Do you give territories?

No. This isn’t a franchise offering or anything like that. I’m just selling some business cards and throwing in a whole bunch of stuff for free.

Do you guarantee results?

No. I am trying to show you what I believe is the path, but I cannot guarantee you will be successful.

I am not interviewing you, not assessing your skills and abilities, not conducting a background investigation on you to determine suitability. Nor am I doing a feasibility study on the viability of your particular market for gig training services. Whether the pursuit of this opportunity is the right fit is solely up to you to evaluate and figure out.

Is this idea proven?

Not as of November 2024, which is when I am writing this.

Have you done gig coaching yourself?

No. I feel very confident I will succeed if I do choose to go this route.

It has already taken me an enormous amount of time to assemble what you see here and all the things in my gig trainer services & support package. All the work I’ve put in gives me great confidence.

I have decided to skip the proof-of-concept phase and go straight to my core mission, which is to provide inspiration, guidance and support to people who like my ideas, see the potential, and want in.

I want to build a network of gig trainers who will help me to sell my “big mileage form” pdf file, as quickly as possible.

One of my friends is an “empire builder” type of entrepreneur. His imagination is tremendous when it comes to thinking big. I’ve never met anyone else like him. He actually fled Iran many years ago. Super cool and friendly guy. Unique. And he has a huge number of connections on LinkedIn of executive type people, because he is highly regarded and a very effective networker. I know exactly what he would be encouraging me to do… and it wouldn’t involve giving my ideas away like I am doing here.

But the track he would advocate for leads to much more complication and a much higher degree of difficulty.

The payoff would probably eventually be big, but I prefer to keep things simple and low stress, and I want to move faster in my own way.

Like I emphasize about seizing first mover advantage as a gig trainer in your geographic area, I am also seizing first mover advantage with the introduction of this first and very unique gig coaching program. I am taking a calculated gamble that I can be more successful, more quickly by helping lots of other people to become successful.

Another thing… advances in robotic technology might be adopted by food delivery gig apps on a widespread basis. I think the chances of this happening are not small or remote. This could shorten the opportunity window.

How much time is there while the opportunity window remains open? I don’t know… All I can do is guess. My current thinking is that we have at least 5 years and maybe a 7 to 10 year runway, so I consider time to be of the essence and we all need to move quickly. We have a wide open opportunity window right now.

Do you ship to Alaska, Hawaii, or countries outside of the United States?

Shipping costs to Alaska and Hawaii are definitely higher. Contact me about it and give me your shipping address.

hello@ideamaned.com

As for international shipping, I will have to research this. Tell me your shipping address. If the cost is too high, too complicated, or the shipping time too long, I might come up with an alternative way for us to collaborate.

All of my thinking on the gig training opportunity has been geared toward how it applies in the United States.

Would I be damaging my market by encouraging new entrants?

Possibly.

Let’s figure out the strategy here…

You will be promoting food delivery gig work as a way for people to make money. Some people will be getting into the food delivery business that otherwise would not have, because of your training service marketing.

As you know, an increased supply of drivers without an increased demand for delivery services can impact current drivers. In addition, these new drivers will have more sophistication and will be more likely to only accept the delivery opportunities that you go for.

Therefore, if you are going to do this, you should NOT be trying to get just one student per week while doing deliveries the rest of the week. Instead, you should be STRIVING to get your calendar FULL of student training days, where the need to do actual food deliveries yourself simply disappears, because your time is better spent doing training sessions.

So then the supply of new drivers won’t really be an issue for you, personally.

But if you are still concerned about “pissing in the village well,” you can promote your training service to people outside of your zone. And then, after it has become clear that you are succeeding as a trainer, you can then go for new business inside your zone, if you want to.

Can I offer training with gig apps in addition to DoorDash, Grubhub, and Uber Eats?

I think this would broaden your appeal from a marketing perspective, and it sets you up to sell additional training to your students, which would be a very good thing.

For example, you begin their training with DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats. And then you sell them on a follow-up training day to go over any issues they are having and to introduce them to the next app they should also be using.

Since they are familiar and comfortable with you, and especially if they like you and the rapport you have with them is good, then you have a real opportunity to sell them an additional training day to get them familiar with their next app.

And if you don’t have that expertise right now, it’s probably a good idea to dip your toe in the water with another app and begin learning it so that you open up the possibility of being able to offer extra training days to your students.

What are the other good apps in your market? Instacart? Spark? It seems there are a bunch of other new ones too.

After you acquire that ability, I’d plant the seed in your student’s mind that they should advance to learning their next app with you, but I wouldn’t press them to immediately do the extra training with you. Instead, give them time to get some experience with the apps you just familiarized them with. I am thinking 3 or 4 weeks, and then get them trained on their next app. (If you move your students ahead too fast, it could be overwhelming for them.)

Strategically, the great thing about being positioned to train them with another app is this will greatly improve your chances of getting yourself fully booked-out, week after week.

It improves your chances of success.

Also, this can work in reverse where you attract a student who is interested in learning Instacart or whatever, and then 3 or 4 weeks later you clinch the add-on sale to train them on the main food delivery trio of apps (DoorDash, Grubhub and Uber Eats).

During the summer it was slow, but now there has been a revival and I am back to making decent money. Stategically, what is the best thing to do?

In some markets, like mine, there are seasonal cycles. I enjoy doing deliveries when the money end of it is working out. And when business gets good, I always assume it’s going to continue to be good.

Of course, it never works out that way. A down cycle inevitably returns.

It’s your choice. You can go crazy with working all the hours you can and make all the money you can while it lasts. Or you can work a few less hours per week while steering towards opening a new frontier of possibilities for yourself.

Strategically, my concern in delaying the opening of the new frontier is the risk of somebody else opening a competing training service before you. Somebody else getting the headstart, or numbers of others getting the headstart, COULD make the launch of your new training service more difficult. Others are going to get access to my ideas, including my marketing ideas, and some of these people might be looking to start an in-field training service in your area.

If it looks like I am trying to persuade you into coming into my program, this is true. If you feel this is right for you but think you want to wait a few months until the next down cycle sets in, I am just informing you about what is in the realm of possibilities.

There are special challenges to being first. It can be more difficult to get traction. But there are also challenges involved with being late to the party.

Do I need to collect sales tax?

Maybe! This is something you need to research. If yes, you apply for a sales tax license through your state, and then you submit the sales tax money you collect monthly, quarterly or whenever your state requires it.

I can say that filing sales tax returns in Pennsylvania is super easy.

Will you put all of my customer testimonials on my sell page?

No. I will do this for my early participants for a little while. I am expecting I will eventually become too busy to continue doing that.

The solution is after it becomes clear that you have a working, on-going, customer generating business, you should develop your own supplemental sell page where you will put your customer testimonials and photos of your students, along with STORIES related to them and your service.

I will insert a link to your supplemental sell-page on your main sell page when you get that ready.

Why should I bother with getting customer testimonials?

Because these are powerful selling mechanisms. I will give you more thoughts on this after we begin collaborating.

Should I use scheduling software?

This is something I will think more about. The current strategy is you are only taking on one student training session per day, so there isn’t a lot of complexity to manage. It’s fairly simple.

Also, you should be doing some screening of your potential students instead of just letting anybody self-schedule. This screening should include asking if they have been approved for one of the apps, (which will tell you they have gone through that app company’s background check. This will increase your safety.)

And I think it is better to build some trust first before automating your scheduling. You do this by earning social proof through the sharing of authentic testimonials from your students.

An online scheduling system could make things easier for you, where the student selects their training day and pays with a credit card without you having to prompt them to pay.

But I think it is best you get some experience with scheduling the old-fashioned way first — which involves human to human conversations through the written word or phone.

I will have more thoughts on this in the future.

How do I handle my taxes if I pay-out delivery income to students because we had to use my phone to get orders?

Keep records of your pay-outs. You will get annual 1099 forms from the app companies that include this income. Since you don’t want to pay taxes on income you didn’t earn, on Schedule C you will make a line to deduct your total delivery payout expense for the year. I would also include an explanation sheet with your return that details how your training business works and the logic you used for the deduction.

If this sounds confusing, then just keep documentation and records of every delivery income payout your made to your students. And hire an accountant to do your taxes.

Also, paying estimated taxes quarterly will lessen or eliminate late payment penalties, (one of the burdens of self-employment.)

By the way, be sure to document all of your business-related miles. That will be a sizeable deduction.)

What is the “Smart Start 10X Program?”

The idea is to make a newcomer to the food delivery gig business 10 times smarter than the average brand new gig worker.

Also, I like the ring of “Smart Start.” But “Smart Start” has been trademarked way too many times. There is too much potential for conflict with people who went through the hassle of getting a trademark for the Smart Start combination of words for their particular business.

However, “Smart Start 10X Program,” is distinct and separate. So there is no trademark issue.

Plus, I just believe it’s good marketing to name the training program. So that’s how I came up with “Smart Start 10X Program” and the meaning behind it.

I completely believe that the training you can provide, in combination with my 42 day email lesson course, will give beginners a huge advantage over those who fail to get trained and end up learning everything the hard way.

You’re going to make brand new rookies 10 times smarter. That’s the message behind it.