The Startup Ideas Podcast - Faceless YouTubers, Millions of Views

Episode Date: November 30, 2023

Greg interviews Dru Riley, founder of Trends.vc, a newsletter and community for founders interested in new business ideas and markets.They talk about growing newsletter subscribers, opportunities for "faceless" YouTube channels built using AI, systemizing companies, and more.►►Subscribe to Greg's weekly newsletter for insights on community,  creators and commerce. You'll also find out when new and exclusive  episodes come out from Where it Happens. And it's totally free.    https://latecheckoutstudio.ck.page/  FIND GREG ON SOCIAL:  Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg  Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/  TikTok: https://tiktok.com/@gregisenberga    LINKS FOR THIS EPISODE:  Production Team:  https://PodFlow.comDru Riley:• Company site: https://trends.vc• Personal site: https://druriley.com• X: https://twitter.com/DruRly• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drurly/  TIMESTAMPS:  00:45 - Dru introduces Trends.vc02:00 - Newsletter co-registration04:45 - Newsletter metrics07:15 - Jumping on new media formats9:08 - "Faceless" YouTube channels16:15 - Examples of faceless channels17:50 - Non-obvious ad sponsorship opportunities23:00 - Custom GPTs28:17 - Productizing execution33:20 - Picking ideas to pursue

I've been looking forward to having this conversation because Drew, you're an idea junkie like me. Thanks for having me, Greg. I've been following Trends.bc for years now. It's just one of those places I go to get startup inspiration. So I'm excited to just jam ideas today, jam some niches and trends. Sounds good. I'll start with an intro for people that aren't familiar with me. I'm the founder of Trends vC.

We started as a newsletter and grew into a community. for founders interested in new ideas and markets. A lot of our audience have existing businesses, but they're asking questions like, hey, how does Open AI or Chat Chippy T affect me? And then you also have people that have a lot of white space in their life. Maybe they're taking a break from a job, and they're looking at what do I do next?

I want to build something. What should I build? How do I put the wind at my back? From a size perspective, how big is the business? We're a team of three right now. We work with agencies, but like a core team of three, 63,000 newsletter subscribers, about 1,400 pro members to give you a sense of the size.

What's cool about where you sit is you're seeing a lot of new markets, new ideas, just being at the center of the community. So you actually became a little prepared, which I love. And this one I really want to talk about newsletter co-red. I feel like that's an idea that needs to be unpacked a little bit. Give folks a little background on what you're thinking here. I first heard about a company called SparkLute. It was early last year, and a friend was using it and telling me about it.

I'd used SparkLute before, but it was a tool from SparkLoop called Upscribe, where they make this idea of co-registration really easy, where if you're not familiar with it, let's say you sign up as a new email subscriber for Trends v.C. We're recommending three to five other newsletters. And for each referral that we make, we earn, let's say, a dollar or $3 or $4 per. subscriber that we refer to those other newsletters. And there's two opportunities that come off of that. Let's say that you've built the skill set up or you're interested in building the skill set up around performance marketing or paid ads. If you have a product yourself, you could run paid ads against your product and basically grow your audience at break-even or at a profit if you're generating more revenue than you're spending on those ads. If you're not great at performance marketing,

but you're great at building sales funnels, you can get on the other end of that. that relationship. The beautiful thing about co-registration, or at least the way Sparklew does it with Upscribe, you're not paying for each subscriber, you're paying for each engaged subscriber. And it depends on how you set your criteria. So you can define it engaged subscriber however you want to, but then try to nail that payback period for that paid subscriber down to one month, two months. If you get it down to one month, you hear these mythical stories of people saying, okay, I put the ad spin on a credit card and they're just generating points because they have it paid off. by the time that the bill comes due because they've already, again, hit that payback period.

So you could basically say, I want to buy a subscriber at $2 a subscriber. And then an engaged subscriber could be something like that person clicks a link within 30 days. Is that right? Yeah, for us, it's been a while, maybe two months since I've revisited our screening criteria, but I did have to tighten it up. For us, it's maintaining a 50% open rate for two weeks. Because we use ConvertKit, they don't allow us to easily track clicks per subscriber and attribute a click to a subscriber.

If we were using Miller Lite or another platform, we would really be able to drill down to the behavior level. So we just go off of open rates. But if you use a different email service provider, you'll be able to drill down and define what an engaged subscriber means for you. That's my issue with a lot of email metrics in general. Like to me, if someone opens my email, it could be for a variety of different reasons. It could be I was able to create a really catchy subject line. You might have opened it, but I tricked you.

It doesn't mean that you're particularly engaged. So with respect to email metrics, I look at unique clicks curves percent. The ultimate test to is your newsletter engaged or not is how many people are sending you a reply back? When the clicks thing, I think if anyone's new to newsletters or email marketing, please remember what Greg said that. That's very important. It's even to the point where we split test each email that goes out. And since every email goes out is split tested, maybe once or twice a month, we have to make

the decision between do we go for, okay, this email generated a lot of unsubscribed relative to another email. We always show a preference for that engagement, clicks, total unique clicks, like you said. over anything else. It may just mean that if it triggered a lot of unsubs it's spiky, but it also triggered a lot of clicks on other links. People are taking action on that email. And there's something that I miss in terms of being able to attribute those clicks at the subscriber level with other ESPs. The other thing to note is don't feel bad if people unsubscribe to your newsletter. I used to feel so bad. I took it almost personal.

I'd be like, oh my God, 200 unsubscribes. I spent all weekend. creating this amazing content for you. You're all unsubscribing. My lesson now having been writing emails for five years or so is that it's just the cycle of email newsletters. It's like life, right? You live and you die. And it's okay for someone to be interested in your topic for a period of time.

And then at a certain point, they're like, I've outgrown this or I thought it would be interesting and it's not. Or they just don't like your vibe. They might just like not like how you write. right. And that's okay. And it's all about how do you cultivate a group of people that do connect with you and what you're talking about. It's a lot of people look at number of subscribers. But if you're looking at engagement, okay, you unsubscribe, that's a signal there. But it ultimately helps our engagement metrics if you weren't going to stay subscribed and not engage with the content.

So basically for people listening, it's how do you build an infinite sales machine? And a lot of people are against paid for a lot of valid reasons. Like it costs money when you can go on social and get it for free. But I always think about it as R&D, like marketing R&D. Try it out, see if it works. I question email newsletters that have high percentage of paid subscribers. I don't think it should be the only way you're acquiring users. I think the grassroots social events, community, that's going to be your bread and buy. but trying out different channels. Would you agree that every newsletter should be trying it at least?

I have a problem with absolutes. So I'll say almost every. I think there are these strategic windows where you can use it. For example, one thing, and this is getting off topic, you can use paid ads for a similar purpose, but we've often used the newsletter itself to split test a value proposition because we know within a matter of hours which one resonates better. Whereas if that was a web split test and we threw that on the landing page,

you could take weeks or months to do that. You can do a similar thing with paid ads to just see, okay, which value prop gets more clicks or which value prop gets more attention. If you have a new paid platform where ads are underpriced, that might be another arbitrage that you can jump on. So that's what I mean by using paid ads in a strategic way. That's a really good point you bring up. Whenever some new media format or ad format comes out or a new platform comes out, there's always an opportunity to be first movers there. like the example I use is Zinga which was the maker of a lot of very popular Facebook games back in like you're showing our ages Greg we are showing our age but at the same time history repeats itself

Zinga basically Mark Pinkis has this idea he wants to create games on top of Facebook when Facebook launched something called Facebook Connect was basically an app ecosystem on top of Facebook He took advantage of all the different APIs at the time that allowed you to like do something on one of these games. And it would basically automatically post a lot of the things that you were doing within the games onto your Facebook feed. So for example, I made it to the next level and then Drew would see it. And then he'd be like, oh, what's Farm Bill? And you click in and sign up to the game. It started taking off virally, but they also supplemented it with Facebook ads.

And Facebook ads was the brand new platform at the time. And we're really showing our age because I remember when you can get a click on Facebook for five cents. Yep. Now that's probably on average a dollar. So it's 20 times cheaper back then when Mark Pinkis was buying ads. If you're building something, you really want to take note of what's new right now. Should I be spending money on TikTok ads?

Newsletters are way bigger today than they were five years ago. So should I be spending money on newsletter ads? This sort of brings us to the next topic. One thing I've been thinking a lot about is, We don't have a big presence on YouTube yet, but hearing the way that Jay Klaus and Pat Wall talk about the affinity of their YouTube audience relative to a Twitter audience,

that affinity sounds like it's so much stronger. My theory is because you're engaging more senses. It's a higher fidelity medium. So you have the opportunity to build stronger connections there. And the next thing I have listed is around faceless YouTube channels. A lot of content that we already watch is faceless. We just don't think about it that way. But when you build a faceless YouTube channel, it has certain attributes where there's no key person risk.

I'm very obsessed with building systems. So if you could build a system around this, you could go horizontal and cover different topics. I have a few channels. These are all faceless YouTube channels. Some of these people, they'll go after multiple topics like this guy, the Market Whisper. He has one video, 1.9 million views, which is the power of these discovery platforms where you don't put out a podcast without being unknown and get 1.9 million listens. So it just shows the power of the algorithm there.

But that's another thing I'm thinking a lot about and we're actively pursuing right now. A faceless YouTube channel, does that just mean it's around topics? Yeah, there's no talking face or there technically could be a talking face. If you've seen, I think it's synthesia, you have these avatars. A lot of faceless YouTube channels that I'm talking about, they don't even have that. They're using animations or even be. B-roll, whether it's static images or B-roll videos. Or sometimes they'll insert interview clips, which are huge channels out there, like Phenomatics, real engineering is another one.

Real Life lore is a huge channel. There's some AI explain. There are a lot of AI YouTube channels that are popping up and I can't get enough of them. Two-minute papers is another one. So I'm looking at Asianometry. They've got 577,000 YouTube subscribers, which is huge. And it's a channel on science, technology, history. If you're interested in the subject matter, they can't keep your attention. I'm a subscribe. Yeah, I'm looking at this now.

I always like to look at their most popular videos because that'll give you a sense of what's landing with the audience. So the number one video that they have, why this Soviet computer failed. Second, what eating the rich did for Japan. Third, how the Soviets landed on Venus. Fourth, India's semiconductor failure. And fifth, how the rich ate South Korea. Interesting. And it even sounds like they're using like 11 labs or voice cloning with the recent videos. There are different sort of levels of automation that you can step up or step down here.

But if you're obsessed with systems, you could take this pretty far. And like Greg said, 577,000 subscribers. The other interesting opportunity for folks is to do faceless in different languages. Someone took my welcome video on YouTube, this AI company called Rask AI. They basically took my video and made it me speaking in Spanish, perfectly and Chinese, perfectly, and French. Perfectly little did they know. I do speak French. So I don't need your help there. Although they made my accent is like a Quebec accent.

And there's this very nice French, Parisian accent. So maybe it did make me sound better. But anyways, my point here is there's a huge opportunity. And you're seeing this with Mr. Beas too, where he's. He creates channels in different languages. Faceless, Chinese, faceless, friend, faceless, Spanish, huge opportunity. If you haven't experimented with 11 labs yet, it's just a flip of the switch in terms of how you can switch languages now. This is more of a short-term arbitrage than a long-term business opportunity.

But I watch a lot of comedy on YouTube and you see these channels pop up where they're just taking snippet, building these compilations of stand-ups from comedians. The comedians, they're like, I don't mind if people do that. because you're basically spreading my message, even if it's monetized on your end, where I have seen some pushback from the people that are being featured on these compilation channels. Sometimes the people with the compilation channels will go on and then try to scam their watches.

They're like, do not do that under any circumstance. But you sort of would expect like take down notices. But of these, you know, comedians and other influential figures, you're seeing them like grateful of it. you're just amplifying their message by compiling or taking snippets and making shorts out of these longer videos that they put together. Can you talk more about 11 labs? I'm sure not everyone knows what they do. It's voice cloning software and it's very good. So I started messing around with 11 labs maybe like a year ago. You give it a three minute sample of your voice and then it does a

pretty good representation of your voice. So let's talk about a simple workflow. You go to GPT4. You say, give me a video script on the history of semiconductors. Then you go to 11 labs and you read out a prompt that they give you so they can build a model of your voice. You take the script from GPT4, you add that to 11 labs, and now you're reading the script that you use GPT4 to create. And if it doesn't sound enough like you, they have different tunes or different ways that you can tune the voice. It's very powerful. And if you only know English, the next second, you can be speaking Spanish or Japanese or whatever. What's so cool about it is it looks like you actually are speaking Japanese.

I've seen what it does to your mouth. I've used 11 months. It's really good. And also pretty cheap. Like I think it's 11 bucks a month. Yep, yep. I think they have a $5 a month plan, but they have removed a lot of features from that plan.

It starts at 5 and goes up from there. If you were creating a faceless YouTube channel or, faceless video channel, which space would you do it in? And what would be your concept? I played with this before, funny enough, on economic history. There was evidence of demand for this. There's a faceless YouTube channel called Economics Explained, where they talk about current issues, like what's going on in Argentina right now around currency issues. And I would probably try to take a mix of what are you genuinely interested in and evidence of demand. I listened to an episode with you, and I believe it was Jake.

Klaus and you guys talked about the artist versus the distributor. And I think you need to be the artist if you're going to play a game for a long time and get compound returns. But you also need to be a distributor because it can be hard to stay motivated if there's no feedback group at all or there's no evidence of demand for what you're building out. So I would first ask what topic have I been interested in for a while and would I be interested in producing content around? And then also what is there evidence of demand for? Do faceless YouTube channels all get commoditized at a certain point? If everyone has the ability to use chat GPT, 11 labs, access to YouTube,

basically information and the production of the information becomes pretty commoditized, where's the moat? It seems like faceless YouTube channels, there's a significant moat when it comes to editing. Let's go to economics explain, for example. They've been putting out videos for years. You can look at the style of the video and the style. of the animations. They're pulling from a stock library in terms of assets that they've built up over time. They come from a certain angle when it comes to their brand, using certain colors.

The best example of this might be a YouTube channel called the Operations Room. There are other channels that have popped up going after a similar market, but they still haven't reached that quality of editing that the Operations Room has. I'm just checking this now. Operation Room 1.05 million YouTube subscribers creating battle map animations of the most important battles and events in history. They found an interesting way to monetize

when it comes to sponsors because looking at this channel on the surface, you're like, okay, they have a decent following on YouTube. How the hell would you monetize this? And then you watch the videos and you'll notice a lot of game companies, games that are built around wars or war scenarios, have sponsored this channel.

But I think that's non-intuitive. because if I didn't have that context, I would be thinking, okay, cool idea. It can gain traction. But on a scale of one and 10, how monetizable is this? And on the surface, I wouldn't say this is very monetizable, but I'm wrong. They found an interesting way to go about it. But that's another aspect that you want to think about. I think on the other side of that, going back to what we were saying around Zinga, a new format, sometimes the most non-obvious places to advertise are the highest ROI places to average. So if I have a first-person shooter game that I'm launching in three months, I might be like, okay, I got a sponsor a Mr. Beath video and I got a sponsor this big, you know, gaming channel. Whereas like those are already priced to perfection versus something like this, which seems non-obvious. But when you when you talk about it, that makes a lot of sense. As much time as I spend thinking about things that don't change. We talked about this earlier with Facebook and Zenga. A lot of businesses and a lot of media companies are built on these short-term arbitrages that exist because as other people realize, okay, Greg is using this strategy.

They're going to start trying to sponsor similar channels as well, and that arbitrage eventually closes. A lot of big businesses start via arbitrage opportunities. Absolutely. We don't give arbitrage as much credit as it deserves. Is it worth doing faceless YouTube if the mode isn't as big? You can build some really big faceless YouTube. channels right now, build up pretty big audiences, and then I actually use those to drive traffic

to maybe your own personal brand, a substack or something. I saw Asianometry. They've got 600,000 YouTube subscribers, but they've got 20,000 email subscribers. So they were able to basically take their faceless YouTube channel, drive email subs, which is pretty valuable. If you value each of at four or five dollars, like they've created almost $100,000 of value via their face YouTube channel. That's the other thing about arbitrage and marketing arbitrage is it's often a really good way to build something and then direct it to something. And not a lot of people are talking about it. I think a lot of people are bullish on YouTube right now, but I don't hear a lot of talk of platform risk. I'm reading a book ever from Morgan Housel when he talks about the idea

of risk and risk is what you don't see. We're not going to talk about platform risk when it comes to YouTube until we have to, until there's an event. It's coming. You just don't know when. You can't predict, but you need to be prepared. So always have that funnel. YouTube is great for discovery. It's great for growth. But always be driving to a more own channel where there's less platform risk. It's interesting because everyone will agree with you that Instagram, X, platforms like that have

platform risk. But YouTube, no one really talks about it because what they say is, well, it has search built into it. And because that search built into it, your videos will always get found. And the truth is, not necessarily. The algorithm changes. There are so many things that could change. There's this sort of competitive relationship between platform and creator that exists. And it's a friendly relationship at first. YouTube is well beyond this. But when a network or marketplace is trying to get liquidity, they're very creative friendly. Once they reach liquidity, they start to try to capture more and more of that value. And of course, it's hard to replace a marketplace or a social network

because network effects are so strong to go back to moats. But there is this antagonistic relationship that's also always there, whether we talk about it or not. We talked about some AI tools. And I know you got a lot of thoughts on niche AI tools and the opportunities there. I think the latest example of this would be the rollout of custom GPTs, where you immediately saw a wave of, I'll call them op-eds on Twitter, where people are coming out with this mean that Open AI is like killing startups with every feature that they release. I may be in the minority here, but I have this other view. I compare it to Shopify, which for a long time didn't have abandoned cart recovery functionality,

but they had Shopify apps that did have this. So Shopify rolls this out. What does that mean for the plugins? That means the plug-ins are free to make design concessions to pro-sellers or beginner sellers because Shopify has to make millions and millions of users happy. So they're designing towards the middle. They're designing towards the average. But if you're building a custom GPT or you're building a quote-unquote chat GPT wrapper, you can afford to make design concessions because you're not building for the tens of millions of users that Open AI has. So I think that it brings more attention

when you see these companies attempt to Sherlock, which is a like term from Apple, it brings more attention to the problem of, oh, I can analyze PDS with this. And then they eventually hit a roadblock of, I can't use Open AI to do this. And it wouldn't make sense for Open AI to build that feature out because it's such a niche feature. But they can go to these other tools to do that. A few of the PDF AI guys were building in that space were pretty pissed, to put it lately, about what happened with the recent updates to chat GPT because they were making. 10s, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. And now that feature is really baked in.

But the argument they're making is it's never going to be as good and as niche as what they're building. I'll give you another example. I've been playing around with custom GPTs. And my expectation was that, sure, we could use it to upload all trends pro reports and then ask questions of those. It works great for that. Speed issues aside, which they'll figure out.

But what it doesn't work great for is execution if I want it to, let's say, make new predictions about a new market, but have that prediction informed by the style or the format of the way that we make predictions, making sure there's evidence. Custom GPs are not great at execution or content creation at all. So if you have a company like a chat base, which gave you that functionality before perhaps they can go to that pocket or for that problem, which it looks similar on the surface, but they're fundamental. different problems. It's a search problem versus a creation problem. I wonder if there's a faceless YouTube channel idea meets a niche AI software tool idea somewhere in there. There are a lot of AI explainer or AI explained, but are you saying slap a faceless YouTube channel at front of a tool? Use that for growth. That would be cool. Yeah, just build the network of all these eyeballs of people interested in AI tools. You have that proprietary distribution and you're not

competing with others as cost of acquisition is going up. That's a cool idea. I'm just spitballing, but there's definitely a lot of opportunity. People say, don't build these rapper ideas. You're going to get beat up. And people say chat GPC store is cute. But I don't know. I think it's certainly worth experimenting it. Yeah. And there's another take out there. This calls a paradigm shift for me, where a lot of people are saying we're fully expecting our company to be Sherlock by OpenAI or another company. We're going to get the money while the getting is good now and then take those skills and lobby that into another opportunity. That's not the way I like to build businesses. I like to play long-term games, but it's hard to argue against the fact that you still have

those skills that it took to build that first business, even if there's some creative destruction going on there by way of open AI or another company. And for the record, Sherlock means the larger incumbent basically copies your feature and just gives it away for free. Alfred is a tool on Macs where you could do like command spacebar and search for any app and Apple Ad Spotlight to do the same thing. So now they've taken Alfred's customers. I still use Alfred even though Spotlight exists. There's a good Steve Jobs quote around this. I'm going to see if I can pull it up. Steve Jobs told this guy his last name's Wood that he's a good. He's a good. He's a good. He's a good. He's he was going to copy his app.

It says, here's Wood, paraphrasing a phone call from Steve Jobs. You know those hand cars, the little machines that people stand on and pump to move along on the train tracks? That's Carrolia. I guess that's the name of that app. Apple is the steam train that owns the tracks. So basically what Steve Jobs is saying here is, listen, we own the train tracks and you're just coming along for the ride.

The reality is that's how a lot of big platforms. things, including Open AI, including Me Too. They invest millions, sometimes billions into these networks and technologies that they are okay to be able to copy it. And I think that you just need to be aware. You've got to wake up every day being like, is today the day I'm getting copied? That's the reality of entrepreneurship nowadays. Something else, you have these larger companies. It's not only a question of, okay, who's making design concessions and who can afford to build for the smaller, more specific audience and make that group of people happier.

It's also a question of focus where you have Apple, they have Apple music. A lot of people still use Spotify. Like how many things can this large company focus on at once and do well? So it's also a question of focus that I think may be a contributing factor to why some of these smaller companies

build better products for some people. You could use the alarm app on your iPhone, but perhaps you want to wake up to a pot, episode instead of a stock music sound. And that's where we get into this pocket of design concessions. The cool thing about building niche software is you could get really weird with design styles. Like you could put sound on your app.

You could use a lot of bright colors when most software is either black or white. What I encourage people to do, and a lot of the software we build at late checkout, is the out there stuff because we think that's the stuff that's going to linger and people's brains and create lasting impressions, even if a large incumbent copies it, people might just love the design and the brand enough that they might just support it. There's also this idea of counter positioning where you make it expensive for an incumbent to copy you, maybe because they're serving enterprise customers and they want this new market that you're capturing, but they have to give up so much to chase after this new market that you're playing for

that they just won't do it. It's too expensive. You got this other thing here, which I'm curious about productizing execution. You're seeing a lot of these productized services or unlimited agencies. It could be sales as a service or design as a service or you don't see this a lot, but there are companies out there that are doing development as a service. And if we were to do something like this, the way we run operations is very advanced. We use a tool called Process Street. We have a lot of make workflows, which is like a zapier alternative, but more power.

And then I have a lot of founder friends that are very stressed about the way operations run. And we're able to spend a lot of time doing project level work versus operations work. And the productized service would be bringing peace of mind to other established companies when it comes to operations, making sure that things run smoothly. You also have sales as a service. And there are a few companies out there. Cyber leads from my friend Alex comes to mind where he basically lands clients for agencies. as a service. And that's a skill set that we built up by doing outreach. My concern there is that this is a higher level investment. It may take us away from our core focus. But you're seeing a lot of

companies have success around this. I think anytime you can sell peace of mind or anytime you can tell increased revenue, those are generally services that tend to land really well with people. Process Street, first time I have heard of it, what is it? A lot of people talk about notion or Click up, for example. And it's not the same. The way I think about Process Street, we have living documentation. And what I mean by living documentation is the point that our operations veer from the way we have a documented process. There's a forcing function in Process Street that makes you update your documentation. So none of our documentation gets stale because it's like, hey, why did you check this sub requirement if it's not true? Oh, we don't do it that way anymore.

Then update that sub requirement. It puts your SOP. in front of your face. And I think it's like a 110-step workflow and process street, which is a lot, but it also guarantees consistent quality. I can go down a rabbit hole here in terms of like patterns that you want to follow when you're building a workflow out. It gets pretty deep, which is why I thought about this as a service or even a course or something, because you can go deep when it comes to operations and systems design. If you're listening to this and you're looking for opportunity right now, Sometimes there's profit in the boring. I'm obsessed with it.

I find the boring. So if you need your operations smooth out or things are on fire right now, reach out to me. We can figure something out. There you go. I want to end with some sticky thoughts that you can't stop thinking about. I spent a lot of time thinking about things that don't change or things that are true.

It seems like as a civilization, we're on this path of more leverage. where individuals have more power and small groups have more power. There are different indicators you can look for of how small companies are being acquired and what they're being acquired for. Look at WhatsApp. I forget the exact acquisition price, but let's just say $19 billion. How big was that team? About 30 people. Okay, now rewind 10 or 30 or 100 years ago and are there any comparables? No, because you have this ability for individuals and smaller groups to have more impact, more reach per person than you had before. Then I can point to different topics like no code that we've covered or SaaS or a million

dollar one person businesses. They're all evidence of this quote-unquote metatrend of individual leverage. Another is this idea of permissionless innovation. Think about radio stations, for example, where you needed to get a license or to have your own television show. You needed to be in the industry for 10, 15 years before someone gives you that chance. And now your excuses are removed. You don't have to have a printing press. Start a newsletter. There are more opportunities for permissionless innovation. Also specialization niches. That's pretty self-explanatory. The world is getting more and more specialized. And you have niche businesses. And then centralization and decentralization, like how the hell can both of these be true at the same time? So centralization, something's very top of

mind for me is the executive order that just passed where they're basically putting an upper limit on how much processing power you can harness to build an AI model before you notify the government. So I think that's an example of centralization where you still have these bottlenecks. Another example would be Facebook or X with the algorithm change and how much impact that has from the centralized entity. And then decentralization, you have open source when it comes to the ability to be able to like fork and modify any project or crypto the way you can disintermediate banks and go around banks now. I'm not sure if that means the world is becoming more extreme, volatile or what,

but this is what I'm seeing by diving into different markets and ideas. These things are evident at each one. So you're like me because you've got a ton of ideas, a ton of things you're interested in. And a lot of people listening to this pot are like us too. They're all kids in in candy shops. So what do you do when you're a kid in the candy shop and you're trying to prioritize what you should actually be building? This is so tough. I feel like I looked into something where I have an excuse to dive into all of these areas. One answer could be build a personal brand where your brand is built around trying a lot of different things. Like Sam is trying out custom GPTs this week and AI avatars next week. He's actually building this quote

unquote boring sass on the side. And after he sells that SaaS, he still has his brand to fall back on and may start the next business on the back of that personal brand in the audience that he's built and the connections that he's built in that personal brand. So the answer may be not to combine these two things, find the boring thing that brings the bacon home and then have your personal brand built around experimenting on the side. That's why I like the whole multi-preneur model because it allows you to be curious and monetize your curiosity, which is crazy. But you do need to have guardrails. It can't just be like, I'm doing everything here on this list that we've just talked about, AI tools and faceless YouTube channels all at the same time.

Yeah. I think that's the mistake a lot of people make. The way I've made this a habit for a few years is embracing this idea of comfort challenges. It could be as simple as each day I'm going to do something new or scary or uncomfortable. And it doesn't even have to be related to business. It could be building a custom GPT or trying that restaurant around. the corner, but it's building this muscle doing uncomfortable things or doing new things. I heard this story from Danny Postma. He built and sold a company around AI written marketing copy, but the way he got early access is he emailed the CEO. For some people that would make them super nervous, but for him, he probably had this muscle built up. And he's like, it makes me a little

nervous, but I'm going to go ahead and do it. And then look at what that's turned into for him. The what do I have to lose muscle is a good muscle to have. if you want to get rewarded. You have to use it for it to grow, so make that a habit. Totally. All right. Drew Riley,

the Insights per Minute. IPMs were off the charts, as expected. If you want more, Drew Riley, I recommend checking out Trends podcast where you talk about

productized services, vertical software, you're just diving into new markets and sharing some of the opportunities there. So where else could people find you? You can find me on Twitter. at Drew Raleigh or D-R-U-R-L-Y and thanks for having me, Greg. It's been fun. Of course. And if people want more Drew to come back on the show and you like this format,

don't be shy, go on YouTube, throw a comment. Hit me up on Twitter, hit us up on Twitter and share this episode. Yeah, we'd love to be back. All right, later.