Transcript
This isn't your average business podcast, and he's not your average host. This is I will make you a millionaire, another episode helping someone reach their goal of making millions. Jen, what's been happening? I'm gonna take a look at your notes. Everything's been good. I've missed talking to you. I've done a lot and, yeah, a lot of a lot of crazy things. One of the things that I started off doing last time we talked, remember I was mentioning about how billboards are so expensive, but humans should wear your stuff. So I built a website overnight called be my billboard.com where basically people sign up for free and they get mailed different merch, t shirts, tote bags, hats with my logos, other companies' logos on it, and they're human billboards. So, That's excellent. Let me take I'm gonna take a look at it right now. I mean, this is a real business. Yeah. Because here's how I plan and I didn't monetize it yet, but businesses will pay me, of course, to reach my audience and send their stuff out to them. But I built it in, like, 2 hours on a Saturday. I had over, like, a 100 people sign up, and they fill out a form of what kind of stuff they want, what sizes they are, their address, and then I'm gonna mail them packages. I printed all this stuff with my logos on it, so I printed this shirt for odd jobs. It says odd jobs for odd people, and I printed, like, all these different things for my projects that I'm gonna mail out to people. And it's gonna cost me a couple $100, and now I have a 100 something people who are gonna walk around their cities with my logos on it. Okay. So first thing is, Jay, can we sign up and send, like, a t shirt, so we can sending you both care packages of everything. No. But I wanna sign up the James Altucher Show podcast so people could be the billboard for it. And we have t shirts. So, Jake, can we sign up for this and and and have people be human billboards for us? Sure. And then anybody listening to this, be my billboard.com. But here it's now I'm gonna ask some due diligence questions. How do you know that they're really wearing this shirt and and really marketing the brand? Well, this is the thing that you really can ever prove, but I'm gonna send them a mailer inside of the mailing thing that says, like, hey. You know, as a thank you, because this is free for you, can you do one of these five things? And it'll be post on social media. It'll be, can you wear it to an event? Can you do like, can you do these things and send us a picture? And the people who do those things and tag us or send us the picture, I'll make them super billboards, and I'll have them ranked higher in my list. And therefore, I can send them more things or know that they're people who are actively doing Oh, yeah. The people who wear my merch, I should be able to rank them higher. Like, oh, I like this guy's shop. I don't you know, I give them 5 stars. I give them 4 stars, 3 stars. And so then those people have reviews, like, on Amazon. So I could build out that site so it's like people make their profiles. I could that could be, like, another way of actually approaching that I didn't think of. Jenna, I totally think you should do this because I'll sign up both as a billboard, and I wanna sign up my podcast. And now then the question is when someone's a super pro, sometimes they don't want just merch. Maybe they wanna get paid a little bit, or maybe this is a a way, could be getting an exchange where even, like, TikTok influencers or or kind of mini social media influencers can get involved. I didn't even think about that, but you're so right. That way people individuals can be like, hey. Here's proof of what I did, how I wore it. Here's all my my metrics from social media. And then brands can approach them and say, hey. We like you. You know? That's a that's a I didn't even think of doing it that way, but I like it. Yeah. Like, so I wanna see the brands that I could be a billboard for, but I also wanna see the human billboards and Yeah. See if I can get them interested in my brand and so they can do it because and then, you know, I can see their their reviews so I can know, oh, yeah. This podcast says he really drove traffic or this newsletter got subscribers when they use this one guy. And then, I mean, there could be other metrics, but, this seems great. You're gonna you're gonna get people on both sides. You're gonna get people who want merch and maybe pay. I think this eventually evolves into paying like, you're the exchange so people can get paid, and you get a cut in the middle. Like, whether it's 3 per you know, not so much that people wanna go someplace else and make a deal without you because you're the the important thing of being the intermere intermediary of a financial transaction is that you make sure it's secure and people trust you and so on. So almost like a Fiverr or an Upwork for billboards for human billboards. And I Yeah. And and and Uber for human billboards. Idea. Yeah. I couldn't stop thinking about the idea, so I just built the website. I built it in 2 hours using Wix dotcom, and I was like, you know what? This is just something I wanna do. So I just did it. So okay. So, AJ, we gotta sign up as a brand because I want we have T shirts we could send to people. Yes. And, we even have masks we could send to people. So you so you should be able to list all the things that so, like okay. I see. So you say promo items available, T shirts, hats, pens, totes. So you you could list those. I would like to see photos of those. Like, I'd like to be able to click on the 1st years of marriage, see the description. You know? So you're the first brand here is the 1st years of marriage. So when I click on it, see a description of it, you know, you have a link to the newsletter, and then promo items available. I wanna see photos of those. So then I could say, yeah. I could, this would be cool. I'm gonna be a human billboard for this. I'll wear this. You know? I'll wear something every day. I'll do some social media tweet every day of me wearing it that I don't have to talk about it. Right? It just says, like, a tweet of me wearing something in in a situation. And, and then it could go and then there could be reviews for the human billboards or rankings or whatever. Right? And they and they could describe themselves. And, you know, it's different from, like, a TaskRabbit where you know they do the task. So the only question is is how do you know they're doing something? But social media proof is good. And, like, if people like their social media that they that where they're wearing your stuff, that's that's just as good as them wearing it at a 100 people. Like, if I wear a shirt, no one sees it because I never leave my house. But if I wear a shirt and I put it on social media and it's got a 100 likes, that's worth it. You know, at least for for free. And then you scale up to see, you know, it's almost like a reverse auction. What are they willing to do to get paid? Like, you could say, I would I have a budget, but you have to tell me what you're going to do and for how much. And so it's almost like a reverse auction where they sort of reverse bid to be a billboard for you for pay. Wow. These are ideas I didn't even think of. I just built this and was like, I'm not quite sure what it's gonna be, but I really like this a lot. And, you know, you don't actually have to do the financial transaction. You can just let people Venmo each other and let Venmo deal with that. And then the business model then becomes more of well, actually, maybe the brands. You charge the brands $10 a month if they wanna have access to the human billboards. I love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. Love it. So so Cool. So like this, obviously, you could, the website you have made so far, which is be my billboard.com for people listening. I encourage people to put their podcast or newsletters or whatever on there just to try it because right now it's free. And Yeah. And and it's you just have to send a couple of shirts to people and you could see you could you might even just want to see one good human billboard wear a shirt and see if you have any results from it, and then you could scale up from there, you know, as a way of testing it. But so so first task is, Jay, we gotta sign up all our stuff both both as being a human billboard, Jay and I both, and the James Alvester show podcast as being a brand. 2nd, is it hard like, you could it's it's one thing to make this easy one page website or 2 page website. It's another thing to make it a little bit more we're not gonna do transactions up to I'm taking that out. Let's just have people Venmo each other. But can we have a section where the human billboards describe themselves and there's reviews? Yeah. Is that a little harder? Files. I I have to look into it to see if I can do it on Wix or WordPress, but I don't think so because they can make their you can make a profile, and then people would have to log in to see everyone's profile. So I have to play around with it, but I don't I don't think so. I really think I could probably do it without any type of coding or anything like that. Yeah. And I think, first off, there's, I mean, there's definitely ways to do it with either WordPress or Wix. Second off, there are many WordPress experts, and you could find 1 on Fiverr.com who will do the who will do what you need for, like, $10. So we're not talking about any advanced thing, like accepting Yeah. Credit cards or stuff like that. You just you want you want, basically, now a section for the human billboards, a way for people to search it, a way for people to connect with each other. So I could I could either throw an, a project out there and see who wants to do it, or I could contact specific human billboards or brands. So there has to be a way of messaging the profiles on each side of the equation. And then maybe a final thing is is reviews. And then you could give, and some testimonials. Like, this person did this, this person did this. So you could see how people have used this in practice and what kind of success they've had. I love it. I think it's awesome. I just couldn't stop thinking about this idea because I know when I'm out and I see people wearing a shirt with the brand's logo, it captures my attention. I think about it for 5 seconds. And if the shirts are weird enough, the logos are weird enough, you're gonna remember it. Well, you know, merch as it's called is is is the the main way bands make money these days is through merch the sale of merchandise. Like, they don't really make money putting songs on Shopify, and everybody listens to music on YouTube or some semi free service. So they don't make that much money on the music anymore. And they don't really make that much money from tour tickets because it's expensive. Unless you're like the Rolling Stones, it's it's expensive to tour. But they the main way bands make money is merchandise. So this will encourage either podcasters or newsletter writers or other brands. There's plenty other brands out there. You know, lots of startup businesses. So encourage them to work on their merch game. And the human billboard is a is that is that is retail space that is underutilized. So or, you know, advertising space that's underutilized. So I I would flesh this out, like, this is, like, version, you know, 0.9. I would get to version 2.0. I'm on it. I'm excited about it. I didn't even think of these things, so thank you. That's so cool. I mean, I couldn't believe I got the domain name be my billboard. I got some really cool domain names I'm gonna tell you about this week, and that was one of them that was available. Oh, that's great. I like this now hiring you are odd dot com. Okay. So so I bought the domain name youareodd.com, and I linked that to my Odd Jobs newsletter. And then I made these shirts that says odd jobs for odd people, and the back says now hiring youareodd.com. Yeah. Because you you are odd.com, I think, is such a catchy domain name. But you know what? It looks it looks like I think I think you're right. It looks like you are odd.com. So almost makes it look like odd.com is the URL you have, which would be amazing. But I wonder how you can make it look a little bit more like you are, like, you are odd as one word. Oh, I mean okay. Maybe Gotcha. A designer maybe is needed, but maybe Yeah. Maybe you smooshed the letters a little closer together, but put them a little bit off skew. So, like, the the a r e is a is, like, a few millimeters lower than y o u, and o d d is a few millimeters lower than a r e. And then the dotcom is a few millimeters lower. So it still looks like one big word, but it's delineated a little bit. No. That makes sense. I'll I'm obsessed with the domain name because I think it makes people curious. Like, if you saw that domain name, you would be like, am I odd? And you might go there. And then when you go there, it's the odd jobs newsletter. So that's another thing I worked on was making that a whole separate newsletter. I've been publishing that newsletter every single day for the past month since we've spoken, so 5 times a week. And I went from 0 subscribers to close to 200 subscribers doing very little marketing except people spreading it and sharing it. That one, I think, has a lot of potential because as I've been doing it every single day, it's evolved to become something that's not just odd or unique or ugly jobs, but it's also empowering people to start businesses on their own, teaching them how. It's become it's become something that is, I think I think I don't know. It's become something bigger than what I thought it was gonna be, not just, like, here's the odd job of the day. I think you're right. And I think, ultimately, there could be, you know, job postings and and things like that, but, I would start thinking now so so so what what's been your other than word-of-mouth, what's been the main way, you've gone from 0 to 200, and how long has this been? So last time we spoke was, I think, like, in toward the beginning of July, we spoke. So right after we spoke, I made it its own newsletter, had 0 subscribers. I've so I did the 5 the 5 day a week frequency and never missed a day. I've shared a lot of it on LinkedIn. I've posted some of the articles I wrote in the newsletter on LinkedIn or Medium or other places. I've also done some social media posts where I promoted it. I did I did another giveaway to promote it. I did my own podcast episode to promote it. I booked myself on other people's podcasts to promote it coming up. So I've done I've done some, but I wanted to see how this could spread without a ton of promotion because it is sort of viral, and I've gotten a lot of people who share it. The other cool thing I've seen in the past couple of weeks are people who start doing some of these odd jobs and have messaged me to be like, hey. I ended up doing that job, and I'm making some money from it. So that's been really cool to see as well. Yeah. That's amazing. You should put those testimonials on the site for the newsletter. Yeah. And so now the the other thing I would suggest is you should figure out how to start marketing the newsletter. So other than just the the good word-of-mouth, which I think is the ultimately, the best way. But I wonder if you can play with very tiny budgets and do some basic influencer marketing. So reach out to some Instagram accounts where it looks like they do odd sort of jobs and have them recommend, you the the newsletter. And maybe they need you know, you it's funny. TikTok influencers, because I've done a little bit of marketing on tick TikTok. It is super cheap. Like, it's almost no money at all, and you can get and if you and the more niche you go, the better it is because they have fewer followers. But you could get but they have very loyal followers on TikTok, and, I think there there's some good influencer marketing opportunities there. Yeah. That's that's awesome. I didn't do any of that yet, so that could be something that's really cool. Even, like, I've been looking up odd jobs or or weird job podcasts to book myself on those places to promote it, maybe even Google Ads, Facebook Ads. It's definitely something that is could work better in ads than the 1st year of marriage one did. Yeah. I think both could work, but I I think the odd jobs one, you're right, could it's hard to say. When I think about both, they obviously have both an audience in the in market in the tens of millions. But I think right now, what's interesting about odd jobs is people don't want to, go back to work in an office. They want an odd job. They wanna they wanna continue the economic lockdown lifestyle, but make more money. Well, the the number one statistic that I've been running with is 85% of people are miserable at their jobs. So I've been using that again and again and again to promote this because it's that's a huge amount of people who are miserable at their jobs. Yeah. No. And not only that, more than 50% of people don't wanna go back to nonremote work. They like despite all the people who argued with me when I wrote this initially. So with Be My Billboard, you could go from 0.9 to 2.0 without spending hardly any money. And I know, in general, I've been trying to do all these without spending any money at all, but there are some skill sets needed to just you know, it's just a WordPress add on or theme or whatever that Yeah. Would make the whole thing. So you could probably do it on your own, but it might be worthwhile getting someone to in India to do it for, like, a a $100 or $50 or whatever. There's definitely a set of features there where it goes from nice website to legit business, and you could see if the business works. And and, Jay, let's definitely sign up. And by the way, the business itself should be a client of the business. So I'm a human billboard should be a t shirt. I'll I'll sign up to wear that. And, you know, I'm a human billboard dot com or be my billboard dot com. Whatever. So that's that's definitely there's definitely a set of, like, at least 10 features I could think of that turns this into a a little business just so we could see. The Oddjobs newsletter, I think that one, we were just talking to a newsletter guy the other day who talks about trends and things like that, but that's related to Oddjobs. And he has 65,000 subscribers gained over the past year, and, of course, he's making a living at it. Once you have that many subscribers, there's many opportunities for higher end products and so on. So I think that's and and I asked, how did you get, so many subscribers? And part of it was SEO, like Google Ads and some influencer marketing. Yeah. I feel like with both newsletters, because I grew the 1st year of marriage to around 600, I feel like with both newsletters, I'm at a point where I'm sort of stalling because I'm doing my usual techniques and tactics, and now I need to do something else because I'm I'm getting, like, you know, new followers here and there, but it's not reaching the 1,000. It's not going as fast as perhaps it should at that point. No. It's okay. Everything everything takes time. So what happens is it's like, who's who's who's that girl who, was doing the makeup videos, and then she totally blew up and now has her own makeup line? What's her name? Yeah. Something it's was it Michelle? It was like Yeah. Michelle, Ipsy. Ipsy is the company, but she is Michelle Phan or Yeah. I think it's something like that. She was on her, like, 80th video after months months of doing it, you know, every day or a couple times a week. And she finally she did a makeup video of how does Lady Gaga do her makeup. And that was the one that blew up, and she had millions of subscribers after that. So it just takes that one that reaches the front page of Reddit. Like, everybody loves it so much. Like, maybe when you think of writing the next couple, think of, would somebody is this the sort of thing people will share on Reddit and vote up? And, you know, did I put the work in it that shows people will discuss this and people will vote it up and people will appreciate it? Like, I used to, I used to write these articles that you know, ultimately, I started a newsletter, and I wrote these articles, and they would get posted on Hacker News, which is kinda like Reddit for software. Now I have in in entrepreneurship. Now I had nothing to say about software at all. But for some reason, because I was writing for TechCrunch, these would get posted on Hacker News, and they would always get voted up to number 1 to the point where a lot of people, which I seem to engender people arguing all the time about my content, but people would argue, this doesn't belong on Hacker News. And so, eventually, all of my articles, no matter what domain they came from, were banned from Hacker News because all of them were getting to number 1 trivially. So you have to build to that point. And then you'll get you know, 600 is great. That means you have a viable newsletter that people are interested in. So it's not a big leap to go from 600 to 6000, then from 6000 to 60,000. Same thing with the the Odd Jobs one. It might be let me take a look at the Odd Jobs newsletter. This week is Olympics week, so I've been doing some, all all of the newsletters this week are Olympic themed. Oh, that's great. What are some odd jobs about the Olympics? So first of all, is being an Olympian an odd job? It turns out I didn't know that they didn't get paid to go to the Olympics, so I broke all of that down that they don't get paid. How do they make their money? I did, Olympian side hustles, so some of the odd jobs Olympians also have to do to make money. I also did one today called odd jobs that you can do to make money off the Olympics, so how to profit from the Olympics, and I basically, like, created a couple business ideas that people can steal. One of them is to do, like, Olympic tours where you set up a company that does olymp tours of old Olympic stadiums and villages and things like that. So I'm just having fun making it Olympic themed, and some of these this week blew up because people are obviously talking about the Olympics, care about the Olympics, and, some of them got a lot of traction. It's interesting the tour guide one. It'd be interesting to talk to people who maybe maybe someone is a tour guide for the Olympics, and here's how much money they make every day doing tours of the Olympics. I would think of not in everyone maybe, but find someone who does one of these things and see how and then interview them. Do a little mini interview for the newsletter. Yeah. Tomorrow's is about, people who have odd jobs at the Olympics. So, like, the person who cleans up the sweat off the courts, the person there's a lifeguard who's hired to be at the Olympics even though no one really needs their lives. They've there's a scuba diver who's hired at the Olympics to go scuba dive to set up the cameras. So I took quotes from other articles and linked to them about, those people being interviewed and their salaries and things like that. That's great. Like, if you get the information from other places, all the better. I wonder if somebody goes to, like, the city, maybe they're not even from there, and they start a tour business for the Olympics. And then it's, like, just a job they do for 3 weeks or however long the Olympics is, and I wonder how much money they make. Yeah. I I feel like if this was not a pandemic year, that's such an awesome idea. They can put it up on Airbnb experiences. Like, they can list it on local sites, and you could charge whatever you want. If people are paying to go to the Olympics, they're gonna shell out money for all these experiences. I mean, tour guide's such an interesting thing because, like, my daughter, she is a doughnut tour guide in New York City. So she gives tours, and people sign up for these tours. She gives tours where they just go to all the famous donut places in New York City. And, occasionally, she sees celebrities at these donut places, and there's a history buying, like, you know, this place makes their own donuts. This place is the oldest donut place in New York. This place is the smallest donut place. This place only has tiny donuts. This place has giant donuts. And people go on these tours every single day, and she makes money. Not only does she make salary, but she makes good tips. I I gave her good, cognitive biases for for increasing her tips, and they and they work. She went from 0 tips to now getting, like, you know, 40, $50 per couple tips. So Wait. What did what's one thing you told her? Well, first off, I told her in the very beginning that she's to ask for a tip. That if you don't ask, they're not gonna know that they should tip for this. And then I told her, I using anchor bias, you know, say, you know, it doesn't have to be, like, $1,000 and, you know, laugh a little bit at that. But now they're anchored at, like, $1,000, so they're not gonna give $3. And, stuff like that works. Yeah. I actually did a whole newsletter on odd jobs you could have if you like food, and one of them was being the tour guide in all of these different cities for food. I tried out to be a pizza tour guide for New York City when I first moved here. I did not get hired, but that was, like, my dream job was to just take people around and feed them pizza. Maybe it's a later in life kinda career. And, you know, there's an there's there's a lot of, food in food Instagrammers that get paid by brands. Yep. Yep. That's what I'm finding with this newsletter is there's never a shortage of topics. Even doing it 5 days a week, I always have something to write about. It's very, very easy. And then every Friday is my job board Friday where I list available odd jobs that are, that people can apply to. You know, I I I was I was maybe I was talking to you about this, but I spoke with a friend of mine who's his his dad told him a very good quote a long time ago, which is that the uglier the business, the easier it is to make millions from it. And I think that doesn't count, you know, if you're the top of the food chain in Silicon Valley, but everything else. And so he picks up sorry. Let me just throw this away. He picks up the garbage of companies and strips out the steel. It's called slag. And then steals, like, slag is a commodity, and he just sells it on the open market. Makes 1,000,000 of dollars. I think that's sort of interesting is because people think you need to have this, like, glamorous rock star kinda job, but sometimes it is those ugly businesses that really, really make a lot of money. I love what you said the other day about the unexpected. That quote, I can't stop thinking about that. Like, the more you do something unexpected, the more you're gonna stand out. The more you're gonna be famous, the more you're gonna be successful. And that's what these these odd jobs are. It's the unexpected type of careers. Yeah. And and, you never know which one first off, there's 2 things. 1 is people think all these odd jobs only make, like, you know, like, walking dog people's dogs only makes, like, $5 an hour ultimately. So there's there are jobs like that that don't make a lot of money. But some of these odd jobs, you can build into businesses that make millions. We've we've seen many examples of that. You know, like, you could after doing a doughnut tour, I could encourage my daughter to set up various other food tours where she hires the tour guides, but, like, you know, designs the tour and markets it and signs people up and and so on. So, like, who knows? Or or this this slag business, how did this guy get into it? Maybe he started with one company. He was picking up their recyclables and then realized he could sell some of them and and boom. It it it happens. So you just never know which one's gonna be the one that that could blow up to be a a, you know, a $1,000,000 business, including the newsletter about them. You you just gave me an idea to almost sometimes do a rating of, like, passive to hustle. So, like, you can make 6 figures with this business if you are passive, if you wanna do it from your couch, but you can make 6 figures from this business if you wanna hustle. So almost having, like, a scale that's like, okay. How to be rich from this odd job, and then that scale can be showing people, like, hey. If you're somebody who hustles, who wants to, like, do a lot of work, this business is for you. But if you're somebody who wants to sit on the couch and make a lot of money, this business is for you. So almost, like, almost give it, like, a rating of some sorts. Yeah. I like that idea. And then I also, you know, some I some odd jobs are scalable, some are not. So for instance, the people who, go to the Olympics to do tours at the Olympics, maybe they could work all year round going to other events. Like, they go to the Super Bowl. They go to Lollapalooza. Whatever. They could maybe they go from event to event doing tours at each one. And then and then that can scale when they set if there's a lot of demand, they could set up multiple, you know, tours going on simultaneously in each event, and that could turn into a little business. So or there could be events happening simultaneously, and they set up all the tours because they're they become an expert at it. Yep. Yep. I think I have you you've given me a lot of good ideas to take it to the next level. I think I think there's a lot of potential with this newsletter, and I think I have been a couple good next steps of what to do with it. Yeah. How's the Twitch stuff doing? It's good. I was doing some Twitch. Jay was my my loyalist fan, and it was good. I've been doing a little bit of it. I stopped doing it for a little while, but, it was good. It was good because I would do some of the Twitches I did, I walked through my strategies for some of the things I was working on, so it was cool to talk it out, and I liked it. It was it was good. I need to get back into doing it. Yeah. You know, Twitch is a hard thing to be consistent with. I Yeah. I was doing Twitch for a while, and and I'm gonna get back to it at some point. Maybe I should do a Twitch stream where, like, recovery from COVID. So I'm playing a game, and I need to get back to my pre COVID score, to know that the brain fog is over. I like I I can't stop thinking how you called it brain frog. I feel like that could be your Twitch streaming name Yeah. As you go and do this. And so, okay. Then we also talked about the marriage card deck. Yes. So I've been working on the 1st year of marriage. That newsletter goes out 3 times a week. That one, I got to around 600 subscribers. It's been pretty good. Could I do more with it? Yes. I need to I need to continue to take it to the next level. 3 times a week with that one's a little tough. I'm wondering if I should maybe scale back to one time a week. It's definitely has grown because of the frequency that I'm doing it 3 times a week. You know, it it's up to you because you wanna the whole thing is is that we're doing experiments. We're trying different things, and, some things will take off, some things won't. And it takes kind of as you see, it takes a couple months to really see because we don't know there's gonna be a tipping point for one of them. And it's basically a quantity game. It's a it's I should I shouldn't say that. It's quantity and quality. So, you know, you will eventually do a newsletter in one of these categories that will hit the top of, you know, Reddit or whatever, and it'll suddenly hit a tipping point and it'll explode or you'll do the right kind of marketing, and and so on. So but it's a a quantity game in that. You have to try a lot of different things to see which one is gonna really explode within a 6 month period. And once it explodes, monetizing it is trivial. That's why I don't really concern myself that much with monetizing it. But you want because you're trying lots of things, so you wanna minimize the the layout of money needed to do each thing. Ideally, each thing is free Yeah. To do. But, like, you know but that's why okay. A card game that that couples play with each other, that could be a fun idea that's not so expensive to make, and you have a platform, the newsletter and podcast to start marketing it. And also be my billboard.com, you could start marketing it. Alright. So so so right now, there's the the marriage newsletter. There's the marriage, podcast. There's the odd jobs newsletter. But I think the odd jobs newsletter could turn into a fully fleshed out site as well that could make money. There's the be my billboard site, which could definitely be fleshed out into a business. What other stuff do you have going on? I'm doing more stuff with Bridesmaid for Hire. I've I'm gonna build out the maid of honor template that we talked about. Remember we talked about selling, like, a template for the speeches? So I'm gonna be working on that, but I've just been making little changes to my website. I've been adding video to almost every landing page, and it's been converting like crazy. So I made more money than in a while with bridesmaid for hire, not even going to weddings, but doing other things. Mainly, the maid of honor speeches, mainly that course I sell. So I'm also spending time just optimizing that whole process because I don't wanna go to weddings. And how did you increase the amount of money you were making from it? I simply added, videos to my landing pages that I think were pretty engaging that explained the process a little bit more, had the human factor to it. I redid the website a little bit, but I'm gonna completely redesign the website. I did more promotion on social media, so my Instagram has been been blowing up because of doing, Instagram reels. So just like little tweaks here and there have brought more money in with some of the services I offer that weren't so popular in the past. I don't wanna go to weddings, especially just the way the world is. Who knows what's gonna happen with weddings? But I want the business to be functional, and I wanna keep building some of these more passive services. Yeah. The course, like, the template, things like that. And this was a course you had running before? Yeah. It's it's the course to teach people how to be a professional bridesmaid, and, it it sells decently. It could sell better, but I'm gonna redo the landing page. I'm gonna make all these tweaks to it. But just simple tweaks I've made have made it perform better, like the video, adding more testimonials, clearing up a little bit on the landing page what's inside the course. Simple little things that took me under an hour have brought in more sales than ever before. This is great. So one of your questions has always been, like, when do you stop doing new things and you just focus on the things you have going on? I think you have enough things going on that one of these things is gonna make money, particularly as we flesh out the idea and give it more dimensionality. So, like, the be be my billboard is a good example where it's, like, one dimensional right now, but it could be a three-dimensional experience for people. And so so now we could add depth to some of the things you're doing. Like, the odd jobs newsletter, people could submit job requests here, or people could say, I'd like an odd job. And then you could have almost a marketplace of odd jobs. Or, you know, I I I think the the marriage one is still worth pursuing because there's obviously a huge market out there. But just try different angles. Maybe maybe and I'm just throwing this out there. Like, I think the 1st years of marriage is a good, I theme and idea. But maybe people don't wanna maybe it feels like if I get your newsletter, I'm admitting I'm having a problem in my 1st years of marriage. You know, because there are a lot of problems, but people think it's should be idyllic. What? You're only you're it's you're only your first your marriage, and you're already having a problem. So I don't know. I'm just throwing it out there. Maybe there's another there's other things you could do in that newsletter or other ideas you could offer or, you know, maybe there's a section in the newsletter is, you know, one thing a day you should do for your spouse. And here's the thing to do that will surprise yours. Yeah. You won't surprise a day. You should always surprise your spouse in the everyday of their 1st years of marriage. And here's the one thing. Like, maybe you should have little sections. It's not like fully fleshed out content, but it's just ideas. So people might you have to have as many hooks in for why someone would maybe someone only would get the newsletter because they wanna see that idea a day, and all the other article content is just gravy for them. You're right. I I I feel like I need to watch the balance of how negative it is to have fun and, you know, on like, I think because I can be someone who's so honest, not negative, but honest about things. I need to make that newsletter have a balance of, oh, the 1st year of marriage is not all horrible. You know, there are some good things. There are some fun things too. So I need to add that balance. Today's newsletter was short and sweet, and it was just, like, 5 fun tweets about marriage. And that got a lot of response because I think it was just something funny that people could laugh at and relate to. Another type of newsletter that worked really well for odd jobs and 1st year of marriage is I did, like, 5 books you should read, and it was, like, weird alternative books, and people loved that. People love lists. So, like, if you said 10 ways you, in capital letters, can make money from the Olympics, people click on that. They love Yeah. That's why it's the 10 commandments in in Judaism. That's why it's the 4 noble truths in Buddhism. It's why it's the 108 yoga sutras in in yoga. Listicles have worked for 35 100 years. Yeah. And even, like, recommendations, like, the book recommendation one, people shared a lot because they're they were curious about the books, and they weren't obvious books. Like, the marriage books I promoted were not marriage books. They were more how to challenge your relationship books. Like, fun different books like that. They weren't annoying marriage books. And the Odd Jobs one, I put Skip the Line in there. I put, like, all these books in there that aren't preachy but more actionable, and I think people really liked that too. You know, going in a complete other angle, I you know, one of your competitors and you and you wrote this when you were researching the competitors, the the, break free from the affair. So this guy's website is a newsletter on how to deal with infidelity. And he doesn't say how much he charges, but he has articles. He has recent posts. He has posts like, you know, he tells me he loves me and her. Like, these are great article titles. Yeah. You know, it's funny they always say he, but he, so it's she he's dealing mostly with with women. But, you know, I wonder how much people pay for this. Like, peep this these types of, newsletters, people pay a lot of money for. I'm which makes me wonder if I'm so limited by having these newsletters on Substack and instead need to build a website because I can't build out pages. Like, do you think both of these need a website at this point where I could have other pages on it? Yes. But you can use Substack to do that. So Substack's just hosted in the newsletter, but you could have any domain name. I'm pretty sure you can do this with Substack. I don't know the specifics how, but I would look into doing that. You know? Or you can have, like, a a WordPress website that just at the newsletter point points to Substack. Substack. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. I could do that. But, definitely, there are plenty of Substack newsletters that have their own domain names, and you don't know they're using Substack. And they have a 100,000 subscribers or or whatever. Yeah. So let's see. Are there any other businesses we've been talking about so far? The other thing I did this week was last time we talked, I read you my list of things I would do if I became a mill if I was a millionaire, and the moral of that story was I'm making excuses why I can't do them now. So I've been trying to put some of those things in motion. I raised my prices. I said no to more things I didn't wanna do. I, invested in, like, going to the gym, like, getting it like, not a personal trainer, but doing, expensive type of class I really like. So I went through my list and figured out, okay, what's an excuse and what can I do now, and started putting some of those things in motion? And that was fun. That was a really good activity to sort of prove to me. What happened? Like, when you raised your prices, what happened? You know, I don't know if it deterred people from working with me or not. I don't care. It allowed me to have boundaries of what I how I wanna spend my time. You know, I think for a while as a solopreneur, I was, like, desperate to make money. I'm not in that position anymore. So I think it was a good confidence boost, but also a good way of putting up boundaries. I don't need to give people discounts. I don't need to drop my prices. I need to raise my prices, say no to more things, and focus my attention on things I wanna do. You know, I have time. I just waste my time, and I'm starting to see that more and more. Yeah. It's so interesting that the millionaire exercise that and, again, the idea is write a list of 10 or you wrote 20 things you would do if you had a $1,000,000, and it turns out all those things you can do right now. Now. So, that's interesting. So, okay. So right now, we've got bunch of new ideas. You have your legacy stuff. What what are you what what what are you enjoying right now most of all? I I really am enjoying I I'm enjoying it all. Like, I I really liked I couldn't stop thinking about be my billboard. I couldn't stop thinking about that idea. And rather than just ruminate like, rather than just thinking about it, I sat down on a Saturday and built it in 2 hours. So I I'm liking this whole approach of we're not monetizing anything. We're just starting and growing and seeing. So I sort of like that. I I like that thought process. I think it's been really helpful. It also underlines principle of doing versus thinking. Like, you can't Nobody in the universe has ever thought their way to success. It it you can't because thoughts are are they don't exist. They're invisible. They're who knows what a thought is? But when you do something, you're you're it like you said, it takes took you 2 hours to make version I couldn't have told told you if you worked 2 hours or a 100 hours. Like, you've built version 0.9 of of of a launchable business. And it might be a very simple kind of business right now, but it's you did it in just 2 hours, so who cares? And you got people interested. Like, how many people wanna be at Human Billboard right now? I got over a 100 to sign up, and I didn't do very much promotion at all at all, purposely, because I don't wanna mail I don't wanna spend so much money mailing people's stuff, but I didn't I didn't do a lot of promotion. I easily got a 100 people to sign up. So yeah. And people have merchandise they're willing to give out, like, whether Yeah. You know? So I would start trying to get other brands now to use this, but build version 2.0 first. Yeah. And and, again, doing, it doesn't take so long. Like, I watched 2 episodes of The Sopranos last night. That would took 2 hours. Instead of watching that, I could've built an entire version 0.9 of a business. Yeah. So Well, you know what I'm realizing too? It's like all these skills I had that I learned by accident keep showing up in my life. Like, the fact that I started a blog in 2011, I learned how to use WordPress. Like, I learned how to build websites. That is such an important skill that keeps showing up. The fact that I know how to use social media really well keeps showing up. Like, all of these micro skills keep coming back into my life and allow me to do these things. If I was so hung up on not knowing how to make a website, I wouldn't put any of these ideas in motion. So I I feel like it this is this all of this is an experiment to remind me that all of these little skills I've I've built in the past 10 years can really just come back to help me in many ways. Yeah. And then I would start making like, this odd jobs thing, there's 2 directions that I would start making lists. 1 is what other business ideas are related to the odd jobs concept. So whether it's a job posting site or whether it's, I don't know. Yeah. It's a good list. And then another thing is just other ways to get the word out about this newsletter. Because I think this newsletter I I think, like, let me just take a look at at, some this one. Odd jobs to make money off the Olympics. So I think this one's great, and it's interesting. And, certainly, these are the the ways you list are ways to make money. I would flesh out each one just a tiny bit more. Like, what are the, you know, why do you think this is a good way? So, okay, here's an example of a person, or here's the here's the number of money that is the amount of money that is spent by tourists in a town that has in the city that has the Olympics. So and, you know, some percentage of that money goes towards tours or goes towards Yeah. Food trucks or goes towards, you know, hookers or whatever. I don't know. And then, give some data that's, like, proof. And then you have testimonials or social proof. If you have, you know, I would use these these, you know, examples of, from influence to kind of beef out each one of these newsletters. Like, let me look at another one now that I am signed up for it. So we were just talking to someone. So this is, like, cell food. Oh, this is a great one. A 13 year old girl recently found a puffy Dorito in her bag and posted on eBay. Bids went as high as a 100,000, and she ultimately took a $15,000 payout from Doritos. Like, that's amazing. So now that one, you can't, like, do on your own. But these are, like, interesting things. But then I wonder what what's some maybe there should be a section actionable items. If you wanna make money, with selling food, you know, here's some ideas to do. Or, we were talking to someone the other day where who who's told us that searches on snail mucin, which I guess is like the sweat of a snail, is searches on that have gone up, like, a 1000% in the past 2 years because I guess in, k pop beauty culture, snail mucin is this huge thing for, like, tightening up skin or, I don't know, something like that. And so it's just this weird trend. But then I wonder if there's somebody actually making money using that trend. So Yeah. So that's, like, an odd job. And, but then I would wanna know how to do it. Like, how do you buy snail mucin, and, you know, how much can I make, and then where do I sell it? All sorts of stuff like that. So I don't know. That adds a little bit of work, but I think it would add you could see. Will it add, like, thousands of subscribers for just a little bit more work? Right. You know? And and then what's how are you feeling about the card game, which is the most kind of physical item that you're working on? Good. I think I wanna spend more time getting the right questions, crowdsourcing the questions a little bit more. You know, I made a list of, like, 200 ideas, but I wanna spend a little bit more time really nailing down what the best 100 or 25 or a 125 questions would be for the cards. So I haven't really done much with it. Have you asked people in your newsletter for questions? No. I'm gonna I wanna do that. Yeah. I wanna create a survey to ask that. Because you could use your newsletter as almost a mini Kickstarter on this type of thing. So people sometimes people say, oh, I don't wanna use Kickstarter. I don't need to raise, like, $30,000 or whatever it is to make a chair. But the thing about Kickstarter is not the money you raise. It's the audience you build that's waiting for your product to be released. So you could use your newsletter not only to seed questions, but it's really a forum marketing to show people, hey. This is coming, and and I'm making you all aware. Those are gonna be your first customers. Yeah. Maybe should I make, like, a landing page with a video and almost say, like, this is coming. Submit the questions that you think would be good in the deck and get people to actively do that? Yeah. Just be on everything, be direct. I in your marriage newsletter, I would talk about, hey. Sign up for be be my billboard dot com, and people will send you free merch, including me. Yeah. And Yeah. And James Altucher and whoever else. I would just be as direct as possible. I am excited. I feel like I needed to talk to you. It was a couple of weeks, and I was like, okay. I need I need a a James inspiration, and I got a lot of work to do. Now, were are there any other questions that that you had, or did did I answer the ones that you had? You answered the ones I had. I think I was feeling, like, some of the ideas, I was like, okay. I'm on autopilot, and I think you gave me awesome ideas to take everything to the next level. And next time we talk, I'm gonna have a lot of version 2 point o's for you. Yeah. No. That's that's good. I'm excited for for everything still. Like, I don't right now, I don't think you should slow anything down. It but but I do think maybe it's okay to not add more things. Like, now I agree. I think these are enough things that that unless something really excites you, these are enough things that, you know, although let me think about something. I was just thinking about an idea. So one thing I never used to believe in subscription boxes, this idea that, like, a friend of mine is an ex Navy SEAL, and he has a business where, every people who subscribe every month, he sends them, you know, Navy SEAL type stuff. Like, I don't know, Jay. What would be an example of a Navy Seal's, like, stuff? Like the the the the knife? Yeah. Like, a special knife. Right. And whatever. So so I never used to really believe in those, but then during the lockdown, I used a subscription business for food. Like, I had a business cook all healthy meals, so I didn't have to go shopping or anything like that. And and it would deliver them to the door. There was no no touch. I wonder if there's, like, well, the problem with weddings is there's no subscription business because they just get married once. But I wonder if there's something in there, some other kind of, like It could be for, like, a 1st year of marriage subscription box that, like, has, like, a type of book in it or, like, you know, like, something it could be something for that 1st year. A sex toy, a Yeah. A list of of, you know, a bunch of coupons that people contribute for your subscription box. Yeah. You know, for cruises or whatever. So, yeah, there might be something there. Just something to think about. You know, even though we don't wanna maybe add new businesses that we're working on, it's always good to keep thinking of them because they could be part of, it could be a newsletter idea. It could be Yeah. An odd job idea. Who knows? Every time I hang up with you, I I have a rush of ideas. And if one of them lingers enough, I just do it. I just do it and see what happens. So I'll think about that, and I'll do some research. Yeah. And then and I'm I'm really excited about the Be My Billboard. Well, we're gonna sign up right away. Everybody listening should either sign up their brand or Yes. Or just sign up to be a human billboard. I wanna be a human billboard for be my billboard dot com. Okay. But I'm gonna send you a pack of everything anyway. And how's how's everything going? How's your marriage going? You know, it depends if we watch The Sopranos or not. But every Like, in your in your newsletter, I'm curious, like, does does anything from the newsletter bleed into the marriage? I think what's happening in the marriage bleeds into the newsletter. So if we're like, we had, like, a week where we were fighting a lot, so I did a bunch of newsletters about, fighting. And I did something about, like, how saying sorry doesn't work, so here's 10 other ideas, hoping he would read it and do one of those ideas, but he didn't. So I feel like I feel like a lot of the the content of the newsletter is just from real life things that we're experiencing. You know, when I I I might have mentioned this last time, so correct me if I did. But, when I do stand up a lot, I see these couples, you know, sometimes they're together, like, 50 years, and I always ask what's what's the secret. And, you know, one person once told me that if you win every argument, you're probably not gonna be married within a year. Wow. I like that one. Yeah. I like that one. Yeah. I think, I think we're arguing more now than ever, and I think that's just the 1st year of marriage and just the the everything I'm writing about in the newsletter. So it's having the newsletter is a great outlet for my marriage. I think it'll end up, making it even better that I have this outlet to, like, write about it all. Yeah. I think people need to know, like, you know, and this is not really related to business, but arguing in a marriage, it doesn't mean the marriage is bad. It doesn't mean you married the wrong person. Right. Everybody argues, particularly if you're living with someone and you're making plans with someone and you have to deal with other people's families and Yep. Their friends and so on and everything. It's almost a way of, like, okay. Here's something where there's a weakness in the marriage. So if we take a step back and figure out how to patch this weakness, it's just gonna make the marriage stronger. And so the arguing is are the indicators. Hey. This is a weakness you should talk about. If you weren't arguing about it, it's not a weakness of the marriage. I agree. I think, I'm learning a lot, and hopefully, people who read the news better will learn too. But you're right. Marriage is more complicated than people think it is. Yeah. We're we're we'll we'll close on that. That's a good one. Yes. I but thanks so much, Jen. This is all I'm always inspired too after talking with you. You've got so many great things going on, and you're really a doer. And that is such an important thing. Well, I'm loving this, and it's always so awesome to talk to you.
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