The Startup Ideas Podcast - How to write a book with AI [step-by-step guide]

Episode Date: August 12, 2024

I’m joined by Justin Welsh, a 7-figure Solopreneur & Creator, where we dive deep into how we would build an AI-powered book empire and the opportunities and challenges that AI brings. 1) AI-powered book empire 📚Greg's step-by-step process:• Use Claude/GPT-4 to brainstorm book concepts• Analyze Amazon bestsellers with Jungle Scout• Generate detailed outlines with AI• Use Grammarly & Hemingway app for editing• Leverage Bookstat for real-time sales data2)  The rise of AI brings opportunities AND challenges • AI will devalue most content, making it harder to stand out• Top 1% of creators may earn 100x more due to increased demand for quality• Early adopters can capitalize on AI-powered content creation• Long-term success still relies on unique perspectives and staying power3) Creator-led businesses: The new frontier • Example: Midday Squares• Buying products as a "tip" for valuable content• Stand out in a world of commoditized products by becoming a person people want to supportWant more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav)Get access: gregisenberg.com/30startupideas🚀  My FREE 5 day email course to learn how to build a business of the future using the ACP funnel:https://www.communityempire.co/free-course🎯 To build your own portfolio businesses powered by community you might enjoy my membership.You'll get my full course with all my secrets on building businesses, peer-groups to keep you accountable, business ideas every single month and more!Spots are limited.https://www.communityempire.co/📬 Join my free newsletter to get weekly startup insights for free:https://www.gregisenberg.com/70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/FIND JUSTIN ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://x.com/thejustinwelshLinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/justinwelsh/Justin’s Newsletter: https://www.justinwelsh.meTo improve your rankings your business on Google and using AI for SEO, sign up tohttp://boringmarketing.com/Episode Timestamps: 0:00 Intro01:49 Startup Idea 1: AI-powered book empire05:46 Step 1: Brainstorm book concepts / generate detailed outlines with AI08:19 The rise of AI brings opportunities AND challenges18:22 Step 2: Leverage AI to create and edit content22:03 Step 3: Track the sales of competitors23:46 Step 4:  AI-powered book formatting27:09 Step 5: Create the audiobook version of book using AI narration30:27 Step 6: Self Publish Book32:02 Startup Idea 2: All-in-one Solution for SaaS Verticals39:18 Framework: The power of Creator-led businesses

In a world in a world of commoditized products, how do you stand out and become not a product people want to spend money on, but a person that people want to spend money on? Yes, exactly. And you buy the product because this person has given me so much value in my day-to-day life. Therefore, you're like tipping the creator's journey. This is the beginning, like this packaging where the people are in the packaging is the beginning of a bigger trend, which is they're going to take more and more real estate. Like the chocolate you see over here, like, is still 99% of the packaging.

And the people is only 2%. In the future, I'm sure it'll be like 50% the people, 50% of the chocolate. Yeah, might even be the opposite of what it is now, where it might be 90% of people and 10% of chocolate, which could be interesting. All right. Justin Wells, Mr. Solopreneur, you don't do a lot of podcasts. And somehow I convince you to take some time from your vacation. to come on and jam startup ideas with me and startup ideas for solo pinners. So thanks for coming on.

Yeah, of course, man. Greg, it's really good to see you. And I know you swung through my living area many months ago. And we got a chance of Bitee together. And so here I am, ready to talk startup ideas. So you have a few ideas on your list here. Maybe let's start with the first one because it's something I've been thinking about too. You want to hit it?

Yeah. So I've been thinking about, especially having grown my following and been approached by some publishing houses in the last year or so, just like the approach to becoming a published author. And I've talked to a bunch of my friends who are creators or entrepreneurs and have followings. And they have kind of, some of them have started the book process. Others have finished it. Some are trying to decide whether or not to get into that process. and it feels like it's really cumbersome. And there's a lot of unanswered questions. It feels like the negotiation, the advance, picking the agent, picking the editor. And maybe it's because I'm removed from it. And I have not been through the process. But it feels cumbersome. And it feels a bit scary and intimidating.

And like you might get into something without having all of your questions answered. And so I'm thinking, and I made a note here around AI, but I'm thinking through that process in general, and how do we make that process easier? And since I kind of jotted down some of these ideas, I actually think people are starting to approach that problem already. I saw the guys from base camp have come out with something called once.com. I haven't done a deep dive onto it yet, but it seems to be a way in which to get your book out pretty quickly. I believe that James Clear and Tim Ferriss are working on something, um, is, well that seems at least tangentially related to that. So my big question around that is just like, how do we streamline the process of becoming a published author for folks that don't want to

go through the really difficult process of doing so. So I think you're talking about write book, which is the Jason Freed product, right? Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's right book. That's right. Once.com was the product before that. I'm confusing it too. You're right. Yeah, right book. Exactly. Yeah. So write book. I just pulled it up. Instantly publish your own books on the web for free, no publisher required. So this is basically, it looks like, it's how do you make book publishing as easy as blogging? Yeah, exactly. Yeah, it's under the once brand here. Yeah, I use hay.com, which is a product from the base camp guys, and I love all the simplicity that they build into their products. And like, if anyone is going to attack that,

that model, this doesn't seem to be tied into becoming a, you know, New York Times bestselling author, or getting published under a big brand. This seems to be a way to sort of instantly publish your own book. But I actually think that is just as good an idea as disrupting the traditional, you know, publishing model. Like this seems to be faster, better, easier, have less friction for those who want to get started. And like, do we see a major disruption?

Do people in 10 years not publish with huge publishing houses anymore? Is everything done through something like a write book? And I don't know, there's a part of me that says that that's possible or likely. Yeah. So something I've been thinking a lot about is how do you create an AI powered book empire? And so it's less about Justin Welsh or Greg Eisenberg wants to create a book. And like, yeah, maybe we work with Penguin or we do it once.com. But more about how do we create 100 books in a year?

and what would that look like? And I've got actually a step-by-step framework for how I would go about it and do it. You want to hear it? I do. Yeah, I'm very interested. And then I'll argue whether I think it's a good idea or not. Totally.

I love it. This is perfect. And this is why I brought you on is because we can chat ideas and you're a guy who will call me on my stuff. So I appreciate that about you. Okay. So if I wanted, okay, how to build an AI-powered book empire in 2024.

So the first thing I would do is I'd use Clode or GPT for. I'm actually, I'm using Clode just like 99 times more. Yeah, it's just way better. So let's just say use Clode to brainstorm 100 plus book concepts based on trending topics. Then what I'd do is I'd analyze Amazon's bestsellers list with the Jungle Scout app. for gap identification. So are you familiar with Jungle Scout? I'm not. No, I'm looking up now.

Yeah. So a lot of people who are not in e-commerce have never heard of Jungle Scout. But it's basically, I think it started off as a, I want to say a Chrome extension. And it allowed people to see competitor insights and keyword analysis on different products. So you can go on to, you know,

call it a, I don't know, teapot. And you could see that this teapot used to be priced at $40 and now it's on $30. And they've sold 4,000 of them today. So I would use this with books because I can basically just see like, okay, what's selling? What's not selling? What are the trends? And I don't think many people are doing that. Then what I do is I'd use chat, GPT or clode to generate detailed book outlines based on some of these trending areas. Are you with me? I have like a million more steps.

Yeah, yeah. I am with you. I'm just like, quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called Boringmarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world.

They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found. on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI, I could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use Boringmarketing.com and that's why I invested in it. They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. As soon as I hear you kind of going down this like step by step building a book with AI, my mind

pulls back to this quote and I forget who it's attributed to and it's popular. So I'm sure someone will know who said it. But it's something to the effect of, I think it was on Twitter. Like I want, I don't want AI to write my books and do my art and like all that. wanted to do the dishes and like pick up my room so that I can write books and do art. And so like, I just wonder from a long term perspective, if everyone's writing a hundred books, and by the way, I recognize that not everyone's going to do it. People always ask me, what if everyone is the solopreneur? So I get that stupid question. But like, if a lot of people are doing that, does the art of like writing a really strong and powerful book with compelling study and like user experience,

does that die? Do you think about that when you outline this stuff? Or does like, Does that just sort of you separate yourself from that as you're thinking through it? I think the reality is AI is going to devalue the majority of content, period. So in a world where it makes it easier to create any sort of content, book content, video content, podcast content, tweets, posts, whatever, it's going to be devalued and it's going to be harder for artists. Let's call them artists. people who come up with unique perspectives, point of views to stand above the noise. That said, once they do stand above the noise or they are recognized as unique,

I think that there's massive amounts of staying power. And I think that the top 1% of artists are going to make 100 times more in the next 10 years than they will in the previous because there's going to be such demand for curated experiences. But that being said, I think that there's a trend. There is a gap in an opportunity right now to do some arbitrage around creating content with AI and automation. Now, that doesn't mean that it needs to be a book by Justin Welsh. It could be a book by Jane Wells, you know? Sure.

And as long as you read the book and you're like, wow, there's value here, then I still think that there's a huge, it's, I personally, I'm, interested in exploring this space. Yeah, it's an interesting, like, just to be clear, like, I think AI is fascinating. And I'm also, like, not a person who's like, oh, because I like the creative side of things and because I like, you know, unique and personal art that I somehow don't believe that AI will overtake those things. I do. My big concern around it, and not to, like, cut you off on your, on your book idea, but like, my big concern around it is you say people are going to become experts or have a very unique point of view and there's going to be staying power around that. I think a huge concern that I have is like how, right? So someone gets a, someone gets one,

one inch into a journey that they're really excited about where they have a really unique and meaningful perspective. And like, you're talking about using Jungle Scout to see trends. Like, there's going to be much more complicated software at that point in time. Someone's going to see that right away and say, this person is getting some form of traction and like before they can get traction and get a leg up and get staying power, let's just steal that. Let's just take that. And so I just wonder, like, how does someone go really deep get a ton of traction in an area of expertise and like stand out in a sea of people creating hundreds and hundreds of things based on what that person has already just started? I feel worried about that. I think like,

I struggle to envision a world like that. Does that make sense? Yeah, it totally makes sense. And I'm happy you bring it up because 70% of the people listening to this are going to, are having the same voice in their head. So it's good that you're bringing it up. Okay, let's think about the world before the internet, or at least early internet. Like, people were probably having a similar conversation around, you know, okay, I'm a print designer and now anyone could create art on Photoshop or MS Paint and it's so much simpler and faster now. Doesn't that like destroy art? Doesn't it make it, okay, now there's going to be a thousand times more artists because, you know, you don't have to go to the Parsons School of Design and you don't have to like buy canvases.

You can just like fire up your, you know, Microsoft 3.1 or whatever it was called and or MS DOS or whatever and just like start playing around. Yeah, I think like being a creator, being an artist is going to evolve and there are going to be tools that are going to make it ridiculously easy, i.e. Jungle Scout in the year 2030. But I still think that if I'm trying to learn, let's just say I want to be, I'm really into coffee. And, you know, I was a barista for five years and I wanted to create content and create a business around coffee that's not a coffee shop. I could still use Jungle Scout and learn like what's selling, what's not selling, and then come up with my.

own point of views and create a business around it. And hopefully, yeah, you know, it is, it is a way more competitive space today, you know, in this time than it would be in the previous. But my point is, I think not using the tools is a risk, a very big risk. Huge risk. I totally agree. I am not anti-AI. I don't find it to be a particular, particularly fabulous writer at this point in time. It's certainly getting better. Clode is the best I've seen, right? Like, I think chat GPT writes pretty terribly. I've tested it out on a bunch of different things. But like, again, we're only a few years into this thing. Like, fast forward 10 years, I think it's going to be tremendously different. I think about someone like Jack Butcher,

right? He's like, like, as internet are, and by the way, that's only because this is my ecosystem. So I might be blind to those who came before him and we're creating something similar. So I'm speaking within the realm of what I know on the internet. Like when he came out and started creating art, like he got some traction. It became, oh, I can look at that and know that it's something by Jack. Like I can see his style. I know that's a visualized value piece. And as we've kind of gone over time, like, you know, you've had maybe five or 10 or 15

or 20 or 25 sort of knockoffs of that, you know, and it's kind of getting faster and faster and faster. And I'm, I fear for a world and not to kind of, again, take this back full circle to like what I worry about. But I do feel for a world or fear for one where a jack butcher gets traction on one piece. In the next day, there are 10,000 pieces just like that. And it's like, how do you stand out in that noise? And it's a question worth answering. The answer is you have to. And I just wonder what a world full of noise looks like. The way you stand out is you are Jack butcher. You will always be one step ahead of the competition.

and no one could compete against Jack Butcher in that sense. Only Jack Butcher is Jack Butcher. So today. Today. Today. But, you know, okay, if I want to compete with Jack Butcher in an AI world, what do I do? I study all his previous work. And I basically, I become Jack Butcher's brain.

But Jack Butcher's brain is essentially Jack Butcher up into today and previously. Now, Jack Orchard could decide to go from black and white to red and yellow tomorrow. And then it does become a game. Content then becomes a game of cat and mouse. I think that's the trend that is beginning. Yeah, I fear for that trend. By the way, it doesn't mean it's not happening. Who cares what I think emotionally?

But I do wonder what a world like that feels like. I mean, it sucks. I hate that world. too, by the way. Just to be clear, like, I hate it. And it's not fun because people like me and you who like put stuff out there and we spend so much time like crafting things. And then the next day, it gets copied or duplicated. It feels, it feels wrong. But the point I, you know, that's the, that's the negative side of this. The positive side of this is there is a ton of opportunity to, to be building things in a way. Totally. Totally. What's the point of an original thought if the next day it's

duplicated to an infinite degree? Exactly. So like, like, but I do, I do agree that there's tons of, I was just watching a video on someone using perplexity and clode to do like SEO optimized articles. And like, he was prompting perplexity and clode and like couldn't spell. And I was like, this is what happens. Like people can't spell. Like they don't even know how to like do common reading and writing. And I'm just like, is that a world like, do we need to know that anymore? I guess not. but maybe I'm just like a classical person, but like I was just, I was very flabbergasted by that. I'm going to get back to the book steps in a second. Yeah, yeah, sorry, sorry, sorry.

Before I get back, I have to say this little story, Claude was down yesterday. And I noticed Claude was down. I'll be honest. I was trying to like use it for a software project and I wanted some help on it. And I went on to Twitter and I was like, is Claude down? And a bunch of people were saying it down. I saw a tweet, someone said, a very well-known entrepreneur, I won't say who it is, but a very well-known entrepreneur says, I literally thought I was going to have a productive morning today,

and I can't go to work because I don't have Claude. That's kind of scary. Yeah, that's what we're moving towards. But it's a muscle. It's like riding a bicycle. Like once you stop writing on your own or thinking on your own and you let something else do it for you at atrophies. Totally. Now, with that being said, let me tell you how you can use clothes to make 100, Sorry, sorry for getting you off your book idea. Continue. So then you got your outlines. So you've used chat TVT or Clote to make the outlines. Use the outlaw, you know, clode to make the chapter drafts. One of the things I would do is I would write, you know, prompt something like pretend I'm the editor. And here's the 10 ways in which I write and just give them detailed instructions of how.

how you write. And you can train that. I could train that based on Justin Welsh. I could say, like, here's a hundred posts that Justin Welsh has done, write like Justin Welsh. And then bring out, you know, Justin generally is a very clear thinker. And he generally never buries the lead. These are things that you can pull out and that you can put in into Clode. Yeah, their projects, their project's functionality is pretty amazing. That is, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I find that the project's functionality. is light years ahead of like chat GPT's memory and things like that. Totally.

The project functionality in itself is worth the $20 a month. 100%. Yeah. Then you can use, not many people know this, but grammarly, they've got like an AI for, well, a lot of people know it, but I've been using it a lot recently for just real-time editing and proofreading.

You can also use Jasper AI for content generation. and like if you, because you're going to be reading a bunch of these, a bunch of these articles that Clode's going to be outputting and you might be like, wow, this is actually not that good. So if you need new ideas, you can use something like jasper.AI. The Hemingway app, have you ever used that? Yeah, yeah, I use it to make sure that my writing is at a certain grade level for my newsletter or my social content.

I know about what my audience likes to consume at, so I use it almost daily. Can you talk about how it works and how you use it? Yeah. So basically the one functionality I use inside it is grade level. And I want to keep my grade level writing between seventh and eighth grade. Like I've run multiple, like a battery of tests against both my newsletter and my LinkedIn content. Not so much my like X content because I don't think it matters. It's much shorter.

The brevity is what matters. But I will push that through Hemingway. And I will basically not just the grade level. I'll also look for like sentences that can be more clear, clarity and conciseness because that's something that I think I've become known for if I had to like guess on social media is like taking complex ideas and making them very simple. And while I think I'm generally pretty good at that, there are definitely times when I overwrite when I make, when I choose too many words, when I make things too complex.

And so I love Hemingway for that. And I often realize that when I write, I use words that to me seem simple because they've become part of my lexicon from working in startups. for 20 years, from being around people who are certainly more academic than I am. And so Hemingway helps me kind of bring that down, seventh to eighth grade reading level. I've written in third, fourth, fifth, sixth, sixth, ninth, all the way up to 12th. And I will look at impressions. I will look at reply rate on my newsletter.

I'll look at engagement. And that's seven to eight for me is just like where it hits. There you go. That's really helpful to know. I actually, I should do that. But yeah, with a book, it's also equally important. So you want to put that content into Hemingway and check the readability and areas that you can improve. There's a tool called, then the next thing I do, there's a tool called book stat.

I had never heard of it, but heard about it just through the research of this. And the coolest thing it does is like our buddy, Sa Hill Bloom is, launching a book. And wouldn't it be cool to see if, you know, if I was competing against Sathel Bloom in terms of his book, how many pre-orders a day is he getting? And the trend around that. So it's basically a subscription data service.

And I think you're going to see a lot of these pop up, just a lot of these subscription data services in a bunch of different industries. But it just gives you real-time stats that'll help you change the positioning of your book, title, chapters, and help you around the marketing of it. That's really interesting. I often wondered if there was a tool like this.

Like, you know, just very candidly, as I've watched like Sahil and Ali Abdal launched their books, I mean, the consumer, or even their friends, have very little visibility into, you know, there's rah-rah around it. And like, you might assume that it's selling a thousand copies These are 5,000 copies a day, but the reality could be very, very different.

And when someone's not like a New York Times bestseller, my question is always like, how close were they? Or like, what was the gap between them, you know, making and missing the mark? And this is a service that it looks like I could kind of figure that out, which is really interesting. Really interesting. Totally. And it's, you actually go on their website and it looks like it's a website from 1999. Totally.

I'm like, what is this? This is amazing. Yeah. The next thing I would do is you have to templatize your book. So it has to, you can use, I think it's lulu.com. They have an AI powered formatting tool. So it's ready for print, print. But you'll also need a cover design.

So could you use AI to create the cover design? Yeah, you can use Dalli 3 or Mid Journey. I'm starting to feel that a lot of those tools are just like, you can tell it's AI generated. I don't know. Totally. Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah.

It's just like, I don't know, it feels like commoditized to me at this point. It's supposed to be new and unique and interesting. But like every visual that I see, and by the way, I'm not an AI artist. And most people who use it are not AI artists with the prompts. So they're just getting generic output. And so everyone's generic output looks exactly the same. Yes. I'm sure if you're a professional, you know, digital artist who understands AI prompting,

you can probably make something wonderful. But for 99.9% of us, that's not us. Exactly. So you can use, you can use an agency. We have an agency that we built, design scientist.com. A little plug there. And, you know, or just find someone. Go to like Upwork or, or Fiver or whatever, whatever your budget fits. And, and get a human to design it. Nothing wrong with that. The book cover matters. The book cover really, really matters.

It's like one of those things where in YouTube land, they say, it doesn't even matter what your content is. All that matters is your title and thumbnail. It's very similar in books where the title matters a ton and the cover matters a ton. Yeah. A friend of mine is a 12-time New York Times bestselling fiction author writing crime. And he's in his 80s,

and he will tell me all the time, like, he'll have a really creative idea for a book title, and he'll run it by me and my wife. We're like, we like that. And then he'll bring it back and be like, the publisher is actually going with something much more simple. And I'm like, oh, I don't like that at all. He's like, yeah, but it describes what's inside of the book.

And I was like, right, right? That makes sense. That makes sense. It's the same with YouTube, right? It's like. Yeah, totally. It's the same. So then I would,

there's also another company I found. They're called blurb.com. They also allow you to do layouts, so the layout of your book, which cool about blurb.com is they have these templates. So you can like go and make a children's book. And then they have these like children books templates or photography. Like let's say you want to create a cooking book. You can you can do like a photography one. So I think that's really cool.

And again, in our world, no one talks about this stuff. Yeah, you've strung together like the. most AI tools in history to do a really cool process. Like, I'm actually really impressed. You know, I go about as far as perplexity, chat GPT and cloud. These are all really interesting. I feel like my, this audience loves like tools. So.

Yeah. And I feel like you appreciate this stuff too. It's just like we're all looking for unfair advantages. Yeah. In some way or another. So another thing. that is really useful, I think, is Spotify. I think they might have bought this company,

but they, I don't know if they bought it or they incubate it. It's called find, findawayvoices.com. And I'm pretty sure they actually allow you to do an AI narrator selection for audiobook production. Wow. That's really cool. That's a huge process. That's a huge process.

Yeah. And especially if you're Jane Wells and you sound like Justin Welsh, you don't want, you know, you don't want to be going into, you know, renting recording studio and recording for three days straight, sounding, sounding like you sound. Yeah, it's, it's really interesting. As you're going through this, like, um, I mentioned something during the book design part where I said, you know, 99.9% of us aren't AI artists, nor do we understand how to prompt AI to create beautiful art. And I may have just answered my previous concern or question where it's like, how do you become the next Jack Butcher?

Well, it's no longer about the stroke of the brush or the how you move the mouse. It's more about prompting. Like how do you become a world-class prompter, which in turn the outcome is world-class art? So I guess I have to like focus my brain on thinking about how the world changes that way. what being great at something looks like. I think it's going to be a lot around prompting. It is. And, you know, just this morning, I was talking to a finance, someone on my finance team, and she was like, what does this charge here?

This charge here. This charge here. And I'm like, oh, man, have I gotten carried away with AI tools and just like premium tools? Like, are we going to spend, on one hand, I was like scared. But then on the other hand, I'm like, listen. maybe I'm spending $5,000 a month on these tools. But, you know, you wouldn't bat an eyelash,

have paying someone, you know, a salary $5,000 a person, $5,000 a month, right? Like $60,000 a year. So I think that's what's going to happen is the software tools from a percent of your costs are just going to increase versus human beings. Yeah, I was talking to an entrepreneur the other day, who will remain named with seven-figure entrepreneur. in the like digital sort of knowledge space and like um has a team who basically takes his

content and chops it up and creates it you know for for different social platforms and he's like I'm kind of frustrated because their prices are going up and I was like how are their prices going up like explain that to me like with all the AI tools available right now like the service they provide their prices should be going down or you should be like you should be spending one day next week, like designing all of your prompts. And if you really want somebody else to write your content for you, like the following week, you should be able to press a button and do it yourself.

Like, I can't imagine like service companies for copywriting right now, like having the gall to raise their prices. Maybe I'm wrong on that. But like, I don't know, I see that going away fast. Yeah. Yeah, I agree. I got a couple more tools for you. And then our book will be launched.

Our empire will be launched. Nice. Draft to Digital. Number two. Draft to Digital. So their tagline, we are self-publishing with support. Self-publishing on your own is kind of daunting. I've actually explored this.

It's daunting. Think about how many steps we just went through. So draft to digital is services and tools to help you with the publishing the distribution, the layout, and the print on demand paperback. So they just give you a little bit support. Very cool. Yeah. I think this is going to be a huge industry, just like helping people produce longer

form content, whether it's AI created or not irrelevant, like in getting it to the masses in forms that they're used to, I think is going to be just right for like tons of players, as you're already showing me right here, right? I've got tabs open, right? Yeah. And you can, you know, what I love about some of these business models like Draft to Digital is they don't charge you. They just charge 10% of the retail price. So they can tack on a little fee. So you would have charged $20 for a book. Now you charge $22. $2 goes to them. So anywhere where you can do a pay per performance or paper usage or paper task model, I think is going to be interesting to people. Like here's a question I have that maybe you haven't thought about or maybe you have and you'll answer it here in a moment. But I've got one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine different tabs open at the moment.

As you kind of go through this creation, like who becomes the, who takes all these point solutions and becomes the all in one for this? Yeah. I think that's like an interesting question is why do I have to use nine services for producing one outcome? like why can't I use one service for that? Let me just pull, hold on one sec. I want to pull up a name of this new app. Okay, so I first of all, I completely agree that it's overwhelming

and what's going to happen is each vertical is going to consolidate. And you're actually starting to see this in mobile too. Did you see this app that just came out the other day called Hero Assistant? It's pretty interesting. If you think about our mobile, like our iPhones, let's say, we have to open up our calendar, we have to open up our weather,

we have to open up our mail, we have to open up Instacart, reminders. They're all separate apps, and it's getting overwhelming. It's the same issue that, it's one of the same issues that you're describing in AI. It's like there's too many different services. I mean, AI has two problems. One is how do you find out about these services besides listening to the Startup Ideas podcast? And then two, and two is, how do you make it a cohesive, simple experience? And in mobile, you just have the issue of, like, you have the app store, so it's easier to find the apps. But what Hero is, and is really interesting, and is getting a lot of people talking, is it just brings all those apps, calendar, weather, perplexity, Instagram, cart reminders into one interface.

Really cool. I'm looking at it right now. I think that's what's going to happen in AI, but not yet. Because we're still in the soul searching, trying to figure out use cases phase. Yeah. I think this happens in every single problem that I have today in my business is solved by several different point solutions that don't communicate with one another. The last startup that I helped build was a medical startup that,

essentially did exactly that, took every point solution of physician used and put it together in one all-on-one solution sold it at a better price, right? And that's why it's $200 million in revenue today. I see that exact same thing coming to everything that a creator does, everything that a writer does, everything that an entrepreneur does, will be like at first spread out amongst nine to ten different apps and then put into one. And I think that's like, how do you become either one of those 10 or the one? Yeah. That is like a really, a really, big idea that you're sharing, which is how do you be the node in all these different industries? And someone listening, you know, it doesn't need, you don't need to pick a node in like publishing,

which might be overwhelming. But you can pick a node that's like in a sub niche and still be that. And it's, and those businesses have huge sticking power and are great to create. Can I give me an example of something that I've been thinking about recently? So as a creator across multiple platforms, let's think about my workflow on a regular basis. So everything that I do starts with a tweet. Like I might try and think of something interesting or useful to say on X, right?

I throw those out there because there's a short feedback window. So you get feedback in 10 minutes. You know whether this thing's going to go well or go poorly once you push it out there. Since I'm pushing stuff out there on a consistent basis, I have a lot of pieces of content that I can choose to use in different ways. Oftentimes what I'll do is screenshot that, add some context, it's a LinkedIn post, right? Do that a couple times a day, figure out which one works the best.

I can take that same screenshot, same context, move it over to Instagram, copy the tweet, bring it over to threads. Like there's just a million ways to sort of organize this stuff. That in and of itself is one problem that needs to be solved because like going back and forth between different notion tabs, different publishing tools, becomes very cumbersome and confusing. Then add to the fact that inside of every discovery platform, I want to bring my audience to my website, have them do a deeper dive on learning about me and what problem it is that I solve. So every piece of content has to have a relevant piece of deeper long form content that is related

to it so I can drive someone naturally in the next call to my website. So hey, you want to learn more about this or want to go deeper on this, go check out this article, go check out this newsletter. I have a repository of newsletters and articles. It's not easy for me to find which one is most relevant and therefore make it the call to action. That's another problem that should be solved with one click of a button. I use Cloud Projects for that. But today, Cloud Projects doesn't talk to tweet Hunter or Tapleo or any of the publishing tools that I use. Then I want to meet smart, interesting people who I can start to network with on social media.

I do that on platform. I do that on LinkedIn. I do that on X. I do that on Instagram. that doesn't exist in the publishing tools, doesn't exist in Cloth. So there are these disparate problems that I have to solve through all these different tools. And I'm thinking to myself like, why not one tool? Why can't I do this inside of one app?

And why don't I build that? Why wouldn't you build it? I would. Yeah, I mean, it's something that I'm very interested in building. I figure, you know, if I solve my own problems, I'll probably solve a thousand other people's problems. Totally. But you're not actively building it today, right? It's just an idea. Potentially. I love it. I love it. Say less, my friend. This is a big idea. I also have the same issue, which is,

even though I use less tools than that in content, I still feel like I'm going from place to place. and I'm getting basically like content whiplash. That's how I feel. Same. Why can't I focus on writing one good idea? Like even if I don't want to use AI for that and I just want to write myself because I like to write, but once I write one good idea,

why can't I hit one button and just be like, go all the places you're supposed to go and do all the things you're supposed to do? That's, I just want to be the creative. Like I don't want to figure out how to stitch together all this different stuff. Just like, let's build that, that automation now

write for fun and hit the button and everything works. That's the world that I envision AI being fun in less taking over creativity, I guess. Yeah, and there's,

there's, you know, this could be really big. Like, we often forget, but who tweets a billion dollar company. Even on the indie hacker side, like I just had Tebow from Tweet Hunter on.

He sold it for $10 million. So, um, there's a lot. lot of demand for creator tools. And if you can build this efficiently, I think people would pay for it. And very candidly, this is my opinion, by the way, I don't have data to back this up, but I think I can in a weird way, which is like, I use Taplio and Tweet Hunter, and I like Tibo, and I think his team builds really good products. But in a way, in a way,

many of the products that are on the market today, and it's not just in the creator space or the publishing space, are not too dissimilar from one another. They are becoming more and more commoditized. And I think what is most important is if somebody uses it. And so what I'm seeing is like the companies that are standing out in the publishing space, like a Tweed Hunter or a Taflio, have the big creators behind it. The big creators use it.

the big creators talk about it. They sponsor the big creators' newsletters. They're in front of the big creators' audiences. And you might look at that in another tool, and they might at first glance look relatively similar. But if you know that I use it or Sahel uses it or you use it, you're just more inclined to use it as well. And so I think for someone like myself,

how do I leverage, how do I use that advantage? You know, as I'm thinking about both solving my own problem and building something that isn't commoditized and then combining it with, you know, a brand and a person who's known for creating content. Those are things that are kind of percolating in my mind at the moment. So what you're kind of saying is it's similar to like the Mr. Beast chocolate feastables. It's like, why are you buying a feastable over Hershey's chocolate bar? It's like, I know, Mr. Bees is my guy.

I love him. I want to show you something real quick. I just off camera right before I came on, I had this thing called a midday square. Have you seen this product? I have not. So it's cool looking at it's cool packaging. Functional, yeah.

So if you're not watching on this YouTube, on YouTube, by the way, if you're not watching on this on YouTube, just go to YouTube and subscribe and comment and like do those things.

But here it is, the midday square, cookie dough flavor. And when you pull it into the other side, what do you see? Oh, three faces. Who are these three people?

They've been actually building this company. this is Jake this is Jake Nick and Leslie they're the three co-founders they've got like 100 plus thousand followers and they've been building this business in public the highs the lows

creator-led company and you buy the product because I mean the product's great but it's also because you want to it's almost like a tip you're like tipping the creator's journey you're like this person has given me so much value in my day-to-day life

therefore three bucks for the chocolate bar. Dude, totally. I actually think like I buy from a lot of creators just as a tip. Yes. There are creator friends of mine who create something that I absolutely have zero interest in consuming. And like when it comes out, I'll buy it. Because like, you know, if I read a hundred of your tweets and a thousand of your post and I read your newsletter every week, like the least that I can do, it's your small businesses.

The least I can do is give you a tip. So when your product comes out, I will buy it. 100%. And I think a lot of it. lot of people operate that way. Some people don't, but a lot of people do. I think most people operate that way. That's fair. Even subconsciously. Some people are the opposite. Yeah, some people are completely the opposite. Yeah. Yeah. But I appreciate you sharing that because I think that's, I think that's big in the future is like in a world in a world of commoditized products, how do you, how do you stand out and become

not a product people want to spend money on, but a person that people want to spend money on? Yes, exactly. And I think you're, this is the beginning, like this packaging where the people are in the packaging is the beginning of a bigger trend, which is they're going to take more and more real estate. Like the chocolate you see over here like is still 99% of the packaging and the people is only 2%. In the future, I'm sure it'll be like 50% the people, 50% of the chocolate. Yeah, might even be the opposite of what it is now where it might be 90% of people and 10% of chocolate. Totally. Yeah, you'll be like, why am I eating? Oops, I hope I'm not eating like a leg right now. Cool, I like that. That's cool.

I'm at look to that product or at least follow their story. I'm not familiar with that. Cool. Justin, this has been great. Didn't think we'd go here, but we, this has been fun. My creative juices are flowing. How are you feeling? I'm feeling good, man.

I didn't expect to go there either. You had way more tactical information on the book stuff. So I think your audience can, someone will run with that. I think what I hope that people take away from this is like a lot of the stuff that we talked about in just solving your own problems. I think a big part of startup ideas, at least in the future, is going to be being cognizant enough to pause when you actually have a problem. I go through problems all the time, day after day, after day, the same problem. And it actually takes me like weeks and sometimes months to pause and be like, why haven't I solved this?

Like what's a much, because we're so busy and we're so heads down that that becomes a problem. And I think a lot of folks, if they can make themselves stop and think through those things, we'll start to see ideas flowing in much faster than they normally do. Amen. If people want to support Justin Welsh and find you on the internet, Where could they go? They can go to Justin Welsh.me.

That's Justin W-E-L-S-H. They can follow me on X or LinkedIn, and that's about it. They can subscribe to my newsletter, the Saturday Solopreneur. Send out one newsletter every Saturday morning, four minutes or less, 220,000 solo printers subscribe. They can and will. Cool. Great, great chat with you, man.

Good seeing you, my man. Later. See you.