The Startup Ideas Podcast
Perplexity vs ChatGPT "Deep Research" For Startup Ideas Shocked Me
Wed, 19 Feb 2025
Get Greg’s Deep research research notes: https://www.gregisenberg.com/deep-research-ideasI compare in real-time ChatGPT's and Perplexity's deep research capabilities for developing startup ideas. Both platforms were prompted to generate AI agent business ideas with specific revenue targets ($1M Y1, $3M Y2, $5M Y3). The results showed that Perplexity provided faster, more concise responses, while ChatGPT offered more detailed, comprehensive analysis but took longer to generate responses.Key Points:• Comparison between ChatGPT Pro ($200/month) and Perplexity Deep Research (free/~$20/month) for startup ideation• Both platforms were tested with identical prompts for creating AI-based startup ideas• Comparison of response speed, depth, and quality between the two platforms• Practical demonstration of how to use AI tools for business planning and market researchTimestamps:00:00 - Intro01:33 - Defining the Startup Prompt02:29 - Initiating Research with ChatGPT05:05 - Initiating Research with Perplexity09:13 - Perplexity results (Legal Contract AI)15:44 - ChatGPT results (AI Sales Outreach Assistant)26:10 - Comparing Perplexity and ChatGPT Outputs27:55 - Follow-Up Prompts and Further Exploration31:55 - Perplexity's Follow-Up results34:43 - ChatGPT's Follow-Up results 37:07 - Where to get Greg’s Deep research research notes37:31 - Conclusion: Choosing Between Tools1) THE SETUP:• Testing ChatGPT Pro ($200/mo) vs Perplexity Deep Research ($20/mo)• Same prompt: Build a defensible AI agent startup• Target: $5M ARR in 3 years• MVP budget: $5K2) PERPLEXITY AI WINS ON SPEED • Completed research in ~2 mins• Analyzed 34+ sources• More concise, actionable insights• Free tier available!3) CHATGPT WINS ON DEPTH • Longer, more detailed analysis• Comprehensive playbooks• Better market context• More examples & case studies4) BEST STARTUP IDEAS GENERATED:Legal Contract AI (Perplexity):• $2.4B market opportunity• Auto-redline contracts• Defensible through learning• Clear path to $5.4M ARRAI Sales Assistant (ChatGPT):• Virtual SDR automation• Network effect moat• Product-led growth strategy• $100M+ potential5) MVP INSIGHTS:For $5K budget:• Use existing APIs (OpenAI/GPT-4)• Start with Chrome extension• Focus on single workflow• Manual fallback for quality• Self-serve freemium model6) KEY TAKEAWAYS:Both tools are INSANELY good• Perplexity = Fast, concise, free tier• ChatGPT = Deeper analysis, more context• Both provide actionable insights• Worth integrating into workflow7) PROTIP:For best results:• Be specific with constraints• Ask follow-up questions• Double-click on interesting areas• Cross-reference competitor insightsBottom line: These AI research tools are an unfair advantage for founders right now.Notable Quotes:"Distribution is the new moat" - Greg"This is an unfair advantage right now" - Greg regarding AI research toolsConclusion: Both platforms demonstrated valuable capabilities, with Perplexity offering speed and efficiency while ChatGPT provided more comprehensive analysis. The video suggests both tools can be effective for startup planning, with the choice depending on user preferences for depth versus speed.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: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/
Chapter 1: What are the differences between ChatGPT and Perplexity for startup research?
Okay, today we're going to do something that I've been meaning to do for a while. So I want to test the differences between OpenAI ChatGPT's deep research and Perplexity's deep research. I mean, the simplest way to think about it is ChatGPT or Perplexity, when you prompt it, it's going to give you a quick answer. But deep research, it's almost like a junior analyst, a McKinsey analyst,
that they would probably pay hundreds of thousand dollars a year to give you deep research into the question that you have. And today we're going to use it to actually build a business. So we're going to prompt it. We're going to give the same prompt to ChatGPT. This is a $200 a month pro plan. And Propaxity's deep research, I think that's a $20 a month. And we're going to see which is better.
And we're going to go through the startup ideas to actually see, hey, maybe there's actually a great startup idea that one of you can steal. We're going to get ChatGPT and Perplexity to give us the tactics of actually how to build this business. This is what we're going to prompt it. We're going to give it the same prompt to ChatGPT as to Perplexity.
Chapter 2: How do ChatGPT and Perplexity generate startup ideas?
So we're going to say, I want to create a startup. I want it to be an agent, say an AI agent, that focuses on a high-value niche. I want it to be defensible, not just a flash in the pan. I want you to create a zero-to-one playbook of how you'd launch it to get customers too. Give me five ideas with five playbooks on how to grow it.
I'm looking for $1 million AR, $3 million year one, $3 million year two, $5 million year three. So we're going to see if ChatGPT Pro or Perplexity could give us a $5 million AR business in three years with the exact tactics, how to grow. And we're going to be real with it. We're going to see, is this actually going to give us good particular advice?
So if you're going to do this, you've got to click the deep research button here. So it says, that sounds like an exciting venture to tailor the best ideas and playbooks for you. Could you clarify industries of interest? Sure, so we're going to say... Are there any specific industries? No, we are looking for the startup ideas with the highest likelihood of success. Two, would you rather...
Target enterprises, SMB, or individuals, professionals? The truth is, I don't really care if it works, it works. So open to B2B or B2C. And then we're going to say AI capabilities. Do you have a preference for AI applications, automation, data analysis? Not really. Again, we're looking for the highest probability of success. with a moat. Okay. Technical resources.
Do you have a technical team or plan to build one? Or do you prefer a low code, no code approach? And we can say, I prefer an approach that's going to cost $5,000 or less for an MVP. I'm not super technical. What else can we say?
We can say, I might want to just cash flow this business, but I want to potentially raise VC money too if I really think this could go beyond $100 million a year business. Go to market. Would you lean towards direct sales, partnerships, or viral self-serve growth? I think I lean towards viral self-serve growth, but I'm open to what you suggest. Boom.
Now we are going to wait until to see how long it's going to take. Usually it takes like eight minutes. So let's see how long. So it's starting research. So while it's doing that, we're actually going to head to your perplexity and give it the same prompt and see what happens. We're going to compare. We are going to compare all these together. So let's go open up perplexity.
Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders.
They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas.
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Chapter 3: What specific startup ideas did Perplexity generate?
Okay, so first things first is that perplexity is faster than chat GPT. You can see that chat GPT is about halfway done. Perplexity is done. So that's really cool. So let's go through the ideas. Let's go see. Funny enough, actually, one of the sources is me. One of the sources is I went through one of my YouTube videos
three $1 million AI startup ideas to build in 2025, links to it, and that's hilarious. That's actually, it's kind of ridiculous. But it's cool that it goes through YouTube, you can see, and it obviously downloads that transcript and goes through it. So let's go through these ideas and you be the judge. You tell me, are these good ideas? Are they bad ideas? Let's go see.
So number one, legal contract. This is on the perplexity deep research answer. Legal contract lifecycle automation agent. Problem space. Corporate legal teams waste 23% of their time manually reviewing boilerplate contracts with struggling employees. while struggling with version control errors that cost enterprises 2.4 billion annually compliance penalties.
Existing CLM solutions require extensive customization and fail to adapt to company-specific negotiation patterns. Okay, so an AI agent, here's a defensible solution that integrates, number one, integrates directly with email, SharePoint, and DocuSign via API. Two, learns organizational risk thresholds through historical contract analysis.
Chapter 4: How does Perplexity's Legal Contract AI agent work?
Three, auto-redlines third-party paper using firm-specific fallback positions. And four, maintains version lineage with blockchain-style audit trails. Now, By the way, I think this is actually cool, but for an MVP, Minimal Viable Product, do we need Lockshale Stein audit trails? Not really, but I guess we can further prompt perplexity to ask it, what would be the MVP for this?
In ChatGPT, we said it was going to be $5,000 or less, so... That's an interesting thing that if you are going to prompt perplexity, you might want to include some more constraints because you probably won't get that follow-up question. Why is it defensible?
develops institutional memory through continuous exposure to negotiation outcomes, becomes embedded in legal department workflows, average 14.3 logins per week per user. This is data. This is great. This is a great insight. This is something that if you're building a business, you want to know that. It's really helpful.
It requires retraining equivalent to six to nine months of human experience to replace it. And by the way, you can always click on one of these numbers to get to the source and go deeper. So here we have the growth playbook by perplexity. And let's go see if this is actually good. This, I will say, this agent, I mean, seems super valuable. I totally agree why it would be defensible.
So I like what I'm seeing. I like what I'm seeing from perplexity. So the growth playbook, phase one, niche validation, 90 days. Product, build a Chrome extension recording legal contract review sessions for permissions to train initial model. Go to market, offer free redline audits for 100 AMLA, 200 firms. I guess that's American law. Targeting mid-market companies, 50 to 500 million revenues.
So this actually idea, free redline audits is interesting. as a Chrome extension. I would never have thought of that. Again, I'm not a lawyer. I don't play to be on the internet. But just as a person who builds products... that a lot of people use. I will say that just looking at that, that makes a lot of sense to me.
Monetization, $2,500 a month subscription locked to specific document types and days first. Okay, that's it. Again, really interesting. Wouldn't have thought about locking a subscription to specific document types. So that's really cool. Phase two, workflow embedding, months four to nine. Integrate with legal ops platforms like Lexion and Entra.
Launch clause library builder using client's historical favorite language. Implement usage-based pricing at 25 cents per review clause. Really interesting, interesting business model. I like the phases, you know, phase one to phase two. It totally makes sense to me. I like what I'm seeing. Phase three, enterprise scaling. Months 10 to 12. Add SOC 2 type 2 compliance for regulated industries.
Develop custom connectors for ServiceNow and Salesforce CPQ. Upsell to $8,000 a month enterprise tier with custom playbooks. Financial roadmap. Okay, so let's see how they break this out. So in year one, you're going to get 40 clients at $2,500 MRR. That's 1.2 million ARR. Not crazy. 150 clients at 5,000 MRR plus 250K usage pay. Year two, you get 3.1 million.
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Chapter 5: What startup idea did ChatGPT generate and how does it differ?
If you're building an AI startup, building a unique data set of what works is going to be your moat. So really cool to see that in there. Over time, it develops superior personalization and lead scoring tuned to each customer's context, which is hard for competitors to replicate. Integration into CRMs and email systems further deepens the moat by embedding the AI in the sales team's workflow.
B2B sales teams are increasingly adopting such AI prospecting tools. 66% of sales reps say AI helps them better understand customers and personalized outreach. Underscoring demand for an agent like this. The agent can leverage massive contact databases. Okay, we get the idea. So how would they actually build this? What does ChatGPC say?
So focus on a narrow but high-value use case to keep it simple. For example, start with automating follow-up emails to warm leads. Okay, cool. I'm really happy it's saying this because this is an idea that I've heard before. It's actually become almost a meme on X. Of course, you're building an AI virtual SDR. But this...
idea of automating follow-up emails to warm leads using a templated but AI personalized approach. Now this is something that is unique. I really haven't seen anywhere and it's a cool idea. The MVP could be a web app or a Chrome extension where a salesperson inputs a list of prospects or connects their CRM And the AI generates and sends personalized emails on a schedule.
To build this cheaply, okay, now we're talking. They're talking our language. Use existing AI APIs, leverage a service like OpenAI GPT for, hilarious that like chat GPT is being like, use a service like chat GPT. Via API to generate outreach text given key inputs, prospect info, value prop. No expensive model training needed initially. No frills UI.
Create a simple interface using local tools or templates for the user to review, edit AI suggested messages, skip complex analytics at first. Single channel focus. Start with just email. Cheaper to implement before tackling LinkedIn or phone. True. Manual fallback. If AI is unsure, let it flag for human to handle, ensuring quality while gather data to improve prompts.
That's an important, it's important that it has that. And I'm happy that they put that in there. This MVP could be built by a freelance developer in a few weeks. The main cost, less than $5,000, would be a developer time and API calls. By using off-the-shelf AI and focusing on one workflow, you can launch quickly and start onboarding a few beta users to prove its value. Okay, overall, like,
helpful, you're definitely going to need to double click into this and prompt it deeper to really understand exactly what the playbook is. I mean, it asks for a playbook. Is this a playbook? You know, maybe. It's kind of like an outline to the playbook, but it's definitely some really good ideas on how to get started. Customer acquisition and growth.
Product-led viral adoption among sales teams and low-friction sign-ups. Let's see if this makes sense. A self-serve free tier, offer a limited free plan, 50 AI-generated emails per month. Individual sales reps or small startups can try out without approval. This gets foot-in-the-door companies. Viral lube via results.
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Chapter 6: What are the key takeaways from using AI tools for startup ideation?
But if you're just using ChatGPT regular or Perplexity regular, you might go through 50 or 100 prompts to get to how high definition and the clarity that this is. It gives you some ideas on how to optimize revenue, freemium upsell, annual deals, premium features, performance-based options. These are all good ideas. You're not really there yet, honestly.
It's good to think about what this could be, but if you're building an MVP zero to one, you don't necessarily need this, but it is good that they included it. The VC readiness and scaling to $100 million ARR. So I think I included that in the second prompt where I was like, this needs to be able to get to $100 million ARR. It's cool that it says that it's possible.
It's cool that this is like $100 million a year idea that it's like, yeah, it's possible. And it's cool that to get from $200 million ARR, you're probably going to need to raise VC. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty honest with it. So that's the ChatGPT deep research. Now, perplexity, and now if we can compare them, you can see perplexity is a lot smaller, right?
This is a lot more in depth, but this is really, like, there's no fluff with this, I gotta say. This is, you know, the question is, is ChatGPT Pro worth 10 times the price of perplexity? I'll let you decide, you know? It depends on how, you know, do you like in this, you're going to have to prompt a little bit more. This, you're going to one shot it more often.
ChatGPT, you're going to one shot it more often. So it depends on your style. But I, you know, I actually don't pay for perplexity on this account. So, yeah, you can see I don't have a pro on this account. So you can even use this for free. I think you can only use a few times maybe a month for free and then you have to pay $20 a month. But that's incredible.
It's incredible that... Let's see here. Let's just click. Yeah. Okay. So I'm not sure exactly how many free deep research you get. Probably not that many. But The good news is both of these are really, really good. These are insanely good, scary good.
And let's just do for fun, for idea number one, let's just say, I feel like I've seen this idea before on X. How can you take this idea and make it more non-obvious? See what happens. So it says, to make the AI startup idea more non-obvious and unique, we can find underserved niches, combine AI with another trend, let proprietary data introduce a new business model or enhance with a viral element.
Do you have any preferences for how we make it non-obvious? For example, should we explore a new niche? Let's say you're the pro. I pay you $200 a month for this. How about you decide on the idea that has the most legs? Let's see. Let's let ChatGPT do the work. And let's see what happens. I've actually never done a follow-up prompt to... to something to once it gives you the full answer.
So it's unfortunate that it takes so long. I wish it just was faster. That's what I like about perplexity. You can get in the zone. Let's do a follow-up question to this one. And let's say, aren't there a bunch of highly funded competitors In the AI legal space, I feel like I'm going to get smoked. How do we take this idea and make it more non-obvious?
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