What's Old is New Again

Happy Friday!

Bars. Billboards. Wristbands. We’re gonna talk about marketing and business ideas today. And of course we are.

It all started on a Sunday night in late 2010. It was about 1am and I was tossing and turning in my little 3/1 single family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. I had just opened my iPhone repair store a few months prior and things were not going well. I was also a full time student and waiting tables.

I couldn’t get people in the door. 30,000 college students with iPhones and almost none of them knew I existed.

What do I always say? Constraints = creativity.

I remember getting this idea at this exact time and being SO excited about it.

What did college students do? Go to bars. What do they do at bars? Get drunk and break their phone.

So I pulled out my crappy dell laptop and started googling “custom wristbands.”
BOOM. There it was. For about 2 cents each I could order Tyvek wristbands with a custom message printed on them.

Tyvek is the same material they wrap new homes with BTW.

I just searched my Google Photos album and I actually found a picture of the real wristband I got printed!

I still have a box of them in my attic somewhere.

I had a buddy named Will Tyndal that I met in one of my classes. He was a pure hustler. A salesman at his core. He offered to distribute them to all the bars for me. Truth be told, I had never stepped foot in an Alabama bar before.

What happened? It completely changed the game. It completely turned my business around. Every single day we’d have students bringing in gross wristbands with our ad on them.

Right place. Right time. Product market fit.

Remember this: Sometimes all it takes is one stupid, simple, cheap and easy idea to completely change the velocity or direction of your business.

Quick break. I have 3 friends with amazing newsletters that I’d love for you to check out.

My best friend and biz parter has an awesome newsletter called Nikonomics about buying a business and small business here:

Kamal, my Chief of Staff has an awesome YouTube channel and newsletter called 2 and 20. He covers macroeconomic trends and events happening around the world. YouTube Channel here. Newsletter here:

And of course, Michael Girdley, my twitter friend whose conference I’m speaking at next week has an awesome newsletter:

Ok, back to the newsletter.

Ideas are powerful (assuming you actually follow through on them).

And then this week I saw a video on Instagram that inspired me to think of a business idea, which I talk about for 30 seconds here.

What is it? A sticker you can put over drinks at bars so women don’t get their drink spiked. It’s a 5 cent form of insurance against the worst night of your life.

How many bars have these today? I’d guess less than 1%. You don’t need to be the company that already makes and sells these stickers. You just need to be someone that can navigate your way around a Vistaprint account and walk into bars to sell them.

Here’s how I’d approach this:

1. I’d scrape every bar in my local area with this tool.

2. I’d use any number of the hundreds of sticker companies to order a large roll of stickers like the one in the video.

3. I’d break off a few hundred at a time, walk into bars and restaurants when they’re slow (right when they open), and give them out for free with a business card, while explaining how they work. Tedious? Yes. Effective? YES!

4. I’d ask for the managers number so you can follow up and ask how the feedback is.

5. Of course the feedback will be unanimously amazing, because the only people that wouldn’t like this idea are creeps and pervs.

6. Convert a % of those tree trials to paid. You just ship them a roll of stickers every month for 10 cents each and capture the margin.

Let’s address the downsides:

Does this leave residue on the glass? I don’t know, but I don’t think it would be much an issue. It doesn’t seem to prevent the company in my video from selling a ton of them. Do you know how hot commercial dishwashers get? I do, I’ve washed dishes at 3 different restaurants!

Why can’t bars and restaurants just get their own custom stickers printed? They could, and some might, but not enough to make this a bad business model.

You think busy bar managers want to work designing a graphic, finding a vendor, and placing orders ever month for stickers? Only to save a few pennies per sticker? No. Alcohol has great margins, they can work it into the price just fine, and if women feel safer drinking there, then they’ll get more customers.

That’s your value proposition when you’re selling BTW: Women feel safer in your bar than others so this 10 cent investment will pay off 10 - 100 fold.

And then yes, you can sell ad space on the stickers as well, but don’t worry about that at first. That’s just unnecessary friction to actually launching.

You can hire a VA to make a landing page where bar owners can order your custom designed stickers with 2 clicks on a recurring basis, and you have them drop shipped directly from the printer in generic packaging.

All day!

Now what about billboards? As you may have seen in the tweet below, I’m in the process of designing a billboard for my podcast:

I wanted to use targeted Facebook ads to tell me which design people that live near my billboard which design they liked best.

It worked so perfectly! I just sent the design to the vinyl guy.

I think that using targeted FB ads to validate ideas or deisngs is the most underrated growth hack ever!

But I’m out of time. If you can’t tell, I LOVE blending old school marketing tactics with new school businesses, and vice versa. We’ll be talking about that a lot in this newsletter. Speaking of small businesses, did you know I have a new lead generation agency? We help small/local businesses get more customers. Check out our half-built website here.

BTW, I had a recent podcast episode that is blowing up. It’s about starting a cash cow event rental biz with only 1 $5k convection oven. You’ll love it! It’s this one:

Watch/listen here: YouTube - Apple Podcasts - Spotify - Other Podcasts

Thanks for reading!

Chris Koerner
TKOPOD.COM