# $100M+/Year Founder Reveals a Brilliant Startup Idea Built on Top of Twitter

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UG7jEotF3A
Duration: 46 min
Language: English
Words: 9082
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/9UG7jEotF3A

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[0:00] to me strategy means deciding how you're going to win that means things such as my advantage or here's my strengths or assets here's how I'm leveraging those specific things I think in retrospect when a company has a good strategy it's easy to say what it was so you look at Netflix and you're like oh DVDs to the home so you don't have to do the walk of death that was smart and then when they realize streaming is even better cuz it's immediate I mean that was good so to me that is a strategy that that's like this is the critical idea that sets them apart that is unique it's hard to

[0:29] follow I would have a vision like helping thousands of companies succeed because they have the right strategy Jason Cohen welcome to the startup ideas podcast great to have you here and you've got a bunch of ideas you're an idea machine yourself and I just I'm excited to to dive in with you yeah you know I think it's funny uh I don't know that there's an area in the world that you can't make a startup in especially if you have aspirations of building a profitable business for a few people and not a unicorn for that employs thousands of people and makes billions of dollars those opportunities are fewer although

[1:11] once again you can probably disrupt anything with a sufficiently different idea but you know especially if you have more modest goals and I don't mean that in a bad way I mean that in simply a magnitude way um it's hard to imagine a area that you can't make a business in so I to me like the biggest thing there is a large and growing Market because if the if because that means people are spending money already more and more are doing that that means there is a problem to be solved or something people want done and it also means niches will constantly be blooming because as it as

[1:45] it expands like there's no way that the larger players can do a perfect job in all of the niches that's just never true um and so there's opportunities for again if if you don't want to make a billion dollar company then well their niches they too small for the people to certainly Target maybe even notice and then you can fit right in there so I think as long as it's a large and growing Market you've already taken some of the market risk out and you're already on the right path all right so you have some nuggets of some ideas I want to get to which one do you want to

[2:17] start with first whatever you want how about um this social media system that you have that you're thinking of maybe productizing what's this no I'm not thinking of productizing it nope all right well tell tell us about your the system I I you know I've used a lot of these uh systems where you buffer up stuff and sends out and that's a good idea to to sense the fat on a schedule I just find that um there's so much more to social media than that than the broadcast period And I just haven't found tools that um that work well for me in processing the other side of of

[3:00] that so like on Twitter well actually on any of them you know you should be interacting with people um and so how can you do that quickly almost like an inbox that you can move through very quickly some tools have things like that there's other rules on Twitter like if people have a follower to following ratio that's really out of whack and you interact with them it actually lowers your reputation and and and reach so you don't want to do that um so the tools should know that and kind of show you the things that you should react to maybe you should even sort it not in

[3:29] order of time but in order of maybe who it is that you're interacting with and then there's the reverse um you know you want to another another thing they say on Twitter and other things is well there's probably people your size maybe a little smaller maybe a little bigger maybe a lot bigger that's in your Zone that you want to interact with like you want to know them you want to Etc and so for example if they if if if they post something and they have a huge following and you have a very cogent useful great reply that can get a lot of likes and people might even follow you because

[4:01] they saw you that way and that's one of the things people say to do and I haven't really seen tools that are that good at it but it's not even hard to do that with Twitter itself so like if you go to tweet deck you can set up a search uh using a Twitter list in which you can you know keep updated with this set of people right um that's very easy to do because you can do it on all the clients um and then say search in that list for people who have tweeted and it's not a retweet and you know you might have conditions like that to get to these

[4:29] items now the trick to me of getting the comments to work is if they just posted it then if your comment gets in there um it might start accumulating likes and snowballs so that even though that thing might live for a day or 12 hours or whatever it does um you know perhaps you have a uh much higher chance of getting attention and getting this effect that I'm talking about if you were to post it immediately after their post not if you wait eight hours so you can add to that filter um how long it was since the Tweet so I had like 20 minutes like if

[5:03] it's longer than 20 minutes I'm just not even going to look and so that means I just go there and there might be just two or three things they tops at any given time but they're highly likely to be good and I uh I got this idea from a related but different story where um the CEO of Google was saying how it's impossible for him to use Gmail because it's just full of stuff you know right like it's just it's it's a disaster area so he doesn't really use it he says but what he does is he goes in occasionally and he just answers the email that's at

[5:33] the top meaning the most recent one um and he says what he likes about this is most people get exactly the experience they expect which is they email the CEO of Google and of course he didn't respond like why would he respond right but occasionally someone gets an an answer in like 40 seconds and he says he's imagining them thinking like I to seeo Google you answer 4 seconds this is a beast what who is this person how can this be you know so it's like yeah that's that's hilarious so that's sort of the application of that to Twitter is what I'm describing so I think that's

[6:07] pretty funny another thing I do and again I I have my own system for this that i' I've made that I'm not interested in turning into a product and some of it is kind of hacky with stuff like using puppet to control the browser and stuff like that so that that doesn't really scale um so another thing I like to do is um you spend a lot of time replying like how much time do you have in your day like like you know like probably this is too much time to to invent new stuff for your queue but also to have these really great replies that

[6:40] that are actually good don't just say yes I agree you know something really good that's worthy of other people's sharing or liking that takes effort so what I do is um when I make that reply I also have it C and and it's like that one of those kind um in my system it makes a copy of that into a draft C so then at other times I'll go through that and I'll rewrite them to be Standalone tweets with whatever the concept was but in that mental mode I don't have to come up with ideas I've already done that even with the way it's worded and stuff I'm just I'm just

[7:15] editing for purpose so I can just go through very quickly so by I've spent the time having a good idea and even even wording it well in the reply but then I sort of reuse it you might say for the que so that means my queue is very full very long so I never worry about having to come up with an idea um oh the other thing is those are scheduled at least three months later so that it's not really possible for someone to say didn't you just say that you know because it's like sufficiently removed from everyone's mind including my own you know it might as well be a

[7:48] brand new idea um and so that's a way to essentially double the the or reuse you might say the the efforts that I do have good replies and yet um that I I'm not wasting that time in a sense because I'm really filling my own queue also that's another thing that you could easily make the product do that um that doesn't take so much special effort so I think what you're saying is really interesting which is you've built a system for how you manage social media and whenever you've built a system There's an opportunity to productize that that system and sometimes it doesn't even need to be your own system

[8:28] so you can pick off on how other people are creating their sausage so to speak like especially in Social because everything you know a lot of not everything but a lot of it's public you're able to see that oh atreg Eisenberg often replies within five minutes to these people so I think it's really smart like that framework for you have a system how do you productize it I really like that the other thing I really like about this idea is how do you make the UI chat so for example you you you were talking about having replies come into this Gmail like experience I would totally use something like that if you

[9:07] know it told me here's like the 10 people you should respond to right now and it could also give me some ideas based on what I've said in the past and because there's real tangible value associated with that because replies are now being optimized in algorithms I would totally pay for that so I think I I love this idea and it would be also really cool if I was able to subscribe to not just like Jason Cohen system but Greg eisenberg's system or other people's systems and like the UI would change based on that yeah it could be the different systems are good in different ways I don't know I would

[9:43] start with one um I think a couple other things one is um like when I in in my system I don't say here's 10 I just do one at I just show myself one at a time so I'm completely focused and it might be 10 it might be one might be zero whatever like I'm not I'm not trying to waste time here and I'm not trying to make 10 replies that may be wrong maybe it's better to make more replies and it's just prioritized but uh that's how I do it I want to optimize my time um rather than how many things I write um I don't use AI but I agree that it

[10:19] makes sense it's like really obvious to use AI train it on your previous responses blah blah blah your style we all know AI is only only so good at replacing your style or reproducing your style and so on maybe there's some models that are better at that than others and so forth I'm not a big expert in that so I don't use that because I want it to be my own voice for real and my own ideas but I can absolutely see the idea of uh using AI to draft and then you edit it and this obviously could save you time it also depends on what your goal is if your goal is just

[10:49] to accumulate followers because you're going to sell them a course or something like that then I would use more Ai and blah blah blah because it's not really about you it's not even really about your ideas you're just trying to work the system and that's fine I'm not again I'm not saying that in it that it has to be bad it's it's marketing that's not what I'm doing I'm not interested in that I'm not selling anything I don't even run ads on my website like I I actually want to have my ideas and my style and interact with real people and that's it and and uh it is nice to have

[11:16] more followers I like that but my goal is not to accumulate news newsletter subscribers to sell them stuff my goal is is I suppose to accumulate people who are actually interested because I write you know unique stuff the end right that's the reason and so hence like I'm optimizing for something else and I'm not interested in AI making a response because it's just not uh because I'm not just accumulating it I really want it to be an idea that I had that's the point for me the other thing that would be really interesting is I'm not trying to call anyone out but these systems that that exist already of

[11:51] course there's a lot of them they always have a newsletter or something that gives you tips and there's random tips and it's not clear to me that that those tips are really validated they're just they just say that but like is there data that shows have they AB tested stuff and it always occurs to me like you have thousands maybe tens of thousands maybe hundreds of thousands of customers who've done stuff can you actually see what works better um could you AB test stuff within one account or across mult many accounts to see what works better um or other kind of data like maybe you paid for the

[12:25] huge Twitter fire host so you have a whole lot of data and you can actually analyze it no more I know there's looking at the algorithm itself I get that um but that's different than saying stuff like what's VI what's viral like oh you got to use a hook and then a this and then that that's the the the Twitter algorithm won't tell you that part right um I I have a feeling it's all of those things are not Based on data that they're really just based on people saying stuff and wanting to fill a newsletter with things that seem plausible but it seems to me like there

[12:52] should be data and if there's not who really cares what they say in the newsletter so I think there's probably some kind of opportunity in there to to say no this is actually a databased system and the and the product itself is testing things with us with all of us so that the product can improve for you and actually help you you know like I said respond within 20 minutes maybe it should be 10 maybe it can be an hour maybe it depends on other factors the bigger the account blah blah blah or I don't know I don't know that's the point I don't know maybe maybe posting at you

[13:26] know a lot of these things post at uh regular times well maybe it's maybe you should experiment with lots of times that seems obvious to me but like the tools don't want to do that so um my system doesn't do that I guess it could but uh I haven't put in the effort um and I'm also just one person in One account which probably isn't enough data to make many conclusions about anyway this is the point it's like I I think the question of how to quote unquote how to do social media well I don't think is very databased and you could potentially argue it's not possible to be databased

[13:59] cuz it's too complicated and there's too much the the noise of what happens online uh overwhelms any signal you could find um especially with things like this thing went viral and that's that's so unusual that that you can't really analyze it so if it's impossible okay I would agree with that too like I can understand if it's impossible I just don't feel like people are trying first and then concluding it's impossible I think a product that really did and even if it was a slight Edge or something um that might be a reason to use that product over the many other products there are for social the idea that if I create this

[14:34] post I tweet this thing and I could see a projected amount of types of replies and types of I don't think you could do that that would be I like who cares I don't need to project like I want to know like one thing I I think is true is Mondays and Tuesdays I get a lot more activity on on uh Twitter and it falls off pretty steeply on Thursday and Friday is very very quiet maybe even quieter than Saturday something like that I'm not sure though I probably do have the data to figure that out but I think it's something like that if that kind of thing is true you'd want to put

[15:10] more stuff out and engage more and blah blah blah on Monday and Tuesday and maybe save some of your stuff and not do the same thing on Fridays maybe you do some but not a lot or I don't know maybe it depends on how deep your queue is if you have a huge queue maybe go ahead and spit it out but if you don't like there might be uh because you're behind or whatever or just don't want to spend as much time on it um maybe it can be more judicious in where it puts it out I haven't seen any of the systems do that they could of course um they could just

[15:40] take the idea which is fine um but uh that's another one so I just think um it would be nice to take all these kinds of ideas and put them to the test and it might be different for different accounts I don't know that you have to say like oh if you word it this way you'll get more likes if that's actually possible that's great sounds so specific that I I uh I'd be shocked but maybe maybe you could look at an account and say look over the last year whenever you talk about these topics you just get more you get more reach I mean that

[16:11] right there would be very interesting yeah I mean I think I think there's a lot of people who would love to use a product like that even if it's just directionally correct if you spend a ton of time creating content and especially as the algorithms are are are becoming more for you page versus you know follower base where followers are becoming less and less valuable and and the type of stuff that's getting seen on on people's feeds has to be it's similar to like how Tik Tok works you want to make sure that the I mean I'll tell you who cares like I care when I when I I I basically when I

[16:48] create content I want the I want a lot of people who sign up to get my content to see my content so if I know that if I change this word or if I put an image or if I post it in the AM versus PM that I'll get 20% higher lift with 80% accuracy that product itself I would imagine there's a lot of people like me who would love to try that out yeah and and you know maybe those numbers are not possible like that kind of accuracy is is I I wouldn't be surprised if that's not possible but even if it was a small Edge again I

[17:25] think social media is like that where no not 80% sure of something and know that one word doesn't you know doesn't always work but if you if you just make it 6040 instead of 50/50 or you know you just push it a little bit more that's enough like or or or that's uh that may be all there is to do but the current tools don't even do that so totally so lots of good ideas there you can unbundle this idea in in a ton of different ways and and build something cool thank you for that uh you're second idea a simpler lower price segment um I'd love for you to explain

[18:03] that and for folks who don't know what segment is could you also explain that yeah so segment is a tool where um I guess you could call it a Clearing House of data you take all the corporate data about your marketing your websites your product even in internal corporate data potentially your your um your customer base and internal information and you can put it all together into segment you can send it all in some people call that a data Lake um then seg you can connect it all this this all takes extra effort this is not simplistic this is hard to do right but you can do it you segment

[18:42] can connect it all so you know some notion of a customer that that can flow through from the website to the product to backend systems um and then of course you can do stuff with it and uh besides reporting you can take action so you might do things like I me to segment all my customers for high value customers people have been here a long time people have just got here but they're using a lot of tech support um people who aren't customers yet but have other attributes that I want to segment based on um whether they've used certain features or not whether they're certain place whe

[19:17] they've gotten a certain distance through the onboarding process or something you know there's all kinds of ways that you could segment stuff and then act on the stuff right so maybe oh you've been in this segment for three days so I'm going to send you this email like just there's all kinds of stuff you could do to act on that depending on the on the circumstance there's even stuff like connecting it with retargeting systems so that you spend money retargeting only certain segments of customers you know so that might be like some kind of marketing spend optimization type of thing there's all sorts of all manner of stuff and if you

[19:48] want to do everything I just said you probably just need segment or one of their competitors that's it what I what what I think and that's fine that's that's a it's a it's a really interesting interesting product so when I say simpler lower price I mean segment is expensive and it's not simple but it does all this stuff so it seems to me like there's a lot of smbs who have no metrics or extremely bad at data just buying segment is out of the question like it's too expensive too difficult in any way they're not organized enough to have their data flow in and make sense um but if you could

[20:24] connect some of the dots that would already be pretty useful to them and maybe motivation for them to connect a few more dots and you keep it simple so for example um okay maybe it connects to hub spot so that you can segment customers and send emails maybe it connects to stripe for things like billing and maybe it just starts with that and you know there's already probably hundreds of thousands of yeah tens of thousands for sure maybe hundreds of th low hundreds of thousands of people who use those three things where you could already start to make some interesting um progress on and to end data in the company segmenting

[21:01] things making decisions getting reports taking actions and so forth segment was kind of like that at the beginning and they ended up going up Market often when that happens a void is Left Behind because the original concept that was more for engineers and was flexible and and simple that concept was still right it's still right today it's just that they left that for for more for higher arpu pastures that leaves some space behind the bad news about that is um whenever you're dealing with realtime systems that's a lot harder especially for a smaller company you don't have 247 teams you don't have the time to make things that work well

[21:42] at scale um that that's a multi-year difficult process for all companies including segment including WP engine including things like Twitter and Facebook back in the day like no matter how many smart people you have at the company as all those companies did um it's very hard um you Google famously tried to do wave and failed for two years and completely failed I mean these are Google Engineers they're the best ever at all this stuff and they're like yeah we couldn't make that work uh too hard to do that kind of real-time multi-user thing was too hard so the these are really hard things to solve so

[22:13] the bad news is it's hard the good news is uh that keeps out other competitors also sometimes things are hard and there's no benefit to overcoming the difficulty it's just hard and you're like well you could still do it but why are you doing that it's startups are hard enough as it is in this case I think the difficulty is rewarded with a product that is actually useful as evidenced by segments existence and in fact segments ex existence let's say 10 or 15 years ago when they started and that proves it was useful still is and and helps to keep out new competitors so that's actually a

[22:47] useful reason to be hard so for context segment was acquired in 2020 for $2.3 billion by twio it's a huge huge huge business and I think you're right like often times like these businesses kind of get lost along the way when they have to go up Market or down market and stuff like that and it creates these opportunities I also AG I don't think they're lost at all they simply changed their target market yeah I mean agreed they're they're not lost they're doing well they're doing billions of dollars in Revenue I think that segment for X is the big opportunity in my opinion so if you can create segment

[23:36] for lawyer segment for accountants segments for realtors and focus on these different niches that make it easy for them to understand the value proposition and allow them to integrate into their systems really easily I think that there's probably an opportunity probably an opportunity there whereas they'll go on segment.com the leading customer data platform powered by customer AI you know if I'm the chief Innovation officer of a a law firm or head of IT the law firm that might not speak to me as well as you know the leading uh platform for for law firms just like you and I think that's the opp opportunity that um that exists right now with with

[24:26] someone like this who's probably trying to scale to all sorts of different niches at the same time so I love this idea I don't think they have a niche Niche strategy exactly they don't have a segment for lawyers that's not what they're doing yeah they target marketing departments at companies that are big enough to have real data challenges but also can make millions if not billions of dollars if they get it it right or or maybe save that amount of money and and in marketing spend that's not as useful and uh that's what they target it's not a it's not a niche strategy exactly and that's fine just as we said

[25:01] at the top of the call if it's a large and growing Market which dat corporate data is totally a large and growing Market with no doubt about it um that means Niche is open up that the big guys don't even want to Target good don't right that's I like that I like how that sounds totally um if you were if you were starting this um idea how would you go about starting it I would want to know what is the vertical or Niche that makes sense um I don't think lawyers are a good Niche ever like the number of startups that try to do lawyers like

[25:39] it's a very very low probability success Niche it's just they don't get Tech they don't like to spend money oddly because they have a lot of money um it is true that if you get in there you might stay in there for 10 years um for the same reason so I guess that's good but just in general this is not a market where people readily spend money on software understand all that stuff know how to use it to create value for themselves and therefore stay happy successful customers and so those kind of things to me uh very rare to see that uh see that be as successful I say that and of

[26:13] course everyone can think of like one company that does do well and I would say right you can think of one you know how many startups you know attempt to do that thousands and you can think of one and so there you go um the companies that do really well in things like accounting and lawyers and dentists are 20 years old that's my point so I I would want to know what is that Niche it could be SAS companies uh because if you're a SAS company you're not afraid of technology and in fact you may instantly understand the value proposition why to do it even in the

[26:45] marketing department or maybe Tech in general or maybe it is a u an industry vertical maybe one where better since often it's good for marketing one where better marketing translates really directly into more Revenue so they can just see it I tried using this software two months later my Revenue was up or my cost went down noticeably so I don't need an Roi calculator I don't need a sales pitch like you can't Pride this out of my hands if you wanted to because I already see myself like how this pays for itself 10 10 times over so that could be something like Realtors because it is true in in in that like it's a

[27:21] marketing game because all reers are the same for the at the first approximation and so we're it could be other verticals where this is true like better marketing equals oh look I found it you know it could even be something odd like a media company so there's a lot of companies who make money off the website off of content whether that's ads which is the typical way or maybe subscribers and you know paid subscriptions and so forth anyway that's what I mean by Media Company there it is absolutely true if you get 20% more traffic and it's ads you make 20% more money it's simple as

[27:55] that there may be some Arbitrage on paid Market in order to do that as long as the make more money than you pay then this is this is automatically good so if something that was more sophisticated in metrics could help media companies get more views that equals more money again that's that's now now however you're you're starting to get closer to what segment actually does but again since it's expensive and they go after big stuff and it's you know integrating to lots of different systems that may be not um there may be plenty of space there there are certainly millions of media sites on the web like

[28:28] I'm describing um Millions so there's a lot there so the idea that there might be a niche in there um that makes sense uh that that seems plausible to me my advice for folks is go to where you have an unfair Advantage so if you have a you know an internet audience for nurses or healthcare industry that might be a good place to start um if it's for realtors that might be a good place to start now it might end up being a niche that isn't worth going after but it's definitely you know the first place that you should start yeah I would just say go to where

[29:08] you have unfair advantages for for for picking a niche in general I want to move to your third idea um which just says help people make practical simple strategies and that got my ears PE PE uh peaked up uh perked up so I was curious what you meant by that that idea yeah I think the challenge here is do people want it probably not do people want to pay for it maybe probably not so this might be a pretty bad thing it is a problem I think it is a problem but that's about all I can say do people agree it's a problem I don't know are

[29:48] they actively looking for a solution uh not sure like it's probably pretty bad but I do think it's a problem which is you hear strategy and I think um everyone has a different definition of it which is already a problem um and a lot of people conjure up these academic versions of strategies which I agree is not very useful maybe not useful at all and work and and uh um workshops like making a SWAT which I think is useless and my and my uh my evidence of that is it's rare that you do a SWAT and Come Away with some kind of insight you didn't know before and you it's also

[30:23] rare to ever reference one again afterwards like it's not like every month pulling up your SWAT because you're using it you don't okay well then how useful is it you know like so um so I think you hear strategy you think of these things and you're like H I don't need that and you're right to me strategy for what it's worth means deciding how you're going to win that means things such as and so I'm selling to exactly this group and this is my advantage or here's how here's my strengths or assets and here's how I'm leveraging those specific things in my way to win in my way way in my market

[30:59] that sort of thing is strategy to me so not a tactic like we're going to run an ad on this website or we're going to add this feature that's that's important too it's just not strategy that's that's your actual plan that's what you're going to do cool and for that being agile is also good because like in detail it's hard to say in detail you don't know which ad's going to work so you have to try so for that sort of thing being agile makes sense but for this Broad thing of like how am I going to win just being agile and saying I don't know I'm just going to throw a bunch on

[31:32] the wall regardless of what I'm good at or not as you just said that's not a that's not a good plan that's not a good way to find a good strategy I think in retrospect when a company has a good strategy it's easy to say what it was right so you look at Netflix and you're like oh DVDs to the home so you don't have to do the walk of death that was smart and then when they realize streaming is even better because it's immediate I mean that was good and there's their whole strategy in in you know a sentence or two so to me that is

[32:01] a strategy that that's like this is the critical idea that sets them apart that is unique it's hard to follow does it leverage a strength they had that I don't know I don't know anything about them maybe it doesn't I'm not sure but you know it it does explain how they're going to win if someone else had the same strategy then it would be a race um but since their competitors didn't have the same strategy uh their strategy was better turns out you know um it's really hard in the moment to come up with something that straightforward and yet be that compelling so but but don't you need that because

[32:36] it keeps your eye on the prize of like what is it like all the other tactics all the other things you're doing is is in service of this strategy this way to win this your way to win so how do you how do you make one of those how do you get there and if SWAT isn't useful what is like how do I analyze my strengths and my assets and my competitors and the market and you know ideas that that I have and stuff that I got through customer validation Etc how do I take all of those inputs and ideas and things and then arrive at a strategy that does

[33:07] what I'm saying but isn't uh you know academic and silly and 80 pages long and all that stuff which which not good right how do I do it so this is where I think um I don't know if you would quite say that software is the answer because clearly this is a human endeavor it takes creativity and so forth but can a system help if not collect the data then or collect those inputs which again is a lot of that is um is qualitative right but to the extent that there's quantitative fine to the extent that it's qualitative fine I mean even if that's sticky notes

[33:40] in in Meo whatever right but like stuff and then are there workshops or Frameworks or systems to help go from that to a strategy that's simple and makes sense um I don't think a tool will like come with the answers for you but it could walk you through some sort of thing kind of like a course does or a framework does or a book does could it support that so that um the busy work of that is easy and the structure of it is such that it sort of funnels you into having the right conversations you still have to have all the conversations make all the decisions right but could it

[34:14] help you make decisions in a good way could you could it help you arrive at a better decision by prompting properly challenging properly and again I think AI is is interesting here not because AI will come up with your strategy I do not believe that but could it help prompt could it help summarize could it help generate ideas not evaluate the ideas that's you but could it generate things um hey if I have these seemingly conflicting inputs you know people want all this stuff but they also want it cheap or um it seems like the only way to succeed here is to have all this complicated stuff but I'm just one

[34:50] person I have to I can't make a thing that's super complicated I have to make a simple thing these are my puzzles to solve these are the kinds of things that strategy is good for oh yeah that's a good puzzle now we're talking a strategy is how you're going to un un how you're going to solve that puzzle oh I'm going to make a product the target to this then they don't want it as complicated and then you know whatever the solution to a puzzle like that that's what a strategy ultimately is good for having having solve those and saying here's how I'm going to solve it okay nice could AI

[35:18] Identify some of these conflicts to cause you to have to resolve them maybe and if so that's really helpful it can't just solve it but could it generate ideas I have no idea I think it would take some prompt engineering and some and some practice maybe certain models are better than others I don't know but if it could generate like as long as we're brainstorming here could have generate brainstorming ideas to help you get to a good idea that you actually have maybe I could I could see that more so so again again there's a lot of maybe because of course I haven't done this or

[35:49] anything but um yeah maybe maybe as almost like a meeting facilitator type of thing or or a generator of Concepts and ideas could it help or one thing AI is pretty good at is summarization so if I have a bunch of inputs and stuff could I ask it like are there commonalities are there certain topics or there certain things that's the kind of thing it's actually not bad at so again like maybe there's there's a role for it as a facilitator or something to be helpful and to help you get to a place that would otherwise be too be hard or even that you wouldn't have gotten to um so is there something

[36:28] there and no idea but I'm I'm I'm interested because I feel like especially smaller companies especially bootstrap companies um have disdain for strategy and again I don't disagree with them because often when you just search strategy on the internet you see stuff I roll my eyes at that too so I I agree but again I I'm I think I'm painting a picture of a PR a an actually useful the definition of strategy and a system that could help anybody including a solopreneur making something that's not a unicorn um have a good strategy but you know kind of rightsizing what that means um that feels like it would be really

[37:07] valuable I don't think it's good to simply not know how you're going to win I don't think that's good I just can we have the right sort of tools right sort of process for that I'm very interested in that and as you can tell I don't have like the complete answer I have ideas I have specific ideas about those Frameworks that I've used and some of them I've written about as well but I don't claim to have the answer I think though if you could find an answer you could really help a ton of companies be smarter about what going about what they're doing maybe even actively

[37:38] drisking their companies by having a good strategy by good meaning good for them and good for their Market um you probably can't measure that at all but that doesn't stop you from making that the vision statement I would I would have a vision like helping thousands of of companies succeed because they have the right Strat yep I think you know suceed instead of fail and and like how do I know that oh I don't it's why it's a vision statement it's you it's an aeration it's it's a you know it's it's it's the it's the North Star it's not measured I don't know who succeeds and fails other like

[38:13] no I don't know but but having that in your head of like but that's that is what we're trying to do here even if we can't measure it that's still what we're trying to do like that that's actually quite helpful in in uh in staying the course of what you are trying to accomplish absolutely I think uh the Insight here is when you're in a boat it doesn't make a difference how fast you paddle if you're going in the wrong direction uh that's a problem and and and there's so much value in knowing the right direction and that's where strategy plays such a huge role in in

[38:45] this we uh we incubated um an agency called lay checkout. it's called LCA the website's late checkout. agency and we work with like the dropboxes and Nikes and Shopify of the world on strategy and product design and we also use like Ai and automation to figure out what their communities want and then we help build strategies around that however we only focus on these big companies so I think there's like a huge opportunity in in taking like that LCA model and to your point solopreneurs small companies startups there's definitely an opportunity to build some agency mix with AI and data application to get people's strategies as full Pro fullprof or as

[39:33] fullprof as humanly possible um so I like I like this idea and I do like agency businesses so I think as an agency model could work yeah you could IM you can even imagine um an agency having this as part of what makes their their agency product so I'm using that word in the general sense making their product unique in other words there's a lot of agencies that say we help you with strategy there's obviously various products and Frameworks and books and stuff about strategy okay fine you know our agency has a special system um we will help you through it we facilitate it we have all this

[40:11] experience etc etc and also we have these systems that we've the Unique Systems we've built um that help both of us be efficient and smarter about that so maybe you have this internal product as a consult as a as a um agency it's still you human beings helping because again I as I said all along I don't think the product nor AI can just magically find the right strategy I don't believe that I believe it can facilitate though or I say I believe I wonder if it could facilitate it so whether that's helping the agency facilitated much more efficiently for that agency getting to better results

[40:47] faster results um the more time the agencies people at the agency spend actually facilitating a meeting and less time messing around with all the stuff and reading everything summarizing and and organizing and you know the better the more efficient and and maybe it even works better I don't know um you know that's uh that's that's pretty interesting you could you could imagine the agency use creating material especially for lead gen but also just For Thought leadership on this topic so you could imagine that there is a course that they put out on strategy where they explain it um the same thing maybe they make money on the

[41:25] course but more I think more likely use it as marketing to say look how smart we are we can do this for you um like there's all kinds of things you could places you could go as an agency where rather than make this a product where you sell software instead it's part of your agency's offering and it just it just part of your thought leadership and showing how you're special and you have your own philosophy and and you just know what you're doing in other words and and I'm also like as much as I like all this and I have ideas about strategy um it it's certainly true that there's

[41:57] many ways of coming up with a good strategy there's not just one and so it's not even necessarily as the agency we have the best way to make a strategy that's not really what that's not what it is nor it doesn't need to be it just needs to be that you're really good at it you have a way that works really well you the agency you are expert at this particular way right and so sure there's probably 20 decent ways it's just this is one of them right and we're really good at it um we've even built you know our own materials our own software to

[42:28] facilitate it um so we're just really good at this particular way works really well we're not disparaging the way that's right next to us it's fine but this is what we do I think that's uh that's a very I don't want to say humble but that's a very realistic way where you don't have to make crazy claims about being best in the world or nonsense like that and yet you can make a very credible case that like we're really good at this you should just hire us like you could read a book like um read blue ocean you know all right you could read it and try to do stuff in

[43:01] there you can and we're we're not against that you know there's some good ideas in there of course but we know how to actually go from A to Z we know all the letters in between we have this really great system here's materials about to wet your appetite get you interested and like that sounds fun that sounds like could be useful that sounds actually practical and not not just silly exercises H see so let's go you know it's it's not the blue Ocean's bad it's just this is our way and if we can convince you our way is is uh effective and and maybe even fun um then let's let's go um I think

[43:32] that'd be pretty cool yeah I think uh you know if you're thinking about building an agency business starting with the system is a good place to start um and then you can start creating content around that system get people bought into that you know some people will connect with that system and some people won't and that's okay um but the people that will you know a lot of them are going to be like well I can implement system myself but it's going to take me a bunch of time I'd much rather work work with you to help implement this and bring this to my company um I think the yeah I mean look

[44:06] that's that's what the authors of all these books do now sometimes the book does so well that they don't have to do it personally but usually they still have their consulting company and just have other people do it but like the blue ocean people get paid to teach people blue ocean right and a lot of these systems are like that where it's like oh so that's that's exactly what happened once their materials got very popular but you don't have to be as popular as that to have good material so that when you are doing your sales calls in your ways you have an edge over the

[44:34] next agency just says I do strategy here's three customers who are happy you can call them yes we all have that right every agency has that so yes there's nothing wrong with that but it just doesn't stand out like so what yep exactly and it's getting more and more competitive to start an you know to start an agency because what's required it's really just a landing page and a brand and a domain name so yeah yeah I agree the systems really help help stand out um Jason thank you so much for for jamming on ideas there's a there's a lot of good stuff here um for people who are

[45:10] are listening to this on Spotify and apple please uh follow subscribe leave a comment and then subscribe on YouTube just search my name Greg Eisenberg um and then for folks who want to follow Jason uh I follow him on Twitter an incredible follow and and he has he's got a Blog too Jason where where can people find you yeah it's a smartbear letter a smart bear like the animal because smart bear was the company I did uh in the knots as they say another startup so that's where I got the handle as smartbear on Twitter and as smartbear.com for all those articles I mentioned beautiful all right

[45:50] well thanks for jamming and uh I'm sure someone is going to take a couple of these ideas so it'll be interest interesting to see where it goes all right see you Jason

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