Today's episode is gonna be completely different.
So today we're gonna go through a startup idea that I think is super overlooked.
I think it's a great 10K MRR plus startup idea.
We're gonna go through one trend that I think is a banging trend that is overlooked.
We're gonna go through one news item that I think you should be paying attention to, and all the opportunities around it.
I'm gonna give you one product framework.
I'm gonna tell you one AI product that I'm playing with.
And then I'm gonna end with one random product that...
I've been consuming in my life.
That might be a value to you, or hey, maybe it'll get your creative juices flowing.
This is a new type of episode that I think, I hope, people will like.
Let me know in the comment section, like on YouTube as well, if you enjoy this.
So let's get started for the startup idea that someone should really steal.
So I saw this idea on ideabrowser.com.
So it's a review website for women to travel safely.
So the basic idea is that, you know, women are traveling solo and some of them have anxiety.
So actually 84 of solo female travelers are feeling unsafe during their trips, yet they have no reliable way to get basic safety tips.
So if they're planning a weekend in Mexico City they have to like scroll old, you know year long, month long Reddit thread saying is this neighborhood safe at night?
And getting replies from who knows, male backpackers who have no idea what these people face.
The thing here is that you have platforms like TripAdvisors that don't capture this harassment frequency.
So this is actually a really serious issue.
I've been inspired by what Peter Levels has done with Nomads, nomadlist.com and hoodmaps.com.
So if you pull up Hood Maps, I live in Miami and you can just see artificially gentrified area here.
Ratchet South Beach over here.
So it gives you these sort of reviews of the website, and it's gone viral many times.
Going back to the idea here is you can build something simple like that.
A map-based platform where verified female travelers rate neighborhoods, hotels and restaurants on safety metrics that matter.
Green zones for walked alone at midnight felt safe.
You get the idea.
So that's the concept.
I haven't found anything like it.
And you see that solo here in the data that solo female travel is increasing over time.
Definitely something I like to see when I'm building a startup idea.
I want to see that trend growing up. going up, right?
So you can capture some of that search data.
Okay, great.
This is a good startup idea.
You agree.
I agree.
But how do you actually get people into this product if you're going to create it?
Let's talk about it.
So you can target Facebook groups.
There's actually one called Solo Female Travel that has 400,000 members.
And then you can do, you You can partner with female travel influencers.
You can obviously run meta ads, Instagram short form video with women searching solo travel safety, that sort of thing.
So I think that there's a huge short form video opportunity as well.
And just creating these like short form videos that you know, talk about people's experiences, incentivizing these travel influencers who are looking to make money.
A lot of these travel influencers.
You know, if you offer them 100 500, a few hundred dollars here, you know they uh they they'll, they'll take it.
So I think that there's an opportunity to launch with 5000 uh paying members across 20 destinations and that gets you, you know, 500000 ARR.
Uh, but even if you, you know, it's 50,000, you know, uh, you can see how this thing could scale.
And you can imagine a world where this scales to 100000 members and hotels pay 500 a month for safety certification.
So I think this is a big idea.
Let's talk about the offer real quick.
I think you lead with a lead magnet that's like a travel safety self-assessment quiz.
So you can do an interactive quiz.
You can vibe code this pretty easily.
You do a front-end offer where it's a premium offer. premium travel community access.
And then you do, you know, a verified safety guide subscription.
Maybe it's $30 a month for the detailed stuff.
So I think this is a pretty good idea.
You know, I think that the price point, you know, may need to change.
Is it too cheap?
Is it too expensive?
But I like this idea.
If you go to the value ladder on Idea Browser, I always do this because you know the value ladder.
For those who don't know, you know.
It's this framework that helps you structure your offers and the ascending levels of value and price.
So you start with something irresistible and low barrier, and then you build trust at each step.
So you can see that the reason why you do a travel safety self-assessment quiz is it's free.
So if you're going to go and build a lot of attention on short form with these influencers, you convert them into the quiz, you get their email, you can nurture them and sell them later, and the things that you're going to sell them are here.
You can see the, the community access, the verified guide subscription, the safety tips and alert service and then eventually the safety certification for travel business.
I could see a business like this selling five four six seven, eight X ARR.
So beautiful business.
I think that at the very least, if you get some level of product market fit, 10K a month.
All right, that's the startup idea.
Let's talk about the one, that's the one startup idea.
Let's talk about the one trend.
So this trend is gamification and it's happening on websites.
It's also happening on apps.
And you can see that Okay, well, first of all, what is gamification?
It's this idea that you put points and badges and leaderboard and challenges to encourage user participation.
Whoa, that was hard.
Comment for participation and loyalty.
And you're seeing companies like Duolingo absolutely crush it by using this strategy.
But even if you think of social media in itself, it is gamification. is a game.
So I anticipate more and more gamification to sort of this UI trend to get more and more popular.
My friend Yoni has an app called the Brain Rot app which is also sort of this, you know, gamification UI.
The more you scroll on like X and Instagram, the more your brain rots and you see it in real time.
And I'm seeing this UI just be more and more prevalent.
It's the good brand name, it's the mascot, it's the gamification and it's the core killer use case that people really are looking for.
So in this case, focusing, focus mode.
So I'll give you all a quick startup idea that I think someone should take.
Again I think it's at least a 10K MRR idea is who is building the agency that just focuses on gamification for apps and websites?
So you use that trend and then just be like we help you take your existing company and make it more gamified.
Yeah.
We do a bit of that at our company, LCA, which is our design firm for the AI age.
And it's a very, very popular product.
We'll come in and actually help companies go and figure this out.
We work with the biggest companies on the planet.
But I think that if they just focused on gamification, became the gamification person, that's a huge idea.
And I think it starts at $10K a month.
That's the trend.
Let's talk about a news item.
So this went viral 20...
It was said by the ex-CEO of Reddit.
He says, Thank you so much for having me.
Make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity.
The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones related to real atoms, hardware or world-related data, and not software finance.
Okay, Yishan.
I disagree with you here.
I understand why you're saying this.
I understand that you'd come to this logical conclusion.
But I think.
Well, actually I was having a chat with a very, very well-known AI founder this morning.
Super, super well-known.
And he was saying that he was chatting with an executive of someone at OpenAI.
And even OpenAI don't know exactly how things are going to play out.
So I think that yes, it might be the case that OpenAI owns everything, or all these foundations own everything, but I think that you're discounting the opportunity that there is to actually create these, as you call it, flash-in-the-pan apps, to actually get data, to actually own the workflow, to actually create network effects.
I think that those companies, provided that they actually own the workflow, own the customer, have network effects, are going to be extremely valuable in the future.
It's easy to say that these are GPT wrappers and you've got 12 months to cash in and it's going to be over when they figure it out.
But think about Apple.
People used to say, when the App Store came out, that Apple is just going to pick the most popular apps and just clone you and that'll be the end.
Of course that didn't happen.
Apple has a lot of successful apps the Messages app, etc.
But there's tons of apps that have gone and created billions, if not trillions of dollars of value.
And that's my take on this.
Don't know if you agree or disagree, but I think that there's, of course, going to be a bunch of startups that get hit by open AI and the foundational models in 12 to 18 months.
But I think that the great AI wrappers are going to build valuable companies.
We'll see what happens. have the biggest creator, but oftentimes we don't have those connections.
You might not know those people.
So if I were you, what I would do is I'd make a list of everyone who's an ideal creator for your product and make it 100 people.
And the top 10 might have a million plus people, followers.
They might have 500,000, 700,000, a million, 1.2.
So you reach out to them, shoot your shot.
That being said, I think where you're probably going to have the most success is in your smaller creators.
We're talking people with 120,000 followers across platforms and less.
I would reach out to them.
You can use agents to reach out to them.
I've shown how you could in the past use Lindy AI and products like that to do that.
Or you can just reach out the good old-fashioned way, DM them.
I find actually doing a selfie video Don't pitch them from day one.
You have to get to know them, build the friendship and then from there you can hopefully get them onto the.
So step one is you've got to attach the right creator.
You're going to want to do some friendship building.
Get to know them, let them know that you're looking for people to promote with.
You have money, you have upside.
Step two is you want to attach a generous affiliate percentage.
I'm not talking about 10%, 20%.
I'm talking about 30% to 50%, especially in the initial days.
Give it to them lifetime.
You want to get these people on board.
You could think about ways to give them upside in terms of equity if you want, but I would start with just an affiliate percentage.
Sometimes you might have to give them some level of cash to get them excited initially, but you want to get them involved as an affiliate, basically.
And then the third step is—and a lot of people miss this step—
You want to gamify the experience.
The best affiliate gets a trip to Miami.
I heard a story recently that there's a supplement company called Goji.
That's what it was.
An apple cider vinegar gummy.
They had some of the best affiliate programs on TikTok shop ever.
That's how they grew to hundreds of millions of dollars enterprise value.
And they just gamified their affiliates.
So they would say, the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami and will buy you a BMW, literally.
And the numbers make sense for them.
So you need to have the numbers make sense for you.
But this hopefully got your creative juices flowing.
The framework is how to grow a product, especially SaaS.
And it's something I use pretty often.
So one AI product that I want to play with and I hear great things about and I just did a review on Glyph AI
And someone was like, but have you tried Crea AI?
So Crea AI is kind of like Glyph AI, which is it helps you get the most out of creative content.
So you can generate images with it, video on it, real-time video on it, motion transfer, 3D objects.
And I haven't played with it.
That's why I'm bringing it up.
This is on my to-do list to play with it.
But it's cool that it has these mini apps, like Clothes Changer.
Upload selfies and try on different outfits with our free AI virtual try-on tool.
They've got a nano banana image editor.
They've got product photos.
They've got all these apps.
T-shirt generator, AI hairstyle stuff, object remover, change lighting.
And I think what's really cool.
I don't have access to it, but there's this Nodes product which basically is creating workflows.
So kind of like NAN for creative AI.
So this is something that's interesting, something I'm going to be playing with, maybe over the weekend.
And I don't know, is it better than Glyph AI?
TBD, but I hear good things.
The last thing to talk about in this episode is what is one random product that I'm enjoying right now?
I'll give you two, actually.
I'll give you two random products.
They are both beverages.
One is, if you're anything like me, you love a cold cup of coffee.
And a cold brew.
Uh, you know cost uh cost, you know it adds up it's like five dollars for a cold brew now.
So i actually, and i have to go down, i have to go to the coffee shop and sometimes that's good, you want to get out of the office and stuff like that, or get out of your house if you work from home.
But um i uh, i started buying and i just have it in my, in my fridge and is this cold brew, La Colombe from New York light roast, and I just have it there.
Here it says it's $8.49.
You can get it at Target for $5.
It's literally the price of one cold brew and you're getting like six seven, eight cold brews from it.
And it's easy.
So I'm drinking it right here.
Nice to be able to just have cold brew fast.
I work from home.
So, if I need to, if I need to, if I'm feeling low energy and I need my cold brew, I need to record for you all.
I just run to the fridge.
I put some in.
I drink it.
I don't have to leave.
So why I like La Cologne is it's light.
It's a light roast.
It's like not offensive.
It's tasty.
There's some people who drink beer and they like IPAs.
And there's some people who drink beers... and they like light beer like a lager so if you're into cold brew and you like light stuff la colombe for the price i thought was really good and that light golden vibe the other drink i've been drinking and you've seen me on the pod drink this probably olipop the classic root beer absolutely fire absolutely fire um macros on it we're talking 35 calories 11 grams or four percent carbs three grams of sugar um i'm giving it like an 8.5 on 10 i usually actually don't like olipop i find it tastes weird and i love a soda like give your boy a diet coke kidding me so good so you know trying to not not make my body full of aspartame trying to do more of this and uh enjoy it but You know, it's really the root beer that does it for me.
So if you haven't had it, highly recommend.
Not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this podcast.
I hope you enjoyed this format.
I don't know if I'll continue doing it.
I need to know.
But please, please enjoy.
Have a creative day.
And I can't wait to see what you build.
I'm rooting for you.
