Welcome to Ghost Business 👻 Your weekly (mostly) Tuesday email, where we turn $1 into thousands building these weird but simple side hustles

Prepping the preppers

What keeps you up at night? It’s one of my favorite questions to ask people. It lets me know what they think about, how they think about it and why.

I think about apocalyptic scenarios. A lot. Sometimes it’s stressful. Sometimes it’s just interesting to think about trading goods and services after internet and banks fail.

If you were to store something in hopes of trading for something else, it needs to:

• Be small enough to carry and trade easily

• Possibly be divisible

• Should no decay or expire

• Have value but not be useful (like gold)

• Testable for fakes

Weird exercise, I know.

Turns out a lot of others think about this. Companies like SurvivalBox, BattlBox, and Preppers Stockpile have subscription kits delivered right to your door to help you survive disasters.

So how could we capitalize on this trend and how much would it cost to survive the apocalypse? 🔥 

The MVP (Getting your first customer)

Neighborhood watch… I’m going to use a tactic I swore I would never use. I’m going to scare you. ☠️

“According to the National Library of Medicine, less than 50% of Americans have 3 days of food and drinkable water on hand to survive a war, outbreak or natural disaster.

With elections coming up, this risk significantly increases.

For only $50, you can be one of the Americans that can survive weeks, not days. Isn’t that worth it for your family? Click here to find out how easy it is to prepare your family for survival.”

• What are we selling? No clue.

• Does that link go anywhere? Sure doesn’t.

• Are you willing to save your family for $50? Yeah you are 😉 

This can be posted in multiple Facebook and Nextdoor groups to generate some demand. So far this has cost us nothing and we’ve successfully scared our neighbors into buying something we can sell them.

Okay this got weird…

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Getting Your Next 100 Customers

Spending scared… So far we have scared neighbors interested in buying something for $50. How are we going to assemble these kits and price them?

Let’s go with 3 tiers of kits. I like this route because it allows people to not feel pressured into one option.

Tier 1 $50: Very simple, yet slightly over-priced. Let’s include 3 day food rations and a tactical flashlight.

• Our total cost: $20

• Our total profit: $30

Tier 2 $79: Everything in Tier 1. Let’s add a Ham Radio, and a gas mask.

• Total cost: $20+$36 = $56

• Total profit: $23

Tier 3 $169: Everything in Tier 2. Let’s add more rations, a medical kit, water proof matches, Lifestraw, and emergency blankets.

Feeling less apocalyptic vibes already 😊 

• Total cost: $56+$60 = $116

• Total profit: $53

Let’s say on average you can make $30 for each kit sold, this is an easy way to earn $300 scaring 10 of your neighbors!

I would also hit up local survival micro-influencers to get their feedback and promotion on some of the gear.

You could also add affiliate links to some of your items for additional revenue.

This is one of those ideas you could make a killing on going door to door with the pitch!

Viability:

1 [building spaceships] 🚀 to 5 [easy peasy] 😊 

Sale survival… What I love about this business is its a “garage biz”. A business you can start in your garage for very little money.

With the election coming up, people get worried about this stuff. Might as well capitalize on it 🤷‍♂️

(As usual each business will have it’s own setbacks, and it’s all about the execution and consistency rather than just having the idea)

It’s a great day to be great!

Love, Mike 👋