GREG ISENBERG
@gregisenberg • 721,191 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 ISENBERG39,218,877 görüntüleme • 5 ay önce
Grok Bot might be the first tool that lets one non-technical person run an entire business with a team of AI agents. My friend Billy runs his whole newsletter business on Grok Bot agents, and I think we're about to see 100,000+ businesses like his. BEST PRACTICES: 1. The agents run on a shared cloud computer, so running your newsletter, your X, and your receipts all in one place creates context bloat and burns tokens fast. One mission per setup. 2. Start with a Chief of Staff. Give it access to your existing docs (Notion, Slack, Gmail), have it audit the business, then tell you the top three agents to build first to drive revenue. 3. Perfect a task with the Chief of Staff before spinning up a new agent. Have it do the outbound sales once, review it, and only then say "now build a bot that does exactly that." You earn each new hire by proving the task works first. 4. Constraints are the feature. You get a limited number of agents, one thread per bot, like DMs with a teammate. It forces you to stay mission-oriented instead of spinning up a bot for every random idea. 5. You make the decisions, not the agent. Billy's team spent three weeks unable to pick where content should live. At some point you say "we're doing Notion, no more tinkering" and move on. 6. Run week one with no new agents. Build the team, learn to fly the plane, just execute. Week three is when you find the real gaps and expand, someone to man the inbox, someone for the Shopify shop. 7. Then add routines so it works while you sleep. Ask your Chief of Staff what recurring jobs would move the business forward overnight, and it builds the automations that run without you. Thanks to Billy Howell for sharing the sauce on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (follow for more). Grokbot is really cool. Watch below:
GREG ISENBERG4,035,729 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
I’ve been playing with Gemini 4 Argon for 7 days — Google gave me early access and sponsored today’s episode. 10 Insights using Gemini 4 Argon (for people who want to make cool things with AI): 1. It's perhaps the best AI copywriter. Surprisingly. Using it as my default writer as of now. 2. I recreated a 3D version of our website pretty quickly. There's cars driving around, sounds, even a little basketball game you can play. The original took our team 40,000 hours to build. 3. It needs references to make great creative. My first attempt looked like Zuck's metaverse avatar lol. Once I gave it a Mondrian reference, it got beautiful. So you really gotta get your references in there. I like using Sublime or Cosmos for some of my inspo. 4. The best way to get it writing like you is to ask it to study everything you've written and turn it into a skill. It built me a voice guide, my vocabulary and templates in one go. 5. It did really well on my SaaS engineering on the first few prompts. 6. I like using it for physical AI stuff. It designed a product customizer, showed me the layers and the CAD, and exported a print-ready STL file. You can send that straight to a Bambu printer or a print-on-demand API. 7. I think there's a big business in adding custom 3D printed product widgets to Shopify stores. People get attached to things they customize. Someone go an do this. 8. You can rebuild boring legacy software for a niche and give it away for free. The code it writes is tested, so it feels ready to ship. 9. Use /plan before it touches any files. My first website attempt would have been way better with it. 10. The model is great. Antigravity still has some catching up to do. You can use Argon in Cursor and other harnesses in the meantime Link to full ep: Make cool things with AI that people buy. This episode of The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 might give you some ideas. I basically have 3 sections 1 on "vibe marketing", 1 on "vibe manufacturing" (and a cool shopify idea) and 1 on recreating legacy saas products (but better), Whatever it is you are building, just know that, I'm rooting for you.
GREG ISENBERG38,640 görüntüleme • 2 gün önce
HOW TO BECOME A FORWARD DEPLOYED ENGINEER (53 MIN MASTERCLASS) Some forward deployed engineers are getting PAID $1M+/year (kinda crazy, I know) And I REALIZED almost nobody talks about HOW they do it in any detail. It's basically nowhere online. So I asked someone who does it ALL DAY LONG for Fortune 500 companies to walk me through it, step by step. and he shares EXACTLY how he does it Here's what I learned: 1. They start by listening, not building. They interview the people doing the work and let agents quietly read the company's data for a few weeks. The real process is almost always 3x longer than the one on paper. 2. They sort every step into four buckets: delete it, automate it with a simple rule, give it to an AI agent, or keep a human on it. A surprising amount ends up in the first bucket. 3. They build inside the tools the company already uses. Nobody has to learn a new app. When a human needs to sign off, it's just a Slack message. 4. They use the cheapest model that gets the job done. Most of this work doesn't need the most expensive AI. 5. They measure everything before and after, then come back 6 months later and prove it worked. This + concrete client examples + way more on today's episode of The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (thanks to vas) A full course pretty much on the topic aivalable to you 100% for free. This episode is for ANYONE who wants to be a FDE or who wants to make their company AI-native by deploying agents. Watch
GREG ISENBERG213,329 görüntüleme • 16 gün önce
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 ISENBERG20,158,241 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
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 ISENBERG11,020,419 görüntüleme • 2 yıl önce
EVERYTHING you NEED to know about Jack Dorsey's AI agent "Slack killer" Buzz (set up, use-cases etc in 38 mins) What we get into: 1. What Buzz actually is and should founders switch from Slack? 2. How to swap the model under any agent and keep all your context? 3. How to talk to your agents live with audio huddles? 4. How to get agents to build and deploy real apps for you, like a full CRM from one ask? 5. How to set up the context loop that feeds your live app data back to your agents? 6. How to share compute so a few people split one machine running a local model? 7. Who it's actually for right now, and what's still rough? Full breakdown on the pod The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃. Thanks to Vinny for jumping on and clearly explaining jack and team's latest product. My TLDR take is Buzz is a glimpse into the future of work. Some of you will roll your eyes at that, and I get it, it's alpha software and it's slow in places. But the core idea, that your context is the foundation and agents build out from there, is right, and that's worth seeing early. Watch Curious what you think
GREG ISENBERG560,964 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 ISENBERG1,331,019 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce
Jev is HERE and this is the CLEAREST explanation of what it is and what NEW businesses it unlocks. (and at the end I'll tell you how to get Jev even if you're on the waitlist) WHAT IT IS You know how you open your inbox and have to decide what's junk, what needs a reply, and what can wait? Jev does that part. It looks at each thing and says "this is junk, I'm 94% sure." It doesn't write anything back to you. It just sorts. 1,700 emails for 18 cents, instantly. That sounds kinda trivial but the important part WHAT IT UNLOCKS My explanation of Jev sounds small until you realize HOW MANY jobs are exactly this. Someone reading a stack of applications. Someone deciding which support ticket goes to which team. Someone looking at inbound and deciding who's worth calling back. A few ideas on what it unlocks: 1/ Instant quotes that are actually instant. Every quote form on the internet says "we'll email you by end of day." Build the version that answers in under a second, for roofers, movers, insurance, legal intake. 2/ Lead scoring as a product. Every agency and service business has a contact form full of junk. Score every submission and send the real ones straight to the owner's phone. 3/ Support triage for companies with no support team. The ticket gets classified and routed before anyone opens it. 4/ Clipping tools. Pass in a transcript, get the best moments scored in three seconds. Every clipping product just got a cheaper engine. 5/ Application piles. Grants, permits, insurance claims, job apps, loan docs. Someone reads that stack one item at a time today. 6/ Marketplace matching. Someone types what they need and gets matched to the right local business instantly instead of waiting for callbacks. 7/ Browser agents that actually move FAST. That makes bulk browser work practical: pulling quotes from five carriers, filing the same form for 200 clients, checking supplier inventory in real time etc. TLDR; find an expensive queue and put Jev at the front of it. HOW TO GET IT I didn't realize you can skip the waitlist because Jev is live on the Vercel AI Gateway right now, so you can start calling it today. In this episode, we share how. Episode now live on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 (thanks to vogel for coming on and spilling the sauce today) Watch: Jev is a big deal because this is a whole new way to do AI Really cool Happy Jev day.
GREG ISENBERG163,997 görüntüleme • 29 gün önce
I recorded everything I know about the $5T AI roll-up opportunity in 1 new 30 min episode: - why $5T of businesses are about to change owners - what Thrive and General Catalyst are actually doing - how I'd run a one-person holdco with agents - the exact folders and agent files I'd use - the 6 best arguments against it - Link:
GREG ISENBERG100,615 görüntüleme • 19 gün önce
The "marketing engineer" is the NEW forward deployed engineer, and I think the BEST ones will make $1M a year! A forward deployed engineer embeds with your team and uses AI to build the workflows The marketing engineer does that BUT for growth, they build AI agents that find your customers, write your outbound, test your ads, and get smarter every week. The most valuable marketer changes with EVERY major tech wave: 1. Traditional marketer: make people care with story (print, radio etc) 2. Digital marketer: the marketer who owned new digital channels (SEO, PPC) 3. Growth hacker: the growth marketer who lived in loops, PLG and retention 4. Marketing engineer: the marketer who builds AI agents that run the whole system. The type of agents a marketing engineer would create: 1. The customer language agent. It pulls your Gong call transcripts, your Intercom tickets, and your G2 reviews every week, extracts the exact words customers use to describe the problem, and drops a memo ranked by how often each phrase shows up. 2. The buying trigger agent. It watches for signals that someone's ready, a company posting a job for the role you sell to, a funding announcement, a competitor getting torched in a review, then enriches the contact through Apollo and drafts the outbound tied to that exact trigger the second it fires. 3. The SEO gap agent. It pulls keyword gaps from Ahrefs, checks who's already ranking on page one, reads the top three results, then writes a better post with the founder's actual take baked in, plus the meta title and internal links, and drops it in for approval. 4. The creative testing agent. It takes one offer, generates 100 ad variations across three different angles with Nano Banana and your copy model, pushes them live through the Meta API, and kills anything under a 1% CTR on its own so only the winners keep spending. AND MANY MORE. If you're a marketer, this is how you stop being replaceable. If you're a founder, this is how you grow your company efficiently. AI agents are here and marketers are about to have a field day!! I explain everything (tools, agents, 30d plan) on today's episode of The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 Watch: --> Marketing engineers are here. Whatever we end up calling them, the top 1% of them are going to make an absurd amount of money.
GREG ISENBERG239,291 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce
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 ISENBERG1,143,020 görüntüleme • 7 ay önce
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 ISENBERG514,676 görüntüleme • 3 ay önce
Muse AI Connectors COULD be the App Store moment for AI, and I think BILLIONS of dollars are up for grabs. When Apple opened the App Store in 2008, it gave developers access to millions of iPhone users, and less than two years later Apple had paid them $1 billion. Muse could create a similar opening, except instead of building apps people have to find and open, founders can build services a personal agent calls while completing a task. In today's episode of The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃, I explain how Muse Connectors work, how to build one with Codex or Claude Code, how people could discover them and 4 startup ideas I’d investigate right now. Who knows whether Muse reaches 10 million, 100 million or one billion users, but whether Muse wins or not, personal agents are becoming a new place where demand gets routed and money changes hands. So, needless to say, it's a really good time to be experimenting with Muse AI connectors. Nobody knew which iPhone apps would win in 2008, but the developers who started experimenting early learned what the rest of the market wouldn’t understand for years. This feels like another one of those moments.
GREG ISENBERG102,436 görüntüleme • 23 gün önce
1 HOUR MASTERCLASS ON HOW TO WRITE WITH AI (from someone who's made $30M+ writing online)
GREG ISENBERG109,895 görüntüleme • 26 gün önce
How to become a $1M forward-deployed engineer (FDE) in 30 days (and what FDE clearly means): - What an FDE is and why the role EXPLODED - The 3 stages of the job (business reality, judgment, building) - The exact 30 day roadmap to become one - What the top roles actually pay
GREG ISENBERG368,114 görüntüleme • 2 ay önce
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 ISENBERG625,817 görüntüleme • 6 ay önce
WebMCP by Microsoft and Google is HERE and I'm surprised more people aren't talking about it. Why does it matter? BILLIONS of dollars are about to move through agents, and the internet isn't built for them yet. 1. SEO was about Google understanding your page. 2. AEO was about AI citing you. 3. WebMCP is about the agent actually finishing the job (buying, researching, requesting quote etc). WebMCP is basically websites with agent buttons. Instead of an agent scanning a page like a human, screenshotting and guessing where to click, the site just tells it "here's how to search, here's how to book, here's how to buy." 2 cash flowing businesses you could start today using WebMCP: 1. A WebMCP conversion agency Make boring business websites agent-ready. Law firms, HVAC, med spas, dentists. Build them the first tools (request a quote, book a consult), sell the setup for $2k, then charge a few hundred a month to monitor and improve it. 2. An agent mystery shopper. Test whether agents can actually complete the important journeys on someone's site, buying the hoodie, booking the consult, filing the claim. Hand them a report on where the agent got stuck, missing tools, bad descriptions, lost conversions. Charge monthly, then turn the repeated fixes into software. Full episode on The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃 with Vinny below You'll learn what WebMCP really is, see examples of it IN ACTION, and hear more about 2 startup ideas using WebMCP you can start today. WebMCP is pretty cool. Watch.
GREG ISENBERG183,684 görüntüleme • 1 ay önce