He Makes $4K/Day With This Weird Middleman Business - Ep. #295

Chris Koerner (0:00)

So I come across this guy that started a business six weeks ago, and he did $120,000 his second month. 40,000 of that was profit. What's he doing? Cold caking. He's doing cold caking. And if you've never heard of that, it's because it's brand new. You're gonna use the principles that you learn in this to make a whole lot of money, okay? In a world where cold calls, texts and emails are less effective than ever, this is the strategy you need to make a bunch of money selling whatever it is you sell. This story is freaking amazing. This guy's gone viral a bunch of times, so I had to ask him all these questions for myself. Please enjoy. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Well, William, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?

William Lindholm (0:43)

Yeah.

Well, I'm William, and I help you get customers by sending cake. We started like six months ago, saying we were gonna automate birthday deliveries with cake. Did that in Norway. Sort of blew up, and we decided let's think big and go to the States. So we moved to SF and said let's do it in San Francisco as well.

Chris Koerner (1:02)

So you moved from Norway to San Francisco specifically to expand your cake shipping business.

William Lindholm (1:08)

Yes.

Chris Koerner (1:10)

I mean, I feel like if you could make a business work in Oslo, Norway, you could make it work anywhere.

William Lindholm (1:15)

Exactly. But actually, the fun thing is we came to San Francisco and then we tried to do the same thing, the birthday thing, and nobody in San Francisco cared because I think the American culture is nobody cares about their employees. So, we pivoted and yeah.

Chris Koerner (1:32)

Well, first of all, Norway is tiny, it's freezing, it's middle of nowhere Northern Europe, and it's probably not very business friendly, I imagine.

William Lindholm (1:41)

Well, it's definitely business friendly, but it's a smaller market, right? So, you can't make the same kind of size of company in Norway as you can. And I mean, the whole population in all of Norway is five million people, right? So, yeah.

Chris Koerner (1:57)

So, that's like a little bigger than Utah, you know?

William Lindholm (2:01)

Exactly.

Chris Koerner (2:02)

Okay. So, tell me what your business started as and what first gave you the idea for this business.

William Lindholm (2:08)

Yeah, for sure.

Chris Koerner (2:09)

And I know your model changed when you moved to SF, so explain exactly what the business model started as.

William Lindholm (2:14)

Yeah. So, the idea actually came from, I've worked in sales since I was 12 years old, so always been chasing that. And in Norway, there was almost like a hackathon, but for sales. So, it was called the Norwegian Championship of Sales. And there's like a hundred sales rep that show up. I'm like stressed and nervous. I have no idea what I'm selling. And then I get a paper in front of me that says, you're going to automate birthday deliveries with cake.

Chris Koerner (2:36)

This was just randomly assigned to you at a competition.

William Lindholm (2:38)

Yep.

And it's ridiculous. But that day, I booked like 17 meetings in four hours. Like companies like KPMG. So I was like, holy shit. Okay, this is big. People want this. And from there, I started building a birthday solution. Yeah.

Chris Koerner (2:54)

So first of all, how did you book those 17 meetings? Just outbound cold calling to a list that they provided you? And what was your pitch to them?

William Lindholm (3:02)

Well, I don't remember exactly what I pitched back then. But I think it was something like, we started this new company. We're doing something crazy. We got investors on board and we would like to give you a free cake if you'd like to take a meeting with us.

And then I told them the idea which was, we're going to automate your birthday deliveries. And everyone laughed at that because you get so many cold cakes, but when someone, or you get so many cold calls, but when someone called you and asked if you want a cake, right? So it was like a very smooth intro into the call. And yeah, just worked. Okay.

Chris Koerner (3:36)

Okay. So there's like a couple different gifts going on here. Like you want to give them a cake to get their attention, right? But the the quote unquote hypothetical startup that you just raised money for something that automates birthday deliveries that like a large company would buy from you so they could better serve their employees, is that right?