The Startup Ideas Podcast - Perplexity Labs replaces your AI tech stack? (Full Demo)

Episode Date: June 16, 2025

I explorePerplexity Labs, the AI agent product from Perplexity. I test its capabilities across multiple use cases including creating film storyboards, generating sales leads, developing content strategies, and performing financial analysis. Throughout the demo, I am surprised at the quality and depth of the outputs, particularly the tool's ability to create visual storyboards and comprehensive business dashboards. Timestamps: 00:00 - Introduction to Perplexity Labs 01:18 - Film director AI Agent 07:04 - Salesperson AI Agent 11:11 - Content strategy Consultant AI Agent 20:13 - Financial Analyst AI Agent 24:08 - Salesperson AI Agent (pt2) Key Points: • I test Perplexity Labs' AI agents against other AI tools like ChatGPT, demonstrating its capabilities for various business functions • Perplexity Labs ($20/month) can create detailed film storyboards, sales lead lists, content strategies, and financial analysis • The tool generates comprehensive dashboards with actionable information, including contact details for potential clients The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ BoringMarketing — Vibe Marketing for Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Is Perplexity Labs better than chat GPT, Manis, and Clode? Well, today we are going to find out. Now, if you don't know what Perplexity Labs is, it's basically the AI agent product via Perplexity, the $13 billion search engine company. Now, I did a few prompts right before this, and I skim the results. I'm going to go through it today, and I was literally blown away. So watch me as I replace a salesperson, a copywriter, a viral social media lead, a film director, a financial analyst with Perplexity's new AI agents, products, labs. You are in for a treat.

I'm going to actually, I'm going to share all my prompts. I'm going to share the workflows. I'm going to go through it. And by the end of this episode, you're just going to have a really good understanding of how to use Perplexity Labs. how to use these AI agents for your business, for building out, you know, whatever it is that, you know, you want to build, you know, a startup, grow your startup and just give you a better chance of success. So without further ado, I'm going to, I'm going to start with, I'm going to start with this film director thing. So I went to labs and I said, develop an eight-minute mini film ad for a startup idea browser. dot com, a place where people come and find their dream startup idea.

So it's the startup I created called Ideabrowser.com. We have startup ideas there. And I need, I want to do this like, you know, eight minute ad. But I want to make it almost like a short film because I think that if I do that, it would get a lot of views online. But I don't want to spend hundreds, $100,000 on a video agency to do it. So I say, make a story about a 24-year-old McDonald's employee who finds an idea there and changes their life.

And I say, create six storyboards and a full screenplay. Now, I'm not going to bore you with exactly what this says. But just, you know, check this out. It basically details this protagonist profile, Maya Chen, who's 24 years old. Maya embodies the reality that one in eight Americans have worked at McDonald's with 70% of employees learning transferable skills. So, you know, it does some background information. it creates the character.

And then this is what really blows me away. Look at this sketch. I am literally blown away here. And when I first started seeing these sketches, by the way, I was like, wow, if you put this into chat GPT and turn this. And like, this is an easy way to take this image and make really, really good YouTube thumbnails. So you can actually use some of these storyboards that you're developing on Perplexity Labs and just use that for, you know, social content, YouTube thumbnails, that sort of thing. But it's basically drawing out exactly what the storyboards look like.

And then what's cool about Perplexity Labs is it has these files that it generates. So you can see here, you know, it's literally documenting the scene, a typical suburban McDonald's, cars circle the drive-thru, the brake, you know, Maya sits a lot. loan at a small table eating a burger. She checks her phone, several missed calls from student loans. She sighs, opens her banking app, $247 available balance. It's fire. I'm reading this. I'm seeing the storyboards. I'm like, this is absolute fire. And I actually am literally in disbelief on this. Like I thought that I was going to do, by the way, I thought I was going to do this episode on perplexity labs and be like, it's not that good. And I even text.

texted the CEO of perplexity, Arvin, and I was like, you should come and showcase it. He never responded. And I, once I saw this, I was like, wow, this is incredible. So, you know, look at this. Just absolute beautiful thumbnails. They even have a visual storyboard analysis. Like, what are the visual cues? By the way, this is also something that you can take into V-O-3. This is something that you can take into Kling. This is something that you can take to other AI tools to basically create the video concepts. And the beauty is it tells you what to say, right? It says soft, sad lighting, shallow depth of field.

These are things that if you're not a film director, you probably don't, you know, I'm not a film director. I don't have that much experience in film. So how cool is this? It even goes and it created the script for the specific idea browser.com core demographic. Ambitious individuals trapped in unfulfilling employment who possess industry knowledge for entrepreneurship. It gives you a conclusion. It tells you why you should do it. And then if I was actually going and building this, I would be like, great.

I like this. I like this. I would refine the steps. There's an area here for the. the assets when I click on that. This shows all the different steps that it took. So it's very similar to like the perplexity or deep seek reasoning where you can see what's happening in real time.

And I generally like this. I like reviewing the steps because just, you know, it's showing me how they came to these conclusions. So that is the first thing I wanted to show you. Sam Maltman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy, and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup, and if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com.

Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox. box and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building? And then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat gvety for.

ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. I'm going to show you the salesperson, how you know, how you can create the AI sales agent. And then after that, I'm going to show you the viral social media person, which by the way, basically teaches you how to get to 100,000 followers in a short amount of time. So let's start with the salesperson. So I prompted it. We are a design agency She's selling AI products to the Fortune 500 and fast-growing startups. Create a potential customer list for us. The target companies are Fortune 500, execs their CEOs, cheap product officers that need

new profits that are AI first and to shift to an AI-first company. List at least 20 companies clearly stating their contact info, company business intros, addresses, and other specific details make a dashboard. So I had heard that Perplexity Labs, if you ask it to make it a dashboard, it actually can. And I had a feeling that this would be really good because, I mean, perplexity is really good at searching. So it obviously would be good at searching for, you know, potential leads. And everyone wants more customers to, to their business, right? And this is like, I ask this because, you know, we, we do, like I run an agency for, that does exactly this, you know, helping companies

build AI native experiences. So I looked at this and it basically gave me 20 companies and the way it did it was interesting. So it's like here's the first name. Basically it knows that it basically gave me the email address of the CEO of Walmart, the CEO of Amazon, the CEO of Apple, the CEO of Alphabet, the CEO of Microsoft, CEO of United Health Group,

like all of them, right? And it gave me their phone numbers, headquarter address. Look, Elon Musk. Elon at Tesla.com, hit them up. I'm not saying that you can get to these people. Who knows if they respond? But these are their emails, which is absolutely, it's absolutely insane.

So how do you use this dashboard? Okay, personalized outreach, highlight your agency, leverage business instruction. Okay. And this is what, so this is what it's considering the dashboard. This is the dashboard. Okay. So that's a little tip for you. I think that realistically, how many of these people are going to answer? I don't know. But I think that would be interesting to see is like, okay, let's just reprompt it. Okay, these people are going to be really hard to reach. What about the contacts of CEOs, founders, of the last Y Combinator batch. And let's see what happens, right? So let's see if it's able to do it

and how it adds it to the dashboard. The other cool thing is it emails you when it's done your research. So that's pretty cool. So you can just like hit a lab And by the way, to get a labs going, you want to make sure that you're not clicked here for search. Search is like for your fast, quick searches, like your Google searches. Deep reaches is for like, you know, more intense deep research, like almost like you're investigating.

And then labs are basically using the AI agent product. And by the way, I should mention it's $20 a month to get access to labs. and I also should mention I'm not sponsored, obviously, by perplexity. And like I said, I reached out to them and they never responded. So I reached out to them just because I wanted Arvin to come on the pod to demo it. But so be it. Okay, while that's compiling and gathering sources, let's go talk about the viral social media person. How can you use perplexity to have like the smartest Mr. Beast, almost like having your own

Mr. Beast in your company? So here's what I said. I'd been seeing a lot of Dan Coe stuff. I don't know if you've seen Dan Coe, but he's got like a million followers on YouTube and Instagram, stuff like that. I've been seeing a lot of it. So I was just like, hey, I've been seeing a lot of Dan Co stuff everywhere on one man businesses. He talks about one man businesses a lot. I'm trying to replicate that strategy, but for another niche. What niche would that be? And what are the content formats I should do? Bonus points, if you give me a little content calendar,

I want 100,000 followers within 90 days. So this is interesting to me because sometimes I'll see someone like this, like take off. And I'm like, that's really cool. But like there must be, you know, I've talked about this on the channel before. Like social is a game of formats. So, you know, there must be a way to use his formats in another niche. So let's, you know, let's ask labs to tell us.

And it goes and does that. It tells me a bunch of different niches. And I love how it breaks it down. Like AI and productivity is growing really quick, but it's, you know, has very high monetization, but the competition level is medium. The content appeals very high. You know, content creation. What if I just used been the Danco of content creation?

Well, the competition level is very high. So, you know, this is just a good framework for thinking about, you know, what needs should I be in. I will say these are like this is too big. Like personal finance, too big. Health and wellness, too big. Content creation, too big. It should be like content creation for nurses, you know, content creation for lawyers. And that, you know, in the defense of perplexity labs, that is something.

that you can reprompt afterwards. So I don't think Perplexity Labs is like a one-prompt type thing, although I will say the film director thing was pretty close. But yeah, really like how it's breaking it out. Like if an employee showed me this, I would be like, I love you, this is dope. They actually research Dan Coe's content structure. And they say,

Dan Coe's content framework revolves around six key elements that consistently drive engagement and followers' growth. His approach centers on creating content that includes a compelling hook, addresses relatable problems, provides unique solutions, promises significant benefits, takes confidence stances, and offers novel perspectives. So they actually go through his framework, hook, big relatable problem, clear and unique solution, big benefit, confidence in polarization. and novel perspective, big idea.

They define it for you, and then they give you an example. So an example of a hook, most people waste three hours daily on fake productivity. Actually, an incredible hook. Big relatable problem. You feel busy all day, but accomplish nothing meaningful. So good. Clear and unique solution. Use the two-hour AI powered focus block system.

You have me. Big benefit. Reclaim 15 plus hours weekly while doubling your output. But, okay. Confidence and polarization. Traditional productivity advice is dead. AI changes everything. You know it. Novel perspective, big idea. Your attention is your most valuable asset, not your time. And then it says at the last, the content application row, you know, it just tells you for the hook, for example, first line of post, video thumbnails, email, subject line. It's giving you, it's giving you a playbook. It's giving you Dan Coe's playbook. So you don't have to, I mean, you can go and figure this out yourself, but why?

Why would you do that to yourself? This is going to save you time and it's going to give you a better precise way of becoming the Danco of your niche. Okay, let's continue going. Content pillar distribution. Following Danco's methodology, your content should follow this distribution. 40% educational content, AI tool reviews, productivity systems, 25% inspirational content, success stories, mindset shifts, 20% personal brand building behind the scenes content,

and then 10% entertainment, polls, challenges, then 5% soft product promotion. Top performing content types. Are you kidding me? It tells you exactly what you should do and what the engagement rate would be. TikTok, carousel posts, long-form threads, love that. It tells you that he focuses on Instagram and TikTok platform growth,

or actually not that he focuses, that that's where the platform growth is. That's cool, but that's pretty obvious. It shows you in a pretty nice graph, like, you know, that achieving 100,000 followers in 90 days requires averaging 1,11 new followers daily. So, like, it kind of breaks it down. And it says, like, what aggressive growth looks.

like that you're going to need a million plus views each month, cross-posting three to four times daily, influencer collaborations, and a paid promotion budget of $5 to $10,000. Content creators who achieve this typically invests six to eight hours a day. It's telling you this. It's telling you, is this realistic? And you might look at this and you're like, I don't have $5,000 to spend on this. Therefore, I'm out. But then it says, here's some more realistic milestones. It says 10 to 15,000 followers in 30 days, 30 to 50,000 followers in 60 days, 50 to 75,090 days. Okay, cool. Now it gives you daily content distribution strategy. It tells you exactly what you should do. You know, on day one, interactive poll, two, short form video, gives you the content

idea. My content creation workflow revealed. How I manage 50 plus tasks without burning out. I tested five writing tools. Here's the winner. How to think like a high performer. My complete productivity system in 60 seconds. The content repurposing strategy, that works. It gives you the content idea. It gives you the hook.

It gives you the CTA. It gives you the hashtags. I don't know if I'd put the hashtags in personally. That's kind of a miss. But here you go. And again, you know, we can just ask perplexity labs to do this, If you don't want to be in this niche, tell what niche and then just tell it to create a 90-day content calendar for you. It's insane.

And this is $20, $20 perplexity labs a month. So it tells you a weekly production schedule, like how long the time required is. And this is just going to help you put it in your Google calendar so you know if you can actually, you know, get to it. It gives you your content idea bank within an estimated reach. Someone definitely should, I want you all like people listening to this to try this out and see if it works. How much reach are you actually going to get? Like I said, this is my first time using perplexity labs. So, yeah, curious how it works.

But as someone who's myself, like, built an audience of over a million followers on platforms, like I'm reading the stuff and I'm like, yeah, this is going to hit. this is going to hit. This is a really smart idea. Monetization. It tells you how you can monetize mini courses, consultation calls. It tells you your critical success factors, like non-negotiable elements, common pitfalls to avoid, tells you what your content creation arsenal should be. And yeah, it's just like, hey, you should be working on AI and productivity. That's the niche. Although, you know, Dan Co is like more of a productivity. Yeah, I guess the niche they're giving you is like Dan Co, like an AI first version of Danco,

which honestly isn't a bad idea. So I think this is really cool. Here's all the assets in one screen, the strategy right here. This was really, really cool. Okay, so it's still working on figuring out the YC sales lead stuff. So it's just four minutes left. So we'll get to this probably by the end and see if it actually could become a free lead source for not just Fortune 500, but startups. Financial analyst, I thought was interesting.

So I'm a big Warren Buffett guy. And I just basically said, like recommend a trading strategy based on Warren Buffett. I like that value-based investing approach, but I'm into startups. I believe in the future AI, any value-based trades here? So I'm basically saying, like, well, you know, if Warren Buffett was 25 years old or 30 years old and into AI and into startups, what would he invest in? And then, you know, is there opportunity? This is in financial advice or whatever.

Do your own research and stuff like that. But I just think, you know, it was interesting from an educational standpoint around what Warren Buffett AI-inspired investment strategy would be. And the coolest part of it, to me, is this. It basically mapped out which companies are fair-valued. It's got like Microsoft fair-valued according to the Buffett score. And then it's like, oh, who's undervalued? Oh, you know, this company, Marvell.

And like, you know, oh, cool, let me go look at them or this company's super. Oh, you know. or actually sorry, those are, are those overvalued? No, yeah, they're fair valued, fair valued. So undervalued is in the blue. Here, I'll just go in. And it's like, okay, Taiwan Semiconductor seems like it's undervalued. SAP, alphabet.

I'm going to go look into this and do my own research. It says a Buffett-inspired AI strategy should focus on six distinctive investment categories, each offering a different risk return profile and alignment with value investing principles. The most attractive opportunities lie in categories that score highest on both expected returns and Buffett alignment metrics. So if we go through here, we can see the inspected return on here and the risk level here. And Buffett obviously doesn't want high risk.

So this is just super interesting. And it's cool of how fast it was able to do this. It was able to create this in under five minutes. So it says here, AI value plays represent the most compelling opportunity, offering 16% expected returns with a 9 out of 10 Buffett score. These include undervalued companies like Qualcomm, which trades 22% below fair value despite its dominance in mobile AI chips and 5G technology. So if I click on this, it just, yeah, it just shows.

me the Buffett adjusted return, the Buffett fit, what the expected returns are. And again, like it helps you kind of research what companies you want to invest in if Buffett is, you know, interesting to you. It shows what his core investment philosophy it is, but adopted to AI. So he says, you know, focus on AI applications you can understand, prioritize enterprise AI over consumer AI gadgets, look at economic modes in AI, data modes, network effects, switching costs, you know, what PE ratios look at. Just interesting. Conservative projections suggest Buffett-inspired AI strategy can deliver 12 to 15% annual returns over 10 years, beating the broad market by 2 to 4%. So really interesting that you can go and use labs as

a is this company overvalued undervalued and you know is there an opportunity to outperform the market like this is a analyst financial analyst in your pocket okay so let's go back to

this so let's just go let's go through while this is loading let's go through the steps that that it went through so that's going through so it says to identify the contacts of CEO and founders, I'm compiling a list of the most recent YC cohort, gathering public available information

on their leadership and focusing on their contact details, company descriptions, and relevant, specific to facilitate outreach. Okay, great. So it's finding the list of companies, startups, and founders involved in YC SpringBatch. They're finding specific information. They're going through LinkedIn. They're using something called Ask Handel. What?

Whoa. Okay, so it's done now. It created this. Dude, are you kidding me? So this is a list. Okay, we got to do this in full screen. Okay, I clicked full screen and it didn't let me do it. So that's obviously a bug.

But I'm going to just zoom in so everyone can see it here. It's giving me all these people's email addresses. And these are people who've raised millions of dollars. What, okay, actions. What happened? It basically built, oh my God, and an outreach template. Hi, founder name. I noticed cohesive in the recent YC batch and was impressed by your focus on the

agentic CRM for blue collar businesses. So it's pulling what they actually do. Our design agency has helped several B2B YC startups increase conversion rates by 35% through streamlined user experiences and clear value propositions. As you're scaling, would you be, interested in a quick discussion about how strategic design could accelerate your growth. Like from a first shop perspective, pretty, pretty amazing. This is really cool. This is really cool. It's crazy more people don't know about this. Wow. And it basically, it created the distribution.

Like, are they B2B? Are they healthcare? Are they consumer? Interesting that's 75 or B2B. it breaks it out into who's high priority and low priority. By the way, we've talked about vibe marketing on the channel and automating stuff. My next step is like, you know, I'll do this in another episode of the pod. You know, like and comment of this sort of stuff is interesting and you want more of this in your feed. But I think automating a lot of this, like automatically have like your agent reach out. I don't want to do this myself. I just want it to be fully automated from A to Z that uses Perplexity Labs.

So I'm going to look into that and see if that's possible. I've created a comprehensive web dashboard that allows you to filter companies by industry, priority level, and AI focus, access founder contact information with one-click copying, view detailed company profiles and outreach suggestions, and export filtered contact list for your CRM system. track outreach attempts and follow up. Wow. This is crazy.

So it's got the app here. Oh, here it is in full screen. Wow, you can export this as a CIV. You can literally copy the emails. There's an action here. Wow, copy the template. Am I the only one that is just blown away by this? This is like no one is doing this.

I guess I can use other platforms to try to do this. but this is really easy to do. So the last thing I was going to do was I was going to prompt the salesperson AI to write an email to these people. But it had the emails there and they were pretty good, honestly. So that's really, really crazy. So this is, you know, the question going back to the original hook, I guess, going back to the intro, is perplexly loud better than chat cheap D. Manus Clode? in some ways, it's, it's, it's definitely in the stack.

Like, I want to, I'm a, I like using Manis. I like using ChatGBT. I mean, there's pros and cons for each of them. But I definitely think that I'm going to start using this more. And I think there's probably some arbitrage opportunities because there's probably some things that this is doing better than, then, you know, Manis and other, and other things. So there you have it. There you have it. Perplexity labs, AI agents.

Hope you enjoyed. I'm learning in real time and I'm sharing what I'm learning. And I hope that's helpful for you. I hope it gets your creative juices flowing. And I'll see you next time. I'm releasing episodes every few days. So thank you for listening. And I can't wait.

to see what you build and I'm rooting for you.