The Most Overlooked $10K/mo AI Startup Anyone Can Start

0:00Today we're going to talk about creating an AI startup. So I'm actually going to go through the process of how you can start with a relatively small non-AI startup doing$1 ,000 to$5 ,000 a month. You can build it to$5 ,000 to$25 ,000 and that you can eventually get to$5 million ARR with an AI startup. So basically you start with a non-AI startup and you make it AI. Now, this isn't going to work for everyone, but if I want the highest probability of it working, this is how I build it. And this is actually how I'm building some of my businesses. And I wanted to share it with everyone here. So I'm not going to gatekeep.

0:36I'm going to talk a little about the whole process of how you can go and create an AI startup and how you can do it in a really cash flowing way. So the first phase is manual labor. So when I say manual labor, I mean, you're going to start an agency doing one painful, boring task. And you're going to learn all the ins and outs of that particular boring task. Maybe that's Instagram management. Maybe that's, you know, invoice processing. And you're going to sell it as a service. And through that process, you'll make something, you know, hopefully in the$1 ,000 to$5 ,000 a month range. Now, that's possible for most people, right?

1:21Because they are able to find a couple clients and pay them a few hundred dollars a month. in that um you know you might uh hire people to fulfill the work so you might get something like 40 margins but you're going to learn every edge case that's that is the secret to actually building an ai startup is understanding a very very niche insight so uh you're going to learn every edge case phase two is to build a system so this is where you actually are going to use ai agents to do a lot of the work. And then you're going to try to double your margins. You're going to try to get from something like 40 % to 80 % and try to handle 10x the amount of clients.

2:03Now, in doing this, you're adding enterprise value into the business, right? You're no longer a service business. And you're also no longer doing all the work, right? You're sort of replacing a lot of the human work with AI agents. How you do that, you know, I've done tutorials in the past around Gumloop and Lindy AI, N8N, and actually just, you know, Claude Code to actually go and create these workflows. And then the third phase, and this is when you get to like the 25k a month phase, is when you have multiple tiers. And then you're trying to keep that margin and grow from there. So, okay, Greg, this all sounds good to me, but how do I actually do that?

2:49Okay, So we're going to talk about that in this episode. The first step is you're going to want to find extremely boring pain. You can also use a tool like ideabrowser.com. This is something I built for myself to help figure out, you know, what are people saying on Reddit, Facebook groups? It's a feature called Community Signals to find that boring pain. Or you can go and just try to find that boring pain yourself. Maybe you understand it by working, doing this manual task. You're going to do the manual task for about three to six months. You're going to document all the edge cases and SOPs. And then, and this is the key part, is you're going to wire the AI agents to mirror the SOPs.

3:28You're going to keep the service pricing. So you're not going to actually increase the pricing once you've gone ahead and done this. And the reason why is the outcome is the same. Now, if you're, you know, just using an example, like you're managing Instagram posts, If you're able to create faceless Instagram posts at the same price, it doesn't matter if you have humans doing it. All that matters is the outcome is good for the client. Over time, you're going to add tiers. You're going to add an enterprise that's going to be targeting something like Fortune 500s, Fortune 2000s, more expensive. You're going to create a self-serve.

4:04And then you're, you know, eventually create an API, giving access. and then you know very importantly if you're you know if you're a follower of the channel and the startup ideas podcast you know that uh you know building an audience is extremely important to me just because i know it works so you're going to want to be publishing daily in a way that's entertaining and then you're going to reinvest into agents and distribution so you're going to obviously try to make better workflows that's the agent part of it and the distribution part is you're going to want to try to scale your content 10x and you know to me you actually scale it uh you know from a content perspective you know you're going to want to create like cinematic high quality content and then your barbell of you know very very lo-fi 10x lo-fi content um you're going to want to do both those from a content perspective and then you scale it profit profitably okay so what do i mean when i mean you know boring tasks you know because i think a lot of people are asking like what do i mean what do i mean by a boring you know paid pain point sam altman the co-founder of open ai just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong i think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup and if you listen to this podcast chances are you think so too now i think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building.

5:39So that's exactly why I built ideabrowser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox, and it's all backed by high-quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search, what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building? and then we hand it on a silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com.

6:21And if you're listening to this, I highly recommend it. These are soul crushing tasks. So these could be something like managing insurance forms, invoice processing, review responses, PDF to Salesforce. Like that sounds so niche, but a lot of people are doing it. Customs paperwork. These are things that nobody wants to do and everyone needs it done. And these are what's perfect for AI agents to actually go and do these tasks. And what I call this approach, this approach to building businesses, I actually call it a leveraged agency because you're actually starting off by building an agency. You know, it's kind of counterintuitive because it's like, okay, great.

7:07I want to start an AI startup. Why am I starting an agency to start with? Well, you're starting with an agency to start with because you're learning about the pain points. You're profitable for month one, you build the PMF and, you know, you own a lot of your equity and you can reinvest that, reinvest that into distribution and agents. I mean, the other option is you go and build a VC backed startup, right? You know, what does that look like? Well, you're burning hundreds of thousand dollars a month, you find product market fit, and you maybe succeed in five years, there's a small chance of exit.

7:38Now I'm not, I don't want to tell people don't start a VC backed startup. I think that for some people, that's exactly what they should be doing. Heck, I've actually gone and done that multiple times. And I sold my last company to WeWork, which is literally the epitome of raising venture capital. I just think that by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents, you can decide if you want to be a VC-backed leveraged agency. But this is just the best way to start. So you have leverage when you want to raise or if you just want to get those dividends to come.

8:17So, you know, what does this look like from a timeline perspective? So from month one to six, you're looking at, you know, basically doing everything yourself or with a few freelancers that can help fulfill what you're doing. So you're looking at, you know, five clients, maybe month seven to 12, you know, AI agents help 50 clients. And then you're doubling that margins. And then your goal is to get to year two. And, you know, this is what I always say to people is if you can get to a full AI system where you have hundreds of clients at high margins, like that's obviously the holy grail. And as the LLMs get better, because I know people in the comments are saying, OK, but like, you know, no agent can actually go and do X, Y, Z tasks.

9:00Well, yes, they can some tasks, not everything. Right. There's some like creative tasks. I don't think, you know, it's right, right, right now. But these LLMs are only getting better. So now is the time when you should be looking at building those businesses. So I think build in public is an important part of of actually building some of these businesses for two reasons. One is it's going to help you get customers, drive where to mode. And then two, it's going to help you have a better insight to who the customer is. So you're going to be wanting to start, you know, X account, Instagram account, whatever feels best for you and where those where, you know, where your customer base is.

9:39you're going to solve one problem publicly you're going to show the exact process you're going to get to a point where a thousand people are going to see it a hundred people are going to save it ten people are going to try it eight are going to succeed at using your product two are going to quit and then one is going to tell everyone and if you can get nine people to pay three thousand dollars a month let's say then you can go and take and and reinvest some of that money in content and then it goes and creates this really nice flywheel now again people are i'm thinking about the comment section you guys are in my head people are always gonna see this and be like yeah but how am i getting a thousand people to see to see this and it's it's a good point you know it's not easy to create an audience uh you have to look at you know what it you know what how do you come up with a really good account name you know we have this really good account name for example boring marketer it's just interesting boring marketing it's interesting gets people gets people uh to to think of it or even the name of this podcast the startup ideas podcast if you're into startup ideas obviously you're gonna potentially want to click and go into and watch and consume the content so you need a good name you need a good bio if people are interested i can do a whole episode breaking down how i create audiences and how i create communities from those audiences but it's totally possible assuming that you can come up with a good brand a good name and then you've figured out the format.

11:08And what do I mean by format? A format could be just a way of, it could be like long stories that you tell. It could be video content that's 60 seconds. It could be using a Handycam 90s camcorder that you're going and recording content. Some format that is repeatable, that is scalable, that you can do over and over and hopefully post every single day. So, uh, what's really cool about where we're at, uh, in this day and age is you're going to get to this point where your brain, um, you know, and this is why this is a good business for a solopreneur. You're going to be orchestrated, orchestrating a bunch of different agents.

11:50Once you get to the phase three of, um, let's go back up. Once you get to phase three of this, uh, of, of this, uh, business. and you're going to be orchestrating and managing a bunch of different Lindy AI agents, Gumloop agents. You're going to be creating Claude and Cursor custom workflows realistically at that point and you're going to have Zapier connect everything. And the cool part is you're going to have the output of a bunch of employees doing your business. And through this process, you're going to create this backend system. So you're going to be able to basically use that backend system to create multiple price points.

12:34And I talked a little about this in the beginning, you know, enterprise, what is enterprise? Well, that is the white glove service for your product, a self-serve, just go ahead and log in and go and, you know, use the software and API, you know, using the data to go and create other people, create products on top of your data. So, you know, I'm putting these numbers here. You can see like 80K MRR, 50K MRR, 50K MRR. It just goes to show you that, you know, the numbers are possible. I'm not saying, again, I'm not saying everyone's going to do it. Most people who are listening to this are probably not even go and create a startup.

13:18They're going to listen to this and they're going to be like, that's cool or that's impossible. I I don't think I can do that, but it's, it's totally doable. It's happening every day. And the example I love giving the most is, you know, there's like this, uh, company right now. I think they're called bank statement converter, the world's most trusted bank state converter converter, easily convert PDF bank, bank statements from thousands of banks into a clean Excel format. And they're doing like$40 ,000 a month. It's crazy. It's like a simple micro SAS idea. Um, and then you can go and expand, right?

13:54Go expand, uh, your offering from there. So this, uh, this type of business isn't for everyone. Um, and I, you know, I think the reason why I think it's interesting is, um, you know, if you're thinking about starting a business, yes, you can go and do an AI revolution startup idea, but it's very sci-fi. You can do something like we process forms in 24 hours and people are like, I want, you know, take my money. Um, And I think that boring startup ideas, like businesses need it. It doesn't take that long to create. You can create some of this stuff in a weekend, right? So I think that's the other beauty about this whole idea is you can create this in a short amount of time.

14:37And you don't need to be a Stanford graduate. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. You don't need to work at Google. This is, you know, something that anyone can do if they put their mind to it, as long as they are consistent and actually go and put in the work, pick the right niche and and go from there. A lot of people right now, the market feels frothy a little bit in the AI world. I'm seeing tons of seed rounds being raised, tons of people hiring, building the future. And a lot of those businesses don't have a lot of revenue or have zero or not a lot of revenue. And there's nothing wrong with that.

15:16But I think that there's a really interesting, you know, world for people who want to pick these boring tasks, being boring, start by building an agency, automate a bunch of it, use content to drive customers and insights, you know, have as retain as much equity as possible, use those profits to dividend out, build other apps, build, you know, I call it being a multi-preneur, owning multiple businesses. I think is really interesting. And I think that right now is the time because these agents are finally getting to a point where the outcome is good, is quite good. So it's a really interesting thing, something I wanted to share with everyone here to get your creative juices flowing.

16:03I read every single comment that is posted. So I would love to see what you're thinking, if you like this sort of stuff, what other topics I should cover. I'll see you in there. And I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day, friends. And I want to end this, actually, I want to end this episode by saying, these episodes are for the people. You know, someone I know, very well-known entrepreneur hit me up and he's like, why do you create content about creating a$5 ,000 a month, $25 ,000 a month, like agency workflow business, like build, like do episodes on, uh, you know, these big ideas, these really, really big ideas.

16:53Um, he's like, you've, you've raised venture capital. You've advised TikTok. You've advised Reddit. You can, you can like, why are you wasting your time? And no, these are, these are for the people. Like this is sauce that I think that if you're able to, if, if this speaks to you and this seems fun to you, uh, this is, you know, of the path that I would do if I was starting an AI agent startup. And it's actually the path that I am taking with some of my businesses. And I'll be sharing that more as that comes out. And yeah, hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you on the internet.