This is the asymmetric bet of the century. Costs start is almost zero. The tools are either free or cheap. You could do this in and afternoon, literally. These can be $10,000 businesses, million dollar businesses, and even billion dollar businesses. Nico didn't have rich parents, didn't have an MBA, didn't have any experience, and he just did it. He's proof that this is doable for a regular human being. He used to just make pasta. His whole life was hospitality. You don't have to build software. You don't have to invent anything new, just put your own rims on it, your own face on it. If he can do it, anyone can do it. When something works, the window is short before everyone copies it. The better it works, the shorter the window is. Cold email back in 2020 was insane. You can send 100 emails and get 15 replies. Today, you've got to send 10,000 emails, Facebook ads in 2014, Google ads in 2005. You can buy a customer for two bucks. Today is 40. You got to get it while the get is good. And that's usually today or yesterday. The phrase nothing as Tunisia has never been more true. Build lifestyle businesses. They are awesome. Let's talk 12 specific business ideas that you can build using this same playbook. OK, I just got off a call with a guy who, not that long ago, was making pasta in his family's restaurant in New Orleans. He'd never written a line of code in his life. And today, he's running a software business doing $3,500 a month in recurring revenue. No technical knowledge whatsoever. He wasn't even using AI. And the kicker is that anyone listening to this episode can do the exact same thing. Literally, and it's all made possible by what I call the great unbundling, which is a concept framework, whatever that I'm obsessed with. So by the end of this episode, you're going to have ideas, a plan, and probably an urge to open up your favorite vibe, coding app tonight and build something. So we're going to talk about what unbundling is, what platforms are ripe to be unbundled. And then at the end, we'll talk very specifically on what business ideas you should build in and around this unbundling concept that I'm about to describe to you. The guy spoke to his name is Nico. I'm going to come back to him in a few minutes because his story is kind of the whole point of this episode. But before I tell you exactly how Nico did it, I'm going to show you a picture. If you're listening to this on audio, just imagine not showing anything too crazy. It's a screenshot of the Craigslist homepage. And on this screenshot are a bunch of arrows pointing to different services, the personal section, the community section, discussion forms for sale, housing, jobs, et cetera. Then there are logos pointing to each of these sections. Logos of companies you probably have heard of. Zillow, Airbnb, Zippercrooter, Indeed, Upwork, and many, many more. And yes, this website looks like it was designed in 1998 because it was tiny blue links. We've all seen it before. A bunch of columns of categories all crammed into one page, but what's wild is that almost every category on that page got turned into a billion dollar company or hundred billion dollar company. Billion with a B. If you look at the housing section, apartments, rooms, sublets, rents, sale, that's the whole little corner of Craigslist that got eaten by Zillow and Airbnb, Redfin, Realtor.com, et cetera. Zillow alone is worth what, $12 billion, Airbnb, $80 billion, all from one little column on Craigslist that got unbundled. If you look at the personals, strictly platonic, women seeking men, men seeking women, all that, boom, Tinder, $10 billion company, pulled straight out of that column, jobs, accounting, finance, sales, marketing. Indeed, Zippercrooter, Upwork, Indeed, Alone, does over $3 billion a year in revenue. You look at the four sales section, Antiques, Appliances, Bikes, Electronics, Offerup, Facebook Marketplace, many, many others, multi-billion dollar businesses or their discussion forums, Reddit, Reddit was worth $7 billion at IPO or the Services and Gig section, Thumbtack, Shift Gig, TaskRabbit, multiple hundred million dollar businesses. The next door, of course, we know all of these, okay? First of all, the unbundling of Craigslist is not done. It's still a work in progress for you or anyone else to capitalize on. Second of all, there's so many other things we can unbundle. But isn't named Craigslist. Craigslist was unique because it had every feature in the world on one page. Jobs dating, housing, use stuff, whatever. And companies came along, picked one feature, slapped a clean design on it, made it mobile-friendly and built a billion dollar business. Of course, I'm oversimplifying, but we only have so much time today. I'm not saying it was easy for them to do this, but they stole the users of Craigslist. They were more savvy. They cared more about one little feature, one little blue link than Craigslist did, because Craigslist was trying to focus on hundreds of little blue links. Also, side note, unrelated to this episode, I kind of hate how Craigslist is this ugly. Like, people think it's punk rock and it's cool, but they could've been something amazing. They could've provided thousands of jobs. It gets barely, I think, a couple million hits a month today, which is down like 95% to 99% from its peak. They could've innovated. They could've added a lot more value to the world, but now the rich got richer and, you know, Facebook Marketplaces is doing that job pretty well. But that's fine. That's free market capitalism, whatever. So the exact same thing is happening right now on dozens or hundreds of other websites, this unbundling. And over these last few years, it's happening with AI and APIs. Look at open AI, aka GPD, as the new Craigslist or Anthropic, aka Claude, as the new Craigslist. There's a company called Apify. Think of them as the new Craigslist. Clay, clay.com, Zapier, and API marketplace, the new Craigslist. Each one of these platforms bundles a thousand different features into a single tool. And the whole opportunity for the next decade is to unbundle them, pick one feature, wrap it in a nice little app, charge markup, own one niche. And up until three, two years ago, this sexy unbundling thing was only available to people that knew how to code software engineers. But now it's available to all of us, to any of us. Anyone that knows how to speak any given language. Any of us can own a niche. Nico, this guy I talked to, he calls it API arbitrage. And my knees got weak as soon as I heard those two words put together, because that sounds awesome. And it sounds like opportunity. And it might sound technical, but I'm going to explain it in Chad GPT language right now. So it's going to make sense to anyone listening. OK, so you go to website like Apify, which is like an app store for scrapers and AI tools. There's 30 plus thousand different Apify actors or apps or scrapers on this website, 30,000. You pick one of those off the shelf. Let's say it's a scraper that can pull every Instagram follower from any account. That scraper is going to cost you like pennies per 1,000 followers scraped. It's almost nothing. And someone with a lot more technical knowledge than you built the scraper. You don't need to know how to build it. You just need to connect the API key. You build a dead simple website, vibe code it with your favorite vibe coding tool. Put a search bar on it, charge customers, one cent per follower pulled, five cents per follower pulled. It's a great deal for them. And you have like 95% profit margin on that. The customer doesn't know that Apify exists. If they do know it exists, it might be a little too technical for them or complicated. Or they might not like that it has a monthly fee. Oh, and like, please subscribe to the podcast. It's very hard to grow an audio podcast, especially. So it'd mean a lot if on Apple or Spotify, whatever you get your podcast, just hit follow or subscribe or whatever. And it'd mean a lot. Maybe the customer knows Apify exists. Maybe they don't. Regardless, it doesn't matter because they like your website better, even if they have to pay more for it. And your website also conveys the assumption that you're better at focusing on only one thing. Whether that's true or not is irrelevant. If you're only scraping one thing, then the customer assumes you're better at it than a competitor or than Apify even, which is the whole thing that you're white labeling. You're using to do all the hard work. That's API arbitrage. You're competing on price, customer support, and how easy your website is to use. You're just putting a simple storefront on top of someone else's software. So back to Nico, he's proof that this is doable for a regular human being. He used to just make pasta in his family's restaurant in New Orleans. He had no tech experience, no sales experience, nothing. He didn't even know what an API was. He never heard those three words put together. Then COVID hit. He went to Mexico for a four day vacation. Beach tacos, you know the drill. And he ended up staying for six months. He was into loom and plyo del Carmen. And he started meeting laptop people. People working from laptops and coffee shops, et cetera. And he's like, you guys are working? What are you doing? Yeah, we're software people. We work remote. This is before chat, GPT. We make six figures where you live on the beach. And his brain just kind of exploded. All he knew was the restaurant industry. So he went back to the States six months later. And he's like, OK, done with restaurants. I like this laptop life. And he got a job as a sales guy as an SDR sales development representative, basically setting out appointments for sales people for closers. He's called calling for software companies. It's kind of like the lowest wrong on the tech sales ladder. Brutal job, tons of rejection, LinkedIn DMs, cold calling, cold emails, et cetera. He's learning the game. And while at this job, he learns a tool called Clay.com. And he had been getting these spreadsheets with leads and like using the same leads that all of his coworkers were using to get sales. And Clay helped him find anyone's email, their LinkedIn, their company. It helped him enrich the data. So he had a more ways to contact these people and be more ways to find new people that his coworkers didn't have access to. Also, this is not a sponsored episode. It's not sponsored for Clay, Apify, or anyone. OK, it's just me talking. So he started using this tool and then his brain broke even more. He's like, wow, this is what tech can do. So early 2025, late 2024, he quit his job, tech sales job, and started building. He just started tinkering with these vibe coding tools, not knowing anything about how to code. He used cloud. He used codex by OpenAI. And he found a buddy who is technical and could do the heavy lifting when it got out of reach for him. So he's the product guy, the idea guy. He tells AI what to build. His buddy fixes whatever AI might break. And then they ship it. And then as they grow, as they scale, his technical friend helps make that happen. So he started with a Google Maps lead scraper. So you go to his website, you type in gyms in Texas, and then you have a spreadsheet of every gym in Texas. Pretty cool. A lot of demand for stuff like that. There's also a lot of other websites doing it. But he didn't need any technical knowledge. He used, I think, an Apify actor, an API on the back end to do all the scraping.
and he just vibed coated it into a nice clean little website with a striping integration. Charges 35 bucks a month. But he allowed customers to convert that 35 bucks into credits. So if they canceled their account, they could still come back nine months later and use the rest of their credits to scrape more. So people liked that because a lot of us have subscription fatigue and his business model actually respected how most of his customers used the tool, which is a great learning in and of itself. So he's been doing this for like seven months and he's doing 3500 bucks in Mulder Granger Avenue. His cost are almost zero. His customer support is basically zero. It's a self-serve product. And yeah, this is a guy who had no tech experience and he's doing well and it's growing double digits every month. He's never done paid ads. He just kind of told some friends about it in the sales space. They started using it. They started talking about it and he's really found his success through Word of mouth. He didn't have to invent scraping. You don't have to invent anything new. Just put your own rims on it, turn your own face on it. Okay. So now let's talk 12 specific business ideas that you can build using this same playbook. Then I'm going to do a bonus round of apify like white label ideas that I'm just going to riff on because there's there's 30,000 actors. So a lot of stuff to talk about there, but we'll focus on the only the best of the best. By the end of this, you should have at least one idea that makes you want to close this video, close Spotify or Apple and go open your favorite vibe cutting tool. That's the goal here. So idea number one, apify actor rappers. Same thing that Nico did. You can do with Google Maps like Nico. You can do it something else. There's over 30,000 actors and an actor is just a prebuilt scraper or an AI tool that someone already built. You just put a wrapper on top of it. And if that sounds complex, you're just getting a key code from the actor and you're pasting it into replete, lovable codex, whatever vibe coding tool you use. And you're saying, hey, connect this thing with this website. That's it. That's a wrapper. Instagram scraper, LinkedIn scraper, Facebook group scraper, Reddit, buy a $10 domain name, vibe code it, hosted on the domain name. Good to go. You could do this in an afternoon, literally. Okay. Idea number two, Google Maps scraper. Like you can do it just all of Google Maps or you could do a dentist scraper, Rufus scraper, home service business scraper, Texas small businesses scraper, lawyer scraper, anything. Nothing is too niche. The more niche you are, the better you can target your ads, who's a buyer for this stuff, people like me, B2B sales team, cold callers, SDRs, marketing agencies, anyone who needs to build a list of local businesses, tar 35 bucks a month, sell credit packs that never expire and just run it. Post about on LinkedIn to your 452 followers. You don't need to be an influencer. Idea number three, Amazon review scraper for direct consumer brands. So they can kind of do Intel reverse engineering of their competitors. Every Shopify brand or Amazon seller, there are millions of these direct consumer founder. They all want to know what their competitors are doing. What are they complaining about? What do they love? What features are missing? What words are reviewers using? Right now, the only way to figure that out for most people is to manually read hundreds of reviews or to manually screenshot and copy and paste and drag it over to the chat GPT and have that read the reviews. Most people aren't even doing that. It's soul crushing work. But if you build a tool where someone pays in a competitors Amazon URL, your tool can scrape the last 500 reviews, run them through chat GPT and spit out a one-page report, get the top compliments, top complaints, common phrases, suggested product improvements. The back end is all handled by an API key on Appify. You're also using an open AI API key. It'll cost you pennies per report. You could charge 50 bucks a month, 100 bucks a month, $19 for a one-off report. I mean, you sell to the same people that are scraping this, right? There's, I don't know, three or four million Shopify brands. There's a few million Amazon independent sellers. Your potential customers are the same people wanting Intel on each other. The next idea can just be done with Zapier. Zapier is an API marketplace and you just build a very simple automation. And if you never use Zapier, you can use AI within Zapier to build this automation for you or you can just screenshot stuff over to chat GPT and have that teach you how to do it. But build a customer service bot, which is just a Zapier flow. You pay Zapier 29 or 15, nine bucks a month for thousands of credits or hundreds or whatever it gives you. And if a business gets a customer service email into their inbox, Zapier will respond to the email through open AI. And its response will be based on knowledge that it glends from previous sent emails from the same inbox or from the website FAQ page, the return policy shipping policy, et cetera. If you think about customer service inboxes, we're just answering the same questions over and over. So your cost is going to be like cents or low dollars per month. And you could charge 100 bucks a month per shop of I store. You got 95 plus percent margins. They're going to save hours per week or per month. It's a great win win. Every shop of I store on our hates customer service, the tech is already built. You just put in some tools together. Something just happened with Beehive that I think you might have missed. You can now connect your Beehive account directly to quad chat GPT Gemini or whatever AI tool that you use through something called MCP. So last week, I connected my newsletter to cloud. And now I can sit in cloud and say, look at my open rates from the last 30 days and tell me which subject lines perform best. Or draft next week's newsletter based on the topics my audience clicked on the most this month. And cloud does it. It can see my real Beehive data, subscribers, engagement numbers, automations, revenue, everything. And I've already cut my weekly production time because I stopped guessing what to write about and started letting the data decide for me. So instead of using AI to just write generic content, use AI to plug into your actual newsletter to make decisions based on what's already working. Beehive built this MCP. So your favorite AI tool can be your newsletter strategist and your data scientists all in one. So move your email list over today and try Beehive 30% off for 30 days with code Chris 30 because this might be the simplest, highest leverage business you can build right now. Next idea could be a micro influencer marketplace. If you think big agencies, big companies, they want to work with mega influencers like Mr. Beast, etc. But smaller brands know that micro influencers usually have a more loyal audience. They convert better people with 5,000 to 100,000 followers. There's not really a good way to find them. Apathy has dozens or hundreds of actors that do exactly that. They can scrape people from Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, etc. that have a set amount of followers. You just build a wrapper on top of that. You could do it for a specific niche only, micro fitness influencers, micro food influencers, mom influencers, etc. Or you could just do, you know, we scrape micro influencers that have less than 50,000 followers. You could go that direction. You could turn this into a newsletter. You could automatically scrape everyone and just email it out to everyone that subscribes for 10 bucks a month or whatever. I tried this idea fun fact back in 2019. But I gave up because scrapers were terrible back then. Next idea, there's a website called Import Yeti where you can see where companies are importing all of their stuff from, like specifically what supplier, oftentimes what they're paying for it. But their subscription is kind of expensive. And there's an apathy actor that will scrape all that import Yeti stuff for you. So you build a wrapper on top of that to act similarly to Import Yeti. But just to point it to a different audience. You go there and type in Lululemon and see where all of those are coming from and in what containers they're in and how long it takes to get here. It's pretty cool. I didn't even plan it this way, but it seems like a lot of these ideas could be sold to Shopify store owners. And you can go to Upwork.com and you can hire a virtual assistant that probably already has a spreadsheet of every Shopify store. Because a zillion people like me have asked virtual assistants to scrape Shopify stores, built with.com. You can also buy every single of the three million or four million Shopify stores out there. So if you get one scrape, one list of Shopify stores, you could sell 10, 20 different things to them and just see which one resonates the most. Speaking of Upwork, why not an Upwork scraper? Their search tool is fine, but it's not specific enough for power users. So imagine if someone could just use natural language and type in something like find me, Ukrainian mobile developers with five plus years experience and at least a 4.8 star rating and 50,000 in earnings. Boom. Upwork has all that data exported to a spreadsheet and charge 100 bucks a month agencies, recruiters, startup founders, anyone who hires freelancers. This scraper already exists on Appify. You just need to build on top of it. I mean, what's stopping you guys from building one of these? Why not unbundle clay.com itself. Clay is a service where you upload a bunch of leads and it corrects wrong data or it gives you more data about that lead, about that person, a LinkedIn URL, etc. Why not build a clay that does only one of those things really well, really specifically because I would bet you the vast majority of clay's users are only using it for one of like 400 different things that they offer, like validating emails or attaching a first name to just an email address so they can send more personalized emails. So your service could literally be we give you LinkedIn URLs or you give us emails, we give you LinkedIn URLs for that email address. If you can spend some time learning paid ads, then you can test all of these ideas. Why not build five of these ideas? Test all five with 100 bucks in ad spend each and then just run with the one that has the lowest cost per acquisition. Here's an idea I really love the niche zillow, the more niche zillow. This is like so obvious it hurts. So zillow exists for residential, right? But there's no zillow equivalent for any other category of real estate. If you want to go entirely commercial, you've got loopnet, which is super expensive, only shows you a small percentage of search results and it's kind of garbage to use. Then you have CREXY, which is better to use, but also expensive and their sales people will spam you to no end. So yes, we have a couple tools for commercial, which is very broad, too broad, and then many tools for residential, redfin, real, tersillow, etc. But we
Why not narrow that down? RV parks, mobile parks, self storage, the Zillow for self storage, right? As user-friendly as Zillow. That's very important here. Don't undersell how important design is. Companies like Apple, Tesla, Airbnb would not be anywhere close to where they are today without their beautiful design. So yes, there are some websites where I can go shop for RV parks and for mobile parks, but their design is garbage, and they rely on individuals to find them and to list their RV parks. They're not pulling RV parks from CREXY and LoopNet through the MLS system. So they're marketplaces. Marketplaces are hard to launch and most don't succeed. So just scrape and tap in to other categories on Zillow and CREXY, unmundle them, and pull them over to another website. Zillow for laundromats, Zillow for car washers, ATM routes, the biz by cell for vending routes, the biz by cell for billboards or convenience stores. Most of these have no good marketplaces. What's stopping you from scraping biz by cell for every single yogurt shop and putting them on a Zillow for yogurt shops? Three years ago, it would have been probably pretty stupid to waste your time on something so random that may or may not work. But today, when you just got a prompted a few times, why not throw a flyer at it? Or go to biz by cell, type in one state. You can do this like Texas, scrape everything, okay? Everything. And then a week later, to the minute, scrape everything in Texas on biz by cell again, and then subtract what sold, okay? Then do it again in a week and do it again in a week. And within a month, you're gonna know very quickly which categories are the hottest, which categories of businesses are selling the fastest because biz by cell doesn't offer this to you. You've gotta kinda back end into it, if you will. Once you learn that, then unbundle biz by cell with only the hottest categories. Because if, say, restaurants don't sell well at all on biz by cell, then you're probably gonna waste your time building an unbundled version of biz by cell for restaurants. This is a little for duplexes, this is a little for fourplexes, et cetera. Okay, bonus round. These are, you know, apify, actor, unbuttoned, slash, white label slash, wrapper ideas. It's all about the same thing. Shopify store scraper. I bet you a ton of the people that go to builtwith.com are just going there to scrape Shopify stores. And you can see in their drop down, it's one of the top listed things. So they're making it easy for people to find. Build your builtwith.com, but for only Shopify stores, that needs to be a thing. Instead of $450 a month, yes, that's what buildwith charges. You're $4.50 a month. What does it matter? You don't have any cost or $45 a month or whatever, or $5 per scrape and credits and they can use it whenever. How about a TikTok hashtag trend scraper? Pick a niche, beauty, fitness, finance, whatever. Run a TikTok hashtag scraper every Monday morning, compile the top trending sounds, hashtags, creators, email it out as a weekly trend report. Charge marketing agencies, $50 a month, $100 a month, but whatever. You do a little work on Monday morning, and that's it. Yelp scraper, every roofer and Phoenix, every chiropractor in Atlanta, phone, email, owner name, review count, average rating, whatever, sell it to local service businesses that want to require competitors, or suppliers who want to pitch them. Yadda, yadda, yadda. How about an App Store scraper or Google Play Scores scraper? Trust pilot scraper, an indie job scraper. Unbundle indeed. Make an indie just for nurse practitioners, crunch based scraper for funding alerts or a Reddit niche sentiment scraper. Brands want to know what people are saying about them on Reddit or on Twitter. Twitter just dropped their API costs, by the way, it used to be kind of unreachable for most people. Now it's a lot cheaper. If you've been listening to this pod for a while, I'm sure that you've heard me say this, but I'm gonna say it again. The efficacy of a growth hack is inversely correlated with its lifespan, okay? Translation is when something works, the window is short before everyone copies it. And the better it works, the shorter the timeframe is. The shorter the window is. You could send 100 emails and get 15 replies. Today you've got to send 10,000 emails to get 15 replies on a lot of different offers. Facebook ads in 2014, Google ads in 2005, you could buy a customer for two bucks. Today it's 40, TikTok in 2020, like you got to get it while the Gitton's good. I feel like we're in year two or three of like a seven to 10 year time span. And seven, five years from now, there's gonna be something else really hot, another growth hack, but it's not gonna be this. Think of it this way, for the entire decade of the 2010s, every venture catalyst on the planet was saying the same thing. They would say it on every podcast and write blogs about it, whatever, they would tell all the founders pitching them the same mind. Don't just build a company that could just be a feature of another company. Like that's what Snapchat did, right? Disappearing tech messages and photos. Other companies copied them. Guess what? Snapchat's still around, they're publicly traded, they're doing great. And they were founded while everyone was saying this. But today it's all been flipped on its head. We used to think that data was everything, that these AI models were everything and then deep seek and other Chinese and non-Chinese companies came out and open sourced AI models that were about 80% as good as open AI or anthropics. Now open AI is scrambling, they're trying to build hardware because if the model's not the mode, then maybe hardware will be the mode. It's all been flipped on its head. The phrase nothing as two niches never been more true. A feature can be a company. So that advice is officially dead in 2026. They are awesome. All these companies clay andthropic open AI amplify their trying to be the everything platform for everyone, which means that every single feature inside of their platform is just sitting there waiting to be unbundled, begging for someone to come along, pull it out, give it some love, wrap it in a clean user interface and sell it to a very specific tribe of people. These can be $10,000 businesses, million dollar businesses and even billion dollar businesses. If it could happen in the 2010s, it can happen today. Don't think you're competing with open AI if you build open AI for podiatrists, which would just be a chat, you be the rapper for podiatrists. You're not competing with them. It's different. This is like the asymmetric bet of the century. Costs to start is almost zero. Venture capitalists are funding these tech companies so they can offer us free trials, use them and these big platforms can't and don't even want to move fast enough to fight you because who cares about us, right? We care about us. We're doing this. Everyone's winning. So here's my CTA. Here's my call action for you. I want you to do three things this week. Number one, go find something to unbundle. I don't care where you get it from. Appify clay, indeed, whatever. Don't overthink it. Just pick one. Then go to Replet or Claude or Codex, whatever and build a simple website with a search bar that has an API call to an apify actor or to a scraper or to anything. You don't even need to launch it. Just build it. See how far you can get in an afternoon or a weekend and I promise you're gonna get further than you think. And if nothing ever comes from it, at least you've learned some awesome skills. And if you or someone you know has a really cool story about building something either software, hardware, service business, product business, I don't care. That made decent money in a short amount of time. Hit us up. Email Molly at cofounders.com or
[email protected]. Tell them your story and we'll have you on the pod. And if you want to sell or implement AI into small, the medium sized businesses, check out PlaymakersAI.com. That is my company. We've got over 200 people in there doing exactly that, having a lot of success. Nico didn't have rich parents, didn't have an MBA, didn't have any experience and he just did it. His 3500 MRR today eventually will be 5,000 and 10,000, maybe 20 or 30,000. Maybe he pivots and does something else. I don't know. But it's growing double digits a month and yours can too. We'd love it if you hit subscribe, share it with a friend and we'll see you next time on the corner office.
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