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- Newsletter #00034
Happy Sunday!
Today’s email will be a little different than most.
I haven’t written much about everything I’ve been building over the last few months, so I’m going to do that today, and talk about new lessons I’ve learned from building these things. I always got good feedback about that. As always, I’ll be sure to use real numbers where I can. No fluff.
Here’s everything I’m currently working on (that I can remember right now):
Sunbeam Paws (The site took me 10 mins, can you tell? I love businesses that don’t need elaborate websites…)
This is our pet cremation business that went live on Monday. We’ve got revenue, finally! Every Monday, Wednesday and Friday my partner picks up a handful of frozen dogs from our vet customer and delivers them to the cremation facility. We need more vet customers!
That’s the extent of the business right now. We make about $70 per dog and about 82% of that is profit. We need more dogs! We have learned that Fridays are the busiest days for dead dogs, for whatever reason. Sample size: One Friday in business so far.
What started as an offhand Tweet about autism clinics 1.5 years ago eventually turned into us almost buying an autism clinic in Tucson, AZ. We raised all the money needed from that one Tweet, but ended up killing the deal because of a flaky seller.
Then we pivoted to pet cremation because we liked that biz even more. After a year of working out the kinks, we are finally in business.
Remember, don’t be afraid to pivot, and don’t be afraid to chase shiny objects.
Usually when something takes that long to launch, it never launches. This was an exception.
This takes me about 3 hours per week right now.
This takes quite a bit of time, but I’m having a ton of fun. Every episode gets about 1,600 downloads right now. That doesn’t sound like a lot to me, but it’s growing quite a bit. A month ago it was closer to 500. Next month we should be around 2,500 each.
That puts me in the top 1-3% of all podcasts, but still about 97% smaller than, say, My First Million. There are levels to this game…
I’ve got a long ay to go! Any tips for me? I’m starting to test interviewing other entrepreneurs and multipreneurs to dive deep into their numbers and margins. First episode of that format drops on Wednesday. LMK what you think!
Podcast downloads are much more valuable than tweet impressions or Youtube views because of how long they are and how intimate or a setting it is. I’d much rather have 2,000 downloads than a 200,000 view tweet.
There are no ads or sponsors, and I don’t plan on it any time soon. I’m sure I’ll monetize it one day, somehow, but I’m not anxious to.
I’ve actually been trying to grow my podcast via cold email a lot lately, with some mixed success. I’m fully sold on using GMass for all of my cold email needs nowadays. I used to love Lemlist, but they’ve gotten too pricy and clunky. I might wrestle heavyweight, but I like my software lightweight.
I’ve heard so many people say “you can’t grow podcasts. They are sooo hard to grow.” Etc. Well, I say “We’ll see about that.” I’m trying to get creative, and it’s looking good so far.
The podcast stuff takes about 10 hours per week.
I’ve been a GP (General Partner) in a private equity fund for RV parks since January. It’s a ton of fun. We are buying about 2 RV parks per month and I help with 3 things:
Deal sourcing
Strategy
Fundraising
Our ideal park is a 9-11% cap rate at purchase, located in the southeast, and big enough to get to $750k top line revenue after expansion.
The hope here is to get over $100M AUM and then get bought out by private equity at a stupid cap rate. We’ll see. We’re about $60m right now. If that never happens then at least we’ll be putting off some cool dividends to us and our investors.
The play is to add short term rentals and/or more pad sites a year or two after purchase, and it’s working well so far. If you’re an accredited investor, you can see our current offerings here. We’re having a webinar for our next 2 parks on Monday here. Our parks average 20 - 40% IRR, depending on the location and risk profile.
This takes about 20-30 hours per week right now.
Stealth Project 1
I am very, very excited about this one, and I won’t be revealing much. If I did, I feel it would invite competitors. In short, there’s more downside than upside to talking about this one.
But I WILL be talking about how you can copy this idea in OTHER industries at some point in the future.
This is taking about 7 hours per week and we just hit profitability this week.
Other Cofounders Projects
This is the software we have that helps skilled nursing facilities save money. We are still pre revenue and things are going slowly, but there’s a big opportunity here. This takes almost no time per week, but Nik and Zach are spearheading it and spending much more time on it.
Our tree trimming business! We are growing! Most of our leads come from our proprietary outbound method. We are also starting to make and sell content around this business as well, with some success.
James is doing a great job with this business.
I’m spending just a couple hours per week on it right now.
This is our crypto miner company. We have been in the process of getting out of the managed hosting business for about 8 months now, and we are almost done.
We lose money on hosting our customer’s miners, and we always have. About $40k per month, to be exact. I’m not great at operations, so the older I get the more I learn to pick ideas that are operations light, as well as pivot our current companies away from operations.
Growth, sales and marketing is fun and comes easier for me.
This is taking a few hours per week, but I should be spending a TON more time on it…
Better Parks is simply one small RV park in Waco, TX. Things are not going great here lately, as we are duking it out with the city. We’re having to add bathrooms and a laundromat, and it’s been taking forever.
This takes almost no time per week for me.
Every month, like clockwork, we just grow. My partner Kirk is busting his back at this biz and doing a great job. I haven’t been pulling my weight so I haven’t been taking any distributions. We might be shifting the equity here soon to account for that as well.
I’ve made enough mistakes as a business partner by now to learn that when I’m not pulling my weight, I need to proactively do something about it before contention builds.
I’ve been helping with email marketing and a few operational things here or there, but that’s about it. We might top $5m this year with healthy margins. great biz!
This is taking about 2-3 hours per week.
Chief of Staff
We finally hired our Chief of Staff! His name is Kamal and he’s incredible, and we had to import him from Canada. He started on Monday and I’ve been helping him get trained up and working on some cool projects.
This has been taking just a few hours per week.
Other
We recently invested in a commercial appliance repair company in Tampa.
I’m putting out short form content every now and then with mixed results.
I’m still tweeting at least once per day, but spending less time on it overall.
I’m managing ad campaigns for a few of our brands until we find our paid ads guy. Kamal is going to be helping with that as well.
Still writing this newsletter with no plans to quit!
Any questions for me? Feel free to respond to this and ask or better yet, have me answer it on my show!
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As always, thanks for reading! Please share with a friend.
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com
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