The Startup Ideas Podcast - 3 startup ideas from the co-founder of Loom (make $120k/mo)

Starting point is 00:00:00 I've got a close friend on the pod right now. And I mean, he's sold a company for a billion dollars. He doesn't do podcasts really, but he is doing us a favor, the community of favor. And he's got a few ideas that he would do. So he's given them away. So you might as well listen to this full episode. Welcome to the pod. It's great to be here, Greg.

Starting point is 00:00:26 It's good to see you. Good to see you. I mean, you've got some free time. ever since the loom exit to write some ideas. And I'm chomping at the bits. Like, what do you got for us? Yeah. So I'm pretty excited about this one.

Starting point is 00:01:04 So I, you know, I spent the last year, more or less kind of traveling, going to different countries, going to different states, just with friends, solo. And one of the things that I'm actually really passionate about from a consumer perspective is just like how we travel today and witnessing how millennials especially prefer to travel these days. So the first idea, which I would say is probably one of my favorite ideas on this list is what I'm coining the anti-trip advisor traveler.

Starting point is 00:01:42 So you go on Google today, say you're going to Rome, Italy. And you have to now build an itinerary. There have been services that have been created targeting millennials around these kind of micro travel agents who can kind of design a guide. You know, you give them the dates, the budget, and they can design something pretty advanced for you. But for 99% of the travelers out there, travel is, you know, I would say a byproduct of how good an SEO engineer really. is. And what I mean by that is trip advisor ranks very highly on Google

Starting point is 00:02:26 and Expedia ranks very highly. All of this like conglomerate monopoly of travel sites that have been around since our, you know, parents were our age traveling tend to get the most traffic. So what does that do for travel? It sends

Starting point is 00:02:43 people to all the same places. It sends them to all the same restaurants. It sends them to all the same, you know, takes them to the Coliseum in the morning for a walking tour. It takes them to the famous Cacho-Pipe restaurant that's like two blocks away from the Coliseum. The restaurant itself is called Cacho-Pipe. So you know none of the locals are eating there. So the idea is TikTok for modern travel. So right now users on TikTok, these like micro-influencers post these really aesthetically minimal TikTok guides of beautiful.

Starting point is 00:03:21 beautiful coffee shops, bookstores, places to sit and people watch and take in the city, right? Like, this does not exist on any of these travel sites today. So I'm actually helping a friend of mine who kind of had this concept. And I would love to kind of bring this to life. But I, when I travel, I go on TikTok, I've tried to find two or three, you know, spots near my hotel that I should go to. and I just kind of curate this own list. And I went to Seoul last year in May. Love the city, incredible city, very creative, you know, design forward city and design

Starting point is 00:04:00 forward businesses, pastry shops. And none of these things had popped up on when I was looking it up on trip advisor. So I think there's like this new segment for millennials and Gen Zs who want to travel the path less taken. and I feel like if there's an app that can kind of bring this to life, there would be a huge crowd that would be interested in it. So I want to talk about this idea, but before we get into the idea, there's something that I've been playing with a lot recently, which is, I'm curious if you have checked it out.

Starting point is 00:04:38 Have you seen on TikTok the creator search insights? I have not, no. Okay. So if you haven't, it's a chance that other people haven't. And me too. I actually, I only recently figured this out. So if you go and you open up TikTok, instead of searching for, I don't know, some whatever you weird things you people search on TikTok,

Starting point is 00:05:07 you can actually search for creator search insight. and it pulls this up. If you're watching this on YouTube, sorry, if you're watching this on Spotify or Apple, go to YouTube to see what it is. You have to click this, and it says, see what TikTok users are searching for and get inspired to create.

Starting point is 00:05:30 Now, it shows suggested and trending search topics. And it shows content gaps as well. What you'll notice is a lot of time there's travel in here. So it seems that people are using TikTok for, instead of going to Google, they're going to TikTok, TikTok to your point. So I just wanted to just make that note that people, whatever it is you're working on, look at the trending topics on that on TikTok because it is worth it to figure out what you should build. Because this is like one of those really big ideas, but it's like,

Starting point is 00:06:06 where do you start, right? Like, how do you, you know, should you niche it down a little bit? And this is where something like TikTok could help you figure that out. Shh, 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.

Starting point is 00:06:44 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 sheet. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash-flowing business is waiting for you. Yeah. And another pro tip that I, maybe it's more popular now than when I first found out about it.

Starting point is 00:07:15 I would, you know, alongside TikTok, I would go on Instagram and I would, you know, search if I'm going to Rome. And I want to see like since the last time I went to Rome, what are all the best places for me to go to? I would go, I would search for Rome and I would kind of use the Instagram map, which is a great geolocation tool that's hidden within Instagram. And I would just zoom and there's a bunch of photos of people posting stories. And it's kind of like your snap map that kind of has this like heat map on it to show where there's like density or like what's more popular. And where like are people kind of going to in real time.

Starting point is 00:07:59 So that that has also helped me when kind of designing things to. to go see museums with new exhibits that might not be as well known or, you know, some of the more locally, I love exploring local culture when I travel. So like Instagram and, you know, kind of to your point, TikTok as well, these are all great places to go find hidden gems within the app. So if you were to start something like this, you know, I buy the key insight. It's validated by people searching on TikTok. how do you actually go and build it?

Starting point is 00:08:41 Where do you take it from there? So I think the first I would go to, I would do my research by looking at, you know, what are all, to your point, the TikTok, you know, search results, I would look at, okay, well, what are the most search results? And try to find a category. Are people looking to find coffee shops? Are they looking to find coffee art in cities like Seoul?

Starting point is 00:09:08 Are they going to bookstores? What are the top ranked kind of category of places people want to visit? And then what I would do is I would kind of hack together a mobile app. There's a bunch of no-code tools out there, low-code tools. Or if you want to build something sophisticated, you could go kind of higher developer. You could also use Claude AI and chat GPT. There's a bunch of tutorials on how to build apps without knowing how to code with AI specifically. And what I would do is I would kind of build a directory based on cities.

Starting point is 00:09:45 So the way that I would do that is I would kind of formulate everything into guides. So I would want like a coffee guide of Seoul. And within Seoul, Seoul is such a big city. And there should be a map where I could see these are like the top 10 most incredible new, relevant design forward coffee shops. If you're a coffee snop, you'd love to go there. I would love to go into that guide. And if you're monetizing it, you could either sell it by guide.

Starting point is 00:10:15 So you could unlock, say you get the first two coffee shops for free, and it's a list of 10. And if you want to unlock it, you could pay, say, 99 cents to unlock that guide. Now you have access to the best coffee shops in Seoul. So I would rank, I would build these guides and I would make kind of like a video carousel very similar to TikTok. This is like what the aesthetic, this is what the coffee is like, the general vibes.

Starting point is 00:10:40 If you go on Google Maps and you go on a specific location, they now have a vibes category. So it kind of just shows the general charm of the place. And then I would branch out from a very specific niche, such as coffee shops and bookstores, to what are all the other searches that are trending on TikTok and on Instagram? and start to kind of build that curation further out.

Starting point is 00:11:08 So the next time someone comes, you know, if they're not just looking for coffee shops, maybe they're looking for something else. And there's something that's nearby to the coffee shop that based on their TikTok history they would like, that is something that I would expand into. And the content, like how do you create the content? So it's actually, the content is already,

Starting point is 00:11:33 there. You know, like, you can technically go on TikTok and just, as a general, minimal, viable product, you can host these TikTok videos, just embed them directly into the app and be like, these are, you know, the top local, you know, micro-influencers who are talking about these coffee shops. And this is like, these are the coffee shops that you should go to. I think the beauty of TikTok is that it has this critical mass. So as any influencers, I could kind of or even if I'm not an influencer, right, I could just kind of create a video seamlessly

Starting point is 00:12:09 add a aesthetically pleasing sound on top of it and add, you know, use Capcut or any of these video editing tools and add captions on top of them. And, you know, what I would do, so I live in New York City. And if I were to create this and I were to create the content myself just to get the app up and running, I would go to,

Starting point is 00:12:33 all the, you know, spots that I think, you know, say a foreign traveler who wants to experience Soho, like a local, like what are the coffee shops, the wine bars, the bookstores, the streets for the best photos at sunset, the West Side Highway, you know, rent a city bike, get on the west side highway bike path and ride up and down the path and you get to see New York city and you get to see the Hudson River, and especially this time of the year in fall, like I could go myself and create this content and host it. That isn't as scalable as just initially when you're ramping up. You just want to kind of get the information into the app. I think what's also really interesting about this idea is there's probably a ton of like

Starting point is 00:13:24 amazing, I mean, not probably. There is the best content around local, is hidden in TikTok videos. So the real question is, how do you extract that in a meaningful way? Post it on the web with like curating it a little bit, like adding, you don't want to just pull the raw transcripts, right? Right. So what do you do?

Starting point is 00:13:54 I'm just trying to think about it. So if I'm trying to do something like this, TikTok does have an API So you can use the TikTok API for getting some of these trending local videos And then you can use Descript for transcription There's also other tools

Starting point is 00:14:15 I think Google has like a speech to text API as well That you can use But then you're going to actually have to clean up the transcripts Because you know It's not It worked in video but it won't work for like a blog, so to speak. So you can use, you can use Clode,

Starting point is 00:14:33 you can use chat GPT's API. And then you can automate, you can actually literally automate this whole process. You just use Zapier to eventually like post it to your WordPress blog or whatever it is. So what are you doing? You're essentially making an, you know, the MVP, you're making like an SEO machine, right? Right.

Starting point is 00:14:52 And maybe you start only with coffee shops. Like you become the place where wherever it is you land. Like if you're a coffee snob, maybe you call it coffee snobs. Dot XYZ because that's probably available. But you do it in every city. And then once you do coffee shops, then you can expand beyond there. Right. Yeah, I think it's important to your point to kind of start in a very specific focus area that, you know,

Starting point is 00:15:23 if like imagine yourself if you go to a new city or new country you've never been to you check into your hotel or drop your bags what is the first thing you look for on Google Maps and or on TikTok or on any of these social platforms and when you look for recommendations you know what is if you go down the list of things that the average traveler does is they probably ask their friends they probably go on Instagram and have probably saved these videos in advance and then they probably go on to Google Maps and start pinning a bunch of locations near their hotel that they should check out. And truth be told, like we don't, you know, we tend to overcomplicate this process. But instead, if, like you said, the MVP could be, if you follow those instructions, you can extract that information.

Starting point is 00:16:15 Imagine just pasting a TikTok link into a URL, like the URL into a text field or excuse me, into a URL field. or excuse me, into a URL field. And then it just kind of auto generates a written guide from that one TikTok video. It's like in this TikTok video, there was this coffee shop was mentioned. Here's like the link to their Google Maps. This coffee shop was mentioned. Here's the link to their maps. And then it just kind of creates a written guide that is SEO friendly that people,

Starting point is 00:16:46 if they search for say coffee in Williams. this guide would ideally pop up and it would also allow them to save it to like bookmark it in the app so that once they are in say Brooklyn they see that that coffee shop is nearby. So I think there's a lot of ways to kind of get started with this. I, you know, kind of in this like post-COVID world where travel has really taken off. A lot of airlines have posted massive. profits just goes to show that travel is not slowing down. People love experiences. They love to go to new cities. They love to go to cities they've been to many times and try new things there.

Starting point is 00:17:35 So if there's an app that can kind of facilitate that for the millennial and Gen Z generation that is very specific when it comes to traveling, I think there's a big market for someone who ends up building this, including myself. I would love to use it. You'd love to try third wave coffee in Istanbul, you know, the right, the right, you know, the right shop. I actually, I heard recently, there's like a famous coffee saying around coffee snobs that once you, like, once you really get into coffee, you're going to hate it because

Starting point is 00:18:12 you're going to be that person that travels lands into New City and has to walk 45 minutes or take an Uber somewhere to get that first. cup of coffee that is going to hit the spot for you. Like the diner coffee won't be good enough. So I digress. I like this idea. I think it's great. We've talked a lot about directories on the pod before.

Starting point is 00:18:33 I think that directories are only going to get more and more popular. I think what I'm really interested with respect to directories is how can you put your directories on autopilot, start building that SEO juice. And who knows where, you know, some of these could go. You could end up getting, for all you know, in the coffee business. You can end up becoming an O.T. You know, working to create like an Expedia competitor. So you don't really know where it goes, but with a cool part about a directory and guides,

Starting point is 00:19:05 and I like that you're using the word guide, because I think that's a really important word, is you're just, you're building a center of gravity. You're building a center of gravity around a topic. And it gives you a lot of leverage for where to take it. So I like this idea. What's your next idea? So if we stay on the topic of travel for a second, one of the things that I feel like has been broken,

Starting point is 00:19:36 and it really broke during, like, when, you know, kind of COVID had taken place. People are everywhere now. People have moved to new cities. You moved to Miami. I moved to New York. We both lived in San Francisco. Our friends have moved all over the place.

Starting point is 00:19:57 And there hasn't been a, what I want to call, like this micro social network, which is a very minimalist thing. It does one thing really well. And we'll get into that in a second. But there hasn't been a micro social network around where my friends are. So especially in summertime when no one, I mean, all my friends who live in New York are all out traveling. I want to know, like if we end up overlapping the same city or if we're going to overlap in the same city, I would love to know that in advance. So we can kind of arrange some plans, maybe meet for a meal, plan some stuff out. But you might have noticed that Instagram had launched their kind of, you know, you.

Starting point is 00:20:46 you could call it status updates. Those status updates are, I would say, at least in my feed, 90% of it is just people telling their friends which city they're in. And I don't know if Instagram had either envisioned that that would be the primary use case for their status updates. But I think it says something really important, which is friends want to know where their other friends are. So a lot of people, and including myself, I have.

Starting point is 00:21:16 a lot of my close friends on Find My Friends. And that's, you know, that's Apple's kind of take on this like, call it pseudo-social network. But it's a very flat, you know, there isn't much depth to find my friends. And instead, what I would love to see is where I could push a button. It just automatically updates my location. The feed would be incredibly simple. It shows your friends based on your proximity to them.

Starting point is 00:21:45 So just imagine your face right next to mine. It's like, oh, we're overlapping in Montreal. I shoot you a text. And I'm like, hey, we should grab a meal. I saw that you're in Montreal. And I'm sure you remember. I don't know how many of your listeners remember this. Maybe this is dating us a little bit.

Starting point is 00:22:04 About 10 to 12 years ago, there was a private social network called Path that had kind of taken, you know, really the media. it had kind of taken off on its own. And the whole premise of path was a privatized close social network of your close friends, family members. So you're only able to, I think, have up to 75 friends. I'm not sure on the exact number of that. But you only wanted to accept friends that were your true friends. You call it 75 best friends.

Starting point is 00:22:37 And you would be able to kind of see their lives through a series of photos and videos and status updates and locations. but people have been wanting a path-like social network for so long because, you know, Twitter is a completely different product today. Facebook is a completely different product. And now, you know, we kind of use Instagram for letting our friends know where we're at. Some of us still use Snap. I think there's a vertical in which people can build this incredibly simple micro social network. Quick ad break.

Starting point is 00:23:12 Let me tell you about a business I invested. It's called Boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. 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.

Starting point is 00:23:45 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. So, yeah, let's talk about, first of all, I just want to say something that I always, when it comes to building a new startup, social, consumer social,

Starting point is 00:24:16 I'm always like, don't do it, Greg, don't do it, Greg, don't do it Greg. And then I'm like sketching it out. And then it's like, oh, no, I'm doing it. The reason is it's playing startups on hard mode. It is just so hard to do it well. Now, I will say what changes it a little bit is with AI now, it is faster to create these products. So you don't need to raise $2 million and hire a team of 10 to beta test this. Now, what you're talking about with path, I think people need to study path, especially, you know, because people probably forgotten.

Starting point is 00:24:54 Someone in the comment section is going to be like, I didn't forget. I hear you, but most people who are listening to this have not heard of path. It was 150 people, up to 150 people that you can have on path. And the reason why it was 150 people, I don't know if you remember this, is because it had to do with a sociology theory called Dunbar. Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number was the theory that human beings can only maintain about 150 connections max at once. But when you think about today's world in social media, like we follow hundreds, thousands, we're seeing tweets, posts, TikToks everywhere, right? So what was Path? Path was the anti-version of the current state of social networks. Now, Path actually ended up selling for like $100 million to Google.

Starting point is 00:25:49 I think this idea, your idea, which is basically like reinvent Path for today's, for today is really interesting. I'm not convinced that it's the I'm in a new city. Like, I need to, you know, I'm in a city and like you're in the city and like let's hang out. But I think the idea around a social network called Dunbar, I think that you get like the name of it is Dunbar because then there is a story about Dunbar. Oh, what's Dunbar? Oh, it's an app where you can have max 15 people and like you can do XYZ things and then you just clone it and then you run a PR machine to get like everywhere. Everyone wants to write about how every legacy media

Starting point is 00:26:35 company hates social media. So they're going to be happy to write about how you're going to try to kill it and why it's burning your lives. That's my take. What do you think? No, I like that. I like the branding around it too. I think a lot of people in our industry who had got to play with PATH and even more broadly than our industry have kind of wanted a path for 2024, 2025, right? What does it look like today? To your point, the reason why we haven't seen one since the existence of PATH is because, like you said, consumer. and social are like oil and water. It's just it's so hard to mix. Almost impossible and quite nearly impossible, right? So so many companies have tried to build consumer social products. I think there is such a demand for it, but when there aren't network effects or, you know, kind of levels of scale to it, it kind of really becomes difficult. So if I'm the only one on this app and none of my friends are on it and there's like I have some internet friends who I don't consider to be close friends

Starting point is 00:27:46 where I feel comfortable enough either sharing my location or photos or whatever. It becomes really tricky. I, my very specific use case was around, I love, you know, kind of seeing where my friends are at any given time, like, oh, cool, you know, and it doesn't have to be like the exact GPS location. It has to be, like, assuming we're close enough friends and we see that we're, in a different city in Europe. And we have plans to kind of like meet up. It kind of creates, it's a conversation starter.

Starting point is 00:28:20 And I feel like most social networks kind of today are, you're kind of taking in a lot of information. You're not contributing. You're kind of just lurking around. So if you could kind of get the consumer to create information or to create something to discuss or to spark a conversation, that would hopefully create. more engagement around the app.

Starting point is 00:28:45 But I think to your point, there's a lot of ways to go around it. The desire for having a closed-off network with your friends, because everything is so public these days, is certainly there. Hopefully someone builds it, and hopefully we can use it.

Starting point is 00:28:58 Yeah, and I think that with the location bit, I think what was cool about a path back in the day, and people should really look at it. Like, when you used to open up path, I'm pretty sure you used to say, like, good morning from Hayes Valley. You know, it like knew your neighborhood even. Hayes Valley, San Francisco, a neighborhood in San Francisco.

Starting point is 00:29:18 So I think that if honestly, like I kind of want to do this, but like someone should just clone path. Like look at exactly what they did. Clone path. Make it like a little more shinier, a little more glossier, a little more beautiful in today's 2025 standards. But like from a, dude, I hate to admit this publicly. I'm just going to go ahead and say this because whatever if you're going to judge me judge me

Starting point is 00:29:47 I went on Facebook the other day because I wasn't I wasn't no it gets worse It gets way worse I went on Facebook yesterday because I wasn't sure if it was a friend of mine's birthday

Starting point is 00:30:03 and I knew he I had him on Facebook so I was like oh let me check to see if it's his birthday So I go on Facebook, lo and behold, 45 minutes past. And I'm just scrolling Facebook. And the worst part about it is I'm enjoying every second of it. What were you scrolling? Were you looking at photos?

Starting point is 00:30:26 We're looking at memories? Just through the timeline. I was everywhere, bro. I was everywhere. I was like, I started off on the just like the feed. I was scrolling down the feed. And let me open it up.

Starting point is 00:30:46 I was scrolling on the feed. And I just loved how, you know, oh, someone moved to Bend Oregon. Like I had no idea. Like that's an, you would never like, I don't know if you'd post that on Instagram. Like you might just, you might, but you might not. And then I got like, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:03 a Facebook group update that was like really interesting. And then I see this, like, someone is playing tennis, and it's like a week ago, right? Because Facebook is like not, you know, but my point is I started thinking to myself, it would be cool. Like, Facebook as a product is pretty amazing. Like the profiles that you can like explain who you are and customize your profile to a certain extent is like quite interesting. It just sucks because like it's Facebook. And you know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:31:36 So what was Path? Path was a reinvention of Facebook. Mobile first, max 150 people. Someone needs to take this idea. It will work. Someone could make this work and create a really nice business. Path used to monetize via selling sticker packs, I believe.

Starting point is 00:31:57 They used to sell sticker packs and charge two, three, four, five bucks. There's a way to just charge $20 a year, $30 a year. and people will pay for this if you start getting a network effect. And there is demand from people to do this. And this is a multimillion dollar your idea. You can do a pre-strap. That's right. And I also think, I mean, you look at the progression of SNAP as a company

Starting point is 00:32:23 and where they've been able to monetize from. And even Instagram, right? It's like sponsored posts and very curated to the user-sponsored posts, relevant ads. I also, so there's this wild idea, but this is very kind of like tech forward and less kind of steers this away from this idea, but I'm going to come back to it. I've thought about this a lot, you know, with kind of chat GPT launching two or three years ago now and companies constantly trying to train their local language, you know, their large language models with more information. I feel like there's a future in which we will, you know, the SaaS subscription model, which we call it $8 a month, $16 a month, and then there's an enterprise plan, right? Very typical SaaS structure.

Starting point is 00:33:21 That gets replaced with being able to commit your personal data. So I'm talking about like anonymized data where this data gets anonymized and then someone like Facebook can basically train on it. So just like, oh, and we're talking not necessarily Shaw met up with Greg, but it's like, oh, there's a connection that was made here. Maybe that data is relevant. Maybe that data is not relevant, but I do think there will be at some point my hunch is a future in which we can pay for premium subscriptions with our own anonymized data. And hopefully someone builds a path. I do want to kind of double-click into your, you know, your 10 minutes of or 30 minutes of Facebook screen time for a second, which is this kind of goes into my third idea. And this is because of something that I find myself doing quite often, which is I will go into my ICloud photos.

Starting point is 00:34:30 I'll just open up the photos app and I'll try to find a specific memory and I'll try to create a sticker out of it so I could send it to a friend. and I'll just find myself 20 minutes deep into looking through photos from the past. So shared albums, my take on this is shared albums are where your memories go to die. I want to be able to share a, and the idea here is what I'm calling time capsules of your shared memories. So I want to be able to share a physical time capsule of the memories I've made with friends, either on trips or just at dinner at their home. You and I hosted a dinner at your place in San Francisco. I actually had a memory for that on Facebook. Funny enough, we talked about that.

Starting point is 00:35:20 That must have been eight years ago, seven years ago, let's say. And that was a super fun dinner. But how often do we come back to that period? of our lives, right? Just like the beautiful bliss of pre-COVID, everyone living in San Francisco, us hosting a dinner together and having her friends over was awesome. But if I was like, oh, it's Greg's birthday, I want to send to him a present. I want to send him a memory of both of us. And sure, I could send him photos of us from my iCloud. Or I could somehow curate this time capsule and send it to him. That's a very personal high touch gift. And I think for it to work, it has to be

Starting point is 00:36:05 ephemeral because I don't want you to feel like you're getting, assuming this takes off, it gets widely adopted. Now everyone's sending you these time capsules and now you feel obligated to hold on to these time capsules. It has to feel ephemeral enough where it obviously super curated. And it should feel as if you're reliving that memory, but it's ephemeral enough where could also toss it out if you want to after pulling onto it for a day, a week or two weeks. But that's my third idea. And this kind of, this takes a page out of the book of Path and a page out of the book of Clout, if you remember Clout.

Starting point is 00:36:46 Of course. Tell people what it was for people to remember. So Clout was the social network that really monetized on nostalgia. you. And what that means is I would hook up, I would basically connect all of my social network accounts, so Facebook, Twitter, Instagram at the time, and any other social network. And Clout would send me a reminder of, this is before Facebook had memories built into their app. Cloud, this is around 2013, so we're talking about 11 years ago, Clout would send you a reminder of this memory you had with a friend of yours.

Starting point is 00:37:25 And it was done so well. Humans love nostalgia. They love to look back on life and be like, wow, that was an incredible time. I'm glad we got to like, you know, share that moment, yada, yada. And it just does, it did nostalgia so well in a social format where because I was reminded of my trip to South by Southwest

Starting point is 00:37:48 at the Amex, you know, sponsored show where they had Jay Z there. I was inclined to be, you know, Cloud had really clicked in on the idea of if we can send the emotions of nostalgia to this user of something that has happened, you know, that they posted in the past, the likelihood of them sharing that out to their friends is very high. So clout went viral as a result of people sharing their nostalgia. But it failed to kind of really sustain in a world where Facebook had the network effects and Instagram had the network effects. People would only come to cloud to see their memories and share it to these other platforms. So it didn't have its own network effects and ultimately it led to.

Starting point is 00:38:36 I think they ended up getting acquired. But there's always room for nostalgia. And I think this is very nostalgic, ironically, for us to talk about. We're talking about two apps from 11 years ago that we've brought. both loved. And I think this concept of time capsules of these shared memories of memorabilia or

Starting point is 00:38:59 photos printed out on a note card with a signature in the little box, nice packaged well, shipped to you, sounds super cool. And people are going to be like, why are these people bringing up such old apps? Like, why

Starting point is 00:39:17 bring up clout? Why bring up path? These things, people people don't change. Like human beings don't change. Our needs don't change. The products that we create change based on how we consume it and shifts like that. But I like this idea. I actually said something that went viral.

Starting point is 00:39:40 I said nostalgia is a hell of a drug. And I like this idea because I think it not only is there a business here, it's also like, I actually think that it'll really put smiles on people's faces. I'm also one of those people that, like just last week, I came across some old photos. I agree with your thesis on this, by the way, that shared albums is where memories go to die. I sent over like five photos to my group chat of like friends. And everyone was like, it made their day. It made their day. But then those photos are going to like they're dead like they you know so there's something here and I think the catchiness of shared photos are going to die uh is is is enough to create a business around

Starting point is 00:40:35 exactly and I think there's something between a photo that you sent to a friend um you know in a text thread and a digital album that that you have on your nightstand. Something in between needs to exist, and it doesn't today, and there's clear opportunity for someone to go out there and build it. Dude, thank you for sharing these ideas. I need people to literally just bug, go into the comment section on YouTube, and we need to have this man on again.

Starting point is 00:41:14 We have to convince him in 2025 to come on again and to thank him. I appreciate you. Where could, do you have anything to plug at this point? No, just, you know, really happy to be here, happy to see you. If you want to, you know, I often tweet about kind of ideas like this that I find when I travel or when I'm just kind of walking my dog on the West Side Highway. You know, go follow me on Twitter underscore S-H-A-H-E-D-K. tweet at me if you have any ideas if you're building any things that we mentioned would love to

Starting point is 00:41:54 love to take a look would love to give feedback also on instagram wherever you can find me would love to connect beautiful all right my man this has been a treat thank you so much appreciate you have me on later

The Startup Ideas Podcast - 3 startup ideas from the co-founder of Loom (make $120k/mo)

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