Own Your Empire

Happy Friday!

I’m on a quick getaway with my wife, and we are having a blast! But the show must go on! I’m going to touch on 2 things today:

• How to create your own Subreddit so you can sell whatever you want to whoever you want

• How I’d grow a fuel delivery business

Reddit:

First of all, I already wrote a full, free guide on how to go viral on Reddit earlier this year. This email is not that.

This email is an expansion of what I talked about on today’s newest podcast episode (Apple - Spotify - on YT tomorrow). You’ll have to watch or listen for the full backstory, but basically I did this:

• Created my own Subreddit

• Created a Zapier automation to grow that Subreddit while I sleep

Why? Because although it may be easy to go viral on Reddit, it is somewhat hard to link to your product and service from a post…unless of course you own the Subreddit.

I want to own my own empire! Don’t you? I don’t want some negative Nancy Subreddit moderator to censor me and my links! Can I blame her? NO! Do I hate her? YES!

Here is exactly how you can steal this idea, step by step:

1. First, what is your idea or business? Do you already have one? Or you want to start one? Let’s say you own a local service business and you don’t think Reddit can benefit you. Hah! Think again! Let’s say you own a landscaping business in Eugene, Oregon.

2. Create a Subreddit called EugeneSmallBusiness or 30SomethingLandscapers or EugeneHomeService

3. Go to Zapier, click “Create Zap,” choose Reddit as the trigger, and then choose this as the trigger event:

4. Now on the below step you will enter this:

5. If you want to search for a phrase you HAVE to enter it like I did. You can’t only enter it in quotations or it won’t work on Reddit. This took some finessing to figure out. If you just want to search for the word “Eugene” then just enter Eugene on that field, no quotations or “title:”

6. Before you choose the action step you need to create a filter to ensure that you don’t comment on posts with no text and only media. You also want to find posts that are quickly rising in popularity, by making the filter settings like the below. This will only show me stuff that HAS text and 2+ upvotes:

7. Then on the “Action” step you will choose ChatGPT." You need to first create an API account which is very easy to do within OpenAI (will do a full video on this later). Enter in your API key and then type in your prompt like this, and choose gpt-4o-mini:

8. You want ChatGPT to use the text of the post “selftext:” to create the prompt. So if someone posts in any Reddit about a landscaping business, ChatGPT will read the text and then respond with whatever your prompt is. It could be as simple as “Hey! You own a landscaping business!? Me too! Come join us in r/30somethinglandscapers” That’s it.

9. All of your steps will look like this below, so let’s go to the last step, create Spreadsheet row:

10. That last step will be set to “Create new spreadsheet row” with the below settings:

11. How’s this for transparent? Here’s what your google sheet should look like. This is exactly the one I’m using now.

12. Every time someone posts to Reddit, OpenAI + Zapier will write your reply on that Google Sheet….BUT…you still have to post it! That must be done manually via clicking the link inside the Google Sheet and then pasting your comment. It takes 5 seconds AND you can automate this with an AI agent but that’s an email for another day.

If this was helpful, please share with someone. I’m writing this on vacation, y’all! Because I want y’all to win!

Now to framework #2 of this email: The fuel delivery business:

2 days ago I dropped a podcast that is blowing up right now. (Apple - Spotify - YouTube)

Gas delivery! This is a thing now! And why? Let’s look at this beautiful Jeff Bezos’ quote:

“I very frequently get the question: 'What's going to change in the next 10 years?'... I almost never get the question: 'What's not going to change in the next 10 years?'... In our retail business, we know that customers want low prices... fast delivery; they want vast selection. Those things will never change”

So instead of starting business based on what the cool new thing is, start a business based on first principles. Human nature.

Humans value convenience and want to save time. When will that change? Ironically, gas delivery is more convenient than a convenience store!

As for me? I drive an electric car (braces for pitchforks) and I still LOVE going to the gas station and binging on unhealthy snacks. That will never change. But I’m in the minority! And funny enough, I always feel guilty when I park at a gas station in my Tesla, like everyone is judging me or that I’ll get towed. Silly Chris.

Another framework for ya:

Find a business opportunity where current owners are saying “We don’t even need to advertise,” like Korey did on my podcast!

What does that line mean? It means if YOU start that business and DO advertise you will crush it even more!

This business is all about route density. What kind of marketing caters to route density extremely well? Direct mail.

Yes, it still works.

Yes, it costs as low as 30 cents per piece.

Find a neighborhood with big, expensive, homes that likely hold families and 2-4 cars.

I lived in one in Houston that had 6,000 homes. 6,000! Cross Creek Ranch. Let’s crunch the numbers on that bad boy:

• We’ll do 6,000 pieces of mail x 5 mailings, because 1 mailing is never enough. That’s 30,000 pieces of mail at 35 cents each = $10,500. Yikes! That’s a lot of money!

• But Korey told us that his customers spend $5,000/year and almost never churn. They get ADDICTED to gas delivery! Let’s say net margins are only 10% and customers move away after 2 years. That means 1 customer = $1,000 in profit.

• 30,000 mailings to 6,000 homes and only a 1% conversion rate (1% is unlikely if only 1 mailing, but very conservative if 5). That’s 60 new customers or $60,000 in net profit over 2 years!

• We call that a 6x ROAS - return on ad spend, and guess what? This is an INSANELY dense route. And the more your wrapped truck is driving around in there, the more calls you’ll get from customers you didn’t spend a dime to market to.

I’ll end it there, folks. This was a new style of email, if you’re still with me. Yes, it was a subtle pitch to watch/or listen to 2 different podcast episodes of mine (but sue me, they are free and don’t have ads), but the intent was to add value to the episodes by adding more instruction or context. Should I do more of this?

Thanks for entrusting me with your valuable time. Please say thanks by subscribing to my podcast below and/or sharing this with someone with the referral link at the bottom of this email. You can also vote below on how you liked today’s email.

If you can’t figure out how to do the Zapier integration, I won’t be able to help, I’m sorry! I only have so much time. YouTube is your friend!

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Your favorite toxic optimist,

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner