# ChatGPT Pro ($200/month ) vs Perplexity AI (Free): Building a $5M Startup from Scratch

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QVNjP6siwEU
Duration: 39 min
Language: English
Words: 5815
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/QVNjP6siwEU

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[0:00] okay today we're going to do something that I've been meaning to do for a while so I want to test the differences between open AI chat gpt's deep research and perplexities deep research I mean the simplest way to think about it is chat gbt or perplexity when you prompt it it's going to give you a quick answer but deep research it's almost like a junior analyst a McKenzie analyst uh that they would probably pay hundreds of ,000 a year to give you deep Research into the question that you have and today we're going to use it to actually build a business so we're going to prompt it we're going to

[0:39] give the same prompt to chat gbt this is a $200 a month Pro Plan and perei deep research I think that's a $20 a month and we're going to see which is better and we're going to go through the startup ideas to actually see hey maybe there's actually a grid startup idea that one of you can steal uh we're gonna get chat gbt and perplexity to give us uh the tactics of actually how to build this business [Music] so this is what we're going to prompt it we're going to give the same prompt to chat gbt as to perplexity so we're going to say I want to create a startup I want

[1:22] it to be an A in an agent say an AI agent that focuses on a high value Niche I want it to be def defensible not uh not just a flash in the in the pan I want you to create a zero to1 Playbook of how you'd launch it to get customers too give me five ideas with five playbooks on how to grow it I'm looking for $1 million a $3 million year one $3 million year two $5 million year three so we're gonna we're going to see if chat GPT Pro or perplexity could give us a $5 million AR business in three years uh with the exact Tac that'ss how

[2:05] to grow and we're going to we're going to be real with it we're going to see is this actually um is this actually gonna give us good particular advice so if you're going to do this um you got to click the Deep research button here uh so it says that sounds like that sounds like an exciting venture to tailor the best ideas and playbooks for you could you clarify in industries of Interest sure so we're going to say um are there any specific Industries no we are looking for uh the startup ideas with the highest like [Music] lihood of success two would you rather Target Enterprises SB or individuals

[2:54] professionals the truth is I don't really care if it works it works so open to B2B or or B to C and then we're going to say AI capabilities do you have a preference for AI applications automation data analysis not really again we're looking for the highest probility of success with a moe okay technical res resources do you have a technical team or plan to build one or do you prefer a low code no code approach and we can say I prefer an approach that's going to cost $55,000 or less for an MVP I'm not super technical um what else can we say we can say I might want to just cash flow this

[3:55] business but I want to potentially raise VC money too if I really think this could go beyond a $100 million a year business go to market would you lean towards direct sales Partnerships or viral self- sered growth um I think I lean towards [Music] um so viral Self Serve growth but I'm open to what you suggest boom now we are going to wait until uh to see how long it's going to take uh usually it takes like eight minutes so let's see how long so it's starting research so while it's doing that we're actually going to head to perplexity and give it the same prompt and see what

[5:00] happens we're going to compare we are going to compare all these together so let's go open up rep plexity quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things

[5:40] that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire.co in the description now deep research is a brand new product in order to enable it you'll see it in this little drop down here let's go add our prompt and the interesting thing is going to be to see if is it going to ask ask for follow-up questions like chat jpt did um not sure we will find out

[6:22] soon so deep research so one of the cool things about deep research both chat gbt and perplexity I think is they go through instead of going through two sources or three sources they're going through way more sources so you can see ready this is this is pulling for six sources by the way I'm I'm like pretty new to this I'm using this for for for the first time really I've used chubbt a little bit but we're kind of learning this together and we're going to find out by the end of the episode if this is super value or not um I'm not sure um so we'll

[6:57] find out so this is you know it feels like a reasoning model uh so you can see you kind of un see how it's thinking about things so it says I need to search the web to find information on 0 to1 playbooks specific to AI I found some insight into 0 to1 startup playbooks cool great uh I from the previous search I found insights great I found insights on defensible AI strategies okay this is cool um I don't necessarily need to know exactly how it's doing it but uh it's really you know it's it's it's it's good to know that it's Crossing it's what's the expression Crossing its te's dotting

[7:38] its eyes someone in the comment section tell me what the expression is but you know it's basically that you know it's good that perplexity is is checking out all the stuff and you can see it's going through 29 sources right so if you if we were to do this manually if we went to Google I mean if you went to Google I don't you couldn't do this but if we actually went and did this manually uh this is this is going to take us many many many hours so the Hope here is that you know this is basically uh Ai and intelligence that could could help us uh

[8:12] one thing interesting is that perplexity is not asking me a qualification question like we saw in uh chat gbt um chat gbt it you know asked that qualification question um so we'll see the difference uh in terms of uh what you know what's more what's what's a what's a higher quality uh end result Okay cool so uh going back to perplexity it says it's now gather sufficient information to answer your query it's answering the query 3 now we're up to 34 sources so this is exactly I mean if this was a real person this is exactly how they would answer answer it okay so first things first is that perplexity is

[9:03] faster than uh chat gbt you can see that chat chat GPT is about halfway done perplexity is done so that's really cool so let's go through the ideas let's go see funny enough actually one of the sources is me one of the sources is is went through one of my YouTube videos three $1 million AI startup ideas to build in 2025 links to it uh and that's hilarious that's actually it's kind of ridiculous um but it's cool that it goes through YouTube you can see and it it obviously downloads that transcript and goes through it so let's go through these ideas and you be the judge you

[9:46] tell me are these good ideas are they bad ideas let's go see so number one legal contract this is on the perplexity uh perplexity deep research answer legal contract life cycle a a agent problem space corporate legal teams waste 23% of their time manually reviewing boiler pre contracts which struggling while struggling with Version Control errors that cost Enterprises 2.4 billion annually compliance penalties existing CLM Solutions require extensive customization and fail to adapt to company specific negotiation patterns okay so an AI agent here's a defensible solution that integrates number one integrates directly with email SharePoint and DocuSign via API two learns organizational risk thresholds through historical contract analysis

[10:40] three Auto redlines thirdparty paper using firm specific fallback positions and four maintains version lineage with blockchain style audits uh Trails now by the way I think this is actually cool but like for an MVP minimal viable product do we need lock sha Stein audit Trails not really um but I guess we can further prompt perplexity to you know ask it what would be the MVP um for for this right and unlike uh well in chat gbt we said it was going to be $5,000 or less so um that's an interesting thing that if you are going to prompt perplexity you might want to include uh some more constraints because you

[11:25] probably won't get that follow-up question why is it defensible develops institutional memory through continuous exposure to negotiation outcomes becomes embedded in legal department workflows average 14.3 logins per week per user this is data this is great this is a great Insight this is something that if you're building a business you want to know the you want to know that it's really helpful requires retraining equivalent to six to n months of Human Experience to replace it and by the way you can always click on one of these uh numbers to get to the source and go deeper so here we have the growth Playbook by by perplexity and let's go see if this is

[12:05] actually good this I will say this agent I mean seems super valuable I I totally agree why it would be defensible um so I I I like what I'm seeing I like what I'm seeing from perplexity so the growth Playbook phase one Niche validation 90 days product build a Chrome extension recording legal contact contract review sessions with permission to train initial model go to market offer free Redline audits for 100 amlaw 200 firms I guess that's American law targeting mid-market companies 50 to 500 million Revenue so this actually idea free Redline audits is interesting as as a Chrome extension like I would never have thought of that again I'm not

[12:51] well I'm not a lawyer I don't play to be on the internet so um but just just as like a person who builds products uh that you know a lot of people use I I will say that just looking at that that makes a lot of sense to me monetization $2,500 a month subscription locked to specific document types n first okay that's again really interesting wouldn't have thought about locking a subscription to specific document type so that's really cool phase two workflow embedding months 4 to9 integrate with legal Ops platforms like lexion and entra launch Clause Library Builder using clients historical favored language Implement usage based pricing

[13:40] at 25 cents per review CL uh Clause really interesting interesting business model I like that uh I like the phases you know phase one to phase two it totally makes sense to me um I like what I'm seeing phase three Enterprise scaling months 10 to 12 add sock to type to compliance for regulated industries develop custom connectors for service now and Salesforce cpq upsell to 8 $8,000 a month Enterprise tier with custom playbooks Financial road map okay so let's see how they how they break this out so on year one you're going to get 40 clients at $25,000 Mr that's 1.2 million ARR not crazy 150 clients at

[14:24] 5,000 Mr plus 250k usage pay year two you get 3.1 million and then year three platform fees from 300 plus embedded incense 5.4 million so I look at this idea and I'm like I could see this idea being soand so YC company gets funded to go build this this is a really good idea the growth Playbook although it's not super long I have a feeling that the chat GPT deep research is going to give me a longer answer but I I I think that um overall this is like you know we say on this channel do you do you spit not like an idea or do you sip an idea do

[15:03] you like the idea this is a sip I sip this idea makes a lot of sense this is a pretty good one pager um on the negative side I think you do need to you know go deeper into this u meaning like I think you need to prompt it more um but you know overall like how can I complain it took me like what a couple minutes and I got an incredible incredible idea and and that's just the beginning of it right so um let's go back to chat GPT deep research let's see if it's done okay so it's done so let's compare what we saw with perplexity deep

[15:44] research with um with chat gbt it would be hilarious if it was uh the same idea but it is not so AI sales Outreach assistant I mean I'm kind of skeptical I will say I feel like I've seen so many of these but um I'm open-minded all right let's go see first of all let's just quickly scroll look how long this is like this is a fullon it's like a business mind literally okay so I'm going to read this whole thing this is you know could be a really good idea I don't know uh let's we're going to find out together um so it's an a it's an a AI powered sales

[16:30] Outreach assistant that acts as a virtual SDR which is a sales development rep automating Prospect research and personalized called email LinkedIn messages the target market is B2B companies which are startups to midsize firms that me more pipeline without hiring extra sdrs the AI agent enriches lead data and crafts tailored Outreach at scale the events ability comes from a Data Network effect it learns from every interaction by the way Data Network effect good term really good term I like I I feel like deep research knows what it's talking about like that is an incredible term it learns from every interaction which messaging yields replies building a unique data set with what works in

[17:13] each industry again this is really important if you're building an AI startup building a unique data set of what works is going to be your remote so really cool to see that in there over time it develops Superior personalization and Lead scoring tune to each customer's context which is hard for competitors to replicate integration into crms and emails systems further deepens the moat by embedding the AI in the sales team's workflow B2B sales teams are increasingly adopting such AI prospecting tools 66% of sales reps say AI helps them better understand customers and personaliz Out treats underscoring demand for an agent like this um the agent can leverage massive

[17:58] of contact databases okay we get the idea so how would they actually build this what does chat DPC say so focus on a narrow but high value use case to keep it simple for example start with automating follow-up emails to warm leads okay cool I'm really happy at saying this because this is an idea that I've heard before it's actually become almost a meme on on X like of course you're building an AI virtual SDR but this idea of automating follow-up emails to warm leads using a templated but AI personalized approach now this is something that is unique uh I really haven't seen anywhere and it's it's it's

[18:43] a cool idea the MVP could be a web app or a Chrome extension where a salesperson inputs a list of prospects or connects their CRM and the AI generates and sends personalized emails on a schedule to build this cheaply okay now we're talking they talk our language use existing AI apis leverage a service like open AI GPT for hilarious that like chat GPT is being like use a service like chat GPT via API to generate Outreach text given key inputs Prospect info value prop no expensive model training needed initially No Frills UI create a simple interface using locco tools or templates for the user to review edit AI suggested

[19:27] messages skip complex analy at first single Channel Focus start with just email cheaper to implement before tackling LinkedIn or phone true manual fallback if AI is unsure let it flag for human to handle ensuring quality while gather data improv prompts that's an important it's important that it has that um and I'm happy that they put that in there um this MVP could be built by a freelance developer in a few weeks the main cost less than $55,000 would be a developer time and API call by using off-the-shelf Ai and focusing on one workflow you can launch quickly and start onboarding a few beta users uh to prove its

[20:09] value okay overall like helpful you're definitely going to need to double click into this and prompt it deeper to really understand exactly what the Playbook is I mean it ask for a Playbook is this A playbook you know maybe um it's kind of like an outline to the Playbook but it's it's definitely uh some really good ideas on how to get started customer acquisition and growth um so product Le viral adoption among sales teams and low friction signups so let's let's see how you know if this makes sense so a self-served free tier offer a limited free plan 50 AI generated emails per month so individuals so individual sales reps or

[20:56] small startups can try out without approval this gets foot in the door at companies viral Lube Bea results whenever the AI assistant books a meeting or gets a reply prompt the user to share the success internally this meeting was set by AI salespeople love sharing hacks at work this word of mouth can drive wide adoption that's true that is really that is good referral incentives um yeah as more reps use it the AI can perform better with share data creating a network effect content marketing publish katees case studies how X startup tripled using Ai and short demos that's I mean that's good right and look you know there's a link to

[21:36] starter Story how a 27-year-old grew Jenny AI to 5 million ARR I mean what's cool about this is like this is so relevant this is such a relevant story and it's cool that it's bringing that in there and it's knowing that this is high quality I like that that's it's definitely po points for for deep research um list incm marketplaces like HubSpot um being present on these channels gives you distribution yeah um so the goal would be to reach on the order of a few hundred paying teams within year one if say 200 companies convert to paid Clans at $5,000 a year on average that's a million bucks ARR

[22:19] growth to 3 million in year two might come from a land and expand I like that that they're including that free users converting to paid and small team paid users expanding usage or upgrading tiers as they see Roi the bottoms up adoption means minimal spend on sale uh sales the product essentially sells Itself by proving value similar to how another AI SAS product cursor scaled purely by developers word of mouth with no sales team needed and individuals you uh pulling into their teams again I really am impressed that they're using you know their jny AI cursor like these are the examples I want to see in here so it's

[22:58] that's really cool so we're going to go through monetization and pricing then we're going to know VC Readiness and then that's it and then we're going to compare perplexity to Chad gbt um so let's go back to monetization so it's a per seat pricing or usage based tier for example charge per sales rep user 10050 deduct per month for unlimited Outreach or by volume typical structure could be basic plan for $49 a month solo rep limited emails team plan for $199 a month five reps more emails and CRM and Enterprise for Advance or higher volumes that makes sense um I I'm more interested in usage based tiers I wish it would have said

[23:55] like you should do usage based tiers because that's the future of South but I mean I'm happy that it even included you subve tiers again if you're doing if you're going through if you're going to be using deep research you know I think it it you gotta on on both perplexity uh or chat gbt you definitely need [Music] a if you have question marks it seems like you got to ask it again which is totally fair at least at least with this and you know you might have to prompt it five more times seven more times but if you're just using chat jpt regular or perplexity regular you

[24:33] might go through 50 or 100 prompts to get to where you're getting what how how high definition and the clarity that this is um so it's you know it gives you some ideas on how to optimize Revenue you know premium upsell annual deals premium features performance-based options these are all good ideas um you're not really there yet honestly like when you're it's it's good to like think about what this could be but like if you're building an MVP 0 to one like you don't necessarily need this but it is good that they included it the VC Readiness and scaling to $100 million AR so I think I included that in

[25:18] the in the second prompt where I was like this needs to be able to get to $100 million AR it's cool it's cool that it's it says that it's possible possible like it's cool that this is like a100 million a year idea that it's like yeah it's possible and it's cool that it's like to get from $200 million AR you're probably going to need a raise VC like it's it's pretty awesome it's pretty honest with it um so that's the chat GPT deep research now perplexity and now if we can compare them you can see perplexity is a lot smaller right this is a lot more in depth

[26:10] but this is really like there's no fluff with this I gotta say this is you know the question is is chat gbt Pro worth 10 times the price of perplexity I'll let you decide you know it depends on how you know do you like you this you're going to have to prompt a little bit more this you're going to oneshot it more often chat jbt you're going to oneshot it more often so it depends on your style but um I I you know I I actually don't pay for perplexity on this account um so yeah you can see I don't have Pro on this account so

[26:59] you can even use this for free so and I think there you know you can only use a few times maybe a month for free and then you have to pay $20 a month but that's that's incredible um it's incredible that let's see here let's just click yeah okay so I'm not sure exactly how many free deep research you get uh probably not that many um but uh the good news is both of these are really really good these are like insanely good scary good um and let's just do for fun for idea number one let's just say I feel like I've seen this idea before on

[27:53] X how can you take this idea and make it more nonobvious see what

[28:07] happens so it says to make the AI startup idea more non obvious and unique we can find underserved niches combine AI with another Trend life proprietary data introduce a new business model or enhance with the viral element do you have any preferences for how we make it nonobvious for example should we explore a new niche uh let's say you're the pro I pay you $200 a month for this how about you decide on the idea that has the most legs let's see let's let chat GPT do the work and let's see what happens I've actually never done a follow-up prompt [Music] to to something uh to once it gives you like the full

[29:01] answer so it's unfortunate that it takes so long you know um I wish it just like was faster that's what I like about perplexity you know you can get in the zone let's see let's do a follow-up question to this one um and let's say aren't there a bunch of Highly funded competitors in the AI legal space I feel like I'm going to get smoked how do we take this idea and make it more nonobvious also can you give me the stepbystep plan on how to implement the MVP features Etc and make sure that this startup MVP will cost 5,00 ,000 Max let's see how fast or slow uh perplexity deep research

[30:07] will take it says here deep research takes a couple minutes um let's go back to chat gbt so while it's uh while it's thinking both of these are thinking I think the the thing to think about is for whatever your workflow is if you're building a zero to1 startup you want to build a zero to1 startup you want to build zero to1 features um you know I think that having a companion like deep research uh putting it into your workflow is just it's a no-brainer it's a no-brainer because it's going to make you smarter at what you do uh and it's going to help you refi it's going to

[30:53] help you refine the types of products that you build so that you have the highest probability a success it's like why not right um so let's see what's happening here perplexity is saying that it's found highly funded competitors like Harvey and case Tex so you do need to like I know this right I know that there's highly funded competitors in the AI legal space um I think that you do you still the onus is still on the prompter on the prompt um because you do need to know the right questions to ask I mean this isn't rocket science in terms of what I said but you do need to be somewhat

[31:42] knowledgeable okay so we just got the answer from perplexity deep research and it's given me an executive summary wow an executive summary of what's going on in the legal AI startup space so our analysis of 37 f competitors reveal three under under defended niches um and it just goes through it gives me a competitive analysis it writes this amazing kind of cool opportunity Matrix wow this is this is cool this is cool just like writing what the differenti here is for example Clause geneology what is the technical approach blockchain inspired version lineage and what is the defensibility source uh two 22,000 annotated NDA Corpus and then it gives you a full-on

[32:35] MVP implementation plan with a $4,800 budget less than $5,000 they're going to give you $200 to go for dinner thank you perplexity um they're G to give you $200 not to spend it at Chachi G GPT Pro maybe that's why they chose $4,800 and they say here's a Chrome extension prototype uh records anonymize contract review sessions uh tracks cursor movements edit frequencies external research sources and the tools are manifest V3 and tzer flow JS which is zero Dev cost uh legal team interviews and then it gives you phase two core feature build with the different components like the Clause library and how to build it what the

[33:23] cost is this is pretty this is pretty darn good this is like this is is really good and then the go to market sequ uh sequencing which to me like is among the most important parts like yes knowing what product to create is obviously really helpful and what the roll out of the MVP should be but distribution is the new Moe um so how to figure out go to marketing is really important offer Fe free Clause ver vulnerability audit generating historical enforcement re risk stores scores alternative language access rates and then 15 cents a clause Auto Redline I mean this is these are great ideas it's giving you the monthly searches

[34:10] what the CPC is so it says go to organic search you know it's telling you how to do webinars I mean it's not as deep as the chat GPT Pro but I love these tables I think they're this is awesome and this is like this is what you need to know and you just you have to just reprompt it to to go deeper into these uh sections so let's go see if chat gbt is finally done it is done um so it gave me new ideas and it says AI platform for longtail podcasts and sponsors an AI agent that not only streamlines podcast production but also

[34:49] bundles small podcast for ADI advertisers unlocking the longtail podcast advertising this is pretty cool notice how it's like a literal research document if you're watching this on YouTube or if you're watching the if you're listening to the startup ideas podcast on Spotify and apple check it out on YouTube because you can you can just see how in-depth this is wow so this is a pretty good idea so it talks about um how how basically what the competitive note uh mode is the proprietary data Advantage um so for example as the platform onboards podcasts and run sponsorship campaigns it accumulates unique data on what cont content resonates and which ad placements work

[35:36] for each Niche which is really cool over time the AI learns the style tone and listener behavior of each show and which sponsors me messages yield results this creates a continuous learning Loop that improves targeting so it's got some good ideas in the MVP development for 5000 start with the paino of timeconsuming content creation Implement an AI transcript and summary generator for podcast episodes tells you exactly how to do it what technical technically how to do it whisper or assembly AI I just I do feel feel a bit weird that it like recommends its own product but I get it you know it's kind of bias but here we

[36:18] are um so and then tells you you know make a basic web interface manual wizard of all sponsor m matching it just goes a little deeper it goes a little deeper than

[36:38] perplexity yeah I'm not going to go through all of this obviously this is like super long but I'm just scanning it and I'm like this is really darn good this is really good so I didn't have time to go through all five of the chat gbt deep research startup ideas and the five from perplexity deep research but I've included in a doc it's completely free to download I'll include the link in the show notes for anyone who wants to steal those ideas go Implement them and uh build a big business there you have it folks if you aren't using one of these platforms you probably should the good

[37:26] news is there's something for free perplexity deep research it's really good it's really fast uh you might have to do a little more prompting to get to the level of depth that you want but some people might even prefer it it's like Driving Manual instead of driving automatic on your car chat GPT Pro uh deep research um you have to wait longer you get more in-depth reports um but uh the quality you know it's high quality stuff uh I don't think you can go wrong with you know either product uh they're both awesome and it's it's really you know what floats your boat um I think you just need to you know if you

[38:05] can play with both see and then you can always cancel one or the other um well perplexity is free so you won't even need to cancel it um but I think the the important thing is is you know use it play with it come up with ideas because this is an unfair Advantage right now and um that's why I wanted to show it to you all I mean frankly I wanted to learn it myself because I want to implement into my day today um if you uh if you enjoyed this video uh please let me know in the comment section just say something I I read every single comment

[38:37] uh you can like And subscribe for for more of this in your feed and uh I'll see you on the next one uh Happy building and I hope this got your creative juices flowing thanks for listening to the startup ideas podcast later guys

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