I challenged Genspark to be my AI Co-Founder (Honest Review + Tutorial)

On this episode, I provide an unsponsored review of GenSpark, testing its capabilities across multiple business applications. I evaluate the platform's ability to create investor decks, product demos, customer personas, and marketing strategies. While I was impressed with GenSpark's research capabilities and business-oriented content, the product had significant limitations in design quality and occasional content confusion. Timestamps: 00:00 - Intro 00:55 - Genspark Super AI Agent Overview 03:28 - Building Fundraising Deck 07:33 - Building Product Demo 10:46 - Generating Social Media Strategy 16:26 - Building Fundraising Deck Pt2 17:17 - Building Data Room 18:59 - Researching Ideal Customer Persona 21:52 - Mapping/Researching Distribution Channels 24:05 - Final Thoughts on Genspark 25:43 - Genspark does not have Self Service Subscription Cancellation Key Points: • GenSpark is a new AI agent platform that reached $36 million ARR in 45 days, adding almost $1 million daily • Greg tests multiple use cases including creating investor presentations, product demos, customer research, and distribution strategies • The platform shows strengths in research and content creation but weaknesses in design and image generation • At $25/month, GenSpark offers value for specific use cases but isn't a complete replacement for other AI tools 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, we're going to look at GenSpark, the super agent platform. You see it right now. It's got AI slides, AI sheets, download for me, deep research, call for me, fact checking, all these AI agents, and it's adding almost a million dollars ARR a day because it's going viral. Now, is it hype or is this the new Manus, new ChatGPT? Today, we're going to find out. I take you through it all around prompts that help you build your business zero to one, how to market your business, how to sell your business, how do you create a deck that raises $2 million? Can GenSpark use its suite of agents and super agents to help you have an unfair advantage in your business?

• 0:45Greg Isenberg?

  Today, we're going to find out.

• 0:56Greg Isenberg?

  Today, we're going to dig into GenSpark. They call themselves the super agent platform, and they're competing with ChatGPT, Claude, Manus, but is GenSpark the new Manus, ChatGPT, or is it hype? I wanted to find out, and that's what we're going to do today. We're just going to go through a bunch of prompts to find out if GenSpark is super, super valuable to people like us, people who are building zero to one, people who are looking to get more productive, people are looking to make internet money. So if you've never heard of GenSpark, it used to be a search engine. I think it had about 5 million users. Then they launched the agent platform about two months ago.

• 1:40Greg Isenberg?

  It hit 10 million ARR in nine days. Now they're at 36 million ARR in 45 days. They're basically adding almost a million dollars a day in ARR. Let's dig in to see if these agents are any good. So I went to GenSpark and I basically said, hey, I've done this video on perplexity labs, where I showed founders how to use perplexity to replace their copywriters, salespeople, film directors. I want to do the same for GenSpark, different use cases and stuff like that. And I basically asked it to give me game-changing prompts. So it gave me a bunch. It gave me, you know, replacing a market research agency, replacing a business development

• 2:25Greg Isenberg?

  consultant, replacing competitive analysis firm, replacing a content marketing agency, replacing a growth marketing agency, replacing a sales consultant. You get the idea. I asked more. I was like, I want to make sure that these are the best prompts for 0 to $10 million AR founders, people who are starting from scratch. It gave me some more. And in this episode, we're just going to go through some of these and just see, you know, I'm going to give you my honest opinion. I'm not sponsored by GenSpark. I don't know anyone at GenSpark. I paid $25 for access to this and we're going to go through this together. And by

• 3:06Greg Isenberg?

  the end of it, we're just going to see, you know, is it worth it and how to think about using GenSpark? Because I have heard a lot of good things about it, but you never know in this day and age. So that's why I'm here. I'm here to like, basically help you figure out, you know, what's signal and what's noise. So let's get into it. So the first prompt I did, I said, I'm raising a seed round for my company, ideabrowser.com. I say, research it, which is a suite of ideas, tools, trends for people looking to build startups, create a compelling investor presentation that tells our story with data-driven slides. And then I basically asked it to come up with, you know, some specific slides.

• 3:54Greg Isenberg?

  So it comes up with it. And as you can see on the left-hand side, GenSpark has like an AI slides product, an AI sheets product. And so that's one of the reasons why I picked this one. I wanted to see can, is it possible to create really good research slides? I've used other products. I've used Gamma. I've used Manus for slides. I'm still looking for like a really good AI slides product. And, you know, if I, if this can actually do it, design a 15-minute presentation that gets investors excited to write checks of $2, $3 million, it's gonna be helpful for a lot of people here listening. So I'm using idea browser.com, my startup, just because I'm curious what it's gonna say. But it,

• 4:39Greg Isenberg?

  first of all, the design does not look that awesome. It's, you know, you know, okay, I'll call, I'll call it what it is. The design looks lame, super lame, but I'm reading here and, you know, the startup opportunity ideas are everywhere. I really like that. The entrepreneurial explosion. You know, a lot of this content is pretty good. Time spent on idea validation, like, yes, like, this is interesting to me. As someone who's building, you know, this product, where it's a database of ideas and trends and AI agents to help people through the idea process, you know, that is interesting to me. You

• 5:20Greg Isenberg?

  know, I've never thought about it like that. The average founder spent 155 hours on validation before building. So I'm liking the research. I'm not liking the design. And I'm not gonna go into every single slide, but just like looking at it from a gut reaction perspective, it's done a really good job, better than most in the research. And from a design perspective, mid, as the kids say. So I'm gonna go and ask it to, I'm just gonna be like, hey, GenSpark,

• 5:56Greg Isenberg?

  I find the content of this presentation to be an eight on 10, but the design is a super mid, three on 10. I want something more similar to the design of my website, idea browser.com, which I find clean, fresh, and crisp.

• 6:23Greg Isenberg?

  Can you redesign it with that in mind? So let's see what happens there. I anticipate this is going to take some time. So we'll come back to this. And we will, we will see. 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.

• 7:04Greg 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. And let's go to another prompt and see what happens. The next prompt I said was, "Create an interactive product demo experience for idea browser.com that converts prospects into customers. Build a single-page HTML demo that includes interactive product walkthrough showing key

• 7:49Greg Isenberg?

  features, customer success stories with embedded testimonials, pricing calculator shows ROI, lead capture forms integrated throughout social proof, et cetera, et cetera. Make it load fast and look like it costs 25K to build." So this is testing, basically building apps on GenSpark. And it created this, I think it took like a few minutes. And the funny thing is, I'm looking at it and this is like, I don't understand what it's saying. Resolve conflicts without breaking the bank. It's like... What? And then I realized that this is actually the idea of the day. So what happened was Genspark actually went on idea browser.com.

• 8:33Greg Isenberg?

  It found the idea of the day, which is basically an AI-powered alternative to hiring a mediator or lawyer. It's this idea that, you know, for $99 a month, you can have this like SaaS app that's AI-powered that helps mediate, for example, couples who are trying to get divorced and stuff like that. So that's what it did. So it made that mistake, but then I'm like, this is really interesting. So it basically thinks that that is the startup in that, you know, is idea browser.com. So huge miss. But then I'm looking at this SaaS app and this is brilliant, right? So you upload your documents. So let's just assume that, you know, it's trying to build out this idea, right?

• 9:18Greg Isenberg?

  From idea browser. Securely upload legal documents, emails and relevant files. Our AI analyzes instantly AI analysis and strategy. Get personal mediation strategy based on thousands of successful cases. Practice conversations, role-play, role-play difficult conversations with AI coaching to build confidence and then reach an agreement. Generate fair proposals and track progress until both parties agree. So it's basically taken the idea from idea browser and built a app that, you know, is like working, which is crazy and gets me thinking that a lot of people are going to

• 10:03Greg Isenberg?

  go onto idea browser, look at some of our database of ideas and just use products like this to create it. So I think this is interesting. What happens if I just actually try this feature? Like, is this just the front end, right? It's probably just the front end. So I asked it, does it actually work? It says, let me test the demo I created to see if it's actually working. Using the tool, it's capturing the screen. That's pretty cool. So it's actually. It's actually like going through the website and checking it. So it says that it's working, the live demo works, the ROI calculator works. That's cool. I mean, pretty cool. I like what I saw there.

• 10:47Greg Isenberg?

  Let's, uh, let's do one more and then we'll go back to the slides. So this prompt is about social media. So I need to dominate social media to build my personal brand as a founder. I know a lot of people listening here are trying to build their personal brand. So let's see what, what we can do. Create a complete visual content system, including 20 quote graphics with the best insights about startup ideas. It actually, I put startup ideas because that's my niche. So you would, you know, whatever niche you're in, you would obviously put that there. Infographics, templates for sharing, industry data, social media, post templates for LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram. Branded slide templates, yada, yada, yada.

• 11:30Greg Isenberg?

  Generate actual images I can use immediately and templates I can customize. Focus on content that positions me as a go-to expert in my niche, startup ideas. Okay, so it's given me 20 quote graphics, seven templates, 90 day content calendar, all ready to use.

• 11:49Greg Isenberg?

  Every unicorn, every unicorn startup with this, well, mm, look, they spelled, see how they spelled startup?

• 11:56Greg Isenberg?

  That's how you know that's, could be AI, right? So you hate to see that. You, you're starting to see this here, look, for solution, flesh, you know, no, no, no, no, no. Text is remarkably bad for, um, yeah, yeah, for, you know, with AI, you want to limit the amount of text. And just in general, here's like a tip for you. If you, if you include the text in a JSON format, it's more likely to give you the right text. So this was a huge, that sucked.

• 12:38Greg Isenberg?

  The, the templates, like just looking at these templates, like they kind of look mid in terms of the design. But I will say like, these things work, right? Like five key startup metrics that matter, like that probably will work. Three-step frameworks, that's probably going to work on a LinkedIn carousel. Like they've got the framework right, but the design.

• 12:59Greg Isenberg?

  Is not great. That's cool. It gives you a little content calendar, which I do, I do think that's really cool. It gives you, you know, weekly themes to think about. I think that's cool.

• 13:14Greg Isenberg?

  That's actually well done.

• 13:17Greg Isenberg?

  You know, behind the scenes kind of like, it's giving you a lot of good advice. The design's just not great. What to avoid? Don't post without adding your own perspective or experience. I guess this is good advice. Always add personal commentary to quote graphics. This is really good advice. Engage with comments within two hours of posting. Good advice. Use relevant hashtags. I find hashtags to be cringe personally.

• 13:40Greg Isenberg?

  But, you know, tell me what you think in the comments.

• 13:48Greg Isenberg?

  Target metrics, like overall, like interesting. I wouldn't, like, I don't think this like replaces your social media manager

• 14:00Greg Isenberg?

  in one prompt, but I, you know, it would be interesting to see if you can,

• 14:08Greg Isenberg?

  if you can continue to prompt this to get this to,

• 14:12Greg Isenberg?

  like, let's see if we can like, okay, so first of all, interesting thing, it uses flux. So it uses flux here. And it tells you what it uses. It also, it also gives you the ability to make it image to video. That's a really good feature. So I'm going to say, I'm just going to prompt and say,

• 14:33Greg Isenberg?

  I don't like this quote. Use quote from famous person who knows stuff about startup ideas. And make the design fresh, clean,

• 14:51Greg Isenberg?

  and crunchy. And let's just see what happens.

• 14:57Greg Isenberg?

  Let's see if it goes and researches like what, you know, obviously a quote by Sam Altman about a startup idea is going to be better than

• 15:06Greg Isenberg?

  Felipe Carré, who I have no idea who that, you know, obviously this, I don't think that's a real person. So it's interesting. It's using the tool and

• 15:18Greg Isenberg?

  Oh wow, okay, so it's creating multiple of them. Reid Hoffman, Eric Ries, Mark Cuban. And that's the thing with a lot of these tools, honestly, is like, we expect to one-prompt it and it's perfect. And the reality is, it's not the case. It's really, really not the case. Like, people one-prompt and then they're like, wow, ha, ha, ha, AI sucks. Because the, you know, look at how they spell love. They put a one in it, but it's like, well, if you continue prompting it, you could get it to a place that's better. Or you can't, you know? Or you can't, but you know, it's good to see, like, wow, okay. So basically, what have we learned here?

• 16:02Greg Isenberg?

  We've learned that GenSpark basically can't do quotes or text on images. So that's a big miss. It's getting me excited. I'm literally taking off my sweater because I was getting excited. You know? I was getting really excited there and, all right. Well, that's a miss from GenSpark on that one. All right, next prompt. Actually, let's go back to see if our design worked for our fundraising deck. Way cleaner.

• 16:42Greg Isenberg?

  It's not taking my idea browser logo, which I would have loved. It's only, it's taking the blue, which is cool. It's, it's fine. This is, it's fine. Like, it went from a two or three on 10 to a five or six on 10. So this is, you know, this is, like, this is valuable to have. This is valuable to have. And, you know, it's $25 for a monthly thing here. So even that alone is valuable. All right. Let's go to create a comprehensive fundraising package that proves my startup idea browser.com is investable.

• 17:26Greg Isenberg?

  Build a data room website with organized financial documents and metrics, traction, visualize dashboard showing growth trends, market analysis slides with compelling charts, financial model with scenario planning visuals, customer testimonial showcase page, team credentials presentation, competitive analysis with positioning maps, and an executive summary with key metrics highlighted. Make it look like we hired McKinsey to prepare our fundraising materials. So I actually don't find this to be super helpful from a fundraising perspective, but if you're selling a company, and I've sold companies before, you're going to want a data room. And making a data room is super lame.

• 18:07Greg Isenberg?

  So looking at this, the fact that it's a conservative scenario, base case, aggressive, pretty cool. I mean, some stuff that's not true. We don't have an advisory board or investors, but funny that all of these are my old investors from my last company. So anyways, pretty interesting. Like, good to know. Good to know that you can basically build a data room and on the fly in a web app and send this over. And then you can just, you know, obviously, this isn't real information, but you would upload your documents to make sure that it puts your information in.

• 18:52Greg Isenberg?

  So next time you want to create a data room, GenSpark might be for you. Okay, I'm building, okay, next prompt. I'm building idea browser.com, a database of validated startup ideas, trends and tools to build a business that's more likely to succeed. I need to understand my ideal customers inside and out. Super important, by the way. Like, can we get GenSpark to basically create a report with actionable insights for messaging, positioning and outreach? Researching, you know, I'm continuing the prompt. Research and create detailed customer personas for my target market, including their biggest pain points, what they complain about online, where they hang out, what language they use to describe their problems.

• 19:37Greg Isenberg?

  Their buying triggers, objections they typically have in the exact moments they realize they need a solution like mine. So, so key to have this insight. You know, when I'm building businesses, I want to know this. So let's see if it was able to do it for idea browser.com. So it gives the demographic profile. Experience year to two previous startup attempts. Current status, either pre-Idea validation or stuck in building within validation phase. Like, I find this really helpful. Major pain points, direct quotes from research. I spent six months building features nobody wanted. It's really hard to find problem, find those problems. What if you don't know who the customer is?

• 20:18Greg Isenberg?

  I wish there was a website that just listed different, different real customer pain points by industry. Most no-code tools available, but difficulty building their MVP. Anyways, point is, they nailed the pain points. The specific language they use, I'm looking for my next idea. Why is this so key? Is that you can actually feed this in to Claude and say, you know, write copy on my landing page based on these pain points and specific language they use. And that's going to help you convert better on whatever it is you're working on. So, you know, exact moments they realize they need help. I really like that.

• 21:01Greg Isenberg?

  Emotional triggers, price objectives, skepticism. This is, this is probably one of the best prompts. This is, this is the best prompt out of all of them I've seen so far. Like, this is, and then it says feature prioritization based on pain points? You kidding me? Says what they'll pay for, time savings, risk reductions, avoiding another failed venture. I mean, this is all true. This is all true. Must have features. Come on, this is so good. This is really, this is really good. This, I think GenSpark is probably, it's, yeah. It's, if it wasn't worth it for the data room, whenever you sell your company, I think it probably is just for this one.

• 21:43Greg Isenberg?

  And by the way, they have a free, a free plan as well. Okay, let's do, let's see if we have time for a couple more.

• 21:53Greg Isenberg?

  I'm a bootstrap founder with idea browser.com, targeting founders and solo entrepreneurs. Again, that's my space, but you would put whatever it is you're working on. Map out every possible distribution channel and partnership opportunity for my business. Include direct sales, partnership opportunities, platform integrations, affiliate programs, marketplace opportunities, and unconventional growth channels my competitors haven't discovered. For each channel, estimate effort required, time to results, and potential acquisition cost. So, obviously, super important. Let's see if they can do it. Complete distribution channel map for idea browser.com. Okay, so the highest impact they're saying is content-led growth.

• 22:37Greg Isenberg?

  I think that's right. The content ties 50 startup ideas from Reddit this week. That's good. Trend analysis reports, that's good. Founder journey stories, that's good. That's on point. This is what I'm learning about Gen Spark is like the design of things, the images, not great, but the actual content, pretty good. Long tail keywords around startup ideas and trends, free tier with viral mechanics, approach daily idea email plus limited database access. So we already have that. People can get a free startup idea on idea browser.com. So I'm wondering why it gave me the same, the same idea, but I'll skip that one. Or I'll, I won't judge you on too much on that one.

• 23:22Greg Isenberg?

  But yeah, this is like, okay, platform integrations and marketplace opportunities. Connect idea browser to Slack, Trello, and Ocean Airtable. Automate weekly idea delivery to team channels. Pretty interesting, except, you know, do teams want new startup ideas in their channels? Yeah, actually, maybe. Who knows?

• 23:43Greg Isenberg?

  Ooh, app marketplace listings, create a Shopify app store, e-commerce business ideas section, word plus plugin directory, Chrome extension store. This is really good. This is really good. I won't go through all this, but I'm thinking about idea browser a lot. And you know, some of these, some of these ideas I've had and some of these ideas are like, oh, I never thought of it that way. And that's why it's interesting. My gut take on GenSpark is, you know, is it the Manus killer? Is it the ChatGPT killer? No. But is it interesting and something that you want to put as a part of like your cocktail of different tools that you're using to get a diverse opinion on a particular

• 24:24Greg Isenberg?

  problem? Yes. Like, you know, if you're trying to create a social media calendar, or you're trying to do some market research, or you know, you're trying to build a SaaS app, like, or a lead magnet, you might want to go to Manus, you might want to go to GenSpark, you might want to go to ChatGPT, you might want to go to Perplexity Labs, and just see what is working best for you, you know? And that's kind of, that's kind of how I see it right now. Like, I'm in, I'm sort of in wait and see mode with GenSpark. I've seen a couple of interesting things. I've seen some big misses, seen some big misses, like some, some of the design stuff, that was, that was horrible. And it's kind of like, missing it with respect to what, you know, what idea browser.com really is. So that,

• 25:09Greg Isenberg?

  you know, that was a miss, and you have to like, kind of re-prompt it, you know? Don't love that. Don't love that. But I think a lot of the formatting, I think some of the research was really good. I think, I also find they're not just like writing content for the sake of content. So I found it like, very concise and clear. So, overall, GenSpark, it's worth a shot. It's worth trying. And, and seeing what, yeah, seeing what you get out of it. Okay, after I recorded this episode, I tried to cancel my GenSpark, and just go down to the free version. And I literally couldn't figure out how to do it.

• 25:53Greg Isenberg?

  And so I went on GenSpark and I basically asked it, "How do you cancel your GenSpark?" And it basically says, "I couldn't find a self-service cancellation option directly on GenSpark's website." And then it gives you email support and a phone number, and there's no self-service option. And that gave me an idea for a tweet. "Never trust a company that makes canceling your monthly subscription harder than signing up." Not cool. Not cool, GenSpark. Not cool at all. So I just wanted to let people know that.

• 26:38Greg Isenberg?

  There's a lot of good in the product. But I just feel like it's dishonest when companies hide the cancellation button. So my recommendation for people is try out the free version. See if it works for you. And if you do get in your workflow, definitely upgrade if you can use more of it. And yeah, you know, it's just gonna, but it's gonna be, you know. I don't know if I wouldn't, I probably wouldn't use sensitive data on this product. This is like, you know, Toby from Shopify, founder of Shopify, has this really good

• 27:22Greg Isenberg?

  concept called the trust battery, where you trust a person, you know, you hire someone and, you know, they might start at 50% and then they do a lot of good work and have high integrity, and now they're 70%. Or maybe they do something shady and they go to 30%. Well, I think we have trust batteries for companies too. So, you know, I think.

• 27:42Greg Isenberg?

  Jen Spark lost 20% of my books. I don't know about you. But let me know in the comments what you think. And I just wanted to give you all a heads up about that. Not cool, right? Not cool. Thanks for listening to the episode. I think I think I need to do like a comparison episode like Manus. What's Manus good for? What's ChatGPT good for? Which model for this? Which model for that? And just do like, it might be, it might be like a two hour episode, but breaking down what you should use what for. So if people are interested, let me think about that. Let me know in the comments. I read every single comment. I appreciate every single like.

• 28:23Greg Isenberg?

  And I'm learning alongside you and showing you what I've learned along the way. So I hope it's helpful. Have a creative day, friends.