One Startup Idea, One Trend, One News Debate and One Framework

0:00Today's episode is going to be completely different.

0:30that I've been consuming in my life that might be a value to you, or hey, maybe it'll get your creative juices flowing. This is a new type of episode that I think, I hope people will like. Let me know in the comment section, like on YouTube as well, if you enjoy this.

0:52So let's get started for the startup idea that someone should really steal. So I saw this idea on ideabrowser.com. So it's a review website for women to travel safely. So the basic idea is that, you know, women are traveling solo and some of them have anxiety. So actually 84 % of solo female travelers are feeling unsafe during their trips, yet they have no reliable way to get basic safety answers. So if they're planning a weekend in Mexico City, they have to like scroll old, you know, year long, month long Reddit thread saying, is this neighborhood safe at night? And getting replies from who knows, male backpackers who have no idea what these people face.

1:43The thing here is that you have platforms like TripAdvisors that don't capture this harassment frequency. So this is actually a really serious issue. I've been inspired by what Peter Levels has done with NomadList.com. and hoodmaps.com. So if you pull up Hood Maps, you know, I live in Miami, and you can just see, you know, artificially gentrified area here, you know, ratchet South Beach over here. So it gives you these sort of reviews of the website, and it's gone viral many times. So going back to the idea here is you can build something simple like that, a map-based platform where verified female travelers, right neighborhoods, hotels, and restaurants on safety metrics that matter.

2:29Green zones for walked alone at midnight, felt safe. You get the idea. So that's the concept. I haven't found anything like it. And you see that solo here in the data, that solo female travel is increasing over time. Definitely something I like to see when I'm building a startup idea. I want to see that trend growing up, going up, right? So you can capture some of that search data. Okay, great. This is a good startup idea. You agree. I agree. But how do you actually get people into this product if you're going to create it? Let's talk about it. So you can target Facebook groups. There's actually one called Solo Female Travel that has 400 ,000 members.

3:08And then you can do post showing side-by-side safety comparisons. You can partner with female travel influencers. You can obviously run meta ads, Instagram, short form video with women searching solo travel safety, that sort of thing. So I think that there's a huge short form video opportunity as well. And just creating these like short form videos that talk about people's experiences, incentivizing these travel influencers who are looking to make money. A lot of these travel influencers, if you offer them$100,$500, a few hundred dollars here, they'll take it. So I think that there's an opportunity to launch with 5 ,000 paying members across 20 destinations, and that gets you$500 ,000 ARR.

3:59But even if it's$50 ,000, you can see how this thing could scale. and you can imagine a world where this scales to 100 ,000 members and hotels pay$500 a month for safety certification so I think this is a big idea let's talk about the offer real quick I think you lead with a lead magnet that's like a travel safety self-assessment quiz so you can do an interactive quiz you can vibe code this pretty easily you do a front-end offer where it's a premium travel community access. And then you do, you know, a verified safety guide subscription, maybe it's$30 a month for the detailed stuff. So I think this is a pretty good idea.

4:44You know, I think that the price point, you know, may need to change. Is it too cheap? Is it too expensive? But I like this idea. If you go to the value ladder on Idea Browser, I always do this. because the value ladder, for those who don't know, it's this framework that helps you structure your offers and the ascending levels of value and price. So you start with something irresistible and low barrier, and then you build trust at each step. So you can see that the reason why you do a travel safety self-assessment quiz is it's free, right? So if you're going to go and build a lot of attention on short form with these influencers, you convert them into the quiz, You get their email.

5:27You can nurture them and sell them later. And the things that you're going to sell them are here. You can see the community access, the verified guide subscription, the safety tips and alert service, and then eventually the safety certification for travel business. I could see a business like this selling, you know, 5, 4, 6, 7, 8X ARR. So beautiful business. I think that, you know, at the very least, if you get a sum level product market fit, 10K a month. All right. That's the startup idea. Let's talk about the one. That's the one startup idea. Let's talk about the one trend. So this trend is gamification and it's happening on websites.

6:08It's also happening on apps. And you can see that, you know, OK, well, first of all, what is gamification? It's this idea that, you know, you put points and badges and leaderboard and challenges to encourage user participation.

6:25Whoa, that was hard. Comment for participation and loyalty. And you're seeing like companies like Duolingo absolutely crush it by using this strategy. But even if you think of social media in itself, it is a game. So I anticipate more and more gamification to sort of this UI trend to get more and more popular. My friend Yoni has an app called the Brain Rot app, which is also sort of this, you know, gamification UI. The more you scroll on like X and Instagram, the more your brain rots and you see it in real time. And I'm seeing this UI just, you know, be more and more prevalent, right? It's the good brand name.

7:13It's the mascot. It's the gamification. And it's the, you know, core killer use case that people really are looking for. So in this case, you know, focusing, focus mode. So I'll give you all a quick, you know, startup idea that I think someone should take. Again, I think it's at least a 10K MRR idea. is who is building the agency that just focuses on gamification for apps and websites. So you use that trend and then just be like, we help you take your existing company and make it more gamified. We do a bit of that at our company, LCA, which is our design firm for the AI age. And it's a very, very popular product.

8:03We'll come in and actually help companies go and figure this out. We work with the biggest companies on the planet. But I think that someone could, if they just focus on gamification, became the gamification person, that's a huge idea. And I think it starts at$10K a month. That's the trend. Let's talk about a news item. So this went viral, 20 million views. And I'm going to read it to you all. It was said by the ex-CEO of Reddit. He says,

9:00new app as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startups can make money. Number one, make a flash in the pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash. My estimate is you have 12 to 18 months cash flow generation. Number two, make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity. The situation is highly unstable. We don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon, but both scenarios make it very difficult that any AI application will independently become a generational super company.

9:37The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones related to real atoms, hardware, or world related data and not software finance. Okay, Yishan, I disagree with you here. I understand why you're saying this. I understand that you'd come to this logical conclusion. But I think, well, actually, I was having a chat with a very, very well-known AI founder this morning. Super, super well-known. and he was saying that he was chatting with an executive at OpenAI and even OpenAI don't know exactly how things are going to play out.

10:28So I think that, yes, it might be the case that OpenAI owns everything or all these foundational own everything, but I think that you're discounting the opportunity that there is to actually create these, as you call it, flash-in-the-pan apps to actually get data, to actually own the workflow, to actually create network effects. And I think that those companies, provided that they actually own the workflow, own the customer, have network effects, are going to be extremely valuable in the future. I think that it's easy to say that these are GPT wrappers and you've got 12 months to cash in and it's going to be over when they figure it out.

11:13But think about Apple, right? People used to say when the App Store came out that, oh, Apple is just going to pick the most popular apps and just clone you and that'll be the end. Of course, that didn't happen, right? Of course, Apple has a lot of successful apps, the Messages app, et cetera. But there's tons of apps that have gone and created billions, if not trillions of dollars of value. And that's my take on this. Don't know if you agree or disagree, but I think that there's, of course, going to be a bunch of startups that get hit by OpenAI and the foundational models in 12 to 18 months. But I think that the great AI wrappers are going to build valuable companies.

12:03We'll see what happens. The one framework I'm going to talk about today is how to grow a product, especially a SaaS. It's a three-step framework to help you get your creative juices flowing. The first is you're going to want to attach the right creator. Now, how do you figure out what is the right creator for your product, for your SaaS? Obviously, it's ideal if you have the biggest creator, but oftentimes we don't have those connections, right? You might not know those people. So if I were you, what I would do is I'd make a list of everyone who's an ideal creator for your product and make it 100 people.

12:41And the top 10 might have a million plus people, followers. They might have 500 ,000, 700 ,000, a million, 1.2. So you reach out to them, shoot your shot. That being said, I think where you're probably going to have the most success is in your smaller creators. So we're talking people with 120 ,000 followers across platforms and less. I would reach out to them. You can use agents to reach out to them. I've shown how you could, in the past, use Lindy AI and products like that to do that. Or you can just reach out the good old-fashioned way, DM them. I find actually doing a selfie video, like a real selfie video.

13:22Hey, my name is Greg. I'm the co-founder of ideabrowser.com. I think that you'd love this product for these reasons don't like pitch them from day one like you have to get to know them build the friendship and then from there you can you know hopefully get them onto the you know involved in the product so step one is you got to attach the right creator that's going to be involved you know you're going to want to do some friendship building get to know them let them know that you're looking for you know people to promote with you have money you have upside Step two is you want to attach a generous affiliate percentage.

14:01I'm not talking about 10%, 20%. I'm talking about 30 % to 50%, especially in the initial days. Give it to them lifetime. You want to get these people on board. You could think about ways to give them upside in terms of equity if you want. But I would start with just an affiliate percentage. Sometimes you might have to give them some level of cash to get them excited. initially. But you want to get them involved as an affiliate, basically. And then the third step is, and a lot of people miss this step, is you want to gamify the experience. You want to kind of have, you know, the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami.

14:41I heard a story recently that there's like, I think it was like a supplement company called Goji. That's what it was. And an apple cider vinegar gummy and they had some of the best affiliate programs on tiktok shop ever just that's how they grew to i think like you know hundreds of millions of dollars enterprise value and they just gamified their affiliates so they would say it you know the best affiliate gets a trip to miami and will buy you a bmw literally and they made it they made it you know the numbers make sense for them. So you need to have the numbers make sense for you. But this hopefully got your creative juices flowing.

15:25The framework is how to grow a product, especially SaaS. And it's something I use pretty often. So one AI product that I want to play with, and I hear great things about, and I just did a review on Glyph AI. And someone was like, but have you tried Krea AI? so create ai is kind of like glyph ai which is it helps you get the most out of creative ai tools that exist on the internet and uses agents to do that so you can generate images with it video on it real-time video on it motion transfer 3d objects um and i haven't played with it and this is you know that's why i'm bringing it up this is like on my to-do list to play with it but it's cool that it has like these mini apps right like clothes changer upload selfies and try on different outfits with our free ai virtual try on tool they've got a nano banana image editor they've got product photos um so they've got all these apps uh t-shirt generator um ai hairstyle stuff object remover change lighting and i think what's really cool i don't have access to it but there's this nodes product, which basically is creating workflows.

16:44So kind of like NAN for creative AI. So this is something that's interesting, something I'm going to be playing with maybe over the weekend. And I don't know, is it better than Glyph AI? TBD, but I hear good things. The last thing to talk about in this episode is what is one random product that I'm enjoying right now? I'll give you two, actually. I'll give you two random products. They are both beverages. One is, if you're anything like me, you love a cold cup of coffee. And a cold brew, you know, it adds up. It's like$5 for a cold brew now. So I actually, and I have to go down, I have to go to the coffee shop, and sometimes that's good.

17:37do you want to get out of the office and stuff like that or get out of your house if you work from home but um i uh i started buying and i just have it in my in my fridge is this cold brew la colom from new york light roast and i just have it there here it says it's 849 you can get it at Target for$5. It's literally the price of one cold brew and you get, you know, you're getting like six, seven, eight cold brews from it. So, and it's like, it's easy, you know, so I'm drinking it right here. Nice to be able to just have cold brew fast, right? If I needed to, you know, I work from home. So if I need to, if I need to, if I'm feeling low energy and I need my cold brew, I need to record for you all.

18:30I'm just run to the fridge. I put some in, I drink it. I don't have to leave. So why I like La Cologne is it's light. It's a light, it's a light roast. It's like not offensive. It's tasty. There's some people who drink beer and they like IPAs. And there's some people who drink beers and they like light beer, like a lager. So if you're into cold brew and you like light stuff, La Cologne for the price, I thought was really good. And that light golden vibe. The other drink I've been drinking, and you've seen me on the pod drink this probably, Olipop, the classic root beer. Absolutely fire. Absolutely fire.

19:13The macros on it, we're talking 35 calories, 11 grams or 4 % carbs, three grams of sugar. I'm giving it like an 8.5 on 10. I usually actually don't like Olipop. I find it tastes weird. And I love a soda. Like give your boy a Diet Coke. Kidding me? So good. So, you know, trying to not make my body full of aspartame, trying to do more of this and enjoy it. But, you know, it's really the root beer that does it for me. So if you haven't had it, highly recommend not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this podcast. I hope you enjoyed this format. I don't know if I'll continue doing it.

19:55I need to know. But please, please enjoy. Have a creative day. And I can't wait to see what you build. I'm rooting for you.