The Simplest $7M Business You've Never Heard Of ⏐Ep. #283

Chris Koerner (0:00)

You were making like 36,000 a month recurring within your first four months. Yeah, that's wild.

Michael Clark (0:06)

And it was just us. That was great. We're sending about 120,000 letters a month now. I didn't expect this. In 2024, we broke the five million mark. Last year, we broke seven. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of, but your mother's gonna love.

Chris Koerner (0:19)

Is Mother's Day huge for you?

Michael Clark (0:21)

It's our Super Bowl, yeah.

Chris Koerner (0:22)

That's awesome. What other niches do you think could be really interesting with the snail mill business?

Would you believe that you could make millions of dollars per year sending stories through the mail? Well, that's exactly what Michael and his wife Hanny do with The Flower Letters. They charge $12 a month and they are sending 120,000 letters per month. Last year, they made $7 million in revenue. But what's most impressive is that within four months of starting the business with almost no money, they were making $36,000 a month and most of that was profit. They grow the business through Facebook ads and referrals. And I am just obsessed with the snail mail subscription business. This is the second episode I posted about it in the last two months. We'll link to the one I did with Hanna below. And at the end of this episode, Michael will give us advice for starting our own subscription business, what niches look interesting, how we can be successful, and most importantly, how to find customers. Let's dive in. You want to start by just telling us who you are and what you do?

Michael Clark (1:19)

Yeah, Michael Clark. I'm the co-founder and CEO of a company called The Flower Letters. The best way to describe it is something you've never heard of, but your mother is going to love. So, we tell stories through letters sent through the mail. You get two letters a month for a year, and it tells a story. My wife is an artist and an author, and just so creative. When she sings, she does everything. She's doing stained glass.

I call her her creator, and it was about February, March of 2020 Anyway, we were just talking, we were on a walk, and she was trying to figure out how to kind of... She made these paintings, incredible, these 3D floral paintings, and she put one up for sale, and it's sell within 20 minutes. I remember one night we were going on a date and she put one up. It was like three hours past. She's like, hey, this hasn't sold yet. Do you think it's not good? I'm like, hey, I gotta put this in the context for you. You sell your paintings in three hours. Like, most people have paintings up for days, months, years. People are, they want your stuff. And then, sure enough, in 30 minutes, I'm gonna buy it.

Chris Koerner (2:28)

And what was she selling these for? And on what platform was she selling them?

Michael Clark (2:32)

Oh, this is Instagram. She just make a painting, put it on Instagram and say, hey, if you want it, let me know. Someone would say, I want it. And, you know, depending on how she makes it, anyway, from this size to big, I mean, the big ones could be upwards of $1,000. But there's mostly small ones, so a couple of hundred dollars each way.

Chris Koerner (2:51)

Yeah.

Michael Clark (2:52)

And so she was doing that just and, you know, really enjoying it. And then she was trying to figure out how to grow her business and kind of get more people involved in the email list. And she had the idea. She's like, what if I like sent them a letter if they sign up for my email list? They're like, oh, that's kind of an expensive thing to sign up for email list. So we sent them an email. She's like, what if I send them a letter? She's like, there's all these old letters you can find. To be honest with you, all at once, the idea came to me. And I saw people, like I remember getting mail, a letter in the mail. I saw people going to the mailbox, getting a letter and it being a chapter in a story. And I said, hey, what if you wrote a story and sent it to them? And she's like, that's a terrible idea.

She's a writer. And so, there's a lot of details we had to work out. But I was like, immediately I thought of World War II. I was like, what if you write a letter, then I write a letter and we kind of send that out and we've kind of figured that out and we just iterated, went back and forth. There was another subscription that we were doing called Letters From Afar. We actually did podcasts with them. They're awesome. We got their letters and there's a sort of a standalone letter each month, which is like okay, great model. Do the stand alone.