Greg Isenberg’s Step-By-Step Blueprint To Building A Successful AI Business

So I'll give you the playbook of. If I was starting an AI company, here's how I would do it.

How do you decide what companies to either invest in or build with this whole narrative that these AI companies don't.

Have a moat, I think it's wrong. We started a business that is going to do 2 to 3 million dollars of free cash flow without raising $0.01 from anyone else. And it was all using this framework.

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. My name is Matt Wolfe. I'm here with my co host, N Land, and we've got an excellent show for you today. So in the AI world, you've probably heard a lot that AI businesses have no moat. It's really, really difficult to create a new business in the world of AI when everybody can create similar businesses. Well, on today's show we've got Greg Eisenberg. And Greg has a completely different idea about how this is all going to play out. In fact, he gave us a step by step roadmap, a playbook of on how you can build a successful business in this current world of AI. So let's go ahead and just dive in with Greg now.

Greg Eisenberg, thanks for joining us here today.

A dream come true.

This is going to be fun. I mean, right now we're in this, this era where AI is sort of taking over all of the news cycles and everything has AI baked into it. Even all the products that don't seem like they need AI have AI baked into them. And you're doing some amazing stuff with AI. So it just, it seems like a good fit for you to be one of our first early guests on this show and talk about where all of this is headed.

The interesting thing about AI is everyone from your barber to Jeff Bezos is interested in AI. Yeah, I recently got a haircut and my barber just kept asking me about different AI tools that he was using. He wanted my feedback on it. And what Nathan and I actually have in common is I think I tweeted something about AI and he tweeted something about AI and then within 24 hours, Jeff Bezos both followed us on Twitter.

And then Matt also got followed off of that. Ye.

We're all in an exclusive Jeff Bezos follows us club now.

Yeah, yeah. So we got to finally message him and actually get him to come on or do something with all of us.

So that's right.

So, Greg, how do you see the holding company concept? How do you decide what companies to either invest in or build with this whole narrative that These AI companies don't have a moat. Knowing that almost any company out there can use some of these existing resources to build the same software you're building. How is the approach to what companies to invest in or build?

So there's this narrative that if you're building on top of OpenAI, ChatGPT, you're this rapper, that you have no moat and therefore you haven't built any value. And I think it's wrong. I think it's wrong because if you think of ChatGPT and OpenAI, what is it? It's basically an amalgamation of the craziest amount of worldwide data in one place. It's, it's, it's incredible. It's like a trillion times the great Library in Alexandria, maybe even more. And I think that what people don't get is, you know, what's another little startup that is a thin wrapper around the world's information? It's Google. Google doesn't create any of the content. They are a wrapper around the Internet, but they point people to pages within the Internet. And it's the greatest business model of all time. You know, even today, you know, it's trillion dollar company. If you look at their financial statements, a huge chunk of their business still comes from Google search. I also think that there's this great unbundling of ChatGPT that is happening now. What unbundling is, there's a great quote, I think Jim Barksdale said it. There's two ways to make money. You're either unbundling or you're bundling. And what that means is what does unbundling mean? Unbundling means, you know, if you look at Craigslist, Craigslist was a marketplace for everything. You had the ability to post a job that became indeed dot com. You had the ability to, you know, find a mate that became, you know, Tinder and what Match is doing basically on the Internet, you can't really be everything to everyone. So there's going to be a huge opportunity to look at what are the different use cases on the horizontal platforms like ChatGPT and what OpenAI is doing and basically think about how can I apply a community first approach, create what you might call as a thin wrapper. But what I call is this is dope. I don't have to rebuild everything from scratch and just focus on a particular use case. Now I want to give one quick example to that. I forget the name of the founder. PDF, AI. And when Chat GPT introduced this idea around, you can now talk with a PDF Basically everyone basically assumed that this guy's quote unquote, thin wrapper was going to go to zero. And what he noticed is that revenue actually didn't really go down. A lot more people now knew about ChatGPT, there was news about it, they knew that you can use PDFs and he had a purpose built business focused on it. So I think you're going to see more of like the PDF AI stories than you are going to see other stories.

Yeah, I've always thought the critique on like the thin wrapper thing was kind of bullshit. Like, I don't know, like it, it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. Like, like almost every company on the Internet's reliant on something. I mean at one level or not, I'm like, even everybody's relying on the Internet.

You're right.

You know where I think the community approach that you're doing makes a lot of sense. It's probably a really unique advantage is that with the new AI tools and especially, let's say GPT5 comes out and it's even way more impressive than GPT4. We're going to get to a point where you're going to be able to look at a SaaS website and say, hey, GPT5, go build that for me. Make my own version for me. That might be like a year away. And if you have a brand and a community, people who trust you, like you, I think they'll keep doing business with you. Whereas if you're just like a soulless company that doesn't have that, I think you're at a great disadvantage in this next wave.

Yeah, I want to expand on that because I don't think a lot of people are talking about like the marketing community angle to these products. Yeah. For the longest time people were saying that energy drinks were actually a saturated market and then out of nowhere, what's like the best performing stock of the last 12 months or one of the best is Celsius holdings. And you know, it's like a $15 billion company. It's a energy drink that they're. They originally targeted women because in their research and insight they noticed that if you look at like monster energy and all these, you know, energy drinks, it was very like male dominated. Now what's the difference from a formula perspective of a monster versus like a bang or whatever, like probably not that different. Same with beer, you know, what's the difference between, you know, a Miller Light and a Coors Light? Now a lot of people listening are going to Be like, no, I'm a Miller. I'm a Miller, a Miller girl or a Miller guy, or I'm a Coors Light guy. But that's identity playing into it. You, you've in your identity, you're like, I'm that type of person. And I think you're going to see that identity based consumption model happen with AI startups too. Like, I'm not, I'm a Gemini person, I'm not a chatgpt person.

Was it PDF AI? What, what would be some like, advice you would give to that company as, as far as like building a community around it? How do you build a community around a tool that essentially just helps you understand PDFs better?

Yeah, well, I think the, the issue with PDF AI is it's niche, not what I call super niche. So step one is your horizontal. You have no niche. Your ChatGPT step two is your niche. You're, you've picked like PDF as your category. And then step three is micro niche, which is like your PDF for lawyers, your PDF for accountants. What I would be doing is be focusing on the community piece if I was him. What are the different communities that need PDFs the most in trying to retrofit it for those people? Because those people, like accountants or lawyers for example, will have a set of pain points that are going to be different than me or you. Just because we're, we're different. And also they just might just trust you more if it's called Legal PDF as well, which is like the, the beer example. They might just trust you because they like the name, which also is a thing that not many people talk about in startups, which is names actually pay a MA. And you know this Nathan. Yeah, Mr. Lore. But names actually play a bigger role in how people actually connect with products than people like to think.

Yeah, totally. I think you're right. Like, especially like in the age of AI, that's going to matter more and more. Like having a name and a brand that people trust that they feel connected to, so they keep going back and doing business with that company versus the random company that just, you know, sprouted up of nowhere and just copied you.

With AI, you, you bring up a good point around if, if everyone could basically press the duplicate button.

Yeah.

Like how do we think about building companies in that, in that world? And it's a really good point. I've thought about it a lot and I think that, you know, the good side of it, by the way, is that it's going to be really easy to spin things up.

Yeah.

And you, you could see a viral tweet and then be like, wow, this is really cool. And you can be living in like, Sri Lanka and you could be 14 years old and you can press the duplicate button and then you can like, you know, pay for X blue. And you, you show up and you reply and you get a million downloads. Like your life could, could change overnight.

Yeah.

The downside of the, of that coin is that competition is going to 100x. Like, the amount of software that's going to be created is going to be 10 to 100x minimum.

Yeah.

Just like you saw that in content land with tools like TikTok, you know, as an advisor to TikTok for a few years and it was crazy seeing the amount of content, you know, just, I mean, you see it, I'm sure you've seen played with TikTok. Like, there's the amount of content on all these platforms. TikTok, YouTube, Instagram. You give people easier tools to create things, they're going to create things. So that's what's going to happen. I'd love to talk about you guys. Like, how would you navigate this world where everyone's given the duplicate button?

Well, I mean, Greg, that's, that's a big reason, like, I thought you'd be a great guest on the show, honestly, is because, like, I think your approach is right on. Like, you're building a personal brand. I think in the age of AI, that's really important. You're an actual person, people like you, and you can leverage that across various companies that you build. So I think that that approach is right on the community aspect, having people involved in the actual product so they like you and they feel engaged and actually you adjust the product based on feedback and talking with them, I think is huge. And also you've got the innovation agency as well. Right. That's another one. We're like, yeah, in this new age, like, companies have to be thinking about, oh, I don't just have this one product and people are going to use the same product for a hundred years, somebody may come and copy it and they, and they, you know, I think that I have a better brand, but maybe all of a sudden they're cool. Everybody switches over, you know, and so you have to be, you have to continue innovating and trying new things. I think the companies that are really going to be the big companies in the Next, you know, 100 years are the ones that build innovation into their company and they're constantly innovating and Spinning out new projects.

I run this site called Future Tools, which, you know, it curates all of the latest AI tools that, that come out. There's a submission form on the site where people submit their tools to me. I review them with a team of a couple extra people, and this, the tools that I think are cool make it onto the site. So I'm truly trying to curate now. The problem that I tend to have is that every single day, 13 of the exact same tool pops onto the site, right? Almost every single day I'm like this. I see a tool that's like, here is your AI copywriter. Use this to write your sales copy for your business. Here's an AI blog writer. Every single day, there's like 11 of those submitted to the point where I can't even tell the difference. And a lot of times it's like a completely different company. But I swear I've seen that site, that ui, that, that page before. And so, um, you know, from the perspective I'm in, where I'm seeing all these tools being submitted to me, it feels like this, this AI world has kind of gotten to a place where everybody is just kind of already cloning everything else. Oh, that tool worked. Let's clone it. Somebody else clones it. Somebody else clones it. It gets to a point where, you know, the first movers, the ones that put out the product first, are still the ones that people talk about, but then there's just like a whole bunch of junk that followed behind it. So I do think that being an early mover is important, but then I also think about the sort of big incumbents, right? You've got the Googles, the Adobes, the Microsofts, companies like that. And, you know, I feel like we might be moving into this world where whenever something works really, really well as a small SaaS company, one of those big companies is either just going to acquire it or build it in and then wipe out pretty much everybody else that was doing that already. I mean, we were talking even before we hit record about the new OpenAI video model. It's like when that gets released to the public in a single day, that's already better than Runway, than Pika, than Animate Diffusion, all of that stuff. There's already a better option out there. So now, you know, what, what do we do with those now?

So I'll give, I'll give you and folks listening, the playbook of if I was starting an AI company, here's how I would do it. And I'll use an example that we've done and it has worked. Like I can finally say it's worked. We started a business, an AI powered business that is going to do 2 to 3 million dollars of free cash flow without raising $0.01 from anyone else. And it was all using this framework. So the business is called Boring marketing dot com. We started off as a Twitter account. Literally anyone could sign up for a Twitter account. It's free, more fast. And we called it at Boring Marketer. And we created a character behind this idea around. You know, people talk about boring businesses, but not that many people talk about boring marketing. So you start, step one is you, you build a character. You, you start with a character that people are going to connect with. Or maybe you are that character. Like maybe like for me, like I like being that character, you know, or, or Nathan likes being that character. So we just started like talking about boring ways to grow your Internet business. People kept asking us about SEO, SEO, SEO. And then we looked at the market and we realized that there was an opportunity to create AI assisted tools to do SEO. So we started using those AI tools on our own products. That's another benefit of having a holding company. You can basically, you have this portfolio of companies. I could dog food your product. The good news of it is we knew that people wanted it because they were telling us that they wanted it. We built this community of about 10,000 people and then we took that, those AI tools, we wrapped it around a service agency to, to help people implement and create content and people started seeing results. It started driving word of mouth. So now all of a sudden, like fast forward like that, you know, it hit a seven figure run rate within four or five months. And now it's, it's a really profitable engine. And, and now we're moving towards like, by the time this is out, like boring ads.com will be out.

No brand is attached to a lot of this. Like is, is that sort of quick run rate? Is it because you sort of had a springboard with your own personal brand? Or do you think it's due to the merits of the products themselves?

Like I'm just going on Boring Marketer right now. The Twitter account, you know, hundred, two hundred, three hundred likes per tweet. And this is boring SEO stuff, right? Like what, what the cool thing about having, you know, one personal brand with a few thousand people, you can kind of like give seed capital, kind of like, you know, social capital to another account and be like, hey, like I just started boring at Boring Marketer. Check it out. Yeah, that gets the first two or three thousand followers. And then from that you try to get it to a point where it's like, you know, it starts off as a baby and then gets to a toddler and then a child and then now it's like an adult. So I think how helpful was it for me to be behind it initially? Helpful. But do I think it like, you know, my take on Twitter specifically is anyone can get to 10,000 followers if you just set up tweet notifications and write thoughtful replies. So you could have done that, you could have started at Boring Marketer. It probably would have taken you four months to get there. I was able to do it in four days, but I don't think that should be a stopping point for people who want to do something like this.

I wanted to talk about like the agency business model. I know that was one of the notes that we had, Nathan, that we wanted to dive into. Do like agencies still exist several years down the road? I mean if, if we can, if you know, chat, GPT becomes our consultant and we can prompt any website into existence in a year or two from now.

I think low to mid level agencies get commoditized to basically nothing or very little. So you're right. In a world where you can just prompt something to create a website or a landing page or you know, a marketing video, like of course, you know, that's tough. And I think there's millions of people who work in that space that are, that's tough. Like it is a tough place to be. You know, do I think that, you know, McKinsey is going anywhere or Bain or Ideo or you know, we have a, an innovation agency where we work with Fortune 500s and, and some fast growing startups with like Jasper AI and people like that. Do I think we're going anywhere on the innovation side? Absolutely not. People forget that you need taste.

Yeah.

Like taste is going to be the most sought after skill set for the next, you know, at least 10 years. Whereas, and this is somewhat controversial, I think engineering was the most sought after skill set of the last 10 years. And I, I'm a, I could say that as like I studied computer science, like I'm a trained engineer, you know, but I think that if you're able to, if you have good taste and you know how to prompt and you know how to come up with, you know, great ideas. I'll give you an example. Like we, we came up with a really big idea for a Fortune 100 company to shift their entire business. If you're the CEO of that company. You're not just gonna like prompt an idea generator to do that. You're gonna want to outsource that thinking to someone that you can trust. And that's where taste comes in. Right. Like so I think that, yeah, you.

Gotta another sort of example along the same lines is, right, I've got a YouTube channel. All of my thumbnails for my YouTube channel are created with AI. I've got like an AI model with my face trained into it. You know, I use Mid Journey for backgrounds. I actually still have a thumbnail designer on my team. He uses AI for me because he knows what thumbnails look better than I do. Right. So he can actually use these tools, Dolly, the Stable diffusion, Mid Journey. And I mean I can create amazing images with those. He creates really amazing thumbnails, pulls them all together and still has a much better design eye than I have. So I still hire somebody to use a high for me to make the thumbnails.

Yeah, yeah.

I think one thing there though is like, you know, a lot of grunt work I think will be kind of replaced with this. Right. It's like, like you're the guy who's making the thumbnails, he has great taste. But if it's somebody who is doing something just very repetitive without a lot of thought put into it or you know, requiring taste, a lot of that is going to get automated away.

Yeah. And I think in a lot of ways too, it, you know what you were saying, it sort of levels the playing field as well. So yes, there's going to be like non skilled people that might struggle a little bit, but those people in that sort of middle class realm, they also have these tools at their disposal to sort of take them to the next level. If you want to learn how to code, it's easier than ever right now to learn how to code. If you want to learn how to be really good at graphic design, it's easier than ever to learn how to be really good at graphic design. So I feel like the people that are sort of in that middle, lower end, I know this is like a buzzword, but it sort of democratized the information to, to get you there. Right.

I think those people are at a crossroads. Like they can either see the knowledge and see the tools and be like, I'll get to you later or they can get their hands dirty.

I'm kind of convinced this stuff's going to get, you know, 20 to 50% better every year for the next five years. So that's coming soon, that this is going to be able to help you plan out your life and like an action plan of things you could be doing to make your life better. So I think that's going to be such an unlock for so many people.

There's this sort of narrative going on. We were talking about the, you know, AI video generators, like OpenAI just came out with theirs. And there's this narrative that I just absolutely hate that I see all over Twitter that's like, oh, it's the end for directors. Oh, it's the end for filmmakers. Look what you can do now. And I can't stand that narrative. I don't like the narrative of any time somebody goes on Twitter and makes a blanket statement of this AI is killing this industry. What I feel right now is that it levels the playing field, but it also sort of raises the playing field. It makes everybody that is sort of making videos, making art sort of up level their game. Because now what used to be something people thought was really good, now anybody can do it. So the people that were good at that now need to up their game and get even better at that thing, because pretty much everybody can do the original thing. And so I feel like that is kind of what we're, what we're seeing right now, especially with like AI video and AI image creation, is just this, this leveling the playing field for what used to be considered good, but also raising the bar for what is really amazing now. And I feel like it gives creatives, like the video creators, the art creators, superpowers, right? Like, if you're really, really good at art and now you have AI at your disposal to make art even better, you're still going to be ahead of the game of the person who just learned AI art.

So, yeah, let's, let's talk about that. So Sora, which is the model I think you're talking about, is really interesting because you can essentially prompt it to create. Let's just say I wanted to create an animation film. And right now I think it's only up to one minute, one minute of film. But I'm. I'm sure in the future you'll be. Get access to 90 minutes. And I wanted to create a film that essentially was like a Disney, a Disney film, but with my own script, like that is in the realm of possibility in the future. So if anyone could be a Walt Disney basically, and you, you, you can make that assumption. If you have good ideas, right? If going back to the taste thing, you know, you have good taste and you can write well and you have the skills to do that. Then what is mispriced? The mispriced piece is the distribution. The only place that you can't compete with Disney is in distribution. They're in tens of thousands of movie theaters or hundreds of thousands of movies across the world. They are on Netflix. Like, they've done these deals, they're taking out super bowl ads, stuff like that, Right? So that's where I think that people are mispricing creators, and they're mispricing distribution in general. So if I'm listening to this and if I'm. Me too, like, and I'm you, like, the thing to do is two things. One is you build a distribution lane. So you do everything you can to build as much distribution and credibility and trust as possible. And then the other lane is playing is the best way to describe it. Like, you play with the tools and you play to learn, but you have to pick. You can't just be like, I'm going to be the video person and the audio person and then the writer person. And then you have to, like, pick a lane also. Right? Like, you have to decide, like, oh, my dream is to build, is to be the next Walt Disney.

For example, I spent a little bit of time in Hollywood, so for, like, about a year and a half, I was partnered with Barry Osborne. I think, Greg, maybe I told you a little bit about this, but we, you know, lore.com Originally, the reason I bought the fancy domain is because I was partnering with the producer of Lord of the Rings. I was like, we're going to make this new kind of movie studio together. And it was this crazy dream of mine. And so I got to spend time on the set of Mulan out in New Zealand, you know, a Disney set, and got to meet all these crazy people out in Hollywood, New Zealand.

And.

But one thing you realize is it's so hard to break into that industry, right? And, like, you really have to know people and things like that. And it does feel like with this new technology, like, so many more people are going to get discovered because they can. They can show. They can show their concepts to Netflix or whoever, Right? Like, right now, the people who pitch Netflix, they're coming in with storyboards and things like that and a team and. And that's a big part of what sales sells. It is like, the storyboard and, like, the concept and the research around it. And before people, you had to have a whole team to do that. And now, like, somebody who has good taste, they can have those ideas, produce the storyboards, or A short video concept. Maybe not, maybe that's not gonna be the final film, but they can produce a one minute or 90 minute video and say, hey, here's not the final film. But here you get the gist of it. Here's a gist of this idea I have. Help me make it. And I think a lot of people are like, Netflix will write checks, like large checks to come in and produce those films. That's gonna be exciting for so many people.

Do you think that like AI Video is the new storyboard? Instead of making a storyboard, here's just a mock of the video.

I think there's so many opportunities around that I think, I think you're going to see like talent agencies too where they'll like, you know, they'll, they'll pitch the studios with their talent and like just put our talent's face into the concept. Like here's how this, you know, this guy that we have, girl, is how they would look in this role. And then you just show it. You know, there's like so many areas, entertainment that's going to get changed from this. Yeah.

I also think that the leverage that you're going to have with the Netflixes of the world is going to be, oh, I've got 50,000 or 100,000 followers.

Yeah.

And I've already posted this IG clip or whatever and I got 20,000 shares and they're loving it and they're banging on the door and they want more of it.

Yeah.

So I think that's why I always go back to the distribution piece because like, I think that, that if everyone has the ability to create essentially these Disney style like levels of films and storyboards, like it's going to be. You have to have some point of leverage.

Yeah. I mean when you look at like the music industry and even like the book industry. Right. Among authors, when you go to get like a publishing deal for books or if you go to get like a, you know, a music production deal from these, these music studios, that's kind of the thing they're looking at these days is how big of a following do you have? Right. It's a heck of a lot easier to get a book publishing deal if you have a million subscribers on YouTube and you know, 1.5 million followers on X. You know, it sounds like that might be the future of video as well. If the sort of creation of video is completely democratized and anybody can make them, that's sort of the next level is what sort of distribution do you bring to the table. On your existing platforms. That's a, I think that's a really interesting way to look at it if I'm interpreting what you're saying. Right?

Yeah. I mean, you saw that a little bit with music, you know, 10, 15, 20 years ago, even when YouTube came out. Like Justin Bieber, it was a YouTube creator, you know, we didn't call him that, but he posted videos on YouTube. He was found by Scooter Braun on YouTube and then he became Justin Bieber, one of the biggest acts in the world, musical acts in the world. From YouTube. We don't have that really. With movies, for example, like the way you become big in movies is you go on a more traditional path. Like you go to USC and study film and then you get an internship at, you know, you know, xyz, you know, I don't even know because I don't know the film business, but I know. All I know from what I hear is that it's, it's a very linear path and you get like, here's like, you have to like check the boxes. What this does is there's only two boxes to check. Do you know the tools and do you have distribution is what I'm saying.

And you can use the tools to get distribution too, is a beautiful thing.

Right.

Like you could be somebody in Quebec or whatever, like in a small town who starts producing films or AI art or whatever on Twitter and get an audience and then go out and try to take the next level and actually, you know, partner with some big company to actually make it.

Absolutely. I also think this is kind of a little bit of a different topic, but I think there's a huge opportunity to create content for different geographies and languages and cultures. Yes. I'm interested to see how AI plays a role in that so that like, you're not just lip dubbing different videos. For example, like, what if in France you're wearing like a beret or something? And you know, in America and, and then the video in the US maybe you're not wearing a beret, right. You're, you're wearing a baseball cap or something like that. Just like, what are these little nuances, things that you can add to the content so that it feels more, oh, this is for me, this is for people like me. And I think that's really interesting. And I think that the greater trend to that is all media will be personalized. I think that's the really cool part about where we are in like the cycle and the this AI world. It's like, it's not just an AI world. It's like there's a lot of ma massive trends happening right now like AI, virtual reality.

Yeah. Robotics is just starting as well.

And robotics is just starting. I saw YC came out with their like here's the things that we're really interested. I don't know if you saw that.

Yeah, I saw it yesterday.

Yeah. It's like you know, applying machine learning and robotics. Using machine learning to stimulate the physical world. New defense technology. Bring manufacturing back to America. New space companies. Climate tech.

Yeah.

Commercial open source companies. Spatial computing. New enterprise resource planning software. Developer tools inspired by existing internal tools. Explainable AI LLMs for manual back office processes and legacy enterprises. AI to build enterprise software. Stablecoin finance A way to end cancer foundation models for biological systems. The managed service organization model for healthcare. Eliminating middlemen in healthcare. Better enterprise goo. And finally small fine tuned models as an alternative to giant generic ones. There's a lot of stuff going on.

And, and, and people were saying that part of that whole list was oh you know, it's an end of the trend with SAS or something like this. I think YC is like seeing the writing on the wall that like dramatic changes are coming, like dramatic changes. And so yeah, we should be looking for more moonshots, big things and, and, and now the technology is making it possible. But also from a, you know, probably from their perspective from an investment standing like the companies that they would have invested in before. A lot of those now probably be built with like one or two people and they're not going to need as much capital, you know. And Greg, you talk a lot about this kind of stuff but so I think they're looking like okay, yeah, the investors and VCs are probably going to focus more and more on the companies that are really going to need a lot of caps, right. People that are trying to solve cancer, people are trying to build robotics and things like this and like new type you know, simulating the world with AI. Like, like very ambitious things that are going to require lots of capital because the other one just like God like in a year or two and especially you know I've been hearing from friends in San Francisco and a lot of them are like connected to the whole YC kind of network really positive things about GPT5. I assumed, you know, since you know, Sam Altman's connection to yc, a lot of those people know ideas of what's coming and so they're probably realizing like yeah, in a year or two from now a lot of those simple SaaS tools. If you don't have great distribution or a brand, they're not gonna make a whole lot of sense. And so I think that's part of the list too.

Is, Is that, like, personally, I'm happy that people are working on those hard problems, but I personally prefer working on easy problems.

The 1 to n or. Or whatever versus 0 to 1.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's like, I'm a thin rapper guy, and I've. I've. I'm. I did the whole Silicon Valley thing. I lived nine years there. I've been a part of companies that have raised billions of dollars. Like, I could say I did it, but, man, am I glad to be on the other side.

Yeah.

And, yeah, and, and. And creating thin wrappers with deep communities, like that should be the title of this. This. Something like that. It's like thin wrappers and deep communities. Like, that's the strategy for you want to win in AI. Like, that's literally the strategy.

But before we do wrap up, I do want to ask about. You probably need a robot. Could you quickly explain that to me? Because I was asking Nathan about it and, you know, I figured the. The best person to ask about it and get the explanation from is from Greg himself. So can you tell me a little bit about what that is?

I start all businesses with this framework of mine. We call it the ACP funnel Audience community product. So, like I was talking about with boring marketing, we started with the Twitter account. We did the same thing with you probably need a robot. This is like over a year ago. Yeah, over a year ago. AI obviously wasn't as big as what it is today. And we created a Twitter account where we just share productivity tips with. Like, we use this tool and here's what we learned. And then we opened up a Discord, and then we got like 20,000 people to join the Discord, maybe more. 25,000. And we saw that there was demand, and then we, of those people, we turned it into a newsletter. And then every week we would give people, like, deep dives around. Here's how we're using AI this week. So less. Not like AI news or anything like that, but just like, here's things that we're learning and to make it more productive in your business career. And it's evolved to other things too. Like we created like, a Deal pass, which is very popular, where you get access, like 48 bucks, and, like, you get, you know, discounts on, like, all the major AI tools or a lot of them. Like, my mind and drippy AI Framer and barely that AI Apollo. So a lot of things like that. And so we've been able to monetize really well through this, like, audience community product. And then we also, you know, because we run a lot of agencies, we also do helping companies, like, transform their businesses to be AI first. The reason I wanted to yeah, I just wanted to share that structure because I think that that same structure, acp, could be helpful for other people.

Nathan, anything else you want to you want to ask or add before we wrap this up?

Yeah. I really appreciate you coming here, and it's been awesome.

Thank you for your time. And I'm excited to see where this goes. And you're doing great.

Appreciate it.

Sa.