The Startup Ideas Podcast - Startup ideas brainstorm (steal this $100k/month idea)

Episode Date: June 10, 2024

Join us for a jam session where I break down several startup ideas from the SIP community. I’ll share my insights on why these ideas are promising or problematic, and reveal the frameworks and strategies I’d use to grow these businesses. In this episode, we explore diverse opportunities, including affiliate websites, loyalty programs, DTC brands, and more. Discover the evaluation techniques and growth strategies that can help you build your next successful startup. Whether you're aiming to launch your first million-dollar business or are interested in entrepreneurial tactics, this episode is packed with actionable advice and inspiration. Don’t miss this essential guide to launching a thriving startup!🚀  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.com70,000+ people are already subscribed.FIND ME ON SOCIALX/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenbergInstagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/To scale your revenue faster with conversion-focused creative sign up to https://designscientist.comEpisode Timestamps: 0:00 Intro01:25 First business: Newsletter focused on summarizing scientific journals08:38 Second business: Loyalty program for gamers11:48 Third business: Carnivore snacks DTC brand15:29 Fourth business: Content website for plugs and adaptors17:56 Fifth business:  Newsletter focused on QSBS and 83b startups 19:41 Sixth business: Fantasy League for real-life physical activities

So how would I do this? How would I actually go and create something like this if I wanted to go build a startup? Step one, you use AI to create content. Step two is that just creates this SEO juice. And step three is you monetize initially by affiliate. And that's the playbook. That's the idea. I hope someone takes it.

It's a no-brainer. Oh, and by the way, I think that this is easily $100,000 a month business. Hello, everybody. It's me, Greg Eisenberg. I'm doing a solo podcast today from my home in the mountains of Canada. And I've got a lot of ideas today, but there's one in particular I want to share. And I hope someone takes this idea. And then towards the end of the episode, I will share four or five ideas that people have sent to me. And I hope someone takes this idea. And then towards the end of the episode, I will share four or five ideas that people have sent to me. and hopefully it'll get your creative juices flowing. So let's get right into it. I came across an article about microplastics recently. I didn't know this, but tea bags have billions of microplastics in them. So it's not just water bottles and stuff like that.

And this whole microplastics thing is everyone's talking about it. And apparently they found that some, like, huge percentage of men have microclastics in their testicles. So it went viral after that. In this article, I saw a link to one of the scientific journals, Nature or Science, or just one of them. And I started reading one of the scientific papers, and it was just so dense. I mean, it's written for scientists. So hence my idea, that was the insight. The insight is there's tons of cool things going on in scientific papers,

but they are written for scientists. What if we can extract, probably using AI, insights from scientific papers, curate it, and write it in plain English for people to read? I think that a lot of people would be down with that. So I'm going to be share, I'll share my screen. I should give you a sense of how I think about these things and how I come up with, you know, some of these ideas. So I had that insight.

And then I went to perplexity. Perplexity.compteatia. The AI search engine. And I was just like, what are the best places to find scientific journals and research papers? Turns out there's Google Scholar, which indexes 200 million scholarly articles across disciplines. There's BASE, which indexes 136 million academic documents. There's Core, which is 136 million.

And then there's semantic scholar, which has 40 million articles. So first of all, I read that and I was like, whoa, I didn't realize that there were that many academic articles. Think about how many insights are in these. I mean, of course, some are less relevant to the average person than others. But I bet you there's tons of insights there. So I see there's also some repositories. There's also libraries. So I see this.

And then I actually, I want to go check out the Nature website. And I look at it. And this is music to my ears. When I see a website that looks like this, it sort of looks like it's been built in the late 2000s. There's nothing better than this. In fact, I can't even click here. It's not even letting me click

because this pop-up is up. It's just pretty brutal. So I really like that. And it just, you know, to me, this is validation that, you know, you have a lot of people who are referencing these articles. you have hundreds of millions of articles and that there's just an opportunity

to create a repository made for non-scientists. So how would I do this? How would I actually go and create something like this if I wanted to go build a startup? So first I would come up with, you know me, I like a catchy name. So I think about what is a catchy name

that kind of makes fun of the idea that scientific journals are for Brainiacs. And I started to think about that. I use that as my prompt and I just write a bunch of names related to that. And then I would actually probably use chat GPT, OpenAI, and some other AI products to start fine-tuning a way to unpack scientific articles with one or two key insights. So I would probably spend, you know,

few thousand dollars trying to figure that out because i would use that and essentially create a twitter account that would automatically post these things and i'd probably do like a before and after as well right like i'd show like here's the 25 000 uh word scientific journal article and here's the 25 word insight you know here's what you could you should actually care about um and i'm sure you're thinking, well, how can I make money from something like this? Okay, great. You eventually build this and it gets more popular. Well, you know, you could do affiliate products, right? So, you know, using the example of the tea bag thing, the tea bag is interesting because there are companies, like I buy tea off a company called firebelly tea.com, which is just loose leaf tea. And the loose leaf tea doesn't.

have the microplastic. So I can just strike up an affiliate deal and maybe they already have an affiliate partnership and I can just say like switch to fire belly D. So you generate and this is a bigger trend I'm starting to see more of where, well, use AI to step one, you use AI to create content. Step two is that just creates this SEO juice. And so the SEO starts. starts bringing people every single month, every single day. So you have customers basically coming on autopilot. Now, this takes six, eight, nine, 12 months actually build. But it does take time.

SEO takes times. And step three is you monetize initially by affiliate. And that's the playbook. That's the idea. I hope someone takes it. It's a no-brainer. Oh, and by the way, I think that this is easily $100,000 a month business at, you know, once it starts, the SEO starts to kick in. Hey, everyone. If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need. Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's

going to convert. You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where Design Scientist.com comes in. It's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work, all your copywork, all your engineering, and do stuff that actually scales your revenue. You don't need a designer. You need a design scientist. Let's go. Designscientist.com. I liked it so much. I invested in the business. So let's talk about, I did a live stream where I just took kind of people's question, you know, where I took people's ideas for startups and we just jammed on it and I gave them feedback. And I want to give a few people. So just talk about their ideas and

tell you how, what I think about them. Now, these are just ideas from people like you listening. So some are good, some are bad. And I'll tell you why they're good, why they're bad and what I think of them. Matthew M underscore Sandy's on Instagram says, this idea is like the rewarding exercise idea, but for gaming. I think he's talking about the sweat coin. So you basically, for the amount of steps that you do, they would give you a coin and pay you basically.

So he says, here's the idea. You link your gaming account, Steam account for the MVP, and you earn tokens for your hours played. And then you could spend those tokens on affiliate products offers, could partner with gaming brands and even streamers to enable their viewers to get exclusive access to products via the platform. Now, I love the idea of hooking into your Steam data, which has literally hundreds of millions of users,

because I don't think a lot of people are hooking into that data and based on it giving you rewards. Now, we all know about credit card rewards. There's a company called Drop. A friend of mine started at JoinDrop.com. I think he raised like $50 or $75 million. He basically created an app called Drop and you link your debit and credit card to it.

And then you get these points, like additional points, and then you can spend those points at Amazon or Walmart or Old Navy. He did deals with all these different e-commerce websites. And yeah, I don't know if they like sell the points. Sorry, I don't know if they sell the data or how that works. But five million people have downloaded the app. So it's the real deal. So yes, I think like a drop, but for,

Steam is a huge, huge idea. But I'm not sure I would build it on top of Web 3 rails to start, because I don't think it really needs to me. So I would say someone should build something that rewards gamers for, you know, what's their kill-death ratio? How many hours have they played? Are they having a streak? Have they logged in every single day? And I think the thing to check here is, Is it Steam? Is it Activision? Is this data available? But I do think that there's a huge business to be built on loyalty plus gaming. So that's a good one. All right. This guy message me. His Instagram is Carnay Shabu. That's the name of his business. I'm working on a grass-fed Wagyu beef fried meat snack. We're targeting mostly women. So think of it like carnivore snacks for women.

So then I go to his Instagram, or first of all, I go to the Instagram. I just assume it was a woman who is messaging me. And then I, it's like, not at all. He says he's targeting women and it's this, you know, white guy with a hat and like a big beard, like eating meat. It's like the complete opposite. Yes, he is wearing a pink hat in one of them, but, you know, this dude is a male. So I like the idea of taking something that, you know, women do and bring it to men.

Women wear makeup, men's makeup is a, you know, a trend that's only getting bigger. You can just go through the list of things that are popular for women and see if that makes sense for men. And vice versa. What's something that's become popular for men? or is popular for men, and what can you bring to women? Now, if you're going to do that, you've got to make sure that it's authentic,

because I think anyone who's going to go to this Instagram, if you're a woman, you're going to be like, this is just, you know, just because you're wearing a pink hat doesn't mean it's connecting with me. So I like the idea of this. I just think that if I was him, I would work with a creator and I wouldn't be seen at all in front of the camera.

I don't think that he's the right creator. It just doesn't have creator product market fit. And that's something for you to think about is when you're building your business, because every business now is a creator business, are you the right creator for it or should someone else be? And being honest with that is really important. Now, I want you to think about what are some typically male products or typically female products and can you bring it to the other gender?

Because I think that framework for thinking about startup ideas is a wedding one. And I think what I often do is if I come up with an idea, let's say makeup for men. I mean, that's quite an obvious one, but something like that. Then I go to Google Trends and then I'll go to see, okay, where has makeup for men, you know, where has that gone, you know, in terms of trends of the last 12, 18, 5 years, 12, 18 months, 5 years. So it's a good, it's good to come up with the Theses and then double check it with the data. And the other sort of bonus idea to this is what you could do is you can find something

that starts to be trending for women, let's say, and then bring it to men, right? So you don't have to, you know, something that's very new and then bring it to men. And again, it doesn't need to be positioned exactly this is for men or this is for women, but just from a creator standpoint, a branding perspective, a positioning perspective, a messaging perspective. Like, you know, another idea would be like a candle company for men. Candles are getting more and more popular, is there an opportunity to create like the de facto men's candle company. All right. Let's go to the next idea.

We're on a roll here. Yash Bardwage says, ultra-niche idea. There's a website called whatplug.info which tells you the plugs and adapters you need when you are traveling to a new city. But their UI was made like 10 years back. So this is one of those. ideas and I want to be a part. Like I wish that this existed on the internet, but I don't want to be the person to build it. Now, if you have, you know, if you, if you're not worried about money and you're not worried about growing your business and you just want to put this out in the internet and you want

it to be a utility of the internet, not a business of the internet, a utility of the internet, then go ahead and create this. And sometimes I do that and I love doing that sometimes. But you have to realize that this is not a business. It's not a business because there's no business model here. You know, okay, if you get 25,000 people a month to come and or 100,000, you know, best case to come and check out this website with the plugs and adapters you need when you're traveling to New City, which you, by the way, probably know most of the time anyways, like, what's next? You're going to put Google Ads, AdSense there. I'm not going to go buy an iPhone from you, so we can't do the affiliate thing. So this is just one of those ideas that I wish exists, but just, you know, and just because the UI is 10 years old doesn't mean it's necessarily a good business.

When we talked about the Scientific Journal one, I think that was more interesting to me from an affiliate standpoint because you can actually cherry pick scientific journals, take out the insights that are relevant to products, and then sell those products. Whereas this, I just don't really see that happening and it feels very niche. So sometimes, lesson learned, sometimes ultra niche is too niche. I always say you want to go niche and then think about can you go a little bit nicheer? I call that super niche. But when you're talking about ultra niche, you know, this is sometimes

that's not a business idea, that's a utility. But thank you, thank you for this, Yash. William Blaze says, new idea here, newsletter and job board for companies that qualify for

QSBS and allow 83B early election for people looking to join early stage companies with tax advantage outcomes. So for those outside the U.S. You don't know what QSBSB is. QSBS is just a tax law that allows founders and early employees to save money on stock, basically. And 83B is the same sort of idea.

It's a tax way for early employees, founders to save money on stock. Again, this feels a little too niche. Also, job board plus QSBS. feels like the reason why you're going to join a startup, it's like you believe in the founders, you believe in the mission, you think you can add value. It's not because you can do an 83B election.

So sometimes you come up with an idea and you're like, oh, I wish I can, you know, this would probably happen here is William Blaze here, if that is his real name. William Blaze was like, oh, you know, I had an issue with, you know, I started a company and I never signed my 83B and it was a mistake and something happened, you know, like I had a bad experience. So other people might have that experience. But again, this is a bit too ultra niche and I'm not convinced that job seekers think about this when they're actually going and looking for their jobs. Okay, another startup idea.

Alejandro Ordenez says, feedback on this idea, and we just built it. It's called Sweatrow, Fantasy League for Real Life Physical Activities. So it says virtual race platform and fantasy league for real life physical activities. Competition is not about winning or losing. It's about pushing ourselves to be the best we can be. Okay, how does it work? you basically sync your device. It creates like a sweatsrow profile.

So like it's a fitness tracker. And then you join a challenge. You commit to a goal. And then you earn cash rewards by completing the challenge. So this is actually very similar to what we talked about for the gaming one. You're just getting rewarding, getting rewarded for getting fit. And then they've got, you know, four brands that are compatible, Garmin, Sinto,

Wahoo, Polar. And like one of the, it sounds like the reason why, oh, interesting. So a lot of them you actually have to pay. Wow. Okay. So this is, wow. Wild.

So I'm looking at one of the challenges. Run 45K in one week. The entry fee is $5, but the pot is $30. Or you can, the July 4th, 10K run. The entry fee is $10, and I'm not sure how big the pot is. I didn't say, but there's some pot.

The Tour de France challenge, it's a free entry fee and pot is $300. So this kind of feels like somewhat gambling. I mean, it's kind of gambling, right? You're putting a money and there's a pot. Interesting. I just think that there's a lot of friction with getting people to put money in. I mean, if they're going to do this, maybe they rather put money in a meme coin. If they're trying to gamble, there's other ways that they're going to go and gamble.

So I'm not sure that I love that approach. I think this could be like a small business, which is cool. And I think the impact of it is really cool. Like you're making people more healthy. But I think that this is something that a big company my do, I mean, not the gambling piece, but just motivating people to be more active. I think that if I'm a startup and I'm trying to deal with the Garmin APIs and the Sinto APIs and the Wahu APIs and the polar APIs, I mean, I've only heard of Garmin. I just feel like that's a lot of work to do.

Upkeep of the app, deal with like people's money and entry fees. I don't love it. I like simple businesses That's why I like the gaming one. It was like, okay, you're going to plug into one API and it's gamers. And you're not going to ask anything from them. They're just going to get rewarded. So it's just a win-win proposition. So this is cool, but I personally wouldn't start something like this. And there you have it.

A bunch of ideas for you. Get your creative juices flowing. If you like this, please, please, please. follow, subscribe on your platform of choice, and go to YouTube to write a comment. I read every single one of them and I enjoy reading them. I'm having a blast reading them. And it helps me know, if you like this, it helps me know what I should talk more about. And I'm trying to make this the best possible show for you to make it the most valuable show for you. And I want you to have a good time and I want you to learn along the way and I want you to come up with ideas along

the way and you're going to take one of these ideas sometime and you're going to you're going to build something big. So it's been real. I'll see you later. And thanks for tuning in. Later.