Making $$$ with Voice AI Agents and SaaS

Get the exact roadmap to build your Voice AI Agent (Diagram Included): https://dub.sh/voiceai On this episode I share a comprehensive guide on creating profitable businesses using voice AI agents. I give away 5 detailed startup ideas with complete workflows and technical requirements. We go through the technology stack needed for implementation and provide recommendations for both technical and non-technical founders. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 01:13 - Startup Idea 1: AI Property Manager Voice AI 03:58 - What Are Voice AI Agents? 05:10 - How Voice AI Agents Actually Work 08:23 - Types of Voice AI Agents and Applications 10:17 - Demo of Startup Empire’s Voice AI Agent 13:34 - Startup Idea 2: Voice AI patient intake assistant for dentists 15:41 - Startup Idea 3: Voice AI HOA Hotline 17:34 - Startup Idea 4: Voice AI School Absence Line 19:57 - Startup Idea 5: Voice AI Trade Contractor Secretary 22:57 - Startup Idea 6: Voice AI funeral Home Intake Line 25:22 - Voice AI Platform tech stack recommendations Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://dub.sh/brex-sip Key Points: • Voice AI agents are software systems that can have natural phone conversations, understand speech, reason about requests, and take actions to solve problems • Four main types of voice AI agents: customer service, sales qualification, appointment scheduling, and information/support • Key technologies needed include speech-to-text (DeepGram, Whisper), AI brain (GPT, Claude), text-to-speech (11labs), and platforms like VAPI, Synthflow, and Retail AI • Voice AI agents can be applied across industries including healthcare, home services, legal, restaurants, real estate, and e-commerce • Hybrid approaches combining AI agents with human handoffs for complex issues or sales closings are often most effective 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 - 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, we're going to talk about how to make money with voice AI agents. Now, I think a lot of people, when they hear voice AI agents, they just think of these like robot callers that actually are horrible experiences. Now, I think that there are tons of those poorly set up voice AI agents. But at the same time, we're getting to a point where some of these voice agents actually sound like human beings. And I think there's a bunch of businesses that you can create using voice AI agents that could generate a lot of money. So today, we're going to give you a primer on how to master voice AI agents. And I'm going to give away a bunch of startup ideas,

• 0:42Greg Isenberg?

  the exact workflows on how to actually create these startup ideas and frameworks. And let's just start with one, just to get you excited. You know, I want you to feel excited. And I know that when you go through this startup idea, you're going to be like, wow, I could sit through this entire episode to learn exactly how to build these voice AI agents. So.

• 1:14Greg Isenberg?

  This is startup idea number one. It's an AI property manager voice line. How does it work? We've all been there. We're renting an apartment, your toilet breaks. So you end up, you call this line, 1-800-tenant, whatever. And it transcribes in real time what you're saying. So it knows that you said toilet broken. And then it classifies the issue as urgent versus non-urgent. Based on that, it'll either create a high priority ticket using an API. And then it'll dispatch a request with notes and photos. And then you actually get a text with the ETA and a ticket link.

• 1:58Greg Isenberg?

  But if it's not urgent, you know, it'll just log the ticket with normal priority. And then it'll text troubleshooting steps and tickets. And then you get a push call summary and a sentiment. So this whole process, you can use Vapi and 11 Labs. You can use Deepgram and Whisper. You can use a property management tool like Appfolio or Buildium and just. Connect with those softwares. And that's, by the way, one of the things I love about voice AI agents is you can use it and connect it to outside software, repair vendor, and then you can use something like Twilio for SMS.

• 2:37Greg Isenberg?

  If you didn't really understand that, you know, this framework, I also like thinking about it from a flow perspective. So the inbound tenant calls, you issue the category, is it urgent? Then you create the ticket. If it's not urgent, creates the ticket and self-help SMS. And then you sync the summary to the dashboard. This is a business that someone could create and charge $500 a month, $1,000 a month, $1,500 a month. And, you know, you don't need that many customers to, you know, have a million dollar business here. So I think it's totally possible. And I know that there's people listening to this that are going to say, well, this

• 3:21Greg Isenberg?

  already exists, or, you know, the other, the old school property managers are going to get into this. Well, okay, if that's the case, just go niche here. Create an AI property management voice line for Quebec or Canada, or, you know, with a specific type of brand. So I think it's, it's totally doable. Now, I'm at, by the end, at the end of the episode, I'm going to go through four more ideas like this, and I'm just going to give it away. People charge for this stuff. I'm just giving it away. I want you to have the sauce. I want you to build something. My goal is to get you to build something. But I need to start by just explaining lay of the land, the foundations, a primer about

• 4:04Greg Isenberg?

  what, you know, what, what, what is a voice AI agent? Why, why you should care? And what are the different types of voice AI agents? So. A voice AI agent is basically a software system that can have natural phone conversations with human beings that understand what people want and that take actions to help them. Think of them as digital employees with three superpowers. Listen and understand, listen and understand human speech in real time. Think and reason about what you're asking for and speak and act to solve your problems. Now, there's four main types of voice AI agents. Number one, you have customer service agents handling complaints, returns, order status.

• 4:48Greg Isenberg?

  Number two, you have sales and leads qualifications. That's qualifying prospects, gathering requirements. Number three, you have appointment scheduling. You can book meetings, manage calendars. And lastly, you have information and support. Answering questions, providing business info. You know, that's what the four main types are. Now, if we just zoom in here, this is the way to think about it. How does this work? How do these voice agents work? Well, basically, step one is they listen to your voice. I need to book an appointment. Step two is, and this is the key point, and this is why it's finally starting to get, voice AI agents are starting to get good. It's because the models are getting better.

• 5:30Greg Isenberg?

  So there's an AI brain that understands the intent. So basically, when you're, when you're on the phone with, with one of these bots, you're on the phone with, you know, an LLM, a Gemini, a ChatGPT. So it understands what's happening. And then there's text to speech. Step three, text to speech that converts the response to voice. I'd be happy with that. And step four, there's some action. So it takes an action in a business system. It books the appointment and updates a CRM and Salesforce. It sends a confirmation. Real quick, I need to tell you about something that's helping me sleep better at night as an entrepreneur. I was running multiple companies with money scattered

• 6:13Greg Isenberg?

  everywhere, zero spending visibility and making growth decisions pretty blind. I knew there had to be a better way and my friend told me about. So I switched and now I have mission control for every dollar. Spend management and visibility, virtual cards for my team, and earning cash from the same day treasury product. I was leaving so much money on the table, but not anymore. I have a financial operating system for our businesses to make decisions so I can spend smarter and move faster. And it's been a total game changer. I'm loving Brex so much.

• 6:55Greg Isenberg?

  I reached out to them and asked them to sponsor the pod. If you're building something real, you need a complete financial operating system like Brex. It'll help you sleep better, too, and you can't be mad at that. Now, what are the key technology components? And what tools do we need to care about? And by the way, at the end of, and very end of this episode, I will go through which tools, you know, the pros and cons of some of these tools. And if you're technical, which tools you should use? And if you're non-technical, which tools you should use? That'll be at the end of the episode. Now, there's a few components to voice AI agents. You have the speech to text. So that's gonna, you know, you're gonna need that to convert the voice to text.

• 7:38Greg Isenberg?

  So you can use something like Deepgram, Whisper, Assembly AI. An AI brain, you can use something like chat, yeah, GPT. GPT five, I guess, Claude and Gemini. Text to speech, you can use Eleven Labs, which I've talked about a lot on the pod. Carteja, OpenAI, TTS. And then there's these platforms that basically handle everything for you. I've had Lindy AI on the, on the, on the podcast before. They do a lot of voice AI. But Vapi and Synflow and Retell are also the big ones. So those are, that's kind of a, from a tech's perspective, like what you need.

• 8:22Greg Isenberg?

  And a lot of people think that voice AI agents are just really just focused on like it's a limited use case and it's just not true like you can apply voice AI agents to healthcare, you know, appointment booking, insurance verification, home services, emergency calls, service scheduling, legal, client intake, case screening, restaurants, reservations, menu questions, real estate, lead qualification, showing schedules, e-commerce, order status, and returns in exchange. So this is, you know, we haven't even scratched the surface on what to do with voice AI agents. I want to just make one important point here. A lot of the time, actually, human beings are better than the voice AI agents. The only

• 9:07Greg Isenberg?

  thing is, human beings don't work 24/7 and voice AI agents can. And also, some people don't have the budget to hire 10 sales reps or 10, you know, assistants and stuff like that. So they, it's just cheaper to do this, right? If you're trying to save money, it's a good way to do it. I will say, though, if it's a complex request, what I like to do here is, you know, I'll start a voice AI agent, but if it's complicated and I, and the LLM could see it's complicated, you can have it transferred to a human. So you can say, let me connect you with someone who can help. The other, and what some people

• 9:51Greg Isenberg?

  do here is if it's sales related, if it's, if it's close to making a sale, just transfer it to a human being. So that's just something to think about, is like, kind of like a hybrid approach. You don't need to go full on 100% voice AI agent. You can have some voice AI agents help you, and that'll get your cost down, help you scale. And then when you actually want to do the sale, or you want more of a white glove experience, that's when you do transfer to human. We have a paid membership for entrepreneurs called Startup Empire. There's about 600 people in it, and it just helps people who are idea people, help them build their businesses faster. We thought it would be fun to build a VAPI AI agent that gets

• 10:34Greg Isenberg?

  feedback from our customers, because we always want to make it better and better. And we use the flow like this, and it's, it's working pretty well. And I'm going to actually call Anna, that's her name, Anna, the

• 10:47Greg Isenberg?

  Anna Eisenberg AI.

• 10:51Greg Isenberg?

  Call her and see what she has to say for us. And this is how good voice AI agents are. Don't take my word for it. Take Anna's.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Hello, this is Anna. I'm Startup Empire's AI assistant. I'll be in charge of collecting any feedback you have about your experience in Startup Empire. All of your feedback will be completely anonymous unless you decide otherwise. Let's get started. Would you mind telling us your name? If not, just say no, thank you.

• 11:22Greg Isenberg?

  My name is Greg.

• 11:24Speaker 01

  How has being part of Startup Empire helped you or your business?

• 11:28Greg Isenberg?

  It's been pretty good. I've only been a member for 30 days. And I noticed that there's some amazing people in the community. But I want to spend more time with them. I just don't know how.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  Could you please provide more details?

• 11:42Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, absolutely. I noticed that there was someone named Jordan in the community. And I want to hop on a Zoom with him or just get to know him better because I just think he's super smart.

• 11:55Speaker 01

  What did you think was the most useful or impactful part of your experience?

• 12:00Greg Isenberg?

  I would say every few weeks, Tony does an AI chat where he just shows the latest stuff. And what's working for him? That has been the most interesting thing for me.

• 12:13Speaker 01

  If you could change one thing about our community or product, what would it be and why?

• 12:19Greg Isenberg?

  I think that there's so many smart people in the community. It's just about how do I spend more time with them?

• 12:26Speaker 01

  Is there anything else you'd like to add?

• 12:28Greg Isenberg?

  No.

• 12:29Speaker 01

  Thanks for taking the time to give us feedback. We appreciate you. Bye.

• 12:33Greg Isenberg?

  Bye. So the cool thing about it is now what we do is we actually take that feedback. We send it to an LLM. It summarizes it. It shares it on our Slack. And I can actually show you that. Let's see. Empire notifications. You can see Greg. So Greg, a 30-day Startup Empire member, shared valuable feedback highlighting the community's smart people and Tony's impactful AI sessions. His main suggestion is to create more opportunities for members to connect deeper and specifically mentioning wanting to interact with more community members like Jordan. How cool is that? How cool is that? And now our community manager can go in and be like, okay, there's this person named Greg. Let's go connect him with Jordan.

• 13:17Greg Isenberg?

  Let's do more events. And everyone on our team could see. So this is a bit of the primer on what voice AI agents are. And I want to get to the fun stuff. I want to get to the ideas. I want to give these ideas and I hope you end up building it. The second idea is an AI patient intake assistant for dentists. So you know, you call up this number. I'd like to book a cleaning. It transcribes an entity extract. So your name, your date of birth, your insurer. And then it checks the patient record. Are you an existing or new patient? If you're a new patient, it needs your insurance provider and member ID.

• 14:02Greg Isenberg?

  So then it goes and creates that. And then it'll create that in a, in a software. The popular ones in the dental world are Dentrix and Open Dental. It queries the appointment slots. It'll see if there's available times. It offers the top three times for you. You select the slot, it books the slot, but plus a little buffer. It adds appointments and the notes, and then it sends the confirmation and forms link. So the tech stack needed for something like this is you're going to use something like a Vapi, a Deepgram, whatever system that the dentist is using. Calendar, you can use, you know, Google Calendar or Calendly and then Twilio.

• 14:45Greg Isenberg?

  So super simple idea, something that you could sell to, you know, dental companies all day long. It's a, it's a, it's a huge value add for people to be able to call at any hour of the day to do this. And then dental offices are, are good customers. Like they, they make a lot of money, a lot of revenue there. I could see you end up potentially selling this to one of the practice systems. Like not crazy that you scale this to one, $2 million in revenue and they're like, yeah, we'll pay you four to six X revenue. And, you know, life-changing result. So I love this idea. I think it's interesting. Someone, please build it.

• 15:29Greg Isenberg?

  And then from a flow perspective, this is what it looks like. The call starts and matches by the name and date of birth, the yes, no, and you got your SMS confirmation. That's idea number two. Idea number three, and I must say, I stole this idea from idea browser.com, where if you haven't been already, go there to grab all your startup ideas.

• 15:55Greg Isenberg?

  So what is the, what is it? What is number three? AI HOA hotline. So HOAs are huge, especially in the United States. There's, I think, must be millions of people living in HOAs. So let's say you call this hotline and says, when is the trash pickup? It looks through semantic search in the FAQ or database, knowledge database. It finds the answer, gives you the answer snippet. It provides the time and rules. It logged the calls and resolution. And it collects the details, address and evidence. It stores the structured result, or sorry, it stores the structured record

• 16:37Greg Isenberg?

  and it creates the ticket and notifies the HOA manager. So this is a very simple, very, very simple flow. And I wanted to put this here because it's also, you know, it's just not that complicated. And it's about having the information in a database. Like you can store it in an Airtable. Like this is a simple, simple voice AI agent business that you can create. Use Retell or Vapi. You'll have to obviously have the knowledge database. You have to create that content, but you probably already have it anyways.

• 17:13Greg Isenberg?

  And then, yeah, you just literally use an Airtable. So super, super simple. HOAs have a lot of money. It's a good customer to sell into. It can scale a lot and makes the lives of people better. So that's, that's idea number three for you.

• 17:35Greg Isenberg?

  This one, this is a funny one. So.

• 17:41Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know about you, but I kind of remember this being a problem in elementary school. So it's called the AI School Absence Line. So Johnny, you know, you call this number and you say Johnny Smith, grade four is sick today. It transcribes and extracts those entities. So it's like, okay, Johnny Smith, name, grade four, got it. Name, grade, date, reason. It validates that Johnny Smith is, in fact, a student in Miami, in Miami grade school. And if it's valid, it append, it appends the absence row, it compiles and

• 18:21Greg Isenberg?

  sends an 8 a.m. daily report to Power School, which is software for K through 12. It's a, it's like a vertical software for K through 12 for schools. It confirms it. And yeah, you can have it asked to repeat and clarify, and it flags the exception for the office. So, you know, could be cool, right? Could be cool. Just like a very more, a very clean way of dealing with people are sick, kids get sick, and they get sick all the time. And wouldn't it be great if it just automatically updated the database into a

• 19:06Greg Isenberg?

  Google Sheet? There's a daily email report. This is valuable. Now, it is harder to sell to schools. It is harder to sell to schools. So I think that if I were going to do something like this, it might be one of those things where you kind of give it away. You give it away, and you get them on the, on the product. And then over time, once you've earned their trust, then you upsell them. So that, that's what I would do here. I would literally give this away. And, and then start, there's, you know, once, once you're in their system and you're integrated, then you can think about, you know, what are other things that you can go ahead and sell to them. So it might look like a funny, simple idea that can't go anywhere, but I actually think it's like a sneaky, really good idea. That's

• 19:49Greg Isenberg?

  a huge wedge into something that can be a lot bigger.

• 19:54Greg Isenberg?

  And here's the flow for folks that want to screenshot that. Another idea, and we have, we think we have one more idea, and then we're going to get to

• 20:04Greg Isenberg?

  the different tools and the pros and cons, if you're technical or non-technical. So this one is the AI trade contractor answering service. So basically, an answering service, if you're a plumber, HVAC, electrician, had to do a boring business idea in here. So, okay, let's break it down. How does this work? So the customer calls in and says, "The water heater is leaking." You do an urgency check, plus address, plus photos via an SMS link, and then it queries the next slot by zone and tech. You get the slot options via Google Calendar, and then you offer the earliest window.

• 20:47Greg Isenberg?

  So, you know, I should have said, the voice agent is something like a VAPI in 11 Labs. You're checking the calendar, you're offering the earliest window, and if they accept, then you can actually take the deposit using Stripe, or whatever payment processing you use. And then if it's successful, that's awesome. You can create a job ticket and attach photos, and then you can do an SMS confirmation and prep instruction. So what I love about these voice AI agents, and it's built into all these different softwares, is it makes it a lot easier for the businesses, right? So if it makes it a lot easier for the businesses, there is value that you're creating for them.

• 21:30Greg Isenberg?

  And if there is value that you're creating for them, you can charge them money for it. Now, how much could you charge? I don't know, a few hundred dollars a month, maybe? Eight hundred dollars, five hundred dollars? Tough to say exactly, but I do think that they'd be willing to pay for it, and on a monthly basis. So I like this idea. I also think that it's interesting that, you know, obviously that you can connect the payments, right? Like, people... That's the cool thing about voice AI agents and the integrations to these platforms is you can literally collect payments 24/7. It's kind of like the internet, right? Like, it blew people's minds that you, you know, when the internet came out,

• 22:13Greg Isenberg?

  that you can go on the internet and people can put in their credit card and they can buy a digital product or a physical product. And you can wake up every single morning and you're getting paid. Now, the same idea could be applied to all these voice AI agents. You could literally just wake up and just, if you're, you know, you own an HVAC company or you're a plumber, oh my God, I have these four or five new customers that came in, which is super, super awesome.

• 22:43Greg Isenberg?

  And here's what the flow looks like over here. Again, I think it's really interesting that you can upsell people using these voice AI agents, offer an annual maintenance plan and then tag them in the CRM. Now, the last idea is a bit grim, but you know, it's basically this idea that, you know, an AI funeral home intake line that's compassionate and compliant, of course. So, a family caller calls the line, reports the passing of a loved one and requests assistance. I just put this in because I think it's important to note

• 23:25Greg Isenberg?

  that, you know, you'd want to have the VAPI or whatever voice AI agent you use that's super soft tone, low pace, empathetic prance, you know, no rush, I'm here to help, things like that, putting it in there. And of course, if people do want to speak to a human being, you should have that option for people, especially during that time.

• 23:49Greg Isenberg?

  So it transcribes the entity and intent extract. So you know, the name, the time, location, maybe you know, their religion, any preferences they might have. It creates a preliminary case file. They gather key details, pick up location, contact, preferences. It notifies the on-call director with a summary, confirms callback window. It provides an ETA and what to expect, document checklist, PDFs, anything like that. And then sends any compassionate resources, confirmation, and maybe a phone number of or many phone numbers of the people they can speak to if they need any support, if they want to talk about anything. You know, I have here on-call director human. It's important to have that human in the loop.

• 24:33Greg Isenberg?

  So this is like a hybrid idea that just is an intake form for, you know, a space that, you know, a lot of people aren't creating, you know, creating software for, in the funeral home industry. But you know, if you can make the lives easier for that business and for the people running it, so that they can focus on their job and stuff like that, I think that could be great. So, you know, that's, that's, that's the last idea that I want to give. And I think a lot of people, hopefully, a lot of people went through some of these ideas and are like, wow, this is, I could do something like this.

• 25:14Greg Isenberg?

  I could see myself building a voice AI, AI business, either hybrid or fully voice AI. And I just, but I just don't know like which voice AI, AI platform to start. So, you know, it, I can't answer that for everyone. But what I will say is, you know, do you code or not? Well, if you don't code, then, and your, your, your priority is speed and quality, then I would say, you know, something like Synth Flow, which is about a 30-minute setup. It's a visual builder. It's about $29 to $450 a month, perfect for an MVP. If you want quality, something like retail.

• 25:59Greg Isenberg?

  Retail AI, so it's natural conversations, handles interruptions, it's usage-based, it's a bit more of a premium experience. Now, if you're a bit more technical, and you don't have to be super technical, but a bit more technical, I would say using something like Vapi. I've used Vapi for a few use cases and it's been really great. OpenAI, TTS, Whisper, GPT, Mini. But that's in the less to 50 cents per call, I believe. So it does add up, right? More than 50%, there are some more expensive tools that you could be using.

• 26:41Greg Isenberg?

  But yeah, I think for the most part, using something like Vapi, or Synflow, or Retail is kind of where you want to start. Vapi is a little more technical, but if you can figure it out, I highly recommend Vapi. I'm not, I don't work with them. And I'm not sponsored by any of these tools. But I do think that having, I don't know, I find that if you can learn how to use it, it's worth it. And it's just, you have to be a little bit technical. You have to be a little bit technical. So I should also mention that I'll include in the show notes, how to actually get access to this Excalibur.

• 27:25Greg Isenberg?

  I know that's a big question that people have. They see me do these, and they're like, hey, I need this, I need this. I don't want to just screenshot it. So please, like and comment. Before you grab it, just do a quick like and comment, and then grab the link from the show notes, and I can't wait to see what you build. There you have it. This is how to master voice AI agents with some startup ideas in there. Hopefully now you have a good foundation of what is happening in the world of voice AI agents, and how you can partake in it. That's the magic of voice AI. And I know it's not perfect, but voice AI and connecting it with software and the automations

• 28:09Greg Isenberg?

  that you can do, it's really, really something special. If you can see past, some of it is janky, of course. It's only going to get better. And If you're here, you're early. So this is just scratching the surface, of course. This is the tip of the iceberg. If people want me to go deeper into any of these topics, maybe doing a tutorial on something like Bappy or one of these platforms, just let me know. I read every single YouTube comment. I see every tweet that is tweeted at me. I love when people like the video. It gives me a sense to know if I should create more stuff like this. So please, please let me know.

• 28:51Greg Isenberg?

  I live to serve and I want to see you build something big and great. So, thank you. I'll see you in the comment section. And have a creative day, friends.