# SaaS apps that will print profits

Channel: Greg Isenberg
Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v3bZlLulDFg
Duration: 49 min
Language: English
Words: 8212
Transcript page: https://viewrankai.com/tools/youtube-transcript/v3bZlLulDFg

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[0:00] like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody's using a spreadsheet it should be like you know a light bulb going off as like this is a startup opportunity one of the other kind of like Universal rules of startups is that like once you aggregate users in a place you know in some digital property you can add I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this like cute profitable little thing but it has the leg to become something big if you want it the way you can be with any network is you carve off a

[0:35] section of it of like power users of some sort some Niche and you build better features for them or something like that okay let's do let's do a bonus framework with Brett bonus framework all right so it's called the Enterprise workflow startup idea formula all right so you're going to use this formula to come up with any uh startup idea that can be Venture scale billion dollar company uh and guess is what it is you know what it [Music] is all right BR Goldstein I think you're criminally underf followed that's why I brought you on today whenever we hang out I love I love just picking your brain you've you

[1:29] know you were part of the Google m&a team you bought companies at Google you did a startup you raised 12 million plus for that you did the VC thing and now you're working in stealth and and working on a really cool product but you're not here to talk about any of that you're here to talk startup ideas and I'm excited uh I'm excited that you agreed to come on yeah I'm excited as well we're just gonna give away all of the goods that I've been hoarding for years uh now that I'm working on something else but yeah super excited yeah I I was I said you can't hoard

[2:02] anymore you got to stop hoarding it's just not fair yeah I mean I think it's also just the most the best expression of your self-confidence and status to give away um stuff for free that is like extremely valuable or you could benefit immensely from keeping it to yourself so here here I am pump pumping my bags totally and I think someone's going to take one of these ideas and they might be bigger than you and me and couple years because they're taking one of these ideas yeah well selfishly I hope that some of these ideas get taken because I need some of them right now all right well what's on your mind

[2:41] what's idea number one okay so I guess idea number one is goes to this uh crappy startup idea that every kid in college has coming out of college they're like 22 and the first idea they come up with is what it's it's an app to help you hang out with people when you're bored and all of these apps have failed like all of them have failed like they just don't work there's this negative selection bias where it's like the people who actually want to hang out are not the people you want to hang out with and like all of this stuff but before we landed on the idea that I'm working on

[3:22] right now in stealth we actually pursued something that is an iteration of this idea that will actually work really really well uh and the idea is that instead of focusing on uh nerdy looners in big cities that want to hang out and weren't invited to parties as your target audience you focus on um conference attendees conference attendees and the idea is that if you've ever been to a conference whether it's like Tech week some crypto conference whatever it is you know most of the action is not actually the the main conference events all of the action is the side events and actually maybe the more of the action is

[3:59] and like the the private dinners and stuff like that but really the side events are where the action is that's where all the cool people are hanging out that's they're more interesting uh they're in more interesting places like I went to one during Tech week and Testo was there you know um so all these they're all these side events but the problem with all the side events is that there aren't they aren't centralized in one place usually what happens today is you have some poor soul who Aggregates a spreadsh sheet um of all these side events their crossplatform it's Luma it's party full it's Eventbrite it's all this stuff and

[4:36] it's in this really shitty spreadsheet and you have to go through and click through all the ones that look interesting rsbp to them you have all this annoying emails confirming and all this stuff um but I think the really important Point uh to focus on is the spreadsheet like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody's using a spreadsheet it should be like you know a light bulb going off as like this is a startup opportunity there's countless startups that started as spreadsheets or took processes that were spreadsheets and then converted them into uh products and so really the simple simplest thing is you go and you

[5:18] find these spreadsheets ahead of these conferences or during these conferences you build some scraper some system to ingest all of that data uh parse you know the dates the times the s other information images about these events and then you create a beautiful app that plots them on a map one click RSVP um and basically that's your wedge your wedge is this is the place you're going to go to see where all the conference events are right um when we tried this at I think we did it this at like nfnc or something we built a very crappy version of this people were just Like Loving It

[6:01] people clamored for it like people said thank you so much can I get my friend on it all that stuff but where does this turn into an app to find friends to meet up with conferences are designed for people to meet up and hang out like literally the whole point of the conference is for professional networking to happen for you to go and find that person who's at the conference and go grab coffee or whatever or do business and stuff like that so these people are very like of anybody in the world these people are like the most authentically interested in connecting and chatting and like meeting up in

[6:38] person because that's what they're there for and actually unlike the social world the so you know a non uh professional space where you you have negative selection bias of like the nerdiest weird weirdest people being the only ones who want to hang out um this is actually everyone right hi status low status whoever so that's the first thing that's the first solution or the first problem that you've solved is you have great people who want to hang out quick ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing.com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were

[7:19] some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing.com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint

[7:55] with 100% money back guarantee who does that nowadays so check it out highly recommend boring marketing.com every conference organizer is trying to get people to meet up because they know that people will come back if if that matchmake happens so and by the way you know I know some people are listening to this and they're and they're like okay like how much money is there really in this space um and you know there's a business called Cent do you know cent no I had never heard of them and but they're basically uh a four and a half billion dollar company I think they're publicly traded actually and what they

[8:37] do is they have a white label app for events and conferences yeah exactly you talked about a wedge which is a really good you know I I think people don't think about wedges enough but I think this is a wedge to ultimately compete with Cent four and a half billion dollar opportunity and Cent by the way like you know you'll go to their website we can show it on YouTube like this is like an old school kind of yeah you know it's not like the designers of Snapchat went and design let's put it that way yeah must must be at least like 10 15 years old but yeah but yeah I

[9:17] think like you know one of the other kind of like Universal rules of startups is that like once you aggregate users in a place you know in some digital property you can add social features right pretty standard operating procedure you build an amazing one player experience which is what it's the uh find any conference event you know Side Event at this conference and the two-player experience is suddenly everyone who's at that conference is available in a directory and you can DM them and you don't have to worry about sharing your phone number with some random you know professional contact if you don't want to um you may be able to

[9:58] share your location which is something that has also failed miserably in the social world like what if you want to connect with somebody but you guys are bouncing around between all these different events it's a great opportunity to share share locations and stuff like that so that's so the wedge is the one player experience the next step is the the directory and the chat right you could even do some like crazy AI features where you uh train uh an llm on all the conference information oh where is checkin like what's you know you know when is this speaker going or like what's the status of this event these are questions people

[10:41] are constantly sending conference organizers and stuff like that but you can throw that literally in the same chat UI as everything else um and all this stuff is like you know you could build this in a month or less but yeah what's what's nice about this is you have this group of people who it are basically the power users of professional networking right so one of the things you want to if you want if you wanted backing up if you wanted to compete with LinkedIn you can carve off a you the way you could be with any network is you carve off a section of it of like

[11:19] extremely power users of some sort some Niche and you build better features for them or something like that and so if you think about power professional networkers like the people who are on LinkedIn the hardest are probably the same people who are going to these conferences and dying to meet up right so s suddenly you have this directory of people they've added their work history they've added their interests maybe you can search through send DMS to people you sell ads into in it which is like hey come to the you know advertisers can be like hey come to this event or or try this new thing or something like that

[11:59] that um and yeah obviously it works cross event cross uh conference as well so once you're on this for one conference if you're going to another conference which most people do you just open the app again and you see who's there totally that that's the uh the magic experience of the shop app have you ever have you ever downloaded that app yeah so it's the it's shopify's app and I recently downloaded and if you ask me Greg how many Shopify purchases have you made I would say like I don't know two um you don't really know that you're making Shopify purchases because it's the back end it's

[12:40] powering these e-commerce experiences so I downloaded the app and then I saw like I don't know 50 different you know companies I bought stuff from yeah and it was such a magical experience I'd love to be able to open this app and be like oh my God I didn't know that Brett is going to be at you know South by Southwest and you know so I think that's I I I do think that having that magical sort of experience is cool if you were building something like this and I mean you built the product so I'm sure You' thought thought about this how would you actually get

[13:17] to like how would you get awareness and in something like this yeah I mean I think you know conferences are are a historically fantastic place to Launch products South by Southwest itself is like known to you I I guess it's not anymore but it used to be this place where like yeah everyone anticipated the the next social app to launch and so um it's one of these things where it's like it has a strong Network effect especially with these social features which is like you host an event at a South by Southwest or a tech Curr or a tech week or something like that um these events if you're in their

[13:58] distribution system system get tons and tons of RSVPs we hosted one for Tech week 800 uh RSVPs 800 people all down I'll download your app conferences are probably no more than like 20,000 people at in the the largest sense so once you have that 800 people you just do the next conference that these people are going to that's probably how I do it obviously you know you're targeting particular niches so you may want to start with the crypto Community or something because these people tend to like hop from one conference to another pretty consistently um you may want us Target like the Tech Community or another specific group of people that

[14:43] tends to show up consistently at these conferences but um yeah I think that's yeah how it work cool I like this idea I think it's one you know I love a wedge man I love a wedge salad you know so this to me is a wedge salad and a half yeah um I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this like cute profitable little thing but it has the legs to become something big if you want it yeah so that's what that's why I like this idea uh yeah one one last one interesting point is that uh conferences

[15:18] are actually where most people spend their Learning and Development budget um at their companies they're usually getting like2 to $3,000 a year or something like that these workers these Tech workers or any sort of worker most of them spend it at conferences this is why conference tickets are so expensive because obviously the conference grounds are expensive but like they're more so expensive because these corporate people have the money to spend on them and so it's interesting is that means that this app because it has a you know a business focus it's conference focused um people can expense it in their Learning and Development budget which means you have

[15:58] the potential right out of the gate you know you can gate some of these features the AI chatbot information stuff some of the like maybe some of the like social features or something you get some features and you could charge 50 bucks a month or something like that 100 bucks 250 bucks for one conference if you wanted to and I think you'd see adoption before we go on to the next idea I have to ask why didn't you proceed with this idea idea we came up with a even bigger idea okay okay yeah it wasn't it wasn't the idea itself that you you looked at it and

[16:40] you're like oh my God you know this is really hard it was just there's another opportunity and you went for that no yeah I think this is a pretty clear-cut straightforward thing I mean you have to be excited about conferences you have to be you know in this kind of like multi-chapter you know story of like first we're doing the wedge and that and it's going to take some time um but yeah we just came up with a better idea cool all right Brett what's uh what's idea number two um all right so I have two the next two ideas are both dating related because I'm hopelessly single in New

[17:20] York um and I find that people just kind of talk about don't you feel like when you're hanging out with people in a certain city they kind of talk about whatever the whatever the thing of the city seems to be so it's like you hang out with people in San Francisco they're only talking about the latest AI models and stuff like that you hang out with people in New York where dating is like a sport basically conversations naturally go back to dating I have a couple ideas that I think would be super super killer the first one is basically a vertical sass for matchmakers so the main point is that

[17:59] like there are people in every community and this is like a Thousand-Year old job who play this role of Matchmaker like particularly in like like we're both Jewish the Jewish matchmakers Indian matchmakers like you know any sort of religious or ethnic Community there are strong matchmakers but what I also find interesting is that like uh there are other communities uh and you're the community guys you I want to hear your thoughts on this but like there are other communities that have emerged or have their own identities that also should or already have match Mak makers within it so rock climbing like you would think that rock

[18:39] climbers would get along with each other and be a good match you would think that crossfitters would get along you'd think that like you know people on Twitter would get along with each other right do you have any thoughts on that I want before I go I want to get your yeah so you're you're absolutely right I also think that you know 50% of uh genzi Americans are not religious at all so they're looking for they're attaching themselves to to some of these movements and these movements have become their identity so absolutely I think you know a non-obvious one would be the so the sobriety movement you know yes I want to

[19:24] connect with other sober daters in my city and who subscribe to the same philosophy and ident and identity that I have yep yep exactly and I just to confirm I'm I'm not sober and I have a wife you know yeah yeah yeah yeah got it that was that was an example I thought you said you're not sober now I'm like I I didn't get the memo oh no I'm sober right at this right now but I might have a glass of wine tonight you know yeah yeah yeah yeah same yeah but yeah I think like you know you think about like all these people who and if you talk to people in

[20:05] couples like one of the things that people like to do in their spare time is get their friends who are not married married like it's like it's like a classic pastime of couples to do that and so there's this there's this all this Demand right like there's these dating apps but they don't actually support um this kind of like third player to be involved in this process you think about like what is the user flow of a Matchmaker it's like you have a database of people and then you have all these traits and then you need some sort of UI to be able to pair them up

[20:41] and you need some sort of double opt in to get them to go and get go on the date and stuff so there's this whole like a lot of different ways to do this you could charge the Matchmaker where you where you basically say like you pay 30 bucks a month for these features and 150 a month for these features um you could also charge in terms of like a if you wanted to do like Community Based you could almost charge like a transaction fee so imagine if um the like there was like a Jewish Matchmaker in New York or something and I had to pay like 50 bucks

[21:18] a month to be part of her pool right everyone pays 50 bucks a month or maybe there's some discriminate discriminatory pricing based on gender or something like that by the way there's probably a way to do that just for with religious groups so that it's tax deductible too oh that's a great that's a really good point right smart yeah yeah definitely becomes a no-brainer right yeah yeah yeah you just have to do a little like prayer before every right swipe yeah but um yeah you charge you charge some amount maybe the Jewish one is 50 maybe another one who 150 maybe uh you're a celebrity in the LA area and

[22:00] you have access to all these billionaires and celebrities and all these crazy models and whatever whatever those types of people are and you charge you know $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month for it to be part of that pool um and then you take you know the company takes a percentage of that um that subscription or something like that you know what this reminds me of have you seen pallet no what was New York startup I I actually invested in it a few years ago or lay check out invested in a few years ago but the basic idea of pallet uh it's pallet.com oh is the job

[22:37] board yeah it's job board for creators basically so like they'll work with like Al Lenny ritky uh who's like the product management guy and they'll be like hey we're gonna power your job board uh for Lenny jobs yeah and uh they they provide the you know the the technology and and they have a Fe structure that I I assume that they get like a percentage Yeah so this is basically that right the the thinking is like they so they're going after creators and people with big influence and different niches you're you're you're saying kind of the same thing um and recruiting in some ways is very similar to dating it's

[23:19] the same for sure yeah it's the same yeah totally yeah and I think what's interesting about this is like dating as a space to invest in always gets a bad rep because it it it like the incentive structures make it so it's never going to be a massive business aside from Tinder maybe it's turned into a giant business over time but like you know if the app works then you turn from it um but I think the way that you know in this sense you're almost like changing you're creating almost like a unlimited upside like you know it could be as expensive as uh as the person

[24:01] decides if if they're doing that model so that means you could make a lot more money uh from this I also like so Shopify I know I just brought them up but I'm bringing up them again they have this philosophy called arming the rebels which is oh yeah yeah yeah just such a such a good concept around they've got all these Rebels quote unquote who are merchants and then their job is to arm them with tools and software to make their lives easier and better what what I like about this business is it's arming the rebels which are these nonformal matchmakers these casual matchmakers that are doing this out of

[24:45] the the goodness of their heart anyways yeah all you're doing that with with this is you're just arming them to make their lives easier and if they want to have upside and and maybe the upside you know some people are going to be like no I'm just doing this out of goodness of my heart and bless their hearts we need more of those people yeah but some people are going to be you know so so for those people you know maybe you have it so you can it donates to a charity of your choice or something like that yeah taxes up to dble again yeah and it's

[25:16] interesting if you think about like what actually is a dating app what are the new what is the the way that you would start a new dating app is you find a niche you find a an A specific group of people and and then maybe there's some special mechanism but the group of people matters more than the mechanism right any dating app you're on like Rya is like these type of people Tinder is these type of people like the the whole evolution of dating apps is just about like slicing off another Niche so really what this product is talking you know the point of this product is to

[25:50] productize that process of taking a niche and turning it into a dating app very quickly yeah I like this one a lot you know on this podcast I've been doing something new and I and I say do I do I sip an idea I I do I like this idea or do I spit this idea I don't like it and you know go back to the drawing board and I I definitely spit this idea you're you're just you're doing something you're productizing that people are already doing and you're just making it easier for them so I like it um and uh I also think there's that Trend

[26:23] around a bit of message fatigue on a lot of these dating apps like people are kind of for something like this so you have the tail of that as well yeah and I find that you actually treat um you treat matches more seriously when they come from friends or community members versus like you know the open abyss of New York City or something like that so I think it would have a much higher conversion rate to actual marriage and stuff totally and I could see the the quote on your website now now yeah dope all right second dating app let's let's rock what do you got second dating app

[27:05] all right you're in the flow I can I can see it I can see you're in the we're in the flow let's start with the I I'll paint a picture of this dating app from the landing page starting with the landing page so the app is called Serendipity you go to the app you go to the website maybe it's a enough but call it a website very mysterious like very intense branding and it says something like we've perfected the the ancient craft of uh finding life Partners finding people life Partners the ancient mystical scientific craft right and on the website you'd be exposed to the the process which

[27:53] is first you have to fill out all this information and give us as much information as possible we need to know who you are on a soul level right so you're you take this survey and it's asking just weird questions like would you rather uh you know interview an iguana or a raccoon just like the most absurd strangest questions that you can imagine this is partially like a growth tactic because people will be like I'm I'm joining this dating app and it's like asking me the most ridiculous questions I've ever seen in my life well I I could I could picture the the viral Tik toks with two million views yeah

[28:31] right people screen sharing that yeah and so yes 100% yes yes yeah and then you get to the end you have to you have to link your accounts link your Instagram link your LinkedIn everything just like information sharing oversharing because the message is we have this we have this tool we have figured it out fundamental human unlock to find you your life partner so you're like whatever I'll do it all get to the bottom and then you finish and then it basically says um our council is now going to be reviewing your um your information and who's on the council a monk a priest a uh relationship and sex

[29:16] psychologist or doctor or something like that um physic physicist right a rabbi like all of these all of these kind of like mystical you know really intense types of figures and you see their faces and they're old and they're like you know you see the wisdom in their eyes and you're like oh man like these people are reading my stuff and they're going to find my my life partner and then it says thank you we're reviewing your stuff um it'll take some time literally months will go by maybe obviously not great for conversion but it's more about the vibe months go by you forget about it then

[30:02] you get a text message that says hey we finally found your life partner we found them they they exist they live in your city we have found them but we are not going to tell you who they are or where they are you have to find them yourself uh we believe that love happens serendipitously right and so the way the way you have to find them is that you get text messages or something um basically with hints about where they may be right specifically where but maybe there's like some probably not much information around there like who what they look like or anything like that but where is

[30:42] the key point so one night you'll get a text that's like hey um she is uh most likely going to be at a cocktail bar in SoHo with you know red trim on the chairs or something and then you're when you're deciding where to go with your friends that night you're like okay let's just see if this cocktail bar has anything interesting you go to the cocktail bar and what is what's your feeling like what what is excit what is your heart telling you when you get to that cocktail bar maybe you're like I don't know if I believe this thing but part part of you

[31:19] wants to believe it part of you wants to believe that life partner is there and you're going to be very openhearted when you talk to these people at this bar you may go up to people you may stay there a little longer you may hang out and all that stuff and I think what's interesting about this that idea this idea like okay if you're if you're there looking for a life partner or think that somebody could be your life partner there you're going to treat everybody a lot differently and it actually doesn't matter if your life partner is there or not because you may actually find

[31:54] somebody you really connect with but you know because you are much more receptive and open and stuff and so the the secret this may be more of like a social experiment than an actual business idea but um the secret is the council doesn't have to exist right the council doesn't have to be real the life partner doesn't have to exist the most important thing is that you need to send your users these people to the same place to find each other right so like it'd be even better if you were able to maybe the more capitalist version of this is like you find a bunch of characteristics of of

[32:36] all these people who take this survey you know relative attractiveness education interests all that stuff and then every night over on the weekends you send them people with similar interests to the same bar to just connect and find each other so what do you think social experiment or actual product idea definitely the craziest idea on your and you know here's what I here's what I like about the idea and I think this applies to other ideas too so to me this feels very much like turning something that is not a treasure hunt into a treasure hunt yes and I think that thesis could be applied to a bunch of

[33:21] different spaces so for people listening who are like okay Brett's crazy with this dating app idea but you know this concept applied to something else maybe it's e-commerce maybe I don't know what it is but something in another space I think that's really really interesting so that's what I really like about this idea yeah I think another another kind of interesting framework about this is that like the reason the reason dating feels icky to people is the same reason why like the app that helps people hang out when their board doesn't work is because when it's too on the nose it's too Direct right like I'm am single I'm

[34:00] on a dating app to date um there's some negative selection bias and weird feelings versus when you're one degree removed and you're like oh I'm just going to this party or I'm just going to this conference event but I actually really want this lower level human thing it eliminates the negative selection bias it allows you to have like higher status more desirable people in the mix and all that stuff how would you actually go about building something like this like is this something is this hard to build is it is it easy to build MVP wise the social experiment part's easy it's like you throw a type form on

[34:37] a website you blast it out to as many people as you can dating related things are usually pretty viral and people are pretty ex excited about um them I have a friend who runs a dating like a matchmaking company and he created this like landing page that showed like you basically say what your preferences are in somebody it's like religion age height and then it calculates how many people of those how how many people exist and it went super viral it got millions of like impression millions of views how was your friend that was the person I I saw that around I W someone who's 65 and higher Works in

[35:20] finance and makees more than $100,000 a year that's that was your friend it got like yeah tens of millions of impress question yeah what's funny is that was actually the second thing like that he he had already released this thing and it got all this press this website you can go to to type those things in and then they just jumped on the like 65 whatever that train that Meme train so could be as simple as that cool yeah I like I also the other thing I like about this idea is people will you know you want to start an idea that people will pay for and people are used to

[35:58] paying for dating match m match matchmaking and uh so if it if it does go viral like who knows what you have on your hands it could be really big yeah sweet all right ready ready to go into Enterprise land okay yeah I could I could gears I could shift gears and and do a huge uh you know R yeah let's let's see what you got okay this is a very like half baked idea but it's um something I've been feeling lately is there are a lot of crms and marketing automation platforms that kind of rely on having extremely high quality data so that you can segment and do various

[36:42] marketing campaigns or all this various stuff um and I think and obviously llms have kind of unlocked a new way to extract data from unstructured information like podcasts YouTube videos like all of this stuff and so I used to work at clearbit clearbit was a is like a data enrichment company it's an API you plug in a domain it gives you a bunch of data points about the company you plug in an email address it gives you a bunch of data points about a person what was hard about clearbit is like there's all this just like work to get each of those data points perfect and it took a really long time and then

[37:22] at the end of the day you only had those data points you didn't have anything else if you wanted something more unique it's special you couldn't get it and so what I'm imagining is kind of like a new kind of clear bit which is like um a flexible Knowledge Graph API where you basically put in a company name or something and then you list the data points that you're looking for and then you know you will have indexed you know you'll have embedded like all podcasts LinkedIn you know you can buy total you could buy a LinkedIn data dump if you wanted embed LinkedIn you embed a bunch

[38:00] of tweets you embed uh all these news sources and stuff like that and then use that to kind of fill these data points on the Fly for people so if you wanted to like doing a do a marketing automation push using this API for like um people in New York or people who said they were going to come to the techr or the New York Tech week um you know how would you find that data through an API like this because it would have all that information kind of embedded automatically and then how do you charge for it and how would you actually how would you actually build

[38:41] something like this like how do you go from idea to tox execution yeah I mean so building is pretty straightforward because you're basically like putting everything in a data warehouse and embedding everything in terms of the actual nitty-gritty AI stuff beyond that that it's beyond my pay grade but yeah I think for charging it's pretty easy you can charge per enrichment so clear bit and others cost like up to 50 cents per per contact enrichment so you know you do the math 100,000 contact enrichments is $50,000 which can be pretty lucrative um but I think the key with this would be to charge a little less than Zoom info

[39:25] or another player and then probably have just more flexibility and interesting data and stuff to provide and is this a venture-backed idea or do you think this could be bootstrapped it could be either I would probably want to do it bootstrapped because data is a really hard hard space like you know zoom in just data if you're selling data it's just a tough business because it's always going to be about like is this data better than the other data and you can get some of this stuff off the ground pretty easily I I have friends who run there are a handful of these startups that have popped up um

[40:06] that do some sort of data enrichment um in the post AI world and they have gotten to you know 203k Mr pretty quickly just from basically selling csvs that's insane yeah CS it depends on what's in the CSV if it's it's good stuff and they're using llms and AI you know for some of that yeah yeah so apparently when clearbit added L llms to their whole mix they had data points that went from being like 30% accurate to like 95% accurate so pretty big um pretty obvious opportunity and I think the other thing is as more people are building apps that need data underlying it like for example

[41:00] like if you're building a if we're building this app we talked about in the beginning the conference app wouldn't it be nice if we had a bio for everyone if we had their social profiles if we had other Dynamic information about them in this app you wouldn't be able to do that um there's no affordable API for that right now yeah and the data is out there no one wants to put it in it's just you just need a little enrichment in your life yep I think uh this works I you know I think this works really well for certain groups and certain um you know very specific

[41:41] niches um what do you think are two three four five specific groups that would use something like this well I think what's interesting is like the data the data companies are not incentivized to go after a lot of a lot of niches right so if you wanted to start like um you know a Sri Lankan real estate CRM or marketing automation platform and you needed to have a lot of information about you know the building location and like the number of rooms or all that stuff like you would need to build that data set yourself or hope that users input it and the magic of this is that because you're using

[42:21] llms because you're kind of crawling the web a little bit or you're finding data sets online or other places that you can point llms to is that you can do you can Target almost any Niche um much better than these kind of like incumbents can so yeah Shri Lan and real estate like I don't know I don't know why I thought of that that's the task if you're listening to this figuring out what are these groups what are you know who needs enrichment who's who's going to be willing to pay for it but you're right this is this is like a an obvious idea um and I love

[42:59] this idea I sip this idea greatly just because you are right with incumbents aren't they're not going to be everywhere and and and that's that's the opportunity that's why you don't raise money for something like this you build it profitably and you know you could get to a situation where you're doing one to three million AR or something like that and you go to um a clear bit or someone like that and you sell the business what do you think you know what are what sort of multiples you know you've worked in the Google m&a world like what sort of multiples are are some of these

[43:36] businesses getting not much so I like it depends on the approach like the clearbit acquisition clearbit was acquired by HubSpot and the rumor is that it was not the most amazing price because HubSpot didn't value the existing business HubSpot is not in a in a data enrichment business they bought it so they can have data enrichment out of the box in their own CRM and have this kind of competitive mode based on that so they bought it for the capabilities they bought it for the for the data not the business so when you are selling a company like you need to know what the acquirer wants in your

[44:18] company the best deals are ones where they're buying the whole business because that means you're getting traditional like whatever the relevant multiple is based on public comps other Acquisitions and other kind of fundraises um but if they're not building buying it based on a business then it's kind of like I don't know it's totally random sometimes yeah yeah I think um this is probably one of those ideas that you might just want to cash flow it and if you get an unreasonably good offer from one of you know one of these platforms like let them come to you don't you know don't run a process yourself because you're

[44:59] right the multiples especially which with dependence on some of these llms might not be amazing yeah exactly exactly Brett you crushed it wait you want to do this you want to do this last it's not a it's not a startup idea it's just a framework Qui okay let's do let's do a bonus framework with Brett bonus framework all right so it's called the Enterprise workflow idea startup formula or startup idea formula Enterprise workflow startup idea formula all right so you're going to use this formula to come up with any uh startup idea that can be a venture scale billion dollar company every five years you can

[45:46] rebuild this company uh and guess I'm salv salv no I'm salivating right now okay so you basically take any workflow that a professional does so like designers design like marketers do email marketing salespeople live in a CRM uh Engineers have ticket management system you see where I'm going with this right like documents like all this type of stuff all these like core workflow tools need to get rebuilt every five to 10 years why is that because the technology gets better right the people all people always want the same thing they want it to be beautiful they want to look like the tools that they use with their consumer products they wanted

[46:34] to have the latest in greatest technology and all that stuff and the reality is incumbents are never going to be able to adapt quickly to these changes and stuff this is this is the linear formula linear didn't build a brain exploding ticket management system they built a ticket management system that was simpler number one more beautiful number two more targeted at a very specific Niche number three uh more performant and that's it like that that's it like they are killing Trello they're killing jira um they're going to replace those in even large Enterprises as well and they didn't have to build the craziest most advanced stuff it's not like a it's not

[47:23] like 10-dimensional chess kind of product visionary stuff it's like literally just build it better so you can do this with most types of things um it's even easier when you focus on a niche so if you wanted to build a a CRM for real estate people like there's a CRM for realate people called follow-up boss that's like 15 years old if you wanted to replace them you could just following kind of this this formula this is a gift you've given people a literal gift pretty great it's pretty great works I'm gonna I'm GNA write that down and uh appreci I appreciate you sharing that with everyone Brett um this has been an

[48:07] absolute pleasure uh where could people learn more about you uh LinkedIn and Twitter I would say or maybe the newsletter so LinkedIn is uh SLB Goldstein 3 Twitter is that guy DG and then the newsletter is homec screen . newws and if You' made it this far in the Pod if you're on YouTube least you can do is subscribe give us a like comment if you like if you like this episode and if you're listening on audio uh just follow and and review and and share this with everyone you know because uh there's a lot of gold in here thanks a lot Brett it's been real catch

[48:51] you later yeah thanks Greg [Music] Downy

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