277 - Best of 2025! Turning AI Ideas Into Real Income with Chris Koerner

0:00I feel like this is the most underrated things in AI right now. No one's talking about it. So there's a guy on Twitter, Pitch Deck guy. He goes and he scrapes SEC filings when people launch a new fund or anything. And he will do cold outreach to them and say, hey, congratulations. I'd love to make a Pitch Deck for you. Here's my portfolio. What does he charge? $3 ,500. Nick, Manus has an API that could be fully automated as of today. You're just like giving value to them right away. It's genius. Oh my gosh, that's a great idea. How easy would it be? At first I was like, this is just deep research.

0:27Now, here's what Perplexity Labs does. How do we make money on this?

0:34Okay, so I am chock full of ideas today, but I have one that's literally 10 minutes old. Like I just bought the domain name 10 minutes ago and Replit is building it literally as I speak because I just can't wait. I'm not going to lie, Nick, you kind of inspired this idea. Oh, am I going to be offended by this? No, no, you're not. You're not. So recently on your podcast, Nickonomics, you've been asking people every day, how are they're using AI, right? It's true. And so I've just been thinking of that question. How are you using AI? How are you using AI? And it's like, I feel like that's going to become a standard question over the next decade, right?

1:11It's like, what do you do for work? What do you do for work? That question will never get old. But instead, it's going to be not, it's going to replace it. But it's going to be that type of question where it's like, oh, how are you using AI, right? Because that is the hardest part with all of this is just thinking of how to use it. Like, oh my gosh, this new feature is amazing. It's going to change the world. How do I use it? Or more importantly, where in my business or where in my life do I apply this? Because I just don't know. And it's too much. You don't even know where to start. You don't even know which question to ask to get started.

1:38Like, okay, which of these tools do I even use to get started? I totally agree. Yeah. Okay. So I went to Namecheap and I looked up how do you use AI.com and it was not taken. No. It was not taken. So I bought it. and then such a good name it's a good name i'm going to share my screen and i went to google trends i did this after i bought it to be fair and i'm sharing the google trends chart of the phrase how do you use ai it peaked like at the local peak was february which is interesting i think operator maybe operator came out in february that's the operator yep that sounds about right but it's still climbing like if you're just listening it's a it's a good looking chart okay and so i started thinking and this is literally 10 minutes old so this is probably a bad idea at this point but you'll help me make it a good one right yeah right and i'm not thinking of a billion dollar idea right now i'm just thinking of a wrapper some sort of a website a gimmicky website maybe a newsletter something this is what i have replet building me right now can i read you the prompt yes okay i want to build a website where people can merely submit ideas to others of how they are using AI.

2:45This is the key. But you can only see everyone else's use cases once you submit your own use case. And then you can upvote others ideas of how to use AI after you submit your own. So it's like you have to give to the system before you get back from the system. You got to give. You got to give. Did you give? And then they can subscribe to be notified of all the top upvoted ways people are using AI every week. So upvotability, you can't see anything on the website until, and when you go to the website, it's just an open cursor box, just like you see on Replit or Chagipity or anything. And you can type in ABCD and get something.

3:24It doesn't matter, right? And then once you type it in, you can see a bunch of use cases. You can upvote, yada, yada, yada. And then as like a newsletter play or an email capture play, you could say, hey, we'll take the top five most upvoted ideas and email them to you every week. What do we think? I love it. I think it's an amazing idea. It's kind of how I feel about AI, generally speaking, is it's an idea generator. I'm the guy who's in a group. When we're trying to figure something out, I'll throw out the first bad idea because we kind of need that first bad idea at least to just second through 13th.

3:55Maybe all of them. Maybe every idea is a bad idea. Maybe every idea that comes up that's bad in that conversation is they're all from you for instance but when you're brainstorming you need somebody to throw out something first and then you can make a decision it's it's kind of like when you're at home and your wife's like hey honey do you like the blue color for this wall or the yellow color for this wall no matter what you say she's going to go with the opposite it just finally gives her an opportunity to be like yeah i don't like that i'm going to go the other way right yeah that's kind of how that's how i view ai is i get like the first iteration from it and i'm like i don't like that and then i start working with it so i yeah i think there's a ton of demand from people just to hear how other people are using ai just for an idea that they can kind of steal and apply to their life or like if you want her to spend time with you you say here hey do you want do you want to spend time with raul or myself tonight your private tennis coach and you always suggest raul because then she'll hang out with you right yeah you know oddly oddly enough she she just always tends to pick raul it's really weird no matter there's really no correlation to what i say yeah and sometimes she doesn't even wait for my answer it's like she knew what i was thinking okay here's why i like this idea again you and i don't talk before we do these things one of my ideas today is i love personality quizzes i know everybody does because you're like, I want to know which house of Gryffindor or, you know, which house of Hogwarts I would be in.

5:25Am I Gryffindor? Am I Slytherin? And you do this personality quiz. Like my son, he wants to know which Marvel character he is. Like we all want to know what our personalities are. And I've actually, I've created a few of these. I'm going to, I'm going to share my screen. Hang with me for a second. I promise that this is going to make sense. I interviewed a bunch of people for my podcast and I was just like trying to figure out what, what do they do with AI? And so from all of their answers, I was able to kind of understand which LLMs people use for which use cases. I went to ChatTBT and I was like, help me create this quiz based off of all of this data.

5:54And so it helped me create this quiz. I went then to Lovable and here it is, right? This is the entrepreneur's guide to LLMs, which AI model is right for your business. And there's ChatTBT, there's Claw, there's Perplexity, and there's Grok. And the quiz helps you identify which AI model aligns with your specific business goals, your ideal AI implementation strategy, and which AI tools deliver the highest ROI for your situation. You know, you start the quiz and then it just starts asking you questions. What's your comfort level of tech, et cetera, et cetera. I'm not going to go through the whole thing.

6:19It's a great idea. But to your point, the thing that AI is really good at right now, these LLMs is taking a ton of data, filtering it and kind of regurgitating it in a way that is concise. It's not yet good at creating novel ideas, but it's really good at taking a lot of information and synthesizing it and giving it to you. So along the lines of what you're talking about, I think that there are tons of opportunities to use AI to give other people ideas of how to use AI. This is one example. This will give you an idea of like, should I go with Grok? Should I go with ChatTBT? Should I go with Google?

6:56You know, which one of those you go through this quiz, you answer some questions, and it just spits out a general, hey, you're not very tech savvy, just go ChatTBT. It's the best user interface, right? But I think there's a million sort of niche implementation or offerings that you can create around this. How do you know yourself better? Like, I'll just go through this really quickly. I'm just going to click on some of these blah, blah, blah. And I'll show you at the very end. This is what it looks like. And again, it's using the LLMs. Of course, I got to have a gating mechanism. You got to put in your email if you want to see your score.

7:28Boom. Here's my profile. I'm the client whisperer. Yeah. My primary model is Claude. And then it gives me all the reasons for that, et cetera. So your idea, which is like a community of sharing idea. And in order to get into it, you've got to give. I think it's freaking brilliant because it just automatically gets people to engage. This is another type of idea playing on that. How do you get AI to reach into you and your insights and give you a recommendation of what might or might not be useful to you? And obviously this is one way I've kind of applied it. That is amazing. How long did this take you realistically?

8:02So this was the first time I did it. So it took me a couple of hours. If I were to do it now, probably an hour. Because what you have to do is I have to take all the data, synthesize it, put it in a format where then I can go to ChatGPT and say, hey, create the quiz for me. And then ChatGPT creates the quiz. And then I go to lovable and I go back and forth, blah, blah, blah. And then it creates this. So it's honestly doesn't take that much intellectual power. It just kind of takes some time to go through the steps. I'm sure there's a way I could even automate it. I just haven't done it. This is beautiful.

8:33So can I keep building on this? Yeah, please. Okay. So along this idea, I think there's a huge opportunity for someone to step into this space. You've heard of Dribbble. Okay. And there's another company, WellFound. I was doing some research. Contra. These are niche job boards, effectively, where they're only targeting one specific skillset. Dribbble is very specific. These are designers. WellFound, I believe, is very specific. It's like angel list job listings or something like that. So these are VC, angel listing startups. But they've found a niche. They're not in everything to everybody. I think by coupling this quiz idea with a job board, you could match job seekers and job offerers, employers with each other that's personality-based and not necessarily skill or background-based.

9:23Because many times you get into a position, it's like, oh, they just didn't mesh. They weren't a cultural fit. And most companies, is my belief, If they're a cultural fit, you can kind of train them on the things that you want them to do. So you could apply this thing to any niche globally. You could apply this to any niche. You could build a company that's just matching people who are digital designers for painting companies. Maybe that's too specific, but I think pretty easily you could build a wrapper. You could build a software platform, et cetera. That's like high level VC land tech opportunity.

9:53But I think for smaller companies, so for people like you and I, we could create our own internal quizzes. is you're hiring people for your content team. I'm hiring people for my content team. Like a Myers-Briggs for the culture that we want to see in our companies. Exactly. And we have so much data about us, right? We can say like, hey, chattypt, create a quiz that somebody can take that will mesh with me. Hey, I don't know if you remember this, but when we started this podcast, we entered into a social contract. I would spend time, energy, and money producing this podcast, interviewing these individuals and giving you insights into how to build, buy, start, grow your business.

10:29And you would like, subscribe, and leave me five-star review. Now, out of that, we both get to talk to really cool people and hear really cool insights. We both get a ton of value. But I just want to help you keep your word. So would you do me a favor? Will you go leave a five-star review for me on Apple or Spotify? It would really help. And if you want, even share this with a friend. A quiz that will prove if someone is good working for someone that's very insecure. You know what I'm saying? yeah like for that would be for you not that would be for me that would be for me yeah yeah it's asymmetric right like i don't have to pay for the for myers-briggs access i don't have to have them log into a specific website or get credentials for it's like hey i created this wrapper take this quiz i want to see if we're a mesh and at least it would give me some insights into where their strengths and weaknesses are so that would be like an internal thing that pretty much any company pretty easily could create a route that would do that.

11:27Dude, dude, what are you going to pay a recruiter to place someone? Like we're talking 30 % of first year salary? 10 to 30%. I mean, it just depends on the role. Let's say it's 10. Yeah. $150 ,000 a year salary,$10 ,000 to place someone. Let's say you set up an automation to message everyone on LinkedIn that is in HR or in hiring. And you say, listen, I match people with HR departments based on their personality type or their culture fit. But this is very unique. I want to know exactly what your company's culture fit is. Would you mind simply taking this quick quiz? And I'm going to tell you exactly what your score is.

12:04And then worst case scenario, I send you some qualified applicants. And then that hiring decision maker, they fill this out. And it might take 10, 20 minutes. It's like a type form. You don't know when it ends. You've got sunk cost fallacy. You're just answering, answering, answering. And it's building a person, like an archetype of your company, exactly the type of person that you like to hire. Right. And then it spits out a result. It's like a numerical result or something. And then on the other side of that equation, you send a similar quiz that matches it up with job seekers. And then you can send notifications to the hiring managers of saying, hey, let's say it's a scale of one to 100.

12:42Hey, your perfect score of a perfect candidate is an 87. look at these 87s that we just found that just filled out the same form right look at these 85 to 88s that we just found and then you could match them place them dude okay i'm gonna go on the other side of it this could be a massive differentiator for any company that they build their own quiz it's like hey and i don't know you're better at this than i am i don't know how they would get people to take it but let's say they build their own quiz it's a lead magnet people start taking it and then they're just they're just building in order to get the quiz results you've got to put your email in.

13:14So they're just building this list where anytime they have an open position coming up, they can go to the list and be like, Oh yeah, Shonda eight, five, seven. She was a nine in these skillsets. Let's reach out to her. So let's think of a company that has a really good, they could white label it from us. Right. Yeah. Like they would use it internally. Yeah. Or let's use you an example as an example. How many followers do you have across platforms now? 3 million, 3 million. Let's say that you decided next week that you're like, Hey guys, I built this cool quiz with AI. It only took me 20 minutes.

13:45Check it out. And it was specifically for this. Like it was asking questions about potential employees for every video that you post. How many views do you get? 800 ,000. Okay. 800 ,000 to a million. And let's just say 1 % of those people. So 8 ,000 people to 10 ,000 people actually go and fill out the survey. You've got 10 ,000 people who filled out the survey with an email address that you can go at any time now to query. If you're looking for a position, if you're like, Oh, I need an accountant. Oh, I need a whatever social media manager. I'm going to go look at this list right now and see how many of them actually matched with my company's culture score.

14:21It's a no brainer. Dude, think about that for HR department, even like big companies, HR departments, they could easily build this within an HR department. It's not hard. Yeah. And you don't even have to include questions about their skills. It could only be questions about their personality, you know, totally. Or their, their preferences. Do you ask any random questions in your interviews? Yeah. What are some of them? Historically throughout your life, what have you been abnormally obsessed with? One question that I always ask is, which one of these scenarios stresses you out more? Being dropped into the middle of a foreign country with no plan, no itinerary, no idea where you are, or going to a foreign country and every minute of every day that you're there is scheduled out to a T and you have no flexibility to do anything outside of what's scheduled for you.

15:14Now, which one of those would give you more stress? This is scheduled one. Yeah. It's the second one, right? Like, so usually if I'm interviewing a marketer, to be honest, if they're like, oh, the first one would trust me out more. I'm like, yeah, you're not going to be a good cold caller. Like if you don't do good in ambiguity, I'm not. And I know like there are a lot of other factors there, but that's one of the questions that I ask. So to me, the whole quiz would be those types of questions. It's not going to be like, how would you rate yourself as a team player? Because everybody's going to answer that question the way that they think the employer wants to hear it.

15:45That's good. That's like asking, like, because if you ask them, do you have a high tolerance for ambiguity? Absolutely, I do. But you don't really know if that's true. If that's what you're really getting at, right? Right. Another just quick interview question I love is kind of, it's very similar to yours. I think I stole this from My First Million, but it was like, what was the last project you spent all night working on? or lost sleep over like i just want to hear what they nerd out about like what are you obsessed with that's a really interesting question okay can i go next yeah all right so have you played around at all with manis's new feature of creating pitch decks no i've read about it but i have not played with i feel like this is the most underrated things in ai right now no one's talking about it why aren't we talking about this i'm going to share my screen while you're pulling that up so I've messed with GPT-40, right?

16:35And the PDFs and the slide decks that they can build are incredible, but you have to build them sequentially and you have to build them one at a time. It's not just going to spit out 10 slides for your slide deck. So what you're saying is Manus actually spits out the whole deck. Holy crap. I'm going to share my screen. All right. So this is Manus. This is my prompt. This is the whole thing. Make a PowerPoint deck for me showing the growth of the RV park industry. Like no details, nothing. Okay. And it worked, it worked, it worked, it worked for 12 minutes and 31 seconds. And it spit out this. 12 slides.

17:11Holy crap. Where did it get that? Hold on, go back to the first picture. Dude, I could be wrong. Have you used this picture before in an RV deck? It looks really familiar. It looks like one that I have used, but I don't think I've used this exact one. Okay. But I mean, look at this. Oh my, North American market growth, RV ownership. This looks like the deck that I use. for the same purpose now does manis do you have this deck in manis like is it pulling from stuff you've already created or is this no totally honest about rv park stuff yeah i didn't teach it anything isn't that crazy so when i use chat gpt it spits it out as a pdf it's uneditable is this editable it spit it out as a ppt as a powerpoint really yeah holy crap man so side quest here.

18:00How much are you using Manus right now? Not that much. I just started playing around with it when this new feature came out. I was using it a month or two ago, but I just moved on. What were you using it for a month or two ago? It's like agentic-like features. It kind of acts like operator, but it wasn't as good in my experience. And so when I didn't like that output, I just, I went back to ChetGPT. What are people using Manus for right now? Manus. Yeah, that's what I said. I think they're using it for this a lot. I don't know. It's a Chinese owned company. And so kind of TBD on what's happening with our data here.

18:41But we'll see. I think it'll work out, but we'll see. How big is the pitch deck industry? It's multi-billions. The corporate world is built on. Pitch decks. Pitch decks. Yeah. Yeah. It's the modern idea conveyor. Yes. Yeah. So there's a guy on Twitter. I think he's the pitch deck guy and his whole business. This is it. He goes and he scrapes like the filings, SEC filings. When people launch a new fund or anything, you know, people that are about to need a really nice pitch deck and he will do cold outreach to them in the right time, the right moment and say, Hey, I saw you launched a fund for buying single family homes.

19:20Congratulations. I'd love to make a pitch deck for you. Here's my portfolio. What does he charge? 3 ,500 bucks. Love it. and they look really good they're really good so nick manis has an api who's stopping you or anyone from building an agent or an app or anything it could be just an automation with with gumloop or lindy or zapier that scrapes all those sec filings the funds that are launched permissionlessly goes to manis through the api and says here's all the information for this fund i I want you to make a really good looking pitch deck. According to these pitch decks, I want it to have this design and send it back to me.

20:00Boom. You get it. Then you go to Apollo or any other feature that finds people's contact information and you cold email the pitch deck to them with watermarks that says, hey, congratulations on the fund. I made you a pitch deck. Would you like to buy this? Here's the first five slides. That could be fully automated as of today. Okay. So there's the pitch deck guy and then there's Matthew Gore. I had him on my podcast he's the pitch deck cowboy he has like that's his business as he built pitch decks for people yeah funny story really quickly I was on my way to Bogus Basin in Boise Idaho I'm buying a freaking burrito at this random place order it I'm picking it up and this guy next to me goes are you on Twitter and I was like uh why yes I am it's like are you co-founders Nick I'm like yeah yeah it's like I'm the pitch deck guy I'm like wait what it's like yeah yeah I'm the pitch deck guy I live in Dallas but I'm actually from Boise so just like random Chances.

20:53Randomly on my way up the hill, I met him, which was, which is crazy. Yeah. Totally random. I think that the ability to convey a story is like so valuable that most people think of pitch decks as like, Oh, a major presentation, or I'm trying to raise money, or it's like something super serious. I think just the ability of pitch decks to convey any idea is so valuable that yes, there's the sec filings, but you could permissionlessly offer this as a marketing agency as a way to get clients. You're like, hey, Ethan Driscoll, this would be a perfect cold outreach for him just to permissionlessly have Manis take all of his ideas, put them into a slide deck by scraping whatever the list is that he's created off the internet and just generate business that way.

21:38Yeah. I love your idea. I also think there's a bunch of different applications you could use for cold outreach. Dude, two more ideas. You heard of slideshare.net? No. It's either five or 10 million visits a month. What the fuck? Okay. It's just a website for uploading your slides, your decks to like to be hosted, to be viewed. Right. So if you go to slideshare.net, you can see like Netflix's famous 125 slide presentation on culture there. And then you can also see, you know, Econ 101 from Alabama Community College, some student group. They uploaded there so they could present it in class. And like it has three views.

22:15Hundreds, if not thousands of slides are uploaded to slideshare.net every single day. this company sold to linkedin in 2012 for 112 million and then they sold from linkedin to scribed for i don't know how much it wasn't disclosed so this is a big business it's a nine-figure business why not like do the same thing with that like create a permissionless thing that anytime a new slide is uploaded to slideshare you revamp it you redesign it so instead of making one from scratch for the sec filings you're just redesigning them sending them back to the original creator and saying hey you may like this better you may not if you do buy it for 20 bucks 200 bucks whatever and automate and automate it or you know teachers paying teachers teachers pay teachers.com it's a place for teachers to sell their lesson plans you can go on there it's such a good name hey teachers paying teachers.com what do they do well they pay teachers you can go on there and like dm mass dm all the teachers that are selling lesson plans and say hey why don't you sell a a pitch deck alongside the lesson plan.

23:20Like a lesson plan is great, but you'll probably sell even more if you have a pitch deck version. I'll convert that for you for 20 bucks. What are we doing? Or anything with a lesson plan. People who teach church, like let's say we have a lesson plan for Sunday. What do we typically do? We're like, maybe we have something on our iPad, whatever. We could just easily upload an outline and be like, hey, create a PowerPoint presentation based off of this. What are we talking about right now, dude what are we doing what are we doing why are we even talking right now we need to be grinding building oh my gosh we're wasting Maria close clear the rest of my day I don't know how Maria can I build off this for a second please all right so it's not easy but what you and I are talking and we're like oh dude why wouldn't we do this all we have to do go to chat chibu td enter this prompt and then it automates here and all of a sudden we've got a product I still think for many people, the prompt is like the hardest thing for them to get past.

24:18Like to think creatively enough in order to get the prompt to give you the output that you want is incredibly hard. And I found something this week that I want to share with you. It's going to be stupid, simple, and you're going to make fun of me, but I think has one of the best pieces of advice I've ever gotten when it comes to prompting. Are you ready for it? Yep. All right, here we go. All right. So you've probably seen this. This was a Reddit post and this guy's talking about how he uses the LLM to generate prompts for him. So in the example that you just gave, where you're sitting there and you're like, I want Manus to create me a slide deck based on this information, but like, how do I even give it the specific information that I want in order for it to create the slide deck?

24:59He's essentially teaching you how to create the prompt by using the LLMs to create the prompt. So the first thing that he does is he tells the LLM, generate a detailed prompt engineering guide. The audience is, let's say graphic designers. So you can fill in the role there. And the role might look like book author, software developers, customer support, whatever. And then he pastes in five examples of how I want my prompt to work. So what he's doing there is he's giving it context to draw. He's helping the LLM understand what exactly he's looking for by providing it with five examples of products that he really likes.

25:32You got to give it more context no matter what you're using context all right and now this is probably the best advice i've ever read this next one i then instructed to quote generate a prompt that could have generated the examples outputs and include a better set of examples dude that blew my mind when i read it so so he's sitting there and he's like hey this is who you are you're a graphic designer here are five outputs that I really, really like. Now I want you to reverse engineer it and think of what the prompt would be that would create the outputs that you're currently seeing. So it's getting the LLM to think about, okay, what are all the different elements within the examples that are given to me that I need to get to in order for this prompt to generate something similar to what I'm seeing?

26:21What do you think of that? It's genius. Like I want to hang up right now and test this. Have you read this before? I feel like this is something that you've seen. Okay. It blew my mind because it's like so simple and yet it's going to be so impactful. I've already started using it and the outputs that I'm getting are way better than I've ever used than I've ever gotten before. It's pretty incredible. How long does it take though to put all this together? Which part? Like the five examples? Yeah. Obviously it depends on what you're trying to build. I've been using it for content and like podcasts.