Happy Sunday!
I have one regret with this newsletter. My first 25-30 editions were all 1,500 - 3,000 words. Those take hours! I set the bar too high. Now that I have a podcast it’s been hard finding the time to stay consistent with that length. Not that anyone asked for that length in the first place…
(Speaking of podcasts, I’ve been ranked in the top 10-15 of the entrepreneurship category for a week now!)
I can’t do that many words every week, but I will when I can. I’ll still commit to doing 1 email/week. I’ll just focus more on shorter versions these things, as always:
And hey, this email today is still 1,157 words!
My keynote yesterday in SLC went great. Thanks for letting me hash out my thoughts over the last couple weeks here in this newsletter. I thought a couple hours of prep would do, but it ended up being 10+. I’m considering giving the same presentation at other conferences, too. I’ll send a link once the recording is edited. LMK if you know of any cool conferences I should speak at!
I think there could be enough content around the concept of hunting your “white whale” that I could write a book about only that. Maybe one day…
Let’s get to it.
Last week Nik was going through old texts and he sent me a screenshot from 2 years ago, and it brought up some memories:
You know you’re a serial entrepreneur when you forget businesses you started a mere 2 years ago, as well as the accompanying lawsuit that sparked the idea in the first place.
You see, two years ago something terrible happened: I lost $288,000 on a deal that went south in China.
We ordered a bunch of Bitcoin miners for a bigger customer and they got held up in customs. Our vendors are responsible for these miners until they hit our doorstep, but they wouldn’t do a thing. That’s the sucky part about importing stuff from China. 1/100 shipments you’ll get something held up in customs for no reason whatsoever.
It can take months to get them back.
In the Bitcoin mining world during a bear market, months = losses. Those things plummeted in value over that timeframe, and the seller would not do a thing, so I had to take action.
The first thing I did was harass them via WhatsApp for a couple weeks. They kept making empty promises but never did anything. Time to ramp it up a notch.
I then flew to a BTC conference in Miami that I knew they’d be at. I walked up to their booth and confronted them on the spot. They knew who I was. I told them I knew where their office was in Houston and I was going to sit there all day every day until I got my $300k back.
That’s a lot of money! They made promises but never followed through. I had to go to plan C. I found a lawyer.
I have a Chinese friend named Brian that I reached out to for help. He knew of just the right lawyer.
This lawyer (Ben) was AWESOME! He was $250 per hour and worth every penny. The same calibre lawyer in the US would be at least 3x that. He scared the crap out of that vendor and guess what? Within a few weeks we had all of our money back.
I was only out of pocket a few grand in legal fees.
Most rational people would stop there, but I just can’t. I have to monetize everything I find awesome! It’s a sickness.
I asked Ben, “Hey, what would you pay me if I sent you more legal work?”
“$77/hour.”
That was a very specific number, but I liked it. He was willing to pay me about 1/3 of his billable rate for any client I brought him for as long as they stayed a client.
You see, this can be a murky area here in the US. There are regulations about lead generation in the legal field. You have to do it the right way.
In China? Shoooot. Not so much. I was certain there were more people like me that needed legal help in a foreign country. I just had to find them.
So I bought a domain, chineselawsuit. com (no longer active).
Then I went to Wix and copy/pasted an existing site I had and swapped out the copy.
Then I went to Google Ads and started a campaign targeting wealthy business owners in the US and Western Europe that searched for keywords such as
By the end of the day I had my first leads!
All of this took just a couple hours!
It was so fascinating seeing what people filled out on the contact form. So many product disputes, customs disputes, trademark disputes, etc. These leads were worth THOUSANDS!
I was really liking what I saw…and so was Ben!
Then I started looking for more premium domains, and I came across internationallawyers . com. The owner owned dozen of mid to premium domains in the legal niche that he’d inherited from a friend that recently died.
I was about to buy one of the domains for $10k to scale up the business but…Ben decided to move to Toronto.
Momentum died. I moved on to something else.
But there is still very much a business here. Here’s two things you could do in this niche:
Target Brazilian business owners looking for Australian lawyers. Or Germans looking for Americans. You get the idea. The options are endless!
Here’s a screenshot of my Google Ads campaign. I generated 50 leads for $23 each! Not bad at all for a product worth hundreds to thousands of dollars!
Let me know how it goes if you execute on this.
Also, if you ever see a tweet (such as the ones below from last week) that you’d like a whole newsletter on, just LMK.
I’m ALWAYS looking for good newsletter ideas.
Top Tweets of the Past Week
As always, thanks for reading!
Chris Koerner
chrisjkoerner.com