I can't believe he shared these $1M+/year startup ideas

0:00one key thing that we see we see there that it's easy to build stuff but it's not easy to grow 99% of the makers can build stuff but only few can actually grow and sell and bring in customers most people actually fail right at the start they just don't get any traction at all like not even one sign up and here you can solve that problem and I think people are willing to pay for that so that's where I think the best ideas are right now so this is the idea like find keyword with high traffic search for it if it doesn't have any directory on the first page of Google go and build

0:37[Music] it John Rush startup ideas podcast he's finally on he's a fellow idea junkie this guy is is pushing out I mean what you have 20 businesses now 24 yeah yeah yeah you've got John has 20 businesses that he's running $2 million ARR 10 million users that are B2B to see 100,000 plus users on B2B come on this guy is one of us welcome welcome my my friend good to have you yeah thanks for having me G all right so what is on your mind right now what sort of ideas and Trends um would you be willing to share with with our audience I see two Trends now so one

1:34trend is that uh there are more and more solar preneurs so there are a lot of people building a startup on the side like people who work at a corporate job and they build it on a weekend and evening and then there are people moving over to uh cost effective countries uh saving UPS some money and spending a year or two building out from there like uh it's called building p public or in the hackers on Twitter and this movement was very small like it was very few people like three two years ago but I think it's doubling every year like I don't have the count but my feeling that

2:12it's at least doubling and will keep growing uh just because we see that uh the access to building startups is really best ever like you don't have to fund raise anymore you don't have to find a co-founder you don't have to find a team you can can just do everything on your own either you just codee it if you're a coder or you use no code if you're not a coder so that's kind of the trend I see and then at the same time I see how this trend can be uh utilized or how how we can supply this trend and uh like my my personal role is pretty much to build

2:49the tools for for this crowd so that they are kind of more powerful with fewer resources and uh I think uh one key thing that we see we see there that it's easy to build stuff but it's not easy to grow like that's kind of like 99% of the makers can build stuff but only few can actually grow and sell and bring in customers so that's where I think the best ideas are right now like the low hanging fruits is building something around the uh the growth and the marketing and c and Tools around that yeah and people will pay for growth is the other thing that people don't

3:32talk about which is yeah you know if you're able to generate customers uh for a startup people are willing to basically share in the revenu you know it's a revenue split basically you know so I think that what sort of prompt could you give to people in terms of you know how do you come up with an idea for you know in the space I think the best way to come up with the idea is to start with how would you sell it so basically uh don't build stuff but just see what people are actually looking for and for example like I give precise examples from from

4:09my own Journey like I saw a lot of people asking about SE for example like people were asking how to get backlinks how to grow how to you know grow the demand rating Etc so when you see those requests usually you see people answering how to do it with like seven steps and some makers kind of like like that just you know they read the steps and they implement but since most makers now are actually busy like they have even full-time job or or their side project say they want to save time and then if you rub that little kind of list of actions into a tool I call that

4:47micras uh and it just does one thing uh but it doesn't clear it's clear what to expect and it's easy to recommend so like my my game plan is this like I want people to recommend my tool under those posts like if somebody asks like how to do X and then somebody comes there and says I did that using this tool and if tool just only does one thing then it's easy for the user to remember this tool and to recommend that tool comparing to the tools doing like a lot of things like that then is hard to remember exactly where it does you were telling

5:26me about a a startup idea you had around weight lists can you can you talk more about that yeah I think like it's really hard to start like I remember uh in old times it was kind of easy to start I thought it's like everybody has an idea I thought like all founders have tons of ideas and they just kind of need funding or people to implement those but now uh I see more and more people uh with the willingness to build something but they don't know what to build and usually they're just looking around for random stuff and they just kind of build that stuff and usually that fails because

6:10like you promote this you know build community first and then the audience then from audience you go to um to the to their needs and then to the product right and I had this idea that if someone actually does this job of coming up with ideas uh validating the ideas uh with the users and then collecting uh a weit list maybe collecting prepayments and then you have the whole thing like there's an idea there is there there like 100 people who want it maybe five paid for it then you have you know all the risks not all the risk but a lot of the risk is gone now and then if there

6:51is someone who can build stuff they could actually buy this little you know uh like rough draft it's like start draft you can you can call it right you can you buy the startup draft and you can build it and you go from one from there which is hey everyone if you're anything like me you've got a ton of design work that you need webites landing pages emails social assets you name it but you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites you want the stuff that's going to convert you want this stuff that's going to actually drive value that's where design scientist.com comes in it's

7:36an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work all your copy work all your engineering and do stuff that actually scales your Revenue you don't need a designer you need a design scientist let's go design scientist.com I liked it so much I invested in the business like I was surprised to see that most people actually fail right at the start they just don't get any traction at all like not even one sign up and here you can solve that problem and I think people are willing to pay for that I think people are willing to pay like my my economics there was that

8:16uh basically people would pay up to $1,000 for that and and if that works and there is some Word of Mouth people can pay like two or three or 5K for that just to save this you know first period uh they could Skip and it's it's pretty low cost to do this so uh one could just make a machine that does all the steps so the first step is coming up with idea and if that's kind of your whole value proposition coming up with ideas then it's easier to put that on scale and to come up with a lot of ideas just by doing things like research on keywords

8:56research on hot topics on Reddit on Twitter and Etc so there are a lot of tools for that and so you do one part of the job you come with ideas and then the second stage is that you validate the ideas using technical methods so uh you check their traffic on organic you you check uh the potential you check the free domains on do com Etc so you do this simple things and that can be automated you can actually make a little tool for yourself uh that automates this and then the uh stage number three is that uh you have to now validate with real people and to do that you create a

9:36weight list and you promote the weight list using uh either ads or you pay influencers I actually like to pay influencers more than the ads because uh it's just cheaper like from my experience it was like you can pay $300 and have 100K views on the post uh now on Twitter so and you do that and then eventually like if if your pipeline is 100 ideas coming at the beginning and then uh like 30 ideas go to the next stage after this now technical validation and then out of those thir ideas maybe 10 ideas go to the next stage uh after being validated by people like they join the weight list and then

10:19those 10 people you explain them the value and eventually ask them to pay 70% discount like a prepayment or something like that and then let's say three ideas survive so you have you know three out of 100 uh and then you have these three ideas you can sell basically now with the little audience with the prepayments with the ID itself with with the landing page let's say you say you sell it for 3,000 or $2,000 and that's like $6,000 and to do all this if there is a system for that and you built little tool for that to do all this you would spend maybe $1,000 right or

10:59or $2,000 so the margins are pretty good and the margins get better and better as more ideas and things you do in the system and everything can be automated like literally everything you can buy domains VI apis you can you know make ads the same way landing pages can be generated using some builders that have apis as well so this can be turned into into a tool and then basically just turn this tool on and it keeps doing the job and even the ideas it can find the ideas uh based on the same algorithm you did by hands but now you can automate that as well using Ai and using scraping and

11:37now the system can do 1,000 ideas a month right and then you have 30 winning ideas and you sell them yeah it's so this is a really smart idea because no one's doing it you know yeah no one is doing it and there you know of course there's marketplaces for startups like aire.com and flipa but also there's no Marketplace for what you're describing which is basically what you're describing is is let us do all the work for validating a startup idea let us let us get you your first 100,000 customers and then once uh the uncertainty is taken away a lot of the uncertainty we are going to

12:23hand that for hand that over to you but you are going to pay us a premium for for that and it's kind of it's a win-win situation because uh the person who's inheriting that uh that new product is they didn't have to go through all that hassle of going through the ideas finding those customers as you said you know Finding customers isn't easy and now all of a sudden they can buy something for cheap because if they would have went on one of you know one of the startup marketplaces or buy a startup you know that's EST that's going to be already too expensive so this is like a cheaper version of

13:03that yeah if you go to the startup Marketplace and they check the prices there so uh you would have no users and no revenue and no validation products for the same price just because they can build something there but it's not the part that's important like uh you can build stuff like building stuff is easy right like it's the easiest part of the startup and if if there are users prepayments and certain validation then it's at least 10K right and that's way too expensive so you glossed over something that I think is really important that I want to unpack a little bit so you said you prefer

13:46influencers right now over ads and you're you're seeing rates like $300 for $100,000 views could you walk us through how you think about like how do you acquire these or how do you do these deals with these influencers how do you reach out to them what is your process to do this yeah so there are a lot of influencers now a lot more than there were a year ago I think uh AI has helped and the new Twitter algorithm has H so uh there are a lot of people doing that for living and uh I kind of I was looking at that segment uh two years ago as well and I was checking the

14:28prices and it was at least 1K and they would guarantee maybe 30,000 views uh and then I kept asking the same people price again every few months uh and now it's way lower just because there are more people kind of doing the same thing there's competition and they dropped the prices so now it's uh it's $300 some is $100 so I have uh some deals for $100 just because I buy often so if somebody sells for $300 and you buy five times they they drop the price right and in my case I have a lot of products and I buy very often I just reach out on uh Twitter and

15:09Linkedin just direct messages sometimes they reach out to me it's more often that they reach out to me then I reach out to them uh they offer their service so it's pretty simple to find but usually they start with really high price so you would get like you know 700 or 800 at the start uh and you should just bargain that down to few hundred and and that usually works even if they say no so that's how it works for me they say no but then they come back four weeks after because they have this one week slot that's not taken and 200 is better than nothing so they say you can

15:46take it right and if you have enough of influencers uh in your pipeline in your list then uh there's always a wick open for one of them or a few of them and you buy and then eventually when you bought five or 10 times you agree on fixed price that's pretty low and what I do now I'm doing new things so I'm experimenting and it's pretty interesting so I pay influencers fixed amount every month and it is similar to partnership like like the football stars to with with Nike Etc but on a micro on Nano scale right so and I pay them fixed money every month and they know it will

16:28be coming in uh whatever happens and I commit for 12 months consolation so I I I won't conso uh unless I give the notice so a lot of people like it and I have certain amount of stuff I can do on their account like it can be a post it can be part of the listicle it can be a reply Etc and now uh the price goes very low for me there's some risk so they might just you know lose their engagement and reach and then I still pay them but uh it never really happens like I haven't seen influencer like completely going out of the business like some some changes in

17:09the algorithm and they get back so and I actually plan to launch a tool around that basically to make that kind of the whole not a Marketplace but a little like people say on Twitter I'm Reinventing the AdSense but yeah AdSense for micro startups cool yeah I like that I think also like it sounds like you're doing a very manual process in terms of responding to influencers reaching out to influencers there's probably a lot of ways that you can automate a lot of it and especially with AI you know you can just feed a list of here's my Niche and here's like the 100 influencers and like hit them up every

17:58week with or every two weeks C you know with an email saying hey like you know are you willing to you know your price is X will willing to pay you half X yeah here's one more idea there's one more idea I needan every idea vers another idea is is the issue is is my constant issues I'm constantly having when I come up with an idea I'm like oh that's a good idea or that's a bad idea but you know oh what if we Chang this and oh that could do this you know so there's that's the idea maze that's why they call it the Maze and yeah I'm definitely always in

18:38it but yeah I love that I think a lot of people go towards ads as a they're just it's just the the easiest way you know it's so simple to set up an ad campaign but I I do think that the micro influencers particularly when you're like reaching out to them is there's a lot of alpha there um not sure how long that Alpha is going to last that Arbitrage is going to last because as more and more marketplaces come up the the prices I'd imagine end up becoming it you know more visible it's kind of like how real estate was so in real you know today in real estate you

19:25know you have the MLS so you have basically a database of all the different at least in North America um I don't know how it works in Turkey but um in North America you have this system and it's basically you can set up like alerts and you can see everything that's in the system but back in the day when things weren't online you know you might have seen a building for sale and they listed it at 200,000 and it was really worth 600,000 but because they didn't have access to the data it was wildly underpriced it was a misprice asset and I think you're starting to see the same

20:03thing with that kind of concept like we're in that era with influencers right now not everything is available actually we're in that area specifically with micro influencers in in in influencers mega influencers I feel like there's very little mispriced attention but when it comes to smaller creators and smaller accounts there is a ton of opport Unity to uh get something that's worth $1,000 for $200 yeah I mean I was just having this dilemma today like I'm using social media a lot and I'm getting I'm getting good at it and my my reach is growing but at the same time uh it's hurting my my other part like I can't build as much

20:52as I as I built know years ago and I see that happening with a lot of the other people like I I posted that on Twitter and I had a lot of DMS from people saying like you know I have the same thing and I think we G to have very huge epidemic of uh people you know turning full-time influencers because it's actually really hard to keep building and influencing or you creating content at the same time and if that's happening then the number of people who are uh on the market you know will be growing and it will be a lot of people there so I

21:34actually think that even when we put this into a Marketplace like with real estate in the case of real estate the number of houses isn't growing much is growing very slow but here I think it's nearly exponential growth of influencers so I think it will be more similar to Spotify where actually the cost of Music dropped almost to zero you can listen and everything for like you know fixed price I think it'll be similar thing here right but again since we're competing and if I have an access to influencers and you have access to influencer and we both advertise our products then you know uh we'll have the

22:13same access but at least at the beginning like people who utilize influencers they will gain a lot of momentum compared to those who don't yeah yeah I think that's right I think the supply of you know creators and influencers is going up and up and especially with you know faceless YouTube channels uh and faceless accounts in general meme Pages if if the ability to create content becomes a lot easier than more content exist meaning more competition for eyeballs um which means that the Monopoly that creators have become smaller and smaller that's why I think right now is such a beautiful time to be creating yeah products and and I don't

23:04know like I said you know I don't know how long this lasts but it's beautiful because as you said it number one it's cheaper now than it's cheaper than ever to create it's uh there's misprice influencer and Creator opportunities and there's number three there's the ability to use AI to enhance support and systematize and automate a lot of content so you have these three things and it's it's just a it's a beautiful it's a beautiful time to be building I want to uh I want to segue to your and and talk about ideas around directories because when I think of directories to me you're like the directory King and I

23:47just want you to talk about like why why are you building directories and and do you have any specific ideas that you can give away around directories I had passion for directories for many years I would say and uh two years ago I had a team and we were discussing directories and I wanted to go full into that stuff and and my team said like look this is uh in obsolete stuff like nobody does directors it was cool in 2017 but not anymore H and I was like no I don't think so but I wasn't sure to actually you know follow my own idea so I I didn't start and then I start later

24:31like just just last year uh I I think directories are under appre underappreciated why because when the quantity grows the quality the percentage wise drops so the more things you can choose from the harder are is to choose and it means that people really want to go to places where where the selection has been done for them either selection or categorization or other type of uh enrichment of information so that they can pick the right tool or anything the right item right and the amount of like the quantity on all the scales is growing like the there are like hundreds of CRM tools there are hundreds of any

25:24kind of tools and tomorrow it'll be thousands and then it will be 10 thousand like it will just keep growing right like like the old ones aren't being deleted they they stay too and the new ones are adding up on top and that's same with regular stuff as well like there there more coffee shops there are more people selling stuff around so everything is growing and it's harder and harder to choose and I think uh the directories are here to solve that problem so people trust other people who have reason to trust them and I think think the directories made by people who show that they have certain experience

26:04in this field and you can trust their choice you can trust their judgment on this list uh people will even pay for that and we see that like they like I'm not charging for my directories like people can use them but I see a lot of people now starting to charge for good directories and people actually pay to have access to that data all right because they just want to save time on know selecting out of 10,000 items and to have just 100 the best being sent to them every week like you know even things like uh for example there is this guy uh Pat his name is Pat and he does

26:41starter story you probably know him and I think you had podcast with him and like even that is directory in my head because it's a directory of stories about startups and people pay him because he does the job of picking the best Founders and putting their stores in right yes so I think like when I say directory people always have this image of of a list of boring items there like why would it be there like list of house or or list of names but it can be list of anything and people are willing to pay for that and people are willing to be in that list uh so you can both

27:19monetize you know the the one side and the other side and I think we are just starting with that I think we are like uh just entering the directory age as they call it uh because uh the AI made it even easier to create everything the information products and everything and obviously the quality dropped a bit so now people are even more interested and the other thing that I'm thinking about uh that most don't think about is that uh AI will have to figure out how to find the best items to recommend to people right and uh what are they using now they are using uh Reddit they're using other kind

28:04of uh places and For Me Reddit is a directory partly is a directory as well like for AI it looks like a directory it's a place where people with reputation you know uh order things they can vote for them and then there is a list ordered by votes and that's a directory too so I think the directories will eventually be really important for AI and the best directories will be chosen by AI to be used for the search results and and and if that happens to your directory that means that uh you have huge power and uh people are willing to pay to be there as well right

28:46yeah so so so you know people are bought in I mean I don't know how you listen to that and and aren't bought in I think like the idea around people there's so much uncertainty and so much content that people just want a trusted Source make sense to I think a lot of people and you know we talk about directories like oh yeah it's been around for the last few years and it's but like the reality is D you know since the internet existed directories have been a thing you know organizing information the first day it's not the first day and you have like you have

29:26publicly traded you know companies uh Angie which was formerly called Angie's List I mean does you know billion billion three in Revenue you know so big businesses that basically are just databases of curated trusted people and people are willing to pay for it so that's what I that's what I like about directories too I mean it's proven it's trusted and you said the the magic words which is you know it started to get uncool and some started to get un cool what does that mean if you're listening to this it means if it's uncool there's Arbitrage there's opportunity to come in and find something that's mispriced and

30:08and do something so yes now we're bought in what directory ideas do you have for for us there are two types of directory ideas I have in mind and I have in my pipeline so one is local directories so basically there are a lot of directories in English I would say m of them are in English and uh there are very few on local languages so like it's really hard to find directory of uh you know S tools made by French people in France right for example so I think moving forward the quantity will be so large that directories will have to find more filters because like now people don't

30:55want to go to a place where they have everything they rather want to go to place that has fewer items than too many so I so one way to do this is find the directory that's working really well in us uh and just find a country where there is no directory like that and it's easy to find you Just Google like the best thing about directories is that the whole research is in Google you just search for something and if you don't see good result on the top you go for it right and uh so that's how you test it you find good directories in bigger

31:32countries and you search in the other language like let's say in French uh and if it doesn't exist on top of the Google results uh you build it right and and then of course you have to solve the the the reputation problem Etc uh but usually uh it is uh solvable over time like if you work on directory you start learning the topic you start learning the tools you start to making podcasts with founders of all these tools for example like there are a lot of easy ways to actually you know uh gain reputation within segment so is the idea there I'm going to go find

32:11validated English directories and then I'm just going to apply what you know my let's say French I'm going to apply my language French to it and then and then localize it to for example France France and Canada and senagal and French speaking countries is that the idea yeah yeah yeah exactly because there are a lot of people uh who don't speak English in those countries actually most people don't and people say like don't those who don't speak English they are not in Tech it's not true you knowt a lot of people speak only French or prefer French and they build within there and they have large

32:53Market too and eventually at some point they go International when things go bigger right yeah I mean you're talking to a guy I mean I'm literally sitting in a place where 94% of the people here where I'm where I'm sitting speak French as their first language so you know you know there are there are you know the American POV is always like focus on America it's such a big market and and it's true in a lot of ways like it is such a big market and it and it's it's a it's an amazing Market but that doesn't mean that they're with with what's happening around the E the the East to create

33:40directories and and creating new tools and like we talked about audiences and stuff like that why not just take something that's working and apply it to a a local market I think makes a lot of sense and again this is not something that we're in Reinventing do you remember rocket internet yeah yeah exactly rocket yeah right those those guys in Germany that basically would look at popular Silicon Valley startups that raised a ton of money and be like okay great eBay is popping off in the US let's go create the eBay for uh you know North Africa yeah and they it it was a brilliant idea I think they're down fall

34:28a little bit was that they went public and but like the idea of like rocket internet not you know cash flowing makes a lot of sense I think like that's a huge idea so this is a really John I hope you know you're you're given a really good idea over here I mean the the best part about the re is that that most people don't appreciate is that uh it's very little teag so it's it's it's easy the building part is really easy like in the rocket internet they had to put a lot of money into that and here it's like if there's one thing you could

35:03do where you don't need money but you need your own time that's a directory right uh because it needs time to make the quality of the content good and promote it but it doesn't need time for building it which is like it just needs a little bit of time comparing to SS absolutely so you so you were saying before I got really exced exed about that idea that you had a second idea around directories what was that yeah the so the second idea about directories is that it's not particular directory it's just the method that I apply myself very often uh and it just works I mean

35:45it works so well that I feel it can't be true that it just works almost every time uh is but when you search for keyword on Google ad plan it's a free tool like it's ads. Keyword Planner something like that and you search for keywords around random topics and then you find a keyword that has high traffic and then you search for that keyword on Google and only block posts are shown on the top that's the idea like you just build a directory around that and Google really likes directories and eventually you will get to the top two so it is it's kind of soulless so you don't pick the idea that

36:33you like but you can actually pick the ideas you like and test them for traffic but overall when I do that I don't use any of my own judgment because then I tend to pick the idea that's not so good it has a little traffic but I think it's good and my my intuition never works and that's the thing like I think with director ideas intuition always fail fails because when you test it turns out the opposite so in in my directories all directories I had high hopes for they failed and those I didn't have hopes for succeeded and I think the reason is that if I have high hopes a lot of people

37:09also have high hopes for the same directory because it's kind of I'm I'm an average of the society and whatever I think most likely a lot of other people think right so we can all build the same thing so this is the idea just use technical method like find keyword with high traffic search for it if it doesn't have any directory on the first page of Google go and build it and you can do that for 10 ideas like it's cheap it's fast you do for 10 IDs and then you drop seven and you push harder on three how do you come up with the keywords like how do you know what are

37:47the keywords that are highly trafficked yeah so it is uh it's boring I asked CH B so what would be an example prompt that you know that you would use with chat GPT uh I I give you the real one uh so I want to have directory so usually I launch directories to help my other SAS tools to bring traffic so and then I had this uh couple of Dev tools like you have Dev hunt and and flat UI and and I want to drive traffic there so I I want to build a directory uh for developers so I just asked J I said I have this this and this

38:28and I want this audience give me 20 ideas and gave me 20 ideas and then uh I just tested all 20 and one was great right so it's a it feels like like a steel like you know it feels a bit boring like sometimes too easy and but it works it works I I think a lot of the times uh Founders think that it's uh uh things have to be hard I think things don't have to be hard but you have to do the right things but doing the right things is hard right so that's kind of the thing well I think what it is is great

39:11entrepreneurs bet heavily when the odds are stacked in their favor so what you're doing the process that you're mentioning is is pretty methodical like there's a lot of steps associated with it so it's less creative in that sense it's less I'm taking a blank canvas and I'm drawing something beautiful and putting it out into the world uh and it's more more like a science experiment but what it does is when you use things like Google Keyword Planner is it reduces your risk and allows you to build something when the odds are stacked in your face you know that with a certain percent of probability that this is

40:03going to hit some level of success and of course it's going to be a numbers game so just like you know betting it's just you have to I I don't think and and correct me if I'm wrong I don't think that you're going to hit J chbt with a high Search terms uh directory stuff and then you pick the first one and it happens to you know work I think this is something that you have to apply a portfolio approach try try multiple of them but I think the key is you're reducing risk uh along the way um John we're going to end it here because

40:42there's just two there there's too much there's too much good in this um I want people to check out John at his ex account he just posts every single day what he's learning in real time building his 20 businesses is it's John Rush X and he's also got a A list of all his

41:03many projects John rush. me uh check it out and it's inspiring because I think the the model that you're applying is is really the future of building startup so thank you for sharing it with us yeah thanks for having me here of course later thanks everyone [Music] B