Support Glacier 1,000 Elevator

If you tried to call Google or Facebook with a problem that you’re having you’re not going to get very far. You’re not going to easily find a number but if you do manage to find some random support number, they’re not going to talk to you. Knowing that, I think there’s a profitable business idea there and I love talking about business opportunities! There’s also an incredible railroad that I found in Switzerland. If I ever get myself over to Switzerland I’m going to ride this train and someone asked a bunch of elderly people about life advice and the results are absolutely incredible and there’s a museum that’s inside of an elevator in New York City.

Let’s talk about the first issue that we’ve all had. I’m going to use Google and Facebook as an example here but think about any giant social media company. If you’re struggling to do something on their site and you can’t find the answer to it on YouTube, wouldn’t it be fantastic if you could just pick up the phone and call Google or call Facebook? Sure, but that’s never going to happen! It’s very hard to get someone on the phone at a lot of companies today, and especially for something like a social media company.

So, I was thinking to myself “why doesn’t someone start a business where they become the unofficial phone support for Google or Facebook?” I was like, that’s genius! How exactly would that work? Well, let’s talk about it.

This business idea doesn’t seem like it would be that difficult to set up and manage. The first thing you’re going to need is a phone number for people to call. I’m sure you’ve seen all those commercials that are like call now it’s only .99 cents a minute, or $2.99 a minute and I found out that there are services that you can buy (and it’s pretty cheap) that will give you all the phone technology behind that part of this idea: payment processing, call routing, the first minute free, etc… 

I found one company that offers this phone service and it’s called Voice Stamps. I don’t know if they’re the best one out there but they do have a lot of the things that you would need for this idea. And marketing-wise they’re really smart, they showed an earnings example! So, let’s say that you charge $2.99 per minute, and the call lasts for 30 minutes. Basically, it says total sale on that call would be $2.99 times 30 minutes which is $89.70. Now, there are fees and Merchant gateways and all that but basically, on a thirty minute call, you can make basically $80 dollars! That’s amazing! Think of all the older people, all the seniors in your life, that have asked you for help doing something online and remember that there’s some older people that don’t have those techy people to call. This is who this business would be for, and I see a lot of potential here.

For thirty minutes, your sales would be basically $80, right? So let’s multiply that times two and say that for every hour you’ll have $160 in sales. But imagine if you had a hundred support people answering these phones, just imagine the sales amount in that scenario! It would take some time and a lot of effort to build a business where you’ve got let’s say, 100 support people, but let’s do the math! $160 per hour per support person time 100 would, $16,000 per hour (we’ll talk about expenses in a bit).

Alright, let’s talk about this phone package by Voice Stamps. It’s a one-time setup cost of $800 and $169 a month. The advanced package gets you 999 agent extensions, auto attendant menu options, live call transfer, set any rate per minute, multiple rates supported and even hold music! So basically you can have a large part of the back end technology of this business for $800 down and $170 a month. 

Getting the phone number is step number one and I would recommend a phone number that can be translated into a few easy to remember words, something like “Get Help Now.” I’m sure you’ve seen those phone numbers that are promoted as words and then you see the actual phone digits underneath it. Once you have that phone number that’s also a few words, try and buy that domain name, so something like “gethelpnow.com” so that the phone number matches the domain. It’s really important to maintain consistent branding if possible.

And the second thing you’re going to need for this business idea is a screen sharing system. 

Imagine an older person sitting at their computer not knowing how to do something on Facebook, but they can’t really articulate what they are seeing – that’s going to be a very difficult scenario to help the person with their problem so you’ll need to have a way for them to initiate a screen sharing session and then to share their screen with the support agent. Typically, screen sharing software gives you a special code and the customers would then give that code to the support person so they can see the customers screen. So you obviously need the phone number, but screen sharing is a close second.

And then of course, you have to find a bunch of smart internet users to be the support people. You might already know a lot of these people (think about your friends) that might want to make some extra money on the side. Of course, this would be a remote job that can be done anywhere so that is going to attract a lot of people. The support people just need to understand how Google works, how Facebook works, simple things like that. And I was thinking to myself, how would you pay them for this? 

Why don’t you just split it 50/50? Seems reasonable, right? 

I would make a list of all my friends that are good with computers (Facebook and Google specifically) and say something like, “Would you be into helping people with Google and Facebook for money? You could do it from anywhere, you would make eighty dollars for each hour you provided support.” How many people do you know make eighty dollars an hour working from their computer (which can be done from anywhere)?

Probably not many.

Now that you’ve got the phone number, the domain name and the support people, there are two other things that I think would be really useful for marketing and promoting this business. It would be to have a promotion where the first two minutes are free. Because some people might be afraid to call and think “Oh, this is a really tough problem that will take an hour.” But if you call and when you get your problem solved in the first two minutes, it’s free. I think it’s a great promotion to get this business started.

And then I was thinking how powerful video testimonials would be for this business. So what if for all calls under ten minutes (the reports in that phone software will tell you what calls fit this criteria) you wrote to that customer and said, “Hey, I hope you got a lot of value from this service. Will you give us a video testimonial? I’ll refund your money back so the call will be free.” If you do that, you can build video testimonials of people that are happy with your service, and all you’re doing is essentially reimbursing the person and just paying the telephone support person for their time – which will not be that much as you are capping the potential calls to a max of ten minutes, so they won’t be the really long, expensive calls. To help the non-techie person, I would have a page on the site that shows the person how to record a video from their phone or computer. Now of course, there’s more to this business, but those are the main pieces I see with this business. It seems like it might work! There’s a market there for people to get help like this, and big companies are useless when it comes to phone support like that.

Okay, so let’s say that you do this, and you’re making thousands of dollars an hour, where are you going to go with all that cashola? 

In Switzerland, there is this incredible railroad system called the Glacier Express. The train has glass on the sides, and on the top, and it goes through these incredible mountains and rivers, and there’s snow, and there’s wonderful food on board, and it goes over these wonderful bridges. The route takes you through three canyons of Valais, Uri and Graubünden. 

It’s eight hours of sheer pleasure for your eyes and your palate too.

Like I said it’s got glass on the sides so you have this amazing view of Switzerland for eight hours. I’m not sure of the price, but whatever the price is, I would absolutely do it because you’re not going to get views like that any other way other than on this railroad. So next time you’re in Switzerland, go on the Glacier Express because I certainly want to check it out.

I subscribe to a newsletter created by Sahil Bloom, he’s sort of a business guy, investor guy, and he said this, “Every year on my birthday, I like to conduct some interesting exercise that will push me to grow in a new way. This year, I asked a number of 90-year-olds a simple question: if you could speak to your 32-year-old self, what advice would you give?”

What a great question!

The response he got totaled over a thousand years of lived experience, and some of these are just incredible. So, I’m just going to read you a few of these, but definitely go to sahilbloom.com and search for this post, it’s really great.

“Now and then break out the fancy china and drink the good wine for no reason at all. Stop waiting to enjoy the Finer Things. If tomorrow is never guaranteed, find the time to enjoy it today.”

“Dance at weddings until your feet are sore. Don’t let the fear of embarrassment stop you from having a ball. Dance proudly.”

“Tell your partner you love them every night before falling asleep. Someday, you’ll find the other side of the bed empty and wish you could.” 

That’s deep, right?

“Treat your body like a house you have to live in for another seventy years. Invest in keeping the foundation structure sound. A little bit of regular maintenance can go a long way.” 

What great advice.

“Always remind yourself that your track record for making it through your bad days is perfect. Right, because you’re still here. You got through it. It’s easy to lose sight of this when you’re down. Zoom out and reclaim your perspective.”

I love that.

“If something has a minor issue, repair it right away. Minor issues become major issues over time. This applies equally to love, friendship, health, and home.”

“The most damning lie you can tell is the lie you tell yourself. If you can’t be honest with yourself, how can you be honest with anyone else?” 

Fantastic, right? 

“Whenever you hug someone, make sure they are the one to let go first. Treat every hug like it could be your last. You never know when it could be.”

“Taking no risk is the biggest risk you can take. Regret from inaction is always more painful than regret from action.” 

That’s absolutely true.

“It doesn’t have to be perfect for it to be wonderful. Nothing in life is perfect and that’s okay because wonderful is pretty damn good.” 

There’s so much more of these and to see them all go to sahilbloom.com and search for life lessons from a thousand years.

Talking about great ideas!

Let’s say you were walking by an alleyway in New York City, and you saw two people staring in little tiny windows of a metal door, you’d be like, what is going on, right? It would be very strange to see people standing there, but they might be looking at something called the Mmuseumm. It’s a funny name, with two M’s at the beginning and then two M’s at the end – Mmuseumm. I don’t know why, but it seems fun. What they did was they essentially took an unused freight elevator, cleaned it up, made it look really nice on the inside, put shelves and then put exhibits on the inside, and the doors (sometimes they’re open, and you can actually walk in) but the doors have two glass panels on it so that anyone can walk by and take a look to enjoy what’s on the inside.

There’s usually a theme right to a museum, right? Well, I’m not quite sure on this one. From the photos on their Instagram, I see a Dora the Explorer backpack, a floppy disk, what looks like perfume bottles, maybe a fast food box, a stuffed animal and more. I don’t know the entire story about the collection but one of the things that they did that I thought was very interesting was they provided a phone number that you can call as you’re standing there and it will play a prerecorded message talking about the different items in the collection. I think you can expand on that and have a museum QR code system that gives you more content than just the audio but the idea is to provide more detail about the exhibits than someone can just assume by looking at it, and it’s all in a little elevator. Very cool!

They also created a beautiful book showing some of the exhibits. 

Now, maybe you’re a museum and you’re looking at this, you’re going, “Yeah, that’s great, but how does that help me?” Well, is there any reason why you can’t find something, maybe on the other side of town, or the town over and have a little exhibit? 

Take some of the pieces from your exhibit and put it over there and let people enjoy the exhibits in your museum but not physically at your museum. And that’s all these people did. I don’t know if they’re unused freight elevators where you are, but it doesn’t have to be a freight elevator. Maybe just an empty storefront. You could ask a storefront that’s not being used, “Hey, can we set up a little museum right here in the window?” And it’ll get your name out there, it’ll get the exhibits out there. 

Seems like a win-win solution for everybody. I absolutely love it, called the, once again, Mmuseumm. The two M’s at the beginning and at the end museum. Genius idea, love it!