Speaker 1I think a gigantic opportunity has just opened up and we need to talk about it. Meta has opened up Muse, its personal AI agent to developers. And you can now submit something called a connector, which gives Muse a way to use your service when someone asks for help. And I think this could be the app store moment for AI. So if you're thinking about starting a business or you already have one, it's worth understanding what just became possible because billions of dollars are going to change hands. By the end of this video, you'll understand what Muse connectors are and where I'd look for business opportunities. We're going to walk through how you can build one using a coding agent and submit it to Meta. We'll also spend some time on how people actually find what you've built. Because let's be real, that's a big part of whether any of this turns into a business. I'll give you four Muse connector startup ideas for free by the end of this video. And if you're new here, my name is Greg Eisenberg, and I'm the host of the Startup Ideas podcast. And I know a thing or two about social apps. In the past life, I was an advisor to TikTok, an advisor to Reddit, and now I build AI native businesses. If this episode gets 7,000 likes, comments, and subscribes, I'll drop a Muse connector guide 100% free with more ideas. I'll include the link in the pinned comment description if that happens. So go ahead and do that. All right, let's start the episode. ♪ The Startup Ideas podcast, it's nipping time, baby. ♪ Think about what happened when Apple opened the App Store in 2008. Apple had built the phone. Now an outside developer could build something useful for the people who owned it and sell it through the store. Someone can build a photo editing app and charge for it. Apple supplied a way to distribute the software and collect payment, so that the developer could focus on making something people wanted to use. And it was a win-win scenario, by the way. Apple got a way better App Store and developers made money. By June 2010, less than two years after the store had opened, Apple had paid developers a billion dollars from paid apps and in-app purchases. So this new market had formed around the phone, and outside businesses were earning a bunch of money from it. That's why I'm interested in this topic. ♪ ♪ The Startup Ideas podcast, it's nipping time, collect money through the store. ♪ have confirmed availability, they can actually go and fix the thing. The customer then chooses a provider and agrees to share the job details and your service passes the request along or it could book the appointment where that's supported. So you could charge the repair company like an agreed upon fee, $100 let's say, for a qualified intro or a confirmed booking. Thumbtack, big company, they already validated that people will pay for customer leads. So your service would have to deliver requests those providers actually want. I'd begin with, you know, one type of repair, one city, one town, you get to know the providers and what they can actually handle. A confirmed opening tomorrow is useful information when someone is standing in a kitchen with a broken appliance. That homeowner might only need you occasionally. The repair company needs that steady flow, though. They need customers every single day. Okay. And that's why I look at demand across the local market as well as how often one person actually comes back. Startup idea number three is a fun one. You know, if you know me, I like racket sports and, you know, where I live, paddle is getting really, really popular. So startup idea number three is a local paddle match and court finder. So someone opens up Muse and they ask, hey, find me a paddle game. And I'm like, yeah, I'm going to show you a paddle game tonight near me with people around my level. So your service is going to go look for open spots at participating clubs and courts, and it's going to show suitable games and how much it's going to cost. The player is going to approve the reservation. If they already have a group, they could ask for a court instead and share the booking details with their friends. I'd imagine, by the way, that Muse is going to get more and more social over the next several years. Six to 12 months. I mean, we're talking about meta, right? They understand social better than anyone. I would start with one city. You know, I think it's called Playtomic. They offer court and match booking. So I'd look for a useful gap, such as local clubs whose availability players currently have to check separately. You need those clubs, by the way, to obviously let you access their opening and make reservation, make reservation. Some some do and some won't. But you can you know, earn an agreed fee on these bookings. You know, a club with an empty slot has something they they want to sell, right? And someone who plays several times a week has a reason to keep using a service that helps them get a game. Startup idea number four is a family dinner planning and grocery integration connector. So a parent might say, hey, sort out dinners for the next three nights, 20 minutes of cooking each night, max. We already have rice and broccoli. So your service is going to build the plan from recipes you've tested for that specific kind of family. It adjusts the quantities. It turns the missing ingredients into a shopping list that they can go buy from. Instacart, their developer tools actually let you create a shoppable list that the customer opens to review products and finish checkout. So that gives you like a practical starting point for helping someone get the ingredients home. By the way, side note, maybe someone like Instacart ends up just acquiring this. Like there might be a bunch of these connectors that get acquired, you know, over the next couple of years if this gets big. If I if I was trying to test this business, you know, I test a subscription with families who want to use it every week, right? The meals have to work for them. But if their kids like the dinners and the portions make sense and they have a reason to use your service for the next grocery shop, you know, I'd want to learn what they actually cooked and use that feedback to improve the next plan. You know, of these four ideas, I'd probably investigate the lead generation idea first. If I was starting with a small budget, you can put together a useful sample and show it to a potential customer before writing much software. And that's what I like about those types of businesses. For someone who already knows, a bunch of local service providers, the home repair idea might be a closer look. But yeah, I tried to give you, you know, a few different types of startup ideas, more consumer, more more businessy. My guess is the consumer ideas are the most fun to do. And because it's meta, they're more of a consumer app company. There's more of those use cases. But, you know, I think there's going to be a lot of money and also business use cases as well. Of course, this brings us to the question I'd have if I was watching or listening to this, which is great. I have a connector. How are people going to learn about my connector? How are they going to learn about my business? Obviously, getting into the directory, you know, gets a lot of exposure. But whether an unknown service is going to get recommended, you know, during a general conversation is something we still need evidence for. So I'd like to build my initial plan around customers I have a way to reach. So the first idea I have for you is work with existing creators who have audiences. So for the family dinner service, that could be a creator who shares vegetarian recipes for parents. And then you help them demonstrate how to turn a few meals into a grocery order. They give their audience the tested setup instructions, and you agree on how they'll be paid for customers they introduce. The viewer has seen a task they want to accomplish and understands why they connect the service. I start with one relevant creator, and I see how many people complete that first task. The size of the audience matters less to me, honestly, than whether the people in it need what you're selling. The second idea I have for you is, you know, for the paddle service, for example, one person books a court and shares a page with other three players, showing the time and location. So this idea is basically product-driven viral sharing. Some people call it product-led growth, too. But basically, it's how do you get one person to share your product? You know, in the paddle service idea, those players get something useful from your product before they ever sign up. So if you give them an easy way to arrange the next game, you know, you have a possible route to another booking. So you can choose ideas with this kind of multi-player sharing built into the work. You can kind of prioritize based on these multi-player ideas, because that's going to help you, you know, drive a lot of growth. And we saw that, you know, in the mobile era, you know, a lot of social apps, a lot of apps had, you know, social features to it. And those are the ones that became really popular. Same is true in this agentic era. So, you know, what's an example of that? You know, a proposal gets sent to someone, an event invitation gets passed around, you know, make the result useful to the person receiving it. And then some of those people may become customers themselves. That's the hope. So I'd measure that before I'd call it a growth loop. But it's a practical thing to look for when you're choosing between, you know, two or three promising ideas. The third idea I have for you is distribution through existing connected marketplaces. So Ticketmaster says eligible events can now appear through its connector without each organizer doing additional integration work. So an organizer now could reach someone through the Ticketmaster experience while continuing to run their own event business. That makes me curious about where each connected service gets its supply. If you're in an industry with an existing marketplace, investigate how businesses participate and what information helps customers choose them accurately. So for some people, that could be the most practical way into this market. You know, for others, building their own connector makes sense because they already have customers or a partner who can introduce them. So I'd make that decision early. You want to be able to point to a specific person or channel that can bring your first customers, even while you're hoping the directory becomes a meaningful, source of demand. Of course, Route 4 is just getting feature placement in Meta's directory. But, you know, let's be real. You're not going to be able to bank on that. You know, when I had that App Store feature, that first App Store feature, you know, it was just like basically somewhat random. I woke up and all of a sudden I was like, why is the chart vertically? And I think a lot of people are going to have that experience with the Meta directory. You know, you're going to have to you're kind of banking on some product marketing manager in Menlo Park to be like, this is a good app. So you're interested in building a connector. How would I approach building the first version? And for me, I would actually start with writing down one thing the customer should be able to accomplish, as basic as that sounds. So for the paddle idea, I'd start with show me the available courts near me tomorrow evening. And then there's a price for each watch. So you can take that brief to a coding agent like Cloud Code or Codex, and then you just give it the documentation for the system that you're connecting to. And then I would describe the customer request in just like plain, ordinary English or language. If you're building a new service, start with just clearly labeled sample inventory while you're figuring out the flow. I'd ask it to build the availability check and the quote first. And the result needs to show the full price and how long the price is valid. A booking operation can follow once those parts work, of course. What you're making is such a small service that another piece of software can use. It needs to be hosted somewhere Muse can reach. It also needs a way to check which customer is using it so people only get access to the information and actions they're entitled to. Otherwise. That would be a bad thing. So you can ask, you know, Cloud Code or Codex or whatever to explain each of those pieces as it builds them. And I recommend that. I'll include a starter brief with the episode so you can adapt to your own idea. By the way, that's insane that you're able to just use Codex or Cloud Code to create one of these. Right. In the in the App Store era, if you wanted to create a mobile app, you needed like one or two million dollars and a team of 10. People to create something that was high quality. Now, anyone listening to this, watching this can do that. So that's really cool. And there's two ways to, you know, proceed from here. And this part caused some confusion when I was doing some research here. So Meta documents a custom connector option. So you can ask your own Muse to connect to a service using its API information. That gives you. A route to trying a supported integration before pursuing a public listing. So you still have to test your own like particularly service and any credentials should go through the secure setup flow. By the way, Meta has to approve you in order to be a connector. So that's also an outstanding question is like how many approvals are they doing a day, a month, a week, a week? So I saw Stacktree's founder published a firsthand. Okay. Okay. So that's an outstanding account of the form for when you submit to Meta for review. And that included options for an API or an existing MCP server. MCP is a standard way to make tools available to an AI application. A lot of you know that if you listen to Startup Ideas podcast, this channel. If you've already built one, that may give you a starting point. The submission also asks for information about the product and examples of how someone would actually use it. So you're going to need documentation and support details. So you're going to want to check the current form as you prepare it because the program is so new. Before I submitted a connector, I'd make sure the service handles the awkward requests or you're probably I would imagine get rejected. So ask for time that's already booked. Try an expired quote. Check that repeated request that doesn't actually create another reservation. And I try the next thing a customer's like. Likely going to ask, such as moving the court booking to another day. You know, that's when you're going to find out how much of the actual job your service can handle. So you can take a lot of the friction out of building with a coding agent like Cloud Code and Codex. But you still need to inspect the results and just really understand what the service does before putting customers through it. Or unfortunately, I think you'll get rejected. So if connectors and Muse is interesting to you. And you're. And you've gotten here and you're like, where do I start? I if I were starting this week, I'd pick a type of customer I could actually talk to and ask about the tasks they keep having to deal with. I want to hear about the last time it happened. How did they get it done? Where did they have to wait? What did it cost them? That conversation usually gives you a more useful starting point than staring at a blank editor trying to invent an AI business. Or you can go to ideabowser.com. Where there's a bunch of startup ideas and you can literally it's literally sign up for free and it's a free idea of the day to help get your creative juices flowing. Then I choose a small part of the job and see whether I can make a work through a connector. And that would that's what makes this whole Muse launch worth paying attention to. Meta has opened another way for our business to participate in the things people ask their assistant to do so we can start learning which services people want there. And what they're willing to pay for. And the only like outstanding question is do we think that Muse is going to have 100 million, 200 million, 50 million or a billion users? That's an outstanding question. And how many of these Muse AI connectors are going to get approved in the app store? Right. That's a is it going to be like YC where they only let in point zero one percent? Or is it going to be like the Apple app store where most are accepted as long as they are high quality? I think that's a really good question. I keep thinking about that idea about the club with the empty court tomorrow evening, the paddle court. That's all I could ask for. This is an incredible time to be building, shipping your ideas, shipping your heart out. It's just an incredible time. I'm rooting for you. Until next time, thank you for everything. See ya.
PodcastTranscript AI