🧠 An Insurance Lead Gen Website ft. Anthony Castrio
How to Find a Trend to Build a Business Around and Why Retiring Early Can Kill You
This week on the 3 ideas podcast, I was joined by Anthony Castrio.
Anthony is the founder of Indie Worldwide, a startup accelerator that connects startup founders around the world.
Anthony has grown Indie Worldwide to over 4,000 free members, and 300 paying member’s, grossing ~$1,501 per month.
We walk through:
How Anthony built a community based business.
What it’s like being a digital nomad.
When you should quit your job and go all in on your business.
The business idea of the week.
Check out the full interview on Youtube 👇
Now let’s get into the idea of the week.
1. Business idea of the Week: An Insurance Lead Generation Website
When you live in a state like Florida or North Carolina, hurricane and flood insurance is a must.
Hurricane’s show up like a drunk airbnb guest. They make a mess, and leave you with the cleanup.
Let’s say you’re looking at moving to Florida and want to understand the likely hood of a hurricane hitting the house you’re buying.
You’re likely going to Google and searching a combination of the words “Hurricanes in XYZ town”. And that’s where this business idea starts.
The idea: Create a website that showcases historical hurricane or natural disaster data for local areas.
There are a few different ways you can monetizing this website (ads, membership, etc.), but let’s look at how this website can generate insurance leads.
Let’s say someone types “hurricanes in Wilmington, NC” and you manage to rank on the first page of Google for these key words. The user will land on your webpage, and receive a prompt to input their street address to see the likelihood of hurricane damage.
Next, they’ll be re-directed to a screen saying “Get your hurricane report for XYZ address. Just input your email, and we’ll sent you the report”.
On the email sign up form they give you their name, email, and agree to your terms of service (aka, this email will be shared with an insurance company).
You’ll then submit that user as a lead to an insurance company, and collect your cash.
I know I just made it sound simple, but there are a few moving parts to this business.
You’ll need to find data sets to actually create the hurricane reports for areas.
You’ll need to have 🔥 programmatic SEO to rank on google, and drive traffic.
And you’ll need to partner with insurance companies that will pay for these leads.
This won’t be an easy business for a beginner, but it has the ability to print cash.
And I know this business model works. because renttoown.org and housinglist.com both use this same exact model.
They have rent-to-own houses on their website, but in order to see the prices: you give them your email → and you become a lead for a credit repair service.
You can listen to Anthony breakdown this idea and how he would build it starting at 35:00 in the interview.
2. Retiring Early Can Kill You
Okay, I know that headline is aggressive… but I hope it got your attention.
Many people dream of retiring in their 40’s with enough money to never work again.
And I get it. No more alarm clock. No boss to answer to. And the thought of doing whatever you want everyday.
But here’s why you might want to rethink that dream.
In this 2001 study released by the Social Security Office of Policy, it was found that early retirement is correlated with early death.
“A positive correlation between age of retirement and life expectancy may suggest that retirement age is correlated with health. Men who retire early die sooner than men who retire at age 65 or older.”
It almost seems backwards…
But this actually makes sense to me, and I have a few theories:
Men who retire early are likely to have: less purpose, structure, and problems to solve.
And as the old saying goes “if you don’t use it, you’ll lose it”.
So if the goal isn’t to retire early, what’s is it?
Find a job that you don’t want to retire from.
3. How to Find a Trend to Build a Business Around.
A trend is like throwing gas on a fire. The fire is your business, and the trend is the gas.
The bigger the trend = more gasoline.
For example, when the COVID lockdowns started → home gym equipment became a massive trend.
And if you were in the home gym equipment business, the COVID lockdowns became gasoline to your fire.
Check out that massive spike for “home gym” searches in March of 2020.
This trend popped up overnight, but was mainly due to the circumstances of COVID.
So how can we find trends that are just starting to take off?
Reddit is a website made up of millions of “subreddits”.
Each subreddit is dedicated to a specific topic and allows members to contribute to discussions about the topic.
So if a subreddit is growing, it’s likely that the topic is becoming a trend.
And subredditstats.com lets us see the top growing subreddits.
Now lets take a look at an example:
r/BudgetKeebs is a subreddit dedicated budget mechanical keyboards and grew 2625% this year.
There’s our trend and opportunity.
With this data, you can create a business around budget mechanical keyboards (ecom, courses, youtube videos, etc".), and use this subreddit to find your customers or ideas for products.
Just. like. that.
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