Speaker 1We need to talk about how in an AI world you can basically build any business, press a button and boom, right? So for anyone who's kind of a little bit anxious about what that world looks like, right? And who want to basically build an asset, who want to create income for themselves, who want to build a business, scale a business, have that whole experience. What do AI proof businesses actually look at? So by the end of this episode, I'm going to cover all of that. And I just want to get your brains thinking about where the world is going. How do you think about AI proof businesses? What does that even mean? And just get your gears turning on it because let's be honest, pretty much everyone has a little bit of anxiety around how to create an AI proof business right now. Even when you're speaking to incumbents, companies that have billions of dollars of revenue, they're kind of like, oh my God, you know, is, you know, big frontiers. I'm not going to be a big frontier, but I'm going to be a big frontier. I'm going to be a big frontier. I'm going to be thinking about how you should be thinking about this. So this is for anyone who's interested in building a business, 2027 and beyond. Let's go. We'll start actually with, you know, Adams businesses. So what do I mean by Adams? You have pixel businesses, the software businesses, and you have Adams. These are physical businesses. Um, and when you think about a physical business, you know, coffee shop, uh, you know, you got to come in and people want coffee or, you know, uh, a plumber, um, you know, your toilet gets clogged. AI is not going to be able to fix that leak. Uh, these are the sorts of businesses that aren't going anywhere. And you can actually make the argument that these businesses valuations are going to go up, uh, from here because you're going to have a lot of that AI tech money. Um, so you're going to have a lot of that AI tech money trying to get in here once they see, uh, the, the moat and, and, and the opportunity. So I think you're starting to see a little bit of that. Um, there's just, I don't know about you. I just see tons of content around boring businesses. Um, people are trying to get into it physical. Um, you know, it's harder to do physical businesses, but, uh, there's, you know, those, those physical businesses, uh, AI can't clone overnight. Uh, the second is businesses that require some permission. What do I mean by that? I mean, licenses, I mean, regulation. Uh, and I also mean if you have the ability, you know, if you're likable or you have connections, uh, or you can, you know, use Grockbot or whatever to actually get you in front of the right people to go and create a deal with a larger company to help, and they help sell your product. That is a partnership. That can't be copied, uh, on day one. So what do I mean by that? Maybe you have, um, an agency and you partner with Salesforce and you're one of their preferred vendors or you're, you know, a preferred vendor of Microsoft or it doesn't even need to be that big, just a preferred vendor of a medium sized company. Um, ideally a large size company, but a medium to large size company. That is something that people can't clone licenses. I mean that there's some businesses that you need. A license to operate. Uh, there's some businesses that are regulated and you, not everyone could go and do that. You know, what's an example? You know, if you want to own, I think like a bookkeeping firm, like you have to in some countries have been educated a certain way. If you want to be, if you want to own a law firm in some countries, you actually actually have to be a lawyer. So maybe you partner with a lawyer, um, and you handle the marketing and growth side and the AI side. And they handle running the law firm. These are the sorts of things to help, you know, I'm just trying to get your creative juices, this entire episode flowing so that you can start thinking about, okay, what, if I am going to start a new business, how do I make it as AI proof as possible? Attention, um, somehow attention is underrated right now. People follow people, um, and in a world where AI exists, you know, if you have the right systems there, they could make your organic content. Uh, like you can go and create more organic content. I was one of those people that, you know, hated short form video. I mean, I like to consume it, but I hated it from like a creation standpoint. Never liked doing it. I hated the editing around it. Now I have Opus 5.5 as my editor. Um, and I can go and create short form on the fly when it works for me in my schedule. Um, and I've actually been quite enjoying it. Um, and just over the last like week I've gotten. Like literally hundreds of thousands of views on that content, um, which is, which is really cool. Um, and people saying it's valuable. So there is literally no excuse to, uh, in, in, in 2026, 2027 to create, um, a machine that is creating media. And I believe that media is somehow underrated right now. I'm talking about newsletters. I'm talking about, you know, meme pages. I'm talking about, you know, founder led content. Um, we all know that distribution is King and, uh, you know, I'm not talking about just creating one page. I'm talking about creating a media company. And I think that those businesses are going to do tremendous over the next few years. And to a certain extent, they're somewhat AI proof. Um, you know, of course, uh, there's some versions of, uh, of media that, you know, could be replaceable. But the idea is if you're going to create, if, if your goal, if you're going to create a good media company, you know, you are, uh, trying to create an irreplaceable, trustworthy brand that people come to for your niche. So I think the way to think about attention is what is your micro niche? What is your niche? How do you create a machine around it? Um, you know, how do you, how do you use AI to amplify, uh, you, you, and you don't necessarily need to be the face, um, you know, necessarily need to do founder led content, but it does help when you have a human being in front doing it. Um, the next is timing. So timing, what did I mean by this? I just basically mean that you're seeing more and more trends for different micro niches and niches now, uh, than ever. And I think that there's an opportunity to use something like ideabrowser.com, use something like a grok bot, use something like a cloud duo, any personal agent platform that, you know, you want to use to go. Go and monitor for trends in your niches, um, in your micro niches and go and build something as the first mover advantage. Sometimes I am shocked when you're early on a trend, how few people have actually gone and built something for these people. What, what, okay, what am I talking about with building? You know, it could be a software product. It could be a physical product. It could be, you know, media company. It could be, you know, an Adam here, an Adams here, a physical thing. Uh, we're going to talk about other things too, like mark marketplaces and data and stuff like that. It can be one of those. Um, but the point I'm trying to make around trends is being a first mover advantage allows you to collect data, to collect, uh, insights around a particular micro niche or niche. And from that, you know, from that your, your initial product might not be AI proof, right? It might not be an AI proof idea. In fact, it might be the least AI proof, but what it is AI proof is the data that you're collecting, the data and the brand and the people that you, you know, you end up collecting into this, that trust that, that you build, that brand loyalty that you build. And I think there's a ton of opportunity to go and look at trends. And I think, I just believe that, you know, everyone should be doing this. Everyone should be thinking about, or not thinking, everyone should be creating machine systems around finding trends, acting on trends in ones that they, they, you know, believe that they can add value to. To me, this is a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. or just a weekly virtual event where you're keeping people accountable. And it's a no brainer. When you think about belonging, you're thinking about a goal that this community has and shared interests that they have. So they want to hit that goal around that shared interest fast with someone else, with that accountability, having fun, entertainment. So there's so many niches and micro-niches where there's an opportunity to charge people to help them go and do that. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It's a no brainer. It is a no brainer. It's a no brainer. that paid community that people would be willing to spend hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars and and then you as the host are are helping them well you're helping curate the group and you're also helping them move along their journey so uh virtual and uh and also irl events there's just so much opportunity in irl events um we just threw an irl event was it last week uh in nashville bringing around you know uh founders who are interested in deploying agents to build their businesses and it was you know there's just we had like so much demand we didn't you didn't really know even how to meet it i think there's tons of demand for this sorts of things sorts of things the hard part for you is going to be thinking about what is the niche what is the what is the goal how can you actually produce a really good experience and what is the price point that makes it a no-brainer the next uh category is around liquidity you know i often hear uh people say greg software is done like it's over don't even consider thinking about building anything in software and you know one example i always i always give to people is is marketplaces you know marketplaces there's so much still opportunity to build marketplaces um and what is a marketplace actually before before i get into it a marketplace is just a fancy word of uh for saying a place where there's supply and demand and you're connecting that supply and demand on this website on this app um a friend of mine launched a uh a marketplace uh last week i think i was it's called final lap.com and basically what it is is uh high i think like high-end collectible cars like every week you come to the site and you can bid a bid on this like high-end collectible cars thing and you can bid on this like high-end collectible cars thing and you can um and they curate the cars and there's like a lot of hype in around it and i think he has a big audience on instagram so he uses his instagram audience to market it um and it's just an example of like a little bit of a new mechanic um around car car uh car sales collectibles um you know so there's that niche there um and all of a sudden there's a new marketplace uh for this sorts of thing and i think what's really cool about marketplaces is they are one of the most sticky businesses of all time if you're able to get people you know get the attention and bring that attention into a marketplace uh you've got a really good good business there i mean in the car space we all know cars and bids sold for a ton of money many millions of dollars um there's so many examples of marketplaces that have gotten acquired for ridiculous amounts and ridiculous sums of money and i think it's a really cool thing to do and i think it's a really cool thing to do why because again we all know that it's it's it's so hard to go and create now i think there's an opportunity to go and actually find creators find media companies and then build their marketplaces for them partner with them or you know you end up just incubating the attention yourself and then you go and build like the liquidity um so i think there's a lot of opportunity here a lot of unmet demand uh hard hard part here is about thinking about what is a new mechanic that doesn't exist currently what is a new niche or micro niche that just doesn't need to be new actually just what is an underserved niche or or micro niche um that is just screaming that they need uh they need a marketplace um so i like this one a lot also what's cool about liquidity the marketplace and liquidity space here is you can go and use a grok bot a clod code one of these personal agent platforms to go and actually run a lot of money and get a lot of money and get a lot of money and get a lot of the tough parts of running a marketplace so it's really it's just really cool that you know in the past running a marketplace was pretty intense from a management perspective support tickets um just you have a lot of people and everything needs to be perfect but with um with ai now and personal agents we've gotten to the point where you actually don't really need a big team you know you can create it you know a team of one two three four five people um and it it could support a marketplace that does many millions in gmv um so like this one a lot unique data so uh you know this has gone viral of last few months just you know you see data brokers making millions of dollars a week and um i'll just give a high level just like what what what is that what is that business the business is basically you on one one hand and maybe i'll do a whole breakdown on on on a separate episode um if people are interested but basically on one side uh you have unique data um around some something you know initially it was uh coding coding like uh a lot of these platforms like i think mercor and um micro one and things like that they they needed um they were getting data coding data and they were selling it to um the big models now there's the the big models just are hungry for these new types of data that they don't have access to so the game is what is what is that data and and then how can you sell it to them that's basically the game there's still a tremendous amount of opportunity there um and that's what i'd call a data rich business another data rich business is actually if you have access to some amount of data that isn't easily easily accessible um you can go and have a curated directory of some sort um that people will pay for and i think you're going to see a just huge explosion of curated websites and apps over the next few years why do i think that in a world where lms uh basically have give you infinite content social feeds basically give you infinite content you're going to want to go and access curated databases of content that you believe is high quality i'll give you the example that comes to mind uh just like off the cuff you know google reviews or or yelp reviews just reviews of restaurants in general have gotten to a place where i don't know if you've noticed this it's either like five star reviews or one star reviews and then like the it's a three and five right because you got some fives and ones or four and five and it's just very polarizing with reviews and also i think a lot of people have gamed the review section uh sections on places like yelp and stuff so um i think that you know for me it would be really cool to pop into a website or an app and really give me new recommend restaurant recommendations from uh you know that were actually high high high quality reviews that weren't just like love it or hate it um yes that's an example of a consumer business consumer business have more risks less likely to work um but just i'm i'm using it as an example to share that like there's probably some reviews that are high quality um and there's probably a way to like curate that into a database and someone might be willing to pay something to access that um i think there's a ton of opportunity in enterprise i think there's a ton of opportunity in prosumer i think there's a ton of opportunity um in the smb space i think that there's some consumer opportunities uh as well um but overall the the game here is you know how do you how do you create you know because we're talking about ai proof startup startups what does that look like how do you create data that someone else can't get and uh that's and then you either sell it uh as a website or app to people monthly or whatever um or you sell it to the labs or you do both lastly i think you're um starting to see this but it's like so early customers paying for results so i believe that there's going to be more and more automated ai services what do i mean by that basically where you have a bunch of agents going and doing the work um you know the example i've given past in the past on the pod is how do you create a creative agency that is fully automated um by different creative uh models um so it creates logos on the fly or landing pages on the fly the unfair advantage that you can have is around context is around data um is around the system that you've created if you can create the best system for a particular output then there's some amount of uh moat or some amount of defense that you can have against that now and you know in the in the whole you know if i was ranking these i wouldn't put the outcomes one as like the best one it's probably the least best i think physical stuff license and regulation stuff huge um you know i think i don't want to rank them all but i would say at the bottom would probably be outcomes um this is oh yeah and i'll end on this one here just to finish my thought here automated ai services i just feel like you know you don't see this very often and i think and there's an opportunity The example I gave on the podcast before is how do you look at platforms like Fiverr and Upwork, see what people want to pay for, and then create a machine that goes and bids on some of this work. There's a ton of opportunity there, and I think agents are going to fulfill a lot of that work. The way to make it AI-proof is if you have the best possible agents, and the way to make the best possible agents is if you feed them with the best possible data, the best possible insights, the best possible inspiration. And you have something, like we talked about, around permission, like you have a deal with a particular company that no one else can have and stuff like that. This is basically the map of how to think about a world where when AI makes software. Content and answers, pretty much free. How do you build something with value? Is it everything in here? No. This is just some of the main ones, the main categories to get your creative juices flowing. I think there's, I'll end with, I think there's a ton of opportunity. You do have to be creative. You do have to think about how many, do you want to mix some of these? Do you want some attention stuff with some belonging stuff? Do you want some permission stuff with some liquidity stuff? Do you want some? Do you want some outcome stuff with some unique data? So there is a bit of a mixing. It's not like you just go into one category and that's it. But I do believe that I wouldn't look at the world and be like, it's done. And we can't create startup ideas and we can't create assets. In fact, sometimes when there's the most amount of chaos, it creates the most amount of opportunity. Thank you for listening. Hope it's been helpful. If you want more of this stuff in your feed, like, comment, and subscribe. I'm here to. Get your creative juices flowing. Here to help you navigate this crazy world we live in with ideas that could help you build a business. So thank you for watching the Startup Ideas podcast. And I'll see you next time.
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