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The Startup Ideas Podcast

Silicon Valley founder shares 3 of her best 150+ ideas

Wed, 24 Jul 2024

Description

Join us for an engaging conversation with Dani Grant, Co-Founder and CEO of Jam.Dev, as we explore a wide range of startup ideas and business opportunities1) K-pop style factories for unicorn startup hires•  Target: Specialized roles like first growth marketer or dev evangelist•  Idea: Train people specifically for these high-demand positions•  Monetization: Startups pay premium for ready-to-go talent•  Key insight: Flips coding bootcamp model on its head2) Bounty program for dev evangelism•  Pre-hire solution for startups•  Deliverables: Docs, tutorials, starter repos, videos•  Workers: Junior devs worldwide•  Edge over Fiverr: Higher quality bar, specialized reviews3) Let millennials invest in VC funds•  Create a shadow LP for public access to top VC funds•  Target: 25-year-olds wanting to invest $100 in A16Z’s fund•  Caveat: Likely won't work due to VC resistance•  Food for thought: What else do millennials want to invest in?4) "So Far Sounds" for X• Inspired by SoFar Sounds' successful model• Format: 3 short talks (comedy, science, etc.) in 60 mins• Key: High-quality, curated experiences• Insight: Events industry ripe for innovation5) Dani’s advice for startup founders• Choose an idea you'll love for 10-20 years• Ensure it's fascinating enough to discuss constantly• Have a rough idea of the "idea maze" ahead• Consider how the business type will shape your lifestyle• Bonus insight: "Moats are dead. Brand is the only moat."Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND DANI ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/thedanigrantLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danigrant/Links Mentioned: Dani’s startup ideas: https://www.notion.so/b598df2c46ac4969af1ac28553d82411?pvs=21Jam.Dev's pitch deck: deck.jam.devTo improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up toboringmarketing.comEpisode Timestamps: 0:00 Intro03:21 Startup Idea 1:  K-pop style factories for unicorn startup hires13:15 Startup Idea 2: Bounty program for dev evangelism16:36 Startup Idea 3: Let millennials invest in VC funds19:49 Startup Idea 4: "So Far Sounds" for X25:11 Dani’s advice for startup founders

Audio
Transcription

0.189 - 19.256 Dani Grant

Moats are dead and brand is the only moat. You know, Peter Thiel says like the best way to compete is to not compete. And I think that brand is the best way you can do that. Where if you occupy enough mental space for a category, no one is searching for an alternative. Like basically the strategy for startups right now is to be Coca-Cola. It's like, why do you drink Coca-Cola?

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19.336 - 25.798 Dani Grant

Not because of any like, like lock-in or anything. It's because it's Coca-Cola. I think that brand is the best moat out there this year.

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47.87 - 69.476 Greg Eisenberg

Danny Grant, I am so excited to have you here. I woke up today, I was like, really excited to have you here because I know you're an idea machine. And then you tweet out something that I just, I was so excited. So you tweet out, before Jam, which is your venture-backed startup, I think you've raised $9 or $10 million, there were 141 startup ideas we didn't build.

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72.423 - 77.849 Greg Eisenberg

about to share them for the first time on Greg Eisenberg's podcast. And now I'm just salivating.

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78.931 - 98.225 Dani Grant

So my co-founder and I met when we were product managers at Cloudflare and we loved working together so much so that After I left Cloudflare, we did like a hackathon weekend trip to Colorado. We got like a cabin in the woods and we like hacked on startup ideas. And we just knew we were going to start something together. We just didn't know what.

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98.865 - 117.825 Dani Grant

And so what does any enterprising, you know, mid-20s person do when they know they're going to start something is they create a notion of ideas. And we filled it with all sorts of ideas we had over the course of like a couple weeks. And there are now 141 ideas in this notion. And we got super lucky because here's what happened.

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118.365 - 138.575 Dani Grant

We had like a call scheduled to go through our notion and pick what startup to start. And before we could even open this doc, we just started gossiping about our old team and talking about this crazy like PM engineer process. that was happening right now in the team. It was like, it was early COVID.

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138.975 - 149.707 Dani Grant

No one was set up for remote and engineers were like asked to be like updating like spreadsheets and JIRAs. It was insanity. And we're like, wait, should we just solve a problem that we have faced ourselves instead of any of these ideas?

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150.216 - 161.821 Dani Grant

And I've got to tell you, I am so happy we did because the thing that I did not appreciate on day one of being a founder is that if this goes to plan, this is actually probably the next 10, 15 years of your life.

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162.301 - 174.546 Dani Grant

And so to work on something that I love the user of because I've been that person and that like I resonate with the problem, like I feel like we dodged a bullet, but now we've got a lot of ideas to share with the people listening to you.

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175.899 - 190.228 Greg Eisenberg

Perfect. Win-win situation. And I actually didn't realize that you were at Cloudflare. At the end of this episode, I'll tell you the story of how I met the founders of Cloudflare when I was just a kid from a Facebook group. So I'll share that at the end.

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190.268 - 191.328 Unknown

No, stop. Are you serious?

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191.849 - 203.616 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah, I'll share that at the end. But all right. We're not going to get to all 141, of course. Of course. I don't want to waste a second. What's your first idea for us?

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204.409 - 230.627 Dani Grant

Okay, idea one. K-pop style factories for... Particular talent. When you're building a startup, there are certain unicorn hires you just have to make. But every single startup has to make the same unicorn hires. Like here's an example. When a startup hires their first growth marketer, that's a specialized hire. It is a hard hire to find.

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230.667 - 245.332 Dani Grant

Like our first marketer, we spent eight months searching, like really searching. But that's a set of skills and you can teach it. And so you could imagine a world in which there's a K-pop style factory where they are churning out the first growth marketer for startups.

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245.652 - 255.854 Dani Grant

And people will pay a lot and they'll pay to not have to spend any much searching and to have the person start the next day when honestly they needed someone yesterday and didn't start hiring soon enough.

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256.894 - 287.01 Greg Eisenberg

So there's a lot of programs for technical talent that exist, training for technical talent. But there doesn't feel like there's that much in the growth marketer content marketer space. So are you saying develop the programs around taking someone who's not a growth marketer to become a growth marketer and then connecting those growth marketers with people who want to hire them? Is that the idea?

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287.797 - 310.388 Dani Grant

I'm here to tell you that I love bootcamps. I think coding bootcamps have changed so many people's lives. I think they are one of the best things that's happened in education in the last 10 years. But this flips it on its head. The code bootcamp route is... Take people, make them junior developers at a generalized big company. This is the opposite of that.

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310.968 - 333.759 Dani Grant

It's take people, make them extremely senior, very fast, extremely specialized for a high paying, like extremely focused type of job. So growth marketer is one. Here's another type of job that you could do this sort of like K-pop factory for. which is a dev evangelist. When a startup needs their first dev evangelist, that person is like a superstar hire.

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333.839 - 356.154 Dani Grant

I mean, they have star power, they're building, they're great at speaking. That person is so hard to find. And the only people out there that you can see doing it are the ones who are already doing it. And you don't just need someone who can do it, you need someone who's going to be the first. And so instead of me as a founder, any founder out there,

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357.85 - 373.34 Dani Grant

hiring a recruiter, trolling through LinkedIn and Twitter and trying to interview like hundreds of people for this one super specialized role. Why shouldn't there just be like the factory that turns out the best people at this? Low acceptance rate, but they like make them amazing.

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374.295 - 391.46 Greg Eisenberg

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.

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392.04 - 416.33 Greg Eisenberg

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

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416.71 - 439.099 Greg Eisenberg

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. I think it's really interesting that you're thinking about job titles that are overlooked. The way we connected originally, I don't know if you remember, but you were looking for a community manager.

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440.159 - 462.087 Greg Eisenberg

You were looking for a community manager. Less so now, but at the time it was a a new type of role, like managing discords and things like that. So I think maybe, maybe the, the framework for people listening at least is like, what are roles that are, you're just starting to hear for the first time. So one of those, for example, is design engineer.

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463.287 - 463.968 Dani Grant

Totally. Yes.

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464.588 - 486.195 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah. So I think, uh, what, you know, what you do is when you start hearing a, a name for the first time, and maybe it's twice, three times, take a note of it, go to Google, Google trends, see if it's going up. if it's going up, then the way to monetize it is, it sounds like it's exactly what you're saying through your method.

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486.846 - 503.269 Dani Grant

Totally. And there's no competition out there because here's what happens today. Like startup founder goes to a recruiter and says, I'm looking for this person. And the recruiter tells them, that's kind of a unicorn. And you're like, yeah, yeah, I know. I'm in the business of hiring unicorns.

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504.449 - 521.346 Dani Grant

And the recruiter says like, okay, but that doesn't really work with my model because my model is I do a bunch of work. And then if I happen to succeed, then you pay me commission. And so they're nervous to do a ton of upfront effort for a search that they don't have a ton of history of doing.

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521.406 - 541.039 Dani Grant

They don't have the network for, will take a ton of calls to like sift through candidates and they may not even find the person. So this is like the opposite of that. It's like you tailor make people for these positions. And the reason why I think this is so impactful for the world is because it makes it easier to start companies and build like impactful businesses.

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541.119 - 559.294 Dani Grant

And like, that's the way a lot of things in the future will advance is like, through companies building new things. But the other reason is there are a lot of people out there who need to change their life and want to change their life, but they're just not going to become junior developers because their set of skills is different. Like the thing that they can contribute to the world is different.

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559.574 - 565.715 Dani Grant

And so having multiple paths for someone to change their life and impact the world positively is a really, really great thing for everyone.

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566.695 - 573.676 Greg Eisenberg

And if you were to start this, like how would you start this? How much money would it require? What tools would you use?

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574.946 - 596.974 Dani Grant

Yes. So you've heard like first. Well, you you are the you are the champion of this. It's like first time founders like over focus on product and second time founders know to focus on distribution. I think that that product here is not the hard part. It's the distribution because you both have to build trust in your quality, but also you need to find people at the right moment. to sell this.

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597.335 - 610.405 Dani Grant

And so I think the first thing you do is you just start by building your own distribution, your own platform. And you do the things that like you, Greg have been doing, which is like, start the podcast, start the newsletter, tweet every day and like build trust as the person who gets what this role is.

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611.566 - 635.358 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah. I think, uh, I want to give two examples of that concrete example. So there was an account, Julian Shapiro used to run something. Uh, he's an entrepreneur used to run something called demand curve and bell curve. Um, They were, you know, growth businesses. And one of the ways that he got a lot of traction is he created a Twitter account called Growth Tactics, at Growth Tactics.

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635.958 - 636.598 Dani Grant

Oh, it's so good.

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637.359 - 655.448 Greg Eisenberg

So good. So good. So he got a really good name. You'd be surprised. Some of these names are still available. And just started sharing growth tactics. And then people would see it on their feed. And they're like, do I, you know, do I want some more growth tactics in my feed? Yeah, absolutely. Click follow. So it started to grow pretty quickly.

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656.616 - 683.79 Greg Eisenberg

And all of a sudden, he had thousands of people, startups, founders who are interested in growth tactics, and then he sold them courses and services and that sort of thing. So I think one good idea here is to just kind of grab a generic-sounding name and go and build a Twitter or LinkedIn account for that. That's one idea. That's what I would do. Yeah.

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685.526 - 686.633 Dani Grant

I have a counterpoint to this.

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686.653 - 688.022 Greg Eisenberg

Let's do it.

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688.874 - 708.819 Dani Grant

I believe that that would work, but I wonder if it still works well in like 2025. And the reason for that is I think people are moving away from trusting anonymous accounts to trusting people. And here's an example of that. We're hiring right now a role that I wish there was a K-pop factory for, because we're going to spend the next 10 months searching for this like unicorn person.

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709.159 - 733.429 Dani Grant

And this is a designer to lead a growth team. It's just such a specialized role. And you need someone very, very senior who's super thoughtful and like It's a hard job to hire for. So there is a website called Growth Design that has a ton of these case studies and the case studies are so awesome. It's a great website. I've spent hours on this website. Also, there is this woman, Kate Syuma.

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733.569 - 750.73 Dani Grant

She was an early growth designer at Miro. She's since left and started a consultancy, but she's like started a podcast and newsletter and she like writes on LinkedIn a lot. When I was looking for this person originally, I didn't reach out to the growth design team to find a hire. I reached out to her to see if she knows anyone.

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750.75 - 757.958 Dani Grant

And so there's something about people that might be better at getting just inbound interest.

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758.459 - 785.36 Greg Eisenberg

So for people that don't know, Growth.Design, they make these comic books and they break down... It's beautiful. They go check it out. Yeah. They break down different UX flows and they basically, uh, kind of commentate it with, uh, they commentate it with, um, user psychology and stuff like that. And it just, it's, it's absolutely brilliant. But I think that's another thing is it's animated.

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785.84 - 797.167 Greg Eisenberg

So you don't really like feel connected to anyone. Um, so yeah, I agree with you there. Um, makes sense. All right, what else you got?

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798.187 - 822.194 Dani Grant

Okay, here's another one. Before a startup is ready, actually, let me start with the title, which is like Bounty Program for Dev Evangelism. Before a startup is ready for the first dev evangelist hire, they need to write docs. They need to write starters, like tutorials. They need to create like starter GitHub repos, videos.

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822.334 - 841.748 Dani Grant

There's a ton of dev evangelism that needs to happen even before you have the capacity for a full-time hire. And it usually falls on the founder who has a lot of other stuff they are doing. And at that moment would be very happy to pay someone to do like a 95% good job on the basic stuff that they need to get started.

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842.248 - 856.511 Dani Grant

You could imagine a bounty program where junior developers all over the world are like, oh, great, this startup needs a getting started tutorial. This startup needs how to use their tool with Zapier. And just one by one is able to contribute.

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857.631 - 858.811 Greg Eisenberg

Who else is doing that?

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860.932 - 861.332 Dani Grant

Fiverr?

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862.552 - 866.893 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah, that's what I was thinking. It feels like there's no competition for that.

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868.089 - 883.423 Dani Grant

Yeah, I think that's right. I think that the hard part about this is, as a founder, honestly, I'd pay a lot for good quality work, but I wouldn't pay a lot for bad quality work that we'd have to redo. Right.

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883.483 - 899.297 Dani Grant

And so the benefit of a dedicated marketplace for this over a Fiverr is that the reviews can be tailor made to the platform and they can just have a really high bar the way that like Uber has a high bar for drivers or Airbnb for places.

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900.298 - 906.984 Greg Eisenberg

Do you think this is a profitable cash flowing business or do you see this potentially being like a VC back thing?

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908.005 - 931.872 Dani Grant

I think this is. a cash flow profitable business. And I think it gets even more profitable over time, just given the decline of the cost of producing software. Right now, you may even need to hire a developer to build the platform and all the features. But pretty soon, if you've seen Vercel's v0.dev, it will design and build it for you. Just fast forward a few years.

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932.232 - 934.574 Dani Grant

And so then it's like, okay, you're one person, you can run this thing.

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935.572 - 941.394 Greg Eisenberg

Can you just explain to people what vZero is and how that would extend to this?

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941.614 - 952.999 Dani Grant

Well, it is pure magic. And what it is, is it's AI that builds the website for you. So you say what website you're looking for and it will generate it the full thing.

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954.1 - 954.88 Greg Eisenberg

That's crazy.

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954.9 - 979.699 Dani Grant

It's so awesome because it's such a preview of how the future will be. Like today, if you need some sort of service, you have like a whole company to create that service. Like how many engineers work at Yelp? But in the future, there will be some sort of public database of things. And then when you want the service, it can just be automatically generated for you in that time.

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980.06 - 988.628 Dani Grant

And like, that's not five years out, but maybe it's a hundred years out or 50 years out. I don't know. But like when I see vZero, I'm like, oh, cool. The future is arriving soon.

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989.793 - 1000.099 Greg Eisenberg

This is firing me up. This is why you're on the pod right now, because I feel like you have such a good sense to where things are going. I want to keep the ideas going. What else you got?

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1001.119 - 1033.243 Dani Grant

Let millennials invest in VC funds. What you would do is you'd create a shadow LP that becomes an LP in all these funds and then allows the general public to be a part of that LP. So like what it would broaden access to is like you as a 25 year old could buy a hundred dollars of A16Zs, you know, fund, whatever, whether or not the VCs will enjoy that TBD, but do people want it? A hundred percent.

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1033.564 - 1062.243 Greg Eisenberg

Yes. Yeah. That was my first question to that is like, If you're A16Z, not them, I don't want to pick on them exactly, but the idea is there's five funds that are really, really hard to get into and they curate their LPs really, really carefully. And they don't let regular people invest, like you or me. But the problem is I think that they want to keep it that way.

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1063.052 - 1086.499 Dani Grant

Yes, yeah. This is, for the record, an idea that won't work. And it won't, like, and there are more reasons than that that it won't work. It's like, also, they love not having to share their fund, like, returns with the general public. And this would change that. Like, it's like, for all the reasons this won't work. This is sort of an idea kind of like, allow Harvard to accept more students.

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1086.579 - 1089.68 Dani Grant

And it's like, that's not really what they do. Yeah.

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1090.953 - 1115.464 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah, but it's actually really interesting. When you come up with a bad idea, on this podcast we say, if an idea is good, you sip the idea, and if the idea is not good, you spit it. Sometimes these spit ideas actually get you down the line of thinking of a good idea. For example, with this idea, your insight was right. Your insight is that

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1116.601 - 1144.081 Greg Eisenberg

Millennials use a lot of these software businesses, use a lot of these CPG businesses. They would rather invest in that than the S&P 500. Insight correct. But the execution of this is difficult because the other side of the marketplace, so to speak, doesn't really want that to happen. So the question is, what can you build for millennials such that they get that same feeling around

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1145.097 - 1147.599 Greg Eisenberg

you know, that same warm and fuzzy feeling that they would have gotten.

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1148.619 - 1174.114 Dani Grant

Totally. At the time that we wrote this Notion doc, a company had just launched called Otis, which was the Skillshare founder launching a new financial startup. And it allowed, like, I guess it's targeted for young people, but allowed anyone to invest in like alternative assets like art and sneakers and just own a part of culture. And when I saw that, I was like, that's super inspiring.

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1174.154 - 1177.076 Dani Grant

What else do millennials want to be a part of? And I was like, A16C.

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1178.297 - 1184.02 Greg Eisenberg

There's something there and someone in the comment section is going to be like, here's where I should take it.

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1184.12 - 1185.081 Unknown

Yeah.

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1185.121 - 1194.367 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah. So feel free. So let us know in the comment section. I'm just going to keep saying what else you got. What else you got? What else you got? What else you got?

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1194.387 - 1219.356 Dani Grant

Yeah. At the time, so this one is, okay, the one more theme that I got very interested in at the time was these in-person events. And I think that now is the time to start in-person things because we're all so, we all realize just how precious they are, but they're all really hard to start because the quality bar for what you'll attend a second time that's in-person is just super high.

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1219.876 - 1225.478 Dani Grant

And so there is an amazing company called Sofar Sounds. Are you familiar?

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1225.498 - 1230.539 Greg Eisenberg

A little bit. I've never been to one of their events. So tell me more about it.

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1231.299 - 1251.826 Dani Grant

They are concerts in people's homes. But the thing that they just got right is they got the formula that you can trust and you don't know what you're going to get until you show up. So you know it's going to be 60 minutes, three bands play, like 10 minutes each, but like breaks in the middle. So you show up and then you know that they've curated the quality.

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1252.907 - 1275.203 Dani Grant

So one idea in this doc is so far sounds for talks where like I love that format. It's such an easy and fun thing to go and do. It's novel each time. But sitting and listening to music for an hour like isn't everyone's jam. But what could be is sort of more like a variety show where you you show up. And they're going to be three talks. Maybe one is like a comedian. One is like a scientist.

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1275.563 - 1284.271 Dani Grant

And you just and that's that's the format. And that's the that's the in-person event empire.

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1286.152 - 1313.791 Greg Eisenberg

I think so far was was and is really onto something, which is that. Events haven't really changed in years, like they've basically stayed the same. So they were kind of like, okay, how do we, you know, with the trend around stadium shows and bigger and bigger shows and festivals, how do we do the complete opposite? And they did it, and I think they're doing quite well.

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1315.572 - 1337.951 Greg Eisenberg

I think they're doing like eight figures in revenue or so. So they're doing really well. But I think that there's so far sounds for X is kind of the idea that you're saying, which is you know, which I think, I think the, the, the hard part with this is choosing like which community you want to go after and what is the utility for the, the event.

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1338.011 - 1356.598 Greg Eisenberg

So for example, so far sounds a lot of people go to those events, at least in my, like, and anecdotally, it's like, they're going on a first date basically there. It's like, it's kind of perfect, right? It's like 60 minutes, you know, it's, it's not, you're just going to a bar or something like that. You're like doing something a little interactive.

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1356.977 - 1380.076 Greg Eisenberg

And then after you can talk about it and they'll probably be cool people there. So if you were doing, you know, so besides, so for your example, like talks, comedians, scientists, like those to me, like there's probably so far sounds for science, so far sounds for comedy, so far sounds for, you know, talks. What do you think about that?

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1380.657 - 1400.853 Dani Grant

I think it's more generalized. People want to be entertained. And so like, It's so far sounds for your entertainment and you know that the quality bar is going to be good. I think that the hard part is not choosing a category. The hard part is the brand where my co-founder says this like so eloquently and I'm going to butcher this, but his philosophy is,

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1401.118 - 1416.034 Dani Grant

which I think is so right, is that moats are dead and brand is the only moat. It's like, we used to all talk about network effects and like, you know, build something like Twitter. But if you think about all the software tools you use right now, there's not really a network effect. There's not really a network effect for Notion.

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1416.074 - 1435.106 Dani Grant

Like maybe there's like, like we can come up with some, but why did you choose Notion? It's because the brand is just so strong. like basically the strategy for startups right now is to be Coca-Cola. It's like, why do you drink Coca-Cola? Not because of any like, like lock-in or anything. It's because it's Coca-Cola. And so the, why do you show up to a SoFar sounds with the first date?

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1435.466 - 1442.029 Dani Grant

It's because, you know, it's going to be a high quality hour of your life. And so I think the hard part is to establish that trust and to maintain it.

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1443.069 - 1463.366 Greg Eisenberg

I stand corrected. Also, I'd love that line. That line is so good. I'm going to reuse that all the time. And you're right with, with Notion specifically, like We use Notion. We probably have like 70 or 80 people on Notion. And there is no network effects because I've thought about it too, because we're thinking about moving off of it.

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1464.947 - 1488.978 Greg Eisenberg

And now it's just, there were network effects with some of these businesses when it was really hard to get the graph on there. But like, you know, it's really easy to post a link on Slack and get my team to use something else, you know? So, When people were saying network effects were everything, that was like in 2005, 2006, 2007, when that was a lot harder.

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1488.998 - 1508.089 Dani Grant

I agree. You know, Peter Thiel says like the best way to compete is to not compete. And I think that brand is the best way you can do that, where if you occupy enough mental space for a category, no one is searching for an alternative. When we started Jam, we didn't search for what's the best knowledge base. We just use Notion because their brand is so strong.

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1508.449 - 1531.529 Dani Grant

I think that brand is the best mode out there this year. 100%. The thing really to end on is to say that there are things that I did not appreciate on day one of starting a startup about choosing your idea that I really wish that I had known on day one or we sort of lucked into, but I think are helpful for people who are on day one of choosing what to work on. The first thing is that if

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1533.266 - 1549.279 Dani Grant

if the startup goes to plan, like if all your dreams come true, this is probably like 10 to 20 years of your life, which is really a lot. Like when we started Jam when I was 26, this is probably gonna be all my 30s. And so that's very exciting, but it's only exciting if you love what you do.

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1549.439 - 1569.651 Dani Grant

And the thing that I didn't realize on day one is that it's A, has to be exciting enough that you're gonna say no to a lot of other opportunities that come your way. But B, it is going to be like, you are going... to think and talk about your company all the time. Because it's not just at work. It's you go see your family and your family's like, how's the business doing?

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1570.071 - 1586.856 Dani Grant

And you go see your friends and they're like, how's the startup? And you meet people at parties and they're like, what are you working on? And then they have follow-up questions. So you are in that space all the time. And so you better find the thing fascinating enough to talk about it for 10 years straight. The second is

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1588.552 - 1601.558 Dani Grant

once the thing starts working, then you have this question of like, okay, well, great. Like now, how do we like a thousand X this thing? And you kind of want to know on day one that there is a path to that.

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1601.818 - 1616.304 Dani Grant

You don't have to know what the exact path is, but just having like, people call this like an idea maze, but just having like, here's what needs to happen to make this so worthwhile to spend a ton of time on is really helpful. And the last thing is that

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1616.884 - 1632.262 Dani Grant

The type of business you start dictates how you will spend your time and who you will talk to and what you will wear and what your life will be like. So we started a business targeting developers. I get to spend all day, every day talking to developers. It is awesome. I love it.

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1632.782 - 1647.516 Dani Grant

But if we had started something where I have to wear a suit all the time or I have to travel a ton or like there are just a lot of different types of businesses to start. And you should choose one that fits your personality because it should be energizing in your day rather than very detracting.

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1648.797 - 1666.533 Greg Eisenberg

There's only one thing I'll push back on in what you just said, which is. the business will take up 10, 15 plus years of your life. For some businesses, that's absolutely true. And, but I think we're entering this new era of micro businesses.

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1667.233 - 1685.006 Greg Eisenberg

So, you know, 10, 15, 20, 50 years ago, when you wanted to create a business, it was this, it was this, it was like clowning Mount Everest in terms of like what you needed to get done. You know, back in the day when it was, when there was no internet and you wanted to, let's say, make a store, like you had to go and like,

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1685.558 - 1712.123 Greg Eisenberg

find the location and spend so much money renovating it and painting and merchandising and getting the suppliers. You know, then 15, 20 years ago, if you wanted to put an e-commerce store, you had to like build your own shopping cart. There was no Shopify. Now what's cool is you can stand on the shoulders of giants and there is like a lower price

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1713.015 - 1733.122 Greg Eisenberg

kind of a lower risk way of putting things out there. Now, these businesses might not be as big as Jam, and you might need to create a portfolio of them to end up making it meaningful, but that's my take on the business needs to be 10 to 15 years.

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1734.548 - 1750.536 Dani Grant

Okay. You're right. It's true. But something that I underappreciated on the first day of Jam is I used to be a product manager and I sort of thought all about product. And I was like, the hard part of building this is building the product. But building the product is like, now you can just even get started.

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1751.116 - 1772.524 Dani Grant

And the rest of the journey is you're creating a movement that helps people improve their lives in a particular way. And just social change takes time and behavior change takes time. and the environment changes around you. And so you're just, you're like, if it's not something where people are going to search for this tool and it's going to be the top search result and SEO always.

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1772.584 - 1779.307 Dani Grant

And that like, if the distribution doesn't come naturally, you're, you're embarking on a very long journey and a lot longer than I sort of appreciated.

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1780.227 - 1802.928 Greg Eisenberg

A hundred percent. Yeah. I feel you. I feel you on that, you know, and especially if you take venture, that's also like, you're definitely signing yourself up for, a chapter of your life. And where, you know, I guess the difference is some businesses are chapters and some businesses are pages and know the difference between a page and a chapter.

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1803.669 - 1805.09 Dani Grant

Yeah, I think that's right.

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1806.672 - 1820.343 Greg Eisenberg

Before we head out, I need to tell you quickly the story of how I met Michelle Zaitlin from the co-founder of Cloudflare and her husband, Jamie, I think his name is.

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1821.454 - 1822.175 Dani Grant

I'm dying to know.

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1823.075 - 1830.26 Greg Eisenberg

So I think, and he was also involved in Cloudflare, I think. Jamie was, was he? I don't know.

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1830.28 - 1832.822 Dani Grant

Not that I know of, but it's, maybe.

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1834.102 - 1865.601 Greg Eisenberg

So people know this, I'm Canadian. When I first came out to San Francisco, I didn't know anyone, but there was this Facebook group called AC781. And AC781 stood for Air Canada 781, the flight from Montreal to San Francisco. And for whatever reason, I was in this group and I was coming to San Francisco and looking to sublet a place. I didn't know anyone.

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1865.641 - 1897.046 Greg Eisenberg

I was probably like 20 years old or something. And Michelle responded. And she's like, hey, I've got this startup called Cloudflare and we've got this... we've got this space and it's a studio and she rented it to me for like nothing, literally out of the goodness of her own heart. And, uh, really got me like hooked onto San Francisco and, and, uh, changed my life from that little moment.

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1897.066 - 1914.371 Greg Eisenberg

And I think you never know who you're going to meet, you know, now, I mean, now Cloudfair is like a $20 billion company. You never know who you're going to meet. And, uh, it was just so cool how and positive and how she gave back. So I will say there's power in community and, uh, shoot your shot.

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1915.332 - 1922.777 Dani Grant

Wow. That's an amazing story. And like, what a like warm and like beautiful thing to do.

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1922.797 - 1942.17 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah, totally. Danny, it's been a pleasure. Uh, People, please like and comment the YouTube video. If you're not watching this on YouTube, just get on YouTube and like it and comment on it. I hate that I say this now, but it actually gets the video spread and gets the pod spread.

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1943.191 - 1953.179 Greg Eisenberg

If you enjoyed this, if you got an ounce of value, I mean, she gave you a bunch of great ideas and a bunch of good frameworks for thinking about this. So thank you, Dani. Where could people find out more about you and Jam?

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1954.615 - 1974.619 Dani Grant

Well, first, I'll give you for the first time the full 141 idea notion to share. And if people are starting companies, our first pitch deck, if they're raising VC is still online, it's at deck.jam.dev. So that's if anyone out there is starting something, if that's helpful to you. But I'm Danny at jam.dev.

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1974.799 - 1980.94 Dani Grant

If you are using the product and you have feature requests or suggestions or just thoughts, reach out. I love chatting with our users.

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1981.903 - 1984.544 Greg Eisenberg

This is amazing. So you just put up the deck?

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1985.704 - 2005.43 Dani Grant

Yeah, when we started the company, I used to be a VC. And I just thought it's so unfair that I've gotten to see other founders pitch. And when you're starting a company, the quality of your pitch deck matters. And so how can we just like, here's what ours is so other people who've never seen one can create their own.

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2006.071 - 2033.953 Greg Eisenberg

Yeah, I'm just going through the deck right now. Everyone should go check this out because... This is so well done. A good deck is just very clear around here's the problems, here's the solutions. And for anyone who's doing any business idea, even if you're not raising venture, creating a deck like this will just help. It'll help you clarify what you're doing. This is really good. Check it out.

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2034.033 - 2042.225 Greg Eisenberg

Thank you for sharing this. And yeah, we'll link the the notion and this in the YouTube description for for people.

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2043.286 - 2044.508 Dani Grant

Thanks so much for having me, Greg.

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2045.229 - 2046.291 Greg Eisenberg

Thanks, Danny. Later.

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