The Startup Ideas Podcast - 8 GitHub Repos To Go Viral and Make Money

Starting point is 00:00:00 What is going on with GitHub right now? There's so much good stuff being released, like on a daily basis that I'll open a project, see what it does, and I'll end up thinking about the 10 ways I can use that to help me make money and to be more productive. So today, what am I going to do? I'm going to show you five projects, five GitHub repos and three AI skills that I'm playing around with. One makes a launch video for the thing that you've built.

Starting point is 00:00:26 Another, I'd used to find problems. customers already spending money trying to solve, and a few could just make your existing business just easier to run. So most of them are free to download. You still have model costs, though, but they're mostly free to download. I'm recording this at night because this is the stuff I end up going down rabbit holes down at night and weekends.

Starting point is 00:00:49 I thought I'd bring you along with the journey because I did one of these videos about a month ago, showed you some GitHub repos that I'd. I was using, you loved it, so I'm back. These are some of the most interesting GitHub repos and the most interesting AI skills on the internet right now if you care about building businesses with AI, if you care about skills.

Starting point is 00:01:12 So let's get into them and not waste a second of your time. So have you seen Bragg? So look at this video. It was made with a skill called Bragg. You give it your project. or with the newer version, you can actually give it a website link, and it'll make a short launch video with music, motion, and, yes, copy for your post. Now, when you look at some of the stuff that they do, it's pretty insane.

Starting point is 00:01:52 We're not talking about, you know, your Will Smith Spaghetti video, right? We're talking about high-quality stuff, and the limit really does feel like your imagination. So my favorite detail, I think people ask, okay, what do I like about this the most? One of the examples that they used is a fake series A launch from 2016. And you can just choose the tone. So choosing the tone really interesting. It's really like choosing the vibe. And, you know, we're starting to see, not starting to see, we are seeing.

Starting point is 00:02:31 You go on to Twitter, go into X and you just see like, all these highly funded venture back startups with these insane videos, and they spend like $100,000, $200,000 on them, hey, you know, you can get something pretty interesting out for really not a lot of money using something like Bragg. By the way, the version I'm talking about is Bragg Slim, which is designed for Opus 5.5. So install it in your coding agent.

Starting point is 00:03:03 I can include the command. And then just say like make a 20 second launch video for this. And then you hand it your website. It's like literally as simple as that. Give you your website. And you can ask for vertical. You can ask for square. And I believe you can ask for landscape.

Starting point is 00:03:23 It'll make a thumbnail. And you can ask it to redo the individual scene, thankfully, because that's going to happen. So, I mean, you're going to have a part of it that, you know, one part of it that might feel off. So you can, you know, go somewhere specific to, you know, with the feedback. There's a bunch of ways that I think people are going to use this to make money. You know, one is just, you know, if you're just starting out and maybe you want to, you know, get into this startup ecosystem, just go through who's launching things on product hunt.

Starting point is 00:04:02 And, you know, just go and build these launches that don't have videos. Hey, I made you a launch video. What do you think? At the very least, it's a conversation starter. You know, they might want more of that type of work. They might not like it. But, you know, I think this whole idea around, instead of like cold email, cold outreach, do things for people, send it to them.

Starting point is 00:04:30 permissionlessly. And there's a good chance it starts the conversation and you can start hopefully creating value for them. So, yeah, brag, the skill is free. You pay for the model you're running with it. I'll include how you can install it.

Starting point is 00:04:49 And that's number one. The second one is something called agent reach. So what Agent Reach does is it's going to help your agent. get information from the social internet. So YouTube, Reddit, X, by setting up the tools, those sites need. So you can actually ask it to research a topic across different sources without doing all the collection yourself. So I would use it for customer research because to me, I think there's just so much insight in customer research. I know it's like sounds

Starting point is 00:05:29 boring, but like, you know, pick software people already pay for and ask, what are customers still doing by hand and bring me the original posts? So valuable, right? What if you're like a cleaning company, you know, I know that cleaning company owners are exporting their schedules every Friday to work out what everyone should get paid. So I'd be curious about that. You know, they have scheduling software. They're paying for it. And somehow this part of the job, ends up in a spreadsheet. And then you might be able to make a small tool that takes that export and does the calculation. So they keep the software they know and you're helping the annoying bit around it. I think there's so many businesses like that. And it, you know, people on

Starting point is 00:06:17 X are saying, you know, SaaS is dead. Sass is dead. I think Sass is evolving. But I think for like these boring little businesses, there's opportunity here. You know, getting, it's just a little tool that could add value. So how would I use that? I would use it by searching for things like I export it or I copy this into. And does anyone know a workaround? And then you just get a few recent examples from different people. And then you ask one of them to show what they're doing. You still need that conversation before assuming there's a customer here. And yeah, this is just really simple to install. I think that if you're already selling something, you can use the same research to improve how you're explaining it too, right?

Starting point is 00:07:12 It's not just for startup ideas and stuff like that. So maybe something like payroll takes my entire Friday is a pretty good starting point. for copy if that's the problem your product solved. So there's so much gold in here. Basically, the idea is the internet has a lot of insights and gold. You just got to get it out. And I think that LMs aren't necessarily the best. So they need things like this. That's number two. Number three is voice studio. Have you seen this? So it's an app you download onto your computer. for AI voice work. The way I think about it is it's like an open source 11 labs, a similar kind of kind of thing to 11 labs, if you know that. So it could generate speech, you can use

Starting point is 00:08:06 a recording of your own voice, or you can dub a video into another language, which is actually to me one of the most interesting things. So it has local models, so you basically run them on your own hardware. Okay, so how would, you know, how would I, use this, well, I would try to just do a short recording of yourself. Download the app, install the model it prompts you for, give it a clean voice sample, and a few lines to say. And then I'd want to hear what comes back before doing anything like intense and ambitious. So just start there. By the way, your computer affects how quickly it's going to run. So, you know, you do need a little bit of a quicker computer.

Starting point is 00:08:52 think about all the little videos a business makes to explain something how to use the product how to book an appointment how to get started after you've paid so you can use this to make versions for customers who speak another language with a fluent person checking the result that's like a really really big deal i think onboarding is an interesting place to start so if i'm a software company and i already have let's say spanish speaking customers maybe all my tutorials. A lot of people have this. A lot of tutorials are in English. You have a reason to ask whether that's creating problems for support, right? So I would ask which three questions keep coming up, and I'd start with those videos. So you're making something that could get used the next time that question comes in. A lot of us assume that we speak one language or the other, but people speak a lot of languages. So this is pretty big. You can do it with your own company, but also do it with, you know, I think there's a huge business around doing it for other people's companies. You know, if people's products are changing regularly, those videos are going to need

Starting point is 00:10:01 updating. So I can imagine someone being happy to hand that job over once they trust you to keep the instructions accurate and just charge them a monthly fee. So this app is free, but check the commercial license as well as the apps and only clone voices you have permission to use. I do think that it does have like a lot of some like famous voices because it's, I think has access like archived.org and a few other things. But check it out. And that one's just, yeah, it caught my attention. Okay. Number four, PBT Master. I can see your eye rules. I know PowerPoint. But stay with me on this one because I think it could be useful. for a few of you.

Starting point is 00:10:53 Actually, quite a few of you. What PBT Master does is it takes documents or notes and it turns them into an editable presentation. So you can give your own PowerPoint template, too, by the way. Because I know a lot of people have their own company design. When someone asks you to change a price or move something around, you can open the file and edit it. And to try it, add PBT Master to your coding agent

Starting point is 00:11:21 and follow the setup guide for, I think it has Python dependencies, then give it a document and say, turn this into a five-slide proposal using this template. So I'll link the instructions rather than making you sit through the instructions. The first thing I'd put it through is a proposal I've already written with the private information removed. So you know what a good answer looks like

Starting point is 00:11:47 and you can see how much editing it needs. then I would try using it after a sales call. So you've got your notes, the agreed scope, and the price. So have it turn those into something you can review and send it while the conversation is still fresh. There is one thing that matters here, I think. Write the deck for the person who wasn't on the call. Your contact is probably going to forward it to somebody. So that person is going to need to understand why you're doing this and why they're being asked to approve.

Starting point is 00:12:17 You can also help a sales team that keeps rebuilding the same material, right? I'd ask, what slide do you always end up, you know, redoing yourself? Maybe every rep has like a slightly different comparison thing. But give them one good version using approved information and then see what else they need. So I think that that could become useful ongoing work if you understand the product well. And so, yeah, that one, I think it's like a boring one, but one of those that like a lot of us still spend time in PowerPoint and changing them is pretty annoying. So number five, open rig. So open rig lets you organize coding agents into a team.

Starting point is 00:13:06 So you can have one working on a change and another checking it. And there's a way to actually like pass the work between them. So it works with Codex. It works with Cloud Code. It actually works with both. So I think that's really cool. This starts to make sense when you're already using agents and you're doing a lot of the coordinating yourself. You're copying a result into another chat. Maybe you're asking it for a review.

Starting point is 00:13:29 And then you're taking that feedback back to the first one. So there's a two agent starter for exactly this. So you install the tool and you follow that walkthrough in a test project. It needs Mac or Linux setup, which, node and T-Mux, and it changes some agent setting. So you're going to want to read those before running it. I would give it a small job, like a quote calculator for a website, and I'd have the agent build it, and the other check the result against the business pricing. Obviously, make sure it works. It makes sense. I could see this being useful for people who build websites for

Starting point is 00:14:08 clients, client work, because you know how there's like just. small additions after you launch. I've been in that business, so I feel it a lot. You'd obviously still review the work before delivering it, but you're going to spend less time passing instructions between Windows. So I think that's really cool. For people who are just starting to have more and more agents and want agents to talk to each other,

Starting point is 00:14:36 open rigs are really cool one and a fun one that I'm playing with. By the way, I have no affiliation with any of, these GitHub repos or skills. Just find them cool, things I'm testing. And yeah, let me know what you think of them. Or if there's other GitHub repos or skills that you're using. So number six, free tools. I think it was Corey Haynes who built this skill.

Starting point is 00:15:06 For those of you don't know, skill, set of instructions, your agent could reuse for a particular job. some of them come with scripts. Some of them come with examples too. You're basically giving it a process to work through rather than writing these massive gigantic prompts every single time. Free Tools is from Corey Haynes, right? And he has like a whole marketing collection.

Starting point is 00:15:33 And it helps you work out what you could build and give away to attract the right customers. in general, I like this because if you enjoy building things, you can put some of that energy into getting people to find your business. We don't want to just, like on this podcast in general, I'm not just trying to give people ideas. I also want to give you growth tactics in terms of how you can get your thing out there. But yeah, with free tools, like think about a packaging supplier.

Starting point is 00:16:03 Someone's launching a product is trying to work out whether they need to order like 2,000 or 5,000 or 1,000 boxes. What if like a calculator that shows what those options costs, that would be pretty helpful. And if they ask for a quote afterwards, they've already told you something about what they're buying. So I would, you know, if I was building this, I'd let them see the result before asking for their email. Then it offered to turn the estimate into an actual quote without making them enter everything again. I think, think a lot of businesses in general need some version of this. And what's cool is, like, obviously that's a hypothetical example of essentially like a

Starting point is 00:16:51 lead magnet for that ICP or for that use case. But I think there's tons of examples where you're going to need to attract people, convert them and free tools, hey, people love free tools and they're looking for ways to go down the funnel. And that's why I think this is an interesting one. I've used not free tools before this particular one, but free tools, the concept in general. And it's been just so helpful in my career. So I'm going to be playing with this one more. Number seven, might have the best name of the list this month, which is Grill Me, which is actually a good name for this particular skill. I think it's by Matt Pocock.

Starting point is 00:17:38 You give it an idea or a decision and it interviews you about it. So you want to install the collection, you run the grill me, and explain what you're thinking. It asks questions and rounds and falls up based on your answers. And I'd use it before building something I'm like especially excited about because that's probably what I'm most likely to skip over an awkward question. So what do I mean by that? say I'm thinking about making local ads for franchises. Who's paying me, the franchise owner, the headquarters, and does the person paying me have permission to actually approve the ad?

Starting point is 00:18:15 I can imagine confidently building a dashboard and then discovering that every ad needs to go through someone at head office. That is like the little thing that I would love to learn early. So the instruction I'd add is, you know, something like keep track of anything I say, probably about. They probably have budget. They probably gave us access. Those are assumptions I would want it written down. And then I'd ask which I should check first and take the question to a potential customer. So the skill helps you prepare. The customer is the one who can tell you what's actually

Starting point is 00:18:50 happening. And by the way, I feel like as I'm saying this, people are going to be like, these are just for big decisions. You can use this for smaller decisions too, right? Should we offer an annual plan. Is the feature worth building for one big client? I think it's useful to have something, just keep asking questions when you're already halfway to opening the code editor. We can all be asking ourselves more questions, all be asking ourselves to be grilled more because through the grilling, I think we get more clarity, we get more insight. So that's why I think this one's interesting and certainly a level up. All right, impeccable. Impeccable. is the last one. Paul Bacos built it to give coding agents more specific design guidance.

Starting point is 00:19:41 And I think it's worth a look if you've been asking your AI to make things look better, but you're not really getting too far. So you installed in your project, you run the setup, and you tell it who the product's for, keyword. Then you have commands like critique and polish. There's also bolder and quieter, which I like. Sometimes quieter is exactly. exactly what I want from an AI generated website, by the way. So if you look at the creator's conference site example, they started with the mockup and a brand reference and they turned it into a working site. And they checked it in the browser and fixed things like awkward crops and overlapping elements.

Starting point is 00:20:22 So I would start with critique on a page that I've already built. So see whether it notices something I missed, then ask it to fix the parts that I agree with. So you can focus on onboarding or checking out instead of changing the whole site. And by the way, I do think there's work here for someone with a good eye. So if you find a small product you like, just some small product that you like where the website is just like hard to understand what you're buying. You just put together a couple of specific suggestions and then you show the founder what you change. What do I mean by that? I mean like maybe the pricing is like confusing on mobile or the sign up form just like

Starting point is 00:21:09 asked too much of people. That gives you something useful to discuss. So I'd want to be able to explain why the change helps beyond preferring how it looks. And then you can sell that to people. Like if you have a good eye and you start using the skill, you can start selling that to people. And it's kind of like what we talked about with the product hunt thing, right? It opens the conversation. And even if you don't sell it initially, it's like, okay, great.

Starting point is 00:21:37 But do you want any other design services? Do you want me to do market research? Do you, you know, would you pay me $1,000 a month if I do this? And then, you know, I can hear the comment section. Yeah, okay, but like that's not a big business, you know. That's $1,000 a month. $10,000 a month. This is where it starts, right?

Starting point is 00:21:55 Every big business starts as a small business. And you learn and through that, you build a moat. You can build technology. You go from services to technology. I'll cover that in unseparate episodes. And I have pieces of it. But just so you know, using these skills is kind of interesting just in general to like use these skills, use these GitHub repos as a way to get cash flow and then build a business around it. Obviously, if you're going to use impeccable to help do the work, your judgment is still,

Starting point is 00:22:30 a big part of what someone's going to hire you for, right? But I think it's a good place to be able to spot the problem and able to make the fix. And I'm glad things like this are coming out because, let's be honest, some of the outputs on LLM designs, there's something to be desired. It's free to install, by the way. Your coding agent costs are going to be separate. I would try it on a copy of your own site first before doing it with others, but check it out. That's the episode. Hope it's been helpful. Hope it got your creative juices flowing. If I had to pick one to try tonight, I think it would be Bragg. You get something you can send to someone. I like that, like a video. So just take a project that you've built something, an idea you've built something, make a video on it. You give

Starting point is 00:23:23 people a reason to look at it. The other one that I want to spend more time with is agent reach. If I'm looking for, if I was looking for a business to start, understanding some of the customer pains there are helpful. We do have some of these skills built in to ideabrowser.com, which is literally free to sign up to get your idea of the day if you want validate ideas and trends. But it does also do skills around a lot of complaints and things like that. So yeah, just interesting to see other products out there. But yeah, these are some of the skills and GitHub repos I've been playing with. And what can I say? I'll put all the links below.

Starting point is 00:24:12 Hope this has been helpful. Again, I will do things that I will create videos, episodes of the podcast that are valuable to you. Just let me know what those things are. I follow you. I live to serve. Have a creative day and I'll see you next time.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - 8 GitHub Repos To Go Viral and Make Money

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