Serial Entrepreneur Chris Koerner on DOAC Podcast (Transcript)

I have a spreadsheet, but it’s at least 80.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what have the outcomes been? How much money have you made? How has that changed your life? What freedom has that given you?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, so cumulatively, all of the businesses have generated low hundreds of millions of revenue, low tens of millions of profit. But on a real number basis, the majority of them have been abandoned or fizzled out or failed or there was too much opportunity cost, so I pivoted to something else. It’s just a numbers game.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how has that changed your life? What does your lifestyle look like?

CHRIS KOERNER: My life is awesome. We built our dream house in our 20s. We had all four of our kids in our 20s. We travel a lot. I’ve been married for 17 years. We’re a very close family. We take a lot of trips. We live in a good school district, but my kids go to public school. And we have everything we need and more. And we’re very grateful for that.

The Foundational Mentality for Success

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is the overarching, sort of underpinning mentality that’s required for someone to be successful at starting businesses in the way that you’ve started them, starting these side hustles at volume and seeing success? Is there like a foundational mentality or personality or character trait required before we get into the tactics?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, the pain of your problem needs to be greater than how much you care about what people think about you. It needs to get to that point, because by far, that is the biggest roadblock to success: people caring too much about what people think about them.

And so they don’t want to do the thing, or they don’t want to talk about doing the thing because some random person from high school follows them on Facebook and might comment something. Right? Which is really silly, but I’ve been there. I get it.

If we can get over that, if we can just flip the switch in our brain that says “people are thinking about me, people are caring about me,” and just switch that to off, we’ll win. Because the world is our oyster at that point.

Why Now Is the Best Time to Start

STEVEN BARTLETT: And in terms of where we sit at this moment of time, with technology, with AI, with fast Internet, with mobile phones, do you think this is the best time for people to start something? To start a side hustle or to try?

CHRIS KOERNER: Every day that goes by, the timing gets better for people. Things are getting more competitive, but there are more tools than ever.

Ten years ago, if I wanted to start a business, and this is when the Internet’s in full swing, social media is in full swing, I probably had to spend a lot of money or move to San Francisco or raise venture capital.

I would love for you to try to convince me, try to give me an idea where you have to raise money or where you have to go all in, or where you have to quit your job. It doesn’t exist.

With all these AI tools, software tools, you can make a website with one prompt. You can make an app with one prompt. You could post on Facebook Marketplace and have hundreds of inquiries within an hour. You could post Facebook ads. You could go to Craigslist. You could put a sign up in front of your house. You could go launch a survey to people.

There are so many tools for testing and validating and experimenting with these concepts that it is more accessible than ever.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why don’t people?

CHRIS KOERNER: I think number one is they’re afraid of what people think. Number two is they don’t have the tools, or at least they’re not connecting the tools with the ideas.

They’ll use Facebook Marketplace to sell a sectional, but then they won’t think to use it when validating their woodworking idea. They’re just not connecting the dots. There’s too many tools, in a sense, so we don’t know how to tie them all together.

They also probably don’t know how much the law of abundance is a real thing. People think business is a zero sum game. What does that mean? Well, they think that things are oversaturated.

They’ll have an idea for a product or service, and then they’ll get really excited, and then they’ll go Google it, and then they’ll see it exists and they’ll move on.

And when I do that and I see it exists, I’m like, “Yes, this is it.” Someone went to the front lines of the battlefield and validated this for me.

And then I’ll go to the web archive, I’ll go to Whois, and I’ll go look at what their website has looked like over the last decade. See where they started. Maybe their product was $99. Now it’s like $49 every two months. Interesting.

Okay, I’ll look at the copy of their headline. I’ll look at how many tabs they have on their website, do they post their Instagram feed on. I’ll look at all these things and see how it’s evolved over time and think, “Awesome. I’m going to start where he’s at today.”

This guy already proved it out for me. He took all the risk. This is amazing. This exists. I don’t need to do it better. I don’t need to do it differently. I just need to do the same thing. And the market is big enough, the world is big enough to where I can win as well.

Using Web Archive and Similar Web as Research Tools

STEVEN BARTLETT: You said web archive. What role does web archive play? What is that for anyone that isn’t familiar? And how do you use that?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, it’s just a tool that shows snapshots over time of what a website looks like. So it’s a great way of kind of reverse engineering what businesses have done to be successful.

And then there’s another tool called Similar Web, where you can see what their traffic has been over time and you can kind of overlay the two and you can say, “Oh, interesting. When they redesigned their website to be more mobile friendly, their traffic went from 3,000 a month to 4,500 a month. Interesting. I’m just going to make it mobile friendly from day one.”

So we’re at a great advantage when we start where our competitors or our future competitors already are, instead of starting where we think we need to be starting, like trying to be different or innovative or unique.

In my experience, that’s more of a signal of our pride or our ego. We feel kind of weird or odd or even dirty or unethical if we’re just copying and pasting a business, even if we had the original idea ourselves, when really there’s nothing to be ashamed of.

We don’t want to steal their intellectual property or their logo or anything, but copy what’s already working.

The Power of Copying What Works

STEVEN BARTLETT: People think, people don’t think that that’s the thing, because they think if I copy a business that’s already working, then I’m not going to get any customers because this existing business has all the customers. But it’s interesting, I had someone on the show where they talked about how some of the greatest entrepreneurs in the world basically just copy 95% of the blueprint. I think it was Walmart. I think they were talking about Walmart.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, they copied other regional grocery chains.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Copying as a strategy.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you done that?

CHRIS KOERNER: Oh, absolutely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me an example.

The Phone Repair Business That Led to a Multi-Million Dollar Exit

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay, well, I had a phone repair business when I was in college, 2010, and I got a call one day from someone that said, “Hey, Chris, I want to buy all of your broken iPhone screens. Do you have any broken iPhone screens?” Sure. We don’t throw them away because we think it’s bad for the environment. We just have a box of them. “How much will you pay me?” 3 bucks a piece. “Why? Why will you pay me $3? It’s just broken glass.”

And they said, “Well, there’s actually a way of remanufacturing these. We can send them to China. We can remove the broken glass, put new glass on them, and then we can resell them as a remanufactured unit.” And that was just like a light bulb. Right.

So most people, I think, at this point would say, “Yeah, where do I ship these?” You know? But I was like, oh, I need to be in that business. I want to copy that guy who called me right now. I don’t know what his website was. I don’t know what the name of his business was. There was no web archive at the time to look at. I just wanted to copy the business model because I thought, this is going to be a thing. I’m in the industry. I know the industry.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m going to do this as well.

CHRIS KOERNER: We did $2 million the first year, then $5 million and then $9 million, and then we exited a few years after that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s interesting, but, you know, you often don’t think that everyone’s in search of a new idea. And it’s tough to find new ideas.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Like, I think, was it Einstein that said there’s no such thing as a new idea?

CHRIS KOERNER: Sounds right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you have an orientation just to look at existing models and to replicate them. Do you put a spin on it at all?

Why Copying Exactly First Leads to Better Innovation Later

CHRIS KOERNER: I’ll develop my own spins over time. Right. Because we’re all a product of our environment. And so in the case of this business, I started copying exactly. Right. I went and found people in China. I just went to Alibaba, I messaged a ton of people that sold iPhone screens, and I said, “Do you recycle? Do you recycle? Do you recycle?” And 5 or 10% of them said yes.

So then I shipped them samples, and then they shipped me some back. And then over time, I started taking some marketing principles from previous businesses like Facebook ads, cold calling, and I started applying them just because I didn’t know how this other competitor was finding success. I knew he was cold calling and that was working. That’s all I knew. Remember, I didn’t even know the name of his business.

And so over time, you start using your previous experiences to apply these tweaks to the business and to make it your own. But if you do that right at the outset, right, like if I got a call and he said, “I want to buy your broken iPhone screen,” then I said, “Okay, I’m going to do that, but I don’t want to just sell iPhone screens. That’s lame. I’m going to do Samsung.” Right. Pretty good chance there’s not even a market for that, or there’s not even a method for that.

And because of my ego, my pride, my unwillingness to just copy what’s already working, I wouldn’t have that successful business in my back pocket. Right. So if you do twist in the beginning, it’s kind of like, kind of thinking of an analogy. Like if you’re on a long road trip and you start taking detours early on, or if a flight is on a flight path and he starts getting off track just a little bit at the beginning, he’s going to end up hundreds of miles away from his destination. But if he starts making tweaks along the way, then he’ll be much closer to where he would have been anyway.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you might reach a better destination with some of those exact tweaks because…

CHRIS KOERNER: You’re blending it with your experience, what you know better than the person that you’re copying.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so it’s important to copy the model exactly at the beginning because you’re also going to learn what it is about that existing model that works.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And therefore what you can iterate on, change, expand. If you didn’t, then you might miss something.

The Expensive Lesson of Thinking You’re Smarter Than Your Competitors

CHRIS KOERNER: Exactly. Because so often I made the mistake of looking at another business and saying, “Oh man, why are they doing that? Why are they charging like that? They’re charging all these different things. That’s so confusing.”

I made this mistake. I had an e-commerce fulfillment business where brands would send us all their products. We had this big warehouse and we would ship all of their stuff out. Right. And I was like, “Why do they have storage fees, pick, pack and ship fees? They charge fees for tracking their expiration dates. They charge extra fees if there’s five items in a box versus four. There’s so much friction there. That’s so messy. We’re going to make this simple. We’re going to just one flat fee, no storage fee, and that’s going to be our differentiator.” Right.

And then over time, over the course of months and years, we learned, “Oh, storage fees. It’s because sometimes your customers go out of business and then you’re left holding the bill and your storage costs are actually very high, but there’s nothing to pass on. Oh, pick, pack and ship fees.” Because you learn all these things and you’re like, “Okay, I wasn’t this genius that had an MBA. I was just trying to put my own spin on it because I thought I was smarter than that business owner.”

Turns out someone that’s been doing this for 15 years versus 15 days knows a lot more about the industry than me. And I’m much better off just copying his pricing, copying the layout of his website, copying the size of the warehouse he has, copying the same niche that he’s going after because that’s clearly working for him.

So I don’t make that mistake anymore. I don’t assume that other competitors are idiots. Right? Yeah. I’ve been proven wrong too many times. I assume that they’re doing that because they’ve learned the hard way. Yeah. And if I copy them, then I won’t have to learn the hard way.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I had several of our executives over at my house over the last couple of days, and we were looking at different models of, so basically we’re looking at other companies that do similar things to us that have been around for a long time. And the question I ended up asking at one moment when I had the exact same epiphany, I was like, “Why do they do it that way? Isn’t that shitty?”

And there was a second where I think we were tempted to try and reinvent the wheel. But the question I ask myself now with the wisdom of many years of business, is like, “Why did it end up that way?” Which is, why did our competitor, who’s been doing this for 50 years, end up there? Because as you said, there’s clearly a set of things that have happened that have made them conclude, whether it’s at scale or some other factor that’s made them conclude that this is the best way of doing it.

And just like you, I’ve been wrong so many times where I’ve thought, “Oh, they’re just idiots. That’s why they can’t see this obvious thing.” But actually, their model is stress tested in the market much more than mine is. So maybe I should put my ego aside and at least start how they start, as you said, which I think is really important advice.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, well, there are times when a company just keeps doing something because it works and so they don’t take the time to test something that works better. Right, but it’s almost impossible to guess what that is. Right. Like if a clothing brand is growing their business entirely through Facebook ads and they’ve just never tried Google Ads, maybe Google Ads could convert twice as better. Right.

But I don’t want to guess that. I just want to start with Facebook ads and then I’ll still take 5% of my budget and start testing other concepts. But nine times out of 10, I ended up just coming right back to Facebook ads.

Old Problems vs. New Problems: When to Copy and When to Experiment

STEVEN BARTLETT: It got me thinking about how in business, basically everything, again speaking broadly here, can be put into one of two categories. Either old problems, where thousands of people have come before you and the same solutions and same thinking is still relevant. And then new problems, things like AI have created a set of new problems, new opportunities as well.

And what I tend to find is that 95% of the things in business are old problems like hiring, cash flow, how finance is done, legal, all those kinds of things. And when you’re dealing with an old problem, expertise is usually the answer, which is find someone who knows or hire someone or mentor or whatever. And then you have these new problems where there is no blueprint. In our industry, it’s a new challenge. So experimentation is the answer. Does that broadly hold in your mind?

CHRIS KOERNER: Oh, 100%. Yeah. I like to say test everything except drugs. We’re always testing. It’s the basis to everything we do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But do you test when it’s an old problem?

CHRIS KOERNER: Can you give me an example?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So like things like cash flow management. Hiring principles around probation and notice periods. A lot of legal structuring in deals, things with a well established, well established precedents where nothing has fundamentally changed in the world that makes that invalid?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, I think if it’s an old problem, I look to an example of someone within the last decade that solved it in an interesting way. And I’m more likely to copy that. Like in hiring. Traditionally companies will, they’ll spend hours and weeks or days hiring, going from round to round to round person, person, person.

And if you look at Y Combinator, arguably the greatest startup incubator in the world, they have seven minute interviews and they said they would make it five minutes, but it just felt rude. Right? And in their interviews, they really know in the first three minutes if it’s a fit or not. And then the interview’s done. They’re either in or they’re not.

I approach hiring the same way. I would much rather take a law of large numbers approach to it and give five people 30 days to show what their skills are as opposed to spending 30 days going all in on one person. Because in my experience, that one person that I spent 30 days on is not any more likely to succeed than those other five people that I might be testing. Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And your example of that storage company you started, it sounds like you hit an old problem.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yes, very much so.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you tried to innovate and experiment, but this was an old problem where the laws of human beings and how they behave and businesses combust were still pertinent.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. And at the end of our two year experiment, we look just like all of our competitors. Right. So if we would have started there, we could have saved two years.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this is what I find is founders waste years trying to experiment where old problems are still strong and still hold.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this is what I missed. That several of the mistakes I made in my company was I should have spent all of my time experimenting on the new problems and should have hired people to tell me how to navigate the old problems. Yeah.

What was your, I think one of the videos that made you go pretty viral was your story of Buc-ee’s. We don’t know what Buc-ee’s is around the world. I think it’s a US brand.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But this shows, I think, how you’ve always had an orientation to think slightly differently or innovatively.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What happened with Buc-ee’s?

The Buc-ee’s Opportunity

CHRIS KOERNER: So this was during the time when I was running that business shipping products for other companies. Buc-ee’s is a gas station brand with only 50 locations. And from those 50 locations they do billions of dollars of revenue. I say gas station, they’re between 40,000 to 80,000 square feet. They’re massive. They have an amazing brand, an amazing logo and they just have a lot of trust from their customers.

But these gas stations are on the way out to these road trip destinations. They’re out in the middle of nowhere. And so if you live in Dallas and you’re driving down to the beach, you’re going to stop at Buc-ee’s on the way there and on the way back and you’re probably going to spend hundreds of dollars. You’re going to fill up the tank, then you’re going to buy shirts and snacks and all that stuff.

So at the time we were running this e-commerce fulfillment business. We went to Buc-ee’s. I brought my cousin, my business partner, just to kind of show them the experience. And we were just having a conversation. I remember exactly where I was. I was under this underpass, this huge underpass in DFW. We were driving home and I said, “Man, these guys must kill it online. They must sell so much stuff.”

Why? Because I knew that Disney sells billions of dollars of T-shirts on their website. I read a stat recently, so I kind of just took that data point, connected it to Buc-ee’s and said, “All right, Buc-ee’s is a fraction of the size of Disney, but they have the same amount of brand loyalty.” People love their shirts. You’ll see their shirts all over the world, even though they only have 50 locations in the Southeast.

So we went to their website, and there was no shop button. There was no place to buy their stuff. And I was just like, all the light bulbs were going off at once. It was like, “Oh, my gosh. Okay, we need to reach out to them. We need to bring them online.” I just had all these ideas, and my cousin is much more balanced than I am. He’s the operator, and I’m the ADHD crazy guy. So his role is to calm me down, and he’s very good at that.

But I just couldn’t be calmed down from this. I’m like, “No, no, no, we’ve got to do something here. We’re going to buy one of everything. We’re going to hire a photographer to take pictures of it. We’re going to launch our own Buc-ee’s online store, and we’re going to try to go viral.” It’s viral or bust. If we don’t go viral, then I’ll just be eating these unhealthy snacks for the next three years of my life.

And so we did. We bought one of everything, cost thousands of dollars. I brought all four of my kids, and we brought it back to our warehouse, we took pictures of it, we launched a website, and I emailed all the reporters I could find. And one of them just loved the idea. He ran with it, and so he reached out to Buc-ee’s for comment because they wouldn’t respond to my cold emails. I wanted to launch this with them in tandem, but who am I? They didn’t care about me. And I don’t blame them.

And so he wrote this big article about me. Millions of people read it. All these other news outlets wrote about it. And we did hundreds of thousands of dollars in our first 30 days organically from that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How did Buc-ee’s feel about that?

CHRIS KOERNER: They wanted us to make some key changes to the website. They wanted us to basically put disclaimers everywhere that said, “We are not Buc-ee’s. We’re not affiliated with Buc-ee’s.” They wanted us to change the name. It had the word beaver in the name. That’s their mascot. They didn’t want it to be confusing at all. So we made all those changes and then we got the unofficial thumbs up from them. They said, “We’re not going to sign anything, but you have our blessing. Have fun.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: And did that website make you a lot of money?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, it still is. It’s been five years. We still own it, 100% of it, and it’s going great and it’s made you millions.

Applying the Lesson: Shortening the Idea-to-Action Gap

STEVEN BARTLETT: What can someone listening take from that in terms of applying that to their own life, finding opportunities like that out in the world? Or is that just a one and done? Is there only one opportunity like that?

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay, so specific. I get asked that question a lot. How could someone do that with another brand?

I don’t know if there was another brand out there like that, I would be doing it. Trader Joe’s is similar, but they’re very litigious. I think that was kind of lightning in a bottle for that particular experiment, as in launching an online brand for an in-person business. Okay.

But people should not be disheartened hearing that because on a macro level, people should take their curious ideas very seriously. They need to shorten the amount of time spent between having the idea and doing something about that idea. Why? Because that will strengthen their bias for action muscle.

We all have ideas, some of them good, some of them bad. On a regular basis, we usually don’t do anything about it. It’s just a passing thought. Whether it’s a business idea or a hard conversation I need to have with something, any idea. But the more we shrink the amount of time between doing something about that idea and having that idea, the more often we’ll do that and it becomes a self-perpetuating snowball that just compounds.

And then before we know it, we’ll get more ideas, we’ll do more about those ideas, we’ll be testing things, we’ll be learning tools, we’ll be experimenting and we’ll have a whole portfolio of businesses.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there something in your mentality or perspective there where you walk into a Buc-ee’s and you even think about how you could do something. Whereas most people walk into a Buc-ee’s and buy their stuff and leave. Is there something foundational in the way that you’re looking at the world?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, but I don’t think I’m any different. I think a lot of people have ideas like that. You walk into a Buc-ee’s and you see something about something that could be improved, and people have these passing thoughts and they move on. I think that you become an expert at doing something about those ideas. When you do something about those ideas, you just get better at what you do, at what you test, because you’ve built.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Up some kind of muscle, which means that you don’t really care about it seems failure as much as the average person. And also in that particular case, the average person might think, “Well, I’ve got no experience in doing that.”

CHRIS KOERNER: No one has any experience in anything until they do it. Every expert started out as a beginner. Sometimes, though, people try this and they learn it doesn’t give them energy. It’s not for them. That’s okay. Now when they have ideas, they can know, “All right, box checked. That’s not really for me that entrepreneurship thing. Someone else needs to do that.” And great, good, all the power to them.

I just want people to answer that question for themselves. I hate seeing regret in people’s faces. I have friends that want to start a business they’ve always talked about, and I know they would be good at it. And I know it just eats them up and they have really, really good ideas objectively. And I just hate seeing them have that question for the rest of their life. I just want them to taste entrepreneurship.

Is Entrepreneurship for Everyone?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it for everybody, though? You know, you can think of all your friends.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You can probably put them in groups of, “This person should. This person shouldn’t.” And what defines who goes in which group?

CHRIS KOERNER: To me, it’s how far they go in doing something about that idea. Because I will have friends that will text me ideas or talk to me about ideas, and then I never hear from them again about that thing. I don’t worry about them. I feel like there’s a selection bias at play. If they really want to do something about it, they would get a little further down the line. They’d follow up with me. They’d say, “I did this thing,” because I’ll always give them tips and feedback. “You should do this. You should try this.” And they’ll follow up and then you know, at some point along the line, it’ll die. But if they don’t get any further than just telling me their idea, then I don’t lose sleep over them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So it’s kind of survived. It’s kind of sort of self-selecting itself anyway. It is entrepreneurship.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, absolutely. But then I have other friends that follow up, follow up, follow up, and then it dies, which is okay. A lot of my ideas die too. And to me that’s the signal that it was supposed to die. I’ll just move on to the next thing. So it’s those people that maybe I’m just biased and they look more like me. You know, maybe that’s not an accurate signal or not. But if they look more like me, then that’s a signal that they should get further down the line and actually launch something that gets to revenue.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In your head, think of one person, you know, that should never start a business.

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you think of that person without telling me who they are?

CHRIS KOERNER: Because they make a lot of money at their job and they like their job well enough. They’re not miserable. And they’re in their late 40s and they probably feel like it would be too big of a risk to start something.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And you objectively agree that it would be too big of a risk for them?

CHRIS KOERNER: I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you’re looking at that on a risk-reward basis, thinking the reward doesn’t outweigh the risk here for you?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Yeah. Because people come to me hoping that I’ll encourage them to quit their job. Begging me to do that without actually begging me. And I don’t want to do that. I’ve never had to quit a job. I started with entrepreneurship. So the thought of being 48 with four kids and quitting my $400,000 a year job to test something, it just sounds crazy to me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: On the other hand, think of one person, you know, that isn’t an entrepreneur, but definitely should be, but you always think, “Why don’t they do it?”

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why did you think of that person?

CHRIS KOERNER: Because it’s a person that comes to me the most often with ideas and they’re really, really good ideas. He’s an engineer, and so he sees the world in that way. Engineers make great entrepreneurs. And he has a great work ethic. And he’s mid-career, but not so far along. And I know objectively that he’s actually quite miserable in his job. And I hate that for him because I see the talent that’s there, and I want him to excel, and I want to see that dream come true for him.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why isn’t he doing it?

CHRIS KOERNER: I think it’s insecurity.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Fear.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Fear of probably just letting go of something certain that’s provided his family a nice lifestyle and not getting that back again ever. I think that insecurities are at the root of our best and our worst selves, and it can drive us to be our best or our worst selves, depending on how self-aware we are about those insecurities.

The Side Hustle Solution

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there a little bit of a flaw in his thinking in your perspective? Why is it you still, even though what he’s saying there about what you think he believes there about security for his family is true, you still think he should, which suggests that there’s some kind of flaw you see in the way he’s thinking about it.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Because he doesn’t have to quit his job. There’s enough time in the day to do this, on the nights and weekends to do enough of it to really prove itself out. Oftentimes,

The Ceiling of Side Hustles

CHRIS KOERNER: Whatever our side hustle is, it has a very low ceiling if we’re only working on it after hours. Let’s say we’re spending 20 hours a week on a side hustle and it makes us $50,000 a year, but our job pays us $200,000 a year and we spend 40 hours a week on that.

One thing that I’ve noticed, which is kind of contradictory to how I feel about quitting something, is when we go from 20 hours a week on the $50,000 a year side hustle to 40 hours a week and we quit the full time thing, that $50,000 a year goes to $500,000. We double the amount of hours, but we 10 times the amount of money that comes from it because of the fact that we burn the boats, that it has to work.

I just don’t want people to burn the boats too soon. There has to be a pathway. Let’s say our Facebook ads are converting really well. We’ve tested scaling it, and they’re profitable. And we know what that would look like. But if we scale it, then we’re going to have more customer service complaints. We’re going to have to do more architecture of the business. But we see a path to scaling, and it’s already profitable. And we know that probably my boss will take me back. We have kind of these safety nets. That’s the perfect time to really burn the boats. Not when we have an idea or we’ve tested it a little bit, but not thoroughly. That’s too soon, in my opinion.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And by burn the boats, you mean the analogy of, I guess, some of the wartime leaders who would pull up on an island that they were invading and burn the boat so that they had no plan B?

CHRIS KOERNER: Exactly. Yeah. To quit.

The Plan B Debate

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that really matters, the whole idea of a plan B? Do you think people should have a plan B when they embark on entrepreneurship? Can I contradict myself 100%?

CHRIS KOERNER: All right, so the rational Chris, Chris with four kids says, absolutely. You got to be a dad. You got to be a husband. You got to provide for your family. And again, there’s so many tools out there for testing, for scaling, for outsourcing. We could find a business partner to help pick up the slack. We could use our kids, we could use our spouse, whatever. So many ways to really vet something out before quitting that we don’t have to quit.

But the other side of my mouth, there’s been two times in my entrepreneurial career when someone burned the boats for me. I pull up to an island, and so I’ve got my plan B. I’m testing this business. This business is profitable. It’s paying the bills. And then someone else, in the middle of the night, they snuck out, they burn my boats, and I wake up, and I’m like, whoa, where’s my plan B? I wasn’t ready to burn those boats yet. And plan A just freaking thrives.

And it’s not so much because of the fact that I don’t have a safety net anymore, but it’s because that event put a chip on my shoulder that makes me want to prove those bad guys wrong. To oversimplify, these guys that burned my boat.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Toxic motivation.

CHRIS KOERNER: Exactly. That’s a good way to put it. To show them I didn’t need those boats. I’m not going back. This island is better than where I came from.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I remember reading about a study on plan B’s where they got a group of students, two groups, and then they told them to do a puzzle to win a treat. And then in one of the groups, they told them that they could get this treat at a vending machine down the hallway if they wanted it after. And the group that didn’t understand they could get the same reward from a plan B worked significantly harder to complete that puzzle.

So there’s something in the human psyche of when you know that you could get the reward in another way. When you have a plan B, we work less hard at the plan A. Logically, maybe we should, you know, we’re practical and responsible. Remove the plan B from our mind.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, yeah. I just, I can’t think of any stories from people in my sphere of influence that have tested something, quit the plan A and then plan B just failed and they just lost everything. Surely that’s happened. That does happen when people prematurely quit, but in my experience it doesn’t happen. It has the opposite effect. It becomes this huge motivating factor.

And when they quit, I ask them, how do you feel? Are you freaking out? And it’s always, always, “I’m so excited right now. I’m going to go all in on this. This has to work.” And it does. It just does.

The Truth About Passive Income

STEVEN BARTLETT: A lot of people are looking for passive income from side hustles and I wondered what your opinion was on passive income because it’s a word that comes up so often in the comments section of this channel. But when we’re doing sort of sentiment analysis and what people are interested in, passive income seems to be a bit of a buzzword.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, it’s the silver bullet. It’s like, it’s the financial Ozempic, you could say.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is passive income? How would one define that?

CHRIS KOERNER: I would define it as income that you receive that you don’t have to continually put effort towards, like buying treasuries, earning 4% on your money and you don’t do anything and you just get paid. And it’s very hard to find, especially early on.

We have to be willing to create active income, sweaty income, ugly income, by whatever means necessary. And the more we do that, the longer we do that, the more realistic true passive income actually is.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sweaty, ugly income.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me an example of some sweaty, ugly income that anyone listening right now could create. What are your favorite examples of non obvious businesses that people have started that have resulted in passive, sweaty, ugly income?

The Concierge Car Buying Business

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, I mean, most things that I’ve started have been just that. I had a concierge car buying business.

STEVEN BARTLETT: A concierge car buying business?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

CHRIS KOERNER: So picture a traditional car dealership, a used car dealership. You got to get your dealer’s permit that enables you legally to go to the auctions and buy cars at wholesale, put them on your lot and sell them. So I did all the regulatory stuff. I got my dealer’s permit. But then I would go to individuals and they would say, “I want a 2024 Sequoia. I want it to be blue, under 30,000 miles.” And I would just go to the auction and buy it for them for like $700 fee.

So they get wholesale, they save money, I make money. I don’t have to bear the inventory risk, and I can buy exactly what they want. This sounds great, right? On paper. People do that business successfully. I didn’t invent it. I copied it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I hated it.

CHRIS KOERNER: I was breaking down on the side of the road, driving these things back from the auction. I’m not a car guy. I don’t care about cars. I don’t work on cars. It’s not my passion. That was ugly. It was hot in Texas. I was standing out on the blacktop. I was making money, it was profitable. And I got to the point where I just quit it. I just shut it down, moved on to something else that was very active. It was not scalable on the surface. It was ugly. I hated it.

And so I pivoted because I had a plan B. I didn’t have to do that. That’s one example. If someone likes cars, it’s actually a great business. I know a gentleman in Alabama that makes a lot of money doing that. For me, it was not great.

Follow the Profit Until You Can Afford Passion

STEVEN BARTLETT: So how important is passion in this equation? How important is it for you to love the thing, to be successful at it, in your view?

CHRIS KOERNER: I think you need to fall in love with business, with commerce, and if you can love entrepreneurship, turning $1 into two, if you could focus on that being your passion, then anything that falls underneath that you should win at.

But I like to say follow the profit, P-R-O-F-I-T, until you can afford to follow your passion. Because if we’re trying to follow our passion from day one, we’re probably not ever going to get there because the statistical likelihood that what we love and what makes us money overlaps in the beginning is almost zero.

So ignore passion for a time. Try to build your passion around commerce and then start anything. And then once you’re able to have more passive income, then start things that you’re passionate about, in the actual industry that you’re passionate about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Persistence. Persistence is obviously going to create the repetitions to understand the problem, to learn more. So I wonder, as it relates to passion and persistence, they seem sort of inextricably linked. Something I’m more passionate about, I’m more likely to continue at, even when the results don’t show up.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, like my car business. I had no passion for cars. And I had another business that was doing great, so I abandoned that. But people think that they’re lazy or they’re not a hard worker and so they’re just not confident that they could do this.

But everyone is a hard worker. Everyone on this planet has the same DNA that enables them to work hard. But the problem is what they’re working on probably gives them no energy. They’re probably not passionate about it. So what am I passionate about? Well, we’ve got to test everything. We have to try new things. We have to take that curious question and turn it into a business. Maybe that’s fun, maybe it’s not.

We need more surface area for finding what our passions actually are. Because we might think that, I love woodworking. I don’t have to build a business around that because I love business. So I can build a business around anything. But if I got super hung up on, I cannot make a profit from this woodworking business, then I would fail at entrepreneurship if I started there.

Whereas if I approach this from the angle of, all right, I like woodworking, what else do I like? Maybe I like running, maybe I like cooking, maybe I like short form videos. And I just start trying all those new things and eventually I’m going to have enough surface area for testing that I’m going to find things where, you’ve heard of the Ikigai principle, right?

So what you love, what you’re good at, what the world needs and what you can charge for. The overlap of that is the sweet spot. That’s what’s scalable. That’s what you can do until you die. But if you get super hung up on that on day one, like, “I’m just not passionate about that,” you’re never going to find it. You’re going to be in that job forever.

Finding Your Ikigai Through Experimentation

STEVEN BARTLETT: My career follows the same arc, which is I tried tons of things and then I built this marketing business and then that became more of a product business and grew. And I didn’t love it. It wasn’t my passion to help Coca Cola sell more cans of Coke or Uber sell more Ubers necessarily. That wasn’t my passion in life.

However, it taught me a bunch of skills, which then when I quit that business and I spent some time in psychedelics, DJing, building software, Web3, you name it, I came out on the other side and could ask myself that Ikigai question, which is, of all the things that I have tried, what is the thing that I would do really irrespective of money? Now I had that luxury to do that.

And actually, in 2020, the answer was this. This was the answer. This answer was, I literally moved to London from New York and found a place without viewing it properly that looked like this, because I thought this would be a good podcast set, and moved into that place, called Jack. And then we started about five years ago doing this weekly. And it’s become a business off the back of it.

But I didn’t have that luxury at the start. If I tried that from day one, I wouldn’t have had the skills to know how to scale an audience. I wouldn’t have had the flexibility to buy all these cameras, which cost like $50,000 or whatever at the start. And I do think some people sometimes get that inverted.

The Power of Distraction as a Signal

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. And you’re not distracted anymore, right? You’re not looking for the next DJ thing, or like, you found it, you’re here right now, you’re focused on scaling.

It’s like people get so hung up on focus or lack thereof, and they just beat themselves up over it. But in my experience, like, a lack of focus is a signal that there’s something else out there. Right. That maybe we shouldn’t be focusing on that thing, because you’ve probably worked on things that had perfect product market fit and were just crushing. And you weren’t thinking about starting a DJing business at that point. Right. You were all in on this one thing.

But the times when you were working on something, you know, maybe I’ll try this, maybe I’ll try this. And you beat yourself up, you’re like, oh, and focus, focus, focus. Like, let’s actually pay attention to those signals. Why am I distracted from this thing? So that’s, I don’t know if that’s just me coping with my own ADHD or if that’s actually a true principle, but I try to lend some credence to those signals of distraction that I get on a regular basis.

The Someday Shelf Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, I have a someday shelf, which is just a digital board on my Monday board, where when I have ideas that, like, captivate me at 11pm at night, one night, instead of trying to act on them immediately because I think I’m, in some respects, like you, I put it on the Sunday shelf and I wait and see.

Yeah, I wait and see how much it pulls at me to come off the shelf. And then sometimes it comes off the shelf, I get a little bit of a way down. I discover that actually there’s something I didn’t realize, and then I quit.

But then there’s this, you know, when you think about, like, the excitement arc of a new idea, you have the initial surge of excitement, like, “this is the best thing ever. I’m going to become a billionaire. Why has no one ever thought of this before?” And then you kind of get into it and you get into that sort of valley of, “oh, f*, this is a terrible idea. I’m an idiot.”

If I can come out of that valley, if something pulls me up out of that valley, then I think it’s worth pursuing.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, that’s a good way of looking at it. The Valley of Despair or something. That’s what they call it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you follow a similar sort of path with your ideas?

CHRIS KOERNER: It’s funny, because my kind of framework is if I have an idea, am I thinking about it still two weeks later, for whatever reason? That’s just my timeline. Two weeks.

I had an idea yesterday, and I was at the airport. I was excited about it, and I was doing research. I forgot about it, right? Who cares? But I have ideas where I just cannot get it out of my head. And I’ll see something out there in the world that adds to the idea. And I tell my friend about it, and I send these manic voicemails or these manic voice notes to my friends about it, and I’m still thinking about it two weeks later. That’s my signal that there’s actually something here.

How to Validate Your Ideas Fast

STEVEN BARTLETT: You used the word validating earlier on when you’re talking about these ideas. And I think this is something that could really, really help a lot of people who have a lot of ideas is this idea of trying to validate your idea as fast as possible. How might one validate an idea? And can you give me an example of an idea that you have validated? What does validation mean?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. So I like to see people get joy from my product or service, right? Not just like, “oh, it’s good.” Like, let’s say I’m selling a food product. It tastes good. It’s good. Okay. People might buy this, but I’m not going to have product market fit. I’m going to be pushing a boulder up the hill, right?

But if people are like, “oh, my gosh, this is the best thing I’ve ever had. Where did you make this? How did you make this?” It lights up in their face. That’s an example of a validation in my case. Right. Same industry, food, product, completely different reactions. Right?

So one specific example is my wife has a cookie bar business. Right? Square cookies. And they’re amazing. And we’re not trying to scale it. We don’t want to scale it. It’s a way to teach our kids entrepreneurship, and we love it. But the best way to validate this was going to our local farmer’s market and just posting up and just giving people samples and just watching them. Right. What do they say versus how do they react? And is it the same?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you mean by that?

CHRIS KOERNER: Well, sometimes we try to use the Internet in places where it’s not needful. Right. She sold these online. Right. She shipped them to friends, family across the country. Like, “they’re great. We love them.” Okay. I didn’t see you eat it. I don’t know how you actually love it. Are you saying that because you’re my mom, right, or you’re my friend?

But when you solicit feedback on your product or service in person, even if it’s like an Internet tool or an app, in person makes all the difference. You want to take note of what they say and take note of their body language and how they react when they experience your product or service. Right.

And if all three of those things overlap, then either they’re a psychopath and they’re just lying for no good reason, or you have something really special on your hands. And so that’s what we did with her cookie bar business, and they loved it. And you can do that with any business. It doesn’t have to be food.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what does validation mean? It’s checking if the market gives a f* about the thing you’re making as fast as you can.

The Boulder Test: Finding Product-Market Fit

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Yeah. I like to kind of picture a boulder up a hill. Right. And most people in their businesses, even businesses that are working there, are two steps forward, one step back. Two steps forward, one step back. And that’s okay. Like, that’s not a bad thing.

But in my experience, 5% of the time, I’ll have a business where the boulder is chasing me like, I’m trying to not die because this boulder’s chasing me down a hill. And that boulder, in this case, represents customers demand. Right? Like, I can’t sleep because I’m fulfilling orders. I’m answering emails. Like, I’m not getting distracted by the next shiny object.

That is validation. That’s product, market fit. In my experience, you don’t have to have that to launch. I don’t want people to misunderstand. But if you have that, like you have something very special and you need to go all in on that thing.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There was a book published several years ago called the Lean Startup which talks about this idea of just like testing an MVP as quickly as you possibly can. Can you explain that to the audience who probably have ideas but in their head are thinking, “I’ve got to quit my job, I’m going to have to raise money, I’m going to have to spend two to three years building something to figure out if this is a good idea or not.” What is the alternative approach that you adopt when you’re trying to stress test an idea quickly?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, so if I had to pick one tool, I mean, it’s one that one in four humans use every day. And it’s Facebook. Right. You’ve got Facebook groups, you got WhatsApp, Instagram, Facebook Marketplace, Facebook pages, Facebook ads. Right. Let’s just say there’s six different meta products, Facebook products. That’s everything you need right there. Right.

Why don’t you give me an example of just a random business and I’ll tell you or the audience how they could validate that with a Facebook product.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay. I’m thinking of starting a creatine brand for women that makes creatine taste good.

The Facebook Marketplace Validation Method

CHRIS KOERNER: All right. Are we talking powder gummy? What form factor?

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know.

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay, well, let’s try both. Okay. So I’m going to do something that seems very non obvious and probably won’t work, but it’s the lowest amount of friction. I’m going to take a description for that and I’m going to use Nano Banana, ChatGPT, any of the AI image generators to come up with what the product could look like. Right. In both a gummy form and a powder form. Okay. Then I’m going to go to Facebook Marketplace.

STEVEN BARTLETT: You’re just going to post a photo?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. I’m just going to say, like, “women’s creatine brand actually tastes good.” Right. Like, “did you know that creatine improves cognitive function or whatever?” Just your standard pitch. I could even use AI to generate it. It doesn’t really matter at this point.

And I’m going to post it to Facebook Marketplace simply because that’s the lowest amount of friction to get some level of validation or not. Right. Because in my experience, focus is overrated and momentum is underrated. Right.

And so you could have told me any idea. And my first step that I tell you to do is going to be something very, very low friction, because I want you to get something back from the world, right? Because the most likely way to sell that product is with meta ads, right? But there’s a lot of friction there. Like, it’s hard to use.

So you’re going to be like, okay, you’re going to go, ChatGPT, “how do I use meta ads?” And you’re going to burn out and you’re going to be onto something else by tomorrow. But that might be an amazing idea, right? So I’m going to tell you, go to Facebook Marketplace, even though people don’t sell creatine on Facebook Marketplace.

And then we’re going to see, you know, Facebook gives us like three stats when you post something to Facebook Marketplace: clicks, and then how many people that reach out and then how many views. Okay, so I’m going to post one Facebook Marketplace ad for the gummies. Different picture. It’ll look like gummies, basically. Same headline, same benefit, same description. Post to Facebook in the same local market with the same radius. Don’t want to change any variables.

And then I’m going to open a Google sheet and I’m going to say how many views, how many clicks, how many messages for that ad. Then I’m going to do the same thing. Take the same features, the same benefits, different picture, because this one’s powder. Post it in the same market with the same radius to Facebook Marketplace and have a new column: views, reach outs and clicks, right?

And then I’m going to watch and I’m going to see what’s getting more clicks, and I’m going to know within two hours where there’s more demand. Now, does that little sample size indicate, like, what form factor I should go all in on? Not necessarily, but it’s something. It’s a relevant data point, right.

There’s not very likely to be a large amount of people searching for creatine gummies on Facebook Marketplace, but it doesn’t matter because there’s 2 billion people using it, right? So we’re just trying to capture some of that traffic.

So I’m going to do that with two ads, and then after a day or two, I’m going to boost those two ads and put $10 behind each of them to see how my results differ. Does it make any difference? Do I get a lot more clicks, a lot more views, or is it just wasted?

And then I’m going to probably post like 10 more ads of like, different photos, different headings, different descriptions, different price points, and then put all those in a Google sheet and track it. All right, now I have a lot of data now concurrently.

So while I’m doing all these things, I’m going to go to Facebook groups and I’m going to join Facebook groups like moms who work out, moms who love creatine, moms who love rucking, ultra runner moms, like healthy moms, whatever. I’m going to join all these groups and just start doing searches for creatine, gummies, powders, price points, vendors, websites, and just start like pulling pieces of data out of the atmosphere. Right.

And I’m going to put that in my spreadsheet and I want to wait till the Facebook marketplace tests are done. I want to do that at the same time, then I’m going to start learning Facebook ads. Because everything I’ve told you to do so far takes like two hours. Let’s say we have an afternoon to dedicate to this, right? Then I’m going to learn Facebook ads and I’m going to watch a YouTube video about, you know, how to get Facebook ads up in 10 minutes.

Mastering Facebook Ads: The Infinite Money Glitch

STEVEN BARTLETT: How important is it to understand Facebook ads? And how long would it take me to get a sufficient understanding of Facebook ads?

CHRIS KOERNER: You could be proficient in a couple days. If you had like one thing to sell and you just wanted to go all in on that thing and you actually learned by launching ads and not just learning, not just endlessly watching YouTube videos, you could be fairly proficient within a couple days easily.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Do you think that’s the skill everybody should have?

CHRIS KOERNER: Absolutely. I mean, Facebook ads are like the infinite money glitch. It’s just like a magic money machine. It’s the reason they’re a trillion dollar company. It’s like a cheat code. Yeah. We should know Facebook ads like we know how to write emails. Like, we should know Facebook ads like we know how to build websites or to do anything. It should be foundational.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I wonder how many people actually have that skill.

CHRIS KOERNER: Very few. That’s why there are so many ad agencies charging a lot of money.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And then so you’ve got the data back into your spreadsheet on this creatine situation, how do you then make a decision whether this is something worth pursuing?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Then I would go find like a co-packer.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s a co-packer.

CHRIS KOERNER: It’s a company that will take my idea and put it into a physical form. Right. I’d find like a supplement company that could actually make this and I would tell it roughly, like what I’m thinking and then ask for samples. And then I would use those samples to go get feedback from people in person. Right.

But I wouldn’t get those samples until I got feedback from all these Facebook tests telling me what form factor, what price point, what color, what flavor and etc. And then I would go to a farmer’s market and actually have people try it.

Finding the Right Audience

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ve had so many founders speak to me and say, why didn’t this particular ad that I ran on this platform work for me? Maybe the copy wasn’t good, the creative wasn’t strong. But usually the problem is they’re not having the right conversation because that ad never reached the right person.

And if you’re in B2B marketing, that is much of the game. And this is where LinkedIn ads solves that problem for you. Their targeting is ridiculously specific. You can target by job title, seniority, company size, industry, and even someone’s skill set. And their network includes over a billion professionals. About 130 million of them are decision makers.

So when you use LinkedIn ads, you’re putting your brand in front of the right people. And LinkedIn ads also drive the highest B2B return on ad spend across all ad networks, in my experience. If you want to give them a try, head over to LinkedIn.com diary and when you spend $250 on your first LinkedIn ads campaign, you’ll get an extra $250 credit from me for the next one. That’s LinkedIn.com diary. Terms and conditions apply.

I’ve heard you say that there’s various types of entrepreneurs. There’s the sort of zero to one entrepreneur who’s good at starting things. There’s the maintainer and then there’s the finisher. Which one are you?

CHRIS KOERNER: I’m a starter. Yeah, through and through.

If I stay in a business too long, it all falls apart. Right. Just objectively. So I need to hand off the reins at a very specific point or I need to have a partner from the outset that knows me, my strengths and my weaknesses. That just takes over at a certain point.

So I like to say there are starters, maintainers and finishers. A starter could be called like a visionary and not as like a backhanded compliment way, but someone…

STEVEN BARTLETT: An idea guy.

CHRIS KOERNER: Right. Not just a business idea guy, but like a marketing idea guy. Let’s change the subject line to this idea guy. Like an idea machine. Right. That’s a visionary.

And then you have the maintainer, which would be an operator. That’s a guy that just wakes up every day and loves tweaking little things and making small improvements. Process oriented. Someone that loves growing something and just fixing little problems all day. Right.

And then you have a finisher, which is like a deal guy, right? That’s the guy. That’s a super connector. He likes to, oh, you need to talk to Barry. And then he calls him, he connects him. And like, he just gets a lot of energy from connecting deals, coming up with creative deals for an exit for a sale, putting people together, hiring the right people, seeing something to its completion. But I’m definitely in the first camp.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is it possible to be all three?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, when you’re all three, you’re Mark Zuckerberg. I mean, truly, like, you start something from scratch and you see it to a trillion dollars. There’s been like, I think there have been three people on the planet that have brought something from zero to a trillion. Jensen Huang, Nvidia, Elon Musk, and Mark Zuckerberg.

I think, like, even Bill Gates, even Steve Jobs, I might be wrong. Yeah. But even Steve Jobs got out long before they hit a trillion market cap.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But a billion, a lot of people get zero to a billion.

CHRIS KOERNER: That’s not nothing. Also very impressive. But when you get all three, that’s what you get.

The Focus Paradox

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that I find really interesting about your story is you start, what is it, 75, 80 businesses. When I speak to people like Kevin O’Leary, who have worked with some of the greatest entrepreneurs to ever live, like Steve Jobs, and he’s very familiar with Elon Musk, they talk to me about focus.

And he says to me that the great thing about Steve Jobs is he was 80% signal and 20% noise. That is 80% of his time. He was focused on the most important thing, and he was brutal about not entertaining anything else.

Jony Ives has famously said that the one thing Steve Jobs was most known for is his remarkable ability to focus. He would literally ask you, what have you said no to in order to focus on the most important thing.

I think about Mark Zuckerberg and his unbelievable ability to focus. I remember several people at Meta, but also, I think it’s a public story telling me that when he realized he was late to mobile, he refused to take any meetings about anything other than mobile. Like extreme levels of focus.

And then Kevin O’Leary from Shark Tank said the same to me about Elon Musk. He says, Elon Musk is the only person that I think operates close to 100% signal, which is he… And I interviewed Walter Isaacs and his biographer, and he said, Elon will sit in a meeting when, if people aren’t talking about something that is the most important thing, he’ll completely zone out.

And then the minute he hears something that he considers to be the most important thing, it’s like he snaps into reality and he takes control and he’s deep into the detail and it sits in contradiction to a lot of the narrative of like, lots of side hustles, lots of businesses. Do as many things as you can.

CHRIS KOERNER: How do you…

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’ve both kind of, you know, you’ve managed to create a life yourself where you’re, you’re a millionaire and you’re free in that regard. But when I look at the biggest companies in the world, there’s this like, there appears to be obsessive focus. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I love that question.

CHRIS KOERNER: I think that all else equal, the guy who focuses more is more likely to be a billionaire. But back to momentum, right? The person that keeps and maintains momentum and gets energy from what they do, they’re more likely to be a millionaire than the average person. Right.

I genuinely have no desire to be a billionaire. Genuinely.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If I get there, cool.

CHRIS KOERNER: But I don’t want to leave my kids tens of millions of dollars anyway. I know where I get most of my energy from. I have a lot of surface area for this. I’ve tried the focus, I’ve tried having a board. I don’t want any of that. Genuinely, I don’t. Right.

So if my life with hyper focused Chris looks like billion dollar exits, reporting to a board, being chairman of the board, being CEO, sitting in meetings all day, that’s miserable Chris. Right?

And if I’m not going to, if I don’t want to leave a ton of money to my kids anyway, then why am I making Chris miserable? So my fourth great grandkids can be rich instead of just my second great grandkids. Like that’s genuinely how I look at it.

One of my superpowers is my long term perspective, right? I think of things on an eternal scale. And if I have to have a miserable life so my kids in year 2300 can still be wealthy. Forget that. Like, I don’t, I don’t, I don’t want them to have all that money anyway, you know.

So I want to live an awesome life where I’m a good and present father. And to me that looks like focusing less, not more.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What if you focused for the next 10 years, you made it to a billion dollars on one thing, and then because you’ve done that, you can take even more sort of experimental bets with higher risk and more enjoyment and more sort of pleasure centric bets over the next 40, 50, 60 years of the rest of your life. Yeah.

CHRIS KOERNER: I just don’t think that that juice would be worth the squeeze. I think that those bigger bets that I take will just amount to more meetings and more travel and more time away from my kids.

And I don’t, like, it might sound controversial, like, I’m not trying to change the world. Like, I want to help people start businesses and I can do that with my iPhone and that will change the world, right. But I’m not trying to solve world hunger. I think that’s someone else’s problem to solve.

And so I just want to be a good dad and work on really cool things. And it’s been a grind to get here, right? Like, I’ve had more years with zero income than I’ve had up years, right? But my up years have more than compensated for my down years.

So what you’re looking at today is the end result of 17 years of a lot of testing. Like a very patient wife that was unquestioning and unwavering and extremely loyal, which I could not have done it without.

And so there were a lot of periods of my life where I beat myself up over that lack of focus. I went and got my MBA because of my lack of focus. I finished my undergrad because of my lack of focus. Like, getting a full time job has never really been off the table until the last five or so years.

So I’ve never been unwilling to get a job or to focus. And I probably did it the hard way, honestly. But I’m to the point now where I don’t feel the need to focus all on one thing.

Guilt and Sacrifice

STEVEN BARTLETT: Did you ever feel guilty because of the situation you put your family or your partner in?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. More than once? Yeah, more than many times.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Give me an example.

CHRIS KOERNER: I spent 18 months working on a project that had no cash flow along the way with the hope of a big payout, and we were making no income, right? And I was focused on this one thing, and that is kind of the downside of focus, is if you focus on the wrong thing, it can really come back to bite you. Right?

But to me, this is objectively the right thing. It was showing all the signals. It was growing.

We had like a few rental homes, we had some assets, and I was selling those things so my family could maintain their quality of life, right? So I felt guilty, but I was also insulating them from feeling the pinch that I was feeling in the office, right?

And then at the end of that experiment, it all went to zero. I was out money, I was out time. I was out everything. And I felt very guilty. That was one example.

But thankfully, we didn’t have to sell our house. We didn’t have to do anything drastic. And what that looked like at home was, dad was quiet more often than not. Dad was grumpy more often than not.

But dad wasn’t really talking freely and openly about the things he was going through because he was trying to put on a brave face and insulate the family from that. Even when my wife was begging to know more, to get more out of me, I just… If I talk about stressors, then it becomes more stressful to me oftentimes. So I just keep it in.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I find the same. I think my partner understands this of me, and I tried to explain to her that I don’t like talking about the stress because in this environment, it’s actually de-stressing me from not having to explain and conversate about it, so… Which is a bit of a paradox, because then they don’t really understand.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And if they don’t understand, they might misunderstand. Misunderstandments might lead to arguments. The arguments create stress, and then you’re going to tell them in some sort of, like, argument. Yeah. What’s going on?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, yeah, I’ve lived that for sure.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I don’t know how to navigate that. But it’s definitely true that me’s going through something in work and then having to come home and, like, go through it for another hour to someone else and stress them out potentially doesn’t feel like the right approach.

CHRIS KOERNER: No, I don’t know what the right approach is. Because they have a right to know about it as well. Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think we just need an outlet. Whether it’s a friend that kind of understands or someone else that, you know, is in our space that we can just talk to about the situation. I think having no outlet is also bad.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. And I’m guilty of that. I find a lot of joy in my work, and so I don’t look at it as work often, but it’s still work. Right. Like, it’s still taxing. So I need to be better by having an outlet.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Have you developed a new relationship with rejection and failure? Because, you know, starting 80 odd businesses, you must have dealt with a lot of failure.

CHRIS KOERNER: Mm.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And how does that feed into everything we’re talking about today?

CHRIS KOERNER: Oh, man. I would. I don’t know where I’d be without rejection and failure. I’m not good at sales. So if anyone’s watching this and, like, “I can’t start a business. Business is all sales,” like, you don’t have to be good at sales. I’m not good at sales.

I can’t think of a business that where I had to rely on, like, early customers coming from friends and family because I cared a lot about what people thought. I didn’t want to post my side hustle number 37 to Facebook because I just thought my friends would roll their eyes. So I created this stupid constraint for me where, like, I had to launch things without the help of my ever willing friends and family because I was too prideful, right? So I advise against that, first of all. Second of all.

I served a mission for my church. I went to Eastern Europe for two years and I knocked doors in Hungarian for two years straight. I approached people on the street in freezing weather wearing a big Russian hat. Like, I got rejected tens of thousands of times over the course of two years.

Being an introvert, staying an introvert, still an introvert, still bad at sales, still hating sales today at age 38. Right? But that, like, changed me as a man, as a person, right? That rewired my brain to just realize that every no is closer to a yes. If my conversion rate is 0.1%, I got to talk to a thousand people and I will surely get a conversion. If I talk to a thousand and I don’t get a conversion, then I’m going to get two conversions by the time I get to 2,000, statistically speaking. So I just need to keep getting rejected.

And that changed everything for me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think it’s super underrated to give kids a job in, like, cold sales. It’s what I did when I was 16 till 19. Sounds like it’s what you did as a young man. Are your kids going to do that?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, hopefully. And two of my kids are introverts, two are extroverted. But they will. They are selling like they already have businesses, little side hustles here and there. But I am encouraging them to go on missions and to do selling because it’s the fastest way to learn. Like, it’s the fastest way to test.

If I talk to a thousand people, then I can have a thousand different approaches. And if my conversion rate is 0.1%, I’m going to get that 2.5% over time because I’m able to test and iterate and pivot based on all that feedback I get.

Building Teams and Choosing Business Partners

STEVEN BARTLETT: What have you learned about team building and business partners through this process? What advice would you give to someone who sat there alone listening to this right now? Do they need a business partner if they do who?

CHRIS KOERNER: Oh, man.

Usually people don’t need a business partner.

If you look at the stats on, like, business failure rates with companies that have co-founders, it’s significantly higher than companies that have solo founders. We see their survivorship bias examples, right? The Apples. And a lot of companies we can look at that had two co-founders that won. But nobody talks about or writes about the 90, 60, 80% of companies that fail with co-founders.

Think about it this way. When we get married, we’ll spend years talking about our potential plans, like, big goals, like, where do we want to live, how many kids do we have? My wife and I wanted seven kids. When we got married, we settled on four, right? It changed over time. It took years to change. We realized kids are actually frigging hard. Right? And we, so then we’re like, where do we live? What kind of a house do we want? We spend all this time, maybe while we’re engaged, maybe while we’re dating, maybe after we’re married. But those are big decisions, right?

But when we choose a business partner, we go get avocado toast together and we’re like, “50-50. Cool. Sounds good. Let’s do this.” You know, I’ll get the doc signed. It’s like, who is that guy? You might have even known him your whole life. But who is he as a business partner or as a business person? I just feel like business partnerships are significantly harder than marriages even. But we put 99% less thought into the structure of things, and that’s a giant failure that I’ve made over and over again.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you wish someone had said to you in the situations where it didn’t work out with business partners or really across the board? Because I read that you’d had, what, seven business partners?

CHRIS KOERNER: It says that I’ve had like 15.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, so in those 15 occasions, what is the advice you wish someone had given you before you engaged in those business relationships?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Well, what do they say about dating? It’s like, be a good, like, the best way to find a good spouse is to be a good spouse. Best way to find a good girlfriend. You know what I’m saying? You’ve got to learn more about yourself before you partner with someone else.

Most people have no idea, like, who they are as a business person or as an entrepreneur. When they partner, they don’t know what their strengths are or their weaknesses are. They sure don’t know what the other guy’s strengths or weaknesses. So I suggest people solo found things to start to learn more about themselves. Are they a visionary? Are they an integrator, starter, maintainer, finisher? Who are they? And then when they want to jump into another thing, because inevitably, if we launch one thing, we’re going to launch more. They know more about what to look for in a partner, and they can optimize for that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about equity?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, I mean, 50-50 is the old standby, right?

Could you imagine if you go on a first date and it’s like, “How many kids do you want?” “Four.” “Okay, we’ll have four. We’ll get married, and that’s how many we will have no matter what.” That’s a 50-50 partnership. Right. It’s making an incredibly important decision based on they both equal 100 numbers sound clean to me, but, like, what is the statistical chance?

This is what needs to be true for a 50-50 partnership to work. Okay? They both have to be all in. They both have to always be all in for the whole lifespan of the business, maybe years, maybe decades. They have to put in the same amount of money, same amount of effort, same amount of connections, value, history, background. Also, both of them should be completely selfless. Right. And not care if the other one’s not pulling his weight. “I’m taking a month long vacation.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cool.

CHRIS KOERNER: “You’ll make up for it later.” They have to be like that chill of a human being. And of course, like, they have to be the same as the other person. If all those things are true, 50-50 works great.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And they need to develop going forward in the same way. Because the next 10 future, they need.

CHRIS KOERNER: To grow at the same rate.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah, yeah.

CHRIS KOERNER: Which will never, never, ever be the case. So I like to say, like, you don’t want to DTR to find the relationship too early or too late. If you sit down at brunch and you’re like, “Let’s do 50-50.” “Cool.” Big mistake. If you’re two years down the line and you’ve got all this revenue and customers and you’re like, “All right, we should probably formalize this,” too late.

Because, like, that only works if the business just stays at, like, a steady state forever, which it won’t. It’s going to go up or it’s going to go down. Right? And like, things get really ugly when either one of those two scenarios happen.

So the sweet spot in my experience is, listen, this is how this conversation would work. We’re going to partner together. “Hey, I think you’re going to be great for this business because you have a sales background. You’re great at sales. You have a lot of contacts in the industry. I don’t have any of that. I don’t even like sales. I don’t know anything about sales, but I’m an amazing engineer. Like I know I can build this thing. You’ve seen me build other websites, other apps in the past. I already have like a wireframe in mind. Like, we’re going to be great for this, right? So let’s just do this. I don’t know how this is going to go. I don’t know how much time you have. We both have full time jobs. Why don’t we just get to $10,000 in revenue, let’s get product market fit, let’s get some good traction. Maybe we’ll get like,” you really have to set a defined metric around it. Not like, “Let’s see how this goes in 30 days,” but something like a revenue number, number of customers or something.

“At that point, let’s sit down, let’s just like put it in the calendar today and let’s have a conversation about what our equity looks like.” Because almost every time they’re going to be remote just based on the world we live in, or one person will put in more money, or one person has more experience and all those things are relevant.

STEVEN BARTLETT: But you’re going to get resentment 100%.

CHRIS KOERNER: And you’re probably not going to talk about that resentment. And it’s only going to get worse.

It’ll only get worse if things either go up or down. So they will always get worse. But it’s hard to define because one person might have 30 years of industry experience and contacts and expertise and he can make one phone call that changes everything. And the other person might be 18 years old and just a hustler and willing to put in 80 hours a week. So is the level of value the same if the level of hours put into the business not the same?

It’s hard. Like it’s really hard to say, “Hey, my one phone call made us tens of millions of dollars. But you’ve done all the work, you’re the operator, so we should be 50-50.” They’re both going to take issue with that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: The only instance I was thinking about all the business partnerships that I’m aware of. So companies I’ve invested in, there’s about 60 or 70 companies I’ve invested in and then businesses I started myself. And the one time I’ve seen it work to split equally, the two people had known each other for a long, long time and they were both late in their career so they’re like, you know, when we think about rate of development and potential, not only did they have a strong relationship, they’d known each other a long time, they’d worked together for more than five years together.

And they’re sort of later in a more mature phase of their career where, you know, like the kids situations figured itself out. Are they going to have kids or. And there hasn’t been some of the big life disruptors that sometimes can come along and change things.

And then I can think of another example where two people knew each other. They were very, very young. They’d worked together before the contract went in, 50-50, although it was never really equal. And then their rate of growth changed wildly where one person really just like became a superstar. And they look back at the contract and it was 50-50. And I remember being privy to the conversation where that person turned around to their business partner and was like, “This is not fair. Yeah, this company without me goes to zero. Without you, it keeps growing.”

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there was an adjustment made to the equity at that point, which is hard to do because of tax reasons and stuff. Yeah.

CHRIS KOERNER: The one thing I will say about a 50-50 and going in with someone that you’ve known for a long time or going in with your best friend, that can be really freaking fun. Like it can just be the most enjoyable life ever. So it’s just very high risk and very high reward. And if you can make it work, like oftentimes the biggest and the best and the most well ran companies you see were 50-50 partners that knew each other for a long time for that reason. But the rate of failure is higher than average.

The Suitcase Challenge: What Business Would You Start?

STEVEN BARTLETT: So in these three suitcases in front of me, I have different amounts of money. And all I want you to do is to let me know if I was giving you this amount of money, what business you would start.

Okay, so the first one.

Has.

$500.

Selling AI to Small Businesses

CHRIS KOERNER: Awesome. So most people would look at this and think, what am I going to do with $500? It’s a lot of money, right? In the age of today, with 30 day free trials and a lot of Silicon Valley funded companies willing to give you a lot of money to test your product, this goes a long way.

So the first thing that comes to mind is probably my favorite business idea of all right now. Thankfully, you can start it with even less than this. And that would be a business that helps implement AI into small businesses, small to medium sized businesses.

So some facts for you. There’s 400 million small businesses on the planet. They’ve surveyed some of these business owners and 77% of them have admitted that AI would be transformational to their business. They need AI. It’s not a fad, it’s not going away. Five percent of them have claimed they’re using AI in a meaningful way. Define that as you will.

So basically we have this knowledge gap. It’s like a business cognitive dissonance, if you will. We know we need to do something and we’re not doing it. It doesn’t matter how easy the tools are, doesn’t matter how much you can create a new website or an app with one prompt. They need someone to do it.

I know how to vacuum my floor. I know how to clean my house. I still would rather just pay someone to do it. And so with a fifth of the money, call it a hundred dollars, I would start learning some vibe coding tools. Replit, Lindy. There’s a ton of them out there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What is vibe coding?

CHRIS KOERNER: For anyone that doesn’t know, vibe coding is the non technical person, the non coder, such as myself, using their natural language to just say, “Hey, build me an app that manages customers for dog trainers.” You’ll have an app. Is it fully functional? Is it workable yet? Not quite, but 10 to 20 more prompts and you’re good to go.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And for anyone that doesn’t know, I would suggest, I’m an investor in both lovable and replit, so disclaimer. But I would recommend going on replit or lovable and typing in any website idea you have just to have that sort of eureka moment of watching it be made in front of you.

I think that eureka moment is the moment your mind expands to the possibilities that are currently right in front of all of us. You know, we think of building websites or apps as exclusive to those that have spent five years learning to code. That has now changed. We can all do it.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. And everyone should, like you said, one prompt, develop an app. Oh, what do I prompt? What do I build? Ask ChatGPT what to build. Copy, paste one of those, ask ChatGPT to prompt it, take it over to replit or lovable, paste it and see what it builds.

So I would use this as my education and also to build a website. Chris AI automations.com, whatever, anything. And then I would take the rest of the money and I would put it into ads. Preferably meta ads, Facebook ads. And I would target local businesses.

Even though this is a global thing, if I live in Omaha, Nebraska, I could sell this to people in Tokyo. Doesn’t matter. I’m going to put a radius around Omaha and my ads are going to say I’m Chris and I can help put AI into your business. I’m going to use fifth grade words. I’m not going to use LLM. I’m not even going to say ChatGPT.

I’m just going to say I will make your business more money or save your business money with AI, just a service business. And then I’ll get on discovery calls with these business owners and I’ll just start peppering them with questions about their business.

And over time, I’m going to learn based on their answers, what their problems are, what they’re struggling with. Is it hiring, is it payroll, is it sales? Usually it’s going to be sales. And then I’m going to take this money over here, this hundred dollars, and go back to those apps and start building solutions for them for free, just to kind of implement myself as an expert.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What are you going to charge them?

Pricing AI Implementation Services

CHRIS KOERNER: I’m going to charge them between $500 and $5,000 upfront one time to implement it. And then I’m going to charge them 20% of that amount on an ongoing basis to maintain it and fix it as it breaks.

Let’s say there’s a gutter cleaning business in Omaha, Nebraska that doesn’t want to take calls after hours. He’s with his wife watching Netflix and he knows that’s a $3,000 job. He doesn’t want to take it. So it’s going to voicemail and they’re calling someone else that is taking it.

So I’m going to build an AI voice agent for him, which sounds really intimidating. It feels like we have to have all these skills. You don’t. You just need to prompt a couple tools a couple times. I’m going to build a voice agent for him and then I’m going to tell him to call that agent as if he were a customer and say, “Hey, pretend you’re a customer that needs gutter cleaning. You’re calling at 9:30pm and just see how it reacts.”

He’s expecting there to be a delay. There’s really not. He’s expecting it to be dumb. It’s not. He’s expecting it to need to know all about his business. It doesn’t. The AI knows about gutter cleaning businesses. Then he’s sold.

Charge him $3,000 for that. You build it and then you charge him, call it $500 or $600 a month to maintain it over time. And then the beautiful thing is you can go to every other gutter cleaning business in Omaha or anywhere and copy and paste that same app and sell it to them.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Got you. So selling AI to small business owners who are in huge demand but don’t have the time or think they need some sort of incredible, expensive time and resource, expensive competence to understand AI, when actually AI is really, really simple.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yes.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And we see this play out over history where there’s an initial arbitrage when a new technology comes into play. In fact, one of the call center jobs that I had when I was very, very broke many, many years ago, when I was like 18 or 19, was calling businesses from the yellow pages and selling them Facebook ads.

I would call a builder on a building site. I’d speak to Dave, who’s the owner of the building company, and I’d explain Facebook ads to him over the phone, and then I’d set them up for him and manage them for him on an ongoing basis and just send him the leads because he didn’t understand Facebook ads.

And these opportunities seem to exist for years when there’s a new technology, as we’re seeing with AI.

CHRIS KOERNER: But the thing is, with that idea and with most ideas in my experience, we think there’s a very limited time span. But if I were to start that business today, just start calling people, it would work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. You could still do it.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. I might have more competitors, but it doesn’t matter. It would still work.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interestingly, the issue back then was people didn’t even know what Facebook ads were. So maybe it works to some degree better now. People have heard the word.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. You were pretty early.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. 2015 or something. So it was quite rough, but it was a business nonetheless.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And there were 40 other people in the room with me in that call center doing it.

CHRIS KOERNER: Wow.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So that’s the first idea you have.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What else? $500. What else could you do?

Drop Servicing Physical Businesses

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay, do you want a physical business or an online business, or does it not matter?

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about a physical one?

CHRIS KOERNER: All right, for a physical one, I would… Have you heard of drop servicing?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

CHRIS KOERNER: So the phrase drop shipping has kind of a bad rap, and some of it for good reason, which is basically buying a product in China, having a website for it, and basically having the Chinese manufacturer or the supplier ship it directly to your customer so you don’t have to take possession of the inventory.

Drop servicing is doing something similar with a service. Call it a home service business. So in this case, it would look like a garage repair company that has a website that looks like they have a physical presence in a market but is really just a lead gen factory.

And so what you’re doing is you’re using Facebook or Google Ads to generate leads. Kind of like what you were doing on Facebook for a local business. And then instead of just selling the leads for $20, you’re actually doing more of the work. You’re subcontracting out the work to a local business that actually repairs garage doors. They’re the fulfillment arm of the business. You’re the marketing arm of the business.

So in essence, you have a garage repair business without actually having one. You don’t know anything about garage doors. You’ve never been on site. You’re just drop servicing. You’re sending all the work to a local company to do it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I, a car repair company, I put up a car repair website. I use Facebook ads to drive people towards it. When they click to buy my car repair, I call a local car repair person and say, “Hey, I’ve got a customer here for you. Can you take them?” I book the customer in, they handle the car repair, I take the payment and pay the garage.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yep, great question. So let’s just say in your example, an oil change at Bob’s Car Repair that doesn’t have a website is 40 bucks, which is a great price. Your website is clean, it’s nice. They can pay with a few clicks.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And it’s 80 bucks.

CHRIS KOERNER: Right. So you call Bob one day and say, “Hey, congratulations, I have a lead. I don’t have a lead. I have a customer. I want to send you $40. Her name’s Mary. She’s going to be coming in, she has a Sequoia, she needs an oil change.”

And so Mary just interacts with you. She’s trusting you with the money. You don’t have to trust Bob with the money. You just send Bob the money. You make even more margin than Bob makes. It’s a higher price service, but what you’re charging for is the better UI, the better user experience and having a cleaner checkout method.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there particular types of businesses you would target with that approach? Are you targeting ones that have a shitty customer experience, bad website, et cetera?

CHRIS KOERNER: In the home services, take your pick, they pretty much all do. There are some more established industries like roofing that don’t have those issues because they have higher margins. So they can afford better websites, but they pretty much all have a bad experience.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Any others at a $500 level that stand out to you?

Building Directory Websites

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, I love directory websites.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s that?

CHRIS KOERNER: So Travelocity is a directory website. Yelp is a directory website. It’s a website with a list of things that helps people find answers to their questions more easily.

So another example of a website could be like Wisconsin Ice Suppliers.com. I don’t know if that’s a website. Where if I need to go buy ice for my party, I’m going to Google ice near me. Some categories are so niche or so unevenly distributed that Google Maps is not a good solution for it.

So you’re directed to these random directory websites that are just lists of other businesses. And what people are doing is they’re proactively creating their own directories by scraping, let’s say every dog park in Seattle, Washington and putting them on a website. And then they don’t even drive traffic to it. There’s no paid ad. They just wait for Google and for SEO to do its trick.

And it’s very much an 80/20 rule. You could kind of build the architecture for a directory website with replit or lovable, and then you just copy and paste it in different markets. So the play here is to have dozens of directory websites, and some of them make $0 a month, some make a few hundred, some make a few thousand. But it’s very passive. It’s like one of those rare things that’s passive, yet also doesn’t need a ton of money to get started.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Where’s the money coming from? Where’s the revenue?

CHRIS KOERNER: Great question. You can either do display ads.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s a display ad?

CHRIS KOERNER: Just a banner ad on a website.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And are you having to go and sell that ad to someone that wants to buy it?

CHRIS KOERNER: You would just take Google’s ad network and just put it on your website so you don’t have to do anything.

RV Parks as a Passive Income Strategy

STEVEN BARTLETT: So you can just click a button and it’ll add adverts to your website, which you’ll then paid for.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yep. Or you could just aggregate those leads. Like if we had dog parks in Seattle and you know, we see on our Google Analytics that we’re driving traffic to this one dog park, then we reach out to them proactively and say, “Hey, you notice all these customers you’ve been getting? That’s because I put you on my website. Would you like to pay $300 a year or a month or whatever for priority placement?”

Right. So I like to call this “permissionless marketing.” You’re just proactively adding these businesses to a website. They have nothing to lose. You have nothing to lose. And then once you see traffic, then you reach out to them and say, “Hey, I’ve been bringing you more business. Would you like to start paying for that?”

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interesting. And how much money can someone hope to make if they execute that strategy?

CHRIS KOERNER: Well, in your view, what’s realistic with a directory website? It could be tens of dollars a month, and it could be tens of thousands of dollars a month. But we’re not talking about building another Yelp or Travelocity. This is a zero employee business that costs almost nothing, less than $100 to start.

But it’s just a numbers game. You’re not really going to know what directory really hits until months have passed and until you have a lot of surface area for these experiments.

The Vending Machine Business Model

STEVEN BARTLETT: I hear a lot of people talking about vending machines online, and I’ve always been really curious about that. People say you can make money from vending machines.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Could you do that with $500?

CHRIS KOERNER: Absolutely. So if we were doing another physical business, I would go to Facebook Marketplace and I would find an existing vending machine for three to $400. Right. That could be a snack or a drink vending machine. Oftentimes the expensive part of a vending machine is the credit card reader. It can often cost more or as much as the whole machine itself.

And then I would use $100 to stock the machine with Costco. Costco or Sam’s Club is where all of these operators buy their snacks, believe it or not. And then I just need one business owner to give me a chance to allow me to put the vending machine in his lobby. Let’s say it’s a car repair business. I can say, “Hey, I’ll pay you $100 a month,” or, “Hey, I’ll split the revenue with you. I’ll give you 30% of the revenue.”

And then once I have one, that’s the hardest part. Now you have a track record. Now you can say, “Hey, Bob’s auto repair makes $700 a month passively because he let me put this vending machine there.”

This is a business that can be passive if you have an employee to restock it. That is the active part of the business, the restocking and the selling of new locations. But if you have an atmosphere, then that becomes even easier because you can outsource all of the restocking to a cash management company.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How much money could one person hope to make from a vending machine business? And have you ever ran this business yourself?

CHRIS KOERNER: I have. I’ve actually been in a different part of the vertical. I’ve sold vending machines. I posted a video to Instagram that got tens of millions of views. And we started just importing those vending machines that I was talking about in the video and then selling them to entrepreneurs.

But the level of revenue is, I mean, it’s as much as you want to scale it. I have a friend in San Diego that makes seven figures a year on vending machines. Just snacks and drinks.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there an art to good vending machine placement or the right things to sell in the vending machine or anything else?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, it’s funny that you asked that because he said, “You know, I’m in San Diego, people are health conscious here.” And he tested all these healthy concepts and they all failed. Like, people want Doritos and Cokes and Diet Coke, right? So that’s all they have now. That’s where the demand is.

But the biggest needle mover on this is the location. And it’s a matter of testing. Back to testing, right? Testing what types of locations. He landed on apartment complexes, like apartment lobbies. He tried auto repair shops and they just weren’t high volume.

But it’s the type of business, kind of like directories, where if you have 100 vending machines, you’re going to have 20 of them that make $3,000 a month each, and then you’re going to have 80 of them that make $400 a month each. But once you find out what types of locations are the most profitable, then you just start directly reaching out to those types of locations.

Wedding Rental Business Opportunities

STEVEN BARTLETT: So I have another box here. This box has slightly more money in, double, $1,000. What would you do with $1,000?

CHRIS KOERNER: All right, so for whatever reason, when I see $1,000, I think about the wedding rental business. Do you know anything about that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

CHRIS KOERNER: So believe it or not, weddings are increasing in popularity. People are getting out, getting married outside more than ever. I think like 75% of weddings are outside now, which is increasing every year. And that increases the market for these random one off rentals. Right.

I read an article on Reddit about a guy that built a wedding arch from his garage with some two by fours, some lumber. I think he spent like $200 or $300 to build it and he rents it out to weddings for like $1,000 per wedding. And it’s just a piece of wood for the couples to stand under as they say “I do.” Right.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And so he works with event organizers or wedding organizers to continually rent it to the wedding organizer.

CHRIS KOERNER: Exactly. He doesn’t go through the brides, he goes through the wedding planners. Because surface area, they’re touching all kinds of weddings on a regular basis. To find these wedding planners, you go to The Knot, you go to Zola Wedding Wire, you scrape them and all of their phone numbers and emails and names and businesses are on the website for everyone to see. And you just start reaching out. And one contact could be one wedding a week.

So that could be started, that could be in the $500 box. Right. You could spend $300 on supplies. You could spend $100 on scraping all the emails quite cheaply. And then you could spend $100 on gas and then, or let’s say another $100 on renting a truck and trailer from Home Depot. Say you have a car. So you don’t have a car. Right. You’ve got $400 left over to go to a nice meal or to, or for Facebook ads.

So photo walls are very popular. Charcuterie carts where wedding patrons can make their own charcuterie board. You could do custom pizzas at weddings. You could do wedding arches. There’s a lot of different opportunities there.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Weddings and funerals.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Because everything you said there could also apply to…

CHRIS KOERNER: That’s true.

STEVEN BARTLETT: They don’t seem to be stopping either. Because funerals are going to get more popular with the population continuing to increase. What else? So wedding rentals is the first one you do with $1,000. Anything else?

Local Email Newsletters

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Should we do an online one?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Sure.

CHRIS KOERNER: So there’s a lot of people nowadays making money with local email newsletters. Are you very familiar with that?

STEVEN BARTLETT: No.

CHRIS KOERNER: So basically what you do, we keep coming back, this is like a big ad for Facebook. I swear it’s not. But people are using local Facebook ads. Let’s say you live in Boise, Idaho. There’s 200,000 people there. You post a Facebook ad that says, “Hey, find out what’s happening in Boise, Idaho. One email per week in your inbox.”

You can acquire a subscriber for about 50 cents from Facebook or Instagram. Okay. Let’s call it a dollar to be more conservative, acquire a subscriber for a dollar. If you sell ads inside that email newsletter, you can charge about 50 cents per month per subscriber.

So if we had $1,000, I would use a free trial for an email newsletter software like Beehive or Convertkit or any of those. And so I’ve already spent $0. And I would give all $1,000 to Meta. I would set a defined radius in a local area. Preferably it’s where you live, but it doesn’t have to be. It could be on the other side of the world. I’ve launched this, I tested this in New Mexico and it worked.

I’d spend $1,000 to acquire 1,000 subscribers and then I would start sending them weekly newsletters. What’s happening in Boise, Idaho? Discounts in Boise, Idaho. News in Boise, Idaho. I would not use ChatGPT to write it. I would write it myself in my own natural language, whether I’m a good writer or not.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Why?

CHRIS KOERNER: Because it needs to feel personal. It needs to feel like a local is writing it. Not like an author, not like ChatGPT. And then I would use those same subscribers to source sponsors. So Bob’s car repair owner is potentially in your list. There are 10% of all adults are business owners. Right.

So if I have 1,000 email subscribers, 100 of them are going to be business owners, are going to be potential sponsors to my newsletter. So after a month or so I’m going to send out an email that says, “Hey, your ad here. I’d love to sponsor your business. It’s a very relevant market. It costs $500 per send to send your email.”

So then if I spend $1,000 to acquire these customers, I will get that money back within two months because I’m making $500 a month, 50 cents per subscriber from 1,000 newsletter subscribers. And that can scale as much as you want. If Boise, Idaho is only so big, you copy and paste the template in another city or a bigger city.

The $5,000 Investment Level

STEVEN BARTLETT: Okay, let’s move up then. This briefcase has a lot more money in it. $5,000. What side hustle do you start if you’ve got $5,000?

CHRIS KOERNER: Okay, so if we’ve got a sliding scale of active to passive income, the closer you get to this to $5,000, the more realistic the passive income becomes. Okay, so I’m going to go closer to that. I love RV parks.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What’s an RV park?

The RV Park Business Model

CHRIS KOERNER:

An RV park is one of two things. It’s a place for someone to live in full time for months or years at a time where they live in a recreational vehicle in an RV, a campervan, a camper van. It could be a fixed income retired person. It could be a blue collar worker. It could be a digital nomad. Right. That’s kind of the three categories.

The other type of RV park is a recreational like a more short term RV park that might be right outside of the Grand Canyon or you know, a popular tourist destination where people are staying one to four nights at a time. Right.

This is a business I’ve been in for about seven years now. They have very small RV parks out there that are three to ten pad sites that are about three to ten times more profitable than buying a single family home as a rental. Okay.

So I genuinely, I don’t understand why people buy single family homes because like buying a small RV park costs the same, but is significantly more profitable and more flexible because you have, your risk is more distributed amongst five to ten tenants as opposed to one tenant that could go bankrupt or disappear in the middle of the night. So with this $5,000.

I would call every small RV park in my area, preferably within a three hour drive. I would just find them on Google Maps. This would take a little more time because we can’t allocate any of this budget to the finding of the park. We’ve got to do that very manually with our iPhone and our Internet connection. Okay.

I’m going to find, in my experience for every 100 parks, I find about two or three of them can be a really good deal. Okay. So if I get 100 people on the phone, I know I can find one good deal from that with seller financing, because we can’t use any of this to buy the park either. Got a lot of constraints.

I’m going to use let’s say $2,000 of these dollars for my due diligence. I’ve got to get inspections on the park, I’ve got to get a title policy on the park to make sure it’s not a scam, to make sure that the owner who says they own it actually owns it.

And then with the remainder of the money, I need some operating capital, I need to be able to pay the power bill to maybe trim some trees to get the park looking nice on day one. And then to actually buy the park, I need to set up creative financing with the seller.

And the best way you can do that is by building a relationship with the seller, building some trust with them, showing them that you’re going to take good care of the park.

Now the unit economics on this, let’s say you buy a park for $200,000. In the real estate world, they’re valued on a cap rate basis, which is the profit of the park divided by the asking price of the park. So if I buy a park for a 10% cap rate, that means it’s going to make $20,000 a year of profit and it’s going to cost me $200,000. Okay?

So that park probably has no website, it probably has way under market rents, it probably has occupancy issues because it has no website. They’re not doing anything.

So I’m going to get the park to perform by literally posting ads on Facebook Marketplace. Free ads. Making a free website with a vibe coding app and increasing the occupancy. And that $20,000 a year goes to $30,000 a year. And the park is worth an 8% cap rate. You bought it undervalued at 10%, so it’s now at $360,000 park that you paid $200,000 for. So you can either sell it or you can just manage it and enjoy the profits.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

When you said seller financing, what does that mean?

CHRIS KOERNER:

That means the seller is holding the note. They are bearing the risk of you buying the park, but what’s in it for them is they can get the park back if you default.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Okay. So they’re not actually giving you the park up front. They’re letting you have it today on the basis that you’ll pay them in the future with profits you make.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Exactly. So you’re making monthly payments to them because oftentimes they’re going to take that money that you give them and they’re going to have to invest it in something else, something they don’t understand.

So your pitch to them is, “Hey, you know this park better than anyone, right? You know what I can do to fix it. You know what the deficiencies are. If for some reason I’m not who I say I am, you just get it back. You take it back and you’re where you started and you keep all the money that I’ve paid you so far.”

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How much money have you made from doing this?

CHRIS KOERNER:

I’ve made net profit, probably $400,000 to $600,000.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Revenue.

CHRIS KOERNER:

I would say between $3 million and $4 million a year. With these RV parks and mobile home parks as well. Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How many of them?

CHRIS KOERNER:

I’ve been involved with 35 or so over the last seven years.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What about business?

CHRIS KOERNER:

No, I mean, you’re capitalizing on baby boomers retiring and on millennials traveling and on. Yeah, it’s just. It’s a growing market. People are getting outside more.

Macro Trends and Business Opportunities

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. What are the macro things you think about at the moment when you’re trying to decide on a new side hustle or a new business to start? Are there obvious macro things that are happening that we should all be thinking about?

CHRIS KOERNER:

You just can’t ignore AI. Whatever you’re doing, AI has to be part of it. So I like the framework of implementing new AI tools into old businesses and I like the framework that 10,000 baby boomers are retiring every single day, and that will be the case for the next five to ten years.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What’s the opportunity there?

CHRIS KOERNER:

To either buy the businesses or to implement AI into the businesses. Those are the two biggest opportunities. I see those two.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Get them to give you the business and you run it better in a more digital way.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And you pay them off for that business when you’ve made profit from it. If you don’t make the profit, they get their business back. Yes.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Now, I will say finding seller financing on a business is harder than on a piece of real estate, but it is possible.

Most Profitable Businesses

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Of all the businesses you’ve started, which one has been most profitable and was the easiest?

CHRIS KOERNER:

Oh, man.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

So what is the winner?

CHRIS KOERNER:

I would say either my RV parks business or my Texas snacks business, my e-commerce business.

And they weren’t easy because they’re easy businesses or industries. They’re easy because I had matured enough to a point to find good operators to run those businesses where I had little to no involvement in them. Does that make sense?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah. You found people to run them for you so that as a starter, they didn’t die the minute you got bored.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Exactly.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Whereas they carried on growing and evolving. Right.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Whereas those are both quite hard industries. E-commerce is quite hard and real estate is as well. But I had good operators.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

What have you learned about finding good operators?

CHRIS KOERNER:

Hmm. Oh, man.

It all comes down to trust. How much trust am I able to put in them? How much trust do I have them? I’ve found a direct correlation between people I know really well and people that have made really good operators.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

How do you incentivize them?

CHRIS KOERNER:

Directly from the profits of the business so that they feel more like an entrepreneur. They’ve got more of a piece of the pie. Yeah.

I made the mistake in my 20s of dangling a carrot of equity too often, genuinely meaning it. But most equity goes to zero, period. I put a lot more emphasis on cash flow now in my 30s than I do on equity. I think equity is overrated.

And so nowadays I’m less likely to give an operating partner equity, not because I don’t think they deserve it, but because it’s more likely to go to zero. And I’m more likely to cut them in on the profits so they can get paid ongoing on an annual basis or quarterly basis.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Quarterly. Yeah. Interesting.

Is there any side hustles that you’ve heard about that you wish you’d started?

The Deep Sea Fishing Analogy

CHRIS KOERNER:

It’s funny because a lot of the ones that I wish I started, I started. A lot of the 80 that I’ve done. I just. It’s something that I thought about for two weeks. I can’t get it out of my head, and I just have to get it out of my head.

And so if I start something and it fails, I don’t really care because I don’t invest a lot of money into it. And I answered the question. I don’t have to stay up at night wondering if that thing would have worked anymore.

Sometimes I’ll run these tests on Facebook that show me such amazing results that just kind of unlock an opportunity for me. Can I give you an analogy?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Yeah.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Have you ever been deep sea fishing?

STEVEN BARTLETT:

Not deep sea fishing, no.

CHRIS KOERNER:

Okay, so here’s a real story. I was out deep sea fishing, and we were just throwing lures, and we weren’t getting any bites. And the captain reaches in under the seat, and he pulls out straws from McDonald’s. McDonald’s straws, specifically because they have red and yellow stripes along the side of them.

And he pulled out scissors, and he started cutting them into fourths. And then he took the hook off the line and he put the string through the straw, and then he tied the hook back on. He’s like, “I know. Seems crazy. Just stick with me.”

And we cast it out and we started getting bites. And I’m like, what? It was the same place with the same lure, same hook with just a straw. And I’m like, what? Why does this work?

And he’s like, “It’s the colors. It’s the white and the red, and it just spins as you reel it in and it mimics a fish.”

And I was like, “How did you learn this? What made you think to try this?”

He’s like, “I don’t know. Maybe alcohol was involved. I don’t know. But that worked.” And we started catching fish the rest of the day.

So it just got me thinking. Entrepreneurship is this massive ocean with millions of varieties of fish, billions of fish, some sharks, some minnows. And so many of us go out there and we cast a few times, and we just go back home. Like, “Entrepreneurship doesn’t work. It’s not for me. Back to the nine to five.”

But we’re not testing enough stuff. There’s different depths, there’s different baits. We could spray something on it to make it smell different. We could put a McDonald’s straw on it, and occasionally we’ll find something. We’ll get a bite. Maybe we won’t get another bite for another hour. But the bite is a signal and it’s like, “Oh, there’s something there. Okay, let’s try that again.”

But try this. Or maybe let’s just cast a hundred more times and then you get a fish and then you get a bigger fish. And the more you’re out there, not just focusing on one type of fishing, but increasing your surface area and trying all kinds of different things, the more you learn. The more you test.

And now you have a bunch of sharks in the boat and you have this, and you have this and you have all these options at your disposal. We’re eating shark tonight. We’re eating grouper. We’re eating snapper. You have this amazing life that’s dynamic and full of color and all these other awesome things are coming into play because you stayed out there and you didn’t just do one thing, you tried all these other things.

So that’s how I look at business. I’m out there on the ocean testing other things, and even if I don’t catch anything, it’s fun. And I think other people should try that too.

The Trap of Sexy Businesses

STEVEN BARTLETT:

A lot of people want sexy stuff, don’t they? They want to build the next Facebook or they want to do the ChatGPT or the AI app that does this, that and the other. Do you think that’s in part a trap for the average person to be aiming at sexy?

CHRIS KOERNER:

Yeah, because the fact that everyone wants sexy means the fact that the sexy things are the most competitive. It’s the exact reason why we should go as unsexy as possible, because no one’s looking at it.

STEVEN BARTLETT:

And looking forward, Chris, is there anything that you’re mulling over now in terms of new business ideas that you could give me?

The Power of Unfair Advantage

CHRIS KOERNER: Man, lately it’s been about stuff I can launch with my content.

I love the phrase “unfair advantage.” I will only start businesses today where I have an unfair advantage. Everyone has an unfair advantage in something, right? Even a 13-year-old has an unfair advantage. They might know Roblox better than anyone, right?

So unfair advantage is not only for the rich or the wealthy or the elite or the most experienced or the PhDs, right? So I try to start businesses where I have an unfair advantage. And that might be because I can grow it with my content. It might be because I have a bunch of friends in that space or have a unique knowledge or insight into that space.

So if I have a zillion ideas and a spreadsheet a mile long with a bunch of business ideas, the ones I’m most likely to start are the ones where I have an unfair advantage, a right to win.

Mirage Opportunities: When Obvious Ideas Don’t Work

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah. I have this phrase called “mirage opportunity,” which I use when I look at an industry that never seems to work for anybody but seems so obvious. Do you know what I’m saying?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, I do.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’m thinking of something.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And this has been a bit of a way for me to know what not to work on is if I see everybody trying to solve this particular problem and nobody’s been successful yet, more and more people are plowing in. And yet it seems obvious to me. I just stay away from it because there’s something in my understanding of consumer behavior or current alternatives that I’m misunderstanding.

An example I’ll give you. Everyone at the moment is trying to start a… So this is the first sort of first principles they’re reasoning up from. They’re saying people are more lonely than ever before. They’re saying there’s no clear place to organize a group of people. WhatsApp has its limitations, its restrictions, doesn’t have the feature set one would like. Facebook groups aren’t working for a certain generation of people anymore for sort of Gen Z’s and younger generations, millennials.

So what I’m going to do is I’m going to make an app for groups. Your run club, your friends, your piano recital group, your entrepreneurs. We’re going to build all the group features into this app. It’s going to be dedicated to that. I’ve heard this pitch over and over again. I’ve seen all of them. None of them seem to have any traction or work. It’s a mirage. Something fundamental about your assumptions is off.

When I said mirage opportunities, did you think of anything in particular? I stay away from businesses where I don’t know why it’s not working, but clearly it’s not working.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. I think of banking or healthcare, right? Like, banking is terrible. Look at the UI at Bank of America. Why is… It’s like, ah, it’s probably like that for a reason, right? Or like Amazon’s UI is terrible. What is it? It’s like they probably know why it looks like that, right? I assume they’re smarter than I am.

One idea that I thought of is like, everyone hates typing in their password a zillion times a day. So you have like these password managers. But I’ve seen a dozen companies that are going to fix the password, right? Some like replacement to a password and they’ve all failed. And it’s probably because it’s a really hard problem to solve. And I don’t want to try to invest in a person that’s trying to solve it because statistics are not on their side.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Another one that comes to mind for me is at university, every entrepreneurial college kid decides that they’re going to build an on-campus “what’s going on” app to let everybody know what’s going on on campus, and they never seem to work.

And I think the reason why they don’t work is because both you’re losing 33% of your potential customers every year and gaining 33% new customers every year. So you have a bit of an acquisition problem. But then also, people don’t decide what they’re going to do based on some notice board. They decide based on their dorm room friends and where they’re going and where the girl they like is going. And so it’s not really about what’s going on. It’s like, what does my group of people want to do? I think that’s the mirage in that.

CHRIS KOERNER: Well, I thought of another example that’s like building apps around podcasting.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Oh, my God.

CHRIS KOERNER: Right?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Yeah.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. I have a friend that had a podcast, a great one that helped podcasters, right? And it was great. I listened to it, and he realized over time, like, I’m selling to a market that quits, right? I’m asking for customers to pay for my thing that are statistically, like 95% of them are going to quit within six months. So it’s just a broken market to sell to.

And then the 5% that are successful, what percentage of them are actually profitable? What percentage of them can afford to pay for an expensive agency or software? Very few.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Mirage opportunities.

CHRIS KOERNER: I like that.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s been a really useful framework because it’s the obvious ones that no one’s doing. But there’s clearly a huge opportunity that I think pulls people in the most. But for me now, with the amount of time I’ve spent starting businesses, those are the ones that push me away the most.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Well, it all comes back to the value of just copying what’s already working. Amen.

The Reality of Entrepreneurship: Trade-Offs Over Freedom

STEVEN BARTLETT: Is there anything we haven’t talked about that we should have talked about, Chris, for young and old people that are considering starting their own business, their own side hustle, building passive income?

CHRIS KOERNER: Many of the people that think they want to be an entrepreneur, they just like the idea of it, and they think there’s freedom in entrepreneurship when oftentimes it’s even more of a prison than their nine to five. It can be, at least in the first years, not months, not years, sometimes decades, right?

And so I want people to answer the question for themselves, is this for me? So they don’t regret. They need to find out if they love the idea of it or they like the actual day-to-day grind of it. Because they probably won’t. But I want them to find out.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Such an important point because the narrative online at the moment is, you know, “be your own boss,” etc., etc. And I just, I don’t think people… I’m speaking for myself, I don’t want to speak for you, but I don’t think people realize how many people I have to answer to.

Oh yeah, I have all of my team members, which is hundreds of people. Then I have my investors, I have my suppliers, my clients. So it’s not like I’m living as a free man. Yeah, I’m less free now than I was before I started all this stuff.

CHRIS KOERNER: Isn’t it nice when someone just also just tells you what to do and exactly what path to take? Yeah, like my wife does that. She’s like, “Hey, I need you to do this.” It’s like, oh, it’s so nice. I don’t have to think. Thank you. You know, so I have bosses in other areas of my life and it’s really nice.

Like there’s something to be said for a nine to five and some people have no desire to even test entrepreneurship. Great. All power to you. But I want people to test it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And I think, you know, people would look at someone like me or you and think, oh, you know, they’ve got total freedom. But this is just not the case, even for me as a podcaster, you know, I’m now kind of somewhat constrained by the fact that I need to publish on a Monday and I need to publish on a Thursday and that means lots of other work takes place throughout the week.

And I can’t just go to Hawaii and chill out and spend a month off and then I’ve got all my clients now and the team members, etc. So I think I’m starting a bit of a war against this idea that independence and total freedom is both something to aim for, but also like realistic when you’re pursuing something you love.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah.

STEVEN BARTLETT: I think a generation have been sold this idea of independence and I don’t think it’s gotten us anywhere. That’s the goal. Freedom, independence, don’t depend on anybody. But when I look on your life, your life, you’ve got four kids, you’ve got lots of responsibility, you’ve got employees, you’ve got businesses, you’ve got so much dependency. And that’s probably the source of much of your happiness.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah, exactly. My quote of this year is, “There are no solutions, only trade-offs.” Entrepreneurship is not a solution. You’re trading something for it. The question is, is that trade-off worth it or not? And we won’t know until we try it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what’s the trade-off you’re making?

CHRIS KOERNER: Stability, lack of volatility. Predictability. My life has been volatile and unpredictable, but the more I do it, the more predictable it becomes, in a good way. But that’s been the trade-off is the mental load of not knowing where my paycheck’s coming from or if it’s coming at all.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s not for the faint-hearted.

CHRIS KOERNER: No.

Closing Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: Chris, we have a closing tradition where the last guest leaves a question for the next, not knowing who they’re leaving it for. And the question left for you, I love this question, for obvious reasons, is during your interview with Steven today, what is one thing he did that you genuinely appreciated?

CHRIS KOERNER: I would say that I appreciate that the questions you asked me got me to look at the things I’ve been looking at in one way completely differently. I came into this conversation looking at things in a specific way, in ways that I always have. But your questions got me to approach it from a different angle that made me learn something more about my own story, if you will.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what was that in particular? Was there a specific thing you’re thinking about?

CHRIS KOERNER: Maybe just the overall framework that… Maybe it’s just recency bias, but just, it’s not for everyone. It’s not for everyone. And that we just need to learn if the trade-offs are worth it.

STEVEN BARTLETT: There’s an element of your personal trauma, experiences, upbringing, insecurities, toxic fuel, that makes the trade-offs worth it, that makes you in some respect unreasonable, unrealistic, willing to take the risk. And we don’t talk about that enough because we’re not able to go into people’s trauma and the nuance of their life in childhood and what their dad said to them and what the… how they were bullied to be able to transmit into their mind to make that, to figure that out for themselves.

But I think probably is in both your life and my life. I mean, we both, I think, have ADHD to some degree and we have a brain wired in a certain way. So it’s not… it can seem like we’re making a choice, but it often doesn’t feel like that for me. Doesn’t feel like I’m making a choice. It feels like there is no other choice. In the same way that one might make a choice to get a nine to five job. I think for me, that would be a terrible thing. And vice versa, probably.

CHRIS KOERNER: Yeah. Well, what you just said just brought up a memory. I don’t know if it’s relevant to this or not, but you said ADHD. When I was in undergrad, I got tested for ADHD, and the psychiatrist said… It was a big report. I’m summarizing it to the only sentence that I remember. But she said that I just had “delusions of grandeur,” right?

It wasn’t like an official diagnosis. It was one line in like an eight-page document. But I saw that just bounce off the page and I was like, how do you know that’s a delusion? Right? Like, it’s only a delusion if enough time has passed so we could look back and say, yeah, he was wrong. He was way off base.

STEVEN BARTLETT: By delusions of grandeur, what does she mean?

CHRIS KOERNER: She meant I had unrealistic expectations about how my life would turn out and that that was causing strife in my personal relationships. And I thought it was wrong. I still think it was wrong. But it put a chip on my shoulder. It planted a seed that I never forgot. I have that printed. It’s in my drawer at work.

I just have the report that she gave me back in 2009. It’s highlighted and drawn up in my drawer at work. And I just look at it sometimes for motivation. Because what is a delusion of grandeur? I have plans of grandeur. This is a plan.

And so I think about her sometimes. She probably has no idea who I am. She probably forgot all about me.

STEVEN BARTLETT: If people want to learn more, where’s the best place they should go to check your work out? You’ve got your podcast on YouTube. It’s not necessarily a podcast in the same way that this is a podcast. It’s much more sort of practical and specific around specific subject matters. So I highly recommend people go check that out. I’m going to link it below and put it on the screen. But where else? Where’s a good place to get in touch with you or to consume your work?

CHRIS KOERNER: Probably tkopod.com, as in Koerner Office. It’s just my main website.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And people can sign up here for your newsletter?

CHRIS KOERNER: Yep. One email per week.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What do you send out?

CHRIS KOERNER: A very tactical guide on how to start X, Y or Z business. And I ask my audience what they want to learn about. So they tell me and then I dive deep and then break it all down for them.

Where to Find Chris Koerner

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll link that as well below for anyone that’s interested. What is the most popular, most frequent request you get through that website on business ideas to talk about?

CHRIS KOERNER: Probably the AI agency, the AI Implementation Agency idea that I talked about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: And what is the most viral video you’ve ever made?

CHRIS KOERNER: Oh man, that was about this Chinese street vendor that sold ice cream. She had this little contraption. It was like a frozen cylinder that she poured cream over and it would scrape off ice cream in this really visually appealing way.

And so I basically broke down in 30 seconds, you could pay $200 for this. You could post it at any given street corner and you could make $1,000 by the end of the day. So it’s like A, B, C. Here’s how to get to this revenue. And 30 or 40 million people saw it.

Final Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: I’ll put the video on the screen for anyone that’s interested in that as well, just so you know what this ice cream contraption is.

Chris, thank you so much. Thank you so much for being yourself in every respect. You teach me that there’s many ways to skin a cat, as the saying goes. There’s many ways to become successful, to be happy, to be motivated in your life. There’s many ways to become a millionaire. Some of it bucks sort of conventional wisdom of how to grow business.

I think that is actually liberating to know that your own unique wiring and your own unique perspective and ikigai can drive you to the same outcome of financial freedom. If you do have the self-awareness, if you’re willing to work hard and if you can cope with the opinions of others.

And also if you’re willing to sacrifice tremendously, because you have sacrificed tremendously. And especially as someone, as a man that has a young man that has four kids, you’ve taken on your shoulders a huge amount of risk.

And I applaud you for both simplifying and demystifying the pursuit of side hustles and business and entrepreneurship for so many people. Because I think in the world we live in, it’s probably going to become more and more important that people have more options.

CHRIS KOERNER: Agreed.

STEVEN BARTLETT: In a world of AI, and if Elon Musk is to be successful in creating the age of abundance that he’s describing, then maybe we’re all going to end up as entrepreneurs.

CHRIS KOERNER: Who knows? Who knows?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Thank you, thank you, thank you as well.

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