Join us for a jam session where I break down several innovative startup ideas from the SIP community. I’ll share my insights on why these ideas are either promising or problematic, and reveal the frameworks and strategies I’d use to grow these businesses. In this episode, learn how to capitalize on the micro weddings trend to build multiple service-based businesses. I also discuss my framework for the future of AI-enabled service businesses and how you can leverage it to build a highly profitable enterprise. Additionally, we dive deep into an innovative approach to building a course business and how to position your SaaS business for success. Discover the evaluation techniques and growth strategies that can help you build your next successful startup. Whether you're aiming to launch your first million-dollar business or are interested in entrepreneurial tactics, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this essential guide to launching a thriving startup!Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀 My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/To scale your revenue faster with conversion-focused creative sign up to https://designscientist.comEpisode Timestamps: 0:00 Intro02:53 First business: Lead Generation for Wedding Venues06:14 Second business: Fractional Wedding Planner12:55 Framework: AI-enabled Service based businesses15:22 Third business: Niche Credentialing Business20:40 Fourth business: UX Analytics SaaS App
Here's where I think service-based businesses are going to go. When you build a service-based business, think of a design agency or an SEO shop or something like that. Number one, you start with humans doing the work. And then number two, you transition from humans doing 100% of the work to AI-assisted human work. And then step three, you transition to agents do all the work.
Once you get to step three, the margins are going to 3, 4, or 5x. Instead of making 20% EBITDA, you might be able to make 60% EBITDA, 80% EBITDA. And the reason why is because you're paying tokens and you're getting agents to do the work. And this might be in five years and this might be in seven years or three years.
But the point is, if they can get there and you've built up all the systems and processes and client base, then you're going to be in a really, really good place. So that's And we're back. Another solo pod, just me. I'm going to give away some ideas, some trends. I did one of these last week and you all loved it. So I figured I'd do another one. Let's get right into it.
So I want to start off with the trend and I'll give you some ideas for this trend. So recently I got married and my wedding was different than most people's wedding. A lot of people have weddings and they've got a hundred of their closest friends and families there. I had a wedding and there was 14 people there and that was including me and my wife. So Weddings are changing.
People don't want to spend thousands of dollars on weddings. They want to do something small. They want to do something intimate. And that leads me to my trend of the week, which is micro weddings. So what is a micro wedding? I think we need to just define it. So it basically means a wedding with less than 50 people. It's just way more intimate.
And it's especially big in places like New York, LA, Miami. where the cost per wedding guest could be more than $1,000 per guest. So it's absolutely out of control. This is obviously due to inflation. And over the last few years, it's just gotten out of hand. So okay, so this is the trend. I think a lot of you are probably nodding your head and being like, of course, this makes a lot of sense.
How can I create a business on top of this trend? So idea number one is just lead gen. So there's a bunch of small venues that haven't... They're not really set up for micro weddings. And the biggest challenge of that is these small venues don't have the visibility. They have smaller marketing budgets. And then they probably just don't know that this trend is happening.
So you could go and just bridge the gap. So, you know, I just Googled here, micro wedding, Los Angeles. And I saw that there is actually a sponsored link called intimate mountain weddings.com. So great domain, good SEO. Um, and as the search volume starts to increase, if people become aware that micro wedding is a thing, uh, traffic's going to go, you know, go up.
So how can you operate this idea as a service? So, you know, step one is you just got to form the partnerships agreement. So you go to these wedding venues, uh, and you basically say, Hey, I'm going to send you a bunch of leads for, for, for your micro wedding. And then would you be willing to give me 10%, 5%, 20% of a booking that's made through your platform?
So it's like a win-win situation for the small venue. And a lot of these venues, they're hanging on by a thread. They want more revenue. Then you're going to... Step two is just to implement SEO and advertising. So you're going to generate traffic mostly by... mostly by search. So the bet here is that more and more people are going to search it, you're going to show up.
And then you could obviously do a little bit of ad arbitrage. What is ad arbitrage? That just basically means when you're spending $2 a click, but the average click gives you $3. You create this vending machine where you put $2 in, $3 comes out. So, uh, that's, that's where you're going to mainly focus.
Of course you can do content and building an audience around it and, and just showcase these venues and showcase other weddings. Uh, that's definitely a given. So I would say implement SEO advertising and, and build an audience. Uh, and then step three is, uh, specialize and promote. So, you know, I would say become the micro wedding market gal or guy. Um,
once you position yourself as that person, and I think that's ripe for the taking, you're going to earn more trust. And the hard part about something like this is it is a new market. And whenever you have a new market, you have to educate people why this should exist. Everyone knows, oh, I just got engaged. I need to go and create a wedding. But they don't
know about the concept of a micro wedding, what that is, why it's better, why it's going to save you money, and why, if you forget all the money, it's just going to be a more intimate experience for the people that you love. So, you know, I think that there's tons of opportunity to own that, to own that category. And, you know, this is just like one of those low-risk ideas. So,
Idea number two in the micro wedding space is just helping plan. So offering comprehensive, all-inclusive micro wedding packages that streamline the entire planning process. So I found this Reddit post. So here's the post. Micro wedding in Southern California, LA County, 13 guests, $23,000. And they basically just go into this. This is a long one for those interested in the numbers.
They talk about how the original wedding was supposed to take place in June 2020. But obviously, because of COVID, they couldn't do it. They talk about how much they paid in their deposit. They talked about basically the budget breakdown. So ceremony venue, $2,000. Dinner venue, $3,500. Partial planner, $1,500.
I guess that's a party planner, but only partially, which is kind of an interesting... That's a whole other niche to own. Another idea right there is a fractional partial party planner. Photographer, 3,100. Videographer, 1,000. String trio, $800. Florals, $1,500. Anyways, you get the idea. Bottom line is it's $23,386, which obviously is a lot of money, but isn't $100,000.
Or isn't, you know, some people spend a million dollars. So they just go into this and you can see, you know, they talk about everything and they break this all down. This is an incredible content piece. I would love to see, you know, you could create a whole audience around breaking down different micro weddings. And then if you look in the comment section on Reddit, people are just so engaged.
They're so appreciative of it. Hey everyone, if you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want Beautiful landing pages are beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert. You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where DesignScientist.com comes in.
It's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work, all your copy work, all your engineering. And do stuff that actually scales your revenue. You don't need a designer. You need a design scientist. Let's go. Designscientist.com. I liked it so much, I invested in the business.
I like to use Reddit and see posts that go viral in particular communities as a way to validate a particular business idea. So I see this. And I'm like, okay, there's something here in the micro wedding space because they put it in the wedding planning subreddit, which has 829,000 members. And it went viral within that community.
So one thing you could do is you can create the subreddit for micro weddings. You can be that moderator. So that's just an idea for you. Okay, let's get back to the idea. So So the idea is basically to create an agency, a wedding planning agency, but only focus on micro weddings. And there's one company that I was able to find that's doing it, and it's called Our Little Wedding.
And I found it via that Reddit post. They're based in San Francisco. You can tell there's basically a coming soon version of their website. So it's not exactly optimized, but you get the idea. There's these all-inclusive...
micro weddings that they sell and it's you know between five and sixty one hundred dollars five thousand and sixty one hundred dollars so uh here's one the bay area redwoods elopement so it's an all-inclusive uh package five thousand dollars you get a mill valley amphitheater private ceremony one hour photography personal floral florals you get a dinner a luxury reception dinner celebration
cake and cake florals and you get add up to six guests so you get this beautiful background super picturesque uh instagram friendly and it's beautiful it's intimate and it's five thousand dollars so this is the type of thing that you can go and create idea number two is you just go and uh organize these packages, build brands around it, and capitalize on the micro wedding trend.
So that's my trend of the week, micro weddings. I love it for a lot of reasons. Like I mentioned, validated on Reddit, offshoot of a particular subreddit. You're starting to see little businesses pop up. There's so many validated business models. You don't need to reinvent the wheel. You can do things like an agency. And then people are willing to spend on their weddings.
So when you're creating a business, you obviously want to prioritize businesses where people are willing to take out their wallet. And this is something where people feel like they're saving money. If they're spending $5,000 on a wedding and they thought that they're going to spend $50,000, they're going to be pretty darn happy. So I love this concept for a lot of reasons. And I also think that
you know, as someone who had a micro wedding, I didn't even know it was called a micro wedding, but as someone who had a micro wedding, it was just an incredible experience and special in its own way.
I feel like, you know, I'm 35 now and a lot of my friends have gotten married and it just sort of feels like by the end of like the last weddings of my friend group, it almost felt like all these weddings were the same and they were beautiful weddings and great places and Beautiful hotels. But they all had the 100, 200, 300 people. They all had the same band. They all had the same sort of food.
And I think this idea around micro weddings that are just also just unique experience. Like imagine getting married in the sequoias north of San Francisco. All these trees that they're hundreds of years old and they're as tall as skyscrapers. Like how cool is that? So love this trend. And I wanted to give it to you.
The other thing that I wanted to talk about is just an insight I had around building businesses that are powered by human beings. And when I'm talking about building businesses, I'm talking about service-based businesses. Here's where I think service-based businesses are going to go. So when you build a service-based business, think of a design agency or an SEO shop or something like that.
you start with, number one, you start with humans doing the work. And then number two, it's you transition from humans doing 100% of the work to AI-assisted human work. And then step three, you transition to agents do all the work. And I think this is just an interesting framework and something I'm just thinking about and I wanted to share with you around what are businesses that are going to
translate into that framework. Because I think that once you get to step three, the margins are going to 3, 4, or 5x. Instead of making 20% EBITDA, you might be able to make 60% EBITDA, 80% EBITDA. And the reason why is because you're paying tokens and you're getting agents to do the work and people are expensive. There are certain industries where this probably won't happen.
We run an innovation design agency called LCA. And We work with the Nikes and the Dropboxes and the Shopifys of the world and these large companies with their executive team. And they don't want AI to do all the work. And they also need someone to talk to. And they need someone to brainstorm with. And they need someone to jam with. So there are certain spaces where... where it doesn't make sense.
But there are certain spaces where it does make sense. And I think that's sort of my homework for you. It's something to think about is what are service-based businesses that are most likely going to hit that number three, basically get agents on board? And this might be in five years and this might be in seven years or three years. But the point is,
If they can get there and you've built up all the systems and processes and client base in five years, then you're going to be in a really, really good place. So that's something that I've been thinking about. And the last thing I want to talk about today is I've been doing these live streams where I've been bringing people on stage who have startup ideas, who want my feedback.
And it's been really, really fun. And also people who just have a business experience. And they're past the idea stage, like they've got something live. And they want my feedback. So I'm going to share with you a couple of the ideas that were shared to me that I wasn't able to bring people on stage. And I'm going to give live feedback.
And my hope here is it's going to get your creative juices flowing. It's going to help you get a bunch of startup ideas. And so let's get right into it. So Peter Gray messaged me. It says, here's the idea. It's called More Than Academy. It's an athlete-tailored entrepreneurial education.
There will be online community networking masterclass type videos, more formal LinkedIn type online courses for certificates and badges, and an in-person workshop primer series targeting at high school athletes with aspirations of being an athlete aimed at empowering student athletes. Well, it's a lot of athletes with the skills and mindset needed for both athletic and entrepreneurial success.
The person workshops lead gen for the online community and online education. Our business would then lead gen potential clients for all the NIL agencies or organizations like athletes.org. Okay, so I'm not going to give you specific feedback on do athletes or aspiring athletes need this. I think they probably do, but I'm not one myself, so you would know better than me.
But I'll give you feedback and give everyone feedback on a really big opportunity, which is credentialization. We're living in a world where the value of a Harvard degree and a Stanford degree is going down. Of course, it's valuable. I'm not going to say it's not. But in our world, our world of Twitter, podcasts, YouTube, what people really care about is what have you done?
Has your content gone viral in your niche? And that's basically it. And are you an interesting, cool person that I want to work with? That's what people care about. That being said, getting in the front door is difficult today. It's probably even more difficult today than it was 10 years ago.
And I think the good part of having a Stanford degree or a Harvard degree is it gets you in the front door. I think that there's tons of opportunity to build online programs and IRL programs that credentializes. And what do I mean by credentializes? I mean you get a certificate and people will pay for that certificate. So I saw this really good tweet by Peter Levels on Twitter. And he goes,
Python is the fastest growing and highest paid for remote jobs right now. The median salary is $80,000 a year for remote, but with massive outliers into $300,000 a year and higher if you go non-remote, usually in office in San Francisco. So then he's put this chart of basically the fastest growing and highest paying jobs in 2024.
Python, Marketing, Node, Backend, TypeScript, Sales, Ruby, React, Nontech, JavaScript, Customer Support. I would basically use ChapGPT to build this list. Or you can even grab this list. We can put it in the show notes. But I would basically create a list. And then I would be like, how do I credentialize for Python? How do I credentialize for not marketing? Because marketing is too big.
But what about growth marketing? So how you'd actually go and build out this idea is You take out a piece of paper, you'd write in the middle, hub and spoke. The hub would be marketing. And what are the spokes? Growth marketing, PPC, audience development, video content. What are all the ways that people market in 2024? And then I'd look at credentializing.
And the other way you can create this business is you can actually go to existing course creators and be like, hey, I'm going to manage... the credentialization of your program. I'm going to manage the graduation of your program. I'm just going to make this experience incredible. I think that's another business that would definitely cash flow $10,000 to $100,000 a month.
To give you feedback, Peter, I don't know enough about athletes, but I think what you inspired me to think about is credentialization is something that's a huge, huge, huge idea. So I like it a lot. And then Jose Carrillo says, I recently started building trip.com. It's an analytic platform for UX teams. I'd love some feedback. Okay. So let's bring up trip.com and give him some feedback.
Okay, so I pulled it up. It says analytics for UX teams that tracks user task duration and helps you fix user sticking points for smoother task completion. Discover the true efficiency of your app with real-time insights into task completion times, identify and streamline complex workflow to enhance user satisfaction and productivity. Okay, and then there's an image here.
And then how do they charge? So they charge $9.99 a month. And you get five different tasks configured to record. Or $19.99, they call it a business plan, where you get 10 different tasks. So this is one of those ideas that you've built something really smart, but the way you're talking about it and the way it's positioned could be optimized.
So it's not just about, quote unquote, smoother task completion. Because what does that mean? It means if you get people to complete their tasks... We actually did some research. If you get someone to compete their task, their primary task of going onto a mobile app or going onto a website, they're actually 67% more likely to buy a product or service from you.
So if you can tell me that you're going to help me sell more stuff, or you're going to help me get more people to subscribe, or you're going to help me get more followers, or you're going to help me drive word of mouth, all these things, that's what this is about. It's not about task completion. So the biggest thing that you need here is to reposition around what is unpacked task completion?
And the other thing is, when you're writing copy, write like you talk. You would never say in a conversation, discover the true efficiency of your app with real-time insights and task completion times. So you just need to rewrite your website as if you're talking to an eighth grader. And that's a prompt that you can actually put within ChatGPT. You can say,
You can put in all your copy and then put into ChatGPT and say, I really want this to be written in plain English. Can you make this really, really clear and catchy for an eighth grader? And then you ask it to rewrite it and you're going to get some good stuff. The other thing is, where's the video? I'm on your website and it's just an image. I think that
So many people are using images and just text on web pages. I'm really, really bullish right now on having above the fold a video, and that's going to help increase conversion rates, no question. Show me what you're doing. People are used to Instagram stories. They're used to YouTube shorts. They're watching video everywhere. They should be watching video on your website.
And the beauty is video is one of the best, I think, if not the best way to storytell. Because you've got audio, you've got visual, you've got sound. So you feel more connected to a product via video if it's just an image. And last thing is, I don't know about your business model, 999 to 1999. That feels quite arbitrary.
And it feels like if you're actually helping that much with task completion, it's worth a lot more than $19.99. So that's my feedback. And I hope that was helpful. All right. So that's the pod. If you enjoyed it, please, please go to YouTube, subscribe and comment on the YouTube video. And I read every comment. I respond to most of the comments, especially if they're nice.
And I'll see you on the next one. Hope this got your creative juices flowing. Later, everyone.