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A special solo episode recorded from Mexico City, where I go through 3 million-dollar startup ideas I canโt stop thinking about: creators going into software, new ways to monetize underserved niches, Coffeezilla for startups, and so much more.
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00:00 First business idea: Leveraging an audience to create software products
00:00 First business idea: Leveraging an audience to create software products
07:00 Second business idea: Tyler Mikorski (AKA vookum) makes $500k/ month from a paid community
14:15 Third business idea: Coffeezilla for tech
Creators & Guests
What is The Startup Ideas Pod?
This is the startup ideas podcast. Hosted by Greg Isenberg (CEO Late Checkout, ex-advisor of Reddit, TikTok etc).
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Greg Isenberg [00:00:00]:
Hello, everyone. Good to see you. Good to hear from you. Today we're to do something a little bit different. It's just me on the pod, and I'm just to talk about some startup ideas I have right now, some things I'm thinking about. I'm recording live from Mexico City. I got my coffee with me, and the creative juices are flowing, so I figured I'd just hit record and tell you how I'm feeling about things. Yesterday, James Clear, the York Times bestselling author, came out with an app called the Adams app.
Greg Isenberg [00:00:30]:
And for those who don't know, James is a New York Times. Well, he's a New York Times bestselling author, but he's the guy for habits. If you want to get better at habits, you go to James, and he's got one of the best selling business books of all time. So he created a really beautiful app that basically drives that ritual of getting better at your habit. And it's just taken know, it's just looking at the App Store. It's ahead of Spotify, it's ahead of HBO, it's ahead of Netflix. I think what we're seeing is this is a part of a bigger opportunity around creators and creating software products. In the past, if you were a creator, what you would do would be, you'd go the Mr.
Greg Isenberg [00:01:12]:
Beast approach. So Mr. Beast created a big audience, and then he created Mr. Beast Burgers, which was the ghost kitchen selling hamburgers. He created Feastables, which is a chocolate bar company. With creating physical products, you have just a lot more headaches. Supply chain merchandising distribution distributors. It's a lot more difficult to get to the top selling a physical product than it is to get to the top using code.
Greg Isenberg [00:01:43]:
When I look at the James Clear playbook, I think it looks something like this. Number one, you own a category, so you try to own a category. James obviously owns the Habits category. Number two, you build an Internet audience. James has spent a lot of time, years, building his three to one newsletter. Even if you go on his instagram, which he has a lot of followers, I think in the millions, it's all about driving people back to the newsletter. So he spent years building his newsletter. Then you earn credibility.
Greg Isenberg [00:02:11]:
Number three, obviously, he's a New York Times bestselling author. There's other ways to gain credibility, but I think having credibility when you're launching a software product is critical. The fourth is you build beautiful software for product market fit. The habits app isn't just an app, it's beautiful. And I think they did a really good job. And from what I've heard from their community, it's absolutely stunning. And they love it. They're really enjoying it.
Greg Isenberg [00:02:41]:
So number five, you pick another habit. So you don't just build this app for one particular use case. No, the big idea is actually you pick another habit or you pick another ritual, and you create another app or multiple apps. So I could easily see James creating a sobriety app, a fasting app, what are all the different habits that are most popular? And then he can basically unbundle his own app and create these verticals. And then I can imagine him charging a monthly for it, or one time fees for it. And number six, you essentially build a constellation software, or Berkshire Hathaway, but for your word, constellation software. For those of you who don't know, canadian company that basically has been buying vertical SaaS apps for, I think, over 25 years, they've built this constellation of software, and it's an incredible performing stock. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but it's up thousands of percent over the last ten years.
Greg Isenberg [00:03:39]:
James could easily do something like this, easily do something like this where he's creating multiple apps, either that he's incubating himself or with an agency and or he's actually going and acquiring those businesses and then putting his name on it. And then step seven, he can either ipo that business just like Constellation software, he can sell that business, which is really important for creators, because they're no know, doing the speaker circuit or being reliant on YouTube ads. They've got a business that they can rely on and actually sell the business. So I think this new creator playbook is going to be very attractive to creators because they're in the market for creating something that they can make money while they sleep. So you can either sell the business or you can just cash flow that business forever. He doesn't need to sell it. I can see a world where he has ten apps. Each app is making anywhere between four and $40 million a year in revenue, and he just is just cash flowing it.
Greg Isenberg [00:04:38]:
So I wanted to bring this to your attention just because I think there's a ton of other names, words that have yet to be claimed. And I'm thinking about this a lot, and I'm also thinking about it in the context. Know, we have an agency called LCA, which is an innovation agency that partners with companies like this, and we actually go and create products like this. So I think that there's probably hundreds, if not a thousand plus different opportunities where you can do this. And I think you're just going to start to see a lot of creators go the software route over traditionally what they've been going for, which is the CPG route. So that's idea number one. Something to think about, something for you to think about and just brainstorm. What are different words? That there's opportunities.
Greg Isenberg [00:05:26]:
And if you're not the creator, can you partner with the creator? The second idea I've been thinking a lot about is I stumbled, and I've actually talked about this on the pod, like, I don't know, a year and a half ago, but I stumbled upon this guy. His name is Tyler Vukim McCorsky, 23 year old guy from central Jersey. He's got 2.2 million followers on TikTok, and he basically goes into the Diamonds district in New York and he negotiates on luxury watches, and he has a camera crew that follows him. And by camera crew, I mean like another 23 year old guy from central Jersey that is filming him either on a camera or just in an iPhone mostly. And he's crushing it. He's crushing it in two ways. One is he actually has a paid community of other people buying and selling watches. And rumor has it that he's doing $500,000 a month of revenue just from that paid community.
Greg Isenberg [00:06:22]:
So what he's doing is people watch him about buying and selling luxury watches, and then he's just like, hey, if you want to buy a watch, go to Vucam verified. And he charges like, I don't know, $20 a month to get access to this group. And it's a lot of watch dealers or people who are in the business, but also people just want to buy a watch at a good price. Now, $500,000 a month, and the margin there is 99.9%. That's one thing he's doing. And then the second thing he's doing is he's opening his own diamond jewelry exchange in Jersey. In central Jersey. And whole space with other people buying and selling jewelry.
Greg Isenberg [00:07:00]:
It's not open yet, but he's going to rent those spaces to different luxury dealers. So why is this interesting? Why should you care about it? And why should you steal this model? And we'll put up a video in this podcast right now so you can listen to Tyler in one of his videos to get a sense of what these real time luxury negotiations look like. And by the way, he was the first to do this. Come back to fast whips. Yasha has a blue skydrawer on a Jubilee bracelet that I really need. I'm going to sell it for twenty four seven. I got to go pick it up from Jasmine and Melanie. Hopefully I can pay like 23 and make myself $1,700.
Greg Isenberg [00:07:37]:
How are you? The price was 23 eight. Beautiful, beautiful timepiece. What are you whispering? 23 423. I need it. Give me it. Thank you. What? 23 eight, I just said. Yeah, just bought this fucking thing for 23 eight.
Greg Isenberg [00:08:10]:
Tony needs it. Better go drop it off with him now. Hopefully it pays my asking price of 25,000. There's going to be a fucking issue. There he is. Show Tony what's up. How are you guys doing? Everything good? Here's the watch. Just give me 25 two.
Greg Isenberg [00:08:25]:
It's fine. No, I didn't say any price. A genie. It's nice. I don't know what you got to do now. I have to go. Do you have my chain, though? Yeah, I got your chains coming right now. Listen, let's make it very easy.
Greg Isenberg [00:08:48]:
24 eight. That's it. 24 nine. Done. Not you, not me. Okay, cheers. Thank you. Okay, pay you wire and I'm going to get you.
Greg Isenberg [00:08:56]:
The chain is coming in like five minutes. All right. Anyway. 24 900. -23 eight. Thank you. Thank you. Made $1,100 on that.
Greg Isenberg [00:09:10]:
The day is still young. Not really. It's like 03:00 p.m.. Already. I think that's what's really interesting is no one was recording luxury watch. Hey, I'll buy this Rolex from you from $10,000. And then the seller is like, no, it's 8000. And then there's the back and forth and it's all these characters.
Greg Isenberg [00:09:28]:
And it was absolutely genius. The right niche, the right format, the right timing. He's been doing it for two years before I get into the idea that I think you can have around this. He actually, the other day, gave some really good advice on how you can grow like him on social. And I just want to share it real quickly. Don't do what everyone's doing. Create a new kind of video that no one else is making. So he did that, like, jewelry exchange stuff.
Greg Isenberg [00:09:52]:
Make your videos both fun and informative. Keep trying different things until something sticks. Once you find something that works, keep doing more of that and stop doing what doesn't work. And then probably one of my favorite piece of his advice is stack what works. So if you see that people are connecting to being funny, that you're funny, do more of the funny stuff. If you see that they like more of the educational stuff and funny stuff, do funny and educational, and then post something every day. Obviously be consistent. My prediction here is there's a hundred plus other watch talk esque opportunities ripe for innovation.
Greg Isenberg [00:10:31]:
So what Tyler Vucam did for luxury watch selling, I think that there's tons of different other verticals that you can actually go and create some new format. For example, the negotiation stuff. Just bring a camera around, build it has to be a niche, like luxury, luxury watches, that there's a lot of demand and pent up demand. But I think that there's a huge opportunity to basically take his playbook of finding the right niche, finding the right format, finding the right timing, of course, and then building something, starting with an audience and then thinking as the product to be either a marketplace or thinking about the product to be a paid community, because that way the margins are just so ridiculous and you can actually take some of that profit. Like what he's doing, he's making $500,000 a month and he's reinvesting that into things like real estate, the physical marketplace. And I just see this as another trend that is only beginning. And I think I did some preliminary research and there is literally 100 plus different opportunities like this. And maybe I'll talk more about some of these opportunities in future videos and on the pod.
Greg Isenberg [00:11:49]:
But I just wanted to get you thinking about this huge opportunity and just his playbook and how it sounds like so simple, but there really is, again, so many other areas you can do this for. The last idea I wanted to talk about today is I've been watching the youtuber coffeezilla recently. He's got a few million YouTube subscribers. And what he does is he's basically like an investigative journalist. He goes in front of his camera, he has his coffee, and you always see it steaming up the steam from the coffee. And that's kind of like his shtick. And he goes and he finds people who are essentially scamming other people, and he ousts them, and he does really good investigative journalists. So, for example, he did something on, I think, Logan Paul around.
Greg Isenberg [00:12:43]:
He had like a crypto thing that they never delivered on the project, and he goes deep on it, or grant Cardone. He talks about why grant Cardone scams people and stuff like that, or misleads people. Now, here's my idea. I think that there's a coffeezilla opportunity, but for tech, what I mean by that is there's a lot of action in the tech space, new apps coming out every day, AI startups, venture capital, all this stuff. And there used to be gawker media, which actually covered a lot of the gossip part of technology. But I think that there's an opportunity to do something like a coffee zillow for tech where he goes or she goes or they go. Person goes and investigates. Hey, this person says that they're doing 8 million ARR.
Greg Isenberg [00:13:32]:
Are they really doing 8 million ARR? Or this person just raised $100 million, but in actual fact they raised it three years ago, but only announced it today. I just think that the tech category, because it's become so big, there's hundreds of thousands, no, millions of people working in tech. There's enough of people interested in the investigative journalism, a little bit gossipy part that I think that there's a huge opportunity to begin by building an Internet audience. There probably YouTube to start. There are versions of this that happen. Like there's vc brags on Twitter. That's kind of like a jokey Twitter account. There's like a little gossipy stuff.
Greg Isenberg [00:14:15]:
But I'm talking about a non anonymous real journalist going deep on these topics and building a real media company around it. So those are my three things, ideas, startup ideas, niches I'm thinking about right now. And I want to share it with you on the where it happens pod because this is where we talk about these ideas. It's really the only place where you can come. And I only want to talk about ideas on this podcast. And I only want to talk about ideas because I think that it'll get your creative juices flowing. And if you're working a full time job, maybe it makes you do a side project or maybe you even want to quit or maybe you have your own startup right now, but you're just looking to take it to the next level. So thank you for tuning in.
Greg Isenberg [00:15:11]:
This has been fun. And subscribe to the YouTube. Least you can do if you enjoyed this and comment something because I read every comment. I read every comment and share this pod if you enjoyed it. So cheers to you and have a good one later. Close.