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Podcast

6 One-Person AI Businesses That Will Make You $60,000/Mo

The Startup Ideas Podcast

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  • Productized Services Over Agencies
    • Productized services using AI offer more sustainability than traditional AI automation agencies.
    • They provide recurring revenue and scale better than project-based automation agencies. Transcript: Cody Schneider I promise you, you won’t fall into the tar pit that is AI automation agencies. And I’m going to instead convince you why you shouldn’t do that. And you should make a productized service that uses AI automation to deliver a deliverable on like a monthly cadence or whatever that is. I mean, why that productized service is a way better business than the AI automation agency. Okay. Greg Isenberg So you’re basically saying all the people that are pitching these AI automation agencies, disregard them. There’s actually a way bigger opportunity with productized services. And you’re going to show us how someone could go and create one, maybe some ideas on ones that they can steal. And how much money do you think people can make using some of these ideas? Cody Schneider Dude, you can easily make like 40 to 80 grand a month and get to that within six months I zero doubt that that’s possible with this stuff. And also these businesses, like it’s just a better business than AI automation agencies. Like, can we just break that down first? Like why that’s it? So I know so many, I’ve had so many friends that have started these like AI automation companies and like every one of them, they last like 12 to 18 months and then they hard pivot into some Productized service. And the reason for that is that the business composition or the biology of the business for an automation agency is just really hard. Like you have to be really good at getting like top of funnel leads. You have to be really good at sales because it’s like typically kind of higher ticket. So it’s like you’re having to like go through that traditional sales motion. And then the revenue is one time, right? Like it’s not like it’s a recurring purchase. Like you do, it’s project-based. And so it’s just a, it’s a hard business to build and scale. And so I think that that is like the, the biggest thing to think about with this is like, it’s just a poor, it’s a bad business to build. (Time 0:00:56)
  • Med Spa AI Marketing Service
    • Create 10 new Facebook ad creatives monthly for med spas using AI tools like ChatGPT and HeyGen.
    • Optimize Google Maps listings with reviews, keywords, and images to boost local SEO results. Transcript: Cody Schneider So the first one that I think is a huge opportunity is med spa marketing. So med spas are this category that I had no idea how profitable they are. They average per location, 1.4 million to like 2 per location in revenue. The customer lifetime value of one of these people, if you can like convert them is like six grand, right? So crazy, crazy, like good revenue, if you can basically help them get these customers into the business. So what I would do and kind of my focus or how I’d go about this is I’d focus just on two things. It looks like all of the purchasing decisions that people are making are coming from basically paid ads on social, Instagram and Facebook and maybe TikTok and then local SEO. So how I would go about the service that you’re basically providing is going be creating like Facebook ad content, running those ads for them, et cetera. And then you do reporting based off of leads that you’re providing them, the new revenue that you’re providing them. That’s how you validate that you’re actually, you know, like worth the money that they’re paying you. And so the, so basically running those Facebook ads and then doing Google ads optimization. This is the service that you’d be offering these people is basically… Greg Isenberg Sam Altman, the co-founder of OpenAI, just said that it is the era of the idea guy and he is not wrong. I think that right now is an incredible time to be building a startup. And if you listen to this podcast, chances are you think so, too. Now, I think that you can look at trends to basically figure out what are the startup ideas you should be building. So that’s exactly why I built idea browser.com. Every single day, you’re going to get a free startup idea in your inbox. And it’s all backed by high quality data trends. How we do it, people always ask. We use AI agents to go and search what are people looking for and what are they screaming for in terms of products that you should be building. And then we hand it on a, you know, silver platter for you to go check out. We do have a few paid plans that take it to the next level, give you more ideas, give you more AI agents and more almost like a chat GBT for ideas with it. But you can start for free, ideabrowser.com. And if you’re listening to this, I highly recommend it. Cody Schneider Creating those deliverables for the Facebook ads, for the paid ad side, and then also doing the Google Maps listing optimization. So on the Facebook ads, what I would do is say, hey, we’re going to make you 10 pieces of new creative per month. You’re going to use the, you know, ChatGPT API to make static images. You’ll use HeyGen or Arc ads to make the dynamic images or sorry, the like videos. And then what I would do to do like the research for these, this creative is use perplexity to go and scrape for edit and other social media for the problem benefits, like solution that The services that these med spas are offering, like, like, why would people basically do whatever the med spa service is off that, that they’re trying to promote. And so when you use, like, all of this can be automated, right? Like the scraping for the research, the writing of the ad scripts, the writing, like the description of the ads that you’re trying to create through the static image API. That’s where the AI automation piece comes in, where it’s like, you don’t need to hire a graphic designer. You don’t need to hire a video editor. Like all of these things can basically, um, be handled by a lot of these AI tooling, this AI tooling. And then, um, the, uh, other piece of this is an optimizing Google maps. So if you go and you search on Google right now for like Med Spa, right? Any location, like any location. First thing that comes up, huge Google Map listing, right? And the reason for this is this is a local like search. Like Google has categorized this as a local search. And so it is super valuable if you can show up in the top three of this map pack. The only thing that you need to do to be able to show up there is basically optimize the profile. There’s tons of videos on YouTube talking about this optimization. The thing that we found to be most important is getting reviews, making sure the keywords are in that listing, and then also having images of the physical location in that listing as Well. If you do those three things and then combine that with building directory listings. So these are basically making whatever the name of the business, the location, the address, the phone number, any of this contact information. You go and you’ll submit these to all of these different websites, like Foursquare, any of these old map websites. And the reason that this works is Google uses this as a metric to validate that this is like a real listing, a real company. And so to do this, you can use one of friends of the show’s companies. It’s called local rank.so, I And basically what you do, one click and it submits to all of these different directory listings. So that’s kind of the service offering. I would charge something in the range of like two to three grand per month. And then how you actually go and get customers for this is all of their information is public, right? Like their contact information, their website information, they’re probably going to be spending most of their time on Instagram and probably via email or phone. So it just turns into a process of reaching out to those businesses or running ads to them on Facebook. This is probably another strategy. You can target people who basically work at med spas on Facebook, run ads showing case studies, send them to a lead magnet to download some free PDF, talking through literally your exact Service offering, like here’s how to do this. And then what’s going to happen naturally is people are going to download that. They’re going to give you their email. They’ll give you their phone number. And they’re going to realize, oh, this is actually a lot like a major pain in the ass to do this. I don’t want to spend my time doing this. I’m going to go hire this company. The other acquisition channel would be doing YouTube videos, talking through the case studies. Name the video something like I grew this med spa, you know, by X revenue from Facebook ads or, you know, I grew this med spa by. All right. I got a hundred leads from Google Maps for this med spa. Here’s how I did it. Something like that. Literally just talk your book and that’s going to create the lead volume that you’re looking for, for this agency. And then the last thing that you’re wanting to do is figure out some type of reporting that you can do to your clients so that it shows them basically the like outcomes that you’re, you’re, That you’re going to get. I would try to attach that to the thing that’s closest to (Time 0:03:29)
  • AI Ads for Beauty Brands
    • Provide beauty e-commerce brands with constant fresh Facebook ad creatives to prevent ad fatigue.
    • Use AI like makeugc.ai to produce videos showing the product being held and used, increasing ad relevance. Transcript: Cody Schneider Awesome. So the next one on the list is Facebook ads for beauty e-commerce brands. And the reason why you should do this is they need to constantly make new ad creative because it gets stale really quickly, right? They’re running a ridiculous amount of, you know, basically just ad spend through these accounts. And so what you see is that the creative really quickly, you know, people will see that same ad too many times and then it loses the effect that it had when they initially launched that. So that’s a component of this. Also, this is business critical for these businesses. You can see here e-commerce ads agencies, really quickly growing category, very high value to create a brand within this. And how I would do this, again, using this AI automation tooling. So again, use some type of research agent. You can build these. There’s so many builds of this on YouTube talking through N8N flows of like, here’s how to use this AI agent to research product pain points, like how the product can be a case for this, Scraping reviews, like aggregating all that, and then pulling out the best like hooks, right? For the creative that you’re making, doing that competitor analysis. And then I would use something like a makeugc.ai. Do you know this company yet, Craig? Greg Isenberg No, I don’t. Cody Schneider They are a, it’s one of these ad creative like makers, but their whole differentiator is that they the person in the video can hold the product. And so why this is like way more valuable to this is them here. Right. So it’s like trained on the actual product that you’re trying to sell. And why this is way more valuable to these beauty brands is a lot of the times they need them to like hold the product and then talk through, you know, what the product does or like their Experience with it. Right. So I would use something like this to actually make the creative of them holding the product. And then same kind of structure, you know, have some type of deliverable that it works like it will give you 20 ads a month. And then you’re also analyzing the best performers, remixing those and looking at competitor analysis. So to get these clients and sell this to service, same strategy, basically go to YouTube, do your case studies in public, show the process of you actually doing it. Again, this is going to be hard for a lot of people to go and mimic. Show the breakdown of how you’re using this agent to do research, etc. People are going to watch that content. You’re going to get naturally inbound leads from that. Post on LinkedIn and Twitter, just doing breakdowns of different ad types, different formulas that you’re seeing work, different formats, etc. And then have a call to action basically to do a discovery call with you or some type of lead magnet. So that’s your whole strategy around this business. And again, I would charge like 3k to 5k a month for this, if not more. I know there’s some agencies that are UGC agencies that are traditional, they’re using real humans, they’re charging so much money for this, like basically the creative development. And, you know, six grand for five videos. It’s insane. So if you can come where it’s a lower price point, even more creative. (Time 0:13:52)
  • Social Media for Nutrition Coaches
    • Manage nutrition coaches’ social accounts with daily posts featuring AI-generated food images and recipe blogs.
    • Use client approval tools like meetassembly.com for efficient workflow and charge around $2,000 monthly. Transcript: Cody Schneider With nutrition coaches and like health coaches right now. I think that anything that was a coach is suddenly like disruptable by AI first off. So that’s why I’m like deep in this. But again, I had no idea how much money these people make and like how many clients they serve. So like the customer lifetime value is relatively small, right? So it’s like maybe we’ll say $1,000, but they’ll service like 100 people a month, right? With their nutrition coaching. It’s crazy to me. And this strategy, the thing that I think is the opportunity is doing organic social media management. Because the CLB is smaller, you need to have some type of organic strategy. Month over month for the last couple of years. So it’s this growing category. People are looking for this. And I think the angle that you could go from is basically you make images of food that are like recipes, right? You see people doing this on Pinterest right now, or they like have AI generate food. And then they like basically send them to recipe blogs that are written by it. So like really hard to compete in this category on Google. Pinterest, you can actually compete really effectively in it. But I think you can do this for Instagram accounts and then like tell client stories related to those photos that you’re doing. And then the deliverables, what this ends up being is a post per day. And then you basically the measurements of success is the impressions and then the leads. I would drive them to some type of lead magnet, like, you know, 100 day, you know, recipe ebook, right? And then get their email, you put them into a drip nurture, like have it be the classic thing. But I think it’s something like this, you could probably charge like two grand a month for it. And the acquisition strategy is really similar to the ones that we’ve been talking about. But I think the difference is you would do cold DMs to these nutrition coaches on Instagram. That’s where I’m seeing this whole ecosystem live. And then also, again, running that, you can target nutrition coaches on Facebook with Facebook ads. You could do that same thing to some type of educational YouTube video that’s email gated. And then also do YouTube content where it’s like, this is how I grew a client’s social account. And here’s how many leads we got. Again, try to get as close to revenue as possible with whatever it is that you’re doing. And how big could this get? I think this could be… I mean, as a solo person, imagine you have 10 accounts that you’re managing. I don’t think that that’s unreasonable. If you’re doing a post a day across social, and you just use something like a meetassembly.com, which is a social media scheduling app that allows for you to, to basically get the, like A, like a, an okay from your client. It’s like a, you know, they have a client facing portal to, okay. Oh, can you open that up? Yeah, absolutely. I’ve never heard of that. Yeah. It’s my friend’s company. They’re awesome. Basically how it works. I can jump in here and show you. Oh yeah. This ends up being, so basically how this works is you can have a bunch of your social accounts connected to a single portal. But what’s really powerful is you can have this approval section where your client can just go in and basically approve each of the posts. And so you can go and schedule these out within assembly and then have the final approval process be handed off to them. They approve it. Those get scheduled out. And so this is a great tool to basically do this. (Time 0:21:40)
  • Link Magnets for Webinars
    • Convert existing webinars into ebooks or white papers as lead magnets to increase registration and engagement.
    • Promote these link magnets via LinkedIn and gated content to attract webinar-hosting companies. Transcript: Cody Schneider Is close to my heart um i just know a lot about this so i i’m like i think there’s a massive opportunity um but making link uh magnets for webinars i think is a massive opportunity so when You look at b2B, it’s insane numbers. It’s like over half of B2B marketers say that they hosted a webinar in the last year. And then it’s like consistently a part of their marketing process. But for a lot of webinars, there’s like the biggest problems are getting people to actually show up to the webinars, getting people to register. And then like once the webinar is recorded, what do you do with that? Like, how do you get people to consume that content? How do you resurrect that content? And I think link magnets are a great way to do this. So it’s basically taking those webinars that you already have that back catalog, and you go and you create ebooks and white papers or whatever it is that that industry is most receptive To. You basically create that media for them. And then again, turn it into a deliverable format where it’s like, hey, we’ll do whatever it is. It’s like four link magnets a month, eight link magnets a month, et cetera. And then the acquisition strategy here is you just reach out to people who are running webinars and be like, hey, I made this ebook that’s about this webinar. You can use it as a link magnet. Like here it is, right? You can create these super easily again with these AI automation tools, take the webinars, turn them into transcripts, take those transcripts, turn it into like, you know, these bolded Lists, et cetera. And then, you know, format it into a PDF that’s branded for them. And then for them, you basically show your work before they’re even working with you. And then say you offer this as a service. If they’re interested in it, you can jump on a discovery call. And then again, talk about how you’re driving leads for these companies that are running webinars on LinkedIn. That’s going to be the distribution channel here. You can use that organic strategy that we talked about earlier, where it’s like LinkedIn posts with some type of link or some type of lead magnet. When you comment to get the lead magnet, that creates your own leads for you. I would just focus on webinar marketing. Get my access to my webinar marketing guide. People are just trying to figure out how do I get more people to show up to it. That’s their measurement of success typically at the company that they’re working at. I think this is a really easy and powerful one. And it also like it’s constant repurposing, right? (Time 0:25:10)
  • AI Data Analytics Agency
    • Offer small businesses unlimited data analytics using AI tools to extract actionable insights.
    • Provide KPI dashboards and quick responses to questions via Slack or messaging for ongoing value. Transcript: Cody Schneider Analytics agency popped off recently. I’m not sure why. But just like, I think it’s just because more and more data is becoming available. But the opportunity here, I think people are just sitting on ridiculous amounts of data and they have no idea what it is. Right. And I’ve seen so many of these like videos now where it’s like people are like plugging into, you know, maybe it’s their Instagram analytics or their Google analytics with these like MCPs and then chatting with it to try to like extract insights. And I think that there’s an opportunity to go and basically create an agency like on top of this AI tooling, because it’s easier than ever to like basically build out these dashboards. All you have to do is convert that raw data into information and into insights for them. And so I think how I would probably structure this is like, it’s unlimited data analytics for like SMBs, you know, something like that, for like a set cost per month. And then whatever questions they have, you can just ask you. And then you use these tools to go and build out these dashboards or get these insights for them, get that data extracted from whatever data set that they have. So again, I think there’s like the off the shelf generic tooling like Claude with the MCP stuff. You can now connect a chat GPT to this as well. You can also learn stuff like Looker Studio or like Tableau or Power BI. The problem is that the learning curve on those are like really aggressive. So it’s going to take some time. But all of that content is available on YouTube. So you could go and find it. Or you could use this new product that we just released this week. It’s called graph.com. The basically how it functions is like it’s one of these business intelligence tools, but you just connect the data source or upload a C upload a CSV. And then you can convert that into dashboards, into insights, you know, based off of whatever the data sources that you provided. So here’s an example. Here’s the chat, etc. But yeah, man, that’s the last one. I think there’s a huge opportunity just to tell people about their businesses and like the health of their companies. And more and more people are realizing like they’re trying to be data, like, you know, data decision makers, database decision makers. But they just don’t know how to do, especially if they’re like a founder, right? Like if you’re a local business and say you run like, you know, 10, like swimming, like child swimming locations, right? Like you’re trying to understand like, what is my cashflow? What’s my P&L, et cetera. You could offer all of these services to basically analyze their crit books. Like look at like, you know, what is their current customer count from their CRM, et cetera, and provide those answers. (Time 0:29:36)
  • AI Agents and Voice Interaction
    • Future AI agents will do complex browsing and task execution, enabling true last-mile automation.
    • Voice and chat agents will transform how we interact with the internet, shifting from apps to conversational interfaces. Transcript: Greg Isenberg Uh right now i i just saw you know as of recording this that open ai is launching or yeah i think they’re launching basically agents that go and browse for you. And we saw the tip of the iceberg with ChatGPT operator with that. But I’m very excited about actually having agents go out and do things for you, like actually. I feel like there’s been a lot of vaporware in the AI agent space. And it’s been close. A lot of the products have been really close so I’m excited about products that can actually get you the last mile so I’ve been you know this isn’t just chat GPT but I’ve been spending a Lot of time trying to figure out which AI agent platforms can actually get you to the last mile and then trying to actually set up those workflows. So that’s what I’ve been spending the last few days just kind of figuring out. Cody Schneider Dude, I love it, man. Have you played with perplexity comment yet? It’s the first time where I’m like, damn, this is actually how I want to interact with the Internet now. Because like I’m basically doing this in perplexity where I’m like back and forth between tabs, but it’s just this like sidebar that can, as an example, like when I saw recently that I was like, shit, this is so good is it basically goes to your LinkedIn and accepts the request and then it sends them a message that you tell it to send. And then it like does that you can set it. So it’s recurring. So it’s like every, like every morning check to see who’s cool. I’m like, accept that basically but have that for any of the the tasks that you used to have to use like an automation tool for um you can now just do that in the browser and that was like the First aha moment that i saw with this where i’m like damn this is going to totally change i think how we also separate from this but it feels related. I’m finding myself more and more wanting to like talk to everything. Like I want to be able to talk to websites to ask it questions about its service offering. Like I don’t like give me like this voice agent that is trained on everything that you know, or that like everything that it knows about the company and allow for me to interact with that Rather than like having to read or talk to a human um i don’t know if that’s something that like that you’ve seen but like i i’m just finding myself i’m using super whisper more and more Like for all of my kind of communication and i’m just finding myself more and more wanting to interact with the internet in that way and i’m like thinking myself, like, do apps just go Away? Like, is it just like a repository of information that I like, have a conversation with and like, tell my agent to compare against? And like, they have their own, like, you know, five threaded conversations simultaneously to figure out what’s the best solution for me. (Time 0:32:50)