LinkedIn Data API - GET company insights from LinkedIn username

LinkedIn URL

Subtitle

Profile picture

Location

Work experience

Industry

Education

Summary

Skills

# Followers

# Connections

Title

Company name

Company LinkedIn URL

Description

Year founded

# Employees

HQ country

Industries

Company website

Get LinkedIn posts of user

LinkedIn Activity

Automation adoption likelihood

Reasoning

Sales Automation Adoption Likelihood

Start date school year

Persons Age

Sales Automation Affinity

Job openings at company

Job openings

Tech stack lookup

Hubspot lookup

Tech stack Hubspot

Scoring

Score

Adoption Likelihood

<p>Takes a LinkedIn profile URL and returns a comprehensive adoption score based on multiple data points including prospect demographics, company metrics, LinkedIn activity, job openings, tech stack analysis, and CRM usage. Uses AI to assess sales automation affinity and generate a final likelihood score for tool adoption.</p>

New tool adoption likelihood

Late Checkout

Late Checkout is a holding company that builds, acquires and incubates cash-flowing businesses that are powered by internet audiences and communities.

Learn more about our businesses at https://latecheckout.studio and work with us.

CEO & Co-Founder 

Reddit, Inc.

Advisor

TikTok

WeWork

- I defined and adjusted holistic technology product strategy for WeWork apps
- I joined WeWork via Islands acquisition where I served as Founder/CEO

Head of Product Strategy

Islands

Islands was a community platform for colleges. Imagine Discord but for college campuses.

Islands was backed by Greylock, Scott Belsky, Erik Torenberg, Howard Lindzon and others.

Founder & CEO (acquired by WeWork)

StumbleUpon 

I was on the StumbleUpon management team, with a focus on leading StumbleUpon video, corporate development and product advisory.

StumbleUpon was one of the largest social media websites by referring traffic. StumbleUpon was acquired by Expa.

CEO, 5by (Acquired by Expa)

The best videos on the internet, guaranteed. 

5by was the winner of one of the best apps of 2014 named by Google 
"​ 5by is my favorite app" - ReCode

CEO & Founder (Acquired by StumbleUpon)

Stock-Trak / WallStreetSurvivor

Wall Street Survivor is the most popular stock market simulator on the internet. It was acquired in 2017

Stock-Trak is the web’s leading financial simulation for the college-level investment classes and allows students to manage a virtual portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, futures and mutual funds.It is used by over 80% of the top U.S. Business Schools. It was acquired in June 2013.

Partner, VP Product & Investor (Acquired)

StressLimitDesign

stresslimitdesign was a product design shop focused on helping brands like Microsoft and Fedex build fantastic digital experiences.

I was in charge of business development, marketing and helped with product/marketing strategies for clients.

Partner & Chief Marketing Officer

The Sender Policy Framework is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery.

Web-based email, calendar, and documents for teams. Renamed to Google Apps for Work, but now known as G Suite from Google Cloud.

High volume DNS services from Google Cloud Platform.

The website redirects traffic to an HTTPS/SSL version by default.

React.js framework for static site generator apps. Owned by Vercel.

This page uses the viewport meta tag which means the content may be optimized for mobile content.

The website contains code that allows the page to support IPhone / Mobile Content.

Let’s Encrypt is a free open Certificate Authority.

This site is hosted on Amazon AWS EC2 Infrastructure.

A JavaScript library for building user interfaces from Facebook.

API that can be used to understand the visibility and position of DOM elements relative to a containing element or to the top-level viewport.

This page contains an icon for iPhone, iPad and iTouch devices.

The Google Font API helps you add web fonts to any web page.

Google has off-loaded static content (Javascript/Images/CSS) to a different domain name in an effort to reduce bandwidth usage and increase network performance for the end user.

Forces browsers to only communicate with the site using HTTPS.

CrUX is a data collection system that gathers information about how real users interact with websites. This website is included in the user experiences data gathered from Google Chrome and thus considered sufficiently popular on the Internet.

Relative measure of site popularity within the CrUX dataset, measured by the total number of navigations on the origin. This site is in the top 50 million.

The website mentions twitter.com in some form.

Serverless hosting platform. Previously known as ZEIT.

Relative measure of site popularity within the CrUX dataset, measured by the total number of navigations on the origin. This site is in the top 10 million.

Pixi.js is a fast lightweight 2D library that works across all devices.

A heatmap, survey, feedback and funnel application.

A technical specification created by a group of organizations that want to help reduce the potential for email-based abuse

This technology represents us finding some form of mention of AI or ChatGPT on the homepage of the website.

Based on the title and description text the website content is potentially English.

The domain has a DMARC policy of 'None'. A policy of 'none' means this DMARC record will not affect the delivery of email, but it will provide reports on where your outbound email appears to be coming from.

Managed hosting, cloud hosting and datacenters since 1999.

This website appears in the Common Crawl Page Rank top 10m websites.

DNSSEC strengthens DNS authentication by using digital signatures based on public key cryptography.

Tag management that lets you add and update website tags without changes to underlying website code.

Networking service that sends traffic through Amazon Web Service’s global network infrastructure for performance improvements.

Modern browsers now support native module functionality, optimizing loading and efficiency. Import and export statements are key for using native JavaScript modules.

Framer is a web builder for creating stunning and modern sites at any scale, offering design and publishing tools for building websites.

Based on the title and description text the website content is potentially German.

McGill University

How I'd build a $100K MRR AI startup in one image

My career advice in one image

(find startup ideas/trends at ideabrowser.com)

A mini-essay on this moment in history:

We're living through something our grandkids will study in history class, and we're experiencing it as just ANOTHER Thursday.

You don't really feel paradigm shifts while you're in them. They feel like normal life with slightly better tools.

The printing press was just a faster way to copy books. The internet was just a better library. AI is just a smarter autocomplete.

You get numb to launch after launch and it all sorta blends into the new normal.  Claude writes entire codebases and you're frustrated it missed a semicolon. 

The audacity.....

Then ONE DAY you wake up and everything changed while you were sitting in a pointless meeting. That little startup that went viral on X is suddenly the incumbent. That 18 year old kid with a GPT wrapper with no moat is now suddenly the most interesting man in Silicon Valley.

The history books won't capture how mundane it felt. How we spent the revolution arguing about return-to-office policies. How we witnessed the death of gatekeepers while refreshing our email. How the greatest democratization of capability in human history happened mostly on Tuesday afternoons between Zoom calls.

You exist in the 20-year window where individuals can compete with institutions. Where a laptop equals a team. Where David doesn't need a slingshot because Goliath's advantages are somehow available for $20/month.

Soon, the window closes. The regulations arrive. The moats get built. The incumbents adapt. The wild west becomes the suburbs.

But today... on this Thursday... today you can still build something in a weekend that changes everything. Today it's tilted in favor of the individual for the first time in history.

Enjoy this moment while it lasts.

note: go to ideabrowser.com for startup ideas :)

i paid my mortgage off today. in one shot. thank you internet.

people think you need one massive win. one unicorn exit. one viral moment. but the internet doesn't work like that. the internet rewards consistency. 

$500 here. $3,000 there. $10,000 from that random project. keep going. you're founder intuition is growing. compound that over 10 years.

suddenly you're staring at your mortgage balance thinking "i could just... end this right now."

so i did. now, im sitting in this house i actually fully own and i hope it inspires someone to ship something. you could be at your full-time job and launch something this weekend. you could be a student and build between classes. you could be retired and start your first internet business at 65. the internet doesn't check your resume. it just waits for you to show up. and rewards the heck out of you when you do.

"BuT iT mAkEs MoRe SeNsE tO kEeP tHe MoRtGaGe AnD iNvEsT"

yeah i know. 5% mortgage, 9% s&p returns, compound interest, blah blah blah.

the spreadsheet guys will tell you i'm an idiot. that i just threw away 4% annually. that compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world.

it's not rational. i just hate owing money.

i've always been this way. debt feels like a weight on my chest. doesn't matter if it's "good debt" or tax-advantaged or whatever. it's still debt.

my bank account is smaller now. my runway is shorter. by every financial metric, i made the wrong choice.

but i own my house. like, actually own it. no bank has a claim. no payment due on the 1st. if everything crashes tomorrow, i still have somewhere to live.

is that worth the thousands in lost returns? financially, no. psychologically, absolutely.

sometimes the best financial decision isn't financial at all. it's buying peace of mind. it's removing that tiny voice that whispers "you don't really own this" every time you walk through your front door.

and to someone like me that means i feel better about taking bigger bets and helps living a happier life. 

and isn't that what a big part of financial freedom is about? a happier life??

the math says i'm wrong. the feeling says i'm right.

and i've learned to trust the feeling.

the internet is undefeated.

note: if you're looking for your startup idea, it's at ideabrowser.com

My 1 pager on what you need to know about today's OpenAI's gpt-oss announcement

OpenAI just made it possible to build AI for healthcare, finance, defense etc. The $300B+ markets that were off-limits are now wide open.

The Announcement

- OpenAI released gpt-oss - open-weights reasoning models you can run locally
- 120B version matches o3 performance, smaller versions run on phones
- Completely free, download today
- Result of billions in R&D

What This Actually Means

- No more API costs - one-time hardware investment
- No data leaves your device - privacy by default
- Works offline - no internet required
- You can modify the model itself - not just prompts

Industries That Can Finally Use AI

- Healthcare: HIPAA-compliant apps, medical diagnosis, therapy tools
- Finance: Trading systems, fraud detection, private wealth management
- Legal: Contract analysis, case research with full confidentiality
- Government/Defense: Classified document processing, field intelligence

The Biggest Opportunities

- Regulated Industries - $300B healthcare market now accessible
- Offline Markets - 4 billion people with phones but poor internet
- Enterprise Privacy - Air-gapped systems, proprietary data
- Edge Computing - Instant responses, no network delays
- Model Tools - Everyone needs deployment, optimization, fine-tuning

Why This Is Different

- Previous: Pay per API call forever
- Now: Pay once for hardware, infinite usage
- Previous: Build around rate limits
- Now: Build assuming unlimited compute

Business Model Shifts

- Sell apps instead of  subscriptions
- One-time purchases at premium prices
- Enterprise licenses without ongoing costs

What Builders Should Do Now

- Pick one regulated/offline/privacy-sensitive vertical
- Price high - you're selling capability, not API access
- Smart builders will own entire industries that couldn't use cloud AI

THIS IS A GENERATIONAL MOMENT TO START A COMPANY AND STEAL MARKET SHARE FROM BILLION-DOLLAR INCUMBENTS. most billion-dollar companies are "adding AI" the same way blockbuster "added streaming." slowly. defensively. committee-approved baby steps while the world changes around them. 

here's how you steal their market share from billion dollar incumbents:

build AI-first everything.

AI-native products that couldn't exist without language models at their core.

the opportunities are everywhere:

1. vertical AI agents: pick a job title. insurance underwriter. freight broker. customer success manager. build AI that IS that person. commercial insurance software costs $30k/year and brokers still review policies manually. AI-first version: upload policy, get gaps in 30 seconds. the AI is the underwriter.

2. CLI-first tools: developers are living in the terminal with AI. cursor and aider changed everything. what other workflows belong in the command line? AI-powered database management. infrastructure automation. deployment tools. the entire devops stack rebuilt for engineers who think in prompts.

3. AI-native SaaS: don't add chatbots to old interfaces. rebuild the entire product assuming AI exists. expense software where receipts explain themselves. CRMs where meeting notes write themselves. project management where tasks assign themselves.

4. distribution as a moat: build the audience, brand, or community that becomes the gateway to AI for specific industries. own the youtube channel teaching realtors to use AI.  

the incumbents can't do any of this. they're stuck adding "AI-powered insights" to software designed when obama was president.  note: https://lnkd.in/dm59mzQg helps companies go AI-first in a tasteful way)

meanwhile, entire boring industries don't even know what's happening in AI. insurance companies think claude is a guy from montreal. 

where opportunities could exist:

1. find anywhere humans are basically expensive routers. moving data. matching patterns. following decision trees. that's where AI-first wins.

2. price at 70% of the incumbent. be 10x better AND cheaper. impossible to ignore.

3. start with power users who've already hacked together solutions. they get it immediately. everyone else follows them.

4. 1% of any market equals generational wealth. pick boring b2b. pick massive TAM. pick workflows that make people want to quit.

note: you can use ideabrowser.com for validated startup ideas, painpoints, and prompts to build your idea

the prime window is 12-18 months. eventually incumbents will all be AI-first in the same way that desktop companies became mobile-first. And it will be harder to compete. 

now's the models are good enough so you can actually build on top of them to create insane value for customers.

the moment to steal market share from billion dollar giants has never been more in reach.

90% of the incumbents are still sleeping. how much market share will you steal before they wake up?

The CLEAREST path to $5m ARR AI startup is something nobody talks about on LinkedIn/X, is BORING and requires 0 venture investors.

it's called a leveraged agency. & i'm gonna show you exactly how to build one.

Phase 1: learn by doing ($1-5k/month)

find a b2b/prosumer problem so boring it makes people want to die. insurance forms. invoice processing. review responses.

the more soul-crushing, the better.

now here's where everyone mess up up: they rush to build software.

slow down, cowboy. we'll get there.

you do it MANUALLY. like a caveman. $2k/month to be someone's human copy-paste machine.

your friends raising seed rounds will think you've lost it. they're building "the future." you're copying data from PDFs. they'll feel bad for you, and you'll probably feel bad for yourself too.

but when you do the work manually, you learn what NO customer interview will teach you. which fields actually matter. what breaks everything. what clients say they want vs what they'll actually pay for.

YOU EARN THE INSIGHT.

six months of this. pure pain. pure learning.

Phase 2: Build the Machine ($5-25k/month)

month 7 hits different.

you've seen every edge case. every stupid request. every way a human breaks the process.

NOW you build. not a product. a SYSTEM.

AI agents are your new employees.

you're duct-taping AI agents together to do EXACTLY what you were doing manually. and better.

you dont need to reinvent an agent platform. 

here's the beautiful part... you keep charging the SAME price.

client doesn't care HOW you do it. they care that it's DONE.

your margins just went from 40% to 80%. you handle 50 clients instead of 5.

you keep costs low, begin using agents to fulfill some of the work. 

Phase 3: Package the Magic ($25k+/month)

time to segment, you add new pricing tiers.

Enterprise: $8k/month. white glove everything.
Self-serve: $500/month. here's your login, figure it out.
API: $99/month. for the nerds.

same backend. different prices. pure profit.

watch this: "we use AI to revolutionize workflows" → crickets.

"we process your forms in 24 hours with 99.9% accuracy" → SHUT UP AND TAKE MY MONEY.

"BuT yoU mAkE it SouNd sO EaSY. HoW to gEt CuStoMers"

every week, solve ONE problem in public:

"client had 47 customs delays. built this tracker. saved $80k. here's the exact template."

give it ALL away. 

1000 people see it → 100 save it → 10 try it → 1 succeeds → 9 become customers.

you put paid ads behind the organic stuff that is working.

that 1 person tells everyone you gave away the secret sauce. the 9 who failed? they pay you $3k/month because doing it themselves is harder than it looks

you can find a bunch of these ideas at ideabrowser.com (also can check community signals feature for painpoints from linkedin, fb groups, reddit)

find boring problem → do it manually → build AI agents to replace yourself → charge service prices for automated work

highest probability path to $5M ARR for an AI startup in 2025.

Y Combinator JUST announced what startups they want to fund next in 2025. And they want 10-person companies worth $100 billion (and more).

My notes below in case it's helpful to you:

1. AI-Powered Vocational Training
The Problem: AI infrastructure needs skilled tradespeople (electricians, welders, HVAC techs), but training takes years The Opportunity: Use multimodal AI, AR/VR to train workers in months, not years Revenue Model: Employers pay for well-trained workers; AI teachers scale infinitely

2. Video Generation as Computing Primitive
The Reality: Google's Veo 3 creates photorealistic 8-second clips for dollars; costs approaching $0 Applications:
Personalized content (TikTok for one viewer, canceled TV show revivals)
Commerce (try-on experiences, auto-staged apartments)
Gaming (no game engines needed, infinite robotic training data) Focus: Build infrastructure for limitless, low-latency video

3. The 10-Person, $100B Company
The Shift: Like cloud computing 15 years ago, AI eliminates need for large teams Key Metric: Revenue per employee becomes critical optimization target Advantages: No politics, fewer meetings, faster execution vs. bloated incumbents Goal: $100B company with just $500K in YC funding

4. Multi-Agent System Infrastructure
Evolution: AI agents moving from single-threaded to distributed workflows with thousands of sub-agents Challenges: Traditional distributed systems problems plus new issues (prompt engineering, monitoring, untrusted context) Opportunity: Make operating agent fleets as routine as deploying web services

5. AI-Native Enterprise Software
Historical Pattern: Salesforce & ServiceNow (both $10B+ revenue, $200B+ market cap) rode cloud wave 25 years ago to beat incumbents Today's Opportunity: AI presents same once-in-generation chance Vision: "Cursor for sales, HR, and accounting" - AI embedded throughout, not just system of record Advantage: Incumbents will struggle to rebuild around AI

6. Replacing Government Consulting with LLMs
Market Size: US government spends $100B+ annually on consulting (Deloitte, Accenture) Drivers: Political pressure to cut waste, LLMs can already do consulting work Examples: FedRAMP approval automation, regulation compliance checking Opportunity: Build LLM software to replace traditional consulting functions

What YC Wants: Deep domain expertise in specific verticals, Full automation, not just human assistance, Clear B2B revenue paths, Infrastructure/tools that help AI scale, Treating AI as primitive building block

Happy building.

(For validated startup ideas you can build (with AI), check out ideabrowser.com)

I put together a list of the AI tools I use to build startups and find customers FAST

we're living in the GREATEST time in HISTORY to turn ideas into reality

claude code subagents allows you to organize AI agents like a startup team 

each one living in its own markdown file with specific instructions, personality traits, and expertise areas, from frontend-developer md to tiktok-strategist md to growth-hacker md. 

each markdown file becomes a complete employee profile.....your frontend-developer md knows react best practices and has a preference for clean code, your tiktok-strategist md understands gen z humor and trending sounds, your growth-hacker md obsesses over conversion rates and a/b testing everything. you can give them different communication styles, decision-making frameworks, even quirky personalities that make them feel like real team members you're managing.

people are scanning ideabrowser.com for painpoints of niches on subreddits/fb groups (feature is called community signals and is brand new), getting startup ideas, spinning up landing pages with bolt or lovable

and then coordinating their AI agent "team" where the product agents prioritize features, engineering agents push code, and marketing agents create content 

all working from their individual instruction files. 

you can literally structure your ai workforce like a company org chart, with agents in engineering/, marketing/, design/, and operations/ folders, each with detailed prompts about how they should think and act. 

we've gone from using AI as a single tool to managing entire ai organizations where each agent has a specific role, communication style, and area of focus

you can literally write down what you want built in markdown files and watch ai agents execute it while you sleep or you are at your full-time job.

claude code subagents are a game changer

it's going to be a good week.

12 STARTUP IDEAS YOU CAN BUILD THIS WEEKEND (48 hours, AI native, all viable)

1. supplyd AI

ai agent that finds underpriced inventory on alibaba, negotiates with suppliers, and sets up your shopify backend. one-person import/export empire. $500/mo b2b, $99/mo indie.

2. hyperpitch

founders type idea → ai turns it into a pitch deck, demo video, landing page, and 3 investor intros. instant fundraising workflow. $399/output or $79/mo.

3. acquirebot

monitors niche marketplaces (flippa, acquire, X), screens for hidden gem startups, and gives a daily “buy this” list. $149/mo for buyers.

4. formfilter

ai agent that fills out RFPs, grant apps, procurement bids using your company docs + past wins. killer for gov, education, and nonprofit vendors. $299/mo.

5. stackreview dot com

public reviews of internal tech stacks at top startups. “what does stripe use for payments?” seo goldmine. monetize via saas affiliate + hiring leads.

6. autocto dot ai

early-stage founders get a “fractional ai cto” agent that advises on build vs buy, stack choices, code quality. $250/mo. perfect for solo non-tech founders.

7. vibeengine

ai-powered meme studio + trend analysis + reposter. auto-generates viral content for creators, brands, meme pages. $49/mo solo. $499/mo for agency plan.

8. inboxqualify

your cold emails scored by ai before you send. checks tone, spam triggers, personalization level, sender health. $19/mo. add-on: ai cold reply agent.

9. exitalerts

 notifies founders when their competitors update terms, pricing, headcount, layoffs, or M&A moves. “exit strategy radar.” $149/quarter.

10. ai agency os

 one dashboard: client portal, prompt repo, reporting, agent execution tracking. the “webflow for ai agencies.” $99/mo base. $499/mo pro.

11. vendor kill switch

agent checks all your subscriptions, runs ROI calc, suggests cancels or cheaper swaps. aimed at startups bleeding cash. $49 flat or $10/mo.

12. niche site factory

finds low-effort, ai-automatable niche content sites → auto-generates a rebuild plan with keywords, backlinks, agent flow. Directory to sell them too. $499/service.

note: for more startup ideas/trends/prompts for LLMs/etc, head to ideabrowser.com

there's a quiet shift happening in how we design software. we're moving from UX to AX (agentic experience).

traditional UX is screen-centric. you tap a button, product reacts, job done. every session starts from zero.

designers pre-plan every path with hard-coded flows. users fill out forms and dropdowns because the product remembers nothing about you.

success = fewer clicks and faster flows. 
trust = "interface looks clean so it must work."

agentic experience is relationship-centric. the agent keeps track of ongoing goals, nudges next steps, improves over time. you're never starting over.

the system plans its own path - it senses, infers, chooses actions the designer didn't script. context is learned, not asked. preferences, patterns, even team norms are remembered.

success = earned trust and compounding value. metrics shift to retention, satisfaction with decisions, how much autonomy you hand over.

trust = the agent shows its work early, then tapers as confidence grows, like a human teammate.

most apps will eventually work this way.

your email client will learn your writing style and priorities. your design tool will remember your brand guidelines and suggest layouts. your CRM will track relationship patterns and recommend next moves.

the best products will anticipate needs, remember context, and get better with every interaction.

we're moving from tools you use to partners you work with.

the companies building ax instead of ux will own the next decade.

users will stop tolerating dumb software that makes them repeat themselves. 

once you experience true AX, traditional UX feels broken. there's no going back.

note: if your company is looking for AX, my team at latecheckout.agency is leading the charge (credit to them for this graphic)

the key to startups (and life?) is focusing on the few things that matter

we get pulled into urgent emails, coffee meetings, and busy work that feels productive but moves us nowhere. 

meanwhile, the one thing that would actually change everything sits untouched because it's harder, scarier, or less immediately rewarding. 

i've observed the "smartest" people are just really good at ignoring everything that doesn't matter and really good at working hard on the things that do

the question that cuts through all the noise: "am i focusing on the most important thing right now??"

cloudflare just BROKE the internet's business model. they launched "pay per crawl" websites can now charge ai crawlers for scraping content. instead of "block all bots" or "let them steal everything," there's option 3: "pay me."

why this is a BIG DEAL:

every SaaS has valuable data rotting in help docs, case studies, feature pages. ai companies have been training on this for free while building your competitors. now you can charge them $0.10 per page.

your dental saas help docs, well, that's years of practice wisdom. charge crawlers for access and make $3k/month from companies building "dentist ai."

tons of opportunity for founders building businesses:

build a restaurant review database, charge humans $5/month but charge ai crawlers $0.01 per review. two revenue streams, same content. im scanning startup ideas from ideabrowser.com and seeing where i can add this rev stream.

expert knowledge platforms where you take 30% of human subs and 50% of crawler fees.

cloudflare handles the billing, you set the price.

they way to think about it...

what valuable data do you have sitting around... internal company docs, customer conversations, industry insights, process knowledge.

all of it can now generate revenue from ai companies who desperately need training data.

the winners will be content businesses that move fast. imagine owning a cooking blog with 10 years of recipes. that's training data gold for ai food companies. early adopters will set market rates before competition drives prices down.

this also completely changes saas valuations. businesses with proprietary content now have two revenue streams instead of one. 

it's the beginning of a complete realignment of incentives on the internet.

suddenly, creating high-quality, unique content becomes dramatically more valuable. we'll see a renaissance of niche expertise sites because depth now pays better than breadth. the incentive shifts from "create content to rank in google" to "create content so valuable that ai companies must pay for it."

this also creates a new class of digital asset. your company's knowledge base is a revenue-generating asset that appreciates over time (not a cost center). 

I'd expect more m&a activity around content libraries, not just user bases.

this makes human expertise defensible again. AI companies will pay premium rates for content from recognized experts because it's higher quality training data. this reverses the commoditization of knowledge.

cloudflare quietly changed the game.

pay-per-crawl just became your new best friend.

(for more startup ideas you can steal, go to ideabrowser.com, its the software I built for myself to come up with validated startup ideas and optimized AI prompts to vibe code)

startups are not for the faint of heart. you're wandering through a desert for months, maybe years, searching for water. everyone thinks you're lost. sometimes you even feel that way. but you keep walking because you know there's an oasis somewhere.

most people want startup outcomes without startup pain. 

doesn't work that way.

but when you finally reach that oasis... you own your time, your money, your life. that freedom is unbelievably beautiful.

startup idea for you:"AI agents that finds expired dotcom domains"

every day 50,000 domain names expire. most are garbage lbut hidden in there are gems - domains with real traffic, clean backlinks, brandable names that someone will pay thousands for.

domain investors know this. they make serious money buying expired domains for $100 and flipping them for $5k+.  i did this when i was younger but finding the good ones is pure torture.

right now they manually download massive lists of expiring domains, then spend hours checking each one. does it have traffic? clean backlink history? is the name brandable? by the time they finish analyzing 50 domains, the best ones are already gone.

this is exactly what AI agents are built for. pattern recognition at machine speed.

how it works:

your ai agent watches all the domain drop lists 24/7. it checks each domain's traffic history, backlink quality, spam scores, and brandability. when it finds a winner, it texts you: "XYZ domain dropping tomorrow. 5k monthly visitors, mentioned in techcrunch, estimated auction price $300."

how to build it:

weekend mvp: connect to daily domain drop feeds, run everything through a scoring algorithm, send sms alerts via twilio when something hits your criteria. plug in apis like majestic seo and similarweb for traffic data. charge $99/month to beta users.

how to grow it:

start with 100 beta customers paying $99/month. these people currently spend 2+ hours per day doing this manually, so you're literally paying them to use your product.

wont be easy to find first 100 customers. maybe you'll have to create tons of yt content, x content around what you're seeing out there, but i do think its possible.

scale to 1,000 customers = $1.2m arr. your only real costs are data feeds and servers and your team. but this could be a 1 person biz with contractors.

add features: auto-bidding at auctions, one-click listing to marketplace sites, private deals for agencies. each new feature makes manual competitors look like cavemen.

(thanks to @ideabrowser
 for this idea)

why i like AI agent businesses like this domain startup idea (and how to find them)

look for markets where people are: → doing repetitive, boring work that requires pattern recognition → monitoring multiple data sources 24/7 (impossible for humans) → already paying significant time/money for manual solutions → making real money when they find opportunities (so they won't churn) → working in industries where speed = competitive advantage

the best ai agent businesses solve problems that are too tedious for humans but too valuable to ignore. find the digital needle-in-haystack problems where people are burning hours for clear ROI.

happy building.

for more startup ideas, go to ideabrowser.com (and sign up)

is this the biggest LIE on the internet? "AI won't take your job. someone who knows AI will." the REAL TRUTH is messier. here's how i think it actually plays out:

MILLIONS of white collar jobs disappear once the productivity gains of AI present itself over the next few years. the layoffs happen in waves. coordinators, junior analysts, customer service reps - anyone whose job can be done with a good prompt, agent swarm, automation gets cut. this is mostly individual contributors who get hurt. managers are more likely to remain (because they are managing the output).

but the TOP 1% of employees who master AI have tons of leverage with their employer so they get paid 2x while creating 10x+ output. both employer and employee feel like its a really good deal. realistically, its a better deal for the employer.

THOUSANDS of smart people suddenly have severance checks, free time, and a chip on their shoulder. they start playing with cursor, claude, and bolt. they realize building a business now costs less than a decent laptop used to.

the NUMBER of founders is about to 10x+. many build tiny apps that solve one specific problem. most stay small but profitable and do not raise money. this is the mom and pop era of internet software. "small software" becomes a thing. 

but not all want to create saas or apps - that's hard and for tech people in their mind. so, some buy BORING businesses from retiring boomers.  that appeals to them. it goes hit or miss.

some become CREATORS. they go full-on influencer, do reviews, create internet communities, get into the newsletter game.

meanwhile, big companies get lean and mean, hiring only when humans add something bots can't. you saw that already from what Tobi from Shopify said. you need a real reason to hire human or else its AI.

new jobs do emerge - prompt engineers, AI workflow designers, chief agent officer... this new class creates thousands of jobs. ill admit to that. 

what we end up with looks like a beehive: a few giant companies running efficiently, surrounded by thousands of tiny, profitable one-person businesses.

this transition could get really ugly. MILLIONS of people out of work, competing for fewer traditional jobs, while trying to figure out entrepreneurship for the first time. 

lots of failed startups, burned savings, and genuine hardship. we honestly don't know how fast this happens or how society adapts.

but yes, AI will delete millions of jobs. yes, power users of AI will dominate. And yes, we're about to see the BIGGEST explosion of entrepreneurs in history.  

And yes, the next decade is going to create more millionaires than the last 50 combined.

this is how i think it probably plays out.

money, life, luck, and happiness are 4 kids at the same table, constantly stealing fries off each other's plates, and the older I get the more I realize you need to referee without ruining the meal.

money is loud and impatient, but it calms down once you treat it like a utility bill instead of a trophy. stack a cashflow engine (agency, saas, mobile app, boring biz etc) that pays for your curiosity and it will stop demanding costume changes every quarter.

life is the messy art project in the middle; it looks like chaos from two feet away and museum-worthy from twenty, so zoom out often and remember the uglier brushstrokes are what make the piece feel alive.

luck is the quiet kid flicking paper airplanes; you cannot summon him on command, but you can build a wide runway by shipping half-baked prototypes, replying to cold emails, and sitting in rooms you technically have no credential for...surface area is luck's love language.

happiness is the shy one who only speaks when the other three settle down; she shows up when your calendar matches your values, when your yes is clean and your no is kind, and when tonight's dinner is something you can taste instead of scroll through.

the game is learning that the best meals happen when you stop counting fries and start enjoying the chaos. let them be loud, let them steal, let them make a mess. your job isn't to control the table, it's to make sure everyone gets fed.

and maybe that's how you live a happier, healthier life.

it's a beautiful thing.

startup idea for you...review platform for women's travel safety ($5M ARR opportunity)

my friend Emma just canceled her solo trip to Marrakech, Morrocco because she couldn't get a straight answer about neighborhood safety

spent weeks scrolling Reddit threads asking "is this area safe at night?" and getting replies from male backpackers who have zero clue what women actually face

turns out 84% of solo female travelers report feeling unsafe during trips, yet they're making decisions based on TripAdvisor reviews that don't mention harassment frequency or walking safety after dark

the problem is existing travel platforms like airbnb etc focus on amenities and price, not safety details that matter

some women want to know: can I walk alone at midnight? does this "charming café" turn sketchy at sunset? will hotel staff actually help if something happens?

you end up overpaying for tourist zones or missing amazing experiences because there's no reliable safety intel

the solution create a map-based platform where verified female travelers rate neighborhoods, hotels, and restaurants on safety metrics that actually matter


 green zones for "walked alone at midnight, felt safe"  

yellow zones for "daylight only, busy streets preferred"

red zones for "avoid completely, multiple harassment reports"

each location gets detailed safety scores plus specifics like "well-lit streets," "responsive hotel security," "staff walked me to taxi"

distribution strategy

 • partner with female travel influencers to create neighborhood safety videos and review videos (short form ig/tiktok)
• Instagram ads targeting "solo travel safety" searches with hooks like "stop googling 'is [destination] safe for solo female travelers'"
• target Facebook groups like "Solo Female Travel" (400k+ members) with side-by-side safety comparisons
• build media empire around solo travel for women (stories, reviews etc)... would be video.

revenue model

launch with 5,000 paying members across 20 major destinations for $500K ARR at 25,000 subscribers, add premium tiers with 24/7 safety monitoring for $2.5M ARR scale with enterprise partnerships where hotels pay $500/month for safety certification

why now

solo female travel is exploding

I saw this Virtuoso’s trends report showing that females now make up 71% of solo travelers.

from 2023 to 2024, Google searches for ‘solo female travel’ increased by 131 per cent 

tldr; massive underserved market with clear monetization path and something that would make the the world a better place

i hope someone builds it

this idea was sourced from ideabrowser.com (for more ideas check it out ideabrowser.com)

the amount of founders is going to 10x in the next 10 years

it’s the perfect storm of

- white collar jobs getting decimated due AI
- non-tech people can ship ideas now
- starting a company feels safer than staying employed
- people are EATING up entrepreneurship content (vids etc) and it's motivating them
- social media makes it easier to distribute any product
- digital products are easier businesses to start than physical ones (less starting costs, stand on the shoulders of giants like stripe, shopify, openai etc)

we're returning to the default state: most humans working for themselves.

maybe employment was the historical anomaly?

vertical-ai playbook (in 84 seconds)

1. pick a razor-thin niche
2. wrap the whole brand around it (build media)
3. identify most painful workflows that hasn't been automated (spot the "sunday-night pain")
4. ship a one-click ai fix for that pain
5. grow sideways into the next pains and niches
6. keep going

(for startup ideas, grab them at ideabrowser.com)

Dear internet,

You can't lose when you put your ideas out on the internet. Even if nobody cares, you learn what people want, what they ignore, what resonates and what falls flat. 

The ideas that flop teach you as much as the ones that take off, maybe more. 

The internet is the ultimate feedback loop, and the only way to lose is to never play.

-- 

note: for validated startup ideas you can take, go to ideabrowser.com (i built this for you!)

Why this is the GREATEST time to be building a software startup

1. Millions of people actually want to try new AI products 
2. Building software is way easier now
3. Anyone can go viral overnight (it's possible)
4. APIs turned everything into Lego blocks, you can build on top of Stripe, OpenAI, Twilio without rebuilding infrastructure 
5. Remote work makes it easier to find people to build with you
6. Agents/automation are making business making more efficient than ever
7. You don't need VC to get going 
8. The playing field has never been this leveled 

"BuT iT'S mOrE CoMpEtiTive ThAn EveR"

Yeah, more people are building. But most of it is pretty mid. It doesn't really address the pain point or it does it in a way that doesn't really speak to them. 

Competition has always existed. The difference is now you have the same tools as billion-dollar companies. Low barriers to entry cut both ways - yes more competitors can enter, but so can you.

"YoU mAkE it SoUnD So EaSY"

Building is easier. Building the RIGHT thing is still hard as heck.

Most people give up after month one when they realize coding was the easy part. Distribution, retention, finding product-market fit - that's where 99% fail.

The tools got better. The game didn't get easier.

But if you can push through the hard parts that eliminate most people...

You're competing in a market with infinite demand and the best building tools in history.

for validated startup ideas worth building, grab one at ideabrowser.com

Jeff Bezos talks about Type 1 vs Type 2 decisions. Type 1 are irreversible (like selling your company). Type 2 are reversible (like launching a product feature). Most decisions are Type 2, but we treat them like Type 1.

So, I've been trying something new.

Just acting based on how I feel and making decisions quicker. Thinking more about type 1 vs type 2.

If I feel like I should make the decision, I make the decision. Right then. No sitting on it, no overthinking, no "let me sleep on it."

I don't sit on decisions anymore. That takes up brain space.

Turns out most decisions are reversible anyway. And the mental energy I was spending on "should I or shouldn't I" was way more expensive than just making the wrong call occasionally.

I used to think deliberation was wisdom. Now I think it's often just procrastination dressed up as being thoughtful.

The best decisions I've made in business came from gut instinct made quickly. The worst ones came from overthinking obvious choices until I talked myself out of them.

Your brain is constantly processing information below the conscious level. That "feeling" about what to do is usually your subconscious telling you something your rational mind hasn't figured out yet.

Most people ignore their instincts because they think logic is more reliable. But logic without intuition is just slow decision-making.

Speed compounds. Fast decisions create momentum. Momentum creates more opportunities. More opportunities create better outcomes.

This might sound obvious, but been helpful to me living a happier and more productive life.

Just sharing in case it sparks something in you

HOW TO BUILD A CHROME EXTENSION BUSINESS WITH AI (my workflow)

Go to any major platform and ask: what's this website missing?

Look for:

– What's annoying users?
– What's repetitive and manual?
– What features are hidden?
– What do power users hack together?

The biggest websites have millions of users but can't build every feature. LinkedIn can't add every sales tool. YouTube can't add every analytics feature. Amazon can't add every shopping helper.

That's your opening.

VidIQ built YouTube analytics and has millions of users. Grammarly built writing assistance and sold for $13B. Honey built coupon finding and sold for $4B.

Why Chrome extensions work:

Distribution is built-in. You're not convincing people to visit a new website or download an app. You're adding features to sites they already use daily.

The users are already there. The behavior is already established. You're just making their existing workflow better. You piggyback off them (read their terms and services too to make sure it wont bug them)

Most successful extensions follow the freemium model: basic features free, advanced features $5-15/month.

Some go one-time purchase: $20-50 for lifetime access.

Others do usage-based: $0.10 per action, which scales with value.

HOW TO BUILD MVP

It's crazy but you can literally ask Claude/ChatGPT/etc to build you a Chrome Extension now

1. Tell Claude: "Build me a Chrome extension that automatically saves LinkedIn profiles to a Google Sheet when I visit them."

It'll write the entire codebase. Manifest file, content scripts, background scripts everything.

2. Have Bolt/Lovable create a marketing site. Funnels with Perspective or Clickfunnels.

3. Ask ChatGPT to add features: "Now add a button to categorize contacts as 'hot lead' or 'cold lead.'"

4. Use Cursor to debug and iterate. The AI handles the technical stuff while you focus on solving the actual problem.

5. You can hire someone to help scale it and with security as revenue comes in. (important step)

Fun business to be building If you can get it right. Hope this got your creative juices flowing.

Happy building!

(for startup ideas, check out ideabrowser.com)

i dont think you understand

you vibe code a saas

you get to $50k/month (it won't be easy but its possible)

your net margins are at least 50% because you dont need a big team anymore

you are making $25k/month ($300k/year)

you can sell the business for 5-10x EBITDA all day long

your business is worth $1.5M-$3M and you own 100% (no investors)

you can keep growing or sell

you double the business and all of sudden its worth $3M-$6M

your customers love the product

why are you raising venture capital again?

i dont think you understand

(for folks looking for startup ideas, i suggest http://ideabrowser.com find validated ideas/trends, there are free and paid plans)

We're about to see the rise of "autonomous companies" and it's the greatest wealth creation opportunity for the average person ever.

Think of autonomous companies like cars.

First manual sticks. Then automatic cars. Then cruise control. Then self-driving.

Slow, then all at once. Same thing is happening with companies.

I've been watching this play out in real time. 3 years ago, my businesses needed armies of people. Today, half those jobs are done by AI and the remaining humans are basically supervisors.

We're in the "cruise control" phase right now. AI handles the repetitive stuff while humans steer.

But I think the future of 80%+ of internet business looks something like this:

AI writes the code, handles the customer support, and manages all the marketing.

The founder just sets the destination, handles quality assurance (and new ideas) and watches the dashboard.

The transition from cruise control to self-driving happens overnight. Tesla didn't gradually introduce self-driving. One day it didn't exist, the next day it did.

We've seen this before. When mobile happened, mobile-first companies like Instagram, Uber, and WhatsApp destroyed desktop-first competitors who tried to adapt. The companies built for the new paradigm always win.

The same thing will happen with knowledge work. Microsoft and Amazon are hiring fewer people, not more. These tech giants see what's coming and they're preparing.

The companies being built today that assume full automation will demolish the ones still optimizing for human labor.

There will be a new breed of these autonomous companies. Solo founders competing with Fortune 500s using AI teams instead of human teams.

They will out compete on price and service. They will move quicker. Build faster. Iterate more. Personalize more.

I don't think this window will stay open forever. Just like how the mobile era closed. Find ideas (validated ones on ideabrowser.com) and build them.

Welcome to the autonomous era of building companies.

Some people will disagree with me on this but...

You need an idea, a laptop, an LLM, some prompts and the courage to start.

That's it.

friendly reminder: productizing AI agents is the biggest zero-to-one play on the internet right now.

step 1

start with the workflow. open someone’s “how-to” loom, watch for any section where the mouse repeats itself for more than 30 seconds. that is your extraction point. i call this step looking for drudge. 

step 2

add the context. scrape the internal FAQ, the tribal acronyms, the edge-case screenshots that a general LLM will never see. that proprietary mess formatted into plain text or json is your first moat. sometimes you need an audience for this. it helps. usually i create an audience/community to start.

step 3

wire up an agent on an LLM or agent platform: claude, gpt-4o, gemini, lindy, string dot com. keep the prompt brutal-simple: “given this context and that input, return this output.” test until the agent’s average response time beats the human baseline by 10×. keep refining prompt, it will get longer, longer and more valuable. never share that prompt with anyone.

step 4

wrap the agent in the thinnest UI possible. one drop zone, one action button, one log window that says “done.” hide the settings; hide the model; hide the magic. outcome is the only feature. make a brand people fall in love with.

step 5

price the saved hours. take the median hourly cost of the person who used to run the workflow, multiply by the time you shave off each week, and anchor the subscription somewhere south of pain but north of hobby.

step 6

ship video proof before a landing page. record old way vs. new way in a split-screen clip; caption it; post it where the operators hang out. every “how did you do that?” reply is a warm lead. you can use platforms like lindy ai etc to do cold dm/email automation.

step 7

loop usage back into the context file. new ticket? new edge case? append it. your agent improves without code, and the context corpus becomes asset #2.

step 8

layer distribution inside the product. add a quiet “powered by” footer on every output, or trigger a shareable report by default. users spread the gospel while you sleep.

step 9

when churn stabilizes and support tickets hit near-zero, bolt on adjacent micro-agents each with its own promise, its own subscription tier, no extra complexity in the UI.

step 10

ignore vanity metrics. screenshots of ARR can be faked (and are constantly). My favorite was watching someone screenshot test payments. Literally fake money lol. 

Anyways, time returned to a paying customer cannot be faked. compound that saved time across niches until you own a stack of invisible employees.

you own a portfolio of little products that save people time and you get paid for it. the market for this is in the billions.

do this on repeat and you won’t need funding, permission, or glossy charts.

you will be free and be creating impact.

this is probably one of the biggest opportunities out there.

for startup ideas, head to ideabrowser.com and get building!

i keep a running doc called “things i’m not doing anymore” and look at it monthly

really simple way to live a happier & more productive life

a few simple examples 

- joining Slack channels that don’t have a clear purpose - treating sleep like a luxury instead of a baseline
- waiting for perfect weather to get outside
- feeling guilty playing video games even though i enjoy it
- booking red-eye flights
- arguing with strangers on the internet
-saying “we should grab coffee” to people I don’t actually plan to see
- hoarding old chargers for devices I'll never use again
- looking at zillow prices of houses in my neighborhood constantly (it doesnt matter what my house is worth)
- giving “maybe” RSVPs just to avoid a polite no
- checking the same three apps on loop like a slot machine
- doom-scrolling stock tickers when I’m a long-term investor

you get the idea. simple stuff.

"boring" startup idea for you. quickbooks desktop is getting discontinued (~$2.3B/year rev) so millions of businesses have no idea how to migrate their books without breaking everything

someone’s going to build the $1,500 flat-fee “escape ramp” and print 

im rooting for you

to go deeper on this idea and others head to ideabrowser.com

how aren't we in an AI gold rush?

i can build programmatic seo directories with cursor that bring in 20,000 visits/month on auto pilot and it only took me a few lines of english and $6.

i can talk to a document, a database, or a YT video and it talks back with clarity. i can clone my voice in 5 seconds max, create video content, write a blog post, and schedule social posts without opening a camera or doc.

i can spin up agents to research, reply, generate strategy, and write code, all at once. i can go from idea to landing page to first users before dinner. 

i can test pricing, positioning, and messaging instantly. i can simulate customer conversations and handle objections i haven’t heard yet. i can get from “this might work” to “this is working” faster than ever before.

the friction is gone. the overhead is gone. we have reasoning on demand. infinite research capacity. tools that get better weekly. 

boring businesses feel new. consumer mobile is back. service businesses scale like software. what used to need a team and vc money now just needs a laptop and good taste. 

if this isn't the greatest time to be building i dont know what is. not everyone will be successful, startups are hard, but this is a remarkable time to be building.

if this isn’t an ai gold rush, i don’t know what is....

How I changed my life

1. I started writing online, even when no one was reading. 

2. I started using the internet like a lab testing ideas, aesthetics, and workflows to see what clicked.

3. I began treating every conversation as either energy-giving or energy-draining, then designed my life around the givers. 

4. I started screenshotting things that sparked curiosity and treating them like startup seeds.

5. I stopped hanging out with people who rolled their eyes at my ideas and started surrounding myself with builders who said "you should ship that."

6. I realized no one was coming to save my ideas or hand me opportunities. So I picked myself, grabbed my laptop, and kept building until something stuck.

7. I stopped asking “Is this good?” and started asking “Did this create motion?”. 

8. I began saying no to everything that felt like should and yes to everything that felt like curiosity.

9. I built things I wanted to exist, then let strangers on the internet shape them. 

10. I stopped treating social media like entertainment and started using it like distributionI started naming my projects like brands, even when they were just docs.

11. I began creating systems that worked while I slept. I started valuing quiet ambition over loud mediocrity. 

12. I started showing up like it mattered and eventually, it did.

13. I started building things that worked without me, then using that freedom to build bigger things. 

14. I started treating my brain like a search engine feeding it better inputs so it could generate better outputs.

15. I realized that building wealth and building happiness use the same playbook: compound what works, eliminate what doesn't, and stay in the game long enough for magic to happen.

The right startup idea can change your life. Grab yours here ideabrowser.com

Okay, let me get this straight...

1. You have 1-click n8n, Zapier, and Lindy AI agent templates to automate your content, outreach, research, reporting, anything. 
2. You can clone your voice with 5 seconds of audio. 
3. You can run billion-parameter AI models on your laptop for free. 
4. You have agents that write, debug, and ship code while you sleep. 
5. You can turn scripts into talking head videos with your face and voice. 
6. You can spin up AI agents to negotiate bills and cancel subscriptions. 
7. You can summarize 300-page PDFs in seconds. 
8. You can turn rough Looms into polished blog posts instantly. 
9. You can generate personalized landing pages for every visitor. 
10. You can talk to your data like it's ChatGPT.
11. You can train a custom GPT on your company docs and have it answer support tickets 24/7.
12. You can A/B test 100 ad creatives before you spend a dollar... all AI-generated.
13. You can scrape the internet, analyze competitors, and generate go-to-market strategies overnight.
14. You can deepfake yourself into any language and accent to localize content globally.
15. You can run AI to audit your finances and suggest tax optimizations (for a pretty much free second opinion)
16. You can generate an entire week of social content with tone, brand, and format baked in.
17. You can create full e-commerce stores from just a CSV and a brand vibe.
18. You can deploy voice agents that call leads, qualify them, and update your CRM... in your voice.
19. TLDR; you can do a lot, my friend

This is the greatest unlock for solo builders since the App Store.

Enjoy it.

Note: if you want startup ideas worth building, check out ideabrowser.com

it's bizarre that being rude to chatgpt, claude etc somehow unlocks AI god mode

“are you kidding me? this is AWFUL. make it way better or else”

The Micro-Startup Flywheel (explained in 54 seconds):

→ Unbundle a big vision
→ Find the most viral piece using trend tools (google trends, ideabrowser
 etc)
→ Launch it to generate cash (cursor, bolt, lovable etc)
→ Use cash to build the next piece

when i lived in silicon valley, the term 'lifestyle business" was treated like a dirty word... people would look down on you for it.

which to me never really made sense.

isn't one of the main reasons you're building a business to have a good lifestyle for you and your family?

the reality is now in this AI age, a lifestyle business can be a big business

so you can have your cake and eat it too

lifestyle, impact and serious wealth.

grab a lifestyle business idea at ideabrowser.com and build something this weekend

much of the AI internet is down now right now... firebase is down, cursor is down, lovable is down, supabase is down, google ai is down, aws is down, cloudflare is down... almost everything is down.

finally time to catch up on the 87 tools, 14 models, and 12 AI startup ideas we want to build.

if you're looking for startup ideas or a research partner for your business, say hello to http://ideabrowser.com... it just got back up... for now?

Using Claude without MCP is like It's like buying an iPhone and only using it to make calls.

Why would you limit yourself like that?

It takes 10 mins to spin up and you'll outperform 99.999% of human beings on the planet.

8 ways founders could use MCP + Claude:

1. have Claude pull live data from your Google Analytics and write weekly performance reports automatically.

2. connect it to your email and have it draft responses while you're in meetings - saves hours daily.

3. feed it access to your project files and databases so it can give you insights without you copy-pasting data.

4. let it browse competitor websites and social media to track what they're shipping in real-time.

5. connect it to your calendar and task management so it can actually help your prioritize my day based on what's coming up.

6. have it monitor your investment portfolio and give you updates when things move - no more checking 10 different apps.

7. connect it to your CRM so it can help me prep for sales calls using actual customer data, not generic advice.

8. let it access your financial dashboards and write investor updates using real numbers instead of  manually pulling everything.

Happy MCPing.

sam altman just dropped a blog post on why we're entering the era of the "idea guy"

so, i wrote down 19 ways to come up with startup ideas in the AI age:

1. ask chatgpt: "give me 10 tedious workflows a [job title] does that ai could automate." rinse and niche down.

2. scroll your own chatgpt history. if you're repeating the same prompt weekly, that's a product hiding in plain sight.

3. search: site:reddit. com "is there a tool that" + your niche. you'll find users begging for tools that don't exist. 

4. audit where you copy/paste between tools. that friction is a startup idea. 

5. read ai tool youtube comments. people write what they wish the tool did, that's your roadmap.

6. join industry discords/slack groups. look for "does anyone have a tool for..." complaints. (can set up an automation for that on n8n)

7. use ideabrowser.com to find validated startup ideas from fb groups, subreddits, and google trends. use the ai agents to validate your own ideas (launch pricing ends soon fyi ideabrowser.com) 

8. study your calendar for recurring meetings with repetitive prep work. if you're copying templates each time, that's software.

9. browse fiverr for "i'll use chatgpt to..." services. those manual workflows are apps waiting to be built.

10. talk to local business owners about their daily excel updates. that's an ai agent waiting to be built.

11. browse g2 for top-rated legacy tools without ai. build the ai layer.

12. ask agency owners what clients beg for repeatedly. if it's annoying and repetitive, it's worth turning into software.

13. read comments on popular (70k+ views) youtube tutorial videos. look for friction points and niche applications for software ideas.

14. find multi-step tutorials using 8+ tools. build the one-click version.

15. scan linkedin job titles in growing industries. ask: "what would make this person 10x faster with ai?"

17. look for exploding job titles on linkedin. ask what workflows they're stuck doing manually.

17. find 2-star shopify/wordpress plugins with high usage. low stars + high usage = people care but experience sucks. or clone them with AI, focus on diff geographies and undercut on pricing.

18. join niche facebook groups and look for workflow hacking in comments. build the tool they're manually creating.

19. browse upwork for repeated ai + grunt work gigs. if multiple clients want it manual, it's ripe for productization.

sam altman gets it. your biggest bottle neck is the right ideas (startup ideas/growth ideas).

happy building. im rooting for you.

we're all idea guys/gals now.

For the longest time, my podcast was a mega failure. 

3 years. 200+ episodes. Embarrassing download numbers. I kept telling myself "just one more episode" because I had nothing to lose.

Somewhere around episode 150, recording in my closet, I had this moment: I'm never gonna be the next Tim Ferriss. I can't interview like him. I'm not that smooth.

So I figured out I'd just focus on giving out 100% sauce. Tactics that actually work. Ideas that fire up founders. Zero fluff.

It worked.

I went from 10k subs to 300k subs in 18 months. Today "The Startup Ideas Podcast" gets millions of listens a month.

And most importantly, I'm always getting DMs from founders where they "stole" and idea from the show, or learned something that put them on a completely new life trajectory. How cool is that?!

The closet forced me to focus on the only thing that mattered: whether I was saying something worth hearing.

And because I'm not a content creator (ive got businesses to run!), i didnt prepare much. Just shared what I was learning in real-time.

The constraints made the content better.

I told myself I'll only be able to get out of the closet when I deserve it. When I see comments on yt flowing in. Not just high school friends or fam members.

I eventually upgraded to a home office, but those 200+ episodes in the closet taught me everything. You don't need perfect conditions. 

I just wanted to take a minute to thank you for sticking with me.

You could have spent your time elsewhere.

But you spent it with me.

I'll give you more sauce than you know what to do with.

Teach you everything I'm learning in real-time.

Free.

Thank you.

The most dangerous skillset combo right now: builder (designer or engineer) + filmmaker.

You're a 1 person factory from creation to distribution.

Think about it. Most companies have two massive cost centers: building the product and marketing it. They hire engineers, designers, then pay agencies or marketing teams to create content that sells what they built.

You skip all of that.

You design the app, code it, then film the demo videos that make it go viral. No middlemen. No agency markups. No explaining your vision to someone else who has to translate it.

The speed advantage is insane. While competitors are coordinating between teams, you're shipping.

The cost advantage is obvious. You're not paying $50k/month to agencies.

But the real edge to be honest is the dividends you get from authenticity. When the person who built the product is also telling its story, the message hits different. You understand every detail because you created every detail.

Most founders either build well or market well. The ones who do both become impossible to compete with.

They're vertically integrated humans in a world of fragmented teams.

And when people talk about the $1B solo founder, this is the skillset they'll have.

They won't just code. They won't just create content.

They'll be the person who builds the future and films it happening.

And for startup ideas you can steal, steal them at ideabrowser.com

$100k/month startup idea someone should steal

(more ideas at ideabrowser.com)

ARE YOU LOCKED IN?

LOOK AT THIS BLOCK OF TEXT BECAUSE WITH AI THIS IS THE GREATEST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY TO START A COMPANY.

THE UNIVERSE JUST HANDED YOU THE KEYS TO CREATION. EVERY BARRIER BETWEEN YOUR IMAGINATION AND REALITY JUST DISAPPEARED. THE ONLY THING STANDING BETWEEN YOUR CURRENT LIFE AND YOUR DREAM LIFE IS TIME AND INTENTION. AI DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR BACKGROUND. AI DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR DEGREE. AI DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR CONNECTIONS. AI ONLY CARES ABOUT YOUR VISION AND YOUR WILLINGNESS TO ITERATE. THE PATH IS CLEAR. THE TOOLS ARE READY. THE MOMENT IS NOW. WHAT ARE YOU GOING TO CREATE?

IN 10 YEARS, YOU'LL PROBABLY WISH YOU STARTED TODAY.

THIS IS 1995 AND THE INTERNET JUST LAUNCHED. THIS IS 2007 AND THE IPHONE JUST DROPPED. THIS IS 2008 AND PEOPLE ARE BUILDING APPS IN THEIR BEDROOMS. EXCEPT THIS TIME IT'S AI AND IT'S BIGGER THAN ALL OF THOSE COMBINED. THE EARLY INTERNET CREATED AMAZON AND GOOGLE. MOBILE CREATED UBER AND INSTAGRAM. AI WILL CREATE THE FIRST BILLION-DOLLAR SOLO FOUNDER AND THOUSAND MORE $1M+ FOUNDERS.

THE DATA IS CLEAR. 90% OF PEOPLE WILL WATCH AI REPLACE THEIR JOBS. 9% WILL LEARN TO USE AI TO KEEP THEIR JOBS. 1% WILL USE AI TO CREATE NEW JOBS

I CAN’T WAIT TO SEE WHAT YOU BUILD. 

MY NAME IS GREG ISENBERG AND I’M ROOTING FOR YOU.

THE FUTURE BELONGS TO THOSE THAT LOCK IN RIGHT NOW.

LOCK IN.

(for startup ideas, go to ideabrowser.com)

Today, I officially became a citizen of the USA.

I’ve lived in other countries. Built companies in other ecosystems.

But there’s still nothing like America.

The optimism. The permission to reinvent yourself. The way people bet on ideas before they make sense.

Nowadays, you can build from anywhere, but America still feels like the home court for builders.

Just a feeling I have. 

Where ambition isn’t seen as ego.
Where people want you to win.
Where capital, talent, and story all collide.

This country was built by people who thought they could do better.

That energy is still here.

Still infectious.

Grateful to officially be part of it.

Startup idea someone should steal (via ideabrowser.com)

The complete playbook for building profitable companies in the AI age (35 steps):

1. Go heads down 
2. Find an underserved niche + trend backed by data (start small)
3. Learn their painpoints/what content drives them
4. Come up with an idea (or steal one from ideabrowser.com)
5. Build an audience/community (pick 1 platform)
6. Use Manus/v0/Bolt/Lovable/Cursor to build v1
7. DM your audience, offer a discounted version
8. Reinvest that cash to fund product/content flywheel
9. Keep team small (AI is your co-founder)
10. Automate ~90%+ with agents/zaps etc
11. Reinvest profits into content + core features
12. Partner with creators in exchange for equity (1–20%) or rev share (20–50%)
13. Keep surfacing new ideas from users + trends (use agent feature on pro on ideabrowser.com)
14. Build public-facing tools to drive top-of-funnel
15. Add modular pricing: free → $29 → $299 → $3K
16. Turn manual services into productized features
17. Build in public to attract users, partners, and acquirers
18. Bundle into an ecosystem, not just a single feature
19. Own the loop: audience → product → content → more audience
20. Run sprints on retention (fix that leaky bucket)
21. Backfill with AI agents before hiring ops roles
22. Test new channels with throwaway brands
23. Monetize the backend, sell data, leads, APIs if applicable
24. Have fun
25. Repeat. Build a portfolio
26. Share hires, tools, and infrastructure across products
27. Acquire underperforming products with distribution upside
28. Relaunch or bundle existing apps using your playbook
29. Create a holding company brand people want to follow (this is exactly what im doing, practicing what im preaching)
30. Build long-term wealth with no outside investors  and infinite spins
31. Cross-promote wins across your product ecosystem to drive flywheel growth
32. Create an internal idea-to-launch pipeline (every 30 days, something ships)
33. License or clone successful products into new verticals or geos
34. Recruit niche operators to run individual products for cash + upside/profitshare
35. Build once, compound forever... audience, code, and trust all stack

This is the greatest time to be an idea person.

Happy building.

My friend PJ Ace cracked 100M+ AI video views using a weird twist Google VEO3 + ChatGPT + Capcut + Final Cut Pro. I summarized his playbook in under 1 minute (copy this workflow):

EVERYONE SHOULD START A BUSINESS

1. because AI agents make it possible to move like a team of ten 
2. because you can start one while you still have a job (and probably should)  
3. because it rewires your brain
4. because $100 and an audience gets you further today than $1M did in 2010.
5. because AI just created the biggest entrpreneurial opportunity window of human history
6. because it forces you to get good at storytelling
7. because it gives you an absurd amount of leverage in the job market 
8. because you get to help people 
9. because you can test demand before writing a single line of code.
10. because you can automate the boring parts and focus on the fun
11. because you can test ideas in 48 hours, not 48 weeks
12. because your ideas deserve more than a Google Doc
13. because making money in your sleep never gets old
14. because you get to stand on the shoulders of giants building on their tech (openai, shopify, cloudflare etc)
15. because it's 2025 and you can even get free startup ideas backed by trends on ideabrowser.com
16. because it's a rollercoaster of emotions and you'll learn a ton about yourself  
17. because maybe you can't stop thinking about an idea and it's driving you mad 
18. Because life is short and it's fun

I'm launching a new startup called ideabrowser.com. It using AI agents (and humans) to give you startup ideas you can steal.

why we started it:

You don't need venture capital.
You need a better idea.
You don't need a 10-person team. You don't need a pitch deck. You don't even need to know how to code.
You need insight. You need signal. You need a better starting point.

Most people don't fail because they didn't try hard enough. They fail because they built the wrong thing.

The idea was too broad. The market was too small. The timing was off. Or they started with inspiration instead of insight.

Today, everyone has access to the same tools. What separates builders now isn't speed, it's clarity. Not "can you build?" but "should you build this?"

That's why we created Ideabrowser.com.

We were tired of guessing. Tired of wandering into crowded spaces. Tired of reading trend reports with no idea what to do with them.

So we built the tool we wish existed.

Ideabrowser combines signal + execution. It finds real trends, emerging behavior, growing demand, early indicators, and pairs them with startup ideas you can actually act on.

Not just vague inspiration. Concrete ideas. Clear use cases. Suggested tools. Proven tactics.

Ideas that make you want to get to work right now.

Because we believe insight is the ultimate leverage. It saves you time. It reduces risk. It makes the hard part feel obvious.

We believe most builders are just one well-timed idea away from something that changes their life. We believe "just ship" is only useful if you're building the right thing. We believe tactics matter just as much as vision. We believe the best companies don't start with decks. They start with insight and momentum.

The old way was: wander until something clicks.

The new way is: know what works, and go faster.

You don't need to wait for lightning to strike. You don't need another newsletter. You don't need permission.

You just need a better idea, and a plan to act on it.

History remembers the builders who saw what others couldn't see.

The ones who started with clarity when everyone else was confused.

The ones who had conviction when others had only opinions.

The greatest advantage in business isn't capital, connections, or luck.

It's starting at the right place, at the right time, with the right insight.

THE BIGGEST HACK TO FINDING STARTUP IDEAS USING AI AND AI AGENTS IS HERE

Tremont

Co-Founder & Operating Partner

Growth Unhinged

Every week, I take a closer look at the playbooks behind the fastest growing startups. Growth Unhinged reaches 75,000+ subscribers.

Writer

OpenView

Operating Partner

VP, Growth

Director, Market Strategy

Highspot

Board Observer

Simon-Kucher & Partners

Led strategy consulting teams working with top tech companies (pre- and post-IPO).

Director

Manager

Consultant

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

Analyzed how and why regional, state, and local governments have pursued climate change adaptation in the absence of federal resources. Published findings in peer-reviewed journal.

Ernest F. Hollings Scholar

Webmaster tools provide you with a free and easy way to make your site more Google-friendly.

Amazon CloudFront is a web service for content delivery. It integrates with other Amazon Web Services to give developers and businesses an easy way to distribute content to end users with low latency, high data transfer speeds, and no commitments.

The website mentions linkedin.com in some form.

Google Analytics 4 formerly known as App + Web is a new version of Google Analytics that was released in October 2020.

This page contains links that give the impression that some of the site contents are stored on a content delivery network.

Google's primary tag for Google Measurement/Conversion Tracking, Adwords and DoubleClick.

Google Analytics offers a host of compelling features and benefits for everyone from senior executives and advertising and marketing professionals to site owners and content developers.

JQuery is a fast, concise, JavaScript Library that simplifies how you traverse HTML documents, handle events, perform animations, and add Ajax interactions to your web pages. jQuery is designed to change the way that you write JavaScript.

Content owned by this site hosted on the Cloudflare CDN.

Automatically optimizes the delivery of your web pages so your visitors get the fastest page load times and best performance.

Execute code seamlessly without server management, workload scaling, event integration, or runtime maintenance.

Underscore is a utility-belt library for JavaScript that provides functional programming support.

Webflow is a website builder for designing custom, professional websites without code.

DoubleClick enables agencies, marketers and publishers to work together successfully and profit from their digital marketing investments. Owned by Google and now referred to as DoubleClick Digital Marketing or Google  Enterprise Advertising.

The US Privacy API (USP API) is a lightweight API used to communicate signals represented in the US Privacy String.

Messaging app for teams that makes working together simple and efficient.

Amazon S3 is storage for the Internet. It is designed to make web-scale computing easier for developers.

The website mentions facebook.com in some form.

The website mentions Instagram in some form.

A free CDN where Javascript developers can host their files. Encompasses MaxCDN, and BootstrapCDN.

Share this page on Facebook using a deprecated sharing syntax.

Amazon Simple Storage provides unlimited storage to developers and online businesses - saving costs and increase storage reliability.

Graduated Magna Cum Laude and with departmental honors in Environmental Studies. 

Awarded top departmental prize for my Senior Thesis, where I quantitatively evaluated the future social costs of extreme weather (hurricanes and heat waves) on Rhode Island and the economic efficiency of policies to mitigate those impacts.

Co-authored report and amendment to S. 2439 Rhode Island Climate Risk and Reduction Act, the first state legislation on urban adaptation; testified at RI Senate hearings.

Brown University

I've never seen a pricing page like this & I'm a little obsessed 😍 

monday.com includes quick 60 second videos explaining exactly why to buy its Standard & Pro plans. And I'm loving it so much more than the static pricing page!

Your product team probably built a detailed matrix on what features go in what tier so they could build out all the right feature permissions and settings.

Did that feature matrix get dumped on your pricing page as-is, leading to confusion and eye-rolls across your target buyers? Be honest.

Don’t dump that on the pricing page. Tell a story about what the customer can do with the feature.

And perhaps take a page from monday.com's playbook.

—

🎁 For more insights on SaaS growth & pricing, join 75k+ who read Growth Unhinged — my free weekly newsletter: https://lnkd.in/exTbjKaM

Adam Robinson has bootstrapped RB2B to $5.5M+ ARR w/ only 3 people (🤯). He just ran a wild experiment to replace RB2B's sales-assist team with a $99 per month AI avatar. Here's what happened next.

First off, very few are suggesting AI as a replacement for salespeople. Remember, for example, how Salesforce said they’re actually hiring 2,000 more salespeople to sell AI?

Well, Adam is an outlier. He's bootstrapped RB2B to date & is on a mission to hit $10M ARR as profitably as humanly possible.

RB2B's sales-assist team was supposed to help customers who weren't ready to buy via self-serve. But there was no convincing data that sales-assist was actually incremental. So Adam wanted to see if AI could do the job instead.

Four weeks into replacing a human sales-assist rep with the AI avatar, RB2B’s metrics look… almost identical. And the AI avatar had 1,683 (!) conversations in its first 22 days including:
 - 304 demo requests
 - 98 SOC2 docs
 - 16 custom pricing quotes

About 10% of the conversations captured an email. 70% of folks who talked to the avatar said the experience was positive. Almost none of the answers were flat-out wrong.

You'll want to read the full story in today's Growth Unhinged newsletter: https://lnkd.in/epFMtymA

I’m not sure AI is ready to be a replacement for sales. But it can help augment the sales motion, filling the gaps left behind between fully self-service versus fully sales-managed. 

#ai #genai #sales

I've studied data on 4,000+ software companies over the past 8 years. Forget LTV:CAC, look at this instead 👀 

Gross margin-adjusted CAC payback period & net dollar retention (NDR) are usually looked at separately. If you bring the two metrics together, they're the strongest predictors of *long term* & *profitable* growth:

1️⃣ High NDR (100%+), low CAC payback period (<18 months)

 -- Median growth rates are 65% YoY
 -- Median Rule of 40 is 45%

2️⃣ High NDR (100%+), high CAC payback period (18+ months)

 -- Median growth rates are 35% YoY
 -- Median Rule of 40 is 5%

^Enterprise-focused products often fall into this category

3️⃣ Low NDR (<100%), low CAC payback period (<18 months)

 -- Median growth rates are 25% YoY
 -- Median Rule of 40 is 35%

^PLG businesses often fall into this category

4️⃣ Low NDR (<100%), high CAC payback period (18+ months)

 -- Median growth rates are 20% YoY
 -- Median Rule of 40 is 0%

---

This data comes from the annual SaaS benchmarks survey w/ my friends at High Alpha. Please help us recreate it for 2025: https://lnkd.in/ga9H2NZ2

PS: There's limited time left and we're on track for a record breaking amount of data 🤞🙏 

#saas #benchmarks #growth

I've been working in B2B monetization for 15 years now. Honestly, startup pricing used to be something you could punt on for later. Now you can’t afford to get it wrong.

The old playbook was simple: Undercharge ➡️ learn who gets the most value ➡️ build for them ➡️ raise prices ➡️ repeat.

But AI breaks this model in all kinds of uncomfortable ways:

1. AI products hit real revenue milestones fast.

No more “we’ll figure out pricing later.” If your launch demo goes viral, your pricing is live and locked -- whether it makes sense or not.

2. AI infra costs are real, and negative gross margins are very real

When a SaaS company under-charges, the customer might have a 50% gross margin instead of 80%+. When an AI company under-charges, the best customers can become wildly unprofitable.

3. You can’t afford to leave legacy customers alone

Startups usually raised prices on *new customers*, but left their existing ones alone. And for new customers a pricing change can feel like a non-event.

But when you’re sitting on a pile of unprofitable revenue, you have to reset pricing across the board. And that’s where the backlash kicks in (see: Cursor).

---

So here’s my (unsolicited) pricing advice for AI startup founders:

 - Study pricing & be aware of the options in front of you. There are more flavors of AI pricing than you might realize.
 - Be aware that the big players haven't necessarily figured pricing out themselves (see: SFDC, OpenAI adjusting pricing).
 - Avoid flat-fees & unlimited use plans for AI products unless you're sure you have the GMs to support them.
 - Keep contracts to 1 year or less. Optionality is your friend.
 - Ask potential customers about value & willingness-to-pay early on even before you start building.
 - Set up tech/processes to allow yourself to adjust pricing w/o it becoming a multi-month slog.
 - Measure pricing-related KPIs (ex: GM by customer, plan mix, gross & net retention by plan) *now* so you can identify pricing issues before they become a massive headache.
 - Track the outcomes your customer sees from your product & how much that's worth to them in $$, not just how much they use it. (This could be survey or interview-based, too.)

Pricing isn’t a future-me problem anymore. Get it right, or it’ll break when you start to scale.

#ai #pricing #monetization

I expected GTM teams to embrace a bunch of specialized AI tools for different jobs. What I didn’t expect was this much consolidation around a single winner: ChatGPT.

It's the #1 tool people are obsessed with and the #2 most essential in their stack (just behind HubSpot) via a new survey from Emily Kramer.

That made me wonder: what exactly are GTM teams doing with ChatGPT that makes it so indispensable?

I asked readers of Growth Unhinged to share their favorite ChatGPT use cases. Here are the top 12, categorized by function & complexity.

Get the prompts & step-by-step workflows here (no need to comment!): https://lnkd.in/eipiemhC

1. Persona research to fill knowledge gaps (via Francesca Krihely-Price)
Complexity: Beginner

2. New AI product positioning to create a differentiated narrative (via Jarod Greene)
Complexity: Intermediate

3. Product messaging grader/audit and re-write for a CISO audience (via Nathan Burke)
Complexity: Advanced

4. Producing detailed outlines from primary source material (via Gail Axelrod)
Complexity: Beginner

5. Localizing content into multiple languages w/o an agency (via Thibaut Davoult)
Complexity: Intermediate

6. Programmatic landing pages based on community feedback (via Jesus Requena)
Complexity: Advanced

7. Paid spend analysis correlating the impact to organic/direct sign-ups when paid search spend is on (via Andrea Kayal)
Complexity: Beginner

8. Employee social posts w/ custom voice profiles (via Ryan McCready)
Complexity: Intermediate

9. Prioritizing growth experiments from PostHog and Mixpanel data (via Sibi M.)
Complexity: Advanced

10. Personalizing events including selecting seat assignments & topics for intimate dinners (via Andrea Kayal)
Complexity: Beginner

11. Prep for initial sales calls combing through websites, press releases, content, and LinkedIn profiles (via Laura MacGregor)
Complexity: Intermediate 

12. Use Gong sales call recordings to define patterns for the R&D team (via Elena Luneva)
Complexity: Advanced

Hope this inspires how you can get more from your fave GTM tool. And if you have any other 🔥 workflows, drop 'em in the comments!

#chatgpt #ai #genai

Steal this upgrade email from Calendly. It's so simple, but so good 🔥 

Why I'm digging it:

1. The advantages of upgrading couldn't be more clear

With most products, I don't *really* know the difference between free & paid. Calendly makes it black-and-white. (This would also be very easy to fwd to a manager or anyone who asks "can't you just use the free plan?")

2. They've done the work of recommending a plan

I'm not choosing between 18 permutations of packages and add-ons. "Based on your scheduling needs, the Standard plan seems like a perfect match for you." 🤌

3. They play on loss aversion

Calendly has a reverse trial where new users start with a free 14-day trial, then downgrade to a free forever plan. This gives folks a chance to try things like multiple event types or automated workflows. 

Behavioral psych finds that people value things they own *a lot more* than things they don't.

--

I'm surprised I don't see more upgrade emails like this. Of course, now I probably will...

I’m amazed by the level of creativity that’s going into identifying target accounts these days. 

You used to be lucky if you could find a list of companies in a specific industry with a certain number of employees. At one point not long ago I had an offshore research team dedicated to finding the right accounts!

Now the parameters available are truly endless. Some examples I've been digging lately:

 - Scraping job posts to target companies w/ specific initiatives
 - Scraping job posts to target companies w/ specific tech/software
 - Scraping SEC filings before PR announcements
 - Finding companies w/ a "get started" button on their website
 - Finding companies w/ a public security page
 - Finding ICP accounts where 2+ users from the same domain have viewed marketing assets (docs, webinars, etc.) in the last 30 days
 - Finding companies w/ an unusually high ratio of [x] function as a % of total employees
 - Finding the next employers of past champions & any hire on their team
 - Using AI to find 'look-a-likes' of the best existing customers
 - Using AI to find all competitors of the best existing customers

What this means for B2B teams:

1. You can't have a static account list anymore. If you're targeting the same accounts in July as you did in January, may I suggest a refresh?

2. Back-test hypotheses based on real data around CW & CL accounts. Ideally pull in data points on deal size and expansion/churn, too. (I like measuring the expected ARR per 100 opps).

3. Manually review the top ICP accounts w/ sales & CS to ensure buy-in.

4. The account/domain isn't enough. Part of identifying your ICP means knowing the exact right *people* & where they are in the buying journey.

5. Don't trust a black box. This is too important to not have an owner internally.

And, most importantly, have some fun w/ this. The opportunity for creativity is incredible (never thought I'd say that!).

#icp #marketing #gtm

Yesterday, ChatGPT hit 2.5 BILLION (🤯) prompts per day, up from 1 billion in December. It's quickly approaching Google's 14 billion daily searches. Getting recommended by AI engines is no longer just a weekend side project (*guilty*).

Josh Blyskal from Profound analyzed data from 100,000 prompts to figure out how these AI engines actually work. Here are nine practical takeaways that you could start applying now to improve your AI search visibility:

(Don't miss the full deep dive in today's Growth Unhinged newsletter: https://lnkd.in/e2GdwgNN)

1. Decide which prompts you want to own.

2. Be aware that answer engines behave differently. ChatGPT & Perplexity share only 11% of domain citations. 

3. Write specialized, specific content. 

4. Create surround sound around your product. The best starting points are UGC & social media sites like Reddit, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Quora.

5. Get mentioned on Reddit. It's the single most-cited domain in ChatGPT & Perplexity. 

6. Use structured comparisons and lists. Remember that ChatGPT loves to "borrow" entire answers in chunks rather than do the thinking itself.

7. Make fewer images and more tables. AI engines can't see images well.

8. Measure your influence, not just clicks. The vast majority of AI search is zero-click (but it can still be highly influential.)

9. Stay on top of citation drift. Half of domains cited change in a given month.

Hope you find this useful! If you have other learnings, drop 'em in the comments 🙏

#ai #aeo #chatgpt #marketing

Some of the most fascinating AI outcome-based pricing examples so far:

1. Intercom (per successful resolution)
2. EvenUp (per demand package or medical chronology)
3. CaseMark (per legal deliverable)
4. Chargeflow (25% per recovered chargeback)
5. Sierra (per completed task)
6. Zendesk (per automated resolution)
7. Decagon (option of per resolution or per conversation)
8. Crescendo (pay per resolution)
9. Maven AGI (only pay for resolutions)
10. Flycode (only pay for revenue recovered above baseline)
11. Redux Payments (only pay for revenue they add)
12. AirHelp (35% success fee)
13. SmarterDx (only gets paid when hospitals make $$ incrementally)

The interest in outcome-based pricing models is unlike anything I’ve seen. 

Look, I love outcome-based pricing -- in theory. It feels like the ultimate win-win. Will we get there? There's a (big) elephant in the room, which I’m calling the CAMP framework. 

To pull off outcome-based pricing, you need four things:
- Consistency of outcomes across customer types
- Attribution for those outcomes
- Measurability, ideally in real-time
- Predictability of outcomes

Without CAMP, outcome-based pricing is just hype. I'll be following along to see how the first-movers navigate this 👀

#genai #aimonetization #pricing

There’s a bigger & bigger gap between early-stage SaaS and everyone else.

SaaS companies used to get way more efficient as they scaled with a $50M+ ARR company typically making 2-3x the ARR per FTE of a $1-5M ARR startup. This was part of the magic of SaaS! 

But it’s no longer consistent with what’s happening.

More mature SaaS companies are facing dual crises of team bloat paired with decelerating growth:

 - $5-20M ARR: Median ARR per employee was down slightly (-9% year-on-year)
 - $20-50M ARR: It dipped even further (-17% year-on-year) 
 - >$50M ARR: It fell materially (-34% year-on-year)

(Public SaaS companies are facing a worrying level of inefficiency, too.)

The bright spot: early-stage startups have gone in the opposite direction. 

They’re much smaller than in previous years and seeing far higher ARR per employee. Growth rates have actually increased year-on-year despite (because of?) the small team sizes. 

There used to be a time when a big team = a big moat. Not anymore. Small, AI native startups are shipping releases at a blistering pace, riding the wave of improving LLMs, automating processes from day one, and finding first-mover advantages as new opportunities arise. 

The real question: will legacy SaaS companies be able to maintain the pace?

See the full deep dive in today’s Growth Unhinged here: https://lnkd.in/eWXKb3WP 

#ai #saas #benchmarks

The recent interest in hybrid, usage-based and outcome-based pricing is on 🔥. Here's the thing: successfully going usage-based is way more than a pricing change. It's a hard pivot, and you might not be ready for it.

What to look out for:

1. Pure usage-based or pay-as-you-go pricing really isn't for every product. 

The challenge is finding a metric that buyers accept (the feeling of predictability is key) & that makes more $$. Look for metrics that grow quickly within an account, aren't susceptible to huge swings, and that are *outputs* of getting value rather than *inputs*.

Or consider a workaround like putting a usage limit on a subscription plan or adding a fair usage policy to protect against heavy users.

2. In a usage-based business, there's no room for shelfware.

The hard work *starts* at contract close. Everyday the customer is making a purchase decision about whether to adopt your product. This means everyone plays a role in customer success.

3. Sales incentives need to evolve to embrace land-and-expand.

It's better to close deals quickly, then let usage grow over time. Commission structures can't over-index on the initial commitment. 

4. Overage isn't a bad thing to penalize. 

Your customer grew their business and wants to consume more of your product. That's fantastic, celebrate it!

5. There are ways to make usage models more palatable to the enterprise. 

This usually means getting into the weeds with contract structures like:
 - Annual draw-down: Customers flexibly draw down their usage over 12 months like a gift card. If they use the product faster than expected, they have time to plan & budget before renewal.
 - Roll-over: Give customers the option of rolling over unused usage credits *if the next commit is larger than the last*. This helps reduce hoarding.
 - Grace periods: After the grace period, customers can either re-up their contract at a higher commit or pay for the one-time flex spend. 

6. Usage-based revenue isn't necessarily ARR. 

But that doesn't necessarily mean it's de-valued by investors. Folks want to see that usage revenue *acts* like ARR -- that it's highly re-occurring, grows over time in the average account, isn't project-based, and has high gross margin.

7. Forecasting your business is about to get way more complicated.

It becomes a data science exercise more than a pipeline exercise. Finance teams are building models looking at individual customers & cohorts, factoring in criteria like the use case, ramp time, commitment, etc. What could go wrong 🙃 

---

Adopting usage-based models isn't easy. But there aren't many better alternatives for AI, automation, API and FinTech products.