3 startup ideas from the co-founder of Loom (make $120k/mo)

In this episode, I am joined by Shahed Khan, co-founder of Loom, as we explore innovative startup ideas, and his frameworks for finding and building startups Episode Timestamps: 00:00 Intro 00:50 Startup Idea 1: The Modern Travel Guide 19:25 Startup Idea 2: The anti-social social network 34:06 Startup Idea 3: Time Capsules of Shared Memories 1) The Anti-TripAdvisor Traveler Problem: Millennials & Gen Z hate cookie-cutter travel experiences Solution: TikTok-inspired travel app with curated, local gems Key features: • City-specific guides (coffee shops, bookstores, etc.) • Video carousels showing vibes • Monetize by unlocking full guides ($0.99) How to build MVP: 1. Use TikTok API to pull trending local videos 2. Transcribe with Descript or Google Speech-to-Text 3. Clean up with ChatGPT 4. Auto-post to WordPress via Zapier Pro tip: Start hyper-niche (e.g., coffeesnobs.xyz) then expand 2) The New "Path" - Dunbar's Social Network Problem: We've lost connection with our REAL friends Solution: Reinvent Path for 2024 - ultra-private social network Key features: • Max 150 connections (Dunbar's number) • Location-based updates • Simple, minimalist design Why it could work: • People crave intimate, ad-free spaces • AI makes building faster & cheaper • Charge $20-30/year subscription Marketing angle: "The anti-social social network" 3) Time Capsules of Shared Memories Problem: "Shared albums are where memories go to die" Solution: Physical, ephemeral time capsules of shared experiences Key features: • Pull from connected social accounts • Curate personalized memory boxes • Make it EASY to send as gifts Monetization: • Subscription for curation • Charge per physical time capsule sent Inspiration: Remember Klout? Leverage nostalgia! Bonus insight: People don't change. Our needs stay the same. Products evolve, but human nature is constant. Study the past! Want more free ideas? I collect the best ideas from the pod and give them to you for free in a database. Most of them cost $0 to start (my fav) Get access: https://www.gregisenberg.com/30startupideas 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/ BoringAds — ads agency that will build you profitable ad campaigns http://boringads.com/ BoringMarketing — SEO agency and tools to get your organic customers http://boringmarketing.com/ Startup Empire - a membership for builders who want to build cash-flowing businesses https://www.startupempire.co FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/ FIND SHAHED ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://x.com/_shahedk LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shahedkhan/ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/_shahedk/

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

• 0:00Greg Isenberg?

  I've got a close friend on the pod right now. And I mean, he sold a company for a billion dollars. He doesn't do podcasts really, but he is doing us a favor, the community a favor. And he's got a few ideas that he would do. So he's given them away. So you might as well listen to this whole episode.

• 0:23Greg Isenberg?

  Welcome to the pod.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  It's great to be here, Greg. It's good to see you.

• 0:28Greg Isenberg?

  Good to see you.

• 0:51Greg Isenberg?

  I mean, you've got some free time ever since the loom exit to write some ideas. And I'm chomping at the bits. Like, what do you got for us?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I'm pretty excited about this one. So I, you know, I've spent the last year, more or less, kind of traveling, going to different countries, going to different states, just with friends, solo. And I've, one of the things I'm actually really passionate about from a consumer perspective is just like how we travel today and witnessing how millennials especially prefer to travel these days. So the first idea, which I would say is probably one of my favorite ideas on this list, is what I'm coining the anti-trip advisor traveler.

• 1:42Speaker 01

  So you go on Google today, say you're going to Rome, Italy, and you have to now build an itinerary. There have been services that have been created targeting millennials around these kind of micro travel agents who can kind of design a guide.

• 2:04Speaker 01

  You know, you give them the dates, the budget, and they could design something pretty advanced for you. But for 99% of the travelers out there.

• 2:14Speaker 01

  Travel is, you know, I would say byproduct of how good an SEO engineer really is. And what I mean by that is TripAdvisor ranks very highly on Google and Expedia ranks very highly. All of this conglomerate monopoly of travel sites that have been around since our, you know, parents were our age traveling tend to get the most traffic. So what does that do for travel? It sends people to all the same places. It sends them to all the same restaurants, sends them to all the same, you know, takes them to the Colosseum in the morning for a walking tour. It takes them to the famous Cacio Pepe restaurant

• 2:56Speaker 01

  that's like two blocks away from the Colosseum. The restaurant itself is called Cacio Pepe. So you know, none of the locals are eating there. So the idea is TikTok for modern travel. So right now, users on TikTok, these like micro influencers post these really aesthetically minimal TikTok guides of beautiful coffee shops, bookstores, places to sit and people watch and take in the city, right? Like this does not exist on any of these travel sites today. So I'm actually helping a friend of mine who kind of had this concept and I would

• 3:39Speaker 01

  love to kind of bring this to life. But I, when I travel, I go on TikTok. I've tried to find two or three, you know, spots near my hotel that I should go to and I just kind of curate this own list. And I went to Seoul last year in May. Love the city. Incredible city. Very creative, you know, design forward city and design for businesses, pastry shops. And none of these things had popped up on, when I, when I was looking it up on TripAdvisor. So I, I think there's like this new segment for millennials and Gen Z's who want to travel the path less taken. And I feel like if we, you know, if there's an app that can kind

• 4:21Speaker 01

  of bring this to life, there'd be a huge crowd that would be interested in it.

• 4:26Greg Isenberg?

  So I want to talk about this idea, but before we get into the idea, there's something that I've been playing with a lot recently, which is, I'm curious if you have checked it out. Have you seen on TikTok the Creator Search Insights?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  I have not, no.

• 4:45Greg Isenberg?

  Okay. So if you haven't, it's a chance that other people haven't because I and me too. I actually, I only recently figured this out. So if you go and you open up TikTok instead of searching for,

• 5:02Greg Isenberg?

  I don't know, some whatever you weird things you people search on TikTok.

• 5:08Greg Isenberg?

  You can actually search for creator search insight and it pulls this up.

• 5:17Greg Isenberg?

  If you're watching this on YouTube, sorry, if you're watching this on Spotify or Apple, go to YouTube to see what it is. You have to click this and it says, see what TikTok users are searching for and get inspired to create. Now it shows suggested and trending search topics.

• 5:36Greg Isenberg?

  And it shows content gaps as well.

• 5:40Greg Isenberg?

  What you'll notice is a lot of time there's travel in here. So it seems that people are using TikTok for, instead of going to Google, they're going to TikTok, TikTok, to your point. So I just wanted to just make that note that people, whatever it is you're working on, look at the trending topics on, on that, on TikTok because it is worth it to, to figure out what you should build because this is like one of those really big ideas, but it's like, where do you start, right? Like, how do you, you know, should you niche it down a little bit? And this is where something like TikTok could help you figure that out. Shh, don't tell anyone, but I've got 30 plus startup ideas that could make you millions and I'm giving them away for free.

• 6:25Greg Isenberg?

  These aren't just random guesses. They're validated concepts from entrepreneurs who've built $100 million plus businesses. I've compiled them into a one simple database compiled from hundreds of conversations I've had on my podcast. But the main thing is most of these ideas don't need a single investor. Some cost nothing to start. I'm pretty much handing you a cheat sheet. The idea bank is your startup shortcut. Just click below to get access. Your next cash flowing business is waiting for you.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, and another pro tip that I maybe it's more popular now than when I first found out about it. I would, you know, alongside TikTok, I would go on Instagram and I would, you know, search if I'm, if I'm going to Rome and I want to see like since the last time I went to Rome, what are all the best places for me to go to? I would go, I would search for Rome and I would kind of use the Instagram map, which is a great, you know, geolocation tool that's hidden within Instagram. And I would just zoom and there's a bunch of photos of people posting stories.

• 7:46Speaker 01

  And it's kind of like your snap map that kind of has this like heat map on it to show where there's like density or like what's more popular. And where like are people kind of going to in real time? So that, that has also helped me when kind of designing things to go see museums with new exhibits that might not be as well known. Or, you know, some of the more locally, I love exploring local culture when I travel. So like Instagram and, you know, kind of to your point, TikTok as well. These are all great places to go find hidden gems with, within the app.

• 8:27Greg Isenberg?

  So if you were to start something like this, you know, I buy the key insight. It's validated by people searching on TikTok. What do you, you know, how, how do you actually go and build it? Like what, where do you take it from there?

• 8:43Speaker 01

  So I, I think the first I would go to, I would, I would do my research by looking at, you know, what are all, to your point, the TikTok, you know, search results. I would look at, okay, well, what are the most search results? And try to find a category. Are people looking to find coffee shops? Are they looking to find, you know, coffee art in cities like Seoul? Are they going to bookstores? What, what are the top ranked kind of category of places people want to visit? And then what I would do is I would kind of hack together a mobile app. There's a bunch of no-code tools out there, low-code tools. Or if you want to build something sophisticated, you could go

• 9:28Speaker 01

  kind of hire a developer. You could also use Claude AI and ChatGPT. There's a bunch of tutorials on how to build apps without knowing how to code with AI specifically. And what I would do is I would kind of build a directory based on cities. So what I, the way that I would do that is I would kind of formulate everything into guides. So I would want like a coffee guide of Seoul. And within Seoul, Seoul is such a big city. And it, there should be a map where I could see, these are like the top 10 most incredible new relevant design-forward coffee shops. If you're a coffee snob, you'd love to go there. I would love to go into that guide. And if you're monetizing it,

• 10:13Speaker 01

  you could either sell it by guide. So you could unlock, say you get the first two coffee shops for free, and it's a list of 10. And if you want to unlock it, you could pay, say, 99 cents to unlock that guide. Now you have access to the best coffee shops in Seoul. So I would rank, I would build these guides, and I would make like, kind of like a video carousel, very similar to TikTok. This is like what the aesthetic, this is what, you know, the coffee is like, the, the general vibes. You go on Google Maps and you go on a specific location, they now have a vibes category. So it kind of just shows the, the general charm of the place. And then I would branch out, you know,

• 10:53Speaker 01

  from a very specific niche, such as coffee shops and bookstores, to what are all the other search, searches that are trending on TikTok and on Instagram, and start to kind of build that curation further out. So the next time someone comes, you know, if they're not just looking for coffee shops, maybe they're looking for something else. And there, there's something that's nearby to the coffee shop that, based on their TikTok history, they would like. That is something that I would expand into.

• 11:24Greg Isenberg?

  And the content, like, how do you create the content?

• 11:29Speaker 01

  So it's actually, the content is already there. You know, like, you can technically go on TikTok and just, as in a general minimal viable product, you can host these TikTok videos, just embed them directly into the app and be like, "These are, you know, the top local, you know, micro-influencers who are talking about these coffee shops. And this is like, these are the coffee shops that you should go to."

• 11:57Speaker 01

  I think the beauty of TikTok is that it has this critical mass. So as any influencer, I could kind of, or even if I'm not an influencer, right, I could just kind of create a video seamlessly, add an aesthetically pleasing sound on top of it, and add, you know, use CapCut or any of these video editing tools, and add captions on top of them.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  And, you know, what I would do, so I live in New York City. And if I were to create this, and I were to create the content myself, just to get the app up and running, I would go to all the, you know, spots that I think, you know, say, a foreign traveler who wants to experience Soho, like a local, like, what are the coffee shops, the wine bars, the bookstores, the streets for the best photos at sunset, the West Side Highway, you know, Rent a City Bike, get on the West Side Highway bike path and ride up and down the path, and you get to see New York City, and you get to see the Hudson River. And it's, especially this time of the year in the fall, like, I could, I could go myself

• 13:07Speaker 01

  and create this content and host it. That isn't scalable, as just kind of initially when you're ramping up, you just want to kind of get the information into the app.

• 13:19Greg Isenberg?

  I think what's also really interesting about this idea is there's probably a ton of like amazing, I mean, not probably, there is, the best content around local is hidden in TikTok videos. So the real, the real question is, how do you extract that in a meaningful way? Post it on the web with like curating it a little bit, like adding, you don't want to just pull the raw transcripts, right? Right. So what do you do? I'm just trying to think about it. So if I'm, if I'm trying to do something like this,

• 13:59Greg Isenberg?

  TikTok does have an API, so you can use the TikTok API for getting some of these trending local videos. And then you can use Descript for transcription.

• 14:14Greg Isenberg?

  There's also other tools. I think Google has like a speech to text API as well that you can use. But then you're gonna actually have to clean up the transcripts because you're, you know, it's not, it worked in video, but it won't, it won't work for like a blog, so to speak. So you can use, you can use Claude, you can use ChatGPT's API.

• 14:37Greg Isenberg?

  And then you can automate, you can actually literally automate this whole process. You just use Zapier to eventually like post it to your WordPress blog or whatever it is. So what are you doing? You're essentially making, you know, the MVP, you're making like an SEO machine, right? Right. And maybe you start only with coffee shops, like you become the place where, wherever it is you land, like if you're a coffee snob, maybe you call it coffeesnobs.xyz if, because that's probably available.

• 15:07Greg Isenberg?

  But you, you do it in every city and then once you do coffee shops, then you know, you can expand beyond there.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I, I, I think it's important to your point to kind of start in a very specific focus area that, um, you know, if, if, like, kind of imagine yourself, if you go to a new city or a new country you've never been to, you check into your hotel or drop your bags, what is the first thing you look for on Google Maps? Um, and if, or on TikTok, or on any of these social platforms. Um, and when you look for recommendations, you know, what is, if you go down the list of things that the average traveler does is, they probably ask their friends, they probably go on Instagram and have probably saved these videos in advance, and then they probably go onto Google Maps and start pinning a bunch of locations near their hotel that they

• 15:59Speaker 01

  should check out. Uh, and truth be told, like, we don't, you know, we tend to, um, overcomplicate this process, but instead, if, like you said, the MVP could be, if, if you follow those instructions, you can extract that information. Imagine just pasting a TikTok link into a URL, like, the URL into a text field, um, or, excuse me, into a URL field, and then it just kind of auto-generated a written guide from that one TikTok video. It's like, in this TikTok video, uh, there was, this coffee shop was mentioned, here's, like, the link to their Google Maps, this coffee shop was mentioned, here's the link to their Maps, um, and, and then it just kind

• 16:43Speaker 01

  of creates a written guide that is SEO-friendly, that people, if they search for, say, coffee, um, in Williamsburg, this guide would ideally pop up, and it would also allow them to save it to, like, bookmark it in the app, so that, once they are in, say, Brooklyn, they see that that coffee shop is nearby. Um, so I think there's a lot of ways to kind of get started with this. I, you know, it, kind of in this, like, post-COVID world, where travel has really taken off, um, a lot of airlines have posted massive, uh, profits, just goes to show that

• 17:24Speaker 01

  travel is not slowing down. People love experiences, um, they love to go to new cities, they love to go to, uh, cities they've been to many times and try new things there, so. If there's an app that can kind of facilitate that for the millennial and Gen Z, you know, kind of generation that is very specific when it comes to traveling, I think there's a, there's, there's a big market for someone who ends up building this, including myself, I would love to use that.

• 17:55Greg Isenberg?

  You'd love to, you'd love to try Third Wave Coffee in Istanbul, you know, the right, the right,

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 18:01Greg Isenberg?

  You know, the right shop. I actually, I heard recently, uh, there's like a famous coffee saying around coffee snobs that once you, like, once you really get into coffee, you're gonna hate it because you're gonna be that person that travels, lands in Nune City and has to walk 45 minutes or take an Uber somewhere to get that first cup of coffee that is going to hit the spot for you. Like, the diner coffee won't be good enough. So, um, I digress. I like this idea. I think it's great. We've talked a lot about directories on the pod before. I think that directories are only gonna get more and more popular. I think what I'm really interested with respect to directories is how can you put your directories on autopilot?

• 18:44Greg Isenberg?

  Start building that SEO juice and who knows where, you know, some of these could go. You could end up getting, for all you know, in the coffee business. You can end up becoming an OT, you know, working, working to create like an Expedia competitor. So you don't really know where it goes, but with a cool part about a directory and guides, and I like that you're using the word guide, because I think that's a really important word, is you're just, you're building a center of gravity. You're building a center of gravity around a topic. And it gives you a lot of leverage for where to take it. So I like this idea. What's your next idea?

• 19:29Speaker 01

  So if we stay on the topic of travel for a second,

• 19:34Speaker 01

  one of the things that I feel like has been broken,

• 19:38Speaker 01

  and it really broke during, like when, you know, kind of COVID had taken place. People are everywhere now. People have moved to new cities. You moved to Miami. I moved to New York. We both lived in San Francisco.

• 19:53Speaker 01

  Our friends have moved all over the place.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  And there hasn't been a, what I want to call like this micro social network, which is a very minimalist thing. It does one thing really well.

• 20:09Speaker 01

  And we'll get into that in a second, but this, there hasn't been a micro social network around where my friends are. So especially in summertime, when no one, I mean, all my friends who live in New York are all out traveling. I want to know, like, if we end up overlapping the same city, or if we're going to overlap in the same city, I would love to know that in advance so we can kind of arrange some plans. Maybe meet for a meal, plan some stuff out. But you might have noticed that Instagram had launched their kind of, you could call it status updates.

• 20:48Speaker 01

  Those status updates are, I would say, at least in my feed, 90% of it is just people telling their friends which city they're in. And I don't know if Instagram had either envisioned that that would be the primary use case for their status updates.

• 21:07Speaker 01

  But I think it says something really important, which is friends want to know where their other friends are. So a lot of people, and including myself, I have a lot of my close friends on Find My Friends. And that's, you know, that's, that's Apple's kind of take on this, like, call it pseudo-social network. But it's, it's a very flat, you know, there isn't much depth to Find My Friends. And instead, What I would love to see is where I could push a button. It just automatically updates my location. The feed would be incredibly simple. It shows your friends based on your proximity to them. So just imagine your face right next to mine. It's like, oh, we're overlapping in Montreal.

• 21:52Speaker 01

  I shoot you a text and I'm like, hey, we should, we should grab a meal. I saw that you're in Montreal. And I'm, I'm sure you remember, I don't know how many, how many of your listeners remember this. Maybe this is dating us a little bit. About 10 to 12 years ago, there is a private social network called Path that had kind of taken, you know, really the media. It, it had kind of taken off on its own. And the whole premise of Path was a privatized, closed social network of your close friends, family members. So you're only able to, I think, have up to 75 friends. I'm not sure on the exact number of that, but you only wanted to accept friends that were your true friends, your, call it 75 best friends.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  And you would be able to kind of see their lives through a series of photos and, you know, videos and status updates and locations. But people have been wanting a path-like social network for so long because, you know, Twitter is a completely different product today. Facebook is a completely different product. And now, you know, we kind of use Instagram for letting our friends know where we're at. Some of us still use Snap. I think there's a vertical in which people can build this incredibly simple micro social network.

• 23:11Greg Isenberg?

  Quick ad break. Let me tell you about a business I invested in. It's called BoringMarketing.com. So a few years ago, I met this group of people that were some of the best SEO experts in the world. They were behind getting some of the biggest companies found on Google. And the secret sauce is they've got a set of technology and AI that could help you outrank your competition. So for my own businesses, I wanted that. I didn't want to have to rely on Mark Zuckerberg. I didn't want to depend. Depend on ads to drive customers to my businesses. I've wanted to rank high in Google. That's why I like SEO and that's why I use boringmarketing.com. And that's why I invested in it.

• 23:54Greg Isenberg?

  They're so confident in their approach that they offer a 30 day sprint with 100% money back guarantee. Who does that nowadays? So check it out. Highly recommend boringmarketing.com. So yeah, let's talk about, first of all, I just want to say something that I always, when it comes to building a new startup,

• 24:14Greg Isenberg?

  social, consumer social, I'm always like, don't do it, Greg, don't do it, Greg, don't do it, Greg. And then I'm like sketching it out and then it's like, oh, no, I'm doing it. The reason, the reason is it's, it's playing startups on hard mode. It is just so hard to do it well. Now, I will say what changes it a little bit is with AI now, it is faster to create these products. So you don't need to raise $2 million and hire a team of 10 to beta test this. Now, what you're talking about with path, I think people need to study path, especially, you know, because people have probably forgotten. Someone in the comment section is going to be like, I didn't forget.

• 24:57Greg Isenberg?

  I, I, I hear you, but most people who are listening to this have not heard of path. It was 150 people, up to 150 people that you can have on path. And the reason why it was 150 people, I don't know if you remember this, is because it had to do with a sociology theory called Dunbar's number. Dunbar's number was the theory that human beings can only maintain about 150 connections max at once. But when you think about today's world and social media, like we follow hundreds, thousands, we're seeing tweets, posts, TikToks everywhere, right? So what was path?

• 25:40Greg Isenberg?

  Path was the anti-version of the current state of social networks. Now, path actually ended up selling for like $100 million to Google. I think this idea, which your idea, which is basically like reinvent path for today's.

• 25:57Greg Isenberg?

  For today is really interesting. I'm not convinced that it's the I'm in a new city. Like, I need to, you know, I'm in a city and like you're in the city and like, let's hang out. But I think the idea around a social network called Dunbar, I think that you get like the name of it is Dunbar. Cause then there's a story about Dunbar. And, oh, what's Dunbar? Oh, it's an app where you can have max 15 people. And like you can do X, Y, Z things and then you just clone it. And then you run a PR machine to get like everywhere. Everyone wants to write about how every legacy media company hates social media. So they're going to be happy to write about how you're going to try to kill it.

• 26:40Greg Isenberg?

  And why it's ruining your lives. That's, that's my take. What do you think?

• 26:45Speaker 01

  No, I, I, I like that. I like the branding around it too. I, I, I think a lot of people in, in our industry who had got to play with path. And, you know, even more broadly than our industry have kind of wanted a path for 2024, 2025. Right? What does it look like today? To your point, the reason why we haven't seen one since the existence of path is because, like you said, consumer and social are like oil and water. It's just, it's so hard to mix, almost impossible and quite nearly impossible. Right? So, so many companies have tried to build consumer social products.

• 27:28Speaker 01

  I think there is such a demand for it, but when there aren't network effects or, you know, kind of levels of scale to it, it kind of really becomes difficult. So if I'm the only one on this app and none of my friends are on it. And there's like, I have some internet friends who I don't consider to be close friends, where I feel comfortable enough, either sharing my location or photos, whatever. It becomes really tricky. I, my very specific use case was around, I love, you know, kind of seeing where my friends are at any given time, like, oh, cool. You know, they're, and it doesn't have to be like the exact GPS location. It has to be.

• 28:08Speaker 01

  Like, assuming we're close enough friends and we see that we're in a different city in Europe, and we have plans to kind of like meet up, it kind of creates, it's a conversation starter. And I feel like most social networks kind of today are, you're kind of taking in a lot of information. You're not contributing, you're kind of just lurking around. So if you could kind of get the consumer to create information or to create something to discuss, or to spark a conversation, that that would hopefully create more engagement around the app. But I think to your point, there's a lot of ways to go around it.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  The desire for having a closed off network with your friends, because everything is so public these days, is certainly there. Hopefully someone builds it and hopefully we can use it.

• 28:58Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, and I think that with the location bit, I think what was cool about Path back in the day, and like people should really look at it, like when you used to open up Path, I'm pretty sure you used to say like, "Good morning from Hayes Valley", you know, it like knew your neighborhood even, Hayes Valley, San Francisco, neighborhood in San Francisco. So I think that if, honestly, like I kind of want to do this, but like someone should just clone Path. Like, look at exactly what they did, clone Path, make it like a little more shinier, a little more glossier, a little more beautiful in today's 2025 standards. But like from a, dude, I hate to, I hate to admit this publicly, I'm just gonna go ahead and say this,

• 29:44Greg Isenberg?

  because whatever, if you're gonna judge me, judge me. I went on Facebook the other day, because I wasn't, I wasn't, no, it gets worse. It gets way worse.

• 29:58Greg Isenberg?

  I went on Facebook yesterday, because I wasn't sure if it was a friend of mine's birthday, and I knew he, I had him on Facebook, so I was like, "Oh, let me check, see if it's his birthday."

• 30:10Greg Isenberg?

  So I go on Facebook, lo and behold, 45 minutes passed, and I'm just scrolling Facebook, and the worst part about it is I'm enjoying every second of it.

• 30:23Speaker 01

  What were you scrolling? Were you looking at photos? Were you looking at memories? Just through the timeline.

• 30:31Greg Isenberg?

  I was everywhere, bro. I was everywhere. I was like, I started off on the, just like the the feed. I was going down the feed and let me open it up. I was scrolling on the feed and I just loved how, you know, oh, someone moved to Bend, Oregon. Like, I had no idea. Like, that's an, that's an, you would never like, I don't know if you'd post that on Instagram. Like, you might just, you might, but you might not. And then I got like, you know, a Facebook group update that was like really interesting. And then I see this, like, someone is playing tennis and it's like a week ago, right? Because Facebook is like not, you know, but my point is, I started

• 31:15Greg Isenberg?

  thinking to myself, it would be cool, like, Facebook as a product is pretty amazing. Like, the profiles that you can like, explain who you are and customize your profile to a certain extent is like, quite interesting. It just sucks because like, it's Facebook. And you know what I mean? So, what was Path? Path was a reinvention of Facebook. Mobile first, max 150 people. Someone needs to take this idea. It will, it will work. Someone could make this work and create a really nice business. Path used to monetize via selling sticker packs, I

• 31:56Greg Isenberg?

  believe. They used to sell sticker packs and charge two, three, four, five bucks. There's a way to just charge $20 a year, $30 a year, and people will pay for this if you start getting a network effect. And there is demand from people to do this. And this is a multimillion dollar a year idea. You could do a bootstrapped.

• 32:16Speaker 01

  That's right. And I also think, I mean, you look at the progression of Snap as a company and where they've been able to monetize from. And even Instagram, right? It's like sponsored posts and very curated to the user sponsored posts, relevant ads. I

• 32:40Speaker 01

  I also, so there's this wild idea, but this is very kind of like tech forward and less kind of steers us away from this idea, but I'm going to come back to it. I, I've thought about this a lot, you know, with chat GPT launching two or three years ago now. And companies constantly trying to train their local language, you know, their large language models with more information. I feel like there's a future in which we will, you know, the SaaS subscription model, which we call it $8 a month, $16 a month, and then there's an enterprise plan, right? Very, very typical SaaS structure.

• 33:21Speaker 01

  That gets replaced with being able to commit your personal data. So I'm not, I'm talking about like anonymized data where this data gets anonymized and then someone like Facebook can basically train on it. So just like, oh, and we're talking not necessarily Shaw met up with Greg, but it's like, oh, there's a connection that was made here. Maybe that data is relevant, maybe that data is not relevant, but I do think there will be at some point, my hunch is a future in which we can pay for premium subscriptions with our own anonymized data. And hopefully someone builds a path.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  And I do want to kind of, kind of double click into your, you know, your 10 minutes over 30 minutes of Facebook screen time for a second, which is, this kind of goes into my third idea. And this is because of something that I find myself doing quite often, which is I will go into my iCloud photos, I'll go, I'll just open up the Photos app and I'll try to find a specific memory and I'll try to create a sticker out of it so I could send it to a friend. And I'll just find myself 20 minutes deep into like looking through photos from the past. So, shared albums, my, my take on this is shared albums are where your memories go

• 34:50Speaker 01

  to die. I want to be able to share a, and the idea here is what I'm calling time capsules of your shared memories. So I want to be able to share a physical. Time capsule of the memories I've made with friends, either on trips or just at dinner at their home. You and I hosted a dinner at your place in San Francisco. I actually had a memory for that on Facebook. Funny enough, we talked about that. That must have been eight years ago, seven years ago, let's say. And that was a super fun dinner. But how often do we come back to that

• 35:30Speaker 01

  period of our lives, right? Just like the beautiful bliss of pre-COVID, everyone living in San Francisco, us hosting a dinner together and having our friends over was awesome. But if I was like, oh, it's Greg's birthday, I want to send him a present. I want to send him a memory of both of us. And sure, I could send him photos of us from my iCloud. Or I could somehow curate this time capsule and send it to him. That's a very personal, high-touch gift. And I think for it to work, it has to be ephemeral, because I don't want you to feel like you're getting, assuming this takes off, it gets widely adopted, now everyone's sending you these

• 36:14Speaker 01

  time capsules, and now you feel obligated to hold on to these time capsules. It has to feel ephemeral enough, where it obviously is super curated. And it should feel as if you're reliving that memory. But it's ephemeral enough where you could also toss it out if you want to, after pulling on to it for a day, a week, or two weeks. But that's my third idea. And this takes a page out of the book of Path and a page out of the book of Clout, if you remember Clout.

• 36:46Greg Isenberg?

  Of course. Tell people what it was for people who don't remember.

• 36:49Speaker 01

  So Clout was the social network that really monetized on nostalgia. And what that means is

• 36:59Speaker 01

  I would hook up, I would basically connect all of my social network accounts of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram at the time, and any other social network. And Klout would send me a reminder of, this is before Facebook had memories built into their app. Klout, this is around 2013, so we're talking about 11 years ago. Klout would send you a reminder of this memory you had with a friend of yours. And it was done so well. People, humans love nostalgia. They love to look back on life and be like, wow, that was an incredible time. I'm glad we got to like, you know, share that moment, yada, yada.

• 37:38Speaker 01

  And it just, it did nostalgia so well in a social format where, because I was reminded of my trip to South by Southwest at the Amex, you know, sponsored show where they had Jay-Z there. I was inclined to be, you know, Klout had really clicked in on the idea of if we can send the emotions of nostalgia to this user of something that has happened, you know, that they posted in the past, the likelihood of them sharing that out to their friends is very high. So Klout went viral as a result of people sharing their nostalgia.

• 38:19Speaker 01

  But it failed to kind of really sustain in a world where Facebook had the network effects and Instagram had the network effects. People would only come to Klout to see their memories and share it to these other platforms. So it didn't have its own network effects and ultimately led to, I think they ended up getting acquired. But there's always room for nostalgia and I think we're, this is very nostalgic ironically for us to talk about. We're talking about two apps from 11 years ago that we both loved. And I think there, you know, this concept of time capsules of these shared memories of memorabilia or, you know, photos printed out on a note card with a signature in the

• 39:03Speaker 01

  little box, nice packaged well, shipped to you, sounds super cool.

• 39:10Greg Isenberg?

  And people are gonna be like, why are these people bringing up such old apps? Like, why bring up Klout? Why bring up Path? These things, people, people don't change. Like, human beings don't change, our needs don't change. The products that we create change based on how we consume it and shifts like that. But I like this idea. I had a, I actually said something that went viral. I said nostalgia is a hell of a drug. And I like this idea because I think it, not only is there a business here, it's also like, I actually think that it'll really put smiles on people's faces.

• 39:54Greg Isenberg?

  I'm also one of those people that, like, just last week, I came across some old photos. I agree with your thesis on this, by the way, that shared albums is where memories go to die. I sent over like five photos to my group chat of like friends. And everyone was like, it made their day. It made their day. But then those photos are gonna, like, they're dead. Like, they, you know? So there's something here. And I think the catchiness of shared photos are going to die

• 40:31Greg Isenberg?

  is enough to create a business around it.

• 40:37Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I think there's something between a photo that you sent to a friend, you know, in a text thread and a digital album that you have on your nightstand. Something in between needs to exist, and it doesn't today. And there's clear opportunity for someone to go out there and build it.

• 40:58Greg Isenberg?

  Dude, thank you for sharing these ideas. I need, I need people to literally just bug, go into the comment section on YouTube and we need to have, we need to have this, this man on again. You know, we have to convince him in 2025 to come on again and to thank him. So I appreciate you. Where could?

• 41:24Greg Isenberg?

  What do you, do you have anything to plug at this point?

• 41:26Speaker 01

  Uh, no, just, uh, you know, really happy to be here, happy to see you. Um, if you wanna, you know, I, I often tweet about kind of ideas like this that I find when I travel or when I'm just kind of walking my dog on the West Side Highway. Um, you know, go follow me on Twitter, uh, underscore S H A H E D K. Um, tweet at me if you have any ideas, if you're building any things that we mentioned, would love to, love to take a look, would love to give feedback also on Instagram, wherever you can find me. Would love to connect.

• 42:02Greg Isenberg?

  Beautiful. All right, my man. This has been a treat. Thank you so much.

• 42:06Speaker 01

  Appreciate you having me on.

• 42:08Greg Isenberg?

  Later.