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Have a drone question? We'll answer it. Welcome to "Your Drone Questions. Answered.", the podcast where we bring you the answers to your burning drone-related questions! Each episode, we take questions submitted by our audience and find industry experts to provide insightful and informative answers. Our interviews with these experts are typically 10-15 minutes long, making it easy to fit into your busy schedule. From flying techniques and gear to regulations and industry news, we cover it all. Whether you're a drone hobbyist, a professional, or just curious about the world of drones, "Your Drone Questions. Answered." is the podcast for you. So, send in your questions and join us as we explore the exciting world of drones!
John Dickow: [00:00:00] Hello. Welcome back to another episode of your drone questions answered. I'm John Decker with the drone launch Academy here to find the answer to your drone questions.
And today's a special episode I've got with me, David Young, founder of the drone launch Academy. David, thanks for joining me again today.
John Dickow:of course, John. So you just wrapped up season six of the Drone to 1K podcast. And so that's a podcast that essentially spotlights drone pilots, drone business people who are out there making at least a thousand dollars a month a business having to do with drones, using drones to make money.
And so you've got a pretty special insight into how people are starting businesses, making money. using their drones. In fact, DLA even has a course, specifically about making money with drones and starting businesses. So you really have some visibility into what people are up to, new ideas that are coming out.
And so I wanted to ask you, what are the biggest, best, most interesting drone ideas when it comes to starting a business? In 2024?
David Young: yeah. So John, like you said, we just wrapped up season six of Drone 1K podcast. There's 10 episodes per season. So that's [00:01:00] 60 episodes, I don't know, 30 minutes to an hour long.
So it's like 30 to 60 hours that I've talked to just drone entrepreneurs in all different types of industries. So people that are sort of just starting out, like you said, that are just crossing that thousand dollar a month threshold, and they've seen some traction on seeing what's working. And then we've interviewed people that are making several hundred thousand dollars per year in various industries.
and they're all over the country. and all different, you know, some have full time jobs, some do drone business full time. So we've seen a lot of different things of what works, what doesn't work and just wrapped up this season. So we had talked to a lot of people recently, we have a course on it.
I'm not here to promote that, but with that course, we had a lot of people that are starting drone businesses and then we have a mechanism inside the course where they report in on, Hey, here's how much money I made. They send us their invoices. they have assignments that they do. So we again can make sure that, Oh, these industries are working, these approaches are working.
Right. So we, we see what's happening. So with that, I'll break down for you sort of what I'm seeing right now and I'll organize it in terms of most opportunities. So like, Hey, here's where you can make the most money and [00:02:00] here's where there's the least competition that I'm seeing. and I'll work my way down to maybe, less money, still money, but less money and more competition sort of in that order.
typically The ones with less competition require maybe some more skillset, which is why they have less competition. So let's get into it. So I'd say if I was starting a drone business today, what I would focus on, and again, don't, don't take this as like, Oh, this is the only one I have to do, right?
There are so many ways that will work. But one that I'm seeing is, The realm of mapping and progress and progression updates in the world of construction. construction is one of those industries where it can be an old school industry. People are like, Oh, we've always done it this way, right? You got some old, old, you know, old school contractors.
but I've seen it in the last year or so, maybe a little longer start to shift where these construction companies, especially large ones are, are sort of seeing the light when it comes to drones, they're adopting. They're going, Oh, okay, this makes sense to have drones and I can see what they do for us.
So the services that you can provide here or that these construction companies will, will hire out contract. And I'll give you an example. I just got an email over the [00:03:00] weekend from a student in our course. And he said, Hey, David, I'm so excited. I'm going to get my first one K month. They get a little special prize package when they cross their first thousand dollar month threshold.
He's like, I actually think it might even be 2, 000 a month. he was pumped. He said, And I was like, well, what was it? Like, what were you doing? He said, it was this exact thing, right? A big construction company, they're working on, opening this big plant, and he's there to document it and do the progress.
the services that are in demand are site progress updates. So whenever there's a site update, Typically commercial construction, they're building something large. It requires coordination across a bunch of teams, right? They're gonna have a ton of subcontractors. There's a lot of project management that goes into it.
Typically there is a project manager for this whole thing and the more visibility that they can get across the site, the easier it is for them to do their job and especially documenting things in stages along the way. It helps them with a lot of their liability too. And I can give some examples there.
you'll go out with your drone. and this is where maybe that higher skill comes in, maybe a higher knowledge of knowing how to do photogrammetry, which is, when people say drone mapping, a lot of times, that's what they're [00:04:00] referring to, which essentially you could take a hundred acre construction site, fly it with your drone, take several hundred photos, and then you get it stitched together and you create basically one giant, super image that's very high resolution, but you can also make precise measurements off of it.
So they can ensure things are going in correctly in certain places. depending on what software you're using, you can also like overlay the original plans on top of that so you can make sure, Oh, hey, this is where we were wanting this pipe to go. And here's, here's the image. And yes, it is going there, right?
They can verify that. they love these, the more and more they're, they're understanding the value of these things. So, and the nice part about this project is they're usually long. So a big construction project, maybe take 18 months and they're going to want a drone pod to come out there. Some of them just pay once a month.
Some of them are like every week. So imagine every week for 18 months, that's like 75 flights. And you're going to charge several hundred dollars per flight no matter what you're doing. Great opportunity there. in addition to this drone map that you, you may make, they will likely want progression photos or progress updates.
So these are just photos of like, Hey, you fly your drone back, [00:05:00] take a picture from each of the four corners. Maybe you fly a big circle around the site and they'll use this for things like marketing. they'll use this for stakeholder updates. So a lot of times if. You know, let's think about a car plant.
I drove, I don't know where I was driving somewhere in the Southeast and I saw this just enormous facility being built and it's where they're going to make electric cars for, I don't know, I want to say like Hyundai or one of these companies and think about it, you know, this is kind of in the middle of nowhere.
the executives at that car company, I don't know, I don't know. Aren't going to be like going over there once a week, right? the people who have responsibility for making sure that this project is successful or reporting on it, they want to be able to show that to the manager where they're going to do like walk around with their cell phone, take pictures.
No, it makes so much more sense to get a drone pilot, especially the scale to create these maps, to go fly up, take pictures. So it gives them something to report back to their bosses and check in and say, Hey, here's our progress. Here's what's going on, right? Cause these people are almost always in other locations.
So it allows them to have. Better site visibility. One more example, real quick on the construction thing. we just did like a, a webinar on, some mapping training. So this is fresh on my mind. [00:06:00] This is from this year in 2024, a construction company just finished a project. and they had regular drone flights over their area.
And then after they were done like a manhole or a drainage area, like a manhole cover slash drainage area, completely collapsed and sunk in. And the company that owned the land tried to come after the construction company and say, Hey, you guys did this wrong. This sunk and collapse. This needs to be totally redone.
It was going to cost a ton of money to redo that or, you know, more money than they wanted. and the construction company is like, no, we did that correctly. Well, now it's a, he said, she said thing, right? Like, well, it's obviously not done correctly because it's now sunken into the ground. Well, since they had those regular drone flyovers and that site documentation, they could show step by step.
Nope. Here's exactly how we did it. First. We, laid this amount of rock and we packed it in and then we did this and they can show layer by layer of what they had done. Since they had these flyovers and they could show actually across the street, there was a, like a river that had, swelled up and the, had come down and washed away a lot of the stuff.
And it was a [00:07:00] problem with the adjacent property owner that had caused this issue, not the construction company. They had done everything to code. and it was, correct. So they could show that and they were able to avoid that rework cost. So again, there's like billions and billions of dollars. every year some construction association listed it of rework, costs or, costs to different disputes as like, Oh, Hey, you didn't do this right.
Or you didn't deliver these materials. So just having this documentation, it eliminates those issues, right. So that's what I would focus on sort of construction site mapping progress updates. If you want to give even a little bit more advanced with that, you can partner with a survey or maybe you are a surveyor yourself and you can provide more advanced services in this area to provide like survey grade or survey stamped plans because a lot of times, especially in the beginning, those construction sites need, a survey, of the area to make sure they're putting things in their places.
That I would put it kind of the top of the list. There's less people who know how to do that and better consistent money there. Moving down the list, underneath that sort of a separate category, I would say first person view. So FPV [00:08:00] drone, fly through videos. So these are those cool like one shot take videos.
I'm not sure if you've seen the one like where the guy's flying all around through the bowling alley. but these are really good for high end luxury properties actually. So episode 10 of the other podcast, journal, one K. Was a guy doing all of this. really high end luxury properties. They'll do these sort of one shot, take fly throughs.
they'll do these for golf events, right? You might have seen Tom Brady hitting a hole in one in a golf, FPV drone is chasing the golf ball. Another really cool thing that just came out was this team over in Europe developed this drone to fly like 250 miles an hour. To chase a formula one car and keep up with it. The whole time with that perspective and Red Bull sponsored that whole thing. So people are really getting into this FPV one shot thing. but the reason there's less competition there is because it actually takes a good amount of skill, actually flying skill to do it well and to get something that's worth using.
So there's a few people that I know that are doing this successfully right now. one person we had on the podcast was Drones by Dro, Pedro Silva. he's doing really well with this working with hotels. So they'll open up a new hotel and he'll do an [00:09:00] FPV, like fly through video of it. and he makes good money doing it that way with commercial.
So look at hotels, high end commercial real estate, high end residential properties for real estate agents. You can get paid thousands of dollars per shoot for this, but it's a high skill. And the reason it's lower competition, it's because it's harder to get. So those, I put those two, maybe at the top of my list.
If you're going to focus on someone's scrolling down from there. There's a lot of other opportunity, but you get into a little bit more competition when it comes to just like. Regular drone photos. Hey, I need some, pictures of this house or I have an event and I'm doing some marketing stuff.
Can you take some pictures for me here? so just general aerial photos and videos, which I feel like is what a lot of people try to do. And the problem is their work is just sort of average because they haven't practiced it enough. They haven't gotten good at things like video editing editing photos and learning how to frame shots and things like that.
but once you get decent at that, it's really about. Marketing and connecting with people so you can be successful there. So, you know, I know people who just do real estate photo and video, right? They're just taking pictures of the inside of houses, even just, you know, run of the mill to 300, 1, 000 homes, like whatever median [00:10:00] price is.
They'll do that. and typically those, you make money by doing high volume and having a good system of getting through it. So I still know people who make six figures just as real estate photographers. But it's less about your skill. You still need to be good, right? You still need to have, at least a standard level of goodness.
But then after that, it's about those other factors like, availability, reliability, communication, real estate agents want it to be delivered pretty quickly. so having a good system where you can network with people, get clients, and sort of, have a higher volume. So you make maybe less per job, but if you can do them quickly and you can get a lot of them, you can make good money there.
So I know, several people another guy who's been on the podcast, Robert Nix, become good friends with him over the years. And he was a radiology tech, helping people do x rays and MRIs and stuff. And, he was kind of wanting a career change. And he built this up on the side working with real estate agents and was able to quit his radiology tech job and just do that.
so that would be a field that you would imagine is saturated. and people might be like, Oh, I don't want to do that. Yada, yada, yada. but if you focus on the right things, you can be successful there too. So I would kind of put that in the, third [00:11:00] tier category of still possible.
Maybe requires a little less technical abilities, but more abilities to be successful on the marketing side and the system side. So that's my overview for 2024. That's what I would focus on if I was, if I was diving into a new drone business today.
John Dickow: Okay. that was excellent insight.
And I, I know we hear and we talk to all the time, drone videographers, drone photographers who are out there, running their business and sharing their success stories. But the construction angle was one that, really surprised me actually, that, you know, there's so much value for a construction company to have those kind of shots that kind of Safety net in a lot of ways is what those drone shots are to them.
So that's really cool. I appreciate that.
David Young: Yeah. Let me just add one more thing to think about like a, if you're building the building, like a big commercial, huge warehouse, right? that's a multi, multi, multi million dollar project typically, right? Let's say you have a 20 million project.
They're not going to quibble over a few thousand bucks for a drone pilot, right? That's like a rounding error to them. One little tiny blip. Whereas if you're, if you're working with a small business or like a local pizza shop and you ask them to pay five grand for a video, they're going to be like, Whoa, like I need to [00:12:00] see some major ROI on this.
So again, you can do those smaller projects, but they're just going to be a lower amount because you just gotta figure it. You gotta realize who your customer is. The constraints that they're working with. So that's why it's sometimes nicer to target those bigger customers. If you can, if you can get the skills to be able to land them.
John Dickow: Excellent. I always, always appreciate it. when you come on here and, kind of share your, insights, you're a drone business leader yourself. but you also just have this really unique position of talking to, other, Drone business people, drone community members, within the drone launch academy, it's really cool.
And so I appreciate you coming on here and sharing some of that.
David Young: Yeah, man.
John Dickow: Always happy to, uh, jump on. And Hey, if you've got a drone question, please send it our way. We will find the answer to it. You can submit your drone question on YDQA. io, or if you're part of the drone launch connect community, go ahead and just type it in there.
Ask, uh, we'll see it. We're always watching that feed, and finding answers to your questions. So until then. We'll see you in the sky.