$500+ Per Month From a Mexican Horse Ranch

Josh Brody with a story posted to Hacker News…

During COVID I was in Mexico. At some point I wanted to go horseback riding. I was researching places to go horseback riding and I was not at all surprised to see I would have to make some calls to book.

Fast-forward a few weeks, I become pretty good friends with the owner at the ranch I went to. We grab tacos one night and he shares his concerns: They’re not doing so well financially and are worried about whether or not they’ll be able to afford feed in a month.

I got involved and we solved that problem and a few more: revamped the website (it looked and felt like it was from 2006), I whipped up a booking/reservation system to get more customers through the door, and exit surveys to make sure everything was perfect (and figure out what went wrong if it wasn’t).

Bookings this month are up 490% from 2018 […] and that’s without a single dollar spent in paid marketing. I answer a few emails every day from prospective riders and make sure everyone’s happy. I get a percentage of each reservation which is cool, but the coolest part is that I get to say I am a co-owner in a Mexican horse ranch.

So he basically helped out a business he liked with their online presence in exchange for a cut of each online booking 😎

Someone commented on Josh’s post…

Mexicos overall internet presence is literally stuck in the early 2000s.

Most business’ official website are a Facebook page.

In a country of 150M people and growing expat presence, there is a TON of opportunities for software businesses to enter the market.

For example: Riviera Maya has no MLS style real estate tracker/listing platform. The entire real estate industry operates on word of mouth, WhatsApp and Facebook messages.

Someone else commented that there are plenty of opportunities like this in the USA as well 🇺🇸

Is there a business you like that could use some help along these lines?

Just be sure to apply some riskiest assumption testing to the idea before diving too deep.

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