One Startup Idea, One Trend, One News Debate and One Framework

New format, same value. I cover one startup idea, one trend, one news debate, one growth framework, one AI tool, and one product recommendation. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 00:53 – Startup Idea 05:55 – Trend 08:17 – News Item 12:05 – Product Framework 15:31 – AI Tool 17:00 – Product Recommendation Startup Idea Solo Female Travel Safety Platform The problem: 84% of solo female travelers feel unsafe. No reliable platform answers basic safety questions. The solution: Map-based reviews where verified female travelers rate neighborhoods, hotels, and restaurants on actual safety metrics. Path to $500K ARR: 5,000 members at $30/month Hotel safety certifications at $500/month Lead magnet: Free travel safety quiz Distribution: Facebook groups (400K members), travel influencers, short-form video Trend: Gamification UI: Duolingo did it. Social platforms are built on it. More apps and websites are adding points, badges, leaderboards, and challenges. The opportunity: Launch an agency specializing exclusively in gamification. Start at $10K/month. News Item Ex-Reddit CEO: "AI Startups Have 12-18 Months" Yishan's viral take (20M views): AI apps are flash-in-the-pan cash grabs. Foundational models will crush them. Greg's counter: Great AI wrappers that own workflows, customers, and network effects will build billion-dollar companies. Remember when everyone said Apple would clone every successful app? That didn't happen. Product Framework: 3-Step Creator Growth Playbook for SaaS Attach the right creator (target 120K followers or less for higher response rates) Offer generous affiliates (30-50% lifetime, not 10-20%) Gamify the experience (contests, trips, prizes for top performers) Real example: Goji (apple cider vinegar gummy) hit hundreds of millions using gamified TikTok Shop affiliates. AI Tools: Krea AI: Alternative to Glyph AI. Generate images, video, 3D objects. Features Nodes product for building creative workflows. Mini apps: Virtual try-on, hairstyle generator, object remover, product photo editor. Product Recommendations: La Colombe Cold Brew (Light Roast) - $5-8.49 at Target for multiple servings. Light, smooth, always cold when you need it. Olipop Classic Root Beer - 35 cal, 3g sugar. Better than Diet Coke. 8.5/10. The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/ Boringmarketing - Vibe Marketing for Companies: boringmarketing.com The Vibe Marketer - Join the Community and Learn: thevibemarketer.com Startup Empire - get your free builders toolkit to build cashflowing business - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire-toolkit Become a member - https://startup-ideas-pod.link/startup-empire FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  Today's episode is gonna be completely different. So today, we're gonna go through a startup idea that I think is super overlooked. I think it's a great 10K MRR plus startup idea. We're gonna go through one trend that I think is a banging trend that is overlooked. We're gonna go through one news item that I think you should be paying attention to and all the opportunities around it. I'm gonna give you one product framework. I'm gonna tell you one AI product that I'm playing with. And then I'm gonna end with one random product that I've been consuming in my life that might be of value to you, or hey, maybe it'll get your creative juices blowing. This is a new type of episode that I think, I hope, people will like. Let me know in the comment section, like on YouTube as well if you enjoy this.

• 0:53Greg Isenberg?

  So let's get started for the startup idea that someone should really steal. So I saw this idea on idea browser.com. So it's a review website for women to travel safely. So the basic idea is that, you know, women are traveling solo and some of them have anxiety. So actually, 84% of solo female travelers are feeling unsafe during their trips, yet they have no reliable way to get basic safety answers. So if they're planning a weekend in Mexico City, they have to like scroll old, you know, year-long, month-long Reddit thread saying, is this neighborhood safe at night?

• 1:37Greg Isenberg?

  And getting replies from who knows, male backpackers who have no idea what these people face. The thing here is that you have platforms like TripAdvisor that don't capture this harassment frequency. So this is actually a really serious issue. I've been inspired by what Peter Levels has done with Nomad's, NomadList.com and HoodMaps.com. So if you pull up HoodMaps, you know, I live in Miami and you can just see, you know, artificially gentrified area here.

• 2:09Greg Isenberg?

  You know, ratchet South Beach over here. So it gives you these sort of reviews of, of the website and it's gotten, it's gone viral many times. So going back to the idea here is you can build something simple like that. A map-based platform where verified female travelers rate neighborhoods, hotels and restaurants on safety metrics that matter. Green zones for Walk Alone at Midnight, Felt Safe. You get the idea. So that's the concept. I haven't found anything like it. And you see that solo here in the data, that solo female travel is increasing over time. Definitely something I like to see when I'm building a startup idea. I want to see that trend growing up, going up, right? So you can capture some of that search data. Okay, great. This is a good startup idea.

• 2:54Greg Isenberg?

  You agree, I agree. But how do you actually get people into this product if you're going to create it? Let's talk about it. So you can target Facebook groups. There's actually one called Solo Female Travel that has 400,000 members. And then you can do, you know, posts showing side-by-side safety comparisons. You can partner with female travel influencers. You can obviously run meta ads, Instagram, short-form video with women searching solo travel safety, that sort of thing. So I think that there's a huge short-form video opportunity as well. And just creating these like short-form videos that, you know,

• 3:34Greg Isenberg?

  talk about people's experiences, incentivizing these travel influencers who are looking to make money. A lot of these travel influencers, you know, if you offer them $100, $500, a few hundred dollars here, you know, they, they, they'll, they'll take it. So I think that there's an opportunity to launch with 5,000 paying members across 20 destinations and that gets you, you know, $500,000 ARR. But even if you, you know, it's 50,000, you know.

• 4:05Greg Isenberg?

  You can see how this thing could scale. And you can imagine a world where this scales to 100,000 members and hotels pay $500 a month for a safety certification. So I think this is a big idea. Let's talk about the offer real quick. I think you lead with a lead magnet. That's like a travel safety self-assessment quiz. So you can do an interactive quiz. You can vibe code this pretty easily. You do a front-end offer where it's a premium, premium travel, community access. And then you do, you know, a verified safety guide subscription. Maybe it's $30 a month for the detailed stuff. So I think this is a pretty good idea. You know, I think that the price point, you know, may need to change. Is it too cheap? Is it too expensive?

• 4:50Greg Isenberg?

  But I like this idea. If you go to the value ladder on Idea Browser, I always do this. Because, you know, the value ladder, for those who don't know, you know, it's this framework that helps you structure your offers in the ascending levels of value and price. So you start with something irresistible and low barrier. And then you build trust at each step. So you can see that, like, the reason why you do a travel safety self-assessment quiz is it's free, right? So if you're gonna go and build a lot of attention on short form with these influencers, you convert them into the quiz, you get their email, you can nurture them and sell them later. And the things that you're gonna sell them are here. You can see the community access, the verified guide subscription,

• 5:35Greg Isenberg?

  the safety tips and alert service, and then eventually the safety certification for travel business. I could see a business like this selling, you know, 5, 4, 6, 7, 8 X ARR. So beautiful business. I think that, you know, at the, at the very least, if you get some level of product market fit, 10K a month. All right, that's a startup idea. Let's talk about the one, that's the one startup idea. Let's talk about the one trend. So this trend is gamification and it's happening on websites. It's also happening on apps. And you can see that, you know, okay, well, first of all, what is gamification? It's this idea that, you know, you, you put points and badges and leaderboard and challenges

• 6:20Greg Isenberg?

  to encourage user participate, participate, participation. Whoa, that was hard. Comment for participation and loyalty. And you're seeing like companies like Duolingo absolutely crush it by using this strategy. But even if you think of social media in itself, it is game, it is a game. So I anticipate more and more gamification to, to, to sort of this UI trend to get more and more popular. My friend Yoni has an app called the Brain Rot App, which is also sort of this, you know, gamification UI. The more you scroll on like X and Instagram, the more your brain rots and you see it in

• 7:05Greg Isenberg?

  real time. And I'm seeing this UI just, you know, being more and more prevalent, right? It's the good brand name. It's the mascot. It's the gamification and it's the, you know, core killer use case that people really are looking for. So in this case, you know, focusing focus mode. So I'll give you all a quick, you know, startup idea that I think someone should take. Again, I think it's at least a 10K MRR idea is who is building the agency that just focuses on gamification for apps and websites.

• 7:45Greg Isenberg?

  So use that trend and then just be like, we help you take your existing company and make it more gamified.

• 7:54Greg Isenberg?

  We do a bit of that at our company, LCA, which is our design firm for the AI age. And it's a very, very popular product. Like, we'll come in and actually like help companies go and figure this out. We work with the biggest companies on the planet. But I think that someone could, if they just focus on gamification, became the gamification person, that's a huge idea. And I think it starts at 10K a month. That's the trend. Let's talk about a news item. So this went viral, 20 million views, and I'm going to read it to you all. It was said by the ex-CEO of Reddit. He says, "My AI investment thesis is that every AI application startup is likely to

• 8:38Greg Isenberg?

  be crushed by rapid expansion of the foundation model providers. App functionality will be added to the foundation model's offerings because the big players aren't slow incumbents. It is wrong to apply the analogy of fast startups, slow incumbent here. They are just big. Far more so than any other prior new technology, there is a massive and fast-moving wave that obsoles every new app as fast as it can be invented. There is almost no time to build a company and scale it. There are two ways AI application startups can make money. Number one, make a flash-in-the-pan app that generates a ton of cash and bank the cash. My estimate is you have 12 to 18 months cash flow generation. Number two, make a good enough app that you get acquired by one of the big players for

• 9:23Greg Isenberg?

  sufficient equity. The situation is highly unstable. We don't know if it's going to crash or go to the moon, but both scenarios make it very difficult that any AI application will independently become a generational super company. The best odds are finding an application niche in a highly specialized field with extremely unique and specific data barriers, ideally ones related to real atoms, hardware, or world-related data, and not software finance." Okay, Yishan. I disagree with you here. I understand why you're saying this. I understand that you you'd come to this logical conclusion. But I think, well, actually, I was having a chat

• 10:08Greg Isenberg?

  with a very, very well-known AI founder this morning, super, super well-known. And he was saying that, you know, he was chatting with an executive of someone, you know, at OpenAI, and even OpenAI don't know exactly how how things are going to play out. So I think that, yes, it might be the case that OpenAI owns everything, or all these foundational own everything. But I think that you're discounting the opportunity that there is to actually create these, as you call it, flash-in-the-pan apps, to actually get data, to actually own

• 10:48Greg Isenberg?

  the workflow, to actually create network effects. And I think that those companies, provided that they actually own the workflow, own the customer, have network effects, are going to be extremely valuable in the future. I think that it's easy to say that these are GPT wrappers, and you've got 12 months to cash in, and it's going to be over when they figure it out. But think about Apple, right? Like, you know, people used to say when the App Store came out that, oh, Apple is just gonna like, find, you know, pick the the most popular apps and just clone you, and and that'll be the end. Of course, that didn't happen, right? There's still, there's, of course, you know, Apple has a

• 11:30Greg Isenberg?

  lot of successful apps, the Messages app, etc. But, you know, there's tons of apps that have gone and created billions, if not trillions of dollars of value. And that's my take on this. Don't know if you agree or disagree, but I think that there's, of course, going to be a bunch of startups that get hit by OpenAI and the foundational models in 12 to 18 months. But I think that, you know, the great AI wrappers are going to build valuable companies. We'll see what happens.

• 12:06Greg Isenberg?

  The one framework I'm going to talk about today is how to grow a product, especially a SaaS. It's a three-step framework to help you get your creative juices flowing. The first is, you're going to want to attach the right creator. Now, how do you figure out what is the right creator for your product, for your SaaS? You know, obviously, it's ideal if you have the biggest creator, but oftentimes, we don't have those connections, right? You might not know those people. So if I were you, what I would do is I'd make a list of everyone who's an ideal creator for your product and make it 100 people. And the top 10 might have a million-plus people. They might have followers. They might have 500,000, 700,000, a million, 1.2.

• 12:49Greg Isenberg?

  So you reach out to them, like, shoot your shot. That being said, I think where you're probably going to have the most success is in your smaller creators. So we're talking people with 120,000 followers across platforms and less. I would reach out to them. You can use agents to reach out to them. I've shown how you could, in the past, use Lindy AI and products like that to do that. Or you can just reach out the good old-fashioned way, DM them. I find actually doing like a selfie video, like a real selfie video. "Hey, my name is Greg. I'm the co-founder of ideabrowser.com. I think that you'd love this product for these reasons." Don't like pitch them from day one.

• 13:34Greg Isenberg?

  Like, you have to get to know them, build the friendship, and then from there, you can, you know, hopefully get them onto the, you know, involved in the product. So step one is, you've got to attach the right creator that's going to be involved. You know, you're going to want to do some friendship building, get to know them, let them know that you're looking for, you know, people to promote with. You have money, you have upside. Step two is, you want to generate, attach a generous affiliate percentage. I'm not talking about 10%, 20%. I'm talking about 30% to 50%, especially in the initial days. Give it to them lifetime. Like, you want to get these people on board. You could think about ways to give them upside in terms of equity if you want,

• 14:17Greg Isenberg?

  but I would start with just an affiliate percentage. Sometimes, you might have to give them some level of cash to get them excited initially, but you want to get them involved as an affiliate, basically. And then the third step is, and a lot of people miss this step, is... You want to gamify the experience. You want to kind of have, you know, the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami. I heard a story recently that there's like a, I think it was like a supplement company called Goji. That's what it was, an apple cider vinegar gummy. And they had some of the best affiliate programs on TikTok shop ever.

• 14:59Greg Isenberg?

  Just that's how they grew to, I think, like, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars enterprise value. And they just gamified their affiliates. So they would say, you know, the best affiliate gets a trip to Miami and will buy you a BMW. Literally, and they made it, they made it, you know, the numbers make sense for them. So you need to have the numbers make sense for you. But this hopefully got your creative juices flowing. The framework is how to grow a product, especially SaaS. And it's something I use pretty often. So one AI product that I want to play with and I hear great things about. And I just did a review on Glyph AI.

• 15:43Greg Isenberg?

  And someone was like, but have you tried Creo AI? So Creo AI is kind of like Glyph AI, which is it helps you get the most out of creative AI tools that exist on the internet and uses agents to do that. So you can generate images with it, video on it, real time video on it, motion transfer, 3D objects. And I haven't played with it. And this is, you know, that's why I'm bringing it up. This is like on my to do list to play with it. But it's cool that it has like these mini apps, right? Like clothes changer, upload selfies and try on different outfits with our free AI virtual try on tool. They've got a Nano Banana Image Editor. They've got product photos.

• 16:26Greg Isenberg?

  So they've got all these apps, T-shirt generator, AI hairstyle stuff, object remover, change lighting. And I think what's really cool, I don't have access to it, but there's this nodes product, which basically is creating workflows. So kind of like N A N for creative AI. So this is something that's interesting, something I'm going to be playing with, maybe over the weekend. And I don't know, is it better than glyph AI TBD, but I hear good things. The last thing to talk about in this episode is what is one random product that that I'm I'm enjoying right now? I'll give you two, actually.

• 17:10Greg Isenberg?

  I'll give you two random products. They are both beverages.

• 17:17Greg Isenberg?

  One is, if you're anything like me, you love a cold cup of coffee. And a cold brew, you know, costs, you know, adds up. It's like $5 for a cold brew now. So I actually, and I have to go down. I have to go to the coffee shop. And sometimes that's good. You want to get out of the office and stuff like that, or get out of your house if you work from home. But I I started buying, and I just have it in my in my fridge, is this cold brew La Colom from New York, light roast. And I just have it there. Here it says it's 8.49.

• 17:58Greg Isenberg?

  You can get it at Target for $5. It's literally the price of one cold brew. And you get, you know, you're getting like six, seven, eight cold brews from it. So and it's like, it's easy, you know, so I'm drinking it right here.

• 18:16Greg Isenberg?

  Nice to be able to just have cold brew fast, right? If I needed, you know, I work from home. So if I need to, if I need to. If I'm feeling low energy and I need my cold brew, I need a record for you all. I just run to the fridge, I put some in, I drink it, I don't have to leave. So why I liked La Colombe is it's light, it's a light roast. It's like not offensive, it's tasty. There's some people who drink beer and they like IPAs. And there's some people who drink beers and they like light beer, like a lager. So if you're into cold brew and you like light stuff, La Colombe, for the price, thought was really good. And that light golden vibe.

• 19:02Greg Isenberg?

  The other drink I've been drinking, and you've seen me on the pod drink this probably, Ollie Pop, the classic root beer. Absolutely fire, absolutely fire.

• 19:13Greg Isenberg?

  The macros on it, we're talking 35 calories, 11 grams, or 4% carbs, 3 grams of sugar. I'm giving it like an 8.5 on 10. I usually actually don't like Ollie Pop. I find it tastes weird and I love a soda. Like give your boy a Diet Coke.

• 19:32Greg Isenberg?

  Kidding me? So good. So, you know, trying to not, not make my body full of aspartame, trying to do more of this and enjoy it. But, you know, it's really the root beer that does it for me. So if you haven't had it, highly recommend, not affiliated with any of the companies mentioned in this podcast. I hope you enjoyed this format. I don't know if I'll continue doing it, I need to know. But please, please enjoy, have a creative day and I can't wait to see what you build. I'm rooting for you.