About this channel
Greg Isenberg looks at AI through the eyes of someone searching for products to build and services to sell. Software businesses, agent deployment, freelance work and new development tools recur…
Greg Isenberg looks at AI through the eyes of someone searching for products to build and services to sell. Software businesses, agent deployment, freelance work and new development tools recur throughout the channel. The emphasis is on possible commercial uses: how a capability might become a workflow, an offering or the basis of a business.
The formats include courses, masterclasses, tool walkthroughs and reactions to product announcements. One course is presented around constructing a software factory, while a masterclass examines work deploying AI agents. Other videos take an announcement or an emerging tool as the starting point for a discussion of business opportunities. This gives the channel a mixture of instruction and entrepreneurial interpretation.
A recurring question is how much of an existing job can be handled with AI. A video about freelance assignments considers using models to carry out paid tasks; another turns to writing and the problem of generic AI output. Interest in local AI and collections of GitHub projects adds a more technical strand. These examples connect the search for revenue with choices about tools and the quality of what those tools produce.
The material is aimed at founders, independent builders and people exploring AI services. Its revenue figures and large market estimates belong to the opportunities proposed in the videos, rather than establishing what a viewer will earn. The useful starting point is the business question behind each proposal: who has a task to complete, how could the work change, and what would a customer actually buy? Viewers interested in generating and examining such ideas will find that orientation throughout the channel.
Latest episode
Make $$$ Selling AI to Boring Businesses
Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP
I sit down with James Dickerson, the Boring Marketer, who owns Diesel Dudes, a mobile diesel repair business in Charlotte…
Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP
I sit down with James Dickerson, the Boring Marketer, who owns Diesel Dudes, a mobile diesel repair business in Charlotte, North Carolina, and spent years running agencies for local businesses. James shows how to sell AI-built funnels to Main Street trades businesses doing $2 million to $20 million a year, starting with a Boring Funnels search that found 100 Dallas plumbers worth pitching. He walks through the leaks he finds on their landing pages, the funnel offers he'd sell, and how he'd win clients with the Dream 100, lumpy mail, and local meetups. If you know how to use coding agents, this episode gives you a full playbook for a service business built around booked jobs.
Build funnels that sell: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/boring_funnels
Timestamps
00:00 – Intro
01:23 – Sponsor: Brex
02:08 – Why sell AI to Main Street
03:05 – James's Background
04:32 – Finding and Picking a Niche
07:26 – The $2M to $20M Opportunity
09:02 – Plumbing and HVAC Market Size
10:56 – Underserved Trades Niches
12:38 – Auditing Five Dallas Plumbers
13:50 – Personal Agents vs. Google
15:02 – Selling Booked Jobs and Phone Calls
17:41 – Funnel Offer Overview
19:43 – Funnel Example
23:19 – Matching Ads to Funnels
24:14 – Chet Holmes and the Dream 100
28:18 – Branding your Firm
30:04 – Meta Ads for your firm
31:37 – Stacking Old School and New School Marketing Strategy
34:31 – Find, Pitch, Deliver
36:02 – Showing Owners the ROI
37:37 – Pricing your Offer
41:45 – Reporting With AI
42:33 – Closing Thoughts
Key Points
• Main Street trades businesses doing $2 million to $20 million a year have budgets and few useful pitches in their inbox.
• James sells booked jobs and phone calls, since owners care about revenue and ROI over AI.
• The biggest leaks sit on the landing page: missing ad promises, hidden Google ratings, and buried booking buttons.
• Funnels with tripwires, instant prices, quizzes, and owner videos turn paid traffic into booked jobs.
• The Dream 100, lumpy mail, and local meetups build trust with owners over months.
• One free build in exchange for a case study gets you to paid work.
Numbered Section Summaries
1. Why James Sells to Main Street
James started out owning agencies for local businesses and startups, running performance ads, social, and SEO. He owns Diesel Dudes, a mobile diesel repair business in Charlotte that dispatches mechanics to broken-down semi trucks, and he grew it with ads, funnels, and local SEO. He packages that experience into how he'd start an agency again today.
2. The Market and the Niches
Roughly 112,000 plumbing and HVAC companies average about $2.5 million a year, only 14% of owners say AI is fully part of how they run, and they pay around $129 per lead. James steers toward urgent, high-ticket work like commercial hood cleaning, dental implants, tree services, irrigation, sport courts, artificial turf, chimney sweeping, gutter guards, septic, crawl space, and backup generators. I'd add snow removal in the Northeast, since the trades around where you live are your unfair advantage.
3. Funnels as the Offer
Agencies still charge $20,000 for a good funnel, and anyone who knows a coding agent can build one fast at high quality. For an HVAC company, James tests a free check, a $79 tune-up tripwire, an instant price, a repair-or-replace quiz, an owner video sales letter, and an advertorial, each tied to its own ad campaign. A tripwire liquidates ad spend: at $1 a click, 20 visitors cost $20, one $20 sale covers it, and the rest leave an email address.
4. Pricing, Proof, and Mindset
A plumber with 100 leads a month at $129 spends about $13,000, and one $1,714 job pays for 13 of those leads. James suggests an intro install plus monthly testing and reporting, possibly performance pricing later, and a first free build in exchange for a case study. I believe you have to commit to being the best person to help plumbers in Dallas for six to 18 months, and James recommends one market and one geography for six months.
The #1 tool to find startup ideas/trends - https://www.ideabrowser.com
LCA helps Fortune 500s and fast-growing startups build their future - from Warner Music to Fortnite to Dropbox. We turn 'what if' into reality with AI, apps, and next-gen products https://latecheckout.agency/
FIND ME ON SOCIAL
X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/gregisenberg
Instagram: https://instagram.com/gregisenberg/
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/gisenberg/
FIND JAMES ON SOCIAL
X/Twitter: https://x.com/boringmarketer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jadickerson/
YouTube Shorts
The Startup Ideas Podcast Episodes
uploads
More episodes from this channel
The 9 Stages of AI Agent Adoption, Explained
21.10.2026
In this solo episode, I break down the war on AI agents, from Amazon blocking Meta's Muse to Delta treating outside booking agents as unauthorized automated activity to Yelp charging agents for access. I...
Meta Muse Will Create 1,000 Millionaires
19.10.2026
Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP In this solo episode, I break down how to make money with Meta Muse by mining Facebook groups, Marketplace, and Instagram to match buyers with sellers. The...
Make cool things with AI that people buy (Gemini 4 Argon)
15.10.2026
Gemini 4 Argon is LIVE, Google's most advanced AI model, try it for yourself: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/gemini4-argon In this solo episode, I share what I learned after a week with Gemini 4 Argon, Google's new frontier...
8 GitHub Repos To Go Viral and Make Money
8.10.2026
In this solo episode, I walk through eight GitHub repos and AI skills that I test at night and on weekends. The list covers launch videos, social research, local voice and dubbing, editable decks,...
13 Businesses for the Age of AI
6.10.2026
In this solo episode, I walk through the 13 businesses I think are left to build in the agentic era. I believe that in a world of agents and abundance, owning the right assets...
Masterclass: How FDEs make $1M/yr deploying AI agents
1.10.2026
Google's most advanced audio models are LIVE, try them for yourself: Gemini 3.8 Live: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/gemini-3.8-live Gemini 3.5 Transcribe https://startup-ideas-pod.link/gemini-3.5-transcribe Gemini 3.5 Live Translate: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/gemini-3.5-live-translate In this episode, I talk with Vas from Varick about...
OpenAI DevDay: Dots, Agents & $100B Opportunities
29.9.2026
I watched almost 60 minutes of Sam Altman on stage at OpenAI Dev Day 2026. Out of 20-plus launches, I pick the three or four that I think can make people billions of dollars...
$5T opportunity: AI Roll Ups
28.9.2026
In this solo episode, I break down the $5 trillion wave of small businesses set to change hands as their owners retire, and why AI agents make this wave a real opening for solo...
Meta Muse AI Connectors: The App Store for AI?
24.9.2026
In this solo episode, I break down the huge business opportunity because Meta has opened Muse, its personal AI agent, to developers. You can now submit a connector, which lets Muse use your service...
Take Upwork jobs, let AI do them (Astra etc). It's absurd.
23.9.2026
Build your own AI native creative agency with Higgsfield : https://startup-ideas-pod.link/higgsfield In this solo episode, I explain why I expect a wave of one-person businesses built as AI-native service firms, and I show you...
$30M Writer: Never write AI slop again
21.9.2026
Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP In this episode I speak with Nicolas Cole about the real value of everything you write on the internet. Cole has 15 years of experience as a...
Jev is HERE. How to use it
18.9.2026
In this episode, I talk with Ryan Vogel about Jev, a new type of AI built for classification. Ryan shows how Jev takes an input plus an output schema and returns a probability for...
Instinct AI is For Real. What You Need to Know.
15.9.2026
Invites while they last to Instinct: https://startup-ideas-pod.link/instinct_ai I sit down with Remy to go through Instinct, the new invite-only personal agent that runs inside iMessage. Remy shares his raw chat history on screen: a...
Building a Software Factory that actually works (Full Course)
14.9.2026
Get Your Complete Financial OS at https://startup-ideas-pod.link/brex_SIP I welcome Ras Mic back to the pod to explain the phrase "software factory." Mic shares his screen and walks through the exact system that he runs...
GPT-6 Astra: How I’d Make Money With It
10.9.2026
I talk with Ras Mic about GPT-6 Astra. We skip the game demos and the 3D toys, and we focus on use cases to earn money or improve products. I share 9 Astra prompts...
I'm Obsessed With Local AI. Here's Why
8.9.2026
I run this episode solo. I explain local AI in plain terms: the model runs on hardware I control, and a cloud model runs somewhere else. I map the four pieces of the local...
5 GitHub Repos: Kill AI Slop, Go Viral, Make Money
2.9.2026
On this solo episode, I review five free, open source GitHub repos that help you build products, make money, or save time: Peter Yang's No AI Slop Skill, the CRM by TryComp AI, Video...
Marketing Engineer: The $1M Job with AI Agents
31.8.2026
In this solo episode I explain a role that I call the marketing engineer. I believe this person becomes one of the most valuable hires in tech in the next 18 to 24 months....
WebMCP: Let AI Agents pay you money
26.8.2026
Vinny is back on the pod, and he explains WebMCP. WebMCP puts MCP tools inside the browser UI, so any agent that you bring can read a page and act on it. Vinny demos...
Making $$$ with Grok Bot
21.8.2026
I sit down with Billy Howell for an inside look at a real business that runs on Grok Bot agent teams. Billy tests hundreds of tools for The Rundown, and he uses Grok Bot...
Innohub TV
Watch this content also on Innohub TV
We picked clips from Innohub TV that continue the same topic.
