10 AI Business Ideas From The Queen of AI ft. Sarah Guo

**Sarah Guo** (0:00)
I think it is worth talking about the fact that there are ways to make a million bucks, and then like ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks, right? And I think we should talk about both.

**Shaan Puri** (0:09)
Ah, do we hit record already?

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
Yeah.

**Shaan Puri** (0:11)
That's the intro. Alright.
So what do you mean by that? You're saying there's ways to make a million bucks, and then there's ways to make a million bucks that could turn into a billion bucks. You have my interest. Let's go.

**Sarah Guo** (0:29)
Okay, okay, let's go. So I think maybe, and I don't mean this in a dismissive way. I think venture capitalists are very often accused of dismissing something as like a cashflow lifestyle business or whatever, right?

**Sam Parr** (0:41)
Which by the way, for anyone who is not in the VC world, you go to a VC, you say, I've got this great company. I think I can make $5 million in profit in year eight. And then after that, maybe we can grow this for another 50 years. And one day it could be a thing. And they say, that's a really nice lifestyle business. It's like them saying, that's cute.
Right.

**Sarah Guo** (0:59)
It is, that's cute, yeah.

**Sam Parr** (1:01)
I remember my first time doing that. Of course, the thing is, is that anyone who actually is an entrepreneur, including anyone who's a VC, they know that you can oftentimes get richer and have a less stressful life if you have a quote lifestyle business.

**Sarah Guo** (1:13)
Yeah, so I'd say like, there's many types of valid businesses, right? And then also a lot of things that have become very interesting start very small. So I wanna recognize that.
But I think a reasonable analogy is, if you can figure out internet distribution and then get super powerful models getting increasingly powerful to just do something useful in a niche, those two things together, that's like the new drop shipping. You know how like for maybe seven or eight years, I'm like too old to know what the exact timeline was, but there was a period of time where people were like, oh, I'm an internet kid, I'm gonna figure out some drop shipping thing and like make my first $100,000. I think this is it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:51)
Yes, so basically for people who don't really know, you could go on Alibaba or Aliexpress. That was like the open AI in this case, right? So it was like, this thing exists that you didn't have to build, but it's magic. Watch this, you can push a button, you never had to make the product, you never had to warehouse the product, you never have to ship the product. It will just magically appear at your customer's door, you know, somewhere between one and three weeks later.
All you have to do is the marketing bit and kind of what you're saying is open AI and the other AI companies have built this magic that basically will take a piece of text and turn it into a video or a song or whatever. And if you just do the marketing bit, you can actually almost like drop ship a product or a service to the customer without having to make it yourself. Is that the idea?

**Sarah Guo** (2:33)
That is, thanks for explaining it. And I think it's like easier with a few examples, right? Like copy editing is probably a prototypical one, right? You can do not amazing, but like reasonable copy generation with these models today. And so there are a series of companies where you just have some templates that make it more obvious to somebody writing marketing copy, how to use these models. And then you have a website with decent SEO, and then like you add some Stripe integration and you're in business.

**Sam Parr** (3:05)
What's an example?

**Sarah Guo** (3:06)
Well, I think like CopyAI and Jasper, these companies started this way, right?
And then I have several friends who have shipped like AI companionship apps. Just look at paid apps in the app store by charting. And some of those people are generating a million dollars of cashflow for themselves. It's not because they're deep AI people.

**Shaan Puri** (3:23)
All right, let's take a quick break. I gotta tell you, you ever seen those Coachella posters where it's got all the artists names? And you're like, oh my God, wow, they got Fred again and Skrillex and that's what the HubSpot inbound conference looks like. Just listen to the speaker list that they have. I don't know how they pulled this off, but listen to this.