America." It's like... what? What? That's your takeaway from this success story — that success is bad? The amount of poor-quality thinking and attitudes in the comment sections on a big video is pretty wild.
45:41	Sam Parr	"Do you guys read the comments?"
45:44	Shaan Puri	I read the comments on our YouTube videos. I don't really read them to get feedback, though, if that makes sense. I read them and I reply to people because I'm like, "Oh, it's cool that you care enough to write, so I'm going to— I want to talk to you." That's cool. But I don't look at them and think to myself, "Oh, I'm going to do that," because that would defeat the purpose of what I'm trying to do. You know the Rick Rubin quote: > "The greatest thing—the nicest thing you could do for your audience is ignore them completely." If you're a creator, if you're an artist, if you're trying to make something, you should make the thing you want to make and then let the chips fall where they may. That has become much more the philosophy I have. If you want feedback on a specific thing, cool—go ask certain people that you respect for that feedback. But you don't just react to what's in the comments.
46:36	Sam Parr	Yeah, I agree with your philosophy, and it's hard.
46:42	Shaan Puri	Hard, like psychologically, to avoid it, you mean?
46:45	Sam Parr	Well, you get a huge dopamine rush. So, if we do something that hits, and you're like, "I didn't even have fun doing that, but it hit," you'd still get a dopamine rush. You can record something that people love and it falls flat for you. You're like, "That doesn't feel wonderful right now," even though it felt great when I recorded it.
47:03	Chris Koerner	I like to say it: "You can't go viral without half of everyone thinking you're an idiot, right? It just comes with the territory..."
47:09	Shaan Puri	"Else it wouldn't go viral. Doesn't that seem like a pretty toxic game to play?"
47:14	Chris Koerner	If you read the comments, yeah.
47:16	Shaan Puri	But not just toxic for your mentality, but almost toxic in the sense of... you know, I'm a sports fan. I used to love growing up watching SportsCenter, and SportsCenter used to be a bunch of people who loved sports showing you the highlights—the coolest shit that you missed—and making some jokes along the way. If you fast-forward to ESPN today, it's basically debate shows where one guy is going to say the craziest shit ever and the other guy's going to fight him. And they're like, "Cool. Do you believe any of that shit you're saying?" They're like... </FormattedResponse>
47:48	Chris Koerner	Yeah
47:48	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, what does that have to do with—what does that have to do with this, you know?"
47:53	Chris Koerner	The key differentiator is: do you believe it? Everything I post — that's a checkbox in my mind before I hit publish: do I actually believe what I'm saying? Sometimes I believe something that's controversial, and that people think is... and I post it, and it usually does well. But I'm not in the game of publishing things that are just bombastic to get views if I don't believe it.
48:15	Shaan Puri	Chris, have you done anything else cool in your businesses since the last time we talked? So you pivoted your tree-trimming business. Last time we talked on here we were like, "All right, I got like a dozen businesses that are doing, in total, you know, $2 or $3 million a year in free cash flow." Has anything cool happened in your portfolio?
48:33	Chris Koerner	"I'm almost ready to open my secret pickleball club that we talked about last time."
48:37	Shaan Puri	Okay, so... it's been a little while. You seemed like you were going to open that up quickly. Have you run into real-world bumps doing that, yeah?
48:46	Chris Koerner	"I have to expand my metal building, and it's really hard finding a company that wants to do that because it's a small job. There are companies that want to build metal buildings and barndominiums from the ground up, but that was the..." [sentence unfinished]
48:57	Shaan Puri	Hard idea again: you had a space—like a shed or a big barn—in your backyard.
49:02	Chris Koerner	Yeah.
49:03	Shaan Puri	"And you called it a secret pickleball."
49:06	Chris Koerner	"Secret pickleball. Yep."
49:07	Shaan Puri	And you were like, "I'm gonna have 100‑something members — or 200 members or something like that — who pay me... What was it?"
49:13	Chris Koerner	A $100 per month.
49:14	Shaan Puri	Yep. $100 a month, and I'm gonna base [it]. All I gotta do is basically run this kind of no-employee backyard pickleball club for people. </FormattedResponse>
49:24	Chris Koerner	"Yep, and it's almost open. Well, Chris, I see one."
49:27	Shaan Puri	I'm on your TikTok feed. You have—it’s kids' gym equipment, and I just bought a little bit of this for my home gym because my kids always come down and want to be in the gym with me or kind of bug me while I'm working out. They just think it's playtime, and I need something to occupy them. So I bought some of this Fisher-Price–looking gym equipment, and there are a couple of problems with it. One, kids get bored of it fairly fast. Two, it's really ugly. You end up with red, yellow, green, and blue all over your gym, which was not that color before, so it kind of trashes up the space. What kids actually like is basically obstacle courses. So I think the kids' gym equipment to make is basically an easy-to-set-up little obstacle course—the equivalent of a McDonald's menu of, say, 12 different courses you could just set up. That would occupy my kids for 30 minutes and it would be really fun. I do this manually every day with my kids; I basically create obstacle courses in my house. Chris, have you seen the Nugget? Sam, do you know about the Nugget?
50:39	Sam Parr	"Oh yeah. I'm a nugget owner."
50:41	Chris Koerner	So, yeah—oh, yeah... These are modular, yeah.
50:45	Shaan Puri	So the nugget is this incredible business where they created kids' furniture, but it doesn't look like furniture. If you thought of kids' furniture from first principles, as Elon would say, then you would make this: something with no hard edges or corners that kids can get cut on. It would basically look like a toy, which is what the Nugget is. It's a couple of foam base pieces and then foam triangles, foam circles—whatever. You get these shapes that you can set up as a couch when you're not using it, or when you want to just sit. You can also fold them up and create, basically, a jungle gym. Moms go nuts for this thing. If you've seen the "Nugget owners" Facebook groups, it's like 100,000 members of moms who just love the Nugget. They want new colors, ideas, and tips—like, "if you buy two Nuggets you can create this in your house." Kids love the Nugget; parents love the Nugget. It's basically a modular piece that's a mix of furniture and a toy, and I think there should be more of that. This business has scaled. I think their plant started in North Carolina or something, and they do, you know, $50–70 million a year in revenue on the Nugget. It's a real, legit business. Actually, I think that estimate might be dramatically low—it might be double that by now. I looked into it for the first time a couple years ago and was thinking about potentially competing with them.
52:11	Sam Parr	"Yeah, I bought one after he told me about it. It seems amazing. What do you think the revenue is now?"
52:17	Shaan Puri	Let me see. They had posted—I remember it was like $75,000,000 a while back, but I imagine it's now north of $100,000,000, would be my guess. It was a profitable business that was bootstrapped—no investors, as far as I could find. There were a bunch of opportunities. One: the Nugget was quite expensive, so making a lower-cost Nugget was one option. Two: you could make the Nugget and get into retail, because they weren't in retail. I remember thinking somebody should do the Costco version. Costco basically has knock-off versions of everything. If you see Peloton, you walk into Costco and there's something called like... I don't even know what it's called, you know?
53:02	Sam Parr	The Echelon.
53:03	Shaan Puri	Echelon — it looks exactly the same. The name, fucking rhymes, and it's like, "this is Peloton, cool." There's Oura Ring, which is the kind of fancy fitness tracker. And they're like, "boom, we have the... Zora Ring." They'll have the Costco-brand, partnered version of these. Costco doesn't make it; they just find a company that plays at the right price points for Costco.
53:26	Sam Parr	"Dude, that's exactly — like, that's pretty much what my company also does with the same approach. We just aren't gonna raise any VC, and I could sell for less and make more money. I mean, it's the same thing; that's what Ashland did. I mean, that's the difference. What's the difference? How are you guys different? Well, we didn't raise VC; therefore we can make less profit and get..."
53:40	Shaan Puri	Are you more different? The spelling?</FormattedResponse>
53:44	Sam Parr	"I can't read."
53:45	Chris Koerner	I bet I can tell you where the nugget found all their customers — from Facebook ads.
53:50	Shaan Puri	Yeah.
53:50	Chris Koerner	Yeah — Facebook ads. That's it. Everywhere you look, it's just Facebook ads.
53:54	Shaan Puri	And they did have to be clear—insane word-of-mouth. People really love this product and will show it. When we do play dates, inevitably the parents are like, "Oh, what is that?" We tell people it has some virality to it as well. It's a great product and they did a great job. But I think there's more opportunities like that in the kids' space, where you make something that's functional, that kids find fun, but doesn't clutter up and make your house look ugly at the
54:24	Chris Koerner	"Same time. Yeah, I wonder if you could do the Casper mattress version of this and build a Nugget competitor — one that you can shrink down [compressed for shipping] to make shipping costs cheaper and make it more affordable."
54:35	Sam Parr	Comes, isn't it?
54:36	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, it does come like that. It comes rolled in a thing, and then you let it expand for two days when it gets to your house." "Chris, what's your favorite business of all the businesses that you own? I'm curious."
54:48	Chris Koerner	Oh man. Of the ones I currently own—yeah. Yes. Oh man.
54:53	Shaan Puri	But what's the best business when you're the one—the one that you're like, "Oh..."
54:56	Chris Koerner	This RV parks like my RV, say.
55:00	Shaan Puri	More. Say more words. I just... I.
55:02	Chris Koerner	I don't understand why people invest in single-family or multifamily properties. With a mobile home or an RV park, you don't maintain the units; you just maintain the infrastructure under the ground. It's a hedge against the economy. When the economy's good, millennials and boomers are traveling, so you get short-term stays. When the economy tanks, you have people living in your RV parks full-time. So you hedge it both ways.
55:24	Shaan Puri	"What's your RV park called?"
55:26	Chris Koerner	Well, I have ownership in 9 of them.</FormattedResponse>
55:29	Shaan Puri	"Streams side — what's one of them like?" </FormattedResponse>
55:31	Chris Koerner	Moose Creek, near Glacier National Park.
55:34	Sam Parr	"Why don't you just buy more of these, then?"
55:38	Shaan Puri	Well, I am okay. So I'm looking at this Moose Creek. What is Streamside?
55:44	Chris Koerner	That's our holding company that owns all of them. We have 29.
55:48	Shaan Puri	And then I'm looking at—there's a very nice website. So when I think RV park [recreational vehicle park], I thought trailer park, but this looks like a fancy thing. What... yeah, am I dumb, or is there just... like...?
56:01	Chris Koerner	No, I've done both. Yeah, this is more like KOA — this is for short-term stays. They're near national or state parks; people stay one to three nights at a time. Trailer parks: people live there full-time, month to month or year to year.
56:13	Shaan Puri	So you went near a national park. You buy a piece of land, you get it zoned and permitted, I assume, and then basically people bring their RVs there. So you're not building mobile homes; they bring their RV and get to park it, and they pay you a fee to park there. That's what this is.
56:31	Chris Koerner	Yeah, we don't really build — we'll expand, but we're usually buying existing parks and adding value.
56:36	Shaan Puri	Okay, great. So that's what this is. And then—how do I, if I just want to come short-term and stay: do you have stuff sitting there that I could just go use, or do I have to bring my... I have to bring my—bring your RV? Yeah. Okay, so there's...
56:48	Sam Parr	No. It basically just has a way to easily change the water. It has electric hookups, and it might have a pool or some type of lounge that you can use.
56:57	Shaan Puri	You walk through the business among these. So, you said you buy them—you don't build them. Yep. So you buy out of, whether it's this one or another one... so, like, how much do you buy this for? </FormattedResponse>
57:05	Chris Koerner	This one, we bought for $8,000,000. It was doing $700,000 a year, so about a 9% cap rate.
57:13	Shaan Puri	Give or take. So you put down 2,000,000 or 3,000,000—what did you put down?
57:17	Chris Koerner	We put down 20%, so 1,600,000. We raised 40% from investors, and we financed the remainder through a bank.
57:28	Shaan Puri	Okay, so you put down $1.6 million, and then 40% of the $8,000,000 you also put down as equity. So you have less debt than typical — you have 40% equity on this thing. You buy it; it was making $700,000 of profit at the time, right? And then you said, "we add value" — so what was the play to add the value to this one?
57:50	Chris Koerner	So this one was open five months a year, whereas it could have been open six months a year. It opened on May 15 and closed on October 15. We opened from May 1 to October 31, right? So we added a month of occupancy.
58:03	Sam Parr	"Sounds pretty simple, right?"
58:04	Shaan Puri	Genius. Okay. And by the way, you talk to the owners and you're like, "Hey guys, how come you don't do that?" And they're just like, "We just... that's how we do things." Or what?
58:14	Chris Koerner	No good reason.
58:15	Sam Parr	Happy we don't, yeah.
58:16	Chris Koerner	We're good. It makes good money. Then we bought an acre next door—or two acres next door—and we expanded into it. The rents were under market, so we raised rents. We added more pad sites and expanded the season. Now it's doing like $1,200,000 a year of net profit. Gotcha.
58:33	Shaan Puri	And it would be maybe still a 9% cap rate... or, you know, was that a sign of the times?
58:38	Chris Koerner	We bought it under market. It was probably worth an 8% cap when we bought it at, like, a 7.5% cap. It's—it's an 8-figure park now. </FormattedResponse>
58:47	Shaan Puri	Yeah, that's a $15,000,000 thing now. So if you went and sold it today — if it's stabilized and it's working well because you did raise the rents, add more pads, extend the seasonality by 15%, or, you know, opened windows and whatever else you said you did — now it's a $15,000,000 asset. If you go sell this, you will end up turning 1.6x of equity into something like 3.2x, or maybe more, because you have carry on the investor thing — something like that.
59:18	Chris Koerner	Well, more because we're packaging it with 28 other parks. So we have $150,000,000 worth of parks under management, and then we have a portfolio worth $111,000,000 under contract right now. So, by the end of the year we'll have $260,000,000 worth of parks under management. That way our cap rate comes way down and we could sell the whole thing for a six-cap to private equity. And how do we—me and my partners... I'm a co‑GP in this fund [co‑general partner].
59:43	Sam Parr	So, you have two or three.
59:44	Chris Koerner	Three partners.
59:45	Shaan Puri	"Do you operate in this, or you're just like... you a [unfinished thought]?"
59:47	Chris Koerner	Don't. You don't want me operating, Sean. Come on.
59:50	Sam Parr	"What value do you do?"
59:51	Shaan Puri	"You do? I help."
59:52	Chris Koerner	With marketing and with fundraising.</FormattedResponse>
59:55	Shaan Puri	I'm an idea guy with a great personality — somebody everybody wants on.
59:59	Sam Parr	The board.
01:00:00	Chris Koerner	"That's... that's."
01:00:00	Shaan Puri	"Usually, my pitch."
01:00:01	Chris Koerner	Strategy, quote "strategy," right?
01:00:04	Shaan Puri	"Okay, so RV parks is your best business."
01:00:07	Chris Koerner	Yeah, but I've been doing this for seven years. I've been with this company for two years, and before that I was working with a couple of other partners seven years ago.
01:00:14	Sam Parr	"Did you ever have a job, or are you always doing your own thing?"
01:00:17	Chris Koerner	"Always doing my own thing."
01:00:19	Sam Parr	"Which of the eight things has been the biggest financial success for you?"
01:00:24	Chris Koerner	This will probably end up that, when we exit — which will probably be within a couple of years — I've had two different e-commerce brands that were eight-figure businesses. One I exited and one I did not. "Which one did you exit?" We sold wholesale iPhone parts for seven years to iPhone repair stores. </FormattedResponse>
01:00:44	Shaan Puri	Okay. So, if I cleaned your slate—if I took away all your businesses and gave you all your free time back—right—you still know everything you know today about the world, but I gave you all your time back. What would you go really hard at? If I said, "Do something now; you're starting from scratch," and you know everything you need but you have to do one thing, where does your brain go? Not "what would you do" in a specific sense—maybe you don't know that—but what immediately comes to mind when I ask that question?
01:01:13	Chris Koerner	I would want to ride a tidal wave, and I would want to ride what I know. I know small business—right? Medium and large, I know nothing about those. I know small business inside and out. The tidal wave is AI, and I would want to implement AI in small businesses for free to get my foot in the door: earn their trust, show myself as an expert, and then start charging. I would have a simple AI automation/implementation agency for small- to medium-sized businesses.
01:01:39	Shaan Puri	What do you think is an example? What would be a hero example — a clear, no-brainer case where you could say, "Here's an example of a small business, and here's an example of how AI would help that small business: clear, no-brainer. Boom." That's the one I would try to rinse and repeat.
01:01:55	Chris Koerner	Yep. The simplest thing is setting up an AI voice answering agent (24/7) for small business owners who don't pick up the phone after hours because they're with their family. It's just an AI robot, and you can plug it into other software services that already offer this. You don't need any technical knowledge. Charge a flat monthly fee. If there's an emergency, it would pass the call through to the business owner — for example, a plumbing emergency. Otherwise, it's just like a smarter voicemail system. I would start there.
01:02:26	Sam Parr	We've had a lot of people say that. I've had a couple friends do it. I know Alex Lieberman is doing it. Sean... I don't know — do you know Grant Wilkinson? Maybe Grant's one of my good buddies. He started saying, "I'm looking at the website now." So originally this guy was like, "Hey, I want to work on something. Do you have any ideas I can work on?" I told him three things and all three failed miserably. He's an engineer and he was like, "I'm just gonna do this agency thing. It's called Rosedale — rosedale.ai." He's doing agency work that automates a variety of tasks using AI, and customers are just begging him to do shit for them. There are dozens and dozens of these services, and I'm seeing this firsthand with what's going on with Grant's business — people are just begging. It's simple.
01:03:12	Shaan Puri	"You think these businesses are doing well, Seth? Like, they're going gangbusters—these AI implementers for businesses?"
01:03:17	Sam Parr	It depends what you define as "gangbusters." But can the owner make seven figures a year — $1,000,000 a year? For sure. Can you get to $2–$4 million a year in revenue? For sure. Is it a lot of work? Yeah — it's a service. But if your goal is to make money, work 40 hours a week, and have a business, I think there's massive demand for it right now. How does that scale beyond that, to be as big as, you know, maybe $100,000,000 a year? I'm not sure. But some people will figure that out in agencies — that is a scale. People always say agencies aren't scalable. No — it's definitely scalable. You're going to have to have a thousand employees. It'll work; it's just going to be really hard. But that's not bad at all.
01:03:59	Shaan Puri	Yeah, yeah, yeah — it's scalable. You like pain? Yeah. It's: "What is your pain tolerance?" That's the question, not "Is this scalable?"
01:04:08	Sam Parr	But yeah—I mean, you don't have a bunch of friends who are doing this right now.
01:04:11	Shaan Puri	I've met a few people, but my understanding was that for a lot of these businesses they don't really know how AI can help them. So you basically have to go bespoke and figure out: what's your problem set and how do we use AI to do this? The AI part is almost the easy part. Then it's about how you get adoption and buy-in and all of that. I think there is definitely desire and demand. Everyone generally feels like, "I should probably be using AI to do stuff better," but when the business owner themselves is clueless about where AI could plug in, you need something like what Chris is talking about: here's a generic problem I can see from the outside that you see as a no-brainer for you. If I can find that match, I can do that specific implementation. Beyond that, it's a little bit harder. The more interesting plays to me have always been: you understand where AI is changing the game and then you basically go buy a business at a fair price today. Then you're like, "Cool — my value add is that I'm gonna use AI to drop 10 points of margin to the bottom line. I could take this from a 10% EBITDA business to a 20% EBITDA business just by doing this." Just by doing this one thing, I can get rid of all these people who are doing stuff because I can automate all of that at higher accuracy and speed using AI. So I think the play is: figure out the right type of business for that. Is it a bookkeeping business? Is it something else? You basically go and say, "All right, I could buy this business for $25,000,000. It's an established business with a book of clients already, and I know that I have this lever of AI that the 55–65‑year‑old business owner wasn't going to use. I bought it at a fair price, but I can make this thing more valuable, and I can capture $1,020,000,000 in two years of work without the hustle of scaling an agency." I like that play — that version of this play — much better personally. </FormattedResponse>
01:06:11	Sam Parr	Do you know anyone that's going after that now?
01:06:13	Shaan Puri	There's a lot of people—like full funds, private equity funds—that are doing this. They're like, "Cool, we're gonna do private equity." But typically the private equity play was maybe offshoring things, cutting headcount, or centralizing certain functions. Now the play is AI. They're going in and adding AI in three ways—kind of what Chris said: AI on the sales-automation side; AI on operations automation; and AI to, maybe, reduce headcount across the board in product or engineering. So a lot of people are trying to do that. I don't know how well it's going because they're not talking much on Twitter about how great it's going. Yeah... we'll see.
01:07:01	Sam Parr	"Chris, what do you want to be? Where do you want to be in ten years?"
01:07:04	Chris Koerner	I just want to keep starting businesses, man. I just chase product-market fit — that's what I do. But why? Because I'm just... I'm chasing dopamine. Like, that's it.
01:07:16	Shaan Puri	"The flavor of dopamine you like."
01:07:18	Chris Koerner	Yeah. I just—my focus, my version of focus, is focusing on my superpower, not on one business. My superpower is seeing and executing on opportunities really, really fast. Mhm.
01:07:29	Sam Parr	Well, don't you get worn out having to manage or work with people who run your shit and aren't as good as you want them to?
01:07:38	Chris Koerner	Yeah. I mean, I've had like 15 different business partners. Nowadays I'm much more likely to find a business partner that takes the vast majority of the business so I can have more slices of small pieces of pie. So there's low expectations from me, and I just go into a partnership eyes wide open saying, "Hey, I'm going to be super distracted. FYI, if you think I'm going to put in 10 hours a week, it's probably going to be 2—so adjust your expectations and equity accordingly." It took me 15 years to learn that, but that's just how I prefer to do things.
01:08:09	Sam Parr	"Where do you think, ten years from now, what's going to make it a huge win for you?"
01:08:13	Chris Koerner	It's probably going to be a SaaS business that I launch and promote with my audience—one that has a big exit. That's where I see this heading.
01:08:24	Shaan Puri	What kind of SaaS?
01:08:26	Chris Koerner	Well, I'm building a QuickBooks competitor right now. When I say "I," I mean my brother-in-law, who’s a 10x developer. It’s an AI-enabled QuickBooks competitor, so maybe that'll be it—maybe it won't even be a thing in six months. I don't know.
01:08:40	Sam Parr	"Yeah, that's pretty cool. I think that's good — like product–audience fit for you."
01:08:46	Chris Koerner	Would think.
01:08:46	Shaan Puri	"Yeah, that's a super competitive space, unfortunately."
01:08:51	Chris Koerner	I know.
01:08:53	Shaan Puri	So that's interesting. No—interesting.
01:08:56	Chris Koerner	But listen: I've got almost 4 million followers who like me. Most people hate QuickBooks; they hate Xero. If it's AI-enabled and it's cheaper, and I use it and talk about it, I'm not trying to beat QuickBooks or beat Xero. I'm just trying to build a cool business that cash flows.
01:09:15	Sam Parr	You know... what are we going to call it?
01:09:17	Chris Koerner	LazyBooks — bookkeeping for people who hate bookkeeping.
01:09:21	Sam Parr	Lazy books.
01:09:22	Chris Koerner	That's pretty.
01:09:23	Shaan Puri	"I like that you start with names. It seems like a guy who starts with a name — you get the name early."
01:09:29	Chris Koerner	"Yeah, yeah. I start with the domain name and the marketing. What?"
01:09:32	Shaan Puri	"That makes it real for you. It kind of forces clarity of thought around the product — like, why do you think that's important?"
01:09:39	Chris Koerner	It's more that I start with a marketing channel, right, in mind, and then I build an idea around that. Oftentimes, the name and the brand go hand in hand with the marketing channel, right? I don't like building ideas and then seeing if people will want them. I want to see if they will want it first, and then build the idea.
01:09:57	Sam Parr	"What was the name of number two and number three?"
01:10:00	Chris Koerner	There was, there was none—mean.
01:10:02	Sam Parr	"It's LazyBooks."
01:10:03	Chris Koerner	I tried ThinBooks; I couldn't find that domain. LazyBooks was one I was actually able to convince the seller to sell to me. I was really thinking of a slimmed-down QuickBooks competitor that had the 20% of features you only really need—features that never break, you know, that never disconnect from your bank account. That was the thought process there.
01:10:25	Sam Parr	You and Darmesh, man — you're all about the domain names. Did you guys... did you see? Sean Heath gave the country of Antigua, I think it was — did you see what happened?
01:10:33	Shaan Puri	"No—what did he do?"
01:10:35	Sam Parr	It was a very small article on TechCrunch (techcrunch.com).
01:10:38	Chris Koerner	"I saw that."
01:10:38	Sam Parr	It said Dharmesh Shah, founder of HubSpot. I don't remember exactly, but I think it said he gave them "antigua.ai" and paid them $800,000 to make that their official domain name. I don't understand why he paid them to make that their official domain name, but "antigua.ai" is now the country's official domain name.
01:11:03	Chris Koerner	Well, AI is actually... it stands for Antigua. Like, most of their revenue is coming from all of those registrations.
01:11:11	Sam Parr	Yeah. I don't know why Darmesh is just slowly making inroads with a variety of countries, starting with domain names. And before we know it, in the next 20 years he's going to have an army. This isn't out of the realm if you know Darmesh, Chris. Hopefully you had a great time — we like having you on.
01:11:32	Chris Koerner	This is a blast. Thanks, man.
01:11:33	Shaan Puri	Thanks for coming, man. </FormattedResponse>
01:11:34	Chris Koerner	Thanks for having.
01:11:35	Sam Parr	"You're an interesting guy with interesting ideas, and we appreciate you big time. You go ahead—promote it: tkopod.com"
01:11:40	Chris Koerner	It's the Kerner Office Podcast. I didn't want to talk about it, but here—I don't even know. I had this on, but here we are: tkopod.com
01:11:49	Shaan Puri	"Chris, what's your shirt? What does your shirt say?"
01:11:51	Chris Koerner	It says, "Look at this freaking thing right here—that's my headline for videos, yeah."
01:11:57	Shaan Puri	You're committed to the bit, and I appreciate that. I respect.
01:12:00	Chris Koerner	"Thank you."
01:12:01	Shaan Puri	"Your commitment to the bit, thank you."
01:12:03	Sam Parr	That's it. That's the pod. Thank you, Chris.

Discover

Listen

Catalog

Guides

Connect

Make $8K/day From These Side Hustles You’ve Never Heard Of

Transcript