How To Build Your First AI Business From Scratch (Steps & Tools)

We might be moving into this future where less and less people work for big companies. Big companies need less and less people. There's really never an easier time to start a business than right now because of the tools that make all this stuff really, really easy. They're all at your disposal.

Hey, welcome to the Next Wave podcast. I'm Matt Wolf. I'm here with Ethan Lands. And one of the questions that we get asked pretty often is, is if you were starting over from scratch with all these AI tools that are available to you, what would you do? What path would you take? And so in this episode, we're going to break down exactly what Nathan would do if he would start from scratch, what I would do if I was starting from scratch, as well as the things we are actually doing right now with AI that are helping build our business. So some really cool stuff. Get ready to take some notes, and let's dive right in. One of the things that we were talking about right before we hit record on this episode was that me personally, I don't really think starting an AI business is the smartest path for somebody to. To take. Right. And what I mean by that is like starting a business that is like your own AI company. Right. I feel like more the path to take would be starting a business that's not like a specific AI SaaS or something like that, but a company that leverages all of the AI tools that exist out there to make your life and make building this business a lot easier. That's the path that I would take. But I know, Nathan, that, like, if you were kind of starting over today from scratch, you would build probably like a SaaS company and focus, like, in a very specific niche audience. How would you build that? Like, what. What tools would you use, you know, for, let's say, like, the idea for the SaaS you're going to use? Like, how would you go about actually building the SaaS? Would you use AI for, like, the marketing, you know, like, what sort of, like, what would that flow look like, what. How would you break down? Like, all right, I'm starting this business. Here's how I would go and do it.

I think I would go for a walk, talk to ChatGPT voice, just chat with it. I would literally just, like, go for a walk and talk to AI, talk about different ideas I have and go back and forth with it. Tell it to, like, summarize what I. What we discussed and give me like, a list of, like, 10 to the top 10 ideas from that. Go back, put them on a Whiteboard, sit down with like, ideally, like a, you know, a partner, somebody who's helping me, you know, implement these ideas and then use something like, you know, cursor or something like that to just like, crank out the websites and test them out.

Yeah, yeah. I think I like the idea of going for a walk, having a conversation with, with OpenAI's new advanced voice mode, and then just sort of like fleshing out, like the conversation with the AI and sort of, here's my thoughts. You know, what are the pros and cons of this? You know, do you see any potential downsides of doing this route? You know, are there any things you would change about the idea? You have that conversation with the AI and then the cool thing is you can go back to your computer at home and literally look back at the history and see that conversation and see the conclusions. And so, like, it's all there, save stored for you inside of, you know, your chat GPT dashboard. What I would probably do slightly different is I don't think I would go and necessarily build the software ideas that it gave me. Let's say this is what I would do. I would probably take like the 10 ideas that we came up with from that conversation, right? Like, let's say the end of the conversation is like, all right, give me a recap and list 10 ideas based on what we talked about for cool software companies. Then what I would go do is I would use a tool. There's a couple of cool tools out there. One's called, like, Mixo. I think it's Mixo IO, which is a tool to rapidly build, like a website with a single prompt, right? So you go to that website and you say, I'm going to build a software product for real estate agents to help them find leads using AI, right? I'm just sort of making this up off the seat of my pants here. But let's say, like, you gave it all of those details about, like, the software you're thinking about doing. What it'll do is it'll go and create a landing page for you with, you know, images and copy and headlines and sub headlines and all that kind of stuff with the idea for your software. And then at the bottom it'll have an email opt in box that says join the wait list, right? So then what you can go do is take all 10 of those ideas that OpenAI gave you, go to a tool like Mixo. Have Mixo rapidly create 10 different websites that sort of flesh out the idea on the website, and then you can go and buy advertising on Facebook ads, Google Ads, Twitter ads, wherever to all 10 of those landing pages. And then whichever one has the most interest on the waitlist, whichever one's wait list grows the fastest, go make that product. That's probably what I would do.

That's kind of like the. Was it Tim Ferriss that talked about ideas like that, where you would test ideas with ads, where you would. Yes, you would try something. I think that's how he did his books, right? Like his book covers. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Whereas, like, he would do a Facebook ad and then see which one converted the best and that would, like, show him which direction he should go.

Yeah, yeah. Well, his original book title, the Four Hour Week Week Workweek was originally called something like how to Sell Drugs for Fun and Profit or something like that. And he actually tested that title against the Four Hour Work Week and the Four Hour Work Week one.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Obviously.

It'S kind of funny that he thought it wasn't going to. But I. I wouldn't depend on AI to give me all the ideas. Definitely a lot of the ideas would be coming from me and me kind of brainstorming with the AI and I probably would go do research after that. Like, I'd probably use something like Perplexity. So, like all these different industries that I don't know much about, like, you know, let's say it's landscaping or whatever. Like, I would. I would go do some, like, Perplexity searches and pull up to see if there are existing companies in those areas. And if there are, I would look at their websites, you know, maybe copy and paste that into ChatGPT or something to use as a reference. And I think what I would do. So I haven't used Mix. You said Mix IO is that. I think it's like AI.

Well, this Mixo website, just to clarify, is literally just designed to like, test concepts. Like, it doesn't build the whole website. It's designed to make a landing page with the idea on it and then, you know, send people that wait list to gauge interest. Like, it specifically seems to be tailored for that use case.

Oh, interesting. I'll have to try it out. Yeah, Depending on how good it is. I mean, you might be able to just do this the same thing yourself, though, like using cursor, like having like a template and then you go into cursor and like, hey, change this stuff for me. Like, change the taglines. Here's the kind of stuff I want to change. Change the colors. You probably, like within like five minutes could Change all that stuff. Then, you know, if you, you know, if you know how to use, if you know how to code, you just push it live and then you're good. So that's probably what I would do. But yeah, I love the idea of using the Facebook ads and just like testing it, you know, just how Tim Ferriss used to do.

Yeah, yeah. And then, and then the nice thing is too, you've already built an email list. So then when you go and actually release the project, you just hit up all the people that joined that specific wait list that said, they basically raised their hand and said, I'd be interested in this product because they joined the waitlist. Right. And then boom, you've got your, your, your sort of first marketing campaign for it because you just mail that list. I mean, heck, if you want, you can mail the other nine lists as well and say, hey, we didn't make that product, but come check out this one.

So maybe we should try this and record it.

Yeah, that actually become a fun episode. Okay. If we do that, who owns it? Does.

But yeah, so that, that's the way I would do it. And then, and then you would go and like build the software. Right. And you mention Cursor's probably, I believe, like the biggest benefit of Cursor, right, is that it can use your entire code base for context. Right. Like it's.

Yes.

It's using, I believe, retrieval augmented generation, which can like look at the text of everything that you upload. But when you're using Cursor, it's looking at all of the code. So like, even if it's like 30 files long, right. It's going to look through all of those files to sort of understand what's going on in the software that you're creating. Right?

Yeah, exactly.

I actually never use Cursor still.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, that's. I mean, you know, I've only used it a little bit. But like the biggest benefit I saw was that it can see your whole code base. So it's like it has context of your entire code base versus you copying, pasting something into claw. And it only knows the one page it's on.

Exactly.

It doesn't know that if you change this thing, it's going to break something somewhere else. So it's important to know how things are interconnected.

Yeah, yeah. But I think, you know, with the tools that are available out there, you can rapidly get ideas for software. You know, having the sort of conversations. You can rapidly go and test the ideas by collecting emails. Once you've got the idea you can pretty much rapidly create the software right between tools like Cursor. Right. You've got tools like Cursor, but then you've also got tools like Replit and Firebase, where Firebase tends to handle like the back end sort of database of whatever website or SaaS you're building. Like Firebase will handle that. It also handles like a lot of the single sign in stuff like, like Google Login and Apple Login and all that kind of stuff. So you don't have to really mess with a login functionality.

Yeah.

And then Replit tends to host like the front end for your site a little bit. So if you're using Cursor to write the code, Replit to host the front end, Firebase to host the back end. Like you use all three of those tools. And now Replit just added an integration for Cursor, so whenever you make these updates in Cursor, you can just have them automatically pushed into Replit, which for you and fixed live on your site. So, I mean, like, we've said it before, there's really never an easier time to start a business than right now because of like the AI tools and the tools that make all this stuff, like really, really easy. They're all at your disposal. Look, I'll be honest, if you're not using AI in your marketing, chances are you're slowing yourself down. AI has helped me find new ways to market my YouTube channel, grow my newsletter help, and it even helps me with the process of writing my newsletter. That's just another way AI has completely changed the game for me. If you're looking to freshen up your marketing tactics, HubSpot just dropped a free guide that goes all in on how you can use AI to create a killer marketing plan. It goes into the entire process with AI prompts at each step and how you can leverage AI to optimize your marketing strategy. If you want it, just grab it at the link in the description. Now back to the show.

Yeah, it's crazy how easy it is to make a database with Firebase. It's kind of wild. I met James Taplin, I think Tamplin, I believe that's his last name. Sorry, James, if you're listening. But I met him with some friends in San Francisco, smoking hookah together. They're like, oh, here's this guy James, and he's building something pretty cool. I'm like, oh, cool, what is it? And it was like, oh, Firebase. I was like, yeah. And he was way more technical than Me, I was like, oh, cool. It's like easy database or something. Okay, that sounds neat. Had no idea if it would work or what the hell he was building. Exactly.

And then it became Google at the time or did Google acquire it later?

No, they, they acquired it, I, I believe. Firebase was a YC startup, I believe, and they, Google acquired it for I think a few hundred million. Like it was a lot. And, and it all happened like within like a year or two. It was kind of wild. Like literally like we were like smoking hookah. He's telling me this crazy idea. And then a year or two later, like I, I see the thing like, oh, Google's bought them for like a few hundred million. But so, so most of the stuff we were talking about was like, kind of, you know, know the stuff I would do. So what, what, what would you do, like, if you were creating a business?

I do want to add, I do want to add one more like, idea to what we were just talking about because, like, a lot of ideas have been done already, right? Especially since like AI has become a lot more prolific and a lot of coders are able to use it. We're seeing just like almost like this spamming of soft SaaS companies, right? Like, yeah, like, I run the Future Tools website. I have a submission form where people can submit their new tools. I get like a hundred new tools a day submitted. I only accept about 1% of them because most of them are just like clones of tools that already exist because everything's so easy to make. So the other thing that I would, I would add into the mix of what we were talking about. There is, I would go and try to find the products that already exist that are somewhat close to the idea that we're talking about because there's probably something out there that's already fairly close to like almost every idea you could come up with. But then what I would do is I would go to like Reddit and I would search out that software on Reddit. I would search out that software on trustpilot. I would search it out on, oh, what's the, there's all those sites that are like sort of like peer reviewing websites and software that exist out there, right? I would go to all of those different sites and I would copy and paste all of the comments, all of the reviews, all of that kind of stuff into Clod. And then I would get like a sentiment analysis of like, what do people love about this product? What do people hate about this product? You know, what is the, what is the feedback that this product has gotten. And then I would use that feedback to make sure that I make my product better than the one that exists out there.

That's a good idea. I. I was just thinking I would probably just look at similar web and see if it was like, trending up or down like the. The website. Yeah, yeah.

But, you know, you can always do that sentiment analysis. Like, I. This is. This is a tactic that a lot of Amazon sellers use, right? Because, like, on Amazon, like, every product has like 30 competing products because everybody just orders them off Alibaba.com and sells the same crap, right? So what people do on Amazon is they go and look at the reviews of the products that exist already and then sort of get the sentiment analysis of what people do and don't like about that product and then make sure that when they go sell their version of the product, they're fixing the things that people don't like and they're sort of leaning into the things that people do, like, in the marketing, right? So, like, if a lot of people say, like, for this software, I love X feature, I love that they added this feature, you want to make sure that that feature's in yours, right? Or if you look at the software or if you look at the reviews for those various software companies and they say, like, I really, really hate that they haven't added this feature. It seems so easy for them to add. Why don't they add this feature? And there's like this overwhelming thought that, like, this functionality should be in this tool, but it's not. Well, make sure you add that functionality, right? So that way you're making sure that whatever you go and build, you know, you used AI to sort of analyze what are the features that should be in my MVP and which feature should I exclude?

Okay, cool. So, so, so, Matt, what would you do, like, if you were starting over today?

So I would likely still go down the route of being really focused heavily on content creation. I love content creation. I also think content creation is somewhat future proof, right? I do think, like, there are tools that make content a lot easier for anybody to create, right? You've got the like, hey, gen tool where you can make a digital clone of yourself and now anybody can just crank out videos of themselves talking, right? You've got Notebook lm, which will create really actually good podcasts that people will listen to, right? So I say it'll future proof me to some degree. But I also feel like a lot of people, as AI gets more and more prolific, right? As it's Just sort of everywhere. And people are inundated with AI all the time. They're going to look for real humans, right? They're going to look for that like, real voice, that real person that they can trust, that they know there's an actual human being behind it who's not just looking to like make affiliate commissions or whatever, right? And so I still think there's a lot of value to being a. Not a faceless content creator, but a face full content. What's the word for that? Not faceless, but face full.

Having a face, having a face, be.

A face in content creation, a face channel. So I still think there's a lot of, of.

I still think there's a lot of room to, to grow and build in that space and leverage AI to make your life a lot easier to do it, right. So I would probably pick a fairly niche topic that I can, that I'm really excited about and passionate about and I can talk about myself, right. And then I would use AI to help me with the ideation, right? I right now I use Perplexity and Claude constantly. And when I am using Perplexity, I have the pro version and I have it set to use Claude when I'm using Perplexity. So like, Perplexity and Claude are like my AI stack that I'm mostly using right now, right? But like, I would use those tools to research what are people searching for in this niche right now? What type of content are they looking for? What are things that people are struggling with that they need help with. And I would go and create as much content around those topics as possible. And the content is so much easier to create as well because you can have tools like Cloud go and outline the, the concepts for you. Like I can say I want to make a video about how to make, you know, 3D walkthroughs of houses for the real estate niche, right? I can go and go to Claude and say, hey, this is the video I want to make. What are the things that I need to make sure are included in this video? What is the flow of this video? How can I make it that so it holds people's attention throughout the whole video and it will actually generate an outline for me and I can follow the outline and make sure I hit all the beats that it recommends I hit, right? Like one of the biggest questions is what kind of camera am I going to need? So make sure you talk about the type of camera you're going to need. How long do I need to set the camera down in Each location of the house. All right. I need to make sure that gets into my video, right? So I can use AI to really, really help with the outlining process of the content that I would create.

Where would you start first? You've mentioned like video, I think you mentioned newsletter, Twitter, things like that. Where would you start if you were starting a new media brand today, simultaneously.

Work on a newsletter and probably short form video. Now I. Long form video is my main game, right? Long form video on YouTube is, is actually where I make the most of my money. That's where most of the sponsorships lie. AdSense revenue is more significant on long form videos. However, short form videos. I've actually started doing quite a bit of short form videos as well. I'm putting out about three short form videos a week right now. Short form videos are so much faster to produce, right? I'm making like a 59 second script. I'm not reading the script exactly anymore. I was for a little bit, but it kind of got too obvious. Like you can see my eyes reading the script and I'm like, all right, I need to basically like memorize what I'm going to talk about and hit all the points. And so now what I'm doing is I'll like speak out a paragraph and then look down at my script and then speak out of paragraph. So it's not word for word anymore. But the short form videos I can, I can batch record three or four short form videos in a half hour, right? Just like, here's one, here's another, here's another, here's another. And then I can either pass them to an editor or I can use a tool. I use a tool called Time Bolt to edit mine, which is basically like an automated tool that will go through and find all the gaps and silence and remove them automatically. And it tries to find some of the mistakes and it tries to take out some of the ums and stuff like that. So I can just feed my sort of rough video into that tool and then it'll spit out the sort of one minute version for me. And then I would go in and you know, add B roll and stuff like that the old fashioned way using DaVinci Resolve or Adobe Premiere. Now I would pass it to an editor. I have an editor that helps me with short form. But I would go and I would batch record a bunch of them at this point, pass them all to my editor, the editor would go and add the visual effects to them. And the reason I like short form is because in the content world the majority of the income that I earn doesn't come from the YouTube AdSense revenue, it comes from sponsorships. Right. And all the sponsors care about is how much reach is this video gonna get. Right. They don't care if it's a 10 minute video or a 45 second video. They want to get the views on their product, they want to get the views on their brand. Right. So the people that are making these 60 second shorts are making the same amount of money off their sponsorships and is I'm making by putting out 20 minute long videos that take me multiple days to dial in. Yeah. From a sponsorship perspective, ad revenue is crap on short form videos. Right? Like I can get, you can get a million views on a short form video and it'll make you like 60 bucks. It's, it's really dumb. But from a sponsorship perspective, I can basically charge the same amount to a sponsor for a short form that might get a hundred thousand views as I can for a long form that might get a hundred thousand views. So it's, you know, a lot less effort for creating the content. I can crank out a lot more of it. And the sponsors will still come knocking as long as the videos get views.

Right.

So I probably go that route.

And you would use your face, so you wouldn't do Faceless.

I wouldn't do Faceless. I would use my face on those. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean you could use something like hey Gen. And train your face into it and then it also learns your voice using 11 labs and then you can copy and paste a script. And I know people that are doing that. Rowan Chung is doing that, Varun Maya is doing that. Those guys are doing really, really well with it. Like they're, it's actually their face, but it's an AI avatar version of their face and those work. But I do think like they work for them right now because they're like the pioneers. Like they're the ones that are like the first ones out there doing this stuff and being seen. But there's going to hit a saturation point where half your short form content that you see is these like AI generated avatars and you start to get sick of them. Right?

Yeah.

I think that's where being a real human is still going to be important. You know, going to conferences and you know, as they say, shaking hands and kissing babies. Right. Like that's that type of thing. People build a relationship, they build a bond with you. They realize you're a real person that they can trust that, you know, they can get to know personally that they could, they feel like they want to go have a beer with. Right. Like building up. That I think is really, really important. And I think it's only going to get more and more important as we're seeing more and more AI generated content.

Yeah. And it's going to get easier too. Right. I think I saw Peter levels the, you know, famous indie hacker. He put out something yesterday showing where you can just generate an avatar of like this beautiful woman and all of a sudden she's like a CNN anchor talking about whatever. You literally like copy and paste in CNN like a news story into like, you know, chatgpt or whatever and have it produce the script and then you just feed that into the system and it does all of it. So I mean, you know, I think it's got a thing where that kind of stuff is probably a decent tactic though, like for like the next year or maybe even two. But at some point there's like, everyone's going to be doing it and like you're gonna know, okay, that's another one of those.

It is gonna, and it's going to start to be associated with low effort content. Right. In the same way, like when I watch, when I, when I click on a YouTube video and let's say it's like a 10 minute video and I immediately hear like an AI voiceover on the video, I click away. It turns me off like immediately. Like, I'm just like, I don't want to listen to an AI voice for the next 10 minutes. I almost immediately click off because I just assume this was low effort content that somebody just slapped together and threw on YouTube to try to get quick views. That's what I associate with that. I, I, you know, I don't know if that's good or bad, but that's what my brain associates with it. Like hear the AI voice, I go, this is obviously an AI voice. I'm out, moving on to the next video. I want to hear a human explain the thing to me. Right.

So for now though, like, I mean, I mean at some point you might not be able to tell though. There's no.

I agree. Yeah, I agree. I think at some point we won't be able to tell, but I also think those AI generated avatars. It's going to be a similar thing. Right now I actually like watching Varun Maya and I like watching Rowan's videos where they're doing it that way, but it's not really a shortcut. Like those guys put a lot of effort still into Making a lot of those videos and finding the right B roll and cutting it at the right time. So it's harder to tell that it's an AI generated video. That kind of stuff. There's more effort into it than I think they, they actually let on. Like to let people believe, right? But there is, there is sort of a part two to what I would do, right? So like, I did mention I would simultaneously create an email list while, while also doing content. I would probably do like a mix of both long and short form, but I'd probably make short form the main and make long form a little less frequent just because of like the, the pace that I can put out short form videos, I can put out a lot more of them. But like a newsletter, there's never been an easier time to, to grow on. We talked about this on stage on the, the HubSpot creator stage when we're at Inbound is like when it comes to creating a newsletter. Like, the newsletter could mostly be outlined and edited using AI, right? Like, you can have AI write an outline for you and then you go in with your own words and write it out. Or you can have AI flesh it out, write the whole thing for you, or you can write it yourself and have AI go back and fix it for editing and grammar and spelling and all that kind of stuff so that it reads a little bit better. Like, writing the newsletter should be nobody's excuse anymore, right? It's. It's easier than ever to actually create the newsletter. You have Perplexity that can do the research. Let's say you're making a newsletter on their real estate niche. And let's say it's a daily newsletter. You can go to Perplexity every morning and say, what are the top 10 most interesting things happening in the world of real estate? And Perplexity will give you a breakdown of like, based on the news we found, here's the top 10 things happening in the world of real estate today. Okay, cool. Take that list of 10 things, jump over to Cloud and say, Here's 10 things that are happening in the real estate world today. Write me a newsletter around these 10 things and break it all down. Boom, I got that newsletter written. That's you can use make.com and probably make like a API flow where every day you just press a button and it goes right to the newsletter for you. Following that formula, like, it's so easy to create the newsletter now, right? And then I would leverage the short form content with a call to action to join the newsletter. Right? So at the end of every single video, you'd have like a two second call to action. Get on the daily newsletter to, to, to be the most in the know person in real estate in your area, right? Like if you're not on this newsletter, your competition probably is. So make sure you're on it, right? You do those kinds of calls to action at the end of your short form videos and you grow the newsletter that way, right? And what I love about the sort of blend of having a newsletter and having a sort of content machine is that now you can sell sponsorships in a completely different way. Like one question I get asked a lot when I'm at these events is like, you know how, what's the cpm Do I, what CPM do I charge sponsors for my YouTube videos, right? Other YouTubers are like, all right, so per thousand CPM is how much you make per thousand views, right? So let's say on average somebody might charge $40cpm. So for every thousand views a video makes, they make $40 on it. A video that gets a hundred thousand views might make, what is that? Four, four grand, right? Yeah. So, but people will ask me like, what's the cpm? And I'm like, I don't play the CPM game, I play the bundling game. I've got the Future Tools website where I can put sponsors at the top of the website. I've got my YouTube channel where I can integrate sponsors in the middle of the video. I've got shorts where I can make sponsored shorts for companies and I've got my newsletter and people can sponsor the newsletter. So I don't sell CPM at all. I go to these companies and say, here's a bundle. You can get a featured listing on Future Tools for one week. I'll integrate your ad read into one video and you can sponsor two newsletters over the next month. So it's more of this like package deal where you're being seen on all of these platforms, right? And now I get out of that CPM game and I sort of elevate, elevate above it. And I'm charging way more than some other YouTubers would charge because you're now getting access to the newsletter, the YouTube channel, the YouTube shorts, maybe Instagram, maybe Twitter, maybe my LinkedIn, maybe my Discord community and the, you know, the Future Tools website, all of that, right. Like all of that can be sort of worked into some sort of bundled deal. So that's the game that I play now with my content.

Yeah, you, you told me that in the taxi in Boston, we were heading, heading back. And that was one of the main things. Like when I got back, I told ChatGPT, like, remember this?

So that was one of my notes. Like I did like a decompression like after Boston, like, what's all this stuff I learned or whatever that I want to remember? That was one of my big notes. I'm like, remember this, this is smart. Because not only does that help you, like, better monetize your media properties, but also they help grow each other. So it's like, it's amazing. It's like amazing for growth and monetization. I do feel like with newsletters, it's. It's going to be similar to like the faceless YouTube channels where, yeah, it's easier than ever to create them. So the ones that are really like, yeah, you could have newsletters right now where you literally just copy and paste up in and say, hey, give people these bullet points. Just like, just, just summarize. And, and there have been like, newsletters that are really successful that are just like purely summarization kind of newsletters. Yeah, I feel like those are going to be challenging long term though, right? Because like, yeah, people are going to use perplexity or whatever else to have their own personalized summarization.

Yeah.

So I think, I think if you're doing it, like, make sure that you have a unique voice and have something to say. I think long term is going to. Because people are going to want to have that real person and learn from that real person and hear what they have to say versus just here's a, An AI summary of what happened anywhere.

Yeah. You know Peter Diamandis, right. He's got a newsletter called Future Loop. And Future Loop is completely automated with AI. I don't think he touches it. I think like he, he, he's created some sort of app that watches the, the sort of tech emerging tech news for him, writes the newsletter and sends it. Like, I literally think it's completely hands off. It's just on a daily basis it runs through this process and blasts out the newsletter without like a human really even touching it, saying that out of. I subscribe to it. Out of all the newsletters I read, I sort of have like a priority of like, I always read this one. Like, Rowan Chung's rundown is probably my favorite. I always read that one. Ben's Bites is really good with Ben Tassel. Right. There's a handful that I'm like, these are my must reads every day. Right. And I Look at Future Loop, which is like the one that's automated with AI, it's the lowest on my priority list, right? Like, if I'm like rushed for time and I'm just like, all right, give me the really quick news. I only read two or three newsletters and that one doesn't make the cut, right? Because I know it's automated, I know it's AI. Sometimes it finds news articles that are like two months old and I'm like, what did, why did that make it into this one? Probably because automation screwed up and put the wrong article in somehow. Right. So I do think that there is like a sort of limited window where you can do this and over time there'll be so many just junk newsletters that is not effective anymore. But if you can be that person that has a voice that it makes a difference.

Yeah, it can be, it could be a good short term strategy. I mean, you could do that. And then once it becomes obvious that it's no longer working, like, oh, pivot. Now I'm writing the newsletter. Here's the new format.

You know, so I'm, as far as, you know, I'm writing the newsletter.

Yeah, I'm writing it. Yeah, yeah.

By the way, the way, this is not what I do with my newsletter. I actually, like work with a team and I've got an editor and some people that help me with writing. It's actually still humans behind my newsletter. So I just want to say that if anybody's like listening going, oh, Matt's automating the whole thing. I'm not, but I'm just pointing out how easy it is to create a newsletter and that like, the amount of time that goes into that really shouldn't be a factor.

Yeah. So, so basically you're saying that it's easier than ever to create YouTube shorts and a newsletter. And so if you were starting over, that's what you would do. You'd use all these AI tools. What do you think? Like, so this all works today, like in, in like five years from now. What do you, do you think it'll be similar or do you think it's all going to be different?

Yeah, I think, I think timing is a big factor. Like, look, when it, when it comes to my success on YouTube, I got insanely lucky with the timing, right? Like, I started making YouTube content around AI about six months before AI hit the mainstream consciousness, right? Like, yeah, I was making videos about AI and cool technology and then the rest of the world caught up because of the ChatGPT launch. And I had already been making videos on that topic. Right. So I think the earlier you get in and like this sort of more brand reputation you build earlier on, the better you're going to be off down the line. I think, you know, a lot of people are going and creating AI related YouTube channels now and they're just sort of floundering because there's already a handful of really, really big channels that most people already follow. And the smaller channels kind of are starting to feel like me too. Channels like, oh, they're looking at the analytics and going, that worked for them. I'm going to try to do the same thing, but it doesn't really work because there's already sort of some established names in that space. I think it's going to be the same thing. But I also think when it comes to like what niche you're going to go into and talk about, there's unlimited potential niches. Right?

Like, right.

Maybe just think of a sub niche of the niche. Right? Like real estate is honestly probably too broad of a niche, but if you can think of like a sub niche of that niche, you could probably own it. Right?

Like it's the Japanese gardening or.

Yeah, yeah, it's like a blue ocean strategy versus the red ocean strategy. Right. Like if, if there's a billion content creators talking about this niche, you know, niche down even further until you're in a blue ocean where you're the only one talking about that specific portion of the niche.

You know, I think one other interesting thing that, that you, you told me in Boston was how you were using Perplexity's API to like create, to fill out future tools. I mean, I've been thinking about that a lot. I'm like, God, there's probably so many directories you could build using stuff like this, you know, and Obviously I've got lore.com like, damn, should I be using this? Like, should lore.com be something else? Should lore.com be like a, you know, like every single fantasy thing or every game or whatever? Like, like, like a page is filled out and so I got this like, you know, just really game SEO on that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't know. I mean, it's a great domain name, but I, I, yeah, I'm not sure. But yeah, with like the Perplexity API, it's, it's been. The problem with the API is you can't, I wasn't, maybe there's a way to do it, but I wasn't able to pick like sonnet or Chat GPT. It lets you pick like from an open source model. So I'm actually using llama 3.1 paired up with Claude right now or with Perplexity right now. But basically the way I used to run the future Tools website was whenever I came across a new tool that I liked, I would add it to a spreadsheet. Then it would go to make.com it would use a tool called Scraping Bee. It would scrape all the copy off the website. It would take the copy that it just scraped, it would put it into chat GPT and say, summarize this tool for me. And then it would take that summary and that would be the sort of content of the listing on future tools. The problem with that method was that sometimes the page that I would, I would plug in would just have like a YouTube video embedded and so it wouldn't find anything to scrape. Or it would be like a page that's just full of images and not a lot of text. And it couldn't figure out what the tool was about by scraping it. Or it had some sort of like, like blocker on it that would block any sort of scraping tool from actually scraping it. And it would say, we couldn't find any data on this. Things like that would happen. So what I started doing instead is now when I add that URL inside of a Google Sheet cell, instead of it scraping the website, it actually takes that URL, goes to Perplexity and says, tell me what the tool at this URL is about. And why that works is because Perplexity can go and look at that website and essentially like scrape what's on it for you. But if there's nothing on the website for it to scrape, it goes and finds other sources on the Internet that talk about that tool. So if that tool is listed on Product Hunt, if somebody's talked about it on Reddit, if somebody's written an article about it on TechCrunch or something like that, it's gonna go still figure out what that tool is about because it's going and actually like searching for information about it as opposed to just sort of scraping the sales page. The flow after that's the same, right? It figures out what the tool's about and then goes over to like a GPT 3.5 API, I think, and says, summarize this for me down into like a single paragraph and then it sends it to webflow and populates the website. But that Perplexity API has made the listings on future tools ten times more accurate.

Yeah, I wonder how Google's going to deal with all this. I keep being worried for Google. I don't know, like this new age, like, like not everyone's figured this out yet. Like there's gonna be like, you can make so many directories with stuff like this. Like someone who had resources could make like a hundred directories and just like totally game everything.

Yeah, yeah. I mean using something like webflow, like webflow is a drag and drop, no code website builder. You know, you can design a website in a matter of hours using webflow and then use either make.com or zapier and link it up to perplexity and clot and some of these AI tools and the next thing you know you've got it like you can turn it on total autopilot. I still want to review every tool before it goes on the site. So I pick which tools go into that spreadsheet and make the site. But you can totally make a tool that's just like watching the Internet for you. And whenever a new AI tool pops up, it just scrapes the website and puts the tool on your website and it's just automated building up the website for you. And every day you log in and there's 40 new tools on the website. You can totally do that. I just think that when it comes to curation, the value of future tools isn't just having a site with the most tools listed. The value of the site is my curation of the tools. Like if I think it's a dog crap tool, it's not going to make the website. And so that's why I feel like the website is still valuable to people is that I'm kind of curating the tools. And all the tools that are just sort of like cheap knockoffs or money grabs or feel a little scammy aren't going to make the website.

But somebody who doesn't have morals could just do that.

There's a great business there.

Yeah, just don't put your face on it, you know, use a faceless channel for that one to promote that one. Right?

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I even think that concept has gotten so saturated. Right. Like there's so many like AI tool listing websites that do the same thing as future tools now that I think if somebody went and tried to create the same concept, it's just not going to work. Right. But if you go and fight a different niche, it'll work really, really well.

Right.

Cool. I don't know, Is there anything else we want to talk about today? Maybe.

I feel like we covered a lot of ground in this one. I mean, you know, I know what you would do if you were starting over. I know what you are going to do with a new business that you're planning. You know, I talked about how I would do it if I was to start over. I also told you exactly what I'm doing right now, today. So I feel like people listening to this have the strategies we would do, the strategies we are doing and hopefully they can fill in the gaps for how can this work in my business? How can this work in my niche? How can I leverage these ideas? I think, I think there's a lot to go off of. I also name dropped a ton of potential tools that you can use to do this stuff. Tools to validate ideas for products, tools to actually create the content for you. I think, I think there's a lot here that people should be able to take away and run with and ideally go and build a business that leverages these AI tools. I think we might be moving into this future where less and less people work for big companies. Big companies need less and less people. So I think it's really smart to learn this stuff and figure out what kind of businesses could I be building right now because it may become a necessity really soon for a lot of people.

Depend on yourself more probably versus like a company.