July 30, 2025 • 35 mins
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I sat down with Sam Thompson again and we talked about why it’s never been easier to clone massive SaaS companies and sell the same functionality for 90% less. We broke down how AI is turning platforms like Salesforce, AppFolio, and RentManager into overpriced dinosaurs, and how you can use tools like BuiltWith, G2, and Manus to reverse-engineer their features and customers. Sam even shared how he ran paid traffic to a $1 trial landing page before building the product—and people bought it. We also talked about his new strategy for selling backlinks like products in a Shopify-style marketplace, why form factor changes (like caffeinated gum or chewable toothpaste) are underrated business models, and how his hummingbird nectar side hustle is still going strong.
You can find Sam on Twitter (https://x.com/ImSamThompson) and check out what he's up to at https://www.unlimitedcontent.com/
Timestamps below. Enjoy!
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00:00 Disruption in Software Pricing
02:58 The Commoditization of Services
05:52 AI and the Future of Business
09:08 Innovative Business Ideas and Form Factors
12:04 The Rise of Transparency in Business
14:57 Exploring New Market Opportunities
17:53 Backlink Strategies and SEO Insights
20:45 Testing New Business Models
24:04 The Value of High-Quality Backlinks
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:00):
I built a clone of App Folio using AI, and I know you're
paying $2300 a month. I charge $23 a month.
That's what's going to happen with Vibe Coding and AI.
They're going to have competitors that do just as much
if not more for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you?
I'm a big fan of form factor. Try create.com.
Phenomenal product. Like all he did really was like
(00:22):
change the form factor of greeting and he was like
gummies. These other guys took toothpaste
and they just turned it into chewable.
Heard of a run gum? It's just gum with caffeine for
running. Guess what?
Their sales are $28 million. All right, You'll remember Sam.
He was just on last week. We had to keep talking about
(00:42):
these business ideas. Please enjoy.
Two companies, huge companies. Rentmanager.com, appfolio.com,
they're just, they're CRMS and rent collectors for landlords,
property managers, OK. And they are so expensive.
You go to their website and it'slike click, you know, call us
for pricing enterprise. Schedule a demo.
Schedule a demo or they charge per door.
It's 5 bucks per month per door.And it's like to you and I,
(01:04):
we've got a three or four rentalproperties, whatever, but for a
lot of companies that's thousands of dollars a month.
And what do they do? It's it's just software that can
now be software. OK, so someone listening to
this, someone within the sound of my voice do exactly this.
Dude, you go to builtwithbuiltwith.com 450 bucks
a month. Don't spend that.
(01:25):
Go to upwork.com. Little post free post.
You've spent $0.00 say I need a built with export of all of the
app folio and rent manager websites.
And you can get this. I've checked on built with
because they use subdomains, right?
You go to pay your rent. You go to
appfolio.johnsrentalhomes.com. Right.
Yep, very easy to scrape this list.
Boom, now you have all of their customers.
(01:47):
OK. And then you just start a cold
emailing campaign and you say, hey, I see you use Appfolio.
I built a clone of Appfolio using AI and I know you're
paying $2300 a month. I charge $23 a month for
unlimited units. Unlimited.
Like that's what's going to happen with Vibe Coding and AI
(02:09):
is the sales forces of the world, the oracles, these big
stodgy companies that charge waytoo much because they can,
because coding is hard, or at least it was until a year ago.
They are going to get disrupted out the yin Yang.
They're going to have competitors that do just as much
if not more for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you?
100%. No, you're on, you're, you're
(02:31):
spot on. I mean, like, I see it, there's,
I forget the guy's name. There's a guy on Twitter that
did it where he was doing that for Buzz Sprout or like any of
the social media scheduling apps.
Oh, his company's called Post Bridge.
I've got his name, but it's Post, I think it's Post
bridge.com. And that's basically his entire
(02:53):
business model was like. It's like buffer OK.
Yeah, Buffer, like any of those like and it's just social media
scheduling and it's way cheaper.These are commodities.
Now CRMS are commodities. Social media scheduling
calendly, that's a commodity. Like a year ago these were
proprietary IP driven assets. Today, they are replicable
(03:15):
commodities. Yeah, yeah.
And I think that, I mean we've seen it happen with internal
tooling right now with AI, just like it's the Arc that continues
to be out of like internal toolsor softwares that we would have
been paying for. And especially on companies that
are bigger, that are spending $2,000,000 a year on Salesforce,
that are spending $82,000 a month on app folio where like
(03:41):
you can come in and you don't even have to go from $2200 to
$22.00 a month. You could even go to $220 a
month, right? And mathematically they're still
good. And so, yeah, I think that that
will be a very interesting macrotrend.
I'm curious how that impacts stock, like the stock markets.
I know, right? Like that'll be a they're.
(04:02):
Not going to say 1 like they're too entrenched, right?
Like if you're a billion dollar company, it's still way too much
work to go swap to something a little cheaper, right?
But they're going to lose the lower and lower mid markets that
like I don't know if it was you or somebody else was talking
about their buddy that like rebuilt something for them and
(04:22):
like charged his own business like the company that he.
Worked for, he rebuilt. Their CRM or whatever it was and
saved them a bunch of money and then like got paid as the
service for like as the SAS guy.As this new.
Software that he built and it's like I see that happening more
and more and more like it forcesthe incumbents to like really
(04:44):
double down on which I think I transparently is what I think
will end up happening is I, I don't think that the sales
forces of the world are dumb. I think that they will just say,
hey, we are launching an AI copilot for Salesforce, right?
That allows for you to make all these customizations and stuff a
(05:05):
little bit easier, right? Like they're going to have to
react in some way. The pricing like price becomes
the biggest, you clone and charge less, right?
Like price is then your value prop.
I think the slippery slope of that is it's literally a race to
the bottom. Agree.
(05:26):
Like an absolute race. If you can capture that first
batch of $23 a month customers, they're never gonna leave you
for something that's 19. They're not gonna, yeah, they're
gonna. It's sticky.
It's like the the rate of diminishing returns, like
they're not gonna leave to save $4.00 a month.
Look what I'm doing here. Hit it.
Yeah. No, they would.
They would. But there is a floor to it
(05:47):
somewhere. Yeah.
All right. For those listening only, I went
to g2.com, which is the website for software reviews.
And it's just such a good website to mine data.
And nowadays we don't have to dothis ourselves anymore.
We can use AI. So I went to G2 and I went to
software, I went to sales tools,I went to CRMS.
And of course, Salesforce is number one.
(06:08):
They have 23,360 reviews. Salesforce Sales Cloud.
OK, I took the URL, copied it, and then I'm going to go to
Manas, which is what I use for just doing like quick one off
agent tasks. OK, and this is, I think I have
the $20.00 a month account, nothing too crazy.
And I'm going to paste the URL in here and I click the little
(06:28):
agent button and I'm going to say I want you to find all of
the features of Salesforce that get referenced the most in a
positive way. So you can do one of two
approaches. The surface level is like, I
want to find all the complaints that people have about
(06:48):
Salesforce so I can fix all that.
Now I want to find the, you know, 'cause Salesforce has 1800
thousand million features. I want to find the five that
everyone's talking about becausethat means it's the five
features that everyone uses. It's funny 'cause like these
companies pay thousands of dollars a month for Salesforce
and most of their employees are just using it to search by
e-mail address. They just want to know their
(07:10):
customer's e-mail address, right?
So I just want to know like, what are those three sales force
features that everyone uses? The most basic ones?
Because then I'm going to build a really lightweight sales force
alternative that only has those 3 features.
Yes, we can feature creep later.We can add whatever we want
later, but like, it's a feature,not a bug of us having less
(07:31):
features, if that makes sense. So I'm going to say I want you
to find all the features of Salesforce to get referenced the
most in a positive way. And then it'll just get to work.
It's scraping and it'll go to page 2.
It'll go to Page 3, and then it will tell us like what type of
CRM to build. What would you do here
differently? No, I dude, I was just thinking
that like we talk a lot about pros and cons of AI but also do
(07:54):
I just love AI? It's just.
It's just so awesome. It's just amazing.
Oh, got to get the verification.There you go.
That's all right, it will handlethe errors on its own.
You have to reply, dude. I'm using Have you heard of Cora
Cora dot computer I? Don't think so.
It's an e-mail agent and they were invited only now they're
(08:16):
open to everyone. It summarizes your emails.
It's finally the e-mail agent that can like learn from how you
e-mail and then it will draft them and then you can choose to
send them or not. Anyway, Lindy does something
similar and I'm using both of them in my inbox today to just
summarize my emails. And I was joking with Kamal that
like they were fighting and like, I was thinking like, we're
(08:38):
probably not too far away when like we have competing agents
that are like going and cancelling each other's like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like. Yeah, we're not.
Too. We're not down, dude.
Yeah, like, did you know you could save this many dollars by
cancelling Lindy? Dude, I'll just do all that work
for you. Dude, that's a whole other
business. Imagine embedding yourself in a
(08:58):
company with 1000 thousand employees and saying hey I'm
going to install AI agents on all your inboxes.
So your employees spent an hour less per day emailing and you
just install a $10 a month software for them?
That's it, Yeah. It's like the role of all the
integration specialists at the software companies, right?
Like you go buy an enterprise plan from, I don't know, like a
(09:19):
superhuman or a Cora aura, right?
Like any of those types of tools.
And they're like, yeah, we're going to help you roll this out
with all of the team members andall of that.
It's the same like as the race to the bottom happens, I think
that there's a world like that was the bet that we made with
unlimited content, right? Like the individual components
of AI, technical writing and backlinks are all getting
(09:43):
commoditized via AI tools, right?
Search Atlas AI Auto really good.
There's 9 million blog writing tools backlinks, as we talked
about before, is like the own it's own thing.
It's just like pay to play and that's what we aligned ourselves
to is like cool. We know that our costs as an
agency to fulfill on these services are getting cheaper and
(10:05):
cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.Let's.
Align ourselves as the service provider on top of those.
Knowing that the market knows that where we're not selling,
we're not selling the fact that we have like some secret sauce
that you couldn't access. It's like, no, no, no, we're
using all of these tools. We're going to save you the time
and if you. Were to.
Go and do this yourself. You would spend the same amount
(10:28):
of money that you pay us to do it.
We have economies of scale and expertise.
Can we align ourselves to that alittle bit more directly versus
like going out here and being like, oh, $2000 a month SEO
agency. We don't tell you what we do.
Like, no, no, no, we're using the best tools on the market.
We tell you that it's why we charge $500 a month, not 2000,
(10:51):
because we're just the operator sitting on top of that being
strategic, using the tools for you.
And so like, I don't know, I've just, I've, I've been thinking
about that more and more as all of this happens of like there is
this kind of micro service layeron top of this AI stuff of the
people that don't either do not have the time nor the desire to
learn how to use the tools, but know that they can leverage them
(11:15):
and just aligning your price point to that better.
We're like, we're super sticky now because like we're not $2000
a month. You're not looking at us like 2.
We're yeah, 30 grand a year on this agency.
Like I saw this AI tool can do it for 99 bucks a month.
And it's like, no, no, no, oh, the guys at the Limited are
using that tool and this tool and this tool and I'm only
getting charged 500 a month. Like it's the transparency
(11:37):
thing. Like the world is moving in the
in the way of transparency. You can't hide anymore.
You don't. You don't want to.
It's like a parent saying I don't want to talk to my kids
about porn or or drugs because then they're going to go.
That's going to give me the ideato go shoot guns and look at
porn. It's like, dude, you got to get
ahead of it. It's a matter if, not when.
I. Don't want to talk to my
(11:58):
customers about these AI alternatives because then
there's you got to embrace thosealternatives because they're
about to embrace them from someone and they'd rather do it
with a party that they already work with, know and trust.
Might as well do. Yeah, to AT.
OK, sour drinks. I'm going to call her right now.
I'm starting to see it. You think it's up and to the
(12:19):
right. Dude, this is what Google trends
shows. I mean, it's slow, but why not?
What are the spikes, dude? What are those spikes every
year? Is it always like, dude, April
comes around and people get on their little sour kick?
They're like, dude, it's summer,let's get sour.
Dude here's here's an idea. I want to buy Celsius or Ghost
(12:42):
energy drinks that don't have caffeine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100% dude. So there's there's a brand based
out of Sweden called Noco NOCCO.They have caffeinated versions
and then they have non caffeinated that have BCA as in
them the amino acids. They actually have a green apple
(13:04):
that is phenomenal. Dude sour green apple soda is so
good. I I bought some ingredients on
Amazon. I'm going to start messing
around with sour drinks. I'm going to make a sour busy
juice. Yeah, yeah.
Some citric acid and some malic acid.
That's all you. Need all I'm saying sell it as a
mix. I know.
(13:25):
For sure, so much easier. It's only dry goods, dude.
That's what I've. That's what I've.
What would you know about selling bag powders on the
Internet? Look, dude, every, every soda is
just sugar water, dude, you knowwhat I mean?
It's all it's all the same thing.
Speaking of sugar water, any update there?
I told you I ran to the supply chain issues and all of that.
(13:47):
I bought the mini bags. I've been getting repeat orders
off of the QR code on the back of the back and so like you
know, maybe a couple times a week I'll get a little 68 bucks.
I had $100 purchase 2 days ago dude off a repeat bar.
They bought 3 bags in April and then bought 6 bags and you'll
(14:10):
love it. And my book $100 AOV dude got to
get the book dude. Hummingbird attraction One O 1.
If for no other reason, you can't let this business die.
Because it's my third most viewed YouTube video of all.
Time. It's never.
Going to die 50,000 views. I'm really excited to get on the
pod 12 months from now. OK.
Because I started this one like right at the very beginning of
(14:34):
Hummingbird season, right? And so like, I had to work
through the kinks during the busy season.
Now I've got kinks ironed out dude, and I'm ready for next
year. I have some bad news for you.
This is going to keep you up allnight.
This guy tagged me on Instagram and it's called Hummingbird Hype
(14:55):
Fuel. Hell yeah.
I have to imagine since he tagged me on this, he learned
about this from the pod. So you're inspiring some
competitors here? That's fine, you're.
You're gonna go broke, man. I know it's all good, dude.
I love competition. Yeah, no, it's all good.
I think more people should. Market share is big, dude.
(15:16):
The market's big. Like I was saying, we went up to
Sequoia National Park for the 4th and we stayed at this Airbnb
like hour and a half outside thepark.
And it was like, I'm talking themiddle of nowhere.
There was 11 commercial facilitythat was the bar, the
restaurant, the general store, the all of it.
And I walk in there dude, and they've got, I'm talking this,
(15:37):
this place stocks like 1 box of Raisin bran, right?
Like limited inventory. You know what they did have
though? Hummingbird Nectar.
And I was like, catch me, catch me up here, dude.
Camp Nelson. I'll be up here.
(15:57):
All good. I'm going to make it happen.
All right, well, we'll follow upevery time you're on I'm.
Going to ask you, all good. I mean, it'll be pretty boring I
think in the winter, but I don'tknow.
I'm going to play with it. Dude, not to jump around too
much, there are a few TikTok accounts or a few companies on
TikTok growing like crazy. And their whole niche is like
extremely sour homemade candy. Yeah, so and they're they've got
(16:21):
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers and people
get the reaction videos when they try it.
Who's doing that for shippable powders?
Like it would be even easier to ship than count than count.
For 20%, yeah, like I'm a big fan of form factor, right?
Like like when I think about business ideas and stuff.
(16:41):
Or changing form factors. Yeah, where it's like you sell
protein, right? Loosely.
But like inside of that you haveprotein powders, protein shakes,
protein drinks, protein bars, protein gummies, like like you
have all of these form factors. And I think that there's like
you could go, I mean, you see itwith the with creatine, right?
(17:04):
With trycreate.com, phenomenal product where he was just like
all he did and we talked about this before, right?
Well, it's like all he did really was like change the form
factor of creatine. It was always sold as a powder
that you added to smoothies or drinks.
And he was like gummies, right? And it's like he's not selling
anything new. He's still selling creatine,
(17:26):
just the form factor of that is a little bit different.
I've just been thinking about that a lot of like, you know,
people put pressure on themselves, like come up with
this like genius new business idea, right, Because you start
you when you're coming up in entrepreneurship, you're looking
at the the Zocs, you're looking at Elon, you're looking at these
like, I'm going to call them inventors more than
(17:47):
entrepreneurs, right? Like inventors like versus like
business guys that like took something that people are buying
and operated a Better Business around a specific thing.
And I think there's tons of those little form factor type
offshoots of existing things that people can go and jump on
really easily. Like, 'cause you're not
(18:08):
reinventing the wheel, you're just changing.
Maybe you are reinventing the wheel.
No, I'm not really. You're just like you're you're
adding. You're like, my wheel has four
spokes instead of 6. Dude.
Yeah, you know, it's like, but it's still a wheel.
Right. Did you see that like hands free
toothbrush that they're selling?On social, yeah.
Yeah, they have like 10s of millions of dollars of sales.
(18:31):
Yeah, I have 0. Everyone uses a toothbrush,
hopefully. Maybe not in Alabama, but
outside of Alabama everyone usesa toothbrush.
I've heard rumors about North Dakota too.
I don't know. And and it's just they're
changing the form factor. And then these other guys direct
to consumer guys took toothpasteand they just turned it into
like like a chewable. And it's like, Oh yeah, you
(18:52):
don't have time to brush your teeth.
Let's do the 8020 of brushing teeth and just chew this.
Yeah, 100%. It's just form factor.
What was that? Is that bites?
Is that? I think so.
Bites did that. Yeah.
They again, yeah, it's toothpaste, dude.
They just changed it's, I mean, Neuro gum is another phenomenal
example of that. Like it's caffeinated gum like
they're still, they're selling the same thing that Red Bull is
(19:15):
selling. It's just gum, right.
There's another dude that's doing caffeinated.
I don't know if it's a chocolatebar or protein bar.
I forget the name of it now, butit's the same thing.
It's like, yeah, just like a little something special in this
same form factor that people buyon a different use case that
they want. Game over.
(19:36):
Well dude, have you heard of RunGum?
You and I talked about it before, yeah.
Best name ever. Exactly what we're talking
about. It's just gum with caffeine for
running. Guess what?
Their sales are $28 million. Yeah, I mean.
And you can get a Co Packer to make that for you for sure.
(19:56):
Find a company on Thomas net that makes gum and say hey throw
22 milligrams of caffeine in there for sure.
And then you go find a packager.Yeah, it's like the big, what's
the big Kodiak cakes? Yep, right.
That's a protein. Pancake mixes protein.
Billion dollar buses, right? It's like they still sell
(20:18):
pancakes, bro, but it's, I like looking at opportunity kind of
through that lens a little bit where it's like, what else is,
is a form factor thing. I think about it on, on even on
services. Like one thing that we're
starting to, to do on like the backlinks, like an SEO backlinks
(20:38):
side is like backlinks traditionally are like, I'm not
going to say hard to get, but you have to like know what
you're doing to go and get them right?
Like you got to go to the right suppliers.
It's easy to get screwed on a fiver where someone's like, I'll
get you 500 backlinks for six cents.
And it's like, dude, they're lowquality, right?
Like all of that. And then the way that you
(20:58):
normally would go about procuring good backlinks is
through an agency, right, Which you're either paying a heavy
retainer on or a markup really on those.
And it's like, dude, why can't, why can't you just buy backlinks
on a Shopify store, right? Like why can't you just log in?
(21:18):
And we buy a lot of backlinks for all of our clients and we
deal with the pain of going to 97 different providers of which
one provider could have 6 good backlinks and three bad
backlinks. And like we've done that.
Like we've spent the money to know all of those pieces.
I was like, dude, what happens if I just put it all in one and
it's like it's just different form factor, you know what I
(21:40):
mean? I.
Like this? I like this.
All right, two ideas for you. Yeah, sub ideas #1 you just,
it's literally a Shopify store as if you're looking at a merch
store and it's, it's backlinks, but you reveal what the backlink
is. I understand the risk in that
that someone will circumvent you, but they don't know the
person to reach out to at the company.
For instance, I got an e-mail today from a follower and that
(22:03):
said, Hey, check out this article about Bucky's in Barons,
Barons News like barons.com and that he's like, they, they
mentioned you and I clicked on the article and they link to us
like five times in an article. They have these products and
these products and they sell Bucky's because they don't sell
online. And then I go to moz.com, free
domain authority checker and I type in barons.com 89 domain
(22:26):
authority out of 100. And it just came.
I didn't ask for it. So to your point, there's a
Shopify store and this would be hard, right?
I'm not saying this would be easy.
It's hard to get backlinks. But once you have someone at a
company, are there large or small to provide backlinks, then
you can have that person give you all kinds of backlinks.
So you say, all right, now I gota guy at Barron's, he might not
(22:48):
say yes to everything. If he doesn't say yes, then you
refund them and you say, all right, $150.00 Barron's
backlink. Or that's idea number one idea
#2 as part of this form factor is you just filter by domain
authority rankings. So it's like $150.00 for one
backlink with from a domain authority that's between 85 and
(23:10):
92. So you don't know it's barons.
No one can circumvent you. You know what you're getting.
Because that's the problem with almost every backlink site out
there is that they can promise it's high quality.
They're usually not. You might need above 50 domain
authority. And for those listening, domain
authority is just like literallya score between 0 and 100 of how
much authority a website has, according to Google.
(23:33):
Right. And the value of backlink from a
higher domain authority site means more to your SEO rankings
because of their you're like borrowing the domain.
If in Google's eyes, if somebodyof that high caliber links to
your site, you must also be of high caliber.
And so your domain authority will go up.
Your rankings go up by getting mentioned in high authority
(23:56):
site. Yes, and to give you an example
of what it can do, that article on Barron's went live yesterday.
I went and looked at our Google Analytics and I saw that
barrons.com was our like 19th most popular referring site for
the day, which is bad. It's not good.
It was like 17 clicks. But I don't care about that
because what you can't quantify immediately is what that does
(24:16):
for your domain authority, for your keyword rankings across
thousands of keywords, right? So yeah, if buckys.com links to
us on their homepage, it's goingto be #1 and it's going to be
the most life changing thing ever for the company.
But their domain authority is much, much lower than someone
like Barron's. So yeah, I would prefer Bucky's.
But all else equal, I want any site, whether it's relevant to
(24:37):
Texas snacks or not, to have high domain authority.
Right? Yep.
And so ours, the, the model thatI'm playing with is, yeah,
basically go in, get full transparency on all of them and
order like literally like you said, like get a backlink on
Barron's 4X price, which like backlinks are relatively pay to
(24:58):
play anyways. Like you might have a connect at
Baron's, but like if you want him to be doing that regularly,
the man's getting the man or woman or they is getting paid
right. Like, yeah, I'll pay you 150
bucks. And then I go to the client and
in our model at unlimited content, it's just a 15% flat
markup that we're very transparent about.
(25:20):
But other agencies will mark that up 400%, like, and they
won't tell you who it's through or what it's for, right?
Like it's just kind of an opaqueworld.
And so like, I think I'm going to follow more of like the
Costco membership model of like,look, we're not going to charge
a markup on any of these backlinks, but you have to pay
(25:41):
us 100 bucks a month for access to them.
Yeah. So are you saying you're going
to actually test this? I already did.
Dude, what? We're not supposed to actually
do things on this podcast. We just talk about things.
Right dude, I, you know, I wouldit's, it's fitting that we
talked today, but I literally was like sitting around last
night. Lauren was packing envelopes for
our save the dates and we were just watching cheaper by the
(26:05):
dozen. And I just had my laptop open
and I was like, I should just test this funnel, dude.
Like, let's just see if we can do it.
And so launched a, a $1.00 free trial funnel 0 product.
Dude, I do not have the marketplace built.
Like I tinkered the top five, but like nothing that I could
show to a customer. But like, yeah, hey, sign up for
this one dollar trial and let's see what happens.
(26:25):
We got, we got, we got some homies coming through dude on
Facebook ads. So you just, you say you built
the funnel, you just launched the Facebook ad campaign.
To just like a landing page thatwent to A1A1 dollar trial stripe
payment link just to see if I could get cold traffic to pay
for it. What was the offer?
Do you want to show your your landing page?
(26:46):
Yeah, yeah, I can do. That see this what did you build
the landing page with? Oh, perspective.
Dude, you better put my effect link in your in your.
I will, I will. I'll hook you up.
Prospective landing page perspective perspective.co.
Perspective. Yeah, OK.
Screen share. You are like the tool master,
(27:08):
you know every. Tool thanks to in the.
World, you're a giant tool. I'm a big tool, dude.
Yeah, so this is the Lander. Super simple.
It looks horrible on desktop because no one's looking at it
on desktop on Facebook ad but like literally the Costco of
backlinks. Stop wasting money on low
quality backlinks. Get real results without the
markup direct access to wholesaling prices for 83 bucks
(27:32):
a month, 100% money back guaranteed placements done
right. What do you get high quality
backlinks for a fraction of the price.
Access to all of our partners, No markups or middle men right
like that's the that's just the value stack.
We also we we already do a bunchof press releases for all of our
clients and unlimited content. And so why do this super Yeah,
(27:52):
from ourselves basically, but like, yeah, so we'll just RIP
that case studies and the the nice for me, which is a little
bit different than what some other people can do, which is
like just to be super transparent is like these are
clients of unlimited content so I can.
I can actually say they're case like.
You've got a little unfair advantage here.
Yeah, like we've done that. That's a good framework because
(28:13):
people should launch businesses where they have an unfair
advantage and everyone listeningto this has an unfair advantage
in something. Maybe it's your your background,
your history, the job you have, what you're passionate about.
It doesn't have to be people, you know.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be yournetwork.
And so, yeah, that's basically. It's like.
Yeah. So I can sit here and like put
case studies because like these are people that we actually
(28:34):
bought backlinks for using the same backlinks that we're going
to sell, right. So it's like I can, I can do
that a little bit easier than somebody popping in and being
like, how can I just make up thenumber of customers like?
Yeah. You decide your own ethical
line. But like we, since we have
unlimited, I can do that better.Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, start ranking like become a member, browse
(28:54):
inventory. All the way through.
All the FAQs, all the fun stuff.So.
And then just ran the ads at that.
What did you do to the people that paid?
What, did you e-mail them or? Yeah, immediately and and just
refunded them and said that we'dreach out when the platform's
ready. OK.
Wow. Obviously you're not going to be
profitable at a dollar, right. But what what was your like your
(29:17):
cost per acquisition or cost perlead?
We average like $21.00 for that dollar, which like I have no
VSL. Yeah, like I'm happy, I mean.
It's an 83. You're telling them it's an $83
a month offer, right? And so it's in my brain, I go,
cool, if 25% convert on that trial and break even on, I
(29:37):
haven't decided if I'm going to like, like this was very early
stage testing, right? And so like I haven't decided
between a three day trial or a seven day trial, right?
Like, and it's all just a cash conversion cycle question of
like, cool, if I can get people at 80, if I can get $20 trials
at 83, I'm either in a 25% trialconversion rate, I'm breaking
(30:01):
even on a three it, it will be 3, five or seven days.
Like I'm not going to do a 30 day trial.
And so then I can go and spend on, on ads pretty aggressively.
But it was cool. Like it's one of those it's like
you just get the, and I to be clear, I also turn the ads off
because I don't have a product to sell, but I like prove that I
could sell it. So now I get to go build it next
week and it'll go live maybe by the time this episode comes out,
(30:23):
depending on how fast Muhammad is.
But you know. He's pretty fast.
He's quick, I know. Dude, there's there's so much I
want to say. First of all, anyone listening,
Sam is a bro. He's a bro of the pod and he's
inviting people to compete with him because he's also trying
this. But we don't, we don't hold back
(30:44):
the juicer. We don't, we don't withhold
secrets, right? Come compete.
Dude. Come compete.
I love it. And if you listen to episode
164, that was like my most downloaded audio episode ever.
It's about a guy that builds directories and I don't remember
it was $50 or 500, I don't remember.
But in the episode he talked about how he really shelled out
(31:07):
for a very relevant backlink to his directory.
And that 50 or $500 investment Nets him like 2 to $3000 a month
in like at just like media Vine ads on his directory.
That's it, 100%. And that's the power of a good
back. Like not a backlink, but a good
(31:27):
backlink. It has to be relevant.
It has to have high domain authority.
We have a nine hour conversationaround backlinks, like we spent
a bunch of money on them and, and all of our SEO agencies, but
it's like you get the right one in there and you, you think
about backlink placements strategically, you can actually
see like massive lift. Like what we think about when
(31:47):
we, when we look at clients is like backlinks are like paid ads
a little bit, right? Like if you're ranking, if
anyone's like, thinks about how they use Google, there's kind of
like 3 buckets, like 3 tiers of what we call like click density.
And so like the the highest clicked on links are 1-2 and
(32:09):
three, right? So like top 3 is where you see
the most, the most clicks, right?
Then you have 7 through 10, right?
The rest of the first page, and then you have 11 and on, right?
Kind of like classic Pareto principle, right?
Where you get the clicks. What we do from a strategic
perspective when we're thinking about backlinks is we go and
look for where you're on the cusp of the next tier, right?
(32:31):
Because for you guys, like let'stake Texas Snacks as an example.
It's like if you're ranking #11 for something and then you go
get $300 worth of relevant backlinks for that 11 page and
move to number 10 or #9 yeah, you actually can arbitrage the
cost because you're not. The difference between being #8
(32:52):
and #7 is pretty minimal, but the difference between 9:00 and
11:00 is meaningful. Or same with like 5 and six or
five and three, right? It's like, And so when you're
when you're thinking about that and a lot of this is going to be
educating people on how to self-serve backlinks and like be
smart about how they go about it.
We are going to offer a free backlink strategy when you sign
(33:14):
up as a member. So like we'll help them kind of
coach them into best using our. Product but like.
When you're going through and doing those, that's, those are
the opportunities that you're looking for of like, yeah, like
a $500 backlink could equal spending $500 a month on Google
Ads if you're behind the right one.
You just only have to pay for itonce or as frequently as your
(33:35):
competitors are buying backlinks, right?
Like that's the thing. It's so funny how I mean, like
Google and Facebook, these trillion dollar companies.
And a large reason for that is because of like just the slow
death of ads because we set these daily budgets.
It's like, yeah, I'll do 20 bucks a day.
That's not that's not much $2600a month.
(33:56):
Like what else? $7200 a year.
Do you pay $600 a month for but but you, you break it down on a
daily basis, which is why you always see ads that's like for
less than the price of a coffee per day.
Like that stuff works, right? So when it comes to backlinks,
it's like $500.00 for a backlink.
Are you an idiot? That's going to pay dividends
for a decade. Whereas your Facebook ad, once
(34:18):
you turn that $20 a day budget off, it doesn't care about you
anymore. It's forgotten about you.
I just had a sick idea off the back of that, which is I'm
definitely going to let people buy backlinks with buy now, pay
later. Like Klarna?
Yeah, I'm for sure, I'm for suregoing to put Klarna on this
(34:38):
thing. Why?
Why would? You you get this.
You get this backlink for four equal payments, 0% interest.
If I could buy $1.50 hot dog at Costco on buy now, pay later, I
should buy backlinks with. It I'm just saying I'll throw it
on there. I'll see what's good.
Oh my gosh, dude. So.
That'll be a fun one. That's a good idea.
(34:58):
I really like the idea of sayingnot like by 10 backlinks, but by
this backlink from these guys, this one from these guys, this
one from these guys. All right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
I built a clone of App Folio using AI, and I know you're
paying $2300 a month. I charge $23 a month.
That's what's going to happen with Vibe Coding and AI.
They're going to have competitors that do just as much
if not more for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you?
I'm a big fan of form factor. Try create.com.
Phenomenal product. Like all he did really was like
(00:22):
change the form factor of greeting and he was like
gummies. These other guys took toothpaste
and they just turned it into chewable.
Heard of a run gum? It's just gum with caffeine for
running. Guess what?
Their sales are $28 million. All right, You'll remember Sam.
He was just on last week. We had to keep talking about
(00:42):
these business ideas. Please enjoy.
Two companies, huge companies. Rentmanager.com, appfolio.com,
they're just, they're CRMS and rent collectors for landlords,
property managers, OK. And they are so expensive.
You go to their website and it'slike click, you know, call us
for pricing enterprise. Schedule a demo.
Schedule a demo or they charge per door.
It's 5 bucks per month per door.And it's like to you and I,
(01:04):
we've got a three or four rentalproperties, whatever, but for a
lot of companies that's thousands of dollars a month.
And what do they do? It's it's just software that can
now be software. OK, so someone listening to
this, someone within the sound of my voice do exactly this.
Dude, you go to builtwithbuiltwith.com 450 bucks
a month. Don't spend that.
(01:25):
Go to upwork.com. Little post free post.
You've spent $0.00 say I need a built with export of all of the
app folio and rent manager websites.
And you can get this. I've checked on built with
because they use subdomains, right?
You go to pay your rent. You go to
appfolio.johnsrentalhomes.com. Right.
Yep, very easy to scrape this list.
Boom, now you have all of their customers.
(01:47):
OK. And then you just start a cold
emailing campaign and you say, hey, I see you use Appfolio.
I built a clone of Appfolio using AI and I know you're
paying $2300 a month. I charge $23 a month for
unlimited units. Unlimited.
Like that's what's going to happen with Vibe Coding and AI
(02:09):
is the sales forces of the world, the oracles, these big
stodgy companies that charge waytoo much because they can,
because coding is hard, or at least it was until a year ago.
They are going to get disrupted out the yin Yang.
They're going to have competitors that do just as much
if not more for 90 to 99% less. So why not let it be you?
100%. No, you're on, you're, you're
(02:31):
spot on. I mean, like, I see it, there's,
I forget the guy's name. There's a guy on Twitter that
did it where he was doing that for Buzz Sprout or like any of
the social media scheduling apps.
Oh, his company's called Post Bridge.
I've got his name, but it's Post, I think it's Post
bridge.com. And that's basically his entire
(02:53):
business model was like. It's like buffer OK.
Yeah, Buffer, like any of those like and it's just social media
scheduling and it's way cheaper.These are commodities.
Now CRMS are commodities. Social media scheduling
calendly, that's a commodity. Like a year ago these were
proprietary IP driven assets. Today, they are replicable
(03:15):
commodities. Yeah, yeah.
And I think that, I mean we've seen it happen with internal
tooling right now with AI, just like it's the Arc that continues
to be out of like internal toolsor softwares that we would have
been paying for. And especially on companies that
are bigger, that are spending $2,000,000 a year on Salesforce,
that are spending $82,000 a month on app folio where like
(03:41):
you can come in and you don't even have to go from $2200 to
$22.00 a month. You could even go to $220 a
month, right? And mathematically they're still
good. And so, yeah, I think that that
will be a very interesting macrotrend.
I'm curious how that impacts stock, like the stock markets.
I know, right? Like that'll be a they're.
(04:02):
Not going to say 1 like they're too entrenched, right?
Like if you're a billion dollar company, it's still way too much
work to go swap to something a little cheaper, right?
But they're going to lose the lower and lower mid markets that
like I don't know if it was you or somebody else was talking
about their buddy that like rebuilt something for them and
(04:22):
like charged his own business like the company that he.
Worked for, he rebuilt. Their CRM or whatever it was and
saved them a bunch of money and then like got paid as the
service for like as the SAS guy.As this new.
Software that he built and it's like I see that happening more
and more and more like it forcesthe incumbents to like really
(04:44):
double down on which I think I transparently is what I think
will end up happening is I, I don't think that the sales
forces of the world are dumb. I think that they will just say,
hey, we are launching an AI copilot for Salesforce, right?
That allows for you to make all these customizations and stuff a
(05:05):
little bit easier, right? Like they're going to have to
react in some way. The pricing like price becomes
the biggest, you clone and charge less, right?
Like price is then your value prop.
I think the slippery slope of that is it's literally a race to
the bottom. Agree.
(05:26):
Like an absolute race. If you can capture that first
batch of $23 a month customers, they're never gonna leave you
for something that's 19. They're not gonna, yeah, they're
gonna. It's sticky.
It's like the the rate of diminishing returns, like
they're not gonna leave to save $4.00 a month.
Look what I'm doing here. Hit it.
Yeah. No, they would.
They would. But there is a floor to it
(05:47):
somewhere. Yeah.
All right. For those listening only, I went
to g2.com, which is the website for software reviews.
And it's just such a good website to mine data.
And nowadays we don't have to dothis ourselves anymore.
We can use AI. So I went to G2 and I went to
software, I went to sales tools,I went to CRMS.
And of course, Salesforce is number one.
(06:08):
They have 23,360 reviews. Salesforce Sales Cloud.
OK, I took the URL, copied it, and then I'm going to go to
Manas, which is what I use for just doing like quick one off
agent tasks. OK, and this is, I think I have
the $20.00 a month account, nothing too crazy.
And I'm going to paste the URL in here and I click the little
(06:28):
agent button and I'm going to say I want you to find all of
the features of Salesforce that get referenced the most in a
positive way. So you can do one of two
approaches. The surface level is like, I
want to find all the complaints that people have about
(06:48):
Salesforce so I can fix all that.
Now I want to find the, you know, 'cause Salesforce has 1800
thousand million features. I want to find the five that
everyone's talking about becausethat means it's the five
features that everyone uses. It's funny 'cause like these
companies pay thousands of dollars a month for Salesforce
and most of their employees are just using it to search by
e-mail address. They just want to know their
(07:10):
customer's e-mail address, right?
So I just want to know like, what are those three sales force
features that everyone uses? The most basic ones?
Because then I'm going to build a really lightweight sales force
alternative that only has those 3 features.
Yes, we can feature creep later.We can add whatever we want
later, but like, it's a feature,not a bug of us having less
(07:31):
features, if that makes sense. So I'm going to say I want you
to find all the features of Salesforce to get referenced the
most in a positive way. And then it'll just get to work.
It's scraping and it'll go to page 2.
It'll go to Page 3, and then it will tell us like what type of
CRM to build. What would you do here
differently? No, I dude, I was just thinking
that like we talk a lot about pros and cons of AI but also do
(07:54):
I just love AI? It's just.
It's just so awesome. It's just amazing.
Oh, got to get the verification.There you go.
That's all right, it will handlethe errors on its own.
You have to reply, dude. I'm using Have you heard of Cora
Cora dot computer I? Don't think so.
It's an e-mail agent and they were invited only now they're
(08:16):
open to everyone. It summarizes your emails.
It's finally the e-mail agent that can like learn from how you
e-mail and then it will draft them and then you can choose to
send them or not. Anyway, Lindy does something
similar and I'm using both of them in my inbox today to just
summarize my emails. And I was joking with Kamal that
like they were fighting and like, I was thinking like, we're
(08:38):
probably not too far away when like we have competing agents
that are like going and cancelling each other's like.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, like. Yeah, we're not.
Too. We're not down, dude.
Yeah, like, did you know you could save this many dollars by
cancelling Lindy? Dude, I'll just do all that work
for you. Dude, that's a whole other
business. Imagine embedding yourself in a
(08:58):
company with 1000 thousand employees and saying hey I'm
going to install AI agents on all your inboxes.
So your employees spent an hour less per day emailing and you
just install a $10 a month software for them?
That's it, Yeah. It's like the role of all the
integration specialists at the software companies, right?
Like you go buy an enterprise plan from, I don't know, like a
(09:19):
superhuman or a Cora aura, right?
Like any of those types of tools.
And they're like, yeah, we're going to help you roll this out
with all of the team members andall of that.
It's the same like as the race to the bottom happens, I think
that there's a world like that was the bet that we made with
unlimited content, right? Like the individual components
of AI, technical writing and backlinks are all getting
(09:43):
commoditized via AI tools, right?
Search Atlas AI Auto really good.
There's 9 million blog writing tools backlinks, as we talked
about before, is like the own it's own thing.
It's just like pay to play and that's what we aligned ourselves
to is like cool. We know that our costs as an
agency to fulfill on these services are getting cheaper and
(10:05):
cheaper and cheaper and cheaper.Let's.
Align ourselves as the service provider on top of those.
Knowing that the market knows that where we're not selling,
we're not selling the fact that we have like some secret sauce
that you couldn't access. It's like, no, no, no, we're
using all of these tools. We're going to save you the time
and if you. Were to.
Go and do this yourself. You would spend the same amount
(10:28):
of money that you pay us to do it.
We have economies of scale and expertise.
Can we align ourselves to that alittle bit more directly versus
like going out here and being like, oh, $2000 a month SEO
agency. We don't tell you what we do.
Like, no, no, no, we're using the best tools on the market.
We tell you that it's why we charge $500 a month, not 2000,
(10:51):
because we're just the operator sitting on top of that being
strategic, using the tools for you.
And so like, I don't know, I've just, I've, I've been thinking
about that more and more as all of this happens of like there is
this kind of micro service layeron top of this AI stuff of the
people that don't either do not have the time nor the desire to
learn how to use the tools, but know that they can leverage them
(11:15):
and just aligning your price point to that better.
We're like, we're super sticky now because like we're not $2000
a month. You're not looking at us like 2.
We're yeah, 30 grand a year on this agency.
Like I saw this AI tool can do it for 99 bucks a month.
And it's like, no, no, no, oh, the guys at the Limited are
using that tool and this tool and this tool and I'm only
getting charged 500 a month. Like it's the transparency
(11:37):
thing. Like the world is moving in the
in the way of transparency. You can't hide anymore.
You don't. You don't want to.
It's like a parent saying I don't want to talk to my kids
about porn or or drugs because then they're going to go.
That's going to give me the ideato go shoot guns and look at
porn. It's like, dude, you got to get
ahead of it. It's a matter if, not when.
I. Don't want to talk to my
(11:58):
customers about these AI alternatives because then
there's you got to embrace thosealternatives because they're
about to embrace them from someone and they'd rather do it
with a party that they already work with, know and trust.
Might as well do. Yeah, to AT.
OK, sour drinks. I'm going to call her right now.
I'm starting to see it. You think it's up and to the
(12:19):
right. Dude, this is what Google trends
shows. I mean, it's slow, but why not?
What are the spikes, dude? What are those spikes every
year? Is it always like, dude, April
comes around and people get on their little sour kick?
They're like, dude, it's summer,let's get sour.
Dude here's here's an idea. I want to buy Celsius or Ghost
(12:42):
energy drinks that don't have caffeine.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100% dude. So there's there's a brand based
out of Sweden called Noco NOCCO.They have caffeinated versions
and then they have non caffeinated that have BCA as in
them the amino acids. They actually have a green apple
(13:04):
that is phenomenal. Dude sour green apple soda is so
good. I I bought some ingredients on
Amazon. I'm going to start messing
around with sour drinks. I'm going to make a sour busy
juice. Yeah, yeah.
Some citric acid and some malic acid.
That's all you. Need all I'm saying sell it as a
mix. I know.
(13:25):
For sure, so much easier. It's only dry goods, dude.
That's what I've. That's what I've.
What would you know about selling bag powders on the
Internet? Look, dude, every, every soda is
just sugar water, dude, you knowwhat I mean?
It's all it's all the same thing.
Speaking of sugar water, any update there?
I told you I ran to the supply chain issues and all of that.
(13:47):
I bought the mini bags. I've been getting repeat orders
off of the QR code on the back of the back and so like you
know, maybe a couple times a week I'll get a little 68 bucks.
I had $100 purchase 2 days ago dude off a repeat bar.
They bought 3 bags in April and then bought 6 bags and you'll
(14:10):
love it. And my book $100 AOV dude got to
get the book dude. Hummingbird attraction One O 1.
If for no other reason, you can't let this business die.
Because it's my third most viewed YouTube video of all.
Time. It's never.
Going to die 50,000 views. I'm really excited to get on the
pod 12 months from now. OK.
Because I started this one like right at the very beginning of
(14:34):
Hummingbird season, right? And so like, I had to work
through the kinks during the busy season.
Now I've got kinks ironed out dude, and I'm ready for next
year. I have some bad news for you.
This is going to keep you up allnight.
This guy tagged me on Instagram and it's called Hummingbird Hype
(14:55):
Fuel. Hell yeah.
I have to imagine since he tagged me on this, he learned
about this from the pod. So you're inspiring some
competitors here? That's fine, you're.
You're gonna go broke, man. I know it's all good, dude.
I love competition. Yeah, no, it's all good.
I think more people should. Market share is big, dude.
(15:16):
The market's big. Like I was saying, we went up to
Sequoia National Park for the 4th and we stayed at this Airbnb
like hour and a half outside thepark.
And it was like, I'm talking themiddle of nowhere.
There was 11 commercial facilitythat was the bar, the
restaurant, the general store, the all of it.
And I walk in there dude, and they've got, I'm talking this,
(15:37):
this place stocks like 1 box of Raisin bran, right?
Like limited inventory. You know what they did have
though? Hummingbird Nectar.
And I was like, catch me, catch me up here, dude.
Camp Nelson. I'll be up here.
(15:57):
All good. I'm going to make it happen.
All right, well, we'll follow upevery time you're on I'm.
Going to ask you, all good. I mean, it'll be pretty boring I
think in the winter, but I don'tknow.
I'm going to play with it. Dude, not to jump around too
much, there are a few TikTok accounts or a few companies on
TikTok growing like crazy. And their whole niche is like
extremely sour homemade candy. Yeah, so and they're they've got
(16:21):
hundreds of thousands, if not millions of followers and people
get the reaction videos when they try it.
Who's doing that for shippable powders?
Like it would be even easier to ship than count than count.
For 20%, yeah, like I'm a big fan of form factor, right?
Like like when I think about business ideas and stuff.
(16:41):
Or changing form factors. Yeah, where it's like you sell
protein, right? Loosely.
But like inside of that you haveprotein powders, protein shakes,
protein drinks, protein bars, protein gummies, like like you
have all of these form factors. And I think that there's like
you could go, I mean, you see itwith the with creatine, right?
(17:04):
With trycreate.com, phenomenal product where he was just like
all he did and we talked about this before, right?
Well, it's like all he did really was like change the form
factor of creatine. It was always sold as a powder
that you added to smoothies or drinks.
And he was like gummies, right? And it's like he's not selling
anything new. He's still selling creatine,
(17:26):
just the form factor of that is a little bit different.
I've just been thinking about that a lot of like, you know,
people put pressure on themselves, like come up with
this like genius new business idea, right, Because you start
you when you're coming up in entrepreneurship, you're looking
at the the Zocs, you're looking at Elon, you're looking at these
like, I'm going to call them inventors more than
(17:47):
entrepreneurs, right? Like inventors like versus like
business guys that like took something that people are buying
and operated a Better Business around a specific thing.
And I think there's tons of those little form factor type
offshoots of existing things that people can go and jump on
really easily. Like, 'cause you're not
(18:08):
reinventing the wheel, you're just changing.
Maybe you are reinventing the wheel.
No, I'm not really. You're just like you're you're
adding. You're like, my wheel has four
spokes instead of 6. Dude.
Yeah, you know, it's like, but it's still a wheel.
Right. Did you see that like hands free
toothbrush that they're selling?On social, yeah.
Yeah, they have like 10s of millions of dollars of sales.
(18:31):
Yeah, I have 0. Everyone uses a toothbrush,
hopefully. Maybe not in Alabama, but
outside of Alabama everyone usesa toothbrush.
I've heard rumors about North Dakota too.
I don't know. And and it's just they're
changing the form factor. And then these other guys direct
to consumer guys took toothpasteand they just turned it into
like like a chewable. And it's like, Oh yeah, you
(18:52):
don't have time to brush your teeth.
Let's do the 8020 of brushing teeth and just chew this.
Yeah, 100%. It's just form factor.
What was that? Is that bites?
Is that? I think so.
Bites did that. Yeah.
They again, yeah, it's toothpaste, dude.
They just changed it's, I mean, Neuro gum is another phenomenal
example of that. Like it's caffeinated gum like
they're still, they're selling the same thing that Red Bull is
(19:15):
selling. It's just gum, right.
There's another dude that's doing caffeinated.
I don't know if it's a chocolatebar or protein bar.
I forget the name of it now, butit's the same thing.
It's like, yeah, just like a little something special in this
same form factor that people buyon a different use case that
they want. Game over.
(19:36):
Well dude, have you heard of RunGum?
You and I talked about it before, yeah.
Best name ever. Exactly what we're talking
about. It's just gum with caffeine for
running. Guess what?
Their sales are $28 million. Yeah, I mean.
And you can get a Co Packer to make that for you for sure.
(19:56):
Find a company on Thomas net that makes gum and say hey throw
22 milligrams of caffeine in there for sure.
And then you go find a packager.Yeah, it's like the big, what's
the big Kodiak cakes? Yep, right.
That's a protein. Pancake mixes protein.
Billion dollar buses, right? It's like they still sell
(20:18):
pancakes, bro, but it's, I like looking at opportunity kind of
through that lens a little bit where it's like, what else is,
is a form factor thing. I think about it on, on even on
services. Like one thing that we're
starting to, to do on like the backlinks, like an SEO backlinks
(20:38):
side is like backlinks traditionally are like, I'm not
going to say hard to get, but you have to like know what
you're doing to go and get them right?
Like you got to go to the right suppliers.
It's easy to get screwed on a fiver where someone's like, I'll
get you 500 backlinks for six cents.
And it's like, dude, they're lowquality, right?
Like all of that. And then the way that you
(20:58):
normally would go about procuring good backlinks is
through an agency, right, Which you're either paying a heavy
retainer on or a markup really on those.
And it's like, dude, why can't, why can't you just buy backlinks
on a Shopify store, right? Like why can't you just log in?
(21:18):
And we buy a lot of backlinks for all of our clients and we
deal with the pain of going to 97 different providers of which
one provider could have 6 good backlinks and three bad
backlinks. And like we've done that.
Like we've spent the money to know all of those pieces.
I was like, dude, what happens if I just put it all in one and
it's like it's just different form factor, you know what I
(21:40):
mean? I.
Like this? I like this.
All right, two ideas for you. Yeah, sub ideas #1 you just,
it's literally a Shopify store as if you're looking at a merch
store and it's, it's backlinks, but you reveal what the backlink
is. I understand the risk in that
that someone will circumvent you, but they don't know the
person to reach out to at the company.
For instance, I got an e-mail today from a follower and that
(22:03):
said, Hey, check out this article about Bucky's in Barons,
Barons News like barons.com and that he's like, they, they
mentioned you and I clicked on the article and they link to us
like five times in an article. They have these products and
these products and they sell Bucky's because they don't sell
online. And then I go to moz.com, free
domain authority checker and I type in barons.com 89 domain
(22:26):
authority out of 100. And it just came.
I didn't ask for it. So to your point, there's a
Shopify store and this would be hard, right?
I'm not saying this would be easy.
It's hard to get backlinks. But once you have someone at a
company, are there large or small to provide backlinks, then
you can have that person give you all kinds of backlinks.
So you say, all right, now I gota guy at Barron's, he might not
(22:48):
say yes to everything. If he doesn't say yes, then you
refund them and you say, all right, $150.00 Barron's
backlink. Or that's idea number one idea
#2 as part of this form factor is you just filter by domain
authority rankings. So it's like $150.00 for one
backlink with from a domain authority that's between 85 and
(23:10):
92. So you don't know it's barons.
No one can circumvent you. You know what you're getting.
Because that's the problem with almost every backlink site out
there is that they can promise it's high quality.
They're usually not. You might need above 50 domain
authority. And for those listening, domain
authority is just like literallya score between 0 and 100 of how
much authority a website has, according to Google.
(23:33):
Right. And the value of backlink from a
higher domain authority site means more to your SEO rankings
because of their you're like borrowing the domain.
If in Google's eyes, if somebodyof that high caliber links to
your site, you must also be of high caliber.
And so your domain authority will go up.
Your rankings go up by getting mentioned in high authority
(23:56):
site. Yes, and to give you an example
of what it can do, that article on Barron's went live yesterday.
I went and looked at our Google Analytics and I saw that
barrons.com was our like 19th most popular referring site for
the day, which is bad. It's not good.
It was like 17 clicks. But I don't care about that
because what you can't quantify immediately is what that does
(24:16):
for your domain authority, for your keyword rankings across
thousands of keywords, right? So yeah, if buckys.com links to
us on their homepage, it's goingto be #1 and it's going to be
the most life changing thing ever for the company.
But their domain authority is much, much lower than someone
like Barron's. So yeah, I would prefer Bucky's.
But all else equal, I want any site, whether it's relevant to
(24:37):
Texas snacks or not, to have high domain authority.
Right? Yep.
And so ours, the, the model thatI'm playing with is, yeah,
basically go in, get full transparency on all of them and
order like literally like you said, like get a backlink on
Barron's 4X price, which like backlinks are relatively pay to
(24:58):
play anyways. Like you might have a connect at
Baron's, but like if you want him to be doing that regularly,
the man's getting the man or woman or they is getting paid
right. Like, yeah, I'll pay you 150
bucks. And then I go to the client and
in our model at unlimited content, it's just a 15% flat
markup that we're very transparent about.
(25:20):
But other agencies will mark that up 400%, like, and they
won't tell you who it's through or what it's for, right?
Like it's just kind of an opaqueworld.
And so like, I think I'm going to follow more of like the
Costco membership model of like,look, we're not going to charge
a markup on any of these backlinks, but you have to pay
(25:41):
us 100 bucks a month for access to them.
Yeah. So are you saying you're going
to actually test this? I already did.
Dude, what? We're not supposed to actually
do things on this podcast. We just talk about things.
Right dude, I, you know, I wouldit's, it's fitting that we
talked today, but I literally was like sitting around last
night. Lauren was packing envelopes for
our save the dates and we were just watching cheaper by the
(26:05):
dozen. And I just had my laptop open
and I was like, I should just test this funnel, dude.
Like, let's just see if we can do it.
And so launched a, a $1.00 free trial funnel 0 product.
Dude, I do not have the marketplace built.
Like I tinkered the top five, but like nothing that I could
show to a customer. But like, yeah, hey, sign up for
this one dollar trial and let's see what happens.
(26:25):
We got, we got, we got some homies coming through dude on
Facebook ads. So you just, you say you built
the funnel, you just launched the Facebook ad campaign.
To just like a landing page thatwent to A1A1 dollar trial stripe
payment link just to see if I could get cold traffic to pay
for it. What was the offer?
Do you want to show your your landing page?
(26:46):
Yeah, yeah, I can do. That see this what did you build
the landing page with? Oh, perspective.
Dude, you better put my effect link in your in your.
I will, I will. I'll hook you up.
Prospective landing page perspective perspective.co.
Perspective. Yeah, OK.
Screen share. You are like the tool master,
(27:08):
you know every. Tool thanks to in the.
World, you're a giant tool. I'm a big tool, dude.
Yeah, so this is the Lander. Super simple.
It looks horrible on desktop because no one's looking at it
on desktop on Facebook ad but like literally the Costco of
backlinks. Stop wasting money on low
quality backlinks. Get real results without the
markup direct access to wholesaling prices for 83 bucks
(27:32):
a month, 100% money back guaranteed placements done
right. What do you get high quality
backlinks for a fraction of the price.
Access to all of our partners, No markups or middle men right
like that's the that's just the value stack.
We also we we already do a bunchof press releases for all of our
clients and unlimited content. And so why do this super Yeah,
(27:52):
from ourselves basically, but like, yeah, so we'll just RIP
that case studies and the the nice for me, which is a little
bit different than what some other people can do, which is
like just to be super transparent is like these are
clients of unlimited content so I can.
I can actually say they're case like.
You've got a little unfair advantage here.
Yeah, like we've done that. That's a good framework because
(28:13):
people should launch businesses where they have an unfair
advantage and everyone listeningto this has an unfair advantage
in something. Maybe it's your your background,
your history, the job you have, what you're passionate about.
It doesn't have to be people, you know.
Yeah, it doesn't have to be yournetwork.
And so, yeah, that's basically. It's like.
Yeah. So I can sit here and like put
case studies because like these are people that we actually
(28:34):
bought backlinks for using the same backlinks that we're going
to sell, right. So it's like I can, I can do
that a little bit easier than somebody popping in and being
like, how can I just make up thenumber of customers like?
Yeah. You decide your own ethical
line. But like we, since we have
unlimited, I can do that better.Yeah, yeah.
But yeah, start ranking like become a member, browse
(28:54):
inventory. All the way through.
All the FAQs, all the fun stuff.So.
And then just ran the ads at that.
What did you do to the people that paid?
What, did you e-mail them or? Yeah, immediately and and just
refunded them and said that we'dreach out when the platform's
ready. OK.
Wow. Obviously you're not going to be
profitable at a dollar, right. But what what was your like your
(29:17):
cost per acquisition or cost perlead?
We average like $21.00 for that dollar, which like I have no
VSL. Yeah, like I'm happy, I mean.
It's an 83. You're telling them it's an $83
a month offer, right? And so it's in my brain, I go,
cool, if 25% convert on that trial and break even on, I
(29:37):
haven't decided if I'm going to like, like this was very early
stage testing, right? And so like I haven't decided
between a three day trial or a seven day trial, right?
Like, and it's all just a cash conversion cycle question of
like, cool, if I can get people at 80, if I can get $20 trials
at 83, I'm either in a 25% trialconversion rate, I'm breaking
(30:01):
even on a three it, it will be 3, five or seven days.
Like I'm not going to do a 30 day trial.
And so then I can go and spend on, on ads pretty aggressively.
But it was cool. Like it's one of those it's like
you just get the, and I to be clear, I also turn the ads off
because I don't have a product to sell, but I like prove that I
could sell it. So now I get to go build it next
week and it'll go live maybe by the time this episode comes out,
(30:23):
depending on how fast Muhammad is.
But you know. He's pretty fast.
He's quick, I know. Dude, there's there's so much I
want to say. First of all, anyone listening,
Sam is a bro. He's a bro of the pod and he's
inviting people to compete with him because he's also trying
this. But we don't, we don't hold back
(30:44):
the juicer. We don't, we don't withhold
secrets, right? Come compete.
Dude. Come compete.
I love it. And if you listen to episode
164, that was like my most downloaded audio episode ever.
It's about a guy that builds directories and I don't remember
it was $50 or 500, I don't remember.
But in the episode he talked about how he really shelled out
(31:07):
for a very relevant backlink to his directory.
And that 50 or $500 investment Nets him like 2 to $3000 a month
in like at just like media Vine ads on his directory.
That's it, 100%. And that's the power of a good
back. Like not a backlink, but a good
(31:27):
backlink. It has to be relevant.
It has to have high domain authority.
We have a nine hour conversationaround backlinks, like we spent
a bunch of money on them and, and all of our SEO agencies, but
it's like you get the right one in there and you, you think
about backlink placements strategically, you can actually
see like massive lift. Like what we think about when
(31:47):
we, when we look at clients is like backlinks are like paid ads
a little bit, right? Like if you're ranking, if
anyone's like, thinks about how they use Google, there's kind of
like 3 buckets, like 3 tiers of what we call like click density.
And so like the the highest clicked on links are 1-2 and
(32:09):
three, right? So like top 3 is where you see
the most, the most clicks, right?
Then you have 7 through 10, right?
The rest of the first page, and then you have 11 and on, right?
Kind of like classic Pareto principle, right?
Where you get the clicks. What we do from a strategic
perspective when we're thinking about backlinks is we go and
look for where you're on the cusp of the next tier, right?
(32:31):
Because for you guys, like let'stake Texas Snacks as an example.
It's like if you're ranking #11 for something and then you go
get $300 worth of relevant backlinks for that 11 page and
move to number 10 or #9 yeah, you actually can arbitrage the
cost because you're not. The difference between being #8
(32:52):
and #7 is pretty minimal, but the difference between 9:00 and
11:00 is meaningful. Or same with like 5 and six or
five and three, right? It's like, And so when you're
when you're thinking about that and a lot of this is going to be
educating people on how to self-serve backlinks and like be
smart about how they go about it.
We are going to offer a free backlink strategy when you sign
(33:14):
up as a member. So like we'll help them kind of
coach them into best using our. Product but like.
When you're going through and doing those, that's, those are
the opportunities that you're looking for of like, yeah, like
a $500 backlink could equal spending $500 a month on Google
Ads if you're behind the right one.
You just only have to pay for itonce or as frequently as your
(33:35):
competitors are buying backlinks, right?
Like that's the thing. It's so funny how I mean, like
Google and Facebook, these trillion dollar companies.
And a large reason for that is because of like just the slow
death of ads because we set these daily budgets.
It's like, yeah, I'll do 20 bucks a day.
That's not that's not much $2600a month.
(33:56):
Like what else? $7200 a year.
Do you pay $600 a month for but but you, you break it down on a
daily basis, which is why you always see ads that's like for
less than the price of a coffee per day.
Like that stuff works, right? So when it comes to backlinks,
it's like $500.00 for a backlink.
Are you an idiot? That's going to pay dividends
for a decade. Whereas your Facebook ad, once
(34:18):
you turn that $20 a day budget off, it doesn't care about you
anymore. It's forgotten about you.
I just had a sick idea off the back of that, which is I'm
definitely going to let people buy backlinks with buy now, pay
later. Like Klarna?
Yeah, I'm for sure, I'm for suregoing to put Klarna on this
(34:38):
thing. Why?
Why would? You you get this.
You get this backlink for four equal payments, 0% interest.
If I could buy $1.50 hot dog at Costco on buy now, pay later, I
should buy backlinks with. It I'm just saying I'll throw it
on there. I'll see what's good.
Oh my gosh, dude. So.
That'll be a fun one. That's a good idea.
(34:58):
I really like the idea of sayingnot like by 10 backlinks, but by
this backlink from these guys, this one from these guys, this
one from these guys. All right, what do you think?
Please share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on
the Kerner office.
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