How to Start a Fully Automated AI Travel Assistant Business
Sam Thompson outlines an AI Travel Assistant business where customers fill a form, an LLM generates a personalized itinerary, influencers share it, and the plans get republished for SEO. The model requires minimal overhead and creates high-margin revenue through affiliate links and programmatic content.
Chapters
Welcome to the Kerner office where we discuss more business ideas than your brain has the capacity to comprehend. Today I had Sam Thompson on. I've had Sam on once or twice before. They're highly rated episodes. It's a double episode today. And then next Monday is part two. You're gonna love both of them. They might be some of the best I've ever recorded. And it's not me, it's Sam. He's an idea guy, I'm an idea guy. And we get really excited when we're in the same room. Virtually, that is. We talked about an idea fair today, like an idea conference just for business ideas. We talked about AI travel itineraries, having an infinite content loop where you can charge 20, 30, 50 bucks to plan someone's travel with, chat GPT as a rapper, and then publish that to have unlimited SEO for live. Really just two or three ideas today, but we went deep on both of them. And then next Monday we're going to discuss three or four more. You're going to love it. Enjoy, subscribe, share with your friends. I've been thinking about conferences and the conference business and yeah. And it's like it is the last business for me to do because I'm so unorganized and that is such like a touch heavy business. Right? But what if, what if it's like that Arrested Development where it's like it doesn't work for them, but what if it worked for us? Right? So not a conference, but like a day long conference where it's like an idea con. Okay, cool. Like forget booths, forget sponsors. Like you could graduate to that on iteration two, three or four. But year one, year one day booked in a hotel or whatever. I don't know how much to get in. 200 bucks, 50, 500 somewhere in there. And all you do, there's two types of attendees. People to present and people to listen. And it's pay to play. Right? You want to present your idea, business idea. Maybe it's a $500 ticket. You want to just listen. Maybe it's a $100 ticket. I don't know. And it's not like Shark Tank. We're not raising money. There's no raising money. These are literally just ideas in the idea phase. So it's not a business. Some of them might, some of the presenters might already be starting something. But there's just like one stage and one crowd of people and you've got two or three minutes and maybe two or three for questions and it's like, this is my idea. I want to do X, Y and Z. Here's what I think will work, yada yada. Here's what I think my blind spots are. Boom. What do you think? It's like everyone's just flooded with ideas and feedback and then there's a winner and the winner, the best idea, maybe first, second, third place gets a share of the pot. Like the prize money, the entry fee. What do we think?
Yeah, that's a vibe. It almost mimics like a hackathon. Right. Like they would do those like in college where it's like, all right, everyone can come for a day and it's like 50 bucks to get in. Everyone. And that's more like, that's like coders, right? Developers are in there, they're all building a V1 of something and then they present them and whoever has the best one or the coolest thing wins. And so I think that part's cool where it's like, I like the ones that involve a degree of action because everyone can get up there and talk about an idea. That's fine. I've thought about it a lot of like, can you apply the hackathon methodology or like experience to a non hacking, like SMB blue collar? Yeah. You know, could you do a LSA hackathon where everyone is in there trying to optimize the same, same marketing component of their home service business and then people can crowdsource the ideas and the strategies and all of that in there. The idea one is dope. I think it's totally doable and I think as long as you layer in. What's that thing that they use in classrooms? Dude, it's like everyone logs in on their computer and they can see their stuff on the screen.
Like the Socratic method or like something.
Like you have like an app and you can like, you can answer your questions as the student and like things get put out on the big screen. That's what the dynamic would be is like I'm up there talking cool and behind me on the screen is all of the attendees votes, if they like it, if they dislike it, their feedback, like all of it. I think you'd have to go a little bit longer than three minutes, because three minutes is an elevator pitch you can't get deep enough into. Like it would be like 3 minutes plus 10 of Q& A.
Or you could go the opposite direction. You could say you have 20 seconds and 10 minutes because if you can't describe it in 20 seconds then you don't understand your idea very well.
Yeah, right. Yeah. Yeah, like, what do you sell into home? Like, right, we help home services businesses get more leads through ppc. Yeah. That was what, eight seconds? Like, right, get to that granularity.
I like the feedback idea. Like if people could put questions up and then others could like upvote them. Like a Reddit in real time where it's like, all right, he's done. He turns around and he goes to the most upvoted. And that's like what people really want to know.
Yeah, no doubt.
Let me level it up. Let me level it up. You just level it up. I'm gonna take him one more. Okay, maybe it's two days. Maybe it's two. Two parts of one day. Because, I mean, you can't sit for eight hours and listen to ideas.
I could, I mean, yeah, I was like, that sounds like a dream day.
Right? So help me walk through this. So I think like the second value prop could be find a co founder, find an investor. Like not formally, not from the stage, but just in just rowing down. So maybe this is it. The first half of the day, we're just four hours, we're just grinding out ideas. It's dopamine and it's feedback and it's Q and A break for lunch included in the price of the ticket. Second half of the day is just bro down with each other and you know, everyone has like a name card or whatever and it's like, oh, you were the guy with the, the plumbing CRM idea, dude, I have that idea. Like, you want to do it together? I could put in 20 grand. You could put. Imagine the connections that could be made, right?
It's almost like you take that, right? And then the back half of the day is like the school science fair where each of the people has a table at the end that everyone can come and sit at. And so like, that's it. Logistics.
How else are you going to find the guy?
Right? You know what I'm saying? So it's like cool, you pay 500 bucks. Let's. For logistics reasons, because neither of us could pull off like a multi day event. Just like, we'd get bored by the second day. We'd be like, all right, we're on to the next. Let's say you slot 15 minutes per presentation. So if you have four hours, you're talking about 16 presentations total. Cool. You break for lunch, you bring in some barbecue, you get a little chick fil A, everyone's happy, chilling, full. And the back half of it is everyone has a table that presented. So there's 16 tables with all of these founders that are there, that then everyone else can come and have one on one conversations to get even a little deeper. If they're more interested in that idea either as a client, an investor, a partner, an employee, like whatever that looks like. And then everyone enjoys a nice meal to end the night. And then it's a one day event, it's done 20 to 16, 20 ideas got presented, a bunch of connections happen and then we all get to go home and we don't think about it again.
I wonder if you could somehow tie the prize money to like them launching the idea, like to hold their feet. Because how many people have ideas, dude.
A delayed prize pool. You don't get it the same weekend. It's who has the most progress after 90 days.
So it doesn't matter how everyone votes. What if someone has an idea and they never do anything and they won.
The money, which is what I did in college. I went in, presented at a startup competition. I won and then never did anything with the idea. I just decided I wanted to participate.
Yeah, yeah, it's interesting.
It's like, yeah, what's the incentive? Is it, are you the best presenter with the most sound idea or are you an executor that actually goes and takes action on it? Yeah.
And I feel like the presenters, like, there might even need to be two classes of them. You know, ideas are live in different phases, right?
For sure.
Some people just have a passive idea and they're like, they really love hearing ideas. And they're like, yeah, while I'm there, I might as well present mine. I, I've been obsessed with it for a while, but I don't plan on doing anything. And then some people are like, I want to do this. I want to quit my job to do this. I really want valuable feedback. I want a booth, right. I want some structure around getting feedback on this idea. And other people are just like, maybe my idea is awesome. I just want to present it and see what happens. You know what I'm saying? There might need to be two tiers.
You go two stages, two separate conference rooms. Are you more interested in like early stage ideation or more interested in feedback of existing businesses or ideas? Dude, I think we should call it the idea fair. Like a science fair. It's the idea.
Oh yeah, I like that. I gotta go to Namecheap right now. I gotta do it.
Pick up the domain before you publish this episode.
Absolutely.
You know, let's see.
I'm gonna try ideafair.com first, dude, imagine.
There'S no way that's available, but no idea fair is idea fair. Yeah. Do you want to present for five bucks?
They're both taken.
Or do you want to attend for a hundred bucks and then you just find. All it is, really, is just finding the venue, I think, like, and catering. Dude, it would be so fun for us to put on an event. It would be like the most bare bones, like, only the essentials, like, type vibe.
It's like the ADHD slash, no attention to detail event.
Yeah, like, sure.
We forgot chairs. We forgot chairs.
Yeah. Everyone's got a post it note on their. Check their chest. Cause we don't have name tags. You know, it's like, I. I paid.
$500 for a post it note.
Name tag, post it note. Different colors, obviously. Like, I'm gonna have a green post it. You'd have a yellow, you know, sure. Like, I mean, we're organized here. Yeah. Come on.
They're not even post its. They're just the aftermarket kind that aren't very sticky and they're floral.
There's floors just covered with them. You give everyone three when they walk in, just in case.
This could be a good idea. And you could have a virtual attendee, too. Oh, for sure.
A little heysummit.com action. Shout out the boys. There you go.
Those are your boys?
No, I just found them. I just decided now we're boys. And so I'm gonna call them homies.
Okay, cool.
Hey, summit's cool. Virtual events, dude.
Okay. Does it work in tandem with in person? Okay.
Yeah. It's super dope. We're Planning one for Q4. Okay.
Yeah. I like this idea. Especially if, like, you could somehow tie it to the execution of it.
Right. Or you don't have to. That's, I guess, everyone's personal prerogative. Yeah.
Because, like, I'm just wondering how you do. Because it's kind of a chicken and egg. I can't launch it without the money. You know, the money first. Maybe you just do something silly, like with no accountability, no legalities, or it's just like a pinky swear, and then you just give them the money. I don't know.
Yeah, you just go, look, dude, there you go. Or you just don't give out any prize money. It's not a Shark Tank situation. It's like you're what you're. As a presenter, what you're trying to derive out of the situation is, like, feedback and networking and just circulating your idea. And so I'd rather. Yeah. It's like, what are you winning? It's kind of hard to put a quantitative, like, thing to determine, even, like, other than crowdsourcing votes from people on, like, the best idea. But, like, I'd rather use the prize money to, like, give away a new computer to a random attendee. Like, yeah, yeah. I like stuff like that.
All right, if you are watching this clip right now, you are watching this on YouTube. And if you are a fan of podcasts, please check out my podcast while you're at it. Because sometimes I have podcasts that aren't on YouTube and sometimes I have YouTubes that aren't on podcasts. So check out the Kerner office on any podcast platform. Or you can go to tkopod.com also, my newsletter will throw that in there. There are no ads. It's weekly. It's different content than my podcast and YouTube newsletter.chrisjkerner.com you'll see the link and we'll see you there. Yeah, and I like the idea of the whole culture of the conference being. Share your ideas.
Right?
Like, don't hoard your ideas. Nobody cares, like, you about your idea.
Right.
I'm just breaking that stigma that it's like the anti.
It's like the anti NDA movement, dude.
Anti.
Yeah, it's like I tweeted the dealer, if. If someone makes me sign an NDA before hearing their idea, I don't want to hear their idea that bad. Yeah.
It's like, yeah, now this guy emailed me and he's like, hey, we have this nice RV park for sale. You might be interested. I'm like, yep, send it to me. I'll look at anything. And he sends me an NDA. And I'm just like, nope.
Literally, I just don't want it.
Like, I don't want to take the time to sign it.
Like, no, it's just like, dude, like, I'm not going to steal your shit, bro. Yeah.
What am I going to do?
I already have my stuff. It's all good. Yeah. Yeah. Knock down.
You got any ideas for me? What are you working on?
I was watching this podcast, Levels IO was on Lex Friedman.
Really?
Yeah, dude, really Mind blowing your Levels? Yeah. Super dope, dude.
I didn't know that.
I know. I was kind of shocked by it. It was a fun watch. It's long. Like, three and a half, four hours. I watched a good portion of it yesterday. Peter Levels is up there in terms of, like, from an indie hacker. Like, he's the guy.
Respect.
Yeah. You know what I mean? Like, Literally it. And he was having all these conversations just around like how he thinks about launching ideas and all of it. And you know me well enough, like I think about this stuff very similar. Put something in the market, generate revenue. If it doesn't work, like move on to the next thing. And the one thing that I was super interested in his take on, because he runs a lot of stuff in AI is these like very hyper niche AI use cases that like feel like they couldn't really be standalone products. But he has that one that's like interior AI, which is like using AI as an interior designer. And you like put in a photo of your, I mean you just did the, the whole redo of your like library room, right? And so you'd like put in the image of that before the rent up and be like, this is what I'm looking for, yada yada. And he's talking about all of these tools that he uses Replicate, which like literally allows for you to like just pump data into an API. And I started doing some digging around, dude. And you can connect it to Zapier. Okay, so like the user, what kind of data? Literally anything, images, prompts.
Give me an example.
What color should I paint my car? Right? And so you, you, the user could upload a photo of their exact car and you could prompt in to create seven variations of it of different colors so that they can see this like vision, which like is not a monetizable, not as easily monetizable idea. Right? Like kind of fun little like gimmicky product. I think that there's starting to be use cases there, like micro SaaS, little things. His whole career has been built on that, right. Nomad list and you know, all these kind of like micro use cases for super niche markets, but like they pump off 20, 30k a month and you know, I'm gonna assume 75 to 80% margins. Like I don't know what these hosting costs are. I've just been thinking about what are little applications of that AI stuff. Like I have. Dude, okay, so here's one, here's one very specific. You just went on that trip to Greece like what, a couple months ago? And I'm planning a trip to New York City and Boston for the fall. And so you know me, I was like, I don't really want to plan this whole thing. I pop on ChatGPT and I say, hey, I'm doing a trip for two in October in Boston for four days and New York City for four days. Here's my budget, here's the stuff that I like to do. Can you hit me with an itinerary? Like I want to stay at hotels. Like what hotels should I stay at? What restaurants? And this thing pumps out a full vacation plan, like day by day breakdown of where you're eating for breakfast, lunch and dinner, what your afternoon activity is, where you should get a drink that night. And all just through like the very classic ChatGPT, like 4O, whatever. And I was like, yo, like there's how big is the travel? You and I talked about it with the cruise lines. Like they're massive, right? And all they're doing is just being the conduit between a traveler and the travel provider.
They're doing boomer stuff.
Yeah. You know what I mean? And I was like, okay, like what's that version? You pop in, you pay me $19 to plan your flight, family vacation to Greece and then you have the AI take all the variables that you submit on a type form. How many people, what do they like, are there allergies? Like whatever, you know, pump it into the AI. Pump all of that through chat GPT into a Google Doc or into Google Slides template with affiliate codes for all of the hotels, all of the like, oh, you know what I'm saying?
I mean you could make this free.
You could make it free. And then you take all of the content that you're getting paid to make and you pump it out as programmatic SEO. Like best family of four itinerary Greece. Where should my. You know what I'm saying?
You repurpose the content that you're spitting out to the customer as an article.
For SEO people search best hotels for families in Greece best. Which like we just did one, right? And it just creates a never ending loop of content.
Instead of a viral loop, it's an infinite content loop.
An infinite content loop. And I think you can run it.
Oh my goodness.
People on IG that are like independents, right? Like I like to travel. I shoot a bunch of video content around traveling and they all dude the number of these like travel influencers that have a 299, I'll plan your vacation for you offer in their link tree. It's absurd, you know what I'm saying? And so I'm like, okay, can you leverage AI to do that at scale for you know, 0, 0. Basically it costs $0.05 per output for us. Like, and then they can ask for like revisions that gets pumped back into the AI. Actually we are going to spend three days in. You know, it's like an AI Travel agent. Yeah.
So you go to these guys selling $300 travel packages and you say, hey, good news, I want you to keep doing that. Except you don't have to do any work anymore.
Any of it.
None.
Yeah, we'll just do it.
All I want is 50 bucks. Right. Plus your. The affiliate codes that you're linking. Right, Right. And also, you don't have to do anything. You don't have to do any interaction. You just keep linking it. We're just going to have a different link in your link tree. They're going to click through, they're going to pay, they're going to go to a type form, they're going to fill it out and immediately, well, you got to put a delay on it so they think it's personalized. Right. And you could even work into the LLM, the personality of the influencer. Yeah. Like you could take transcripts of all their reels and say, all right, make a Persona out of this. Susan, age 36 in Manhattan. All right, we know who she has. Got it. We know how she talks, yada, yada yada, and then combine that with. Maybe they have catchphrases or something.
Right.
Or like, since you know, I love my lattes, I want you to go to this place. Like, it could be so personalized. And they don't do anything.
Literally none.
You just work through them. Or you don't have to only work through them. That's just one distribution channel. You just, you sell it. Facebook ads, Google Ads, Programmatic, whatever you want.
Yeah. And let all of the recycled plans just start ranking on SEO.
It's just in your terms and conditions. It's like, by the way, I get to keep these as well. Right? We're not going to have any identifying information.
Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like, no, this is what it is. A trip for a family of five that loves fitness.
Cool. If you do work in the personality of the influencer, that means that all of your content is going to be dynamic and it won't sound like AI regurgitated nonsense. It's going to sound like some 36 year old in Manhattan actually wrote these things. And she's not going to care that it's listed online?
No. Oh, literally zero care. Then we just whitelist their account to run the ads. Get your Perfect vacation for 29.99, shipping handling not included.
You go, you find their most viral reels from years ago, months ago, days ago, and you just boost some ad spend behind it, post it to their story with a Link to your website, 300 bucks a pop.
I'm with you.
You could charge a hundred bucks or fifty bucks to them plus all the affiliate revenue plus the content you get from it.
And that's the big piece of it is like the cogs are zero. So it's like in the comp, your competition on that is either you're doing it yourself, right? Which most of those people is their option. They're not going to go spend $3,000 for the travel agency, they'll set that up. Or they're going to the travel agency and it's like, where's. You know me with my core belief on product is like, where is like the middle ground between that too expensive offer and the do it yourself option? And like, how close can we get to do it yourself pricing, leveraging it? That's unlimited content. Like, yeah, it's done for you, but really close to that do it yourself pricing model. I think it's the same with this. Like, yeah, you're not going to have to go pay 499 bucks to your influencer at 299 to get a custom travel plan. We'll get you one that's 80% as good as for $30, dude.
And I know they influence. They're going to be like, yeah, but what if it doesn't sound like me? What if it sounds like AI? No problem. Every time you get a sale and they submit the type form, you're going to get an email with a link. You click on the link, you're going to see what you're telling them. You make whatever edits you want. You click submit and only once you approve it and click submit will it go to your customer.
I don't think anyone's even going to care. Like, I don't even think they're going to do that. I think it's just like send it. And again, it's not like a $5,000 thing. It's like if someone's actually unhappy with their $30 travel plan, then you refund the $30. That's our customer service policy. We'll just give them a refund. Like it's cool. Yeah. Then you get into the next piece, which is creating an AI chat bot off of their personality that can ask questions to. Because you train the LLM. There's like so much in that. I think the core, like macro of it is like, I think there's industries like that or offers like that that AI has not been applied to that. Going back to what we talked about in the last Podcast. Do I think that's like a billion dollar startup idea? No. But do I think that someone that just puts 10 hours a day in for six months could, like, get that to being 30, 40, $50,000 a month on, like, at least?
Yeah.
Solid margin. I think someone could go make half a million dollars a year with AI travel guides. I think it's sitting there.
Oh, my gosh. You just gave me another idea, but I don't want to bring it up yet because I'm still excited about this. Let me write it down so I don't forget. Oh, my mind is, like, buzzing. I love that idea. And I think there's like, we're talking about travel. Like, copy paste that idea with any number of things, planning, you know, let's say you want to move. Tell me where to move. Right. Tell me what type of house to buy.
Yep.
Tell me how much square footage I need for this family and our preferences. Tell me what grocery store to shop at based on our preferences.
Dude, that would be a fun one. Put in a link to a Zillow house and AI will tell you what it'll be like to live there. Mm.
Well, the school district sucks. And you said you had four kids, right? It's like, oh, okay.
Yeah. You know what I'm saying? You just pop in the Zillow link. You're like, well, this one's a little bit smaller than the other one that you have that's getting into kind of AI real estate agents, which is, like, also interesting. There's just a bunch of stuff like that. They feel like small ideas, but, like, again, you go look at levels. Peter Lovell's bio on Twitter, and, dude, he doesn't have any singular thing. I mean, maybe now after the publicity of the podcast, I don't think I saw a singular thing that was doing more than half a million dollars a year. Like, he just has seven of them. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it's like, yeah, you know what I'm saying? Where it's like. Which is a sick. No one's mad at that. It's not. You don't have to go chase. Which is his whole philosophy, similar to mine. Like, I'm not out here chasing a billion dollar exit. Like, I'm okay. I want high margin cash flow on an asset that's like, semi. Like, obviously not as liquid as real estate or cash or investments, but, like, reasonably liquid, given people's interest in buying micro SaaS. Like, I like that model.
It's funny that Peter Levels was just on Lex Friedman, because, like, literally an hour ago, someone tagged me in a tweet. There's this new AI not AI, but this. This new tool that basically ranks everyone on Twitter based on how they're growing at any given time. And so it's like, from one to ten thousand followers. Ten to a hundred. A hundred to a million. Million to 10 million. This little tool, which is super cool, will show you the top 10 people growing followers in that range. And I got tagged because I was number 10. This.
