What is Perplexity Computer?

0:00Today we're going to take Perplexity Computer for a spin. Now, I haven't tried it, so together we're going to basically look at how can we use this, how can entrepreneurs use this to make money and be more productive. We're actually going to ask it to tell us what are the top use cases to use, and we're going to test it out and see if it's any good. You've probably seen Perpexley Computer, and you might have bookmarked it, but today we're actually going to see if it's super valuable. So let's just get right into it.

0:35I'm going to just say, hey, I want to know the five best use cases non-obvious for founders who want to make money and be more productive using perplexity computer. Like what are the five prompts and use cases I need to be aware of that are super mind blowing? I'm actually going to share this live on YouTube and Spotify on the Startup Ideas podcast. So we are going to test it. This is on Perplexity computer. as of now you need to be on the max plan to to get it going that's 200 a month they say it's coming to pro and maybe free pens i'm not sure i'm not affiliated with perplexity by any stretch and this is the first time i'm using this so uh just noticing uh for the first time you basically have these tasks on the left hand side um and on the right hand side is what's happening uh with the different agents so it says let me load up the relevant skills to give you the best possible answer here let me read the key reference files to make sure i'm giving you the most accurate picture of what a computer can do and it's running all these tacks in parallel which is pretty cool you don't need to open up a bunch of different cloud code instances it's right there running it in parallel so now it says good i now have a deep understanding of the full capability set since you're sharing this on the startup ideas podcast let me craft five generally non-obvious founder specific use cases that will make your audience jaws drop all right let's see if perplexity computer can drop the sauce here are five non-obvious use cases that surprise should surprise your audience these are built for founders who want to move faster and make more money warm outbound at scale so personalized prospect reach research and outreach in in one shot so let's go ahead and try this we're actually you can i guess you can press copy right over here and I guess you want to start a task.

2:52So here's a list of 30 companies I want to sell to. For each one, find the founder, CEO on LinkedIn, research their company's recent news, funding and pain points, and then draft a hyper-personalized cold email referencing something specific about them. Send each email via my connected Gmail. So we're going to go ahead and do that. So that's actually pretty cool. You have your tasks over here. You can go back and forth. I think that's pretty clean. Perplexity has always done a good job at doing pretty clean UI UX. Sip a cold brew. Let's keep it going. All right, I'll tackle this step by step. I need a few things to make this effective.

3:35Again, running the tasks in parallel. I see a couple things I need to address before we get executed on this. Gmail is not connected yet. I need to get this set up so I can send emails on your behalf. I need some key details from you to make these emails actually convert. So this is cool. I mean, connecting your email, there's definitely obviously some risk associated with that, but I'm going to go ahead and do that. So I've gone ahead and connected it. So it's super cool that you can just do that pretty easily. Gmail is connected. I'm ready to roll as soon as you share the list of 30 companies, paste them in your reply, what you're selling, your SaaS product, podcast sponsorships, tone and CTA preferences.

4:13Once I have those details, I'll research all 30 companies in parallel. I'll find the right person at each and draft hyper-personalized emails and send them through your Gmail. So, you know, I'm going to say I run the Startup Ideas podcast. This is for podcast sponsorships. I want you to research who advertises on TBPN. And then I'll say, take the top, let's just say five companies. And then you now know I'm selling pod sponsorships and Tone and CTA. well tone I want to be friend to friend clear calm and CTA do you want to set up a call with my team let's go ahead and do that and see if it's able to find who advertises on TBPN so it says I need to find the first companies to advertise on TBPN so it actually doesn't know what, does it know what TBPN is?

5:34Oh, it does. So it first says the Bitcoin Podcast Network. It's not called that. I think it's called Technology Brothers Podcast Network. But it still finds the right one over here, you can see. Because you can see that it's finding a bunch of like TBPN signs with CAA, that's the right TBPN. So it finds them. So it had a little trip up over there. And then it just says it finds Is there five? Ramp, Plaid, Figma. And it's researching all five in parallel, recent news, pain points, and any specific I can reference in email. So this is really interesting, right? Because I don't know about you, but I actually don't do any cold email, really, unless it's to a cold DM of someone I look up to and I think is really interesting and cool.

6:21I'll just cold DM them. But for closing leads, finding leads, stuff like that, I don't do cold DMs. My approach is really building audiences and communities and having people reach out to me. So this is cool that, you know, I can do this. But what I've had issues with in terms of cold DMs in the past is it just sounds lame. It doesn't sound like me. It's a lot of work to actually find the people. And, you know, let's just see if this is any good. So it says, excellent research. Let me find the right contact emails and draft the emails. Let me also look up who handles sponsorship and partnerships at these companies since emailing the CEO directly about a podcast sponsorship isn't always the best path.

7:06This is what I'm talking about. This is really cool. Because obviously Dylan Field, the founder of Figma, isn't going to open a cold DM probably from my email. But the podcast sponsorship people might. So it says, good, I have the send underscore email tool ready. So what's really cool is perplexity computer, spinning up a computer. It's like a virtual computer. It has skills, it has tools, and it can actually go and do things. So let's see if this is any good. Okay, so here are the five personalized emails, each referencing specific details from my research. So it's actually crazy. So it found Toby, the founder of Shopify's email.

7:57that's really cool like that in itself is really really really crazy right so good on them for finding that but we did talk about how we shouldn't let me check if these CEOs are reachable oh interesting so it's actually I wouldn't send it to CEOs personally so I guess that's something that you know we can adjust but actually I mean I would probably send it to the CEOs and I would send it to the podcast people. So let's just read the Toby email. Hi, Toby. Been watching Shopify's run lately,$11.6 billion in revenue. I think it's more than that. I think maybe not, actually. 30 % growth and the AI catalog tools are generally impressive.

8:39The MRI thing you did with Claude was wild. So I don't know if you saw that. He did like, I think he analyzed like an MRI result and built a tool around it. and it was wild. So it went and checked his X account and what he's been posting. I run the Startup Ideas podcast. Our audience is founders and builders actively launching companies, many of them choosing their commerce stack right now. We get about X downloads per episode and our listeners skew heavily towards early stage founders who are making infrastructure decisions. I noticed Shopify is already sponsoring TVPN, which makes a lot of sense or shows a similar demo, but a tighter focus on people who are literally in the process starting companies feels like a natural pit.

9:19This is awesome. and then there's another one to ramp and there's another one to plaid and they have all these people's email addresses i don't know how they're getting them but um assuming those are real email addresses that's pretty pretty cool i'm gonna say uh so and by the way and if i press send email uh it would just send the email it's got connected to my email to my email address and go ahead and do that but what i'm gonna do i'm gonna do one more thing and then we're gonna get to the next use case. I'm just curious if it can do this. So I'm going to say CEOs emails are impressive, but realistically, these are busy people.

10:02Let's try to get in front of the person in charge of podcast creator partnerships. Doesn't that make more sense? And then I'm going to just give it a bonus question i'm gonna say by the way is there something i'm not asking you here that could make me more money in this use case i'm just gonna see what it says sometimes you know we're trying to push it to the limit this is where we're reviewing profuxy computer so let's uh let's go and and see you're absolutely right ceos are reviewing sponsorship pitches the person who actually signs podcast deals usually head of brand marketing partnerships and it goes and says let's go what uh you know let's go find those people so it's going to go ahead and find them it also says what you're not asking but should be outreach to companies that sponsor tbvn's competitors too right so if a company sponsors tbpn they also sponsor my first million all in acquired right set up a recurring monitor i can check tbpn all in and other tech podcasts weekly for new sponsors the moment a new brand starts advertising a competitor's brand you get a notification with their partnership context contact so you're reaching out while their podcast budget is hot that is so smart and so cool that you can set it up that's like you know one of the reasons i think people like open claw and co-work now has some scheduled tasks you can yeah schedule a task so So it's very cool that you can spin up a complexity computer and have these recurring monitors and go and do that and do things for you in the cloud.

11:45Follow up sequences. One email converts at maybe five to 10 percent. Maybe I can or I can schedule follow ups three and seven days later with new angles if they don't reply. Absolutely crazy. Want me to do any of those after we get these five out the door? Duh. OK, so let's just see. good findings now i have solid leads let me compile what uh what i found so it's gone ahead and found them it's found wow it's found their email addresses it's hey george caught your 20 this is the vp of growth of ramp the caught your 20 vc episode the bit about finding alpha and channels no one else is trying to really resonate it no one else is trying really resonated direct DirectMail becoming one of Rand's biggest channels.

12:35Such a good example of that. These emails are amazing and they're so personalized. I am impressed here. I'm going to say, I'm just going to copy this. What you're asking and not should be. Yes, go do those things. And after that, I promise we will get to the new use case. But I will say this is better than expected. A lot cleaner. I like the UI. I like that you can spin out multiple tasks at the same time. It is$200 a month. So is that expensive or is that cheap? I guess if you're using it like this, obviously this would pay for itself in this actual use case. It's going and researching sponsors across competing prods.

13:26It's setting up a weekly monitor that checks those pods for new sponsors and sends you a notification. What I like about the Lindy AI assistant, and I'm going to do a video just completely on that, is you can text it using iMessage. I don't know if you can do that here, I don't think so. But I do think that one of the cool things about OpenClaw has been that you can use iMessage, you can use Telegram, you can use Discord.

13:59This is a nice UI, but I do like the idea that I can just text it on some of those other platforms. Okay, so the email has been sent, which is scary because I kind of know some of these people, but we'll see what happens. I'll report back and tell, you know, if you see Ramp, Plaid, Figma, Shopify, AppLovin advertising on this podcast, it hopefully came from that personalized email. So I'll keep you posted on that. What's happening now is it's updating a plan with expanded outreach. It's identifying top five TBN sponsor companies and their CEOs and founders. It's researching all five companies in parallel, finding the partnership, brand marketing contact at each.

14:46it's researching sponsors across tech podcasts to build a bigger prospect list and it's doing follow up sequences and weekly monitoring in parallel this is literally a marketing email marketing person's old job point blank and it's using Claude Sonnet 4.6 which is great I will say I wish it didn't send those emails without me clicking send when I went up here if we scroll up here it was like do you want to send these emails and I didn't click send I actually didn't think it was going to click the emails. I'm all for it because I think it's fun to see if it converts. But I would have loved to have double-checked that.

15:27So this is really cool. It's researching all the sponsors. Let's go ahead and while it's sort of running here, let's go ahead and do some more use cases. Automated competitive Intel. The second one here. Automative competitive Intel on autopilot. Recurring monitoring with push alerts. Every morning at 8 a.m., check these five competitors' websites for pricing changes, new feature announcements, and any new blog posts. Also, search X for any mentions of them. If anything has changed since yesterday, send me a push notification with a summary. And if nothing has changed, stay quiet. Why is this mind-blowing?

16:05This turns a computer into a persistive competitive intelligence agent that runs every day without you touching it. It browses their actual websites, compares it with what it found yesterday. Okay, let's go and see if this works. We're going to head and start a new task. I'm going to go ahead, and you can see what's cool. You can also just dictate here, but you don't need to. And I could see myself getting used to this. I don't know about you, but I can definitely see myself getting used to this. Which competitor should I monitor? Okay, so let's just say, let's go with the podcast stuff. So let's just say My First Million, what other podcasts, All In Podcasts, these are the top three.

16:50And you figure out the other two. My pod is called The Startup Ideas Podcast, and I'm Greg Eisenberg. okay let's yeah let's get let's get perplexity computer to do some of the work why do i have to do all that work so i'm just testing it a little bit um it says remembering greg's podcast and identity so it's updating memory so that's really cool um just loving i'm loving this i'm loving this uh we're just watching it cook it feels really good based on my research too strong competitors are 20 BC and acquired both target the same entrepreneurial audience and frequently overlap with your listener base cool now let's set up the daily 8am monitoring task I need to convert 8am eastern to UDC first so it's going ahead and coding which is really cool so it's going ahead and coding and that's why it's a computer with access to 16 different models we saw before it was using sonnet 4.6 and it's supposed to be using the best model for the best task and uh you know it's just interesting it's interesting watching it how it thinks so every morning i'll automatically check these five competitors what i'm watching for pricing or sponsors of changes on their sites new feature announcements or product launches new blog posts or content new episode drops guest announcements notable x activity and mentions if anything has changed you'll get a push notification with the summary and links.

18:24If nothing has changed, you won't hear from me. First run is tomorrow morning at 8am. I picked a 20 BC and acquired as the two additional. Yeah, we know that. Okay, so I'm going to say, that's cool. But what would today's report look like? I want to see it so I can give feedback. So because you're not going to be there with me at 8 a.m. I just want to I want you to see what you know what it's capable of. So Propexy Computer goes good call let me run the full check right now so you can see exactly what tomorrow tomorrow's report would look like. So if this works and you're a founder or you want to be a founder you want to build something there is no reason why you shouldn't be having something like this going right um i wonder if you can i wonder like here so let's scroll up a bit my question is so you're going to run this but can you email it to me right i'm going to ask that like i would love for it to be emailed i don't necessarily want to like go and check perplexity every morning at 8 a.m but i much rather just be sent to my email or communicated to me and you know like i said i What I liked about Lindy AI is you can use something and OpenClause, you can use iMessage.

19:46It's using Sonnet 4.6 again. It's looking at all the latest episodes of the podcast, doing research, compiling the reports. And then, oh, that's cool. You can go and click and see all the subtasks. This reminds me a lot of Manus. Manus does a really good job at that. And I actually think Manus is just underrated as a platform. I really need to go back in there and do another episode on Manus. But yeah, it's going ahead and doing that. It's cooking, it's cooking, it's cooking.

20:24And yeah, I think this, I mean, I would open this. I would open this, and not because I want to do what like, quote unquote, competition is doing on any business I'm starting but it does help like get your creative juices flowing and you know I'm all about getting uh creative juices flowing I find it helpful even if you want to be the anti version of them right sometimes a competitor will launch a new feature or do something launch a brand campaign and it's not about hey I want to do what they want to do it's Actually, I want to be different than them. A great example of that is OpenAI announced they're doing ads.

21:09Anthropic announced they're not doing ads. They're the anti-version of each other. I think having a competitor analysis report, having agents go ahead and doing this for you, sending it to you could be really cool just to help you get those creative juices flowing. and get the most out of your day that way. I think that's a big part of why a lot of us want to use AI agents is if we can get unfair advantage in terms of information, help us frame that information, help to get the most out of that information, then we'll be ahead. So let's see what's happening here. So it's actually saved. it saved it as an MD file into home slash user MFM I guess the report for each of the different podcasts, the all in, the 20VC

22:17and so it creates those files and then it's done and this is what the notification would look like. A new episode drops today. So it says new episode. This is Harry Stebbings. Anthropic wipes billions off the market. It's the new episode. Published a European micro funds report. Confirmed as a speaker. I mean, I'm just scrolling through this and like it's interesting. My first million. Ryan Smith from the Utah Jazz. That's really cool. Pat Walls. Dumb iPhone apps making money. That's cool. Andrew Wilkinson. best worst business in 26 very cool sampar pivoting youtube channel away from personal finance towards founder-led content his second video already hit 100 000 views like that in itself is interesting right no format or pricing changes to mfm it's like these are this is interesting um and then says that's the format on quiet days when nothing is meaningful or change across all five you get no notification at all what do you think anything you'd want added remove or formatted differently how are you going to send me this report so i like these reports but like how am i going to get them right now it's a push notification through perplexity interesting so you have to download the app um so what is the best way yeah i guess you could um could you send via email is that even possible can you send via iMessage I don't think it's going to be able to send via iMessage but you know let's a man can dream you know we can dream we all can dream let me check what's messaging and email tools are provided are available so it's going to go ahead and do that email is ready to go email is already connected I can send the full report to your inbox every morning.

24:11iMessage isn't available. So anyways, it gives the, you know, it could send via email, which is really cool. Okay, don't send emails for now. All right, so let's go ahead and see what our cold email stuff is up to wow this is this is crazy man oh my god so it's researching sponsors across competing pods it's setting up a weekly monitor checks those pods for new sponsors send you a notification with partnership contacts and it's scheduling the follow-up sequences at day three and day seven who doesn't reply it's just doing it all it's found 96 sponsor product prospects found this is crazy i bet you this can i mean this this is this is something that could definitely work all right let's go back and do another use case uh investor pipeline research deep dive 50 bcs before you fundraise here are 50 50 bc firms i'm considering raising four for my series a for each one find their most recent fund size partner blah blah put it all into a spreadsheet why it's interesting computer runs batch research across 50 firms in parallel web search social and x linkedin uh you get back a structured spreadsheet with everything i'm kind of i'm not that interested in raising money from vcs but i i am interested in seeing how this could work and how you can create spreadsheets so we're just going to test to see how this is able to do some research and throw things into spreadsheets.

26:00So it says I need to clarify a few things before diving into this research. So it says I need some details to make this actually targeted and useful. Which company are you raising Series A for? Let's just do let's pretend I'm the CEO of, well, I'll just say I'm the co-founder of IdeaBrowser.com, the number one website for people to find great startup ideas, trends, and how to build them with AI. hi, I'm at series A level. So I'm just giving it the name of the company. And it's going to go ahead and hopefully create that spreadsheet. While it's doing that, let's go ahead and see another use case.

27:04Turn a podcast episode into a full content machine. Whoa, that's cool. So here's my latest podcast recording, transcribe it with speaker labels, write a 15 word, 100 word blog post, pull out the five most tweetable quotes. That's really interesting. So it's cool that you can do that. I'm not going to do that because I don't have an audio file handy. But basically what you can do is you can set up so that every, you know, every time like you can set up a recurring workflow, I guess, like every time you launch a new podcast, you can extend it to, you know, blog posts, tweetable quotes, LinkedIn carousel.

27:49And just like based on how this is working, it just feels like it would do a good job. Okay, so the status here, if you see the left, it shows that it needs something from me. And now it's just asked me, can you share the VC I don't know who would fund this. You do the research on the best ones. So we're just going to make it do a lot of the work.

28:20And let's see, fair enough. Let me find the best fit VCs for Idea Browser Series A. I'll have the relevant skills and build a targeted list based on your profile, AI-powered platform. And yeah, so it's going ahead. and says Idea Browser sits at the intersection of several hot sectors, AI power tools, creator economy, community platforms, and I'm researching across those vectors. So that's exactly how a human being would go and actually reach out to venture people. Of course, if you know them, you would just be like, I'm going to reach out to Jimmy because Jimmy works at this venture fund. But if you don't, the way you would do it is you would say, what are VC firms that are investing in this genre or type of company?

29:14So it's going ahead and doing it for us. It's using Sonnet 4.6. I just expanded this. It says it's looking at Bessemer and Union Square Ventures. It's researching. It's just going through tons and tons of different articles. Saving the final curated 50 VC firms to workspace. Let's see here. If you click files, what happens? Okay, nothing here really. You know, these are all the connectors, I guess. So this is where you can use. Yeah, we've already connected Gmail with Calendar, but you can connect, you know, Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Slack, Ahrefs, you know, Cloudflare. I'm just looking at the ones that are interesting to me Google Gemini HubSpot is really interesting

30:11because imagine your CRM your CRM has all the data whatever you use, even if you use Google Sheets if you have all the data and you can load it up into here and you have a computer that can go and access this that's really cool PayPal, sending money, that's crazy Reddit, that's cool um you know how do you find pain points and stuff like that you gotta get a you know idea browser.com on here all right waiting for your response so it's gone ahead and identify them um interesting this will search far and wide across the internet to get you fund sizes sector recent investment best best part of this will consume a significant amount of credits do you going to proceed at least it asks at least it asks um i'm not sure how many credits you get with um your max plan so uh you know i've been using this for now like 30 minutes um so far so good but we'll see right i will say that even like if this costs 200 like this session it would would have been worth it for me.

31:21Because again, you close a sponsorship and it works out. That's worth it. Okay, so it's going ahead and researching all in parallel. And this is, wow, this is crazy. These are all like, yeah, these are people I would reach out to if I was raising money. So this is really cool. All right, while it's doing this, let's go ahead and check our last use case, live market diligence on a deal. A full investment memo from a single ticker. Build me an investment research memo on Shopify. Pull their latest financials, earnings, transfer pilots, compare their margins and growth to big commerce and Wix. Check what analysts and finance what are saying.

32:04Compile into a polished PDF with charts. I want bulk case, bear case, and your assessment. I've been seeing, I will say, I've been seeing on X a lot of people using perplexity computer with the use case of using it as a financial analyst. I think it was Morgan Linton who built a Bloomberg terminal like VibeCode using Perplexity Computer, which is really cool. So it seems to be really primed for financial advice. Wow, this is cool. It says, I'll build a comprehensive investment research on Shopify. Let me load the data visualization and research assistant skills. It's cool. You don't have to install the skills.

32:58It's going ahead and doing that for you. I do use Perplexity. It knows that I like value investors and Bill Ackman is a value investor. It's gone ahead and brought that in. It looks at your old searches on Perplexity. and even though I've never used perplexity computer it knows a little bit about me which is interesting for people who use perplexity that context will already be loaded so it says I have all the data I need let me get the shop estimates and analyst research then build the pdf I have plenty of data that's a little it's a little flex there perplexity computer let me now update the tasks and build a comprehensive pdf with charts let me download the price history and csv and build a complete PDF with charts using a subagent.

33:50So what's cool about, you know, what I'm learning, what's cool about computers, subagents, skills, tools, that's all built into this. And people thought perplexity was dead. Here we go. The CSV downloaded as single lines. Let me save the data properly from the content I already have. All right. So you can see the status here. it's working while it's working let's just ask it um do you have any more use cases people should try i'm live right now i'm just curious if it has any of them uh but this is something that you should totally do just you know ask ask it for use cases uh five more different angles we We won't have time to do today, but it could be really interesting for you.

34:46Steal your competitor's SEO strategy. Auto-generate a branded pitch deck from a loom video. That's pretty cool. Shadow CFO. Weekly financial sanity check on autopilot. Amazing. Hiring sourcer. Find and rank 50 candidates a minute. The deal room. Due diligence package on an acquisition target. More. Give me a few more. Those are all really interesting. I think the hardest part of a lot of this is like figuring out, OK, which agents recurring flows should I have? Reverse engineer any SaaS pricing page. Wow, that's cool. You instantly see exactly where you underpriced. That's really cool. Customer discovery on autopilot.

35:29Free customer research. Clone your best performing ad copy. Wow, this is crazy. So, yeah, let's check in on this. so okay so here's here's what we got it's got the name the fund of this is the vc the vc list the partner's name recent tweets recent interviews the different sources that's crazy and it's building yeah it's just building an excel spreadsheet with all that data literally building an Excel spreadsheet. It's an analyst. All right. Safe to say this exceeded my expectations. I don't know about you, but this is really cool. Something I'm going to be playing more with. I'm really interested in sort of the open clarification of the internet.

36:20So this whole world where now you can spin up these machines with agents, sub-agents, tools and skills, have it access files and get them to do things for you. I think a lot of us want to start these one person, $1 billion companies, want to start small teams or even a small team and building these small companies, software companies, agent companies, SaaS companies. And that's why I like playing with these tools. And I'm grateful that you come and you watch these videos, you listen, you like, you comment. I'm sharing everything I'm learning in real time. I just find this such an exciting moment in entrepreneurial history.

37:12I built and sold three startups, advisor to TikTok and Reddit. I've invested in a ton. I've been doing this since I've been a kid. I just find right now just to be so fun, to tinker, have fun, and build assets. I'm excited to see what you think of this perplexity computer. I'll be reviewing and checking out more of these in the future because I think it's an unfair advantage. Hope this has been helpful. Send it to a friend if it has been. I'll see you next time on the Startup Ideas podcast. Have a creative day, my friend.