He Makes $4K/Day With This Weird Middleman Business Transcript, AI Summary & Key Points

00:00 So, this month we're doing $120,000. Yeah, it's crazy. Our company's only existed for 6 months. I lived in a closet for the whole duration of that. In Norway, we're passively invoicing like $12,000 a month right now. >> Wow. >> I have my mom as customer service there. It's on autopilot. Like, why cut off the revenue, right? >> Exactly. >> Mom needs a job.

00:20 >> Next [music] week, we're doing 1,000 cakes for one single company. >> Wow. Tell me your thoughts on the dead internet theory. What that has to do with this? The dead internet theory is that 99.99% of the content we consume on [music] internet, emails, phone calls, videos such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI. So, in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails, we're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs or cold call anyone cuz there's going to be too much [music]

00:47 noise. So, the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in, is physical gifting. Getting attention is absolutely everything. A, buys you loyalty. B, it's [music] a cheap way to stay top of mind, which is harder than ever today. >> sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending an email would probably make you seem annoying.

01:05 >> Yeah. One thing your viewers might find interesting is like how I have my agent set up. >> Yes. >> Yep. >> Yes, very curious about that. >> I'm not involved in it. Every 2 hours, it checks my email, it goes and sources 20 new bakeries, it responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries until we have a deal. This sort of outreach would have been impossible just a year ago.

01:25 And I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries. So, if someone's watching this right now and they're thinking like, okay, this works, this makes perfect sense, but I don't have anything to sell. What should I sell? So, I come across this guy that started a business 6 weeks ago and he did $120,000 his second month. 40,000 of that was profit.

01:49 What's he doing? Cold caking. He's doing cold caking. And if you've never heard of that, it's cuz it's brand new. 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.

02:08 Please enjoy. Well, William, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do? Well, I'm William, and I help you get customers by sending cake. We started like 6 months ago saying we were going to 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 to SF and said let's do it in San Francisco as well.

02:29 So, you moved from Norway to San Francisco specifically to expand your cake shipping business. Yes. I mean, I feel like if you could make a business work in Oslo, Norway, you could make it work anywhere. Exactly. Uh but actually the the fun thing is we we came to San Francisco and then we tried to do the same thing, the birthday thing, and nobody in San Francisco cared cuz I I think the American culture is nobody cares about their employees.

02:54 >> [laughter] >> Oh, shoot. Okay. >> Yeah. So, we we pivoted and yeah. Well, first of all, like Norway is tiny, it's freezing, it's, you know, middle of nor- nowhere northern Europe, and it's probably not very business-friendly, I imagine, right? Well, it's definitely business-friendly, but but it's a smaller market, right? I mean, the whole population in all of Norway is 5 million people, right?

03:17 So, Oh, jeez. So, yeah. That's like a little bigger than Utah. Exactly. Okay. So, tell me what your business started as and what first gave you the idea for this business. And I know your model changed when you moved to SF, so explain exactly what the business model started as. The idea actually came from I've worked in sales since I was 12 years old, so always been been chasing that.

03:40 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 reps that show up. I'm like uh 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." Hm. This was just randomly assigned to you at a competition.

04:00 Yep. It's ridiculous. But but that day I booked like 17 meetings in 4 hours. Like companies like KPMG. So I was like, "Okay, this is big. People want this." And from there I started building a birthday solution. Yeah. So, first of all, how did you book those 17 meetings? Just outbound cold calling to a list that they provided you? Yep. And what was your pitch to them?

04:23 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 like I told them the idea which was we're going to automate your birthday deliveries. And everyone laughed at that cuz you get so many cold cakes, but when when is someone or you get so many cold calls, but when has someone called you and asked if you want a

04:48 cake, right? Yeah. So, it was like a very smooth intro into the call and yeah, just worked. 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 is something that automates birthday deliveries that like a large company would buy from you so they could better serve their employees.

05:12 Is that right? Right. So let's say you have 40 employees and all of these employees you want to make sure they they feel seen. So, you do something for their birthday. Maybe you do something every time someone turns 30, 40, 50, not every single birthday. Whatever. You have to recognize these people. And so, at least in Norway it's very normal to do that with cake.

05:30 And what's the worst that can happen, right? You remember someone but forget someone else. So, we just figured, "Okay, let's just solve that pain and make that never be an issue again." And was the idea to integrate with like Gusto and ADP and Paychex and use that data to automate everything? Yep. Hey, YouTube's fine, but what about when you're driving around?

05:49 What about when you're mowing the lawn? You need my audio podcast, The Kerner Office. Just look up TKO Pod in Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. I think that's also where we met the problem with it because when we were cold calling people, we were very aggressive with like you have to sign up for this. And then we integrated with like 40 different HR systems and we said, "Okay, let's scale this when we get to the US."

06:14 So, we did that and we AB tested like 40 different ads and none of them converted. So, I think the good thing is this is a genuine cash cow business opportunity because the retention is really good. Like if someone signs up for this, they're going to stay there. But the problem was when we tried to really scale this and make this a big company, we met the issue of this not being a big enough problem for someone to actually sign in with their HR system, make sure everything is okay without a human person pushing them.

06:42 So, that's That's why we pivoted. But like we we grew that to $150,000 AR before we we pivoted. Oh my gosh. Okay, I'm still confused about the competition aspect of this. Did at this sales competition, did they give all of the sales people the same hypothetical startup, the same offer? Yep. Okay. So, you weren't supposed to actually turn this into a business, is that right?

07:05 That's right. How many people were at this competition? Like 50 I mean, there was like a thousand people watching. But like 50 sales reps or more that competed. So, they just put us in rounds. It was like I think they divided the day into five blocks of like 1 hours. So, you cold called for 1 hour, whoever had the least meetings after 1 hour, the the 50% least got knocked out.

07:31 And then they did that five times until there was a final and then the winner got like $10,000, I think. So. And how close did you get to winning? Third place. I was one meeting away from first place. So. Oh, no. >> So, but but still I mean uh I I think I got $500 and I got the idea that made this happen, so. So, were you on a team or was it just you cold calling for 5 hours straight?

07:53 Just me. Okay. Now, so of the 50 people, you were the only one that said, "Hey, like I know this is just hypothetical here, but I'm actually going to start this business cuz I had a lot of success here." And you were comparing it to previous cold calls that you made and you're like, "Geez, 17 calls and 17 booked appointments in Exactly. 5 hours for something that has high LTV, lifetime value, low churn, like I need to actually do this."

08:17 I just started doing the numbers in my head. I was like, "Okay, so wait, so if a company with 40 employees sign up, that's $80 per cake and then 50% margins, maybe I'm able to make that happen. Wait, that's like $5,000 a year. And then if I get sales reps to do this and I pay them $2,000 per client, then wait, uh the next year I'm just going to make full profit on that.

08:43 So, I I I just started doing the numbers and like calculating in my head and it just made sense, so. Oh, man. And here's the thing, like I'm a little surprised it didn't work in the States because I just filmed a video, it hasn't gone live yet, but with this woman in Dallas that does corporate gifting. And a lot of what she does is for birthdays, but mostly it's like for, you know, high-ticket enterprise SaaS where she'll send like the company will go to someone's LinkedIn and see they graduated from Syracuse and send

09:11 like a highly curated box of like Syracuse alumni gear to someone in the hopes that they'll get a call with the sales rep. And she facilitates the logistics of all these gift boxes and she does very well. So, like obviously corporate gifting is a well-established industry here. Why do you think you couldn't break into that from with a birthday angle?

09:32 Well, that's sort of what we're breaking into now, but from a sales angle, right? I just think companies usually have two really large budgets, and it's sales and it's engineering. You always want to sell your product and get more customers, and you always want to build your product better, so you get more customers. And so, that's where the two largest budgets are, and everything else is just noise that you have to do to make the business go around.

09:56 So, I think it just wasn't a big enough pain for people to say, "Oh, I I really want to prioritize this." Now, uh it is to be said after going like semi-viral with the cake thing the last couple of weeks, we have gotten inbounds from people who are like, "Oh, we want to do cakes." But, compared to the people that's inbounding us and saying we want to do cakes or cold cakes, as I call them, it's just not comparable.

10:21 And the same thing happened in Norway. We went This is where how I know like the what we're doing now is the right thing is we were in all the biggest news in Norway, like all the time, because it's such a unique idea. And we got zero inbounds from that. Everyone thought it was cool, and when we called, everyone knew about us, and it was easier to sell, but the pain wasn't big enough for people to reach out and say, "Oh, I've been waiting for this the last 5 years."

10:43 I think that that goes for a lot of businesses is it just isn't the biggest priority. Like, if if you're good at sales, you can scale this, and you can make it something you probably make like a million dollars a year off of, and and that's fine, but I wanted to build a a really big company, and I think the path we've taken now is is even better. Yeah, I mean, it So, the budget thing is is a smart, and this is similar, but you're more likely to sell a product or service that's most closely tied to revenue, right?

11:11 And so, you doing this for sales people to book more calls is directly tied to revenue, therefore it's an easier sale for you, as opposed to like help your employees maybe be 2% happier one day of the year, you know? It's like, "Eh." In Norway, the cultural the culture, you know, benefited that, but in the US, it's like, "How am I going to make more money for my birthday cake, bro?

11:31 You know? Exactly. I'll let that be said. I never tried cold calling in the US. I just went straight to ads. So, I I definitely think there's someone watching this that could take this and and run with it. I think >> Yeah. I think it's a great idea. Now, tell me your thoughts on the dead internet theory. It's a great question. And how that what that has to do with this.

11:52 So, AI is just getting better and better. I think we can all agree it's it's not going to de- it's not going to stop evolutionizing itself. So, in a couple of years, AI will be so good that it's literally impossible to tell a human from AI. Mhm. And in this world, I can spin up a cloud agent that makes 10,000 UGC videos or 100,000 emails that all feel supernatural and superhuman made.

12:15 And so, the dead internet theory is that 99.99% of the content we consume on internet, emails, phone calls, videos such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI, and humans aren't going to use the the internet the same way we are today. It's going to be so much noise, it's going to be impossible to cut through. And I think like the first step to counter that is humans are going to get agents that like answer your phone or check your email and say, "This is what you have to prioritize today."

12:46 And then the second step is like the Elon Musk vision where you have neural links and you're communicating completely off the internet the way we are today. So, in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails, we're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs or cold call anyone cuz there's going to be too much noise. So, the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in, is physical gifting.

13:09 If we can become the company that has the most data on what kind of gifts work, we become the next Apollo or the the next like real big GTM engine. So, Okay. So, I love everything about this. Talk to me about Well, first of all, dead internet theory like I do think you're you're mostly correct, but also it's going to be agents talking to agents. Like it'll be agents reading cold emails and sometimes an agent monitoring the box will get a cold email that's relevant to what the owner of that inbox actually needs.

13:42 For sure. And that agent is going to have credit card info and it's going to go buy things while we're out like hiking and fishing and actually like it's going to improve the quality of life in a lot of ways cuz we're going to be sick of the internet, you know? Oh yeah, I view this as a good thing. Yeah, oh yeah. The internet will be busier and more bustling than ever, but it's just going to be computers talking to computers, right?

14:02 So, you're saying like this breaks through that fourth wall so to speak, the physical barrier, and you can still use agents to send these cakes and to do all the outbound. Like you could you could use an agent to do outbound cold email to get a physical cake in front of someone and then you kind of marry the best of both worlds, right? >> Yeah. And this can also like the way we're doing it today is we have a sequence where we first send the email that says, "Hey, in 2 days I'm sending you a cake.

14:29 Is this the right address?" And then we send the cake and then we we follow up either through email or phone. And like AI agent would respond to there's a cake coming to this address. Is it the right address? >> Yeah. But the thing about the agents is they're never going to know what the human doesn't tell them. And a lot of sales is about making someone want something they didn't know they wanted.

14:53 And if you can't cut through the agent because the agent doesn't know the human wants it, then you have to like you have to get into the face of the human either through network or through like just a physical gift. So. Mhm. Okay, so let's talk about like pure AB test. What have you done to to test? Like let's say you get 10 people on the phone and on 10 of them you just give them the your pitch to whatever it is you're selling.

15:17 And on the other 10 you send them a cake to then give them the pitch. Like how much better of a conversion rate do you get from a cake? Um well, cold calling has like what, 2 3% conversion rate? Maybe you can pull off some stats on so you can correct me. >> be all over the map, right? If you're selling t-shirts, maybe 30% if you're selling $30,000 a month software, it could be 0.3%, you know?

15:39 Exactly. So, but but there is like an average there. And um from the cakes we've sent out so far, 35% have converted into meetings, which is really just crazy. >> Wow. >> [laughter] >> Yeah. Guys, tkowners.com, that's my community where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners.

16:02 It's about a thousand people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out tko as in The Corner Office, tkowners.com. So, you send out a hundred cakes and you and 35 meetings are booked for like Is it mostly software stuff, like Silicon Valley stuff? Yeah, that's mostly what we're getting, but I'm also getting like accountants in Miami reaching out, real estate brokers, like really anyone and everyone is reaching out and doing this.

16:28 There's like there's the one part where there's software companies trying to sell to other software companies, but there's also like next week, this is crazy, we're doing a thousand cakes next week for one single company. And this is a dentist software company, archie.com. They're just sending it to a thousand dental offices in San Francisco, Florida, Houston, just all over.

16:49 Have they done the test yet? No, it's Well, the thing is they reached out and did such a big order volume because they did the same thing with pizzas last year. Okay. >> And it was really successful. So, that was their test, so to speak. Yeah. Do you know what the the economics were on their pizza campaign? Uh like how much they paid and how much they converted?

17:11 Yeah. I do, but I don't want to say because I I don't know if I'm allowed to. >> good. It was good. Good enough to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it again. Yes. Yeah. For sure. Or is it maybe not a thousand? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. >> Tens tens of thousands, yeah. Are they paying like 50, 60, 70 bucks per cake for these at that volume? Mhm. Clearly, you're not in the cake-making business.

17:32 Are you just like drop-shipping these from some of the ships' cakes? You could say that. I mean, we we put software on top of it to make logistics better. What we do is we uh I have an AI agent and I'm happy to show you in a bit as well that's uh constantly sourcing bakeries all across the US, London, Australia. And then it negotiates with the bakeries and says, "Hey, we're going to be buying all these cakes from you.

17:55 Um so, we need a 30% discount." Mhm. Mhm. We've been in Forbes. We've We've been so and so on. And then they're like, "Okay, we'll take a chance." Uh they give us a discount. And then someone like Archie reaches out. They need cakes in 10 different cities. We make a We have a system where we just plot in all the 1,000 recipients. And then we let them track all the orders.

18:18 The all the different bakeries are taking pictures per delivery and so on. So. So, this is like 1-800-Flowers, but for for outbound sales, basically. Cuz that's what 1-800-Flowers does, you know? Uh I would say that's pretty accurate. Now, are most of the cakes only traveling at like, you know, 30 miles or less because of the localization of it? >> Yep.

18:38 That's fair to say. >> Okay. I mean, for Archie, for instance, and we've done this a couple time We did it for Rippling as well. They wanted a couple like really special cakes in like very niche areas where we didn't want to spend time finding a bakery. So, we just sent the cake on a flight. Hm. So. >> Interesting. >> That's possible as well. Does it matter at all if the cake is any good?

18:56 Is there any correlation to close rate or book call rate? I definitely think so. I care a lot about the quality of the cake. We only partner with like organic French patisseries make quality cakes because at least my opinion is well, that represents the quality of your company. So, nobody wants to do that. Yeah. And so, we're we're very picky about the bakeries we we end up working with.

19:18 We There's a lot of cheap bakeries we end up just saying, well, this isn't the right fit. So. Yeah. Do you have any data from your customers on the close rate being higher or lower once they get on these booked calls? It's a good question. >> Cuz I I don't >> Here's what I'm thinking. Like, there's a direct correlation to the effort you put into something and the potential outcome.

19:39 Like, if I film a video with a business owner and it's like this talking head, he's in one state, I'm in another, 50,000 views. If I film the exact same video with the same content and I'm in person and we're grinding stumps together, we say the same words, but the viewer sees that I had to get on a plane or he had to get on a plane, we're out there sweating.

19:57 >> And they take it more seriously. They take it more seriously and I I might get 500,000 views on that, right? So, I would think that if I just, you know, dial for dollars, do cold calling all day to get these booked calls to sell enterprise software, my close rate might be 15%, but if I, you know, if I use these cakes, I'm going to spend a lot more money, but A, my book call rate goes way up and B, theoretically, I would think that your close rate goes from 15 to 25, 30%, you know?

20:21 I don't know the data on that, but it sounds logical, right? So, like, one thing that's important is my cakes don't close you the the sale, it just gets you the meeting, it gets you the attention. The rest of the job you have to do yourself, but I think there is something very psychological about wanting to give something back when someone gives you something.

20:43 Yeah, the law of reciprocity. Exactly. That's what they do in like the Turkish markets. If you've ever been in like Turkey, they they're like they you come in their store and they start giving you candy and they're like giving you so much because it's psychology. Yeah. So, it sounds logical. If I were you, I would like hound my previous customers and say like, do you have any idea on what your your rate was on these that like the calls that came from these cakes cuz then you could put that front and center on your

21:09 landing page and it's like >> That is true. increase your close rate like increase your book call rate by 32% and your close rate by 64% like Yep. >> That'd be huge. Like it's a net of net you will make you know, 316% more money for every dollar spent on cakes first cold calling or whatever it is. Yeah, you're you're spot on and I think like this data is so important for us to collect because long-term if this vision of the future becomes right, which I really do think it is, one cakes are going to be overused.

21:40 Everyone's going to get five cakes a day. So we have to do more than cakes. And uh when we get to that point, sure we're going to be a huge company already by then, but to become even huger, we have to collect the data on what works. Like maybe we send a cake, but the close rate only goes up so and so much, but if we send something even more personal and we can talk about what what that could be as well, but uh maybe the close rate is even higher, but the book rate is lower.

22:07 So all of this data is super important. I totally agree with you. Tell me about your numbers. So once you focused on the sales market in the US what was your first month like, your first six months, year, etc. both from a revenue and profit perspective? Well, we've our company's only existed for six months. So Oh, wow. So it's young and promising still.

22:27 Well, in in in Norway the the birthday thing we're passively invoicing like $12,000 a month right now. Wow. So you you sell that side of the business going? Yeah, it it's just running to to to be quite honest with you, I have my mom as customer service there. >> [laughter] >> It's on autopilot. Like why cut off the revenue, right? >> Exactly. >> Mom needs a job.

22:46 Yeah, sure. So we have that going and when we got to the US, we did zero sales for the first two and a half months. Like I said, we were just trying to figure things out and really felt like we were hitting a wall. I was almost about to like just put down the company because of that. I didn't see it becoming large enough. But then we cold-caked, which I'm coining as a term, A16Z, Sequoia, like a bunch of big venture capital firms.

23:12 >> firms. Yep. And that went viral. That hit the news, and we got so many inbounds. What was the message to these firms when you sent them a cake? What was the pitch? So, this wasn't my cake, or like we sent the cake, but we were in Founders Inc. And a friend of mine, Andrew Anderson, who's like running a crypto platform that's really taking off. He was fundraising.

23:33 So, he put his whole pitch deck on like a 100-piece size cake. Wow. Yeah, yeah. And like it was just a bunch of text of everything he was doing. And the VCs loved it. One of them posted it on X. It got like 300 300,000 views. That ended up in the biggest tech news in Europe. And from there the ball is just like uh it's been non-stop. Were you linked in those articles?

23:57 Yeah, yeah. So >> was amazing for him. He probably raised his round. Amazing for you. Great backlink. Win-win all >> Exactly. Yep. And that's also the interesting thing about what we're doing now is it becomes this marketing loop because if you send a cake to X company, then X company might take a picture of that. Not only will they book a meeting with you, but they might take a picture of it and post it on social media.

24:20 And that gives you PR. And then they might think, "Oh, this worked on me cuz I just booked a meeting and posted it on social media." And then they reach out to me and say, "We want to do this as well." And that's what's happening right now. >> Yeah. Like I'm getting inbounds from people that have gotten a cake and think this is this is cool. So. You know what you guys should try is what's it called?

24:39 Like a like a singing-gram? When like someone shows up in person and sings to you? You would have to do like a singing elf. Yeah, like cold marriachi? Yes. >> with a marriachi band. >> a pitch. Like they sing a pitch to them. It would cost a lot more than a cake, but the results could be a lot better, right? Cuz the effort I mean, I'm down. Yeah. I love that you call it day maker cuz you're not going all in on cakes.

25:01 I I agree with you. At some point, people are going to be getting too many cakes, and it's just going to be a waste, right? But, that's fine. You just pivot. You do something else. So, okay. So, first 2 and 1/2 months, you're hitting roadblock after roadblock. That goes viral thanks to a tweet. What do your numbers look like after that point? So, this month we're doing $120,000 revenue.

25:22 Yeah. It's crazy. >> in? Yeah, or I mean, this pivot is 1 and 1/2 month ago, right? >> [laughter] >> Oh my gosh. So, 6 weeks after pivoting, you're doing 120 grand a month and growing double digit, I imagine, per month. Yeah, you Yeah. It's a lot of fun. Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So, if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable, email Molly, m o l l y at cofounders.com.

25:48 That's one word, cofounders.com. Molly at cofounders.com, tell her your story, and we'll give you 100 bucks if we end up interviewing them. >> What does your team look like? Do you have much overhead, like developers or anything? Or are you profitable today? >> No, honestly, we're cooked. I have a list of No pun intended. Yeah. We're baked. Uh we're baked.

26:08 I have a list of 45 inbound leads right now from people that are like, "We need cakes in Australia. We need cakes in Canada. We need cakes in Spain and Mexico." And we're just like, we can't sleep at this point trying to fulfill them all. So, we just have to fundraise and hire and keep this momentum going. So, you're just putting all your money back into the business?

26:32 Oh, yeah. I mean, I just came here from came home from San Francisco after being there for 3 months, but I lived in a closet for for the the whole duration of that. Probably all you can afford. It's so expensive there. It is. It really is. I would think you'd get to this business to the point where you have a positive cash flow conversion cycle. You get paid on day one.

26:50 You have net 30 payment terms with your bakeries, at least with many or most of them. And we're profitable right now, so. Okay. Well, like that could be that could be your natural fundraising. Like that could prevent you from having to fundraise at all, right? >> Especially after you send a bakery a bunch of businesses, like listen, your cake's delicious, it's working, we love working with you, but we're cash strapped.

27:11 If you want to keep getting business from us, we need to be able to pay you in 30 days, or else we're going to have to go to the bakery down the street. Then you guys will be rolling in it. Yeah. For sure. Totally agree with you. We could bootstrap, but my vision is to be a lot more than a cash cow business, and I think to do that, I want to scale even quicker.

27:29 Yeah. Like for instance, there is a lot of company or there is a couple of companies that have done some deliveries now. They do one delivery batch, it goes successful, they order another one, it goes successful, and then they're like, okay, let's just make this recurring. Can you guys integrate with our HubSpot or Salesforce, so on and so on. There's uh they're asking some are asking for ping pong tables uh instead of cakes.

27:50 Yep. It's wild. >> we want to be able to keep up with all of that demand, and to do that, I I think the right move is to fundraise. Yeah. But but you're right, this this could be a cash cow business, for sure. So on $120,000 in cakes, were you profiting 40 grand, 50 grand? Yeah, uh 30 40 grand, yeah. Okay. Okay, so let's say a lot of my audience, most of my audience is not on the coast.

28:17 They're like in middle America, 25 to 55-year-old entrepreneurial, either you know, about 40% are business owners, 60% are aspiring business owners. So if someone's watching this right now, and they're thinking like, all right, I want to start a business or grow a business with something like this. I don't want to start a cake delivery business, right?

28:36 He's got that locked down, but I want to use this principle to make money. What like and someone doesn't have an offer yet, let's say hypothetically. What types of offers or services or whatever could someone use with your cakes or with sending their own cakes or whatever to increase the likelihood of success based on what you've seen. Cuz if I sell t-shirts, right, it's like the unit economics don't make sense, right?

28:59 But if I sell enterprise software, it does. But enterprise software isn't approachable to an individual that wants to start a business either, right? So I think it is, to be fair. I think anyone can make anything today. I mean, it says so on your your t-shirt. But I guess you could >> It's true. >> [laughter] >> It's true. But like I'm saying like a $4,000 a month product, you know, like Salesforce or whatever, like agency services, sure.

29:23 You vibe code now. >> get it. In 2 weeks we're doing like 50 cakes with a SEO agency. And what they're doing is they're putting like a video, they're recording a Loom video, and they're putting a QR code on the cake. And then we're sending that out. So when people get the cake and they scan it, it's like a SEO audit of of their website. Oh, that's cool.

29:43 And that's cool. Also, there's just the virality moment of it. So I do agree if you're selling t-shirts, don't send cakes. But I think one of my biggest lessons building this company is do crazy things, post about it, and you're going to go viral. And so for >> 100% all of our customers that have done like a huge amount of cakes, every single time it's it's gone viral.

30:10 And it's ended up in the news, and it's just been a positive PR thing for for just both us and for our customers. So I I I I think like one of the things we did is we we had a unicorn cake that was huge. That That went super viral. Another thing I did in here back in Oslo before moving to to SF, which I I think is great. This is unrelated, but I think it'll give an idea of how I want you to think is we hosted this founder dinner, and we got all the best founders in in Norway to to be a part of this dinner.

30:39 And then And like, "Okay, how do we make this something people talk about? We hired or we we we leased a llama. So, we had this big venue, we had a private chef, seven course dinner. >> [laughter] >> And then we had a llama walking around in the venue and we had a jazz band playing jazz. And like that blew up as well, right? So, I think like attention is everything.

30:58 Getting attention is absolutely everything. And the cakes is right now like such a great thing a way to get attention cuz it's still new, it's novel, and so on. But if there is one tip I have, it's just do crazy things that get people's attention. And then post it. Yeah. And post it. Yeah. So, agency services, I think that's a great idea. Like is I have a community called playmakersai.com and I teach people how to be AI consultants or to start AI implementation agencies.

31:25 And we talk a lot about customer acquisition, we talk about paid ads, all types of stuff. But this is like a no-brainer. Like why not ship cakes to a medium-sized business that you know has 5 to 50 million dollars in revenue? And instead of a QR code to an SEO audit, it's a QR code to their website that gives them an AI audit. This says like your business could be improved with AI, call me.

31:46 And then you just upsell the heck out of them. Like So, it's a no-brainer. Yeah, you you can do anything. You're like I said, we have accountants and real estate agents doing this as well. So, uh I think as long as you're as long as you think there is marketing coming from this and second of all you have a high enough average contract value or LTV to make it make sense, like send some cakes.

32:08 It's [snorts] Yeah. I mean, dude, if I'm a if I'm a if I'm a real estate agent, I'm going to get a list every morning of properties that are expiring, right? They've been listed for 6 months and that the realtor that's the listing agent is about to lose Yeah. lose the listing. A week before that expires, I'm going to send them a cake, right? >> There you go.

32:27 Cuz even if it's a $500,000 residential home, that's 10 to 20 grand net to the realtor. If they close 10% of those, then what's an $80 cake, you know? Also, like the one thing is the cold cake, which I mean, you're spot on. Another thing is the retention cake. Let's say you have some customers that you've had for like a year, and then you're like, "Thank you for being my customer for a year.

32:48 Here's a cake." And that's like what you're doing there is you're just going over the bar of expectations, and that makes them think about you and talk about you and refer you to more people. So, Yeah. >> you could do retention cakes, you could do cold cakes, you can Yeah, there's there's a lot of things you can do. Cakes. I mean, we hired a custom home builder for our home, and paid him a whole lot of money, and every Christmas we get like a a box of nuts.

33:12 He probably spends 40 bucks on them. And you know what? Anytime someone at church asked me, "Hey, who'd you use for your home builder?" I'm like, "Use him. Use him. Use him." For cuz cuz of a $40 box of nuts, you know? It works. It does. Yep. It keeps it if nothing else, if A, it buys your loyalty. B, it keeps you top of mind. It's a cheap way to stay top of mind, which is harder than ever today.

33:34 Yeah, I mean, sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending an email would probably make you seem annoying. So. >> Yeah. This is amazing. Is there anything cool about this story that I neglected to ask you about before we wrap? There's so much cool things about this story, but I think this was a great conversation. Well, I mean, 120 grand your second month, profitable, incredible.

33:54 I applaud you on what you've done. This is amazing. Do you know if any of the other 49 people tried to start a business like this? Not as far Well, actually, there's there's been a lot of people that have reached out and like said, "Hey, man, I'm going to compete with you." Like anything, it's it's all about execution. If someone does want to start something similar, I encourage that.

34:12 I like heck, we might even partner, right? Maybe I I go like, "Hey, we have this brand, and you can have this area, and we'll take a split revenue. We almost franchise it, right?" So. One thing your your viewers might find interesting is like how I have my agents set up to find these bakeries. Yes. Yes. Very curious about that. Yep. I you you mentioned you have like these AI agent agencies.

34:35 So, so the the way I do it now is I have like this super prompt in in Claude Cowork connected to a superhuman MCP. Superhuman is like an email uh system. The super prompt says like how you're supposed to negotiate. It says how you're supposed to find good bakeries, like look at reviews, so on and so on. And then every single day, I don't I'm not involved in it.

34:54 Every 2 hours, it checks my email and if I haven't found a bakery in the location I've told it to find it, it goes and sources 20 new bakeries. It responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries. And the initial email we send out is like an email that says, "Hey, we want to buy 200 cakes in 2 weeks. Can we make it happen?" And that catches the attention of the bakery and they're like, "Yes, please."

35:19 And then we go like, "Okay, you you have to give us a discount." They give us a discount. If the discount is good enough, my agent sends that email to my personal email where I just give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on it. And if I give a thumbs back, it goes down or back to the bakery, renegotiates more until we have a deal. Yeah. Maybe that was complicated, but it's like >> No, I Claude Cowork, that's like I can wrap my mind around that.

35:44 Yeah. That's incredible. That's how we do that and and that's allowed us to go from one bakery to like 15 bakeries in a month, which is Wow. Like this sort of outreach and like partner networking would have been impossible just a year ago, which is why like nobody has done this before because it In reality, this is so time-consuming to sign up all these bakeries.

36:05 And I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries. So, Yep. Yeah. The tediousness is the moat. >> It is. Right? That's why That's why Plaid is a billion-dollar business cuz they went and made API connections with every random credit union and bank that had terrible API docs. They went and did the hard hard thing to do that.

36:22 And now they're the de facto solution for connecting financial insufficiency, right? The tediousness is the moat is the first mover's advantage is your competitive advantage. It's amazing. William, thank you. This is awesome. Where can we find you if we want to buy some cakes or learn more? Hit me up on LinkedIn, William Lindholm. Hit me up on Instagram if you're not on LinkedIn, that's also William Lindholm.

36:44 Okay, thank you, William. Nice meeting you, man. Guys, I meant what I said about playmakers.ai.com. There's about 300 of us in there and we're all doing the same thing. We're starting AI consulting businesses. We're implementing AI into small and medium-sized businesses and we're having a lot of success. So, check out playmakers.ai.com and shoot, use a cake to go find some customers.

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