Transcript for:
Building AI Startups and Business Strategies

when I give away a bunch of free startup ideas the exact playbooks of how to do it and then I get a DM saying "I just hit 1 million ARR and it I was able to retire my mom." If anyone has good ideas for AI startups it's people who work at jobs they don't like if you're listening to this you're early and you can actually go and participate and create businesses around that that's why it excites me you have like this fivestep framework of how someone can build an AI business in 2025 let's do like a quick 5 10 minute crash course on two AI products I think would be really valuable to people so okay before we get into the episode I want to give some context to this conversation in the last few months I've gone deep down the AI rabbit hole on YouTube and one of the things that has become clear to me is that there is so much opportunity right now to use AI to build a great business for your life and so I got inspired in the leadup to this conversation with Greg because I believe that so many people maybe you watching at home get excluded from these new wealth opportunities because of the belief that you're not a tech person and so my intention with this episode was to make it so easy and simple for you to start an AI business and so we brought on Greg Eisenberg he's a successful entrepreneur he's also a tech outsider that built and sold three companies before he turned 30 and is now building a multi-million dollar AI company called Boring Marketing and a little behind the scenes before we even hit record on this episode Greg told me that in the last year he has shared this framework with a few people in his network and they've gone on to build AI businesses that make over $50,000 a month and so my hope with this episode is simple that some of you watch this video it inspires you to take massive action and by this time next year you're DMing me saying that I just built my first milliondoll AI business that's it i'm speaking that into existence for you guys let's get into the video greg if someone's listening to this maybe they stumbled upon this video on YouTube they clicked on it on their feed what is going to be the value to them they're non-technical but they want to start a business what is going to be the value to them of listening to this conversation of what we're about to talk about in the next 60 minutes so my thesis is that you know if you landed here and you're on this YouTube video and you are seeing what's happening in the world of AI and technology and you feel like an outsider my thesis is that that's a limiting belief and by the end of this episode what I hope to do is to remove that veil because that's what it is and give you the confidence to actually go and put something out in the world that will change your life i think that's awesome let's do Let's do that let's try to do it let's do it right now um you know actually you know what let's start let's start right in the beginning cuz I see these videos on YouTube talking about people that are making millions of dollars with AI agents i want to start right from the top what is an AI agent yeah so good question um an AI agent is well do you know what an LL LLM is le let's start with that okay so here's the way I I'm going to just dumb it down because I think uh what insiders like to do is put complicated words associated to simple things to keep people out so in this conversation we're going to try to use simple simple language um because I actually don't think that the terms really matter large language model doesn't really matter what matters is this before uh AI came to be all software was dumb meaning if you were if you signed up to salesforce.com which is uh a CRM custom you know customer relationship management software basically a way to track all your sales leads if you signed up to it uh preai that software was dumb because it relied on the salesperson to go in and add uh a sales lead manually so it would say Greg Eisenberg is a good sales lead and it says Greg Eisenberg my email address company I work for and it's basically this manual process and a multi- trillion dollar industry was created on dumb software um now we're entering an era uh of smart software I call it smart software what happens to software when you can inject human and humanlike intelligence into that software and what do I mean by that instead of relying on uh a human being to go and say "Okay Greg Eisenberg is a four out of five star lead for these reasons what if there was intelligence humanlike intelligence aka an LLM aka AI that could go and you know maybe scrape the internet and based on a bunch of criteria score the the sales lead." Now that's what a LLM really is and that when you know when people you know they hear about or they've used Chat GBT and products like that you're basically you utilizing humanlike intelligence to accomplish a task and what an agent is takes it a a little step further it says okay we've got humanike intelligence over here what if we can create a human-like person to go and actually complete the task meaning what if we can create an AI saleserson so what if you can go and say um I would like to close 10 sales leads this month and the ideal customer profile is a CEO who is making between one and $10 million a year in their business and they need to be in you know England let's say um go and complete that task in the past you would actually ask a human being to do that but in this new you know smart software uh world you can actually give a task to a human-like individual to go and complete it now I want to end I want to just say one last thing before before I hear your reaction to this when you when I go on X or Instagram or whatever I'm seeing everyone talking about AI i still think despite that it's underrated i still think that we don't understand how society will change and by the way they'll there'll be some negative effects to this we can talk about it but there will be some negative effects to this but how society will change when you can completely unlock uh humanlike intelligence and human like people at scale what happens to the world now I like to look at it glass half full as in if you're listening to this you're early and you can actually go and participate and create businesses around that um and that's what that's why it excites me H you know I I I just find the AI conversation it's just so fascinating um and you know what you even mentioned right at the end there you mentioned that it's underrated and so I was thinking about what you were saying about like up until this point we've been using dumb software like we've had to it's had to be paired with our own intelligence to actually be like useful and that's created trillions of dollars of value with dumb software and now we're kind of getting into this like AI era where we now have as you called it smart software and so if we're actually underrating it right now what in your mind what is the the opportunity like it's hard to do but like how would you even quantify the opportunity or what's going to happen in the future looking forward the fact that we now have smart software yeah i want to talk about two specific examples uh and and there's more than these two specific ones but I just want to give a couple just to get people's creative juices flowing one is my belief is that SAS the SAS industry software as a service so companies like Adobe um companies like monday.com those big companies are basically being completely dismantled by people who are going to go and you know in our world they call vibe coding vibe coding basically just means you're going to go into a software like Replet Bolt lovable cursor and just like just like how you uh do a Google search you type something in uh you can do or a chat GBT search you can basically prompt some of these platforms to create software for you so I believe that uh there's a ton of opportunities to go and create cheaper or free versions of some of these software products um and create businesses around that and so go and create like the uh docuign for you know Germany go and create the monday.com for uh Canada and charge a tenth of the price and try to just suck as many clients as you can and when you look at how big these companies are these big SAS companies they do billions a year so even if you could get 1% 2% it's absolutely insane so that's one trend uh that I think that people listening could go today and go and create a SAS business uh to go and compete with some of those the second one is uh agencies so the consulting business the freelance business the agency business um that is I mean such a huge business like McKenzie and all these companies you know gener have thousands of employees like center thousands and thousands of employees what happens when completing what happens if I can spin up a junior Mckenzian analyst in a second so I think that there's an opportunity to undercut consulting agency and to fulfill it by AI now I know there's someone in the comment section that's saying "Well you'll never be able to do that because I've got really good taste or this person at McKenzie does you know they hire McKenzie because they don't want to get you know fired at their job." like no one gets fired you know there's a quote no one gets fired uh when when you hire IBM and or no one gets fired when you hire Mckenzie why is that the case it's the case because you know people trust those brands i'm not saying McKenzie is going to go to zero i'm not saying Adobee is going to go to zero either i'm just saying that there's going to be billions of dollars for you to go and pick up and create cheaper services that probably have similar type of results and I don't think enough people are doing it yeah you know that's awesome okay you know I'm getting excited and and and we're going to get into um I was actually reading it last night you have like this fivestep framework of how someone can build uh an AI business in 2025 and we're going to get into it before we do though and you spoke about the the opportunity and you even mentioned it before of like there are people that are that have watched your videos or read your content and actually reached out like implemented some of the things that you mention and reached out to you to be like I've built a $50,000 a month business or I'm building like a a business that's tracking to a million in revenue from implementing the steps that you mentioned and so I wanted to just do like a little thought exercise for you with you before we get into the frameworks which is let's say I had two groups of people right I have the group that watches this video and it's a complete waste of time to them like nothing happens after watching this video and then I have another group of people that they listen to this conversation and 6 months or 12 months from this point in time they have built something that is having a meaningful impact in their lives and let's just say I I zoom out I don't know 100 ft and I just observe their behavior I observe the actions that they took in that 6 to 12 month period what did group two do that group one wasn't doing like the people that are successful in actually doing the thing in building the AI startup what what are they doing versus the people that aren't i would say two things there's two things that they they are doing differently one is uh the second group is way more curious just intellectually curious about using some of these new products and pushing out stuff into the world and seeing what's going to happen and I I I will say I'm one of those people like I hear about a tool I hear about something that's happening and I want to get in I want to get involved i want to get my hands dirty the second thing is a lot of people are afraid to get their hands dirty and some people think that they're too good to get to to get their hands dirty um I once met uh a guy who uh owned many factories and and he was in the clothing business uh so he manufactured clothing he's a very famous uh individual and uh he would tell me that every year and I don't know if this was truthful but I it felt truthful every year he would go and sweep the floors of his factories for one day for one day only and I was like "Well why do you do that?" And he was like "I need to remember how to sweep the floors i need to remember what it feels like to sew so that I understand you know the the machines and I understand like my business right?" He's like I don't feel like I'm better than others because like I've succeeded etc and I think that there's a lot of people who are listening to this and they're like well I don't need this i don't need to use Replet or Lovable or Manis or Bolt or try these things or push this idea out there because I've got a stable job i'm I'm you know I'm okay i'll do it in I'll do it in six months when the tools get easier you know people say I hear this narrative a lot oh it's not it's not that good it wasn't able to actually do what I wanted to do but it was it was 96% there when it's 96% there that's exactly when you should be training so that when it gets to 100% you're a ma a master you're you know how to just like prompt this thing and get the most out of it so my hope is that 100% of people listen to this and they even if they don't believe that we're at the 100% mark in in in AI uh in terms of the output quality and by the way I actually don't think we're at 100% but even if we're not there they still say okay I'm going to go implement these things as a part of my workflow i might not ship products that do 10k a month 20k a month 50k a month and build companies around it but having it as part of my workflow is going to make me smarter and being smarter is going to yield good results than not being smart about these tools yeah you know I I I think that second point is so good and it's something that I I constantly uh remind myself which is uh you have to embrace the beginner's mindset is what I tell myself i think a lot of the times it's like we we get to a point where we feel like ashamed to be beginners like we feel ashamed to be noviceses and I think it's interesting for me cuz we've done over a 100 episodes of the show um all with like entrepreneurs that have achieved these like great feats and built huge businesses and they always have that ability to go all the way back to step zero and be like the beginner again and the humility of that um and that's how you learn that's how like when people talk about gold rush eras or a new wave or whatever that's how you take advantage of opportunities is like you are willing to be the complete novice the beginner and build from the base up um I think it's so good you actually said this when we when we spoke before this conversation and I think it's just a nice a nice intro into your framework and how you think about building an AI business you said anyone can sign up for an Instagram account a Tik Tok account an X account for free you have access to global distribution instantly and if you can pair that with AI that can automate work the possibilities are endless can can you can you explain what do you mean by that the possibilities are endless not only is that statement true but there's one thing I missed from that statement which is not only could anyone sign up uh with a Tik Tok account an Instagram account X account be connected to the 7 billion people and and unlock opportunities with AI those seven billion people or or 6.5 billion people have a credit card attached to the whole network never in the history of the planet have you had access to 6 billion people six plus billion people where you have their credit cards and anyone who creates great content uh especially with the 4U pages now and the 4U pageification of all the different social platforms where it doesn't matter if you have a million followers on X you know I I see sometimes accounts with 500,000 1500 followers get a million 2 million 3 million views because the content strikes a chord so the limiting factor to creating a a business that um that could change your life re is can you create content that's going to resonate with people in a niche that is underserved and can you do you have the skill set to actually put out or vibe code a product into the world so that when they see that product they feel something they connect with it and can you get them to pay something for that product now I'm dumbing it down it's these three things i'm dumbing it down because I actually think that that's all it really is like that's what business school should be in 2025 like modern business should be those three things it should be classes dedicated to how do you go viral on social and what does that mean picking a niche picking different formats uh when do you post how to think about those things it should be about how do you use AI to assist you in implementing product ideas that connect with that audience and it should be about pricing strategy and business models around how you can get and create a sustainable business that's all it is i don't know what people learn in business school today i was speaking to a friend of mine she just did her MBA at Colombia she spent I don't know 200 some odd thousand i don't know if you went to an Ivy League school so I apologize no I didn't okay you're in a safe space Greg you can talk about it safe space okay it's not real it's not a real It's fake it's a bubble it's a bubble it's like you're you know you're not in the real world it's like you're a bubble boy you know that's not that's not how you learn business like don't tell me that you're learning business if you've never played with Replet it's it's interesting as well because um I even I heard it even as I was preparing for this episode even in your story cuz you're a college dropout even in your story that that like urge to actually learn and implement what is happening i think at the time it was in engineering like in coding what's actually at the cutting edge in that's the that's the motivation for why you left school can you just briefly tell people about that can you briefly give people that context okay quick break in this internet technology era it's more important than ever to make sure your business is secure luckily the sponsor of today's episode Vanta is going to help you and your business stay compliant irrespective of whether you're a firsttime founder or a seasoned entrepreneur 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episode it was 2009 and I was it was the you know the app store had just come out um we all knew at that point 2009 2010 that the app store was going to change everything just like how we all know right now that AI is going to change everything just like we knew that cloud was going to change everything the web was going to change everything it it was very obvious in 2009 2010 that mobile and the app store what was going to unleash things like Instagram things like Uber etc so I'm sitting in these classes you know curious beginner's mind learning pushing apps to the app store just trying to get something out just to you know again it wasn't at 100% people were creating like beer beer drinking apps and fart apps and stuff like that but it was just like I need to create something so that when a billion people are using apps I'm ready to ship for the prime time so I went to my professor and I said we are learning about how to create desktop apps right now like this is this is by the way that class was supposed to be this is in Miguel University it's it was a top 20 university in the world like here I am thinking I'm at the be best univers one of the best universities and we're learning about how to create desktop apps in a world where mobile is what matters and to me that just didn't make any sense so I was like "Hey can we learn how to create apps i think that this app thing is going to be really big." And he was like "That's not how this works there's no apps in the textbook." And he hands me a textbook and the textbook was like introduction to like Java or something like that and I was just like how do I hand my resignation letter in right now like if you're telling me that at the end of this degree I'm going to be a computer scientist but I don't know how to create and scale mobile apps to me that means you haven't done your job you might you you might have a narrative in your head saying like yeah I did I taught them computer science that I you know I need to teach them the fundamentals and then they can learn mobile apps on their own but I had an insight which was I'm not going to be able to depend on anyone in my life and I'm sure a lot of people think like this too when my bank account was empty it wasn't like I can call the professor and be like fill my bank account i learned computer science it wasn't the degree is wasn't something I can actually fall back on the only thing the only thing that you can fall back on is assets uh now that asset could be in the form of financial assets it could also be in the form of you've got a million followers it could also be in the form of you have a skill set that is really in demand for example you understand how to you know do AI coding so when I had that insight I was just like I need to get the hell out of here because I'm not building assets right now so I quit you know I love it i love it and I and I want to I want to go straight into the framework and I want to give people the playbook and so step one and I and I'll read it out and I want to get your reaction is identify a painful workflow find a problem worth solving the foundation of any AI startup is identifying an inefficiency that AI can automate or enhance instead of chasing broad AI ideas focus on specific tedious workflows that people are willing to pay to fix can what did you mean by that identify a painful workflow i have this thesis that when you're in SAS software and you see a export button that every time you see an export button there's a1 to hund00 million a year AI business that could replace that export button now the reason I mean that I I'll explain what I why and the reason why is when you're exporting data traditionally you have some sort of analysis like the reason you're exporting it is you're doing some analysis around um the data itself so for example I'm filing my I'm doing my taxes this week and I exported data from my bank because I wanted to do categorize some of the expenses now the categorization today is being done by human beings but going back to our earlier conversation what happens when you can have human intelligence on tap when you can essentially humanlike intelligence on tap when you can essentially turn on intelligence um and analyze data so what I mean by find a painful workflow is it painful for me to go and categorize um my financial data like yeah kind of like to be honest like I'd much rather be like hanging with my baby or you know pushing code or designing or being a bit more creative and I think um what people need to do is in their day-to-day lives when they see things like export buttons and when they are a part of a workflow that they feel tedious prompt yourself and say if this could be done via AI what would that look like you know what can you actually cuz I want to make it so real for people can you give some examples of companies either that you've built or you've seen other people build these AI companies where basically they identified almost like a pretty niche painoint and they've managed to build a tool around it or a service that is now generating millions of dollars for them in their business yeah i mean how much time do you have like there's I I I'll just tell you one that I was looking at literally right before uh this this call there is a company called Icon i'll share my screen can I share my screen i think so yeah so anyone who's created Facebook ads or Instagram ads knows that it's a it's tedious it's very tedious um it's you have to find an actor and by the way I'm not involved in any way in this company um I just thought I I just thought it was cool um I just uh yeah you have to like find a creator you have to manage the creator you have to edit the the videos you have to write copy and the best you know people who know Facebook ads know that the the best people create hundreds if not thousands of ads and test the best ones and they always need to be creating new ads how how tedious does that sound it sounds super tedious right so um Oh here even on their website they say coming up with 100 unique 30 secondond scripts is painful um creating three permutations of each of the 100 ads makes the pain even worse so their solution first AI ad maker think chat GBT plus cap cut but for making winning ads with AI in minutes add GBT gets your ads to 80 99% complete make edits with ad cut for ads and prompt ad GBT until you're happyerson creative teams make 30 ads per month with icon they make 300 and get more winners that's a big deal and by the way these they look at these like these are AI this is AI dude um it doesn't look like AI but these are AI so the actual creative itself is AI this is see they have AI generated creators that's what they call it you know I'm just thinking about the person at home that's that's listening and so I like what you mentioned of like anytime you see an export button there's a potential pain point that you could monetize and so the thing that that I would not push back but the thing that I would be thinking is like how does someone figure out the difference how does someone basically figure out the pain point that they should actually act on and by that I mean it's not just like a minor inconvenience that no one would pay for it's actually a pain point big enough that you can monetize it like how do I how does someone make that decision i think a lot of people watching this video work at jobs which they don't like that much or that they think that they can unlock their potential a little bit more and they listen to this because it fires them up that's my thesis based on like the comment section that I saw on this pod on this on this channel and stuff like that so that means that so you might look at this this business uh icon and be like how would I you know it doesn't seem that it doesn't seem that painful it doesn't you know I don't really see it but if you're a marketing manager working at an e-commerce startup and you're creating 20 ads a month that's you probably know it's pretty painful you probably don't like doing it so if anyone has good ideas for AI startups it's people who work at jobs they don't like and doing painful stuff so if you're watching this and you can take stock of here's the two or three things that I do that are repetitive that I don't like doing chances are there's a good chance that you can plug an AI startup to go and fix that workflow and make it a lot more efficient with a they call it a human in the loop um you know maybe it's not fully AI powered but you can still have a human review the ad you know Icon is an example of a human in the loop business it's not like it's fully automated where you just say "Hey I need 10 i need 300 ads and it's going to go and optimize this uh click-through rates and the cost per click and everything." No you still have a human who looks at the ads who posts the ads stuff like that um so that that's what I would say to to those people yeah you know I just I just think it's so good and it's almost like the it's almost step one is like just do a a an audit of your own work life and like those two to three areas and we all know them right those two to three things that you do every single week that is so painful and so tedious there your AI business idea is right there it's right there these and you know you think that the biggest AI business ideas are somewhere in Stanford but they're right here because these people have intimate knowledge around these workflows better than anyone else right so you're competing people who are creating AI startups they're competing they're going to compete with the people who listen to this and they're going to try to figure out how do I get some insider like the people listening to this are the insiders basically Funny enough cuz these people know the workflows yeah okay you know what okay so step two hack V1 fast launch an imperfect MVP quickly rather than spending months refining a product quickly launch a minimum viable product to validate demand can you talk through that yeah the mi the mistake that a lot of people make is uh they find a tedious workflow and they're like I just they're like I know that this is going to be a big business i'm going to go and create a a big brand around this i'm going to go create a deck around this i'm going to go and spend the next 6 n 12 months building this fully featured product because that's what this audience needs in order for it to be very valuable and the goal isn't you know you know the goal is to create a minimal lovable product people talk about minimal viable product it's it's actually to create a minimal lovable product um and uh thinking about how can you use tools like Replet and Bolt and stuff like that to just get something out there that you can uh just gain some like have a foundation think of it as like a foundation um you don't need to build you know Rome in one day and and that's what I mean by that just get something out there um and iterate iterate from there you know I actually Greg I have um I have a confession to make which is um the first two businesses that I ever tried to start they were t-shirt lines in university spectacular failures like complete flops and the thing the biggest thing that I did wrong is I tried to develop this perfect product at the time it was like when the kind of athleisure athleisure trend uh was starting and I was like I'm going to build the next Nike i'm going to build the next Air Jordan and we just never ended up releasing a product cuz I would just keep trying to make it perfect before I would show anyone and it speaks exactly to what you're saying which is you don't need the perfect product you need the minimum lovable product i think that that's so that's just so good well I'll tell you I'll tell you why a lot of people create want to create the perfect product because it's actually similar to why people don't post on social media so the reason why people don't post consistently on social media and build audiences is because they a lot of the time they they feel like they're getting judged by their friends and family and it doesn't feel good to put out a tweet and get zero likes especially after your 40th tweet and it isn't fun to post on Instagram and only and see no likes and just seeing a lot of shares because you're like the reason why people are sharing this is they're sharing it my friends might or my friends quote unquote are sharing this and they're making fun of me and they're they're like why is Greg posting about AI coding tools that's so lame or something like that um products are the same way in the sense that we want to be proud of the products that we ship we don't want to put something out in the world that we're not proud of and that's why like a lot of us are Steve Jobs like in the sense it sound like you are kind of like Steve Jobsesque in the sense that you're like I need to I know what I want and I know what needs to get out there and I have a a high barrier for what makes an incredible product and that's why I need to perfect it but the way to perfect is actually just consistency and iteration so the way you actually get perfection is to put something out there get feedback iterate from there um and I wish more people would just amp up the quantity of things that they put out there um and realize that as you amp out quantity you will increase quality cuz I know that there's someone listening to this and and they're saying "Oh my god he his his philosophy is just put crap out there and something will stick." And I'm not saying put crap out there i'm just saying that what you think is the product is usually you know instead of 10 features it's usually one feature and and then the way to get to 10 features is actually uh by iterating your way and adding one feature at a time m I think it's like entrepreneurs and like just trying to build businesses we also you just have an instinct of like you know when you can put something out and it will be valuable even if it's just to one person like a lot of businesses started out just being valuable to like a very specific type of person or one person in particular and so you know what i want to I want to actually cuz you mentioned um Cursor or Replet these are tools that before speaking to you I'd never heard of can Can you can you explain or just cuz I'm sure there's a lot of people like me um can you explain or just show people what these tools are what they do yes today okay how about this well let's do like a quick 5 10 minute crash course on two two products um two AI products I think would be really valuable to people so maybe let's start with using Vzero which is a design tool and then we could also use something called Manis which no you know is is is the talk of the AI crowd right now how does that sound let's do it all right share my screen and we can go V let's ship something so Vzero you go to vzero.dev I think yep um it's basically like an AI product designer um it's free to sign up i don't pay for it you can see my account is free um and we're gonna see how it works today do you have a website that you know an idea for a website that you want to build it could be anything oh an idea for a website I want to build you know what i'm always trying to find this might sound basic but I'm always trying to find like great uh restaurants or bars in New York m and so maybe I don't know some sort of page that like but it's all like local reviews so it's not like these I don't know big company reviews it's like people that actually like foodies that that like going and eating out their recommendations so you can literally just type that into Yeah and it will design the site yeah so I'm going to say I want to create a restaurant directory of best places to eat in NYC but like you literally talk to it like a human being and I'm going to zoom in so people could see here but the problem with most restaurant directories is they look kind of lame and their uh recommendations are even lamer i want to create something like a something I don't know i want to create just from a stylistic perspective do you have any ideas oh what is that was it called Belly there was an app where it's like all of the reviews are like from your friends and your peers so it doesn't feel like it's like some corporate sponsorship or someone paid for like their restaurant to get the first placement it feels like someone you know i want to say it was maybe B L was it B E L I i think I think that's what it was yeah Belly app i found it okay golly I ain't thought about that app in like two years i'm I'm impressed with myself so what you can do is you can literally take a screenshot of that app i want to create something similar to Belly but do we you know but let's say we want a web version but a web version and I want it to look Give me one or two brands that you like the design of any brand any brand apple and let me think I was going to say like WBY Parker those are two completely different brands but I I like the aesthetic i would I wanted to look like I wanted to look from an aesthetic perspective to be like Apple or Warby Parker very clean minimalistic and with a few pops of color and let's just see what happens so what have we done we've just just prompted it like we would a human being and what Vzero is doing now is just trying to figure out what you know what what what to build first right so it's saying I'll create a modern moistic restaurant directory for NYC with clean aesthetics inspired by Apple Mor Parker similar to the belly app you shared but as a web uh application so we didn't really give it that much that many constraints and we did you know for example we didn't say we want this feature we want that feature but it's still figuring it out you can see on the right hand side it's figuring out name image um curated lists um and it's actually writing out the code for all of this website look classic New York deli serving Jewish fair including pastrami queen you know so it's going to put in some placeholder names and it's going to go and uh just try to create something that's clean and then we would be able to just copy the code and and actually deploy it meaning deploy basically means just pushing it to the web with one prompt how how quickly have you seen someone go through this process so like they've given the prompt they've got the code and they've actually deployed a website and started selling something like how how quickly have you seen it come around turn around i mean when you go on X people will say like I one prompted this and I'm making five grand a month or whatever it is i I don't see that you know like to me it's going to take at least 24 hours call it 24 hours you can do something in 24 hours realistically i'll call it what it is yeah that's still pretty remarkable isn't it have a you have a website for your new business in 24 hours oh my god and when I say like 24 hours is like you're going to have in something insane that would have cost you hundreds of thousands of dollars a few years ago you know I I'm being just very conservative making sure that uh you know I within one business day 24 hours max you're going to have something pretty dope so here we go they even named our our startup NYC eats which I actually think isn't horrible um it it gives you know trending new and notable date night group dining um it's it's coded this it's designed this and if we wanted we can deploy this to the web um with this you know has a search engine um is it the most perfect website of all time not really but it's clean and if I wanted to change the design I could say make a logo for NYC make more make it more colorful you know add uh images for these for these things and that's what you have to do to to take it from like a six on 10 to a 9 on 10 so it's almost like I remember someone explained these kind of AI these large language models to me he said like a lot of people and he was talking about chat GPT specifically he said a lot of people use chat GPT like Google like you know with Google you just type in like I don't know restaurants in New York City like you type in what you want and it spits out a reply it's quite transactional in that way he said that with chat GPT specifically and it sounds similar here it's more of a conversation so like you you give it something it gives you something then you give it feedback and something else then it like it's this two-way street and that's really how you get to this this minimum lovable product that you mentioned is that right yes that's that's actually that's absolutely right that's why when I started this started this conversation around Vzero I was like this is your AI product designer so you literally chat think of it as your employee that you're pay you're not paying for yeah it's an employee that you can just say do this do that of course you're going to hit limits um and then you can pay for vzero and stuff like that um but incredible that you can essentially one prompt a directory website and and and start deploying it to me to me like it's unbelievable and it looks so real as well it look it looks good yeah it's crazy um I want to show one more example uh a lot of people haven't seen um do you see my screen yeah yeah I can see your screen cool this is Manis yes so Manis um is a uh Chinese startup so some people have probably heard of uh DeepSeek which was the Chat GPT competitor out of China this is kind of like it's not from Deepseek but it's a Chinese startup uh you know and so you know be careful what you do with a Chinese startup obviously so like you know in terms of putting in your data and stuff like that but I will say it's one of the most interesting AI agent platforms I have ever used um uh I I asked it for example uh have you heard of uh Starface it's like a uh no pimple patch company it's a pimple patch company I think it does like you know many many millions a year in revenue and I I I prompted it can you design a CPG product I'm looking for boxing and the actual product the idea is a starface competitor or pimple patch but for older adults the reason why I said uh for older adults is the starface branding is very uh like when you go to starface here I'll show it to you like it's like young right I think like I know what you're talking about cuz I'll see people in public they have like these stars they almost stickers exactly on their face yeah I know what you're talking about yeah you see it you see my screen yeah I can see you cool so um I was like there's probably an opportunity to build something for older adults and how I got here by the way was uh on my podcast the Startup Ideas podcast I someone was using a trend tool to figure out trends and and basically helped realize this opportunity so I just plugged it into Madness in the past I would go to my team and be like "Go figure this out." But here I just plugged into Manis and it just started re look at this researching I'll I'll zoom in yeah uh research you know product and competitors in the space um you know it looks at all the com It looks at all the competitors it basically does a complete product analysis goes through all the different competitors um it does like a whole research summary um it does the packaging design like it tells me what my packaging should be and if I wanted I can so for example it says it should be a round rectail compact case it should fit in purses it shouldn't be slippery and then if I wanted I can actually ask Manis to go and actually actually design what it looks like so it's telling me exactly what I should do for this audience and the coolest part about Manis is it's it's a computer so um let's see if I can show you this okay here we go wait it created so this is this is Manis basically scouring the web like it it goes and searches like it went to this research website where it looked at what's the market for patches it literally goes like an employee going and literally researching uh exactly how to you know is this a good business or not it breaks down exactly what it's going to do look it says research tasks research starface product details analyze competitors and then it shows the product design task that it does um all the marketing strategy tasks it literally uh writes out the deliverables like it thinks like an employee and it actually goes and scour the web and shows you you know you can actually watch it live go and do this and this took like 12 minutes I think but you know pretty incredible you know what comes to mind it's like having um it's even more than employee it's like having a team and so I can kind of I can see how if you can find the right pain point um it's going to get you to that point of building that minimum viable product and then even past that it's almost like the engine for your business and so you're able to build just such a profitable company without having like all of these employees and overhead um you know I want to I want move on i want to go through through the other the other steps in the in the framework before we get out of here and maybe I'll combine actually step three and step four so step three is grow distribution daily turn your product into a movement ai startups fail not because of bad products but because they don't have users daily distribution efforts compound over time and make or break a startup can you can you explain that yeah I think uh I think a lot of people are going to create are going to vibe code they're going to use Bannis they're going to use Vzero they're going to put put their startup live and it's going to be crickets and they're going to be like "Wait what i didn't expect that." And in a world where the amount of products and software and startups are going to 100,000x because the tools make it so that something that you know cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a few years ago now doesn't cost anything the distribution is the moat so uh it what I mean by that is if you can create a system around posting content every day and growing your audience and positioning it like a uh like a movement making it different making it even look like from a brand and design perspective that it's different um so when you're in V 0ero I recommend that you I actually don't recommend that you design things that look like Apple or Warby Parker i actually recommend that you make things look like the anti- Apple and anti-war Parker in a lot of ways make it look chunky put a lot of colors um and post content every day because that's what's going to get you customers at the end of the day there's only two ways to get customers right you either have it organic or you pay for it and um organic customers are always you know they're better than not paying for it is better than paying for it basically yeah let's talk about organic just for a quick second which is I think for me personally I am so big on step one like whenever it comes to doing something I'm so big on step one because I think if you can if you can successfully execute step one you start to build momentum and so for the person that's listening that's like I don't have an audience right now like the my following is not zero but it's like close to zero you know i'm not I'm not Greg Eisenberg um what would be your step one to them of like posting content in a way that if they commit to it over time they're going to build an audience that they can then launch their minimum lovable product to could I show a PDF about this because I actually just wrote this down go for it okay let me just pull it up so I'm going to go through this four-step framework on how to build an audience in 2025 in in four minutes or less and this is the answer to your question so before I begin I believe that the way to build businesses today is using a framework that I coined the ACP framework you start with an audience you build a community and then you build a product so your idea for an AI startup you might want to just start as a Twitter account or an Instagram page and start testing what people like in that audience start building a following so that then once you've got that you can build a product for those people basically the old way of building a startup was start with a product then build the audience now the new way is start with an audience then build community product there's a four-step playbook uh that I wrote out um for for basically how do you systematize and build an audience that's going to work for you so the first thing is uh first step is you know a lot of people don't do this but identify who you're creating for understand what they're not getting from others um and you know I just put this as a note because if you aren't getting engagement start one level broader than your niche a lot of people start a little too niche so sometimes you might want to go a little broad broader the secret to building an audience is formats even this you know YouTube channel has a format you have a specific type of format that is working for you so what I tell people to do is pick one format for each business day try to systematize that look for formats outside your niche and copy those n you know that format and bring it to your niche your niche i'm going to go uh step three systems uh this is really important so you want to you're going to want to create your creative faucet routine what what I mean by creative faucet is find what's how you're going to get your creative juices flowing so for example that might be you listen to podcasts to get you know your creative faucet going and you need a a strong creative faucet because you want to have interesting ideas and interesting content to share on your audience so it might be podcast blogs social and then capture those ideas in your and I use a notes app and then just schedule out those pieces of content and the last thing is create a goal so if you want to create an audience in 2025 just pick one primary goal for 2025 now a lot of people pick the goal of I need a certain amount of followers i think that's actually not a great idea think of something like a 25,000 person email list a million dollars in sales through social so my point is the primary goal for your audience might not necessarily be followers it might be something a bit more downstream like revenue or an email list um that's my advice to people around how to build an audience in 2025 yeah no that's so good i I love the um pick one format each day because I think what I've realized um with content and actually just businesses in general the usually the thing you do on day one is not ultimately what is successful for you and so from speaking with content creators that have got millions of followers the thing that they do really well is first of all they post because then you get feedback and then they're doing different things and they're like they're looking for that spike they're looking for that the the type of post or the format to your point that when they posted it instead of getting I don't know five likes it got 20 likes and as soon as they get that spike they're like okay that's the one they double down and they continue to to go up i think it's I think it's so good i'm gonna go to step four which is nail retention and perfect the core loop keep your users coming back ai businesses shouldn't just attract users you must keep them engaged the best startups optimize their core loop can you explain what that means what is a core loop the the problem with a lot of AI startups is a lot of people are trying these products because it's you know I call it curiosity revenue like these startups are saying oh wow I hit 3 million ARR but it's just people trying out you know these products but the core loop meaning like the the core value creation isn't really there it's just that they're think of it as like an impulse buy you know it's you're you're there trying it out but like the actual foundation isn't isn't there and remember when we talked about MVP and MLP we talked about it from like a foundation standpoint like your MLP is like a very strong foundation of one killer feature aka core loop um that you know is going to drive retention up and why does retention matter and why is it so important is because uh you know we talked about fancy words in the beginning of this uh episode is retention is just a fancy word that says do people like your product and use it every day if it's very valuable you're going to see high retention meaning you're going to see people use that product every single day and that should be your goal as a as a product creator you want to drive value if you can drive value you'll be able to monetize it for you know so your your first goal is to drive as much value as possible so that and from a metric standpoint that means your you'll notice your attention is quite high m you know I think it's um I think it's a really good point and it's a mistake that we make with as entrepreneurs and I've made this mistake which is so often it's like our business isn't growing or we don't have the revenue that we want and so instantly we think I need new people I need new users I need new customers you don't think wait all of the customers that I already have how could I give them more value like we don't think about retention and So you you spoke about core loop if someone wanted to understand that and also start to understand some of the steps of like how they could actually improve the retention in their business where would you advise them to look first like where what would you advise as step one in that process well when when people let's say you've created a product and you're noticing that people are churning meaning they're stopping to use the product uh there's basically two ways to do analytics one is uh I think it's called behavioral an analytics which is looking at something like a Google Analytics dashboard which says my retention is 30% i had 25,000 daily active users basically just looking at the numbers and then there's what's called I think it's called attitudinal analytics or voice of customer analytics which is basically asking people why you know what they did what they didn't like about the product and getting their voice of customer let me explain quickly why it's important to have both sets of data and why most people just look at the pure behavioral stuff imagine you are you know you go to shop at a Walmart and you know you're at the Walmart you spend 45 minutes there and you spend $200 there if you just look at behavioral analytics it's going to be like wow what a great customer person spend 45 minutes because you know they love the how beautiful the shop is they spend $200 and that our average you know cart size is $100 so they spend two times so you know what the average person spends marketing team is high-fiving this is amazing but what didn't what didn't that capture well it didn't capture the fact that they spent 45 minutes in the store because they couldn't find what they were looking for and there they spent $200 but their budget was $500 and so they there was a missed opportunity so my recommendation to people who you know are going are going to use this workflow which is you know building the audience vibe coding putting out these products is look at the retention numbers but use voice of customer uh open-ended questions asking people you know what they liked about it what they didn't like about it to get a full picture and using that full picture that'll help you increase retention m you know what it reminded me of as I was listening to you is almost that quote of like um like on your on your deathbed or whenever it ends the thing that people are going to remember is how did you make them feel yes and so like sometimes as businesses it's like you can get so fixated on just like the the quantitative number just the number on the screen that you completely forget but how did you make the customer feel yes and so you could you could win and I think this is to your point like you could be winning in terms of like the the numbers but actually there's a huge missed opportunity if that feeling that the customer has isn't a good one and that's when they're going to churn and you're going to lose customers in business yeah there's there's a lot of people in the tech world who who pride themselves with with the uh the fact that they're data driven they say I'm data driven i'm data driven what does that mean that means that the data drives their decisions i don't believe in that my my saying is data informs not drives i think that when we let the data run our companies fully that's when you end up creating tasteless products that you know are very hard to differentiate and that we don't want to get in there right so we want to we want to create startups that have the highest probability of success so uh you want to look at the data and you want to like you don't want to drive blind obviously but you want to just you just want to have it one piece of the puzzle not the full puzzle you know on the on the point of the core loop I think about the business that maybe they have like it launches and it has like a couple features like you're kind of experimenting you have a few aspects to it how does someone identify actually this is the core loop like Even if if my business is having success this feature over here actually doesn't really matter but this one really does like this is the core reason why people are using it i think it's it's a similar question to like how do I know if I have product market fit you'll know because people are telling will be screaming it at you the hard part is once you have product market fit how do you stay focused so for example you know Callumly a lot of people know that company it's a multi-billion dollar company it's a great success story i think he bootstrapped it um for a very long time and it's a pretty core one feature right you send someone a link and they can book a time with you now of course they can build stuff around that but for the longest time they just focused on the core loop they just focused on how do I make the best scheduling product uh out there and you can schedule via Google calendar now but I still see more Calendarly links than I do Google calendar i don't know about you and I think it's because they focused on the core loop yeah that's actually really cool of like I I think it's actually empowering in a way which is you can build a multi-billion dollar business by focusing on like one core feature and then building a brand around it cuz I'm sure that's also part of it right is like Kalan Lee like even in the name right you like I'm going to send you my Calendarly like you don't think Google you think Calendarly first and that's like the brand um but just they focused on just doing one thing and it and it's led to that result absolutely on step five partner with creators to scale leverage influencerled growth many AI startups struggle to scale because they only focus on the product not on communitydriven growth creator partnerships help you break into markets faster and build trust can you talk about that the PDF I went through how to build an audience in 2025 that's the blueprint but it's going to take time you know what I mean like it's going to take time so the question for for people is does it make sense to uh try to get creators give them 25% of revenue 40% of revenue 50% of revenue just coming up with creative deals to be like you've got this audience of x amount of thousands of people I think that this product they would love how can we make this a win-win and positioning it like that and give them the revenue it doesn't mean that you need to do do it with them forever you know what you're in the background you're still building your own audience so you might be able to reduce your dependency on creators you know in a two years three years four years but I do think that a mistake a lot of people make is they don't uh they don't go to creators and try to figure out how can we make this work for you m I think you're right and I think I would assume I don't know this but I would assume one of the biggest reasons is let's say that I'm at the point where I've launched my AI startup it has good traction like we're making a good amount of money I know that like I've have the product market fit I I've figured out the core loop and it works and now I'm thinking about scaling I would say the thing that holds people back from like the creator partnerships is they're probably like I just don't know any creators like how do I even start like I don't know how to get Ali Abdal or like you know whoever it is Colin and Samir to um partner with me on on my product what What is your advice to someone that's at that point and that's the thing that's holding them back limiting going back to what we talked about in the beginning it's it's a limiting belief they all those people you mentioned they're human beings too they might be getting a lot more text messages and DMs than the average human being but I've texted with Colin and Samir i've texted with Ali and Abdal like you know I the they're real people right and when I was when I was when I had less than 2,000 followers I I realized that on on Twitter that you know 50% of creators had their or or accounts had their uh DMs open like you can literally just DM them what is the cost just what is the cost to you person listening to going and just DMing Ali Abdal DM my DMs are open you know like I look at I look at every one of my DMs 100% of my DMs i might not respond to 75% of them but I look at every single one if something is interesting to me I respond and I've I've hired people i've partnered with people i've invested in people i've acquired companies all through DMs and when I was just starting up in the early days I would reach out to people and you know it sucks you have to be okay to get rejected but like one in every hundred DMs you get the most interesting conversation of your life and it's worth it and just what's the downside people have to ask themselves what is the downside it's free to do why are you not doing it you know what here's here's where I want to end and I want to end with giving people something which I think is is so valuable in life like even just taking out the the AI business I think it's just so valuable what that is I've realized at the end of the day this this game or like business it's all about relationships right like that's what you're that's what you're getting at is there's always going to be a ceiling on your success and a pretty low ceiling on your success if you don't have the relationships piece figured out and we live in like this incredible age where anyone on this planet you can actually reach who has an internet connection maybe not anyone but mostly everyone you can reach through social media through cold DM cold email and so as someone that you've slid into people's DMs and built connections with an Ali Abdal or a Colin and Samir or like other people in your network what would be and also as someone that gets these DMs and emails what would be your advice to someone if you could give them just one piece of advice of like look you might not have followers like you might have under a thousand followers under 2,000 followers right now but if you follow this one piece of advice and you send the requisite amount of volume you will get a response from someone that you admire that could be useful to your business could be the person that 10xes 100xes what you have going on right now like what would be your your one piece of advice okay I'm going to I'm going to answer that question through a quick story someone Okay I had a startup 2016 or so called Islands it was like a Discord competitor it eventually got sold to Weiwork and one of the reasons why it sold and we got you know multiple offers and stuff like that was because we were in the press all the time and after the transition after the company was sold a bunch of people asked me how you know I saw you on all like you were you guys were everywhere you know how did you get so much press you know which agency did you use and I said I just did it myself oh did you know a lot of journalists and by the way this is at a time I had like very few followers like no followers basically and I said 'N no I just DM' them on Twitter so okay how did you do that well here's what I did i made a list of 175 journalists that I thought might cover the story i would create a 30 second selfie video where I'd be like "Hey uh Caleb my name is Greg Eisenberg i'm working on islands i thought that it might be interesting to you for XYZ reason." And I had an ask at the end which was not cover my story it was basically like "Can we meet can we chat by the end of that chat I'm going to give you value value value value." The success rate of that video was you know sta kind of staggering honestly and I don't think enough people are empathetic to the Collins and Samir and Ali Abdals in the sense that they don't put themselves in their shoes they're getting bombarded with all these DMs so how do you stand out and create something that's going to create value for them uh well I think video is one easy way you know even you know using something like a Loom or something sharing your screen um sending it to them giving them value um I mean I've had people who've DM' me and I've I brought them on my p the Startup Ideas podcast which has like millions of listeners a month just because they've they're like "Hey I thought you'd be interested in this video." And I was like "You should come on the pod to talk about it." Random person 600 followers so it happens shoot your shot be different use video add value it's not rocket science yeah Greg you've been awesome man you've been awesome and and as you were as you were sharing that I was like because I I was um I think I actually put this on my Instagram i said this year this show is going to like shock the world like the the level of growth that we're going to experience is going to shock the world and I want to get some of the biggest guests obviously that we that we've ever had this year um and that strategy and method that you just explained I want to try it and I feel like we're going to land some pretty huge guests from doing that so so Greg thank you so much man i appreciate you my pleasure keep it up this is this is awesome it's been amazing seeing uh what you what you're building thank you mate no this is great i love this this was awesome