# 12 High-Impact Startup Opportunities for 2026

**Podcast:** The Startup Ideas Podcast
**Published:** 2026-05-18

## Transcript

I have one goal and one goal only today.
It's to go through the 12 biggest startup opportunities.
So the other day I tweeted and it went viral.
The 30 biggest startup opportunities, B2C, AI, mobile.
And people just wanted more.
They wanted to know more.
So in this episode, I want to go through my 12 favorite ones.
And well, it's not just going to be me.
It's my friend, Jay Ice Cream, Jonathan Courtney on the pod.
What's up?
Welcome.
And you're going to pick six and I'm going to pick six, right?
That's it.
I'm going to pick six.
You're going to pick six.
Who knows?
Maybe one of us will pick seven.
You never know what's going to happen.
You never know.
So you're going to want to stick to the end.
I think people who do stick to the end of this episode are going to have a good understanding of a bunch of different categories that we are building businesses in.
We're sharing the sauce live.
We hope that you actually take these ideas and build with them.
And maybe you want to start off.
Oh, okay.
So looking through your list, the very first one that jumped out to me is something I think that's going to get bigger and bigger and bigger is number eight, which is biggest creator.
So what you wrote is that the biggest creator is going to have this combination of live shows and unscripted content.
As someone who plays a lot of video games, I'm exposed to a lot of these creators who put out their content on Twitch.
And it was interesting to see, what is it, TPBN or TBPN, whichever way around that is, the tech show that's playing on X all the time.
It was interesting to see that hit the tech scene because it's been in gaming for a very long time.
And I think some of the things that the tech world can learn from gaming, is this more unscripted kind of, you know, off the cuff kind of streams.
And I just have a couple of examples if you want to see because I follow a lot of these streamers and I try to emulate them in my content.
And I think it connects with one of the things you said later in your list, which is like it's a bit anti-AI because it's live, because it's unscripted, because things can go wrong.
people actually want to watch.
It's very, very human.
So I'll just take over the screen for a second and show you Twitch.
So Twitch, I think most of you know Twitch.tv.
It is a place where people live stream.
And this is an example of a live stream.
So this is actually a relatively popular streamer, a guy called Jeff Gerstmann.
So he's just one of the people I watch and I pay to watch his channel.
And he does these like three to four times a week, three to four hour long streams where he just sits there talking unedited, like as messy as it can be and just chats to his audience and reacts to his audience.
And pretty much everyone I follow, this guy is live right now, Drewskies.
He plays a game called Marathon.
If any of you guys are playing Marathon, it's a great game.
you should play it.
But this is a perfect example.
So right now, and this is a smaller channel, but right now, you know, 247 people are watching this guy live.
People are paying, a lot of people are paying to watch this guy live and he's just sitting here playing a video game that he wants to play anyway.
And this is something that also scales up to like something that's a bit more official.
Like, let me show you a giant bomb.
Let me show you the kind of funny guys.
They also stream live every single weekday.
This is more close to what you see with the TVPN.
What actually is it?
By the way, it's hilarious because you remind me of the older people who chat GTP.
I still can't remember any of these things.
It's TVPN.
And by the way, if you're listening to this and you're like, well, why do I even care about?
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And I think anyone who has that skill of just being able to talk long form about anything is going to have, I think the ability to make, just to go online, just to be able to talk while you're maybe doing something else.
especially in the business context, is going to be huge and is going to be really differentiated.
Almost all business content out there is very polished.
For example, almost every pure business podcast, like The Diary of a CEO is one of the biggest purely business-focused ones.
It's hyper-polished.
It's all about interviews.
What I'm trying to do is I'm trying to take all of this inspiration from the Twitch streaming world.
and turn that into the very unpolished gamer style mess, but with the business context.
So that's something that I think from your list is going to be bigger and bigger and bigger as AI sanitizes a lot of stuff.
I think more people are going to want to listen to more authentic people speaking long form, unedited, unscripted and live.
So I think that's a huge one.
It's exactly a bet that I'm making for my own business.
It's what I'm doing personally now every Tuesday, experimenting with it.
And yeah, I'm all in on that topic.
Cool, I like that one.
I know people are going to be like, okay, but how are you going to make money if you're just live streaming, vibe coding all day?
There's literally a million ways to skin that cat.
thousands of people tuning into you every stream.
And these are people who have such a high affinity to you that they're begging for ways to give you money.
I can just tell you too, I have only one to 2,000 people tuning into me every Tuesday and that business alone can make 400,000 to 500,000 euros.
with no ads, with nothing else other than me selling in-person events or even merch around the topic of what I'm talking about.
And so it really can be with a tiny audience, you can really build something special there.
And I think if you look at the Patreon, a lot of the Patreon numbers are public for a lot of these podcasts and a lot of these shows that I'm talking about.
And you'll see sometimes they're bringing up to 70, 100,000 a month.
just from people sponsoring their Patreon or just for people paying for their Patreon.
And it doesn't require a huge amount of listeners to make that work.
You don't need to be Greg level to make that work.
I have a tiny podcast and it works.
Who's Greg?
I'm going to go to my favorite one here.
And it's one category that actually has like a hundred ideas or more in it.
It's what I call action apps.
So if you think of mobile apps, Instagram, TikTok, Uber, DoorDash, you name it, you basically scroll and then it feeds you stuff.
Or if you're logging into a CRM or something like a Salesforce, it's asking you, the human being, to do things.
But with AI...
You can actually create apps that do things on your behalf.
Clearing your inbox, booking your calendar, filing expenses.
So not having the human actually...
do something but the agents actually do something so the opportunity is in they're you know basically looking at a bunch of different apps where it's like if i were to make this agent first apps that do things for me not apps i stare at and that rely on human beings what can i reinvent in mobile such that uh you know i'm a first mover advantage so action apps as a category j ice cream what do you think I think it's great.
I think I'd love the idea of just having something that just takes action and I don't have to do anything.
I pay for superhuman mail.
It's supposed to be a super AI optimized inbox thing to get you to inbox zero, but I still have to do everything manually myself.
I don't know exactly how these action apps would work, but I'd love to be able to just plug something like that into my email.
my superhuman, something that somehow learned about the way I want to do things, why doesn't that already work?
Why doesn't it already work that I've been using Gmail, superhuman, whatever, for years?
Why doesn't it already just know what to do?
Why isn't this happening?
This reminds me of, you remember back in the day when mobile first came out and then a lot of the web companies took a while to become mobile first, right?
You remember?
Yeah, I mean, I remember Facebook having a very painful transition to mobile.
Exactly, and that's why they bought Instagram.
Instagram was basically the mobile-first version of Facebook, if you think about it.
I think the same thing is happening right now with agent-first apps.
So it's going to be hard for companies to basically do the transition to become agent-first.
And I think that's the opportunity for people listening right now.
Do you think that from a user experience perspective, if the product is too automated, that it feels like just from a pure sense from the user that it might not feel as valuable, that actually me clicking on stuff and doing things is what adds to the sensation that this thing is worth it?
I wonder if there's some element of all of this of if it's fully set it and forget it.
would there be such low user engagement that people would consider canceling it and wouldn't understand the value?
I'm just, I'm wondering how that's going to play out.
Like there's, do you know this product called Incogni?
No.
So Incogni is like in the background, Incogni like gets you removed from all of these different lists that, you know, spam you and send you emails, whatever.
And it's like a privacy, a piece of privacy software.
you never really hear from this.
You pay for the product, but you never really, you never have to interact with it because it's all happening in the background automatically.
And so every year when I, when like, you know, I get the bill for incogni and it's like, oh, that's still running in the background.
I kind of don't feel the, I almost feel it sounds really stupid, but I almost feel if there was some level of me having to interact with it, even a little bit.
it might increase my engagement with the product and my retention.
It's a completely random thought.
I'm just wondering, when a product gets so clever that you can fully set and forget it, I'm curious to see how the retention gets hit when these things start happening.
I want it to happen, but I'm curious.
My take on that is, what you're describing is a customer...
going into the kitchen and just cooking themselves their own meal and being like, because they've cooked this meal, they're going to enjoy the steak way more.
And my perspective is people just want...
Convenience to the max.
Convenience to the max.
And human beings are lazy by definition.
I shouldn't say lazy.
We're always looking for the path of least resistance.
And I don't blame us human beings because...
Life is difficult, right?
So if we're going to eat a steak, we just want that steak cooked right.
And I think there's going to be just this whole suite of apps.
I think someone can go and create a studio that just focuses on action apps.
And I think those, assuming they're picking the right niche, assuming it's a real pain point, assuming the customer has willingness to spend on that pain point.
there's a huge opportunity to go.
And I actually go and create these apps and I actually think that those apps end up getting acquired similar to how the Instagrams got acquired by Facebook.
And you can use, you don't need to build the AI from scratch, right?
You can integrate with Claude Agent SDK and other SDKs in order to build these things.
So you're basically building a layer on top of it.
You know when people were talking about GPT wrappers?
Yeah, now we have like agent wrappers, right?
That's kind of like where we're at here.
And I'm starting to see people pick up on it.
But I think the mobile first version, mobile first plus agent, plus niche, plus willingness to spend, plus boring workflow.
Plus, if you can figure out how to reverse engineer the TikTok or the Instagram reel to get people actually into the app, that's the workflow.
Easier said than done, of course.
But that's an interesting category I'm spending a lot of time thinking about.
Can you give me an example?
Just to get it into my head properly.
An action app.
For a specific topic, maybe like email, what would an action app look like to you?
Is it doing one small thing within a main product or is it a product within itself?
How do you imagine it?
Using email as an example, That would just be, what does the AI first version of superhuman look like?
Or Gmail look like?
Or whatever email app you're using.
So when you go into an email app today, it really relies on the human being to do things.
Yes, a lot of the Gmail's of the world, email apps have AI bolted on.
But they don't have it as the core experience.
And it's not easy, but you have to reimagine the core UX of email.
And it probably isn't a list of here's all your emails.
Because that's just daunting.
Maybe it's every single day I'm going to send you...
Maybe it's like you download an app, it learns about how you like to answer certain things.
And it basically says, hey, we're going to answer 80% of your emails via agents.
Those are our emails now.
Keep your Gmail, but those 80% are going to be automated and we're going to give you an interface around just managing how the agents are interacting.
Yes, and we're only going to show you the one or two emails per day based on the conversation you've had with the agent or whatever.
I don't want to respond to because it seems too important.
But here's what I was going to say.
Can I say yes to this?
That's kind of the holy grail of email, basically.
Exactly.
All right.
Okay, I understand it.
All right.
So for me, my next one that jumped out for me from your list was just number one.
Not because it's the only one I read, and I'm just kidding.
It's the loneliness, solving loneliness, third spaces, community apps, IRL.
So, and this connects with a couple of the other things.
I think the loneliness thing, especially since COVID has just been insane.
Like it's really crazy.
I think like there was a time where people used to view like my parents' generation and their parents' generation as being very lonely and spending all their time at home watching TV and not interacting with other people and not going out.
There was like this.
People would talk about it.
There was like TV ads for it in Ireland about older people being lonely.
And now I'm seeing that in my generation of people in their mid to late 30s who just stay home all day on the internet, consuming content, just consuming.
And I think this, what you've put in here, this third space is community apps, IRL.
I think it's not just a huge...
like a business opportunity.
I think it's also like something that needs to happen for the good of humanity.
And I think for me, this is the thing that I'm, this is one of the ones that I'm personally chasing and personally experimenting with.
We ran a retreat in February, which was five days off the grid.
So no.
Internet, no phones, no tech, nothing.
I think I invited you to it.
You didn't turn up actually, interesting.
I'm too glued to my phone, bro.
Actually two people pulled out because they got so locked into Cloud Code.
Because Cloud Code was just ramping up.
They were like, I cannot come to this event, I need to be on Cloud.
So we decided to create this thing.
which was like in the kind of sense of a summer camp where people from all over the world come together.
There's no phones, there's nothing.
You're completely separated from everything else and you just hang out.
You do art together, whatever, you hang out for five days.
And it was an amazing experience.
And this is something that I did it.
We basically broke even.
It cost like...
$90,000 to run, we made $90,000.
But I did it so that the people who came to it could do their own versions of it.
I don't want to be the person bringing this out to the world.
It's so hard to do it.
But if someone could turn that into a business, if one of those people could turn that into a business, something that brings people together, something that brings people into the real world, I think it's going to be something that's explosive.
And what you've put in here is, It doesn't have to be just in person.
I'm assuming you haven't heard of the Discord group called Dads of Marathon because it's very niche to one video game.
But there's how many people are in this right now?
So this is an example of like a digital environment community that's exploded.
And I'm part of and it's absolutely amazing.
There's 13,898 members.
It's a Discord group of dads or...
Basically casual gamers who don't have time to play video games, who don't have time to play competitive video games, but because this is a cooperative game where you have to talk to people and they know you're not going to find other dads to play with who you know because people don't have your hobbies anymore.
This Discord group, Dads of Marathon, has been my central community for the last three months to find other people to play this game with.
And it's the first time I've actually made like friends, you know, purely online in a very long time.
And so I think these niche communities around actually talking to people, actually connecting with people, actually doing stuff together.
In this case, it's a particular game.
If you look at the amount of players playing Marathon right now, there's almost more people in this group than actually are playing that game.
It's insane.
It just exploded.
And that is, listen to how niche that is.
It's a niche game and someone has created a community for dads who are playing that game.
Like it's so insane and 13,900 whatever people are in there.
It's super active and it's an amazing like community experience.
And I'm so happy people went and did that.
But it shows that there's this like thirst for connection both in person.
And online.
And those are the spaces that I'm looking into at the moment.
So here's my quick take on loneliness, the opportunity and the impact.
So look at this chart.
I don't know if you saw this.
Americans with less than one close friends is almost at 22%.
It's at 22%.
Yeah, that's terrible.
That's crazy.
Basically, almost a quarter of Americans have no close friends.
From an impact perspective, I completely agree.
We need to do something about this.
From a business perspective, I think that you can actually create a bunch of great businesses that help people with loneliness.
You gave such a great example of dads playing marathon.
I bet you would pay a monthly fee.
Oh, 100%.
If they sell something, I'm going to buy it.
If they sell anything.
Exactly.
So if we distill that for a second, you picked a game, a niche game with a niche, dads.
There's an opportunity to do dads play XYZ, like games, hobbies, different niches, and you can go create the dad company.
And that's just a huge opportunity solving loneliness for dads.
Right?
Yeah, especially men we're not good at.
I mean, I don't know how you are, but I'm quite like, I have to be reminded to be social.
I'm not great at it.
I'm not great at like reaching out to my friends and saying, hey, let's do something.
And so this Dads of Marathon thing, as an example, is the first time since I was 14.
First time since I was 14 years old, I'm 38 now, that I actually played.
like a shooter competitive multiplayer game with other people because of this discord group.
Well, I would play with you.
There's two companies I want to highlight that I think are doing well in terms of just to get people's creative juices flowing around building businesses around loneliness.
So one is a company called 222.
Have you seen this?
Never heard of it.
I'm a small investor in this, like so small.
But basically you take a personality test.
So it says start by taking our personality test so we can determine your most compatible matches.
Choose an experience.
So you decide if you want dinners or cocktail bars or salsa nights or basketball games.
And then you meet five to seven different matches and you actually go and do that thing with these people in your city.
And they are absolutely crushing it.
So as an example, dinner, cowboy hats and cocktails.
Kind of random.
This is amazing.
And you know what?
People listening to this podcast right now are thinking, oh yeah, but these guys have already done it.
It's already done.
First of all, very few people want to even do this type of business.
This is a type of business where you have to be a specific type of person to even create it.
And so if you happen to be the type of person who likes to bring people together for experiences, if you happen to be a goddamn someone who enjoys organizing events, you might be at some sort of crazy advantage right now because I can tell you, I do not like doing those things.
I do it because I think it needs to be in the world.
I don't want to do it.
I don't actually find that.
That's not my thing at all.
I'm too much of an introvert.
That is a killer business for someone who likes to organize events and be around people.
Killer business.
I want to go to our next category.
But before I do that, quickly, if you do want to create a business like this, a membership model makes sense.
I'd encourage people to look at memberships.
And the beauty about that is you're getting recurring revenue.
The other company that's really interesting in this space is a company called Fabric.
So you can see they do 75 plus gatherings per month.
They're in New York and Chicago.
They've got 500 members.
And they have just a huge wait list of people waiting.
It says they have no lengthy wait list, but I'm pretty sure there is a wait list to join.
No affiliation with this at all.
But people apply, you get access to these spaces.
I think they're like 5,000 to 10,000 square feet.
And then you participate in these gatherings.
And the gatherings are just these events.
So they're basically an event company.
You hear about how there's an issue with commercial real estate right now because office space is not doing so hot.
So they've just retooled that into community infrastructure and I hear they're doing really, really well.
So in a great example of a business that I think is doing well in terms of traction but also making impact.
All right, what's the next one you want to talk about?
Oh, I think I went.
That was my one.
Oh, that's true.
That was your one.
All right, so my turn.
I want to talk about...
Elder Tech.
I like the name.
Elder Tech.
Everyone is creating apps, businesses for what we just saw, Gen Z and millennials, cowboy hats and dinners, speakeasies and this, right?
Who is creating apps and companies for older adults?
There's 70 plus million boomers in the US and there's a ton of underserved niches and pain points that they have.
And AI specifically is one of the greatest ways to help those people with things like hearing, mobility, social, memory and vision.
And there's this thinking that if you're creating products for older adults.
In the positioning, in the landing pages, you need to show old people and gray hair and white hair and balding and stuff like that.
These people don't see themselves as that.
They just want products that are going to make them happier and healthier.
And I think there is a ton of businesses to be created in elder tech, which is basically the technology for older people.
Mobile apps, desktop apps, agents, AI with some hardware.
What do you think?
Dude, first of all, what age range are you talking about here in your head?
Like what are you imagining?
65 plus.
Okay, so my main business, facilitator.com, originally our assumption of our audience was it's going to be people in their 20s working in tech companies.
When we started doing Facebook ads and just stopped.
putting them out there generically and seeing who would come in, without doing very specific targeting, it actually ended up that our most valuable customers are all over 45.
And it completely shocked us because all of our advertising is very silly.
I'm in the ads being goofy.
If you go to facilitator.com, it's kind of a cool looking website.
But the people who can spend the most money with us simply because they are the highest earners or have built up the most savings are the people over 40, over 45, over 50.
So just to say the age range thing is such a big thing because we're all told when we're building products, we're all sort of excited to build stuff for people in their 20s because I guess that's the sort of explosive growth range.
if you're just looking to build something that makes a couple of million, looking to who actually has the money and who's not getting a lot of cool shit made for them.
And again, this falls into the dads of marathon thing.
A couple of the people I'm playing with are over 50 and they're loving the fact that there's this place now to hang out if you're bad at the stuff.
Again, video games, all gaming stuff is targeted at kind of...
a younger, cooler audience.
And also, especially with competitive video games, if you're not good at it, if you're not young, you're not going to be good at it.
So older people are sort of left out and I'm even in that range.
And it's been really cool to see, again, Dads of Marathon, it's almost like a piece of elder tech targeting people who are no longer able to use, like, I can't, I'm not Twitch like speed anymore.
I can't like be competitive anymore, but you just want to enjoy yourself.
So I think That is a huge, even if you expand it, the age range down to like the 40s as well.
There's so much scope.
There's so much stuff you can do there.
And I think it's a shame to only be targeting people, you know, like late teens, 20s, 30s, because it's the people in their 40s and 50s who have a lot more.
Also free time, their kids have maybe moved out as well.
That's a huge target customer for us at Facilitator.com is people whose kids have already moved out and they're looking to retrain.
It's an amazing market and honestly sometimes these people are just more enjoyable to deal with.
I mean, when you're creating a business, sometimes you don't need to overthink it.
So fish where the fish are.
And everyone is fishing.
Everyone is trying to create apps for gamers, let's say, right?
And the gamers are between 13 and 25.
Yeah, like the Roblox range.
Exactly.
So what you're saying is the dads of Marathon is way underserved.
And what I'm saying is you're so happy you found dads of Marathon.
Where's the grandpas of Marathon?
That'll be very relevant in 10 years as well.
When gamers are graduating, now that whole audience is getting older and older, it's getting more expensive to game.
The only people who are going to be gaming are older people.
Exactly.
In terms of opportunities, I think that just coming up with ideas around 65 plus is not only a good business to be in because you're fishing where the fish are, But you're also, going back to the loneliness thing, you're going to actually make impact, which is so cool and so fun.
And hot tip, everyone keeps telling me, Jonathan, Facebook ads don't work anymore because no one uses Facebook.
You're wrong.
A very large amount of people use Facebook.
They're just not in your age range.
And we have people buying our product every single day who've just heard about us on Facebook on the same day.
They just happen to be like, 50 or 55 or 60 years old and they're not using TikTok or YouTube.
So I think it's just we're sometimes a little bit out of touch with the market because of our age range.
I definitely know I am.
All right, your turn.
That's a good one.
That's a really good one.
Honestly, that's really powerful.
I think like...
Maybe connected to it, but not 100%.
So number 23 from your list made it into my top six, which is biggest hobbies, adults learning for joy, pottery, woodworking and drawing.
And I chose that because I literally ran a painting, essentially a painting retreat in February for adults, most of whom were over 40 and most of whom were in this.
older range who had their kids had moved out.
Maybe they've been working in corporate for a while.
They're looking for a change.
They're looking for something different to do.
And so I think the age range of that group was maybe between 35 and 65.
And people just wanted to take time for themselves to not learn some business thing, to not learn some tech thing.
but to actually just go and do things that make them feel joyful.
And in this case, it was primarily painting.
And this was like something, again, I've never run a painting retreat under my brand, but I wanted to try it.
And this was something that like sold out essentially instantly.
And I'm a huge, huge fan of creating like a small business or small communities around these topics.
music, like gardening is a huge thing.
I just think it's an amazing thing to go into.
Again, there's not a lot of competition because not a lot of people even want to do this.
It's kind of seen as a boring thing and that's why there's not a lot of competition.
Can I show you something real quick?
Yeah.
So I have a friend, he's a comedian and he has like a new, sort of reinvented himself as someone who helps, people find their inner artist and he has a space called Dr.
Tyler Lemko's Creative Club and he hosts these events where, let's see.
So I love this and I want to go to it already.
I would spend money on this.
I don't even need to know more and I would spend money on this.
Okay, so he hosts these events and it's people who don't want to use...
their iPhones, who just want to go and make something.
And so here's the paper lamp workshop.
I fucking love this.
More of this needs to exist in the world and this shit needs to exist.
Yeah, so you can see here, they're making paper lamps and it's people drinking tea and paper lamps and he charges for these events.
He's starting to do really well and he has this space and it's just...
people are going there on their first dates or they're going there just because they don't want to go to a bar and drink.
So I think this is related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about.
I think this is a no-brainer idea.
And I think you're going to start to see more of this.
It's great.
And you see this as well with book clubs as well, even paid book clubs.
There's one in Berlin.
One of my neighbors was chatting to me last week and he said, there's a book club in Berlin every Sunday.
85 people turn up to it every week and pay for it.
Not saying this is some huge moneymaker or something.
I'm just talking about the popularity of a book club because people just want to find a place to hang out and see other humans and get away from their computers.
I think the pushing back against screens, pushing back against all of this stuff is creating a lot of space for that.
It's creating a lot of space for in-person.
for this, you know, helping people with hobbies.
Also, by the way, a lot of people, when you get to my age, I can tell you, a lot of us don't have any hobbies and we need to even see what there is to do.
Like if you've worked your whole life, if you've been like busy your whole life, if you've had kids and you've been like locked in on all of that stuff, a lot of people like...
They stop having hobbies when they're like 18 years old.
And when they kind of come out of the tunnel of being busy, I'm just talking about this like from my own perspective.
Like I said, I haven't played video games really properly since I was 14.
I'm like now like, what do I do?
Like, what are the things that someone does when you actually start having free time again?
And I think there's a huge, it's a really good one.
The list is really fucking good, man.
I appreciate it.
I want to do AI employees.
You're not going to believe what happens next.
I did a whole episode on this, how to sell $5,000 a month AI employees with my friend Nick.
And I think there's a huge opportunity to look at white-collar work, social media marketers, marketing managers.
ops people and think about how can I go and set up a Hermes instance, an OpenClaw, something, and just go into businesses and set these things up for people and either host it yourself, host it in the cloud, or just...
teach them how to actually go and do these things.
So I think that there's still, I mean, it's one of those, again, all these ideas are pretty obvious, but I think this is one of the most obvious ideas that if you go and create and manage digital workers for businesses, and I think you have to figure out what niche you want to play in because there are a lot of people going after this.
So maybe you focus only on accountants or law firms in Germany or whatever.
But I think that there's a, There's just thousands and thousands of companies that are going to come and do this, set this up, and there's opportunity for all of them.
So AI employees, what do you think about this business?
So immediately the first thing that comes to mind is, myself and the producer of my YouTube channel, we don't have enough people, but we also, for that new business, don't have a huge budget for having someone sitting around and waiting around to do the work.
And there are things that we just need to do for that channel that are so not creative, but just need to be done.
But there's also no like AI product that solves it yet.
And so it would need a workflow, would need an agent.
An example of that, really simple example is when I put out my podcast episode, chapters need to be added to both the video and also the audio version.
And also I need to have...
clips created so that we can look at the clips and then decide which ones we're going to do and we'll do the thumbnails etc but just that would save us so much time that that would essentially be a junior employee's job that right now doesn't feel like the right thing to do but if we were able to dip into that like you know monthly okay we can have this junior employee agent set up for a certain amount of time Until we can hire someone to do it maybe and scale it up, I think that would be insane.
The problem is, actually, I think the problem is the use cases are, again, this might be a verticalization thing.
I think people like me who run businesses don't actually know the use cases that agents can actually do.
If I opened up, you know, we use, someone in your comments might now be writing, hey, use Opus Clip.
It actually clips up the YouTube episodes for you.
Yeah, but then I have to go to Opus Clip.
I have to type in the, I have to put in the YouTube episode.
I have to wait for it to finish.
Then I have to check all the clips and then I have to decide which ones I want to do.
Yeah, quit being a bully.
Yeah, exactly.
So it's not solving the problem for me, but I think that the companies who are going to nail this AI employee thing, are going to be the ones that can show the use case crystal clear to founders or managers and say, hey, this employee can do this, this, this, this, and this.
It removes this much work from your day and it costs a fraction of the price and we can switch it on right now.
There's like a one-time setup fee, whatever.
I honestly think if you could make the use cases of that crystal clear, it would be a no-brainer.
Yeah, I think you're right.
The verticalization is going to be key.
The way to think about this, if anyone's actually serious about going and building something here, is pick the vertical and pick the job title and then go and think about all the jobs to be done for that particular job title.
So for example, what you talked about, like a YouTube producer or YouTube editor.
Junior YouTube.
editor or producer or something like that.
It's like, go and ask ChatGPT or Claude or whatever to write out all the jobs to be done of that person.
What are the 50 jobs to be done?
And then if your agent or your set of agents or digital employee can go and do that at a tenth of the cost, you have a very compelling offer.
And then over time, what you do is you just add the jobs to be done.
First you have a few jobs to be done, two, three jobs to be done.
Then you make five and then ten.
And then all of a sudden you do have a true digital employee that you could sell.
I think there's a lot of opportunity here.
So I really like this idea.
Can I give you guys, so here's the company.
The company is called Juniors and it's about getting junior employees.
Because I think right now there's not enough like...
trust in the market for AI for founders like me to say, oh yeah, it's going to replace any senior employee.
But if the company was coming at me and saying, hey, we know it's not about replacing or replicating a senior employee.
We know it's about more of the junior work.
But every single company needs junior employees as well.
Someone go grab the domain.
JuniorEmployees.ai is available.
Go and build this company.
And that's why you listen to the podcast and that's why you like it and comment and you subscribe because we just give away everything.
We give it away.
So I do think that it's a great positioning and I do think that I like that brand.
So thank you for that.
Imagine how cute you can make it.
You can make a video of...
Some person trying to like, it's like the skit could be someone saying, hey, AI is going to do everything.
But then the founder is like, oh, but this sucks.
This is not a good output.
And so the concept behind juniors is that you're still the creator, you're still the company and you're making all this stuff as a human.
But there are just things that slow you down and make you more like they just get in the way that you probably would love not to do.
And believe it or not, agents can actually solve these things now.
And maybe you could even have a brand where you 100% are against AI doing any creative work.
And that would also appeal to everyone in the creative world that I'm in.
Because everyone in my world hates AI for creative work.
It's like everyone's against it.
But is very positive on AI for sort of...
menial, annoying tasks.
So I think that it could be a really strong branding.
Just this sort of juniors, we're here to help you get more done, not to replace your creativity, etc.
What's your next one?
Alright, here we go.
So we're getting close to the end here.
I'm just looking which one I want to hit.
So for me, this is like a personal one, number 32 from your original list, which is biggest food.
So personalized nutrition based on blood work and butt biome.
So I pay for a service already in Berlin.
It's called Aware.
I don't know how much I pay per year for it, but it's a lot considering the very little that I get.
And the idea here is that you get...
like a very extensive blood test multiple times per year.
It all gets dumped into the app and then it gives you fucking no information.
So basically what I do is I export it all and put it into Claude and I'm building sort of like a brain of my, you know, for me in particular, I have a lot of stomach problems.
And so I have a, literally one of my Claude projects is called, let's just, I'll read the exact name of it.
Stomach helper.
And stomach helper for me has all of my blood test results relating to the aware app I'm using, but also all of the results from my gastro doctor, whatever.
And this is the thing I go to and ask, hey, like I'm feeling this thing.
I've eaten this thing.
Could it be related?
Whatever.
And I know it's not perfect and I know it can give wrong answers.
but it's clear that I'm having to build something for myself that I'm not able to find on the market and I'm not able to pay for.
And I think when it comes to nutrition, when it comes to this particular one, I think it's all about the verticals.
I don't think it should be generic health.
I think if you would do a business just for people with my problem, which is GERD, G-E-R-D, it's like when this valve in your stomach is loose and the acid sort of comes up.
And you get gastritis and all of this.
Like millions and millions.
I don't know, it's like 30.
There's a huge amount of people in the world who have this.
It's a massive amount.
But I can't get help.
I have like relatively good amount of resources to solve this problem in my life with doctors all over the world.
And I can't find any central way to solve this problem.
You know, one doctor sticks a camera down my throat.
Another doctor gives me a blood test.
Another doctor says...
Try this diet.
And then another doctor says, take these pills.
And again, there's no central point.
So for me, this is, if someone would come along to me and say, Jonathan, this is the one-stop shop.
We've got the tools.
We'll be the central brain.
We'll be like the project manager.
We'll help you figure this stuff out.
There's very little I wouldn't spend.
on solving a problem like this.
And then I would want the holistic approach.
Yeah, then I want you guys to send me the food that I can eat and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
So for me, being able to get personalized, not just personalized nutrition advice, but also maybe that this company, you know, sends you the food or recommends a chef that's like certified for that specific thing.
Because meal plans, yeah, for me, this is a huge problem and I'm still not seeing the vertical.
The verticalization.
Basically, what you're saying is there's a lot of apps and offerings for horizontal, but there isn't the verticalization and the specificness.
that you'd like to see.
I don't want to lose weight.
There's loads of these things that are all bundled together.
I want to fix my goddamn leaky valve.
Have you seen this?
Have you seen Zoe?
No, I've never heard of it.
Zoe is a really interesting business.
So the way it works is you get a test kit and it tests your microbiome DNA test.
And then based on that, You download this app and it gives you personalized, evidence-based nutrition feedback.
So it's sort of a mix of, in some ways, a test like a 23andMe meets an AI food tracking app like CalAI, which does 50 million in ARR, and then personalized food advice.
I think what's really cool about this is it shows a new model for how people are going to create businesses and then I'll get to your point around making it more specific in a second.
Where I was coming from with this nutrition category is for the first time ever, you have human beings, millions of human beings actually testing the data for how you're feeling in a health environment.
These tests are now possible.
you know, function health, for example, people going and spending hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars a year to get and learn everything about, you know, their health markers.
So you have these health markers, people are uploading it to the cloud and then they're asking AI to help them figure it out and or they're asking their doctors.
So the opportunity in this category is to do something like Zoe, but to your point, go even more specific.
So you can do Zoe for XYZ issue that you have.
Zoe for men.
Zoe for people in Germany, right?
So there's a lot of opportunity to look at where are people going to be getting more and more data around health markers?
And then how can you create an app or an offering?
That combines not only insights around those data markers, not only an app that has AI built into it that helps you, but also speaks to the pain points that someone is feeling in that moment.
That's nutrition.
And look at the stats for the US alone.
Approximately 60 million Americans, about 20% of the US adult population have GERD.
And this is why when you go into like a CVS, you have all of this anti-acids, like entire rows of them.
I think that's the hint of how you find your verticals.
Go into a CVS, what is the over-the-counter stuff that you're seeing the most of?
Well, that's probably the problems people are having.
I mean, I can think of a couple off the top of my head.
Obviously something like GERD.
Migraines would be a huge one.
These kinds of things are so hard to solve for people.
And if you can solve them, you can improve their life by up to 80% just their well-being.
But these things are usually very holistic, but often I'm not looking for something holistic.
And I think what these AI tools can do, what they can enable is this sort of locking in on one topic and helping people with that.
Hey, if someone thinks they can solve this shit for me, call me.
I want to do another one not related to humans, sort of the opposite.
Pet health.
I did talk about health in some of my lists, but I think what's really underserved is pet health.
You're starting to see things like putting on...
collars on our dogs and stuff that looks at heart rates, step counts, sleep, things like that, and it gives you a report.
Pet industry is massive, $140 billion, but a very small percentage of pets have smart monitoring, have some of these smart AI tools on top of it.
So I think there's just a huge opportunity to do a lot of what we talk about on the podcast around AI, AI agents.
But applying that to pet health to make pets happier and healthier.
And as we know, people spend a lot of money on their pets.
And I think there's just a lot of ideas around helping pets be more happy and healthy with AI, with AI agents, and then also using hardware.
So you can go and look at just pet.
devices and think about how can I inject a $30 AI brain to this to make this better product?
What do you think of pet health as a category?
I used to have a lot of pets as a kid, but I haven't really had one as an adult.
So it's something that people are obsessed with their pets in a way that they were not.
When I was a kid, they were just...
running around the place.
No one gave a shit, to be honest.
Now it's people's baby, right?
People are obsessed with it.
They want to give it the right food.
They want it to be taken really well care of.
It's like a member of the family.
And I can't imagine it going any other way other than pets with their own eight sleep mattress covers.
So I can imagine it would be huge.
I've also listened to...
You know, the Tim Ferriss podcast, Kevin Rose often talks about his dog and dog longevity and giving the dog like different sort of pills and different things to like resveratrier or whatever to increase its life.
And so I can't imagine this wouldn't be an explosively huge market, but I don't hear any of the animal owners that I know.
using this stuff yet.
So I think it's still pretty nascent and young.
It's still early.
There's some products, I'm on one right now, petpace.com, there's Whistle, a few of these have added AI recently.
But I think it's, again, less than 2%, really, really early.
And for people who are trying to find ideas...
for their pets, one of the good ways is just look at what people are doing for human beings.
One of the ideas that I had, I was on the My First Million podcast two, three years ago, and I was like, someone should do Athletic Greens for pets.
And someone took that idea and ended up making hundreds of thousands of dollars a month from that idea, reached out to me and stuff like that.
No cut.
I do it for the love of the game.
God damn it.
But the point I'm trying to make is just look at who's sponsoring Huberman's podcast and then apply that to pets.
I think this is a no-brainer category.
And if you love pets...
Is that a pun?
Category?
Sorry?
Is that a pun?
Oh yeah, it was a pun.
It was a little meow meow.
Doggy gory.
Yeah, category.
Doggy gory.
So I like this one.
I'm not like the biggest pets guy.
I don't want to be thinking about...
I thought you were a big pet guy.
I love animals.
I love animals, but I'm not like...
I don't want to spend 24-7 working on animals, but for people who are obsessed with animals.
this is a huge category and something that I think that a lot of people should do.
So I'm going to break the system slightly because I want to just pull together three from your list and turn them into one thing just to double down on a point.
So earlier I mentioned, earlier I chose as my number one live shows unscripted content.
Then we talked about the idea of, hey, the loneliness, the third spaces, etc.
And then we also talked about this idea of adults finding hobbies.
What I didn't say and what I just want to tell you guys, because this is happening, this is what I'm doing right now, is the missing point from all of this is that there's within all of that, who you choose and what type of person you choose is going to have a dramatic...
different dramatically different outcome and type of business so for me i'm only targeting entrepreneurs who are interested in doing these things so for example when i ran that painting retreat and that art retreat i was able to make 90 000 well 110 000 from it and other people who are running creative retreats were like what the hell like these things usually make five thousand dollars and i'm like yeah because i'm doing it for entrepreneurs I'm doing it for entrepreneurs who are looking for a creative outlet.
And so I think when we're talking about all of these things, if you're looking for examples on the internet, you're often going to find things that maybe wouldn't be that scalable or maybe wouldn't be very lucrative because it's for the general public.
And I think it's great to have that as a service out there.
But for me personally, I just want to say my stack here is that I have a show that's unscripted, as you said.
It's a show that's unscripted that draws in a certain type of creative entrepreneur.
That show is building up an audience.
That audience eventually gets pitched something like a retreat, a creative retreat for entrepreneurs, business owners.
And that's where then I monetize the audience using something that's about in real life and doing something that's anti-AI and kind of taking them away from their phones, etc, etc.
And so for me, a lot of these things, a lot of these businesses that we talked about today, you can choose the type of person you're targeting.
And sometimes just targeting, the targeting of the person makes the difference of this being an easy and enjoyable business to run or a grind.
And I think for a lot of what we talked about today, actually the older, like established business owner, entrepreneur audience, is a fantastic target market.
And I find it much harder to sell these things to sort of people who are just starting off.
And that's like a really boring piece of business advice that sometimes you want to create things for people who already have money and already are established.
And then, you know, creative, Tim Ferriss says, make the free version of something and then the premium version of something.
So maybe you have your free meetups where people can do these creative retreats that look like your friends ones where they're making like the lamps and everything or like your low cost ones.
And then you have your like high end premium ones, like what we did for our one, where you're charging up to seven or $8,000 to go on a creative retreat.
And I think the, I just want to like lock that in that that doesn't have to be a low margin, low revenue business.
This one retreat that we did was 100K.
We're running another event next week, that's 60K, and that's just a virtual three hours per day for two days.
And so these can be still quite large numbers if you're choosing the entrepreneur as your sort of target market, which I think a lot of people listening to this would probably consider doing anyway.
I have a simple saying related to this, which is date the product, marry the niche.
I like it, but what does it mean?
that you have some unfair advantage in, and that you believe have some disposable income.
So in your case, entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs made a lot of sense.
I don't think that everyone listening needs to go and build something for entrepreneurs.
I do think that they should go and pick a niche that they, one, think is underserved, two, think has disposable income, and three, has a big pain point.
So we talked about pets and pet owners.
not necessarily the niche with the most disposable income, but the thing is they're spending their disposable income on their pets because they care a lot about it.
So I think that as people go through a lot of these different opportunities and the whole goal of this really was to get people's brains and creative juices flowing, think about the niche that you're going to marry and the product might change.
And that's what I mean.
date the product because it might change as you learn and you get to know it more.
So that's my feedback to that.
And I think we have time for one last startup opportunity.
I'm just going to go through it quickly.
So we talked about live and sort of an anti-AI approach to creating content and building media.
This is the complete opposite of this.
I think that there's a huge opportunity and some people are going to hate me.
for saying this, but for some people, this is going to be exciting.
I think there's a huge opportunity to create AI native media companies.
What do I mean by that?
I mean using AI to build Instagram pages and other social media where you're using AI, you're letting the audience know you're using AI, of course.
but to build these audiences and then from there you're building products to sell them.
I want to give you an example.
I have a friend, his name is Rowan Chung.
He's actually been on the pod, he's talked about it before.
He grew his account from zero to almost 400,000 followers in the last 18, 24 months.
He does it via his AI avatar and he talks about different news items.
And once he's built this audience, then he can go and build apps, build companies and sell to that audience.
I think that there's going to be a lot more of this.
And I know some people aren't going to like it because they're like, oh, it's just AI slop.
But if you actually go through his account, they're really, really high quality posts.
It's really good.
So I think that there is going to be a lot of slop.
I think that if you can create the top 1% AI native media company in a specific niche, then you're looking good.
So I think this is a huge opportunity.
Yeah, this is a space I just don't know much about, so I'm just going to have to nod and silently confirm.
Well, the hard part about this is how do you create high quality stuff?
And I think one way to do that is to look at how the Rowans of the world are doing it and being like, how is he doing this?
What makes his videos really good?
And how can I do it for my niche?
And what are the tools I need?
Things like HeyGen and 11 Labs and putting it together.
I think that's what you need to do.
I'm not a believer that AI slop is going to work in 2026 and beyond.
I think that that's frankly a waste of time.
But I do think that using AI to create media companies that are actually high quality, maybe with a human in the loop, is just a great way to build audiences right now.
And I think once you have an audience, you can do a lot.
First thing that comes to my mind, again, back to gut health.
If you ended up making a faceless YouTube channel where the research is excellent and it's pulling together an audience of people who have GERD, even if it's kind of a bit soulless or whatever, but then the person who's making it has this audience of people who have this and then they have enough audience and funding to find an actual expert who can then create, do live streams around that topic.
that can still actually be good for the world and it could be an interesting business.
So I think for me, I don't really care as long as then the output or the monetization of it has like a positive impact.
So I guess it doesn't matter if the audience building aspect of it has this AI, like as in the machine is telling the human what to put out there.
it's still helpful and useful to people or entertaining.
Amen.
I love it.
J.
Ice Cream, J.
Ice Cream, Jonathan Courtney, thank you for coming on the pod.
This has been our favorite startup ideas, the greatest startup ideas that we think that people should go and explore, go and build.
I just want to thank you for your time and hopefully people enjoyed this.
Thank you for your time.
Yeah, thank you for your time, man.
This is honestly a pleasure.
We're recording this on a Sunday and there's nothing I'd rather be doing than giving out sauce on a Sunday.
Saucy Sunday.
Saucy Sunday.
Thanks so much, man.
I'm going to turn my light here to a more depressing blue just to finish off the episode.
Just to make it look like I'm in some sort of surgery room.
You look dead.
You literally look...
Like your dad.
It's late on a Sunday night, man.
Thanks, man.
I'll catch you later.
See you, dude.
Bye.
Bye.