SPEAKER_01
Like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody is using a spreadsheet, it should be like, you know, a light bulb going off. There's like, this is a startup opportunity. One of the other kind of like universal rules of startups is that like, once you aggregate users in a place, you know, in some digital property, you can add this.
SPEAKER_00
I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this like cute profitable little thing, but it has the legs to become something big if you want it.
SPEAKER_01
The way you can be with any network is you carve off a section of it of like power users of some sort, some niche, and you build better features for them or something like that.
SPEAKER_00
Okay, let's do a bonus framework with Brett.
SPEAKER_01
Bonus framework. All right. So it's called the enterprise workflow started by the F-formula.
All right. So you're going to use this formula to come up with any startup idea that can be a venture scale billion dollar company. Any guesses what it is? You know what it is?
SPEAKER_00
All right. Brett Goldstein. I think you're criminally under followed.
That's why I brought you on today. Whenever we hang out, I love, I love just picking your brain. You've, you know, you're part of the Google M&A team.
You bought companies at Google. You did a startup. You raised 12 million plus.
For that, you did the VC thing. And now you're working in stealth and working on a really cool product, but you're not here to talk about any of that. You're here to talk startup ideas.
And I'm excited. I'm excited that you agreed to come on. Yeah. I'm excited as well. We're just going to
SPEAKER_01
give away all of the goods that I've been hoarding for years now that I'm working on something else.
SPEAKER_00
But yeah, super excited. Yeah. I was, I said, you can't hoard anymore. You got to stop hoarding.
SPEAKER_01
It's just not fair. Yeah. I mean, I think it's also just the most, the best expression of your self confidence and status to give away stuff for free that is like extremely valuable or you could benefit immensely from keeping it to yourself. So here I am pumping my bags.
SPEAKER_00
Totally. And I think someone's going to take one of these ideas and they might be bigger than you and me in a couple of years because they're taking one of these ideas. Yeah. Well, selfishly,
SPEAKER_01
I hope that some of these ideas get taken because I need some of them right now.
SPEAKER_00
All right. Well, what's on your mind? What's idea number one?
SPEAKER_01
Okay. So I guess idea number one is goes to this crappy startup idea that every kid in college has coming out of college, they're like 22. And the first idea to come up with is what? It's an app to help you hang out with people when you're bored.
And all of these apps have failed, like all of them have failed, like they just don't work. There's this negative selection bias where it's like the people who actually want to hang out are not the people you want to hang out with them, like all of this stuff. But before we landed on the idea that I'm working on right now in stealth, we actually pursued something that is an iteration of this idea that it will actually work really, really well.
And the idea is that instead of focusing on nerdy loners in big cities that want to hang out and weren't invited to parties as your target audience, you focus on conference attendees, conference attendees. And the idea is that if you've ever been to a conference, whether it's like tech weeks and crypto conference, whatever it is, you know, most of the action is not actually the main conference events. All of the action is the side events.
And actually, maybe that more of the action is in the like the private dinners and stuff like that. But really, the side events are where the action is. That's where all the cool people are hanging out.
That's they're more interesting. They're in more interesting places. Like I went to one during tech week and Tiesto was there, you know, so all these they're all these side events.
But the problem with all the side events is that they aren't set. They aren't centralized in one place. Usually what happens today is you have some poor soul who aggregates a spreadsheet of all these side events, their cross platform, it's Luma, it's Partyful, it's Ventbright, it's all this stuff.
And it's in this really shitty spreadsheet. And you have to go through and click through all the ones that look interesting RSVP to them. You have all this annoying emails confirming and all this stuff.
But I think the really important point to focus on is the spreadsheet. Like anytime you have any industry anywhere in the world where somebody is using a spreadsheet, it should be like, you know, a light bulb going off. There's like, this is a startup opportunity.
There's countless startups that started as spreadsheets or took processes that were spreadsheets and then converted them into products. And so really the simplest thing is you go and you find these spreadsheets ahead of these conferences or during these conferences, you build some scraper, some system to ingest all that data, parse, you know, the dates, the times, the locations, other information, images about these events. And then you create a beautiful app that plots them on a map, one click RSVP.
And basically, that's your wedge. Your wedge is this is the place you're going to go to see where all the conference events are. Right. When we tried this at, I think we did it, this is like NFT NYC or something, we built a very crappy version of this. People were just like loving it, people clambered for it, like people said, thank you so much, can I get my friend on it, all that stuff.
But where does this turn into an app to find friends to meet up with? Conferences are designed for people to meet up and hang out. Like literally, the whole point of the conference is for professional networking to happen for you to go and find that person who's at the conference and go grab coffee or whatever or do business and stuff like that. So these people are very like, of anybody in the world, these people are like the most authentically interested in connecting and chatting and like meeting up in person, because that's what they're there for.
And actually, unlike the social world, the social, you know, a non professional space where you you have negative selection bias of like the nerdiest, weirdest, weirdest people, being the only ones who want to hang out. This is actually everyone, right? High status, low status, whoever. So that's the first thing that's the first solution.
The first problem that you saw is you have great people who want to hang out. Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I
SPEAKER_00
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.
The secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank 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 100% money back guarantee.
Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boring marketing.com. Every conference organizer is trying to get people to meet up because they know that people will come back if that match make happens. And by the way, I know some people are listening to this and they're like, okay, how much money is there really in this space? And there's a business called Cvent.
Do you know Cvent? No. I had never heard of them. But they're basically a four and a half billion dollar company.
I think they're publicly traded actually. And what they do is they have a white label app for events and conferences. Yeah, exactly.
You talked about a wedge, which is a really good, I think people don't think about wedges enough. But I think this is a wedge to ultimately compete with Cvent four and a half billion dollar opportunity. And Cvent, by the way, you'll go to their website, we can show it on YouTube.
This is like an old school kind of, it's not like the designers of Snapchat went and designed
SPEAKER_01
was put it that way. Yeah, must be at least like 10, 15 years old. But yeah, I think one of the other kind of like universal rules of startups is that once you aggregate users in a place in some digital property, you can add social features, right? Pretty standard operating procedure.
You build an amazing one player experience, which is what it's the find any conference event, you know, side event at this conference. And the two player experiences, suddenly everyone who's at that conference is available in a directory, and you could DM them, and you don't have to worry about sharing your phone number with some random, you know, professional contact if you don't want to. You may be able to share your location, which is something that has also failed miserably in the social world, like what if you want to connect with somebody, but you guys are bouncing around between all these different events.
It's a great opportunity to share, share locations and stuff like that. So that's the, so the wedge is the one player experience. The next step is the, the directory and the chat, right? You could even do some like crazy AI features where you train an LLM on all the conference information.
Oh, where is check in? Like what's, you know, when is the speaker going or like, what's the status of this event? These are questions people are constantly sending conference organizers and stuff like that, but you can throw that literally in the same chat you live as everything else. And all this stuff is like, you know, you could build this in a month or less. But yeah, what's, what's nice about this is you have this group of people who are basically the power users of professional networking.
Right. So one of the things you want to, if you want to, if you want to backing up, if you want it to compete with LinkedIn, you can carve off a, the way you could be with any network is you carve off a section of it of like extremely power users of some sort, some niche, and you build better features for them or something like that. And so if you think about power, professional networkers, like the people who are on LinkedIn, the hardest are probably the same people who are going to these conferences and dying to meet up.
Right. So suddenly you have this directory of people, they've added their work history, they've added their interests. Maybe you can search through send DMs to people, you sell ads in it, which is like, hey, come to the, you know, the advertisers can be like, hey, come to this event or try this new thing or something like that.
And yeah, obviously it works cross event, cross conference as well. So once you're on this for one conference, if you're going to another conference, which most people do, you just open the app again and you see who's there.
SPEAKER_00
Totally. That's the magic experience of the shop app. Have you ever downloaded that app? Yeah.
So it's Shopify's app and I recently downloaded it. And if you asked me, Greg, how many Shopify purchases have you made? I would say like, I don't know, two. But you don't really know that you're making Shopify purchases because it's the back end, it's powering these e-commerce experiences.
So I downloaded the app and then I saw like, I don't know, 50 different, you know, companies I bought stuff from. And it was such a magical experience. I'd love to be able to open this app and be like, oh my God, I didn't know that Brett is going to be at South by Southwest.
And so I think that's, I do think that having that magical sort of experience is cool. If you were building something like this, and I mean, you built the product, so I'm sure you've thought about this, how would you actually get to, like how would you
SPEAKER_01
get awareness in something like this? Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, conferences are a historically fantastic place to launch products. South by Southwest itself is like known to, I guess it's not anymore, but it used to be this place where like everyone anticipated the next social app to launch. And so it's one of these things where it's like, it has a strong network effect, especially these social features, which is like, you host an event at a South by Southwest or a Tech Week or something like that.
These events, if you're in their distribution system, get tons and tons of RSVPs. We hosted one for Tech Week, 800 RSVPs, 800 people all download your app. Conferences are probably no more than like 20,000 people in the largest sense.
So once you have that 800 people, you just do the next conference that these people are going to. That's probably how I do it. Obviously, you know, you're targeting particular niches.
So you may want to start with the crypto community or something, because these people tend to like pop from one conference to another pretty consistently. You may want to target like the tech community or another specific group of people that tends to show up consistently at these conferences. But yeah, I think that's how it worked.
SPEAKER_00
Cool. I like this idea. I think it's one of, you know, I love a wedge, man.
I love a wedge salad. You know, so this to me is a wedge salad in a half. I love it because it's one of those things where a wedge is something that it starts off as this like cute profitable little thing, but it has the legs to become something big if you want it.
Yeah. That's why I like this idea.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. One last one interesting point is that conferences are actually where most people spend their learning and development budget at their companies that are usually getting like two to $3,000 a year or something like that. These workers, these tech workers or any sort of worker, most of them spend it at conferences.
This is why conference tickets are so expensive, because obviously the conference grounds are expensive, but like they're more so expensive because these corporate people have the money to spend on them. And so it's interesting is that means that this app, because it has a, you know, a business focus, it's conference focused, people get expensive and they're learning and development budget, which means you have potential right out of the gate. You know, you could get some of these features, the AI chatbot information stuff, some of the like, maybe some of the like social features or something, you get some features and you could charge $50 a month or something like that, $100, $250 for one conference if you wanted to.
And I think you'd see adoption. Before we go on to the next idea, I have to ask,
SPEAKER_00
why didn't you proceed with this idea?
SPEAKER_01
We came up with an even bigger idea. Okay. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00
It wasn't the idea itself that you looked at it and you're like, oh my God, you know, this is really hard. It was just, there's another opportunity and you went for that.
SPEAKER_01
No. Yeah. I think this is a pretty clear cut straightforward thing. I mean, you have to be excited about conferences.
You have to be in this kind of like multi-chapter story of like, first we're doing the wedge and that and it's going to take some time. But yeah, we just came up with a better idea.
SPEAKER_00
Cool. All right, Brad, what's idea number two?
SPEAKER_01
All right. So I have two, the next two ideas are both dating related because I'm hopelessly single in New York. And I find that people just kind of talk about, don't you feel like when you're hanging out with people in a certain city, they kind of talk about whatever the thing of the city seems to be.
So it's like, you hang out with people in San Francisco, they're only talking about the latest AI models and stuff like that. You hang out with people in New York where dating is like a sport, basically. Conversations naturally go back to dating.
I have a couple ideas that I think would be super, super killer. The first one is basically a vertical sass for matchmakers. So the main point is that like, there are people in every community and this is like a thousand-year-old job who play this role of matchmaker, particularly in like, we're both Jewish, the Jewish matchmakers, Indian matchmakers, any sort of religious or ethnic community, there are strong matchmakers.
But what I also find interesting is that there are other communities, and you're the community guys who want to hear your thoughts on this, but there are other communities that have emerged or have their own identities that also should or already have matchmakers within it. So rock climbing, you would think that rock climbers would get along with each other and be a good match. You would think that crossfitters would get along.
You'd think that people on Twitter would get along with each other. Do you have any thoughts on that? Before I go, I want to get your thoughts.
SPEAKER_00
So you're absolutely right. I also think that 50% of Gen Z Americans are not religious at all. So they're looking for, they're attaching themselves to some of these movements and these movements have become their identity.
So absolutely, I think, a non-obvious one would be the sobriety movement. I want to connect with other sober daters in my city and who subscribe to the same philosophy and identity that I have. Yep, exactly.
By the way, just to confirm, I'm not sober and I have a wife.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I got it. That was an example. I thought you said you're not sober now.
I didn't
SPEAKER_00
get the memo. No, I'm sober right at this end and I'm sober right now, but I might have a glass of
SPEAKER_01
wine tonight. Yeah, yeah, yeah, same. But yeah, I think you think about all these people.
If you talk to people in couples, one of the things that people like to do in their spare time is get their friends who are not married married. It's like a classic pastime of couples to do that. And so there's all this demand, right? There's these dating apps, but they don't actually support this third player to be involved in this process.
If you think about what is the user flow of a matchmaker, it's like you have a database of people and then you have all these traits and then you need some sort of UI to be able to pair them up and you need some sort of double opt-in to get them to go and get go on the date and stuff. So there's this whole like a lot of different ways to do this. You could charge the matchmaker where you basically say like you pay 30 bucks a month for the new features and 150 months for these features.
You could also charge in terms of like a, if you wanted to do like community-based, you could almost charge like a transaction fee. So imagine if there was like a Jewish matchmaker in New York or something and I had to pay like 50 bucks a month to be part of her pool, right? Everyone pays 50 bucks a month or maybe there's some discriminatory pricing based on gender or something like that.
SPEAKER_00
By the way, there's probably a way to do that just with religious groups so that it's tax deductible
SPEAKER_01
too. Oh, that's a great, that's a really good point. Smart. Yeah, definitely. They become a no-brainer, right? Yeah, you just have to do a little like prayer before every right swipe.
Yeah, but yeah, you charge some amount. Maybe the Jewish one is 50, maybe another one is 150, maybe you're a celebrity in the LA area and you have access to all these billionaires and celebrities and all these crazy models and whatever those types of people are and you charge $5,000 a month or $10,000 a month for it to be part of that pool. And then you take, the company takes a percentage of that subscription or something like that.
SPEAKER_00
You know what this reminds me of? Have you seen Palit? No, I've always seen it. New York startup. I actually invested in it a few years ago or late checkout invested in it a few years ago, but the basic idea of Palit, it's palit.
com. Oh, is it a job board? Yeah, it's job board for creators basically. So they'll work with a Lenny Rachitsky, who's the product management guy and they'll be like, hey, we're going to power your job board for Lenny jobs.
And they provide the technology and they have a fee structure that I assume that they get like a percentage. So this is basically that, right? The thinking is so they're going after creators and people with big influence and different niches, you're saying kind of the same thing. And recruiting in some ways is very similar to dating.
It's the same for sure. Yeah, it's the same. Yeah, totally.
Yeah. And I think what's interesting
SPEAKER_01
about this is like dating as a space to invest in always gets a bad rep because the incentive structures make it so it's never going to be a massive business. Aside from Tinder, maybe it's turned into a giant business over time. But like, you know, if the app works, then you turn from it.
But I think the way that, you know, in this sense, you're almost like changing, you're creating almost like unlimited upside, like, you know, it could be as expensive as as the person decides if they're doing that model. So that means you could make a lot more money
SPEAKER_00
from this. I also like so Shopify, I know I just brought them up and I'm bringing up them again. They have this philosophy called arming the rebels, which is just such a good concept around they've got all these rebels quote unquote, who are merchants and then their job is to arm them with tools and software to make their lives easier and better.
What I like about this business is it's arming the rebels, which are these non formal matchmakers, these casual matchmakers that are doing this out of the goodness of their heart anyways. Yeah, all you're doing that with this is you're just arming them to make their lives easier. And if they want to have upside and maybe the upside, you know, some people are going to be like, no, I'm just doing this out of goodness of my heart and bless their hearts.
We need more of those people. Yeah, some people are going to be, you know, so for those people, you know, maybe you have it so you can donate to a charity of your
SPEAKER_01
choice or something like that. Yeah, taxes are too predictable again. Yeah, and it's interesting if you think about like what actually is a dating app, what are the new what is the way that you would start a new dating app as you find a niche, you find a specific group of people.
And then maybe there's some special mechanism, but the group of people matters more than the mechanism, right? Any dating app you're on like Raya is like these type of people, Tinder is these type of people like the whole evolution of dating apps is just about like slicing off another niche. So really what this product is talking, you know, the point of this product is to productize that process of taking a niche and turning it into a dating app very quickly.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I like this one a lot, you know, on this podcast, I've been doing something new and I say, do I sip an idea? I do I like this idea or do I spit this idea? I don't like it. And you know, go back to drawing board and I definitely spit this idea. You're just you're doing something, you're productizing that people are already doing and you're just making it easier for them.
So I like it. And I also think there's that trend around a bit of message fatigue on a lot of these dating apps, like people are kind of looking for something like this. So you have the tail
SPEAKER_01
lines as well. Yeah. And I find that you actually treat you treat matches more seriously when they come from friends or community members versus like, you know, the open abyss of New York City or something like that. So I think it would have a much higher conversion rate to actual marriage and stuff.
Totally. And I could see the quote on your website now. Yeah. So all right, second dating app.
SPEAKER_00
Let's rock. What do you got? Second dating app. All right.
You're in the flow. I can see it. I can
SPEAKER_01
see you're in the flow. Let's start with the I'll paint a picture of this dating app from the landing page, starting with the landing page. So the app is called serendipity.
You go to the app, you go to the website. Maybe it's an app, but call it a website. Very mysterious, like very intense branding.
And it says something like we've perfected the, the ancient craft of finding life partners, finding people like partners, the ancient mystical scientific craft. Right. And on the website, you'd be exposed to the process, which is first you have to fill out all this information and give us as much information as possible. We need to know who you are on a soul level.
Right. So you're, you take this survey and it's asking just weird questions like, would you rather, you know, interview in a Guana or a raccoon? Just like the most absurd, strangest questions that you can imagine. This is partially like a growth tactic because people will be like, I'm, I'm joining the dating app and it's like asking me the most ridiculous questions I've ever seen in my life.
SPEAKER_00
Well, I could, I could picture the viral tick talks with two million views. Yeah. Right. People screen sharing that. Yeah. So yes, 100%. Yes. Yeah. And then you get to the end, you have to,
SPEAKER_01
you have to link your accounts, link your Instagram, like Joe LinkedIn, everything, just like information sharing, over sharing, because the message is we have this, we have this tool, we have figured it out, fundamental human unlock to find you your life partner. So you're like, whatever, I'll do it all. Get to the bottom and then you finish and then it basically says our council is now going to be reviewing your, your information.
And who's on the council? A monk, a priest, a relationship and sex psychologist or doctor or something like that. A physicist, a physicist, right? A rabbi, like all of these, all of these kind of like mystical, you know, really intense types of figures and you see their faces and they're old and they're like, you know, you see the wisdom in their eyes and you're like, oh man, like these people are reading my stuff and they're going to find my, my life partner. And then it says, thank you for reviewing your stuff.
It'll take some time. Literally months will go by, maybe. Obviously not great for conversion, but it's more about the vibe.
Months go by, you forget about it, then you get a text message that says, hey, we finally found your life partner. We found them. They exist, they live in your city.
We have found them. But we are not going to tell you who they are or where they are. You have to find them yourself.
We believe that love happens serendipitously. Right? And so the way, the way that you have to find them is that you get text messages or something basically with hints about where they may be. Right? Specifically where, but maybe there's like some probably not much information around there like what they look like or anything but where is the key point? So one night you'll get a text that's like, hey, she is most likely going to be at a cocktail bar in Soho with, you know, red trim on the chairs or something.
And then you're, when you're deciding where to go with your friends that night, you're like, okay, let's just see if this cocktail bar has anything interesting. You go to the cocktail bar and what you're feeling like, what is exciting? What is your heart telling you when you get to that cocktail bar? Maybe you're like, I don't know if I believe this thing, but part of you wants to believe it. Part of you wants to believe that life partner is there.
And you're going to be very open-hearted when you talk to these people at this bar. You may go up to people. You may stay there a little longer.
You may hang out and all that stuff. And I think what's interesting about this that idea, this idea that like, okay, if you're there looking for a life partner or think that somebody could be your life partner there, you're going to treat everybody a lot differently. And it actually doesn't matter if your life partner is there or not, because you may actually find somebody you really connect with, but, you know, because you are much more receptive and open and stuff.
And so the secret, this may be more of like a social experiment than an actual business idea, but the secret is the council doesn't have to exist. Right? The council doesn't have to be real. The life partner doesn't have to exist.
The most important thing is that you need to send your users, these people, to the same place to find each other. Right? So like, it'd be even better if you were able to, maybe the more capitalist version of this is like, you find a bunch of characteristics of all these people who take this survey, you know, relative attractiveness, education, interests, all that stuff. And then every night over on the weekends, you send them people with similar interests to the same bar to just connect and find each other.
So what do you think? Social experiment or actual product
SPEAKER_00
idea? Definitely the craziest idea on your list. And, you know, here's what I, here's what I like about the idea. And I think this applies to other ideas too.
So to me, this feels very much like turning something that is not a treasure hunt into a treasure hunt. Yes. And I think that thesis could be applied to a bunch of different spaces. So for people listening who are like, okay, Brett's crazy with this dating app idea, but you know, this concept applied to something else.
Maybe it's e-commerce, maybe I don't know what it is, but something in another space, I think that's really, really interesting. So that's what I really like about this idea. Yeah. I think
SPEAKER_01
another kind of interesting framework about this is that like, the reason, the reason dating feels eke to people is the same reason why like the app that helps people hang out when they're bored doesn't work is because when it's too on the nose, it's too direct, right? Like I'm single, I'm on a dating app to date. There's some negative selection bias and weird feelings versus when you're one degree removed and you're like, oh, I'm just going to this party, or I'm just going to this conference event, but I actually really want this lower level human thing. It eliminates the negative selection bias.
It allows you to have like higher status, more desirable people in the mix and all that stuff.
SPEAKER_00
How would you actually go about building something like this? Like, is this something, is this hard to build? Is it easy to build? MVP wise.
SPEAKER_01
The social experiment part's easy. It's like, you throw a type form on a website, you blast it out to as many people as you can. Dating related things are usually pretty viral and people are pretty excited about them.
I have a friend who runs a dating like a matchmaking company and he created this like landing page that shows like you basically say what your preferences are in somebody. It's like religion, age, height, and then it calculates how many people exist and it went super viral. It got millions of like impressions, millions of views.
SPEAKER_00
That was your friend? That was the person. I saw that around. I want someone who's six, five and higher works in finance and make more than $100,000 a year.
That's that was your friend. It got like tens of millions of impressions.
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. What's funny is that was actually the second thing. He had already released this thing and it got all this press, this website you can go to to type those things in and then they just jumped on the like six, five, whatever that train, that new train.
So it could be as simple as that.
SPEAKER_00
Cool. Yeah. I also, the other thing I like about this idea is people will, you want to start an idea that people will pay for and people are used to paying for dating, matchmaking. And so if it does go viral, like who knows what you have on your hands.
It could be really big. Sweet. All right. Ready to go into enterprise lab? Okay.
I could shift gears and do a huge, you know, right? Yeah. Let's see what you got. Okay. This is a very like half
SPEAKER_01
baked idea, but it's something I've been feeling lately is there are a lot of CRMs and marketing animation platforms that kind of rely on having extremely high quality data so that you can segment and do various marketing campaigns or all this various stuff. And I think, and obviously LLMs have kind of unlocked a new way to extract data from unstructured information like podcasts, YouTube videos, like all of this stuff. And so I used to work at Clearbit.
Clearbit was a, it's like a data enrichment company. It's an API you plug in a domain. It gives you a bunch of data points about the company.
You plug in an email address. It gives you a bunch of data points about a person. What was hard about Clearbit is like, there's all this just like work to get each of those data points perfect.
And it took a really long time. And then at the end of the day, you only had those data points. You didn't have anything else.
If you wanted something more unique and special, you couldn't get it. And so what I'm imagining is kind of like a new kind of Clearbit, which is like a flexible knowledge graph API, where you basically put in a company name or something, and then you list the data points that you're looking for. And then, you will have indexed, you know, you'll have embedded like all podcasts, LinkedIn, you can buy a total, you can buy a LinkedIn data dump if you want it.
And embed LinkedIn, you embed a bunch of tweets, you embed all these new sources and stuff like that, and then use that to kind of fill these data points on the fly for people. So if you wanted to like do a marketing automation push using this API for people in New York, or people who said they were going to come to the TechRunt or the New York Tech Week, how would you find that data through an API like this? Because it would have all that information to kind of embed it automatically.
SPEAKER_00
And then how do you charge for it? And how would you actually build something like this? Like how do you go from idea to execution?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I mean, so building is pretty straightforward because you're basically like putting everything in a data warehouse and embedding everything in terms of the actual nitty gritty AI stuff beyond that, that's beyond my pay grid. But yeah, I think for charging, it's pretty easy. You can charge per enrichment.
So Clearbit and others cost like up to 50 cents per per contact enrichment. So, you know, you do the math, 100,000 contact enrichments is $50,000, which can be pretty lucrative. But I think the key with this would be to charge a little less than Zoom Info or another player and then probably have just more flexibility and interesting data
SPEAKER_00
and stuff to provide. And is this a venture backed idea or do you think this could be bootstrapped?
SPEAKER_01
It could be either, I would probably want to do it bootstrapped because datas are really hard space, like, you know, Zoom in just data. If you're selling data, it's just a tough business because it's always going to be about like, is this data better? The other data, you can get some of this stuff off the ground pretty easily. I have friends who run, they're a handful of these startups that have popped up that do some sort of data enrichment in the post AI world and they have gotten to, you know, 20, 30K MRR pretty quickly, just from basically selling CSVs.
That's insane. Yeah. CSV, it depends on what's in the CSV. It's good stuff.
SPEAKER_00
And they're using LLMs and AI, you know, for some of that?
SPEAKER_01
Yeah. Yeah. So apparently, when Clearbait added LLMs to their whole mix, they had data points that went from being like 30% accurate to like 95% accurate. So pretty big, pretty obvious opportunity.
And I think the other thing is, as more people are building apps that need data underlying it, like for example, like if you're building a, if we're building this app, we talked about the beginning, the conference app, wouldn't it be nice if we had a bio for everyone if we had their social profiles? If we had other dynamic information about them in this app, you wouldn't be able to do that. There's no affordable API for that right now. Yeah. And the data is out there.
SPEAKER_00
No one wants to put it in. It's just, you just need a little enrichment in your life. Yep. I think this works, you know, I think this works really well for certain groups and certain you know, very specific niches. What do you think are two, three, four, five specific groups that
SPEAKER_01
would use something like this? Well, I think what's interesting is like the data, the data companies are not incentivized to go after a lot of, a lot of niches, right? So if you wanted to start like, you know, a Sri Lankan real estate CRM or marketing automation platform, and you needed to have a lot of information about, you know, the building location and like the number of rooms or all that stuff, like you would need to build that data set yourself or hope that users input it. And the magic of this is that because you're using LLMs, because you're kind of crawling the web a little bit, or you're finding data sets online or in other places that you can point LLMs to, is that you can do, you can target almost any niche much better than these kind of like incumbents can. So yeah, Sri Lankan real estate, like, I don't know.
I don't know why I thought of that.
SPEAKER_00
That's the task. If you're listening to this, figuring out what are these groups, what are, you know, who needs enrichment, who's going to be willing to pay for it. But you're right, this is this is like an obvious idea.
And I love this idea. I sip this idea greatly just because you are right with incumbents aren't, they're not going to be everywhere. And, and that's, that's the opportunity.
That's why you don't raise money for something like this. You build it profitably. And, you know, you could get to a situation where you're doing one to three million ARR or something like that.
And you go to a clear bit or someone like that, and you sell the business. What do you think, you know, what are what sort of multiples, you know, you've worked in the Google M&A world, like what sort of multiples are, are some of these businesses getting?
SPEAKER_01
Not much. So like, it depends on the approach, like the clear bit acquisition, clear bit was acquired by HubSpot. And the rumor is that it was not the most amazing price because HubSpot didn't value the existing business.
HubSpot is not in a data enrichment business. They bought it so they can have data enrichment out of the box in their own serum and have this kind of competitive mode based on that. So they bought it for the capabilities, they bought it for the, for the data, not the business.
So when you are selling a company, like you need to know what the acquirer wants in your company. The best deals are ones where they're buying the whole business because that means you're getting traditional, like whatever the relevant multiple is based on public comps, other acquisitions and other kind of fund raises. But if they're not building buying it based on the business, then it's kind of like, I don't know, it's totally random sometimes.
SPEAKER_00
Yeah. Yeah, I think this is probably one of those ideas that you might just want to cashflow it. And if you get an unreasonably good offer from one of, you know, one of these platforms, like let them come to you, don't, you know, don't run a process yourself because you're right.
The multiples, especially with dependence on some of these LLMs might not be amazing. Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
Brett, you crushed it.
SPEAKER_01
Wait, you want to do this last, it's not a startup idea. It's just a framework. Okay, let's do a bonus framework with Brett.
Bonus framework. All right. So it's called the enterprise workflow idea startup formula or startup idea format.
Enterprise workflow startup idea formula. All right. So you're going to use this formula to come up with any startup idea that can be a venture scale, billion dollar company.
Every five years,
SPEAKER_00
you can rebuild this company. I'm salivating right now.
SPEAKER_01
Okay. So you basically take any workflow that a professional does. So like designers design, like marketers do email marketing, salespeople live in a CRM, engineers have ticket management system.
You see where I'm going with this, right? Like documents, like all of this type of stuff, all these like core workflow tools need to get rebuilt every five to 10 years. Why is that? Because the technology gets better, right? People always want the same thing. They want it to be beautiful.
They want it to look like the tools that they use with their consumer products. They want it to have the latest and greatest technology and all that stuff. And the reality is incumbents are never going to be able to adapt quickly to these changes and stuff.
This is the linear formula. Linear didn't build a brain exploding ticket management system. They built a ticket management system that was simpler, number one, more beautiful, number two, more targeted at a very specific niche, number three, more performant.
And that's it. Like, that's it. Like they are killing Trello.
They're killing Jira. They're going to replace those in even large enterprises as well. And they didn't have to build the craziest most advanced stuff.
It's not like a 10-dimensional chess kind of product visionary stuff. It's like literally just build it better. So you can do this with most types of things.
It's even easier when you focus on a niche. So if you wanted to build a CRM for real estate people, like there's a CRM for real estate people called Follow-up Boss that's like 15 years old. If you wanted to replace them, you could just following kind of this formula.
SPEAKER_00
This is a gift. You've given people a literal gift. Pretty great.
It really works. I'm going to write that down and I appreciate you sharing that with everyone. Brett, this has been an absolute pleasure.
Where could people learn more about you?
SPEAKER_01
LinkedIn and Twitter, I would say, or maybe the newsletter. So LinkedIn is slash E Goldstein 3. Twitter is that guy, BG.
And then the newsletter is homescreen.news.
SPEAKER_00
And if you made it this far in the pod, if you're on YouTube, at least you can do is subscribe, give us a like, comment if you like this episode. And if you're listening on audio, just follow and review and share this with everyone you know, because there's a lot of gold in here. Thanks a lot, Brett.
It's been real. Catch you later. Thanks, Greg.