My First Million · Episode Brief
The Side Hustle King: “I’m making $8K/DAY from easy businesses”
Chris Koerner's side hustle portfolio — pet cremation, B2B stump grinding, Buc-ee's snack arbitrage — is either the most original business advice on MFM this year or proof that the bar for a side hustle is lower than most people think.
Chris Koerner runs The Koerner Office podcast and hosts a series of businesses that don't look like they belong together until you understand his actual thesis: boring local businesses with no online competition and motivated buyers are more reliable than anything that gets covered in TechCrunch. The $8K per day number across his portfolio is the headline, but the more interesting number is how many different revenue streams contribute to it — most of which require no proprietary technology and very little capital to start.
The hole-in-one golf challenge business is the most counterintuitive. You partner with local businesses or golf courses to sponsor a hole-in-one prize, charge participants for attempts, and pocket the difference after buying hole-in-one insurance (which is a real product). The business works because the prize feels enormous to participants while the actual probability makes the insurance cheap. It is essentially a probability arbitrage run at golf tournaments.
Pet cremation comes up as a genuine opportunity in a category that is emotionally sensitive enough to create premium pricing power and local enough to avoid Amazon. The demand curve is predictable (pet ownership trends), the competition is fragmented, and the emotional weight of the category means customers are not primarily price-sensitive. B2B stump grinding — selling stump removal services to commercial landscaping companies rather than homeowners — is the same thesis in a different category: find the B2B version of any local service and the economics improve dramatically.
Chris's meta-point — that focus is overrated for the kind of operator who runs multiple small businesses rather than scaling one — is the most controversial idea in the episode. Most startup advice is built around focus. His counterargument is that diversification across uncorrelated local businesses reduces risk in a way that focus cannot.
Key Ideas
- →Hole-in-one insurance arbitrage: sponsor a large prize, buy insurance against it, charge participants for attempts — probability math makes this consistently profitable
- →Pet cremation is emotionally sensitive enough to command premium pricing while being too local for Amazon to dominate
- →B2B stump grinding: the B2B version of any local service has better economics than the B2C version — commercial landscapers need volume work and will pay for reliability
- →Buc-ee's snack arbitrage: buying regionally exclusive products and selling them online to fans who can't access the physical store
- →Focus is overrated for local business operators — diversification across uncorrelated cash-flow businesses reduces risk more reliably than doubling down on one
- →Copy-paste millionaires: finding a proven local business model and replicating it in a new geography, without needing to invent anything new
Worth Remembering
The hole-in-one insurance business — possibly the most niche and immediately executable idea MFM has ever discussed
Chris's argument that focus is overrated, delivered directly against the grain of almost all mainstream startup advice
Buc-ee's snack arbitrage as a legitimate side hustle — buying at a convenience store and selling online to people in snack deserts
The copy-paste millionaire frame: you do not need to invent anything, you need to find something that works and run it in a new zip code