ChatGPT Pro ($200/month ) vs Perplexity AI (Free): Building a $5M Startup from Scratch

okay today we're going to do something that I've been meaning to do for a while so I want to test the differences between open AI chat gpt's deep research and perplexities deep research I mean the simplest way to think about it is chat gbt or perplexity when you prompt it it's going to give you a quick answer but deep research it's almost like a junior analyst a McKenzie analyst uh that they would probably pay hundreds of ,000 a year to give you deep Research into the question that you have and today we're going to use it to actually build a business so we're going to prompt it we're going to give the same prompt to chat gbt this is a $200 a month Pro Plan and perei deep research I think that's a $20 a month and we're going to see which is better and we're going to go through the startup ideas to actually see hey maybe there's actually a grid startup idea that one of you can steal uh we're gonna get chat gbt and perplexity to give us uh the tactics of actually how to build this business [Music] so this is what we're going to prompt it we're going to give the same prompt to chat gbt as to perplexity so we're going to say I want to create a startup I want it to be an A in an agent say an AI agent that focuses on a high value Niche I want it to be def defensible not uh not just a flash in the in the pan I want you to create a zero to1 Playbook of how you'd launch it to get customers too give me five ideas with five playbooks on how to grow it I'm looking for $1 million a $3 million year one $3 million year two $5 million year three so we're gonna we're going to see if chat GPT Pro or perplexity could give us a $5 million AR business in three years uh with the exact Tac that'ss how to grow and we're going to we're going to be real with it we're going to see is this actually um is this actually gonna give us good particular advice so if you're going to do this um you got to click the Deep research button here uh so it says that sounds like that sounds like an exciting venture to tailor the best ideas and playbooks for you could you clarify in industries of Interest sure so we're going to say um are there any specific Industries no we are looking for uh the startup ideas with the highest like [Music] lihood of success two would you rather Target Enterprises SB or individuals professionals the truth is I don't really care if it works it works so open to B2B or or B to C and then we're going to say AI capabilities do you have a preference for AI applications automation data analysis not really again we're looking for the highest probility of success with a moe okay technical res resources do you have a technical team or plan to build one or do you prefer a low code no code approach and we can say I prefer an approach that's going to cost $55,000 or less for an MVP I'm not super technical um what else can we say we can say I might want to just cash flow this business but I want to potentially raise VC money too if I really think this could go beyond a $100 million a year business go to market would you lean towards direct sales Partnerships or viral self- sered growth um I think I lean towards [Music] um so viral Self Serve growth but I'm open to what you suggest boom now we are going to wait until uh to see how long it's going to take uh usually it takes like eight minutes so let's see how long so it's starting research so while it's doing that we're actually going to head to perplexity and give it the same prompt and see what happens we're going to compare we are going to compare all these together so let's go open up rep plexity quick break in the Pod to tell you a little bit about startup Empire so startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me like you who want to build out their startup ideas now they're looking for content to help accelerate that they're looking for potential co-founders they're looking for uh tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them how do you do email marketing how do you build an audience how do you go viral on Twitter all these different things that's exactly what startup Empire is and it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas or it's for people who have a startup but just they're not seeing the traction uh that they need so you can check out the link to Startup empire. co in the description now deep research is a brand new product in order to enable it you'll see it in this little drop down here let's go add our prompt and the interesting thing is going to be to see if is it going to ask ask for follow-up questions like chat jpt did um not sure we will find out soon so deep research so one of the cool things about deep research both chat gbt and perplexity I think is they go through instead of going through two sources or three sources they're going through way more sources so you can see ready this is this is pulling for six sources by the way I'm I'm like pretty new to this I'm using this for for for the first time really I've used chubbt a little bit but we're kind of learning this together and we're going to find out by the end of the episode if this is super value or not um I'm not sure um so we'll find out so this is you know it feels like a reasoning model uh so you can see you kind of un see how it's thinking about things so it says I need to search the web to find information on 0 to1 playbooks specific to AI I found some insight into 0 to1 startup playbooks cool great uh I from the previous search I found insights great I found insights on defensible AI strategies okay this is cool um I don't necessarily need to know exactly how it's doing it but uh it's really you know it's it's it's it's good to know that it's Crossing it's what's the expression Crossing its te's dotting its eyes someone in the comment section tell me what the expression is but you know it's basically that you know it's good that perplexity is is checking out all the stuff and you can see it's going through 29 sources right so if you if we were to do this manually if we went to Google I mean if you went to Google I don't you couldn't do this but if we actually went and did this manually uh this is this is going to take us many many many hours so the Hope here is that you know this is basically uh Ai and intelligence that could could help us uh one thing interesting is that perplexity is not asking me a qualification question like we saw in uh chat gbt um chat gbt it you know asked that qualification question um so we'll see the difference uh in terms of uh what you know what's more what's what's a what's a higher quality uh end result Okay cool so uh going back to perplexity it says it's now gather sufficient information to answer your query it's answering the query 3 now we're up to 34 sources so this is exactly I mean if this was a real person this is exactly how they would answer answer it okay so first things first is that perplexity is faster than uh chat gbt you can see that chat chat GPT is about halfway done perplexity is done so that's really cool so let's go through the ideas let's go see funny enough actually one of the sources is me one of the sources is is went through one of my YouTube videos three $1 million AI startup ideas to build in 2025 links to it uh and that's hilarious that's actually it's kind of ridiculous um but it's cool that it goes through YouTube you can see and it it obviously downloads that transcript and goes through it so let's go through these ideas and you be the judge you tell me are these good ideas are they bad ideas let's go see so number one legal contract this is on the perplexity uh perplexity deep research answer legal contract life cycle a a agent problem space corporate legal teams waste 23% of their time manually reviewing boiler pre contracts which struggling while struggling with Version Control errors that cost Enterprises 2. 4 billion annually compliance penalties existing CLM Solutions require extensive customization and fail to adapt to company specific negotiation patterns okay so an AI agent here's a defensible solution that integrates number one integrates directly with email SharePoint and DocuSign via API two learns organizational risk thresholds through historical contract analysis three Auto redlines thirdparty paper using firm specific fallback positions and four maintains version lineage with blockchain style audits uh Trails now by the way I think this is actually cool but like for an MVP minimal viable product do we need lock sha Stein audit Trails not really um but I guess we can further prompt perplexity to you know ask it what would be the MVP um for for this right and unlike uh well in chat gbt we said it was going to be $5,000 or less so um that's an interesting thing that if you are going to prompt perplexity you might want to include uh some more constraints because you probably won't get that follow-up question why is it defensible develops institutional memory through continuous exposure to negotiation outcomes becomes embedded in legal department workflows average 14.

3 logins per week per user this is data this is great this is a great Insight this is something that if you're building a business you want to know the you want to know that it's really helpful requires retraining equivalent to six to n months of Human Experience to replace it and by the way you can always click on one of these uh numbers to get to the source and go deeper so here we have the growth Playbook by by perplexity and let's go see if this is actually good this I will say this agent I mean seems super valuable I I totally agree why it would be defensible um so I I I like what I'm seeing I like what I'm seeing from perplexity so the growth Playbook phase one Niche validation 90 days product build a Chrome extension recording legal contact contract review sessions with permission to train initial model go to market offer free Redline audits for 100 amlaw 200 firms I guess that's American law targeting mid-market companies 50 to 500 million Revenue so this actually idea free Redline audits is interesting as as a Chrome extension like I would never have thought of that again I'm not well I'm not a lawyer I don't play to be on the internet so um but just just as like a person who builds products uh that you know a lot of people use I I will say that just looking at that that makes a lot of sense to me monetization $2,500 a month subscription locked to specific document types n first okay that's again really interesting wouldn't have thought about locking a subscription to specific document type so that's really cool phase two workflow embedding months 4 to9 integrate with legal Ops platforms like lexion and entra launch Clause Library Builder using clients historical favored language Implement usage based pricing at 25 cents per review CL uh Clause really interesting interesting business model I like that uh I like the phases you know phase one to phase two it totally makes sense to me um I like what I'm seeing phase three Enterprise scaling months 10 to 12 add sock to type to compliance for regulated industries develop custom connectors for service now and Salesforce cpq upsell to 8 $8,000 a month Enterprise tier with custom playbooks Financial road map okay so let's see how they how they break this out so on year one you're going to get 40 clients at $25,000 Mrthat's 1. 2 million ARR not crazy 150 clients at 5,000 Mrplus 250k usage pay year two you get 3. 1 million and then year three platform fees from 300 plus embedded incense 5.