What is Perplexity Computer?

**Greg Isenberg** (0:00)
Today, we're going to take Perplexity Computer for a spin. Now, I haven't tried it, so together, we're going to basically look at how can we use this, how can entrepreneurs use this to make money and be more productive. We're actually going to ask it to tell us what are the top use cases to use, and we're going to test it out and see if it's any good. You've probably seen Perplexity Computer, and you might have bookmarked it, but today we're actually going to see if it's super valuable. So let's just get right into it.
I'm gonna just say, hey, I want to know the five best use cases non-obvious for founders who want to make money and be more productive using Perplexity Computer. Like, what are the five prompts and use cases I need to be aware of that are super mind-blowing? I'm actually going to share this live on YouTube and Spotify on The Startup Ideas Podcast. So we are going to test it. This is on Perplexity Computer. As of now, you need to be on the max plan to get it going. That's $200 a month. They say it's coming to pro and maybe free pens. I'm not sure. I'm not affiliated with Perplexity by any stretch. This is the first time I'm using this. Just noticing for the first time, you basically have these tasks on the left-hand side. On the right-hand side is what's happening with the different agents. It says, let me load up the relevant skills to give you the best possible answer here. Let me read the key reference files to make sure I'm giving you the most accurate picture of what a computer can do. It's running all these tasks in parallel, which is pretty cool. You don't need to open up a bunch of different cloud code instances. It's right there running in parallel. Now it says, good. I now have a deep understanding of the full capability set since you're sharing this on The Startup Ideas Podcast. Let me craft five generally non-obvious founder-specific use cases that will make your audience jaws drop. All right, let's see if Perplexity Computer can drop the sauce. Here are five non-obvious use cases that should surprise your audience. These are built for founders who want to move faster and make more money. Warm, outbound at scale. So personalized, prospect, research and outreach in one shot. So let's go ahead and try this. We're actually, I guess you can press copy right over here. And I guess you want to start a task. So here's a list of 30 companies I want to sell to. For each one, find the founder or CEO on LinkedIn. Research their company's recent news, funding and pain points. And then draft a hyper-personalized cold email referencing something specific about them. Send each email via my connected Gmail. So we're going to go ahead and do that. So that's actually pretty cool. You have your tasks over here. You can go back and forth. I think that's pretty clean. Perplexity has always done a good job at doing pretty clean UI UX. Sip of cold brew. Let's keep it going. All right, I'll tackle this step by step. I need a few things to make this effective. Again, running the tasks in parallel. I see a couple of things I need to address before we can execute on this. Gmail is not connected yet. I need to get this set up so I can send emails on your behalf. I need some key details from you to make these emails actually convert. So this is cool. I mean, connecting your email, there's definitely obviously some risk associated with that, but I'm going to go ahead and do that. So I've gone ahead and connected it. So it's super cool that you can just do that pretty easily. Gmail is connected. I'm ready to roll as soon as you share the list of 30 companies, paste them in your reply, what you're selling, your SaaS product, podcast sponsorships, tone and CTA preferences. Once I have those details, I'll research all 30 companies in parallel. I'll find the right person at each and draft hyper-personalized emails and send them through your Gmail. So, you know, I'm going to say, I run The Startup Ideas Podcast. This is for podcast sponsorships. I want you to research who advertises on TBPN and then I'll say, take the top, let's just say five companies, and then you now know I'm selling pod sponsorships and Tone and CTA. Well, Tone, I want to be friend to friend, clear, calm, and CTA, do you want to set up a call with my team? Let's go ahead and do that and see if it's able to find who advertises on TVPN. So it says, I need to find the first companies to advertise on TVPN. So it actually doesn't know what, does it know what TVPN is? Oh, it does. So it first says the Bitcoin Podcast Network. It's not called that. I think it's called Technology Brothers Podcast Network. But it still finds the right one over here. You can see, because you can see that it's finding a bunch of, like TVPN signs with CA, that's the right TVPN. So it finds them. So it had a little trip up over there. And then it just says, it finds their five, you know, Ramp, Plaid, Figma, and it's researching all five in parallel, recent news, pain points, and any specific I can reference in e-mails. So this is really interesting, right? Because I don't know about you, but I actually don't do any cold e-mail, really, unless it's to a cold DM of someone I look up to, and I think is really interesting and cool. I'll just cold DM them. But for like closing leads, finding leads, stuff like that, I don't do cold DMs. My approach is really building audiences and communities and having people reach out to me. So this is cool that I can do this. But what I've had issues with in terms of cold DMs in the past is it just sounds lame. It doesn't sound like me. It's a lot of work to actually find the people. And let's just see if this is any good. So it says, excellent research. Let me find the right contact emails and draft the emails. Let me also look up who handles sponsorship and partnerships at these companies. Since emailing the CEO directly about a podcast sponsorship isn't always the best path. This is what I'm talking about. This is really cool. And because obviously Dylan Field, the founder of Figma, isn't going to open a cold DM probably from my email. But like the podcast sponsorship people might, you know? So it says, good, I have the send underscore email tool ready. So what's really cool is Perplexity Computer, spinning up a computer. It's like a virtual computer. It has skills, it has tools, and it can actually go and do things. So let's see if this is any good. Okay, so here are the five personalized emails, each referencing specific details from my research. So it's actually crazy. So it found Toby, the founder of Shopify's email. That's really cool. Like that in itself is really, really, really crazy, right? So good on them for finding that. But we did talk about how we shouldn't, let me check if these CEOs are reachable. Oh, interesting. So it's actually, I wouldn't send it to CEOs personally. So I guess that's something that we can adjust. But actually, I mean, I would probably send it to CEOs and I would send it to the podcast people. So let's just read the Toby email. Hi Toby, been watching Shopify's run lately, 11.6 billion in revenue. I think it's more than that. I think, maybe not actually. 30% growth and the AI catalog tools are generally impressive. The MRI thing you did with Claude was wild. So I don't know if you saw that. I think he analyzed an MRI result and built a tool around it, and it was wild. So it went and checked his X account and what he's been posting. I run The Startup Ideas Podcast. Our audience is founders and builders actively launching companies, many of them choosing their commerce stack right now. We get about X downloads per episode, and our listeners skew heavily towards early stage founders who are making infrastructure decisions. I noticed Shopify is already sponsoring TVPN, which makes a lot of sense or shows a similar demo, but a tighter focus on people who are literally in the process starting companies feels like a natural pit. This is awesome. Then there's another one to Ramp, and there's another one to Plaid, and they have all these people's e-mail addresses. I don't know how they're getting them, but assuming those are real e-mail addresses, that's pretty cool. I'm going to say, and by the way, and if I press send e-mail, it would just send the e-mail. It's got connected to my e-mail address and go ahead and do that. But what I'm going to do, I'm going to do one more thing and then we're going to get to the next use case. I'm just curious if we can do this. So I'm going to say, CEO's e-mails are impressive, but realistically, these are busy people. Let's try to get in front of the person in charge of podcast creator partnerships. Doesn't that make more sense? Then I'm going to just give it a bonus question. I'm going to say, by the way, is there something I'm not asking you here that could make me more money in this use case? I'm just going to see what it says. Sometimes we're trying to push it to the limit. This is where we're reviewing Perplexity Computer, so let's go in and see. You're absolutely right, COs aren't reviewing sponsorship pitches. The person who actually signs podcast deals is usually head of brand marketing partnerships. And it goes and says, let's go find those people. So it's going to go ahead and find them. It also says, what you're not asking, but should be outreach to companies that sponsor TBPN's competitors too. Right, so if a company sponsors TBPN, they also sponsor My First Million, All In, Acquired, right? Set up a recurring monitor. I can check TBPN, All In and other tech podcasts weekly for new sponsors. The moment a new brand starts advertising in a competitor's brand, you get a notification with their partnership contacts, so you're reaching out while their podcast budget is hot. That is so smart and so cool that you can set it up. That's one of the reasons I think people like OpenClaw and Cowork now has some scheduled tasks is you can schedule a task. So it's very cool that you can spin up a perplexity computer and have these recurring monitors and go and do things for you in the cloud. Follow up sequences, one email converts at maybe 5 to 10%. Maybe I can schedule a follow ups three and seven days later with new angles if they don't reply. Absolutely crazy. Want me to do any of those after we get these five out the door? Duh. Okay, so let's just see.