9 Huge Startup Opportunities in the AI Boom

0:00I have one goal and one goal only today. It's to go through the 12 biggest startup opportunities. So the other day I tweeted and it went viral the 30 biggest startup opportunities, B2C, AI, mobile, and people just wanted more. They wanted to know more. So in this episode, I want to go through my 12 favorite ones. and well it's not just going to be me it's it's my friend j ice cream j ice cream jonathan courtney on the pod what's up welcome and you're gonna pick six and i'm gonna pick six right that's it i'm gonna pick six you're gonna pick six who knows maybe one of us will pick seven you never know what's gonna happen you never know so you're gonna want to stick to the end i think people who do stick to the end of this episode uh are going to have a good understanding of a bunch of different categories that we are building businesses in.

0:55So we're sharing the sauce live. We hope that you actually take these ideas and build with them. And maybe you want to start off. Oh, okay.

1:15Looking through your list, the very first one that jumped out to me as something I think that's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger is number eight, which is biggest creator. So what you wrote is that the biggest creator is going to have this combination of live shows and unscripted content. And as someone who plays a lot of video games, I'm exposed to a lot of these creators who create, who put out their content on Twitch. And it was interesting to see, what is it, TPBN or TBPN, whichever way around that is the tech show that's playing on X all the time. It was interesting to see that hit the tech scene because it's been in gaming for a very long time.

1:57And I think some of the things that the tech world can learn from gaming is this more unscripted kind of off-the-cuff kind of streams. And I just have a couple of examples if you want to see because I follow a lot of these streamers and I try to emulate them in my content. and I think it connects with one of the things you said later in your list which is it's a bit anti-AI because it's live, because it's unscripted because things can go wrong people actually want to watch. It's very, very human. So I'll just take over the screen for a second and show you Twitch. So Twitch, I think most of you know twitch.tv.

2:41It is a place where people live stream and this is an example of a live stream so this is actually a relatively popular streamer a guy called Jeff Gerstmann so he's just one of the people I watch and I pay to watch his channel and he does these like three to four times a week three to four hour long streams where he just sits there talking unedited like as messy as it can be and just chats to his audience and reacts to his audience and pretty much everyone I follow this guy is live right now Drew skis he plays if any of you guys are playing marathon it's a great game you should play it but this is a perfect example so right now and this is a smaller channel but right now you know 247 people are watching this guy live people are paying a lot of people are paying to watch this guy live and he's just sitting here playing a video game that he wants to play anyway and this is something that also scales up to like something that's a bit more official like let me show you a giant bomb so these guys are let me show you the kind of funny guys so they also stream live every single weekday this is more close to what you see with the tvp and what actually is it by the way it's hilarious because you remind me of the people who like the old older people who be like chat gtp you Yeah, I still can't remember any of these things.

4:13What is it? It's TBPN. And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, why do I even care about streaming streamers? The reason why you care is TBPN sold for over$100 million. And it was a business show. And in terms of viewership, it didn't have a huge viewership, but it had a super high value viewership. So the idea here is, what are other high-value audiences that need live shows? Yes, exactly. And live, it doesn't have to be hyperscripted. Like you wrote in your tweet, this guy, Jeff Gerstmann, again, who's one of my favorite examples, he just turns the stream on and he has a couple of broad topics and he'll talk for hours and hours.

4:57And I think anyone who has that skill of just being able to talk long form about anything is going to have, I think the ability to make, just to go online, just to be able to talk while you're maybe doing something else, especially in the business context is going to be huge and is going to be really differentiated. Like almost all business content out there is very polished. It's very, like for example, almost every like pure business podcast, like the diary of a CEO is one of the biggest purely business focused ones. It's hyper polished. It's all about interviews. What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all of this inspiration from the Twitch streaming world and turn that into the very unpolished gamer style mess, but with the business context.

5:48So that's something that I think from your list is going to be bigger and bigger and bigger as AI sanitizes a lot of stuff. I think more people are going to want to listen to more authentic people speaking long form, unedited, unscripted and live. So I think that's a huge one. And it's exactly a bet that I'm making for my own business. It's what I'm doing personally now every Tuesday, experimenting with it. And yeah, I'm all in on that topic. Cool. I like that one. And I know people are going to be like, okay, but how are you going to make money if you're just live streaming, vibe coding all day?

6:27and yeah I mean there's literally a million ways to skin that cat if you have thousands of people tuning into you every stream and these are people who like have such a high affinity to you that they're begging for ways to give you money. I mean I can just tell you too like so I have only one to two want the 2 ,000 people tuning into me every Tuesday and that business alone can make four to 500 ,000 euro with no ads with nothing else other than me selling like in-person events or like even merch around the topic of what I'm talking about and so it really can be with a tiny audience you can really build something special there and I think if you look at the Patreon a lot of the Patreon numbers are public for a lot of these podcasts and a lot of these shows that I'm talking about.

7:29And you'll see sometimes they're bringing up to 70, 100 ,000 a month just from people sponsoring their Patreon or just for people paying for their Patreon. And it's not, it doesn't require a huge amount of listeners to make that work. You don't need to be Greg level to make that work. I have a tiny podcast and it works. Who's that? Who's Greg? All right. I'm going to, I'm going to go to my, favorite one here and it's one category that actually has like a hundred ideas or more in it. It's what I call action apps. If you think of mobile apps Instagram, TikTok, Uber, DoorDash, you name it. You basically scroll and then it feeds you stuff or if you're logging into a CRM or something like a Salesforce.

8:24It's asking you, the human being, to do things. But with AI, you can actually create apps that do things on your behalf. Clearing your inbox, booking your calendar, filing expenses. So not having the human actually do something, but the agents actually do something. So the opportunity is in basically looking at a bunch of different apps where it's like, if I were to make this agent first, apps that do things for me, not apps I stare at and that rely on human beings, what can I reinvent in mobile such that I'm a first mover advantage? So action apps as a category. Jay Ice Cream, what do you think?

9:14I think it's great. I think I'd love the idea of just having something that just takes action and I don't have to do anything. Like I pay for superhuman mail. It's supposed to be like a super AI optimized inbox thing to get you to inbox zero. But I still have to do everything manually myself. I mean, I don't know exactly how these action apps would work. But I'd love to be able to just plug something like that into my email, my superhuman. and something that somehow learned about the way I want to do things, why doesn't that already work? Why doesn't it already work that I've been using Gmail, Superhuman, whatever, for years?

9:55Why doesn't it already just know what to do? Why isn't this happening? This reminds me of, you remember back in the day when mobile first came out and then a lot of the web companies took a while to become mobile first, right? You remember? Yeah, I mean, I remember Facebook having a very painful transition to mobile. Exactly, and that's why they bought Instagram. Instagram was basically the mobile-first version of Facebook, if you think about it. I think the same thing is happening right now with agent-first apps. So it's going to be hard for companies to basically do the transition to become agent-first.

10:38And I think that's the opportunity for people listening right now. Do you think that from a user experience perspective, if the product is too automated, that it feels like just from a pure sense from the user that it might not feel as valuable, that actually me clicking on stuff and doing things is what adds to the sensation that this thing is worth it? I wonder if there's some element of all of this of if it's fully set it and forget it, would there be such low user engagement that people would consider canceling it and wouldn't understand the value. I'm wondering how that's going to play out.

11:19Do you know this product called Incogni? No. So Incogni is like, in the background, Incogni gets you removed from all of these different lists that spam you and send you emails, whatever. It's like a piece of privacy software. But you never really hear from this. you pay for the product, but you never really, you never have to interact with it because it's all happening in the background automatically. And so every year when I, when like, you know, I get the bill for incognito and it's like, Oh, that's still running in the background. I kind of don't feel the, I almost feel it sounds really stupid, but I almost feel if there was some level of me having to interact with it even a little bit, it might improve or it might increase my engagement with the product and my retention.

12:12It's a completely random thought. I'm just wondering when a product gets so clever that you can fully set and forget it. I'm curious to see how the retention gets hit when these things start happening. I want it to happen, but I'm curious. My take on that is what you're describing is a customer going into the kitchen and just cooking themselves their own meal and being like, because they've cooked this meal, they're going to enjoy the steak way more. And my perspective is people just want... Convenience to the max. Convenience to the max. And human beings are lazy by definition. I shouldn't say lazy.

12:56We're always looking for the path of least resistance. And I don't blame us human beings because life is difficult, right? So if we're going to eat a steak, we just want that steak cooked right. And I think there's going to be just this whole suite of apps. I think someone can go and create a studio that just focuses on action apps. And I think those, assuming they're picking the right niche, assuming it's a real pain point, assuming the customer has willingness to spend on that pain point, there's a huge opportunity to go. And I actually go and create these apps. And I actually think that those apps end up getting acquired, similar to how the Instagrams got acquired by Facebook.

13:41And you don't need to build the AI from scratch, right? You can integrate with Claude Agent SDK and other SDKs in order to build these things. So you're basically building a layer on top of it. You know when people were talking about GPT wrappers? Well, yeah, now we have agent wrappers, right? That's kind of like where we're at here. and I'm starting to see people pick up on it, but I think the mobile first version, mobile first plus agent plus niche plus willingness to spend plus boring workflow, plus if you can figure out how to reverse engineer the TikTok or the Instagram Reel to get people actually into the app, that's the workflow.

14:26Easier said than done, of course, but that's an interesting category I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. Can you give me an example? Just to get it into my head properly. An action app. For a specific topic, maybe like email, what would an action app look like to you? Is it doing one small thing within a main product or is it a product within itself? How do you imagine it? Using email as an example, what does the AI first version of superhuman look like? or Gmail look like, or whatever email app you're using. So when you go into an email app today, it really relies on the human being to do things.

15:15Yes, a lot of the Gmails of the world, email apps have AI bolted on, but they don't have it as the core experience. So you have to, and it's not easy, but you have to reimagine the core UX of email. And it probably isn't a list of here's all your emails because that's just daunting. Maybe it's every single day I'm going to send you... Maybe it's like you download an app, it learns about how you like to answer certain things and it basically says, hey, we're going to answer 80 % of your emails via agents. those are our emails now and we're only keep your Gmail but those 80 % are going to be automated and we're going to give you an interface around just managing how the agents are interacting yes and we're only going to show you the one or two emails per day based on the conversation you've had with the agent or whatever that I don't want to respond to because it seems too important but like here's what I was going to say can I say yes to this that's kind of the holy grail of email basically exactly all right okay I understand it all right so for me my next one that jumped out for me from your list was just number one not because it's the only one I read it's the loneliness solving loneliness third spaces community apps IRL and this connects with a couple of the other things I think the loneliness thing, especially since COVID has just been insane.

17:02Like it's really crazy. I think like there was a time where people used to view like my parents' generation and their parents' generation as being very lonely and spending all their time at home watching TV and not interacting with other people and not going out. There was like this, people would talk about it. There was like TV ads for it in Ireland about, you know, older people being lonely. And now I'm seeing that in my generation of people in their mid to late 30s who just stay home all day on the internet, consuming content, just consuming. And I think this, what you've put in here, this third spaces, community apps, IRL, I think it's not just a huge business opportunity.

17:49I think it's also like something that needs to happen for the good of humanity. And I think for me, this is the thing that I'm, this is one of the ones that I'm personally chasing and personally experimenting with. We ran a retreat in February, which was five days off the grid. So no internet, no phones, no tech, nothing. I think I invited you to it. You didn't turn up actually. Interesting. I'm too glued to my phone, bro. So actually two people pulled out because they got so locked into Claude Code. They were like, because Claude Code was just ramping up. They were like, I cannot come to this event.

18:31I need to be on Claude. So we decided to create this thing, which was like in the kind of sense of a summer camp where people from all over the world come together. There's no phones, there's nothing. You're completely separated from everything else and you just hang out. You like do art together, whatever. you hang out for five days and it was an amazing experience and this is something that I did it we we basically broke even it cost like$90 ,000 to run we made$90 ,000 but I did it so that the people who came to it could do their own versions of it I don't want to be the person bringing this out to the world it's so hard to do it but if someone could turn that into a business if some one of those people could turn that into a business something that brings people together something that brings people into the real world, I think it's going to be totally, it's going to be something that's explosive.

19:26And what you've put in here is, it doesn't have to be just in person. I'm assuming you haven't heard of the Discord group called Dads of Marathon. Because it's very niche to one video game. But there's, how many people are in this right now? So this is an example of a digital environment community that's exploded and I'm part of and it's absolutely amazing this 13 ,898 members it's a discord group of dads or basically casual gamers who don't have time to play video games who don't have time to play competitive video games but because this is a cooperative game where you have to talk to people and they know you're not going to find other dads to play with who you know because you know people don't have your hobbies anymore.

20:14This discord group, Dads of Marathon, has been my like central community for the last three months to find other people to play this game with. And it's the first time I've actually made like friends, you know, purely online in a very long time. And so I think these niche communities around actually talking to people, actually connecting with people, actually doing stuff together in this case it's a particular game is it like that's almost if you look at the amount of players playing marathon right now there's almost more people in this group than actually are playing that game it's insane it just exploded and that is listen to how niche that is it's a niche game and someone has created a community for dads who are playing that game like it's so insane and 13 ,900 whatever people are in there it's super active and it's an amazing like community experience and I'm so happy people went and did that but it shows that there's this like thirst for connection both in person and online and those are the spaces that I'm looking into at the moment so here's my quick take on on loneliness the opportunity and the impact So look at this chart.

21:36I don't know if you saw this. Americans with less than one close friends is almost at 22%. It's at 22%. That's crazy. Basically, almost a quarter of Americans have no close friends. So from an impact perspective, I completely agree. We need to do something about this. From a business perspective, I think that you can actually create a bunch of great businesses that help people with loneliness. You gave such a great example of dads playing marathon. Dads at marathon. I bet you would pay a monthly fee. Oh, 100%. If they sell something, I'm going to buy it. If they sell anything. Exactly. So if we distill that for a second, you picked a game, a niche game with a niche, dads.

22:35There's an opportunity to do dads play XYZ, like games, hobbies, different niches, and you can go create the dad company. And that's just a huge opportunity solving loneliness for dads. right yeah especially men we're not good at i mean i don't know how you are but i'm quite a like i have to be reminded to be social yeah i'm not great at it i'm not great at like reaching out to my friends and saying hey let's do something and so this dads of marathon thing as an example is the first time since i was 14 first time since i was 14 years old i'm 38 now that I actually played a shooter competitive multiplayer game with other people because of this Discord group.

23:25Well, I would play with you. There's two companies I want to highlight that I think are doing well just to get people's creative juices flowing around building businesses around loneliness. So one is a company called 222. Have you seen this? Never heard of it. so I'm a small investor in this like so small but basically you take a personality test so it says start by taking our personality test so we can determine your most compatible matches choose an experience so you decide if you want dinners or cocktail bars or salsa nights or basketball games and then you meet five to seven different matches and you actually go and do that thing with these people in your city and they are absolutely crushing it.

24:17So as an example,

24:21dinner, cowboy hats and cocktails. Kind of random. This is amazing and you know what? People listening to this podcast right now are thinking, oh yeah, but these guys have already done it. It's already done. First of all, very few people want to even do this type of business. This is a type of business where you have to be a specific type of person to even create it. And so if you happen to be the type of person who likes to bring people together for experiences, if you happen to be a goddamn someone who enjoys organizing events, you might be at some sort of crazy advantage right now. Because I can tell you, I do not like doing those things.

25:06I do it because I think it needs to be in the world. but I don't want to do it. I don't actually find that. That's not my thing at all. I'm too much of an introvert. But that is a killer business for someone who likes to organize events and be around people. Killer business. I want to go to our next category. But before I do that, quickly, if you do want to create a business like this, a membership model makes sense. so you know i'd encourage people to look at memberships um and the beauty about that is you're getting recurring revenue the other company that's really interesting uh in this space is a company called fabric so you can see they do 75 plus gatherings per month month they're in new york and chicago they've got 500 members um and they have just a huge wait list of people waiting it says they have no lengthy waitlist but I'm pretty sure there is a waitlist to join no affiliation with this at all but people apply you get access to these spaces I think they're like 5 ,000 to 10 ,000 square feet and then you participate in these gatherings and the gatherings are just these events so they're basically an event company you hear about how there's an issue with commercial real estate right now because office space is not doing so hot.

26:31So they've just retooled that into community infrastructure and I hear they're doing really, really well. So in a great example of a business that I think is doing well in terms of traction but also making impact. All right, what's the next one you want to talk about? Oh, I think I went. That was my one. Oh, that's true. That was your one. All right, so my turn. I want to talk about Elder Tech. I like the name. Elder Tech. It sounds mysterious. Everyone is creating apps, businesses, for like what we just saw, Gen Z and millennials, cowboy hats and dinners, speakeasies and this, right? who is creating apps and companies for older adults there's 70 plus million boomers in the u.s and there's a ton of underserved niches and pain points that they have and ai specifically is one of the greatest ways to help those people with things like hearing mobility social memory and vision.

27:49There's this thinking that if you're creating products for older adults, in the positioning, in the landing pages, you need to show old people and gray hair and white hair and balding and stuff like that. These people don't see themselves as that. They just want products that are going to make them happier and healthier. I think there is a ton of businesses to be created in elder tech, which is basically the technology for older people, mobile apps, desktop apps, agents, AI with some hardware. What do you think? Dude, first of all, what age range are you talking about here in your head? What are you imagining?

28:3565 plus. 65 plus. Okay, so my main business, facilitator.com, originally our assumption of our audience was, it's going to be people in their 20s working in tech companies. When we started doing Facebook ads and just stopped putting them out there generically and seeing who would come in, without doing very specific targeting, it actually ended up that the most customers, or our most valuable customers are all like over 45. And it completely shocked us because all of our advertising is very silly, very, I mean, I'm in the ads being goofy. If you go to facilitator.com, it's kind of a cool looking website.

29:23But our, like the people who can spend the most money with us simply because they are the highest earners or have built up the most savings are the people over 40, over 45, over 50. So just to say the age range thing is such a big thing because we're all told when we're building products, we're all sort of excited to build stuff for people in their 20s because I guess that's the sort of explosive growth range. But if you're just looking to build something that makes a couple of million, looking to who actually has the money and who's not getting a lot of cool shit made for them. And again, this falls into the dads of marathon thing.

30:05You know, a couple of the people I'm playing with are over 50 and they're loving the fact that there's this place now to hang out. If you're bad at the stuff, again, you know, video games are all gaming stuff is targeted at kind of a younger, cooler audience. And also, especially with competitive video games, if you're not good at it, if you're not young, you're not going to be good at it. So older people are sort of left out and I'm even in that range. And it's been really cool to see, again, dads of marathon, it's almost like a piece of elder tech targeting people who are no longer able to use.

30:40Like I can't, I'm not twitch like speed anymore. I can't like be competitive anymore, but you just want to enjoy yourself. So I think that is a huge, even if you expand it, the age range down to like the 40s as well. there's so much scope there's so much stuff you can do there and I think it's a shame to only be targeting people you know like late teens 20s 30s because it's the people in their 40s and 50s who have a lot more also free time you know their kids have maybe moved out as well that's a huge target customer for us at facilitator.com is people whose kids have already moved out and they're looking to retrain it's a it's an amazing market and honestly sometimes these people are just more enjoyable to deal with i mean when you're creating a business sometimes you don't need to overthink it so yeah fish where the fish are and everyone is fishing like everyone is trying to create apps for gamers let's say right and the gamers are between you know 13 and 25 yeah like the roadblocks exactly so what you're saying is like the dads of marathon is like way more way underserved and what I'm saying is you're so happy you found dads of marathon where's the grandpas of marathon you know what I mean that'll be very relevant in like 10 years as well when gamers are graduate now that whole audience is getting older and older it's getting more expensive to game the only people who are going to be gaming are older people.

32:22Exactly. In terms of opportunities, I think that just coming up with ideas around 65 plus is not only a good business to be in because you're fishing where the fish are, but you're also going back to the loneliness thing and going to actually make impact, which is so cool and so fun. And hot tip, everyone keeps telling me, Jonathan, Facebook ads don't work anymore because no one uses Facebook. You're wrong. A very large amount of people use Facebook. They're just not in your age range. And we have people buying our product every single day who've just heard about us on Facebook on the same day.

33:03They just happen to be like 50 or 55 or 60 years old and they're not using TikTok or YouTube. So I think it's just we're sometimes a little bit out of touch with the market because of our age range. I definitely know I am. All right, your turn. That's a good one. That's a really good one. Honestly, that's really powerful. I think maybe connected to it, but not 100%. So number 23 from your list made it into my top six, which is biggest hobbies, adults learning for joy, pottery, woodworking and drawing. And I chose that because I literally ran a painting, essentially a painting retreat in February for adults, most of whom were over 40 and most of whom were in this, you know, older range who had their kids had moved out.

34:03Maybe they've been working in corporate for a while. They're looking for a change. They're looking for something different to do. And so I think the age range of that group was maybe between 35 and 65. And people just wanted to take time for themselves to not learn some business thing, to not learn some tech thing, but to actually just go and do things that make them feel joyful. and in this case it was primarily painting and this was like something again I've never run a painting retreat under my brand but I wanted to try it and this was something that like sold out essentially instantly and I'm a huge huge fan of creating a small business or small communities around these topics like painting, music like gardening is a huge thing I just think it's an amazing thing to go into.