He Turned $90 Into $50K by Mailing Ads⏐Ep. #291

Chris Koerner (0:00)

You turned a $90 investment into $50,000 in a year on the side.

Josh (0:05)

Yeah. Yup.

I didn't have an LLC for the first two cards that I sent out. That's fine. I always just would get caught up worrying about making sure the website looks good, and the logo and all this. I was like, no, this time, I'm not doing it. I'm just going to make sure I can actually make money before I go and spend money on doing all this stuff. And so it's like, I started this business for less than $100. This is kind of snowballed into something that I wasn't really expecting a year ago. I just wanted some extra money, and now it's turning into this full-time thing.

Chris Koerner (0:37)

We built a multi-million dollar business with five or six pieces of direct mail to a few thousands.

Josh (0:42)

There you go.

Chris Koerner (0:43)

And it worked. So all that to say, you should dog food it, right? You should eat your own dog food and use your product to find more services for your product.

So I just came across a 25-year-old on Instagram doing something wild. He turned 90 bucks into 50 grand in one year. From his phone, he's never cold called. He's never ran an ad. He's never even hopped on a Zoom. He closes 95% of his deals in Facebook Messenger of all places. And one plumber even paid him $1,100 after five texts. No skills, no experience, no employees. He pockets about half of everything he collects as profit. And at the end of this, he's gonna show me how to acquire as many customers as you'd ever want. And even more interestingly, he's gonna show me this weird Facebook trick that he uses to make plumbers and other local business owners DM him first. This isn't an AI business or a sweaty startup. But whether you wanna do this on the side or full time, you're gonna love it. Please enjoy.

Josh (1:46)

Oh, what I do is I sell advertising space to local businesses in my area on shared postcards like this. Here's one that I did. So I, you know, filled front and back. You know, here's another one that I did. And so I filled the ad space with local businesses. I only allow one business per category on the card. So I'm not gonna put two landscapers against each other.

So they get full exposure for whatever services that they want to offer. And then I will send it out to the local area. So this card right here went out to 10,000 homeowners in the city right next to me. And so I got businesses that service that area or were in that area.

And then the way that I send it out is by using the USPS Every Door Direct Mail tool. So I don't need a mailing list or names to send these cards out.

Chris Koerner (2:37)

And I'm just thinking, I'm trying to compare it to like something different, like a newsletter. And a newsletter is like a two sided marketplace. You need to you need the supply of the email addresses, you got to go out and find paid ads, organic, you know, one by one by one. And then you need the demand from the advertisers, which is usually in the newsletter business, the harder part.

Josh (2:57)

Yeah.

Chris Koerner (2:57)

But you're over here saying like, I've got a marketplace, but I only need to fill half of it because I can legally, thanks to the US Post Service, EDDM, Every Door Direct Mail, I can mail anyone in the world that I want to mail for $0.40 or whatever. Right? Yeah. I just need to find the advertisers for the postcards. Is that accurate?

Josh (3:14)

Yeah. So I picked the area. I'll go on to the USPS, Every Door Direct Mail tool. I'll type in the zip code that I want to target. And usually I'll sort by higher income just because they're mostly single family homes. Because you don't want to get a bunch of home service businesses like a landscaper, a roofer, and then send your card out to condos and apartments. You're just going to be wasting those people's money.

So pick the area and then I match the advertisers to that area. And so I'll sort by income and then I have a break even point. Right. So it's like I got to fill the front half of my card to cover printing and postage. It's 25 cents per home to send out a card.

Chris Koerner (3:56)

And then that's sorry. That's to buy the data or for the stamp to that home.