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.