The Startup Ideas Podcast - The New Way to Build a Startup (Audience x AI x Speed)

Episode Date: June 2, 2025

Join me as I chat with Jordan Mix to discuss a comprehensive 35-step playbook for building profitable companies in the AI age. The conversation covers everything from finding niches and building audiences to leveraging AI tools for product development and scaling through automation. They emphasize the importance of creating a business ecosystem rather than isolated products and maintaining a culture of shipping new ideas consistently. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 0:41 - Finding and Validating Idea 03:04 - Building an Audience 05:55 - Vibe Code MVP 07:37 - v1 vs v2 09:09 - Marketing and Partnerships 13:07 - Pricing Strategy 13:48 - Building Enterprise Value for your Startup 19:42 - Don’t Forget to Have FUN 20:38 - Building a Portfolio of Cash Flowing Businesses Key Points: • Build a business on the back of a trend by finding an underserved niche and understanding their pain points • Use AI tools like Manus, V0, Bolt, and Cursor to build your product while keeping your team small • Create an audience on one platform first before expanding, and partner with creators for distribution • Focus on retention before growth, and consider building a portfolio of businesses that complement each other 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.startupempire.co](https://www.startupempire.co/) FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND JORDAN ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/jrdnmix LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jordan-mix1/

Today we're going to go through a playbook, actually the complete playbook for building profitable companies in the AI age. There's 35 steps. We're going to go one by one. It's going to get your creative juices flowing. I brought on Jordan Mix, who's been on the pod before, who I work with, he's a partner at late checkout or holding company. And let's just, Jordan, let's just go through this one by one. Can we just take a minute and say, is this not the best time to build in the history of humans? It is. It is. And by the end of the this podcast, hopefully you'll be convinced of that. Step one is go heads down.

I actually think this is an underrated step. You have to, you know, if you have a full-time job, you need to go, you know, and you can't go heads down eight hours a day. That's okay, but just put it in your calendar from 9 p.m. to 10 p.m. you're going to go heads down. Like have some heads-down time. Do not disturb mode and just put it in your calendar that you're going to go and create a startup. But Greg, I have so many ideas.

Which one do I pick? I'm working on all of them. Funny you should ask. So I think that step two, which is finding an underserved niche. And what I mean by underserved is there's a lot of niches out there, but you want one that there's not a lot of competition. There's a way to stand out. That's what I mean by underserved.

People always ask me that. And you want to build a business that's on the back of a trend because that's just going to make it a lot easier for you. And there's just more opportunity. The market's getting bigger. And in this day and age, you could find the data. So you can actually use things like Google Trends. You can use Idea Browser.

We'll talk about that later. But start small, find an underserved niche, and find a trend. Step three is you're going to want to learn what their pain points are. And almost as importantly, what content drives them. What are the memes that they're responding to? What are the formats of content? Do they like vlogs? Do they like stories?

Understanding that because that's what's going to help you build an audience so that you have an unfair advantage to get customers. Step four is you're going to come up with a startup idea. So either by learning their pain points, going on places like TikTok and Reddit and X to see what what is this niche talking about? You might just have an idea when you're on a walk and you're like, this is a startup idea that I think is going to do really well. Or if you're looking for inspiration, you can use ideabrowser.com, which we built, you know, well, what is ideabrowser.com?

It basically just gives you an idea every single day. And it's free to go check out the idea of the day. If you want to go deeper, there is a paid plan. But point is you can actually go and just steal ideas that are backed by data. Step five, you're going to want to build an audience and a community. My advice to people is pick one platform. So the mistake a lot of people make is they're like, okay, I'm going to go build an audience. I'm going to be on TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn.

No, you're going to want to get really good at one format and one platform to start, at least until you get to 25 or 50,000 followers. And if you're starting cold, how would you suggest, let's just pick X, for example. How would you suggest people get their first 100 and 1,000 followers? There's a simple way to get to 10,000 followers on X that anyone could get to. And it's set up tweet notifications with people in your niche and just be a reply guy or gal and just create thoughtful content, not just like great thread or I agree, thoughtful content to people in your niche.

and you're just going to get two or five or ten followers every day by piggybacking off these bigger creators who might have 100,000 or more followers. Step six, use Manis V0, Bolt, lovable, cursor to build V1. So you're going to want to build a prototype for your software. You might want to use Manis and chat GPT to come up with your PRD product requirement document. to do some competitive analysis to help with positioning, to help with copywriting. You might want to use V0 to do your first designs. You might want to use Bolt and Lovable to do the prototype. And then you might want to use cursor or windsurf to scale it to build the first V1.

Step 7 is now that you've built an audience, you might want to, let's just say you have 500 people, 300 people. instead of raising venture or raising an angel around, just go and reach out to all of those people and basically say, hey, I'm building this product. Here's what the prototype looks like. You can record a video actually and send it to them. And just say, I'm willing to give you this for 70% off, 50% off,

if you commit now, and basically get them to fund some of your startup. And you're going to go in step eight, reinvest that cash to fund the product. you might want to hire a designer from Upwork or hire an agency or, you know, just, there's going to be things realistically that the AI is going to be able to do. A logo branding is a big one. So you want to use that cash for that. And you'd also might want to reinvest that cash into your content flywheel. You know, having someone do short form video for you, having someone do editing for you, that sort of thing.

Step nine, keep the team small. So think of AI as your co-eastern. founder and don't hire unless you need to. Step 10, automate 90%, or more than 90% of possible, with agents. AI agents. I've talked a lot about Lindy, Gumloop on the podcast, or Zaps. So that's Zapier.com. And it doesn't have to start with 90%. I think a lot of people see 90%. They're like, oh, I need to automate everything. So they automate nothing. Make one automation at a time. Exactly. And what do you suggest in terms of like getting started for the automation stuff? Yeah, I think just monitor what you're doing. Before you can automate, you need to operate something, you know, and it could be a three-step thing that's taking you five minutes, ten times a day.

And then boom, you basically saved an hour right there. So I would start with that simple three-step automation and not over-complicated. It's really easy to automate and build this beautiful automation, Lindy or N8N that looks amazing in a screen grab, but then breaks a lot or doesn't actually work the way that you want it to. Absolutely. Step 11. So hopefully you're making more profits now. You can go again doubling down into content and more into core features. So now you might have one killer feature for your V1, but now you're going into V2 and you're going into like almost the V2 of your content. So you're doubling down on, you know, maybe you were doing 10 videos a month, now you're doing 20 videos a month and you're hiring a second editor, that sort of thing.

Any questions on that? No, that's great. I think maybe what's a V1? How do I feel good enough about where I'm ready to sell something? Well, I think you can do a lot of the heavy lifting on the V1 with looking at Manis, chat GPT, idea browser of like, okay, here's a product that's going to work most likely. it's not, I always think about it as like, is there a one killer feature? So the V1 is basically one killer feature, plus there's just certain table stakes features that you're going to need to have for launch.

So for example, if you're launching with a marketplace, you might need to have, you know, user profiles or ratings. You know, these are things that you have to have. So that's what V1 is. And then a V2 is like, okay, you've got a thing that's working. you know, if it's a marketplace, you have supply and demand, you have people, you know, posting what they're selling and people buying the products. You know, there's other, a V2 might be like, oh, you know, something, an adjacent killer feature, basically, adding to that. And would you say it's okay to sell services in this V1?

Yeah, I would say that that's a great point. So oftentimes, like the best MVP is a service business with, you know, some automations because you basically get paid to learn about what the pain points are and what the workflows are. And then you can, over time, your V2 can actually be the software that automates it all. Step 12 is you're going to want to partner with creators in exchange for equity. I put one to 20 percent here. It really, there's, you know, people ask me this all the time. Like, is there a particular deal that you can do with creators? There isn't. There's no one size fits all with creators because they're people and they all have individual things and what's driving them.

They all have different businesses, different motivations. But I think having creators and building a creator-led business right now, a huge opportunity because you have all these creators really good at doing content. They're doing brand deals. They're doing advertisement, but they're looking to get into businesses. If you don't want to do equity, which I totally get, you might want to do a rev share. And what I'm seeing is 20 to 50 percent rev shares is basically an affiliate deal. So if they drive customers and they convert, you just pay them. So I would say, be generous with your rev share.

You can always start really high to get them on board because they're taking a chance. And then over time, once you increase how many affiliates you have, you can start decreasing that percentage. Step 13. Keep surfacing new ideas from users and trends. So while you're building your startup, you're not going to want to forget about new ideas. And also the world is changing.

There might be new trends that are popping up. And you also don't want to get displaced. So we have a feature called the agent feature on, idea browser pro plan and yeah that allows you to kind of stay on top of new ideas and see if the ideas from users

are actually a good one so you know they could you know you can have a bunch of different ideas and you can use this agent feature that basically goes out and says like is this actually a good idea if I went and built it and use the feedback that you're getting from all these steps too

and to plug into the agent to get those feedback back trends. Exactly. Good point. Step 14, build public-facing tools to drive top of the funnel. So this is kind of like a hack. It's a hack for a few reasons. One is, you know, as you're learning about your niche and what drives them, you can actually, and especially now with like, you know,

the AI coding platforms like Replit and Cursor and both, and lovable. You can actually go and create just like free tools that your audience would love to use. And it's amazing because they're going to, you can share that on social number one, but two, it also helps with your AI SEO. So meaning, you know, chat GPT when people are, you know, asking chat GPT for, you know, product recommendations and stuff like that, you're more likely to come up if you have public facing tools, either on your website or linked, uh, link to your website. So that's kind of a little hack and some sauce I wanted to share there.

Jordan, you want to give a couple of examples of that? We talk about this a lot internally. Yeah, free tools. I think like just lead magnets that are basically a part of your onboarding. Who's really good at this is VEDIO. They're a software, like video software editing platform. And you see all of these free tools that get people into the funnel.

So this is a good. one. And then these SVGs to PNG. I mean, this is just, I bet they make all their money from ads, but you can see all of these free tools. So just be thinking about that when you're trying to get people to enter your orbit. Step 15 is add modular pricing. So you're not going to just want to have one price point. You're going to want to have multiple price points. And there's no one size fits all advice for pricing. And I want to do a whole podcast on pricing and pricing strategy, and I will. But thinking about what makes sense based on the pain points that you're learning about your niche,

you know, you might want to start, I put here free $29, $2.99, 3K. You might want to do free to $3K, you know. You might want to do free to $2.99. and then add different price points as you're learning. Step 16 is you're going to learn, you're going to be doing a bunch of manual services as you're building out your startup and thinking about how you can productize those features with software,

very, very impactful. And that's going to be something that's going to help increase the enterprise value of your startup. And what I mean by that is there's cash flow of a startup, which is basically the money that you get profit for your business. But the enterprise value is, what will you be able to sell this business for in one, two, five years? So what is the actual value of it? And that's going to help increase the enterprise value of your business. Step 17, build in public to attract users,

partners, and acquirers. Obviously, this is very popular to do. I'm not saying that you should need to share your MR and strikes screenshots and stuff like that. But I do it. But I do think that putting your thoughts out there is an unfair advantage that you might as well do in this AI age. Step 18. Bundle into an ecosystem, not just a single feature. So we talk about the Walt Disney ecosystem. Maybe we can show it on screen. But Walt Disney has this ecosystem. I think you drew that in like the 60s. And, you know, you want to think about your startup in as like a piece or a piece of a constellation, one star of a constellation.

And that's just going to help you think about what other products that you can create and how they feed into this flywheel that you're building. Because ultimately, you don't want to build one profitable company. You want to build basically a profitable flywheel and then over time add products that just make that flywheel stronger and stronger. Step 19, you want to own the loop. So you want to create that audience, goes to a product, goes into content, goes into more audience. So this is what's missing actually from here is community. So actually, you know, we talk about this all the time, audience community product. But point is you want to own the flywheel that you're building around

audience, community, and product. Step 20, by this point, you're going to, if you don't know what churn is, you're going to learn what churn is. You're going to be losing users every single month. They're going to be canceling your subscriptions. And you're going to have to understand why. And so you're going to want to fix that leaky bucket. And the mistake that a lot of people make is they end up, you know, by this point, just focusing on growth because it's fun to get new customers and opening in your stripe

and seeing, you know, new customer alert, new customer alert, new customer alert, But you're going to, you know, you're going to, if you don't fix retention, you're going to be basically always bleeding customers. And that's not a fun place to be. So running sprints around retention at this stage is so, so important. Fix that leaky bucket before you double down on growth and you start like spending money on ads and paid acquisition. 21, step 21, backfill with AI agents before hiring ops roles. Any thoughts on that one?

It goes back to the automation. You're learning a ton. You're operating more and more. So if you don't do the automations yourself or can't build AI agents yourself, which you can hire someone to audit your process and build agents before bringing in full-time employees. Step 22, test new channels. Here I mean growth channels with throwaway brands. And what I mean by that is like go and create a new TikTok and go just,

try stuff out and get feedback. So you, you know, I always think, I think about it as, you know, well, people actually think about product R&D all the time, products, research, and development. I think about it as marketing R&D, marketing research and development. So I think it's a good process to always like create new brands, new handles, try new content, and get feedback. Because at this point, you might have thousands of followers, you might have customers already and trying new stuff.

it might be hard at that point. And you might want to test formats on those other channels too before you bring them to your main channel. Yes, exactly. Step 23 is, you know, at this point, you probably have a back end, you're probably gaining, you have data, you probably have leads,

and you might even have APIs. So there's always this opportunity when you get to this point where it's like, okay, I've got all this data exhaust, that's coming out, is there an opportunity to sell this data? Is there an opportunity to monetize the back end in some way, license the software? It's just thinking, you know, at this point,

you've hopefully built a front end that's really working. You've got this backend, you've got this piece of technology, and you've got all this fuel through the data and stuff like that, that you might be, you might end up having a whole business on step 23. That's worth exploring. Yeah, and a concrete example of that is it's not just selling like emails, right? Yeah, like, oh, cool, this is my email database. I'm just going to sell that to third party.

What I think you mean by that is if you're a video software platform, you probably have leads for a video agency. So you could do a partnership with a video agency to give them leads. Exactly. That's exactly right. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying like you're going to have all this data and you're selling. your data and you're screwing over your customers. That's not what I mean at at all.

So thank you for pointing that out. Of course. Step 24. I mean, now you're in the thick of it, right? So it's like, don't forget to have fun. If you're not having fun, honestly, just stop. Just stop, you know, if it's just not fun, like, what is the point? So if you have a full-time job and you're doing this and it's too overwhelming and it's hurting, hurting you. You know, it might not, you might not want to be in pain all the time. But if you're okay with the pain and it feels like good pain and you're learning a lot and you're really enjoying the journey, have fun. And I think just like honestly, sometimes you just got to like, you kind of like from step one to 24, you got to like trick yourself into having that this is fun, right? You're learning, you're testing, you're experimenting. You're a scientist.

So don't forget to have fun and it's a ride. Step 25 is you can actually go and repeat step one to 24 again. Because at this point, you probably have a business. It's probably doing one, two, three, four million dollars a year in revenue. Maybe you want to go, you know, go heads down again, go find an underserved niche again, go learn their paint and points, go steal an idea, go build an audience community again. You might just want to go and do that again and say, okay, this business is doing, like pretty good. It's a real profitable thing and it's nice to have and I'm going to go,

I want to try a different, you know, a different product or I have a new idea. So nothing, I think that there's something really strong in building a portfolio. I think that it also diversifies your revenue stream. So big, big fan of it and I'm practicing what I preach and what we reach is because we do operate a portfolio of businesses and I do find that I do sleep better at night operating a portfolio because if one of them has a worse month, you know, it's not the end of the world. And go back to step 18 when before you do this, you know, like make sure you're building a skyscraper and not a strip mall. Yeah, exactly. Step 26 is an underrated one. I think, which is share hires, share tools, and infrastructure across products. So if now you've built

this portfolio, you have two, three products, you know, why wouldn't you share learnings? For example, like, we have a partner in our business, the boring marketer. He's been on the podcast before, and we're just DMing with him and saying, like, hey, we're learning a lot about short form video. We'd love to talk to you about it. And he was so stoked about that. So things like that where you're sharing hires, tools, learnings, infrastructure across products, and sometimes even customer lists is really an unfair advantage. And that's the way to think about all these steps. You're creating unfair advantages that compound over time.

Step 27, acquire underperforming products with distribution upside. So at this point, you've now created, you know, an audience and community. you may have actually created multiple audiences and communities in your various different products. So now you've built this distribution upside. And this is one of the reasons why I love building a business nowadays because you can go and build distribution on social and now you have this asset. So now you can actually go out and acquire underperforming products, like products that you look up to and you're like, I would love to have this in my portfolio. but they're not, you know, they're missing the distribution link.

So you can go ahead and do that. And by the way, there's various ways to acquire businesses where, because, you know, with not a lot of upfront capital where it's paid out over time and stuff like that. So I know someone in the comment section is like, yeah, that's great.

You know, I don't have a million dollars to buy a business. Well, there's a lot of reasons why a business would sell to you if you do have distribution upside. Exactly. You can just do a, like, basically a leveraged buyout with leads that you bring them. Yeah, exactly.

And that happens. All financed. Yeah. Step 28 is relaunch or bundle existing apps using your playbook. Step 29 is

create a holding company brand people want to follow. You know, if it's like tiny like Andrew Wilkinson or late checkout like us, like we end up building these private equity groups

almost that a holding company that people like to follow, it just helps all your products, both from a hiring perspective of acquisition, good things happen when people are following your holding company. Yeah, publicizes your Walt Disney map. Exactly. It's no longer just on your desk. It's in the world and people can see it and study it.

Totally. Step 30, build long-term wealth with no outside investors and infinite spins. This is basically what you're doing, because you're building a ton of, you know, a bunch of businesses with enterprise value, with cash flow.

They're compounding each other. So I just think that you don't need outside investors. Now, you might, you know, say to yourself, wow, you know, startup,

our second startup actually is taking off and we need money for inventory or we need money to really make this crazy hire. So there's obviously opportunities where you can go ahead and do that and raise venture and raise Angel to go and to scale it,

but you don't need to using this playbook. Step 31 is cross-promote wins across your product ecosystem to drive five-wheel growth. We talked about that. But I think that's really important. Step 32 is you're going to want to create a culture of shipping. So you want to create an internal idea to launch pipeline. That could be every 30 days you ship something, right? So you're holding company every single day is shipping an MVP.

Sorry, not every day. every single month is shipping an MVP, you're putting it out there. You want to create this system where you have this culture of shipping ideas to launch. And building that, I think, is going to help, you know, make your holding company not just like a one-hit wonder or two products. But ultimately, you want to do this maybe for the rest of your life and have 20, 30, 40, 50 products. Step 33, you want to license or clone successful products into new verticals or geos. Pretty self-explanatory. Anything that you look at there and you're like, what?

Nope. Just make sure it comes back to the ecosystem. I keep saying that, but it's very easy to end up with siloed businesses if you're trying to do this, if you aren't thinking about it as a system. Exactly. Step 34, recruit niche operators to run individual products for cash and upside or profit share. So, you know, go out there. You're going to be a headhunter. If you're a CEO of a Holtko, you're a co-founder of a Holtzco, you're a partner of a Holtzco,

you're going to be trying to find GMs and they're hard to find, but, you know, the right one will, you know, what do they say, hire one to higher 10. I think it's really, it's such an important hire and you're going to want to go head hunting for those people. And just using places like X, honestly, to go and like DM them and be like, hey, like, I see what you're posting about. I see you the work you're doing. I'd love to get to know you. Start by friendship building and see where it goes from there. And you might want to even start doing this like step two. You know, like if you see interest people, just collect them as you go. And when you need them, maybe they're around to collaborate. Yeah. And you never know where a conversation can go.

Like they might not be great niche operators, but they might be good in somewhere else in your business or they might just be like, oh, hey, I have a new friend now and we're going to go play tennis. That's also cool. Also cool. Very cool. Maybe the coolest. Maybe cool. Yeah, maybe the best part. Step 35, and this is just a reminder for everyone, build once, compound forever, audience, code, and trust, all stack. All these steps are going to basically add luckiness into your life and into your ecosystem, into your portfolio. And you kind of just have to show up every day,

learn from your mistakes, iterate, don't run out of money, have good people, and follow the trends, follow the ideas, because this is the greatest time to be an idea person, happy building.

If you do want ideas every single day for free, where do you go, Jordan? Ideabrowser.com. there you go check it out and uh what's what do we have here i i that i that fixes your broken excel formula in second so basically the cool part about idea browser is it goes through trends it looks at the trends and then it gives you a playbook for how to build the business if you scroll down a little bit um it tells you exactly what the offer should be what the lead maddening should be how much you should charge gets that creative juices flowing so

more excited about it and it's free to join. It's free to join the idea of the day and we do have some paid AI agent features. All right. Jordan, thank you for joining me. Any last questions, thoughts, feedback? This is amazing. Take the steps or living proof and doing it every day. You're not going to see progress every day on all these steps, but this is the path to compound.

Yeah, and that's why I was kind of talking about the roller coaster of startups. I'm not saying that this is like, you know, you're going to follow these steps exactly and you're going to be a millionaire. I'm not saying that. What I am saying is directionally, these are the steps and the playbook that have the highest likelihood of success for building a startup today. And I will say that this is just a remarkably easier time to launch and build a product today. because the cost of doing that is less. And also there's billions of people on social with credit cards that you can go and access.

And what I mean by access, I mean, you can build an audience. They can love your brand and then they're going to want to support you. So it's an incredible time to be building. It's going to be a roller coaster, but I can't wait to see what you build, how you build it.

I will continue to give all the sauce away because why not? And cheers to you. Have a creative day. And I'll see you on the next one. Peace. See ya.