I have one goal and one goal only today. It's to go through the 12 biggest startup opportunities.
So,
uh, the other day, I tweeted and it went viral. The 30 biz biggest startup opportunities,
b to c, AI, mobile,
and people just wanted more. They they wanted they wanna know more. So in this episode,
I wanna go through my 12 favorite ones
and well, it's not just gonna be me. It's it's my friend, Jay Ice Cream, Jay Jay Ice Cream, Jonathan Courtney on the pod.
What's up? Welcome. And you're gonna pick six and I'm gonna pick six. Right?
That's it. I'm gonna pick six. You're gonna pick six. Who knows? Maybe one of us will pick seven. You never know what's gonna happen. You never know, so you're gonna wanna stick to the end.
I think people who do stick to the end of this episode
are going to have a good understanding of a bunch of different categories
that we are building businesses in. So we're sharing the sauce live.
We hope that you actually take these ideas and build with them.
And, uh, maybe
you wanna start off.
Oh, okay.
So
Looking through your list, uh, the very first one that jumped out to me is something I think that's gonna get bigger and bigger and bigger is number eight, which is
biggest creator. So what you wrote is that the biggest creator is gonna have this combination of live shows and unscripted content.
And as someone who plays a lot of video games, I'm exposed to a lot of these creators
who create who, uh, put out their content on Twitch.
And it was interesting to see what is it? TPBN
or TBPN?
Whichever way around that is, the tech show that's playing on x, uh, all the time. It was interesting to see that hit the tech scene because it's been in gaming for a very long time. And I think some of the things that the tech, like, world can learn from gaming
is this more unscripted
kind of, you know, off the cuff kind of streams.
And I just have a couple of examples if you wanna see because I follow a lot of these streamers, and I try to emulate them in my content.
And I think it's it connects with one of the things you said, like, later in your list, which is, like, it's a bit anti AI
because it's live, because it's unscripted,
because things can go wrong,
people actually wanna watch. It's very, very human.
So I'll just take over the screen for a second and show you
Twitch. So Twitch
I think most of you know twitch.tv.
It is a place where people
livestream.
And this is an example of a livestream. So this is actually a relatively popular streamer,
a guy called Jeff Gersman. So he's just one of the people I watch and I pay to watch his channel.
And he does these, like, three to four times a week, three to four hour long streams
where he just sits there
talking
unedited,
like, as messy as it can be,
and just chats to his audience and reacts to his audience.
And pretty much everyone I follow, this guy is live right now, Druskeys. He plays a game called
Marathon. I can give it to you. If any of you guys are playing Marathon,
it's a great game. You should play it. But this is a perfect example. So right now,
and this is a smaller channel, but right now, you know, 247
people are watching this guy live.
People are paying a lot of people are paying to watch this guy live, and he's just sitting here playing a video game that he wants to play anyway,
and this is something that also scales up to like, something that's a bit more official,
like let me show you
a
giant bomb.
So these guys or let me show you the kind of funny guys. So they also stream live
every single weekday. This is more close to what you see with the TVPN.
What actually is it? By the way, it's it's hilarious because
you remind me of the people who like, the old older people who would be like, chat GTP.
You know? Yeah. I I still can't remember any of these things. What is it? T It's TVPN. TVPN. TVPN. Yeah. And and by the way, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, why do I even care about, you know, streamers,
you know, gaming streamers? The reason why you care is TBPN sold for over a $100,000,000.
Yeah. And it was a business show,
and,
you know, in terms of viewership, it didn't have a huge viewership,
but it had a super high value viewership. So the idea here is what are other
high value audiences that need live shows?
Yes. Exactly. And live, it doesn't have to be hyperscripted like you wrote in your tweet. This guy, Jeff Gersman, again, who's one of my favorite examples, he just turns the stream on, and he has a couple of broad topics, and he'll talk for hours and hours. And I think anyone who has that skill
of just being able to talk long form
about
anything
is going to have I think I think the ability to make just to go online, just to be able to talk while you're maybe doing something else, especially in the business context, is gonna be huge, and is going to be really differentiated.
Like, almost all business content out there is very polished.
It's very like, for example, almost every,
like, pure business podcast, like, Diary of a CEO is one of the biggest
purely business focused ones.
It's hyper polished. It's all about interviews.
What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all of this inspiration from the Twitch streaming world and turn that into the very unpolished
gamer style
mess,
but with the business context. So that's something that I think from your list is gonna be bigger and bigger and bigger as AI
sanitizes a lot of stuff. I think more people are gonna want want to listen to more authentic people speaking long form,
unedited,
unscripted,
and live. So I think that's a huge one, and it's exactly a bet that I'm making for my own business. It's what I'm doing personally now
every Tuesday,
experimenting with it, and
I'm I'm all in on that topic. Cool. I like that one, and I just I know people are gonna be like, okay, but how are you gonna make money if you're just live streaming, vibe coding all day? And I Yeah.
I mean, what Come on.
There's
literally a million ways to skin that cat if you have thousands
of people tuning into you every
stream.
And these are people who, like, have such a high affinity to you
that they are begging for ways to
to to
give you money.
I mean, I can just tell you to like, so I have only one to two one to 2,000 people tuning into me every Tuesday,
and that business alone
can make
4 to €500,000
with no ads, with nothing else other than me selling,
like, in person events or,
like, even merch around the topic of what I'm talking about. And so it really can be, with a tiny audience,
you can really build something special there. And I think if you look at the Patreon, a lot of the Patreon
numbers are public for a lot of these podcasts and a lot of these shows that I'm talking about, and you'll see sometimes they're bringing up to 70,
a 100,000 a month just from people sponsoring their Patreon, or just for people paying for their Patreon,
and it's not it doesn't require a huge amount of listeners to make that work.
You don't need to be Greg level
to make that work.
I have a tiny podcast, and it works. Who is that? Who's Greg? Alright. I'm gonna I'm gonna go to my my my favorite one here, and it's it's one category that actually has, like, a 100 ideas or more in it.
So
it's what I call action apps. So if you think of
mobile apps,
I you know, Instagram, TikTok,
Uber, DoorDash, you name it, you basically scroll
and
and then it, like, feeds you stuff. Or,
you know, if you're logging into a CRM or something like a Salesforce,
like, it's it's asking you, the human being, to do thing do things. But with AI,
you can actually
create apps
that do things on your behalf,
clearing your inbox, booking your calendar, you know, filing expenses.
So not not having the human actually do something,
but the agents actually do something.
So the opportunity is in they're, you know, basically looking at a bunch of different apps where it's like, if I were to make this agent first, apps that do things for me, not apps I stare at and that rely on human beings,
What can I reinvent
in mobile
such that,
you know, I'm a first mover advantage? So action apps as a category.
J Ice Cream, what do you think? I think it's great. I think I'd love the idea of just having something that just takes action, and I don't have to do anything. Like, I down or I pay for
superhuman
male.
I still it's supposed to be, you know, like a super AI optimized inbox thing to get you to inbox zero, but I still have to do everything manually myself. I mean, I don't know exactly how these action apps would work, but I'd love to be able to just plug something like that into
my email,
my superhuman, something that somehow learned about the way I wanna do things. Why doesn't that already work? Like, why doesn't it already work that I I've been using Gmail superhuman whatever
for years. Why doesn't it already just know what to do? Why isn't this happening? This reminds me of, like remember back in the day when
mobile first came out, and then
a lot of the web companies took a while to become
mobile
first. Right? Remember?
Yeah. I mean, I remember Facebook having a very painful transition to mobile. Exactly. And that's why they bought Instagram. Like, Instagram was basically the mobile first version of Facebook if you think about it. I think the same thing is happening right now with agent first apps.
So it's gonna be hard for companies
to
basically do the transition
to become agent first.
And I think that's the opportunity for people listening right now.
Do you think that from a user experience perspective,
if the
product is too automated, that it feels like
just just from a pure
sense from the user that it might not feel as valuable,
that actually me clicking on stuff and doing things is what adds to the sensation that this thing is worth it. I wonder if there's some
element of all of this of,
if it's fully set it and forget it,
would there be such low user engagement that people would consider canceling it and wouldn't understand the value? I'm just I'm wondering how that's gonna play out. Like, there's do you know this product called Incogni?
No.
So Incogni is, like, in the background, Incogni,
like, gets you removed from all of these different lists that, you know,
spam you and send you emails, whatever. And it's like a privacy a piece of privacy software.
But you never really hear from this. You you pay for the product, but you never really
you never have to interact with it because it's all happening in the background automatically.
And so every year, when I when, like, you know, I get the bill for incogni and it's like, oh, that's still running in the background,
I kind of don't feel the
I almost feel it sounds really stupid, but I almost feel
if there was some level of me having to interact with it even a little bit,
it might imp or it might increase my engagement with the product and my
retention. It's a completely random thought. I'm just wondering
when a product gets so clever that you can fully set and forget it,
I'm curious to see how the retention gets hit when these things start happening. I want it to happen, but I'm curious. My take on that is what you're describing is is, like, a customer going into the kitchen and just cooking themselves their own meal and being like, because they've, like, cooked this meal, they're gonna enjoy the steak
way more. And my perspective is people just want
Convenience to the max? Convenience to the max.
You know? And human beings are, like, lazy by definition.
Like, we're always looking I shouldn't say lazy. We're always looking for the path of least resistance.
Yeah. And I don't blame us human beings because
life is difficult. Right? So if we're gonna eat a steak, we just want that steak, you know, cooked right. You know? And I think there's gonna be just this whole
suite of apps. Like, think someone can go and create a studio
that just focuses on action apps.
And I think those, you know, assuming they're picking the right niche, assuming it's a real pain point, assuming the customer has
willingness to spend on that pain point,
there's a huge opportunity to go. And I I actually go and create these apps, and I actually think that those apps end up getting acquired similar to how like the Instagrams got acquired by Facebook.
And you can use you know, you don't need to build the AI from scratch. Right? You can integrate with Claude Agent SDK and other other SDKs in order to build these things. So you're basically building a layer on top of it. You know when people were talking about GPT wrappers?
Mhmm. Yeah. Well,
yeah, now we have, like, agent wrappers. Right? That's kind of like where we're at here, and I I I'm I'm starting to see people pick up on it, but I think the mobile first version
mobile first plus agent plus niche
plus willingness to spend plus warp boring, you know, workflow,
plus if you can figure out how to reverse engineer the TikTok or the Instagram Reel to get people actually into the app, that's the workflow.
Easier said than done, of course,
but that's an interesting category I'm spending a lot of time thinking about. Alright. What's what's your example? Sorry. Can just just to get it in into my head properly. Yeah. An action app.
What is what is and, like, for for a specific topic, maybe like email,
what would an action app look like to you? Is it doing one small thing
within a main product, or is it a product within itself? Like, how do you imagine it? Well, using email as an example, that would just be
what does the AI first version of superhuman look like? Mhmm. And
when you go or Gmail look like, or whatever email app you're using.
So when you go into an email
app today,
it really relies on the human being to do things. Yes. A lot of the
Gmails of the world
email apps have AI bolted on,
but they don't have it as the core experience.
Mhmm. So you have to you know, it's not and it's not easy, but you have to reimagine the the
core UX
of email,
and and it probably isn't a list of here's all your emails because that's just daunting.
Maybe it's every single day, I'm gonna I'm gonna send you
maybe it's like you you download an app, it learns about how you like to answer certain things,
and it basically says, hey, we're gonna answer 80% of your emails
via agents.
Like, your your your like,
those are our emails now, and we're only you know, keep your Gmail, but those 80% are gonna be automated, and we're gonna give you an interface around just managing how the agents are interacting.
Yes. And we're only gonna show you the one or two emails
per day based on the conversation you have what you've had with the agent or whatever
that I
don't wanna respond to because it seems too important. But, like, here's what I was going to say. Can I say yes to this?
That's kinda the holy grail of email, basically. Exactly.
Alright. Okay. I understand it. Alright. So for me, my next one that jumped out for me from your list was just number one.
Not not because it's the only one I read. No. I'm just kidding. It's the
loneliness,
solving loneliness,
third spaces,
community apps, IRL.
So and this connects with a couple of the other things. I think the loneliness thing,
especially
since COVID, has just been insane.
Like, it's really crazy. I I think, like,
was a time where
people used to view,
like, my parents' generation and their parents' generation as being very lonely and spending all their time at home watching TV and not interacting with other people and not going out, there was like this people would talk about it. There was like TV ads for it in Ireland about, you know, older people being lonely, And now I'm seeing that in my generation of people in their mid to late thirties who just stay home all day on the Internet,
you know, consuming content, just consuming.
And
I think this what what you've put in here, this third space is community apps, IRL.
I think it's not just a huge,
like, business opportunity. I think it's also,
like, something
that needs to happen for the good of humanity.
Mhmm. And
I think for me, this is the thing that I'm this is one of the ones that I'm personally chasing and personally experimenting with.
We ran
a retreat in February,
which was five days off the grid. So no
Internet, no phones, no tech, nothing. I think I invited you you to it. Oh, you didn't turn off actually. Interesting.
I'm too glued to my phone, bro. Exactly. So no actually, two people pulled out because they got so locked into Claude Code. They were like because Claude Code was just ramping up. They were like, I cannot come to this event. I need to be on Claude. So
we decided to to create this thing,
which was like in the kind of sense of a summer camp where people from all over the world come together, there's no phones, there's nothing, you're completely separated from everything else, and you just hang out, you'd like, do art together, you whatever, you hang out for five days, and it was an amazing experience, and this is something that
I did it. We we basically broke even.
It cost like $90,000
to run, we made $90,000,
but I did it so that the people who came to it could do their own versions of it. I don't wanna be the person bringing this out to the world. It's so hard to do it. But if someone could turn that into a business, if some one of those people could turn that into a business,
something that brings people together, something that brings people into
the real world,
I think it's gonna be totally,
like, it's gonna be something that's explosive. And and what you've put in here is,
it doesn't have to be just in person.
I'm assuming you haven't heard of the Discord group called Dads of Marathon,
because it's very niche to one video game,
but there's how many people are in this right now? So this is an example of, like, a digital environment
community that's exploded,
and I'm part of, and it's absolutely amazing, there's 13,898
members.
It's a Discord group of dads
or basically casual
gamers who don't have time to play video games, who don't have time to play competitive video games,
but because this is a cooperative game where you have to talk to people,
and they know you're not gonna find other dads to play with who you know, because, you know, people don't have your hobbies anymore,
This Discord group, Dads of Marathon,
has been my, like, central community for the last three months to find other people to play this games game with. And it's the first time I've actually made, like, friends,
you know, purely online in a very long time.
And so I think these
niche
communities
around actually talking to people, actually connecting with people, actually doing stuff together, in this case it's a particular game,
is it clear like, that's almost
if you look at the amount of players playing Marathon right now,
there's almost more people in this group
than actually are playing that game. It's insane. It just exploded.
And that is listen to how niche that is. It's a niche game,
and someone has created a community for dads who are playing that game. Like,
it's so insane,
and 13,900
whatever people are in there. It's super active,
and it's an amazing,
like, community experience, and I'm so happy people went and did that. But it shows that there's this, like, thirst for connection
both in person
and online, and though those are the spaces that I'm looking into at the moment. So here's my quick take
on
on loneliness, the opportunity, and the impact.
So look at this chart. I don't know if you saw this. Americans with
less than one close friends is almost at 22%. It's at 22%.
Yeah. That's terrible. Crazy. Basically
Terrible. Almost a quarter of Americans
have no close friends.
So
from an impact perspective, I completely agree. Like, we need to do something about this.
From a business perspective, I think that you can actually create a bunch of
great businesses
that help people with loneliness. You gave such a great example of dads
playing marathon.
Dad's a marathon.
People
like, I I I bet you would pay a monthly fee.
Oh, 100%.
100%.
I don't even I if they sell something, I'm gonna buy it. If they sell some anything.
Exactly. So if we can just if we distill that for a second, you know,
you picked a game, a niche game with a niche, dads.
There's an opportunity to do dads
play x y z,
like Yeah. Games,
hobbies,
different niches, and you can go create the dad company. And that's just a huge opportunity solving loneliness for dads.
Right? Yeah. Especially men, we're not good at I mean, I don't know how you are, but I'm
quite
like, I have to be reminded to be social. I'm I'm not great at it. I'm not great at, like, reaching out to my friends and saying, hey, let's do something.
And so this Dads of Marathon thing,
as an example, is the first time since I was fourteen
first time since I was 14 years old, I'm 38 now, that I actually played,
like, a shooter competitive
multiplayer game with other people because of this Discord group.
Well, I would I would play with you. But
I I I believe. There's two companies I I wanna highlight that I think are doing well in terms of just to get people's creative juices flowing around building businesses around loneliness.
So one is a company called two two two.
Have you seen this? Never heard of it.
I'm a small investor in this, like so small.
But basically, you take a personality test. So it says, start by taking our personality test so we can determine your most compatible matches.
Choose an experience, so you decide if you want dinners, or cocktail bars, or salsa nights, or basketball games. And then you meet,
you know, five to seven different matches,
and you actually go and do that thing with these people in your city.
And they are absolutely
crushing it.
So, like, as an example,
you know,
dinner, cowboy hats, cocktails.
Kinda kinda random, but This
is amazing. And you know what? People listening to this podcast right now are thinking, oh, yeah. But these these guys have already done it. It's already done. First of all, very
few people
want to even do this type of business.
This is this is a type of business where you have to be a specific type of person to even create it. Yeah. And so if you happen to be the type of person
who likes to bring people together for experiences,
If you happen to be a goddamn
someone who enjoys organizing
events,
you might be at some sort of crazy advantage right now. Because I can tell you,
I do not like doing those things. I do it because I think it needs to be in the world, but I want other I don't wanna do it. I don't actually find that. That's not my thing at all. I'm too much of an introvert. But that is that is a killer
business for someone who likes to organize events and be around people. Kill killer business.
I wanna go to our next our next category. But
before I do that quickly, if you do wanna create a business like this,
you know, a membership model makes sense. Mhmm. Mhmm. So,
you know, I I'd encourage people to look at memberships.
And the beauty about that is you're getting recurring revenue.
The other company that's really interesting
in this space is a company called Fabric.
So you can see they do 75 plus gatherings per month month. They're in New York and Chicago. They've got 500 members.
And then they have just a huge wait list of people waiting.
It says they have no lengthy wait list, but I'm pretty sure there is a wait list to join.
No affiliation with this at all, but it's people apply. You get access to these spaces.
They I think they're like five to 10,000 square feet, and then you participate in these gatherings. And the gatherings are just these events. So they're basically an event company.
You know, you hear about how there's an issue with commercial real estate right now because, you know, office space is is
not, you know, doing so hot. So they've just retooled that into community infrastructure, and I hear they're doing really, really well.
So and a great example of,
you know, a business that I think is doing well
in terms of traction, but also making impact. Alright. What's the what's the next one you wanna talk about?
Oh, I I think I went that was my one.
Oh, that was that's true. That was your one. Alright. So my turn.
I wanna talk about
Eldertech.
So
I like the name. Eldertech.
Eldertech. Mysterious.
Everyone is creating apps,
businesses,
for,
like, what we just saw, Gen z and millennials,
cowboy hats and dinners,
speakeasies and this. Right? Yeah.
Who is creating
apps and companies
for older adults?
There's 70 plus million boomers in The US,
and there's a ton of underserved niches
and pain points that they have.
And
AI specifically is one of the greatest ways to help those people with things like hearing, mobility, social, memory,
and vision.
And there's this thinking that
if you're creating
products for older adults, you know, in the positioning,
in the landing pages, you you need to show, like, old people
and gray hair and white hair and balding and stuff like that. These people don't wanna don't see themselves as that.
They they just want want products that are gonna make them happier and healthier. And I think there is a ton of businesses to be created in elder tech,
which is basically this, you know, the technology
for older people,
mobile apps, desktop apps,
agents,
AI with some hardware. What do you think? Dude, first of all, what age range are you talking about here in your head? Like, what are you imagining?
65.
Okay. So
my main business, facilitator.com,
originally,
our
assumption of our audience was it's gonna be people in their twenties working in tech companies.
When we started doing Facebook ads and just stopped trying you know, like, putting them out there generically and seeing who would come in without doing, like, very specific targeting,
it actually ended up that the most customers
or our most valuable customers are all, like, over 45.
And
it
completely shocked us because all of our advertising is very silly,
very I mean, I'm in the ads being goofy.
If you go to facilitator.com,
it's kind of a cool looking website,
but our,
like, the people who can spend the most money with us simply because they are the highest earners or have built up the most savings are the people 40, 45,
50.
So
just to say the age range thing is such a big thing because we're all told when we're building products, we're all sort of excited to build stuff for people in their twenties because I guess that's the sort of explosive
growth range.
But if you're just looking to build something that makes a couple of million,
looking to who the who actually has the money,
and who's not getting a lot of cool shit made for them.
And again, this falls into the dads of marathon thing. You know, a couple of the people I'm playing with are 50,
and they're loving the fact that there's this place now to hang out if you're bad at the stuff. Again, you know, video games are all all gaming stuff is targeted at kind of a younger, cooler audience.
And also, especially with competitive video games, if you're not good at it, if you're not young, you're not gonna be good at it. So older people are sort of left out, and I'm I'm even in that range. And it's been really cool to see,
again, Dads of Marathon, it's almost like a piece of elder tech
targeting people who are no longer able to use like, I can't I'm not Twitch like speed anymore,
I can't like be competitive anymore, but you just wanna enjoy yourself. So I think that is a huge
even if you expand it, the age range down to, like, the the forties as well,
there's so much scope, there's so much stuff you can do there,
and I think it's a shame to only be targeting people,
you know,
like,
late teens, twenties, thirties, because
it's the people in their forties and fifties who have a lot more
also free time, you know, their kids have maybe moved out as well. That's a huge target customer for us at facilitator.com,
is people whose kids have already moved out, and they're looking to retrain.
It's a it's an amazing market, and, honestly, sometimes these people are just more enjoyable to deal with.
I mean,
when you're creating a business, sometimes
you don't need to overthink it. So Yeah. Fish where the fish are. Yes. And everyone is fishing.
Like, everyone is trying to create apps for gamers, let's say. Right? And the gamers are between,
you know, thirteen and twenty five.
Yeah. Like the Roblox
range.
You know? Exactly. So what you're saying is, like, the dads of Marathon
is, like, way more way underserved. And what I'm saying is,
you're so happy you found dads at Marathon.
Where's
the grandpas of Marathon
at? Yeah. You know what I mean? That'll be very relevant in, like, ten years as well when gamers
are graduate. Now that whole audience is getting older and older. It's getting more expensive to game. Only people who are gonna be gaming are older people. Exactly. So
for you know, in terms of, like, opportunities, I think that just, like, coming up with ideas around
65
is not only a good business
to be in because you're fishing where the fish are,
but you're also going back to the loneliness thing
Yes. You can actually make impact, which is so cool and so fun. You know? And and hot tip,
everyone
keeps telling me, Jonathan, Facebook ads don't work anymore because no one uses Facebook.
You're wrong. A very large amount of people use Facebook. They're just not in your age range.
And we have people, like, buying our product every single day who've just heard about us on Facebook on the same day. They just happen to be, like, 50 or 55 or 60 years old, and they're not using TikTok. So or YouTube. So I think it's it's just
we're sometimes a little bit out of touch with the market because of our age range.
I I definitely know I am.
Alright. Your turn. That's a good one. That's a really good one. Honestly, that's a really
that's really powerful.
I think, like,
maybe
connected to it, but not a 100%. So number 23 from your list
made it into my top six, is biggest hobbies,
adults learning for joy, pottery, woodworking, and drawing.
And I chose that because
I literally ran a painting
essentially a painting
retreat, uh, in February
for
adults,
most of whom were 40 and most of whom were in this,
you know, older range who who had
their kids had moved out. Maybe they're they've been working in corporate for a while. They're looking for a change. They're looking for something
different to do.
And so I think the age range of that group was maybe between 35 and
65.
And
people just wanted to take time for themselves to not learn,
like, some business thing, to not learn some tech thing,
but to actually just go and do things that make them feel joyful. And in this case, it was primarily painting.
Um, and this was like something again, I've never run a painting retreat under my brand, but I wanted to try it. And this was something that like sold out essentially instantly,
and I'm a huge
huge fan of creating
creating,
like, small bit a small business or small communities around these topics.
Mine like, painting,
music,
like, gardening's a huge thing.
I think I just think it's an amazing thing to go into. Again,
there's not a lot of competition
because not a lot of people even want to do this.
Like, it's kind of seen as, like, a boring thing,
and that's why there's not a lot of competition. Can I show you something real quick? Yeah.
So I have a friend.
He's a comedian, and he has, like, a new sort of reinvented himself as
someone who helps
people find their inner artist, and he I love this. He has a space
called Doctor. Tyler Lemko's Creative Club, and he hosts these events
where
let's see.
So I love this, and I wanna go to it already. Like, I would spend money on this. I don't even need to know more, and I would spend money on this. Okay. So he hosts these events,
and it's people who don't wanna use their iPhones,
who just wanna go and make something.
Yeah. And so, like, here's, you know, the paper lamp workshop.
I fucking love this.
This this is like
more of this needs to exist in the world,
and it's this this shit needs to exist.
Yeah. So you can see here, like, they're making paper lamps, and it's people, like, drinking tea and paper lamps, and he charges for these events.
Yeah. Starting to do really well, and he has this space, and it's just, you know, people are going there on their first dates, or they're going there, you know, just because they don't wanna go to a bar and drink. So I think this is related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about. I think this is a no brainer idea,
and
I think you're gonna start seeing more of this. It's it's great. And you see this as well with, like, book clubs as well, even paid book clubs. There's one in Berlin.
One of my neighbors was chatting to me last week, and he said, there's a book club in Berlin every Sunday, and, like, 85
people turn up to it every week and pay for it? Not saying this is some huge moneymaker or something, I'm just talking about the popularity
of a book club
because people just wanna find a place to hang out and see other peep see other humans and get away from their computers.
I think the
pushing back against screens, pushing back against
all of this stuff
is
it's creating a lot of space for that. It's creating a lot of space for in person,
for this, you know, helping people with hobbies. Also, by the way, a lot of people, when you get to my age, I can tell you,
a lot of us don't have any hobbies, and we need to even see what there is to do.
Like, if you've worked your whole life, if you've been busy your whole life, if you've had kids and you've been locked in on all of that stuff, a lot of people,
like, they stop having hobbies when they're like 18 years old,
and when they kind of come out of the tunnel of being busy, I'm just talking about this from my own perspective,
like I said, I haven't played video games really properly since I was 14,
I'm like, now, like, what do I do? Like, what are the things that someone
does
when you actually start having free time again?
And I think there's there's a huge this it's it's a it's a really good one. The list is really fucking good, man. I appreciate it. Alright. I wanna go I wanna do AI
employees.
You're not gonna believe what happens next. I
mean, I did a whole episode on this,
how do you sell $5,000
a month AI employees with my friend Nick.
And I think it's just there's a huge opportunity
to look at
white collar work,
social media marketers,
marketing managers,
ops people, and think about how can I go and set up a Hermes instance, an OpenClaw,
something,
and just go into businesses and set these things up for people and either host it
yourself,
host it in the cloud,
or or just teach them how to actually go and do these things? So I think that there's still
I mean, it's it's it's one of those again, all these ideas are pretty obvious, but I think this is one of the most obvious ideas
that if you go and create and manage digital workers for businesses
and I think you have to figure out what niche you want to play in because there are a lot of people going after this. So
maybe, you you know, you focus only on account you know, accountants or law firms
in Germany or whatever. But I think that there's a there's just, you know, thousands and thousands of companies that are gonna come and do this, set this up, and there's opportunity for all of them. So AI employees, what do you think about this business? So immediately, the first thing that comes to mind is
we're myself and the producer of my YouTube channel,
we are kind of like, we we don't have enough people, but we also, for that new business, don't have a huge budget for having someone sitting around and waiting around to do the work.
And there are things that we just need to do for that channel that are so
not
creative,
but just need to be done,
but there's also no, like, AI product that solves it yet. And so it would need a workflow, would need an agent. An example of that, really simple example is when I put out my podcast episode,
chapters need to be added to both the video and also the audio version,
and also I need to have clips created
so that we can look at the clips and then decide which ones we're gonna do, and we'll do the thumbnails, etcetera. But just that would save us so much time that that would essentially be a junior employee's
job
that right now doesn't feel like the right thing to do. But if we were able to dip into that, like, you know, monthly, okay, we can have this junior employee
agent
set up for a certain amount of time until we can hire someone to do it maybe and and and scale it up,
I think that would be
insane. The problem is actually, I think the problem is the use cases
are
again, this might be a verticalization
thing.
I think people like me who run businesses don't actually know the use cases that agents can actually do. Yep. And if I opened up you know, we use someone in your comments might now be writing, hey, use OpusClip. It actually clips up the YouTube episodes for you. Yeah. But then I have to go to OpusClip.
I have to type in the I have to put in the YouTube episode. I have to wait for it to finish. Then I have to check all the clips, and then I have to decide which ones I wanna do. Quit being a bully. You know? Exactly.
So it's not it's it's not solving the problem for me, but I think that
the companies who are gonna nail this AI employee thing are gonna be the ones that can show
the use case crystal clear to founders
or or managers and say, hey. This employee can do this, this, this, this, and this. It's it it removes this much work from your day, and it costs a fraction of the price, and we can switch it on right now. There's, like, a one time setup for you, whatever.
Yes. I honestly think if you could if you could make the use cases of that crystal clear, it would be a no brainer. Yeah. I think you're right. The verticalization
is gonna be key. The way to think about this, if anyone's actually serious about going and building something here, is
pick the vertical
and
pick the job title,
and then go and think about all the jobs to be done for that particular job title. So
for example, you know, the what you talked about, like a YouTube producer,
like all the or or YouTube editor or Junior
YouTube
editor, producer, something like that. It's like go and go and ask, you know, ChatGPT or
or, you know, Claude or whatever to
write out all the jobs to be done of that person. Like, what are the 50 jobs to be done? And then if your agent
or you or your set of agents or digital employee can go and do that at a tenth of the cost,
you have a very compelling offer. And then over time, what you do is
you just add the jobs to be done. You know, first you have, like, a few few jobs to be done, two, three jobs to be done. Then then you make five, and then 10. And then all of a sudden, you do have a true digital employee that you could sell. I think there's a lot of opportunity here.
So I really like this idea.
Can I give you guys an so the here's the company? The company is called Juniors,
and it's about getting junior employee. Because I think right now, there's not enough,
like, trust in the market for AI for founders like me to say, oh, yeah. It's gonna replace any senior employee.
But if the company was coming at me and saying, hey. We know it's not about replacing
or replicating a senior employee. We know it's about more of the junior work,
and but every single company needs junior employees as well. And so that's
By the way, someone go grab the domain. Junioremployees.ai
is available. Go and build this company.
And that's why you listen to the podcast, and that's why you like it and comment and you subscribe because we just give away everything. We give it away.
I I do think yeah.
I do think that it's a great
a great positioning,
and I I do think that that
I like that brand,
so thank you for that. Because imagine how cute you can make it. Like, you can make a video of
some
person trying to like, it's like the skit could be someone saying, hey. AI is gonna do everything, but then the founder is like, oh, but this sucks. This is not a good output.
And so the concept behind Junior's is that
you're still the creator, you're still the company, and you're making all this stuff as a human, but there are just things that slow you down and make you more
like, they just get in the way that you probably
would love not to do, and believe it or not, agents can actually solve these things now.
And maybe you could even have a brand where
where you 100
are against
AI doing any creative work. Yeah. And that would also appeal to everyone in the creative world that I'm in, because everyone in my world hates AI for creative work. It's like Yeah. Everyone's against it, but is very positive on AI for sort of menial, annoying tasks. So I think that
it could be a really strong branding,
just this sort of juniors,
we're here to help you get more done, not to replace your creativity, etcetera. What's your next one? Alright. Here we go. So
we're getting close to the end here.
I'm just looking which one I wanna hit. So for me, per this is like a personal one, number 32 from your original list,
which is biggest food. So personalized
nutrition based
on blood work and butt
gut biome
gut biome.
So I pay for a service already in Berlin. It's called Aware.
I don't know how much I pay per year for it, but it's a lot considering the very little that I get.
And the idea here is that you get, like, a very extensive blood test multiple times per year, it all gets dumped into the app, and then it gives you fucking no information.
So basically, what I do is I export it all and put it into Claude, and I'm building sort of like a brain of my,
you know, for
me in particular, I have a lot of stomach problems.
And so I have a
literally, one of my Claude projects is called let's just I'll read the exact name of it.
Stomach Helper.
And Stomach Helper, for me, has all of my blood test results relating to
the
the Aware app I'm using, but also all of the results from my gastro doctor
whatever.
And this is help this is the thing I go to and ask, hey, like, I'm feeling this thing, I've eaten this thing, could it be related, whatever. And I know it's not perfect, and I I know it can give wrong answers,
but it's clear that I'm having to build something
for myself that I'm not able to find on the market, and I'm not able to pay for. And I think when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to this particular one,
I think it's all about the verticals.
I don't think it should be generic health.
I think if you would do a business just for people with my problem,
which is GERD, g e r d. It's like when you're this, like, valve
in your stomach is loose, and the acid sort of comes up, and you get gastritis and all of this. Like, millions and millions like, I I don't know. It's like 30. There's a huge amount of people in the world who have this. It's a massive amount. But I can't get help. I have, like, relatively
good amount of resources to solve this problem in my life with doctors all over the world, and I can't find any central way to solve this problem.
You know, one doctor sticks a camera down my throat, another doctor gives me a blood test, another doctor says, you know, try this
diet, and then another doctor says, take these pills.
And there's, again, there's no central point. So for me,
this is if someone would come along to me and say,
Jonathan,
this is the one stop shop. We've got the tools. We'll be the central brain. We'll be like the project manager, we'll help you figure this stuff out.
That would
There's very little I wouldn't
spend
on solving a problem like this,
and then I would want the holistic approach. Yeah. Then I want you guys to send me the food that I can eat, and etcetera etcetera etcetera. So for me,
being able to get personalized,
not just personalized
nutrition
advice,
but also maybe
that this company,
you know, sends you the food or
recommends a chef that's, like, certified
for that specific thing.
Because meal plans,
yeah, it's it's it's for me, this is a huge problem, and I'm still not seeing the
I'm still not seeing
the vertical
the verticalization.
Yeah. You're basically what you're saying is, like, there's a lot of apps and and and offerings for horizontal,
but there isn't, like, the verticalization
and the specificness
that you'd like to see. Yeah. I don't wanna lose weight. I don't wanna you know what? There's loads of these things that are all bundled together. Yep. I want to fix my goddamn
leaky valve.
Have you seen this? Have you seen Zoe?
No. I've never heard of it.
Maybe Zoe is a really interesting business.
So the way it works is you get a test kit.
Yeah.
And it tests your,
you know, microbiome DNA tests. See? And then based on that, you download this app and it gives you personalized evidence based nutrition feedback.
So it's sort of a mix of,
in some ways, like, you know, a test like a 23andMe
meets a AI food tracking app like CalAI, which does 50,000,000 in ARR,
and then personalized food advice. I think what's really cool about this is it shows a a new model for how people are gonna create businesses, and then I'll get to your point around making it more specific in a second.
Where I was coming from with this nutrition
category is for the first time ever,
you have human beings, millions of human beings actually testing the data
for how you're feeling in a in a health environment. Your these tests are now possible. You have, you know, function health, for example. People going and spending hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars a year to get and learn everything about, you know, their health markers. So you have these health markers. People are uploading it to the cloud,
and then they're asking AI
to help them figure it out, or and or they're asking their doctors.
So the opportunity in this category
is to do something like ZOE. But to your point,
go even more specific. So you can do ZOE for
x y z issue that you have, ZOE for men,
ZOE for,
you know,
you you know, ZOE for
people in in Germany. Right? So there's a lot of opportunity to look at where are people gonna be getting more and more data around health markers,
and then how can you create an app or an offering
that combines
not only insights around those data markers,
not only an app that has AI built into it that helps you,
but also speaks to
the pain points that someone is feeling in that moment. Yes.
That's Yeah. And that's nutrition.
And look at look at the stats for The US alone.
Approximately sixty million Americans,
about twenty percent of The US adult population have GERD,
and this is why when you go into, like, a CVS, you have all
of these antacids,
all like,
rows of them. I think that's the hint of how you find your verticals.
Go into a CVS.
What is the over the counter stuff that you're seeing the most of? Well, that's probably the problems people are having. I mean, I can think of a couple off the top of my head.
Obviously, like GERD. Uh, migraines would be a huge one. That these kinds of things are so hard to solve for people, and if you can solve them, you can improve their life by, like, you know, up to 80%
just their well-being,
but there's very
these things are usually very kind of
holistic,
but often I'm not looking for something holistic. And I think what these AI tools can do, they can what they can enable
is this sort of locking in on one topic,
and helping people with that. And I would just hey, if someone thinks they can solve this shit for me, call me.
I'm gonna do another one relate not related to humans, sort of the opposite.
Pet Opposite of humans.
Health pet health.
So I did I did some I did talk about health in some of these in some of my list, but I think what's really underserved is pet health.
So, you know, you're starting to see things like,
you know, putting on collars on our dogs and stuff that looks at heart rates, step counts, sleep, things like that, and it gives you a report.
Pet industry is massive, 150
$140,000,000,000,
but a very small percent of that of of pets have smart monitoring,
have some of these, like, smart AI tools on top of it. So I think there's just a huge opportunity
to do a lot of what we talk about on on on the podcast around AI, AI agents,
but applying that to pet health to make pets
happier and healthier.
And as we know, people spend a lot of money on their pets,
and
I think there's just a lot of ideas around
helping pets
be more happy and healthy with AI, with AI agents,
and then also using hardware.
So you can go and look at just pet
devices and think about how can I inject a $30
AI brain
to this to make this better
Mhmm? A better product? What do you think of pet health as a category? I used to have a lot of pets as a kid,
but I haven't really had one as an adult. So it's it's something that people
people are obsessed with their pets in a way that they were not. When I was a kid, they were just running around the place. No one gave a shit, to be honest. Now it's the now it's people's baby. Right? People are obsessed with it. They wanna give it the right food. They want it to be, like, taken really well care of. It's like a member of the family,
and I can't imagine it going any other way other than pets with their own Eight Sleep
mattress covers.
So I I can imagine it would be huge. I've also listened to,
you know, the Tim Ferriss podcast. Kevin Rose often talks about his dog
and dog longevity
and giving the dog, like, different sort of
pills and different things to, like, resveratria
or whatever to to increase
its life. And so
I can't imagine this wouldn't be an explosively
huge market,
but I don't hear any of the animal
owners that I know,
like, using this stuff yet. So I think it's still pretty
nascent and young. It's still early. There's some products. I'm on one right now. Petpace.com,
there's Whistle. Like, a few of these have added AI recently,
But I I think it's, again, less than 2%,
really, really early. And for people who are trying to find ideas
for their pets,
one of the good ways is just look at what people are doing for human beings and then a pet.
You know, one one of the ideas that I had
I was on the My First Million podcast,
you know, two, three years ago, and I was like, someone should do athletic greens for pets. Ace One for pets.
And,
you know, someone took that idea, ended up making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from that idea,
reached out to me and stuff like that.
You're getting a cut. No cut. Do it for the love of the game. Do it for the love of the game. Goddamn
it.
But the the point I the point I'm trying to make is
you just look at what what you know, who's sponsoring Huberman's podcast
and then apply that to pets. I think this is a no brainer, I you know, category.
And if you love pets Is that a pun category?
Sorry?
Was that a pun?
Oh, yeah. It was a pun. It was a Hell, yeah. You know, a little meow meow, you know? Doggy gory. Yeah. Category.
Doggy gory.
So so I like this one.
I'm not, like, the biggest pets guy. Like, I don't wanna be thinking about I thought you were big pet guy.
I I mean, I like I like I love animals. I love animals, but I'm not, like I don't wanna spend
$24.07
working on animals, but for people who are obsessed with animals,
this is a huge category and something that I think that a lot of people should do. Alright. What's your what's your
So I'm gonna break the system slightly because
I wanna just pull together three of the of the
from your list and turn them into one thing just to double down on a point. Yep. So earlier I mentioned
earlier I put I chose as my number one live shows unscripted content.
Then we talked about the idea of, hey, the the loneliness,
the third spaces,
etcetera, and then we also talked about this idea of adults finding hobbies.
What I didn't say, and what I what I just wanna tell you guys, because this is happening, this is what I'm doing right now,
is
the missing point from all of this is that there's
within all of that,
who you choose and what type of person you choose is gonna have a dramatic
different dramatically different outcome and type of business. So for me,
I'm only targeting entrepreneurs
who are interested in doing these things. So for example, when I ran that painting retreat and that art retreat,
I was able to make 90,000
doll well, a $110,000
from it, and other people who are running creative retreats were like, what the hell? Like, these things usually make $5,000.
And I'm like, yeah, because I'm doing it for entrepreneurs.
I'm doing it for entrepreneurs who are looking for, like, a creative outlet.
And so I think when we're talking about all of these things, you don't so if you're looking for examples
on the Internet, you're often gonna find sort of like things
that
maybe wouldn't be that scalable or maybe wouldn't be very lucrative because
it's for the general public, and I think it's great to have that as a service out there, but for me personally, I just wanna say
my stack here is that I have a show that's unscripted,
as you said, it's a show that's unscripted that draws in a certain type of creative entrepreneur.
That show is building up an audience, that audience eventually gets pitched
something like a retreat, a creative retreat for entrepreneurs, business owners,
and that's where then I monetize
the the audience
using something that's about in real life and
doing something that's, you know, anti AI and kind of taking them away from their phones, etcetera etcetera.
And so for me,
the a lot of these things,
a lot of these businesses
that we talked about today,
you can choose the type of person you're targeting,
and sometimes just targeting the the targeting of the person makes the difference of this being an easy and enjoyable business to run or a grind.
And I think for a lot of what we talked about today, actually the older,
like, established
business owner, entrepreneur audience
is a fantastic
target market,
and I find it much harder to sell these things to
sort of people who are just starting off. And that's like a really boring piece of business advice that sometimes you wanna create things for people who already have money and already are established.
And then, you know, creative Tim Ferriss says, make the free version of something and then the premium version of something. So maybe you have your free meetups where people can do these creative retreats that look like your friends ones where they're making like the the lamps and everything, or like your low cost ones, and then you have your like high end premium ones like what we did for our one where you're charging up to 7 or $8,000
to go on a creative retreat.
And I think the I just wanted to, like, lock that in, that that doesn't have to be a low margin,
low revenue business.
This one retreat that we did is was a 100 k. We're running another event next week, that's 60 k, and that's just virtual
three hours per day for two days. And so these these can be still quite large numbers
if you're choosing
the entrepreneur as your sort of target market, which I think a lot of people listening to this
would
probably consider doing anyway.
I have a simple saying related
to this, which is
date the product, marry the niche.
So I'm happy. I like it, but what does it mean? So what it means is
the mistake a lot of people make is they pick the wrong niche. So they pick a audience
that,
you know, doesn't have a huge pain point, doesn't have a lot of disposable income, and even though they create a great product,
they're they're struggling.
So what I always say is you wanna pick a niche
that, you know, you love a lot,
that you have some unfair advantage in,
and that you believe have some disposable income. So in your case, entrepreneurship
and entrepreneurs made a lot of sense. I don't think that everyone listening needs to go and build something for entrepreneurs.
I do think that they should go and pick a niche that they, one, think is underserved,
two, think has disposable income, and three, has a big pain point. So we talked about pets
and pet owners.
You know, pet owners,
not not necessarily
the the the niche with the most disposable income,
but the thing is they're spending
their disposable income on their pets because they care a lot about it. Mhmm. So
I think that as people go through a lot of these different opportunities
and
and, like, the whole goal of this really was to get people's, like, brains and creative juices flowing,
think about,
you know, think about the niche
that you're that you're gonna marry, and and the product might change.
And that's what I mean date the product,
because you might it might change as you learn and you get to know it more.
So that's that's my feedback to that.
And I think we have time for one last
startup opportunity. I'm just gonna go through it quickly. This
one so we talked about
live
and
sort of an anti AI approach
to
creating content and building media. This is the complete opposite of this. I think that there's a huge opportunity, and some people are gonna hate me for saying this, but
for some people, you know, this is gonna be exciting. I think there's a huge opportunity to create AI native media companies.
What do I mean by that? I mean using AI
to to
to build Instagram pages
and
other social media
where
you're using AI. You're letting the audience know you're using AI, of course, but
to to build these audiences, and then from there, you're building products to sell them. I wanna give you an example. I have a friend,
his name's Rowan Chung,
and he grew he's actually been on the pod. He's talked about it before.
He grew his account from like zero to almost 400,000
followers in like the last eighteen, twenty four months.
And he does sit via
his AI avatar, and he talks about different, you know, news
news items. Right?
And
once he's built this audience, then he can go and, you know, build apps, build companies, and sell to that audience. I think that there's gonna be
a lot more of this.
And I know some people aren't gonna like it because they're like, oh, it's just AI slop. But, you know, if you actually go through his account, they're really, really high quality posts.
And
it it's it's it's really good. So I think that there is going be a lot of slop. I think that if you can create the top 1% AI native media company
in a specific niche,
then
you are
you're looking good. So I think this is a huge opportunity.
Yeah. This is a play this is a space I just don't know much about, so I'm just gonna have to nod and
silently
confirm.
Well, the hard part about this is how do you create high quality stuff?
Mhmm. Yeah.
And
I think one way to do that is to look at how the rowans of the world are doing it and being like, how is he doing this? What makes his videos really good?
And how can I do it for my niche? And what are the tools I need? Right? And, you know, things like HeyGen and Eleven Labs and putting it together. And
I think I think that's that's what you need to do.
I don't I'm not a believer that AI slop is going to work
in 2026
and beyond. Like, I think that that's
frankly a waste of time, but I do think that using AI to create media companies that are actually high quality, maybe with some with a human in the loop,
is
is just a great way to build audiences right now. And
I think, uh, once you have an audience, you can do a lot.
Well, I mean, just
first thing that comes to my mind, again, back to gut gut health,
if you ended up making a faceless YouTube channel where the research is excellent, and it's pulling together an audience of people who have GERD,
even if there's no even if it's kind of a bit soulless or whatever, but then the person who's making it has this audience of people who have this, and then they have enough, like, audience and funding to find an actual expert
who can then create, you know, do livestreams
around that topic,
that can still actually be good for the world, and it could be an interesting business. So I think, for me, I don't really
care as long as then the output or the monetization of it
has, like, a, you know, positive impact. So I think it I guess it doesn't matter if the audience building aspect of it has this,
you know, a like, as in the the the machine is telling the human what to put out there
as long as it's still helpful and useful to people or entertaining.
Amen.
I love it.
J Ice Cream. J Ice Cream. Jonathan Courtney, thank you for coming on the pod. This has been
our favorite startup ideas,
the greatest offer startup ideas
that we think that we think that people should go and explore,
go and build. And, yeah, I just wanna thank you for your time, and
hopefully people enjoy this one.
Thank you for your time. Yeah. Thank you for your time, man.
This is this is honestly like a it's a it's a pleasure.
We're recording this on a Sunday,
and there's nothing nothing I'd rather be doing than giving out sauce on a Sunday. Saucy Sunday. So Saucy Sunday. Thanks so much, man. I'm gonna turn my light here to a more depressing blue just to finish off the episode,
just to make it look like I'm in some sort of, like, surgery room.
You look dead. You literally look
like you're dead. It's late on a Sunday night, man.
Thanks, man. I'll catch you later. See you, dude. Bye. Bye.