The Startup Ideas Podcast - $1M Startup Trends in 2024, With Michael Karnjanaprakorn

Episode Date: January 11, 2024

I'm joined by Michael Karnjanaprakorn, former CEO of Skillshare. We talk about the biggest startup trends that will shape 2024: IRL community spaces, AI educational agents, and more.📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free: https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ 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 MICHAEL ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/mikekarnjWebsite: https://www.mikekarnj.com/

So I've always wanted to build a holding company for productivity apps. And I understand that productivity apps, the propensity of pay is very low. I could give you all the reasons not to do it, but I just like productivity apps. And a lot of those apps have also just kind of been dormant. And they're probably making millions of dollars. You got to think about like what works on YouTube. It's always like lifestyle, health fitness, making money and productivity. I think from like a playbook standpoint, making sure that either you're the content creator

or they're a content creator you can partner with for distribution. and then if it's digital businesses having some natural knack for product, because that's going to be where a lot of the value add is going to be. Mike is back on the show. You're one of my favorite people, and you brought some ideas on this doc, so we're going to go through it. And I'm just reading through this, and it's just, it's getting me stoked. You brought some heat.

I appreciate it. So let's start with this viral tweet that you had. Yeah. Let's do it. I thought it'd be fun. You know, it's the new year. And your last newsletter was on trends or anti-trend. So that would be fun to just throw some of those out there. I've been thinking through a few, just kind of riff on them.

So I wrote this tweet about a month ago. And I wrote it on a whim. So I took most of the year off from Twitter. And around November, December, I was like, maybe I should open up the app and, you know, just see what's going on. And this idea that was kind of percolating was around living your friends. And I wrote in on a whim. I was, you know, I was going to delete it after a minute because it didn't get any likes. And I said, you know what, let's just leave it up.

And then I came back a few hours later. I was like, whoa. And the tweet reads, I noticed a trend where friends are moving next to each other. It can be the same apartment floor, neighborhood block, or 100 acre rural area divided into lots. Weekly dinners and impromptu walks are more of the norm. We used to prioritize finding the perfect house. But now we're prioritizing being close to our friends and Q.

your own community. And I think the reason it took off from reading all the comments, obviously I got trolled. You know, anytime anything goes viral, I think the counterintuitive idea in there is that most people, as they get older, when they start having a family, they move near their family. And this is kind of like a counter trend to that, which is moving as close as possible to your friends. So I started to see this happening in Austin, San Francisco, even where I live. So that was pretty interesting.

So Adam Newman, we works bankrupt. Yeah. Yeah. And Adam Newman, of course, raised $300 million to go build a business called Flow. And they're opening their first building, I think, in Fort Lauderdale around here soon. And it's basically the same concept as we work, like this idea around like communal space, you get like free coffee, like amenities like that. but around residential living. Also, he's no longer doing long-term leases.

He's buying the buildings. Got it. Obviously, he's learned from his mistakes. And we actually had at WeWork, we had a version of this. It was called We Live. And there was about four or five different buildings where people would come in and you'd pay rent. Let's say it was $4,000 a month. This is in New York City.

$4,000 a month. and you got access to like a bunch of community activities. You get access to a co-working space. You got, you know, within the building. You got access to food. Like, you know. And it was this, it was, it's, it was this sort of product for like 20 something people moving to a new city where they had like a community in it. What do you think of that idea?

Where do you think that will go? I think that's, I think that's a little different because it's a company curating the community for you. And I think what's happening now is people are being a lot more intentional. So I was chatting with my friend, Safuan, and he said in San Francisco, his group of friends are literally taking over a whole floor in an apartment building. So as soon as like an apartment freeze up, they hop on it and they have like a whole waiting list of people that are trying to move in. And it's about curating your own community versus having other people curate it for you.

So I think that's what's happening. Or it could be something as small as, you know, like splitting a town, Brooklyn townhome where you live on the bottom floor and best friend lives on the top floor. And something nice about the impromptu going for a walk or just running to each other. You know, when you have kids, if you need to run somewhere, they can watch your kids for an hour. Just having that prime, you know, what community, like literally pre-internet or 100 centuries ago, what it was kind of like. And I think there's a whole trend of people moving towards it. And I start seeing different variations of this, right? So there's weekly dinners.

So people just host weekly dinners, which is kind of straightforward. And then the easier version next to that is live next door to your best friend. Like literally, you pick a neighborhood together. You just do it. You become roommates or you live next to each other. And then they're like taking over a floor, which is a little bit more organized. And then I'm starting to seeing people like building a village where, you know, they take over a neighborhood.

They take a house. And they make that into the communal space, kind of similar to We Live. It has like a community garden, a spa, you know, like a, you know, they have meetings. They vote, you know, there's dues. So it becomes more organized. They vote on who comes in and who's out. So there's different levels. And I'm starting to see that happening more and more.

And I find that pretty interesting. So I agree with this trend. I think it's happening and it's only going to get bigger and bigger. If you're, you know, listening to this and you want to start a business based on this trend, And what sort of, how do you, how do you build something in this space? That's a good question. I mean, I thought about approaching it less as a startup or a business, but running a neighborhood village as a business, right?

So I thought it would be fun to play it as like a mini developer, right? So rather than building these track homes of cookie cutter, you kind of go in and you take over a block and you become really intentional about it. And I thought that would be fun. but it would require a lot of work. You would have to be super passionate about it. And you would have to have a huge group of friends that would want to do it and et cetera. But that's, I feel like a more natural way to do it.

I feel like if it turns into a business, kind of like a we live, it becomes a little forced. And then it appeals to like the 20-something year olds. But if I were to start a business, I would run it kind of like a nonprofit type of vibe where, you know, I would be super intentional. I have all the cool things that I would curate. I would have like-minded people in that community. And I don't know, it sounds kind of idealistic, but walking down the street, you bump into your friends and their friends and you have these weekly dinners and things along those lines. But I do value privacy too.

So I wouldn't personally do it. But I would probably opt for weekly, monthly dinners and live next to my best friend versus the village. But that could be a cool business like, slash, you know, side hustle, like project for, for most people if they wanted to, to approach that. I was with a well-known entrepreneur a few weeks ago. And he, shockingly, it was the first time I had met him. He's a tech entrepreneur. And I was like, what's interesting these days?

And he said real estate. I was shocked. I was shocked. I was like. What was his reason? So he's just like cash flow. He's like 2024 year of cash flow. So I think he, he's raised a lot of money building venture back stuff.

and he's just like a bit jaded a little bit of it. And he's, he recently got married and, and he's having kids. And so I think he got really into real estate. So he asked me, he said, if you were to start a real estate business, what,

what would you do? And I was off the top of my head. And this is what I told him. I said, because we're in Miami. I said, there's this thing called the Bright Line. The Bright Line is this high speed train that just came out here. And what that does is it opens up, a bunch of, like, you can get from Miami to Orlando in like three hours,

or you can get from, you know, my place to Palm Beach in like 50 minutes. Yeah. And there's probably an opportunity to build a new town. Oh, that idea. Yeah. And my thesis is there's only one, like, cool, this can get me in trouble. But there's only one real cool. one real cool city in Florida, and it's Miami.

So I'm sorry, but, you know. I would actually argue there's zero cool cities in Florida. There's between zero and one cool cities in Florida. Exactly. So I think that there's an opportunity to build like an art sort of inspired creative town, you know, that isn't, that's kind of like Marfa, Texas. I think that is a great idea. You like that?

The ultimate business is taxes, you know, like tax citizens and then funnel that into some cool infrastructure that you would build. Exactly. I think I read that is not, I mean, I might be wrong about this. We should hit up chat GPT to ask this, but I don't think it's that difficult to start a town in the middle of nowhere. I think you just need a small critical mass of a few hundred people. and boom, you can literally create a town.

Exactly. And for those of those of you don't know Marfa, Marfa, Texas, I've never been there, but basically they've got this really cool prodig store in the middle of nowhere. Have you been there? I haven't, but I've seen a lot of people visit it, and it just seems so random to me, why this town in Texas is a huge art destination. Yeah, it's an art destination. and a lot of people are trying to move there.

And I think there's an opportunity. Like you, you know, he was like, so, so this founder is like, so how would you actually do it? And I was like, well, the first thing is I would start by building the community online. So I would create content around it. And there would have to be like some, you know, museum or some like prodig store in the middle of nowhere, like some art piece that like would attract this group of people. But the beauty is you don't need to start a town. and spend millions of dollars on the town initially, you can just use the internet to build demand initially.

Yeah, I like that idea. And then you can attract like-minded people that share the same values or principles. And then you can kind of search for where this destination is going to be. I would imagine most people would probably either live there or co-own a vacation home there. Right. Exactly. That's the other benefit of it being in Florida as like, you know, North Easterners love coming down here during the winter.

Yeah. So if you can sell them culture plus a curated community plus, you know, vitamin D, you're looking good. Yeah, that's like just a traditional commercial real estate developer in a way. It kind of reminds me of windwood walls where that was all created, I think I read on the wall there by a developer that wanted to revitalize that neighborhood and bring art and culture into it. That's right. Yeah. So you can kind of, I would imagine if you own hundreds or thousands of acres of the middle of the middle of, I don't even know if that exists in Florida. But yeah, you can make anything into a destination that people would travel to and own all the land and start selling

that off. And if you wanted to really be ambitious, you could, you know, turn it into a real town with the government and mayor and city council members and whatnot. Yeah, I think it's like a startup, right? Like you don't know where it could really go. But I think, The beauty is, and Bology talks about this too, right? He calls it the network state. Yeah. I haven't read the book, but the concept around it is similar where you, you know, you do attract. You can attract people online.

You bring them to a place. And it could grow from there. I think this is a great idea. Somebody should totally, I bet you someone's already doing this somewhere. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. And I think the other thing that I like about this idea, like the why now of it is the bright line has just opened up.

So for Florida, yeah. For Florida specifically. Well, also the loneliness epidemic or, you know, where that's, that's turning into a big, a bigger and bigger thing where people are becoming more and lonely and they're craving these IRL interactions. So I think that's probably another why now, which is people are getting addicted to their phones. They're not, they're lonely and they're looking for a community, either friends or people that are like-minded. Yeah. You know, I think what you're seeing with what Saffuan is seeing in San Francisco where all their friends are grabbing a floor and this, you know, that's a trend. But also this trend around like, I want to feel more connected.

Yeah. To, you know, the city I live in, the community I live in. I think you're going to see, like my prediction is you're going to see a lot of new towns and new cultural centers being created over the next 10 years. Oh, I think that'll be sick. I would totally buy real estate there. I mean, look at look at what happened with Summit series, like the story of Summit series. That's a great one. You know, they didn't they buy like a ski resort and then sold off each lot for whatever a million bucks? Yeah, so the story there was it started off as they used to throw these events with like well-known people.

And they were like young 20-somethings at the time. They'd like cold call Richard Branson and all these people and somehow convinced some of them to come and join them in Park City, Utah for these events. And then they outgrew that. And then they got a cruise ship and they invited people. And then eventually they were like, let's get into the real estate business. because the founders, mom, I think, ran biz now, started BizNow media, which was a network of real estate websites. And from that, they decided to buy, I think it was like $40 or $50 million. They bought a mountain, Powder Mountain in Utah.

And they sold plots of land. Yeah. There's something so simple about this business, right? It's just real estate and community. It's kind of like the oldest playbook for business. So circle back to answer question. If someone wanted to do side hustle project, they could do a smaller version of this within their own community. But if they want to tackle it as a business, it's like the old tried and true tested business model that has existed since the beginning of time, which is developing land. But within that, I think the other countertrend was what you're saying around. A lot of entrepreneurs are kind of burned out from the start. startup cycle and moving towards new types of businesses. So I'm starting to see that happen as well. So what are your thoughts on that? What type of businesses are you saying?

Well, like real estate is a great example. But I think what will happen is the thought that comes in mind for me is a lot of new funding mechanisms are going to start popping up. And I think we'll start seeing the one and done round. And I think we'll start seeing dividend issuing start, you know, startups that pay a dividend because not every company is going to break out. So I think we'll start seeing a lot of people taking swings. And if it doesn't really, if it takes off for whatever reason, they, they can go to the trish around. And if it doesn't, they could go the alternative route. So I think that will be an alternative path that I think a lot more founders will kind of embark on, especially as they hear stories from, you know,

founders that are kind of trying something different that have done that path. But, and I think with the rise of AI and hard tech, I think a lot of funding will go towards really hard tech problems. And then there'll be this kind of like middle zone for everything else. Yeah. So the dividends thing is real. I think startups plus dividends like never, you know, that was then that was like oil and water.

Right. So that didn't exist. And you know, in the vocabulary of a startup up until, you know, you know who's really doing a good job at professing this is Sahel from Gomrod. Yeah.

That's where I first read about it. I thought was brilliant. Yeah. So what's his, do you know his startup that he has in the dividend space? Gumroad. No, he has a,

he's involved. Oh, yeah. Flexile. That's what it is. Flexile.com. Scale your business without full time commitments. I'm on the website right now.

So it's kind of, it's not just dividends, but basically flexile lets you find onboard and pay qualified contractors to help grow your business, but it allows you to offer dividends as a part of that. Yeah. Like you said, cash flow. I think 2024 and beyond is going to be cash is going to be what people want. Yeah. So I think there's a ton of opportunity. So, okay, so let's look at that. So that's the trend, right? Dividends is the trend. Cash flow is the trend for startups. You know, you could go and build a startup that does really well and offers dividends.

or you can do picks and, picks and shovels for the space like Sahel's doing. Yeah. I think there will be a lot of startups that are probably in the $100K to $10 million revenue range that where this would work really well for them. You know, like maybe they hit a ceiling, maybe they can't grow. Maybe the founders are tired and they want to move on. So I could see a lot of acquisitions.

A lot of, I think 2023 was boring businesses was kind of like the thing with boomers are going to be retiring. so they need to transfer their businesses to the younger generation. And if you tech enable it, you know, you can make a lot of money doing that and rolling them up. And I think that will work. That will start happening. And I think 2024 will be digital businesses. So SaaS, content, software, apps.

I think that range between 100K and 10 million in revenue. I think it's going to be a huge, like a huge M&A activity. I think we'll see a lot more of that in 2024. Yeah, my take on the boring businesses, like, laundromats and self-storage is, yeah, the idea of the cash flow of those businesses are great, but like the actual running of those businesses is not so great. Yes. I think a lot of people have learned that in this year or last year. Yeah. Yeah. So just in terms of like, if I were to start a digital business versus a sweaty business, let's say, a boring business,

like from a from a time commitment and from a leverage and scale perspective, much prefer digital business. And so I think what you're going to start to see is like, I mean, I guess the price for an acquisition might go up on the small scale, right, on places like Acquire.com. Yeah.

I think we'll start seeing that. I think we'll start seeing some new financing that'll go into it. A lot of activity. I mean, prices will probably. go up. I think we'll start seeing founders going back in and buying companies because they realize how hard it is to go from zero one and how much luck and timing factor into it. I think we'll just start seeing a lot more activity. I think we'll start seeing, you know, not just within those businesses, but startups that are kind of failing, merging with other startups that are failing to survive.

I think we'll just see a lot of MNA activity. And it won't be big tech company buying small startup. It will be a lot of smaller businesses selling or merging together. I think we'll just see a lot more activity there. So, you know, what, what ideas do you have? If you were going to start one of these digital businesses in 2024, what would you do? I'll throw this out there. Yeah. So I've always wanted to build like a holding company for productivity apps. And I understand that productivity apps, the the propensity of pay is very low. You know, I could give you you all the reasons not to do it, but I just like productivity apps. So you have Microsoft Office has one subscription and you can access all their tools. Yeah. I kind of want to do that for productivity

apps. So I would go off and buy, I would start rolling up like a habits app or a journaling app. And then you would just have this whole portfolio of apps and charge one subscription. So hopefully the churn would be low because you get access to all the apps in the ecosystem. But I think you do this for any vertical. And I think if you think about productivity apps, when I look at them, like, oh, I could build that. But then I started thinking, oh, man, going from zero to one to like break out and get all the reviews. And I was like, oh, that's going to take forever. So, you know, I think they're just something fun about going and buying up, buying up a lot of these apps. And a lot of those apps have also just kind of been dormant. You know, they get updated once or twice, you know, a few times a

year. And they're probably making millions of dollars. So that's one idea that I kind of pursued. another one was wait on that so just on that like literally a few minutes ago i got a tweet someone replied to me saying how in my newsletter my end of 2023 newsletter i recommended an app called clack it's like a paid app it's five dollars and it turned your keyboard into like a mechanical keyboard via software yeah so that when you like type on your keyboard clock clock clock clock clock and makes that noise and you can like change you can make it go click click click click or clock clock clock and I just love the satisfying uh sound of it yeah um and I mentioned I think I mentioned that the app isn't perfect but I just still enjoyed it and was the best I can

found someone tweeted just now saying clack app is outdated and there's no sign of dev however it feels good to trick my brain into having a mechanical keyboard rocket chip emoji and that's like a great example of like someone should buy this app. Yeah, I mean, that is a great example, right? Someone should buy it, maintain it, improve it. And I would imagine like you don't need to update it all the time, but just make sure you maintain it. And then that could be a great entry point for someone.

And then they see this whole ecosystem of other apps. And then you can centralize the development, especially with AI now, like to always go for the, the whole ecosystem of apps versus forcing the team to always be improving one when that one might not even need to be updated. And partner with a creator on the distribution, like partner like someone like me. Like I probably sent thousands of sales to this random guy who probably is not even checking his stripe account or whatever. You can think about like what works on YouTube. It's always like lifestyle, health fitness, making money and productivity. You know,

productivity is probably one of like self-improvement. productivity is a huge bucket. So yeah, partner with the creator and you can either buy or build. But buying probably makes the most sense because you could probably get a lot of apps. And if you were going to buy, like, let's just say you weren't you and you didn't have some a nest egg to go and buy some of these apps. Like how would you, how would you go about starting this if you didn't have a lot of money in your bank account? I would probably build. I would I would probably take that route. Yeah, I would probably build because that's probably more within one to control because raising money is going to be very difficult if you don't have like a reputation

or track record. Your email is probably going to get ignored if you kind of just ping them because they'll just be like, who's this random person. So I would probably start off trying to build. Cool. And then how do you think about, you know, if you are going to go build like a holding company for X, like holding company for productivity or something, how do you think about what makes a good niche to go after. That's a good question. I think the thought that comes to mind, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this too, is the other thread that's kind of tied to this, and they do overlap a little bit,

which is extreme product market fit with a super passionate community. People that are into productivity are really into productivity. You could tie this to any hobby, you know, like fishing or golfing or whatever. and I think they're very specific niche products are built for those super, super passionate communities. And that's kind of how I would think about it. So I think one is there needs to be deep, deep, hold co-founder fit, meaning like you're obviously into productivity and you're a productivity nerd.

And you're one of them, you know, I'm one of them too. I'm also a productivity nerd. So that wasn't like a diss or anything. But like very difficult to go and build a holding company for AI products if you're just an outsider. You need to be an insider. Yeah. And then I think the second thing to your point is around like is this is this community, the type of community that goes on the top of rooftops and screams that they love, you know, love trying these apps. And then I think the third thing is, do these people have disposable income?

I think, yeah, disposable income. And yeah, I would agree with that. The other thought that comes to mind is, if you're a creator, kind of similar to what you're doing, is just screaming at the rooftops that you're buying X and Y category. I'm still kind of surprised at no one bought Mint. You know, if the company's going to shut it down, like somebody, I'm assuming someone I could have raised their hand and said, hey, I'll buy it for me. Don't shut it down.

And I would assume those users are super valuable and passionate. I've been using Mint for over a decade. That was surprising. But I think it was owned by Intuit, right? And I think sometimes these big companies, it's like they'd rather just shut it down. Yeah. But that was a huge opportunity. Like, I don't know.

You're right. Like, I don't know. That's a whole other opportunity. which is like reaching out to big companies and they're like their M&A departments being like, hey, my name is Greg Eisenberg. I run M&A at XYZ Ventures. At Greg Eisenbergh Ventures. At Gregisberg.com.

You're going to love it. You know, we'd love to chat with you about, you know, ways to work together and you hop on a call and you're like, okay, like we're buying companies and, you know, even if you aren't buying $100 million companies, you're buying a million dollar companies or something, saying that you, you know, if you had mint, like if you were, if you were able to say I got mint for $25 million or $50 million and you went to Twitter like in other places, like you probably could have raised that money to buy it. Yeah, probably. But certainly back to your saying, I think having some passion in the category of passionate community, they're willing to pay. And I think from like a

playbook standpoint, making sure that either you're the content creator or they're a content creators you could partner with for distribution. And then if it's digital businesses, having some natural knack for product, because that's going to be where a lot of the value add is going to be added. So I think it's a great opportunity for repeat founders. I know that's a small subset, really, really, really small subset. But I would definitely start with one and kind of grow from there. Your background, you know, skill share, so education, online education and Otis, which was fintech acquired by public.com. So you, you know, your background's in education and fintech. Like, in those two industries, like, are you, where do you see the opportunity in those

two spaces specifically? And why aren't you, why aren't you doing it? I'm not doing it because I'm, similar to what you write about, you know, like, I don't want to jump on that treadmill again. But within education, I think there's a huge opportunity for AI tutoring. And it also overlaps with thin tech too with education. I think there is going to be a new wave, I don't know, like ed tech 5.0. But I do think everyone is going to have kind of like a like an assistant or an agent is I guess what they're calling the AI community. But like for AI tutoring, for example, like I just want to learn video editing. But I don't want, you know, I, I started Skillshare, but I don't sit through a 50-hour course.

And I don't want to sit on these nightly cohort. I just want to ping someone like, hey, how do I do this? I want them to hit me back really quickly. I want to upload the video clip I edited and I want them to analyze it and then send me to the right places to improve it or tell me how to do it exactly. So instant feedback, I think is going to be a huge thing. I think it's very difficult to probably pull that off. But you could either do like a more general one, you could do it for verticals, like skill. based learning or language learning. I could see that being a thing. I think that overlaps also with

therapy. Like I think it would be really cool to just talk, you know, I got, I got triggered by this moment. Here's what happened. Here's what I was thinking. And it would ask me questions back. And it would like kind of help me rethink about how he reacted. And then also overlaps with like work assistants. So I think there's just going to be a whole trend around assistance. But within education, I think like a tutoring slash coach or something, you know, something like that is like, I would love to just have one for all the things I'm working on. Yeah. So, yeah, I'm hearing people talk about it as assistants, agents, characters has been the recent one.

And so I do think that there's going to be a huge opportunity to create characters or agents or assistants. And I also think that doing deals with creators, so being like for video, let's say, video editing. Like, how do you do a deal with Casey Nestat so you can, like, license his name for that? I think it's an interesting idea. That's going to be pretty cool, especially if you can, if it is him that you're getting tutored from. Yeah. And it's like his brain or his technique or his philosophy that got uploaded.

Exactly. So I think the new thing creators do instead of like courses, like asynchronous courses or cohort courses. It's pay for $10 a month. Like, you can learn from me. And I'm constantly updating the model and fine-tuning it and you can learn directly from me. And the best part about learning from a character like that is you actually have to do the work to learn, meaning like you're actually video editing in real time.

You've got the software up. And when you have a problem, that's when you hit them up. So I think it's probably, I would bet that it's probably like a really effective way of learning because it's learning by doing, not learning by viewing. Yeah, learning by doing, I think you're right, is the most effective way to learn, especially if you could do it and learn from others too in real time. What are the other trends there you're seeing within AI that you find interesting? Right now, it's really this characters.

Like if, how does that manifest? Well, I think, okay, what is a character? What could a character do? It could either entertain you or it could teach you. Yeah. So if we believe that characters are going to be a big part of how people consume media and education, 10%, 20%, 30%, then there's going to be tons of paid monthly memberships essentially to these characters that I'm going to have in my pocket, similar to how we had when the app store was created. So my brainpower right now is thinking about, you know, in the AI space at least, if I want to create, like which characters make the most sense to be created and how do they manifest itself?

And then when does it make most sense to go prime time also? Like, are we ready for that? Or does it make sense to like kind of be, you know, be behind the curtains and just iterating on it, iterating on it? My gut says that like we're pretty close to prime time, but we're not there yet. What do you think is the like the use case that most people would want when the time is, right or like well i think i i i i i think i i think i think there's no question that so the trends that i'm seeing are like yeah girlfriends education and entertainment and then the other i think will be big in 2024 is just interfaces so if you look at um like pdf dot ai so you can

And like basically, if you check PDF.com. Yeah. Chat with any PDF document from legal agreements to financial reports. PDF. It brings all your documents to life. You can ask questions, get summaries, find info and more. That's pretty cool. Exactly.

So the dude who started this actually is really cool. He talks about like everything. He builds in public and he talks about all his revenue and how he's doing. And a couple of months ago, chat GPT. allowed the ability to talk with a PDF. So you would think that it was done for this guy. But it wasn't because the search traffic for PDF and AI is probably still pretty high. And it's purpose built for chatting with PDFs.

Like there's certain things that chat GPT will not be able to be amazing at. So the interface for chatting with the PDF is specific. to this use case. So I think more niche specific use cases, interfaces are really interesting. And from like, we're doing a lot of that work with, you know, our innovation agency where we're designing a lot of these interfaces. It's pretty cool. And thinking about it.

And that's sort of a bonus of running a design agency is you, you basically, you learn a lot about, you know, okay, how do I design AI interfaces? and you learn those problems. And so that's that's sort of another reason why I like being in the space. Yeah. I can see that happening. And then the obvious company that could be built around that is kind of like a Shopify for creating your own character or I'm just thinking from a creator use case.

It's like being able to upload all my videos, everything I've ever written and basically create my own character and charge for that and have this app or software just make that dead simple or it's like drag and drop yeah and i think in the past i would be like i want to create the shopify but now i'm kind of like no no no i just want to create the like the clavio um i want to build the app on top of that you know i think why why what change your thinking from building this SaaS business towards building something because that's counter to what it was like the two 2010s like don't build on other people's yeah platforms build the platform that's right I know and but at the same at the same time I've changed man I've changed yeah at the same time it's like there's not that

much venture funding happening right now but it feels to me at least 90% of it's going to AI yeah and most of it is going to platforms like this so I just feel like I won't be able to compete in that space, but where I can compete is in what I do best, which is like building, you know, building community, picking niches, building great interfaces, and coming up with things that are going to spread among people is where I want to focus my energy. And yes, could I get shut down by any of these platforms at any given time, absolutely. That's the problem with being dependent on, on any platform.

But if you don't take any outside funding and you build it to generate cash flow from day one, it's just a risk. Yeah, I think it also ties to what you're saying about style points too. Yeah, exactly. Like, you're just building something cool with cool people and having fun and making money while you're doing it. It's all, it's like, it's like 100x style points versus. the alternative. Exactly. So I think there's going to be, I think some people are going to have

portfolios that, you know, portfolios of these characters. Just like how you saw people having portfolios of apps and software, that is going to extend to characters. That's going to be pretty cool. Yeah. Scary but cool. Scary but cool. Scary but cool. Scary coming from the old guy, you know, like the old dude. The gray hair dude. There anything, I'll, I'll solve the list you want to cover. Okay. So I had one, one last thing I wanted to get your feedback on. It's an idea. Yeah, let's do it. So it's related to AI. It's haggle.a.i. That's what I'd call it. Okay. And it's basically a character. It doesn't exist yet, but that's what I'd call it. Okay. And I'm really into domains now. Like, I really feel like, yeah, you've got to, I'm really into buying, buy the domain, you know, haggle.

dot AI and it's worth it and it's basically no one likes to haggle with their vendors you know we have vendors that we pay thousands of dollars a month software I'm talking about specifically and we're not going to like we just like add to cart and it scales as our team grows but now our team is like 60 plus people and all of a sudden we're paying thousands of dollars a month and we probably should renegotiate it but we don't. What if there was a character that, you know, did the haggling for you, powered by AI? I would say powered by like ex-FBI negotiators that I train this model to be the best negotiators of all time. And it gets smarter as the other side gets smarter with, you know, like, and it just gets smarter and smarter, smarter. I think it can negotiate anything,

but you could wedge into, well, one, I like the idea a lot, but you could definitely wedge into renegotiating your software. We often forget about it, but do not pay is like the OG, it's like the OG AI software company. Do you know, do not, do not do not pay? No. Do not pay uses AI to help you fight big corps corporations, protect your privacy, find hidden money and beat bureaucracy. So I could fight parking tickets, customer service, bank fees, government money or owed, um, car repossession. city, I mean, the list is hundreds of things that they can help you with.

Last I heard they were doing around $5 million a month of MR. Wow. So this is a, and I don't think they raise much money. Yeah, I'd like the idea of being able to negotiate or haggle anything, like Hagel X. Yeah. I like that idea a lot. And I would assume that it would come up with a set of like a process for how it would do how they would do each one.

Yes. And you just kind of pick. And as long as you're saving people, making people money or saving people money, they'll always pay for it. Exactly. Yeah. And do not pay, I think, is the validation for this. So they've raised $10 million and doing at least $5 million a month in revenue.

And I think the market for this, as people get just more comfortable with AI characters and AI doing tasks is only going to get bigger. Yeah. What are your thoughts on current companies moving into AI to defend against new companies that are trying to use AI to do what they're doing? I'm trying to wrap my head around like that turf battle that's about to emerge where I do not pay, maybe didn't raise a lot of money. They make a lot of money. They probably have a great team, great culture. You know, they could probably move pretty quickly into the space and defend, I guess, their territory if you want to use like a war analogy.

But what are your thoughts on how that's going to play out? I was talking to Eric Reese about this from the Lean Startup on my recent pods. If people haven't heard that episode, check it out. We were talking about this idea around in terms of M&A, maybe the move is you actually buy an existing company that doesn't have a lot of AI. And then you just AIify them. And you create like a like that's the roll up strategy. I think that's pretty smart.

I like that a lot. Yeah. So I think that, yeah, I mean, it's, you know, Facebook wasn't a mobile company. It was a desktop company and now they do, now it's mobile, right? Like, I think there's AI is going to be ubiquitous, just like cloud is ubiquitous and social is ubiquitous. So if it's going to be ubiquitous, then everyone's going to go and it's just because, you know, it'll make the experience better than I think there's tons of opportunity to, to partner with. existing platforms. Yeah. I think that makes a lot of sense. Like this use case has a clear like AI strategy or maybe some other apps don't. But this one has a clear clear one for sure. Would you buy or build this idea if you had to start? You know, because there are probably companies that are just human driven that just do this manually where they call and do it, you know, through the phone or email. And then there's software like this and then there's like to building it. I think I would prefer to buy. it.

Yeah, because of all the data. Like, that's the other thing is, like, the existing companies have a lot of data. And ultimately, like, the most valuable AI companies are going to be the ones with the most valuable data. And they're just using AI to use that data and charge for it. So, you know, would love to buy it. But I also think that there's, I mean, there's an opportunity to go from the ground up as well.

But if I were to do it, just. like how do not pay started with just parking tickets do not pay parking tickets and now have expanded to like 30 different product offerings i would think about what is something small enough that i can do to learn in the space and get really and train the model to get really good at it that's also very viral do not pay parking tickets is a very viral idea that can get a lot of coverage people don't like paying who who like seeing a parking ticket it's the worst right so what is the equivalent in in haggle. this fictitious idea what's what's what's a service that people um or what's something that a toll

or a fine or taxes um yeah yeah yeah i like your approach with haggle around companies and paying for software i think there's nothing more annoying than when you get when you check your credit card statement and your company are like, who signed up for this app or where does this huge invoice come from? And then you're saying, oh, it's the app that we use. But because we're bigger now, they just start charging us enterprise. There's also this really interesting shift happening in AI with pricing models. So Intercom has this product called Finn. And Finn's usage is measured in resolutions. This ensures that only that you only pay when Finn does what you care about most resolving a customer's question. A resolution is counted when following the last AI answer or

custom answer in a conversation. The customer confirms the answer provided is satisfactory or exits the conversation without requesting further existence. So basically each resolution, they charge 99 cents for. So I love that. It's like aligning our incentives immediately with haggle. If you haggle the, I mean, you could even do it like per resolution or just a percentage of the money you saved the other. Percentage of the money saved. Oh, yeah.

That's so simple. No brainer. Yeah. You should totally do it. Someone likes this idea, holler at your boy. Mike, where can people find you learn more about your great ideas? Mike Carnge on Twitter, Mike Carnge.com for a website. I just launched a podcast a few months ago.

You can search TKS or the Karnshinaapricorn show on Spotify, Apple, etc. I listen. I listened to it. I love it. And I was doing a workout today and watching you on my elliptical on video. Same. Yeah. I listened to your 2023 review, which is pretty good.

I appreciate it, man. All right. You're welcome back anytime. Thanks for having me. If people like this episode, tag us on Twitter and tell us what you like, what you didn't like. And thanks for tuning into where it happens. This is where the ideas happen. So we love to see it. Peace.