Gemini 4 Argon: AI Marketing, 3D Printing and SaaS

Gemini 4 Argon is LIVE, Google's most advanced AI model, try it for yourself: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/gemini4-argon In this solo episode, I share what I learned after a week with Gemini 4 Argon, Google's new frontier model. I show three places it shines: marketing with AI, physical AI, and complex engineering, with a real build for each. You'll see Argon rebuild my holding company's website, write a post in my voice, design a Shopify product customizer that exports STL files, and build a free quoting app for commercial cleaning companies. I close with six techniques that raise Argon's output quality and the Google AI plan I'd pick for building. Timestamps 00:00 – Intro 01:35 – What Gemini 4 Argon Does Well 03:09 – Rebuilding the Late Checkout Website 07:49 – Justine Moore's Apple Computer Museum 09:20 – Using Argon for writing 13:03 – Physical AI and Vibe Manufacturing 17:41 – Made-to-Order Shopify Store 19:01 – Building Boring SaaS 21:59 – Commercial Cleaning Quote App 25:12 – 6 techniques to get the most out of Argon 28:39 – Closing Thoughts Key Points Argon produces premium creative work once I give it reference images and a clear direction. A skill built from my posts, newsletters, and videos lets Argon write in my voice. Argon builds Shopify product customizers that export print-ready STL files. Free, focused rebuilds of boring legacy SaaS put me in front of likely buyers. Argon gets the engineering right on prompt one, and design takes a few more rounds. /plan, /subagents, and /goal give me the biggest jumps in output quality. 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/ FIND ME ON SOCIAL X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/

• 0:00Speaker 00

  I've used Gemini for Argon nonstop for the last seven days and I had to come on and share what I found. You know, most people are going to use Argon, just like every other AI, but there are three specific problems where if you just point Argon to it, it can help you build a real business and no one on the internet is talking about it and no one's telling you how to do it. I'm going to tell you. By the end of this episode, you're going to know how to use Argon three ways. The first is vibe marketing. How to use Argon to get customers to your startup. I truly believe it's the best AI for writing right now and I'm going to show you how to set it up to write just like you and all the skills and everything. Second, we're going to talk about vibe manufacturing. Argon is really good at helping you design

• 0:43Speaker 00

  personalized physical products. I'm going to show you exactly how to do it, all the CAD files and everything. And third, how can you use Argon to point it at legacy SaaS products that people are still paying for and just build a better version? I'm going to show you that. I'm going to give away some real sauce around a technique for actually getting customers there. I'm going to walk you through how I would do it. And I want to give a quick thanks to Google for sponsoring today's episode and giving me early access to Argon. Everything you're about to see, I actually built and these are all my personal opinions. And if you stick around to the end, I'll show you six hacks to get way more out of Gemini for Argon than most people will figure out for months. So let's get into it and I'll see you at the end.

• 1:35Speaker 00

  Okay, things to know about Google Argon. What is it amazing at? Well, it's amazing at marketing with AI. So that's important. We need a tool that actually brings you customers. I'm going to show you how to do that and where it's good at it. It's good at physical AI, aka vibe manufacturing. So how do you take STL files and send it to bamboo and 3D print it? I'm going to show you how to do that on demand using Argon. And it's good at complex engineering. So I think that you can point it at, you know, very legacy SaaS products, add your own spin to it, pick a niche, go even nicher, and it could rebuild it relatively

• 2:17Speaker 00

  quickly. And it's, this isn't vibe-coded software. It actually, it is tested. It feels really good. And I've just been so impressed with how you can actually point to complex engineering. I will, I want to get this out of the way. Anti-gravity is not my favorite harness. I think that Google has some catching up to do with anti-gravity and the more I've played with it, the more I was missing some of the other harnesses. Now, you could still use Argon in your cursor or in other harnesses, open code and stuff like that. I just wish that anti-gravity would catch up and I think it will catch up. And I think that, you know,

• 2:59Speaker 00

  one, one reason I think people should actually pay attention to Argon is Google has so much data and they're making so much progress and now they're at the frontier level in terms of a model. So let's talk about marketing with AI. I first want to talk about a website me and my team built in 2021. This website took 40,000 hours to build and it's a, a website that was built for my holding company and it just has all the different buildings for all our different companies. Here you see LCA, our design agency, Boring Marketing, which is our marketing with agents company, careers, all this stuff, right? I can't tell

• 3:41Speaker 00

  you how much money this costs, but I can tell you that, you know, the business has probably brought in more than $40 million of revenue. And a large part of it has to do with this, has to do with this website. And people always tell us how good their website is. I asked Argon to recreate the website. Or actually, I just said, hey, I want a website like this, but can you make it better, basically? And it created this. And it's, first of all, beautiful. I actually gave it the inspiration for, I was like, make it more Mondrian style, Mondrian, the artist. And I think it did such a good job. You know, when you compare it versus

• 4:24Speaker 00

  the one that probably cost us $200,000 to build, I mean, yes, this is really nice, but it's, it's, it's sad in the sense that there's no cars, there's no movement. And the web, the internet has moved, right? And you want things that are more, you know, that you can interact with. And you can see here, there's this like world passport. When you, you know, click on the buildings, there's some sounds and like it gamifies going, looking out all the different building, which is what you want people to do when you want to go to their, their website, right? And I just think there's all these like fun little games

• 5:05Speaker 00

  and things that you can do. Look, shoot a three pointer. Boom, boom, boom. This is crazy. It is crazy that you're able to create this. And when I say marketing with AI or vibe marketing, what I mean by this is why are you creating a normal website in an Argon age? You know, it doesn't make sense anymore, right? Because you want to stand out. And if you could, you know, how do you stand out? Well, the limit isn't the model anymore. The limit is now the imagination. Because when you have a model this good, with an engine this good,

• 5:43Speaker 00

  then you can create stuff like this. Now, my first prompt looked like this. So, and I first was like, hey, make a better version of lecheco.studio and made this. And I think we can all agree that this is pretty brutal. This is really brutal. You know, it got the concept, but it really felt like me, you know, when Mark Zuckerberg like announced the metaverse and it was like that, that like Zuck in 3D and like everyone made fun of him. We'll put that photo up there. It felt like that. And I think the question in the big delta in this

• 6:25Speaker 00

  whole AI era is like, how do you, how do you go from this all the way to this, right? What is the way to do that? And one thing I learned about Argon specifically is it needs good references for good creative. I don't believe that you can get great creative out of Argon unless you give it references. So it actually, in some ways, it's kind of great because you don't want to outsource all your creative thinking to AI, because then you end up creating stuff that doesn't really stand out. I think this has the power to it, but you do need to like, you know, give it, give it that, those references. Initially,

• 7:10Speaker 00

  it created like all these, you know, way too many buildings and the buildings were everywhere. And I was just like, it's too much stuff. And you just have to like, have the creative eye to be like, it's too much stuff. Another, another example was like, the initial version felt like Roblox-y. Like it didn't feel premium. And we weren't there yet. All that to say is this, this was a success. And one of the reasons why frankly, I don't update this website is it's really hard to update. It takes a lot of time, energy and stuff like that. Whereas this, now I can just use Argon to, to, to update it. I saw a really cool example of

• 7:51Speaker 00

  someone using Argon. Justine Moore, A16Z said, "I asked Gemini for Argon for an interactive museum of Apple computers and didn't provide any images or data. It scraped archival Mac photos, wrote a tool to clean the images, pulled 50 years of specs and built a 3D cover flow with UI that morphs to match the decade you're in." So when you look at this, look how good this is. There's just so much opportunity to whatever it is you're building, not to build something basic. And that's what I mean by marketing with AI, is that this would

• 8:31Speaker 00

  have cost you thousands and thousands of dollars before, but now you just, you know, you could just go and create this. And this is the sort of thing that goes viral on Twitter. It goes viral on TikTok. It goes viral on Instagram. And then you can decide, by the way, what, what business you want to create on top of this. If you don't already have a business, right? You can be like, oh, you know, I want to go and I've got this audience now of people into Apple products. Well, what can I sell those people? Is it services? Is it memorabilia? And we'll talk about at the, we'll talk about physical AI and what are the things that, you know, you can do later with Argon there. But I think that's

• 9:16Speaker 00

  a really, one big thing I learned that I wanted to share with, with you all. The second thing I, I learned is Argon is really good at writing. So it's extremely good at it. And I'm going to let you in on a little tip here. How to make Argon an incredible writer in one step. So say, "I want you to research everything about how I write. This is what I wrote. My name is Greg Isenberg. I write on X. I do email newsletters, how I speak on YouTube, everything about me. I want you to internalize all that stuff into a skill. Once you've done that, I'm going to test you on it. I'm going to give you a topic and I want you to write an essay on it and we'll see how you do." And what it does is it basically creates

• 10:00Speaker 00

  the skills. And what I should have done is actually asked it to do slash subagents, to send subagents to go and do that. So you can just go slash subagents on, on, on, on anti-gravity to go and do that. But what it does is it created a skill package. So it created a skill MD file with the core voice operating system, sentence rhythm, rules, mental models, the structure I uses, it created a voice and lexicon MD, like signature vocabulary, things I've coined. And it's just, it's got all this stuff about me, which is crazy. Verbatim samples and templates MD, plus all the structural templates. This is something that if I, you

• 10:45Speaker 00

  know, I was hiring like a head of content, they would be able to do. And they did it perfectly. It internalized exactly how I, how I write and speak. And this is just so cool because I find that one thing that AI isn't that good at is writing, you know? And it's crazy because it's so good at other things, but I don't know why it hasn't been such a good writer. And Argon to me, at this point, is probably the best frontier model for writing.

• 11:19Speaker 00

  If you look here, I basically said, "Write me a post on marketing engineers." And it wrote me a post and it was amazing. It was like, you know, exactly, it was actually crazy because it was exactly how I would write. The old world versus the new world, you know, talking about micro products instead of PDF lead magnets, things that I've said in the past, tweet-sized landing pages. You know, I have this belief that launch your landing page initially not more than 280 characters and stuff like, it had all this stuff. Now, if you don't have content online about you like me, just literally upload it to your anti-gravity and have it learn about you. Like, you've written stuff before, right? So you can have it do this. I really like

• 12:02Speaker 00

  this 95-5 rule. AI does the plumbing, humans bring the taste. And what's really cool is it even signed off, I signed off my newsletter at GregIsenberg.com with "Be Well Greg" and it had that. So if I, like, if I hired someone to write this newsletter, I would have been like 9.2 on 10, probably. I would have been stoked. I would have been like telling my co-founder, "Hey, you're not going to believe this writer I found." And so I think that, you know, from a vibe marketing perspective, marketing with AI perspective, you know, using this to write more should be on your list of things to do. I don't know what you're using to write, if

• 12:40Speaker 00

  you're just doing just humans, or if you're doing some, you know, mix of Astra or, you know, Opus. But in terms of what I'm seeing, as a writer, as someone, you know, who puts out a lot of content there, this is definitely something that I think is, is quite good. Let's move on to physical AI. Now, a lot of you have been asking me about vibe manufacturing. You know, I had this tweet that went viral around vibe manufacturing and how you, this is the age to actually go and create these files called STL files, send them to 3D printers,

• 13:20Speaker 00

  and build businesses around customized physical products. But how can you do it? Well, I'll, today I'm going to show you how Argon is actually amazing at it. I actually asked Argon to build me this vibe manufacturing studio. So this is a big idea here. I hope, I hope people take. So my belief is that you could be able to customize physical products. I think it's going to be a bigger, a bigger and bigger thing. I think the idea is, there's millions of Shopify stores, right? What if you could embed this widget that allows people to actually customize products on Shopify stores? And they could buy it for, you know,

• 14:02Speaker 00

  I don't know, $39, right? So you have here, you can see how long it's going to take, how much it's going to cost for the weight, how much is bamboo, print time is going to be, and by the way, if you don't know what bamboo is, it's a 3D printer, I think it's a Chinese company, what suggested retail would be, one printer overnight, you know, that takes eight hours for four units. I think this idea around basically embedding physical AI customizers on Shopify is an extremely huge idea. Now, you might be asking, okay, like, what, what

• 14:41Speaker 00

  would you actually create? Well, you know, think about, let's talk about the, I don't know, your snowboard company. I know Toby from Shopify started with a snowboard company. It was his first Shopify store. Maybe you create, you know, famous hills, famous mountains, and you allow people to customize it. Maybe you create, you know, famous snowboarders and allow people to customize it. Maybe you could put your own face and your own body in there, and you allow people to customize it. When people customize things, they feel more attachment

• 15:20Speaker 00

  to it. And gifts in general, by the way, physical gifts and these niche SKUs, I just see, seeing more and more of a thing. And, you know, one example here is an espresso porta filter, porta, porta filter station. You know, I would pay for this, and you can see the demand signal, it goes through Reddit, it goes through our, the subreddit, r/sespresso, who spend $2,500 on machines and gladly pay $49 for custom porta filter stations. Just makes total sense. And I think this is like a big business. Argon nailed this. You can

• 16:03Speaker 00

  see here, you know, it went initially, I asked it to, to create a wireframe, show the layers, and then show the CAD. Like, when I see this, it's almost like an undescribable magical feeling that you're able to create this. And there are so few people doing physical AI. So, worth playing with, and I was impressed with how well Argon succeeded here. One of the cool things you can do is, see this export ready to print STL file? Well, that STL file can send to your bamboo printer if you own it. If you don't own one, you can do Slant3D

• 16:46Speaker 00

  print-on-demand API. So I think a lot of people are going to be like, "Oh, I don't want to own like 20 3D printers in my house or my office." Okay, don't. Just use an API and, and have it print there. You, literally, all you have to do is aggregate demand, come up with an idea that folks are going to resonate with, but you know your niche better than other, anyone else, right? So you have that insight, and then you go into Argon and you basically say, like, I basically was like, "Hey, just build this embeddable Shopify widget, just so I can show people." It was literally a one prompt. And then start testing it. See

• 17:30Speaker 00

  if your audience likes it. Get feedback. What, what do they wish, you know, you can have? But I think this idea around niche SKUs, physical AI, is just getting started. How I would actually, like, get to work on this? So you have Argon build the product customizer you embed in your store. So the customer picks like a size, a color, you have a live 3D preview so that they can see what's going on. The customer pays on Shopify. I just start with Shopify, they're the number one, right? Of course, you could do it in the future in other places. You check the custom print file, so you've tested size limits, and then

• 18:10Speaker 00

  you print and ship the product. So it could be your printer or a partner, or a partner. By the way, you can also just sell this as a service to other Shopify's. So you can actually just set up a business, like, here's a business idea for you. Like, just go and do this for other companies. You know, you go to them and say, like, "I could help build more fandom for your audience by having physical products." So it's on their desk, they see it every day. It's when they walk into their homes, they see it, you know, greeting them, and they're going to be thinking of your brand. And you're going to make 50% margin, 40% margin, 70% margin, depending on how you price it. Is that something you'd be interested

• 18:55Speaker 00

  in? And maybe you split the margin with them, make it a no-brainer offer. These are things that you can now do. So the third way I want to talk about where Argon really excels is building SaaS products. So boring SaaS products. Now, I already hear the comment section, people are going to say, "Well, Greg, SaaS is dead. What is the point?" Well, I take a deep breath for that one, because I see that on X all the time. People saying, "SaaS is dead, AI can do SaaS, therefore, you know, it's, it's, it's over." Those are indie hackers selling to indie hackers. But the vast majority of people are fine to pay for software that

• 19:40Speaker 00

  helps their, make their lives easier. Now, here's the way I would approach building a SaaS product, and I think it's different from what, how other people are talking about it. And then I'll show you how Argon goes and does it. So first, go and find a recurring, ideally boring problem. You can find these problems on g2.com, Capterra, Idea Browser, something I built. By the way, has a, it's free, literally free to sign up to get a daily idea. And then from there, I would go and build a very focused problem. Sorry, I would

• 20:19Speaker 00

  build a very focused product. You know, you can, you can be looking on G2 and these other places, even Reddit, to go and see, what are people complaining about? And then obviously put that into your product to make something better. There's so many legacy pieces of software that are just, you know, they're legacy, they're old, they haven't been updated in so long. So there's an opportunity now to rebuild something that really fits the needs of people, that maybe is actually a little bit more niche, in a good way, right? And then you go and make a useful, free tool. Now, a lot of people are, go out when they, they

• 21:00Speaker 00

  think about building SaaS, they think, "Oh, I'm going to go and build something, charge $50 a month, and I'm going to get 10,000 customers." I understand why that's the approach, but I actually think that- Getting a free tool out there is such a good way to get it in front of likely buyers, then make your second or third or fourth tool paid. And just try to think about what's one tool that can go and attract a lot of people. And then from there, you could go and essentially create a product studio around that ICP. And your, your studio could be powered by Argon because Argon has become such a good way to actually build software that actually works.

• 21:42Speaker 00

  And when I say that is we've all vibe coded stuff, but when it comes down to deployment, it hasn't been good or it hasn't been secure. And from my testing, anti-gravity has done quite a good job of that. So I'll give you an example. I gave, I gave anti-gravity this prompt. Build a working web app for a commercial cleaning company that turns site visits notes into a reviewed price proposal. This is, this is a focus replacement for coding spreadsheet. The main experience should be creating a quote. And then you give it customer complaints, source links, anonymized workflow here. And if they don't have it, you know, here, this would be your G2, this would be your

• 22:26Speaker 00

  idea browser. But if you don't have it, you can actually just say, go and find it and it should be able to find something. And then find and inspect the project, explain your implementation plan briefly, then build it using the existing stack where possible. And then you just, you just write it all out clearly. You say, don't deploy it, send proposals or anything, and then give an honest list of remains unfinished. This format is the format for building these micro SaaS's that helps get you, you know, in the door with a lot of these companies. When you look at what, what was built, I pull it up, actually.

• 23:10Speaker 00

  It's basically these like interactive margin calculators. When you look at what was built, I mean, again, this is not the most beautiful thing. And that's, like I said, if you want to get beauty out of Argon, you really need to give it references and you've got to work with it to get it to that point. It has the capacity to do it. It just, it, for whatever reason, in my experience, hasn't gotten it on prompt one. But where it nails it on prompt one is on the engineering and all of these little details that you can see here does such a good job at.

• 23:51Speaker 00

  I mean, I'm not going to bore you with all the boring, you know, parts of this particular workflow, but this format in terms of, you know, these quotes and stuff like that, I think is, is a big idea. One that could, I can see people doing. And if you're going and you're competing against someone that charges money for this, and then all of a sudden you're like, hey, this is free. Like no one talks about that. No one talks that there's thousands of these like boring SaaS products that charge money, then now you can go and sell it for free, literally zero dollars. In the past, I would be scared about, you know, vibe coding something, but we've reached

• 24:36Speaker 00

  this point with Frontier AI that you can build something like this. And it, it works and it, it's probably even better than what the legacy products have. So the question becomes then, what do you do when you, when you sell a free, a paid thing for free? Once you've built the trust, eventually you sell them something. So totally was impressed with how Argon performed here and happily surprised. So having played with Argon for about a week, I found out that there's six techniques worth using to get the most out of it.

• 25:21Speaker 00

  This isn't going to be rocket science to, to people who use AI a lot, but I will, I will say it's going to help. So the first is plan, slash plan. Just agree on what to build before it starts changing files. So like, for example, with my late checkout.studio, you know, example, I should have used plan mode. If I would have used plan mode, it would have been a lot better. My first version would have been a lot better. The second is subagents. You do slash, slash subagents. That splits independent jobs. So research and, and checks can run in parallel. So the example I gave around the marketing agents, creating the different skill files

• 26:02Speaker 00

  for writing better, like in subagents, I would have got better output and it would have been less prompting and stuff like that. So subagents, you might as well use it. And it's basically this concept that, you know, you're, you're not giving a task to one thing and it has to go and figure, you know, go into multiple different directions. You're just basically saying, hey, you, you're delegating. It's just literally delegating to different agents to do different things. Slash goal. One of the reasons why the late checkout studio ended up becoming really good was I did slash goal through, you know, halfway through it, I was like, all right, slash goal,

• 26:47Speaker 00

  make this, you know, make it amazing. I gave it a reference image. And yes, it, it does take more tokens, but I noticed that the output is a lot better. So for me, it's definitely worth it. And you have to think, you're, you have to think about like the value for you, you know, like think about how much, you know, we made so, so many tens of millions of dollars from that website. An extra several dollars in tokens is worth it. If, if that's even what it costs. Slash browser, you can actually have it open the app and test the actual user journey. How cool is that? Good thing to know. Number five, slash learn.

• 27:31Speaker 00

  So you can turn your corrections into reusable project rules or skill. You might as well do that. So, you know, you're going to have things that you're going to mess up on and you're just going to want to like have a better system, more skills, more project rules. You're only going to get better output, so you might as well use learn. And the last thing is initially I was on medium. I turned it up to high. High has been my, my, my, my base on, on this. Like I've been enjoying using high. I do find the output's just a lot better in general.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  And, you know, so I would say use high, like personally, like as the default. But start on medium. So you understand like how to use the thing. These are just like six, six techniques to get the most out of Argon. The biggest one for me being plan, subagents, goal. I mean, they're all kind of big, so they're, I mean, this is why I put them in here. These are some of the biggest ways to get the most out of Argon. So there you have it, folks. Gemini four, Argon is out. Some of the things you can do. I think we're entering this new era of frontier model where these, these models are just getting so darn good at doing complex problems.

• 28:57Speaker 00

  I was impressed. I will say I was using Google AI Ultra, which is a hundred dollars a month. That gets you full access to anti-gravity app at the CLI and the up to 1 million output tokens. And thanks again for Google for hooking that up. The 1999 Google AI Pro membership does not include the anti-gravity app in CLI or Google AI Studio access. You don't get the 1 million output tokens. So that's just more for like text generation or web search, little tasks. But if you're looking to build, the ultra is what you're going to want.

• 29:40Speaker 00

  And what can I say? I, you know, I, I think I'll end with, you know, the, the limit is really your imagination. And the hardest part sometimes is just coming up with the ideas, finding the references, getting the inspiration and finding a niche or ICP that you're, you're going to fall in love with. I always say marry the, marry the niche, date the product. You can always like try different products, but you're going to want to love the niche to serve them. Had a lot of fun playing with Argon.

• 30:21Speaker 00

  Interested to see what, if there'll be updates to anti-gravity. Hope that gets better soon and I'm excited to see what happens in Argon or Gemini 4.1. So let me know what you think down below. I read every single comment. Thank you for, for coming along this journey with me. I'm here to serve you. I'm rooting for you and I can't wait to see what you build.