John Rush
Appearances
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
One key thing that we see there that it's easy to build stuff, but it's not easy to grow. 99% of the makers can build stuff, but only few can actually grow and sell and bring in customers. Most people actually fail right at the start. They just don't get any traction at all, like not even one sign up. And here you can solve that problem. And I think people are willing to pay for that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
It can be a post, it can be part of a listicle, it can be a replay, et cetera. And now the price goes very low for me. There is some risk, so they might just lose their engagement and reach, and then I still pay them. But it never really happens. I haven't seen...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
influencer like completely going out of the business like some changes in the algorithm and they get back so and i actually plan to launch a tool around that basically to make that kind of the whole not a marketplace but a little like people say on twitter i'm reinventing the adsense but yeah adsense for micro startups cool yeah i like that i think also
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I see two trends now. So one trend is that there are more and more solopreneurs. So there are a lot of people building a startup on the side, like people who work at a corporate job and they build it on a weekend and evening. And then there are people moving over to cost-effective countries, saving up some money and spending a year or two building out from there.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Having this dilemma today, like I'm using social media a lot and I'm getting good at it and my reach is growing. But at the same time, it's hurting my other part. Like I can't build as much as I built years ago. And I see that happening with a lot of the other people. Like I posted that on Twitter and I had a lot of DMs from people saying like, no, I have the same thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think we're going to have... very huge epidemic of uh people you know turning full-time influencers because it's actually really hard to keep building and influencing or creating content at the same time and if that's happening then the number of people who are uh on the market you know will be growing and it'll be a lot of people there.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
So I actually think that even when we put this kind of a marketplace, like with real estate, in the case of real estate, the number of houses isn't growing much. It's growing very slow, but here I think it's nearly exponential growth. uh, of influencers. So I think it will be more similar to Spotify where actually the cost of music dropped almost to zero.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
It's called building public or indie hackers on Twitter. And this movement was very small, like it was very few people like two years ago, but I think it's doubling every year. Like I don't have the count, but my feeling that it's at least doubling and will keep growing just because we see that the access to building startups is really best ever. You don't have to fundraise anymore.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
You can listen to everything for like, you know, fixed price. I think it will be similar thing here. Right. But again, since we're competing and if I have an access to influencers and you have access to influencer and we both advertise our products, then, you know, uh, we'll have the same access. But, uh,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
at least at the beginning, like people who utilize influencers, they will gain a lot of momentum compared to those who don't.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I had passion for directories for many years, I would say. And two years ago, I had a team, and we were discussing directories. And I wanted to go full into that stuff. And my team said, look, this is an absolute stuff. Nobody does directories. It was cool in 2017, but not anymore. And I was like, no, I don't think so. But I wasn't sure to actually follow my own idea. So I didn't start.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then I started later, just last year. I think directories... or underappreciated. Why? Because when the quantity grows, the quality the percentage-wise drops. So the more things you can choose from, the harder it is to choose. And it means that people really want to go to places where the selection has been done for them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Either selection or categorization or other type of enrichment of information so that they can pick the right tool or anything, the right item. And the amount of The quantity on all the scales is growing. There are hundreds of CRM tools. There are hundreds of any kind of tools. And tomorrow it will be thousands, and then it will be 10,000. It will just keep growing, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
The old ones aren't being deleted. They stay, too, and the new ones are adding up on top. And that's the same with... regular stuff as well. There are more coffee shops. There are more people selling stuff around. So everything is growing and it's harder and harder to choose. And I think the directories are here to solve that problem. So people trust other people who have reason to trust them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
You don't have to find a co-founder. You don't have to find a team. You can just do everything on your own. Either you just code it if you're a coder, or you use no code if you're not a coder. So that's kind of the trend I see. And then at the same time, I see how this trend can be utilized or how we can supply this trend.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I think the directories made by people who show that they have certain experience in this field and you can trust their choice, you can trust their judgment on this list. people will even pay for that. And we see that. I'm not charging for my directories.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
People can use them, but I see a lot of people now starting to charge for good directories and people actually pay to have access to that data because they just want to save time on selecting out of 10,000 items and to have just 100, the best, being sent to them every week. Even things like, for example, there is this guy, Pat His name is Pat and he does Starter Story.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
You probably know him and I think you had a podcast with him. And even that is directory in my head because it's a directory of stories about startups and people pay him because he does the job of picking the best founders and putting their stories in, right? Yes. So I think... Like when I say directory, people always have this image of a list of boring items there. Like why would it be there?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like list of house or list of names, but it can be a list of anything. And people are willing to pay for that. And people are willing to be in that list. so you can both monetize the one side and the other side. And I think we are just starting with that. I think we are just entering the directory age, as they call it, because...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
the AI made it even easier to create everything, the information products and everything. And obviously the quality dropped a bit. So now people are even more interested. And the other thing that I'm thinking about that most don't think about is that AI will have to figure out how to find the best items to recommend to people, right? And what are they using now? They are using Reddit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
They are using other kind of platforms places and for me reddit is directory partly is a directory as well like for ai it looks like a directory it's a place where people were with reputation you know uh order things they can vote for them and then there is a list ordered by votes and that's a directory too so i think
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
The directories will eventually be really important for AI, and the best directories will be chosen by AI to be used for the search results. And if that happens to your directory, that means that you have huge power and... people are willing to pay to be there as well, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And my personal role is pretty much to build the tools for this crowd so that they are kind of more powerful with fewer resources. And I think...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
There are two types of directory ideas I have in mind and I have in my pipeline. So one is local directories. So basically, there are a lot of directories in English. I would say most of them are in English. And there are very few on local languages. So it's really hard to find directory of...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
uh you know sas tools made by french people in france right for example so i think moving forward the quantity will be so large that directories will have to find more filters because like now people don't want to go to a place where they have everything they rather want to go to place that has fewer items than too many so i so one way to do this is find directory that's
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
working really well in the US, and just find a country where there is no directory like that. And it's easy to find. You just Google. The best thing about directories is that the whole resource is in Google. You just search for something, and if you don't see good result on the top, you go for it. And so that's how you test it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
You find good directories in bigger countries, and you search in the other language, like let's say in French. And if it doesn't exist on top of the Google results, you build it. And then of course you have to solve the reputation problem, et cetera. But usually it is solvable over time.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
one key thing that we see there that it's easy to build stuff but it's not easy to grow like that's kind of like 99% of the makers can build stuff but only few can actually grow and sell and bring in customers so that's where I think the best ideas are right now like the low hanging fruits is building something around the growth and the marketing and tools around that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like if you work on directory, you start learning the topic, you start learning the tools, you start making podcasts with founders of all these tools, for example. Like there are a lot of easy ways to actually gain reputation within segment.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, yeah, exactly. Because there are a lot of people who don't speak English in those countries. Actually, most people don't. And people say, those who don't speak English, they are not in tech. It's not true. A lot of people speak only French or prefer French and they build within there and they have large market too.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And eventually at some point they go international when things go bigger, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I mean, the best part about the Rectress is that most people don't appreciate is that it's very little tech. So it's easy. The building part is really easy. Like in the Rocket Internet, they had to put a lot of money into that. And here it's like, if there's one thing you could do where you don't need money, but you need your own time, That's a directory, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Because it needs time to make the quality of the content good and promote it. But it doesn't need time for building it, which is like it just needs a little bit of time comparing to SaaS tools.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, so the second idea about directories is that it's not a particular directory. It's just a method that I apply myself very often. And it just works. I mean, it works so well that I feel it can't be true that it just works almost every time. When you search for a keyword on Google Ad Planner, It's a free tool, like it's ads.keywordplanner or something like that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And you search for keywords around random topics and then you find a keyword that has high traffic and then you search for that keyword on Google and... only blog posts are shown on the top, that's the idea. Like you just build a directory around that and Google really likes directories and eventually you will get to the top too. So it's kind of soulless.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
So you don't pick the idea that you like, but you can actually pick the ideas you like and test them for traffic. But overall, when I do that, I don't use any of my own judgment. Because then I tend to pick the idea that's not so good. It has little traffic, but I think it's good. And my intuition never works. And that's the thing. I think with director ideas, intuition always fails.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Because when you test, it turns out the opposite. So in my directories, all directories I had high hopes for, they failed. And those I didn't have hopes for failed. And I think the reason is that if I have high hopes, a lot of people also have high hopes for the same directory because it's kind of, I'm an average of the society. And whatever I think, most likely a lot of other people think.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
So we can all build the same thing. So this is the idea. Just use technical method, like find keyword with high traffic, find
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
search for it if it doesn't have any directory on the first page of google go and build it and you can do that for 10 ideas like it's cheap it's fast if you do for 10 ideas and then you drop seven and you push harder on three how do you come up with the keywords like how do you know what are the keywords that are highly trafficked yeah so it is uh it's boring i ask chat gbt
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I give you the real one. So I want to have a directory. So usually I launch directories to help my other SaaS tools to bring traffic. And then I have this couple of dev tools, like I have DevHunt and FloatUI. And I want to drive traffic there. So I want to build a directory for developers. So I just asked ChatGPT. I said, I have this and this, and I want this audience. Give me 20 ideas.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
So that's where I think the best ideas are right now. So this is the idea, like find keyword with high traffic, search for it. If it doesn't have any directory on the first page of Google, go and build it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
and gave me 20 ideas, and then I just tested all 20, and one was great. So it feels like a steal. It feels a bit boring. Sometimes it's too easy, but it works. It works. I think a lot of the times founders think that things have to be hard. I think things don't have to be hard, but you have to do the right things. But doing the right things is hard, right? So that's kind of the thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I think the best way to come up with an idea is to start with how would you sell it? So basically don't build stuff, but just see what people are actually looking for. And for example, like I give precise examples from my own journey.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah. Thanks for having me here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Like I saw a lot of people asking about SEO, for example, like people were asking how to get backlinks, how to grow, how to, you know, grow the demand rating, et cetera. So when you see those requests, usually you see people answering how to do it with like seven steps. And some makers kind of like that, just they read these tabs and they implement.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
But since most makers now are actually busy, like they have even full-time job or their side project, they want to save time. And then if you wrap that little kind of list of actions into a tool, I call that micro SaaS, and it just does one thing, but it doesn't clear. It's clear what to expect, and it's easy to recommend. So my game plan is this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I want people to recommend my tool under those posts. If somebody asks how to do X, and then somebody comes there and says, I did that using this tool. And if tool just only does one thing, then it's easy for the user to remember this tool and to recommend that tool, comparing to the tools doing a lot of things. Then it's hard to remember exactly what it does.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, I think it's really hard to start. I remember... In old times, it was kind of easy to start. I thought it's like everybody has an idea. I felt like all founders have tons of ideas and they just kind of need funding or people to implement those. But now I see more and more people with the willingness to build something, but they don't know what to build.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And usually they're just looking around for random stuff and they just kind of build that stuff. And usually that fails because like you promote this, you know, build community first and then the audience, then from audience, you go to, um, to the, to their needs and then to the product. Right.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And I had this idea that if someone actually does this job of coming up with ideas, validating the ideas with the users, and then collecting a waitlist, maybe collecting prepayments, and then you have the whole thing. Like there's an idea, there are like 100 people who want it, maybe five paid for it. then you have, you know, all the risks, not all the risks, but a lot of the risk is gone now.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then if there is someone who can build stuff, they could actually buy this little, you know, like rough draft. It's like startup draft. You can call it, right? You buy the startup draft and you can build it and you go from there, which is... Hey, everyone.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
I was surprised to see that most people actually fail right at the start. They just don't get any traction at all, like not even one sign up. And here you can solve that problem. And I think people are willing to pay for that. I think people are willing to pay. Like my economics there was that basically people would pay up to $1,000 for that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And if that works and there is some word of mouth, people can pay like two or three or 5K for that. just to save this first period. They could skip. And it's pretty low cost to do this. So one could just make a machine that does all the steps. So the first step is coming up with idea.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And if that's kind of your whole value proposition coming up with ideas, then it's easier to put that on scale and to come up with a lot of ideas just by doing things like research on keywords, research on hot topics on Reddit, on Twitter, et cetera. So there are a lot of tools for that. And so you do one part of the job, you come up with ideas.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then the second stage is that you validate the ideas using technical methods. So you check their traffic on organic, you check the potential, you check the free domains on .com, et cetera. So you do these simple things and that can be automated. You can actually make a little tool for yourself that automates this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then the stage number three is that you have to now validate with real people. And to do that, you create a wait list and you promote the wait list using either ads or you pay influencers. I actually like to pay influencers more than the ads because it's just cheaper. Like from my experience, it was like you can pay $300 and have 100K views on the post now on Twitter. And you do that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then eventually, if your pipeline is 100 ideas coming at the beginning, And then like 30 ideas go to the next stage after this technical validation. And then out of those 30 ideas, maybe 10 ideas go to the next stage after being validated by people, like they joined the wait list. And then those 10 people,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
you explain them the value, and eventually you ask them to pay 70% discount, like a prepayment or something like that. And then let's say three ideas survive. So you have three out of 100, and then you have these three ideas you can sell basically now with the little audience, with the prepayments, with the idea itself, with the landing page.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Let's say you sell it for $3,000 or $2,000, and that's like $6,000. And to do all this, if there is a system for that and you build a little tool for that, to do all this, you would spend maybe $1,000 or $2,000. So the margins are pretty good, and the margins get better and better as more ideas and things you do in the system. And everything can be automated, literally everything.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
You can buy domains. The APIs, you can make ads the same way. Landing pages can be generated using some builders that have APIs as well. So this can be turned into a tool, and then basically just turn this tool on, and it keeps doing the job. And even the ideas, it can find the ideas based on the same algorithm you did by hand, but now you can automate that as well using AI and using scraping.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And now the system can do 1,000 ideas a month, right? And then you have 30 winning ideas and you sell them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah. If you go to a startup marketplace and they check the prices there, so you would have no users and no revenue and no validation products for the same price. just because they can build something there. But it's not the part that's important. You can build stuff. Building stuff is easy. It's the easiest part of the startup.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And if there are users, prepayments, and certain validation, then it's at least 10K.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, so there are a lot of influencers now, a lot more than there were a year ago. I think AEI has helped and the new Twitter algorithm has helped. So there are a lot of people doing that for a living. And I was looking at that segment two years ago as well, and I was checking the prices, and it was at least $1,000. And they would guarantee maybe 30,000 views.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And then I kept asking the same people price again every few months. And now it's way lower just because there are more people doing the same thing. There's competition and they drop the prices. So now it's $300. Sometimes it's $100. So I have some deals for $100 just because I buy often. So if somebody sells for $300 and you buy... five times they drop the price, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And in my case, I have a lot of products and I buy very often. I just reach out on Twitter and LinkedIn, just direct messages. Sometimes they reach out to me. It's more often that they reach out to me than I reach out to them. They offer their service. So it's pretty simple to find, but usually they start with really high price.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
So you would get like, you know, 700 or 800 at the start and you should just bargain that down to a few hundred and that usually works. Even if they say no, So that's how it works for me. They say no, but then they come back four weeks after because they have this one week slot that's not taken and 200 is better than nothing. So they say, you can take it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And if you have enough of influencers in your pipeline, in your list, then there's always a week open for one of them or a few of them. And you You buy and then eventually when you bought five or 10 times, you agree on fixed price that's pretty low. And what I do now, I'm doing new things. So I'm experimenting and it's pretty interesting. So I pay influencers fixed amount every month.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas
And it is similar to partnership like the football stars do with Nike, et cetera, but on a micro, on nanoscale. And I pay them fixed money every month, and they know it will be coming in whatever happens. And I commit for 12 months consolation. So I won't cancel unless I give the notice. A lot of people like it, and I have a certain amount of stuff I can do on their account.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And then now it says how to start a business as a teenager. And now it puts the text. So that's it. So now I basically have a pretty high chance to score on these keywords. And of course, if I want to go further, I will make a page that will have this title and full description. But I usually don't recommend making pages right away because it takes more time to make a page than to make a fake URL.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
item that's why start with this and then watch the queries in the search console and you will see whether you have any traffic for this keyword and if you have any traffic for this keyword then go ahead and make a page for that then you'll win more traffic so basically my whole approach with directors is this you have to be doing as little as possible to validate all the assumptions and then the assumption that wins
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
going to take more of your time, and you invest proper human time into that, and you make it really good. Because obviously, AI is not as good as humans, but it's pretty good for these experiments. But then you make it greater with your own hands. So this is my article, my website.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And just to save time, I will switch to the website I just made, because it's pretty much the same, but with the data. Yeah, so I just made it before the call. So this is my directory, the small business ideas. And I have all the ideas here. And my goal is to have, I don't know, maybe 10 or 100,000 ideas here. And I looked at these keywords. So I put small, little, size startup.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So every keyword you see here has been validated for traffic. either directly or through indirect words and same for all the stuff in the FAQ. So every question I have here is coming from, from the method I just used. So that's pretty much it. And here I have like feature business ideas. So it all takes, if it takes you more than one evening, then you're doing it wrong.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Because if it takes more than one evening, You need to redo your method. Otherwise, you're kind of riding on a small car, on a slow car, and you will never get really far with that. So you have to make sure that you're moving fast because there is a chance that everything I've done will fail. There's a really high chance.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And maybe tomorrow or after a week, I will figure out that this will not work. That's why I usually bet for five, six, 10 ideas. And I test them all at the same time so that I remove the chance to be disappointed when one idea fails. That's a pretty good approach, I would say. Don't do just one directory, because it will be disappointing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And you have to wait quite a lot for SEO to get in and to validate certain assumptions. But if you have 10 of them, then it's faster. So now, the next thing I do is, once I've built the directory, I have to promote it somewhere. So I do a few things. So the first thing I do, I go to Reddit and I search. I just search on Google, small business ideas, Reddit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
When I do that, I will see all the Reddit articles about that. And then I go into those articles and I reply with my URL. Just have to be careful to not be banned. And to not be banned, you have to reply on articles where people actually ask for URLs. And there are articles like that where people ask, do you know places to find the ideas?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And then you put your URL, nobody's going to hate you for that. And there are a lot of articles like that. So for this particular thing, I found over 100 articles. It took me time. You have to search with different kind of queries. And then you don't have to just go into every article and reply right away.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
That's 100% correct. So just to add on that, the reason directories are so big now and they will be much bigger in the future is that as there's more content on the internet, the quality of the content becomes more important. And I think directories are solving this pretty well because people trust directories. If it's a good directory, they trust it that...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
You just make a plan to make three replies a day or one or two just to not be blocked or banned by the Reddit engine itself because it has some rules for URLs too besides the subreddits. So that's number one thing I do. And that brings some traffic. And then the number two thing I do is I put my directory into other directories.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And that's probably the second best way to start on marketing because directories are big. And that's why the other directories might bring traffic to your directory. But it has to be relevant. So you have to find directories which are relevant. But again, you Google for them. And usually find them. And then the third thing I do is I go to social media and I start searching for the same question.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And then when I find the question there, I reply with my directory there, which works sometimes really well. if your directory actually helps to the original question. I had that when Fireship had this, what was that? He had this viral tweet about self-hosted software on Twitter. And I replied with my hosted software directory. And it was the most...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
viewed and like replied there and since his post was like a million views mine got like 30 or 40k views it was really good and and the interesting thing that many people don't know is that Google, they don't say so, but they do this. I know for sure. They look at backlinks from social media. And if there is a good tweet with a lot of views and there is your link there, it's so valuable.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And in that particular case, it was like fifth or 50th time I proved that. So right after that tweet was going viral with my link there, the next day I had traffic from Google growing for everything I have, for all the blogs, for all the items. So this is way better backlink than a backlink from websites, actually, now, these days. So that's the third thing I do, social media.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And I spend some time every day on that, like probably every morning. There are tools for that to spy for keywords, but I rather do it myself because search is pretty good on Twitter and it's the same kind of experience, but more native. And then the fourth thing I do is the SEO. And that's probably the most important part.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And I do it after the first four steps, because first four steps help me to validate my idea. Because if I post it somewhere and no clicks, it means that it doesn't click with people. So people saw it, but they don't click it. It means it's a bad idea or the domain name is bad. I have to change something. There's no reason to push it further.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
But if I have some traffic and it looks fine, then I go for SEO because that's, that's the key way of growing the directories. And I will show you what I do with SEO. So I've built a tool for that too, but there are a lot of ways of doing SEO and I will walk through all of them, but start with, with the way I do it myself.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's a well-curated content, and it has some reviews, ratings, and the quality is high. And the person running it understands the space and picks the right things there. So I think people will be outsourcing the decision-making for the content to the directories from Google, because now they ask Google, and that's...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And basically, what it does is that it scrapes my directory. It will now try to understand everything that's written on it. It will try to do some research. So it will basically do all the actions I do usually myself. And that's how we build this agent. So I just took all the actions I do and I programmed them into the agent.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And in a minute, it will come up with some ideas on what can I do with the SEO for this directory. And while it's doing it, There are other ways of doing it. So one way of doing it is to use clothing or chat GPT and generate content there. But I would rather recommend using tools for that because SEO is more than just a content. It's a lot about internal linking.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's a lot about the structure, the keyword research, and all those things. So in this case, I figured out the content of my page and then it found, uh, the keywords and it came up with, uh, with ideas. So these are pretty good, like 10 locos business ideas for 2025. Uh, and it evaluates the possible traffic it can get for that based on the keywords. And I can just.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
go further and here i have the plan for 10 articles so don't start with a lot of articles some people just go crazy and you know publish hundreds of them if your site is fresh and the domain rating is low if you publish a lot of articles google will just never crawl them because it will look like spam for google that's why the first month
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
you should have maximum 50 pages or 50 articles on your website. And then second month, you can do more. So I usually go for 10 articles on the first month. All right, I will approve this one. So now it's working on this article. So it's looking for the keywords, evaluating their traffic, the complexity, and then working on the outline. So it does a pretty good job.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And one way to learn SEO is to watch what SEO bot does and repeat it manually if someone wants to do it with their own hands, because it does it pretty well. It does pretty well with all the steps and all the actions. Yeah, so now we will create the articles and we'll publish them back to my website.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
That's becoming more and more relevant as we see that the top search results of the Google are mostly dominated by all the hacks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And that's it. So from that moment, I quit working on this directory completely. So it all takes me usually first day to build and promoted on Reddit and social media. And then the other day for SEO and more promotion. And then I just stopped doing anything with that. And I go for the next directory or I go for other idea. And then I come back in 30 days.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And I look at the traffic and I see whether there is traffic or no traffic. And sometimes there is no traffic. And the thing is that if there's no traffic, from my experience, if there's no traffic, it's really hard to fix that. So I never managed... to make a directory, have no traffic in the month, and then do something so that it actually gets the traffic.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's very difficult, because if there's no traffic, then something is wrong fundamentally. Maybe the domain name is wrong. Maybe the keyword looks easy, but in fact, it is not. That's why my recommendation is to never fall in love with the idea for a directory, but rather make maybe five bets, and then in 30 days, look at the one that does the best, and then put more time into that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Otherwise, you will be trying to push the dying horse and will just never work. And in 30 days, I find the directory that does the best among all I did, and then I do the next phase. And the next phase is the data. And that part is even more important.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Because at the beginning, you're just selling the idea and people click that just to validate that they really care, they have the pain, but you don't focus that much yet on whether your directory is actually good. Because if you focus on everything at once, it's difficult to be good at anything, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So that's why the first 30 days, I focused only on validation of potential SEO traffic and the interest from people. But after a month, I go full into the data. And a lot of people who build directories fail here, like must fail here, because they don't put enough effort into making the data great. And here's what happens.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
If somebody opens your directory and they know the topic, they understand it, they are probably experts. they can quickly see whether your data is high quality, whether you understand the topic yourself and you're not someone who just used ChatGPT to come up with the items, right?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And if that expert who sees your directory sees that the value of the content is high, the quality is high, they really respect that and they really want to share with their audience. And that happened... with all my good directories.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Yeah, so there are many ways of doing it, but the best way is to start based on keyword research. So the keyword research is a way to see whether people search for certain keywords and certain phrases. And even if you think that certain idea is great, but often other people might not think so. And you can figure out whether that's true or not by seeing what Google says about that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So they all have this moment where an influencer or few shared with their audience because they think it's really good and they will never think it's good if it's actually not good because they understand the data really well. If they come to, uh, let's say I made these directory, it was, um, LLM models. And then first I had, I just hired a guy to fill it out with data and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Then I open it and I see that it's missing Mistrel. There's no Mistrel there. And this is the example where if an expert comes in and they see you don't have Mistrel in your directory, they will quickly realize that you don't know the topic. You would never miss the most important open source project back at the time. So if the data is great, the influencers might share it with their audience.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And from there, your job pretty much ends because now it just turns into the organic system that people share. If somebody shared, then other people also want to share it. Like people work in a collective mind, right? And the only thing you have to do from there is to make sure the data is great. You keep running your SEO business activities, like I run the agent and others can do other things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
But then the key focus is making sure that you check the data, you check the space every week or month, and you make sure that if there is really hot item, appearing, like new item that everybody talks about on Twitter, you have to add it there. You have to add into your directory.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And you have to do it fast because if you do it fast, there's a chance you will actually get the traffic from Google, from people who search for that new hot item right on your directory. And That's why there's very little work to do, but you have to have put attention into the space almost every day. So I have a lot of directories. I don't really do stuff, but I scroll Twitter every day. And
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Once I see that, oh, this item is relevant for this directory, I just bring it in. And that's kind of the next wave of growth comes from being early to list hot items on your directory. And Google will find nothing else on the internet to supply to the user who is searching for that. And Google will show your item, your page for that. So that's the whole path.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Yeah. Yeah, so there are multiple ways depending on your audience. So if your directory is B2B, it's easier to monetize it because obviously you can go to businesses who have the same audience as your directory and you can pitch them in the banner spot or the sponsor options. That's what I always did.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
I had directories of all GPTs and I just sent an email to all GPT owners saying that, do you guys want to be featured on top of this directory? Because we have 30K items. You're just one of 30K. Do you want to be the number one on the top? And then a lot of people said yes. So that's one way. The other way is the affiliate links. And that way works pretty good.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
If the items you have on your directory cost a lot. So if you have items costing $10, then you'll make a little money on that because you need a lot of clicks. But if you have items for 500 or a few K, then there is good money to be made there. For example, I have a directory for Next.js boilerplates and I have affiliate links to all the boilerplates and they all cost $10.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And Google has this tool called Keyword Planner that people usually use to plan their ads. But you can also use that tool to see the traffic for directories. Not for directory, for keywords. And I basically spend hours in that tool every day, just throwing all random ideas into that tool and seeing whether there is traffic or not.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
quite a lot and it brings quite a good money good income so i would not exclude one way or the other i would say do the first one do the second one like do the sponsoring do the affiliate links and then the third option is uh is to sell the data be careful to not sell the data as a risk because obviously you can't sell people private data but you can sell the
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
the anonymized data, or you can sell the insights. And that's possibly bringing good income if you find somebody who needs that. And usually you have to sell it to the corporates and you have to pitch that to the bigger companies where they are interested in the percentage, in the distributions and things like that. And the most obvious way to monetize directory is to have a paywall to list.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
For example, in this case, it's probably harder for business ideas because why would someone pay to list their business idea? But for example, if you're making a list of nannies,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
search for nannies and then every nanny would pay quite good amount to be listed there if you have traffic and if you have the buyers and the same the buyers so that's number four paywall for listings charge 500 or 50 dollars for listings And then the number five is charge for access for those who are most interested.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
In the case of director of nannies, if you are interested in hiring a nanny, you would probably pay good amount to get access to the whole database. So you show top five or you show nannies without their contact data, without their photos. And then to unlock that contact data, you have to pay and then you get access to the whole directory.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Either you get access for life or you get access for a month and then you can charge them for that every month. And the sixth is you find... The brand sponsors. That's what I do now. So once your directories are pretty big, you can find big companies, big corporates who don't need the traffic, who just need the brand promotion. Like we have Dev Hunt, for example, and it's really big.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's the biggest after Product Hunt. And now it's very easy to get big brands like Clerk or like Superbase and others to want to be there. to be affiliated with it, because that's where developers hang out. And they're willing to pay just to be affiliated with the product. So that you write, like, it's sponsored by Superbase. And it's not for the clicks. It's for their brand there.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And they're willing to pay for that every month or every week. So we have very good deals now with a lot of the players like that for ongoing sponsorship. And that's the best one, because A, it's ongoing. Usually, they will pay forever because your traffic just keeps growing. It just gets better for them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And also, it doesn't destroy your directory because the banners are slightly annoying for users because they will be shown, and you want people to click on them. So you will make them different color, and that annoys some people. But the sponsor links are usually smaller, and they don't annoy people that much. So those are the six ways.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And I can show on a real example, I have even an idea I want to test today. And I will show you how I would test that idea, actually, right here on the platform.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And then the last way is, or there are two more, but they are available for those who have other projects. So if you have SAS project, like I do, and the main reason I started with directories was that I realized one really interesting thing. it is much harder to win SEO traffic for a SaaS tool than for a directory.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So instead of trying to win SEO traffic directly for my SaaS tool, which has some random brand name that has nothing to do with the keyword, that's why it's hard. I'd rather make directories following the SEO-driven approach. I win traffic on directories, and I channel the traffic from directories into the
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
sas tools and that turned out to be the best idea i ever had in marketing because now almost all my traffic goes not to my products but to directories and then to the products and also directories or computing for the keywords that nobody want to pay for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
For SaaS, you compete with VC-backed companies who are paying a lot for the keywords, but nobody wants to pay for directory keywords because there's no money there. There are no VC-backed directory that wants to compete with you. So that's the good way to monetize directory indirectly. Basically, it's your free traffic which you would otherwise pay for.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And the last one is you can sell directories, and you can sell them exactly to the people who have SaaS tools, who have the same audience as your directory, and they would buy it just to channel the traffic. And I did that. I sold all gbt.co to chip.ai, and they bought it because... It has exactly the same audience, and it was really useful for them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
I think there is probably the best ROI on the market right now for marketing for SaaS companies to buy a directory and channel the traffic. It is way better than newsletter ads or all other ways because directors are pretty cheap. If you look at their traffic, let's say there's a directory with 100K views a month, And you can buy it. And in a year you get a million views.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And in that million views, you can channel at least 3%. So it's like 30K. 30K clicks a year. And you will pay for the directory, maybe 20K. And if you pay 20K, so it's less than a dollar per click. Less than a dollar.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
There's no system at all. It just depends on the audience because you can have multiples based on the revenue because revenue is usually not that important. The traffic itself also, like some traffic is more expensive than the others. I think from what I've seen, the actual deals, they go from 2K, they start at 2K. So you can find and buy directly for 2K, which has traffic.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So it will definitely pay... the investment back and then the average directories go for 20k in average so small ones go for 2 to 5k and then 15 to 20k the average ones and then the bigger ones go to 100k and i think that's where it stops i never seen a directory being solved for over 100k
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Well, I just bought the domain called selldirectories.com yesterday, so I will launch the marketplace. That's hilarious. Right now, I see them mostly on small marketplaces, like not the acquire.com, because acquire.com doesn't let directors in because they don't have revenue and they require their revenue.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
But then there are these smaller marketplaces for smaller websites, and I see directors there often. For example, one I... seen the directories the most on called micron io i think it's a small one and they had like 10 directories under 10k there some sold some still being sold so but i think the best way to actually buy directories is to go to similar web and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
research the traffic, research the audience, research the countries, and then reach out to them. an offer to buy, I do that. And because if somebody put their directory for sale, very often they want to sell it for quite a lot. But if you surprise a founder with a offer for a directory, they might just sell it right away for the offer you made and you can have a better deal, I think.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Yeah, so one thing we saw is that your podcast has been really great and it's been growing, the startup ideas. And the idea I got from this is that that's the hottest part of the whole startup journey now, is the ideas. And I think the part people struggle the most with are the ideas. And I think... People search a lot for ideas on Google.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
That's what I do right now.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
I think the 5K is probably where you can get without being lucky or being too smart. In my case, I would say the average direct rate I have is there. It's on 5K. I know that if I put more time, I can bring it to maybe 15 to 20K. I think 20K is probably the limit for the director right now on the market, unless you want to go full time into that and that's your main project.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
But I don't see directors as...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
main project so i only see them as side projects and i think as a side project where you have either i have my main projects but other people have main jobs for for that kind of case i think people can expect 5k mr on that and then uh eventually get to the 10k but i wouldn't hope for a lot more than that so i would look at directories as a as a way to fund your life if you don't live in us because that's a good money outside of us or
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
I think directories are a really good way to start building not software, but digital products. Because starting with SaaS is the worst idea, because you will fail. almost 100%. And then you'll probably feel bad about that and never start again and go back to your job. But with directories, it's really hard to fail.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
I don't think anyone can fail if they launch enough directories and if they spend six months on those directories. Because in SaaS, failure means that you don't have growing revenues but in directories if you get to stable 5k visits a month for a b2b directory you will sell four or five ads and you will make 3 4k a month on that and and that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
it will stay that way and even if you do nothing it will just grow because you have seo as your channel and seo tends to grow even if you do nothing if it's a directory because directories are in non-competitive keywords so that's why my recommendation start with the directory as your first attempt to build internet business and you will have More fun because you will get the document faster.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So the traffic and maybe the first sponsor, all those things you will get faster compared to SaaS. And then you decide either you go full. I know people who go with directories full in, for example, starter story is a directory too, right? It's a directory of starter stories and he's making over a million. And Protohunt was a directory of ideas first. There was no voting system at all.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It was just a list of products he would just look around the internet and put in and send into a newsletter every day. So there is a way to grow into millions, but also the risk of failing completely is pretty low too.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Twitter is the best place. It's JohnRushX. Or my website, jonrush.me. And I have this directory guide I launched where I walk through all these steps of ideating, building, growing, selling, monetizing. So that's probably something people should look into if they want to learn the directory world.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And to validate that, I went to Google, or I will go there now. I've done some tests before. And we come here, and we say business ideas. You can remove the filter on US to see the whole world. It's still in English. And now we're going to see whether people search for it. And as you see, a lot of people search for it. Business ideas is almost one million a month. That's a lot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And competition low. This competition is about the ads. So people don't pay for the ads for this keyword. But finding this domain name is pretty difficult, because the next thing you have to think about is, like, I have a keyword, and I want to make a directory, and I want the domain name of my directory to match the keyword. If there is a match, then it's gold.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Like, for example, I had this directory called Next.js starters, and it was exact match of the keyword, exact match, like. letter to letter. And I launched that, and I opened it back in three months, and it has a lot of traffic just because it's perfect. And it's .com. In this case, obviously, this will be taken.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So I go to GoDaddy, and I see whether businessideas.com is taken, and it's obviously taken. So then I have the next group of keywords here. I can sort them. And I can just take them one by one and test them. Small business ideas, little business ideas, online business ideas, all of them. And eventually, just before the pod, I found one that was available, which was the mini business ideas.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And I bought it. So the mini business ideas is a domain I will try. Why? It's good. So it's basically, I will explain now how the domain and the keyword works. So the key part here is that Google has made the change where in the old times, Google would look at exact word match. And now it looks at the meaning more than the actual words.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And that's why you have these small business ideas here, which is really high up here, and basically can replace small with something else that has the same meaning. And if it's available, you can take it. And that's what I did. So I tried tiny, micro, and then the mini was free. So I bought mini business ideas for $9. never buy expensive domains. Like it's always available.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Just be more creative and find the one that's available. So now I have the domain name, mainly business ideas. I have the idea itself. So the idea is the director of ideas.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And now I will go for the next step, which is building the directory. So there are many ways of building directories and. The worst way of building directories is going into the code. And I'm a developer myself. A lot of people think I'm not a developer. That's why I always promote no code. But I've been coding for like 15 years.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And the reason I always say that you should start with no code is this. When you do no code, you start faster because you can use templates. But that's not the most important part. The most important part is that once you launch, you have to do marketing. And marketing goes around marketing pages, marketing experiments, A-B tests, and all those things. And also the blog and programmatic SEO.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And all those things... are usually out of the box on most modern CMS or web builders because they have thought about it. That's why they built the whole systems. And when you do that, with Next.js or you hard code that with PHP, you don't really think about the future. And maybe in the present, you may find certain template to or boilerplate for that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
But then you'll have a lot of problems in the future when you have to do the other marketing work because everything has to be done manually. And for example, if you want to find somebody on Upwork who will write certain pages for you and publish them, Now, you can't do that because it's all in code. So you will get some Google Doc, and you will convert that into code. So it's all huge hustle.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And that's why it's, even if you know how to write code and you're great at that, it's 100% better to go with no code, any tool. But I obviously go with my own tool, the Unicorn platform. And let me switch the tab to the other tab now. All right, so here we are.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's a unicorn platform, like simple website builder that I pivoted into directory builder, I would say, because most directories or most websites built on unicorn now are directories, and that's interesting. And so we go here, and we say Create, and we find the directories. So here are the templates. People always try to overcomplicate things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So I have this Discord group called Directory Makers, and a guy asked me today, like, I want to make a directory for lawyers, and I want to have this and this and this, like 20 features. And I say, at the first... launch of your directory, the only thing that's important is the items. If you put the out, the ratings, and everything, it will be empty because there will be no ratings.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
There will be no users. So all those features, they don't make sense for a new directory. So the only thing that makes sense for a new directory is a simple page with a name and items. And everything else should come later in the month or even a year. So that's why I always start with very simple directory first. So usually it's, for example, this one. So this is probably the simplest one here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Well, we'll learn how to come up with ideas for directories, how to validate them before you build them, how to build them, and how to work on SEO once you build them. So basically, all three important steps you have to build successful directories.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So I pick this. All right. And I can actually simplify my work. So I can ask AI to generate the directory for me.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
Oh, really? That's why I do things really fast. People always ask me, what's your routine? And I'm like, I use AI for everything. But I do moderate everything, right? So I understand the quality and I add it. But I always use AI to start off many of these ideas for people who want to...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
with simple things like a menu and the structure, the text, the subtitle. Basically, you could do this all by yourself too, but why not to save time if you can? So it suggests me to basically have the directory here and then to have featured ideas here, which is pretty cool because this is... So in the directory, everything has to be taken into the prism of SEO.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So basically, the more text you have, the more items you have, the more pages you have, the more chance to score an SEO for those pages. And for example, in this case, if you have featured ideas, there is a high chance that you can score for SEO compared to just the ideas, because ideas will be smaller items. And featured ideas, you can probably spend time and create longer pages.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
All right, so it's pretty much almost done the work. And now it's a few more seconds. Or it's making the footer for me, I guess. All right, so it's making this also FAQ. So FAQ is pretty important. Yeah, now it's done. FAQ is really important too, because in FAQ, every title here is a possible question people put in Google. That's why the way you usually do with this is pretty straightforward.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
So you go to Google. And you try to search for something. So you write, how do I? And then it suggests you all the other options that other people search for. And that makes it obvious what exactly people search for. And that's how you can basically, for free, understand what people search for. Then you put them here into this FAQ. And you answer those questions.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
And then there is a chance you can get traffic for this.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
It's so basic and obvious, but you'll be surprised that almost nobody does it. Some things look too easy and people don't try because they kind of expect things to be complicated and then being valuable. And if something is easy to do, it feels like it's not valuable because... Everyone would be doing it. So how to start. So here you see. So how to start a business with no money.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
The blueprint for building cash flowing online directories
How to start a business as a teenager. That's interesting. I would never think of this. How to start a business as a teenager. And that's a very good keyword. Because it's probably not served well because it's not obvious. And you could cover that. So now I do this research, and I write down all these questions, and then I go back to my page where I will cover them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
this episode was crazy it was with john coogan and he had some of the biggest ideas i've heard all year these moonshot companies like it's either going to be like a billion dollar business or you're going to have literally lit a billion dollars of other people with money on fire it just seems like the bar to colonizing the moon is like orders of magnitude lower than than Mars.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And we are really good at just taking like, if it costs a hundred thousand dollars a kilo or a million dollars a kilo, or it doesn't matter, we have figured out what the right thing is to do right now. And I don't know the sequence of events. It might be, you want to put a nuclear reactor there first or something, or solar panel, or I don't know, robot, who knows.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
But figuring that out and then just being the company that just does that again and again and again, just puts you in a really cool place. And I just think like we might be, it might be the right time. We like, we might be, it sounds crazy and it sounds early, But at the same time, the Artemis mission is happening. Humans are going to be on the moon.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And I think when that happens and we see... We're going to see HD video of humans walking on the moon in a couple of years. And that's going to be crazy because all we have is the really grainy footage from the 60s that no one believes anymore and everyone thinks it's a conspiracy theory. And it's going to happen again.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And it's going to be undeniable because it's going to be live streamed and there's going to be people on the moon. I'm sure people will be like, it's fake. It's not real. But...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
it will be real and most people will like wake up and then i think the financial community will wake up engineers will wake up everyone will wake up and say like i want to be doing stuff on the moon just like you know five six years ago people or even ten years ago people were like well the spacex thing is working now like i want to do something in low earth orbit and whether that's a satellite or imagery planet labs planet labs just takes photos of the earth constantly and then they can sell that data to all sorts of different resources like hedge funds or weather companies there's a whole bunch of things that are valuable there
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
The question is, what is the Planet Labs of the moon? What is the Varda of the moon? I think that that becomes a really, really interesting question. I don't really have a firm conception, but I just think now is the time to start thinking.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
It just depends on like who you are and what you want to be doing with your life. Like there's, there's, it's totally valid to be like, I want to build a lifestyle business or I want to build a big business or I want to build something really slow or, you know, I want to have full control and not raise like all these things are valid. I just think like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
For the right person out there, there's probably someone who's like, yeah, you know what? I have been obsessed with the moon when I was five years old and I have some skills that are relevant here. Why don't I just go after this? And then I can always build a million dollar business later. But yeah, these moonshot companies, it's either going to be a billion dollar business or you're going to have
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
literally lit a billion dollars of other people with money on fire and and it's gonna be a disaster hopefully it's not like a fraud and you actually just spent it on important things and it just like didn't go well which happens all the time and that's fine everyone signs up for that but uh but yeah i mean um i do think that there are lots of people who who are who like they lose a little bit of that you know childlike wonder and if your childhood
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Let's start with cybersecurity for artificial intelligence companies. So if you have been following AI, there's been this interesting development. Obviously, a lot of people right now are thinking about how can I use AI to build a new app or a new company. And the obvious thing would be putting AI in your cybersecurity layer. So there's an incident report that goes out.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
was all about you know doing something really ambitious or like at least give it a shot you know like why not try and get the first thing done build the pitch deck raise the money go hire some people figure out the next thing i mean a lot of people are doing this like post liquidity like there's there's the the robin hood the co-founder of robin hood the trading app became very, very wealthy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I mean, that's a multi-billion dollar business. And he's always obsessed with space. And so he's doing solar panels in space and then capturing the energy and then beaming it down to earth with a laser. Now, I haven't looked into the numbers. I have no idea if this will work. It sounds crazy to me. Who knows? But like, it's super cool.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And I'm glad he's doing that instead of just like buying another yacht or something, you know, like go for it, like do something cool. Why not?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Yeah, I get you. Well, the next one is a little bit more tactical and a little bit less of a moonshot. I think that this could be, it'd be hard to make this next one a true lifestyle business because it is pretty capital intensive. But I do think that there's a way to make, to de-risk this to the point where you're pretty much guaranteed to make money. Yeah.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And so I'll walk through it and then I'll give some examples of other companies that I think kind of fit into this narrative. So one common problem that I was actually just talking to a kid who's younger who said like his parents really didn't want him to become an iPad kid. And so they got him this locked down Kindle Fire that was just for reading eBooks.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
But then he learned how to code and learned how to hack it so that he could play Clash of Clans on it. And it was just a very funny story. And it actually taught him how to code. And now he's like a software developer and a founder. And it was like a great experience instead of just having the dopamine fed straight into him. But I think that it's a very common thing
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
theme that everyone feels addicted to their phones. But adults really can't go back to the dumb phone. It's just too much of a shift. And so a lot of the like dumb phone companies haven't done all that well. But I think that there's a bigger opportunity to go after the kid's phone.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And so I was kind of jokingly called this like, you know, the iPhone, what comes after I? Well, it's J and then it's K. K phone, maybe it's the kid's phone, but then you could, you know, broaden it out. But when I heard the reviews of a lot of these AI hardware companies like
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
the humane ai pin or or the rabbit r1 a lot of the reviews kept coming back to the fact that these you know there were a lot of problems like they weren't as full featured for like a power user who wants like the right answer every single time but for as a cute little device for a kid to carry around i love the idea of a rabbit r1
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Hey, we got this user alert that someone is trying to log in like 10,000 times with different passwords. We should probably block them. Now, obviously, you could have an AI intermediate that interaction such that that's handled automatically instead of pinging your poor software developer at 2 a.m. He has to get up, check his pager, and say, oh, yeah, we should block that person.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
going into a six-year-old's hands and it's like, what does it need to do? Well, it needs to take a picture of a flower and tell the kid what flower that is. And if it gets it wrong, it's not that big of a deal because they still learned about some flower or some animal. And then it needs to be able to make an emergency call to family and Let the family know where the kid is.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
But it doesn't need to be able to install Clash of Clans or Fortnite or Minecraft or any of this stuff. It just needs to do a few basic things. Maybe it could be a watch form factor. Maybe it's a tablet thing. Maybe it's another device. But you're just deliberately...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
curtailing the dopamine fueled infinite scroll apps and not allowing those onto the platform and i think parents would buy this earlier i think parents will eventually be beaten down by teenagers and just wind up buying iphones but for the middle schoolers i think a lot of parents would be happy to buy something that's like
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
you know decent quality kind of ruggedized kind of fun cool style doesn't look like an apple product doesn't look like a status symbol couple hundred bucks basic features and it's something that can maybe help the kid with homework or questions or learn about the world keep them connected a little bit but not overwhelm them with the dopamine fueled apps and i think that
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
for these hardware companies, they always run into this problem where, I mean, this was a case study with Humane where it's ex-Apple people. And so all their investors are like, you have to beat Apple. And it's like, Apple's a multi-trillion dollar company. You have to full send it at that point. And so they made a lot of decisions that only make sense if you are fundamentally prepared
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
rejecting the idea that Apple just has a monopoly on a lot of things in the mobile device world. And so the Humane AI pin, it had a separate phone number. It wouldn't interact with your phone because they were like, oh, well, we don't want to link into the phone because then Apple will have control over us. We want to make the new platform.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And you see this a lot with like the Oculus device that Zuck's been working on. Like it's always kind of clunky because it's like, wait, why doesn't this just pair with my iPhone? Because like my iPhone's great, but it's like, yeah, we can't because he needs to go to war with Apple. Like he does not want to lose. And so, but for this, it wouldn't really matter if it like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
was set up through the the parents phone or whatever because you're you're not trying to do this crazy thing where like you need to get the 30 app store fee and you need to own the the relationship forever and you also need the the device metrics and you need the tracking in the ads network and you need all these things like because maybe with this one you're not immediately targeting a trillion dollar business you're just thinking like okay i'm gonna put this on instagram
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
advertise it to parents and every time that there's like a new school year right at summer and maybe christmas i'm doing a big push and yeah i'm gonna sell like a hundred thousand units for a hundred bucks each or something that's 10 million dollars like this is a pretty sizable business but it's not going to be hyper scale and then and then over time maybe you do iterations maybe you add features and maybe this does turn out to be a way to attack apple and really take part of their market share because
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Maybe eventually people do get sick of the crazy phones with all the addictive apps and stuff. But I don't think you need to have that happen in order to be successful. So you don't need to raise quite as much money. You don't need to go quite as crazy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And I think you can constantly be counter positioned against Apple with like really quirky designs, just stuff that completely breaks their design language, where if they tried to launch something like what you're making, it would be very weird and antithetical to their brand. They've done this before with...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
with the Tile app, which was a little tracker, a little Bluetooth tracker that you put on your keys. That business was doing phenomenally because everyone, no one wants to lose their keys. But the problem was, is that then Apple saw it and they were like, oh, we want that money. And so they launched the AirTag and the Tile is like the square white, it looks like an Apple product.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
We're getting DDoSed by Russia. Let's turn them off. Let's block that IP address. Obviously, a lot of people have thought about implementing artificial intelligence in part of the cybersecurity stack in order to beef up the existing cybersecurity solutions for all sorts of companies. Everything from Bank of America to Boeing to United Airlines, they all need cybersecurity.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And so the AirTag is circular and white. It looks like an Apple product. And so all the Tile customers just moved over immediately. The same thing happened with the Pebble watch. It was designed with an Apple brand language, so it was very easy to just be like, well, I'll just get an Apple Watch.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
But if you design something that is explicitly anti-Apple from the ground up, they're going to have a harder time being like, well, actually, the Apple brand is sleek. titanium and it's also like quirky pink plastic with a bunch of ruggedized stuff on it. Like it'll be a little bit harder for them to make that pitch.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And then they're also never going to be in a situation where they, where Apple says, Hey, we're launching a device and we deliberately nerfed it so it doesn't have an app store. and you can't install TikTok or Roblox. They're just never going to do that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And so you have this kind of counter-positioned value prop where, sure, you might not be able to ever get that big and win over the business guy who's going to buy the latest iPhone every year, but you're not in a category where Apple's going to come and just destroy your business one year.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Um, so I think that there's something there that's like an interesting tidy business where you could just create like a lot of delight and you have a lot of room to play and experiment. And look, if, if some of the features are a little rough around the edges or a little wonky, as long as they're safe and they're not putting the kid in harm's way and
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
it's really not that big of a deal if it's miscategorizing a dog and a cat or something. But as long as it's not showing them something offensive. So I think that's a really fun place to play. And I think it's underexplored. And I think that increasingly, there are more and more millennials who are tech consumers. Some of them are prosumers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Like, you know, you and I, we have like professional cameras and professional microphones and stuff. Like we know how to buy like, you know, electronics at a higher tier. And a lot of millennials have kids now. And so they're thinking about the same thing. It's not the boomer generation where you need to really do all this education. It's pretty easy to sell a millennial on that.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
The problem is that if you sell it and the millennials, the end user, they're going to be really, really rigorous and be like, are there any problems? It's very similar to starting a company that targets animal owners. So like dog food companies have been one of the few categories in direct-to-consumer that have done fantastically.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And the reason is because your dog doesn't tell you if they're sick of their food. Like, if you start a human food company, the human will be like, you know what? I'm sick of that particular brand of beef jerky. I'm trying something new. But the dog will eat the same dog food for 10 years. And so the churn is just super low.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And the kids, you know, the kids will say, oh, you know, I don't like this or whatever. But it's a lower bar. And so I think there's just more room to play more room to experiment. It's fun. I, I, I miss, I fundamentally miss the era of gadgetry.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I remember when I was a kid, there's a sharper image and every year there was like a new gadget and it was just like, they're like, Oh, this is like a vacuum cleaner that plays music. Or there's a Bluetooth stereo that goes in your shower. You're like just random stuff. And all of that's just been completely cannibalized by Apple. And don't get me wrong. I love Apple products. They're fantastic.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
There's a reason why we all buy them. But I love this. I love this idea of getting back to an era where a small company can tinker and create something that's novel and new, but tactile and something you can unbox. It's so hard to buy presents for people at Christmas because I used to get people DVDs and books and music albums. All that's digital. What am I going to do? Hey, you should...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
like just download this on Spotify and watch that on Netflix. Like, no, I want to get you a physical thing. But then if I start getting you like a kitchen gadget, like a, you know, a Cuisinart or an air fryer, it's like, well then pretty soon your, your whole kitchen's filled with all this junk. It's ridiculous.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
So we need to get back to like the cool gadgets, the unique things, the opinionated hardware. And I think this is a really, really fun and interesting place to play. But what's your reaction?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
You can even sell this in the Apple store. It's not that crazy.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
every cyber security company knows ai can make their job easier so they're implementing this what i'm talking about is doing the flip side building a cyber security firm that's specifically designed to secure the now highest value digital assets in the world maybe next to crypto and bitcoin like if there's a whole bunch of bitcoin that's really valuable but other than that the next most valuable digital asset has to be the weights to these large language models and so
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Yeah. I really hope that, I mean, I don't exactly know what the funding arrangements are in a lot of these new generation hardware AI companies is, but I would love to see one of them like discover this and pivot into it and be really successful. I mean, I want the them all to be successful. But it just feels like a lot of those launches, they came out, MKBHD kind of trashed them.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
No one really bought it. Return rates were kind of high. But it was because the pitch was, this is going to be on par with your iPhone. And that's just too tall of an order. And I think just making it fun and niche and unique. I love the fact that I have Obviously, the phone on the camera is great, but I love getting camera gear still.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I like a Sony camera that's opinionated around this one little thing. It only does this one thing really well. And I love that. But those niches are getting slimmer and slimmer as the phone just does more and more. So I'd love to see some more stuff break through.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Yeah, totally. I mean, I think back to the old Max that had the colored clear plastic on the back. What a crazy design. It's so cool. I think that's kind of making a comeback. Zuck announced some glasses that were clear, which is really cool that you can see the internals. And I think Palmer Luckey's new company, Mod Retro, has a clear Game Boy design that's really cool. But yeah, it's...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
It's tricky. It feels like we're on the cusp of something breaking through, but it is tricky.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Yeah. And it just is differentiated. Like it's, it's going to be hard to compete with apple on just like the clean, perfect industrial design. And people are going to nitpick that they're going to say, Oh, the tolerances aren't that good. Well, it's like, yeah, because like you didn't have the resources to like mill a unibody, like aluminum thing.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Like it's like insane or like however they made this out of titanium. Like that's insane. Like have some fun with it, do something weird. And even if it's like bigger or sort of, you know, sacrifices on some sort of vector, like battery life or durability or whatever, like just be upfront about that. And I think, I think consumers will embrace it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Okay, yeah. So last night, as we're recording this, we're recording this on Friday. Last night, Elon Musk presented a Tesla update called WeRobot, where he announced the CyberCab, which is their unsupervised, full self-driving rideshare network and some new vehicles. And There he also had a number of humanoid robots on display. I think the working name is Optimus.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And there's been a number of these humanoid robotics companies. There's a bit of a boom now. I think everyone's expecting that a lot of the work that was done in large language models and ChatGPT to kind of flow downward towards humanoid robots, where you could just talk to a humanoid robot and tell it to go do your laundry and it'll just do it. Now, at this moment,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
No one's really broken through with a fully autonomous robot. A lot of them are tele-operated, meaning that there's literally a human in a suit kind of like doing the same action remotely and then the robot's just mirroring them. But that works for plenty of things.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I mean, this has been used for a long time, tele-operation in medicine and then also in like, you know, if there's a nuclear reactor, you don't want to go in there, but it's fine to have a remote tech, you know, walk in and, you know, act as the robot or whatever. SWAT teams and bomb defusal. This is the classic tele-operation robot.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
So OpenAI, it's rumored that they spent around $500 million training GPT-4. Now, all of those weights, once the GPUs go off and train the model, it all gets boiled down into these weights. It's just numbers in a file, essentially. It's in a very large database, but you could steal this. And there's a lot of...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
um but there's separately from the ai and humanoid robotics trend there's also been a huge trend in defense technology uh driven mostly by anderle and palantir before that but there's just this trend that like defense tech is cool the government and the military is cool again uh the end of history isn't happening and there's you know, potentially great power competition is back on the menu.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I mean, we see this with Ukraine and Russia, and there are very serious conflicts happening. And so people are coming to the conclusion that, yes, we do need, you know, a serious revamp and efficiency gains within our military.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
so there's been a lot of companies that have started with uh you know drones uh famously uh y combinator just had their first defense tech company it's a cruise missile company uh which is kind of crazy when you think about what yc has done historically been a lot of consumer apps you know airbnb a lot of b2b sas uh you know gusto and rippling and stripe came through here um but then now they're doing cruise missiles and a lot of people think that's funny and interesting i i think it's great i think they should be doing anything that's valuable um but
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
My point was that I was predicting that within the next six months, I think that there will be a startup that will take one of these humanoid robots, even if it's teleoperated, give it an AR-15, like a machine gun or a rifle, and just do a demo of what this would look like for just basically the Terminator. Basically a Terminator scenario. Yeah. And go massively viral, be extremely controversial.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
People will say, is this bad? The robots are going to kill us. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise a $500 million seed round. Maybe that's true, maybe that's not. That's kind of a joke. But the idea is that we've seen so many of these humanoid robots and AI startups. We've seen a lot of people doing cruise missiles and things that would have been controversial 10 years ago.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And now all the planets are aligning to create basically the Terminator company, which would be, you know, completely controversial and like a lightning rod, which could be very good for getting attention and breaking through if you're a new startup. Now there's the question about like, do we actually need this? Is this the right thing for a lot of companies?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
use cases like no you don't want a humanoid robot you want a tank or you want a plane or something um but uh but for some maybe the teleoperation makes sense you know like we like why put a human at risk in you know like when we went in to get osama bin laden we sent in navy seals they got in a helicopter it was a very dangerous mission and if they could have been running that mission
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
remotely from a warehouse and just doing teleoperation, but doing everything that they did, but it's just robots. So even if they got shot, nothing would happen. Basically you die and you just immediately respawn like Call of Duty. That sounds like an improvement. It sounds dystopian and scary in many ways, but at the same time, The progress arrow of the future might just move in this direction.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And it seems like something that if you really think deeply about what will the world look like in 50 years, clearly the technology, it will be possible to build a humanoid robot that holds a gun. And so why wouldn't it happen? What are the forces that would stop that from happening?
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
fear-mongering and conspiracy theories in Silicon Valley right now to the effect that, oh, China has already stolen the weights to GPT-4. Maybe they already have stolen the weights to GPT-5. Who knows if it's real? I actually think most of these labs are pretty secure. But it goes without saying that these are going to be increasingly valuable targets for hackers to break into and steal. And so...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And if you can't think of any good reasons why it wouldn't happen, then, well, maybe we're on the path to it happening, and maybe we ought to grapple with that. And interestingly, Boston Dynamics has actually somewhat explored this
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
uh years ago so boston dynamics is the company that does those incredible viral videos with the the spot robot it looks like a dog and then the atlas robot that can do parkour and they've been working on this for decades and the company has changed hands a few times google owned it at one point i think hyundai bought it for a while and it's moved around but it's always been a company that wasn't particularly focused on government contracting and defense contracting um but
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Back in 2013 or 2012, 2013, I was living with this hacker guy who went on their website and figured out how to scrape all the files from their website, even the ones that weren't necessarily like fully public. Like they were public, but they just weren't like actually shown to people on the website. They were just like hosted there.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And one of them was a sketch artist of their humanoid robot holding a gun. And so it was very clear that they had at least someone in their organization at least like pitched it to the government and said like, Hey, like we could maybe do this. And then I think someone was like, we're not doing that. But, but they have this one humanoid robot called Petman.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
And it was designed, you got to pull up a video or image of this because it's crazy. Because the stated mission of Petman was to test the mobility of equipment to prevent like gas attacks. So imagine you need to wear like essentially a space suit on the battlefield to avoid like some terrible biological attack or some gas. So it's a gas mask, but it's also a body suit.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
and you make the suit and then you need to put it through its paces. So you literally like paces, like you need to have it be like, yes, we put this on a human and the human ran for a hundred miles. And so we know it's not gonna break after a hundred miles of usage.
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could do stuff just like putting in a washing machine just beat it up and see if it holds its like it doesn't break or get leaks but putting it on a humanoid robot and just having the robot walk there for you know 10 miles or 100 miles is a pretty good way to test this stuff and so that's what they were using that for but there was no reason i mean you see this thing it's just super militarized and you just think like okay like this is where this going and every time that there's a boston dynamics video that drops everyone always says like these things are gonna have guns on them eventually
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And some people have put guns on them and the corridor crew, this wonderful YouTube channel has actually done like a CGI version where they had the Boston, they call it boss town dynamics. And they, and they had a whole version of like training them with guns. But basically all of the, all of the clues are pointing to this, this happening.
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And so the question is like, who's going to build this? Like, I think that there will be a startup that will take one of these humanoid robots, give it an AR-15, like a machine gun or a rifle. And I said, oh, and then they're going to raise like a $500 million seed round
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And it just feels like someone's going to put the pieces together that the tech exists and And this would be massively viral and controversial and get me a ton of attention, which could be good. It could be bad, but I could at least harness it. And so I think someone's going to do it. Maybe they're listening right now.
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figuring out how to protect a digital asset like it's fort knox seems like something that's going to be a new and ongoing challenge for the artificial intelligence industry broadly now this is different from in past in past generations of tech because if you stole the code base to facebook and you were like okay i have all the code to facebook i'm gonna launch Facebook2.com.
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Yeah, it is interesting. Will it be an arm of Tesla? Elon is already a defense contractor with SpaceX, but he hasn't built ICBMs, even though he builds rockets. Or Anduril has a lot of capabilities, and they build autonomous weapon systems now, and so they could build something like this. But my original take on Twitter was more just like,
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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the vibes are coalescing around the idea that this will be something that people will talk about if it happens and all the pieces are there for the demo at least and yeah maybe it's tele-operated maybe it's a very niche use case and honestly like yeah giving it a gun is probably not even the most valuable thing i mean still search and rescue just going into the nuclear reactor when it's melting down or you know going into the burning building
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Like, you know, teleoperation for, you know, the firefighter gets out of the truck and is like, okay, I'm going to virtually, I'm going to put on my VR headset and the robot's going to walk in and rescue the kitten. Like, that makes a ton of sense. And maybe that's the first thing. But yeah, I mean, we are...
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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coming to the era of like it is believable that there will be a robot with a gun somewhere in the world in the next couple decades and somebody's going to be building that and that's just interesting to think about you know is it good is it bad there's a lot of things you could you could work through um there will be a lot of regulations a lot of rules and you know what does the geneva convention say about it and i'm sure we'll have a big debate and there'll be lots of you know editorial pieces and op-eds but uh
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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The tech is here.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Well, I just started a new podcast called Technology Brothers. It's a weekly chat show with me and a friend. We just talk about the news of the week. Very casual, but very cinematic. We're having a lot of fun with it. And then I do have a YouTube channel, just my name, John Coogan. And I put up video essays and documentaries about tech and business and politics and all sorts of stuff.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
So check that out. And you can also follow me on X at John Coogan.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
I'll talk to you later. Bye. Bye.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
Humanoid Military Robots and other crazy billion dollar ideas
Well, you don't have any of the users. People aren't going to your website. It's not valuable. But with the large language model weights, once you get the model, you can run that anywhere. You can stick that anywhere. You can wrap that into your own product. And all of a sudden, you're not paying OpenAI or Anthropic if you're able to steal the weights. And so...
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These firms are going to need top-tier cybersecurity. They already do. A lot of these guys, they go to DEF CON. They talk to all the hackers. They have huge, huge resources allocated to this. But it's just going to become an ongoing problem.
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And I think that there might be a new opportunity to figure out, to build a new company around securing these extremely, extremely valuable digital assets, which are the AI models. I think that there's a, in many ways, this is, you know, it's not an entirely novel problem. But if you look at what happened in crypto for a long time, there were kind of two things that were really valuable.
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There was like Bitcoin, which was kind of like sticking around forever. And then there's this company called Chainalysis. Did you ever see this? So Chainalysis was a company that they didn't have a token. It wasn't a crypto company. They did the analysis to find like the fraudsters and they were like super downstream of the actual like cryptocurrency.
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But that company, even when you talk to the most diehard crypto hater, they'd be like, oh, well, yeah, Chainalysis is probably like a good company because their cash flow is like independent of the underlying token prices because they're just getting paid to hunt down the criminals. And so Chainalysis
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i think there's something there's something interesting and uncorrelated about doing cyber security for artificial intelligence companies where you could be indexed to the growth of artificial intelligence without directly needing you know some next benchmark to hit and and and you're not going to be in a situation where oh all of a sudden you know oh you got obsoleted by you know a uh like a current company um so anyway that's my first take
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The cybersecurity for AI companies. Greg, what do you think about it?
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Yeah, you know, this is somewhat related, but with the generative AI that's kind of dominating the performance ad market right now, AI-generated ads, ads generally across
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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Facebook are already being optimized and chosen through artificial intelligence, but increasingly the text will be generated on the fly per user and a brand will just kind of show up with like, hey, here's my product, do your best to portray it in the great light. And Facebook is going to wind up generating video, imagery, everything for your brand ultimately.
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Generative AI is really going to transform digital advertising. But a lot of the big companies and big brands are super nervous about turning their brand over to a generative AI model that is known to have flaws and get things wrong occasionally.
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And so for those folks, like the small and medium businesses, the SMBs, they will just go for it because it doesn't matter if their brand gets misconstrued in some AI hallucination because they just need performance. They just need to grow the top line. But for a really established brand, they don't want to take that risk.
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So maybe you could wedge in somewhere there, like sell to the CMO of Coca-Cola and say, hey, we know that you're going to be using generative AI tools. If there is some sort of backlash to a generative AI campaign that you run, we will foot the bill to do all the brand correction to get you back on track. That could be interesting because those big brands are going to be like the last ones.
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They're going to be the laggards in terms of adopting this. technology.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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Yeah, I mean, with this particular idea, obviously you need rock-solid cybersecurity chops in terms of the actual technical skill of your team, and then you also need insane B2B connections to be able to go and sell this. So it's not for everyone. This is not something some college dropout kid's going to build in their free time. Maybe they will. Maybe they'll be able to put it together.
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But I would assume that this is going to be something that comes out of the current industry, somebody that... somebody that already has a lot of rapport and and connections and can uh really like know exactly what product to build immediately 100 you've got a few ideas so we've got a lot to talk about yeah let's do number two what was number two oh number two was the moonshot so
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I have thought for a long time, I mean, I want to go to the moon. I think most people want to go to the moon. My son certainly wants to go to the moon. Like every kid wants to go to the moon. But there's always a question of like, how do we actually get there? We've been there, 1969. You know, that's a long time ago at this point. And we're going back.
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So SpaceX is going to have the capacity to go to the moon and put humans there. But Elon has never been really focused on the moon. He's super focused on getting to Mars. He wants to make humanity interplanetary. And the problem with Mars is that there's only a small window of time when you can actually launch a mission from Earth to Mars.
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Because the planets, if they're on the opposite side of the solar system, it would just take forever to get there. So you need to wait for them to kind of line up next to each other. And that only happens every two and a half, maybe three years. And so there's going to be this very slow iteration where when the next transfer window comes up,
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spacex is going to definitely try and launch a rocket to get there but it'll probably just be like robots and then the next one they're going to launch like 10 rockets during that window because they're going to have like three years so it's not like going to low earth orbit where they can just launch a new rocket every single day like they're doing now for the starlink satellites um so it's going to be it's going to be a longer process but i really think that just if we're going to get to mars humanity needs to start getting their reps in on the moon and the beauty of the moon is that a it's really close
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you can always get to it and you can always get back from it because if you plant an emergency escape pod on the moon, as long as you're on the earth facing side, the moon is locked in orbit so it always faces earth. So it's never the situation that you're like, oh, my escape pod is pointing at the sun and it's not pointing at earth. Like it's always pointing at earth.
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So worst case scenario, you know, like this is kind of silly, but like sci-fi scenario, like there's a crack in my spacesuit helmet. You could literally just dive into your escape pod, smash the big red button and it shoots you back to earth and you're back in the Pacific ocean in like, you know, a couple hours or I don't know how long it takes, but like, you know, not long guaranteed to be there.
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Now, worst case scenario, like you landed North Korea or something, but for the most part, like at least you're back on earth. Um, and maybe there's a little bit of steering that can try and get you to somewhere that's a little bit friendlier, but it just seems like the bar to colonizing the moon is like orders of magnitude lower than, um, than, than Mars.
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And so the question is like, who's going to build this? Like 20-ish, 10, 10 to 20 years ago, there was a guy named Barney Pell who was, made a lot of money in the dot-com boom and started a company called Moon Express that was kind of targeting this idea of like, let's go do stuff on the moon. And I think he was just a little bit too early.
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He was really well-funded, really talented guy, obviously, but he couldn't get it done. But now there's this interesting period where SpaceX will have the capacity and we will know the price. And there's been a number of companies that have gotten up and running on the basis of SpaceX's falling launch costs to low Earth orbit. So there's two examples that I think of. One is Varda.
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They do drug manufacturing in space. So In low Earth orbit, there's no gravity. And so if you're trying to make a drug and it's crystallizing, if you can turn off the gravity, that can produce higher yields and better drugs, essentially. So it's a pharmaceutical play, but leveraging SpaceX. And it'd be impossible without SpaceX. And the same thing goes for
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Not that big of ideas, but there's a fine line between big idea and just hot take shit post. And I think today we're going to hit some of them that are complete meme companies. Some of them that maybe could be good. It's going to be on the listener and the viewer to decide which of these ideas are actually good and which are purely viral fodder for the media.
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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uh impulse impulse space by tom mueller the first employee at spacex he is building a company that boosts creating a boost vehicle that gets uh gets material from low earth orbit to geosynchronous orbit and so um That is another company that wouldn't exist without SpaceX. And so I think there will be a series of these companies.
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And for the really, really big opportunities, it's totally possible that SpaceX takes it for themselves. SpaceX launches a lot of internet satellites. But when the really big opportunity of Starlink came about, which is low Earth orbit satellites in this mesh, it was obviously going to be just way better performance. You can now...
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do zoom calls or podcasts like on planes it's crazy uh and really anywhere uh they kind of took that for themselves so i wouldn't i wouldn't want to compete with spacex on that um but if i think about you know moon tourism or some sort of like moon mining operation or even just some you know contracting uh organization that that puts assets on the moon for some other reason getting like
The Startup Ideas Podcast
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what if your business is like, we're just going to get food assets or air or water to the moon. And we're just going to build that up so that if SpaceX wants to buy some of it, we have it on the moon or NASA wants some of it, we have it on the moon. And that's what our business is. And we're just really good at understanding the economics of, of SpaceX's current cost to get a kilo to the moon.