The Startup Ideas Podcast - 9 Startup ideas to make $1M+ in 2024

Starting point is 00:00:00 Dude, I would pay $13,000 a month for the ability to have a YouTube channel because I'm attracting people, you know, interested in the same things I'm interested in. And, you know, I could create products, then I can sell them and services and stuff like that. I don't have to live in New York City or live in San Francisco, you know, because I have a YouTube channel now and I have a podcast. 100%. You can get like deep trust in a one to many format. And, you know, It's like, I'm just trying to create as much surface area as possible to create, like, greater serendipity. It's like one of the best quotes.

Starting point is 00:00:36 And like, the easiest way to do that is build media and just be everywhere. And it's just from that, I'm trying to create digital gravity, right? Like for brands and for self and for all of this, it's just as much digital mass on the internet as possible to create as much digital gravity as you can as possible. They should play music, by the way. I wanted to play music. Like it's just like, you know, have like thunderstruck or something. Totally.

Starting point is 00:01:19 Just ACDC, classic dad rock or creed. With arms wide open, Cody Schneider, he's back on the pod, startup ideas pod. One of your YouTube videos on the pod has like 40 or 50,000 views. I'm hyped, man. I've decided that I am, this is like a residency for me. Vegas has the chain smokers and Greg's pod as me. I'm going to come back whenever they want. Totally.

Starting point is 00:01:46 You send me a text. You're on and you send me a text with a box. bunch of, I think nine really amazing ideas. So I want you just to get right into it. Let's go. Let's go quick. Before we do that, can we talk about this dude that did the cricket thing? I'm so hyped about this. Okay. So this guy DM me on LinkedIn and he works at like a big 10, honestly a big five marketing agency. Like it's like, you know, top of the list. It employs one of the, you know, the biggest amounts of people in the U.S. that's in that space. And spun it up, got two customers already.

Starting point is 00:02:24 He's just running Facebook ads, getting like 50 cent emails, just doing a drip nurture, basically upselling him. And he's like, yo, this is, I'm like, from the outside looking in, he's going to build a company on top of this. And I'm hyped for him. So anyways, this is what we live for, all right? It's like people hear this stuff and then they go and they put it out in the wild and tell Greg and I about it.

Starting point is 00:02:43 So anyway. So you put out that idea on the pod. he took it, he probably built it in 72 hours, right? 100%. It was like a weekend project. And it looks like he's just using off the shelf tooling, right? So just Shopify and then some like Shopify apps is the whole thing. That entire like company is that.

Starting point is 00:03:04 And it's a SaaS business, right? Like that is a functioning SaaS business by all metrics. He's got a good name with it too. What is it? SVG something. He's really just, yeah, I think something. something like that. Yeah, SVG collections.com. And, uh, yeah, I mean, this is, I think the exact execution of what I envision this would be. He basically did it and has the skill set to actually,

Starting point is 00:03:32 like, ship on it. And it sounds like you're just going to cash flow it. Like, this is the, his whole plan, which is amazing. And is he using AI to create the designs? Yeah. So that whole build out is using these AI tools, right? So you're basically using Mid Journey. You're prompting it to make like a black and white image with a white background, you know, black only. And there's a prompt, you have to just figure out the prompting. If you just Google like how to do, you know, basically PNG images with with Mid Journey, you'll find it. And then based off of the keywords people are searching for goes and builds out these collections. And you can then take those image, you upscale them, use an AI vectorizing tool to turn it into a vector, which is,

Starting point is 00:04:14 what an SGV file is right at its core. And then at that point, he basically has unlimited amounts of products or skews that he can sell on this. And then the structure of the business is you basically have to, there's all these free products on it, but you have to be signed up. So you have to give your email to basically download all the free ones. And then all the premium ones, you have to be paying to download those. So there's a bump pricing model, right? And when you think about that funnel, super easy. It's just like, cool, offer some type of free download, they can go and get all these free tools, sorry, free SVGs. And then, uh, if, you know, they're constantly going to see like your most popular ones, you just make them, you make them paywall

Starting point is 00:04:54 gate it. That's the whole, the whole model around this that I would do. And I imagine that's what he's going to do as well. So totally. Charging $3.99 a month, $3.99 a month. There's no real cost associated with it, right? His costs are, totally, are his meta ads that he's doing. So this is a beautiful business. And I think just for people listening, don't just listen. Like, go take notes and actually do the thing. Because people are doing it. They're listening to this pod. And they're, they're cash flowing, you know, 10,000 to $100,000 a month sometimes. So it's kind of crazy. 100%. And I think that that's the thing with this is like it looks tiny right now, right? But like, when you think about the audience, like cricket, there's 10 million users. Like he can blow this up

Starting point is 00:05:39 into a huge business by just being like a barnacle on the whale of this massive company, right? And this is already validated. Like this is, you know, this is going to make money. Like zero, there's zeroed out anymore, right? It's now just execution. And so, I mean, for me, this is like a, this is the highlight. You'd live for this type of thing when people actually go and do the stuff that you're like suggesting from a business. All this is junk food, right, at the end of the day, unless you actually go and ship on it. So totally. So you saw that, that fired you. And then you came up with nine ideas just from that.

Starting point is 00:06:12 And here you are. What's idea number one? Idea number one. So LinkedIn video is about the pop off. I just got some data from a friend. He did 700,000 impressions in seven days. He's been doing stuff on LinkedIn for two weeks. And all he's doing, he's like Instagram, TikTok famous already.

Starting point is 00:06:36 He talks about like business content on those platforms. He's just been porting that content over to LinkedIn, like vertical video, and it's just been ripping. So he only had 2,700 followers when he started doing this, but still got that many impressions. So the reason this is happening is LinkedIn is rolling out like a 4U page feed, just like TikTok. So what this means is it's just blue ocean. The content over there, it's terrible, right? Like everybody is like, it's just, you know, BDR is talking to like AEs. Like that's what's going on here.

Starting point is 00:07:06 And so what the opportunity is is basically building out a company that goes in services founders. And the idea is you basically like would interview a founder, you'd come up with, you know, here's these seven different scripts. We'd write these scripts based off the conversation you have. So imagine you sit down once a week and you interview the founder for an hour. You take those ideas. You turn it into scripts. And then you send that back to the founder. They just sit down, they record it.

Starting point is 00:07:34 you give them like recordings like show them the inflection the pacing the whole thing they just are mimicking it and they can crank these out in like 10 minutes is what I've seen and then you send it back to that agency and then they create these clips and they go and schedule them and this is already validated like I had a friend just buy this from like another person for like two grand a month and it's like really what you're doing is you're riding this way the selling mechanism that I would go after is like there's this huge opportunity for founders to create massive personal brand with this free reach that LinkedIn is providing. And then it also creates like an inbound generation for your company. But that is this, I think there's just like, that's a wave

Starting point is 00:08:15 that can be written right now from a company standpoint. Like if you just have a little bit of execution prowess and know how to work with offshore teams, like this is easily, I bet you could get this to 30K, you know, a month in like probably 90 to 180 days. Like no questions asked. So, hey everyone. If you're anything like me, You've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert.

Starting point is 00:08:50 You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where design scientists.com comes in. It's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work, all your copywork, all your engineering, and do stuff that actually scales your revenue. You don't need a designer. You need a design scientist. Let's go.

Starting point is 00:09:14 Designscientist.com. I liked it so much. I invested in the business. A lot of people ask me, oh, how did I get such a big Twitter audience? And I got a big Twitter audience when two things happen. Threads, the ability to create a thread, you know, that wasn't a feature and became a feature on Twitter.

Starting point is 00:09:37 And then number two, the feed was latest and it moved to algorithmic. So all of a sudden, your content was getting recommended to new followers. My content game didn't change. It was just the platform changed. So what you're saying is really smart. You're saying that the platform, LinkedIn is changing and there's going to be a bunch of B2B creators that are going to take advantage of it. but they're going to need sort of a middleman to facilitate it, right?

Starting point is 00:10:07 1,000%. And that's the biggest thing with all of this is like any company I'm trying to start, I'm looking for like a larger trend that I can attach myself to, right? Because you don't want to ever educate the market. Like what you're trying to do is just sell things that people already want to buy, right? Like what's going to happen right now is they're going to start seeing these creators like just pop off on LinkedIn. It's already happening. Like it's happening. At this moment, it is actively happening. I know like 10 people that are

Starting point is 00:10:33 already famous in this space that are all doing this and just going ham on this as a channel, right? And they're getting like 500 engagements with this content with only like 3,000 followers on their account. Like that's unheard of. That's crazy. That doesn't exist, right? It's it it's the same moment that exists on Twitter for you like, you know, when you basically grew your audience. And so the angle here is like founders want to do that. They know they need to do that. They have VC dollars. And so you basically go to them and be like, yo, this is a done for you solution. It's going to take, you know, let's just throw out a number,

Starting point is 00:11:05 like two hours of your mental energy, three hours of your mental energy a week. And we're going to handle everything else for you. We'll do all the data analytics. We'll get smarter with this. And then they start to understand, okay, cool. Like imagine you give the like an affiliate link in the like the visit my website section on your LinkedIn profile and then like whatever if you're adding a call

Starting point is 00:11:25 to action to the comments. And then you can start to track. Okay, cool. like these videos were the best performers. So it's like more like this, less like this, and it creates a flywheel. So again, I saw your tweet where you were like, you know, nobody's talking about this, but there's founders that built their personal brands on the back of like VC subsidies. And like, this is an angle.

Starting point is 00:11:47 This is another thing that you can basically do for that exact idea. You can just, you know, go and capitalize on this bit. The people are going to want this. They're going to need this. And so it's just a company that. it's like right for the taking. Yeah, to me there's the entry level pricing, which is probably like $2,500 a month,

Starting point is 00:12:05 which is just exactly what you said. But then for like five to $8,000 a month, you can do lead magnets as a service. So it's like every month will create a lead magnet for you. Yeah, like a drip email course. Totally. Totally. Totally.

Starting point is 00:12:20 Exactly. Totally. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. And then the third thing is probably just design help. So it's like, we'll do your, you know, your banner, your cover art will go and create, you know, beautiful infographics.

Starting point is 00:12:34 So you put that together. You target founders and that's the idea. How do you actually get to founders though? Yeah, I think that will be the hardest part. Probably what it turns into is like you are doing your own channel, like you're doing your own clip making and posting on the platform and be like you want to do this for yourself, like book an intro call. It's probably like a community play, honestly.

Starting point is 00:12:56 It's like to drip them into a community and then up. sell them into like a service like this and where it's like everybody's talking about how do they grow on LinkedIn like you make the LinkedIn community for the people that are trying to grow their accounts and then they're going to see oh this is really hard right because it is really hard like I'm talking to you know like I'm working with like two you know two people I know that are really like have deep knowledge in this space to try to figure this out and we you know there's no way I don't have that I have the mantle bandwidth or energy to figure this out right so think about that and and that's really what you're selling. You're selling the ideation, the creative components of this.

Starting point is 00:13:31 And for these creators, man, like, it's like, I mean, this is a no-brainer. Like, they sit down and can crank these scripts out and like, I've seen them do it. And like three minutes, right? Because they just know the cadence. They know the sequencing, all of this. And it's just another play. Like, it's just a product, high service built around a creator that's in a specific category. But this category is business, which we know, because we're both doing this, is like a huge category where a lot of money is sloshing around. So that's the opportunity here. Yeah, absolutely. Here's how I would do the community aspect. So I would get the domain founders going viral on LinkedIn.com. And I'd create a free community where every week I'd give one tip on how to go viral on LinkedIn, like what's working.

Starting point is 00:14:18 And then one breaking down another founder and why it's working. So it's like this person, Cody Schneider just got a thousand. on this post. Let me break down why that matters. You do a monthly call where you, you know, everyone kind of comes in and it's like a peer to peer group. And at the end, you just say like, hey, you know, we've got this service. If you want the done for you service, it's going to cost XYZ. Totally. I think it's brilliant. And I mean, it just, again, shows your expertise and knowledge. It's a repeatable thing. And you're already on the platform doing this research already. You're just repurposing the stuff that you're finding into content.

Starting point is 00:14:56 that you're using as a sales tool, right? So again, another easy one. Look for trends. You know, the high level idea here is like, look for things that are bigger than you that are happening and then how do you attach yourself to them? It's the classic playbook, like especially when you're trying to bootstrap a thing or self-funded. It's the only way to do it that I've seen at work.

Starting point is 00:15:18 When you try to convince the world of anything, it's not going to happen, right? Someone in the comment section is going to be like, but, you know, LinkedIn, isn't going to be video first forever. And in 12 months, you're going to have to shift your business. And it's like, well, even if that is the case, at least now you have a one million ARR business with a bunch of founders and you'll just sell them another service to help them grow on LinkedIn. 1000%.

Starting point is 00:15:46 I think the other piece of it, too, like as a founder, like somebody that's building this audience, like you get to a scale where you can just do whatever you want. Like Greg, you have a huge Twitter, right? You can just basically do whatever you want. You don't even have to play the game and things are going to hit. And that's like there's this, there's this tipping point with all these platforms that you can arrive at. And once you're there, it's like the game, the rules change of the game, right?

Starting point is 00:16:09 And so I think that's just another piece, like on that, you know, not on the business owner's side, but on the like why you should even be thinking about building this audience here. As soon as you have that, I mean, you can just cross, you know, basically like cross promote all of your other social channels and then you have own distribution on every place that you're trying to. All right. My appetite is wet. I had some bread and I'm ready for idea number two. Hell yeah. All right. The next one is a one graph business. I'm going to share my screen real quick and show you. So I stumbled on this the other day. AI automation is the keyword. So this is the graph showing the growth of the search volume for that keyword over the, basically its whole existence. So this is insane to me. Whenever,

Starting point is 00:16:56 I see this, I immediately, you know, sirens are going off. What does this mean? How can I get involved with it? And so what people are looking for is basically like, how do I set up? And again, this is one of those things that's obvious, like people that are in this or know this already. People are trying to figure out how do I create automation with like make.com and Zapier and chat GPT APIs and basically just setting up these systems. But all these companies, like if you look at McKinsey, what's happening right now is they're just doing this for enterprise. but there's this massive opportunity for like SMBs and small business to basically provide this as a solution, right? And so, I mean, the small version of this is you build a consulting company that does this, sets this up,

Starting point is 00:17:38 where you embed with them and you do a sprint for whatever three months and automate away. The better company is probably you go and you create some type of productized service where you have like an embedded AI automation engineer. And all they do is just figure out how to automate like every part of your business that they can. and that's easily like, you know, you probably charge $8,000 a month for something like that, just because you're, the cost savings is like instant for these companies because it's, a lot of it's just like paper pushing that you're automating. But I think the bigger thing here is they're looking, people are just looking for how do I implement this in my company.

Starting point is 00:18:13 And that is the larger wave that's happening. And so if you can just insert yourself here as like a thought leader and probably the distribution strategy, like I would just bid on that keyword. and then every keyword related to like Zapier, make.com, any of these automation tools, Integromat, whatever. I think that changed to make actually. But they like go and basically create tutorials, like use perplexity AI to write tutorials for setups and then have a call to action that's like, oh, you like one AI automation consulting

Starting point is 00:18:43 or service like, you know, book a discovery call that creates all of your inbound. And then it's probably a YouTube channel on top of that. But that is again, just like another insane business you could probably. build. And you own a company in this space already, which is I'm kind of doing this for my understanding. But I don't know if you can talk about it. Exactly. I'll talk about it. And the reason I'll talk about it is just the space is so big that I don't care if other people come in. So we built a AI newsletter community business called You Probably Need a Robot.com, helping people be more productive using AI. And the biggest lesson we learned is people were asking for AI. But what did they really want?

Starting point is 00:19:21 automation. So I think that in the SMB space, there's huge demand for automation because what is automation? Automation is cost savings. And everyone wants to save costs. So it's an easy sell. So I think from a pricing perspective, what you need to do is just figure out, okay, if I'm going to save these guys $200,000, how much can I realistically charge them? And that's like the mental model that you need to come up with. 20 grand. That's the number. That's the number. Yeah, that's the number, right? I mean, that's the way to think about it. And we're actually launching something in July in the space.

Starting point is 00:19:59 And the beauty is we have this media company that we can just like launch these things too. Totally. And that's the whole point of the owned media, right? Like, why are we harping on this constantly? It's because what this allows for you, you have the rails. You can put whatever you want on it. Like anything you want to get out in public, like again, the company can zero to one in 30 days. And it's sustainable.

Starting point is 00:20:20 It's like already cash flow. positive. And so it's sustaining itself when you have these own media channels. And so again, I, it's so easy. It's just like, what like content is a grind, right? Like that's the challenge with it. It's like, how do you not do burnout? But it's like just figuring out that that, that, you know, what is that thing that I can do over and over again, weekly, monthly, daily that's not going to kill me. And then how do I put people behind me to basically run those operations on it? But what kills me and what's so funny is that like, we were talking about this, I think on the live stream. But if you go We're talking like a banker or like the hours that people are like, oh, content's hard.

Starting point is 00:20:55 It's like, this is not that many hours. Like in all reality. Like it's not that grind. Like it's not that grindy as people think it is. It's just like, can you show up and do it consistently? That's the hardest part with this. Totally. And I think it's also like spend time on figuring out what's your tone, what's your voice, what's your personality, what your style, what your structure?

Starting point is 00:21:17 Like, what's your format of the content? and then how are you going to basically bring a pipeline of ideas of content ideas in and then use that system to help you create a lot of that content. That's what the game is. You're more, think of yourself as more of a, you know, an editor than a writer. A curator. You know, you're, you're conductor of the orchestra. You're not playing the flute.

Starting point is 00:21:44 A thousand percent. I mean, that's really just good business ownership, right, as well. you're trying to basically figure out all the puzzles if you're that deep in it even. But a lot of the times in the early days, there needs to be founder energy to like break the laws of physics and get into orbit. Without that, it just doesn't happen in my experience for companies. And then once you get to that place, like, okay, we're in orbit. Now, then it's like, okay, how do I step back as much as possible? I love that quote from the Kinko's founder.

Starting point is 00:22:13 I can't remember his name. But it's like, get out of your business and on top of it. I just always think that that's such a simple way to say that. the core of the idea and it feels, you know, with the content side, it feels like the same thing here. And the company we talked about in, you know, at the beginning of the episode is literally that, right? It's like, okay, cool. Like, I'm letting other people that are experts in it. And for a lot of a lot of founders that are legit, like they can go figure this out, right? But they have, I mean, I got a million other things that I'm trying to manage at this time. So if I can just have somebody,

Starting point is 00:22:40 I show up for an hour and like, I know that content is going to come out of that. It's a no brainer, right? And so it's that same, it's that same thing here. Cool. I love it. What's idea three? Yeah, I want to do, I want to talk about this like AI graphic designers thing. It's, I have a tweet that's like going viral right now, which is hilarious, like as we record this. But it's wild to me that there has, there hasn't been one of these made yet. That's good. Like, and I get pitched these all the time, like in the comments right now.

Starting point is 00:23:09 People are like, oh, we built that. And it's like, no, you didn't. Like, all I'm talking about is like, I just want something where I give it a brand style guy. Like, here's our colors. Here's our logos. here's our like fonts and you know now make me a you know a podcast thumbnail right or like make me an email header for a newsletter or whatever that is and it's just like I don't even need it to be perfect I just want it to be like good enough so that I can then be like oh I like this I'm going

Starting point is 00:23:38 to throw it in Figma and I'm basically going to recreate it something like that almost like a co-pilot in a way and it's insane to me that something like I haven't seen something that does this yet it'll just like all the ones I've seen, it just goes off on this tangent and you end up in no man's land from a design standpoint or just looks like, you know, it was made in PowerPoint in 2009. So I don't know if you've seen anything like this, but the other piece of this as a software, like this is something that people are searching for. There isn't a good solution. So if you just figure out like a small version of this, this is 100% like a SaaS that can be built out. And I think you could sell it super easily. Like what's crazy is Canva hasn't moved into this space already. They,

Starting point is 00:24:17 I feel like they're positioned so well where you could just like prompt and it like creates the thing that you're kind of imagining and looking for based off of your brand style like your brand style guy. But again, it just it just doesn't exist. And so anyway, I'm curious your thoughts on that. I mean, it doesn't exist yet. I think they're going in, I mean, they're going in that direction. Canva recently did. Did you watch any of their, they did like a massive event. No, I didn't see it. No one on tech Twitter. No one on tech Twitter was talking about it. And like that. That. That's the event. Like, forget WWDC. You know, the Canva event actually had like so much that if you're trying to create profitable startups, go, go watch it. Go watch what they announced. Dude, some of these titles are insane. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:25:06 Yeah. It's wild. So they're definitely going into AI territory. And I could see them doing some of this. But I think that even if they do it, it doesn't matter. there's always going to be demand for, hey, I need this asset ASAP. And I'm worse than, you know, I'm worse. Even if I'm good at Canva, I'm not the best at Canva.

Starting point is 00:25:32 So I think there's an opportunity. If it was just like, imagine like an AI aligned thing. Like you'd like throw all the content you want to be in there. And then it just like basically, because that's really what I think people are actually looking for. is like, how do I have it so it has the proper white space so it feels right? How, you know, it's based off the, like, I'm just imagining like I put in the title, the text that I want, right? Maybe I drop in like a background image and I'm like, okay, cool, like turn this into 20 different

Starting point is 00:26:01 Facebook ads based off of my brand style guides. And it just like, yeats those out, right? Like, that's, I think what we're talking about here. It's not like, and again, to your point, I think you made a really valid point of like, it just has to be better than I am. It doesn't have to be graphic designer level. Like if it's an 80% of a graphic designer, but like a hundred times faster than me,

Starting point is 00:26:24 you know, putting in a request to my graphic designer and then I have to wait on them and like the whole, that whole thing. Like if I can just get something out super quickly, like you have a market there if the pricing is right on it. And all this stuff,

Starting point is 00:26:35 I think again, you could do super cheaply when it's augmented by these, by AI. Do you know design pickle? Totally. Yeah. I mean, they're OG. So, OG, been around for, I don't know, 10, 15 years.

Starting point is 00:26:48 They probably do, you know, 30 million a year in revenue. And from what I've seen, they generate a ton of customers from meta ads. I'm constantly seeing their ads on Instagram. And they charge about $499, I believe, $499 a month. So it's very, very cheap to get in there. I think that if you're going to go build this, the way to do it is it's like $9.9,000. $99 a month. 99.

Starting point is 00:27:16 And design pick only allows you to have one thing in the queue at a time. Like if you had it where you could like multi thread, so you give it. Yeah. Or even here's a list of prompts and then it's working on those simultaneously. I think that that is something that would be incredibly valuable to every company. I mean, I know I want it. Just like, I was writing an email newsletter this morning. I'm like, fuck, I just want this header to be like in our style.

Starting point is 00:27:40 Like I can build it in Figma, but I don't like, I just. you know, can we just have this exist in the next two seconds, right? And I just copy it over and drop it in. That's the, that's the, and maybe that's what it's built on top of. It's like, it's built on top of Canva. And that's your distribution strategy. It's built on top of Figma. And it's like just another subscription outside of it. You kind of get platform that way. I mean, it's, it's hard to build, you know, really complex UI things. But I don't know. I just think that this like, even if it just came back like variations of ideas, like, okay, here's 20 of them or some. I don't know. If we, we, think about what's happening in the AI writing space where it's like, hey, we give it source

Starting point is 00:28:17 material and then we're having it write based off that source material and it's making way better outputs, right? So when I'm writing from the general knowledge of the LLL, like the LLM, it's super like it's not, it's pretty average. But when I give it awesome source material, it's going to create really decent outputs is what we're seeing. So it's just that same idea, but it's applied in the graphic design space, right? Like here's these brand style guides. I'm just giving you kind of like a box that you have to work in. Now go build within that box. And like what I found is that by putting constraints on these AI to like just any of these

Starting point is 00:28:50 AI things, like you can, but those limitations allow for it to create way better outputs or the outputs that you're looking for more, you know, most of the time. Cool. I like this one. I think I do think that the pricing like undercutting design pickle like design pickle, my guess is they have a ton of offshore talent, right? So the reason they're able to charge so cheap is it's it's offshore. But my guess is they're not going to create a $99 a month plan, right?

Starting point is 00:29:18 So you can, you know, they rode the offshoring wave. You can ride the AI wave. And there's a business here. 100%. All right. Let's keep the pace going. Just got through the double espresso. So I'm feeling energy now.

Starting point is 00:29:34 All right. This is another done for you service for founders. So every founder wants to have a newsletter. None of them want to write it. And so that same thing we were talking about where you sit down with them for an hour. I mean, this could probably be the same service. It's like another offering that you have. But you sit down for an hour, you interview them.

Starting point is 00:29:54 You take that transcript and you turn it into a newsletter. And so how do you grow the newsletter? A lot of the time, what I would do is I'd go approach people that already have like a Twitter following, a LinkedIn following, something like that. And I'd be like, okay, we're going to get all the news. those people that already followed you on those platforms onto this newsletter and like basically be a sub sub to the newsletter. So how do you actually do that? So you can actually, we just found this recently, but you can go scrape people's emails from Twitter. So like I've just been running the

Starting point is 00:30:22 scraper, scraping emails from like my Twitter followers and then using a validation tool to like, okay, are these real or not? And like the data I'm getting back is like almost like 40 to 50% of them are valid emails, which is insane. So the testing that we're running is just sequence. them into the newsletter and seeing what's happens, right? So you can do the same thing on LinkedIn. Use a tool called like Sales QL, I think is what it's called. But you can again go and scrape all the connections of a person. And then from that same thing, you can basically sales QA extracts the emails. You go and validate it, sequence them into the newsletter. And then at that point, like you can probably get a list. And again, I would go after these people that already have these

Starting point is 00:31:04 following. They want to do this, but they just don't have the operations piece behind it. So again, another super simple business. And that would be really the whole thing. Just like set that up. And then the other component of it is like build these automations for them. Use something like Phantom Buster where it's like every new person that tries to connect with your client, automatically send them like a subscribe to my newsletter link with some type of call to action or offer. And then the same thing with Twitter, anybody that follows you, automated DM that goes out to them to follow. follow and that's how you continue to grow this. But I think that and then again, you just,

Starting point is 00:31:39 as they follow you, you're just every month, you go and scrape them, slowly sequence them in like 200 a day to that list. And then just you're basically writing the content off of the founders' ideas. And it could be even just like a ride along on their business of what they're doing, right? But I think this larger theme that we're starting to see is like these founder led like founder led companies are what's going to happen. A founder is basically turning into a media company themselves. And I'm just imagining what the Beehive founder, like Tyler's doing with his newsletter that's just like updates on the company. How do you do a version of that? But for like every founder that's have some type of audience that they've already built on these other platforms and then

Starting point is 00:32:19 just run that on the background for them. And again, when you interview them, you have the language that they use. You have the ideas that they use. You're basically just translating their, their, you know, raw data that they're providing you into a tone, style and voice. And that you can prompt it like, yo, just take the, here's an insight from this episode, here's the transcript, you know, write, uh, right, uh, whatever, a two paragraph, uh, section based off this transcript about this insight and the tone style and voice that this transcript has. And you'll get it, you know, 95% of the way there from a voice standpoint, human layer over the top of that. But I think the growing side of this super easy too. You just go like DM these people and it's just like,

Starting point is 00:33:02 send them, hey, we grew this newsletter for XYZ person, right? Show them the data for it. And it's like, all you have to do is you show up an hour a week. We record the session and that's it. We handle everything else. It's all handled on the backside and you get this own distribution channel that

Starting point is 00:33:16 creates deeper relationships with your followers and, you know, your customers, etc. Yeah, I like this idea for a few reasons. One is founders are going to look at this as Roaz. They're going to be like, okay, I'm going to pay you $100,000 a year. but the lifetime value of a customer to me is worth $25,000. So I just need four of these to work. So I love that.

Starting point is 00:33:43 And I think that's like a new trend, just like looking at audience as ROAS, return on audience spend. So that's number one. And number two, everyone knows that being dependent on any of these one platforms is a bad idea. So everyone's trying to get off these platforms into email or text. So this is just selling schmuck insurance. 100%. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:34:11 This is just selling schmuck insurance. Don't be a schmuck. Have an email list is like the tagline. So simple. 100%. The branding could be super cool too, like around that idea, right? Yeah. Like just like somebody with like, you know, they got their hands and their hair.

Starting point is 00:34:26 Like just like, oh God, I just got platformed on. Yeah. Oh, no. Dude, did you hear about Roger? Oh, what happened? No, what happened? Oh, Roger got, Roger got a, I thought it was a real person.

Starting point is 00:34:40 Exactly. Roger's gone, dude. It's insane. Anyway, and it's like, that is, I think that's just an easy win, and everybody's trying to do this and trying to figure out how to do this. I like how,

Starting point is 00:34:55 when I was, first of all, are you even friends with a person named Roger? Do you even know any of a person? I hate him. I've never met a Roger I like. I don't know about you. Yeah, that's true, actually.

Starting point is 00:35:07 I don't know what it is about Rogers, but they're polarizing. Put it that way. They're like olives. They're like olives. That's right. Rogers are like olives. But yeah, I was like,

Starting point is 00:35:18 did you hear what would have in a Roger? And I saw your heart drop. Dude, immediately. I was like, wait, who? Is it somebody we know? And I saw your heart drop because you're basically not wearing a shirt right now. So I can see your heart. It's peak, it's peak summer here in Denver right now, and I am dying.

Starting point is 00:35:38 I'm just only in linen and shorts that are way too small. But you have to, I guess, show some thigh. Otherwise, I look like a dad. I'm out here. I'm just trying to wear car hearts and everybody's like, you're not a painter, right? You work online. You have soft hands. You do have soft hands.

Starting point is 00:35:53 I mean, just because you do cold emailing doesn't mean your hands are, got calluses on them. 100%. They're dirty, but, Not calloused. Exactly. That's right. All right.

Starting point is 00:36:05 I like that idea. Very straightforward. Idea number five. What's idea number six? Okay. Six. This one is, we did a live stream,

Starting point is 00:36:14 and I literally can't stop thinking about this idea, but it's basically YouTube thumbnails. It's really similar to the cricket one that initially, like, you know, everybody kind of got obsessed about. But it's YouTube thumbnails, just like a whole library of them as a subscription.

Starting point is 00:36:28 So YouTube is owning the creator space. Why is that happening? Because monetization is built into the platform. They have the best RPMs. And so you can just basically make decent money off of your content if you're good. That's the whole concept behind it. Why does every TikToker, Instagram person, you know, anybody, everybody ends up on YouTube in the long run over a long enough time horizon. The reason for that is because the monetization is so powerful.

Starting point is 00:36:57 And so with that said, I think the opportunity is basically you build. this whole library of these thumbnails that you can just, it's like plug and play. You can go, you know, access any of one of them. You swap out assets. Like, it's like, you know, your face gets swapped in and out, that type of thing. And then the go to market strategy here, super straightforward. You just go and scrape every YouTuber's email address. You can do this. Like, go to Fiverr, scrape YouTube URL, you scrape YouTube emails. You give them like, specifications, of where you want it to be. Like, I want over 10,000 subs in the USA and, you know,

Starting point is 00:37:37 whatever, maybe a keyword category you want them in. And then you go and you just like cold email them basically access to this tool. Like, hey, we built a library of thumbnails. And maybe it's like some free offer initially. It's like, you know, they get access to 100. And it's like if you want access to 100,000, then it's a paid tiers, you know, or access to 10 initially or something like that. But that would be my whole dish, be my.

Starting point is 00:38:01 my whole distribution strategy. And I think there's a huge play here. Especially like this younger generation, like I am watching them print money on YouTube. And then they use that as a subsidy to go build out these product-tized services and build out these SaaS companies. And then, you know, they go on money Twitter and they're like, yo, I've got negative cack. And every, every old head is like looking down at them. They're like, you little fucker. Like what like, like, how are you doing this basically, right? So I think that's the opportunity or the larger wave that you can ride with this, like I think YouTube is becoming the social media. And they're owning it, right? They're owning long form. They're owning podcasting. They're owning short form. They're owning monetization. Like, all of the

Starting point is 00:38:41 tailwinds are there for this platform to kind of just be the winner. And so I think that's where this goes long term. So when I post a YouTube, me and my producer come up with like a few title and thumbnail ideas. And then we kind of just hope for that. We pray for the best. That's Basically it, right? So I think that there's an opportunity to, first of all, not just do only thumbnails, combine it with titles because titles are equally as important. And then putting data behind, oh, this title is, yeah, is, and I knew you were. I knew you were about to go there. This speaks to you, right? This idea around, okay, there's a 75% probability that if you use this title, it's going to generate 25% more traffic because, the search volume, the this, the that. And I can, you can even, like, I use vid IQ.

Starting point is 00:39:36 And vid IQ has a ton of really good data. And this may be something that you like pitch to vid IQ or work, you know, I don't know if they have an API or anything, but the data is available. Totally. 100%. I think if you put that to like, hey, this video, like, here's the thumbnail title combo. And it got this many impressions, this many views, you know, just pull that data out of YouTube and put that in the data set.

Starting point is 00:39:59 So like their whole library is that, right? I mean, you know, create some filtering capabilities within it as well. Like also like a time thing because what I found, again, people way smarter than me that tell me how all these platforms function. What I found is that there's like, just like there's trends on social, like, you know, like Instagram, et cetera, TikTok, like with videos or ideas going viral. It's the same idea with like YouTube thumbnail and title combinations. So there's almost like a shelf life to all of these where you have to.

Starting point is 00:40:29 you have to be cycling through this. If you just use the same kind of format over, people get, there's fatigue to it, right? It's just like add fatigue. It's the same idea. They almost get, they get blind to that.

Starting point is 00:40:41 And so the idea here is you could basically like, it's this constant feed, which creates a stickiness from a user standpoint as well, right? It's like, hey, we're doing all this data scraping for you. We're pulling in all these variations. And then you're basically providing these templates for them. And I don't even know if you'd have to have it be templates to begin with.

Starting point is 00:40:57 Like, thumbnail and titles, like this guy, this kid I'm working with that's like helping me on the YouTube side. Like this is literally, that's actually what I'm paying him to do. It's like, cool, like here's my product and I'm going to go find all these like YouTube thumbnail and title variations that are like could be remixed or like into what my product offering is. Right. And that's real like he just has this pulse on how to do that. But I think there's like a layer in there that you could add some type of software that would augment that that ability to go and find those. And then you just pass it on to your graphic design.

Starting point is 00:41:29 I mean, you could have some AI version of this is like how, you know, what's the, how would I, how would I take this title and translate it into, you know, whatever for the video that I'm about to post. But I think really it's just like show them a library of ideas with the data attached. And that is where all the value comes from. Like, you know, Canva, what's interesting, you know, we've been talking about a lot today, but like they have all of these templates that are there. What I want to know is like, do these templates actually work? Like, especially if it's marketing related. Like, what's the data? Like, okay, if I send this in an email, is this going to be effective? And that is a really interesting idea when you kind of scale that up. Like, what are these

Starting point is 00:42:07 other places that this can be applied in? Right. So I think there's probably like tons of other businesses that are just this. It's like aggregating like what is working. And then what's the trend analysis on top of that for all of these marketing channels that people are investing in currently. Yeah, I like this. I also like, you know, it's just one of those things where more and more people do this. And you said it yourself. They want to be creating. They want to be YouTubers. And it's interesting because now it's bleeding into like the B2B space. There's so many founders I talk to now that are like secretly like, yeah, I want to be like a bit of a YouTuber, you know?

Starting point is 00:42:42 Like I want 100,000 subs on YouTube and I'm like, what? 100% dude. Everyone I'm talking to is doing this because it's like it's a clout thing, which is weird. But the stranger part and I think the layer like, you know, the higher level of this is it's, yeah, exactly. What does it say? I can't see YouTube blurry right now. So, in the last 30 days on my YouTube, 263,000 views. And that's like long form, you know? Insane. Totally.

Starting point is 00:43:13 31,000 hours of time. What's the ad revenue for that to give people perspective? I'm going to give it at the end. I'm not just, I'm not just going to give it to people. That's how this works. That's how YouTube works, bro. I thought you wanted to be a YouTuber. And then I added 6,300 subscribers in the last 28 days. And I made an estimated revenue of $3,000. Totally. Which subsidizes like...

Starting point is 00:43:44 $3,000 a year. Totally. Subsidizes the cost of that, building that audience, right? Dude, I would pay $13,000 a month for the ability to have a YouTube channel. A thousand percent. Because I'm attracting people, you know, interested in the same things I'm interested in. And, you know, I could create products, then I can sell them and services and stuff like that.

Starting point is 00:44:11 So it's, I don't have to live in New York City or live in San Francisco. You know, because I have a YouTube channel now and I have a podcast. 100%. You can get like deep trust in a one to many format. And which just creates inbound for you. But the bigger thing, like, to your point of like, you no longer have to be there, right? Like, I think that that is, again, another reason, like, why I started building own media. It's like, I don't have any pedigree, right?

Starting point is 00:44:39 Like, I'm from bum fuck Idaho, the sticks, right? In comparison to everybody else that's in this game. And so this was like a way to get a leverage point, right? And so because of that, like, anybody globally can now do this. If you have good ideas and you're sharing them regularly and at scale, like this is this way to do that. And oh, by the way, you can get paid for it. as well. And like, why is YouTube going to win podcasting?

Starting point is 00:45:01 I mean, we talk about this all the time offline, right? It's because of this, right? Like, you can have like an hour and a half long video, I can have what, three to four mid-roll ads occur? I mean, shit. It's just a printer when you get to scale, right? And so you're making that simultaneously, you know, it goes all the, you know, down funnel into your companies.

Starting point is 00:45:20 And again, it's just this new way to do this business, like business model, which is so interesting to me. I feel like it's changing the whole dynamic of how this even functions or works. And it's almost like you're not even playing the game at the pro level unless you're doing this now. Like I look at the stand store guy. Like he's funded, right? Like classic path, but he's also doing this. And I'm like, you're playing at a caliber, like at a level that is so much higher than like the average VC back founder is now.

Starting point is 00:45:48 Like the game you're playing. Like what they're doing traditionally is child's play in what in comparison to what you're doing. Right. I mean, that's a bonus business idea right there. You make a list of all the VC firms. And specifically, I mean, you start with enterprise B2B ones. And then you make the pitch that their founders need to be media companies and their businesses need to be media companies. And you try to sell it to them as a value add to their portfolio.

Starting point is 00:46:17 Hey, we come in and we'll create content, we'll create videos, we'll, you know, do, thumbnails, we'll do titles, like all the stuff that we talked about on this pod, but it's going to cost, and your customer isn't the founder. It's the people who raise a $100 million fund. 100%. 100%. Also, every VC you talk to wants to be famous. Every single one of them. They all get envy on this shit. Like, this is something we learned at Rupa. I was just, I killed me. I thought it was so funny. Like, we grew their Instagram from like zero to like 50,000 followers and like, I think it was like six-ish months. And all I was, doing was like we were basically repurposing quotes from the podcast into like those like quote

Starting point is 00:46:59 tweets right that were like stylized in a brand format and we were just running Instagram only ads would like follow this account for more content like this to like all of Instagram basically but the account just grew you know exponentially because it was interesting like the like it's it's interesting health stuff and what that turned into is like VCs were then reaching out to the founder Tara and they were like, yo, how are you doing this? What is going on? Because they're all trying to accomplish this as well.

Starting point is 00:47:29 So, I mean, you could probably go sell this to them too, where it's like, yo, well, like, it's like, you know, lead interviews that make cool viral moments happen. And like, there's like a story arc that happens in it. Because I think that's a lot of what people don't know how to do is like, how do I make this compelling story that is actually going to get reach on the platform, right? That's this whole other component of it. So, yeah, I mean, 100%.

Starting point is 00:47:50 I think there's a whole business in there. Just like making these people. people famous and selling it downstream to them through, you know, whoever just wrote a check into them. I actually think of a better idea is your idea, like selling, selling to them and because they, they could easily write that off as an expense because it's, it's deal flow, right? They're in the business of getting the best possible deals and they need attention and audience to do that.

Starting point is 00:48:18 That's why people forget, but in tech Twitter, in the beginning, the people who had the most amount of followers weren't entrepreneurs. It was the VCs. Totally. Like the Fred Wilson's and, you know, all those guys. They use it as magnet content. Yep. Yes, exactly.

Starting point is 00:48:37 And they use it as magnet content to get inbound of the best founders in the world, right? So if you do long form content for them and you basically create this, you know, basically, you're making a fishnet to get the best people, like the ideas that they're trying to convey out globally. I mean, then they create inbound volume. And to your point, like, you probably, the price you could charge a founder, you can probably charge 4x that to a VC if you actually can like ship on it and prove that you do this, which is crazy to even think about. But I think they're thinking about this. Like, I mean, every, I feel like in the last six months, I've seen every, you know, tier A VC firm spin out some type of podcast. And like, all of them are getting like 30 views on

Starting point is 00:49:17 YouTube right now. You came in, you're like, yo, I'm going to like help you do. this. And I think actually how you're doing it right now, Greg, is really interesting. Where you mix in the long form, like YouTube, like, you're sorry, like almost podcast content with like the shorter form, like 10 minute, like it's like a, you know, a classic YouTube video. So that classic YouTube video is getting the growth to happen. And it's kind of like a top of funnel entry into the channel, which creates like a, you know, that initial touch point. And then as they get further down the funnel and start to binge, then they get into the long form content, which creates this long-term deeper relationship,

Starting point is 00:49:51 which makes them more buyer-ready for the product, right? And so I think that that model, just take that same idea and then apply it like, you know, to the VC. Again, another company that is probably easily a $10 million a year dollar company if you can figure out how to execute on it. I love it. All right, man. What else you got for us?

Starting point is 00:50:10 I think we're at idea number. I mean, I'm not even to count those bonus ideas, but I think we're at idea number seven, right? Yeah, I think we're at seven. This one would be quick. it's kind of, it's more of a tool than anything, but it's software. So, Canva doesn't have good video captions right now where it's like, you basically imagine I upload a video into it and I just like wanted to caption just like all, you know,

Starting point is 00:50:31 whatever, Dobie, Premiere or any of these other tools. If you built an app, and there's some apps in this space, but again, they're not super good. But I think there's an opportunity to go and build this. And it's like, based off a search volume that I'm seeing, people are definitely searching for it. Canva is like one of the biggest tools. It's one of the fastest growing video editors. It's insane. When you look at it, it's actually nuts. And all this is is you would basically like they put a video, imagine you put a video into it. There's like an app section that's in the bottom left hand corner. They click it. It's like caption this video. It transcribes it. Just use like a large whisper model. And then that gets added and you have like a, you know, you basically can

Starting point is 00:51:10 tap into the font styles that's already built into Canva and then add some different variations with like karaoke, etc. but I think I think this is like a, you know, a cool 20K a month type company that's using the distribution, if not bigger, that's using the distribution of Canva. I know I have friends that have done this for like plugins for Adobe Premiere and like all of these other kind of like larger tools that are more traditional like video editing softwares. But why is like Vee beating Canva right now?

Starting point is 00:51:40 It's because it has stuff like this. Like go and just really, you could probably just go build what Veed is at like. like Vita has built. And if you clone that into Canva and then just like offer that as like a suite, like you would basically, I mean, there's probably an acquisition strategy there as well because it's like, okay, Canada doesn't have to go build this. They just basically just acquire it and, you know, they roll it out to their whole, their whole group. But anyway, yeah, just something we, I stumbled upon and through Swell, like just people were,

Starting point is 00:52:07 you know, talking about it. And I was like, oh, this is like a very interesting small little tool thing. That is probably a great little company that could be run. Yeah, so I was thinking the same thing. You get to 20K a month and then what you do is then you take like 20K of your profit and you spend it on PR and you just get into like tech crunch and all these places. And that's when you reach out to Canva and you're and you're like, talk, doc, tuck, tuck, here's all these articles about us. We're doing 20K a month. You know, we love what you're doing. We want to be a part of the mission. You know, is there an opportunity to talk about M&A and then you sell it to them? You know, at some... Totally. You know, and that's what you do. And that's the playbook for that one.

Starting point is 00:52:49 So I'd like that idea. It's one of those sneaky small ones that could be big. Totally. Yeah, and the next one, another sneaky small one. Yeah. So do you remember Scott's cheap flights? I remember when it first came out. I was like, you know, and I was turning credit cards for points.

Starting point is 00:53:08 I still do it to this day just because it's fun. It's more like a hobby type thing. But I remember when it came out, I was like, this is. is so legit, it's sick, it's now going or something stupid, and it's just evolved into this like, just bohemoth. It's lost all flavor, right? So I think that there's this opportunity to resurrect that business idea. And I think there's a really low-code version of this that you can do.

Starting point is 00:53:33 So Google flights, you can now go select a city as like your home city. And you can turn on alerts on Google flights to like every city in the world. And what then happens is that at any time in the future that a price between those cities that you've set up drops, like dramatically, you get an email from Google automatically. It's like, hey, like you're trying to fly to Dublin. Like the price is 350 right now. And it's like that's you just get like I, you know, I've done this where imagine like you get 10 different emails a day of like any place that you're trying to go to. Right. So what I imagine this as a business could be is like you say, okay, cool.

Starting point is 00:54:10 I go on Facebook. I target people that have like a frequent. traveler interest on Facebook. This is a category and interest group that you can target. You then run ads to those people that's like find cheap flights from Denver to anywhere. And you send them to a newsletter. And then that newsletter is all it's doing is it's aggregating the Google flights that are coming in. And it's just putting those into like this larger newsletter. And then you like monetization is charged a subscription. You can probably get a kickback on those as well. I know Kiwi has an affiliate program that you can do.

Starting point is 00:54:46 But then, you know, don't just do that for one city. Do that for like all the major metros in the U.S. And this is this like super low code thing that you could do with probably just like a zapier setup that could honestly, in my opinion like that, again, another easy like 20K a month company that you could build. And all those people that you get onto the email, they'll forward that email with all the flights to their friends. And that's how that list grows like organically as time goes on. So again, another just like small, random one that if I was like 20, this is what I would go do because I think it would be fun. I honestly want to build this because I just think it would be super fun. But here's what I would do in this space.

Starting point is 00:55:27 Because I think you're onto something. You're right that Scotch cheap flights has no soul anymore. In fact, it was rebranded to going.com, which come on. That's like, there's no soul to that name versus Scott's cheap flights. Like, I connect with that. So I, I, it was doing some of a little bit of research. And I found out that there's a Canadian version of Scott's cheap flights. What's it called?

Starting point is 00:55:58 It's called. So the holding company is called, I think, wide deals. And so what they do, which is really smart, is they own, For all the different Canadian cities, they have, so the airport in Montreal is YUL, so they own YUL deals.com. And Toronto is Y Y Y Y, YZ, so they own Y Y YZ deals.com. Super smart. But if you look at the website, like 1998 vibes. And the guy claims that there's millions of Canadians that are subscribed.

Starting point is 00:56:33 So there's an opportunity to, you know, reach out to someone like this and be like, how much? because it doesn't feel like he's, I mean, literally, like there's images of like travel 2000 and just, Toronto to Iceland. Like, it looks like a, oh my God, dude, it's amazing. Look at it totally has Craigslist vibes. It's Craigslist vibes. And whenever you see Craigslist vibes, you know they're printing money. You know it.

Starting point is 00:56:59 You know it. They don't need to change anything. They've got something that's working. And there's probably an opportunity there. And if there isn't an opportunity to buy it, I think you can just clone a similar version and just bring it into 2024. What's insane is they're not even ranking for like a ton of keywords. So it must just be like they literally have a massive list that they're just,

Starting point is 00:57:22 every deal goes out through that. People don't realize, too, like you get crazy kickbacks from these airline companies if you sell to them as well. Like why did Google spin up Google flights? Like that is the reason. They're basically an affiliate is what it's turned into, right? which is a huge item line. If you actually look at their P&L,

Starting point is 00:57:40 it's super interesting. But again, I think that there's, I love ideas where it's like, it happened before and it's like now eroded to now where like it's current version is just terrible. And how do you just like do that same idea over and over again? And that's really what the internet feels like anymore.

Starting point is 00:57:56 It's like if you go through enough cycles, you just see the same shit happening. Like I'm dying right now watching this younger generation. Like go through the whole pickup artist and like, how do I make money on the internet through an agency? see how to build it. They've been these Discord channels, like, here's how to build a Twitter DM agency

Starting point is 00:58:12 and make tens of thousands, put a roly on your wrist from your parents' basement, like that type of thing. And it's like, man, this just literally feels like what Tim Harris was hawking like earlier. We were all in that beginning stage. So anyway, yeah, like the great thing about this too is it's already validated.

Starting point is 00:58:29 You know that people want this and this can exist. It's now just, okay, what's the execution piece? Yeah. But I think just like a simple newsletter, You just build this on top of Beehive, right? Yeah. And all this turns into is like each location has a newsletter. I mean, the other side of it too is you probably, I mean, you could probably go sell the like that whole.

Starting point is 00:58:47 Like if you had, you know, 50 of the top cities in the U.S. and they all have a list and each list has 20,000 people on it, like that is not a small number, right? And you could probably go and just flip that to like a larger media org. So I don't know, just another random thing, especially on the tourism side, which is like a huge play. Like, everybody is, you know, anything travel related is typically a really high, uh, CPM that you can, you can, you can, you can, you know, if you have these lists, 20,000, 50,000, 75,000, you can also do like, okay, now we're going to do a weekly, here's what's happening in my city newsletter.

Starting point is 00:59:24 Thousand percent. You know, you can create different newsletters off that foundational newsletter. So it's like, come, come for the deals and stay for like local news. So I think there's, there's a lot of opportunities. here. I think it's a sneaky big idea too. And then, yeah, it's about getting the right domains. Like, I don't know, LGA, LaGuardia, LaGuardia deals.com or something like that. And also, even if those are taken in the U.S. and Canada, there's also other countries, you know? Think more globally. And so there's a lot of opportunity in this one. I like it a lot. All right, we promise people nine official ideas, but you actually had eight on your list. I'm going to give, not that I feel bad, by the way, because we gave

Starting point is 01:00:09 like a bonus like three or four, but I'm going to give one more. I have a, I have a notes file with all my ideas. And I had, I don't know, two or three ideas per week that just come to me. And I just, I just pulled it up and I'm going to bring up the latest idea. And I'm curious you're, I'll just give it away. Screw it. So did you see this, Finn, Finneloop? No, what is it? So Finaleau just raised $35 million in Series A funding, which I didn't even know. Like Series A funding, 35 million? No. That's like, you know, a typical Series A is like 5 to 10 million.

Starting point is 01:00:47 So it's a massive, something is working. And basically what it is is e-commerce accounting, software, and service that never slows you down. So it's real-time bookkeeping for D to C, multi-channel, and wholesale. So they've taken something, which is basically quickbooked, which we've talked about in the past. Oh, God. And they've niched it down to D2C and Ecom. I love it. And I think the old, so we use a laycheckout uses a service called Bench.

Starting point is 01:01:22 Okay. Bench.com. This is the old way of creating a startup. It's kind of like, we're, you know, cloud bookkeeping. and it's going to be like 300 bucks a month and it's going to be great. But it doesn't speak to anyone, right? It doesn't speak to SaaS.

Starting point is 01:01:39 It doesn't speak to crypto startups. It doesn't speak to econ. It's too broad. It's too broad. So here's my idea. My idea is what could, what, what, okay, the idea is quickbooks for X. Yep. Now, what are those different categories?

Starting point is 01:01:56 I don't know. They're probably something like QuickBooks for SACs. QuickBooks for agencies. Real estate. Real estate. You know what you can do is you can go to the QuickBooks extensions and just look what everybody's trying to integrate with them. And that will give you all the industries that are related to it.

Starting point is 01:02:14 And then just look at the biggest categories. And from there you could assess, okay, cool. This is going to be, you know, there's a huge category that people are trying to connect their QuickBooks data into. I'm just thinking about the real estate one because like I know there's a platform that's like, which is hilarious. It's like a platform that's built for tech. in accounting for real estate that people are trying to get into QuickBooks for their accountant.

Starting point is 01:02:40 But I mean, that's probably how I'd go about this of assessing which one of them is the biggest market opportunity and then you just go and build that out. But would you focus only on internet businesses or would you try to go for like more traditional? My hunch is that for internet businesses, there's probably a lot of competition. So I would probably go towards like non, you know, like I wouldn't go to, I wouldn't start with SaaS. I bet you there's something maybe a little bit similar. Nonprofits.

Starting point is 01:03:09 This is what you do. 4,400 searches a month. How I'd start this is I would list out, like I think your QuickBooks idea is really smart. Just like look at the extensions. I think I would write in a list what are all the different categories based on that and based by prompting chat, GBT. and then I would say, and then I would go look for competition. I would say like,

Starting point is 01:03:32 what is the competition? I'd put that in my Google sheet. And then I'd say, I'm not going after something with a lot of competition. I'm just not interested. At this stage of my life, I'm just not interested in going after,

Starting point is 01:03:44 you know, companies that have raised hundreds or if not billions of dollars. Totally. And then I'd pick one based on, you know, is it a growing trend? Is it,

Starting point is 01:03:57 Does it have low competition? Like, I think to give a concrete example of this, it would be like quick books for like Airbnb entrepreneurs or whatever, like something like that where it's like, you know, it's a larger wave that's happening and there's businesses that are being built on top of it. I would just look at these platforms because like really DDC is kind of that, right? Like they're all kind of built on top of Shopify. So it's like find that version of that in these other spaces. Like what's a bigger thing that's happening?

Starting point is 01:04:23 And then just like build a custom. That's super interesting. This is happening in the EHR space, like in the health world, where it's like you used to have like this massive, you know, single EHR that everybody would use. You know, I think one of them is Epic.com. I think it's the name of it or Epic is the biggest one. They lobby so much. It's insane. Do not build an EHR. Just full stop. Do not build this. Like if you're listening right now, never even think about this idea, never approach it. There's no way you can win. You're fighting the government. So I think the bigger thing here, though, is that people basically spun out like EHR. that were specific for all of these different practitioner types. And you could basically, it's that same idea of like, okay, how do I take this like larger thing? And then just the Craigslist untangling in a different space, right? But do it for accounting.

Starting point is 01:05:11 It's all the same ideas. Just remixed in different places. So, but yeah, man, I think that's super interesting of just like, you know, even the nonprofits thing, all those people are super easy to contact as well. Like, like Finneloop as an example. like what they're probably doing for growth is they're just cold emailing every Shopify owner and being like, yo, we built a custom, you know, taxes integration for, it just plugs into your Shopify and it runs on the backend or whatever you're, you know, the system is that they're

Starting point is 01:05:40 using for. There's like skew management and all that, all that, all that. But I don't know. I think, I think the bit that the play here is always just like going back to like where, what is a bigger platform that people are doing or like using or a business, some type of business category that you can then go and build that custom solution for. That's it, man. That's it. That's a wrap plus a bunch of bonus ideas. Cody Schneider.

Starting point is 01:06:04 How you feeling about this episode? Dude, I feel good. I think the first one had the energy, you know? Like people are going to get tired of me real quick. And so that is, we're trying to bring the sauce every time. I think the bigger thing here that I'm like always, I want to talk more the next time we do this on like what, like here's the actual tactical. components of this of how to go market. Because I can say like go email every Shopify person,

Starting point is 01:06:29 but like what I'm really saying is like go to Apollo and you scrape every person that's using Shopify out of Apollo and you go and you validate those emails with zero bounce and then you set up a smart lead campaign and you basically are cold emailing every one of them that like, yo, we do this, this type of service, this software, right? So like the actual tactical components of that, I think that that's like a piece of this as well. Because like the idea is fine, but unless you got the distribution part of it, And I think that's why the cricket one was such a bit like a banger thing. So anyways, I'm going to hold myself to that on the next one. It's like with everything we talk about, it's like what's the tactical distribution that we're going on and go really deep and heavy on those pieces.

Starting point is 01:07:05 But yeah. Cool. So on YouTube, comment if you want to see that from Cody. I know you want to see it. And don't forget to subscribe on YouTube and also to follow what if you're listening on Spotify or you're listening on Apple Podcast. don't forget to follow because then you'll know when Cody comes back on. So I appreciate it. Cody, thank you so much. People can find you on Twitter.

Starting point is 01:07:34 Yeah, Twitter and LinkedIn are my most active. And then the company I'm building right now is Swell AI. We're doing basic content repurposing powered by AI. Go take a look and be stoked to have you. So thanks again, Jay. Always so fun, man. I live for these things. They're awesome.

Starting point is 01:07:47 Yeah, I love when you get just so excited about an idea like halfway through and I just see your brain just like, it's like your kid getting really exciting. Totally. Yeah, you love it. I love it. It's a compulsion. Like, it's 100% like I can't not think. It's just for some reason it's like the puzzle piece.

Starting point is 01:08:05 I just get the dopamine hit right when it's like, yo, like here's this thing and like here's, you know, these people that want that thing. Like what's the bridge that we can build to do that? Like that that is the thing I live for is like that whole that bridge building piece. Right. it's funny because I'm not a long term I don't I don't want to do ops right like I want to figure out the puzzles and hand them off to people that are you know can ship on them and just do that over and over again and run that process I love building the process and that whole piece you know it's kind of that orchestra conversation that we were talking about but when we do this it's just like you know

Starting point is 01:08:39 it's junk food for me right because it's like here's this idea how would you how would you actually grow it and then it's like boom here's all these tools in the tool belt that we can tactically you know, go to deploy. And it's the same playbooks over and over again. I think that's the thing that like a lot of people don't realize with this stuff is like everything is exactly the same from a gross standpoint. It's just different tweaks that are happening. And you know, it's only 10% that we're changing to the core, you know, distribution idea. So totally. Yeah, I think, you know, it's like a few frameworks. It's like, okay, this idea works. How do we bring it to another geography? Exactly. This is a trend here that's underserved. It's just and that's why I love going

Starting point is 01:09:17 through a bunch of ideas is because you're hearing, okay, you're starting, it's starting to get into you, okay, this is how I would approach the problem. It's not this specific idea that I want to take. It's just in general, this is how I could, if I come up with an idea, this is how Greg and Cody would come, you know, would actually create, create something like this. 100%. It also is, again, like this at-bats thing of like, it gets me more at-bats, like when I can hear from your perspective of how you would approach like, okay, how do I grow this company? And that just creates this like, I don't know. You connect all these thoughts and ideas together, right? That you otherwise, like, that synthesis happens when you think through these from like other people's perspectives. And then you can

Starting point is 01:09:55 go and like apply that to the company, you know, whatever it is that you're building currently. And so that's this whole other mechanism. I mean, it's what's funny is like, I know you and I probably have, I don't know, 10 of these conversations a week or five of these conversations a week. Only one of them's recorded, right? Like this episode. But like I have founder friends that I talk to like on a weekly basis where it's like, yo, I'm seeing this. What are you seeing? This is working. This isn't that type of thing. Right. And all I'm trying to do is just more at bats, more looks at pitches so that when I come up to the plate, it's like I have, you know, more knowledge of what, how the pitcher's throwing, et cetera, right, or whatever. And, you know, that is really the

Starting point is 01:10:33 value of this. All we're doing is just taking those conversations and putting it in public. And that, that same idea can be applied in any industry. This is what kills me, right? It's like, this is every industry that you're trying to like build a company in you can just literally just have these conversations that you're already having put them out in public and you will get followership through that and build reputation and build knowledge and like also just build leverage through that piece of media that you build and it could be super small like something that's like super niche like I have a friend that all he talks about is like digital out of home advertising right but has like one of the biggest podcast in this space. And like he gets invited to these like events like with media buyers.

Starting point is 01:11:14 And he just talks about the trends he's seeing based off the conversations that he's having. And like again, that looks like nothing from the outside. But he makes a great living doing that. Right. So anyway, just another another way to think about it. Totally. And you don't need that many followers for it to be super impactful. Like I know guys, girls, whatever, who have five, 10,000 followers are making millions of dollars a year from that, from that group. It's just the right amount of followers with, it's not the right amount of followers. It's the right followers. It's about attracting the right people and it opens doors. You know, the way we met is kind of funny, which is you probably had like five or 10,000 followers on Twitter and I was following you because you were a real one.

Starting point is 01:11:55 You were actually putting out, this is how I'd grow this thing. And I was like, oh man, in a world where Twitter is just like so sterile and manufactured, it felt so. amazing to see what you were putting out there. And I would basically feature you in my newsletter with like, has, you know, 75,000 subs every single week. It's so funny. Right? And I think the first thing I said to you is like my grandma put me back in the will because you put me in your newsletter or something like that. That was the cold open. Yeah. It was so funny. I like this guy. I like this guy. But that is the bigger trend, right? Like, an easy way for people to think about this is like look at a physician or a doctor like traditionally

Starting point is 01:12:40 all of that knowledge used to be trapped behind them then the internet came and like now it's all in public and so the authority that they had the gatekeepership that they had was eliminated through that process with that said though then these people saw this and they're like actually all this knowledge is pretty terrible and that's why you see like the hubermans and you know the peter and all these people in the health categories come out and own these categories that are talking about these things that aren't in kind of the general knowledge that exists online, right? It's that same concept here. Like, if you just like ungatekept what used to be gatekept,

Starting point is 01:13:13 like you will get people that are interested in that same thing to just start reaching out to you. And that's just the natural effect that happens when you do that. And it's not complicated. It's just like, but a lot of the times like, again, I'm anti-course because I just won't do it. Like I think that teaching is like a public service, right? Like, I'm on here because this is. state mandated by my parole officer. Like, I have to be talking to you right now because they require me to share this information. But in all reality, like, this is just a way to talk about

Starting point is 01:13:46 this stuff in a public setting that I had mentorship that, you know, there's no way, I shouldn't be where I'm at unless I had, you know, I wouldn't be where I'm at unless I had that. And I was, I worked for this dude that just basically taught me like how to do all this stuff, right? And in, you feel this almost is obligation to you. But what happens, the, the, knock on effect is when you put all this out there in public then suddenly you just start to get inbounded like you reaching out to me or stuff like that where it's like it wouldn't otherwise when it happened right and that bigger media plays that game here that's the whole the whole strategy behind this and like really that's just another business like pick pick a category you're in like I just

Starting point is 01:14:23 another friend that's in the supply chain management uh space she spent a podcast like now one of the leading voices in it this was like two years ago she did this and dude she's making a great living And again, all she's doing is it's super niche down. There's maybe 10,000 people that listen to it. That's the whole audience. But they have so much buying power. And it's so under service. Like we're talking about this LinkedIn thing with like, you know, there's like video content.

Starting point is 01:14:48 There's a, it's blue ocean there. Well, look for all these spaces that are like unsexy and where blue ocean exists. And if you just build media there, you can build companies on top of that and like whatever that is, whether it's consulting or service businesses, et cetera. And honestly, that's all these podcasts are turning into more and more is like, It's just a sales tool. It's just sales and disguise, right? Like, Greg and I have a trench code on.

Starting point is 01:15:09 Like, he's sitting on my shoulders. And we're just, like, using this platform to basically talk about this stuff that, like, we know it's junk food that we know majority of people won't go and actually do. But in reality, like, what's going to happen from this is, like, it's going to create all this inbound volume that will go down into the things and the companies that we're building. And that's what, you know, the byproduct of doing this in a public setting does. I mean, it also, you know, I think a bunch of people, listen to this podcast and just it's entertainment for them. It's like watching Shark Tank. So I think there's that. But I also think that there's a sub, there is a group of people who

Starting point is 01:15:44 listen to this podcast like the SVG collective guy, a collections guy, who are like, wow, I never thought of that. I'm going to go and do this thing. And it's going to be a success. And when it's a success, he's going to reach out to us already, but he's going to reach out to us and he's going to be like, thank you, Cody. Like, you changed my life and I won't forget that. And then he's going to start his own podcast. And he's going to, you know, pay it back. And so it does, you know, that's also just a cool part about doing this.

Starting point is 01:16:19 Totally. 100%. And it's like, I think the way I think about it more and more is like, I'm just trying to create as much surface area as possible to create like greater serendipity. It's like one of the best quotes. And like the easiest way to do that is build media and just be everywhere. And it's just from that you just create, yeah, I talk about this all the time.

Starting point is 01:16:38 But it's like I'm trying to create digital gravity, right? Like for brands and for self and for all of this. It's just as much digital mass on the internet as possible to create as much digital gravity as you can as possible. And this is another vehicle for that. And one one thing that I've learned is be yourself. You know, when I first started podcasting, I wasn't myself really. and it was only recently where I was like, you know, I'm just going to... How is that changed?

Starting point is 01:17:03 Just, I'll give you an example. People always, you know, people say that, uh, I talk slowly or I have a calm voice. So what I would do is I'd counteract that. And I would be like, I try to put my Gary V hat on, you know, and try to get super, and it's just, it's not me. They're like, oh, fuck, this guy. Have you seen that meme and it's like Gary Vee showing up to your yard sale? It's like, they're like, oh, fuck, not him again.

Starting point is 01:17:32 And he's just like bartering with them on like fucking hot wheels. And they're like, God, damn it. Just get out of here. Like, I love that so much. So good. Yeah. I was someone who, you know, I really wasn't. And the reason I did that is because I was like, oh, these are best practices.

Starting point is 01:17:51 Therefore, I need to do it. As soon as I started being myself and also another part of that is talking about what I want to talk about, which is startup ideas, even though the best people in the world told me that's too niche. The best podcast is insane. When I pitch this idea originally, they were like, it's too niche. And as soon as they said that, I was like, I'm going to be on to be on to something. And you know what? There are people who are listening to this who are going to be like, I wish you would talk faster. I wish you did have more energy. I wish you did these. And it's like, okay, well, you're, you know, you're listening to me. You're listening to Cody because you like us,

Starting point is 01:18:27 presumably and you find it valuable. If you're that person hate listening this deep into this, I'm so proud of you. I want that energy. Yeah, it's like, what are you doing? It's an hour plus deep. And it's like, why are you listening to us? A thousand percent. You don't like us.

Starting point is 01:18:45 That's when you know you actually made it, though. I love this quote. It was from this runner. I can't remember her name, but she's like, she's like, if somebody doesn't hate you, like you aren't even in the game. I think that that's so true. Like if you don't, like you're not even playing

Starting point is 01:19:01 or you're not at the highest level unless there's like a subset of people that just despise your existence. And you know what's exhausting? Being someone who you're not is exhausting. A thousand percent, man. It's just a character at that point. Like, you know,

Starting point is 01:19:15 I mean Tucker Carlson, you have to play that dude. I don't think he believes any of that shit. The Zins piece, that's the East for sure. I think he's aligned on the Zins, but everything else, it's like, you know, this is this character playing. But, man, I think it's interesting, though.

Starting point is 01:19:29 Like, you also have to think about it. Like, you want to bring these differing, like, it's like different tempos. Like, that's actually what good writing is. Is it's like the, you know, it's that, I think they call it perplexity and burstiness. And it's like, you're like, short sentence, long one. You know, short, short, long long. And it's like creating this kind of like variety. And that's like one language, like oration when you look at it.

Starting point is 01:19:52 Like, that's the how it's like the composition of it. and why it sounds good and it moves us, etc. It's like music, right? It's like, it actually is music. And I think when you have this variety of people on, you create like, it's like different, you know, almost rhythms that are happening and different pacing. You're the baseline that's just constantly going.

Starting point is 01:20:08 And like for you, I feel like from the, you know, outside looking in, it's like, okay, how do I bring these like ridiculous, almost like, oh, again, manic like people onto the show that are like, they're going to play the solos or whatever on this top level. And then I just get the baseline this whole time. which is like it creates this really interesting composition, right?

Starting point is 01:20:27 So anyway, yeah, I just make sense. Also, it kills me that people told you that. And I probably know who these people are that said that this was a bad idea. But I'm over here and I'm like, this is the best business move that's happened in 20, 2034,000, like zero doubt. Like people live for this. There's a vacuum in this space right now. All the people that were in this space have leveled up and they're now like,

Starting point is 01:20:49 we want to talk to billionaires and that shit. And that's like, this is not accessible, right? It's like Kanye talking about, like, you know, private jets after he does, like, 808 and heartbreak, or heartbreaks, right? It's like, oh, like, you're talking about, like, just getting a whips that women's like you. And then now you're talking about jets. Like, I have that, that leap I can't even make. I can't even, like, fathom or think. And I think that this thing that you're doing, it's like you're riding that common denominator of, like, you know, the 200 million people that want to start a company.

Starting point is 01:21:17 But there's only whatever it is. It's like 10 million that actually have, right? Like, you get to service that whole group of people. Again, we can talk about this all day from a strategy and a standpoint, but I just think it's just like a no-brainer from the outside looking in. It looks ridiculous. I'm guessing. We got to run.

Starting point is 01:21:34 We got to run. This has been great. Cody, thanks again for coming on. Also, you also need a shave. We're doing a live stream, man. What was it? So we're going to give you a mullet. Is that what's happening?

Starting point is 01:21:48 Yeah, I'm going to, the next live stream, well, I'll get a mullet and I'll shave my beard, mustache only is kind of what I'm thinking. And we'll just do it live. We'll just like while we're talking to founders and giving them advice. Just have that going on in the background, just like this haircut existing. So I'm in. We're there. We probably needs to be this weekend if we do it.

Starting point is 01:22:10 But I don't know when the next time, I know you're traveling right now, so we'll figure it out. Oh, I'll do anything for Cody Schneider Mullet. So we'll figure it out. All right, dude. Catch you later. Later, J. Thanks for having me.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - 9 Startup ideas to make $1M+ in 2024

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