5 game-changing startup ideas from a life hacking genius

and all I could think about is like what other books are selling for $19 $17 on Amazon that could be turned into $500 a month businesses I would say that if you're really passionate about something and it's niche enough then you probably have an unfair advantage to build media if there's one thing that I've learned in the last I don't know 20 years it's that you need to be passionate about like the industry but you might not need to be like so passionate about the exact specific spefic company you work at it's a therapist app that's making like $36,000 a year and he just launched it what are the things I could go test this weekend that aren't go build software into hardware and and scale up manufacturing so I would say go work for someone but at the same time go also be testing what you're learning on the side you know if I had 48 hours to figure out how to make a million dollars and actually love doing it I would probably spend my 48 hours start [Music] Chris Hutchins it's uh not surprising that you're sipping on Kirkland sparkling water you know you alternate between highend and super affordable I'm excited to chat today because you always bring the heat you uh you've got a top podcast all the hacks where you're sharing you let you let people into your mind you're sharing all your financial tips and and you've got a unique mind you've sold a company to Google before you're just you're an interesting guy and interesting people need to need to uh share their ideas yeah I got lots of ideas so we I'm excited to take this to wherever you go all right so what's on what's been on your mind lately okay so I got one thing that's been on my mind and we talked about this for for a moment before so so uh I'll set the stage there's this episode of this podcast called acquired uh about Ultra Luxury premium products and services and where the value of products like goes beyond their utility and it's just got me thinking about this like premium category of creating products that are not Kirkland water but something else so that was like set the backdrop um and then I have a three and a half-year-old okay and I saw this tweet for this product that is like an iPad app to help your kid learn how to read and I was sitting here like oh this is really cool like here's a three-year-old reading my daughter loves books she can't read anything to herself wouldn't it be cool if she could read so I go sign up and it's like do you want to do the 7-Day trial and I'm like this app iPad app 500 bucks a month I do I mean other than like that joke Red Diamond app or what whatever it was back in the day like I have never seen a piece of software for consumers at that price ever I don't know if you have an example of something at that price point but that might be the most expensive piece of consumer software I've seen uh yeah I haven't seen anything like that I know dating apps H have been trending way more expensive like dating apps used to be you know $5 a month $9 a month um Rya I think charges I'm going to pull it up now they're charging 50 bucks a month which is like the Tinder that's more like high-end so to speak so you are seeing that Trend around like people spending $50 a month but $500 a month I haven't seen anything like that it was wild so I'm like okay 7-Day trial why not and we do a 7-Day trial and the the quality of the app is like pre-alpha in terms of visuals right like I was looking at on iPhone some of the buttons are missing there's basically I think 20,000 games or something but they so far in the first 150 we've done there's like seven games right and the games are very very basic visually everything however my daughter is learning to sound words like here's the crazy thing it doesn't take this beautiful app that's perfectly designed to do anything and but fundamentally it was working like I sat down with my daughter yesterday and she's like sat and I'm like wait you just read a word like prior to today you haven't read words you could identify characters and letters but you couldn't read a word now you read a word and we're like one week into this app and I'm like this is insane well it both works but like $500 a month and so I saw someone post on Twitter like this is crazy you're charging so much money and the guy's like well then just buy this book on Amazon and it's the exact same as our thing you could just do it yourself and I was like okay so I bought the book on Amazon right $500 a month $17 book and I look at the book and the book is literally like do this exercise with your kid and it's the same exercise as the app and if I were a developer I feel like maybe I could just build this app you know like I'm not I don't want to diminish how much work they've done to create 20,000 exercises but when you use it it it creates this feeling of this is so simple why would I pay $500 for it because I feel like I could do it even though I'm sure it's way way harder I even did a video call with one of their product managers like there's a lot that goes into it however it works and the only alternative is do I want to sit down for 30 40 minutes a day every single day and like create the exercises with paper and pencils and my hands or do I want to pay $500 a month and all I could think about is like what other books are selling for $19 $17 on Amazon that could be turned into $500 a month businesses for people who just don't want to do the work and want an easier more gamified version of it right like look at du lingo uh Rosetta Stone like all these language learning products they are also pretty expensive um I think dual lingo is probably actually not or it used to be free but there's a paid version but I feel like Rosetta Stone all these things like hundreds of dollars for software that isn't like Rya where like there's a community of other people you know it's infinitely scalable you could have a hundred million users um or not so I don't know I haven't gone down this path yet but I it had me thinking I'm curious what comes to mind for you like are there other learning related things where there's books like How to illustrate right like you want to teach your kid to draw or you want to learn to draw well there's this discrepancy between how much does it cost for a professional to do a thing with me like a tutor and that was their argument was like how much does it cost to have a tutor come to your house for 30 minutes a day 365 days a year well it's probably going to cost you $5,000 a month so in a way we're super cheap and then I was like oh personal training and everyone seems to be you know like I'm wondering what tweaks you could add to make it feel more like the tutor which would get my head wrapped around the price H because right now it just feels like it should be a $ Five Doll app even though it's worth more I don't know that's something on my mind I like the prompt which is what are other apps that we can build that we can charge $500 a month for that actually helps people get from point A to point B based on proven tried and tested Knowledge from things like books and I think the like the framework I would have to to go after ideating something like this is I would start with kids because kids is such a good market like people are willing to spend $500 a month on kids and lesso $500 a month on themselves unless it helps them get a date I.E Rya um so I'm I'm kind of thinking like okay what are all the Milestones that kids have you know and you're just like you you you write that down in a notebook you literally write down all the different things like you know spelling and writing their first word and saying their first word and all all the things and you try to think about Lear math learning a language Lear like go through all the courses all of them all of them and you just you unbundle them into these separate apps and you take advantage of ASO App Store optimization um so that when people put in the App Store like you um you know learn whatever we end up creating an app around let's say it's uh doing math that you come up first and I think you know it's one of the reasons why I actually rename this podcast from where it happens to the startup ideas podcast was so that when people would type in on Spotify startup ideas or on YouTube startup ideas I would come up first it's literally like people are making fun of the name change I was like yeah I I know it's really like obvious it's it's obvious because I want people to search ideas and for me to come up so I think like an ASO angle to this is is kind of how I think about it quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret s is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with 100% money back guarantee who who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com you know what's funny when you just said that I was like I didn't even think to look are there other apps doing this that are like better and I just looked and like du lingo of course funny funny thing has an app for kids called learn to read 100% free designed by experts to teach your kids how to read now I'm immediately going to download this and test it out and see how it compares the thing that changed everything was like they gave us a trial and and you could see progress in a week so maybe this I don't want to be it's like app store optimization and first first s day or first three- day optimization it's like there have to be ways that you can convince someone to show them progress in minutes um and that was the thing that this did so well that I'm like oh do I do I want to go try du lingo like is it going to have the same effect if I if I use the Dual app and I don't see progress in like 20 minutes I'm like this is garbage you know like I also think there's just there's an opportunity an opportunity to be the anti- dualingo you know what I mean so like it's okay that dualingo is doing this because a lot of people I mean dualingo is massive at this point like I think multi-billion dollar company and a a lot of people are like yeah I tried dualingo like I tried dualingo for Spanish and I gave up like there's millions of us you know there's more there's more Giver ERS like me uh than there are people who succeeded on language learning apps like dualingo so I think if you can just brand it and position it as like we are the app like we're experts in uh and you know who did this actually really well uh I invested actually in their company synthesis have you heard of synthesis no check it out synthesis. comom so it's a really interesting uh story and I think a lot of startups could learn a lot for how they position so they're founding story Elon mus asked me to start an experimental school with him at SpaceX in 2014 the goal was to develop students who are enthralled by complexity and solving for the unknown synthesis offers the most Innovative learning experiences from that school they're designed to cultivate student voice strategic thinking and collaborative problem solving I believe synthesis builds these skills like no other educ ational experience until Rec recently synthesis was only available to a handful of SpaceX families today our community is worldwide and growing quickly so really cool idea they've got this synthesis tutor where it says they've partnered with these researchers to make the first superhuman math tutor that actually works for kids five years and older and it's $29 a month says on their website said 10,000 plus kids use it and I think what's really cool about it is you're like as a parent you're like whoa so Elon Musk like this is good if this is good enough for Elon musk's kids it's good enough for mine there's something really interesting about I mean the way they they don't push this but the mava thing that was so interesting was like it's super premium right I knew it going in that it was going to be super premium but I could get a free trial for seven days and then they're like you know what take 30 more days and you know you can re get a full refund so you get 37 days and I'm like I might as well like get this thing that cost 500 it's like get a tutor to come to your house for the day and this is a common practice uh it's funny I I didn't put these dots together but there's a gymnastics place in the on the peninsula and they're like bring your kid in for a free class right and then your kid goes and you're like wow my kid's learning uh now I want to keep doing and so this like get your kid to learn something show them how good it can be and and rinse and repeat it all I mean I I hope we're allowed to go down tangents but it makes me think of two things this company I invested in a while ago called camble which is online English classes with English speakers so most people listening to this don't know this product because they probably speak English because if they didn't speak English it would be tricky to listen to this conversation um but they created these like remote learn English platforms uh and then the other one is this company called fitter I don't know if you know this company it's uh it's online personal trainers so what this kind of makes me think about is like the accountability is the hard part right is for a lot of learning like why du lingo didn't work for you but if you had a tutor come in your house to teach you Spanish for 30 minutes every day you probably wouldn't have dropped off as much and when I saw fitter it was basically personal trainers but all the personal trainers are in India and I don't know doesn't really but so the cost of living is so low that it ended up looking like it was going to be like $5 a month or something it was some astronomically low cost for a person who speaks English to FaceTime you and and work out with you and show you tell you what to do and motivate you and push you whatever you need but they brought the cost so far down by putting people getting people from other countries um who speak your language not just not just a person coming it's India's like where yoga comes from yes so they know yoga better than us funny enough this was for like strength cardio so uh yoga would make even more sense I was looking at this for like they do Fitness and Nutrition but like you know I know so many people that want a personal trainer and say it's too expensive well okay why do you need your personal trainer to be here right like what other models are there like why do you need your language tutor to be here like we've already done this with all the outsourced kind of EAS and and you see a lot of more Outsourcing around different creative talents happening now and I don't know in This Global Workforce of people all around the world at different costs of living what other opportunities are there here for things um I've once thought uh this is is a little bit of a crazy idea but we have cameras like over the kids cribs so it's like you know kid wakes up in the middle of the night are they okay wake up check the camera like you could probably have some service to parents that are like hey I sleep really heavy I'm not going to hear my kid wake up put a alarm on my phone that you can sound off and have someone in a remote place watch the video all night you know like there's just like with between cameras and sensors and lowcost labor and fast internet I just feel like there's like millions of ideas like for this if we were doing an inperson podcast we have a remote producer in a much cheaper cost of living who dials in and uh I have a video switcher in our that you can control online so someone could literally control the video switcher choose which channels Slide the levels for the audio and video and not be here at all now we're way off from where we started by the way like this is like the power of uh just going down rabbit holes of brainstorming and coming up with cool ideas it's like I don't know there's so many I think the so yes we are we are in din rabbit hole and that's okay I want like I my goal is to be in rabbit holes with you because I think I just want to unpack the prompts and and and the Frameworks behind it so one of the really interesting things you said is okay we've got this Global Workforce we've got things like AI we can bring people in um to do you know teach us things or or you know remote experiences a a prompt I have for myself is okay if in India the world's best yoga teachers are there what are you know how do you go through every country and be like what is this group of people known for so you know the best you know I'm Canadian the best hockey players probably come from Canada you know is there a way to teach you know hockey remotely in some in some way or create a product that could teach it um and it doesn't necessarily everything doesn't need to necessarily be around teaching it could also be like doing things right like maybe the best editors live in a particular country and of course I don't want to like generalize and everything but like you kind of have to generalize a little bit you be like all right I'm staking the claim the best hockey payers are coming come from Canada or the people who know best quality of life are from France or something you know like teaching manners by people in England I don't know I'm making things up but I think that's a really interesting prompt for for thinking about uh how to how to how to create an experience around remote Talent I'm just thinking when you said hockey I don't play hockey or golf but I was like Wow imagine you've seen these drones that follow people now right um imagine if you could for the purpose of learning right you had a hockey stick and a hockey puck and they were both like somehow connected to sensors I one time did this golf lesson where we like analyzed our swing right and it was done with cameras but you could probably also do it with sensors and now imagine I'm like in my you know the lake behind my house or something or some practice ice and I could literally have someone watching me and watching the analytics on the devices I'm using and be and like in an airpod being like all right I need you to Archer back a little bit more and they could be doing this from anywhere in the world they could you know without having to be where I am and paying rents in the Bay Area and you know it would be great for everyone totally now I'm like what other where is there like I think what's changed is the ability to get all this information right like the fact that you couldn't see me here I'm at a computer that's one thing but small version I could put up a tripod and like go to the batting cages and I could probably get a and put an airpod in and someone could coach me on my my baseball swing and it's funny cuz uh our neighbors who have kids that are all three boys are into baseball and he's like this one of the best batting coaches is down in San Jose so they drive like an hour to San Jose for this batting coach to do like a batting lesson and I'm just like I don't know why didn't need to drive to San Jose like it seems like such you know like and why why does that batting coach need to have such a big yard that he can have a batting cage back there why why don't you just bring him with you and schedule a lesson out of place tot I actually literally had this issue like two days ago so I want to I I live in South Florida a lot of people play golf and I don't play golf and it's gotten to the point where I was invited to play golf with and one of the people who I was invited to play golf in a for Sim and Michael Jordan was one of the people in the forsome and I actually said no to it and I said no to it why because it's Michael Jordan if I don't you know I'm not gonna like I don't want to slow down Michael Jordan playing golf so I was like you know what this gives me the kick kick in the butt to actually learn to play golf and I Googled like golf classes or golf coaches and the PGA actually has a professional Golf Association actually has a list of people who they recommend in your area and I reached out to this person who who actually coaches a bunch of pro golfers and he was like I'm not driving 40 minutes to you and I was like fair but I'm also not driving 40 you know 40 minutes to you um so I I think there's something really smart here about Hardware like how do you create these spaces like I don't know if it's a golf simulation Zone um but something like that and incorporate people in other areas of course I don't want to pay someone who lives in Miami me who's super expensive but you know I would pay someone in Japan where you know $1 us is $160 n now and there's a huge currency Arbitrage trying to think of all the use cases for I mean there's just unlimited number here's a funny one and this is even easier I was trying to set up these cameras for a interview and I was like I just have some questions and this platform has failed every time there's so many companies that have started this I'm curious if if you think now anything's different like connect me with an expert for an amount of money that is you know smaller than you know they would normally make for like a house call so I was like there is a person that knows how to dial in the settings on a Sony camera and I the spectrum is like hire a video producer for a few hours that's going to cost hundreds and hundreds of dollars or thousands of dollars or watch YouTube videos and I still and maybe you have to do it in a niche maybe you don't but I haven't seen this work I remember multiple startups trying to do this where it's like you know you have an electric question you know you could pay $10 and ask your electric question I feel like sometime this is going to be solved like there is a person out there who would like to make $50 to spend five minutes answering these questions and I just don't know where they are who they are or how to connect with them yeah so I I actually forgot about that but about almost 10 years ago now when mobile is starting to take off there was a bunch of venture-backed companies I'm blanking on the names of them that was like ask a question and you're going to get an answer from experts and you have to pay for it do you remember the names of them I don't but I remember one and I even think Google launched one was an experiment yes they did they absolutely did and that was like help Google helpouts is what it was called oh yeah and Facebook even launched one didn't didn't Facebook launch one Google is shutting down helpouts in 5 yeah this exactly that and it failed exactly that's what it was and there was also a bunch of venture-backed ones that like they were just copying these Venture back startups but there was something so amazing about that idea I can ask a question and get like a real answer now fast forward to 2024 and you have Chad gbt for that so you could ask a question and you have ai that answers it that being said we're not you know a plumber is better than chat GPT right now uh in terms of asking some Plumbing questions would you agree uh yes and no there I actually had a couple Plumbing questions in the last few weeks and I would have I wish there was a does chat PD have a good way to search your history or do you just have to scroll to find to scroll uh your thing but I actually asked a few Plumbing questions and I was very surprised at how good the answer was but I had some follow-up questions that it was terrible at but the initial I was surprised at how much cuz uh my father-in-law builds homes and is just kind of like one of the people who just generally like knows everything about homes and Electric and Plumbing and so I was like should I call him I'm GNA ask Chad gbd first and I was like I got I got my answer um and then I did go down a rabbit hole of watching some YouTube videos that I didn't that was like wow now we're now we're in the weeds and I probably could have saved some time but electricians I think is the one where I've tried and failed and you've tried on chat gbt and you and yeah yeah here's my take after after going down this rabbit hole on this on this concept I think chat gbt and its competitors when it comes to like figuring out an answer and getting data on a question it's only getting better and better and they're going to win when it comes to education and experiences that's where people will prevail um because if I want someone to teach me how to play guitar there needs to be a certain amount of taste I think and also I'm I you talked about accountability I will feel more accountable to another person than I will to a robot always yeah every time so I mean I don't know if you saw the other day but uh levels levels uh Peter levels that's his name he launched um therapist AI where I can see that yeah and it's you know a lot of people hate it a lot of people don't like it at all but because they're saying like you can't just like say that you're laun you know there's an AI powered therapist because like you go to school to be a therapist and you get training to be a therapist um so yeah he he caused some controversy there but the um what he showed also on Twitter if you check his Twitter he showed what it would look like right now it just looks like chat GPT with you know you're basically talking to chat GPT that's what it looks like but in the future you'll be a he has like almost like an avatar it looks like a real person and you can hear um and we'll put it in the YouTube clip but you can hear uh um what your therapist is saying and like it feels like you're talking to a therapist but it still feels like you're talking to a 3D character interesting yeah it's CBD CBT do chat I think what is that I'm not sure no I'm trying to find this thing but it's not it's not therapist. but I think it's maybe it's hold on let me pull it up it is therapist ai.com okay okay and is that what it is oh there we go it's Al yeah it CBT do chat is the same URL okay but therapist ai.com is better it's a telegram app yeah that's even crazier and I'm sure this is to get around making this as a telegram app makes me think this probably isn't something that's licensed and and legal to do exactly but I love it it's a therapist app that's making like $36,000 a year and he just launched it like ARR that's amazing yeah there's so many ways to combine this but I agree the for me I don't think I the accountability is really important but I also wonder how much we can get to a place where that accountability is virtual like you get a text message did you work out today you know you get a text message like in French asking you a question and you have to reply to it and and it's all all virtual it's all you know AI I wonder if you can replace that accountability without having a phone call but also I don't know if you did that demo recently where it was like a call center you could like set up a basically a dentist appointment call center with AI and you would like call and make an appointment and it sounded like a person and they were actually listening and responding to you and it was pretty crazy yeah and I think I I it's obviously going to put a lot of people at a job customer service job I I just rented a car I just gave a back a car this morning I was renting it uh for a couple days and as I'm leaving it was an Enterprise as I was leaving an Enterprise the woman I could tell that the woman at the cash was like having a bad day and she just lost her mind on someone else and basically she was like I'm not going to give you a car like B oh here's what happened so woman was sitting in the chair customer was like I've been waiting here for an hour she's in nurse Garb and she was like I need to get to the hospital I have my shift and you told me you were going to get me a car an hour ago and I still don't have it and she goes I'm not giving you a car and she was like what do you mean you're not giving me a car it's not your decision like I booked it um and then the woman the nurse goes listen I I understand you're having a bad day but like you have to give me a car and then she goes I I'll give you a car if I want to give you a car robots won't do that yeah so yeah robots aren't gonna have bad days they might glitch and give you a helicopter instead of a car exactly um but yeah it's uh it's going to be interesting to see how actually I um I was looking at these two services is there two um sound mixers and one of them actually has some type of intelligence built into it so let's not call it AI yet but they were like hey this one's better for beginners because you can basically just start talking into the microphones and it will just like Auto calibrate everything for you and I was like well this is cool like imagine when you're buying Hardware like a camera that instead of like the Sony Auto you could tell it something be like oh recording a podcast like it used to always be choose a setting but if it could just adapt and say oh it looks like you're shooting a podcast so we just changed all of these things um like the Sony thing has like Auto and manual there's not and then sometimes there's like in the Middle where it's like I'm shooting a child but there are too many scenarios to have like 7,000 sliders where you're like let me scroll down to in-person podcast with three people you know at night in a room with you know well-lit you know professional lights um and you'll just start to bake all this into Hardware but that's not really an I mean there are some people listening who can go build that yeah if I were listening I'm not going to go build that totally uh so I'm trying to think what are the things I could go test this weekend that aren't go build Hardware go build software into hardware and and scale up manufacturing so what is that I mean Chris like you could build anything um you have 48 hours you have real not Noah Kagan question here yeah exactly we had exactly you have you have 48 hours to make a million dollars how do you do it I'm G to challenge The Prompt a little because I'm like well yes you didn't say I have to make the million dollars today I just have to kick something off that's going to make a million dollars if there's one thing that I've learned in the last I don't know 20 years it's that it's very hard to keep doing something for more than a couple years if you don't really really like it so for a while I just thought I was unemployable because I had a series of I had a series of jobs in a row that I just didn't like and I was like oh maybe I don't like jobs but I never really like took the time to figure out what I liked doing and I think that's really hard so you know if I had 48 hours to figure out how to make a million dollars and actually love doing it I would probably spend my 48 hours trying to figure out what kinds of things I enjoy doing because I'm not going to be able to get to to that million dollars uh if I don't have the longevity like some people are going to do it overnight right but most people it's going to take years and so kind of experimenting with that and I maybe I'd spend some of that time like interviewing my friends and you know my spouse about what makes me tick sometimes like seeing things in yourself is really hard when I started a podcast about life optimization it was so funny every single person I knew was like well of course you did and I was like what do you mean of course I did why didn't you tell me that 20 years ago it took me 20 years to come to this career that 20 years ago probably would have you know would have loved but I didn't realize it I didn't put the pieces together but I imagine if I'd taken the skills that I had as a product manager interviewing customers and asking questions trying to figure out the five y's what if I just appli that to myself and Ed like my peers and friends and you know colleagues and family as my customer research panel could I arrive at things about what I'm uniquely qualified to do what I'm passionate about that would have been harder for myself maybe I could just use an AI therapist and be like help me figure out like imagine if I went through chat GPD help me figure out what I'm good at ask me questions until we you know come up with a business idea that would be something I would love doing AI might be actually pretty good at that so when we were growing up everyone told us do what you're passionate right did you did you get that advice you must be a little younger but I feel like somewhere slightly after I graduated college I'm about to turn 40 so somewhere slightly after I graduated college I feel like that was happening but I don't feel like that was the message yet in the Zeitgeist of like me looking for my first job because I mean my first job I was looking for a job at like an investment bank because I was like that's the most like amazing job you can get out of college it certainly wasn't that I was passionate about it it was like that's the best job um so but I will say in the years that followed that seemed to be the norm everyone's like go pursue your passion do the thing your pass I don't know if I totally I think it's good to know your passion but like that doesn't mean it can be your job tomorrow well here I'll challenge that a bit so here's my take I am yeah I'm 35 so I'm 5 years young you know five years younger and when I was growing up that was the prevailing wisdom do it do it you're passionate and and everything will work out and the reality is then the you know great financial crisis hit a lot of us couldn't get jobs and the the reality is it wasn't true like it turns out that if you're passionate about some you know Niche Niche topic it you know you can't make money during you know doing it now fast forward to today I I would say that if you're really passionate about something and it's niche enough you can't just be like I'm passionate about sports you can't just no that's a cop out answer um then you probably have an unfair advantage to build media so create a podcast create videos go on YouTube whatever and if you can do that then you can attract an audience and if you can attract an audience then all the next step is you have to be passionate about learning how to build stuff so basically I think everyone should become a product manager in that sense what is a product manager I don't mean like I know you're you're thinking like Google product manager and there's like 40 layers of YY I mean like a product owner forget product manager product owner like a builder a builder exactly a builder so if you had going back to the question if you had 48 hours wouldn't you just try to figure out what you're really passionate about and then try to come up with like how am I going to create content AKA media that's going to attract as many people as possible and then figure it out from there I think it depends where like I actually reflected a lot on this with my own podcast I don't think it would be where it is today if I had launched it with the same type of Interest 20 years ago not because of the market like you know if I could freeze myself in a time machine and launch it you know the same day I launched the podcast except I'm now launching it with you know 20 years less experience if you will I don't think it would have been the same I think there were a lot of lessons along the way that enabled it to be more successful and so I would say you know you could try it but I would not like throw in the towel on getting real experience building at some other company before you you know just commit to a life of your passion as a project I also think you know it took me a while to realize actually what that passion is is my passion um you know deals no is my passion like breaking some system down and figuring out how it works maybe we're getting closer but you could argue people knew me for you know deals and points and miles and all that stuff but if you told me to go create social media Clips it would have been a disaster like I didn't like even though I'm passionate about a topic doesn't mean that the medium is right and so the only way that I kind of came to podcasts was I tried out all these different mediums in another part of my life running a business and realized that there is one that I felt like I was more comfortable during so maybe it's like test out all the mediums over the weekend figure out the areas you're interested in but if you're really interested in personal finance right you could start a podcast you could write a newsletter you could build a spreadsheet template like it's it's more Niche than even the category it's like let's say you're really into sports okay we already said two wide now you're really into sports cards right you could go become a sports card Trader or you could build a model that allows you to analyze sports cards and sell that model like sell a spreadsheet you've built like I've done this now by the time this airs I will have launched two versions of a a spreadsheet that I built um so that's very different than creating a podcast right and like that might be you so you got to figure out like what is the thing you like doing and the thing the topic and the process so if you like building companies if you like hiring and managing people if you like you know coding if you like uh talking sharing it could be anything and I'd pick one of those and and start to do it but even the best on lots of these channels spent years how many videos did like Mr Beast produce before any of them took off like a thousand mkb mkdh same thing like the T time it takes to commit to the platform for almost everyone that doesn't already have some audience is so long that I would say find your p passion and pursue it while you're getting tangible real skills that can pay your bills because like chances are that side project with is not going to is not going to be that right away there are people that are not going to listen and those are the people that are probably going to go build the crazy thing so you know that's great but for the average person I think it's not going to happen overnight in 48 hours like Noah kagan's million dollar weekend is like you know it's not build a company that's doing a million dollars of Revenue it's like valid an idea and I had I had an interesting conversation with Andy rackliffe who started Benchmark Capital One of the best returning Venture funds of all time and then went on to start wealth front and he was saying you need to be passionate about like the industry but you might not need to be like so passionate about the exact specific company you work at so find a thing that you love and let someone else pay for you to go deep on it if you're really passionate about hockey go get some job related to hockey while you're thinking about your side projects because there's a lot about whatever industry you want to work in that I think you will unlock by getting more experience I'm sure all the uh I'm sure all the follow your dreams and don't don't go get a full-time job people are hating this but I think there is a a ton of value I picked up from you know 15 or so years of working at companies that made my thing feel easier than it actually was I get it but if you were going to you know if you were going to be building media today meaning if you're going to pick a niche and go after it where where do you think would be interesting you know niches to go after like where's the biggest opportunities right now as we're recording this to be building content like what type of media what topics topic oh so topics not platform exactly topics okay um well I think I think we just established that the topic really just has to be something that you can provide a unique perspective on that is the most valuable thing so if you pick a topic like I could tell you o I think there's a really big opportunity in you you know childhood education but you have no experience with kids and no interest in it it's kind of irrelevant right like um whereas if that's your thing you could go build an Empire like Emily Oster and Becky Kennedy have in that space like there's a lot of opportunities so here's where one where like the answer to that question is actually pursue your passion right like go become an expert with a unique perspective on a thing whether those are hot takes or deep analysis or you know access to other Minds I don't think that matters but it has to be an area that I think is somewhat uncovered and I think given the current nature of media it has to be smaller and smaller right like I have a friend who's launching a micro course and I was like okay this is super interesting because I you know like you you want to talk about micro course this guy's launching a course on how to use miles and points to go to Japan like it's not here's a course on credit cards it's not here's a course on redeeming your points it is a course Point course on how to redeem your points to go to Japan and I think that right now search algorithms and content Discovery is getting better and better and better such that you it's going to be really hard to break through if you're like trying to be Broad in some topic but if it's like I'm going to make hockey videos on you know how the stick should connect with the puck I mean someone listen that plays more hockey he's like that's not about it's about the Arc of your AR I don't know but like that's going to do better than like I'm just G to have a hockey show you know like maybe it's the I'm gonna have a show that's really only relevant for the first year you're learning to play hockey after that don't even listen like this is who that's for and maybe you have your audience grows up with you and you take them on that journey and now three years from now it's something different because you're someone different but I was just so excited when this this friend of mine instead of trying to launch one of a thousand courses on how to use your points in Miles he's like I am launching redeemed miles for Japan and redeem miles for the Maldives those are his two courses yeah so I think it it goes back to outcomes like mapping out all the different outcomes and mini outcomes of particular topic area and Niche and then creating unique content that's packaged well and you can't lose doing that and I want to talk about one more thing related to that because I always had a conversation with uh Dicky Bush and Nicholas Cole so they they have a bunch of courses they do millions of dollars a year in the writing space so they have something called chip 30 for 30 and PGA professional ghost Writing Academy and they've done really really well and one time I remember asking Cole who's your competition are you worried about your competition he says the only slice I want to own is start writing there's going to be a ton of other content around writing online and writing and writing books and no no no I just want to focus on start writing actually he said start writing online if you wantan to if you want to be a person who doesn't write online and you want to get to writing online you come to us and I think that was such a smart way of putting it because yeah to your point it's like almost like it feels mini but it's it's it's not yeah and and if there's an area that you want to get bet like here's a great example of this isn't necessarily a startup idea but maybe it is there are a lot of people out there who have audiences that are terrible at or or don't even participate in certain verticals so if you're like I've realized that hockey and writing is my Niche okay well you want to get some experience doing hockey and writing why not find a hockey Creator who's big and has a huge audience and does no writing and just go get the Reps in like I think that one of the things that I was listening to an episode of all-in and chamath was describing how he thought he had an opportunity to go work at apple and this is after Facebook like has enough money that doesn't need a job and he's he's like I would drop anything to go work uh for Steve Jobs at Apple like learning this thing like he was one of those people that's like I don't care about going back to the drawing board for my career to get an opportunity to do this thing and I think it's a trait of many successful people and it's funny it came up in my interview with Andy he's like this guy was always defending wealthfront from trolls on the internet and he had no experience in product or anything but he loved the wealth front product and Andy reached out to him he's like you're always talking about wealth front I just wanted to get to know you and then he was like I would love to work at wealthfront he's like I don't have any tangible skills he's like come do product support and it's like our customer support function and if you crush it there we'll find a home and this guy went from product support to product to another company where he became the VP of product that had a billion plus dollar outcome and had a super successful career in product but he was willing to take his probably like I don't know manager senior manager level role at another industry and reset to do customer support for two years so that he could get the Reps in at a kind of company he wanted to work at and and I think people just don't they want to skip that path and it's so hard to skip that path so I'm not doing a lot with social media if someone was like I am super passionate about social media and I love your content was like can I help with this area most successful people it's not like you have to do it for free like I don't think gone are the days of like go be a unpaid intern hopefully any successful business that's sees value in your skills are willing to pay you but you might not own the brand but but you'd get to test your skills at scale and I think that is something I would encourage anyone who is trying to get into content creation it's an alternative path yes you could go start your own newsletter or you could go find someone who has a not great newsletter in an area you're passionate about and ask to run it and by the way there are multiple creators I know who I've realized this has happened to them and they set up really lucrative deals like you come over take over my YouTube channel and you can keep 30% of the revenue from YouTube or something like deals like that where you're bringing someone in to own a vertical and giving them real upside so yeah You Don't Own 100% of the upside of a newsletter that you would start but you might own 30% of the upside of a newsletter that has a massive audience that you can start with and if that works it's not like there's only ever going to be one newsletter in a topic right like you go leave and start your own thing uh so I think you have a lot of opportunities and obviously find the right person to work with but I don't know I feel like there's something cool there what do you think I feel like you would say no go start your own thing don't go work for someone else I I would say both like go work for someone because you can do things at scale and test at scale and there's especially in Social specifically social and product you know when you when you launch a new feature to millions of people or hundreds of thousands of people you really pay attention to what that product is is and if it's dialed versus you're just putting it to potentially no one or same with social like you're tweeting to a million people versus just tweeting to 100 people like you really you really instinctively over time learn about how to connect with people and you can take that in the future and and apply that to your own products so I would say go work for someone but at the same time go also be testing what you're learning on the side yeah I think that's fair there's a really cool example um Ben Wilson was the producer for my first million for a b a long time and he had his own podcast called how to take over the world and so on his own on the side he's building this podcast it was really great but also he wanted to learn how to like work inside of a podcast that was operating at a lot greater scale and was a great producer and his show got mentioned and referenced like dozens of times on my first million which aggressively grew the audience on his show because it turns out growth is hard but if you have really high quality content like you can land really cool big growth like step functions that will make it possible now he's on his own doing his own thing um I think he's also turned his production role into an outsourced like agency business where he'll help other people do production um in that newsletter example it's like find a Creator that's doing not doing newsletters about an area you're passionate about go help them spin up a newsletter function figure out how that works then reach out to other creators and be like we'll help you spin up a newsletter function now you've got this agency business now you've been able to promote your own newsletter about your own thing you love now you've got you know three streams of revenue for a project that started out as something that's a side hustle and now you can afford to leave one of them if you don't want to I love it Chris we went down a lot of rabbit holes today as expected this is the most messy episode we've ever done but it is filled with gold filled with gold we you know there's probably like seven 10 startup ideas you know meaning of life and we didn't even go down the path I texted you about which was like this uh Mass affluent market so I feel I feel like I'll challenge people to think about that too well give me give us you're going to have to come on another time but give us uh give us one last startup idea around that macro Trend yeah so what's interesting is mercury which is a bank for businesses recently launched a bank for consumers Mercury Personal Banking and they charge $240 a year and everyone I know oh you got look at that you got a book I got a iPhone case um I thought it was interesting how do they choose which promotional product to send people which marketing thing uh but what was crazy was nobody pays for banking like that's not a thing that ever really existed but they realized that there was this Gap in the market between what serves High net worths and what serves the average customer and the needs in the middle weren't being met and so they said look people who are in this like Mass affluent bucket where they have disposable income maybe they're making a couple Investments here or there like they understand the value of earning yield on their money but they also o want a premium product experience because they're a little younger they're digital native kind of millennial gen Z but also they need to send some wires and there wasn't really anything in the market for them and people are willing to pay now in the long run do they end up lowering the interest rate enough to make it free because people just hate annual fees maybe like I think that's possible but finding a a place in the market to serve something in between I think think is really really interesting and it seems like there's always the cheap end and the super expensive end and I feel like there's going to be more products and services targeting the kind of mass affluent group of people which would be like maybe it's like just another way to say upper middle class or lower upper class I don't know like but like you know enough disposable income that they'll spend $250 a year on their bank or they'll spend you know not me today but they'll spend like uh you know $2 for water right like it's a little bit of a branding thing but for water maybe that's not the right example because it's certainly not the feature Set uh but if you can build a premium feature set you can charge for it and I wonder how many Industries have been erased for the bottom where building something a bit more premium might differentiate like I I feel like there will be a service if Uber hadn't built Uber Lux and Uber black someone could have come in and done something like that um that's probably a bad example because the scale you need to build something is uh like uber is not there but what I I challenge people to think what industries have become such a race for the bottom that there's a big hole in the middle well yeah I think what what you can do you know going back to the how do you make a million dollars in 48 hours is like I would look at uh not the biggest SAS apps but the SAS apps doing between a million dollars a year and $40 million a year um and say okay who is this targeting is this for everyone so is this like the Zoho which is like the Costco of SAS or is this the higher higher end which is like a you know it might not feel like high-end but HubSpot is like a higher end product uh it's like more expensive or Salesforce it's more expensive and then could I create something that's like premium and I think a big part of it is also like signaling I don't know if you disagree with me but I think you know a lot of people like to say oh I don't you know I don't use uh Chase or I don't use Wells Fargo I use mercury I think that's a big I feel the same way about super oh really tell me more about that email so I mean they did this like email was free free free Gmail's free Yahoo's free everybody's launching free email and they're like look we're not going to do the email we're just going to be interface for it and it's going to be better and it's $30 a month and people are like you want me to pay for email and they're like why don't you use it for a month and you use it and you're like [ __ ] this is amazing like superhuman I I've been trying to get them to be a sponsor of the show because I'm like such a big fan and it took me two years finally happened um but it just makes email so much better and in that use case it's almost like they took Enterprise features and applied them to Consumers which I think the more people become you know multi- income multi- job the more we're going to be treating ourselves like businesses and so tools like Mercury which is basically like I want business banking for myself I want business email for myself um I think there's just going to be an endless number of products and services that become more like something that was Enterprise SAS for consumers and superhumans just I don't know do you superhuman or do you pay for email or do you I'm surprised that you pay for email honestly I'm shocked I mean you're drinking Kirkland you're sipping on Kirkland uh sparkling water so here's the thing I genuinely think I can get through I think I probably can save 30 minutes a day on email with how many emails do you get a day let's call it 200 see that seems like a lot of email I feel like I don't get that much email and you're including like a newsletter that kind of stuff I guess I probably get like a 100 emails a day yeah okay so all the little things that you can do from like quickly responding like the instant intro this is like for someone like you and I it's like my favorite feature someone emails as like hey imagine I get an email from you hey Chris I want to connect you with my friend Ted and I'm like in one keyboard shortcut it pops up and says Greg thanks Greg to BCC hi Ted moves Greg to BCC moves Ted to the two field um all automatically I use all Snippets I don't know I am uh I'll give it a shot I'll give it a shot and you definitely if you or anyone else alth hacks.com superhuman first month free I worked hard to get them to become a sponsor so check it out no I'll use that I'll check that out um and they do on the premium thing one thing they do that's really smart is when you sign up I bet you'll get an email for scheduling like a session for them to like train you on it and I just think it's so valuable for lockin to like teach your customers how to use your product better um I think notion is a product that doesn't do like I I have so many people I know that love notion but they don't know how to use it and so there's this whole Marketplace of templates I have a a no-brainer business idea we'll end on this where if someone wants to do it hit me up at Greg Eisenberg um on Twitter okay it's an agency that basically does these onboarding calls for companies so you approach a notion and you you know you hire some of the old let's say superhuman onboarding Specialists and stuff like that so you create this team this customer support team and you go to yeah let's say notion you say like hey today you're no you're not doing these like onboarding calls we'll do it for you we're going to manage the process end to endend we're going to learn everything about your product we're going to make amazing we have this like special method for how we go about doing it and you're going to see a lift of retention and how much is that worth to you and they're going to come back and they be like well if you were able to increase retention 8% that's worth $30 $ million a year it's like great okay give me one to $3 million a year and let's make it happen I think it's brilliant I think any product that charges some amount of recurring Revenue that's 20 30 bucks per person or user would massively increase adoption training someone and maybe that's something like an AI version of clippy from like the old Microsoft Office days can do but I just feel like I'm so there are so many tools that I use that I'm not using to their full potential and they would be really smart to do that Chris I love it been a pleasure uh all the hacks where could people find it all the hacks you just said it all the hacks.com all the hacks on search your podcast app search YouTube search my name I feel like you know you can find it I TR I have faith in this audience at finding anything yeah if you can find it you're not looking for the hacks you're probably you probably shouldn't be listening to that yeah all right thanks man thanks for having me I love these J later [Music]

Channel: Greg Isenberg

Views: 12,192

Keywords: startup ideas, sip, entrepreneur podcast, business ideas, business trends, best chrome extensions, cody schneider, ai ideas, ai business, entrepreneur advice, business advice, b2b podcast, CHRIS HUTCHINS, life hacker, startup advice, career advice, million dollar business ideas, All The Hacks, Business Strategy, Financial Optimization, life hacks

Id: vDV6oV56TAQ

Length: 64min 15sec (3855 seconds)

Published: Wed May 15 2024