This Google Doc Has $10M Startup Ideas in It (My Secret Sauce)

I share 17 practical methods for generating viable startup ideas in the AI era. The strategies focus on identifying pain points, tedious workflows, and manual processes that could be automated or improved with AI. These techniques can help both aspiring entrepreneurs seeking new ventures and established startup founders looking to expand their product offerings. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:48 - Method 1: Using ChatGPT to identify tedious workflows 06:08 - Method 2: Analyzing your ChatGPT history 09:11 - Method 3: Searching Reddit for tool requests 12:00 - Methods 4-7: Finding friction points and using Idea Browser 15:08 - Methods 8-11: Exploring niche groups and software review sites 19:13 - Methods 12-15: Learning from agency owners and job titles 24:06 - Methods 16-17: Finding opportunities in low-rated but high-usage plugins Key Points: • Use ChatGPT to identify tedious workflows in specific professions that AI could automate • Analyze your own ChatGPT history to find repeated prompts that could become products • Search online platforms (Reddit, Facebook, Discord) for people asking about tools that don't exist • Examine where you copy/paste between tools as these friction points represent startup opportunities • Browse service marketplaces like Upwork and Fiverr to find manual tasks ripe for AI automation 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 Sale: http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.skool.com/startupempire/about 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 I'm going to talk about 17 ways to come up with startup ideas in the AI age. I'm going to go through some workflows. I'm going to go through some tools. I'm going to go through some prompts. I'm going to show you exactly how to come up with really good startup ideas. Let's get into it.

• 0:25Greg Isenberg?

  You know, and a lot of people listening, they say to me, well, I don't need a startup idea, Greg. I'm already working on a startup. Well, this is going to help you grow your startup. You know, it's going to, you're going to come up with ideas for your startup that are going to basically grow the product, grow your customer base. And if you're looking for a startup idea, well, you know, a lot of people here have a nine to five. They're looking for a side hustle. They're looking for, you know, just another business, a creative outlet. And I didn't want to gatekeep, so I'm going to go through exactly how I would come up with a startup idea in the AI age. And I got it handed to Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, because he really inspired me to do this,

• 1:11Greg Isenberg?

  this episode of the pod. He just posted on his blog, he says, "For a long time, technical people in the startup industry have made fun of idea guys, people who've had an idea and were looking for a team to build it. It now looks to me like they are about to have their day in the sun." So if you are an idea guy or gal, this episode, and pretty much honestly, all episodes of the pod, but this one specifically is a tactical, sauce-filled, 17 steps, how to come up with startup ideas in the AI age. So the first thing you can do, if you want a startup idea, is you can literally go into ChatGPT and say,

• 1:55Greg Isenberg?

  "Give me 10 tedious workflows." And then you insert a job title. For example, social media marketer does that AI could automate? And then you just rinse and niche down. So let's actually go and cook that up and see what, what, you know, how I would approach it. So I'm going to go ahead and copy the prompt. Give me 10 tedious workflows that a social media manager does that AI could automate. Now you're going to want to make sure that O3 is clicked here. Sometimes by default, I think 4O is clicked. But I find for, for questions like this, you're going to want to use O3. It's just going to be a bit more effective.

• 2:39Greg Isenberg?

  So it's going to give you, I don't know, around 10, I think, of ideas. So daily content roulette, sifting through trends, brand assets and half baked brainstorm docs just to fill tomorrow's posting calendar, captioning Franken, Franken signing, manual hashtag mining, evergreen reedits. So it's going to give you a bunch of ideas that are really, really tedious. And tedious is a synonym, synonym for painful. And if you're coming up with a startup idea that helps solve someone's pain, you will be able to make money from it. So I think that that's why I like to use the word tedious or painful.

• 3:24Greg Isenberg?

  And then you just got to go through here and pick the one that you think is the most tedious. And you can even, sometimes I do this and I go like, which one do you think is the most tedious? And why? And just let the LLM do the hard work. Now, if you are a social media manager, you probably know this already. But if you're not, you might not know it. And even if you are a social media manager, I, you know, I, I find it helpful to just ask anyway. So it says screenshot and pace reporting. It's peak drudgery. Every platform hides its metric in a slightly different maze.

• 4:05Greg Isenberg?

  Exports, break the moment, a filter changes and one typo on a slide can nuke everyone's confidence. And the numbers, there's zero creative upside, just an hour long copy paste gymnastics that the exec team skims in 30 seconds. High stakes for accuracy, low reward for you and perfectly suited for API hungry API AI bot that never misaligns a chart. So there you have it. You know what the pain point is. And then you can go ahead and just start prompting it and be like, you know, what would an MVP look like? And give me a realistic, high growth

• 4:46Greg Isenberg?

  plan to acquire,

• 4:50Greg Isenberg?

  you know, 100 customers in 30 days.

• 4:55Greg Isenberg?

  And it's going to tell you this. So this is, this is now you, you know, you, you understand a pain point. You know, now you're just like planning the MVP and growth strategy. You can start in chat GPT. I find Manus also is super helpful. Uh, and then you can, uh, and then you, you, you start having a plan of what to do. So that's the first way you can come up with a startup idea in the AI age. Quick break in the pod to tell you a little bit about Startup Empire. So Startup Empire is my private membership where it's a bunch of people like me, like you, who want to build out their startup ideas. Now they're looking for content to help accelerate that. They're looking for potential co-founders.

• 5:39Greg Isenberg?

  They're looking for tutorials from people like me to come in and tell them, how do you do email marketing? How do you build an audience? How do you go viral on Twitter? All these different things. That's exactly what Startup Empire is. And it's for people who want to start a startup but are looking for ideas. Or it's for people who have a startup, but just they're not seeing the traction that they need. So you can check out the link to startupempire.co in the description. Number two, scroll your own chat GPT history. If you're repeating the same prompt weekly, that's a product in, in hiding in plain sight. So one example of that is like, I was just scrolling through.

• 6:21Greg Isenberg?

  My chat GPT history before this and I noticed that I ask chat GPT to take my content and write it more clearly. If I'm doing a YouTube description, like for example, for this episode, I'll ask it. You know, I'll, I'll write something and I'll say, make it more clearly, just so people understand what I'm saying. And by the way, if you're listening to this on YouTube, go ahead and like and comment. So I know to continue doing these videos. But yeah, back to the chat GPT history thing. This, you know, number two is really only helpful if you use chat GPT every single day, or if you use Claude every single day, or if you met use Mattis every day, you're going to basically know how you're using it.

• 7:05Greg Isenberg?

  And if you're using it a certain way and it's solving a tedious workflow for you, for example, you know, make it more clear, make writing more clear, there's probably other people that are suffering in the same way. So, um, you know, as an example, like, yeah, there's probably a business that you can create. That's like make my writing more clear.com. And it's specifically designed to make writing more clear. And, you know, people like me might be willing to pay for that. So that's what you're going to kind of see with chat GPT is it's going to be like unbundled. There's going to be like very specific, um, vertical agents, vertical SaaS that are specific.

• 7:50Greg Isenberg?

  To that and, and, and, you know, there's an opportunity right now and an arbitrage opportunity, frankly, where you can go ahead and create that, own that niche, own that headspace. Just like, you know, the guy from, you know, PDF.ai. You know, I think this guy does like at least a million dollars a year in revenue and it's just chat with any PDF document.

• 8:14Greg Isenberg?

  And like, of course you can do this on chat GPT, but he owns like the, the, the headspace. Look, loved by millions of happy users. So, um, this could have been found, this idea could have been found via just looking at your history, if you're uploading a ton of documents. And by the way, you know, I know that there's someone in the comment section who's gonna be like, "Yeah, but like, all the, you know, big ideas have been taken. PDF has already been taking a lot of, you know, a lot of these ideas have been taken." Fine, then just, you know, go and niche it down a little more, right? So maybe you don't just do all PDFs, but you do, um, you know, one specific type of finance PDF.

• 8:58Greg Isenberg?

  Um, or maybe, and this is a huge opportunity, is you just focus on a specific geography. You do pdf.ai for Brazil, and that's your business. There's so much opportunity in that. Uh, the third thing is you can go on Google, yes, Google still exists, um, and search "site Reddit, is there a tool?" and then your niche. And then you're gonna find users begging for tools that don't exist. Let me show you exactly what I mean when I say this. So I'm gonna go ahead and copy this prompt here.

• 9:37Greg Isenberg?

  I guess it's like, not really a prompt, because it's Google, but you know what I mean? Um, search "site Reddit, is there a tool?" and then our niche. Let's just say we're doing a fitness, we're in the fitness niche. What is this doing? This is basically searching Reddit for free for, um, basically people asking, "Is there a tool?" and then in the fitness niche. So I can go and see, uh, you know, here, I can see in the productivity subreddit, you know, "What, what tools do you use to balance and track daily tasks?" And this is around work and volunteer, but also family and fitness.

• 10:21Greg Isenberg?

  So you can see that, you know, there's, um, demand for that sort of thing. Or you can see in the running subreddit,

• 10:32Greg Isenberg?

  You know, hi runners, I'm a software engineer. I wonder if there's any software tool which potentially is not available and could be helpful in your training and planning communication between trainer and runner. And then you have comments, you know, to help influence your idea. Like this person is saying, I would just want a free Strava, you know? Like, that would be amazing. Okay, maybe there's an opportunity to create a free Strava and you monetize it in a completely different way. And by the way, Strava, I think, you know, is like a billion dollar, you know, company. So I think that, you know, the point is, the point is you can search on Reddit and this is going to give you ideas and you do it through Google.

• 11:16Greg Isenberg?

  And then just write down what you're learning. And it's kind of crazy if you think about it, like these people are telling you exactly what they want. It's, it's literally gold. Number four, audit where you copy and paste between tools because that friction is a startup idea. If you find yourself, for example, copying and pasting emails into a CRM, well, that workflow is a tedious, painful thing that you can build software for and charge money for it. So in your own life, whenever you're, whenever you see copy and pasting, there's an opportunity for a startup idea there.

• 12:01Greg Isenberg?

  Number five, browse Upwork for repeated AI and grunt work gigs. If multiple clients want it manual, it's ripe for destruction. I think that's, you know, pretty self-explanatory. Upwork is a marketplace for services and people are paying, you can see how much people are paying and what they're paying for, for service. And, you know, I think the opportunity right now is of all these services that are happening, how can you productize that with AI? So there's certain things that, you know, I think you could, that, you know, We can do a whole separate Upwork, you know, episode if people are down for that.

• 12:44Greg Isenberg?

  But the point is going through Upwork and and just looking, you know, what are what are some repeated tasks and then how can you create agents and AI that can productize that and essentially charge a lot less? And then there's your startup idea. Number six, join Discord, Slack groups. Look for, does anyone have a tool for complaints? You can even set up an automation for that on N8N. But basically, looking, just doing the hard work of going into groups and just looking and scrolling and seeing if people, if people are asking for tools and you can just search within the tool, within the group itself.

• 13:28Greg Isenberg?

  You can, number seven, you can use idea browser.com. I built this like for myself. So, you know, idea browser basically is to find, you know, startup ideas from Facebook groups and subreddits and Google Trends. It's completely free to see the idea of the day. So, you know, today's idea is AI bulletin boards that actually organize your chaos. So, every single day, it's going to look at trends and it's going to give you a free startup idea and it's going to tell you, you know, what's the feasibility of it, why you should do it. You know, is this a big problem or not such a big problem? It goes through all the subreddits, Facebooks, YouTube to help give you the idea.

• 14:12Greg Isenberg?

  And then my favorite part is it tells you exactly what the offer should be. So, you know, you want to start with a lead magnet, you want a front end offer that's like $12 a month. But the point is, literally every single day, we're giving out a free startup idea. So, all you have to do is just sign up, look at it and be like, is this exciting to me? And if it is, go build an audience and go build a product to do it. Or you might realize, hey, I actually don't really like this startup idea, but like it, I'd like to take this idea and kind of like put it into a completely different niche. So, I find, you know.

• 14:55Greg Isenberg?

  I subscribe to a bunch of, you know, people or brands and products that help me in my head, give me startup ideas. So I recommend you do that as well. You can join, number eight, you can join niche Facebook groups and look for workflow hacking in the comments, build the tool that they're manually creating. So Facebook groups, you know, still has a billion monthly active users, I believe. Don't sleep on them. There's a bunch of, you know, especially older people who are using it and, and there's just a lot of alpha, alpha in Facebook groups.

• 15:35Greg Isenberg?

  Number nine, which is similar to the Upwork thing, which is browse, browse Fiverr for all use ChatGPT, quote unquote, services. So these are manual workflows that are apps waiting to be built.

• 15:53Greg Isenberg?

  So, um, yeah, that's just like a pretty self-explanatory, but go on, go on Fiverr. And yeah, you can just see like, uh, what people, what services are here. And then if they have ChatGPT in the like, for example, you know, I'll pay fifty dollars for anyone who writes me an SEO blog post with chat, uh, and I'm going to do it with ChatGPT.

• 16:23Greg Isenberg?

  Like there's people paying for services on Fiverr and, and people are actually fulfilling it with AI. And it's happening, yeah, it's happening pretty much all over, writing, video, animation, everywhere. So those are opportunities to build startups around there.

• 16:45Greg Isenberg?

  But I will say that there's a, a window for that and that window is probably now. Number 10, literally talk to business owners about their daily Excel updates, because that's an AI agent waiting to be built. So.

• 17:04Greg Isenberg?

  The reason I put Excel is because, you know, that is, uh, there is a lot, you know, businesses are run on Excel in a lot of ways. Um, so if you just ask local business owners, and by the way, you can pay them. You can say, I'll give you $50, $100 for your time to learn about, you know, how you use Excel. And if there's any way I can make that workflow a lot better for you. And it doesn't just necessarily need to be about Excel, but you can also just, you know, I, that's one example. You can also just ask them like, tell me about, you know, the struggles you have in your business, just generally, like literally how you can come up with startup ideas is by just talking to business owners, maybe paying for their time,

• 17:45Greg Isenberg?

  taking them out for coffee, reaching out to them and being like, you know, what are some big issues in your business? And then that might give you ideas around, um, around, uh, around your startup idea. And then you might have your first customer there, too. Number 11, browse G2 for top rated legacy tools without AI. And then you can build the AI layer. So G2 is basically a review site for software. So, you know, you can see here Slack has 34,000 four and a half stars and there's monday.com. And, you know, so what does this

• 18:26Greg Isenberg?

  do? This allows you to just see like, what are the issues with the software? And you can actually go through the reviews. What are the missing features, which is insane. You can actually like, what do you like best about Slack? What do you dislike about Slack? And this can help you not only, you know, create a Slack killer or, you know, um, but it can also, you know, I think the opportunity right now is to create AI first versions of a lot of these software pieces. So, um, think about like, okay, you know, now I have a better understanding what are limiting features and missing features.

• 19:04Greg Isenberg?

  Now I can actually not only go ahead and create something that's competing, but I can actually create it in an AI-first way. Number 12, ask agency owners what clients beg for repeatedly. If it's annoying and repetitive, it's worth turning into software. So that's similar to what we talked about, just asking business owners. But specifically, agency owners, I think it's for a lot of people, especially creating some of their first businesses. There's so many agencies. It's an easy business to create. And it's one of those great businesses where you can actually go and cold email people, cold DM them. They're more susceptible to it.

• 19:48Greg Isenberg?

  And I think that building software for agencies is a really big opportunity. So just wanted to include that in there as well. Number 13, read comments on popular YouTube tutorials. So a lot of videos and episodes like this where a lot of people will watch something like this and you can learn about what friction points exist and what applications and software, niche applications for software you can create. So I think that watching tutorial videos, software tutorial videos is what also is like

• 20:33Greg Isenberg?

  a really no grainer way to come up with startup ideas because in a lot of tutorials, they're hinting to what they like about certain things, what they don't like, what are their pain points? And I don't think a lot of people actually go on YouTube and look for startup ideas. So think about that one. Number 14, find multi-step tutorials using 8+ tools and build the one-click version. So if you stumble across tutorials where people are stitching together a lot of tools, well, you'll come up with a startup idea just there. And people are willing to pay for products.

• 21:13Greg Isenberg?

  That make it really easy and faster. Faster is, we talked about tedious before, but fast is just another code word or synonym for I will pay you to do it faster. So building the one click version, super, super effective. Fifteen, scan LinkedIn job titles in growing industries. Ask what would make this person 10 times faster with AI. So, you know, take 30 minutes and just, you know, look around and be like, okay, this person is a marketing manager at Procter and Gamble. Okay, what do they do? You know?

• 21:56Greg Isenberg?

  And like, you can go ahead and ask ChatGPT or Manus or Claude. And you can like, literally be like, we can do it right now.

• 22:06Greg Isenberg?

  You know, I just came across this guy with 12 years of marketing experience.

• 22:18Greg Isenberg?

  He has been at Procter and Gamble the whole time. He works in the digital marketing department. So you can look, obviously you can see what he does a little bit. A lot of people put a little bit about what they do. So you can just include that there, copy and paste that there. And then just say, what would make this person 10 times faster with AI? And what are you doing here? You're basically leaning on to ChatGPT to do a lot of the user research and also act as like an AI co-founder.

• 22:59Greg Isenberg?

  And it's just, we've gotten to the point where it's just, it's excellent at it. It's just absolutely excellent. So how do you turn a battle hardened P and G digital marketer into a 10x machine? June 2025 edition. Spin up a brand, tune co-pilot, fine tune GPT 4O on 10 years of, you know, Gillette and Pampers briefs, Dr. And, you know, look at this. This is literally, this is amazing. Build a creative conveyor belt instead of a studio queue. Concept storyboard, mid journey V7 mood boards. Like, this would blow a marketing manager at Procter and Gamble's mind. Like, absolute.

• 23:43Greg Isenberg?

  There, this is many, you know, multimillion dollar opportunity for someone to do like, wire Gumloop into Braze AI for always on growth loops. They, they are not doing any of this. Deploy an insight mining agent, they're not doing that. Wrapping it in a brand safety compliance guide rail, like, I'm happy that they included that. So good. And then last, lastly, number 17. So find two star Shopify WordPress plugins with high usage, low, low stars. Sorry. Find two star Shopify WordPress plugins with high usage. So you want low stars, but high usage. That's like the holy grail.

• 24:25Greg Isenberg?

  So people care about the space, but the experience sucks. Or you clone them, focus on, clone them with AI and use like cursor, you know, Bolt, Lovable, focus on different geographies and undercut on pricing. So the point is, you can go on Shopify's app marketplace and you can go on WordPress plugin directory and you can literally see what, what people think of the software. And then you can just go and build competing software and undercut them on pricing or focus on different geographies and, and make the tool better.

• 25:05Greg Isenberg?

  You know, these are people that have paid millions of dollars to create their software, but now in the AI age, it's a lot cheaper and I don't know why more people aren't doing this. And there's an opportunity to build like a portfolio of these, you know, Shopify and WordPress plugins that are giving you five, 10, 15K a month each. So I think that this is definitely underrated. And you can create even like, the beauty is now you can create really, really niche plugins and it's not going to cost you a lot of money to build. Like, I'm even interested in that, just for fun.

• 25:44Greg Isenberg?

  Like, you know, I was talking about an idea in the Shopify ecosystem too, today, that I would have never been able to build two years, three years ago, because it probably would have cost me 500K, a million dollars. And I wouldn't know if people actually would use the product. Because. It's like a nicher version of something that's popular and has low stars. But now I can actually go and do that. Probably cost me $5,000 to build. So, uh, these, this is, um, this is designed to give, just get your creative juices flowing, to make you smarter about whatever it is you're working on, or to help you figure out what you should be working on.

• 26:28Greg Isenberg?

  And yes, you can come up with an idea, uh, just walking, you know, going for a walk in the sauna. I don't know, just in the real world, just it hits you. And those are good ideas, but, um, sometimes. But what I'm saying, the ideas I like to, to work on are the ideas that I have odds stacked in my favor. So if I know that thousands of people are saying, I want this product, or they're showing me by, you know, low star reviews that they're dissatisfied with this product, or I can go on L L Ms and it's surfacing all the world's information and it's telling me in a curated way that, um,

• 27:13Greg Isenberg?

  that this is an opportunity. Or I can go on idea browser.com and it's just going through Facebook groups and subreddits and Google Trends and it's handing to me on a silver platter. I'm going to go and do that. So, um, I'm excited for you and I can't wait to see what you build. Thanks for listening to me and, uh, happy building. I'm rooting for you.