The Startup Ideas Podcast - Meet the man who growth hacked his app to 1M downloads

Starting point is 00:00:00 Today I want to talk about something that I think you're one of the best in the world at, which is getting attention and going viral. So many people don't know Chris Joseph's, and that's okay, because they have seen the Nancy Pelosi tracker or the Michael Berry tracker, or they've seen what you've been, you know, the recent thing you did with the UFC and getting a lot of attention there. So what I want people to get out of this episode is by the end of this, they'll be able to internalize their own Chris Joseph's. And whatever they're able to do, they'll be able to come up with viral ideas to get millions of people to engage with their stuff.

Starting point is 00:00:48 Do you think we can do that today? Yeah, yeah, I'll try and kind of unveil the curtain. And I've been on your podcast before, and I think like the theme of that one we did a while back was we call it like trend hacking. When, you know, the analogy I like there was you have a river of conversations going on on social media and there's different boats that go along that river. As a brand, if you can kind of throw a life jacket or any sort of thing to hook onto that boat and let that trend take it with you, your brand. You can kind of get growth with that. I think with this one, it's a little bit more of, like, this idea of, and this will kind of set the conversation well as I don't see myself as a marketer. I don't see myself even as a growth guy.

Starting point is 00:01:54 I see myself more as like a social engineer. And like what I mean by that is social media is all built on algorithms. And it's just one people, one kind of side of the marketplace of the attention span and then the other side. On our side, it's like how do we algorithmically and scientifically come up with a formula. around our content that would work on kind of both sides. So as a social engineer, like the things that go into it, reverse engineering viral ideas, reverse engineering, a tweet that is kind of written a certain way so that it gets 20,000 retweets as opposed to 15,000.

Starting point is 00:02:30 Reverse engineering, like if you're going to sponsor the UFC, what's one thing to do? You can kind of put autopilot on the banner, or you can kind of really think through, like, how do we get this thing to get even more viral? which I have a full-on kind of calculation I'll get into. And how do I add in the different variables for that one piece to go viral? So as you kind of mentioned, we have the Pelosi tracker autopilot. It's the first app that allows you to automatically copy politician stock trades. That's kind of a viral idea in itself.

Starting point is 00:03:01 I've personally built that Pelosi tracker with the help of my team. It's not just me. But to around like $750,000. On Instagram, we have another account called the Politician Trade Tracker, which is around $750,000, and our app has around like $1.2 million downloads, $300 million invested, things of that nature.

Starting point is 00:03:20 So the story on the UFC was a lot of people know the idea of the Pelosi tracker, but not as many people know that autopilot is the company and the product that powers the Pelosi tracker. So say 100 people know Pelosi, maybe 20% of them know that autopilot's the team behind it. how can we kind of start creating that, narrowing that gap and getting more and more people to understand that autopilot is associated with the Pelosi tracker because the Pelosi tracker has

Starting point is 00:03:49 such goodwill. The UFC, probably three weeks before their big sphere event reached out to us and it was like, hey, we're big fans. We'd love to market with you guys or we'd love you guys to come and sponsor kind of some of the upcoming fights. And we kind of thought at the beginning, like, we don't do any sponsorships. We've never swung big. We've never done anything like that. maybe now is the time because the UFC is great. Dana White, Joe Rogan's there. Trump goes a lot.

Starting point is 00:04:16 Invest like a politician. The majority of their fans are libertarians. That would kind of work well. And we said, look, like, let's kind of think it through and let's go from there. It's a long, long story. But the way that we approached the actual advertising of it was we haven't really gone too public with this stuff yet. I'm going to kind of work on making this viral. So probably after this comes out, you'll see these things on social media. But we realize, like, as a small startup, in this goes to the formula idea, sponsoring autopilot or sponsoring the UFC is one thing. That is cool.

Starting point is 00:04:51 That'll get brand recognition. But how do we kind of take that to another level? The way that we thought we could take it to another level was create like the most riveting and kind of emotionally driven and funny pieces of content as possible around the actual ad. So that was step one. What did that mean? invest like a politician in red, white, and blue directly on the back of the octagon, figure out a way to get it placed so that it's on the noon timeline or the noon vantage point

Starting point is 00:05:19 so that any time they're talking, you know, we're right there. Another part of that is create the funniest adder read as possible for Bruce Buffer. When he did it, he came up like, and now autopilot, if ever wanted to copy a politician's stock trades, well, now you can go to join autopilot. Polit.com and invest like a politician today. Like, writing that pieces of content so that it goes viral and it can be clipped is another piece of it. And then I'm rambling here.

Starting point is 00:05:47 But then the last piece of it is how do you create viral moments aside from the actual sponsoring of the fight? Normal brands, they would just sponsor it. Their marketing team would be like, that's it. It is kind of, it is what it is. We'll hope it goes viral. We'll hope it kind of blows up. us on our creative kind of social engineering team were like that's not enough we need more and more

Starting point is 00:06:11 chances more and more moments to create virality and that's where we came up with the idea of wouldn't it be funny to send a fake nancy Pelosi to the fight put her front row have a whole vlog style be with her wouldn't it be funny to get create this whole slogan of Pelosi 2024 invest like a politician slapping on a cyber truck and start driving it around and then can we kind of create virality from that I have learnings and kind of what went right and what went wrong with that, which we can kind of dive into. But that was the general approach with the UFC. It was create the most viral campaign possible for the actual event and then create viral moments that could kind of support the actual event to increase chances of virality. Shh, don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions.

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Starting point is 00:07:30 cheat. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash-loving business is waiting for you. Okay, so during this pod, I actually want to go through step-by-step and just break all this stuff down. But step zero was, well, okay, before I talk about step zero, you basically said that the UFC reached out and was like, hey, we want to sponsor, you know, are you interested in sponsoring

Starting point is 00:07:59 this event? Step zero was you created meme pages that had millions of followers. So you created credibility so that you had access to something like the UFC. For someone who wants to create a meme page similar to a Pelosi tracker, but in their space, do you have a framework for how they can go ahead and do something like that? Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's possible in every space. It's happening in the seed oil space.

Starting point is 00:08:31 There's an app out there now that is kind of capturing the seed oil things. Joe Rogan retweeted it the other day. It's happening in kind of the hedge fund space with our burry tracker, the Pelosi tracker. And I think it kind of got to get more and more. The way that we approach that is controversial, but you've got to have a little bit of a controversial take to it. The attention spans of people are so short that you need to be able to have your product and have your niche and have your meme page adapt to the different news cycles as they come. Wall Street Betts is a good example that does as well.

Starting point is 00:09:03 They were finance, but now they got politics. They got inverse Kramer's. They got this and that. And they can use any piece of content kind of narrowed down to their thing. With autopilot in the Pelosi tracker, we started off specifically with Pelosi's trades and then moved over into politicians' trades and then got into hedge fund stuff. And they kind of were able to use the trend hacking method that I spoke about earlier. And I can get it to now here too.

Starting point is 00:09:25 but that's kind of how we did do it. If I were to start one from scratch, what I would do is I would kind of probably take three approaches, and this is specifically to Twitter. Instagram is honestly even easier, in my opinion. I think Twitter is harder. But step one is I would create an actual account of the name that someone would follow.

Starting point is 00:09:47 Like Pelosi tracker, it makes sense. We have other ones that are going to be coming soon. It's kind of called like Stop to Spend. Stop to Spend is perfect. Like what are we going to do? and we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about how the government spent so much freaking money. Oh, if I'm seeing content like that,

Starting point is 00:10:01 I'm going to follow an account called Stop the Spend because I want them to stop the spend. Michael Berrychalker, that's another example. So any piece of content or any account that is in your niche or in your space, that you want to build a meme page account, don't be afraid to name it as something as simple as that. No one follows brands. Everyone follows movements. Everyone follows people. So that's kind of the first approach.

Starting point is 00:10:23 The second approach would then to do the reply guys. stuff. You know, if Elon's tweeting, come up with a good comment, typical stuff that everyone on Twitter does. And the third part, though, is you really got to dive deep and become like an investigative journalist with some of your content if you're going to take that approach. You can do the meme stuff, but the investigative journalist, and like this is the really, really important part that I think a lot of people don't understand is this stuff builds your account credibility. This stuff builds your virality. So the meme builds virality, investigative journalist builds credibility, and marrying them together, and then you have an account that's an authority. And if you're not an authority in the

Starting point is 00:11:04 space, you're kind of just mixed in with all the other accounts. But if you are that one authority, like the Michael Berry tracker, that is followed by hedge fund people because we have built out enough authority in people's minds to be like, that is an account that follows the hedge funds, and I can trust that account. That's how we kind of would do it from, um, that's how we're have we done it in the past. And that's how I'm going to be working on a whole workshop. And it's good. I'm saying this is kind of accountability.

Starting point is 00:11:30 It's like I'm going to make a new account called Stop to Spend. And I'm going to try and run this playbook to build an account that highlights the ridiculousness of the government spending and things like that. That's how I would do it, though. And then I would take that account, those pieces of content, I would translate those over to Instagram. You could take a post, put it as an actual reel. Instagram is pushing reels these days.

Starting point is 00:11:51 You then could take those posts and put them on TikTok. TikTok is pushing carousels. But as long as it's controversial and as long as it is informative or funny, that's how you kind of grow the things to the scale that you would want. So the investigative journalism bit, can you give an example of, you know, one trust-building exercise you did using investigative journalism that really, really put maybe Pelosi tracker or Burry tracker on the map? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:12:22 Yeah, yeah. I mean, and I do them probably once or twice a week, but earlier on in the early Pelosi days, and these aren't built for virality again. They're not built to, like the investigative journalist piece aren't built to, and they're not supposed to get millions of views. But if you remember back in 2022, when everyone was talking about the political stock trading, we kind of did have two different approaches to this. Like we had the Pelosi tracker. It was around 30,000 followers. It's like, do we go to the meme accounts? Do we kind of just create funny Pelosi talking the phone, hey, I want $100 million of this. Like, that will go viral and things of that. But the investigative journalist piece is, like, if you take a piece of content and say Pelosi bought Nvidia, one tweet, the Mimi one, Pelosi bought Nvidia, can't believe it's inside a trading. That's such corruption, you know, I can't believe she's allowed to do this. That's kind of the viral meme page.

Starting point is 00:13:15 The investigative journalist example, though, is like Pelosi bought Nvidia. Interestingly, six months before that, they passed the chips. Act, which are allowed to have $40 billion of investments, that $40 billion of investments trickles down to U.S. base companies, which is around $13 billion of it. X amount of that could go to Nvidia. This may be why she's buying, follow for more to come. And that's the sort of investigative journalist that then turns into an Instagram real, it turns into a TikTok, and it builds accountability and trust because no one else is doing it to that degree. everyone is doing the fun meme page stuff that gets tens of thousands of likes.

Starting point is 00:13:54 And that's honestly why a lot of the meme pages don't like on a product's guide. Like their product is selling advertisements. Whereas with us, it's like we have a full on product built behind this that makes millions of dollars because we have put the time and effort in to make sure that it provides value. Cool. All right. Step zero.

Starting point is 00:14:13 Check. Step one. Step zero. Check. You have the accounts. Yeah. You have the accounts. You have the accounts.

Starting point is 00:14:21 Maybe you've gotten it to 50,000 followers. You've built some affinity, which I think is something that most people don't think about when they think about building a social account. They're thinking about attention, not affinity. But you're saying build attention and affinity. What's the next step in the process? And what have you learned from the whole UFC thing? Yeah.

Starting point is 00:14:43 So the next step is once you have attention and affinity and authority and authority, and authority, you then can start becoming, like, adding in creativity. If you think about New York Times, you think about, like, they don't have that creative angle, that vibe, that, oh, go do cool content just for the sake of it and people then build loyalty to your brand. That's the next stage of it. So we were able to, with the Pelosi tracker, kind of build authority, affinity, attention, but there's no major loyalty.

Starting point is 00:15:13 There's no one taking a step back and be like, damn, like, that company's cool. Liquid Death has that, though. Red Bull has that. Apple has that. Nike has that because they do cool stuff and then they marry it back to their own page. When the UFC reached out, like a perfect kind of two-way example going back to the original thing is like we wanted to sponsor with them because it adds virality trust, you know, this and that. But the two approaches is we could have just gone the approach of like, we'll just sponsor with you guys. You guys will build trust for our community and we'll tell the community that we sponsor the UFC.

Starting point is 00:15:45 Everyone would be like, oh, that's cool. You know, cool. They sponsored the UFC. That's great. They have a cool product. But when you do the loyalty stuff where you kind of get into the creative angle, this is the first time we've ever done this. It's do something so cool that people will take a double take and go tell their friend about. So when we did the UFC approach, when we were like kind of doing the whole strategy around it, it's let's create that cool, invest like a politician thing, put it on the noon. camera angle and see what happens. That may make us go viral. Let's take a fake Pelosi, send it to Red Rocks in Vegas, have Mike Maylack, have the Nelk boys gamble with her because there's going to be content there. That's another viral piece. Let's take a cyber truck and put Pelosi 2024, invest like a politician under and have a driver all around Vegas getting flipped off, giving away TV shirt, giving away shirts. That's another viral piece to it. And when you kind of take a step back, we've done two things with this whole thing. One, we've sponsored the UFC as a brand that's

Starting point is 00:16:52 important, that's creative, that's smart. But two, we've maximized surface area for virality, which helps offset the costs and creates content that we then can use on the pages that we've built to build loyalty and to have people be like, damn, that company is cool. I like that company. Like that was the goal of the UFC. It was to not to drive downloads, not even really to build out brand awareness. But to put autopilot on the map and differentiate us from our competitors, to be like, that's a cool company that I like because they're swinging and they're doing fun stuff. And if you don't have, if you didn't do Step Zero and you don't have the meme page, for example, and you still sponsor the UFC and you did it in this really smart way,

Starting point is 00:17:36 what people can also do, and I'm curious your opinion on this, but what people can also do is get that content and just reach out to different meme pages and be like, hey, I'll give you $500 for you to repost this or whatever. You know, you could rent that space if you don't want to actually do the work. Yep, 100%. 100%. One thousand percent. And we, we aren't able to do that as much anymore because we're a registered investment advisor. And once you're on RAA on the autopilot side, you got to be careful with payments and things of that nature. But if I were a registered investment advisor, that's exactly what I would do. There's a great YouTube video by the Yes Theory guys talking about the fake Justin Bieber with the burrito. What they did was they pretty much

Starting point is 00:18:23 spoofed the entire world into thinking that Justin Bieber eats a burrito sideways. But what they had they sparked it was they planted that piece of content on Reddit and then they sort of manipulated the algorithm to get that thing to go viral in the whole kind of world. It took it by storm. With autopilot, what we, with the UFC stuff, honestly, a little bit of a failure on our end was we didn't do a good enough job planting these different pieces of content places to spark that original virality. We relied on our own social media channels, which worked. It did great for us. But a learning on that was like there really is so much power in having someone else post about you and kind of having them be the validation for you that goes beyond just anything

Starting point is 00:19:07 that comes from your own brand, especially when people know you in the space because they know you got money, they know that you can pay, and it just becomes a harder game to create organic virality around. So a last part of the strategy, which that goes into the UFC thing is you build up all these cool viral ideas, you hope they go viral. But again, the idea of 5%, 10%, 15%, 20%, 30%, the last piece of it is how do you get free press? And free press is hard because you get pitched all the time. Fox News wants to write about you, but give him 10 grand. You know, it's expensive to do. The way that we've kind of done it that's worked well is everything kind of marries back to this idea,

Starting point is 00:19:48 the investigative journalism, becoming an authority, being a content creator that people take you seriously, and then providing high-quality content. So the New York Post has already covered the UFC sending a fake Pelosi. Maybe we'll get more, maybe we won't. But the way that we got that organically was we have a great relationship with a lot of reporters that cover these spaces because for the past three years, I've built out an email list of anyone that has ever written or talked about politician stock trading. They're in a beehive.

Starting point is 00:20:19 I send them an email anytime something is interesting that comes out. You know, hey, Pelosi made this trade. Here's all the information. If you want to write a story about it. Go for it. Hey, this politician did this. Here's all the information. If you wanted to write a story, go for it.

Starting point is 00:20:32 Hey, we sponsored the UFC. It kind of went viral. It was kind of dope. Here's all the information. If you want to write a story, go for it. And that's, I think, like, the importance part that people don't understand about being like, if you really want to be a good growth marketer, you got to have your hands everywhere.

Starting point is 00:20:48 And I recommend to people build out a email list of reporters that cover your space and don't sell your product. Don't sell you. Just give them high quality content. Make them feel like they're always in the know with their space. Because when they do want to write about it or if they do, they turn to you because they turn to you because they see you as an authority. They start quoting you.

Starting point is 00:21:09 They start featuring you. And that's the last part that we're going to try and make work with the UFC as well. And how do you scrape that list? Is that a manual thing that you go and just have to do? Oh, yeah, yeah, purely. Three years of it. I mean, Twitter is a big thing. And also, like, the last, we're spoiled by this.

Starting point is 00:21:32 But, you know, this is just from years of hard work. It's once you have an account that is an authority, you can DM people, people answer. Like, we've DM'd with Vivek. We've DM'd with Tulsi Gabbard. We invited Mark Cuban to the UFC fight. He was doing, he was doing Shark Tank. We DM people all the time. And a lot of the news reporters, they follow the accounts.

Starting point is 00:21:55 We can send them a very quick DM. Hey, Chris, I'm behind this account. We have an email list that we update people with interesting and suspicious trades. if you'd be interested in kind of getting added to it, just let me know. And they all say yes. Why would they not? But yeah, there's no scrape in. There's nothing like that. It's just pure, pure grinding of anytime you see an interesting article, find them on Twitter, DM them, get their email, add them to the list, and then you start sending emails out. And the best part about getting press, especially TV press, is that, you know, once you get,

Starting point is 00:22:29 for example, a two-minute CNBC clip, it's not about the 500,000 people. that are watching CNBC at the time. It's actually about repurposing that clip, putting it on social, and when not a lot of people talk about, putting some paid behind that to even make it go further. Yep, 100%.

Starting point is 00:22:48 Yep. Yeah. We were featured in ABC. They came and they flew us out. This is also another... This is so much. The cool thing of what we've done with autopilot is people are fascinated with us because it's just like,

Starting point is 00:23:01 I put my face out there. Like, I am behind the police. OC tracker. I'm not afraid to, you know, will I die tomorrow? Like all that conspiracy stuff. But people respect and appreciate it. Then they realize like, oh, it's just like a 28 year old guy that, yeah, I'm not rich. I don't have millions of dollars. I don't have access to these things. I'm building this to the community and kind of people get interested with that. I put myself out there and then ABC News, they do a whole feature set. They fly out. They interview us. We crush it. They love us. We love them. We take that piece of content. We put it on Twitter or on TikTok.

Starting point is 00:23:33 goes viral on TikTok, we take it on Instagram, put it on on Instagram, and that barstool picks it up. And it's like, just constantly getting content out that makes yourself an authority is important for every angle of the growth side. 100%. Okay, cool. And so what's next? Yeah, yeah. So the plan of what we're doing now is we have all this content. We haven't, kind of filmed, uh, shared the video yet, but we literally did send a fake Pelosi to the fight. She was sitting there in the front row with Mike Maylack. There's all these pieces of content

Starting point is 00:24:12 around her. The New York Post already kind of took it up. They, they created an article about it. I'm going to be sharing a lot more content on our social media accounts around the, the cyber truck. The UFC is about to put up a story of us that I think is going to be really interesting. And then looking back, if people are listening to this, go check it out because, um, you'll see like the formula of what I've done, going back to the surface area part, and this may be helpful because this is just scientifically how I think about all this stuff is. Quick ad break, let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called Boringmarketing.com.

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Starting point is 00:25:45 Sponsoring the UFC, sending a fake Pelosi, having a fake cyber truck gives you a 20% chance. And the more and more stuff that you can do to add to that chance of virality is the name of the game, I think, in like the growth team and the social engineers and kind of people in MySpace. So we're going to have more stuff coming. What's next, though, on the marketing side and on the growth side, it's, I mean, it's two things. One on the product kind of, without getting into kind of boring everyone on autopilot, the cool thing, we're a marketplace now. So we're going to have people actually be launching their portfolios. And we're going to be building content around those people, like a Kathy Wood, for example, she can launch a portfolio on autopilot.

Starting point is 00:26:25 She then can monetize it. We grow it for her. We're all happy. Our end users are happy. But in the other marketing side, it's to double down in this kind of Pelosi idea. And this is a bet that I'm going to take. The same way that the Nelk Boys are famous for these skits, these pranks, liquid death has all. They're known for these kind of crazy commercials.

Starting point is 00:26:43 Duolingo has their owls. There's a world where we create kind of consistency around this Pelosi 20204 invests like a politician. Why do we want to get a re-elected so we can keep copying our stock trades? That, I think, is going to be the theme of the autopilot. marketing for the rest of the year. And it's going to be building moments around that. There's something going on at Rumble in Florida that we might go to. There's another UFC event.

Starting point is 00:27:08 Maybe we sponsor. And it's just taking learnings from those and doubling down and the consistency of it, all in an effort to get just people to love the brand. Like I think people underestimate how much loving a brand matters, especially in this world, because no one really has any affinity to brands much. But people have affinity to people, like the great. Greg Eisenberg podcast, I feel like you guys probably have a loyal, devout following of kind of your top five or 10 percent. On autopilot, that's what we're working on.

Starting point is 00:27:38 That's what we're building on. And that is what comes next. I think the other smart thing that you did, which a lot of people don't do, is they create a meme page. They create a set of meme pages. And then they create a product that has very low LTV. But you're in the complete opposite. like your, you know, Robin Hood, TD Ameritrade, companies like that will spend hundreds of dollars,

Starting point is 00:28:06 sometimes thousands of dollars to acquire a customer. And you're doing it pretty cheaply and smartly. So I think that's really smart. I want to actually shift gears. We didn't talk about this, but I actually built a meme page in 2020, I think, 2021. And it was in the plant space back during COVID when everyone was like getting plans for their office and stuff like that. And we built it just for fun.

Starting point is 00:28:33 And I want to get your brain to see if you built this, what would you do next? So I'm going to share my screen and we're going to do this live. Using your framework, your scorecard basically that you've created. Let me share my screen. Your viral score. card, yes. So this is kind of crazy. So this, just to show you how easy it is sometimes to build a meme page. This was built in a couple months, maybe a couple, yeah, one or two months. And we also built a Twitter page, which is now defunct, but it had 500,000 followers. And the idea was we

Starting point is 00:29:15 didn't create any content. And for people who are listening on audio, you can go to YouTube and see the page. I need plans. I'll try to describe it as best as I can. But it was basically people would send us pictures of their good looking plants and people like plants. They like being plant moms, plant dads. And I used your kind of idea around the usernames,

Starting point is 00:29:40 I need plants. The difference between, yeah, the difference between what you built and what I built here was I think you can make more money building building a stock trading app than you can in the plant space.

Starting point is 00:29:58 That being said, people are making millions of dollars a year doing AI plant identifier apps. So my question to you is, you know, I give you this page as a gift. Using your methodology, what type of content are you posting?

Starting point is 00:30:14 How are you thinking about a product to create? Which type of events would you sponsor? And where do you take it from here? Yeah. Yeah, yeah. I love it. This reminds me of, and a lot of my ideas will come from that. Have you seen the page of the people that, it's called like, I love this stick or something

Starting point is 00:30:33 like that? They send in content of like cool sticks they find around on social media. I don't know what the name is, but. Official Stick review? Yeah, official Stick Review. Two point two million. Have you seen this account? No.

Starting point is 00:30:49 So it's brilliant. What they do is they, and I think. there's psychologically a couple of reasons behind this. What I would do is, so yeah, if you watch a video, it's, it's just people sending in stick reviews because it's funny. People like them, you know. There's a world where this becomes a plant one too, where, you know, you got a lot of, on your original page, actually, let me go back. The reason why this is important is on Instagram, growth comes from reels. So you need videos. And you can make one video around kind of looking at the plant, this and that. But the reason why this stick page works so well is because you have the commentary of the person and it just people just like it. It's authentic. It's real. It's fun. So first step with the actual, yeah, like look at this guy. It's just brilliant. It's smart. Looking at the plant page, the first thing I would do is I would start trying to build out a strategy around this where I would go, I would personally film myself and just create commentary on like me talking to a plant. And

Starting point is 00:31:53 the same way I would talk to a puppy or the same way I would talk to a kid. It'd be like, this is my plant blank. You know, I've been growing it for this long. Like, look at how pretty this one leaf is. It looks like a heart. Like, this is how I'm going to treat it. I'm going to do this, this and this. And I hope it doesn't die, you know, things like that.

Starting point is 00:32:10 And eventually, if you kind of build out enough pieces of content around that, you create open for submission. And then you have everyone in your community, you start sending in videos of that. themselves reviewing the plants and being like, hey, this is my plant. I'm in kind of Augusta, Maine. I've been growing this thing and kind of, this is for the community. The same exact way that stick one works. And I think it's important because one, you get original content, two, you get content from people that are enthusiastic and like your community and kind of can

Starting point is 00:32:46 relate to other people. And three, probably the most important part is if you've noticed on Instagram, the most viral stuff is funny. And that's like, even like look at this right here. I don't even know what, what is that one with the 130,000? When one of your plans dies. When one of your plants dies. Funny. It's funny.

Starting point is 00:33:15 Someone's just crying. But you have room for a new plant. Yeah. Yeah. It's brilliant. The most viral stuff on social media is funny. And that's, I think, like, the stick thing, 2.2 million views. That's just people reviewing sticks.

Starting point is 00:33:30 Why is that? It's just funny. So creating the content strategy around your meme pages that is built just to be funny and kind of make people laugh is the last way that I would do it. And then I would introduce the product that you were mentioning. Create an AI plug-in. Take a photo of the plant, AI identifier, charge 10 bucks a month, 50 bucks a year. have it in the link in bio, use it in some of the videos, and then start making money.

Starting point is 00:34:00 Because meme pages, again, like, the hard part about the meme stuff is a lot of the original ones, they don't have a product around them because they built an audience just purely around content and memes. The meme pages these days now can be translated into a product, similar to the Pelosi tracker, that can make people a lot of money if they do it right. and also, like, provide value. Like, I'm sure people will like this idea of identifying plants. But that stick one is good, right? It's like, so good, dude.

Starting point is 00:34:34 So good. And that's why, you know, the stuff that works is scroll stopping, and that is scroll stopping? You're like, wait, is this guy reviewing a stick? Yeah, exactly. Is this guy reviewing a stick? And it's hard to remember that. Like, even with my content,

Starting point is 00:34:50 We have 700,000 followers, and the ups and downs of the Algo is crazy. And it's like you can get into this path of or this trap of just posting just purely funny meme 10 to 15 second piece of content. But the problem is, again, going back to my original point, that may get you 500,000 views, but like your informative, legit one that you put in in time for authority gets 50,000 views. You still have to do both. And even with the plant one, that is, I think, like, the key to monetizing your audience the best via products is you can't just go full meme.

Starting point is 00:35:28 You got to go authority or else people will just scroll right by you and not take you seriously. Which is also, by the way, Greg, like why a lot of these influencers, these earlier ones, don't make money that much either. Like, I don't know if you've ever eight or nine million followers and they put a link in a story and no one clicks it. Meanwhile, the people with 100,000 followers put a link in their story and they get 10,000 clicks. I think it's like the time you launched them is under a different era and people have manufactured their pages to work in those areas. I agree. I think that's a good point. If you were thinking of sponsoring an event, I don't know, just any sort of sponsorship, you know, for this plant one, how would you think about it?

Starting point is 00:36:15 I have no idea what, well, so I don't know what type of events can't even go on with it, but I don't even know if you would have to sponsor it to that degree because you're not kind of necessarily building it out. What I would do is I would go to the actual events and do street interview conversations using the app. I don't think about it. There's a lot of money to be made in these apps in this kind of plant one. But I wouldn't necessarily, like you could sponsor.

Starting point is 00:36:45 it, yeah, for sure, but it kind of use that. Like, the interesting thing about what we did with the UFC was the UFC sponsor was important. People have kind of said to me, it's like, why did you need the UFC sponsor? Why couldn't you've gone viral with the Pelosi tracker? Because you need some sort of authority in the entire ecosystem of the content strategy. So if we didn't sponsor the UFC, we would have just been like, oh, you guys sent a fake Pelosi. That lowers the chances of virality. If there were as a plant exposium, I would sponsor it and then would go with a t-shirt and I would start using the apps.

Starting point is 00:37:19 I would be interviewing people. I would be having fun creative content. How many plants have you killed in your life? You know, things like that. That's the approach that I would do. And honestly, you could probably do it across a lot of things. Birdwatching apps, animal app. Like, I don't know what other niches there are.

Starting point is 00:37:38 There's just so many. That's what I. I would do it. I bet you could probably make a couple million pretty easily, honestly. So when it comes to sponsorship of events, the best sponsorships are kind of the ones that you're like, why are they sponsoring it? Like why is this trading app sponsoring this UFC fight? So I'm here in Miami and it was recently the gun show in Miami. It's like one of the biggest gun shows in America. And it's like, imagine I Need Plant Sponsors the Miami Gun Show. And it's like, don't kill people or kill plants instead of people.

Starting point is 00:38:25 I don't know, you know, something like that. And then you create content around that. That could be really cool. That's one idea. Yeah. Yeah. It's one and the second idea. It's so funny.

Starting point is 00:38:33 Yeah. Yeah. Well, you gave me that idea when you were like, killing plants. And I was like, okay, killing plants, guns kill people, plants don't kill people. There's something here. A hundred percent. And that's like such a good, that's a good thought with autopilot.

Starting point is 00:38:53 I wonder what we can do with like the stuff that we have coming because I don't know how expensive it is to kind of do that. And then the strategy that I would run with that as a plant company is I would run that, get a banner, take the photo of it, then go to a big, The big underestimated piece, I think, of Twitter and Instagram is people have built livings off of being social media news people. There's this major guy. He's a British dude.

Starting point is 00:39:24 He's got bright blue eyes, handsome guy on TikTok. I think that's why he crushes it. He's a British dude, and I don't know if you've seen him on TikTok. All he does is just talk about the news. He's like 24, and he got 11 million followers. And he just talks about interesting stories. on Instagram or on Twitter there's people like Colin Rugg, there's the Mario Narf wall and they just they're looking for good content.

Starting point is 00:39:46 They're looking for creative stuff. And if you can kind of even go then you sponsor it, the don't kill plant, don't kill people kind of thing at the NRA event as a plant company. You then take those and then we talk about what we said earlier. You plant it, plant. You feed that piece of content to these news people and say like, hey, we did this thing. We think it's pretty funny. If you're interested to cover it, let me know.

Starting point is 00:40:12 And we can hop on a call. And maybe you get the organic kind of posts on that nature. And that's what, that's again what I think we didn't do that well because we are in RAA now and you run into a lot of legal issues with that. But that's a great idea with the plan thing. And honestly, whoever's running that stick page, they should launch a, like a Pokemon Go Catch a Mall stick app, you know? Totally. Like they have so many users.

Starting point is 00:40:41 It'd just be funny. Charge 10 bucks a month and see what happens. Totally. That's such a good idea. Yeah. You want to hear my other idea? Yeah. This is the startup ideas podcast.

Starting point is 00:40:55 So we could, we got one for ideas. So this has been my hot take. This has been my, this is nothing to do with autopilot. This is in there. the beauty brand industry because I think like there's just so much money in that because there's so many influencers. And I'd be curious to hear your take on this. But I have kind of bullish on it for two reasons.

Starting point is 00:41:17 The idea is guys ages, you know, 7, 15, I'll honestly say 14 to 25. They watch live streaming of people playing video games. Why? Because it's cool. It's fun. Video game stuff. They watch Logan Paul. There isn't really a world where that has translated over to the female world.

Starting point is 00:41:38 And I think like what girls kind of 17, 15 have had to end up with is get ready with me videos. You know, one minute, get ready with me. Vlogging, Alex Earl, I'm a Chamberlain. And now kind of if you've seen on Instagram, there's trends around like girls just kind of get dressed with me. Let me share my fit with you. I think the next thing is the same way that 15-year-old kid boys watch other boys play video games, I think there's going to be a world where girls should launch their own live stream online shopping channels, where it's them just going on 10 to 15 seconds, maybe a minute, maybe two minutes,

Starting point is 00:42:21 and they're just filming themselves online shopping. It's like, all right, I'm going to wake up. Like, what do I want today? I want a T-shirt. Let me go to my favorite pages. is, ooh, I think this one will look good. I don't know about this one. Chat, what do you think about, like, kind of this one?

Starting point is 00:42:36 And they build a whole shopping experience around you just online shopping. I think that is a world where that can turn into the same monetization efforts as boys watching video games of other guys, girls watching other girls online shop. And I don't think anyone's tried that. And I see it as, like, the next evolution of getting ready with the makeup, putting your outfits on, fit checks. to then this is like what I'm shopping for online shopping experience and I think girls would eat it up. That's my that's my pitch to content creators out there.

Starting point is 00:43:10 Go film yourself online shopping and see what happens. Yeah, I think I like this idea for so many reasons. One is it's a behavior that's happening already. So you're kind of just unbundling it and you're just putting on its own its own platform. I think the idea for this to work, it's going to need a name that's just like super, super catchy while you were i mean this name isn't isn't right for this idea but while you were talking i was just like oh my god does someone own get ready with me dot com because that that is such a good domain wow yeah someone someone owns it unfortunately but like someone go acquire that domain

Starting point is 00:43:51 like that is the perfect domain maybe actually i was going to say it's not perfect because it's like but you know what it maybe it is perfect get um Or even just like GRWM. Yeah. Oh man, that's so good. Hold on. Let's see if that's taken. I might just want to take that.

Starting point is 00:44:09 I see this as a billion. Because like, you know like the whole Neil Patel went on a podcast. And I know that Gary V. They've been talking about this idea of like online shopping. Like live shopping is going to come to America. It crushes it in Asia, but it hasn't translated to America.

Starting point is 00:44:26 And I don't know if online like live shopping in a third party, me standing there on my phone watching you sell me something will work as well as you just watching me shop you know because like if i know this through all the the girls that i know out in la in la it's run with this stuff they're all posting videos of themselves kind of fit checks on instagram on tic-tok every comment is literally where'd you get that shirt where'd you get those shoes where'd you get those pants like why don't the girls just film themselves shop it and be like, this is literally where I got it. You know, it's like, and like, the cool thing about it is, like, it's such low-hanging fruit.

Starting point is 00:45:04 It follows the, what's her name? Strawberry Milkbop. Like, her idea, she sells the bikini. She just hops, she's like, oh, she just talks. And like half of the videos, there's no ending to it. It's just nothing. It's just funny. Like, I can see a world where, like, girls.

Starting point is 00:45:23 A lot of people don't know. A lot of people listening to this might not know her. So just for folks who don't know, she's got like a couple million followers at this point. And she she's like just a girl that, you know, people want to hang out with. She's funny and she's witty. And she's got this bikini brand that she like, if she does 100 posts, only one out of 100, she actually like promotes. And she crushes it. Crushes.

Starting point is 00:45:52 And she's now built out of reality TV because her sister. is coconut milk mob or something. And then she had this boyfriend who they called him Brad. And then Brad launched a golf like merch company. And then she then launched a female golf merch company. They're just hustlers. I respect them. But like I think your point on that is so they don't sell.

Starting point is 00:46:19 They just live. And I think girls love that about other girls with their content. I think the next step of that, though, is, like, people would die to see her scrolling through her phone shopping for herself. I think they would watch 30 minutes of that. So whether that becomes a full-on product, I'm sure it could. Like, I don't know why Twitch couldn't do it, but I think Twitch is just, it's branded too much as a video game site. Someone should build the Twitch for online shopping. 100%.

Starting point is 00:46:54 100%. If you like this idea. Post in the comments. We'll be in there. So I would love to see this become a reality. People are actually taking ideas that we're putting out on here and they're like building it. Like almost every day I'm getting a DM being like I took this idea.

Starting point is 00:47:09 So someone might build this. What other ideas have there been? I've listened to a couple. Some of them are kind of easier ones for like one-off apps and other ones are like, I think this one is like a venture scalable business, the online shopping for girls. Yeah, so I'll share my screen for a sec. So have you seen this?

Starting point is 00:47:36 AI Hagler? No. So I talked about this on a pod. I was like, wouldn't it be cool if AI can just haggle for you? And this guy did it. And the use case he has is basically like, there's a world where you can just use. a phone agent that gets you a better hotel price.

Starting point is 00:48:02 So it says our AI agent calls hotels and asks for a discount for your last minute's days. If you never ask, you never know. And he posted it on Twitter. He tagged me in it. He's like, I took your idea. And it got like four or five thousand. Okay, I'm going to, I'm going to, I got four or five thousand likes on Twitter. I'm going to just play this.

Starting point is 00:48:24 Our AI agent calls a hotel in Columbia. Speak Spanish. Gets a discount on the hotel. all right from $410,000 to $350. Hello, I'm looking for this night for two persons. I can't ask you if you have an abitation available?

Starting point is 00:48:40 Yes, if I have it done available. Hello? Can you? I hear of hear me? Yes, I'm heard perfectly. Me said that you have

Starting point is 00:48:51 available for this night. What is the price is reserved directly with you? Well, I have the invitation standard and it has been in 400, 10,000 pesos,

Starting point is 00:49:02 until in 400 you get the idea. Basically, you know, he's getting a deal because he's booking direct and he's charging five bucks for every phone call, I think.

Starting point is 00:49:18 So people are like taking these ideas. And the best part about that guy is that he didn't know how to code at all. He like learned to self-code. Wow. So he's like, full-on AI. Yeah, it's crazy. Yeah, that's, that's, that's, that's, that's the, partly, I'm, you know, I love my job.

Starting point is 00:49:39 I love the startup. You know, we're crushing it with auto, or we're trying to crush it. We got a long way to go with autopilot, but I'm wearing it for the long haul. I get envious a little bit of these people at Google, these people at meta. It's like, you guys can be launching these one-off things, like constantly. Like, you should be. I think like an example like that, especially now if like that guy can do it. it. He can learn how to code it. And like there's clearly product market fit with it because like

Starting point is 00:50:03 why not? Why not do it? Um, more and more people should be launched and stuff like that. That's, it's cool that, uh, he actually followed through with it though. It sounds like do not pay if that. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah, it's similar. It's funny we, the, uh, so I don't know, you, you've been to our office in LA, but for those that don't know, it's, uh, we have a little startup kind of hub. All number one apps, um, all kind of like, we're all growth hackers at. heart, but we all are venture-backed startup guys. And there's been now multiple apps that have come in three weeks, prototypes, built it out solely to work. I don't think I can share the exact ones because they don't want people to know, but they built apps that literally work for TikTok and Instagram

Starting point is 00:50:51 algorithms, where it translates perfectly to the algorithm to work. And then everyone comments, what app is that they then get downloads. Multiple apps have made 60, 70, 100K months similar to, what's his name? The guy that built the Cal AI app. People should be launching apps like that constantly. Cal AI is an app that you can scan your food, plugs into chat, GPT tells you roughly how many calories are in each serving. There's a world where you can build that for everything.

Starting point is 00:51:24 And more people should, because I think they'd also provide value. That's what's kind of cool about it. People will... AI's changed the game because it's not just flappy bird video games. It's like this thing can actually make your life easier. So it's kind of moving in that direction.

Starting point is 00:51:42 It's cool. You're bringing people on and just jamming on ideas. I wonder if anyone will run with the shop and one. They probably will. They probably will. Keep us posted. Yeah, do it. Like straight up do it. Don't like do it tomorrow. Do it now.

Starting point is 00:51:57 So, Chris, this has been obviously so fun. It's a pleasure. You're like a fountain of knowledge. Thank you so much for coming on. Where could people get to know more about you and autopilot? Yeah. So we're big on Twitter. Twitter is kind of our main spot. And then we're kind of also on Instagram. My personal Twitter where I try and tweet more, but I do use my social battery so much on these other accounts that I have enough time and mental energy. tweet on my own. My personal Twitter though is Chris J. Joseph's on the autopilot account. We're going to start putting more and more fun content out. You'll see if you go there, you'll see the I'm starting strategies around like nearly Monday, kind of every Monday I'm going to post like it's Monday, go get that money kind of because we're a money app. You guys can follow the journey of seeing if that will work. I don't know if it will. That is called joint autopilot. And then the bigger accounts that we run, the Pelosi tracker, the Michael Berry tracker, those are,

Starting point is 00:52:57 or if you search those, it'll show up. I'm going to try this new account. I don't know if it'll work. This stopped to spend. That was inspired also by the All In podcast, and people listen there. Jason was like someone should do it. I'm like, I'll try.

Starting point is 00:53:11 Why not? And then we're also going to launch the GPT portfolio again, if you remember that one, where a year ago we thought it would be funny to give ChatGBT 50 grand, build an algorithm, and have it, not even build an algorithm, just have it tell us what stocks to buy.

Starting point is 00:53:26 that account will be coming back maybe soon. Open AI sent us a cease and desist. So we have to close that one down. But that one should be back soon too, and that's all on Twitter. Beautiful. All right, my man. It's been real. Catch you later, dude.

Starting point is 00:53:42 Cool. Appreciate it. Thank you.

The Startup Ideas Podcast - Meet the man who growth hacked his app to 1M downloads

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