Jun 20, 2022
If you’re still not sold on the power of the Internet of Things (IoT), then listen to this episode!
There are endless applications of the technology in real estate, and our guest John Humphrey joins us to discuss how STR owners can mine crypto on their property using IoT and create passive income. He also talks about their company, LinxSTR, and the work they do to help people optimize their business operations and build wealth by leveraging the potential of IoT.
[00:01 - 06:20] Decentralizing the Internet
- John talks about his background
- Helium and creating the world’s biggest IoT network
[06:21 - 20:15] Passively Earning Crypto Rewards
- Losing money in their short-term vacation rental properties during the pandemic
- Starting a technology arm of their business
- Building their own Helium hotspot box
- How STR owners can benefit through mining HNT
- What’s LinxSTR’s next play
- Smart solutions using IoT
- John breaks down the best way to set up the hotspots in properties
[20:16 - 21:24] Closing Segment
- Reach out to John!
- Links Below
- Final Words
Tweetable Quotes
“Almost a hundred percent of our lives in three years right now is going to be all interconnected.” - John Humphrey
“Me and you won't be talking over cellular towers anymore. Our phone, our actual communication is going to box to box, to box, to box, to box, to get anywhere it needs to get.” - John Humphrey
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Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below:
[00:00:00] John Humphrey: Right now in the next three years, 75 billion new devices are going to need a place to hook up to the internet. I mean, this is everything what's going to happen. Almost a hundred percent of our life in three years right now is going to be all interconnected. It's really crazy.
[00:00:28] Sam Wilson: John Humphrey's a seasoned entrepreneur author and is best known as The Revenue Generation Expert. He is an expert at implementing systems to generate ongoing income for not only his own companies, but also for his clients worldwide. John, welcome to the show.
[00:00:42] John Humphrey: Sam. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:00:44] Sam Wilson: Pleasure is mine. Three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show: in 90 seconds or less, can you tell me, where did you start? Where are you now? And how did you get there?
[00:00:51] John Humphrey: Okay. Started 20 years ago, originally from New York. I'm out here in California, 20 years, April, this past April is 20 years. My wife and I had been out here in California. Yes. We came out of California to create fame and fortune and become entrepreneurs. And that's where our kind of our journey started. Fast forward 20 years, you know, I've been in business with like one of my best friends that I met out here california when we first got out here, Jerry Conti and we've owned three or four different companies together on our latest company right now, LinxSTR, is revolutionizing the new IoT Helium platform that's being launched worldwide. And that's our latest play right now. And it's a, it's super exciting what we're into.
[00:01:35] Sam Wilson: Can you, can you break this down for us? You may have used a bunch of words that if entrepreneurs like me just said, what did he just say? Helium IoT LinxSTR and my eyes glaze over. Break it down for us.
[00:01:48] John Humphrey: I'm going to tell you all about it. It's actually, it's, it's a, it's a pretty cool concept. It's right around a little bit over two years ago, a cryptocurrency called Helium, the actual cryptocurrency said, okay, listen, we're going to create our own new cryptocurrency.
[00:02:01] John Humphrey: You know, it's right now there's 8,000 cryptocurrencies in the world that most people will never hear, right? This one said, we're going to do something different. We are going to create the world's biggest IoT network and IoT stands for internet of things. Now, if you don't know what that is, I didn't know what the hell it was when we got this whole thing rolling.
[00:02:20] John Humphrey: But basically it's a network that is an, basically an outdoor network of the internet. I'm just going to give you the plain, plain simple truth. So like I was sharing with you saying like inside our house, we have, you know, we have our wifi in the house, right? But we go outside, we're using cellular data, but there are billions of new devices that are being developed right now for everything from, from a motor scooters to the cameras that go around your property to temperature monitor, to, to leak detection, to all sorts of things that can happen with a property. These, all these little devices need to be hooked up into the internet, but typically they're not going to hook up into the wifi 'cause a lot of these devices are actually outside the property. So how did they hook up? Well, they're not going to hook up to cellular because it's too expensive and they're not going to the satellite cause that's even more expensive. So over the last number of years, there's been a, there's been a network called the IoT network.
[00:03:18] John Humphrey: Now the IoT network has been around in major cities for a very, very long time. So if you ever gone to, you know, swipe your credit card and a parking meter downtown. Well, your information is getting beamed into this outdoor internet network called the IoT network. If you've ever gone to a, like the, like the line motor scooters that you know, the little electric scooters you see everywhere downtown, how does that all operate?
[00:03:44] John Humphrey: That's an IoT device. So now what's happening is that not only are more and more IoT devices becoming made. Right now in the next three years, 75 billion new devices are going to need a place to hook up to the internet. I mean, this is everything what's going to happen. Almost a hundred percent of our life in three years right now, it's going to be all interconnected.
[00:04:05] John Humphrey: It's really crazy. So what do they do? Well, they created this, so Helium said we're going to create the world's first 100% connected worldwide network and how they're going to do it is not by building it centrally. They're going to decentralize the internet. So now this isn't the size of an actual box, but it's about the size of what's called, what's called a Helium hotspot.
[00:04:28] John Humphrey: Okay. So imagine having this in your house and all this little device does is it looks for other IoT devices and all it does is it beacons and witnesses, it just basically shares the network to create a network. So think of it this way. If Netflix got started today, they would send you a little device that you would plug into your router.
[00:04:50] John Humphrey: This is what they would do. And they would say, great, we'll send you the device. And when your neighbor orders, a TV show or a movie, and the movie has to go through all these devices to get to your neighbor. And this little movie goes over your box to get to your neighbor's box. We're going to pay you every time that that happens.
[00:05:09] John Humphrey: This is a peer to peer network that is being built. This is really what. You know, Web 3.0 really is, it's called decentralized the network, having the people own the network. So Helium is known as the people's network, and this is what's getting built right now. So super exciting. There's about, like I said, there was about 700,000 of those little devices worldwide in 5,800 cities and 200,000 of them are in the United States.
[00:05:36] John Humphrey: So there are quite a number, but people are saying, well, you know, how many will it take? It'll take about 2 to 3 million devices to completely blanket the United States. So think about this in a few years, and this is, this is kind of crazy me and you won't be talking over cellular towers anymore. Our phone, our actual communication is going to be going box to box, to box, to box, to box, to get anywhere it needs to get.
[00:06:02] John Humphrey: The entire world, this is where it's going to be happening. So Helium's going to be really the biggest data provider, you know, in, in the world in the next few years, this is what's happening.
[00:06:13] Sam Wilson: That that is really amazing. I mean, this is, this is obviously you're, you're at the front of this, I guess. Tell us, give us the backstory on how you saw the opportunity here. I mean, was this what your background was in and, you know, are you a big tech guy?
[00:06:28] John Humphrey: Nope, not a tech guy. I love tech, you know, I like to use tech, but I'm not in the weeds when it comes, I'm going electrical engineer or anything. I'm more of a user, right? So, so here's what happened. So my, my partner, Jerry, we've had a short-term vacation rental development company for many, many years. And we actually taught people how to convert large homes into luxury short-term rentals. And we did that in the arbitrage model where we're basically, we would go rent a giant house. I convert it. And then Castro, the property was amazing. I mean, one of my properties at Arizona, I was paying 10,500 a month rent, which was nuts.
[00:07:05] John Humphrey: Right. But it was bringing in $35,000 a month and bookings. Super great business, but then 2020 happens and we all know what happened in March of 2020, we had the pandemic. And what people don't realize is in the month of April, Airbnb came out and said, listen, we know everybody's panicking with travel, so here's what we're going to do regardless of your cancellation policy with your host, if you want to go ahead and cancel, go ahead. And we'll give you 100% of your money back. Well, listen that was great for the traveler, but it sucked for us as the host. Jerry and I lost $600,000 in bookings in 30 days 'cause everybody was canceling and there was no recourse. And so that really scared us. And we said, whoa, listen, if we're really hooked into a big tech giant here, like Airbnb or BRBO and they do something like this, it could really kill your business.
[00:07:58] John Humphrey: And so, Jerry decided, Hey, let's start a technology arm of our short-term vacation rental business, where people can create websites where they can book direct that we, we can, we can do pricing. We could do marketing, social media marketing, where people can go out and get their own bookings. So they can be empowered to have their own business, regardless of what happens if they got knocked off of Airbnb or knocked off of BRBO.
[00:08:22] John Humphrey: And the same thing happens in marketing, right? People have a Facebook account and it gets shut down for some. All their marketing drives up. So we want it to do that for the STR world. So we're doing this for a little bit, and a friend, and we were looking for all tech to put into our homes and somebody said, Hey, you want to check this thing out?
[00:08:40] John Humphrey: It's called Helium. We don't know what it was. And they said, well, listen, you can put a box, literally add this Helium hotspot to your short-term vacation rental properties. And you can earn crypto. You'll get rewarded in crypto currency. And we looked into, we said, wow, that's really amazing. We jumped on it. But then as soon as we jumped on it, we saw a whole bunch of pitfalls of why it wasn't going to work.
[00:09:04] John Humphrey: And so one of the big reasons is, is that I show you this little box, right? This is the size of a Helium hotspot. You would get off the internet. It doesn't work and it reason it doesn't work is it's not powerful enough. So what we did was is we hired a guy from Motorola who took that thing apart. We deconstructed it and we built this kind of this, it looks like a utility box.
[00:09:26] John Humphrey: I don't have one right here with me at the office, but it's a, it's a small utility box, probably the size of a toaster. And then we put an external antenna on the roof and we did this whole thing. So we basically souped up the Helium hotspot. We contracted with a manufacturer and we created our own customized box.
[00:09:44] John Humphrey: And by doing that, we built a better mousetrap. And then all of a sudden this was doing even bigger than our short term vacation rental businesses as people kept calling us saying, I want one of your boxes. I have a property, I'm a property management company. I have a thousand properties. I want to make crypto, like I could add this on and just make residual money without doing anything I'm in. And that's kind of how LinkxSTR got started six months ago.
[00:10:07] Sam Wilson: Six months ago. That's rapid growth. Tell me, tell me about the opportunity for commercial real estate investors.
[00:10:14] John Humphrey: Yeah, this, this is what's amazing. If you have a property, if you're, if you have like a commercial building, if you have real estate residential, doesn't make a difference what it is is what we have done is we have created a software where we can literally predict how much cryptocurrency your location could mine, meaning how much it would get rewarded. So what we do is we invite people, you know, to get on our calendar. We will literally get on a zoom call with them and say, Hey, let's go over your 5 to 10 property that you have, or maybe it's even more. We'll analyze them in real time. And then they'll make a decision on where they want to put hotspots because the one pitfall that we did see, Sam, was that in the beginning, people were just buying hotspots, plugging them in, and then all of a sudden I'm seeing all over social media.
[00:10:59] John Humphrey: This is a bunch of BS. Like I'm not making any money. This is what they're still like, well, what is this? And it's because they were literally taken a little box like this, plugging it into their router box, stick it next to a window on the first floor of their apartment. And the signal was going nowhere, absolutely nowhere.
[00:11:16] John Humphrey: And so that's what we found, so for real estate professionals, commercial real estate people at buildings, we can put an antenna on the roof and you could just be earning residual crypto rewards. I mean, to me, it's a no-brainer for people. It really is.
[00:11:31] Sam Wilson: I mean, what's, what's the break, even on that, I mean, is this something where, Hey, it's a thousand bucks for the box, you know, in three years you break even on it.
[00:11:39] Sam Wilson: I mean, it's, it sounds like I'm just going to be in being forthright here. So don't, let me offend you. Obviously, you've got a, you guys are going somewhere with, and you've got traction with it, so. I'm just the naysayer, trying to clarify.
[00:11:50] John Humphrey: This is great. I'll tell you the costs right now or how it works. Real simple. So the box is $29.97. So if you bought a retail box about three grand, now people say, okay, now listen, you can, I will tell you I'll be the first one to tell you. You can go onto eBay right now and buy a box for $500. You can, but it's going to look like this, right? And it ain't going to work.
[00:12:12] John Humphrey: I'm just telling you it's a $500 waste of money. So, what we did is we, we have a premier piece of tech that we put together for somebody. Now, here's the reason we did it. It's not for how much it costs, but how much it's going to make. So let's say for example, you put our box out there and it gives you five tokens a month, meaning five HNT.
[00:12:32] John Humphrey: Yeah, it's rewarded for you basically do enough and the box is sitting here and it's just pinging in witnessing. So over the course of a year, that 60 tokens in five years, that'd be 300 tokens that you would have in your crypto wallet worth, whatever the value HNT is going to be. Now, I will tell you, in five years, HNT is supposed to be around $250 a token, and let's just make it a round number.
[00:12:54] John Humphrey: Let's just say it's 300 a token. And you've got 300 tokens, you know, that's not bad. That is not a bad if you, you know, if you do, if you could do the math on that, that's pretty good money. That's 90 grand on a $3,000 one-time investment with no maintenance fee, no anything. It costs about $5 a year in electricity to run the box.
[00:13:17] John Humphrey: So this is what people are looking at in terms of ROI is that I'm in it for more of the 10 year play. You know, Jerry and I want to mine a few million coins in a, in 10 years. Our goal is to put 20,000 hotspots out in the marketplace and that's a hundred million dollar business right there. I mean, it's going to be massive.
[00:13:37] John Humphrey: So everybody that gets a Helium hotspot, you want to be thinking right now, just accumulating coins, because then when Helium goes to 500 or a thousand, maybe becomes a Bitcoin one day and goes to 10 or $20,000. You're going to be sitting on a fortune for a very, very minimal investment.
[00:13:56] Sam Wilson: Tell me about this. You know, we're long in the RV resorts space. So talk to me about that application.
[00:14:03] John Humphrey: Yeah. We're putting them everywhere. RV resorts are fantastic because there is an office there, right? That does have internet. And the reason I say internet is because the, the box needs to be powered by the ethernet right now, it's simply that it plugged into the ethernet port of your router box.
[00:14:20] John Humphrey: It doesn't use data. It just uses the power. Now in the future, they're going to have other locations where it's going to be Siler and you don't have to plug it in, but RV resorts are great. And one of the reasons they're great is because you can put literally a 40 or 50 foot tower, like an antenna, like in the RV resort. And the higher, the intent is the more HNT, the more crypto rewards you're going to earn, because the more boxes it's going to reach. Everything is about height with us, everything. So the higher, you know, the higher, the relocation of your intended, the better. So RV resorts, we have put Helium hotspots and our RV resorts very good, because they can kind of make their own rules they don't have an HOA, they can just build some fricking tower there that we'll help install. And now they're just mining tons of crypto there.
[00:15:05] Sam Wilson: What is your guys's angle? You know, I know you guys want to mine your own Helium, but what, or HNT I guess as you call it, maybe that's the short, short three letters for it, but what's your guys' angle other than selling the boxes, which is a one-time sale. I mean, maybe you're making some money on your box, but there's gotta be more to the business than that.
[00:15:23] John Humphrey: Correct. So we're sharing. Every box that we put out there, we're sharing the HNT with that person. So we will get 50% of the HNT. They get 50% of the HNT, but we do everything. We do the shipping, we do installation.
[00:15:37] John Humphrey: We do your hotspot maintenance, your crypto wallet. Everything is like, we do it all for you. And the reason we did that is we wanted to target real estate professionals that want to make the want to be in the money of just making money with their properties. And this is extra money for them, but let us handle the technology, the tech of this. We're not interested in people that want to tinker and you know, like that, isn't it.
[00:16:02] John Humphrey: I come across those people saying, like they're going. I'm going to go build my own hotspot. I'm going to go do that. I said, listen, you go for it. You know, our goal is every box is out there. It's a long-term play for us that we want to earn HNT but then the second part of this play is, is that we're going to be creating a consulting division of LinxSTR that is going to be all about the devices.
[00:16:23] John Humphrey: Cause this is the next phase of what's going to happen. There's going to be 75 billion new IoT devices that are going to be introduced into the world marketplace. So we're going to create a whole division. That's going to be creating devices, consulting with companies on how to get the data to their devices. All of those things is really the next play and that's going to be massive. That's gonna be massive.
[00:16:46] Sam Wilson: The sales and the front end of these devices, that's really just the entry point for you guys into the market collecting HNT.
[00:16:51] John Humphrey: And there's tons of hard costs in a tech company. So we don't, we're not making a fortune off of devices. We're really not. I mean, the whole point of this is the HNT and the consulting and how to use the data when the data comes up.
[00:17:05] John Humphrey: And we, we actually was interested. We actually, we spoke to an IoT device manufacturer the other day and they, and it was this, they have hundreds of devices and they're the funniest devices you'll ever see. There are little devices, right? One of the ones and they were all designed for real estate, they're all designed for how to maintain your property remotely, how to, how to do everything from like a leak happening on your property or fire damage or, you know, anything even critters.
[00:17:34] John Humphrey: So the funniest thing I saw was an IoT mousetrap that they have. So imagine you mentioned putting mousetraps out in your property, you got critters. And instead of hoping and praying that you're catching something, the device is actually an IoT device. So when something happens with the device, it'll alert. So you can put it out into your yard and it's on the network. And as soon as something catches, you actually get notification on your phone.
[00:17:59] Sam Wilson: That's funny. Yeah. There's endless applications like, oh, your applications right now. You, if you're in Memphis, it would be rats, not mice. So yeah, I know, right? Everybody on the show just took their headphones out and went, oh, that's disgusting. Yeah. Well, welcome to the Delta. Yeah. So that's, it'd be funny. Yeah. He caught a rat, great. Okay. Tell me about saturation. Like how far apart do these have to be? Is there, you know, is it one per neighborhood? Is it one per house?
[00:18:26] John Humphrey: Great, great question. The hotspots, ideally to be a thousand feet. So, if you had a building, like you had an apartment complex or something, or a fourplex, you would only put one hotspot there.
[00:18:37] John Humphrey: So that's it. Now this is the, also the issue that's been happening because when the whole network got started, it's completely unregulated at this point. So people were just buying things and what happened is there'll be too many hotspots in a concentrated location. So there's a network called the IoT Helium network.
[00:18:56] John Humphrey: And it'll tell you the great thing about it is that every hotspot that is live on the network, you can see what that hotspot is doing in real time. So there's actually a worldwide map and the way that they break it down is if I was to take this hotspot and have it go live, it would show up in what's called a green hexagon.
[00:19:16] John Humphrey: That's what it looks like on the map. It looks like there's a green hexagon that is over my house here, but the hexagon is literally two square miles. And this, this shows up as one hotspot within the green hexagon. Now the ideal thing, and the reason they do that is because ideally you do not want to have more than six Helium hotspots in one hexagon.
[00:19:41] John Humphrey: You get past six, then it's kind of like a pizza eating itself. There's only so much that's going to be, it's like a pizza and more and more people coming in. If the pizza is the same size, now that's this type of hotspot. Right? The one that we have, which is built ours is going to go outside of our hexes.
[00:19:58] John Humphrey: And they're going to go up to 200 miles away. They're going to network with other boxes. So it's going to go super far, the signal like you don't realize how far the signal can go. It goes really, really far. So that's why ours will outperform anything on the market.
[00:20:13] Sam Wilson: Wow, John, this is fascinating. Thanks for taking the time to break down this opportunity. We have here with our properties. That's, that is the either. There's always something new to learn in this. This is certainly something new to me. So I appreciate you taking the time to share it with us. If our listeners want to get in touch with you or learn more about you and what you guys are doing, how do they do that?
[00:20:31] John Humphrey: Simple. I just, if you have some properties, you want us to do an analysis of your property. You want to learn about a little bit more what we're doing. I'd say just book some time directly on my calendar. I always kind of do this. I leave this open ended with everybody it's simple. It's iotjohn, iotjohn.com. And then you can book some time to get into valuations done of your properties and see if you're sitting on a crypto gold mine somewhere.
[00:20:54] Sam Wilson: That's cool, John, thank you so much for your time today. I do appreciate it.
[00:20:57] John Humphrey: Thanks so much, Sam, be well.