The Most Overlooked $12.5K/mo AI Agent Business Anyone Can Start

0:00Today we're going to talk about creating an AI startup. So I'm actually going to go through the process of how you can start with a relatively small nonAI startup doing$1 to $5,000 a month that you can build it to $5 to $25,000 and that you can eventually get to $5 million ARR with an AI startup. So basically you start with a nonAI startup and you make it AI. Now, this isn't going to work for everyone, but if I want the highest uh probability of it working, this is how I build it. And this is actually how I'm building some of my businesses. And I wanted to share

0:33it with everyone here. So, I'm not going to gate. I'm going to talk a little about the whole process of how you can go and create an AI startup and how you can do it in a really cash flowing way. So, [Music] uh, the first phase is manual labor. So, when I say manual labor, I mean you're going to start an agency doing one ba painful, boring task and you're going to learn all the ins and outs of that particular boring task. Maybe that's Instagram management, maybe that's, you know, invoice processing. And you're going to sell it as a service. And through that process, uh, you'll make

1:15something, you know, hopefully in the $1 to $5,000 a month range. Now, that's possible for most people, right? Cuz they're able to find a couple clients and pay them a few hundred a month in that. Um, you know, you might, uh, hire people to fulfill the work. So you might get something like 40% margins, but

1:34you're going to learn every edge case. That's that is the secret to actually building an AI startup is understanding a very very niche insight. So uh you're going to learn every edge case. Phase two is to build the system. So this is where you actually are going to use AI agents to do a lot of the work. Um and then you're going to try to double your margins. you're going to try to get from something like 40% to 80% and try to handle 10x the amount of clients. Now, um in doing this, uh you're adding enterprise value into the business, right? You're no longer a service

2:10business and you're also no longer doing all the work, right? You're you're you're sort of replacing a lot of the human work with AI agents. how you do that. You know, I've done tutorials in the past around Gum Loop and Lindy AI uh NAN uh and and and actually just, you know, Claude Code to

2:31actually go and create these workflows. And then the third phase, and this is when you get to like the 25K a month phase, uh is when you have multiple tiers, um and then you're trying to keep that margin and grow from there. So, okay, Greg, this all sounds good to me. Um but how do I actually do that? Okay, so we're going to talk about that uh in this episode. The first step is you're going to want to find extremely boring pain. Um you can also use a tool like ideabrowser.com. This is something I built for myself um to help figure out, you know, what are people saying on

3:04Reddit, Facebook groups. It's it's a feature called uh community signals to find that boring pain. Or you can go and just try to find that boring pain yourself. Maybe you understand it by working this doing this manual task. You're going to do the manual task for about 3 to 6 months. You're going to

3:20document all the edge cases and SOPs. And then, and this is the key part, is you're going to wire the AI agents to mirror the SOPs. You're going to keep the service pricing. So, you're not going to actually increase the pricing once you've gone ahead and done this. Um, and the reason why is the outcome is the same. Now if you're uh you know just using an example like you're ma you know managing Instagram posts if you're able to create faceless Instagram posts at the same price it doesn't matter if you have humans doing it all that matters is the outcome is good for the client over

3:55time you're going to add tiers you're going to add an enterprise that's going to be targeting something like Fortune 500s fortune 2000s more expensive you're going to create a self-s serve and then you're you know eventually could create an API um giving access uh and then you know very importantly if you're you know if you're a follower of the channel and the Startup Ideas podcast you know that uh you know building an audience is extremely important uh to me just cuz I know it works. So you're going to want to be publishing daily in a way that's entertaining. And then you're going to

4:25reinvest into agents and distribution. So you're going to obviously try to make better workflows. That's the agent part of it. And the distribution part is you're gonna want to try to scale your content 10x. And you know, to me, you actually scale it uh, you know, from a content perspective, you know, you're going to want to create like cinematic high quality content and then your barbell of, you know, very, very lowfi

4:5810x lowfi content. um you're going to want to do both those from a content perspective and then you scale it profit profitably. Okay. So what do I mean when I mean you know boring tasks you know because I think a lot of people are asking like what do I mean what do I mean by a boring you know paid painoint. Sam Alman the co-founder of openai just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this

5:30podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends uh to basically figure out uh what are the startup ideas you should be building. So, that's exactly why I built ideabser.com. Every single day, you're going to get a free startup idea in your inbox and it's all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building and then we hand it on a you know silver platter for you to go check

6:06out. Um we do have a few paid plans that you know take it to the next level uh give you more ideas give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it but you can start for free ideabrowser.com and if you're listening to this I highly recommend it. These are soulc crushing tasks. So these are could be something like you know managing insurance forms, invoice processing, review responses, PDF to Salesforce, like that sounds so niche,

6:35but a lot of people are doing it. Customs paperwork. Um these are things that nobody wants to do and everyone needs it done. And these are what's perfect for AI agents actually go and do these tasks. And uh what what I call this um this approach this approach to building businesses, I actually call it a leveraged agency cuz you're actually starting off by building an agency. Um you know, it's kind of counterintuitive cuz it's like, okay, great. I want to start an AI startup. Why am I starting an agency to start with? Well, you're starting with an agency to start with because you're learning about the pain

7:15points. um you're profitable from month one, you build a PMF and you know you own a lot of your equity and you can reinvest that uh reinvest that into distribution and agents. I mean the other option is you go and build a VC back startup, right? You know what does that look like? Well, you're burning

7:32hundreds of thousand dollars a month. You find product market fit and you maybe succeed in 5 years. There's a small chance of exit. Now I'm not I I don't want to tell people don't start a VCbacked startup. I think that for some people that's exactly what they should be doing. Heck, I've actually gone and done that multiple times. Um, and I sold my last company to Weiwork, which is literally the epitome of um, you know, raising venture capital. I just think that, you know, by starting as a leveraged agency, by starting doing these manual tasks, creating the agents, uh, you can decide if you want to be a

8:07VCbacked leverage agency, but this is just the best way to start. So, you have leverage when you want to raise or if you just want to get those dividends to come. So, you know, what does this look like from a timeline perspective? So from month 1 to six uh you're looking at you know basically doing everything yourself or with uh a few freelancers that can help fulfill uh what you're doing. So you're looking at, you know, five clients, maybe month 7 to 12, you know, AI agents help 50 clients and then you're doubling that margins. And then your goal is to get to year two. And you

8:43know, this is what I always say to people is if you can get to a full AI system where you have hundreds of clients and high margins, like that's obviously the holy grail. And as the LLMs get better, cuz I know people in the comments are saying, "Okay, but like you know, no agent can actually go and do XYZ tasks." Well, yes, they can. Some

9:02tasks. Um, not everything, right? There's some like creative tasks. I don't think it, you know, it's right right now. But these LLMs are only getting better. So, now is the time when you should be looking at building those businesses. So, uh, I think build in public is an important part of uh of actually building some of these businesses for two reasons. One is it's going to help you get customers, drive word of mouth. And then two, it's going to help you have a better insight to who the customer is. So, you're going to be wanting to start an, you know, X account, Instagram account, whatever feels best for you and where those

9:37where, you know, where your customer base is. You're going to solve one problem publicly. You're going to show the exact process. You're going to get to a point where a thousand people are going to see it. 100 people are going to save it. 10 people are going to try it. Eight are going to succeed at using your product. Two are going to quit. and then one is going to tell everyone. And if you can get nine people to pay $3,000 a month, let's say, then you can go and take and and reinvest some of that money in content. And then it goes and creates this really nice flywheel. Now, again,

10:06people are I'm thinking about the comment section. You guys are in my head. People are always going to see this and be like, "Yeah, but how am I going to get a thousand people to see to see this?" And it's and it's a good point. You know, it's not easy to create an audience. Uh you have to look at you know what it you know what what how do you come up with a really good account name you know we have this really good account name for example boring marketer it's just interesting boring marketing it's interesting gets people gets people uh to to think of it or even the name of

10:38this podcast the startup Ideas podcast if you're into startup ideas I obviously you're going to potentially want to click and go into and watch and consume the content so you need a good name you need a good bio Um, if people are interested, I can do a whole uh episode uh breaking down how I create audiences and how I create communities uh from those audiences. Um, but it's totally possible assuming that you can come up with a good brand, a good name, and then you've you figured you you figured out the format. And you know what do I mean by format? A format could be uh you know just a way of it

11:14could be like long stories that you tell. It could be video content that's 60 seconds. It could be uh using a a handy cam 90s camcorder uh that you're going and and you know recording content some format that is uh repeatable that is scalable that you can do over and over uh and hopefully post every single

11:33day. So uh what's really cool about where we're at uh in this day and age is you're going to get to this point where your brain um you know and this is why this is a good business for a soloreneur. You're going to be orchestrate orchestrating a bunch of different agents once you get to the phase three of um let's go back up once you get to phase three of this uh of of this uh business and you're going to be you know orchestrating and managing a bunch of different Lindy AI uh you know agents gum lube agents uh you're going to be creating claude and cursor custom

12:12workflows realistically at that point and you're going to have Zapier connect everything. Um, and the cool part is you're going to, you know, have the output of a bunch of employees doing, you know, your business. Um, and through this process, you're going to create this back-end system. Um, so you're going to be able to basically use that backend system to create multiple price points. And I talked a little about this

12:35in the beginning. You know, enterprise. What is enterprise? Well, that is the white glove service for uh your product. Uh, a self-s serve. just go ahead and log in and go and you know uh use the software an API uh you know using the data to go and create uh other people create products on top of your data. So um you know I'm putting these numbers here you can see like 80kr 50kr 50kr. It just goes to show you that you know the numbers are possible. Um I'm not saying again I'm not saying everyone's going to do it. Most people who are listening to this are probably not even go and create

13:17a startup. They're going to listen to this and they're going to be like that's cool or that's impossible. I don't think I can do that. But it's it's totally doable. It's happening every day. And the example I love giving the most is you know there's like this uh company right now I think they're called bank statement converter. The world's most

13:36trusted bank state converter converter. easily convert PDF bank statements from thousands of banks into a clean Excel format and they're doing like $40,000 a month. It's crazy. It's like a simple microsass idea. Um and then you can go and expand, right? Go expand uh your offering from there. So this uh this type of business isn't for everyone. Um, and I, you know, I think the reason why I think it's interesting is, um, you know, if you're thinking about starting a business, yes, you can go and do an AI revolution startup idea, but it's very sci-fi. You can do something like we process forms in 24 hours and people are like, I want,

14:17you know, take my money. Um, you know, I think that boring boring startup idea, you know, ideas, like businesses need it. It doesn't take that long to create. You can create some of the stuff in a weekend, right? So I think that's the other beauty about this whole idea is you can create this in a in a short amount of time and you don't need to be you know a Stanford graduate. You don't need to be a rocket scientist. You don't need have you know work at Google. This is you know a something that anyone can do if they put their mind to it as long

14:49as they are consistent and actually go and uh put in the work, pick the right niche and um and go from there. a lot of people right now, you know, the market feels frothy a little bit in in the AI world. I'm seeing tons of seed rounds being raised. Um, tons of people hiring, building the future, and a lot of those businesses, you know, don't have a lot of revenue or, you know, have zero or not a lot of revenue. And there's, you know, nothing wrong with that. But I think that there's a really interesting, you know, world for people who want to pick these boring tasks being boring,

15:26start by building an agency, automate a bunch of it, uh, use content to drive customers and insights, you know, have as retain as much equity as possible, use those profits to dividend out, build other apps, build, you know, I call it being a multipreneur, owning multiple businesses. uh I think is really interesting and I think that right now is the time because um these agents are finally getting to a point where uh you know you're you know they're the the outcome is is good is quite good. So it's um a really interesting thing something I wanted to share with everyone here to get your creative juices flowing. Um I read every single

16:04comment that uh is posted. So I would love to see uh you know what you're thinking if you like this sort of stuff. what other topics I should cover. I'll see you in there. And uh I can't wait to see what you build. Have a creative day, friends. And I want to end this actually I want to end this episode by saying these episodes are for the people, you know. Um, I uh someone I know, very well-known entrepreneur hit me up and he's like, "Why do you create content about, you know, creating, you know, a $5,000 a month, $25,000 a month, like agency workflow business, like build

16:46like do episodes on uh, you know, these big ideas, these really really big ideas." Um he's like you you've raised venture capital, you've advised Tik Tok, you've advised Reddit, you can you can like why are you wasting your time? And no, these are these are for the people like this is sauce that I think that if you're able to if if this speaks to you and this seems fun to you, uh this is you know the path that I would do if I was starting an an AI agent startup and it's actually the path that I am taking with some of my businesses and I'll be

17:18sharing that uh more uh as that comes out. Um, and uh, yeah, hope you enjoyed this and I'll see you on the internet.