🧠 Vending Machine Placement Service Side Hustle

Google's new AI music machine and What I'm reading

Today’s read time: 2 minutes and 25 seconds

What’s up party people! We’re back with another side hustle idea!

Before we dive into today’s idea, let’s connect on Twitter!

1. Business idea of the Week: A Vending Machine Placement Service

If you’re into side hustles, you’ve probably looked into vending machines.

After all, they seem like a great (small) business.

You place a vending machine in a busy area → restock the inventory → collect the cash.

But if you’re like me, the one question you ask is…. How do you find a place to put the machine?

And where there’s a problem, there’s a business.

The idea: Create a vending machine placement service.

Instead of dealing with constantly re-stocking machines at mediocre margins, you’ll just source the locations.

This service will help people find a business or public area to put their vending machines.

You’ll lock in a location, and sell it to someone that will place a machine there and service it.

Since this is usually what people see as the hardest part of the vending machine business, they’ll be willing to pay a premium for it.

Now you might be wondering… how will you find places to put the vending machines?

There’s no right or wrong way to do this, but here’s how it’s typically done:

Put together a list of businesses, apartments, or places in your area that receive a lot of foot traffic (ex: hospitals, apartment buildings, golf courses, etc.)

Next, it’s time to get in touch:

Cold calling: you can cold call the owners or managers of the places on your list and ask them if you can place a vending machine in the building.

Walk-in: good ole’ in-person combat. Walk into the places on your list and ask for the manager or owner.

The key is to highlight what’s in it for the owner.

Sometimes they’ll want a monthly fee to have the machine there, but sometimes they just want the additional amenity to offer their customers, without servicing it themselves.

Now let’s assume you’ve got your first location to sell.

Post it on Facebook marketplace and/or Craigslist. You should be able to get a bunch of interest from these platforms. If not, call other venting machine operators in your area and tell them you have a location for sale.

On the flip side, you can start by finding a buyer before you source the spot. This can be done by calling local vending operators, and asking if they are interested in new locations. Agree on a fee and start sourcing.

Now let’s talk about pricing. I’m no expert here, but I assume you can charge anywhere from $500 to $1,000 for a spot.

And if you decide you’d rather operate a full vending machine business, you’ll already have the hardest part out of the way.

Once you’ve proved your business model, you can hire additional overseas cold callers an VA’s to fully operate this.

And thats a wrap!

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2. Things I’m Reading.

• Sales Scandal: Amex Sales Reps Get Jipped - The Follow Up

• How To Grow & Monetize LinkedIn - Justin Welsh

• Publishing 5,000 Blog Posts - Anthony Iannarino

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Google’s AI Music Maker

This week I was accepted into Google’s new AI Music generator, MusicLM.

First impression: Wow. It’s impressive. Not quite there yet… but pretty close.

All you have to do is describe the type of music you want, and it generates it in a few seconds.

Here’s a few prompts I gave it and the results it gave me:

“Emotional electronic dance music that sounds like it would be played at a large festival” - Click here to listen.

“Country pop music that would be played on the radio” - Click here to listen.

”Classic rock with a fast tempo” - Click here to listen.

As you can see, it’s almost there.

And it also comes with limitations…

I told it to make a “fast tempo Drake song”, but as you’d expect, it told me no.

So is this going to replace traditional music production soon? I don’t think so.

But there’s a strong chance that AI plays a major role in music production soon.

Want to try MusicLM out for yourself? You can join the waitlist here (it only took me 1 day to get access).