Steal their Users

Happy Sunday!

Y’all…you are going to FREAKING LOVE episode 11 of The Koerner Office that drops bright and early tomorrow morning (Monday at 4am CST). We covered:

• A guy making $60k PER JOB pressure washing parking garages…and outsourcing ALL the work!

• How to make money passively by buying obscure book and music royalties from Craigslist

• Spending very little $ to develop, import (from China) and sell a new product on Shopify and Amazon

• How to find customers for a digital dashboard biz that has a $3k price tag.

No ads, no cost, no filler! Be the first to listen or watch here:

• Apple Podcasts

• Spotify

• YouTube

• Everywhere else

3 days ago I also did a 1 off episode called “Part 1: Every Business I’ve Ever Started.” You can find it at all the links above as well. 60% of y’all open this email every week, but only 9% of you subscribe to my podcast! Shame! Let’s change that!

I want to do an episode that roasts YOUR business ideas. Submit your idea anonymously with 2 clicks right here.

No time to waste today. It’s 4am and I can’t sleep because it’s raining cats and dogs outside. Might as well bang out a newsletter, eh?

Let’s get to it!

Here’s one of my favorite frameworks:

1. Find a billion+ dollar company

2. Unbundle a subsegment of it

3. Steal their users

AirBnB is a perfect example. Room sharing used to be one of the most popular categories on Craigslist. One of the lesser-known AirBnB founders coded a script that auto-emailed every Craigslist listing something like this,

“Hey I saw your room for rent here in (city name). Did you know you can charge a lot more for it on AirBnB.com? Good luck!”

This little hack CHANGED the game for them! Check out this article.

Everyone loves telling the cereal box story, but that was a gimmick. They would not be around today if it weren’t for the Craigslist hack, I guarantee it.

Where do you think I got my idea to auto email Craigslist users that had iPhones listed for sale?

I LOVE this framework.

A couple years ago I went to FB Marketplace to sell our RV. Shortly after listing I got a DM from someone that said,

“Hey, can I list your RV on our website, popsells.com? You’ll still get your full asking price, but we’ll take any amount we sell it for above your asking price as our fee. You have nothing to lose. We’ll even come out and take professional pics on our dime.”

I was intrigued. This pitch sounded familiar.

I said yes so I could learn how it worked. It was a pretty seamless process, and they even sold my RV! I wasn’t happy forking over a few grand to them but hey, that was the deal.

They even handled all the paperwork.

This is starting to sound like an ad, but it’s not, I just love this framework.

Take a good hard look at this infographic:

You can also call this unbundling, and it happens in every industry. Take logistics, for example:

But it’s unbundling with a twist.

It’s one thing to create the “UpWork for tutors” or the “eBay for RVs”, but we’re talking about blatantly using those platforms to snag their users, like Pop RVs did in my example above.

I think there’s a ton of runway with this same Pop RVs model, except with:

1. Golf carts

2. $1k - $10k+ bikes

3. Sports equipment

4. Heavy machinery

5. Trailers

You get the idea.

Go to Pop’s website and start the process as if you are a prospective RV owner. Look at the docs they send you and get a feel for what their systems and processes are.

Use Sharetribe or something similar to quickly build a marketplace.

With the marketplace model you can drive FB Marketplace traffic to your site for people to list items directly, and you take a cut.

With the pop RV model you list the products yourself and drive traffic to it from other marketplace sites such as eBay, RV Share, etc.

The entire thesis of today’s newsletter is that there is so much money in bad photos. Remember?

That’s the one part of this strategy that you can’t skip on - the photo quality. Use Thumbtack to find local photogs in whatever market you’re playing in and pay them $150 to go take some pics.

Photogs are great to hire because there’s always a dozen decent ones that want to build their portfolio for cheap. Those are your people.

Wanna start the Upwork for piano tutors? Post a job on Upwork to find the tutors and host them on your own website. ½ the job is now done!

Rinse and repeat with endless combinations.

LMK if I should dive even deeper on the how-to of this entire concept below:

Conclusion

What’s the catch?

Well, you’ll surely be breaking the platform’s Terms of Service when you do this strategy. Are you ok with that? If not, then try something else!

I could dedicate a daily newsletter to breaking down alllll of the many ways one could build a business off this framework alone. If only there were more time...

Hope you enjoyed this one! PLEASE share it with someone entrepreneurial.

Top Tweets of the Past Week

1. Dog Washing Biz

2. Recruiting Idea

3. Pet Cremation

4. Bike Flights for X

As always, thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com