The Startup Ideas Podcast
4 profitable startups from the founder of exploding topics
Wed, 04 Sep 2024
Join us for an engaging conversation with Brian Dean, Co-Founder of Exploding Topics I, as we explore a wide range of startup ideas and business opportunities1) AI Content Updater for Publishers • Automatically finds & updates outdated content• Fixes broken links, outdated stats, irrelevant info• Integrates with CMS for seamless updates• Target: Large publishers with 1000s of posts• Potential: $1k-$10k/month per enterprise client 2) Uber Black of Meal Delivery • Chef-prepared, high-end meals ($50-$75 per meal)• Beautifully presented, like an "Apple product"• Target: Tech cities with high-income professionals• Potential: Multi-million dollar business in select markets• Key insight: There's always a market for premium versions3)ADHD Brand & Community • Position ADHD as a potential superpower• Create content, products, and community• Start with social media to build audience• Expand into apps, tools, coaching services• Opportunity: No clear market leader in ADHD space yet• Pro tip: Name it after a historical figure with ADHD4) Content Repurposing Service • Turn blog posts into videos, podcasts, newsletters• Target: Content marketers at larger brands• Pricing: Per-update model to avoid subscription fatigue• Potential: 8-figure agency if executed wellWant 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: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 🎯 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.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND BRIAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/BrianEDeanLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brianedean/Episode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:11 Startup Idea 1: AI Content Updater for Publishers08:25 Startup Idea 2: Uber Black of Meal Delivery 18:08 Startup Idea 3: ADHD Brand & Community 26:28 Startup Idea 4: Content Repurposing Service
The beauty of it, you build the audience, the world is your oyster, as you know. Once you have the audience, the product's the easiest thing to do. I mean, even if you don't wanna create your own, just promote other people's ADHD apps. But the point is, everyone's trying to go, they go right for the product. They're going, okay, I wanna make an ADHD chair.
they're forgetting the most important part and the opportunity in this space is to create the brand so when you think of i need help with adhd i want to do something about it i go to julius and that's the brand that's associated with this growing huge market and you don't see very often a huge growing market without a go-to brand and that's what we're seeing
We're going straight into it. Brian Dean on the podcast. I think this might be the best ever episode of the 150 episodes or whatever I've done on this podcast. You're literally calling me from your couch.
Yeah, it's more of an intimate episode. We're just going right into it. It's already the best episode. It's only like 20 seconds in. So all the pressure is off now.
Totally. Yeah, we wanted to invite you into Brian's home.
Yeah, that's what we're going for. Production meeting we had before is what we talked about.
Exactly. All right, man. We're getting into it. So you are the trend god. I'm just going to call you that. That's what I'm going to do.
Okay, not going to argue with that.
You might even call yourself the Exploding Topics God.
All right.
And so I was hoping you can come on and you can share some of the most interesting trends, topics, and ideas. And you're a listener of the pod, so you know what this audience wants. Brian, what do you got for us?
Yeah, the first idea right off the bat is one that I would pay for. It's a take my money situation. It's an AI content updater. So there are a million and one tools for creating content with AI. There's content writing tools. There's tools that do outlines. There are tools that rewrite your content. There are tools that will take your long-form video and chop it up into shorts.
But what real publishers need is help updating their existing content library. So, for example, with Exploding Topics, we have... maybe like 500 blog posts, which is nothing compared to most publishers. And even that we have trouble keeping up to date.
We have about, uh, you know, one and a half full time people constantly updating this content and they're going in, they're saying, okay, this, that's a little bit old or this isn't really as relevant anymore. Or there's a link that's broken or there's a source that's more recent we can use. And they're doing it manually.
So if there was a tool that could go through your existing content library, find areas that need to be updated and actually go into your CMS and update it, it would be a game changer.
What do you think you can charge for something like that?
I would say this would be something you'd want to go more enterprising for sure. Like it's starting at a thousand bucks a month because anyone who has a small con, if you don't publish that much or have a big library, it's not that valuable because you can do it manually. You can just use spreadsheets and have a couple of staff members do it. That's what we're doing now.
But let's say you have 25,000 posts. You're like Tom's guide or something.
you it's and it's insane to even think of doing that manually but you need to to keep this stuff up to date because it's about technology so i would say you're starting at like a thousand five thousand ten thousand you know that big enterprise contract level and if you were to start something like this okay so this is a great idea i see the need i actually i would pay pay definitely a few thousand dollars a month for something like this uh how would you go about
like actually starting this? Like, what do you do? Okay, what's next?
The first thing I would build it for myself. So I'd be my own case study to start with. And it's one of those business ideas are usually, in my opinion, the best because you're using it yourself. So you can see what needs to be added. What does it need to be done? Where does it mess up? Where is it good? Where is it bad?
So first thing would definitely be building a beta that I test out on my own site or a different property that I own to get the nuts and bolts out. And then from there, I'd probably do manual outreach and just be like, you have this massive library. I'm seeing a bunch of posts that haven't been updated in three years. We have software.
I'll just go in, use AI and give it some updates that it needs.
What about charging per update instead of going monthly? There's this monthly subscription fatigue. I feel like a no brainer offer could be like per update. What do you think?
Yeah, I love it. Yeah. And better expansion revenue too, because with the tier system, it's hard to get people to move up from the different tiers. You can, I mean, it's not possible, but there's friction there. You have to lock out a feature or lock out a number of seats. The person has to click a button. They have to then, you know,
Decide on the next plan and I don't know if I really need it or should I just wait till next month. But if you just do it where, you know, it's the first 10 updates are free or five updates are free and then $1 each additional update per month, then that's actually probably better.
And have you seen anyone doing this?
No, I haven't looked like super extensively, but I haven't seen it.
feel like you would know yeah i kind of yeah i feel like i would have come across it because i've had this idea since i started the exploding topics blog got big you know with you know we got like 650 000 visitors a month and i'm thinking how and we're hiring all these people to update i'm just like how can we automate this so i have my radar set to find this and i haven't seen anything out there for this brian this is what i'm talking about this is such a good idea
Yeah, this is a take my money situation. And the best part about it is that it's a no-brainer offer for the right customer. If you reach out to a smaller blog and you're doing $49 a month, you're going to be in a world of pain with this product. But if you go to the bigger publishers that have at least – and it's easy to find. You're literally –
Your leads are sites that have more than X number of pages on the site. And assuming those are, that's blog content. And you just cold outreach and say, I noticed, and I noticed you have these posts that are out of date. We just built something that can update them. Or if you want to go crazy here, you know, here's the updated versions that are software created for you.
You know, let me know if this is something you'd like to automate.
Don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free. These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into one simple database. Compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast.
But the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The Idea Bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash flowing business is waiting for you. I like it. I like it. So dude, this is just, I like it. There's nothing more to say. Yeah. I have literally nothing more to say.
Do you want my next idea, I guess? That's the transition. Yes, I would like. Okay. As a host, I thought you would just like ask, but no, I'll just do it. I'll host this one.
I'm going to make it weird. I'm just going to try to make it as weird as possible.
All right. Great. So my second one is definitely not an indie hacker business. This would require some cash. So I don't know if that's against the rules, Greg.
It depends how much cash.
I think you'll like this idea, though.
Hold on. Just tell me how much cash are we talking?
In the millions, probably.
So no?
Let me just say what it is.
Wait, wait, no. Millions as in one to two million?
Yes, yes. Okay, yes.
Proceed.
So do you know factor 75?
No, I do not.
They're like a meal service that there are these like pre-prepared meals that you buy. They sponsor a bunch of YouTube channels and you basically say, okay, I'm vegan or I'm keto and they deliver, let's say seven meals a week and you warm them up and they're ready to go and they deliver them to your door. These are huge right now, this meal service. But the problem is,
they're the meals are like not the highest quality they're about 10 bucks a pop 11 bucks a pop my idea and something else i would pay for is like an uber black of meal delivery where we're talking 50 to start and it's chef prepared meals super gourmet And it's essentially like what you get with a private chef without needing to have a private chef come to your house.
Because my buddy has a private chef and I go to his house and she makes these amazing meals. And I'm always like, oh, I should hire her. But then I'm like, I'm going to have someone come into my house and cook in my kitchen. And I'm playing Fortnite with my friends. It's weird. But why would I do that?
And I don't want to order a meal that's like 10 bucks, their margins, you know, how much does it cost them to make? They're using like the lowest quality ingredients possible. I'll pay 50 because it's what I would pay for a nice meal out. For a chef prepared meal, it's not made to order.
Like that's the thing about Factor 75, but you can tailor it to your dietary restrictions, gluten-free or what have you. So for me, that would be another take my money situation.
I had a hot dog the other day in Quebec and the hot dog, it was like, I don't know, 79 cents Canadian, which is like 40, I don't know, 45 cents US. And I'm like halfway through it and I'm like, wait, wait, wait a second. If I'm paying 48 cents for this, they're paying 10 to 15 to 20 cents for this. I probably shouldn't be putting this in my body.
And I feel like that's kind of, even these meal planning services, even if they say it's dope for you and I just, I don't buy it at 10 bucks.
Yeah, the same. That's what I'm saying. So I would pay 50 even if it was the same meal. I'm a sucker. I just don't want to think you're getting – I don't want to think I'm eating something that costs them a buck to make. I might as well get a Hungry Man meal for that. So why not get a nice – so it would be high-end and it would come at like – with Uber Eats –
It's like some guy gives it to you in a paper bag. Here you go. This would be presented almost like an Apple product. You open it up and it would be like beautifully presented. It would be this whole like culinary experience at home. Because even during COVID, I remember a lot of really nice Michelin star restaurants started doing Uber Eats because they were closed.
And they were figuring out ways to do this. So it's not totally unprecedented to pay this much for essentially a delivery meal. But you have to order from Uber Eats. This would replace those sort of pre-prepared meals that come and you put them in the fridge and then warm them up when you want. But they're going to be like 50 to 75 bucks a pop.
And it's going to be like lobster and free range chicken and grass fed beef and stuff like that.
And so you warm it up yourself, right? You put it in the oven?
Yeah, or the microwave.
Or microwave. But no, you wouldn't want a microwave.
No, no. Oh, for this thing? No, no, dude. Come on.
What are you? Come on. You're not a barbarian, Brian.
You're right. I am, I guess, because I thought about it. I must be.
So, I mean, I don't know if you need $1 to $2 million to start this idea. Yeah.
Yeah, maybe not. I just, usually it's more than you think. So I usually go up. So whatever number first pops into my head, I usually double it. So that's where I came up with that number. I thought it cost like 500K. So probably double that because of all the stuff, you know, that doesn't come to your, to your head.
I mean, to test this idea isn't going to take $1 to $2 million. Oh, no, no, no.
You could do it yourself. I mean, you could do it in your house. I invested in a company that went out of business that did that here in Lisbon, where I spend most of my time. They started at-home Uber Eats, basically, home-cooked Uber Eats.
And they partnered with different home cooked chefs and they would make a meal for you on demand at their house instead of at a restaurant and they would ship it to you. So I have some experience in this world and I know that the challenge with that business is the delivery on demand element where you need to make it now. Someone sends an order, you need to be like at the ready, ready to go.
And if you're not a restaurant or a ghost kitchen, it doesn't make sense. That's why I like these prepared meals because you can do them at a massive scale and just ship them out.
We have a thing on this pod. Do I sip this idea or do I spit this idea? I don't like it. Sip as I like. I sip the test of it, but I don't know at scale if I love this idea. Operating this in 50 cities to me seems like a mess. But I do think that maybe this is just a business where it's in one or two cities and it's not crazy to do a few million bucks per city, is it?
No. If you just – New York, San Francisco, Austin, a couple of those tech cities where people have more money than cents like me who will just pay $50 for a meal that someone made that's – you're picturing them in a white – like with white gloves. Yeah, suckers. The sucker market really. Yeah. That they'll pay for it because I'm at the point where I like cooking.
But I'm a little bit like I don't want to have to cook every night. And the challenge is Uber Eats is like a mixed bag. I don't really enjoy the whole experience of like ordering, waiting for it. So these meals sound like a great thing. But again, 10 bucks, it's not as bad as a hot dog, but it's the same idea.
Don't look at me like that, Brian. I saw you look down on me.
I'm not judging.
No, you are judging. I see you.
If it was like a dollar, man, come on. But anyway, the idea is that the reason that I like it is that in most markets, there's an option for a higher tier, whether it's cars, software, gyms. There's usually a market for this higher end version of that thing, but I haven't seen it in this space yet.
Yeah. I also, if I was doing this, I think the trend around clean eating, I'm sure you're seeing a lot of that. Everything's clean. People are just using the word clean. It's like clean is the new healthy. In the 80s and 90s, people used to say, oh, that's healthy. Now people say, oh, that's clean. So I think if you ride on that trend, like clean meals, I think that could be really interesting.
And I also think
handwritten notes or just stories you know people especially suckers suckers love stories they do they can't get enough of them but you're right i can imagine opening it and you get a little note from the chef like i hope you enjoy it doesn't have to be for every meal because you're sending these in bulk right like a week or 7 10 20 30 meals at a time so one note from the chef that says hey uh i hope you enjoyed these meals we made for you this week
Greg, you know Chef Greg. I think that would go a long way, forgetting those suckers to share it on social media.
Have you ever seen Lost in Translation, the movie?
A great movie.
Great movie. Incredible movie. Highly recommend. So that movie, they're in the Park Hyatt in Tokyo. So I was there recently, and I'm having breakfast. And as I'm sitting down for my first breakfast, one of my first breakfasts in Japan... Uh, the chef comes over and he puts down a plate of, uh, Madeline cookies. Um, these like French cookies that he talks about that his mom used to make.
And now he makes them and he comes from Paris and the whole story. And I'm like melting. I'm quite literally melting. Uh, and, and then I pick up one of the cookies and of course it's like perfectly hot temperature. And he was like, that's the way my mom used to like get that story, like productizing that in this. There you go. You know, huge margin in that.
Yeah, for sure, man. Yeah, that company that I invested here was called Mama Food. They did that. And it definitely helped add that element of personal touch. But it's just logistically was difficult. But yeah, they did that. They would have in your, like when you ordered from, instead of going by restaurant, you go by chef. So you go for like chef number one. Oh, this lady, she's from Bangladesh.
And this is her meal she made back in the day or her mom made for her. So it had that little bit of story element to it.
You have another idea?
Yeah, yeah. So the other idea I have, I don't know if you'll like this one. But how many ideas do you have? You said come with some half-baked ideas, two to three. I think I have to check my notes. I have my notes written down. I wrote a bunch down.
So the other one I have is based on a lot of trend data we're seeing, we're seeing a bunch of trends in the ADHD space, especially when it comes to products. So more and more people are getting diagnosed and self-diagnosing themselves with ADHD. And there's a lot of products around it now.
Like for example, some trends that we're seeing in that space include ADHD timers, ADHD watches, ADHD chairs, ADHD coaches, ADHD apps, And this is basically a booming market that people aren't really talking about that much. So for me, the opportunity isn't necessarily in these individual SKUs, these individual products, it's in no one's creating the brand for ADHD.
So anyone that creates that community, that brand around ADHD, Then you can – the world is your oyster when it comes to selling these products. You can sell your own. You can sell affiliate products. You can be – you can promote other people's stuff. But I haven't seen that out there. My wife recently got diagnosed with ADHD and it's –
It's interesting because a lot of people who are like influencers in this space are saying you can use it as a superpower. Actually, it can be an advantage for you. And I feel like the first brand that comes out and positions ADHD as that is like we help you take this thing that could be looked at as a disadvantage and it's actually something you can use to your advantage. We'll show you how.
And we have a community of people that will help you do it.
Here's how I would name a product like that. So... I get migraines and I used to get embarrassed about getting migraines because like I'd be doing something and then all of a sudden like my vision would get blurry and it really sucked. And I would get this migraine. And then I went to see a neurologist and he told me that. This is when I was young.
He was like, you know, he started off the conversation by saying, you know, you know who else had migraines? And I was like, no, who? He was like Julius Caesar. And Julius Caesar did a lot of big things. Granted, I think he probably killed a lot of people because he was like a general and stuff like that.
But I mean, he was running Rome, you know, like he was able to live a successful life, whatever that meant at that time. I think that with ADHD, how do you find someone like that? So, okay. So if I was creating a migraine brand, I would call it Caesars or Julius. For ADHD, who is someone like that that people look up to and then just call it that?
Yeah, that's a good idea. That's a good way to do it. That's a good brand. The person would have to be someone that's not a likeness that's copyrighted or trademarked. So it has to be from back in the day, like that.
Yeah, exactly. Okay, so I buy the thesis, but what's not clear to me is what the actual product is.
But that's the beauty of it. You build the audience, the world is your oyster, as you know. You can worry about the product later. It can be a suite of products. It can start with an app and then be fidget toys and then be a chair. Once you have the audience, the product's the easiest thing to do. I mean, even if you don't want to create your own, just promote other people's ADHD apps. Yeah.
But the point is, everyone's trying to go, they go right for the product. They're going, okay, I want to make an ADHD chair. They're forgetting the most important part and the opportunity in this space is to create the brand. So when you think of, I need help with ADHD, I want to do something about it. I go to Julius and that's the brand that's associated with this growing, huge market.
And you don't see very often a huge growing market without a go-to brand. And that's what we're seeing.
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So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee.
Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. Who else, like who do you look up to in terms of other brands that have done something similar that they're just amazing at building audience and building brand?
Well, in meditation, like for example, I don't know if you know Dan Harris from 10%. He built a huge meditation brand where they were – meditation was seen as like a woo-woo thing that you did in your garden cross-legged and he was a newscaster who had panic attacks and he used –
he wrote a book called 10% happier about his journey from being a skeptic about meditation to, uh, someone that practiced it every day. And then he created an app around that and they have a whole community and a brand. So he was able to take that and turn that into a brand for a specific niche within meditation. That is this like skeptical group.
So that's one that comes to mind as built completely from scratch in a growing space. Um, How about you? Do you have any, Greg, that you can think of?
The one that comes top of mind is a friend of mine and friend of the pod. Her name is Natalie Ellis. It started off as basically a meme page called Girl Boss, I think it was called. And she was sharing memes and quotes and stories around female entrepreneurship, women-led businesses. And it grew to 6.4 or something million followers on Instagram.
And once she had that, she was like, okay, what are the things that I could sell? Templates, a membership, events. Now she has one of the top podcasts, one of the top business podcasts. So she went from a meme page to a millionaire basically quite quickly. And it started with the brand.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, some businesses start with a product and they do well that way. There's no right or wrong way. Yes, there is. Okay, well, what's the right way, I guess?
I mean, my take is, I mean, I was joking a little bit, but my take is it's way easier to sign up with an Instagram account than it is to build a D2C product and figure out logistics and manufacturing and all that sort of thing. So I think that if you're creating a minimal viable product, I always think about it as like the minimal viable product is the social account.
Yeah, for sure. I'm with you 100%, especially because in this particular area, The crowded area is the product area. So if you were to create another ADHD chair, you're one of like 100 of those. And they can get knocked off really easily on Amazon. If you're a brand, then you don't need to worry about knockoffs because you'll say, we have the best ADHD chair or we have the best ADHD planner.
And next thing you know, people are buying it.
I like it. You want to give us one last Brian idea?
I need to check my notes on that. Oh yeah, this is another, I think you might sip this one as the kids say, Greg. So this is another, back to B2B, a content repurposing service. So this is another scratch my own itch thing. So
If you work in content marketing and SEO for bigger brands, they always, even smaller brands, they have content that's just sitting around collecting dust that was published once. It's an email newsletter. It's a video. It was a webinar. It's an article. It's a tweet. And they never repurpose that content.
And for me, that's the greatest opportunity with content marketing right now is repurposing rather than creating original stuff from scratch because it's cheaper and it has a proven track record already. So in my case, for example, with Exploring Topics, we have... all this blog content, and we're starting to repurpose it into videos on a YouTube channel that we started.
So it's so much easier to create those videos because we already have the building blocks of the article. We don't have to think and say, oh, what should we make a video about? Oh, what should we start with? We go, okay, here are the biggest marketing trends. We have a blog post about marketing trends that was updated last week. Let's turn that into a video.
Or the reverse, let's take the video and turn it into a bunch of shorts and an article and an email newsletter and a webinar or whatever. So for me, that's another take my money if someone emailed me and said, hey, you have all this content, let's get some more value out of it.
Yeah, so Megasip, you know me too well. Oh, nice. I think, yeah. What I'm seeing is there's a bunch of AI tools that are promising that. It's like, give us your content and we'll spit out other formats of it. And I just don't think that the AI tools are probably 100% there yet. So I do think that, oh, so that's one end of the spectrum.
On the other end of the spectrum is humans creating new content, which is like, well, I don't want new content. I've got all this great stuff. So I agree. I think that there's something in between that is a big opportunity. And I think the way to sell it is you do a cold reach out and you're like, hey, you wrote this post in 2005. I've turned it into this. Do you like it? Yes.
And then you have to prove yourself on the cold DM basically.
Yeah. But I think, like you said, it's kind of an easy sell. Again, it's kind of like the updating idea in the sense there's a small market that will 100% get it. And most people won't. And that's fine. Because the market that will get it is huge. And they have money. And they're willing. And you're basically saying...
know if you're selling a dollar for a dime basically you're saying you have all this content you give me this money as a service and then we'll just get you more roi from that content you felt obviously you felt good enough to create it once so why not just distribute it eight times in eight different formats and we'll do that for you so for me it's an easy sell easy everything the hard part is the delivery like you said like you said greg where
It's not something I can do because it does require some ingenuity in terms of what's the best way to turn this video into a blog post, to turn this, you know, blog post into a video. However, whichever direction you're going in, because what a lot of people do is they'll say, oh, I want to. get more out of my videos. So I'll get a transcript of the video and I'll publish it as a blog post.
They never do well because you need someone to turn that into, you can take that content and turn it into a blog post, but you need to filter it through the lens of like writing it as if it was a blog post for the first time. But even that is so much faster than writing from scratch. So for me, that's another idea that I would happily be shelling out money for.
How big is this idea? How big could this get?
Um, I would say at max, like if you create a huge agency out of it, like eight figures, like 10 million.
Cool. All right. There you have it. Those are my ideas. Those are really good ideas.
Oh, thanks, man. I spent some time on it. I really want, I wanted to come prepared.
I appreciate it. It shows. Thank you for inviting us into your home, uh, on your couch. It's, it's, it's, it's very kind of you.
Yeah. Hey, you're welcome. Anytime, Greg.
Where could people get to know you better?
The best place is probably on X, Brian E. Dean. Cool.
Well, we'll find you there. And come back anytime, please. Will do. Thanks for having me. All right. Don't eat any hot dogs, okay?
Okay. See you later. Later.