“Just Testing Something”—and Then It Made Money

Hey oh, buyers and builders! Each week I share the cider to go with your biz buying donuts so you can taste the sweet freedom.

This week’s fall cider:

“Just Testing Something”—and Then It Made Money

I accidentally started a business in under 30 minutes.

While gearing up for our new business acquisition, I realized that the business we're looking at is throwing away a ton of potential leads they can’t service, because of capacity (short staffed) and that they don’t capture because they only answer the phones from 9am to 4pm M - F.

Many customers call on the weekend or outside of those hours and the business has more than enough customers that they just don’t care about those calling at inconvenient times.

So I thought, “Why not try something a little outside the box?”

Long story short, I decided to test this in a totally different industry—orthodontists! I built a little local SEO site with an AI code buddy, scraped some contact info, and started sending out texts to see if orthodontists would actually pay for leads.

Spoiler: in under 30 minutes, I received multiple text responses from orthodontists that were interested.

Now I also didn’t want to answer inbound calls from parents looking for braces for their kids so I set up a AI voice agent to handle calls 24/7.

Now my little side project might just turn into an income stream!

What I learned:

1. Use the “waiting period” before closing to test creative ideas. I’m also quietly building a recruiting platform that’s already finding qualified candidates (more on that in a future letter).

2. Tech can radically improve the customer experience.
   Simply answering more calls and capturing leads 24/7 created a better experience and uncovered a more scalable new business model: a lead gen site that sells high-intent leads to shower door installers.

Want the tech stack?
Reply “hook me up” and I’ll send you the tools I used to:

• scrape every orthodontist in Metro Detroit

• launch a text campaign

• plug in a 24/7 AI voice agent

• and build the lead gen site

Stay curious,