The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃
@startupideaspod • 47,748 subscribers
Get startup ideas and practical tutorials on AI tools to build your business. Host: @gregisenberg Available on Spotify, Apple and YT
Videos
One of the best categories to build in right now is pet health. The pet industry is $140 billion and people spend a lot of money on their pets. But a very small percentage of them have smart monitoring, and less than 2% have any AI on top of it. Here's the setup: 1) Look at what people are already buying for themselves. Start with who's sponsoring Huberman's podcast. 2) Apply it to pets. I said on My First Million two or three years ago that someone should do Athletic Greens for pets. Someone took the idea, built it, and reached out later to tell me it was doing hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. 3) Do the same thing with hardware. Pull up the pet devices that already exist and ask how you inject an AI brain into this to make it a better product. 4) Collars are the easy one. Heart rate, step count, sleep, and a report that goes back to the owner. There are products already. I'm on PetPaste right now, and Whistle and a few others have added AI recently. It's really, really early. Almost nobody I know is using this stuff yet. Do this one if you love pets. I think it's a no-brainer category. Find the human product, make the pet version, then put a brain in it
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃20,369 次观看 • 2 天前
One of the best businesses to run with GrokBot is a directory. A directory is basically just curated data on a website. You pick a topic and you say, here are the best XYZ in this topic. It's a good $10K, $25K, $100K a month business, Here's the whole setup: 1) Pick the niche. Pickleball equipment. Board games that are good for parties. Something you already have taste in. 2) Build the site on Astro. Astro specifically is really good at directories. 3) Set up a research agent. Every day it investigates a new brand and writes a great page on that brand as Markdown. 4) It hands the page to the engineer, who posts it. 5) Rinse and repeat until you're getting thousands of visits a month. 6) Then add an agent that collects referral links and does outbound to get deals. Step 6 only works after step 5. Nobody gives you a deal when the site has no traffic. Once the directory is getting visits, you have a foundation. Put a niche newsletter on a subdomain and link people over to the directory with your referral link. Those warm leads become sponsors in the newsletter. And the whole SEO game is changing right now. People are going to ChatGPT and Google AI overviews to consume content, and platforms like that need directories. There's too much information out there, so curated is what's helpful. Pick the niche, let it write the pages, then go get the deals
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃103,670 次观看 • 18 天前
One of the best skills to install right now is my friend Peter Yang's no AI slop skill. It's an editor. It hunts for the patterns that make writing feel AI generated and strips them out, while trying to preserve your actual voice. The second part is the hard one. Most writing tools make you cleaner and sand off the interesting parts, so everyone ends up sounding the same. You already know the smell. The grammar is fine, the syntax is fine, and it still reads like a keynote from a fake SaaS conference. It writes "it's not x but it's y." It uses "quietly" a lot. Here's how I run it: 1) Install it: npx skills add, then the GitHub link. 2) Write a rough draft yourself. An outline is fine, messy is fine. 3) Get your real points down, the ones only you would make 4) Ask the skill to remove the AI patterns and keep your voice. Step 4 only works if step 2 is real. If you ask AI to write the whole thing, there's no voice left to preserve. If you're building products, you're writing constantly. Tweets, landing pages, cold emails, launch posts, product updates, onboarding copy, investor updates. Nobody replies to say "this was written by AI." They just trust you less and keep scrolling. Write the messy draft, run the skill, then post it.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃40,041 次观看 • 7 天前
One of the best businesses you can start right now is a community centered around a niche. There's a Discord called Dads of Marathon - It's dads who are casual gamers who don't have time for competitive games, all playing one niche shooter. - There are 13,898 member and there's almost more people in that group than there are people playing the game. - I'm 38. That group is the first time since I was 14 that I've played a shooter with other people, and the first friends I've made purely online in a very long time. - If they sell anything, I'm buying it. Here's the whole setup: 1) Pick who it's for before you pick what it's about. 2) Pick something they can't do alone. 3) Go niche enough that they can't find each other anywhere else. Your existing friends don't have your hobbies anymore. 4) Run it free on Discord until it's busy every day. 5) Then charge a membership fee. It's recurring revenue, and people who found their friends there will pay it. 6) Then take it off the internet. Dinners, trips, five days somewhere with the phones off. Step 5 only works after step 4. Nobody pays a monthly fee to sit in a channel where nobody talks. One warning: you have to actually like doing this. If you're the person who likes bringing people together, you have a huge advantage right now. Pick who it's for, get them doing something together, then charge for it
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃14,716 次观看 • 2 天前
The "marketing engineer" will be one of the most valuable jobs in a company. These people will command $250K, $500K, and $1M/year. The best marketer changes with every major tech wave: 1) Traditional marketer: makes people care with story (print, radio) 2) Digital marketer: owns the new digital channels (SEO, PPC) 3) Growth hacker: lives in loops, PLG and retention 4) Marketing engineer: builds AI agents that find your customers, write your outbound, test your ads, and get smarter every week Most companies already own the pieces in a stack of SaaS tools: - Dashboards - Call recordings - Content calendars - CRM But the learning is scattered: - Sales hears one version of the market. - Support hears a different one. - Product sees the usage. - Marketing sees the clicks. - The founder remembers the one call that hit him that week. Everybody then walks into the growth meeting with a different version of reality. One person pulls those signals into one system and turns them into pipeline. Hire that person, or become that person.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃40,690 次观看 • 9 天前
One of the best things to build right now is an action app. An action app clears your inbox, books your calendar, and files your expenses on your behalf. The AI-first version of email answers 80% of your messages and shows you the one or two a day that are too important to automate. Every app you use today works the other way around. Instagram and TikTok feed you stuff to scroll. Salesforce sits there waiting for you to type. Here's the whole setup: 1) Pick a boring workflow in a niche where people already pay to make it go away. 2) Reimagine the core UX. Don't rebuild the list of everything you owe someone, because the list is the daunting part. 3) Build on the Claude Agent SDK and other SDKs. You're putting a layer on top of it. People called them GPT wrappers, now it's agent wrappers. 4) Give people an interface for managing how the agents work. 5) Figure out the TikTok or the Reel that gets someone to install it. Step 5 is the hard part. Everyone can build the agent now, so the winner is whoever gets the reach. Facebook had a painful transition to mobile, so they bought Instagram, the mobile-first version of Facebook. Agent-first apps are the same setup. Everyone with AI bolted onto the side of an old product can't rip out their core experience, and that's the opening. Someone should start a studio that only builds these. Pick the boring workflow, let the agents run it, then go get acquired
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃14,073 次观看 • 3 天前
One of the easiest wins with an AI agent right now is letting it sign up for your own mobile app on a real phone. There's a repo called Phone Harness that connects Codex or Claude Code to an actual iPhone or Android. The agent sees the screen and can tap, type, scroll, open apps, and verify what happened. Here's the whole setup: 1) Connect the phone. iPhone goes through Mac iPhone mirroring, Android goes through ADB over USB or wireless. 2) You don't have to jailbreak anything, you don't need Xcode, and you don't need a special app on the phone. 3) Paste the setup prompt from the repo into Codex or Claude Code: clone the GitHub, read the install.md, put phone harness on your path, register it as an agent skill, then read onboarding.md and walk me through setup. 4) Run phone-harness 5) Give it the first job: open the app, create an account, tap through onboarding, try checkout, take screenshots, and tell me where it gets confusing or breaks. 6) Then point it at the mobile apps that have no API at all. Every mobile team should be running that signup test constantly. Most don't, because it's tedious, or they don't want to hire that person, or the person makes mistakes anyway. Agents are moving from answering questions to operating tools, and the phone is one of the biggest tool surfaces in the world. Connect the phone, run the doctor, then hand it your signup flow
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃24,256 次观看 • 6 天前
Boris Cherny, the creator of Claude Code, shared his entire setup. He runs 5-10 Claudes in parallel. Half his coding happens from his phone. Here's his 3-part formula for better results: Use the smartest model available — Counterintuitive: it's actually cheaper — Smarter model = fewer tokens = lower total cost — "Once the plan is good, the code is good" Invest in your Claude MD — Plain text file. No special format. — Whole team contributes multiple times a week — Every mistake Claude makes gets added so it never happens again Give Claude a way to verify its own output — Let it run the code. Let it see the browser. — "Imagine you're a painter wearing a blindfold" — Same thing for an AI that can never check its work His morning routine: wake up, kick off 3 sessions from his phone, check in later. His workflow: start in plan mode → lock the plan → auto-accept edits → done. No fancy setup. No complex tooling. Just multiple Claudes, a good plan, and a shared knowledge base.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃559,454 次观看 • 5 个月前
How do you sell agents before you build them? You run the pilot as labor. You charge for the outcome. Pick one niche. Start with 3 customers with the same workflow and the same pain Then promise a result you can measure: "we will answer and qualify your missed calls." Price it simply: - $1,500 setup, then $1,000 per month for one workflow - $2,000 setup, then $30 per qualified appointment - $3,000 per month for up to 500 handled tickets The exact price matters less than what you learn. Watch where the agent breaks, what needs approval, and what the customer will miss if you remove it. Every roofer asks for the same emergency call script, service area check, financing answer, and estimate follow-up. Build the product from that pattern. Do the work first that's how you earn the software.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃14,716 次观看 • 4 天前
The job of a marketing engineer is to pull signals into one system and turn them into pipeline. Here is an example of an SEO/AEO workflow: 1) Read Google Search Console 2) Pull the keyword data from Ahrefs or SEMrush 3) Look in the CMS to find out if the post is already there 4) Put the keywords in order by search volume and buyer intent 5) Read the pages that are at the top of the results now 6) Add the founder's point of view 7) Write the post, the meta title and the internal links Then the agent sends all of it to a person for approval. The agent can only do this if you connect it to your live business data and your tools. "The tools are going to keep changing, but the workflow is the thing to actually learn." Learn the workflow first.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃23,403 次观看 • 8 天前
FDE is the hottest role in tech. Here's the 30-day plan to actually become one: Week 1: Build the loop - Agent looping, tool usage, guardrails - Context, memory, and an audit trail - Checkpoint: one working agent, one task. Week 2: Make it recover - JSON schemas, not freeform text - Failure modes for the 1,000 ways it breaks - "There's only one way something goes right. A thousand ways it goes wrong." Week 3: Make it measurable - Retry logic + a golden dataset for evals - Test cheaper models on sub-tasks - Score it on revenue, risk, cost Week 4: Defend it like an FDE - The pain points, the architecture, the economics - Then pitch it to real businesses Think: - Week 1 = build - Week 2 = survive - Week 3 = measure - Week 4 = sell That's the whole ladder.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃108,443 次观看 • 1 个月前
How do you build an AI agent that people pay for? You watch a human do the job first. Ask a restaurant host what time the restaurant opens. You get a time. The host also knows: - when the kitchen closes - which tables are good for strollers - when the patio closes - how to handle a VIP - when to route a private dining inquiry That is the real workflow. So I sit with the person for 10 or 20 cases before I write a prompt. I ask for - a screen record. - Them to narrate the work. - what makes a case easy, weird, and where the mistakes happen. A lot of founders want to skip this part. It is where the unfair advantage is. Shadow the human. Then build.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃13,223 次观看 • 5 天前
Can your agent finally edit your videos? Yup, it's a repo called video use, by Browser Use. You put the raw footage in a folder. Then Claude Code or Codex edits it. It removes the filler words, cuts the dead space, adds the subtitles, and renders the file. Then it checks its own cut points. Most creators use the same small set of edits in every video. That style stays in your head and in your hands. This repo puts it in a file that an agent can read. People ask for a full YouTube channel on day one. They see bad results, and they stop. Start with one format instead. - One founder loom into a 60 second launch video - 3 clips out of one podcast recording Then make the format a system. Then you operate the system, or you sell it. - Real estate agents need listing videos - Coaches need clips - Agencies need ad variations Manual installation with git clone is possible. For 95% of people, the agent is faster. Here's how i intalled it: - Gave the setup prompt to Claude Code with shell access - Let it read install.md - Installed the repo - Connected FFmpeg - Registered the skill
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃15,435 次观看 • 6 天前
I run 34 AI agents with a 3-word prompt. "do smart things" That's the full instruction. My AI chief of staff is Simon. Simon runs the org. Everything under him touches my meeting transcripts, email, calendar, Notion, Stripe, Supabase, GitHub, my 2026 goals, my business, my family. Several times a day I want something to look across all of that and just go. I ran an org of 100 people at AWS. The part I loved was empowering people and watching them blow past what they thought they could do. Then it hit me that I was functioning at the limit of my own imagination, and every single thing my agents worked on was still initially prompted by me. The catch: the width expanded, the risk tier didn't. They are not sending 100 emails on their own. I still check all emails. Widen the scope before you widen the permissions.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃54,326 次观看 • 28 天前
One of the best businesses to start right now is an agent conversion agency. An agent conversion agency makes boring business websites agent ready. You pick an industry and you give their site tools that an agent can actually call. $2K to $10K to set it up. Then $500 to $700 a month to keep it running. Here's the whole setup: 1) Pick the niche. Law firms. HVAC. Med spas. Dentists. Anyone whose whole business is booked appointments. 2) Build the V1 tools. Request a quote. Book a consult. The two things their front desk does all day. 3) Sell the package, not the acronym. WebMCP is one piece. An MCP server is another. Show them a headless version and a UI version and let them pick. 4) Charge the setup fee up front. $2,000 for a small shop, $10,000 for a large firm. 5) Put them on a monitoring and evals retainer. A few hundred a month, up to $700, every month. 6) Then go after their internal tools. Same client, same tech, and their office processes are a bigger surface than their website. The retainer is the business. The setup fee is just how you get to the retainer. WebMCP launched in February out of Microsoft and Google and it's still experimental in Chrome. That's the point. You're selling them on "a new class of citizens on the Internet" before those visitors show up, and you're the first mover when they do. Pick the niche, build the tools, then keep the retainer.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃26,479 次观看 • 13 天前
What's the tool stack for a marketing engineer? Here's how what I'd use: Start with GrokBot. It is connected to the X ecosystem, so give it 4 clear lanes: - Watch the competitors and report what changed - Watch customer language on X and Reddit - Watch the creators in the niche and find formats to test - Watch the ads and the landing pages Then keep the other work in its own position. Claude and Codex build the repo, the landing pages, and the small internal tools. Hermes Agents run on a schedule, with memory and approval: "every Monday morning, build me a market brief." Creative models such as FAL AI and Higgsfield make ads, thumbnails, and mockups faster. Local AI holds the data that must stay private: customer transcripts, regulated notes, pricing plans. Local AI also helps when a cloud tool is too expensive. Start with one lane. Add the next one when the first one works.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃16,495 次观看 • 9 天前
One of the biggest arbitrage opportunities in AI is to build a "software factory." Here is the example: - I run an AI First Index with my Fortune 500 clients. - We interview their executives and score them on 16 dimensions. - Then we made a public version of it. Option one: open Claude Code, or Codex Say "build out the product." Spend hours refining and iterating until you finally release it Option two: go one level up and "build the factory for the thing." Ours has 5 parts: 1) Primitives. - Login. - Payments. - Social sharing. - You build each one only one time. 2) Promotion. - The owned media that sells the product is part of the machine 3) Memory - We map the roadblocks we had in a shared memory bank so never make that mistake again. - For example, we had a web hook problem. - "I want to learn through the mess." 4) Humans. - These loops are not autonomous. They are "very heavy-handed with humans." 5) Speed. - The first product is already profitable. - The next product is faster, better and stronger. The catch: This process is a "measure twice cut once", so make sure you take the time to build it right the first time Then use the same factory for your content engine, or for your new leads.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃40,176 次观看 • 26 天前
Grok 4.5 is ~1/10th the cost of Fable and 10–15x faster. You'd think that saves you money. It doesn't and that's the best part. An 8-hour job now takes 1 hour. So I don't go home early. I pack 8x the work into the same day. I pay for every lab. Codex, Claude, Perplexity, Grok. This is the one that made me unstoppable. $300/mo plan, 24% left, bought it the day it dropped And it's the best money I spend.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃74,100 次观看 • 2 个月前
how to actually get customers for your vibe coded app: - let AI sell for you (MCP servers) - build 10,000 SEO pages once (programmatic SEO) - vibe code a free tool by lunch (it markets itself) - get cited by ChatGPT (answer engine optimization) - allow your users to create content for you (viral artifacts) - buy a 10K subscriber newsletter for $5K - turn one voice memo into 20 pieces of content Pick two. Start this week. Stop just vibe coding. Start getting customers.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃169,277 次观看 • 5 个月前
The best startup idea right now isn't software. It's a job. Old SaaS said: "here's a tool your team can use." Agent SaaS says: "here's a job your team never has to do again." That's the whole shift. A restaurant doesn't want dashboard software. They want the phone answered, reservations booked, and VIPs routed while the host seats tables. A plumber doesn't want a CRM. He wants every missed call picked up at 2am and turned into a booked job. Same demand. More revenue. Zero new hires. So the only question that matters: Can I do one annoying job better than a junior, faster than an agency, and cheaper than a new hire? Build that. The product is the job.
The Startup Ideas Podcast (SIP) 🧃73,865 次观看 • 2 个月前