The Startup Ideas Podcast - 3 AI app ideas that are goldmines (and how to grow them)

Episode Date: December 9, 2024

In this episode, I am joined by Dan Shipper, co-Founder and CEO of Every, as we explore a wide range of AI startup ideas and business opportunitiesTimestamps:00:00 - Intro01:12 - Startup Idea 1: Advanced Voice Notes 08:59 - Startup Idea 2: N of 1: Personalized Data Science Marketplace 16:12 - Startup Idea 3: Great Books Reimagined28:28 - Trend to Watch: Voice-First Products 34:33 - Distribution Strategy for AI Apps1) Advanced Voice Notes Imagine voice notes you can actually talk to!- Record your thoughts while walking• AI creates smart summaries• Team members can "interview" the recording• Get deeper context without endless follow-up questionsThe future of media might be media you can talk to.2) N of 1: Personalized Data Science Marketplace Remember Netflix's $1M algorithm challenge?Now ANYONE can be a data scientist with GPT-4.- Post personal/business datasets• Set bounties for predictions• Perfect for health tracking• New way to do personalized scienceMarket size: Think Kaggle but for everyone.3) Great Books Reimagined Classic literature is valuable but hard to digest.The opportunity:• AI-powered modern translations• Format classics for specific audiences• Create multimedia versions• Add interactive elementsTwo markets:- Students (massive TAM)- Business intellectuals (high willingness to pay)4) The Luxury AI Paradox Key insight: As AI makes things cheaper, human-made becomes luxury.Examples:• Broadway shows• Handmade clothing• Mechanical watchesOpportunity: Look for what AI is making cheap, then create premium human-made alternatives.5) Voice-First Products Huge trend: Kids growing up with voice interfaces (Apple Watch + Siri)Opportunities:• Voice-first travel booking• Conversational commerce• Voice-native discovery enginesTAM: Could capture 1-5% of existing markets just by being voice-first.6) Distribution Strategy for AI Apps Dan's approach:• Build media presence first• Target like-minded audience• Use early adopters for feedback• Start with YouTube → funnel to email• Product-led growth after initial tractionWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideasLCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.coFIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND DAN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/danshipperLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/danshipper/Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@EveryInc/videosEvery: https://every.toSpiral: https://spiral.computer/Sparkle: https://makeitsparkle.co

This episode is with Dan Shipper, who's incubating a bunch of AI startup ideas. And he gives a few away for free to us. He also showed me a really cool tool about datasets and how you can build startup ideas around it. I can't stop thinking about that part. Enjoy the episode. I know you're going to come up with a bunch of startup ideas just from listening. We got Dan Chipper. He's incubating some of the most interesting AI startups.

right now and he's doing it in a really interesting way. So I brought him here so that he could he can share some of his startup ideas with everyone listening because no one likes to be greedy with their startup ideas. We don't like that. So well, thanks for having me. I'm really excited. All right. Shall we dig in? Let's do it. So the the first idea is advanced voice notes. So ideally, I assume you're aware of advanced voice mode. from chat chabit. Really, really cool way to like chat back and forth with,

with AI. And what I, what I notice, um, when I'm using that is I'll often like go take a walk and I'll like, think about an issue. Like, let's say it's a business issue or a strategy issue and I'm like having it help me,

like think through all the different ways I could address it and whatever. And it's really good at like helping me come to like a conclusion. And what I really want is then like there are people I work with like, uh, Brandon who runs our studio or Kate, who's our editor-in-chief, there are people who I want to, like, send that to. And I want them to, like, get a little bit of the summary, like, the high-level. This is what, this is what Dan thinks about this. But I know they're going to follow up with, like, a bunch of questions. And what I want is for them to get a, like, text summary of it and then

be able to talk to the transcript of our conversation to, like, get, like, maybe the summary is just sort of the tip of the iceberg, but like get all the reasoning behind what I'm, what I'm, you know, why I decide, why I decided or why I'm thinking, the way I'm thinking. And I think, A, that'll just like help me, like, avoid, like, answering lots of lots and lots of questions, but B, it just gives everyone else, like, much richer access to much richer context. And it's sort of, it's basically like a voice note, but like, it's a voice note that you can, like, talk to and have a conversation with. That's like just an interesting idea, which is, like, if you think about media like what where you know is the future of media media media that you talk to it like what are what's

dumb media and how do you make you know is that is that like a theme that you're thinking a lot about we are actually um so one of the internal incubations we have is um and i think we'll probably release it i don't know like in the next week or two so it might be before this podcast is out um but it's called tlDR um and what it does is um it takes all of the media meetings that we have and then turns them into podcasts that are kind of like the notebook L.M podcast. So for me, like if I miss a meeting and we're at a scale now where I can't go to all the meetings, like while I'm like while I'm doing dishes, I can like listen to a podcast that like gives me all the key takeaways of the meeting in like three minutes.

And I think that's really cool. And like to sort of add on to that, one of the things we've prototyped is the same interaction of like, you're listening to a podcast. The host is like saying something and then you can interrupt it and be like, wait, I didn't get that. And then it will just have a conversation with you. And it's sort of like, you know that like, you know that meme of like someone who's like talking to the wall and like it's a print like printout of like their friends on the wall and they're like this is that's like what podcasting is. So it's sort of like that meme, but like they come out of the wall and they become real people for a second. It's very cool. I think it's human.

nature to want that, right? Like people listening to this podcast are probably like, wait, Dan, I want you to explain X, Y, Z thing. So I think that there's probably a hundred startup ideas just around that sort of concept. So, you know, people listening, one of the things I would do is just think about the media you consume

and then think about how can I turn that media into two-way with AI. I would also think about how do you prioritize the things that people are going to pay for. A lot of people listening to this, bootstrap founders, indie hackers. Yeah, like, there's obviously some consumer media that they can do, but maybe they're interested in more B2B stuff,

stuff that they can sell to businesses, prosumers. So with your idea, you know, that you're sort of giving, you're talking about right now, like how do you think about monetization of it and how big could it be? That's interesting. I have to think about that.

I think the way that I think about it is new technologies create the opportunity for new media formats. Every new technology, like YouTube videos, new media format from the just because of the internet, right? Killing Hollywood. I think the thing that is true about this wave of AI is it's taking store. storytelling and it's making it way cheaper than it has ever been before. And I don't think that replaces professional storytellers, but what it does is it allows you to tell stories in places that was way too expensive previously. So like, for example, I would never hire a really good storyteller to like go summarize our meetings for me. But I'll have the AI do it because it doesn't

cost me any money. And so looking for places where there are stories to tell that were previously too expensive is like the, I think that's the total adjustable market of this sort of idea. And then in terms of charging for it, we've been, we've been thinking about this because like, like our strategy is like everything we incubate, we bundle it into the every subscription. And but we've been thinking to ourselves like, okay, for something like this, like, would people pay more for it? And if so, like, how do we charge for it? Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boring marketing. 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. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO, and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com, and that's why I invested in it.

They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money-back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. I think, like, the thing that that I think would sort of work for, I mean, for the podcast idea, maybe for the voice mode idea or voice note idea is like on, number of downloads or plays or listens because like that's the that's the amount of value that's

being gotten out of this thing. And so and it scales nicely with the scale of the organization. So I think that's a cool way to do it, but I don't know. Yeah, I mean, I think people are tired of subscriptions, you know, you know what I mean? Like I don't know about you. I see like a 99 subscription and I'm like, even if it's like, yeah, $10, $5, $3, I'm kind of just like, oh, I know. I know, I'm going to forget to cancel this. You know what I mean? So I think we all kind of collectively got to this point where we're getting sick of it. So I do love and, you know, this, I do love kind of more novel ways of monetizing.

Yeah. I think, and I think that's a new sort of trend in the AI pricing realm is not charging per month, but charging like per successfully completed task or something like that. Yeah. And I think that's going to work really well. Cool. I mean, it's an interesting, this is an, you know, this is an interesting prompt, I would say. Yeah.

This idea. Curious what people like in the common section come up with. So drop it in. What's your, what's your next idea? My next idea is called n of one. The basic gist is, is, do you know, are you familiar with Caggle? No. So Caggle is this like, it's this basically like market for data scientists where you can post a data set and a bounty and then have data scientists like fulfill the bounty and like sort of win the prize with your data set.

So like an example is like the, you know, like the Netflix challenge where they were like, we'll give a million dollars to anyone who can like improve our recommendation algorithm. Of course, that was OG. Yes, I remember. I remember that. Yeah, so that's really cool. Well, I think the really interesting thing now is, A, there's way more interesting data sets that are like all personal ones. And B, everyone's a data scientist because like anyone can just like prompt tune like

GPT4 to like find some, like do something interesting with the data set. So it's a platform to post your own data sets, whether that's like a personal one or a business one. And then, and post bounties for anyone to. make predictions that are useful for you about the dataset. So the place that it came from is for me, I've OCD. And what I think is really interesting is I think we're getting to a place where if I take Woop data and probably some amount of like voice and face, facial movement data, I'm pretty sure, and I've been working on this, but I'm pretty sure I can get,

I can get it to label whether or not I'm having symptoms on any given day. And if it can accurately label that, my next question is, like, can something predict when I'm going to be symptomatic or not? And so what I'm going to do is, or what I want to do, is basically, like, post a big data set of, you know, all of, like, all of my biometrics and whether or not I was having OCD on that particular day and then post a bounty and have, you know, it's like 10K for anyone who can predict my OCD. And then I think if that works, and I think it will, then I can get people like you or like

anyone else who has like an interesting problem like that to like post their own bounties and share it with their audience and like sort of start to bootstrap a little bit of like a market there. And the reason I think it's interesting is, One, OCD sucks and be really fun if someone could predict it for me. But two is it's a new way of doing science, actually. Because the way that science proceeds right now is like you're trying to find like underlying explanations for things by like doing high end studies on like lots and lots and lots of people and like doing like a linear regression to like understand like

how like how things work at a group level. and I think instead what we should be doing is making predictive models for individuals for N of 1 that just like solve the problem and just help us like basically predict the problem and worry about the generalized scientific explanation later. And I think this is like a platform to do that. All right, let's get into this. First of all, I just pulled up Cagle. I realize I've actually been on this website.

this is a gift because there's probably there's probably tons of startup ideas that you can come up with just by hanging out on Caggle, right? Yeah. Yeah, definitely. Like just pulling it up right now, like looking at the different data sets, it says,

$406,000 high-quality public data sets, everything from avocado prices to video game sales. And then there's all these like ready to deploy ML models. On top of it, it just feels like this is a goldmine for coming up with startup ideas. It definitely is. And I think the important thing is that Cagle was built for a time when the people who could do this stuff were people who had had PhDs in data science. And it's like totally changed now where like anyone can enter one of these competitions and like do better. than a PhD could five years ago, just with GPD4 probably.

And so I think that opens up a ton of opportunities. I'm looking at, check this out. I'm going to share my screen real quick. We're derailing a bit. Need to show what's happening here. There's literally a data set called open source data for Hacker Nune, startup of the year votes, over 623,000 total votes, 30,000 startups, 4,000 cities. think about what you can do with that data

if you're trying to come up with startup ideas, trying to sell to startups, right? Totally. Yeah, I guess, yeah, what would you do with it? I would be interested in, well, I think people who are building startups, like probably people listening to this show would be interested to know, like,

what is this community? what are people in like I call it Sydney, Australia. What do they find interesting from a startup perspective? And then contrast that from Austin, Texas, and be like,

maybe there's some interesting startups coming into Sydney. And in Austin, everyone's building AI startups, but in Sydney, they're building marketplaces. And there's actually, like, a lot of opportunity

to build some marketplace idea for Austin. That's just like one example. Or maybe there's like some sort of like real estate or community building play for a city that has a surprisingly high density of a certain kind of company. Right. Yes. Yeah. Yes.

So I love just, I think people should just go on Kaggle and just look at some of their data sets and just ask themselves, okay, here's a random data set. What are some startup ideas I can come with it? And I think the easiest startup ideas with some of these data sets is database as a service. So I've seen that trend pop up more and more, DAS, database as a service, which basically what does that mean? It's a fancy way of saying you're taking some data, you're curating the data, you're putting a paywall against it, you're putting a stripe link, and you're selling it, often to social audiences. So either organic, you're building Twitter account, TikTok, you're paying creators to post about it, or you're throwing some paid ads behind it. Yeah, I like that.

Cool. You got more ideas? I got plenty of ideas. Let's keep going. One idea that's sort of like on this new media format train. is there are, I think there's this like social aspiration around the great books. It's like Marcus Aurelius or like Plato or like Moby Dick or whatever. It's like books that form the like Western canon, people feel like they should have read

them but like they're kind of a drag to read in a lot of cases. And I also think they're actually like really useful. they're really great if you actually can get into them. But you have to kind of be in like an English class or something to like really get something out of it. And even then a lot of English classes are like not that great. And what's really interesting about AI is it can make those stories available in new formats and in new translations that are like tailored for specific types of people or specific situations. So a really like easy example is, you know, if you try to read Plato, like most of the

most of the Plato translations are like really trying to like get the historical like what would be like the right word like the historical context right and they're not really like trying to make it like engaging and interesting for a specific you know for like

someone who's in their 30s speaks English like is into tech right like they're just that's just not on their mind and I think you can basically create new versions of great books that are translated specifically for particular types of people are super easy to read, are super engaging. And you can even do it in like a multimodal type way where you do like, you can have a Plato movie where you watch a like a platonic dialogue and

it's like it's probably mostly AI generated, but like probably that you need like an editor to like put it together. But I think you can like create a new great books library where you can consume these out of copyright books in really digestible translations in audio and video formats and even maybe like you can add some you know advanced voice mode interactivity type stuff and I think one there's tons and tons and tons of students that like need to like read this for school and there are all these like sites like Cliff's notes or whatever or Spark notes that like are just so last generation um and I'm I think that market is like very captureable.

And then two, I just think that there's like a lot of people who are kind of in the like business like intellectual space that I would probably like put myself and the stuff that we make it every in that place who aspire to like be familiar with that canon who would like pay for this. So okay question. Question before I get into this. Would you sell? like sell these books?

How do you how do you monetize it? I would probably sell either like one-off access or a subscription and or I would create a like beautiful physical version. This is more less for the students and more for the like business thing. I would create like a really beautiful physical version

that I would charge a lot for and then have a companion like digital version that like can help you kind of like get into it and like you know gives you commentary or or you know you can listen to it or you can watch it or whatever as like a yeah a digital component that makes it easier to consume but I think I think books I think like books started out as luxury goods and then because of the printing press they became like there was this push to make them cheaper because you needed ways to get more information to people's hands. And they're no longer necessary as as cheap forms of

like information dispersal because we have the internet. And I think that they need to go back to being really well, well made beautiful like luxury goods and that you charge a lot for. And I think that's, maybe that's a slightly different idea, but it's like, I think that's a great business. Yeah, I mean, it's a great business because it's repeatable. It's a good custom. customer base that you can chart, you know, the lifetime values high. Don't tell anyone. But I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions. And I'm giving them away for free.

These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into a one simple database. compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast. But the main thing is, most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat cheat. The idea bank is your startup shortcut.

Just click below to get access. Your next cash-loaning business is waiting for you. It could be a business of one, realistically. maybe with some contractors. Spark notes and Cliff Notes, I was just perplexiting them to see what their revenue is. It's private.

They don't say what it is, but both, I think they sold, I was saying that one of them got acquired by, Cliff Notes got acquired by IDG books for $14.2 million in 1998. So you've got to think that these businesses are, I mean, 1998 was like hundreds of years ago.

That's a lot of money. It feels it. And just $2024. Yeah, exactly. So you got to think that these businesses are making millions of dollars a year. So I tend to think that the more interesting idea is like the luxury piece of it. And the prompt being like what's something that's not luxury today that could be luxury? is really interesting.

And then if you can use AI to go and create that thing, then you're looking good. Yeah, I think, and I think the place to look or the way to ask that question is, I think there's an interesting effect where as technology makes things cheaper, the things that they end up making really cheap end up becoming luxury status goods.

So like an example, it would be like Broadway, right? Like plays were like the, and musicals and stuff are like the way that people would like see live, see entertainment in a lot of ways. They were very cheap a long time ago. Everyone would go. And now it's like, because we have TVs and phones and whatever, like you go to Broadway and it's like a special, special, special night out. That's very expensive.

So it doesn't go away. It just gets less popular and becomes more of a more of a luxury good. And I think that trend will continue with AI stuff. So I look at what is AI making cheaper and then look at what like that thing will become more expensive just for a smaller percentage of the population. Yeah. And it becomes like like a status symbol. It's like, oh, I'm going to Broadway. I'm going to this play, right?

Yeah. Yeah. Or I have a handmade shirt artisanal, you know, like that people. this shirt is super cheap but people pay a lot of money for something that's handmade. Yeah, also, you know, limited edition things. There's only 100 versions of that T-shirt.

So if you're listening to this, like, we gave you a gold mine before, but this is a gold mine because I think like luxury, limited edition, AI generated stuff, you know, it's in our nature to always

to think about let's build things for the masses. It's like, you know, I'm wearing a Kirkland T-shirt under here, you know. The epitome of, you know, to the masses. And I love it, but, you know, I don't feel special when I wear it. You know what I mean? So feeling special status, luxury, a lot of opportunity. I would revise that slightly, which is like all, I think all that is true except I think in this specific space you need to like key on like human made and handmaid

rather than AI made and that's the thing that that gives it status. Like a good example is like I like this watch right like this watch isn't that expensive but like watches are get really fucking expensive and this is like more expensive probably than it should be. And it's because it's like a handmade thing. What is it? What kind of watches it? It's a Zen. This is like this is not like super ball or anything like that. But it's a, it's a Zen. It is a Zen. But it's not a Zen, like not what you're thinking.

S-I-N-N. It's a German brand. Got it. I have to say, if someone else is, you know, going to be like, you'd let him say Zen, but you didn't question him on it, you know? The watch nerds will know what I'm talking about. Got it. Yeah.

So, but like, you know, I. could tell the time for a lot cheaper than this. Or like, it's on my, it's on my phone. You know, like, I don't need to have this. I just think it's cool. And that's because it's like, it's crafted. It's like, it's a thing. It's different from like the sort of like mass produced like everyone has it thing.

Yeah, there you go. And so I think there's always room for that. And it's easy to overlook it in the kind of like AI technology race. But like it creates more opportunities for the. those kinds of things. Yeah, I agree. I think, so there's a really interesting trend that's happening right now, which is a lot of college students are anti-AI.

Have you been seeing this? No. Yeah. Really, really, it was surprising at first because I was thinking, like, oh, come on, like early adopters, right? Yep. But it turns out that a lot of them, for a variety of reasons, if you actually do some market research.

They're just, they tried chat GPT a year and a half ago, wasn't as good as it is now. They are entering a job market that's highly competitive, and they're worried that the junior jobs are going to AI, so they kind of just see it as like, you know, oh, I don't like this thing because, like, I'm competing against it. All that to say, there's a huge opportunity to be, build anti-AI products, just in general.

Yeah. Or like I have this, I have this, I'm not being paid for this. I have this thing called the brick, which you probably see on the Instagram ads. And I really like it. Like it just locks me out of my phone. I tap it, locks me on my phone. I leave it somewhere and then I can't get in my phone. And I'm an investor in light phone.

It's sort of like a, you know, weekend phone that doesn't have all the smart. stuff in it. And yeah, I think I think that's a huge thing. I did not know about the anti-AI thing. I thought it was really big for like doing your homework. So I'm surprised to hear that. Yeah, it is surprising. Yeah. What the what I've heard recently, I was at a dinner last night and it wasn't about college students, but it was about kids and voice mode. And that voice is becoming this really, really natural interface for that generation of, like, let's say, like, three to, like, 12-year-olds. Specifically because, even before chat jvety, because parents didn't want to give their kids

phones for obvious reasons. And so the compromise position was an Apple Watch. And the thing that an Apple Watch has is, like, obviously, like, the screen is, like, it's really hard to do anything on the screen. So kids just figured out how to, like, get the absolute max out of C. Siri. Like, they're just like Siri masters. And, um, and, uh, and, and, and, and, and now with advanced voice mode, like, even kids who like can't really read yet, they can interact with advanced voice mode and they can just spend hours and hours and hours asking question after question after

question. Um, and advanced voice mode will like answer in a way that like an adult, like, will probably just get tired, you know. Um, and so there's a lot of like, there was just a lot of conversation last night about whether we're kind of like entering a new like oral culture where you're going to do a lot more interacting with computers and everything around you in voice instead of in text. I think that's a really interesting thing to think about. And I think in particular, if you think about starting businesses, thinking about voice first interfaces is a really interesting place to explore. We've already kind of talked about that a little bit. but just as a broader theme,

I feel like that'll be way more prevalent soon. So, yes, I agree. And I also think that, like, if all these kids grow up and they're, you know, they're used to voice, they're going to want to continue using voice, even, you know, right? They're just going to be used to it.

It's going to be natural. So look at, I would say, like, what's the opportunity? What's the startup opportunity? Looking at discovery engines. like content discovery engines. Like, for example, maybe that, maybe the voice first version of Expedia

is a huge opportunity. Expedia, just check their market cap, $24 million company. And it's like, yeah, could you get 1%, 2%, 5% of Expedia just focusing on voice first and making it for voice first?

Like, not crazy. Yeah, I wonder, like what the what the features of a particular kind of product are that make it more likely to be good like better voice first right like um for example like i always get like annoyed at like ivr's like those phone systems because like they list like 15 options and then i can't remember all the options whereas like if i'm having a conversation with someone i can like pretty much keep the conversation in my head. So there's something like that for like that that that kind of dynamic like a more conversational dynamic is better for voice versus like I don't know like logistics or something

like that maybe is like not as good, you know, because you have to you have to hold all the like stuff in your head. I don't know. Yeah. It's a good it's a good question. You know, I got to think about it. I think you're right though like voice voice does you know lend itself to certain spaces. better than others. I also think that one thing I was thinking about is, like, how do you integrate with Siri? Like, you can integrate with Siri, right? I don't know.

I think that you can, you can, like, make it available as an action on Siri or something like that, but I don't really, to honest, I don't really know. Yeah. Well, I think what matters is, as a lot of these platforms grow, Siri, Alexa, chat GPT, a lot of them are adding voice. there's going to be ways for developers to embed themselves into that workflow.

And if you could be known as the voice version of XYZ, assuming that that audience of people really want to use voice and it lends itself well to it, there's a lot of opportunity there. And someone's going to be listening to this and they're going to say, oh, but Expedia could add voice at, anytime, right? And it's like, yeah, you could have said the same thing about mobile. There was a whole generation of mobile first companies that came out, created literally

trillions of dollars of market cap and value. And it happened because there was an opportunity from a U.S. perspective to create something that was just really, really dialed in for that use case and for that ux the same is true with with voice yeah i mean i i just think that whole thing like there was that whole thing of like for the last couple years of like oh yeah every big company is just going to like integrate AI and like no startup's going to be able to compete and it's just like pretty much all of those integrations suck like maybe maybe a couple of them are okay you know but really it's a totally new paradigm and like way of using computers and the big companies are really limited in the amount of risks that they can take

to make their actual interface good for that specific thing because they can't risk pissing off their regular users. And that's a tremendous advantage for startups to actually figure out what the future of this is like and start with the early adopters of people who really want to use it that way. And then slowly they'll just get into the mass market after that. Totally. Okay, I want to end with. one last thing, which I don't prep you with anything.

So you're out there. You're building AI apps. You're getting traction on them. How do you think about distribution for those apps? How should people, how should someone who's building an AI app think about, you know, getting their first thousand, 10,000, 25,000 users? Well, this is a, this is quite a layup because, I just send it out to my newsletter.

Basically, like, I spent five years building a media business of people that, like, are really, like, really engaged and hopefully, like, really, really love the brand and really love the writing and the videos and all that kind of stuff that we put out. And so when we have an idea like this, we can just push it out to those people. And we pretty much immediately get, like, you know, hundreds, two thousands of people. try it on the first day, which is really amazing. And I think the things that I've learned about that that have been really useful is I and everyone else at every, like, we basically write about things that we care about, that we genuinely like, that are about things that are sort of like in our lives or things that we think about. And that has it attracted an audience of people who are like us and sort of have a lot of the same characteristics. And, and, you know,

And that allows us to, I think one of the interesting things about the AI wave right now is it sort of resets the playing field where there's a lot of low-hanging fruit of things to build. And so it becomes that that's a real opportunity to build things for yourself that was not true a couple years ago because all the low-hanging fruit had been picked and everyone had built. I built this for myself app. And so what's been really nice for us is like we build things for ourselves. and then we have an audience of people who are like us, so they probably want it. And that becomes the first 1,000, 5,000, 10,000 users. And then obviously, like, that runs out

and you have to scale from there. But that's how we think about it, is actually distribution first and then build something second. Yeah. And then once you have your first users, then you can do some product-led growth stuff. Like, it could be like, okay,

I've got a thousand D. use, how do I get these people to share this? And maybe it's like incentivizing them for like a free, you know, free three months or six months or maybe you get access to these early features to share or maybe it's

you know, come to this event in New York for, you know, so I think every which you guys cover like AI and startups, right? And stuff like that. So I think like

everyone should be thinking about creating their own version of every right so what is the media what is the media distribution arm um for whatever it is you're creating um i actually tend to think that like and i'm curious your thoughts on this like i don't know if i would you know in 2025 start with like essentially a blog and a newsletter as as the way to get traffic like why why do you recommend starting there. That's a good question. I actually, I was not thinking about that from like, what I would do in 2025. It's a really interesting one. Definitely like we got lucky because when we started every, it was like right before the big substack wave. And so we got a lot of subscribers. And like that was the whole thing. And I do think that like email is just really powerful to

have. But it's much harder to grow newsletter now than it was five years ago. I'd probably probably start with YouTube, actually, I think. And funnel people into, from YouTube into a newsletter. That feels like the right move. And we have a YouTube channel and it's growing really fast and it's been really great. It's like, it's definitely a little bit less effective to like get a YouTube subscriber to like read an email. Like that that conversion is not not nearly as good as it was like back in the day and like old Twitter or, you know, the heyday of substack. Um, but yeah I'd probably start with YouTube yeah I'm honestly I'm

I gotta say I'm subscribed I'm I'm subscribed no I'm surprised that how many people subscribe to my newsletter via the YouTube description like I put like a little lead magnet slash greggisenberg.com

which is where people sign up and I literally get hundreds of people per day coming and signing up to the newsletter are from that. And the cool thing what you can do on kit.com,

formerly known as ConvertKit, is you can segment those people. So you can say, okay, here's all the people that came from YouTube. And you can even do it. So here's all the people, there's ways to do it.

So here's all the people that came from this video. So there's really interesting ways to segment your audience so that you send out invitations to the app to the right people, right time.

because it's not just about getting users to your app, it's about getting the right users initially because the insights, the feedback that you're going to get from them, the fan base, the community that you're going to build, is important. And so anyways, I like your style, Dan. I like your style. Thank you.

Great minds think alike. Dan, thanks for coming on besides every. Is there anything else you want to plug? Definitely. I mean, obviously subscribe to every, every.to. If you're interested in some of the products we build, you should check out Spiral, which helps automate a lot of your repetitive creative work, like doing tweets and LinkedIn posts and YouTube descriptions and all that kind of stuff.

That's spiral.computer. And you should also check out Sparkle, which is another product that we built, that automatically organizes your file system with AI. for you. And that's make it sparkle.com. Cool. And yeah, I encourage people to check it out, have fun, and just see, see like how Dan's thinking about shipping these products, you know, and how he's building it. It'll give you inspiration and it's just cool to see. If you like this episode, you didn't like it until you click like on YouTube, of course.

That's how I know to keep making videos, keep making potty. I'll see you in the comment section. Dan, thanks again for coming on. I'll see you around. See you. Later.