Transcription
When I give away a bunch of free startup ideas, the exact playbooks of how to do it, and then I get a DM saying, "I just hit 1 million ARR and it I was able to retire my mom."
If anyone has good ideas for AI startups, it's people who work at jobs they don't like. If you're listening to this, you're early, and you can actually go and participate and create businesses around that. That's why it excites me. You have like this five-step framework of how someone can build an AI business in 2025. Let's do like a quick 5-10 minute crash course on two AI products I think would be really valuable to people. So okay, before we get into the episode, I want to give some context to this conversation.
In the last few months, I've gone deep down the AI rabbit hole on YouTube. One of the things that has become clear to me is that there is so much opportunity right now to use AI to build a great business for your life. And so I got inspired in the leadup to this conversation with Greg because I believe that so many people, maybe you watching at home, get excluded from these new wealth opportunities because of the belief that you're not a tech person. And so my intention with this episode was to make it so easy and simple for you to start an AI business. And so we brought on Greg Eisenberg. He's a successful entrepreneur; he's also a tech outsider that built and sold three companies before he turned 30 and is now building a multi-million dollar AI company called Boring Marketing.
A little behind the scenes, before we even hit record on this episode, Greg told me that in the last year he has shared this framework with a few people in his network, and they've gone on to build AI businesses that make over $50,000 a month. And so my hope with this episode is simple: that some of you watch this video, it inspires you to take massive action, and by this time next year you're DMing me saying that I just built my first million-dollar AI business. That's it. I'm speaking that into existence for you guys. Let's get into the video, Greg.
If someone's listening to this, maybe they stumbled upon this video on YouTube, they clicked on it on their feed, what is going to be the value to them? They're non-technical, but they want to start a business. What is going to be the value to them of listening to this conversation, of what we're about to talk about in the next 60 minutes?
So my thesis is that, you know, if you landed here and you're on this YouTube video and you are seeing what's happening in the world of AI and technology and you feel like an outsider, my thesis is that that's a limiting belief. And by the end of this episode, what I hope to do is to remove that veil because that's what it is and give you the confidence to actually go and put something out in the world that will change your life.
I think that's awesome. Let's do it. Let's do that. Let's try to do it. Let's do it right now. Um, you know, actually, you know what? Let's start, let's start right in the beginning, cuz I see these videos on YouTube talking about people that are making millions of dollars with AI agents. I want to start right from the top. What is an AI agent?
Yeah, so good question. Um, an AI agent is, well, do you know what an LL, LLM is? Le, let's start with that. Okay, so here's the way I, I'm going to just dumb it down because I think uh what insiders like to do is put complicated words associated to simple things to keep people out. So in this conversation, we're going to try to use simple, simple language, um, because I actually don't think that the terms really matter. Large language model doesn't really matter. What matters is this: before uh AI came to be, all software was dumb. Meaning if you were, if you signed up to salesforce.com, which is uh a CRM, custom, you know, customer relationship management software, basically a way to track all your sales leads, if you signed up to it uh pre-AI, that software was dumb because it relied on the salesperson to go in and add uh a sales lead manually. So it would say Greg Eisenberg is a good sales lead, and it says Greg Eisenberg, my email address, company I work for, and it's basically this manual process, and a multi-trillion dollar industry was created on dumb software.
Um, now we're entering an era uh of smart software. I call it smart software. What happens to software when you can inject human and humanlike intelligence into that software? And what do I mean by that? Instead of relying on uh a human being to go and say, "Okay, Greg Eisenberg is a four out of five-star lead for these reasons," what if there was intelligence, humanlike intelligence, aka an LLM, aka AI, that could go and, you know, maybe scrape the internet and based on a bunch of criteria score the the sales lead? Now that's what an LLM really is. And that when, you know, when people, you know, they hear about or they've used ChatGBT and products like that, you're basically, you utilizing humanlike intelligence to accomplish a task. And what an agent is takes it a a little step further. It says, okay, we've got humanlike intelligence over here. What if we can create a human-like person to go and actually complete the task? Meaning what if we can create an AI salesperson? So what if you can go and say, um, "I would like to close 10 sales leads this month, and the ideal customer profile is a CEO who is making between one and $10 million a year in their business, and they need to be in, you know, England, let's say," go and complete that task. In the past, you would actually ask a human being to do that, but in this new, you know, smart software uh world, you can actually give a task to a human-like individual to go and complete it. Now I want to end, I want to just say one last thing before before I hear your reaction to this: when you, when I go on X or Instagram or whatever, I'm seeing everyone talking about AI. I still think, despite that, it's underrated. I still think that we don't understand how society will change, and by the way, they'll, there'll be some negative effects to this. We can talk about it, but there will be some negative effects to this, but how society will change when you can completely unlock uh humanlike intelligence and human-like people at scale. What happens to the world? Now I like to look at it glass half full, as in if you're listening to this, you're early, and you can actually go and participate and create businesses around that, um, and that's what, that's why it excites me.
H, you know, I, I, I just find the AI conversation, it's just so fascinating, um, and you know what you even mentioned right at the end there, you mentioned that it's underrated. And so I was thinking about what you were saying about like up until this point we've been using dumb software, like we've had to, it's had to be paired with our own intelligence to actually be like useful, and that's created trillions of dollars of value with dumb software, and now we're kind of getting into this like AI era where we now have, as you called it, smart software. And so if we're actually underrating it right now, what in your mind, what is the the opportunity like? It's hard to do, but like how would you even quantify the opportunity or what's going to happen in the future looking forward, the fact that we now have smart software?
Yeah, I want to talk about two specific examples, uh, and and there's more than these two specific ones, but I just want to give a couple just to get people's creative juices flowing. One is my belief is that SaaS, the SaaS industry, software as a service, so companies like Adobe, um, companies like monday.com, those big companies are basically being completely dismantled by people who are going to go and, you know, in our world they call vibe coding. Vibe coding basically just means you're going to go into a software like Replit, Bolt, Lovable Cursor, and just like, just like how you uh do a Google search, you type something in, uh, you can do or a ChatGBT search, you can basically prompt some of these platforms to create software for you. So I believe that uh there's a ton of opportunities to go and create cheaper or free versions of some of these software products, um, and create businesses around that. And so go and create like the uh DocuSign for, you know, Germany, go and create the monday.com for uh Canada, and charge a tenth of the price and try to just suck as many clients as you can. And when you look at how big these companies are, these big SaaS companies, they do billions a year, so even if you could get 1%, 2%, it's absolutely insane. So that's one trend uh that I think that people listening could go today and go and create a SaaS business uh to go and compete with some of those. The second one is uh agencies, so the consulting business, the freelance business, the agency business, um, that is, I mean, such a huge business like McKinsey and all these companies, you know, gener have thousands of employees, like center thousands and thousands of employees. What happens when completing, what happens if I can spin up a junior McKinsey analyst in a second? So I think that there's an opportunity to undercut consulting agency and to fulfill it by AI. Now I know there's someone in the comment section that's saying, "Well, you'll never be able to do that because I've got really good taste, or this person at McKinsey does, you know, they hire McKinsey because they don't want to get, you know, fired at their job." Like, no one gets fired, you know, there's a quote, no one gets fired uh when when you hire IBM and or no one gets fired when you hire McKinsey. Why is that the case? It's the case because, you know, people trust those brands. I'm not saying McKinsey is going to go to zero. I'm not saying Adobe is going to go to zero either. I'm just saying that there's going to be billions of dollars for you to go and pick up and create cheaper services that probably have similar type of results, and I don't think enough people are doing it.
Yeah, you know, that's awesome. Okay, you know, I'm getting excited, and and and we're going to get into, um, I was actually reading it last night, you have like this five-step framework of how someone can build uh an AI business in 2025, and we're going to get into it. Before we do though, and you spoke about the the opportunity, and you even mentioned it before of like there are people that are that have watched your videos or read your content and actually reached out, like implemented some of the things that you mention and reached out to you to be like, "I've built a $50,000 a month business, or I'm building like a a business that's tracking to a million in revenue from implementing the steps that you mentioned." And so I wanted to just do like a little thought exercise for you with you before we get into the frameworks, which is, let's say I had two groups of people, right? I have the group that watches this video and it's a complete waste of time to them, like nothing happens after watching this video. And then I have another group of people that they listen to this conversation, and 6 months or 12 months from this point in time they have built something that is having a meaningful impact in their lives. And let's just say I, I zoom out, I don't know, 100 ft, and I just observe their behavior, I observe the actions that they took in that 6 to 12 month period. What did group two do that group one wasn't doing? Like the people that are successful in actually doing the thing, in building the AI startup, what, what are they doing versus the people that aren't?
I would say two things. There's two things that they, they are doing differently. One is uh the second group is way more curious, just intellectually curious about using some of these new products and pushing out stuff into the world and seeing what's going to happen. And I, I, I will say I'm one of those people. Like I hear about a tool, I hear about something that's happening, and I want to get in, I want to get involved, I want to get my hands dirty. The second thing is a lot of people are afraid to get their hands dirty, and some people think that they're too good to get to to get their hands dirty. Um, I once met uh a guy who uh owned many factories and and he was in the clothing business, uh, so he manufactured clothing. He's a very famous uh individual, and uh he would tell me that every year, and I don't know if this was truthful, but I it felt truthful, every year he would go and sweep the floors of his factories for one day, for one day only. And I was like, "Well, why do you do that?" And he was like, "I need to remember how to sweep the floors. I need to remember what it feels like to sew so that I understand, you know, the the machines and I understand like my business, right?" He's like, "I don't feel like I'm better than others because like I've succeeded, etc." And I think that there's a lot of people who are listening to this and they're like, "Well, I don't need this. I don't need to use Replit or Lovable or Manis or Bolt or try these things or push this idea out there because I've got a stable job. I'm, I'm, you know, I'm okay. I'll do it in, I'll do it in six months when the tools get easier." You know, people say, I hear this narrative a lot, "Oh, it's not, it's not that good. It wasn't able to actually do what I wanted to do, but it was, it was 96% there." When it's 96% there, that's exactly when you should be training so that when it gets to 100%, you're a ma, a master. You're, you know how to just like prompt this thing and get the most out of it. So my hope is that 100% of people listen to this and they, even if they don't believe that we're at the 100% mark in in in AI uh in terms of the output quality, and by the way, I actually don't think we're at 100%, but even if we're not there, they still say, "Okay, I'm going to go implement these things as a part of my workflow. I might not ship products that do 10k a month, 20k a month, 50k a month and build companies around it, but having it as part of my workflow is going to make me smarter, and being smarter is going to yield good results than not being smart about these tools."
Yeah, you know, I, I, I think that second point is so good, and it's something that I, I constantly uh remind myself, which is uh you have to embrace the beginner's mindset is what I tell myself. I think a lot of the times it's like we, we get to a point where we feel like ashamed to be beginners, like we feel ashamed to be noviceses, and I think it's interesting for me cuz we've done over a 100 episodes of the show, um, all with like entrepreneurs that have achieved these like great feats and built huge businesses, and they always have that ability to go all the way back to step zero and be like the beginner again, and the humility of that, um, and that's how you learn. That's how, like when people talk about gold rush eras or a new wave or whatever, that's how you take advantage of opportunities is like you are willing to be the complete novice, the beginner, and build from the base up. Um, I think it's so good you actually said this when we, when we spoke before this conversation, and I think it's just a nice, a nice intro into your framework and how you think about building an AI business. You said, "Anyone can sign up for an Instagram account, a TikTok account, an X account for free. You have access to global distribution instantly, and if you can pair that with AI that can automate work, the possibilities are endless." Can, can you, can you explain what do you mean by that? The possibilities are endless.
Not only is that statement true, but there's one thing I missed from that statement, which is not only could anyone sign up uh with a TikTok account, an Instagram account, X account, be connected to the 7 billion people and and unlock opportunities with AI, those seven billion people or or 6.5 billion people have a credit card attached to the whole network. Never in the history of the planet have you had access to 6 billion people, six plus billion people, where you have their credit cards. And anyone who creates great content, uh, especially with the 4U pages now and the 4U pageification of all the different social platforms where it doesn't matter if you have a million followers on X, you know, I, I see sometimes accounts with 500,000, 1,500 followers get a million, 2 million, 3 million views because the content strikes a chord. So the limiting factor to creating a a business that um that could change your life re is, can you create content that's going to resonate with people in a niche that is underserved? And can you do, do you have the skill set to actually put out or vibe code a product into the world so that when they see that product they feel something, they connect with it, and can you get them to pay something for that product? Now I'm dumbing it down. It's these three things. I'm dumbing it down because I actually think that that's all it really is, like that's what business school should be in 2025. Like modern business should be those three things. It should be classes dedicated to how do you go viral on social, and what does that mean? Picking a niche, picking different formats, uh, when do you post, how to think about those things? It should be about how do you use AI to assist you in implementing product ideas that connect with that audience, and it should be about pricing strategy and business models around how you can get and create a sustainable business. That's all it is. I don't know what people learn in business school today. I was speaking to a friend of mine, she just did her MBA at Columbia. She spent I don't know, 200 some odd thousand. I don't know if you went to an Ivy League school, so I apologize.
No, I didn't.
Okay, you're in a safe space, Greg. You can talk about it.
Safe space. Okay, it's not real. It's not a real, it's fake. It's a bubble. It's like you're, you know, you're not in the real world. It's like you're a bubble boy. You know, that's not, that's not how you learn business. Like don't tell me that you're learning business if you've never played with Replit.
It's it's interesting as well because um I even, I heard it even as I was preparing for this episode, even in your story, cuz you're a college dropout, even in your story that that like urge to actually learn and implement what is happening, I think at the time it was in engineering, like in coding, what's actually at the cutting edge in, that's the, that's the motivation for why you left school. Can you just briefly tell people about that? Can you briefly give people that context?
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It was 2009, and I was, it was the, you know, the app store had just come out, um, we all knew at that point, 2009, 2010, that the app store was going to change everything, just like how we all know right now that AI is going to change everything, just like we knew that cloud was going to change everything, the web was going to change everything. It, it was very obvious in 2009, 2010 that mobile and the app store what was going to unleash things like Instagram, things like Uber, etc. So I'm sitting in these classes, you know, curious beginner's mind, learning, pushing apps to the app store, just trying to get something out, just to, you know, again, it wasn't at 100%. People were creating like beer, beer drinking apps and fart apps and stuff like that, but it was just like, "I need to create something so that when a billion people are using apps, I'm ready to ship for the prime time." So I went to my professor and I said, "We are learning about how to create desktop apps right now, like this is, this is, by the way, that class was supposed to be, this is in McGill University. It's, it was a top 20 university in the world, like here I am thinking I'm at the be best univers, one of the best universities, and we're learning about how to create desktop apps in a world where mobile is what matters." And to me, that just didn't make any sense. So I was like, "Hey, can we learn how to create apps? I think that this app thing is going to be really big." And he was like, "That's not how this works. There's no apps in the textbook." And he hands me a textbook, and the textbook was like introduction to like Java or something like that, and I was just like, "How do I hand my resignation letter in right now?" Like, if you're telling me that at the end of this degree I'm going to be a computer scientist, but I don't know how to create and scale mobile apps, to me that means you haven't done your job. You might, you, you might have a narrative in your head saying like, "Yeah, I did, I taught them computer science that I, you know, I need to teach them the fundamentals, and then they can learn mobile apps on their own," but I had an insight which was, "I'm not going to be able to depend on anyone in my life," and I'm sure a lot of people think like this too. When my bank account was empty, it wasn't like I can call the professor and be like, "Fill my bank account. I learned computer science." It wasn't the degree, it wasn't something I can actually fall back on. The only thing, the only thing that you can fall back on is assets, uh, now that asset could be in the form of financial assets, it could also be in the form of you've got a million followers, it could also be in the form of you have a skill set that is really in demand, for example, you understand how to, you know, do AI coding. So when I had that insight, I was just like, "I need to get the hell out of here."
Be crickets, and they're going to be like, "Wait, what? I didn't expect that."
And in a world where the amount of products and software and startups are going to 100,000x because the tools make it so that something that you know cost hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a few years ago now doesn't cost anything, the distribution is the moat. So, uh, what I mean by that is if you can create a system around posting content every day and growing your audience and positioning it like a, uh, like a movement, making it different, making it even look like, from a brand and design perspective, that it's different.
Um, so when you're in V0, I recommend that you—I actually don't recommend that you design things that look like Apple or Warby Parker. I actually recommend that you make things look like the anti-Apple and anti-Warby Parker in a lot of ways. Make it look chunky, put a lot of colors, um, and post content every day because that's what's going to get you customers. At the end of the day, there's only two ways to get customers, right? You either have it organic, or you pay for it. And, um, organic customers are always, you know, they're better than—not paying for it is better than paying for it, basically.
Yeah, let's talk about organic just for a quick second, which is I think, for me personally, I am so big on step one, like whenever it comes to doing something. I'm so big on step one because I think if you can—if you can successfully execute step one, you start to build momentum. And so for the person that's listening that's like, "I don't have an audience right now," like, "My following is not zero, but it's like close to zero," you know, I'm not—I'm not Greg Eisenberg. Um, what would be your step one to them of like posting content in a way that if they commit to it over time, they're going to build an audience that they can then launch their minimum lovable product to? Could I show a PDF about this because I actually just wrote this down?
Go for it. Okay, let me just pull it up. So I'm going to go through this four-step framework on how to build an audience in 2025, in—in four minutes or less, and this is the answer to your question. So before I begin, I believe that the way to build businesses today is using a framework that I coined the ACP framework: you start with an audience, you build a community, and then you build a product. So your idea for an AI startup, you might want to just start as a Twitter account or an Instagram page and start testing what people like in that audience, start building a following, so that then once you've got that, you can build a product for those people. Basically, the old way of building a startup was: start with a product, then build the audience. Now the new way is: start with an audience, then build community, product. There's a four-step playbook, uh, that I wrote out, um, for—for basically how do you systematize and build an audience that's going to work for you.
So the first thing is, uh, first step is, you know, a lot of people don't do this, but identify who you're creating for, understand what they're not getting from others, um, and you know, I just put this as a note because if you aren't getting engagement, start one level broader than your niche. A lot of people start a little too niche, so sometimes you might want to go a little broader. The secret to building an audience is formats. Even this, you know, YouTube channel has a format. You have a specific type of format that is working for you. So what I tell people to do is pick one format for each business day, try to systematize that, look for formats outside your niche and copy those—n you know, that format and bring it to your niche—your niche. I'm going to go—step three: systems. Uh, this is really important, so you want to—you're going to want to create your creative faucet routine. What—what I mean by creative faucet is find what's—how you're going to get your creative juices flowing. So, for example, that might be you listen to podcasts to get, you know, your creative faucet going, and you need a—a strong creative faucet because you want to have interesting ideas and interesting content to share on your audience. So it might be podcasts, blogs, social, and then capture those ideas in your—and I use a notes app—and then just schedule out those pieces of content. And the last thing is create a goal. So if you want to create an audience in 2025, just pick one primary goal for 2025. Now a lot of people pick the goal of, "I need a certain amount of followers." I think that's actually not a great idea. Think of something like a 25,000-person email list, a million dollars in sales through social. So my point is the primary goal for your audience might not necessarily be followers; it might be something a bit more downstream, like revenue or an email list. Um, that's my advice to people around how to build an audience in 2025.
Yeah, no, that's so good. I—I love the, um, "pick one format each day," because I think what I've realized, um, with content and actually just businesses in general, the usually the thing you do on day one is not ultimately what is successful for you. And so from speaking with content creators that have got millions of followers, the thing that they do really well is, first of all, they post, because then you get feedback, and then they're doing different things, and they're like—they're looking for that spike; they're looking for that—the type of post or the format, to your point, that when they posted it, instead of getting, I don't know, five likes, it got 20 likes. And as soon as they get that spike, they're like, "Okay, that's the one," they double down, and they continue to—to go up. I think it's—I think it's so good. I'm going to go to step four, which is: nail retention and perfect the core loop; keep your users coming back. AI businesses shouldn't just attract users; you must keep them engaged. The best startups optimize their core loop. Can you explain what that means? What is a core loop?
The—the problem with a lot of AI startups is a lot of people are trying these products because it's, you know, I call it curiosity revenue. Like these startups are saying, "Oh, wow, I hit 3 million ARR," but it's just people trying out, you know, these products. But the core loop, meaning like the—the core value creation isn't really there; it's just that they're—think of it as like an impulse buy, you know? It's—you're—you're there trying it out, but like the actual foundation isn't—isn't there. And remember when we talked about MVP and MLP, we talked about it from like a foundation standpoint. Like your MLP is like a very strong foundation of one killer feature, aka core loop, um, that, you know, is going to drive retention up. And why does retention matter, and why is it so important? Is because, uh, you know, we talked about fancy words in the beginning of this, uh, episode, is retention is just a fancy word that says: do people like your product and use it every day? If it's very valuable, you're going to see high retention, meaning you're going to see people use that product every single day, and that should be your goal as a—as a product creator. You want to drive value. If you can drive value, you'll be able to monetize it for, you know—so your—your first goal is to drive as much value as possible, so that—and from a metric standpoint, that means your—you'll notice your attention is quite high.
M, you know, I think it's—I think it's a really good point, and it's a mistake that we make with—as entrepreneurs, and I've made this mistake, which is so often it's like our business isn't growing, or we don't have the revenue that we want, and so instantly we think, "I need new people; I need new users; I need new customers." You don't think, "Wait, all of the customers that I already have, how could I give them more value?" Like we don't think about retention. So you—you spoke about core loop. If someone wanted to understand that and also start to understand some of the steps of like how they could actually improve the retention in their business, where would you advise them to look first? Like, where—what would you advise as step one in that process?
Well, when—when people—let's say you've created a product, and you're noticing that people are churning, meaning they're stopping to use the product, uh, there's basically two ways to do analytics: one is, uh, I think it's called behavioral analytics, which is looking at something like a Google Analytics dashboard, which says, "My retention is 30%; I had 25,000 daily active users," basically just looking at the numbers. And then there's what's called—I think it's called attitudinal analytics or voice of customer analytics, which is basically asking people why, you know, what they did, what they didn't like about the product, and getting their voice of customer. Let me explain quickly why it's important to have both sets of data and why most people just look at the pure behavioral stuff. Imagine you are—you know, you go to shop at a Walmart, and you know, you're at the Walmart, you spend 45 minutes there, and you spend $200 there. If you just look at behavioral analytics, it's going to be like, "Wow, what a great customer! Person spent 45 minutes because, you know, they love the—how beautiful the shop is; they spend $200, and that our average, you know, cart size is $100, so they spend two times—so, you know, what the average person spends." Marketing team is high-fiving: "This is amazing!" But what didn't—what didn't that capture? Well, it didn't capture the fact that they spent 45 minutes in the store because they couldn't find what they were looking for, and there they spent $200, but their budget was $500, and so they—there was a missed opportunity. So my recommendation to people who, you know, are going—are going to use this workflow, which is, you know, building the audience, vibe coding, putting out these products, is: look at the retention numbers, but use voice of customer, uh, open-ended questions, asking people, you know, what they liked about it, what they didn't like about it, to get a full picture, and using that full picture, that'll help you increase retention.
M, you know what it reminded me of as I was listening to you is almost that quote of like, um, like on your—on your deathbed or whenever it ends, the thing that people are going to remember is how did you make them feel. Yes, and so like sometimes as businesses it's like you can get so fixated on just like the—the quantitative number, just the number on the screen, that you completely forget but how did you make the customer feel. Yes, and so you could—you could win, and I think this is to your point, like you could be winning in terms of like the—the numbers, but actually there's a huge missed opportunity if that feeling that the customer has isn't a good one, and that's when they're going to churn, and you're going to lose customers in business. Yeah, there's—there's a lot of people in the tech world who—who pride themselves with—with the—the fact that they're data-driven. They say, "I'm data-driven; I'm data-driven." What does that mean? That means that the data drives their decisions. I don't believe in that. My—my saying is: data informs, not drives. I think that when we let the data run our companies fully, that's when you end up creating tasteless products that, you know, are very hard to differentiate, and that we don't want to get in there, right? So we want to—we want to create startups that have the highest probability of success. So, uh, you want to look at the data, and you want to—like you don't want to drive blind, obviously, but you want to just—you just want to have it one piece of the puzzle, not the full puzzle.
You know, on the—on the point of the core loop, I think about the business that maybe they have like it launches and it has like a couple features, like you're kind of experimenting, you have a few aspects to it. How does someone identify, "Actually, this is the core loop," like, "Even if—if my business is having success, this feature over here actually doesn't really matter, but this one really does," like, "This is the core reason why people are using it." I think it's—it's a similar question to like, "How do I know if I have product-market fit?" You'll know because people are telling—will be screaming it at you. The hard part is once you have product-market fit, how do you stay focused? So, for example, you know, Calendly—a lot of people know that company; it's a multi-billion dollar company; it's a great success story. I think he bootstrapped it, um, for a very long time, and it's a pretty core one feature, right? You send someone a link, and they can book a time with you. Now, of course, they can build stuff around that, but for the longest time they just focused on the core loop; they just focused on, "How do I make the best scheduling product, uh, out there?" And you can schedule via Google Calendar now, but I still see more Calendly links than I do Google Calendar. I don't know about you, and I think it's because they focused on the core loop.
Yeah, that's actually really cool, of like—I—I think it's actually empowering in a way, which is you can build a multi-billion dollar business by focusing on like one core feature and then building a brand around it, 'cause I'm sure that's also part of it, right? Is like Calendly—like even in the name, right? You like, "I'm going to send you my Calendly." Like you don't think Google; you think Calendly first, and that's like the brand. Um, but just—they focused on just doing one thing, and it—and it's led to that result.
Absolutely. On step five: partner with creators to scale; leverage influencer-led growth. Many AI startups struggle to scale because they only focus on the product, not on community-driven growth. Creator partnerships help you break into markets faster and build trust. Can you talk about that?
The PDF I went through, "How to build an audience in 2025," that's the blueprint, but it's going to take time, you know what I mean? Like it's going to take time. So the question for—for people is: does it make sense to, uh, try to get creators—give them 25% of revenue, 40% of revenue, 50% of revenue—just coming up with creative deals to be like, "You've got this audience of x amount of thousands of people; I think that this product they would love. How can we make this a win-win?" And positioning it like that and give them the revenue. It doesn't mean that you need to do—do it with them forever, you know? What—you're in the background; you're still building your own audience. So you might be able to reduce your dependency on creators, you know, in a two years, three years, four years, but I do think that a mistake a lot of people make is they don't—they don't go to creators and try to figure out, "How can we make this work for you?"
M, I think you're right, and I think I would assume—I don't know this, but I would assume one of the biggest reasons is: let's say that I'm at the point where I've launched my AI startup; it has good traction; like we're making a good amount of money; I know that like I've—I have the product-market fit; I—I've figured out the core loop, and it works, and now I'm thinking about scaling. I would say the thing that holds people back from like the creator partnerships is they're probably like, "I just don't know any creators; like how do I even start? Like I don't know how to get Ali Abdaal or like, you know, whoever it is—Colin and Samir—to, um, partner with me on—on my product." What—what is your advice to someone that's at that point, and that's the thing that's holding them back?
Limiting—going back to what we talked about in the beginning, it's—it's a limiting belief. They—all those people you mentioned, they're human beings too. They might be getting a lot more text messages and DMs than the average human being, but I've texted with Colin and Samir; I've texted with Ali Abdaal; like, you know, I—the—they're real people, right? And when I was—when I was—when I had less than 2,000 followers, I—I realized that on—on Twitter that, you know, 50% of creators had their—or—or accounts had their, uh, DMs open. Like you can literally just DM them. What is the cost? Just—what is the cost to you, person listening, to going and just DMing Ali Abdaal? DM—my DMs are open, you know? Like I look at—I look at every one of my DMs; 100% of my DMs. I might not respond to 75% of them, but I look at every single one. If something is interesting to me, I respond. And I've—I've hired people; I've partnered with people; I've invested in people; I've acquired companies all through DMs. And when I was just starting up in the early days, I would reach out to people, and you know, it sucks; you have to be okay to get rejected, but like one in every hundred DMs you get the most interesting conversation of your life, and it's worth it. And just—what's the downside? People have to ask themselves, "What is the downside?" It's free to do. Why are you not doing it?
You know what? Here's—here's where I want to end, and I want to end with giving people something which I think is—is so valuable in life, like even just taking out the—the AI business; I think it's just so valuable. What that is—I've realized at the end of the day, this—this game or like business, it's all about relationships, right? Like that's what you're—that's what you're getting at is there's always going to be a ceiling on your success, and a pretty low ceiling on your success if you don't have the relationships piece figured out. And we live in like this incredible age where anyone on this planet you can actually reach who has an internet connection—maybe not anyone, but mostly everyone—you can reach through social media, through cold DM, cold email. And so as someone that you've slid into people's DMs and built connections with—an Ali Abdaal or a Colin and Samir or like other people in your network—what would be—and also as someone that gets these DMs and emails—what would be your advice to someone if you could give them just one piece of advice of like, "Look, you might not have followers; like you might have under a thousand followers, under 2,000 followers right now, but if you follow this one piece of advice and you send the requisite amount of volume, you will get a response from someone that you admire that could be useful to your business, could be the person that 10xes, 100xes what you have going on right now," like what would be your—your one piece of advice?
Okay, I'm going to—I'm going to answer that question through a quick story. Someone—okay, I had a startup, 2016 or so, called Islands; it was like a Discord competitor; it eventually got sold to WeWork. And one of the reasons why it sold and we got, you know, multiple offers and stuff like that was because we were in the press all the time. And after the transition, after the company was sold, a bunch of people asked me how, you know, "I saw you on all—you were—you guys were everywhere. You know, how did you get so much press? You know, which agency did you use?" And I said, "I just did it myself." "Oh, did you know a lot of journalists?" And by the way, this is at a time I had like very few followers—no followers basically. And I said, "No, I just DM'd them on Twitter." So okay, "How did you do that?" Well, here's what I did: I made a list of 175 journalists that I thought might cover the story. I would create a 30-second selfie video where I'd be like, "Hey, uh, Caleb, my name is Greg Eisenberg; I'm working on Islands; I thought that it might be interesting to you for XYZ reason." And I had an ask at the end, which was not cover my story; it was basically like, "Can we meet? Can we chat? By the end of that chat, I'm going to give you value, value, value, value." The success rate of that video was, you know, sta—kind of staggering honestly, and I don't think enough people are empathetic to the Colins and Samirs and Ali Abdaals in the sense that they don't put themselves in their shoes; they're getting bombarded with all these DMs. So how do you stand out and create something that's going to create value for them? Uh, well, I think video is one easy way, you know, even, you know, using something like a Loom or something, sharing your screen, um, sending it to them, giving them value. Um, I mean, I've had people who've DM'd me, and I've—I brought them on my—the Startup Ideas podcast, which has like millions of listeners a month, just because they've—they're like, "Hey, I thought you'd be interested in this video," and I was like, "You should come on the pod to talk about it." Random person, 600 followers. So it happens. Shoot your shot; be different; use video; add value; it's not rocket science.
Yeah, Greg, you've been awesome, man. You've been awesome. And—and as you were—as you were sharing that, I was like—because I—I was—I think I actually put this on my Instagram; I said this year this show is going to like shock the world, like the—the level of growth that we're going to experience is going to shock the world, and I want to get some of the biggest guests, obviously, that we—that we've ever had this year, um, and that strategy and method that you just explained, I want to try it, and I feel like we're going to land some pretty huge guests from doing that. So—so Greg, thank you so much, man. I appreciate you.
My pleasure. Keep it up. This is—this is awesome. It's been amazing seeing, uh, what you—what you're building.
Thank you, mate. No, this is great. I love this. This was awesome.