How Will People Make Money in the AI Age?

Greg Isenberg (0:00)

Today, we're going to talk about the only businesses left to build in the agentic era. Yes, I think that there's only 13 businesses to be building in the world of agents. Now, I don't subscribe to the people who say, there's going to be this permanent underclass and you just got to create businesses or else you're kind of messed up for the future. I don't think it's going to be as dire as that, but I do think that in a world where agents exist, abundance are going to exist, owning these assets are going to put you just in a better position. So today, what are we going to do? We're going to go through the 13 businesses that are left to be built. By the end of this, you're going to understand all 13 pretty well, why there's an opportunity, why they're going to exist in a world of agents, couple ideas. So, but you know, grab your coffee, grab your tea, strap in because, hey, this is the stuff that, you know, if you're in your teenager, if you're in 20s, you're 30s, 50s, 70s, this is good stuff to know because the world is changing and it is changing fast.

So, the first type of business that, you know, you'd want to own in an AI agent world is AI native service firms. What is that? Well, an AI native service firm is when the agents do more of the delivery. Now, I've seen people say AI native service firms is when they do all of the delivery. I don't believe that's the case. I think you can still have the agent doing 90% of the work and still be an AI native firm. So, as an example, you can create a bookkeeping firm for one type of business where, you know, you have client records, the agents prepare the books, and then the human reviews exceptions, and then you complete monthly books, and you charge for the completed job. It could be a monthly fee, but it could also be, hey, every time we, you know, complete these books, it's going to cost X, Y, Z.

Why is owning this business good? Well, it's high margin. You don't need that many clients. The why now exists when you have, you know, Astra, 5.5, some of these great models that are coming out soon. You know, you actually, they, you know, could get this incredible amount of output. So I'm really interested in AI native service firms. I did a whole episode on one recently. I'll include it in the description around creating a creative agency. So you can imagine doing like logos as a service, or ads as a service, these sorts of things. Really like these businesses, super high margin, and something I'm ideating actively around. The second is just generally offline businesses. You know, people, yes, it's an AI age, but we, you know, people actually want to pay to go and do something with other people. So one example of this is, you know, this company called Othership. I heard about them from the founder, actually, in Toronto where they started. And they've got this like neighborhood sauna club where there's, you know, you walk into the sauna and it's like huge and there's other people and there's music and they, you know, there's someone who can help you do cold plunges and it's just this incredible environment and tea. They basically leveled up the experience of a communal sauna. And I think now more than ever, you know, people want this sort of thing. And it's not cheap. It's really not. The visit itself could be, you know, I don't remember exactly what it is, but it's not cheap, but it's an incredible experience and they sell a membership. So I think businesses like this that, you know, are onto trends, you know, here the trends are obviously our wellness, community, and you're just seeing them scale. They've been scaling in New York and I just, I love these types of businesses, especially ones that have a membership model. So I think you're going to see a lot more like this. And you can run, you know, of course, you can have agents do a lot of the admin, but the room, the experience is what people are buying. Now, the hard part about offline businesses, obviously, is that it costs a lot more money to start an offline business than an AI native service firm, especially if you're creating an offline business in a place like Manhattan or Toronto, like a place with high amount of real estate. So, you know, how I think about offline businesses is, you know, what is the food cart version of, or food truck, what is the food truck version of your business? What do I mean by that? If you're going to start a restaurant, sometimes the best thing to do is to start a food truck version of it, because it's just so much cheaper and you can prove out that model that way. So, the MVP, you know, what is that look like? And I actually think, now that I'm remembering, I remember speaking to the founder about this, the first version of Othership was literally in the founder's backyard. He literally like made this in his backyard and obviously that didn't cost too much money, started inviting friends, community members, and then he decided to get a place. So take it one step at a time. Third is Distribution. So we live in this world now where you prompt a few times and all of a sudden you basically have a startup, but getting people to the products that you're building or people are building is harder than ever, honestly. And my belief is that the price of reaching people is going to get higher and higher. And actually if you take a step back and look at what people used to charge for, for example, a Facebook ad. In 2009 or whatever, when the Facebook ad platform came out, they were literally charging five cents a click. Now the average click, I don't have the exact data in front of me, but we're talking a dollar, two dollars, like even more than that, $3, $4, $5, depending on who you're trying to target and which country you're trying to target. So I think that owning organic audiences is so, so, so important and I think that even before you end up, if you end up wanting to create an offline business, if you end up wanting to create an AI native service firm, starting with the distribution, building organic audiences, the cool part about this is you can get paid to generate useful niche information, you get paid by advertisers to basically build your audience and then you go and build the products that they ask for. This is something I call the ACP funnel, audience community product. First you start with the audience, then you build the community, then you build the product. This is something that is a business model. I think people who own multiple meme pages, multiple YouTube channels, multiple Instagram audiences, those people are going to do well in this era. So I think number three, distribution. The fourth, which is actually not talked about that often, is proprietary data sets. So I think that what you're starting to see is that data is just so valuable. Data is the new oil.