The Startup Ideas Podcast - 5 game-changing startup ideas from a life hacking genius

Episode Date: May 15, 2024

Join us for an in-depth conversation with Chris Hutchins, an expert life hacker, financial optimizer, and host of the award-winning podcast, All the Hacks. On this episode, Chris shares his proven strategies on how to launch a million-dollar business in just 48 hours. We also explore the emerging trends of affluent consumers and unveil five transformative startup ideas to inspire your next venture.🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND CHRIS ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/hutchins?lang=enLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chrishutchins/All the Hacks: https://www.allthehacks.com/To improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up to boringmarketing.comEpisode Timestamps00:00 First business idea: Premium Tutoring App14:36 Second business idea: AI-Powered Service Businesses33:06 Chris’s framework for building a million dollar business43:30 Chris’s framework for creating media/content48:07 Third business idea: Content as a Service for Big Creators54:35 Fourth business idea: Bringing enterprise products/services to consumers1:01:51 Fifth business idea: Agency for onboarding calls

And all I could think about is like, what other books are selling for $19, $17 on Amazon that could be turned into $500 a month businesses? I would say that if you're really passionate about something and it's niche enough, then you probably have an unfair advantage to build media. If there's one thing that I've learned in the last, I don't know, 20 years, it's that you need to be passionate about like the industry, but you might not need to be like so passionate about the exact specific. company you work at? It's a therapist app that's making like $36,000 a year and he just launched it. What are the things I could go test this weekend that aren't go build software into hardware and scale up manufacturing? So I would say go work for someone.

But at the same time, go also be testing what you're learning on the side. You know, if I had 48 hours to figure out to make a million dollars and actually love doing it, I would probably spend my 48 hours. Chris Hutchins. It's not surprising that you're sipping on Kirkland sparkling water. You know, you alternate between high end and super affordable. I'm excited to chat today because you always bring the heat. You've got a top podcast, all the hacks where you're sharing.

You let people into your mind. You're sharing all your financial tips and you've got a unique mind. You've sold a company to Google before. You're an interesting guy and interesting people need to share their ideas. Yeah, I got lots of ideas. So I'm excited to take this to wherever you go. All right. So what's been on your mind lately?

Okay. So I got one thing that's been on my mind. And we talked about this for a moment before. So I'll set the stage. There's this episode of this podcast called Acquired about, ultra luxury premium products and services and where the value of products like goes beyond their utility. And it's just got me thinking about this like premium category of creating products that are not Kirkland water, but something else. So that was like set the backdrop. And then I have a three

and a half year old. Okay. And I saw this tweet for this product that is like an iPad app to help kid learn how to read. And I was sitting here like, oh, this is really cool. Like, here's a three-year-old reading. My daughter loves books. She can't read anything to herself. Wouldn't it be cool if she could read? So I go sign up and it's like, do you want to do the seven-day trial? And I'm like, this app, iPad app, 500 bucks a month. I mean, other than like that joke red diamond app or whatever it was back in the day, like I have never seen a piece of software for consumers at that price ever. I don't know if you have an example of something at that price point, but that might be the most expensive piece of consumer software I've seen. Yeah, I haven't seen anything like that.

I know dating apps have been trending way more expensive. Like dating apps used to be, you know, $5 a month, $9 a month. Raya, I think charges. I'm going to pull it up. Now they're charging 50 bucks a month, which is like the Tinder that's more. more like high end, so to speak. So you are seeing that trend around like people spending $50 a month, but $500 a month. I haven't seen anything like that. It was wild. So I'm like, okay, seven day trial, why not?

And we do a seven day trial. And the quality of the app is like pre alpha in terms of visuals, right? Like I was looking at it on an iPhone, some of the buttons are missing. there's basically, I think, 20,000 games or something, but they, so far in the first 150 we've done, there's like seven games, right? And the games are very, very basic, visually, everything. However, my daughter is learning to sound words.

Like, here's the crazy thing. It doesn't take this beautiful app that's perfectly designed to do anything, but fundamentally it was working. Like, I sat down with my daughter, yesterday and she's like, s at, sat. And I'm like, wait, you just read a word. Like, prior to today, you haven't read words. You could identify characters and letters, but you couldn't read a word. Now you read a word. And we're like one week into this app. And I'm like, this is insane.

Well, it both works, but like $500 a month. And so I saw someone post on Twitter like, this is crazy, you're charging so much money. And the guy's like, well, then just buy this book on Amazon and it's the exact same as our thing, you could just do it yourself. And I was like, okay, so I bought the book on Amazon, right, $500 a month, $17 book. And I look at the book and the book is literally like, do this exercise with your kid. And it's the same exercise as the app. And if I were a developer, I feel like maybe I could just build this app, you know, like I'm not, I don't want to diminish how much work they've done to create 20,000 exercises. But when you use it, it creates this feeling of this is so simple, why would I pay $500 for it? Because I feel like I could do it.

Even though I'm sure it's way, way harder. I even did a video call with one of their product managers. Like, there's a lot that goes into it. However, it works. And the only alternative is, do I want to sit down for 30, 40 minutes a day every single day and like create the exercises with paper and pencils and my hands? Or do I want to pay $500 a month? And all I could think about is like, what other books are selling for $19, $17 on Amazon that could be turned into $500 a month businesses for people who just don't want to do the work and want an easier, more gamified version of it, right? Like, look at Duolingo, Rosetta Stone, like all these language learning products. They are also pretty expensive. I think Duolingo is probably actually not, or it used

to be free, but there's a paid version. But I feel like Rosetta Stone, all these things. like hundreds of dollars for software that isn't like Raya where like there's a community of other people you know it's infinitely scalable you could have a hundred million users um or not so i don't know i haven't gone down this path yet but it had me thinking i'm curious what comes to mind for you like are there other learning related things where there's books like how to illustrate right like you want to teach your kid to draw or you want to learn to draw well there's this discrepancy between how much does it cost for a professional to do a thing with me, like a tutor, and that was their argument was like, how much does it cost to have a tutor come

to your house for 30 minutes a day, 365 days a year? Well, it's probably going to cost you $5,000 a month. So in a way, we're super cheap. And then I was like, oh, personal training. And everyone seems to be, you know, like, I'm wondering what tweaks you could add to make it feel more like the tutor, which would get my head wrapped around the price. because right now it just feels like it should be a $5 app, even though it's worth more. I don't know. That's something on my mind.

I like the prompt, which is what are other apps that we can build that we can charge $500 a month for that actually helps people get from point A to point B based on proven tried and tested knowledge from things like books. And I think the framework I would have, have to go after ideating something like this is, I would start with kids because kids is such a good market. People are willing to spend $500 a month on kids and less so $500 a month on themselves, unless it helps them get a date, i.e. Raya. So I'm kind of thinking like, okay, what are all the milestones that kids have? You know? And you're just like, you, you, you, you, you, you, you,

write that down in a notebook. You literally write down all the different things like spelling and writing their first word and saying their first word and all the things and you try to think about... Learning math, learning a language. Like go through all the courses. All of them. All of them and you just you unbundle them

into these separate apps and you take advantage of ASO, App Store optimization so that when people put in the app store like you, learn whatever we end up creating an app around, let's say it's doing math, that you come up first. And I think it's one of the reasons why I actually rename this podcast from where it happens to the Startup Ideas podcast was so that when people would type in on Spotify,

startup ideas or on YouTube, startup ideas, I would come up first. It's literally like people are making fun of the name change. I was like, yeah, I know it's really, like obvious. It's obvious because I want people to search ideas and for me to come up. So I think like an ASO angle to this is kind of how I think about it. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the C.E. Secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI, I 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 you know what's funny when you just said that i was like i didn't even think to look are there other apps doing this that are like

better and i just looked and like duolingo of course funny funny thing has an app for kids called learn to read 100% free designed by experts to teach your kids how to read now i'm immediately going to download this and test it out and see how it compares the thing that changed everything was like they gave us a trial and you could see progress in a week. So maybe this, I don't want to be, it's like app store optimization and first, first seven day or first three day optimization. It's like there have to be ways that you can convince someone to show them progress in minutes. And that was the thing that this did so well that I'm like, oh, do I want to go try duolingo? Like, is it going to have the same effect? If I, if I used

the Duolingo app and I don't see progress in like 20 minutes. I'm like, this is garbage. You know, like, I also think there's just, there's an opportunity, an opportunity to be the anti-Duolingo. You know what I mean? So like, it's okay that duolingo is doing this because a lot of people, I mean, duolingo is massive at this point. Like, I think multi-billion dollar company.

And a lot of people are like, yeah, I tried Duolingo. Like, I tried Duolingo for Spanish and I gave up. Like, there's millions of us, you know. there's more there's more giver uppers like me than there are people who've succeeded on language learning apps like duolingo so i think if you can just brand it and position it as like we are the app like we're experts in and you know who did this actually really well uh i invested actually in their company synthesis have you heard of synthesis

synthesis no check it out synthesis dot com so it's a really interesting story. And I think a lot of startups could learn a lot for how they position. So their founding story. Elon must ask me to start an experimental school with him at SpaceX in 2014. The goal was to develop students who are enthralled by complexity and solving for the unknown. Synthesis offers the most innovative learning experiences from that school. They're designed to cultivate student voice, strategic thinking, collaborative problem solving. I believe synthesis, builds these skills like no other educational experience. Until recently, synthesis was only available to a handful of SpaceX families. Today, our community is worldwide and growing quickly.

So really cool idea. They've got this synthesis tutor where it says they've partnered with these researchers to make the first superhuman math tutor that actually works for kids five years and older. And it's $29 a month. This says on the their website, 10,000 plus kids use it. And I think what's really cool about it is you're like, as a parent, you're like, whoa, so Elon Musk, like, if this is good enough for Elon Musk's kids, it's good enough for mine. There's something really interesting about, I mean, the way they, they don't push this, but the Mantava thing that was so interesting was like, it's super premium, right? I knew it going in that it was going to be super premium, but I could get a free trial

for seven days. And then they're like, you know what? Take 30 more days. And, you know, you can get a full refund. So you get 37 days. And I'm like, I might as well. Like get this thing that costs 500. It's like, get a tutor to come to your house for the day.

And this is a common practice. It's funny. I didn't put these dots together. But there's a gymnastics place on the peninsula. And they're like, bring your kid in for a free class. Right. And then your kid goes and you're like, wow, my kid's learning. now I want to keep doing this.

And so this like, get your kid to learn something, show them how good it can be, and rinse and repeat. It all, I mean, I hope we're allowed to go down tangents, but it makes me think of two things. This company I invested in a while ago called Cambly, which is online English classes with English speakers. So most people listening to this don't know this product

because they probably speak English, because if they didn't speak English, it would be tricky to listen to this conversation. but they created these like remote learn English platforms and then the other one is this company called fitter. I don't know if you know this company. It's it's online personal trainers. So what this kind of makes me think about is like the accountability is the hard part, right?

It's for a lot of learning. Like why duolingo didn't work for you. But if you had a tutor come in your house to teach you Spanish for 30 minutes every day, you probably wouldn't have dropped off as much. And when I saw Fitter, it was basically personal trainers, but all the personal trainers are in India. And I don't know, it doesn't really, but so the cost of living is so low that it ended up looking like it was going to be like

$5 a month or something. Like it was some astronomically low cost for a person who speaks English to FaceTime you and work out with you and show, tell you what to do and motivate you and push you, whatever you need. But they brought the costs. far down by getting people from other countries. Who speak your language?

Not just a person coming. It's India is like where yoga comes from. Yes. So they know yoga better than us. Funny enough, this was for like strength cardio. So yoga would make even more sense. I was looking at this for like they do fitness and nutrition. But like, you know, I know so many people that want a personal

trainer and say it's too expensive, well, okay, why do you need your personal trainer to be here? Right? Like, what other models are there? Like, why do you need your language tutor to be here? We've already done this with all the outsourced kind of EAs and you see a lot of more outsourcing around different creative talents happening now. And I don't know, in this global workforce of people all around the world at different cost of living, what other opportunities are there here for things?

I've once thought This is a little bit of a crazy idea But We have cameras like over the kid's cribs So it's like You know kid wakes up in the middle of the night Are they okay? Wake up, check the camera

Like you could probably have some service to parents That are like, hey, I sleep really heavy I'm not going to hear my kid wake up Put an alarm on my phone that you can sound off And have someone in a remote place Watch the video all night You know like there's just like between cameras and sensors and low cost labor and fast internet i just feel like

there's like millions of ideas like for this if we were doing an in-person podcast we have a remote producer in a much cheaper cost of living who dials in and uh i have a video switcher and that you can control online so someone could literally control the video switcher choose which channels slide the levels for the audio and video and not be here at all now we're way off from where we by the way. Like this is like the power of just going down rabbit holes of brainstorming and coming up with cool ideas. It's like, I don't know. There's so many. I think the, so yes, we are, we are in down a rabbit hole and that's okay. I want to like my goal is to be in rabbit holes with you because I think I just want to unpack the prompts and the frameworks behind it. So one of the really interesting things

you said is, okay, we've got this global workforce. We've got things like AI. We can bring people in to do, you know, teach us things or, you know, do remote experiences. A prompt I have for myself is, okay, if in India, the world's best yoga teachers are there, what are, you know, how do you go through every country and be like, what is this group of people known for? So, you know, the best I'm Canadian, the best hockey players probably come from Canada. Is there a way to teach hockey remotely in some way or create a product that could teach it? And it doesn't necessarily, everything doesn't need necessarily be around teaching. It could also be like doing things, right?

Like maybe the best editors live in a particular country. And of course, I don't want to like generalize and everything, but like you kind of have to generalize a little bit. You'd be like, all right, I'm staking the claim. The best hockey players are coming, come from Canada. Or the people who know best quality of life are from France or something, you know, like teaching manners by people in England. I don't know.

I'm making things up. But I think that's a really interesting prompt for thinking about how to create an experience around remote talent. I'm just thinking when you said hockey, I don't play hockey or golf. I was like, wow, imagine, you've seen these drones that follow people now, right? Imagine if you could, for the purpose of learning, right, you had a hockey stick and a hockey puck, and they were both, like, somehow connected to sensors. I one time did this golf lesson where we, like, analyzed our swing, right?

And it was done with cameras, but you could probably also do it with sensors. And now imagine I'm like in my, you know, the lake behind my house or something or some practice ice, And I could literally have someone watching me and watching the analytics on the devices I'm using and be and like in an AirPod being like, all right, I need you to arch your back a little bit more. And they could be doing this from anywhere in the world. They could, you know, without having to be where I am and paying rents in the Bay Area. And, you know, it would be great for everyone. Totally. Now I'm like, what other, where is there like, I think what's changed is the ability to get all this information, right?

Like the fact that you couldn't see me here, I'm at a computer. That's one thing. But small version, I could put up a tripod and, like, go to the batting cages. And I could probably get a, and put an air pod in, and someone could coach me on my, my baseball swing. And it's funny because our neighbors who have kids that are all three boys are into baseball. And he's like, one of the best batting coaches is down in San Jose. So they drive like an hour to San Jose for this batting coach to do. do like a batting lesson. And I'm just like, I don't know, why do you

drive to San Jose? Like it seems like such, you know, like, and why, why does that batting coach need to have such a big yard that he can have a batting cage back there? Why don't, why don't you just bring him with you and schedule a lesson at a place? Totally. I actually literally had this issue that like two days ago. So I want to, I live in South Florida. A lot of people play golf and I don't play golf. And it's gone to the point where I was invited to play golf with and one of the people who I was invited to play golf in a foursome and Michael Jordan was one of the people in the foursome and I actually said no to it and I said no to it why because it's Michael Jordan if I don't you know I'm not going to like I don't want to slow down

Michael Jordan playing golf so I was like you know what this gives me the kick kick in the butt to actually learn to play golf. And I Googled like golf classes or golf coaches. And the PGA actually has a professional golf association actually has a list of people who they recommend in your area. And I reached out to this person who actually coaches a bunch of pro golfers. And he was like, I'm not driving 40 minutes to you. And I was like, fair, but I'm also not driving 40 minutes to you. So, I think there's something really smart here about hardware. How do you create these spaces? I don't know if it's a golf simulation zone,

but something like that and incorporate people in other areas. Of course, I don't want to pay someone who lives in Miami, who's super expensive. But, you know, I would pay someone in Japan where, you know, one U.S. dollar is 160 yen now. And there's a huge currency arbitrage. I'm trying to think of all the use cases for, I mean, there's just unlimited number. Here's a funny one.

And this is even easier. I was trying to set up these cameras for an interview and I was like, I just have some questions. And this platform has failed every time. There's so many companies that have started this. I'm curious if you think now anything's different. Like, connect me with an expert for an amount of money that is, you know, smaller than, you know, they would normally make for like a house call. So I was like,

there is a person that knows how to dial in the settings on a Sony camera. And I, the spectrum is like, hire a video producer for a few hours that's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars or thousand dollars or watch YouTube videos. And I still, and maybe you have to do it in a niche. Maybe you don't.

But I haven't seen this work. I remember multiple startups trying to do this where it's like, you know, you have an electric question. You know, you could pay $10 and ask your electric question. I feel like sometime this is going to be solved. Like there is a person out there who would like to make $50 to spend five minutes answering these questions.

And I just don't know where they are, who they are, how to connect with them. Yeah. So I actually forgot about that. But almost 10 years ago now, when mobile is starting to take off, there was a bunch of venture-backed companies. I'm blanking on the names of them that was like, ask a question and you're going to get an answer. from experts and you have to pay for it. Do you remember the names of them? I don't, but I remember one.

And I even think Google launched one as an experiment. Yes, they did. They absolutely did. And that was like, Helpouts. Google Helpouts, is what it was called. Oh, yeah, and Facebook even launched one. Didn't Facebook launch one?

Google is shutting down helpouts in 2015. Yeah. This is exactly that, and it failed. Exactly. That's what it was. And there was also a bunch of venture-backed one that, like, they were just copying these venture-back startups. But there was something so amazing about that idea.

I can ask a question and get, like, a real answer. Now, fast forward to 2024, and you have Chad GPT for that. So you could ask a question and you have AI that answers it. That being said, we're not, you know, a plumber is better than chat GPT right now in terms of asking some plumbing questions. Would you agree? Yes and no. I actually had a couple plumbing questions in the last few weeks.

I wish there was a... Does Chatchip, do you have a good way to search your history? Or do you just have to scroll to find your thing? But I actually asked a few plumbing questions, and I was very surprised at how good the answer was. But I had some follow-up questions that it was terrible at. But the initial... I was surprised.

at how much, because my father-in-law builds homes and is just kind of like one of the people who just generally like knows everything about homes and electric and plumbing. And so I was like, should I call him? I'm going to ask chat GPT first. And I was like, I got my answer. And then I did go down a rabbit hole of watching some YouTube videos that I didn't, that was like, wow, now we're, now we're in the weeds. And I probably could have saved some time. But electricians, I think is the one where I've tried and failed. And you've tried on chat GPT and you and yeah. Here's my take after after going down this rabbit hole on this on this concept.

I think chat GPT and its competitors when it comes to like figuring out an answer and getting data on a question, it's only getting better and better and they're going to win. When it comes to education and experiences, that's where people will prevail. because if I want someone to teach me how to play guitar, there needs to be a certain amount of taste, I think. And also, you talked about accountability. I will feel more accountable to another person than I will to a robot always.

Yeah, every time. So, I mean, I don't know if you saw the other day, but Levels, Peters, Peter Levels, that's his name. he launched therapist AI where yeah

yeah and it's you know a lot of people hate it a lot of people don't like it at all

because they're saying like you can't just like say that you're launched you know there's just an AI power therapist because like

you go to school to be a therapist and you get training to be a therapist so yeah he caused some controversy there but the

um what he showed also on Twitter, if you check his Twitter, he showed what it would look like. Right now, it just looks like chat GPT with, you know, you're basically talking to chat GPT. That's what it looks like. But in the future, you'll be able, he has like almost like an avatar. It looks like a real person. And you can hear, and we'll put it in the YouTube clip, but you can hear what your therapist is saying. And like it feels like you're talking to a therapist, but it's still feels like you're talking to a 3D character.

Interesting. Yeah. It's CBT. Chat, I think. What is that? I'm not sure. No. I'm trying to find this thing, but it's not, it's not Therapist.I.O.

Oh. But I think it's, maybe it's, hold on, let me pull it up. It is therapistAI.com. Okay. Okay. And is that what it is? Oh, there we go. Yeah.

It's CBT. chat is the same URL. Okay. But TherapistAI.com is better. It's a telegram app. Yeah. That's even crazier. I'm sure this is to get around.

Making this as a telegram app makes me think, this probably isn't something that's licensed and legal to do. Exactly. But I love it. It's a therapist app that's making like $36,000 a year and he just launched it, like, ARR. that's amazing. Yeah, there's so many ways to combine this, but I agree. For me, I don't think the accountability is really important, but I also wonder how much we can get to a place

where that accountability is virtual. Like you get a text message, did you work out today? You know, you get a text message like in French asking you a question and you have to reply to it. And it's all all virtual. It's all, you know, AI. I wonder if you can replace that accountability without having a phone call. But also, I don't know if you did that demo recently where it was like a call center. You could like set up a basically a dentist appointment call center with AI. And you would like call and make an appointment. And it sounded like a person and they were actually listening and responding to you.

And it was pretty crazy. Yeah. And I think I, it's obviously going to put a lot of people out of job, customer service jobs. I just rented a car. I just gave it back a car this morning. I was renting it for a couple of days. And as I'm leaving, it was an enterprise. As I was leaving an enterprise,

the woman, I could tell that the woman at the cash was like having a bad day. And she just lost her mind on someone else. And basically she was like, I'm not going to give you a car. Like, oh, here's what happened. So woman was sitting in the chair. Customer was like, I've been waiting here for an hour.

She's a nurse garb. And she was like, I need to get to the hospital. I have my shift. And you told me you're going to get me a car an hour ago, and I still don't have it. And she goes, I'm not giving you a car. And she was like, what do you mean you're not giving me a car? It's not your decision. Like, I booked it.

And then the woman, the nurse goes, listen, I understand you're having a bad day, but like you have to give me a car. and then she goes I'll give you a car if I want to give you a car robots won't do that yeah robots aren't going to have bad days

they might glitch and give you a helicopter instead of a car exactly but yeah it's uh it's gonna be interesting to see how actually I um I was looking at these two services or two um

sound mixer and one of them actually has some type of intelligence built into it. So let's not call it AI yet, but they were like, hey, this one's better for beginners because you can basically just start talking into the microphones, and it will just like auto calibrate everything for you. And I was like, well, this is cool. Like imagine when you're buying hardware, like a camera that instead of like the Sony auto, you could tell it something and be like, oh, I'm recording a podcast.

Like it used to always be choose a setting, but if it could just adapt and say, oh, it looks like you're shooting a podcast. So we just changed all of these things. Like the Sony thing has like auto and manual. There's not. And then sometimes there's like in the middle where it's like I'm shooting a child. But there are too many scenarios to have like 7,000 sliders where you're like, let me scroll down to in person podcast with three people, you know, at night in a room with, you know, well lit, you know, professional lights. And you'll just start to bake all this into hardware. But that's not really...

I mean, there are some people listening who can go build that. If I were listening, I'm not going to go build that. Totally. So I'm trying to think, what are the things I could go test this weekend that aren't go build hardware, go build software into hardware and scale up manufacturing? So what is that? I mean, Chris, like, you could build anything. You have 48 hours.

You have... The real Noah Kagan question here. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. You have 48 hours to make a million dollars. How do you do it? I'm going to challenge the prompt a little because I'm like, well, yes.

You didn't say I have to make the million dollars today. I just have to kick something off that's going to make a million dollars. If there's one thing that I've learned in the last, I don't know, 20 years, it's that it's very hard to keep doing something for more than a couple years. if you don't really, really like it. So for a while, I just thought I was unemployable because I had a series of, I had a series of jobs in a row that I just didn't like.

And I was like, oh, maybe I don't like jobs. But I never really, like, took the time to figure out what I liked doing. And I think that's really hard. So, you know, if I had 48 hours to figure out how to make a million dollars and actually love doing it, I would probably spend my 48 hours trying to figure out what kinds of things I enjoy doing. because I'm not going to be able to get to that million dollars if I don't have the longevity.

Like some people are going to do it overnight, right? But most people, it's going to take years. And so kind of experimenting with that. And maybe I'd spend some of that time like interviewing my friends and, you know, my spouse about what makes me tick. Sometimes like seeing things in yourself is really hard. When I started a podcast about life optimization, it was so funny. Every single person I knew was like, well, of course you did. And I was like, what do you mean?

course I did. Why didn't you tell me that 20 years ago? It took me 20 years to come to this career that 20 years ago probably would have, you know, would have loved. But I didn't realize it. I didn't put the pieces together. But I imagine if I'd taken the skills that I had as a product manager, interviewing customers and asking questions, trying to figure out the five whys, what if I just apply that to myself and used like my peers and friends and, you know, colleagues and family as my customer research panel, could I arrive at things about what I'm uniquely qualified to do, what I'm passionate about that would have been harder for myself? Maybe I could just use an AI therapist and be like, help me figure out. Like I imagine if I went through chat GPD, help me figure

out what I'm good at. Ask me questions until we, you know, come up with a business idea that would be something I would love doing. AI might be actually pretty good at that. So when we were growing up, everyone told us, do what you. you're passionate, right? Did you get that advice? You must be a little younger, but I feel like somewhere slightly after I graduated college, I'm about to turn 40. So somewhere slightly after I graduated college, I feel like that was happening. But I don't feel like that was the message yet in the zeitgeist of like me looking for my first job because, I mean, my first job, I was looking for a job at like an investment bank because I was like, that's the most like

amazing job you can get out of college. It certainly wasn't that I was passionate about it. It was like, that's the best job. So, but I will say in the years that followed, that seemed to be the norm. Everyone's like, go pursue your passion. Do the thing your passion. I don't know if I totally, I think it's good to know your passion, but like, that doesn't mean it can be your job tomorrow. Well, here, I'll challenge that a bit. So, Here's my take. I am, yeah, I'm 35, so I'm five years young, you know, five years younger.

And when I was growing up, that was the prevailing wisdom. Do it, do it, you're passionate and everything will work out. And the reality is, then the, you know, great financial crisis hit. A lot of us couldn't get jobs. And the reality is it wasn't true. Like, it turns out that if you're passionate about some, you know, niche, niche, niche topic, you know, you can't make money during, you know, doing it. Now, pass forward to today, I would say that if you're really passionate about something

and it's niche enough, you can't just be like, I'm passionate about sports. You can't just, no, that's a cop-out answer. Then you probably have an unfair advantage to build media. So create a podcast, create videos. go on YouTube, whatever. And if you can do that, then you can attract an audience. And if you can attract an audience, then the next step is you have to be passionate about learning how to build stuff.

So basically, I think everyone should become a product manager in that sense. What is a product manager? I don't mean, like, I know you're thinking like Google product manager and there's like 40 layers of bureaucracy. I mean like a product owner. Forget product manager. Product owner. Yeah.

Like a builder. A builder. Exactly. A builder. So if you had, going back to the question, if you had 48 hours, wouldn't you just try to figure out what you're really passionate about and then try to come up with like, how am I going to create content, aka media, that's going to attract as many people as possible and then figure it out from there? I think it depends. I actually reflected a lot on this with my own podcast. I don't think it would be where it is today

if I had launched it with the same type of interest 20 years ago. Not because of the market. Like, you know, if I could freeze myself in a time machine and launch it, you know, the same day I launched the podcast, except I'm now launching it with, you know, 20 years less experience, if you will. I don't think it would have been the same. I think there are a lot of lessons along the way

that enabled it to be more successful. And so I would say, you know, you could try it. But I would not like throw in the towel on getting real experience building at some other company before you, you know, just commit to a life of your passion as a project. I also think, you know, it took me a while to realize actually what that passion is. Is my passion, you know, deals? No. Is my passion like breaking some system down and figuring out how it works? Maybe we're getting closer.

But you could argue people knew me for, you know, deals and points and miles and all that stuff. But if you told me to go create social media clips, it would have been a disaster. Like I didn't, like, even though I'm passionate about a topic doesn't mean that the medium is right. And so the only way that I kind of came to podcasts was I'd try. guide out all these different mediums in another part of my life, running a business and realize that there is one that I felt like I was more comfortable during. So maybe it's like test out all the mediums over the weekend, figure out the areas you're interested in. But if you're really interested in personal finance, right, you could start a podcast, you could write a

newsletter, you could build a spreadsheet template. Like it's more niche than even the category. It's like, let's say you're really into sports. Okay. We already said too wide. now you're really into sports cards, right? You could go become a sports card trader, or you could build a model that allows you to analyze sports cards and sell that model. Like, sell a spreadsheet you've built. Like, I've done this now. By the time this airs, I will have launched two versions of a spreadsheet that I built.

So that's very different than creating a podcast, right? And like, that might be, you, so you got to be. to figure out like what is the thing you like doing and the thing the topic and the process. So if you like building companies, if you like hiring and managing people, if you like, you know, coding, if you like talking, sharing, it could be anything. And I'd pick one of those and start to do it. But even the best on lots of these channels spent years. How many videos did like Mr. Beast produce before any of them took off like a thousand MKB, MKDHB. same thing. Like the time it takes to commit to the platform for almost everyone that doesn't

already have some audience is so long that I would say, find your passion and pursue it while you're getting tangible real skills that can pay your bills because like chances are that side project is not going to be that right away. There are people that are not going to listen and those are the people that are probably going to go build the crazy thing. So, you know, that's great. But for the average person, I think it's not going to happen overnight in 48 hours. Like Noah Kagan's million dollar weekend is like, you know, it's not build a company that's doing a million dollars of revenue. It's like validate an idea.

And I had an interesting conversation with Andy Rackleff, who started benchmark capital, one of the best returning venture funds of all time, and then went on to start wealth front. and he was saying, you need to be passionate about like the industry, but you might not need to be like so passionate about the exact specific company you work at. So find a thing that you love and let someone else pay for you to go deep on it. If you're really passionate about hockey, go get some job related to hockey while you're thinking about your side projects because there's a lot about whatever industry you want to work in that I think you will unlock by getting more. experience. I'm sure all the, I'm sure all the follow your dreams and don't, don't go get a

full-time job people are hating this. But I think there is a ton of value I picked up from, you know, 15 or so years of working at companies that made my thing feel easier than it actually was. I get it. But if you were going to, you know, if you were going to be building media today, meaning if you're going to pick a niche and go after it, where do you think would be interesting, you know, niches to go after? Like, where's the biggest opportunities right now as we're recording this to be building content? Like what type of media? Yeah, what topics?

Topics? Oh, so topics, not platforms. Exactly, topics. Okay. Well, I think we just established. established that the topic really just has to be something that you can provide a unique perspective on. That is the most valuable thing. So if you pick a topic, like I could tell you, ooh, I think there's a really big opportunity in, you know, childhood education, but you have

no experience with kids and no interest in it. It's kind of irrelevant, right? Like, whereas if that's your thing, you could go build an empire. like Emily Oster and Becky Kennedy have in that space. Like there's a lot of opportunities. So here's one where like the answer to that question is actually pursue your passion, right? Like go become an expert with a unique perspective on a thing. Whether those are hot takes or deep analysis or, you know, access to other minds,

I don't think that matters. But it has to be an area that I think is somewhat unconsored. And I think given the current nature of media, it has to be smaller and smaller. Right. Like, I have a friend who's launching a micro course. And I was like, okay, this is super interesting because I, you know, like you, you want to talk about micro course. This guy's launching a course on how to use miles and points to go to Japan. Like, it's not here's a course on credit cards.

It's not here's a course on redeeming your points. It is a course on how to redeem your points to go to Japan. And I think that right now, search algorithms and content discovery is getting better and better and better such that it's going to be really hard to break through if you're like trying to be broad in some topic. But if it's like I'm going to make hockey videos on, you know, how the stick should connect with the puck. I mean, someone that plays more hockey, he's like, that's not about it. It's about the arc of your art. I don't know.

But like, that's going to do better than like, I'm just going to have a hockey show. You know, like maybe it's the, I'm going to have a show that's really only relevant for the first year you're learning to play hockey. After that, don't even listen. Like, this is who that's for. And maybe your audience grows up with you

and you take them on that journey. And now, three years from now, it's something different because you're someone different. But I was just so, excited when this friend of mine, instead of trying to launch one of a thousand courses on how to use your points in miles, he's like, I am launching redeem miles for Japan and redeem miles for the Maldives. Those are his two courses. Yeah. So I think it goes back to outcomes, like mapping out all the different outcomes and mini outcomes of a particular topic area niche and then creating unique content

that's packaged well. And, You can't lose doing that. And I want to talk about one more thing related to that because I always had a conversation with Dickie Bush and Nicholas Cole. So they have a bunch of courses. They do millions of dollars a year in the writing space. So they have something called Chip 30 for 30 and PGA professional ghostwriting academy. And they've done really, really well. And one time I remember asking Cole, who's your competition? Are you worried about your competition? He says, the only slice I want to own is start writing. There's going to be a ton of other content around writing online and writing and writing and

books. No, no, no. I just want to focus on start writing. Actually, he said, start writing online. If you want to be a person who doesn't write online and you want to get to writing online, you come to us. And I think that was such a smart way of putting it because, yeah, to your point, it's like, almost like it feels mini, but it's, it's not.

Yeah. And if there's an area that you want to get better, like, here's a great example of, this isn't necessarily a startup idea, but maybe it is. There are a lot of people out there who have audiences that are terrible at, or don't even participate in certain verticals. So if you're like, I've realized that hockey and writing is my niche. Okay. well, you want to get some experience doing hockey and writing,

why not find a hockey creator who's big and has a huge audience and does no writing? And just go get the reps in. Like, I think that one of the things that I was listening to an episode of All In, and Chimath was describing how he thought he had an opportunity to go work at Apple. And this is after Facebook. Like, has enough money that doesn't need a job. And he's like, I would drop anything. to go work for Steve Jobs at Apple, like learning this thing.

Like, he was one of those people that's like, I don't care about going back to the drawing board for my career to get an opportunity to do this thing. And I think it's a trait of many successful people. And it's funny, it came up in my interview with Andy. He's like, this guy was always defending Wealthfront from trolls on the internet. And he had no experience in product or anything, but he loved the Wealthfront product. and Andy reached out to him. He's like, you're always talking about Wealthfront. I just wanted to get to know you. And then he was like, I would love to work a Wealthfront. He's like, I don't have any tangible skills. He's like, come do product support. And it's like our customer support function. And if you crush it there, we'll find a home. And this guy went from product support to product to another company where he became the VP of product that had a billion plus dollar outcome and had a super successful career in product. But he was willing to. take his probably like, I don't know,

manager, senior manager level role at another industry and reset to do customer support for two years so that you could get the reps in at a kind of company he wanted to work at. And I think people just don't, they want to skip that path and it's so hard to skip that path.

So I'm not doing a lot with social media. If someone was like, I am super passionate about social media and I love your content, was like, can I help with this area? most successful people, it's not like you have to do it for free. Like, I don't think gone are the days of like go be an unpaid intern. Hopefully any successful business that sees value in your skills are willing to pay you.

But you might not own the brand. But you'd get to test your skills at scale. And I think that is something I would encourage anyone who is trying to get into content creation. It's an alternative path. Yes, you could go start your own newsletter. Or you could go find someone who has a not great. newsletter in an area you're passionate about and asked to run it. And by the way, there are multiple creators I know who I've realized this has happened to them and they set up really lucrative deals.

Like you come over, take over my YouTube channel and you can keep 30% of the revenue from YouTube or something. Like deals like that where you're bringing someone in to own a vertical and giving them real upside. So yeah, you don't own 100% of the upside of a newsletter that you would start, but you might own 30% of the upside of a newsletter that has a massive audience that you can start with. And if that works, it's not like there's only ever going to be one newsletter in a topic, right? Like, you go leave and start your own thing. So I think you have a lot of opportunities and obviously find the right person to work with, but I don't know. I feel like there's something cool there. What do you think? I feel like you would say, no, go start your own thing. Don't go work for someone

else. I would say both. Like go work for someone because you can do things at scale and test at scale. And there's, especially in social specifically, social and product, you know, when you, when you launch a new feature to millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people, you really pay attention to what that product is. And if it's dialed versus you're just putting it to potentially no one or same with social. Like you're tweeting to a million people versus just tweeting to 100 people. Like you really,

you really instinctively over time, learn about how to connect with people and you can take that in the future and apply that to your own products. So I would say go work for someone. But at the same time, go also be testing what you're learning on the side. Yeah. I think that's fair.

There's a really cool example. Ben Wilson was the producer, for My First Million for a month a long time. And he had its own podcast called How to Take Over the World. And so on his own, on the side, he's building this podcast. It was really great. But also he wanted to learn how to work inside of a podcast that was operating at a lot greater scale and was a great producer.

And his show got mentioned and referenced like dozens of times on My First Million, which aggressively grew the audience on his show because, it turns out growth is hard, but if you have really high quality content, you can land really cool big growth like step functions that will make it possible. Now he's on his own doing his own thing. I think he's also turned his production role into an outsourced agency business where he'll help other people do production. In that newsletter example, it's like find a creator that's not doing newsletters

about an area you're passionate about. Go help them spin up a newsletter function. figure out how that works, then reach out to other creators and be like, we'll help you spin up a newsletter function. Now you've got this agency business. Now you've been able to promote your own newsletter about your own thing you love. Now you've got, you know, three streams of revenue for a project that started out as something that's a side hustle. And now you can afford to leave one of them if you don't want to. I love it. Chris, we went down a lot of rabbit holes today as expected. This is the most messy episode we've ever done. but it is filled with gold.

Filled with gold. There's probably like seven, 10 startup ideas, you know, meaning of life. And we didn't even go down the path I texted you about, which was like this mass affluent market. So I feel like I'll challenge people to think about that too.

Well, give us, you're going to have to come on another time, but give us one last startup idea around that macro trend. Yeah, so what's interesting is Mercury, which is a bank for businesses, recently launched a bank for consumers, Mercury personal banking. And they charge $240 a year. And everyone I know, oh, you got, look at that. You got a book.

I got an iPhone case. I thought it was interesting. How do they choose which promotional product to send people? Which marketing thing? but what was crazy was nobody pays for banking like that's not a thing that ever really existed but they realized that there is this gap in the market between what serves high net worths and what serves the average customer and the needs in the middle weren't being met and so they said look people who are in this like mass affluent bucket where they have disposable income maybe

they're making a couple investments here or there like they understand the value of of earning yield on their money, but they also want a premium product experience because they're a little younger, their digital native kind of millennial Gen Z, but also they need to send some wires and there wasn't really anything in the market for them. And people are willing to pay.

Now, in the long run, do they end up lowering the interest rate enough to make it free because people just hate annual fees? Maybe. Like, I think that's possible. But finding a place in the market to serve something in between, I think is really, really interesting. And it seems like there's always the cheap end and the super expensive end.

And I feel like there's going to be more products and services targeting the kind of mass affluent group of people, which would be like, maybe it's like just another way to say upper middle class or lower upper class. I don't know. But like, you know, enough disposable income that they'll spend $250 a year on their bank. or they'll spend, you know, not me today, but they'll spend like, you know, $2 for water, right? Like, it's a little bit of a branding thing, but for water, maybe that's not the right example because it's certainly not the feature set.

But if you can build a premium feature set, you can charge for it. And I wonder how many industries have been a race for the bottom where building something a bit more premium might differentiate. Like, I feel like there will be a service. If Uber hadn't built Uber Lux and Uber Black, someone could have come in and done something like that. That's probably a bad example because the scale you need to build something is like Uber is not there. But I challenge people to think what industries have become such a race for the bottom that there's a big hole in the middle. Well, yeah.

I think what you can do, you know, going back to the, how do you make a million dollars in 48 hours is like I would look at not the biggest SaaS apps, but the SaaS app's doing between a million dollars a year and $40 million a year and say, okay, who is this targeting? Is this for everyone? So is this like the Zoho, which is like the Costco of SaaS? Or is this the higher, higher end, which is like, you know, it might not feel like high end, but HubSpot is like a higher end product. It's like more expensive or Salesforce.

It's more expensive. And then could I create something that's like premium? And I think a big part of it is also like signaling. I don't know if you disagree with me. But I think, you know, a lot of people like to say, oh, I don't, you know, I don't use Chase or I don't use Wells Fargo. I use Mercury. I think that's a big.

I feel the same way about Superhuman. Oh, really? Tell me more about that. For email. So, I mean, they did this. Like email was free, free, free. Gmail is free. Yahoo's free. Everybody's launching free email. And they're like, look, we're not going to do the email.

We're just going to be the interface for it. And it's going to be better. And it's $30 a month. And people are like, you want me to pay for email? And they're like, why don't you use it for a month? And you use it and you're like, shit, this is amazing. Like, superhuman, I've been trying to get them to be a sponsor of the show because I'm like such a big fan. And it took me two years. Finally happened. But it just makes email so much better. And in that use case, it's almost like they took enterprise features and applied them to consumers, which I think the more people become, you know, multi-income, multi-job, the more we're going to be treating ourselves like businesses. And so tools like Mercury, which is basically like, I want business banking for myself. I want business email for myself. I think there's just going to be an endless

number of products and services that become more like something that was enterprise SaaS for consumers and superhumans just i don't know do you use superhuman or do you pay for email or do you i'm surprised that you pay for email honestly i'm shocked i mean you're drinking kirklin you're sipping on kirklin uh sparkling water so here's a thing i genuinely think i can get through i think i probably can save 30 minutes a day on email with how many emails do you get a day let's call it 200 300 see that seems like a lot of email i feel like I don't get that much email. And you're including like a newsletter, that kind of stuff.

I guess I probably get like 100 emails a day. Yeah. Okay. So all the little things that you can do from like quickly responding, like the instant intro, this is like for someone like you and I, it's like my favorite feature. Someone emails is like, hey, imagine I get email from you. Hey, Chris, I want to connect you with my friend Ted. and I'm like in one keyboard shortcut, it pops up and says,

Greg, thanks Greg to BCC. Hi, Ted. Moves Greg to BCC, moves Ted to the two field. All automatically. I use all snippets. I don't know. I am, I'll give it a shot. I'll give it a shot.

Definitely, if you or anyone else, all the hacks.com slash superhuman first month free. I worked hard to get them to become a sponsor, so check it out. No, I'll use that. I'll check that out. And they do on the premium thing, one thing they do that's really smart is when you sign up, I bet you'll get an email for scheduling like a session for them to like train you on it. And I just think it's so valuable for lock-in to like teach your customers how to use your product better.

I think Notion is a product that doesn't do. Like I have so many people I know that love Notion, but they don't know how to use it. And so there's this whole marketplace of templates for notion. I have a no-brainer business idea. We'll end on this where if someone wants to do it, hit me up at Greg Eisenberg on Twitter. Okay. It's an agency that basically does these onboarding calls for companies. So you approach a notion and you hire some of the old, let's say superhuman onboarding

specialist and stuff like that. So you create this team, this customer support team, and you go to, yeah, let's say Notion. You say like, hey, today you're not doing these like onboarding calls. We'll do it for you. We're going to manage the process end to end. We're going to learn everything about your product. We're going to make amazing. We have this like special method for how we go about doing it. And you're going to see a lift of retention. And how much is that worth to you? And they're going to come back and there would be like, well, if you were able to increase retention, 8%, that's worth $30 million a year. It's like, great.

Okay, give me $1 to $3 million here and let's make it happen. I think it's brilliant. I think any product that charges some amount of recurring revenue that's $20, $30 per person or user would massively increase adoption training someone. And maybe that's something like an AI version of Clippy from like the old Microsoft Office days can do. But I just feel like I'm so, there are so many tools that I use that I'm not using to their full potential. And they would be really smart to do that. Chris, I love it. It's been a pleasure. All the hacks. Where can people find it? All the hacks. You just said it. All the hacks.com. All the

hacks on search your podcast app. Search YouTube. Search my name. I feel like, you know, you can find it. I have faith in this audience at finding out. Yeah, if you can find it, you're not looking for the hacks. You're probably, you probably shouldn't be listening to that. Yeah. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks for having me.

I love these jams. Later.