Happy Wednesday- I realized I deleted a very important portion of the email after I sent so here is is again- complete and ad free!

Also- I'm hosting a one-day live AI event where 8 AI experts show you exactly how they build and get paid, step by step. In a single day you'll build your first app, automations, agents, and a way to charge for it. No coding or fluff, and you keep every template. Sign up here for the August 4th event!

Okay, let’s get into it.

This is the second time I've talked to someone about this subject in the last four months because I'm so bullish on it. For this one, I sat down with a guy named Luke who makes and rents websites for a living.

He mentioned that one of his sites finished last month at $1,925 in profit, and it's a website he hasn't touched in years. He owns 232 of these things at over 90% net margins and he spends two or three hours a week on all of them combined. By the end of the convo I was sitting there thinking I need to go build one of these myself. That's how good this hustle is. Watch/ listen to the whole thing on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Luke's hack is finding demand that nobody is serving yet. He stays out of roofing, plumbing, and concrete in big cities where 50 companies are already clawing at each other. There is no reason to walk into a fight when there's an empty room down the hall. The sweet spot combines two things:
1. The service has to be expensive enough to be worth your time
2. The owner has to be someone you can actually get on the phone.

Lawn mowing fails that test because the owner picks up- but each job is worth twenty bucks, so you'd have to generate 8,000 leads to make anything. Dentistry fails it from the other direction because the ticket is huge but you're likely never getting the dentist on the phone. Towing lands right in the middle, and so do tree service, pest control, radon mitigation, carpet cleaning, and landscape design when it's real design and not just guys cutting grass.

You also want to stay small on geography and target cities between 60,000- 500,000 people. Luke tried a towing site in a two-million-person market, found 87 companies already fighting for it, and walked away because it was too much work for the payoff. The random small town with zero competition is the one that stays passive so that's the one you want.

This next part you can do it tonight. Go to thumbtack.com, browse the near-me categories, and you'll find a giant menu of services people actually pay for. Pick one and Google that service + a city.

Now read the page the way Luke does. Skip the ads and look at the map pack first, because you're hunting for weakness. You want to see businesses with fewer than 10 reviews, companies running a Facebook page instead of a real website, and nobody using the exact keyword in their name. When you see all of that, you're looking at a market that is begging for a competitor.

Then scroll down to the organic results and look for inner pages, directory listings, and Yelp ranking on page one. If a random sub-page on somebody's site is sitting at number one, that means nobody ever built a real website around that topic in that town. You build one and you win, and the only reason it works is that it's work most people won't do.

Do one last check before you commit. Drop your keyword into trends.google.com and compare it against the variations, like "radon removal" versus "radon mitigation." You don't want to build a beautiful site around the phrase nobody actually types, so find the real keyword first.

Buy the exact-match domain if you can, meaning city plus service dot com, like WoodsideTowing.com. That branded match makes ranking easier and it's worth maybe 5 to 10% of your success, so it's an easy head start but it isn't everything. If the exact domain is taken, add a word like "pros" or "net" and you still get the city and the keyword doing the work.

Then build the site on WordPress, or a vibe coding app, and you don't need to write any code. Drag-and-drop builders give you a menu where you drag a headline onto the page and drop a paragraph under it.

Your content is the foundation, and if you build on sand the house falls down. The mistake so many make is slapping up a homepage with a bulleted list of services and calling it done, with no real pages behind any of it. That tells Google nothing, which means you're basically shrugging at the algorithm.

Do the opposite and build a real page for every single service you offer. Study your competitors, take notes on everything they mention, and then double or triple it. If they wrote three bullet points on a service, you write a thousand words on it and weave in the questions people actually ask. To get those questions fast, ask ChatGPT for the common questions consumers have about radon in Dallas and tell it to source from Reddit and Yelp, and it hands you exactly what to write about. Do this well enough and the site will sometimes rank with zero backlinks, which is the goal every time.

Set up a Google Business Profile and let the site simmer for a couple of months while it climbs and the leads start trickling in. Renting it out is the easiest part because you're not cold-calling into the void. You already have leads in hand, and that's your leverage.

Target the owners who are already spending money on Google or Facebook ads, because they've proven they'll invest in themselves. Call them up and say, "Hey, I know you don't know me from Adam, but I've got customers who want this, so if I send you some people, can we work out a cut?" Most of them say yes because there’s no downside.

Then test them before you trust them. Ask how fast they'll follow up, and if they say "today" but don't call the lead today, they're gone. Do a shadow call to hear whether they answer the phone like a professional. When you find the right one, lock it in with a flat fee and their credit card on file, set to autopay through Stripe so you keep all the control.

Once you have a flat-fee site humming, there's another gear called revenue share. Luke went back to his biggest clients and restructured the deal to take 20% of the revenue those leads generate, and his income jumped overnight. A passive $4,000 site can turn into a $30,000 site once you're sharing in the upside instead of charging a flat rate. This can all come later, but it’s something good to keep in the back of your mind.

Your one job this week is simple: open thumbtack, pick a niche, Google it against a small city, and just look at whether the market is begging for you. And again, if you’re interested in learning more, go watch/ listen to the whole thing on YouTube, Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Everything is figureoutable. Let's get after it.

And again, you can listen to the episode where we talk about just this on YouTube, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.

Have a great week!

Chris

P.S. I share deep dives on business ideas and complete playbooks three times a week on YouTube and every podcast platform.