Join us for an engaging conversation with Brett Goldstein, who is currently building a stealth startup. Previously, Brett was the Co-Founder and CEO of Launch House and served as a Senior Product Manager at Clearbit. In this episode, we explore a variety of startup ideas and business opportunities, including a conference event aggregator, vertical SaaS for matchmakers, data enrichment SaaS, and much more. Brett shares his framework for building a billion-dollar startup by disrupting legacy enterprise software companies. We break down how to transform spreadsheets into profitable startups and discuss the tactics and frameworks to build these businesses from idea to cash flow. Whether you're aiming to launch your first million-dollar business or are curious about cutting-edge entrepreneurial strategies, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this essential guide to launching a successful startup!Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: [gregisenberg.com/30startupideas](http://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 BRETT ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/thatguybgLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bgoldstein3/Brett’s newsletter: [https://www.homescreen.news](https://www.homescreen.news/)To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up to: boringmarketing.comEpisode Timestamps:0:00 Intro02:55 Startup Idea 1: Conference Event Aggregator and Social Platform17:20 Startup Idea 2: Vertical SaaS for Matchmakers27:12 Startup Idea 3: Bespoke Dating App36:22 Startup Idea 4: AI-powered Data Enrichment Startup45:28 Framework: Enterprise workflow startup idea formula
like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody is using a spreadsheet it should be like you know a light bulb going off there's like this is a startup opportunity one of the other kind of like universal rules of startups is that like once you aggregate users in a place you know in some digital property you can add
I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this cute, profitable little thing, but it has the legs to become something big if you want it.
The way you can be with any network is you carve off a section of it of power users of some sort, some niche, and you build better features for them or something like that.
Okay, let's do a bonus framework with Brett.
Bonus framework. All right. So it's called the Enterprise Workflow Startup Idea Formula. All right. So you're going to use this formula to come up with any startup idea that can be a venture scale billion dollar company. Any guesses what it is? You know what it is?
All right, Brett Goldstein. I think you're criminally underfollowed. That's why I brought you on today. Whenever we hang out, I love just picking your brain. You were part of the Google M&A team. You bought companies at Google. You did a startup. You raised $12 million plus for that. You did the VC thing. And now you're working in stealth and working on a really cool product.
But you're not here to talk about any of that. You're here to talk startup ideas, and I'm excited that you agreed to come on.
Yeah, I'm excited as well. We're just going to give away all of the goods that I've been hoarding for years now that I'm working on something else. But yeah, super excited.
Yeah, I said you can't hoard anymore. You've got to stop hoarding. It's just not fair.
Yeah. I mean, I think it's also just the most, the best expression of your self-confidence and status to give away stuff for free that is like extremely valuable or you could benefit immensely from keeping it to yourself. So here I am pumping my bags.
Totally. And I think someone's going to take one of these ideas and they might be bigger than you and me in a couple of years because they're taking one of these ideas.
Yeah. Well, selfishly, I hope that some of these ideas get taken because I need some of them right now.
All right. Well, what's on your mind? What's idea number one?
Okay. So I guess idea number one goes to this... crappy startup idea that every kid in college has coming out of college. They're like 22. And the first idea they come up with is what? It's an app to help you hang out with people when you're bored. And all of these apps have failed. Like all of them have failed. Like they just don't work.
There's this negative selection bias where it's like the people who actually want to hang out are not the people you want to hang out with and like all of this stuff. But before we landed on the idea that I'm working on right now in stealth, we actually pursued something that is an iteration of this idea that it will actually work really, really well.
And the idea is that instead of focusing on nerdy loners in big cities that want to hang out and weren't invited to parties as your target audience, you focus on conference attendees. conference attendees.
And the idea is that if you've ever been to a conference, whether it's like Tech Weeks and Crypto Conference, whatever it is, you know most of the action is not actually the main conference events. all of the action is the side events. And actually maybe more of the action is in the private dinners and stuff like that. But really the side events are where the action is.
That's where all the cool people are hanging out. They're more interesting. They're in more interesting places. Like I went to one during Tech Week and Tiesto was there. So there are all these side events. But the problem with all the side events is that they aren't centralized in one place.
Usually what happens today is you have some poor soul who aggregates a spreadsheet of all these side events. They're cross-platform. It's Luma. It's Partyful. It's Eventbrite. It's all this stuff. And it's in this really shitty spreadsheet. And you have to go through and click through all the ones that look interesting, RSVP to them. You have all this annoying emails everywhere.
confirming and all this stuff. But I think the really important point to focus on is the spreadsheet. Like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody is using a spreadsheet, it should be like, you know, a light bulb going off as like, this is a startup opportunity.
There's countless startups that started as spreadsheets or took processes that were spreadsheets and then converted them into products. And so really the simplest thing is you go and you find these spreadsheets ahead of these conferences or during these conferences.
You build some scraper, some system to ingest all of that data, parse the dates, the times, the locations, other information, images about these events. And then you create a beautiful app that plots them on a map, one-click RSVP. And basically, that's your wedge. Your wedge is, this is the place you're going to go to see where all the conference events are. Right.
When we tried this at, I think we did it like NFT NYC or something. We built a very crappy version of this. People were just like loving it. People clamored for it. Like people said, thank you so much. Can I get my friend on it? All that stuff. But where does this turn into an app to find friends to meet up with? Conferences are designed for people to meet up and hang out.
Literally, the whole point of the conference is for professional networking to happen, for you to go and find that person who's at the conference and go grab coffee or whatever, or do business and stuff like that. So these people are very... Of anybody in the world...
These people are the most authentically interested in connecting and chatting and meeting up in person because that's what they're there for. And actually, unlike the social world, a non-professional space where you have negative selection bias of the nerdiest, weirdest people being the only ones who want to hang out. this is actually everyone, right? High status, low status, whoever.
So that's the first thing. That's the first solution or the first problem that you've solved is you have great people who want to hang out.
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Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. Every conference organizer is trying to get people to meet up because they know that people will come back if that matchmake happens. And by the way, I know some people are listening to this and they're like, okay, how much money is there really in this space? And there's a business called Cvent. Do you know Cvent? No.
I had never heard of them and... But they're basically a $4.5 billion company. I think they're publicly traded, actually. And what they do is they have a white label app for events and conferences. Yeah, exactly. You talked about a wedge, which is a really good... I think people don't think about wedges enough. But I think this is a wedge to ultimately compete
with cvent four and a half billion dollar opportunity and cvent by the way like you know you'll go to their website we can show it on youtube like this is like an old school kind of yeah you know it's not like the designers of snapchat went and designed cvent let's put it that way yeah must must be at least like 10 15 years old but yeah but yeah i think like you know one of the other kind of like universal rules of startups is that like once you aggregate users in a place
you know, in some digital property, you can add social features, right? Pretty standard operating procedure. You build an amazing one-player experience, which is what? It's the find any conference event, you know, side event at this conference.
And the two-player experience is suddenly everyone who's at that conference is available in a directory and you can DM them and you don't have to worry about sharing your phone number with some random, you know, professional contact if you don't want to. you may be able to share your location, which is something that has also failed miserably in the social world.
Like, what if you want to connect with somebody, but you guys are bouncing around between all these different events? It's a great opportunity to share locations and stuff like that. So the wedge is the one-player experience. The next step is the directory and the chat, right? You could even do some crazy AI features where you train an LLM on all the conference information. oh, where is check-in?
When is the speaker going? Or what's the status of this event? These are questions people are constantly sending conference organizers and stuff like that, but you can throw that literally in the same chat UI as everything else. And all this stuff is like, you could build this in a month or less. But yeah, what's nice about this is you have this group of people who are basically...
the power users of professional networking, right? So one of the things you want to, if you want, if you want to backing up, if you want it to compete with LinkedIn, you can carve off, the way you can be with any network is you carve off a section of it, of like extremely power users of some sort, some niche, and you build better features for them or something like that.
And so if you think about power professional networkers, The people who are on LinkedIn the hardest are probably the same people who are going to these conferences and dying to meet up. So suddenly you have this directory of people. They've added their work history. They've added their interests. Maybe you can search through, send DMs to people.
You sell ads in it, which is like, hey, come to the... Advertisers can be like, hey, come to this event or try this new thing or something like that. And yeah, obviously it works cross-conference as well. So once you're on this for one conference, if you're going to another conference, which most people do, you just open the app again and you see who's there.
Totally. That's the magic experience of the Shop app. Have you ever downloaded that app?
Yeah.
So it's Shopify's app and I recently downloaded it And if you ask me, Greg, how many Shopify purchases have you made? I would say like, I don't know, two. But you don't really know that you're making Shopify purchases because it's the backend. It's powering these e-commerce experiences.
So I downloaded the app and then I saw like, I don't know, 50 different, you know, companies I bought stuff from. And it was such a magical experience. I'd love to be able to open this app and be like, oh my God, I didn't know that Brett is going to be at, you know, South by Southwest. And, you know, so I think that's, I do think that having that magical sort of experience is cool.
If you were building something like this and I mean, you built the product, so I'm sure you've thought, thought about this. How would you actually get to, like, how would you get awareness and in something like this?
Yeah, I mean, I think conferences are a historically fantastic place to launch products. South by Southwest itself is known to... I guess it's not anymore, but it used to be this place where everyone anticipated the next social app to launch.
And so it's one of these things where it has a strong network effect, especially with these social features, which is like you host an event at a South by Southwest or a Tech Week or something like that. These events, if you're in their distribution system, get tons and tons of RSVPs. We hosted one for Tech Week, 800 RSVPs. 800 people all download your app.
Conferences are probably no more than like 20,000 people in the largest sense. So once you have that 800 people, you just do the next conference that these people are going to. That's probably how I do it. Obviously, you're targeting...
particular niches so you may want to start with the crypto community or something because these people tend to like hop from one conference to another pretty consistently um you may want to target like the tech community or another specific group of people that tends to show up consistently at these conferences but um yeah i think that's yeah how it worked cool i like this idea i think it's one you know i love a wedge man i love a wedge salad you know so
This to me is a wedge salad in half. I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this cute, profitable little thing, but it has the legs to become something big if you want it. So that's why I like this idea.
One interesting point is that conferences are actually where most people spend their learning and development budget at their companies. They're usually getting like $2,000 to $3,000 a year or something like that. These workers, these tech workers or any sort of worker, most of them spend it at conferences. This is why conference tickets are so expensive.
Because obviously the conference grounds are expensive, but they're more so expensive because these corporate people have the money to spend on them. And so what's interesting is that means that this app, because it has a business focus, it's conference focused, people get to expense it in their learning and development budget. which means you have potential right out of the gate.
You could gate some of these features, the AI chatbot information stuff, maybe some of the social features or something. You gate some features and you could charge $50 a month or something like that. $100, $250 for one conference if you wanted to. And I think you'd see adoption.
Before we go on to the next idea, I have to ask, why didn't you...
proceed with this idea we came up with a even bigger idea okay yeah it wasn't it wasn't the idea itself that you you looked at it and you're like oh my god you know this is really hard it was just there's another opportunity and you went for that no yeah i think this is a pretty clear-cut straightforward thing i mean you have to be excited about conferences you have to be
you know, in this kind of like multi-chapter, you know, story of like, first we're doing the wedge and that, and it's going to take some time. Um, but yeah, we just came up with a better idea.
Cool. All right, Brad, what's, uh, what's idea number two?
Um, all right. So I have two, the next two ideas are both dating related because I'm hopelessly single in New York. Um, and, uh, I find that people just kind of talk about, don't you feel like when you're hanging out with people in a certain city, they kind of talk about whatever the thing of the city seems to be.
So it's like you hang out with people in San Francisco, they're only talking about the latest AI models and stuff like that. You hang out with people in New York where dating is like a sport, basically. Conversations naturally go back to dating. I have a couple ideas that I think would be super, super killer. The first one is basically a vertical sass for matchmakers.
So the main point is that like there are people in every community and this is like a thousand year old job who play this role of matchmaker, like particularly in like, like we're both Jewish, the Jewish matchmakers, Indian matchmakers, like, you know, any sort of religious or ethnic community, there are strong matchmakers. But what I also find interesting is that like,
There are other communities, and you're the community guys who want to hear your thoughts on this, but there are other communities that have emerged or have their own identities that also should or already have matchmakers within it. So rock climbing, rock climbing. you would think that rock climbers would get along with each other and be a good match.
You would think that CrossFitters would get along. You'd think that like, you know, people on Twitter would get along with each other. Right. Do you have any thoughts on that? I want, before I go, I want to get.
Yeah. So you're, you're absolutely right. I also think that, you know, 50% of Gen Z Americans are, not religious at all. So they're looking for, they're attaching themselves to some of these movements and these movements have become their identity. So absolutely. I think, you know, a non-obvious one would be the sobriety movement.
You know, I want to connect with other sober daters in my city and who subscribe to the same philosophy and identity that I have.
Yep. Yep, exactly.
By the way, just to confirm, I'm not sober and I have a wife, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, got it.
That was an example.
I thought you said you're not sober now. I'm like, I didn't get the memo.
Oh, no, I'm sober right now, but I might have a glass of wine tonight, you know?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, same. Yeah. But yeah, I think, like, you know, you think about, like, all these people who... If you talk to people in couples... One of the things that people like to do in their spare time is get their friends who are not married married. It's like a classic pastime of couples to do that. And so there's all this demand, right?
There's these dating apps, but they don't actually support this kind of third player to be involved in this process. If you think about what is the user flow of a matchmaker, it's like you have a database of people And then you have all these traits and then you need some sort of UI to be able to pair them up, and you need some sort of double opt-in to get them to go and go on the date and stuff.
So there's this whole, like, a lot of different ways to do this. You could charge the matchmaker where you basically say, like, you pay $30 a month for these features and $150 a month for these features. You could also charge in terms of, like, if you wanted to do, like, community-based, you could almost charge like a transaction fee.
So imagine if there was like a Jewish matchmaker in New York or something and I had to pay like 50 bucks a month to be part of her pool, right? Everyone pays 50 bucks a month or maybe there's some discriminatory pricing based on gender or something like that.
By the way, there's probably a way to do that just with religious groups so that it's tax deductible too.
Oh, that's a great, that's a really good point.
Right?
Yeah, definitely.
It becomes a no brainer, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah. You just have to do a little like prayer before every right swipe. Yeah. But, um, yeah, you charge, you charge some amount, maybe the Jewish one is 50, maybe another one is 150. Maybe, uh, you're a celebrity in the LA area and you have access to all these billionaires and celebrities and all these crazy models and whatever, whatever those types of people are.
And you charge, you know, $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month for it to be part of that pool. Um, And then the company takes a percentage of that subscription or something like that.
You know what this reminds me of? Have you seen Palette? No. New York startup. I actually invested in it a few years ago. Or Late Checkout invested in it a few years ago. But the basic idea of Palette... Uh, it's palette.com.
Oh, it was the job board.
Yeah. It's job board for creators basically. So like they'll work with like a Lenny Richitsky, uh, who's like the product management guy and they'll be like, Hey, we're going to power your job board, uh, for Lenny jobs. Yeah. And, uh, they, they provide the, you know, the, the technology and, and they have a fee structure that I assume that they get like a percentage, uh,
yeah so this is basically that right the the thinking is like they so they're going after creators and people with big influence in different niches you're you're saying that kind of the same thing um and recruiting in some ways is very similar to dating it's the same for sure yeah it's the same yeah totally yeah and i think what's interesting about this is like
Dating as a space to invest in, it always gets a bad rep because the incentive structures make it so it's never going to be a massive business. Aside from Tinder, maybe it's turned into a giant business over time. But if the app works, then you turn from it. But I think the way that... In this sense, you're almost like changing... You're creating almost like an unlimited...
upside like you know it could be as expensive as uh as the person decides if if they're doing that model so that means you could make a lot more money uh from this i also like so shopify i know i just brought them up and i'm bringing up them again they have this philosophy called arming the rebels which is oh yeah yeah yeah just
such a good concept around, they've got all these rebels, quote unquote, who are merchants, and then their job is to arm them with tools and software to make their lives easier and better. What I like about this business is it's arming the rebels, which are these non-formal matchmakers, these casual matchmakers that are doing this out of the goodness of their heart anyways.
All you're doing with this is you're just arming them to make their lives easier. And if they want to have upside and maybe the upside, you know, some people are going to be like, no, I'm just doing this out of goodness in my heart and bless their hearts. We need more of those people.
But some people are going to be, you know, so for those people, you know, maybe you have it so you can, it donates to a charity of your choice or something like that.
Yeah. Taxes are deductible again.
Yeah.
And it's interesting. If you think about what actually is a dating app, what is the way that you would start a new dating app is you find a niche, you find a specific group of people, and then maybe there's some special mechanism, but the group of people matters more than the mechanisms.
right any dating app you're on like raya is like these type of people tinder is these type of people like the the whole evolution of dating apps is just about like slicing off another niche so really what this product is talking you know the point of this product is to productize that process of taking a niche and turning it into a dating app very quickly
Yeah, I like this one a lot. On this podcast, I've been doing something new and I say, do I sip an idea, i.e. do I like this idea or do I spit this idea? I don't like it. Go back to drawing board and I definitely spit this idea. You're doing something, you're productizing that people are already doing and you're just making it easier for them. So I like it.
And I also think there's that trend around a bit of message fatigue on a lot of these dating apps. Like people are kind of looking for something like this. So you have the tailwinds as well.
Yeah. And I find that you actually treat, um, you treat matches more seriously when they come from friends or community members versus like, you know, the open abyss of New York city or something like that. So I think it would have a much higher conversion rate to actual marriage and stuff.
Totally. And I could see the quote on your website now.
Yeah. So, all right. Second dating app.
Let's rock. What do you got?
Second dating app. All right.
You're in the flow. I can see it. I can see you're in the flow.
We're in the flow. Let's start with the, I'll paint a picture of this dating app from the landing page, starting with the landing page. So the app is called Serendipity. You go to the app, you go to the website, maybe it's an app, but call it a website. very mysterious, like very intense branding.
And it says something like we've perfected the ancient craft of finding life partners, finding people like partners, the ancient mystical scientific craft, right? And on the website, you'd be exposed to the process, which is First, you have to fill out all this information and give us as much information as possible. We need to know who you are on a soul level, right?
So you take this survey and it's asking just weird questions like, would you rather interview an iguana or a raccoon? Just like the most absurd, strangest questions that you can imagine. This is partially like a growth tactic because people will be like, I'm joining this dating app and it's like asking me the most ridiculous questions I've ever seen in my life.
Well, I could picture the viral TikToks with 2 million views. Yeah. Right? People screen sharing that. Yeah. So yes, 100%. Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah.
And then you get to the end, you have to link your accounts, link your Instagram, link your LinkedIn, everything. Just like information sharing, oversharing. Because the message is, we have this tool. We have figured it out. Fundamental human unlock to find you your life partner. So you're like, whatever, I'll do it all. Get to the bottom and then you finish.
And then it basically says, our council is now going to be reviewing your... your information and who's on the council, a monk, a priest, a relationship and sex psychologist or doctor or something like that. A physicist, right? A rabbi, like all of this, all of these kind of like,
mystical you know really intense types of figures and you see their faces and they're old and they're like you know you see the wisdom in their eyes and you're like oh man like these people are reading my stuff and they're going to find my my life partner and then it says thank you we're reviewing your stuff um it'll take some time literally months will go by maybe
Obviously not great for conversion, but it's more about the vibe. Months go by, you forget about it. Then you get a text message that says, hey, we finally found your life partner. We found them. They exist. They live in your city. We have found them. But we are not going to tell you who they are or where they are. You have to find them yourself. We believe that love happens serendipitously.
And so the way you have to find them is that you get text messages or something basically with hints about where they may be. Right. Specifically where. But maybe there's like some probably not much information around there, like what they look like or anything like that. But where is the key point?
So one night you'll get a text that's like, hey, she is most likely going to be at a cocktail bar in Soho with, you know, red trim on the chairs or something. And then when you're deciding where to go with your friends that night, you're like, okay, let's just see if this cocktail bar has anything interesting. You go to the cocktail bar and what's your feeling?
What is your heart telling you when you get to that cocktail bar? Maybe you're like, I don't know if I believe this thing, but part of you wants to believe it. Part of you wants to believe that life partner is there. And you're going to be very open-hearted when you talk to these people at this bar. You may go up to people. You may stay there a little longer. You may hang out and all that stuff.
And I think what's interesting about this, that idea, this idea like, okay, if you're there looking for a life partner or think that somebody could be your life partner there, you're going to treat everybody a lot differently. And it actually doesn't matter if your life partner is there or not.
Because you may actually find somebody you really connect with because you are much more receptive and open and stuff. And so the secret, this may be more of like a social experiment than an actual business idea, but the secret is the council doesn't have to exist. right? The council doesn't have to be real. The life partner doesn't have to exist.
The most important thing is that you need to send your users, these people to the same place to find each other. Right? So like, It'd be even better if you were able to, maybe the more capitalist version of this is like, you find a bunch of characteristics of all these people who take this survey, you know, relative attractiveness, education, interest, all that stuff.
And then every night over on the weekends, you send them people with similar interests to the same bar to just connect and find each other. So what do you think? Social experiment or actual product idea?
Definitely the craziest idea on your list.
and you know here's what i here's what i like about the idea and i think this applies to other ideas too so to me this feels very much like turning something that is not a treasure hunt into a treasure hunt yes and i think that thesis could be applied to a bunch of different spaces so for people listening who are like okay brett's crazy with this dating app idea but
you know, this concept applied to something else. Maybe it's e-commerce, maybe I don't know what it is, but something in another space. I think that's really, really interesting. So that's what I really like about this idea. Yeah.
I think another kind of interesting framework about this is that like, The reason dating feels icky to people is the same reason why the app that helps people hang out when they're bored doesn't work. It's because when it's too on the nose, it's too direct. I'm single. I'm on a dating app to date. There's some negative selection bias and weird feelings.
versus when you're one degree removed and you're like, oh, I'm just going to this party or I'm just going to this conference event, but I actually really want this lower level human thing. It eliminates the negative selection bias. It allows you to have higher status, more desirable people in the mix and all that stuff.
How would you actually go about building something like this? Is this hard to build? Is it easy to build MVP-wise?
The social experiment part's easy. It's like you throw a type form on a website, you blast it out to as many people as you can. Dating related things are usually pretty viral and people are pretty excited about them. I have a friend who runs a dating, like a matchmaking company, and he created this like landing page that shows, like you basically say what your preferences are in somebody.
It's like religion.
age height and then it calculates how many people of those how many people exist and it went super viral it got millions of like impressions millions of views that was your friend that was the person i i saw that around i want someone who's six five and higher works in finance and make more than a hundred thousand dollars a year that's that was your friend it got like yeah tens of millions of impressions
Yeah. What's funny is that was actually the second thing. He had already released this thing and it got all this press, this website you can go to to type those things in. And then they just jumped on the 6.5, whatever that train, that meme train. So it could be as simple as that.
Cool. Yeah. I like, I also, the other thing I like about this idea is people will, you know, you want to start an idea that people will pay for and people are used to paying for dating match made it match matchmaking. And, uh, so if it, if it does go viral, like who knows what you have on your hands, it could be really bad.
Sweet. All right. Ready to go into enterprise land.
Okay. Yeah, I could, I could, yeah, I could shift gears and do a huge, uh, you know, right. I, yeah, let's, let's see what you got.
Okay. This is a very like half-baked idea, but it's, um, something I've been feeling lately is there are a lot of CRMs and marketing automation platforms that kind of rely on having extremely high quality data so that you can segment and do various marketing campaigns or all this various stuff. Um,
And I think, and obviously LLMs have kind of unlocked a new way to extract data from unstructured information like podcasts, YouTube videos, like all of this stuff. And so I used to work at Clearbit. Clearbit was a, it's like a data enrichment company. It's an API. You plug in a domain. It gives you a bunch of data points about the company. You plug in an email address.
It gives you a bunch of data points about a person. What was hard about Clearbit is there's all this work to get each of those data points perfect. And it took a really long time. And then at the end of the day, you only had those data points. You didn't have anything else. If you wanted something more unique and special, you couldn't get it. And so...
what I'm imagining is kind of like a new kind of clear bit, which is like a flexible knowledge graph API, where you basically put in a company name or something, and then you list the data points that you're looking for.
And then, you know, you will have indexed, you know, you'll have embedded like all podcasts, LinkedIn, you know, you can buy a total, you can buy a LinkedIn data dump if you want it. embed LinkedIn, you embed a bunch of tweets, you embed, uh, all these news sources and stuff like that. And then use that to kind of fill these data points on the fly for people.
So if you want it to like doing it, do a marketing automation push using this API for like, um, people in New York or people who said they were going to come to the tech crunch or the New York tech week, um, you know, how would you find that data through an API like this? Because it would have all that information kind of embedded automatically.
And then how do you charge for it? And how would you actually, how would you actually build something like this? Like, how do you go from idea to execution?
Yeah. I mean, so building is pretty straightforward because you're basically like putting everything in a data warehouse and embedding everything.
terms of the actual nitty-gritty ai stuff beyond that that's beyond my pay grade but yeah i think for charging it's pretty easy you can charge per enrichment so clearbit and others cost like up to 50 cents per per contact enrichment so you know you do the math 100 000 contact enrichments is 50 000 which can be pretty lucrative.
But I think the key with this would be to charge a little less than Zoom Info or another player and then probably have just more flexibility and interesting data and stuff to provide.
And is this a venture-backed idea or do you think this could be bootstrapped?
It could be either. I would probably want to do it bootstrapped because... Data is a really hard, hard space. Like, you know, zoom in just data. If you're selling data, it's just a tough business because it's always going to be about like, is this data better than other data? And you can get some of this stuff off the ground pretty easily.
I have friends who run, there are a handful of these startups that have popped up that do some sort of data enrichment stuff. in the post AI world and they have gotten to, you know, 20, 30 K MRR pretty quickly just from basically selling CSVs. That's insane. Yeah. It depends on what's in the CSV. It's good stuff.
And they're using LLMs and AI, you know, for some of that.
Yeah. Yeah. So apparently when Clearbit added LLMs to their whole mix, they had data points that went from being like 30% accurate to like 95% accurate. So pretty big, pretty obvious opportunity. And I think the other thing is as more people are building apps and that need data underlying it.
Like for example, like if you're building a, if we're building this app, we talked about the beginning, the conference app, wouldn't it be nice if we had a bio for everyone, if we had their social profiles, if we had other dynamic information about them in this app, you wouldn't be able to do that. Um, there's no affordable API for that right now.
Yeah. And the data is out there. No one wants to put it in. It's just, you just need a little enrichment in your life. I think this works really well for certain groups and certain very specific niches. What do you think are two, three, four, five specific groups that would use something like this?
Well, I think what's interesting is the data companies are not incentivized to go after a lot of niches. So if you wanted to start a Sri Lankan real estate CRM or market automation platform, and you needed to have a lot of information about the building location and the number of rooms or all that stuff... you would need to build that data set yourself or hope that users input it.
And the magic of this is that because you're using LLMs, because you're kind of crawling the web a little bit, or you're finding data sets online or in other places that you can point LLMs to, is that you can do, you can target almost any niche much better than these kind of like incumbents can. So yeah, Sri Lankan real estate, like, I don't know.
I don't know why I thought of that. That's the task. If you're listening to this, figuring out what are these groups, who needs enrichment, who's going to be willing to pay for it. But you're right. This is an obvious idea. And I love this idea. I sit this idea greatly just because you are right with incumbents aren't. They're not going to be everywhere. And that's the opportunity.
That's why you don't raise money for something like this. You build it profitably. And, you know, you could get to a situation where you're doing one to three million ARR or something like that and you go to a Clearbit or someone like that and you sell the business.
What do you think, you know, what sort of multiples, you know, you've worked in the Google M&A world, like what sort of multiples are some of these businesses getting?
Not much. So, like, it depends on the approach, like, The Clearbit acquisition, Clearbit was acquired by HubSpot. And the rumor is that it was not the most amazing price because HubSpot didn't value the existing business. HubSpot is not in a data enrichment business.
They bought it so that they can have data enrichment out of the box in their own CRM and have this kind of competitive mode based on that. So they bought it for the capabilities and they bought it for the data, not the business. So When you are selling a company, like you need to know what the acquirer wants in your company.
The best deals are ones where they're buying the whole business because that means you're getting traditional, like whatever the relevant multiple is based on public comps, other acquisitions and other kind of fundraisers. But if they're not buying it based on the business, then it's kind of like, I don't know, It's totally random sometimes.
Yeah, I think this is probably one of those ideas that you might just want to cash flow it. And if you get an unreasonably good offer from one of these platforms, let them come to you. Don't run a process yourself because you're right. The multiples, especially with dependence on some of these LLMs, might not be amazing.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Brett, you crushed it.
Wait, you want to do this last? It's not a startup idea. It's just a framework.
Okay, let's do a bonus framework with Brett.
Bonus framework. All right. So it's called the Enterprise Workflow Idea Startup Formula or Startup Idea Formula. Enterprise Workflow Startup Idea Formula. All right. So you're going to use this formula to come up with any idea startup idea that can be a venture scale billion dollar company. Every five years, you can rebuild this company. I'm salivating.
I'm salivating right now.
Okay, so you basically take any workflow that a professional does. So like designers design, like marketers do email marketing, salespeople live in a CRM, engineers have ticket management system. You see where I'm going with this, right? Like documents, like all of this type of stuff, all these like core workflow tools, right? need to get rebuilt every five to 10 years. Why is that?
Because the technology gets better, right? People always want the same thing. They want it to be beautiful. They want it to look like the tools that they use with their consumer products. They want it to have the latest and greatest technology and all that stuff. And the reality is incumbents are never going to be able to adapt quickly to these changes and stuff. This is the linear formula.
Linear didn't build anything. a brain-exploding ticket management system. They built a ticket management system that was simpler, number one, more beautiful, number two, more targeted, at a very specific niche, number three, more performant. And that's it. That's it. They are killing Trello. They're killing Jira. they're going to replace those in even large enterprises as well.
And they didn't have to build the craziest, most advanced stuff. It's not like a, it's not like 10 dimensional chess kind of product, visionary stuff. It's like literally just build it better. So you can do this with most types of things. It's even easier when you focus on a niche.
So if you wanted to build a CRM for real estate people, like there's a CRM for real estate people called follow a boss. That's like 15 years old. If you wanted to replace them, you could just following kind of this, this formula.
This is a gift. You've given people a literal gift.
Pretty great.
It really works. I'm going to write that down and I appreciate you sharing that with everyone. Brett, this has been an absolute pleasure. Where could people learn more about you?
LinkedIn and Twitter, I would say, or maybe the newsletter. So LinkedIn is slash bgoldstein3. Twitter is thatguybg. And then the newsletter is homescreen.news.
And if you've made it this far in the pod, if you're on YouTube, least you can do is subscribe, give us a like, comment if you like this episode. And if you're listening on audio, just follow and review and share this with everyone you know, because there's a lot of gold in here. Thanks a lot, Brett. It's been real. Catch you later. Thanks, Greg.