Join us for an engaging conversation with Cody Schneider, Co-Founder and CEO of Swell AI, as we explore a wide range of startup ideas and business opportunities1) Canva Agency • Create tutorials on how to use Canva• Build an audience through YouTube• Offer design services to viewers• Hire offshore talent for execution• Monetize through ads, affiliate links, and services• Potential: $80K/month with 80% margins 💰2) AI-Generated Type Beats • Use AI to create thousands of "type beats"• Upload to YouTube with SEO-optimized titles• Monetize through streaming, licensing, and beat sales• Top producers making $60K/month• Distribution strategy: YouTube + beat marketplaces3) Digital Influencers for DTC Brands • Create AI-generated influencers owned by brands• Craft narratives and drama for engagement• Cheaper and more controllable than human influencers• Becomes a digital asset on balance sheets• Use tools like Midjourney, DALL-E 2, Stable Diffusion4) AI Email HTML Generator • Solve the pain of writing email HTML• Create an AI-powered tool with visual preview• Target keywords like "email HTML generator"• Distribution: AI directories, Google Ads, content marketing• Potential: $20K MRR, sellable for $1M+5) Newsletter Service for Short-Form Creators • Help creators monetize through newsletters• Creator records 30-min video, you create newsletter• Build targeted B2B email lists• Monetize through ads and sponsorships• Potential: $20K/month per newsletterWant 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 CODY ON SOCIALCody’s startup: https://www.swellai.com/X/Twitter: https://tinyurl.com/5fjdn8d7LinkedIn: https://tinyurl.com/28e89f5rEpisode Timestamps:0:00 Intro01:44 Startup Idea 1: Canva Agency 10:53 Startup Idea 2: AI-Generated Type Beats 19:37 Startup Idea 3: Digital Influencers for DTC Brands33:44 Startup Idea 4: AI Email HTML Generator 37:31 Startup Idea 5: Newsletter Service for Short-Form Creators
What is the promise that you are going to give our listeners by listening to this full episode?
Okay, the promise I'm going to make is that wherever you are in your career, you're going to come out of this with like some business idea that you can implement. So if you've done like, you know, you're just starting or you're, you know, started tons of companies, you're going to get something out of this. And this is just data that I've seen and stuff from the front lines that I'm going to share.
So.
We're just going to get right into it. You look like, why do you dress up like The Rock?
What are you talking about? This is how I normally dress.
Why do you dress the way you dress?
What are you talking about? This is how I normally dress. It's totally a meme. Wait, I want to tell you what you look like.
You look like if Elizabeth Holmes got in a fight with The Rock, that's you.
Okay, cool. That crossover. I would love to see Elizabeth Holmes in WWE. That would be amazing. What would her name be?
Bloodlust. Elizabeth no homies. No homies. Okay, Cody, we don't have that much time. And you know how the YouTube and podcast game works.
Yeah, we'll get right into it, baby. Let's jump into it. So first one is how to Canva YouTube videos. But this is just a lead gen funnel to an agency. And you hire offshore talent that are just really good at Canva. And it's like unlimited design on Canva. So...
was uh talking i got intro to this person uh that uh was like hey i'm trying to start my first company she'd worked at it uh as a basically ran ops for a big creator that you would know the name of and was like i'm trying to go do my own thing uh and so long story short i was like what do you know like this is always the question i start whenever i'm kind of talking to these people and they're like oh well she's like i'm really good at canva right and so i'm like all right well let's just go see if there's
like any search volume related to tutorials of course there is it's like how to do xyz how to make basically xyz on canva right like tens of thousands of these searches i'm like literally you could just start a youtube channel and every day you film a video that shows somebody how to do like you know one of these keywords and what this turns into is it's basically going to be top of funnel for an agency right
And so she's like, yeah, she's from South Korea originally, immigrated to the US. She's like, I have contacts all throughout Southeast Asia and just all over Asia that I can basically tap into. I was like, this is a perfect business model for you. Go do this. And I think that this idea is something for like, I had a conversation with these young founders a couple of days ago as well.
They were, again, another intro that I was taking for a friend. And for them, they had done all these physical businesses. They're like, hey, how do I get into digital? This is such an easy way to get into digital.
Like we've talked about a similar idea previously on the show where it's just Google ads for X, Y, Z. You just like literally show people how to set up Google ads for every type of business imaginable. This is that same concept where it's like, hey, I do these YouTube videos that are long format.
And, you know, say they're 20 minutes long and it shows this like step by step tutorial on how to do this thing. People are going to watch that and they're going to be like, I don't have time to do this. Can I just hire you? It's just a natural inbound. And you've already developed this deep relationship with those people.
So that YouTube channel also turns into a revenue generating activity for your business. You can make ad revenue off of that. And simultaneously, you just like build a newsletter from this as well. So you get that top of funnel that drips down into the newsletter. Every time that a new video that you drop goes live, you email that newsletter and then you sell ads to that newsletter.
So there's like three ways to monetize this thing. So anyways, and I think that can be done in different phases too, right? Like it could be just you're just the creator and like you're also servicing some clients. Or that can be leveled up into, okay, now we manage, you know, a hundred different clients and I have a team of people that are managing each of them individually.
And then I have actual like ICs that are doing the work. So there's like layers to this that you could go. And I mean, this could be a million dollar company. If you just, for the next six months, if you just published a video a day on how to do XYZ on Canva, like you will have an agency that is making, you know, an 80% margin and doing 80 grand a month.
Okay, few reactions to that. One is another way you can monetize is affiliate. So not many people know this, but SaaS products will give you anywhere between like 10 and 50% of monthly revenue, like recurring. Totally. So like, hello.
Do that all day long. And then just include them in your workflows. It's a natural progression. And then in the description, you're like, yo, here's my link below. They click that. It turns into a recurring revenue stream. This is like, again, massive, huge opportunity here. If you look at anybody in the print-on-demand space, they're doing this, and I know them personally.
They are printing money doing this, like easily doing 500K a year between courses, doing affiliate, and then just the YouTube ad revenue. They make more money, though, off of the affiliate than they do off of the YouTube ad revenue and off of the courses that they sell. That's their biggest piece of the pie when you look at their actual revenue generation.
And someone listening to this is going to be like, oh, but affiliate is so like spammy or whatever. Adobe is literally like a 200 plus billion dollar company. And they recently just changed their, like we think of them as this
you know beautiful ad campaigns product-led growth but it might surprise you that they literally have one of the most killer affiliate programs in the game it surprised me they were originally short form creators like they are spamming short form creators with money right now like everybody i know that's in that space they're telling me this they're like you know they're trying to do brand deals and lock me in and not be able to like work with any competitors basically like non-competes
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. Exactly. Their original, I think, deal was they'd give you 85% of the cut. They just increased it to, I think, 100%.
They're literally increasing it. So obviously their numbers are working. Yeah.
Also, I know Canva has an affiliate program. I don't know what their percentages are. I'll try to pull it up while we're doing it live. But the other piece of this, Greg, that I think could even be taken further is like you're going to find limitations within Canva and you're going to be like, oh, well, I'll just go build this Canva app that solves this problem.
And you immediately have an audience and also a newsletter that you can like get this out to, right? And so there's this natural progression of like creator down, you know, creator agency software, right? That, that you can go through. And again, this is, it's, we're just doing the same strategies. Like these are, this is a repeatable thing that you can do in any of these spaces.
Um, but I, I think that this can be taken like a great, great example is we identified this right as, as captions within Canva are terrible. So you go make a captioning software for videos like Canva is turning into one of the big, biggest video, uh, like post-production tools that use just globally and their captions just don't exist.
Like you're still having to copy in like an SRT and then like, you know, actually do the captioning manually. And so if you can build out something that, you know, taps in the whisper, pulls us back. Also, if you want to build this, reach out to me and like, we, I will partner with you on this. And I'll do all the distribution. And you literally, all you have to do is hit an API from SwellAI.com.
And like, that will be how you get the transcription. Like we will, you just have to build this app and we'll do a partnership. So anyways, I'm going to, I'm going to show that right now.
That's not even a show, you know, come for the ideas, stay for the partnership opportunity.
Please, please, please. I want you, I want you to inbound me that you want to build this. So reach out.
So, On the video, the recording of videos, you're like, okay, you can record 20-minute videos, teach them how to do it. By the end of the video, they're going to be like, I don't want to do this myself. Here's what I'm seeing is working. Go and create a two-hour video. Totally. Make it super long.
Video sales letters are back, baby. It's gone full circle. Russell Brunson has been here the whole time. And we're just doing the same thing over and over again. The earth is a flat circle, I swear to God. But if you look at like Iman Ghazi, right? He just printed on his last course, from my understanding. Again, just back channeling people that are in that space.
It is literally sold through like, I think it's an hour and a half long video of him talking through this whole, like, here's how to start an online agency, right? And then it sells you into this like 5K online agency course. And that whole entire thing, it's just a VSL. Like that's a traditional VSL that you would use in like spammy affiliate marketing back in, you know,
the early 2000s with ClickFunnels. So yeah, anyways, I didn't mean to cut you off, but I think you're so right on this. I'm just like this, like the long form is winning right now. That's kind of unfiltered, kind of raw, et cetera.
Exactly. Cool. What else you got? Idea number two. Next one. Do you know what type eats are? I don't.
Okay, so type beats are basically a subset of the hip hop in like rap space. So somebody would go search, they'd be like Drake type beat. I don't think anybody would ever search that now, but they would look like Kendrick type beat, right?
And so basically it's just like they're trying to, people are looking or anybody that's like trying to rap is trying to basically find beats that sound like similar to these styles of artists, right? Thousands of keyword search volume in this space. The only reason I know about this is at one point during my life, I was like, I'm going to become a producer.
And like, you know, when I'm like 20, right? And so I was making like trap type beats, basically. So you can make a ton of money licensing these beats out and also selling these beats, right? But here's the kicker where I think there's a huge opportunity is these AI models for like beat production and like kind of like making the sounds that are then layered together
are easier than ever to create so i think you could go and you could make you know i'm just traditionally like a producer they go they sit down maybe over a day they make 10 type beats right that are around this this specific uh like we'll say it got kendrick type beat you could go and make a thousand kendrick type beats with these tools and you build a marketplace out to basically sell these so the whole distribution strategy and how people do this is they are
they basically register those type beats right and then they post them to youtube and when people search you know whatever kendrick type beat they again get serve those up but they make ad revenue and streaming revenue off of somebody listening to that type beat then within the description they link back to the company and then you can either license or buy that that that beat from from that producer
I think this is a huge opportunity to be disrupted. They're like traditionally, again, you know, go look up like a producing group called there's one called Internet Money. And it's these kids out of L.A. They did a lot of like, for example, like Juice WRLD's beats, etc. That's kind of their whole the scene that they're in. They're making unreal money doing this.
There's so many people that are trying to make music right now that are basically just using these producers and then rapping over the top of it with a mic they bought off Amazon. I think there's an opportunity to capitalize on this and disrupt what used to be hours of work. You can now generate pretty decent outputs with this AI stuff and it's just going to get better and better.
Is the biggest marketplace for this typebeats.com?
Literally, that's one of the biggest ones. I'm so out of the game now, I don't even know like where kind of everybody goes. But if you go to YouTube and you search just like any type beat, right? There's gonna be thousands of these videos that come up. You can also bid on these keywords, Greg. So you can bid to like have your YouTube video show up as an ad for that type beat.
So from my understanding, it's just a funnel game then, right? Of like, you built out this, you know, whatever beat, this Kendrick type beat. do the ad on YouTube. It sends them to the YouTube video and then they literally can listen to the type beat there. They go to the link, they purchase it. That's the whole funnel that you're optimizing for. It's that whole thing. So typebeat.com...
typebeats.com definitely check it out because whenever i see like an ugly website like this i'm like oh my god there's something here so that's one printing money printing and then there's uh beats beat stars the top beat market stars yeah that sounds right so they you know the ceo abe bachin says the best type beat producers are making 60 000 a month leases for type beats typically cost between 15 and 150 but they can add up quickly
YouTube usually ranks instrumentals higher in search results, which can lead to more views and potentially more sales and leases for the track.
Also, some of these producers, their YouTube channels have like, you know, 100,000 subs. And so every time that they do a drop, they're getting revenue, streaming revenue from like, this is actually a great business. If you want to do something in the creative space, like this is an unbelievable business for somebody because you're making money off of the actual streaming.
You're making money off of selling like the beats themselves. and off of the licensing. So it can be a recurring. So the licensing, how this is structured from like an economic standpoint is you typically like license the beat for like, for example, you buy it for a year for like $29. And all that means is that nobody else can use that beat during that period that you're licensing it.
You can also buy the rights to that beat, but it's a higher price, right? We'll say like, whatever, 295 instead of the 29. A lot of times what people do is they go and they'll buy like a batch of these beats, right? So they'll buy whatever, we'll say 10 of them. And then they go and they'll make tracks over all of them. And then one of those will actually go live into the public, right?
But it's just a numbers game anymore in the music industry, especially when it comes to like hip hop or stuff that's like less writing is occurring. It's more just like, you know...
ad lib you know it's happening in real time as they're as they're doing the recording like there's great videos talking about this with how the this industry has evolved into punching in and punching out right you basically are just punching in and like you do like you know one verse and then you know it'll be like a couplet or whatever and then it stops you go back and then you like in pro tools you're just doing this over and over again right and so that's how your whole track is basically being produced it's basically you punching in for every section
They're not writing anything down. It's funny, because when you talk to old heads in this space, they're like, this isn't even music. This is garbage, blah, blah, blah. But then what's interesting is actually that this all originated from Jay-Z. So he was notorious for not writing any of his stuff down. And so because of that, the industry heard about it.
And Lil Wayne quit writing, because he's like, if Jay-Z doesn't write, I don't write. And so then this is like, you know, trickled all the way down now into anybody that's coming up is kind of doing the same tactic.
I tweeted right before this about real estate. And I feel like this is kind of like digital real estate. I tweeted that, you know, half, nearly half of real estate investors, 42% have lost $200,000 or more on a single investment with 45% admitting a bad investment. That has almost ruined them financially. What are you doing? Just make beats. No mortgages.
Straight up. It's crazy. I don't know what's going to happen in commercial. Everybody I'm talking to is just freaking out. The things that I hear that people are buying, like my friend who's in this space...
is he's like yo everybody's trying to get their hands off of uh on uh strip malls that's like what they're obsessed with right now if you're in commercial it's like this mixed use space and any type of business can go in there and it's like places that people would go to right whether it's like health care or you know some other random or food or whatever that goes into those rather than these like massive structures so it's gonna be it's gonna be wild over the next like four years
Yeah, but I look at that and I'm kind of like, why would I invest in real estate? And I know people in the comment section are going to be like, dude, you're missing out. What do you do in real estate is the best.
They always go tax incentives. I feel like the biggest is like, oh, well, there's all these tax incentives. And I'm like, but are there really? Personally, I'm like, I don't know. This just feels like a headache. I'm over here and we can push some pixels around and make way more money. And then I just buy a digital asset, SMP, and I don't have to think about it. And it just goes up 9%.
I don't have tenant management. I don't have anything. And so I think if, I don't know. there's kind of, I feel like two camps. Like I'm, I'm, I'm visiting a family right now. And, uh, our, we have some friends that are up here and like their families, like deep in the real estate game, like their world is so uninteresting to me, but my world is so uninteresting to them.
Like we have nothing to talk about. I'm like, ah, I'm just going to, I'm going to get drunk at this party. Let's be real. Like I'm going to about the delete eight beers and then talk to you about, you know, whatever sports and crypto. Yeah. But I don't know.
I think it's fascinating to me because it's I think that, you know, there's that great quote that real estate is where you meet the dumbest rich people. And I feel like that is kind of a truth. Like the it's it's it's a grind type business. And if you can just show up and be like very studious with it, like you can make money there, in my opinion. But there's also outliers and all this.
But I'm just saying on the looking at the bell curve of the average and I'm gonna get total heat in the comments for this. But whatever.
Two more digital ideas. What do you got?
Yeah, yeah. So random one for you. I think that D2C brands are going to start owning digital influencers. So let me take a step back. So this idea all came from, I think it was Zoe Grace Moretz, if I remember correctly. She was the face of Coach. And then something happened and she like Basically, she got in trouble and in public, like the tabloids dragged her through it.
But Coach had just signed this deal with her for like three years or whatever, right? For her to basically represent Coach like within all their advertisements. But now suddenly, like she is basically like, you know, bad goods, right? Like they can't really work with her. They probably still have to pay her. And so I had this epiphany like, oh, this is probably like, what is going to happen?
And this really all stemmed from like what was going on with like Lil Miquela. and all these other digital influencers that are out there. I think that brands are going to start owning influencers and they're going to create drama and gossip. And like, just like you see in with like real influencers to basically make conversation happen around their world and their ecosystem. Right.
So I'm imagining like, you're going to have, you know, somebody like, uh, like parade, right. Which is like a underwear company. Um, Like they're going to make all these influencers that are all these different body types. And again, they're just using like versions of stable diffusion and training on it. These people aren't real.
They don't exist, but they're going to grow these accounts and they're going to make them interact with each other and like do things in public or whatever. Right. And create this gossip and drama, which creates dialogue about the brand, which gets deeper buy into the brand for from these from their audiences. Right.
And I think that this is where this goes because it's going to be a way, it's going to be cheaper, number one. And then number two, it's going to be a way to, like, you're basically covering yourself. Instead of partnering with a celebrity, you're, like, there's no way that they can mess up and, like, ruin your brand by being affiliated with it.
And then also, I think that this turns into an asset. Like, just like you and I talk about, like, oh, you have a YouTube channel or you have, like, an email list. Like, you're going to be like, oh, yeah, we own these 20 influencers. Right. And a cumulative between all of them, they do X amount of impressions per month.
So that's like, you know, when you look at a balance sheet, that's going to be something that's included in there. I'm like, oh, this is a digital asset that we own. Right. Like this is some digital real estate that we own. And so I think it's going to start out first as agencies providing services like this to companies.
So, you know, the first version was like, oh, little Michaela, can we make her famous? Yes. Then they're like, okay, can we offer this as an agency to companies? Yes. And then what's going to go down further is then it's going to be like, this is going to be a team internally at these companies that are like basically building out these whole networks or these communities.
This is my kind of like thesis on this and where it goes. And I think that this is just an inevitability just based on it's going to be cost driven. Number one, it's like this is going to be so cheap to do this and be so effective from a reach standpoint that it's going to. Why would I do influencer marketing? I'm just going to go and I'm going to do this thing. So.
Yeah, it's also a convenience thing because finding the right influencer creator for your brand is really difficult. And they are literally human beings, meaning they change, their interests change. So...
But this person's always on brand. They always are the same. They always end up like doing the work that they promised. It's just going to create more consistency and the cost component and it being an asset that you own long term. Right. I think that all of those things are just going to it's just going to naturally cascade into this being a fact of reality for DTC companies.
So if you want to create one of these characters, how do you create one?
From my understanding, and I'm not deep in the generative AI space for video and photo, but from my understanding, you can just generate a person or you can license somebody's likeness and then make a person based off them. And then you're basically like training a stable diffusion model or training. What's the new model that just came out? It's absolutely insane. We've been playing with it.
I can't think of the name. It's flux. Yeah. Flux. Unbelievable. Crazy. I'm curious to see what happens there. If they get just like, I don't know who you would sue, but just get there.
ass absolutely handed to them but I think you would take one of those you basically would train it based off that person and then you would go and have them you know live out their life and their lifestyle and then craft this like narrative it's almost like this story that's being told through this individual like I'm imagining like
You know, you know, fantasy and like how there's all this lore that happens behind the scenes. And like that's actually what gets like like fan bases to be just so bought into that fandom is because there's all of this lore behind that.
This is just a version of that before brands like you're going to make all of this lore and all of this, you know, and people are going to be fine with it that it's fake. Right.
like they're fine with fantasy being fictional and but what it does is it creates this dialogue and you're going to see these communities like develop around this where it's like oh just like there's a lord of the rings like you know subreddit that discusses what did tolkien mean here or you know take that for any of these other fandoms it's you're gonna see the same thing happen but around brands like just how they used like you know used to see this for like kanye or whatever it's gonna be i think that brands are gonna be able to stimulate this
And it's, again, it's super early days. I think it's just going to be like an owned media asset that's cheaper. But long-term, you're going to be able to like craft these interactions. And maybe they even like have their own YouTube channels, right? And it's like, hey, fam, blah, blah, blah. I did a new haul. Here's what I got from Parade, right?
Or whatever, you know, whatever that ends up looking like. I don't know, I think that there's something here that's going to evolve, that's just gonna be kind of in this realm of Uncanny Valley, but it's just so cheap to do it now, it makes sense.
Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google.
the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and ai that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses i wanted that i didn't want to have to rely on mark zuckerberg i didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses i wanted to rank high in google that's why i like seo and that's why i use boringmarketing.com and that's why i invested in it
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. Yeah, and they're 100% going to do YouTube videos. I mean, the first version of Lil Miquela... was just these pretty flat images. And then it became super realistic.
And then they started doing little short-form videos, GIFs type things. So of course, yeah, it makes total sense that as the technology catches up, you'll be able to make... Well, I mean, you can today. You make essentially a Facebook video. By the way, quick, hilarious thing. I went on Clode and I asked... to give me the steps of how I'd create an avatar like Lil Miquela.
And Claude says, I apologize, but I cannot recommend ways to generate AI avatars or deepfakes that impersonate real people without their consent, as it's illegal, basically.
And I was like, go to Perplexity and turn on their model. It will answer anything, and it's my favorite thing ever. You have all these companies, and they're putting on guardrails, and Perplexity's like, no, we're just going to answer anything that you ask us.
We're doing this live. Boom. So how do you do it? Mid-journey, Dally 2, Stable Diffusion, Focus, which is a free alternative. You craft your prompt. You do something like a photo realistic 3D render of a young woman, digital influencer style, similar to Lil Miquela with specific features, clothing style, background setting. You generate and refine that.
Use the face lock feature to maintain consistency across multiple generations. You use AI powering editing tools like Maki.ai and even Canva has one. And you can even use face swapping technology to maintain consistency across different poses. There you go.
That's super interesting. I know in the beginning they were just doing like a face swap, uh, for my understanding where it was like this, they would have like a model with a similar body type and then they would just like basically change the face. And that was like the, the quick way that they were doing it. Um, yeah, man, I, I,
Just imagining this, like you combine it with like, hey, Jen, or one of these where it makes the digital avatar version of you. And it's like an entirely, you know, fictional human. But imagine that for Instagram, for TikTok, for like long form YouTube videos, etc. And that person is a representation of a brand. They're a face to a brand.
And I mean, just to attach this to another idea, like why are iconic founders so impactful to brands? It's because people like have a hard time like thinking about a brand like in their minds, like in like, you know, think about Apple and you're like, OK, maybe the logo, maybe the letters, et cetera. But now think about Steve Jobs and like you can see his face in your mind. Right.
And so I think what this does is when you make these digital influencers is you put a face to a brand which becomes very powerful and like a high leverage point long term.
What do you say to people who will say, no, no, no, I will never fall in love with a digital brand. What do you say to those people? A digital avatar.
It's the same people that say I delete every cold email and say it's spam that I send out. I think you're not interacting with the world as the average person does. I think for a lot of people, I don't know, if you're in tech, you're living a way different life than the average person.
But if there's this gossip and it's entertainment, this company is basically going to be providing entertainment to you. I think that people are going to engage with that. They like entertainment. We're constantly entertained more than we have ever done before. It's honestly shocking to me these brands aren't doing this already. Why aren't there more creators just on salary?
It's like literally your job is to make a YouTube video a week about some topic that's related to us. or whatever, right? I mean, that's crazy to me. That isn't the thing. If you ask young people, what's their top job? Like, what do they want to do? They say YouTuber, right? Like Gen Z, that's literally their response. So why aren't we doing that?
Like, why aren't we hiring these kids at whatever the price is? 50K a month, it's their first job out of college. And it's like, yo, you're a YouTuber. Like, your measurement of success is how viral these videos go. Like, and you just, it treats it like it's like an in-house thing, so.
Anyway, these are the things that I've been thinking about in relationship to where I feel like all this technology is going.
I have two thoughts on that question. One is, when you watch the movie Avatar, do you not connect with the characters? If you watch Family Guy, do you not connect with Peter Griffith? Of course you do. Of course you do. So that's one. And number two... you're not going to know the difference. You're going to be scrolling Instagram. You're going to be on YouTube shorts.
You're going to be on TikTok. You're going to see a creator who has content that you're interested in. And then only on video four are you going to ask the question, wait, is this a real person? Dude, they sold OnlyFans for these people.
Have you seen, what's her name? Fit Atana, the one out of Barcelona. It's this like art collective.
um it's like a i fit a i t i n a or a yeah a i t a n a atana lopez okay she's fake and like it was this art collective that did this and they're like yo let's make this influencer make her famous and then they're like let's sell only fans and see what happens and so they do this i don't think they're nudes but it's like Them selling like, you know, whatever.
Her wearing like lingerie, I think is what they ended up doing. They sold like 20 grand of it in the first 24 hours. Like this is what is happening. I don't think people understand this. Like... I look at young men and I'm like, yo, I feel like I took the last chopper out of Nam.
I can't imagine being 22 right now and you're just living in a city and can't meet anybody because it's work from home remote. You suddenly have access to... There's this The other one that I heard is going viral. It's called Candy AI. And it's like one of those chat with girlfriends, but they'll also send you nudes. Like I can't even imagine what that is like right now.
Like if you're young and just like coming into like the dating world. So anyways, all this stuff is about to get so messed up. Again, I think that this is going to become a normal thing, right? Like it's going to become these people, like again, these influencers. And again, it always starts in art. It starts in these collectives, right? And they're like, oh, can we do this?
And then they figure it out. And then what naturally happens? Like it's going to trickle down into like direct-to-consumer. And that trickles down into B2B. And like this is an inevitability that will happen over time. time. Imagine like a corporation, right? Like a torture 500, like they would kill for this.
They're like, you're telling me we can have like the same spokesperson for the next 300 years. They never age. They're always on brand and there's never a scandal with them. And they're just like, we build this own media asset over time. Absolutely. They're going to do that. Like they're going to do that tomorrow. Right. But it's got to, it's got to get established enough.
And the idea is to get concrete enough for that to arrive there.
I need another idea. I just, I need it.
All right. Next one is like a pretty simple one, but so yeah. Have you ever written a email HTML?
Yeah.
Okay. It's mind numbing, right? This is like one of my first things I ever learned to program. Absolutely mind numbing. So it can just like AI is unbelievable at writing. Like unbelievable. And so I think there's an opportunity. There's tons of search volume around email, HTML generator. I think you just make an AI powered version of that.
And there's still people that are trying to program like these HTML emails, right? Like this is an absolutely huge thing. There's tons of offshore agencies that do this for you. But you can just go in and prompt back and forth. And you can probably do this in Cloud already in a hacky way.
But I think that the way that I would have it is just mimic what Cursor SO has done, but do it just for email templating. Where it's like, you have like a box where you're prompting. It's like writing the code out below that. And then over to the right, it's like visualizing what that email is going to look like. I think that was what the UI would be.
And then the distribution strategy would be like email templates for XYZ industry, like email templates for e-commerce, email templates for blah, blah, blah. And then you do like a listicle style blog post and then bid, do Google ads on keyword phrases related to like... email template or sorry, email HTML generator. So it's like really bottom of funnel, do a conversion event for the signup.
And like, I think that this is easily, you know, one of those businesses that you could build, get it to 20K MRR and then sell it for, you know, a million plus and be a solo dev, solo founder. And like, that's your whole strategy is just that. And then to build out the initial organic links, I would just go and like submit it to all of these AI directories.
And like, that's how you'd get to the initial domain authority.
from there then take that and like you know publish all these articles uh uh that are related to to like building email templates out but your thoughts i mean no-brainer idea proven pain point on you know it's pretty obvious on how to scale it doesn't take a lot of people and i always get this i you know i get this feedback from people there you know people are always like
Why don't you do share ideas that don't cost a million dollars to build? This doesn't cost much to build. How much do you think this would cost to build?
Oh man, I think that you could build this for three grand. Like you could go to my homies, they're called htmlburger.com. These dudes out of Bulgaria and tell them I sent you, they love this and be like, yo, I'm trying to build this tool. Like literally give them a wireframe, tell them the tech stack that you want. They'll come back to you with a quote and you could probably have this live.
And I'm guessing they could probably do it in three to four weeks and it would cost you three to five grand is what I would estimate. Just based off of random builds I've done in the past for them. I I mean, all this is, is like super simple UI with some API calls and then like a signup flow. Like that's pretty straightforward. And then Stripe connection. Like that's, that's all this is.
I wouldn't even make it free either. I would like, I would, I would, I would have no freemium. I would have it like be pay, pay to play. And then have a pro tier that you can, they can bring their own API key if they want. It's like 249 one time, one time payment. And they bring their own API key and do as much as they want.
I think with those things alone, and then, you know, probably could throw it up on Hacker News and that would go viral, I'm assuming. Get some friends to upvote it and like strategically post it so that it hits North. It goes like rides Europe into North America. And I think that you could get this thing probably to like 5K a month in the first, I bet in a week you can do it.
I know I said last idea, but I need one more idea. Just because you know why? Because there's people listening to this that are in the deep end that are here that they deserve the bonus idea.
I love it. So this one is more of an ops game, but I think anybody can do this. So we talk about this a lot just offline, but like short form creators don't actually make that much money, right? It's like a very, especially in B2B, it's just very hard to make like really substantial money in that space. I think there's an opportunity.
And we're testing this actually right now, but basically build out newsletters for them that are like for their target audience. So like imagine they do like design, right? Or like they talk about design and you go out and you build out this, you know, you find anybody that's interested in design. So interior designers, architects, etc. Get all their emails.
And then for the content, super straightforward. You just have that short form creator. You tell them, hey, you sit down, you record a video for 30 minutes of you just talking through whatever has happened in the last week that you found interesting. Like any insights, any data, et cetera. Record that, send it over to us. We turn it into a transcript. We turn it into an email newsletter.
We figure out your voice, all the vocabulary that you use and mimic that based off the transcript that you provided. Send that back to them. They okay, yes, no, they redline it. At that point, you have this like content that's unique, it's original. And then you send that out to this audience that's high value in the B2B space that they're in.
Then from there, I think that you could like, and again, this is what we're testing is just using beehive boosts as a way to, uh, get the initial revenue for this so that it self funds its own growth. And then from that, you then go and you sell ads.
But if you have enough of these, right, then you go and you, I mean, imagine you have whatever, 50 different newsletters that are all in these different spaces. You go and do an ad ads, you know, an ad buyer sell, uh, to, uh, somebody that's in those related industries. So I'd probably do one that's in a specific product category, focusing on anybody that works in a growth org.
So head of growth, head of customer experience, whatever that ends up being. But I think this is very symbiotic. I think the short-form creators are trying to figure out how do they do long-form and make more money. And creating unique, like just newsletter content on a repeated basis is extremely hard. I think for a lot of people, like just doing that, like, especially if it's a daily, right.
Or like, three times a week. That's a very hard thing to do. But if you ask most people, they can sit down and talk about a topic for 30 minutes, like no question, right? Like we just did it. Like this is a great source of original source material that you can then repurpose and turn into these newsletters. And then you just run it. You just have it be turnkey.
This thing's in the background growing for them. It's making money. A check shows up to them every month and they don't have to think about it. I think that's a huge business opportunity. And again, it's just an ops game. You could build this literally on top of Swell AI, right? Like the company that we own. So, yeah.
Size-wise, how big could this get?
Man, I don't know. I know with like 100K list, you can build those lists in about 12 months, right? To get them to 100,000 subs. Yeah. And if you're doing four a week, I bet you could probably get people to buy in. So it's like every send is like, I don't know, probably three to five grand, depending on the industry. So I think one of these could make probably 20 grand a month.
So you have a hundred of them, you know, whatever that ends up being, uh, what is that? 2 million a month or something like that. I mean, my math is probably way off on this. I'm not as deep in this game. You'd have to ask people that are more in the newsletter space. Um, I think that it's somewhere in that range probably though.
And then it's like, how do you aggregate all of these together and then do a media buy for a larger company where they're like, okay, we want to buy out ad slots across all of them for the next whatever, like two quarters, et cetera.
The other thing to note is the newsletter is an asset. So if you have 100,000 subs, especially B2B, at the worst case, it's worth, call it a dollar. At the best case, it's worth $10. If it's worth $10- That's a million dollar asset that you're sitting on. There's your real estate. If it's worth a dollar, then it's $100,000.
100%.
And think about that like as an exit for these creators, right? So it's like, okay, cool. Like over the next 12 months, we're going to do this work and we're going to sell this list at the end of that 12 months or whatever, million plus, or even if it's 500K. I mean, you're talking about two hours of work a month for the creator. Like that's all they have to do to make this happen.
And then you just do a rev share with them all the way through. So it's profitable. And then you have this exit that occurs. I mean, again, this is a great business. It's why we're experimenting in it and see if we can happen. Early data looks like you can do this. So if you're a short form creator that's in B2B, reach out. I want to work with you and learn about what you're trying to do.
But I think that, again, this is a huge business opportunity to your point because you can exit these things, right? And you can just walk away from them. A lot of the times, that's how it functions. It's like, cool, you've got this list. You already have trust with them. They just take it over. They just take over and you walk away and you don't have to think about it. There's no earn out.
It's just like buy and walk type of sale. They want you to walk away, dude. Totally. Exactly. That's their best case scenario. A hundred percent. I think you could do this probably. You want to know the shady version of this? Of course. Okay. Okay. So if you believe in HR for early stage companies, don't listen to this part.
So the kind of gray version of this would be you build this for like already a creator that exists and then like make the sending name from them and just use the content, the podcast content or whatever it is that they're putting out in public already and just grow this list and then get it to like 10,000 and be like, hey, we built this email newsletter out for you already.
Do you want to partner with us?
and then you basically just take that and you know grow it from there or you get it to a hundred thousand and then you sell it without them ever knowing and that is the shady gray version of this that you could a hundred percent do because this information is already public that you can scrape from so and full transparency we are doing this i really want to but we are not doing this okay all right well
That's perfect. That's a perfect way to end the pod. Cody, where can people learn more about Swell and follow you?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So I'm most active on Twitter. I will continue to call it that and LinkedIn. Those are kind of the two places. You can just reach out as well to Cody. Actually message me there when I get my email. It goes bananas. I need to make a public one.
um but uh one last thing too if you're an e-commerce company that is has like a ton of skews we just made this new company is called landingcat.com basically we do ai powered programmatic seo uh we build like thousands of collection pages we're seeing unbelievable results for our clients that we're working with uh and i want to work with you if that's uh if you fit that criteria so
We're just working with Shopify. WordPress should be live by the end of September. But yeah, reach out. We basically build these pages out at scale and then function as an SEO agency that's building all these collections.
And thank you for coming on, man. Thank you for coming on.
Thank you for having me, man. It gets me juiced, baby. I didn't eat today. I had three coffees so that I could be manic for Greg.
I will say, I will say this. You were the most viewed podcast on my YouTube channel.
Until the Reddit one, baby. You took it back.
I took it back. And my Reddit one now has like 130,000 views.
If you're still listening to this, that's why he didn't have me back. He's like this little fucker. He can't be top on my, he can't be the top three videos on the channel.
No, let's bring Cody back. Let's make this video. So if you liked Cody and you like the ideas, the best thing to do is tell us in the comment section. Cody comes in there here and there. And just like the YouTube video so you get more of this in your feed.
Cody. Also sub to Greg's newsletter. It's one of the best on the internet right now. If you want to learn about cash flowing businesses, I'm going to show that straight up all day long. I never show it. GregEisenberg.com. Check it out.
It's one of the best on the internet. You always say that because I just put your tweets in it all the time.
I mean, that's a part of it. I mean, you just got leverage over me, right? But in reality, though, I learned something from it every time. And again, I'm in this world, right? And if you're in the same world, you're trying to figure out how do I build cash flowing businesses. This is the place like his newsletter is the place that documents how to do that in real time.
I appreciate that, man. I appreciate that. And I've been following you for a while now and you're one of the real ones on the internet. There's only like a handful of people that are out there sharing the sauce. They share the sauce. I live to serve. You live to serve, and I love that about you.
It's community service, man. It's mandated by Idaho. My parole officer said I had to do it. But in reality, I'm built online. I'm a child of the internet. My whole career is entirely that. And so this, to me, is a way to basically give back to it. I mean, this stuff didn't exist when I was growing up. you know, 150 view videos on how to do Google ads. Right.
And like, that's what I was building my career off of some dudes, like, like with a potato for a mic and you can't even hear, you know, you can't hear what he's saying. And that's how we were like structuring campaigns. So if there's any, uh, for this, it's again, I think it adds the, to, to the community and educates that next generation. So it's, it's, it's, I love to do it. Love to serve.
I'll be back anytime you want me.
All right, man. I'll see you soon.
Peace. Later, G.