Greg Eisenberg
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yes. Yeah. That was my first question to that is like, If you're A16Z, not them, I don't want to pick on them exactly, but the idea is there's five funds that are really, really hard to get into and they curate their LPs really, really carefully. And they don't let regular people invest, like you or me. But the problem is I think that they want to keep it that way.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah, but it's actually really interesting. When you come up with a bad idea, on this podcast we say, if an idea is good, you sip the idea, and if the idea is not good, you spit it. Sometimes these spit ideas actually get you down the line of thinking of a good idea. For example, with this idea, your insight was right. Your insight is that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Millennials use a lot of these software businesses, use a lot of these CPG businesses. They would rather invest in that than the S&P 500. Insight correct. But the execution of this is difficult because the other side of the marketplace, so to speak, doesn't really want that to happen. So the question is, what can you build for millennials such that they get that same feeling around
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
you know, that same warm and fuzzy feeling that they would have gotten.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
There's something there and someone in the comment section is going to be like, here's where I should take it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah. So feel free. So let us know in the comment section. I'm just going to keep saying what else you got. What else you got? What else you got? What else you got?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
A little bit. I've never been to one of their events. So tell me more about it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
I think so far was was and is really onto something, which is that. Events haven't really changed in years, like they've basically stayed the same. So they were kind of like, okay, how do we, you know, with the trend around stadium shows and bigger and bigger shows and festivals, how do we do the complete opposite? And they did it, and I think they're doing quite well.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
I think they're doing like eight figures in revenue or so. So they're doing really well. But I think that there's so far sounds for X is kind of the idea that you're saying, which is you know, which I think, I think the, the, the hard part with this is choosing like which community you want to go after and what is the utility for the, the event.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So for example, so far sounds a lot of people go to those events, at least in my, like, and anecdotally, it's like, they're going on a first date basically there. It's like, it's kind of perfect, right? It's like 60 minutes, you know, it's, it's not, you're just going to a bar or something like that. You're like doing something a little interactive.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
And then after you can talk about it and they'll probably be cool people there. So if you were doing, you know, so besides, so for your example, like talks, comedians, scientists, like those to me, like there's probably so far sounds for science, so far sounds for comedy, so far sounds for, you know, talks. What do you think about that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
I stand corrected. Also, I'd love that line. That line is so good. I'm going to reuse that all the time. And you're right with, with Notion specifically, like We use Notion. We probably have like 70 or 80 people on Notion. And there is no network effects because I've thought about it too, because we're thinking about moving off of it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
And now it's just, there were network effects with some of these businesses when it was really hard to get the graph on there. But like, you know, it's really easy to post a link on Slack and get my team to use something else, you know? So, When people were saying network effects were everything, that was like in 2005, 2006, 2007, when that was a lot harder.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
There's only one thing I'll push back on in what you just said, which is. the business will take up 10, 15 plus years of your life. For some businesses, that's absolutely true. And, but I think we're entering this new era of micro businesses.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So, you know, 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago, when you wanted to create a business, it was this, it was this, it was like clowning Mount Everest in terms of like what you needed to get done. You know, back in the day when it was, when there was no internet and you wanted to, let's say, make a store, like you had to go and like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
find the location and spend so much money renovating it and painting and merchandising and getting the suppliers. You know, then 15, 20 years ago, if you wanted to put an e-commerce store, you had to like build your own shopping cart. There was no Shopify. Now what's cool is you can stand on the shoulders of giants and there is like a lower price
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
kind of a lower risk way of putting things out there. Now, these businesses might not be as big as Jam, and you might need to create a portfolio of them to end up making it meaningful, but that's my take on the business needs to be 10 to 15 years.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Perfect. Win-win situation. And I actually didn't realize that you were at Cloudflare. At the end of this episode, I'll tell you the story of how I met the founders of Cloudflare when I was just a kid from a Facebook group. So I'll share that at the end.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
A hundred percent. Yeah. I feel you. I feel you on that, you know, and especially if you take venture, that's also like, you're definitely signing yourself up for, a chapter of your life. And where, you know, I guess the difference is some businesses are chapters and some businesses are pages and know the difference between a page and a chapter.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Before we head out, I need to tell you quickly the story of how I met Michelle Zaitlin from the co-founder of Cloudflare and her husband, Jamie, I think his name is.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So I think, and he was also involved in Cloudflare, I think. Jamie was, was he? I don't know.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So people know this, I'm Canadian. When I first came out to San Francisco, I didn't know anyone, but there was this Facebook group called AC781. And AC781 stood for Air Canada 781, the flight from Montreal to San Francisco. And for whatever reason, I was in this group and I was coming to San Francisco and looking to sublet a place. I didn't know anyone.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
I was probably like 20 years old or something. And Michelle responded. And she's like, hey, I've got this startup called Cloudflare and we've got this... we've got this space and it's a studio and she rented it to me for like nothing, literally out of the goodness of her own heart. And, uh, really got me like hooked onto San Francisco and, and, uh, changed my life from that little moment.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
And I think you never know who you're going to meet, you know, now, I mean, now Cloudfair is like a $20 billion company. You never know who you're going to meet. And, uh, it was just so cool how and positive and how she gave back. So I will say there's power in community and, uh, shoot your shot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah, I'll share that at the end. But all right. We're not going to get to all 141, of course. Of course. I don't want to waste a second. What's your first idea for us?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah, totally. Danny, it's been a pleasure. Uh, People, please like and comment the YouTube video. If you're not watching this on YouTube, just get on YouTube and like it and comment on it. I hate that I say this now, but it actually gets the video spread and gets the pod spread.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
If you enjoyed this, if you got an ounce of value, I mean, she gave you a bunch of great ideas and a bunch of good frameworks for thinking about this. So thank you, Dani. Where could people find out more about you and Jam?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
This is amazing. So you just put up the deck?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah, I'm just going through the deck right now. Everyone should go check this out because... This is so well done. A good deck is just very clear around here's the problems, here's the solutions. And for anyone who's doing any business idea, even if you're not raising venture, creating a deck like this will just help. It'll help you clarify what you're doing. This is really good. Check it out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Thank you for sharing this. And yeah, we'll link the the notion and this in the YouTube description for for people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Thanks, Danny. Later.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So there's a lot of programs for technical talent that exist, training for technical talent. But there doesn't feel like there's that much in the growth marketer content marketer space. So are you saying develop the programs around taking someone who's not a growth marketer to become a growth marketer and then connecting those growth marketers with people who want to hire them? Is that the idea?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and ai that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on mark zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in google that's why i like seo and that's why i use boringmarketing.com and that's why i invested in it
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. I think it's really interesting that you're thinking about job titles that are overlooked. The way we connected originally, I don't know if you remember, but you were looking for a community manager.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
You were looking for a community manager. Less so now, but at the time it was a a new type of role, like managing discords and things like that. So I think maybe, maybe the, the framework for people listening at least is like, what are roles that are, you're just starting to hear for the first time. So one of those, for example, is design engineer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah. So I think, uh, what, you know, what you do is when you start hearing a, a name for the first time, and maybe it's twice, three times, take a note of it, go to Google, Google trends, see if it's going up. if it's going up, then the way to monetize it is, it sounds like it's exactly what you're saying through your method.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Danny Grant, I am so excited to have you here. I woke up today, I was like, really excited to have you here because I know you're an idea machine. And then you tweet out something that I just, I was so excited. So you tweet out, before Jam, which is your venture-backed startup, I think you've raised $9 or $10 million, there were 141 startup ideas we didn't build.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
And if you were to start this, like how would you start this? How much money would it require? What tools would you use?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah. I think, uh, I want to give two examples of that concrete example. So there was an account, Julian Shapiro used to run something. Uh, he's an entrepreneur used to run something called demand curve and bell curve. Um, They were, you know, growth businesses. And one of the ways that he got a lot of traction is he created a Twitter account called Growth Tactics, at Growth Tactics.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So good. So good. So he got a really good name. You'd be surprised. Some of these names are still available. And just started sharing growth tactics. And then people would see it on their feed. And they're like, do I, you know, do I want some more growth tactics in my feed? Yeah, absolutely. Click follow. So it started to grow pretty quickly.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
And all of a sudden, he had thousands of people, startups, founders who are interested in growth tactics, and then he sold them courses and services and that sort of thing. So I think one good idea here is to just kind of grab a generic-sounding name and go and build a Twitter or LinkedIn account for that. That's one idea. That's what I would do. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
about to share them for the first time on Greg Eisenberg's podcast. And now I'm just salivating.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So for people that don't know, Growth.Design, they make these comic books and they break down... It's beautiful. They go check it out. Yeah. They break down different UX flows and they basically, uh, kind of commentate it with, uh, they commentate it with, um, user psychology and stuff like that. And it just, it's, it's absolutely brilliant. But I think that's another thing is it's animated.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
So you don't really like feel connected to anyone. Um, so yeah, I agree with you there. Um, makes sense. All right, what else you got?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Who else is doing that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It feels like there's no competition for that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Do you think this is a profitable cash flowing business or do you see this potentially being like a VC back thing?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
Can you just explain to people what vZero is and how that would extend to this?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas
This is firing me up. This is why you're on the pod right now, because I feel like you have such a good sense to where things are going. I want to keep the ideas going. What else you got?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
We're going back to the egg juice. You can't just say and they sip the egg juice and just like segue it into something else.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, I saw that one.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I texted you and I was like, hey, you want to record a pod right now?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I mean, the reality of the situation is that startup idea with the insight around bookmarks is a huge insight.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Like, period. That's a really good insight. No, and it's something I'm going to think about. So yeah, listen, you might talk about egg juice here and there. And that's really, really strange and unusual. And I hope you're well. I'm not well. Yeah. But, you know, in a sea of egg juice, you sprinkle on some great startup ideas and some good insights that I think people should be taking notes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And I take notes. So that's why I bring you on. All right. Yeah. Thank you, Matt. All right. See you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Next segment. You want to talk about life hacks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Does that sound good? Well, let's do that, but be sure to bring up the one around Instagram close friends.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I the only social media app I have on my phone is TikTok. Oh, and that sounds like an addictive one, though. And it's like buried away. And it isn't something that I post on. And it, for me, it's not an addictive one. So I think, I mean, I think the advice is don't have the, you know, certain apps are more addictive to, to certain people. Like Twitter for me, it would be the most addictive.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Instagram to others would be the most addictive. So I just remove the ones that are addicted to me. And, uh, It's just the experience on desktop isn't as dopamine friendly than on mobile. You've got to be crazy to put social media apps on your phone. You've got to be crazy, period.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
No, actually I don't. You don't? No, but sometimes I will say if I'm out of the house for like a really long time or I'm traveling or something and I've got like a tweet or something that I just can't get out of my head. A banger. A banger as the kids say. I'll download it and... And quickly push it live and then delete it after.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I tweeted this and someone who listens to the pod was like, yeah, and the river goes into the river into steps into the river. Remember from like four episodes ago? The worst analogy ever. Yeah. I made like the worst analogy ever.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So I read a book a long time ago and maybe this is actually interesting because we're going to talk about books later, but it was called Made to Stick.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So I read it maybe 15 years ago at this point. And it talked a lot about how do you communicate in a way that sticks with people. And one of the ways is just analogies. The reality is when you have a conversation with someone for an hour, they're going to remember one or two things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Even egg juice, right? It's so visual. You can kind of picture it. I can picture it. Oh yeah, you can smell it, unfortunately.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So analogies work. And in the context of business specifically, like creating content, selling people, analogies just really stick in people's minds.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
The other thing related to this that some of the smartest entrepreneurs I know do is they make it conversational when they're writing copy or they're communicating.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So what they'll do is, instead of saying, I remember a story that Steve Jobs said, and just explaining what the story is, you say, when Steve Jobs was at WWDC and everyone thought that BlackBerry owned mobile, Steve Jobs goes up on stage, he goes, So using the words, he goes, and then you just talk like you are Steve Jobs.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
When you're conversational and you talk like the person that you're bringing up, it puts the person listening, gives them a front row seat, and it is just a way more effective way to get your point across.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
No, I don't know him, but... You need to get him on your podcast. I do. I do need to get him on the podcast.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
The funniest part of what you just said was that you tried to do Neville Medora's accent, but then you just used your own accent.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Okay, let's start with the idea. Let's go backwards. We're going to start with the idea. Then we're going to go the life hacks. And then we're going to go the books. If we get to it. No. Well, listen to the whole episode to get to it. We are going to get to it. Okay.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah. Like you started talking about Steve Jobs and then you're like, oh, give me a second. And you like pull up a black turtleneck and you just start changing. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
When I first moved to San Francisco, I became friends with a group of 10 Japanese people who had just moved to San Francisco too. They all could barely speak English. Really, they were learning about American culture and stuff like that. And one of the first things I noticed was every time I'd meet them, they would show up with a gift.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And although I didn't need a pancake mix as a gift, which was one of the gifts, it didn't need stuff like that. It was just so nice that they showed up with a gift. So I took that to heart. And when I was in my early 20s, I remember I bought a thousand mini Buddhas. Because who doesn't want luck of a mini Buddha?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
No, I gave... So I spent... I gave out those... It was like the year of the Buddha. I gave out all a thousand Buddhas that year.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, I had a lot of meetings. In my early 20s, I would just like meet with anyone. Yeah. And... People just like started talking about it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah. People started talking about it and I like kind of became known as like the guy who showed up with gifts. From that, and by the way, I was giving gifts to like the founder of Uber who I just like randomly met and all these crazy people that I shouldn't have been in those rooms, but I was in those rooms and they would send me an email right after and be like, by the way, thanks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I'm looking at the Buddha right now.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So it works, especially if you're trying to build your network and you're trying to create a lasting impression in people's minds.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It like price doesn't matter. It's really just the thoughtfulness. I don't know if a thousand Buddhas would make sense today. Maybe they would. But it's just thinking about... Maybe today people are really stressed about the election, let's say. And it's generating anxiety. So what is something that you can give to people that is the ante of that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
What is something small, thoughtful that you can give? Xanax. Yeah. Maybe you should just... Go to... Become a pharma company.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Well, the problem with tea is that you're done, right? Like, I'm sure that there's people who still have these little buddhas on their desks. Teapot? Teapot is a good one.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's the least you can do. It's the least you could do. After all we've done. After all we've been through together.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I would think that's real. I would love that. That would make me so happy. But that's not permanent, I don't think.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I take it back. It's pretty permanent.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
The best time to give a gift is to give a gift when the person least expects it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Why are you spraying egg juice at me?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
What I mean by that is on people's birthdays they often get gifts and they're busy. Yes. Are they more likely or less likely to remember a gift you give them on their birthday?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Exactly. So you want to give someone a gift when they're not expecting it. So that could mean the first time you meet them. But then also at month 6 or month 18 or month 24...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, don't be like a bot. You don't create a system where it's like, okay, on the third week of every month, I buy this thing and I create a script. No, be a human being.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Hell yeah, Harnell. Hell yeah or no by Derek Sivers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
By the way, I can't believe you're going into books, even though.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
That's a really good one, is always have gifts in your apartment or house to give to people. It's like no-brainer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I mean, I wrote it, so...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I use the Things to-do list app.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I think somewhere. It's made somewhere. I think it's Germany. Somewhere in Europe, for sure.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Okay. I use this German product called Thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's a lovely product. I use it. I have one of my tasks on it is learning list. And every quarter I have three new things that I'm trying to learn.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's basically every month I'm trying to learn a new thing. And the thing I'm trying to learn, sometimes it's about business, but sometimes it's just like a personal thing. So it could be, well, actually right now I'm taking a bunch of Stanford online courses on finance.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So I never went to business school. Of course I can like read an income statement, a balance sheet, that sort of thing. But I figured, hey, it would be great to be better at this. So it's one of those things where if you don't put it in a list and actually have homework and put it in your calendar, you're never going to get around to it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I think it's business weaknesses and life's curiosities. So like right now, I'm also like for this upcoming three months, I'm also just trying to get better at guitar. So taking a guitar course and then if I pull up, I'm also learning how to golf.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's also I live in Florida, so. It's a golfing place. It's a golfing place.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
This came to me a couple years ago. We got offered a $100 million blank check to basically scale out late checkout and build out a bunch of new products faster, acquire faster. Just take our model and just... add steroids to it. And we turned it down and the VC basically called me up like sweating bullets.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
He goes, I don't understand. This is like a surefire way for you and your team to get generational wealth.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, a similar voice. Very similar voice to me. And I go, I'm not chasing generational wealth. I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. In fact, the people who I look up to who have that sort of wealth, they give away 99.9% of their wealth anyways to charities. what I'm about is I want to, I want to live a wealthy life. I want to live a rich life.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I want to be able to do whatever it is I want, but I don't need generational wealth. I think that's, it's something that what I don't like about chasing general generational wealth is it's infinite. You're chasing an infinite goal.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I don't have a number because people I know who have numbers are just, they hit the number and then the number becomes 2x. And then they hit the number and the number becomes 2x. And they hit the number and it becomes 2x. The way I think about it is I want to be able to do what I want.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, and there's a lifestyle that I want to have and that requires a certain amount of money, but that's kind of where I'm at.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Well, what's your personal mission statement?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
You don't have one? Even around like facilitator.com?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So where this came from was a lot of companies have mission statements. Most companies have mission statements. And I realized that founders, because they care so much about making the business work, they kind of lose sight of what their goals are.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah. So that's my point on this life hack. How do you do it? It doesn't make a difference what your mission is or what mine is. It's just like, have a mission.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So... Help me! Help me help you. Help me! A personal mission statement could be something like, it could be numbers. Like you can say, I want to make a million dollars a year and I want my children to have the best possible life. And I want to have a happy family. And that's a personal mission statement. You can put dollars in there. You can add personal, of course, into it. Family, friends.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I don't even know what that means.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, there's like... There's a few frameworks for it. There's one called the three question framework. What is most important to you? What are your goals? What values guide your actions? For example, the integral piece that you talked about, the value that you have is integrity. You have pieces of it. That's one framework. There's also the purpose, values, goals framework. It's
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And we turned it down and the VC basically called me up like sweating bullets. He goes... People need a sip on Jonathan Jice Cream Courtney.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
purpose what is your life about values what do you stand for and goals what do you want to achieve so I kind of like that one because I do think that you need to have some number what you know associated like from a goal perspective because otherwise it just becomes like so lofty and then the last one that I've seen is the five step plan So it's, what are your past successes?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Identify themes from your past achievements. What are your core values? List and prioritize your most important values. Identify contributions, how you want to impact different areas of your life. Identify goals, short and long-term goals. And then it's write mission and vision statements. So you're basically synthesizing all the above stuff in concise statements. Love it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Tabbed out. Okay, one more. One last one. One last and then more or then end of episode? No, then three to four books.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I just want to talk quickly about the Instagram close friends one just because it's on my mind.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Did I not put that on the list? Oh, yeah. Being on someone's IG close friends doesn't mean you're close friends. So I don't know if this is just me, but recently I met a couple people out in the world and they just throw me on close friends. Oh, really?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I'm saying that if someone adds you to close friends, it doesn't mean they're your close friends. And if you want to get deeper, it's like you only have a couple of close friends in real life.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
when when you say angry people are you saying someone who's just got a generally negative vibe or someone who's actually angry so in my mind i wasn't going to use this word on twitter because it wouldn't hit the same but i think of them as curmudgeons curmudgeoness the the people the people who are not going to hand out candy at halloween
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
because they hate the kids or the kids listen to loud rock music or whatever it is. You know what I mean? Also, the people that just are rooting for you to lose.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
A lot of people hate this podcast for that reason, actually.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
There's a group of people who love... this podcast. Thank you for listening. I noticed on Twitter, there's another group of people who are like, oh, the Startup Ideas podcast? Ideas? That's nothing. Execution? That's everything. And they hate on idea people. And they don't realize that this is a positive, fun, creative way to get people's juices flowing. That's what this is. And
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Those people that are just anti this podcast to me are like curmudgeons. And I think that when you're building a startup, you can't have curmudgeons in your life because it's so hard as it is.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
You don't have to. That's what it was.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
That's how excited you are.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's that and running out of cash.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
True. Or they also, you know, something bad happens. Open AI changes their, you know, their pricing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
This is Ram Sharam, who is on the board of Google. OG Silicon Valley guy. He was on the board of a company I was at a few companies ago that I was helping run. And he's the one who told me, he was like, there's two ways that a company dies. Either The team gives up or the company runs out of cash.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Also, if you're listening to this and you want to work with a founder like Jai Scream. Jai Scream. Jai Scream. You... You don't want to be a curmudgeon. You want to be positive. You can give constructive criticism, but in a positive way, not in a passive-aggressive, curmudgeonous way.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Well, it's just not my vibe. It's like going back to personal mission statement. That's not my MO. All right, let's get to books. I know you got some books that matter to you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So it's shocking that The 4-Hour Workweek still holds up. I still remember the framework for the 4-Hour Workweek. Some of the biggest business books all are based around one framework. In the 4-Hour Workweek, it's the deal framework. Definition, elimination, automation, and liberation. So definition, I just sort of Googled it to remind myself, defines the new rules for work and lifestyle design.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Elimination focuses on eliminating unnecessary tasks and time wasters. Automation explains how to automate income and tasks. By the way, it couldn't be more relevant today in an AI world. And liberation focuses on achieving mobility and freedom. So... I mean, the frameworks make sense and are still relevant. Of course, some of this stuff is not going to be as like an oh my God moment.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I remember reading the 4-Hour Workweek in 2006 or whatever. Yeah, 2005, 2006. And hearing that you can hire people, VAs in different countries, I was like, I can't believe you can do this. Now everyone knows you can do that. Or at least people listening to this pod know you can do it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
What's your next book?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I got to be honest, I just Googled Derek Sivers. I have no idea. I didn't know who he was.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Why is Derek Sivers interesting?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
He's like MySpace Tom. That's the MySpace Tom effect.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Generational wealth. Freak show. He didn't chase the general generational wealth. Okay, cool.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's just like... Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, so... Yeah, I... Get him on. I'm trying to get him on. Trying to get him on. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
That was one of the best books I've ever read. Quick's Jason Freed story just because I think it's interesting to you. You'll find it interesting because you're always like, Greg, how do you meet everyone? So I tweeted out... I did a tweet about bootstrap businesses. And then by the way, we'll get to one last book recommendation after I tell this quick side tangent story.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So I tweeted out just about bootstrap startups and why I think they're great and how I've been enjoying building them. And Jason Freed replied. He doesn't follow me, but he replied. I responded instantly. I was on desktop. Instantly, I replied and I was like, you should come on the pod. And then he was like, email me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And the reason I'm sharing this is because I think people might find this interesting in terms of getting busy people, well-known people, and working with them in some capacity. So I go, hey, Jason, big fan. So I keep it really short. I have a podcast that gets 250,000 downloads a month.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Not an interview podcast, just a pod where I bring in three to four half, where the guest brings three to four half-baked ideas and we jam on it. If this is something of interest, I can work around your schedule. Just tell me what works, basically. And then I include past gets, include Alexis Ohanian, Sam Parr, Andrew Wilkinson. Jonathan Courtney. And then I take a screenshot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I know he's a busy guy. So I took a screenshot of the tweet to remind him who I am. That's good.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Saving in time. So then he responds right away. Sounds fun. Format sounds really interesting. Let me watch a recent episode today to make sure I can bring something worthwhile. Sound good, Jason? I could have easily been like, absolutely sounds good. What are you going to do next? That's not my vibe.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
A few options for different types of recent episodes. Jonathan Courtney! Yep. Kevin Rose, big, fun ideas. I include the YouTube and the Spotify because I don't know what he's going to prefer. Cody Schneider, D-Gen Scrappy Ideas, and Jice Cream. He's a friend, so more of a jam. Haven't heard back yet, but I'm optimistic.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Give us one last one. One last recommendation before we head out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I'm going to, a new thing is- that I've been doing is whenever someone who I respect mentions a book, it's an auto Amazon order.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Dude, I've been buying. I just went on Amazon. We'll include the links in the YouTube description. If and only if you like, subscribe, comment. By the way, if you're going to like this YouTube video, which you should... I want you to click the thumbs up button, but because you liked it so much, click it again. And when you click it again, it's actually going to unlike it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
But then I want you to like it again. So it's like three times because you like it so much, even though it's only going to register once. Or click it really hard. Yeah, just click it really hard. All right. I want to see those injuries.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I like it longer, personally.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It's not short and it's not long.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
You ever see the Royal Tenenbaums?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I think it was Richie Tenenbaum, he... He has like the tennis player has like really long hair and then he like shaves his head.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Anyways, that was you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Cool. Well, I'm glad we ended on that note. It's been real. Thanks for coming on. I appreciate it. This is the longest we've ever chatted. I don't know if anyone made it to the deep end, but if you did, thank you for listening. Hopefully, well, you're traveling a bit, so you won't be on the pod for a few weeks. You'll come back soon.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
All right. Thanks, everyone.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I'm not chasing generational wealth. I don't need hundreds of millions of dollars or billions of dollars. This came to me a couple of years ago. We got offered a $100 million blank check to basically scale out late checkout and build out a bunch of new products faster, acquire faster products. Just take our model and just add steroids to it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
It would be really cool if you can also connect the dots. So for me, I'm one of those people too. I have thousands of bookmarks and I bookmark them. In my mind, I'm like, I'm going to get back to this. I'm totally getting back to this. Never get back to it. In fact, on my newsletter, I started just sending out five bookmarks called Greg's Letter, gregeisenberg.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And I started doing that because I literally don't look at my bookmarks. And I was like, this is going to force me. Creating a newsletter around these five most interesting bookmarks of the week is going to force me to drill in my head that these bookmarks, I need to read them, write notes. But then I forget about them. Yeah, absolutely. I forget about them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
That's what I'm saying. You know, the drip noise. That's what I'm saying.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, I think the easy way to do this, so you can still be a one-man startup and build this and not have to do crazy AI stuff, build a big team and raise venture, is when you sign up to the service, it could say, what are your goals and what kind of business are you in?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
So for example, I could say, I'm an agency owner and I'm trying to get to $75 million this year in revenue and I'm looking for content that XYZ. And then from those data points, from that first party data, from the data of the bookmarks, then it's like, oh, hey, we're going to resurface this bookmark with this new piece of information that WPP has acquired this agency. Yes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And we think that... Like community notes edition or something. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I like calling you Jice Cream.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
I don't think I do a free version. To me, you do a paid version. I think the way to... get a lot of people excited about this is you create a bunch of Twitter accounts that are like Sean Poorey's bookmarks, Greg Eisenberg's bookmarks, Jay Ice Cream's bookmarks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Well, that's the internet, bro. That's the internet.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And maybe what you do is you go to some of these creators and you're like, hey, I'll give you $1,000 a month if you just share your bookmarks with me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
That's so true. Oh my God. Oh my God.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
What do you want to talk about today?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
How much would you pay for it?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
By the way, I thought you were going to say like, yeah, minimum pay like $10,000 to $50,000 a month. Is there like $10 a month?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
You think you're a baller because you're about to spend $10 a month on this service?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
People... No. No. No. Don't do it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
No. I use Twitter bookmarks religiously. And that's it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Why aren't you more excited? Yeah, why aren't you more excited? Why isn't someone building this right now?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
Yeah, but we took, in our defense, we took the idea to the next level.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
He spread the seed.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
And it was amazing. You were lovely. Thank you. We consumed it. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
80 mins of advice to level up your life with lifehacks
We don't. And everyone who's listening to it sipped it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
There's an opportunity to build a social media insurance company. I mean, if you have an email list of 400,000 people, like that's easily worth four plus million dollars. That's a mansion. That's a mansion on 20 acres, you know?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Wherever you want to start.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And in the case that your account gets taken away, we will write you a check for XYZ amount or we'll help you get back that account. It's basically just, I would pay for that. And I don't do engagement pods or stuff like that, but I would just pay a fee to make sure that I don't lose my account from some black swan event.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Are you kidding me?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So this is brilliant. This is brilliant. The way to do this, so I still think there's an opportunity. Notch is going very horizontal. So they're basically saying like, they're trying to be the Geico of digital assets. I think the way to do this is I would create a bunch of sub-brands. So it'd be like Twitch insurance, X insurance, YouTube insurance. And then it's just a bit more niche.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And I think that if I got reached out by someone who just focuses on Twitter X insurance, and that was where my bread and butter was, I would trust them maybe a little bit more than something like Notch.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. Also, I see it says Twitter insurance coming soon. I don't want to be the first person that they're going to insure. There's a 401k company. I won't name them. But two years ago they launched. And I have my 401k with some boring bank, Fidelity or something like that. And they hit me up. Great pitch. Great pitch. Great loom with it. Cold DM. And I was like, I love this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And once I went and looked at moving my 401k, they're like, oh, you're going to be the first person to actually move your 401k. And I was like, respectfully, dude, I'm out. I'm out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
How big is your email list?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
100%. I mean, if you have an email list of 400,000 people, that's easily worth four plus million dollars. So that's a mansion. That's a mansion on 20 acres. So it's like, of course, you would spend a certain amount per year to make sure that if a black swan event happens or you do something wrong or you have an employee who goes AWOL, there's someone you can call and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And I think this is a really big business idea. And the way I would do it is I would, again, focus on these different niches. So let's just say newsletter. I'd even start even more granular. I'd be like, I'm only doing Beehive newsletters. So I would be like the Beehive newsletter insurance person and company.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And what I would do is I would prove out the model and then eventually partner with Beehive. right? So once you partner with Beehive, they can just upsell it. You split the revenue. They're happy because they're making more money. You're happy because you now have distribution through them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And eventually, I see you can easily sell one of these businesses to Beehive because they're going to want that internally.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Well, the beauty is my job is to start new businesses and buy businesses. I might start this business, honestly. I might text DM Tyler after this from Beehive and be like, let's do this thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Yes. Yes. I mean, that's why, that's why I do this, you know, that's why I do this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So it's like, of course, you would spend a certain amount per year to make sure that if a black swan event happens or you do something wrong or you have an employee who goes AWOL, We will write you a check for XYZ amount or we'll help you get back that account. You're selling peace of mind.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. Totally. Yeah. I mean, I think what they did for you is almost like something they should have charged for. Yeah. but they don't. They just give it away for free and I think that's why this insurance idea for Beehive makes so much sense because they'll be able to upsell that and that's the reason Shopify has, I think, three plans.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I think it's Shopify, the regular one, which is like 30 bucks a month and they've got a mid-tier and then they've got Shopify Plus, which is basically their enterprise plan. And a big reason why you're on their enterprise plan, which I think is $2,500 a month, is you have someone to talk to, you have a shoulder to cry on, and that's worth a lot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
What planet do you live on?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So I think the one takeaway I have for people is... if you're coming up with startup ideas, this category, this trend is businesses for people, their shoulder to cry on businesses. You can just brainstorm 100 ideas just on this. And I think it could be Beehive, it could be a bunch of different categories, but those are some of the best businesses to be in.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And that's why Warren Buffett, Berkshire Hathaway, you know, their biggest businesses are insurance businesses, Geico, et cetera, because they understand, you know, what is an insurance business and insurance businesses. There's a certain amount of risk that a bad thing's going to happen, but you're an expert. You understand what that risk is.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So for example, I was just watching the annual meeting for Berkshire Hathaway and they had this guy named Ajit who runs all their insurance businesses. And he was saying how there was like a year or two where Berkshire Hathaway did not insure any homes in Florida because they, based on their research, they're like, there's gonna be a hurricane and they're gonna lose a lot of money.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And then, but now, For whatever reason, they have data that's saying, we are going to insure in Florida. So as risks changes, they decide what to underwrite and how to think about this. But insurance is an incredible business. Why?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Because you're selling something, let's say for $5,000 a year, and it's literally a piece of paper that says, if this bad thing happens, I will give you money or something. But you're getting all the funding In the beginning, right? Yeah. So it's a beautiful business model if you understand how to underwrite for risk.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I love it. We have time for one more idea. I could either give you an idea that you can give feedback on or you can give me an idea that... It's up to you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Cool. Let me pull it up. So I saw this tweet by this guy at CanadaCaz. Someone needs to build an AI agent that is good at financial analysis. They will make an obscene amount of money and make the world a better place by freeing thousands of hours a day that some of our smartest people spend typing numbers from annual reports into Excel sheets. And then people responded.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
There's this guy named Shiel Manote who writes, I get at least one pitch a week on this topic, but I haven't seen anything compelling yet. I think this idea around a financial advisor agent is kind of the dream. I'm curious, what do you think of something like that? Because when you think of a financial advisor, for example, they act like an agent. They act like AI, right? They're like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
okay, what's your risk tolerance? What are your goals? And then they have a model based on that. We're going to buy companies like this. And it just feels like something that the best possible financial advisor to me is probably an AI agent because they'll just have access to way more data and they'll act with less... Humans act when fearful.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
When they're fearful, when the market goes down, they often sell. When they're when the market goes up, they end up being greedy. So I'm curious, what do you think about this idea around building AI agents for, you know, the financial world?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Okay, here's the idea. I've got it. It's called haveyouthoughtofthis.com. That's good. And what it is, it doesn't replace your financial advisor. It doesn't replace your lawyer. It doesn't replace your business advisor. But it acts as a third party that's unbiased that sends you a weekly email or text that says, have you thought about these three things?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So for example, in the financial advisor thing, it's like, have you thought about buying...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So I feel like any market withers, an overwhelming amount of information, which is this, and people willing to spend money, which is this. Like, you know, if you're newly pregnant, for example, like you want to spend, you know, it's all about your baby.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
uh berkshire hathaway this week because the stock price went down 10 but their earnings went up five percent in the last quarter and then you can take that information that's distilled and actually this goes back to what we were talking about earlier where there's so much information people just want curation that you can go to your financial advisor and be like hey have you thought of berkshire hathaway and then you can have that conversation with your advisor
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
How much do you think people would pay for something like that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. Yeah. And for you, you're like, it's peace of mind. You're selling peace of mind.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. And that's another trend, right? Another way to think about business ideas is, you know, how do you sell peace of mind to different niches? Because that's another thing like shoulders to cry on. People will pay for peace of mind.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
um and so i think checkbox checkbox i think it could be really interesting if you did either a text or email like it's basically a newsletter or or just like a text every week like every week we're gonna send you a text and like here's what you need to know and and i you know and and just make it like remove the noise do you know what i mean
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
burn down and I'm not sure like there's not you're able to mitigate those risks you can sleep easier at night totally and I think from a you know how I'd grow this perspective I think there's so many stories like sad bad stories that you know someone forgot to I don't know file their tax return and they have all this interest or you know
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
someone you know some bad thing happened and you can just sell fear basically so you create uh instagram twitter whatever tick tock and you're just gonna be let me tell you the story of how xyz went from a 10 million dollar net worth to you know in debt a million dollars and you tell these stories and then it's like buy our product follow us for more of these stories oh yeah i think yeah that's what you do have you heard of johanna
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
No, tell me about it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
you know your normal life to-do list and then your parenting to-do list and they just take that whole thing away and i think that is a big trend and people are willing to pay for it and they've been able to make it really affordable too yeah it's really affordable it's 129 a month like i expected it to be way more yeah my guess is so they this is started by this is like a crack team so they this is started by um
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
johanna i guess is her name no yoki um and she she co-founded google x so she developed nest like the nest thermostat so she's smart she knows what she's doing she knows what she's doing my guess is they've raised tons of money i'm gonna check real quick it's really smart to just release people's mental load and in specific niches you could i could see this oh yeah tell me what you're finding
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So first of all, they launched with a $249 membership. So they've actually cut it in half. And I wonder if it's the AI that's just making it a little more efficient. I personally wouldn't want, I think this is a great business. I don't know how much they've raised, but I'm guessing tens of millions.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I personally wouldn't want to compete with them because they've got an app that they've built and it just seems like they're subsidized. They're probably not making much money on that 129. But yeah, what could you unbundle from this to compete with them? That's a question. I don't know. I don't know the answer to that. But that's interesting and it's cool.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I'm happy you brought this up because I do think that Yeah, this is a peace of mind play. And even when you go to their about page, it's literally like a person with their brain and doves coming out of their brain.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. Cool. This was fun.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
You're like, you're ready to just run through a wall right now. You're like, oh my God. You're like, did we just start four businesses?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
You know, different strokes for different folks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Dozens of people have taken ideas over the last couple of months and built them. Some are creating, you know, generating revenue. And it's really, really cool quitting their jobs and everything. But the vast majority of people listen and they're just like listening to they they're just they find it fun to to get their creative juices flowing. And it also might spark something in their own life.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
You know, it might be like, well, I never heard about Johanna. I'm going to go and use that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Natalie, where could people learn more about you and get to know you better?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Cool. Yeah. Check it out. I listen to episodes and it's you're good. You're good at what you do. So I highly recommend it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. And then, and then, yeah, I think once you, there's a few ways where you can extend this business. So one is of course you can go like after postpartum, you can, you know, as the child gets older, you have new needs. So you can like extend it that way. Eventually you can, you know, as soon as someone gets pregnant, download this app or, or whatever.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
So you can, you can, you could extend it. I like that. Um, how would you actually grow something like this? So let's just say you wanted to build something like this. How do you, you know, I know you're, you know, you've built Instagram audiences with three, four or 5 million followers, you know, probably hundreds of millions of views at this point.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Uh, you've probably, you've, you've done eight figures in revenue from those audiences. Like would you do an audience first approach with this?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Hey, everyone. If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert. You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where DesignScientist.com comes in.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
it's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work all your copy work all your engineering and do stuff that actually scales your revenue you don't need a designer you need a design scientist let's go designscientist.com i liked it so much i invested in the business
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I mean, I always start with building an audience just so I can... Even if I don't use the audience, just so I could understand the audience better and understand the positioning and A-B test the offer. So I would concurrently build the audience, even if I don't really use it. I have a question for you on that Loom video strategy. That worked for you?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Because if I'm getting a DM from Natalie Ellis, I'm opening that... But how important was the fact that people trust you? Or do you need a creator-type co-founder with something like this?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Totally. I think you don't really need the social capital. It obviously helps. You just have to... Your offer needs to be dialed. Your offer needs to be super dialed and you have to build the trust another way. So I just hired someone... who came personalized approach, like you said, loom, which by the way is the best for, you know, a two minute loom. And it was just like, Hey, I'm 23 years old.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I've done XYZ things. I think that I can help you in, you know, this category in this cat. It was, it was like growth and, um, just made it really easy for me. And I was like, okay, so it was $7,500. And I was like, okay, this is a random DM, but like, here's my credit card.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Natalie Ellis, the queen of startup ideas herself, blessing us. Thank you for coming on.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
I mean, they're not. And on hiring, I actually review every single person that applies to late checkout. And I'd say 20% of the people that apply to late checkout, there's like a reason field. It's like, why do you want to join? And they say, the number one reason why they're applying for this job is to learn from late checkout or learn from Greg Eisenberg.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
It's like, that's not why, oh, I'm going to go pay you $80,000 a year or $100,000 a year to just come and learn what we're doing. And then so you can just, in six months or nine months, just go and start your own version. No, that's not the right offer. The positioning should be, you've got this business. I think I'm uniquely able to help. Here's a couple ideas for you. And...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Exactly. For me, this is fast food. This podcast is fast food in the sense I need to get this out there. It's my... It's my guilty pleasure. I need to put these ideas out there. And I know you have some ideas for us.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
Yeah, totally. And I think two-minute looms. Just do a two-minute loom and get your background right. Get a microphone. Spend $50 or something on a microphone so you sound good. Be excited and write a script. Don't just like talk, you know. Oh, let me, yeah, I'm just going to talk. No, no, no, write a script. Write a script.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
A friend of mine texted me this morning. He was like, how's your experience with the Twitter algorithm recently been? And I wrote, most tweets get way less impressions, but sometimes you go ballistic. He writes, my engagement has been trash. And he works with a ghost writer. He writes, my content guy who's Gen Z literally quit because he couldn't deal with the low engagement. Ha ha ha. Ha ha ha.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
That's who you're competing against. In the hiring market, you're competing against that. It's not that hard. And then in the startup ideas and startup space, that's who you're competing against. So I think that going back to your idea, it's like you just have to be a little more polished. You just have to... do a little more and people will appreciate it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
And that's why cold DMing does still work.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
My list. All right, I'm going to pull up my list. Okay, here's one for you. A friend of mine called me the other week and he goes, dude, you're not going to believe it. My Twitter account got suspended. This is a person with 500 plus thousand followers. And why did it get suspended? He was basically in an engagement pod. So He would tweet out something. He'd post it to this group chat.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Peace of mind business ideas (and why they print cash)
They would all come in, reply, sometimes retweet him. And it's actually against Twitter's terms of service to do that. His account got banned. He was in tears. The guy's literally in tears. And it got me thinking that there's an opportunity to build a social media insurance company. Okay? So... pay us $1,000 a year.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So is this what you're saying? So basically, dating kind of sucks right now because people are... going on dates and a lot of the dates are low quality. People are wasting time. They're wasting money. It's frustrating for people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So if I ever need a gut check, text Ben, hey, I'm thinking about this big idea. What do you think? He's sold a company to Epic Games, House Party. He started Meerkat, which was a...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So you're saying, what if we had some sort of scoring system basically that allowed reputation to exist on chain so that I guess like both parties or potential parties could trust this source of data.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
live streaming it was ig live before ig live was a thing and now he's working in the crypto space and building well we'll talk more about it but he's building kind of community infrastructure for the crypto web um so when when ben talks i listen and he's got a ton of crypto ideas that he came prepared with and i know people some people are listening to this and i would say 93 of our audience
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
that her and her boyfriend broke up okay they met on a dating app they met on a dating app and they broke up and she was you know she's obviously super upset about it and like her you know her tldr of the whole thing was uh I have to pick better and prob go a lot slower. So... Yes. That's what you're saying, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah. What you're saying is when you go on a dating app today, the profile, which is essentially curated by the person, aka it's biased by definition. Yes. It's biased.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
And so there needs to be some...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
yeah i also think that i mean you can make some of those some of that data free but you can also make some of it premium data that if you know i want to see ben's like i would pay so much money to know that information yeah because like you know four dates are costly in new york yeah they're costly also just from like um a mental time.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Absolutely. Yeah. So yeah, you can do like a tagline, like something like, you know, heartbreak costs an arm and a leg or something like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah. Um, okay. So if you wanted, so I, I buy the idea that this would be valuable. So, Ben, how hard is it to build something like this? And can you give us like a step by step on how you build this proof of concept?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
isn't in the crypto world. So their guards are up.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
It's something one person could do. And you kind of, it's one of those ideas where you don't know where it's going to go in which direction. So it's kind of fun. It's kind of fun. It is fun.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yep. So I want to go over two more ideas today. The next idea I want to go over is the watch marketplace idea. And then I want to end with the teaching and tutoring business idea. The watch marketplace idea. Do you watch like watch talk like with all these influencers? Do you just be honest with me?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
You're talking to a guy who's wearing no watch and a $4.50 Kirkland t-shirt. I get it. But for whatever reason, on my TikTok feed, I get a lot of these luxury watch people trading on... It's because of your lookalike, probably.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So there is a situation. Some people probably even... know the situation where there's these two guys on watch talk. There's this guy named Vukom who has like millions of followers or something. And then there's this guy named Manny. Okay. Now Vukom and his partner, what the hell's his name? Buckley. Okay. These guys are like the Kings of watch talk and Manny is
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
is now accusing Buckley of just being like, you know, he's out there selling, you know, saying he's selling $100,000 Rolexes, but this is like a, what does he call him? He calls him a battery repairman. All he knows is to repair battery. Who is this guy? And then you have Buckley creating videos being like, Manny is like.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
That's Manny's point, right? Manny's point. And maybe we can include one of the videos so people could see it. But the point is, there's a lack of trust. Like both of them are trying to create a lack of trust in the luxury marketplace. So tell me, I just want to set the stage with that. Tell me about your watch marketplace idea and why trust is really important in this space.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
It's a purpoise.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
They know who is the other person. Just for people listening, how can they... Okay, so let's say someone wants to go and build this... this watch marketplace idea, take, you know, the VIG, I think as it's called, or the commission from, or percentage from 15% to like a dollar a transaction, how do they go, okay, they build this, they build it in a month.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Now they want to make it more interesting with River. What does that mean?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah, so I want to synthesize a little bit what you said for people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
No, it's just, this is why I'm here. So, because I think what you're saying is really smart. The way Vukom and Buckley built their business was they built an audience up top on TikTok and Instagram. Then they created a paid community called Vukom Verified where you have to pay $20 a month and other watch dealers and watch buyers can buy and sell from each other.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
But there's no real trust besides for the fact that you have to have a credit card that can spend $20 a month. What you're saying, I mean, you can still build the audience on these platforms, build the audiences on these platforms. but create and focus on areas where there's not so much trust, like in the watch industry, but basically create a trust layer between both parties.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
And once the trust layer exists, then it's almost like someone gets a badge that allows them to enter to the community as like, hey, I'm not just... You know, there's a difference between... Okay, I went to a concert last night, and this is not a flex, but I was backstage. And, you know, anyone could buy it. Not a flex, okay. I mean, I didn't say what show it could be.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
It could have been, like, my cousin's ukulele show. Yeah, recital. So let's keep it at that. But, you know, the idea was anyone could... Anyone could buy a ticket to the show, but not anyone could get backstage passes. What you're saying is, by virtue of this verified trust layer, you actually get the backstage passes and the exhaust, so to speak, from the...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
The trust is the ability to have this social layer. That's what you're saying.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Right. Cool. Okay, we have time for one last quick startup idea. Teaching, tutoring businesses. I think it's very similar. So... It's basically a manifestation of what we talked about. Explain what you're thinking here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Education and coaching are fundamentally retention businesses. Your goal is you want the person.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
And relationships. Yeah, for sure. It's relationships and it's retention. It's those two things. It's, you know, I can even just thinking about like in high school and elementary school, like some of the teachers that made a meaningful impact on my life, And it was a mix of like who they were as people, how they were able to communicate.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
But also they were just really good at getting me to retain information and stories and stuff like that. So what you're saying is interesting because you're saying like, oh, with something like this, this is going to help. Like you're kind of gamifying the experience in some way where there's like levels and almost leaderboards. And in some ways, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Because you're like, couldn't you use this technology to do that? And in which case the outcome is like a high, more retentive student. For sure.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yes, totally.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
I think this is honestly my favorite idea of all of them because it drives the most amount of impact and it feels relatively simple to create something to get to proof of concept it. I want to summarize our entire conversation in four steps. So this is what I've learned. This is what I've learned from this conversation. How to create a product people want. Number one, find inefficient markets.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Number two, add a trust layer. Number three, build social. And number four, don't necessarily say it's crypto. I mean, you said the word NFT before. But it doesn't matter, right? You don't have to expose that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
The other thing I think is really interesting about building in crypto right now is if you compare crypto to, let's say, AI, there's way more competition in the AI space, like building on top of, you know, building GPT wrappers and stuff like that. Everyone's trying to do that. But with crypto, because it's... it hasn't hit the mainstream adoption. But it just feels like there's less competition.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Beautiful. Ben, where could people find more about you and building on top of the River Protocol?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah, I think if what Ben was saying resonated with you at all, and you're like, that's kind of interesting. I came into this. maybe skeptical and now less skeptical. I think I always like to get my hands dirty and just try different things. That's why when it comes to AI tools, I'm always just like, hey, go and play with it. Try to build something.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So there's opportunities for people to see what are the new protocols coming out? How do I build something on top of it that's actually going to create value? And as the tide shift and as the industry matures, you end up swimming downstream instead of upstream. And there's less competition.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
If you're interested in Web3, this is a great place to experiment. LCA, our innovation agency, actually built something on top of the River Protocol and it was an absolute blast.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
called propeller.chat and you learn from you learn from this you literally learn from this and it's fun it's it's a lot of fun so it is and there's gonna be some people who listen to this are gonna be like you know what like this this doesn't speak to me whatever this doesn't speak to me but there are gonna be people listen to this are gonna be like wow
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
you know, if I could, you know, add efficiencies to the billion dollar watch market or, um, you know, I'm really into, you know, this one tutor in school, like made such a big difference in my life. And if I could give that same experience that, you know, thousands of people in the world, like I want to dedicate some time, I want to dedicate, you know, three weeks of time to hack on something.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So thanks for coming on. And, uh, Appreciate you. Thank you, Greg. It was a pleasure. Later.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
I always try to look at like, what are things that are low status right now or medium status and that will be high status in two or three or four years? Because that's where the arbitrage is. And I think that's where we're at with crypto.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and ai that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on mark zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in google that's why i like seo and that's why i use boringmarketing.com and that's why i invested in it
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
I want to summarize our entire conversation in four steps. So this is what I've learned. This is what I've learned from this conversation. How to create a product people want. Okay, so Ben Rubin, live from Soho. Ben is the guy that I call if I have a big idea. He always knows, it feels like he always knows where things are, the direction where things are going.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
Yeah, I love it. I think I think you're on to something. agreed, obviously, like if there's millions of pieces of content, like, you know, myself, right? Let's just say right now I create 20 pieces of content a week with AI in a year from now, I might create 300, 400 pieces of content. So, and we just need to know like who's Greg, who's not and sort of verify that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
3 crypto startup ideas: dating app, luxury watch marketplace, tutoring platform
So yeah, I think that's where blockchain comes in. You've got a lot of ideas on this list and I want to get into some of these ideas. that speak to a lot of this stuff. And you're giving these away. I want to start with the first one, the dating idea. Yeah. If you don't mind. I do not mind. Okay, let's jump in.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
What's the why? Everyone is busy. That's the truth. Everyone is busy. And the people that are going to be lazy with those types of DMs, I don't want to spend my time with them. I'd rather support... People who... Non-lazy people. Non-lazy people. Because those are the people that I think are going to actually do cool things in this world.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And then going back to the river story, what's really cool about reaching out to someone who's above you is all of a sudden, if you show value to that person, they give you access to their whole world. Exactly. So all of a sudden... Like forget Weezer for a second. Green Day, like I'm hanging out with Green Day. Like that's really cool.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
You know, and what ended up happening with that story is I texted him and he's like, I'm in Tampa in a few weeks. I was like, okay, great. I'll see you there. And I went to hang out with him at the show backstage in front of like 50,000 people, which was really cool.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Oh, the whole thing happened. So I'm backstage. I brought a friend with me. Thanks for the invite, by the way.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Well, you're more of a YouTube fan. If I was meeting Bono, I would hit you up. So I'm backstage. And now all of a sudden... I can't even believe that he's hanging out with me. He could be hanging out with all these cool people, but he's hanging out with me. And I don't want to make this conversation about me at all.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So 100% of the conversation is about trying to figure out what is interesting to him and how can I add value to him. And what did I know about the situation? I knew that based on the like of his tweet of mine, like obviously this idea of, being too glued to our phones and social media addiction was something that he was thinking a lot about. So we started talking about that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And from that, I learned that he's actually a bit of a nerd like me and you, and he's really into AI and he's really, he's like, oh, I coded up this like discord bot. So all of a sudden now I understood that. And I was like, oh, let me tell you, let's talk about how we can make your discord bot better. Let's talk about how you can make an interesting community for Weezer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Oh, hey, we just worked on something for Fred again that I think might be really interesting for you. And then it was just at the end of the conversation, he was like, oh, dude, I want to hang out with you again. Like, let me know next time we can hang out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I mean, this literally has changed my life, this way of communication, because now all of a sudden I could literally meet I want to say this. I don't want to sound pompous, but I'm pretty sure I can meet almost anyone via this strategy. So what is it? It's content. Throw out content that's applicable to people and attract them. See who likes it. DM them. Keep it short and sweet. Meet them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Go to where they are. Add value to their lives. That's it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I know exactly what you mean. I know exactly. Tell me. Yeah. You do. And I think with you specifically, you sent me a message with a loom. A loom video of a pitch to you. I pitched it to you. You literally pitched it to me and it was... I don't know, maybe a four minute loom. And I'm not going to lie.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I'm fucking 10 X. You know, at least I put it on at least 1.5 X, but I was listening to this and I was like, okay, what do I have to lose by recording a 30 minute conversation with Jonathan?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So I was like, you made a pitch to me. You, you did in a fat, in a,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
easy to consume way for me i think loom by the way so underrated as like just a great way to pitch people yes and you're using you're sharing your screen you're you're showing visuals and i was engaged the whole time we did it you show you you came to that conversation prepared it was fun of course we're going to do another version you know another episode so it
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Just in general, email, Twitter, you name it. I'm not afraid to just reach out to people. And I'm sure a lot of people are listening to this and they're like, well, Greg, like, You have 300,000 followers. Of course, it's easy for you to DM people and they're going to respond. But I've literally been doing this my entire life. My whole life just reaching out to people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Well, the problem is I'm looking over here. Because I want to look at you, but my camera's over here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
But I think it's okay to speak to that person who commented, listen, me and you are learning in real time. But at the same time, we're human beings. We're human beings. And the reason why you listen to this show is because you want an inside take from two people who are in the trenches who are sharing how they're feeling, you know, not filtered.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And if we're going to, if our eyes are all over the place, like sue me, my last name is literally Eisenberg. What did you expect? Eyes in Berg.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So the first thing is their profile. So let's just use Twitter as an example. It can't be empty because if you're going to DM, and you'd be surprised, by the way, how many people have open DMs on Twitter. I mean, my DMs are completely open. Anyone can message me and I actually read all of my DMs. I don't get back to everyone, but I read everyone and I get back to the most interesting ones.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So I would say, Your profile is your calling card, is your business card. So your bio needs to be super tight. Your profile picture needs to be there. You have to have something. A real photo. Yeah, a great photo. The person should be able to scroll on the timeline and be like, some of these things are quite interesting. I connect with some of this content. So that's step number one.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
It's pretty lazy. It's pretty lazy just to do a straight up RT. However, doing a quote retweet is a different story.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I would recommend that you change your username.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah, but if someone named Jicecream reached out to me and I didn't know who they were, I would probably report a spam message.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And when I was a teenager, I'd reach out to people and I'd try to add value to people's lives. And I was in my early 20s. Reach out to people and try to add value. Someone asked me the other day, they're like, I heard you talking on the podcast about having a mentor and I really want a mentor.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
It's just something I don't want. I'm not like waking up on a Monday morning being like, you know what I need today? Jice cream.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
That's totally fine, as long as your take is interesting. And you don't need to create all the content. You can just quote retweet someone else's tweet and add your opinion on it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I would, I would start with X because if you're listening to this, you're in, you're in the business entrepreneurial tech world. That's where a lot of these people are having these conversations. And it's also where you have the ability to DM a lot of people for free because a lot of people have open DMs.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah. And I'm not saying that it's the best platform, but I am saying that it's a great place to start.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah. So then I would, what I would do, step two is make a list of the five or 10 people who you want to meet in the next 12 months and set tweet notifications for those people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And which is by the way, like I would never call my mentor, my mentor, you know, that's like being caught with my pants down, you know, like it's just, you're my mentor, Greg. No, no, no. You know, it's like, too late. You're my mentor now. Mentor me. Mentor me. Yeah. It's just something that, it's an unspoken thing. It's just like you have someone generally they're like 10, 15, 20 years older.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I appreciate that. But I also didn't want you to be the person who says, I have a secret, but I'm not telling.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
It's amazing. Say that to the camera, though. Say it to the camera. Look at the camera.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah, same here. They're awesome. So, okay, step three. Once you've got the list, you're going to get a tweet notification from Rivers Cuomo, let's say. Your job now is to reply as soon as possible, but also reply extremely thoughtfully.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
You'd be surprised. You might look at someone like Rivers. Oh my God, this person has 2 million, 3 million, 4 million followers. There's no way this person's looking at his or her replies. No, most people look at their replies. And if you say something that is smart, some of these people notice it. For example, on Twitter, I notice it's like the same group of people who always reply to my stuff.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So if someone reaches out to me, I'll recognize their profile picture and I'm more likely to have my brain picked or have coffee with that person because I know that they care about my content and they care about startup ideas and they care about all the stuff that I care about. So we're like, we're cut from the same cloth.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
He's trying. He has got like a waiting list. He's trying. No, I think this is... This strategy is, is full proof. Like you, you are able to pretty much meet whoever you want via this strategy and, and you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers. Now you have to be okay with rejection and you have to be okay with silence. And that's not easy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
They've been through things that you've been through. Um, and most of those relationships began by just me literally reaching out on places like twitter and being like hey i see that you're you know you've built this thing not can i pick your brain for an hour oh fuck that fuck that yeah yeah i hate that that's the word dude or like the people oh let's grab a quick coffee i'm like why who are you
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
and bastard of course you know them fucking personally of course you do greg literally knows everyone i want dude i never meet anyone who doesn't know you personally that's actually a good story i cold dm'd colin and samir tell us tell us exactly how it went so i think the way it worked was
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
They tweeted about monetization of their channel, and I replied with an idea on how they could monetize their channel. So going back to, I had tweet notifications for them. I replied thoughtfully with an idea for them. And I just DM them after. If you ever want to talk more about this, hit me up. And I arranged a meeting in New York to chat. I wasn't in New York.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah. I didn't tell them that, but yes, correct.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I Bono'd them big time. And it was a great meeting. I was happy I met them. It was a very inspirational chat. And I was thinking, who would be cool to have on the pod? I thought Samir would be really awesome. Colin would be equally as awesome. But I have Samir's phone number. So I sent him a message April 21st. Hey, love you to come on my podcast.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
it's a top tech podcast, not your typical creator audience. Cause he usually goes on podcasts for creators. So I'm trying to think like, how could I, how can I, how can I get him excited about the podcast? And I wrote past guests include Alexis Ohanian, Morgan Housel, Jonathan Courtney, Jonathan Courtney, Jonathan Courtney, Jonathan Courtney, J ice cream from Twitter, J dot ice cream.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And then I, I posted a, a tweet of me with, when Kevin Rose came on. So I had the credibility of Kevin Rose. And then I was like, if that sounds fun, let me know. It's called the Startup Ideas Pod. And then he goes, happy to come on. But the problem was, Samir was impossible to schedule with. And impossible, just impossible. So I followed up one, two, three, four, five, six, seven times.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And then he just texted me today, finalizing a travel schedule by end of day today. We'll give you a time tonight. But I had to look like an idiot for a lot of times to do it. And that's just the price you pay to use this strategy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Quick, quick, let's grab a quick coffee so I can pick your brain. So let me pay $2 so I can pick your brain for 90 minutes and just like hide back your afternoon.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Of course, it's easy for you to like DM people and they're going to respond. But I've literally been doing this my entire life.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Agreed. I think that's a great tip and I think that's a great place to end. I want to see who people end up meeting from this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Well, Jonathan... I think people could follow you at Jicecream on Twitter.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And if you want us to continue doing episodes like this, comment on YouTube. We are in those comments. And subscribe.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
to the youtube channel and share with all your friends that's all we ask it's not a big ask small ask it's not a big ask at all it's barely an ask it's a micro ask it's the only way we know very small barely visible it's the only way we know that people are enjoying it because if if not we'll just we'll stop doing it yeah you know yeah
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
We're kidding. We're kidding. But I will say, if a lot of people like this, a form of content, you want to do more of it. So, for example, that's how the Startup Ideas podcast came. I started... Like this podcast was called where it happens before. And people were just really resonating when I started talking about startup ideas, enter the pivot startup ideas podcast.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Exactly. This is what I'm talking about. This is how not to do it. And I'm happy we're having this conversation because so many people don't realize that this is not how you do it. So the question is, how do you do it?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
All right, man. It's been real. Take care. Later bye.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Well, I think you need to do the work. So the beauty about today's world is let's just say you wanted to get in touch with me, there's literally hundreds of podcasts of me talking about things that you know I might be interested in. Coffee, you know that I like Miami, you know that I'm Canadian, you know that I drive a Volvo. There's a bunch of things that you can grab. And here's a hack.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
On a lot of people's Twitter accounts, you can actually go to their likes. So you can actually see what are the things that they're liking. It's kind of stalkery.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah, and I literally just hid mine this morning because I was like, I do this to other people. So I was like, I don't want other people to see what I like. But the point is, if you can see what people like and you can watch interviews of them, you could understand how to position it so that you have an offer that connects with them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and ai that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on mark zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in google that's why i like seo and that's why i use boringmarketing.com and that's why i invested in it
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
It's Sipping Time with Jonathan Courtney and Greg Eisenberg.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
I think that if you want your cold DMs to work, you should create content on the internet. You should publish content on the internet. Because the hack is publish content on the internet. One in every 20, 50, 100, even 1,000 pieces will go viral. See who likes your content. And then once they like the content, if it's one of those people that you really look up to, DM them instantly.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So I'll give you... Uh, I'll give you a non-financial example of this. So I grew up, one of my favorite bands, you know, this is like the early two thousands. Who is it? Yeah, it was Weezer, you know, alternative rock. Yeah. Okay. You approved. Okay, great.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah. You know what I'm saying? So, um, Loved it. And I played guitar, as you can see in my background. And you actually can't even see it. But on that guitar, there's a strap. There's the same strap that Rivers Cuomo, who's the frontman of Weezer, that's the strap that he used.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Exactly. Fast forward to about eight months ago. And... I tweet something and it just, it goes ballistic. It goes viral.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
It was... What was the tweet? The internet used to be an escape from reality, but now reality is an escape from the internet.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
This strategy is, is foolproof. Like you, you are able to pretty much meet whoever you want via this strategy and, and you don't need hundreds of thousands of followers. And most of those relationships began by just me literally reaching out on places like Twitter. I'm sure a lot of people are listening to this and they're like, well, Greg, like you have 300,000 followers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Well, it doesn't matter if you don't like it because you know who liked it. Rivers Cuomo.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
Yeah, he liked it. So it's like 11 p.m. I'm just about to close my eyes. I'm aimlessly scrolling in bed. Oh, I know that problem.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
And I see he likes it. So I go and DM him right away. And I say, and this is a tip for whenever you DM someone busy, be short. So I say, I bet you hear this a ton. Your art has been life-changing to me. Often in LA, would be cool to hang out sometimes.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
sometimes interesting yeah so sometimes you wrote it wrong no i said it wrong i'm a better typer than i am uh sayer of things so let's just break it down a little bit i bet you hear this a ton your ideas your art has been life-changing to me so saying the word art to like a musician like he's like oh it's art you know it's like this is something that's a compliment i think
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
You're with me? Okay. Then often in LA, I know that he lives in LA. I did the research, right? Do the research. And then I wrote, would be cool to hang out sometime. I'm not like would want to pick your brain. And you know what I mean? It's like very like nonchalant. Like if it works out, it works out. He responds instantly. Let's do it. I'll be here until June. What part of the world are you in?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to meet anyone you want
So then I respond. Love that. I'm based in Miami, often in LA. I'll hit you up next time I'm there. And let me know if you ever come to Miami. I give him my number. Then he goes, we'll do. We're in Tampa in a few weeks with Green Day. And he just puts his number in there.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So you have a few ideas on your list here. Maybe let's start with the first one because it's something I've been thinking about too. You want to hit it?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
The positive side of this is there is a ton of opportunity to be building things. Totally.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I'm going to get back to the book steps in a second. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Before I get back, I have to say this little story. Claude was down yesterday. And I noticed Claude was down, I'll be honest. I was trying to use it for a software project and I wanted some help on it. And I went onto Twitter and I was like, is Claude down? And a bunch of people were saying it's down.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And I saw a tweet, someone said, a very well-known entrepreneur, I won't say who it is, but a very well-known entrepreneur says, I literally thought I was going to have a productive morning today and I can't go to work because I don't have Claude. That's kind of scary.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Totally. Now, with that being said, let me tell you how you can use clothes to make $100,000 a month.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So... So then you got your outlines. So you've used ChatGPT or Cloud to make the outlines. You used the Cloud to make the chapter drafts. One of the things I would do is I would write, prompt something like, pretend I'm the editor. And here's the 10 ways in which I write. And just give them detailed instructions of how you write. And you can train that. I could train that based on Justin Welsh.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I could say, here's 100 posts that Justin Welsh has done. Write like Justin Welsh. And then bring out... Justin generally is a very clear thinker. And he generally never buries the lead. These are things that you can pull out and that you can put in into Clode.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
yeah their projects their projects functionality is pretty amazing that is yeah exactly yeah yeah i i find that the project's functionality is light years ahead of like chat gpt's memory and things like that yeah totally the project functionality in itself is worth the 20 a month oh 100 yeah uh then you you can use uh not many people know this but grammarly uh
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
They've got an AI for... Well, a lot of people know it, but I've been using it a lot recently for just real-time editing and proofreading. You can also use Jasper AI for content generation. Because you're going to be reading a bunch of these articles that Claude's going to be outputting, and you might be like, wow, this is actually not that good.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So if you need new ideas, you can use something like Jasper.ai. The Hemingway app. Have you ever used that?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Can you talk about how it works and how you use it?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
There you go. That's really helpful to know. I actually, I should do that. But yeah, with a book, it's also equally important. So you want to put that content into Hemingway and check the readability and areas that you can improve. There's a tool called, then the next thing I do, there's a tool called Bookstat. I had never heard of it, but heard about it just through the research of this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And the coolest thing it does is like our buddy Sahil Bloom is launching a book. And wouldn't it be cool to see if, you know, if I was competing against Sahil Bloom in terms of his book, how many pre-orders a day is he getting? and the trend around that. So it's basically a subscription data service.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And I think you're going to see a lot of these pop up, just a lot of these subscription data services in a bunch of different industries. But it just gives you real-time stats that'll help you change the positioning of your book, title, chapters, and help you around the marketing of it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Totally. And you actually go on their website and it looks like it's a website from 1999.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
The next thing I would do is you have to templatize your book. So it has to... You can use... I think it's lulu.com. They have an AI-powered formatting tool. So it's ready for print. Print. But you also need a cover design. So, you know, could you use AI to create the cover design? Yeah, you can use Dali 3 or Mid Journey.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I'm starting to feel that a lot of those tools are just like, you can tell it's AI generated. I don't know if you can do that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Exactly. So you can use an agency. We have an agency that we built, designscientist.com. A little plug there. Or just find someone. Go to Upwork or Fiverr or whatever, whatever your budget fits, and get a human to design it. Nothing wrong with that. The book cover matters. The book cover really, really matters.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
It's like one of those things where in YouTube land, they say, it doesn't even matter what your content is. All that matters is your title and thumbnail. It's very similar in books where the title matters a ton and the cover matters a ton.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
That makes sense. It's the same with YouTube, right? It's like... Yeah, totally. It's the same. So then I would... There's also another company I found. They're called Blurb.com. They also allow you to do layouts. So the layout of your book, which is cool about Blurb.com is... They have these templates. So you can go and make a children's book.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And then they have these children books templates or photography. Let's say you want to create a cooking book. You can do a photography one. So I think that's really cool. And again, in our world, no one talks about this stuff.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I feel like this audience loves tools. Yeah. And I feel like you appreciate this stuff too. We're all looking for unfair advantages in some way or another. Yeah. Another thing that is really useful, I think, is Spotify. I think they might have bought this company, but I don't know if they bought it or they incubated it. It's called findawayvoices.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And I'm pretty sure they actually allow you to do an AI narrator selection for audiobook production.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
That's a huge process. And especially if you're, if you're Jane Wells and you sound like Justin Welsh, you don't want, you know, you don't want to be going into record, you know, renting recording studio and recording for, for three days straight. Sounding, sounding like you sound.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
It is. And you know, just this morning I was talking to a finance, someone on my finance team and she was like, what is this charge here? This charge here, this charge here. And I'm like, Oh man, have I gotten carried away with AI tools and just like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
premium tools like are we going to spend on one hand i was like scared but then but on the other hand i'm like listen maybe i'm spending five thousand dollars a month on these tools but you know if you you wouldn't bat an eyelash at paying someone five you know a salary five thousand dollars a person at five thousand dollars a month right like sixty thousand dollars a year
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So I think that's what's going to happen is these software tools from a percent of your costs are just going to increase versus human beings.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. Yeah. I, I agree. I got a couple more tools for you. And then our book will be launched. Our empire will be launched. Nice. Draft2Digital, number two. Draft2Digital. So their tagline, we are self-publishing with support. Self-publishing on your own is kind of daunting. I've actually explored this. It's daunting. Think about how many steps we just went through. So Draft2Digital...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
is services and tools to help you with the publishing, the distribution, the layout, and the print-on-demand paperbacks. So they just give you a little bit of support.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. And, and, and you can, you know, what I love about some of these business models, like draft to digital is they don't, they don't charge you. They just charge 10% of the retail price. So they, they can tack on a little fee. So you would have charged $20 for a book. Now you charge $22, $2 goes to them. Um,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So anywhere where you can do a pay-per-performance or pay-per-usage or pay-per-task model, I think is going to be interesting to people.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Let me just pull, hold on one sec. I want to pull up a name of this new app. Okay. So I, I, first of all, I completely agree that it's overwhelming and what's going to happen is each vertical is going to consolidate and you're actually starting to see this in mobile too. Did you see this app that just came out the other day called hero assistant? It's pretty interesting. Um,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
If you think about our mobile, like our iPhones, let's say, we have to open up our calendar. We have to open up our weather. We have to open up our mail. We have to open up Instacart, reminders. They're all separate apps and it's getting overwhelming. It's the same issue that... It's one of the same issues that you're describing in AI. It's like there's too many different...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
services i mean ai has two problems one is how do you find out about these services besides listening to startup ideas podcast and then two and two is uh how do you how do you make it a cohesive simple experience and in in mobile you just have the issue of like you have the app store so it's easier to find the apps but
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
What Hero is and is really interesting and is getting a lot of people talking is it just brings all those apps, calendar, weather, perplexity, Instacart reminders into one interface.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I think that's what's going to happen in AI, but not yet. Because we're still in the soul searching, trying to figure out use cases phase.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. That is a really big idea that you're sharing, which is how do you be the node in all these different industries? And someone listening... You don't need to pick a node in publishing, which might be overwhelming, but you can pick a node that's in a sub-niche and still be that. And those businesses have huge sticking power and are great to create.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So I think you're talking about Writebook, which is the Jason Fried product, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. So Writebook, I just pulled it up. Instantly publish your own books on the web for free. No publisher required. So this is basically, it looks like, it's how do you make book publishing as easy as blogging?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Totally. But you're not actively building it today, right? It's just an idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I love it. I love it. Say less, my friend. This is a big idea. I also have the same issue, which is even though I use less tools than that in content, I still feel like I'm going from place to place and I'm getting basically content whiplash. That's how I feel.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah, and this could be really big. We often forget, but Hootsuite's a billion dollar company. Even on the indie hacker side, I just had Tebow from Tweet Hunter on. He sold it for $10 million. So there's a lot of demand for creator tools. And if you can build this efficiently, I think people would pay for it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So what you're kind of saying is it's similar to like the Mr. Beast chocolate Feastables. It's like, why are you buying a Feastables over a Hershey's chocolate bar? It's like, I know, Mr. Beast is my guy. I love him. I want to show you something real quick. I just, off camera, right before I came on, I had this thing called a Midday Square. Have you seen this product? I have not.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
It's cool packaging. Functional, yeah. So if you're not watching on this YouTube, on YouTube... By the way, if you're not watching on this on YouTube, just go to YouTube and subscribe and comment and do those things. But here it is, the Midday Square cookie dough flavor. And when you pull it into the other side, what do you see? Oh, three faces. Who are these three people?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
They've been actually building this company. This is Jake... This is Jake, Nick, and Leslie. They're the three co-founders. They've got like 100 plus thousand followers and they've been building this business in public, the highs, the lows, creator-led company. And you buy the product because, I mean, the product's great, but it's also because you want to, it's almost like a tip.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
You're like tipping the creator's journey. You're like, this person has given me so much value in my day-to-day life, therefore three bucks for the chocolate bar.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I think most people operate that way.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Even subconsciously, subconsciously.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. Some people are completely the opposite.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yes, exactly. And I think this is the beginning. This packaging, where the people are in the packaging, is the beginning of a bigger trend. They're going to take more and more real estate. The chocolate you see over here is still 99% of the packaging. The people is only 2%. In the future, I'm sure it'll be like 50% the people, 50% the chocolate.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. You'll be like, why am I eating? Oops. I hope I'm not eating like a leg right now.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Cool. Justin, this has been great. Didn't think we'd go here, but this has been fun. My creative juices are flowing. How are you feeling?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Amen. If people want to support Justin Welsh and find you on the internet, where could they go?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Good seeing you, my man. Later.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Like the chocolate you see over here, like is still 99% of the packaging. And the people is only 2%. In the future, I'm sure it'll be like 50% the people, 50% the chocolate.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah. So... Something I've been thinking a lot about is how do you create an AI-powered book empire? And so it's less about Justin Welsh or Greg Eisenberg wants to create a book and like, yeah, maybe we work with Penguin or we do a Ones.com, but more about how do we create 100 books in a year? And what would that look like?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And I've got actually a step-by-step framework for how I would go about and do it. You want to hear it?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah, I'm very interested.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I love it. This is perfect. This is why I brought you on is because we can chat ideas and you're a guy who will call me on my stuff. So I appreciate that about you. Okay, so... If I wanted, okay, how to build an AI-powered book empire in 2024. So the first thing I would do is I'd use Clode or GPT-4. I'm actually, I'm using Clode just like 99 times more. Yeah, it's just way better.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So let's just say use Clode to brainstorm 100 plus book concepts based on trending topics. Then what I'd do is I'd analyze Amazon's bestsellers list with the Jungle Scout app for gap identification. So are you familiar with Jungle Scout?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah, so a lot of people who are not in e-commerce have never heard of Jungle Scout. But it's basically, I think it started off as a, I want to say a Chrome extension. And it allowed people to see competitor insights and keyword analysis on different products. So you can go on to, you know, call it a, I don't know, a teapot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And you could see that this teapot used to be priced at $40 and now it's on $30 and they've sold 4,000 of them today. So I would use this with books because I can basically just see like, okay, what's selling, what's not selling, what are the trends? And I don't think many people are doing that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Then what I do is I'd use ChatGPT or Clo to generate detailed book outlines based on some of these trending areas. Are you with me? I have like a million more steps. Yeah, yeah, I am with you. I'm just like... Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and ai that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on mark zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in google that's why i like seo and that's why i use boringmarketing.com and that's why i invested in it
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I think the reality is AI is going to devalue the majority of content, period. So in a world where it makes it easier to create any sort of content, book content, video content, podcast content, tweets, posts, whatever, it's going to be devalued and it's going to be harder for artists, let's call them artists, people who come up with unique perspectives, point of views, to stand above the noise.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
That said, once they... Once they do stand above the noise or they are recognized as unique, I think that there's massive amounts of staying power. And I think that the top 1% of artists are going to make 100 times more in the next 10 years than they will in the previous because there's going to be such demand for curated experiences.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
But that being said, I think that there is a gap and an opportunity right now to do some arbitrage around creating content with AI and automation. Now, that doesn't mean that it needs to be a book by Justin Welsh. It could be a book by Jane Wells, you know?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
And as long as you read the book and you're like, wow, there's value here, then I still think that there's a huge... I personally am interested in exploring this space.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
All right, Justin Welsh, Mr. Solopreneur, you don't do a lot of podcasts and somehow I convinced you to take some time from your vacation to come on and jam startup ideas with me and startup ideas for Solopreneur. So thanks for coming on.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yeah, it totally makes sense. And I'm happy you bring it up because 70% of the people listening to this are having the same voice in their head. So it's good that you're bringing it up. Okay, let's think about the world before the internet. Or at least early internet. People were probably having a similar conversation around... Sure. Okay...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I'm a print designer and now anyone could create art on Photoshop or MS Paint and it's so much simpler and faster now. Doesn't that destroy art? Now there's going to be a thousand times more artists because you don't have to go to the Parsons School of Design and you don't have to buy canvases. You can just fire up your Microsoft 3.1 or whatever it was called.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
or MS-DOS or whatever, and just start playing around. Yeah, I think being a creator, being an artist is going to evolve. And there are going to be tools that are going to make it ridiculously easy, i.e. Jungle Scout in the year 2030. But I still think that if I'm trying to learn... Let's just say I want to be... I'm really into coffee. And I was a barista for five years and I wanted to...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
create content and create a business around coffee that's not a coffee shop. I could still use Jungle Scout and learn what's selling, what's not selling, and then come up with my own point of views and create a business around it. And hopefully, it is a way more competitive space today in this time than it would be in the previous. But my point is, I think not using the tools is...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
Yes, exactly. And you buy the product because this person has given me so much value in my day-to-day life. Therefore, you're like tipping the creator's journey. This is the beginning, like this packaging where the people are in the packaging is the beginning of a bigger trend, which is they're going to take more and more real estate
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
The way you stand out is you are Jack Butcher. You will always be one step ahead of the competition and no one could compete against Jack Butcher in that sense. Only Jack Butcher is Jack Butcher. So... Today. Today. Today. But, you know, okay, if I want to compete with Jack Butcher in an AI world, what do I do? I study all his previous work and I basically... I become Jack Butcher's brain.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
But Jack Butcher's brain is essentially Jack Butcher up into today and previously. Now, Jack Butcher could decide to go from black and white to red and yellow tomorrow. And then it does become a game. Content then becomes a game of cat and mouse. I think that's the trend that is beginning.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]
I mean, it sucks. I hate that world too, by the way. Just to be clear, I hate it. And it's not fun because people like me and you who put stuff out there and we spend so much time crafting things and then the next day, It gets copied or duplicated. Totally. It feels wrong. But the point I, you know, that's the negative side of this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So how would I do this? How would I actually go and create something like this if I wanted to go build a startup? Step one, you use AI to create content. Step two is that just creates this SEO juice. Then step three is you monetize initially by affiliate. And that's the playbook. That's the idea. I hope someone takes it. It's a no-brainer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
I'm not going to go buy an iPhone from you, so we can't do the affiliate thing. So this is just one of those ideas that I wish exists. And just because the UI is 10 years old doesn't mean it's necessarily a good business.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
When we talked about the scientific journal one, I think that was more interesting to me from an affiliate standpoint because you can actually cherry pick scientific journals, take out the insights that are relevant to products and then sell those products. Whereas this, I just don't really see that happening and it feels very niche.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And this whole microplastics thing is... Everyone's talking about it. And apparently they found that some huge percentage of men have microplastics in their testicles. So it went viral after that. In this article, I saw a link to one of the scientific journals, Nature or Science or just one of them. And I started reading one of the scientific papers and it was just so dense.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So sometimes, lesson learned, sometimes ultra niche is too niche. I always say you want to go niche and then think about can you go a little bit nicher? I call that super niche. But when you're talking about ultra niche, sometimes that's not a business idea, that's a utility. But thank you for this, Yash.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
William Blaze says, new idea here, newsletter and job board for companies that qualify for QSBS and allow 83B early election for people looking to join early stage companies with tax advantage outcomes. So for those outside the US who don't know what QSBS and 83B is, QSBS is just a tax law that allows founders and early employees to save money on stock basically. And 83B is the same sort of idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
It's a tax way for early employees, founders to save money on stock. Again, this feels a little too niche. Also, job board plus QSBS feels like the reason why you're going to join a startup, it's like you believe in the founders, you believe in the mission, you think you can add value. It's not because you can do an 83B election.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So sometimes you come up with an idea and you're like, oh, I wish I could... What probably happened here is William Blaze here, if that is his real name, William Blaze was like, oh, I had an issue with I started a company and I never signed my 83B and it was a mistake and something happened. I had a bad experience.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So other people might have that experience, but again, this is a bit too ultra niche and I'm not convinced that job seekers think about this when they're actually going and looking for their jobs. Okay, another startup idea. Alejandro Ordinez says, feedback on this idea, and we just built it. It's called Sweatro, Fantasy League for Real Life Physical Activities.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So it says, virtual race platform and fantasy league for real life physical activities. Competition is not about winning or losing, it's about pushing ourselves to be the best we can be. Okay, how does it work? You basically sync your device, It creates a Sweatro profile.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
It's a fitness tracker and then you join a challenge, you commit to a goal, and then you earn cash rewards by completing the challenge. This is actually very similar to what we talked about for the gaming one. You're just getting rewarded for getting fit and then they've got four brands that are compatible. Garmin, Suunto, Wahoo, Polar. And it sounds like the reason why... Oh, interesting.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So a lot of them you actually have to pay. Wow. Okay. So this is... Wow. Wild. So... I'm looking at one of the challenges. Run 45K in one week. The entry fee is $5, but the pot is $30. Or you can... The July 4th 10K run. The entry fee is $10, and I'm not sure how big the pot is. I shouldn't say, but there's some pot. The Tour de France challenge, it's a free entry fee, and pot is $300.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So this kind of feels like somewhat gambling. I mean... kind of gambling, right? You're putting in money and there's a pot. Interesting. I just think that there's a lot of friction with getting people to put money in. I mean, if they're going to do this, maybe they'd rather put money in a meme coin. If they're trying to gamble, there's other ways that they're going to go and gamble.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So I'm not sure that I love that approach. I think this could be like a small business, which is cool. And I think the impact of it is really cool. Like you're making people more healthy. But I think that this is something that a big company might do. I mean, not the gambling piece, but just motivating people to be more active. I think that if I'm a startup and I'm trying to like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
deal with the Garmin APIs and the Sento APIs and the Wahoo APIs and the Polar APIs. I mean, I've only heard of Garmin. I just feel like that's a lot of work to do. Upkeep of the app, deal with people's money and entry fees. I don't love it. I like simple businesses. That's why I like the gaming one. It was like, okay.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
you're going to plug into one API and it's gamers and you're not going to ask anything from them. They're just going to get rewarded. So it's just a win-win proposition. So this is cool, but I personally wouldn't start something like this. And there you have it. Bunch of ideas for you. Get your creative juices flowing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
I mean, it's written for scientists. So hence my idea, that was the insight. The insight is there's tons of cool things going on in scientific papers, but they are written for scientists. What if we can extract, probably using AI, insights from scientific papers, curate it, and write it in plain English for people to read. I think that a lot of people would be down with that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
If you like this, please, please follow, subscribe on your platform of choice and go to YouTube to write a comment. I read every single one of them and I enjoy reading them. I'm having a blast reading them. And it helps me know if you like this, it helps me know what I should talk more about and I'm trying to make this the best possible show for you to make it the most valuable show for you.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And I want you to have a good time and I want you to learn along the way and I want you to come up with ideas along the way. And you're going to take one of these ideas sometime and you're going to build something big. So it's been real. I'll see you later. And thanks for tuning in.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So I'll share my screen to give you a sense of how I think about these things and how I come up with some of these ideas. So I had that insight and then I went to perplexity Perplexity.ai, the AI search engine. And I was just like, what are the best places to find scientific journals and research papers?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Turns out there's Google Scholar, which indexes 200 million scholarly articles across disciplines. There's Base, which indexes 136 million academic documents. There's Core, which is 136 million. And then there's Semantic Scholar, which has 40 million articles. So first of all, I read that and I was like, well, I didn't realize that there were that many academic articles.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Think about how many insights are in these. I mean, of course, some are less relevant to the average person than others, but I bet you there's tons of insights there. So I see there's also some repositories, there's also libraries. So I see this, and then I actually, I want to go check out the Nature website, and I look at it, and this is... music to my ears.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Oh, and by the way, I think that this is easily $100,000 a month business. Hello, everybody. It's me, Greg Eisenberg. I'm doing a solo podcast today from my home in the mountains of Canada. And I've got a lot of ideas today, but there's one in particular I want to share. And I hope someone takes this idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
When I see a website that looks like this, it sort of looks like it's been built in the late 2000s. There's nothing better than this. In fact, I can't even click here. It's not even letting me click because this pop-up is up. It's just, it's pretty brutal. So I really like that. And To me, this is validation that you have a lot of people who are referencing these articles.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
You have hundreds of millions of articles and that there's just an opportunity to create a repository made for non-scientists. So how would I do this? How would I actually go and create something like this if I wanted to go build a startup? So first I would come up with, you know me, I like a catchy name.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So I think about what is a catchy name that kind of makes fun of the idea that scientific journals are for brainiacs. And I sort of think about that. I use that as my prompt and I just write a bunch of names related to that. And then I would actually probably use ChatGPT, OpenAI, and some other AI products to start fine-tuning a way to unpack scientific articles with one or two key insights.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So I would probably spend a few thousand dollars trying to figure that out because I would use that and essentially create a Twitter account that would automatically post these things. And I'd probably do a before and after as well. I'd show here's the 25,000 word scientific journal article and here's the 25 word insight. Here's what you should actually care about.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And I'm sure you're thinking, well, how can I make money from something like this? Okay, great. You eventually build this and it gets more popular. Well, you could do affiliate products, right? So Using the example of the teabag thing, the teabag is interesting because there are companies, like I buy tea off a company called firebellytea.com, which is just loose-leaf tea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And the loose-leaf tea doesn't have the microplastic, so I can just strike up an affiliate deal and maybe they already have an affiliate partnership and I can just say, switch to firebellytea. So you generate, and this is a bigger trend I'm starting to see more of where, well, use AI to, step one, you use AI to create content. Step two is that just creates this SEO juice.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And so the SEO starts bringing people, you know, every single month, every single day. So, you know, it's, you have customers basically coming on autopilot. Now this takes six, eight, nine, 12 months to actually build, but, you know, It does take time. SEO takes time. And step three is you monetize initially by affiliate. And that's the playbook. That's the idea. I hope someone takes it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
It's a no-brainer. Oh, and by the way, I think that this is easily $100,000 a month business once the SEO starts to kick in. Hey, everyone. If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where DesignScientist.com comes in. it's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work all your copy work all your engineering and do stuff that actually scales your revenue you don't need a designer you need a design scientist let's go designscientist.com i liked it so much i invested in the business
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
I did a live stream where I took people's ideas for startups and we just jammed on it and I gave them feedback. I want to give a few people, just talk about their ideas and tell you what I think about them. Now these are just ideas from people like you listening. So Some are good, some are bad. And I'll tell you why they're good, why they're bad, and what I think of them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Matthew M underscore underscore Sandys on Instagram says, this idea is like the rewarding exercise idea, but for gaming. I think he's talking about the sweat coin. So you basically, for the amount of steps that you do, they would give you a coin and pay you basically. So he says, here's the idea. You link your gaming account, Steam account for the MVP, and you earn tokens for your hours played.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And then you could spend those tokens on affiliate products, offers, could partner with gaming brands and even streamers to enable their viewers to get exclusive access to products via the platform. Now, I love the idea of hooking into your Steam data, which has literally hundreds of millions of users,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Because I don't think a lot of people are hooking into that data and based on it giving you rewards. Now, we all know about credit card rewards. There's a company called Drop. A friend of mine started it. JoinDrop.com. I think he raised like $50 or $75 million.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
he basically created an app called Drop and you link your debit and credit card to it and then you get these points, additional points, and then you can spend those points at Amazon or Walmart or Old Navy. He did deals with all these different e-commerce websites. I don't know if they sell the data or how that works. But 5 million people have downloaded the app, so it's the real deal.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So yes, I think a drop but for Steam is a huge, huge idea. But I'm not sure I would build it on top of Web3 Rails to start, because I don't think it really needs to be. So I would say someone should build something that rewards gamers for what's their kill-death ratio? How many hours have they played? Are they having a streak? Have they logged in every single day?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And I think the thing to check here is, is it Steam? Is it Activision? Is this data available? But I do think that there's a huge business to be built on loyalty plus gaming. So that's a good one. All right. This guy messaged me. His Instagram is Carne Shabu. That's the name of his business. I'm working on a grass-fed Wagyu beef fried meat snack. We're targeting mostly women.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And then towards the end of the episode, I will share four or five ideas that people have sent to me And hopefully it'll get your creative juices flowing. So let's get right into it. I came across an article about microplastics recently. I didn't know this, but tea bags have billions of microplastics in them. So it's not just water bottles and stuff like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So think of it like carnivore snacks for women. So then I go to his Instagram. Well, first of all, I go to the Instagram. I just assume it was a woman who was messaging me. And then I... It's like... Not at all. He says he's targeting women and it's this white guy with a hat and a big beard eating meat. It's the complete opposite.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Yes, he is wearing a pink hat in one of them, but this dude is a male. I like the idea of taking something that women do and bring it to men. Women wear makeup. Men's makeup is a trend that's only getting bigger. You can just go through the list of things that are popular for women and see if that makes sense for men and vice versa.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
What's something that's become popular for men or is popular for men and what can you bring to women? Now, if you're going to do that, you got to make sure that it's authentic. Because I think anyone who's going to go to this Instagram, if you're a woman, you're going to be like, just because you're wearing a pink hat doesn't mean it's connecting with me. So I like the idea of this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
I just think that if I was him... I would work with a creator and I wouldn't be seen at all in front of the camera. I don't think that he's the right creator. It just doesn't have creator product market fit. And that's something for you to think about is when you're building your business, because every business now is a creator business, are you the right creator for it or should someone else be?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And being honest with that is really important. Now, I want you to think about what are some typically male products or typically female products, and can you bring it to the other gender? Because I think that framework for thinking about startup ideas is a winning one.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And I think what I often do is, if I come up with an idea, let's say makeup for men, that's quite an obvious one, but something like that. Then I go to Google Trends, and then I'll go to see, okay, where has makeup for men... Where has that gone in terms of trends of the last 12, 18, five years? 12, 18 months, five years.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
So it's good to come up with the theses and then double check it with the data. And the other sort of bonus idea to this is what you could do is you can find something that starts to be trending for women, let's say, and then bring it to men. So you don't have to... Something that's very new and then bring it to men.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
And again, it doesn't need to be positioned exactly this is for men or this is for women, but just from a creator standpoint, a branding perspective, a positioning perspective, a messaging perspective. Another idea would be a candle company for men. Candles are getting more and more popular. Is there an opportunity to create the de facto men's candle company? All right, let's go to the next idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
We're on a roll here. Yash Bardwaj says, Ultra niche idea. There's a website called whatplug.info which tells you the plugs and adapters you need when you are traveling to a new city. But their UI was made like 10 years back. So... This is one of those ideas that I want to be a part. I wish that this existed on the internet, but I don't want to be the person to build it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
Now, if you're not worried about money and you're not worried about growing your business and you just want to put this out on the internet and you want it to be a utility of the internet, not a business of the internet, a utility of the internet, then go ahead and create this. And sometimes I do that and I love doing that sometimes. But you have to realize that this is not a business.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)
It's not a business because there's no business model here. Okay, if you get 25,000 people a month to come or 100,000, best case to come and check out this website with the plugs and adapters you need when you're traveling to a new city, which you, by the way, probably know most of the time anyways. What's next? You're going to put Google Ads, AdSense there?