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- Newsletter #00053
Happy Friday!
I’ve got another car idea today! You will love it. But first, a few things to go over.
I created a new lead magnet that I’ve been using to find new subscribers. But hey, no fair! Because I never gave it to existing subscribers. It’s called the TKO Toolkit, and I’ll keep adding to it over time. I didn’t want anyone to feel left out.
Can you believe 6,758 of you new subscribers are from Instagram? Welcome!
No it’s not on a fancy website or Notion template, because done is better than perfect and Google Docs works just fine.
Also…I’m ONLY going to send the weekly podcast summary emails to people that explicitly tell me that they want them from now on. So if you DO want me to keep sending them, just click this and you’ll get a summary of everything I cover on my podcast from the week prior, as you’ve been getting.
If you don’t click that link, you’ll no longer get it.
Also, we are hiring 1-2 salespeople at cofounders.com. Please apply here!
One final, final, thing! I am launching a separate newsletter for real estate stuff only. Primarily, things like:
How to structure deals
How to find off market properties
Creative growth hacks, etc
Lots of MH/RV park stuff, of course
Because I wanna write about that stuff, but not to this newsletter because this newsletter is more about business ideas, me building companies in public and growth hacks. And I wanna keep it that way.
It may be once a week or once every month or so. I just don’t know. If you wanna get it, just click this link and you’ll get it once I write my first edition.
Ok, now to the meat! Man that’s a lot of preamble today. Sorry about that!
If you’ll remember from last month, we accidentally started a business selling perfume vending machines. I totally forgot to write about it! This is how it’s going so far:
That site traffic going up on the right is because my YT Short about these machines started going viral this week. I recently cracked the YT Shorts code and it has been very exciting, and yes I plan to write about how I did it very soon.
We’ve done $75k in sales through the site about about $30k through Stripe, before the site was live.
So over $100k the first 2 months! With about 30% gross margins. Not bad! But we still need to see how they look and perform once they’re delivered.
We have one FT sales guy and are working on finding another, hence the link above.
So far this business has been very fun, but with a very long sales cycle.
Car Business Idea
These thing are all true:
Americans buy a new or used car every 3.5 years.
Those cars cost about $37k on average. That’s $48k new and $27k used.
The car buying experience is stupid and terrible and everyone hates it.
You can hire quality offshore talent for $4-7 per hour.
People will always want to save money and avoid pain. These are 1st principles.
What do we do with these 5 truths?
Find people that are in the market for a new or used car and do their car haggling, research and buying for them, with the help of a VA.
It’s similar to this car idea that I wrote about months ago, but different. That idea is buying cars from auctions and charging a fee. I did that idea myself and it works, although I didn’t enjoy it.
It works like this:
Find high intent shoppers. Ok, but how?
People selling cars on FB Marketplace are also likely about to be buying a car. Go message them.
Local FB Groups are FULL of people almost on the market.
If the average American adult buys a car every 3.5 years (or 42 months) and there are 200m adults in America that need a car, then what is 200,000,000 divided by 42 months? 4.8 million.
So every month there are 4.8 million Americans shopping for a car, or 1.5% of the US population needs a car at any given time.
Does this remind you of the grill cleaning email yet? You now see how my brain works.
Only live in a city of 50,000? No worries! That’s 750 new potential customers every single month!
Have them fill out a Typeform of whatever it is they are looking for:
Mileage range
Color
Make and model
Age
Target price
How qualified of a buyer are they? Do they need a loan, down payment amount, etc?
How serious are they about buying this month, from a scale of 1-10
If they don’t look promising from those last 2 questions above, don’t waste time on them.
Then have a VA start doing research in the local market. Have them assemble a standardized report of 10 contenders. Then provide that to the customer, and they’ll pick 3-5 favorites.
Now get the dealerships (or private owners) on the phone and start haggling. Use the contended against each other to get a better price.
Come back to the customer with the good news! You found their dream car for $1,500 under list.
You charge 30% of that savings. $450, sweet! And the VA spent about 4 hours doing this, 90% margins.
Lots of caveats, as always:
There might be a flaw with the car that you only notice in person.
People will back out of deals
You might not have a lot of options to choose from
Some people will want to do all this themselves
That’s ok. All those things are the cost of doing business. They’re all figure-outable. In fact, tattoo this on my forehead
EVERYTHING IS FIGUREOUTABLE.
You want to pick a business that has the roadblocks and headaches that you are okay to tolerate. There will always be roadblocks. Hopefully this newsletter, #53, is your 53rd option!
Notice how I never mentioned filing for an LLC or building a website? Exactly. Those things are friction to preventing you from starting. Just like how I’m using a Google Doc for my lead magnet above. Eating my own dog food over here, y’all!
Speaking of, I’ll speak candidly here: This newsletter is really good. Please share it with others at the link below, and I’ll love you forever.
I talk more about this exact idea on the podcast that just dropped today.
How'd I Do Today? |
Thanks for reading!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner
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