When it comes to building urban-based solutions where you don’t have traditional access to support and resources, the common thought is to work with what you got and move to the next level. Play the cards you were dealt in your current hand for a better hand is another common phrase about hustling up from nothing to something, from zero to 100.  

The question to ask is bootstrapping the hustle always the best approach? If you bring something that is a good idea to the hood, what is stopping stuck up elitists in your hood from swagger jacking your hustle and the local media hype them up and try to shut you out like you non-existent? 

Let’s look at an example model where you would try to create an urban-based media distribution model in your hood by bootstrapping with $15 DVDs from Goodwill and a $20 cheap DVD burner. 

Network-less Business Model

Let’s discuss the business model we are considering in our bootstrap example. The goal is offer hood-based barbershops, salons, waiting areas at auto dealers and more with media broadcasted from a screen they can play for their customers as they wait for service. 

The model is network-less where you will send a media such as a DVD for the barbershop to simply play on their flat panel screens. The reason why is most urban hood shops don’t have high-speed media or may fight it too much effort to hook up to a network and networks do go down in the hood. 

You make money on both sides where charge local and national business advertisers to provide you with a video that can be from a 30-second commercial to a 7-minute documentary or a 2-hour music mix of independent trap artists in the trap game dropping unsigned beats and bars. You then compile all of these videos into a DVD that you distribute to barbershops you added as a monthly subscription service. 

To get started, you decided, you are going to burn 25 DVDs and hand them out at barbershops and hair salon around your hood and then provide the shop with an offer card to get on your subscription program to receive more DVDs as a subscription. Your goal is to put your media brand out there in the real streets and hopefully gain enough users from the streets to grow your empire organically online and eventually your own national and international media distribution. You straight up trying to hustle from the bottom to the top starting with some DVDs to balling driving TVRs around King Cross on these cats doubting on your dreams and come-up. 

Goodwill DVD Approach

Your first thought was while you were at Goodwill trying on used business suits, you saw a whole bunch of used DVD players that are in the back next to the used TVs. These DVD players are just being donated because people are upgrading their home systems and giving away their video players. You look at the brand names and these are Sony, Yamaha, Deon and other good name stuff you know can last 30-40 years solid and they costing $10-$15. You thinking you can cop these for your hustle and offer these DVD players to the shops to play your DVDs to setup. 

There are some things to consider about the Goodwill DVD players. First and this is most important, these DVD players are usually 480p with RCA jack connectors. Most shops nowadays have 720p, 1080p and 4K resolution. So it is important to look for a DVD player that has an HDMI and upscaling capability to make the 480p DVD look good on a screen. There are Blu-Ray players entering Goodwill Supply chain but they are running $20-$25 but they may be worth it as well. One of the problems we noticed is not all DVD players have remote but some of the newer smart Blu-Ray DVD players can be control through Android and iPhone apps. 

The good thing and the best thing is everybody know how to use and hookup a DVD player to their flat screen, so the adoption and boarding of hood broadcasters may not be a problem. The issue we saw was the DVD production – a DVD burner is kind of slow to produce a DVD so you may need help in burning enough DVDs based on your client growth rate to push out to your clients. So if you starting off with the DVD as the media, it may be tough to scale up to demand until you get a real DVD duplicator which will cost money but you have to ask is the DVDs worth it versus other media formats?

USB/SD Card Streamer

These are media streaming boxes that are similar to Roku or Apple TV but are generic streamers that stream video from either a USB drive or SD card. The video can support up to 4k but keep in mind that each streaming device is $40-$50 from Amazon to purchase upfront. Even though the streamers are most expensive, they are smaller and compact in size and do not suffer from “bumps” like a DVD player and some streamers can be installed behind a modern flat panel television set. 

Creating the media on a USB/SD card is quick and simple, just perform a copy of the video file to the USB/SD Card and you can probably copy to several dozens of SD cards and USB in an hour. But USB and SD cards are more expensive than DVDs where a 100-pack DVD is the equivalent cost of the cheapest 2GB SD card on the market. 

Local Wi-Fi Router with Hard Drive

These are $100 wireless routers that allow you to attach a USB hard drive to stream content. There are smaller travel wireless routers that allow up to 8 people share files and videos. In this model, you provide files for waiting customers to connect with their mobile device and stream from their mobile phone. 

The good thing about this model is the wireless modem allow you to stream data on-demand to the customer and you provide the content to their router but the only way you can do that is provide a USB dongle, not a USB hard-drive which is heavy and also expensive as well. But the problem is the video can start to lag in performance if too many people try to access the files to stream. 

While this approach sounds good, it is too expensive to both purchase and manage and even distribute the media which is on USB that is way more expensive than a 100-pack DVD. 

Our Recommendation

As you saw with the Goodwill $15 DVD option versus other others to stream media to hood-based businesses on your block, there are some pros and cons to consider. Do you offer a DVD player to the barbershop to be cheap or do you invest in better equipment to offer high-tech modern solutions? 

One of the things is someone who is uppity want to do what you do and they go out and buy SD/USB streamers that are more expensive in order to compete with you because they want to provide superior technology over you. Do you go in trying to have the best equipment on the market? 

Here is our recommendation – we will always recommend to you to go and get the $15 Goodwill DVD players and the 100-pack DVDs to get going. Think about your business model for a second as you get started. Your average hood shop will have no problem setting up a DVD player themselves if you provide them one and the wires to hook it up to their TV. Some of them probably will buy their own DVDs or already have one in their house somewhere. So that eliminate the complexity of providing the equipment. Don’t get bent over the DVDs used and coming from Goodwill when the cable companies gives their customers used and refurbished cable boxes all the time out here. 

Even if you are burning DVDs one at a time, you got a 100-pack DVD and you probably will have 10 customers at best in your first round. You charge them $30/month to receive the DVDs and if you have 10 customers at the beginning, that’s $300/month at least which is not bad. Your real money is not the shops, your real money is $50 per DVD from the advertisers and if you running 1-4 hours DVD, that’s a lot of money like $2,500-$10,000 or more per DVD and that number will rise fast. 

10 DVD players from Goodwill is $150-$200 and 10 customers paying $30 months is $300 paying off your equipment on the first month of operation. Those Sony, Toshiba and Yamaha DVD players are going to last years and they start producing income for you after just one month. That’s too much ground floor hustle and return on investment to consider any other option than DVD-based media distribution. 

How to Get Going

We believe the first move to make is to realize those DVD players are not going anywhere in Goodwill because people are dumping them there, so no need to buy inventory before getting a customer on deck. The first step is to focus on the DVD and the content. Many will call this a chicken and egg business model where you have to fight for both content producers and content broadcasters and I disagree. 

The best approach is to find out who is putting out videos on social media, who is putting up pictures on social media and let them be your first wave of content producers. You can take YouTube videos, you can even take SoundCloud and podcasts and use a visual audio analyzer for effects. You create your own filler video clips that show your media brand, show how to advertise with a number and further, you create 30-second videos local businesses yourself. The first DVD is what you going to focus on to pass around to drum up business and interest in your hustle. You make 25 copies of a DVD and pass out for free with your contact information to subscribe. 

Use a mobile phone for text message for support and also setup Instagram or Facebook or some kind of social media messenger, you don’t need a web site for the hood. You are on the streets and you hustling at the street-level. You meet them in their shops and ask them if they like DVDs to play in their shops and you got some local stuff the local people want to see. You offer for free and tell them to take it home and play it first to see if they like this for their shop. You offer DVD for them to lease and just charge a fee per month and they receive DVDs to play for their customers.  

It’s not really a hard street level to setup to broadcast local advertisers and national advertisers from a DVD as the distribution medium in the hood. The real takeaway is the bootstrapping – don’t get caught up in the latest technology and what’s cool. It is not bad to use technology 10 years old because it already been proven and already mature. Everybody knows how to work a DVD player nowadays and hookup to a TV, especially any shop in the hood. Instead of selling mix-tapes, you selling curated mix videos to shops. 

Because let’s be honest – hood businesses need to get the word out and hood people like seeing other hood people on television screens doing their thing. So don’t be afraid or two proud to start from the bottom to make your way to the top.