$26,000 Mistake, Profitable Niche & Boat Tours

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor.

I go down weekly rabbit holes of business ideas & lessons. Then, you get this 200 second email.

Today's Outline:

💰 $26,000 mistake
☕️ Identity Products
👋 Goodbye Startup
🚢 Boat Tour Software

Bonus: Profitable Niche you haven’t heard of at the bottom

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💰 $26,000 Mistake

Quick personal story:

I sold my first company February 2020.

Here’s the thing no one tells you:

Once you sell your company, you get insanely bored.

So, I decided I’d buy something new.

I loved the e-commerce space and I knew someone who just spun up a new Shopify store selling Adobe Lightroom Presets (digital products, so 97% margin).

He just built a crazy good ad and make $5,000/month PROFIT in this first month.

He was more bullish on his supplement company though, so he wanted to sell it to someone else to focus on his main thing.

I decided to buy it for $26,000 (nearly 5 months profit).

In my mind this was a genius move. I hold onto this business for the next 12 months, double my money, then sell it for $180,000 once it has 12 months of history.

Here’s the mistake:

I wasn’t buying a business. The Adobe Lightroom store had existed for a maximum of 45 days before I bought it.

I wasn’t paying for the brand, big customer list, exclusive products, contracts, employees, etc.

I was paying for one thing:

A really freaking good ad.

And if you’ve ever run FB ads, you know how quickly ad creative can go stale.

Month 1 of running that business we made $3,500 profit. Then $2,500. Then $1,700. Then $900.

Despite introducing email marketing, new products, new pricing, new ad creative, we just simply couldn’t make it work.

So we closed the store a year later.

My lesson: When you buy a company (or an asset) – recognize what you’re truly paying for. It’s easy to have a profitable month. It’s much harder to build a sustainable business with profit every month and years of history & systems.

Identity Brands

I love finding frameworks for new business ideas.

You’ve probably heard of the cliche ones (Uber for X) (Airbnb for Y).

But here’s a new one that I fully believe in:

Commodity Goods for Die-Hard enthusiasts.

Black Rifle Coffee is nearly a $1B company and publicly traded $BRCC.

Find things consumers spend money on (Coffee, Clothes, MakeUp, Supplements, etc.) and brand them for their lifestyle.

📖 Goodbye Startup

Another amazing business model:

Find antiquated, confusing, government run processes.

And then offers a done-for-you service with easy UI & amazing Support.

That’s what GoodByeStartup does.

For $550, they’ll fill out the forms & file the paperwork to help you shut down your LLC.

Other companies that do similar work are IncFile or Rush My Passport.

Research popular licenses that people need (Fishing License, Hunting License, Medical Marijuana Cards, Applying For Handicap permits, etc.) and build the easy-to-use service for them.

Bonus points for doing it in B2B spaces (they have more to spend).

🚢 Boat Tour Software

You’ve probably never heard of this company, but FareHarbor bootstrapped their way to a $300M exit to Booking.com on $50M in revenue.

I love finding bootstrapped giants.

The product is simple: Booking software for tourism activities.

I love this business for 3 reasons:

1. All of their competitors raised 20-30M. When one VC backed company went under, FareHarbor got creative and offered $100,000 to keep their lights on for 7 days. By providing that lifeline, it resulted in FareHarbor taking 90%+ of their competitors transaction volume & 340 of their 549 customers.

2. The won on pricing. The software was free. So it was dead simple to onboard customers. Then they charged 6% of all booking revenue.

3. The power of niches. This once again proves that there is a huge advantage starting niche (kayak & paddle board rentals) when starting.

✌️ See you next week

-Connor

PS – Profitable niche of the week: Mulch Dying. Heard through a friend of a friend that their company is doing $20M+ from selling mulch dye… I never would have guessed.