Million Dollar Social Accounts, First Responder Clothing, Cellphone Towers

designed to be skimmed

Welcome to Biz Brainstorms –

My name's Connor. I'll send you a weekly email covering ideas to help start or grow your business.

You probably get a lot of emails already. So, these emails are designed to be skimmed. No need to read the whole thing, just find 1 cool thing you enjoyed. 🧠 ☕️

Today's Outline:

  • Million Dollar Social Accounts

  • Clothing for Cops & Firefighters

  • Articles I loved last week

  • Cellphone Towers

Did someone forward you this email? If so, you can subscribe below:

🐦 Four Million Dollar Social Accounts

I'm fascinated by people who are able to build a strong following through social media and turn likes & followers → dollars. Here are a few favorite:

Easlo – This 21 year old makes $50,000/month selling Notion templates through his twitter account. I like how he structures the link in his bio to convert followers to subscribers or paying customers:

What I love about this is the man is literally just selling & teaching organization templates.

I think the same could be replicated for tools like: Asana, Airtable, Clickup, Basecamp and more.

Justin Welsh – From following Justin it becomes clear that he's done a great job at 2 things.

  1. Developing a phrase that fits his brand: "The Diversified Solopreneur"

  2. Monetizing people who want the same.

Looking at his products here's my guess on his life-time revenue:

  1. $100k newsletter revenue – $2,000 to sponsor, weekly send

  2. ~$1.5M LinkedIn Course – 12,000 students at $150/per (I'm guessing there was a price raise so assuming early students paid less).

  3. ~$600k LinkedIn Course – 4,500 students at $150/per

The nice part is these are super high margin products.

I'll admit, I personally don't love how meta the products are (read my content then buy my course to learn how I make content). But I respect the hell out of the sales achieved.

Daniel Vassallo – Daniel left a $500,000/yr salary job at Amazon to pursue making money on the internet. His philosophy was simple: create a handful of digital (and some physical) products that he can sell.

Everything from an AWS course to teach gaining twitter followers, to now starting a cohort based course teaching people how to do the same. He's also extremely open about his numbers.

His community, Small Bets, made $438,000 in 2022 and $351,000 in profit.

Nick Huber – In my opinion, Nick Huber has done the best job at leveraging an audience to building substantial cashflow + equity from it. By the numbers he's:

  • Raised money to buy over $150M in storage

  • Launched a Cost Segregation Study Company that reportedly does $200-250k per month

  • Invested in Support Shepherd which reportedly pays him ~$50,000/month in dividends

  • Launched a head-hunter US based recruiting company called Recruit Jet

  • Launched a landing page web design company

  • Launched a property insurance company

  • Launched a debt brokerage company

  • Operates a course, community, and consulting (FYI his consulting rate is $5,000/hour).

  • Finding operators + launching new companies and getting distribution from Day 1.

Want to study turning attention into equity?

I can't think of a better resource than studying Hubers account.

👮 Cops & Firefighters

FIGS is publicly traded at just shy of a $1B valuation.

They sell "comfortable scrubs" to nurses. And a sh*t ton of them.

In 2022 they did $505M in revenue across the 3,047,530 nurses in the US.

One of my latest obsessions has been the idea of niche apparel.

Take the largest product vertical behind food & beverage (apparel) and make a loyal fan base obsessed with it.

Nursing is a great industry. There are even companies like Bala that I suspect do mid-8 figures just selling comfortable footwear to healthcare workers.

Well, Figs made generic tacky uniforms a fashion choice at work. And I believe you can do the same in other "uniform-based industries":

  • 800,000 cops in the US

  • 1,215,700 fire fighters in the US

  • 110,000 active commercial pilots

  • 2,347,836 janitors in the US

  • 1,419,427 delivery drivers in the US

The secret that FIGS had that you'd need to learn yourself is which industry were employees already buying their own uniforms?

Hospitals don't provide scrubs. But you can buy through them.

That way, you're building a B2C company.

Otherwise, you'll be building a B2B company here. Which is OK because securing contracts is a valuable business moat. However, selling the idea of "more comfortable & fashionable" to businesses who are optimizing costs is more difficult.

What’s your favorite part of the newsletter

Login or Subscribe to participate in polls.

📚 3 Articles That Made Me Think Differently Last Week

Fighting Entropy – Jack put together a piece that I've been thinking about for a while. His main point here is around the idea that the default in life is the undoing of everything you work for:

As I mentioned before, entropy is observable in the breaking down of everything over time. That means:

• Entropy degrades your body if you don’t work out.• Entropy ruins marriages and destroys friendships if you don’t cultivate those relationships.• Entropy dulls your mind if you fail to keep it sharp.• Entropy strives to erode your life from a breathtaking adventure to monotonous drudgery.

Jack Raines

Going through Levels of Wealth – This post is a really solid break down of wealth classes, not just by financial metrics like this:

But also talking about qualitative things like ones risk tolerance between upper and lower class.

The Mindset of the Successful Investor – This is a quick read but one line really stood out to me:

Life is long. To live up to their (investors) full potential, every human needs to do some things that won't pay off for 5, 10, 20, or even 100 years.

Nick Huber

📱 Cellphone Towers

So I read this tweet last week:

So here's what really happened in Jakes deal:

He bought a distressed hotel that came with a cell phone tower on the property earning ~ $26,125/yr

Once you subdivide the land between the hotel & cell tower, you can actually sell that tower to one of the larger players in the space like American Tower ($92B/company) or Crown Castle ($56B/company).

If you have additional land on a property, you could probably even hire American Tower to build a cell phone tower – and then enter into a long term lease with them to occupy the land (often a 20-50 year lease).

There are ~142,100 cell towers in the US according to the WIA (Wireless Infrastructure Association). Almost 3x the number of self storage facilities (51,206 facilities in 2022).

See you next week ✌️

-Connor

PS – This email costs $0. But if you enjoyed it could you fwd it to just 1 person? It's more fun to write this as the audience grows