Startup idea someone should steal

Today's episode is going to be completely different. So today we're going to go through a startup idea that I think is super overlooked. I think it's a great 10K MR plus startup idea. We're going to go through one trend that I think is a banging trend that is overlooked. We're going to go through one news item that I think you should be paying attention to and all the opportunities around it. I'm going to give you one product framework. I'm going to tell you one AI product that I'm playing with and then I'm going to end with one random product that I've been consuming in my life that might be of 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 uh someone should really steal. So uh I saw this idea on ideaber.com. So it's a review website for women to travel safely. So the basic idea is that you know women uh are traveling solo and some of them have uh anxiety. So actually 84% of solo female travelers are feeling unsafe during their trips. Yet, they have no reliable way to get basic safety answers. So, if they're planning a weekend in Mexico City, they have to like scroll old, you know, year-long, month-long Reddit thread saying, "Is this neighborhood safe at night?" and getting replies from who knows, male backpackers who have no idea what these people face. The thing here is that you have platforms like Trip Advisor that don't capture this harassment frequency. So, this is actually a really serious issue. Um, I've been inspired by what uh Peter Levelvels has done with Nomads, nomadlist.com and hoodmaps.com. So if you pull up hood mapaps, you know, I live in Miami and you can just see, you know, artificially gentrified area here, uh, you know, ratchet South Beach over here. So it gives you these sort of reviews of of the website and it's gotten uh it's gone viral many times. So going back to the idea here is you can build something simple like that. A map-based platform where verified female travelers 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. Um I haven't found anything like it. Um and you see that solo uh here in in the data that solo female travel is increasing over time. Definitely something I like to see when I'm building uh 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 uh one called Solo Female Travel that has 400,000 members. And then you can do, you know, post showing sideby-side safety comparisons. Um you can partner with female travel influencers. Um, you can obviously run meta ads, Instagram short form video, uh, with women searching solo tra uh, travel safety, that sort of thing. So, um, I think that there's a huge short form video opportunity as well. Um, 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, few hundred here, you know, they uh they they'll they'll take it. So, I think that there's an opportunity to launch with 5,000 uh paying members across 20 destinations and that gets you, you know, $500,000 ARR. Uh but even if you, you know, it's 50,000, you know, uh you can see how this thing could scale. Um, and you can imagine a world where this scales to 100,000 members and hotels pay $500 a month for safety certification. So, I think this is a big idea. Let's talk about the offer real quick. I think you lead with uh a lead magnet. That's like a tra travel safety self- assessment quiz. So, you can do an interactive quiz. You can vibe code this pretty easily. Um, you do a front-end offer where it's a premium premium travel community access. Uh, 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. Um, 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. Um, if you go to the value ladder on idea browser, I always do this. Um, because you know the value ladder for those you don't know, uh, you know, it it's this framework that helps you structure your offers in the ascending levels of value and price. So, you start with something irresistible and low low barrier and then you build trust at each step. So, you can see that like the reason why you do a travel safety self- assessment quiz is it's free, right? So, if you're going to go and build a lot of uh 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. Um, 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, you know, 5 4 6 7 8x AR. So, uh, beautiful business. I think that, you know, at the at the very least, uh, if you get some level of product market fit, 10K a month. All right, that's a startup idea. Let's talk about the what that's the one startup idea. Let's talk about the one trend. So, this trend uh is gamification. And it's happening uh on websites. It's also happening on apps. And you can see that, you know, okay, well, first of all, what is gamification? It's this idea that uh you know you you put points and badges and leaderboard and challenges to encourage user participate participate participation. Whoa, that was hard. Uh comment for participation and loyalty and uh you're seeing like companies like Duolingo absolutely crush it by using this strategy. But even if you think of social media in itself, it is game is a game. So I anticipate more and more uh gamification to to to sort of this UI trend to get more and more popular. Um my friend uh Yonyi has an app called the brain rot app which is also sort of this uh you know gamification uh UI. Uh the more you scroll on like X and Instagram the more your brain rots and and you see it in real time. And I'm seeing this UI just, you know, being more and more uh prevalent, right? It's the good brand name. It's the mascot. It's the gamification. And it's the, you know, core uh killer use case that people really uh are looking for. So in this case, you know, focusing focus mode. So uh I I'll give you all a quick, you know, startup idea that I think someone should take. Again, I think it's at least a 10k MR idea. Um, 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. Um, we do a bit of that at our company LCA, which is our design firm for the AI age. Um, and it's, you know, a very very uh popular product. Like we'll come in and actually like help companies go and figure this out and we work with the biggest companies on the planet. But I think that someone could, if they just focused on gamification, became the gamification person, that's a huge idea. Uh, and I think it starts at 10K a month. Uh, that's the trend. Let's talk about a news item. So, this went viral, 20 million views, and I'm going to read it to you all. It it was said by uh the ex CEO of Reddit. He says, "My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundation model providers. App functionality will be added to the foundation models offerings because the big players aren't slow incumbents. It is wrong to apply the analogy of fast startup slow incumbent here. They are just big, far more so than any other prior new technology. There is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoletes every new app as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startups can make money. Number one, make a flashin the pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash. My estimate is you have 12 to 18 months cash flow generation. Number two, make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for sufficient equity. The situation is highly unstable. We don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon, but both scenarios make it very difficult that any AI application will independently become a generational super company. 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, Yan, I disagree with you here. I understand why you're saying this. I understand that you you know you'd come to this logical conclusion. Um but uh I think well actually I was having a chat with a very very well-known AI founder this morning super super well-known uh and he was saying that uh you know he was chatting with an executive of at someone you know at open AAI and even OpenAI don't know exactly how uh how things are going to play out. So um I think that yes it might be the case that OpenAI owns everything or all these foundational own everything but I think that you're discounting the opportunity that there is to actually create these as you call it flash in the pan apps to actually get data to actually own the workflow to actually create network effects and I think that that those companies provided that they actually own the workflow own the customer uh have network effects are going to be extremely valuable in the future. I think that um it's easy to say that these are GPT rappers 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, right? Like you know people used to say when the app store came out that oh Apple is just going to like find you know pick the most popular apps and just clone you and and that'll be the end. Of course, that didn't happen, right? There's still there's of you know, Apple has a lot of successful apps, the messages app, etc. But, you know, there's tons of apps that have gone and created billions if not trillions of dollars of value. Uh, and that's my take on this. I don't know if you agree or disagree, but I think that um there's of course going to be a bunch of startups that uh get hit by open AI and the foundational models in 12 to 18 months, but I think that you know the great AI rappers uh are going to build valuable companies. We'll see what happens. The one framework I'm going to talk about today is how to grow a product, especially a SAS. It's a three-step framework uh to help you get your creative juices flowing. The first is you're going to want to attach the right creator. Now, how do you figure out what is the right creator for your product for your SAS? You know, obviously it's ideal if you have the biggest creator, but often times we don't have those that those connections, right? You might not know those people. So, what 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 a hundred people. And the top 10 might have a million plus people. They might uh followers. They might have 500,000, 700,000, a million, 1.2. So, reach out to them, like, shoot your shot. Uh, that being said, I think where you're probably going to have the most success is in your smaller creators. So, we're talking people with 120,000 and followers across platforms and less. I would reach out to them. Uh, you can use agents to reach out to them. I've shown how you could uh in the past use Lindy AI and products like that to do that. Um, or you can just reach out the good oldfashioned way. DM them. Uh, I find uh actually doing like a selfie video, like a real selfie video. Hey, my name is Greg. I'm the co-founder of ideaser.com. I think that you'd love this product for these reasons. Uh don't like pitch them from day one. Like you have to get to know them, build the friendship, and then from there you can, you know, hopefully get them uh onto the, you know, involved in the product. So step one is you got to attach the right creator that's going to be involved. You know, you're going to want to do some friendship building. Get to know them. Let them know that you're looking for, you know, people to promote with. You have money. you have upside. Step two is you want to generate uh attach a generous affiliate percentage. I'm not talking about 10% 20%. I'm talking about 30 to 50%. Especially in the initial days, uh give it to them lifetime. Like you you want to get these people on board. Um you could think about ways uh to give them upside in terms of equity if you want, but I would start with just an affiliate uh percentage. Sometimes you might have to give them some level of cash to get them excited initially. Um, but you want to get them involved as an affiliate basically. And then the third step is and and a lot of people miss this step is you want to gify the experience. You want to kind of have, you know, the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami. Um, I heard a story recently that there's like a I think it was like a supplement company called Goji. That's what it was. an an apple cider vinegar gummy and they had some of the best affiliate programs on Tik Tok shop ever. Uh just that's how they grew to I think like you know hundreds of millions of dollars enterprise value and uh they just gified their affiliates. So they would say it you know the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami and we'll buy you a BMW literally. and it they made it they made it you know the numbers make sense for them. So you need to have the numbers make sense for you but this hopefully got your creative juices flowing. The framework is how to grow a product especially SAS uh and it's something I use uh 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, um, 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 AI tools that exist on the internet and uses agents to do that. So, you can generate images with it, video on it, uh, real-time video on it, motion transfer, 3D objects. Um, and I haven't played with it, and this is, you know, that's why I'm bringing it up. This is like on my to-do list to play with it. But it's cool that it has like these mini apps, right? Like clothes changer, upload selfies, and try on different outfits with our free AI virtual tryon tool. They've got a nano banana image editor, they've got product uh, photos. Um, so they've got all these apps, uh, t-shirt generator, um, AI hairstyle stuff, object remover, change lighting, and I think what's really cool, I don't have access to it, but there's this nodes product, which basically is creating uh, workflows. Uh, so kind of like n for creative AI. So, this is something that's interesting, something I'm going to be playing with uh, maybe over the weekend. Um, and uh, 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 um that uh, I'm I'm enjoying right now. I'll give you two actually. I'll give you two random products. Uh, they are both beverages. Um, one is if you're anything like me, you love a cold cup of coffee and a cold brew uh, you know, cost uh, costs a you know, it adds up. It's like $5 for a cold brew now. So, I actually and I have to go down and 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 is this cold brew la colum 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 get, you know, you're getting like six, seven, eight cold brews from it. So, and it's like it's easy, you know? So, I'm drinking it right here. Nice to be able to just have cold brew fast, right? If I need to, you know, I work from home, so if I need to uh 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 Black Colom is it's light. It's a light It's a light roast. It's like not offensive. It's tasty. There's some people who drink beer and they like IPAs. And there's some people who drink beers and they like light beer like a logger. So if you're into cold brew and you like light stuff, La Colom for the price 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, Lollipop. The classic root beer. Absolutely fire. Absolutely fire. Um the macros on it, we're talking 35 calories, 11 grams or 4% carbs, three grams of sugar. Um I'm giving it like an 8.5 on 10. I usually actually don't like lollipop. 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 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. Um but please uh please enjoy. Have a creative day. And I can't wait to see what you build. I am rooting for you.