GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg • 681,431 subscribers
I drop startup ideas daily. Host @startupideaspod. CEO: @latecheckoutplz we build companies like @ideabrowser, @meetLCA, @boringmarketer etc
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I sat down with Howie Liu, the CEO of Airtable ($500M+ revenue, 1 billion in the bank) and asked him: is there really 1 trillion up for grabs in AI agents? His answer: it's way more than that. It's the entire GDP of white collar labor. Tens of trillions. Here's what stood out: 1. Howie runs 30 Claude Code instances in parallel on HyperAgent. Each one is coupled to a browser, fully autonomous. They review each other's PRs. That's how the CEO of a $10 billion company develops software right now. 2. He wrote his most recent board memo with AI agents. His best investors told him it was the best memo he'd ever written. It cost him $150 in tokens and 10x less time. 3. His take on why people aren't building: they're still using agents like chatbots. They ask "who's going to win the next election" instead of giving it a real multi-hour task. Using is believing. You have to spend a full weekend going deep. 4. AI agents are at less than 10% penetration in most industries. Software engineering is at 50% but even that's an overestimate because most devs are still in "tab autocomplete" mode. The frontier has moved way past that. 5. He revealed HyperAgent. Think of it as the visual agent builder that gives you a low floor and a high ceiling. You can prototype fast and also scale to running serious operations with a fleet of agents. 6. Howie's philosophy/POV: HyperAgent is to agents what the iPhone was to computing. The power was already there. The accessibility is what changes everything. Good news Howie is giving $1,000 in free HyperAgent credits to the first 1,000 people who sign up. $1 million committed to listeners The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃. You get Opus, frontier models, real agent workflows. You just gotta click the link in the description of the YT vid (share this with a friend to give them the $1000 too before it runs out!) episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 and thanks to Howie for supporting the community/channel. Howie Liu is rooting for you to build a $100 million company with less than 5 employees. So am I. watch
GREG ISENBERG39,210,670 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
My friend Corey makes $1,000/hour doing the simplest AI business I've seen all year. Only 5% of businesses use AI beyond ChatGPT, the other 95% need you. He sits with a small business owner for 45 minutes, finds where they lose 5-10 hours a week, and prescribes off-the-shelf AI tools that fix it. He charges $999 for that assessment. He's a doctor writing prescriptions. The tools already exist. He just knows which ones. Everyone wins. 50% of his clients then hire him to implement it, and that's where the $1,000/hour work comes from. Corey came on the podcast The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 and gave away a full course for free. Like actually the full way you can copy his system and run it yourself on your own: - The exact offer (with a money-back guarantee that makes it a no-brainer) - The 4-phase system to deliver it - A template you can download and use today - 6 things to upsell after the assessment - 7 ways to get clients with zero audience and zero capital Even if you never start this exact business, watching Corey Ganim break it down will get your brain working on your own productized AI service. That's the real reason to press play. Link: Or watch below (1hr course) Yeah, I know it's an hour. But if you're serious about startup ideas in the AI age right now, this is one of the most useful hours you'll spend all week. Corey holds nothing back. I love this era. A laptop, a few conversations, and a real business. Go get it.
GREG ISENBERG251,704 Aufrufe • vor 3 Tagen
I recently ran into Demis, founder of DeepMind I was with a friend who's part of a group living with autoimmune disorders Demis: personalized medicine with minimal side effects is coming in 10 years or less The most exciting use case of AGI is ending suffering for billions.
GREG ISENBERG276,943 Aufrufe • vor 4 Tagen
Grok 4.5 might be the BEST model to run inside Hermes or OpenClaw RIGHT NOW. I've been sleeping on Grok to be honestNot anymore. It's more than 60% cheaper than Opus 4.8 and lands around $2.49 per task versus ~$12 for Fable in Claude Code. And it's fast. So what happens when you give Hermes + Grok 4.5 its own email, its own phone number, its own debit card, and access to every tool you use? You pretty much get an AI co-founder. Everything you need to know about Grok 4.5 + Hermes below. Full episode is available to watch at The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 ( thanks Nick Vasilescu for coming on) I slept on Grok. Not sleeping on it anymore. Watch
GREG ISENBERG250,001 Aufrufe • vor 8 Tagen
If I was starting a new company today, I'd start an agent business. SaaS was a multi-billion dollar market. Agents are a multi-trillion dollar one. How to build I'd build an agent business from 0: Spot the niche → find a workflow with a paycheck → shadow the human → spec the agent → run it manually first → build the smallest useful version → sell the pilot like labor → productize the repeatable parts. Entire episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 100% free like always. SaaS sold software and let your team use it to get the job done. An agent business sells the job already done. That shift matters because labor is a multi-trillion dollar market, far bigger than software ever was. Watch
GREG ISENBERG505,936 Aufrufe • vor 17 Tagen
GPT 5.6 SOL IS HERE! How to run your personal + business life with GPT 5.6 Sol + Codex (full 49 min masterclass) We tested it for 30 days and the video it's the CLEAREST look at the FUTURE of work: Here's what's possible once you set it up: 1. Your inbox becomes cards every morning, each with a summary and a reply drafted in your own voice. Y 2. Your Slack, meeting notes, and company updates can turn into one daily feed with a clear next action. It learns what you care about over time and rewrites its own prompts to get sharper. 3. You can give your agent its own email address, so your other tools and even your team's Slack bot email it directly and it just handles things. 4. You can have it watch you do a task once and turn it into a skill it repeats forever. 5. You can set a long goal and walk away. You can have it run for 20 hours straight, and fine-tune your own models, something that was out of reach for non-engineers 12 months ago. How to start: Open Codex, give it access to your computer, and ask it to suggest things it could do for you based on how you already work. Full episode on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (thanks Dan Shipper 📧 for sharing your entire workflow and review of GPT 5.6) Start with one boring task, get it working, and build from there. You'll learn exactly how to make something similar. GPT 5.6 Sol is impressive. Sol (according to openAI benchmarks) is the best coding model out right now. It set a new state of the art on Terminal-Bench 2.1 at 88.8%, and its "ultra mode" hits 91.9%, beating Claude Opus 4.8, Fable 5, and even Mythos 5 this masterclass is 100% free, like always. For more The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 Watch
GREG ISENBERG152,821 Aufrufe • vor 9 Tagen
HOW TO USE AI LOOPS TO RUN YOUR BUSINESS 24/7 A lot has been written about loop engineering for building products. Almost nothing about using loops to run the business itself. That's the bigger idea. A loop is when you give an agent a goal, a way to check its own work, and permission to keep trying until it hits that goal. Build. Verify. Repeat. Stop when the condition is met. Here's what it looks like in practice: 1/SEO loop You're position 30 for a term you want. The loop runs once a month, makes changes, checks where you rank, and keeps pushing until you're on page one. This is running in production right now on Inbox Zero. 2/Ads loop You're spending $100 a day and losing money. The loop tests creative, checks profitability, kills what fails, and keeps going until the account is in the black. 3/Eval loop Your AI feature is only 88% accurate. The loop keeps adjusting the prompt and swapping the model until it passes 90%. 4/LLM visibility loop People search in ChatGPT now, not just Google. Same loop, new scoreboard. Are we the answer or not? The whole thing hinges on one thing: a metric that comes back black and white. Where do I rank? Did it hit profitability? Did the evals pass? Give an agent that scoreboard and it runs for months. Loops used to run for 30 minutes. These run for a year. Take a step, sleep, wake up next month, take another one. You're basically hiring an agency that never sleeps, gets paid in tokens instead of invoices, and undoes its own mistakes when the number goes down. Full episode on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 watch
GREG ISENBERG80,088 Aufrufe • vor 5 Tagen
This is one of the best videos to ever exist for entrepreneurs, creators... I think about it often. In 2016, Pharrell Williams visited a NYU music production class to critique student songs. At the beginning you could see student "Maggie Rogers" drenched with the absolute terror of sharing this with him. Pharrell is there just trying to keep his excitement in. The guy couldn’t wait to tell her this song is the bee’s knees. After he listened to a song called “Alaska”, he explained why “I have zero, zero, zero notes for that:” 24 hours later, someone posted the clip to Reddit. It blew up and the rest is history. Grammy nominated, millions of followers etc. And Maggie responded to the Reddit thread (i'll share screenshot in the next tweet). This story I find so cool because it inspires other artists to share what they got. We all can all connect with the fear of showing our work. It ain't easy. And to have a unique POV like Maggie. Easy to copy, harder to have something unique. I’ve got a bunch of designs, creations that have never seen the light of day. This video inspires me to publish more. My point of sharing this video: Publish your art anonymously. Or publish your art proudly as yourself. Bonus points if it's one of a kind work. But publish your darn art. This is your new week's energy. This is your 2024 energy. Go get 'em. -- If you enjoyed this, go listen to some Maggie Rogers. And thank you to Pharrell for being so supportive to an up and comer. And go follow me for more stories like this GREG ISENBERG, so you get more of it in your feed I share stories about internet communities, free startup ideas and more. (link in bio for more info about me)
GREG ISENBERG20,154,767 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
So, Mark Zuckerberg finally tried the Apple Vision Pro and compared it to the Meta Quest 3 He says: - Quest is 7x less expensive yet way more comfortable - Quest is better for gaming, Xbox, YouTube - "I'm surprised how much better Quest is better for majority of things" My biggest takeaway: The future of ads feels like his IG post. This is real. No marketing talk, just saying it as it is. Zuck's Apple Vision Pro feels like I'm listening to a tech reviewer not a guy worth $165B. I feel like I'm having a convo in a living room with my friend Mark. You feel his enthusiasm. Reminds me of the Kayne Superbowl ad. The guy spent $7M and took a 30s selfie video. Highly effective. He sold $19M of product within 24h of that video. So my point is, if you're creating an "ad" More living room, less high budget. Be real.
GREG ISENBERG11,018,471 Aufrufe • vor 2 Jahren
i heard about a guy in a small town in england who turned his openclaw into a short form video marketing machine millions of views, steady app downloads, and revenue coming in every day i needed to find out how he was doing it 1. spin up an ai “employee” using openclaw 2. give it one job like grow your app with tiktokk 3. give it access to tiktokk analytics, a browser to research and image/video tools to create content 4. the openclaw studies your niche and starts generating slideshows and videos 5. every post feeds performance data back into the system views → hook quality downloads → CTA quality revenue → funnel quality the openclaw then iterates on - new hooks - new formats - new CTAs until it finds winners one of his posts hit 170k+ views and the system keeps improving because the analytics loop feeds back into the content generation so the agent slowly learns what works what i like about this is the framing most people think about ai tools this is different you spin up an ai employee you give it a job and let it run the loop thanks to Oliver Henry for coming on the The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 today more like this soon, i will share the most interesting stories and gatekeep nothing this episode was dripping in sauce i gotta try this and see if it works kinda wild if it does watch
GREG ISENBERG1,327,456 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
how to use obsidian + claude code to build a 24/7 personal operating system and build your startup: 1. write everything in markdown (daily notes, projects, beliefs, people, meetings) 2. link your notes together so they mirror how your brain actually thinks. 3. install obsidian cli so claude code can read your entire vault + the relationships. 4. stop reexplaining projects every session. use reference files instead. 5. build custom slash commands: /context → load your full life + work state /trace → see how an idea evolved over months /connect → bridge two domains you’ve been circling /ideas → generate startup ideas from your vault /graduate → promote daily thoughts into real assets 6. keep a strict rule: human writes the vault. agents read it, suggest, execute. 7. let claude aka clode surface patterns you’ve been unconsciously circling for years. 8. delegate from inside your notes. one sentence in obsidian → agent handles the rest. 9. treat writing as leverage.the more you write, the more context your agents have. 10. understand this:markdown files are the oxygen of llms. i really enjoyed seeing how to use obsidian thanks to internetVin vin uses ai like a thinking partner wired into his life’s work. 99.99% of people won’t do this because it requires reflection + setup. but once the vault exists, the agent stops being generic. it starts thinking in your voice. episode is live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (more there) this one is different. send this tweet to a friend. im still processing how game changer obsidian + claude code is, maybe you too watch
GREG ISENBERG1,132,030 Aufrufe • vor 4 Monaten
how to use Google's NEW open source Design.md + AI Skills to make your startup look like a $100 million company in 1 hour: 1. Design.md is an open source file from Google that captures the soul of a design. Typography, colors, spacing, all in one markdown file. You attach it to your prompt and your agent builds beautiful things every time. 2. Think of it this way. The HTML is the finished dish. The design.md is the recipe. The skills are the ingredients. Put them together and everything you build looks consistent and professional. 3. Don't create a design system from scratch. Find a brand you love. Linear, Stripe, Vercel, whatever resonates. Study it. Use ChatGPT or Claude to help you extract the design language into your own design.md file. 4. Build skills on top of your design.md. A landing page skill. A mobile app skill. A motion design skill. A slide deck skill. Each one references the same design.md so everything looks like it came from the same designer. 5. The biggest mistake people make: they nail one screen and then everything else looks generic. Design.md solves this. One file keeps every page, every format, every medium consistent. 6. Use it across everything. Your landing page. Your app. Your pitch deck. Your promo videos. Same DNA. Same taste. Same system. That's what separates a startup that looks real from one that looks vibe-coded. 7. Build a second brain for design inspiration. When you see something beautiful in the real world or online, capture it. Save it. When you're building something new, reference it. Taste is developed, not downloaded. 8. It's obvious but the difference between a product people trust and a product people bounce from is how it looks and feels. Design.md gives you that edge. you can watch below shoutout to Meng To for coming on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 and walking through his full workflow. if you want to use AI to actually build gorgeous designs, you'll want to use see this. watch
GREG ISENBERG504,178 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
how to set up hermes agent step by step. built-in memory, 40+ tools, works on your phone, and what to think of hermes vs openclaw: 1. hermes is a personal AI agent that runs in your terminal. think of it like open claw but with built-in memory, 40+ tools out of the box, and 90% cheaper token costs. you install it with one command. 2. the 3 problems with open claw that hermes solves: no memory (you keep repeating yourself), constant gateway restarts, and zero visibility into what you're spending on tokens. 3. hermes remembers everything. every completed task gets saved to memory. it searches through past logs to find solutions. over time it literally gets smarter at your specific workflows. 4. connect it to open router. you see exact costs per model per task. free models rotate weekly. one founder went from $130 every five days on open claw to $10 on hermes. same output. 5. it comes preloaded with skills. apple notes, imessage, find my, browser, web search, image generation, cron jobs. no hunting for plugins. 6. connect it to obsidian so it reads your entire vault. connect it to gstack for your dev environment. create custom skills for your specific workflows. 7. the biggest money saver: have it write code once for recurring tasks. then it runs without burning tokens every time. stop paying an LLM to do the same scrape or report daily. 8. run it on android via telegram. name your agents. talk to them like coworkers. in this episode imran shows you how to set this up. 9. you can run it bare metal, in docker, or serverless on modal. pick your risk level. i begged imran to come on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 and walk through the full installation live. he made it impossibly clear. if you've heard of Hermes Agent and want the clearest explanation of how to get set up like a pro let me know what you want me to cover on the next ep this is the best personal agent setup video on the internet right now. watch
GREG ISENBERG616,304 Aufrufe • vor 2 Monaten
I met a 19 year old who makes $200,000+ building apps with AI and he can't even code. 1 year ago he was literally working at TJ Maxx. He made a deck called "How to scale your app to $10k/month (easy mode)" and gave away the entire playbook on the pod: 1. Pick an idea you're actually passionate about. He proved this the hard way. The app he hated got 1.8M views and made $35. The app he loved made $17,000. Same month. 2. Build one "gotcha feature" anyone gets in 5 seconds. Take a picture of food, get calories. That's the whole pitch. 90% of distribution is nailing this. Gotcha features that include AI are working a lot right now. 3. Onboarding is where the money is. Educate, add social proof, personalize to create sunk cost, then hit them with FOMO right before the paywall. 4. Your IG is both a sales funnel for users and your credibility when pitching influencers. Three demos, clean bio, collab posts. 5. Distribution is a numbers game. Tailor your feed to your ideal customer, scroll and DM all day, hire a VA, get creators on the phone fast. His name George Lampropoulos. It was fun hearing him share what is working in real-time from his POV. Might get your creative juices flowing if building mobile apps with AI is exciting to you. I love how simple his deck he showed is. Full episode on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 Watch
GREG ISENBERG217,435 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
The most comprehensive Hermes Desktop tutorial on the internet NOW is LIVE. You'll learn sessions, profiles, artifacts, cost savings, and real use cases for making money and building startups with Hermes agents. Whether you're already running Hermes or haven't started yet, this is the episode for you. Alex Finn says this is the moment Hermes overtakes OpenClaw. S/o to Alex for walking me through it. "It's now the best way to use AI agents on your computer" I do think the desktop app of Hermes looks almost like an Apple product. Everything you need to know about Hermes Desktop App/agents in 43 minutes This episode is 100% free. No ads. The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 I just want to see you win on the internet. And I think Hermes can help. Plus, It's fun thing to play with this weekend. Share this with a friend. Link below. YT: Watch
GREG ISENBERG223,181 Aufrufe • vor 1 Monat
