Sweaty businesses

I follow Peter Askew because of his story of selling onions on the internet. It’s inspiring to see how he starts these projects where he adds a job board or a ecommerce website to conventionally old school industries. Besides selling premium Vidallia onions, he also has a job board for ranch work. His customer submit photos like to for their job listings, and sometimes he goes visit them!

I love how his projects are a nice blend of old school and new, tradition and tech, online and offline (or off-the-grid!).

And for forever I’ve wanted to try his approach for a project. He just tweeted about it:

cheat sheet:

✅ a descriptive (generic) .com domain
✅ above average search volume (5k+/mo)
✅ low serp competition
✅ high ticket price; 50%+ margins
✅ old school industry (manufacturing, ranching, ag, home svs)
✅ over-serve everyone

now, go

Simple and underrated playbook. I’ve always done descriptive and generic .com domains whenever I can. But so far not tried using SEO tools like Ahrefs or Semrush to learn about search volume and serp competition. So I just went and created a Semrush account, might end up paying for 1 month to do some research!

Old school, sweaty startup industries are interesting because of the potential for tech, but scary in a way because I lack of experience with them. But that never stopped Peter! He just called them, met them, talked to them about it.

A few industries I can think of:

Plumbing
Electrician
Construction
Small-medium F&B
Traditional crafts
Food hawkers
Domestic cleaning

Nick Huber (@sweatystartup) got a list of 200+ simple sweaty business ideas too, and I like a few there:

Pest control
Landscaping
Window cleaning
Tree trimming
Carpet cleaning
Laundry services
Mold removal
Pet walking
Pet groming
Solar panel installation
Home appliance repair
Locksmith
Carpenter
Drone Pilot

Imagine a simple job board for businesses to hire people. But first research on search volume and serp!