SPEAKER_00
Here's where I think service-based businesses are going to go. When you build a service-based business, think of a design agency or an SEO shop or something like that. Number one, you start with humans doing the work.

And then number two, you transition from humans doing 100% of the work to AI-assisted human work. And then step three, you transition to agents do all the work. Once you get to step three, the margins are going to 3, 4, or 5x.

Instead of making 20% EBITDA, you might be able to make 60% EBITDA, 80% EBITDA. And the reason why is because you're paying tokens and you're getting agents to do the work. And this might be in five years and this might be in seven years or three years, but the point is if they can get there and you've built up all the systems and processes and client-based, then you're going to be in a really, really good place.

And we're back. Another solo pod. Just me.

I'm going to give away some ideas, some trends. I did one of these. And I'm going to give away some ideas, some trends.

I did one of these last week and you all loved it. So I figured I'd do another one. Let's get right into it.

So I want to start off with the trend. And I'll give you some ideas for this trend. So recently I got married and my wedding was different than most people's wedding.

A lot of people have weddings and they've got 100 of their closest friends and families there. I had a wedding and there was 14 people there and that was including me and my wife. So weddings are changing.

People don't want to spend thousands of dollars on weddings. They want to do something small. They want to do something intimate.

And that leads me to my trend of the week, which is micro weddings. So what is a micro wedding? I think we need to just define it. So it basically means a wedding with less than 50 people.

It's just way more intimate and it's especially big in places like New York, LA, Miami where the cost per wedding guests could be more than $1,000 per guest. So it's absolutely out of control. This is obviously due to inflation and over the last few years it just got out of hand.

So this is the trend. I think a lot of you are probably nodding your head and being like, of course, this makes a lot of sense. How can I create a business on top of this trend? So idea number one is just the Gen.

So there's a bunch of small venues that haven't, they're not really set up for micro weddings. And the biggest challenge of that is these small venues don't have the visibility. They have smaller marketing budgets.

And then they probably just don't know that this trend is happening. So you could go and just bridge the gap. So I just Googled here micro wedding Los Angeles.

And I saw that there was actually a sponsored link called IntimateMountainWeddings.com. So great domain, good SEO. And as the search volume starts to increase, if people become aware that micro wedding is a thing, traffic is going to go up.

So how can you operate this idea as a service? So step one is you just got to form the partnerships agreement. So you go to these wedding venues and you basically say, hey, I'm going to send you a bunch of leads for your micro wedding. And then would you be willing to give me 10%, 5%, 20% of a booking that's made through your platform? So it's like a win-win situation for the small venue.

And a lot of these venues, they're hanging on by a thread. They want more revenue. Then you're going to step two is just to implement SEO and advertising.

So you're going to generate traffic mostly by search. So the bet here is that more and more people are going to search it. You're going to show up.

And then you could obviously do a little bit of ad arbitrage. What is ad arbitrage? That just basically means when you're spending $2 a click, but the average click gives you $3. You create this vending machine where you put $2 in and $3 comes out.

So that's where you're going to mainly focus. Of course, you can do content and building an audience around it and just showcase these venues and showcase other weddings. That's definitely a given.

So I would say implement SEO, advertising, and build an audience. And then step three is specialize and promote. So I would say become the micro wedding market gal or guy.

Once you position yourself as that person, and I think that's ripe for the taking, you're going to earn more trust. The hard part about something like this is it is a new market. And whenever you have a new market, you have to educate people why this should exist.

Everyone knows, oh, I just got engaged. I need to go and create a wedding, but they don't know about the concept of a micro wedding, what that is, why it's better, why it's going to save you money, and why. If you forget all the money, it's just going to be a more intimate experience for the people that you love.

So I think that there's tons of opportunity to own that category. And this is just one of those low risk ideas. So idea number two in the micro wedding space is just helping plan.

So offering comprehensive, all-inclusive micro wedding packages that streamline the entire planning process. So I found this Reddit post. So here's the post.

Micro wedding in Southern California, LA County, 13 guests, $23,000. And they basically just go into this. This is a long one for those interested in the numbers.

They talk about how the original wedding was supposed to take place in June 2020, but obviously, because of COVID, they couldn't do it. They talk about how much they paid in their deposit. They talked about the ceremony, basically the budget breakdown.

So ceremony venue, $2,000, dinner venue, $3,500, partial planner, $1,500. I guess that's a party planner, but only partially, which is kind of an interesting, that's a whole other niche to own. Another idea right there is a fractional partial party planner.

Photographer, $3,100. Videographer, $1,000. String trio, $800.

Florals, $1,500. Anyways, you get the idea. Bottom line is it's $23,386, which obviously is a lot of money, but isn't $100,000.

Or isn't some people spending a million dollars. So they just go into this. You can see, they talk about everything and they break this all down.

This is an incredible content piece. I would love to see, you could create a whole audience around breaking down different micro weddings. Then if you look in the comments section on Reddit, people are just so engaged.

They're so appreciated of it. Hey, everyone. If you're anything like me, you've got a ton of design work that you need.

Websites, landing pages, emails, social assets, you name it. But you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites. You want the stuff that's going to convert.

You want the stuff that's going to actually drive value. That's where design scientist.com comes in.

It's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work, all your copy work, all your engineering and do stuff that actually scales your revenue. You don't need a designer. You need a design scientist.

Let's go design scientist.com. I liked it so much. I invested in the business.

I like to use Reddit and see posts that go viral in particular communities as a way to validate a particular business idea. I see this and I'm like, okay, there's something here in the micro-wedding space because they put it in the wedding planning subreddit, which has 829,000 members. It went viral within that community.

One thing you could do is you can create the subreddit for micro-weddings. You can be that moderator. That's just an idea for you.

Let's get back to the idea. The idea is basically to create a wedding planning agency, but only focus on micro-weddings. There's one company that I was able to find that's doing it and it's called Our Little Wedding.

I found it via that Reddit post. They're based in San Francisco. You can tell there's basically a coming soon version of their website.

It's not exactly optimized, but you get the idea. There's these all-inclusive micro-weddings that they sell and it's between $5,000 and $6,100. Here's one.

The Bay Area Redwoods Elopement. It's an all-inclusive package, $5,000. You get a Mill Valley Amphitheater private ceremony, one hour photography, personal florals.

You get a luxury reception, dinner celebration, cake and cake florals. You get add up to six guests. You get this beautiful background, super picture-esque, Instagram-friendly.

It's beautiful. It's intimate. It's $5,000.

This is the type of thing that you can go and create. The number two is you just go and organize these packages, build brands around it, and capitalize on the micro-wedding trend. That's my trend of the week, micro-weddings.

I love it for a lot of reasons. Like I mentioned, I'm validated on Reddit, offshoot of a particular subreddit. You're starting to see little businesses pop up.

There's so many validated business models. You don't need a reinvent the wheel. You can do things like an agency.

People are willing to spend on their weddings. When you're creating a business, you obviously want to prioritize businesses where people are willing to take out their wallet. This is something where people feel like they're saving money.

If they're spending $5,000 on a wedding and they thought that they're going to spend $50,000, they're going to be pretty darn happy. I love this concept for a lot of reasons. I also think that as someone who had a micro-wedding, I didn't even know it was called a micro-wedding, but as someone who had a micro-wedding, it was just an incredible experience and special in its own way.

I feel like I'm 35 now and a lot of my friends have gotten married. It just feels like by the end of the last weddings of my friend group, it almost felt all these weddings were the same. They were beautiful weddings in great places and beautiful hotels, but they all had the 100, 200, 300 people.

They all had the same band. They all had the same sort of food. I think this idea around micro-weddings that are also just unique experience.

Imagine getting married in the Sequoias north of San Francisco, all these trees that they're hundreds of years old and they're as tall as skyscrapers. How cool is that? Love this trend and want to give it to you. The other thing that I wanted to talk about is just a insight I had around building businesses that are powered by human beings.

When I'm talking about building businesses, I'm talking about service-based businesses. Here's where I think service-based businesses are going to go. When you build a service-based business, think of a design agency or an SEO shop or something like that.

You start with, number one, you start with humans doing the work. Then number two, you transition from humans doing 100% of the work to AI-assisted human work. Then step three, you transition to agents do all the work.

I think this is just an interesting framework and something I'm just thinking about and I wanted to share with you around what are businesses that are going to translate into that framework? I think that once you get to step three, the margins are going to 3, 4, or 5X. Instead of making 20% EBITDA, you might be able to make 60% EBITDA, 80% EBITDA. The reason why is because you're paying tokens and you're getting agents to do the work and people are expensive.

There are certain industries where this probably won't happen. We run an innovation design agency called LCA and we work with the Nike's and the Dropboxes and the Shopify's of the world and these large companies with their executive team. They don't want AI to do all the work and they also need someone to talk to and they need someone to brainstorm with and they need someone to jam with.

There are certain spaces where it doesn't make sense, but there are certain spaces where it does make sense. I think that's my homework for you and something to think about is what are service-based businesses that are most likely going to hit that number three, basically get agents on board. This might be in five years and this might be in seven years or three years, but the point is if they can get there and you've built up all the systems and processes and client-based in five years, then you're going to be in a really, really good place.

That's something that I've been thinking about. The last thing I want to talk about today is I've been doing these live streams where I've been bringing people on stage who have startup ideas who want my feedback and it's been really, really fun. People who just have a business and they're past the idea stage, they've got something live and they want my feedback.

I'm going to share with you a couple of the ideas that were shared to me that I wasn't able to bring people on stage and I'm going to give live feedback. My hope here is it's going to get your creative juices flowing. It's going to help you get a bunch of startup ideas.

Let's get right into it. Peter Gray messaged me and says, here's the idea. It's called More Than Academy.

It's an athlete-tailored entrepreneurial education startup. There will be online community networking masterclass type videos, more formal LinkedIn-type online courses for certificates and badges, and an in-person workshop, primary series, targeting at high school athletes with aspirations of being an athlete aimed at empowering student athletes, well, it's a lot of athletes, with the skills and mindset needed for both athletic and entrepreneurial success. The person workshops lead gen for the online community and online education.

Our business would then lead gen potential clients for all the NIL agencies or organizations like athletes.org. I'm not going to give you specific feedback on do athletes or aspiring athletes need this. I think they probably do, but I'm not one myself, so you would know better than me.

But I'll give you feedback and give everyone feedback on a really big opportunity, which is credentialization. We're living in a world where the value of a Harvard degree and a Stanford degree is going down. Of course, it's valuable.

I'm not going to say it's not. But in our world, our world of Twitter, podcasts, YouTube, what people really care about is, what have you done? Has your content gone viral in your niche? That's basically it. Are you an interesting, cool person that I want to work with? That's what people care about.

That being said, getting in the front door is difficult today. It's probably even more difficult today than it was 10 years ago. I think the good part of having a Stanford degree or a Harvard degree is it gets you in the front door.

I think that there's tons of opportunity to build online programs and IRL programs that credentializes. What do I mean by credential? What credentializes? I mean, you get a certificate and people will pay for that certificate. I saw this really good tweet by Peter Levolz on Twitter.

He goes, if you're looking for a remote job, go learn Python and apply for jobs in AI. Python is the fastest growing and highest paid for remote jobs right now. The median salary is $80,000 a year for remote, but with massive outliers into $300,000 a year and higher if you go non-remote, usually in office in San Francisco.

Then he's put this chart of basically the fastest growing and highest paying jobs in 2024, Python, marketing, node, back-end, TypeScript, sales, Ruby, React, non-tech, JavaScript, customer support. I would basically use ChapGPT to build this list or you can even grab this list. We can put it in the show notes.

I would basically create a list and then I would be like, how do I credentialize for Python? Credentialize for not marketing because marketing is too big. But what about growth marketing? How you'd actually go and build out this idea is you take out a piece of paper, you'd write in the middle, hub and spoke, a hub would be marketing and what are the spokes? Growth marketing, PPC, audience development, video content. What are all the ways that people market in 2024? Then I'd look at credentializing.

The other way you can create this business is you can actually go to existing course creators and be like, hey, I'm going to manage the credentialization of your program. I'm going to manage the graduation of your program. I'm going to make this experience incredible.

I think that's another business that would definitely cash flow $10,000 to $100,000 a month. To give you feedback, Peter, I don't know enough about athletes, but I think what you inspired me to think about is credentialization is something that's a huge, huge, huge idea. I like it a lot.

Then Jose Carrillo says, I recently started building Trip.com. It's an analytic platform for UX teams. I'd love some feedback.

Let's bring up Trip.com and give him some feedback. I pulled it up.

It says, analytics for UX teams that tracks user task duration and helps you fix user sticking points for smoother task completion. Discover the true efficiency of your app with real-time insights and to task completion times, identify and streamline complex workflow to enhance user satisfaction and productivity. Then there's an image here.

How do they charge? They charge $999 a month and you get five different tasks configured to record or $1999. They call it a business plan where you get 10 different tasks. This is one of those ideas that you've built something really smart, but the way you're talking about it and its position could be optimized.

It's not just about, quote, unquote, smoother task completion. What does that mean? If you get people to complete their tasks, we actually did some research. If you get someone to complete their task, their primary task of going onto a mobile app or going onto a website, they're actually 67% more likely to buy a product or service from you.

If you can tell me that you're going to help me sell more stuff or you're going to help me get more people to subscribe or you're going to help me get more followers or you're going to help me drive word of mouth, all these things. That's what this is about. It's not about task completion.

The biggest thing that you need here is to reposition around what is unpacked task completion. The other thing is when you're writing copy, write like you talk. You would never say in a conversation, discover the true efficiency of your app with real-time insights and task completion times.

You just need to rewrite your website as if you're talking to an eighth grader. That's a prompt that you can actually put within chat GPT. You can put in all your copy and then put into chat GPT and say, I really want this to be written in plain English.

Can you make this really clear and catchy for an eighth grader? You're going to get some good stuff. The other thing is where's the video? I'm on your website and it's just an image. I think that so many people are using images and just text on web pages.

I'm really bullish right now on having above the fold a video and that's going to help increase conversion rates. No question. Show me what you're doing.

They're used to Instagram stories. They're used to YouTube shorts. They're watching video everywhere.

They should be watching video on your website. The beauty is video is one of the best, if not the best way to story tell because you've got audio, you've got visual, you've got sound. You feel more connected to a product via video if it's just an image.

Last thing is, I don't know about your business model, $999 to $1999. That feels quite arbitrary. It feels like if you're actually helping that much with task completion, it's worth a lot more than $1999.

That's my feedback and hope that was helpful. All right. That's the pod.

If you enjoyed it, please go to YouTube, subscribe and comment on the YouTube video. I read every comment. I respond to most of the comments, especially if they're nice.

I'll see you on the next one. Hope this got your creative juices flowing. Later, everyone.