Issue #1: Twenty Episodes. Three survived.

This issue originally stated that in most regulated states, a written disclosure satisfies new wholesaling requirements. That's true only in disclosure states like Maryland, Ohio, and Texas — Pennsylvania's Act 52 requires a real estate license, which disclosure does not cure, and North Carolina (HB 797, effective October 2025) now treats wholesaling as brokerage activity, which affects Wilmington, one of the markets discussed below. Details corrected in the text. We publish our corrections; that's the point of this letter.

→ Wholesaling vacant land to builders — $0 startup, $8,600 average per deal

→ Simple niche apps via vibe coding — a $500/month converter built in three days

→ Backyard inflatable movie theater rental — $43K year one from a Christmas gift

Wholesaling vacant land to builders

Two guys — Jackson and Carson — went on The Koerner Office and laid out the most detailed playbook I've heard on any podcast this year. The idea: find spec home builders, ask what they'd pay for a lot, then call landowners in those same zip codes and offer slightly less. You never buy the land. You sign an assignable contract with the seller, send it to the builder, and a title company wires you the spread. They reported an average profit of $8,600 per deal, with 90–95% margins because there's almost nothing to spend money on. Their best month, they say, was $532K on 37 deals — but that was with a team of acquisition managers, five cold-calling VAs, and their own CRM software. The number to plan around is one deal a month, which clears roughly $60K–$100K a year depending on market. Most people who try this won't close their first deal for 30–60 days, and some won't close one at all if they can't handle rejection on the phone.

The startup cost is genuinely zero. They confirmed it multiple times: an iPhone, an internet connection, and the willingness to make awkward calls. One of their mentees reportedly made $5,200 in 14 days without even having an LLC.

1. Go to Zillow and filter for newly built homes (2025/2026) in Sun Belt markets — Cape Coral FL, Lehigh Acres, Northwest Arkansas, Wilmington NC are specifically called out. The builders' names and numbers are on the listings. (One caution on Wilmington: North Carolina's HB 797, effective October 1, 2025, defines wholesaling as brokerage activity requiring a license — and its definition is broad enough that double closing isn't a workaround. Of the episode's named markets, Florida and Arkansas remain open to the unlicensed; North Carolina no longer is.)
2. Call the builder: "I see you built seven homes last month. What would you pay for an off-market lot?" Get their buy box — price, zip code, lot size. Log it in a Google Sheet.
3. Back on Zillow, find vacant lots in those same zip codes. Or use Google Earth to spot empty parcels in subdivisions.
4. Look up the landowner's phone number for free on TruePeopleSearch.com using the property address.
5. Cold call the owner. Offer 5–10% below what the builder will pay. Frame it as: cash, no realtor fees, no closing costs, close in two to three weeks. Calls last 90–120 seconds.
6. Get an assignable purchase contract signed. You can generate a draft using ChatGPT, but have an attorney review it. Include a feasibility study clause so you can back out with no risk. Earnest money is nominal ($100–$150) and isn't due until closing.
7. Email the deal to your builder. They typically respond within two hours.
8. Send both contracts to a title company. Wait two to three weeks. Receive a wire for the spread.
9. After closing, call the neighboring property owners via TruePeopleSearch — they often pay at or above market to extend their yard. The guests say they did 28–29 referral deals in one year by sending a handwritten thank-you letter offering $1,000 for referrals that close.

Simple niche apps via vibe coding

Steve Young from App Masters laid out a system on The Side Hustle Show for building tiny, single-function apps that target long-tail App Store keywords. The example that stuck: a JPEG-to-PDF converter his team reportedly built in two to three days. It's currently making about $500/month. That sounds small until you hear the rest of the math. A green noise app pulls in roughly $2,300/month. A paraphrase AI tool does about $2,600/month. Stack three of those and you're at $5,400/month from apps that cost almost nothing to maintain.

The trick is keyword research before you build anything. Steve uses ASO Mobile (free plan at asomobile.net) to find search terms with traffic scores around 20–30 and low competition. Then he names the app after the exact keyword. He charges a weekly subscription — $6.99/week — because users of simple utility apps tend to use them once and forget to cancel. He says using the word "Continue" instead of "Subscribe" on the paywall button increased conversions 30%. Adding "No payment now" underneath bumped trial activations another 30%.

The honest catch: Steve says his hit rate is about 40%. Six out of ten apps he builds make nothing. A tattoo generator flopped. You need the temperament to launch fast, kill losers, and double down on winners. And you need to know that even the $500/month figure comes from someone with years of ASO pattern recognition. A first-time developer's real milestone for month one is getting any app approved and ranked — not revenue. The same idea showed up on AI Hustle, where a host described getting two vibe-coded apps approved on the App Store in a single week, with his non-coding wife rebuilding an app from scratch in two weeks. One redesigned app got 4,000 update downloads the next day — but that only happened because the app already had an existing user base. A brand-new app with zero reviews starts from zero.

1. Research keywords on ASO Mobile's free plan. Look for terms with traffic scores of 20–30+ and few competitors using that exact phrase in their app title.
2. Check the App Store search results manually. If the top results don't have your keyword in their title and have fewer than 500 ratings, that's your opening.
3. Use Claude Code (or Cursor at $20/month) to build a minimal app that does one thing well. Name the app after the target keyword exactly.
4. Add a hard paywall during onboarding. Weekly subscription at $6.99, with a "Continue" button and "No payment now" text underneath. Copy competitor pricing — Endel charges $60/year as a benchmark.
5. Pay the $99 Apple Developer fee and submit. Budget a full week for review — apps with subscriptions and paywalls take 3–7 days, not overnight. (source)
6. After 30 days, evaluate downloads and revenue. If the app isn't getting traction, move to the next keyword. If it is, add a ratings prompt and consider Apple Search Ads (Apple offers a $100 credit for new advertisers).
7. Repeat. Target four to five apps before judging whether the model works for you.

Backyard inflatable movie theater rental

Derek, the guest on The Koerner Office, started this business by accident. He bought a $300 inflatable movie screen from Amazon as a Christmas gift, set it up in his backyard, and neighbors started asking to rent it. He reported $43K in his first year and says he's projecting $90K–$100K in year two at 80% profit margins. I can't verify those projections, and they almost certainly reflect an existing local network that gave him early bookings. But the unit economics are straightforward enough to stress-test yourself: his base package is $375, his average ticket climbs to $850 with LED chairs and extras, and his premium indoor setup runs $1,700.

That indoor setup is the interesting part. In Texas, it doesn't get dark until 9:30 PM in summer — too late for kids' parties. Derek custom-designed an enclosed inflatable room through an Alibaba manufacturer with air duct ports for four window AC units, interior LED lighting, and carpet. Total cost for the structure was roughly $2,000, plus $600–$800 in used AC units from Facebook Marketplace. It creates a completely dark, climate-controlled theater that works at any hour. He says he's the only person doing this. I believe him — I couldn't find anyone else.

The caveat that tempers my enthusiasm: this is a local services business. Your revenue ceiling depends on your metro, your climate, and how many birthday parties happen in your zip code. Seasonality is real outside the Sun Belt. And Derek's year-one number likely benefited from warm contacts — friends, neighbors, parents at his kids' school — that a stranger in a new city wouldn't have on day one.

1. Buy a 16–20ft inflatable movie screen. Amazon has consumer-grade options starting at $300. Commercial screens on Alibaba run $420–$2,000. (source)
2. Add a projector ($300–$1,100) and JBL-style speakers ($500–$3,000 depending on quality).
3. Set it up in your own backyard and take photos. These become your listing images.
4. List on Facebook Marketplace in your city. Local pickup listings on Marketplace are completely free — no listing fees, no commissions, no selling fees. (source)
5. Create three tiered packages: basic (screen + sound, ~$375), mid-tier (add LED chairs, ~$850), premium (full décor and setup, ~$1,500). Price the base low enough to get your first five bookings and generate testimonial photos.
6. After validating demand, reinvest in commercial equipment and consider the indoor inflatable theater (custom Alibaba order, 2–4 months lead time, ~$3,500 all-in including AC units).

I keep coming back to it. The startup cost is real-zero, not pretend-zero. The playbook is specific enough to follow step by step. The risk is asymmetric — you can back out of any deal with the feasibility clause. And unlike apps or rentals, you're not competing against every other person who heard the same podcast, because the work (cold calling strangers about property they may not even remember owning) is exactly the kind of thing most people won't do. That reluctance is the moat.

Reddit is now the #1 cited domain across ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews, with citation share in commercial categories up 73% between October 2025 and January 2026. If you sell anything online, a branded Reddit account with real comment history is no longer optional. (source) EcomCrew E648

The median app makes under $50/month after a year, and only about 17% ever reach $1,000 in monthly revenue. Steve Young's 40% hit rate on vibe-coded apps beats that base rate handily — which tells you the keyword research is doing the heavy lifting, not the coding. (source) Side Hustle Show 743, AI Hustle

AI token costs vary 6–30x depending on which model you use. DeepSeek V3 runs $0.50 per million input tokens; Claude Sonnet 4.6 runs $3.00. Companies using tiered model routing hit a median blended cost of $2.31/M tokens vs. $18.40/M for those using frontier models for everything. (source) If you consult for any business running AI workloads, there's a service here. Marketing School

"Best X" listicle blog posts make up 44% of all pages ChatGPT cites, per Ahrefs' analysis of 1 billion+ data points. And 28.3% of ChatGPT's most-cited pages have zero Google organic visibility — so you don't need to rank on Google to get cited by AI. Schema markup had zero impact. (source) Submit your sitemap to Bing Webmaster Tools — ChatGPT's web search runs on Bing, not Google. Marketing School

Omar Zenhom on The $100 MBA Show: "Go to Stripe, pull your top 100 customers, call them. Ask what's hard right now." Then publicly announce you're holding prices and offer annual lock-in deals. Monthly subscribers churn at 3–5x the rate of annual customers. (source) If you run any subscription business, this is a free 90-day playbook.

The Side Hustle Show — 743: $1,000 a Month with Simple Vibe-Coded Apps
Niche Pursuits Podcast — How Taegan Goddard Built a Paid News Subscription Business
AI Hustle — Profit from Amazon's AI Custom Merch
AI Hustle — Monetizing Apple's New AI Features
Leveraging AI — 299: The magical world of AI skills
Tropical MBA — #860 How Direct Mail Built a Multi-Million Dollar Business
My First Million — The most simplified breakdown of the SpaceX IPO on the internet
My First Million — Brutally honest guide to not losing money in the market
The Koerner Office — $532K in One Month Selling Land They Didn't Own (Ep. #308)
The Koerner Office — He Found a Side Hustle With No Competition (Ep. #307)
AI Hustle — How Lovable Hit $500 Million in ARR
Leveraging AI — 300: AI done right
The $100 MBA Show — How To Recession-Proof Your Business In The Next 90 Days
The $100 MBA Show — Exactly How To Become A Millionaire (Step-By-Step Guide)
The $100 MBA Show — The Gurus Are Lying! Debt Is The Devil.
The Ecomcrew Ecommerce Podcast — E648: The Do's and Don'ts of Marketing on Reddit
Marketing School — The Real AI Bottleneck Nobody Is Talking About
Marketing School — Why ChatGPT's Most Cited Pages Don't Rank on Google
Marketing School — How 57% of Website Traffic Is Now Bots
Marketing School — If You Are Not Working 7 Days A Week, You Will Lose