Sliding into Profits

Happy late late Sunday night!

It’s 11:54pm EST and I’m at the JFK airport, waiting for my redeye to Athens with my wife and 4 kids. I just crushed 2 Uncrustables and a bag of Cool Ranch you-know-whats. Pic for proof:

Was this about to be the FIRST WEEK I skip my newsletter? Hah. How dare you even assume as much?

I’m very excited to write this email today, so let’s get after it.

I had an amazing conversation with someone this week, and I wanna talk all about it. His name is Matthew, and we became fast friends.

Matthew opened the 2nd alpine coaster in the Pigeon Forge area.

Pigeon Forge is a tourist trap of a town, nestled in the Appalachian foothills an hour outside of Knoxville, TN. It’s home to Dollywood - the best redneck theme park this side of the Mississippi. Over 10,000,000 Americans visit every year.

In 2014 Matthew’s friends approached him and said,

“Hey man, this alpine slide thing just opened and there’s a line around the corner all day every day. They charge $16 a pop and we counted over 500 people walk out of that place yesterday. You wanna help us launch a direct competitor?”

Of course he did. Who wouldn’t?

As I just said on Twitter, I LOVE copycat businesses, because isn’t every business one?

2 years and $3.6m later, they launched Dollywood Alpine Slide Coaster #2, affectionately named Goats on the Roof.

They grossed $2m that first year. Net margins? Over 50%.

Over the next 8 years, 1-2 new coasters would open in the same area every year, and guess what happened?

All of them stayed busy! A new market had been created.

Today it costs well over $8m to launch an alpine slide, but it’s still a great investment. Matthew sold his stake a few years ago and did very, very well.

He then opened an indoor sledding facility called Pigeon Forge Snow (click here for deep dive) that also nets 7 figures per year. While parents wait for their kids to finish sledding, they spend their money on his massage chairs and candy, which have 70+% margins.

What’s he doing now? That’s where it really gets interesting. He somehow finds ways to keep outdoing himself, over and over again. Everything he does is fun and amusing and AWESOME.

He’s coming back on the pod next month to pull back the curtain on current projects, as well as give us even more ideas.

We spoke for well over an hour and I’m LUCKY I hit record, because it’s going to go live on my podcast this Thursday.

Allow me to take this moment to say….PLEASE subscribe below to listen when it goes live:

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There were so many incredible business ideas and insights packed into those 83 minutes that your head will explode.

On June 20th my episode with the owner of Dig World goes live, and that one was ALMOST just as cool.

My favorite takeaway? His hack was to place his facility in the parking lot of an insanely popular mall. Baked in demand from day 1!

Anyway, back to alpine slides and such. Here are some of my favorite takeaways and frameworks from my chat with him:

• Massage chairs in the right locations can absolutely print cash. I’m sitting at an airport right now. What’s stopping you from placing some chairs at an airport and then only buying them once you have a signed contract in hand? If I could pay for some massage chair time at JFK right now I totally would.

• Take the Hunt Brothers Gas Station pizza model and copy/paste it with other things. Candy by the pound, perhaps? We cover this in depth on the pod.

• How interesting that no matter how many alpine slides a market gets, the market just keeps growing? How can you find other opportunities where the same can be true?

• At one point Matthew said, “I’ve never seen an alpine coaster close down.” Isn’t that incredible!? There are still markets similar to Pigeon Forge (Beaver’s Bend, OK, for one) that don’t have an alpine coaster. What are you waiting for? Oh yeah, probably $8m. Me too!

• Have you ever paid for gem mining? I LITERALLY want to buy a gem mining station and place it in the middle of a busy shopping mall. You can’t tell me that the video of kids mining for gems wouldn’t incite other kids to do the same!? We talk all about this, too!

• I love the “illusion of saturation” concept, AKA finding a new market and open a ton of secret, subtle “competitors” to detract any real, would-be competitors.

Listen y’all, I read your poll results. You read this newsletter for business ideas, plain and simple. But my podcast has 3-10x as many ideas as this newsletter. so LMK what you think when you listen!

I’ll send a note when this episode in question is released. Shooting for this Thursday morning, June 13th.

What say ye:

Thanks for reading! Our flight is boarding now!

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

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner