Issue #5: The bank pays $65 to photograph a house that isn't finished.

→ Construction loan draw inspector — $60–75 per visit, no license in most states, phone and a car

→ Local lead-gen website rentals — $192K/month reported, but the skill gate is real

→ Partnership-based customer acquisition — zero to $1M in year one, with thank-you cards

Construction loan draw inspector

When a bank loans money to build a house, they don't cut one big check. They release funds in stages — called "draws" — tied to construction milestones. Before each release, someone has to visit the site and verify the work actually happened. That someone is you. You drive to the job site, photograph what's there and what's not against a checklist the bank provides, submit your report through a platform, and get paid. Lou, the guest on the Side Hustle Show, says he averages about $4,100 a month gross working two to three days a week — roughly 91 hours a month total, before expenses. He reports each inspection pays $60–$75, takes 20–30 minutes on site, and his monthly expenses run about $972 (mostly gas) — so call it roughly $3,100 net. His daughter, a stay-at-home mom with no construction background, says she earned about $1,250 in her first six weeks — two of which she spent on vacation.

No specific construction license is required in most jurisdictions — check your state and local regulations. You don't need to know how to frame a wall. The banks give you a checklist — foundation poured, roof sheathing done, HVAC roughed in — and you photograph each line item with your iPhone (GPS on, so location data embeds in the photos). Platforms like Nationwide Loan Inspectors, Built, Land Gorilla, and Raze send you inspection requests. Some use a bid model where the price starts low and rises if nobody takes the job. You pick what you want, drive out, shoot, submit.

The constraint is geographic. If there's no residential construction near you, there's no work. Lou himself says "it's probably not for the person that lives in the middle of a desert." And his $4,100/month average took time to build — he started wanting $1,200–$1,500 and averaged $2,000 his first year. Most people starting will land closer to his daughter's pace than his current one. That's the number to plan around.

1. Watch free YouTube content on residential construction phases — you need to recognize the difference between rough framing and finish carpentry, not do it yourself.
2. Form a sole proprietorship or LLC and get a CPA (you'll be a 1099 contractor).
3. Get general liability insurance — budget $41–$59/month, not the $35 the episode quoted (see caveat below).
4. Sign up on aggregator platforms: Nationwide Loan Inspectors, Built (app-based), Land Gorilla, Raze (getaraze.com), Inspection Pros.
5. Set competitive pricing. On Land Gorilla, jobs start around $45 and the price rises if nobody bites.
6. Accept your first request. Call the builder or site contact, visit within 24–48 hours.
7. Photograph every checklist item. Use the Regrid app to verify parcel addresses match.
8. Submit through the platform portal. Build a reputation for speed and accuracy — this gets you repeat assignments and preferred-inspector status.
9. Once volume justifies it, consider a drone and Starlink mini for remote sites.

Local lead-gen website rentals

The guest on Koerner Office Ep. 315 reports earning $192,500 last month from 232 websites, with margins above 90%, working two to three hours a week. His system: build an SEO-optimized website for a specific service in a specific city (think "Irving carpet cleaning"), rank it on Google, and rent the leads it generates to a local business for $500–$5,000 a month. He owns the website. If the renter churns, he finds another. One site has been rented at $500/month for seven years. Another generates 30–40 calls a month and rents for $700.

I want to be honest about two things. First, those are his numbers, not yours. He started in February 2016, has nine years of compounding SEO knowledge, and previously ran an SEO agency. He names three other people who've crossed $1M doing this since 2022, but he doesn't say how many people tried and didn't get there. Most won't. The skill gate — real SEO, not "I read a blog post about keywords" — is the whole game. Second, a site takes two to three months to rank before you earn anything from it. Your first few months are pure investment.

That said, the replication detail in this episode is unusually complete, and the startup cost is genuinely low.

1. Browse thumbtack.com/near-me for service categories. Home improvement niches work best.
2. Pick a niche and city under 500K population. Google "[service] [city]" and look for weak signals: map results with fewer than 10 reviews, competitors without websites, directory pages ranking instead of real businesses.
3. Check Google Trends to validate search volume and pick the right keyword variation.
4. Register an exact-match domain (cityservice.com or a variation like .net). Cost: $10–$15.
5. Build a WordPress site with a drag-and-drop builder (Elementor or Divi). Homepage with phone number and quote form. Individual service pages — not a bullet list — with 1,500+ words each. Use ChatGPT or Claude to generate FAQ content pulled from Yelp and Reddit for that niche.
6. Structure your HTML with proper heading hierarchy. Interlink service pages.
7. Wait two to three months for rankings to develop. This is the hard part — nothing happens, and you wonder if it's working.
8. Find a renter: search for local businesses already running Google or Facebook ads (check Meta Ads Library). They already spend on leads. Cold call small companies — tree service, pest control, towing — where the owner picks up the phone.
9. Offer a few days of free leads as a trial. Then convert to a flat monthly fee on Stripe with autopay. No invoicing.
10. Vet the renter: secret-shop their phone answering. Call their customers pretending to do a satisfaction survey. If they don't follow up same-day on leads, fire them and find someone who will.
11. To scale: hire a VA ($1,000–$1,200/month) for outreach and rank tracking. Set up CallRail (~$50–60/month) for call tracking.

Partnership-based customer acquisition (OPP)

Chandler Bolt, on SPI 937, says he went from zero audience and zero revenue to $1M in his first year selling book-publishing coaching. Not through ads. Not through content. Through what he calls OPP — Other People's Platforms. He built genuine relationships with people who already had audiences, and those people eventually put him in front of their email lists and communities.

This isn't a business. It's an acquisition strategy. But I'm including it because it's the most detailed zero-to-one playbook I heard this week, and because it's free.

Here's what he actually did: he wrote a thank-you card every day for a year. Not to prospects — to people he admired, had met briefly, or wanted to build relationships with. He sent personalized gifts to their families. He specifically targeted physical mail because "that's the part that doesn't get filtered by the assistant." Jamie Tardy's kids apparently knew him as "the guy that sends us gifts" before he ever appeared on her platform.

The critical detail: he didn't follow up three weeks later asking for a promotion. The relationships formed first. The platform invitations came later, organically. He reports $80M in total revenue over the past decade from the business this strategy launched.

I'll be blunt about the limitation. He doesn't explain the mechanics of how those promotions actually worked — affiliate deals, JV webinars, email swaps? He doesn't say. And this strategy rewards a specific personality type: patient, genuinely generous, comfortable with months of effort before any return. If that's not you, this will feel like throwing cards into a void.

1. Identify 20–30 people in your space who have audiences you'd want access to. Not celebrities — mid-tier creators, podcast hosts, newsletter writers.
2. Start with genuine engagement. Comment on their content. Share their work with your own network, however small.
3. Write one handwritten thank-you card per day. Mail it. Physical mail stands out precisely because nobody does it.
4. Send occasional gifts — not to the person, but to their family. A knife set, a children's book, something that lives in their house. Budget: $5–$20 per gift.
5. Do not ask for anything. Not for six months minimum. Build the relationship first.
6. When you have something real to offer — a product, a service, a piece of content — mention it in conversation naturally. Let the person offer to share it with their audience.
7. When they do, be ready: have a clear offer page, an email capture system, and a product that delivers.
8. Track which partnerships drive actual revenue. Double down on the ones that work.

It's the rare idea where the reported income ($4,100/month gross) comes with an honest denominator (91 hours, specific expenses, a daughter's first-six-weeks result to benchmark against), the startup cost runs a few hundred dollars in most states (LLC filing fees alone range from about $50 to $500 depending on where you live, plus the first month of insurance), and you don't need to learn a new profession to begin. The AI automation risk is real but not immediate. Start now, build local bank relationships before the platforms shrink, and you have a side income that works around a full-time job.

Sell before you build. Koerner Office Ep. 316 hammered this: post your service on Facebook Marketplace or Nextdoor before you buy equipment or build anything. Free to test. But know that Facebook Marketplace charges 10% on shipped items as of mid-2026 (source), and Nextdoor enforces anti-spam rules that block repeat posts of the same content (source). The Koerner Office

AI model costs dropped 75% in one week. Leveraging AI Ep. 308 reported frontier model tokens fell from $25–$50 to $4.50–$8 per million. GLM 5.2 via OpenRouter costs $1.40 per million input tokens, lowest-provider rate $0.42 (source), versus Claude Opus 4.8 at $5.00 per million input tokens (source). If you're running any AI-powered workflow, audit your model choices now. Leveraging AI

AEO is the new SEO panic. Marketing School reported that every prospect they reach says they need Answer Engine Optimization — getting mentioned in ChatGPT and Gemini results. Budgets are still small, roughly 1/11th of SEO budgets, but growing. If you do SEO work, this is worth watching. Marketing School

SaaS-to-service pivot. The SaaS Podcast featured Respona, which demoted its $800/month DIY tool on its own homepage and led with a done-for-you service instead. One customer went from negotiating down to $500/month to spending $65–$70K/month on the done-for-you version. The lesson: if your customers aren't using your product, they might pay more for the outcome. The SaaS Podcast

Tree removal: $12,000 per job. The Sweaty Startup host reported paying $12,000 — the cheapest quote — to remove one tree. The scaling path he outlined: do the work yourself, hire cutters, hire managers for the cutters, run five or six crews, expand to a second city. The Sweaty Startup

The Koerner Office — Stop Following Your Passion (Do This Instead) — Ep. #316
The Koerner Office — The Most Hands-Off $192K/M Business Anyone Can Copy — Ep. #315
The Side Hustle Show — 748: $2k+/mo Taking Pictures of Houses: The Life of a Loan Draw Inspector
My First Million — Brainstorming business ideas with a billion-dollar founder (Ep. 840)
My First Million — 5 ruthless business lessons from one week in NYC (Ep. 839)
Niche Pursuits Podcast — How Ben Bozzay Turned His Own Problem Into a $20K/Month SaaS
AI Hustle: Make Money with AI — The Website Where AI Hires Each Other
Leveraging AI — 308 | The craziest new releases week in AI history…
Leveraging AI — 307 | Stop Starting From Scratch: Build AI Projects That Actually Remember with Loren Bartley
The $100 MBA Show — A Social Media Strategy For People Who Hate Social Media (MBA2805)
The $100 MBA Show — How Do You Work With Your Spouse Without Sacrificing Your Relationship? (MBA2804)
The $100 MBA Show — Who You Should Listen To When Everyone Is An "Expert" (MBA2803)
Marketing School — Palantir's Best Marketing Strategy Is Not Talking About Palantir
Marketing School — The Data Is In: AI Is Creating Jobs, Not Killing Them
Marketing School — Who Controls Your AI Marketing Stack? (AI Sovereignty)
Marketing School — The AEO Panic Is Here — And It's The Best Thing To Happen To SEO
The SaaS Podcast — He demoted his SaaS to sell a service and 4x'd revenue in 12 months
The Sweaty Startup — The Truth About Private Jets (Built on "Boring" Businesses)
The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast — Why Do Some Memberships Last While Others Fizzle Out?
The Smart Passive Income Online Business and Blogging Podcast — SPI 937: Why Personal Brands Are Winning in 2026 with Chandler Bolt