Underrated Tools to Find Hidden Business Ideas

What's up, everyone? Welcome back to another episode of Founders Journal, my personal diary made public for the world.

I'm Alex Lieberman, co-founder and executive chairman of Morning Brew. Today we are talking about mining the internet for great business ideas. And to help me do that, I'm bringing on my friend Greg Eisenberg. Greg is the founder of Late Checkout, a holding company that creates, grows, and buys community-based products. Prior to that, he was the head of product strategy at WeWork after selling his community app Islands to the company. He was also the founder of 5by, a video discovery app, which was acquired by StumbleUpon. Greg is one of the best business ideators I know, hands down. He has an iPhone note with literally thousands of business ideas on it, and he has a number of go-to software tools that help him find emerging trends and ideas hidden in the corners of the internet. After listening to this episode, you will have a handful of tangible tools that Greg uses and you can now use in your life to either find ideas for a new business or new product ideas for an existing business.

Without further ado, let's hop into it. Okay, Greg Isenberg, thanks for joining the pod.

I'm excited to be here, man.

Okay, we are going to— you're like, I consider myself to be like an explosion of business ideas, and I think you are maybe even on a different level. You were just taking me through your iPhone note that you were scrolling for 5 seconds before hitting the bottom with all of your ideas. And of course, there's always gonna be podcast episodes around execution, and execution is important. But I also think the practice of going through the idea maze and thinking of great ideas is not only important, it's also just a lot of fun. And so I'd love to hear your approach to mining the internet for business ideas, and also how you find ideas that solve actual problems versus just kind of being romantic about finding an idea that maybe is in search of a problem.

So I feel like in our world, people say ideas don't matter, execution is everything. And I violently disagree with that. I think that there's a set of several thousand ideas that you can actually figure out by mining using spy software, essentially on the internet, that are just pretty simple autopilot execution ideas. Where you're just connecting dots, but it's the idea that matters. So I just want to debunk that first and foremost. I also think that people, when they come up with business ideas, they often drink a bunch of wine and they're like, this would be a cool business idea, or have a lot of coffee and this would be a cool business idea, when they should be using software to come up with business ideas. And we can talk about some of the software I use.

Yeah, I mean, you talk about this idea of spies, like your spies that are on the internet that are helping you mine for these ideas. What are kind of your favorite tools that you use as Greg's personal spies to bring back ideas to you?

So I'll give one mini playbook on one tool that pretty much everyone listening knows, but probably doesn't use it to come up with business ideas. And it's Product Hunt. So not many people know this, but on Product Hunt, there's a tab under the product, on the product tab that says Launch Archive. And basically, Product Hunt's been around for 10+ years, and it's basically an index. There's a calendar view you can actually go and check. So you can go and scroll down on Product Hunt and go to like, I don't know, January 16th, 2014. And it'll list all these top products. So I'm looking right now, I see First Opinion, text a doctor for free. Kimono, never write a web scraper again. Founder Suite, tools to get startup shit done. So you can see that there's a bunch of these ideas that have been out there and have been validated in the sense that they have some amount of consumer demand. The interesting thing is, well, it's actually a few things. One is a bunch of ideas, like people just post on Product Hunt, it gets traction, and then this like indie hacker just gives up on it for whatever reason. It could be they got a full-time job, it could be they were able to build the product but not get sustainable growth. But it doesn't mean that that isn't a good business idea to take. And remix as your own. So my playbook to people is, if you're looking for a startup idea that's validated, comb through the calendars and look at what's working and take notes around. Ask yourself, why did this thing work? Why didn't this thing work? Is this thing still alive today? And My thesis on Product Hunt, and I'd love to jam with you on this, is you can probably go, especially from like 2013 to 2018, and DM a bunch of these founders and indie hackers that have basically given up on these projects and be like, hey, I'll buy your startup for $0 or 5% of equity in my new thing. And let me go find a creator and attach it to this particular business. What do you think of that?

I think it's really interesting. It's funny because I literally, I literally was going through the launch archive today looking at— because it's kind of like a daily ritual for me to go on Product Hunt. And whenever I miss days, I go back to look at the days that I missed. And I think it's basically what you're saying is there are many reasons that people decide not to pursue businesses. that are, that are not necessarily related to the business not being a viable business. And so your view is like, if you can find patterns that clearly there's consumer demand and you find one of these ideas that are in line with one of those patterns, that for whatever reason, the person who built it found a new job, started a new company, and they're just sitting on this codebase for a piece of software that does something that you think actually would be very valuable for yourself and for others. Maybe there's a really interesting way where you could be a better operator of this business because of either your unfair advantages in terms of your audience or your connection to people with audience, or just having the time and the dedication to put into it. And you can probably get it for a very reasonable price.

Yes. And I think the other thing to note is the world has changed since 2014, 2016. There's AI now, right? So like a business that was not viable in 2016 might be viable in 2023 because of, I don't know, some automations that you can do. There's creators who are hungry to do deals with startups and who are looking for monetization opportunities that didn't exist 10 years ago. So I think it's something that if you're an idea person, like if you love business ideas and you love spinning up spinning up new ideas and you'd like to be like what I call multi-preneur, someone who owns a portfolio of businesses. If you're not on Product Hunt, and you're not combing through Launch Archive, like you're missing out.

Yeah, I think that's super interesting. One kind of meta question here is, what do you consider a good business idea?

I mean, it depends the person. Like to me, if you ask me, what do I think of a good business idea? Like to me, we start and buy businesses and we try to keep them forever. And we love cash flow. And we also, you know, get off on the idea of creating a community that people are obsessed about. So to me, like, it's about generating cash flow. It's a bit— it's about raving fans. How many raving fans do I have? It's also about category of one.

What does that mean?

So category of one is this idea around I wouldn't want to create a Morning Brew because they're, you know, Morning Brew essentially created the category of one of all, you know, business news digestible format, get smarter in 5 minutes or less. You created a category that only you were in.

I see.

Yes, you can make the argument that, you know, business news has been around forever. But no, this— the way you were doing it for the audience that you were doing it for, was unique and is unique. Or actually, honestly, it was unique. And now there's a bunch of people who are, you know, so I think I'm more interested in— you asked me what businesses I'm interested in. I'm more interested in ideas that could be in category of one.

Yeah. Well, it's funny the way that you describe category of one. I don't know if you think about it in the same way, but it reminds me of kind of David Perell's definition of personal monopoly for writing, where it's like you, you have 3 skill sets or 3 qualities to a business that on their own may not be super differentiated. But when you combine all 3, all of a sudden you are hypothetically the only business that is doing business news in newsletter format for 25 to 35-year-olds.

Yeah, I think, I think that's another interesting lens to have even when you're on Product Hunt, because you might see 2 businesses on one day, or maybe it's on one year and another year, and you're like, whoa, if only I, you know, combined this and that, that was the missing ingredient.

Yeah.

So you're looking for those missing— when you're— what makes a good business idea is, is, is the taste, right? Like you make— it's like cooking, right?

Totally.

It's like making a great margherita pizza.

And to be honest with you, I think this is one of the reasons that I love kind of early-stage business so much is because it very much feels like artisanship. Like, I feel like, you know, like a dad in his woodworkshop chipping away at a piece of wood. Like, that's at least for me, that's what like the ideation and building and like scrappy phase of getting to actual product market fit. That's what it feels like to me.

I, I picked up the Nintendo Switch because I was recently in Japan and I was playing Zelda. And in Zelda, you basically can come get food and you can like, you can get wood, you can get fruits, you can get all these things and you come, you put it in a pot and you never know if you're gonna get like, you basically stir the pot and you never know if you're gonna get this like magical Michelin star meal or you're gonna get like junk. And it's this, to me, it reminds me of entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

Where it's like you are in the building phase. And you're combining all these things and you're like, I'm going to put it in the oven or I'm going to put it in the pot and see what it comes up with. And are people going to resonate with it? And what I'm saying and why I like all these tools and software, spy software, whatever you want to call it, is there's a way to basically know that if you combine apples and sugar and crust and stuff like that, an apple pie tends out to be pretty good.

Yeah.

Totally.

I want to ask you about another tool selfishly, because I feel like for the longest time you've been talking about the power of Reddit and how every subreddit could be a business and a community in itself, and there's 1,000 ideas sitting in Reddit. But I'll also just— talking about my experience, and maybe it's just because I feel FOMO because I haven't found the same value in it, is I find Reddit to be really overwhelming. I find it hard to find signal on Reddit because there is so much noise. And so I guess one of my questions is like, is it just simply you have to spend a ton of time on the platform to find opportunities, or are there kind of tools or like approaches to going through Reddit over time, kind of like patterns you found that allow you to get to signal faster to find an idea?

So when I first started talking about— and this is many, many years ago— when I first started talking about, hey, maybe there's a way to unbundle, quote unquote, Reddit, maybe there's a way to go into Reddit communities, search what people like, the top posts, and basically come up with ideas based on that. It was a hunch. It wasn't like for certain. And I tweeted it out, I posted about it, and then all of a sudden people were coming to me and being like, hey, man, I have a good post. You became the guy.

Yeah.

And like, it changed my life. And like, all of a sudden, like, I have generational wealth and stuff like that. And then, then I started doing it because people were like, I had the hunch. And then, then I went and actually did it. And it's worked many times. And I initially made the same mistake that I think a lot of people make, which is they will just go on Reddit. And it turns out Reddit is like the most overwhelming place on the internet. It's like the Times Square of the internet. There's so much going on.

I somehow ended up on a post yesterday about a person talking about being a swing with his wife for 10 years before deciding to leave the swinger life. I don't even know how I ended up there. All of that to say, it's very overwhelming.

Yeah, I mean, I don't know what subreddit that is, but send that to me. I'm interested. I, I use tools to help me sort through and, and basically make sense, make signal out of the noise. So one of the tools I use is a tool called Gummisearch. You can check it out, gummisearch.com. And one of the cool features about GummySearch, and I'm not like affiliated with any of these businesses, Product Hunt, GummySearch, I'm just, I use the tools. Like to me, maybe you should be, the value I get outta the tools is, yeah, it's true. Um, GummySearch, what it, what it does is it has a feature which shows you what are the top problems in that people are asking in a particular subreddit. So you can go, basically it sorts it by problems and solutions.

Yeah.

So you can go into the entrepreneur subreddit and it could be like, what are the problems that entrepreneurs are having and what are the solutions that they are having? And that just gets your brain going. So that's a tool I really like. You know, do I go to Reddit a lot to find business ideas like the raw version of reddit.com? Like sometimes, but I prefer gummisearch.com or subredditstats.com.

Yeah.

tells you about the growth.

You almost prefer— you prefer the layers on top of Reddit that make— that are kind of like the skinny versions of Reddit that have the things you actually care about on the platform.

Exactly. Another product I like using is EtsyHunt.com. That's a layer on top of Etsy. So not that I create a lot of physical products, but it actually gives me a sense to what are the different trends that people are spending money on. So Etsy is huge. It has like 48 million products and there's 120,000 Etsy shops. And it basically gives me rankings of where the shops are. What are the strategies that they're using? What are the keywords that they're using? What are the reviews? So yeah, I prefer the layer on top of these platforms, not the actual platforms themselves.

Makes sense. And just one last question around this is, can you give me— can you actually walk me through an actual example of in the past for a business you've built in the past or acquired in the past, how Reddit or one of these tools came into the equation of you building it?

Sure. I mean, I'll tell you the first one that ever happened. So in March 2020, COVID hit and I had a lot of time on my hands because we were all locked down. I start— I join a few subreddits One of the subreddits I joined, I think, was called r/barber, and it was because it just— I had a friend who was a barber, and he just sent me like a funny post. And then I was just reading about the problems that barbers were having, and of course it was shut down. Their barbershops were shut down. They couldn't make a living. For fun, I started creating memes and posts on this barber subreddit because I'm weird like that, and I ended up basically getting to know the set of barbers over the next 30 days. And I got to— I basically created a WhatsApp group, Barbers of Brooklyn, actually. And I create from Reddit, I brought them off the platform into this private community. And I said, and I wanted to help them. So from that, so I got my initial seed. And I went on squarespace.com. And I created a one-page website called youprobablyneedahaircut.com. And it was a way that connected barbers in Williamsburg primarily with people who needed haircuts, because at this point people's hair were getting really long.

Yep.

And that is, you know, I built it in 4 hours, you know, press publish, sent it to the WhatsApp, had an EA manage the whole thing, went to sleep, woke up the next day. And it was— the website had hundreds of thousands of visits.

Oh my God.

It was literally everywhere. And I had media requests from every major, every major news network you can think of.

Is it still running today?

We, we stopped running it, but it made, it made a ton of money in the short amount of time. We ended up donating a lot of it.

That's awesome.

But It was cool because, I mean, it came from this one barber who couldn't pay his rent, and I felt for him. And I basically, you know, could I expect that I was gonna build some software for barbers? Absolutely not. But the point of the story is it all started from Reddit. The idea came from Reddit. The first people came from Reddit. And, uh, I guess no-code software also makes it easy to create, create initial minimal viable products.

Love it. Awesome. Greg, a few really cool tools and ideas. Thanks for joining the pod and excited for our listeners to hear them.

It's been fun. Later.

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Founders Journal. If you got to this part of the episode, it means you are an all-star listener that really cares about the show and being part of the Founders Journal community. I would love to get to know you and better understand what content I can create for you to help you be a better entrepreneur. So shoot me an email to alex@morningbrew.com, say what up, and I will get the conversation going. As always, thank you for listening, and I'll catch you next episode.