He Makes $4K/Day With This Weird Middleman Business - Ep. #295

Summary

The Koerner Office Podcast: He Makes $4K/Day With This Weird Middleman Business (Ep. #295)

Podcast Host: Chris Koerner
Guest: William Lindholm
Date: April 28, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this engaging episode, Chris Koerner interviews William Lindholm, founder of a unique “cold caking” business—a physical gifting company using cakes to break through digital noise and secure business meetings. William shares how, within six months, his company rocketed to $120,000/month in revenue, why the “dead Internet theory” underpins his strategy, and how leveraging AI has enabled his rapid, scalable growth. This candid discussion covers startup pivots, the power of attention, creative sales outreach, automation, and future plans for “physical interruption” in a world flooded with AI-generated content.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origin of the Business Idea

• Sales Competition in Norway:
  • William’s idea emerged from a sales hackathon where he pitched “automated birthday cake deliveries for companies.”
  • Booked 17 meetings in 4 hours with major companies (e.g., KPMG):
    “I booked like 17 meetings in four hours...so I was like, okay, this is big. People want this.” (04:10; William)
  • Realized high-value sales were easier when offering something unique—cake instead of a standard cold call.
• Business Model Evolution:
  • Started with automated birthday cake deliveries for companies in Norway, integrating with HR systems.
  • Pivoted after expanding to San Francisco, realizing U.S. culture didn’t prioritize employee birthdays in the same way: “We tried to do the same thing...with birthdays, and nobody cared...we pivoted.” (02:44; William)

2. Pivots & Adaptation to Market

• Initial Norway Success:
  • Consistent $12,000/month in passive revenue from automated birthday cakes; William’s mother handles customer service on autopilot.
• Challenge in the U.S.:
  • U.S. companies weren’t interested in birthday cakes for employee morale; retention wasn’t a big enough pain point.
  • Shifted focus to sales enablement—using cakes as “door openers” for booking meetings and prospecting.
• Notable Pivot Trigger:
  • Sending cakes to big VC firms (16Z, Sequoia) resulted in viral social media buzz, numerous inbound leads, and media coverage: “We cold caked a16z, Sequoia...that went viral...from there the ball’s just—like it's been nonstop.” (23:10; William)

3. The 'Cold Caking' Business Model

• Core Concept:
  • Send cakes to prospects as a way to initiate or warm up client relationships for outbound sales prospecting.
  • Not limited to software—works for real estate, accounting, agency services.
• Results & Metrics:
  • 35% of sent cakes convert into booked meetings (massive compared to 2-3% for cold calling). “From the cakes we've sent out, 35% have converted into meetings, which is really just crazy.” (15:56; William)
  • High retention and referral effects when recipients share their cake experiences: “...they might take a picture of it and post it on social media. And that gives you PR. Then they reach out...that’s what’s happening right now.” (24:02; William)
• Not Just Cakes:
  • The product is a “physical interruption”—cakes today, potentially other gifts (ping pong tables, unicorn cakes, etc.) in the future.
  • Creativity and novelty drive virality and attention.

4. The Dead Internet Theory & Why Physical Gifting Works

• Theory Explanation:
  • Internet content—emails, phone calls, videos—becoming almost entirely AI-generated; outbound digital efforts lose their novelty and effectiveness. “99.99% of the content we consume...is all going to be AI. In a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails...too much noise.” (12:07; William)
  • Humans will rely on AI agents for filtering and prioritization; breaking through requires something physical.
• Strategic Implication:
  • Physical gifts cut through digital noise and create memorable, higher-stakes first touches.

5. Automation & Operational Efficiency

• AI-Driven Operations:
  • Uses cloud-based agents (Claude Cowork + email systems like Superhuman) to automate:
    • Sourcing and vetting bakeries globally.
    • Negotiating discounts and partnership terms.
    • Managing logistics for massive simultaneous orders.
    • Tracking and quality control through photos and delivery confirmations. “Every two hours, it checks my email...sources 20 new bakeries. It responds to all the emails, negotiates...this sort of outreach would have been impossible just a year ago.” (01:12/34:29; William)
  • No involvement needed from William in day-to-day bakery outreach—he just thumbs-up or thumbs-down terms.
• Scalability:
  • Operating in the U.S., Norway, and fielding leads from Australia, UK, Canada, Spain, and Mexico.
  • Example: Archie.com, a dentist software company, sending 1,000 cakes for a single campaign (16:51).

6. Economics, Traction, and Growth

• Startup Timeline & Numbers:
  • Only six months old; pivoted to the sales-focused model ~six weeks prior to the podcast.
  • Current revenue: $120,000/month with $30-40k net profit. “This month we're doing $120,000 revenue...30, 40 grand profit.” (25:32/28:06; William)
• Overhead & Profits:
  • Lean team; most profits reinvested for growth.
  • Major challenge: demand and global logistics management, not lack of customers.
• Growth/Scaling Ambition:
  • Considering fundraising to scale faster, meet multinational demand, and expand offerings.

7. Applications, Variations, and Advice for Listeners

• Ideal Use Cases:
  • Best for high-LTV products/services (enterprise SaaS, agency services, real estate, accounting).
  • Can be used for client retention as well as new business development.
• Creative Implementations:
  • Example: SEO agency sends cakes with a QR code linking to a custom video audit (29:22).
• Standing Out:
  • “Do crazy things. Post about it. You’re gonna go viral.” (31:09; William)
  • Attention is (still) everything.
• Partnering/Franchising:
  • Open to collaboration or franchising in new regions. “If someone does want to start something similar, I encourage that...maybe I go, hey, we have this brand...we almost franchise it.” (33:56; William)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Breaking Through Digital Noise:
  • “In a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails, we're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs...so the way you cut through...is physical gifting. Getting attention is absolutely everything.” (00:28; William)
• On Viral Effects:
  • “If you send a cake to X company, then X company might...post it on social media. And that gives you PR...then they reach out to me and say, we want to do this as well.” (24:01; William)
• On Execution as a Moat:
  • “The tediousness is the moat...that’s why Plaid is a billion dollar business. Because they went and did the hard thing.” (36:09; Host)
• On Automation:
  • “I have an AI agent...constantly sourcing bakeries...negotiates with the bakeries...if the discount is good enough...I give a thumbs up or down.” (34:29; William)
• On Agency:
  • “One thing your viewers might find interesting is, like, how I have my agents set up.” (01:06/33:56; William)
• On the Business’s Early Growth and Sacrifice:
  • “I lived in a closet for the whole duration of that.” (00:05/26:29; William)

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Important Timestamps

• 00:28 – The Dead Internet Theory & Physical Gifting
• 02:20 – Introduction to the Cake Business
• 04:10 – Origin at the Norway Sales Competition
• 11:30 – Market Differences Between Norway & US
• 12:07/13:39 – Deep Dive on the Dead Internet Theory
• 15:56 – 35% Conversion Rate from Cakes
• 16:51 – Case Study: 1,000 Cakes for Archie.com
• 23:09 – Pivot to 'Cold Caking' & Viral Success
• 25:32/28:06 – Traction: $120k Monthly, $30-40k Profit
• 29:22 – Example: Cakes with Video Audit for Agencies
• 31:09 – Advice on Getting Attention (“Do crazy things...”)
• 33:56 – Franchising/Partnering & AI Automation Detail
• 36:09 – Execution and Tediousness as Competitive Advantage

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Summary Table: Business Model Snapshot

| Feature | Details | |---------------------------|--------------------------------------------------------------------------------| | Core Offer | Physical gifting (cakes) used as sales outreach to book meetings | | Primary Market | US (now global inquiries), targeting high-LTV B2B spaces (SaaS, agencies, etc) | | Automation | AI agents for sourcing, negotiation, and logistics | | Revenue/Profit | $120,000/month; $30-40k profit (as of episode) | | Viral Effects | Social posts → PR → more inbound leads | | Retention | High, with recurring/retention cake campaigns | | Potential for Expansion | Yes—more gifts, different markets, possible franchising |

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Final Thoughts

William Lindholm’s “cold caking” concept provides a fascinating, highly actionable blueprint for creative business development in an era awash with AI noise. The episode is packed with actionable insights on modernizing sales outreach, the power of physical gifts, leveraging automation, and scaling a services marketplace. Whether you’re a founder, agency owner, or just a hustler looking for an original edge, Lindholm’s story is both inspiring and practical.

William Lindholm:

• LinkedIn & Instagram: @William Lindholm

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Interested listeners are encouraged to explore more at TKOPOD.com, or reach out if they’re looking to partner, franchise, or simply try “cold caking” themselves.

Transcript

[William Lindholm]

So this month we're doing $120,000 revenue. Yeah, it's crazy. Our company's only existed for six months. I lived in a closet for the whole duration of that. In Norway, we're passively invoicing like, $12,000 a month right now. Wow. I have my mom as customer service there.

[Podcast Host]

It's on autopilot. Like, why cut off the revenue? Right? Mom needs a job.

[William Lindholm]

Next week, we're doing a thousand cakes for one single company.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. Tell me your thoughts on the dead Internet theory. What that has to do with this?

[William Lindholm]

The dead Internet theory is that 99.9 of the content we consume on Internet emails, phone calls, videos, such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI. So in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails, we're not going to be able to send LinkedIn DMs or cold call anyone because there's going to be too much noise. So the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in, is physical gifting. Getting attention is absolutely everything.

[Podcast Host]

A, it buys your loyalty. B, it's a cheap way to stay top of mind, which is harder than ever today.

[William Lindholm]

I mean, sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending an email would probably make you seem annoying.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

One thing your viewers might find interesting is, like, how I have my agents set up.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, yes. Very curious about that.

[William Lindholm]

I'm not involved in it. Every two hours, it checks, my email, goes and sources 20 new bakeries. It responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries until we have a deal. This sort of outreach would have been impossible just a year ago. And I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries.

[Podcast Host]

So if someone's watching this right now and they're thinking like, okay, this works, this makes perfect sense. But I don't have any need to sell. What should I sell? So I come across this guy that started a business six weeks ago and he did $120,000 his second month. 40,000 of that was profit. What's he doing? Cold caking. He's doing cold caking. And if you've never heard of that, it's because it's brand new. In a world where cold calls, texts and emails are less effective than ever, this is the strategy you need to make a bunch of money selling whatever it is you sell. This story is freaking amazing. This guy's gone viral a bunch of times, so I had to Ask him all these questions for myself. Please enjoy. Hey, please just take half a second and hit subscribe on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you're listening to this right now. It would really mean a lot. Well, William, why don't you tell us who you are and what you do?

[William Lindholm]

Well, I'm William and I help you get customers by sending cake. We started like six months ago saying we were going to automate birthday deliveries with cake. Did that in Norway, sort of blew up and we decided, let's think big and go to the States. So we moved to SF and said, let's do it in San Francisco as well.

[Podcast Host]

So you moved from Norway to San Francisco specifically to expand your cake shipping business?

[William Lindholm]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, I feel like if you could make a business work in Oslo, Norway, you could make it work anywhere.

[William Lindholm]

Exactly. But actually, the fun thing is we came to San Francisco and then we tried to do the same thing, the birthday thing, and nobody in San Francisco cared because I think the American culture is nobody cares about their employees, so.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, shoot. Okay.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, so we pivoted and.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, well, first of all, like, Norway is tiny. It's freezing. It's, you know, middle of nowhere, Northern Europe, and it's probably not very business friendly, I imagine. Right?

[William Lindholm]

Well, it's definitely business friendly, but it's a smaller market. Right. I mean.

[Podcast Host]

Right.

[William Lindholm]

The whole population in all of Norway is 5 million people. Right. So. Oh, geez.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, that's like a little bigger than Utah.

[William Lindholm]

Exactly.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so tell me what your business started as and what first gave you the idea for this business. And I know your model changed when you moved to sf, so explain exactly what the business model started as the

[William Lindholm]

idea actually came from. I've worked in sales since I was 12 years old, so always been been chasing that. And in Norway, there was almost like a hackathon, but for sales. So it was called the Norwegian Championship of Sal. And there's like a hundred sales reps that show up. I'm like, stressed and nervous. I have no idea what I'm selling. And then I get a paper in front of me that says, you're going to automate birthday deliveries with cake.

[Podcast Host]

This was just randomly assigned to you at a competition?

[William Lindholm]

Yep. It's ridiculous, but that day I booked like 17 meetings in four hours, like companies like KPMG. So I was like, okay, this is big. People want this. And from there, I started building a birthday solution. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So first of all, how did you book those 17 meetings? Just outbound, cold calling to a list that they provided. You?

[William Lindholm]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

And what was your pitch to them?

[William Lindholm]

I don't remember exactly what I pitched back then, but I think it was something like we started this new company, we're doing something crazy, we got investors on board, and we would like to give you a free cake if you'd like to take a meeting with us. And then like I told them the idea, which was, we're going to automate your birthday deliveries, and everyone laughed at that because you get so many cold cakes, but when is someone. Or you get so many cold calls, but when someone called you and asked if you want a cake. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

So it was like a very smooth intro into the call and. Yep, just worked.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so there's like a couple different gifts going on here. Like, you want to give them a cake to get their attention. Right. But the quote unquote hypothetical startup that you just raised money for is something that automates birthday deliveries that, like, a large company would buy from you so they could better serve their employees. Is that right?

[William Lindholm]

Right. So let's say you have 40 employees and all of these employees, you want to make sure they. They feel seen. So you do something for their birthday. Maybe you do something every time someone turns 30, 40, 50, not every single birthday, whatever. You have to recognize these people. And so at least in Norway, it's very normal to do that with cake. And what's the worst that can happen, right? You remember someone but forget someone else. So we just figured, okay, let's just solve that pain and make that never be an issue again.

[Podcast Host]

And was the idea to integrate with like Gusto and ADP and Paychex and use that data to automate everything?

[William Lindholm]

Yep. I think that's also where we met the problem with it because when we were cold calling people, we were very aggressive with, like, you have to sign up for this. And then we integrated with like 40 different HR systems and we said, okay, let's scale this when we get to the US So we did that and we a B tested like 40 different ads and none of them converted. So I think the good thing is this is a genuine cash cow business opportunity because the retention is really good. Like, if someone signs up for this, they're going to stay there. But the problem was when we tried to really scale this and make this a big company, we met the issue of this not being a big enough problem for someone to actually sign in with their HR system, make sure everything is okay without a human person pushing them. So that's, that's why we pivoted. Like, we, we grew that to $150,000 AR before we, we pivoted.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my gosh. Okay, I'm still confused about the competition aspect of this. Did at this sales competition, did they give all of the sales people the same hypothetical startup, the same offer?

[William Lindholm]

Yep.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so you weren't supposed to actually turn this into a business, is that right?

[William Lindholm]

That's right.

[Podcast Host]

How many people were at this competition?

[William Lindholm]

Like 50. I mean, there was like a thousand people watching, but like 50 sales reps or more that competed. So they just put us in rounds. It was like, I think they divided the day into five bulks of like one hours. So you cold called for one hour. Whoever had the least meetings after one hour, the. The 50% least got knocked out. And then they did that five times until there was a final, and then the winner got like $10,000, I think. So.

[Podcast Host]

And how close did you get to winning third place?

[William Lindholm]

I was one meeting away from first place, so.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, no.

[William Lindholm]

So, but, but still, I mean, I think I got $500 and I got the idea that made this happen, so.

[Podcast Host]

So were you on a team or was it just you cold calling for five hours straight?

[William Lindholm]

Just me.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, now, so of the 50 people, you were the only one that said, hey, like, I know this is just hypothetical here, but I'm actually going to start this business because I had a lot of success here. And you were comparing it to previous cold calls that you made and you're like, Gee, 17 calls and 17 booked appointments in five hours for something that has high LTV lifetime value, low churn. Like, I need to actually do this.

[William Lindholm]

I just started doing the numbers in my head. I was like, okay, so wait, so if a company with 40 employees sign up, that's $80 per cake and then 50% margins, maybe I'm able to make that happen. Wait, that's like $5,000 a year. And then if I get sales reps to do this and I pay them $2,000 per client, then wait, the next year I'm just gonna make full profit on that. So I, I just started doing the numbers and like calculating in my head and it just made sense. So.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, man. And here's the thing. Like, I'm a little surprised it didn't work in the States because I just filmed a video. It hasn't gone live yet, but with this woman in Dallas that does corporate gifting. And a lot of what she does is for birthdays, but mostly it's like for, you know, high ticket enterprise SaaS where she'll send like, the company will go to someone's LinkedIn and see they graduated from Syracuse and send like a highly curated box of, like Syracuse alumni gear to someone in the hopes that they'll get a call with the sales rep. And she facilitates the logistics of all these gift boxes, and she does very well. So, like, obviously corporate gifting is a well established industry here. Why do you think you couldn't break into that from. With a birthday angle?

[William Lindholm]

Well, that's sort of what we're breaking into now, but from a sales angle. Right. I just think companies usually have two really large budgets, and it's sales and it's engineering. You always want to sell your product and get more customers, and you always want to build your product better so you get more customers. And so that's where the two largest budgets are. And everything else is just noise that you have to do to make the business go around. So I think it just wasn't a big enough pain for people to say, oh, I really want to prioritize this now. It is to be said, after going like semi viral with the cake thing, the last couple of weeks, we have gotten inbounds from people who are like, oh, we want to do cakes. But compared to the people that's inbounding us and saying, we want to do cakes, or cold cakes, as I call them, it's just not comparable. And the same thing happened in Norway. We went, this is where. How I know, like the. What we're doing now is the right thing is we were on all the biggest news in Norway, like, all the time, because it's such a unique idea, and we got zero inbounds from that. Everyone thought it was cool. And when we called, everyone knew about us and it was easier to sell. But the pain wasn't big enough for people to reach out and say, oh, I've been waiting for this the last five years. I think that that goes for a lot of businesses is it just isn't the biggest priority. Like, if you're good at sales, you can scale this and you can make it something you probably make like a million dollars a year off of. And that's fine. But I wanted to build a really big company, and I think the path we've taken now is. Is even better. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, so the budget thing is smart and this is similar, but you're more likely to sell a product or service that's most closely tied to revenue, right?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

And so you doing this for salespeople to book more calls is directly tied to revenue. Therefore it's an easier sale for you as opposed to like help your employees maybe be 2% happier one day of the year. You know, it's like in Norway, the cultural, the culture, you know, benefited that. But in the US it's like, how am I going to make more money from a birthday cake, bro? You know?

[William Lindholm]

Exactly. I'll let that be said. I never tried cold calling in the us. I just went straight to ads. So I definitely think there's someone watching this that could take this and run with it. I think. Yeah, I think it's a great idea.

[Podcast Host]

Listen, I need more people like this to interview on my podcast. So if you know of someone with a side hustle or a business that's unique and cool and super profitable. Email Molly M O L L y@co founders.com that's one word. Co founders.com Mollyofounders.com Tell her your story and we'll give you a hundred bucks if we end up interviewing them. Now tell me your thoughts on the dead Internet theory.

[William Lindholm]

That's a great question.

[Podcast Host]

And how that, what that has to do with this.

[William Lindholm]

So AI is just getting better and better. I think we can all agree it's, it's not going to d. It's not going to stop evolutionizing itself. So in a couple of years, AI will be so good that it's literally impossible to tell a human from AI. And in this world, I can spin up a cloud agent that makes 10,000 UGC videos or 100,000 emails that all feel supernatural and super human made. And so the dead Internet theory is that 99.99% of the content we consume on Internet, emails, phone calls, videos, such as the one we're making right now, it's all going to be AI. And humans aren't going to use the Internet the same way we are today. It's going to be so much noise it's going to be impossible to cut through. And I think like the first step to counter that is humans are going to get agents that like answer your phone or check your email and say this is what you have to prioritize today. And then the second step is like the Elon Musk vision where you have neural links and you're communicating completely off the Internet the way we are today. So in a world like that, we're not going to be able to send cold emails, we're not going to be able to send LinkedIn, DMS or cold call anyone because there's going to be too much noise. So the way you cut through to someone in the future, which we really believe in is physical gifting. If we can become the company that has the most data on what kind of gifts work, we become the next Apollo or the next real big GTM engine.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, so I love everything about this. Talk to me about. Well, first of all, dead Internet theory. I do think you're mostly correct. But also it's going to be agents talking to agents.

[William Lindholm]

Yes.

[Podcast Host]

Like, it'll be agents reading cold emails. And sometimes an agent monitoring inbox will get a cold email that's relevant to what the owner of that inbox actually needs for sure. And that agent is going to have credit card info and it's going to go buy things while we're out, like hiking and fishing. And actually, like, it's going to improve the quality of life in a lot of ways because we're going to be sick of the Internet, you know.

[William Lindholm]

Oh, yeah. I view this as a good thing.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Oh yeah. The Internet will be busier and more bustling than ever, but it's just going to be computers talking to computers. Right. So you're saying like, this breaks through that fourth wall, so to speak, the physical barrier, and you can still use agents to send these cakes and to do all the outbound. Like you could, you could use an agent to do outbound cold email to get a physical cake in front of someone, and then you kind of marry the best of both worlds, right?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. And this can also, like the way we're doing it today is we have a sequence where we first send the email that says, hey, in two days I'm sending you a cake. Is this the right address? And then we send the cake and then we follow up either through email or phone. And like AI agent would respond to, there's a cake coming to this address. Is it the right address? Yeah, but the thing about the agents is they're never going to know what the human doesn't tell them. And a lot of sales is about making someone want something that they know they wanted. And if you can't cut through the agent because the agent doesn't know the human wants it, then you have to, like, you have to get into the face of the human, either through network or through like just a physical gift.

[Podcast Host]

So, okay, so let's talk about like pure a B test. What have you done to, to test, like, let's say you get 10 people on the phone and, and on 10 of them, you just give them your pitch to whatever it is you're selling, and on the other 10, you send them a cake. To then give them the pitch. Like, how much better of a conversion rate do you get from a cake?

[William Lindholm]

Well, Cold Calling has like what, 2, 3% conversion rate. Maybe you can pull off some stats on. So you can cry.

[Podcast Host]

It could be all over the map. Right. If you're selling t shirts, maybe 30%. If you're selling.

[William Lindholm]

Right.

[Podcast Host]

$30,000 a month, software could be.3%, you know, exactly.

[William Lindholm]

So. But, but there is like an average there. And from the cakes we've sent out, 35% have converted into meetings, which is really just crazy. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So you send out a hundred cakes and 35 meetings are booked for like. Is it mostly software stuff? Like Silicon Valley stuff?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, that's mostly what we're getting. But I'm also getting like accountants in Miami reaching out real estate brokers. Like really, anyone and everyone is reaching out and doing this. There's like, there's the one part where there's software companies trying to sell to other software companies, but there's also like next week. This is crazy. We're doing a thousand cakes next week for one single company. And this is a dentist software company, Archie.com. they're just sending it to a thousand dental offices in San Francisco, Florida, Houston, just all over.

[Podcast Host]

Have they done a test yet?

[William Lindholm]

No, it's. Well, the thing is they reached out and did such a big order volume because they did the same thing with pizzas last year.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[William Lindholm]

And it was.

[Podcast Host]

That was their test, so to speak.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do you know what the economics were on their pizza campaign?

[William Lindholm]

Like how much they paid and how much they converted? Yeah, I do, but I don't want to say because I don't know if I'm allowed.

[Podcast Host]

It was good. It was good. It was good to spend tens of thousands of dollars to do it again.

[William Lindholm]

Yes. Yeah, for sure.

[Podcast Host]

Or is it, man, 1000?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[William Lindholm]

Tens of thousands.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. Are they paying like 50, 60, 70 bucks per cake for these at that volume? Clearly you're not in the cake making business, are you just like drop shipping these from some of the ship's cakes?

[William Lindholm]

You could say that. I mean, we put software on top of it to make logistics better. What we do is we. I have an AI agent. I'm happy to show you in a bit as well. That's constantly sourcing bakeries all across the us, London, Australia. And then it negotiates with the bakeries and says, hey, we're going to be buying all these cakes from you, so we need a 30% discount. We've been in Forbes, we've been so. And so on. And then they're like, okay, we'll take a chance. They give us a discount. And then someone like Archie reaches out. They need cakes in 10 different cities. We make a. Or we have a system where we just plot in all the 1000 recipients and then we let them track all the orders. All the different bakeries are taking pictures per a delivery and so on. So.

[Podcast Host]

So this is like 1-800-Flowers, but for. Yeah, for outbound sales, basically. Because that's what 1-800-FLowers does.

[William Lindholm]

I would say that's pretty accurate.

[Podcast Host]

Now, are most of the cakes only traveling, like, you know, 30 miles or less because of the localization of it?

[William Lindholm]

Yep, that's fair to say.

[Podcast Host]

Okay.

[William Lindholm]

I mean, for Archie, for instance, and we've done this a couple of times. We did it for rippling as well. They wanted a couple, like, really special cakes in, like, very niche areas where we didn't want to spend time finding a bakery, so we just sent a cake on a flight.

[Podcast Host]

Hmm. So interesting.

[William Lindholm]

That's possible as well.

[Podcast Host]

Does it matter at all if the cake is any good? Is there any correlation to close rate or book call rate?

[William Lindholm]

I definitely think so. I care a lot about the quality of the cake. We only partner with, like, organic French patisseries, make quality cakes, because at least my opinion is, well, that represents the quality of your company. So nobody wants to do that.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

And so we're very picky about the bakeries we. We end up working with. When there's a lot of cheap bakeries, we end up just saying, well, this isn't the right fit. So. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Do you have any data from your customers on the close rate being higher or lower once they get on these booked calls? It's a good question, because here's what I'm thinking. Like, there's a direct correlation to the effort you put into something and the potential outcome. Like, if I film a video with a business owner and it's like this talking head. He's in one state, I'm in another. 50,000 views. If I film the exact same video with the same content and I'm in person and we're grinding stumps together, we say the same words, but the viewer sees that I had to get on a plane or he had to get on a plane, we're out there sweating,

[William Lindholm]

and they take it more seriously.

[Podcast Host]

They take it more seriously. And I might get 500,000 views on that. Right. So I would think that if I just, you know, dial for dollars, do cold calling all day to get these book Calls to sell enterprise software. My close rate might be 15%. But if I, you know, if I use these cakes, I'm going to spend a lot more money. But A, my book call rate goes way up and B, theoretically I would think that your close rate goes from 15 to 25, 30%.

[William Lindholm]

You know, I don't have the data on that, but it sounds logical, right? So like one thing that's important is my cakes don't close you the, the sale. It just gets you the meter and gets you the attention. The rest of the job you have to do yourself. But I think there is something very psychological about wanting to give something back when someone gives you something.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah, the law of reciprocity.

[William Lindholm]

Exactly. That's what they do in like the Turkish markets. If you've ever been in like Turkey, they, they like, they, you come in their store and they start giving you candy and they're like giving you so much because it's psychology.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

So it sounds logical.

[Podcast Host]

If I were you, I would like hound my previous customers and say like, do you have any idea on what your close rate was on these, that like the calls that came from these cakes? Because then you could put that front and center on your landing page and it's like, that is true. Increase your close rate. Like increase your book call rate by 32% and your close rate by 64%. Like, yeah, that'd be huge. Like it's a net of net. You will make, you know, 316% more money for every dollar spent on cakes versus cold calling or whatever it is.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, you're spot on. And I think like this data is so important for us to collect because long term, if this vision of the future becomes right, which I really do think it is, one, cakes are going to be overused. Everyone's going to get five cakes a day. So we have to do more than cakes. And when we get to that point, sure, we're going to be a huge company already by then, but to become even huger, we have to collect the data on what works. Like maybe we send a cake, but the close rate only goes up so and so much. But if we send something even more personal and we can talk about what, what that could be as well. But maybe the close rate is even higher, but the book rate is lower. So all of this data is super important. I totally agree with you.

[Podcast Host]

Tell me about your number. So once you focused on the sales market in the U.S. what was your first month like, your first six months, year, et cetera, both from a revenue and profit perspective?

[William Lindholm]

Well, we've. Our company's only existed for six months, so.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, wow.

[William Lindholm]

So it's young and promising still. Well, in Norway, the birthday thing, we're passively invoicing like $12,000 a month right now. Wow.

[Podcast Host]

So you still have that side of the business going.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, it's just running to. To be quite honest with you, I have my mom as customer service there.

[Podcast Host]

It's on autopilot. Like why cut off the revenue? Right. Mom needs a job.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, sure. So we have that going. And when we got to the us we did zero sales for the first two and a half months. Like I said, we were just trying to figure things out and really felt like we were hitting a wall. I was almost about to like just put down the company because of that. I didn't see it becoming large enough. But then we cold caked, which I'm coining as a term, a 16Z sequoia. Like a bunch of big venture capital.

[Podcast Host]

Venture capital firms.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. And that went viral. That hit the news and we got so many inbounds.

[Podcast Host]

What was the message to these firms when you sent them a cake? What was the pitch?

[William Lindholm]

So this wasn't my cake or like we sent the cake, but we were in Founders Inc. And a friend of mine, Andrew Anderson, who's like running a crypto platform that's really taken off, he was fundraising. So he put his whole pitch deck like a 100 piece size cake.

[Podcast Host]

Wow. Yeah, yeah.

[William Lindholm]

And like it was just a bunch of text of everything he was doing and the VCs loved it. One of them posted it on X. It got like 300,000 views that ended up in the biggest tech news in Europe. And from there the ball is just like it's been non stop.

[Podcast Host]

Were you linked in those articles?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So it was amazing for him. He probably raced his round. Amazing for you. Great backlink.

[William Lindholm]

Win.

[Podcast Host]

Win all around.

[William Lindholm]

Yep. And that's also the interesting thing about what we're doing now is it becomes this marketing loop because if you send a cake to X Company, then X Company might take a picture of that. Not only will they book a meeting with you, but they might take a picture of it and post it on social media. And that gives you pr. And then they might think, oh, this worked on me because I just booked a meeting and posted on social media. And then they reach out to me and say, we want to do this as well. And that's what's happening, right?

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

Like I'm getting inbounds from people that have Got my cake and think this is. This is cool.

[Podcast Host]

So, guys, tkowners.com that's my community, where people are building businesses. I do AMAs, Q&As every week live. You can ask me anything you want. You can have accountability partners. It's about a thousand people in there building, starting, growing businesses. Check out TKO, as in the currenter office. TKowners.com. you know what you guys should try is. What's it called? Like a. Like a singogram. When, like someone shows up in person and sings to you.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. Like cold mariachi.

[Podcast Host]

Yes. They sing a pitch pitch. Like they sing a pitch to them. It would cost a lot more than a cake, but the results could be a lot better. Right. Because the effort.

[William Lindholm]

I'm down. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I love that you call it day maker because you're not going all in on cakes. I agree with you. At some point, people are going to be getting too many cakes and it's just going to be a waste, right? Yeah, but that's fine. You just pivot. You do something else. So, okay, so first two and a half months, you're hitting roadblock of a roadblock that goes viral thanks to a tweet. What do your numbers look like after that point?

[William Lindholm]

So this month we're doing $120,000 revenue. Yeah. It's crazy.

[Podcast Host]

Six months in.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. Or I mean, this pivot is one and a half month ago. Right.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, my gosh. So six weeks after pivoting, you're doing 120 grand a month and growing Double digit, I imagine, per month.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. Yep. It's a lot of fun.

[Podcast Host]

What does your team look like? Do you have much overhead, like developers or anything? Or are you profitable today?

[William Lindholm]

No, honestly, we're cooked. I have a list of.

[Podcast Host]

No pun intended.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

You baked?

[William Lindholm]

We're baked. I have a list of 45 inbound leads right now from people that are like, we need cakes in Australia, we need cakes in Canada, we need cakes in Spain and Mexico. And we're just like, we can't sleep at this point trying to fulfill them all. So we just have to fundraise and hire and keep this momentum going.

[Podcast Host]

So you're just putting all your money back into the business?

[William Lindholm]

Oh, yeah. I mean, I just came here, came home from San Francisco after being there for three months, but I lived in a closet for. For the whole duration of.

[Podcast Host]

That's probably all you can afford. It's so expensive.

[William Lindholm]

There it is. It really is.

[Podcast Host]

I would think you can get to this business to the point where you Have a positive cash flow conversion cycle. You get paid on day one. You have net 30 payment terms with your bakeries, at least with many or most of them.

[William Lindholm]

And we're profitable right now. So.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, well, like that could be, that could be your natural fundraising. Like that could prevent you from having to fundraise at all. Right, that's true. Especially after you send a bakery, a bunch of businesses like, listen, your cake's delicious. It's working. We love working with you, but we're cash strapped. If you want to keep getting business from us, we need to be able to pay you in 30 days or else we're going to have to go to the bakery down the street. Then you guys will be rolling in it.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, for sure. Totally agree with you. We could bootstrap. But my vision is to be a lot more than a cash cow business. And I think to do that, I want to scale even quicker.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah.

[William Lindholm]

Like for instance, there's a lot of company or there's a couple of companies that have done some deliveries now. They do one delivery batch, it goes successful, they order another one, it goes successful. And then they're like, okay, let's just make this recurring. Can you guys integrate with our HubSpot or salesforce, so on and so on. There's. They're asking, some are asking for ping pong tables instead of cakes. Yep. So, like, we want to be able to keep up with all of that demand. And to do that, I think the right move is to fundraise. Yeah. But you're right, this could be a cash cow business for sure.

[Podcast Host]

So on $120,000 in cakes, were you profiting? 40 grand. 50 grand?

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. 30. 40 grand. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

Okay. Okay. So let's say a lot of my audience, most of my audience is not on the coast. They're like in middle America, 25 to 55 year old entrepreneurial either. You know, about 40% are business owners, 60% are aspiring business owners. So if someone's watching this right now and they're thinking like, all right, I want to start a business or grow a business with something like this, I don't want to start a cake delivery business. Right. He's got that locked down. But I want to use this principle to make money. What, like, and someone doesn't have an offer yet. Let's say hypothetically, what types of offers or services or whatever could someone use with your cakes or with sending their own cakes or whatever to increase the likelihood of success based on what you've seen? Because if I sell T shirts right it's like the unit economics don't make sense. Right. But if I sell enterprise software, it

[William Lindholm]

does, it does make sense.

[Podcast Host]

That's enterprise software isn't approachable to an individual that wants to start a business either. Right.

[William Lindholm]

So I think it is. To be fair, I think anyone can make anything today. I mean, it says so on your, your T shirt. But I guess you.

[Podcast Host]

It's true. Like I'm saying like a $4,000 a month product like Salesforce or whatever, like agency services. Sure. You vibe code them out.

[William Lindholm]

I totally get it. In two weeks, we're doing like 50 cakes with a SEO agency and what they're doing is they're putting like a video, they're recording a loom video and they're putting a QR code on the cake and then we're sending that out. So when people get the cake and they scan it, it's like a SEO audit of, of their website.

[Podcast Host]

Oh, that's cool.

[William Lindholm]

And that's cool. Also, there's just the virality moment of it. So I do agree, if you're selling T shirts, don't send cakes. But I think one of my biggest lessons building this company is do crazy things, post about it, and you're going to go viral. And so for 100%, all of our customers that have done like a huge amount of cakes, every single time, it's gone viral and it's ended up in the news and it's just been a positive PR thing for just both us and for our customers. So I think like one of the things we did is we, we had a unicorn cake that was huge. That, that went super viral. Another thing I did, and here back in Oslo before moving to, to sf, which I think is great. This is unrelated, but I think it'll give an idea of how I want you to think is we hosted this founder dinner and we got all the best founders in Norway to, to be a part of this dinner. And then we were like, okay, how do we make this something people talk about? We hired or we released a llama. So we had this big venue, we had a private chat, seven course dinner and then we had a llama walking around in the venue and we had a jazz band playing jazz and that blew up as well. Right. So I think attention is everything. Getting attention is absolutely everything. And the cakes is right now such a great thing, a way to get attention because it's still new, it's novel and so on. But if there's one tip I have, it's just do crazy things that get

[Podcast Host]

people's attention and then post it.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, and post it. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

So agency services, I think that's a great idea. Like is I have a community called playmakers AI.com and I teach people how to be AI consultants or to start AI implementation agencies. And we talk a lot about customer acquisition and we talk about paid ads, all types of stuff. But this is like a no brainer. Like why not ship cakes to a medium sized business that you know, has 5 to $50 million in revenue and instead of a QR code to an SE SEO audit, it's a QR code to their website that gives them an AI audit that says like your business could be improved with AI, call me. And then you just upsell the heck out of them. Like so no brainer.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah, you can do anything. You're like I said, we have accountants and real estate agents doing this as well. So I think as long as you're, as long as you think there is marketing coming from this. And second of all, you have a high enough average contract value or LTV to make it make sense. Like, send some cakes. It's. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, dude, if I'm a, if I'm a, if I'm a real estate agent, I'm going to get a list every morning of properties that are expiring, right. They've been listed for six months and that the realtor, that's the listing agent is about to lose, lose the listing. A week before that expires, I'm going to send them a cake. Right, There you go. Because even if it's a $500,000 residential home, that's 10 to 20 grand net to the realtor. If they close 10% of those, then what's an $80 cake?

[William Lindholm]

You know, also like the one thing is the cold cake, which, I mean, you're spot on. Another thing is the retention cake. So let's say you have some customers that you've had for like a year and then you're like, thank you for being my customer for a year. Here's a cake. And that's like what you're doing there is you're just going over the bar of expectations and that makes them think about you and talk about you and refer you to more people. So yeah, you could do retention cakes, you could do cold cakes. You can, yeah, there's, there's a lot of things to do with cakes.

[Podcast Host]

I mean, we hired a custom home builder for our home and paid him a whole lot of money. And every Christmas we get like a, a box of Nuts. He probably spends 40 bucks on them. And you know what? Anytime someone at church asked me, who'd you use for your home builder? I'm like, use him. Use him. Use him for. Because. Because of a $40 box of nuts. You know, it works.

[William Lindholm]

It does. Yep.

[Podcast Host]

It keeps. If nothing else, if A, it buys your loyalty, B, it keeps you top of mind. It's a cheap way to stay top of mind, which is harder than ever today.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah. I mean, sending an email wouldn't do that. In fact, sending an email would probably make you seem annoying, so.

[Podcast Host]

Yeah. This is amazing. Is there anything cool about the story that I neglected to ask you about before we wrap?

[William Lindholm]

There's so much cool things about this story, but I think this was a great conversation.

[Podcast Host]

Well, I mean, 120 grand. Your second month. Profitable. Incredible. I applaud you on what you've done. This is amazing. Do you know if any of the other 49 people tried to start a business like this?

[William Lindholm]

Not as far. Well, actually, there's. There's been a lot of people that have reached out and, like, just said, hey, man, I'm gonna compete with you, like, anything. It's. It's all about execution. If someone does want to start something similar, I encourage that. Like heck, we might even partner, right? Maybe I go like, hey, we have this brand, and you can have this area, and we'll take a split revenue. We almost franchise it. Right. So one thing your viewers might find interesting is, like, how I have my agents set up to find these bakeries.

[Podcast Host]

Yes, yes. Very curious about that.

[William Lindholm]

I meant that you mentioned you have, like, these AI agent agencies. So the way I do it now is I have, like, this super prompt in cloud cowork connected to a superhuman mcp. Superhuman is like an email system. The super prompt says, like, how you're supposed to negotiate. It says how you're supposed to find good bakeries, like, look at reviews on, so on. And then every single day, I'm not involved in it, every two hours, it checks my email, and if I haven't found a bakery in the location I've told it to find it, it goes and sources 20 new bakeries. It responds to all the emails, negotiates with the bakeries. And the initial email we send out is like, an email that says, hey, we want to buy 200 cakes in two weeks. Can we make it happen? And that catches the attention of the bakery, and they're like, yes, please. And then we go, like, okay, you have to give us a discount. They give us a discount. If the Discount is good enough. My agent sends that email to my personal email where I just give a thumbs up or a thumbs down on it. And if I give a thumbs back, it goes down or back to the bakery, renegotiates more until we have a deal. Yeah, maybe that was complicated, but it's

[Podcast Host]

like, no, I Claude cowork. That's like, I can wrap my mind around that.

[William Lindholm]

Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

That's incredible.

[William Lindholm]

That's how we do that. And that's allowed us to go from one bakery to like 15 bakeries in a month, which is.

[Podcast Host]

Wow.

[William Lindholm]

Like, this sort of outreach and like partner networking would have been impossible just a year ago, which is why, like, nobody has done this before. Because in reality, this is so time consuming to sign up all these bakeries and I can take that and do that with so much more than just cakes and bakeries. So. Yep. Yeah.

[Podcast Host]

The tediousness is the moat.

[William Lindholm]

It is.

[Podcast Host]

Right? That's why. That's why Plaid is a billion dollar business. Because they went and made API connections with every random credit union and bank that had terrible API docs. They went and did the hard thing. Hard thing to do that. And now they're the de facto solution for connecting financial institutions. Right. The tediousness is the moat is the first mover's advantage, is your competitive advantage. It's amazing, William. Thank you. This is awesome. Where can we find you if we want to buy some cakes or learn more?

[William Lindholm]

Hit me up on LinkedIn. William Lindholm. Hit me up on Instagram if you're not on LinkedIn. That's also William Lindholm.

[Podcast Host]

Okay, thank you, William.

[William Lindholm]

Nice meeting you, man.

[Podcast Host]

Guys, I meant what I said about playmakersai.com. there's about 300 of us in there and we're all doing the same thing. We're starting AI consulting businesses. We're implementing AI into small and medium sized businesses and we're having a lot of success. So check out playmakersai.com and shoot. Use a cake to go find some customers. We've got over a hundred hours of recorded content, including three to seven hours of live content with 25 different paid experts every single week. We'll see you [e-mail] if you're still here with me, I would really, really love and appreciate a five star review on Spotify, Apple or wherever you get your podcast. It would mean a lot. If you want to go the extra mile, share this episode with a friend that might have an interest in starting a business. It would mean a ton. Hope you have the best day of your life today.