The Startup Ideas Podcast - Cursor Replaces Your Entire Business Stack (Full Demo)

Episode Date: July 7, 2025

Join me as I chat with Amir to discuss how Cursor can function as a comprehensive interface for business operations beyond traditional coding. Through demonstrations of Model Context Protocols (MCPs), Amir illustrates how to automate financial reporting, conduct UX analysis, create marketing content, and perform QA testing—all within Cursor. The conversation highlights how this approach can dramatically improve productivity by eliminating the need to switch between different applications. Timestamps: • 00:00 - Intro • 01:03 - Overview of using Cursor beyond coding • 02:40 - Finance automation with Xero MCP • 07:58 - UX analysis using Playwright MCP • 14:37 - Sales/Marketing automation with Perplexity and Firecrawl MCPs • 23:51 - QA testing automation • 26:50 - Advice for non-technical users getting started with Cursor Key Points: • How Cursor AI can be used beyond coding to manage finance, analytics, design, and marketing tasks • Model Context Protocols (MCPs) allow seamless integration with third-party services like Xero, Playwright, and Perplexity • Automated workflows can handle accounting tasks, UX analysis, content creation, and QA testing • Different AI models serve different purposes: "thinking models" for planning and "agentic models" for execution LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: https://www.boringmarketing.com/ The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn:https://www.thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND AMIR ON SOCIAL Humblytics: https://humblytics.com/?via=community X/Twitter: https://x.com/amirmxt Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@amirmxt Build, Ship, Market: https://buildshipmarket.com

Okay, Amir, you're a vibe coder I look up to. And I wanted to have you on the pod. And what are we going to learn today? First of all, I'm very flattered. Thanks a lot. Today, I'm going to do an extension of the conversation you recently had actually with James, aka the Borgantor. I think he did an excellent job showing how he's using Cursor to do a lot of

vibe marketing and how he's using it to grow his business. I want to take a step further and show you how you can essentially use Cursor. pretty much it's the interface for work. You can use it for finance, analytics, design, and marketing. And I'm going to show you some workflows and tips on how you can essentially have a team of agents to do specific things for you,

especially with MCPs. I'm intrigued. You've intrigued me. Yeah, I have your attention. You have my attention. All right, it's great. What's really interesting is, I think I want to take a step back,

is with a lot of LMs, we previously didn't have access to a lot of third-party services or apps. With Chad, GPT, we briefly saw connections to like Zapier and custom integrations, but what we didn't see was how you can seamlessly just grab data and interact with that data. And essentially, when Anthropic came out with MCP's model context protocols, it was an interface for you to be able to interact with those apps, and it's very much synonymous with APIs. And the MCPs made it easy for us to be able to access this data, create data, change,

or transform it all through LLM. And I currently have a company called Humboldics. It's an analytics tool that lets you run split testing and CRO. And, you know, I come from a background. I've previously started companies and grew teams and scale teams. And my co-founder and I this time around said, you know, how far can we scale this company with AI and agentic workflows? and let's try to push to the ceiling.

And I think AI did a big part in educating us, but also enabled us to do a lot of these workflows. And then when MCPs came out, complete game changer. Yep. Complete game changer. So, you know, with Cursor, we traditionally saw people just building apps with it in development. And I was like, okay, I'm spending a lot of time

vibe coding and building a cursor. What if I try to not leave Cursor at all? what if I do my finance, my marketing, my SEO, and my development all in one place? Is that possible? Absolutely. Absolutely. So I think what we can do actually is start off with finance. Okay.

So one of the biggest things for me is I would love to be able to just get a list of invoices and be able to get an update on my profit and loss. Yeah. Directly from my accounting app called zero. Yep. So what you can do is you can actually just connect to the zero MCP and say connect to zero MCP and list out my profit report for May 2025 or 2024, for example. And what it's going to do is actually going to connect to the zero MCP and directly pull that information for you. Now, you can also update your accounting software directly through here as well.

So let's say, for example, you want to do a payroll report or you want to create a quote or an invoice, it will do that automatically for you. So I can say create a quote for one of my vendors. And what I did here is, you know, this is a financial report that I just recently created where I got a list of my bank accounts and my revenue accounts, my costs. This is all sample data, by the way. So anyone wants to, you know, hack my accounts. And other line items. and I can use this directly to actually access that information. So right now we have an MCP that got a list of my accounts and it's going to say,

okay, I can create a quote for you. So I can say create a quote for UX services for ABC furniture. And it's going to go ahead and do that and then give me a link to actually access that quote. So I know someone is going to ask like, well, why should I even do this in cursor? Like, what, you know, why is this better than, you know, going on to zero directly? I don't want to click things, you know, too many things to click. And I think we're naturally moving towards voice and text to do actions. Yeah.

And that's essentially where we are. So really what it comes down to is being able to actually do this directly in here and programmatically. Yeah. Accountant spent a lot of time repeating the same actions. And they use a lot of no-code tools to do it. That, to me, is the most interesting piece. is like the programmatic piece of this. Exactly.

Like how much time are you going to save by being able to program that stuff? Absolutely. I think even, you know, right now, like we just created multiple, a quote right now. Yeah. Within one line of sentence. Yeah. I could have taken many steps. So if I click on this right here, you can actually see the quote that is now live directly through here.

So I'll just log in. That's crazy. Yeah. Because like this, like what you're talking about. right now is just about like how do you how do you turn sass how do you turn sass into programmable right exactly you know and i think that this might look like oh it's cute but it's actually not just cute right it's it's it's really about saving a lot of time being more accurate being more productive exactly and i you know i i demoed this to like 300 accountants and they couldn't believe

they're like you just probably complete transformed our workflow when it comes to tax season where we have to like do a list report of all the invoices and quotes that we have for our clients or get tax reports done. So I just literally using one sentence created a complete quote for ABC furniture on U.S. design and consultation services. And what's amazing that it automatically knew how I would approach the services and gave it a price point for it, which is pretty cool. What's interesting is I have right now, you know, a list of the dashboard of my business.

And then I, what it can do is actually open it up and get. finance report that says here's all the accounts you have here's the latest cold value here's your tax rates what you spend money on and just you know you can just deploy this to a server like netlify and just share with anyone within your team within seconds crazy absolutely crazy yeah so putting you know this is our accounting team they run our financials here and I really don't have to do much within cursor anytime my co-founder bugs me's like hey what's this line item I'm seeing here I'm like just go check the report that's right it's already up there all through cursor I love it so going back, we covered our finance team.

Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup, and if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built Idea Browser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high quality data trends.

How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chatGVT for ideas with it. But you can start for free ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. I also have a U.S. team that monitors my landing page all the time, take screenshots, and gives me feedback based on our analytics data and says, you know what, you need to make some changes here or you need to do this. And how that works is I use Playwright.

So I say use Playwright MCP. And Playwright is really interesting because it's essentially an agentic browser where an agent will open up the browser for you and perform specific actions. So you can use it to QA to take screenshots to navigate or give you feedback on like errors that you're seeing. And there's other competitors to Playwright, right? Yeah, there is Firecrawl and browser base as well. Yeah. Yeah.

So those are great tools as well. Fryequal, I use a lot and I'll show an example for that as well where we use the scrape. But Playwright I like because the MCP is so easy to install. Yeah. And it's free, which is fantastic. Yeah. So you say use Playwright MCP to go to Humboldetics.com and take a screenshot. So what it will do is I'll just, you know, take this away.

And I don't want to take this time to actually talk about models as well. You know, with cursor, it really depends on like prop engineering. It plays a big part on the outcome that you get, and models play also more crucial part. They're like two types of models. You have the thinking and reasoning models like 03, Gemini 2.5, and Cloud 4 max mode. They're really good at complex problems. And then you have the agenic models like Sonnet 4 or Opus Opus, Opus, Opus, 4. And those are more like active.

action-based models. So I've seen a tactic a lot of developers or just AI prompt engineers use is they have a very big task or complex problem and they'll get a thinking model to actually come up with a plan to execute, then switch over to the agentic model and then actually execute on it. Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah. And it works really, really well. So you can kind of pass these models through. So going back to our U.X team, so I just have my U.S. agent right now. now taking screenshot of our browser here and, you know, displayed a screenshot. And what it did in here is it has a screen capture of what our landing page looks like. And I actually prompt it. So I have a custom mode here that is specifically focused on design and growth. And I'll say, based on the

screenshot, provides some examples on how you would improve this or give me some, you know, recommendations on what split tests to run. So I'll say, I can say, you know, reference the screenshot and provide an outline of, you know, UX growth suggestions and AB tests. And why do you think, you know, doing this within cursor is better than, let's say, chat GPT or something like that? It's a closed system, right? So put yourself in the shoes of a developer or a designer that is building a landing page

directly within cursor using custom code. They now have access to MCP. that can run all these tasks in parallel for them without actually having to work with other people or having to switch tabs and go somewhere else. So if I'm looking at my landing page, I want instant access to my website traffic data. I want access to the screenshot of the webpage

and just get an agent to actually get those feedback from me and then use that feedback to make the changes to the code itself. So I can use this output right here to say, okay, based on this output, start making changes to the landing page. Right. You know? That's crazy. Yeah.

So what we have here is essentially a complete comprehensive review of like what to change in the hero section. You know, add a social proof video testimony above the fold. You know, user funnel assessment and some, you know, suggestions on what to run for split testing. And this is like good. This is good advice. Yeah. It's solid advice. Yeah.

Yeah, it's all the ways. Yeah. Like, you know, our current, our current homepage says one-click analytics. Yeah. And it says tripletate conversions in 60 seconds. I mean, that's pretty good. I'm, like, yeah. Like, I'm intrigued.

Yeah. Yeah. You like say more. Yeah, yeah. I'm curious. So, you know, and it gives you some implementation notes. And, you know, I can, for example, right now reference another MCP, our own MCP. So we dog food here.

You know, we have a humble little. MCP, we say refer to Humboldolitics MCP and get summary insights. And it'll connect to our analytics MCP and actually call all the key metrics and insights that we have. And I can use this as context to inform our design and decisions. So I can say use this. Now, you know, revise this UX review based on the insights that you have right here. So like it's saying user journey insights, you know, our traffic and engagement.

engagement metrics, traffic sources, and what the opportunities are to actually grow it. It's interesting. I saw like Brazil is your number one traffic source. It's like, you know, why? Why, you know? Yeah, that is a good question. Yeah, why is Brazil? I mean, surprisingly, we have a lot of Brazilian customers, a lot of Brazilian startups,

high growth startups actually that use our services. And yeah, like, it's interesting. But it's interesting, right? Because you probably, you might have missed that, right? Yeah. And this allows you to see it. And then you can ask further questions. and kind of, yeah, get more context.

Get more context. And like, you know the issue is it's like, I think we're moving towards LLMs as the interface for everything, right? Instead of me having to go to our app. What's the browser? LMs are the new browser. Exactly. Exactly.

Yeah. So instead of having to open up our app to say like, oh, how many pages you that I get today or in the last seven days, it's by speaking to it, I'm already seeing that. And I think over time we're going to see Generative UI Where it's like, okay, cool, now create a UI based on that. You know? Yeah.

And I think we can get a sense of that as well where it's like, okay, I want to show this to my team members to say, hey, like here's all the key insights you need to know. So, you know, we have our page views here, our geographic distribution and traffic trends that I can just quickly show with our team. Amazing. Yeah.

So at this point, we've covered finance. We know how much we're spending and how much money we're making. We know our growth. And we've also done a comprehensive UX analysis. Where do you want to go next? We have QA and sales and marketing. I mean, probably sales, just because, you know, it's important. All right, all right.

Okay, cool. Let's do that. So how do we get to creating email templates and actually automating our sales outbound process. I'm going to walk you through this. I use my favorite, favorite, favorite MCP, which is firecrawl. And for, you know, for the audience that might not know what firecall is, it's a great tool that we use essentially to have agents run on the browser to scrape content. And what's interesting is you can actually create context files. And these context files are really relevant when it comes to actually being able to inform your LLM about what is your

talking about. So we have Humboldolitics lLM. text file that is very comprehensive around everything where a product is, how much it costs, what it is, who our ICP is. And you can use Firecrawl to actually generate that file for you to scrape humbleliletics.com, for example. And it will scrape all the content that's on that website to create that LM text file for you. And you use this as context for any tasks you want to get done. Any questions so far? I mean, not so far. Not so far?

Okay. Clear. Crystal clear so far. Crystal clear. Perfect. So we use this context file. And we have an MCP that we run to actually get our keyword data as well. And we use this as an input between what we've scraped and what we have in the keyword data to start creating both sales and marketing content.

Okay. example is say, you know, based on the keyword data, based on the LM file that, you know, James covered last time in the session in the pod as well, um, create an article based on this XYZ topic. So I can essentially run an MCP, say use perplexity MCP to research top, you know, split testing tools and refer to Humbleetics context file and the keyword data. to generate an article. And what this does is you have an agent that will go, use perplexity MCP to actually run a deep search on a topic that you want,

and then use the keyword data that you've already gathered to create a very comprehensive article with keyword, like good keyword density and so on. So you can even use like content templates that I've created myself, like best product in year, best competitor, how to do it, you know, a thing. and it'll create an article that's quite accurate. Typically, when you ask LMs to write an article,

you'll see sometimes it hallucinates. When you're using MCPs like Proplexity and Firecrawl, you can use that as a way to cross-reference because it's scraping relevant information that's up to date. I noticed both you and James used Perplexity MCP for deep research. Is that like what people should be using? I think so. Yeah.

Yeah, I think, you know, across the board, you have fire crawl, perplexity, and Exa. Yeah. Exa is great when it comes to accessing data sets. Yeah. Firecrawl is great for scraping data. Yeah. But I think perplexity, their prompt and their approach to search is probably the best. And for XA, data sets, like, what would be an example of a data set that you might want?

Find me a list of, like, five companies in the construction software space. Yeah. You know, it'll go by category, industry, the type of companies. Revenue. A number of employees. And from a, like, how much do these services cost, do you know, like, off top of your head? I just, I just put my credit card. I'm like, I'll have the vibes take care of it.

I wish I knew. I'm like the ROI. Like, are we talking like tens of dollars, hundreds, thousands? I mean, so Firecrawl specifically, I think I pay like $9 or $19. Yeah. But XA when it comes, they have a pay as you go service. And then, you know, we're talking about like $5, $25. Right.

Which is compared to the time. put into it is the opportunity cost insane. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Yeah. I I'm a vibe code and I'm also a Vybender. Like just take the card. Yeah. Yeah.

So an example of this, you know, if we had, you know, run the perplexity search, it created an article in the top tools. It has the right keyword density. So what this will look like is something like an article like this. So it has

you know, it's prompted in a way to give me suggested alternative titles, meta descriptions, keywords, content statistics, and article summaries. And how this works is by a very customized mode within cursor. You can actually create custom modes. Have you used those before? No, I haven't. Yeah. So custom modes, they're essentially specialized agents. You can assign the model.

you can assign a shortcut key if you wanted to and then also access the tools. But what's really interesting is the prompt. So I have this prompt right here. I'll show you actually where it specializes in generating comprehensive product requirement documentation. So you're an AI specializing and creating PRDs. Here's how you should approach it.

Here's the key features you keep in mind. Here's how you should map out the directory. How do I copy this? Or do I need to do myself? You can do yourself. Definitely. You can use an agent to prompt it to create a prompt for you, which is possible. But I also share these resources online and I have an access to this prompt as well.

Okay. Thank you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's also good because it gives you like mermaid diagrams, which is key for a lot of agents to be able to follow the data flow. And, you know, there's other great tools. Explain what that is for people. Yeah, for sure. So, mermaid diagrams are essentially visual diagrams or flows for, like, in most cases, used to visualize architecture, right, or data flows.

And I think it's now, in my opinion, a big factor for providing context to agents to actually understand the data flow. So I'll say, like, you know, I can show you an example where create an example, murmurated diagram for a job board. showcasing the flow between an employer, posting a job, and admin reviewing it. So what this does essentially is it helps you map out what that flow will look like. And I think the key part around vibe coding in general is you're the architect. You're guiding it. Claude code is great in terms of you prompting it and it goes and does it for you. But with cursor, I think the differentiation is you're still the driver in the seat and you have a co-pilot.

It's going to do it for you. Yeah. Yeah. Or you're the co-pilot, actually, and the driver's doing it for you. So this is what a murmur diagram looks like. So you can actually map out exactly what the flow will look like if you build an app. So I want to have a job board that where an employee can go in, access a dashboard, create a job posting, felt information. And then as a user, or as an admin, I want to access this. So this is quite complex. Yeah. Right. So imagine like if I was a product manager at a startup or company, I'd probably have to do a lot of this before LLMs with

hand. Yeah. Like manually doing this. But now you can just get a murmur diagram directly in here and it has all, all the mapped out for you. Yeah. I used to do those by hand. Like I was a product manager.

So. Yeah. Yeah. It's not fun. It sucked. It's like, I do not like doing this at all. It's not fun at all. And I think that's where it gets interesting to like talk about cursor.

even if you're not building a product, but if you're a PM or you're a researcher, cursor can be the interface for you to actually just do a lot of this work and use it as a process to hand over to whatever it is that you're doing. So as a PM, you can create PRDs. You can do these flows and have it focused on your work. Yeah. You don't have to be building a business.

100%. But ideally you should be always building business. But yeah. That's a separate conversation. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the net of it here is like, you can, you know, I created these folders to show that, like, you can essentially have all these different functions within both your business and the work that you're doing to,

to show what's possible, right? Even if you're a QA agent, for example, you can create, you know. QA is, it's the least, like, interesting on the surface, but it's so important, right? Very important. So, so important. And I think what's interesting is, like, if you have a test plan, you can use something like browser base or playwright to say look at this test plan yeah and start acting on like start doing it so i can actually get you know playwright to follow this test plan to say go do this

go do that crazy yeah that's crazy we have you know for our app right now we have a lot of a qa done with agenic browsers and it works and it works and it completely works so like i can for example go in here and say, you know, like go to humblelittics.com using playwright mCP and click on login, for example. And, you know, hopefully it works. And there's that, you know, you know, they say there's a saying, do a demo, lose the sale. I'm not trying to sell you on anything, but in most cases, we'll see because sometimes you have models that break and they don't use MCPs properly. But Even if it doesn't work, I'm happy because it shows that things break sometimes. Absolutely.

And that's totally normal. It's completely normal. And I think part of it is chances are the model is not the right model you're using or your problem's not right or just something broke with a cursor and you just need to try it again. So as this is loading, oh, there you go. So it should open my browser right now and navigate to the page. Oh, there we go. Okay, so it says, oh, the pages loaded successfully.

There's a login. Crazy. And it should click it. There you go. Oh, my God. So I can say, you know, fill it out, fill it in with an example email. Now, if I wanted to, I can refer to that QA plan that we had and say, hey, go through the step by step. Right.

So I just put it, it just automatically typed in a user example. This is magic, man. And it, you know, when it's crazy, it passed the CAPTCHA. Captcha's don't work anymore, right? In this world? I don't think so. I think we just showed that AGI as possible. Yeah. That's true.

So you can actually have complete automated QA testing engine. Incredible. As you're building your app, have an agent spin up. I mean, that's why I wanted to have you on the pod. It's just to show, like, I had heard that, you, you know, you showed James, the boring marketer, how you use cursor. Yeah. And after you did that, he has never been the same.

And I'm having that same visceral experience right now where I'm looking at how you're running your business on top of cursor. And it makes me feel like, like I use actually zero, for example, for accounting. Our company uses it. And I hate logging in. And I'm constantly asking our finance person, X, Y, Z. And all these little tasks that could be programmable.

And I think the reason why I don't use cursor for a lot of these things is a bit, as a non-technical person, it's a bit overwhelming. Absolutely. So like what do you say to someone who looks at this IDE and is like a bit overwhelmed? Yeah, you know, because James was, James was that person three weeks ago. Yeah. And now he's like fluid, right? Yeah, N-A-N is out the window. He's a big M-A-N guy.

I'm like, yeah, we need to check the market share of NAN because I think we had an impact here. But no, absolutely. I think it's totally natural to feel that way. I think I would actually have a very contrary intake to that to say, open up cursor and try to build your own app. Because once you get over that gap of knowing how to deal with the interface, how to use the terminal on those command lines, you can then go ahead and do all these other tasks in a breeze. Right. So if you get the hard part done, you can actually do all this. But it's totally natural to feel that way.

And if some people don't want to build or code in there, it's okay because the intended use case of cursor is not for these kind of tasks. Right. I think because I have more of a development devolved per mindset first is well like, okay, how do I just keep it all in here? I'm also very like OCD and like to have things very clean and simple. Like a lot of my friends make fun of me for how simple my sidebar is. Or your doc too. I noticed that. Yeah, I got nothing in there. Yeah.

I'm like, I just need to keep things very simple here. So if I can keep things all in one place, I'm okay. And honestly, a little bit of that rooted from that. I was like, okay, cool. I just want to see how far I can take this in Cursor. Yeah. Yeah. Well, it's cool because I guess I've never really seen anyone use Cursor like this.

So is there anything else you want to show or? I think we've covered it, right? We essentially covered marketing, finance, design, analytics. Where I really end this off is like for anyone that wants to start off, is just open up Cursor and work with just dropping a file. in there and interacting with that file. And then install an MCP, see how far you can go with the MCP. Then work backwards to say, what can I achieve?

What is a task or outcome? I want to, you know, in this case, just get a list of all the invoices that I have to open to pay for. I'll include where to find you and get all your great content online in the show notes and description. I'll also include a link to Humboldiletics in the description for people who want to check that out. Thank you for being so generous with your sauce.

You appreciate it. This is an audience that appreciates your like this type of sauce. So thank you so much for sharing. I'm glad. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. All right.