Mine, All Mine!

Happy Sunday!

Almost done with our Greece trip and we’re having a blast! This was us a few short hours ago:

Gorgeous, right? Now my kids are in bed, so I gotta bang this out real quick.

If you’ll remember last week’s newsletter, I hyped up this week’s alpine slide/massage chair/gem mining/candy podcast episode pretty hard. Did I overhype it, or did it deliver?

If you haven’t listened or watched yet, here’s the Youtube version, and podcast links below:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

Anyway, let’s get after it!

This’ll be another short one because…vacation.

I really think I’m going to do it, y’all. My curiosity is getting the best of me, as it always does, and if it fails it’ll make for great content.

I think I’m going to buy a either an inflatable bull riding ring or a 12’ sluicing system for gem mining and place it in the best location of a really popular DFW-area mall.

Okokok whoa there Chris. Slow down on me. That’s the first time I’ve heard the world “sluice” in my life, and I thought it was a typo at first.

Here’s what I mean by sluice.

It’s nothing more than a fake country-bumpkin lookin’ water tower that you pump and cycle water up to so it can flow down along a channel that kids can mine for gems in.

My body literally won’t let itself die until I see one in a huge Texas shopping mall with the word “Galleria” in the name.

I just HAVE to see what happens. I have to! It hasn’t been done before. And we both know that’s only for 1 of 2 reasons:

1. It wouldn’t work. Dumb idea.

2. It’s a great idea that hasn’t been executed yet.

Here’s the business model:

1. Buy bags of stuff like this for $7 - $15, mark it up 2-3x and sell to kids to mine for gems, arrowheads, shark teeth, etc.

That’s it. Pay someone $15 hour to sit there and incentivize them with $5 for every kid they convince. You can even hand out samples for them to taste mining with!

Put up a big TV to show how it’s done so the kids can see the gems becoming uncovered by the water. It sells itself.

Parents pay for this on vacation, why not in the mall?

I’ll find out. I’m really going to do this, IF I can get this to happen:

1. The mall says that yes, they have a great location for this (that has plumbing) and will allow it.

Really that’s it. The only thing I need. I can find a $15/hour kid and an iPad with Square. And yes, I’m oversimplifying. That’s a feature, not a bug. I don’t do that on Twitter to be misleading to clickbaity, I do it because that’s how I do it off Twitter as well.

If you don’t oversimplify then you don’t launch!

Oh, and what did I mean by bull riding? I was referring to this Tweet:

I still wanna try that. Gem mining can be plan A and this can be plan B. Or hey, maybe both of them!

Here’s how the gem mining numbers break down. I’ve already been in touch with a manufacturer:

• Bags of rocks, dirt and gems are about $10 each.

• I think they’d sell for $30 each, but I could be wrong. I’d play around with this pricing a ton.

• Kiosk rent would likely be about $4k/month, and we’d be closed every Sunday.

• My employee would be $20/hour after payroll taxes, etc.

• The mall is open 10 hours per day.

At these numbers, break even would be about 14 bags per day, or 1.4 per hour. These malls get 10m visitors per year, so I think that would be conservative.

5 sold per hour would mean this business would net about $20k per month, and I think it could get there.

If the model was working I’d add more bag options, shirts, upsells, etc. Discounted 2nd bags, etc. That would be the cherry on top. Here’s a bulk pricing sheet if you’re interested.

If it doesn’t work then the rent is month to month and I close up shop. NBD.

What do you think, should I do it?

Top Tweets of the Past Week

1. Water World

2. Junk Removal

3. Farewell, Chris

As always, thanks for reading! Please share with a friend.

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner