3 AI app ideas that are goldmines (and how to grow them)

this episode is with Dan chipper who's incubating a bunch of AI startup ideas and he gives a few away for free to us he also showed me a really cool tool about data sets and how you can build startup ideas around it I can't stop thinking about that part uh enjoy the episode uh I know you're going to come up with a bunch of startup ideas just from listening start [Music] B we got Dan chipper he's incubating some of the most interesting AI startups right now and he's doing it in a really interesting way so I brought him here so that he could he can share some of his startup ideas with everyone listening um because no one likes to be greedy with their startup ideas we don't like that so welcome thanks for having me I'm really excited all right shall we dig in Let's Do It um so the the the first idea is advanced voice notes so ideally I assume you're you're aware of advanced voice mode from chat gbt um really really cool way to like chat back and forth with with AI and what I what I notice um when I'm using that is I'll often like go take a walk and I'll like think about an issue like let's say it's a business issue or a strategy issue and I'm like having it help me like think through all the different ways I could address it and whatever and it's really good at like helping me come to like a conclusion and what I really want is then like there are people I work with like uh Brandon who runs our studio or Kate who's our editor and chief there are people who I want to like send that to and I want them to like get a little bit of the summary like the high level this is what this is what Dan thinks about this um but I know they're going to follow up with like a bunch of questions and what I want is for them to get a like text summary of it and then be able to talk to the transcript of our conversation um to like get like maybe the the summary is just sort of the tip of the iceberg but like get all the reasoning behind what I'm what I'm you know why why I decided what I decided or why I'm thinking the way I'm thinking and I think a that'll just like help me like avoid like answering lots of lots and lots of questions but B it just gives everyone else like much richer access to much richer context and it's sort of it's basically like a voice note but like it's a voice note that you can like talk to and have a conversation with that's like just an interesting idea which is like if you think about media like what where you know is the future of media media that you talk to it like what are what's dumb media and how do you make you know is that is that like a theme that you you're thinking a lot about we're we are actually um so one of the internal incubations we have is um and I think we'll probably release it I don't know like in the next week or two so it might be before this podcast is out um but it's called tldr um and what it does is um it takes all of the meetings that we have and then turns them into podcasts that are kind of like the notebook LM podcast so for me like if I miss a meeting and we're at a scale now where I can't go to all the meetings like while I'm listening while I'm like while I'm doing dishes I can like listen to a podcast that like gives me all the key takeaways of the meeting in like three minutes um and I think that's really cool and like to to sort of add on to that one things we've we've prototyped is this same interaction of like you're listening to a podcast the host is like saying something and then um you can interrupt it and be like wait I didn't get that and then it will just resp like have a conversation with you um and it's sort of like you know you know that like you know that Meme of like uh someone who's like talking to the a wall and like it's a print like print out of like their friends on the wall and they're like this is that's that's what podcasting is so it's sort of like that Meme but like they come out of the wall and they become real people for a second it's very cool I think it's human nature to want that right like people listening to this podcast are probably like wait dan I want you to explain XYZ thing so um I think that there's probably a hundred startup ideas just around that sort of concept um so you know people listening one of the things I would do is just think about the media you consume and then think about how can I turn that media into two-way with AI um I would also think about how do you prioritize uh the things that people are going to pay for you know a lot of people listening to this bootstrap Founders Indie hackers um yeah like there's obviously some consumer media that they they can do but maybe they're interested in more B2B stuff stuff that they can sell to businesses prosumers so with your idea you know that you're you're sort of giving you're talking about right now like how do you think about monetization of it um and how big could it could it be that's interesting I have to think about that I I think I think like the the way that I think about it is new technologies create the opportunity for New Media formats um every new technology like YouTube videos New Media format from the just because the internet right um killing Hollywood um I think uh the and the the thing that is true about this wave of AI is it's taking storytelling and it's making it way cheaper than it has ever been before um and I don't think that that replaces professional storytellers but what it does is it allows you to tell stories in places that was way too expensive previously so like for example I would never hire a really good Storyteller to like go sumarize our meetings for me um but I'll have the AI do it because it doesn't cost me any money um and so looking for places where um uh there are stories to tell that were previously too expensive is like the that I think that's the total addressable Market of this sort of idea and then in terms of charging for it we've been we've been thinking about this because like uh like our strategy is like everything we incubate we bundle it into the every subscription um and but we've been thinking to ourselves like okay for something like this like would people pay more for it and if so like how do we charge for it Qui ad break let me tell you about a business I invested in it's called boring marketing. com so a few years ago I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world they were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google and the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you out rank your competition so for my own businesses I wanted that I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg I didn't want to depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses I wanted to rank high in Google that's why I like SEO and that's why I use boring marketing. com and that's why I invested in it they're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30-day Sprint with a 100% money back guarantee who does that 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com I think like the thing that that that that I think would would sort of work for I mean for the for the podcast idea maybe for the voice mode idea or voice note idea is like on number of downloads or plays or listens because like that's the that's the amount of value that's being gotten out of this thing and uh and so and it scales nicely with the scale of the organization um so I think that's a cool way to do it but I don't know yeah I mean I think yeah people are tired of uh subscriptions you know you know what I mean like I I don't know about you I see like a999 subscription and I'm like or even if it's like yeah $10 $5 $3 I'm kind of just like ah I know I'm going to forget to cancel this you know what I mean so I think we're all kind of collectively got to this point where we're we're we're getting sick of it um so I do love and and you know this I do love kind of more novel ways of monetizing yeah I think and I think that's a new sort of Trend in the AI pricing realm is um not charging per month but charging like per successfully completed task or something like that yeah um and I think I think that's going to work really well cool I mean it's an interesting this is an you know this is an interesting prompt I would say this this idea um curious what people like in the comment section come up with so drop it in what's your what's your next idea my next idea um is called n of one the the basic gist is it is you know are you familiar with kaggle no so kaggle is this like um uh it's this uh basically like market for data scientists where you can post a data set and a bounty and then have data scientists like fulfill the Bounty um and like sort of win the prize with your data set so like an example is like the you know like the Netflix um the ne Netflix challenge where they were like we'll give a million dollars to anyone who can like improve our our recommendation algorithm of course that was OG yes I remember I remember that um yeah so that's really cool well I think the really interesting thing now is a there's way more interesting data sets that are like all personal ones and B everyone's a data scientist because like everyone anyone can just like prompt tune like gp4 to like find some like do something interesting with the data set so it's a platform to um post your own data sets uh whether that's like a personal one or a business one and then uh and post bounties for anyone to make predictions that are useful for you about the data set so the place that it came from is for me um I OCD um and what I think is really interesting is I think we're getting to a place where if I uh take whoop data and probably some amount of like voice and face facial movement data um I I'm pretty sure I've been working on this but I'm pretty sure I can get um I can get it to label whether or not I'm having symptoms and at any on any given day and if it can accurately label that my next question is like can something predict when I'm going to be symptomatic or not um and so what I'm going to do is or what I want to do is basically like post a big data set of you know all like all of my Biometrics and whether or not I was having OCD on that particular day and uh and then post a bounty and have you know it's like 10 10K for anyone who can predict my OCD um and um and then I think if that works and I think it will then I can get people like you or like anyone else who has like an interesting problem like that to like post their own bounties and share it with their audience and like sort of start to bootstrap a little bit of like a a market there and the reason I think it's interesting is uh one OCD sucks and be really fun if someone could predict it for me but two is um it's a new way of doing science actually um because the the way that like science proceeds right now is like you're trying to find like underlying underlying explanations for things by like doing high-end studies on like lots and lots and lots of people and like doing like a linear regression to like understand like how like how things work at a group level and I think instead what we should be doing is um uh making predictive models for IND individuals for n of one um that just like solve the problem and just help us like basically predict the problem and and worry about the generalized scientific explanation later um and I think this this is like a platform to do that all right let's get into this first of I I just pulled up uh kagle I realized I've actually been on this website this is a gift because there's probably there's probably tons of startup ideas that you can come up with just by hanging out on KAG right yeah yeah definitely um like just pulling it up right now like looking at the different data sets it says 406,000 high quality public data sets everything from avocado prices to video game sales and then you can there's all these like ready to deploy ml models uh on top of it um it just feels like this is a gold mine for coming up with startup ideas it definitely is and I think the the the important thing is that kagle was built for a time when the people who could do this stuff were people who like had had like phds in data science Y and it's like totally changed now where like you anyone can enter one of these competitions and like do better than a PhD could five years ago um just with gbd4 probably um and so I think that opens up a ton of opportunities I'm looking at check this out so I'm going to share my screen real quick we're going to we're derailing a bit need to show what's Happening Here there's literally uh a data set called open source data for hacker noon startup of the Year votes over 623,000 total votes 30,000 startups 4,000 cities think about what you can do with that data if you're trying to come up with startup ideas trying to sell to startups right totally um yeah I guess yeah what what would you do with it um I would be interested in well I think I think people who are building startups like probably people listening to the show would be interested to know like what what what is this community you know what are people in call it Sydney Australia what what do they find interesting from a startup perspective and then contrast that from Austin Texas and be like maybe there's some interesting startups coming out of Sydney um and in Austin everyone's building AI startups but in Sydney they're building marketplaces and there's actually like a a lot of opportunity to build some Marketplace idea for for Austin that's that's just like one example or maybe there's like a like some sort of like real estate or Community Building play for uh a city that has a surprisingly high density of a certain kind of company right yes yeah yes um so I I love just I think people should just go on kaggle and just look at some of their data sets and just ask them okay here's a random data set what are some startup ideas I can come with it and I think the easiest startup ideas with some of these data sets is database as a service um so I've seen that Trend pop up more and more Das database as a service MH which basically what does that mean it's a fancy way of saying you're taking some data you're C curating the data you're putting a pay wall against it you're putting a stripe link and you're selling it often to um to social audiences so either organic You're Building Twitter account Tik Tok you're paying creators to post about it um or or you're throwing some paid ads behind it yeah I like that um cool you got you got you got more [Music] ideas I got plenty of ideas let's keep going um one one like one idea that's sort of like on this like new media format train is um there are I think there's this like social aspiration around the great books it's like Marcus aelius or like play or like Moby Dick or whatever it's like um books that form the like Western Canon people feel like they should have read them but like they're kind of a drag to read in a lot of cases um and and I also think they're actually like really useful like they're really they're really great if you actually can get into them but like you have to kind of be in like an English class or something to like really get something out of it and even then a lot of English classes are like not that great um and what's really interesting about AI is it can make those um those stories available in new formats and in new translations that are like tailored for specific types of people or specific situations um so a really like easy example is you know if you try to read PL like most of the most of the pl translations are like really trying to like get the historical like what what would be like the right word like like the historical context right and they're not really like trying to make it like engaging and interesting for a specific you know for like someone who's in in their 30s speaks English like is into Tech right like they're just that's just not on their mind um and I think you can basically create new versions of great books um that are like translated specifically for particular types of people are super easy to read are super engaging and you can even do it in like a multimodal type way where you do like like you can have a a Playdoh movie where you watch a like a platonic dialogue and it's like it's probably mostly AI generated but like probably you need like an Editor to like put it together but I think you can like create a new great books library where you can consume these outof copyright books in um really digestible translations in audio and video formats and even maybe like you can add some you know advanced voice mode interactivity type stuff and I think one there's tons and tons and tons and tons of students that like need to like read this for school and there are all these like sites like Cliffs notes or whatever or spark notes that like are just so last generation um and I think that market is like very capturable and then two uh I just think that there's like a lot of people who are kind of in the like business like in intellectual space that I would I would probably like put myself in the stuff that we make it every in that that place um who aspire to like be familiar with that Canon who would like pay for this so okay question question before I get into this would you sell like sell these books like How do you how do you monetize it I would um I would probably sell either like oneoff access or a subscription and or um I would create a like beautiful physical version this is more less for the students and more for the like business thing I would create like a really beautiful physical version that I would charge a lot for and then have a companion like digital version that like can help you kind of like get into it and like you know gives you commentary or or or you know you can listen to it or you can watch it or whatever as like a um yeah a digital component that makes it easier to consume but I think I think books I think like books started out as luxury goods and then because of the printing press they became like there was this push to make them cheaper because you needed ways to get more information into people's hands and they're no longer necessary as um as cheap forms of like information dispersal because we have the internet um and I think that they need to go back to being really well be well-made beautiful like luxury goods and that you charge a lot for and I think that's maybe that's a slightly different idea but it's like I think that's a great business yeah I mean it's a great business CU it's repeatable it's a good customer base that you can Char you know you the lifetime value is High um shh don't tell anyone but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free these aren't just random guesses they're validated Concepts from entrepreneurs who built $100 million plus businesses I've compiled them into one simple database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast but the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor some cost nothing to start I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet the idea bank is your startup shortcut just click below to get access your next cash flowing business is waiting for you it could be a business of one re realistically um maybe with some contractors um spark notes and and and Cliff Notes I was just I was just perplexing uh them to see like what their revenue is it's it's private they they they don't say what it is but both I think they they sold think I was that one of them uh got acquired by cliffnotes got acquired by idg books for $14. 2 million in 1998 so you got to think that these businesses are I mean 1998 was like hundreds of years ago that's a lot of money it in224 yeah exactly so you got to think that you know these businesses are making millions of dollars a year um so I I I I you know I tend to think think that the more interesting idea is like the luxury piece of it yeah and the prompt being like what's something that's not luxury today that could be luxury um is really interesting and then if you can use AI to go and create that thing then you're looking you're looking good yeah I think and I think the the the the place to look or the way to ask that question is um I think there's this there's an interesting effect where as technology makes things cheaper the things that they end up making really cheap um end up becoming luxury status Goods So like um an example would be like Broadway right like plays were like the and musicals and stuff are like the way that people would like see live see enter like see entertainment in a lot of ways they were they were very cheap a long time ago everyone would go um and now it's like because we have TV and phones and whatever like you go to Broadway and it's like a special special special night out that's very expensive um so it doesn't go away it just gets less popular and becomes more of a more of a luxury good and I think um I think that Trend will continue with AI stuff so I look at what is AI making cheaper and then look at what like that thing will become more expensive just for a smaller percent of the population yeah and it becomes more like a status symbol it's like oh I'm going to Broadway I'm going to play right yeah yeah or I have a handmade shirt artisanal you know like that people you know this shirt is super cheap but like people pay a lot of money for like something that's handmade yeah also you know limited edition things there's only hundred versions of that t-shirt um so if you're listening to this like this is we gave you we gave you a gold mine before but this is a gold mine because I think like luxury limited edition AI generat stuff um you know it's it's in our nature to always to to think about let's build things for the masses it's like you know I'm wearing a Kirkland t-shirt under here you know um the the epitome of you know to the masses um and I love it but you know I don't feel special when I wear it you know what I mean so feeling special status luxury a lot of opportunity I would I would revise that slightly which is like all I I think all that is true except I think in this specific space um you need to like key on like human-made and handmade rather than AI made and that's the thing that that gives it status um like a good example is like I like this watch right like this watch isn't that expensive but like watches are get really expensive and this is like more expensive probably than it should be um and it's because it's like a handmade thing and what is it what kind of watch is it oh it's it's a Zen this is this is like this is not like super ball or anything like that but it's I it was I think it's a Zen it is a Zen but it's not a Zen like not not what you're thinking s i NN um it's a it's a German brand got it um I had to say someone else is you know gonna be like you let him say Zin but you didn't question him on it you know um the the nerds will know what I'm talking about um yeah uh so but like you know I could tell the time for a lot cheaper than this um or like it's on my it's on my phone you know like I don't need to have this I just think it's cool um and that's because it's like uh it's it's crafted it's like it's a thing it's diff it's different from like the sort of like mass-produced like everyone has it thing um yeah there you go um and so I I think there's always room for that and it's it's easy to overlook it in the kind of like AI technology race but like it it creates more opportunities for those kinds of things yeah I agree I think uh so there's a really interesting Trend that's happening right now which is a lot of college students are anti- AI have you been seeing this no yeah really really it was surprising at first um because I was like thinking like oh come on like early adopters right yeah um but turns out that a lot of them uh for for a variety of reasons if if you actually do like do some market research like they're just they they tried chat GPT year and a half ago it wasn't as good as it is now um they are are are entering a job market that's highly competitive and they're worried that the junior jobs are going to AI so they kind of just see it as like you know oh I don't like this thing because like it might I'm competing gains it all that to say there's a huge opportunity to build anti-i products just in general yeah or like I have this I have this uh I'm not being paid for this I have this thing called the called the brick um which you've probably seen on the Instagram ads and I really like it like it just locks me out of my phone I tap it it locks me out of my phone I leave it somewhere and then I can't get in my phone um and I'm an investor in Light phone um it's sort of like a you know weekend phone that doesn't doesn't have all the smart stuff in it and um yeah I think I think that's a huge thing I did not know about the anti- aai thing I thought I thought it was really big for like doing your homework um so I'm surprised to hear that yeah it is surprising yeah what the the what I've heard recently um I was at a dinner last night and it wasn't about college students but it was about kids and voice mode and um that voice is becoming this like really really natural interface for that generation of like let's say like three to like 12 year olds um specifically because even before chat gbt because um parents didn't want to give their kids phones for obvious reasons um and so the compromise position was uh an Apple watch um and the thing that an Apple Watch has is like obviously like the screen is like it's really hard to do anything on the screen so kids just figured out how to like get them like the absolute max out of Siri like they're just like Siri Masters and um and uh and and now with advanced voice mode like even kids who like can't really read yet they can interact with advanced voice mode and they can just spend hours and hours and hours asking question after question after question um and advanced voice mode will like answer in a way that like an adult like would probably just get tired you know um and so there's a lot of like there was just a lot of ation last night about um uh whether we're kind of like entering a new like oral culture where you're going to do a lot more interacting with computers and everything around you in in in voice instead of in text um I think that's a really interesting thing to think about and I think in particular if you think about starting businesses thinking about voice first interfaces is a really interesting place to explore we've already kind of talked about that a little bit but but like just as a as a broader theme I feel like that'll be way more prevalent soon so yes I agree and I also think that like if all these kids grow up and they're and they're you know they're used to voice they're going to want to continue using voice even you know right they're just G to be used to it it's gonna be natural so look at I would say like what's the opportunity what's the startup opportunity looking at Discovery engines like content Discovery engines like for example maybe that maybe the voice first version of Expedia is a huge opportunity you know Expedia let just check their market cap $24 billion company and it's like yeah could you get 1% 2% 5% of Expedia just focusing on voice first and making it for voice first like not crazy yeah I wonder like what the what the features of a particular kind of product are that make it more likely to be good like better voice first right like um for example like I always get like annoyed at like ivrs like those phone systems because like they list like 15 options and then I can't remember all the options um whereas like if I'm having a conversation with someone I can like pretty much keep the conversation in my head so there's something like that for like that th that kind of dynamic like a more conversational Dynamic is better for Voice versus like I don't know like Logistics or something like that maybe is like not as good you know because you have to you have to hold all the like stuff in your head I don't know yeah uh it's a good it's a good question you know I I got to think about it I think um you're right though like voice voice does you know lend itself to certain spaces better than others um I also think that one thing I was thinking about is like how do you integrate with Siri like you can integrate with Siri right um I don't know I think that you can you can like make it available as an action on Siri or something like that but I don't really honest I don't really know yeah well what I think what matters is as a lot of these platforms grow Siri Alexa chat GPT a lot of them are adding voice there's going to be ways for developers to to embed themselves into that workflow and if you could be known as The Voice version of XYZ assuming that that audience of people really want to use voice and it and it lends itself well to it like there's a lot of opportunity there um and you know someone's going to be listening to this and they're going to say oh but Expedia could add voice at any time right and it's like yeah you could have said the same thing about mobile you know there was a whole generation of mobile first companies that came out created literally trillions of dollars of of market cap and value and it happened because there was an opportunity from a ux perspective to create something that was just really really dialed in for that use case and for that ux the same is true with with voice yeah I mean I I just think that whole thing like there was that whole thing of like for the last couple years of like oh yeah every big company's just GNA like integrate Ai and like no startup's going to be able to compete and it's just like pretty much all of those Integrations suck like maybe maybe a couple of them are okay you know um but really it's a totally new paradigm and like way of using computers and the uh like big companies are really Limited in the risk of the amount of risk that they can take to like make their actual interface good for that specific thing because they can't risk like pissing off their regular users and that's a tremendous Advantage for startups to like actually figure out what the future of this is like and start with the early adopters of people who really want to use it that way and then slowly just get into the mass market after that totally okay I want to end with one last thing which I I don't I don't prep you with anything so um you're you're out there you're building AI apps um you're getting traction on them how do you think about distribution for those apps How should people how should someone who's building an AI app think about uh you know getting their first thousand 10,000 25,000 users uh well this is a this is quite a layup because uh I just send it out to my newsletter um basically like I spent 5 years building a media business um of people that like are really like really engaged and hopefully like really really love the brand and really love the the writing and the videos and all that kind of stuff that we that we put out and so when we have an idea like this um we can just push it out to those people and we pretty much immediately get like you know hundreds two thousands of people try it on the first day um which is really amazing and I I think um the things that I've learned about that that have been really useful is I and everyone else at every like we basically write about things that we care about um that we genuinely like that are about things that are sort of like in our lives or things that we think about and that has it attracted an audience of people who are like us and sort of have a lot of the same characteristics um and that allows us to I think one of the interesting things about the AI wave right now is it sort of resets the plan field where there's a lot of loow hanging fruit of things to build and so it becomes uh that that's a real opportunity to build things for yourself that like was not true a couple years ago because all the lwh hanging FR had been picked and everyone had built their like I built this for myself app um and so what's been really nice for us is like we build things for ourselves and then we have an audience of people who are like us so they probably want it um and that becomes the like first you know thousand 5,000 10,000 user and then um obviously like that that runs out and you have to like scale from there but like that's that's how we think about it uh is actually distribution first and then build something second yeah and then you know once you have your first users then you can do some product Le growth stuff like it could be like okay how I've got a thousand daus how do I get these people to share this and maybe it's like incentivizing them for like a free you know free three months or six months or maybe it's you get access to these early features to share or maybe it's you know come to this event in New York for you know so I think uh Every Which you guys you guys cover like Ai and startups right and stuff like that so I think like everyone should be thinking about creating their own version of every right so what is the media what is the media distribution arm um for whatever it is you're creating um I actually tend to think that like and I'm curious your thoughts on this like I I don't know if I would you know in 2025 start with like essentially a Blog and a newsletter as as the way to get traffic like why why why do you recommend starting there that's a good question I actually I was not thinking about that from like uh what I would do in 2025 it's a really interesting one um definitely like we got lucky cuz when we started every it was like right before the big substack wave and so we got a lot of subscribers and like that was the whole thing and I do think that like email is just really powerful to have um but it's much harder to grow a newsletter now than it was five years ago I'd probably start with YouTube actually um I think and funnel people into from YouTube into a newsletter um that feels like the right move um and we have a YouTube channel and it's growing really fast and it's it's been really great it's like it's definitely a little bit less effective to like get a YouTube subscriber to like read an email like that that conversion is not not nearly as good as it was like back in the day in like old Twitter you know the Heyday of substack um but uh yeah I'd probably start with YouTube yeah I'm honestly I'm I gotta say I'm subscrib I'm I'm subscribed no I'm surprised that how many people subscribe to my newsletter via the YouTube description like I put like a little lead magnet greenberg. com which is where yeah people sign up and I literally get hundreds of people per day wow coming and signing up to the newsletter from that and the cool thing what you can do uh on kit.

com formerly known as convertkit is you can segment those people so you can say okay here's all the people that came from YouTube and and you can even do it so here's all the people there's ways to do it so here's all the people that came from this video so um there's really interesting ways to segment your audience so that you send out uh invitations to the app to the right people right time because you know it's not just about getting users to your app it's about getting the right users initially because you like the insights the feedback that you're going to get from them um the fan base the community that you're going to build like is important and uh so anyways I like I like I like your style Dan I like your style thank you great great minds think alike yeah um Dan thanks for coming on um besides every uh is there any anything else you want to plug definitely I mean obviously subscribe to every e. to um if you're interested in some of the products we build uh you should check out spiral uh which helps automate uh a lot of your uh repetitive creative work like doing tweets and Linkedin posts and YouTube descriptions and all that kind of stuff that's spiral. computer and you should also check out Sparkle which is another product that we built that um automatically uh organizes your file system with AI for you um and that's makeit sparkle.