19 AI-assisted marketing tools to build a cash-flowing business in 2024: Market research

1. Hotjar AI surveys (@hotjar)
- auto generate custom surveys
- analyze audience segments

2. Crayon (@Crayon)
- competitor metrics
- alerts

3. Speak (@speakai_co)
- analyze customer data
- pattern recognition

Why is Gen-Z OBSESSED with luxury watches?

- 41% of Gen Z acquired a luxury watch in the last 12 months
- Avg spend on a watch was $10,870, millennials spend 1/2 that much
- Gen-Z buys on avg 2.4 new watches per year
- 21% more likely than other generations to use debt

Wild.

My best guess is you have TikTok creators who romanticize watch flipping.

People are buying it half for the flex, half for the investment.

New pod just dropped with Cody. It’s going viral.

9 profitable startup ideas anyone can start in 2024 (please do them).

I’ll summarize the startup ideas for you in this thread: 1) LinkedIn Short Form Video Agency

LinkedIn just dropped a video tab

Cody’s friend just got 400,000 views in 7 days with only 2500 followers.

The idea:

If you can script, record, and edit videos for founders and business leaders, start reaching out now.

Low risk biz idea.

Niche internet communities are in high demand. And it's not stopping.

But the best part isn't the traffic from Reddit. It's the ideas and trends.

My entire business is plan is listen to what people say on Reddit, and build internet products for them.

It keeps working. It’s never been easier to find ideas to build and build ideas quickly

There are tons of bad startup ideas.

But ideas from subreddits are validated.

People are literally telling you what they want.

I'm a startup idea junkie. Maybe you are too?

I interview top founders 2x per week on "The Startup Ideas Podcast"

Here are 8 ideas free startup ideas that could make $10k-$1M/month (with no investors): 1. Google Ads for XYZ

Everyone is searching on Google for tips on how to run ads.

You can dominate YouTube search results with tutorials tailored to specific niches.

Think "Google Ads for apartments" or "Google Ads for car dealerships."

This model works for any niche.

1) Pick an industry
2) Master the nuances
3) Crank out helpful content

Tutorial videos drive ad revenue, open up affiliate marketing opportunities, and open the door for a specialized agency.

Huge opportunity target high-value keywords and monetize every step of the way.

h/t @codyschneiderxx

How to win in your 20s (a thread):

1. Don’t send angry emails/texts. Wait 24 hours. Eat, sleep, chill and remember that it’s not worth it

2. Post vids. You’re young, you know how to film well. Pick a niche, share 1 video a day, and let it compound. By 30, you have 100k subs 3. Move to a big city. Don’t have to live there forever, but being in NYC or SF even for a short while will pay you back like crazy in your 30s.

4. Be a generalist. The internet belongs to people who understand design, copy, paid ads, new technologies.

I recently reviewed 1000+ internet businesses.

About 500 of them make $1-5M/ year of profits and 25 of them make $10M+/year of profits.

And I distilled a playbook of how to build your business to be like the top 0.01% of these businesses.

Read the playbook here: Here are the "machines" you need to master to build a profit machine:

1. Content machine
2. Referral machine
3. Events machine
4. Recycling machine
5. Paid machine
6. Hiring machine
7. Search machine
8. Innovation machine
9. Community machine

I'll explain it in this thread:

15 ideas, opportunities and things I’m thinking about right now:

1. Finding mispriced assets.

Is this business worth 2X EBITDA or 6X? In an AI world, some businesses are worth a whole lot less or a whole lot more than we think. That spread is your retirement. 2. Data is the new oil.

NewsCorp did a $250M deal with OpenAI. Reddit inked $60M/year with Google. What non-obvious data sources will be valuable to LLMs in the future? Think about the unique data you have or can access.

People who say "ideas are worthless" don't understand 2024 and the world we live in.

AI makes turning ideas into software businesses effortless.

In 2024, execution is worthless.

Ideas are everything. Ideas are

- Startup ideas (what you're building)
- Distribution ideas (how you'll get it seen)
- Creative ideas (how to make people convert)

It's more art than science.

Winning on the internet is 99%

1. Have a clear life vision
2. Spend less money than you make
3. Going offline to reset
4. Use tools to find trends
5. Automate lots
6. Have a balanced yet interesting “content diet”
7. Ignore people who make most of their money from courses 8. Be kind
9. Stay under the radar or become the radar
10. Build in underserved niches
11. Show up 5 days a week
12. Be different in design
13. Write well
14. Copy should sound like you’re reading the friend you trust the most on text
15. Know how to visualize ideas like a pro

I've been on "pinch me mode" since 2019.

Life has been happier and wealthier ever since.

I'll explain this simple concept in this thread: How often do you pinch yourself?

I mean, really stop in the middle of your day and think:

"Damn, how cool is this? I'm so lucky."

I call these "pinch me moments".

The truth is 95% of startups in 2024 can start as a:

1) group chat
2) waitlist

That's it. It usually costs ~$10 and takes a weekend.

You do pre-sales to fund development. Give away 0% equity to investors. Profit share with your team.

This is building startups in 2024. You'll learn pretty quickly through your group chat, what's resonating.

You can't hire a community manager to run it. You're the community manager.

Your job is to figure out what this group chat wants, and go build it for them.

Meet Marques "MKBHD" Brownlee.

30 years old, has 18.3M subscribers, 4.2B views and makes $3M+/year.

But you haven’t met him at 10 years old giddy over his 79th subscriber.

This video is his 100th video. A must watch for anyone that puts creative work out on the internet.

It reminded me that “perfection kills progress”.

At age 10, MKBHD wasn’t the best tech reviewer on the internet. But that didn’t stop him.

In the first 6 months of putting out videos, Marques had already posted 200+ videos.

The guy was just unapologetically hitting publish on videos.

And did you watch the intro to this video?

I mean, that intro got me fired up, but it wasn't exactly a Scorsese film.

Many of us get lost in the “comparison trap”.

You don’t start something because you don’t think you’re good enough.

The reality is you aren’t good enough until you start something.

Marques didn’t wait.

He published his work.

From the video: “I hope I get more subscribers if I upload great videos everyday”

It turns out he did. 18M+ of them.

MKBHD shipped 100 videos to get 74 subs.

MrBeast shipped 100 videos to get 760 subs.

PewDiePie shipped 100 videos to get 2500 subs.

You get the idea.

Hit publish first, get good later. Maybe even more remarkable is MKBHD's first ever video.

My observations:

- Authentically curious about tech
- 10 years old but speaks more confident than most 30 year olds I know
- Clearly had raw talent
- Empathetic from day 1
- I wonder if he ever thought he'd interview Bill Gates, Kobe Bryant and Elon Musk one day

This was no ordinary 10-year-old

Wise beyond his years.

We could all learn a lot from him.

--

You can follow me @gregisenberg for more stories of how people use audiences, communities and the internet to build businesses (and if you want to see more of this sorta stuff)

20 years of juicy startup & life knowledge in 1159 words

1. Everything is a drug. Coffee is a drug. Food is a drug. Business is a drug. Use accordingly.

2. Google is a $2T biz walking around with their pants on fire because of AI. There's no guarantees in life

(keep reading) 3. Jargon almost never helps your case. The simplest sentences make things happen

4. Avoid “trust me” people. Constantly the most untrustworthy people

5. Why most products fail: not opinionated enough, wrong opinions, wrong community, distribution never figured out, giving up

My biggest flex is I bought a 3500 square foot house in the mountains outside Montreal, on a lake, with 20% down payment and these are the details

And yes, those numbers are Canadian dollars ($1 USD = $1.36 CAD)

I bought the house in 2020, when everything was shut down.

I figured if the world was ending, I'd want to be in nature, with fresh water, rivers and lakes.

This is outside my spot.

The anti-smartphone movement will be one of the biggest movements of our time. It's just getting started...





the future:

- phone free zones
- dopamine rehab centers
- more IRL fun without screens
- no screens turns into a status symbol
- apps that only work during certain hours

All of these UNBELIEVABLE videos were created using Sora, the new AI model from OpenAI

Watch each one and see how it makes you feel...

I don't think it's crazy for me to say this going to shift Hollywood, social apps and media forever

Video #1
Prompt: The camera directly faces colorful buildings in burano italy.

An adorable dalmation looks through a window on a building on the ground floor.

Many people are walking and cycling along the canal streets in front of the buildings.

My take:

This dog looks freakishly real. I want to pet him. Video #2

Prompt: A movie trailer featuring the adventures of the 30 year old space man wearing a red wool knitted motorcycle helmet, blue sky, salt desert, cinematic style, shot on 35mm film, vivid colors.

My take:

This could easily be Interstellar #2

Where's Matt Damon?

What would happen if I prompted with a celebrity on Sora?

No one talks about this but you can use Loom as a "lead magnet" in 10 minutes or less:

1) Record a Loom jam packed with value
2) Request email to view loom
3) Share Loom link on social or paid ads
4) Get thousands of emails
5) You now know there's demand for your product More Loom tips:

You can add a call-to-action button with a URL within looms

I always add and it's generated many free organic sign ups to my newsletter

Free newsletter sign ups. gregisenberg.com

The VC startup market is starting to crack.

I had 2 VCs cold email me today saying their companies are looking for an exit ASAP. I took calls with both.

One raised $30M from top tier investors. Another is burning $1M/month.

Both companies raised money on Notion 1 pagers in 2021.

Both VCs were eager to sell them for pennies on the dollar.

It's a good time to be in the buying companies business. I'm no longer doing minority investments. I completely shifted to majority investments.

I can't justify putting $25k into a business to own a 0.025% of a seed company with liquidity in 10 years unless to support a friend or cause I care about.

There are about to be some dream businesses up for sale at dream prices.

I figured out a playbook to make products grow REALLY fast in 2024 (especially SaaS)

It's the same playbook that Alex Hormozi is using and why he wrote the BIGGEST check of his LIFE last week into a startup called Skool

Silicon Valley is sleeping on this

My 3 realizations: #1 - Attach the RIGHT creator

This is obvious. It’s happening.

But not all creator partnerships are created equal.

Hormozi & Skool are perfect for each other because of WHO his audience is and WHAT the product does.

I’ll call it what it is…his audience is mostly people trying to get rich.

So, if he can find a product that enables them to do what they want. That’s the sweet spot.

Skool allows anyone to start a community + membership.

So, his audience can hop on, charge a monthly fee and spread via social.

This is the important part.

It helps get his audience where they are trying to get to.

The right creator partnership isn't the biggest creator.

It's the creator partner that if ONLY they used your product... they'd accomplish their goals way quicker.

This creates the top of the funnel.

Let’s continue.

I came across Facebook's beautiful employee handbook by Ben Barry for the first time today.

And I think every employee and founder needs to see it.

Even Zuckerberg-haters will probably be impressed.

A sneak peek into 15 pages of the Facebook Employee Handbook: Simple, impactful.

Truthful? I don't know. I never worked there.