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Happy Friday!
This newsletter has doubled in size lately, so I felt it appropriate to do a regular update on what I’m working on lately. 52 weeks of newsletters! It’s a big week! This will be part journal entry and part updates.
If you’ve been around here a while, don’t go anywhere! Because y’all seem to like my fresh update emails. I’m unveiling one of my stealth projects below! Kinda two, actually.
If you’re new here, then most this will be new to you!
Here are allllll of the projects I’m working on right now, and hopefully you learn something along the way. I promise to be brutally transparent.
Stealth 1:
This is a lead generation agency that we will be launching very soon. It’s mission will be twofold:
Generate a ton of high ROI leads (via several different methods) for small businesses.
Offer a white-labeled service to individuals that want to start a lead generation agency themselves.
If #2 is confusing, here’s what I mean.
Let’s say you want to start an agency that charges $1,500/month to help local businesses rank in the top 3 of the Google Maps map pack, but you have no idea how to actually help businesses do that.
You would simply go find some local customers and outsource the fulfillment of the actual service to us. You are the face of the company, you collect the cash, and you pay a % of that cash to us to do all the work and generate the results for your clients, in stealth mode. But you’re the hero that gets all the back slaps and equity.
This won’t just be “any other” business that we launch, this will be a flagship business for us that we are very excited about. It will help us serve:
People that follow us that own a small business, as well as…
People that want to start a small business themselves.
Why would it make sense for us to enable a ton of competitors?
The politically correct (but still true) answer: Because my mission is to empower entrepreneurship.
The capitalist answer: There are 33 million small businesses in America that need more leads. We’ll never get around to touching 99% of them. We’d rather make a little money from more of them than a lot of money from less.
If either of these options sound interesting to you, please simply vote here with 1 click:
Do either of these interest you? |
Ok, on to the next project:
Stealth 2:
Ok screw it, let’s pull this out of stealth already. Don’t worry, none of you reading this could be a customer of this.
It’s a programmatic site that captures organic leads for pet cremation and euthanasia. We sell these leads to local business owners and it’s going super well! And it’s been a ton of fun!
It’s not fully ramped yet, but let’s just say I sold a horse cremation in Minnesota this morning so things are looking pre-tty pre-tty good! (lol)
If you’re unfamiliar with pSEO, I talk about it in today’s podcast, as well as a few recent ones like this one.
The ultimate goal with this one is to find 1-4 big chains of vet clinics that will buy every lead we generate near their offices.
We paid $3,300 for the premium domain name, only after first validating the concept with the $11 animal-aftercare.com domain. But dashes are for losers so we ditched it!
Cool, right?
Mining Syndicate
This is our company that sells crypto mining hardware, software and services. It is not doing great right now. The mining market is absolutely brutal and we recently made some layoffs that were very painful.
We’ll get through it ok, but it has not been a rosy picture. Business is hard. That’s why you subscribe to this newsletter, because this is the stuff I don’t post about publicly.
We’ll leave it at that.
Sunbeam Paws
This is our pet cremation business. It’s really small, and we aren’t trying to grow it right now. It’s been profitable from day 1 and we have 1 very large customer (vet clinic.)
2-3 times per week we pick up frozen pets in a refrigerated van and drive them 45 minutes north to a cremation facility. Once a month we send an invoice.
That’s pretty much it. It took 2 very critical relationships that took a long time to nurture, as well as a few negotiation skills.
When you have a ton of businesses it’s hard to grow all of them at once until you hit scale and have more back office support. We aren’t there yet, but we’re getting there!
Voltera
This is software we developed that helps healthcare companies make more money using AI. It’s been a grind to develop this thing, and we realized we need more money to really scale it, so we decided to go the VC route. It’s a work in progress.
This is our Buc-ee’s reseller company. It has been crushing it! I went viral last month on a few platforms telling that story, and the YouTube Short version is STILL going viral. It gets 40k - 150k views per day, which is basically a free ad for our website. That’s led to record day after record day.
Very grateful for that unexpected blessing. It is so hard to make things go viral on YT Shorts, but when it does…the lifespan is so dang long. That video is my only YT Short success story after 160+ videos.
I am the co-General Partner in an RV Park fund for accredited investors. We’re closing on another gorgeous Montana park next month that’s 90 minutes from our park outside of Glacier National Park. The summer is the offseason in the RV park acquisition business, because park owners are too busy running their business to answer the phone! It’s about to heat up here soon.
The vast majority of our parks are at, close to, or above projections. Things are going very well here.
Waco, TX RV Park
This has been another story entirely. We’ve had myriad issues with the city that have been a massive distraction, so we are selling the park to move on from it. We will still make a healthy profit, but not as much as we’d hoped. My wife is the listing agent and it’s gotten a ton of interest, but no offers quite yet.
Fast Tree Care
This is the tree trimming business that we incubated last summer with our operating partner, James. It is profitable every month, and growing slowly. We recently started outsourcing the quoting of new jobs to our crews, so we could literally run this “local” business from anywhere in the world.
Like Sunbeam Paws, it isn’t growing as fast as it could be, because we aren’t putting enough firepower behind it. James is the best partner we could ask for, though!
Content
Content has been taking a bunch of time here lately. The Twitter algorithm is seemingly dead. I swear, just like Elon is constantly pulling A/B testing levers with Tesla, he does the same thing with the algorithm. One day your tweet gets 10 million views, and the next day something just as high quality gets 10k views. It never used to be that way.
Thankfully, I’m much reliant on Twitter than I ever have been.
I’m hiring a VA that will help me post and/or repurpose 25 pieces of content per day for me across all the platforms. I’ve been adding over 100k followers per month across platforms, and I expect that to double or triple by the end of the year, as right now I’m only posting 6-9 pieces of content per day.
I’ll never ever outsource my writing or videos, but I definitely need more help with the more manual tasks.
My podcast growth was flat until last month when it doubled over the course of a couple weeks, and it’s been flat again since.
Anything I can do to improve the podcast? Let me know! I’ve been really happy with the quality of episodes lately. But man, podcasts are so hard to grow.
Man, today’s newsletter is half journal and half informational, huh?
I hope you enjoyed this style. I could write for hours and hours…if only I had the time!
I appreciate each and every one of you. I really mean that. Your time is valuable, and I get to share some of it with you.
If you ever start a business based on an idea you heard from me, please let me know. Those stories are so gratifying to read! Have a great weekend.
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Thanks for reading!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner
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