Forget Big Apps. That Tiny Tools Are Making Millions - Ep. #301

Chris Koerner (0:00)

This is the asymmetric bet of the century, cost to start is almost zero, the tools are either free or cheap. You could do this in an afternoon, literally. These can be $10,000 businesses, million dollar businesses and even billion dollar businesses. Nico didn't have rich parents, didn't have an MBA, didn't have any experience, and he just did it. He's proof that this is doable for a regular human being. He used to just make pasta. His whole life was hospitality. You don't have to build software, you don't have to invent anything new, just put your own rims on it, put your own face on it. If he can do it, anyone can do it. When something works, the window is short before everyone copies it. And the better it works, the shorter the window is. Cold email back in 2020 was insane. You can send 100 emails and get 15 replies. Today, you've got to send 10,000 emails, Facebook ads in 2014, Google ads in 2005 You can buy a customer for two bucks. Today is 40 You got to get it while the getting is good. And that's usually today or yesterday. The phrase nothing is too niche has never been more true. Build lifestyle businesses. They are awesome. Let's talk 12 specific business ideas you can build using this same playbook.

Okay, I just got off a call with a guy who not that long ago was making pasta in his family's restaurant in New Orleans. He'd never written a line of code in his life. And today he's running a software business doing 3,500 bucks a month in recurring revenue. No technical knowledge whatsoever. He wasn't even using AI. And the kicker is that anyone listening to this episode can do the exact same thing, literally. And it's all made possible by what I call the great unbundling, which is a concept, framework, whatever that I'm obsessed with. So by the end of this episode, you're going to have ideas, a plan, and probably an urge to open up your favorite vibe coding app tonight and build something. So we're going to talk about what unbundling is, what platforms are ripe to be unbundled. And then at the end, we'll talk very specifically on what business ideas you should build in and around this unbundling concept that I'm about to describe to you. The guy I spoke to, his name is Nico. I'm going to come back to him in a few minutes because his story is kind of the whole point of this episode. But before I tell you exactly how Nico did it, I'm going to show you a picture. If you're listening to this on audio, just imagine not showing anything too crazy. It's a screenshot of the Craigslist homepage. And on this screenshot are a bunch of arrows pointing to different services, the personal section, the community section, discussion forums for sale, housing, jobs, et cetera. Then there are logos pointing to each of these sections. Logos of companies you probably have heard of, Zillow, Airbnb, ZipRecruiter, Indeed, Upwork and many, many more. And yes, this website looks like it was designed in 1998 because it was. Tiny blue links. We've all seen it before. A bunch of columns of categories all crammed into one page. But what's wild is that almost every category on that page got turned into a billion dollar company or hundred billion dollar company. Billion with a B. If you look at the housing section, apartments, rooms, sublets, rent, sale, that's the whole little corner of Craigslist that got eaten by Zillow and Airbnb, Redfin, realtor.com, et cetera.

Zillow alone is worth what, $12 billion, Airbnb, $80 billion, all from one little column on Craigslist that got unbundled. If you look at the personals, strictly platonic, women seeking men, men seeking women, all that, boom. Tinder, $10 billion company pulled straight out of that column. Jobs, accounting, finance, sales, marketing.

Indeed, Zip Recruiter, Upwork, Indeed alone does over $3 billion a year in revenue. You look at the for-sale section, antiques, appliances, bikes, electronics, offer up, Facebook Marketplace, and many, many others. Multi-billion dollar businesses or the discussion forums, Reddit, Reddit was worth $7 billion at IPO, or the services and gigs section, Thumbtack, Shiftgig, TaskRabbit, multiple $100 million businesses. The next door, of course, we know all these, okay? First of all, the unbundling of Craigslist is not done. It's still a work in progress for you or anyone else to capitalize on. Second of all, there's so many other things we can unbundle. That isn't named Craigslist. Craigslist was unique because it had every feature in the world on one page. Jobs, dating, housing, used stuff, whatever. And companies came along, picked one feature, slapped a clean design on it, made it mobile-friendly and built a billion-dollar business. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but we only have so much time today. I'm not saying it was easy for them to do this, but they stole the users of Craigslist. They were more savvy. They cared more about one little feature, one little blue link than Craigslist did because Craigslist was trying to focus on hundreds of little blue links. Also, side note, unrelated to this episode, I hate how Craigslist is this ugly. People think it's punk rock and it's cool, but they could have been something amazing. They could have provided thousands of jobs. It gets barely a couple million hits a month today, which is down 95 to 99 percent from its peak. They could have innovated. They could have added a lot more value to the world, but now the rich got richer and Facebook Marketplace is doing that job pretty well. That's fine. That's free market capitalism, whatever.